Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Immigration and the U.S. Political Scene

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Bob and Doug MacKenzie have posted below on the recent anti-immigrant riots in Switzerland and while they cover Europe very well indeed, they do not address the situation in their Friendly Neighbor to the South.

The endless U.S. presidential campaign has been mostly charted as a horse race with the touts focusing largely on trivialities – Hillary’s cleavage, Hillary’s cackle, Edwards’ haircut, Romney’s ” my gosh and golly” vernacular, Hucklebee’s folk songs, Giuliani’s family problems, how much money each has raised, etc. But while the Democrats focus largely on Iraq and healthcare the Republican candidates are beginning to sound a bit like the American equivalent of the European far-right. There is something about scaring the bejesus out of everybody that appeals to them and with 9/11 apparently losing some of its scare appeal they have discovered the undocumented workers who pick grapes, mow lawns, wash dishes, drive taxis, etc. as this year’s group to fear.

The United States flirted with a solution when a bipartisan immigration bill, supported by President Bush, almost passed the Congress but the bill became a target for most of the Republican candidates and they continue to suck on that teat as they drum up not-so-new passions against their latest scapegoat – the illegal immigrant. But none of them seem to have a reasonable solution – although some are better than others. The basic message is that these people are breaking our laws and we need to throw all 11 million of them out of the country and never mind whatever contribution individuals might have made – in some cases for many years – paying taxes, doing hard work for low wages, etc.

As the campaign heats up there is considerable potential for campaigns to flirt with a subtle form of racism which may very well make the U.S. a soulmate of Switzerland and Austria. And as with almost every issue of any significance in the U.S. it is becoming increasingly difficult to have a serious discussion about the real problems and practicalities involved in immigration policy with discussion moving to mindless shouting matches with bogus statistics and rants of “no amnesty”, “ they are taking our jobs”, “they want their children to go to our schools”, ad nauseum.

trouble in paradise(s)

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The ever more violent clashes between far right and far left political groups in Europe erupted in a most unexpected place on the weekend, Bern, the capital of Switzerland, which would probably win a popularity poll searching out the most peaceful place in Europe. But for anyone paying attention to the growing animosity between those in favour of a multicultural/multiethnic Europe reflecting the concept of free movement and settlement of people across borders, and those defending the idea that a piece of land occupied for millennia by a specific linguistic (and often ethnic) group should remain the domain of that group, this should not have been such a surprise. Switzerland has always had a strong nationalistic wing determined to keep Switzerland as Swiss as Wilhelm Tell would have liked it, and it is not only in recent years that there has been a strong far right party, which now however forms the largest party in the Swiss parliament.
The latest clashes took place when masked far left left wing demonstrators stopped a political march by 10,000 members of the arch-conservative Swiss Peoples Party under its leader, Switzerland’s finance minister Christoph Blocher. In the ensuing riots, 17 policeman were injured, some of them seriously, store windows were smashed, cars set on fire and dozens of protesters arrested. My brother and I have come up with a theory about the rise of big right wing parties in western Europe that are opposed to much immigration, namely that they are growing by leaps and bounds in small countries, where many citizens are afraid that their old national qualities will be threatened by immigrant groups preaching new religions, speaking exotic languages and demanding different social codes. Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria are all western European societies with long histories and short borders and they have all spawned far right parties with broad popular support drawing on the fears of large-scale immigration. It’s true that some larger countries, France comes quickly to mind, have had serious flirtations with such groups as well, but they seem to be able to swallow them up much more easily into moderately conservative parties than can those small nations who consider themselves under immediate threat.

A few facts from the Oktoberfest

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It rained a bit during the week in Munich so when the sun came out on Saturday morning, the crowds were chomping at their bit to get to the action of the Oktoberfest. There are no records kept for such feats but long-term observers think that the mass spurt to the beer tents reached Olympian heights on this glorious Bavarian morning. At 9:00 the gates were opened and the assembled crowds poured into the Bavarian heaven. At 9:04 the police declared that the Löwenbräu tent, a gigantic piece of canvas occupied by a brass band and thousands of customers, was full and the doors were closed. Police could not explain how so many people could sprint across the open space and pour into the tent in only 4 minutes, aber so war es!.
Otherwise it has been a relatively normal Fest. On Saturday 600,000 people showed up, during the week 200,000 Italian tourist made the journey north, dramatically reversing the usual trend, 3,4 million liters of beer were drunk, 200,000 more than last year, you don’t want to know how many oxen ended up on the barbecue, 3921 patients had to be treated by the Red Cross, and 14 pickpockets were arrested. Mensch, was willst du noch mehr?

Desperate Acts of a Desperate Man? Bush and Iran

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The visit to New York of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has highlighted America’s paranoid fear of a third-rate clown from a second-tier power. Having placed Iran within his Axis of Evil, President Bush now must deal with the fact that his invasion of Iraq handed Iran the strategic gift of unparalleled influence in the likely Iraq of the future (for a detailed analysis of why this is so, see Peter Galbraith’s The Victor in the October 11 issue of the New York Review of Books).

While the United States begins the long and painful process of coming to grips with the Iraq reality of – at best – stalemate and at worst – defeat, it has proven all too tempting to lay the blame as far away from the White House as possible. And what better place than Tehran? Ergo, the ongoing stories of weapons being smuggled into Iraq from Iran, ignoring the unpleasant fact that the U.S. has basically armed both sides of a civil war in which its own soldiers and marines are caught in the middle. The American press dutifully reports every account of Iranian weapons found in Iraq, joins in the jingoistic threats of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and ignores the unpleasant reality that the vast majority of deaths in Iraq can be traced to Sunnis and Shiites killing each other and even some of their own – frequently with American weaponry.

The recent Israeli flyover of Syria led to hints of North Korean-Syrian cooperation on nuclear weapons development; hints  given the same credibility the press gave Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. At the same time the Cheney wing of the administration sees an opportunity to scuttle the talks with North Korea, something they have tried to do from the beginning of those negotiations. All of which begs the question: what is Bush planning for his swan song?

One possibility is for Bush to continue to pressure for more sanctions on Iran; another would be open direct negotiations with Iran and yet another would be to initiate bombing attacks on Iran’s nuclear and military facilities. At this point it seems the first of these options has been chosen, the second is almost surely not going to happen but the third option remains viable. President Bush is not known for his subtlety of mind – indeed his behavior suggests an impatience with those who disagree with him and a schoolyard bully’s tendency to use others to fight his battles for him – in this case it could be his own Air Force and/or the Israeli Air Force. A bombing attack on Iran would feed some of his more vocal neo-con supporters and leave one more mess for his successor to clean up.

An analyst friend theorized this week that perhaps the best solution to the perceived nuclear threat from Iran would be to do what was done to the Soviet Union in the Cold War: serve notice that a nuclear attack on any country by Iran would be met with subsequent annihilation of the Iranian nation and its people. Détente was never a perfect solution – but it worked for 50 years against a foe a whole lot tougher than Iran and it could possibly put an end to foolish posturing by American politicians and media editorialists.

The loony brings down the eagle

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For the first time in more than thirty years, the Canadian dollar is worth as much as the US dollar, and many economists predict that Canada’s booming economy, particularly in the energy and commodities area, will now cause a surge that leaves the greenback in its dust. Any economist who suggested this half a dozen years go, when the loony was worth $.62, would have been considered a loony in reality, and it’s hard to remember a more startling reversal of economic fortune in such a short time in the western world. The reasons are easy enough to see in retrospect, although the speed of change stuns everyone, and should cause the Yanks to consider carefully the financial implications of the seemingly bottomless debts that George Bush’s military follies will leave for whoever is unlucky enough to have to deal with the consequences.
Meanwhile Canada has during the same period managed to beef up its military presence to the point that it is now being courted, even begged, by such supposed powers as France and Germany to continue, along with the Dutch, to do the real fighting in Afghanistan, since the European heavyweights prefer to cheerlead from the sidelines. Six years go it would have seemed as loony to predict that the Canadian dollar would surpass the greenback in value in 2008 as it would have been to suggest that the European military bigwigs would soon be pleading with Canada to do their fighting for them. But then who could possibly have imagined that at the end of the same period, thousands of Mexican emigrants to the US would stream across the border in places like Windsor, Ontario and claim refugee status in Canada. Wonder what will have happened six years from now.

The Failure of Bush’s Surge

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President Bush, his GOP Congressional supporters, and a large proportion of the American news media have cooperated in pulling off the great Petraeus shell game. It goes something like this: you start with 130,000 troops in a failed occupation in Iraq and make a case for a short-term surge of an additional 30,000 troops to provide time for the Iraqis to put together a strong central government with all factions in Iraq sharing power. You report in six months that the surge has been successful and that you expect to begin withdrawing from Iraq in a year or so by removing 30,000 troops. So, of course, we are right back where we started and – at this writing – no closer to a strong government in Iraq than we were a year ago. But the withdrawal of 30,000 troops is an illusion. The U.S. military has simply run out of available troops and 30,000 would need to be removed regardless.

Putting the surge into context requires understanding that there remains no end game strategy from Bush; that the U.S. military is in a highly weakened state with generals predicting problems responding to additional threats; that the violence in Iraq remains high and is mostly not connected Al Queda; that 2 and a half million Iraqis (largely the middle class professionals) have left the country; that the British pulling their troops out of Basra is already leading to increased sectarian violence there; that the cost to the United States will soon be over a trillion dollars; that the war in Afghanistan is suffering due to our inability to supply adequate troops there: that Iran remains the likely big winner in Iraq because of Bush’s inability to even consider the real consequences of his fiasco; that much of the billions spent on reconstruction in Iraq has been wasted on shoddy construction or simply stolen by corrupt contractors; that soon the American military death toll will be over 4,000 and the number of wounded over 30,000; that hundreds of thousands Iraqis have been killed in the aftermath of the invasion; that the basic infrastructure in Iraq is worse than it was under Saddam; and that no longer does anyone use the word “victory” when discussing the future of our efforts in Iraq. It would be impossible to make up a perfect storm of ignorance and arrogance to match what the Bush presidency has done in Iraq.

As for General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, it is, in my view, wrong to fault them for trying to make the best of the rotten hand dealt to them. They were careful to avoid making the kind of stupid boasts that regularly come from their President – “bring it on”, “mission accomplished”, “we’re kickin ass in Iraq”. etc. – and while they put the best face they could on the situation, the blame must be laid at the President’s desk – with the complicity of the American electorate who elected him not once, but – for God’s sake – twice!

Germany’s home-grown explosive experts

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Exactly thirty years to the day that a group of young German extreme leftists kidnapped and eventually murdered German business chief Hans-Martin Schleyer, initiating a series of violent attacks on German civilian targets, such as Lufthansa, whose repercussions continue to make Germans nervous, a new batch of home-grown terrorists has made a dramatic entry into the headlines. Like the original RAF members, the Al-Quaida-affiliated group that had six times as much explosive chemicals stored in a garage in a remote village in the Black Forest as did the bombers of the railways in Madrid and London, was dominated by the children of middle- to upper-class German parents. They had received normal German educational training and been rather anonymous teenagers when they converted to Islam, went to training bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan and returned as explosive specialists with the intention of blowing up, apparently, the Frankfurt airport and the US air force base at Ramstein.
Since Germany refused to take part in the Iraq war and has had a rather inconspicuous role in the NATO foray in Afghanistan, preferring to leave the real fighting to middle powers like the Netherlands, Denmark and Canada, your average Fritz Schmidt felt that Germany was an unlikely terrorist goal. But these illusions have now passed as it becomes clear that the real goal of the Al-Quaida mission is the destabilization of the pillars of western society. Their leader stated in his most recent announcement, that the only way the west can be spared is by converting to Islam. It’s a sobering thought for any Judeo-Christian society and for the Germans it becomes even more threatening and disheartening when the explosive experts are named Fritz and Daniel and learned their trade during the ever-more-common coming-of-age trek through once exotic Asia.

Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen

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The rankings for most livable city on earth have been led by the usual suspects, in differing order, for the last decade: Vancouver, Zürich, Geneva. This year a couple of other European cities began to make inroads, not old favourites Paris or London – too expensive, too overdeveloped and too prone to violence – including Copenhagen, the beautiful Danish capital immortalized by Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen in the most absurd film biography ever made. Hans Christian Andersen had as many dark sides to his ultra-neurotic personality as anyone you could imagine and it is precisely these descents into a threatening and dangerous underworld that characterize his greatest works, apparently simple fairy tales that are full of deadly threats to any kind of attempt to discover a kitschy Disney paradise in Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen.

On the weekend wonderful Copenhagen erupted into the kind of social violence that you could never imagine happening in other leading European pretenders to the most livable city throne, Stockholm and Munich, cities that my brother and I would be happy to place in competition with Vancouver. They would certainly lose due to the unmatchable splendour of the wilderness within easy reach of Vancouver, not to mention its own waterfront, but they have plenty to offer before they fall behind, one of those things being the relative serenity of their societies. Citizens of Stockholm and München do not find it necessary to challenge the police in ritualistic semi-warfare, as do the citizens of Berlin or Paris, but increasingly such events are becoming established in Copenhagen. On the weekend it was 1000 youths once again engaging the undermanned Copenhagen police force in a running battle featuring tear gas and non-lethal weapons. And once again, the Danish police could not really control crowds looking for trouble. This time it was once again demonstrations recalling the anniversary of the tearing down of a youth centre. Previously it had been violent, even fatal, bouts with the motorcycle gangs or neo-Nazis, and then there are the ongoing semi-violent confrontations concerning the somewhat off-limits alternate settlement of Christania. Copenhagen’s most unruly group may in the long run however turn out to be its large Muslim minority, which is feeling increasingly alienated in a way that is not the case in neighbouring Sweden. If this nasty uneasy relationship continues to sour, Copenhagen will end up light years away from the Danny Kaye version of it.

Campaign Update II

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It is hard to imagine a two-year campaign for the presidency that could be more tedious and less substantive than the one we are being given.  It is hard to know whether this is mostly due to the dismal candidates or to the American press that manages to find almost nothing of substance to report. We have had reports on John Edwards’ $400 haircut, Hillary Clinton’s showing a shadow of cleavage on the Senate floor, Barack Obama’s basketball days in Hawaii, Mitt Romney’s “golly gee whiz” vernacular, Rudy Giuliani’s kids’ likely voting, Bill Richardson’s politically incorrect comment that people are gay because of “choice”, Clinton’s letters to an old college boyfriend, etc.

When Romney “won” the so-called Ames, Iowa straw ballot he was applauded for having organized a successful “walking around money” campaign in which he literally bought the election.  The second place finisher, Mike Huckabee, was elevated to a serious campaigner by virtue of his “folksy humor” – sort of a Latter Day Will Rogers to Romney’s Latter Day Saint. But the fundamental fact is that Romney won by giving people the money to go and vote and then feeding them and Huckabee came in second because he was basically the only other serious candidate to show up.

The big news yesterday and today is that a Republican Senator was arrested for doing something distasteful in an airport men’s room. This on the second anniversary of the Katrina recovery fiasco, and on the day that President Bush is seeking an additional $50M to drag out his Iraq fiasco with not a glimmer of a long-term strategy.  As for the candidates, presumably the Republicans will take aim at the sinful Senator while supporting the President’s request for good money after bad and ignoring the victims of Katrina. The Democrats will continue to split hairs of difference among themselves and to cater to a variety of narrow interest groups.  President Bush will continue to seek out meetings of veterans groups to drum up support for his war and the rest of us will simply wait for the serious campaign to start…assuming it will.

Public Diplomacy: Sow’s Ear to Silk Purse??

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The United States’ public diplomacy program is a shadow of its former self. The days of American libraries abroad, widespread student exchange programs, strong surrogate broadcasting programs, and support of cultural exchanges are long over and we are now reduced to sending athletes abroad and beaming trashy American rock into countries that are desperate for objective reporting and analysis.

Ice skater Michelle Kwan was the first of Secretary Rice’s athlete-ambassadors for public diplomacy and has now been followed by baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr.  Radio Farda continues its tragically misguided pop music broadcasts into Iran eschewing the hard news and analysis formerly broadcast by its predecessor, Radio Azadi.   The assumption seems to be that the attention span and interests of the reform-minded elites in countries like Iran and China are similar to the interests and tastes of the urban American teenager.

Selling America to the world is a near impossible task in the current environment. The Iraq invasion is a huge part of the problem, but torture as an intelligence tool, the Abu Ghraib scandal,  support of Israel during its disastrous bombing of Lebanon, ignoring the threat of global warming, walking away from multilateral treaties, trashing the UN, snatching people off the streets of some of our European allies for CIA-supported torture in foreign countries – the list is seemingly endless.

Making a silk purse of mutual international understanding and support out of the sow’s ear of the Bush foreign policy is a task way beyond world champion figure skaters and iron man baseball players.