Tuesday, April 29, 2003

[4:08 PM] Fields Report is going to take a brief vacation from posts (that have dwindled lately in favor of his paying job) and return with a vengance for the one-year anniversary of The Fields Report in May.

# posted 4:12 PM

Friday, April 25, 2003

[5:39 PM] It’s so easy to criticize George W. Bush not for his policies but just simply because he is inarticulate and doesn’t seem to grasp complex issues whether he cares about them or not. I was reading Tom Brokaw’s interview with almost peek-a-boo style wondering if it would be a series of softball questions inadequately answered, or relevant policy questions inadequately answered. Here is some idiocy

Q Were you surprised by the degree of looting that occurred almost instantly?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I wasn't surprised at all.

Q You were not? Why?

THE PRESIDENT: I mean, these were people that hated the regime under which they lived.

Q But they went after hospitals and museums and --

THE PRESIDENT: I don't like that part.

One theme that stuck out was about the humanitarian crisis that Iraq faces.

Q Your old family friend, Brent Scowcroft, who has some differences with the policies here, says one of the things that he's worried about is that there's no tradition of democracy there, that people will just seize power wherever they can. It seems to a lot of people that that is playing out in the south, especially where the Shia are saying, look, we're going to run things here, we'd like to have an Islamic government. Isn't that a serious concern?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, we just started. The country isn't secure yet. I mean, the first things that we're worried about is making sure that the militia units of the old Fedayeen Saddam aren't out killing people. So our troops are working with coalition forces to make the country more secure...I was pleased to see that the Doctors Without Borders organization said that they went into Iraq and found no grave humanitarian crisis. In other words, the food is getting to the people, medicines are getting to the people. They did say there is a shortage of personnel, professionally -- not a shortage of medicine, but a shortage of professionals necessary to deliver the aid, and we'll help the Iraqi people address that problem.

But this is ridiculous. First off, it isn’t Doctors Without Border charge to assess humanitarian needs. Their specialty is emergency health care—not assessing critical infrastructure. “Médecins Sans Frontières (also known as Doctors Without Borders or MSF) delivers emergency aid to victims of armed conflict, epidemics, and natural and man-made disasters, and to others who lack health care due to social or geographical isolation.”

Bush goes on to say in the interview that “The good news is, is that the hospitals are now up and running, they've got enough medical supplies to take care of the people that need help.”
So no humanitarian crisis according to a group who doesn’t assess humanitarian crises, and the state of medical care is just great. Yeah right. Here’s what Doctors Without Borders actually said

MSF's Recent Medical Surveys:

    Baghdad

At Al Yarmouk Hospital, which was bombed 10 days ago, only the emergency department is operating. Thursday was its first day back at work. There is a serious lack of nursing staff and a very limited supply of essential drugs. Much of their medical equipment was also looted. The management of the hospital is finding it difficult to cope. Only one generator out of three is running, which means that the kidney dialysis machine is only working for part of the day. The staff are having to turn patients away to other hospitals.

Karameh Hospital on the west bank of the river has around 450 beds and is continuing to work effectively. The staff found ways to guard the hospital and there was no looting. There were not many material needs here but there was concern about insecurity in the wider city that was discouraging staff from traveling and returning to work.

The Pediatric Hospital had very limited treatment capacity.

MSF's surgical team has continued to work in the Zafarinia hospital, where they have been helping with routine operations: ovarian cyst, appendicitis, limb injuries.

MSF delivered drug supplies, particularly painkillers, and some surgical materials to these hospitals where there were clear needs and requests.

The MSF Medical Coordinator in Baghdad summarized the overall problems as follows.

1) Many patients - possibly thousands - were discharged to their homes after initial surgery due to insecurity. Some will need secondary surgery. It is currently impossible to get an overview of the remaining surgical needs.

2) Some patients with chronic medical diseases, such as kidney disease (no dialysis machines working well), diabetes (no refrigerators to store insulin), cardiovascular diseases (no drugs, no medical attention, no pharmacies open) will have serious problems.

3) There are 34 hospitals in Baghdad, with about a half of them are believed to be functioning. The few we have seen are generally under great stress with organization and management often limited. Patients are being taken care of but the quality of care may be far from optimal. Moreover, most people do not know which hospitals are functioning or where to go if they are ill.

4) Many hospitals were looted but the ones now more or less open seem to have enough medical supplies, apart from specific items such as anesthesia drugs and external fixations. There is still insufficient information about stocks. [Note that Bush seems to have fixated on this statement ignoring the fact that this is only a fraction of the hospitals in a city of 5 million people]

The report goes on to give the status of hospitals around the country some of which were operating quite well and some still suffering from lack of personnel and supplies. But clearly Bush was speaking out of turn (and ignorance) to present such a rosy picture. And this is still only to speak of emergency health care. Bush claimed no humanitarian crisis based on MSF reporting, which is simply not true.

# posted 5:40 PM

Thursday, April 24, 2003

[11:44 AM] It shouldn’t be lost in the Bush administration’s likely spin that it forced North Korea into multilateral talks, that for two and a half years now North Korean policy has been absent. One could argue that the U.S. wouldn’t have gone down this road at all if the Bush administration had engaged from day one as Colin Powell initially said then backtracked. This seems to be a situation that has, for the moment at least, worked itself out despite the diplomatic bungling on the Bush administration’s part. Fred Kaplan writes a nice assessment in Slate.

# posted 11:44 AM

Monday, April 21, 2003

[3:44 PM] The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has published a strategy paper titled “Winning the Peace in the Middle East: A Bipartisan Blueprint for Postwar U.S. Policy.” It’s endorsed by the likes of Lawrence Eagleburger, Newt Gingrich, Alexander Haig, Robert Kerrey, William Perry, Fred Thompson, and R. James Woolsey. The paper is long on big ideas—stop Syria’s support for Hizballah—but a bit short on detailed policy options, many of which are rather basic (threaten Syria with worldwide condemnation; offer economic aid for good behavior). Read it in pdf format here.

# posted 3:45 PM

Monday, April 14, 2003

[2:57 PM] William Safire lays out the benefits of the doctrine of preemption now that hostilities in Iraq are winding down. “Dangerous dictators elsewhere as well as fair-weather friends no longer doubt America's seriousness of purpose,” he writes. He goes on to cite North Korea’s new found respect for multilateral engagement as a by-product of “preemptive” action in Iraq: “First dividend of our new credibility can be seen in a sudden shift in attitude in and around North Korea.”

Safire goes on to suggest that U.S. hardball brought Russia around on the North Korea issue as well: “Then Vladimir Putin, rattled by Paul Wolfowitz's mild suggestion that Russia forgive the $8 billion arms bill run up by Saddam's Iraq, ordered his foreign ministry to state ominously that Pyongyang's nuclear threat ‘goes categorically against Russia's national interests.’”

And he’s probably correct to some extent on the effect that military action had on North Korea’s psyche. However, his argument still rests on the shaky ground that this administration used to build its case for war—that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States.

That’s the essence of our new policy of pre-emption as a last resort. If threatened by a regime harboring terrorists or likely to provide them with mass-murder weaponry, the U.S. will not wait to gain world sympathy as the victim, but will defend itself by striking first.

It remains to be seen whether the U.S. will find any chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. This op-ed raises some good points about if and under what circumstances any chemical or biological weapons are found. If they’re found in obvious places, the “give the inspectors more time” camp was justified. If they’re found in obscure locations using U.S. intelligence data, the question is why that information wasn’t shared with inspectors. Then of course there is the possibility that none are found at all.

This is the first suspect building block of pre-emption. The second is the terrorist angle. This is still debatable. A secular Saddam Hussein just isn’t likely to share weapons of mass destruction with Islamist terrorists (who aren’t too fond of him anyway). The Bush administration has simply shoved it down our throats with no evidence on the assumption that if they keep doing that, we’ll develop an appetite for it. I suppose there is some merit to that thinking since Safire has bought into it.

# posted 2:59 PM

Monday, April 07, 2003

[4:58 PM] Samantha Power has won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. I highly recommend it.

# posted 5:02 PM

[10:10 AM] At the start of the war in Iraq, before all the American networks had to rely on Arabic language television to get live pictures, it seemed there was a lot of debate (really criticism) about Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war (an Al Jazeera and “Arab TV” were generally used interchangeably). This nice essay in Slate finds Al Jazeera no more biased than CNN, just on different sides of the coin. Another Slate piece reminds us that there are other Arabic language television networks as well.

I often wonder how much Al Jazeera those who mock its “dead baby” coverage actually watch. After all, it’s in Arabic, and if watching a lot of war has demonstrated anything, (although it’s predictably obvious) American television journalists don’t have much facility with foreign languages. Curiously, Bob Arnott of MSNBC says he speaks Arabic; but I can’t watch its coverage long enough to hope for glimpse of him in action. This Sunday’s NYT Magazine offers the chance for reflection on Arab TV news coverage from an Arab living in Ramallah and Amman, Jordan. It doesn’t seize the opportunity though and doesn’t offer much we haven’t read elsewhere—“Al Jazeera is the most-watched Arab satellite station, partly because its journalism is highly professional and partly because viewers like the fact that its reporters and anchors give the news a pro-Arab spin.”

That said the NYT did run a mostly sympathetic and encouraging editorial titled “Why Al Jazeera Matters.”

Al Jazeera’s English language website seems to be back up. Check it out here. You can watch Al Jazeera live online here but I haven’t had much luck getting the stream to work lately.

# posted 11:43 AM