O Contraire

Sherry Rehman, the Pakistani ambassador to the United States, wants the US to (a) apologize for a NATO attack on Salala and (b) halt drone attacks on her native soil, neither of which demands—let’s face it, Sherry—is going to happen anytime soon. Always a bad idea to apologize to governments and security agencies run by certain officials who want you dead, and besides, the really tall bearded guy hanging out in a seriously ugly compound in Abbottabad? With the wives? And an office full of plaintive missives to his followers? Whom nobody in Pakistan noticed or observed?

But let’s leave apologies aside. These days, the question on everyone’s mind is—or should be—are drone attacks anywhere a good idea? Meaning, if we get right down to it: do they create more enemies than they kill?

Here are the near certainties: sooner rather than later, Greece will exit from the euro. More Spanish banks will fail the EU stress test.

And here’s fact. In 1997, then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl lied to his electorate about Italy’s suitability to join the European Union. Essentially, Kohl claimed that Italy was in fine financial standing, while knowing all the time that it had been cooking the books. How did Italy cook the books?  According to Der Spiegel, which just came out with these revelations, by having one government agency sell gold reserves to yet another government agency.

And the reason Kohl was so anxious to hide Italian malfeasance from his own public? Der Spiegel claims it’s because he felt sure France would withdraw from the eurozone if Italy couldn’t be a part of it. The longtime chancellor wanted a stab at immortality, in other words, and considered the euro his means of shouldering “the weight of history”—his way to claim his place among the gods.

What happens when a nation bans a work, a piece of writing, however loathsome? Those forms of expression become mythical. They are endowed with a power and a mystery that might otherwise have been denied them. The very act of banning a phrase, a gesture, a television program—or refusing to allow the appearance of a certain work in print—implies strongly that the government issuing these decrees is a weakling, raging, foaming, threatening, but essentially impotent against a force of arguments found so compelling they are made to disappear.

Or are they?

In France last month, Nicolas Sarkozy—in a last-ditch and ultimately futile effort to get reelected by playing the strongman—decreed it illegal for citizens to access terrorist websites. However, no one appears to know exactly how such a law will be implemented. How, in other words, will France define “terrorist website”? How will it manage to track down every last person online? And would François Hollande, the new socialist president, ever implement such a decree? (Probably not…)

I’m not saying we should all feel sorry for Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who (and what a shock this must have been for all of his readers!), now that his employees have been discovered to have broken a few laws, finds himself in a spot of trouble. But he is 81, and has been conducting his scummy business for, oh, say, some 60 years. And it has taken those same six decades for Murdoch’s political allies, targets, admirers, and paylist beneficiaries to realize that maybe some of the reporters who work on his newspapers aren’t all that noble. They discovered, in other words, that there was gambling in Casablanca, and they are shocked.

Let’s examine how difficult it was for British authorities to have learned of Murdochian methodology in the past decade. In 2002, a young British kidnapping victim turned up dead. Oddly enough, however, her cell phone messages kept getting erased even while she was dead—meaning, of course, that it wasn’t the 13-year-old victim who listened to or deleted those messages. It was someone else, and by deleting those messages that someone gave the parents of the dead teenager and the police false hope that she was still alive.

About this time last year, the levels of corruption in Mexico were revealed to the universe by the Mexican Employers Association. Mexican companies, it was pointed out, spend more than 10 percent of their revenue on corrupt acts. More than 44 percent of Mexican companies make secret payments to public servants on both national and local levels. Mexico ranked 98 out of 178 companies on Transparency International’s Corruption Index (right down there with Egypt and Burkina Faso). The cost of Mexico’s corruption is around 9 percent of its gross domestic product.

Why would any Frenchman vote for François Hollande, a ghost of a man with the temperament of Eeyore, over tiny, tempestuous Nicolas Sarkozy with his Napoleonic desires and flamboyant charm?

I have asked this question for the past few weeks of a wide assortment of French voters I happen to know—many of them every bit as flamboyant as the man they claim to despise. And the answer is always pretty much the same, and always astonishing: “We are tired of this cult of personality.”

Israel is a country that is used to living by its wits—an excellent substitute, in a nation riddled with problems, for the more tangible assets of great wealth or great numbers of citizens or great neighbors.

About the first thing you learned on arrival in Italy is that it is virtually impossible for a worker to get fired. This is, of course, excellent news for the employee, but not necessarily for Italy.

Almost any kind of behavior has been routinely tolerated on the job in the name of workers’ rights: absenteeism, dishonesty, arrant rudeness to customers, sexual harassment. (“We need yet another instance of sexual harassment to take care of the problem,” a friend who works in education informed me. “Because we gave a guy who harassed a student a warning last year. He has to harass again before we can fire him.”)

In Rome, for example, city bus drivers who neglect to show up for work as much as 30 percent of the time are nonetheless assured of a position—and a city bus from which so many of them regularly phone their girlfriends, mothers, and wives, while driving—whenever they decide to return. Fire anyone for failing to report to work, and you can be sure of a lawsuit. Which the employee will almost certainly win.

Just three years ago, a teenager from Western Sahara (which has long been occupied by Morocco) left a human rights meeting, at which point she was accosted, as she reveals in a YouTube video, by six plainclothes Moroccan policemen. They pushed her into a waiting vehicle, blindfolded, and handcuffed her.

And then they raped and sodomized her with truncheons, in the presence of high ranking Moroccan officers. Once that was done, they told her she would be killed if she decided to talk about her treatment at their hands.

Several months later, on August 27th, yet another teenage human rights activist, Nguia el-Haouassi, found herself abducted by Moroccan police, stripped naked, and subjected to what was called “physical and psychological torture.” Most notably, according to the victim, she was told by police that if she discussed what had occurred while in custody, the videotape of her naked body would be downloaded onto the Internet, and she would be raped.

Let’s say you loaned a friend a truckload of money: more than a friend really, basically a member of your family. And by truckload, I am talking about more than $300 billion.

Time goes by, and this family member knows the debt is coming due. But instead of repaying the hefty loan, the family member decides to change the rules of the game. So, two days before the repayment is due, you receive not a truckload of cash, but simply a hastily scrawled note from your debtor. This is what it says: “Thanks for the cash, which I am not about to pay back any time soon. In fact, you have until Thursday evening to restructure my loan. By which I mean, I am not going to pay one euro of what I owe you unless you agree to my new terms, which I myself have unilaterally devised out of thin air.”

Every year, Egypt receives of $1.5 billion from the United States in return for—well, honestly, I never have quite figured out what it’s for, not these days anyway. Basically, it started as an open-ended bribe, a kind of cash-stuffed drugstore greeting card from the West to onetime President Hosni Mubarak who continued to maintain relations, however fraught, with Israel, long after the murder of his predecessor, Anwar Sadat.

For this massive tribute, Egypt has been, since the start of US aid, only minimally grateful. Back in the ’80s, when I lived in Cairo, there was much griping, both on the street and among intellectuals, about the disparity between what Israel received from the US ($3 billion in 1987, in all-grant economic and military assistance) versus what Egypt got (almost $2 billion, mostly in the form of Abrams battle tanks and F-16s).

In December, a 28-year-old Jewish woman boarded a bus in Israel and was promptly ordered by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man to sit at the back. Tanya Rosenblit refused to sit where she was told (sound like a familiar scenario?)—whereupon her male harasser refused to allow the bus driver to close the doors and take any of the passengers to their desired destinations.

I suppose they’ve finally done it. Someone somewhere has finally forced me to revisit my old fallback position (“I-don’t-care-about-his-sex-life-as-long-as-he-can-govern”) and fall over. Flat. With disgust.

That someone happens to be Mimi Alford (Mimi Beardsley to John F. Kennedy, when she was 19, a virginal intern), about the hundredth person to describe in a book what it was like to crawl into bed with the president of the United States. The bed which, as it turned out, JFK shared with Jackie.

Now you and I could argue for hours and hours about Mimi’s motives, at age 68, for detailing her long-ago past. She has her own rationale: writing a book was a thrilling, a liberating experience for the graduate of Miss Porter’s School in Manhattan. Why so liberating? Because keeping a secret, Mimi told the New York Times on Sunday “silences a piece of you inside.”

Maybe so, maybe so. On the other hand, not for nothing is it said that silence is golden.

What if we change places with Iran for a moment?

Let’s say we’ve been learning that (a) Western nations are implementing even tougher sanctions as payback for our sovereign right to develop our nuclear capacity in order to accomplish whatever goal we choose and (b) Israel is basically telling everyone—us, the United States, its allies, and especially the New York Times—that it will wipe out our nuclear facilities before the year is out should we, the sovereign nation of Iran, go ahead. Which would be an act of war.

On Sunday, as part of a strategy to show the rest of Europe how fiscally responsible the third most important nation in the eurozone (and the world’s seventh largest economy) is becoming, Italy sanctioned a T-man blitz over Milan. Members of the little-feared Guardia di Finanza, 580 of them in fact, descended on merchants of that prosperous city, and—amazingly—found that one third of all the places checked out were indeed hiding revenue from the taxman. News of the raid was blasted all over TV; it was the front-page headline of every newspaper. And in all that coverage, as is all too customary in that country, not one cheat was either named or shamed.

Or indeed punished. You can imagine just how terrorized all these tax evaders were: No sales slips get you a 159 euro fine, or a scolding. It depends. Mostly it depends on just how connected you are to those in power. In other words, in Italy tax evasion isn’t simply commonplace. It is universal. It is the great national pastime. Next to Albania, I cannot think of a country more opaque:  No one knows how much anyone makes. No one would dream of telling the government.