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DDV DOES DIPLOMACY: Master Hunk of the Rational Universe Dominique de Villepin is, according to Reuters, off to make a diplomatic tour of Africa. By an amazing coincidence (!) his itinerary will take him to Angola, Cameroon, and Guinea, the three African countries with seats on the Security Council.
I’ve noted earlier on JWN that Colin Powell’s failure to actually visit key countries, but to rely on phone calls instead, has been noted with annoyance around the world.
But what, I want to know, will the leaders of these three countries do if DDV’s people are proposing he visit their leaders at home on the very same day that George W. Bush issues his imperial summons that they visit him at his new Versailles in Crawford, Texas?
If Presidents Dos Santos, Biya, and Conte end up facing this painful scheduling dilemma, how might we expect each of them to react?
(By the way, jolly good luck to these leaders of extremely needy nations as they negotiate the very best deal they can get from the superpowers under the present circumstances. Here are some figures on “Life expectancy at birth” from the U.N. Development Program: Angola– 45.2 yrs, Cameroon– 50.0, Guinea– 47.5, USA– 77.0, France– 78.6.)
It would not be a walkover for the US! I don’t have the exact figures on comparative aid flows from France and the US to each of these three countries. (Nor do I want to suggest for a moment that aid flows are the only important factor here, though of course they are going to be one factor.) But France is no slouch as an aid donor. In 2000, it disbursed $4.1 billion in overseas development assistance (a figure of $80 per French capita), with 24 percent of that aid going to the “least developed countries”– a category into which both Guinea and Angola fall. That year, USA overseas development aid came to $10.0 billion– or $35 per American capita– with 20 percent going to least developed countries.
Beyond that, we know that Cameroon and Guinea are former French colonies that since independence have been tied into the web of “francophonie” that Paris has maintained especially strongly throughout Africa. So both governments probably have fairly long, close, and quite possibly appreciative relations with Paris. Angola is just emerging (we hope!!!!) from a really nasty civil war and desperately needs the kind of reconstruction aid that the UN and the Europeans are pretty good at– even if they’re still far from perfect– but is the kind of thing that really doesn’t grab Washington’s attention at all.
So I’m guessing that those factors, along with a little stroking from DDV, can keep Dos Santos, Biya, and Conte out of Washington’s grasp on the war vote. Certainly, none of these governments will be an easy (or cheap) pushover for the US warhawks.
But wait! Good news for the hawks! This just in! Albania’s going to contribute troops to the war effort! And so the coalition grows… As for the diplomatic effort in the Security Council, the war party still only has four members…. Thank you, Spain and Bulgaria!

CODE PINK RALLY REPORT: I confess I did not feel entirely in sync with the “celebratory, creative” approach that the feminist organizers from Code Pink For Peace had planned for their pro-peace events in DC yesterday. But Barbara Ehrenreich, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, and a raft of other great creative and dedicated women were scheduled to speak. And the timing was great– coming so close to Dubya’s final-final decision on going to war. (Has this been made yet? Good question. I like to argue that until we see the very first US cruise missiles launched, there will still be time for him to “stay the dogs of war.”)
But the organizers were asking us all to wear pink. Ugh.
I felt more in a somber, black-wearing mood. A mourning, Women-in-Black mood. So I dressed in black, but as a concession to the CodePinksters I rounded up some scraps of fuchsia fabric and tore them into makeshift scarves for myself, Barbara, and the other folks we were traveling to DC with. (Is there a fuchsia in this, I wonder? Oh, never mind.)
Well, the rally was great. The speakers were all tremendous. Nearly everyone, including the many brave guys who were there, was wearing something pink. Some of the “creativity” seemed a little out of place amidst the talk of war– except that the idea, as I understood it, was to celebrate life, to celebrate International Women’s Day, and to celebrate solid human values of caring and creativity in place of– and as antidote to– the gathering clouds of war.
The most welcome surprise among the speakers was “Granny D”, the 93-year-old peace activist Doris Haddock who just a few years ago walked across the US of A as her witness against war.
Call me an ageist if you will, but I’d never encountered Granny D in the flesh before; I’d only read a few news stories about her Peace Walk. So I guess I was expecting a dear, if still feisty and committed, “little old lady” with good pro-peace values whose main importance seemed to be merely her advanced age.
Well, that’ll teach me to under-estimate people in their 90s: she was an absolute pistol! She spoke out loud and clear with the most well-considered, succinct, and smart political advice I’ve heard anyone give in a long time. Her main emphasis? Focus like a laser on the November 2004 elections in order to turn things around.
So listen to your Granny, folks. You can find her here.
I estimate that the number of participants was between 15K and 20K. The 1.5-mile march from Malcolm X Park down 16th St. to the White House was uneventful. The original plan had been to “surround the White House”. That task used to involve making a cirumference around a couple of city blocks only. Now, given how far they’ve pushed out the WH security perimeter it involves making a human chain around a huge, multi-block chunk of that part of DC.
I’d say we more or less achieved it, but the organizational clarity of the event sort of got dissipated by that point. Some of the organizers were focusing on trying to negotiate entry into Lafayette Park for small numbers of participants– and there were a few arrests along the way there.
I’m hoping that those were some of the DC Police Dept’s “celeb arrests”, such as happened on a regular basis outside the South African Embassy there throughout the 1980s– you’d see Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, and whoever being photographed stepping into one side of a paddy wagon; and then within minutes they’d step out again as free men. Last fall, though, the DCPD turned very ugly against– was it the October antiwar demonstration? They herded people into parks, kept them there for hours, and then booked them without even– it now seems– giving them the required orders to disperse.
News coverage of yesterday’s events seemed surprisingly prominent on at least the evening’s ABC and CNN broadcasts. It looked to me, though, that the mainstream newsies just loved focusing in on the arrests and the small but ultra-vociferous presence of counter-demonstrators, rather than on the thousands of people who’d come from many parts of the country to take part in a peaceful act of anti-war witness.
What else is new?

DUBYA: PERHAPS NOT XANAX BUT VOICE LESSONS? The Washinton Post’s Tom Shales was one of the first to suggest that perhaps the android-like, affectless behavior of the Prez at thursday’s news conference was due to him being on some kind of anti-depressant medication. Today, the peerless Maureen Dowd picks up the theme, titling her perceptive column on the event, “The Xanax Cowboy.”
I have a different explanation to suggest, drawing on my recollection of Maggie Thatcher’s early months in office. As an aspirant to the PM’s office in No. 10 Downing St., she had been a pretty electrifying stump speaker, well able to rally the Conservative troops after the debacle of the end of the Heath Prime Ministership. But once she had become la suprema that same feisty expressivity seemed not to serve her well in her new role. She sounded, well, just plain shrill.
I was living and working in Beirut at the time, and the main way I kept up with the news of the ‘Old Country’ was through a small short-wave radio. When Maggie’s voice spoke on it in those early months, the tranny would jump around all my writing table with the vibes from her voice!
Then, suddenly, the vibes were gone. The tranny stayed still. Maggie had lost her shrillitude. And for a while there– until she discovered a slightly more resonant and Churchillian tone (which as I recall took some time)– she just sounded flat. Soon enough, the news came out in the British media that the PM had– at the urging of staff who’d been worried by the criticisms of her excess of expressivity– been taking voice lessons.
Well, we all know that Dubya, too, has been coming in for a lot of flak– especially from some foreign quarters– for the “feisty expressivity” he has displayed in some of his utterances over recent months. It is not beyond the bounds of reason that Karl Rove, Andy Card or other political handlers would have taken a leaf out of the great Lady Thatcher’s playbook and prescribed voice lessons as a remedy.
I read somewhere that before the “news conference” performance, the Prez asked for ten minutes to be alone to prepare himself. At the time, I had visions of him communing with the Almighty, and asking His (Her?) blessings on his upcoming venture in manipulating public opinion.
Well, I still think it’s entirely possible he did that. But maybe a few of those ten minutes were given over to the kind of breathing exercizes and other warmups that a voice coach would suggest.
You read it here first!

DUBYA, BLIX, BARADEI, AND THE ‘NIGER CONNECTION’: Last night we had the scary experience of seeing the Prez floundering, being evasive, and reiterating his intention to go to war regardless of what the U.N. might or might not do.
Today, we had the very professional presentations of Hans Blix and Mohamed el-Baradei to the Security Council. I loved Blix’s exclamation that “these are not toothpicks” that the Iraqis have been destroying, but real and potentially very damaging surface-to-surface missiles.
Blix made an eloquent plea for “some months” to give UNMOVIC a realistic chance to try to get its job done. But I found some of the details of what Baradei said absolutely intriguing. Baradei, of course, as head of the IAEA, deals solely with the nuclear side of things. Of which there is not a lot actively going on in Iraq these days. So what he and his part of the inspectors’ team have been chasing after have been reports that Iraq has been procuring various items that might be antecedent to resumption of their nuclear-weapons program.
He focused on three items in particular: those infamous aluminum tubes that we’ve heard so much about; some magnet-production components and facilities; and the “reports” of Iraqi purchases of potentially weapons-grade uranium from Niger.
Baradei patiently refuted nearly all these allegations. But regarding the so-called “Niger documents” he was scathing. He said his investigators had established that the documents on which the allegations had been based had turned out not to even look like regular Republic of Niger bills of sale at all; and the signatures on them did not relate to those of any Niger officials.
Do I smell a “Zinoviev letter” affair here? That was the infamous forgery that the British spooks had produced back in the mid-1920s, which purported to “prove” that Soviet Comintern head Grigori Zinoviev had been fomenting the labor unrest that was plaguing Britain in those years.
I’m not saying it necessarily the Brits who produced the alleged Niger documentation. But let’s face it, someone did. And whoever did it was knowingly misleading the inspectors, trying to drag the world closer to the brink of war. Or at the very least, sending the inspectors off on a wild goose chase that ate up their attention and resources for many months.
I think that we need to follow the story of the so-called “Niger documents” up aggressively. Who was behind them? Who gave them to Baradei? That’s one good place to start– and an item of info that I think we should require him to disclose. Though it might not be the end of this sinister trail.

NEVER MIND ‘NUCULAR’: … half of America mis-says that one. It’s “IAEA” that’s the real test of someone who knows what she’s talking about when it comes to weapons of mass destruction.
IAEA as in the International Atomic Energy Agency, a very important UN-linked body that’s the guardian of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, known as the NPT (not the NNPT; go figure).
Try saying “IAEA” in the middle of a sentence, clearly and with conviction, without skipping a beat. Find it hard? So did Dubya in tonight’s “media conference.”
So just what is the “IEAE” that he was telling us about, anyway? And why should we place any trust in this guy who looks like he’s pretending to be something that he ain’t– some kind of “expurrt” on weapons of mass destruction?
Face it, folks, Dubya’s in this ways over his head.

THE SAD OLD CANARD OF ‘CREDIBILITY’ (again): A blogger called Sean-Paul, who posts to The Agonist, has produced a four-part listing of the possible risks and rewards involved in the US invading or not invading Iraq.
The listing is interesting, though very provincial and US-centric. Sean-Paul seems to have given no thought to the idea that the US, as a country and as a citizenry, might actually have a huge interest in the robustness of the global system as a whole.
He also seems not to have much real clue at all about the dynamics of Middle Eastern countries, as evidenced by the list he gives of “possible rewards” of a U.S. invasion, most of which are pure pie-in-the-sky. (“Iraq becomes a cost free linchpin of US operations in the region,” etc.)
I don’t know who Sean-Paul is, and he doesn’t give us any real clues. What he reads like on the site is an earnest young man trying desperately to sound wise beyond his years. As when, in the first two of the “risks” he describes in “not invading”, come: “1. Loss of credibility–(Liberals too often deride this. It is a very serious issue. [Scratch chin here.]) 2. It would be seen as a defeat of the US and extremists would be emboldened.”
Firstly, just how again are these two items different from each other?
Secondly, the “credibility” argument is and always has been the last refuge of failing policies. “Credibility” is what any individual, institution, or government makes of it. The policies of the Bush administration over the past 25 months have not exactly built up much credibility with anyone at all, with the possible exception of Ariel Sharon. (Anyone remember April 4, 2002, when the Prez called on Sharon to “withdraw immediately” from the Area A portions of the West Bank and Gaza? They’re still there… Anyone remember Kyoto, or the ABM treaty, or a host of other issues on which Dubya squandered our country’s global credibility like there was no tomorrow. And now, it even seems possible that there may not be.)
“Credibility” is what warhawks finally end up huffing and puffing about when all rational justifications for their policies have disappeared. (Lebanon, 1983, for example. I know. I was there.)
Let’s face it, even now– though this current war has already started in some little dribbles and drabbles here and there, the Prez could still swing it to a halt if he wanted to. He is the Commander-in-Chief. And if he decided, after examining both all the options and his own consceince that he wanted to explore alternatives to war, he’d find thousands of capable and experienced people very eager to help him to do so.
He could “declare victory”, by saying that he really does want to give the U.N. and inspections a chance; by supporting stringent benchmarks such as those Blix is rumored to be proposing. He could note that it has been because of his own steadfastness that the inspections have shown the progress that they’ve shown already; he could invite leaders from around the world to join him in brainstorming on how to build a secure and conflict-free Middle East that is free from all weapons of mass destruction… (That would be a good goal to aim for, wouldn’t it?)
And many wonderful, capable people would scramble over each other to help Dubya climb down from this terrible limb of violence onto which he seems to have hoisted himself.
The way I see it, Ari Fleischer is such a very accomplished flack– and there are others there, too– that they could tell the world that this whole train of events has already strengthened the United States’ global credibility, so it’s now okay for the U.S. forces to shift to holding posture; and in a sense, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let’s hear no more about this hollow old argument of “credibility”. How “credible” will the policy and its authors look if the Prez allows this war to go ahead and the whole regional order in the Greater Middle East and beyond comes crashing down around our heads?
(A hint: Vietnam.)

‘TERROR TOURS’ OFFERED IN THE WEST BANK: The BBC has been reporting that “Jewish settlers are offering special ‘terror tours’ of the West Bank and Gaza, in which tourists will be trained to fire weapons and participate in mock fights with Arab militants.
Those who sign up for the four-day, $5,500 experience will “be taken on a helicopter tour of Palestinian ‘terrorist enclaves’ and be shown arms and suicide bomber belts seized by the Israeli army.” Amongst other attractions offered during the tour, organizer Jake Greenwald (a settler who immigrated to Israel from, guess where, the US of A) promised there would be, “talks by Israelis who took part in Israel’s military offensive in Jenin last April.”
Yes, that would be the same “offensive” during which Amnesty International and other investigators said Israel’s forces undertook actions that probably constituted war crimes. (Sharon refused to allow the UN’s specially mandated fact-finding team to visit the area to investigate.)
Greenwald’s whole project– for which he already claims to have some eager American customers– is grotesque and sad beyond belief. In addition to trading on the genuine misery of the Palestinians forced to scrabble for survival under the settlers’ jackboots, it also seems to trade obscenely on the whole genuinely-felt climate of fear experienced by many people in Israel and the United States… Ooh, terrorism, how divinely titillating! That unmatchable frisson of fear! Honey, shall we spend our vacation money on a “terror tour” in the West Bank this year?
As I said, obscene– and profoundly sad.

HONEYMOON IN FRANCE: Back in 1984, my newly-wed spouse and I were planning our slightly belated honeymoon. (The scond one, that was: the one without my father, my brother-in-law, and the two kids from my first marriage also tagging along.) No, this was to be the real thing. And being as how we are both deeply convinced Francophiles, it was going to be France…
But we wanted to do something completely off the beaten track. We wanted to rent a car and drive around to some little-known towns, sample the riches of regional cuisines, climb to the source of the Loire, see some neat places… you get the drift.
So we asked our friend and colleague was then the Middle East-watcher in the French Embassy in DC for his ideas on good places to go, and he was really most helpful and forthcoming. His name was Dominique de Villepin…
So now, there he is, Master Hunk of the Rational Universe: witty, urbane, devastatingly logical and with a much defter diplomatic hand than his current boss, Jacques “those East Europeans ought to stay silent” Chirac.
In a March 3 column in the Washington Post, David Pugnatious writes of DDV that, “While working as Chirac’s chief of staff, he wrote a well-reviewed history of Napoleon’s 100-day dash from Elba to the disaster of Waterloo. And he has just finished a thousand-page book that he describes as an ‘elegy’ to the art of poetry, whose galleys he proudly displayed in his sumptuous office at the Foreign Ministry on Saturday. In short, de Villepin is one of those modern Supermen who can get by on four or five hours of sleep a night, write books several hours a day, maintain an impressive private collection of African and Asian art, and run marathons — in addition to directing French foreign policy. He describes his many passions in the words of a Portuguese poet, as le devoir d’inqui