Just World News with Helena Cobban

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.
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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