Southern New Hampshire University/University of Limpopo South African Microenterprise Development Institution

Leave it to the Republicans to oppose microloans and small enterprise budget assists to economically disadvantaged persons of continents that begin and end with the letter A and don’t feature tiny Asian geniuses with advanced degree paths for minors. Yes, I’m talking about Africa and the Americas, two places where apparently it’s manifest destiny to die of starvation whilst your banana republic rulers and psychotic genocidal despots make mincemeat of the general populace instead of building the infrastructure and strengthening education pillars.

No, Alabama doesn’t apply, though you might have thought so. But while Fannie Mae is no longer giving out subprimes to backwoods illiterates, the clearest indicator of the success of the microloan principle is the fact that millions are presently living under the watchful eye of the welfare state. It’s not a lonely existence, nor is it devoid of merit. Why, just the other day Buck Muskrat and his family of eight began the long, arduous journey into the hills of Arkansas with intent to produce and distribute “mountain sweet water” across state lines. Thanks to government micro-handouts, they get to install new filters on their custom-built still, ensuring that their customers will no longer suffer debilitating blindness, retching, and liver disease.

But let’s transport the process overseas to the squalid savannas and craven cocoa fields. What happens when you give Swahili Sue a generous grant of two thousand American? Sue, with the entrepreneurial spirit of her long-necked ancestors, is able to collect shiny pebbles, paying the kids of distant tribesmen sweatshop wages to gather shells (dead animals or bullet casings, either one), while her cousin, the one who owns the funky bodega (which he secretly runs a Nigerian email scam out of), sells her radiator wire from junked and burned out vehicles. She now employs neighbors, who previously hacked *their* neighbors to death with machetes for a living, to construct necklaces and bracelets, which she is then able to ship to the nearest city market, where corrupt officials, after being given their own economic stimulus packages, allow her to maintain a booth in the market next to the biggest tourist draw in the city. Pretty soon Swahili Sue is pulling in $500 every month. After bribes and payouts, she is still the leader of the pack, and with her growing capital she’s able to employ even more.

Pretty soon she’s running a small shop inside an air-conditioned building. She gets calls from local politicians, who want her opinion on new zoning legislation. She threatens to move her business across the water if she doesn’t get a tax break from the local warlord, who it so happens, freaking loves those bullet casing necklaces. He cuts her a midnight deal, and now the two of them maintain one of the biggest jewelry trading outfits in the entire region. She’s making the real stuff now, including possible blood diamonds from south, in the Congo, but it’s funny how the greasy southerners always seem to have a fresh story about all the opportunity there is if you just open your eyes.

Swahili Sue is better than all that. She maintains a delicate balance, paying off the right officials to keep her operation running smoothly, but she also takes care of her people. Her factory floor fairly hums, and even pregnant workers get padded chairs to sit on while they set stones, hand-embroider little suede bags, and stuff pendants into jewelry boxes. This is the reality–you can’t run a business here without feeding the monkey, and the monkey drives a lot of cars, usually bulletproof vehicles with tinted glass and built-in bars with the country’s second best Amarula and ice. Sue looks at the papers every day to know what’s coming down the road–which ethnic cleansing may clean her country’s house next, which politician she’ll want to cozy up to and which one she’ll want to steer clear of.

And at the end of the day, when she’s selling her company to a guy who thinks he’s a businessman because he ran a regional sugarcane distribution center and whose rich uncle is subsidizing him, she’ll think back to that first $2000 someone gave her, and wonder how she came so far with so little.

“I have introduced a resolution that calls on President Bush to define the mission of our military in Iraq, set a plan to accomplish that mission and establish a timeframe for the withdrawal of US troops, so that we can provide some clarity with regard to our intentions and restore confidence at home and abroad.”

I doubt any such resolution will garner much appreciation from folks who simply want us out NOW NOW NOW. Any defined mission (other than to exit Iraq) will be met with acrimony, any plan to accomplish said mission (again, other than to exit Iraq) will be decried, and any timetable set won’t be fast enough.
The problem is the military is being used now as an enforcement tool rather than a…military. That tends to be bad for infrastructure, since enforcement generally takes precedence over rebuilding (which is why many reports from Baghdad, Kabul, Mosul, etc mention the horrible living conditions that were present under Saddam, but which have been exacerbated by his overthrow and the subsequent vaccuum left behind).
However, to exit before Iraq has the national will to both run itself and eliminate (or diminish) the threat from domestic terror (or insurgency, if you like) would be fatal to the entire purpose of the war effort and democratic reform process.
So the question is (and always has been) when will we know when it is well and truly time to leave? Neither Bush, nor Rumsfeld, nor any politician or military personnel, nor even any Iraqi or Middle Eastern resident know the answer to that. It is a question, not of timetables and exit strategies, but of the collective abilities of all to discern the times and determine, when the time finally is right, how to go about leaving Iraq for good.
I just don’t think anyone can or is ready to answer that, and to do so prematurely through a specific timetable, is to knock on the door of disaster.

On the other hand, if this program were restricted to boys, think of the hell that would be raised. Miller is absolutely right that boys have been behind girls in academic performance for a while, but our political and educational leaders have continued to focus on girls’ achievement and even beat up on boys for being, well, themselves in class. The way this program was moved around is also unseemly, and its indirect association with a national park raises federal nondiscrimination issues.

There it is. The prominence of programs that openly discriminate through PC action is not new, but it is disturbing how few people seem to realize the ironies inherent in the methodology. Actually, when I think about it, I’m reminded of Affirmative Action, which is more race-based than gender-based, but shares similar, arguably worthy goals. It’s the perhaps unintended effect that these programs have on the portion of society that, in truth, needs as much attention as the ones being targeted. Minority benefits should not imply majority denigration.
Nevertheless, the focus here should be on the repercussions of this all-female program. Do we, as cherishers of individualism and freedom of society to advance in its own way through reform and social change, let this go? After all, no one’s stopping someone from starting an all-boy glacial class. Or do we call on the federal government to put its foot in yet another pie, based on cries of discrimination? I’d rather not see it come to the latter, though I’m not fully content with the notion that the implied double standard is allowed to stand.
Honestly, it’s been a while since I last confronted and thought about issues such as this. I’d like to get back into the game some–having had a nice break from the political and social circle I used to inhabit, I hope to put a few more brain cells on issues like these in the future. Here’s a shoutout to Greg Piper for keeping interesting posts of this nature on his blog, which I read daily and often link, and which you should be too, if you’re smart and interested. Keep ‘em coming, dude.
UPDATE: The students on the trip were/are high school students, NOT UW students. Sorry for the error.

Not for the first time, President Bush called upon Egypt in his recent State of the Union address to “show the way toward democracy in the Middle East,” and pundits want to hold the administration to its word. A Washington Post editorial in January hailed a group of anti-Mubarak protesters in Cairo and slammed Bush for giving “no indication that he objects to another of the fraudulent referendums with which Mr. Mubarak has ratified his rule.” Max Boot, writing in the Los Angeles Times, has asserted that there is “little evidence that Islamists are popular enough to win a free election in Egypt” and urged Washington to cut or squeeze the umbilical cord of aid to the regime “unless there’s real economic and political progress.” Throw the bum out, some argue, and let the chips fall where they will.
The desired ends of the Post editorial writers and Boot–liberal democracy in Egypt–are noble, and I share them. But the means they apparently envision–regime change through free elections this spring–would be self-defeating.

Braude goes on to say that opposition to Mubarak’s rule is as, if not more, theocratic and fundamentalist as the extremist opposition in Iraq. With conditions in Egypt, Braude says, Mubarak, himself a leader with a spot-stained record, might be in the best position to clean things up.

To foster a semblance of political balance in Egyptian society, political and cultural pressure must first be exerted from the top–a twenty-first century Ataturk-style project to undo the country’s decades-long tilt toward Islamism is needed. This means opening Egyptian broadcast media to progressive voices, not just religious clerics and the political establishment. It means advancing a secular humanist agenda through the educational system. It means opening the organs of state, from the judiciary to the executive, to the sort of exchange programs with democratic countries that bore fruit so profoundly in the Ukraine in recent months. The details of the project would best be left to Egypt’s liberals themselves, who know better than outsiders what they need to gain ground. But the central question has already been well expressed by Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, no stranger to the country’s prison system himself: “What, Mr. Mubarak, have you done to preserve the popularity of non-Islamist forces in the country?”

Mubarak’s response to increased American pressure indicates that, given the right motivations, he might be willing (and perhaps even enthusiastic) to enact more liberalized changes to the political structure in Egypt. Of late, he has demonstrated a more facile involvement in the Israel-Palestinina peace talks, whilst threats of aid withholding has Mubarak in a conciliatory mood, releasing political dissidents from prison that the United States has deemed useful and helpful for reform.

With Bush signaling that he intends to make the promotion of liberal democracy a staple of his second term, it would be a bad time to see one of the world’s more malleable Arab despots pass from the scene–assuming, as seems likely, that a replacement governing coalition gleaned from today’s political opposition groups would be worse.

By keeping a hands off approach in Egypt, at least for a couple of years, Bush would maintain the luxury of an ally whose words, if not actions, are aimed at not only remaining in the United States’ good graces, but also fostering an environment in which his son Gamal may have a better chance at winning an election. Gamal, as Braude writes, is far more accomodating a figure for democratic change in Egypt; his embrace of Western secularism, his uninvolvement with Islamist fundamentalism, and his political ambitions seems a far more approachable aim. Bush would be wise to wait and allow time to foster what free and fair elections would only undo.
Read the whole thing–it was a pretty fascinating and informative piece, despite my relative virginity with the subject matter.

As two people who drafted and negotiated the scope of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, we can tell you: The [Robert] Novak column and the surrounding facts do not support evidence of criminal conduct.

Memories being short in this country, this is unlikely to make an impression in the crowd that believes Bush personally called for Plame’s outing with the intention of ruining Joe Wilson’s career and reputation.
Piper thinks this is more relevant to the quality of editorialism than anything else. With sloppy disregard for anything remotely close to objective reporting, the instant allegations were made that Novak was a messenger of revenge, the call for investigations into the matter assumed too much and failed to dig deeply enough to find the truth. Piper:

Even in the absence of sources who can speak freely, the response from editorial pages and journalism advocacy groups to the Plame affair has been uncharacteristically sloppy. They didn’t know her CIA status, simply assuming that she must have been covert for Novak to exact this retribution on her. They never considered that Plame’s agency role might have been the decisive factor in the CIA sending Wilson, “an expert neither on nuclear weapons nor on Niger,” on the fact-finding mission (and what effort he put in there!). The editorialists and pundits who were screaming for an investigation apparently never thought that other journalists who were tangentially involved might get hauled before a grand jury and sent to jail if they refused. It’s no wonder that so few newspaper readers bother with the staff editorials if this is the average quality of research.

That about sums it up. Newspaper editorial sections have long ago abandoned reasoned debate, investigation, and discourse in favour of shouting matches and shadowy rumour mills. Someone should hire Greg–I have a feeling he’ll be a bit more partial to the actual details and less interested in the sugary crumbs that everyone else seems to fall for every time. Investigative journalist/editorialist waiting in the wings over there in Bethseda, and he’ll work for cheap!

I’d like to think that Martin can persuade all those Canadians who dismiss the vast swath of America as “Jesusland” to tolerate and even respect their neighbors to the south. But it’s a tall order.

As a long admirer of Canada, and as a one-time Canadian impersonator, I respect Canada’s ability to right itself from its French baggage overload, resume a steady course as America Jr., and hopefully figure out what’s wrong with their current civil rights policies. I just hope it happens sooner rather than later.