Who’s on Trial with Sergeant Bales?

Goodbye Tibet?

For ten days last month I saw first-hand what the Chinese are doing in Tibet. The reports you’ve heard of cultural genocide are true. China is obliterating the ideas, traditions and habits of the Tibetan people.

Do we care? We’d better. China’s confidence increases with each step onto the world stage. What the Chinese are doing in Tibet tells us a lot about what we can expect from them as their power grows.

Watching the sandbox antics in Washington over yet another polarizing issue--the debt ceiling--I feel sad and angry at my country’s incompetence. Yet there may be a model for America’s future in Sierra Leone, a country the size of Iowa on the bulge of West Africa. It’s a potentially rich country, impoverished by a brutal ten-year civil war that ended in 2002--think child soldiers and Blood Diamonds.

Why can’t we figure that out in the United States? Why are we, with far more going for us than the Sierra Leoneans, unable to build a future together even as the toxic consequences of our divisions become more apparent by the day?

What Will Qaddhafi Do?

For a short time in 1969 I probably knew more about Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddhafi than any other American. I was then a young diplomat attached to the American Embassy in Tripoli. Since I was the most junior member of the embassy's political staff, I was given the worst job -- as liaison officer to the sprawling American air base just outside the city. For a year, I settled minor customs disputes, bailed drunken American airmen out of the Tripoli jail and played a lot of beach volleyball.

That all changed on September 1, 1969 when then Lieutenant Qaddhafi and his Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) toppled the old king and took control of the country in a single night.

Boys Into Men

I went to a quiet meeting yesterday at the local Veterans Resource Center in the small rural county where I live. At the meeting were 25 vets, family members of vets and a few others. From that small group flowed gut-wrenching  stories of suicides, addictions and shattered minds and bodies.

As a young man I’d gone to war in Vietnam for the adventure of it. What a fool I was.  But I was hardly alone. Every war has recruited eager young men looking for adventure, seeking to prove their worth as men. And every war has left behind the wreckage that these young men did not foresee or chose to ignore.

By now certainly you’ve heard of Steven Slater, the flight attendant who, suffering one too many abusive passengers, cursed the last offender over the intercom, activated the plane’s emergency escape slide, grabbed a beer and slid to the tarmac. Slater became an instant folk hero. “Free Steven Slater” T-shirts are popping up all over the country.

Slater had finally had it with wrongs he was supposed to accept. When that passenger slammed the lid of an overhead bin on his head, airline rules told him he had to act with restraint. This time, he didn’t.

Americans identify with Steven Slater. When economic recovery means upticks on the Dow and no real progress in creating jobs, we’re supposed to be accepting. When our country engages in misbegotten and/or unwinnable foreign adventures, we’re supposed to watch the coffins coming home and salute. When our elected leaders fail to even address serious problems like climate change and energy, we’re supposed to wait until the next election, as if that will change a system of governance corrupted by money and cowardice. When we see the gap between rich and poor destroying the very fabric of our public life, we’re supposed to try harder to be rich ourselves.

I forward this report from Antoine Jaulmes, a French  auto engineer  and a colleague of mine in Initiatives of Change (IofC), a non-governmental organization working for peace, reconciliation and human security worldwide.

Rebuilding Haiti will not be enough

By Antoine Jaulmes

20 January 2010

The 12 January earthquake in Haiti was devastating. Between 50,000 and 100,000 people were killed. International aid was mobilized quickly, though there was much criticism that the aid sent was slow to reach those most in need; the deployment of aid was slowed by the destruction of the country’s infrastructure—already inadequate because of Haiti’s acute poverty.

Why was it that the daily reality of Haiti did not cause the same kind of emotional response as the catastrophe which hit the island? Life expectancy in Haiti is only 53 years (against about 75 years in developed countries). The death rate of children under five is 12.3 per cent (against 0.5 per cent in developed countries), meaning that over 40,000 very young children die every year in Haiti. Losing your child before its fifth birthday is a rare tragedy for the developed world but a cruel reality in Haiti – the odds are one in seven. Ninety-five per cent of these tragedies could be avoided if poverty receded.

There are many differences between our wars in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. There are also similarities we can’t ignore, including the vital need for an indigenous government that commands broad-based popular support.

I saw the possibility of a just and peaceful world last week--at a conference on a mountain in Switzerland. The (second annual) Caux Forum on Human Security was no Davos nor G-8 Summit. No media were invited. While the 300 invitees included some global VIPS, the key criterion for being there was not celebrity, but a personal history of creativity and courage in addressing public problems. The guests were people like:

The givens: our country over decades has jerry-built a health care “system” that is unfair and inefficient. We pay far more for far less care than any other industrialized nation. And we have forty million people uninsured for whom a major illness can mean mortgaging a home, not sending a kid to college, or worse.

Now the country is finally beginning to address health care reform in a meaningful way, in what could well be the most important domestic policy debate since the New Deal.