Bush and the Republican Mutiny

Posted on January 3, 2006 by Tony


Huggy-Bear McCain has proved a more nettlesome
opponent to Bush than the Dems

A little over a year ago, my then-weekly appearance on CNN International happened to coincide with President Bush’s inauguration, so I found myself in the unusual position of having to play pundit on Washington politics. I remember the anchor suggesting that the fact that the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House meant that Bush would have unprecedented freedom to ram through his agenda. I disagreed, pointing out that the locus of opposition to Bush would now shift to the ten or so moderate Republicans in the Senate who were plainly unhappy with the direction in which Bush was taking their party, and many of whom had openly questioned his Iraq policy (at various points, Hagel, Lugar, Warner, McCain) or aspects of his domestic policy (Specter, Snowe, Collins and others). They would find themselves, improbable as it may have seemed, holding disproportionate influence in a very finely balanced legislature.

Even though the signs were there a year ago, I’ve certainly been shocked by the speed of Bush’s domestic political decline, or the intensity of the resistance he’s faced from within the GOP. By year’s end, Bush was recording defeat after defeat, and sometimes on key issues — failing to get the Patriot Act renewed; being forced by McCain to back down on torture; failing to get his White House counsel appointed to the Supreme Court; scolded by a key conservative Republican-appointed judge on the handling of the Jose Padilla case; and most recently, facing the prospect of Capitol Hill hearings, arranged by Republican judiciary committee chair Arlen Specter, into his decision to order the NSA to bypass the established legal system to conduct domestic eavesdropping. We could go on and on, with Karl Rove, various budget setbacks, Michael Brown and Katrina, and so on.

Although most of these wounds have been self-inflicted, I suspect the thoughtful Republican realists in the Senate (and in the military, intelligence services and State Department) have recognized that Iraq symbolizes Bush’s catastrophic stewardship of U.S. national interests on the global scale. Not only has the idea of projecting force into the heart of the Middle East with the aim of transforming its politics along lines desired by Washington been a disaster — even the elections the administration so proudly touts portend civil war and an entrenchment of the insurgency — the U.S. appears to have lost any prospect of securing short-term tactical advantages from its occupation (access to Iraqi oil reserves; long-term military bases from which force can be projected throughout the region). And in the process the U.S. has squandered the deterrent power of its military by showing the limits of its capacity to sustain an occupation, emboldening the likes of Iran — which, curiously enough, ends up holding the key to the U.S. exit strategy by virtue of its influence with the Shiite parties that appear to have again prevailed at the polls. And the failure of the invasion to vindicate a universally unpopular decision to invade (by either turning up weapons of mass destruction, or by producing a more, not less stable region) have accelerated the decline of U.S. leadership over its traditional allies. The whole episode has made it possible for allies to say no to Washington, and then to cluck in smug sympathy while conspicuously avoiding saying “told you so.”

Iraq, overwhelmingly unpopular abroad and increasingly so at home, stands at the center of Bush’s decline — the fact that his agenda is collapsing despite his party’s control over all the levers of government is a sure sign that the sober Republicans who may have long doubted the wisdom of Bush’s choices are now no longer remaining silent. The irony is that they appear to be more inclined than the Democrats have been to distance themselves from Bush, and to challenge him directly on matters of national security. The Democrats are still flailing about unable to take a coherent position on Iraq (with a few honorable exceptions). Listen to John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and you hear an often incomprehensible excercise in self-congratulatory political ju-jitsu — they’re quite simply not prepared to challenge the basics, which leaves them to argue that they would have invaded Iraq, but done it “properly” — more troops, more allies, that sort of thing. Frankly, that’s the same unprincipled, politically cowardly doggerel we’ve heard from them all along, and is ultimately so indistinguishable from the administration’s own positions that it simply make the Dems sound petty and partisan. There was no way to get more allies on board for the operation for the simple reason that most of the world believed there was no good reason to invade Iraq, and they wouldn’t have followed Hillary or Kerry or even Bill into that quagmire any more readily than they followed Bush. More troops? I don’t think the U.S. has enough combat troops to sustain an occupation force much larger than the one they currently have there. And the bottom line is that the Iraqis would certainly not have been any less inclined to resist an occupation designed by a Kerry or Clinton administration than the one designed by Bush.

So no matter how bad it gets for Bush with his own party, I’m not convinced that the Democrats are going to manage to make the Republicans pay a significant price at the polls in November’s mid-term elections.

Posted in Situation Report | 5 Comments

Another ‘Flesh Wound’ for Chalabi

Posted on December 22, 2005 by Tony

Remember that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which the Black Knight loses three limbs in a sword fight and ends up hopping around on one leg, insisting that he’s suffered only a flesh wound, and insisting that he will smite his assailant, King Arthur? Well, if the knight’s name had been Ahmed Chalabi and the setting Iraq, some sections of the U.S. media would likely have faithfully reported it something like this: “Dismembered Knight set for Improbable Comeback.”

A few weeks ago, no less an esteemed outlet than the Washington Post would have had us believe that Ahmed Chalabi was a serious contender for prime minister of Iraq — and this after almost everything of consequence that Chalabi had told the U.S. media had proven to be bogus. Nor were they the only ones: The story of Chalabi’s imminent resurgence was all over the media. Presumably this because Chalabi himself was telling them this, and his backers at the Pentagon – who’re never going to admit defeat – were underscoring it. “Highly placed sources say he has become the choice of many U.S. officials to lead the country,” the Post reported. Indeed, as he had been before the invasion. And somehow the Washington Post and a number of other titles that really should know better have not yet fully grasped the reality that the U.S. rarely gets its way on the ground in Iraq. Chalabi, for the record, garnered so few votes in the December 15 elections that his list may not get a single seat in parliament. As ever, it seems, Chalabi wields far more influence along the Potomac than he does along the Euphrates.

Posted in 99c Blogging | 4 Comments

The Price of Solidarity

Posted on December 20, 2005 by Tony

Driving my kids to school through the gridlocked streets approaching the Brooklyn Bridge Tuesday morning, past picket lines of dreadlocked transit workers chanting “No contract, no work!” — their action paralyzing a mass transit system that ferries 7 million people to work — my mind traveled back to a student rally in Cape Town in 1984. The speaker was a garment worker whose name I remember only as Maria.

She was part of a tiny, maverick union, that had somewhat recklessly broken away from the sweetheart Garment Workers Union (a “little castle with a big flag,” was how its architect described the rebel organization) and had even more recklessly launched a strike action in a factory where it didn’t have a majority. The action was doomed, but I was fascinated by the effect that joining it had had on Maria, a black working class woman at the very bottom of apartheid’s social pile, the most voiceless and powerless section of the population. We watched transfixed as this woman long denied a voice suddenly stood before the microphone and a hall filled with hundreds of middle class students, her eyes glazed with pride and rage. “I drew my first ever strike wages this week,” she said in Kaaps, that mix of Afrikaans, English and a smattering of Xhosa rivaled only by Yiddish as a patois for rendering the tragicomedy of the powerless. “And I feel damn proud about that.”

Although you’d never know to listen to New York’s billionaire mayor bleating about the “selfish and illegal” action of the transit workers, joining a strike means risking everything for working people, those whose livelihoods are already at best tentative. It’s an action take only when they feel they’ve been pushed too far, an economic version of La Pasionara’s legendary intonation to the doomed Republican defenders of Madrid as the Fascist armies massed at the city’s gates, that “we can live forever on our knees, or we can die on our feet.” Maria had chosen to face death — or poverty, in this instance — on her feet, and with that choice came a surge of power — the heady recognition of one’s own subjectivity and ability to transform circumstances through collective action. The decision to strike had given Maria her dignity, and no amount of economic pain could take that from her.

Union leader Toussaint: “This is all about dignity.”

And I sense the same effect for those 32,000 transit workers who downed tools today, most of them people of color facing a mostly white establishment that has treated them with palpable arrogance and disdain. I’m reminded of the old days in South Africa when I hear union leader Roger Toussaint — could there be a more fitting last name for a charismatic Trinidadian union leader who started his working life cleaning subway cars? (Toussaint L’Overture was the leader of the Haitian slave revolt that made the tiny island the first black polity to liberate itself from European colonial rule). Asked by a reporter to comment on the fact that his strike is illegal and could bring massive fines to the union and the strikers (and even jail time for himself), he answered in his sonorous Trini baritone, “If Rosa Parks had observed the law, most of our members would not have been transit workers.”

And I’m also reminded of the old days in South Africa when I hear Mayor Bloomberg, a rather short fellow who appears to treating the action as something between a personal affront by some cheeky subordinates and a terror attack on the city by some alien “thugs”, insisting that he won’t negotiate until the “illegal” strike action is ended. Don’t be a shlemiel, Mike, you’re only making things worse.

The right to strike is a basic right of any democracy. The fact that the law forbids it for state employees in New York is simply a reflection of the balance of power in the legislature that adopted that law. The transit workers don’t believe the law is fair to them; they know that the critical leverage they have is their ability to withhold their labor. Like Maria back in Cape Town in 1984, they’re risking everything. Her strike, also, was illegal. But she had no say in shaping those laws, and I suspect most of today’s transit workers in New York feel the same about the 1966 Taylor law in force today. Like most of us in New York, they’re living from paycheck to paycheck, and on the eve of the Christmas holidays, they’ve embarked on an action that is going to cost them two days’ wages (in fines) for every day they’re out.

Long before the strike, it was clear that the MTA is appallingly managed. I sensed that much a few weeks ago when they suddenly announced that they had a huge surplus for this year, and would be simply giving away tens of millions of dollars in subway fare discounts over the holiday season. That seemed insanely short-sighted even without knowing anything about the state of their contract talks with the union — there had to be more prudent ways of spending that money; now, in light of the fact that they’re telling the union they have no money, the MTA’s decision seems giddily reckless. (Even if the substantial issue of the MTA’s long-term finance is far more complicated, the fact is that with contract talks looming they should have had the brains to consult the union over how they’re were going to spend the surplus. The bigger picture, of course, is one of the degradation of infrastructure all over America, choked of investment by a free-market ideological consensus in the corridors of power — just look at the state of AMTRAK, never mind those levees that gave way in New Orleans. And also the crippling cost of health care in a society ruled by narrow corporate special interests and an adherence to free market shibboleths with a dogmatism worthy of the Taliban. The New York transit strike is also a symptom of a deep structural crisis in the American economy, which is no longer able to maintain middle-class and working-class living standards, much less offer the next generation a better quality of life than their parents. )

Back in New York, however, not only has the work of the transit workers become progressively more dangerous in the past five yeras, but the fact that one of the union’s major grievances is the upward of 15,000 disciplinary proceedings each year (almost one for every second employee) signals that the management culture has to be archaically authoritarian. That, surely, was a ticking time bomb. Then you have the spectacle of the head of the MTA refusing to even join the talks until the last hour. What does it take to get Master to come the table and face his employees? The provocation is palpable. Listen to Mike Bloomberg and you hear the words “illegal and selfish” occur more often even than the word “victory” in a Bush Iraq speech. Listen to Roger Toussaint, and the word that occurs most often is “respect.” At the end of the day, that’s what the union is demanding. And it’s not hard to see that the authorities could have avoided this — and could end it — simply by getting off their high horses and changing the way they’re communicating. Bloomberg would do better to drop the discourse of 9/11, a city under attack showing its fortitude, and recognize that there’s a major problem going on inside the city’s transit system — a problem to which, as the mayor, it is his responsibility to mediate a solution.

I don’t know how this will end. Not well, I fear. But I do know that it was a decision not taken easily, an act of courage by people who felt they had been pushed too far, and were ready to make sacrifices in pursuit of redress. And as mind-numbingly enfuriating as it is to be stuck (literally) for hours in gridlocked traffic, while the radio touts the billionaire mayor complaining of the “selfishness” of workers who’re forgoing two days pay for every day that they’re out in order, partly, that the next generation of transit workers will enjoy the same deal that they have, I’ll say this: If a couple of days road rage and epic inconvenience is the price of the dignity of those who ensure that I get to work safely and speedily every day, I’ll pay without complaint.

Posted in New York Moments | 11 Comments

Making the Muslim World Laugh

Posted on December 20, 2005 by Tony

Okay, kudos to Albert Brooks for his new film Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which parodies U.S. ignorance of the lands it is trying to transform. The plot line has Brooks playing an unemployed comedian contracted by the State Department to travel to the Islamic world to find out what makes Muslims laugh. Of course, as we’ve already noted in this column in real life that would be Karen Hughes’s job.

Posted in 99c Blogging | 6 Comments

Who’ll Stop Brazil?

Posted on December 10, 2005 by Tony


Ronaldinho: For the defending team, a player who smiles that much on the ball is just plain scary

Premilinary Thoughts on the World Cup Draw

There’s Brazil, and then there are the rest. I recently had a look at the squads of the 16 finalists of the European Champion’s League competition for this year (uncontestably the strongest club tournament in the world). I counted 44 Brazilian players among them (only Chelsea, Liverpool and Rangers don’t have any in their senior squads). Players like Jefferson Farfan and Alex at PSV or Benfica’s Nelson would walk into most national teams, but they’re unlikely to make the final 22 for Brazil, let alone start. Brazil could bring two full squads to the tournament, and if the draw allowed, they might meet in the final.


Peter Tosh was right: Poland’s pride, Emmanuel Olisadebe

Group A: Not much to say, a safe passage for hosts Germany who will face Poland (easy favorites for the second qualifying place), and minnows Costa Rica and Ecuador. I have a soft spot for Poland, not just because their keeper is our very own Jerzy Dudek, nor just because they play open, attractive soccer. And certainly not as the homeland of my grandparents , where I therefore qualify for citizenship under EU rules. What I love about Poland is their star striker, Emmanuel Olisadebe. Back in my weed-puffing student youth, I remember cracking up with laughter every time I listened to that Peter Tosh song “No Matter Where You Come From (As Long as You’re a Black Man) You’re an African”, when he sang the line “And if you come from Poland, lord, as long as you’re a black man…” Turns out Peter Tosh was a prophet in more ways than one. Besides, Nigeria didn’t qualify, so Olisadebe – a Nigerian, naturalized in a hurry before the 1998 world cup, but who now earns his wages in Greece – will carry their hopes, too.

seaman
Ronaldinho’s glorious free kick sails over England’s hapless ‘keeper Seaman for Brazil’s first, last time around. Look for him to repeat the feat if England get as far as the semis

Group B: England, Sweden, Paraguay and Trinidad. England will win this group, but they will not win the World Cup. (Not for the foreseeable future, much as they like to tell themselves they will.) Sweden will challenge for the top spot, and the outcome of the game between the two of them will likely settle it. Of course England’s coach, Sven Goran Eriksonn is Swedish, but more to the point, he’s also crap. (They win the group, get past Poland in the round of 16, then if they can get past Portugal in the quarters they are humiliated by Brazil in the semi.) I’d love for Trinidad, the land of CLR James and Brian Lara and The Mighty Sparrow, to inflict an upset on England, just for the prospect of the week-long celebration it would provoke in Port of Spain. But it won’t happen, I watched the Soca warriors against Bahrain, and as much as I love Trinidad, they’re the Cinderallest of all the Cinderella teams. Still, fairytales have been known to come true at the finals.

78
Pasarella punches out Neeskens. Will the Dutch avenge the travesty of ’78?

Group C: Now this is the closest we have to a group of death, with some great old grudges to be settled and some very talented footballers. I love the idea of Holland taking revenge for the travesty of 1978, when they outplayed the Argentinians for most of the match but were kicked off the park by sheer thuggery, the team playing rather a lot like the brutal junta it represented at that time. Today’s Argentina, of course, are a different entity, playing beautiful but fast and tough football, and on paper should be considered one of the favorites to win the whole thing. But somehow, they always choke.

90
My favorite ever World Cup result: Roger Milla celebrates Cameroon’s victory over Argentina in 1990. Are Drogba & co. going to repeat that feat for Cote d’Ivoire?

The wild card, of course, is Cote d’Ivoire – Drogba, Dindane, Kolo Toure, Kallon… They’re a classy team, and I expect them to be this tournament’s Senegal. They’ve played together for years and have knit into a well-disciplined and exciting unit that almost upset Italy in a recent friendly. I fantasize about them pulling off a repeat of one of my all-time favorite World Cup games, from 1990: Argentina 0 – Cameroon 1. Also an opportunity for Didier Drogba to make a point about his rival for the Chelsea “Big Number 9” role, Hernan Crespo who’ll lead Argentina’s line. And, of course, the importance of their presence here can’t be underestated in terms of the crisis back home: civil war remains a distinct possibility in Cote d’Ivoire, which is divided in half by an armed rebellion. The players come from both sides of the frontline, and at least the country will stay together through next summer…

The Elephants could even snatch the points from Holland, depending on which Dutch team shows up. If they’re in the right state of mind, I’d rank them favorites to win the whole thing – they should have won in Germany in 74; they were the best team there. And if you have the likes of Robben, Kuijt, Van Persie, Van der Vaart, (I won’t say Nistelrooy, I can’t stand him), playing at the top of their game, with the likes of Cocu, Davids, Van Bommel and Bronckhorst (whose aunt I met on a train from Montauk!) providing the experience, they’re a tough team. But they so seldom turn up in the right frame of mind. (That said, Germany is the closest they’re ever going to get to playing at home, so it ought to raise their game). And if their traditional pschye problems are in effect, they could even struggle to beat Serbia. So this is a wide-open group, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Cote d’Ivoire will claim the second spot from Holland. (Of course I’d have loved Cote d’Ivoire to be in the same group as France, to get some revenge for all that mischief France has wrought – and continues to promote – on them. But it was not to be.)

eusebio
Portugal’s greatest player, Eusebio, was Mozambican. This time, another former colony, Angola, plays for its own honor against the former colonizers

Group D: The god of colonial vengeance was in effect here, of course, putting Angola in the same group as Portugal. Portugal’s plunder of footballing talent from its colonies was the source of probably its greatest ever World Cup team, the 1966 outfit which was carried singlehandedly by the legendary Mozambican Eusebio. A fairytale victory then for Angola, a nation drenched in oil and blood and sadness (a combination that seems common, somehow) where there are whole soccer leagues for amputees playing on crutches and where about half of the national team are amateurs? My heart is with Angola, given the appalling failure of Bafana Bafana to qualify (the first of many appalling failures I expect from our national team for the next few years). But my head says they don’t have a prayer. Still, as Gramsci would have it, pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the spirit. The seeded team here is Mexico, a position the U.S. would swear was stolen from them much as California was stolen from Mexico. Perhaps; perhaps not. But Portugal are the strongest team in the group. I have a feeling that freed from the expectations of the home crowd they faced in Euro 2004, they may even do better. Looking forward to seeing Christiano Ronaldo run at defenses; he seems like an awful character, but a marvelous footballer. But the team I’m rooting for here is Iran – simply because when they win, it brings the youth of Tehran and other cities out onto the streets, emboldened to challenge the Basiji and all other repressors in order to have a little fun. (When they beat the US in 98, you’d have thought the Mullahs would be pleased: Quite the contrary, the resulting all night street party freaked them out!) Probably Portugal followed by Mexico.

czech
Czech mates: Nedved and Baros celebrate a goal

Group E: This is the real reason the U.S. will be grumbling about not being seeded. They’re going to face a tremendous battle to best Italy and the Czech Republic for a place in the last 16, and even Ghana could give them a tough examination – particularly if thug of the week Michael Essien decides to let his studs do the talking on Damarcus Beazleys knees. Italy are a shadow of squadras past, but they should still qualify, although I’m backing the Czechs to win the group, and go all the way to a glorious semi-final showdown with Holland. Nedved will come out of international retirement, no doubt, to orchestrate along with Galasek, Rosicky, Poborsky, feeding big man Koller (Peter Crouch with chest hair) to knock down for Baros. (Plus they have possibly the world’s best keeper in Cech.) Predictions? Well, if the US was going to cause an upset, I’d bet on it happening against Italy. Ghana are going to struggle – they got here over the bodies of Bafana Bafana, but that was no great feat. They have two great midfielders in Essien and Steven Appiah, but for the rest they’re pretty ordinary.

kewell
Socceroos great hope: Liverpool’s Harry Kewell

Group F: Well, Brazil won’t break a sweat here. Interestingly enough, the group gives the Aussie their best possible shot at second spot. Croatia are always a power, and will be favorites for second, but they’re not at their best. Japan, actually, are more dangerous. Coached by my man Zico, they’re no longer a novelty side, and could give all the others bar Brazil a real game. You’d have to fancy Brazil for the title, their coach’s biggest dilemma being that he has far too many brilliant forwards and attacking midfielders – Ronaldinho, Kaka, Adriano, Robinho, never mind aging dough-boy Ronaldo – and far too many brilliant attacking defenders — does Cafu still get a game? Ze Roberto? And so on.

dhorasoo
Indian Diaspora’s first World Cup star? France’s midfield anchor Vikash Dhorasoo

Group G: France made such heavy weather of qualifying that they needed an easy group, and they got it. Togo are going to be a punchbag, the question is will South Korea be able to claim the second spot from Switzerland. I’ll wager they will. Les Bleus, however, are simply no longer a power. Sure, Henry is magnificent, but he seldom delivers for his country. Trezeguet is a scrappy gem, Stroller Pires is past it, much of the rest have a rather brittle look to them. Patrick Vieira has never been the player for France that he was for his club, and the same may be said for Makelele. What I do love, however, is the fact that their midfield is anchored by the first ethnic Indian, I think, to make the World Cup – Vikash Dhorasoo, who comes from the Indian Diaspora outpost of Mauritius, if I’m not mistaken.

xabi
I’d like to teach, the world to pass… The inimitable Xabi Alonso

Group H: Spain got lucky. Ukraine are going to turn a few heads, and will easily claim second, if not actually win, depending on their outcome against Spain (I fancy Shevchenko to score more against Saudi Arabia and Tunisia than Raul or Fernando Torres or David Villa or Morientes). But I think Spain will go further in this World Cup than in most recent tournaments. Just a feeling. Maybe it’s that Xabi Alonso is the best midfield orchestrator in Europe right now. They won’t win it, of course, but I think they’ll have one of their best campaigns, ever.

Final Four?
This will change a few times before the tournament, I’m sure, but right now I have the following quarter finals:
Germany vs. Holland, won, of course, by Holland
Czech Republic vs. France, won by the Czechs
England vs. Portugal, won by England
Brazil vs. Spain, won by Brazil.

That gives as a glorious Czech vs. Holland semi, won by the Dutch, and another Ronaldinho lesson on the joys of football at the expense of England, setting up a Holland – Brazil final, and yet another Brazilian triumph. That’s for now. Will the geopolitical system handle it? Yes, I think so… But I could be wrong.

Posted in Glancing Headers | 24 Comments

Are Jews White?

Posted on December 5, 2005 by Tony

yemeni

A Jewish convict in California has applied to the state’s courts to have the penal system reclassify him from “white” to “other”, for practical reasons of personal security: When the prison is locked down because of any clash among prisoners, prisoners are segregated on ethnic lines. That means in a moment of stress in the prison, he’d find himself sharing a cell with Aryan Nation thugs, for whom his yarmulke is an invitation to a pogrom. But while his purposes are prudent, Steven Liebb has raised an interesting question. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the extent to which that question makes many Jews uncomfortable.

Jews, historically, are no more “white” than Jesus was. Our roots are Semitic, not European. And the emergence of more typically “European” features among some of us – blond or red hair, blue eyes, for example, or even simply the pinkish skin that is misnamed “”white” (as Steve Biko pointed out when asked how people with brown skin could call themselves “”black”) – all of these are likely signs of our interaction with others in Europe, whether on fortuitous terms or unfortunate ones. (When Woody Allen wailed “My grandmother was too busy being raped by Cossacks,” he wasn’t speaking only for himself – and Jewish law had accomodated such realities hundreds of years previously, in the early centuries of the Diaspora, by making a Jewish mother the source of the faith’s genetic transfer.)

But the term “white” as Steven Liebb in his prison cell has recognized has little to do with features, or even with culture or ethnicity. As the South African experience taught all too well, “white” is simply a political boundary, a term of inclusion and exclusion.

I was also reminded of the odd relationship between Jewish identity and “whiteness” recently when a friend forwarded to me one of those bizarre emails that circulate among right-wing Zionists revealing supposedly “expert” arguments in defense of their most vile prejudices – this one ostensibly from a Spanish columnist in Europe crying crocodile tears for the Jews of Auschwitz — by destroying its Jews, the argument went, Europe had instead inherited “20 million Muslims who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty.” I responded angrily, in an email, that the Spanish had actually driven out their Jews, along with their Muslims, in 1492, almost 500 years before Auschwitz. And as for “stupidity and ignorance,” his column was evidence that those qualities had continued to flourish in the interim. But it was worth noting that the Muslims of Andalusia had, in fact, introduced in Europe everything from mathematics to toothpaste, deodorant and laundry detergent.

But then I got to thinking about why it was that feeble-minded Zionists would draw comfort and relief from the crocodile tears of a Spanish racist, suddenly willing to recognize the Jews as an ally against the “Muslim horde.” (That also overlooked the fact that it was for the most part in the lands of Islam that Spanish Jews took refuge from Christian persecution in Spain. And we shared with the Muslims a common victimization at the hands of the Inquisition and the Crusades. When Saladdin drove the Crusaders from Jerusalem, the first thing he did was invite the Jews to return — the great Rabbi and philosopher Maimonides was the personal physician to Saladdin, the most venerated Muslim warrior in history.) But something tells me the people who circulate these emails would be very uncomfortable with the knowledge that for hundreds of years, we were far more at home with the Muslims — even a militant jihadi like Saladdin — than we ever were among the Christians of the West. Nor would they, and probably many other Jews, be comfortable acknowledging that we might not be entirely “white.”

I was invited, growing up in apartheid South Africa, to imagine myself as “White.” I lived in neighborhoods reserved for white people, went to schools reserved for white people, where I was taught the brittle racist mythologies that undergirded minority rule; I was allowed the vote (although I never exercised it) and was expected to serve two years in the military, like other white men my age. (Another piece of South African “whiteness” I managed to avoid.) But at the same time, there was never any doubt that we Jews were accepted as “white” somewhat under sufferance.

Although a small number of British and German Jews had settled in the Cape in the 19th century, when the first Ostjuden arrived in the rough and tumble mining town that was Johannesburg towards the turn of that century, they were widely, if somewhat inexplicably, termed “Peruvians.” The “white” people of South Africa had also placed immigration quotas on Jews in the 1930s. Like Greek and Portuguese South Africans, we were labeled “see-kaffirs” (“ocean-niggers”) by some Afrikaners – politically unreliable; culturally alien; preferred soccer to rugby (that being, in the apartheid imagination, a “black” game over a “white” game); and, in the case of Jews, we bore the burden of the inherited stereotype that the “whites” of South Africa had brought from Christian Europe (stingy, conniving, untrustworthy, damned by the killing of Christ, that sort of thing…) as well as the latterday suspicion, grounded perhaps in the wildly disproportionate number of Jews among “white” people who had actively aligned themselves with the liberation movement, that we were all inclined to be “kaffir-boeties” (culturally translated as “nigger-lovers”).

Despite the resulting low-intensity social anti-semitism, the regime needed all the help it could get. Even though many of them had been active Nazi sympathizers, they had enough realpolitik to welcome the Jews into the system – even more so when they began a fruitful military collaboration with Israel, one of the few countries willing to ignore international sanctions against the apartheid regime.

But South Africa was also a good education in the meaning of “white.” It implied no singularity of identity, but rather an exclusion set, as captured in the traditional apartheid signs on all amenities reserving them either “For Whites Only” or for “Non-Whites Only.”

The meaning of “white” is best illustrated by a slang term I encountered at school: someone deemed to be trying to act above their station was accused of “getting white,” as in “don’t get white, hey!”(Of course this was used among people classified white, and the put down was in implying that someone else wasn’t, because to be other than white in apartheid South Africa was to be subordinate.) The apotheosis of this usage, for me, came in a documentary by Guy Spiller, in which he recorded a white working-class family watching TV footage of the release of Nelson Mandela. “Fuck it,” one of the sons clucks resignedly, “the kaffirs have been getting white lately, but now… now, they’re going to get whiter than white.”

And then of course there was the “flexibility” in the system driven by realpolitik. The B-List soul singer Percy Sledge came to Cape Town in 1970, and was put up at the President Hotel, which was reserved for “Whites Only.” It was good for the system to have Percy there, though, separately entertaining black and white audiences with “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “Come Softly,” however, so an accommodation was made: Percy was housed in a separate suite, in which he was served his meals and held his parties, in the process pioneering a new category in apartheid legalese that allowed others to follow: He was the system’s first “honorary white.”)

So are Jews “white”?

Well, we’ve begun to establish that this is a political rather than “ethnic” question. We weren’t for a long time, although that began to change in Western Europe in the wake of the Reformation. And in the last century, many of us have been, uh, acting white. For various political, economic and moral reasons, we’ve been accepted into the mainstream “white” establishment in much of the West. The Zionist movement in its early discourse explicitly appealed to the European imperial powers on the basis that Jews emigrating to Palestine would help bear “the white man’s burden,” serving as an outpost of Western civilization against the native hordes. And it’s hardly surprising to me that once that outpost was established, the apartheid regime recognized it as a fellow traveler, an outpost of Western civilization defending itself against the brown-skinned hostiles.


Mensch-edik Bolshevik:
Joe Slovo

In South Africa, of course, the mainstream leadership of the Jewish community did its best to persuade the apartheid regime of its “whiteness,” and to distance itself from Jews (like Joe Slovo, Dennis Goldberg and Ruth First) had become leaders of the liberation movement. Rather than taking pride in the fact, they were acutely embarrassed by the preponderance of Jews among the white faces in the dock alongside Mandela, or in the ranks of the ANC more generally. I’ll never forget debating the head of the Jewish Board of Deputies at an annual Habonim camp on “The Role of Jews in South Africa.” After my pep talk about a Jew’s place being in the struggle, and how these idealistic young people would find a natural home there in a movement that has long idolized the likes of Dennis Goldberg (then a political prisoner jailed along with Mandela), Joe Slovo (then commander of the ANC’s armed wing), Ray Alexander, Rusty Bernstein and so on; the Board of Deputies guy stepped up and began “Jews are not radicals, Jews are not subversives…” Now he was talking to an audience of 17-year-old in their second week of a socialist summer camp, where the air was filled with raging teenage hormones, the occasional whiff of weed and rampant change-the-world idealism. And this while the townships were burning. Let’s just say it was no contest. After all, if Judaism is about values and ethics, rather than just a tribal identity, then anyone who wasn’t a subversive or a revolutionary in apartheid South Africa wasn’t a very good Jew. Trying to be “white” in South Africa wasn’t a very Jewish choice for Jews.

And between the collaborationist instinct of the Board of Deputies in the apartheid years, and the glee that right-wing Zionists appear to feel when they mail around diatribes by some Spanish fascist arguing that the big mistake of Europe’s “whites” was to rid themselves of their Jews, there is a link.

Let’s just say when Jews try too hard to be “white” they often end up in political spaces where no Jew should feel comfortable.

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 95 Comments

Don’t they know it’s Kwanzaa?

Posted on December 5, 2005 by Tony

stamp
Published in the Cape Times, December 1997

Only in America, as the saying goes.

Africans spending their first holiday season in New York are usually surprised to find that sharing equal billing with Christmas and Chanukah (which gets pretty much equal status to Christmas in a city which is home to the highest concentration of Jews anywhere in the world) is an “African” holiday: Kwanzaa, which runs from December 26 to New Year’s day, and includes many of the features of both Christmas and Chanukah, such as gift-giving and lighting seven candles on consecutive days.

It is not surprising that a city which celebrates everything from the Chinese lunar New Year and Ramadaan to Diwali and Mexico’s Day of the Dead (and everything in between) would chose to honor a traditional African holiday. What is surprising, is that this “African” holiday doesn’t exist in Africa.

karenga
Father Kwanzaa: Ron Karenga

Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga following riots in the African-American ghetto of Watts, in Los Angeles. The intention was to promote cultural self-awareness of the African roots of black Americans, as well as to inculcate traditional African values. The festival, whose name is taken from a Swahili phrase meaning “first fruit”, emphasizes family and community, and shared positive values such as unity, self-determination, collective responsibility and faith. Families are encouraged to light a candle each of seven days in honor of a different virtue, and host a large family meal at which African dishes are eaten, gifts are given and a pledge written by the poet Maya Angelou is read:
Because we have forgotten our ancestors, our children no longer give us honor.
Because we have lost the path our ancestors cleared kneeling in perilous undergrowth, our children cannot find their way.
Because we have banished the God of our ancestors, our children cannot pray…
Because of these things we pledge to bind ourselves to one another, to embrace our lowliest, to keep company with our loneliest, to educate our illiterate, to feed our starving, to clothe our ragged, to do all good things.

Despite its rather obviously self-conscious attempts to invent a tradition, Kwanzaa has moved from being the preserve of small activist circles in the early ‘70s to a celebration currently marked by as many 13 million Americans. Having been cut off from their centuries-old traditions by slavery, many African-Americans are happy to have a holiday expressing their heritage even if that holiday’s purported “tradition” involves a bit of a leap of the imagination.

Indeed, it’s not as if celebrants of Christmas and Chanukah can legitimately claim that those festivals (in their current form) are innocent of such leaps. Christmas, after all is rooted in pagan Celtic and Germanic celebrations of the midwinter solstice – the Church appropriated the popular festival in the early years of Christianity and changed its meaning to represent the birth of Christ. Moreover, in its modern incarnation, Christmas bears even more similarities to the genesis of Kwanzaa: Santa Claus as the patron of Christmas, for example, was the 1822 invention of New York poet Clement Moore, who reconfigured the story of St. Nicholas, a relatively obscure 4th Century saint from Asia Minor, to create the image of a rotund and jolly bearer of gifts and goodwill. The elves-and-reindeer imagery came even later.

Chanukah, for its part may be a based on a commemoration of the Jews surviving a siege of their temple two millenia ago, but it had always been a relatively minor event on the Jewish calendar. In contemporary America, however, under pressure from Christmas, it has been transformed into a self-conscious equivalent of Christmas, allowing Jewish New Yorkers a sense of not being left out of the seasonal gift-giving frenzy.

As Kwanzaa has moved closer to the mainstream, it has lurched beyond the control of the nationalist-minded community which created it. Estimated to generate as much as $500 million in consumer spending on greeting cards, gifts, gift wrap and other artefacts, it’s little wonder that the holiday has spawned its own subsection of the Hallmark catalogue. In fact, corporate America is pushing the niche marketing possibilities to ugly extremes: “The Kwanzaa celebration begins with a Beefeater,” says one gin commercial lambasted by community activists – but they’re powerless to stop everyone from Colgate to the Kmart supermarket chain from cashing in on Kwanzaa marketing.

The U.S. Postal Service is also getting in on the act, marketing Kwanzaa stamps promoted with a speaking tour by Dr. Karenga himself. (He’s drawn fire in the nationalist community for collaborating in what many see as a community ceding control over its own symbols.)

The very success of Kwanzaa in winning mainstream recognition for a celebration of African-American culture during the holiday season has also driven its commercialization by the wider consumer culture. Corporate America doesn’t much care whether consumers are observing Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Ramadaan, Halloween or Valentine’s Day, as long as they’re buying more stuff in order to do so.

Adbusters, a California-based organization of social critics who have attacked the excesses of consumerism and the advertising industry, had hoped this year to get celebrants of Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa to stop and think before their holiday spending sprees. They advocated that the Friday after Thanksgiving, traditionally the opening of the holiday shopping season, be observed as a “Buy Nothing Day,” and created a TV ad to that end. “The average North American consumes five times more than a Mexican, ten times more than a Chinese person, and thirty times more than a person from India,” the ad begins, using an animated image of the North American continent as an insatiable pink pig. As the pig becomes increasingly bloated, the scene cuts to mountains of garbage in an American urban dump, and the voiceover warns, “We are the most voracious consumers in the world; a world that could die because of the way we North Americans live…”

With the global warming talks under way at the time in Kyoto underscoring the latter point, Adbusters’ message may have struck a chord with at least a few Americans. Evidently, the major TV networks thought so too, refusing to air the ad because, as a spokesman put it, it ran counter to “the current economic policy in the United States.”

Christmas, Chanukah and Kwanzaa all involve some degree of tampering with, if not inventing, cultural or religious “tradition.” But corporate America is prepared to treat all three, and whatever new holidays any group of Americans cares to add, as valid expressions of the national tradition it cherishes most: over-consumption.

Posted in The Whole World's Africa | 10 Comments

Will U.S. Troops Leave Iraq?

Posted on December 5, 2005 by Tony

Yes, there will be a big change next year in the number and nature of U.S. forces deployed in Iraq, and in their location and mission. But no, this is not a prelude to a full and expeditious departure desired by the generals (who are channeled by the likes of Rep. John Murtha and retired general William Odom). At least, not yet.

Instead, as Seymour Hersh (and various British reports) have pointed out, the “draw-down” of substantial numbers of U.S. troops over the next year (up to 80,000 of the 160,000 currently there) will occur in the context of a strategic reorganization that will see them redeploy from all of Iraq’s cities, where even the Coalition’s own opinion surveys show they are resented as an occupying force by 80 percent of the population (and about half of that number see attacks on U.S. forces as legitimate). They will hand over policing and garrison duties to Iraqi forces, which will allow them to remove most of their own infantry from the exposed role of patrolling the cities, and send a good many of them home. The U.S. force mix and role will change, with greater reliance on air power and rapid deployment forces that can back up Iraqi forces in clashes with insurgents.

But how long they’ll remain in these “superbases” remains an open question, and my own suspicion is that the question has not yet been answered by the Bush administration, who do not appear as yet to have given up on the Iraq war planners’ dream of creating permanent bases there from which the U.S. could project power throughout the region — there’s a conspicuous silence from the administration in response to pleas from Democrats and moderate Republicans that President Bush declare that the U.S. has no interest in permanent military bases in Iraq.

This more limited redeployment has been forced on it by a number of different factors, and the question of what follows remains to be settled by a number of ongoing struggles on the ground in Iraq and in the corridors of power in Washington, DC.

The prime reasons for the redeployment are (a) that the U.S. can no longer afford to maintain the current one; and (b) that the current one is ineffective, and even counterproductive in securing U.S. goals.

The United States literally doesn’t have enough combat troops to sustain the current form and level of deployment. As Odom and Murtha warn, the military has been stretched beyond breaking point by repeat year-long tours of duty in Iraq, and it will take years to recover. And the shift of U.S. public opinion decisively against the war suggests that the political will to sustain the current casualty rates (produced mostly by having U.S. forces undertaking policing duties in and around Iraqi cities) may be ebbing.

Equally important, though, is the recognition that the current deployment doesn’t work: The U.S. is taking casualties, but it isn’t defeating or even really containing the insurgency, and the generals know that the local civilian population in the Sunni areas is unlikely ever to be decisively turned against the insurgents while American troops are in their towns.

While the U.S. will now accelerate the transfer of security duties to Iraqi forces in whose combat quality and political loyalty to anything beyond their own sectarian affiliations U.S. commanders have expressed considerable doubt, there is no question of transferring responsibility for national defense, i.e. a military capability to protect Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity from outside aggression, to Iraqi forces for the foreseeable future. That’s because no serious effort has yet been made by the U.S. to create such a force. The personnel being trained now are lightly armed formations capable of internal policing and counterinsurgency operations; there is no Iraqi air force, no heavy artillery or missile capability; no serious armored capability and other mainstays of a defense force capable of defending national borders in a dangerous neighborhood. The U.S. has quite simply refrained from creating such a force (as James Fallows explains in this oddly-spaced version of his excellent Atlantic Monthly piece. On present indicators, the U.S. presence in bases outside the cities will continue for years to come.

Many have discussed the new deployment in terms of “Iraqification” of the counterinsurgency war, in the tradition of “Vietnamization.” I think a more appropriate analogy (bearing in mind the inherent flaws of all strategic analogies) for what the U.S. military plans to do after the December elections, is the redeployment of the Israeli military from the West Bank and Gaza as the Olso Accords took effect. The Israelis also removed their troops from the Palestinian cities where they were more vulnerable, and where there presence was a source of friction. Security duties were handed over to an ostensibly friendly policing force, whose light armaments precluded it ever challenging the Israelis, who maintained effective control over the borders. Of course the Israelis had no interest in transferring real sovereign authority, whereas the U.S. objective in Iraq is more ambiguous. In its best-case scenario, a sovereign Iraqi government would have been as friendly to Wal-Mart as to Israel, a long-term base for the U.S. military and a model pro-American regime at the heart of a region whose populace is overwhelmingly hostile to the U.S. But the best-case scenario was a fantasy, and the depth of divisions in Washington precluded any contingency planning.

They can’t seriously imagine that they Iraqi security forces they are creating will succeed where the U.S. failed, in militarily eradicating the insurgency. But it doesn’t need to – they simply have to be capable of not being overrun by the insurgents. The U.S. will remain there as a security force of last resort. (Like the Palestinian Authority, the Iraqi government is aware that eradicating the insurgency militarily is impossible, and it is beginning to signal the likelihood that it will negotiate some form of compact with the militants, a revised political framework in which they can be accommodated. Thus the importance of the Cairo talks recently held among Iraqi factions inside and outside of the government – including elements aligned with the insurgency – and also the revelation that President Bush’s man in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, is to hold top level talks with Iran, and has indicated a willingness even to talk with insurgents.)

I’m not sure that it’s possible to say definitively now what their plan might be in the wake of the redeployment. My guess is, to use a marvelously utilitarian Rastafarian phrase, they’re going into “watch and play” mode. (P.S. Just noticed this piece by Anthony Cordesman of the CSIS, very informed on the thinking in the strategic establishment, explaining why it’s too soon to finalize an Iraq strategy, which seems to underscore this point.) I suspect that many of the generals want out, but the political echelon is not ready to let go. And it’s not hard to see why:

  • They have stretched the U.S. military beyond breaking point, while at the same time emboldening America’s most hostile enemies by demonstrating the limits of its military capacity to enforce its will;
  • They have squandered hundreds of billions of dollars intensifying the economic pain that will be felt by tens of millions of Americans in tough times;
  • They have committed thousands of young Americans to their deaths or to a life scarred by permanent disfigurement;
  • They have left the U.S. more diplomatically isolated than at any point in its recent history, its credibility in question even among close allies and its ability to lead others by persuasion almost entirely depleted; and in the eyes of the vast majority of the world’s population they ahve painted America as an arrogant aggressor, squandering the vast store of international goodwill that followed 9/11 and instead fomenting generalized anti-American rage that works to the advantage of all extremists.

    Despite that epic investment, if the U.S. was to move to depart Iraq in the near future it would likely leave without permanent basing rights; without oil contracts and other lucrative business deals; without a friendly government in place much less one likely to support the U.S. agenda in the region; without a political order in place that the American people would recognize as an achievement. That can’t look like smart politics in the White House.

    Even Israel’s foremost military historian derides the Iraq invasion as “the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them.” But the political leadership to whom it will fall to make the decisions about withdrawal may be too imprisoned by their own vanity and delusion to recognize it as such. Although in the strategic classroom of history, Bush will surely be awarded the Dunce cap, he’s certainly not going to don it himself. Besides anything else, the “legacy” thing won’t allow it.

    • Posted in Featured Analysis | 20 Comments

    Singh Country

    Posted on November 11, 2005 by Tony

    taxi
    How about a nice cup of chai?

    Hollywood’s traditional idea of a New York cabbie is probably Robert De Niro’s alienated Vietnam vet Travis Bickle, or the wiseguy Jews, Italians and Poles of the 1970s TV hit show “Taxi.” But those stereotypes couldn’t be further from today’s reality. According to the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, the most common driver surname today is Singh, followed by Mohammed – two out of every three New York cabbies today hail from South Asia, predominantly from Pakistan and Punjab.

    So while Travis Bickle might have gone in search of coffee and pie on his break, his real-world equivalent is more likely to want a plate of saag and a decent cup of chai. And ask any south Asian driver anywhere in the city to name his favorite eating spot, the most frequent answer will be Punjabi Grocery and Deli. “Even if I’ve just dropped someone in Harlem and I’m on 114th street, if I need a cup of tea I’ll get on the FDR Drive and come down here,” says Mahmood Butt, a veteran Pakistani driver sipping on a paper cup of the Deli’s legendary frothy, spiced brew. Of course any tea drinker in New York City could relate to the impulse to drive 113 streets in search of a decent cuppa, but the allure of Punjabi Deli is far deeper.

    Why go all the way down to the Lower East Side to eat when there’s food all around, I ask Bishen Ghotra Singh, as he nudges his cab forward in the line outside the Hilton in Midtown. “The owner, he’s my best friend,” says the turbaned driver. “And it’s always easy to get parking.” Parking, of course, is a major issue for cab drivers. The city isn’t designed for parking – most of the vehicles on its streets are cabs and trucks, which tend to only make brief stops to disgorge or take on their freight. So when a cabbie gets peckish, he has a problem. Even more so when he needs the bathroom. New York is notoriously bereft of public bathroom facilities, and while most of the city’s residents know to sneak in to McDonalds or Starbucks or even Barnes and Noble when nature calls, the absence of parking deprives cabbies of even those options. Many drivers on night shifts simply make do with a bottle.

    No wonder then, that many drivers call Ranbir Singh their best friend. The first thing the stocky, bearded Sikh with the warm eyes and ready smile did after buying Punjabi Deli four years ago, was put in an extra toilet. Ranbir, of course, understood his market well – he’d worked as a driver himself for six years. Indeed, Punjabi Deli had been his favorite stop when he was driving, even when it had only one bathroom. Its location — in an unprepossessing basement storefront on a sparse patch of First Street, separated from Houston by only a traffic median – makes for plenty of parking at all hours of the day. The easiest way to find it, of course, is simply look for the cluster of yellow cabs outside at any time of day or night.

    “We have all the conveniences the cab driver needs,” Ranbir’s partner, Kulwinder Singh, offers as explanation for the deli’s popularity. And he’s not just talking about the bathrooms, either. He points to hundreds of cassettes of devotional and filmi music to keep the driver connected with home between fares, the deli also keeps a supply of such basics as rolls of the paper spool for the standard taxi receipt machine and bulbs for the light in the driver’s cabin. Then there’s piles of pain killers, bottled water and such favorite driver snacks as roasted black chick peas. And, of course, always a good supply of change.

    But it is not simply the conveniences that make Punjabi Deli the eatery of choice among the men who Manhattan moving. The main attraction, of course, is the food. “It’s delicious and very good for the digestion,” enthuses Rashpal Singh, a driver who’s just finished a platter of red lentil dal with a cornmeal roti. “You see, it’s light, there’s no meat, and it’s not very spicy, which is good if you’re having to digest while sitting in a car.”

    Punjabi’s most popular entrée is Saag – a creamy, lightly spiced blend of spinach and mustard leaf, eaten with roti or on basmati rice. And three days a week, when the drivers are lucky, it’s Saag Paneer, the same dish cooked with fried cubes of delicious homemade paneer, a creamy farmer’s cheese. Punjabi’s kitchen is up in Queens – the downtown hole-in-a-wall is too small to house a full kitchen – and the food is brought down two or three times a day, depending on demand. The menu changes daily, depending on the availability of season vegetables such as okra, but Saag and Chole – chick peas stewed with cumin, tomatoes and garam masala – are the standards. Tonight there’s also soupy red-lentil dal, a lightly spiced cabbage and potato dish, mouthwatering eggplant simmered with coriander almost down to a paste, and the ever present saag and chole. There are plenty of delicious kulfi desserts, all of them with diminished sugar content to guard against the high incidence of diabetes among South Asian drivers.

    What do drivers who come here for breakfast eat, I ask, anticipating being made privy to some Punjabi culinary secrets. “Bagel. With butter or cream cheese,” says Mulwinder Singh. Some things are the same all over New York. But pressed for other options, he comes up with Pinni – mixed nuts and grains roasted and ground together with dried milk. “It’s the Punjabi energy bar,” quips Rashpal Singh. “Eaten any time you need it.”

    Punjabi’s menu appeals the cab driver’s unique appetites: “It’s light food, because if we eat meat then we go to sleep,” says Butt. “We don’t like to eat too much, and this light food is best. This is the cheapest and best food in Manhattan – and nobody makes better tea.” There’s no great secret in the chai, of course – its base is the rather lifeless American deli standard Lipton teabag, brewed with half-water half-milk and a tantalizing blend of tea masala and cardamom.

    Unlike Travis Bickle, today’s drivers are mostly conscious of their health – driving a cab is not a dead-end job, as much as an entry-level position for immigrants looking to make good. “This is the best job for a student,” says Bengali driver Enamul Jalil. “You can work irregular hours and make enough money to keep yourself going through school.” Not that the money is great. What allows a yellow cab to work New York’s streets is its medallion issued by the TLC – and there are only a finite number of those. The going rate for buying one these days is in the region of $250,000, with the result that most drivers are simply renting their cars from large fleets. And simply covering costs consumes somewhere between $100 and $125 of what a driver makes on a shift, leaving a balance that seldom amounts to much more than $100. No wonder then, that many of the drivers have left their families back in Asia and share small apartments in the outer boroughs with three or four other drivers. “I like to eat light, mostly fruit and vegetables, or salads,” says Jalil. “Because I have to be aware of my health, sitting around for eight hours every day. And driving a cab is extremely stressful, too.”

    Driving a cab all night, of course, is inherently alienating. Punjabi drivers try to break down their loneliness through a CB radio network, and other attempts at building a community. And if that community has a hall, it is Punjabi Deli. “This food is home cooking for cab drivers, because most are from Pakistan or Punjab,” says Rashpal Singh. “And you know if you come here, you find friendship and familiarity. You can speak in your home language, and it helps to know you are not alone out there.”

    But its secret is out, of course, among the hipsters, aspirant filmmakers and dot-com entrepreneurs of the neighborhood. “Many Americans come here now,” says Ranbir Singh. “Thirty percent of the customers now are from the neighborhood. We don’t mind. We welcome all, black, white, no matter. When the disco places close, that’s when people start to stream in here.” After all, almost everyone in New York is from elsewhere, and most sometimes crave a little home cooking – comfort food, prepared with love and served with camaraderie — even if it’s from someone else’s home.

    This first appeared in Eat magazine in 2000

    Posted in Cuisine | 4 Comments

    Jihadists vs. Baathists: The Amman Bombing and the Iraqi Insurgency

    Posted on November 11, 2005 by Tony


    Saddam and King Abdallah compete for
    pride of place in an Amman storefront

    The alliance between the global jihadists of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the various Baathist and other national Islamist and nationalist forces who make up the vast bulk of the Iraqi insurgency has always been a marriage of convenience between entities with very different agendas and longterm interests. And the signs of strain are beginning to show.

    The Baathists don’t like the random slaughter of civilians, not because they hold much sympathy for the Shiites they kept at heel for so many decades, but because it’s bad politics in terms of holding on to their constituency. Compare it, if you like, to the old South Africa — the Sunnis, were also a ruling class that comprised around 15 percent of the population — the apartheid regime could win the consent of the white minority to kill ANC militants, but if they’d simply started bombing black churches and broadcasting the fact on television, they’d have lost the support of their own people. (The grievances of the Sunni community that gives either tacit or active support to the insurgency are primarily political in nature; the vicious Salafist hatred for Shiites as “apostates” expressed by Zarqawi is not widely shared.)

    Many Baathist commanders also encouraged Sunnis to vote No in last month’s constitutional referendum, putting them at odds with Zarqawi’s crowd. And like nationalist elements everywhere that have come into contact with al Qaeda — Palestine and Chechnya are two obvious examples — the mainstream insurgents are not inclined squander resources and risk isolation and the wrath of potential allies or neutrals by acting out a global “jihad” that requires them to attack targets other than their immediate, national foe.

    These conflicts of interest wouldn’t necessarily affect many of the day to day operations of the insurgency. But many commanders have spoken increasingly frankly in recent months of the inevitability of a showdown. The Baathist commanders who have negotiated with U.S. officials in secret have made clear that they see the potential for a compact with the U.S. in the future, in which the two sides work together to limit Iranian influence in Baghdad, and the Baathists round up and eliminate the foreign fighters who have come to wage their global jihad on Iraqi soil. (And let’s be frank, no matter what the Cheney gang and the Pentagon neocons said in the course of campaigning for the war, U.S. intel professionals know well that the Baathists never harbored al Qaeda back when they ran things.)

    Already there are signs of open warfare, as the agendas of the two sides begin to bump into one another. Knight-Ridder reports on violent clashes between Qaeda and local nationalist insurgents in Ramadi, and the scale of the clash seems to suggest the rift won’t easily be healed. Chris Allbritton noted earlier this week that in Huseybah, the U.S. was fighting alongside a local Sunni tribal faction that had fought against U.S. forces last year, but had since fallen out with a rival tribe that had allied with the foreign jihadis. These may be isolated incidents of a phenomenon that cleary varies from region to region. But they may be the first signs of a widening schism.

    If so, the Amman hotel bombings are likely to hasten that schism.

    The move to turn Iraq into an exporter of global jihad certainly accords with interests of one side of a reported debate in al Qaeda over the question of reestablishing a geographic base of operations. But if it suits the Qaeda agenda, it works directly against the interests of the Baathists. Jordan has long been considered a relatively friendly entity as far as the Baathists are concerned — Saddam’s daughters took refuge there after the war, and remember, the late King Hussein refused to join the coalition in the 1991 Gulf War even though such key Arab states as Egypt and Syria actually sent troops to fight alongside the U.S. Jordan’s Palestinian majority, and its long-established economic ties with Iraq made it difficult for the Hashemite monarchy to side too openly with the U.S. in the invasion. Saddam has historically been very popular among Jordanians. And, it’s a relatively safe bet that the Baathists are taking full advantage of that history, and more importantly, of the growing misgivings in Amman over the fact that the U.S. has essentially authored a takeover in Baghdad by pro-Iranian Shiites.

    And there’s no doubting that Jordanians are enfuriated by the latest attacks, directed randomly against whomever from the local middle class happened to be partying at those hotels.

    It’s quite conceivable that they’re running all sorts of clandestine financial and other logistical and support operations from Jordan. Antagonizing Jordanians and their government — and the wider Arab world — by sending suicide bombers into their capitals is anathema to the Baathist agenda, because it weakens the regional support that will be all-important to their ability to sustain the insurgency. The Baathists, if anything, will be looking to amplify the sympathy in Arab capitals for the plight of the Sunnis, because this will strengthen their position, both in the future political process (when the U.S. has to begin negotiating a new compact with the region) and also, their ability to raise funds and support in Arab capitals.

    By bombing the hotels in Amman, the Zarqawi group are antagonizing not only the regimes in Amman and elsewhere, but also their Baathist allies in Iraq. The Baathists are unlikely to stand by and watch their own interests imperiled by those who would seek to make Iraq a new headquarters for terror attacks across the Middle East. Their objective, after all, is to restore some version of a regime detested by al Qaeda.

    Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 12 Comments