[t]he Greatest Nation in Human History. This would force the United Nations to say, "Now we will hear from the delegate representing The Greatest Nation in Human History."
"He's in the hands of the Iraqi system. I don't have anything more on the shoe-thrower," spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters when asked if the White House was concerned about reports that the Iraqi journalist showed signs of having been tortured.
A Turkish shoemaker who made the famous footwear that was hurled at President Bush during a visit to Baghdad is enjoying a massive sales boom, it emerged today.
Ramazan Baydan has recruited an extra 100 staff to meet orders for 300,000 pairs of the Model 271 brogues that were thrown by Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi.
His Istanbul-based firm normally sells about 75,000 pairs a year for about £28 each.
Today it was claimed Mr al-Zeidi was tortured into writing a letter of apology to Mr Bush - and told his brother he would 'do it again'.
"America’s standing in the world is eroded when we are perceived as bystanders to genocide. Yes, we must understand that preventing mass killings may eventually require military intervention, but this is always at the end of the list of intervention options, not the beginning. We must learn to recognize the early warning signs of genocide and move quickly to marshal international cooperation, to bring diplomatic and economic pressure to bear against those who violate the norms of civilized behavior."
The whole episode sent nary a shiver through Bush's sunny little universe. Bush merely expressed his mystification about why Zaidi might have hurled those shoes. "I don't know what the guy's cause is," he told reporters brightly after Zaidi was beaten and dragged away by Iraqi guards.
Maybe no one had bothered to translate Zaidi's Arabic words for the president. As Zaidi threw the first shoe, he cried, "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!" As he flung the second, he was even more explicit: "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!"
No, shoe throwing's not exactly a form of nonviolent resistance -- and Zaidi's not up there with Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But if Zaidi inspires a new global trend of shoe throwing, I'll take that over bomb throwing any day.
LINGERING LIKE A STALE FART
14. Chicago Bears
Chicago's new offense: "Throw the ball up to Devin Hester and hope he either catches it or draws an interference penalty." In other words, the Bears are using the same offense my buddy Geoff mastered in "Madden '96," only without the wrinkle of Kyle Orton running backward for 20 yards, scrambling around for eight seconds and heaving a Hail Mary downfield. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this fails.
"I'm not going anywhere, and I'll fight... fight... fight..." [looks at notes] "... until my last breath."
"These are the most serious comments from the Governor since he was arrested."
"I won't walk away from a job the people of Illinois hired me to do."
"Each country, including our own, needs to improve its human rights record."
"gives rise to uncertainty in the law and challenges existing human norms."
Hazaras are mostly Shia, with a history of ties to Iran, whereas most Pashtuns are Sunni and have turned to Pakistan for support. Over the past century, the two peoples have fought periodically, and the Hazaras, who are thought to make up between nine and nineteen per cent of Afghanistan's population--the Pashtuns make up nearly half--have usually lost. On the border between the Hazara heartland, in the country's mountainous and impoverished center, and the Pashtun plains in the south and east, conflicts over grazing land are common. But, working alongside NATO soldiers, Hazara police units are now operating far to the south of these traditional battlegrounds and deep into Pashtun territory.
Responding to Hannity’s assertion that “we need to take him [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] out,” Warren agreed, saying that stopping evil “is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers.”
Lately, not a week passes without an exclusive report hitting the front page of newspapers in Britain or America conveying the same message: the Taliban is back, boastful, bearded and boisterous. Still, as a Swiss anthropologist pointed out to me recently, the Taliban of today is more than just the result of US failure in Afghanistan. According to him, it is a multifaceted, indigenous movement, mirroring many of the concerns of rural Afghan society.
We cannot get into a situation in which there a security vacuum is left in Somalia and all the good work of Djibouti is undone and we go back to two years ago prior to the Ethiopian offensive. That would not be a good circumstance to find ourselves in. And I really don't imagine American forces being a part of a peacekeeping operation. American forces are pretty busy these days.
The Secretary-General has been giving some very careful thought to the way forward in Somalia. He has recommended a multinational force which could prepare the way for a UN peacekeeping force in the future. But at the moment, many members of the Council feel that the conditions aren't right for the UN to be able to put in a traditional blue-helmeted UN force.
For scholars of insults, what comes to mind almost immediately after a high-profile insulting incident is the central African nation of Chad, where hitting someone with a pair of pants is the highest form of insult. It means that the target is lower than pants, the hem of which, while not on the ground, is often near the ground and, again, unclean. The only problem with this form of insult is that the thrower then has to retrieve the pants, as he or she had been wearing them.
For many years people threw shorts, but almost no one was offended, as the hem of shorts is a great distance from the ground. “We’re working on new forms of insult, as well as changing our country’s name, which, strangely, is a common first name in California,” said a Chadian cultural attaché. “We need to be taken more seriously.”
“[In] reality the risks to maritime flows of oil are far smaller than is commonly assumed. First, tankers are much less vulnerable than conventional wisdom holds. Second, limited regional conflicts would be unlikely to seriously upset traffic, and terrorist attacks against shipping would have even less of an economic effect. Third, only a naval power of the United States’ strength could seriously disrupt oil shipments.” —Dennis Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2007
On Nov. 15, 2008 a group of Somali pirates in inflatable rafts hijacked a Saudi oil tanker carrying 2 million barrels of crude in the Indian Ocean. The daring raid was part of a rash of attacks by Somali pirates, which have primarily occurred in the Gulf of Aden. Pirates operating in the waterway have hijacked more than 50 ships this year, up from only 13 in all of last year, according to the Piracy Reporting Center. The Gulf of Aden, where nearly 4 percent of the world’s oil demand passes every day, was not on the list of strategic “chokepoints” where oil shipments could potentially be disrupted that Blair and Lieberthal included in their essay, “Smooth Sailing: The World’s Shipping Lanes Are Safe.” Hopefully, Blair will show a bit more foresight if, as some expect, he is selected as Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence.
In the immediate term, pressure should be put on the Rwandan leadership itself to rein in Nkunda; in the short term, Monuc should be supplemented by a large EU force; in the longer term, as eastern Congo seems ungovernable from Kinshasa, I see no option but the creation of a buffer state on the western shores of Lakes Kivu and Tanganyika. This could be achieved by regional forces with Monuc-EU backup.
[T]he notion that "whenever humanitarian emergencies break out, we do nothing to stop them" is incorrect. During the Clinton administration, the United States intervened to stop the mass slaughter of Bosnians and then Kosovars. It didn't work perfectly, but it worked, and it would have worked better if we had intervened earlier.
I'd also point out that the notion that the United States can't intervene militarily without U.N. Security Council authorization is not a historical norm that existed before the Bush administration smashed it. In fact it's never existed at all. ... No government in American history has ever committed itself to gaining U.N. permission before using non-defensive force. ... Previous governments did pay more attention to international opinion than the Bush administration has, but none of them granted it veto power. The Clinton administration's motto in this regard was "Multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must."
There is a school of thought which holds that U.S. intevention in the Balkans was a pretext to kill people rather than a genuine effort to stop genocide. But this school is mostly associated with extreme Serbian nationalism. I'm surprised to see it propounded by an organ of mainstream American liberalism.
"While a whole population in the Gaza Strip is being slowly eliminated by the Israeli regime and while the international community is in shock and anguish over the horrendous Israeli war crimes against the innocent Palestinian people in the Gaza strip, the US tries to divert the attentions in one way or the other."
... "If there is one thing that the people in the Persian Gulf region are concerned about that is the interference of the United States in the region and its tired divisive policies and practices that is futilely aimed at creating divisions in order to pursue its own narrow political aims and to serve the interests of the Israeli regime."
Ok, I’ll bite. How can one tell the difference a priori between something like Kenya and something like Rwanda? Because it certainly seemed like in Rwanada all that happened was the international community trying to ‘grasp thoroughly the ethnonationalistic motivations of all actors in a conflict, and work towards implementing diplomatic solutions that head off the worst impulses of these actors’ when what was needed was ‘”sending in the troops” to stop the bad guys from doing bad things’.
Trying to contain the damage around the edges of a conflict doesn’t really solve anything
On this I strongly disagree as well. I concur with your spectrum of resolution, prevention, enforcement, as well as not landing right in the middle of a hot LZ guns ablazing. However, on the margin is where (an appropriately multilateral and authorized) force could do the most good. Think of like fighting wildfires. The centers are a lost cause, and pre-fire prevention and abatement is obviously the most bang for the buck. But while the conflagation is in progress, fighting it around the edges to push it back and moreover to prevent it spreading is the best and really only way to fight it.
Ambassador at Large is setting up a straw man when he raises the issue of Kenya. No one proposed sending in foreign troops (he could have used the case of the USA in 2000 just as well).
Myanmar doesn’t work very well for AaL for several reasons. For one thing, the people of Myanmar made their wishes very clear in the last election, but their will was thwarted. In a case where the people’s will is clear, why shouldn’t foreigners help them ? Same goes for re-installing Aristide in Haiti or (I assure you) removing Coard from power in Grenada. For another, the military regime in Burma is horrible and not just horrible in the imediate aftermath of typhoons
What about Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraqi Kurdistan ? I mean there have been a few armed interventions into ethnic conflict. I’d be interested in his opinions on things that were actually done not something which no one proposed.
OK now Sudan. On one side there is, among other things, a military dictator who uses militias who murder civilians to fight a possible threat to his power. Now what does a dictator have to do to lose the protection of international law ? I’d say bombing hospitals should count as crossing a line which makes a civil war not civil for the purposes of international law. The Bashir regime has done that.
There is huge human suffering. There is a military dictatorship. That regime has violated the rules of war. To me the case would be clear *if* there weren’t insane hawks in the USA who might be in power again and would use the intervention as a precedent. On the other hand, they will do insane things in any case when they are back in power. I mean does anyone really think that if Clinton had respected Haitian and Serbian sovereignty then Bush would have stayed out of Iraq ?
You know, I’ve been concerned about the Darfur “genocide” for a long time. What’s it been now, 4 years? 5? But I’m starting to wonder. Either the Janjaweed are really slow inefficient genociders or this isn’t a genocide. I mean, shouldn’t they have killed everyone by now?
AoL: But Rwanda, as Albright herself today said, was “volcanic” violence. It was almost unprecedented in its virulence and speed, and it was in many ways unique. Darfur is the genocide of the future, the brutal suppression of ethno-geographic rebellion. With diplomatic skill, perhaps we can head off the worst before it happens. But we basically can’t do anything to stop such an event once it starts. The sooner we accept that, the better.
I don’t agree. As Samantha Power has written, many things short of military intervention - like jamming radio signals - can be done, although with Rwanda, the US should have intervened.
The US should sign on to the International Criminal Court so that genocidal dictators will be assured they are not safe within their sovererign immunity. Milosevic - who enabled genocide against the muslim Bosnians - and Saddam - who committed genocide against the Kurds - paid the price and serve as warnings. And there are other examples. Unfortunately China and Russia are making the UN irrelevant by blocking many things interfering with “sovereignty.”
The punishment of criminals serves as a good deterrent. But I agree with Matt and AoL, more preventative diplomacy is needed. And we shouldn’t define genocide down, as Russia did with the South Ossetians.
There’s nothing wrong with preventing genocide, of course. But the public conversation on preventing genocide in the United States has, over the years, come to be dominated by a kind of myopic focus on the idea of using unilateral American military force to stop genocides. The basic way the conversation goes is basically that whenever humanitarian emergencies break out, we do nothing to stop them. And sometimes we invade Iraq. But then whenever anyone suggests that the U.S. commit itself to following international law and not using non-defensive military force absent a UN Security Council authorization, people show up insisting that we need to maintain the right to unilateral non-defensive war in order to stop genocide. Then whenever humanitarian emergencies break out, we do nothing to stop them. But the larger cause of unilateral militarism lives to fight another day. Or something.
There will need to be a way to finally incent Iran to make a different choice concerning its nuclear ambitions, but this was not an effort to develop a common strategy. It was really the first large meeting. We had an informal consultation in Sharm el Sheikh, but I think what really did come through here is that these are countries who have really deep interest in how this issue gets resolved, and they want to continue consultations with the P5+1 on how this is all going to come out.
