The Q&A Minefield

The art of interviewing is a little like the art of photography: the magic happens behind the scenes, and only the polished result ends up in the newspaper or gallery. In both cases, what goes unseen is messy and usually dull, whether it is a stack of discarded test shots in the darkroom or an hour of droning conversation captured on a mini-recorder. A political aide extemporizes endlessly on his boss’ reelection chances, or a research scientist spends his lunch hour detailing the ins and outs of organic chemistry, and the monologue is reduced to a couple lines in a front-page article. Usually this is a good thing, as few people want to read the long-form version of Chem 101. At times, if the reporter is especially lazy, pieces of the transcript will be published verbatim, a tactic taken to extremes by the magazine Interview, which promises “conversations between some of the most creative minds from the worlds of fashion, art and entertainment,” but mostly delivers mutually congratulatory ramblings between egotistical maniacs. Donatella Versace opened her back-and-forth with fellow fashion designer Riccardo Tisci by saying, “Let’s talk about your last collection, which I found to be very beautiful—super sexy. I would wear all of it.” A few minutes later and Tisci returns the favor: “I say to you sincerely that what I very much admire about the Versace maison . . . is that from day one until today, Versace is the peak of sexy but never crosses that red line into the vulgar.” How enlightening.

Almost without exception, people speaking off the cuff are not particularly coherent. They repeat themselves, spend fifteen minutes dancing around the same idea, or veer off topic. The appeal of the written word is that it can pick out the best parts and paraphrase the rest, condensing a paragraph into a single sentence. Every four years, the particular limitations of the interview are thrown into the spotlight by the presidential horse race. We watch as a stageful of candidates manages to duck every substantial question and respond with the same focus-grouped talking points they use from Iowa to South Carolina. Granted, multi-candidate debates are not the best setting for incisive questioning, given the need to keep the show moving, but the candidates still manage to show off their ability to speak without saying anything at all. In the Oct. 11 debate, Rick Perry’s energy plan (“We’re sitting on a treasure trove of energy in this country”) was the answer to every question — ironic, considering that in the next debate, he couldn’t come up with the Department of Energy to save his life. A more aggressive moderator would have pointed out that Perry’s response didn’t address the question, but the conversation had already shifted to the next candidate. Maria Bartiromo put forward a good effort in the Nov. 9 CNBC debate, pressing Gingrich to identify an example of how “the news media doesn’t report accurately how the economy works,” but didn’t follow up after he gave an off-topic response about Occupy Wall Street. There is a limit, after all, on how much time a moderator can devote to making a candidate answer the damn question.

While no one would want to get their news solely from raw interviews — it’s the job of the reporter, not the audience, to wade through the dross — uncensored footage is often more revealing than a reported article. Witness the ten seconds of dead silence that elapse before Herman Cain begins to stumble through his stance on the conflict in Libya.

“O.K., Libya,” he starts. “President Obama supported the uprising, correct? President Obama called for the removal of Qaddafi — just want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I say ‘Yes, I agree,’ or ‘No, I didn’t agree.'” And that isn’t even the worst part. His interviewers, a group of editors and reporters from the Milwaukie Journal Sentinel, let him flounder for the next five minutes. (Watch the video here.) They offer prompts and clarify questions but don’t allow Cain to change the topic or get away with a non-answer on Libya. Sometimes being a good interviewer means knowing when to step back and let the subject hang himself with his own rope. Yesterday, Cain bowed out of an interview with a New Hampshire newspaper, The Union Leader, which planned to post video of the interview on its website. Cain’s spokesman blamed “a scheduling conflict,” but one has to assume he was nervous about another gaffe going viral — as one soon did. The Times reports that, at a news conference today in Florida, “Mr. Cain’s remarks on Libya – including a suggestion that the Taliban, way over in Pakistan and Afghanistan, are at least partly running the government – raised new questions about his foreign policy qualifications.” Note to Petraeus, et. al.: The Taliban are now in Libya.

For as often as politicians seem to get a bye from their inquisitors, dodgy statements from celebrities and businesspeople go unchallenged even more frequently. The relationship between politicians and the media is historically and necessarily adversarial, but a reporter writing a feature on Steve Jobs or Tom Cruise is playing on the subject’s home turf. President Obama is never going to stop holding press conferences, but access to an executive or movie star is far from guaranteed. An interviewer who pushes too hard risks being frozen out altogether, and may end up staring at a blank page with a tape recorder full of “yes” and “no” responses. Women’s magazines are by far the worst offenders; no one picks up an issue of Glamour with Jennifer Aniston on the cover expecting to read a take-no-prisoners expose. The profile is often a boiler plate combination of a Hollywood press release and a list of weight-loss tips. Business publications, which regularly praise their interviewees as the next Henry Ford or Albert Einstein, aren’t much better. The questions are mostly softballs: How did you achieve such fantastic success? or Does your wife know you’re a genius?

Steven Levy’s interview with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, which ran in the November issue of Wired, is the epitome of such fawning. Levy isn’t someone you’d pin for a wide-eyed sycophant; he wrote the bestseller In the Plex and has interviewed Steve Jobs — who, after his death, was compared by an enthralled mourner to Gandhi. In terms of hyperbole, the Wired interview is only slightly less dramatic. Levy pitches the softest of softballs — for example, “How has Amazon been able to reinvent itself so consistently over the past 15 years?” Bezos, naturally, doesn’t miss the opportunity to wax on about “our greatest cultural strengths.” When Levy asks about Silk, the new browser that comes pre-installed on the Kindle Fire, Bezoz gives a standard line about leveraging “the cloud” to “accelerate a lot of what makes mobile web browsing slow.” Not mentioned is what everyone believes is Silk’s real appeal for Amazon: the fantastically lucrative ability to keep tabs on the buying choices and entertainment habits of its customers. Would this have been a good issue for an interviewer to bring up? Yes. Does Levy even broach the question? No. He just moves on to the next topic. Granted, we can assume that what the magazine refers to as “a series of interviews” has been edited or condensed, but I would rather know that Bezos said “no comment” than think that Levy didn’t bother to ask.

Similarly, when Levy brings up Amazon’s battle against collecting sales taxes in California, the answer he gets could have come straight from a PR flack: The company has been “clear and consistent” on the issue, and does “great” in the five states where does collect taxes. Profit margins is “not what this is about.” What is it about? “We want federal legislation.” A pretty disingenuous statement, to be sure, but it goes unchallenged by Levy. I’ll buy the fact that Amazon wants federal legislation, but it’s hard to believe the company wouldn’t launch a California-style campaign against any laws requiring it to collect sales tax. Had Levy chosen to write his article as a standard narrative, he could have provided this sorely needed context. As it is, the bare-bones back-and-forth style gives Bezos an unrestricted platform for his views.

It’s unfortunate that Levy allows the interview to serve as a big ad for Amazon, but he’s bullish about the company even in his own remarks. He concludes that the Kindle Fire “showcases how forward-thinking Bezos has been,” and fairly gushes when he posits that the Amazon founder “may well be the premier technologist in America, a figure who casts as big a shadow as legends like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.” Bill Gates, Steve Jobs – big names, both. I suppose I should just be thankful that he doesn’t mention Ghandi.

Libya’s Liquid Gold

Businessweek's Aug. 29 cover (image via businessinsider.com)

In the wake of Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi’s fall, as other publications detail the gold-plated guns found inside the palace or report on the rebels’ efforts to restore power and water to Tripoli, Businessweek leaves no uncertainty as to its chief concern. On the cover, splashed in graffiti-print across Qaddafi’s portrait are the words, “Now About That Oil . . . .” If Qaddafi’s disappearance into the warren of tunnels beneath the capital city echoes the subterranean post-invasion existence of Saddam Hussein, the drippy red letters conjure an uncomfortable reminder of the blood-for-oil accusations that dogged western involvement in both countries. The Times reports that oil production, which reached 1.3 million barrels per day before the revolution, has ground to a halt during the months-long conflict. It will take months to restart, and even Businessweek acknowledges that “History says Libya is not a good bet to become an oil superpower anytime soon.”

The rebellion largely followed the tribal faultlines already present under Qadaffi’s rule, and no one is sure how quickly the rebels will be able to form a government. Even if the country is not torn apart by the centrifugal forces of tribal politics, four decades under a dictator who elevated himself at the expense of any civil institutions has left little in the way of a working society. “In the aftermath of the civil war, state building will begin from scratch,” Dirk Vandewalle wrote recently in Newsweek. While Libya may not be Afghanistan, where half a century of warfare precluded any tradition of modern government and forced the American invaders to build — not rebuild — a state, it is also not Iraq, with an educated professional class and a reservoir of exiles awaiting return. Businessweek writes that “the starting gun on resuming oil production can’t be fired until there’s a recognized, central government in place able to make decisions on how to pay for repairs and cooperate with partners.”

There is also the challenge of security; the explosions that have plagued the pipeline that delivers natural gas from Egypt to Israel since the toppling of Mubarak demonstrate the difficulties of protecting infrastructure after a revolution. Oil companies from Britain, France and Italy all had contracts with Qaddafi’s Libya, as did several American companies and major multinationals like BP and ConocoPhilips. Foreign involvement, which spiked dramatically after 2003, when Qaddafi reentered the international community after renouncing unconventional weapons and paying $2.7 billion to the families of the Flight 103 bombing victims, will presumably be welcomed by the rebels as well, but no one is sure exactly what form it will take. Clifford Krauss of the Times reports that “it is unclear whether a rebel government would honor the contracts struck by the Qaddafi regime or what approach it would take in negotiating new production-sharing agreements with companies willing to invest in established oil fields and explore for new ones.” This is where the Businessweek article, which outlines the potential stumbling blocks to resumed production and muses about potential agreements with foreign companies, falls short. The physical and logistical barriers to restoring the flow of oil are indeed high, but the more interesting challenges to the industry are political, not commercial. Qaddafi and the rebels’ National Transitional Council are not merely interchangeable figureheads for Libya; the regime change will have deeper effects than a new heading on the official government stationery. The Times describes it best:

 Even before taking power, the rebels suggested that they would remember their friends and foes and negotiate deals accordingly.

“We don’t have a problem with Western countries like Italians, French and U.K. companies,” Abdeljalil Mayouf, a spokesman for the Libyan rebel oil company Agoco, was quoted by Reuters as saying. “But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil.”

Russia, China and Brazil did not back strong sanctions on the Qaddafi regime, and they generally supported a negotiated end to the uprising. All three countries have large oil companies that are seeking deals in Africa.

The fallout from the Libyan revolution may create a singular situation in Africa, where Chinese investment has lately seemed to be challenging older connections with the West. White-hot economic growth and an ever-widening trade surplus with countries like the U.S. have spurred the Chinese to look beyond the low-yield U.S. treasury bonds in which its sovereign wealth funds have long invested. In turn, the developing world is hungry for cash with which to exploit its natural resources. Under Qaddafi, Libya stood out from its African neighbors by achieving a modicum of stability and, after the country abandoned weapons of mass destruction, more than a modicum of petrodollars. Even before Qaddafi’s rapprochement with the West, however, Chinese investment might have appealed to Qaddafi for much the same reason as it attracted his impoverished neighbors. The decades of internecine conflict that followed many African countries’ independence left little in the way of infrastructure and even less in the way of good governance. Money from China helped solve the former problem without requiring such corrupt dictators as Omar El Bashir of Sudan to address the latter. In an April 2011 story on mining in Angola for Guernica magazine, reporter Scott Johnson dubbed China “the newest colonial arrival to Africa.” Johnson elaborates:

Angola was fast becoming China’s biggest advocate, touting its superiority over the standard Western donors like the World Bank and the IMF, whose bureaucratic restrictions had angered the government and, in their view, only hobbled Angola further. Angola opted for the simpler and quicker Chinese solution.

In Libya, the “simpler and quicker” solution was not only Chinese but, as Clifford Krauss’ Times article implies, Russian and Brazilian as well. These are countries notorious for their reluctance to meddle in what they deem the internal affairs of other nations. Russia, China and Brazil have repeatedly blocked actions at the United Nations that could eventually be used to justify military intervention; they water down or threaten to veto sanctions against human-rights violators like Syria and Iran, and acquiesced to the U.N. mandate to protect civilians in Libya only by abstaining from the vote. Especially in China’s case, such behavior is rooted as much in ideology as in self-interest, as the number of issues — civil rights, media censorship, religious persecution — on which it feels threatened by U.S. criticism grows ever higher. In Russia, the rollback of democracy orchestrated by Vladimir Putin and his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, provides similar motivation to turn a blind eye to foreign corruption and atrocities. We won’t bother you, Russia and China signal to the world, and you won’t bother us. Offering money with strings attached, as the World Bank does when it mandates transparency and good governance in return for investment, is seen by Moscow and Beijing as setting a dangerous precedent.

If the restrictions that accompany western aid are increasingly driving African countries into the amoral embrace of China, Libya provides an interesting exception to the rule. With the triumph of the NATO-backed rebels, Libya is moving in exactly the opposite direction: away from authoritarian benefactors, not toward them. It is worth asking whether, as the Arab Spring topples dictators who have cozied up to China and its ilk, this turning of the tide has the potential to spread beyond Libya. So far, the outlook is not overly promising: Egypt’s Mubarak was a dependable if cool ally to the west in general and Israel in particular, but his successors may more easily swayed by anti-Israel popular opinion. However, if (and this is a big “if”) protesters in Syria, Yemen and other restless countries manage to install more democratic regimes, it’s possible that a new Middle East will prefer to exchange its oil for dollars, not renminbi or rubles.

American and European oil companies are well-positioned to take advantage of this sea change. While Italy’s Eni and France’s Total were among the companies to sign production deals with Qaddafi’s government prior to the revolution, both countries also ultimately backed NATO involvement and are likely on the rebels’ shortlist of preferred investors. The Times reports that Libya supplies more than 20 percent of Italy’s oil imports, and 15 percent of imports for France, Switzerland and Austria. France was one of the first and strongest proponents of intervention; Obama’s much-denigrated doctrine of “leading from behind” was not the product of an insufficiently ambitious president but of a Pentagon which, according to the Times, “never wanted to get into the war in the first place and felt dragged in by the exuberance of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and a number of White House advisers”. In the same article, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller contrasts the Iraq-era American disdain for the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” to the current “grudging respect” afforded to the French military, which has flown one-third of NATO’s air sorties in Libya.

Of course, Sarkozy’s interest in Libya rests on more than just the country’s oil wealth. To Americans, Africa is a distant world, scarcely more familiar than the Dark Continent of David Livingstone’s day. For France, chaos in Libya is chaos on Europe’s doorstep, and the ties between Italy and its former colony are even tighter. Tripoli and Cyrenaica are not just foreign names on a map; they are the sites of military campaigns as recent as World War II. In Italy’s case, geographical proximity has made for a complicated relationship with Libya’s rebels, as Qaddafi offered Italy not only an abundance of oil but relative stability on the Mediterranean pond. Like China, which would rather prop up dictators like Kim Jong Il than risk a power vacuum that would send a flood of North Korean refugees over the border, Italy had a vested interest in perpetuating the Libyan status quo. “Italy’s islands are just a few hundred miles from Libya’s shores,” the AP reported in August. “Rome has relied on Gadhafi to keep away waves of boat people escaping conflict or poverty.”

Silvio Berlusconi treated Qaddafi as a personal friend, though considering Berlusconi’s penchant for partying with call girls and appointing former Miss Italy contestants to government positions (see my post on the mess in Italy here), the Italian premier has a loose definition of “friend.” Rome, while not rising to the level of Beijing and Moscow in its initial distaste for intervention, was a relative Johnny-come-lately to the NATO military campaign. The AP deems Berlusconi’s sudden embrace of rebel leader Mahmoud Jibril a “remarkable about-face,” noting that “in one notorious incident last year, Berlusconi kissed Qaddafi’s hand at a summit. And when the world rushed to condemn the Libyan’s bloody crackdown on protests in February, Berlusconi held back — saying Qaddafi was too busy to be bothered.” The Times’ Steven Erlanger minces no words:

Italy is concerned about resuming its imports of Libyan oil and natural gas, one reason Rome was slower than some other countries to come out against Colonel Qaddafi.

It doesn’t take a high level of cyncism to attribute Berlusconi’s sudden change of heart to the rebels’ equally sudden shift in fortune. Twenty percent of imports is a lot of oil, and Italy does not want to find itself in the company of China and Russia, which waited until September 1, when more than 60 nations convened in Paris to offer assistance for Libya’s fledgling government, to recognize the legitimacy of the rebel council. “Council leaders have said that they want to preserve existing contracts,” the Times writes in an article about the conference, “but that new ones will favor the countries that helped them defeat Colonel Qaddafi.” Even countries that declined to support the U.N. mandate for intervention — China and Russia, but also countries like Algeria, which is reportedly sheltering members of Qaddafi’s family — sent representatives to Paris, suggesting that they have bent to the reality that the rebels, not Qaddafi, will be the ones handing out oil contracts in the near future. As the heady disorder of the revolution is molded into a workable state, it will be instructive to see whether the “political issues” the rebels have with Quaddafi’s former backers really amount to a blacklist. Idealism overthrows governments but realpolitik sustains them, and the National Transitional Council may not have the luxury of saying no to Chinese investment.

The political fallout of Italy’s early support for Qaddafi is even less clear. The AP quotes Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister, as stating that the rebels “have committed to honor all of the contracts, also those of Italian businesses, that were signed by Libya. They weren’t contracts with Qaddafi.” The article provides no confirmation by the Transitional Council of Frattini’s claim, however, and it is an open question whether the rebels will see a similar equivalence between Qaddafi and the Libyan state. But when push came to shove, Berlusconi backed the anti-Qaddafi forces, despite acknowledging “the personal difficulties that this decision entailed for me.” Will the new government reward Italy for its eventual support or punish it for its initial hesitation? The likeliest outcome seems to be one in which the rebels make peace with Italy — which, in the end, got in line behind the NATO campaign — but deal more cautiously with countries like China and Russia that have, a la William Buckley, stood athwart history, yelling “stop,” in nearly every outbreak of the Arab spring. China’s strategy of currying favor with its client states via no-strings-attached investments may for the first time prove unsuccessful. If the Arab Spring — which began in Tunisia, spread to Egypt and has now swamped Libya — continues to upend the status quo across the Middle East, the so-called Red Dragon would be advised to look elsewhere for the oil to fuel its fire.

Threading the Needle at the ICC

Prosecutors at International Criminal Court in The Hague are requesting arrest warrants for Muammar Qaddafi and two of his relatives, the NYTimes reports. The men are said to have “crushed peaceful demonstrations and ordered the use of live ammunition and heavy weapons against protestors.”

In another act of shameless self-promotion, here is an expanded version of the comments (which have not been “highlighted” — yet) I left at the Times:

If the warrant is based on the accusation that Qadaffi “crushed peaceful demonstrations and ordered the use of live ammunition and heavy weapons against protestors,” then why has not a similar warrant been issued for Bashar al-Assad of Syria? Assad has responded similarly to protests in his own country. I expect the U.S. to base its rhetoric on political considerations, but while it may be in America’s best interest to have a stable (albeit autocratic) Syrian regime, the ICC can hardly justify such hypocrisy. The court in the Hague should be above such realpolitik considerations, but in singling out Qadaffi without also citing the leaders of Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, it shows that politics has infested every level of international justice.

Is it hypocritical to accuse the ICC of hypocrisy while not leveling the same charges at the United States? Maybe. But the U.S. government has its own interests to look out for; the ICC is a supposedly neutral arbiter of justice. Of course, the U.S. Supreme Court is also meant to be neutral, but Scalia and his fellow strict-constructionists (gee, let’s pretend we know what Thomas Jefferson would think of gay marriage) are about as neutral as the billionaire Koch brothers in the Citizens United case.