The Mound of Sound

Newt by name, newt by nature. The chrubic little salamander, Newt Gingrich, is testing the waters to see if he’d have a shot at the Republican presidential nomination for 2008.

Gingrich, considered the driving force behind the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress, remains very popular among US conservatives, even those who can keep their pants on.

Newt led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair. At the time, Repugs were literally gushing with family values indignation, so self-righteous that they spent many times more investigating Clinton than George W. did investigating the 9/11 attacks.

Now before you get into a presidential nomination campaign, common sense dictates that you first clear the decks. You gotta get rid of anything that smells, chuck it over the side, so that one of your rivals won’t make you wear it later.

It turns out that Newt, like Clinton, has a problem with his pants. There was the mini-scandal of his first wife who, while beset by cancer, learned that Newt had taken up with another woman. That woman, in fairness, did become Mrs. Newt II. He did clean that mess up – sort of.

Mrs. Newt II held the title from 1981, the end of Newt I, until 2000, the arrival of Mrs. Newt III. That’s when it came out that Newt had decided to trade up again, this time to current wife, Callista Bisek, a former congressional aide more than 20 years younger than he is.

Before launching his campaign, King Grinch decided to seek absolution in a TV interview with Focus on the Family founder and fundamentalist uber zealot, James Dobson. The way Newt described it, he was plainly the victim of the whole, sorry business:

”There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them,” he said in the interview. ”I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I’m … not proud of.”

Oh, c’mon Newt – just a little bit proud, really, eh? You can still score the young’uns.

No, it’s not a new soft drink, it’s what Las Vegas is doing to the rest of the state.

Trying to maintain vast lawns, pools the size of small lakes, fountains and golf courses in a rapidly growing city stuck in the middle of a desert takes a lot of water, a lot more than Las Vegas gets from its 4 inches of annual rainfall.

The city now wants to build a pipeline to drain Nevada aquifers, some 300 miles to the north. Ranchers in that area are less than pleased, especially as they already face shortages from depleted groundwater reservoirs. The city’s water commissioner concedes that even the dwindling supply of rural groundwater won’t be enough to meet future needs of Las Vegas.

The long term solution, she says, would see Las Vegas pay to build and operate desalination plants along the California or Mexico coast and trade the freshwater from that source for a greater share of the Colorado river flow. Maybe somebody should tell her the Colorado is already under severe stress.

Enviromin John Baird says Canada is going to move “quickly” to regulate pollution from all industrial sectors. That’s a promise vague enough to sail an oil tanker through.

“Regulating” pollution isn’t necessarily the same as reducing it or eliminating it. The US also regulates pollution and, under its regulations, GHG emissions are expected to increase 20% over the coming decade. That doesn’t mean they’re not regulating, they are. We’ve been given plenty of notice that Harpo’s bottom line is also “intensity based” regulation, so we too are going to regulate possibly hefty increases in our already excessive GHG emissions.

The other little Harpo dodge came straight from the mouth of our Furious Leader: “We are working through the Kyoto [protocol] process to try and get international action … that will involve all of the world’s major emitters, and as you know, currently, most of the major emitters are not part of the protocol or at least have no targets under the protocol. So these are efforts that are important that we will continue to work on.”

So, we’re going to “try” to get international action and, after all, you can’t blame us if China and India and the US don’t hop on board, right? Those are weasel words, weasel talk, something Harpo has in abundance.

The international answer to fighting global warming has to be found in one place, the World Trade Organization. We need to change WTO rules to permit carbon taxes, a form of tariff levied against the exports of those countries that will not act responsibly to cut – as in actually reduce – their GHG emissions in accordance with scientific recommendations. Nations that don’t should be penalized, hit in their pocketbooks, while nations that do should be rewarded. Make it a paying proposition and you’ll quickly find meaningful global warming initiatives universally embraced. If someone has a better solution, I’d love to hear it.

You’ll know Harpo is serious about international action and not merely using it as a dodge when he comes out strongly in support of carbon taxes. Don’t hold your breath.

I wish Harpo was in Chicago. If he was, maybe he’d load up on a lot of wisdom about the international turmoil now underway in Afghanistan and elsewhere. There’s plenty of it to be had in the Windy City from the roughly 3,000 international affairs thinkers gathered there for the annual, International Studies Association convention.
Here, according to James Travers, writing in the Toronto Star, are some of the words of wisdom Harper could find helpful:

“Politicians stiffening national backbones won’t find renewed strength in this sampler drawn from four intensive days. There’s no guarantee imposing democracy controls terrorism, that being over there necessarily makes us safer over here or, most importantly, that the hope of reconstructing Afghanistan as a stable, modern state is guided by a common blueprint.

“None of that is idle musing. Academic and think tank business is booming in the failed states/security sector and the result is a lot of empirical holes in subjective cloth.

“For example, research predicts that violent groups will cling to their methods even after becoming political parties, Western powers become targets by intervening in essentially local conflicts, and practical short-term tactics make nonsense of the theoretical long-term Afghanistan strategy.”

“A steady supply of walk-in suicide bomber recruits is a product of new anger over infidel boots on Islamic soil and not just a manifestation of more deeply rooted grievances.

“And in Afghanistan the goal of winning hearts and minds is being pushed further over the horizon by the day-to-day damage of air strikes in a war fought among the people and by anti-drug policies that make farmers poorer and more vulnerable to corrupt officials.”

This isn’t revolutionary thinking, far from it. It’s actually very conventional wisdom that is simply not heard very often and even more rarely heeded.

I’ve written several comments about the quiet arms races underway – in the United States, China, India and even Russia. In no small part, these have been – if not triggered, certain accelerated – by America’s unilateralism under George Bush and the infrequently mentioned, bellicose “Bush Doctrine” in conjunction with lesser provocations such as Bush’s space doctrine.

George Cheney-Bush has done a great deal of damage to multilateralism and global order. His foreign policy is built on coercive acquiesence (“you’re either with us or against us”), not concensus. It is premised on “strength beyond challenge” and not just pre-emptive war but preventative war – war on the pretext of preventing war even if the perceived threat is only “emerging.” These are the policies of mad men, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed in Beijing and Moscow.

Everybody that matters is going for their guns, strapping on the six-shooters, and, while no one is willing to admit it, they’re beginning to mosey on down to the corral.

Now it’s Russia’s turn. According to The Guardian, Russia is about to unveil a new military doctrine of its own, one that holds NATO and the West as Russia’s greatest danger.

In a statement posted on its website, Russia’s powerful security council said it no longer considered global terrorism as its biggest danger. Instead, Russia was developing a new national security strategy which reflected changing “geo-political” realities, and the fact that rival military alliances were becoming “stronger” – “especially Nato”.

There have been changes in the character of the threat to the military security of Russia. More and more leading world states are seeking to upgrade their national armed forces. The configuration has changed,” the council said.

“In particular Russia has been incensed by the US administration’s plans to site two new missile interceptor and radar bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“Senior figures in the Russian military yesterday told the Guardian they were infuriated by what they regard as Nato’s “relentless expansion” into “post-Soviet space” – the countries of former communist eastern Europe and the Baltic. Russia felt increasingly “encircled” by hostile neighbours, they said.

“Yesterday Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Washington had failed to explain why it wanted to site missile bases on Russia’s doorstep. President Putin has ridiculed the US claim that the bases are designed to shoot down rogue missiles from Iran or North Korea, claiming their real target is Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

“‘We have been discussing this issue with our American colleagues. But most of our questions have remained without coherent answers,’ Mr Lavrov said.

“The chairman of Russia’s academy of military science, Mahmoud Garayev, said Russia could no longer afford to ignore the threat from Nato. Drugs and terrorism were an irrelevance, he said.”

It’s not as though no once could’ve seen this coming. George H.W. Bush presided over the end of the Cold War. His Frat Boy kid may have just brought Cold War back from the grave.

I don’t always agree with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman but I have to agree with his take that the Walter Reed hospital scandal is just one manifestation of how George Bush has tried to run the country as though there was no war at all:

“Mr. Bush summoned the country to D-Day and prepared the Army, the military health system, military industries and the American people for the invasion of Grenada.

“From the start, the Bush team has tried to keep the Iraq war ‘off the books’ both financially and emotionally. As Larry Diamond of Stanford’s Hoover Institution said to me: ‘America is not at war. The U.S. Army is at war.’ The rest of us are just watching, or just ignoring, while the whole fight is carried on by 150,000 soldiers and their families.”

Welcome to the world of the far-right, a world in which you run huge deficits, fight a war on borrowed money and slash taxes for the rich. There is something genuinely pernicious about people like that.

News Alert! We’re not the first group to think we can overwhelm the native Afghans with our superior technology and intelligence. They’ve been playing this game for centuries, since the days of the ancient traders.

In the last couple of centuries these backward, impoverished, primitive and feudalistic people have driven out two British and one Soviet invasion. They’ve learned that, given enough commitment and willingness to sacrifice, they can easily outdo us in coping in terms of adversity, sustaining casualties over a protracted campaign, and maintaining popular belief and support for their cause. That’s why they’re able to boast that “you have all the watches but we have all the time.”

These people aren’t a bunch of Supermen. They don’t have secret powers. We, like those armies that went before us, have the power, the technological powers of military sciences and weaponry. They’re willing to take clearly losing odds but why? Maybe because they’re about the first of the modern-age guerrillas. Maybe because they’ve been at this great game for so much longer than we have that they believe, truly believe, they can win this. And – maybe because they’re right.

More than a century ago, this is how Rudyard Kipling wrote of Afghanistan:

If you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains

And the women come out to cut up what remains

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

And go to your God like a soldier.

Kipling learned from these people a century ago that they play to win, so much so that they’ll risk annihilation should they lose. They’re willing to go twenty years, they’re willing to go fifty. We can kill them off in droves but they know that new generations will follow to replace them.

Here, ask yourself this. Name the last bunch of foreigners to defeat these people. To whom did these Afghans last surrender, to whom did they accept defeat and yield? Who has conquered these people, how, and where are these conquerors now? No points for coming up with those who’ve merely tried.

Then ask yourself this. Who, among the generals, who keep drifting in and out of this counter-insurgency, has had practical, hands-on experience in the field, commanding a company or a battalion or a regiment, in a successful counter-insurgency?

Far be it for me to claim these Afghans can’t be defeated. They can, given enough manpower deployed over enough time under rules brutal, even barbaric enough to tame civilian and insurgent alike. But are we ready to go that far back to the time and place where their wars are fought, even today, and would we really be willing to welcome home our soldiers if we did?

Maybe we really are lemmings but in just about every corner of the northern hemisphere there are signs that governments are dragging their heels on effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Global Warming poster boy, the United States, says the best it can do is a 20% increase in GHG emissions over the next decade. Our own prime monster, Harpo, seems intent on following suit with his own “intensity based” targets. The two emerging, economic superpowers – India and China – have shown little commitment to curbing GHG emissions although China has been talking a lot about it lately. Now we have the European Union, the place where many hopes were anchored, beginning to balk. From Spiegel online:

“France and 10 other countries, including several in central Europe, have already indicated that they are uncomfortable with binding targets or quotas.

“The EU currently accounts for about 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions. Yet, as emerging economies such as China and India grow, Europe’s share of the worlds emissions are receding. China is already second only to the United States in its CO2 pollution. On Monday China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao announced that the country would do more to save energy and cut pollution, but he didn’t set any specific targets.

“The left-wing Die Tageszeitung writes.

“‘To reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in a market economy, it has to be made more expensive … The easy way is to implement an environment tax: The increase in income from energy consumption then flows directly towards reducing other taxes and expenditures.’

“‘Some European Union countries obviously want to prevent an agreement on binding emissions targets — and do not want to accept penalties in the case of failing to meet these commitments.’

If Europe folds and fails to put in place binding and effective measures to reduce GHG emissions, I expect it will set the tone for the remainder of our northern hemisphere. Washington and Ottawa will certainly use it for all it’s worth to justify their own lax GHG policies and our vacillation will undoubtedly be pounced upon by China and India for the same purpose.

That’s not to say that the day isn’t coming when all of these nations finally get the “GHG” problem. As drought, floods, violent storms, warming, desertification and population migration reach a certain threshold of destruction and economic disruption, attitudes will change. The problem is that threshold is very likely to be past the tipping point.

Well, at least we can’t say we didn’t have one last opportunity to confront the problem and do something meaningful. Of course, we’ll be gone by then. It’ll be the generations we’ve bequeathed this to that will do the talking. I can only imagine what they’re going to think of us.

If we continue to treat the solutions, imperfect as they are, as a burden rather than an opportunity, we’re heading down a path where we’ll eventually confront much greater burdens that will dictate our future for countless generations to come.