Avuncular American

Farewell to Diplomacy - But I'm Still "Diplomatic"

Five years ago today, 30 November 2002:

• IAEA inspectors hold press conference about search for WMD in Iraq
• Pentagon running short of chem/bio suits in event of   "    "    "
• President Bush urged Americans to volunteer for the "armies of compassion"

Sometimes it's fun instructive to look back on what was happening, 25, 50, or 100 years ago.  Newspapers do it, so does Harper's Magazine "Weekly Review" and the BBC's "On This Day," where you can get multimedia resource material.

What was I doing five years ago today?  Well, I was spending my last day as a US Foreign Service Officer.  After 24 years in the US diplomatic service, I was leaving for "Life After the Foreign Service" (there are no links showing my relatively quiet departure, but here's a nice link to NPR's profiles of Life in the Foreign Service).  It was like leaving the priesthood.

I wasn't one of the three FSOs who left in protest over Iraq.  If anything, I left in large part out of accumulated disgust over the way the United States "sells" its ambassadorships to the highest bidd... sorry, contributors.  While this has been a bipartisan sin going way back, I saw it up close and personal when a "Pioneer" arrived on my doorstep.  I had been running a small US embassy in Europe as Chargé d'Affaires for a year and a half in a long interregnum between Clinton and Bush political appointees.

It wasn't a bad way to end a career: I got to sign a treaty, celebrate 50 years of a resident US Embassy sitting next to the head of state, and represent the US at countless ceremonies in honor of General George S. Patton and the more than 5,000 fellow GIs from the Battle of the Bulge.

Like most other people, I remember exactly what I was doing on September 11, 2001.  Of all things, our small embassy was completing a day-long Emergency Action Exercise, where security experts from Washington put us through our paces in a scenario imagining the worst that could befall us given our privileged location in Western Europe.  During a mid-afternoon break, one of our officers came back with a story about a plane ramming into the World Trade Center.  At first, it seemed like a planted "story" for our exercise, another part of a pretty wild scenario.  When it began to dawn on us that this was not make believe, we ended the exercise and re-entered the real world.

The ensuing months were a whirlwind of activity, enlisting the assistance of an already willing host nation in the American effort to track down those responsible.  Within weeks of 9/11, we were convening - with the host nation and its large banking and financial industry - an international conference on combating terrorist financing.  Down the road at NATO, the Alliance unanimously declared - for the first time in its history - that the September 11 attacks were an attack against all, and offered assistance.  Allies joined in the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.  The world was with the US.

We know the rest of the story.  "You're either with us or against us," the message, if not the exact words, got through loud and clear to friend and foe alike.  Back in the US to serve on promotion boards in the late summer/early fall of 2002, I started to hear the drumbeat to war: mushroom clouds and smoking guns, regime change, pre-emptive strikes.  Returning to Europe, I heard reports of ordinary Americans at the annual Thanksgiving dinner paling at the US Ambassador's war talk.  But wasn't the US, in the words of the President, still giving Iraq "an opportunity to avoid conflict?"  We now know the level of sincerity behind those statements - the clock had already started ticking.

Five years ago, a private citizen again, I watched and read with mounting horror and frustration the headlong rush to war.  Thanks to the internet, I was able to read the best of what American investigative, muckraking journalism could provide as an antidote to the know-nothing-ism of the mainstream press.  Much of this came from blogs, and I came to respect this new medium and its messengers.  Five years ago I never thought I would be joining their ranks, but here we are, and "Avuncular American" is officially one month old today.

I guess you can never shed your persona, especially one that suited me so well over a quarter century.  So I hope to continue being a (diplomat)ic blogger, for as long as readers put up with me.

Qualitätsfilm: "The Edge of Heaven" (Auf der anderen Seite)

Sorry if I (probably incorrectly) employ a favorite German wine connoisseur term for this film of great quality.  But we were very impressed by Fatih Akin's newest film, and are more eager than ever to see his previous hit, "Head-On" ("Gegen die Wand," 2004).  And we're not alone: Akin won the Cannes Best Screenplay award, and he and his film are nominated for several more at this weekend's European Film Awards  in Berlin.

I'm not terribly fond of the English title chosen by the distributors (it looks like the film has been released in Canada, and will come out in the UK early next year; no release date visible yet for the United States).  The French title (it's just been released in Belgium) is "De l'autre cote," a direct interpretation of the German original, "On the Other Side."  But I can see the symbolism of choosing the reference to Heaven: I'm not giving anything away that the director doesn't announce (on screen, in the titles given major film segments) when I say that Death figures prominently in this beautiful film.

On the other side, in a more literal, earthly sense, can also refer to Germany and Turkey, separated by more than the Bosporus.  The film, which at times has a smidgen of the asynchronous style of "Babel," is equally at home in Bremen or Istanbul.  That is more than can be said of some of the characters, who have more than their share of brushes with culture shock.

Though we know, almost from the beginning, that a couple of the characters will die, one of the film's "charms" is that danger - and death - don't necessarily come from the side you most expect.  And there are "sides" in Auf der anderen Seite: illegal immigrants vs. the police; Islamists vs. secularists; authority vs. insurgents.  Watch this and get a subtle, concentrated dose of every story you have heard about Turkey: its European pretensions, undercurrents of political Islam, the restive Kurdish minority, and the Turkish diaspora in Europe, especially Germany.  There are other "themes," too: father/son, mother/daughter, lesbian love, and expatriation/homesickness (including a German bookseller in Istanbul!).

Definitely a film to watch, and a director to follow.

Brussels Conference on Cuba's Transition (or Is It Succession?)

First, for the Cuba-watchers in Miami and Washington: no, this was not a European Union conference.  It was organized by the Maison America-Latina, an educational center for Latin American students in Europe that also offers Spanish and Portuguese classes, films from the Hispanic world, and other cultural events.  Entitled "Cuba at the Crossroads: After Fidel, What Transition?" the day-long conference brought together an interesting mix of academics and activists, and featured the Cuban Ambassador to Belgium and the European Union.

Due to apparent ill health, former CIA agent and current Havana resident Philip Agee, author of the 1975 expose "Inside the Company: CIA Diary," was a no show.  But the sponsor's staff and guest speakers - including Jean-Jacques Kourliandsky of the Paris-based Institut des Relations Internationales et Strategiques (IRIS) - covered a good bit of ground relevant to the conference's title question.

Cuban Ambassador Elio Rodriguez took issue with the notion of "transition," and answered the question "After Fidel, What Transition?" with a simple - official - word: "none."  For the Cuban Ambassador, reducing the future of a country of 11 million people to the longevity of Fidel Castro is simplistic.  Obviously, none of the other speakers had a crystal ball answer, but all pointed to the preponderant role of the United States in whatever transpires in the immediate post-Castro era.

In a presentation entitled "The Bush Plan," the audience was first given a historical sketch of the long - and often sad - story of US-Cuban relations, starting with a great 1809 quote from Thomas Jefferson: "Cuba... would allow US domination of the Gulf of Mexico," nicely prefiguring the 1898 Platt Amendment and establishment of the US base in Guantanamo, and at least four military interventions in the first half of the 20th century (that is, before Castro's revolution).  We all know about the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.  But how many Americans are aware of the "Bin Laden of the Western Hemisphere" (the aging anti-Castrite, Luis Posada Carriles, wanted in Cuba and Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of an airliner off Barbados, killing 73 people), at large in the US?  The centerpiece of the Bush Administration's Cuba "transition" plans, the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, with its home in the State Department, was given a boost by President Bush on October 24, 2007 when he announced the launch of a Freedom Fund for Cuba.  "Succession," in these quarters, is a no-no; "transition" translates into regime change.

Ambassador Rodriguez preferred to concentrate on Cuba's efforts to normalize relations with the EU.  Though a member of the ACP (Africa-Caribbean-Pacific) process, Cuba has still not succeeded in obtaining a bilateral treaty with the EU, and is the only Latin American country to lack one.  Individual EU states, especially Spain, maintain trade ties (and are a major source of tourists), and 35% of Cuba's trade is with Europe.  Cuba remains frustrated that European concerns over democracy and human rights keep sanctions in place.  Rodriguez pointed to the irony of human rights paragons China, Vietnam, and the Gulf States - all of which enjoy healthy relations with Europe.

Kourliandsky sees some hope for progress toward normalization of relations between Cuba and the US, especially should a Democrat enter the Oval Office in 2009.  Democratic support in the Hispanic community is from the majority Mexican-American community, and even in the Republican Miami Cuban community, Bush Administration restrictions on family visitation and remittances have angered Cuban Americans.  In the US business community, lobbyists see Kennedy-era sanctions as increasingly anachronistic.  Kourliandsky and Rodriguez both underlined the irony of the US trade in pharmaceuticals and wheat, where the US, despite sanctions, has a leading place in the Cuban market - on a strictly cash basis.  A nice return on investment for campaign contributions - agribusiness and big pharma figure prominently in the Bush contributor hall of fame.

So maybe that's the transition plan: just as the US was not terribly bothered to see Mao's Communism evolve into the current "capicomm" China, maybe Cuban generals - already in charge of the island's booming tourist industry - can "evolve" to an accommodation with capital from the North.   The main danger is to avoid the admonition of Jeb Bush: "After its success in Iraq, Washington should finish with the regime of Castro.''

American Mideast Zapping: Meanwhile, Over on Channel Iraq...

You will be forgiven (in fact, you'll even get a few Brownie points) for having been riveted by the Annapolis Conference, the spirit of which continues today at White House talks between Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert, hosted by George W. Bush.  But you'll get at least ten demerits for missing the news from Iraq.  No, not the latest casualty numbers, which show the number of US soldiers killed inching steadily towards the 4,000 mark, despite the Surge-induced relative "calm."  Nor the trickle of Iraqi refugees returning from Syria, though that might either be a sign that they see something afoot back home, or simply that Syria has enough problems of its own and can't provide them any more jobs.

The news I'm talking about are these two items that may have escaped your attention while watching the US Naval Academy show: Iraqi PM Maliki and President Bush signing a framework agreement outlining bilateral talks to cement longterm US-Iraqi relations; and the Maliki government's application to the United Nations (you may ask, "why are they asking Ban Ki-moon and not George Bush?") to extend the American (sorry, Coalition) troop presence for one more - "final" - year.  Did you know that?  According to the BBC

"The United States has promised that the multinational forces will stay under a UN mandate only until the end of 2008," Mr Maliki said in a televised address.  Mr Maliki said that Iraq had reached the stage where it did not need coalition forces, adding that the country should be allowed to become a "normal state".

If you're like some principals in the US Government, maybe you were on your elliptical trainer and couldn't switch channels.  But I'm sure some people - especially those who have been saying that the US could be in Iraq for 10 years, 20 years, or however long "enduring" lasts - will have seen the significance of Maliki's moves.

Back to the Iraqi-United States agreement.  According to the AFP

At the White House, US "war czar" Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said that next year's talks would cover issues at the heart of the bitter US debate over the war -- including whether Washington would have permanent bases in Iraq, how many US troops would be stationed there, and for how long.  "The basic message here should be clear: Iraq is increasingly able to stand on its own; that's very good news, but it won't have to stand alone," Lute told reporters in a briefing on the tentative accord.  "The shape and size of any long-term, or longer than 2008, US presence in Iraq will be a key matter for negotiation between the two parties, Iraq and the United States," the general said.  Lute's remarks were notable in that top US officials, starting with Bush, have repeatedly denied seeking permanent bases in Iraq or that the US deployment -- currently at roughly 162,000 troops -- is open-ended.

I have the greatest respect for LTG Douglas Lute, but I guess I might quibble when a three star US Army general addresses what really should be in Condoleeza Rice's bailiwick.  Or, perhaps if she were too busy getting ready for Annapolis, then maybe our main diplomat in Baghdad, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, might have announced this important bilateral process.

But then, I'm an ex-diplomat, so what do you expect?  Niceties like civilian primacy in matters of diplomacy may have been dealt a death blow by this unilateralist administration.  And then there's the time line: the July 31 2008 target date to reach "agreements between the two governments with respect to the political, cultural, economic, and security spheres," according to the White House document.  That should be just in time for the September 2008 Republican Convention, where the Republican nominee can wave around another "Mission Accomplished" sign before the final stretch of the Presidential campaign.

Most sovereign countries, when they want to manage "political, cultural, economic, and security" relations with the United States, simply set up an embassy in Washington and get on with business.  Unless you're a client state - or in a state of "enduring" occupation - you can also communicate with the US through its ambassador in your capital.  This agreement has all the hallmarks of another decades-long commitment of US troops.  But we can't say we weren't told before: back in late May, as the nascent Petraeus Report was beginning to be hyped, we had the roll out of the "Korea Model."

All a bit much, while the Mideast peacemaking glow is still warm?  Okay, go and change channels.

Annapolis: Before Any More Road Maps, Map the Ground Truth

On the eve of the Annapolis Conference, a little grounding in geography is in order.  Already, we are told by all concerned to lower expectations ("lower than the Dead Sea," according to a Washington wag).  The conference is to last all of one day, and if you think there's going to be much time left for meaningful discussion, after President Bush launches the meeting and each of the fifty or so delegations make their introductory remarks...

No, even the US hosts are stressing the notion of a "launchpad" for further talks, as opposed to negotiations per se.  I can already imagine the spin: "The mere fact that delegations from Israel to Syria were gathered here at the same table..."  In other words, success is defined by the mere fact of convening the conference, not in any "deliverables" coming out of it.  No wonder it was reduced from three days to one.

17 long years ago, Israeli author (and former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem in the Seventies) Meron Benvenisti closed down his West Bank Data Project.  For more than twenty years after the Six Day War of June 1967, Benvenisti had meticulously chronicled the steady growth of Israeli encroachment on the Palestinian lands of the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza.  His maps - showing first a few dots, then dots merging into blobs, then blobs connected by settler-only bypass roads - were essential to any understanding of "the Middle East Peace Process" and what might one day become a Palestinian state.

But Benvenisti threw in the towel in 1989, turning his data over to a university.  This is from the New York Times 22 October 1989 article "Hard Facts Daunt Israeli Researcher"

His work is maps and numbers, by and large. But he has an unusual talent for summing up the statistics in catch phrases. He often talked of Israel's ''second republic,'' established after it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and the ''master race democracy.'' By that he meant Israel's present status as a nation with about 3.2 million Jews ruling 750,000 Arabs inside Israel, who can vote but are clearly second-class citizens, and 1.7 million Palestinians in the territories who are subjects of the state.  ''Intimate enemies,'' and ''the geography of fear'' were other favorites.  But his best known theory he sums up with the word ''irreversibility.'' That is Mr. Benvenisti's thesis that Israelis and Palestinians have grown so interdependent - as employers and employees, buyers and sellers of goods, providers and purchasers of services - that in his view they cannot split.  ''The surgicial solution, amputating part of the area'' and giving it to the Arabs, as advocated by Israel's political left, ''is meaningless,'' he says his research has shown.  ''Jews and Arabs are living in the same area, but 90 percent of the cultivatable land, 75 percent of the water, and all the infrastructure is geared to support one of those two peoples,'' the Jews. Without access to the Jews' land, water and infrastructure, he argues, no Arab nation could survive - unless it started life with grants in aid amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

Mind you, Benvenisti's work - and the numbers above - date back almost twenty years.  That is, before Ariel Sharon's expansion of the settlements (but also his removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza), before Oslo and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, before the rise of Hamas and its victory in parliamentary elections, before the construction of the "security barrier."

Today's facts on the ground are best illustrated by maps, this time thanks to the BBC's excellent "Middle East Crisis" report, especially "Israel and the Palestinians."   Actually, even these excellent illustrations give the misleading impression that everything in the West Bank which is not an Israeli settlement is by default under Palestinian control.  Not so: PA-administered lands are within "Area A," delineated in the 1993 Oslo agreement.  Israeli settlements are just that - basically massive gated communities on steroids, with the Israeli Army guarding the gatehouses.  But the rest of the West Bank - the Jordan Valley and its crucial water resources, the strategic heights over which watchposts guard - is under Israeli Army control.

In his 2002 memoir and ode to his peacemaking father, "Strangers in the House," Palestinian human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh recounts how neighbors would accost him and say "we should have listened to your father twenty five years ago when he counseled making peace with Israel."  The elder Shehadeh had vainly called for the establishment of a state of Palestine within the borders of the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip.  Shehadeh pere was ostracized by the PLO, which was always holding out for more.

Had the Palestinians in the thirties and forties accepted the reality of a Jewish state, and had Israel's independence been greeted with resignation but not rejection, then Palestine might have kept much of the territory - contiguous, viable territory - promised them in the 1947 UN Partition Plan.   It is, of course, an oversimplification to place the failure of Partition solely on the Palestinians; we now know that there was at least as much Israeli "push" as there was Arab "pull" in the exodus of Palestinians from their homes and lands.

Peace, territory, and statehood thrown away in 1948, again after 1967 as recounted by Shehadeh, yet again in holding out for the maximum solution in Camp David in 2000: Palestinians are ill-served by their leadership.  In "Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007," by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar (reviewed in The Economist), we see how Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of the exiled PLO in Tunis

had no idea how settlements had permeated the West Bank.  To the horror of their local advisers, they agreed [in the Oslo accords] to no more than a token constraint on settlement growth.  Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who signed Oslo and whom the authors plainly admire for hating settlers almost as much as they do, gets a lashing for presiding during one of their fastest rates of growth and being in a "state of denial" about their influence.

The facts on the ground - settlements, checkpoints, bypass roads, walls - all will make an Israeli-Palestinian accord harder to reach.  A viable agreement would be one respected by all major elements of Palestinian and Israeli society.  But when the leaders of Hamas - who won the January 2006 parliamentary elections fair and square - are excluded by the US, Israel, and a compliant PLO, it is reasonable to question the legitimacy of any eventual agreement.  Yes, it is difficult to deal with Hamas, and yes, their brand of political Islam may be anathema to the other parties.  But that is what happens when "freedom reigns" in the Middle East - sometimes the voters, bless them, will choose the "wrong" people.  Annapolis, which is only a one-day launch fest, will only get somewhere if it can find a way to bring Hamas into the tent.  Otherwise, why waste the effort?

(Maps courtesy the BBC Special Report "Israel and the Palestinians")

The Economic Cost of Politics: Belgium, France, and the U.S.

If a diplomat at the American Embassy in Brussels were to draft a report on the political situation in Belgium, giving a status report on the protracted negotiations to form a coalition government (167 days and counting), he or she would assign a "PGOV" tag (Traffic Analysis by Geography and Subject - TAGS) so that it would get proper distribution in Washington.  Likewise, a report from Embassy Paris on the series of public sector union strikes to protest President Sarkozy's proposed pension reforms might carry ELAB - Labor Sector Affairs.

I don't know what system the British Embassy in Washington might apply to "tag" a report on the economic impact - both domestic and international - of almost eight years of the George W. Bush administration, but it is possible that the homeland of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes might still use the term political economy.  Thanks to Typepad's tag system, I've chosen political economy to describe that nexus of government action and market reaction that describes much of our economic world.

Somehow, in the shorthand of university course listings and textbooks, "political science" came into its own (and always sought legitimacy in quantification through often obtuse statistical studies).  Political economy got shortened into economics, where Econ 101 maintained the necessary "macro" understanding of political underpinnings, and Econ 102 or microeconomics looked at the market through the motivation and workings of the enterprise.

So, back to our diplomats reporting on the political/economic situations in their respective countries of assignment.  Now, thanks to the Governor of the Belgian National Bank, the protracted political crisis has a price tag: 2.5 billion euros.  Echoing the concerns of the Belgian Employer's Federation, the nation's central banker sees folly in ignoring the economy by the narcissistic political class.

In France, where the strikes have tapered off (for now), the head of the employer's federation condemned the "masochism" of the unions, where a recent strike cost an estimated 60 million euros to Air France alone.

Since we don't have an American Embassy in Washington, we'll have to look to the outside world to judge the cost of allowing the dollar to lose its world reserve currency status; of essentially giving the trillion dollar Clinton/Gore budget surplus away in tax breaks for the wealthy; of allowing the country's infrastructure to literally collapse; of spending without limit, using the national credit card.  Congress recently estimated the cost of the Iraq war - so far - at $1,500,000,000,000 (I think I got the zeros right, but it's $1.5 trillion).

So, "political economy" might be a term worth reviving.  Political choices, whether dithering over forming a government, striking-before-negotiating, or charging your wars 'cause you can't choose betweens guns or butter - all of those "choices" bear an economic cost.

Odes to Africa on BBC World Service Radio

I'm listening to it now, and I hope you will too.  BBC World Service radio, that lifeline from London to the world, has its "Close Up" program on its website, and you can listen to it on their Radio Player.

On the East African island of Zanzibar, the lyrics of local Taarab songs are used not just for entertainment but to convey pungent messages of longing, rivalry and loss between the members of the audience. This goes back to a time when open expression of personal emotion was taboo in this traditional Islamic society.  Close Up this week explores the course of love in Zanzibar through this vibrant local tradition, in the first of a 3-part series of Songs of the Earth. Local men and women speak frankly about their relationships, from infatuation to disenchantment, from respectful love to outrage, when a wife discovers that her husband wishes to bring another wife into the household.

Here you will hear the lilting English of Zanzibaris who came of age in the days of independence (and fusion with mainland Tanganyika, forming Tanzania) in the sixties.  The Taarab music provides a haunting backdrop.  Just listening to this wonderful little bit of radio should help provide an antidote to the pervasive tendency to portray Africa in the abstract as a continent of misery, only surfacing in the media when a disaster (usually man-made) strikes.

While you're at it, another BBC World Service staple, "From Our Own Correspondent," gives journalists a chance to report on the atmospherics and "backstory" of the places they cover.  This week's is also devoted to Africa, and again provides some gems on little-heard stories.  In "No Guns at Ethiopian Peace Talks," East Africa correspondent Elizabeth Blunt recounts how "the tribes of the South Omo Valley in Ethiopia recently held a gathering to discuss shared concerns and invited their neighbours from the Kenyan and Sudan borders."

In a continent as massive and varied as Africa, there have to be scores of stories that show something other than dying children - and child soldiers - but don't count on soundbite journalism to tell you.  But the BBC is a good place to start seeing Africa in a different light.

Thanksgiving - Accentuate the Positive

With no more Art Buchwald around to help us explain the American feast of Thanksgiving (it's the only American holiday that can be described as such, unless you consider Fourth of July hot dogs a "feast") to non-Americans, the best way is show-and-tell.  Invite a foreigner to Thanksgiving and help improve America's image.  Thanks, Art, for "Le Jour du Merci Donnant" and other joys.

If you can't do that, then go over to www.FreeRice.com, a wonderful idea started by American John Breen in association with the World Food Program.  It's a game, but the "payoff" is real: a fun vocabulary test results in rice donations to the needy.  It's really as simple as point and click.  Even when you get a wrong answer, you get more chances.  Thanks to Mr. Breen, who reports that his son's SAT scores improved after getting hooked on the vocabulary-for-rice quiz.

Thankfully we still have Al Kamen of the Washington Post, whose column "In the Loop" was a political gossip blog before the word blog ever existed.  His list of places to avoid on Thanksgiving ("The Pumpkin May Fly") is instructive, though a mite incomplete.  But he only has a few inches of column space.  My favorite:

The Krongards'. Not a particularly close family -- State Department Inspector General Howard "Cookie" Krongard did, after all, sue his own son and daughter-in-law over a home loan, threatening that their kids would be "on the street" -- and things have clearly taken a turn for the worse.  Cookie's brother, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, former CIA executive director, says he specifically told Cookie of his membership on a Blackwater advisory board. This grievously embarrassed Cookie, who repeatedly and emphatically told the House oversight committee last week that he had no knowledge of this. They weren't real close before, but now . . .

There are a couple of other "close" families, including the Giulianis, where the kids are campaigning for anyone-but-Dad.  Al, thanks for sticking it to the hypocritical - and the just plain dumb - with your usual wry humor every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Finally, for smug readers in the US, spare a thought for your compatriot expatriates, who have to contend with the lack of everything from corn syrup for the pecan pie to the prospect of eating fresh cranberries (though I see from the WSJ that the American staple, cranberry sauce that you cut with a knife, is a rarefied commodity in the States).  The situation is nicely described by Pamela Druckerman in the LA Times, "The French Don't Do Pop-Tarts."

So, from those of us on this side of the Atlantic, happy Thanksgiving.

Guilty on Arrival: DHS Agent Asks "What's UNESCO?"

In its quest to win hearts and minds in the Arab world, the administration has hired no less than three high powered Undersecretaries of State for Public Diplomacy; Karen Hughes, the latest to declare victory and go home (obviously she hadn't paid attention to this advice from former US diplomat John Brown); her predecessor Margaret Tutwiler, a retread from the George H.W. Bush White House who left in frustration after five months; and Charlotte Beers ("the most powerful woman in advertising"), brought in from Madison Avenue to revamp the US image before it went down the tubes in "Mission Accomplished."

But read this account of the recent US tour of legendary Lebanese composer and musician Marcel Khalife and you'll get an inkling of why all the high-priced PR people in the world cannot help the US deal with the Arab world.  Khalife describes his arrival experience:

At the end of the interview [see below*] with the immigration officer (naturally, this was not the first time; anywhere I landed, I had the same conversation), I had a CD and I gave them a copy and I told him I would like to give you this as a gift so that you’ll know I am just an artist and musician. He was surprised I gave him a CD. I told him at the same time, I'm the UNESCO Artist for Peace. And he said, what does UNESCO mean?  This happened here in New York. I told him this was a UN organization for culture.

The lucky but clueless Immigration officer (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of DHS) had just received an album from the "Bob Dylan of Arab music," (which probably understates his talent) and UNESCO, of course, is the UN's Educational and Scientific Organization.

My point here is not to excoriate some hapless immigration official in a chaotic JFK arrival hall.  No, my point is that Marcel Khalife, on his way to concerts throughout the United States in this time of American travails with the Arab world ("why do they hate us?") -- and in the week before the Annapolis conference -- misses an opportunity to win points through its welcome (or lack thereof) to one of the most influential artists in the secular Arab world.  I stress secular, since Khalife has been attacked by extremists in Bahrain and elsewhere, who once objected to his presentation of an ancient Arab love story.

In other hands, in a different age, the US might have handled this differently.  The US Information Agency, which former Senator Jesse Helms succeeded in dismantling and handing over to the State Department, might have organized a US tour for Khalife.  It would have ensured a smooth arrival in the US, and would have given his American tour prominent coverage on the Arabic service of VOA.  Instead

*Once I come to the airport, you feel a certain difference in treatment, in the negative, not positive sense. Once our names are checked in the computer, the computer reacts unnaturally. They isolate us inside rooms and questions are asked which have to do with our very humanity.  ... the identity that you have become grounds for accusation.

When I was a young vice consul at American embassies, I quickly learned that foreign visa applicants had no Constitutional right to a US tourist visa.  In fact, the burden of proof is on the applicant.  There is an assumption of ineligibility, if not "guilt" per se.   But  Khalife had already been through the visa process, and in fact had been to the US before (I remember hearing him on NPR a couple of years ago).  Does "traveling while Arab" mean that humiliation is de rigueur at every "checkpoint" - even after you've been approved?

I think Khalife has probably left the US by now, and is presumably back in Lebanon.  Maybe the State Department should task its cultural attache in Beirut to organize a little gesture - a dinner invitation? a concert? a travel grant?- to make amends to Marcel Khalife.  It could go a long way.

Pity OPEC and China: Pegged to the Falling Dollar

And while you're at it, pity us American expatriates, yearning for the days when the Economist's Big Mac Index was good for a wry chuckle about those crazy Europeans paying (insert astronomical sum) for a cheeseburger.

Now we have to worry about the nabobs of OPEC, their pockets overflowing with $100 (or almost) a barrel petrodollars, vying for Big Macs or Big Mercs when their dollars are worth less and less.  Are they going to switch?

From the Financial Times' editorial yesterday:

The dominant male in a pride of lions has an easy life – as long as he shows no weakness. The US economy has long been in a similar position, yet the increasing vulnerability of the dollar is creating a risk that others will lose confidence and turn on the dominant currency. Comments from Opec, the oil cartel, and Wen Jiabao, Chinese premier, suggest that other lions are restless.

Is it me, or is the deafening silence from the White House an ostrich-like head-in-the-sand unwillingness to acknowledge that there is a huge problem looming?  Is the dominant male curling into a fetal position?   Why is it that US Treasury Department announcements about truly wanting a "strong dollar" are greeted with the same international skepticism as other "do as I say, not as I do" pronouncements?

I'm not an economist, but my gut tells me that this may be a turning point in international financial arrangements.  It may not even happen in a Bretton Woods-like venue, when after World War II the US dollar came to replace the pound sterling as the international reserve currency.  In fact, it may just happen in a sort of stealth switch, as individual nations, cartels, companies and government investment funds start dealing in currencies other than the dollar as their default currency.  Sort of like voting with your feet, this may be the world's final judgment on the disastrous credit-card presidency of George W. Bush.