Category: Current Affairs

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Hawking Freedom

Inauguration Day (1,461 days until Bush II is scheduled to leave office).

All Bush’s liberty and freedom talk (here’s the link, if you have the stomach) is swell. But the kind of liberty and freedom he and his people are pushing is more a matter of public relations on one hand and pure faith on the other.

The public relations part needs no explanation. It’s manifest every time he or Cheney or Wolfowitz or Rice or any of the other hucksters of liberty talk about how we’ve liberated Iraq. Yes, we’ve invaded. We routed the army. We rooted out the old power structure, right down to ground level, whether it was wise or not. We’re capable of outmuscling the insurgents, when push comes to shove. We put the smackdown on Saddam Hussein, who has been forever reduced to a bedraggled old man cowering in a hole. And yes, we’ve handed out lots of soccer balls to kids and fixed some sewers and built some roads. The power grid still sucks, though.

For all that, we’ve let loose something we cannot control in the insurgency. For all that, we’ve created oceans of resentment and even hatred in Iraq and throughout the Arab and Muslim world that won’t just evaporate under our sunny intentions. And despite all the money we’ve spent and our willingness to shed our own and others’ blood to do it, what we’re creating in Iraq is unlikely to resemble anything like freedom and liberty as we would recognize it.

The marketing campaign for the march of freedom brushes aside incidents like U.S. troops opening fire on a family at a checkpoint, killing the parents; or troops treating a minister of the U.S,.-appointed Iraqi government like a terrorist suspect; or the fact our handpicked Iraqi leader, Iyad Allawi, is the subject of persistent rumors suggesting he has personally executed terrorist suspects.

Those realities are messy, so this is where faith comes in. Faith that Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else exposed to our light will see their way to the truth. If people are killed and countries devastated in the process, well, we’re helping them make the necessary sacrifices to have just what we have.

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More Tsunami Aid Statistics

After fiddling around for a week or so assembling, then updating and updating again, lists summarizing some governments’ tsunami aid commitments (here and here), I moved on. I liked watching the relative surge in traffic and seeing visitors hit the site from all over the world, due in large part to the fact a Google search for “per capita tsunami aid” (and close permutations) returned this site at the very top of the list. But I didn’t see making the collection of aid statistics a full-time job.

Now the traffic surge is over. One reason is that per capita tsunami aid is cooling off as a topic (yes, those Norwegians and Australians shelled out a ton of cash. Boy, those Americans sure are reluctant to take the plunge). Another is that other sites have risen to the top of the list:

—Tsunami Aid is a post on another blog that approaches the relative aid that governments have committed from the standpoint of gross domestic product. It’s just another variable for quickly analyzing what governments are offering.

–A site called NationMaster, which apparently is in the business of mining the CIA World Factbook for data and presenting it in new and interesting ways, has put together a richly detailed section that includes not only government commitments, but also statistics on the amount donated to the cause by private sources in each country, how aid stacks up per capita and by GDP, and how many nationals of each donor country were killed or are missing. Each category is ranked (and, according to this list, as of today, the United States ranks second (after Germany) in the world in the total of public and private aid committed to date with $1.003 billion; but judged in terms of dollars of aid per capita and per dollar of GDP, the U.S. ranks 23rd and 27th, respectively).

–One resource that doesn’t show up on Google and appears only in fine print on NationMaster’s site is a Wikipedia compilation of government and private donations from around the world. What makes this list great is how well it’s sourced — you can see directly where the numbers are coming from, which is a big aid in assessing how reliable and current they are. The article also includes a detailed listing of just what aid has been offered in terms of cash, loans, services, and materiel; and it concludes with a list of contributions by U.S. corporations. Pretty impressive, and a great demonstration (I think) of Wikipedia’s power to build authoritative information through an open group effort.

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Death of an Army Blogger

One of the latest U.S. casualties in Iraq: Army Specialist Michael J. Smith of Media, Pennsylvania, was killed in action last Tuesday. He was 24. (And he was not the first Michael J. Smith to die in Iraq.)

The Defense Department issued the usual antiseptic press release. The news has created a little more buzz online, because Specialist Smith maintained an infrequently updated blog that hinted at how he felt about some of his experiences (“so i think i might have made a mistake,” a November post started; it concluded “this place sucks”) without elaborating). The blog itself is simple to the point of poignancy. Smith’s last post, titled “regrets, i’ve had a few,” is dated eight days before his death:

“so i’ve been thinking a lot lately.

that time at the college… nope…

those countless times in the car… nope…

the party? you guessed it… NOPE

i know i’ve always said i don’t regret anything i’ve done in my life, but i think i found one.

——————————————–

it’s time to call my dad. it’s his birthday today

——————————————–

beauty and the beast is such a great movie

——————————————–

i need a day off

that is all…

missing you

and all of you too

-Mike”

Some of Smith’s fellow LiveJournal bloggers have posted about his death (here and here, for instance). Several papers in eastern Pennsylvania and his hometown paper, the Daily Times in Delaware County, ran a feature on him last week:

“James Smith, who lives in Coatesville, Chester County, learned of his son’s death Tuesday night. Smith said the officers who delivered the news were professional and supportive.

” ‘I don’t know that I could do that job,’ he said.

“Smith said his son did not show any interest in the military as a child.

” ‘It was a couple of years ago he came to me and said, ‘Dad, I’m going to join the Army.’

“Smith said the terrorist attacks of 9/11 probably influenced his son’s decision to join the Army in November 2002. Whatever the reason, it was supported by the family.

” ‘He believed in the liberation of Iraq, and so do I,’ Smith said. ‘He died doing what he believed.’ ”

Stories along the same lines appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.

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Official Boycott List

The New York Times has a little story today on fund-raising for Bush’s second inaugural. The story is accompanied by a list of donors, both individuals and companies, who have given $250,000 for the festivities (the official inaugural committee has the complete list). My first reaction on seeing it was — great, I’m not having anything to do with anyone who’s given money to this thing (although one of Bush’s money men points out in the story that in the case of the companies, they apparently set aside cash for the event no matter who wins because they want to be good and sure they make friends with the government people who might oversee their business). But then, looking down the complete list, you see that ceasing business with all the donors is not a casual decision. No Microsoft, Oracle, or Dell. No cars from Ford, GM, or Toyota. No Pepsi, no Coke. No Bud, either, but that’s OK. No fine distilled petroleum products from ChevronTexaco, Exxon. or Marathon. No phone calls on MCI or SBC. No checking accounts at Bank of America. No packages from UPS or FedEx.

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What Are We Fighting For?

From an Army journalist/blogger who is returning from 11 months in Iraq:

“This war started out as a means to find weapons of mass destruction. Then, it was let’s give the Iraqi people freedom. Now, politicians say let’s fight the terrorists there and not on American soil. To be honest, soldiers don’t care about the cause. We’re not fighting for any of the above; we are fighting for the guy on our left and right. You form a bond so tight with fellow soldiers that you never want to let them down. I’ve seen it displayed every day for a year.”

Later in the same post, the blogger (whose observations are certainly worth reading, whether you agree or not) talks of his resentment that wire services and newspapers have seldom picked up on the personal stories of American troops killed in Iraq:

“We learned our lesson of spamming a memorial story to the larger outlets like AP. The editors deleted the story and used the photo of a crying soldier hugging the memorial display of an M-16 bayoneted into a box with the soldier’s helmet on the buttstock and dog tags on the hand grip. The photo cutline read: A soldier mourns the loss of a fellow comrade. Elsewhere in Iraq, 14 killed in a large explosion outside… you get the point. Just a single sentence. No name. No family. Just a sentence and then elsewhere in Iraq. That’s hardly justice for a soldier who gave that reporter the freedom of press.”

It’s the last sentence of that paragraph — especially in combination with the sentiment expressed in the first quote — that really gets to me. “We’re only fighting for our buddies and their survival … but we’re giving all you media ingrates (and those who express questions, doubts, criticism or outright rejection of the war) the freedoms you enjoy.” It’s as if, yes, the corruptness of the reasons given for going to war in Iraq — and for putting all the troops at risk there — is recognized. But at the same time, there’s a belief that the fight is preserving our rights.

I don’t get it. “Soldiers don’t care about the cause” (can’t help but think of the Country Joe lyric here: “One two three, What are we fighting for? Don’t tell me I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam. …”) Yet, as one person lectured me a couple months ago, they’re keeping me safe to sit here and blog my brains out.

You know, I don’t believe any of this is keeping us safe. And as for rights, I think the people who launched this war with their campaign of untruths are a bigger menace to our future as a democracy than Saddam ever was.

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Tale of a Remade City

Yes, a vote will happen in Iraq later this month, and it will be a remarkable feat. Whether it amounts to an election and how many people will die in the course of trying to stop it and trying to make it succeed remains to be seen. But here’s a story you need to keep in mind when you listen to the comfortable people, safe in Washington or, if they’re quite daring, in Baghdad’s Green Zone, talk about the march of liberty they’re leading.

It’s a dark fairy tale, really, and it has taken place in Fallujah, a city that’s not a fantasy. Just two months ago, our president and his commanders launched wave after wave of young men into the city, a stronghold for the anti-American insurgency. Scores of those young men died and hundreds were wounded. On the other side, facing the best-trained and best-armed military in the world, hundreds of other young men died, too. In the aftermath, the city looked much like any other battlefield: a ruined place, a place where sanctioned murder had taken place on a large scale.

Despite the grim scene — after two weeks of battle, many of the blown-apart enemy fighters were still lying in the streets — U.S. commanders and civilian officials said they were ready to put Fallujah back together again. The hundreds of thousands of residents who had fled the violent prelude to the battle would be welcomed back. Millions and millions and millions of dollars would be spent to make the city a peaceful and prosperous place. And it would all happen quickly. Grateful Fallujans would get to vote in the elections at the end of January. Like everything else Iraq is to become with our help, it sounded great and not all that hard to figure out or get done.

But first, the Americans had to find and eliminate the last enemy fighters. They had to pump sewage out of the streets and truck in drinking water and get the electrical system working again. And, finally, before the people of Fallujah could come back, the U.S. military needed to devise a way to make sure enemy fighters didn’t come back among the future peaceful and prosperous citizens. A strict identification system was suggested, including retina scans, a DNA database, and badges that would be displayed at all times. Security comes at a price.

But something’s not working. U.S. troops control the city, but they can’t seem to weed out all the guerrillas. Putting the city back together has proved much harder than the optimistic Americans guessed. Foul water still stands in the streets. There’s still little power, and that situation is unlikely to improve for months. The districts where the fighting was fiercest are still wrecked.

And the Fallujans?

Despite all that’s been done for them and all that’s promised, they appear reluctant to come back to their renewed city. In the last several weeks, about 85,000 of them, less than a third of the city’s pre-battle population, have lined up for the hours-long wait at the American checkpoints outside town. After they’re cleared to enter, they go to see what’s left of their homes. They seem angry with the destruction they find. Some talk of exacting revenge on those they believe responsible. Fewer than 10,000 have decided to stay in the city; the rest prefer refugee camps or whatever makeshift arrangements they’ve made to survive until the trouble passes.

So, where’s the new Fallujah our military and officials promised? A guess: The same place as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The same place as Saddam’s cooperation with al Qaida. The same place as our easy victory in a nation that would greet us as liberators. All just stories, it turns out, but with real enough consequences for all the people who have died to find that out and for the rest of us, too.

Now the same people who spun these tales have crafted the inspiring story of Iraqi democracy. Let’s hope we’ll be able to find some trace of it before we go on to our next adventure.

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Fighting Evolutionary Terrorism

Link: Salon.com News | The new Monkey Trial.

Salon (subscription, unfortunately, required) has a superb long review on the political advances that anti-evolution forces have made in public schools across the country. The piece focuses on the struggle in a Pennsylvania school district over the school board’s decision last year to order the teaching of “intelligent design” in high school biology classes. ID, as proponents call it, is calculated to undermine the teaching of evolutionary biology by pointing to cases that evolution (or physics) has a tough time explaining, thus suggesting that a higher creative intelligence was involved (guess whose?). ID is largely designed to get the Bible’s take on creation into science classes without overstepping the constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools.

The Salon story contains one breathtaking quote from a state legislator in Missouri that says volumes about how extreme and cockeyed anti-evolutionary thinking can become:

“Speaking to the [New York] Times, state Rep. Cynthia Davis seemed to compare opponents of intelligent design to al-Qaida. ‘It’s like when the hijackers took over those four planes on Sept. 11 and took people to a place where they didn’t want to go,’ she said. ‘I think a lot of people feel that liberals have taken our country somewhere we don’t want to go. I think a lot more people realize this is our country and we’re going to take it back.’ ”

Oh, yeah — it’s just like that.

The reason orthodoxy of any stripe — religious, political, scientific — is not a good thing is that by definition it promotes rigid thinking and suppresses inquiry. The brand of Christian fundamentalism active in U.S. politics today is a menace because it insists on imposing the beliefs of many on all. But it doesn’t do for those whose world view is based on the fruits of the scientific method to laugh off the beliefs of others, either.

This is more a question of attitude than knowledge. I’m not suggesting that Judeo-Christian creationism be put on the same footing as science (if that kind of thing’s going to get into the classroom, I’m afraid I’ll have to insist on equal science-class time for the Norse creation story, the Navajo story, and the Celtic explanations for the world). But I do think those teaching science would be well-served by a sense of humility in approaching their task. Scientific knowledge is evolving. What comes to be regarded as established truth in one era — for instance, the origins and form of the universe, the nature and structure of matter, or our understanding of the processes that cause earthquakes (and trigger tsunamis) — can and often is unraveled by further inquiry.

The story should always carry a tagline: “To be continued.”

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More on Tsunami Aid

A brief reflection on tsunami aid statistics: It’s clear, two weeks after the calamity struck, that most of the world’s wealthier nations have — either through shame or competitiveness or just plain good feeling (why did I list the best alternative last?) — come forward with a significant pile of cash to address the disaster. An updated list from Reuters shows a total of more than $5 billion in government aid pledged. At the top of the list in total contributions: Australia (detailed in this updated earlier post). At the top in per capita (an updated list) is Norway. The list includes some countries you figure don’t have a lot of spare cash lying around, too: Bulgaria, Niger, and Mali, for instance.

The Reuters tally also includes statistics on private giving. The total: about $1.3 billion, and that does not include contributions from the United States.

The scale of the disaster is so vast, and the amount of money committed so far to relief seems to have mounted so quickly, it’s hard to get a handle on how well the need is being met. (And of course, even the total of $6 billion plus is small compared to the amount of money the world’s only superpower — oh, hey, that’s us — is dropping in Iraq. Our rough expenditure on that little mission of mercy tops $7 billion — every month.

Maybe a more pertinent piece of context is this: the Oakland Hills fire in 1991, which destroyed about 3,000 dwellings and killed 25 people, reportedly caused between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in damage (insurers are said to have paid out $1.7 billion). Insured losses for the 2004 hurricane season in Florida (something like 120 people killed) have been put at $17.5 billion. Even making allowances for the way property is valued in the United States, the $6 billion-plus promised to South and Southeast Asia so far is just the beginning of dealing with the disaster.

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How to Pay for Libraries

David Kipen, one of the book review editors at the San Francisco Chronicle, has a column today on how to resolve funding problems for public libraries in towns that can’t or won’t pay for them. The prompt for his commentary is the situation in Salinas, where voters in November rejected a series of local tax measures to pay for city services, including the public library. The city says it will close the libraries sometime between now and June. Meantime, some book-loving citizens in town are hustling to get a new tax measure on the ballot this spring so that the libraries cans stay open.

Kipen, noting that Salinas isn’t the only community with a library-funding crisis, suggests a radical solution: redistributing available library funding from cities that have well-funded systems (like Berkeley, whose citizens have taxed themselves repeatedly to keep all the system’s branches open, well-maintained and well-staffed) to those that don’t. He says, “There’s no excuse for a system in which San Francisco embarks on an ambitious brand library renovation and construction program while, just down the 101, the next John Steinbeck can’t check out a book by the last one.”

Give him points for trying to come up with a new idea. He’s right about the importance of libraries to communities and their citizens and helping foster the intellectual growth of kids. But he’s vague on how such a redistribution of resources would work — suggesting, for instance, that “friends of the library” groups from better-off, book-loving communities be paired with groups from less-well-off, more book-challenged ones; whatever money was raised for the richer community would also have to be raised for the poorer one (through sharing, I guess).

Kipen’s underlying argument is that all library systems ought to have access to a basic level of funding to guarantee a basic level of service; that, similar to public schools, that level of funding and service shouldn’t be impaired simply because a community can’t pay at the same rate as its richer neighbors. Kipen’s smart enough to see that voters in places that have made a strong commitment to support libraries by passing special taxes won’t want their tax money to leave town. In the case of a place like Salinas, that’s doubly so: Why in the world should San Francisco or Berkeley or anywhere else share their dough with a town that’s declared, at the polling place, that it doesn’t want to pay for its libraries. What Kipen’s suggesting isn’t a hard sell. It’s impossible.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do something along the lines of what Kipen is suggesting. Maybe a state library endowment, funded through charitable contributions, tax-return checkoffs, and perhaps partly with a special bond issue. The endowment could provide matching funds for library districts across the state for any library-related purpose — branch expansion, capital improvements, buying books, or keeping branches open. The matching-fund amount would be capped so that rich districts didn’t take a disproportionate share of funds. At the same time, the matching funds would give lower-income districts an incentive to maintain basic library spending.

I’m sure there are practical reasons my idea would be tough to carry out. I’ve got no idea, for instance, how much money you’d have to devote to the endowment to make it self-sustaining. But since it promises some benefit to communities that are already committed to spending on their libraries, it would get past the predictable and justified local resistance to sharing tax money outside the community where it’s raised.

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Tippecanoe and Fallujah, Too

To do my part for The New Iraq, I’ve started to think about a national slogan. This would be in addition to the current one inscribed on the familiar red, white, black, and green flag, “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.” That one’s sturdy and sober and sacred as all get out, but it doesn’t quite convey the pizzazz and pyrotechnics of the Iraq that’s in the making.

Here are a few ideas:

“Iraq: Not as Bad as It Looks”

“First Saddam, Now This”

“The Land Between Attacks”

“Watch Out — It’s About to Go Off”

“Hey, Help Us Out — We’re Dying Here”

“Where Ideas Meet IEDs”

“Land of Many Martyrs”

“Mission Accomplished”

“Land of Martyrs and Mortars”

“We Don’t Take Kindly to Meddlers”

“What Happens Here, Stays Here”