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mercredi 21 mai 2003
 

With my apologies ... and thanks. Apologies for leaving this here for hours as a partly unedited mess. In the final phase of writing, I had major connection glitches. And thanks to Francis for some help with the "top shelf". He doesn't read the stuff, of course, but he knew just where to look. Some pix from 'La Poudre aux Rêves'. Not the American dream...)

offensiveI usually direct my cordial contempt for some American "thinking", particularly by the semi-elected regime in and around the White House, at the politicians and greediest capitalists. Just as I've made clear that few politicians anywhere have much respect from me.
Targetting a people for the acts of their rulers is strictly a "no-no".
Some rules are made to be broken.
There are moments when my patience with Americans as an alien species runs short. It's a British politician, Tam Dalyell, with whom I breathe fire in agreement about some American manners (for those who don't know of this Labour veteran, Wikipedia has a more extensive, link-rich, warts-and-all bio).

While acknowledging the gravity of his allegation, controversial dragon Dalyell already wants Tony Blair "branded as a war criminal".
I don't know about Bush. The devious team behind the part-puppet president took pains, as we knew back in March, to be sure a few buddies would join them in refusing to recognise the new International Criminal Court in the Hague.
This was part of long-prepared plans for the invasion of Iraq, along with screwing up any effective WMD search by UN inspectors quite as efficiently as "brother-enemy" Saddam.

What aroused my wrath was a blunt statement by Dalyell about some US troops in Iraq who "behave like yobs". Tam made a very good point. While renowned for occasional hooliganism, even perfidious Brits rarely turn it into a military virtue when it suits them. They also made more of an effort over hospitals and other vital services. I heard an Iraqi doctor weep at what US troops allowed to happen.
It's conceivable that some of those troops were like their great grand-dads who arrived in the trenches: farmboys with scarcely a notion of geography, let alone politics, simply doing their bit for freedom, democracy and the Stars and Stripes. And we Europeans do owe their forebears a great deal.

As it becomes dimly apparent that while the "secret stashes" news regarding the Baghdad museum is less clearcut than the harshest critics of pillage charged at the time, the US army, let alone Washington, has much more explaining to do.

Dalyell's comment came in a Commons debate Wednesday about a subjects dear to his heart, the ancient ziggurat of Ur (Hansard) ... and reports of a "paint job" by the kind of technically brilliant idiots who had sprayed "friendly fire" almost as freely. He'd already told the House of a family tie to this (and to the people who "set up Kuwait) in 1992.
Another charge against farmboy "yobs" comes in separate news reports of a fair chance that American soldiers are happily pinching stones from another old monument for an ad-hoc airbase.

zzz

'mine too!'At AFP, news flies in from bureaux worldwide which never gets past us on into the wider world. Obviously. Risky claims, especially "conspiracy theories", must be checked and counter-checked. If the sources aren't good enough, then we'll spike them.
This can be a pity, because I've seen many more - or less - believable tidbits about the loathsome way in which Washington's louts and their multinational backers are slowly building a "new world order" for the rest of us, which revolt me. Sometimes I can't help flashes of anger at "ordinary American folk" who buy all the bullshit.

My outlook has sadly changed since on March 7, I wrote Anti-American sentiment? Mais non! Why the hell not? Since those tough talking days, I've now seen film of a smiling Bush, even when the grin on his face has little to do with what the man may be reading. People who not only believe the spin but flood the web with stale stereotypes and prejudiced nonsense, if not ill-digested lies, about France and old Europe have begun to get on my tits (a view the young lady shares).

I could make a good job of developing an anti-US bias were I compelled to read such rubbish and didn't work in a multi-national environment where it's easy to make friends with bright Americans across a broad political spectrum. I really enjoyed helping to build TS with other "founders", all but one of these American. From richly varied professional backgrounds, of different ages, interests and outlooks, we became friends around one common passion: the Mac and some of the best of trans-Atlantic technology (even if many components are farmed out to cheap labour markets abroad).

But even the road to making TS one of the friendliest communities on the Web, where our Macs fortunately constitute only about three-quarters of the chat, had its perils. There was a dangerous rift en route when somebody quit over heated debate about the PR&S (politics, religion and sex) business, and feeling ill-treated by me as then "chairperson", despite communal hand-wringing in kid gloves. Too much for some! The episode and some twisted allegations undermined my confidence in my skills in that chair, but the others rallied round to restore it. Some considered me too diplomatic.

While my pride and delight in TS is untarnished, I began to post less often there as of "9/11" and eventually took a back seat. That date was a landmark for journalists, who've rarely worked so hard as we have ever since. However, the terrorist attacks on the States triggered reactions from a small handful of TSers which shook me almost as much as the shockwave and global fall-out from the blasts.
Diplomat though I can be, it took all the restraint I could muster to avoid acid responses to a few ablaze with patriotic fervour, flag-waving bluster, "my country right or wrong" disease, and incomprehension of the rest of a planet that one inordinately powerful, self-appointed policeman has largely helped to mould. And often to shape, through inexcusable ignorance and lack of savoir-faire, for the worse.

Such comments as I ventured earned me stinging reproaches from half a dozen of the handful. To some I politely replied, most got trashed for the junk they were.
Now, getting on for two years later, there's only so much sympathy one can feel for a nation in shock. Mine swiftly began to run out.

zzz

Who in hell did they think they were, these whingers who so cruelly learned how double standards, the seeds of injustice, the greed and self-centredness and a smug faith in all-American values, with the weaponry their own governments had so liberally distributed to some of the world's most barbaric dictators, would end up literally exploding in their faces?
They'd been bombed on home soil, and so what, even it was in stupendously novel style? One can unstintly admire the fire-fighters, grieve with the families, but the attacks ... well, they looked like karma come home.
Pompous-assed letters informed me that I couldn't possibly conceive of the scale of the shock among the great American people. The ones that pissed me off most were well-meant warnings that it was not my place to make ironic or witty remarks about some of the President's finest speeches, as if I'd spat in the face of God Almighty. Along with more reminders of the sacrifices brave American boys made to save the rest of us twice in one century.

"Mon cul!" as we put it here. Americans, at least the cynical shits you find in any rich country and too many a desparately poor one, made an obscene fortune out of two world wars and any number of smaller spats, while preaching that almost unbridled capitalism and globalisation would be magnificent for the rest of us.
The world's policeman did nothing when more than three million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Just as it made friends with a pretty tough regime in Rwanda - after the genocide of 1994. Satellites that could spot Russian missile bases in Cuba in 1961 were perfectly useless, we were told, when it came decades later to locating a few hundred thousand black refugees in eastern Zaïre, as then it was.
The cop worked hard to ensure the Arab world remained divided against itself, as part of a global energy and control strategy. Instead of funding the United Nations, it shat on it when lesser powers took issue with wayward notions of international law. And Bush gave the job of Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs to a dangerous but allegedly bright spark by the name of Walter Kansteiner.

Like many "Africa hands", I read one of his first interviews for allAfrica with a mixture of incredulity, humour and despair. He bestowed several gems on journalist Charlie Cobb:

"What are we looking at as we look at Sharia in Northern Nigeria? When we look at Khartoum? And...."

"Absolutely. Remember, in grad school when we were all learning to be Africanists it was always called 'the Black-Green line.' And it cut right across the southern Sahel. Historically it's been there and that rivalry, conflict - call it what you want - has historically been a fact of life for decades and centuries."
Aahh, well-informed Walt! Yes, that's modern Africa, the one you learned at "grad school". The green sort of Arab-like bit at the top (when you turn the map the right way round), and all those funky darkies at the bottom. But there was better to come:
"The Administration has been emphasizing the need to 'fight terrorism' characterizing it as a war. At the same time the Administration has argued in various forums for 'democratic transparency' as the real solution to any number of issues in Africa, any number of states in turmoil. And the two notions seem to be in conflict with one another: the need to fight terrorism and the argument for democratic transparency. How do you resolve that?"

"It kind of goes back to that old adage that authoritarian governments are stable governments. They are authoritarian and hence can make security happen. In the short term you can probably make a case for that. In the long term you most certainly cannot. In the long term the stable secure countries are ones that are democratic, that have institutions that let the body politic have a voice. They are countries that have independent judicial systems where civil liberties and human rights are protected and private property rights are protected."

This was September 19, 2001, when the Bush-baby was possibly too gripped by that "state of shock" to be lucid about anything.
So "it kind of goes back to that old adage" that "we" did right propping up those dictators and thieves. Nothing like a bit of "authority".
But hang on. What is this "long term", Waltie boy? You mean you want "civil liberties", "human rights" and all that stuff your friends are domestically stifling today with a package of legislation, having whipped much of a once bold American press into cringing subservience? What you're saying is fine, but would you really install democracy instead of friendly and conveniently "authoritarian" Arab regimes.

Now Algeria, Walt told us, was not in his "bailiwick". Neither was Egypt. This obviously came as some relief when asked an irritating question about countries where people just could, and did (in Algeria in December 1991, before the military halted the poll) begin voting Muslim radicals into power. Quelle horreur! Could the reason for that have anything to do with Israeli hardliners and Palestine and US support for constant breaches of UN resolutions, as well as regimes which did nothing about grinding poverty?
Walt's learned a lesson or two since. The poor fellow worked his ass off visiting countries which nearly all, oddly enough, produce oil. He even tried, but didn't succeed, to bribe persuade Nigeria to quit OPEC.
Now that the invasion of Iraq has been such a rip-roaring success, the idea of setting up a second US oil-defence outpost off west Africa looks like its gone on to the back burner again.
Worse, only two of those countries which had enabled Cobb's headline to be "Sub-Saharan African Rallies to US Support" were left on Washington's list of bosom buddies at its shortest.

fort knoxWalter's even made most of the "right" friends. That fellow in Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasago, not only has oil, but is "stable" and adored by his people. In the last election held since first he killed his uncle soon after a coup in 1979, he won 97.1 percent of the vote! The stuff of a wet Rumsfeld dream. The CIA manages to spell the president's name mostly correctly in its Factbook, and even gets quite a lot of its facts right, glossing over a few gory details of no concern to the Kansas city milkman.

fort knoxYou do know the fact book, one whose very cover changes like the moods of US presidents? The newest would suggest that the world will become a far safer place, as armour-plated as Pentagon policy, than it was when Bush's dad pledged to make America a kinder and gentler nation" a decade back.
We use that book at AFP, but it's usually a good idea to double- if not triple-check what's in it.

Unlike the mythical milkman and one real former US secretary of state who was sent to Ethiopia for some talkfest at the headquarters of what's now the 53-member African Union but prudently asked first, "Where is Addis Ababa?", Walter knows where most of those odd places are.
That milkman, as I remind far-flung correspondents in African towns with wonderful names, "is the feller you're writing for. Just imagine he knows nothing about your country. The first thing you do is give him an interesting story, and in the 3rd para you add the basics of background." I suppose it must work, because I've seen the most obscure "pick-ups" in Florida papers.

It's a fat chance most of AFP's local African reporters will ever be able to afford to see America. There's a better one that the Kansas city milkman might become a US serviceman, in which case he should bloody well behave in a fashion that befits the world's most powerful armed forces! Or even a tourist in Paris, unless he's been turned off by the propaganda war. A little effort to say "Champs Elysées" of instead "Champs" (as in horse on bit) "Ellizez" might also win a friend or two.

zzz

"To be perfectly honest, I don't much like the Americans," generalised Kamel over lunch, just back from Morocco to resume charge of the "canteen". But then Kamel - the 'Elio' of some entries here (his "nom de patron" at the pizzeria) - had been enjoying a meal in Casablanca's Safir Hotel just two days before Friday's blasts.
I've not dug deep enough into the more credible conspiracy theories and bizarre reports we couldn't use at AFP to be sure that when Rumsfeld over-ruled the Pentagon on the military strength needed to conquer Iraq, he had damned good reason to expect a walk-over.
That "they 'took out' Saddam", fine, Kamel thought. Whether or not the conspiracy tale about a deal with Russia's Putin, a mysterious plane flight, and the vanishing of any Iraqi Republican Guard to fight was true. There are various ways of "taking people out".
"They could 'take out' Algeria's generals while they're at it," Kamel added, perhaps like many compatriots who'd accept a foreign invasion to end years of oil-related corruption and theft. "After that, they go home!"

The swift departure of Jay Garner (previously link-probed here) may be a sign that Washington has learned at least something from the Romans, whose emblems it borrows, about how to run a burgeoning empire.
Kamel's people endure "terror" from both fundamentalists and the state, sometimes the two hand-in-glove. There, it's life. In Paris, where I've known two people injured, one seriously, in bomb blasts, most of us are sick to the back teeth with American "What we did we do to deserve this?" whining after September 11; let alone the talk of "freedom" and "democracy" and "human rights" that Kamel, like thousands of others, submit to far better, even-handed political analysis than the drivel on CNN, Fox News and other major shapers of opinion for a gullible American public.

peace and loveWhen some contend that the real problem and ignorance arise because "they don't have much history to speak of", that's unfair even on a nation far too fond of its poor wounded navel.
In any case, my answer to that is, "Even were it true, they've begun making history a little too fast for their own good, let alone ours."
If US citizens are serious about waging a relentless "war on terror", a phrase about as all-embracing and finally meaningless today as "The Base", that onetime American creation al-Qaeda, a good place to start might just be at home. Right at the top.
Enough of this seriousness!!

zzz

whoosh!I was mightily cheered to get comment here on my latest 'Matrix' ramble from a rare animal, "Dallas Republican, black turtleneck, go figure" and fine wit Chipstah!, who even found something nice to say about me at his place. What an outstanding exception among his brainless fellow-believers.
When it comes to intelligence, Tony's sent in a tiddling test:
"Q. What is the penalty for bigamy?
A. Two mothers-in-law."
It reminded me of an old Jewish jibe I heard about high-handed intervention:
"Q. What's worse than a Jewish mother-in-law?
A. Two Jewish mothers-in-law."
Hey, chipstah! gets to rant on blogcritics.
What about little me? Nah... They're just a bunch of Americans!

Thank you. Something completely different tomorrow. Em, I mean later.


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