Every once in a while, it’s a good idea to charge Anwar Ibrahim with sodomy. Or so it would appear.

A top Malaysian opposition leader and a former deputy prime minister, Anwar spent six years in prison after a 1998 conviction of sodomy, which was later overturned. Now he faces 20 more on charges he sodomized a campaign worker – the second time he’s been charged with an “act against nature.” (Sodomy is illegal in Malaysia in both homosexual and heterosexual couples.)

Those of us following the story at the time couldn’t help but notice the first sodomy charges against Anwar were launched during the build-up to President Clinton’s impeachment in 1998.

As the rest of the world looked on in awe at America’s Puritan politics, you could almost picture Malaysian leaders rubbing their hands together and coming up with a plot against Anwar. Mere infidelity wouldn’t do it.  Sodomy – that time, of his adopted brother  — now that’s enough to get Malaysians to sit up and listen! A semen-stained mattress, hauled into court, has gone down in history as the Malaysian prosecutors’ answer to the blue Gap dress.

Every once in a while, it’s a good idea to anoint one of Asia’s “widows, widowers and orphans” the heir-apparent to a political dynasty. Or so it would appear.

Asia-hands have been writing about this phenomenon for a while:  Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of assassinated independence hero Aung San; Sonia Gandhi is the widow of assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (and now their son, Rahul Gandhi, is in parliament); Asif Ali Zardari became President of Pakistan after the assassination of his opposition leader wife, Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 – herself the daughter of executed former prime minister.

The list goes on.

One to keep an eye on in years to come is Yenny Wahid, daughter of the late Indonesian President Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, who died in December. She is now at the Wahid Institute, which promotes a moderate and tolerant form of Islam.

Again in Malaysia, Anwar’s wife Azizah Ismail won her husband’s seat in parliament following his 1998 conviction.  Now, some Malaysians are reportedly looking to their daughter, Nurul Izzah to take up the reins of opposition movement in Malaysia.

Democracy in Asia’s great, it seems, as long as it comes with a family name attached.

But every once in a while, one must simply marvel at the staying power of Hun Sen.

Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen recently marked his 25^th anniversary in power, having first been appointed premier in January 1985 – apparently a merit-based appointment.  At 33 years old, it made him the world’s youngest prime minister.  He now ranks at the 11^th longest serving ruler in the world.

“Democracy” in Asia’s great – if you’ve been in power for 25 years.

One can argue that the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Cambodia, which included a groundbreaking democratic election in 1993, was one of the UN’s most glorious success stories, ending a four-way civil war known to some die-hard fans as “the last battle of the Vietnam War.”

Or one could argue that the mission was a textbook UN failure.

Hun Sen lost that election and refused to give up power. The UN invented a “co-premiership” which dysfunctionally plodded along for 4 years until Hun Sen overthrew his senior partner and election-winner Prince Norodom Ranariddh in a coup in 1997.

And Hun Sen’s been coasting along ever since.  The only genuine form of opposition in Cambodia is the long-suffering (and some would say self-promoting) Sam Rainsy, now working in exile due to being convicted in absentia on race-baiting charges and sentenced to two years in jail. (Hun Sen is widely believed to be behind a the failed grenade-throwing assassination attempt of Sam Rainsy in 1997, which killed 16 others.)

Hun Sen, now 58, has declared he would hang on to power until he is 90 years old. At the moment, there’s no reason – barring ill health – to think that won’t hold true.  If Hun Sen does get sick in the next 30 years?  Good thing he has a daughter and a couple of sons.

Meanwhile, in 2020, if nothing else is going on? Maybe Malaysia will charge Anwar with sodomy again.

Today I’m introducing what might become a regular feature of my blog – “The Best of Late Night Foreign Policy.”

Of course, as soon as I decided to pursue this line of research, the Battle of Jay vs. Conan monopolized the airwaves, and the nation was enthralled by the question of which Filthy-Rich-White-Guy-in-a-Tie-Sits-Behind-a-Desk-on-TV-Better.

At the same time, the Haitian earthquake occupied much of the foreign news landscape, from which the Late Night Guys get their material. Tragedy, of course, is hard to make funny.

Still, there are some recent contenders.

By the “Best of Late Night Foreign Policy,” I mean not only funny, but also grounded in a reasonable knowledge of the world outside US borders.  Here are some recent contenders:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Yemen, January 6, 2010:  “Can’t we get into a war with paved countries?”

The Colbert Report – Yemen – January 5, 2010.  “Yemen is not only full of terrorists, but also Mexicans.”

Unlike Comedy Central’s fake news programs, the Late Night landscape made up of Jay, Conan and Dave seem to rarely produce segments on international events. So judging their foreign policy cred is based on the jokes they throw out during monologues. (To save both my sanity and my DVR, I’ve chosen to ignore Jimmy Fallon, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel and anyone else lurking in late late night.)

The winner is David Letterman.  On the 23 year-old Nigerian underwear bomber: “The guy was not too bright – he said the reason he became a suicide bomber was to work his way up the al Qaeda organization.”

Conan is second, but Jay?  I don’t want to gang up on the guy, but let’s just say that Jay needs to travel more. Not every foreign event needs to be linked to NBA penis size.  And not everyone lives in a cave.

Since pickings were slim on the Late Night foreign desk,  I’m going to reach into some recent archives to highlight two other very funny spots:

Saturday Night Live’s joint press conference with President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, November 2009.

And one more from Stephen Colbert – October 6^th, 2009:  “Afghanistan is just not that into being invaded.” (Starts around 1.30)

The New York Times is running an interesting piece, critiquing the broadcast coverage of the Haiti disaster, commenting in part on the tendency of broadcasters to reach for a good-news-bad-news paradox, and more importantly – the careful balance anchors try to achieve between “compassion and self-congratulation.”

The piece is by Alessandra Stanley. Please read it.

I understand the natural instinct to push for the good news.  The purest definition of news I’ve ever heard?  News is the aberration of normality.  Amid all that tragedy, doing a story on a kid being pulled out of the rubble isn’t some over-produced moment intended to pull on the heart-strings. It’s an aberration.

Stanley goes on to observe:

The line between compassion and self-congratulation is thin on television; in a calamity this vast and acute, many viewers flinch at any sign of reportorial showboating.

She cites some examples along that thin line:

• CBS’s Katie Couric holding the hand of an injured child who was being treated by a doctor.
• Brian Williams, who acknowledged that he and his crew were the only ones with food and water, but that the purpose of NBC coverage was to galvanize viewers to get involved.
• CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, a medical doctor,  walked past injured in a hospital,  while CNN repeatedly showed a different sequence of him administering to one injured child.

I’m torn. As a freelance journalist who spent 17 years overseas, the US broadcast teams were by far the most egregious “parachute” journalists – dropping into a situation they knew virtually nothing about, covering it with the thinnest veneer of journalism, while relying on teams of local fixers and producers who do the actual legwork of journalism, before flying out again.  (CNN is the exception in some – but not all – cases.)

That doesn’t appear to be in the case in Haiti. In disasters, reporting is a veritable “embarrassment of riches” – stories abound.  It doesn’t require much investigation.

In the cases Stanley lists, would you rather Katie Couric didn’t hold the kid’s hand? We don’t actually know if the producers said, “Let’s go do a story about Katie and a suffering kid,” or if they were focusing on a kid and Couric just happened to step in.  (I imagine she, and every journalist there, have had to walk by a lot of suffering kids this week.)

And I actually appreciate Brian Williams’ guilty admission that NBC isn’t all that hard up on the ground in Haiti – I’m sure they flew in a charter flight of their own camping supplies.  And he’s right:  the purpose of journalism is to inform.

Sanjay Gupta…He’s there as a journalist, not a doctor, so no – I don’t expect him to be treat every injured person he comes across.  And I can believe that he takes a little time out to help when he can. And the apparent repetition of that segment isn’t coming from Sanjay Gupta, it’s coming from CNN producers in a control room somewhere in the US.

But at the same time, in the celebrity-soaked US culture, I think there’s far too much focus on the anchor-as-a-personality.

During the Hurricane Katrina disaster, for example, my broadcast journalist friends and I widely mocked CNN’s Anderson Cooper for his infamous crying stand-up.  At one point, shooting a piece-to-camera amid the devastation, Cooper got teary.

Why did we mock him? Because it wasn’t live.  Cooper had the opportunity to re-shoot that piece-to-camera – without crying – but the calculated, cynical decision made by him or by CNN was to run the one in which he got a little weepy.   That shifted CNN’s editorial line in that segment from being about New Orleans, to being about Anderson Cooper’s reaction to New Orleans. That made it “Broadcast News.”

In my 17 years overseas, primarily in Southeast Asia and South Asia — when the “big story” happened — the non-American networks including the CBC, the Australian networks, the BBC for example, had been covering the area in some form before a) disaster struck, or b) the riots happened, c) the elections were held, etc.  They had a presence and a body of work to represent their interest in foreign news without any personalities attached – beyond working-grunt correspondents.   (NPR was there, as were US print media.)

So if you’re an American network, and you’ve decided to do some foreign news,  you don’t pay your anchor $15 million a year…. not to hold the kid’s hand.

Without being on the ground in Haiti, we’re never going to know the point at which the genuine feelings of an anchor give way to the “information triage” that goes on in a disaster… remember – news is the aberration of normality.

But I’ve always thought it would be nice if a network would pay their anchor, oh -  I don’t know,  $5 million a year to squeak by –  while devoting the other $10 million to coverage of foreign affairs like their broadcast colleagues around the world.  Then they’d really be doing their duty to inform.

As widely reported, Haitian President Rene Preval has estimated that there may be “hundreds of thousands” killed by the earthquake – an extraordinary sum. By comparison:

• The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 killed 170 thousand in Indonesia alone, and 250 thousand around the world.

• An estimated 30 thousand were killed by the tsunami in Sri Lanka – almost half of the 70 thousand killed in Sri Lanka’s 25 year civil war.

Clearly, the impact of the earthquake on Haiti is massive – and the aid effort to rebuild the woe-beset nation, also wracked by a series of hurricanes, will be massive as well.

Former President Bill Clinton has weighed in the Haiti crisis, with an appeals for assistance and coordination.

And he’s one to watch in the coming weeks – not as much for disaster relief, but political finesse.

President Clinton is the UN Special Envoy to Haiti – a post he assumed in 2009, to help the UN and Haitian leaders cement a fragile peace since the last outbreak of fighting and a military coup took place in 2004 (not to be confused with the coup in 1994, in response to which President Clinton sent US troops.)

The UN peacekeepers are  – or sadly, had been – working to promote peaceful political processes, and to strengthen the rule of law across Haiti.

The focus in Haiti now, of course, is on saving lives and alleviating the humanitarian crisis.

But sitting in offices in the State Department and the United Nations, I’ll wager, are the policy-wonks whose job it will be to ensure that the humanitarian disaster will have no negative impact on the peace processes.

But it goes beyond that. The wonks will look for ways the earthquake can be used for good -  that perhaps Bill Clinton will spearhead.

There are two recent precedents to look at:

First, there’s Aceh, Indonesia.  Aceh was home to a very tired, low-intensity 25 year-old insurgency between the “Free Aceh Movement” and the Indonesian government.  It was a resource conflict, essentially – Aceh is rich in timber and oil.  From the perspective of the independence movement, far too much of the profit from Aceh’s natural wealth ended up in the pockets of politicians in Indonesia’s faraway capital.

Peace efforts came and peace efforts went in Aceh (some of which I covered.) But it was the sheer enormity of the tsunami that forced both sides to sit down, throw in some international mediation, and seriously hammer out a peace agreement.

Then there’s Sri Lanka.

The Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government had been fighting a 25 year war -  the rebels believing that ethnic Tamils were consistently shortchanged by the predominantly ethnic-Sinhalese government. So they wanted independence.

Like in Aceh, the Sri Lankan government, the Tamil Tigers,  the aid-community, the press, the policy-wonks  – everyone was positively aflutter with the notion that the overwhelming tragedy of the tsunami might finally unite the long-divided country, ending the years of bitter hostility.  Give peace a chance.

Two billion dollars of aid was pledged to Sri Lanka following the tsunami.

And it made things worse.

Sri Lanka’s domestic politics, international donor politics, and the very logistics of delivering aid conspired — and that aid, in the end, was distributed in an extremely uneven manner.  The Sinhalese in the south received far more assistance than the Tamils in the north.

(This is an extremely complicated subject, which I may weigh in on in the coming days and weeks.  One dimension however, was that the US put the Tamil Tigers on the State Department’s controversial official terror list. That means the US – and organizations that rely on the US for funding – could only legally give money to the Sri Lankan government to distribute. The Sri Lankan government simply did not exist in Tamil Tiger controlled areas. Therefore, no one – not even civilians — in those areas received any benefit of US funding. US funds went to exactly one side in the civil war, which arguably only exacerbated tensions.)

Long story short, Sri Lanka fell apart again.   (The Sri Lankan government defeated the Tamil Tigers in May 2009 – amid reports of horrendous human rights abuses by government forces.)

Of course, Haiti hasn’t got a separatist insurgency.

But  consider this: UN peacekeepers have been in Haiti, in various missions, since 1993.  Sixteen years (!) of peacekeeping suggest that whatever peace the UN had achieved remains fragile.  And we don’t know yet if the key Haitian leaders involved in forging that peace have survived the earthquake.

So you take poor country, with simmering political tensions, a horrific tragedy that may create a political vacuum — and throw in millions and millions of dollars - $100 million from the US alone?  Whoa.

Will it be Aceh, or will it be Sri Lanka?

That’s situation that the Haitian government, the policy-wonks, the donors, the UN and the Bill Clinton’s of this world are going to have to finesse.

From a straightforward media perspective, it will be interesting to watch the Haiti crisis to see the role played by social networking and “citizen journalism.”

CNN’s “I-Report” is serving as a hub for people to post photos of missing loved ones and hopefully to get word that they are alright.

Because CNN is also receiving photos of the damage across Haiti, they know some people have access to the internet – despite what is reported to be extensive damage to phone system and power-grids.

Facebook, for its part, also has at least one Haiti Earthquake page, for people to get in touch with family members in Haiti.

Twitter has also lit up with Haiti as a “trending topic.”  I can see, so far, how Twitter might be useful to encourage people outside of Haiti to donate money to the relief operations. But so far, I’m at a loss to see if it’s actually serving people within Haiti – unlike for example, the Iranian student movement, which used Twitter to coordinate protests.  Would someone please fill me in if I’m wrong?  (If you can tweet, you can also text and email. So where’s the value in Twitter?)

(For an excellent piece on the real impact Twitter had in Iran, please read  Evgeny Morozov’s “Iran: Downside to the Twitter Revolution” which ran in Foreign Policy.)

Call me Old-School, but I suspect the wave of “citizen journalism” to come out of Haiti will likely reveal both the power and the failings of the media trend.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people in Port-au-Prince upload astonishing images of damage, of heroism, of humanity.  But to sift through the masses of information, confirm what needs to be confirmed, provide corroborating coverage coming out of Washington, out of London -  out of every other place decision-makers may be -  still requires, at the most basic level, an Associated Press or a Reuters, among a few other wire services. The excellent coverage coming from news outlets like Washington Post, The New York Times, and all the  broadcasters, CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS/FOX/BBC/SKY  relies in part on them.