Your War Questions Answered

How is the genocide in Sudan's Darfur region affecting neighboring countries?

BY ANDISHEH NOURAEE

Since 2003, the black African farmers of western Sudan's Darfur region have been victims of genocide. The genociders are Sudan's Arab-dominated government and nomadic Arab militia groups known as the Janjaweed. With Sudan's military providing assistance, Janjaweed have murdered approximately 400,000 of their fellow countrymen and have forced another 2 million to flee their homes and farms.

The genocide is motivated by three basics: power, hatred and greed. The Sudanese government dislikes Darfur's black African farmers because they're not Arab and because they've bristled at Sudan's cruel and incompetent rule in the past.

The Janjaweed share the Sudanese government's ethnic hatred of Darfur's black non-Arabs. They also want to clear Darfur of as many farmers as they can so that they can use the land for themselves.

(Note that this isn't a religious conflict. Both the genociders and their victims are Muslims.)

What do Sudan's neighbors think of all this?

To most, the genocide seems like an annoyance. But not so annoying that anyone is mounting a serious effort to stop it. It's merely a low-grade annoyance, on the level of, "Kindly turn down that genocide. It distracts us from our efforts to misrule and exploit our own citizens."

Yet some of the more thoughtful neighbors have begun to team up to slow the genocide. Under the banner of the African Union, 8,000 soldiers have been stationed in Darfur. Their mission is to monitor an April 2004 cease-fire agreement that never actually ceased any firing. The only thing the AU has been able to "monitor" is that the genocide continues.

Even if they wanted to, the AU forces would be unable to stop the genocide. They're spread too thin and are less well-armed than the police of most American cities.

Sudan's government officials recently blocked an effort by the United Nations to send a larger, better-armed peacekeeping force into Sudan.

They did so by -- get this -- convincing some of their neighbors, namely Egypt, Libya and Ethiopia, that a U.N. intervention would amount to Western imperialistic interference in African affairs. "How dare they interfere with our right to commit genocide without Western interference!" No one actually said that, but they might as well have.

The only neighbor of Sudan for which indifference is not an option is Chad.

Chad's long border with Sudan runs along the Western edge of Darfur. Approximately 200,000 Sudanese have fled to Chad from Darfur. Janjaweed and Sudanese government forces have increased the intensity and frequency of across-the-border raids. Sudan has, in essence, invaded eastern Chad.

And if that wasn't enough reason for Chad to feel bad, Sudan is now sponsoring rebels trying to depose Chad's government. Recently, Sudan allowed (translation: assisted) a convoy of Chadian rebels to drive the width of Sudan and enter Chad.

The incident was just the latest in a series of moves that seem to spell doom for Chad's sickly dictator, Idriss Déby. Many of Lil Déby's top military backers have deserted him. A few weeks ago, someone tried to shoot down a plane on which he was flying. The fatal blow to his regime might have come from, of all people, Paul Wolfowitz.

In his capacity as the World Bank's head teller, Wolfowitz has halted aid to Chad and frozen some of its accounts in response to Déby's reneging on an agreement to spend 80 percent of Chad's oil revenue on economic development projects. With his rule hanging by a chad, Déby wants to spend Chad's oil money on guns that might delay his overthrow.

The people of Chad can hardly afford a military conflict now. It's already one of the worst places where humans live. Per capita GDP is a mere $1,100, and life expectancy in Chad is just 47 years. Chad ranks 167 out of 177 on the U.N.'s Human Development Index, just behind the planet Mercury.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the anti-corruption organization Transparency International recently ranked Chad as the most corrupt nation in the world, the announcement of which came on the same day that Misery & Corruption International ranked Chad the "Best Country in the World Ever!"

Unless the United States or U.K. steps in, it's unlikely anyone will intervene to stop the chaos and killing anytime soon.



Is the American news media screwing up the war effort?

BY ANDISHEH NOURAEE

If you watch TV news or listen to talk radio, you're probably aware that the Bush administration and its allies have responded to the decline in public support for the war in Iraq by blaming the news media.

The blame attack is two-pronged, which, if you think about it, is a great number of prongs for attacking something. I just like saying the word "prong." Prong-prong-prong. Let me see that prong! Man, that is a great word.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the two-pronged attack on the media.

Prong No. 1 mainly comes from the mouths of Bush administration officials and goes something like this: "Hey, awesome American people (particularly those of you in middle-class suburban areas of electoral swing states)! There's plenty of great stuff going on in Iraq. Unfortunately, the news media only tell you about the bad stuff because the bad stuff is more sensational and easier to report."

Prong No. 2 is nastier -- and borderline libellous. Prong No. 2 usually doesn't come from the Bush administration directly but instead from its political and media allies. Prong No. 2 aims to tar as a traitor anyone in the media whose reporting makes the Bush administration's war policies look bad. If we are losing the war, according to Prong No. 2, it's the media's fault.

Bill O'Reilly typically uses that attack style. On the March 21 broadcast of "The O'Reilly Factor," he announced, "I believe that there is a segment of the media trying to undermine the policy in Iraq for their own ideological purposes." During the same broadcast, O'Reilly continued his attack during an exchange with right-wing radio hostess Laura Ingraham. My favorite bit was when O'Reilly "asked" Ingraham, "Do you think NBC news is actively trying to undermine the war in Iraq?" Great "question," Bill.

Now, as a member the news media, you might expect me to respond to these sorts of accusations with an indignant, smarty-pants comeback, such as, "If the White House planned the war in Iraq as well as it planned its assaults on the news media, the war might not be going so badly."

And to all the people who call in to TV and talk-radio shows to moan about how Americans are pessimistic about the war only because the liberal media never report about the schools the United States has built and/or repainted in Iraq, you might expect to me say something like, "When a reporter goes to Iraq and writes about schools instead of car bombings, that is like going to Columbine on the day of the shootings and reporting about SAT scores."

But I'm not gonna say anything like that.

No, sir/ma'am, I'm here to tell you that the accusations are in fact correct.

The news media are indeed screwing up this war, but it isn't the entire news media doing it. It's just me. I, Andisheh Nouraee, am solely responsible for the Iraq War going badly.

The fact is, I have had a hand in all the major screw-ups that people keep blaming on the Bush administration. For example, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to follow Gen. Eric Shinseki's advice that it would require several hundred thousand U.S. troops to secure Iraq after an invasion. But one night in early 2003, I snuck into Rumsfeld's bedroom and whispered in his ear while he slept. I told him, "A hundred thousand soldiers is plenty to secure Iraq. Good night, sweet Rummy."

And remember when L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, disbanded the Iraqi army and the police, two decisions that simultaneously undermined public order and boosted the insurgency? Well, that was my fault, too. Bremer handed me a quarter and said, "Heads, disband 'em. Tails, keep 'em." I told him heads even though it was really tails.

Some other biggies: My decision to not provide adequate armor for U.S. soldiers. "Shrapnel wounds build character," were my exact words. Halliburton? All me, babe! Abu Ghraib -- me, too. (Don't knock naked pyramiding till you try it.) Greater Baghdad's on-again, off-again electricity? I've got the master switch on my desk.

You should come by and play with it sometime. It's fun.



What happened in Iran's recent presidential election?

His victory defied conventional wisdom, but in the end the support of his country's powerful religious conservatives was enough to propel him to victory in an election marred by charges of voting irregularities.

The people who like him say he's an inspiring, pious patriot with a common touch, and a strong leader willing to wage battle against both foreign enemies and the out-of-touch, decadent urban elite at home.

His critics, and most of the free world, see him as a narrow-minded ideologue whose religious fanaticism, ignorance about global affairs, and aggressive foreign policy will only lead to more war, more terrorism, and an erosion of personal liberties.

"Enough about President Bush," you say. "Tell us about Iran's new president."

But I was talking about Iran's election. Honest. The above is actually a description of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's 49-year-old president-elect. If you wanna get creeped out by the fact that our politics bear an eerie resemblance to the politics of a militant theocracy, then that's your problem.

Iran's president-elect didn't exactly come out of nowhere to win Iran's presidency last month. Since 2003, Ahmadinejad has been the mayor of Tehran, Iran's capital and largest city. Nevertheless, his victory came as a complete surprise to most of the people who talk to Western reporters about Iranian politics. The people who broadcast their expectations about these sorts of things were loudly expecting that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would win the election.

The first surprise came during the election's first round of voting. On June 17, Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad finished a close first and second, respectively, in a field of seven candidates. Nobody expected Ahmadinejad to do so well, and there's strong evidence indicating that his second-place finish was helped with vote-rigging and voter intimidation. Ahmadinejad was the favorite candidate of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And Khamenei's Guardian Council manages Iran's elections.

Iranian election rules mandated a second round of elections, this time just between Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad. Rafsanjani was once again widely favored. Rafsanjani is an experienced political maneuverer. He was Iran's president from 1989 to 1997, and experts on all things Iran assumed that Iranian voters would want him in office to serve as a counterweight to Khamenei and Co.

What analysts didn't bank on was that Rafsanjani's reputation and experience were a minus to his candidacy rather than a plus. Yeah, he's less of a hard-liner than Ahmadinejad, but if you play word-association with an Iranian and say "Rafsanjani," the word you're likely to hear in response is "corruption" or one of its synonyms. Rafsanjani enriched himself and his cronies during his eight-year presidency.

In the end, Iranians chose the ultra-hard-line Ahmadinejad over the less-hard-line, but corrupt Rafsanjani. There were still charges of vote-rigging, but Ahmadinejad's margin of victory in the runoff (17.3 million to 10 million) was way outside the margin of corruption.

Does that mean the Iranian people want an extreme Ahmadinejad ruling them? Not really. Keep in mind this was not a democratic election in the sense that you and I know one. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the Guardian Council chose who was allowed to run. Nobody who questions theocratic rule or Khamenei's position as God's chief bureaucrat on Earth was allowed near a ballot. A presidential election in Iran is like choosing which size and shape stick someone's going to be beat with for the next four years.

So why did they choose Ahmadinejad? He ran on a platform of economic reform. He promised to stamp out corruption and narrow the gap between rich and poor. Because Ahmadinejad grew up poor and to this day lives a materially humble life, his populism had credibility with voters.

What do the election results mean for Iran's relations with the United States? Well, it's not a good thing. Ahmadinejad celebrated his victory with scary speeches about how Iran should move full-steam ahead on its nuclear program. During his campaign, he criticized the government for conceding too much to the European negotiators during nuclear talks.

Ultimately, though, it doesn't matter much because the real authority in Iran isn't in the presidency. It's in the hands of Khamenei and his Guardian Council. He's the one dictating how Iran operates. Ahmadinejad's victory is really just a consolidation of Khamenei's power.