Last month, having watched in frustration as his Solicitor General got his clock cleaned during the Supreme Court’s Obamacare hearings, the President made matters worse by publicly braying about how “unprecedented” it would be for an “unelected group of people” to overturn a law passed by a “strong majority” in Congress. This idiotic assertion provoked a tsunami of scorn from constitutional experts of all stripes, and angered the judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals so much that they humiliated the lawyers of the Justice Department by giving them a homework assignment on judicial review. If, however, you thought that embarrassing episode was enough to stop the Obama administration from trying to bully the Court, you were mistaken. In a new attempt to influence the justices as they deliberate over the ultimate fate of Obamacare, the White House has told them that striking down the “reform” law would wreck the Medicare program : “Medicare’s payment system… could freeze if President Barack Obama’s health care law is summarily overturned, the administration quietly informed the courts.” This bizarre claim is, according to former CMS administrator Thomas A. Scully, nonsense: “If you look at the way the law was financed, it was a combination of higher taxes and lower Medicare payments. That’s what you would be rolling back.” In other words, by striking down the law, the Court would forestall $500 billion in Medicare cuts called for by Obamacare as well as deep slashes in Medicare Advantage. The claim that Medicare payments might stop if the Court ignores the administration’s intimidation tactics is much like a threat the President made during the 2011 battle over the debt ceiling. At that time, Obama averred that Social Security checks might not be mailed if the GOP refused to roll over : “I cannot guarantee that those checks will go out … there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.” That was a lie, of course, as is the threat that Medicare payments might halt. But that hasn’t stopped Donald Berwick, the recess-appointed CMS head who resigned when he became an election year embarrassment for Obama, from repeating the whopper: “Medicare cannot turn on a dime… I would not be surprised if there are delays and problems with payment flow.” By reiterating the preposterous claim that Medicare payments might be delayed if Obamacare is struck down, Berwick is participating in a predictable election year strategy that goes beyond meddling with the Court. The threat is also meant to frighten seniors. Like the perennial Democrat claim that the GOP is secretly planning to destroy Social Security, this strategy seeks to exploit the insecurities of the elderly. Obama and his creatures want the nation’s seniors to be so afraid of losing their retirement benefits and medical coverage that they will go to the polls and vote Democrat notwithstanding the President’s pathetic record and the failure of his party’s congressional leaders to produce a single piece of useful legislation since they returned to power in 2007. Ironically, it is the prospect that the Court might preserve Obamacare that should frighten seniors. The health care “reform” law contains two primary features that should worry all Medicare beneficiaries. First, it will raid Medicare’s coffers to the tune of $500 billion and use that money to pay for the health care of young, healthy Americans. Many of the 30 million people whom Obamacare will allegedly lift from the ranks of the uninsured will receive coverage subsidized by money siphoned from Medicare. Much of this money will come from cuts in the Medicare Advantage program, which means that the benefits now enjoyed by 25 percent of Medicare beneficiaries will be dramatically reduced. The second, and even scarier, prospect that seniors face if the Supremes allow Obamacare to stand will involve the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). This committee of fifteen unelected apparatchiks will begin rationing care to the elderly shortly after Obama’s reelection. IPAB’s mission is closely modeled on that of Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). NICE has been rationing care to elderly Brits for many years, and it routinely denies British patients access to drugs and treatment regimens taken for granted in most developed countries. In fact, it recently declined to approve the first new drug developed in half a century for the treatment of lupus because it was too expensive. And yet, in a typically Orwellian submission, the Obama administration has told the Court that overturning Obamacare will create “extraordinary disruption” to the Medicare program. And it would no doubt be inconvenient for the government bureaucrats at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. As tragic as it would be for these apparatchiks to earn their paychecks for once, there is no honest basis for the claim that it would somehow freeze Medicare payments. As the Washington Post points out , “Even if the law were completely overturned, the government still would have authority under previous legislation to pay hospitals, doctors, insurance plans, nursing homes and other providers.” The people who run the Obama administration understand this, of course, but they are evidently betting that the justices of the Supreme Court do not. This is the kind of forlorn hope to which desperate people cling. The palpable fear at the White House that the law may be struck down is causing them to do stupid things. A month ago, the President tried to intimidate the Court, and succeeded only in making a fool of himself. Now his minions have produced this latest lame attempt to influence the Court. As objective as the justices try to be, they must by now be growing weary of these amateurish attempts to meddle in their deliberations. The justices expect the executive branch of our government to treat them with the respect due a coequal branch. This deference has been glaringly absent since Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address. During that speech, you will recall, the President contemptuously rebuked them before Congress and the American people for possessing the temerity to rule in favor of the First Amendment in their Citizens United decision. Such presumption, combined with the pettifoggery to which the Obama Justice Department has subjected them in the Obamacare case, is unlikely to have endeared the administration to the Court. Indeed, it has probably angered more than one of the justices. This is not the kind of mood you want them in when they are considering the constitutionality of your most “significant domestic achievement.”
There has been an ongoing discussion, these past few years, among those scholarly opinion-makers in politics, the media and the professoriate that America is in a state of inevitable and irreversible decline. Let’s call them the “declinists.” They readily accept the deterioration of U.S. power after the Second World War was hastened by a period of self-delusion that coincided, precisely, with the “remarkable triumphalism of the post-Gulf War ’90s,” to echo the words of the declinist-in-chief, Noam Chomsky. China — they say — will become the world’s largest economy over the next decade, and surging giant India boasts a middle class population that’s larger than the entire United States. Doomsday forecasts and sound-bite metrics fuel an industry that’s reached prophetic intensity. Once a cottage industry, this schtick now heats Thomas Freidman’s palatial 11,400 square-foot home — bought and paid for by best-sellers sub-titled ” How America Fell Behind in the World it Invented .” For these folks, the daydream of American exceptionalism has been revealed as fallacy. Countries such as Russia and China threaten to obstruct our supremacy in matters of foreign affairs. Our leadership on the global stage is no longer wanted. Our flat-lining economy is hectored by a broken political system, itself ground to dust by the interminable gridlock of hyper-partisanship. I know the academic argument backwards and forwards. The end of America’s time in the sun is supposedly presaged by historic failures of each economic behemoth before us. Whether Genoan, Dutch or British, the end of the hegemonic cycle generally coincides with overextension and financial crisis. But I disagree that this is the end of our turn at the top. Take a look around… or just scan the front page of your local paper. Where does one look for leadership? Europe? The continent has scuttled itself. The EU is maimed –perhaps terminally — by a single currency Eurozone that will demand the next decade to repair. Of course, that’s to assume the restoration of solvency is even possible. Scholarly declinists often point to China as the ascendant state, and potential heir to superintendency of the global order. However, China’s growth will prove capricious. This is a fact that even the Chinese accept. Premier Wen Jiabao has admitted that his nation’s development is “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable.” But these past few weeks have revealed that something’s rotten in the People’s Republic. Mind you, this “something” lurks below the superficiality of red-hot economic indicators and a thrilling Olympiad. Chen Guancheng’s activism awakened public crisis unheard of since tanks drove down Tiananmen Square. His family suffered 20 months of house arrest at the command of local officials, after he exposed their regional despotism and forced abortions . With a little luck, he’ll soon be studying law in the United States. But while his case has received the most attention, there are other difficulties currently facing China’s Communist regime. Several weeks ago, rumors of a coup troubled the institutionalized transition of the Politburo’s General Secretary. The power squabble between Shanghai’s “Princeling” faction and their rivals in the Communist Youth League simmered over in a rare glimpse of party fracture . Now the wife of disgraced party chief, Bo Xilai, is being held in connection with the murder of a British national. But the ramifications of this case are far deeper than a simple homicide. In fact, they threaten to expose bright-line schisms within the party, first revealed by the leadership dispute. Suffice to say, China’s problems run deep — deep enough to often escape our scrutiny, but also deep enough to threaten the Communist Party’s systemic integrity. As such, I’d say it’s premature to portend their ascendancy at America’s expense. In his excellent column regarding ” 5 Myths of America’s Decline ” for the Washington Post , political risk guru Ian Bremmer suggests that the United States isn’t done yet — for some of the reasons I’ve detailed, and others he explores in greater length. I’ll leave you with his rebuttal to those declinists who assume consensus spells capitulation: We are entering what I call the G-Zero: a period when global leadership goes by the wayside. It’s a less productive, more crisis-prone world, but it’s less painful for the United States than for everybody else. If America can engage the world with a narrower, self-interested focus, it will reap rewards. It will have the luxury of applying cost-benefit analysis before intervening abroad. It’s a downsized role, but don’t mistake this for decline. Sounds like a plan to me.
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Chen Guancheng and the Myth of American Decline
As recently reported by the British press , in the next James Bond film to be released in October, Skyfall , the suave secret agent to be played by Daniel Craig will not be sipping vodka martinis — he will be drinking beer, and one may also conclude he will not be all that suave. We do not yet know how Craig will ask for it, but given the dumbing down of the James Bond persona, it is not hard to imagine the words, “ice cold bottle of beer here” spoken at the gaming tables of Monte Carlo. The admirers of Bond are said to be outraged. For decades we have heard the words, “vodka martini, shaken not stirred,” spoken by the world’s urbane super spy, known almost everywhere as Bond, James Bond — as he is wont to introduce himself in a slightly menacing, condescending way. At home in the paneled offices of London’s intelligence service or MI6, the dignified casinos of the Riviera, the Space Shuttle, and on board the Orient Express streaking from Istanbul across Europe, Bond has been an icon for those with discriminating taste and for those who would like to have it. Whether it was Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, or Pierce Brosnan, the character Bond knew his fine wines and foie gras and how to conduct himself elegantly, whether in a bush suit or black tie. He could lecture the Bank of England on the deficiencies of their brandy, and advise M, the chief of MI6 on obscure flora found in the Amazon — in a patronizing manner. In the early Bond movies with Connery and Moore in particular, there was focus on the spy’s character and wry sense of humor, before the onslaught and distraction of high speed cameras and gadgetry. Later actors, especially Dalton, projected a more sensitive Bond — a Bond with listening skills — and Brosnan continued to enhance the image of all things dapper, the stiff upper lip, and good taste. But no more. Craig is a different kind of Bond — however still with much public appeal. His surliness and sometimes glowering manner speak to those in need of anger management. His musculature is suggestive of many hours spent in the gym, bench pressing several multiples of his body weight. His slightly spiked hair is suggestive of the coolness of a new generation, a new order of things. The grime and dried blood on his face convey a hands-on 007, a hard-charging executive of espionage — one who prefers substance over form and just wants to get the job done. The new Bond now played by Craig does not mind looking grungy and casual, and in this respect he is a certainly a man of the times. And while the earlier Bonds seemed to do their work for King and country, with pluck that was decidedly British, it is not yet clear exactly what motivates Craig in his role, other than the desire for a good dustup and a cold beer. It is possible that the commercial sponsors of Bond are shrewdly cognizant of globalization and its potential for profit. Imagine the rising demand for beer in Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC countries, as hundreds of millions of young men and women aspire to become secret agents, swigging down a well-chilled beer after completing a clandestine operation. Not surprisingly Heineken, the Dutch brewing company in collaboration with film sponsors, has weighed in , reportedly stating, “Bond is a perfect fit for us. He is the epitome of the man of the world.” Bond traditionalists may not be happy about the dilution of their brand, perhaps conceding that Daniel Craig still epitomizes something — but it is not worldliness. After all, a super sleuth with dirt and his own dried blood on his face cannot be doing everything right. But drinking beer need not be inconsistent with savoir-faire, as Jonathan Goldsmith, the Dos Equis man, shows us. Were Goldsmith cast as the next James Bond, we might hear him say, “Stay covert, my friends.”
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A Beer for Mister Bond
However the French vote Sunday April 22 in the first round of their presidential election, or in the runoff May 6, the long-term winners in terms of real political change will be neither the putative conservative Nicolas Sarkozy nor the Socialist Party’s François Hollande. They will be the newly puissant populist parties of far right and left. If you combine the expected votes of the right-wing National Front and the new, communist-backed Left Front, they would outnumber those of either Sarkozy or Hollande. In fact, the National Front already dominates France’s youth vote: with 26 percent, more 18-to-24-year-olds plan to vote for it than any other party. Hardly surprising then that a large majority of French voters, disgusted with politics as usual, say flatly they don’t want the predictable Hobson’s choice runoff between Sarkozy and Hollande. The rejection cuts across class, age, professional and even political lines including former Gaullists and socialists: they no longer trust the established mainstream parties. While the two mainstreamers have bobbed and weaved for months with tired variations on the theme of a chicken in every pot — most appropriate in the land of Henry IV, the first to pledge a poule au pot for every mother’s son in the realm — the fiery populist speeches of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen and the Left Front’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, challenging what they term a corrupt economic and political system, make them the revelations of this campaign. What they reveal is a hunger for something other than routine rhetoric — hardball, edgy programs that tackle France’s grievous socio-economic problems head-on and restore the feeling of distinct national and political identity eroded by uncontrolled immigration and globalization. Even if those proposals, on close examination, sometimes constitute an insult to the intelligence of the Gaul in the street. Or pander with simple solutions to complex problems. Or appeal to racial and class conflict. What the French apparently don’t want in 2012, whatever he promises, is five more years of Nicolas Sarkozy. Some 64 percent disapprove of him, a much worse figure than the 46 percent disapproval rating of Valérie Giscard d’Estaing in 1981, the only Fifth Republic president who failed to win a second term. Sarkozy is expected at least to make it into the runoff. But polls point to a loss to Hollande by up to 16 points then — even former president Jacques Chirac of Sarkozy’s own UMP party says he will vote for Hollande. Sarkozy, who exudes nervous energy and never shies from a fight, but has little political flair, has spent his flailing campaign 1) apologizing for the mistakes of his first term and promising to be different if re-elected, 2) casting himself as the only captain with the experience to steer the good ship France through the current economic crisis, 3) telling the French they should be more like the Germans (a real vote-getter, that), and 4) seeing that none of this worked, rebranding in seeming panic to an unconvincing hard-right campaign as “the people’s candidate” speaking for the “silent majority” against Parisian elites. This last tactic shows the burgeoning influence of the National Front, expected to garner 17 percent or more of the vote. (Pollsters admit the figure could be much higher, many NF supporters hesitating to say they favor the politically incorrect Marine Le Pen.) Borrowing liberally from its playbook, Sarkozy has jumped from one hot-button issue to another almost daily in a shifting, carpet-bomb campaign. Depending on which way the wind was blowing that day, he vowed to cut immigration from the current 200,000 a year to half that, pass new security laws to protect against the Islamist threat, keep Muslim halal meat out of public school canteens, turn the screws on welfare abusers, protect French products from foreign competition, tighten border controls even if the European Union objected — all proposed months ago by Marine Le Pen. In his drive to siphon off votes wherever he can, Sarkozy even finds nice things to say about the Trotskyite head of the other populist party, the pugnacious Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who calls for things like a “citizens’ revolution” against capitalism and “civic insurrection” against just about everything. “Concerning his ideas on the human level,” Sarkozy said coolly if cryptically the other day, “I must say I have no complaints.” Another example of his political tone deafness: the Left Front’s rabid supporters would rather take their party underground than back a bourgeois capitalist like Sarkozy. Socialist François Hollande, too, winks in the direction of populist voters, mainly of the Left Front. Though personally mild-mannered and moderate, at his political rallies he punches the air as he declares that his main enemy is the world of finance: “I will be the president of a republic much stronger than the markets,” he vows, “a France stronger than finance.” He promises to “profoundly reform” France to keep it the most generous welfare state in the world, unpleasant economic realities notwithstanding. Lest the left populists suspect he is merely another capitalist tool, a conservative sheep in liberal wolf’s clothing — after all, on a campaign visit to London, Europe’s financial center, he assured audiences, “I am not dangerous” — Hollande pledges to implement a confiscatory 75 percent tax rate on personal income over $1.30 million. (Mélenchon, who sees the capitalist U.S. as “the world’s primary problem,” tops him with his rabble-pleasing plan to confiscate personal income over $470,000.) To signal his independence from a domineering Uncle Sam, he would pull French troops out of Afghanistan by the end of this year, two years ahead of the NATO schedule. That, he hopes, will help persuade Left Front believers to vote for him after Mélenchon, credited with about 14 percent in the first round, fails to make it to the runoff. The French turn to populism actually comes late compared with the rest of Europe. From the True Finns in Finland to the Northern League in Italy, the British National Party to the Danish People’s Party and emerging regional movements across the Continent, voters increasingly have been turning away from traditional parties that they feel are out of touch. Cozy consensus, comfortable right-left alternation with a wink and a nudge are out, fragmentation, rejection and the quest for new answers are in. Angry and often incoherent, the populists represent what Pierre Poujade, a now-forgotten French post-war populist, called “the ripped-off, lied-to little people.” The similarities to the Tea Party are obvious. But, being European, these populists typically are more concerned about a loss of national sovereignty and control over their own affairs due to the European Union. They are also further along in organization, structure, and ideology. With voters casting their protest ballots for a field of 10 candidates in the first round before getting down to the business of choosing between the two frontrunners in the second, surprises are distinctly possible on both ballots. One obvious joker is abstention: results could be skewed by the lowest turnout in years, due partly to much of the country being on sacrosanct spring school vacation. But while France’s new populists don’t seriously expect Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Mélenchon to be president come May, they are gunning for a healthy bloc of seats in the follow-up parliamentary elections in June. That could begin to change the face of French politics.
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None of the Above
The folks running the show in Mali, the landlocked West African country that is near the top of most lists of the world’s poorest countries, picked Cheick Modibo Diarra, a rocket scientist and the head of one of the world’s richest companies, Microsoft, to serve as interim prime minister until things get back on track following a coup d’état by junior officers and the loss of nearly half the country to secessionist desert tribesmen and holy warriors out of shariaize the whole place. They must have figured that since all else seemed to be failing, they might as well try somebody with a serious résumé. There were no reactions from France, the ex-colonial master and, according to rumors in Bamako, the instigator of the trouble that has led to this sorry pass, wherein anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000 people have been turned into refugees, by the ICRC’s count and, with commerce and business at a standstill — or at least a what-next — shortages of essential goods and foodstuffs are becoming acute. Dr. Diarra, 60, an astrophysicist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, educated at Paris’s Curie Institute and Washington’s Howard University, was the consensus choice of the putchists who overthrew the elected government of President Amadou Toumani Touré on March 22 and the representatives of neighboring countries’ association, ECOWAS (Economic Union of West African States, CEDEAO by its French acronym) that responded to the coup with an embargo. The African Union, including all the members of ECOWAS, ostracizes regimes that come to power illegitimately. With a transition plan announced last week and the swearing-in of an interim president, speaker of the Assembly Dioncounda Traoré, ECOWAS is switching gears by lifting the embargo and offering to mobilize forces to restore governmental authority in the north. However, and evidently without consulting either the new highest officials of the Republic or the regional interested parties, the junta sent soldiers and policemen to arrest public figures close to deposed President Touré, still in hiding but reportedly safe and sound in the Senegalese embassy. Little damage was reported, as they were released the next day; possibly the junta simply wanted to send a signal to the political class that it expects respect. The junta has warned that high ranking members of the fallen government might be charged on various counts, thus far unspecified but presumably related to the misappropriations of public funds and the collapse of military resistance in the north due to “treasonable” neglect of the security situation there. Dr. Diarra, son-in-law to the former dictator General Moussa Traoré (no relation to Dioncounda Traoré), has been known most of his life for his research on the outer frontiers of science. He has been a UNESCO goodwill ambassador with the mission of promoting education and encouraging access to advanced technology. An American citizen (a dual national), he has been head of Microsoft-Africa since 2006, reportedly taking leave of absence last year to found a political party, Union for Development in Mali, and was a candidate in the presidential election scheduled for April 29 of this year, now postponed. The overthrow in March of President Touré was widely perceived as a blow to Malian democracy, touted by the U.S. as a regional success since it was instituted in the early 1990s by Mr. Touré, who overthrew Moussa Traoré in a 1990 coup. Mr. Touré, popularly known as “President ATT,” ran for election in 2002 and was re-elected in 2007. The constitution places a two-term limit on the presidency and Mr. Touré had indicated clearly his intention to retire from public affairs. The motives and goals of the officers who seized power under the command of Captain Amadou Sanogo last month remain unclear. Initially announcing their determination to repress the northern insurrection, or insurrections, and reconquer the territories north of the Niger river, they did not react to the routing of the reportedly ill-equipped garrisons defending the principal centers and, according to unverified local eyewitness reports, the ensuring pillaging and terrorizing of the local populations. ECOWAS received support from France and the U.S. in its prompt ruling that the coup would not be tolerated. France expressed willingness to provide logistical assistance to a multilateral force to restore Mali’s territorial integrity. Despite this diplomatic and political support, residents of Bamako have accused France since the beginning of the armed insurrection in January of supporting the rebels of the MNLA, the Azawad national liberation movement from the name of the region that Tuareg tribesmen consider their historic homeland. It is not entirely clear how nomadic Berbers like the Tuareg should be able to precisely delineate the borders of a historical homeland, but it is not in dispute that the southwestern Sahara and its Sahelian shore, which runs through northern Mali, is inhabited largely by Tuareg tribesmen. It is inhabited as well by Songhai, Peuls, and Arab Moors who have indicated, politically and at times by the organizing of local militia, their opposition to secession during previous Tuareg revolts. These have been recurring occurrences since independence was given to French Soudan, renamed Mali in 1960 for its associations with the pre-colonial Malinke and Songhai empires. Critics of President Touré accused him when the armed rebellion began in January — or resumed, given that a truce had been signed in 2009 — of taking a soft line toward the Tuareg, numbers of whom had served in the ranks of Moammar Gaddafi’s army and returned home laden with up-to-date weapons. France is suspected of cutting a deal with them to desert the Libyan strongman’s service, in which some had been for years and even decades, while others were recruited to reinforce his side when France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy instigated hostilities against his regime in 2011. Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, whose day job is mayor of Bordeaux, repeatedly denied this theory, according to which the French and their British and American allies got the upper hand against Gaddafi by promising the Tuareg unhindered passage out of Libya and tacit support for their territorial claims, by pointing to the long history of Tuareg restiveness in Mali (as well as in other parts of the Sahel, notably neighboring Niger) and to France’s firm record of support for the principle of inviolability of post-colonial borders. The United States supports this principle as well, as does, of course, ECOWAS and the African Union and indeed just about every official national and multi-national institution in the official international community otherwise known as the United Nations. However, the same institutions, as well as the IMF, supported the partition of Sudan and the breakaway of Eritrea from Ethiopia, but observers point out that these modifications to the post-colonial border arrangements were duly negotiated by the interested parties, usually with honest brokers overseeing the deal-making — as occurred in the case of Sudan under the presidency of George W. Bush. Sudan and the young South Sudan are presently engaged in violent hostilities evidently caused by an unresolved dispute over the oil revenues from territory astride both nations, which were supposed to be equitably shared. The Tuareg revolt is viewed with a mix of revulsion and trepidation by many, if not most, sub-Niger Malians, Bambara-speaking Malinke and related tribal groups. They resent the refusal of the “whites” of the north (the Tuareg are in fact rather dark, and they often are referred to with some contempt as “blue men,” but this just goes to show that color, as we Americans well know, is in the head not on the skin, even if, objectively, it often is that too) to fit into their tolerantly diverse society, which is not entirely fair since many do fit, intermarry, serve in the army, run small businesses, etcetera. Indeed, the no-longer-wildly-popular President ATT is rumored to have Tuareg family connections. The case certainly can be made that the Berber peoples of the Sahara, including the Tuareg, who are notoriously clannish — sort of like the Irish, if Mr. Tyrrell will permit me to say so — do not “fit” well with the sub-Saharans. This is evident not only in Mali but in Mauritania, for example. But Mauritania, no less than Mali itself, also disproves the rule, or racial cliché. Since the consolidation of constitutional rule following a series of coups (which to some degree could be called a game of violent musical chairs among separate but related Moor tribes), there is a marked amelioration of relations between the peoples north and south of the Senegal River. Another example of the value of strong political underpinnings in the overcoming of sectional and tribal mistrust within a nation are the careers of Willie Morris and Tom Wicker in that Yankee bastion, New York City. But then, America is exceptional. What is disheartening about the crisis in Mali is that for 20 years it has been a model of constitutionalism in a region noted for arbitrary politics, where security resides in the family and the clan rather than the law. The Tuareg secession was formally proclaimed in the first week of April by a spokesman for the MNLA, but it was immediately contradicted by the Ansar Dine movement, a Tuareg-based Islamist fighting force which, according to reports, controls some of the population centers in the north, possibly more than the MNLA — no one can say for certain. The Ansar Dine (“defenders of the faith”) claim to be interested not in creating a new state but in imposing Sharia throughout Mali. They may or may not be in league with the AQIM irregulars (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). Even the most knowledgeable specialists in the region evidently are unable or unwilling at present to sort out who is really who and who has the upper hand in the north of Mali. However, Berber sources familiar with Tuareg politics believe the MNLA is resolutely anti-Islamist and could conceivably serve as a pro-Western “aircraft carrier” in the Sahara if it wins an independent, or even autonomous, space that it can call its own. Nonetheless, it is clear that the vast area, rumored, but again without demonstrable proof, to be rich in minerals and hydrocarbons, long has been a hideout for highwaymen and kidnap gangs, drug traffickers and gun runners, lawless wild west men who have traded camels for all-wheels and live by a ruthless and pitiless ethos, albeit mitigated by their legendary hospitality and the protection they afford foreigners, though they are not above ransoming them. They eat dates, eschew pork, but — except for these mysterious Ansar Dine, whose leader is the famous or infamous Iyad Ag Ghaly — they are not known to be especially fanatical about religion; indeed “tuareg,” according to etymologists, comes from a Berber root for “forgotten by God.” You certainly can feel forgotten by man in the depths of the Sahara; but for the moment the Tuareg are quite present in the minds of north Africans. The destabilization of Mali and of the Sahel is in no one’s interest except those who stand to profit from it. This is precisely the point made by Ferhat Mehenni, a leader of a large Berber group, the Kabyles, concentrated in the mountainous region south and east of Algiers. “The states born of de-colonization,” he asserts, “are inherently unstable and prone to tyrannical regimes because they are, for vast numbers of people — particularly the Berbers — confined in their borders, forced to relive the colonial experience.” While surely there are Berbers in Algeria and Morocco and the other Maghreb countries who would scoff at such a condemnation of the states to which they vow allegiance, Ferhat Mehenni believes de-colonization is far from over; indeed it is just beginning. The government-in-exile of Kabylie, of which he is the president, and its political arm, the Kabyle Autonomy Movement, promptly expressed support for Azawadi independence and petitioned the U.N. Security Council, as well as the White House and the Elysée Palace, to desist from condemning the MNLA’s declaration at least until careful review of the situation in northern Mali and, somewhat wistfully, the organization of a referendum that would measure the resident population’s preferences. There are now as many as 200,000 northern Malians taking refuge in Niger, rising numbers aggravating a strained situation brought on by drought, food shortages, and the return of expatriates from Libya, from which they were expelled by the fanatical (and anti-Semitic and racist) Islamists who are now in power thanks to American and French and British arms. There are refugees also in Mauritania, and southern Mali. So the idea of a referendum may be a bit fanciful. The Malians have their own postponed election to worry about, not to mention the small matter of what to do about Captain Sanogo and his men, who are still calling the shots (and making arrests) despite their pledge to ECOWAS to disband their Committee for Democracy and Reform and return to their barracks. France’s presidential candidates are staying mum, one might almost say studiously, about the whole Malian affair, with little more than expressions of support for the restoration of constitutional rule by high officials such as Alain Juppé and mumbled “I support peace and love” type statements from the candidates. The neo-Gaullist candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aigan offered qualified support to the Azawari in a letter addressed to the Kabyle leader. “I believe in the right of self-determination of [all] peoples [note the plural],” he wrote recently to Mr. Mehenni, “while respecting national sovereignty and opposing interference in the affairs of other countries.” Deliberately or unwittingly, M. Dupont-Aignan, whose party, Debout la République (“Arise Ye Republican Heroes”), a splinter from President Sarkozy’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (“Unite Ye Majoritarian Plebeians!”), is not given even long odds to get past the first round of voting this weekend, put his finger right on the soft underbelly of the whole self-determination conundrum, reminding us once again of the ambiguities of Woodrow Wilson’s international vision, principled, abstract, usually impractical, and thoroughly pernicious if we cannot see it through, which all recent history demonstrates we cannot. Another great American segregationist, John C. Calhoun, was similarly principled and philosophically abstract, though unlike Wilson he was possessed of an iron sense (however mistaken one might in hindsight judge it to have been) of what was practical and crucial for his homeland, South Carolina. In modern states, is not national sovereignty always in conflict with self-determination? Ferhat Mehenni believes this question will preoccupy the 21st century as much as the question of the color line, as W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1898, preoccupied the 20th. Perhaps. For it becomes a matter of public concern only when a major crisis is under way — the breakup of the Soviet Union or the Yugoslav Federation, to take two examples. Mali scarcely makes the cut in our sense of important crises. The avoidance of Mali could be an illustration of the ordinary selfishness of politicians during electoral seasons, or it could reflect embarrassment about their belated recognition of the Libyan affair’s unintended — if such they were — consequences. Just as likely, it is that they really do not know what to make of it: Africa is far from France, and it scarcely figures in discussions of public affairs. This should not be difficult for Americans to comprehend — how many public figures talk soberly of the potentially enormous catastrophe on our southern border? How many even know it is there? State Department and DoD officials have been discreet about the Mali situation, well aware of the risks of adding strain to the beleaguered nation. Mali has been an important element in our Sahelian, and indeed our entire sub-Saharan policy, whose principal aims are the prevention of infiltration by the Qaedists and their epigones like Ansar Dine, the implementation of successful multinational counter-terrorism policies, the advancement of liberal democracy, and the promotion of free trade and free markets. It is not at all clear whether these priorities are themselves subject to any sort of hierarchical order, or even if anyone has demonstrated their inter-connections. However, a State Department official noted recently that without democracy, nothing else is possible and therefore the restoration of democratic, constitutional government takes precedence over any plans, if any exist, to help Mali regain its lost northern territories. Mali’s new prime minister has his work cut out for him — and not the least of his tasks will be explaining each of his countries to the other.
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Borders and Peoples
