1. Campaign 2008: Huckabee breaks from Bush foreign policy.
Mike Huckabee surprised me writing in Foreign Affairs. In an essay he distanced himself from Bush’s “arrogant” “bunker mentality.” Rarely does a candidate break from his own party, but Huckabee’s hardly been orthodox. Still, his actions are welcome. Bringing foreign policy to the center of the GOP debate will make the next three weeks more interesting and relevant than endless gab on “illegals” and tax cuts and flip flops.
Romney and Huckabee sparred on the Sunday talk shows yesterday. Romney called on Huckabee to apologize for his Bush diss. Huckabee denied having anything to be sorry for.
2. Brits Hand Basra to Shiite Militias
Ah, more democracy. Today, the Brits are officially handing Basra back to the Iraqis, ending a four and a half year occupation. Basra Province is the southern tip of Iraq, home to the second largest oil fields on earth and Iraq’s main port. For all the Limeys “as Colonialists we know occupation better than you foolish Yanks” posturing, the Basra enterprise sure looks like a failure, a retreat, a loss, a spreading of anarchy not democracy:
As British forces finally handed over security in Basra province, Major General Jalil Khalaf, the new police commander, said the occupation had left him with a situation close to mayhem. “They left me militia, they left me gangsters, and they left me all the troubles in the world,” he said in an interview for Guardian Films and ITV.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/video/2007/dec/17/video
Even better, honor killings are as big in Basra as they are in Kurdistan (‘Topher “The Hitch” Hitchens—Sir Kurdish Solidarity/British Colonial Excellence—really needs to weigh in on both the Basra retreat and the honor killing spree.)
· Basra has become so lawless that in the last three months 45 women have been killed for being “immoral” because they were not fully covered or because they may have given birth outside wedlock;
3. UN Peacekeepers in Haiti Raping Teens
Once again the UN is embroiled in a rape scandal. Here’s the Miami Herald, whose Latin American coverage is our nation’s best:
Girls as young as 13 were having sex with U.N. peacekeepers for as little as $1. Five young Haitian women who followed soldiers back to Sri Lanka were forced into brothels or polygamous households. They have been rescued and brought home to warn others of the dangers of foreign liaisons.
http://www.miamiherald.com/top_stories/story/347519.html
4. What’s an agent?
That’s a question I found myself asking a few years ago, after someone said I needed one to find a book publisher. When a friend hooked me up with one, I soon learned that agents and editors shape book concepts as much as authors do. A few months later my agent sold the book I was coauthoring to editor Scott Moyers at Penguin Press. Moyers was both a fantastic editor and mellow bro: a big time comma-hater who liked Minor Threat and jam bands. He’s the guy who made Alan Greenspan and Al Gore’s books read like Raymond Carver’s. Recently, Moyers quit editing books to work as agent for Andrew Wylie.
Here’s a wonderful interview with Wylie. (Moyers makes an appearance towards the end as a globetrotting McSweeney’s courtier. Trust me, if there’s a guy in publishing who could help increase Dave Eggers’ Bono-of-Books rep it’s McMoyers.)
Speaking of Raymond Carver and editors, here’s a look at Carver’s relationship with his editor Gordon Lish:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/24/071224fa_fact
Carver, who died in 1988, was known as the ultimate minimalist—short stories written in short sentences, short on flourishes and plot. But now Carver’s wife says that style was not his but his editor’s.
5. Saturday: Africa Day in the NYT!!!_
Less people read the paper on Saturday than any other day. Which means it’s always a good day to run a cover story about the continent no one cares about–Africa.
In Saturday’s Times, razor sharp Jeff Gettlemen probes the Ethiopian Army’s use of forced conscription in the breakaway Ogaden province. Ethiopia’s one of America’s top allies in the War on Terror ($500 million in US aid yearly). But because it’s on the Horn of Africa (and no one cares about Africa), we hear little about the dictatorship in Addis Abbas.
Aside from invading Somalia last spring (on the US’ dime) and massing 100,000 troops on the Eritrean border, Ethiopia’s been fighting separatists in Ogaden, a vast province bordering Somalia.
Now the Ethiopian government is forcing professionals to take up arms, and forcing them to Ogaden’s frontlines without training. Here’s Gettleman:
The Ethiopian government, one of America’s top allies in Africa, is forcing untrained civilians — including doctors, teachers, office clerks and employees of development programs financed by the World Bank and United Nations — to fight rebels in the desolate Ogaden region, according to Western officials, refugees and Ethiopian administrators who recently defected to avoid being conscripted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/world/africa/15ethiopia.html
Darfur is Africa’s blue chip humanitarian crisis, universally condemned in the West, complete with a slogan, ribbon, and action figures like Mia Farrow. Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s Somalian occupation now looks to be just as dire as Darfur, at least according the UN. But Ogaden’s child nutrition rate is worse than both, says Save the Children.
Unlike Darfur, Somalia and Ogaden are humanitarian crisis directly tied to US support of a murderous regime. You could say America’s what China is to Darfur for the Ethiopian wars.
Of course, terrorism is the reason for our involvement on the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia hates Islamic terror, making them an American ally. Yet despotic regimes that kill civilians are the best mechanisms for creating terrorists. Like Bill Richardson said, American foreign policy should place human rights at the very top of its priorities. In most cases, terrorism is a reaction to a perceived human rights violation. Let’s give terrorists fewer reasons to blow themselves up, not more, ok?
TAGS: BOOKS, Boston, debate, GOP, Iraq, Islam, Shiite, Slam, united nations, Video, war
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