The best news about the Vice Presidential debate tonight is that it will almost surely be the least significant of any of the debates held. Last week we got a serious, substantive debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush, and (to my wildly partisan eyes, at least) a confident and thorough stomping by Kerry all over Little Lord Bush. (I still would much rather that I could vote for John Kerry in 1971, but it’s a fallen world and you’ve got to take what you can get.) Tonight, what we got was a series of weak and poorly-connected attacks between two non-respsonsive soundbite machines, a vituperative bull session without any clear upshot for anyone. Dick Hordak Cheney was appalling as always; John Edwards surprised no-one (I hope) by turning out to be a smiley face atop an empty suit.

That’s not the main topic for this post, though; the Veep debate was way too lame to justify a post about it. Rather, I want to follow the candidates’ own procedure and talk for a while about some tangential point that happened to be raised along the way even though it has nothing to do with the question. During one of his most meandering answers, Edwards tried to run to the right of the Bush Administration on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Along the way he offered the following nugget of conventional wisdom about the predicament of the Sharon government:

They don’t have a partner for peace right now. They certainly don’t have a partner in Arafat, and they need a legitimate partner for peace.

But why in God’s name do they need that?

Israel did not look for a partner for peace in South Lebanon. They are not looking for a partner for peace in Gaza.

We need to think carefully about what trying to find a partner for peace means in this context. You might, of course, wonder whether the Palestinians have a legitimate partner for peace in the government of Ariel Sharon; you might well, on the other hand, agree that Arafat is a crook and a thug, that he has failed ordinary Palestinians countless times, and that there is little hope for any substantial progress of any sort with him. But how did Arafat come to hold the position of power that he holds now? What process legitimated his Fatah cops and his authoritarian regime? Oh yes, it was the negotiated peace process. When American or Israeli politicians talk about trying to find a partner for peace what that means is hand-picking someone who will be reliably agreeable in negotiating on behalf of all Palestinians. What it means is that the occupation has to keep on its long, bloody, deadly grind until politicians from Israel and from the U.S. have effectively handed over the reins of power in the Palestinian community to someone based on their negotiating priorities. What that means is giving tremendous power and resources to a select few and expecting this elite–created from the coercive pressure of the occupation, with no authorization from the Palestinians that the partner for peace claims to speak on behalf of. That’s what they did for Arafat and Fatah, and that’s what they are trying to do now for Fatah officials seen as more moderate or more reliable; but the whole history of the colonial and postcolonial world should tell you that hand-picked elites cannot be trusted not to abuse the power and resources they are given–least of all hand-picked elites whose claim to legitimacy derives from the occupying power. The record is as clear in the occupied territories as anywhere else: an Oslo-style negotiated process, and the requisite partner for peace propped up Yasser Arafat as the stand-in for the Palestinian people as a whole, and hand-picked Fatah as the government for the Palestinian Authority. It has not moved the peace process forward; it handed tremendous power and resources within the Palestinian community to bandits and street thugs. It has made a terrible situation worse, with every passing day, for ordinary Palestinians and ordinary Israelis.

Sooner or later Edwards and Cheney and Sharon and Barak and the rest of them are going to have to realize that peace through hand-picked partners for peace doesn’t work. It provides only the illusion of a peace process. There’s a moral here, for both the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. The answer is not negotiating (which legitimates and empowers any gangster who happens to attach himself to the peace-process teat). If you think that you can handpick a good government for the people underneath the boots of your military, and if you think that refusing to lift those boots from off their necks until you have found the right one for them, is a good way to promote peace, freedom and human flourishing, then you are on the wrong side of history. But continuing an indefinite occupation is intolerable (as the majority of Israelis already realize, and as most Americans are swiftly learning). So what is to be done?

Isn’t it obvious? Quit trying to negotiate and quit trying to stay; unilaterally withdraw, and let the once-occupied people decide their own fate rather than trying to hand-pick a new State for them before you leave. In Gaza, in the West Bank, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, what we all need to do is: quit trying to find a partner for peace, quit trying to win, and just get the hell out.

Getting the hell out and leaving people alone. Now that would be a nice model for that broader Middle East.

Further reading

• GT 2004/08/16: The Long Memory
• GT 2003/11/11: Winning the Peace

From Pakistan, there is a horrifying and completely ordinary tale.

In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran’s brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village’s tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy’s sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped.

. . .

In Pakistan’s conservative Muslim society, Ms. Mukhtaran’s duty was now clear: she was supposed to commit suicide. “Just like other women, I initially thought of killing myself,” said Ms. Mukhtaran, now 30. Her older brother, Hezoor Bux, explained: “A girl who has been raped has no honorable place in the village. Nobody respects the girl, or her parents. There’s a stigma, and the only way out is suicide.”

A girl in the next village was gang-raped a week after Ms. Mukhtaran, and she took the traditional route: she swallowed a bottle of pesticide and dropped dead.

But there is something extraordinary, too: Ms. Mukhtaran survived, fought back, won a victory for justice and struck a fragile note of hope.

But instead of killing herself, Ms. Mukhtaran testified against her attackers and propounded the shocking idea that the shame lies in raping, rather than in being raped. The rapists are now on death row, and President Pervez Musharraf presented Ms. Mukhtaran with the equivalent of $8,300 and ordered round-the-clock police protection for her.

Ms. Mukhtaran, who had never gone to school herself, used the money to build one school in the village for girls and another for boys – because, she said, education is the best way to achieve social change. The girls’ school is named for her, and she is now studying in its fourth-grade class.

Unfortunately, that note of hope is fragile not only because of the terrible crime that Ms. Mukhtaran survived, but also because the Pakistani government is threatening to undo, by neglect, the remarkable victory that Ms. Mukhtaran won.

But the Pakistani government has neglected its pledge to pay the schools’ operating expenses. “The government made lots of promises, but it hasn’t done much,” Ms. Mukhtaran said bluntly.

She has had to buy food for the police who protect her, as well as pay some school expenses. So, she said, “I’ve run out of money.” Unless the schools can raise new funds, they may have to close.

Meanwhile, villagers say that relatives of the rapists are waiting for the police to leave and then will put Ms. Mukhtaran in her place by slaughtering her and her entire family.

Don’t let it end in tragedy. You can send contributions directly to Ms. Bibi by writing a check directly to Mukhtaran Bibi and sending it to:

Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036

Or directly to Ms. Bibi by international post at:

Mukhtaran Bibi
Meerwala
Tehsil Jatoi
Post Office Wadowallah
District Muzaffargarh
Punjab
Pakistan

Any amount of money, no matter how small, helps. (Remember that theschools themselves were established on about US$8,500.) Do it. Now. It’ll mean a lot more than anything else you accomplish by sitting around on the Internet. After you’ve done it, you can read my kvetching about Nicholas Kristof below, but this is more important.

Read the rest of Horror and Hope …

Vote early, vote often: enjoy the electronic voting experience with an online Florida Election Ballot.

One of the least respected and most important conversational features of a democratic polity is the question. If you’ve been watching the past two decades of Reaganism, Clintonism, and Busholepsy, you may have noticed the steady progress of politicians sidestepping, evading, ignoring, and otherwise refusing to respect the most simple questions directed at them. So it’s nice to see some rumbling from liberal and Leftist sources–brainstorming hard questions that demand serious answers (pointed out by Sappho’s Breathing: Questions for W.).

Of course, there are the expected stuff. Why have you lost interest in Osama bin Laden, the leader of the organization that attacked the United States of America on September 11? and all that. Good questions, questions that deserve to be answered; but the ones that I would insist on are a bit different. (If I had three questions, I’d include an obligatory war question–on Iraq, and on the killing of Iraqi civilians, specifically. But this is Two Questions for George W. Bush.)

First question:

George, in 2000 you promised to preside over a fiscally conservative administration. Yet over the past four years, with a clear majority of both houses of Congress held by your allies, you have presided over the largest increase in federal spending and programs since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. More than half of the growth in expenditures has had no relation at all to war or civil defense. Who will pay for these spending increases, and the rapidly increasing federal debt?

Second question:

If you had the opportunity to rewrite the laws as you see fit, George, would you make a law banning abortion? If so, what would you do to women who sought abortions, and what would you do to doctors who provided them?

(Sidebar: why in God’s name aren’t John Kerry and his pals drilling George Bush at every opportunity over abortion? Bush has no politically acceptable answer to a question like this–he cannot say he wouldn’t, or else his base will be screaming for his head on a platter; and he cannot say that he would (particularly not if saying that he would entails spelling out the actual means by which such bans would be achieved)–if Democrats make this election a referendum on abortion then Democrats will win. Is it because Kerry doesn’t want to be closely associated with the controversial abortion issue? But why not? A solid pro-choice position is only controversial for the Christian Right. Is Kerry trying to win votes from the Christian Right?)

In any case, even if I only got two questions, this third follow-up would be necessary:

Very well, but what is your answer to my question?

Or, perhaps:

What in God’s name did that even mean?

Last week, while stumping for her husband’s re-election campaign, Laura Bush noted that It’s for our country, and our children and our grandchildren that we do the hard work of confronting terror and promoting democracy, and saluted the fighting men and women in Iraq who make that hard work possible. This is standard Bush administration boilerplate, and of course it’s the kind of boilerplate that the conservative audiences at these speeches lap up. But one ticket-holding audience member, Sue Sapir Niederer, had a bit of a different perspective: her son, Army 1^st Lieutenant Seth Dvorin, who was killed in Iraq while trying to disarm a bomb. Ms. Niederer, wearing a t-shirt that read “President Bush, you killed my son”, Ms. Niederer spoke up in the middle of Ms. Bush’s salute to the veterans to ask why her son was sent to die, and Why aren‘t the senators, the legislators, the congressman, our children serving in this war, if this war is a war that they agree with, there are three…

Well, knowing this administration, you can be sure that Ms. Bush and the event staff showed their compassion, their respect for vigorous public debate, and their deep concern for the lives of soldiers and their families. Specifically, they showed it by trying to talk over Ms. Niederer’s questions by continuing the scripted speech, and then by handcuffing a grieving mother, dragging her out of the building, and arresting her, while the crowd tried to drown out her voice by yelling Your son chose to fight in that war and chanting Four more years.