Recently in Asia Category

"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."

"'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.

"'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.

"Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terror camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States...'The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today that is comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,' said Seth Jones, a Pentagon consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation."

In the NYT, Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde explore how, despite all their endless bluster and unconstitutional behavior, the Dubya administration is losing the war against Al Qaeda, and has apparently given up on catching Bin Laden. "By late 2005, many inside the CIA headquarters in Virginia had reached the conclusion that their hunt for Bin Laden had reached a dead end...'You had a very finite number' of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. 'Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.'"

As I'm sure you've heard, Central China experienced a devastating earthquake today, killing thousands. This follows the nightmare cyclone in Burma (not Myanmar), a.k.a. Katrina writ large, which may now have claimed upwards of 100,000 lives. [Donations.] As with the 2004 tsunami, it seems almost criminally obtuse to keep nattering on about superdelegates and movie trailers while such large-scale catastrophes are unfolding. But, what is there to do?

"The protests, sparked by the anniversary of the failed 1959 uprising that sent Tibet's Dalai Lama into exile, are the latest embarrassment to hit 2008 Olympic-host China." Some deadly (and potentially Olympics-threatening) violence breaks out in Lhasa, Tibet, claiming between 10 and 100 lives (depending on the source.) "Chinese authorities blamed the Dalai Lama for the unrest, but the Dalai Lama said the protesters were simply acting out of 'deep-rooted resentment' of the Chinese government. 'As I have always said, unity and stability under brute force is at best a temporary solution...I therefore appeal to the Chinese leadership to stop using force and address the long-simmering resentment of the Tibetan people through dialogue with the Tibetan people. I also urge my fellow Tibetans not to resort to violence.'"

Reporting from China, the Atlantic's James Fallows says the news isn't really getting past the Great Firewall...yet.

"Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government’s attempt to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted. When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss it—at least with me—they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the government’s approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people’s daily lives."

Forget Ohio and Texas, Sen. Clinton...Want to see a "real" firewall in use? The Atlantic's James Fallows explains the nature and workings of China's "Great Firewall." "What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother...When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside? All the technology employed by the Golden Shield, all the marvelous mirrors that help build the Great Firewall—these and other modern achievements matter mainly for an old-fashioned and pre-technological reason. By making the search for external information a nuisance, they drive Chinese people back to an environment in which familiar tools of social control come into play."

"Today’s American system values upheaval; it’s been a while since we’ve seen too much of it. But Americans who lived through the Depression knew the pain real disruption can bring. Today’s Chinese, looking back on their country’s last century, know, too. With a lack of tragic imagination, Americans have drifted into an arrangement that is comfortable while it lasts, and could last for a while more. But not much longer." The Atlantic's James Fallows examines the unstable financial codependence between China and the United States, and how it could all too easily unravel. "Lawrence Summers calls today’s arrangement 'the balance of financial terror,' and says that it is flawed in the same way that the 'mutually assured destruction' of the Cold War era was...With allowances for hyperbole, something similar applies to the dollar standoff. China can’t afford to stop feeding dollars to Americans, because China’s own dollar holdings would be devastated if it did. As long as that logic holds, the system works. As soon as it doesn’t, we have a big problem." Update: Make that 1.53 trillion.

Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007. It seems all too many christmases of late has been marked by grim news on the global front, from the devastating tsunami to the botched Saddam execution. This year, obviously, it was the assassination of the former prime minister who, while no angel, nevertheless embodied for many hopes for a stable, democratic Pakistan. Her murder -- in the military stronghold of Rawalpindi, no less -- further destabilizes a nuclear-armed nation already teetering on the brink, and roils significantly the Dubya administration's fatally flawed approach to the country. Let's just hope Bhutto isn't remembered as the next Franz Ferdinand.

"'The train is derailed and off the tracks,' said Stephen P. Cohen, author of 'The Idea of Pakistan.' 'We have to give ourselves a share of the responsibility for this. We placed all of our chips on Musharraf.' At this point, Cohen added: 'I don't think there is anything we can do. We are not big players in this anymore.'" Dubya diplomacy takes another huge hit as a power-hungry President Musharraf declares martial law in Pakistan to ensure his continued reign, sparking nationwide protests and leaving the Bushies between a rock and a hard place. "One adviser traveling with Rice saw a silver lining in the rapid turn of events. 'Thank heavens for small favors,' the official said. Compared to Pakistan, 'Iraq looks pretty good.'" Oh, joy.

Update: Slate's Fred Kaplan weighs in. "The state of emergency in Pakistan signals yet another low point in President George W. Bush's foreign policy -- a stark demonstration of his paltry influence and his bankrupt principles. More than that, the crackdown locks us in a crisis -- a potentially dangerous dynamic -- from which there appears to be no escape route...The Bush foreign policy was neither shrewd enough to play self-interested power politics nor truly principled enough to enforce its ideals."

Congressman Tom Hanks bends the House rules for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the new trailer for Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (from the book by George Crile), also starring Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, and Ned Beatty. Hmmm...it looks a bit like Volunteers.

Attempting to be Last Tango in Shanghai by way of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, or at the very least to cast straight sex in as taboo a light as the gay love of Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is, the lurid promise of its NC-17 rating notwithstanding, sadly a bit dull. As with most of Lee's oeuvre, the film is ravishingly beautiful throughout, and it recreates WWII Shanghai much more evocatively than, say, Soderbergh's The Good German did Berlin. But, at two hours and forty minutes, the film also feels overlong, and its central conceit -- female agent deep undercover, deep under the covers -- is burdened with entirely too much in the way of backstory. Lust, Caution isn't a bad film by any means, but, its occasional explicitness notwithstanding, it doesn't make for a particularly memorable one either.

As Lust, Caution begins, it's 1942 in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, and four wealthy women, seemingly above the harsh impositions of wartime, exchange gossip and veiled state intel over a friendly game of Mahjong. Among this quartet are Yee Tai Tai (Joan Chen), wife of the secret police chief (Tony Leung), and one Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei), the young and beautiful spouse of a Hong Kong importer. But, as we soon discover (after she leaves the game and makes a suspicious phone call in an English cafe), Mak Tai Tai does not in fact exist. Rather, we are to learn in a very extended flashback (it's Michael Clayton all over again), she is Wong Chia Chi, a resistance agent whose journey to that Mahjong table began four years earlier, as a displaced schoolgirl in Hong Kong. Falling under the spell of a handsome, earnest young patriot (Wang Lee Horn) then, Wong, a lover of movies, begins appearing in nationalistic plays to much acclaim. And, when it is decided by her schoolyard coterie of six that more drastic action should be taken to fight the Japanese invader, she takes on the role of an importer's wife to lure a key collaborationist, the aforementioned Mr. Yee, to his demise.

But trapping Mr. Yee poses several quandaries for these budding freedom fighters. For one, there is the rather delicate matter of how an inexperienced virgin could pass for a married woman. For another, this Yee is no provincial rube, but a man who's at once deeply careful and extremely untrusting. Most problematic, Mr. Yee is no ugly, oafish lout, but the one-and-only Tony Leung, and hardly anybody in this world looks better smoking artfully in period suits than Tony Leung. Nevertheless, the kids go for it...with mixed results. And, when a spy is needed by the real Resistance to trap Mr. Yee a few years down the line, they find one ready-made in Wong, who takes on her role anew with even higher stakes. Only now, she discovers, Mr. Yee is more cruel than he first lets on, and very much into the rough stuff, sexually speaking. And, more to the point, once the Pandora's Box of her own sexuality has been jarred open by Yee, Wong begins to lose herself in the part, to the detriment of all...

WWII spies, steamy, illicit sex...this seems like it should be an enticing concoction, to be sure...obviously it was right up Verhoeven's alley in Black Book. But, as several reviewers have put it, Lust, Caution turns out to be much more cautious than it is lustful. Even if you factor out the extra hour of padding here, that's a problem. Ang Lee's films, among them Crouching Tiger, The Ice Storm, and Brokeback, have always been noted for their delicacy and artful restraint, which is frankly why he may not have been the best choice for this material, about a couple who lose themselves in sexual passion. The much-discussed sex scenes aren't as puritanically minded as the nightmare visions of Requiem for a Dream, but there's a definite coldness and frigidity about them, as if neither participant is having very much fun. They're not so much erotic as they are animalistic, all acrobatic contortions and grunted yelps. I guess you could argue that's the point -- the two are driven not by love at all but by an inexplicable earthy necessity, and Lee even cuts to a growling German shepherd to forward that idea along. But, if that's the case, if it's all just physical -- then why -- spoiler here -- when a key slip-up is made by one of the lovers, doesn't it happen while in the throes of passion, rather than when one is presented with the sight of a shiny (dare I say gaudy?) bauble?

The acting in Lust, Caution is universally good, with special plaudits going to Tang Wei and Tony Leung. And sex is usually handled so sophomorically in films that I feel bad for faulting Lee's unabashed use of it to further the story along here. But take away those few explicit scenes, and you're left with a rather conventional snooze of a cloak-and-dagger movie, however lusciously filmed. And even the sex here could've used some of the sensuous warmth of Shanghai-born Wong Kar-Wai's work. Sadly, when it comes to lust and caution in this film, Lust, Caution pretty much foregoes the red-light, and ends up raising more red flags than a Mao rally.

"If you're really worried about Iran, do you want to put your faith in the United States, the country that bungled Iraq? If you really care about Islamic fundamentalism, do you want to be led by the country that, distracted by Iraq, failed to predict the return of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan?" Why has the world soured on America of late? The real reason, argues Slate's Anne Applebaum and the data she surveys, is that, thanks to seven years of Dubya, we're starting to look incompetent. "And even if the surge works, even if the roadside bombs vanish, inept is a word that will always be used about the Iraqi invasion."

"'Inhumane deeds should be fully acknowledged,' said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee...'The world awaits a full reckoning of history from the Japanese government.'" The House passes a resolution calling for Japan to apologize for its WWII "comfort women" program. [Text.] "Lawmakers want an apology similar to the one the U.S. government gave to Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. That apology was approved by Congress and signed into law by President Reagan in 1988." Well, I'm all for offically recognizing historical sins in the past -- *cough* slavery *cough* -- but, unfortunately, no mention was made in this bill of our own possible complicity in Imperial Japan's ugly system of forced prostitution. The resolution might carry more rhetorical force if it did.

Yes, so it's been quiet around here again -- the usual reasons. And, what with the GOP debate this evening and
Spiderman 3 on Friday, there's much to discuss in and around here in short order. But, sadly, GitM is likely off again until early next week, as in a few short hours I'll be flying down to Puerto Plata, in the Dominican Republic, for a travel-reunion with old-friends. Y'see, it was ten years ago this weekend that my lightweight crew boat, though derided in the early standings, won the National Championship, and thus we've all decided to congregate and commemorate the occasion in grand style. (This also means my ten-year college reunion is in a month...my, time flies.) So, at any rate, I'm off to escape the dustbin of history for a bit and go enjoy the sights, sounds, and shores of the DR. Have a good weekend and a safe, happy, and memorable Cinco de Mayo. (And, while Tony Soprano may be correct in noting that "'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation," I have to say, back then, we were pretty darned fast.)

"'As expected, after it opened it was elbow to elbow,' the history says. 'The comfort women...had some resistance to selling themselves to men who just yesterday were the enemy, and because of differences in language and race, there were a great deal of apprehensions at first. But they were paid highly, and they gradually came to accept their work peacefully.'" The continuing furor in Asia over Japan's ignominious use of "comfort women" (re: forced prostitution) during WWII reaches America, as it comes to light that occupation Japan created a similar "comfort system" for American GI's in the year after the war (until MacArthur shut it down in the spring of 1946.) "An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan's atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war...Although there are suspicions, there is not clear evidence non-Japanese comfort women were imported to Japan as part of the program."

"Writing is a way to have a dialogue with yourself. You can never compete with something in the past, in memory. Like some people said, we love what we can't have. In this world, the end becomes the beginning. It's very unfair for anyone around him [Tony] in the present, because they can never compete with his imagination or his memory. We love what we can't have, and we can't have what we love."

Since I spent Friday evening watching In the Mood for Love -- a tale of a romance-that-almost-was, told in furtive hallway glances -- and 2046 -- a broader and more diffuse disquisition on love and heartache -- back-to-back, here's an intriguing 2004 interview with director Wong Kar-Wai on how they fit together: "Mood is a chapter in 2046. It's like 2046 is a big symphony, and Mood is one of its movements." Maybe so, but I'm glad I saw them as I did. At first Tony Leung's Chow in 2046, a dissolute, world-weary rake, seemed eons apart from the quiet, somewhat nervous journalist of ITMFL. But the films are clearly meant to be taken as a piece. From its first images (hole, train) to its last (taxi, hole), 2046 dwells on the corrosive consequences for Chow of ITMFL: The memory of Su (Maggie Cheung), bottled up in the tree, is eating Chow alive...hence, the whole otherwise-non sequitur sci-fi subplot (ITMFL told again, by Chow to himself) involving the indecisive android. (Um, the last few sentences make more sense if you've seen the films, but only slightly.)

Now I really kinda wished I'd watched Days of Being Wild, the first part of Wong's trilogy, before these two. But then again, however sumptuously filmed (these movies are absolutely gorgeous to look at), and however tempered by the presence of several stunningly beautiful actresses (Cheung, Zhang Zi Yi, Gong Li, Faye Wong), there's only so much exquisite melancholy I can take in a given evening. By the end of this extended tale of romance and loss, I had half a mind to just curl up in a ball and drift amid a sea of despond for the rest of the night, lost in the phantom reverie that was both the allure and prison of "2046" in 2046. Even stronger was the urge to light a cigarette and watch the tendrils of smoke slowly writhe and curl through a shaft of light, preferably to the strands of some vintage Nat King Cole. If nothing else, these very worthwhile films suggest, if you're going to ruminate on old heartaches, you might as well look really good doing it.

[%@*#, that's aggravating. Movable Type just ate my entire review. Ok, let's try this again.] A lush, operatic saga of a cancerous ninth-century family fracas that threatens to topple the Tang Dynasty from within, Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower is the type of film for which the cliche "sumptuous visual feast" was coined. True, this sordid tale of betrayal, corruption, incest, and time-release murder is overwrought to the point of self-parody, and the action sequences -- like those in Zhang's House of Flying Daggers -- eventually veer well past rousing to the far corner of preposterous. But, my, is this film gorgeous to look at: From start to finish, Curse of the Golden Flower is an explosion of riotous color. (Particularly after sitting through two hours of Letters from Iwo Jima's bleak, monochrome grays, viewing the veritable kaleidoscope on display here felt even more sensuous and indulgent.) Throw in some very watchable performances by Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li, and others, and Curse comes across to me as the best entrant in Zhang's recent trilogy of fanciful-historical Chinese epics (That would be Curse, Daggers, and the scarily nationalistic Hero -- Fortunately the political subtext is more restrained and ambiguous here. In fact, Curse may even be revolutionary, depending on how you read the film's final image.)

It is the hour of the rat for the Tang Dynasty, chrysanthemums bloom throughout the Middle Kingdom, and opulence comingles with palace intrigue in the halls of the Forbidden City. For the Emperor (Chow Yun-Fat, both fierce and serene), in his Divine wisdom, has seen fit to slowly and secretly poison his Empress (Gong Yi, equally good), by means of a deathly black fungus added to her daily medicine. The Empress, meanwhile, strains to rekindle her romance with the Emperor's first son (by a previous marriage), the Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye), but he only has eyes for a fetching maid (Li Man) in the imperial employ. (In fact, she is the daughter of the doctor administering the poison.) And also residing in this increasingly broke down palace are the Princes Jai (Jay Chou) and Yu (Qin Junjie), both of whom discover they have their own roles to play in the schemes of their feuding parents, particularly after the ailing Empress weaves a plot of vengeance to coincide with the coming festival...

Also milling about the Forbidden City is a cast of hundreds: the cooks, maids, laborers, soldiers, ninjas (Yes, this film has ninjas, or at least their Chinese equivalent), and ladies-in-waiting that make up the infrastructure undergirding the Tangs' divine rule. Zhang goes out of his way here to emphasize the sheer amount of sweat and toil expected of this teeming support staff for even the most mundane task -- It takes at least four servants to administer the Queen's medicine and considerably more to cart the Emperor to and fro. Yet, Zhang seems to suggest, these people are as much part of the story as the resentful royals. They are the props of the extravagant ritual, rigid hierarchy, and striking beauty that characterize the Tang's rule, and they are ennobled by knowing and playing their appropriate role in this imperial order. Whether or not you agree with this sentiment (and Zhang himself seems to cast doubt on it by the final shot), it does make for several breathtaking scenes of elaborate ceremony throughout the film.

And, yes, some of these are battles. To be honest, both Hero and House probably exhibited better fight choreography. If you come to Curse expecting a martial arts extravaganza akin to those films, you may well leave disappointed. I found the final Helms' Deepish "silver versus gold" sequence to be too bloodthirsty (beheading prisoners and such), too unrealistic (here, more than anyone else in the film, physics don't apply) and too obviously CGI for my taste. That being said, there are a few notable melees interspersed throughout the picture, most of them involving the black-clad, scythe-wielding "Flying Monkey"ish ninjas of the Imperial Army, who tend to swoop down from above and bury their scythes in the nearest possible revolutionary with extraordinary aplomb. (Sigh. Only one movie after Iwo Jima, and war and violence are already being made to look artful again.)

While I thought most critics lavished too much praise on Pan's Labyrinth, the very similar swells of appreciation for Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima are, surprisingly, much closer to the mark. Eastwood's first crack at Iwo Jima in 2006, Flags of our Fathers, was to my mind a well-meaning dog, one made particularly lousy by the heavy-handed fingerprints of Paul Haggis all over the film. But (perhaps due to the different screenwriter, Iris Yamashita), Letters is really something quite remarkable. A mournful, occasionally shocking testament to the inhumanity and absurdities attending war, and a elegiac dirge for those caught in its grip, even on the other side of the conflict, Letters from Iwo Jima is an impressive -- even at times breathtaking -- siege movie. And strangely enough, elements that seemed trite or intrusive in Flags -- the desaturated landscape, the minimalist piano score -- are truly haunting and evocative here. In fact, Letters from Iwo Jima is so good it even makes Flags of our Fathers seem like a better movie just by association, which, trust me, is no small feat.

As you probably know by now, Letters from Iwo Jima follows the famous World War II battle, ostensibly depicted in Flags, from the Japanese side. Here, nobody cares about artfully raised flags or the Ballad of Ira Hayes -- the emphasis instead is on honor and survival. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe, as captivating here as he was in The Last Samurai) has been ordered to lead the defense of the island against the Americans. To this task, he fully devotes himself, despite fond memories of his earlier days on US soil. But it only takes a few walks around Mt. Suribachi for Kuribayashi to figure out it's pretty much a no-win scenario -- the Americans are too many, too productive, and too strong. And once word leaks out that the Japanese fleet has been broken at Leyte Gulf, Kuribayashi and his men -- most notably friendly grunt Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), and former Kempetai Shimizu (Ryo Kase) -- must slowly come to grips with the fact that they're not digging cavern defenses so much as their own tomb...a tomb in which many Japanese officers, and not least the headquarters on the homeland, will expect them to die with honor.

What's particularly surprising here is how unafraid Eastwood is to invert the usual sympathies of a World War II film. It's not just that the Japanese are the "good guys" here -- True, Letters dramatizes the soldiers' plight by portraying them, particularly Saigo, as just like our fun-loving GI's at heart. But it also doesn't shy away from examining a cultural emphasis on dying well that seems completely foreign to the American mind. And, although a wounded American serviceman shows up later in the film, for the most part the US forces are -- surprisingly -- portrayed here like something out of The Empire Strikes Back, all gleaming, remorseless battleships and Fiery Death from Above. (Some have argued that Eastwood elides over Japanese atrocities in this film, but I'm not sure that's really fair, unless I somehow just missed the Dresden firebombing subplot in Saving Private Ryan. This is not to say that all war crimes are equivalent or that both sides are equally guilty (although Lord knows it got ugly) -- that gets into a moral calculus well outside the bounds of this review -- only that Letters seems more interested in portraying war itself as an atrocity, and that enough reference is made to ugly tactics (aiming at medics, for example) that the film doesn't feel to me like a whitewash.)

The sobering truth at the heart of the grim, moving Letters from Iwo Jima is captured in its penultimate image. (Alas, like too many WWII films, Eastwood opts for an unnecessary contemporary bookend, but it's not as distracting as the Greatest Generation stuff in Flags. In fact, you might argue that it plays very well off those scenes, in depicting what little survives the war on the Japanese side.) I won't give it away here...suffice to say that Letters makes clear that War is a demon that rips lives apart and rends men asunder, no matter what side you're on or for what reasons. Regardless of race, creed, nationality, or ideology, all who invoke its wrath will eventually come to taste tragedy.

Jeffrey Sachs, take note: A new report finds that the best way to get the US to pony up some foreign aid for impoverished nations is to get that country on the Security Council, and pronto. "A two-year seat on the Security Council, for instance, can generate a 59 percent spike in U.S. assistance, according to a study by two Harvard University scholars that tracked U.S. economic and military assistance from 1946 to 2001. In times of crisis, U.S. aid to some member countries has increased by as much as 170 percent. Those aid levels tend to recede after the country leaves the 15-nation council." So, great news, Panama...You just hit the jackpot.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the Security Council seemingly decides on Ban Ki-Moon, South Korea's foreign minister, to replace Kofi Annan as the next general secretary of the United Nations. Ban's closest rival, India's Shashi Tharoor, has conceded the race...Official word comes next Monday.

Now, in our country there is problem. Despite being British, Sasha Baron Cohen, a.k.a. Borat, sparks a mild diplomatic situation between the US and Kazakhstan, one that the administration will try to alleviate with White House talks. To be honest, I think I'd prefer Borat representing my country over Dubya.

A belated happy 230th Independence Day to you and yours, and here's hoping the recent spate of scary news (North Korean missiles, incipent war in Gaza) didn't detract too much from the festivities in your parts. (Also, with regards to more joyous fourth of july rocket launches, congrats to the crew of Discovery STS-121 on a successful return to space yesterday.)

Also in news-of-the-future, China sets a lunar launch date of 2024.

As if the Dallas-Miami NBA Finals (ok, I was way off) weren't sports bliss enough 'round these parts, the 2006 World Cup has begun, with host Germany defeating Costa Rica 4-2 and Ecuador besting Poland 2-0 on Day 1. Alas, since I have to maximize my research time while I'm briefly back in the 202, and since the Manuscript Reading Room of the Library of Congress aggravatingly keeps bankers' hours (and charge $0.20 a photocopy, but that's a whole 'nother rant), it looks like I'll be missing much of the first round. But I promise to make it up on the back end.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet our crack foreign policy team, who apparently decided to catch some Z's during the slight-happy official state visit of Chinese president Hu Jintao. China...sure, this one's not important. Might as well get some shut-eye.

By way of a friend, the State Department releases its mandated yearly human rights report for 2005 (here), finding cause for alarm in Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, Burma, North Korea, Belarus and Zimbabwe and (surprise, surprise) progress in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report doesn't delve into human rights violations here at home (although China tries to fill that gap in response every year), but it does unequivocally state -- in bold, no less -- that "countries in which power is concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers tend to be the world's most systematic human rights violators." Hey y'all might be on to something. Deadpans the head of Amnesty International: "The Bush administration's practice of transferring detainees in the 'war on terror' to countries cited by the State Department for their appalling human rights records actually turns the report into a manual for the outsourcing of torture."

The LA Times examines the beginnings of the second lunar space race, which will involve, among others, the US, Europe, China, and India. "Some researchers even have a name for the first lunar city: Jamestown, in honor of the first English settlement in the New World."