Outrage, anyone?

Troops and civilians at a U.S. military base in Iraq were exposed to contaminated water last year, and employees for the responsible contractor, Halliburton Co., could not get their company to inform camp residents, according to interviews and internal company documents.

Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, disputes the allegations about water problems at Camp Junction City, in Ramadi, even though they were made by its own employees and documented in company e-mails.

“We exposed a base camp population (military and civilian) to a water source that was not treated,” said a July 15, 2005, memo written by William Granger, the official for Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary who was in charge of water quality in Iraq and Kuwait.

An odd time, when obscene lies and bad deeds don’t faze us at all. We just take badness for granted in the Age of Bush. It’s too tiring, too soul-eroding to get upset by it. So we let it go, hoping that if we don’t think about it or say anything, maybe it’ll just go away. We are totally complacent and numb. We hear the charges, but they bounce off us, unprocessed and unregistered. Water off a duck’s back.

The most disturbing, most shocking story I’ve read in a long time. Not China-related; sickening things happen in America, too.

We’ve just had some heated threads (over-heated, really) that pounded on the same theme, i.e., that Westerners cannot understand China and shouldn’t comment on it. Whatever. So I’m pleased to point you to Isabel Hilton’s review of a Chinese writer’s book on Tibet and the glorious liberation it has been lucky enough to enjoy.

Tibet, of course, is one of those radioactive issues and a lighning rod for extreme opinions. On the one side, we have the starry-eyed Hollywood liberals who’ve fallen for the romanticized Tibet mythology of Lost Horizons, and on the other we have the CCP talking points: the CCP took a chaotic, feudal society and brought them modernization, infrastructure, freedom from serfdom, etc. And there’s certainly some truth to the latter, even if many (most?) Tibetans would have preferred not being liberated. But that’s a small detail.

From Hilton’s spell-binding review:

In one scene in his travel memoir Red Dust, Ma Jian – who has fled Beijing to escape arrest in the Campaign against Spiritual Pollution – describes dining with a doctor and his friends on an owl that they had stolen that afternoon from the dissection lab in the local hospital. “It reeked of formalin,” he wrote, “but after braising it in ginger and soy sauce, the taste was quite bearable.” Later, after a visit to the maternity ward, his doctor friend brings home some placenta to stuff dumplings with for supper.

It’s worth mentioning these episodes because, without the Tibetan context in which Stick Out Your Tongue was written, the stories can seem stark, even brutal. Relations between Han Chinese and Tibetans are not generally warm. For Tibetans, Han Chinese are the occupiers of their land and destroyers of their culture. For most Han Chinese, Tibetans are the dirty, backward and ignorant people of Beijing’s propaganda, lucky to be “liberated” by the Red Army from their feudal serfdom. For those Han Chinese who find Beijing’s propaganda less appealing, Tibet can seem like the romantic locus of a profound spirituality and a place of exhilarating, if dangerous, beauty….

In 1983, Ma Jian was living in Beijing as a photographer and painter in a circle of dissident friends – young men and women who snatched moments of sexual licence, exchanged precious copies of foreign books, and discussed each other’s work in tiny gatherings that were reported by the neighbours and raided by the police. They were seen as socially deviant – and so dangerous – elements and therefore vulnerable to persecution in the now quaint-sounding Campaign against Spiritual Pollution. It sounds less quaint when the figures are tallied: more than a million arrests and 24,000 executed. Ma Jian embarked on his journey to evade arrest himself and on publication of Stick Out Your Tongue he was held up as an example of both “spiritual pollution” and “bourgeois liberalism”. He has lived in exile ever since….

The three-year journey that inspired first Stick Out Your Tongue and then Red Dust was taken 20 years ago, and the book itself was banned in China in 1987. In Lhasa, when he arrived, the Chinese were celebrating the 20th anniversary of the “liberation” of Tibet, a miserable festival of flags and blaring loudspeakers imposed on a sullen, conquered people. Ma Jian escaped to the high plateau to wander among nomads and monks in search of spiritual truth, but discovered instead poverty and the degradation of a spiritual tradition all but destroyed by political persecution. Tibet since has been subject to waves of Han migration. The Tibetan city of Lhasa has largely been destroyed and prostitution flourishes amid the Chinese-imposed concrete blocks and karaoke kitsch. Today Han Chinese visit Tibet as tourists, buying up Buddhist images that they hope will help them in their businesses; for them Tibet has been tamed as a spiritual Disneyland, not unlike the Tibet of many western imaginations.

Ah, liberation. Read the article, and if you want to read a Chinese writer’s personal experiences in Tibet, buy the book. Though, needless to say, you won’t find it in China.

How odd; it seems like awfully serious reading for our preznit. A most unusual article on why Bush is so enamored of the controversial biography.

The book might at first seem an odd choice for Bush, whose taste in biography, like that of other U.S. presidents, runs to previous occupants of the Oval Office. But it is not so surprising given that “Mao: The Unknown Story” has been embraced by the right as a searing indictment of Communism.

Other reviewers have praised the book’s brutal portrait of Mao as a corrective to sunnier biographies, even as they have questioned some of its prodigious research and criticized the authors for a moralistic, good-and-evil version of history.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said last week that Laura Bush had given the book to her husband as a gift and that the president had just finished reading it. Asked why Bush liked the book, McClellan said he would find out, then reported back on Friday that Bush had told him that it “really shows how brutal a tyrant he was” and that “he was much more brutal than people assumed.”

Bush also said, McClellan recounted, that “millions upon millions were killed because of his policies.” On that score, the book is both sweeping and specific, with a first chapter that begins with this sentence: “Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.”

Chang and Halliday said in a telephone interview from Paris on Friday, during a long weekend away from their home in London, that they were “thrilled” that Bush had read the book. Chang, whose “Wild Swans,” a memoir of her family’s oppression under Mao, sold 10 million copies, said she surmised that Bush was drawn to the book because “it’s a very dramatic story about a roller-coaster life.” She also said that since Bush was dealing with the current Chinese leadership, “it’s not surprising that he should want to know from what roots this regime has grown.”

American scholars say that Bush was probably also drawn to the book because it is, in effect, an argument for the president’s second-term agenda of spreading democracy around the world.

One major disclosure in the book, for example, is Stalin’s powerful role in Mao’s rise.

“The book certainly makes an effective case for the wickedness of dictatorship,” said Andrew Nathan, a specialist in Chinese politics at Columbia University. “It doesn’t talk about democracy, but for a person who believes in democracy, this is a valuable brief.”

Nathan, who criticized what he called the authors’ vague and inaccessible sourcing last year in The London Review of Books, said the biography presented Mao as a “comic-book monster,” with little explanation of the psychological, sociological and historical forces that allowed him to rise.

He also said he was skeptical that the book would help in understanding China’s current leadership.

“Today’s Communist Party is a highly developed bureaucracy like IBM or General Motors,” Nathan said. “It’s not the Communist Party of Mao’s time.”

Considering how Bush sees things as pure black and white, I’d prefer to see him reading a more nuanced book on China. However, if his endorsement of the book helps bring Mao’s savagery and inhumanity into the limelight, I won’t complain.

A city in motion. Photo from here.

This unlinkable article tells one of those oh-my-god stories, the kind where you really don’t want to believe it’s true. Could a woman really do this kind of thing to her own niece?

Slavery in Our Time
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 22, 2006
Historians will look back in puzzlement at the way our 21st century world tolerates the slavery of more than a million children in brothels around the world.

India alone may have half a million children in its brothels, more than any other country in the world. Visit the brothel district in almost any city in India, and you can meet 14-year-old girls who have been kidnapped off the street, or drugged, or offered jobs as maids, and then sold into a world that they often escape only by dying of AIDS.

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Unlinkable, and a must-read for understanding why Republicans are so much better at manipulating public opinion that the Democrat amateurs.
Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito
By FRANK RICH
Published: January 22, 2006

IF James Frey hadn’t made up his own life, Tom Wolfe would have had to invent it for him. The fraudulent memoirist is to the early 21st century what Mr. Wolfe’s radical-chic revelers were to the late 1960’s and his Wall Street “masters of the universe” were to the go-go 1980’s: a perfect embodiment of the most fashionable American excess of an era.

As Oprah Winfrey, the ultimate arbiter of our culture, has made clear, no one except pesky nitpickers much cares whether Mr. Frey’s autobiography is true or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes & Noble. Such distinctions have long since washed away in much of our public life. What matters most now is whether a story can be sold as truth, preferably on television. The

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Lobbyists on drugs. Simply the best Krugman column I’ve read in many months, maybe ever. Utterly devastating. Please read it.

The K Street Prescription
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 20, 2006

The new prescription drug benefit is off to a catastrophic start. Tens of thousands of older Americans have arrived at pharmacies to discover that their old drug benefits have been canceled, but that they aren’t on the list for the new program. More than two dozen states have taken emergency action.

At first, federal officials were oblivious. “This is going very well,” a Medicare spokesman declared a few days into the disaster. Then officials started making excuses. Some conservatives even insist that the debacle vindicates their ideology: see, government can’t do anything right.

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Just a 30-second rant.

I went to dinner two night’s ago alone (as usual these days) and a Taiwanese family was at the table next to mine. Their 6-year-old boy wouldn’t stop staring at me (the laowai death stare is far less common here than in China, of course). Suddenly, he just shouted out, “Waiguoren, waiguoren! Ta bu hui shuo Zhongwen!” His family just smiled lovingly at the apple of their eye, while I sat there feeling singularly self-conscious. I said softly, “Wo hui shuo Zhongwen” (though it’s not quite true, yet), which shut the little sucker up.

Then last weekend I had a craving for a greasy American cheeseburger, and went to the Friday’s in Ximen. (Not recommended; Ruby Tuesday’s at Warner Village is way better.) The hostess on the ground floor pointed me up the stairs, and then I heard her speak into her little microphone, telling the hostess upstairs I was coming. “Waiguoren qu lou shang,” she said. (A foreigner is coming upstairs.) It just got me thinking, why not a customer is coming upstairs? Can you imagine being in a Friday’s in America and hearing the hostess refer to you as a foreigner, or as a black man or as a Chinese man? Can you please seat this Chinese man? (Although I’ve never been to a Friday’s in the US; maybe it’s a global policy to refer to Friday’s customers who can’t speak the local language very well as “foreigners.”)

Was thinking about this all week. it feels good to get it down on “paper.”

A report from a US government agency looks at Iraq, and fails to see a picnic.

An official assessment drawn up by the US foreign aid agency depicts the security situation in Iraq as dire, amounting to a “social breakdown” in which criminals have “almost free rein”.

The “conflict assessment” is an attachment to an invitation to contractors to bid on a project rehabilitating Iraqi cities published earlier this month by the US Agency for International Development (USAid).

The picture it paints is not only darker than the optimistic accounts from the White House and the Pentagon, it also gives a more complex profile of the insurgency than the straightforward “rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists” described by George Bush.

The USAid analysis talks of an “internecine conflict” involving religious, ethnic, criminal and tribal groups. “It is increasingly common for tribesmen to ‘turn in’ to the authorities enemies as insurgents – this as a form of tribal revenge,” the paper says, casting doubt on the efficacy of counter-insurgent sweeps by coalition and Iraqi forces.

Meanwhile, foreign jihadist groups are growing in strength, the report said.

“External fighters and organisations such as al-Qaida and the Iraqi offshoot led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are gaining in number and notoriety as significant actors,” USAid’s assessment said. “Recruitment into the ranks of these organisations takes place throughout the Sunni Muslim world, with most suicide bombers coming from Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region.”

The assessment conflicted sharply with recent Pentagon claims that Zarqawi’s group was in “disarray”.

Meanwhile, the insurgency continues to rsvp to Bush’s invitation to “bring ’em on.”

The bodies of 36 Iraqis killed execution-style were found in two villages north of Baghdad on Wednesday, Iraqi officials said. Many of the dead were identified as police recruits from the largely Sunni Arab city of Samarra.

At least 16 people were killed in attacks around the country on Wednesday, including two American civilian security contractors who were killed by a roadside bomb in Basra.

In a swath of desert near Nebaie, a village about 20 miles northwest of Baghdad, farmers found 25 bodies, some with police identification badges, said Major Muthana, an aide to the governor of Salahuddin Province. According to a police officer from Taji, a city near the area, the men were from Samarra but had been studying at the Baghdad Police Academy.

Apparently each had been shot in the back of the head within the last day or two, the police officer said.

But don’t forget: We’ve “broken the back” of the insurgency, and victory is right around the corner. The right-wingers say this is all because of cowardly liberals hurting the morale of our soldiers. Maybe there’s another reason. Maybe it’s because people don’t like being occupied, and because we screwed up our post-invasion strategy (or non-strategy) in every conceivable way.

But when you try to make this simple point based on evidence (i.e., piles of corpses), they say you’re a sky-is-falling alarmist. Sorry, but the sky is falling.