George Packer's Blog, page 245

The Other Rebels

The Libyan rebels, with the backing of NATO air power and massive international pressure on Qaddafi, are having a hard time holding any town west of their base in Benghazi. Meanwhile, all but ignored by international media until today, the Ivorian rebels are poised to enter Abidjan, the last and most important stop on their relentless southward advance.

Back in 2003, I spent some time with Ivory Coast's northern rebels. They had a just cause—the government of Laurent Gbagbo, with the help of armed youth gangs from the Christian south, was pursuing a policy of anti-northern, anti-Muslim discrimination that had genocidal overtones—but they didn't inspire much confidence. Stuck behind a U.N. ceasefire line that was patrolled by French and West African troops, the rebels spent their ample free time getting drunk, boasting about their prowess, and committing acts of petty banditry. They drove around armed in pickup trucks, with Spider-Man logos and names like "Delta Force" painted on the sides. At night they sat in outdoor restaurants with pet pythons wrapped around their shoulders and downed glasses of local moonshine. No one was over thirty; everyone was his own chief. And these were the more disciplined rebels; the Liberian mercenaries were truly scary.

In 2003, the rebels said that all they needed was for the French troops to get out of the way. Gbagbo's gangs, meanwhile, were calling for direct American help against our mutual enemies, the Muslims. The U.S. was about to invade Iraq—why not Ivory Coast, too? The world paid no attention.

Eight years later, American and international attention is once again distracted. And eight years later, as they had promised over shots of moonshine, the rebels, now called the Forces Nouvelles, are about to take their country. After years of delay and stalemate, the northern politician Alassane Ouattara, who had loose ties to the rebels, won a fair election last October. The world, including Africa, demanded that Gbagbo, a former history professor (it's always worse when dictators have academic backgrounds), go. He refused; his security forces and gangs started killing people in Abidjan's Muslim neighborhoods, the civil war resumed, and last month the rebels crossed the ceasefire line. Abidjan is the home base of Gbagbo's youth gangs, the Young Patriots, and there could be a lot of ugly neighborhood-by-neighborhood violence in the coming days, with unarmed civilians getting the worst of it. But with the army melting away, nothing serious stands between the Forces Nouvelles and victory.

The key to their success is the legitimacy of their leader, Ouattara. I don't know whether the rebels have developed into a more disciplined fighting force than they were eight years ago—there is evidence that they have. But they've become politically sophisticated. The regional support for Ouattara, the isolation of Gbagbo, the financial vise grip that kept his soldiers from getting paid, and the collapse of his military command all led to the demoralization and disintegration of the regime. These were the advantages of the Ivorian rebels over the Libyans: years of experience, political leadership, a fair election, a fatally weakened regime that lost the will to fight.

The only help the Ivorian rebels needed from the outside world was the stamp of legitimacy. The needs of the Libyan rebels seem bottomless. The argument over when and where and how to intervene is enormously complex and, fundamentally, unresolvable. Any fixed abstract guidelines will perish against the reality of new circumstances (an implied theme of Obama's anti-doctrine speech on Monday night). Still, the American decision to get involved in Libya's war while staying out of Ivory Coast's makes sense. The strategic situation of Qaddafi's Libya amid the upheavals of the Arab world was more important, and the threat of massacres was more imminent. There was more to lose by staying out, and more to gain by going in. One intervention chosen doesn't make hypocrisy of all the others foregone. But if I had to bet on a marginally successful outcome, or at least a less dramatic failure, I'd go with the guys with pythons, who are doing it without our help.

Egypt and the Velvet Revolutions

The British historian Timothy Garton Ash, who's seen a few popular uprisings over the past quarter century, writes this in an essay called "Velvet Revolution in Past and Future," from his recent collection "Facts Are Subversive":

One might suggest that the best chances are to be found in semiauthoritarian states that depend to a significant degree, politically, economically and, so to speak, psychologically, on more democratic ones—and most especially when the foreign states with the most passive influence or active leverage on them are Western democracies.

When the people rise up, there's no guarantee they'll succeed. Just ask a Burmese or an Iranian. Egypt's revolution has a number of counts against it, the main one being the hollow core where Egyptian civil society ought to be—the absence of institutions, groups, and leaders that could shape this massive expression of popular will into an organized counterforce to the regime's violence, with the means to reach deep into the military hierarchy and a strategy for victory. Instead, Mubarak systematically closed off that space, so that he could say to the world: me or the Islamists, choose. In Burma in 2007, there was a similar void of opposition leadership, other than the moral power of the monks. Young Burmese later told me that they considered their headless revolution more flexible and durable than the older kind—one student called it "post-modern"—but the regime crushed it without much trouble, and hundreds of young Burmese are now rotting away in far-flung prisons.

Iran, on the other hand, had the key elements for popular success in 2009: a broad and alienated middle class, organized groups of civil society, professional journalists, a sophisticated political opposition. If you ignored the regime for a moment, Iran would have seemed a likelier candidate for a victorious velvet revolution than, say, East Germany in 1989, whose opposition consisted of a few pacifist churches and scattered writers and artists. But the regime made all the difference. Iran's Revolutionary Guards and Basij paramilitaries remained loyal and were ready, even eager, to inflict limitless violence. Ill-informed observers have shed a lot of ink explaining that certain authoritarian regimes stay in power because of the country's religion, its culture, its people's passivity or respect for authority or love of pleasure. In fact, the reason is much simpler. The difference between success and failure, between the Philippines and Burma, the Soviet Union and China, Poland and Iran, comes down to the willingness of security forces to fire their weapons into unarmed crowds. Very few people will stay in the main square once it's certain they'll be mowed down.

Where does Egypt fall in this modern history of non-violent revolution? The Mubarak regime seems like an ideal candidate for collapse. In Garton Ash's terms, it depends on the West—not least, on billions in American military aid. Unlike Iran, it has no revolutionary energy, however degraded, to muster in its own defense. Unlike Zimbabwe, it is open to the world and the world's scrutiny—which is why the regime, having allowed the foreign press to enter en masse, is now trying to shut it down. Unlike Burma, which has neighboring China, Egypt lacks any powerful regional ally to bolster its economy and uphold its case to the world.

And yet the regime hasn't collapsed, not yet. Mubarak's thuggishness turns out to be as ferocious as the Egyptian people knew it to be, and if the West is surprised that he's fighting back, perhaps that's because we've always turned away from the regime's true character, as long as tourists were welcome and the violence was directed at Islamists and those luckless Egyptians who happened to fall into the hands of the police. Under assault, the brave determination of the mass of people in Tahrir Square, and elsewhere, could use the support of leaders and groups with the toughness and vision to absorb the blows and persist, to find friends in unlikely places, including abroad. The lack of organization is the second greatest threat to the movement's staying power.

In 1986, at the climax of the original People Power revolt, President Reagan sent Senator Paul Laxalt to Manila to tell Ferdinand Marcos that it was time to leave—and Marcos left. That kind of paternalism is not possible today, not in the Middle East, not after Iraq, not in the age of Al Jazeera, not with the foreign-policy views of President Obama. Ambassador Frank Wisner went to Egypt to deliver a more cautious message than Laxalt's, and the violence grew worse, and Wisner came home. There's no reason to think a direct order from the White House would have had any success.

From the start, the Administration has been reacting to rather than anticipating events in Egypt, always a step behind. And yet Obama's public words, and what we can surmise about his non-public diplomacy, have seemed right to me, if a day late. He understands the limits of American leverage over Mubarak and the pitfalls of American heavy-handedness in the region. What Obama can be faulted for is not his "handling" of the current crisis, but his mistaken belief, upon taking office, that Muslims in places like Egypt wanted American respect first and last. His Cairo speech, in June 2009, was the fullest expression of that belief. It was long on understanding and dialogue, and short on human rights and democracy. As I wrote last year, when Obama finally got around to these topics, his first rhetorical move was to condemn American meddling. But his Cairo audience was already applauding the word "democracy," which caused Obama to stumble over his speech. He and they were in different places, and in a sense, the U.S. has been stumbling to catch up ever since. Administration policy in Egypt has allowed Mubarak to crush the few remaining pockets of breathing space for civil society and the political opposition. It's a policy that goes back decades, one that neither Obama nor George W. Bush did much to change. The dramatic events of the past week have shown it to be an utter failure.

Read more from our coverage of the protests in Egypt and beyond.

Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images.

Holbrooke Remembered

Last Friday, the late Richard Holbrooke was remembered at the Kennedy Center in Washington. In keeping with Holbrooke's life, the ceremony transcended his pay grade: the lineup of onstage speakers included the President, both Clintons, as well as friends and family. Joe Biden, other American luminaries, and a bunch of foreign heads of state and dignitaries were in the audience, which ran somewhere over a thousand people, and which also included Rufus Phillips, an eighty-something retired C.I.A. legend, who was Holbrooke's first boss from his Vietnam years. (I wrote about Phillips in my Holbrooke Profile, and you can read about him in this post as well.)

Phillips sent me this remembrance of his rambunctious young protégé:

Barbara and I were seated with Vlad Lehovich and his wife. I was reminded that Vlad and Richard first arrived in coat and tie at the Saigon airport together as young Foreign Service officers in June, 1963. They were greeted by our administrative officer, Ralph Boynton, who said, "Take off those coats and ties; this is a shirtsleeves outfit." That specific side of his character was not much talked about at the memorial, but in my mind he remained at heart under all that sophistication a shirtsleeves guy who loved being out on the ground where the action was.

As you remember, when I saw him in Kabul in July 2008 at a dinner party in his honor at the Ambassador's residence he had just returned from the field. Our meeting was very emotional, and when he spoke before dinner he singled me out as his first boss in extravagant terms—nothing about Richard was ever half-hearted—and seated me at his table. As you described in your New Yorker profile he had been briefed that same day in Ghazni Province about some successful but exclusively American-administered project. His reaction was that wasn't good enough, we had to get the Afghan government involved; we weren't going to be there forever. That came straight from his counterinsurgency experience as a provincial rep in a tough Mekong Delta Province where I had sent him at age 22.

While I think about what an enormous loss his passing means for his family and for all those in so many walks of life who were his friends, I am also saddened by what it may mean for his unique mission to help resolve favorably the Afghanistan- Pakistan conundrum. I last saw him this past October at a 90th birthday dinner party for a former American official in Saigon, Barry Zorthian, who has since died himself. Naturally all the table talk was about Vietnam. But as we were shaking hands to say goodbye, I brought up Afghanistan, asking him directly, "Does anyone at the top of this Administration understand how long this is going to take?" He replied, "They'll have to learn the hard way." Then when we were at the elevator he said, "I am reminded of a scene in 'Blazing Saddles' where the sheriff says, 'Stop or I'll shoot!' while pointing his gun at his own head." That irreverent comment referred, I think, to the American inclination to threaten Afghan and Pakistani leaders when they failed to take certain actions with an "or else," without having an answer to the question "or else what?" It was the last time I saw him.

Richard was indeed one of kind. Besides a deep sense of personal loss, he will be sorely missed not only for his knowledge and skill but particularly, I believe, because he was the sole civilian at the top of our government who had actually served on the ground during a similar struggle even though it was long ago and in a different place. He had been there and worked at that, giving him more than a fleeting notion of what it was going to take to change the population's mind in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That he felt, I believe, was key to any reasonable outcome.

Arguing Tucson

Over a hundred comments and counting! Many are well-argued, including a lot of the dissents, and make me want to argue back. Some are nasty enough to give my original post a sort of roundabout boost. But who knew that so many conservatives read The New Yorker? I hope they stay subscribers.

I'll group my answers and after-thoughts under several topics that come up frequently in the thread.

Marx wasn't Hitler! I paired them, in the shorthand of blogging, as influences on Loughner (he cited "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf") whose destructive legacies do not include the shootings in Tucson. Obviously, a philosopher of political economy and a genocidal totalitarian dictator are not remotely commensurate—I should have made that clear. But when tens of millions of people are killed under the banner of an ism that bears your name within a century of your life, you don't get the philosopher's free pass. Were those murders the result of a tragic distortion of Marx? Yes—and yet, at the same time, one can't read Marx's writings without being aware of his brutal inflexibility, his hatred of what he considered humanistic moral cant. Marx heralded the remorseless wheel of history, whatever victims it might claim.

You started it! It's undeniable that some Americans on the left never accepted the Bush Presidency as legitimate after the Florida recount. It's also undeniable that the left's rhetoric over the Iraq War was often hostile, simplistic, and unfair. For commenters who don't know my work and assume I'm a partisan hack, take a look at Chapter 11 of "The Assassins' Gate," my book about Iraq, for detailed criticism of just that tendency, which flourished on both sides of the war. I try to call them as I see them, and I get in trouble with both sides along the way.

But it won't do to dig up stray comments by Obama, Allen Grayson, or any other Democrat who used metaphors of combat over the past few years, and then try to claim some balance of responsibility in the implied violence of current American politics. (Most of the Obama quotes that appear in the comments were lame attempts to reassure his base that he can get mad and fight back, i.e., signs that he's practically incapable of personal aggression in politics.) In fact, there is no balance—none whatsoever. Only one side has made the rhetoric of armed revolt against an oppressive tyranny the guiding spirit of its grassroots movement and its midterm campaign. Only one side routinely invokes the Second Amendment as a form of swagger and intimidation, not-so-coyly conflating rights with threats. Only one side's activists bring guns to democratic political gatherings. Only one side has a popular national TV host who uses his platform to indoctrinate viewers in the conviction that the President is an alien, totalitarian menace to the country. Only one side fills the AM waves with rage and incendiary falsehoods. Only one side has an iconic leader, with a devoted grassroots following, who can't stop using violent imagery and dividing her countrymen into us and them, real and fake. Any sentient American knows which side that is; to argue otherwise is disingenuous.

And yet plenty of people who ought to know better are making just that argument, with a heat that suggests they protest too much. For example, Ross Douthat, who brought his promising Times column this morning to its low point. Douthat wrote, in the spirit of phony equivalence, "If overheated rhetoric and martial imagery really led inexorably to murder, then both parties would belong in the dock," but also this: "the attempted murder of a Democratic congresswoman is a potential gift to liberalism." In other words, everyone goes over the line now and then, no one actually wants anyone dead, but one side kind of wouldn't mind. Douthat's column adds moral ugliness to the intellectual dishonesty that's characterized the right's furious response.

No one's free speech ever got anyone killed, and you're trying to take away mine! This was Jack Shafer's claim in Slate. It's dishonest as well—hardly anyone is calling for suppression of speech, certainly not me. What's at issue is self-restraint on the part of leaders and media figures who command a following over which they exert considerable influence, and whom they daily incite into a state of political fury. My post stated at the top that no one but the shooter is responsible for the massacre. But other people, far from the Tucson Safeway, are responsible for pushing language, thought, and feeling to an extreme where political violence begins to seem legitimate. Is it a coincidence that threats to the President and Congress have skyrocketed over the past two years? The Secret Service doesn't like to talk about these things, but I'll bet that in years to come we'll hear about a truly frightening level of threats during the Obama Presidency. Is it completely surprising that the shootings took place in a state and district that have become bywords for extremism and hot rhetoric? Or that the target was an elected official whose opponent last year used the M-16 as a campaign symbol?

Loughner might, by chance, have been completely unaware of the climate in his hometown. Or he might have been steeped in it. The point is that the climate is dangerous, in Arizona and elsewhere, and the shootings ought to have prompted its purveyors to step back and do some hard thinking. As David Frum wrote yesterday: "This talk did not cause this crime. But this crime should summon us to some reflection on this talk. Better: This crime should summon us to a quiet collective resolution to cease this kind of talk and to cease to indulge those who engage in it." That was the point of my post, and it's remarkable that Frum seems to be the only conservative who's had the courage to say anything like it (other than one Republican senator, who, not so courageously, requested anonymity). At a minimum, human decency should have led Sarah Palin to express regret for the dog whistle she directed against Gabrielle Giffords, among others. Instead, in Palinland and across the right, the attitude has been: Never apologize. But this has been the right's attitude throughout the Obama era, with considerable political success, and I don't expect this tragedy to bring a change.

It Doesn't Matter Why He Did It

Judging from his Internet postings, Jared Lee Loughner is a delusional young man whose inner political landscape is a swamp of dystopian novels, left- and right-wing tracts, conspiracy theories, and contempt for his fellow human beings. He refers to the gold and silver standard; that doesn't make Ron Paul responsible for the shootings. He is fond of "Animal Farm"; George Orwell didn't guide the hand that pulled the automatic pistol's trigger. Marx and Hitler produced a lot of corpses, but not the ones in Tucson.

But the plate-glass window of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords's office was shattered last March after the final health-care vote. Judge John Roll, who was among the dead, had received death threats and spent a month with a protection detail. Roll was apparently a bystander to Loughner's intended target—and maybe the gunman had no idea why he was aiming for Giffords either, maybe he didn't know how she voted on health care or what her position on Arizona's draconian immigration law was. It would be a kind of relief if Loughner operated not out of any coherent political context but just his own fevered brain.

But even so, the tragedy wouldn't change this basic fact: for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. Instead of "soft on defense," one routinely hears the words "treason" and "traitor." The President isn't a big-government liberal—he's a socialist who wants to impose tyranny. He's also, according to a minority of Republicans, including elected officials, an impostor. Even the reading of the Constitution on the first day of the 112th Congress was conceived as an assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Administration and Congress.

This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On the left it appears in anonymous comment threads, not congressional speeches and national T.V. programs.) And it has gone almost entirely uncriticized by Republican leaders. Partisan media encourages it, while the mainstream media finds it titillating and airs it, often without comment, so that the gradual effect is to desensitize even people to whom the rhetoric is repellent. We've all grown so used to it over the past couple of years that it took the shock of an assassination attempt to show us the ugliness to which our politics has sunk.

The massacre in Tucson is, in a sense, irrelevant to the important point. Whatever drove Jared Lee Loughner, America's political frequencies are full of violent static.

Photograph: Mamta Popat/Arizona Daily Star/AP

Snow Story

The trouble began Sunday night. Just as the storm was blowing at its wildest, I trudged out to buy milk and found two women trying to maneuver a helpless old-model compact off our Brooklyn street, two-thirds of the way down the block. Stuck at an angle near a buried fire hydrant, they were pushing and spinning and getting nowhere, with the smell of burning rubber noxiously sharp in the cold air. "Do you need some help?" No one ever answers right away, "Yes, thank you." They're too caught in the immediate distraction of their trap, too angry or embarrassed or wary. The women, black and in their thirties, considered the offer of a stranger emerging out of the blizzard. I explained that we could move the car fifty or sixty feet up the street, following the tracks of another car that was stuck farther up. "And how is that going to be helpful?" one of them demanded. My idea was to guide the car into a row of free parking spaces ahead of mine, but she was right: the tracks were disappearing in the snow even as we stood talking, and though we got the car out of its rut, we couldn't advance more than five feet.

By then, an emergency vehicle had appeared behind the car. I went over to talk to the driver. "Get the car off the road any way you can," he said tersely. "Back up, go forward, back up, go forward." That was all the help he was offering, and I relayed it to the two women. I wondered what had possessed them to drive out into the storm in a car that could disappear in a mid-sized New York pothole. With one of them at the wheel, me and the other pushing, the car backed up and went forward a few times, and sure enough, it gained some maneuverability. Suddenly the hydrant seemed to offer a perfectly good parking place, which had been their idea in the first place—I needed fifteen minutes to get rid of my city-dwelling scruples and reach their level of survival pragmatism. And somehow, shoving the side of the car from nose and then tail, while the driver turned hard to the right and left, we managed to move it sideways toward the curb. They ended up at an oblique angle at least five feet into the street. "I'd say that's a hundred!" one of them exclaimed. We exchanged handshakes and names, and I almost didn't mind that the store was shuttered and there would be no milk in the morning.

On Monday, the ledge of snow in the doorway was above the knee: no way to leave the house except by digging from inside out. Up and down the block, cars were buried in drifts. Someone had carved a canyon from the sidewalk to a driver's side door through a roof-high snow pile that was partly composed of shovelings. In the economy of a storm this big, there was nowhere to get rid of snow that didn't encroach on someone else's space, and some shovelfuls must have been tossed back and forth a few times. All day we waited for the plows, but they didn't come.

Instead, one car after another turned off Flatbush Avenue, which was slushy but passable, and onto our street, where they were all brought to a standstill halfway up the block. Along with whatever neighbors happened to be out on the street, I helped push one or two back down toward Flatbush, but soon I turned against them. This Audi, this minivan, even this New Jersey pickup truck had no business driving unplowed side streets. And why did these interlopers from elsewhere keep choosing ours? Why didn't they take a hint from the vehicles already stuck in snow directly up ahead? Not only were they behaving stupidly, they were keeping the snowplow—if it ever showed up—from clearing our block. My neighbors and I shook our heads and fumed. These drivers didn't live here, they were just on their way through, so they didn't care. As far as I was concerned, they were on their own. And all day Monday, Monday evening, and Tuesday morning, they kept coming, clumsy sea mammals blindly following one another onto shore, and they kept getting beached. Sunday night's generous feelings were long gone.

Twenty inches of snow isn't a 7.5 earthquake or Category 4 hurricane. Unless it's life-threatening, an emergency rarely lifts human beings above themselves. A snowstorm like this is bad enough to make people parochial and aggrieved, but not disastrous enough to make them generous and heroic. The stories of people trapped on subway trains all night, of hundreds of 911 calls going unanswered for hours, remained abstract, because we were in no actual danger. And so, instead, it seemed as if our block was being singled out for idiocy and neglect. The scene on the street brought my neighbors and me into a fraternity of usefulness and scorn: we locals did one another little favors—here's some salt, thanks for shoveling my walk—and remarked on the folly of outsiders insisting on driving a car through such snow. The circle of inclusion was now the neighborhood—more narrowly, the block—but this bond wasn't strong enough to prompt one of us to put an orange cone of warning at the bottom of the street, let alone to organize all of us into teams that could shovel out the whole block. Urban solidarity had a limit, and some quaint notion of deserving city services kept us waiting passively on the silent street for the plow that, by midday Tuesday, still hadn't shown up.

The last vehicle to attempt our street was a moving van. A couple was leaving their apartment for another on the next block. Apparently they couldn't wait. The moving crew consisted of three Spanish speakers, and, as they were loading up their van with furniture and bedding, you could almost see the massive vehicle sinking deeper into snow. The treacherous snow was just a few feet ahead of them—they'd never get through it. I'd had enough. We had an out-of-town trip planned, and if the plow—which was sure to show up any minute now—couldn't reach the point where our car was parked, we'd have to bag it. I stalked over to the movers. "What's your plan for getting off the street?" The driver, who spoke some English, assured me that they could do it easily—after all, they'd made it this far. "But the worst part is right in front of you." He shrugged. I asked why they had to do the job today. He said that the company—no surprise—had a backlog, and it wanted to get this one done, and someone must have thought our neighborhood was clear. He went back to work.

I went back inside. When I came out, a little after noon, the movers had finished loading and had actually managed to advance their van ten or fifteen feet. They were doing it by shoveling the entire street in front of them—two or three of them furiously working the snow, without gloves, then laying the blankets they use to protect furniture in front of the van's tires and creeping forward. Stage by stage, they were getting close to the intersection. I walked around the neighborhood to see if there were any passable streets and found an exit route that a four-wheel-drive vehicle might clear to a major avenue. By the time I returned, the van was past the intersection, part way up the next block, and the movers were already unloading it. They had plowed our street with shovels. Outsiders on the clock, they had done the city's work—our work.

Photograph: WanderingtheWorld, via FlickrCC

In the Company of Holbrooke

Rufus Phillips called on Saturday morning with the news that Richard Holbrooke was critically ill. Phillips had been Richard's first boss, back in South Vietnam in 1963, and sent him to run an aid program in the Mekong Delta. That was where Richard's career began, and now that he is gone, it's staggering to think of how much ground he covered, how much history involved him, how many people across generations were touched by his life, from Clark Clifford and Averell Harriman to the members of his staff who weren't yet born when the Vietnam War ended, how many phone calls he made and took every day, how many times he flew to Afghanistan and Pakistan and back, how much schlocky TV and cinema he watched, how huge his energy and appetite for life were. It's hard to understand how he fit all of it into those sixty-nine years. And he was always reaching out for someone, which amplified his presence many fold. His diplomatic style was supposed to be that of a bulldozer, but I will remember his whimsy. Without him, there's less zest in the world.

One day, he would call to report that he and Kati had just returned from Italy, raving about the villas he'd seen: "Oh, you must read So-and-so's book on Palladio." Another year, another call: David Rohde had escaped from the Taliban! What a book he would have to write! Another year, another call: had I seen the play "Time Stands Still"? Iraq war journalists—Laura Linney was excellent in it. "I discovered her long ago." Competitiveness and teasing went together—he couldn't help himself. Every now and then you could get bruised, then he'd quickly move on, and if you were able to do the same, the hurt wouldn't matter, the pleasures and rewards that came with letting it go far outweighed it.

He had wanted to be a journalist, thought like one, loved their company and their gossip, and also loved knowing a little more because he was on the inside. He would tell you how to write the lede to your story—even your story about him—what you needed and what was inessential. It was annoying to realize how often he was right.

There are too many things to say—others have said them, and will say much more—about his career as a diplomat, his ideas about American power and leadership, his writings, his last mission with the Obama Administration. He did many things besides work in government, but that work was so core to his being and happiness that, once he started his new (and nearly impossible) job, it was as if a pilot light inside him had suddenly burst into flame: his eyes had a new gleam. He harbored a dose of skepticism about the Afghanistan war, but he worked tirelessly for success, to the obvious detriment of his health. In a sense he gave his life for his country.

But what I'm thinking about on the sad, sad night of his death is not Holbrooke's role on the world stage, but Richard on the phone for six minutes, or seated across the table, eyebrows lifted and mouth slightly open with barely suppressed mirth. He was the most excellent company. My wife and I were supposed to have dinner with Richard and Kati this Friday. I'll always wish that evening had come sooner.

Photograph: Sebastian Abbot/AP

The Right to Secrecy

What do we learn from the latest WikiLeaks dump, at least according to the Times's privileged and heavily edited account? That the Gulf Arabs are just as nervous about Iran's nuclear program as Israel is, and they want the U.S. to stop it. That Saudi King Abdullah doesn't think much of Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. That Yemeni President Saleh is happy to claim American airstrikes against Al Qaeda targets as his country's own, and that he doesn't mind whiskey being smuggled into Yemen as long as it's the good stuff. That the Chinese government probably hacked into Google. That Qaddafi never goes anywhere without his Ukrainian "senior nurse."

On the whole, the trove makes American diplomacy look pretty good. Obama's Iran strategy of engagement-leading-to-isolation is shown to have succeeded. Bush—contrary to the impression left on every page of his new memoir—had enough self-awareness about the disaster in Iraq to put the brakes on military action against Iran. And American diplomats are capable of writing blunt, vivid, even amusing assessments of world leaders. Berlusconi is feckless, Sarkozy thin-skinned, Mugabe a megalomaniac: the accounts seem spot-on. The faceless corps of tight-lipped American embassy officials turn out to be an alert and discerning bunch.

Future diplomatic correspondence is going to be a lot more circumspect. The WikiLeaks dump contains (so far) a number of minor embarrassments, a few surprises, a lot of confirmations of what we already pretty much knew, and no scandals. It will make the work of American diplomacy harder for a long time to come. Classification abuse will increase—more cables will be labelled "Top Secret" that should have been labelled "Secret" or "Confidential." Exchanges between American officials and their foreign counterparts will grow less candid and more opaque. The same with cable traffic between U.S. embassies and Washington. There is an undeniable public interest in knowing, for example, that U.S. intelligence believes the Iranians are buying advanced missiles from North Korea, and that Gulf Arab rulers have been privately urging American military action against Iran. The question is, does that interest outweigh the right of U.S. officials to carry out their work with a degree of confidentiality?

Yes—the right. Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators, and—not least—journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn't the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials? If WikiLeaks and its super-secretive, thin-skinned, megalomaniacal leader, Julian Assange (is he also accompanied everywhere by a Ukrainian senior nurse?), were uncovering crimes, or scandals, or systemic abuses, there would be no question about the overwhelming public interest in these latest revelations. But the WikiLeaks dump contains no My Lais, no black sites, no Abu Ghraibs. The documents simply show State Department officials going about their work over a period of several years. Will we get another update in six months? Will it be worth the damage? Should no government secret remain secret? Is diplomacy possible when official views have all the privacy of social networking? Assange's stated ambition is to embarrass the U.S. This means that his goals and those of most journalists are not the same. WikiLeaks doesn't trouble itself with these questions. The rest of us, journalists included, should.

What If Aung San Suu Kyi Goes Free?

Whenever Aung San Suu Kyi is allowed her freedom, the Burmese authorities never know what might happen. When she was released from her first stint in custody, in 1990, her National League for Democracy overwhelmingly won elections. The junta responded by cancelling the results and placing her under house arrest. A decade later, in 2002, they let her out, and as she travelled around the country huge crowds greeted her everywhere. This time the generals turned loose a gang of state-owned thugs on her motorcade, and Suu Kyi narrowly escaped death (many of her followers were killed). In Burma, winning elections and surviving murderous attacks qualify you for imprisonment, and she was returned to house arrest in 2003. Her detention has continued more or less ever since (in September, 2007, in the middle of nationwide demonstrations, she met a group of monks who had come to pay respects at the gate to her house, and the pictures galvanized the protests). In other words, Suu Kyi's very presence is a threat to the regime. They knew what they were doing when they locked her up for fourteen of the last twenty years.

Saturday morning her house arrest is scheduled to end. Crowds have already gathered near her house on Inya Lake, in the middle of Rangoon. This time the generals timed her release for the week after national elections that were heavily rigged in favor of the ruling party. Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy boycotted because she wasn't allowed to participate. A faction of the NLD decided to compete and, predictably, fared poorly. The entire process of the elections, from the writing of a constitution to the counting of the ballots, has been a sham.

Beneath a cowed, compliant surface, Burma is incredibly volatile. Troops have been fighting ethnic armies on the Thai border, and thousands of civilians have fled the country. Since 2007, numerous civic organizations composed of young, determined people have sprung up. Thousands of political prisoners remain in jail, some of them serving sixty-year terms in brutal conditions. There is no telling what will happen if or when Suu Kyi goes free.

Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

The Empty Chamber Goes to TV

My magazine piece on the dysfunctional Senate, "The Empty Chamber," has been produced as a segment on "Need to Know," the new PBS Friday night news-magazine show. Keep an eye out for the author as a bewildered-looking eight-year-old, and Mitch McConnell going after The New Yorker by name.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.