The Cherry Orchard

You may have seen or heard about the controversial Bill Clinton interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News in which the former President scolded the conservative journalist for suggesting that Clinton did not do enough to combat Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda during his eight-year presidency.

The video is 10:01 minutes long but worth it (it gets real good around 5:47). Once you’ve watched this video, check out Keith Olbermann’s brave words about this altercation. Well said, Keith.

I’d like to add another perspective to the discussion of Bill Clinton’s legacy against terrorism. I haven’t heard others mention this recently, but it’s a fact that Clinton’s record as a peacemaker in the Middle East was second only to Jimmy Carter’s.

When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook the hand of Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat in 1993, that was the inspired work of Bill Clinton and his team, including Secretary of State Warren Christopher and U. S. Envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, whose thick history book The Missing Peace provides an enlightening look at the hard, hard work it takes to end wars.

Do you remember the 1993 Rabin/Arafat handshake? All Americans felt proud at that moment, because our country had helped to bring about a change towards greater global understanding and justice. How far we’ve come since then!

Peace had been a growing trend (though a rocky road) in the Middle East during the years leading up to September 11 2001. The attacks on that day were a strike against the momentum towards peace. Those who loved war found eager partners in the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration, and the rest is history.

I’ve earnestly been trying to keep up with the United Nations General Assembly debates, checking in on day two, day three and day four so as to report on the quality and integrity of each speech by each national representative.  This was the first time I’ve tried to pay anywhere near this much attention to UN’s annual autumn bash, and four days in I am already over my head.  Discouraged by technical problems at the UN.org website and frustrating lapses in coverage (such as the failure to provide an English translation of Venezuelan President Huge Chavez’s speech, which made the biggest headlines of the event so far when he called George W. Bush “the devil”), I’m now aiming for coverage that will be more impressionistic than complete, and I’ll try to dig in harder next year (assuming the planet and the institution known as the United Nations are both intact by next year, and I hope both will be).

As I said above, Chavez stole the headlines.  I don’t think George W. Bush is quite the devil, but I’d probably rather spend a day at the beach with Chavez than with George Bush, and I am amused to learn that the Venezuelan President and I share a high regard for Noam Chomsky who, I agree, everybody should read.

 In contrast to Chavez, here are the surprising words of Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq, who seems to like George Bush more than either I or Hugo Chavez do:

“We here renew our gratitiude for these forces that took part in liberating our country from the worst dictatorship known in history.  We specifically thank George W. Bush for his leadership of the campaign to liberate Iraq from tyranny and opening the doors for a new, democratic, pluralistic and federal Iraq that is at peace with itself and the world.”

Maybe this goes to show that theoretical issues of war and aggression look rather different when you are inside the nation fighting the war then when you’re sitting in Venezuela reading Noam Chomsky or Queens, New York posting to a blog. However one spins it all, it’s clear that a few causes get all the mic time at this debate: Israel and Palestine are number one, America and Iraq a distant second, Darfur virtually nowhere at all.

But what are we to think when despicable royals like Prince Faisal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia say all the right things about the importance of compromise settlements between Israel and Palestine, while Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel fails to rise to the occasion at all?  I’d hoped Israel’s plucky young representative would throw a curve-ball or otherwise try to inject some sand into the vaseline of international hypocrisy on display here, but she instead delivers a cool-toned speech including some prayers in Hebrew and an invocation of Ariel Sharon as “a great leader” – something even a person who cares deeply about the fate of Israel (such as myself) cannot agree with.

Leave it to Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine to deliver the best speech I’ve read so far, in which he speaks passionately for a fair peace and wistfully recalls the still-surprising and, of course, infinitely difficult 1993 compromise agreement between Yasser Arafat of Palestine and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel.  We need more speeches like this one, and we need more moderate world leaders like Mahmoud Abbas.

The debate returns on Monday with speeches by representatives of several straggler nations that didn’t make the cut for the kickoff sessions, including Laos, Nepal, Vietnam, Gabon, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Gambia, and Uruguay.

I planned to review the second day of debate at the United Nations General Assembly this morning. Unfortunately, the UN.org website is still a technical mess, and I can’t get to the texts of most of the speeches. There is no excuse for this, and the volume of web traffic to UN.org can’t possibly justify the poor performance. If YouTube.com can serve millions of LonelyGirl15 webviews to the world with barely a glitch, certainly the United Nations web servers should be able to deliver the text of a few dozen speeches each day without crashing to their knees.

But my review of day two will have to wait, even as day three commences with speeches by Boris Tadic of Serbia, Uribe Velez of Colombia, Emile Lahoud of Lebanon, Emilio Guebuza of Mozambique, Branko Crvenkovski of Macedonia, Stephen Harper of Canada, Jose Socrates of Portugal, Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania, Miyegombo Enkhbold of Mongolia, Solomon Berewa of Sierra Leone, Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea (who is often mentioned as a possible successor to outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan), Sergey Lavrov of Russia, Alexander Downer of Australia, Ursula Plassnik of Austria, Miguel Angel Moratinos Cuyabe of Spain, Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt, Aichatou Mindaoudou of Niger and Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine (who gets, like Israel yesterday, the terrible closer spot at the end of another long, long day of speeches).

I wish I could comment on Hugo Chavez’s speech, which made big news when the Venezuelan leader suggested that George W. Bush was the devil and that the UN’s podium still smelled like sulfur after his appearance the day before. But I haven’t been able to read the full text of his speech, so instead I’d like to follow up on Tuesday’s speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a dynamic and wily speaker who is leaving many moderate and reasonable people stunned and speechless with his inflammatory remarks about Jewish history and the Holocaust.

I hate being stunned and speechless, personally, but my natural emotional reaction to Ahmadinejad’s words leaves me grasping for words, and I’m not sure where to even begin refuting his points. Well, let’s leave some other avenues aside and start right here:

Mr. Ahmadinejad, you have every right to re-examine the myths of history, and you are certainly correct that the European genocide of the Jews that took place during World War II has been overly mythologized. No part of human history can be considered taboo; every stone must be turned over, and every “certainty” is fair game for re-examination. Nobody should stand against the honest pursuit of historical fact, even when one fears (as in this case) that political motivations are underlying the pursuit.

BUT, Mr. Ahmadinejad, you go too far when you suggest that the history of the Jewish holocaust stands as the justification for the current existence of the nation of Israel. As I’ve said here before and I will certainly say again: Israel’s right to exist is based only on the fact that there are human beings living there now. They were born there, they are citizens of no other country, and this is the only home they have.

A new study of the history of the Holocaust may turn up some surprising facts and conclusions (though it won’t find that the genocide was a fraud). But even if it turns out that all of World War II was staged with actors and filmed in a studio in Burbank, the fact remains that millions of Jews have been born in the nation of Israel, and that “the Zionist entity” is their home.

It’s about living human beings, Mr. Ahmadinejad. There are living human beings in Israel and living human beings in Palestine. History happened yesterday. What do you have to offer us for tomorrow?

The fact that the leaders of almost every nation on Earth meet each September for an intensive general “debate” sounds like a great thing, at least in theory. Maybe the opening session of the 61st United Nations General Assembly can work some tough problems out? It’s less encouraging to realize that the “debate” consists of no more than a series of self-contained speeches, with no rebuttal or cross-examination.

It’s even less encouraging to learn that participating world leaders have a tradition of only sitting to listen to those speeches that they expect to agree with. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not there in the morning of the first day to listen to George W. Bush, and George W. Bush was not there in the evening of the first day to listen to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. So much for debate. Let’s see what our philosopher kings had to say on the first day.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan opened with a stern but hopeful opening statement. Annan’s ten year term as the UN lead ends this December, so this is the Ghanaian diplomat’s last General Assembly. Annan can’t possibly feel satisfied with the state of the world in 2006, and while his long hard work has not yielded peaceful results, it’s fair to say that this is through no lack of trying.

I’ve read through most of the speeches, most of them moderate and reasonable in tone. Luiz da Silva of Brazil, King Hussein of Jordan, Jacques Chirac of France and General Musharraf of Pakistan seemed intent on addressing and solving problems.  Not one of these leaders has clean hands, yet one can almost be lulled into a sense of hope by reading their pleas for compromise and mutual dialogue.

But their speeches were overshadowed by the shrill voices of two world leaders who don’t like compromise and don’t favor dialogue, both of whom used the UN General Assembly to present their stark, militaristic views of the world’s problems.  It is fascinating to read the words of George Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad next to each other and ponder how much these “enemies” have in common.  They are both slick politicians whose reputations thrive in times of global hostility, and they are clearly both motivated to keep the stakes high.  George Bush uses the word “extremist” or “extremism” 16 times, neatly ignoring the fact that many smart people around the world (and in the USA) consider George Bush a dangerous extremist.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pretends to care deeply about the suffering Palestinian people, ignoring the fact that the Palestinian people have already been used as a political symbol by ambitious Muslim leaders who have no intention of actually helping them for the past 60 years. 

The world is more than tired of war-mongers like Bush and Ahmadinejad, and I’d love a chance to challenge either of their pretensions to political wisdom in a real debate. 

The 61st Session continues today with presentations from Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Bachelet Jeria of Chile, Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka, Hugo Chavez Frias of Venezuela, Romano Prodi of Italy, Esteban Lazo Hernandez of Cuba, Robert Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Alfred Moisiu of Albania, Joseph Kabila Kabange of the Congo, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia, Adnan Terzic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ivo Sanader of Croatia, Sheikh Mohammad Al-Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah of Kuwait and Tzipi Livni of Israel.  Should be an interesting session.

The 61st session of the United Nations General Assembly has begun, and today will bring speeches from an awe-inspiring series of world leaders (I use the term “awe” mostly in its sense as the root of “awful”, not to mention “shock and awe”, a sensation many Earthlings are currently familiar with).

Here are some of the names that will be stepping up to that big open mic today: Kofi Annan and Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa of the United Nations, Luiz Da Silva of Brazil, George Bush of USA, Thabo Mkebi of South Africa, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Jacques Chirac of France, Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Congo, Vicente Fox of Mexico, King Hussein of Jordan, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Evo Morales Aima of Bolivia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Kjell Magne Bondevik of Norway and Ivo Sanader or Croatia.

What will they all say? Supposedly this page at UN.org will have audio and video, and I hope to report more on the outcome as soon as the podcasts arrive. Will it all amount to no more than a choreographed assault of hypocrisy by an assemblage of professional liars? That’s how some would describe the UN’s general assembly, and they may have a point. Let’s actually watch this year, and find out for ourselves.

Despite a weekend of worldwide protests and the ongoing flow of weak, ambivalent press releases about the situation in Sudan, it’s very difficult to discern what’s going on at all from news sources around the world.

I have been trying for days to write an informative article about the Sudan situation, and after much reading I am still mystified. Why is the African Union peacekeeping force leaving on September 30, and why is the United Nations waiting for the Sudanese government — the force, apparently, that hundreds of thousands of refugees need protection from — to give them permission to take the African Union’s place? Wikipedia’s not much help, and neither is the New York Times, which regularly devotes only a moderate amount of space to this growing crisis.

Despite the famous ineffectiveness of the United Nations, their email press releases have been more enlightening than other sources, and one cannot fault Security General Kofi Annan for failing to yell loudly enough. One can, however, fault various governments, media outlets and organizations around the world for not picking up the call.

Those who remember the Nazi holocaust used to repeat the phrase “Never again”, and I remember a time in my life when I was naive enough to take comfort in that thought. The problem is, never again always seems to start after the holocaust is over. I read Philip Gourevitch’s history of Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and gained a crystal-clear understanding of how that disaster was allowed to happen in 1994. Similarly, it’s easy in retrospect to look back and comprehend the incredible massacres carried out by Pol Pot in Cambodia. But what do we do when the head of the United Nations tells the world “it’s happening again, right now” — and you look for a way to help and find none? It cannot be that we must wait for the atrocities to lapse into past tense before we can wrap our brains around them.

It’s happening again. Everybody knows it, and nobody knows how to help. Over in Iran, where the government pretends to care about humanitarian crises whenever Israel is to blame, a major conference is being planned to examine whether or not the Jewish Holocaust of the 20th Century was a fraud. The past is a comfortable place to dwell. Is anybody out there concerned with the present?

I’m not giving up on my wish to become knowledgable about the situation in Sudan, but I need to find better sources of information so I can hopefully say something better than “it’s bad” sometime soon.

I don’t want to spend too much time writing about electoral politics here– I’m much more fascinated the undercurrents and assumptions that influence popular politics. But I do occasionally have something to say about electoral strategy, as in a short piece I wrote for Daily Kos last night. Here’s what I posted:

As opponents of the Iraq war across the USA hopefully await our chance to take back the White House in two years, we still hear disturbing rumbles that Democrats cannot find a clear position on the Iraq war, both past and future.

For instance, I have now heard from two different sources that Hillary Clinton can never be President — not, surprisingly, because she was married to Bubba, or because she’s a liberal woman. Hillary’s biggest problem right now, apparently, is that she voted to go to war against Iraq in 2002.

Democrats and liberals need to get past the unfair and inaccurate charge that we are “wishy-washy” on future policy in Iraq, or that politicians are “flip-floppers” because they voted to go to war in 2002. How do we get past this? Mainly, we need to focus on the terrible performance of the Bush/Cheney administration, their lack of planning, their lapses in judgement.

The lack of seriousness with which the Bush/Cheney administration has been conducting this ongoing war resonates with all Americans, red state or blue. For many Americans, the Iraq war didn’t go wrong when the tanks started rolling, but it went wrong when Baghdad fell and the occupying troops failed to prevent — or even encouraged — widespread looting. And it went more horribly wrong when we discovered what had been happening in Abu Ghraib.

Democrats, let’s stop arguing over who voted for or against the war in 2002. This war was an aberration and an injustice before it began, but that’s not why Americans hate this war. We hate the war because it is a disaster and a failure, and that’s not something any Democratic politician must bear responsibility for.

USA President George W. Bush appeared dejected and defensive in tonight’s televised address to the nation. The fight against Islamic fundamentalism, Bush said, will be the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st Century, but many viewers will wonder if the struggle against the type of antiquated chauvinism this president represents won’t be just as difficult.

“Incompetent” remains the best word to describe the presidency of George W. Bush, but “antiquated” is rising in the ranks as well. Evidence:

• Bush speaks of the children who lost parents on 9-11 as never being able to “hug their daddies”. Umm … mommies too, George?

• Bush urges Arabs to “leave the desert of despotism”, as if he doesn’t realize this type of quaint “Lawrence of Arabia” stereotyping has got to go.

• The man who barely knew the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims when making the decision to invade Iraq now says that we will not leave the war until “the extremists” are defeated. This shows that he is still not well-informed about the situation in Iraq, in which “extremism” plays a minor role behind territorial and political confrontation.

• Our beloved president evokes World War II yet again, despite the fact that if he had been President in World War II he would probably have attacked Quisling or Petain instead of Hitler (that’s what his record against Bin Laden shows, anyway).

I recently posted a suggestion pleading with George Bush and Dick Cheney to just stop giving speeches, because the experience is incredibly painful and frustrating to those of us who have to listen. The decisive ideological struggle of the 21st Century will be against militarism, chauvinism and stupidity of all kinds, and George Bush better think about which side he’s on.

British author and social critic Martin Amis recently wrote a book called The War Against Cliche; it’s a pretty good book, and it’s a great title. As an author of fiction and poetry trying to turn my head towards the controversial topics of the day, I can relate to the title. When I write about world events I often feel myself fighting the war against cliche, and sometimes losing it.

What’s a writer to do? I am filled with disgust and anger towards a few world leaders whose decisions and statements seem too banal for tragedy and too predictable for comedy. I want to write about this, but I can come up with nothing to say that hasn’t been said before. But if I don’t write what I feel, I find myself unable to write anything at all. My anger is a clot, a clump.

So, let’s dive in. I have two subjects today, two influential global leaders who claim to be each other’s philosophical opposites: one is a religious fundamentalist and populist politician who embraces military solutions to human problems, whereas the other is a religious fundamentalist and populist politican who embraces military solutions to human problems. I’m speaking of George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Bush administration has begun a new public relations initiative aimed at keeping Republican seats in the US Senate and Congress during the November midterm elections. Their speechwriters have now put the phrase “Islamic fascism” into regular rotation, and Vice-President Dick Cheney recently delivered a speech comparing the anti-war movement in the USA to the appeasement of Hitler before World War II.

As many before me have already said, the Bush administration does not have the credibility to make comparisons like this pass any type of inspection. The horrific results of the war in Iraq, begun in March 2003, betray a more obvious truth: this war was hastily planned and badly executed. The good citizens of the USA know that their current leadership is frighteningly incompetent, and many of us dread the damage that may be done in this administration’s remaining two years. As far as I’m concerned, Bush and Cheney are already lame ducks, and I earnestly plead that they cease delivering speeches. They have already insulted America’s honor with their reckless foreign policy; I beg that they stop insulting our intelligence.

The administration of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no less reckless. Cartoonists and comedians in the USA like to portray the earnest fanatic as a clown, a madman, but in fact he is a career politician with over twenty-five years of experience in Iranian politics. It’s all too easy to laugh him off when he convenes a panel of academics to study whether or not the genocide of six million Jews in mid-20th Century Europe is a myth. We know that the Holocaust was all too real, as were other holocausts of modern times from Russia to China to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia to Darfur. How shall I react to a politician like this? Ahmadinejad is all over the news: he is famously beginning a program of nuclear enrichment, he has declared that Israel has no right to exist, he has called for a purge of liberal intellectuals from Iranian universities. I believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a familar character from history. I don’t intend to bore my poor readers by beating this subject to death, but I do plan to use this site to watch his activities in the future.

Cliches? Yeah, I’ve got nothing but cliches to offer today. I hate when the world seems simplistic, but I’ve got to call the shots like I see them.

I’m not impressed with an article in the New York Times, 9-11 Polls Find Lingering Fears, which describes the citizens of New York City as jittery about the prospects of future terrorism.

This doesn’t describe any New Yorkers I know. Fear? We all face hazards every day, whether we live in cities or towns or off the grid completely. Our individuality and strength comes through in the way each of us react to these hazards.  Fear does not describe the looks I see on faces when I walk down the streets of New York City.

As the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001 approaches, I have a feeling I’m going to be annoyed by many of the cliches I’m going to hear. I’ll try to avoid spouting any myself. What makes me angriest about the September 11 attacks was how incredibly successful they have proven to be for Al-Qaeda. We’ve been living in an Al-Qaeda world since that day. My own country, which I was once prouder of than I am right now, seems to be playing a grisly role in the cosmic comedy Osama Bin Laden and his associates orchestrated.

Fear? No.

Disgust? Anger? Strong, strong desire for change?

That’d be a yes.