The Mound of Sound

Brigadier General David Fraser is unusual. He says curious things. The departing commander of Canadian and NATO troops in southern Afghanistan has given a farewell interview to the Globe. In it he justifies the Afghanistan mission by claiming that it’s better we fight the Taliban over there than let them bring the fight to us in Canada.

Wait a second, Dave. This is the Taliban we’re talking about, not al-Qaeda. The Taliban are a nasty, oppressive bunch of religious fanatics with a completely medieval outlook but they’re not globetrotters. The Taliban have no history of attacking other nations not even when they were in power. Their focus is inward. They want Kabul and are determined to get it.

Maybe Dave should give us some good reason to believe the Taliban are a real danger to Toronto. Of course, he won’t. General Fraser just says weird stuff. At Panjwai he told us he had the Taliban surrounded, trapped. When it turned out the bad guys were quite free to leave Panjwai in good order with their weapons and without Dave knowing about it, he proclaimed a great victory and announced he’d driven the Taliban out of Panjwai district for good. Oddly enough he’s been fighting off Taliban attacks in Panjwai ever since.

In a Toronto Star interview, Fraser said that Canadian critics of “the mission” were more dangerous than the Taliban. Huh? Did he really say that? Yes he did.

The Globe interview faithfully recites General Fraser’s bluster. Odd the reporter didn’t ask what Dave thought of Hamid Karzai’s overtures seeking negotiations with the Taliban.

What if there is no Global Warming? What if they’re right? What if it’s all made up? What if? How about it would be the first and only time in the history of modern science that a genuine scientific concensus of this magnitude was actually wrong. It would mean that the underminers, the guys whose fly-by-night, non peer-reviewed research Big Oil throws at us, were right.

Run that through your mind a couple of times, toss it around, and decide what you really think the chances are that the global warming scientific community has this one wrong.

If the side that’s has always been right for us in the past actually is right on this one, as the overwhelming majority insists, we need to get past the naysayers and stop letting them hurl obstacles in our way. That goes for Little Stevie too. Harper has to decide whether he’s going to Stand Up For Canada or just stand up for the tar sands.

If you’re like me – and I know that at some level you are – you may be getting Headline Fatigue – a famous syndrome I just discovered where you notice you’re reading the same headine – day after day after day – but someone just keeps changing the number.

I just see “Baghdad” and 31 or Baghdad and 40, 22 or 60. The story is always the same. This militia did this to that one or a convoy of police trainees or just some poor Shia or Sunni who managed to get caught at the wrong roadblock. The few facts that distinguish one victim from the next have lost meaning. It’s the same story, over and over again.

You wouldn’t put up with this many re-runs from your cable provider. Why are we accepting this from our government providers?

We, in the outer circle, need to start pressing inward to make these clowns start acknowledging reality. We have to get back to that safe zone again so that we can begin talking to the other side. Washington has to talk to Syria, it has to talk to Iran, and the Palestinians, and the democracy activists who undermine their cozies with Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

This insanity has got to stop. But. then again, consider this:

When global warming really wreaks havoc on the planet, we can all blame Greenland. Yes, that’s right, Greenland. I mean, after all, how can anyone trust an icebound country that calls itself green?

The fact is that Greenland is going to kill an awful lot of people, many millions and perhaps more. According to the British government’s chief scientific advisor, Sir David King, the battle to arrest global warming has to be won before the melting of the great Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible.

What’s the deal with this ice sheet? For starters, it’s really big, hence the name “great.” It’s big enough that, if it melts, it’ll send sea levels rising 20-feet. Bye, bye New York; bye, bye London as well as vast swathes of Holland, a great deal of the South Pacific and south Asia – hell, everywhere!

Sir Dave’s approach is to target GHG reduction efforts at saving the great ice sheet. Just what that means remains to be discovered but, hey, it’s a good start.

Give Dick Cheney credit, he sometimes tells the truth even when he doesn’t mean to. Now he’s saying that Iraq violence is linked to the American election. Duh. Cheney and his gang have been using Iraq violence to grease their victories since 2002. The whole Bush administration has been fueled by violence, real or imagined, by or against Iraq. It saved their asses in 2004, that and a good dollop of chicanery in Ohio. Now, however, it doesn’t seem to be working the same magic for the Repugs so let’s use it again anyway, this time as a crutch.

Canada’s newly-minted, “red meat” crowd like to bellow that peacekeeping is a thing of the past, irrelevant in today’s infinitely more dangerous world. Who the hell says?

Is the problem peacekeeping or the shrinking amount of peace worth trying to keep? In the Busharama era of clumsy megapower blundering, we’re not getting a lot of people to the table to make peace that kind, well-intentioned nations like Canada can send forces to help keep.

I really don’t care how many times Globe editorialist Marcus Gee and other dimbulbs of his ilk proclaim that peacekeeping is dead, irrelevant – it’s not and, so long as mankind retains any hope of a future, it never will be.

Follow their argument along. Peacekeeping is passe. Therefore, what? Why, therefore we redirect the efforts of our personnel into 21st century, hi-tech mayhem. That seems to be the default option. It isn’t even debatable. If you can’t be bothered to keep people from killing each other you might as well get yourself up to your neck in blood. It’s like the world is critically short of people to blast away at other people. Get real.

Rambo was just a movie. Let’s fight wars but only the wars we really need to fight. There are plenty of other countries that indulge their trigger happy appetites.

Countries that ought to be peacekeeping are now transforming themselves into Bush’s Foreign Legion, sending their young men and women in to places where America has already screwed up. What’s with that anyway? NATO = FUBAR?

Afghanistan isn’t about fighting terrorism, it’s about taking one side in an incredibly long-running civil war. It’s about wasting the lives of Canadian soldiers to wipe GWB’s backside. Enough.

Today the Washington Post editors came out swinging to urge their president to finally act and act decisively on climate change:

“AFTER THE coming election, President Bush is likely to face a Congress more apt than the current one to take strong action on climate change. He will then face a fateful choice: Does he want to spend his final two years in office blocking action and pretending that voluntary curbs on greenhouse gases will solve the problem of global warming, or does he want to help shape solutions? At some point, conservatives will need to reconcile themselves to the problem of climate change. Some leading Republicans — Arizona Sen. John McCain and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, most notably — have already taken strong stands on the question. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that the intransigence of Mr. Bush’s administration on climate change will long survive his tenure, no matter who succeeds him. Will he take a hand in developing America’s response to this global problem, or will he go down as the president who fiddled while Greenland melted?

“An engaged president could do much to change the political climate on climate — which is already changing around Mr. Bush. It will take presidential leadership to put in place the sort of regulatory infrastructure necessary, over the long run, to move away from fossil fuels. Federal policy must put a price on emitting carbon into the atmosphere so that companies have an incentive to sequester carbon emissions and to develop energy sources that don’t increase atmospheric greenhouse concentrations. This probably can’t happen without a president willing to put his prestige and time into the issue.

“Even short of a dramatic new initiative, Mr. Bush could alleviate the country’s addiction to carbon by encouraging energy efficiency. His administration has already taken constructive steps on fuel economy standards, but those standards remain insufficiently ambitious. Likewise, a huge percentage of buildings in this country will be refurbished or replaced in the coming decades; aggressively pushing design features that maximize energy savings would reduce energy use enormously without much pain.

“Ultimately, strong steps have to be taken; the chances of catastrophic consequences of global warming are too high to ignore. The longer policymakers wait, the more wrenching economically and culturally the steps are likely to prove. Mr. Bush spent his first six years emphasizing the undeniable need for more research; in his final two years, he could finally embrace the need to act.”

Nobody could ever accuse John Howard of going with the prevailing winds. Of course I could say the same for the fire hydrant in front of my house.

The Aussie PM is digging in his anti-Kyoto heels in the face of the release of the Stern report on global warming. Howard steadfastly refuses to sign any agreement that doesn’t include China and India and he insists that coal will remain the primary source of energy into 2050.

Howard’s approach isn’t unexpected even though Sir Nicholas Stern’s findings point to Australia as being likely to be hardest hit by global climate change. This excerpt from the paper, The Australian:

“In a pointed reference to Australia, the report by former British Treasury head and World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern warns that if global temperatures rise by an average of four degrees, large swaths of Australia’s farming land would be rendered unproductive.

“While grim in its outlook if nothing is done, the report is optimistic that a concerted effort to develop clean coal technologies will be able to stabilise world greenhouse gas emissions.

“Described by British Prime Minister Tony Blair as the most important report he has ever received, the document says the economic impact of global warming must begin to be addressed immediately to avoid world economic catastrophe.

“Sir Nicholas estimates acting now to cut carbon emissions would cost 1 per cent of global GDP a year, about $500 million. By doing nothing, the costs at the time would be a minimum of 5 per cent and as high as 20 per cent of GDP a year.

“Australian estimates of such an impact on the energy-based economy are between $15 billion and $66 billion a year, driving down Australian wages by 20 per cent.”

John Howard’s head in the sand approach illustrates the Kyoto conundrum. Countries like the U.S. use the excuse (and it is nothing more than a cheap excuse) that there is no point signing on to the Kyoto protocols unless the emerging giants, India and China, do likewise. India and China, meanwhile, question why they should hop aboard until the wealthy and filthy lead the way.

We can only hope that the Stern report and a new Congress will be enough to get Washington to move on global warming and bring the rest of the gang, Ottawa included, along with them.