October 2005 Archives

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October 27, 2005 08:52 AM

THE BANE OF BILLION(AIRE)S: Not long ago, while chatting over coffee with a fried in Kiev, I confessed that the Khodorkovsky matter made me very uneasy. Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a Russian billionaire who was imprisoned two years ago amid indications that he was considering a political challenge to Putin. (He now resides in a labor camp.) There is no question but that Khodorkovsky was singled out for his apostasy; by the standards of your typical Russian elite, he had done nothing particularly out of character. My friend responded, basically, why shed tears for a corrupt billionaire -- sure, none of the post-Soviet oligarchs came by their riches honestly -- when the wretched legacy of the Soviet empire has left so many others to suffer anonymously? Point taken. Yet I think Khodorkovsky's vast wealth is at the heart of the issue: Not even the richest man in Russia, which many believed him to be at the time, was any match for a determined autocrat like Putin. And that says more about the dismal state of post-Soviet Russia -- about its weak courts, its timid media, its cynical elites and its weary, hopeless citizens -- than all the rest. Natan Sharansky puts it in proper perspective.

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October 24, 2005 08:41 AM

TAK YUSHCHENKO!: Today's purchase of Ukraine's Kryvorizhstal steel plant for $4.8 billion may mark a crucial turning point for Viktor Yushchenko's beleaguered government. First of all, the fact that the world's biggest steel producer, Mittal Steel, was willing to shell out that kind of money for Ukraine's premier factory -- 20 percent of Ukraine's gross output of metal products comes from that one plant -- will be a source of national pride and suggests a higher level of expectation for Ukraine's economic future than the country's mood reflects at the moment. It also enables Yushchenko to return to the territory where he's been most successful politically -- as a reformer. The most important context here is that Yushchenko's predecessor, Leonid Kuchma, sold Kryvorizhstal to his own son-in-law just last year for $800 million. Yushchenko decried this sale as a "theft," and used Kryvorizhstal to symbolize the predations of the country's corrupt ruling elite. Given that today's "re-privatization" fetched six times last year's purchase price, one would have to say that Yushchenko's been amply vindicated.

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October 21, 2005 07:44 AM

THE LAWYER'S WORKSHOP: Read this contract, and try to guess the service being offered. Time's up! This is the document one must fill out -- and send -- to the Ukrainian News Service in order to read daily blurbs and articles off its Web site. I think the same form is used here for permits to quarry minerals.... P.S. I'm partial to Clause 4, Subsection 1.5 (pushy!), but perhaps you'll have another favorite. P.P.S. "I'm inclined to sign this, but I'd like to have my lawyer go over it first. In the meantime, can we agree on a modified temporary adverse possession action? Basically I just want to read your frickin' Web site!"

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October 19, 2005 09:15 AM

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL: Joe Conason takes us back to a place where Joseph Wilson remains a gentleman-victim of high distinction, and not someone whose credibility has been shredded by two major government inquiries. In this place, it is still a "smear" to reveal that the CIA sent the husband of one of its own WMD analysts to check the validity of specific WMD intelligence. Would anyone lay odds that Valerie Plame had also doubted Iraq's interest in uranium from Niger? Unfortunately for Conason, this fairy-tale universe is no longer much larger than the space his column fills each week.

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October 19, 2005 02:30 AM

JACOB'S LADDER: I have a policy against discussing the Plame matter as a serious instance of scandal. For one thing, Valerie Plame's identity was important information that should have been exposed to public scrutiny under the circumstances. Certainly it should have been no more a secret than her husband's conclusions about Niger, since the public was being asked to balance those against the word of the president. Just the same, I refuse to believe it can be made a crime to reveal the identity of someone who, by all indications, has been desk-bound at CIA headquarters for several years, or that my country prosecutes the confidential exchange of information between two consenting adult citizens -- especially when one of them is supposed to be acting as a professional journalist. That's Third World. If more of my colleagues in the news industry had viewed Plame's identity as an important new variable in the unfolding Niger tale -- and not solely as an attack on a (mistakenly) sainted "whistleblower" -- we would have neither a special prosecutor nor the grim specter of being lectured on "truth-telling" by one as serially mendacious as Joe Wilson has shown himself to be. All that said, it is comforting to find that some journalists have taken the longer view of things. Raise a glass to Jacob Weisberg, who notes that self-described "liberals" ought not celebrate a prosecution that would place severe restraints on the public's "right to know." P.S. The sooner liberals can stop worrying about the damage done to our clandestine services, the sooner they can get back to blocking the CIA's recruiting efforts on their campuses. Dismissal's a win-win!

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October 16, 2005 05:31 AM

If you've written a book entitled "Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq," what are the chances that actual manifestations of democracy -- you know, like a Constitution, referenda and elections -- will cause you to rethink your assumptions. Umm, zero.... And by the way, since when is overwhelming opposition from within a roughly 20 percent bloc of the electorate a sign of irreconcilable social division? (Are you seriously trying to compare the Sunnis in Iraq to African-Americans? -- hlm Yeah! Sunnis will become gradually more acclimated to their government as they learn to build leverage within political coalitions vying for power. It doesn't seem to be working too well for African-Americans -- hlm That's a lesson for both groups: Don't rely on an IOU....)

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October 13, 2005 02:47 AM

I'm getting a bit irritated by the recurrance of a nasty rhetorical trope in the pages of the New Yorker. From David Denby's review of "Good Night, and Good Luck" in the Oct. 10 issue:

There's little gravy in atacking Joe McCarthy in 2005, and that's only a small part of what Clooney is up to. His real intention appears to be to deliver a blow to the patella of a conglomerate-controlled press corps that, until recently, has indulged the Bush administration's most extravagant smears and lies. He has completely succeeded. [Emphasis mine]

This is not the first time I've seen remarks such as these smuggled into New Yorker copy by the magazine's culture and arts critics. I recall similar comments toward the end of a recent Nancy Franklin piece on "The Home Front," the TV series about the Iraq war, and in another review of something or other by Anthony Lane. I read the New Yorker only sporadically, so this probably occurs with far more regularity than I'm aware of.

Now, I'm no fan of the Bush administration. In fact, quite the opposite. But I do wonder whether the cheap moral preening and faux-radical earnestness of the New Yorker's review corps passes muster with the magazine's famously stringent fact checking department. It's one thing to lay out evidence to support such a charge -- as, say, Hendrik Hertzberg does in his political columns for the magazine. It's quite another matter, though, to stipulate as "fact" conclusions that have no objective basis. Or does the magazine now take the position that these "smears" and "lies" are objectively true? If so, would statements to the contrary -- i.e. "The Bush administration is fair and honest" -- be edited out?

P.S. I'm not just asking this because it is annoying to be subjected to the puerile and screechy politics of film reviewers. (Of course it is!) I'm annoyed that the magazine looks at its readers -- like me -- as thoughtless, smug initiates who already know certain "truths."...

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Thinking out loud

October 4, 2005 02:01 AM

The Miers nomination seems so perfectly ill-conceived that one suspects it must be designed to fail. The perfect winning strategy! (hlm: You mean Bush wins by losing? No, Bush wins by appearing to want to lose. Democrats won't give him the satisfaction! hlm: That's too clever by half. Here, I'll let them tell you. Hey fellas, come over and explain your secret winning strategy on the Miers nomination to my friend hlm here! Uh, fellas? Fellas? hlm: By the way, you know this narrative device is a shameless rip-off of Kausfiles, don't you? Hey, martial artists still repeat the movements first practiced by the ancient Shaolin masters. Must each new generation invent karate?)

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October 4, 2005 01:30 AM

The AP's John Solomon comes through with rich fodder for armchair press critics.

The news media is [sic] in a less-than-ideal position in the Plame probe.

The reporters' sources _ rather than being whistle-blowers exposing wrongdoing and facing retaliation if identified _ are government officials whose motives in leaking appear to have been to undermine the credibility of a critic of the Bush administration.

Wrong! The information reporters learned about Valerie Plame did "undermine the credibility" of Joseph Wilson. It suggested he was hardly the disinterested expert he claimed to be, and cast suspicion on the CIA's motives in sending him to Niger. The problem for the news media is that, in spite of much evidence to the contrary (see here and here), they have continued to cast Wilson as a whistle-blower, which makes his critics "retaliators" by default. Lewis Libby: government discloser AND scourge of government disclosure, all in one! ... P.S. Am I the only one who is fuzzy on the distinction Solomon is making here? You're a whistle-blower if you expose government wrongdoing to the press -- just so long as you're not trying to undermine anyone's credibility! Or, rather, just as long as you're not adjudged by the press corps to be "motivated" by a desire to undermine someone's credibility. That would be grounds for a special prosecutor! Meta-message to government officials from the press corps: Stop talking to us!. P.P.S. The real problem arising from Patrick Fitzgerald's prosecution of the Plame matter is not the "chilling effect" it might have on potential anonymous sources who fear exposure. It's the chilling effect it might have on potential anonymous sources who fear that merely speaking to a journalist could be grounds for prosecution. (Better safe than sorry!) Sure, there are laws that protect government whistle-blowers from their higher-ups, but what's to protect them from the short-sighted political crusading of the NYT editorial page? What brave soul would come forward now with the next Pentagon Papers?... Thumb-sucker special: Could anyone but George W. Bush have impelled the press corps to call the cops on itself? Or did Gail Collins believe one could investigate press leaks without talking to the press?

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