Christopher Hitchens on Falling Into the Scum of the Earth

Source: Charlie Rose.

Gisele, Jian, and the Dropping Dollar

Open up your wallet, pull out a dollar bill, look at it closely, and things get weird. So weird that last week both supermodel Gisele Bündchen and Chinese Bank official Xu Jian became the strangest of bedfellows. I would wager that the two have never before been mentioned in the same breath. However, as the value of U.S. currency hits record lows around the world, they both threatened to dump the dollar. Today, whether you are a made-up mannequin or a bumbling bureaucrat, American cash in your pocket is a problem.

Bündchen, a Brazilian bombshell, works all over the globe, flaunting her scantily clad curves for companies like Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Dior. She is reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the richest supermodel on the face of the planet. Only, as Bloomberg reported last week, Bündchen — like many major hedge funds — has decided to be paid for a recent American shampoo deal in Euros rather than dollars. Her manager (who is also her twin sister) said in September that “we don’t know what will happen to the dollar.” Last week she denied ever saying it, perhaps trying to save face in front of the American public. But can anyone blame her?

Switch gears to Jian, the Chinese central banker. Last Wednesday he said the dollar is “losing its status as the world currency . . . We will favor stronger currencies over weaker ones and will readjust accordingly.” China, second only to Japan in terms of U.S. currency reserves, holds $400 billion in U.S. dollars, the U.S. Treasury says. And should China “readjust,” that is, decide the dollar is a weak investment and sell off their chunk of change, there could be hell to pay.

Even Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, recently told “60 Minutes” that it didn’t matter how he was paid because he would immediately diversify.

When the dollar drops abroad, inflation rises at home. Current Fed chair Ben Bernanke said as much last Thursday. Why is this all happening?

Economists agree there’s nothing radical or controversial here: For far too long, the U.S. has been living beyond its means. And there’s no quick fix. The bankers who botched the housing market are going to have to pay. But for the rest of us, our hard-earned cash is worth less and less. Maybe we should all pull a Gisele and demand to be paid in Euros.

(Also published in Metro. Image from flickr.)

Brand America Wears Thin

Cairo, the cultural capital of the Arab world, is a loud city. Car horns mix with calls to prayer from the city's minarets. When I visited earlier this year, what I heard from Egyptians sounded like a broken record. Conversations went like this: "Where are you from?" "New York," I always said first. "Oh, you're an American!" "Well, yes," I muttered. "See, I like you. I like Americans. It's the American government that is terrible."

Karen Hughes would probably sympathize. She was the State Department official encumbered with the task of boosting the image of the U.S. in the Islamic world who announced her resignation last week. A former NBC reporter and director of the Texas Republican Party, Hughes served President Bush for five years when he was governor. She was appointed two years ago, and other than her prior service to Bush, one has to wonder about her credentials. She had no experience as an ambassador, and more confounding, she speaks no Arabic.

According to a recent Pew survey of 7,200 people across the Middle East, America has an image problem. The U.S. is "wildly unpopular," and perceptions of the country are "abysmal." Indeed, we've come a long way since the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the Middle East held candlelight vigils to show their solidarity with our grief. It's almost hard to believe how bad things have gotten, until you remember the arrogant bungling foreign policy that led us to war.

The war has instigated a rebellion at home, too. Hughes' colleagues at the State Department are revolting against forced service in Iraq. Resignations could be imminent. At a raucous, hour-long town hall meeting last week in Washington, veteran diplomat Jack Croddy stood up and said to a State Department official, "It's one thing if someone believes in what's going on over there and volunteers, but it's another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment. I'm sorry, but basically that's a potential death sentence, and you know it."

The Cairenes I met know that reconciliation with the U.S. won't come from more of the same. The world won't be safe for our diplomats--let alone for the folks at home--until our administration fully grasps that.

There's a difference between diplomacy and deceit. The Egyptians know this. It's time for Washington to learn.

(Also published in Metro.)

AFRICOM: US Going it Alone Again, Naturally

New peace talks aimed at resolving the crisis in Darfur began this weekend in Libya. The prospects don’t look good. Although the Sudanese government agreed to a cease-fire on Saturday, leaders of some of the most potent rebel groups did not even show up.

Congress, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and President Bush have all called the situation a genocide. But while the U.S. has given more than $2 billion in aid since 2005, according to Bush, at the same time it’s changed its military position in Africa. You have to ask, is the U.S. repeating its go-it alone style of foreign policy in yet another hotspot?

Since February 2003, when violence broke out in Darfur — an area of the Sudan that is roughly the size of France — more than 200,000 people have been killed, and nearly 3 million have been driven from their homes. Tens of thousands live in refugee camps, sheltered by tattered brown tents. Not only has the situation grown far more complex as rebel groups have splintered, but violence in Chad, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo suggest that Darfur isn’t an isolated issue.

“We all know that Africa cannot fully develop economically, politically or socially where there is violence, the threat of terrorism or fear about the security of legitimate governments and the people they represent,” Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary for African affairs, told Congress in August. Her testimony explained the U.S.’s “new strategic relationship with Africa” by way of Africa Command, or AFRICOM, which will create a permanent U.S. military command on the continent in conjunction with the State Department. To put it simply, the endeavor is an attempt at diplomacy and nation-building backed by military firepower.

The State Department has acknowledged how touchy the notion is, but what may be more worrisome is the idea that, with military might and economic leverage, the U.S. can act alone in this world.

Glancing back at recent history, this has proved to be a dubious strategy at best. Earlier this fall, the climate change talks Bush orchestrated alongside those held by the U.N. turned out to be a disaster. Moreover, flying solo in Iraq has left the U.S. without a friend to help shoulder the burden.

Given the situation in Iraq, and adding the increasingly dire situation in Darfur, can the U.S. really afford to continue to go it alone?

(Originally published in Metro in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Image of Intifada transit refugee camp from USAID.)

World War III, Redux

Are you ready for World War III?

Last week, President Bush threatened as much, should Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad develop a nuclear weapon. (Yet, few have remembered to mention that this isn't his first such quip.) Add that to the Senate’s recently approved resolution urging Bush to label a faction of Iran’s standing army as a foreign terrorist organization and you’ve got some serious ramped-up talk. But is it in perspective?

World War I, deemed the “war to end all wars,” killed 10 million people, wounded 20 million more and left wounds deep enough to bring about World War II. Challenging comprehension, WWII killed 70 million and was the most deadly era in human existence. It reduced Europe to rubble and gave
birth to the atomic bomb. The current situation, however, rings more confounding because, other than Bush, there seem to be few willing combatants for WWIII.

As the president issued warnings from a podium last week, Ahmadinejad smiled, hip to hip with Russian
President Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader — who has lately developed several autocratic tendencies — declared his country’s vehement opposition to any action against Iran. Is Bush going to pick a fight with Putin, the man he still calls a friend?

And then there’s China. At first glance, China may seem to have little to do with American action in the
Middle East, but the emerging superpower’s current concerns offer a foreboding echo to Bush’s latest threat by saber-rattling over Taiwan and the Dalai Lama’s visit to Washington. China’s Communist Party congress, which meets twice a decade, assembled in Beijing last week. Their chief challenge? Managing the country’s frenetic economic growth. As China continues to loan billions to the U.S. to fund the ongoing war in Iraq, the agenda in Beijing was very telling. While China has to address growing income inequality and potential environmental disaster, World War is nowhere to be found.

So, what do you think about waging World War III? Before you decide, there’s one more puzzling development. Last Tuesday, Iraq also announced $1.1 billion in contracts for desperately needed power plants. Who is going to build them? Iran and China.

Perhaps, as the White House later suggested, Bush’s World War III remark was just “a rhetorical point.” In such tense and uncertain times, there’s a danger in rhetorical flourishes meant for effect. With the stock market in flux and other economic indicators painting a cautious picture for next year, the president should focus on reality rather than conjuring up new wars.

(Also published in Metro.)

Save the Lemmings from Islam and America: Majid's 'A Call for Heresy'

There’s a haunting television commercial in rotation these days. Thousands of nondescript people are bustling across a heavenly green meadow toward a gaping, bottomless hole where, like lemmings, they plunge into nonexistence. With their arms at their sides and their complicit legs still pumping, mass mentality, according to the ad, deprives them of a sizzling hamburger. It’s supposed to be funny.

Instead of making you laugh, though, the spot tunes into some newfound hardwiring of the American brain. For the last six years, out of the mainstream has meant you’re out of your mind.

According to a new book, at least now we have one thing in common with the Muslim world. Anouar Majid’s provocative new tome, “A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America,” argues that both Islam and the U.S. must look critically at history and propose serious alternatives to the injustices that globalization breeds today, the most damning and destructive of which, according to Majid, is Islamist terrorism.

“I am interested primarily in the ways [Muslims and Americans] are increasingly being subjected to religious, political and economic orthodoxies that suppress the intellectual legacies that once gave both traditions, however briefly, their greatest cultural élans,” Majid writes. At least in the U.S. today, it’s tough to argue with him — these years will prove to be anything but our finest cultural, political or spiritual era of our history.

During the Inquisition in the 13th century, heretics were burned at the stake. Today you can stand in front of the White House, call George W. Bush a war criminal (or worse, as some do), and police officers will walk right past you. When you are free to say anything, as the old adage goes, nobody listens. At the same time, remember what happened when Salman Rushdie committed what some considered blasphemy by writing a novel critical of the Prophet Muhammad? It earned Rushdie a fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini that called for good Muslims to kill the author.

Neither the meaningless cacophony of the U.S. nor the reactionary repression by some radical Muslims ought to silence anyone, because Majid makes it clear that Islam and the U.S. have a lot more in common than we think. Both need to summon the courage, brilliance and wit to usurp the rapacious rules we’re all following, or it’s straight into the big hole we go.

(Also published in Metro. Majid will be reading Wednesday, October 10th at 7pm at Bluestockings in New York.)

Six Years On, and September 11th is Politics as Usual

Flaring tempers, big talk about Iraq and another video from Osama bin Laden: It must be September 11th.

Last week, families of those who died six years ago today slammed New York's ABC Channel 7 Eyewitness News with angry e-mails and phone calls, and convinced the station to broadcast all of today's memorial services. Also, Gen. David Petraeus, the head honcho in Iraq, today concludes his assessment of the war to Congress. And the wretched man at the heart of the whole matter, appearing older and fatter in a recent videotape, has called for Americans to "embrace" Islam to stop the war in Iraq. September it is, indeed.

Since I moved into my apartment two years ago, through my living room window I have watched four--count them, four--high-rise buildings shoot skyward. They're luxury apartment buildings, and in seemingly no time, they are massive and fully occupied.

At the same time it has been six years and just finally are the "final" plans for a rebuilt World Trade Center showing up on the evening news. Construction is on, but it has been a long time coming, held up by interests, money and power. Books, literally, have been written on the monstrous egos, collective grief and financial disaster the project has become.

To think it is a coincidence that the White House chooses to present Petraeus on the  Hill this week, as opposed to any other of the 51 this year, would be utter denial. The attack six years ago, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq, is here on public trail again with the same cheap, false associations. Sept. 11 is still peddled as one in the same with the now devastated lands of modern-day Mesopotamia.

Everyone mourns in his or her own way, and if we, as a country, had some class, we wouldn't necessarily have any more memorials, but we would at least leave ceremonies the time and space to take place in peace, free of the slimy banter of politics.

I was surprised the other night when I saw the twin beams of blue light bursting from Ground Zero, piercing a layer of thick clouds above. Watch them closely tonight, because each in our own way and without the callous cacophony to muck up our minds, the "Tribute in Light" allows us to do what a true memorial should: Remember.

(by Andrew Bast, also published in Metro.)