Like stuck in traffic

The Oscar-winner "Crash" begins with this quote from Don Cheadle's character, setting up the tone and message of this metaphor-movie about racism, prejudice, and solipsism in crowded places: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."

I find metaphors about cars and traffic particularly illustrative of American society. As we all know, Americans love their cars, and road rage, wasted fuel, rising insurance costs, expensive gas, maddening traffic, melting ice caps, and billions of dollars in bailouts will not change that. Invariably, the Americans I meet have sharper and more coherent opinions about the 14-billion-dollar rescue package to keep Detroit afloat than about the more than one trillion dollars haphazardly dispensed to save the banking and mortgage industry. We might not know our ABCs, but we know our cars.

I have always found that driving a car and trying to navigate traffic brings the worst in us. It's a very antisocial behavior. Behind the wheel, we are always the good guy, and everyone else is a suspect, a faulty driver, and you can only rely on yourself. Driving would be a pleasant activity if it wasn't for all those terrible drivers out there (which I have yet to meet - I have met self-defined "aggressive" drivers, but never self-defined "bad" drivers). We all consider ourselves relatively good, play-by-the-rules drivers, and when we cut someone off or merge too late, we consider it an exception that we can allow ourselves for all those times that we were the victim of such infraction. And, protected by all the metal and glass, we can yell, and feel aggravated, and say all the impolite things that we don't say in the subway when we're standing shoulder-to-shoulder with annoying strangers.

Too many of us see the world as if we were always driving a car, always behind the wheel. As if we were always virtuous and good citizens, and a few maladjusted, misbehaving party-poopers were ruining it for everyone. Around us, people morph easily into welfare queens, cheaters, and system-abusers. It is hard to conceptualize the intricacies of capitalism, or the hydraulics of our imperfect government, or the lobbying tentacles of Big Pharma, but it is easy to remember that person in front of you at an overcrowded emergency room. Mike Huckabee, a presidential contender in this past cycle and a likely candidate in 2012, just published a new book, "Do The Right Thing," in which he essentially concludes that in order to get government off our backs we just need to be better people. We don't have a health care crisis in America, he would say. We have a health crisis. No need to fight over single-payer universal health care or the other patchy, piecemeal approaches in the menu if we just start eating right, and taking care of ourselves, and exercising daily. I hear this often in my classes, and I call it the New Year's resolution approach to government. Frankly, I think James Madison put it much more eloquently when he said "if men were angels..."

Most people remember Obama's 2004 DNC speech by his "there's not a red America, and a blue America, there's the United States of America" line, but my personal favorite is when he laid out the basic creed of progressivism: "If there's a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties." And although he often appeals to our sense of personal responsibility -especially in front of African-American audiences, to Reverend Jackson's chagrin- his most important trait to me is his fine sense of empathy, and the belief that we have a crisis of empathy in America.

It feels strange to speak ill of American individualism and selfishness only a few weeks after record-breaking Americans elected this man to the highest office, but I fear that he convinced lots of people less empathetic than he is into voting for him, and very soon we will have to have our seventh national conversation about universal health care since World War One. Maybe it is true that 2008 is not 1993, but Princeton University's Uwe Reinhardt, America's leading expert on health-care economics, is not so optimistic. Why? There is no social solidarity in America. Maybe it's just one of those days, but I happen to agree.

Transatlanticism: Swinging to the right, swinging to the left

Tony Judt, possibly one of the best political historians of our time, likes to remind us that Austria never exorcized its Nazi past. As Hitler's first 'victim,' it never intoned the kind of national mea culpa that Germany, grudgingly and painfully, let out over time. But Austria was not only Adolf Hitler's birthplace; it provided a disproportionate amount of SS agents, concentration camp administrators, and Nazi sympathizers, on a higher per capita basis than Germany itself. In the absence of accountability and collective soul-searching, the echoes of Austria's post-war deafening silence reverberate today.

Austria's 2008 general elections have just yielded the strongest electoral result of the far-right in Europe since the end of World War II. Surpassing Jörg Haider in 1999 and Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, the new poster boy of xenophobic, anti-Brussels Europe, Heinz-Christian Strache is the rising star in a country that embodies European civilization and is one of the highest contributors to the EU coffers. The young Strache and his former mentor, Haider, combined for one-third of the vote, holding a key to the success of any governing coalition emerging from the elections. A former dentist (am I the only one who finds that extremely appropriate?), Strache has been filmed in military fatigues training alongside known neo-nazis; wants to repeal a ban on swastikas and other Nazi symbols but prohibit the construction of minarets; enjoys calling headscarved women "female ninjas" and seems distressed that many Austrians prefer falafels, kebabs, and couscous over Wiener schnitzels and sausages; and his rhetoric and programs are unashamedly anti-gay rights, anti-immigration, anti-Islam and, perhaps most importantly, anti-EU. All of the above brings him close and tight with extreme right-wingers in France, Flanders, Bulgaria, Serbia, and elsewhere.

And it is not just Austria. A former fascist party, Alleanza Nationale, is part of Silvio Berlusconi's governing coalition. Alessandra Mussolini, Benito's granddaughter, is growing more outspoken every day. While her cohorts harass Gypsies and immigrants, Berlusconi wants to make illegal immigration a punishable criminal offense and fingerprint the Roma minority. Similar anti-Islam and anti-immigration sentiment is growing in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Poland.

More mainstream conservatism is also on the rise. The Labour Party is crumbling in the United Kingdom, Sarkozy is winning his battle against the unions in France, and at least one of the Polish twins keeps quarrelling with Brussels over the death penalty. Not even Sweden is a social-democratic paradise anymore.

Meanwhile, the United States, a country whose political center is supposed to be markedly to the right from Europe, is in the midst of the biggest government intervention in its economy since the New Deal. American leaders are embracing words like 'bailout' and 'nationalization,' and railing against 'the unfettered free market' and 'deregulation' -although one could equally argue that "socialism for the rich," the only acceptable socialism in America according to John Kenneth Galbraith, has always been part of the conservative agenda. While stocks plunge in Wall Street, the political capital of atheism, universal health care, same-sex marriage, and taxes for the rich is steadily increasing. And unless something dramatic happens, Americans are about to elect a young, black, progressive man from the South Side of Chicago called Barack Hussein Obama to the highest office of the land.

It's almost as if a law of opposites informs the variable distance between the political centers of America and Europe, or as if the pendular swing of politics moves too fast to give all those books that came out at the beginning of the decade any respectable shelf life. Robert Kagan, who famously declared that Americans hail from Mars and Europeans hail from Venus, should look for new planets to explain the transatlantic gap. Jeremy Rifkin and others should wake up from their European Dream. Congressman Tom Tancredo, known for his hardline anti-immigration positions, is about to retire from his seat in the House of Representatives after failing to get Americans to embrace massive deportation. Well, maybe he should just move to Europe!

What is Holding Turkey Back?

To understand Modern Turkey, one must examine the mentality of the country’s founder and first strongman, Kemal Ataturk, and his legacy in Turkey today. Under his leadership, the remains of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and Asia Minor were forged into Modern Turkey. The Turkish transformation from the dismantled Ottoman state to the Turkish Republic was made in the image of this man, whose last name translated means “father of the Turks.”

Quite the contrary to what Turkish citizens believe, and have marketed to the rest of the world, the Kemalist ideology is exactly what is preventing the country from moving forward. As has been noted by Marcus A. Templar in his recent study Tasting the Bitter Pekmez: Causes of Turkey's Instability argues that:

The reality that haunts the Turkish Republic from its inception is dangerously revealing itself. Kemal's dream was to Europeanize Turkey, but the foundations he forcibly set have remained stagnant while Europe keeps developing. Government institutions in Turkey look back to Kemalism fearing that deviation from Kemalist ideals could bring the end of their state. Turkey has been built on the principles of Pan-Turkism that are no longer acceptable in Europe and, as she is not an ethnically and racially homogenous country, this alone is the cornerstone of its instability.1

The Kemalist ideology also appears to be the main reason why Turkey cannot be relied on to abide by treaties, thereby hindering the normalization of relations between itself on the one hand, and Greece, Cyprus and the European Union on the other.

[1] Marcus A. Templar, "Tasting the Bitter Pekmez: Causes of Turkey's Instability" in Journal of Global Change and Governance Volume I, Number 2 (2008).

Bonfire of the Vanities

One of the best lessons of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938) is the fratricidal viciousness of the left's internal squabbles, seemingly more passionate about fighting each other than about fighting General Franco. An unforgettable vignette from Monty Python's Life of Brian parodies a similar dysfunction, with the Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea, and -with only one member- the Popular Front of Judea all too busy in petty internal disagreements to have any effectiveness against mighty Rome. Highbrow or lowbrow, a common thread is inescapable: allowing for exceptions and varying degrees, the political left tends to divide itself and amplify internal differences, while its opponents on the right do exactly the opposite.

To the disbelief of most observers, Silvio Berlusconi became Prime Minister of Italy for the third time a couple of weeks ago, commanding a coalition that stretched from the political center to the secessionist and xenophobic Lega Nord. The anti-Berlusconi camp, appalled that the wealthiest man in Italy, routinely indicted and prosecuted for corruption, and owner of more than half of all media outlets, was too divided to prevent Berlusconi's resounding success.

This pattern can manifest itself not only in multi-party, parliamentary democracies, but also in bipartisan, presidential ones like the United States. American progressives usually blame the corporate media, or, more abstractly, the "system" for their electoral under-performance, but sometimes, and not only when Ralph Nader shows himself, they should blame themselves. The Democratic primary is still ongoing, despite being almost mathematically clinched since the Wisconsin primary two months ago. Barack Obama, now running out the clock, would prefer to use this time to pool some of Clinton's advisers and money, campaign in Florida and Michigan, win over skeptics in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and peel off McCain's support among independents instead of courting white, working-class Democrats. Both candidates are getting scratched up and battered, more by the insufferable and exhausting length of the race than by a gaffes-obsessed media. The Democrats, who are right about the issues but are quite clumsy about process, are readying themselves to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and lose another unlosable election.

If ignorance is the cardinal sin of the right, vanity is the cardinal sin of the left. Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, spent the weekend on a vanity tour that could only damage the electoral prospects of the member of his church. But it is not just Wright that is vain or narcissistic. Since Obama won eleven contests in a row and emerged as the front-runner, the senator has received as much venom from allegedly liberal journalists as from conservative ones. Tavis Smiley, for example, is less than enthusiastic about Obama, partly because his views don't go far enough for his political taste, partly because Obama did not show up at his State of the Black Union event in New Orleans. In response, Bill Maher summed up the feeling of many viewers when he said: "I know, he won't do my show either, but if that's what he has to do, and it's working for him, maybe we should accept it and get over ourselves." Paul Krugman, who many expected to support the anti-war candidate, has spent most of his columns this year attacking Obama over disagreements with details of his health care reform plan. Markos Moulitsas, a strong Obama supporter, spoke in the harshest terms against Obama's decision to be interviewed by Chris Wallace in FoxNews. Obama may be the first liberal Democrat to be elected in a long, long time, but all of us have left-leaning friends that refuse to join the bandwagon because of disagreements over the candidate's policy on Israel, or a specific trade deal, to name only a few.

On a New York Times' article commenting Reverend Wright's exercise of narcissism, Alessandra Stanley closed with a quote from Chuck Todd (and a Carly Simon song): "You're so vain, I bet you think this campaign is about you." But that's all of us. It's who we are, and it's why we lose. We are so vain, we think this campaign is about us. And not "us" as in community, or country, or even the progressive movement, but "us" as individuals.

Digital/Medieval Finance: Speed and Chaos as Architecture

I am presenting next Friday at the DGA Conference and wanted to try out some of the ideas from my presentation here with you. The following is a brief snippet. Any comments/suggestions are always welcomed.

---

One of the most significant enablers of a distinctively new configuration of global finance is the recent application of digital information technologies in financial transactions. These technologies have facilitated the nearly instantaneous transaction of more complex financial instruments by a wider array of investors at lower costs.

Digital financial transactions have reconfigured these global, fast-paced conduits into new hierarchical formations where governmental institutions do not necessarily occupy the top layers. For example, the application of digital technologies in finance has allowed for an interconnected and distributed network of a larger number of investors and instruments to end up as a kind of concentrated power not previously observed.

It is not impossible to imagine a large-scale financial crisis occurring before the wide-spread use of digital technologies; the Great Depression of the 1930s is the most well-known example of such. However, it is perhaps difficult to imagine millions of decisions from a multitude of dispersed investors coalescing around a handful of countries to severely affect their national markets in a matter of a few weeks, such as what occurred during the 1997 Asian crisis.

The speed of action of this concentrated power, and not only its scale, becomes a major transformative feature in our current architecture of global finance.

It is largely through the interplay between money and digital technologies, complex financial instruments, private knowledge networks, and other phenomena that I believe global financial markets have been able to overgrow the centripetal pull of governmental frameworks, whether national or international.

As with other social structures becoming transfixed by globalization, the emerging architecture of global finance lets us peer into a medieval-like future of overlapping authority, competing allegiances, and a diffuse patchwork of social dynamics.

Transatlanticism: Politics and Sexual Scandals

Alan Dershowitz, arguably one of the most famous faculty members of Harvard Law School, must enjoy being unpopular. In 2002, he began advocating in favor of legalizing torture. In 2006, he defied international outcry in a series of articles that argued that Lebanese civilians killed by Israeli bombs were fair game, and compared Lebanon's collective culpability to Austria under the Nazis. In the face of mounting criticism against the Israel lobby and its outsize influence in Washington, he accused former President Carter and professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of bigotry and anti-semitism. These days, he is one of the few people defending New York's Governor, Eliot Spitzer, recently linked to a prostitution ring and likely to experience one of the most vertiginous political downfalls in memory.

Professor Dershowitz contends that the politicians' minor sexual peccadilloes are private matters that should not be exploited for political purposes, and that this would never happen in Europe. According to him, sexual scandals get bumped to the lifestyle section of the newspaper and then fade away. This is just another manifestation of the transatlantic gap, and most Europeans would proudly agree. François Mitterrand had numerous extramarital affairs but went on to become the longest serving President of France. The pornstar Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina, was elected in 1987 to a seat in the Italian Parliament, representing the Lazio district of Rome. Pim Fortuyn, the anti-immigration and anti-Islam Dutch politician murdered by an animal rights activist, was believed to have had sex with Moroccan teenagers. Europeans carry these anecdotes like badges of honor, and never miss an opportunity to mock American puritanism.

However, the transatlantic divide is not as wide as Dershowitz suggests. A quick review of sexual scandals involving politicians offers a mixed bag: on both sides of the Atlantic, some political careers survived, while others were doomed. In the United States, President Clinton held very high approval ratings in the aftermath of the Lewinsky scandal. "Gropegate" did not damage Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became Governor of California. Representative Mark Foley resigned, but senators Larry Craig and David Vitter kept their seats. Barack Obama's first adversary in his senatorial race, Jack Ryan, dropped out after his wife filed for divorce and aired her husband's uncommon sexual habits. So did Senator Gary Hart when he ran for President in 1988. But JFK remains one of America's most popular presidents, and he was hardly a boy-scout. In Europe, sexual scandals have dogged the careers of many politicians. Angela Merkel feared for the stability of her coalition cabinet because Günter Verheugen, the Vice President of the European Commission, was having an affair with his chief of staff. The Scottish politician Tommy Sheridan is still battling one of Rupert Murdoch's tabloids. The pretender to the Italian crown, the prince Vittorio Emmanuele, spent time in jail in 2006 due to his connection to a prostitution ring. And many believe that the Profumo Affair in 1963, involving John Profumo and a prostitute, helped topple the Conservative government of Harold MacMillan. Even the French (!) are slightly bothered by President Sarkozy's choice of the supermodel Carla Bruni as his new wife.

Nevertheless, we are mixing apples and oranges. Spitzer is likely to be charged with a federal crime, after making a name for himself busting prostitution rings. It is a story that writes itself, regardless of cultural idiosyncrasies. It is patently untrue that a case similar to Eliot Spitzer would not make it to the front page of European newspapers. In fact, Spitzer's case itself did make it to the cover of many European newspapers that had never even mentioned him before. Imagine that Judge Garzón had been found to spend a small fortune in cocaine for his private use after devoting a lifetime sending cocaine smugglers to prison; if Beppe Grillo had been accused of corruption after decades of unmasking the corruption of others; or if Eliot Ness had been buying for himself some of Al Capone's alcohol during Prohibition. Those would be fairer comparisons to Spitzer's case than Mitterrand's double life. Europeans may be more tolerant than Americans towards nudity, but are equally uneasy with corruption, hypocrisy, and wrongdoing.

Italy might be an exception. With twenty-four convicted legislators and fifty-seven appealing guilty verdicts, Italy is in a category of its own. Perhaps if Professor Dershowitz used Italy as a frame of reference, he could aptly argue that Spitzer's expensive philandering is just a drop in the bucket. That way he could continue to antagonize public opinion and common sense.

Update your IR textbooks: Chronicle of a non-crisis

After deploying his troops to the border with Colombia, Ecuador's President Rafael Correa said on television that Latin America would turn into a new Middle East, and that regional war was a possibility. The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez sent ten tank battalions and the air force to his side of the line, and threatened to use his newly acquired toys, the Russian warplanes Sukhois. He accused Colombia of state terrorism and called President Uribe a criminal. Uribe replied that they had evidence that both Chávez and Correa had ties to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and that he planned to send this evidence to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The President of Nicaragua, the Sandinista Daniel Ortega, jumped into the fray. They all closed borders and withdrew diplomatic delegations. Former President Fidel Castro ranted against US interference and genocidal policies in Latin America. Not to be outdone, Senator John McCain, acting 'presidential,' committed the United States to another jungle war of impossible solution if Colombia was attacked.

In the end, Latin America's worst diplomatic crisis since the brief Cenepa War in 1995 came to an abrupt and swift end at a summit of the Organization of the American States, with all of the dignitaries involved shaking hands, hugging, and exchanging jokes, back pats, and apologies. In what can be described as one of the most unscripted moments in the history of televised diplomatic meetings -Khruschev's shoe banging at the Security Council was scripted-, Daniel Ortega managed to force Uribe to commit to withdraw a Colombian warship from Nicaragua's coast. President Chavez could hardly contain his smile.

The rapid escalation and de-escalation of this border crisis, initiated with the assassination of the FARC's second-in-command during a raid in Ecuador, provides a new case study for IR theory classrooms. What defused the crisis? Realists might say that Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia were merely saber-rattling and bluffing, and that their weak military forces hardly stood a chance against one of the biggest recipients of American military aid in the world. Confident of Washington's support, Colombia had achieved its goal and was happy to offer an apology. Liberals might say that Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela are major trading partners, and a regional war would have no winners and many losers. Institutionalists might chalk this one up to multilateralism. The fact that the OAS had a summit scheduled for that week, forcing the leaders to seat at the same table and talk it off in front of their peers, highlights the benefits of these institutions of cooperation. Finally, culturalists of Hungtingtonian persuasion would say that countries that speak the same language and belong to the same cultural space and civilization do not go to war with each other nowadays. Absent an ethnic or religious cleavage, the crisis could only qualify as a family argument.

But could this truly be a happy win-win? I suspect some stand more to gain than others. Washington's persona-non-grata du jour, Hugo Chávez, effectively solidified his leadership in the region, exacerbating the isolation of the United States' biggest regional ally. Chávez has got Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba firmly in his sphere of influence. Brazil, Chile, and Argentina all came down on his side. For most Latin Americans, his recent successes mediating the release of hostages held for years by the FARC surely matters more than his embarrassing performances at the UN General Assembly or the last Summit of the Americas. And President Uribe knows that, with oil and cocaine yielding such high profits, neither the FARC nor President Chávez are likely to go anywhere.

Political Dynasties

After tipping the scale in primaries and caucuses in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, California, and others, it is now commonly known that Latinos support the candidacy of Hillary Clinton by an overwhelming margin. No one really knows why. After all, the brown-skinned candidate with an immigrant story and a different-sounding name is Barack Obama, and his campaign has poured untold sums of money into courting the Latino vote. Senator Clinton is not Latina, does not speak Spanish, and never fails to mispronounce the names of her Latino endorsers. Her biggest connections with the Latino community were her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, and her husband's appointment of Bill Richardson for two cabinet posts. Solis Doyle resigned early in the race after being singled out as main culprit of Clinton's campaign woes, and Richardson has all but endorsed Senator Obama.

Among those that flat-out reject the idea of a rift between the Latino and the African-American communities, some maintain that Latinos are much more comfortable with political dynasties, and this explains their support for the Clintons. This is always backed by a handful of examples that includes the Somozas in Nicaragua, the Pastranas in Colombia, and the Perón and Kirchner families in Argentina. However, this alleged Latino affinity with political dynasties is nothing but another example in a long list of unsubstantiated myths involving anything south of the Río Grande.

It has been a centuries-old game in the United States to depict Latin America as a disorderly riotocracy where lazy drunk men and receptive women indulge their childlike impulses; a sort of Roger Rabbit’s Toontown to be entered at one’s peril and that stands in stark contrast with the order and reason that prevail in the north; a chaotic amalgam of banana republics ruled by populist ideologues or iron-fisted caudillos. These stereotypes can be more or less fair, but the assertion that Latinos are favorably predisposed towards political families does not stand scrutiny. Comparatively speaking, dynasties in Latin America are a rare exception, rather than the norm. In fact, Latin America’s tumultuous history has worked against political dynasties. That Juán Perón or Néstor Kirchner were followed by their wives surely has little to do with the political culture of a Latino community that has few and thin ties to Argentina.

Latin America is not like the Middle East, where monarchies still prevail. Ruhollah Khomeini, after bringing down one of the world’s most famous dynasties, the Pahlavis, used to speak derisively of Saudi Arabia for being founded by, ruled by, and named after one single family. It is also clearly different from South Asia, where the Gandhis and the Bhuttos are only better known than a string of political families in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia or Malaysia. If there is one country in the American continent that has proved, again and again, that it is perfectly comfortable, if not enthusiastic, with dynasties, that is the United States. Everyone is familiar with the Clintons, the Bushes, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, the Daleys, the Bakers, the Cuomos, the Doles, the Gores, the Tafts, the Rockefellers, the Jacksons, the Fords, the Romneys, and other dynasties in the making, such as the Bidens and the Carters. That is in the last century alone, leaving out the time of John and John Quincy Adams, when a cluster of political families controlled politics and wealth. According to Stephen Hess, there have been 700 families with two or more members of Congress. Currently, ten percent of Congress has a close relative who has also served in the House or Senate. The Frelinghuysens of New Jersey, for example, have put four senators and two representatives in Congress. Name recognition surely counts for something.

Latinos are not bringing their love for dynasties across the border. If anything, their desire to assimilate to the new environment is overriding their natural impulse to be wary of families that hold on to power for too long.

An ancient people insulted

In the midst of all that has occured and caught notice in the last week or so we have overlooked yet another shot across the bow in a centuries-old struggle between ancient peoples with a twined history. As I recently noted in another space, I think that when considering what it is that makes a nation we would do well to also weigh an idea put forward by the humorously paranoiac author Thomas Pynchon in his last novel: "maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again."

fp

As Fidel Stands Down, Others Stand Up

Today, the world's attention turned to Cuba, where Fidel Castro retired and was succeeded by his younger -at seventy-six years of age- brother, Raúl. Castro's enemies have a good reason to rejoice. Or maybe not. After all, Fidel outlasted ten American presidents and the collapse of the regime's main ally, the Soviet Union; survived the longest economic embargo in history, several assassination plots, one invasion attempt, and thirteen days of a nuclear missile crisis; and he is willingly stepping down while making sure that power stays in the family and the ideological contours of his revolution are not blurred.

With time, it is likely that his heirs will toy with the free market in a gradual and centrally-planned manner, à la China or Vietnam. But I suspect that it will continue to be safer to criticize Cuba's appalling lack of political freedom than its economic under-performance. After noting that Cuba is outranked in the UN's Human Development Index by Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Costa Rica, the editors of The Economist wrote, characteristically: "Forget the cigars and the posters: Cubans have had a rotten deal from a miserable regime -and they know it." The statement is incomplete. In the Americas, Cuba is also outranked by the United States, Canada, Barbados, and the Bahamas. And yes, according to the same index, Cuba is better off than the remaining 26 countries in the Americas, including NAFTA's Mexico and Brazil; better off than two EU countries, Romania and Bulgaria; better off than all the other communist, single-party regimes, such as China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea, and than every non-EU offshoot of the Soviet Union, including Russia and Ukraine; better off, in sum, than 126 countries listed in this ranking.

On the same day but a different island, another Communist was elected president of his country. In Cyprus, Demetris Christophias made history by becoming the first Communist in the history of the European Union to reach the presidency in one of its states. Christophias is the Secretary-General of AKEL, a Marxist-Leninist party, and was labeled by his opponents as the Castro of the Mediterranean. He is, after all, Soviet-educated (Ph.D. in History at Moscow's Academy of Social Sciences), and maintains ties with the Kremlin. The party, AKEL (formerly KKK, or Communist Party of Cyprus), had never before fielded a candidate for presidential elections. No one in Europe seems, however, too worried. Demetris Christophias may do to the 'communist' label what Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done to the 'Islamist' label. If anything, some hope that Christophias will be successful in addressing one of the world's most intractable problems: the division of the island among Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots. Christophias' rejection of the UN's 2004 reunification plan was merely tactical, and his party is more inclined to a federal solution to the island's partition. It will be a hard sell and an improbable journey, but so is everything else.

What a surprise...

It is clearly noticeable that some contributors on this blog feel disappointed by what happened in Serbia today. I am honestly surprised by their reactions considering how deeply the Serbian society is divided on fundamental socio-political issues which date back long before Milosevic came to power. This partition on backward nationalists elements on one side and democratic oriented citizens on the other was further magnified during the last 20 years of political turbulence in the Balkans.

I believe such actions were actually secretly celebrated by those parties who recently lost elections in Serbia. Their argument is that aggression against Western companies and embassies will entail a sharp response from abroad which would further alienate the people in Serbia from the West. In addition, Kosovo’s crisis, evocation of the Kosovo's mythology, and calls for national unity are actually going to serve the purpose of diverting attention from more important domestic issues such as war crimes, economic issues, and origins of “dirty money” for a period to come.

On the other hand, there is an obvious responsibility of the West for the situation in Serbia. The ultimate questions that most of the Serbs would ask their counterparts in the West are: "How would you feel if 15% of your territory is forceably taken away from your country by breaking the international law (U.N. resolution 1244)? How would you feel if your country is bombed for three months because of the so-called humanitarian crisis? How would you feel if every nationality except yours has rights to self-determination?"

Additionally, the E.U., represented by the E.U. High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy Mr. Javier Solana, actually put pressure on the Democratic Party to accept Mr. Vojislav Kostunica as the prime minister of Serbia even though he got only 13% of votes on the last parliamentary elections held last year in Serbia. This move kept the common and secret police under the control of nationalists. Moreover, due to a strong U.S. pro-Albanian stand, the so-called talks between the Kosovo and the Serbian leaders were condemned even before they started. Not to mention the U.S. claim of Mr. Milosevic as a "factor of stability and the main peacekeeper in the Balkans" in the mid-1990's as well as the role of the former U.S. ambassador in Serbia, Mr. William Montgomery, in defaming the reputation of the former pro-liberal prime minister of Serbia Mr. Zoran Djindjic.

Finally, I would like to address to Americans who found themselves hurt by seeing the pictures of the U.S. embassy on fire. At the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador, said he was “outraged” by the attack on the Embassy and would be seeking a unanimous statement today from the 15-member Security Council condemning it. “The government of Serbia has the responsibility under international law to protect diplomatic facilities, particularly embassies.” Now, I would like to quote my friend’s response, a graduate student of the New School at New York, Mr. Rados Piletich to Mr. Khalilzad’s demand. “Responsibility under international law, huh? Like the kind of responsibility when we invaded Iraq without UN Security Council approval? Or maybe the kind of responsibility we took when we decided not to pay Nicaragua one penny of the $17 billion in reparations that the International Court of Justice ordered it to pay for arming, training, and supporting the Contras, and mining the coast off of Nicaragua to prevent international trade? Or, perhaps the same kind of responsibility exhibited by the country that bombed Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, leading to the deaths of scores of thousands of civilians in that country, and preparing the way for the genocidal Khmer Rouge?
Mirror, mirror, on the wall... eyes wide shut."

The Pitiable Serbs

Such an outrageous display of virulent nationalism as we have seen today makes me ashamed for every time I defended the Serbs going all the way back 1991. While I have been careful to balance my position on Kosovo’s independence over the past week, I can no longer hold my tongue. The Serbs who have attacked the US embassy in Belgrade are manifesting a form of nationalism which I can only describe as pitiable.

This once proud nation has fallen behind the curve of history. Such chest-thumping nationalism in the Europe of Regions smacks of medieval backwardness. Let the Kosovars and their lignite mines go. Serbia has other more precious resources to protect. Why preserve the Field of Kosovo? To remember the loss to the Turk? Again, such backward-looking nationalism not befitting the once and future great power of the Balkans.

Why do the Serbs blame America for their loss of Kosovo? Thousands of cascading decisions led the country to this point—no small number of which were made in Belgrade, Brussels, London, and Berlin. Burning the US embassy will do nothing to reverse that long trend line.

I take back my defense of Serbia as more ready to join the EU than Croatia. I take back my defense of Serbia as the victim of a neo-liberal war of attrition in the 1990s. I take back my defense of Serbia as a misunderstood and wronged nation. Those rioters have made it clear that we in the West have often understood Serbia and sometimes Serbia is simply wrong.

Happiness: Location, location, location

“It is time we admitted that there is more to life than money, and it is time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB, that is, general well-being.” These words came not from a hippie throwback or a leftist intellectual, but from David Cameron, leader of the Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition and of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party. Of all the things David Cameron has said in the last years, no one has met as much public approval as this one. Measuring and explaining the happiness of nations is not anymore just the subject of social science research and journalistic interest. It has entered the realm of policy. Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher that argued that the purpose of politics should be about bringing the most happiness to the greatest number of people, would be proud. The United States may be the only country -that I know of- with a constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness, but in Bhutan they take it seriously enough for the king to proclaim Gross National Happiness as the prism that should guide rulings and policy.

It may appear to some as epistemologically flawed, if not utterly bogus, but thousands of psychologists, sociologists, economists and political scientists are in the business of finding the happiness quotient of a given country, comparing it, and unbundling it in search of explanations and, possibly, policy prescriptions. The World Database of Happiness lists almost 8,000 names in its Directory of Happiness Investigators. Apart from a database of happiness research, there is a map of global happiness, competing surveys and indexes ranking the happiness of nations, and passionate debate over their findings.

Interestingly, most try to prove the old adage that money does not buy happiness. The World Values Survey made headlines when it established that the countries with the greatest percentage of people satisfied with their lives were Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, and El Salvador. Although counter-intuitive, this seemed to reinforce conventional wisdom, which long ago accepted that warmer countries are poorer but happier. Scandinavian countries top almost every ranking that matters, uniquely excelling at both creating wealth and distributing it, and finding the balance between efficiency and fairness that big-government advocates long for. But one also associates those societies with alcoholism, wife battery, weather-induced depression, and suicide. Tropical countries, despite poverty and malaria, are often thought of as happy places where people dance and mate on empty stomachs. Other studies point out that the happiness quotient of industrialized countries has not varied much since World War Two, despite a dramatic rise in income. Western nations do not get happier as they get richer. This has important policy implications. If better education, health care, and prosperity do not contribute to the overall level of well-being, why should governments even bother? Why should rich, sad countries help poor, happy countries?

The truth is that most surveys indicate that Swedes, Danes, Swiss, Norwegians, Austrians and Icelanders actually top the overwhelming majority of the happiness rankings. The United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, despite the bad reputation of its gastronomy and climate, do quite well too. In studies that measure SWB (subjective well-being), the effect of poverty and conflict is immediately apparent. Allowing for exceptions, the map of global happiness correlates very strongly with UN data on health and wealth. Whether one looks at happiness surveys or at the United Nations' Human Development Index -which combines GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, life expectancy at birth, and rates of literacy and enrollment in higher education- you will find almost the same countries at the top of the list, and the same countries at the bottom. Romania, Moldova, and other legendary sad places in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, are only rock bottom when poorer, African countries are left out of the picture. Italy is romanticized by tourists and movies as an ideal place, with ideal weather, food, and people, but Italians, appalled by economic under-performance and third-worldly levels of government corruption and instability, are reportedly very gloomy these days. Suicide is not just something that happens to Japanese or Scandinavians for whom material well-being is not enough. It happens, in much larger numbers, to poor cotton farmers in India unable to pay back loans used to buy pesticide.

The happiness debate is not immune to the geography versus culture dilemma. And one can quibble endlessly over how to define and measure well-being or satisfaction, or how to distinguish correlation from causation, but those Scandinavians, at sub-zero temperatures and taxation above fifty percent of income, are actually very happy people after all. I suspect good governance has something to do with it. It has to be either that or the alcohol.

Superdelegates: Waiting for the Un-Democratic Convention

A modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosing the health of American democracy would probably criticize the outsize influence of special interests and powerful lobbies. He might rant against an apathetic and uninformed public, and scorn the 80 million people of voting age that decided to stay at home in the last presidential election. He would probably write about the hundreds of millions of dollars in funds raised to buy 30-second television ads, and how money has become a better indicator of electoral success than a well-reasoned argument or a good debate. The media, the military-industrial complex, the electoral college, the Florida recount, the butterfly ballot, would all be included along with the usual suspects to be blamed for the bad shape of the world's first modern liberal democracy. And yet the now famous superdelegates, which will supposedly decide the Democratic primary this summer, could become the last straw for many, and the most embarrassing chapter for most.

Superdelegates, which account for one-fifth of the Democratic Party Convention, are members of Congress, governors, former presidents and vice presidents, party insiders, and members of the Democratic National Committee, including city council members and union leaders. These are not chosen by primary voters, nor are obligated to give their vote to the candidate preferred by a majority of the people. Thus, as it is often mentioned these days, one could envision a scenario where Barack Obama ends up winning twice as many state primaries and caucuses as its opponent, obtains more delegates and more votes, and still loses the nomination because party insiders prefer Hillary Clinton. Until now, very few knew those superdelegates even existed. As a matter of fact, most people that volunteered their time, donated their money, spent hours in a caucus somewhere, or simply went to the voting booth, believed they were participating in a beautiful exercise of democracy at its finest.

The party's primaries were a largely undemocratic affair for most of its history, and were dominated by big-city bosses and party machines. After the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, in passionate contest for primaries with Eugene McCarthy, the DNC gave the nomination to Hubert Humphrey, who supported the Vietnam war and had not won a single primary. As a reaction to the public outrage -the convention itself was mobbed by protesters who were tear-gassed-, the party revised the primary process to make it more democratic and ensure that the will of the people decided the nominee. However, after the consecutive nomination of mavericks like George McGovern or Jimmy Carter, the party introduced the superdelegates to control the fervor of activists and the momentum of insurgent campaigns and non-establishment candidates. Party insiders and elected officials, or so it was argued, would be better judges of a candidate's potential electoral success. They did not, however, get off to a good start. Superdelegates propelled the nomination of Walter Mondale, who lost 49 states to Reagan in the 1984 general election. Since then, people forgot about them. Each time, a clear front-runner emerged early in the race, and superdelegates simply crowned him en masse at the convention. Over the last years, the closest thing to a brokered convention took place in a fictional election, in the last season of the American television serial drama The West Wing.

It is not at all clear that Clinton would get a majority of superdelegates, or that Obama will reach the convention with a lead in states, delegates, and votes. It should also be noted that many Obama supporters welcomed the idea of a brokered convention when they thought Clinton would lead in votes and delegates. They knew the rules of the game. But most voters didn't, and many will feel understandably disillusioned, if not enraged. Watching so many of these party insiders relish at their role as king makers and boast about receiving calls from Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and the Obama campaign is unsettling enough. The political system of the United States allows for someone to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college and the presidency, and for thirteen state legislatures in the smallest states representing 4 percent of the population to block any amendment to the constitution, among other notoriously anti-democratic features. But you can chalk these up to the federal structure of the United States. The power of superdelegates in the Democratic party, however, has no other explanation than the desire to control and tame democracy. After getting so many people involved and excited, breaking records of political participation in each contest, the will of the majority should determine the nominee, whether this is Hillary or Barack. Otherwise, they should skip the balloons, the confetti, and all the happy talk about the power of democracy at work.

Obama's Foreign Policy Experience

After twenty wins in coast-to-coast state primaries and caucuses, record-breaking turnout in most contests, and a level of national enthusiasm that threatens to alter the political map of the United States, Barack Obama is still asked in interviews, almost without exception, how can a candidate with such "little foreign-policy experience" be viable or electable in a presidential race. Other candidates receive different treatment. That affirmation, for example, never made it to any question posed to the former front-runner for the Republican nomination, Rudolph Giuliani. Before the collapse of his campaign, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Rudy was favored by national-security conservatives, who imagined that only America's mayor could beat radical Islam worldwide. And yet Joe Biden, who called Giuliani "the most uninformed person on foreign policy now running for president" was correct, if only a bit unfair. He forgot Mike Huckabee, but then again, no one bothered to say anything at all, good or bad, about Mike Huckabee those days. Huckabee and Giuliani never got the "little foreign-policy experience" bit from interviewers or debate moderators. Obama has to deal with that assumption as a given.

Of course, he handily rejects that notion by reminding his audience that no one had more experience than Cheney or Rumsfeld, or that judgment can be more important than experience. Others point to the Kenyan or Indonesian chapters of his life story. And very few elected officials had the foresight and the courage to speak out against the invasion of Iraq, which would become the biggest strategic blunder of US foreign policy in the last decades. Less noticed is the fact that, before he began plugging his second best-selling book, before he was rumored as a presidential candidate and only C-Span junkies paid attention, Obama spent most of his time in the Senate talking about issues related to foreign policy, and doing so with the command and nuance that one associates with more seasoned legislators. Whether on the Senate's Committees on Foreign Relations, Homeland Security, or Veterans' Affairs, at Darfur rallies, or in conversations about the embargo on Cuba, Obama was at his best when he spoke about foreign policy.

The Clinton campaign accused Obama of being naive and inexperienced on foreign policy when he stated that the United States should strike against selected targets in the tribal areas of Pakistan, provided actionable intelligence and Musharraf's inability to take action himself. Yet Clinton did not protest when a CIA airstrike in Pakistan killed one of Al-Qaeda's top operatives earlier this month, or back in 2005 when a CIA drone took a similar action against another leader of the network, also within Pakistani territory. She did not protest when Ethiopia bombed the Islamists out of Mogadishu a year ago, with help from the United States, or when Turkey repeatedly violated Iraq's northern border to stamp out PKK targets in its Kurdish region. Last September, Israel bombed Syria, unprovoked, in another cross-border attack that did not draw Hillary Clinton's opposition or condemnation. Fortunately, some people have begun to catch up and turn the argument on its head. After another flawed attempt at justifying her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion, Wolf Blitzer, in a rare display of inspiration, asked Senator Clinton: "Are you telling us that you were too naive in believing that George Bush would do the right thing?" She laughed, nervously, and replied without countering: "Nice try, Wolf, nice try." Indeed.

Tunnel Vision in the Strait of Hormuz

Trying to persuade an audience in Nashville, Tennessee, that Saddam Hussein had already fooled the world once about his intentions regarding weapons of mass destruction, George W. Bush issued one of his most memorable malapropisms:

"Fool me once, shame... shame on... you (long, uncomfortable silence). Fool me... can't get fooled again!"

Maybe so, but the American public has shown a surprisingly high tolerance for being fooled repeatedly, as if it were impossible for the Bush Administration to cry wolf too many times. Even though the United States had just invaded Iraq on the false premise that its weapons of mass destruction were a threat to the region and the world, resulting in one of the worst foreign policy mistakes of this generation, the US government has spent the last three years building a case against neighboring Iran based on (you guessed correctly) its threatening nuclear weapons program. The American public and, most importantly, the chattering classes and the foreign policy "experts," believed them once again. The only real disagreement, given the damaged state of national hubris in the wake of the Iraq fiasco, was whether anything at all could be done about it.

Last December, the National Intelligence Estimate stated "with high confidence" that Iran had halted its efforts to develop a nuclear weapons' program back in 2003. Bush had been notified of this for some months, but nevertheless dialed up his anti-Iran rhetoric. Perhaps he put the report in the same to-read-later pile as the "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US" memo.

One month later, some Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz allegedly brought us to the brink of World War Three. Five Iranian patrol boats had approached three US Navy warships. In one of the radio transmissions, a threatening message was picked up: "We are coming at you. You will explode in a few minutes." The US ships said they were about to fire when the patrol boats retreated. Both the United States and Iran decided to broadcast their own version of the event, with the Iranian government saying that it had been a routine mission of reconnaissance and that there had not been any hostility. Asked yesterday which propaganda he believed most, Fareed Zakaria, one of the better-reputed foreign policy pundits, repeated his own past mistakes by acknowledging he believed the American version, but that the Iranians had a reason to be jumpy and aggressive. In an attempt to justify the decision to get ready to fire on the small speedboats, which typically are only crewed by 2-3 people and should pose no threat to US warships, mentions of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole abounded. Many sources within the Pentagon have now begun to retract, venturing that the hostile message was probably issued by a locally famous radio heckler known as the Filipino Monkey. The sound and tone of the voice sounds different than that of the Iranian officer, and lacks a Persian accent. According to the Navy Times, these kinds of things happen frequently, and especially in the Strait of Hormuz.

For Americans, this incident evoked memories of the USS Cole and the death of 17 American sailors. This attack was allegedly carried out by Al Qaeda -although a recent judicial ruling in the US makes the Sudanese government responsible- and took place in a Yemeni port. Iranians and others in the Muslim world, however, are likely to draw different comparisons and historical analogies. They will probably say -and they are right- that the Strait of Hormuz is within territorial waters of Iran and Oman, and that the US warships have been patrolling it for decades. They might remember that a year ago, a US nuclear submarine accidentally struck a huge Japanese oil tanker, risking disaster. They will surely point out, and this incident is almost never brought up in the US media, that in 1988 a US warship mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing all 290 passengers over Iranian territorial waters. The US government said that an inexperienced crew mistook the Airbus 300 for an F-14 Tomcat fighter, but I doubt anyone in Iran believes that. After all, only three months before that, the United States had sank two Iranian warships and six speedboats in what was called Operation Praying Mantis.

And it all happened in the Strait of Hormuz, involving US warships. Remember the USS Cole? How about remembering Gulf of Tonkin?

The Pastor's Dangerous Missive

First of all I want to apologize for the long gap since my last post. The holidays, of course, pose a difficult hurdle for bloggers of my ilk. But now I'm back.

I, unlike some of my friends, have been diligently reading the foreign policy statements which had been put forth by the presidential candidates in Foreign Affairs magazine. While I have been stultified by the banal writings of the Democratic candidates, I have been incensed by the small-mindedness and, in some cases, radicalism of the Republican candidates. Obviously, my agita has not been so acute as a prompt me to write something about. However, after getting back from Florida, I was welcomed by the most recent copy of Foreign Affairs. In it was an essay by Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and fellow son of Hope (along with former President Bill Clinton). Now I have to admit that Huckabee makes me laugh on occasion. Growing up in the South, his soft-spoken ways and his pastoral (literal and figuartive) approach to politics speak to me, despite all my cerebrally-informed attempts for them not to. However after reading just a few paragraphs of his essay, the veil has been ripped from eyes. Now, I never thought he knew anything about international politics, but I was surprised to see that Chuck Norris’ candidate knows nothing about politics. Let me say it again: Huckabee knows nothing about politics.

The reason for this unqualified judgment is as follows: he says, "The first rule of war is know your enemy, and most Americans do not know theirs." He of course is talking about Islamic terrorists, and I agree with him there. Here comes the rub. Just a few sentences before he states that "they really do want to kill every last one of us and destroy civilization as we know it." This nonsense -- this Fox News, Ann Coulter, Kristol family nonsense -- cannot stand.

Osama bin Laden understands politics perfectly well. His decision in the late 1990s to abandon local wars in corrupt Arab states (the near enemy) and begin a focus on the global war against the United States (the far enemy) and its proxy in the region, Israel, shows calculation and an understanding of the way the world works, especially the postmodern, mass-mediated world in which live. Osama bin Laden has no desire to kill every last American. Only the greenest recruit in the Al Qaeda organization has the notion that they can actually rewrite the rules of civilization. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama's mentor, has studied some of the greatest revolutionaries, including a Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and Mao. Al Qaeda's actions are carefully orchestrated to achieve tangible, concrete outcomes. If just killing Americans was their goal, there would be a lot more dead Americans.

Huckabee, while talking about Sayyid Qutb and other important aspects of violent global Islamism in his essay, fails to grasp even the most basic notions of political science. His embrace of this ideal of "Islamo-fascism" shows that his views of the outside world are just as paranoid and muddled as those of Rudolph Giuliani, who is currently under the tutelage of some of the most aggressive neo-conservatives. In Andrew Sullivan's recent article about Barack Obama in the Atlantic Monthly, discusses how having an American president whose father was born in Kenya, grandmother is a Muslim, and studied in a Muslim-majority school as a youth might actually deter some angry young Muslim youth somewhere in Pakistan at sometime in the future from sacrificing his entire life to kill Westerners. While I'm not sure I buy Sullivan's argument completely, a Baptist preacher from a Red state who sincerely believes that all Muslims want us dead will -- if elected to the presidency -- ensure that there will be at least a few more of those young men who choose the route of violence over pursuit of their own self-interest.