Author: Stephen Sachs (Page 23 of 25)

McDonalds and the Mexicans: In a stunning burst of cultural sensitivity, McDonalds has begun a new advertising campaign in Italy, featuring a big, sleeping Mexican resting barefoot against a cactus.

The campaign is intended to showcase the “McMexico” sandwich, which apparently is all the rage in Rome. I never tried it myself, but after a friend decided to grab a snack in the McDonalds on the Via del Corso, I couldn’t help snapping a few digital photos. The main promotional poster, shown below, lapses from Italian to Spanish in encouraging customers to try “the flavor of Mexico,” accompanied by depictions of singing and dancing Mexicans.

As the McDonalds marketing geniuses should be aware, the “sleepy Mexican leaning against cactus” is one of the “least appropriate symbols” for symbolizing Mexican culture, according to a groundbreaking study by University of Colorado professor Sandra Moriarty. More appropriate symbols, says Moriarty, include “family scenes (in kitchen, at table, sitting on porch)” or depictions of “children playing with handmade toys or family dog.” (I don’t know about you, but when I see kids playing with a dog, I think of Mexicans!) Moriarty also concludes that “old Native American women” are appropriate symbols for vegetarians, and that mothers of young children do not respond well to symbols involving “war, violence, sex, starvation, social discontent, anger, [or] aggression (the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example).”

Far be it from me to challenge the experts–either Moriarty or McDonalds–as to which marketing symbols are appropriate and which are not. All I can say is that if McDonalds ever tried these mustachioed caricatures in the U.S., they’d have their heads handed to them.

Anybody know the email address for La Raza?

“Harvard Stands to Profit from War”: According to The Harvard Crimson, various faculty members at Harvard have accused the university of “war profiteering,” as a whopping “nearly half a percent” of the endowment is invested in the defense industry. Religion lecturer Brian Palmer claims that the Harvard fund is “contributing to the death and suffering [of] thousands of people,” while another faculty member surnamed “Bois” (Pulitzer Professor of Modern Art and Chair of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture Yve-Alain H. Bois, perhaps?) comments as follows:

“The idea that Harvard would get richer by the good fortune of these stocks is war profiteering,” he said. “It should be discussed.”

Let’s put this claim in perspective. Harvard has less than 0.5 percent of its endowment invested in defense. In 2001, the most recent year for which all of the applicable statistics are available, U.S. GDP was $10.082 trillion. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, U.S. military spending in 2001 was $308.5 billion (PDF link), or 3.1 percent of GDP. Spending for goods and services likely to be performed or supplied by contractors (such as operation and maintenance, procurement, and military R&D) was $209.6 billion, or 2.1 percent of GDP.

Looking more specifically at investing, the current total market capitalization of all NYSE-listed aerospace and defense companies is $154 billion. For comparison, that’s 1.2 percent of the $12.9 trillion total global market capitalization of the NYSE on Feb. 28 (the most recent date for which the data is available)–more than double the proportion of Harvard’s investments.

So by a number of measures, Harvard is hardly in the pocket of the military-industrial complex. If anything, Harvard is underinvested in the defense industry, compared to its impact on the economy as a whole. What’s more, there’s no evidence that Harvard bought in on the assumption that fighting was about to break out, or that the Harvard Corporation used its nefarious influence to start a war for fun and profit. So what’s the problem here?

Bois and Palmer seem to be arguing two different points: first, that investments in the defense industry contribute to death and suffering abroad, and second, that it’s immoral to profit from other people’s suffering in wartime.

On the first point, it’s almost tedious to point out that the decision to start fighting in Iraq was made by President Bush, not by Lockheed. Once weapons are produced, the decision about how they are to be used (for good or ill) is ultimately a political one. And unless it’s immoral to make weapons in the first place–which would mean that it’s immoral for the U.S. to have a military, period–investments in that industry can’t be wrong per se. (They might become wrong if the companies involved have been doing various other immoral actions, or if Harvard should expect the U.S. military to be used primarily for evil purposes, but neither of those points are argued by Palmer. Personally, I think the U.S. military brings more good than ill overall by providing security worldwide, and that it’s a good thing that defense contractors exist to supply it.)

On the second point, it’s true that the condition for other people’s suffering (the fact that bombs are falling) is also the condition that might provide for Harvard’s investments appreciating. But so long as Harvard hasn’t done anything to cause or exacerbate that suffering (along the lines of the first point), the same would have been true if Harvard had been invested in just about anything during World War II, when the war substantially raised aggregate demand.

My brother adds that a similarly breathless article could be written about other tragedies that Harvard might “profit” from: just imagine the headline when Bois learns that some companies make medicines. (“Harvard Stands to Profit from Cancer, Heart Disease, Diabetes, Depression, and Impotence”…)

Next on “America’s Most Wanted”: Gen. Ali Hassan al Majeed. Known as “Chemical Ali,” al Majeed is wanted for ordering Iraqi forces to use chemical weapons on Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988. Gray-haired and with a mustache resembling that of his cousin, Saddam Hussein, al Majeed “has been hiding his identity by dressing up in plain attire, so he can blend into the populace.” Informants also report that he has been driving around southern Iraq “in an old red car, possibly a 1979 Nissan.”

John Walsh, call your office.

UPDATE: Case closed.

Danger signs. Despite the below, some of al-Sahaf’s statements may be ominous in their absurdity:

“What they say about a breakthrough [in Najaf] is completely an illusion. They are sending their warplanes to fly very low in order to have vibrations on these sacred places.

“And I think this will agitate, this will be scorned by all Shiites all over the world because those tombs are the most sacred to Shiites all over the world, and they are trying to crack the buildings by flying low over them.”

One guess as to what happened here.

Al-Sahaf goes bonkers? Maybe Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf has finally lost it. To be honest, I’m not sure how else to explain quotes like the following:

The minister also said that coalition forces were throwing booby traps in the form of pens and pencils into Iraqi villages and townships.

“The authority of the civil defense … issued a warning to the civilian population not to pick up any of those pencils because they are booby traps,” he said, adding that the British and American forces were “immoral mercenaries” and “war criminals” for such behavior.

“I am not talking about the American people and the British people,” he said. “I am talking about those mercenaries. … They have started throwing those pencils, but they are not pencils, they are booby traps to kill the children.”

What possible incentive would we have to kill children with booby-trapped pencils? If we wanted to kill children in Iraq, wouldn’t the MOAB work just as well? And does he even realize just how silly this makes him sound?

Then again, maybe al-Sahaf just wanted a little diversion from a long day of manufacturing quotes from Never-never-land:

Al-Sahaf also said the Iraqis have “shot down a lot of those cruise missiles” and said war’s impact was “trivial.”

“I can assure you that those villains will recognize, will discover in appropriate time in the future how stupid they are and how they are pretending things which have never taken place,” he said.

Geraldo goes home.Personally, I find it hilarious that Geraldo Rivera has been forced to leave Iraq (although revealing future troop movements on a live broadcast isn’t quite as funny). But what’s even better is his explanation for how it happened:

A Pentagon official told CNN that members of the 101st Airborne would escort Rivera to the Kuwaiti border. But Rivera appeared in another live report from Iraq hours after the official announced his expulsion, and said he knew nothing of it.

“In fact, I’m further in Iraq than I’ve ever been,” he said. “It sounds like some rats from my former network, NBC, are trying to stab me in the back.”…

Rivera said he had heard nothing about being expelled until he called network headquarters for the scheduled live broadcast.

“MSNBC is so pathetic a cable news network that they have to do anything they can to attract attention,” he said. “You can rest assured that whatever they’re saying is a pack of lies.”

Nevertheless, as the day went on, Fox News executives pleaded with Pentagon officials to not expel Rivera. Pentagon officials stood their ground and insisted that Rivera go, and a deal was eventually reached, the Pentagon sources said.

A “pack of lies”? What is there for them to lie about? The mistake was made on a live broadcast, and he’s either being expelled from Iraq or he isn’t. Maybe Rivera is just polishing his rhetoric to get a job with the Iraqi Information Ministry:

BEIRUT, Lebanon – Iraq’s information minister on Friday denied U.S. claims that Syria was sending military equipment to Baghdad, calling the claims “baseless” and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “ridiculous.”

“These accusations against brotherly Syria are of course baseless,” Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said in an interview with Lebanon’s Al-Hayat LBC satellite channel. “He (Rumsfeld) makes such lies on a daily basis.”…

Speaking to the Lebanese satellite channel from Baghdad, al-Sahhaf said: “This man (Rumsfeld) is the most despicable creature. Rumsfeld is ridiculous. He is a strange case.”

The wrong angle on Arnett. Oxblog has gone back and forth (and back and forth) on whether NBC was right to sack Peter Arnett after he gave an interview to a uniformed questioner on Iraqi state TV.

I’m not going to try to settle this debate–I don’t have a ready answer to the question of whether his views, as expressed in the interview, create a reason to fire him. (If Arnett thinks that the U.S. war plan has been inadequate, and that the Iraqi resistance has been stronger than expected, well, that’s a reporter’s analysis. On the other hand, providing propaganda for Iraqi state TV in the middle of a war isn’t exactly a neutral position.)

But regardless of Arnett’s assessment of the war, NBC still had more than adequate cause to fire him after he said this:

ARNETT: Well, I’d like to say from the beginning that the 12 years I’ve been coming here, I’ve met unfailing courtesy and cooperation. Courtesy from your people, and cooperation from the Ministry of Information, which has allowed me and many other reporters to cover 12 whole years since the Gulf War with a degree of freedom which we appreciate. And that is continuing today.

Of course, Arnett doesn’t mention that foreign reporters are under near-constant surveillance by Iraqi “minders”; that individual Iraqis are punished for speaking too freely to the press; that CNN (along with several other major news media) has been forced out of Baghdad for unfavorable coverage; or that several other journalists were thrown in an Iraqi prison a week ago (they were still missing when Arnett gave his interview). Arnett was silent about their fate even after the Committee to Protect Journalists, on whose board of directors he serves, had interceded on their behalf. These journalists, now released, have a somewhat different take on press freedoms in Iraq:

“I asked him if he was held by people from Iraq’s Ministry of Information and he just said ‘That’s a nice name for them.'”

There are two possibilities here. One is that Arnett was simply unaware of the actual conditions under which journalists in Iraq are allowed to operate. He had no idea that the minders were watching his steps, that his man-on-the-street interviews might be less than truthful, or that he was seeing only what Saddam’s regime wanted him to see. In that case, NBC would have a right and a duty to fire him, because he would be misleading his viewers and presenting his reporting as more accurate than it is. (Given that he goes by the title of “journalist,” NBC in this case would also have a right to fire him for being singularly unobservant.)

The second possibility, which I feel may be more likely, is that Arnett knew perfectly well what conditions he faced and was merely shilling for the regime. CNN was booted out because it was unpopular with Saddam’s government; Arnett wanted to stay on, and the price may have been some friendly quotes. Consider the statement he gave to TV Guide (recently quoted by Ha’aretz):

In the April 5 issue of TV Guide magazine, Arnett said he felt he had found redemption reporting on the current war.

“I was furious with [CNN founder] Ted Turner and [then-CNN chairman] Tom Johnson when they threw me to the wolves after I made them billions risking my life to cover the first Gulf War,” Arnett told TV Guide.

“Now [Turner and Johnson] are gone, the Iraqis have thrown the CNN crew out of Baghdad, and I’m still here,” he said. “Any satisfaction in that? Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

He said the Iraqis allowed him to stay in Baghdad because they respect him.

“The Iraqis have let me stay because they see me as a fellow warrior,” Arnett said. “They know I might not agree with them, but I’ve got their respect.”

Does Arnett really think that Iraq’s government decides which reporters to allow in and which to kick out based on respect?

I’m not really sure why this angle has been underplayed–of the stories I saw, only the WSJ‘s Joe Flint got the story right, with a headline of “Arnett, on Iraq TV, Praises Treatment of Reporters.” But no matter what the explanation, whether he’s a fool or a liar, Arnett is unfit to continue reporting from Baghdad.

Since then, Arnett has been scooped up by the Daily Mirror, in the best traditions of the British press.

POSTSCRIPT: Reading the transcript again, I’m still shocked by Arnett’s contention that “clearly this is a city [Baghdad] that is disciplined, the population is responsive to the government’s requirements of discipline.” Why might Iraqis be so “responsive to the government’s requirements”? Maybe, say, because they fear being tortured to death?

Again, I don’t know whether that statement is enough to cost Arnett his job. But there is no doubt that it is morally repugnant.

Two good signs. On the same day that Saddam Hussein (or whoever speaks for him) called for a jihad against the U.S., it was nice to see that there were at least two signs in Tuesday afternoon’s press that Iraqis aren’t listening. The first involved the Marines’ defeat of a contingent of Baath paramilitaries near the town of Diwaniyah:

SOUTH-CENTRAL IRAQ – U.S. Marines waged a firefight with Iraqi forces Tuesday in and around the town of Diwaniyah, killing up to 90 Iraqis and taking at least 20 prisoners, according to reports from the field.

Coalition forces entered Diwaniyah, going a couple of blocks inside the town, where local residents told translators where to find the Baath Party headquarters and the military headquarters from which rocket-propelled grenades had been fired, said Capt. Brian Lewis of the 1st Tank Battalion.

The key point here isn’t that the Marines won, but that their reconnaissance work was performed voluntarily by Iraqi civilians. These civilians may not be rising up against Saddam, but that hardly means that they support him, or even that they’re neutral. With the Iraqi people as our allies, the military’s job is made much easier:

Local Iraqis are increasingly informing British sources of the whereabouts of officials from Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party, [British Col. Steve] Cox said.

Thirty-five party officials are in custody, and three to four more remain at large, Cox said.

[Umm Qasr] was plagued by pockets of resistance until several days ago, but is now safe enough for troops and ordinary civilians to walk around at night, Cox said. He added that there has been no recent guerrilla activity.

The second piece of good news, which is the lead item of the story above, is that two Iraqi suicide-bombers-to-be have picked “to be” over “not to be”:

UMM QASR, Iraq – Two Iraqi soldiers who said they were sent on a suicide attack mission to the country’s largest port have turned themselves in to British troops, the British commander said Tuesday.

“We had two suicide bombers turn themselves in yesterday because they didn’t want to be suicide bombers any more,” Col. Steve Cox, commander of the Royal Marine Commandos running Umm Qasr, told reporters. “We are accommodating them.”

Obviously, there’s a significant danger of wishful thinking here. But isn’t it likely, given everything we know about Saddam’s regime–in particular, that it will sometimes murder its own soldiers to get them to fight–that the noncommissioned officer who committed the May 29 suicide bombing may have done so under duress? Isn’t it likely that his family, which was rewarded handsomely for his death by the regime, might have suffered a somewhat different fate had he refused? And isn’t it therefore likely that the suicide bombing reflects not popular resentment, but rather an official tactic that is both desperate and ultimately short-lived?

I don’t doubt that there are others in the region who would happily blow themselves up for Saddam; the man who drove a truck into U.S. soldiers in Kuwait is believed to be an Egyptian electrician. And these others could make things very messy for the post-war occupation. But these stories give me some degree of confidence that we’re not facing the nightmare of a guerilla force that is supplied, hid, and earnestly supported by the Iraqi people. The fedayeen, the Baath paramilitaries, the jihadis-for-hire–these may represent, at least for the moment, an external and unpopular force rather than an authentic popular resistance. Let’s do everything we can to keep them that way.

“We are all Israelis now.” Until recently, I always drew a distinction between two types of suicide bombings: those directed at soldiers, and those directed at civilians. The latter were simply abhorrent. The former, however, although disconcerting, seemed potentially legitimate as a tactic. The soldiers were combatants and knew their lives to be in danger; the use of suicide bombs seemed to be merely one more way to conduct the fight. (True, the bombers don’t wear uniforms, but U.S. special forces don’t exactly walk around with big American flags.) So long as only soldiers were targeted, and the cause (by assumption) were just, why would a suicidal bombing be any different than a suicidal Pickett’s Charge?

I no longer think that way. What changed my mind was this:

In a statement tonight, the Army said that at 4:30 local time this afternoon a civilian vehicle approached a military checkpoint on Route 9 near Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.

The Army said soldiers at the checkpoint motioned for the vehicle to stop but were ignored. The soldiers then fired warning shots, which were also ignored by the driver, the Army said.

The soldiers then fired shots into the engine of the vehicle, “but the vehicle kept moving toward the checkpoint,” the Army said.

“Finally, as a last resort, the soldiers fired into the passenger compartment of the vehicle,” the statement said.

The Army said that upon further investigation, it determined that 13 women and children were in the vehicle. Seven of the occupants were killed, two were wounded and four were unharmed, the Army said.

The suicide bombing on May 29, which killed four U.S. soldiers, also killed these seven women and children. Any responsible military faced with suicide attacks would have to fire at oncoming vehicles, in order to protect its own troops. The May 29 attack succeeded, in that it forced the American military to distance itself from the population and regard all Iraqis as potential threats. It deliberately created a situation where innocent civilians would be exposed to greater risks–and was recognized as doing so at the time:

“It’s a shame they are doing that because now we’re going to have to treat every civilian vehicle like it is hostile,” said Staff Sgt. Bryce Ivings. “If we accidentally kill a civilian because they took a wrong turn and came at us, it will be on their (the Iraqi leadership’s) head.”

As the NYT ed page has pointed out, that was exactly the point. Iraq has better ways of killing American soldiers than suicide bombings (though, thank God, not many). But what these bombings can do is make the U.S. look absolutely awful in the eyes of the world–can make it, in short, look like Israel:

Israeli troops at a checkpoint shot and wounded a pregnant Palestinian woman in labor and killed her husband today as the couple tried to reach a hospital — a day after another pregnant woman was shot in an almost identical case at the same West Bank roadblock, Palestinians said…

According to the army, soldiers opened fire when a car tried to get past an earthen barricade blocking the road, and ignored soldiers’ orders to stop. When the driver attempted to reverse to detour around the temporary roadblock, soldiers shot at the car, the army said.

After the car came to a stop, Hayek opened the door and began yelling, “baby” in English, she said. Soldiers approached, and began administering first aid, placing her and her father-in-law on stretchers, she said.

I had never before entertained the idea that these civilian deaths might be a deliberate terrorist tactic. Now I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t be.

This is why suicide bombings, regardless of their targets, can be instances of terrorism. Those who employ a dangerous tactic in wartime are at least partly responsible for its consequences; these accidental deaths are most certainly on the heads of those who kill under cover of civilian dress. And when the very purpose of an attack is to produce these deadly mistakes, when the lives of innocents become mere instruments to produce useful propaganda, then the effect is to turn civilians into weapons of war–just as surely as destroying buildings with a hijacked airplane.

Well, I’m back. After an embarrassingly long hiatus, I’ve managed to start writing again. February was a month of work; I’ve been in and out of Oxford since mid-March, and right now I’m back at home recovering. But I’ve saved up a few posts, and hopefully will be able to maintain a steady stream of content for a little while.

I’ve also updated my links at the left (which I should have done a month ago) to include Ross Douthat’s new web log, The American Scene.