Link Banana

I was torn between linking to this post about what Passport bloggers are reading, which contains a number of interesting suggestions, and this very approachable article from Fareed Zakaria that one mention. Obviously Zakaria won the coin toss; a sample:

It’s also worth noting that ever since World War II, the United States has tended to make its strategic missteps by exaggerating dangers. During the 1950s, conservatives argued that Dwight Eisenhower was guilty of appeasement because he was willing to contain rather than roll back communism. The paranoia about communism helped fuel McCarthyism at home and support for dubious regimes abroad. John Kennedy chose to outflank Nixon on the right by arguing that there was a dangerous missile gap between the Soviets and the United States (when in fact the United States had almost 20,000 missiles and the Soviets had fewer than 2,000). The 1970s witnessed a frenzied argument that the Soviet Union was surpassing the United States militarily and was about to “Finlandize” Europe. The reality, of course, was that when neoconservatives were arguing that the U.S.S.R. was about to conquer the world, it was on the verge of total collapse.

While most of America is still obsessed with what scandal will next be dug up about Sarah Palin, Foreign Policy offers an interesting list of Barack Obama’s ten worst policy proposals. It’s unlikely that you could ever find consensus on such a list, but it’s worth seeing what they’ve come up with.

UPDATE (9/2/08): As a counterpoint (or maybe just because I liked it), I offer a recent Op-Ed by Sarah Vowell.

UPDATE (9/10/08): Just noticed they have the same feature for McCain. That would have been a better counterpoint.

I wasn’t quite sure how to read a recent story in The Economist about demonstrations in Kashmir. Pankaj Mishra says that its clear evidence that if the Indian government doesn’t change its ways, it risks creating a new generation of motivated international terrorists.

A new generation of politicized Kashmiris has now risen; the world is again likely to ignore them — until some of them turn into terrorists with Qaeda links. It is up to the Indian government to reckon honestly with Kashmiri aspirations for a life without constant fear and humiliation. Some first steps are obvious: to severely cut the numbers of troops in Kashmir; to lift the economic blockade on the Kashmir Valley; and to allow Kashmiris to trade freely across the line of control with Pakistan.

Another coincidence worth noting:

• The Big Picture has a great set of photos of life in Rio de Jinaro.
• While at Passport, Patrick Fitzgerald argues that the IOC should make Rio the host of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Though his argument is at times tepid, I find myself in agreement.

Not quite sure why — perhaps because the topics been on my mind recently — but I feel compelled to link to Gary Bass’s passable summary of the concept of humanitarian intervention.

It’s a momentous date for number of reasons. The three most prominent:

1. The Olympics begin. That’s a link to a Big Picture post.
2. Russia and Georgia are in the midst of an “undeclared war” over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. This had been speculated about for a while — The Economist even ran an analysis piece on their website today about what trouble such a conflict would cause. Passport has a wrap-up.
3. It’s the 20th anniversary of the biggest pro-democracy demonstration in Burmese history. That one, like the recent “Saffron Revolution”, was pretty handily suppressed. (Link goes to The Irradday’s special issue, via Passport.)

From the annals of the slightly absurd:

Rwanda’s government ruffled some French feathers yesterday with the release of a 500-page report alleging that senior French military and political leaders had prior knowledge of the country’s 1994 genocide and that French peacekeeping troops actively participated in the killings. Among those accused are the late former President François Mitterand and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

And the reason to doubt:

Given that the Rwandan government began work on the report just a few months after President Paul Kagame was accused by a French judge of assasinating the Rwanda’s former president — the event that precipitated the genocide — the report is going to be read with a pretty large grain of salt.

Passport is of divided opinion about which state is most in danger of collapsing. While Patrick Fitzgerald points to the risk for Mongolia…

Following cries of fraud in parliamentary elections — accusations that were disputed by international election observers — hundreds of rioters, many of them drunk, attacked the headquarters of the dominant political party and the neighboring national art gallery on July 1. Fires were started. Five people were killed. More than 1,000 pieces of artwork were destroyed, damaged or looted.

Blake Hounshell advances the case on Yemen:

The failed state narrative, in which Yemen devolves into something resembling Somalia or Afghanistan, has also spread. Yemeni ministers, foreign aid workers, and journalists routinely predict an imminent demise, as food prices skyrocket, drought hurts harvests, the long-running al-Houthi rebellion in the north drags on, and riots erupt in the south over unresolved grievances stemming from the 1990 reunification of the country.

Foreign Policy’s annual figures about the risk of states disintegrating is out. I must say I’m surprised by the rather good scores of Chile and Mauritius.

(via The Economist)

A MetaFilter post — I don’t care about your “not credible source” nonsense — raises the interesting spector of Hawaii ceasing to be a member of the United States. The comments are also typically good.

Teddy Roosevelt’s famous model for diplomacy was “Talk softly but carry a big stick.” Barack Obama’s model for diplomacy is… Winnie the Pooh?

Mr Danzig [an Obama advisor] spelt out the need to change by reading a paragraph from chapter one of the children’s classic, which says: “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.”

(via Passport)

Because we hadn’t already heard it 1000 times. Also, I realize a lot of this is just noise, but — like Blake Houshnell — I’m wondering what Spain has against McCain.

I’d have never thought that this problem:

Over the past year, the District has fought to eliminate thousands of vacant buildings, sharply raising property taxes to force owners to sell, lease or occupy their real estate. But officials can exert no such pressure on more than a dozen derelict properties that have added a dose of blight to some of Washington’s grandest neighborhoods.

Each of the buildings served as an embassy or diplomatic residence for countries including Liberia and Malaysia, the Philippines and the Republic of Togo. Legally considered foreign soil in almost all cases, the buildings are exempt from property taxes and the fine print of the city’s building code.

(via Passport)

Roger Cohen made the interesting — if intellectually dubious — contention yesterday that the world isn’t actually flat, it’s inverted:

To understand it, invert your thinking. See the developed world as depending on the developing world, rather than the other way round. Understand that two-thirds of global economic growth last year came from emerging countries, whose economies will expand about 6.7 percent in 2008, against 1.3 percent for the United States, Japan and euro zone states.

Anne Applebaum is understandably upset that Robert Mugabe is able to safely and easily visit Rome:

It’s hard to think of any other single gesture that would so effectively reveal the ineffectiveness of international institutions in the conduct of both human rights and food-aid policy. Even someone standing atop the dome of St. Peter’s, megaphone in hand, shouting, “The U.N. is useless! The EU is useless!” couldn’t have clarified the matter more plainly.

Because it gives me a small measure of comfort to know that even their fellow Europeans are capable of confusing Latvia and Lithuania, I note that the Czech soccer federation did the following:

The Latvian flag was in the game program along with a photo of the Latvian national soccer team. Before the match, Czech organizers played Latvia’s national anthem. However, the Czech Republic was facing Lithuania on Tuesday night, not Latvia.

You probably missed it — I nearly did — but Joshua Keating points out that three important things happened yesterday:

Israel and Syria, technically at war since 1967, are holding historic peace talks in Turkey that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described as a “national obligation.” The Lebanese government negotiated a compromise with Hezbollah, ending 18 months of violence and political deadlock. And Pakistan’s government defied the U.S. by agreeing to withdraw from Taliban-controlled territory in exchange for security guarantees.

They also make the point that this is clear sign of the current irrelevance of the United States to world politics.

I feel vaguely like I’ve heard this story before, but it’s interesting nonetheless:

Jane Novak, a 46-year-old stay-at-home mother of two in New Jersey, has never been to Yemen. She speaks no Arabic, and freely admits that until a few years ago, she knew nothing about that strife-torn south Arabian country.

And yet Ms. Novak has become so well known in Yemen that newspaper editors say they sell more copies if her photograph — blond and smiling — is on the cover. Her blog, an outspoken news bulletin on Yemeni affairs, is banned there. The government’s allies routinely vilify her in print as an American agent, a Shiite monarchist, a member of Al Qaeda, or “the Zionist Novak.”

It’s not surprising that Israel’s 60th anniversary has gotten a lot more ink than the 60th anniversary of the coincident nabka (catastrophe). Yesterday, Elias Khoury wrote an Op-Ed adressing the latter.

Israel has depicted the problem as rooted in the Arab world’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But even after the majority of Arab states demonstrated their recognition of this right by supporting the Saudi peace initiative of 2002, nothing changed; in fact, things became worse. To Palestinians, the true problem lies in Israel’s rejection of the Palestinian right to an independent state, and in the prevailing Israeli culture’s refusal to recognize that Palestinians were themselves victims of forced expulsion from their lands.

Recognizing the sufferings of the victim, even if they are of the victim of a victim, is the necessary condition for an exit from this long and tragic tunnel. However, as the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci suggests, it is difficult to maintain the optimism of the will in the face of the pessimism of the intellect.

Pessimism of the will is what we are living today in the Middle East. It is a pessimism that warns not only of the danger of recurring episodes of catastrophe as Arab societies break apart, but of the dismal prospect of an endless war that will provoke future tragedies in the 21st century.

Combining the theme of the last two posts: a lot of pundits are saying it’s a good idea to invade Burma to provide humanitarian relief. (If you don’t believe me, sample the sources cited in this UN Dispatch post.) I think Mr. Yglesias offers an interesting explanation of the trend:

The thing you have to understand about the surge of pundits wanting to invade Burma is that it’s the very absurdity of the idea that makes it such an appealing op-ed thesis. It’s self-righteousness without responsibility. Advocate an invasion of a country you don’t know anything about and have it happen and, well, all kinds of things might go awry in a way that’s embarasing. But since everyone knows there’s not going to be an invasion of Burma, you can say there ought to be one and then make up a nice story about how well it hypothetically went. You can even show your thoughtful seriousness about matters of war and peace by chalking up the tragic failure to invade as yet another disastrous consequence of the war in Iraq.