Reality check: filibusters

Some Republicans are portraying the judicial filibuster is the greatest threat to the American Republic (even worse than terrorism or the Civil War). Some Democrats have decided to adopt the GOP's Chicken Little approach and act as though ending the filibuster would terminate the Constitution as we know it, I wanted to insert these two little facts...


1) The filibuster is NOT a constitutional question. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution states quite explicitly: Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings.

Getting rid of the filibuster may be (and is) unwise. But it's not unconstitutional.


2) While the Democrats are threatening to filibuster a few Bush judicial nominees (in contrast to some 200 that have sailed through), how many have the Dems ACTUALLY filibustered?

None.

That's right: zero.

Zip.

Not a one.

Some threat to the Republic.

Manchester United

[This might be the only entry in the blogosphere on the soccer team Manchester United that doesn't have to do with its takeover by American businessman Malcolm Glazer]

I'm a bit conflicted. The most promising young American goalkeeper, Tim Howard, plays for the English soccer club Manchester United. I loathe Man Utd. They are essentially the Yankees of English soccer. However, as a supporter of the US national team (for which Howard will surely be the #1 keeper in a few years), I want Howard to do well in his career.

Ever since the great Peter Schmeichel retired from the club in 2000, Man U have used 10 goalkeepers. Some believe that their manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, doesn't know how to manage keepers or are too impatient with them.

It's not uncommon. Very few managers are former goalkeepers and thus know next to nothing about the position and what it requires. This is in much the same way many baseball managers don't know how to deal with pitchers.

It's a very difficult position and one that is highly dependent on confidence. If a forward messes up, he has 9 players behind him to cover his rear end. If a midfielder screws up, he has 4 or 5 players to cover him. Even if a defender screws up, he might be bailed out by his goalkeeper. But the keeper is alone. He's not allowed to screw up because every mistake made is magnified ten-fold. Particularly in the eyes of people most of whom think the position consists of making acrobatic saves and nothing else.

Contrary to what one might expect, it's harder to play goal for a good team than for a bad team. Why? Much higher expectations and much lower margin for error.

If you play goal for a really good team, the opposition might only get a couple shots on goal the entire game. You might see no action for an hour and then be called on to make a lightning-fast save. Facing only a few shots a game requires far more concentration than being bombarded. Plus, if you're getting shelled, you have more opportunities to redeem yourself if you do make an error.

Additionally, the more action you get, the more chances you have to refine your judgement making, an absolutely critical skill for keepers. Ironically, average goalkeepers make acrobatic saves more often than world class goalkeepers, because the latter put themselves in a position where they don't have to make the acrobatic saves very often.

Tim Howard used to play for the MetroStars (based in New Jersey). They have traditionally had a porous defense. As a result, Howard was regularly challenged to make top class saves and rarely went long spells with no action. Suddenly he moved to Man Utd, one of the giants of English soccer. Now, he's not under siege every game but is expected to never make an error, the stakes being so much higher. It requires a totally different set of skills.

Plus, the pressure in Major League Soccer was less constant because playoffs render the regular season largely meaningless. In England, a contender can only afford to lose a few games in a season.

Howard (who was the English Premier League's goalkeeper of the year last season) and his colleague Roy Carroll have each made a couple of well publicized errors between the sticks for Man U. It's not that they've made a lot more errors than other top keepers in the league, only that they were made in high profile games and (just as importantly) the mistakes were punished. As a result, defense and goalkeeping are widely seens as United's achille's heel. Conventional wisdom has it that United's keepers are mediocre and they need to seriously upgrade the position if they want to challenge for major honors.

But is that the club's real problem?

United's keepers suffer only by comparison to Chelsea's Petr Cech. Chelsea won the English Premier League title and did so by allowing a record low 15 goals in 38 matches. United, by contrast, conceded 26 goals.

You might consider me biased because I like Tim Howard. If so, take a look instead at the numbers.

For historical context, the Premier League established a 38 game schedule in 1995-96, when the league went to 20 teams. So 20 teams times 10 seasons works out to 200 team-seasons.

Of those 200, only two (2) have allowed fewer goals than this year's Man Utd. This year's Chelsea team allowed 15 and the 1998-99 Arsenal side, who only finished second, allowed 17. In other words, only 1% of teams in the last decade allowed fewer goals than this year's Man Utd.

So going into this season, none of the previous 9 English Premier League champions had allowed fewer than 26 goals.

Even counting this year's fantastic Chelsea team, the last 10 Premier League champions have conceded an average of 33.4 goals... 28.5% MORE than this year's Man Utd.

This year's Man Utd conceded the same number of goals as last year's Arsenal team, who were the first English side in over a century to go undefeated. The 1999-2000 Man Utd side who were champions of not only England but Europe, they conceded 45 goals... 73% more than this year's Red Devils.

The difference? That United side scored 97 league goals (including 59 just in home games), while this year's edition could only manage 58 goals during the whole season.

As uncomfortable as it is for me to be defending soccer's version of the Evil Empire, I feel compelled to set the record straight.


Update: such harsh criticism of keepers is not limited to Manchester United. Archrival Arsenal is also considered to have a liability between the sticks. The Gunners' main keeper, Jens Lehmann, has started 74 league matches in the last two years; he's lost only three.

Yet anti-Americanism is all Newsweek's fault?

The New York Times ran a sickening article on the alleged murder of two Afghan detainees by American jailers. And [t]he harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.

Some will dismiss this article, and me for commenting on it, as anti-troops. Well, I am opposed to torturers. I am opposed to savages. I am opposed to war criminals. And if these soldiers are guilty of that, then I am most unashamedly anti-THOSE troops. And if you don't like it, tough cookies. If you think torture is ok so long as it's done by Americans, then go read Ann Coulter instead of this blog. If you think torture and despicable inhumanity are wonderful things provided the perpetrator has the correct flag patch on his or her uniform, then get lost.

There are lots of soldiers out there doing good things like protecting schools and delivering food aid. I tip my cap to them. But I'll be damned if I call these torturer (and allegedly murderous) criminals 'our heroes'; they're not heroes and they're sure as heck not mine.

And it's not just the 'long-haired hippy' crowded that's condemning these savages.

"What we have learned through the course of all these investigations is that there were people who clearly violated anyone's standard for humane treatment," said the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. "We're finding some cases that were not close calls."

So if I'm anti-troops for denouncing the torturers, then so is Donald Rumsfeld's spokesman.

And before some nitwits claim this is nothing more than college frat razzing, consider this:

In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both. In sworn statements to Army investigators, [AMERICAN] soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.

When the two tortured kidnapees died, Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides [underlined parts are my emphases]

In reality, this just underlines how difficult and messy it is to occupy a foreign country. People don't like to be ruled by invading foreigners. Occupation troops are put in extremely difficult and stressful situations for long, sustained periods of time (as opposed to combat battles which are intense, but comparatively short). As I've written before many times, if you put people in inhumane situations, they are going to act in inhumane ways. American Exceptionalism nonsense aside, Americans soldiers aren't immune from human nature. It's unreasonable to expect them to be.

It also shows poorly planned the Iraq invasion and occupation were. The article details how inexperienced and hastily trained many of the soldiers were. Unfortunately, when you need 150,000 troops, you can't be overly selective.

The incident also risks being far more damaging than the 'Koran abuse' stories.

As the BBC reported: the US could improve its image in the Muslim world if it started "listening more, speaking in a humbler tone, and focusing on bilateral aid and partnership, while tolerating disagreement on controversial policy issues," according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Admittedly, listening and being humble are not the strong points of American foreign policy.

But it means that we have to be careful. The Times noted that many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well treated. Yet it's hard to ignore a few murders.

This is a chance for us to demonstrate that being humble aspect. Instead of reflexively defending the alleged murderers as 'our heroes,' we need to apply the same standards to these soldiers as to any other accused killers. Charge them and give them trials (something not afford to Guantanamo kidnappees). If found guilty, lock them up for life. Give them public condemnation, not rallies in their honor or hysterical rants in their defense. If they get excused for the inexcusable, it tarnishes the reputation of all other soldiers... and of America as a whole.


Update: while this is going on, it's reassuring to know that our Congress is focused on the right priorities. Such as grandstanding about the steroid policy of a sports' league that doesn't even have a huge problem with steroids.

'Newsweek lied, people died'

I've never been a big fan of Newsweek magazine. I've always found it very fluffy and lightweight. Though owned by the same company as the excellent Washington Post, The Post's journalistic standards apparently have never transferred to Newsweek.

Newsweek seriously screwed up. In its last issue, it published a story claiming that U.S. investigators found evidence interrogators at Guantanamo Bay prison camp desecrated the Koran. This allegedly caused angry riots in Afghanistan. Newsweek has since retracted the story under pressure from the White House

The magazine has egg on its face, and deservedly so. This was always going to be a controversial story. If you're going to run a controversial story, you need to be darn sure you're right. You need to be extremely confident not just in the gist of the story, but in the details as well. As I wrote before in relation to the Dan Rather case, sloppiness with the details can destroy the credibility of a news article (and news organization), even if the main thrust of the story is true. In journalism, the small stuff matters.

Newsweek fully deserves the public flogging it's received.

That said, it's worth keeping things in perspective. If details did in Newsweek, then the magazine's critics should be wary of details as well.

As I said, Newsweek retracted the story. So that means US 'interrogators' didn't do anything to the Koran, right?

Well, not quite.

Many British ex-prisoners of Guantanamo claim that Koran 'abuse' did occur there.

Is that proof that the offensive actions occurred? No. But they can't be totally dismissed with a wave of the hand since even the military still feels compelled to continue their investigations into the allegations.

Even Newsweek's carefully worded retraction doesn't make that claim.

Editor's Note: On Monday afternoon, May 16, Whitaker issued the following statement: Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Qur'an abuse at Guantanamo Bay.

In other words, Newsweek isn't saying now that Koran 'abuse'* didn't occur. The magazine is saying that no internal military investigation discovered Koran 'abuse.'

As Donald Rumsfeld would say, "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."

[*-Though I oppose the gratuitous desecreation of sacred texts, I won't use the word 'abuse' in relation to a book]

But Newsweek's unreliable source led to rioting and death in Afghanistan, right? That's according to right-wing critics, the White House and bloggers who proffer fanciful titles like 'Newsweek lied, people died.'

Two people who disagree with this assessment are the miltiary's top officer, Gen. Richard Myers, and the top US general in Afghanistan itself.

As Voice of America reported: General Myers also told reporters at the Pentagon Thursday that the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Carl Eichenberry, disagrees with the reports that protests in the city of Jalalabad were caused by anger over the alleged Koran incident.

"It is the judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eichenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran, but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his cabinet are conducting in Afghanistan. He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine," he explained.

So how did Newsweek mess things up? In the magazine's own words: veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff's interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Qur'an down a toilet.

Essentially what happened is that, when pressed, Newsweek's source suddenly had doubts about where he saw his evidence. Newsweek clearly needs better sources.

Now, if the potentially inflammatory story was flat out wrong, then surely military and government officials would've rushed to deny it.

But they didn't.

A spokesman for the Southern Command declined to comment during research into the initial, controversial article. A senior Pentagon official contacted by the magazine contradicted a minor aspect of the initial article but said nothing about the part that caused all the controversy.

An administration source says one thing, then changes his mind after the article appears. Officials won't comment when a story's being researched but angrily deny it after it appears. You almost wonder if it was a trap.

Showing that the administration's gall knows no limits, White House spokesman Scott McClellan huffed: "The report had real consequences. People have lost their lives. Our image abroad has been damaged. There are some who are opposed to the United States and what we stand for who have sought to exploit this allegation. It will take work to undo what can be undone."

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice added, "Of course, 16 people died but it's also done a lot of harm to America's efforts" to demonstrate tolerance and breed goodwill in the Muslim world.

Of all the things that have had destructive real consequences, of all the decisions that have caused people to lose their lives, of all the things that have damaged America's image abroad, of all the screw ups that require work to undo, of all the things that have damaged the American government's token efforts to demostrate tolerance and breed goodwill in the Muslim world, Newsweek's gaffe ranks somewhere around #982 on the list. Most of the first 981 are related to decisions made by Mr. McClellan's and Sec. Rice's boss.

The BBC reported: The White House has urged Newsweek to take the lead in repairing the US' image among Muslims after its retracted report about desecration of the Koran. McClellan spoke of "lasting damage."

This is a neat trick. Willy nilly invasions and half-baked occupations of random countries for bogus reasons has absolutely nothing to do with America's bad reputation in the Muslim world, but a small blurb in a magazine is the real cause of "lasting damage." Screw up repeatedly and expect others to clean up your mess.

The media needs to be careful. It's clearly in the Bush administration's crosshairs. The administration needs a smokescreen to distract from the messy occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The administration can be totally wrong about its justifications for the Iraq invasion and they get rewarded with re-election; but a news organization can make a small error of detail in one small piece that doesn't affect the gist of the story and be blamed for all of America's problems in the Muslim world. Sure, it's unfair. Sure, it's a double standard. Sure, it's hypocritical. But that's the modern reality. The media needs to be very careful. It needs to be basically perfect, lest give the tiniest opening to a clueless administration looking for scapegoat.

[National Public Radio and particularly PBS are also being assaulted by the administration who is putting the networks' non-partisanship under pressure. they are particularly vulnerable since the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, is headed by a particularly partisan Bush shill appointed by the president.]

It's even more of a neat trick when you consider this observation. Perhaps these specific allegations are true, and perhaps they are not. But people tend to believe them, because there have been so many other allegations of deliberate anti-Islamic acts from Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq - of prisoners being forced against their religious convictions to shave their beards, and even to eat pig-meat. The shaving clearly happened: there is pictorial evidence for that.

Furthermore, a new book by a former US soldier who served at Guantanamo alleged further abuses at the probably unconstitutional prison camp. He claimed that a female interrogator sexually taunted a prisoner and even wiped menstrual blood on the face of a prisoner and then sent him back to his cell.

He volunteered for Guantanamo in 2002. He was a US Army linguist, an expert in Arabic and had high security clearance.

But in his book, Sgt. Eric Saar says what he saw completely changed his attitude towards the camp, and his country.

There were many more suicide attempts in the camp than the US government has ever admitted, Sgt Saar says.

He claims storm trooper-like IRF (initial reaction force) teams were involved in numerous beatings of captives.

And of the 600 or so prisoners there, no more than a few dozen were "hardcore terrorists", says Erik Saar.

"The US Government portrays Guantanamo as a place where we are sending the worst of the worst, but this is not true.

"Guantanamo was the beginning of a mistake. It set a precedent in labelling people as enemy combatants, blurring the line between right and wrong.

"You can see it as the seed that may well have led to the naked human pyramids in Abu Ghraib."

Yet it's Newsweek, not Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, random invasions, counterproductive torture and unconscionable policies, that cause anti-American hatred and violence.

The media used to just get blamed for being "liberal" or for sensationalizing. Now, it's deemed solely responsible for all the anti-Americanism on the planet.

Welcome to our brave new world.


Update: The watchdog group FAIR applauds Newsweek's retraction but wonders why the weekly didn't apply the same standards to its claims on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.



Further update: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported allegations of 'Koran abuse' to the US authorities "multiple times"... long before the Newsweek story appeared


Yet another update: Far from being unfounded, the claims of 'Koran abuse' made by Newsweek were far from the first such allegations. The Pentagon claimed that it had seen "no credible and specific allegations" about 'Koran abuse.' Yet the exact same allegations were mentioned in FBI documents recently declassified. See no evil...

More tales from Albany

Inside Albany is a public television show on New York state government. The most recent show had a story on legislative efforts to raise the age at which one can buy cigarettes from 18 to 19.

One of the sponsors defended the bill by pointing out that the average smoker takes their first puff around age 14.

Huh?

If the average smoker starts at 14, then how will raising the legal purchase age from 18 to 19 make any difference?

Supporters say that raising the age would help get cigarettes out of schools, because few high school students are 19.

Most young teens who start smoking get them not from random upperclassmen but from siblings or friends. Kids tend to have friends around the same age as them. And a 14 year old with an 18 year sibling eventually becomes a 15 year old with a 19 year old sibling. So what's going to change?

And they wonder why New York legislators don't have the greatest reputation.

You can buy alcohol legally when you're 21, cigarattes when you're 18 (or 19 if some people have their way). You can enlist in the military when you're 18. You can drive when you're 16 but with restrictions until you're 18. The state would be better off establishing a single, standard age of majority. The current situation sends a bizarre message to kids: we trust you behind the wheel of a ton of metal before we trust you to defend our country. We trust you to defend our country before we trust you with a cigarette or a bottle of beer.

The same episode of Inside Albany also talked about how a joint legislative committee decided to let each county decide for themselves which voting machines to use. This is in relation to New York's much-belated compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

HAVA was passed to prevent a repeat of the 2000 election debacle in Florida where... each county decided for themselves which voting machines to use.

Darn foreigners!

Our local paper has this 'man on the street' feature. They also have one for teens. I'm not a big fan of the feature; it's shallow, by definition. But people like seeing their photos in the paper. So be it.

For a long time, they always asked teens really vapid, idiotic questions like, "What's your favorite shampoo?" Then someone wrote a letter complaining that this is patronizing. So now, they actually ask real questions.

Today's query was: 'What do you think is the most important issue in the U.S. and why?'

One 16 year old answered: "Too many foreigners in the country. They are taking our jobs."

The kid had the typically American name: Mehmood Sheikh.

He looks South Asian.

Lazy writers

I watched the season finales of the Simpsons last night. The Simpsons is arguably the best show in the history of television; certainly in the top five. Some have argued the show has lost a little of its sharpness in recent years. I'm starting to agree. Last night was a bit disappointing.

The thing that's impressed me most about the Simpsons is the way it packs so much into so little time. The writing is tight, the segueways sharp. Last night's episodes failed in that regard.

In the last episode, Bart got sent to Catholic school and Homer was converted (or was on the road to conversion) too. This set off a battle between Homer and a Catholic priest one one hand and Marge, Ned Flanders and the Rev. Lovejoy together on behalf of Protestantism. The segueways were weak, the cliches lazy.

At one point, Bart gave a quick "Cant' we all just get along?" schpeel and everyone bought it instantenously, as though the previous 15 minutes of squabbling had never occurred. Then Flanders said something like, "We're all Christian. Let's concentrate on our real enemies: gays and stem cells."

The Simpsons has always worked well because of its subtlety and because of its willingness to poke fun at everybody, of all political stripes. Subtlety is the difference between good satire and obnoxiousness. That's why the Simpsons is (usually) funny while Howard Stern is a horse's rear end.

This was not subtlety. It was in your face.

It was unfortunate the way the writers betrayed Flanders. As a writer, you have to make sure to stay faithful to the character you've developed. The Ned Flanders character has been around for most, if not all, of the show's 15 years. He is very nice; some would say naive, others would say honorable. He is not spiteful or bitter or angry. He is probably the least judgemental character on the show (which is ironic, considering the anti-Christian reputation of Hollywood). He lives his life as he sees fit and generally lets others do the same. He's never, to my knowledge, uttered an anti-gay slur since he's been on the show.

I've certainly been very critical of gratituitous conservative gay bashing but it's too bad that the writers decided to betray his character to make a cheap political point. It wasn't fair to the character and insulting to the viewers.

Instability breeds instability

This essay is part of a weekly feature on my blog that presents interesting stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, Israel and Iraq.


Instability breeds instability. That's one of the core principles of conflict prevention. Better to prevent a mess than have to clean it up. This is why I oppose militarism. That's why, unlike many on the left, I'm not a big fan even of 'humanitarian interventionism' (an uninvited military operation for purported humanitarian reasons) except in the most extreme cases.

West Africa is a case study in this concept. First, there was a brutal civil war in Liberia. Warlord (and now indicted war criminal) Charles Taylor conquered the entire country, except for the capital Monrovia. West African peacekeepers were sent to protect Monrovia from Taylor's forces. Eventually, Taylor took power anyways, following "free" elections where he promised to take the country back to war if he lost. A few years later, the conflict spilled over into neighboring Sierra Leone. There, Foday Sankoh, a Taylor comrade, led a rebel group which quickly became infamous for some of the most sickening, gratituitous atrocities the 'modern' world has seen. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Taylor himself was ousted by another rebel group only two years ago.

Both Sierra Leone and Liberia spent most of the 1990s and early 2000s at war. As a result, there are hundreds of thousands of young people who have known nothing but war and chaos their entire lives. There are tens of thousands of young men who, as mere boys, were forcibly recruited, drugged and commanded to kill. Many were ordered to kill, mutilate or rape their own family members. These tactics were not accidental; they were a conscious effort on the part of rebels to turn the social structure upside down, to force child soldiers to sever all ties with their previous life.

These boys and young men have seen such brutality, much of which they themselves inflicted or were forced to inflict. They are not easy to reintegrate into normal society. Close knit West African villages may not be eager to welcome with open arms people who did such horrible things. Yet these boys and young men are also victims. Many were abducted. Many were drugged before being compelled to commit atrocities.

These countries have all these young men, former soldiers. They have post-traumatic stress syndrome or other mental and emotional problems. They are detested by their former communities. They have known nothing but war. They are used to being in positions of authority, used to getting what they want, when they want, by merely snapping their fingers and flashing their Kalashnakov. And worst of all, they have become desensitized to violence. Combine this with the fact that they have no jobs and they have no skills (because they were at war, rather than in school or learning a trade), no prospects.

This is not a good mixture.

They are a prime recruiting target for troublemakers.

The Liberia conflict spilled over into Sierra Leone, then back to Liberia and then crossed the border into Côte d'Ivoire. Each of those conflicts had their own specific grievances involved but they were made all the more devastating by a large pool of potential recruits. Recruits who had already become detached from and desensitized to the norms of regular society.

Not surprisingly, the human trafficking industry has gotten involved.

Authorities are investigating a Liberian suspected of recruiting child-soldiers to fight in Cote d’Ivoire amid warnings that more and more young ex-combatants are resorting to work as hired guns in West African trouble spots, says Human Rights Watch, according to IRIN.

The report, based on interviews with ex-combatants from more than a decade of West African wars, described the mercenaries as “roving warriors”, or an “insurgent diaspora”, who will continue to fuel regional conflict unless the issue of providing an alternative livelihood is addressed.

Furthermore, it's been reported that Young veterans of West Africa's wars are being recruited to fight new conflicts across the region, according to a report by [HRW]. The New York-based group says poverty is forcing thousands of young men and boys to become mercenaries.

The report warns war will continue to be seen as an economic opportunity unless alternatives are provided... It says many of the migrant fighters began their military careers as child soldiers, abducted to fight in wars, and many are guilty of war crimes and atrocities... Economic hardship and the failure of disarmament efforts have led the men to fight for money and looting opportunities in fresh conflicts further afield, the report says. A veteran of several wars in West Africa said he fought to support his parents. "The commanders said we could pay ourselves, which meant looting," he told Human Rights Watch.

Instability breeds instability.

This is why the International Crisis Group is warning that the worst may be yet to come in the Côte d'Ivoire conflict.

The Ivorian disaster has been exacerbated by political considerations: notably fanatical xenophobia whipped up by the government, its partisans and the hate media in the commercial capital Abidjan.

The ICG notes that: The protagonists of the Ivorian crisis are adept at pleasing diplomats by giving the impression they are cooperating under the peace process framework. However, this has nearly always meant one step forward, two steps back. The explosion of violence that follows a period of relative calm has become more serious each time. Not many more cycles will be needed before the dynamic morphs into qualitatively worse violence, probably including large-scale ethnic cleansing.

It carries an ominous warning for Côte d'Ivoire's neighbors: That would be a tragedy for more than Côte d'Ivoire: Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso would likely be drawn into a regional conflict. The greatest damage could be done to Liberia's fragile peace process, which is meant to culminate in presidential and legislative elections just four days before Côte d'Ivoire's scheduled presidential vote.

Fortunately, there is a fair amount of international attention on Côte d'Ivoire. The UN and African Union need to keep pressure on the parties to the conflict, especially the Ivorian government, to keep to their promises.




Other related articles and links:
-Children at War: the Lost Generation, The Globalist.

-Rebels With a Cause, but No Training, IRIN.

-How Dangerous are the Loyalist Militias, IRIN.

-War Child, 'Helping Innocent Victims of War'