Word on the street here in Cairo is that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has become an Islamist overnight.

It's not a joke. Clinton was greeted by protests upon visiting Egypt this weekend -- but this time it wasn't just Islamists who were denouncing the United States. Rather, opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood rallied to object to what they saw as Clinton's support for President Mohamed Morsy, who hails from the Islamist movement's ranks. Tawfiq Okasha, a staunch supporter of Egypt's military establishment, led a protest outside the Four Seasons hotel, where Clinton was staying. In the city of Alexandria, protesters taunted Clinton with chants of "Monica, Monica" -- a reference to Monica Lewinsky -- and threw tomatoes and shoes at her motorcade.

The dissatisfaction can't be dismissed as the work of a few rabble-rousers. Leading members of Egypt's Coptic Christian community refused to meet with Clinton due to the U.S. government's "support for Islamism over other political and civil forces." The meeting with Coptic leaders who did show up apparently did not go any more smoothly: According to human rights campaigner Hossam Bahgat, one speaker accused the White House of being infiltrated by Islamists -- and pointed to Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedine, as evidence.

If Hillary Clinton is indeed a covert Islamist, she's not doing a very good job eliminating the tensions between the Muslim Brotherhood and the U.S. government. The list of potential issues goes on and on: The Brotherhood's uncertain guarantees of equal rights to Copts and women, its shaky commitment to inclusive democracy, and its antagonism toward Israel are just a few of the subjects that could trip up relations with the United States. Decades of built-up antagonism and suspicion can sabotage even the most basic cooperation: Just this month, a spokesman for the Brotherhood's political party accused the American NGO workers who were arrested under the former military government of being involved in "intelligence work." (start at 34:40)

As Clinton said at the presidential palace in Cairo on Saturday, being forced to choose between Egypt's diverse political forces is exactly what the United States doesn't want to do.  "President Morsy made clear that he understands the success of his presidency -- and indeed, of Egypt's democratic transition -- depends on building consensus across the Egyptian political spectrum," she told the assembled media. Only such a coalition, she said, will allow him "to assert the full authority of the presidency."

Egypt's leaders, however, have shown little sign that they are willing to accommodate Clinton's ecumenical approach. Supreme Council of the Armed Forces chief Mohamed Hussein Tantawi seized the opportunity following his meeting with Clinton to say that the military would prevent Egypt from falling under the control of a "certain group" -- a reference to the Brotherhood. If the conflict does reach a crisis point, we may finally see how far Clinton's sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood goes.

As my colleague Uri Friedman discussed in today's Morning Brief, the Spanish government has unveiled tough new austerity measures to reduce its deficits after securing a nearly $37 billion bailout from the European Union. The measures, part of the conditionalities attached to the bailout money, include cuts to unemployment benefits, the elimination of Christmas bonuses for civil servants and a rise in the value-added-tax. 

The government is already facing a backlash, including protests by miners over subsidy cuts, but data on past interactions between governments and international financial institutions suggests that Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's government is actually in the safest period of the crisis. When economic conditions improve is when he will have to worry about his government's political prospects.

A paper recently published in the journal International Organization seeks to answer the question of whether IMF and World Bank interventions induce political crises. The authors, Axel Dreher of Heidelberg University and Martin Gassebner of the Swiss Economic Institute, began their research before the recent round of European bailouts but in an interview with Foreign Policy, Dreher said he sees similar dynamics at work in the recent crises.

The paper examines more than 90 developing countries between 1970 and 2002 and finds that intervention by one of the two international financial institutions significantly increases the likelihood of political crisis. These crises can be anything from coups and assassinations to mass demonstrations and general strikes.

An illustrative example discussed in the paper is the political turmoil which struck Bolivia in 2003, when more than 100 people were killed in political protests spurred by governments moves to raise taxes and increase natural gas exports. This followed 15 years of IMF-imposed structural adjustment program. The violent clashes led to the resignation of President of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and, three years later, the rise of populist President Evo Morales.

The paper's other significant finding is that the likelihood of a political crisis actually increases as economic prospects improve under assistance from an international financial institution. When times are really tough, the Dreher argues, the "government's leeway is increased due to the availability of additional loans." Governments are able to blame unpopular programs on the necessity of cooperating with the outside institution and voters are unable to tell is the government is merely incompetent of if its hand are tied by the conditions of the loan.

"If the government remains under an arrangement while the economy performs better, this signals that the government is more incompetent because a really competent government would no longer need the help of the international organizations," Dreher says.

Countries like Spain, Italy and Greece may have more robust democratic institutions than developing countries like Bolivia, but they are no less susceptible to moral hazard.

"You can see that [European governments] are able to implement certain conditions by using the troika -- the EU, the ECB and the IMF -- by way of a scapegoat," he says. "They say, we don't want to implement these conditions, we think they are too harsh, but we need the support of these organizations to stay in the Euro."

This is essentially the case Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy made to voters today, according to the New York Times, telling the public, "I know these are not pleasant measures but they are necessary."

But Dreher suggests that this kind of excuse won't work forever.  "If the situation becomes better and the government remains in these partnerships with the conditions that come with the money, probably voters would turn against the government," he says."

Dreher and Gassebner's research suggests that if governments like Greece and Spain want to stay in power, "they would have to try to get out of these programs as soon as the situation becomes better."

Of course, given the scale of the economic woes these governments are currently facing, that's probably a problem they wouldn't mind having right now.

Obviously this is not the blog for analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court's healthcare decision today, but as we get further into election season, I thought it might be worth noting that it's not a good day for frequently-cited prediction market InTrade, which as of two days ago was giving the individual mandate a 77 percent chance of being struck down.

Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz rounds up some more past examples of Intrade being spectacularly wrong on political predictions noting, "Futures markets are really a focus group unto themselves: When the group is something less representative of the target market, they get it wrong with alarming frequency. Indeed, the further the traders are as a group to the target decision makers/voters, the worse their track record." Given that the decision makers in this case were nine people deliberating in secret, it should have been a tip-off.

But even in the case of elections, the usefulness of Intrade is pretty questionable. As Slate's Daniel Gross noted in 2008 after Intrade's not-so-impressive performance in the Clinton-Obama primary, "The price movement tends to respond to conventional wisdom and polling data; it doesn't lead them."

Most of the people making bets on Intrade don't have access to better information than anyone else. It's not surprising that the betting market on Obama's re-election  tracks pretty closely with his polling averages over the last year -- falling to a low point last fall, rising steadily over the summer, falling again in May. One could read some significance into the fact that InTrade gives Enrique Pena Nieto an 87.5 percent chance of winning this weekend's Mexican presidential election, or you could just take a look at the polls giving him a 17.4 percent lead. 

The wisdom of the crowds -- or at least the wisdom of the crowds as filtered through Irish bookies -- may not be all that wise.

Fidel Castro has never really been into the whole brevity thing. This is, after all, the man who gave the longest speech in the history of the U.N. General Assembly. But since June 11, Castro has dedicated his semi-regular newspaper column "Reflections" -- normally devoted to lengthy screeds against all manner of imperialist perfidy -- to mysterious paragraph length koans on a number of topics.

It began with this "reflection" on former East German Communist leader Erich Honneker, who died in 1994: 

THE most revolutionary German I have known is Erich Honecker. Every human being lives in his or her era. The current one is of infinite change, in comparison with any other. I had the privilege of observing his conduct when he was paying bitterly for the debt contracted by the man who sold his soul to the devil for a few shots of vodka.

I retain for Honecker the most profound sentiment of solidarity.

His thoughts on former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping are not so fond:

HE thought of himself as a wise man and, doubtless, he was. But he made a small mistake.

"Cuba has to be punished," he said one day. Our country never even pronounced his name.

It was a totally unwarranted offense.

There have also been his thoughts on the Indian Moringa tree: 

THE conditions have been created for the country to begin massively producing Moringa Oleífera and mulberry, which are sustainable resources [for the production of] meat, eggs, milk and silk fiber which can be woven by artisans, providing well-remunerated employment as an added benefit, regardless of age or gender.

Yoga:

YOGIS do things with the human body which are beyond our imagination. There they are, before our eyes, via images arriving instantaneously from vast distances, through Pasaje a lo Desconocido [Cuban TV program]

And the cosmos itself:

I respect all religions, although I do not share them. Human beings seek explanations for their existence, from the most ignorant to the wisest.

Science is constantly seeking to explain the laws which govern the universe. At this very moment, they see it during a period of expansion which began some 13.7 billion years ago.

The posts have provoked some bafflement among Cuba watchers:

For Miami analyst Eugenio Yañez, Castro needs to stay in the limelight. “Like a mediocre starlet of cheap and superficial shows, [he] needs to feel like he’s in the center of the spotlight, even though at his age he’s only getting boos and hisses,” Yañez wrote in an Internet column.[...]

“Evidently he does not feel coherent enough to write longer pieces,’’ said Jaime Suchlicki, head of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami.

And Phil Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute, joked in an Internet post that perhaps Castro “is getting in shape for Twitter,” which restricts users to 140 characters.

Many in Cuba are doubtless wondering if the 86-year-old has finally lost it completely, though something tells me he may be having a good laugh. 

The Obama administration, this month, decided to take up the fairly unrewarding task of pushing for the ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. In a piece for FP today, James Kraska explains why ratification is long overdue. The treaty, which lays out rules for both military use of the seas and extraction of resources, went into effect in 1994, has been accepted by 161 nations, and was supported by both the Clinton and Bush administrations as well as U.S. Naval commanders. However it will still face a tough fight in Congress where many lawmakers feel it would constitute an unwarranted intrusion on U.S. sovereignty. 

But the Law of the Sea is hardly the only major international agreement waiting for either a U.S. signature, or for Congress to approve ratification. Here's a quick look at a few of the other international treaties and conventions where the United Statates is conspicuous by its absence:

Convention on the Rights of the Child

Entered into force in 1990, signed by U.S. in 1995

Number of states parties: 193 (Fellow non-ratifiers: Somalia, South Sudan*)

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

Signed by U.S. in 1980, entered into force in 1981

Number of states parties: 187 (Fellow non-ratifiers: Palau, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Tonga) 

Mine Ban Treaty

Entered into force in 1999, never signed by U.S.

Number of states parties:159

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Entered into force in 2008, signed by U.S. in 2009.

Number of states parties: 112

Convention on Cluster Munitions

Entered into force in 2010, never signed by U.S.

States parties: 71

Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture

Entered into force in 2006, never signed by U.S.

Number of states parties: 63

International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance

Entered into force in 2010, never signed by U.S.

Number of states parties: 32 (91 have signed)

One could, of course, make the case that the fact that countries like Iran, North Korea, and Belarus have ratified many of these treaties suggests they don't actually accomplish very much. On the other hand, it doesn't look very good that the United States is considered a likely no vote when it comes to new human rights treaties, and at this point there's enough evidence from other states parties to suggest that ratifying an agreement on say, the rights of children, won't lead to U.N. bureaucrats telling parents how to raise their kids. 

*In fairness to South Sudan, it has only been a country for about 10 months.

The first episode of Julian Assange's new TV show, The World Tomorrow, premiered on RT today with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as the first guest. Aside from a quick intro and a goofy theme song by M.I.A., it's a pretty spartan affair, consisting solely of Assange and his translators speaking with Nasrallah over skype. The newsiest quote was probably Nasrallah's fairly staunch defense of Bashar al-Assad's crackdown on protesters:

From the beginning of the events in Syria, we’ve had constant contact with the Syrian leadership.  We’e spoken as friends, giving each other advice about the importance of carrying out reforms. Right from the beginning, I personally found that President Assad was very willing to carry out radical reforms. This used to reassure us regarding the positions that we took.[...]

We contacted even elements of the opposition to encourage them and to facilitate the process of dialogue with the regime. These parties rejectged dialoguel. Right from the beginning we’ve had a regime that is willing to undergo reforms and open to dialogue. On the other side, you have an opposition that is not prepared for dialogue and is not prepared to accept any reforms. All it wants is to bring down the regime.

The house-arrested Assange is a fairly generous interviewer by cable news standards, letting his guest do most of the talking. The questions were mostly softballs along the lines of "What was your earliest memory as a boy?," "How did you manage to keep your people together under enemy fire?" and "Why do you think the United States government is so scared of [Hezbollah satellite network] al-Manar?

Things got a bit odd with Assange's last question, in which he asked the reglious extremist, "Isn’t Allah, or the notion of God, the ultimate superpower? Shouldn’t you as a freedom fighter also seek to liberate people from the totalitarian concept of a monotheistic god?" Not surprisingly, Nasrallah didn't buy the premise of the question. 

It wasn't the most penetrating interview -- interestingly, there was only one question about the contents of a WikiLeaks cable and Nasrallah denied the veracity of it -- but that's probably why Nasrallah was willing to talk with him in the first place. (According to Assange, this was his first interview with "western" media since the 2006 war with Israel.) If he can keep getting the kind of high-profile guests who would never go near a mainstream journalist with a ten-foot poll, the show will probably continue to be worth watching.

Who would you like to see sit down with Assange next?

Kilis, Turkey — Just as international efforts to reach a ceasefire in Syria intensify, the long-running crisis appears to be growing even bloodier. On Monday, the violence spilled over into both Turkey and Lebanon: A Lebanese cameraman was killed while filming from the northern town of Wadi Khaled, while two Syrians were killed and more were wounded when they were fired upon at a refugee camp inside Turkey. Two Turkish nationals attempting to help the fleeing Syrians were also injured in the crossfire.

The clash at the Turkish-Syrian border began when Syrian regime troops launched an offensive in the town of Azaz, on the Syrian side of the border, in the dawn hours of Monday morning. Syrians who lay wounded in the hospital in Kilis said that violence began when Syrian soldiers opened fire on refugees who walked to the border to protest the attack on Azaz.

The camp, which lies about a fifth of a mile from the border, was established to provide aid to the thousands of Syrians who have fled President Bashar al-Assad's crackdown. Over 9,000 refugees are living in the Kilis camp, and more are expected to arrive to alleviate overcrowding in other camps. As we drove from the Turkish province of Hatay to Kilis, five buses filled with Syrian refugees traveled ahead of us, making their way to a new place of supposed refuge.

In Kilis, we walked into a ward where three Syrian men lay sprawled on hospital beds, blood seeping from fresh wounds where bullets had just been removed. "We were watching the attack over the border," explained Betar, a Syrian man who was shot twice in the leg while inside the Kilis refugee camp. As Syrian forces attacked Azaz, refugees across the border in the camp looked on helplessly and began to protest the violence. "When [the Syrian Armed Forces] heard us say ‘Allahu Akbar' they started to shoot at us," he said.

Betar, who lives in the Kilis refugee camp with his family, thinks the Syrian regime is following them into Turkey to kill them. Snipers fired on the camp from less than 500 meters away, noted his friend, who recounted how he picked up bullets from rooms within the camp. Around 21 Syrians have been wounded and three have died, according to wounded Syrians within the Kilis hospital. (Other reports said that two Syrians had died).

Turkish officials, eager to prevent the cross-border violence from spiraling out of control, are limiting access to information for inquiring journalists. Police stopped us while we were interviewing a badly injured Syrian man and directed us to a small room, where we were questioned for two hours. They interrogated our Syrian translator on his opinions of the Assad regime. Two other French-speaking journalists were being questioned as well.

The Kilis refugee camp has become an easy target for Syrian forces, and eye-witnesses within the camp say the Turkish police did not fire back when the attack began. Betar described how Turkish police in the camp fell to the ground to protect themselves, but did not retaliate.

With the end to the conflict nowhere in sight, Syria's refugees have found little comfort in escaping Assad's brutal crackdown. They left Syria in the hope of finding safety and peace, but violence still seems to follow them wherever they go.

Sophia Jones, a former editorial assistant at Foreign Policy, is an Overseas Press Club fellow and freelance journalist based out of Cairo. Erin Banco is a Cairo-based freelance journalist.

In media, timing is key to breaking news and getting recognized for original journalism. But it can also sting you, as Vogue and Condé Nast Traveler learned during the Arab Spring after publishing, respectively, a glowing profile of Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad and a list of the "15 Best Places to See Right Now" that included Libya.

Today, the New York Times fell victim to the timing trap. The paper led its print edition with a story by Jeffrey Gettleman entitled "A Taste of Hope in Somalia's Battered Capital," only for a suicide bomber to attack a gathering of Somali officials this morning in Mogadishu's National Theater, killing the heads of Somalia's Olympic committee and soccer federation, among others.

Gettleman had even mentioned the National Theater in his piece (key lines in bold):

Outside, on Mogadishu's streets, the thwat-thwat-thwat hammering sound that rings out in the mornings is not the clatter of machine guns but the sound of actual hammers. Construction is going on everywhere - new hospitals, new homes, new shops, a six-story hotel and even sports bars (albeit serving cappuccino and fruit juice instead of beer). Painters are painting again, and Somali singers just held their first concert in more than two decades at the National Theater, which used to be a weapons depot and then a national toilet. Up next: a televised, countrywide talent show, essentially "Somali Idol."

Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, which had been reduced to rubble during 21 years of civil war, becoming a byword for anarchy, is making a remarkable comeback. The Shabab, the fearsome insurgents who once controlled much of the country, withdrew from the city in August and have been besieged on multiple sides by troops from the African Union, Kenya, Ethiopia and an array of local militias.

Today the theater is a scene not of cultural renaissance but of carnage:

Yet only weeks ago, when the theater was reopened, the atmosphere at the Chinese-built complex very much matched Gettleman's description:

On Twitter, some people are tweaking the Times for being a bit trigger-happy on the optimism ("NYT story on #Somalia illustrates the danger of proclaiming peace in such places; new violence was bound to happen," argued the Atlantic Council's Barbara Slavin), while others are simply discouraged ("Wanted so badly to believe NYT's article on Somalia today," photographer Ed Suter wrote. "Guess it was a bit premature").

The Times, for its part, has put the two stories into a dialogue of sorts on the World page.

And it's worth pointing out that Gettleman tempered his report with the sober assessment that Mogadishu "and the rest of Somalia still have a long way to go," citing a recent attack on the presidential palace in the capital as just one example.

"Who says it's just bad news coming out of Somalia?" Gettleman tweeted early this morning. Indeed, any positive news out of war-torn Somalia is welcome. In the news business, sadly, you can never pick the right day to highlight a heartwarming story.

Romney's camp seems to be pushing its luck with the aftermath of last week's "hot mic" incident judging by this response to a request from the Obama campaign for the candidate's tax records from his time at Bain capital:

“The Obama campaign is playing politics, just as he’s doing in his conduct of foreign policy," Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul wrote. "Obama should release the notes and transcripts of all his meetings with world leaders so the American people can be satisfied that he’s not promising to sell out the country’s interests after the election is over.”

The argument that all statecraft should be conducted in public so that voters can be sure there's nothing nefarious going on is a pretty impractical one, as quite a few people pointed out when WikiLeaks was making it. (Romney described the WikiLeaks CableGate release as "treason" for what it's worth.)

But questions of practicality aside, it's tempting to wonder just what might be in those transcripts -- or what Romney hopes is in them:

Obama: Mahmoud, I've got to keep up this sanctions stuff until the election. Then I'll get you those centrifuges. 

Ahmadinejad: I will transmit this information to the Supreme Leader. 

--

Obama: It's an election season, Hu. You know I've got to talk tough. Next year, I promise I'll get you those 100,000 American jobs I promised.

Hu: I will transmit this information to Xi.

--

Obama: Stephen, this Keystone stuff is just until November. Then we open up the border and roll out the plan for the Amero.

Harper: I will transmit this information to the NAFTA supercouncil.

DEVELOPING...

While, for now unsubstantiated, coup rumors sweep China, a very real coup is underway in Mali. Renegade troups have appeared on state television to announce that they have taken power away from President Amadou Toumani Toure, who they say inadequately supported them in the fight against an ongoing insurgency by Tuareg rebels in the country's north. The army has apparently shut the borders and the whereabouts of Toure, who has been in power since 2002, are unknown. Soldiers are reportedly looting the presidential palace. 

Twitter's probably the best way to stay on top of the fast-moving story at the moment. Alex Thurston's Sahel Blog has some good suggestions of feeds to follow as well as some valuable quick analysis.

Given that it was only two years ago that the government of neighboring Niger was overthrown in a military coup, and just weeks since President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives was forced from office -- he claims -- at gunpoint, it's tempting to wonder whether military coups, which are often seen as a relic of Cold War ideological struggles, are returning to the world stage. (The SCAF's seizure of power in Egypt certainly exhibits some classic coup characteristics as well.)

So are we returning to a Cold War era level of coup occurence? Not really. Political scientists Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans plotted out this chart for their research on coup frequency in 2009:

As you can see, the two successful coups we've had this year were essentially the baseline throughout the 60s and 70s. Moreover, the coups that do happen today are more likely to end in at least semi-democratic elections. As Thurston writes of Niger:

Soldiers in Niger intervened to “reset” the civilian democracy after President Mamadou Tandja manipulated the constitution to stay in power. There was no war in Niger at the time. But in light of the coup in Niger, it is not surprising that the coup leaders in Mali have taken on the rhetoric of democracy, naming themselves the National Committee for the Restoration of Democracy and State (CNRDR) and saying, “We promise to hand power back to a democratically elected president as soon as the country is reunified and its integrity is no longer threatened.”

They may well make good on this promise. If the coup succeeds, there will be massive pressure – in a sense there already is - for Mali to hold elections. In Niger, although again, the situation was different, soldiers were in power for slightly longer than a year before organizing new elections.

Similarly, the Hondruan military leaders that overthrew the government of Manuel Zelaya in 2009 organized elections later that year. There are still a handful of governments run by leaders who took power in recent coups -- Fiji, Mauritania, and Madagascar, for instance -- but it's pretty rare. (The political future of the Maldives is still very much unsettled.) 

The reason is that in contrast to the Cold War era, there's generally considerable international pressure brought to bear against new military juntas, rather than incentives from ideologically-driven superpowers for them to remain in power. We're already seeing that pressure brought to bear in Mali:

The African Union said the "act of rebellion" was a "significant setback for Mali".

Kenya's Foreign Minister Moses Wetangula and his delegation are stranded in the country, as Bamako's airport is closed, after attending an AU meeting on peace and security.

The West African regional body Ecowas said the mutinous soldiers' behaviour was "reprehensible" and "misguided".

Additionally, the U.S. has pledged its support to Mali's previous government, and former colonial power France has suspended security cooperation since the coup.

All this means that if Mali's new military rulers are successful in their putsch, there will likely be enormous pressure to go ahead with the presidential election that was already scheduled for next month, and indeed they have already pledged to do so. Of course, with Tuareg rebels making major gains in the north of the country, a return to stability may be too much to hope for.

Norbert Mao is a lawyer and politician in Uganda. He was a presidential candidate in the 2011 general elections. He represented Gulu in the national parliament between 1996 and 2006 and was head of the Gulu Local Government from 2006 to 2011. In 2006 and 2007 he made several trips to South Sudan and the LRA base in Congo campaigning for peace.  Here, he shares his thoughts on the Kony 2012 campaign and controversy:

On January 12, 2003, I received my first phone call from Joseph Kony, the elusive leader of the Lord's Resistance Army.  At the time, I was a member of parliament representing an area that was the epicenter of the war in Northern Uganda. The call lasted about two hours -- which was remarkable given that Kony was in the bush, and using a sat phone, to boot.

"People should seek to understand the political agenda of the LRA," Kony said over static when I was on the line.  "Why are we in the bush?" he asked?  "It is because we are resisting oppression.  Many people have been to the bush in Uganda. We are also resisting murders committed by the NRA [the National Resistance Army, which brought Uganda's current president, Yoweri Museveni, to power].  You go to places like Acholi Bur, Paimol, Bur Coro, and Anaka and you will find there the mass graves of our people," he told me. "People must recognize that there was a problem.  Kony is not the problem. The problem existed before Kony."

The LRA has a complicated history, to say the least.  When the group first emerged in 1986, it cloaked itself in the garb of Christianity -- a group that had risen from the ashes of previous rebellions to save the Acholi of Northern Uganda from the onslaught of the National Resistance Army, which had just swept the state a few months earlier.  At the time, Uganda was in the throes of state collapse and civil war, with over twenty rebel groups raging throughout the countryside.  One by one, the new government managed to pacify each group. The LRA managed to survive, but let its mask slip in the process, the true predatory face of Kony emerging to feast on the people he purported to save.

Over the years, I've spoken to Kony many times and eventually met him face to face in August 2006, when I led a community peace delegation to his hideout in the Congo. We pinned our hopes on him reaching a peace agreement with the Uganda government. Eventually, though, he walked away due to mistrust, an ICC indictment that would have sent him to The Hague, and probably pressure from his backers (the Sudanese government, among them). A great opportunity was missed.

Kony is now heading a multinational guerilla force comprised of mainly abducted children and adult soldiers who were first taken as children.  He roams the bush in Sudan, South Sudan, Congo, the Central African Republic, and Chad without hindrance. He has defied the U.N. peace keeping force in Congo. He has also survived many military expeditions aimed at defeating him. He has redefined the rules of asymmetrical war.

This man with whom I've had many encounters is now the subject of a powerful video that has captured the imagination of the world. Is the video a bad thing? I would say no. Has it got gaps? Plenty.

First, to give the impression -- even by omission -- that the victims themselves were passive and did little or nothing to relieve their own suffering is wrong. Before Invisible Children there were many efforts to let the world know what was going on. But the world was distracted. In 1998, in the middle of the insurgency, Bill Clinton came to Uganda and declared the country a peaceful nation. A few weeks later, the LRA marched from Congo into Bwindi National Park in Uganda and killed tourists who were gorilla tracking. Most of the victims were American. For a moment, Kony got some international media, but it soon went quiet. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands in Northern Uganda were displaced and the killings went on.

Second, it has to be said that official neglect on the part of the Ugandan government is responsible for much of the suffering we witness in Kony 2012 -- suffering that was brought on by an incompetent counterinsurgency strategy that, at its height, herded over one million civilians into disease infested and poorly protected camps. Right now it is a point of controversy that U.S. troops are standing shoulder to shoulder with certain Ugandan officers who ought to be charged with war crimes. Americans should shudder at this partnership and demand that the Ugandan government hold accountable those members of its military establishment who need to be tried for crimes against humanity.

Having said all that, I still view the release of Kony 2012 as a positive development.  To those critics who say that the video was propelled by less than savory aspects of western media culture that perpetuate the mentality of the white man's burden, I say that western advocacy matters and can make a difference. From the anti-slavery struggle to the anti-colonial struggle, voices from the West have been indispensible. The key is for Africans to influence the direction of that advocacy. We cannot stop it, but we can redirect it. So how do we respond to this video that has convinced the world to bear witness to the untold suffering of Northern Uganda? We can complain about the gaps, but we also have to celebrate the fact that at least part of our story has been told. And told powerfully.

It's clear that the aim of the video was never intellectual stimulation. I don't think the founders of Invisible Children are the foremost analysts of the complicated political, historical and security dynamics in our troubled part of Africa. They certainly wouldn't earn high marks in African Studies. But I will go to my grave convinced that they have the most beautiful trait on earth -- compassion.

Such sentiments matter, even today.  There are those who say the war is over in Northern Uganda. I say the guns are silent but the war is not over. The sky is overcast with an explosive mix of dubious oil deals, land grabs, arms proliferation, neglected ex-combatants, and a volatile neighborhood full of regimes determined to fish in troubled waters. What we have is a tentative peace. Our region is pregnant with the seeds of conflict. The military action in the jungles of Congo may capture Kony, but we need to do more to plant the seeds of peace founded on democracy, equitable development, and justice. Like peace, war too has its mothers, fathers, midwives, babysitters, and patrons. Perhaps Kony 2012 will help sort out the actors. The video has certainly shaken the fence, making fence-sitting very uncomfortable, indeed.

The current debate is thus timely. One hopes that the ICC will now have to investigate the Ugandan government. The scrutiny of Invisible Children (its finances and activities) is also a good thing. Communities emerging from conflict need more results than noise. But even more important is that all actors see the need to act with humility. This volatile place is not a project. It is our home. That is why we will never accept anyone closing the door to peace through dialogue.

For more on Kony 2012, see Michael Wilkerson's initial response to the video,  David Kenner's comparison to the situation in Syria, past Ugandan government negotiator Betty Bigome's take, and David Rieff's piece on the dangers of Invisible Children's brand of advocacy.

Israeli Defense Minister and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak can now add another title to his resume: real estate mogul. On Sunday, it was reported that Barak had sold his notoriously luxurious Tel Aviv apartment in the Akirov Towers, a five-room compound on the 31st floor whose amenities include a gym, outdoor pool, spa, and breathtaking views, for $7 million. In 2003, he paid a mere $3.87 million for the 450-square-foot space.

Naturally, Barak took to Facebook to explain his decision:

"My wife Nili and I decided that the sale was inevitable faced with the recognition that this place of residence created a sense of alienation and detachment from vast sectors of the public."

In true Ehud Barak fashion, the apartment was sold to a foreign company. The veteran kibbutznik, who was raised in a 12-by-9 foot room with no running water or toilets and described his childhood as "happy" and "warm," entered the private sector after stepping down from a failed premiership in 2001. His business ventures included oil shale rock in Jordan, a stint as president of Satcom Systems, Ltd., a mobile communications company with ties to repressive African regimes, a post on the advisory board of venture capital firm Tamir Fishman & Co., and a network of parking lots in Istanbul (which failed). All of these expeditions, though, were peas and carrots compared to his passion for working with international hedge funds. According to son-in-law Zvi Lotenberg, "the bulk of Barak's activity takes place abroad, for a number of the world's largest hedge funds and investment firms, whose names he declined to reveal."

Barak may maintain that he has been transparent regarding his business transactions, and that he has paid his taxes, but in 2006 he put away some money in a favorite tax haven, using "an account of 38 million Japanese yen (the equivalent of $380,000) in the Cayman Islands branch of Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank as collateral to obtain a loan from the bank."

Compared with the corrupt financial escapades of Israeli leaders like former prime minister Ehud Olmert, this is pretty vanilla, but there are certainly more than enough former government officials with extensive tastes in the world. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, built the 95-acre estate of Hala Ranch in 1991 just miles from Aspen, which was the "most expensive single-family residential property in the nation on the market" when it was listed for $135 million in 2007. Former British prime minister Tony Blair bought  a house in London's posh and swanky Connaught Square for 3.5 million pounds. When Jacques Chirac stepped down from the French presidency in May 2007, he rented an apartment overlooking the Seine on Paris' Quai Voltaire. What makes Barak notable is that he's still on the government payroll.

So where will Barak end up next? Perhaps the David Promenade? Or maybe he'll downsize to this four-bedroom stunner on Atzuk Beach? Wherever he ends up, the next home for this cigar-chomping pol promises to be far from the kibbutz.

Here's a puzzle. A video calling for international action to capture Joseph Kony, a Ugandan guerilla who commands a couple hundred men and has killed 151 civilians during the past year, has been viewed by a whopping 76 million people on Youtube. Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- who boasts 600,000 men under arms, along with almost 5,000 battle tanks, and who often kills over 100 people a day, according to activists -- generates exponentially less outrage.

The imbalance is particularly striking on Twitter. According to al-Jazeera social media head Riyaad Minty, the #Syria hashtag has been used around 6.6 million times over the last three months. By comparison, the #Kony hashtag has been used 11.5 million times -- in the past seven days. Obviously, there's something about Joseph Kony that pushes an audience's buttons in a way that Syria fails to do.

I asked Minty why he thinks that is. He said that he wasn't surprised by the disparity in the coverage between Syria and Joseph Kony: The uprising in Syria, after all, has been dragging on for a year, and the coverage -- often captured in grainy YouTube clips or dry accounts of dozens of people slaughtered in an anonymous city -- isn't favorable for attracting a wider audience.

"Syria isn't as personal, in terms of the narrative that is being presented," Minty said. "There's a lot of death and destruction, but it just doesn't have that personal connection for people."

The Kony video, by comparison, is just the opposite. It was professionally produced, told a straightforward story of victims and villains, and advanced a simple message: Stop Kony.  "The way it was done -- it was like a Hollywood production," said Minty. "It was very slick, it was targeted to a very specific audience, and it got people's emotions up because you could connect with it."

That's the formula for attracting the likes of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga to your cause, and becoming the fastest-growing viral video of all time. Syria, where the debate over intervention often seems to be a choice between a series of flawed options and journalists in the country have reportedly been targeted by Assad's forces, will have a hard time duplicating the Kony video's success.

The bigger question is whether any of this Internet-based sturm und drang can be translated into real-world action. Minty found that, during the peak of global interest in the Kony video, only about 140 tweets came out of Uganda regarding the story, and that Ugandans wrote only about 2,000 comments on Facebook out of a pool of 5 million -- a drop in the bucket compared to the deluge of comments coming from the United States and Europe.

Sure, many Syrians would love to see a viral video bringing international attention to the Assad regime's atrocities. But it's going to be the hard realities on the ground, and the decisions made by calculating men in foreign capitals -- not YouTube -- that determines the future of Syria.

Via Tyler Cowen's excellent new food-only Twitter feed, an AP story of economic scarcity, climate change, conflict, and the favorite superfood of American yuppies: 

Bolivian authorities say at least 30 people have been injured in a fight between two communities over land for growing quinoa, the Andean "supergrain" whose popularity with worldwide foodies has caused its price to soar.

Oruro state police chief Ramon Sepulveda says combatants used rocks and dynamite against each other Wednesday and Thursday. A government commission was dispatched to the two high plains communities south of La Paz.

Farmland in the region is owned not by individuals but communities.

Authorities say the dispute is related to climate change because quinoa can now be cultivated in areas previously subject to frequents frosts. Bolivia produces 46 percent of the world's quinoa, which has nearly tripled in price in the past five years.

For the "How Food Explains the World" package for the last May/June issue, I looked at how quinoa's international popularity has effected eating habits in Bolivia. Prices have skyrocketed thanks to export demand and domestic consumption of the nutritious grain has fallen by more than a third, prompting fears of an obesity epidemic as Bolivians switch to rice and white bread. President Evo Morales' government subsidizes quinoa as a "strategic foodstuff."