Commentary by Stanley Meisler

Tribal Politics

Tribal Politics

February 3, 2008
Tribal Politics
In 1962, when we were both young, I spent a good number of hours with Mwai Kibaki in Nairobi, listening to him explain the complexities of Kenya tribal politics. He was an official of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the party that would lead the colony of Kenya to independence a year later, and I was a Ford Foundation fellow studying the new nations of Africa. I would drop by his office every week or so and, if he was not busy, he would take time to reply to my questions. He was polite, soft-spoken and matter-of-fact, not charismatic at all, and it never dawned on me that he might become president of Kenya some day...

Blather about Iraq

Blather about Iraq

September 26, 2007
Blather about Iraq
Recent weeks have brought us so much blather about the war in Iraq that it is difficult to hold on to realities. But let’s try. The President gave us his latest speech on Iraq in September. I often wonder who listens to him any more, who believes him any more. Yet I can’t help finding a certain fascination with his oratory. I am always astonished at what he will come up with next. He has a new though clunky slogan: Return on Success. Since the success is imperceptible, his pullback of troops is insignificant. But he does not say that, of course...

Letting Go of Iraq

Letting Go of Iraq

April 11, 2007
Letting Go of Iraq
The enthusiasts who stormed into Iraq are incapable of letting go. It is not so much that President Bush and Vice President Cheney cannot face defeat. Far more important, they cannot face the enormity of the mindlessness that powered them to war. So they are hanging on with a stubborn show of honor and even political courage, persuaded that, despite their mistakes and misadventures, history will absolve them. To keep on in the face of congressional harassment and public discontent, they are spewing a lot of cant about terrorism, micromanagement, chaos and patriotism. It is not easy to see the awful situation clearly...

Transparency at Ban Ki-Moon’s United Nations

Transparency at Ban Ki-Moon’s United Nations

January 22, 2007
Transparency at Ban Ki-Moon’s United Nations
The last ten years have been the most transparent in the history of the United Nations. Scholars, reporters and the public learned more about the machinations behind UN scenes than they ever had before. But that openness may be difficult for Ban Ki-Moon, the new Secretary-General, to maintain. Ban is a veteran South Korean diplomat, and diplomats are notorious for their joy at working in secret and commenting afterwards in words of mush. In one of his first interviews, Ban boasted to Warren Hoge of the New York Times that the press in South Korea used to call him "the slippery eel" because "they could never grab me..."

Kofi Annan at the UN: An American Waste

Kofi Annan at the UN: An American Waste

December 4, 2006
Kofi Annan at the UN: An American Waste
This is the season for summing up the legacy of Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General whose ten-year reign comes to an end on December 31. Just a few weeks ago, I attended a day-long seminar at Georgetown University assessing his "legacy for Africa." The forty scholars, diplomats and civil servants agreed that Africa had benefited from his campaigns against AIDS and poverty, his hectoring against military coups, his championing of peacekeeping missions, and his remarkable doctrine asserting that the UN has the right to trump sovereignty and cross any border to stop a government from abusing its peoples...

Defaming Kofi Annan

Defaming Kofi Annan

September 10, 2006
Defaming Kofi Annan
I was applying some last touches to my biography of Kofi Annan on August 10th when I was surprised to read an ad by the Anti-Defamation League on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. The ad had a simple and stark message. It said: "UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan: How many more Israeli civilians must die before you condemn Hezbollah? And when will you extend condolences to Israeli victims." It was signed by the Anti-Defamation League’s national chair, Barbara B. Balser, and by its national director, Abraham H. Foxman. The accusations were scathing. The source, moreover, was dispiriting for any admirer of the Secretary-General...

Bolton and History

Bolton and History

March 24, 2005
Bolton and History
When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the nomination of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations, she proclaimed that he would serve in the tradition of our best ambassadors “with the strongest voices.” She cited Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jean Kirkpatrick as the models. But the Bolton nomination hardly fits any historical tradition. It is a defiance of history...

Unidentified Sources

Unidentified Sources

February 5, 2005
Unidentified Sources
While covering French President Francois Mitterrand on a trip to Martinique in the 1980s, we in the press corps were told he would meet us in his hotel suite for a conversation “à bâtons rompus.” That French idiom — literally “with broken sticks” — meant that the discussion could shift from one subject to another and that Mitterrand would be less formal and more open than usual. But the aides cautioned, his replies would be “off” — a new French journalistic expression that is an abbreviated form of the English “off the record.” In short, Mitterrand could not be quoted...

Inaugural Fog

Inaugural Fog

January 31, 2005
Inaugural Fog
I have finally read the complete text of our 43rd President’s Second Inaugural Address. Although I had not seen the ceremony on television, I had tried to read the speech a couple of times the day after but found it impossible to penetrate the fog of glitter that enveloped his words. I was put off, I think, by the gnawing conviction that I must be reading the valedictory speech of some high school senior. The words were highfalutin, the themes were lofty, and the concoction bore no relation to the world around us. Each paragraph vanished in my mind as I tried the next. So I gave up...

Bitter Returns

Bitter Returns

November 3, 2004
Bitter Returns
In 1952, the first time I ever voted, I cast my ballot for Adlai Stevenson. Since then my presidential choice, always a Democrat, has lost more often than not. But no loss has been as dispiriting and bitter as this one. It is hard to take. The Iraq adventure is a catastrophic failure, launched on arrogance and faith, managed with ham hands and closed minds. The cost has been awful. Yet the know-nothings who launched and managed it have received a resounding endorsement. Bush and his ideologues will face no accounting for failure and stupidity...

Removing Tyrants

Removing Tyrants

October 4, 2004
Removing Tyrants
More than 30 years ago, during the dark days of the despicable Idi Amin, I would yearn for some way for the world to rid itself of tyrants. As a foreign correspondent covering Africa for the Los Angeles Times, the injustice of it all would torment me. Why should innocent people be forced to endure the terror and poverty inflicted upon them by the cruel whims of Idi Amin? Why should they be condemned because of their accidental birth in an unwieldy country put together by European colonial pooh-bahs in the 19th century? Could not some international entity like the United Nations be empowered to pluck him away?

The Chaos of Iraq

The Chaos of Iraq

June 7, 2004
The Chaos of Iraq
So much wonderful critique of the Bushites, the foolish war, the botched occupation and the torture scandal has come forth recently (especially the articles by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, the daily news coverage in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the extraordinary book of James Mann on Bush’s Vulcans) that there is no need to add comment. But I would like to summarize a little...

United Nations in Crisis: The American Challenge

United Nations in Crisis: The American Challenge

May 7, 2004
United Nations in Crisis: The American Challenge
A case can be made that the American and British invasion of Iraq a little more than a year ago enhanced the moral force and international standing of the United Nations. The Security Council, after all, had refused to be bullied. Most of its members, even the weak ones, had stood up to the United States and made it clear they would not pass a resolution authorizing the invasion. The American failure to obtain UN authorization galvanized demonstrations throughout Europe and elsewhere against the invasion. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the United States had no right to topple a tyrant, no matter how evil and dangerous, if the UN did not agree. The UN was clearly the world’s only anointed keeper of peace and war...

Fact-checking and The Da Vinci Code

Fact-checking and The Da Vinci Code

December 23, 2003
Fact-checking and The Da Vinci Code
The editors of Doubleday, headquartered at 1745 Broadway in New York, would surely have raised their eyebrows and grabbed their red pencils if a best-selling novelist had submitted a manuscript that placed the Empire State Building on Central Park West, the United Nations on Broadway and Yankee Stadium on Fifth Avenue. Yet Doubleday has published a novel - number one on the best-selling lists for a good many weeks - rife with so much confusion about the sites of Paris that it is hard not to wince. This might be excusable if Paris played a minor role in the book. But the main setting of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is Paris. Someone should have supplied him with a map...

Democracy: One Man, One Vote, Once

Democracy: One Man, One Vote, Once

November 14, 2003
Democracy: One Man, One Vote, Once
More than 40 years ago, I sat in the Western Nigeria House of Assembly in Ibadan and marveled at how well the British colonial government had implanted its democratic parliamentary system into this new African country. An African page in blue knee breeches and red stockings walked into the chamber carrying a mace. “The Speak-uh,” he cried. The Speaker, a tall African in white wig and black robes, entered, strode across the chamber and sat in his enormous chair. The page carefully put the mace on its stand on the table below the Speaker and saluted him...

Dismantling the Art of the Irascible Doctor Barnes

Dismantling the Art of the Irascible Doctor Barnes

November 14, 2003
Dismantling the Art of the Irascible Doctor Barnes
Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the patent medicine man who amassed the greatest private collection of paintings in America during the first half of the 20th century, behaved so outlandishly that it was always hard to write about his hoard of art without writing an awful lot about him. Now that his collection is in dire danger of losing its special and wonderful character by moving to a cold modern museum in downtown Philadelphia, he and his wishes have few defenders...

A Few Memories of Benny Carter

A Few Memories of Benny Carter

August 13, 2003
A Few Memories of Benny Carter
Both John Wilson in the New York Times and Jon Thurber in the Los Angeles Times wrote ample and thoughtful obituaries of Benny Carter after he died July 12 at the age of 95, and there is no need here for me to try to embellish their accounts of his long and incredibly versatile musical career. But I have a few memories of Benny as a gentle and gracious man, and I would like to set them down. Wilson and Thurber caught this side of him a little, but it was overwhelmed, of course, by their first-rate accounts of his greatness as a musician, composer, arranger and bandleader...

Depressing Thoughts on Our Victory

Depressing Thoughts on Our Victory

April 29, 2003
Depressing Thoughts on Our Victory
Those of us who opposed the war were probably right. Iraq posed no danger to Americans. It had few, if any, prohibited weapons ready to strike. No link with terrorism was ever proven. No doubt Saddam Hussein was a despicable tyrant but we have always tolerated - and still do - a globe full of them. But none of this really matters. We might as well, like Lear, rail at the wind and storms. History belongs to the victors. Only they can gloat...

Badgering the United Nations

Badgering the United Nations

March 2, 2003
Badgering the United Nations
The United Nations has been castigated by critics for weeks as a toothless organization loaded with appeasers and weasels, as a throwback to the League of Nations, as a cracked body tottering on the brink of irrelevance. George F. Will, the erudite conservative columnist, even suggested it was heading the way of the medieval Hanseatic League. Yet the current Iraq crisis may actually prove one of the UN's finest hours...

A Frightening Performance on Iraq

A Frightening Performance on Iraq

October 16, 2002
A Frightening Performance on Iraq
We have seen a frightening performance in the last few weeks. President George W. Bush has shown us the ease with which a relentless and obsessed president, wielding simplistic language, exaggerating dangers, distorting history, invoking patriotism, churning fear and nightmarish memories, can smother debate and take almost all of us along for his ride...