It’s been another long haul since the last Liberia update, once again because there hasn’t been all that much to report. The country is rebuilding, slowly. The UN force remains there to oversee the disarmament of the warring factions. It’s not terribly exciting, but a far sight better than the chaos that preceded it. I argued at the time that this was a situation that merited international intervention, and I feel quite comfortable with that position in retrospect.

That said, yesterday there was a riot in Monrovia instigated by former members of Charles Taylor’s army who claimed not to have been paid for weapons they’d already turned in. Several people were injured and one was killed. (A similar dispute over cash suspended the disarmament program for a while last year.) Ambiguities outnumber facts in this situation: Were the fighters actually unpaid or underpaid? If so, was it a result of mismanagement or corruption? If not, are the fighters just being uppity or are their actions part of a coordinated attempt at destabilization?

Who knows? But this is as bad as it’s been since Taylor was ousted, and it’s not near as bad as I thought it’d be. On Liberia’s future, I remain cautiously optimistic. Disarmament still has a long way to go: about 26,000 have turned in their weapons so far, out of anywhere from 38,000 to 60,000 total estimated former combatants. But most of those who remain live upcountry, not in the more heavily populated coastal cities. And in any case, the disarmament program is far less crucial to the country’s future than the delivery of aid and economic development, but since it’s the big UN operation it tends to get the press coverage.

Charles Taylor remains exiled in Calabar. I noted earlier that his stay there is looking a little less cozy than it was at first. Phase One of his exile involved barely-concealed activity to influence Liberian politics from afar. After being told to pipe down by President Obasanjo, Taylor entered Phase Two: stony silence. Last month, before sliding back into stony silence (or at least being ignored by the media), he briefly tried to enter Phase Three, tearful pleading:

“My involvement in Sierra Leone was approved by Ecowas. This bizarre scenario (of his sponsoring war crimes in that country) was put together to get at Charles Taylor,” he told his Nigerian television interviewer . . . Taylor broke down in tears when the television interviewer asked him if he missed Liberia, saying: “I did not squander the wealth of my people. Mr Taylor did his best in Liberia.”

Friendly tip to CT: if you’re gonna go for the heartstrings, don’t refer to yourself in the third person all the time. It freaks people out. But hey, big props for this bit . . .

The former president said he was writing a book, and added that he wanted to return to Liberia and set up a foundation for orphans, war wounded and gifted children.

. . . because nothing makes people forget all about corruption, brutality, and general misrule like helpin’ the kiddies!

Since I’ve been following this story relatively closely, I’m attuned to the slight misstatements and oversimplifications pervasive in media coverage. A classic example is this sentence from the BBC article cited above:

Mr Taylor, who relocated to Nigeria last August, said he felt “absolutely safe”—despite a reported $2m bounty on his head, and an Interpol warrant for his arrest.

Regular readers of Polytropos will be able to say it with me by now: _“It’s not a bounty!”_ Furthermore, the Red Notice put up by Interpol, while significant, is not the same thing as a warrant for his arrest. Come on, people. It can’t be that hard to keep the facts straight if I can do it, sitting on my ass and using Google.

Now we come to the disturbing news, which, thankfully, is only tangentially related to Liberia.

Let’s say you’re an ex-KGB officer who’s become wealthy in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union as a weapons dealer and smuggler. We’ll call you—oh, I dunno—Victor Bout. You operated out of Belgium for a while, but left when the government there started looking into the shady activities of your vast fleet of planes. You found it must more hospitable in the United Arab Emirates, where you operated for a long time, though you reportedly live in Russia now.

You sold weapons to Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, but when the Taliban took over, you sold to them too. In 2000, Peter Hain of the UK Foreign Office called you Africa’s “leading merchant of death,” because of your work smuggling weapons into war-torn Angola and Sierra Leone. Between your dealings with the Taliban and with the illicit diamond trade in Liberia, you certainly have connections with Al Qaeda] (Here are some related comments by Douglas Farah on that point.)

So, when the UN finally catches up with you and wants to freeze your assets because of your involvement with Charles Taylor’s ousted regime, who do you turn to to make it go away?

Why, the United States, of course!

Yes, that’s right, the U.S. wants to keep Bout’s name off a list of those who are going to get hit with UN sanctions, because—wait for it—he’s being used in Iraq. He’s a freakin’ contractor.

Contracting with South African mercenaries: objectionable. Contracting with people with known Al Qaeda links: completely fucking nuts.

And now the caveats: the story’s new, it hasn’t even broke stateside yet, there could be some other, perfectly innocent reason for wanting to protect Bout. Besides, Saddam contracted with far worse folks than him. I’ll be waiting for the facts to surface that make this less awful-sounding than it is now. But I’m not holding my breath.

(Note: After working on all this I discovered that, not surprisingly, Kathryn Cramer wrote about Victor Bout yesterday. Check her site out for some more interesting/depressing links and quotes.)

UPDATE: Suanna’s first comment on hearing the stuff about Bout: “I guess that makes the U.S. a country that consorts with those who support terrorists.” And her second: “If the guy had an Arab name he’d be sitting in Guantanamo right now.” Yup.

UPDATE: It looks like, thanks to the first Financial Times article, the U.S. is backpedalling on this one. Armitage: “As far as I’m concerned [Bout] ought to be on any asset freeze list and anything else you can do it him.” I’ll bet it wasn’t State that was trying to protect him in the first place, though. Anyway, thank God for media scrutiny.

¹ This text is part of a web page about Victor Bout maintained by an aviation enthusiast named Ruud Leuw. Leuw has copied the full text of a number of news articles onto his site, some of which are no longer available online. From the ones that are it appears that the texts have been copied intact, but nevertheless, caveat lector. There’s much more good reading about Bout on the site—I’m only scratching the surface here.

It starts — well, not _innocently_ enough, but at least at a place that is arguably problematic but not blatantly reprehensible. “According to Sy Hersh”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact, Rumsfeld was up in arms about the fact that U.S. military units would have to phone home to get clearance from a _lawyer_ before hitting targets in Afghanistan — a practice that apparently led to some golden opportunities being missed. So he had Stephen Cambone, his Undersecretary for Intelligence, set up a special-access program: a covert op, basically, that was authorized to act without hesitation and to take extreme measures (including things like the sexual humiliation of prisoners) in order to help capture or kill the most dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists.

So what we have here is the power to commit awful acts given to a small number of people, in extraordinary circumstances, and in secret. I think there’s a healthy debate to be had about whether such power should ever be granted at all, but I think we can agree that, as far as real-life situations go, capturing Bin Laden is one of those cases where it may be warranted, if at all.

But after a couple years the same power-to-abuse is granted, under the auspices of the same program, not to some Special Forces guys working against Al Qaeda, but to Army reservists overseeing a hellhole prison full mostly, according to the ICRC, of people pulled in off the street who had nothing to do with the Iraqi insurgency and which, we should never forget to mention, have nothing whatsoever to do with Al Qaeda.

In the healthy debate about whether this sort of abuse and torture is _ever_ allowable, I can think of no stronger argument for the con side than the current situation: the mandate for such power, once granted, has a way of expanding on its own.

The following rant is brought to you, tangentially, by “this Slate article”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2100008 about the TV show Friends. Chris Suellentrop argues that it’s a mistake to see the show as the “last great situation comedy” because it’s not even a sitcom, but rather a “soapcom”: “a soap opera masquerading as a situation comedy.” He points out that the show features multiple-episode story arcs that reward and even demand continuous attention to understand what’s going on: a trait anathema to traditional sitcom rules. Along the way he makes a very good point:

Somewhere along the way, TV drama and TV comedy switched places. It’s fairer to call shows like Law & Order and CSI “sitdramas” than it is to call Friends a sitcom. Law & Order’s syndicated success hinges on the tidiness of each episode. You can shuffle them all together and deal them out in any order you like, and viewers won’t even notice. But if you shuffled episodes from Friends’ 10 seasons and aired them in random order, you wouldn’t have the slightest bit of continuity from show to show.

He’s perfectly right as far as it goes, but (and here’s the rant) why must soap operas always be invoked whenever referring to TV shows with plot continuity? It irks me here the same way it irked me to hear people critical of “Babylon 5”:http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/lurker.html refer to it as “a soap opera in space.” It’s true that B5 featured a continuous story, and that soap operas do the same, but that’s as far as the similarity goes. B5’s storyline was an actual _plot_, heading for an ending, within each season and across them. It wasn’t the first show to do this (I’m curious to hear of examples that predate “The Prisoner”:http://www.the-prisoner-6.freeserve.co.uk/), but was imitated quickly by shows like Buffy and Angel, and now by more mainstream shows like 24 and Alias.

By contrast, the storylines of soap operas are constantly unfolding but never-ending. Short-term twists and turns try to maintain the audience’s interest, but in the long-term there’s no plot development, just more of the same. ER follows this model, as did The X-Files, which disingenuously posed as a show-with-a-plot even though it was just one long, and ultimately annoying, tease.

The long-term unfolding story is an obvious match for television; it’s the way to achieve a sweeping, deep effect, like that of a novel, on the screen, something a two- or even three-hour film can never hope to do. There are plenty of shows that do this, and they deserve better than to be compared merely to soap operas.

Someday, a device that fits in your pocket will be able to store all your music and all your favorite books, and allow you listen and read with ease. As my last entry makes clear, I look forward to that day, in no small part because it will allow me, in theory, to cut down on the sheer bulk of material possessions.

But whenever I contemplate the heady freedom of being able to stick all I own on my back and ride a motorcycle off into the sunset, there’s always one question that stops me short:

What about the board games?

There’s no denying that my taste in board games runs counter to my general proclivity for the portable and the unobtrusive. I adore my suitcase-sized backgammon board. I wish I owned one for Crokinole. I like games with lots of cool bits—preferably made of wood, not plastic. And though there are ubiquitous online places to play backgammon or chess, and even cool places to play German-style games, that just wouldn’t be the same.

Why is that the case for board games and not for books? Aren’t a game’s pieces simply a medium for transmitting the ruleset to the brain, just as book does with text? Yes, but there are at least three factors that make the physicality of a game particularly important:

1. Just as the main difficulty with an electronic format is readability with books, so too an electronic form of a game must try to match the “readability”—ease of both interaction and apprehension—that a physical structure provides. And that standard for games involves more complicated factors than proper screen size and font resolution. Having the actual game elements arranged before you engages both spatial and abstract reasoning. Physically moving pieces on a board cements what’s going on at a cognitive level.

2. Similarly, both the physical design of a book and a board game have an aesthetic component, but with a game’s many possible components and countless ways for them to interact, there are many more opportunities to achieve beauty of design.

3. Unlike reading, playing a board game has a social component; I hope it’s self-evident that whether the people you’re playing with are right there or not makes a big difference.

Of course, board games get played from a distance all the time. The ability to play online revolutionized backgammon by allowing competitive players to play around the clock if they wanted, but any serious player will tell you that while that’s great for practice, it’s no substitute for the real thing. So there’s no point in trying to scale down on the space those games take up; I might as well embrace the bulk and commit to a life of limited mobility. It’s not like there was really a choice in the first place, what with all the baby gear . . .

Incidentally, we’ve had a portable, flexible game-generating mechanism for centuries; it’s called a deck of cards. A love of bits and a bias toward complexity are what make me favor board games over card games; I get bored with Hearts rather quickly, though all-night sessions of poker or Skat are always welcome.

According to Will Baude of Crescat Sententia, my definition of “shelfworthy” (as described here) is a “theory of book-bigotry.” He goes on:

In some technical sense, Nate is only defining a term, so quarrelling with him seems needlessly antagonistic, but because of the notion inherent in the term (and reinforced in his comment) that one ought to shelve ones [sic] books [bookshelves?] only with books that look and feel good, I feel obliged to take issue.

Needlessly antagonistic? Bien sur! Where would we bloggers be without others nitpicking our views? Ultimately I don’t think Will and I actually disagree very much, but I’ll take up the gauntlet anyway, in the spirit of needless antagonism.

First of all, the subsequent discussion by Will (and others) has drifted into talk about the pros and cons of hardcover vs. softcover. This is a fine topic to discuss, but my definition only made a claim about mass market paperbacks. I very deliberately left trade paperbacks out of it, because they are the big Grey Area when it comes to shelfworthiness. The fact that they’re of varying sizes, and that there’s usually more room for interesting design on their spines, means that TPs can very often be shelfworthy, though not always. I’m less likely to buy one than a hardcover, all else being equal, but the fact that they’re cheaper means that they outnumber hardcover titles on my shelves just like everybody else’s.

Anyway, Will’s argument centers on a book’s usability, best summarized here:

No question, books are made to be loved and used, but that use isn’t—or shouldn’t be—limited to sitting on a shelf and looking pretty. Ease of transport, minimization of cost, minimization of storage space—these are all real constraints that true book lovers deal with every day. Cloth-bound hardcovers aren’t always the most aesthetically pleasing books, and aesthetical-pleasingness should not be the only concern aside from content.

And he’s perfectly correct. My purchasing bias toward shelfworthy books is motivated by an impatience for the future.

When I left boarding school in Jos, Nigeria, oh-so-many years ago, I could fit everything I owned into a long military duffel that, with some difficulty, I could sling over my shoulder. It was an incredible feeling of freedom, of being unbound from material constraints. My possessions have only increased since then, making life an ongoing struggle against accumulating too much stuff. To say that that makes me anti-materialist would be a lie: it’s the space that stuff takes up that gets me, not the number of items or money spent. I seriously dig miniaturization. I consider the iPod to be one of the triumphs of our technological culture, and I am eager—even impatient—for the device to come along that does for books what the mp3 player has done for music.

The important part of a book is its text. The actual physical structure is secondary—indeed, it exists as a particularly ingenious mechanism for transmitting that text to the brain. Right now, nothing can even come close to the book for the job of text-transmitting. By contrast, reading on a computer screen is abysmally difficult. eBooks, as they exist today, are only slightly better on readability and still not up to snuff on portability or durability either. But, in time, we’re going to have an electronic reading machine that’s the book’s equal on readability, portability, and durability—and will be able to store your entire library inside it, to boot.

Now, I like the musty smell of books, and the tacticity of their pages, and all the other things that people who oppose the very concept of electronic books talk about. I like them exactly enough to want to keep shelves full of books even after a real electronic book—one that you can curl up on the couch with—comes on the scene. But my criteria for the ones I keep will be based on physical aesthetics and nostalgia value, not portability or efficiency. Hence, shelfworthiness.

In “Broken Engagement”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.clark.html, Gen. Wesley Clark argues that the only way to bring democracy to the Middle East is the same way it was brought to the Soviet bloc: not through military confrontation but through long-term, patient cultural exchange, waiting for the moment when the call for it comes from their own people.

Democracy and freedom have been ascendant in most parts of the world for at least the last 15 years, and it’s hard to imagine that they aren’t also destined to take root in the Middle East. But to play a constructive role in bringing this about, we must understand the facts on the ground and the lessons of history clearly. Our efforts should take into account not just the desire for freedom of those in the Middle East, but also their pride in their own culture and roots and their loyalty to Islam. We should work primarily with and through our allies, and be patient as we were during the four decades of the Cold War. More than anything else, we should keep in mind the primary lesson of the fall of the Soviet Union: Democracy can come to a place only when its people rise up and demand it.

Instead of brandishing military force and slogans about democracy, we must recognize what our real strengths and limitations are. In this part of the world, American power and rhetoric tend to produce countervailing reactions. Demands and direct action are appropriate in self-defense, but in a region struggling to regain its pride after centuries of perceived humiliation by the West, we should speak softly whenever possible. If we really want to encourage forms of government to emerge which we believe will better suit our own interests, then we have to set a powerful example and act indirectly and patiently — even while we take the specific actions truly necessary for our self-defense.

A fine piece by our next Secretary of Defense, maybe State. There’s an excellent section outlining neoconservative misconceptions about why we won the Cold War. The sad thing is that by taking the neocon route in Iraq we’ve set the timetable back on real, postive change by decades.

Hat tip to “Slacktivist”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/.

UPDATE: In the comments, Dvd Avins points out that, by law, Clark _can’t_ be SecDef because he’s been an active duty officer in the past ten years. Shows what I know.

There’s only one thing worse than being stuck, with a baby, in an apartment in a building that hasn’t turned the air conditioning on yet when it’s almost 90 degrees outside . . .

. . . and that’s putting up with the heat unnecessarily because you never bothered _trying_ the air conditioning, but just assumed that the sign was right and it wasn’t on yet.

If you’ve ever been to Tulip Time in Holland, MI, you know that it could do with a few more pirates. Some enterprising students have “stepped up”:http://www.thehollandsentinel.net/stories/051204/loc_051204002.shtml/ :

Nineteen youths who dressed as pirates have been issued tickets for joining Thursday’s Kinderparade during Tulip Time because they lacked authorization to participate . . . The group of West Ottawa students, calling themselves The American Pirate Association, carried a banner and were dressed in pirate garb when they joined Thursday’s parade . . . Police dispersed the group near the intersection of Eighth Street and Pine Avenue. Most of the pirates fled when police closed in on them, but Fegel and one other “went down with the ship.”

Hat tip to Marty Wondergem, who noted in an email:

My co-worker’s son said the “captain” is a really hilarious guy, and when the police confronted him that what he was doing was illegal, he responded: “Argh, and what would ja do about it, mateys?”

I don’t have the time to get a DC chapter of the APA going, but if somebody else does, I’m in.

Brood X has “started to arrive”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16031-2004May10.html. Didn’t see any today, but if the rain falls as forecasted, they should be out in droves afterward.

In Liberia this sort of thing happens every year, on a slightly lesser scale, with the flying termites known locally as bugabugs. They’d get fried up by the hundreds and eaten as snack food. The neighbor kids brought a bunch of them by on a cookie sheet the first year my family was in Monrovia, and were highly amused by our squeamishness.

I mention this only to clarify that I’ve already done my bug eatin’ for this lifetime, so I get a pass. For the rest of you, “here’s”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1866011 a recipe.

It’s hard to remember what life was like before “Chowhound”:http://www.chowhound.com/. For those who don’t know, the site’s message boards are organized regionally and consist of foodies tossing recommendations back and forth endlessly. Search them for the name of the relevant restaurant or city or neighborhood and you’re bound to find a good place to visit.

I am not a foodie — I think that goes without saying, since once you have a child you can only be an ex-foodie. But I’m not even an ex-foodie, just someone who tends to appreciate foodie advice. For Suanna and I, this past weekend was an object lesson in power of Chowhound. We had a couple of nights — one in Philly and one in West Chester — where we needed a place to eat and had no clue at all where to start. Both times I hopped online and, after a few minutes of combing the boards, had solid leads on where to go. Absent the power combo of Chowhound & hotel room Internet access, we would have just picked the place down the street that looked all right, or wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood, finally settling on something at random. As it was, we ate very well both nights. Herewith are capsule reviews.

Monk’s Cafe

This pub is in Central City, near Rittenhouse Square. It’s all about Belgian beer. A good number of their many varieties are too pricey for anything but a special occasion, but they brew a killer Flemish sour ale in-house. Suanna had a wonderful drink called the Ephemere which was sort of a cross between a Belgian-style beer and a good hard cider. The food is standard bar fare, gussied up with homemade bread and gourmet cheeses. Mussels are their other big thing, which we didn’t try, but as a result ate far more cheaply than most websites suggest this place is.

Tacqueria Moroleone

I didn’t know this, but the Brandywine Valley is the mushroom capital of the U.S.A. Ergo, there’s a large population of seasonal laborers. Ergo, there’s a disproportionate number of good Mexican restaurants in the area. The one that Chowhound directed us too was Tacqueria Moroleone. There was no address online; we had to ask twice for directions, and found a very unassuming place in a dingy strip mall. Service was lousy, but the food was glorious. I had _molcajete_: basically fajitas, but with the meat and veggies served in a bowl of lava rock, simmering in sauce, instead of fresh off the grill. It was mind-blowing. A quick web search indicates that the word refers to the bowl, not the dish itself, though on the menu it was just ‘molcajete.’ Remember that word. It’s yummy.

Singh Thai

This is not a Chowhound find, but a local grapevine one that I’ve been meaning to mention for a while. It’s a new Thai restaurant in Arlington, right near Court House metro (and consequently walking distance for Suanna and I). If it’s not quite the best Thai food in DC, it is unquestionably the best _value_. It’s dirt cheap, and I just hope they can manage to stay in business while maintaining both their prices and their quality. (They did save some money by composing their menu without consulting anyone fluent in English.) They have solid Panang curry and superb pad thai. Don’t miss their froo-froo drinks, too — they have a long list of ones that come with umbrellas and the like. Great fun. Mango margarita: highly recommended. Mango martini: not so much (should have guessed).