Deliver Us from Evil

...You also have the unique opportunity to lead a group of young people who face the spiritual challenge of being away from home for the first time in their lives...

...Nevertheless, as if bursting out of the bonds of his disability, his prose pours out-lush, exuberant, and evocative...

...Commonweal 2 7 August 11, 2000...

...He writes by having his head held as he taps at a typewriter with a stick attached to his forehead...

...This novel took him thirteen years to finish...

...WORLD ANARCHY v. WORLD PEACE R. Scott Appleby n the aftermath of the sucI cessful NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, a triumphant President Bill Clinton promulgated the doctrine that came to bear his name: "If somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background, or their religion, and it is within our power to stop it, we will stop it...

...White Teeth is the saga of World War II buddies, Archibald Jones--a self-effacing Englishman "whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble: Beach...

...I've got to go to school...

...or European national interests--inhabitants of places like Algeria, Angola, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, East Timor, Chechnya, and Cambodia--can expect timely and effective intervention when they are targeted on the basis of their race, ethnic background, or religion...

...Year after year she soldiers on with the farm work while Brendan, now a bishop, struggles with doubt and alcoholism in New York Sheila lives in a loveless marriage, and Frankie, her favorite, goes his lone wild way in Australia...

...Thus Shawcross directs his attention to the United States, France, Russia and other members of the Security Council who occasionally manipulated and undermined the UN, thereby making a mockery of its advertised role as the world's conscience and defender of universal human rights...

...It's not fair...

...It w;21 Commonweal 2 ~ August 11, 2000come from wiser forms of humanitarian intervention, and what Tony Blair calls "progressive wars'--wars fought less on grounds of realpolitik or national self-interest than "for a fundamental principle necessary for humanity's progress: that every human being, regardless of race, religion, or birth, has an inalienable right to live free from persecution...

...Magid Iqbal, a freak genius, "given a glorious name like Magid Mahfooz Murshed Iqbal," wants instead to be called Mark Smith, and attend the Harvest Festival at school "like some wood sprite," instead of accompanying his father to Mecca...

...Irie Jones (whose name means, in patois, "everything OK, cool, peaceful"), battles with "the bird's nest of her hair," and her weight: her body has "brown bulges for children, bags of fruit, buckets of water, ledges genetically designed with another country in mind...

...ARMY CHAPLAIN CORPS...

...The event and its fallout further eroded any lingenng American ambition to play policeman to the world...

...refugee camps became breeding grounds for extremism and retaliatory violence...

...Archie marries Clara, an attractive Jamaican (and as a consequence is no longer invited to company banquets...

...Shawcross acknowledges as much in the epilogue, which envisions "a new global architecture" emerging through the establishment of the International Criminal Court and the ad hoc war crimes tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda...

...Readers will be held by the language to the very end: A day crate before her, a clay crate behind her, clay in every Stygian stitch of the vacancy in the hole where she now lay, and lingering, the crowd gathered at the graveside waited the final decade for decoration at the end, as green grass the clay waited to grow, the earthworms to fodder, there in Drumhollow graveyard, where woman of women all, the Fenian-heart-stopper Minnie Humphries-that-was joined her husband-that-used-to-be for ever and ever, amen...

...Smashing "cultures of impunity," a goal Annan and many world leaders have embraced as essential to genuine peace, requires unflinching moral judgments enforced by nation-states willing to make the necessary sacrifices, up to and including the lives of their own citizen-soldiers...

...The children of these two couples, Irie Jones, and the twins, Millat and Magid Iqbal, are strangers in a strange land...

...Nolan's prose has been called Joycean and passages like this give reason to the claim...

...in such encounters, neutrality has a dangerous tendency to degenerate into appeasement...

...Does it accumulate the military might necessary to reduce or eliminate its dependency on nation-states...

...This unwillingness to "cross the Mogadishu hne"--to risk American lives in a peacekeeping operation that does not clearly serve U.S...

...Too frequently they became pawns--and in some cases, hostages--rather than peacekeepers...

...As an Army priest, you minister to soldiers, spouses, children, and retirees...

...In addition, the United States refused to pay $1.5 billion in overdue UN dues and assessments for peacekeeping operations, and the Clinton administration was instrumental in denying Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali a second term...

...One young man's body was dragged through the streets of the city, a gruesome scene shown repeatedly on American television...

...her in-laws speculate that her family has "some funny mental history...

...It's not fair...

...Shawcross's detailed reports of Annan's globe-trot~ng diplomacy nevertheless provide undeniable evidence of the UN's inadvertent complicity in several of the diplomatic and operational failures...

...The secretary general received an assignment (for example, prevent the outbreak of Tutsi vs...

...The very ordinariness of the story is transformed by the language...

...I can't go on haj...

...Magid is returned to Bangladesh "to be brought up proper" by his grandparents, where he eerily turns, in a twist of poetic jusR. Scott Appleby teaches history and directs the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame...

...Unable to maintain the peace where one or more parties to a conflict resented their presence, they were certainly unequipped to enforce the peace...

...Abigail McCarthy, a longtime Commonweal contributor, lives in Washington, D.C...

...There are emotion and intensity in the telling of the final part of Minnie's life but no real disappointment because of its truth to life...

...William Shawcross's grim account of international peacekeeping and "endless conflict" in the nineties suggests all manner of unspoken qualifications and loopholes lurking in Clinton's post-Kosovo proclamation...

...Minnie, n6e Humphries, has left service in her father's shop to marry Peter O'Brien...

...Hutu violence in Rwanda), but not the resources or the actual authority needed to fulfill it...

...Finally, one might reasonably infer from Kosovo that "when it is within our power" is Clintonspeak for "whenever we can minimize casualties by relying solely on low-risk air strikes...

...Frequently the supplies fell into the hands of black marketeers and predators...

...Annan's commitment to neutrality and his overwhelming desire to prevent or end violence at any cost---characteristics that mark him as a man of peace did not always serve the cause of peacemaking in a world of dictators, warlords, and amoral gangs of young thugs armed with machetes and guns...

...It opens with the weekly churning of butter and the language of its description is mesmerizing: Nursing still their helium harvest the cataracted crocks waited, still playing their stoic games, but the moment they were lifted up they yielded up their booty, listening in awe as their dotted cream dropped ploppingly down into the cold, damp coffin of dankness...

...Unarmed or lightly armed peacekeepers, deployed piecemeal by reluctant member nations that needed cajoling to fulfill their commitments (and often reneged on them), found themselves wholly unYOUR ARMY NEEDS PRIESTS, TOO...

...To date, the "somebody" deserving of punishment has included Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein--deserving, to be sure--but the comeupCommonweal 2 4 August 11, 2000pance, such as it was, occurred after the dictator in question had presided over the slaughter of many thousands of noncombatants...

...The "international community," according to Shawcross, is perhaps the greatest fiction underlying the UN's mandate and mission...

...There it lay fooling itself that it might yet escape but then snapped the lid, snap went the clamps, and up the churn was hoisted onto its stand...

...Christopher Nolan is mute and a paraplegic...

...And she learns to understand and cheer his game of hurling...

...Commonweal 2 5 August 11, 2000prepared for the hostilities they faced...

...national interests or preserve "international peace and security"--became a fixation in Washington, Shawcross reports, after the pursuit of Somali warlord Mohammed Aideed resulted in the death of eighteen American soldiers in October 1993...

...Efforts to build a coalition of nation-states willing to fight "progressive wars" might merit and attract the support of Catholics committed to the church's defense of human rights and support of the UN, its challenge to developed nations and especially the United States to assume moral leadership, and its abhorrence of wars and the unimaginable human suffering they cause...

...And, because you train with your fellow soldiers, you experience a closeness that few other ministries can offer...

...BE ALL YOU CAN BE...

...Shawcross, the British journalist who made his name with Sideshow, an expos6 of Nixon's clandestine bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, demonstrates that each of the key concepts informing his current project--"humanitarian intervention," "peacekeeping," and "the international community'has earned its scare quotes...

...What is clear from the Kosovo conflict is that when it came to making war, "we" (as in "we will stop it") meant the powerful NATO alliance, but when it came to managing the peace, "we" became the understaffed, logistically challenged, and financially dependent United Nations...

...Shawcross does not help much in evaluating such possibilities...

...Stubbornly holding to her belief that Frankie will return to farm the five fields and the family will be reunited, she lives out her days in Drumhollow...

...Deliver Us from Evil is both instructive and odd because it attempts to argue, in effect, that the world needs a UN-friendly version of the Clinton Doctrine, even while presenting case after case that illustrates, with depressing redundancy, the formidable obstacles to its realization and the heavy odds against its success...

...Moreover, it has yet to be demonstrated that the "innocent civilians" of nations and regions standing outside the sphere of U.S...

...A UN-friendly version of the Clinton Doctrine might deserve to have the loopholes eliminated, the double talk dropped...

...The author leaves such questions hanging in the air...

...In dutifully chronicling the woefully mixed record of humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping, Deliver Us from Evil seeks to stir hope for meaningful reform in the way we pursue peace...

...One may be forgiven for squinting to detect the fine print of the Clinton Doctrine, and not merely in response to its namesake's unfortunate tendency to inflate a half-truth or tell the occasional whopper...

...544 or visit www.goarmy.com...

...Incident after incident is fraught with luminous detail and fresh insights...

...For more information about specific opportunities and benefits, call 1-800-USA-ARMY, ext...

...Unintended and tragic consequences befell UN peacekeeping as well...

...Time and again, the members of the Security Council passed resolutions in the name of the "international community," but acted in their own national interests...

...The oldest is already ordained a priest and the daughter become a nurse when Peter succumbs to the heart condition he has kept secret...

...They milk the cows, feed the calves, slop the pigs, and check the roosting hens before sitting down to tea in their own kitchen...

...The seemingly intractable ethnic, religious, tribal, and border wars of the post-cold-war era do not lend themselves to short-term solutions...

...Accordingly, attempts by the international communityinvariably short-term in nature---to prevent, manage, and resolve these conflicts produced a litany of blunders that provoked finger-pointers of every persuasion...

...Shawcross wants to defend the UN and Secretary General Kofi Annan, whose perspective is privileged throughout the book...

...VIEW FROM THE MARGINS Anita Mathias o-called mulficultural literature in many ways extends the enterprise of the early feminist writers: "the custodians of the world's best-kept secret:/ Merely the private lives of onehalf of humanity," as Carolyn Kizer put it...

...And shortly thereafter Minnie's youngest son Frankie leaves her to set out on his own...

...Repeatedly, the world's remaining superpower, acting independently and sometimes in defiance of the majority of member nations, worked at cross purposes to the United Nations...

...Though he quotes Annan, approvingly, to the effect that the United Nations, if given the means, could break these cycles of violence, Shawcross fails to identify the precise role of a chastened and more effective UN...

...Does the ultimate contribution of the UN lie in forging dynamic educational and civic partnerships with nongovernmental, intergovernmental, cultural, and religious organizations...

...There in total darkness the cream lay while the churn hung where it sung, while Minnie geared herself up for the imponderables ahead...

...Oddly enough the most absorbing part of the novel is Minnie's struggle with loneliness after her husband dies and her children leave Drumhollow one by one...

...She learns to help with the peat harvest, "'Now his slean swung toward her, and yielding him a catcher's grasp she clutched his sod, swung round and slapped it down onto the slatted barrow...

...Samad's marriage is arranged to Alsana, who can kick and punch her husband with a ferocity that matches his own...

...the provision of aid without security enabled people to survive just long enough to become victims of the next raid...

...His most recent book is The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Rowan & Littlefield...

...After an idyllic honeymoon in Dublin, "the city of just about right," they return to Drumhollow to farm their five fields and do the daily chores...

...The history it recounts, however, provides precious little warrant for optimism...

...The Army has a critical need for priests to serve full-time in the Army or part-time in the Army Reserve (usually two days a month, plus two weeks a year...

...How should it redefine the diplomatic role played by the secretary general and his deputies...

...Needle: Haystack"-and Samad Iqbal--a Bangladeshi tom between Allah, alcohol, and women...

...The story is a simple one---the life of Minnie O'Brien on a small Irish farm...

...Day follows day...

...Raindrop: Ocean...

...For a rambunctious and quirky take on our modem cities in their color and diversity, the melting pot simmering and boiling, we could do worse than turn to the dark eyes, pressed against the window, eyeing the party within with wistfulness and scorn...

...Minnie and Peter have three children...

...In this first novel, Zadie Smith, the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant to Britain, continues the enterprise of giving us the view from the margins, as she sweeps Jamaican and Bangladeshi immigrants into mainstream literature in English...

...During the civil wars raging in Sudan, Sierra Leone, and dozens of other trouble spots, humanitarian intervention--the provision of food, medicine, and medical care to battered and displaced populations-often prolonged and deepened the conflict...

...I don't have time to go to Mecca...

...In dealing effectively with the viUains on the international scene, one must first see them as villains...