Pejman Yousefzadeh

Iran’s constitutional watchdog on Tuesday banned former president and opposition-backed Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from next month’s elections, a move expected to undermine the credibility of the poll.

The Guardian Council, which vets all potential candidates for loyalty to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, and the regime, also banned Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, an ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, from participating in the poll.

The move leaves eight candidates for the presidency, with Saeed Jalili, the chief nuclear negotiator, seen as a leading contender. While the disqualification of Mr Mashaei had been expected, that of Mr Rafsanjani will come as a shock to many Iranians.

A pillar of the Islamic revolution, Mr Rafsanjani is seen by hardliners as a threat because he backed the 2009 opposition Green Movement, which alleged that the presidential elections that year were stolen. But he was reappointed by the Supreme Leader last year as head of an important unelected body called the Expediency Council.

As another BBC Persian correspondent, Bahman Kalbasi, observed, the disqualification of a once-powerful figure like Mr. Rafsanjani, a 78-year-old cleric who was close to the Islamic republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, stunned many Iranians and seemed to confirm that the authorities are determined to avoid the popular uprising that followed the disputed vote in 2009.

[…]

Mr. Kalbasi added that sources in Iran reported that even text messages with the former president’s name appeared to be blocked inside the country on Tuesday.

Be sure to check out the tweets by Karim Sadjadpour as well, which are on point and revealing. It is safe to say that any pretense of democracy in Iran has officially disappeared.

Remember when we were told by all and sundry that Benghazi was a nothing-to-see-here-move-along type of scandal? Yeah, that was funny:

Four days after the 9/11 anniversary attacks in Benghazi, Libya, the U.S. intelligence community knew very little about who did it, how it happened, and whether it was planned or not, according to 100 pages of internal emails released Wednesday afternoon by the White House.

Those emails provide the clearest record to date of the genesis of government-wide talking points for senior Obama administration officials that asserted that the Benghazi attacks stemmed from a demonstration that never occurred.

House Republicans have been calling for weeks for the White House to release the emails, claiming in a report issued last month from Republican leadership that the emails show the edits to the talking points were not done to protect classified information as the White House initially claimed.

The talking points were first generated by the CIA for a briefing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Nonetheless, the emails themselves raise more questions than they answer. For example, there is extensive discussion on the evening of September 14 about whether the talking points should mention Ansar al-Sharia, a jihadist militia the original CIA draft stated was a likely participant in the attacks. Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman at the time, asked whether or not mentioning the group would prejudice the investigation, and the FBI in later emails did not object. Still, the final version excised the reference to Ansar al-Sharia as well as a reference to Facebook posts the group had created suggesting a link to the attacks.

TO: Stephen Hawking

FROM: Pejman Yousefzadeh

RE: Hypocrisy

Dear Professor Hawking:

So, when are your principles going to lead you to get rid of that Intel Core i7 chip?

The whole world wonders.

Yours truly,

Pejman Yousefzadeh

The New Yorker is not generally known as a right-wing rag—it is very much an Obamaphile publication, in fact—but even it can’t deny that there was something very wrong with the Obama administration’s response to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi:

On Friday, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl revealed the details of the editing process for the C.I.A.’s talking points about the attack, including the edits themselves and some of the reasons a State Department spokeswoman gave for requesting those edits. It’s striking to see the twelve different iterations that the talking points went through before they were released to Congress and to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who used them in Sunday show appearances that became a central focus of Republicans’ criticism of the Administration’s public response to the attacks. Over the course of about twenty-four hours, the remarks evolved from something specific and fairly detailed into a bland, vague mush.

From the very beginning of the editing process, the talking points contained the erroneous assertion that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved.” That’s an important fact, because the right has always criticized the Administration based on the suggestion that the C.I.A. and the State Department, contrary to what they said, knew that the attack was not spontaneous and not an outgrowth of a demonstration. But everything else about the changes that were made is problematic. The initial draft revealed by Karl mentions “at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi” before the one in which four Americans were killed. That’s not in the final version. Nor is this: “[W]e do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.” That was replaced by the more tepid “There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.” (Even if we accept the argument that State wanted to be sure that extremists were involved, and that they could be linked to Al Qaeda, before saying so with any level of certainty—which is reasonable and supported by evidence from Karl’s reporting—that doesn’t fully explain these changes away.)

Democrats will argue that the editing process wasn’t motivated by a desire to protect Obama’s record on fighting Al Qaeda in the run-up to the 2012 election. They have a point; based on what we’ve seen from Karl’s report, the process that went into creating and then changing the talking points seems to have been driven in large measure by two parts of the government—C.I.A. and State—trying to make sure the blame for the attacks and the failure to protect American personnel in Benghazi fell on the other guy.

But the mere existence of the edits—whatever the motivation for them—seriously undermines the White House’s credibility on this issue. This past November (after Election Day), White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Remarkably, Carney is sticking with that line even now… .

Read the whole thing. And recall that from the very outset, Obamaphiles have assured us that criticism of the administration on this issue was misguided and partisan, without any real credibility. So much for that claim. (The talking points are linked in the excerpt, but I am going to provide another link to them here.)

Ron Fournier sums up matters rather well:

“These changes don’t resolve all of my issues or those of my building’s leadership.” With that sentence, one in a series of emails and draft “talking points” leaked to Jonathan Karl of ABC News, the Obama administration was caught playing politics with Benghazi.

Summaries of White House and State Department emails — some of which were first published by Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard — also contradict the White House version of events that led to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice misleading the public about the cause of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. installation in Libya.

Where does this all lead?

Politics: It would be naïve to expect any White House to ignore the political implications of a foreign policy crisis occurring two months before a presidential election. But there is a reason why no White House admits to finessing a tragedy: It’s unseemly. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland injected politics into the U.S. response to Benghazi when she raised objections to draft “talking points” being prepared for Rice’s television appearances.

One paragraph, drafted by the CIA, referenced the agency’s warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months prior to the attack, as well as extremists linked to the al-Qaida affiliate Ansar al-Sharia. In an email to officials at the White House and intelligence agencies, Nuland said the information “could be abused by members (of Congress) to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …”

The paragraph was deleted. The truth was scrubbed.

How much more has to be revealed before the administration’s response to the Benghazi attack gets seriously investigated?

My latest for the Atlantic Council discusses the Obama administration’s Syria policy, and why it is causing the administration to lose face:

When it comes to maintaining military credibility in the face of potential national security threats, the Obama administration has gone out of its way to convince friend and foe alike that the president and the administration do not bluff when it comes to their foreign policy and national security goals and commitments. However, the situation in Syria threatens to make a mockery of the administration’s public posture, which would likely have serious and deleterious consequences when it comes to administration commitments on a host of national security issues and challenges.

Read it all.

Venezuela’s new supposed president  has decided to go to Cuba in order to “ratify a strategic, historic alliance that transcends time, that is more a brotherhood than an alliance.” The language Maduro employs is, of course, ridiculously over-the-top, so readers can feel free to point and mock. But what really makes this story newsworthy is the fact that Maduro has demonstrated the same propensity to back a loser that marked the political career of Hugo Chavez:

On weekend nights in Havana, young hipsters fill the sidewalks at a busy intersection near the seafront and spill into the park below, passing rum bottles between them, smoking cigarettes and playing guitars.

Black t-shirts, low-slung jeans, oddball haircuts and tattoos are in vogue at this spot, a favorite hangout for Cuban youth with a counter-cultural, slightly rebellious feel to it.

On one corner, police question a few overzealous partiers, but generally leave people alone compared to years past, when, according to one regular, Ernesto Ramis, they made everyone move along.

Ramis, 25, says you can get drugs here - uppers, downers, maybe some ecstasy - but there is no overt evidence of illegality this night, only a sense that being young in Cuba today is different, that conformity to the old ways has faded.

“The main difference,” says Ramis, pointing toward the Straits of Florida, barely visible in the darkness, “is that everyone wants to leave.”

One can readily understand why—assuming, of course, that one is not the supposed president of Venezuela. Young Cubans yearn to vote with their feet and leave their homeland. Nicolas Maduro seems to think that everything in Cuba is hunky-dory. One can readily forgive the people of Venezuela for being appalled by the fact that their supposed president has no grasp whatsoever on reality.

Anyone who claims—as Paul Krugman does—that the Bush administration “lied us into war” in Iraq ought to read Jamie Kirchick’s demolition of this absurd claim:

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found “no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: “Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”

Yet Rockefeller’s highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that “top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11.” Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were “substantiated by intelligence information.” The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were “misled” into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

In 2003, top Senate Democrats — not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others — sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month’s report, titled “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees — who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors — many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.

The list of people who should read Kirchick include New York Times editors who are allowing their paper and their brand to be hijacked in the service of lies by people like Paul Krugman. And since there is no way to say the following nicely, I won’t try: Either the Times hierarchy will force Krugman to adopt some ethical journalistic standards, or they are complicit in his rank dishonesty and deserve to fade away from the world of journalism so that more honest news sources can take the place of the New York Times.

Robert Merry offers some very thought-provoking commentary on Robert Kaplan’s defense of Henry Kissinger and realpolitik:

Castlereagh was vilified for helping craft a post-Napoleonic peace that restored the Bourbon dynasty in France and preserved the Continent’s aristocratic order. But this approach, writes Kaplan, was necessary to establish a lasting European peace and foster Britain’s emergence as the dominant world power. Palmerston manifested a complete inconsistency in terms of morality in foreign policy while manifesting a complete consistency in supporting Britain’s internationalist aims. “He supported any tribal chieftain who extended British India’s sphere of influence northwest into Afghanistan, toward Russia, and opposed any who extended Russia’s sphere of influence southeast, toward India—even as he cooperated with Russia in Persia.”

This kind of tactical improvisation in the interest of strategic stability is difficult for many to understand or appreciate. But it served Britain well in the nineteenth century, and it served America well in the years of Kissinger’s prominence. “Like Palmerston,” writes Kaplan, “Henry Kissinger believes that in difficult, uncertain times—times like the 1960s and ‘70s in America, when the nation’s vulnerabilities appeared to outweigh its opportunities—the preservation of the status quo should constitute the highest morality.” Subsequent political leaders might later find opportunities to foster a more liberal order, but in the meantime the “trick is to maintain one’s power undiminished until that moment.” That’s what Kissinger sought to accomplish during his years serving Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Kaplan acknowledges that it is often searing for some to face the reality that affairs of state sometimes don’t lend themselves to the application of Judeo-Christian morality. But those who act on the necessity of violating such moral precepts and then take responsibility for their actions “are among the most necessary leaders for their countries, even as they have caused great unease among generations of well-meaning intellectuals who, free of the burden of real-world bureaucratic responsibility, make choices in the abstract and treat morality as an inflexible absolute.” Thus, in the case of Kissinger, to be uncomfortable with him may be natural. “But to condemn him outright verges on sanctimony, if not delusion.”

Indeed, adds Kaplan, you can make a case that Kissinger’s actions and geopolitical sensibilities were quite moral—”provided, of course, that you accept the Cold War assumptions of the age in which he operated.”

Here’s where Kaplan gets particularly interesting, as he punctures much post–Cold War analysis put forth by liberal intellectuals, particularly the idea that the West’s victory was inevitable, and hence the tough U.S. response to the Soviet threat was in many ways unnecessary. No, says Kaplan, the Soviet threat was real, particularly in Europe. Eastern Europe had been reduced to “a vast, dimly lit prison yard” that would have expanded westward but for the military divisions and nuclear weapons of America. It was those military resources, in the hands of U.S. leaders willing to plan for Armageddon, which kept the peace.

Read it all, especially if you are a current policymaker.

UPDATE: It is worth emphasizing just how much more moral Kissinger’s application of realpolitik was when compared with the utterly naïve foreign policy of the Carter administration. As Kaplan makes clear, a strong case can be made for the proposition that the Carter administration’s “morality-based” foreign policy was responsible for more humanitarian disasters than anything Henry Kissinger might have brought about. Indeed, between Carter and Kissinger, the latter saved countless more innocent lives worldwide, while advancing American interests in a manner the Carter administration could only have dreamt of imitating.

So, Venezuela recently had its first post-Chavez election. Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s hand-picked successor (hand-picking successors is democracy, Chavista-style for you) was expected to beat opposition candidate Henrique Capriles going away, but as it turns out, he just barely eked out a win. And that win might not have been legitimate:

According to the electoral council, Maduro won by 262,000 votes out of 14.9 million ballots cast.

Capriles says Chavistas stole the election and provided reporters with some examples:

At 283 polling stations, election monitors were forced to leave before vote counts, some at the point of a gun, he said. At one voting booth in the western state of Trujillo a total of 717 people voted when only 536 were registered, he said.

One imagines that there are other examples as well. There certainly appears to have been enough to persuade the Obama administration not to recognize the Maduro “government” until and unless a recount takes place.

The dispute has led to demonstrations in the street, which, at the time of the writing of the article, “had caused seven deaths and 61 injuries across Venezuela.” Naturally, Maduro claims that the United States is behind it all; he is trying to be a good little Chavista, and as we all know, good little Chavistas blame the United States for everything that goes wrong in Venezuela. He is also claiming that Capriles is trying to organize a coup by demanding that all the votes be counted fairly—which would be the strangest coup plot that I have ever heard of. Let’s remember that Hugo Chavez first emerged on the scene in Venezuela by trying to organize a coup himself.

Even if it is somehow considered legitimate, Maduro’s margin over Capriles is pathetically small when compared to the fact that Chavez beat Capriles by 11 points in the last presidential election—when Chavez was sick and dying. Of course, Chavez had the help of government goons and government-run media to win the election, in addition to throwing around state largesse in order to appeal to the voters—a policy that was not in the long term interests of the Venezuelan people, but still, the razor-thin margin between Maduro and Capriles can’t reflect well on Maduro. And now, with credible allegations that Maduro’s side committed electoral fraud, it’s obvious to see that no matter how much government support there is backing the Chavista movement, the old Chavista magic is gone in the aftermath of Chavez’s death.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of socialists. Maybe, just maybe, the Venezuelan people are close to finally getting a government that will be good for them, rather than one that is merely good for their rulers.

Margaret Thatcher was of the leaders of the side that won the Cold War. A number of the Thatcher-haters were on the other side. I am betting that is one of the reasons why they hate her so much.

The above may read like hyperbole. But if the jackboot fits …

Newly discovered documents showed substantial sums of money in hard currency were secretly transferred to the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) during the major industrial action.

They also stated that the former German Democratic Republic offered free holidays to the country for striking miners and their families in 1984 and 1985.

Food parcels and clothing were also shipped to those taking part in the strike, which ended in a historic defeat for the miners.

Professor Stefan Berger, from the University of Manchester, and Dr Norman LaPorte, from the University of Glamorgan, detail the documents in their new book, Friendly Enemies: Britain And The GDR 1949 to 1990.

Prof Berger, who is based at Manchester’s School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, said: ”My research finds that the NUM and the East European communists wanted to keep the affair secret and had some consequential problems getting the money to the NUM.

”The documents talk about the possibility of using a ‘go-between’ from the French communist union CGT who would deliver the money straight from Eastern Europe to representatives of the NUM.

”They also allege that the East German FDGB union (Free German Trade Union Federation) helped the miners by providing free holidays for the families and children of British miners in the German Democratic Republic.

”The FDGB, the documents say, also co-ordinated the shipping of food parcels, clothing and so on to British miners.”

He added: ”The communists perceived the NUM as an ally in the international class struggle against capitalism - hence the close interest in the strike.

”Relations between the NUM and East European communism had been good since the 1960s.

The article is from 2010, so the documents and the information are no longer “newly discovered.” However, I don’t see many Thatcher remembrances bringing up this issue, so I thought I should.

Here is another thing worth noting:

Baroness Thatcher would have viewed the parties held to celebrate her death as a “remarkable tribute” to her achievements, one of her closest friends has said.

Conor Burns, a Conservative MP who visited Lady Thatcher on a weekly basis in her final years, said she would have been pleased they felt “so strongly” about her.

He said that when he told her that “death packs” including commemorative T-shirts had been sold at the TUC congress last year she saw them as a tribute.

He said: “Funnily enough the parties that we’re seeing, the things in some of these mining communities and those young people opening the champagne in Glasgow, they’re a remarkable tribute to her you know.

“I remember telling her last year about the TUC congress selling the Thatcher death party packs.

“She said the fact that they felt so strongly about her more than 20 years after she left Downing Street was a tribute to the fact she had done something in politics rather than simply been someone.”

If death partiers wanted to insult Thatcher, they would have ignored her passing. They can’t even hate competently.

Having dispensed with the Thatcher-haters, we can turn our attention instead to the Economist, which critiques Thatcher in some respects in its remembrance, but gets the main point right:

Because of the [economic] crisis, the pendulum is swinging dangerously away from the principles Mrs Thatcher espoused. In most of the rich world, the state’s share of the economy has stubbornly risen. Regulations—excessive as well as necessary—are tying up the private sector. Businesspeople are under scrutiny as they have not been for 30 years and bankers are everyone’s favourite bogeyman. And with the rise of China state control, not economic liberalism, is being hailed as a model for emerging markets.

For a world in desperate need of growth, this is the wrong direction. Europe will never thrive until it frees up its markets. America will throttle its recovery unless it avoids overregulation. China will not sustain its success unless it starts to liberalise. This is a crucial time to hang on to Margaret Thatcher’s central perception: that for countries to flourish, people need to push back against the advance of the state. What the world needs now is more Thatcherism, not less.

Quite so.

Andrei Lankov has the best take that I have seen on North Korea’s attempts to act out and get attention from the international community:

NORTH KOREA is a tiny dictatorship with a bankrupt economy, but its leaders are remarkably adept at manipulating global public opinion. In recent weeks, we have been exposed to yet another brilliant example of their skill.

Scores of foreign journalists have been dispatched to Seoul to report on the growing tensions between the two Koreas and the possibility of war. Upon arrival, though, it is difficult for them to find any South Koreans who are panic-stricken. In fact, most people in Seoul don’t care about the North’s belligerent statements: the farther one is from the Korean Peninsula, the more one will find people worried about the recent developments here.

The average South Korean’s calm indifference is understandable: he or she has been through similar “crises” many times. By now South Koreans understand Pyongyang’s logic and know North Korea is highly unlikely to make good on its gothic threats.

People who talk about an imminent possibility of war seldom pose this question: What would North Korea’s leadership get from unleashing a war that they are likely to lose in weeks, if not days? Even if they managed to strike Japan, the United States or South Korea with nuclear weapons — a big if, given that they do not have a reliable delivery system — they could not save themselves from ultimate defeat. On the contrary, the use of nuclear or other terror weapons would be certain to invite overwhelming retaliation, delivering North Korea’s decision makers to a fiery oblivion.

Suggestions that those leaders are irrational and their decisions unfathomable are remarkably shallow. North Korea is not a theocracy led by zealots who preach the rewards of the afterlife.

In fact, there are no good reasons to think that Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s young dictator, would want to commit suicide; he is known for his love of basketball, pizza and other pleasures of being alive. The same logic applies to his advisers, old survivors in the byzantine world of North Korean politics who love expensive cars and good brandy.

If Robert Gates were still secretary of defense, he would have made a point of laughing off North Korea’s threats in public, while making it clear to the North Korean regime in private that if the regime’s behavior graduated to anything beyond bluster, North Korea would be destroyed as surely as night follows day. That likely would have been more than enough to put the kibosh on the North’s temper tantrum. By contrast, too many people in the American national security leadership are affording North Korean threats an aura of legitimacy that those threats simply do not deserve.

Apparently, Beijing’s patience is not infinite:

Responding to regional worries over North Korea’s bellicose threats, China on Sunday expressed concern and what appeared to be veiled criticism of its longtime ally.

“No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gains,” said Chinese President Xi Jinping at an economic forum in Hainan province. Avoiding mentioning North Korea by name, Xi said, “While pursuing its own interests, a country should accommodate the legitimate interests of others.”

Xi said that the international community and its collective scrutiny should act as a platform for common development rather than an “arena where gladiators fight each other.”

On Sunday, China’s Foreign Ministry also issued a statement saying it was “seriously concerned” about the “continuously escalating tensions.”

The comments from China come on the heels of several days of escalating threats by North Korea on the United States and South Korea, including the possibility of nuclear attacks.

China — long seen as a key factor propping up the regime in Pyongyang — recently has shown signs of frustration after North Korea ignored its pleas not to carry out a recent nuclear test.

Chinese officials who value stability above all else are unlikely to abandon North Korea altogether in the near future. But sensing an opening amid Chinese frustrations, the Obama administration is trying to push Beijing to take a much stronger stance against the renegade country than it has in the past, U.S. officials have said in public and private comments in recent days.

Let’s hope that the administration succeeds. As everyone even remotely familiar with the situation in North Korea knows, Chinese indulgences have traditionally been a major catalyst for North Korean intransigence. Were it not for the Chinese, a great deal more could have been done in order to bring North Korean behavior in line with the expectations of the international community. While I don’t expect any dramatic changes in North Korean behavior overnight, I would like to think that China’s slight, but unmistakable change in tone might help bring about more reasonable behavior from Pyongyang. Here’s hoping that it does.

This:

The editor of a publishing house in Cuba who wrote a critical article in The New York Times opinion section about persistent racial inequality on the island, something revolutionaries proudly say has lessened, has been removed from his post, associates said on Friday.

The author, Roberto Zurbano, in an article published March 23, described a long history of racial discrimination against blacks on the island and said “racial exclusion continued after Cuba became independent in 1902, and a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it.”

On Friday, The Havana Times blog reported that Mr. Zurbano had told a gathering of Afro-Cuban advocates that he had been dismissed from his post at the publishing house of the Casa de las Americas cultural center, leaving the implication that the dismissal was connected to the article. Other associates said Mr. Zurbano told them he had been removed but would continue working there.

Reached by telephone in Havana, Mr. Zurbano would not comment on his employment. “What is The New York Times going to do about it?” he asked. He angrily condemned the editors of the opinion section for a change in the headline that he felt had distorted his theme.

The article’s headline, which was translated from Spanish, was “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun,” but Mr. Zurbano said that in his version it had been “Not Yet Finished.”

“They changed the headline without consulting me,” he said. “It was a huge failure of ethics and of professionalism.”

Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for The Times, said the editor stood by the article’s preparation.

I am left with little doubt that Zurbano was dismissed because he had the temerity to point out that racial equality had not been achieved by a long shot in Cuba, and that the promises of the Cuban revolution—ephemeral though they have been for anyone not named “Castro” or not allied with the Castro brothers—have certainly not been fulfilled for Afro-Cubans. But the issue of whether the article should have been titled “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun,” or whether it should have been titled “Not Yet Finished” is also an interesting one. Let’s consider it by consulting the article in question:

CHANGE is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality. Over the last decade, scores of ridiculous prohibitions for Cubans living on the island have been eliminated, among them sleeping at a hotel, buying a cellphone, selling a house or car and traveling abroad. These gestures have been celebrated as signs of openness and reform, though they are really nothing more than efforts to make life more normal. And the reality is that in Cuba, your experience of these changes depends on your skin color.

The private sector in Cuba now enjoys a certain degree of economic liberation, but blacks are not well positioned to take advantage of it. We inherited more than three centuries of slavery during the Spanish colonial era. Racial exclusion continued after Cuba became independent in 1902, and a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it.

In the early 1990s, after the cold war ended, Fidel Castro embarked on economic reforms that his brother and successor, Raúl, continues to pursue. Cuba had lost its greatest benefactor, the Soviet Union, and plunged into a deep recession that came to be known as the “Special Period.” There were frequent blackouts. Public transportation hardly functioned. Food was scarce. To stem unrest, the government ordered the economy split into two sectors: one for private businesses and foreign-oriented enterprises, which were essentially permitted to trade in United States dollars, and the other, the continuation of the old socialist order, built on government jobs that pay an average of $20 a month.

It’s true that Cubans still have a strong safety net: most do not pay rent, and education and health care are free. But the economic divergence created two contrasting realities that persist today. The first is that of white Cubans, who have leveraged their resources to enter the new market-driven economy and reap the benefits of a supposedly more open socialism. The other reality is that of the black plurality, which witnessed the demise of the socialist utopia from the island’s least comfortable quarters.

Putting aside the ridiculous notion that there is anything about the quality of life in Cuba that is worth celebrating in any significant way—dissidents have pointed out that when it comes to claims about “free health care” in Cuba, those claims are overblown and even if they aren’t, they are not worth the tyranny and oppression that Cubans experience at the hands of the Castro regime—this passage certainly reads more like the revolution for Afro-Cubans has not begun, not that it has not yet finished, a conclusion reinforced by reading the following passage:

Racism in Cuba has been concealed and reinforced in part because it isn’t talked about. The government hasn’t allowed racial prejudice to be debated or confronted politically or culturally, often pretending instead as though it didn’t exist. Before 1990, black Cubans suffered a paralysis of economic mobility while, paradoxically, the government decreed the end of racism in speeches and publications. To question the extent of racial progress was tantamount to a counterrevolutionary act. This made it almost impossible to point out the obvious: racism is alive and well.

So, good call by the Times on the headline. The fact of the matter is that there is a massive amount of racism alive and well in Cuba, the government has done nothing whatsoever to combat it, and Roberto Zurbano was likely sacked for having pointed it out. I am pretty sure that the headline of the piece did not drive him from his post; rather, the content did. But to the extent that headlines matter, the Times chose the right one. I am glad to see that I agree with them on some things.

And yes, before anyone says anything, I think that the embargo against Cuba has proven to be stupid and pointless. We trade with the Chinese—who are still technically communists—and everyone trades with the Cubans, so I see no reason why we shouldn’t trade with the Cubans as well; it will give American industries access to markets, put more Cubans in touch with more Americans, and possibly engender changes in Cuban society and politics. I am all for dropping the embargo. But I am also for calling things by their proper names, and when it comes to Cuba’s treatment of its Afro-Cuban population, I am all for calling that treatment “racism.”

Nota Bene: Incidentally, is it just me or do others find it weird that the same people who demand that we boycott, divest from and sanction Israel for its relations with the Palestinians simultaneously seem to have little problem with dropping the boycott against Cuba, despite the persistence of racism when it comes to dealings with the Afro-Cuban population? I am willing to drop the embargo because I don’t think that it serves American interests to continue it, but at least I am willing to acknowledge the presence of racism in Cuba, which is more than the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions-from/on Israel crowd is willing to do.

Charles Krauthammer calls for us to “codify the drone war”:

… The war’s constitutional charter, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), has proved quite serviceable. But the commander-in-chief’s authority is so broad — it leaves the limits of his power to be determined, often in secret memos, by the administration’s own in-house lawyers — that it has spawned suspicion, fear and now filibuster.

It is time to rethink. That means not repealing the original AUMF but, using the lessons of the past 12 years, rewriting it with particular attention to a new code governing drone warfare and the question of where, when and against whom it should be permitted.

Good thing that someone is on top of this issue.

I am not sure that this is what the Egyptian people had in mind when they overthrew Hosni Mubarak. At least, I hope it isn’t:

Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood warns that a U.N. declaration on women’s rights could destroy society by allowing a woman to travel, work and use contraception without her husband’s approval and letting her control family spending.

The Islamist movement that backs President Mohamed Mursi gave 10 reasons why Muslim countries should “reject and condemn” the declaration, which the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women is racing to negotiate a consensus deal on by Friday.

The Brotherhood, whose Freedom and Justice Party propelled Mursi to power in June, posted the statement on its website, www.ikhwanweb.com, and the website of the party on Thursday.

Egypt has joined Iran, Russia and the Vatican - dubbed an “unholy alliance” by some diplomats - in threatening to derail the women’s rights declaration by objecting to language on sexual, reproductive and gay rights.

The Muslim Brotherhood said the declaration would give “wives full rights to file legal complaints against husbands accusing them of rape or sexual harassment, obliging competent authorities to deal husbands punishments similar to those prescribed for raping or sexually harassing a stranger.”

Strangely, those who told us that we had nothing to fear from the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in Egypt have been relatively silent on this matter and on other issues that involve the Brotherhood being pitted against principles of decency. I wonder why.