Crossposted from European Tribune.

Jyllands-Posten’s Flemming Rose — yes, the man who commissioned certain caricatures — has interviewed the influential neo-conman in his Washington home.

Suspected by some of having better-than-average connections at Mossad and widely admired for his ability to wield unofficial power, Perle says he would gladly depose Saddam Hussein again. He also claims that the neocons “lost every political battle in the Bush administration” and that the policies implemented in Iraq had nought to do with them. Above all he has harsh words for Europe.

I have confined myself to translating, and fisking, a few excerpts. Since this involves translating Perle’s remarks back to English, the exact wording of the citations should be treated with caution.

On Europe:

Certainly the US war machine remains unmatched. The impressive military-industrial complex is a major reason why 400 Americans earn significantly more than the 166 million citizens of the four countries on their President’s 2003 Africa tour combined. But the claim about development aid is not quite true, Dick. From an overview in Foreign Policy last year:

On the other hand, you may be right that the US is more picky about the receiving ends of the aid. A fifth of official US aid is direct transfers to another industrial country, which also happens to be the world’s fourth greatest military power and the only one to spend substantially more on arms per capita than the US.

And just so there is no misunderstanding:

Perle again:

There are 9,200 non-American (mostly European) troops in Afghanistan; the number will increase to 15,000. If these count for nothing, they should be told so. I am sure they would be happy to return to home.

On Iraq:

And how would that be? Here’s the beef:

Ah yes, we remember: “the George Washington of Iraq.” This alleged Iranian double agent is a personal friend of Perle, one whose role
John Dizard at Salon has summarized neatly:

Back to Perle:

But to which Iraqis exactly? The answer is presumably Chalabi, a larger-than-life fugitive from justice who a Jordanian court sentenced to 22 years in jail on 31 charges of financial crime — crime that cost Jordan 10 percent of its GDP.

Well Dick, isn’t it then a little rich to accuse others of wanting to “replace one criminal with another”?

As well, some just might consider it relevant that Chalabi polled slightly below Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion. “If Chalabi is the guy, there could be a civil war after Saddam’s overthrow,” one former CIA operative told The New Yorker’s Seymor Hersh.

In fairness to Perle, there is civil war there now anyway.

On America:

Asked if he fears that the US could be tempted to withdraw from the world, Perle replies:

If that be so, Dick, you have a lot to answer for.

So this is, like, not a bargain maybe:

Some quick calculations show that, for a total cost $650 bn, the Americans could have had nearly 390,000,000 years worth of children’s health insurance, or more than 11,500,000 manyears of public school teaching. Or they could have fully funded global anti-hunger efforts for 25 years.

No wonder the brains behind this project has been made President of the World Bank.

However, according to a former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of that institution, even the new official estimates are far too modest:

The Iraqis are grateful, though! Aren’t they?

OK, but surely, the $1-2 trillion investment has made inroads in the War on Terror? No?

But hey, when 4.5 percent of homo sapiens are in need of consuming 25 percent of the world’s petroleum, it stands to reason that decisive action may be called for anyway. John B. Judis in The New Republic:

In other news:

Do these dots perchance add up to something?

The New York Times:

So what is it these people want?

Both sides have shown through their actions that they do not desire peace at the price exacted: a federal Sri Lanka. Nor does either side want relapse into full-scale civil war. Unless they are idiots, they must have learned that it is unwinnable as well as unbearable. It is simply not an option.

Each must also know that the other is not all of a sudden going to fold. This is not a game of chicken.

That leaves only one possibility. What either side prefers is precisely this teetering on the edge of the abyss in an apparent show of strength.

Too bad gravity is getting the last laugh.

Begged by a war-weary Sri Lanka government to facilitate peace, Norway brokered the 2002 cease-fire that gave respite from a quarter century of carnage. Ever since, despite no end of insults and abuse designed to eject it, it has striven to get the psychotic Tamil Tigers and the rigid hardliners in charge of Colombo to meet and work out a compromise.

Not a chance. In fact, if not for pressure by the international community, the peace process would have ended long ago.

As with the Oslo Accords for the Middle East, neither side was interested in preparing its population for compromise. Instead, the prevailing faction on each side saw the process as a means of wringing concessions from the other side without giving up anything of substance in return.

There is little to do now but to leave this mad little island to war, until it tires of it once again. Though some of them will doubtless be trying, the Sri Lankans — unlike Iraqis — will have noone to blame but themselves.

The representative of 1.2 billion Chinese found himself manhandled on the White House lawn on Thursday by the so-called leader of the free world.

But that — and screaming protesters — were not the worst indignities Mr. Hu had to endure: in another protocol gaffe, China’s national anthem was announced as the anthem of “the Republic of China.”

This brings to mind a Norwegian official visit to China sometime around 1980, during which the PM, at the formal banquet, called a toast to the Republic of China. And so it was that a dining hall of Communist cadres were forced to drink to independent Taiwan.

I fondly think of that as an unintended high spot of Norwegian diplomacy.

From the blog of one of Britain’s better print journalists, Andrew Brown.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

If you don’t want your contemporary to get ahead, give him a loan. ~ Chadian proverb

Don’t let a dog guard the ribs. ~ Chadian proverb

A central African country twice the size of France, its former colonial power, Chad is almost the epitome of obscurity. Until last week, its main claim to fame was having some 200,000 Darfur refugees on its soil.

But now there are other uninvited guests from Darfur to worry about. Reeling from last week’s penetration of the capital by allegedly Sudan-backed rebels, President Ibriss Déby is busy stocking up on weapons. The delivery is financed by revenue from the oil which since 2003 has been flowing in a $4,2 billion, 1070 km pipeline linking Chad’s southern oilfields to terminals in Cameroon, thus also marrying the world’s largest multinational oil company, Exxon-Mobile, to the world’s most corrupt regime. The World Bank, to its regret, was the matchmaker. It is a sordid story.

President Déby blames the World Bank for not being able to buy more hardware, the BBC reports:

The Bank, led by Paul Wolfowitz, also halted $124 million in loans. And rightly so. For what it should in fact be blamed for is to have enabled the pipeline project in the first place by financing it with credit guarantees and $200 million. In so doing it ignored the pre-lending assessment of its own commission: that the project would breed poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, and conflict.

The latter is familiar to Chad. Civil strife marked the three decades from independence to 1990, when Déby marched in from Sudan to oust the dictator Hissene Habré. Having since won two flawed elections and quelled one insurgency, he is to run again on May 3 after pushing through constitutional changes abolishing the two-term limit. His record so far?

Eighty percent of a population the size of Sweden’s are illiterate. The same proportion get by on less than $1 a day. Or they do not: life expectancy is below 45 years and one in five dies before the age of five.

It’s not just the President’s fault, of course. Like many of the world’s most impoverished countries, Chad is equatorial as well as land-locked; as if that were not enough, it is cursed with oil. By January the greasy stuff had earned Chad $399 million in gross direct revenues. It had also poisoned the ground water, ruined the hunting fields of pygmies, and destroyed agriculture in the Doba Basin — one of the desert country’s few fertile areas, now morphing into a miniature Niger Delta. In addition, it has made the capital N’Djamena — among the sorriest in Africa — a more alluring prize for the rebels determined to seize it one of these days.

The statistics are telling. As Chad moved from an economy based only on cotton and cattle (2002 exports: $197 million) into the club of petroleum exporters, it moved down eight slots on the Human Development Index, to #173 out of 177. In 2004, Chad’s GDP grew by 40 percent. This was the last year when the retired got their pensions and a year when the graft of taxes and customs skyrocketed, sending Chad to its current position at the bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

In other words, the project came off much as predicted, including by the World Bank’s commission and by independent experts. Of the latter, Wolfowitz’ predecessor James Wolfensohn (what’s up with these names?) remarked upon making his decision: “I think it’s important that we have a proper balance between the Berkeley mafia and the Chadians, and I for my part, am more interested in the Chadians.”

That interest must have been slightly selective. Otherwise, he would have discovered a lot of Chadians — those organized in human rights- and other NGOs — who ever since the mid-90s had pleaded for halting the project until Chad’s government became more accountable. The Chadians to whom he listened were effectively Déby and his shills, who vowed that the oil would serve the “interests of peace in Chad” and benefit the poor.

Whether it has done so is a matter of how ‘peace’ and ‘the poor’ are defined. For instance, are Exxon-Mobile, Petronas, and ChevronTexaco among the poor? If so, the pipeline has stricken a mighty blow for the downtrodden, with a consortium of the aforementioned getting nearly 80 percent of the gross total revenue. Counting taxes and royalties it amounts to a fifty-fifty split, which may sound innocuous but is, in fact, a rip-off of a newbie petrostate by wily mega-corporations. It would be a cold day in Hell when, say, Iran or Norway agreed to such a deal.

Meanwhile, in what was hailed as a model for development in Africa, the World Bank ensured that 80 percent of Chad’s revenues be earmarked for education, health, infrastructure, rural development, and water management. Ten percent would be deposited in a future generations fund. The law also mandated that royalties go directly into an offshore account and an independent oversight committee — the Collège de Contrôle et de Surveillance des Ressources Pétrolières, or the Collège for short — monitor all spending. This is the arrangement which Chad formally scrapped in December 2005, drawing the World Bank’s ire.

In reality, it was undermined long ago. This became clear in May 2004, when Thérèse Mékombé, vice-president of the Collège, blew the whistle at an anti-corruption conference in London. Mékombé, a women’s rights campaigner, is one of the civil society representatives who in 1999 begged Wolfensohn for a two-year moratorium on the project. She now reported that the Collège was understaffed, underfunded, and kept in the dark both by the government and the consortium.

Discrepancies appared even before first oil, with $7,4 million in advance royalties embezzled and $4,5 million entrusted the President’s son to buy attack helicopters from Taiwan. True, a handsome $48 million has since been allocated to building roads, but the railroadless country has few cars. The contractor is led by Déby’s brother.

Investment in the energy sector might have been more useful. There is no national electricity grid; less than 2 percent of Chadians have access to electricity. The sole power supply is oil trucked in from Nigeria and, ironically, Cameroon. The fuel cost represents 90 percent of one of the highest electricity tariffs in the world. In a bid to dispense with the paradoxical import, a Sudanese company, Concorp International, was contracted to extend a 350 km pipeline from a small northern oilfield to N’djamena, the site of the only state power plant. Sadly, the pipeline turned out to be rubbish, to the dismay of the World Bank, which had paid for a brand new generator.

But Déby, if he survives, will get more cash to burn on bungled projects. Encouraged by soaring prices, ExxonMobile is developing five new fields which are safely outside any World Bank management system. A Chad with an oil sector-dominated economy would be a rentier state; one whose finances do not primarily rely on taxes. In such a state the government has less incentive to care about pesky annoyances like the population, unless it happens to be constrained by well-functioning democracy.

Chad, on its part, combines everything that is wrong with African statehood. It has a central government without monopoly on violence within its borders. The territory was demarcated by colonial powers with supreme indifference to socio-ethnic coherence, and harbors more than 200 ethnic groups plus a three-way religious split between Muslims, Christians and animists. Weak on democratic institutions, the state is strong on repression, nepotism, personalism, and corruption. Thus it is also plagued by endemic instability, occasionally spiking in open rebellion by the ruler’s disaffected henchmen. These tend to operate from abroad, exploiting the porous borders. “Power comes from the east,” they say in Chad.

If Chad is not atypical for sub-Sahara, it does not bode well that the latter is becoming a mainstay of world energy production. It now provides 12 percent of global oil and 18 percent of US oil imports. The US National Security Council estimates that the latter share will reach 25 percent by 2015, surpassing that of the notorious Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, China is plying the waters with increasing fervor.

Let’s look at how this has turned out so far. Nigeria, Africa’s major oil producer, has earned around $400 billion from oil since 1970. It was revealed last year that past rulers have misused or stolen nearly all of this, over $392 billion. An ongoing US investigation shows that even in Equatorial Guinea, where oil exploitation began just a decade ago, President Obiang — in power since 1979, when he toppled his uncle — has $700m stacked away in an overseas account. (In January he resorted to piracy against a UN ship to supplement his meager income.) Also in the trade is the Republic of Congo, the world’s most indebted country. Last year, on a stay in New York to give a 15-minute speech in the UN and be entertained by a US oil corporation, President Sassou-Nguesso and his entourage spent a total of $295,000 at the Palace Hotel. Most of it was settled in $100 bills.

Thanks to everyone involved, and best of luck to Chad.

Everyone should read the Washington Post piece about the host of My Left Wing, the remarkable Maryscott O’Connor. Entitled “The Left, Online and Outraged,” it appears on the front page today.

The writer, David Finkel, told Maryscott he had never been to a blog before, which is telling about the disconnectedness of Beltway reporters. Anyway, he does a good job conveying her famous zeal as a progressive activist.

He also gives the impression that what goes on at MLW and likeminded blogs is mostly expletive-filled railing against Bush, which is less accurate, though the righteous wrath is certainly part of it. Finkel writes:

They do indeed. And still, for endless white-glowing rage sans analysis or reasoned discussion, the websites to try remain Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, and their hateful ilk. Why the wingnuts of those parts are so grumpy is mysterious given that their heroes control all branches of the US government. Perhaps they are simply mad at reality itself, which stubbornly resists the effort, as a senior Bush adviser bragged, to “create new realities” without “judicious study” of the discernible one.

But I digress. If you haven’t yet, go read about Maryscott. She is an inspiring example of what civil society is all about, as well as a funny, fair-minded, and all-around likeable person.

Update: The more I reflect on this article, the more I feel it was a hatchet job, perhaps even payback from the WaPo to leftist blogs for exposing its wingnut blogger as a plagiarist. The horrid photo chosen is a give-away.

For those of us who know and love her, Maryscott shines through in this piece. For the garden-variety reader, maybe not so much. The naked fury is at center stage, and to many it may be disturbing, even pathological. This isn’t Maryscott’s fault, of course. And if anything, it illustrates why liberal blogs are needed in the USA.

The “liberal media” is the evanescent daydream of unicorns.

on Free Republic:

Crossposted from European Tribune.

From the Gulf Times:

When you think about it, this is nonsense. There may be pragmatic reasons to fund the Hamas government, but declining to do so over its vow to annihilate Israel is not hypocrisy by itself. To insist on democracy does not obligate anyone to fund whatever government is elected, irrespective of policy. In other words, it’s a coherent position that being elected is necessary but not sufficient to merit support, because respecting international law is necessary too.

To see that the Arab League has no case, it’s enough to recall its objection to US funding of democratic Israel.

Which leads us to the real sense of double standards here. What is hypocritical is not to hold the Hamas government to certain standards. It is to give Israel a free pass on same.

I can only say this:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. ~ H. L. Mencken

A remarkable feat of what Jon Elster calls ’sour grapes’ can be observed these days among US neo-Jacobins, and much of it in the once-respected Washington Post. The other week, neocon shill Charles Krauthammer extolled the goal of “getting the Iraqis to fight the civil war themselves.” Now Caleb Carr, the military historian and juvenile blowhard who as late as July 2005 fulminated in The Wall Street Journal about how the mere thought of leaving Iraq engenders terrorism, is suddenly all for it: “Let Them Have Their Civil War,” he demands in the WaPo. His argument is that the Americans had their go in the 1860s, and so should not begrudge the Iraqis the right to an ennobling carnage of their own.

I think this gives a whole new dimension to the concept of being ‘pro-war’.

Meanwhile, more recent history is also repeating itself, though whether as tragedy or farce I cannot quite decide.

The article below ran in a noted European newspaper a week ago. Can you guess which one?

They had no idea what they were talking about. Born and raised in Habsburg Central Europe, they were thinking just like their surroundings. And they were thinking in imperialist terms.
    The natives of Palestine would embrace them, Herzl believed. Jewish supremacy was bound to be preferable to Ottoman ditto.

Two world wars hence a number of things are up for debate, but hardly that the origins of Israel lie in a European understanding of race, religion and language as the foundation of the state. One either belonged to the dominant people, enjoying the privileges of state, or else one belonged to a minority and had to make do as best one could.
    Prior to World War I, the Hungarians ruled the Croats, Slovakians, and Romanians with an iron fist. Then followed the Greater Romanian Kingdom, which treated its Hungarians and Gypsies as third rate citizens. The Czechs would despise the Slovakians, the Serbs would oppress Croats and Albanians, the Greeks would terrorize their Macedonians and Turks. The madness culminated in the German genocide against the Jews.
     That Israel is a democracy is demonstrated by the recent parliamentary election, but Israel has a fundamental problem: the emergence of the Jewish state in the form of a Habsburg nationalist project in the Middle East, long after such projects were discredited in Europe.
    Not for nothing does the great contemporary British-American historian Tony Judt write that “the very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”

The debate will go on for a long time about what can be derived from the Israeli election and from that in the Palestinian territories, which Hamas won.
    Hamas’ involvement in terrorism and demands that Israel be wiped off the map are not the best starting point for detente.
    But what are the realities?
    The Hamas are laying low, knowing full well that they must continue to do so if they are to keep receiving financial aid from the West. Were they to give up terrorism, it would not be the first such change of direction in Middle Eastern history. The Israeli state was born in blood. One of its later heads of government, Menachem Begin, led the infamous Irgun Gang in 1948.
    Does Israel live up to its obligations? With its illegal settlements, Israel has done its part to sabotage the peace plan of President George W. Bush. Was the plan at all serious? That is open to doubt. As so much in today’s US Middle Eastern policy, it was rather a mixture of dreams and nightmares.
    Israel insists on a non-existent right to politically motivated killings. One absolves oneself of any responsibility for four million Palestinian refugees and displaced people who are entitled to return to their homes and property.
    For years, all that used to be in terms of Palestinian infrastructure — including the security apparatus, government buildings, olive fields, roads, and residential blocks — have been destroyed. Easily perishable export goods are routinely blockaded; customs and other fees due the Palestinian Authorities in Ramallah are not being paid. Whatever seeds of prosperity there were 15–20 years ago have been transformed into abject poverty. The Palestinians are stuck in their bantustans, powerless and desperate, hemmed in by barbed wire, minefields, roadblocks, passport requirements, and Jewish settlements. So far the latter encompass a quarter million colonists, many of them heavily armed. It is a lack of respect for international law and agreements that, one might say, also has a background in traditional European thinking.
    Radical rightwing politicians like Avigdor Lieberman declare their willingness to deport tens of thousands of Israeli citizens. Why? Because they are Arabs, not Jews. Lieberman is an immigrant from Moldova. To hear him speak is like hearing the Iron Guard on the march. There are many like him.

If the elections in Israel and the Palestinian territories are to have a common meaning, it must be that the time is ripe to abandon the old European ways.
    The initiative has to come from Israel, the military great power of the region. It ought to be generous: the policy that was implemented — alas, unilaterally — in Gaza should be followed up with an equally consistent withdrawal from all other illegally occupied areas. That means the Syrian Golan Heights; that means the West Bank; that means the Arab East Jerusalem. The parties may agree on modifications, but in general Israel must return to the borders from before the war of 1967. Furthermore, a genuine Palestinian state with its own airspace, sea territory, and security forces should be established — a serious country that inspires confidence in its citizens and that can be held responsible by the international community.
    To persist in building on a way of thinking that characterized Europe a hundred years ago is to invite a repetition in the Middle East of the European tragedy in the 20th century.

So where did the article run? Answer: the author is a staff writer at that most dreadful reactionary rag and purveyor of virulent ethnic nationalism, that foul anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda outlet: Jyllands-Posten.

News from Sri Lanka:

I don’t usually cover the Sri Lanka conflict on this blog. There are times, though, when the sheer inventiveness of the lies and duplicity in Lankan politics just leaves me awestruck. The Bush administration, the Khartoum regime, both sides in the I/P conflict — they could all take lessons from many of the operators on that troubled island.

From a new excellent article by Eric Reeves:

There is a sense in which the Rwanda method would be less cruel.

US House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi vows that the gloves are off.

So the Democrats have been handling the Republicans with gloves trough more than five years of the power-mad, corrupt, and all-around odious Bush regime?

Good to have that confirmed.

The 56 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) have commenced their campaign to limit freedom of expression through a UN convention on respect for religion, Jyllands-Posten reports from the ongoing UNESCO Executive Board meeting in Paris. A “well-placed source” is quoted thus: “They are trying to restrain the way freedom of expression is implemented in our part of the world. They want to force us to punish people who use freedom of expression in ways that can offend religious feelings and symbols in their part of the world.”

Despite resistance from the EU countries, the OIC does not budge in the initial negotiations. It is expected to gain a majority for instructing UNESCO to draft such a convention if the matter is put to vote, as many African and Latin-American countries will vote in favor. Fortunately the convention has no practical meaning if the Western countries reject it.

Meanwhile, in Egypt according to al-Ahram:

In related news, Aftenposten reports that Arab journalists visiting colleagues in Norway this week said they have to be extremely careful about expressing critical attitudes towards religion. Voicing doubt or unbelief carries significant risk of abuse or violent death: “Several journalists called this an essential problematic, but symptomatically refrained from elaboration,” the newspaper states. It continues:

Astronomers have discovered a giant cloud of alcohol, spanning about 288 billion miles, in the W3(OH) area of the galaxy.

— It’s incumbent upon us to liberate our brothers in W3(OH) from fascism, says a well-known British writer in a comment.

More news from the cultural center of the Arab region: the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheykh Ali Gomaa, has issued a fatwa condemning sculptors and their work as shirk (idolatry; the most serious offense against Islam). The extremely reactionary edict denounces the use of statues for decoration as haram (forbidden). While it does not mention statues in museums or parks explicitly, the implication is that these too are in violation of shari’a.

Based at the ancient mosque-cum-university al-Azhar, Gomaa is widely seen as a puppet for Mubarak’s regime. Like the cartoon outrage, this might thus be an attempt by the establishment to bolster its religious credentials. Anyhow, Sheykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular al-Jazeera “televangelist” who was key to stirring up said outrage, supports the edict.

Interestingly though, the Muslim Brotherhood — the Islamist opposition that dominates Egypt’s civil society and is well represented in Parliament through independents — takes a different tack: “The people are more concerned with corruption. What they would like to see is a fatwa banning the presence of the same people at the helm of the country for 25 years and not against statues,” a spokesman tells al-Jazeera. That doesn’t mean the Brothers necessarily reject the edict as a matter of principle (they probably disagree on that) but it proves once again that they know what most irks the masses about the status quo.

It will be an interesting time ahead when the 77-year old Mubarak strains to transfer power to some much weaker heir — most likely his not too bright son Gamal — as the Brothers prepare to finally grab the reins. Who knows, perhaps they will grant him a statue?

It’s a story that is dead but won’t lie down. Egyptian Sandmonkey reports that the Syndicate of Egyptian Cartoonists now strikes back “as a response to those who fell under the thrall of racism, forgery and crime.”

The somewhat tardy riposte ran as a spread in Al Fagr — the newspaper which, as Sandmonkey revealed back in February, was the first outside Denmark to republish the doodles from Hell. Unsurprisingly, several of the counter-cartoons trot out the good ol’ Evil Joos:

Well, what to say? Classy.

Arthur Koestler’s neologism ‘mimophant’ clearly applies to the folks behind this: they combine the robustness of a mimosa with the delicate tact of an elephant. But in the same breath to cry up about racism is, I’m afraid, outright pathological.

One more thing, to both the hapless Danish draughtsmen (still with police protection, sadly) and these Egyptians: it is possible to be hard-hitting, elegant and witty all at once. Actually many cartoonists manage to, including my award-winning compatriot Finn Graff at Dagbladet. Here, for instance, is Graff on mandatory religious education in kindergartens:

On the mindset of Ayatollah Khomeini:

On neo-colonialism:

Just saying.

In a Zimbabwe refusing to seek food aid, Harare’s town clerk comments on the 20 or so corpses of newborn found each week in the city sewer:

I suppose one could put it that way.