So that’s where you can find me if you want to tell me what an idiot I am. Enjoy!

We left Vietnam in 1975 and were supposedly so scarred that we’d never do anything like that again in any of our lifetimes. Your definition of “like that” might be different from mine, but a mere five years later we dipped our toe into Afghanistan and then, over the next 30 years, intervened militarily in Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan 2.0, and Iraq 2.0. In other words, once every three or four years, which is about as frequently as we did this kind of thing before Vietnam. Some scarring, eh?

Right now it looks like we’ve learned a lesson because, aside from a bit of chest beating from frustrated neocons over Iran, no one’s banging the war drums. But no one was banging the war drums in 1976, either, which is why it looked like maybe we were going to enter a new era back then too. Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and suddenly everything changed. So let’s not declare a victory for common sense in foreign policy just yet. I’ll believe things have changed when something actually happens overseas, a president tries to build support for intervention, and Congress and the public—including Joe Klein and me—balk. That will mean things have changed.

I think Kevin is basically right about this, but would clarify a couple of things. First, what I meant wasn’t that the US has been dissuaded from engaging in any kind of foreign military shenanigans for the foreseeable future. I was really thinking of the particular brand of nuttiness encapsulated in the invasion of Iraq: an unprovoked “pre-emptive” attack predicated on the idea that our troops will be welcomed with flowers, democracy will break out all over, and we’ll be able to bring the troops home fairly quickly at a modest cost, leaving behind a pro-American, pro-Israeli government. I think that kind of madness is off the table for quite some time. Somewhat more broadly, I doubt we’ll see any unprovoked American attacks on other countries, regardless of how “threatening” they seem, unless perhaps Cuba tries to buy a nuke from North Korea or something.

But I don’t think it impossible that we might see other kinds of limited military interventions, and I think some of the examples Kevin provides are illustrative of the kinds that may still occur. As he says, the US got out of Vietnam in 1973, and got into Afghanistan by 1980. But we intervened in Afghanistan by supporting local tribal-religious rebels in the hopes of handing the Soviets their own Vietnam. We weren’t trying to establish anything in particular in Afghanistan; we didn’t really care what happened to the country so long as it made things hard for Moscow. And, by its own lights, that strategy worked. In hindsight, Afghanistan would probably be better off today if the Russians had won, but the Afghan quagmire was among the reasons why the Gorbachev faction decided to forego military intervention as a means of quelling anti-communist political turmoil in the near abroad, so a Soviet victory in Afghanistan might have meant no velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989. Anyway, the point is, it’s not at all hard to imagine that the US might use limited force or special forces to back local allies against a foreign adversary in some third country in the near future.

This would be similar to the model of US intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador, which Kevin also cites. And again, one thing to note about the US military efforts in Nicaragua and El Salvador is that, by their own lights, they worked. Certainly, they were bloody and unconscionable messes that involved American support for terrorism and war crimes, but the aim was to crush left-wing Soviet-backed authoritarian agrarian-socialist movements in favor of right-wing US-backed authoritarian plutocratic pseudo-democratic regimes, and that aim was achieved.

You could get deeper into the reasons why US interventions in Central America, and later in the Balkans, more or less achieved their own aims at an acceptable cost, while the interventions in Vietnam and Iraq (and, probably, Afghanistan) failed, at unacceptable cost. I would concentrate pretty heavily on proximity and zones of influence: Central America is the US’s restive backyard, the Balkans are Europe’s, and these things make a very big difference. But the main point is that I think the US won’t be cooking up excuses to launch pre-emptive attacks on supposed rogue states in the next couple of decades. Whether the US will send in Green Berets to back, oh, Christian rebels in southern Sudan, or whatever, is another question.

I watched the match at the community-center pub in Tuincentrum Holland’s Glorie, across the road from the friend’s houseboat where we’re staying. A tuincentrum is a community garden, and their presence is a icon and artifact of Dutch egalitarian socialist urban planning in the period before the neo-liberal turn of the 1990s. They’re close in to urban areas, and the plots are large enough to construct a little shed, so apartment dwellers can have some garden space in a separate location. Holland’s Glorie has a playground, a soccer field, and a little shop and community center with a pub, and they were showing the match on a large screen in the pub. At the end of the first half, with Holland down 1-0 and playing lethargically, people had a characteristically sour Dutch self-critical attitude. I didn’t manage to film the ecstatic reaction when the Dutch scored their goals, but here’s how it looked as the match drew to a close.

Down on the River Amstel where we’re staying, people were stripping naked, climbing onto other people’s houseboats and jumping into the river.

Today in his blog at the NRC Handelsblad, Steven de Jong asks: “Can the World Cup fix our banged-up country?” Since the last time the Netherlands reached the quarterfinals in 1998, de Jong writes, the country has seen crisis after crisis, with the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, the constantly collapsing and reforming Christian Democratic governments of the past decade, and so forth. He cites sportscolumnist Auke Kok’s linking of conservative politics to conservative soccer in mid-June: “A few weeks after the electoral victory of [far-right politician] Geert Wilders [who didn't actually win but scored unprecedentedly well], Orange is playing a game that stands miles apart from the progressive bravura with which whole generations grew up.” He refers to historian Coos Huijsen’s book “The Myth of Orange” and the argument that abstract concepts such as democracy and freedom are insufficient to form a polity, that soccer supplies the “emotional dimension that gives sense and meaning to membership in a society.”

What de Jong doesn’t specifically address is the ethnic-religious tension that has driven Dutch politics over the past decade, and whether the success of the national soccer team can do anything on that score. My sense is that this is unlikely, but I would be curious to know more about how strongly ethnic Moroccans and Turks, apart from my taxi driver, are rooting for Holland to win. I don’t know how important this is, but one of the ways in which sport has classically served as an integration machine is by promoting ethnic-minority stars (think Zinovine Zidane in France, or in the US Michael Jordan or for that matter Joe DiMaggio); and the Dutch team is strikingly white. In the previous generation of Dutch greats, the teams that won the European Championship in the late ’80s, you had the half-Surinamese star Ruud Gullit. Today the top two strikers are Arjen Robben and Wesley Sneijder.

All of this is a bit tongue in cheek; sports don’t really have much influence on politics, and for the moment politics in the Netherlands is preoccupied more with budget deficits than with racial or religious issues. But I do share a bit of Aude Kok’s concern that a victory for Orange at this moment will be felt as a victory for a very conservative, nostalgic, “autochtoon” vision of Orange that Dutch society really needs to move beyond.

Anyway, long story short, to get to Amsterdam, we flew to Paris yesterday and took the TGV. To get the cheap fare on the Thalys, you had to pre-book, so I booked a train that left us plenty of time to get to the station in case our flight was late. As it happened, our flight was on time, so we wound up at the Gare du Nord with three hours to kill. Now, if you’re stuck in an airport for three hours with young kids waiting for your next flight, you wander around trying to find a playground, usually fail to find one, and end up succumbing to their whining pleas for smoothies and coloring books.

If, on the other hand, you’re stuck at Gare du Nord some morning for three hours with young kids, you go for a stroll, like this:

Sacre Coeur, Montmartre

The Thalys from Paris to Amsterdam takes about 3 1/2 hours. So by the afternoon, we were sitting on a friend’s houseboat on the Amstel.

Houseboat on River Amstel

I mean, not that it wasn’t a really long trip or that really long trips with kids are every free of unpleasantnesses. There was dropped ice cream, whining, and so forth. But in the meantime we got a few hours in Montmartre and the kids got to actually see something of Paris, rather than seeing the inside of an airport. Since the point of travel is generally to see places like Paris rather than to see the insides of airports, I think the ability of rail travel to get you to fun places directly, and to do so via other places that are, themselves, often fun, is a big advantage over air travel.

Back in 1994-7, I was a member of Echo, New York’s first popular electronic chat messaging environment, founded by the visionary Stacy Horn. Echo was the New York equivalent of The Well in the Bay Area. At some point in what I believe must have been 1997, I was online chatting about the budding Silicon Alley scene when someone mentioned a lavish party that had been hosted a few days before by the web-design outfit Razorfish. At the time, my roommate was dating a woman who worked at Razorfish, and she had told him something about the hiring of belly-dancers for said party that was in some fashion mildly scandalous. I literally cannot remember anymore what the issue was. It may simply have been the fact that the belly-dancers were paid for by the firm; perhaps that was in some way untoward. Or there may have been a feminism-related complaint. Or something. I have a feeling that the issue itself was so inoffensive that if I could recall it, the whole affair would seem ludicrous.

In any case, I noted in a comment thread on Echo that I had heard that…whatever it was about the belly dancers. Within half an hour, my roommate’s girlfriend was on the phone. Had I posted that information on Echo? Yes, I had. Did I realize that everyone at Razorfish had seen the post, and was asking who’d leaked that information? What the hell was I thinking? Suddenly I realized: I was an idiot. I used a screen name, but some people knew who I was. Some of them might know who my roommate was. Some of them might know he was dating the girl who worked at Razorfish. If somebody figured all of that out, she could get fired.

And so I went back onto Echo and started to lie. I introduced some deliberately inaccurate information into the rumor, in response to others’ queries, to make it sound like I’d heard it fifth-hand rather than third-hand. I let slip some faux-offhand misleading hints to the identity of the person who I’d heard it from, in the course of saying that it was just some weird rumor I’d heard from someone who had no reason to know whether it was true or not. I tried to make it sound like this was just something circulating in the Silicon Alley gossipsphere. I also coordinated my story with her, to make sure it seemed believable and to reassure her that I was doing everything possible to cover the tracks.

I did this because I had a responsibility to this girl not to let some stupid piece of information I’d unthinkingly disclosed get her fired. Had I done something immoral by disclosing this information? Not exactly, I don’t think. I had failed to think out the potential consequences of revealing a certain piece of moderately juicy information in an online forum. Had she done something immoral by disclosing this information to her boyfriend? I think not, or at worst, perhaps very slightly. Had he done something immoral by telling me? Again, at worst, he’d failed to think through the potential consequences, or had mistakenly relied on me having the good sense not to post it online. The person who might have done something wrong, if anyone, was the Razorfish principal who’d done whatever it was involving the belly-dancers. But I’m not even sure whatever that was had been “wrong”, as opposed to “moderately scandalous”. I can’t remember what it was.

The point of tension was simply this: the principal relied on his employees not disclosing embarrassing information. I hadn’t been careful enough with some embarrassing information that had come into my hands on a confidential basis. And as a result, I was now busily and actively telling white lies on the internet, which, arguably, was immoral, in order to avert the clearly much greater harm of getting somebody fired.

It worked. Nobody at Razorfish knew who the Echo member who went by the screen name “steiny” was. They didn’t figure out who my roommate was or that he was dating one of their co-workers. She kept a p-p-poker face for a few days, and then the whole affair slipped into the mists of time. By now the very posts involved are probably unrecoverable due to the mercies of incompatible archives.

Thirteen years later, that margin of anonymity, the space you have to recover from such errors, is almost gone. While I’ve been typing this post, the Zemanta widget on the right of my window has already called up images of belly-dancers, New York parties, and the Razorfish logo. The internet already knows who I am and what I’m writing about. If I’ve made a mistake by writing this post, it may be too late to rectify the damage, even before I’ve hit the “publish” button. What’s our response? Do we log off and go live in log cabins? I think not. I think we get cagey, we get ambiguous, we don’t talk about anything juicy that isn’t at least 13 years old, and we get ourselves some thick skins. And communication strategies change, and older people have trouble keeping up, and younger people don’t realize what can happen to you if you say something unwise until they’ve done it a few times, and that’s life.

Amazingly, Echo appears to still be functioning; the discussion groups are not on the web; and it seems to still be possible to telnet into the servers and engage in old-fashioned text chat. I may try it one of these days for nostalgia’s sake. I wonder who’s still out there?

It should have been “no”. Dozens of dissidents have been sentenced to multi-year jail terms in Vietnam over the past three years, usually for “spreading propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” For many of those convicted, the fact that they gave interviews to foreign news organisations has counted as evidence against them. The US and European governments protest the arrests of democracy activists, but foreign intercession has never prevented the conviction of a Vietnamese dissident, except for a few who had foreign citizenship. (I’m aware of just one case in which a jailed Vietnamese democracy activist with close ties to American institutions was released without a trial due to US pressure.)

As for news organisations like CNN (or the ones I work for), we can do nothing to protect the dissidents we interview, apart from running critical reports on their arrests and convictions. The Vietnamese government largely ignores such press coverage, and foreign media don’t usually pay much attention either. It’s just one small story among many. The fact that Ms Boykoff’s article consistently misspells Ms Quynh’s name doesn’t give much reassurance that CNN is paying focused, long-term attention to the issue of Vietnamese democracy activism. Nor does the televised report’s use of a file-footage establishing shot of the old National Assembly building in Hanoi, which was torn down over a year ago. To a Vietnamese spectator watching the report, the use of that shot says: we don’t follow Vietnam very closely.

What responsibilities do news organisations have in these circumstances? Does Ms Quynh know what she’s getting into by going on CNN to criticise the Vietnamese government? Is she under the misimpression that the publicity will help protect her from arrest? I’ve interviewed a number of people like Ms Quynh, ordinary citizens rather than public figures who have fallen into dissident status without entirely meaning to, and who, having grown up in Vietnam’s cloistered information environment, may be strikingly naive regarding the nature of the Vietnamese state and the ability of foreign governments or organisations to intercede. I’ve also interviewed highly educated, self-conscious dissidents who knew precisely what they were getting themselves into and had a reasonable sense of what strategies were likely to be effective.

I’m happy to report the statements of this latter sort of dissident. Moreover, I’m obliged to. They’re political activists who are making news. My job is to report the news. They’re acting quite deliberately, and they can take care of themselves. With the less sophisticated dissidents, however, things get complicated. I sometimes feel that these are people who have been pushed over an emotional edge by the unfair treatment they’ve received, and are lashing out in a fashion that, in the end, will only hurt them. By running interviews with them, you’re essentially exploiting and to some extent egging on their self-destruction.

I’m not saying CNN shouldn’t have run the interview. It’s their call. But I hope that when Ms Quynh asked whether CNN could ensure they would be “safe”, they told her very clearly that they couldn’t, that what she was doing was not safe at all.

My best guess, after a few minutes, was that it’s from the Greek “muse”. And that turns out to be right, says Wikipedia (Greek mousike to Latin musicaa). A hint to what may have happened comes later in the Wikipedia entry: it seems a lot of Native American and African languages don’t have a separate word for what we would consider “music”, which in those cultures is bound together with dance and religious practice. So what we may be seeing here is the trace of two thousand years in which the conception of music as a distinct art composed entirely of sound spread from Greece and Rome out through classical antiquity and thence to the barbarian lands to the north, becoming the word for that art because those cultures had never conceived of such an art in those terms before. The word for music sounds like “music” everywhere in Europe for the same reason the word for internet sounds like “internet” everywhere around the world.

And then I thought, wait—German and Dutch arbeit/arbeid, “labor”, has the r-b-t/d root that’s probably the same as the Slavic r-b-t. Take it over to the Latin tongues, French: travailler, or Spanish trabar. That r-b root is probably also related to the Slavic and Germanic r-b-t/d.

Right? Probably. I’m not even going to bother looking it up; anybody who knows I’m wrong, please let me know.

David Dinkins was a universally respected politician widely seen as smart, competent and a good conciliator, if somewhat uninspiring. (There’s the first point of sharp dissimilarity with Obama.) He was congenial to white liberals, and brought along the black and hispanic votes largely out of solidarity. The simple prospect of having New York’s first black mayor generated a fair amount of voter enthusiasm.

However, that enthusiasm was not attached to a strong agenda, and once in office, like any Democrat in New York City (or anywhere else), Dinkins found himself tied down like Gulliver to a million tiny cross-cutting interest groups and points of ideological dogma, not to mention Democrats’ habitual enthusiasm for circular firing squads. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, a Democrat in Gracie Mansion was immobilized. He couldn’t cross the teachers. He couldn’t cross the school boards. He couldn’t cross the sanitation workers’ or transit workers’ unions. He couldn’t override the delicate sensibilities of neighborhood historical preservation boards and other NIMBY-enforcing associations. He tried to bring the city a grudging racial peace, after the years of Bernard Goetz and Howard Beach and “wilding” (which may or may not ever have taken place). But he proved unable to tame the tensions that flared during the Crown Heights riots. And he had the bad luck to preside over a vicious recession that gave the city an air of defeat.

Meanwhile, Dinkins never really got the benefit of the doubt from the conservative white neighborhoods of Queens and Staten Island, who had become accustomed to a white, ethnic image of New York under Ed Koch. They treated his mayoralty as though they were living under enemy occupation, as a betrayal of their image of what New York-ness was. New York, to them, was not Spike Lee or Run-DMC. New York was Woody Allen and Frank Sinatra. They heard Dinkins’s “gorgeous mosaic” speech as a repudiation of the melting-pot ethic that underpinned their own narratives of immigrant Americanization.

So the first chance they got, they put somebody into office who brought back Ed Koch’s accent, but with a more punitive attitude. And while much of what Rudy Giulani accomplished was due to luck (the strong economy, the continuation of the fall in violent crime that began under Dinkins), the overwhelming sensation was that a Republican with the backing of the police, Wall Street, and the yuppie elite could generate momentum in overwhelmingly Democratic New York that no Democrat ever could. This political sensation has continued under Bloomberg.

In many ways, this comparison reveals how little Dinkins has in common with Obama. The racial politics of 2008-10 are very different from those of the early ’90s. Identity politics is dead. Sister Souljah has no army. Barack Obama himself personifies an easy grace with mixed racial identity that renders the mosaic-vs-melting-pot debates of 1990 antique. 2008 in America, unlike 1989 in New York, was a moment of remarkably low racial tension. New York elected a black mayor in 1989 in part because it needed a racial peacemaker; America was able to elect a black president in 2008 in large measure because racial conflict was not on the immediate agenda.

Then, of course, there’s Obama himself. He is inspirational. He has a style all his own. He is a personality, a celebrity. He can be electrifying on television. He’s an analytical thinker and a manager with a professorial gift for expressing complex processes in clear, conversational terms. Dinkins was none of these.

The similarity lies in the sense that Obama was swept into office on a wave of personal enthusiasm insufficiently attached to an agenda, and that he’s now bogging down in a characteristically Democratic muck of dissension and squabbling. My anxiety is that Obama, like Dinkins, is a cool, friendly conciliator who was elected by a deeply divided community in the hope that he could bring it together. But both of them have been smacked with insurmountable economic problems that have denied them the resources they need to make reconciliation work. And as the community relapses into vicious squabbling, it blames the conciliator for its own failures. That’s the mess I’m afraid Obama may get stuck in.

Add: I realize I’ve failed to communicate here that Barack Obama has in fact accomplished an immense amount in his first year and a half in office. Passing national health-care…is enough for a president to retire on. Financial reform, once passed, will be a major accomplishment; we’ll have to see how good the bill is. And, of course, we have an economy that’s in some kind of recovery, due in no small part to the ARRA, and whatever else you want to say about Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, at no time in the past 2 years have I gone to an ATM machine and found that I can’t withdraw money because the global financial system has ceased to exist. This was not a foregone conclusion. Obama has had, objectively, a very accomplished 18 months. But we’re running into a sense of the doldrums this summer, and that’s what prompted the comparison. Again, it may well be a very bad analogy.