Politics and Press

Newfoundland geese, Nigerian bombers

Apparently the Canada geese that knocked that plane down into the Hudson river a few months ago were really from Newfoundland. Quick-thinking scientists did DNA tests on them that proved they were invaders from somewhere around l’anse aux meadows on the northern tip of the northern peninsula of the island where the Vikings once began the invasion of the Americas. For some reason this was met with a sigh of relief in certain quarters since it demonstrated that these weren’t American canadian geese. US geese apparently don’t do such things.

And now we have yet another shoe bomber/self immolator who strived mightily and unsuccessfully to commit suicide by killing 300 other folks in the process, and he too came from foreign shores. The result of this misadventure was total chaos in airports servicing the US market as security was tightened to the point of strangulation. The question is: what difference does it make where the wannabee killer came from, the result would be the same. Why have the greatest disruptions occurred at the US customs barriers at major European and Canadian airports, where security is surely better than at many domestic airports? Would the US Homeland security boss’s amazingly nutty statement some months ago that the 9/11 bombers came from Canada have anything to do with it? Canadians are amazed to still hear that urban myth when they visit the US and are even more amazed to discover Mme Napolitoni is still in charge of homeland security, though back then she had no idea how and where the 9/11 killers got on their planes.

In any case it is already clear that the only success that failed assassin will enjoy will involve the further isolation of the US because of border controls that are as useless as they are disheartening and ultimately counterproductive. Travellers are already looking around for some other place to visit and spend their money than in a place where a star-wars strip-search at the border has become a routine and legal procedure. Maybe the beaches of Cuba?

Whiting out the USA

According to last week’s New York Times, the US Homeland Security folks have ordered the guards at their new border station in Massena, New York – across from Cornwall, Ontario – to whitewash – erase -the name United States from the side of their building, as they consider the name itself to make it a security threat. The Montreal Gazette then wrote that the word “paranoid” no longer suffices to describe the US border policy, “surreal” is the right word.

Can it really be that such a great and powerful country whose own border it is supposedly defending is afraid to name itself? Can anyone imagine Romania or Bulgaria, both of which are now easier for Canadians to enter than the USA is, giving out such an order to their border guards? Is the lady who not long ago announced that the 9/11 terrorists came from Canada still in charge of Homeland Security?
Please, Barack, put some people who live on this planet in charge of your borders before it is too late.

Obama and the Politics of Disappointment

As the Obama presidency approaches the six-month mark the record is decidedly mixed. Our friends, the brothers Mackenzie, have indicated their disappointment in a recent posting critical of the “Buy American” element of the stimulus package and lays the blame on the “Obama regime”. While American presidents do not normally have the luxury of leading a “regime”, Bob and Doug point out the need for a more vigorous political stance by the president.

“Buy American” represents a gut response from politicians unwilling to provide leadership to the electorate, and unable to resist foisting easy answers onto a population whose inability to accept the reality of the decline of America leads them into a mythical America Uber Alles. A Buy American campaign fails to recognize that foreign companies hire many Americans and it begs for retaliation by other nations, leading to even greater trade imbalances and reduced employment in the future. Globalization is here to stay and politicians need to recognize that and deal with it honestly and realistically.

While the Republicans in Congress continue on an obstructionist journey to oblivion, Democrats in Congress share the blame for Buy American sentiments as well as for more serious failures looming on the horizon. Solidarity is not a keystone of the Democratic Party so while the Republican Senate and House of Representatives could support just about anything George W. Bush dreamed up, Democratic Senators and Representatives lack the kind of party discipline needed for a Democratic president to move the country toward major change – change perceived by some as threatening to lobbyists and major campaign contributors. Obama’s apparent commitment to  “pragmatism” in working with Congress in developing policy leads inevitably to disappointment.

While disappointments are there, more are sure to come. Prisoners remain in Guantanamo while members of Congress from both parties cower in fear over the possibility that any of them might be housed in prisons in their states; the stimulus package is far from successful and may very well end up an economic fiasco; a variety of security programs of questionable legality initiated by the Bush administration remain in place; the war in Afghanistan is beginning to look like a project of questionable value to the national interest; the health care debate seems headed toward the continuing of private insurance programs with no public alternative; the Congress  is unlikely to allow the Department of Defense to shake off the influence of the military industrial complex and  many major  public welfare initiatives are likely to fall victim to the economic  recession.

The current Congress lacks the statesmanship, ethics and intelligence necessary to deal effectively with domestic policy that has been built on a long history of private gain at public cost. There is an argument that capitalism has been the great strength of the United States but as we become increasingly committed to bailing out inefficient and even crooked industries, capitalism as we’ve known it begins to look more like the problem than the solution. If Obama is to have success it appears that it may have to be in foreign affairs, where presidents have more power and less need to coddle members of congress.

Iran and Mucho Macho Americano

Whenever I forget how pitiful the American press has become I turn to PBS’s Lehrer Report knowing that Judy Woodruff is likely to remind me. While I largely avoided cable TV and network news talk shows during the Iran election fallout I had noted in the NY Times and Washington Post the comments of various Republican politicians to the effect that the president had not been “forceful” enough in his comments on the Iranian elections. (Much like foreign leaders had not been forceful enough in discussing the U.S. presidential election of 2000 when our Supreme Court handed the presidency to G. W. Bush, rather than bother to count the votes in Florida.) Comments came from the usual suspects, Senators McCain and Graham, Representatives Boehner and Kantor, Newt Gingrich, right-wing neocon columnists like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, and of course the usual blowhard media types on Fox TV and dumbbell radio.

Obama’s point – that it was strategically essential to avoid making the U.S. the outside force to be blamed for the demonstrations – was lost on these political hacks and we were treated to the predictable displays of American artificial testosterone. Virtually every credible Iran analyst supported Obama’s approach and assessed it as correct, as did Indiana Republican Senator Lugar – one of a diminishing number of Republican Senators with foreign policy bonafides.

Understanding a difficult, complex situation in Iran requires more effort than most Americans will give to it and unfortunately more effort than most of the American press will put into it. The attraction for simple-minded blowhards to spout meaningless slogans is too strong for a country that long ago decided to see all events through a strictly American prism. This is just the time for PBS to step up and provide the kind of background and intelligence needed to sort through the complexities. Lehrer and Woodruff gave us what they too often fall back on – an interview of two politicians (Senators Graham and Kerry) on opposite sides to argue about things that more often than not avoid any prospect of actually educating the viewer about anything other than where the two stand on whatever is defined as the issue. Woodruff’s interview served to carry the GOP’s water, asking in two or three different ways just why Obama did not speak out more strongly. Senator Graham was all over that while Senator Kerry did as well as could be expected to educate the viewers on some of the realities of the situation.

It is perhaps unfair to pick on Woodruff when so many of her colleagues in the press bow to the same gods of vacuity and simplicity (anyone who watched the Obama’s press conference can attest to that), but we used to expect more from PBS than mind-numbing, self-serving debates by politicians.

For anyone seeking an intelligent, instructional and nuanced view of the Iranian situation and Obama’s response to it, I recommend Terry Gross’s interview yesterday of Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Listen to it here.

Interview with The Homeland Security Secretary

As if poor President Obama doesn’t have enough to worry about, as he considers whether it is the chaps who ordered torture in the name of homeland security or the chaps who carried out the orders – or neither or both – who should be brought to trial. And then, as a side show, his choice for protector of that same border gives an interview on Canadian national television outlining her concerns. Coming as it did upon the conclusion of a Canuck hockey game and first round sweep, the talk with an unknown woman appeared to be a perhaps somewhat heavy-handed satire about the former guardians of the US side of the Canadian border. Here was a comedienne portraying a US diplomat who was announcing that the US-Canada border must be made more impenetrable – just like the Mexican one – because the 9/11 terrorists had entered the US that way and that the currently informal border controls would have to be made much more stringent so it didn’t happen again. Well, you could walk down the street and ask almost anyone and they would know that no 9/11 terrorists entered from Canada, so this part of this routine was too nutty to really be cutting satire. The four-hour waits at the border on the last long weekend also made the second part too obvious since it was just meant to show the supposed US diplomat hadn’t crossed that border in years, if ever.

And then her name flashed on screen – Janet Napolitano, apparently a Canadian comedienne my brother and I had never heard of, though we have great connections in that field. And then her title popped up – Homeland Security Secretary of the USA. Well, that was a good one, if a bit of a cheap shot, until it turned out to be true. This birdbrain – apparently the former governor of Arizona – is in charge of US border security, and is going to cost both countries billions of dollars in lost trade, more if she builds a wall like the one on the Mexican border in the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, and she doesn’t know what country the guys came from who attacked New York. Sometimes satire just doesn’t pay.

TORTURED LOGIC

“Thus, although the subject may experience fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning, the waterboard does not inflict physical pain. As we explained in Section 2340A Memorandum, “pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering.”… Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering”….Jay Bybee, former Dept. of Justice Lawyer in the Bush Administration and current 9th Circuit Judge

Judge Bybee, a graduate of the University of Obfuscation Law School, might also have noted that chopping off a prisoner’s leg is allowable since he had two of them. He did not comment on what to do when you run out of legs but perhaps there are other body parts to consider– testicles, arms, kidneys etc. Reading the memoranda makes it clear that in this and other instances our Law Schools have helped create some monsters that would make Goebbels proud.

The release of four selected torture memoranda from the Bush Justice Department have raised two firestorms, each interesting in its own way. From the right we get the old familiar argument to screw the law and do anything we wish to anyone we think might want to hurt us, regardless of evidence and American values. A deep thinker from the Heritage Foundation reminded us on TV that in the white heat of post 9/11 it seemed clear that we needed to make sure we got the information needed to protect the country regardless of our laws or international law. He conveniently forgot that some of the memoranda were written as late as 2005 and that – in fact – we HAD the information that 9/11 was around the corner, that the information was given to Bush and National Security Advisor Rice – and ignored by both, and that there is little if any evidence that the subsequent use of torture ever improved the quality of information received.

It was not a huge surprise to see an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing the release of the information by former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey who were apparently upset that leaking the memos’ “…effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on September 11, 2001.” They must have missed the part – referred to above – where Rice and Bush were warned well before 9/11 – a warning based on intelligence gathered via more traditional – and legal – means. But then Hayden and Mukasey both have metaphorical blood on their hands in this matter so it’s not so surprising they take this view.

The blast from the left is criticism of Obama for deciding not to prosecute Intelligence operatives for torturing prisoners with the approval, even urging, of lawyers from Bush’s Department of Justice. (a piece in today’s NY Times details one such case) This is a quandary since to say “they were only following orders” has a 1940s reminiscent stink about it, but this was clearly a decision intended to protect intelligence operatives from the consequences of the folly of their masters and to avoid harming those agencies that – like it or not – we depend on for a degree of security. As for bringing the likes of Judge Bybee and others in leadership positions to justice, it seems unlikely until and unless Obama gets a much larger majority in the Congress. And even then, he would more likely argue for a kind of Commission on Reconciliation and Truth but when looking at the Bush administration and his cronies in Congress it is hard to imagine anything like truth or reconciliation being of any concern to them. And to be credible, such a Commission would need to be bipartisan.

In other news: President Obama welcomed Texas Governor Rick Perry’s suggestion that Texas secede from the Union and offered his assistance in facilitating the process. There is a strong rumor that George W. Bush would emerge from retirement to fill the Office of Texas Monarch, leaving Perry with even less of a job than he has currently.

Impeccable Mooning

Now that the British Vanguard and the French le triomphant have limped back to harbour after colliding in the otherwise empty blue seas – apparently because the French won’t share its navigation plans with its supposed NATO allies – it is time for the USians to have one of its splendidly named vessels join the Monty Python farce. Its state of the art surveillance (i.e. spy) ship The Impeccable was recently chased away from the Chinese coast south of Hainan after it turned its fire hoses on a rag-tag fleet of irritating Chinese fishing trawlers and coast guard boats, and was faced with rows of mooning Chinese seamen. Not since John Cleese bombarded King Arthur and his fearless knights with the garbage from his French castle has military history seen such a ragged retreat as that of the Impeccable running for cover in the open ocean, no doubt in the hope that some French or British nuclear sub wouldn’t ram them.

Canada, Obama and the Northwest Passage

Things have started out well with regard to relations between the new Obama regime in Washington and the old Harper one in Ottawa. It has been announced that Obama will make his first foreign visit to Ottawa – apparently it is his first visit to Canada – as had long been the tradition before George Bush decided to go to Mexico City first. This first apparently trivial but symbolically weighty step led to 8 years of poor relations between the supposedly friendly neighbours when Bush failed to mention Canada in his public thanks to many countries for aid after the attack on New York. He later went on to explain that he sort of considered Canada to be part of the US so it didn’t need any special mention. That hardly helped matters and nothing he did later did, either, although his views on such an important matter as free trade seem to be closer to Canada’s than Obama’s have been at times.

Now Hilary Clinton, who had much experience in Canada as first lady, went out of her way to point out to the Senate committee considering her nomination as Secretary of State that she intended to work hard on improving relations with Canada which happened to be the US’ leading trade partner and one of the very few countries that was punching way above its weight in Afghanistan, while most US allies preferred watching from the bleachers.
That is all promising particularly since the new secretary of state is so much better informed than her clueless predecessor. But Bush threw out one more mine into troubled waters just as he was abandoning ship. In his last week in office he proclaimed the US position on sovereignty in the Arctic in such a way that no Canadian government can accept it, saying that the US had the right and even the obligation to extend military control over Arctic waters, including the northwest passage, that Canada considers to be internal Canadian waters between Canadian islands. Harper has announced plans to increase the presence of the Canadian Armed Forces on northern islands exponentially along with the strength of icebreakers and arctic warships. The two proposals do not mesh and the topic will inevitably come up during the upcoming meetings in Ottawa. It is clear what Canada’s position will be, and that will likely be even more forceful if Michael Ignatief, who has many former Harvard colleagues among Obama’s closest advisors, becomes Prime Minister, so it will be up to Obama to comment on Bush’s view of the north. It is an areas where Obama has little or no experience and his response could be an interesting clue on how he will attempt to guide his ship of state through troubled waters where he has never sailed before.

The Trivialization of Public Diplomacy

When Edmund Gullion, Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, coined the term “public diplomacy” in the mid sixties it’s unlikely he thought the best way to carry out such a program would be to send American sports figures around the world. But that is how it has seemed to have evolved during the Bush presidency.

The United States’ practice of public diplomacy preceded the coining of the phrase with serious and effective cultural and educational programs including Voice of America, and the many cultural and arts programs of the United States Information Agency (USIA). While on one level America’s public diplomacy has traditionally been a governmental effort to promote American interests by informing foreign audiences, on another level it has included efforts by private individuals and groups to develop and maintain civil, educational dialogues among people throughout the world. These non-governmental efforts took on increased importance while the government’s efforts have veeered toward the trivial over the past eight years. In addition, surrogate broadcasting efforts like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty provided domestic news to countries with state monopolized media.

In the age that gave us rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the Iraq War a strong public diplomacy program was an oxymoron, but as we come out of the Dark Ages the government can do better.

While there is nothing wrong with sending athletes like Cal Ripkin, Jr and Nancy Kwan out into the world, it is not enough to rely on sports figures and/or minor league actresses to be “public diplomacy envoys”. Furthermore, the recent use of Twitter as a public diplomacy tool is simply a victory of style over substance. Surely we are at a point where we can begin to rebuild the cultural, educational and artistic exchanges and programs that over the years have slipped into disuse.

Hopefully the Obama transition team is considering the range of possibilities that together form our “soft power” and will make the kind of long-term investment that can pay off over time. The current state of our image in the Arab world reminds us of the need both to match policy with our traditional values and to make the investment to clarify those values to the outside world.

Politics and Sport – Part 5

There is one area – and maybe only one – in which Canada comes together as a whole. French and English, Inuit and Nu-cha-nulth, maybe even Newfoundlanders – all stop bickering long enough to agree that as far as the national sport is concerned Canada stands in nobody’s shadow, particularly not that of our rambunctious southern neighbour. That area is, of course, hockeyworld, and nothing drags the national interest together – certainly not another sideshow of an election – more than an international tournament, in particular when it takes place in Canada. When that happens, the bragging rights that used to be ritualistically fought over by the largest and second-largest country on earth have been irritatingly disturbed in recent years by bellowing from the third-largest country .
And so it is that a country being bombarded from coast to coast to coast with the most wintry winter in memory – 50 cm on the ground in usually tropical Vancouver as the snow continues into its fourth week and the new year arrives – focusses its attention on the World Junior (Under 20) championship that annually begins on Boxing Day and ends two weeks later. This year it is in Ottawa and more then 400,000 tickets have been sold to a sporting event that will undoubtedly receive no mention in the US sporting bible, Sports Illustrated. But the US boys arrived full of confidence and swagger, only to lose to Canada in a spirited affair, and then collapse and be eliminated by little Slovakia. Meanwhile super power Russia lost decisively to Sweden, but was very much prepared for a semi-final meeting with Canada, which almost matches it in size but not in power, except in hockey. It was a match that made Canucks forget the blizzards outside. Having gained and lost a lead 4 times only to find themselves trailing with two minutes left, Canada got a goal with five seconds to go and went on to win in a shoot-out. When was the last time you saw tough Russian guys actually crying as somebody else’s national anthem played?
There is one more hurdle, however. On Monday, Canada meets Sweden in the final, and lots of people think that Sweden has the strongest national and junior team in the world at the moment – just wait for the Olympic Game matches in Vancouver a year from now, though it will cost you a couple of thousand bucks to get a ticket to the final – and that it will not be the first second or third largest nation in the world that hears its anthem played, but the twenty-fifth. In any case don’t miss the game.