I like Holbrooke. After the one chapter about him in "This Town" I wanted to read a book about him but there was no biography. Almost bought some sort of academic festschrift instead. But now there's a biography! By a good writer!
His is a name so generic I'm never sure if I remember who he is.
(And thanks Heebie! I'd forgotten about this myself.)
Holbrooke handed Mondale's speechwriter a paper about a similar conference, held in Evian, France, in 1938, on the fates of Jews in Nazi Germany. Almost no delegates at that earlier conference offered to raise their refugee quotas. As Holbrooke hoped, the speechwriter used the reference as a hook. "Let us renounce that legacy of shame," Mondale read out loud at the conference. "We have a world problem. Let us fashion a world solution. History will not forgive us if we fail. History will not forget us if we succeed." The speech roused a standing ovation and pledges from many delegates to let more people inside their borders.
I recently read the Atlantic cover story based on the book about Holbrooke (about his efforts to end the war in the Balkans and establish the Dayton peace agreement) and it was well done.
The obvious place for a peace conference was Paris or Geneva. Holbrooke didn't want either. Those sparkling cities had seduced diplomats who spent years talking and talking about Vietnam, eating well and sightseeing, while the killing continued on the other side of the world. Holbrooke wanted the United States to host the conference, and on a military base, where there would be maximum American control, no distractions, and no temptation to linger. He wanted the success to be American and he was willing to risk an American failure, and although he was a mere assistant secretary of state, the success or failure would also be his own, because this was Holbrooke's show and he was going to gamble everything for his country and himself.
Almost no one else liked the idea of an American venue. Why risk damaging the president just before an election year? But they deferred to Holbrooke, who had brought the talks this far.
He selected Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, outside Dayton, Ohio, one of the biggest military bases in America: 8,000 acres sprawled across flat farm country, 23,000 employees, an airstrip two and a half miles long. The delegations touched down on the night of October 31, and Holbrooke was the first on the red carpet to shake each arriving president's hand. Near the entrance to the base were four two-story brick barracks around a rectangular parking lot--the Visiting Officers' Quarters. These became the temporary home of the national delegations. The Bosnians and Croatians faced each other from the north and south ends of the parking lot, the Serbians and Americans from the east and west; the Europeans occupied a fifth barracks just outside the quadrangle. The housing blocks had long, narrow corridors and cramped rooms, with vinyl trim and shabby furniture, like a $49-a-night motel.
The only places to eat on base were the Officers' Club, a short drive away, and Packy's Sports Bar & Grill, in the concrete-block Hope Hotel and Conference Center, 200 yards across a grassy field from the barracks. Workers laid a winding path over the grass and lined it with ground lights, a modest touch of elegance. But in the history of international diplomacy nothing was less elegant than Wright-Patterson.
Like chaining the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel, but without the art.
5. Wright-Pat has the world's biggest aircraft museum, though. If there were military representatives at the talks, they'd probably love it.
I am pretty sceptical that the advantage of WPAFB was "I'm so bored that I will make peace if necessary in order to leave" and not "look around you at the immense array of air power that will resume turning your pathetic little parastate into crispy bacon bits if this peace negotiation falls apart".
I've been to Dayton. I'm much less sceptical. Not saying you're wrong, but it's very possible Dayton is that horrible.
Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, but every people and place has their own unique Ohio.
Holbrooke was also largely responsible for averting an India-Pakistan war, with possible nuclear exchange, around 1999 or 2000 IIRC.
I only just realized now that the "Wright" in "Wright-Patterson Air Force Base" must be after the Wright brothers, who were from Dayton.
And sure enough, Wikipedia confirms that it originated as Wilbur Wright Field in 1917(!).
I am pretty sceptical that the advantage of WPAFB was "I'm so bored that I will make peace if necessary in order to leave" and not "look around you at the immense array of air power that will resume turning your pathetic little parastate into crispy bacon bits if this peace negotiation falls apart".
The skepticism is reasonable, but the description makes it sound like there wasn't much of a threat of US intervention (emphasis mine).
There was no fixed closing date, though [Holbrooke] didn't think the cast could last longer than two weeks at Wright-Patterson. He came without a schedule or a script--this was an improv piece that could shut down at any moment.
He thought he would probably fail. And yet here he was, thrusting himself into every scene.
Tudjman, the Croatian president, came to Dayton the winner of the Balkan wars. His entire country was now ethnically cleansed, except for eastern Slavonia, the region across the Danube River from Serbia where the war had begun. Eastern Slavonia was all Tudjman wanted from Dayton--he would go back to war for it if necessary--so he was able to come and go from Zagreb with his obsequious retinue, playing the other two sides against each other for his own gain.
Milošević wanted peace at Dayton. He wanted the Americans to help get him out of what he had started years ago. In Holbrooke he'd found his redeemer, and just setting foot in the United States, where harsh coverage greeted Milošević as the evil mastermind of the war, was a sort of victory. He wanted to hold on to power in Serbia, and he wanted sanctions lifted. Holbrooke had tried to suspend them before the talks began as an incentive for a deal, but Anthony Lake and Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had blocked him. The ongoing stranglehold made Milošević vulnerable--he left Belgrade fearing that a military coup might occur in his absence or that assassination might await his return--and at Dayton he started out in no mood to negotiate. But he was ready to go further than anyone else for peace. Karadžić and Mladić were not among the Bosnian Serbs at Dayton; as indicted war criminals, they would have been arrested by U.S. authorities.
The Bosnians were the wild card. Izetbegović hated to negotiate, because it required him to make decisions, and any decision would either plunge his people back into war or ratify Serb atrocities. He saw the peace talks as a kind of blackmail, and he found the false niceties of diplomatic chat over meals with people who wanted to destroy him so unpleasant that he withdrew to his quarters. He slept badly at Dayton and woke up in the middle of the night with his heart pounding, as if he were about to have a heart attack. "I felt crucified," he later wrote. His two top advisers, Silajdžić and Sacirbey, hated each other. They were fighting for their political future--postwar Bosnia would not have room for all three leaders.
17 is well supported, but missing gratuitous insults directed at Dayton.
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"TIL there's a shitton of computer vision literature in 2017-2018 that COINCIDENTALLY tries to build facial recognition for Uyghur people. How. Curious." This does not seem to have gotten a lot of recirculation?
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It's kind of weird they're allowed to write-up the with they do to assist ethnic repression.
19 & 20. "Publish or be sent to the re-education camps."
The paper, apparently published Aug 2018. No, it doesn't seem to have gotten news coverage. Not just Uighurs but Tibetans and Koreans, researchers tied to Dalian Nationalities University and others in the northeast.
"Dalian Nationalities University" is not a typo, huh.
Home of the Fighting Persistences of Memories.
As if Dalian referred to Salvador Dali.
I don't know if Dali was ever that big in China though.
The short Twitter thread links to this Foreign Policy article that may or may not have gotten linked here last year: Beijing's Big Brother Tech Needs African Faces. Zimbabwe is signing up for China's surveillance state, but its citizens will pay the price. And of course they're writing up their findings. Who's going to stop them?
Oh, I thought it was a typo for "National University" because I had not heard of this "nationalities university" thing before.
29: The topic (and research, and investment in related companies) in general is circulating constantly, but I haven't seen the 19 paper mentioned before.
28: It's about eleven thousand square miles. (There's a separate city and prefecture in the southwest named Dali, which was once a large independent kingdom. No relationship to the man or to Dalian.)
I assume it's called "Nationalities University" because it caters to, or in a different time was once intended to cater to, the national minorities of China, who are absolutely equal to the Han in every way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7N2wssse14
There's a whole system of minzu/nationalities universities, by which the PRC has always studied, codified, co-opted, and is now annihilating, the non-Han. (And until quite recently, and probably still today in some places, non-Han could actually game them to get ahead - less competitive entrance exams than the national Mandarin standard, etc.)
I don't mean to bore you, Mossy, nor to treat you like a comment monopsony. I couldn't remember if you'd shared that Zimbabwe article last year or not (or if someone else had, but it probably would have been you). I'm at that point in the personal-life cycle where cultivating my garden dead lawn with live weeds is not sufficient to block out the burning world.
I don't think I'm a monopsony? Who should I see about that?
That FP link shows unread in my browser, so not me. I think I saw the headline in my alerts a while ago.
And I don't find any of this boring, and didn't mean to imply so.
"Doctor, I worry that I'm turning into a monopsony!"
[250,000,000 doctors nod attentively, jot down notes]
Anyway, it appears I am under considerably more stress than I had realized and I'm going to go calm down for a bit. (One of these days, heebie or neb or ogged or one of you should post a few ballpark numbers for average daily readership here. Ceteris paribus, I'd like to know how many witnesses to my okay close tab
When Dali National plays the Dali A&M Grand Masturbators, there's not an empty seat in the stadium.
lurid, you're a good commenter, not boring at all, and I like what you add to conversations. I hope the storm passes soon.
"the description makes it sound like there wasn't much of a threat of US intervention"
Not much overt threat but then there didn't need to be; the US had already intervened, by supporting the massively successful Storm offensive and ethnic cleansing of Croatian Serbs through MPRI mercenaries, and (through NATO) the Deliberate Forcd air strikes on Bosnian Serb positions, though most of the airframes involved were European IIRC because back then we still had Cold War armed forces.
A late friend worked for/with Holbrooke when he was ambassador to Germany, and all of those stories ring true with what she said about him, too.
This does not seem to have gotten a lot of recirculation
I've definitely seen coverage of it in the Graun, eg here which is itself to an extent an aggregation of a Bloomberg report, and in the FT, eg here.
Another Holbrooke/Dayton thing. IIRC an important factor was that his delegation had one computer workstation that ran a high-end GIS package, and they could take it away with them. So one party would propose some change to the borders, the NGIA map nerd on duty would plot out how that would look in 3D, everyone would take a look. Or they would go and see Holbrooke in secret and they would do the same thing, but the 'pooter would then mysteriously vanish, or have a diplomatic virus infection, so no other party could see the render and walk out until the fix was in.
That's something you definitely couldn't do now.
THAT'S NGA TO YOU, ASSHOLE.
If the founding fathers had their way, NGA wouldn't exist and we'd have 50 state agencies doing the work.
Look, if you're going to insist on being an intelligence agency rather than the Bureau of Maps so people don't think you're a bunch of map nerds, you might as well go through with it and put it in your acronym!
REAL SOBS ARE TLAS. ASSHOLE.
Tangentially related, this is a great story about how a couple of British officers managed to prevent Wes Clark starting a shooting war with the Russians at Pristina (if you can ignore the horrible uses of full stops at the end of quotes and subsequent capital letters in the middle of sentences, which drove me half-mad while reading it).
The direct command [that] came in from General Wesley Clark was to overpower them." Blunt said later. "Various other words were used that seemed unusual to us. Words such as 'destroy' came down the radio."
Blunt and his officers looked at each other. The line hadn't been great, but Clark's orders were clear. Seize the airport from the Russians, no matter the cost.
What was obvious to them was that this cost was rising by the second. A number of Serbian militiamen had arrived and were now taking up position alongside the Russians.
Worse, there was no sign of the rest of the KFOR column -- as Jackson had suspected, they had been held up at the Kacinic defile.
There, a Serbian general had spontaneously decided to block the pass. A rapidly deteriorating situation had only been resolved by the the arrival of 1st Para commander Adrian Freer on the scene, known to his men as "Angry of Aldershot".
"Let us through, mate." He'd said to the Serbian general with an evil grin. "We're off to make love to the Russians."
The two men glared at each other, then both laughed and the Serbians waved the column through. The advanced resumed.
Such a pity Jackson and Dannatt couldn't find the same spirit three years later.