Remembering Dag Hammarskjold 50 years after his death

By Brian Urquhart, New York Times, September 16, 2011
Brian Urquhart, a former under secretary general of the United Nations, is the author of “Hammarskjold,” among other books.

The second secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, died 50 years ago this weekend on a mission to the Congo, when his plane crashed on its landing approach to Ndola, now in Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia. In his eight years at the United Nations, he brought vitality to the world organization and established its secretary general as a major player in global affairs.

Hammarskjold’s resolute international leadership has never been equaled. He developed the role of the secretary general at a particularly dangerous point in history to such a degree that “Leave it to Dag” became a slogan, even as he ran the risk of arousing the ever-vigilant defenders of unlimited national sovereignty. The men who succeeded him (when, at last, will a woman be nominated?) have often been measured against Hammarskjold, and they have referred to him as a model for their own efforts.
When Hammarskjold arrived at the United Nations in April 1953, most of the members of the Security Council were under the impression that they had voted for a competent Swedish civil servant who would not rock the boat or be particularly active or independent. The next eight years were quite a surprise.
By 1953, the cold war had virtually paralyzed the Security Council. Regional conflicts were potential brush fires that could ignite a nuclear East-West confrontation, and Hammarskjold became an accepted go-between; his first success was to negotiate the release of the American airmen who had come down in the People’s Republic of China during the Korean War and been imprisoned as spies.
Some of the most powerful nations, including the United States, came to view Hammarskjold as an outstanding leader, even if they sometimes disagreed with him. Nikita S. Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and Charles de Gaulle’s France did not see him in this light. In a famous scene in the General Assembly, Khrushchev demanded his resignation. Hammarskjold refused and received a standing ovation.
Of all the people I have known, Hammarskjold was by far the most successful in organizing his public life and his widespread intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic interests into an integrated and self-sustaining pattern. Literature in three or four languages, music, the visual arts and nature were his beloved companions, and his posthumously published diary, “Markings,” showed that he was developing his own version of mysticism. His friend the sculptor Barbara Hepworth said, “Dag Hammarskjold had a pure and exact perception of aesthetic principles, as exact as it was over ethical and moral principles. I believe they were, to him, one and the same thing.” But Hammarskjold’s feet were firmly on the ground. “The United Nations was not created to bring us to heaven,” he told an audience in 1954, “but to save us from hell.”
Hammarskjold had few of the conventional trappings of a leader. For the secretariat, his authority was absolute because we respected the intellectual and moral effort and the judgment that went into his decisions, and the calmness and lack of pretension with which they were communicated. There is a photograph of him reviewing the first contingent of the first United Nations peacekeeping force on its arrival at Abu Sueir on the Suez Canal in 1956. His slight, lonely and profoundly unmilitary figure dominates the scene and leaves no doubt as to who is in charge. There was, I think, more than a touch of genius in Hammarskjold’s passionate and imaginative service. It is this that makes him so  hopememorable.
The excitement, danger and of Hammarskjold’s time at the United Nations are hard to recall and impossible to replicate. Governments reach agreement in the organization and outside of it to a far greater extent than before. The Security Council is exploring new ground under the concept of the “responsibility to protect.” The international and independent leadership that was Hammarskjold’s hallmark is conspicuously lacking.

What sort of person do governments want as the secretary general of the United Nations? For all the tributes pouring forth on this anniversary, there is no evidence that the members of the Security Council have ever tried to find another Hammarskjold. Can it be that eight years of dynamic leadership half a century ago was enough for them?
The Security Council has recommended, and the General Assembly has approved, a second five-year term for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. But the process of finding his successor by an imaginative, widespread search procedure should start soon. In a time of ominous global problems, the example of Dag Hammarskjold could provide important guidance in that search.
Here was a global leader before globalization of the economy, in the middle of the Cold War, prior to the onset of both 24-7 gossip dressed up as news, and the internet, dressed up as communication. It was his presence, his imagination, the force of his integrated person that commanded, demanded and received, without rancour or resentment, the respect, and loyalty, of world leaders, of all stripes.
Is there such a person today, and would the culture even permit such a person today?
Have we so contaminated our public discourse by the scurrilous attacks that are dredged up as "reporting" and the coverage of those willing to engage in public life, to reduce both them and us to conform to our heightened level of both cynicism and narcissism.
We grew up in the fifties, almost in awe of this man, whose name we could barely pronounce, but whose leadership of the newly formed United Nations made him almost above national and regional political messes, the details of which we were shielded from by the amount of information available to us.
We cannot imagine a current Secretary General uttering words even similar to those uttered by Hammarskjold: "The UN was not created to bring us to heaven but to save us from hell."
Facing what was then the threat of annihilation from nuclear weapons, building bomb shelters in the basements of public buildings, taking classroom drills "in the event of an attack" even listening as we did this week to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis tell Arther Schlesinger, in interviews she did with the famous American historian, four months after the death of her husband, John F. Kennedy, "we want to die on the lawn of the White House with you if the bomb shelter is full" (although this reference was more to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the Secretary General was no longer in office)....we can attest to Urquhart's claim that it was an "exciting" time in history.
The next decade will be no less "exciting" and will require no less a leader at the helm of the United Nations than, (not a duplicate for there is none but) an equal or superior to Mr. Hammarskjold...and in order for such a person to be found and accepted, we will have to raise our sights on the possible, in political, military, peace-keeping and international security theatres, not to mention the take-over of the economic, fiscal and monetary files, of all national and international issues.
The selection, acceptance and success of leaders are all directly related and attributable to the level of acceptance and support and internal strength of those being led and our weakness, including our disengagement and our cynicism of leaders, witness the current level of attack on the president of the United States, while he attempts to lead a literally and metaphically intransigent Congress, can do nothing but harm our own prospects of achieving resolution of the most intractable gordion knots of international relations.
From the Nobelprize.org website
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld (July 29, 1905-September 18, 1961) was the youngest of four sons of Agnes (Almquist) Hammarskjöld and Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, prime minister of Sweden, member of the Hague Tribunal, governor of Uppland, chairman of the Board of the Nobel Foundation. In a brief piece written for a radio program in 1953, Dag Hammarskjöld spoke of the influence of his parents: "From generations of soldiers and government officials on my father's side I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country - or humanity. This service required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions. From scholars and clergymen on my mother's side, I inherited a belief that, in the very radical sense of the Gospels, all men were equals as children of God, and should be met and treated by us as our masters in God."

Gerald Caplan: Harper the enigma...

By Gerald Caplan, Globe and Mail, September 17, 2011
Stephen Harper has just declared that the greatest security threat to Canada is something he called “Islamicism.” I’ve seen no sensible dissection of this remarkable comment because no one can make sense of it. It goes without saying that vigilance against any potential terrorist attack is vital. Has some new peril now been discovered that no one else knows about? Are Canadians in imminent danger? Might we not be fretful about a nice homegrown Christian version of Norway’s notorious Anders Breivik as well as extremist Muslims? Why does our leader choose to feed into the bigotry of those who are determined to smear all Muslims as terrorists?

In terms of what really menaces Canadians, is “Islamicism” really scarier than global warming? What is it about these conservatives that make them care so little about their kids’ future? What about water scarcity, a looming crisis? Or the fragility of the global economic system? Youth unemployment? What about the bottomless need everywhere in Canada for new or repaired or upgraded infrastructure? Who’s going to protect us from exploding road rage on our gridlocked roads? What about glaring, growing inequality and our declining quality of life?
Then there’s the never-ending scandal of exporting Canadian asbestos to poor countries where it will certainly kill poor labourers. It’s an issue in which the Harper government stands virtually alone in the western world, and no one can fathom why. Asbestos touches directly only one seat in Quebec. Can that possibly explain Mr. Harper’s stance? His government has been harshly condemned by every health agency that exists, both in Canada and around the world. What possible benefit can outweigh this blow to Canada’s reputation, let alone the untold suffering the Prime Minister’s stand will cause?

Taking the heat at the moment for her boss’s incomprehensible intransigence is newly elected Conservative MP Kelly Leitch. Ms. Leitch is a pediatric orthopedic surgeon. (Why a youngish specialist wants to trade her precious skills for politics is another question.) Ms. Leitch has now been directly targeted by 250 fellow medical colleagues who wrote to remind her that she’s taken an oath to do no harm, and by 40 Canadians who personally lost family members to asbestos.
Mr Caplan, long of platinum reputation as one of the leading thinkers in the social democratic movement including the NDP, posits a couple of other Harper enigmas in his piece:

1. the failure/refusal/tardiness...in Harper's inaction on calling a by-election to replace Jack Layton and
2. the insertion of "royal" into the names of two of the Canadian military forces, Air Force and Navy.

It says here that Mr. Caplan's irony is much too genteel, too kind and too incisive..he also has a wonderful line poking fun a those political pundits, like himself, he calls "bloviators". It reads as follows: Just as the technique of politicians is often to fake sincerity, so the skill of the pundit is to fake intelligence. Whether through a newspaper column or TV panel, the bloviating pundit offers up insights that ordinary folks lack. It’s a great gig if you can get away with it. To Caplan's list, we might humbly add: the politically bloviating blog.
Not to be able to comprehend, or explain, or attempt a hypothesis for the actions and statements of a political leader is about as scathing a critique one can have. The pundit renders the actor and the script as virtually inconsequential, whether benign or malignant.
Let's put on our "thinking caps" as our grade five teacher, Miss Thompson, would request, for our consideration of the Harper enigmas, as outlined by Mr Caplan...and "speculate" as many of our best English teachers would have us do about the most clouded piece of T.S. Eliot poetry.
Is Harper deflecting attention from his otherwise unsupportable and frankly quite dangerous over policies?
Is Harper merely playing with the Canadian reporters and voters, by throwing out bones on which they might chew, unsuccessfully, while all the time playing hardball politics behind closed doors as he struts his political-diplomatic muscle in Libya, and formerly Afghanistan, and who knows where next?
Is Harper using his majority to create camouflage, for his campaign to dramatically alter the culture and the consciousness of the Canadian political landscape, into the kind that would agree with those in the back rows of the Republican debate this week in Florida, who responded to a question from Wolf Blitzer of CNN about a destitute and seriously ill patient who arrives in the emergency room of an American hospital without medicare or medicaid, "Are you prepared to let him die, and not treat him?" the cat-callers eagerly and loudly replied, "Yes!"
Is Harper, on the other hand, deliberately and in an overt Machiavellian mode, disdaining both the intelligence and the right to know of both reporters and citizens, as he does whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants, without regard to even a modicum of public accountability, while he struts about in his own bubble of rarefied helium, or some other equally foreign gas, (to the rest of us living on the planet) oblivious to our definition of reality, and the disconnect between ours and his definition of reality?
When Pierre Trudeau told the reporter who asked how far he would go to tame the "apprehended insurrection" in Quebec, "Just watch me!" we all gasped in both awe, for some, and embarrassment and anger, for others. When he gave the finger to those out west who disagreed with his policies, we all smiled and muttered, "There goes Pierre, once again!" When he performed that famous pirouette behind the back of the Queen in a London Commonwealth conference, a conference he did not wish to attend, but was forced to by his advisers, we were a little taken aback, smiled, joked at the water cooler, or whatever surrogate for that listening post was current back then.
But those gestures, while shocking at the time, are like a little glitch in the Canadian archetype of reserved politeness, compared with the insults that are emitted by the current prime minister. Those who support him must find him and his "leadership" acceptable, if a trifle awkward. Those who oppose him find his approach beneath contempt, but are powerless, for the next four years, to do much to alter the political and cultural and historical landscape, except to work as hard as we can for Harper's political demise.
It cannot come too soon!

New secret war tactics and strategies make all less safe

By Roland Paris, Globe and Mail September 14, 2011
The drone’s rise to prominence is a remarkable story. Ten years ago, the U.S. military had fewer than 60 in its arsenal; today, it has more than 6,000. Many of these unmanned aircraft are used only for surveillance, but some models can carry missiles or bombs. The Predator C Avenger, for example, can cruise at 53,000 feet for as many as 20 continuous hours, tracking targets on the ground with powerful sensors. It can also carry 3,000 pounds of precision munitions.

It’s an open secret that the CIA runs a major drone program in Pakistan. According to statistics compiled by the Washington-based New America Foundation, there were nine U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 to 2007 and 33 in 2008, the final year of George W. Bush’s administration. After Barack Obama became President, that figure jumped to 53 in 2009 and 118 in 2010.
Three months ago, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the CIA would launch a similar lethal drone program in Yemen, where the U.S. military has been conducting occasional strikes against al-Qaeda affiliates for years. The Washington Post then reported the first U.S. drone attack against militants in Somalia. If these reports are accurate, they point to a significant escalation of the clandestine drone war – with little fanfare or public debate....
The revolution in robotic warfare is about to go global. Many countries are trying to develop or acquire remote-controlled “drone” aircraft such as those the United States has used to kill hundreds of alleged militants in Pakistan. Before this proliferation occurs, liberal democracies should be working to clarify and strengthen international rules on the use of these weapons systems.

The U.S. seems to be taking the opposite course, extending its drone campaign to countries far removed from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan – including Yemen and Somalia – and using rules of engagement that are, at best, obscure and, at worst, illegal.
This is a dangerously short-sighted strategy. While execution by drone may appear to be a relatively low-cost and low-risk option for dealing with America’s enemies, it legitimizes methods that other countries may be expected to follow once they acquire similar capabilities.
Canada, which doesn’t yet operate armed drones, has little to say on the subject. We have traditionally spoken strongly for international law, but apparently not in this case.
"Controlling the message" in today's politics is at least as important as "setting the agenda" for the political culture. In fact, they seem to have become one and the same. And drones are an excellent example of how to control  the message, while still taking serious action against enemies. There is no coverage in the press of the country using the drones (in most cases still, this means the U.S.). Therefore there is no need to explain how many people were killed. Certainly there are no casualties among the pilots of these machines, because they sit in a simulated cockpit somewhere perhaps in Nevada, and command/direct/fly these lethal weapons into the skies over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq. At least these are the countries we know about.
As with the hiring of military contractors of all types, including interrogators, the United States government does not have to answer for the behaviour of their "agents" who are merely carrying out the directives from the Pentagon in a manner for which the contracting agent, the United States, is not and does not wish to be, responsibile.
Stealth warfare is, nevertheless, still killing. It leaves hundreds of innocent victims dead, maimed and literally unaccounted for, except and unless some reporter for some "western" media outlet happens to find and upload the story in the west, and that happens so rarely that there is really an umbrella of silence on these operations.
In secret, there are no rules and regulations because there is no evidence and no place to bring the evidence for a "due process" hearing. One of the main reasons the U.S. has not signed on to the International Criminal Court is that if and when it does, then its operatives will be subject to the jurisdiction of that court, something they do not seek, thereby "permitting" them to operate outside the law.
Allies of the U.S., and this list includes Canada, are loathe to "go public" with any initiative that would attempt to bring new technologies, including drones, under international law,  because Canada too may harbour ambitions to acquire these "stealth killers" under the guise of the $70 billion currently being allocated for fighter jets and ships. Secrecy is a major component in current military/intelligence/national security operations and that secrecy is growing in both depth and in public acceptance given the last decade of "cover-up" in the name of making us all safer from terrorist attacks.
Not only has America lost its innocence following 9/11; she has also lost (newspeak would say "gained") the cloke of the internationally accepted standards of military conduct and civil liberties in the obsessive pursuit of appeasing the paranoia that is at the core of much of the U.S. response to 9/11.
We can hear, without having to sit in the war rooms of the Pentagon, the Congress and the White House, the conversations that deploy secret weaponry.
"The technology is there and it is one of our best weapons against what is now a 'secret' enemy operating from anywhere, anytime, without regard to international rules of military conduct, so why wouldn't we use it? Who is going to stop us in the first place? And when and if the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN find out, they will only be able to find disconnected pieces of the story from 'enemy sources' and not from our official sources and the story will literally have no legs."
We have known about espionage carried on by most developed countries against other developed countries, throughout the Cold War; however, the rules have essentially been set aside, given the unscripted and unplanned and non-state terror of the last decade plus.
We now risk both the continuation of secret war theatres carried out by the U.S. and her allies, but soon the same mode of conduct from other less 'allied' players, as the technology becomes available and the war games escalate.
This is just one more important and compelling reason for the international community, (and it could be led by middle powers like Canada, but won't be, under the current goverment) to bring international relations under some new multilateral, enforceable agreements that must include the globalization of the world economy, and the rules of conflict especially as it regards international co-operation in the fight against non-state terrorism. And that initiative can not find momentum too soon. It is already long overdue, and that is another reason why refusing to face reality, by many of the candidates for president in the current Republican "batch," is so frightening.

Zakaria: proposal for China et al to solve European debt crisis...

By Fareed Zakaria, Global Public Square, September 14, 2011
Today, $10 trillion of foreign exchange reserves are sitting around across the globe. That is the only pile of money large enough from which a bazooka could be fashioned. The International Monetary Fund could go to the leading holders of such reserves — China, Japan, Brazil, Saudi Arabia — and ask for a $750 billion line of credit. The IMF would then extend that credit to Italy and Spain but insist on closely monitoring economic reforms, granting funds only as restructuring occurs. That credit line would more than cover the borrowing costs of both countries for two years. The IMF terms would ensure that Italy and Spain remained under pressure to reform and set up conditions for growth....

The time has come for China to adopt a broader concept of its interests and become a “responsible stakeholder” in the global system. The European crisis will quickly morph into a global one, possibly a second global recession. And a second recession would be worse because governments no longer have any monetary or fiscal tools. China would lose greatly in such a scenario because its consumers in Europe and America would stop spending.
Of course, China would have to get something in return for its generosity. This could be the spur to giving China a much larger say at the IMF. In fact, it might be necessary to make clear that Christine Lagarde would be the last non-Chinese head of the organization.
While Mr. Zakaria may have, and probably does have, an excellent point from the perspective of the solution to the current fiscal and monetary crisis in Europe, there are serious implications for the rest of the world should his proposal be adopted.
We already know that the largest holder of U.S. Treasury bonds is China leaving the U.S. at the political behest of the Chinese. And with the application of this recommendation from Zakaria, China for one would not only be given greater access to the levers of power in the International Monetary Fund; it would be given the "keys" to the agency. We have so elevated the economic health of the world to the place where the health or sickness of a nation is so dependent on the monitoring of the figures that emerge from the multiple instruments "taking the pulse" of any situation that to control those digits is literally and metaphorically more important than controlling the skies, or the seas, or the land through military might.
There is no suggestion here that China would misuse her new-found geopolitical leverage for political control; however, with a large purse, in this world, comes a large voice. We have taken the Rooseveltian phrase, "walk softly and carry a big stick" to mean, quite literally, "walk silently and grasp and hold control of the world's economy" which seems to be the maxim guiding the Chinese.
Try to imagine a China linked to a Saudi Arabia, as the guarantors of such a loan to the IMF, and the implications for global energy needs, global warming, and the shift in the old notion of the "balance of power" from the west to the east and the Middle East for starters.
We already know that China feels and acts differently, for example, on the question of Iranian nuclear energy, the first reactor of which program was activated just this week. The Chinese have made substantial investments in real community infrastructure in Africa, thereby gaining the confidence and loyalty of much of that continent when compared with the west's vaunted "aid to Africa" programs that have left both Africa dependent and the donor countries disillusioned.
It is not that Zakaria's recommendation should be trashed, only that it needs careful and diligent design, implementation and monitoring and those processes requires much more co-operative political will from other nations than we have seen in resolving many other global exigencies.
The global power structure, beginning with the UN, and including the IMF and the World Bank, plus the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court all need much more formal and informal support, including membership and willing "fee payers" if we are to establish a world order that is open to international and enforceable norms, and not left to the power of those with the largest banks and bank accounts, as we have left world markets.
It is time, globally, for political leaders to confront the monster in the kitchen that is the economic "darwinian elephant" of the marketplace. Not only must the world's issues NOT be left in the hands of the countries with the largest banks, even the world's fiscal and monetary issues must not be left in those hands, but, in fact, the world's complex issues need political fora with credibility, international respect and international political and legal powers of enforcement.
There must, in other words, be consequences, for national behaviour on the international stage, and that includes international commitments to those actions and agreements that would finally see such rogue agencies as AlQaeda, but not restricted to that group and/or its descendents, and the Taliban. And we have so far seen far too little of that kind of collegiality.
And there is little doubt that the principle of one country-one vote will not likely be able to be applied to such arrangements.
If we ever doubted the shifting sands of geoplolitical power, we can see the winds blowing that sand from west to east, in nothing less than a tornado, in velocity and in strength and we have made far too few preparations for our safety and the safety of our grandchildren.

Let's all work to abolish the Death Penalty everywhere, especially in the U.S.

From Amnesty International website, September 14, 2011
More than two-thirds of the countries of the world have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. While 58 countries retained the death penalty in 2009, most did not use it. Eighteen countries were known to have carried out executions, killing a total of at least 714 people; however, this figure does not include the thousands of executions that were likely to have taken place in China, which again refused to divulge figures on its use of the death penalty.



Chart courtesy Amnesty International


Where "+" is indicated after a country and it is preceded by a number, it means that the figure Amnesty International has calculated is a minimum figure. Where "+" is indicated after a country and is not preceded by a number, it indicates that there were executions or death sentences (at least more than one) in that country but it was not possible to calculate a figure.


What is shocking is to listen to the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, take such pride in his "accomplishments" in the very high number of executions in Texas since he became governor, while he campaigns for president as a Republican candidate.

U.S. faces existential crisis now!

New York Times Editorial, September 13, 2011
On Sept. 8, Mr. Obama proposed a $447 billion job-creation initiative, and on Monday, he proposed a sensible package of tax increases to pay for it — saying, in essence, that a sane fiscal policy requires more careful government spending now and eventually higher taxes.

Congressional Republicans initially offered a cautious reaction to the jobs bill. But once Mr. Obama talked about taxes, they lost all restraint. For all the caterwauling from Republicans about the budget deficit, the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, said paying for the plan would amount to a tax on “job creators.” The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said the tax proposals were dead on arrival — his reaction to anything Mr. Obama has proposed since Inauguration Day.
Now it is up to Mr. Obama to sell the public on his approach, something the White House has not done well. It will be a test of whether Mr. Obama will aggressively take on his opposition as the 2012 elections approach.
And then just this morning, we learn the New York congressional seat vacated by Anthony Weiner (D) was won by a former cable executive for the Republicans after he successfully channelled public anger against President Obama.
"Dead On Arrival" is the mushroom under which the republicans are hiding, in the hope that the New York example will be repeated across the country in the presidential election of 2012.
Unfortunately, DOA is the moniker that should be used to describe the Republican party representatives in Congress who have made government virtually cease to function. DOA removes the obligation to think through all proposals and recommend approaches in the country's best interests. DOA also removes republican candidates from answering questions, legitimate questions from the media as to their detailed policy approaches to what is now agreed to be the worse economic crisis since the 1929 Depression.
Harry Truman made famous the phrase, "do-nothing-Congress" when he was met by obstinate opposition to his proposals to get the economy moving back in 1949. The current Congress is not only a do-nothing congress, it is a congress determined to assure that President Obama is a one-term president.
And the country is locked, for the next fourteen months, in the jaws of this rich-baited, affluency-addicted, cash-dependent political dinosaur, the Republican party now having been taken over by the Tea Party.
Rendering the government "existentially challenged" is not an exaggeration because that is the real goal of these anarchists. For the most part they would like to see a return to the days of the wild west when the anarchists ruled by the power of their guns, where government, if it existed at all, was an annoying pimple on the buttocks of the territory, where the safety and security, and the schooling and the health care of the people came from the "back kitchen" with recipes and simple addition and subtraction were taught at the end of the old man's belt that hung, for effect, in public view of all the kids. There was no television and no knowledge or consciousness of the world beyond the range of hills that formed the boundary of both physical vision and intellectual capacity. There was no research university with scientists learning about how we are suffocating our planet; there was no 'third world' starving and dying to disease, poverty, terrorist and a different kind of lawlessness. There was only the simplest and most basic of facilities like water from the bucket that was carried to the well, or the stream, a hole in the house out back for a washroom, a stove in the middle of the kitchen to gather around for warmth and a few chickens and the occasional cow for meat and the few vegetables that each family could grow for their own table. There was a God "up there" and a Devil "down there" and a few aphorisms to please the former and avoid the latter. And these people believe that a return to these conditions: physical, mental, legal and certainly governmental are in the best interests of all Americans.
And having reduced themselves and their country to a one-dimensional cardboard stereotype, they are proceeding to act out the hollow lines of the script whenever they open their mouths. No matter the question, or the issue or the nuance of the questioner, the responses are the same.
the most elementary television sit-com has more nuance than a Tea Partier's answer to a question, any question. It is as if the proponents of this reductionism have elevated their form of vacuuity to a religion, with its own 'gospel' and its own pulpit, the political bully pulpit. And they proceed in their tyrannical and obsessive addiction to the pursuit of their own personal power, while they take the country, and the millions of unemployed, hungry and disaffected Americans down the drain of uselessness.
Talk about an existential crisis, for countries like Israel, in the face of the Arab uprisings. There is an existential crisis facing the United States below the 49th parallel. And it's face is the face of the Republicans who are committed to gaining power while their countrymen and women starve, become ill and even die, except for those win the big earnings and the big houses and the big cars and the big vacation homes....for it is those people who will perpetuate this crisis by funding the very voices who will make it happen in Washington.

Palestine approaches United Nations...complex, delicate and very high stakes

By Karl Vick, TIME, from GPS website, September 7, 2011
Instead of asking for full U.N. membership, Palestine can ask to be admitted as an "observer state." That's one rung up from the "observer entity" status it has held since 1974. Such a promotion comes with two advantages: It requires no Security Council action, and so amounts to a sure thing. The other privilege: it very likely opens the way for Palestinians to level charges against Israel in the International Criminal Court, and otherwise confront the occupying power in new, more sympathetic venues.
"The ICC is a big issue," says Yuval Shany, a professor of international law at Hebrew University, "but I'm not so sure it's the only issue. There could be other issues, like peacekeeping. "A Palestinian observer state might invite U.N. peacekeepers into the West Bank and Gaza, inviting at least a legal confrontation with Israeli troops that have been occupying the territories since 1967. "It opens up a lot of options, no matter what happens," Shany says.

Palestinian leaders are still debating what course to take come Sept. 21, when the U.N. General Assembly convenes in New York. While both Israeli and Arab diplomats court wavering European governments, the Obama administration is working frantically to produce a formula that will coax the Palestinians back to negotiations with Israel, which have proceeded for 20 years without resolution. Meanwhile, the global Palestinian community is riven by an earnest debate about the implications of statehood for the four to five million Palestinians living outside Gaza and the West Bank.
"I actually make the argument against going to the Security Council, because you're just going to embarrass the Americans by forcing them to veto," says Victor Kattan, a policy advisor for al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. "You can go the General Assembly and get what you want."
What Palestinians want, most immediately, is leverage over Israel, because statehood only becomes meaningful with the withdrawal of Israeli troops, which Abbas concedes will happen only through negotiations. The threat of being dragged before the bar at The Hague looks like leverage. As evidenced by its outcry over the U.N. investigation of war crimes in the 2008-2009 Gaza offensive, Israelis are extremely sensitive to allegations of wrongdoing leveled by international organizations. Indeed, the country likes to describe the Israel Defense Forces as "the most moral army in the world." If things got as far as arrest warrants, accused Israeli officials would be cast in the same lot as Sudan's Omar al-Bashir and others who must plan their overseas travel with great care.

"It's more than bad publicity," says Kattan. "I think they would be terrified of traveling to any country, not just Europe, any country that has ratified the Rome treaty [establishing the ICC]. The U.S. hasn't so they'd be safe there."
But Palestinians would face the same hazard, notes Robbie Sabel, another Hebrew University professor of international law. Signing on to the ICC treaty — as experts say entities with U.N. observer status are very likely entitled to do — also makes the signatory accountable for crimes against humanity, including terror attacks. "If they join the ICC every Palestinian citizen in the future who commits a war crime or crime against humanity will be subject to the jurisdiction of a court," says Sabel. "This is why none of Israel's neighbors, except Jordan, have joined the ICC. So the Palestinians would have the same dilemma."
Palestinian moderates, who are led by Abbas, might be tempted to exploit that dilemma in order to coerce militant factions, such as Hamas, to forswear violence. If that seems a bad bet, however, U.N. rules present yet another option, one that would put similar pressure on Israel without any immediate prospect of blowback. The General Assembly might ask another court affiliated with the U.N., the International Court of Justice, for an advisory opinion on whether Palestine qualifies for statehood.

"I recommend it," says Abdallah Abu Eid, a retired international law specialist from Birzeit University on the West Bank. "Ask the General Assembly to ask the ICJ for an advisory opinion. Although advisory opinions by the ICJ are not binding legally but they have very big impact morally." Sabel agrees: "It's considered weighty, shall we say."
The bottom line, experts say, is that in legal terms Palestinians ought to gain from almost any course they ultimately choose in New York. In the end, states become states by being recognized as states by other states. Admission to the General Assembly, which South Sudan won in July, amounts to collective recognition, which is wonderfully efficient. But a steady accumulation of endorsements by individual governments and international institutions — the IMF and World Bank both say Palestine looks ready — has the same effect, and being gradual, may be more likely to coax Israel toward concessions.
"I think the most significant tangible outcome they can hope to attain is a call by the General Assembly on member states to recognize a new Palestinian state and facilitate its introduction to other international instruments and institutions," says Shany. "That would mean you have significant political endorsement with perhaps some legal implications."

High stakes diplomacy, initiated by the Palestinian Authority, seems a very complex, multi-motivated move. To leverage the U.S., to leverage Hamas, to gain respect and some credibility in the room with other entities, by potentially moving from "observer entity" to "observer state" is not, as many headlines would suggest, an end run around the negotiations with the Israeli's. In fact though, such a move, possibly without the involvement of the Security Council, where the U.S. has indicated publicly it will exercise its veto against the move, could gain both some muscle with the Americans and also with the Israelis.
If granted, and if "observer state" does in fact permit Palestine to join the International Criminal Court, then it is possible that such moves could provide a venue for airing criminal charges from Palestine's partners-in-conflict on both sides of its psyche, Israel and Hamas.
For the UN to ask the International Court of Justice for an opinion on whether Palestine qualifies for statehood is another potential move that, regardless of the opinion rendered, would put feathers in the "hat" of Palestine, because, in a serious legal venue, it would have to make its case, and the world would know that such a case was being evaluated by objective jurists. It may seem miniscule but to the Palestinians even a step the size of one taken by an ant would be at least a step in the direction of finding their voice, and of having their voice heard, beyond the "Quartet" and beyond the White House.
This potential petition to whichever body of the UN is finally chosen, the General Assembly and/or the Security Council, is likely to unbind multiple silences, with a long-term view to leveraging a modicum of respect, credibility and association for the Palestinians in their long struggle for legitimate statehood.
Perhaps, in the world of formal diplomacy, the Palestinians are taking strength, courage and some muscle from the Arab Spring, and making a move that heretofore would not have been feasible. If so, it behooves the UN membership to listen carefully, to considered seriously and to rule judiciously and that will require extreme skill, sensitivity and a broader perspective than blind loyalty to either the Israeli-U.S. position or to the Palestinian position.
We could possible be witness, on September 23, when Abbas makes his pitch to the UN, to a situation in which the potential worthiness of the "global debating society" as the UN has so often been called in deep derision, becomes evident, and in the process the UN itself enhances its leverage on any number of fronts, including the provision of food aid to starving women and children on the horn of Africa.