• Sean Penn rising to the defense of Venezuelan demagogue and increasingly authoritarian Hugo Chavez with this gem:

“Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.”

Evidently being elected excuses authoritarianism and locking up vocal critics.

• Glenn Beck once again displaying his special brand of ignorance that had got Christians on the left and the right pissed off at him:

“I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”

He followed this up by comparing the basis of most Christian churches in ministering to the needs of their flock to Nazism and Communism:

“Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That’s what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: ’social justice.’ They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy.”

Must be news to the Catholic Church that principles that are central to its mission are akin to the Nazism and communism.  Beck was presumably targeting his usual liberal targets but used his typical broad brush strokes to incorporate any Church activities aimed at aiding the poor.  It is interesting to note that social justice was the rallying cry of the liberal churches who opposed slavery and segregation.  Of course in the alternate reality of Glenn Beck, progressives used to be called “tyrants,” or “slave-owners — people who encouraged you to become dependent on them.”   See link.

• Baseball player Torii Hunter lashing out his frustrations at the declining percentage of African American players in baseball with this:

“People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they’re African-American. They’re not us. They’re impostors. Even people I know come up and say, ‘Hey, what color is Vladimir Guerrero? Is he a black player?’ I say, ‘Come on, he’s Dominican. He’s not black.’”

“As African-American players, we have a theory that baseball can go get an imitator and pass them off as us. It’s like they had to get some kind of dark faces, so they go to the Dominican or Venezuela because you can get them cheaper. It’s like, ‘Why should I get this kid from the South Side of Chicago and have Scott Boras represent him and pay him $5 million when you can get a Dominican guy for a bag of chips?’ … I’m telling you, it’s sad.”

See link. Setting aside the lack of awareness of the racial ancestry of of the “impostors” this is hardly the way to generate a discussion on how to encourage baseball (which has not held up well to competition from basketball and football) in the African American community or to address concerns that players in Latin American communities countries are being exploited.  After doubling down on his comments initially, Hunter has since decided to zip it using the old “taken out of context” routine.

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Toyota’s beleaguered executives must already be wishing that 2010 is a distant memory.  The last couple of months have seen the Toyota brand name get battered and the increasingly confident (some would say over confident) industry leader discover that its management structure is now the subject of discussions in business schools – on how not to run a disaster response.  A brand name painstakingly built up over the last few decades is being shredded as Toyota executives struggle to assuage the concerns of Congress and panicky customers that they have solved the mystery of why some cars unexpectedly kept accelerating.

But the unfortunate timing of events today bring to mind the classic Kevin Bacon performance from Animal House.

The day starts with Toyota conducting a demonstration intended to “prove” that software glitches are not responsible for some cars randomly accelerating.  See link.  Fair enough.  There are even some who think the hysteria is being blown way out of proportion.  See link.  Unfortunately, on the very same day a rogue Prius took off and reached speeds of 94 mph where a sticky gas pedal and not the mat obstruction for which there was a Prius recall appears to have been the problem.  See link.  Luckily the driver of the vehicle was not injured.

We still don’t know what caused the Prius to take off today, but this reinforces the urgency for Toyota to get this problem behind it as soon as possible.  This is not the only blog or news article to note the awful timing of the episode for Toyota.

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The Christian Science Monitor has reported that Pakistan  arrested half of the Afghan Taliban leadership in recent days.  See link.  Speculation abounds about the timing of the crackdown and whether it was related to Pakistan seeking a more direct role in the Afghan peace negotiations.  To me the speed at which the Taliban leadership is being rounded up raises the question why this was not possible in the past eight years or even in the last couple of years when Pakistan itself became the target of the fundamentalist terror it midwifed.  Pakistan’s future actions will show just how serious it is in tackling the threat, or whether this is merely the latest gambit in the new Great Game (see previous blog post).

Also, unclear is the extent the lack of leadership affects the Taliban’s military operations.  It should make it harder to coordinate joint attacks, but there are enough lower level commanders with guns and experience to continue fighting.  Similar decapitations of the leadership among the Pakistani branch of the Taliban appear to have lead to militants training their guns at each other as they jockey for power.  Whether and to what extent the pattern repeats itself here remains to be seen.

For now, this should be a boost to the American surge.  But good news in Aghanistan seems to be accompanied by bad.  As usual it comes from the man supposed to provide the good governance essential for a lasting peace.  In recent days Hamid Karzai has tried to pack Afghanistan’s impartial election commission with his cronies, deepened his ties to the corrupt warlords and once again pandered to the fundamentalist fringe by weakening constitutional protections for female representation in parliament. See here, here and here.  Some things never change.

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The casting of Gerard Depardieu to play Alexandre Dumas in a biopic about the famous author has stirred up a hornet’s nest in France.  See link.  Many fans of the possibly greatest author of historical fiction may not know that Dumas whose grandmother was Haitian of Afro-Carribean ancestry dealt with racial taunts all his life.

Alexandre Dumas, photo by Nadar (from Wikipedia)

To play the role, the blond fair-skinned Depardieu had to wear blackface and a curly wig.  Needless to say this has kicked up a racism row.  It looks like the producers tried to raise the likely viewership by latching on to the Depardieu’s popularity.  I am not in principle opposed to actors portraying a different race, recently satirized by Robert Downey, Jr.’s brilliant performance in Tropic Thunder, but it is a sore subject among minority actors in Hollywood (and evidently in France) for good reason.

If roles were subject to race-blind casting this would not be an issue.  But ethnic actors find themselves pigeonholed into stereotypical roles with few opportunities for a major role.  So when a prominent part like this in their ethnicity goes to someone who has to perform in blackface, it is not hard to see why they get upset.  For an alleged bastion of liberalism, Hollywood has aways been retrograde and craven on race.  Race was evidently a major factor in the casting of the leads in Hitch (African American superstar with a Latina actress). See link.  Minorities often disappeared on major TV shows.  The sitcom Friends somehow spent a decade in New York City with lily white racial surroundings.  ”ER” set in downtown Chicago had a near total absence of any Asians.  Indian American characters on TV speak with the exaggerated accent of Apu on the Simpsons (voiced by Hank Azaria) though many of them are born and raised in the United States.

Now I don’t think TV shows need to match the exact racial percentages that exist in American society, but I do wish that the TV execs would break out of their own ethnic prejudices and put some faith in the American public.  At a time when we have a President of mixed race, interracial or race-blind casting should not be taboo.  Based on recent shows, Hollywood seems to be improving.  But more needs to be done so that  a cross-racial casting like the one above can one day pass with little comment, other than those evaluating the caliber of the performance.

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The maxim above is one that the American devotees of torture often forget.  This article by Glenn Greenwald is worth reading because it captures right wing hypocrisy on torture and prisoner conditions when Americans or co-religionists are involved.  Greenwald’s column was triggered by recent hand-wringing from usual torture supporters at the plight of the American Baptists arrested in Haiti for smuggling children out of Haiti.  It also gave him the opportunity to revisit this article from 2006 where Michelle Malkin fretted about the quality of legal protections awarded to alleged (Christian) terrorists in Indonesia.

This double standard was of course predictable.  The uniformed military many former officers (including then Secretary of State Colin Powell and Arizona Senator John McCain) and many JAG officers (including South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a former JAG officer) opposed the Bush administration’s eagerness to torture (somehow magically transformed by calling it enhanced interrogation) for exactly such reasons.  Once America tortures it does not have much standing to grouse about similar treatment to its own citizens and soldiers.  When America uses fear to toss away the rule of law and the right to a fair trial it is much harder to claim such rights for its citizens, let alone sermonize about the denial of rights to others.

What the torture loving elements of the right also fail to appreciate is that when America eschews torture, it can actually enhance security.  While Republicans have been up in arms lately that the Obama administration did not torture the underpants bomber, they ignore the point raised by Fareed Zakaria in his recent column.  See link.  The underpants bomber and the five American Muslims arrested in Pakistan when they went for jihad training were turned in by their parents.  Zakaria is right to observe that this would not happen if the parents felt that he would be tortured, and while the example of Chechen parents not turning their kids in to Putin’s thugs is a bit extreme it is on point.

So basically the American security hawks want the right to torture or deny trial to terrorist suspects (my guess is that given how the right reacted to the FBI raid at Ruby Ridge in the 1990s we are talking about Muslim suspects here) in the interest of national security, but such deviations from the rule of law are not permitted elsewhere (particularly against Christian suspects).  It is hypocrisy at its rankest.

One of my complaints about the American legal response to 9/11 was the failure to evaluate how other countries handled similar (and often far more severe and pervasive) terrorism threats and the failure to set up mechanisms to limit the inevitable abuse of power from draconian anti-terror statutes.  It was also unfortunately not the first time in American history fear became a mechanism to subvert the rule of law and American values.

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It has become a predictable pattern ever since Pervez Musharraf as chief of the Pakistani army instigated the the Kargil War.  Barely a week after the announcement that India and Pakistan would resume the talks that were put on hold after the Mumbai attacks, comes a bomb attack.  See link.  This time the target is the city of Pune.  As in Mumbai, the target of the attacks was a location where foreigners congregated.  Even though the perpetrators have not been identified, the site of the attack was surveyed by David Headley, the Chicago man of Pakistani origin who is being investigated for his connection with Mumbai attacks.  See link.

The attacks promptly brought calls to suspend talks with Pakistan, which the Indian government has said will continue.  Personally, I see the talks as a charade played out for public (particularly Western) consumption.  President Zardari’s government simply does not have the power to make the compromises necessary for a lasting peace treaty and does not control the Pakistani security establishment.  Islamabad still tries to distinguish the jihadi movement in Afghanistan from the proxies launched against India.  India is never going to accede to a demand to sever Kashmir from the Union of India, at best the Kashmiris on the Indian side of the LOC can look forward to a type of enhanced autonomy (which should probably be extended to the other states of India).  If Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at the height of his power did not have the ability to recognize the LOC as the international border with India (when he signed the Simla Accord), his widely despised son in law (Asif Zardari) who genuinely seems to want peace with India will not be able to do so either.

So the impasse will continue.  A few months from now Pakistan will complain the Indians are not serious about negotiations.  India will respond that the jihadi network still flourishes in Pakistan.  A terrorist strike that tests India’s patience will occur.  Pakistan will make some token arrests and bans to deflect attention.  One difference from the Musharraf years is that Pakistan stands alone and bereft of world sympathy as a result of its role in midwifing global terrorism.  As the Indian economy grows stronger and as Pakistan crumbles the balance of power is inexorably tilting in New Delhi’s favor.

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Newsweek has ruffled some feathers in Switzerland with a provocatively titled article “The Death of Switzerland.”  While this probably sounds like music to the ears of mercurial Libiyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi who tried to introduce a resolution in the United Nations last year calling for the dissolution of country, it has naturally drawn some pushback from the locals that Newsweek is being a a tad melodramatic.  See link.

They may have a point.  Even in their alpine refuge the Swiss are hardly immune to the worries and fears that have spread across an aging continent.  With no tradition of taking in immigrants, Europeans have struggled to integrate the more conservative and religious (and often Muslim) newcomers.  Even the increasing separation of Switzerland’s communities is hardly original in today’s Europe.  See link.

If, as the Newsweek article suggests, English is rapidly becoming the common tongue of the Swiss, it is yet another example of how the former language of imperial rule is today the glue that holds diverse countries (like India) together.

Malaise is easy to find across the Western world nowadays.  One thing the Swiss have in their favor is 800 years of experience in keeping an unwieldy confederation together and adapting to changed circumstances.  It is too early to count Switzerland out.  Rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

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Many observers have noted that one of the unintended side effects of weakening European nation states in the cause of European integration has been to give the long suppressed sub nationalities their opportunity to claim greater autonomy.  For example the Catalans and the Basques in Spain, some Scots (and increasingly many English) in the United Kingdom do not see the advantage of being a constituent part of the national unit when they could instead get the protection of the super-national European Union.

This has been most evident in Belgium.  Created in 1830 after a Catholic and often French speaking region revolted  against the Dutch dominated United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the country has always been divided among the French speaking Wallonia in the south and the Dutch speaking Flanders in the north.  Last year there were serious concerns that the country that houses the headquarters of the EU would dissolve. (For analysis of possible scenarios of dissolution see here, for the experiences of a bemused American tourist making sense of the situation in Brussels see here).  An artificial country that some joke is united only by its soccer team and monarchy in a region that has almost never been united, Belgium may have outlived its purpose.

The secessionist trend started by Woodrow Wilson’s famous calls for self determination 90 years ago is not one I look on with much favor.  I can understand it in national units that suppress regional languages and cultures (like France) or where the majority community oppresses the minority and exploits the resources in the minority region (Pakistan in Baluchistan; Sudan with its southern half), but in many of these European countries such a situation does not exist.

What often exists is rank selfishness.  In Belgium a once dominant community is now the economic underclass taking more than its fair share of state resources.  In Italy some in the more prosperous North would rather get rid of the far poorer South (if that was where Italy would end up, they might as well have left poor Francis II on his throne).  It is a sentiment sometimes expressed in the United States where residents of certain states are convinced they are subsidizing everybody else (some with more justification than others).   It is also evident in India as noted by the recent brouhaha in Maharashtra.  See link.

It is a short sighted approach that ignores the inevitable swings of history.  Belgium where poorer Flanders is now economically dominant is a fine example of this.  A cacophony of small states will eventually bring with it far more intransigent battles over national resources (notably water and in the case of England and Scotland oil reserves), inherited debt and other conflicts and a much harder job to divide aid at the European level.  They would be better off working towards a common national purpose while retaining their regional culture (that includes you too Quebec).

But then I do not speak from the perspective of a paranoid or threatened minority.

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Following up on my previous posts here and here, is this Newsweek article on the practical difficulty of buying off the Taliban.  See link.  A failure to buy off the “good-Taliban” renders a large chunk of the Obama administration’s Afghan pacification strategy meaningless.  Ron Moreau’s article highlights how the choice before the Pashtun peasantry resembles Morton’s fork.

There is no love lost for the brutal Taliban, but still a sneaking admiration for the true believers who have not taken the easy way out.  But the weak and venal Karzai regime along with its equally brutal warlords offer likelihood of protection.

When the Americans leave it is very likely things fall apart.  As noted in previous blogs, the Taliban resurgence has been immeasurably aided by the inability or the unwillingness of Pakistan to crack down on their former clients.   Pakistan’s crumbling state has also been unable and unwilling to seal off the porous Afghan border.  So the Taliban can strike, retreat to its Pakistani refuge and strike again. Even without the active backing of Pakistani intelligence services, this strategic advantage allows them to survive the immense disparity of manpower that exists on the ground.

Assuming Pakistan has cut off the cash and weapons flow to its former proxies, will that continue once America leaves?  There is little love lost between Karzai and his Tajik and Uzbek allies and Pakistan.  The temptation to rehash the early 1990s could prove irresistible to a Pakistani regime that still tries to distinguish between the domestic Taliban it is bombing and the Afghan Taliban it harbors, however unwillingly.

For a long time I supported the Afghan surge and still believe the diversion of American attention to Iraq cost the world a chance in a generation to guide an exhausted Afghanistan to an uneasy peace.  But as the Afghan conflict starts morphing into a tribal civil war of the sort that has plagued it since the creation of the country by Ahmad Shah Abdali, the desirability of American boots on the ground in the middle of the crossfire will continue to drop.

I hold out a tiny sliver of hope that the Afghan regime will prove my pessimism wrong, but the sliver is tiny and keeps shrinking.

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In the last decade its become fashionable in certain quarters to lob the charge of anti-semitism at any criticism directed at Israel.  For example see link discussing a similar charge against General Wesley Clark.  But the blogging world was stunned this week by the broadside launched by The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier against erstwhile pal Andrew Sullivan.  See link.  Worth reading is this long piece by Glenn Greenwald about TNR’s reckless hurling of anti-semitism charges which has limited its impact (something similar seems to be happening with Nazi and Hitler comparisons lately) particularly when Wieseltier’s boss Marty Peretz delights in racist innuendo against Arabs and Muslims.  Sullivan has himself responded to the screed.  See here, here and here.  Greenwald has also linked to some of the other blogs demolishing Wieseltier’s rants, some of which for convenience are re-linked here, here, and here.  Also see this by Daniel Luban on how the outrage seems generated by the changing rules on how Israel is to be criticized.  Given the material linked above, I will avoid the repetitive task of going through Wieseltier’s tedious post myself.

The anti-semitism card is not targeted just against gentiles.  Associates of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netenyahu were allegedly convinced last year that Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod and other Jews in the Obama administration were “self-hating” Jews for failing to give Israel a blank check.  See link.

Needless to say, this is a very unhealthy manner to conduct a debate.  It is also the fastest way to build resentment among Israel’s well wishers who do not always toe the party line while making it much harder to corral the true anti-Semites.  TNR and their allies would be well served by brushing up on their Aesop’s, particularly the part on The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

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Had previously posted about the mystery of Nigeria’s missing president.  See link.  That mystery continues since President Umaru Yar’Adua has still not given a video interview. But for now the limbo in Africa’s giant has been alleviated with parliament elevating Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to acting President.  See link.  Political tensions still run high and Muslim power brokers are unhappy that President Yar’Adua’s illness caused them to lose power before their turn was up.  In someways the Presidential system of government chosen by Nigeria is ill suited for the delicate sharing of power that its competing ethnicities and religions need.  The theoretical stability of tenure also relies heavily on the wisdom of the man of top.  It is not clear whether a man chosen (in a fashion similar to American practice) to balance a Presidential ticket will be up to the job of balancing the various tensions in the country.

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Iran has now come out and repeated India’s position on Afghanistan vis a vis the good Taliban.  See link.  Iran’s motivations are pretty clear since there never has been any love lost between Iran and the Taliban, the former considering the Taliban as backward fanatics and the latter considering the Iranians as schismatic heretics.  Given Washington’s inclination to disregard anything Iran says, this will not prevent the Karzai government from seeking a rapprochement with elements of the Taliban.  But any increase in Taliban influence in Kabul raises the chance of Iranian meddling and counter-meddling from Pakistan.  The vicious cycle continues.

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The LA Times has an article about the emerging showdown between the next round of the confrontation between the Iranian regime and the opposition on the 22nd of Bahman (February 11), the 31st anniversary of the Iranian revolution.  See link.  In recent days the regime has tried to decapitate the opposition with executions, arrests and attempts to suggest that opposition Presidential candidates Mousavi and Karroubi had conceded defeat.  But as previously noted the strength (and weakness) of the Iranian protests is the absence of a leader whose removal will demoralize the protesters.  While the regime has not hesitated to use batons and occasionally bullets to disperse the crowds, it has not yet brought (or has been unable to bring) tanks on the streets to decisively crush the opposition like the Syrians did at Hama and the Chinese did at Tiananmen.  Till then the world can draw inspiration from the dogged protesters in the street and hope that the men with the guns will have a change of heart.

Meanwhile neocons are still equally dogged in their determination to bomb Iran, however pointless and self-defeating the attack will be.  See link to the latest by Daniel Pipes. Also see link.  One of the lines of attack seems to be to keep referring to the Iranian regime as “apocalyptic” even though since its inception the Iranian regime has been ruthlessly pragmatic in its primary goal – survival.  A regime allegedly rooted in Islam has even given itself the right to suspend Sharia law in the interests of the state (a marked difference from the Saudis and the Taliban).  Even North Korea, whose actions are significantly more irrational and unpredictable, has demonstrated that nuclear weapons are primarily being used as a deterrent.  There seems little evidence (other than verbal broadsides) that the Iranian regime with its lust for power and keen eye for survival would not do the same.

UPDATE: Here is a link to the latest Juan Cole column about the scaremongering and hyperbole that American policy makers (Hillary Clinton) and neo-con pundits keep coming up with to inflate the military threat from militarily weak third world countries.  When Barack Obama pointed out this fact in the 2008 eight presidential campaign, that Iran is hardly the existential threat that the Soviet Union was he was pilloried for it.  Here is one blogger who is glad that the occupant of the White House has the ability to keep things in perspective.

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A recent Foreign Policy article highlights a danger to stability in Afghanistan not often discussed – the toxic relationship between India and Pakistan.  See link.  This dates back to the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.  Afghanistan (even under the Pakistani created and supported Taliban) never accepted the Durand Line drawn by the British as the border between the two countries.  This line divides the Pashtun people between the two countries.  As a result every government in Kabul (other than the Taliban) has had a frosty relationship with Pakistan and a warm one with India.  Paranoid about facing hostile states on both flanks, Pakistan has always sought to install a more pliant regime in Kabul.

Durand Line border between Afghanistan and Pakistan (in red). The blue area represents the predominant Pashtun and Baloch area.

It is one of the reasons why Pakistan has proved so unwilling to dump its Taliban clients and has eagerly pushed the idea of a reconciliation with the “Good Taliban.”  India having faced a tide of Pakistani sponsored Islamic terrorism in the past decades sees this as a distinction without a difference.

India has been one of the major aid contributors to rebuilding Afghanistan.  This has, as usual, stirred paranoia about Indian intentions in Pakistan with wilder theories speculating that India intends to install military bases in the region once the Americans leave.  In 2008, these fears appear to have prompted an attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul allegedly sponsored by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.  See link.

Given its ethnic divisions, Afghanistan is always likely to be a weak state subject to meddling by its neighbors.  The Indo-Pakistani tussle is yet another destabilizing influence that imperils any attempt to pacify Afghanistan.  And then there is Iranian meddling in the western part of the country.  The world community should prepare contingency plans if (or maybe when) things fall apart after the United States departs the region.

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Previous posts in this blog (see link) had noted the challenges facing Sri Lanka in the aftermath of its total military victory against the LTTE.  Sri Lanka’s President and the Amy Chief tried to hog the credit for the victory and both giant egos faced off in the recent Presidential election, which President Rajapaksa won handily.  In what seems like a harbinger of the policy facing the defeated Tamils, President Rajapaksa seems unwilling to rest on the laurels of victory at the ballot box.  He has now proceeded to arrest General Fonseka, confirming the fears of the opposition.  See link.   Generals who grow too big for their boots while in uniform are a concern for any democracy.  But arresting the loser of an election a week later is an authoritarian move that does not bode well for Sri Lankan democracy.

Many Tamils are still stuck in refugee camps.  The minority areas had ironically voted for General Fonseka feeling he was more likely to seek a solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic divide.  With the firm backing of Sinhalese nationalists President Rajapaksa may not see the need for compromise or to implement the Sri Lankan constitution’s mandate to devolve power to the provinces.  See link.  It is hard to see how a state with two distinct ethnicities at loggerheads who are also conveniently segregated can survive without such a compromise.  The failure to compromise (and the attempt to deny citizenship to the Tamil minority) helped spark the civil war in the first place.

The LTTE’s assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 cost it Indian sympathy.  But the LTTE is now gone and sympathy for Sri Lanka’s Tamils runs deep in the next door Indian state of Tamil Nadu.  Any recurrence of civil war would put domestic pressure on India to intervene to protect the Tamils ( a situation neither New Delhi or Colombo want to arise).  Sri Lanka could use a dose of enlightened leadership that uses the period of war exhaustion to forge a lasting settlement.  I am not sure that President Rajapaksa’s thin-skinned government is up to the challenge.

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Barely a week after I commended the Indian constitutional set up and politicians for marching towards a common nation purpose (see link) comes a piece of rank demagoguery arising out of cynical political opportunism.  As with any culturally diverse nation, India has had to deal with various ethnic groups feeling threatened from time to time.  The early 1960s saw a dispute over language where the southern state of Tamil Nadu successfully opposed the imposition of Hindi as a national language.  Assorted regional grievances spawned separatist movements along India’s periphery in Kashmir, Punjab and Assam.  The Assamese insurgency is relevant to the events of the past week as it arose from concerns over illegal Bangladeshi immigrants taking away local jobs (not to mention like any good neighbors Assam and Bengal have had about 1300 years of mutual enmity).  The rise of regional parties caused some concerns about the balkanization of India, but apart from making sure that immigrants learned the local language in schools an active campaign of discrimination was never proposed by any major political party.  Until last week.

The western Indian state of Maharashtra has been India’s industrial and financial powerhouse.  Its capital Mumbai is the most cosmopolitan city in India.  As the home of India’s financial markets and the Hindi film industry Bollywood, it is at once India’s New York and Los Angeles.  Since the 1960s it has been the magnet drawing fortune, dream and job seekers from across India.  The competition from outsiders and a perception that the immigrants only hired their own has always created an undercurrent of tension.  It is this tension and the perceived plight of the “Marathi manoos” (the Marathi man) that the Shiv Sena a local right wing party founded by former cartoonist Bal Thackeray has historically tapped into.  Thackeray has a history of baiting Muslims and others and controversially claiming Hitler as a hero, but until last week had not crossed beyond a certain line.

But times have changed.  A succession struggle over the ailing Thackeray has split his party.  Thackeray anointed his son Uddhav as his successor.  This caused Thackeray’s thuggish but more charismatic nephew Raj Thackeray to split off and form his own party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena.  For the last two years Raj Thackeray has stirred up protests and occasional violence against North Indian immigrants in Maharashtra.  It had the unusual effect of making the Shiv Sena look like a mature party.  However, the 2009 Indian parliamentary and Maharashtra elections showed that Raj Thackeray had tapped into an undercurrent of resentment.  His MNS split the Shiv Sena vote costing it seats in parliament and the state assembly.

Threatened by the emergence of the MNS, the elder Thackeray has decided imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Starting with his comments on the cricket dispute noted in this blog yesterday he has ramped up the volume by asserting that cosmopolitan Mumbai belonged to Marathis.  See link.  Fuel was thrown on the fire when the Congress party which rules Maharashtra suddenly issued a directive (since withdrawn) that all Mumbai taxi drivers needed to speak Marathi.  See link.  The xenophobic oneupmanship is escalating with Raj Thackeray asserting that jobs in Maharashtra must go only to people of Marathi descent (not just people who spoke Marathi).  See link.

This is a line no political party in India has crossed so far.  It has also caused serious rifts in the Shiv Sena’s already strained alliance with the national Bharatiya Janata Party and the Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.  See here and here.

One heartening feature of this has been the united front put forward by every other political grouping to the Shiv Sena and MNS’s insanity.  Less heartening is the threat by local demagogues else where to engage in retaliatory attacks on Maharashtrians in their states for attacks by the Shiv Sena/MNS.  The Shiv Sena’s stance is hypocritical for a political party that has railed against Article 370 of the Indian constitution granting special rights to (Muslim majority) Jammu and Kashmir (one guess on what fuels the opposition to Article 370).  Indian nationalists can be forgiven for wondering if the uncle-nephew duo are in fact Manchurian candidates trying to achieve what Pakistan sponsored terrorists have not managed for the past 25 years.

While the bluster of the Thackerays’ practically amounts to a lot of hot air at present, a dangerous line has been crossed.  Without electoral repudiation of such tactics it will encourage demagogues in other parts of India.  While the increasing percentage of India’s labor force crossing state lines for work will cause some tensions, it is the best way to encourage national integration in a country that sometimes resembles the Tower of Babel.  The past week also demonstrates the delicate balance Indian democracy must maintain to achieve its dreams of becoming a world power.

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Here is an amusing story from Iran.  In a seeming reaction to the “Green Revolution” that brought thousands of protesters into the streets this summer, Iran’s regime seems to have reacted by taking the green band in Iran’s flag and turning it to blue.  See here and here.  Before rigging the elections this summer, the regime had warned the opposition not to attempt a “color” revolution as seen in other parts of the world (Orange in the Ukaraine, Rose in Georgia, etc.).  This is a move steeped in multiple ironies.  Green is the representative color for Islam and is now possibly being disowned by a putative Islamic regime.  Replacing green with blue turns would result in the Iranian flag sharing the red, white and blue combination of the two “Great Satans” of the regime – the United States and the United Kingdom.  For additional humor inherent in this situation, see the cartoon below that ran during the summer and was reposted on Andrew Sullivan’s site today.  See link.

'Khamenei Tears Green Stripe (Associated with Mousavi) Off Iranian Flag' Cartoonist: Jihad 'Awartani, Source: Al-Watan (Saudi Arabia), June 26, 2009.

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Juan Cole has a fascinating analysis of the latest Bin Laden audio tape and why he is not convinced it is genuine.  See link.  As Cole notes Bin Laden has not been seen on video since October 2004 and the new tape has generally been ignored in the Arab world.  If Cole’s analysis is correct, Bin Laden’s decline also serves as a lesson on why terrorists with no practical positive plan struggle to maintain support.

Bin Laden at one point attracted genuine sympathy and support in the Arab world.  He was the rich kid who abandoned his wealth to fight a jihad against two superpowers back to back.  The perceived impotence of their regimes against Israel and frustration at the lack of political and economic opportunities contributed to his support.  But Al Qaeda never had a serious or practical program to offer.  Unlike Hamas and Hezbollah whose goals are narrower and nationalistic, Al Qaeda has the unrealistic goals of restoring the  pan-Islamic Caliphate.  The entity Al Qaeda wanted existed only in its imagination.  Of the first four caliphs, three were assassinated.  The distance from the capital of Damascus (and later Baghdad) to the extremities of the Empire (Spain and Morocco in the West and the Indus River in the East) meant that provincial governors would always have a lot of local autonomy.  The “golden age” of the famous Harun al-Rashid also marked the disintegration of the empire as Baghdad could not hold effective sway over such a vast region.

Far less ambitious projects like the union of Egypt and Syria (which barely lasted 3 years) crumbled in the 20th century.  Needless to say, no Arab state took Al Qaeda’s goals seriously.  Ultimately, all Al Qaeda offered was terrorism against its presumed enemies with involuntary martyrdom offered to any Muslims who happened to be in the way.  The terror attacks in Jordan, Zarqawi’s blood lust in Iraq that helped give rise to the Sunni Awakening and the terror attacks in Pakistan last year that forced the Pakistani army to respond with lethal force, all have dimmed the rosy glow some had for this band of thugs.

While vigilance must be maintained and bands of murderous fanatics are still out there, such groups do not present and existential threat to the American way of life (unless we do the job for them).  As Fareed Zakaria noted a few weeks back overreaction plays into their hands (see link).  Meanwhile, the location of the chief evildoer (as George W. Bush once named him) is somewhat of a mystery.  As Cole notes he increasingly appears to be an irrelevancy.

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France is moving closer to a partial ban on the burqa in certain public places.  Like the previous ban on head scarves in schools, I find it disturbing when a government steps into religious practice that does not pose a threat to its practitioners.  It is correct that the Quran does not explicitly mandate the veil.  The language requiring modest dress in inherently subjective and open to interpretation on cultural norms.  However, that interpretation should rely on the practitioner and not the state.  This is in some ways the other side of the coin of the Taliban and Saudi Arabia mandating the burqa and Iran mandating the head scarves.  They are both wrong and an infringement on religious liberty.

Separation of church and state is a trick subject for Islam since its founders and early leaders combined secular and religious powers in the same individual.  However, after the fragmentation of the Abbasid Caliphate even Islam saw a bifurcation of these functions.  To the extent Sultans exercised religious authority, it was not different than Christian monarchs proclaiming themselves god’s vice-regents on earth.

I had an interesting conversation with someone who supported the proposed French policy today.  However, I cannot help but wonder whether the support would have remained in place if a similar ban was targeted at that person’s religion rather than at what is currently an unpopular religious minority.  A ban of this nature would not be constitutional in the United States.  While I have no fondness for religious fundamentalism and am generally unmoved by overt public religious displays, I will take the liberty granted by the American constitution to the type of secularism (and cultural xenophobia) rammed down people’s throats in France.

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And now for something different.  Touched by the tragedy in Haiti, Charlie Simpson came up with the seemingly modest idea of raising 500 GBP for Haiti via UNICEF by doing a sponsored bike ride of 8 km around a local park.  At present Charlie Simpson has exceeded his goal by 26976%.  That is not a typo.

What got this huge response in support of Charlie’s plan is the fact that he is only seven years old.  See link.  In the Internet age the news spread like wildfire once the media found out about it.   At the time of writing, he has raised over  $200,000.  For a link to his page click here.

In a cynical age it is refreshing to see that a simple and generous gesture from a young boy can draw such an outpouring of support.

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The Economist’s Banyan blog has an article up about the latest round of score settling in Bangladesh.  This has its roots in the assassination of the country’s founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and most of his family in 1975.  Like many of the charismatic leaders of Asia and Africa who led his country to freedom, Sheikh Mujib struggled to govern his country and in his last years lapsed into authoritarian suppression of dissent.  One of the coup plotters and Sheikh Mujib’s eventual successor (and another hero of the Bangladesh liberation struggle) Ziaur Rahman would himself be killed in a counter coup in 1981.

After the end of military rule in 1990, Bangladeshi elections have  alternated in bringing Sheikh Mujib’s daughter Sheikh Hasina and Ziaur Rahman’s widow Khaleda Zia to power.  The mutual loathing of the two Begums for each other has paralysed Bangladesh’s political life ever since.  Their foreign policy outlooks also differ.  Sheikh Hasina, like her father espouses closer ties to India.  Khaleda Zia like her husband embraces a more prickly brand of nationalism that often rubs New Delhi the long way.

Fed up with the squabbling, in 2007 the Bangladeshi army intervened and initiated corruption investigations of the two Begums and their progeny.  However, the 2008 elections showed the continuing dynastic fascination of the Bangladeshi public as Sheikh Hasina was swept back to power.

Sheikh Hasina’s pursuit of justice against her family’s killers is understandable.  After all, she is alive today because she fortuitously was abroad at the time of the coup that killed her father.  But the settling of scores for events that occurred 35 years ago threatens to further destabilize an impoverished country that desperately needs good governance.  It also guarantees payback when (as has been the norm in Bangladeshi electoral politics) she is swept out of office in the next election.

Stories like this make one appreciate the incredible magnanimity and wisdom of Nelson Mandela after assuming the presidency of South Africa.  Mandela realized that his nation required a leader who united instead of delivering payback for centuries of oppression (and in that regard the movie Invictus is worth watching).  Bangladesh’s Begums would do well to learn from Mandela’s example.

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It often comes down to what gets through the filter of the American media. To be fair, the United States is hardly unique in this.  Few countries engage in serious introspection about their actions.  However, there often seems to be a major disconnect between American self-image and the image as seen abroad.

To some extent it is understandable.  Self-criticism is too hard to take and certain groups can often go too overboard on the critiques of America without acknowledging the good.  But too often the American media goes to the other extreme by embracing the Pollyannaish version of American exceptionalism (like the ridiculous George W. Bush assertion “they hate us for our freedoms“) in which all American foreign policy actions are undertaken for noble reasons.  As many Latin Americans would tell you, that has unfortunately not always been the case.

A column by Juan Cole brought this issue up for me recently.  The column deals with the continuing human catastrophe in Gaza.  Israel’s apologists in the United States often attribute any criticism of Israel to an undercurrent of anti-semitism and are only too willing to grant it unquestioned support.  However, it is stories like the one linked above that have undercut the sympathy Israel attracts (including among some progressives in the United States) in many parts of the world.

Israel is no longer the plucky underdog of the Six Days War or the Yom Kippur War threatened by seemingly overwhelming odds.  While the threat to Israel is real, the armies of its Arab neighbors have atrophied since the fall of the Soviet Union.  Meanwhile the Israeli army built up with a steady diet of American aid is the 800 lb gorilla in the Middle East.  Add to that the (not publicly acknowledged, but understood) second strike nuclear capability delivered to Israel by the United States and Israel has the ability to pulverize any of its neighbors (as Lebanon and the Gaza strip found out in the last two years).

However, with great power comes great responsibility.  American media coverage generally fails  to acknowledge this change in status for Israel or the extremely disproportionate number of Palestinian casualties in the last decade.  American media has also not really delved into the details of the collective punishment inflicted on Gaza in the past year.  When the destruction is covered, it is generally framed solely in the context of a response to terrorist attacks with little discussion of whether a hammer is being used to swat a fly.  As a result, the United States remains one of the few countries where public opinion and elected officials generally uncritically support Israel.

In contrast, the rest of the world’s media has covered this issue extensively.  So now a furious and sometimes bewildered Israel finds much of world opinion treating it as a bully for actions it feels are justified self-defense.  Israel is also painfully learning the lesson the United States learned in Vietnam.  Civilian suffering transmitted to the living rooms makes for awful public relations for a democracy, unless of course the media chooses not to cover it.  It is unfair, but countries are generally held to higher standards than terrorist groups.

A critique I have had for the Cheneyian vision of the world is that it often seeks to lower American actions to the standards of the thugs they oppose while encouraging charges of hypocrisy by maintaining the high minded rhetoric that plays so well domestically.  Israel does have a point that it should not have to take too many pious bromides from human rights “paragons” Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. who are only too willing to use the Palestinians as props while doing nothing to ameliorate their lot.  However, the question does arise whether Israel really wants to lump itself on the issue of human rights with these countries?

Juan Cole’s column also brought about a sense of deja vu.  The stories about Gaza sound distressingly similar to the stories about the sufferings of Iraqi civilians during the sanctions in the 1990s.  These stories were circulated by human rights groups, dismissed by the Clinton and Bush administrations as solely Saddam Hussein’s fault and were largely ignored by the media.  While nobody should discount Saddam’s brutality, hiding behind indifference of a tyrant to the suffering of his people is an odd way to absolve yourself of any responsibility.  And ultimately all that suffering made not a whit of difference to toppling his regime.  As the Iranian people are finding out and as the Chinese found in 1989, public outrage by itself cannot topple men with the guns who have no qualms about shedding blood.  It is also very easy, as in the case of Iraq, for governments used to manipulating public opinion to transfer the blame to the people implementing the sanctions.

The result is a propaganda coup for the regime (another example would be Castro’s dictatorship in Cuba that blames the yanquis for the failures of its socialist revolution) and a recruiting boon for fanatics like Al Qaeda who tap into the resentment caused by the suffering that is transmitted into living rooms across the Middle East.

However, as little of this is transmitted to American living rooms the perspective of the American public is shaped very differently than the rest of the world.

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For those who have not heard of this before, the scene below from the German-Austrian movie Der Untergang (Downfall) has been gleefully parodied since the movie was released in 2004.  A quick search of You Tube will display many such parodies of Bruno Ganz’s depiction of an unhinged Hitler at the moment he realizes the war is lost and as he lashes out at the Generals stuck with him in his bunker.  Even though the movie attracted some controversy for the somewhat sympathetic portrayal of some Nazi officers and for sanitizing the fate of many German women in Berlin after the Russians took the city, it is definitely worth seeing.

The clip below has a humorous take on the Scott Brown election, whether or not you accept the subtitled text or the riff on Obama.  Enjoy…

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It is not a pleasant start to the new year for Venezuela’s populist strongman Hugo Chavez.  With oil prices in decline there simply is not enough money for him to toss around for his pet domestic projects and to fund his rogues gallery abroad.  Economic trouble at home and rising crime are denting his popularity.

Then he commenced the year with a devaluation of the currency.   One suggested rationale was that it gave him more money to spend domestically to buy goodwill before the Presidential election (something his buddy Iran’s Ahmadinejad tried to do before rigging the elections).

But there are natural effects to such a move.  As Venezuelans worried that imports would double in price (and Venezuela is heavily reliant on them) they started shopping furiously.  So the next diktat went out to store owners warning them not to raise prices.  Now inevitably comes the next phase of nationalizing banks and supermarkets.

Venezuela is yet another country to be cursed with natural resources.  It makes it too easy for corrupt leaders to siphon off the money (Nigeria, Indonesia, Chad) or to blow it on populist largess (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela).  It is easy to sympathize with Chavez’s assertion that the oil wealth has been used to enrich a few, because it is true.  But rather than using the wealth to create sustainable avenues for growth in the future, he has squandered it on populist subsidies and quixotic support to Cuba and other dictatorships to tweak Uncle Sam’s nose.  Venezuela is now facing the effects of his mismanagement.  But with no viable opponent to his regime in sight yet, Venezuela’s caudillo is likely to be re-elected in the elections this fall.

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Jyoti Basu died this Sunday.  The nonagenarian had been ailing for some time.  The usual round of obituaries, paeans and critiques have poured in.  See here, here, here, here, here and here.  In 1977, the English educated Basu initiated the longest running elected rule by communists (which likely will draw to a close next year).  The common theme in the articles on Basu since his death generally refer to the following:

• His unusual length of tenure,
• The land reforms initiated in Bengal that broke the feudal hold on society,
• His secular outlook that saw few religious riots on his watch,
• And finally the historic moment in 1996 when he bowed to the command of his party’s politburo and turned down the prime minster’s job.

The more critical articles also refer to the industrial stagnation, if not regression, that occurred on his watch.

Basu in many ways is an overrated figure.  His importance is inflated by the collapse of all opposition parties in West Bengal, aided by the general unwillingness of the Congress party to challenge the reds on their home turf and the communists ruthless utilization of the instruments of state to quash dissent.  This is in stark contrast to the other communist bastion in Kerala, where Communist and Congress led coalitions alternate power with mind numbing regularity.

However, the untrammeled power Basu and his communist colleagues had locally, ultimately showcased the ideological bankruptcy and incompetence of the communist movement in India.

Land reform in Bengal was long overdue, and that early accomplishment marks the high water mark of communist rule in West Bengal.  Unlike Kerala, the other social indicators remain average.  The Bengali peasant is still poverty stricken, businesses have fled the state and Kolkata’s status as the cultural capital of India has long since been taken over by Mumbai.  The violent collapse of the communist party’s attempt to entice the Tata Motor Company to build a plant at Nandigram, symbolizes why businesses are not keen to enter Bengal.

The impact Basu would have had in the rejected prime ministership (he later cryptically referred to the rejection as a historic blunder) is also overrated.  Basu would have headed a ramshackle coalition united by the pursuit of power and a loathing of the Hindu nationalist Bharaitya Janata Party (subsequent events would show that many of the constituents of the coalitions valued power over their loathing of the BJP).  The coalition was supported from the outside by the just deposed Congress party which was smarting from its electoral humiliation and itching for the opportunity to force a new election.  It is hard to see how Basu’s tenure as prime minister would have been markedly different or longer than what actually transpired.  The BJP would have still made the necessary electoral adjustments and Basu’s mismanagement of West Bengal’s economy hardly supports the theory that any good governance on his part would have prevented the BJP’s ultimate rise to power.

The humbling of Bengal’s communists in India’s parliamentary elections last year has given rise to hope that their  33 year old grip on power may come to a close in the next state elections.  However, with the successor likely to be the mercurial populist Mamata Banerjee, it is hard to see West Bengal’s lot improving anytime soon.

Meanwhile, one of the last of India’s “gentlemanly” politicians of a bygone era has passed on, fortunate that he will not see the collapse of the creaky edifice he nurtured in West Bengal for so many years.

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