Category: Asia

Kabul by the Horns.

“The good news is that, seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks and nearly three years after the resumption of full-scale war with the Taliban, we are finally beginning to formulate a strategy — and we have officers in place who think strategically. As history shows, however, smart generals and shrewd strategists don’t necessarily yield victory — especially in Afghanistan.”

As the incoming administration correctly looks to reprioritize Afghanistan, Fred Kaplan summarizes the current situation in our “other” war, and the potential pitfalls ahead. “[T]here is a paradox: More U.S. troops are needed to provide security to the Afghan people; but these troops may, at the same time, fuel the insurgency — which will require more troops, and on the cycle goes.”

Kaplan: The Good News Abroad.

“It’s a truism that Barack Obama faces the most intractable set of challenges that any president has faced in at least 50 years. But on a few issues in foreign and military policy, he’s caught a break. Whether by luck, the effect of his election, or President George W. Bush’s stepped-up drive to win last-minute kudos, Obama will enter the White House with some paths to success already marked, if not quite paved.” Having covered six diplomatic priorities for Obama right after the election (the link was buried in this post), Slate‘s Fred Kaplan takes a gander at five foreign policy arenas primed for good news under the coming administration.

Bin Laden Long Enough.

“‘If you think of this as sort of a combination of [the hunt for] Eric Rudolph, who was the Olympic bomber, and the movie ‘Deliverance,’ multiplied by a factor of 10, that’s really what you’re focusing on in trying to find bin Laden,’ said Robert Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan.” Also high on the foreign policy to-do list for President-elect Obama: bringing the war on terror back to Osama bin Laden.

Alas, despite Dubya’s occasional bouts of half-hearted bluster, it seems the bin Laden trail may well have gone ice-cold over the past few years, while we’ve been focused on Iraq. “Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer, told CNN he’s talked to ‘a dozen CIA guys who’ve been on the hunt for him, and half of them told me they assumed he was dead, the other half said they assumed he was alive, but the key word here is assume. They don’t know.’…[Commander of special operations at Tora Bora Dalton] Fury says the best route for the president-elect to take would be to change the dialogue about bin Laden…He believes taunting the al Qaeda leader may force him to prove he’s relevant and, in the process, lead the United States right to him.“

Good Germans | Poor Little Rich Boy | Rusty Fan.

In the trailer bin of late:

  • Terrence Stamp, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Izzard and that scientology fella plot to kill Hitler in the latest trailer for Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie. (I think I can guess how the Fuhrer takes the news.)

  • Jamal Malik looks to win 20 million rupees and the girl of his dreams in the trailer for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, with Dev Patel and character actor Irrfan Khan. (Which reminds me, I tried out for Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? once in NYC — I got a perfect score on the pre-test and still didn’t make the cut, meaning I got axed by dint of my sheer, boring personality. Hmm, let’s move on.)

  • And, though it was withering in development hell for so long that it’s now woefully out-of-date, Jay Baruchel, Dan Fogler, and Kristen Bell — in a slave-Leia costume, no less — brave road trip woes, William Shatner, and the varied shocktroops and minions of Lucas the Hutt in the trailer for Kyle Newman’s Fanboys, also featuring Carrie Fisher and Billy Dee Williams paying their respective mortgages. (Yes, this looks terrible, but it seemed somehow GitM-appropriate, and did I mention the irrepressibly cute Kristen Bell dresses up as Leia?)

    • You’re no Ivan Denisovich.

    Sure, Reagan did this all the time. Still, it takes either a man whose memory is too wracked by age to be president — or an inveterate liar — to simply make up this kind of story. (See also Reagan.) Apparently, John McCain’s heartwarming tale of the Christian guard in Hanoi, which he related again over the weekend at the mutual kissing of Rick Warren’s ring, was in fact lifted from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. (Apparently McCain, and/or his ghostwriters, are fans of the man.) Uh, Senator McCain, did you really feel you had to embellish your time in a Vietnamese prison camp? The situation should speak for itself.

    For what it’s worth, McCain is blaming the controversy on “the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd.” Well, speaking as a member of the prObama World of Warcraft crowd (really, Senator, you’re dating yourself — again), I should note that the story actually originated with the Freepers several years ago, once the mythical maverick felt the need to start peddling false wares to the nation’s conservative Christians. For shame, Senator.

    Update: Forget Solzhenitsyn. According to scholars (via TPM), this tale isn’t from The Gulag Archipelago at all, but rather seems to be a right-wing fairy tale emanating from the likes of Chuck Colson and Jesse Helms.

    Thunder Rolls.


    When it comes to penning movie reviews around here, I tend to find writing about comedies the most difficult. (See, for example, my original mulligan on Borat.) For one, it’s hard to quantify exactly what makes a picture *funny*, and often what one person finds uproarious, another finds on the wrong side of lame. (Although I’m sure all right-thinking people can agree on the merits of The Big Lebowski.) For another, comedy more than any other genre seems dependent on one’s mood. (Case in point, Anchorman, which I saw in a funk and shrugged at, then caught later on TV and found quite amusing)

    All of which is to say that, even more than usual, my thoughts on Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder should be taken with a grain of salt — Actual results may vary. For my part, even though both Stiller and Jack Black were basically doing their usual schtick, and Steve Coogan is pretty much wasted (in more ways than one), I found Thunder to be a decently funny experience last Wednesday. It’s got a bit of the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach, and some jokes — say, Tom Cruise gyrating in a Harvey Weinstein fat suit — end up getting run into the ground through overuse, Austin Powers-style. But, that being said, I had a good time. It helped that I’m a sucker for the sort of Hollywood inside-baseball humor that Thunder endlessly trafficks in. (IMHO, that’s also the only redeemable thing about HBO’s otherwise aggravating Entourage.) And there are elements of it that just appealed to my funny bone — seeing Nick Nolte finally get all Chris Walken up on us, for example, or the funny-’cause-they’re-tired ‘Nam-era ditties (Creedence, Rolling Stone, Buffalo Springfield) interspersed throughout the flick. So, I’m not going to say it was the best film of the year or anything, but as a diverting and amusing morsel of late-summer fare, Tropic Thunder gets the job done…for me anyway.

    The story, as you probably know, involves a behind-the-scenes look at an Apocalypse Now-level movie disaster deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia. After a few wry trailers (the funniest and most dead-on being Satan’s Alley, although I’d have hated to be Eddie Murphy during The Fatties 2), we’re introduced to the gang on hand. There’s fading action star Tugg Speedman (Stiller, being Stiller), drug-addled comedian Jeff Portnoy (Black, going for Farley/Belushi and ending up with Black), Aussie thespian Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr, weirdly genius), hip-hop phenom Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson, used mainly to cover Downey’s ass), and newbie Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel, late of the Apatow factory), all under the supervision of video director Damien Cockburn (Coogan). Once the film ends up a month behind schedule (three days into filming), the who’s-more-grizzled source material for this ‘Nam picture, Four-Leaf Tayback (Nolte), insists Cockburn bring his bevy of spoiled stars into “the s**t.” Well, things go wrong, of course. And, soon, stranded somewhere near the Laotian border without even a Tivo on hand, this cast of thespians — only some of whom seem to understand the trouble they’re in — must navigate and negotiate their way back to SoCal-style civilization…but not before ticking off the local drug cartel, living out the inexorable men-on-a-mission tropes, and, just possibly, making a decent 80’s-style actioner in the process.

    The aspect of Tropic Thunder which *originally* was drawing the most heat is Downey, Jr.’s resurrection of one of Hollywood’s darker stains in its past, blackface. (Controversy has since moved on to the portrayal of mentally handicapped people in the film-within-the-film Simple Jack, which, to my mind, is patently absurd. Watch Forrest Gump or Rain Man again sometime and you should get the point.) At any rate, surprisingly given the poor taste involved in reviving minstrelsy in any form, I thought Downey and the writers actually pulled it off. This is mainly thanks to the incredulity of Jackson’s Alpa Chino to most of Downey’s racist tics, such as reveling in crawfish, gumbo, and the like. All in all, I’d say David Roediger should be proud: Downey and the Tropic Thunder team managed to make their blackface routine a comment about the enduring racist foibles of white people (and the supreme actorly ego of Russell Crowe-type Method men) more than anything else, and thus help to subvert black stereotypes by drawing attention to them. (Of course, one irony here, at least from Spike Lee’s perspective, is that Jackson’s “Alpa Chino/Booty Sweat” act could be construed as even more minstrel-ish than Downey’s role.) In any case, it was a high-wire tightrope act for Downey to pull off, and the fact that his performance has elicited so little controversy suggests how well he pulled it off. (In fact, the five minutes where Downey pretends to be Asian, and pretty much just chop-sockey’s it up rather embarrassingly, illustrates how badly this could’ve gone, and how much we’ve still got to work on.)

    Saakashvili’s Fatal Blunder.

    “How could Saakashvili have made such a catastrophic misjudgment? The answer is that he stepped into an elephant trap set for him by Russia. Moscow-backed Ossetian rebels had been provoking the Georgians for weeks with artillery attacks and raids. Saakashvili took the bait. He sent in his army for an all-out grab. But the Georgian offensive gave Russia just the excuse it needed to send troops and tanks into Ossetia. More importantly, the fact that Georgia launched the first attack has robbed Saakashvili of the moral high ground…Russia has once again proved itself a master of the brutal art of colonial politics.”

    As Russian President Medvedev announces he is halting military operations (although, apparently, not quite yet), the Daily Mail‘s Owen Matthews explains what’s happened in Georgia…and what’s at stake. “The only non-Russian controlled oil pipeline from Central Asia and the Caucasus runs from Azerbaijan through Georgian territory to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan…It is too late for Russia to do anything to stop the existing pipelines — but a destabilised Georgia would doubtless undermine Western confidence in non-Russian gas supplies…[In addition] It’s impossible that NATO will accept Georgia as a member as long as its rebel regions are occupied by Russian troops – so in invading South Ossetia, Russia has effectively drawn a line beyond which NATO cannot expand.”

    Georgia On Our Minds.

    “‘I expressed my grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia,’ Bush said. ‘We strongly condemn bombing outside of South Ossetia.‘” As Georgian forces pull back from South Ossetia in the face of a full-scale Russian assault, the US, UN, and European Commission increasingly condemn Russian attacks across all of Georgia.

    Meanwhile, Medvedev argues that Russian operations are winding down, but that troops will stay in South Ossetia for awhile. “Anatoly Nogovitsyn, a colonel-general on Russia’s General Staff, said at a Moscow news briefing that Russia was not intending ‘to invade Georgia’ and that a ‘key principle’ of the current operation was that troops remain inside South Ossetia — ostensibly to protect a population it said was under assault by the Georgian military, as well as its own peacekeepers stationed there.” Update: Russia pushes into Georgia.

    Olympus — and Ares — in Asia.

    “‘This is the worst nightmare one can encounter,’ he said. Asked whether Georgia and Russia were now at war, he said, ‘My country is in self-defense against Russian aggression. Russian troops invaded Georgia.‘” Well, so much for that whole settling-differences-through-sports shebang. On the day of the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, Russia has apparently invaded nearby South Ossetia, next to Georgia, on reports (or is it simply the pretext?) of a Georgian incursion and ethnic cleansing in the region.

    It’s still unclear (to me, at least) exactly what is going on over there. According to Georgia president Mikhail Saakashvili (and the current CNN reports), Russian troops have “been amassing at the border for the last few months. They claimed they were staging exercises there and as soon as a suitable pretext was found, they moved in.” According to Russian president Dmitry Medvedev (and some witnesses in the AP story), Russia is going in to protect Russian citizens in South Ossetia from both ethnic cleansing and a Georgian attempt to retake the breakaway region, which apparently Saakashvili has been promising to do for awhile. “Russia ‘will not allow the deaths of our compatriots to go unpunished’ and ‘those guilty will receive due punishment…My duty as Russian president is to safeguard the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, wherever they are. This is what is behind the logic of the steps we are undertaking now.‘” So, somebody‘s up to no good here on Opening Day, and, with competing claims to the region at hand, matters could soon get much worse.

    In any case, at the moment we’re calling for an immediate cease-fire in the region, and have reasserted that “the U.S. supports Georgia’s territorial integrity.” More to come, I’m sure.