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	The Dogs That Never Barked by Gareth Evans International Crisis Group Belgium   22 November 2005   As we mark the 10th anniversary of the Dayton accords that ended the war in Bosnia, it must seem to most Americans that the world hasn''t really learned much, then or since, about how to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. With every night''s evening news full of the grim daily death tolls in Iraq, riots in France, bombs in Jordan, ugly fighting still in Afghanistan and recurring nightmares in Africa, there doesn''t seem much room for optimism.   But there is. Contrary to what just about everybody instinctively believes, there has been a dramatic decrease in the number of conflicts, down 40% since the early 1990s. There were just 25 armed secessionist conflicts underway in 2004, the lowest number since 1976, according to the meticulously documented Human Security Report 2005, a new multi-government study (www.humansecurityreport.info).   The number of mass killings has fallen 80% since the late 1980s, according to the report. And around the world, there has been a spectacular increase in the number of civil conflicts resolved — as in Indonesia''s separatist Aceh province this year — not by force but by negotiation.   There are many reasons for these turnarounds. They include the end of the era of colonialism, the aftermath of which generated two-thirds or more of all wars from the 1950s to the 1980s. The end of the Cold War meant no more proxy wars fueled by Washington or Moscow, and it also hastened the demise of a number of authoritarian governments that each side had been propping up and that had generated significant internal resentment and resistance.   But the best explanation is the one that stares us in the face: the huge increase in international efforts to prevent, manage and resolve conflicts.   The best stories are the ones that do not reach the evening news: the dogs that never barked. Using the hard lessons learned from the disastrous days of the early 1990s in places such as Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia, the international community is much better now than it ever used to be at preventing conflict.   Between 1990 and 2002, the number of U.N. diplomatic missions aimed at stopping wars before they started increased sixfold, according to the Human Security report. Although sometimes an imperfect tool, economic sanctions against abusive regimes around the world increased elevenfold between 1989 and 2003. Early and sensible action in places such as Burundi, Indonesia and Macedonia has kept most Americans blissfully unaware that these were countries that recently veered away from the large-scale violence that has plagued them in the past.   Liberia''s recent presidential election was a one-day news story about people peacefully voting after years of bloodshed. But only a successful peacekeeping mission made it so.   A catastrophic new civil war looked certain to erupt in Somalia this year, with a misguided decision by neighboring governments to intervene militarily in support of one side of an internal political dispute. But organizations such as mine rang the alarm bells and there was a flurry of diplomatic activity in Nairobi, Addis Ababa and New York. Wiser heads prevailed, no intervention occurred, no war broke out — and because "nothing happened," nobody noticed.   For every roadside bomb in Baghdad, international peacekeepers in places such as Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone have quietly gone about their duties in work that seems now almost routine. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of U.N. peacekeeping operations more than doubled.   Regional organizations in Europe, the Americas and Africa have also become much more forceful in standing up and taking action against intolerable abuses against civilians, helping to limit conflicts before they spread out of control. Max van der Stoel, Europe''s former high commissioner on national minorities, deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for stopping as many as a dozen major ethnic and language-based conflicts from breaking out across Europe, from the Baltics to Romania.   One of the abiding lessons from the Balkans conflict was that the international community can be effective when it works together. Before the U.S. and Europe coordinated their approach in Bosnia, the situation was a bloody mess, the international response ineffectual and the world was looking at a failed, lawless state in the middle of Europe. When both sides of the Atlantic did pull together, things changed dramatically.   There has also been an emerging consensus on the international community''s responsibility to protect civilians at grave risk. This has helped bridge the gap between those who want to defend traditional principles of state sovereignty and those who assert an international right to intervene in humanitarian crises. We cannot yet be said to have reached, as an international community, anything like consensus as to how and when any intervention should be undertaken and under whose authority. And while the disagreement continues, people keep dying. But we are at least now on our way.   Much hard work remains to be done around the globe in places such as Iraq, Sudan and the Congo, but there is far more good news to celebrate than you probably have been led to believe. In an often uncertain world, the lives of millions of people are now vastly safer and more secure than they were even just a decade ago.   (Gareth Evans, is president and chief executive of the International Crisis Group. He was foreign minister of Australia from 1988 to 1996. This article appeared in the Los Angeles Times).
	We Americans are like recovering addicts after a four-year bender by Naomi Wolf, Paul Krugman The Guardian / New York Times USA   November 7, 2005   "We Americans are like recovering addicts after a four-year bender", by Naomi Wolf.   President Bush made his white constituency feel good about themselves, but no longer. Citizens are rediscovering democracy.   In the US comic strip, Peanuts, there is a little boy who is always followed by a cloud of dust. Wherever he goes, his cloud follows him. George Bush can"t shake his personal cloud. The until recently eerily untouchable president has now lost his mojo. The man to whom the entire US press corps has been on its knees for four years is finally in the doghouse.   It is almost a cartoon of karma. First, hurricane Katrina hit - and the sight of black and brown bodies floating in what had been the streets of a US city, of babies crying for water, of old people shrouded in their wheelchairs seemed to rip right through the collective fantasy of US goodness and infallibility constructed by Dick Cheney and his cabal and hyped by a crotch-strapped Bush in a flightsuit.   How did he get away with so many lies for so long? After 9/11, Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove successfully used the fear of more terrorist attacks and the intoxicant of ruthless jingoism to sedate the country and make it compliant.   They could not have had more fortunate timing. During an era when US prestige abroad had already been declining, when US schools were turning out subliterates, when the US economy was being crippled by competition from harder-working south-east Asians and Chinese, Americans - and especially American men - were feeling the sinking self-regard characteristic of those losing prestige in once-great empires in decline.   Bush, Cheney and Rove changed all that with their myth making post-9/11. Suddenly those feminists were no longer so threatening: we still needed tough men in firefighter suits to protect the less powerful. Suddenly American men could feel potent at the sight of a statue of a tyrant toppling in a public square, could vicariously inhale the discourse about "liberating the Middle East" and "spreading democracy", could put a yellow "Support the Troops" sticker on their SUVs and forget the spiking mortgage, the downsizing of good-paying white-collar jobs, the increasing obstreperousness of their women. Bush managed to be golden for so long because he made Americans - and especially white American men, his core constituency - feel good about their identity again.   Well, Katrina was like the end of the Wizard of Oz: the tiny, fibbing man was revealed behind the great big voice and the inflated ideals. Scene after scene of the failure of the US to act like the US held a mirror up to our faces. It was like an intervention for a drug addict: suddenly the lies, the hype, the intoxicants, the bad company, looked as destructive to our true selves as Americans as they really had been all along. "This is not who we are," we realised inwardly, in revulsion at our own long bender.   So now Bush can get no slack. The Miers fiasco showed him up as arrogant - no news, but we are sick of it now. The Valerie Plame leak suddenly feels serious, now that Bush has lost the monopoly on the word "treachery". The press is refusing to go away in the face of threats and platitudes. We hit the 2,000 mark for dead young American men and women in Iraq, and no one thought that was inspiring any more. The man can do nothing right.   It"s true that, in spite of Bush"s current implosion, some rightwing structures will remain well past this lame-duck presidency. The right has a firm grasp on such powerful institutions as Fox News, the network of think tanks, and soon, probably, the supreme court as well.   But here is the thing about democracy: when it is really working, it is not deferential to institutions. Real citizen action upends the best-laid plans of the best-financed oligarchs. Alabama was locked up politically in 1955 by segregationist old boys - but a bus boycott, sparked by a seamstress, Rosa Parks, who did not want to give up her seat, led the Jim Crow henchmen at the top into irrelevance. Because of an outburst of second-wave feminist activism, Roe v Wade was passed in spite of a number of conservative justices during a conservative Nixon presidency. Before Katrina, when the mass hypnosis of US jingoism still prevailed, there was widespread judicial support for curtailing the rights of war prisoners. Now, because of a changed national mood, judges seem far less eager to hand over authoritarian executive privilege to Bush. Justices, in other words, are people who live in and cannot help but respond to the bigger cultural shifts of their time. I believe in the power of this cultural shift around us to move even the judiciary: Institutions are made up of human beings, and no one likes being looked at with contempt at dinner parties.   But will this shift in the wind affect US relations with the larger world community? I think it could, but not, again, because our role at the UN will change or because we will have an awakening about our pathetic behaviour in relation to Kyoto. The shift in foreign relations will be an outcome of ordinary human shame. We were willing to be held in contempt by those effeminate Frogs - by "old Europe" - when we were intoxicated with ourselves: our isolationism made that easy. But now we are actually ashamed of ourselves at home, we can"t bear international contempt in the same way. Now it hurts.   I don"t see Cheney being shamed into dropping his Halliburton cronies now carving up Iraq. But I do see a renewed citizen interest in wind power, in driving petrol-electric hybrid cars, in reading about the short lives of the war dead - who, only six months ago, were spirited home away from the cameras in their body bags, when protest was considered unseemly. Today on the AOL homepage there is a headline about Bush being jeered by a foreign leader: that story would never have made it out of the land of blogs six months ago.   Like recovering addicts who have taken a step into a 12-step programme, we are ready at last to hear how we have harmed others - and to try to make amends. Star, the supermarket gossip tabloid, has put Angelina Jolie"s work with Ethiopian Aids orphans on the cover, with a bigger photo than that of Paris Hilton"s latest outfit. We used not to think black children in trouble overseas had anything to do with us - until we saw what happened to other black children, on our watch, here at home.   I do feel hopeful: everywhere I go, I hear disgust at our long drunken lurch through recent history give way to a renewed interest among ordinary people in activism, in justice, in what we used to understand as citizenship. I am less concerned about whether this results in a Democratic or Republican victory at mid-term elections than I am in whether we get to be a democracy again.   I am seeing Americans across party lines look again at what made us for so long, a moral force in the world - our judiciary, our until recently free press, our almost-retired belief in the equality of all - and think, yes, that is who we are. That is what makes us able to face ourselves in the mirror of news events. That is what made the US great, when it was great - not armies, not penal colonies, not a licence to terrify the world.   Bush will never recover his swagger in our eyes: he was our dealer. What remains to be seen is whether we will turn again to the next good drug to come along, with the next charismatic pusher - or whether Katrina"s real legacy will lead us to do the hard work of reclaiming a civil society rooted in reality. My bet is on the latter.   31 October 2005   "Ending the Fraudulence", by Paul Krugman. (The New York Times)   Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of us, daily life has remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare has merely been intellectual: we realized early on that this administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent, but spent a long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others - above all, of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose real rationale has never been explained - the nightmare has been all too concrete.   So is the nightmare finally coming to an end? Yes, I think so. I have no idea whether Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, will bring more indictments in the Plame affair. In any case, I don"t share fantasies that Dick Cheney will be forced to resign; even Karl Rove may keep his post. One way or another, the Bush administration will stagger on for three more years. But its essential fraudulence stands exposed, and it"s hard to see how that exposure can be undone.   What do I mean by essential fraudulence? Basically, I mean the way an administration with an almost unbroken record of policy failure has nonetheless achieved political dominance through a carefully cultivated set of myths.   The record of policy failure is truly remarkable. It sometimes seems as if President Bush and Mr. Cheney are Midases in reverse: everything they touch - from Iraq reconstruction to hurricane relief, from prescription drug coverage to the pursuit of Osama - turns to crud. Even the few apparent successes turn out to contain failures at their core: for example, real G.D.P. may be up, but real wages are down.   The point is that this administration"s political triumphs have never been based on its real-world achievements, which are few and far between. The administration has, instead, built its power on myths: the myth of presidential leadership, the ugly myth that the administration is patriotic while its critics are not. Take away those myths, and the administration has nothing left.   Well, Katrina ended the leadership myth, which was already fading as the war dragged on. There was a time when a photo of Mr. Bush looking out the window of Air Force One on 9/11 became an iconic image of leadership. Now, a similar image of Mr. Bush looking out at a flooded New Orleans has become an iconic image of his lack of connection. Pundits may try to resurrect Mr. Bush"s reputation, but his cult of personality is dead - and the inscription on the tombstone reads, "Brownie, you"re doing a heck of a job."   Meanwhile, the Plame inquiry, however it winds up, has ended the myth of the administration"s monopoly on patriotism, which was also fading in the face of the war.   Apologists can shout all they like that no laws were broken, that hardball politics is nothing new, or whatever. The fact remains that officials close to both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush leaked the identity of an undercover operative for political reasons. Whether or not that act was illegal, it was clearly unpatriotic.   And the Plame affair has also solidified the public"s growing doubts about the administration"s morals. By a three-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather than risen under Mr. Bush.   So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm. But the nightmare won"t be fully over until two things happen.   First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled. Second, the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as patriots.   It"s a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell"s former chief of staff, telling us how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal," it"s hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just that last week.   And as for the media: these days, there is much harsh, justified criticism of the failure of major news organizations, this one included, to exert due diligence on rationales for the war. But the failures that made the long nightmare possible began much earlier, during the weeks after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our political leaders build up a completely false picture of who they were.   So the long nightmare won"t really be over until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn"t we tell the public?
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