Send China to Burma

Dr. Steven Taylor noted earlier in the week that the SLORC junta in Burma (sorry, no Myanmar here) has agreed to receive aid but not aid workers.  Dr. T notes that this is par for the course in dictatorships:

One of the tried and true (and tragic) behaviors of hardline dictatorships is to reaction to internal disasters as if either they didn’t happen (something that is increasingly difficult to do these days) or to downplay the need for help from the outside (if not to reject it outright). It has to do with control (of information as well as what the population might learn) as well, I suspect, with embarrassment over the state of the country. No doubt there is a healthy dose of xenophobia thrown in for good measure.

The shroud being drawn across the disaster relief effort by the junta naturally creates a problem for donor countries, as there are zero guarantees that humanitarian aid will (a) go to the victims of Cyclone Nargis, (b) not be used politically by the government, and (c) can actually be delivered in a prompt and effective manner.

To an extent, the junta’s policy is understandable from the perspective of a hyper-paranoid autocratic elite which has almost no international friends and sees the crisis situation as a potential opening for outsiders intent on toppling the regime.  The human cost of this need for total control is difficult to estimate — surely it will add thousands to the final death toll from the storm — but SLORC likely looks to examples such as the North Korean famine as assurance that a hardline regime can remain in power despite massive loss of life.

So, what should the UN and the West do to make sure that relief aid can actually get to devastated Burmese communities?  They might want to call on China.

While an international pariah, SLORC, like the regimes in Sudan, Zimbabwe, and North Korea, has a significant ally in Beijing.  Westerners have thus far unsuccessfully tried to pressure China to change its friendly policies towards the Burmese government.  They ought to learn by now that China will always refuse to implement policies that might run contrary to the interests of one of its client states.  That said, while nothing will sever the Sino-Burmese relationship, the international community might be able to persuade China to put boots on the ground in Burma as part of the relief effort.  SLORC trusts China, after all, and is not likely to see Chinese relief workers as a security threat.

China might not agree to be the West’s proxy, but the country’s relatively recent history in providing relief operations suggests an openness to the idea.  Bringing Beijing on board would require illustrating the following benefits to Hu Jintao and his foreign policy hands:

• Leading a significant relief effort will provide good PR for the Chinese government in advance of the Olympics and in the wake of the Tibet riots.
• China, by distributing aid, could help stabilize Burma (and help SLORC stay in power).
• Western countries could provide the bulk of the material cost, and even some of the air- and sealift, leaving China with the cost of manpower, which is significantly less than Western manpower costs.

Many in the West will be left scratching their heads and wondering where the good side is in this proposal.  China, a sometimes-adversary, comes out ahead, while the SLORC emerge unscathed and Western countries foot most of the bill.  Yet, as we watch the news from Burma, we cannot underestimate the scale of the tragedy nor the urgency of the situation:  between 20,000 and 100,000 already dead, millions displaced, and tens of thousands more threatened by malnourishment, disease, and floodwaters.  This is a rare circumstance where the lesser of two evils is easy to determine.

The question is, will any leaders in the West or the UN step forward and ask China to go to Burma?

Jeremiah Wright, House Divider

A short video of a rant by Barack Obama’s pastor Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright has been making the rounds in the right-wing blogosphere.* While Wright has been on the radar screen of many an Obama critic for months now, it’s rare that we get to hear him in his own words. And what ugly words they are.

It’s troubling at first considering that Wright trots out the kind of religious identity politics that racist cult leader Louis Farrakhan and the black religious left made famous, but it moves from disturbing to ludicrous when Wright compares Sen. Obama to other blacks to illustrate how “privileged” Hillary Clinton is. Despite Wright’s laundry list to the contrary, Obama is half-white, the family wasn’t poor — and for that matter the senator himself isn’t poor — and while Obama was raised in a single-parent household, his was a uniquely international, multiracial childhood — one in which, again, contra Wright, acceptance came more naturally. To hear Wright speak, however, it sounds like Obama grew up the son of a welfare mother in the projects.

While sadly amusing, this may also be the more racist, more divisive aspect of Wright’s rhetoric, since instead of embracing and endorsing Sen. Obama as a welcome bridge between races and generations, Wright employs his own one drop rule and vulgarizes Obama into a common black man victimized by rich white men. No respect is paid to the reality of Obama’s white mother and the white grandparents who raised him, nor does Wright seem cognizant of the modern American cultural milieu, which has progressed to the point where a “black president” is not only possible but, if the predictions hold, likely.

Overall, Wright’s speech is divisive and nasty, and if I were Barack Obama, “preaching” like the above, taken with the fact that Wright said of Louis Farrakhan,

His depth on analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest.

and the fact that he further presented a “lifetime achievement” award to Farrakhan in late 2007

would be enough to drive me from Rev. Wright’s congregation. Not so with Sen. Obama, and his unwillingness to rebuke Wright — he merely says he doesn’t agree with all of Wright’s opinions — makes me think that the dream many have for a post-racial politics to emerge from the Obama candidacy is a false hope.

It further begs the question, who is the real Barack Obama?

Update:  Can you guess the uplifting phrase in Wright’s post-9/11 sermon?  How about “God damn America”?  Obama says this was just Wright trying to be provocative.  Pat Robertson’s PR guy better write this phrase down to use next time ol’ Pat opines on supposed Godly displeasure with His creations that leads to natural disasters.

* Liberals aren’t linking to it yet because they’re too busy complaining about McCain’s endorsement by Christian fundamentalist loon John Hagee. But John Hagee isn’t McCain’s pastor, and no amount of blogging by the left will prove that he holds sway over McCain the way Wright has influenced Obama.

Thought for the Day

Among international couples I’ve known here in China, two observations hold as the relationships develop:

• Either the Chinese partner becomes progressively better in his/her partner’s language (usually English), or
• The foreign partner becomes progressively better in Chinese.

Rarely do both partners improve their foreign language skills during the relationship.  Why?

Stereotypes with Chinese Characteristics

One classroom lecture that I’ve repeatedly used and refined during my time in China has been an exploration of student understandings of stereotypes and the propagation of stereotypes among the Chinese urban middle class. What stands out during the lesson is the degree to which some kinds of imagery — the Arab terrorist, the black athlete — have become so globalized that many Chinese sound exactly like their American counterparts when discussing people from different backgrounds.

I generally begin this lesson by defining the word stereotype and inviting students to offer stereotypes, positive and negative, of men and women. This makes things lively at the start, especially in classes with a strong mix of male and female students. From there we move on to stereotypes of people from different parts of China.

I asked the students to complete sentences such as the following:

• Dongbei people are …
• Beijing people are …
• Hong Kong people are …
• Xinjiang people are …

Not surprisingly, Dongbei people — in Tianjin at least — were painted in colorful but positive terms, but people in the capital were ripped on heavily, while those from Xinjiang came in for the most negative stereotypes (“monstrous,” “dangerous,” “terrorists”). This impression of Uighur people is worrying to me since, of all of China’s minority groups today, they have the greatest chance to face discrimination in society, and when stories like this one go flickering into the public consciousness, the stereotyping verges on becoming a permanent fixture in Chinese thought.

Returning to the lecture, one thing I added tonight was a group quasi-experiment in which the students were shown a series of photos and asked for their impressions. Since our reactions to the appearance of strangers can be influenced by the stereotypes we subscribe to, this was another way to gauge the prevalence of certain stereotypes among my students. That said, this wasn’t a truly scientific survey,* and I “rigged” things a bit when choosing the nine images shown in the collage below by making sure some photos were out-of-character for the person depicted:

These images are all famous people save one (the Sikh in the center left), and except perhaps for young Michael Jackson (top center), none of them are recognizable to most Chinese. What reactions did the students have?

• Ted Bundy (top left): “intelligent,” “businessman,” “lawyer”
• Michael Jackson (top center): “poor,” “good at sports”
• Gov. Bobby Jindal and family (top right): “happy,” “Middle Eastern,” “not American”
• Sikh man (center left): “Bin Laden,” “Arab,” “oil merchant,” “terrorist”
• Kristen Kreuk (center): “model,” “actress,” “mixed”
• Kim Jong-nam (center right): “rich,” “countryside person,” “taxi driver”
• Augusto Pinochet (bottom left): “Nazi,” “strong man,” “Japanese”
• Cindy McCain (bottom center): “businesswoman,” “serious,” “kind”
• Bobby Bowden (bottom right): “government official,” “intelligent,” “European”

To analyze the responses a bit, I created this segment of the lecture expecting the Sikh to catch most of the negative comments, since Westerners also mistake Sikhs for Muslim fundamentalist Arabs and thereby transfer negative stereotypes from Arabs to Sikhs. Furthermore, I deliberately included a friendly-looking Ted Bundy, so as to further underscore the point of the dangers of stereotyping, and the students fell for my “trap.” The other results are across the board, and the reactions to Bobby Bowden and Kim Jong-nam made me laugh. Lastly, while liberals may be heartened by my students’ reaction to Pinochet, China throws a wrinkle into the mix because being Nazi-like is not always negative here.

But that’s a subject for another post.

* A scientific survey would probably involve individual testing and ask respondents to simply note whether they had good feelings or bad feelings about the person they were looking at.

The Polish Lobby?

Adam Blickstein writes that the Clinton campaign found time to remember the Katyn Massacre — the Soviet mass murder of 20,000 Polish POWs during World War II — just before this week’s Super Tuesday II primaries. The campaign, naturally, made no attempt to connect the dots, but Blickstein and others note that the sizable Polish-American populations of Ohio and Pennsylvania (the latter state will feature in the next set of electoral contests) may have invited just such ethnic politicking.

This is not the first time American politicians have crafted foreign policy to appeal to Polish-Americans, of course. Reagan’s embrace of Pope John Paul II doubtless helped him make inroads in the Midwest, while President Clinton’s push for Poland’s membership in NATO in the mid-1990s was arguably influenced by domestic concerns.

As The New York Times reported in 1996,

White House officials tried to portray the speech [endorsing NATO expansion] as only partly campaign related, saying the President wanted to influence a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in December. The ministers are to set a date for a NATO summit meeting in late spring or summer that will select the first new nations to be added to the alliance and begin the process of negotiating their entrance.

But the officials also acknowledged that the President was delivering his speech in a part of the country with a sizable number of residents who emigrated from Eastern and Central Europe. And Mr. Clinton’s focus on ethnic voters was only underscored when he went from the speech to lunch at the Polish Village Cafe and ingested stuffed cabbage, pierogis and sauerkraut.

Together with the assault on Serbia in 1999, the eastward expansion of NATO was one of the foreign policy moves responsible for alienating the Russians from the US. Since our relationship with Russia should be more important than our relationship with Poland, this policy choice went against American national interest as defined by realists.

In light of the long-term linking of American foreign policy to Polish-American support for American politicians, no doubt Mearsheimer and Walt will be hard at work on The Polish Lobby after completing The Cuba Lobby, The Mexico Lobby, and The Armenia Lobby as follow-ups to The Israel Lobby.

Oh, no, wait, none of those other lobbies involve Jews. My bad.

Lowering Standards at The Atlantic?

I consider myself a fan of The Atlantic, but this post by James Gibney is simply disgusting (emphasis added):

John McCain and others often cite U.S. bases in Korea and Japan as a model for a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq. This rape case, which the Japanese authorities dropped because the family of the 14-year-old junior high student didn’t want to pursue charges, is a reminder of one of the less savory dividends of U.S. bases in your backyard. U.S. military personnel have been raping Okinawans for the last 60-plus years.

Soldiers have often had a bad track record with women, and Japan’s behavior during World War II is proof of that (even if the Japanese don’t admit it), but Gibney crosses the line between saying rape incidents are a problem that causes tension between the US, Japan, and Okinawa* and arguing American soldiers are predisposed to rape. By the Gibney standard, news stories like this should lead us to oppose efforts to send UN Peacekeepers to Darfur.

Gibney’s main point is to use the Okinawa rape case as an anti-Iraq War talking point, and he pushes his argument further beyond the pale by “admitting” in the next paragraph that not all American soldiers are sociopaths. There are numerous reasons against being Iraq, but our soldiers will rape the local women and some of our soldiers are sociopaths aren’t among them. Faulty reasoning got us stuck in Iraq, but bad faith arguments won’t get us out. James Gibney should be ashamed.

(h/t to Marc Danzinger, who is an Atlantic fan no more)

* Note that one of the reasons the Okinawans are so vigorous in protesting transgressions by American personnel is that many Okinawans consider themselves a separate people from the rest of the Japanese, so the Japanese government’s endorsement of the Okinawan deployment is seen as an extension of Japanese domination of the Okinawan people. This fact is rarely mentioned in media discussions of the US presence in Japan.

Andes Crisis Escalation

Chavez makes good on one of his threats and thus brings the Andes closer to war:

Venezuela’s military said it started sending 10 tank battalions toward the border and activated its air force and navy. Military analysts estimate such a mobilization could include more than 200 tanks.

Reuters reports that during a meeting with Ecuadorian President Correa, Chavez declared,

“Our movement is totally defensive, fortifying our border posts due to the threat. … They are war, we are peace[.]“

And freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

If Washington really wants to avoid a war in the region, they should encourage the Colombians to back down from their own extreme positions and not to follow Chavez’s lead.

On the Proper Use of Kryptonite

Frank Rich winds down an editorial damning GOP nominee John McCain with faint praise by noting (of Democratic contender Barack Obama),

What repeatedly goes unrecognized by all of Mr. Obama’s opponents is that his political Kryptonite is the patriotism he offers in lieu of theirs. His upbeat notion of a yes-we-can national mobilization for the common good, however saccharine, speaks to the pride and idealism of Americans who are bone-weary of a patriotism defined exclusively by flag lapel pins, the fear of terrorism and the prospect of perpetual war.

I first clicked through to the article after seeing this bit quoted approvingly to try and figure out what Rich was trying to say.

The problem with this turn of phrase “his political Kryptonite is the patriotism he offers in lieu of theirs” is that when we say X is somebody’s Kryptonite, we mean that X is his/her weakness. This is the standard usage since the phrase came into fashion during the 1990s, and thousands of examples can be found from Googling the phrase. As one can glean from the excerpt I quoted, though, Rich’s usage of the phrase goes against the actual meaning. He ought to have written, “Obama’s concept of patriotism is his opponents’ Kryptonite” or something along these lines. I am inclined to disagree with that assertion, of course, but at least that formulation would be correct.

Thus concludes my editorializing on the dangers of op-ed writers trying to sound hip.

Update:  Daniel Larison already noted Rich’s Kryptonite flub and has substantive analysis of the column as well.

The Hegemon’s Prerogative

Chris Waugh makes the following observation about global defense spending figures compiled by SIPRI:

America wins with a whopping 47.77%, UK comes a very, very, very distant second with 4.83%, France third with 4.61%, then 4.2% followed by China on 4.1%. Of course, these figures are not presented in numerical order, and there could be other countries that should be inserted in the gaps, but still: Do you see why I don’t take any American complaints about China’s defence spending even remotely seriously? Do you see why such complaints send my hypocrisy detector way off the scale and into rehab?

Chris, with all due respect, is both right and wrong in this analysis.

Firstly, America does spend too much money on national defense, roughly $420 billion in FY 2007, a number sure to rise in 2008, especially when taking into account defense supplemental spending, extra funds approved by Congress during the course of the year. The budget features a lot of bloat, especially in contracting and operations, and for years American Congressmen have made Pentagon spending a piggybank for pet projects.

What are Americans buying with their $400+ billion? While it’s fashionable to think that all of the Pentagon budget goes towards weapon systems, operations and maintenance is the biggest single chunk of the US defense budget, and when combined with combat pay expenses and procurement expenses to replace used equipment, it easily approached $200 billion — roughly half — of the 2007 defense budget. The War on Terror plus the Iraq and Afghan conflicts are responsible for most of the operations budget, and as most other nations have declined to deploy as many forces as the US, their operations budgets are noticeably smaller, which in turn makes the US defense budget loom that much bigger over the rest of the world.

To be fair, we cannot really compare the Chinese peacetime defense budget to the US wartime budget. But if we took most of operations and maintenance off the table, America is still spending over $220 billion a year, about five times more than the 2007 SIPRI estimate for China’s defense budget, $41 billion, and roughly four times China’s $60 billion budget for 2008. This still seems like a massive disparity, but let’s consider how many military theaters China and the US are active in, respectively. China’s primary theater of operations is Asia, with a sprinkling of deployments to protect Chinese interests in Africa. The US, conversely, has forces deployed globally, with major operations in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. If we did some ugly math and divided the US’ spending by 5 to account for each theater of operations, then the US would be spending roughly the same amount per theater as the Chinese are spending in a single theater.* And for reasons I will explain, the strategic scope of a country’s operations matter when evaluating their defense budgets.

Why do American policymakers get uppity about a 19 percent hike in China’s disclosed defense budget?** Because US policy, post-WWII, has always been to be the militarily dominant power in as many theaters as possible. NATO was used to bolster the US presence in Europe and overpower the Soviets, while the US mostly went it alone — with some British help — in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, while relying on Japan and South Korea for assistance and strategic positioning in East Asia (a role that may ironically be filled by Vietnam in the future). In more recent years, the Pentagon has downgraded its strategic plans from the ability to fight two major theater wars to fighting one major theater war plus a small conflict — i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan — but there’s always been a demand for enough materiel and troops to respond to any crisis, anywhere. From the perspective of the political scientist, this is the way the US performs the role of “offshore balancer” — the foreign power strong enough to prevent the outbreak of regional wars or to limit their spread. Others will see the US behaving as an imperial power, and there is merit to this argument as well, though in function the US is less a “dictatress to the world” than a global magistrate.

Returning to the main point, China is quickly achieving parity with the US in Asia, and if China continues to grow its defense budget at the current rate, then the US runs the risk of being outmaneuvered and outgunned in this corner of the world. If you are American, or a conservative-minded Japanese, South Korean, or even a nationalist Vietnamese, the prospect of China ascendant in Asia may prove troubling. If you are Russian, then you’re happy to see America’s designs thwarted in the short term but might worry about the security of the Russian Far East in the long run. If you are a center-left European, you are happy to see America begin to step down from the hegemonic stage, though you fear what would happen if America similarly disengaged from NATO. But if you’re like most people around the world, you probably think the US shouldn’t be a hegemon in the first place, so you’re likely to accuse the US of hypocrisy for demanding that China justify its defense spending increases.

Not surprisingly, I find myself in the first category of thinkers, though I have hope that economic links and America’s technological edge will enable a peaceful rise of China. I understand where critics like Chris are coming from, but it’s the hegemon’s prerogative to be jealous of its power. The US has a lot invested in the status quo, and she will not gently accede to a regional challenger unless China proves that it is less interested in upsetting the balance than in preserving the system for mutual benefit.

* Few would assert that the Chinese have designs on a global military empire, but all signs point to a Chinese desire to be the regional hegemon of Asia.

** Always bear in mind that this is the budget we know about and probably not the entire budget.

Chavez: Jaw-Jaw or War-War?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has long been a de facto ally of the leftist Colombian FARC guerillas, and with the news that Colombia killed FARC’s no. 2 man Raul Reyes in cross-border raids on FARC encampments in Ecuador this weekend, it’s not surprising that Chavez’s talk has moved from advocacy to threats. Not surprising, but certainly troubling.

Reuters reports:

“Mr. Defense Minister, move me 10 battalions to the frontier with Colombia immediately, tank battalions. The air force should mobilize,” Chavez said, adding he will bolster his military’s presence along the 1,400-mile (2,200-km) border.

“May God spare us a war. But we are not going to allow them violate our sovereign territory,” the ex-paratrooper added on his weekly TV show.

“Mr. Defense Minister, move me 10 battalions[.]” What kind of elected leader talks like this? Even Chavez’s hero Fidel, for all his faults, had a certain gravitas in the midst of bluster. Not so with Chavez, whose dangerous buffoonery continues as follows:

“This is something very serious. This could be the start of a war in South America,” Chavez said. He warned Colombian President Alvaro Uribe: “If it occurs to you to do this in Venezuela, President Uribe, I’ll send some Sukhois”-Russian warplanes recently bought by Venezuela.

He called Uribe “a criminal” accusing him of being a “lapdog” of Washington saying “Dracula’s fangs (are) are covered in blood.”

The slaying of Reyes and 16 other guerrillas, Chavez said, “wasn’t any combat. It was a cowardly murder, all of it coldly calculated.”

“We pay tribute to a true revolutionary, who was Raul Reyes,” Chavez said, recalling that he had met rebel in Brazil in 1995 and calling him a “good revolutionary.”

“The Colombian government has become the Israel of Latin America,” an agitated Chavez said, mentioning another country that he has criticized for its military strikes. “We aren’t going to permit Colombia to become the Israel of these lands. … Uribe, we aren’t going to permit you.”

“Someday Colombia will be freed from the hand of the (U.S.) empire,” Chavez said. “We have to liberate Colombia,” he added, saying Colombia’s people will eventually do away with its government.

The backdrop for all this saber-rattling is the ongoing economic turmoil in Venezuela, which has seen store shelves stripped bare despite a global oil boom that ought to leave Venezuela flush with cash. While Chavez remains more popular than he should be, the economic crunch has caused setbacks for his so-called “Bolivarian revolution,” the most prominent of which was the rejection of constitutional changes that would’ve allowed Chavez to run for president repeatedly. (He is currently term limited.)

Given the situation, the threats to use force against Colombia resemble a classic case of diversionary use of force in a democracy.* Many foreign policy scholars have asserted that elected leaders may turn to using military force during periods of low popularity. If successful, the leaders may be rewarded with higher approval ratings (e.g. President George H.W. Bush after the Gulf War), a change in the public’s focus away from negative topics (e.g. President Clinton’s Sudan bombings during the Monica Lewinsky scandal), and increased political capital to use domestically (e.g. President George W. Bush during his first term). If unsuccessful, the leader is likely to lose the next election.

In Chavez’s case, bellicose rhetoric may be all for show, but with the end purpose of heightening nationalist sentiments. By talking about war but not actually fighting, he may benefit from a “rally round the flag” effect in the population, increasing the public’s enthusiasm for his socialist agenda. The real danger here is that Colombia and Ecuador could also engage in military threats for the sake of domestic benefits, with the end result being that one or more of the parties to the dispute might fail to take Churchill’s advice that jaw-jaw is preferable to war-war.

* Though Chavez behaves like a dictator, Venezuela isn’t a dictatorship. Yet.

Update: The Colombian side is doing its share of upping the rhetorical ante:

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said the International Criminal Court should try Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for “genocide” for allegedly financing FARC, listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union. He cited documents in laptops Colombia says were recovered at the jungle camp that apparently refer to a $300 million Venezuelan payment.

[...]

At a U.N. disarmament meeting in Geneva, Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos claimed the FARC were trying to acquire radioactive material that could be used to make “dirty bombs.”

Without providing details, he said the evidence was found two computers found with Reyes. Colombian officials said Monday that investigators found documents suggesting the rebels had bought and sold uranium.

These charges come close to a casus belli, and Colombia ought to come forward with all of the information it has and allow independent observers to verify the accuracy before taking any action. While I wouldn’t put aiding the FARC past Chavez, the insinuation here is that Chavez has indirectly aided the FARC in its pursuit of a dirty bomb, and it seems just as over-the-top as Chavez’s statements.

Farewell, Bill

William F. Buckley, Jr. is dead at 82. He leaves behind a tremendous volume of work and a legacy of penetrating thought and refined debating. His many accomplishments include founding National Review, hosting the public affairs show “Firing Line,” and denouncing the John Birch Society and the paranoid fringe of the American right wing. Through his magazine he gave American conservatism a voice, and by repudiating the Birchers, he helped bring harmony to that voice, bringing the conservative movement into the mainstream. Consequently, it’s not a stretch to say that without Buckley, there may have been no Reagan revolution.

Though he certainly energized the GOP with his beliefs, Buckley was, unlike some on the right, a conservative first and a Republican second. As he began his slow walk down from the stage around the time Reagan left the White House, no single figure emerged to take his place. Newt Gingrich made a stab at it, but his own eccentricities brought him down. Grover Norquist has been too singularly obsessed with “starving the beast” to be a serious thinker in the Buckley mold. Rush Limbaugh, even at the height of his popularity, has been an entertainer first and foremost, and never intended to fill Buckley’s shoes. Finally, Karl Rove is in many ways the anti-Buckley: Republican first and conservative second.

In closing, Buckley’s passing is a sad time not only for conservatism but also for liberalism, since he followed a tradition of intellectual commentary that engaged opposing viewpoints in good faith through dialogue and argumentation, something our new generation of American dogmatists seems incapable of doing. And it is precisely because of this lack of engagement that bold new ideas on the left and right are few and far between. Yet conservatives should take heart: Bill Buckley is gone, but he left his shoulders to stand on, and if only they climbed up, they could see so far.

Here is a Charlie Rose special on William F. Buckley, Jr. from last year:

More thoughts on Buckley’s passing from around the web (to be updated as they they come in):

• Rod Dreher
• James Joyner
• The Corner (full of posts — just go there)
• Kevin Drum (he has no actual commentary, but his commenters go overboard in making my point from paragraph three)
• John Podhoretz
• Rick Perlstein via Henry Farrell
• Tyler Cowen
• The Economist
• Jacob Sullum
• Radley Balko
• Stephen Bainbridge
• Jonathan Martin
• Ilya Somin (who mentions Buckley’s unfortunate racial politics during NR’s formative years but weighs it against other accomplishments)
• Brad DeLong (who quotes a post on Buckley’s racial politics, a subject DeLong has blogged about before, and also quotes a post on Buckley’s ability to change)
• Matthew Yglesias
• Ilya Shapiro
• Andrew Sullivan, who also gives us Buckley vs. Noam Chomsky
  

Biographer Sam Tanenhaus (h/t Ross Douthat) remembers Buckley as he responds to reader’s questions on the New York Times Papercuts blog. It’s worth quoting for the observations on race and for a strange anecdote on Buckley and the counter-culture. First, on Buckley’s progressive philo-Semitism and support for segregation:

Q: I understand that in the 1960s Mr Buckley publicly backed Southern segregationists even though he crusaded against anti-Semitism. How did he reconcile this difference in his own mind? Did he ever formally renounce or apologize for his backing of the segrationists? —John Fuller

A: In the 1950s Buckley did indeed support segregationists in the South but later changed his views. He wept when he learned of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black children. Later he became an admirer of Martin Luther King.

And then the weirdness:

Q: William F. Buckley famously admitted to having smoked pot at least once on his boat outside U.S. territorial waters. Did he continue to smoke it after trying it? What if anything did he say about the subject? —Rich Turyn

A: If so, only seldom. But Buckley was much piqued by the counter-culture. He recently told me an amusing anecdote on this general subject. In the 1970s, Buckley and one of his mentors, the political thinker James Burnham, decided they would indulge in some current vices by smoking pot and then watching the sex-drenched film “I am Curious — Yellow.” The pot was procured by Bill’s chauffeur. It was a good plan — or seemed so, except they made the mistake of drinking alcohol first. This blunted the effects of the pot, and they both fell asleep during the film.

Clearly, the teen comedy side of Bill Buckley deserves to be explored in future biographies.

Editing note: The DeLong link write-up was originally negative, but has been edited to reflect subsequent posting by DeLong.

Lost Treasures and the Law

Besides mass-murderer and despot, we might need to add “world’s biggest art thief” to Joseph Stalin’s list of epithets. While we’ve known for years that the Soviets stole art from Germany that was originally expropriated from European countries by the Nazis, the exact scale of the theft and value of the stolen artwork hasn’t been made public.

An editorial in The International Herald-Tribune notes (h/t The Marmot’s Hole) that “From Russia,” a new art show in London, will feature these lost masterpieces on the proviso that no action will be taken to return the art to its rightful owners. So how much is this art worth?

What is at stake is approximately 10 to 15 percent of the world’s great art treasures that were well catalogued in 1939, but disappeared from sight at the conclusion of World War II.

That was the subject of a recent conference at the Harvard Law School, “Spoils of War vs. Cultural Heritage: The Russian Cultural Property Law in Historical Context.” Experts who attended agree that Russia is hiding works valued at $10 billion to $15 billion, perhaps even more[.]

The Russians assert a right to possess the art as a “spoil of war,” and have even passed a law to this effect, but according to the author, Allan Gerson, such claims are illegal:

But even assuming that Russia has a valid claim for restitution-in-kind on the grounds that what it possesses offsets the plunder of the Soviet Union by the Nazis during World War II, this argument cannot justify retention of private property.

The 1998 Russian law draws an exception for private property of victims of the Holocaust and those whose property was taken as part of the Nazi persecutions based on race, religion, or ethnic identity. But there have been no claims by Holocaust survivors or their families for the simple reason that Russia has not come forth with an accounting of what it possesses.

Moreover, beyond victims of the Holocaust, there is no justification – and the international law community is unanimous on this point – for confiscation of any privately held art property. Its continued retention is simply unlawful. Actions by museums that profit from exhibiting these works and countries that accept such exhibitions are complicit in enabling Russia to hold on to stolen art.

The immediate thought I had was that, in addition to the laws cited by Gerson, the legality of the art seizures could also be addressed in part by looking at the terms of German reparations following World War II. Was it legal at that time for the Soviets to take properties not specified as restitution or are the seizures extralegal according to terms agreed on by the Allies and defeated Axis powers?

A larger point looms in all of this. The loss of cultural treasures following conflict, and the need to reclaim them, seems more relevant today after the looting of Iraqi Museum and the secession of Kosovo, with the former an ongoing mission for archaeologists and international police alike, and the latter a new and pressing concern, as hundreds of important Serbian cultural sites face the prospect of annihilation or no hope of reconstruction* if the the new Kosovar government fails to restrain militants in the Albanian population.

In light of these situations, the Russian art dispute, as well as the Taliban’s attempt to “cleanse” Afghanistan of of its Buddhist past, perhaps the world community should work together to add some legal teeth to UNESCO’s mission to preserve our common cultural heritage. The WTO could similarly be involved, with allowances for trade-based punishments in cases of expropriated cultural treasures. For instance, if the Chinese discovered that, say, the French were holding on to Chinese artifacts, then China would be allowed to raise tariffs against France until the artifacts were returned.

* Consider this list of Orthodox churches destroyed or damaged in Kosovo since NATO’s occupation began in 1999. Will they be lost forever?

Smart URIs in Comment Forms?

Many blogs have taken to posting notices to remind commenters to use HTML to include URIs in comments rather than simply typing or pasting the full URI out in the comment box.  (For example, read the comment form at Outside the Beltway.  See also a long post on the subject at Balloon Juice.)  This is because most blogs designs feature fixed-width comment areas that “break” if the URI is too long.

Obviously, it’d be best if the commenters did use HTML when posting links, but many won’t, because most Internet users remain HTML-illiterate.  The worst way to handle this problem is to put a hold on posting all comments with a URI included and manually edit each comment to make the links correct.  Another way around the problem is to make the comment form a WYSIWYG box, thus making inserting URIs as painless as possible, but doing so increases server load, especially for highly-trafficked blogs.  A better option, which I’ve been thinking about after a couple months of miniblogging on Twitter, where short URIs are a must, would utilize the shortened URI feature of TinyURL!, Snurl, or similar services.

I got to thinking:  WordPress and Movable Type already convert simple characters to special characters after we post — two hyphens become an em-dash, straight quotes become curly quotes, and so on — so why not have “smart URIs”?  The blogging application could catch the presence of URIs, check their character length, and then automatically convert all URIs over a certain length (e.g. 25 characters) to a shortened URI using an API from one of the short-URI web applications or a custom-built app.  Ideally, the blog would combine these short URIs with a link previewing feature so that no one gets suckered into going to a non-worksafe URI, making the links created truly smart.

If someone has already done this as a plugin, then great.  But it really should be a standard feature of WordPress and Movable Type in the future.

How Does One Say Troll in Albanian?

My post on Kosovo invited thoughtful commentary from “John” (74.72.91.158), who shares the namesake of my favorite Albanian but apparently not his sense of humor. Among other things, it convinced me that removing my comment policy from the sidebar was a mistake. As for what John actually wrote, I’m not going to litter my comment database with his “writing,” but I have reprinted the entire comment below.

John begins,

Kosova has never been Albanian dick?

At first I wondered if John was trying to call Kosovo the male member of Albania, then I realized he just forgot a comma. For his efforts, we’re sending John a complimentary copy of Eats, Shoots, & Leaves.

But wait, there’s more–

Kosovars have been there 5000 years ahead of the time Serbs came from Mongolia.

Two things here: first, in the words of Robert Plant, it really makes me wonder, when did 5,000 years become the gold standard for historical legitimacy? Those of us in Asia have heard it from Korean and Chinese nationalists for the last decade, so perhaps there was a secret meeting of hypernationalists from around the world in the late 90s — a sort of Davos for Evil — that encouraged them to all start using the words “5,000 years” in their propaganda. Anyways, it will come as news to most historians that there was anything like a “Kosovar” (read: Albanian) identity 5,000 years ago or that the Serbs came from Mongolia. (The Slavic peoples were historical victims of the Mongolians, not Mongolians themselves.)

This brings me to the second point: the ruthless way that both sides have sought to “orientalize” their enemies. For example, on the Serb side we hear such rhetoric as recognizing Kosovo “grant[s] new legitimacy to centuries of Ottoman violence,” thus making the Albanians Turks-by-association. John’s attempt to smear the Serbs as Mongol interlopers is, I suspect, a popular meme on the Albanian side, yet just as ridiculous. Though both sides are ultimately wrong, in this fight the Serbs may have the stronger side of the argument, since the Albanians really do have a link to the Muslim invaders of the region. (I eagerly await John’s next comment where he proves that “Mohamed” and “Ibrahim” have been Albanian names for 5,000 years.)

Returning to John’s correspondence, he gives us this little non-sequitir:

Do you think the whole world reads the history with your ass eyes?

I’m not sure what “ass eyes” are, but if plastic surgeons can give Asians double eyelids, they can surely correct my condition. Note that John’s use of “the history” suggests English is his second language, which, given that his ISP is in New York, makes me rethink my liberal stance on immigration.

We are left with John’s parting shot:

Don’t try to teach the world how to read idiot!

I don’t know how to read idiot but I can read English and some Chinese. Oh, wait…

Kosovo’s Dangerous Statehood

When most Americans are introduced to the international media’s chosen narrative about Kosovo, that of ethnic Albanians overcoming oppression and securing their right to self-determination, they are likely to feel proud that America served as midwife to the birth of the newest country in the world. They are no doubt doubly proud to see all the American flags being waved by jubilant Kosovar Albanians . Wow, they must think, here are some Muslims who actually love us for a change. On top of this, some Serbs had to come along and burn the US Embassy in Belgrade in response to the Kosovar independence vote, thus cementing the perception that America has truly been on the side of the angels in the Balkans.

My suppositions may seem exaggerated, but they have some basis in fact. The backstory of Clinton’s war in Kosovo was that of America returning to the heart of Europe to defeat a new, would-be Hitler — Slobodan Milosevic. After Milosevic’s forces retreated from the province and the bombs stopped falling in Belgrade, the story of Kosovo quickly disappeared from public consciousness. The media subsequently downplayed such developments as ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Albanian side after the war, since that would have complicated the black and white politics of the Balkans. Still, Kosovo came roaring back to the front pages this week, and it seems many young Americans still subscribe to the storyline first drafted in the 1990s.

Just consider the results of this ABC News/Facebook poll on the subject. 54% of the respondents are between the ages of 18 and 24.

While at first I was going to chalk this result up to the overexuberance of Obama supporters who flood Facebook polls, support for Kosovar independence in the poll is in fact broad across the ideological spectrum. (A caveat: the Facebook polls do not give statistics to separate American Facebook users from foreign Facebook users, so there’s a chance, however slight, that anti-Serb foreigners could be rigging the poll.) If accurate, this poll can only mean that the media has one again downplayed the risks of supporting the Kosovar Albanians in favor of a feel-good morality play. But those risks are real, and we have only begun to feel the effects.

The most immediate fallout from Kosovo’s vote on Feb. 17 is the mortal blow dealt to the project of Westernizing Serbia proper. Paradoxically, this means that American policy, insomuch as it encouraged Kosovar independence, has utterly undermined American policy, insomuch as it supported Serbian liberalization.  After all, the US and the European powers had several key goals at war’s end: first, removal of Milosevic and his nationalist clique, and second, the cultivation of liberal values in Serbia, leading perhaps to the ultimate goal of Serbian accession to the European Union. Unfortunately, after the Kosovar vote, the Serbian tilt towards the West has ended for the foreseeable future and Pan-Slavic ties between Serbia and Russia have strengthened considerably. As Serbia’s patron, Russia can be counted on to block Kosovo’s integration into the world community, contributing to the possibility that Kosovo will be a failed state in the years to come. Beyond these troubles, there remains a very real possibility of a new war in the region.

One would have hoped that the West had learned its lessons after statebuilding experiments in Iraq and Yugoslavia — two historical fictions held together by the centripetal force of dictatorship — but our present situation suggests otherwise. Kosovar statehood, like the British creation of Iraq and the Euro-American creation of Yugoslavia, is a perfection sought at the expense of the good. Our loss will come in the form of the dangerous precedent established by the West in Kosovo, which threatens to embolden a myriad of separatist factions around the world, all of which have clamored for a state of their own, yet who, until now, have lacked the legal and political standing to make their desires a reality. However, by recognizing Kosovo, the West has unwittingly aided these factions by rewriting the rules of statehood.

Let’s now look at how the West has decided in favor of statehood for Kosovo and what that means to the rest of the world. To begin with, Kosovo meets only a few of the traditional requirements for statehood. Points in favor of Kosovar statehood include the fact that province is territorially contiguous and internationally recognized by the United States and most — but not all — of the European Union. The Palestinians will tell you that the former is a necessary but not sufficient condition for statehood. The latter, while a classical rule of international politics, is a matter of relativity; Taiwan certainly functions like a state despite the fact that few countries dare recognize it as such.

Points against Kosovar statehood are numerous and include the fact that Kosovo, in a Weberian sense, does not have a monopoly on the use of force; the fact that the territory is not economically independent from Serbia, or, in the place of Serbian ties, Western aid; the fact that the present-day population of Kosovo is the product of a relatively recent demographic shift and not a “permanent” situation; and the fact that Kosovo qua state has no prior historical reality. Taking these points one by one,

• the Weberian criticism is the weakest, since Kosovo has, since the declaration of UN Resolution 1244, continued to be administered by NATO and the UN, and the Kosovar government has had no chance to exercise its full powers. As such, Kosovo’s stability in the absence of foreign presence remains a giant question mark.
• Next, the poor Kosovar economic situation will necessitate either long-term support from Western powers, thrusting Kosovo into a semi-colonial situation, or else invite economic union with Albania. Neither of these options is good for Kosovar sovereignty, and a federal arrangement with Serbia would have been more conducive to economic growth and regional stability
• Moving on, rather than being Albanian all along, Kosovo has become Albanian thanks in part to internal migration within the former Yugoslavia and World War II era Nazi policies which saw Kosovar Serbs expelled en masse and replaced by Albanian allies of the Nazi regime. Admittedly, some in the United States may be bold enough to argue that recent demographic changes deserve to be honored by new political arrangements, but few Americans would support this logic being applied to the benefit of Mexicans living in the American Southwest.
• Lastly, the biggest strike against Kosovar statehood is that it has never historically been its own country. For hundreds of years it was either controlled directly by the Serbs or by the Ottomans (who controlled the Serbs). Unlike East Timor, Kosovo wasn’t an independent territory violently annexed by its neighbor. Nor was Kosovo part of historical Albania seized by the Serbs the way Israel seized the Sinai Peninsula. Yet historians and the media have worked together to create the fiction of Kosovar nationhood since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and like the story of demographic change noted above, the political history of Kosovo is rarely discussed in the Western media, much to the detriment of the public and decisionmakers alike.

Given that many of the strongest rationales for Kosovar statehood are nonexistent, Western foreign policy elites have had to invent new reasons to make Kosovo an independent country, and it’s these reasons that pose the greatest dangers to piece.

First, there is the idea — which is seemingly an outgrowth of identity politics — that ethnic homogeneity within a particular territory is enough to justify separatism. That is to say that if a country’s population is 85% group A and 15% group B, but 90% of group B is concentrated within a single enclave, then that enclave has the right to declare itself a state. Many people will accept this idea at face value without considering what it means. If, for example, group B is distributed throughout several small enclaves within a country, it may decide to engage in ethnic cleansing for the sake of unifying those enclaves and earning the “right to statehood.” In effect, this is what the Kosovar Albanians did by pushing out as many Serbians and Montenegrins as they could from 1999 to 2008. Although self-determination is a cherished right, many Westerners take for granted the fact that other cultures do not share our belief that our right to self-determination ends where another man’s face begins.

Second, it is suggested that the Kosovar Albanians be given a state thanks to their years of oppression at the hands of the Serb majority. This is of a piece with the Serb and Orthodox belief that Kosovar independence is another punishment visited upon Serbia for Milosevic’s misbehavior. (And that the US is furthermore an “enemy” of Orthodox peoples.) This idea is not objectionable outright — it is, after all, a basic tenet of Zionism and therefore a founding principle of the state of Israel — but it begs the question of just how long and how severe the oppression must be to warrant the creation of a new state as the remedy. (When the oppression happened is also an important factor to consider. Is there a statute of limitations on such grievances?) If applied equally, this principle would lead to a splintering of countless states in the international community, not to mention emerge as a grave threat to the very American concept of pluralism, which addresses the issue of oppression through the rule of law.

Lastly, many Western observers and diplomats argued that Kosovo deserved to become a state because it wanted to. (That any parties could object was inconceivable, inconceivable!) This makes sense after a fashion. If you were a diplomat tasked with bringing peace to the region, Kosovar independence would appear to be an appealingly simple solution to a complex problem, and so, like the doctor who encourages amputation instead of chemotherapy in every case of cancer, allowing Kosovar Albanians such an extraordinary degree of self-determination was the easy way for the West to get out of the Balkan morass. What they don’t take into account, though, is how exactly these three new rationales for Kosovar independence will resonate outside of the Balkans.

Starting with the ethnic Russian militants in Georgia’s Abkhazia and Ossetia regions and continuing with DPP rabble-rousers in Taipei, the recognition of Kosovo has emboldened separatists who will attempt to leverage these new standards of statehood to their own advantage. We close now with a brief survey of several internal conflicts worldwide and a look at how they will be affected by the Kosovo precedent.

As the table suggests, the independence of Kosovo stands to have a strong impact on India should the Kashmiri Muslims coalesce into an effective separatist group. Likewise, the Tamil Tigers will have new strategies in their war for statehood and Tamil nationalists in India’s State of Tamil Nadu might follow suit. Overall, however, Kashmir is the most dangerous territory since, besides an internal conflict, it could lead to a regional conflagration between Pakistan, India, and China.

For its part, China will probably be minimally affected, though Xinjiang “terrorist/separatist” groups will remain a factor, and in general, China will stay “gravely concerned” about Kosovar independence. Taiwan could declare itself independent tomorrow but such a move would only further isolate Taiwan rather than invite the full embrace of the international community.

Like Taiwan, Chechen independence would likely go unrecognized owing to the resurgent strength of Russia within the international system. That doesn’t mean, however, that militants wouldn’t look to Kosovo for inspiration and begin another round of fighting.

As it stands, the Russian-dominated regions of Georgia, the Muslim regions of Mindanao in the Philippines, the Spanish Basque Country, and Kurdistan have the greatest potential to erupt into conflict. These conflicts might be civil wars and/or increased terrorism in the Philippines and Spain or they might be full-scale regional conflicts, such as a Russo-Georgian war on behalf of independence for Abkhazia and Ossetia. And if Iraq fails to make significant progress towards a stable government in the coming years, the Kurds will be extremely tempted to take the Kosovar route, and the West — specifically the US — will have to dangle a very large carrot to prevent Iraq from fragmenting.

In conclusion, as nationalist groups around the world begin to learn and apply the lessons of Kosovar independence to their own irredentist and separatist claims, they will not only renew their conflicts with increased vigor but also force the West into a corner. Will we take the hypocritical position of creating one set of rules for Kosovo while requiring other regions to play by the old rules? Will we encourage a thousand democratic flowers to bloom, or will we recognize the danger state fragmentation poses to world peace? Advisers to the next president should take a long, hard look at the Kosovo situation right now, because what they might be seeing is the next president’s war.