Abraham Path Initiative - Reception in São Paulo

Date: Tuesday, July 1 2008
Location: Auditório Schahin – Rua Vergueiro, 2009
Time: 19h30 (7:30 pm)

Prezados Amigos e Colaboradores,

A Iniciativa O Caminhão de Abraão e seu Conselho Diretor no Brasil têm a honra de convidá-los para a cerimônia de encerramento do primeiro Curso Inter Religioso Iniciativa o Caminho de Abraão.

Na oportunidade será, também, oferecido um coquetel em homenagem ao Dr. William Ury, PhD Professor da Universidade Harvard e mentor da Iniciativa o Caminho de Abraão, que fará o discurso de encerramento do Curso.

Para mais informações visite: www.abrahampath.org

The Loaded Gun

By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2     

Among the secret documents obtained by Valor under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, in addition to the cable on Dilma Rousseff discussed last week, there is another worthy of note: A cable from the Secretary of State Condolezza Rice to the American Embassy in Brasilia providing a detailed account of her meeting with Jose Dirceu on March 3, 2005. All of the text was intended to be censored. However, the entire text was inadvertently released and is accessible as document E 144 at www.valoronline.com.br/PDF/20050307Washington.pdf

In a private one on one session Dirceu and Rice discussed Venezuela. "In response to the Secretary's comment that Brazil needs to send a frank message to Venezuelan president Chavez, Dirceu stated that Lula had already counseled Chavez on the need to be more careful in his rhetoric (telling Chavez he was "playing with a loaded gun") and to focus on economic and social priorities.

He added that Brazil did not believe that Chavez is supporting the FARC." Well, this week Chavez belatedly took Lula's advice. Most probably this was the result of the quiet threat by Colombia to release The full details of another set of secret documents: those found in FARC laptops after Columbia attacked and killed FARC commander Raul Reyes in a cross border air and commando strike into Equador last April. There seems no doubt that the information the Colombians obtained from these laptops about Venezuelan financial and military support for FARC was accurate, despite Venezuela's continuing denials.

But one thing is clear: this week Chavez dramatically backtracked from his role as the prominent political supporter of the idea that the FARC should be recognized as legitimate force. In response to the killing of several FARC commanders and the death of its long-term commander Manuel Marulanda as well as the capture by Colombia of a Venezuelan national guard officer in eastern Colombia who was carrying 40,000 AK-47 assault rifle cartridges intended for the FARC, Chavez now says FARC should end its guerrilla war.

Chavez's less belligerent does offer the potential for one very positive diplomatic outcome: the release of the long-suffering hostages held by the FARC, including Ingrid Betencourt. Lets hope.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper

Complexity

By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2  

One of the giants of American journalism, Tim Russert, died unexpectedly late last week of a heart attack at the age of 58. Tim Russert was Washington bureau chief of NBC News. More importantly he was the host of the most influential Sunday morning TV talk show "Meet the Press" where he interrogated the great and the mighty with dogged grace and meticulous persistence.

I doubt very much Tim Russert was widely known in Brazil. He was a very American phenomenon; proud of his roots in the gritty old industrial town of Buffalo, New York; proud of his working class Catholic origins; and he had the well honed instincts of the local street level democratic politician.

Russert began his career working for the legendary New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, another street smart Irishman of very formidable intelligence. Senator Moynihan, a sociologist who had taught at Harvard, was a powerful and eccentric figure in Washington.

Tall and disheveled, and a man who evidently enjoyed his whiskey, he terrified the bureaucrats called to testify before his senatorial committee. Apparently dozing off he would suddenly lurch forward, cast his beady eye on the witness, and demand "complexification".

There is no such word of course: What the senator was demanding was not simplistic assertions but the facts.

Tim Russert's unexpected death made me think of Senator Moynihan, a "public intellectual" who had made his name challenging conventional liberal opinion. Moynihan argued in the mid 1960s that a major problem for American blacks was the lack of Father headed households.

He was vilified by the left for "blaming the victim". But last Sunday, Father's Day in the U.S., and at one of Chicago's largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama said the same thing: "We need Father's to realize that responsibility does not end at conception"

Senator Barack Obama knows. His own father abandoned him and his mother when he was a child. But it was a very sensitive topic for him to address head on and where and when he did; and it makes one think that if Barack Obama becomes President of the United States he will be a leader, like the late senator Moynihan, who demands we recognize there are no simplistic solutions to the world's complexity.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper

Unanswered messages

By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2  

Some years ago I ran into the former legal adviser to Jeane Kirkpatrick during the period she served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He recalled an odd experience he had in 1982 when she had returned to the office baffled after having been taken to lunch by her Argentine colleague at the U.N. She reported that at the end of every other sentence the Argentine Ambassador would pause dramatically and declare: "Malvinas! Malvinas!" What, Ambassador Kirkpatrick asked her adviser, was "Malvinas"?

Jeane Kirkpatrick was supposed to have been an expert on Argentina. The Argentine military regime, which she had defended, saw her as a friend. The Malvinas is of course the designation the Argentines use for the Falkland Islands in their dispute with the British over the sovereignty of the South Atlantic archipelago. Her lack of reaction was taken as a sign of U.S. approval for the invasion of the islands, which took place a week later.

I had witnessed a second missed message in 1981. My office at Columbia University was in the Research Institute on International Change founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who until January of that year had been the National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. We had a weekly seminar on international affairs and the speaker once was Benjamin Netanyahu. Quietly, in the course of responding to a question on another topic, he said that the Israelis intended to attack the Iraqi nuclear plant. He must have assumed the message would be passed on. But no one took note. Silence was interpreted as approval. A week later the Israeli did attack Iraq.

In September of last year an Israeli air strike destroyed a nuclear facility in Syria. International reaction was notable for its silence. Earlier this month the Israelis carried out a major military exercise in the eastern Mediterranean with more than 100 F-16 and F-15 fighters, refueling tankers and helicopter rescue backups. An operation on that scale was hardly a secret to anyone and would have required over-flight permission from Turkey and Greece. It was clearly a simulation of an attack on Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

The cautious director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, was sufficiently concerned about the Israeli operation to warn that an attack on Iran would turn the Middle East "into a ball of fire."

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper