Avuncular American

Being W - Zero Plus, Stone Minus

Karl Zero (photo, on the left), born Marc Tellenne, just loves George W. Bush.  Like he loves Jacques Chirac (Dans la peau de Jacques Chirac, winner of France's Cesar for best documentary in 2007).  In future, stay tuned for similar "unauthorized autobiographies" of Nicolas Sarkozy and - who knows? - Sarah Palin (Zero has already professed his love for her).

Karl Zero will be there with his trademark compilation of rare (and not so rare) footage and imagined (but close to the mark, and to the quick) voice over.  His latest effort, "Being W." (Dans la peau de George W. Bush), which aired last week on the French-German non-commercial channel Arte, is, like Oliver Stone's "W." timed for maximum exposure in this American election season.  We saw it, for free, on Arte in its French version, with Zero's imagined Bush monologue voiced by actor Lambert Wilson.  Anglophones can get a feel for the Zero style in this clip from Zero's website.

Though we like to see films in their "version originale," it's hard to find fault with either French or English version of Being W.  In any case, the documentary footage is left in English with French subtitles, so nothing is lost in translation.

Anyway, I'm being technical: what matters is that Being W. is hilarious, and euro-for-dollar probably a much better return on investment than Oliver Stone's interminable "W."  Somehow, in this election season where all eyes are on the present contest, and hopes fixed on the future, I took the time to see Oliver Stone's latest on the day it was released in Brussels.

I won't go as far as Eileen Jones in Alternet - "A catastrophe worthy of the worst president" - but compared to Karl Zero's little tweaked and twisted documentary gem, Stone's multi million dollar star-studded opus is little better than a ... documentary.  No, I take that back.  It is not nearly as good as most documentaries, where at least you have a sense of when footage is genuine.  Stone's mix of imaginary scenes - many mano-a-mano set pieces between "Poppy" Bush and his neer-do-well son - and Stone's Forrest Gump-like superimposition of Josh Brolin (W.) on board the aircraft carrier in the "Mission Accomplished" scene, make for a sophomoric exercise in film editing.

In the end, Stone's film is unnecessary: we didn't really need a dramatization of Bush reading to schoolchildren on September 11, Bush's carrier landing with codpiece, Bush's address to Congress... they're all on tape anyway.  Stone's depiction of the lost years when Dubya drank and dawdled his way through a bunch of failed ventures are moderately entertaining, but only that.

Want a look at the real Dubya during the missing years?  Karl Zero provides the real thing, and at times the President-to-be looks like a handsomer version of Alfred E. Newman.  Mr. Zero even has a couple of real-life revelations: there's a sequence of a Bush speech where he's recollecting seeing live images of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11, though taped footage was not even available until later that day.  The tricks memory can play.

In the Arte TV premiere of "Being W." Karl Zero and co-director Michel Royer (photo, on the right), during a non-commercial pause, warned that the final part of the approximately two hour film was "darker," and indeed there is footage - no doubt unseen on any American TV screens - of civilian casualties: a grisly lineup of children, probably casualties in the initial invasion phase of the Iraq war.

Karl Zero - a news comedian in the Jon Stewart mold, though very much a la francaise - sees no contradiction in thinking Bush "crazy" and "catastrophic" and yet showing him as the buffoon Bush likes to play (is he just playing or is he truly as dyslexically inept with thoughts and words?).

Stone, on the other hand, portrays Bush as a true believer, at least in terms of religion (for my money, Stacy Keach as Bush's born-again sagebrush preacher/AA team leader "Earle Hudd" is one of the film's more convincing supporting roles - though the character is fictitious).  What is the Stone take on Bush?  I don't really know, and while I can tolerate a good amount of ambiguity in cinema, Stone's W. just seems like it ran out of running time.  Thankfully.

So, if you can somehow get to see the Karl Zero/Michel Royer version of W., you'll learn more about George W. Bush than Oliver Stone will ever be able to tell you.  Both are semi-fictional unauthorized biopics, but instead of squirming in your seat and playing spot-the-politician played by celebrity lookalikes, sit back and savor the skewering that Mr. Zero gives Mr. Bush.

(photo credit: Arte.tv)

Laissez Faire? Sarkozy, Bush, and Obama

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is no lame duck.  He's only been president since 2007, and his (first?) term ends in 2012.  But in his EU round robin presidency, he only has about two months left.  George W. Bush will still have a couple of weeks left in office when Sarkozy hands over to the Czechs on January 1, 2009.  The calendar has much to do with Sarkozy's frenetic pace, but he's always like that.

Bush, of course, is the real lame duck, and The Economist on 23 October captured his pique at having to deal with France's "Energizer Bunny"

The French president invited himself to Camp David, where he appeared alongside “dear George”, spoke warmly of “the great American nation” and called for a special summit of G8 countries to “refound capitalism” soon after the American presidential election. The Americans should host it, he declared, “because the crisis took off in New York”. President George Bush, appearing rather startled, limply agreed (the White House has since announced that the summit will meet near Washington, DC, on November 15th).

Subsequent pronouncements have shown that Bush wants the summit to do rather less than "refound capitalism."  His weekly radio address last Saturday:

During this summit, we will discuss the causes of the problems in our financial systems, review the progress being made to address the current crisis, and begin developing principles of reform for regulatory bodies and institutions related to our financial sectors.

Contrast the minimalist Bush with activist Sarkozy, here characterizing the joint Asian-European

willingness for the Washington summit to be a place where we make some decisions, and we have all understood that it would not be possible to simply meet and have a discussion, we need to turn it into a decision-making forum.

It probably matters less what host Bush wants out of the summit.  Sarkozy is on a roll, and is meeting today with UK PM Gordon Brown, whose thinking on economic matters Sarkozy has come to value.  Next week, on the heels of the US election, Sarkozy will hold a pre-Washington summit of EU leaders in Brussels to prepare the European agenda.  By November 15, of course, there will be a new reality in Washington: the Senate will house a President-elect, whose transition team will be measuring the drapes in the Oval Office while those world leaders are pondering the "new world financial order."

I'll leave it to others to imagine how a McCain/Palin nativist-populist-Christianist administration might deal with the complexities of world cooperation to get out of this capitalist mess.  I find it more useful to ponder how a President-elect Obama might engage with leaders like Sarkozy and Brown.

Despite the Republican noise machine's "Barack The Redistributor" nonsense, serious observers - and increasing numbers of American voters - know that American capitalism would be in much safer hands under Obama (see longtime Obama associate Cass Sunstein's comments in TNR to see how moderate he is).  That said, a President Obama - whose sage counsel helped stave off further meltdown when McCain's gyrations were scaring an already jittery market - would be better apt to engage Sarkozy on his notion (from the 29 September EU Observer) that

The idea of the all-powerful market that must not be constrained by any rules, by any political intervention, was mad. The idea that markets were always right was mad. The present crisis must incite us to refound capitalism on the basis of ethics and work … Self-regulation as a way of solving all problems is finished. Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.

Sarkozy, who was elected last year over a Socialist opponent, is no left wing Redistributor.  As a capitalist who wants his favorite economic ideology to survive, he knows that the current fundamental crisis cries for fundamental reform.  Barack Obama's election to the White House at this critical juncture would provide leaders like Sarkozy and Brown an intelligent, moderate, solutions-oriented counterpart in the world's largest economy.  If, as Sarko says, "laissez faire is finished," then what's needed in the White House is the 21st century incarnation of FDR, whose Keynesian capitalism saved the American economy from destruction wrought by early-20th century Republican laissez faire.

Foreign Fixation With US Election: Free Public Diplomacy, Citizen Style

If the reaction of Belgians to the US presidential campaign is typical of publics throughout Europe and the rest of the world - a recent multi-country poll commissioned by The Guardian and other papers shows that Belgians are among the world's most pro-Obama and anti-Bush - then the United States is enjoying a massive public diplomacy bonanza.  For free.  Thanks to overseas Americans.

For the past several months, but especially in the last weeks leading up to November 4, the services of the Democrats Abroad Belgium (DAB) "Speakers Bureau" have been much in demand.  It might sound impressive, but the "bureau" is just a handful of regular American citizens who happen to be conversant in one or more of Belgium's three official languages: Dutch, French, or German.  English too: in this international atmosphere, it is often the lingua franca of think tanks, educational institutions, discussion groups and news media following the US election.

If we've been swept up in the media frenzy (last night it was the multilingual TV channel "Euronews" filming a bunch of us at a local pub), imagine the toll that this is taking on the Republican.  I say "the" Republican, since the stalwart head of the GOP group in Belgium seems to be a one-man show, trotted out to debate Democrats who put forward one of at least a half dozen debaters who share the burden.

The questions naturally betray the pro-Democratic bias of many of the audiences.  Weary of eight years of Bush unilateralism, terrified at the prospect of a US-led worldwide depression, Europeans want to see an invigorated America under new management.  Luckily for us Dems, this coincides perfectly with our point of view.  European audiences have to be reminded, however, of the ugly underside of American democracy: voter suppression.  Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have written "Block The Vote" in the current Rolling Stone, have also recorded a BBC documentary where they show the myriad ways in which millions - millions - of Americans are prevented from voting.

To Europeans, where in countries like Belgium voting is mandatory, this anti-democratic shrinkage of the electorate is inconceivable.  People receive notices inviting them to vote, and turnout exceeds 90%.  Belgium may have more than its share of political complexity, but gaming the actual voting system is not one of them.  In France, a much larger democracy with far-flung overseas territories, somehow millions of people vote with paper ballots in boxes with slots at the top, which are tabulated by citizen volunteers in time for results announced on the evening TV news.

In the US, meanwhile, the State Department's Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy is organizing the I-VOTE program to promote foreign understanding of the immensely complex and seemingly jury-rigged US electoral system (image above from I-VOTE).  Good initiative, the kind that is done every four years in the US and abroad at its embassies, where local officials, academics, and journalists are invited to straw polls, election night parties, and - depending on the time zone - morning-after breakfasts.

This year, the positive impact of the Obama phenomenon is being multiplied many times over by the kind of citizen public diplomacy us Democrats (and that sole Republican!) are waging on our own dime here in Brussels.  If the Democrats led by Obama win - and especially if the election is shown to be fair and square - the beneficiaries will be all Americans, for the world will see that American democracy is not just a PR story.

"With liberty and justice for all" - so ends the American Pledge of Allegiance.  In his essay on the subject for the Heritage Foundation, libertarian Ward Connerly wrote in 1996 that in America, "we are guaranteed the right to vote."  Would that it were so.  Ten years later, Constitutional lawyer Garret Epps in Salon wrote "You have no right to vote," a sad chronicle of the ambivalent American approach to that most fundamental of democratic practices.

My wife and I have just sent in our absentee ballots.  I wish I could say that we had a good feeling, but our sense of patriotic duty is marred by a realization that many things can go wrong, just like they did in elections past in our benighted County in Florida - Broward-of-the-hanging-chads. Maybe her hyphenated name lacks a crucial hyphen - disqualified!  Maybe our Belgian postmark will be smudged - suspect... discard!  Maybe, as in 2002, the county will just lose 100,000 absentee ballots.  For the sake of American democracy - not to speak of the US image in the world - there has to be a better way.

Chagos Islander Rights Trampled Under "Footprint Of Freedom"

To the shame of the American press (other than wire services), the following is the sum total of US coverage of yesterday's British Law Lords' decision on the expulsion of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia and the islands of the Chagos archipelago.  From the Washington Post, Page A14, 23 October 2008, paragraph seven in roundup of short items entitled Around the World:

Chagos Islanders Lose Legal Fight

Britain's highest court dashed the hopes of Chagos Islanders seeking to return to the Indian Ocean homeland they lost in 1971, when the island of Diego Garcia was leased to the United States for an air base. The law lords' ruling that Britain was not obligated to allow a return reversed last year's decision by an appeals court.

From News Services

That's it.  Minimal context, and only the briefest of history.  No linking to the fact that this case was entirely decided by British obeisance to American wishes.  The London Independent has a fuller account.

"The Footprint of Freedom" - referring to the atoll's approximate shape - is what the US Navy has dubbed its Support Facility at Diego Garcia (the image is from the official website).  The Navy people have even included an "Island History" on the site, with vintage B&W photos of the islanders who - in "Operation Stampede" - were expelled in the late Sixties and early Seventies to make room for the base.  There is no mention of their fate on the base website.

For a heartrending account of how the UK and US governments cleansed the Chagos Islands of their population, see John Pilger's 2006 book "Freedom Next Time."  Pilger, a prolific documentary film maker, covered similar territory in his 2004 film "Stealing a Nation" (click on the link to watch online).  Pilger speaks of the "vandalized lives" of the islanders, whose extreme "sadness" was a leading cause of death when they were exiled from their homes to distant Mauritius.

"Maintaining the fiction" of the supposedly uninhabited islands was the title of a Foreign Office memo to the Wilson Government in the late Sixties, and the "fiction" was maintained throughout subsequent decades by governments Labour and Conservative, Democratic and Republican, on both sides of the Atlantic.  Meanwhile, in the Indian Ocean, the Ilois led lives in desperate poverty on the outskirts of Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius.

In his 2006 book, Pilger tracked down the late British Foreign Minister Robin Cook, who admitted that "the episode was one of the most sordid and morally indefensible I have ever known."  At the time, then US Ambassador to Mauritius William Brewer wrote to Washington:

It is absurd to state that Diego Garcia has no fixed population.  There is no question that the island has been inhabited since the eighteenth century.

But as Pilger writes, both UK and US governments would play "ping pong" with responsibility, "maintaining the fiction" right up to yesterday's ruling. Writing the minority opinion, Lord Bingham cited "highly imaginative letters written by American officials," which brandished vague fears of terrorism as a reason to continue the exclusion of the islanders from their homes.

Had the US and British governments wanted to secure the Diego facilities years ago, what better way than to enlist the islanders as workers and security guards?  One Foreign Office functionary asked at the time, "I don't see why the Americans shouldn't allow some to stay. Could they not be useful?"  But as Mark Gillem writes in "America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire," his study of US military bases overseas, American planners want "white space" around their perimeters.  In the case of Diego Garcia, this has been carried to absurd lengths, where even islands more than a hundred miles away from Diego Garcia must be clear of human habitation.

I have an old diplomatic passport stamped "BIOT" (British Indian Ocean Territory, i.e. Diego Garcia) when I went there from the US Embassy in Mauritius, some twenty years ago. The trip was related to the longstanding arrangement between Mauritius, the British authorities, and the US Navy to employ hundreds of civilian workers for maintenance and housekeeping chores on the base.  But no one from the Chagos refugee community, who from time to time delivered protest letters to the Embassy, was recruited for work on Diego Garcia.  Mauritians, yes, Filipinos, of course.  But no one who might deem themselves as "going home."

Despite prior British courts citing the Magna Carta and its proscription of "Exile from the Realm," yesterday a one-judge majority upheld the government's exile of these forgotten "mini-slaves," as these mixed-race descendants of African slaves, Indian indentured workers, and French and English planters call themselves.  These British citizens contrast their treatment with that given the white Falkland Islanders, whose far flung islands were defended by HMG at great expense of blood and treasure.

What's next?  The Chagossians and their supporters speak of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.  In London and Washington, officials who cannot countenance the notion of a "native" presence on the islands no doubt will take comfort in actuarial fact: by the time the current lease runs out in 2016, many of the surviving exiled Chagossians will be in their eighties.  HMG and the USG have waited them out this long - what's another eight years?

Perhaps the only thing that might be different in the next eight years could be two terms of an Obama Presidency.  For a campaign that has put "human security" and human rights at the forefront of its Change agenda, the plight of the Chagos Islanders cries out for justice.  All it would take from Washington would be an admission that a few hundred former copra workers on out-islands 100 miles away from Diego Garcia would not jeopardize the security of the West.  One word from the Americans would get the British off the hook, and would put an end to this excruciatingly long legal rearguard action.

As Olivier Bancoult, the leader of the Chagos community-in-exile said to The Guardian after yesterday's verdict: "How can we be expected to live outside our birthplace when there are other people living there now?"

Don't expect the octogenarians - or their children and grandchildren - to give up.  After all - for the similarities in their generations-long uprooting - they've been called "the Palestinians of the Indian Ocean."

What John the Plasterer Might Say To Joe the Plumber

My late father John, who knew a few plumbers from a life on construction sites, was a plasterer by trade.  He learned the trade growing up in Ireland, worked in England in the Thirties, and returned to his birthplace just as America entered World War II.  After combat service in the Pacific, he returned to the post war building boom along with millions of veterans.  He was a union man, and always voted Democratic.

Dad saw creeping de-unionization, and the word "non-union" always carried in our household a connotation of undercutting union wages, cutting corners on quality construction, and a sense of selling out to bosses.  The union brought stability, better working conditions, and a network of solidarity.   It helped build America's middle class.  I grew up thinking that medical care was a given; only now do I realize how fortunate we were to have the services of "The Medical Center," as Philadelphia's union facility was called.  How many million Americans dream of such access to generalists, specialists, pharmacy - all under one roof and a "benny" of union affiliation?

In his later years, my father kept a photo of President Bill Clinton on his night table, his last reminder of a life where Democratic was synonymous with pro-worker.  As I spent time with him on visits from overseas, I wanted to rant with him on the downward plunge America had taken under Bush, but his fading memory wanted to focus on other things.  In a way, maybe it was just as well that he was spared the painful realization that much of what he had worked for was rapidly slipping away.  Like the plaster that he had carefully applied in a lifetime of hard work, chipped away by people who gladly took the votes of "Joe the Plumber" and then blithely made policies that served the interests of the 0.02% of Americans who wouldn't be caught in the same zip code as a plumber.  Letting America's infrastructure crumble, and making life rich and easy for the investor class - my father was spared knowledge of the route America had taken under the Republicans.

Today Paul Krugman in the New York Times writes about "The Real Plumbers of Ohio," whose lot is a far cry from media and McCain-hyped "Joe," whose real name is Samuel, and who may not even be a plumber (I hope someone is checking a Karl Rove connection here).  Where plumbers, like other Americans, have fallen behind in so many ways.  Maybe that's why real plumbers - in the person of their union president - have endorsed Barack Obama, and have said that McCain's approach "washes the middle class down the drain."

The Joe the Plumber saga is just the latest manifestation of what in earlier times were Nixon's hard hats, of Reagan Democrats, of brush cuttin' Bush.  It works - but only if you don't think.  Which is why we have Joe on endless loops, and Sarah cuttin' it up with Tina Fey.  Imagine: a week ago Governor Palin was sanctioned for abuse of power in Alaska by a bipartisan commission, but you'd never know that from the coverage of her SNL appearance.  Change the subject.  We are dealing with world class spinners, and in the few weeks remaining in the race, the one thing that is a sure bet is voters will be distracted from the real issues.

At least Colin Powell's Obama endorsement dominated Sunday's political talk shows.  A serious break, in the midst of drivel.

Will Overwhelming Force Sway Powell Republicans?

When he appears today on Meet The Press, it is rumored that Colin Powell may endorse Senator Barack Obama for President.  Or maybe he won't (Larry Wilkerson to Steve Clemons).  [UPDATE: Powell has, in fact, endorsed Barack Obama.]  But if he does side with Obama, it's worth recalling the Powell Doctrine, formulated on the eve of the Gulf War which evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, by the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

• action should be used only as a last resort and only if there is a clear risk to national security by the intended target;
• the force, when used, should be overwhelming and disproportionate to the force used by the enemy;
• there must be strong support for the campaign by the general public;
• and there must be a clear exit strategy from the conflict in which the military is engaged.

Change "enemy" and "target" and put "exit strategy" in abeyance, and you have the elements of what could be a nicely-timed campaign announcement by the former Secretary of State and retired general, a man who still commands respect in many quarters, despite his tarnished reputation as a purveyor of Bush-Cheney disinformation at the UN.  "Last resort... only if there is a clear risk to national security... strong support by the general public..."  Colin Powell obviously sees that the stakes are extremely high.  I hope that he will shed his old soldier persona, where loyalty to his former employers tempered his criticism of the Bush Administration to the point where its impact was lost.

There was a time when Colin Powell was touted as a potential Presidential candidate, and his stature worldwide was enormous.  That has dimmed somewhat, but should he announce for Obama, there is no denying that the supposed "national security" McCain campaign would hear yet another nail driven into its coffin.  That is probably why up to a few days ago, most mention of a potential Powell endorsement came out of the right wing press: Fox News, Weekly Standard, William Kristol.  And Fox saw racial solidarity at play at a recent Powell appearance in London:

Colin Powell has his dancing shoes on, fueling speculation that he's gearing up to do the Obama Two-Step.  The normally staid former U.S. secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff performed an impromptu hip-hop dance alongside well-known rap stars Tuesday following a speech at a festival in London celebrating African-American music and fashion.

Given the avalanche of racial and/or religious-overtoned robocalls, negative ads, and speech writer innuendo, I assume that the Fox/McCain spin machine has already factored in the loss of Colin Powell to Barack Obama, and will simply add footage of a gyrating Powell to their store of images to be spliced with Al Qaeda mug shots.  Anything to diminish the seriousness of Powell's decision.

But serious Republicans of the Colin Powell, George Schultz, Chuck Hagel stripe - people who value a common sense, adult approach to the world - may take notice.  I'm even hoping that some Republican friends of mine might be tempted to abandon an increasingly erratic and out-of-touch McCain, backed up by SNL star Sarah Palin.  Talk about a "clear risk to national security."  Colin Powell, bring on your overwhelming force!

European Reassurance: Will It Calm the Beast?

We’ve passed banks, savings & loans, and assorted financial institutions in France over the last couple of weeks, and have detected no lines queuing up to withdraw deposits.  It was the same early this year, when Societe Generale famously lost some 5 billion Euros when a young trader overstepped his authorized gambling of tens of billions in a volatile market.

Early on – that is, when the US sub-prime crisis finally started to directly affect European banks mere weeks ago – a strange thing happened: a president appeared on national TV and spoke reassuringly to his audience.  President Nicolas Sarkozy may be childishly hyperactive and may have an overly developed liking for bling and glitz, but he is an avowed capitalist.  On that there can be little doubt.  So his jawboning reassurance that no French citizen would lose a Euro cent should their bank fail – beyond the already guaranteed 70,000 Euros per account – came as welcome balm to worried depositors.  France’s deposit guarantee has now been echoed by a number of other European governments.

Contrast this with our dithering MBA President, whose inaction in the first year and a half of the US sub-prime crisis guaranteed that when action finally came, in the form of the $700 billion bailout, it would be both massive and of questionable value.  We know what the $700 billion will NOT do (allow people to stay in their homes or to get them back), but there’s very little confidence in what the hundreds of billions are supposed to accomplish – or in whose pockets they will eventually wind up.  And, as Paul Krugman says today in the NYT, even Treasury Secretary Paulson is having second thoughts about how and where to apply the $700 billion. (Update: congratulations, Dr. Krugman, on your Nobel Prize in economics!)

Certain American practices and ideas make their way across the Atlantic when prudence would dictate that they stay where they are.  In the real estate game, I wish, for example, that cheap wood frame housing had stayed in the US, where American habits of frequent moves, fixer-upper starter homes, and built-in obsolescence seem to be an established pattern.  In France and throughout much of Europe, houses were built to last: cement, brick, or stone walls, tile or slate roofs.  People saved, built, and bought, and borrowing was a serious affair, with no thought of your local bank manager selling off your mortgage to “Joe’s Discount Sub-Primes” on Wall Street.

There’s no guarantee that Sarkozy’s jawboning about guarantees will work any magic.  Contrary to mantras recounted in the French media by “experts,” France is not surrounded by virtual walls of financial security, like Asterix’s Gaulois village against Rome’s encroachment.  It is very much a global player, with large inflows and outflows of investment, both financial and tangible.  At least Sarkozy, in his current role as President of the EU Council until the end of 2008, has a larger stage on which to attempt to inspire confidence.

Charismatic Sarkozy had the sense to invite the stolidly uncharismatic Gordon Brown to yesterday's Eurozone summit in Paris, tribute to the former Chancellor of the Exchequer who has gotten kudos from a wide variety of analysts, including Wolfgang Munchau ("Brown Offers Europe a Lesson in Leadership") in the Financial Times: "The UK bank recapitalisation scheme was the first useful contribution politics has made since the crisis broke out 14 months ago."

But there's no guarantee - despite the hundreds of billions in guarantees - that the markets will settle down.  Martin Rowson's cartoon in today's Guardian captures it well: Monday morning in the asylum, with world leaders readying the aspirin for the inmates.

When and if the financial dust settles, we will hear much about the future of market capitalism, and some will paraphrase Churchill's defense of democracy to say that "capitalism is the worst form of economy except all those other forms that have been tried."  Perhaps.  But one thing will be abundantly clear: laissez faire is over, in fact and as a theory.  Government is good again.

Algeria, 5 October 1988: Turning Point

Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of bloody rioting throughout Algeria in October 1988 - "Black October," which symbolized what many in Algeria call "les annees noires," the Eighties. Things were bad, but how many Algerians could have imagined that things would get even worse, in what became in the Nineties "les annees rouges?"

I'll be reviewing Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed by Martin Evans and John Phillips in the forthcoming issue of the Middle East Journal, and will provide readers with the full review of this essential work in a future post.  As it happens, I've just read the chapter on "Black October," and if any one chapter captures the sense of the book's title, it is this one.

When I arrived in Algeria in early 1990, the figurative smoke and ashes from the riots barely more than a year earlier were still in the air.  I wish I had had the wisdom of Evans and Phillips' analysis then, as I reported on the effervescent political scene for the American Embassy.  What they write about Algeria's young men, frustrated, unemployed, disillusioned with the broken promises of an increasingly geriatric and corrupt leadership - all of that rings true and creates a vivid mental image of what was a tinderbox ready for a match.

It is still unclear if any specific incident sparked the riots, which were preceded by "wild rumors" of imminent violence.  As Evans and Phillips relate, then Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid benefited - at least temporarily - in the riots' aftermath, winning a landslide re-election weeks later.  But the turning point was that the rioting youth showed that authority was no longer sacrosanct, and that it could be humiliated.  Even more, the savage repression of the rioters revealed that the Algerian Army could and would fire on, and torture, its fellow citizens.  The stage was set for far worse violence in the coming decade.  Check out the excellent trilingual site of Algeria Watch for articles, time lines, analysis.

What had led to this despair of the dispossessed?  Here's Ray Takeyh of the Council of Foreign Relations, writing in 2003:

The year 1988 proved to be a watershed in Algeria's modern history. Declining oil prices and the emergence of a global surge toward free markets led the regime to launch a liberalization and deregulation program that entailed the elimination of many social-welfare services and subsidies. The removal of state controls at a time of financial shortfall disproportionately affected the urban working class and the poor. The socially disruptive ramifications of this policy were exacerbated by high inflation and the emergence of an underground economy. The gap between rich and poor continued to grow while official corruption, an endemic feature of Algerian bureaucracy, reached alarming rates. The much-eroded social compact between the revolutionary regime and the populace ruptured with the October 1988 riots throughout Algeria's urban centers. The brutal suppression of the marches by the military further undermined the legitimacy of a regime that based its power on its historical role as a force for liberation. In the aftermath of the riots, that pillar finally began to crumble.

Sounds a bit like Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.

What followed was what I saw between 1990 and 1992.  A sclerotic ruling party, the FLN, that took for granted winning elections unopposed for decades, and didn't see the formidable electoral force of the Islamist FIS rising to take over local and regional councils and mayorships of all the major Algerian cities in June 1990.  And which missed the boat again in December 1991 and lost the first round of parliamentary elections to a FIS that again got out the vote.

The only answer that the Army could provide was to cancel the elections, round up the elected, and plunge the country into a decade-plus of barbaric violence.  It all started - though no one knew it at the time - twenty years ago.

Hey Sister: Cities In Russia, Unvisited By Alaska Governor

Everyone knows that Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska and former Mayor of Wasilla, spent most of her life passport-less.  We are told that she visited Mexico and Canada (hell, you can probably see Canada from a high building in Juneau; there's a Canadian site trying to confirm if in fact she did visit, and where).  There is apparently a controversy over whether you can see Russia from anywhere else than an Alaskan island in the Bering Strait.  But seeing from binoculars is one thing, and visiting in person is another. In any case, Wasilla is almost a thousand miles from Russia, and Juneau is even further away.

So why did Governor Palin, whose state has a dozen sister cities and provinces in Russia, never visit even one?  Not even Mirny, sister city of Wasilla, her home town?  Here's a missed opportunity:

In 2000, Mirny celebrated its 45th anniversary. The city and the diamond mining industry came to the jubilee with certain social, cultural and productional achievements.

Sarah Palin was Mayor of Wasilla at the time.  Where's her sense of initiative?  There are diamonds in Mirny - think of the trade opportunities!  Not to speak of the shopping during breaks in the festivities.

Seriously, governor of a state for all these years and she never led a trade mission to a foreign country?  This confirms her innate lack of curiosity about the world outside Wasilla.  But then we knew that too.

War with Russia?  "Perhaps," says Palin.  Travel to Russia?  Don't have the time, got to go debate Biden...

Media and War: New Vietnam Documentary

For those francophone readers who have an hour and a half to spare watching a tiny screen (!) - and can do so in the next 7 days before it disappears - I recommend "Vietnam, la trahison des medias" by documentary director Patrick Barberis.  Actually, much of the film is in English with French subtitles, since it features interviews with a number of American war correspondents (McClatchy Vietnam reporter Joe Galloway among them) and retired Army and Marine officers.

The documentary shows many familiar images from the war, and concentrates on the use of the media in war.  Use, as in "achieving your objectives," which the North Vietnamese were particularly apt at doing.  The footage from the war is mostly in and around the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive.  For French viewers, American references to Khe Sanh as "more Verdun than Dien Bien Phu" are striking.  As in deliberate, Pyhrric bloodletting to "bleed the enemy dry," as opposed to an ingenious trap - that later becomes a trap for the trappers.

I know little about Barberis, except that he appeared at the Chicago International Documentary Festival a few years ago, where the Festival blurb says: "Patrick Barberis is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker who has made many works dealing with the history of Communism and Utopian movements."  In "Vietnam, la trahison des medias," he brings us up to date: the latter part of the film shows how the US military evolved in its attitude toward the press.

From almost total, unfettered access to the battlefield during Vietnam (the film shows how the Tet attacks on Saigon and the American Embassy brought the war to those journalists who hadn't jumped on helicopters with the troops in the field), the Army had, by Desert Storm, adopted strict press rules limiting access.  By the time of the Bush invasion of Iraq in March 2003, protests from the press - and good PsyOps work from the "information warfare" people - gave the media a golden opportunity for a look at the action under optimum (for the military) circumstances - embedding!  We even see that Lyndon Johnson had his "Mission Accomplished" moment, pinning a medal on General William Westmoreland, who appears to have been pretty clueless in his media relations.

As someone who came of political age watching Walter Cronkite and other TV news legends report on, and turn against, the Vietnam War, watching this documentary hits home just how much the Iraq War is kept away from American TV audiences.  Vietnam won the Vietnam War, but the US military learned at least one lesson: controlling media access may not win you a war, but it might help you from losing the support of the American people.  Though with Iraq, the policy of "what Iraq War?" does not appear to have earned the war, or those who masterminded it, any lasting support from the citizenry.

Here is the link to ARTE+7: you only have seven days to catch this online.  There's no indication of if or when the documentary will be shown on US TV.