Solo Kristof

Ms. Collins is on book leave.  Mr. Kristof, in “Yet Again in Sudan,” says all eyes might be on the atrocities taking place in Libya and Syria, but let’s not ignore the potential Darfur-like situation brewing in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan.  Here he is:

The world capital for crimes against humanity this month probably isn’t in Libya or Syria. Instead, it’s arguably the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, where we’re getting accounts of what appears to be a particularly vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing, murder and rape.

In its effort to preclude witnesses, the Sudanese government has barred humanitarian access to the area and threatened to shoot down United Nations helicopters. Sudanese troops even detained four United Nations peacekeepers and subjected them to “a mock firing squad,” the U.N. said.

An internal U.N. report says that Sudanese authorities are putting on uniforms of the Sudanese Red Crescent — a local version of the Red Cross — to order displaced people to move away from the United Nations compound. They were then herded into a stadium in the town of Kadugli, where their fate is uncertain.

Western aid workers have been forced to flee, and there are credible reports of government troops and government-backed Arab militias systematically hunting down members of the black-skinned Nuba ethnic group and killing them.

“Door-to-door executions of completely innocent and defenseless civilians, often by throat-cutting, by special internal security forces,” a Westerner with long experience in Sudan recounted in a terse e-mail that I posted on my blog. The writer, who was on the scene but has now left, does not want to be named for fear of losing access.

The Rt. Rev. Andudu Elnail, an Episcopal bishop for the Nuba Mountains area, told me that the Sudanese government has targeted many Nuban Christians. Armed forces burned down his cathedral, said Bishop Andudu, who is temporarily in the United States but remains in touch daily with people in the area.

“They’re killing educated people, especially black people, and they don’t like the church,” he said. Women are also being routinely raped, Bishop Andudu said, estimating that the death toll is “more than a few thousand” across the Sudanese state of South Kordofan.

This isn’t religious warfare, for many Nubans are Muslim and have also been targeted (including a mosque bombed the other day). The Sudanese military has been dropping bombs on markets and village wells.

The airstrip that I used when I visited the Nuba Mountains has now been bombed to keep humanitarians from flying in relief supplies; the markets I visited are now deserted, according to accounts smuggled out to monitoring groups. At least 73,000 people have fled their homes, the United Nations says.

A network of brave people on the ground, virtually all locals, have been secretly taking photos and transmitting them to human rights organizations in the West like the Enough Project. My hard drive overflows with photos of children bleeding from shrapnel.

Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, visited the Nuba Mountains a year ago to gather historical accounts of the mass killings of Nuba by the Sudanese government in the 1990s. Now, he says, it is all beginning to happen again.

“As I watch the international community dither as the people of the Nuba Mountains are being killed, impunity reigns,” said Professor Totten.

The Sudanese government signed a framework agreement on Tuesday that could be a step to end the violence in South Kordofan, but there has been no deal on cessation of hostilities. Sudan has a long record of agreements reached and then breached (by the South as well as the North).

Sudan is preparing for a split on July 9, when South Sudan emerges as an independent nation after decades of on-and-off war between North and South. The Nuba Mountains will remain in the North when the South secedes, but many Nuba sided with the South during the war and still serve in a rebel military force dug into the mountains.

Most of the violence in the Nuba Mountains has been by northern Arabs against the Nuba, but there are also reports of rebel soldiers attacking Arab civilians. There is a risk that violence will spread to the neighboring state of Blue Nile and ultimately trigger a full-blown North-South war, although both sides want to avoid that.

It’s critical that the United Nations retain its presence. Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, already indicted for genocide in Darfur, is now visiting China, and Chinese leaders need to insist that he stop the killing of civilians and allow the U.N. to function.

The appeals from Nubans today feel like an anguished echo of those from Darfur eight years ago. Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization that has long worked in the Nuba Mountains, said it received a message from a Nuban pastor: “With grief today, I want to inform you that the new church is burned down. We have lost everything. The house where my staff lives was looted, and the offices were burned. Many people fled from town, but some stayed. There is no food or water now.”

 

Solo MoDo

The Moustache of Wisdom is off today, so MoDo has the stage to herself.  In “Utopia on the Hudson” she says that told by his dad to get off the canvas, Andrew Cuomo learned what the big picture really means.  Here she is:

I figured I’d get straight to it.

“So, Governor,” I asked, “are you afraid you’re going to hell?”

Andrew Cuomo, inculcated at Immaculate Conception grade school, Archbishop Molloy High School and Fordham University, chuckled. “There are forms of hell, Maureen,” he answered. “The question is, which level?”

He’s his father’s son, all right.

“It’s troubling for me as a Catholic to be at odds with the church,” he began, before dissolving into a wry laugh. “Having said that, it seems that my entire political life, the tension with the church has come up again and again.”

Just as his father seized a social issue and established himself in opposition to the church with his Notre Dame speech on abortion, now the son has seized a social issue and established himself in opposition to the church with gay marriage.

Is it genetic, I wonder.

“I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office,” the governor said, calling from the statehouse in Albany. It is a picture Mario Cuomo once kept in his office. He gave it to Andrew as a present when he graduated from Albany Law School, and the younger Cuomo has kept it with him for 30 years as he moved from job to job and city to city. “It’s not the first time there is a tension between the teachings of the church and the administration of the law, for my father and for myself.” Dryly, he adds: “I haven’t lost my head yet.”

Far from it. The New York governor says he still goes to church with his three teenage daughters. He received Communion at his Inaugural Day Mass, but mostly abstains. He has managed to stay on good terms with New York’s pugnacious archbishop, Timothy Dolan, who waged a relatively muted battle against gay marriage that Cuomo calls “reasonable.”

When I asked if the archbishop would preside over the ceremony if the governor decides to tie the knot with the Food  Network glamour girl Sandra Lee, Cuomo says it couldn’t happen “because I’m divorced.”

He shrugged off the shrill complaint of Vatican adviser Edward Peters that he’s living in “public concubinage” with his girlfriend in their Westchester home.

“He was a blogger, not from my state,” Cuomo  said of Peters. “I didn’t want to give it too much credibility.”

As for whether Lee was hurt by the crude, archaic term, he conceded, “It was not a pleasant conversation for anyone.”

Back when he was a young strategist for his dad, Andrew Cuomo attracted adjectives like  arrogant, ruthless, intimidating and manipulative.

These days, having risen from the painful ashes of a failed gubernatorial run in 2002 and a marriage to Kerry Kennedy that ended in divorce in 2003 — a time when those close to him worried that he had lost his way — he seems remarkably Zen.

“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” the 53-year-old murmurs about the nightmare years.

Mario Cuomo told me that Andrew said to him in that period of despond, “ ‘I guess I’m through with politics. What do you think, Pop?’ I told him if you can get up off the canvas after two really hard shots, we’re all with you and now you’ve got something else — the experience of being on the canvas.

“We love him; that’s easy. But admiring him, too, that’s unusual.”

Andrew Cuomo is still a master schemer and relentless phoner. “I don’t hang up until you say yes,” he says. But he has also studied his predecessors’ flaws and talents and added a healthy dose of Rockefeller wining-and-dining to his portfolio.

Having debuted with a flawless six months as a social liberal and a fiscal conservative (he passed an austere budget with a property tax cap and no tax increases), Cuomo seems happy. His dad calls his accomplishment “unique,” saying he has done more faster than anyone he’s watched in Albany, including himself, to break down partisan barriers and move things forward.

Andrew calls himself “an aggressive progressive” and thinks liberals have to reorient themselves toward a government with goals and effective service, rather than big government.

Those who have followed Cuomo’s career for decades do not think he took on the same-sex marriage issue out of the goodness of his heart. They think he saw how he could get a strategic win with little downside.

But like Ted Olson when he fought Prop. 8 in court in California, Cuomo seems genuinely moved by the reaction. He says that at many points “I did not think we were going to win,” which explains why he signed it so quickly on Friday just before the clock struck midnight “with the ink still wet.”

At Sunday’s gay pride parade in Manhattan, the guy who was once the cold insider blossomed into the cherished hero.

“I have never been in anything like that in my life, period,” he said. “Not when I worked with Clinton. Not with my father. In my 30 years in government, I never felt what I felt in that parade. Just the difference we made in people’s lives, how we touched people and made them feel good about society. It was really magic.

“A father, maybe 60 years old, came up to me and said, ‘You know, I have a gay son, and I never really accepted him and I shouldn’t have needed you to tell me that it was O.K. to accept my own boy. But I did.’ ”

For the moment, and it may only be a moment given all the thorny issues he has coming up, he is in that imaginary place his idol Sir Thomas More  invented: utopia. 

He wanted to prove government could work and the two parties could trust each other, and he has — avoiding his father’s mistake of being too highhanded with lawmakers. He wanted to transform a dysfunctional Albany from a joke, after the shenanigans of Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson, to a respected place where young people once more aspired to work, and he has.

“For a moment in time, you had people in this state capital who really heard their better angels and responded,” he said. “Government here has a renewed bounce in its step.”

The governor says he sold the marriage-equality bill as a matter of conscience and didn’t try to buy off any recalcitrant lawmakers with promises about roads or bridges.

He said Senator Roy McDonald, a Republican who grew up in public housing and represents a somewhat conservative district in the Albany area, told him that he wanted to vote for the bill because “it’s the right thing. I believe my God is a God of love and acceptance.”

When Republican donors were brought in to assuage skittish Republican legislators, Cuomo said, “It wasn’t really about the money. It was to say the Republican Party in this state has always been a moderate Republican Party, a Rockefeller party.”

If a politician’s character is defined by what he chooses to put himself on the line for, then Cuomo has shown character.

I asked him if President Obama had missed the moment when he stuck to his position at a Democratic fund-raiser for the gay community in Manhattan that states should decide the issue.

“No, there will be other moments,” he said diplomatically. “The president comes to New York and they ask him that question. That question didn’t exist a year ago. There’s been an amazingly rapid evolution on this.”

But, for many gays, Cuomo is now the civil rights leader among elected officials, a role President Obama should have proudly held. Cuomo, who now has a huge and excited base of millions of volunteers, activists and donors across the country, can press a button and raise millions.

And that, of course, has led to talk of 2016, when he could face his neighbor Chris Christie, who says he is not a fan of the gay marriage legislation, and even Michele Bachmann, who reacted to the joy in New York by saying she wants a Constitutional amendment protecting marriage.

“If I’m breathing in 2016, I’ll be happy,” said the man who learned the value of humility.

He says he does not tease his father about the fact that his poll numbers are now higher.

“Some things you don’t kid about and that’s one of them,” he says.

They talk at least once a day, and he says he values his father’s advice on any issue the “always rational” Mario chooses to weigh in on.

It is a stark contrast to the Bush 43, who was still afraid of his dad’s shadow as president and avoided talking issues with 41.

By contrast, 56 says of 52: “I ask him everything. When you work together as intensely as we did, either you’re very, very close, binary, or it destroys the relationship. He’s so smart, so informed, such a gift to me. I understand him more and more.”  He said he believes that a big part of his job is “leadership on the social, moral and legal issues of the day” because “that’s the model of leadership that I was exposed to as a boy.

“My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty. You can see a line of continuity from the death penalty to choice to marriage equality. You could argue there’s a 30-year span of the pressing social, moral and legal issues of the day.”

I ask him if it bothers him that he lives with a Food Network star but often keeps a 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. schedule at work that causes him to miss out on his girlfriend’s famous “semi-homemade” meals at home. (His mom’s criticism of her lasagna is another thing you don’t kid about.)

“The first six months were a sprint, but I make time for my private life,” he says. “My personal life is all good. The kids are good. Sandy’s good.”

So how does the workaholic on the Hudson relax?

“I’m a Queens boy at the end of the day,” he said. “I go fishing. I ride my motorcycle. I work on my cars. I spend time at home. I try to amuse my daughters, although teenagers do not have all that much use for a slightly controlling father.”

 

Brooks and Cohen

Mr. Nocera is off today.  Bobo has a question in “Convener in Chief:”  What sort of leader can get things done in an age of austerity? A comparison of three management styles sheds some light.  Well, the sort of dim bulb light that Bobo sheds…  Mr. Cohen, in  “America, Awaken,” says the U.S. economic crisis is not a temporary blip. An energy and an industrial policy are urgently needed.  Here’s Bobo:

This is a column about management styles. What sort of leader can get things done in an age of austerity?

Our first case study is what you might call the Straight Up the Middle Approach. When Chris Christie ran for governor of New Jersey, he campaigned bluntly on the need to reduce the state’s debt. After he was elected, he held 30 contentious town meetings with charts to explain how the debt would crush homeowners in each municipality.

Christie makes himself the center of the action and is always in the room. He sat down with Democratic leaders at meeting after meeting and hammered out compromises, detail after detail. The bipartisan pension reform bill Christie signed this month is controversial, but it is a huge step toward avoiding fiscal catastrophe. Christie, needless to say, quotes Springsteen to describe his approach: “No retreat. No surrender.”

Our second case study exemplifies the Insurgent Approach. While campaigning to be mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel also spoke bluntly about the tough steps he would take to reduce the city’s $650 million deficit.

But, in office, he hasn’t led a single frontal assault. Instead, Emanuel has introduced a flurry of initiatives in all directions. He took away credit cards from many city officials. He’s moved to lengthen the school day. He redeployed 650 cops from offices to the streets. He cut $75 million from the 2011 budget. He induced United Airlines to bring 1,300 jobs.

At any given moment there seems to be six Mayor Emanuels announcing six different initiatives. The measures to reduce spending are submerged in a frenetic reinvigoration agenda.

The key for Emanuel is to know which fights to pick (making it harder for teachers to strike, for example), and sequencing those fights within broader narratives about city growth.

It’s almost physical. Christie relies on power and mass. Emanuel relies on dexterity and speed. Both have begun their administrations in spectacular fashion.

The third case study is the most unexpected: President Obama’s Convening Approach. First, some context: In 1961, John F. Kennedy gave an Inaugural Address that did enormous damage to the country. It defined the modern president as an elevated, heroic leader who issues clarion calls in the manner of Henry V at Agincourt. Ever since that speech, presidents have felt compelled to live up to that grandiose image, and they have done enormous damage to themselves and the nation. That speech gave a generation an unrealistic, immature vision of the power of the presidency.

President Obama has renounced that approach. Far from being a heroic quasi Napoleon who runs the country from the Oval Office, Obama has been a delegator and a convener. He sets the agenda, sketches broad policy outlines and then summons some Congressional chairmen to dominate the substance. This has been the approach with the stimulus package, the health care law, the Waxman-Markey energy bill, the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and, so far, the Biden commission on the budget.

As president, Obama has proved to be a very good Senate majority leader — convening committees to do the work and intervening at the end.

All his life, Obama has worked in nonhierarchical institutions — community groups, universities, legislatures — so maybe it is natural that he has a nonhierarchical style. He tends to see issues from several vantage points at once, so maybe it is natural that he favors a process that involves negotiating and fudging between different points of view.

Still, I would never have predicted he would be this sort of leader. I thought he would get into trouble via excessive self-confidence. Obama’s actual governing style emphasizes delegation and occasional passivity. Being led by Barack Obama is like being trumpeted into battle by Miles Davis. He makes you want to sit down and discern.

But this is who Obama is, and he’s not going to change, no matter how many liberals plead for him to start acting like Howard Dean.

The Obama style has advantages, but it has served his party poorly in the current budget fight. He has not educated the country about the debt challenge. He has not laid out a plan, aside from one vague, hyperpoliticized speech. He has ceded the initiative to the Republicans, who have dominated the debate by establishing facts on the ground.

Now Obama is compelled to engage. If ever there was an issue that called for his complex, balancing approach, this is it. But, to reach an agreement, he will have to resolve the contradiction in his management style. He values negotiation but radiates disdain for large swathes of official Washington. If he can overcome his aloofness and work intimately with Republicans, he may be able to avert a catastrophe and establish a model for a more realistic, collegial presidency.

The former messiah will have to become a manager.

Still with the messiah shit, eh, Bobo?  And of COURSE it’s all Obama’s fault that Republicans walk out of meetings designed to avert that catastrophe.  What a horse’s ass you are, Bobo.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once remarked that the United States was “aesthetically inferior but morally superior” to Europe.

On the aesthetics, there’s not much doubt. Savoir vivre is a French expression that English finds it needs. Style is many things but one reason Italy elevates it is because it is a fine disguise for lost power. When you’re running the world you don’t have much time for Windsor knots.

The aesthetics of European cities offer the consolation of the past’s grandeur but seldom the adrenalin of future possibility. It’s wonderful to be lost in Bruges or Amsterdam, Venice or Vienna. The palaces bear no relation to current obligations. They have become outsized repositories of beauty.

Sleepwalk through them and feel content. The only problem is awakening. One of the things you awaken to is that it’s now almost a century since Europe ripped itself to shreds at Verdun. Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently calculated in The New York Review of Books that British losses on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, given respective populations, were the equivalent of “280,000 GI’s killed between dawn and dusk.”

The Great War had its midcentury European sequel. And so power passed to America. It was of a United States ascendant that Berlin wrote, a confident nation assuming responsibility for the world.

He found it “morally superior” to Europe. I think he meant above all the can-do vigor of a young nation still able to dream big and gather its collective resources to realize great projects. Not for America the moral relativism of tired European powers that, ambition exhausted or crushed, settled for comfort and compromise.

I was talking about puritanism the other day with an American friend who observed: “Don’t knock it — that’s what got us this country in the first place!” There’s something to that: America has been inseparable from a city-on-the-hill idealism but also from a strong work ethic. When I became an American citizen and had to do an English test the second sentence of my dictation was: “I plan to work very hard every day.”

But of course you can’t work if you don’t have a job and today that’s the situation of 9.1 percent of Americans and 24 percent of U.S. youth. These are shocking numbers that aren’t temporary blips. They reflect shifts in the global economy. Every year developing economies are producing tens of millions of middle class people who can do American jobs.

What’s most worrying is that the U.S. response to this crisis seems to be one of a country in middle age, a nation that has lost its can-do moral edge, the ability to come together and overcome. In this critical regard President Obama has failed to deliver.

Berlin observed that Americans were a “2×2=4 sort of people who want yes or no for an answer.” They’ve gotten neither of late, only muddle.

Bill Clinton recently took Obama to task in Newsweek, proposing 14 measures to create employment. Given that the Clinton presidency saw the creation of 23 million jobs his advice is probably worth a glance even if it grates. I was struck by two underlying themes: the need for an energy policy and for an industrial policy.

Here’s why: It’s absurd that “climate change” has become an unpronounceable phrase under Obama and that green technology initiatives have been stymied by sterile ideological dispute. Intelligent use of resources makes strategic sense for America whatever your hang-up on global warming. It’s equally absurd that private U.S. corporations, having made $1.68 trillion in profits in the last quarter of 2010 and sitting on piles of cash, are doing fine while job numbers languish and more Americans struggle.

None of this makes moral or any other sense. America needs an energy policy and an industrial policy. It has to lead in green technology and — purist capitalist reflexes notwithstanding — it must find ways to get corporate America involved in a national revival.

In these regards it might look to Europe: Copenhagen now heats itself in winter by burning its own garbage; Germany has 6 percent unemployment in part because the government and corporations have cooperated to keep jobs.

One of Clinton’s energy ideas related to the cash incentive Obama had offered for start-up green companies. America moved in the past few years, the former president noted, from having less than 2 percent of the world market in manufacturing high-powered batteries for hybrid or all-electric cars to 20 percent, with 30 new battery plants built or under construction. Then — wait for it — Republicans in Congress wouldn’t extend the plan because they viewed it as a “spending program” rather than a tax cut.

This is madness, the ne plus ultra of American politicians betraying the American people. As Clinton noted, “We could get lots of manufacturing jobs in the same way” — that is, combining green energy and industrial policy.

It’s past time for Obama to lead in these areas. Americans, Berlin also suggested, are the “largest assemblage of fundamentally benevolent human beings ever gathered together.” But their representatives have lost their moral compass. History tells us where that leads.

 

Just The Pasty Little Putz

Prof. Krugman is off today, so it’s just The Pasty Little Putz.  In “160 Million and Counting” he gurgles about abortion and the tragedy of the world’s missing women.  Here he is:

In 1990, the economist Amartya Sen published an essay in The New York Review of Books with a bombshell title: “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing.” His subject was the wildly off-kilter sex ratios in India, China and elsewhere in the developing world. To explain the numbers, Sen invoked the “neglect” of third-world women, citing disparities in health care, nutrition and education. He also noted that under China’s one-child policy, “some evidence exists of female infanticide.”

The essay did not mention abortion.

Twenty years later, the number of “missing” women has risen to more than 160 million, and a journalist named Mara Hvistendahl has given us a much more complete picture of what’s happened. Her book is called “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.” As the title suggests, Hvistendahl argues that most of the missing females weren’t victims of neglect. They were selected out of existence, by ultrasound technology and second-trimester abortion.

The spread of sex-selective abortion is often framed as a simple case of modern science being abused by patriarchal, misogynistic cultures. Patriarchy is certainly part of the story, but as Hvistendahl points out, the reality is more complicated — and more depressing.

Thus far, female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less. In many communities, she writes, “women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India, sex selection began in “the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” before spreading down the income ladder.

Moreover, Western governments and philanthropic institutions have their fingerprints all over the story of the world’s missing women.

From the 1950s onward, Asian countries that legalized and then promoted abortion did so with vocal, deep-pocketed American support. Digging into the archives of groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Hvistendahl depicts an unlikely alliance between Republican cold warriors worried that population growth would fuel the spread of Communism and left-wing scientists and activists who believed that abortion was necessary for both “the needs of women” and “the future prosperity — or maybe survival — of mankind,” as the Planned Parenthood federation’s medical director put it in 1976.

For many of these antipopulation campaigners, sex selection was a feature rather than a bug, since a society with fewer girls was guaranteed to reproduce itself at lower rates.

Hvistendahl’s book is filled with unsettling scenes, from abandoned female fetuses littering an Indian hospital to the signs in Chinese villages at the height of the one-child policy’s enforcement. (“You can beat it out! You can make it fall out! You can abort it! But you cannot give birth to it!”) The most disturbing passages, though, are the ones that depict self-consciously progressive Westerners persuading themselves that fewer girls might be exactly what the teeming societies of the third world needed.

Over all, “Unnatural Selection” reads like a great historical detective story, and it’s written with the sense of moral urgency that usually accompanies the revelation of some enormous crime.

But what kind of crime? This is the question that haunts Hvistendahl’s book, and the broader debate over the vanished 160 million.

The scale of that number evokes the genocidal horrors of the 20th century. But notwithstanding the depredations of the Chinese politburo, most of the abortions were (and continue to be) uncoerced. The American establishment helped create the problem, but now it’s metastasizing on its own: the population-control movement is a shadow of its former self, yet sex selection has spread inexorably with access to abortion, and sex ratios are out of balance from Central Asia to the Balkans to Asian-American communities in the United States.

This places many Western liberals, Hvistendahl included, in a distinctly uncomfortable position. Their own premises insist that the unborn aren’t human beings yet, and that the right to an abortion is nearly absolute. A self-proclaimed agnostic about when life begins, Hvistendahl insists that she hasn’t written “a book about death and killing.” But this leaves her struggling to define a victim for the crime that she’s uncovered.

It’s society at large, she argues, citing evidence that gender-imbalanced countries tend to be violent and unstable. It’s the women in those countries, she adds, pointing out that skewed sex ratios are associated with increased prostitution and sex trafficking.

These are important points. But the sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence.

Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around.

The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.

 

Dowd, Friedman and Kristof

MoDo has a question:  “Why Is He Bi? (Sigh)”  She whines that The One likes to have it two ways at once.  The Moustache of Wisdom says “It Has to Start With Them,” and says three questions come to mind when thinking about Afghanistan.  Mr. Kristof, who is in Say, Nigeria, comes “Face to Face With a Mother’s Pain,” and says an American student meets a starving mother in southern Niger, and reminds us to care.  Here’s MoDo:

He was born this way.

Bi.

Not bisexual. Not even bipartisan. Just binary.

Our president likes to be on both sides at once.

In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surging and withdrawing simultaneously. He’s leaving fewer troops than are needed for a counterinsurgency strategy and more troops than are needed for a counterterrorism strategy — and he seems to want both strategies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.

On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.

On the budget, he wants to cut spending and increase spending. On the environment, he wants to increase energy production but is reluctant to drill. On health care, he wants to get everybody covered but will not press for a universal system. On Wall Street, he assails fat cats, but at cocktail parties, he wants to collect some of their fat for his campaign.

On politics, he likes to be friends with the other side but bash ’em at the same time. For others, bipartisanship means transcending their own prior political identities. For President Obama, it means that he participates in all political identities. He does not seem deeply affiliated with any side except his own.

He was elected on the idea of bold change, but now — except for the capture of Osama and his drone campaign in Pakistan and Yemen — he plays it safe. He shirks politics as usual but gets all twisted up in politics.

The man who was able to beat the Clintons in 2008 because the country wanted a break from Clintonian euphemism and casuistry is now breaking creative new ground in euphemism and casuistry.

Obama is “evolving” on the issue of gay marriage, which, as any girl will tell you, is the first sign of a commitment-phobe.

Maybe, given all his economic and war woes as he heads into 2012, Obama fears the disapproval of the homophobic elements within his own party. But he has tried to explain his reluctance on gay marriage as an expression of his Christianity, even though he rarely goes to church and is the picture of a secular humanist.

While picking up more than three-quarters of a million dollars from 600 guests at a gay and lesbian fund-raising gala in Manhattan on Thursday night, the president declared, “I believe that gay couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple in this country,” even as he held to his position that the issue should be left to the states to decide.

He’s not as bad as New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who gave another grumpy interview on Thursday, this time to The National Catholic Register, asserting: “You think it’s going to stop with this? You think now bigamists are going to want their rights to marry? You think somebody that wants to marry his sister is going to now say, ‘I have a right’? I mean, it’s the same principle, isn’t it?”

The archbishop concluded: “Next thing you know, they’re going to say there’s four outs to every inning of baseball. This is crazy.” (He’s beginning to sound like Justice Scalia.)

Still, Obama’s reluctance to come out for gay marriage seems hugely and willfully inconsistent with what we know about his progressive worldview. And it is odd that the first black president is letting Andrew Cuomo, who pushed through a gay-marriage bill in Albany on Friday night, go down in history as the leader on the front lines of the civil rights issue of our time.

But for the president, “the fierce urgency of now” applies only to getting checks from the gay community, not getting up to speed with all the Americans who think it’s time for gay marriage.

As with “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Obama is not leading the public, he’s following. And worse, the young, hip black president who was swept in on a gust of change, audacity and hope is lagging behind a couple of old, white conservatives — Dick Cheney and Ted Olson.

As a community organizer, Obama developed impressive empathetic gifts. But now he is misusing them. It’s not enough to understand how everybody in the room thinks. You have to decide which ones in the room are right, and stand with them. A leader is not a mediator or an umpire or a convener or a facilitator.

Sometimes, as Chris Christie put it, “the president has got to show up.”

With each equivocation, the man in the Oval Office shields his identity and cloaks who the real Barack Obama is.

He should draw inspiration from the gay community: one thing gays have to do, after all, is declare who they are at all costs.

On some of the most important issues facing this nation, it is time for the president to come out of the closet.

MoDo thinks Obama likes to “bash” the other side?  Give me one example MoDo, just one.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

When President Obama announced his decision to surge more troops into Afghanistan in 2009, I argued that it could succeed if three things happened: Pakistan became a different country, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan became a different man and we succeeded at doing exactly what we claim not to be doing, that is nation-building in Afghanistan. None of that has happened, which is why I still believe our options in Afghanistan are: lose early, lose late, lose big or lose small. I vote for early and small.

My wariness about Afghanistan comes from asking these three questions: When does the Middle East make you happy? How did the cold war end? What would Ronald Reagan do? Let’s look at all three.

When did the Middle East make us happiest in the last few decades? That’s easy: 1) when Anwar el-Sadat made his breakthrough visit to Jerusalem; 2) when the Sunni uprising in Iraq against the pro-Al Qaeda forces turned the tide there; 3) when the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was routed in 2001 by Afghan rebels, backed only by U.S. air power and a few hundred U.S. special forces; 4) when Israelis and Palestinians drafted a secret peace accord in Oslo; 5) when the Green Revolution happened in Iran; 6) when the Cedar Revolution erupted in Lebanon; 7) when the democracy uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Egypt emerged; 8) when Israel unilaterally withdrew from South Lebanon and Gaza.

And what do they all have in common? America had nothing to do with almost all of them. They were self-propelled by the people themselves; we did not see them coming; and most of them didn’t cost us a dime.

And what does that tell you? The most important truth about the Middle East: It only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them. If it doesn’t start with them, if they don’t have ownership of a new peace initiative, a battle or a struggle for good governance, no amount of U.S. troops kick-starting, cajoling or doling out money can make it work. And if it does start with them, they really don’t need or want us around for very long.

When people own an initiative — as the original Afghan coalition that toppled the Taliban government did, as the Egyptians in Tahrir Square did, as the Egyptian and Israeli peacemakers did — they will be self-propelled and U.S. help can be an effective multiplier. When they don’t want to own it — in Afghanistan’s case, decent governance — or when they think we want some outcome more than they do, they will be happy to hold our coats, shake us down and sell us the same carpet over and over.

As for how the cold war ended, that’s easy. It ended when the two governments — the Soviet Union and Maoist China, which provided the funding and ideology propelling our enemies — collapsed. China had a peaceful internal transformation from Maoist Communism to capitalism, and the Soviet Union had a messy move from Marxism to capitalism. End of cold war.

Since then, we have increasingly found ourselves at war with another global movement: radical jihadist Islam. It is fed by money and ideology coming out of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran. The attack of 9/11 was basically a joint operation by Saudi and Pakistani nationals. The Marine and American Embassy bombings in Lebanon were believed to have been the work of Iranian agents. Yet we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, because Saudi Arabia had oil, Pakistan had nukes and Iran was too big. We hoped that this war-by-bank-shot would lead to changes in all three countries. So far, it has not.

Until we break the combination of mosque, money and power in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which fuel jihadism, all we’re doing in Afghanistan is fighting the symptoms. The true engines propelling radical jihadist violence will still be in place. But that break requires, for starters, a new U.S. energy policy. Oh, well.

George Will pointed out that Senator John McCain, a hawk on Libya and Afghanistan, asked last Sunday, “I wonder what Ronald Reagan would be saying today?” with the clear implication that Reagan would never leave wars like Libya or Afghanistan unfinished. I actually know the answer to that question. I was there.

On Feb. 25, 1984, I stood on the tarmac at the Beirut airport and watched as a parade of Marine amphibious vehicles drove right down the runway, then veered off and crossed the white sand beach, slipped into the Mediterranean and motored out of Lebanon to their mother ship.

After a suicide bomber killed 241 U.S. military personnel, Reagan realized that he was in the middle of a civil war, with an undefined objective and an elusive enemy, whose defeat was not worth the sacrifice. So he cut his losses and just walked away. He was warned of dire consequences; after all, this was the middle of the cold war with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. We would look weak. But Reagan thought we would get weak by staying. As Reagan deftly put it at the time: “We are not bugging out. We are moving to deploy into a more defensive position.”

Eight years later, the Soviet Union was in the dustbin of history, America was ascendant and Lebanon, God love the place, was still trying to sort itself out — without us.

Oh, yes, Tommy.  Let’s DO ask what Ronald Reagan would do.  Other than arm the Taliban, I mean…  You asshole.  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

A chance encounter in a village here between an American medical student traveling with me and a starving African mother was almost too wrenching to handle.

The winners of my annual win-a-trip contest, Saumya Dave of Atlanta, the medical student, and Noreen Connolly, a teacher from Newark, traveled with me to a remote village here in southern Niger. We came across a young mother who was quietly starving beside her thatch-roof hut, along with her two surviving children (two others had already died).

The mother, Miero Finiba, told us that she was eight months pregnant (confirmed by a health card) and had nothing at all to eat in the house (confirmed by her husband). She and her children had last eaten a day earlier, when neighbors — themselves impossibly poor — shared some of their food.

Ms. Finiba was also afflicted with a leg infection that looked gangrenous. That meant that if she didn’t starve, she might soon lose her leg — or, more realistically in a village with no medical clinic, simply die of the infection.

Her two small children, ages 5 and 2, would then be at great risk of dying without their mother to look after them. The father is blind, from a disease called river blindness, which is transmitted by black flies, and cannot cultivate the fields.

It was at that point in the conversation that Ms. Dave choked and teared up. “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.

That was exactly the right response. Journalists should keep a certain distance, yes, but that doesn’t mean that we dispassionately chronicle the death of a starving mother and her children. Ms. Dave was embarrassed that she had lost her composure, but I wish more people would feel the same distress as a food crisis spreads around the developing world.

Global food prices are spiking, not yet reaching their peak of July 2008 but heading there. The World Bank calculates that rising food prices pushed 44 million more people into poverty in the latter half of 2010.

What normally happens is that we wait for a famine, and then rush in with emergency rations. But that’s extremely expensive, and it also comes too late — even for survivors.

Research in recent years has established that hunger in the prenatal period and in infancy deprives a child of the nourishment the brain needs to grow properly. For example, babies who were in the uterus during the 1944 “Dutch famine” of World War II did worse on mental tests than those of similar ages — even 60 years later.

So what can we do, particularly in an era when we face our own severe spending constraints?

There are inexpensive steps that can help avert this kind of hunger. I talked about one low-tech solution in my last column: greater encouragement of breast-feeding, which one study says could save 1.4 million lives a year.

We can also insist that governments in the developing world reduce suffocating corruption that raises transit costs. On both the Mauritania/Senegal and Niger/Burkina Faso borders, we saw huge numbers of trucks lined up, waiting to be “inspected” by customs officials — which in Africa often means paying a bribe. That’s disgraceful and adds to food prices.

In Niger, we also visited a village savings-and-loan project established by CARE that helps women start small businesses. Essentially, it’s a microsavings project, so that women have a nest egg when it’s needed to buy food.

One woman we talked to had started in such penury that four of her children had died of starvation or disease. But with CARE’s help, she started preparing black-eyed peas for sale, branched into growing peanuts and fattening sheep, and with her profits bought a motorcycle that is rented out as a taxi.

And in eastern Burkina Faso, we visited a project of Helen Keller International, financed by the United States aid agency, that shows village women how to grow gardens of high-nutrition vegetables. These gardens create a safety net and ensure that babies get vitamin A and other nutrients.

The Obama administration has promoted aid programs that boost agricultural output to fight malnutrition and poverty. That’s not as catchy as setting up emergency feeding clinics in a famine-devastated land, but it’s far cheaper to avert the crisis than to wait for it.

Another crucial need is family planning, which some of the women I talked to hadn’t even heard of. That would reduce the pressure on the land and the number of mouths to feed.

And Ms. Finiba, eight months pregnant and starving? With the help of Helen Keller International we were able to get her food and, it seems, medical care. But rising food prices may put millions more into Ms. Finiba’s sandals, just as donor countries’ budgets are under pressure.

We need more people raising Ms. Dave’s teary question: Is there anything we can do?

The answer is: Yes, definitely!

 

Solo Blow

Ms. Collins is on book leave.  In “Them That’s Not Shall Lose” Mr. Blow says James Baldwin’s words about how expensive it is to be poor are quite relevant today. If only they could resonate with Washington politicians.  Here he is:

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

James Baldwin penned that line more than 50 years ago, but it seems particularly prescient today, if in a different manner than its original intent.

Baldwin was referring to the poor being consistently overcharged for inferior goods. But I’ve always considered that sentence in the context of the extreme psychological toll of poverty, for it is in that way that I, too, know well how expensive it is to be poor.

I know the feel of thick calluses on the bottom of shoeless feet. I know the bite of the cold breeze that slithers through a drafty house. I know the weight of constant worry over not having enough to fill a belly or fight an illness.

It is in that context that I am forced to assume that if Washington politicians ever knew the sting of poverty then they have long since vanquished the memory. How else to qualify their positions? In fact, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly half of all members of Congress are millionaires, and between 2008 and 2009, when most Americans were feeling the brunt of the recession, the personal wealth of members of Congress collectively increased by more than 16 percent. Must be nice.

Poverty is brutal, consuming and unforgiving. It strikes at the soul.

You defend yourself with hope, hard work and, for some, a helping hand. But these weapons grow dull in an economy on the verge of atrophy, in a job market tilting ever more toward the top and in a political environment that would sacrifice the weak to the wealthy.

On Thursday, the Pew Research Center released a poll that showed how disillusioned low-income people have become. Those making less than $30,000 were the most likely to expect to be laid off or be asked to take a pay cut. Furthermore, they were the most likely to say that they had trouble getting or paying for medical care and paying the rent or mortgage.

But at least those numbers include people with incomes. A vast subset is chronically unemployed and desperately searching for work. According to the Consumer Reports Employment Index, “In 23 of the past 24 months, lower-income Americans have lost more jobs than they have gained.” It continues, “Meanwhile, more affluent Americans seem to be gaining more jobs than they are losing.”

And the current election-cycle obsession to balance the books with a pound of flesh, which is being pushed by pitiless Republicans and accommodated by pitiful Democrats, will only multiply the pain.

Until more politicians understand — or remember — what it means to be poor in this country, we are destined to fail the least among us, and all of us will pay a heavy price for that failure.

Politicians are MOTUs, and their attitude is FYIGM.

Bobo, just Bobo

Prof. Krugman is off today, so Bobo can hold forth all alone.  In “The Saga of Sister Kiki” he gets huffy about a sordid tale of a teenage girl trapped by the allure of virtual celebrity that he says raises important questions about where we’re seeking fulfillment.  I think we’re all supposed to get off his lawn…  Here he is:

In 1900, Theodore Dreiser wrote “Sister Carrie,” about a young woman who left the farm and got mauled by the crushing forces of industrial America: the loneliness of urban life, the squalid conditions of the factory, the easy allure of the theater, the materialism of the new consumer culture.

If Dreiser were around today, he might write about Kiki Ostrenga. Kiki, who was the subject of a haunting profile by Sabrina Rubin Erdely in the April issue of Rolling Stone, was a young teenager who got mauled by the some of the worst forces of the information age.

Lonely at school, she took refuge by creating an online persona, Kiki Kannibal, posting photos of herself with various hairstyles and looks — goth one day; sexually charged, Lady Gaga-style temptress the next.

Though 13, Ostrenga was a phenomenally good shape-shifter. The photos often show her in her underwear or short skirts, with lurid make-up, edgy poses and pouty come-hither expressions. In them, you see the child’s ability to mimic the looks and attitudes of what she admires — in this case the cult of high-fashion celebrity as glamorized in Vogue or Cosmopolitan, on E!, TMZ, “Real World” and a thousand other outlets.

In sports, speed and strength are king. In music, talent and application are king. But online, eyeballs and page-views are king. Achievement is redefined as the ability to attract attention. And, with today’s technology, this sort of celebrity is not just a dream. Young people can create it for themselves.

Kiki must have sensed the tremendous erotic capital that a pretty, vulnerable, barely pubescent girl possesses on the Internet — even if she didn’t understand the consequences of her appeal. Sure enough, she became a MySpace sensation. Two million people are recorded to have logged on to her live stream video. Before long, there were 530 Facebook profiles from people claiming to be her (none of them were). She became an object of celebration, ridicule and hatred.

People talk about the online “community,” but it’s more accurate to see the response as a guerrilla war. Ostrenga made an aggressive bid for attention. Other people made a bid for attention by savaging her. Most of the viciousness hurled her way can’t be quoted here, but the article in Rolling Stone accurately described the mob-like behavior: death threats, savage sexual appraisals. “I know where you live, and I’m gonna kill” your cat, one person flamed. “Kiki go die you ugly [expletive],” another wrote.

Ostrenga inspired a wave of ridicule and defense, which spilled over into real life, including a punch to the head at a concert and the word “slut” painted in giant letters across her garage.

She was contacted by an 18-year-old man named Danny Cespedes, who charmed Kiki and her parents and became intertwined with their household. Unbeknownst to them, Danny had tried to seduce a string of young girls, some as young as 12. After her mother discovered that he had forced himself on Kiki one night, the Ostrengas pressed charges. As he was being arrested, he jumped off the second floor of a parking garage and ended up in a coma. He died two months later.

Next, she was victimized by the owner of a for-profit, teen-exploitation site called Stickydrama. The site’s owner both organized mass hate sessions against Kiki and invited her to live with him and become one of the site’s exhibitionist playthings. “If I can’t have you, I will destroy you,” he wrote in a Twitter message, according to Rolling Stone.

Addicted to the attention and now running an online jewelry business, Kiki couldn’t get offline, even while being painfully aware of the distinction between celebrity performance and the two-way loving relationships that she longed for. Her parents couldn’t seem to take the reins, even after they saw her online presence was not just a way of being creative.

In the end, they had to move to escape the threats. They were bankrupted in the process. Kiki lost any semblance of a normal adolescence.

She is an extreme case of an enormous uncontrolled experiment that is playing out across the world. Young people’s brains are developing while they are immersed in fast, multitasking technology. No one quite knows what effect this is having.

The culture of childhood is being compressed. Those things that young people once knew at 18, they now know at 10 or 12. No one quite knows the effect of that either.

Most important, some young people seem to be growing up without learning the distinction between respectability and attention. I doubt adults can really shelter young people from the things they will find online, but adults can provide the norms and values that will help them put that world in perspective, so it seems like trashy or amusing make-believe and not anything any decent person would want to be part of themselves.

Kiki’s story is not only about what can happen online, but what doesn’t happen off of it.

I’m sure this somehow must be Al Gore’s fault.  He’s fat, you know…

Coates and Kristof

The Times has hired Ta-Nehsi Coates as a guest columnist, I guess while they’re looking for a permanent replacement for Bob Herbert.  The only thing I know about him is that he’s a senior editor at The Atlantic, which fills me with dread since The Atlantic has creatures like The Pasty Little Putz and McMegan McCurdle.  But I’ll withhold final judgment until I know more…  This morning, in “The Haunting of Rick Perry,” he says should Gov. Rick Perry of Texas enter the 2012 presidential race, he would enjoy a strange and remarkable escort — the irrepressible ghost of Cameron Todd Willingham.  Mr. Kristof is in Dogon Doutchi, Niger and, in “The Breast Milk Cure,” he says a miracle cure for childhood malnutrition is free and easily accessible, even in remote towns in Africa. Why is it rarely used?  Here’s Mr. Coates:

Should Gov. Rick Perry of Texas enter the 2012 presidential race, he would enjoy a strange and remarkable escort — the irrepressible ghost of Cameron Todd Willingham.

Charged with the horrific crime of intentionally torching his home and leaving his three daughters to the blaze, Willingham’s 1991 conviction and 2004 execution were secured by two great bugbears of America’s criminal justice system: pseudoscientific forensics and the compromised testimony of a jailhouse snitch.

The fire investigators who fingered Willingham relied on the kind of sorcery that fire scientists have tried for the past 20 years to chase from the field. The informant, for his part, claimed that Willingham had inexplicably blurted out a confession, then recanted his tale. Then, in the words of New Yorker reporter David Grann, he “recanted his recantation.” When Grann tracked him down in 2009, he told him that “it’s very possible I misunderstood” what Willingham said, pausing to add “the statute of limitations has run out on perjury, hasn’t it?”

Perry was unswayed by pleas from Willingham’s lawyers and rejected their request for a 30-day reprieve. This registers as a rather mild atrocity in Texas, a state that does not so much tinker with the machinery of death as it gleefully fumbles at the controls.

In 2000, an investigation by The Chicago Tribune found that almost one-third of court-appointed defense lawyers in capital cases in Texas had, at some point, been publicly sanctioned by the state’s trial board. The Tribune uncovered cases of lawyers falling asleep at trials, engaging in extortion and assaulting teenage girls. Prosecutors and police were found concealing evidence or worse. In 1980, Cesar Fierro received the death penalty on the strength of a confession secured after an El Paso sheriff colluded with police across the border in Juárez, Mexico, who arrested Fierro’s parents and threatened to attach an electric generator to his stepfather’s genitals. Fierro is still on death row.

Texas regularly executes more criminals than any other state, and does so in such haphazard fashion that it could be comic. Except people are dying.

In 2005, Texas created a state commission to investigate the use of forensic science in criminal trials. The Willingham case was one of the first on the docket.

But, in 2009, Perry, anticipating a primary fight, subverted the commission by replacing its chair in the midst of the Willingham investigation. The new panel chair promptly canceled the hearing and declined to hold more for the rest of the year. The Willingham case did not appear in the commission minutes until April, a month after Perry had won the Republican primary.

The employment of lethal force is perhaps the greatest power afforded a state by its citizens. Thus the death penalty debate is ill-suited for those who would shrink from the implications of either its deployment or abrogation.

I am opposed to the death penalty. But my opposition is tempered by the belief that Americans support capital punishment for real and substantial reasons. The unfortunate fact of humanity is that it tends to regularly birth butchers who think nothing of concealing their work beneath a seductive mask of victimhood.

Thirty years ago, Roger Keith Coleman raped and stabbed to death his sister-in-law Wanda McCoy in the mining town of Grundy, Va. Sentenced to die, Coleman spent the rest of his life seducing activists and enrolling them to the cause of his innocence. On the eve of his death, Coleman was awarded a platform by the likes of “Good Morning America,” “Today,” “Larry King Live” and Time magazine. Meanwhile, McCoy’s family, and the small town of Grundy, endured the scornful eye of the nation and the implicit inference that hicks from Appalachia were set upon enacting frontier justice. So convinced were Coleman’s advocates, that after his execution in 1992, they pressed for postmortem DNA tests. Those tests confirmed Coleman’s guilt.

Whenever tempted by moral dudgeon, it should be remembered that abolishing the death penalty would mean asking decent people to tolerate the lives of criminals who revel in the abuse of that tolerance. Opposing the death penalty is not rooted simply in the pursuit of justice, but, perhaps more firmly, in understanding the world’s fundamental injustice, and the ease with which an attempt to permanently balance the scales ultimately imbalances them further. For want of this lesson, Texas may well have executed an innocent man.

Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, the accounts of those who would seek to conceal the results of their theory should be closely checked. If only for that reason, the prospect of Governor Perry as commander in chief induces a chilling nostalgia. Indeed, choosing a leader of the free world from the ranks of those who sport a self-serving incuriosity is a habit, like crash landings and cock-fights, best cultivated in strict moderation.

Once a century should suffice.

Of course, if Gov. Goodhair does run not a word will ever be heard about Cameron Todd Willingham becauase, as we all know, IOKIYAR and Al Gore is fat and wore earth tones.  Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

What if nutritionists came up with a miracle cure for childhood malnutrition? A protein-rich substance that doesn’t require refrigeration? One that is free and is available even in remote towns like this one in Niger where babies routinely die of hunger-related causes?

Impossible, you say? Actually, this miracle cure already exists. It’s breast milk.

When we think of global poverty, we sometimes assume that the challenges are so vast that any solutions must be extraordinarily complex and expensive. Well, some are. But almost nothing would do as much to fight starvation around the world as the ultimate low-tech solution: exclusive breast-feeding for the first six months of life. That’s the strong recommendation of the World Health Organization.

The paradox is that while this seems so cheap and obvious — virtually instinctive — it’s also rare. Here in Niger, only 9 percent of babies get nothing but breast milk for the first six months of life, according to a 2007 national nutrition survey. At least that’s up from just 1 percent in 1998.

(In the United States, about 13 percent of babies are exclusively breast-fed for six months, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then again, most of the rest get formula, which is pretty safe in America.)

Next door to Niger in Burkina Faso, fewer than 7 percent of children get breast milk exclusively for six months. In Senegal it’s 14 percent; in Mauritania, 3 percent.

These are some of the countries we’re passing through on my annual win-a-trip journey, this year with a medical student from Atlanta, Saumya Dave, and a teacher from Newark, Noreen Connolly. It’s heartbreaking to see severely malnourished children and to meet mother after mother who has buried children when such a simple life-saving solution is not applied.

The biggest problem is that many mothers believe that breast milk isn’t enough, and that, on a hot day, a child needs water as well.

On a rural road near the remote town of Dogon Doutchi, in southern Niger, we ran into a family of Tuareg nomads traveling north.

“On a hot day, babies need water,” Gayshita Abdullah, the mother, told me. She said she tries to get water from a well, but if there is no well nearby she gets it from a mud puddle.

In fact, most nutritionists are adamant that babies are best off with nothing but breast milk for the first six months of life (they used to recommend four months, but now say six months). And water in poor countries is often contaminated and dangerous for a baby.

Even when the mother is herself malnourished, her body will normally provide enough milk for a baby, nutritionists say.

A 2008 report in The Lancet, the British medical journal, found that a baby that is partially breast-fed is 2.8 times as likely to die as a baby that is exclusively breast-fed for at least five months. A child that is not breast-fed at all is 14.4 times as likely to die.

Over all, The Lancet said, 1.4 million child deaths could be averted each year if babies were breast-fed properly. That’s one child dying unnecessarily every 22 seconds.

“As far as nutritional interventions that have been studied, we have crushing evidence of breast-feeding’s efficacy in reducing child mortality,” said Shawn Baker, a nutrition specialist with Helen Keller International, an aid organization that works on these issues.

“It’s the oldest nutritional intervention known to our species, and it’s available to everybody,” Baker added. “But for a development community too focused on technological fixes, it hasn’t gained the traction it should.”

The challenges with breast-feeding in poor countries are not the kinds that Western women face, and many women in the developing world continue nursing their babies for two years. The biggest problem is giving water or animal milk to babies, especially on hot days. Another is that mothers often doubt the value of colostrum, the first milk after childbirth (which is thick and yellowish and doesn’t look much like milk), and delay nursing for a day or two.

One mother near the town of Dosso, Fati Halidou, who has lost four of her seven children, told me that after childbirth, it is best to give a baby sugar water or Koranic water. This is water made by writing a verse of the Koran on a board and then washing it off; the inky water is thought to protect the child.

It’s not clear why a human instinct to nurse went awry. Does it have something to do with the sexualization of breasts? Or with infant formula manufacturers, who irresponsibly peddled their products in the past but are more restrained now? Or is it just that moms worry that their babies need water on hot days? Nobody really knows.

But what is clear is that there’s a marvelous low-tech solution to infant malnutrition all around us.

 

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo says “Sing Out, Hillary,” and that First Lady Hillary could give Secretary Clinton a lesson or two about how to get in the face of authoritarian regimes.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “100 Days,” says the first 100 days of every presidency are regularly used as a measuring stick for success. Unfortunately, it seems as if that’s the only time anything gets done.  Here’s MoDo:

It would have been thrilling, of course, if Hillary Clinton had channeled Aaron Sorkin and smacked around the barbaric Saudi men who force women to huddle under a suffocating black tarp.

As Allison Janney’s C.J. Cregg once fumed on “The West Wing” about Saudi Arabia: “This is a country where women aren’t allowed to drive a car. They’re not allowed to be in the company of any man other than a close relative. They’re required to adhere to a dress code that would make a Maryknoll nun look like Malibu Barbie. They beheaded 121 people last year for robbery, rape and drug trafficking. They have no free press, no elected government, no political parties. And the royal family allows the religious police to travel in groups of six carrying nightsticks, and they freely and publicly beat women. But ‘Brutus is an honorable man.’ Seventeen schoolgirls were forced to burn alive because they weren’t wearing the proper clothing. … Saudi Arabia, our partners in peace.”

It would have been thrilling if Hillary 2011 had simply channeled Hillary 1995, when, as first lady, she made her bodacious speech in Beijing, declaring that “women’s rights are human rights.”

In her memoir, Hillary wrote that, despite pressure against it, she was determined to give that speech because she was fed up with “the crucial concerns of women” getting sacrificed “to diplomatic, military and trade issues.”

So it was startling on Monday when Saudi women activists, struggling to bring the Arab Spring to the medieval House of Saud by urging women to drive, chided Hillary for her silence.

Clinton’s office responded that the secretary had used “quiet diplomacy” — raising the issue, and more pressing ones, in a call with the Saudi foreign minister on the Day of Driving Dangerously.

By Tuesday, the secretary of state — who has worked hard for women under the radar and whose legacy will be shaped by her support of women’s rights around the world — realized that she needed to be a bit louder.

“What these women are doing is brave and what they are seeking is right, but the effort belongs to them,” she told reporters, adding that she wanted to “underscore and emphasize that this is not about the United States. It’s not about what any of us on the outside say,” but about “the women themselves.”

One Saudi liberal told me that Hillary should sing out: “Hillary should be more forthcoming and forget about oil. She should also focus on the plight of maids in Saudi Arabia. An Indonesian maid here was beheaded two days ago for killing her employer. Many workers are on death row and don’t get a fair trial.”

No one expected Hillary to be as exuberant as the Ukrainian feminists who cruised in solidarity around the Saudi Embassy in Kiev, covering their faces and baring their breasts.

Clinton is a diplomat now. She knows it’s tricky to push Bedouins, who get stubborn and dig in their heels. Saudis prefer concessions to be seen as gifts.

Still, because the Saudis are our drug dealers on oil, America has never fought hard enough for oppressed women in the authoritarian kingdom.

“We have bigger fish to fry,” a top foreign policy official told me this week.

The Saudis are disgusted with President Obama for what they see as his abandonment of Hosni Mubarak, dithering on a Palestinian state and being “unduly beholden to Israel,” as Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi ambassador to the U.S., wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece. The prince said that Saudi Arabia and other Arab states would help Palestinians bypass the U.S. and Israel and seek statehood at the U.N.

The Arab News reported that the Saudi Women for Driving Internet campaign was “deemed a failure, as hardly any women drove that day,” only about 40, and most did not continue after Friday.

Saudi fans of the 87-year-old King Abdullah, who started the first co-ed university in the kingdom, are upset and surprised that he hasn’t already allowed women to drive.

They blame it on the resistance of the ultraconservative Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz, the interior minister who is believed to be responsible for jailing the first driver, Manal al-Sharif, for nine days. Nayef is said to be arguing with the more progressive king for additional time to prepare for female drivers.

Given the king’s declining health and the illness of his half-brother, the Crown Prince Sultan, the chance to give women any rights may be running out. Nayef, who has long been in charge of the roaming odious religious police who let those schoolgirls die in the fire in Mecca because they didn’t have their headscarves on, is a contender to replace the crown prince, and it’s unlikely he’ll pull a Nixon-in-China move on women’s freedom.

The juxtaposition of images said it all. A smiling Michelle Obama and her daughters meeting with Nelson Mandela was a vivid reminder of how far South Africa has come since it ended race apartheid under pressure. The small courageous spurt of ladies in black driving was a vivid reminder that Saudi Arabia, under little pressure, is still locked in gender apartheid.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

There is something crazy about what is going on in our country today. Our fiscal condition continues on an unsustainable path, the European currency is heading for a crackup, the Arab world is in the midst of a crackup, unemployment is creeping upward and basically our two parties are telling us that they will not make the reforms that we know are necessary because it would involve too much pain and could imperil their chances of winning the presidency in 2012.

Ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legendary “First 100 Days” in office — which stabilized a country ravaged by the Depression — the first 100 days of every president have been used as a measuring stick for success. That’s over. I’ve said this before, and I believe it even more strongly today: We’ve gone from the first 100 days to the “Only 100 Days.”

Really — it feels as if Barack Obama had 100 days to push through the basics we needed to stabilize the economy and then lay the basis for his one big initiative — health care reform — and then he was preparing for the midterms, and then he was recovering from his midterm losses and then he was announcing his re-election bid and then, judging from all the Republicans who have declared for the presidency already, the 2012 race got started. As such, the chances of the two parties successfully doing something big, hard and together to fix the huge problems staring us in the face are very small — unless the market or Mother Nature imposes it upon them.

Therefore, let us all now hold our breath and hope that nothing really bad happens until the next president has his or her 100 days in early 2013 to take a quick shot at fixing the country before getting ready for the 2014 midterms and 2016 elections.

There is no way that America can remain a great country if the opportunities for meaningful reform are reduced to either market- or and climate-induced crises and 100 working days every four years. We need a full-time government, and instead we’ve created a Congress that is a full-time fund-raising enterprise that occasionally legislates and a White House that, save for 100 days, has to be in perpetual campaign mode.

To get elected today, politicians increasingly have to play to their bases and promise things that they cannot possibly deliver (5 percent annual growth for a decade) or solutions to our problems that will be painless for their constituencies (we’ll just raise taxes on the rich or we’ll just cut taxes even more) or to keep things just as they are even though we know they can’t possibly stay that way without bankrupting the country (Social Security and Medicare benefits).

The truth is, we need to do four things at once if we have any hope of maintaining American greatness: We need more stimulus to keep the economy from slipping back into recession. But we need to combine that stimulus with a credible, legislated, long-term plan for cutting spending and getting the deficit under control — e.g., the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction plan. And we need to raise new revenues in order to reinvest in the sources of our strength: education, infrastructure and government-funded research to push out the boundaries of knowledge.

That’s right. We need to do four things at once: spend, cut, tax and invest. And unless we do all four at once we’re not going to break out of our slow decline. But to do all four at once will require a new hybrid politics, which does not conform to the political agenda of either major party.

The Democrats are ready for more stimulus but have refused to signal any serious willingness to cut entitlements, like Medicare, that we know are unsustainable in their present form. The Republicans are all for spending cuts but refuse to accept any tax increases that we need to pay for the past and invest in the future. So what we’re basically saying as a country is that unless the market or Mother Nature make us pay, we are going to hand this whole bill over to our children.

Maybe it is just my friends, but I find more and more people completely disgusted by this situation and looking for a serious Third Party candidate who could run in 2012 and deliver the shock therapy to the corrupt, encrusted, two-party duopoly now running the show in America.

Such a Third Party would have a simple agenda: 1) Inject a short-term stimulus. 2) Enact Simpson-Bowles. 3) Shrink our presence in Afghanistan. 4) Raise automobile mileage standards. 5) Impose a gasoline tax to pay for a massive increase in government-supported scientific research and a carbon tax to pay for new infrastructure and stimulate clean-power innovation.

Do I think such a Third Party can win in 2012? Not likely. But it doesn’t have to win to be effective. If such a party attracted substantial voters on such a platform, it would shape the agendas of the Republicans and Democrats. They would both have to move to attract these voters by changing their own platforms and, in so doing, might even create a mandate for the next president to govern for an entire term — not just 100 days.

 

Brooks and Nocera

In “Smart Power Setback” Bobo says discouraging reports about aid in Afghanistan should drive us to consider the deeper forces underlying societal instability. Hint: It’s not always about the material stuff.  Well, well, well…  It’s dawned on Bobo that there are tribal considerations in Afghanistan.  Mr. Nocera, in “Banking’s Moment of Truth,” explains why banks shouldn’t win the fight over capital requirements.  But $100 says they will…  Here’s Bobo:

So far, few politicians have embraced my plan for a Marshall Plan Tax. The idea is that every time a think-tanker, op-ed writer or retired senator calls for a new Marshall Plan or a moonshot-type initiative to solve a social problem, they would have to pay a tax of $50. Within a few months, we’d have enough money to pay for an actual new Marshall Plan.

The problem with my proposal is this: Do Marshall Plans work? If this country really did galvanize its best minds and billions of dollars to alleviate poverty somewhere or to solve some complicated problem, could we actually do it?

Well, the U.S. has been engaged in a new Marshall Plan for most of the past decade. Between 2002 and 2010, the U.S. spent roughly $19 billion to promote development in Afghanistan. Many other nations have also sent thousands of aid workers and billions of dollars.

In some spheres the results have been impressive. Nearly two-thirds of Afghans now have access to basic health services, up from 9 percent a decade ago. Under the Taliban, 900,000 boys and no girls attended schools. Now more than seven million Afghans attend school, and 35 percent of them are girls, according to the United States Agency for International Development.

But when it comes to laying the foundation for economic growth and stability, the results have been discouraging.

Stuart Gordon of Chatham House, a British think tank, studied aid efforts in Helmand Province and concluded that in places where state capacity is weak and security is uncertain, foreign aid “may have as many negative, unintended effects as positive ones.” After a thorough two-year review of U.S. aid efforts in Afghanistan, the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee emphasized, “The unintended consequences of pumping large amounts of money into a war zone cannot be underestimated.”

Much of the aid effort was premised on the assumption that development would foster stability. Young men with jobs wouldn’t plant roadside bombs. Communities with growing economies would reject the Taliban. This assumption was based on the modern prejudice that bad behavior has material roots. Give people money and jobs and you will improve their character and behavior.

In Afghanistan, as elsewhere, this assumption seems not to be true. A conference of experts brought together last year in Wilton Park in Britain concluded that there is a “surprisingly weak evidence base for the effectiveness of aid in promoting stabilization and security objectives” in Afghanistan.

Violence doesn’t stem from poverty. It stems from grudges, tribal dynamics and religious fanaticism — none of which can be ameliorated by building new roads. The poorest parts of the country are not the most violent.

Meanwhile, the influx of aid has, in many cases, created dependency, fed corruption, contributed to insecurity and undermined the host government’s capacity to oversee sustainable programs.

In the district of Nawa, for example, Usaid spent $400 per person last year. The per-capita income before aid was $300. According to the World Bank, 97 percent of Afghanistan’s G.D.P. derives from spending related to the military and donor community presence.

This incredible infusion distorts labor markets. An Afghan can make $75 a month as a teacher but more than $1,000 a month as a translator or driver for aid workers. The most talented people get sucked out of the real economy and into the aid economy.

It overwhelms provincial governments. It fuels corruption. As aid workers grow frustrated by nonfunctioning Afghan bureaucracies, they build their own parallel ones that, in turn, take responsibility from and infantilize the Afghan agencies that are going to have to administer the country in the long run.

Meanwhile, turnover among U.S. civilians in Afghanistan is about 85 percent a year, according to the Senate report. Many in Congress fixate on “burn rates” — how fast a program can disperse money — not effectiveness.

Many gains that have been made may be unsustainable. A flood of money washed into Afghanistan, and the reports warn about what will happen when the flood dries up in a few years.

The sad thing is, we are not foreign aid rookies. People have spent years trying to learn from past foreign aid disappointments and still, with all these resources, the results are discouraging.

This experience should have a chastening influence on the advocates of smart power. When she became secretary of state, Hillary Clinton sketched out a very attractive foreign policy vision that would use “the full range of tools at our disposal: diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal and cultural.” But it could be that cultural and economic development works on a different timetable than traditional foreign policy.

Perhaps we don’t know enough, can’t plan enough, can’t implement effectively enough to coordinate nation building with national security objectives.

The peace and security timetable is measured in years or decades. Development progress, if it comes at all, is measured in generations.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

Capital matters. Let me put that another way. The current fight over additional capital requirements for the banking industry, eye-glazing though it is, also happens to be the most important reform moment since the financial crisis broke out three years ago. More important than the wrangling over Dodd-Frank. More important than the ongoing effort to regulate derivatives. More important even than the jousting over the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If investment banks like Merrill Lynch had had adequate capital requirements, they would not have been able to pile on so much disastrous debt. If A.I.G. had been required to put up enough capital against its credit default swaps, it’s quite likely that the government would not have had to take over the company. If the big banks had not been able to so easily game their capital requirements, they might not have needed taxpayer bailouts. A real capital cushion would have allowed the banks to absorb the losses instead of the taxpayers. That’s the role capital serves.

Adequate capital hides a plethora of sins. And because, by definition, it forces banks to use less debt, it can also prevent sins from being committed in the first place. “There is no credible way to get rid of bailouts except with capital,” says Anat Admati, a finance professor at Stanford Business School and a leading voice for higher capital requirements. “The only cure is capital,” says Daniel Alpert, a founding managing partner of Westwood Capital. A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial applauding the recent suggestion by Daniel Tarullo, a Federal Reserve governor, that the biggest banks hold as much as 14 percent of assets in capital. I couldn’t agree more.

Which is why a hearing held last week by the House Financial Services Committee was such a sorry sight. Under the guise of examining whether the new financial regulations — including proposed capital requirements — were making American banks less competitive, the Republican majority peppered U.S. regulators, including Tarullo, with skeptical questions about the need for increased capital requirements. It was pathetic.

I should point out that the proposed international standards — Basel III, as they’re called, which are still being negotiated by regulators around the globe — would require banks to hew to capital requirements of only 7 percent, not 14 percent. They are also talking about adding capital surcharges of up to 3 percent, on a sliding scale, to the 30 largest, most systemically important institutions worldwide, meaning that JPMorgan Chase, for instance, would have capital requirements of 10 percent.

There are many experts, including Admati and, one suspects, Tarullo himself, who think this is still too low. The Basel committee has already agreed, somewhat absurdly, to delay the implementation of the requirements until 2019. (Good thing the world’s banks aren’t going to have any big problems between now and then!) And because the Basel standards, whatever their final form, must still be enacted and enforced by individual country regulators, there is no guarantee that every country will agree to them.

But the U.S. should, no matter what other countries do. Banks always want capital requirements to be as low as possible, because the less capital they have, the more risk they can take and thus the more money they can make (and the bigger the executives’ bonuses). But so what? Trading some bank profits for a safer financial system is a deal most Americans would take in a heartbeat.

Indeed, every argument put forth by the big banks and their Congressional spokesmen against higher capital requirements have been demolished by Admati as well as Simon Johnson, the banking expert, whose devastating rebuttal can be found in The New York Times’s Economix blog. But the idea that they will make U.S. banks less competitive with European banks deserves particular scorn.

European banks, to be sure, have fought fiercely against higher capital requirements. It’s not really because they hope to get a leg up on the rest of the world, though. It is because these banks are in far worse shape than the banks in other parts of the world; they can’t afford higher capital requirements. If Europe began insisting that its banks begin holding enough capital to cushion against all the risk on their books — starting with Greek debt — the truth would be out: Their insolvency would suddenly be apparent. If Europe wants to keep kicking the can, by turning its back on the surest measure to increase the safety of its financial system, why on earth would we want to go along?

Tarullo will soon travel to Basel, Switzerland, (yes, that’s why they call them the Basel accords) to push for the highest capital requirements he can get the rest of the world to agree to. He will also try to convince the international standard-setters that a significant surcharge on the most systemically important banks is vitally important. Really, there’s only one appropriate response:

Good luck, sir.