This is my third annual posting of this World Food Program Superbowl ad from Superbowl XLI featuring New Orleans Saints star Reggie Bush. It never gets old.
Consider supporting the World Food Program as you watch the Pittsburgh Steelers crush the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday.
And for viewers outside the United States who have never heard of Reggie Bush, this message should resonate a bit more clearly. Here's FIFA star Ronaldhino.
While Iceland's stupendous financial meltdown apparently doomed its front-runner status in October's elections to the UN Security Council, the European Union evidently has no such qualms about admitting the country.
Iceland could win early European Union membership, a top European Commission official was quoted as saying on Friday, amid expectations it will apply for entry to help stave off its financial crisis. "The EU prefers two countries joining at the same time rather than individually. If Iceland applies shortly and the negotiations are rapid, Croatia and Iceland could join the EU in parallel," EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn was quoted as saying by The Guardian.Joining the EU is a turnaround from Iceland's earlier wariness toward acceding to the body, but I guess that's what a new government and a crippling financial crisis can do to a country. Just to be sure, though, maybe Reykjavik should slip some of those tasty Icelandic pancakes down to Brussels...
This is very exciting news. The Pulitzer prize winning author of "'A Problem From Hell': America in the Age of Genocide" and "Chasing the Flame," a biography of slain UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, was just appointed the Senior Director of Multi-lateral Affairs at the National Security Council. This means she will have a direct hand in formulating U.S. policy on the United Nations, G-8, and other global forums.
The MSM is predictably honing in on "monster-gate," which is sort of silly considering she has apologized profusely for the comment and Secretary of State Clinton has accepted her apology and everyone seems willing and eager to move on.
The real story here is will Samantha Power take to working in government? In "A Problem From Hell" (which is probably number one on my list of all-time best foreign policy books) Power describes how government is not well structured to respond effectively to humanitarian crises. Part of the problem, she shows, is that individuals in government sometimes react to these crises in politically expedient ways that do not do much to address or reverse ongoing genocide or mass atrocity. This is less a critique of specific individuals than it is a condemnation of American foreign policy making more generally. Now that she is embedded in the U.S. foreign policy making apparatus the big question on my mind is whether or not she falls victim to the very processes she criticizes so ably in her book.
I'm tempted to think that she will not be much of a quiet Mandarin. The heroes of her book are people who rail against the system--people like Raphael Lempkin who coined the word genocide, and Senator William Proxmire, who gave daily speeches on the senate floor on the need to ratify the Genocide Convention. She shows real admiration for these agents of change, and I suspect that she will be an important advocate for human rights in critical inter-agency debates. The thing is, in her book she describes how voices like that get effectively silenced by the bureaucracy and I imagine there will be situations in which her ideals bump against the realities of bureaucratic politics. How will she respond? We will have to wait and see.
Above all, though, her appointment may signal a more fulsome U.S engagement on issues like Darfur and Eastern Congo--two of the worst ongoing mass atrocities in the world. That would be a big change over the past eight years. With a giant like Power overseeing policy making on the UN -- and the UN is where solutions to Congo and Darfur are most effectively discussed and implemented -- I am optimistic that we will see more sustained attention paid to these issues at top levels of government. That would be change I can believe in.
I wish her the best in her new job.
Provincial elections in Iraq will take place on Saturday, but early voting has already begun for some groups. Check out this video to see some of the measures that UN and Iraqi officials have taken to prevent fraud (that purple ink is not just for style).
The Washington Post reports considerably less violence in the run-up to these elections than to that of their historic predecessor three years ago. But I don't care what the Post says; that ink looks more purple than blue to me.
I have a column in the American Prospect online today arguing that the forthcoming International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al Bashir gives the Obama administration an opportunity for a diplomatic breakthrough on Darfur.
In the coming weeks, Darfur will reach yet another crisis point when the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for President Omar al Bashir of Sudan. When this happens, President Bashir has all but promised retaliation -- against United Nations personnel in Sudan, against Darfuris, and against southern Sudanese separatists. This much we know. What is still unclear is how the Obama administration intends to respond. Susan Rice, the new United States ambassador to the United Nations, once aptly described the previous administration's Darfur policy as "bluster and retreat," "bluster" for the lip service paid to the issue, and "retreat" for never following up its tough rhetoric with meaningful political, diplomatic, or even military action. Now, with Rice at the U.N. and Hillary Clinton at the helm in Foggy Bottom, one would suspect bumbling Bush-era policies would come to an end. Both women have been strong advocates for a more robust approach to the Darfur crisis. Clinton was an early sponsor of Darfur legislation in the Senate. Rice has written on numerous occasions about the issue, at one point even endorsing U.S. airstrikes. Still, the forthcoming ICC arrest warrant will pose an early test for the Obama administration. And if approached with the kind of deft diplomatic touch that the previous administration clearly lacked, the prospects for peace in Darfur may suddenly become brighter.Read the rest!
A shell landed near the compound on Saturday evening, and then another early Sunday morning, killing 9 civilians and wounding more than 20, according to a memo sent by United Nations officials in Sri Lanka to their headquarters in New York. “Our team on the ground was certain the shell came from the Sri Lanka military, but apparently in response to an L.T.T.E. shell,” the memo read. “All around them was the carnage from casualties from people who may have thought they would be safer being near the U.N. Sadly they were wrong that night.”This disregard for the responsibility of civilian protection is as unconscionable as Israel's bombing of UN schools and the UN headquarters in Gaza. And as tragic as the loss of further civilian life is, perhaps even more unfortunately portentous for the cause of protection is the willingness of another military to ignore the neutrality of UN blue and jeopardize the lives of those who thought they had found temporary safe shelter.
The Interpreter star cuts a PSA for the WFP.
A snippet of Al Gore's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning provides a forward-looking outline of what this year's climate negotiations in Copenhagen can achieve:
More and more Americans are paying attention to the new evidence and fresh warnings from scientists. There is a much broader consensus on the need for action than there was when President George H.W. Bush negotiated – and the Senate ratified – the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and much stronger support for action than when we completed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The elements that I believe are key to a successful agreement in Copenhagen include: • Strong targets and timetables from industrialized countries and differentiated but binding commitments from developing countries that put the entire world under a system with one commitment: to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants that cause the climate crisis; • The inclusion of deforestation, which alone accounts for twenty percent of the emissions that cause global warming; • The addition of sinks including those from soils, principally from farmlands and grazing lands with appropriate methodologies and accounting. Farmers and ranchers in the U.S. and around the world need to know that they can be part of the solution; • The assurance that developing countries will have access to mechanisms and resources that will help them adapt to the worst impacts of the climate crisis and technologies to solve the problem; and, • A strong compliance and verification regime. The road to Copenhagen is not easy, but we have traversed this ground before. We have negotiated the Montreal Protocol, a treaty to protect the ozone layer, and strengthened it to the point where we have banned most of the major substances that create the ozone hole over Antarctica. And we did it with bipartisan support. President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill joined hands to lead the way. [emphases mine]Read his full statement below the fold.
In the Year of the Gorilla, and amidst a consistent panoply of violence, comes this bit of surprising good news:
The population of mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park has risen by 12.5%, a census shows.Rebels have had control of the park for a over a year, and the first census taken since then shows an increase in their population? This is either an anomaly, or it belies the convention intuition that having a huge protected forest in the hands of murderous rebels probably does not bode well for primates. That, or some entirely different explanation that has more to do with gorilla demographics than I'd care to know. With only the first two options available, I'd say a little bit of both. Not to disparage the benefits provided by the gorillas' caretakers -- the deplorable attacks against whom, one could reasonably wager, have been a destabilizing factor with regard to the area's gorilla population (and they have a blog, so there's no way I could disparage them) -- but rebel presence in the enormous Virunga National Park may not have affected gorillas as much as is typically assumed. Over 3,000 square miles. a couple hundred gorillas are not too likely to get hit by a stray bullet. Really, though, the relative well-being of the region's gorillas should just provide further reason to the, shall we say, morally eerie logic of bemoaning gorilla deaths when many, many more human beings are being raped and killed. May the Year of the Gorilla continue successfully, but may the Year of Peace in Eastern Congo flourish at least equally.