Right now we are struggling to win more multilateral support to help maintain order in Iraq. (This is so urgent that Paul Wolfowitzf is lying through his teeth, insisting we always wanted the UN to be there with us and always welcomed them with open arms. Check the story — it’s one of Marshall’s best posts ever.)

But if anyone needs a reminder of the contempt in which we held the United Nations only a few months back, maybe this passage from Bush advisor Richard Perle will be useful:

Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The “good works” part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.

And you wonder why the world sees America as a go-it-alone, with-us-or-against-us cowboy that holds the UN in contempt? And you wonder why the UN member nations are so reluctant to join us?

As a serious opera lover, I found this little interview with the composer of the new opera Madam Mao quite fascinating.

Definitely the most intelligent, articulate analysis I have seen yet on the BBC, Dr. Kelly, Andrew Gilligan and the “sexing up” of the Blair dossier. And this paragraph wins a gold star:

It appears that Gilligan used information from a single source that he says he had reason to trust, he tweaked the wording to make it sound a bit more ominous than it was, and in the end it turned out that his specific charges were probably untrue. But regarding the infamous 45-minute claim, Tony Blair’s dossier also used information from a single source that British intelligence says they had reason to trust, they tweaked the wording to make it sound a bit more ominous than it was, and in the end it turned out that their specific charges were untrue. This leads to a pretty obvious question for both sides: why is it OK for your guy to do this but not the other guy?

Read the whole post, and don’t miss the excellent comments.

[Via BONOBO LAND]

I’d written earlier of how enchanted I was with Dai Sijie’s book, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

I just watched the movie and have to admit I was disappointed. It was fairly faithful to the book, but it lacked gravitas and pathos. There was a poignancy to the book that stayed with me for many days (and does so even now); the movie, despite several memorable scenes and a fine start, just didn’t cut it.

It begins with a spectacularly beautiful shot of the young heroes climbing up a seemingly endless stone stairway leading up a steep hill surrounded by lush green vegetation that clings to limetone mountains that rise sheer up from the ground. They are going to their re-education camp. After a few seconds, we hear in the background children’s voices chanting an old Cultural Revolution song:

We are the Red Guard of Chairman Mao
Who march from the steppes to Tiananmen

Toward the end of my stay in Beijing, I bought the DVD for 8 yuan (about a dollar) and started to watch it with my friend Ben. (After about 20 minutes, the DVD stopped playing, an all too commonplace occurrence with fakes.) As soon as the singing started, Ben got quite excited and began to sing along. He said all the children in his school had memorized this song. Ben was born nearly five years after Deng ended the Cultural Revolution, so I was surprised he was taught songs glorifying the Red Guard.

(If you aren’t familiar with the details of the Red Guard, please buy the book Wild Swans, which manages to bring this phenomenon vividly to life, in all of its ugliness and irrationality.)

So I just watched the full movie, and as the childrens’ voices began their chant, I felt another of those wistful, all-consuming waves of — of what? It’s not easy to describe. The feeling goes beyond nostalgia and is right out of a Thomas Wolfe novel, that longing to recapture a moment that was magical but can never be experienced again. In other words, the movie gave me a flood of memories about China.

The sentimentality meter just shot up into the stratosphere, signalling that I should quit here and go to sleep. I had an unusually long and hard day today, but also a very intersting one that I hope to write more about soon.

No one will miss you:

Hong Kong’s leader said Friday he has withdrawn an anti-subversion bill that plunged his administration into crisis, sparked a massive public protest and fueled fears that China was trying to curb freedoms in the former British colony.

Talk about a communications disaster! Which was worse for the CCP, SARS or this odious legislation? Both are shining examples of China’s unique ability to dig its own grave and win the contempt not only of the world but of its own citizens as well.

Another shocking article on how the current administration lavishes favors on its adored Saudi friends, many of whom — Osama Bin Laden’s relatives among them — were rushed out of the US following the 911 attacks thanks to their friends in the White House.

“We did everything that needed to be done,” said John Iannarelli, a bureau spokesman. “There’s nothing to indicate that any of these people had any information that could have assisted us, and no one was accorded any additional courtesies that wouldn’t have been accorded anyone else.”

But the Vanity Fair investigation quotes Dale Watson, the former head of counterterrorism at the F.B.I., as saying that the departing Saudis “were not subject to serious interviews or interrogations.”

Mr. Watson could not be reached for comment today.

The official who architected the great escape “said in an interview that he was driven by concern that the Saudis ‘would be targeted for retribution’ by Americans after the hijackings.”

Can he really say this with a straight face? Of all the concerns the nation was undergoing at this historic moment, this was our highest priority — to coddle and mother a group of billionaire sheiks and Bin Laden relatives? Some of them were even chauffeured out on special flights at a time when all other flights had been grounded.

Can Americans really just shrug their shoulders and accept it?

It’s business as usual in China, where the government hisses that it does care about AIDS in China, it really, really does:

CHINA today slammed an international rights group for “falsely” blaming government policy for a massive AIDS outbreak, and said it was determined to care for victims of the epidemic.

‘If some international organizations, based on some inaccurate information make irresponsible accusations against China, I think this will not go with the facts,” foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan said.

“It is true that in some parts of Henan province there were some problems with blood collecting stations and it led to the spread of AIDS in that area. The central government attaches great importance to this issue.”

“SOME problems”? Well, keep in mind that these are the same leaders who blandly refer to the Tiananmen Square massacre as “an incident.”

The report, by Human Rights Watch, is damning indeed.

“The number of persons with HIV is much higher than the one million cases that Beijing officially acknowledges,” the 94-page report, ‘Locked Doors: The human rights of people living with HIV/AIDS in China,’ said.

[….]

While documenting discrimination against HIV-AIDS carriers in China, the rights report also accused China of driving HIV-AIDS patients underground instead of helping them, fuelling the spread of the potentially explosive epidemic.

“Human Rights Watch found that at one hospital, the door to the AIDS clinic was actually padlocked,” said the report which is based on more than 30 interviews with HIV/AIDS sufferers, police officers, drug users, and AIDS outreach workers in Beijing, Hong Kong, and southwestern Yunnan province.

I’ve written extensively on this topic here and won’t go into another rant (even though it’s warranted). Suffice it to say that the government bears responsibility for almost all aspects of this tragedy and that its track record of taking responsibility for and speaking honestly about the topic has been abysmal, and still is.

Related post: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China

Once again, one of my least favorite magazines has surprised me by putting out a top-notch article on China by Arthur Waldron, this one delving into the real ramifications of Hong Kong’s recent half-million-man march in protest of Article 23.

Make no mistake about it, the knowledgeable author warns; the event underscored the inherent infeasibility of the Special Administrative Region:

In fact, the Basic Law—Hong Kong’s constitution—is itself unworkable. It gives the people the freedom to speak out and to elect representatives, but denies those representatives the possibility of ever forming a government. The chief executive, chosen by Beijing in the manner I have indicated, is responsible not to the people he rules but to the Beijing government that rules him. Only full democratization—or full dictatorship—can restore something like equilibrium, and each has its perils.

Reading the article, I wanted to quote just about every paragraph I read. I knew at the time that the July 1 march signalled a major and possibly defining moment in China’s modern history. But I thought at the time it was HK that was in the most trouble, not China. The article makes it clear that the march and its side effects have pushed China into an untenable position.

Whatever direction the Hong Kong crisis takes, it will continue to reveal what may be called, in this post-strongman era, the Wizard of Oz aspect of political control in China. The past 30 years have shown what masters of prevarication and illusion are China’s Communist leaders. Their greatest triumph has lain in their ability to convince the world, and many of their own people, that ever since the 1970’s they have been in the process of doing, or about to begin to do, things which, if they actually did them, would spell their own demise: freeing the press, reforming the banks and state-owned enterprises, developing a legal system, above all engaging in political reform. But limits exist even to China’s ability to postpone and to the rest of the world’s willingness to believe, and the Hong Kong crisis has brought those limits out into the open.

Quite unexpectedly, the Beijing government has been forced to fish or cut bait. Hong Kong will either be democratized, as public opinion overwhelmingly demands and as even the Basic Law strongly suggests it eventually will be, or it will not. No merely tactical solution exists. The problems in both China and Hong Kong are like the cracks in the Three Gorges Dam, structural defects that cannot simply be plastered over.

Most interesting is the catch-22 scenario the author paints of China’s current mess; they may really have no way out. It would be nice to think so.

It really is one of the most interesting anomalies, the way that China’s leaders today gloss over those little blips in the Great Helmsman’s career. You know, little things, like the near-asphyxiation of all the nation’s brain cells during the Cultural Revolution, or the needless deaths of some 40 million during the Great Leap Forward. It’s as though they’ve been expunged from the record.

An article in today’s People’s Daily quotes Hu Jintao singing Mao’s praises:

“Comrade Mao Zedong and other revolutionaries of the elder generation had not only made historical achievements by realizing national independence and liberation but also left us with precious spiritual wealth,” said Hu, stressing such revolutionary spirit and tradition, which were fostered through arduous struggles, remain a strong spiritual strength for overcoming difficulties and risks of all kinds in our way forward.

On the occasion this year of the 110th anniversary of the birth of Mao, all party members and the general public should be encouraged to learn from the lofty spirit of the older generation of revolutionaries in order to further push forward the grand cause of seeking better lives for the public, for which the party has been striving for decades, said Hu.

(No wonder they get along so well with North Korea. It’s the same type of gobbledy-gook language I saw in that tragi-comic advertisement yesterday.)

I really can’t think of anything comparable. Most societies that have suffered so deeply from the misdeeds of megalomaniacal mass murderers come to terms with the issue eventually, toppling their statues and exposing the crimes. None that I know of has managed to hold out as long as Madman Mao. Can they be so desperate for heroes that this is the best they can come up with? I think I’ll marvel over this one for years to come.

I couldn’t make that up if I wanted to, could I?

Doctors have grown a new penis on a Russian boy’s arm after he lost his old one in a bizarre accident.

The 16-year-old, named only as Malik, lost his penis after receiving an electric shock while urinating on an electric wire.

Surgeons grew a new penis on his arm and have now moved it to his groin.

The Russian Clinical Hospital for Children surgeons created it by putting an empty latex cylinder in Malik’s forearm and pumping a solution into it every day, reports Pravda.

The cylinder grew on the boy’s arm for 10 months until it took on the shape of a penis.

I won’t put the very bizarre photo on my site; for that, and the rest of this odd story, you’ll have to go here.

[Via Dowbrigade, which I got to via Dave Winer.]