Safer World: March 2007

Inside Iran

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Almost exactly five years ago I was lucky enough to be granted a journalist visa to Iran.

I am not being facetious.

Journalist visas are like gold dust and Iran is a memorable country to visit.

There's the majesty of Isfahan with its blue mosques, giant squares and scented bazaars; the ancient courtyard mansions of Kashan; the sophistication of Tehran, where beautiful women are forced to wear headscarves and anoraks in public and look like supermodels masquerading as spies.

Like all other journalists I made my weekly pilgrimage to the Friday prayer meeting at Tehran University.

Tens of thousands of students and other devotees converged in what could best be described as a giant car-park covered with the kind of roof you expect to find in an aircraft hangar.

We were allowed onto a viewing gallery.

Below us, the veterans of the Islamic revolution, the heavies from the Revolutionary Guard and thousands of students wearing the white clothes of would-be martyrs listened to Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei berate the Great Satan - America - and its understudy the Little Satan - Britain - for their aggression.

'Axis of evil'

Afghanistan had already been invaded. Iraq was next on the list.

Iran had just been named by President Bush as a founding member of the axis of evil.

So, even a cursory glance at the map and American troop movements would have created a lump in the average Iranian throat.

A well-dressed man in his 30s wandered up to me. He looked angry. "How dare you call as an axis of evil?" he said in Farsi and waited for our translator to deliver every word of his diatribe.

"What about your President Bush?" he soldiered on. "He's a top-class aggressor!"

Then he looked around and motioned me to come and stand behind a pillar.

He leant so close to me I could smell the tobacco and garlic on his breath. My personal space was definitely being invaded and I was pondering options.

"There is a joke doing the rounds," he suddenly said in a whisper and in perfect English. "If only the B-52s [bombers] could stop off in Tehran before going on to Kabul.

"After all, it is on the way!" He motioned to the ayatollahs on the podium next to us. "We can't get rid of them without your help!"

Chewing the fat

Later in the day I came across a similar if less brazen view.

The editor of a 'liberal' newspaper which had been shut down no fewer than seven times and reopened under a different name told me he approved of sanctions because they would put pressure on the regime.

Military action, he said, would be counter-productive.

We were invited to attend an editorial board meeting.

The discussion ranged from domestic issues, like the latest arrests of human rights activists, to the turmoil on Tehran's nascent stock market and the war in Afghanistan and how the regime was not sure whether to thank the US for getting rid of its old enemy the Taleban or be afraid of Uncle Sam's designs on the region.

As far as I could tell through the translation, the conversation was sophisticated, funny and relaxed - scribblers chewing the fat. It could have been London or Washington.

Pelted with eggs

Here's the point: Iran is complicated, mercurial and rife with internal divisions.

President Ahmadinejad is no Saddam Hussein, even if he has hosted a "Holocaust Denial" conference, and does want to develop a nuclear capability.

Saddam Hussein personally shot people he didn't like.

The president of Iran has been pelted by unruly students with eggs and insults and no-one was shot.

I'm not saying he's been grossly misunderstood. I am saying that Iran is far less monolithic than many in Washington like to think. The trick is to sweat out the differences.
Today Iran is more isolated than it has been for a long time. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are lining up with Israel to work against the thing they fear most - a Persian nuke.

Consider that among the last words uttered by Saddam Hussein, of all people, before the noose tightened around his neck: "Damn the Americans and damn the Persians!"

The Russians are annoyed because the Iranians won't pay their dues on the nuclear reactor at Busher. This is hardly ideological opposition, but it's better than nothing.

The Chinese are voting with the other members of the UN Security Council against Iran even though they can't get enough Iranian light crude.

The pressure may be working but it isn't enough.

Lure with iPods

If I were the US government I would issue Iran with 10,000 student visas and 1,000 technology grants to Silicon Valley.

Iran boasts five million college students with higher degrees, the largest proportion in the Middle East.

Instead of encouraging them to turn into head-bashing extremists I would seduce them into becoming head-banging, iPod-wearing computer geeks.

Unfortunately none of this will ever happen.

Even if the administration thought of it, the Democrats, flexing their muscles on Capitol Hill or positioning themselves to race for the White House, would oppose it.

They were, after all, the ones who kicked up a stink about the Dubai ports deal even though the Gulf States actually quite like America and Dubai is already the biggest US naval base overseas.

But subtlety doesn't play well in election campaigns.

What's more, the rhetoric coming from the US is music to Tehran's ears.

Every time there's a tiff the price of oil inches above $65 a barrel, making the Iranian government a little bit richer still.

So - with US Iran policy struck in a groove, Tehran thriving on adversity, an extra US carrier group in the Gulf, the Revolutionary Guards building IEDs [bombs] for Shia death squads in Iraq and the Israelis feeling distinctly twitchy about the prospect of a nuclear Iran - the stars are dangerously aligned for a show-down, even if the White House and Tehran don't actually want one.

Now imagine "an event", an unforeseen crisis that pushes everyone to the brink - like 15 British sailors being held hostage by the Revolutionary Guard Navy in the Shatt al-Arab waterway.

Enslaved by self-pity

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The idea that black people are 'emotionally scarred' by slavery is borderline racist.

Imagine if I were to blame the problems I face in life on the Irish potato famine. Over 150 years ago "The Great Hunger" swept Ireland, killing around a million people and forcing another million to emigrate. Many of my ancestors, based in the poverty-stricken west of Ireland, starved to death; others fled to America.

Perhaps that horrible experience explains why I sometimes feel stressed out and angry today. Maybe that long-gone famine has left me "emotionally scarred", unable to deal with all the things that modern life throws my way. I wonder if I will one day develop a potato-related eating disorder ...

The notion that I might be shaped and directed by a famine from the 1800s is stark raving mad. And yet today, serious commentators claim that black people in modern Britain are disadvantaged, dejected and "scarred" as a result of the slave trade, which was abolished 200 years ago. Of course, there is no real comparison between the Irish famine (a four-year-long hunger) and the slave trade (a gross historic injustice), yet the idea that any of us is directly made and moulded by an historical event is absurd.

It is narrow-minded and fatalistic, even borderline racist. In the past, some people said blacks were driven by their biology; today, so-called progressives claim blacks are driven by history. Is there really a great difference between biological determinism and historical determinism? Both view black people as wide-eyed children, moved and motivated by forces beyond their control. Young black Britons risk being enslaved by self-pity thanks to the dodgy deterministic arguments of various community workers, commentators and officials.

It seems there is no problem among the black community that cannot be pinned on the slave trade. Ms Dynamite - the singer whose views on the slave trade are, unbelievably, being treated seriously; she even made a documentary for BBC2 - claims "there are things which are the direct result of slavery which still affect us today as black people". Apparently this includes tensions between black men and black women. Ms Dynamite tells us that the slave owners' policy of "divide and rule" helped to "set men against women", and "as black people we are still living that law".

Ms Dynamite says there is "stuff in the family and home which is also a result of slavery". She explains: "Men were not allowed to be fathers but were used to breed to create more slaves. It's something that - not with everyone - is common in the black community, especially in our generation: the fathers are not always there. We're not that far away from slavery and that way of living, where a man is literally just a tool to reproduce."

These are extraordinary claims. Instead of interrogating the problems of poverty and discrimination that might have an impact on how black people relate to each other, and which might harm family integrity and structure, everything is explained as being part of the heavy burden of history.

When Ms Dynamite says black people are "still living that law" - that is, still living by the rules drawn up by slave-owners hundreds of years ago - she effectively writes off contemporary blacks as eternal slaves. Never mind the slave revolts and the great leaps forward made by black rights activists over the past 200 years; apparently blacks are still slavishly chained to the past, unable to escape the prison of history. They might have won numerous freedoms over the past century and more, but they are mental slaves to past events. Black people are depicted as the equivalent of damaged children, haunted by dreams of past abuses.

Guardian writer Joseph Harker goes even further and argues that slavery has determined both blacks' physical and mental make-up today. "For many black men, the only way to endure this historical inhumanity has been by combining physical strength with an aggressive-competitive mentality - Darwin's survival of the fittest, in its most basic form", he writes. Here, the old, discredited arguments about blacks having evolved in a different way to whites are dusted down, given a seemingly radical gloss and re-presented as black people being structured around historical injustices.

And if you are a slave to the past - an apparently incompetent adult whose physicality, mental attitudes and relationships with others are shaped by forces beyond your control - then of course there is only one solution: you need help. You need the authorities to look after you, to care for you, to offer you therapy and recognition. As Harker argues: "If Tony Blair wants to mark the anniversary with a meaningful gesture, he should surely set up a full-scale investigation - on the scale of a Royal Commission - into the causes of the problems which afflict much of Britain's black population, and pledge, with the help of Gordon Brown, to put in the resources to ensure these are fully addressed."

In the past, blacks fought for equality and respect. Even slaves, those most degraded individuals, fought against their oppressors. Today, when the view of blacks as historically determined individuals seems widespread, the assumption is that they need patronage and support; they need to be protected by the authorities from the harm caused by history and from their own potentially self-destructive behaviour.

These arguments about slavery haunting contemporary black communities are becoming increasingly commonplace. Much of the demand for an official apology from Blair is based on the idea that it will help today's blacks to feel more "confident".

Such claims have been doing the rounds in America for more than a decade. There, many black community representatives have demanded financial and emotional reparation for the injustices of slavery. In his book The Debt: What America Owes Blacks, Randall Robinson argued: "I don't think that there is very much appreciation in America of the causal relationship between the present condition of the black community and the 246-year crime of American slavery, how it debilitated a whole people psychologically, socially and economically, and how those consequences have stayed with us inter-generationally through the 20th century."

These are degrading and dangerous arguments. They are underpinned by the idea that history makes us rather than we making history. Remembering the attempts by black slaves and subsequent black communities to make their own history is sidelined in favour of putting forward the fatalistic argument that blacks today are shaped and scarred and structured by history. It is a scary snapshot of the narrow-minded view of humans as fragile bundles of genes and historical impacts that passes for progressive politics today, and of the patronising and paternalistic underpinnings of the politics of identity and recognition.

What message does all of this communicate to young blacks? That there is little you can do about your place in the world because it has already been written for you by history. So keep your head down, try not to become too damaged, and let the caring powers-that-be nurse you through life.

The Achievement Gap

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Why aren't African-Americans achieving all that they could? American blacks are twice as likely to be in poverty as non-blacks, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and they make nearly $5,000 a year less, on average. What exactly is standing in their way? That's not an easy question, but some compelling and controversial answers are coming from an unexpected source: economics.

Economists who studied racial inequality were once viewed with skepticism, even by other economists. In the 1970s, Glenn Loury's Ph.D. classmates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology joked that his economics thesis began: "This dissertation is concerned with the economics of racism. I define racism as a single-valued, continuous mapping...."

The joke is now on them, as economists have dug up insight after insight in the field. Now Loury's young co-author, Harvard's Roland Fryer, is attracting attention for his study of "acting white," where black kids who work hard at school are said to be ostracized by their peers. Despite a lot of talk about the problem--Barack Obama raised it in his famous speech to the Democratic National Convention--some academic researchers weren't convinced that it existed. Their surveys showed that kids who were doing well at school, whether black or white, had lots of friends.

Fryer argued that asking a teenager how many friends he had wasn't any more likely to produce the truth than asking him whether he was a virgin. Instead, he sifted through a database of the social connections of 90,000 teens, judging a teen's popularity based not on their own claims but on whether other teens named them as a friend. His conclusion was that hardworking black and Hispanic children, unlike non-Hispanic white kids, lost friends if they studied hard.

Fryer has an economic explanation of why white nerds get an easier ride from their peers. Members of minority groups often face a choice between learning something that the minority group values (say, street slang) or learning something that is more widely valued (say, accountancy). Someone who chooses the minority activity is making a commitment to the group--hence it's natural for him to enjoy more trust. And Fryer points to similar behavior by Italian immigrants in 1950s Boston; by the Burakumin in Japan, who are descendants of what was traditionally a low caste; and even in some traditional Amish communities.

It's a bold piece of work in a sensitive area. But of course, there is much more to the racial achievement gap. Urban poverty, for instance, surely plays a role. Economists are looking into this, too. Jeffrey Kling of the Brookings Institution is among those who've studied the "Moving to Opportunity" program, where poor (usually black) families were offered incentives to move to a wealthier neighborhood. Because the incentives were offered to families on a random basis-- just as a pharmaceutical trial would randomize who received the drug and who got the placebo--the results are unusually reliable for economic research. Kling found that those who moved to richer neighborhoods were happier and less likely to be the victims of crime, but their test scores didn't improve. By way of explanation, he argues that the new schools just weren't much better than the old ones. Kling's research suggests that disadvantage doesn't just float around the neighborhood: You can identify specific causes, such as family poverty and the quality of schools.

These factors clearly make a difference, according to the co-author of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt. Working with Fryer, he produced a statistical analysis of the gap in test scores between first-grade black and white kids. While big, it is entirely explainable by differences in factors such as family poverty and the number of books in these kids' homes. Later on, the achievement gap widens beyond what can be explained purely by poverty. It's at this point that "acting white" becomes a factor.

But what about discrimination? Economists have studied it closely, but they have a habit of asking unnerving questions--such as, what is discrimination? Economists distinguish between "taste-based" discrimination, where racist employers refuse to give minorities a job because they don't like minorities, and "statistical" discrimination. When an employer considers an applicant's race as a marker for his or her ability, that's statistical discrimination.

Both types of discrimination are rightly illegal. Both prejudge applicants as members of a group rather than as individuals. So the distinction might seem like logic-chopping, especially if you're black, well-qualified and jobless.

Economists say there's all the difference in the world, and that statistical discrimination is, if anything, more pernicious, because it can withstand competition. A racist who turns down workers even though he knows them to be competent will take a hit to the bottom line, but statistical discrimination could improve profits, which makes it harder to stamp out. As long as an employer can learn something extra from an applicant's race that he can't learn from looking at a résumé--about the likely quality of the school the applicant attended, perhaps--then the worrying possibility for profitable discrimination exists. Non-racial statistical discrimination is actually rather common: An insurer will consider your age and your sex when deciding how much to charge for auto insurance. Why? Because the stereotypes, however crude and however unfair to individuals, contain a bit of extra information.

Fryer and two colleagues, Jacob Goeree and Charles Holt, showed how statistical discrimination could easily lead to a vicious circle. They used computer-based classroom games that assigned students the role of employers, "purple" workers and "green" workers. Students in the role of employers quickly jumped to the mistaken conclusion that purple workers were uneducated, and that view became self-fulfilling, as purple workers abandoned hope of getting hired and stopped paying for education. Once the downward spiral set in, a color-blind employer would actually lose money.

"I was amazed," recalls Fryer. "The kids were really angry. The purple workers would say, 'I'm not investing [in an education] because you won't hire me', and the employers would respond 'I didn't hire you because you weren't investing.' The initial asymmetries came about because of chance, but people would hang onto them and wouldn't let them go."

Fighting statistical discrimination requires a different strategy to fighting taste-based discrimination. In the computer simulation, equality could be restored if all workers were known to have acquired education--perhaps because of an educational subsidy. Taste-based discrimination, on the other hand, won't go away just because the statistics change.

And there is still plenty of discrimination. In fact, economists have produced some of the most convincing evidence of racism in the modern job market. The method is alarmingly simple and has been used for decades in the U.K.: Draw up résumés, but toss a coin to see whether each résumé is assigned to the minority group or the majority group. These studies have uncovered British discrimination against immigrants from Asia, the West Indies and Africa--but far less evidence of discrimination against white immigrants from France and Australia.

Economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan recently conducted a large study along these lines in the U.S., mailing out nearly 5,000 résumés after randomly assigning them black-sounding names like Jamal or Ebony or white-sounding names like Kristen or Brendan.

Not only did the "black" résumés get fewer callbacks, but employers didn't even seem to notice whether the résumés were any good or not. They just stopped reading at "Jamal."

Economists tend to assume that people respond to the incentives they face. If that's true, we have to face up to the fact that young black Americans are facing some lousy choices. There is a lot of work for all of us to do.

Labels: African-Americans

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose the Military?

Friday, March 16, 2007

Almost a decade ago the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick penned an essay asking "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?" That is, why would those who live well reject the open society that allows them to do so? The essay was less a venture in social science than a thought experiment about the upbringing of intellectuals and the outsized influence this group exerts on society. Much of what Nozick says about intellectuals' reflexive disdain for capitalism also helps explain their disdain toward the military - and even the differences are intriguing. So his essay is worth pondering today as we survey civil-military relations in a nation at war.

Whom are we talking about? In his book Intellectuals, Paul Johnson defines a member of this elite group in general terms, as "someone who thinks ideas are more important than people." By contrast, Nozick confines his attentions to "wordsmith intellectuals" concentrated in professions such as the academy, print and electronic journalism, and government. He deems "numbersmiths" working in the sciences, business, and other quantitative fields less prone to anti-capitalist animus, despite similar intelligence and academic attainment. (Why this should be true warrants looking into.)

Schooling, maintains Nozick, breeds in intellectuals a sense of superiority, and with it a sense of entitlement to the highest rewards society has to offer - not just top salaries but praise comparable to that lavished on them by their teachers. After completing their formal academic training in the centralized environment of the classroom, intellectuals go forth into a seemingly chaotic capitalist society, which purports to reward individual citizens by merit but in fact applies a different standard of merit from the one imparted in the classroom.

So an open, capitalist society falls just short of satisfying intellectuals' sense of entitlement. At least three points are worth teasing out of Nozick's essay. One, capitalist society allows wordsmiths to live comfortable lives-but those who excel outside the classroom often reap the highest material rewards. Entrepreneurship in business or other applied disciplines -- disciplines that may or may not depend on pure academic knowledge or verbal dexterity -- can bring a far more extravagant lifestyle than a career in journalism, government, or the academy.

This runs afoul of intellectuals' sense of their place in the natural pecking order. But it should have little bearing on intellectuals' attitudes toward the armed services, given the less-than-generous salaries and benefits paid to soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Servicemen rank well below wordsmith intellectuals from a purely material standpoint. This disparity should seem to reinforce intellectuals' sense of superiority.

But, American society reserves the highest respect and admiration not for professors or journalists but for those in practical disciplines such as the armed forces, law enforcement, firefighting, or emergency medicine. Americans typically rate the military at or near the top of the nation's institutions, with journalism and lawmakers near or at the bottom. This status deficit rankles intellectuals. While America certainly needs academic skill and enterprise, an open society maddeningly-prizes other things as much as if not more than the ability to turn a clever phrase.

Success in such a society comes in large part from applied intellect, amplified by such virtues as technical proficiency and physical and moral courage. Schooling is not primarily responsible for instilling these virtues. Disaffection follows when society frustrates intellectuals' lofty expectations. Awarding superior status to people they learned in the schoolhouse to regard as their inferiors must trigger a certain revulsion.

Nozick observes that academic training teaches intellectuals to prefer a centralized environment in which an authority figure, not the vagaries of the market, sets standards and dispenses rewards and punishments according to certain rational standards. Does this relate to intellectuals' skepticism toward military service? It's unclear. The armed forces are nothing if not regimented institutions, and thus they should seemingly appeal to wordsmiths. An old joke in the ranks points out how odd it is that it takes a socialized institution like the military to defend liberty.

But here, too, the military allocates rewards-medals, ribbons, written evaluations-based on criteria that cut against the intellectual grain. While training and education provide the foundation for excellence in the armed forces, servicemen are judged primarily by factors such as technical acumen and valor under fire. In other words, Americans acclaim the military for reasons that have little to do with schooling-calling into question wordsmith intellectuals' feeling of superiority, and indeed their entire worldview.

Do intellectuals' attitudes even matter, given their predilection for the abstract over the concrete and for ideas over action? Yes, says Nozick. While wordsmiths cannot dictate the outcome of national discourse, they do set the terms of debate.

"They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly on the explicit formulation and dissemination of information."

Nozick left his inquiry open-ended, commending it to the study of social scientists, and so will I. Some enterprising social scientist ought to examine these matters in a sustained, rigorous manner. If wordsmith intellectuals indeed frame debates on affairs of state-in particular war and peace-then their views and prejudices must be taken into account in public discourse. Our system of civil-military relations could depend on it.

Why is Bush so obsessed with ungrateful foreigners?

Thursday, March 15, 2007

What is it with George W. Bush and his insistent demand for the gratitude of foreigners?

In São Paulo, Brazil, last week, on the first day of his Latin America tour, the president said, "I don't think America gets enough credit for trying to improve people's lives."

The complaint was reminiscent of earlier expressions of pique.

In his memoir of his year in Baghdad as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer recalled that President Bush once told him that the leader of a new Iraqi government had to be "someone who's willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq."

Bremer noted that Bush made this point three times in the course of a single conversation and further insisted that the president of Iraq's first interim government should be Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, because Bush "had been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition."

It was no coincidence, therefore, that when Iyad Allawi, Iraq's first American-handpicked prime minister, held his maiden press conference in June 2004, he broke into English to say, "I would like to thank the coalition, led by the United States, for the sacrifices they have provided in the … liberation of Iraq."

President Bush, at his own press conference soon afterward, drew attention at least twice to Allawi's gratitude.

In September 2004, when Allawi traveled to Washington to speak before a joint session of Congress, one of his opening lines (recited from a speech written mainly by the White House) was: "We Iraqis are grateful to you, America, for your leadership and your sacrifice for our liberation and our opportunity to start anew."

Just this past January, in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes, President Bush returned to the theme, this time annoyed that the people he'd liberated seemed so unappreciative.

"I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude," he said. "I mean … we've endured great sacrifices to help them," and the American people "wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq."

There's a skewed view of the world reflected in these remarks. Does Bush really fail to recognize that even the most pro-Western Iraqis might have mixed feelings, to say the least, about America's intervention in their affairs—that they might be, at once, thankful for the toppling of Saddam Hussein, resentful about the prolonged occupation, and full of hatred toward us for the violent chaos that we unleashed without a hint of a plan for restoring order?

Bush may have had a political motive in making these remarks. He may have calculated that Americans would be more likely to support the war if the people for whom we're fighting thanked us publicly for the effort. By the same token, their palpable lack of gratitude, and the war's deepening unpopularity at home, might have heightened his frustration and impelled such peevish outbursts.

But this peevish imperiousness is precisely what's most disturbing about Bush's incessant concern with the proper level of fealty. The word that he repeatedly uses when discussing what he wants from nations he thinks he's helping—"gratitude"—implies a supplicant's relationship to his lord.

As Stanley Renshon, a political psychologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center (and generally a Bush supporter), puts it, "Gratitude is something you give to somebody who's superior. It's very different from, say, appreciation, which is something that equals give each other."

Apart from his view of Iraq, Bush may have a point when he complains that America gets too little credit for its generosity (though this is hardly new). He doesn't acknowledge, however, that governments give aid or go to war for their own interests, not just for the interests of others, and therefore don't generally require thank-you notes. Nor does he seem to realize, whatever his motives, that nobody likes a whiner—that donors who demand bowing and scraping are often resented, if not despised.

Not to put the president on the couch, but personality probably plays some role here. I remember watching a White House press conference (looking it up, I see that it took place on April 5, 2004), where an Associated Press reporter started to ask Bush a question without first uttering "Mr. President," the customary preface when addressing the leader of the free world. Bush snapped at him: "Who are you talking to?" The reporter corrected his discourteousness, reciting the honorific, before restarting his question.

It was a startling display of a president who seemed insecure in his authority, bitter that some piddling reporter wasn't treating him (the president of the United States, damn it!) with the proper respect. The same complex may be triggered when piddling nations don't repay his good intentions with the proper "gratitude."

But this tendency reveals something deeper, and more worrisome, than some hypothetical character quirk. It reveals a basic misunderstanding of foreign policy and of the modern world.

In many of his pronouncements, President Bush seems to believe that because America is a good and generous nation, everything done in its name is, ipso facto, good and generous—and that the peoples of the world, if they're honest about it, will view our actions as good and generous, too.

Bush and his team also came into office believing that America had emerged from its Cold War victory as the world's "sole superpower" and that it could, therefore, bend other nations' will by merely flexing some muscle. They didn't realize that the end of the Cold War made America, in a certain sense, weaker. As long as there were two superpowers, the nations belonging to one bloc or the other often felt compelled (or forced) to go along with their protector's interests even when those interests conflicted with their own. With the collapse of the Soviet Union as a common looming enemy and a fulcrum of pressure, nations feel freer to go their own way, with far less regard for what America might think about it.

So, here is George W. Bush, presiding over the United States in its "unipolar moment," armed with the mightiest military in the history of the world. And not only is he failing to dominate the guerrillas of Baghdad, he can't get so much as a thank you from the people of São Paulo.

No wonder he's sometimes sounds like the narrator in Randy Newman's song "Political Science":

We give them money
But are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful
And they're hateful
They don't respect us
So let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one
And pulverize them.

Let's hope he doesn't sing the verse all the way down.

Leonardo, Diamonds and Child Soldiers (Part II)

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Although the use of child soldiers is deemed a war crime by the International Criminal Court, the world's commitment to end this scourge is still lacking. As Susan Braden explains, the unfortunate reality is that children in the developing world remain highly vulnerable to recruitment and subsequent abuse — both by governments and rebel groups.

lthough the recruitment and use of child soldiers is a flagrant violation of international law (as codified in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child), it doesn’t seem to have much impact on their recruitment.

Child soldiers can be found on every continent of the globe. You can find them in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. They have become an integral part of organized military units, rebel organizations and terrorist groups.

Global child soldiers

In Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Uganda, you can find children serving as combatants, raiders, porters, cooks and sex slaves.

As Singer’s study demonstrates, child participation in armed conflict has become globalized. How many child soldiers there are in the world at any given time is unknown, but the figures tend to hover around 250,000 to 300,000 persons under 18 years old, with one-third of them serving in Africa.

Part of the problem is that much of the recruitment takes place in conflict-affected states that are also poor, fragile and have a very weak governance regime.
Attraction of child forces

Children make particularly attractive recruits to non-state armed forces operating outside the bounds of national and international law because they are a low-cost way to build up their forces. In that way, they are mission-critical to help non-state armies counteract the inherent advantages that governments have in building their military forces.

In addition, child soldiers give these rebel groups a slight advantage in that most government-trained troops are taught not to shoot live ammunition at children. At the same time, weak governments are not above recruiting child soldiers as a means of quickly replenishing their forces. They do so in a pinch because they know that they can get away with it. The international community condemns the practice — but has yet to muster the wherewithal to take any punitive action against it.

International Criminal Court

In 2002, the International Criminal Court was created at least in part to reverse this trend.

It is tasked with punishing those who violate the rules of war and are not punished by their own countries. In particular, the court has jurisdiction over the use of child soldiers, which is declared a war crime.

Although the United States did not join the ICC out of concern that American soldiers might be unfairly targeted for war crimes, 104 other countries did join the organization. With its own budget provided by member states, the ICC is independent of the UN, although the UN Security Council can refer cases to it. The court has four cases pending before it, all of which involve African countries — Sudan, Congo, Uganda and the Central African Republic.

The only warlord that the ICC has in its custody at the moment is the Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, whose trial will begin later this year. He is being prosecuted solely for the forcible enlistment of children younger than age 15.

Fighting for future children

How these proceedings will affect the use of child soldiers in the future is unclear. When a conflict is still raging, it is difficult to collect information from former child soldiers because neither the court nor the government can guarantee their protection.

In addition, rebel leaders are less likely to release the children from service because to do so is to admit guilt — therefore making themselves susceptible to prosecution.

There is also an issue as to whether the court’s efforts to serve justice are inadvertently undermining the prospects for peace and reconciliation. Moreover, when seeking to investigate and put on trial officials in a sitting government, the court’s efforts are further complicated by the fact that it must rely on that government to cooperate with the investigation and hand over those officials responsible.

Lifelong damages

Dia and Beah were both children at war who survived and became peacefully productive citizens. Unfortunately, this is not the case for most former child soldiers. As Singer’s study shows, many former child soldiers find themselves physically and psychologically damaged, with no help and no ability to make a living.

Rehabilitation programs like the one Beah went through tend to be woefully under-funded and not part of any peace settlement. So once the conflict is over, many of the former child soldiers end up on the streets, involved in crime — or are recycled as mercenaries in other conflicts.

Funding for education

To reverse the effect of their experience in conflict and to further their rehabilitation, children who have served in armed groups or been victims of armed conflict need help reintegrating into society. What Dia, Beah and Valentino most wanted after having escaped conflict was an education. Through education, they could better process what had happened to them and gain the skills necessary to become productive members of society.

At the moment, however, conflict-affected fragile states are the least likely countries in the world for a child to find a quality education. All three kids had to leave their countries in order to obtain an education.

According to UNESCO, there are 77 million children out of school, and over half of them are in conflict-affected, fragile states. International funding levels for education have gone up in recent years, but the money does not go to countries affected by armed conflict.

Need preventative action

Through films,literature, the work of the United Nations and a variety of NGOs, the international community has been made increasingly aware of the fact that, in modern warfare, children are in effect doubly victimized. They become both the targets of armed conflict — and the perpetrators.

To be aware of the problem, however, is not to solve it, even when the solutions are known. As abhorrent as the practice is, children are plentiful, cheap, malleable and expendable tools of war. To end the practice will require sustained commitment, effort, innovation and funding.

One Bullet Away From What?

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

INSIDE Washington, the frustration of doing business with Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is matched only by the fear of living life without him.

For years, the notion that Mr. Musharraf is all that stands between Washington and a group of nuclear-armed mullahs has dictated just how far the White House feels it can push him to root out Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives who enjoy a relatively safe existence in Pakistan.

The specter of Islamic radicals overthrowing Mr. Musharraf has also limited the Bush administration’s policy options, taking off the table any ideas about American military strikes against a resurgent Al Qaeda, which has camps in Pakistani tribal areas.

But just how fragile is Mr. Musharraf’s hold on power? And might the United States have more leverage than it believes?

The question of how to handle Mr. Musharraf is critical at a time when intelligence officials widely agree that the Taliban is expanding its reach in Pakistan, gradually spreading from remote areas into more settled regions of the country.

The fear within Washington that Islamic extremism has become a dominant force in Pakistan has been stoked in part by Mr. Musharraf himself. Some analysts say his warnings are used to maintain a steady flow of American aid and keep at bay demands from Washington for democratic reforms. He often invokes the dangers of Islamic radicalism when meeting American officials in Washington and Islamabad, and his narrow escape in two assassination attempts is frequently cited by President Bush as evidence of his tenuous grip on power.

While the Islamists would surely take power in any way possible, an examination of polling data and recent election results — however suspect in a less than democratic country — provides little evidence that Islamists have enough support to take over the country. If anything, they would likely control only select areas.

The last time Pakistan went to the polls in 2002, religious political parties received just 11 percent of the vote, compared with more than 28 percent won by the secular party led by Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister.

And that election may have even been a high-water mark for the Islamists, who were capitalizing on surging anti-American sentiment after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Even though the Iraq war has also inflamed anti-Western attitudes, these sentiments do not seem to have translated into electoral gains for Islamist parties.

Islamist politicians received a drubbing in local elections in 2005, gaining less support than expected in their power base in the tribal areas. In September, a poll by the International Republican Institute, a respected organization affiliated with the Republican Party that helps build democratic institutions in foreign countries, found that just 5.2 percent of respondents would vote for the main religious party, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, in national parliamentary elections.

Although the poll found that this party was the most popular in Baluchistan, the southwestern province where Taliban support is strong, Islamist leaders lagged far behind both Mr. Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto, as well as another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. It is also thought to be unlikely that a successful attempt on Mr. Musharraf’s life would mean wholesale changes to the power structure of Pakistani politics.

For decades, the military has been the most dominant institution in Pakistan. If Mr. Musharraf were to fall to an assassin’s bullet, American diplomatic and intelligence officials say, it is unlikely that there would be mass uprisings in Lahore and Karachi, or that a religious leader in the Taliban mold would rise to power.

“I am not particularly worried about an extremist government coming to power and getting hold of nuclear weapons,” said Robert Richer, who was associate director of operations in 2004 and 2005 for the Central Intelligence Agency. “If something happened to Musharraf tomorrow, another general would step in.”

Based on the succession plan, the vice chief of the army, Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hyat, would take over as the leader of the army and Mohammedmian Soomro, an ex-banker, would become president.

General Hyat, who is secular like Mr. Musharraf, would hold the real power. But it is unclear whether General Hyat would be as adept as Mr. Musharraf at keeping various interest groups within the military in line. American officials say that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the I.S.I., continues to play a direct role in arming and financing the Taliban’s re-emergence in western Pakistan, and there are worries about the relationships between some senior military leaders and Islamist groups.

The ties between Islamic militants and Pakistan’s security services are decades old, with the two sides working together most closely during the mujahadeen battles against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Analysts generally agree, however, that the military remains a largely secular institution that takes seriously its role as protector of Pakistan’s identity and would not allow Islamists to become the dominant force in Pakistan.

While many in Washington agree that the threat of Islamic militants has become something of a useful foil for Mr. Musharraf, there is a rift about just how the White House should be treating the Pakistani president.

Some counterterrorism officials at the Pentagon argue that to the extent that Mr. Musharraf’s government feels real pressure, it is from those within the Pakistani military who worry most about alienating Washington and jeopardizing the flow of military aid to Pakistan.

The money and military hardware from the United States is crucial for Pakistan’s armed forces to keep pace with archrival India. Because of this dependency, some officials argue, the Bush administration has powerful leverage to force Mr. Musharraf to crack down on extremism.

On the other side of the debate, some State Department officials say that while Islamic militants probably would not topple Mr. Musharraf, why roll the dice?

Mr. Musharraf might be frustrating to work with, they say, but he has the virtue of being a known quantity. And with Iraq spiraling out of control and an emboldened Iran flexing its muscle throughout the region, aren’t things complicated enough without taking a chance on a nuclear-armed Muslim nation of 165 million people?

“How many degrees of difficulty do you want to add?” asks one Bush administration official. “This is one equation that we don’t want to touch.”

Mr. Musharraf’s turn against the Taliban after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and his status as a personal target of the militants, won him a reputation as a man Washington could do business with. He developed a rapport with President Bush, and received rock star treatment during a recent book tour through the United States, even appearing on “The Daily Show.” (He shared tea and Twinkies with Jon Stewart.)

In the United States, he is considered the voice of moderation, but Mr. Musharraf has also navigated the often brutal world of Pakistani politics by keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. Although he speaks ominously about the Islamists’ rising power, he has regularly brokered agreements with them in the provinces as a way to gain allies amid the growing support nationally for civilian challengers like Mr. Sharif and Ms. Bhutto. Pakistan experts say this is smart politics, but the agreements have also effectively strengthened religious groups in the rural areas and made punishing Islamic militants in those areas more difficult.

“To the extent that religious extremism is a concern, it is a concern partly of Musharraf’s and the military’s making,” said Husain Haqqani, a professor of international relations at Boston University and an adviser to several Pakistani prime ministers. “And, he has been very effective in turning this around into getting more support from the U.S.”

The Democratic takeover of Congress has given the Bush administration its own useful foil in its negotiations with Pakistan. During a recent meeting in Islamabad with Mr. Musharraf, Vice President Dick Cheney said that the White House has no intention of cutting aid to Pakistan, but mentioned that Democrats had threatened to make aid conditional on a crackdown on Islamic militants in the tribal areas.

Congress is unlikely to ever stem the flow of aid to Pakistan. But invoking Congressional frustration with the country could play on Pakistani fears that the United States is engaged in an ever tighter embrace with India.

And within Pakistan, that is considered the greatest threat of all.

Leonardo, Diamonds and Child Soldiers (Part I)

Monday, March 12, 2007

While the Academy Award-nominated film “Blood Diamond” focuses on the controversial global diamond trade, it also vividly and disturbingly portrays the role of children as warriors in one of Africa’s deadliest conflicts. In the first of two parts, Susan Braden explores the tragic fate of the world’s child soldiers.

hen Edward Zwick’s Academy Award-nominated film "Blood Diamond" first came out, it stimulated considerable controversy over the actual degree to which diamonds are used to fund conflicts. Human rights groups claim, for example, that as many as 15% of all diamonds come from conflict-affected states, while the industry itself puts the figure at 4%.

To me, however, the most interesting aspect of the film is not the focus on how wars are financed, but on how children are increasingly recruited, coerced and induced into becoming soldiers. To watch a boy hold a gun to his father’s head, — while his father slowly tries to revive the boy’s memories of home, school and family — is jolting, to say the least.

Bloody diamonds

Set against the backdrop of the civil war that took place in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2001, "Blood Diamond" is about South African mercenary Danny Archer’s (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) promise to help a poor West African fisherman, Solomon Vandy (played by Djimon Hounsou), find his family. Archer is prepared to do so in exchange for a diamond worth millions of dollars.

Solomon found the diamond while enslaved by the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), which was exploiting the diamond trade to fund its insurgency. Together, Archer and Solomon embark on a perilous journey to find Solomon’s family and the stone he hid from the RUF.

Along the way, Archer develops a conscience — and Solomon finds his son, Dia (Kagiso Kuypers). Abducted and brainwashed by the RUF, Dia has become a trained killer. He can no longer recognize his father, let alone understand what he has become as a member of the RUF.

Children in war

Children did indeed play a prominent role in the civil war that raged in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2001. Altogether, there were approximately 10,000 child soldiers engaged in the conflict. They fought mostly for the RUF, but they were also recruited into the government’s forces, as revealed in a new book entitled "A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" by Ismael Beah.

In the book, Beah, now a 26-year-old living in the United States, describes how he was recruited into the government of Sierra Leone’s army at the age of 13, after his village was burned by rebel forces and his family killed.

Kill or be killed

The first time Beah was ordered to kill, he couldn’t do it. But after watching his
Children join armed groups because they have no home or family — and see it as a way to get food and clothes.

two friends die, he “shot everything that moved” — and never had a problem shooting again. Summing up his experience as a child soldier, Beah writes, “My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector and my rule was to kill or be killed.”

When he wasn’t out raiding villages and killing people, he was watching Rambo movies and sniffing cocaine mixed with gunpowder. At the age of 16, the RUA handed Beah over to UNICEF, which took him to a rehabilitation center.

When he first arrived there, Beah writes, “Whenever I turned on the faucet, all I could see was blood gushing out.” It took almost half a year for him to forgive himself, regain his humanity and sleep without the help of medication.

Increasing child casualties

The use of children in Sierra Leone’s conflict was not an anomaly. As Brookings Institution analyst Peter Singer argues in his study "Children at War," over the past decade the most basic laws of war have changed, allowing children to increasingly become both its victims and perpetrators.

In contrast to a century ago — when only 5% of war casualties were civilians and wars were generally fought between soldiers — today more than 90% of those killed and wounded as a result of conflict are civilians, and about half of them are children.

Over the past decade alone, more than two million children have been killed in war, one million children have been orphaned and almost 25 million more driven from their homes. According to Singer, approximately 50% of the refugees in the world are children.

New books on war

All things considered, in many of today’s conflicts, it would seem that children have three choices — to be killed, to join one of the armed groups, or to become a refugee. In two new books — "God Grew Tired of Us" by John Bul Dau and "What is the What" by Dave Eggers — the authors document the mass migration of 25,000 displaced and orphaned children during the Sudanese civil war (1983-2005).

God Grew Tired of Us" is a memoir that Christopher Quinn turned into a moving documentary of the same title, which won this year’s Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. "What is the What" is a novel of sorts told from the perspective of a single boy, Valentino Achak Deng.

Valentino was one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” who made his way to Atlanta, Georgia after having walked across Southern Sudan to a temporary shelter in Ethiopia — and then to a vast refugee camp in Kenya. Along the way, Valentino confronted inter-religious strife between Christians and Arabs, starvation, soldiers from all sides of the conflict, landmines — and lions and crocodiles.

A creation legend

In the book’s preface, Valentino explains that he told his story to Eggers over a period of years and that the author then turned it into a novel using the basic tenets of Valentino’s life. The title of the book comes from a Dinka legend as told by Valentino’s father. According to the legend, when God created man, he said, “You can either have these cattle as my gift — or you can have 'The What.'"

When asked what is "The What," God said that he could not say, but man must nonetheless choose between the two options. The Dinka could see the cattle in front of them, knew that they could live in peace with them and that, if treated well, they were a tangible source of milk, meat and prosperity.

Children as soldiers

They could, in short, appreciate what had been given them — and would not trade it for the unknown. The Arabs, on the other hand, picked the mysterious and hard to define “what,” — which became a source of tension between the two from that moment forward.

Children join armed groups, as Ishmael Beah did and Valentino might have, because they have no home or family — and see it as a way to get food and clothes. They are also kidnapped, as Dia was in Blood Diamond, because children can make very good soldiers. They tend not to ask a lot of questions, and when infused with drugs or religious fervor, will fight with an absolute disregard for their own lives.

Like other child soldiers, both Dia and Beah went through a process of indoctrination that involved the sustained use of drugs, which subsequently made it difficult for them to give up their lives as child soldiers.

Summit surrenders

How much does the European Union really encourage competition?

THE eyes of the world will be on the European Union's summit in Brussels this week. So claims the European Commission's president, José Manuel Barroso, anyway. He may just be wrong; powerbrokers in Washington, Beijing and Delhi probably have better things to do with their time.

But let us pretend they did tune in. What would they find? The summit hopes to set the rules for a common energy policy and a single energy market, both of which would make quite a difference. To establish the energy market, the commission has proposed breaking up national gas and electricity behemoths around Europe into separate companies for the transmission and retail ends of the business (this is known in EU jargon as “ownership unbundling”). But what the outside world actually sees will be quite different. The EU's political leaders are likely only to require transmission and supply to be run separately, allowing the behemoths to retain ownership, and they may set up regional energy markets, rather than a single European one. Whatever the final details of the eventual deal, the summit's outcome will thus fall well short of its advertised goals.

This is typical enough. For the past two years the commission, the central institution in the European project, has been selling itself as the embodiment of economic modernisation. When he came to office in 2004, Mr Barroso set economic reform (ie, the Lisbon Agenda) as his priority. Under his leadership, he said, the commission would become a slasher of red tape, an advocate of free markets and a sponsor of fiercer competition. In Paris he was rewarded with the sobriquet of an “ultra-liberal”.

There was sound sense in choosing this course, even so. Europeans have been rebelling against grand dreams, such as enlargement or the draft constitution. The hope was that they might respond more favourably to measures to promote competition, cut prices and help consumers. To use a phrase of the moment, this promises a “Europe of results”. And, at the macroeconomic level, the results have been pretty good: growth was healthy last year and EU countries created 3m jobs. But the answer to the question of whether the union has really fostered free markets and more competition has to be: well, it's tried.

On the credit side, fines on cartels are running at record levels—last month, the commission imposed its largest-ever penalty (on lift-makers, for rigging the market). The European Court of Justice has slapped down a German law protecting Volkswagen from takeover. The commission has told 17 countries to get rid of special protective rules cosseting notaries. Only last week, the commission and American trade negotiators reached a tentative “open skies” deal that could partially liberalise air travel between Europe and the United States (see article).

Moreover, at least to judge by intentions, the EU's drive to open up markets is accelerating. The commission recently outlined plans to limit the remaining powers of national governments to block trade in goods within the EU. It wants to storm the last bastion of post-office monopolies (carrying ordinary letters). Neelie Kroes, the competition commissioner, is investigating the insurance industry for conflicts of interest, and promising to tighten the rules against state aid. This may come to nothing, but at least Europe's competition authorities show willing.

The debit side is, however, just as weighty. The commission has given up its long-running attempt to scrap the use of poison pills and other barriers to takeovers—a victory of managers over shareholders. It has limited the ability of national watchdogs to intervene in cross-border financial mergers and backed away from threats to abolish “interchange fees” charged by credit cards and retail banks. (Mrs Kroes once lambasted these companies for “outrageous” profiteering.) The single-market commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, says the big four accounting firms ought to be shielded from lawsuits that threaten their stability; he might even propose capping their liabilities. None of these actions is necessarily wrong-headed. But they are largely designed to help specific industries rather than to improve the working of markets. In short they are pro-business, not pro-market.

This generally pro-business stance has been softened by good old-fashioned economic populism, such as price controls on mobile-phone roaming charges, and plans to limit car emissions, albeit not as much as green lobbyists had hoped. In both cases the commission proposed new rules without the sort of impact assessment it promised when it set itself up as a champion of competition and destroyer of red tape. These decisions were thus pro-consumer, but again not necessarily pro-market.

The national resistance
The biggest problem has long been the ability of national governments to squash the commission's more competitive instincts. At best, this produces uneasy compromises between consumers and business—examples include the deal over car emissions and the extraordinarily strict rules governing every aspect of the chemicals industry. At worst, national governments manage to eviscerate reforms altogether. Witness the gutting of the commission's efforts to reform services. Witness, too, the lamentable failure to set up an EU-wide patent. And witness the latest financial-markets directive, intended as a single rule-book for Europe's investment industry, which has had so many national bells and whistles added that it risks becoming, in Mr McCreevy's own words, a “nightmare”.

The commission could reply that it must be pragmatic, and that it is at least pushing for consumer rights as the only force strong enough to stand up to both governments and businesses. That much is true. But sometimes pragmatism lures it into backroom deals with big countries, notably France and Germany, undermining both reform in general and hopes of a break-up of national champions. That is not so much pragmatism as negotiating the terms of your own surrender.

It’s Dukakis Time! Why 2008 Will Be About Competence

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Competency usually doesn’t win Presidential elections. Michael Dukakis tried it in 1988, touting the Massachusetts Miracle. It was spectacularly unsuccessful. But 2008 may be different. This may be the first election in many years in which managerial capability trumps ideology.

This is, in large part, the doing of the current administration. When liberals used to call this Presidency the “most incompetent” in history, conservatives would roll their eyes. Now they are reduced to arguing that it is less incompetent, at least, than the Carter administration.

In this time of polarized politics and venomous rhetoric, there is a broad bipartisan consensus that this administration, regardless of its policies and prevailing philosophy, is just plain inept.

The list of blunders now goes well beyond the big-ticket items of Iraq and Katrina.

Everyone from John McCain to John Edwards agrees that the management of the war has been awful; the only difference of opinion is whether it was ever winnable.

But beyond these headliners comes a string of minor and not-so-minor goofs and unforced errors: the Dubai Ports deal, the lost Veterans Affairs computer, the Harriet Miers nomination, the Walter Reed hospital scandal and the politically motivated termination of eight U.S. Attorneys.

While some of these episodes are arguably less deserving of a place on this list than others—Dubai is a perfectly reliable ally, for example, and the U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President—the administration’s execution and public explanation of these events is indefensible.

So what is the reason for the outbreak of incompetence? Is it because of a culture of secrecy that prevents vetting of alternative views? Is it because this administration has contempt for most functions of government? Is it because the intellectually flabby “compassionate conservatism” that got George W. Bush elected produced an administration and bureaucracy without any firm sense of purpose or direction? Is it because delegation is a skill better suited to a C.E.O. than a President of the Unites States? Perhaps it’s a bit of all of these.

So where does that leave us for 2008? It should give an advantage to those with a record of managerial competency. If the public managerial for someone to help the government get its act together, then those who have successfully managed a crisis or two and have achieved tangible results will have a leg up.
The advantage here will go to the executives.

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney will argue that balancing the Massachusetts budget and seizing command of Boston’s Big Dig debacle are proof of his qualifications. Rudy Giuliani will point to the successful fight against crime in New York and his well-documented leadership after Sept. 11. Mike Huckabee will roll out his statistics on improved education and health care in Arkansas.

On the Democratic side, Bill Richardson—in contrast with a field dominated by legislators—will be able to tout the record of executive success that got him re-elected in New Mexico by an overwhelming margin.

But if you run on your record, you have to live with the mistakes that you’ve made. Opposition researchers are already combing through the records for the miscues that plagued each of these men. Mr. Romney’s health plan has hidden costs, his opponents will say. Mr. Richardson blundered as Energy Secretary. Mr. Huckabee spent like a drunken sailor. Mr. Giuliani was a tyrant. And so on.

Still, they’ve all been there. They all know what it is to be an executive, and they have real records of accomplishment to point to.

The public is growing weary of an administration that looks more and more like the Keystone Kops with each passing day. The candidate who can effectively project the ability to act as a capable steward may well be this year’s ultimate crossover candidate—and the next President.

The Momblockers

Friday, March 9, 2007

When father knows best, again and again and again.

But why can’t my parents put her to bed?” I asked Jake. Alice was 11 months old, and my parents were coming over to babysit so we could go out to dinner. Each time they came, Jake would insist on putting her down and then we’d sneak out, like burglars in reverse.

“She’s going through a lot of separation anxiety right now,” he said. “I want to keep things calm for her.”

“But if we don’t let them do it soon, it’ll only get harder!”

“I’m not saying this will be forever. I’m just not ready tonight.” I rolled my eyes; he shook his head angrily. “If they put her to bed, I’ll spend our entire dinner miserable, worrying every moment if she’s okay. Is that what you want?”

Well, yeah, I thought. If it means she can get used to other people taking care of her so eventually we can go out earlier than 8:30. But I didn’t say that. I just said, “Of course not,” and gritted my teeth.

I was slowly discovering a strange and difficult truth: I married a momblocker. Last year in Time, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman wrote about “gatekeeper moms”: women who tell their husbands they want their help, but then micromanage every decision. These moms, not uninvolved dads, were the secret underminers of egalitarian parenting, the authors suggested.

I know plenty of those moms. But in my own circle of artistic, self-employed, super-involved, neurotic, and, yes, Brooklyn parents, I see far more control-freak dads. These are the men you see chastising their wives for not dressing the baby warmly enough or using only the three-point latch in the stroller, not the five. They insist on pushing the stroller on family outings, they crowd their kids on the jungle gyms, they spend hours online researching high chairs. Somewhere along the line, Mom gave up her automatic veto power—and Dad seized it for himself.

A Park Slope dad I know who spends several days a week caring for his toddler says his wife loves his help—until the moment he’s better at something than she is, in which case it infuriates her. A mother in Windsor Terrace told me that when her 4-year-old son has to go to the bathroom, her husband insists on escorting him every time. A stay-at-home-mom friend came home excitedly with a new winter coat she’d bought for her son, but when she showed it to her architect husband, “he took one look at it and said, ‘We could do better.’ ”

Greg Allen, author of the Daddytypes blog, became a de facto momblocker during the first three months of his daughter’s life, when he and his wife stayed home to care for her. “We decided that I would do EBB—everything but breast-feeding—to help her out. It was so much easier for her to let me change the diaper and give the kid a bath than to do it herself and risk screwing up. It took a lot of effort for her finally to say, ‘I need to learn how to do this now.'”

Some of these gatekeeper dads are simply a male version of the stay-at-home mom, who oversees the parenting because she’s with her child more. Michael, a 43-year-old stay-at-home dad, told me that after Halloween, his wife started giving their 6-year-old daughter candy after each meal. So one day, when his wife went out, he simply tossed the bag. His wife was upset, but he believed it was the right choice—and that the real reason his wife was doling out the candy was so she’d have an excuse to have some too.

But a dad doesn’t have to stay home to be a momblocker. Some men I’ve talked to simply consider themselves more expert than their wives because they were raised by divorced parents and had experience caring for younger siblings. Others had children in their mid-forties and are anxious not to miss out on a single school play, checkup, or soccer game because they’re hyperaware of their own mortality. (Contrast this with my own father, 27 when I was born, who stayed home in Brooklyn alone during the first three weeks of my life while my mother took me to her parents’ in Philadelphia.)
And some momblockers have a twistier motive: They’re not really obsessed with their kid’s vitamin intake but they stake a claim anyway, because it looks bad to be indifferent. As Allen points out, “A lot of dads have strong opinions to mask their insecurity. It’s ‘I don’t know my kid well but I’m going to have an opinion on this because I know I’m supposed to.’”

When the momblocker is married to a mom mellow enough to defer to him, there’s rarely a problem. But when his wife is just as opinionated, it can be a power war. Renee, a 52-year-old Long Island publicist, still argues with her husband over decision-making even now that their children are teens. “Bella Abzug was asked the secret to juggling career and family, and she said that you had to find a man like Martin Abzug. I have a Martin Abzug and yet I resent it. I wonder, ‘Why does he have an opinion about this?’”

I have spent many hours complaining to my shrink about Jake’s opinionated nature: He wants Alice to go to private school; he thinks it’s too soon for us to go on vacation without her; he insists Maurice Sendak’s book Mommy? is too scary for her. “I want to get my own way,” I said in one session, “but he won’t even discuss these things. When two married people disagree, who wins?”

“The one who feels more strongly,” he said.

“But that’s him every time!” I cried.

I am not knocking paternal involvement. I am always aghast when, at the playground, a mother jokes about a husband who put the diaper on backward or exploded baby food in the microwave—so foreign is the idea of a clueless dad.

And yet there have been times when I believed I knew what Alice needed but deferred to him anyway, and I regret it. When she was 9 months old and began waking up at night, he would persuade me to nurse her even though my instinct was not to, so she’d learn to sleep through. In the end, she outgrew the habit, but it would have happened faster if we’d done it my way.

So I find myself baiting him, just to show I have my own will. I know he despises Alice’s dingy white Old Navy corduroys, but instead of throwing them out I dress her in them repeatedly, only to have him frown, remove her from my arms, and return her to her room for a change. Would it be better to toss the pants? Of course. Do I even like the pants? Not really. But that’s not the point.

On other occasions I vow to do things so perfectly that he won’t be able to correct me. On a fall trip to visit friends in Amagansett, I triple-checked the suitcase to make sure I had remembered everything: bath toys, baby towel, blankie, Pack ’n Play, booster, diapers, crib sheet, baby utensils, baby wet suit. We made good time and arrived before our hosts, who had said we should make ourselves at home. There was an outdoor pool.

“I want to take Alice in,” Jake said. “Can you get a swim diaper?” I looked up at him with a terrified face. “You forgot swim diapers,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but she already pooped today, so she can go in without one.”

“I don’t want to risk it. It’s not our pool.”

I hunted for a swim diaper in the house but couldn’t find one. Seeing the chagrined look on my face, he added, “It’s okay! It’s not a big deal. Don’t worry about it.”

But it didn’t feel okay. It felt catastrophic. In my battle to show my proficiency, I lose again and again, strengthening his belief that he can parent better.

As many parents have told me, most of these issues will be moot once Alice is old enough to assert her own will and a third party comes into the picture. Until then, I may have to defer to the more opinionated parent, Jake, as much as it kills me. Even if most of the child-rearing decisions are meaningless, they matter to him. So I consult him, give in, and then resent him, when many mothers would kill for a husband so invested in his child’s life.

It’s not easy to feel confident as a mother when you’re married to a momblocker. So I make sure to spend ample time alone with Alice and do things my way, like buy her Tasti D-Lite or let her stomp in puddles. Right now, when she’s not yet 2, these are our secrets. But pretty soon I’ll have to reckon with the only entity more daunting than a controlling dad: a tattletale.

How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.

When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.

In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.

In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.

I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).

Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.

However, my views have found favour with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents — from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and exiles from Europe and North America — assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel on Monday.

According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

Race and Republicanism

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Race has always been a provocative subject when the needs of science and statistics intersect with politics. Now that debate is once again heating up in France, as the planned introduction of “ethnic statistics” has caused a fierce dispute that touches the very heart of French republicanism.

According to a law that dates back to the French Revolution, and reconfirmed in 1978, French government officials are forbidden to collect information about a citizen’s ethnic or racial origins, whether real or alleged, when conducting a census or other efforts to gathering statistical information on the population.

There are two main reasons for this. The first is the republican principle, enshrined in the Constitution, that recognizes only citizens and does not accept any distinction among them due to origin, race, or religion. The second reason is historic: the painful and still vivid memories of the Vichy regime of WWII, when citizens’ “racial” and religious origin was stamped on national identification documents and was used as a key tool in rounding up French Jews for delivery to the death camps.

Today, the issue has returned to the forefront because of a new fight against racial discrimination, which appears to require more accurate measures of social inequality. Existing public statistics, it is believed, do not provide enough relevant information to analyze the possibility of discrimination in employment or housing. After all, without appropriate statistics, it is difficult to prove discrimination.

Indeed, many argue that by refusing to take into account distinctions linked to ethnic and religious origin, these distinctions are legitimized. One British social critic, quoted by the sociologist Dominique Schnapper, compares the behavior of the French, unwilling to mention ethnic discrimination, with English people of the Victorian era, who refused to talk about sex.

Supporters of gathering statistics on race and religion also look to the experiences of the United States, Britain, or the Netherlands, where census takers are free to inquire about ethnic origins and a citizen’s sense of belonging. Since 1990, the US has collected data on ethnic origins. Although the First Amendment of the US Constitution bans any religious test for citizenship or political office, ruling out questions on religious beliefs, it is possible to gather information on ethnicity, even in certain cases of multiple ethnic origins, such as “White,” “Black,” “Asian,” and “native American.”

In Britain, the concern about social promotion of minorities led to the introduction in 1991 of statistics that indicate ethnic status. As for the Netherlands, companies were obliged to report the ethnic composition of their workforces until the law was repealed in 2003.

But today’s French legislation is less rigorous than it seems. It distinguishes between anonymous files from random samples and established for scientific purposes, which may contain data about a person’s origins, and files that are not anonymous, which have direct consequences for the people concerned – and for which it is strictly forbidden to register any information about ethnic origins. The 1978 law allows government statisticians to ask “delicate” questions only if these questions are relevant for the survey and with the consent of the person polled.

But government statisticians have long been studying the national origins of immigrants, and are permitted to indicate the previous nationality of people who have acquired French citizenship. Thus, there is a distinction between mentioning the original nationality, which is allowed, and mentioning ethnic and racial origins, which is not.

Is it necessary to go further just because the indicators linked to national origin are not enough to identify discrimination – especially indirect discrimination – based on ethnic grounds? Some surveys show that the groups involved are doubtful about this.

Statistics are not only a reflection of reality: they help to shape it. Statistical categories often tend to become social categories. Not only are racial indications (White, Black, Arabic, Asian) very inaccurate in a world where racial mixing is now common, but, as François Héran, the head of France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies, argues, it is also necessary to prove that difference means inequality and that inequality necessarily means discrimination. Indeed, ethnic counting could merely reinforce the logic of community separation.

Given the desire to penalize ethnic discrimination, the push for government to gain this knowledge is understandable. But the state has other means to encourage equality on the basis of national, social, or economic criteria. In view of the risk of inciting fresh antagonism, gathering racial, religious, and ethnic statistics may not be worth it. The ban against ethnic and racial data is a taboo that should not be overthrown easily, and not without carefully weighing the risk to social peace.

What You Think You Know about Happiness and Why You're Wrong

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

You might think that richer countries are happier. But there's actually no correlation beyond about $10,000 per capita income. See how each country compares on this scatter chart. One surprise is that Vietnam, with a per capita income of less than $5,000, has been just as happy as France, with a per capita income of about $22,000. The happiest country surveyed was Puerto Rico. The unhappiest were Indonesia, the Ukraine, and Zimbabwe. Within Europe, the happiest countries were Denmark, Ireland, and Iceland.

All that data comes from the World Values Survey. You can play around with the dataset online. (Great for a class project, kids.) And definitely check out the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World and the other graphs that cluster cultural values by nation, all to be found by clicking the "Findings" tab. See how life satisfaction correlates with democracy and other ideologies. North America, for example, is more traditional than Northern Europe. Relatively speaking, the miserable former Soviet bloc focuses more on survival than on self-expression.

For those with a longer attention span, it's worth reading Beyond Money, the most authoritative scholarly summary; 300 academic studies on happiness packed into 25 pages. To see how the "satisfaction index" has changed over your lifetime, check out the graph on page three. Though the GDP has tripled, the average person is no more contented with life now than the average person was in 1950.

World Press Photo Mix-Up

Monday, March 5, 2007

This photo won the World Press Photo Award for 2006. The story behind the photo is more complex than appearances suggest.

Bissan Maroun got a first impression of what international publicity means when she walked home from a cinema in her hometown of Beirut two weeks ago. Her mobile phone told her she had missed a huge number of calls. Then it rang again. This time it was her mother, who sounded hysterical: "Your picture is on all the TV channels," she screamed. "My children are famous."

It took a while before Bissan realized what had happened: A snapshot showing the 29-year-old driving through a suburb in southern Beirut in a convertible with her brother, her sister and two female friends had been selected as World Press Photo of the Year 2006.

"I want them to invite me to Amsterdam, to the award ceremony," was Bissan's first reaction. Her dream could actually come true -- the World Press Organization is currently deciding whether to invite the five young people to the ceremony in the Netherlands. It would be a first -- and it might have something to do with a guilty conscience about how the people were portrayed. Seldom has a war picture led to such vilification. "At first everyone said: That must be those rich, chic Lebanese visiting the poor neighborhood like a tourist attraction," Bissan says. "But that's completely untrue."

In fact the captions accompanying the photo in the world's press -- even before it was elected photo of the year -- were rarely sympathetic. Foreign commentators were incensed by the skimpy T-shirts worn by the girls, arguing such apparel was out of place in the conservative neighborhood. They commented on the disgusted expressions on the faces of those in the car, saying those expressions only showed the rich have no sympathy for ordinary people. And what about that car -- wasn't it the most blatant provocation towards the neighborhood's low-income residents? Bissam's acquaintances also began to whisper among themselves -- so much so, that she called in sick at the bank where she works. When her picture was awarded the World Press Photo Award, her boss advised her to make the true story public.

"We're from Dahiye, from the suburb, ourselves," Bissan explains on a hot February afternoon in Beirut. She, her 22-year-old brother Jad and her 26-year-old sister Tamara fled the neighborhood during the Israeli bombings. They stayed in a hotel in the safer district of Hamra and did what most Lebanese did at the time. They waited. The siblings met the other two women in the hotel, Noor Nasser and Lillane Nacouzi, at the hotel. Both are employees of the Plaza Hotel and were allowed to stay in vacant rooms during the war.

"It was so hot, and there were five of us in the small car"

On Aug. 15, the day of the ceasefire, Jad borrowed a friend's orange Mini Cooper. For weeks the siblings had heard nothing about whether or not their apartment block was still standing -- now that the fighting was over, they wanted to go and see for themselves. Jad drove and Tamara rode shotgun, while Bissan squeezed in between the two friends on the backseat, holding her camera phone ready. "We spoke briefly about whether we should really open the roof," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But it was so hot, and there were five of us in the small car, so we folded it back."

Bissan admits that, at first glance, her excursion must look like a prime example of disaster tourism. "But look at our faces. They clearly show how horrified we were, how shocked," she says. "We were not cheerful." Today she can only laugh at the accusation that she and the other young women are dressed too salaciously. "This is Lebanon. We always dress this way," she says, adding that her clothes have never caused her any trouble with conservative neighbors.

It was about 1:00 p.m. and the young people were just on their way to their apartment when the photographer Spencer Platt spotted the orange convertible from the corner of his eye. He told CNN that he spontaneously raised his camera and pressed the shutter four or five times. Most of the pictures didn't turn out, he said, because some one walked into them. He admitted that the award-winning picture was the only one he could use. He never spoke to the five young people. Now he's sorry his photo has caused them so much trouble, saying he never meant to use it to make a political statement.

Catering to a Lebanese cliché

When it was first published, the photo caused a stir among war photographers. Many thought the picture was just too good to be true. There were rumors that the picture had been staged. The controversy continued when the photo received the World Press Photo Award and appeared in the papers once again. Lebanese photographer and jury member Samer Mohad vehemently opposed giving the award to Platt and spoke of an "insult" to all press photographers who had "risked their lives" reporting on the war in Lebanon.

The strong reactions prove that Platt has struck a nerve. He caters perfectly to a cliché about Lebanon that is not entirely unjustified. In fact Lebanon does see immensely wealthy people and extremely poor inhabitants sharing not just the same country, but also the small area of a few square kilometers that is Beirut. There really were rich people wearing expensive sunglasses -- mostly Christian or Sunni -- who sat, hookah in hand, in popular bars above the city watching the unloved Shiite neighborhoods go up in smoke.

The trouble is that Bissan and her companions don't belong to that group.

Bissan has only been able to enjoy the photo's success since her story has appeared in a few Lebanese newspapers. She has told journalists that her apartment was badly damaged, with all the windows broken and the furniture crushed by shock waves from the bombs.

Now she no longer gets reproachful looks from customers at the bank where she works. They bring in newspaper clippings with her picture instead. "My whole desk is full of them," she says. Journalist friends have warned her that he coming weeks will see her getting even more media attention. "But that will hopefully be over by the summer," Bissan says. That's when she is planning to get married -- quietly, and without too much publicity.

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