Left Flank

Is it any wonder pundits are sidetracked by this notion of forcing aid on states when aid NGO specialists make arguments like Marines (via Matthew Yglesias, "Aid From Above"):

The plane swoops in low and its cargo bay slowly opens to reveal a landscape devastated by flood, war or drought. Men in jumpsuits pull levers sending massive pallets of emergency food supplies trundling out and down to the desperate masses below. The plane pulls up and away and the job is done. Aid has been delivered to the needy.

This is the telegenic aid fantasy that has hooked some politicians and appealed to some columnists as a viable option in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. Dropping pallets of aid from the sky seems a straightforward, elegant and technological solution to the difficult political problem of the Burmese government's refusal to allow enough humanitarian workers into the country to deal with the disaster.

Except air drops are not the aid equivalent of smart bombs. Running a humanitarian effort from the skies, like running a purely airborne war, is fraught with problems.

For a start it requires excellent intelligence. Yet no one knows exactly where the worst affected areas are, or how many people are suffering in each place. We don't know if people are on the move, or what diseases are starting to appear, or exactly what state their homes and infrastructure are in.

Has the nonprofit sector conveniently assumed the worst, and avoided the deeper question of how to alleviate the need for intervention? But, there's no national legislature to woo with inflated budgets and dire prophecies. As a donor, please don't tell me I have to give indefinitely. Death and taxes, maybe, but NGOs don't last forever!

Let's stop canonizing or demonizing (unfortunately, both left and right have latched on to this cause celebre) celebrities for taking safe political stands. Case in point: Steven Spielberg (and Mia Farrow). Why stop at boycotting the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when we can just end the Olympic movement!

Who cares for weeks of spectator sports most viewers will never practice, and the mere viewing of which is even more harmful to health. Why support a movement fueled by corporate endorsement of drugs-abusing spoiled, isolated monsters whose entire lives have revolved around celebrity and abuse of their own bodies? Why support a movement that allows governments to build worthless infrastructure with public money, and then forces tax-payers to alter their life's for weeks to cater to foreigners for the governments' benefit?

It's not that I agree with Beijing's human rights abuses, or its Sudan policy. It's that the reason Beijing, and other developing states, want to host an Olympics is, to justify building infrastructure.

«It's like approaching the Forbidden City, it's absolutely incredible.» The adjective is one that Mouzhan Majidi, chief executive of Foster + Partners, liberally attaches to Beijing's new airport terminal, designed by his British firm. The world's largest, designed in the gently sinuous form of a Chinese dragon, it was planned and built in four years by an army of 50,000 workers. «The columns on the outside are red and you see them marching for miles and miles,» says Mr Majidi.

A little hyperbole is understandable. The terminal is 3km (1.8 miles) long. The floor space is 17% bigger than all the terminals at London's Heathrow combined (including about-to-open Terminal Five). Chinese officials like the Forbidden City analogy. Just as the towering vermilion walls and golden roofs of the imperial palace inspire visitors with awe, China wants its golden-roofed terminal to impress those arriving for the Olympic games in August. Part of a $3.8 billion expansion, which included the opening of a third runway in October, it is due to open on February 29th, weeks ahead of schedule.

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There was no consultation with the public on the terminal. Nor was there any public debate about the construction of Beijing's third runway, notwithstanding the noise pollution already suffered by thousands of nearby residents. Beijing is now planning a second airport (even with Mr Majidi's terminal, the current airport is expected to exceed its designed capacity of 60m passengers this year, seven years before schedule). The location is being considered in secret. Xu Li, an official at the Ministry of Communications' transport research institute, agrees that China's infrastructure expansion is not as restrained by rules as it is in America. Once a plan is made, it is executed. «Democracy», she says, «sacrifices efficiency.»

An often heavy-handed approach to land appropriation also helps. For Beijing's airport expansion, 15 villages were flattened and their more than 10,000 residents resettled nearby. But several of the former farmers told your correspondent that they were still barred from the unemployment benefits and other welfare privileges of city dwellers even though their farmland had been grabbed from them. One elderly man said that officials had threatened them with violence if they refused to leave their villages.

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A show-off tendency among Chinese urban planners (as well as a dire lack of suburban rail networks) has helped to fuel a rapid expansion of costly underground railways. In some cases, says the World Bank, this is diverting resources away from urgent needs in the bus systems. Two decades ago only two cities, Beijing and Tianjin, had subways (and only three lines between them). Now 15 cities are building them at a total cost of tens of billions of dollars. Beijing and Shanghai are leading the way, spurred on by their desire to impress the world at the Olympic games and, in Shanghai's case, the World Expo which it will host in 2010. Beijing's official Olympics website displays a story saying that the city will have the biggest underground network in the world by 2015.

Such abuse is not limited to Beijing, or even East Asian autocracies.

• For the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, 720,000 people were forcibly evicted from their homes and homeless people were rounded up and detained in facilities outside the city, the report said.
• Leading up to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, more than 400 families were displaced to make room for the Olympic Village, 20 families were evicted from the site of the Olympic stadium and 200 other families were displaced for the construction of ring roads. Housing prices and rents increased 139 and 149 percent respectively during the six-year period before the games and the lack of affordable housing forced low-income earners out of the city.
• For the 1996 Atlanta Games, some 30,000 poor residents were displaced due to gentrification.About 2,000 public housing units were demolished. Legislation was introduced to criminalize homelessness, the report said.
• Legislative measures also were introduced ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympics to simplify the expropriation of private property. Hundreds of Roma were evicted from their settlements. Homeless people were also locked up and stuck in mental hospitals
• Because the main sporting complex for the 2000 Sydney Games was built on surplus government wasteland, no one was directly evicted or displaced for those games. But the city's gentrification led to house prices more than doubling between 1996 and 2003. Rents soared 40 percent, forcing many to move to the city's fringe.

In short, the real human rights abuse is not just Beijing, but the Olympics itself. Even The Economist has to admit, that the modern Olympic movement has never lived up to its own hype:

Lofty words are always a hostage to fortune. The Olympic movement boasts that the games «have always brought people together in peace to respect universal moral principles.» Yet history suggests otherwise. Boycotts marred the jamborees of 1956, 1976, 1980 and 1984. In 1968 two American sprinters gave a Black Power salute on the podium. The 1972 games were blighted when Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes.

It's not as if athletes will miss opportunities for competition, or corporations for advertising. World Cups are just as prestigious, and incur their own abuse (that will be the next boycott!). But, if we want to use the Olympics to make a one-time statement about Sudan, then why not take the extra effort and avoid future abuse on a two-year rotating schedule?

A remarkable «Discussion about Counterinsurgency on The Charlie Rose Show. Two scholars, Sarah Sewall and Montgomery McFate take credit for their contributions to The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and offer further commentary on Iraq and Sudan. Both praise the US military organization's adaptation to the counterinsurgency model and caution that «the American way of war» will probably never recur. Both bemoan how American political leadership lags the military leadership's ability to understand and accept local conditions outside of American standards. Sewall for her part also cautioned about how to minimize the consequences of withdrawal in Iraq, and how little the counterinsurgency model might apply to that war. Finally, there is the hope American political and military leadership will not evaluate the counterinsurgency model based on the failures in Iraq.

A must-view interview!