June 2007
Monthly Archive
June 17, 2007
Shivcharan Jatav must be the world’s champion optimist. He’s been trying to pass his Grade 10 exams since 1969. Now 73, Jatav has just failed for the 39th time. Undeterred he says he’ll get it next time.
38 years ago Jatav set out to get his Grade 10 qualifications so that he might make it into the Indian Army. That option is long closed but he’s determined to pass the exams. Why? Because he’s convinced that it will improve his job and marriage prospects.
“I could not get married as the girls told my family members that I was not properly educated. It’s my fate that deprived me of education and a married life,” he said. Sorry hopefuls, I’ve searched the internet and there’s no picture of Shivcharan to be found.
June 16, 2007
No one can claim that George w. Bush hasn’t pursued an aggressive foreign policy. His weakness may be in getting caught in too many, conflicting foreign policies due to far too much aggression.
Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine – all are paying the price of this incompetence. As noted by Malcolm Rifkind in a previous post on this page, Afghanistan will never be sorted out until its boundary dispute with Pakistan is resolved and until India is told to back off from Afghanistan. Bush doesn’t want to push Pakistan or India. There’s a dubious fear that nuclear Pakistan can fall into Islamist hands unless Musharraf is kept in power. At the same time, Washington has chosen to draw closer to India in hopes of gaining a counterfoil to China.
Then there’s the Sunni/Shia chasm that has the US taking both sides. At first it was all about confronting and defeating Sunni al-Qaeda. That was followed by toppling the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein. The reward for that was the installation of a Shia-dominated government in Iraq with close ties to its religious brethren in Iran.
Iran was said to be fomenting trouble in Lebanon and Palestine by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. To counter this the US began arming Lebanese Sunni groups linked to al-Qaeda. At the same time it cinched the lid on the pressure cooker that is today’s Palestine.
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, US commanders opted to provide arms and assistance to the Sunni insurgents – the same bunch who routinely target American soldiers – on the strength of the insurgents’ promise to use those weapons to hunt down al-Qaeda forces. Meanwhile the Baghdad government of al Maliki is widely believed to be in league with the Shiite militias and violence continues to spread through Baghdad and other Arab Iraqi centres while the Kurds are on the brink of launching their own civil war of independence that may bring Turkey into the fray.
Even a genuine statesman would find this melange of contradictory forces and alliances utterly daunting but there are no real statesmen in Washington, just a bunch of ideologues who started this madness in the belief that, with a healthy dose of American military supremacy, all would be made well. Oh, and al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that sparked this whole thing? They’re doing just fine and spreading throughout the Muslim world.
What to do? For starters, scrap the messianic delusion. Cutting one’s losses isn’t cutting and running. Stop expecting the Islamic states to do your bidding. That’s not working, even in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Focus, instead on how to put out all the fires you started.
First and foremost. Enforce a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Impose it – on both sides – if necessary. Israel withdraws to its pre-1967 borders. Jerusalem is made an open city. Israel either grants a right of return or offers full compensation for displaced Palestinians. Create a demilitarized zone between the parties and have it occupied by neutral peacekeepers who have authority to use force where necessary. No more negotiations if only because there really isn’t time for yet another succession of failures. The West created Israel and has every right to dictate these terms.
Promote genuine democracy and start that effort where you can do the most good right now – Saudi Arabia and Egypt. If you want democracy to flourish in the Arab Middle East, that’s where it has to begin. Parlour games in Iraq or Iran are no substitute. Make it clear that autocratic rule and suppression of democratic reform is over.
Reduce tensions between Pakistan and India while you still can. Draw attention to India’s role in Afghanistan and how it is undermining Pakistan’s security. Make India back off. Then compel Pakistan to establish ordinary, civil authority in the tribal lands. Tell Afghanistan (and they’re in no position to argue) to accept the Durand Line for the border between the two countries.
Accept that the West cannot prop up a corrupt and feeble regime in Kabul indefinitely. Understand that Afghanistan may need to find its own way to democracy, in its own good time, and may be better off with strongman rule until then.
Decide whether democracy truly has a chance in Iraq without your perpetual military intervention. If not, have the country carved up fairly. Don’t leave Iraq’s Sunnis at a desperate disadvantage that could draw in regional Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia and ignite a much larger Sunni/Shia conflict that will spill over Iraq’s borders.
Do the best you can, do it quickly and then get out. Leave. The genie is out of the bottle and you’re never going to drive it back in. You can no longer demand to micromanage the agendas of these nations or their region. These people have an awful lot of sorting out to do. At times it will probably be bloody and you may even feel guilty for unleashing this instability but, at this point, that can’t be helped.
Try to unravel as much of this as you can in the time remaining in your term. Don’t dummy up with “stay the course” in hope of escaping responsibility for your failures. Don’t let this brew boil until your successor moves into your office. Admit you messed this up. That’s something the Islamic world needs to hear if only to let them begin to hope that you genuinely want to set things right. Then apologize to your own people and to the world.
June 16, 2007
The US government has long maintained a strategic oil reserve. It’s a large quantity of oil that can be made available to offset supply disruptions in the event of emergencies.
China, too, has a strategic commodity reserve only the Chinese aren’t hording oil but pigs. And right now the Chinese government has opted to dip into the strategic porker reserves to stave off potentially destabilizing food price increases.
What’s behind China’s recent spate of food price instability? Asia Times reports that the culprit is ethanol:
“Current hikes in both grain and pork prices are blamed on the same culprit – the ethanol industry, whose explosive growth has been gobbling up a growing share of China’s corn (maize) harvest traditionally preserved for food and animal feed.
“Having promoted the production of the environmentally friendly gasoline additive for years, Chinese economic planners now fear the sector has grown too much and too quickly, presenting them with an uncomfortable dilemma of choosing between the country’s green agenda and its national food security.
“Pig feed, which is made mostly of corn, simply followed increases in corn prices. Prices of the commodity have risen by up to 30% since the latter half of last year, according to the ministry.
“What is more, producers have ignored a government limit on converting about 3 million tonnes of corn into ethanol a year and used up to 16 million tonnes of the crop in 2006, the ministry said in April. China has been encouraging the production of biofuel such as ethanol and bio-diesel from renewable resources to satisfy the country’s voracious appetite for energy and reduce its growing dependence on imported petroleum. “
June 16, 2007
Federal Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn seems to think Stephen Harper is a lunatic. Referring to Saskatchewan’s decision to accept Harpo’s challenge to “sue me” over equalization entitlements, Lunn said, “I just think it’s nuts.” So Gary, your Boss went a bit squirrelly. What else did you expect besides nuts?
June 16, 2007
Can you think of the last time Iraq had a day without a violent death or two or a dozen? If you’re like me, you no longer read the daily accounts of the killings because they’ve lost their meaning except as statistics.
In Iraq people are routinely killed by al-Qaeda terrorists or Sunni insurgents or Shia militiamen or Iraqi security forces or US and coalition ground and air forces. Iraq may not have electricity of even oil but it has no shortage of armed people wandering around looking to kill people. And, when it comes to blame, there’s more than enough to spread around.
A good share of the blame for each death that occurs in Iraq today and tomorrow and next month lies with something that’s no longer around, the Coalition Provisional Authority, that was put in place by Washington to restore order to Iraq in the wake of the conquest. The CPA was headed, as you may recall, by Paul Bremer who served as pro-consul. His top British aide was Andrew Bearpark who stayed on the job until the CPA was wrapped up.
Bearpark has now accused the Coalition Provisional Authority of criminal negligence. In an interview with The Guardian, Bearpark described a totally dysfunctional civil administration. As an example he cited the total lack of planning for restoring essentials such as electricity:
“…when he asked for details of the plan to restore the Iraqi power supplies, he was given a one-page piece of paper with a list of a dozen Iraqi power stations and their potential output, amounting to what he describes as ‘a wish list’. ‘That was the CPA plan.’
Mr Bearpark said: “If we are going to take upon ourselves the right to invade people’s countries and kill people – which is what we do with maybe the most laudable objectives – it puts an incredible moral responsibility upon us to do it as well as we possibly can.”
A veteran of reconstructions in Bosnia and Kosovo, Bearpark, ” insists there was a window of opportunity in 2003, following the invasion in April, when the coalition had the support of the Iraqi people, but by the winter ‘we were losing them since we were unable to control security’. By January, the people realised the situation would not improve.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. He supports the call for an official British enquiry into the failure of planning for the postwar occupation.
June 16, 2007
Destined for Greatness?So George w. Bush is a “paranoid megalomaniac,” so what? It’s not his fault. Blame his dad.
A neat Fathers’ Day article in the Toronto Star says that a lot of the most notable leaders in the world were either orphans or children of single-parent families.
“According to Dr. Justin Frank, a prominent Washington psychoanalyst and author of Bush on the Couch, the younger Bush is a ‘paranoid megalomaniac,’ partly because his father was emotionally and physically absent during his childhood, which ‘triggered feelings of both adoration and revenge in George W.’
“Frank’s analysis seems at least partly in line with research I did, showing that a majority of the 500 most influential people in history came from what society would term a dysfunctional home. More than 300 major historical figures were orphans or rejected by their parents, including Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Mikhail Gorbachev, Gamal Nasser, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Golda Meier, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and the “father” of the United States, George Washington.
“Some 40 per cent of U.S. presidents lost a parent when they were young, four times the national average. “A serious loss in childhood is a real motivator,’ says professor Robert Albert of Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who studies high achievers.
“‘People go into politics, especially, to overcome loneliness and early deprivation of love.’
In fact, some psychologists believe the so-called “daddy hole” is an integral part of American culture, where people often seek to fill emotional needs with achievement.”
June 15, 2007
You stand shoulder to shoulder with the military of the nation that did this and simply left it in its wake. It’s Agent Orange and it makes the horror of 9/11 look like kids’ play. Vietnam has a population of 84-million. It’s estimated that upwards of three and a half million of them have suffered disease or birth defects from the American use of Agent Orange during its Vietnam War.
9/11 ended on 9/11. Vietnam’s Agent Orange curse will keep killing and deforming for generations. The chemicals bond to the soil and leach into the water, ensuring that this terror from a past war will linger, perhaps for centuries.
America, naturally, disputes the Vietnamese estimates of Agent Orange victims and – wait for it – says more research is necessary to establish a link between the defoliant and the birth defects. Now we’re nearing almost four decades since this stuff was sprayed over the Vietnamese countryside and just how much research has the US done? You guessed it. However if you were a US soldier who got ‘exposed’ (as opposed to doused with it), you got your compensation cheque a long time ago.
According to the Associated Press, the US Congress recently set aside $3-million to address dioxin contamination in Vietnam.
A lawsuit seeking compensation from Agent Orange manufacturers, filed by the Vietnam Agent Orange Victims Association, is to be heard by a U.S. appeals court on Monday.
Ambassador Marine said in an interview that the U.S. does not plan to provide direct compensation. But he noted that, on top of the US$3 million Congress approved, Washington has spent US$43 million since 1989 helping Vietnamese with disabilities, regardless of their causes.
Fortunately for Iraqis and Afghans caught up in the current war, Agent Orange is no longer being used. They, however, will have to wait and see what effects await them from the depleted uranium shells America likes to use so freely in their countries.
If you’re interested in the Agent Orange fiasco, a Canadian firm, Hatfield Consultants have done a lot of work in Vietnam. At their web site
http://www.hatfieldgroup.com/ you can find links to numerous books and documentaries on this shameful mess.
June 15, 2007
US economics professor Brad DeLong has pondered the meaning of “honest conservative” and has formulated the following categories to assess Republicans:
Class of 2000: People who in 2000 said, “George W. Bush is not qualified to be president, and we should be really worried about this.”
Class of 2001: People who in 2001 said, “I supported Bush in 2000, but George W. Bush is not listening to his honest conservative policy advisers, and we should be really worried about this.”
Class of 2002: People who in 2002 said, “I supported Bush in 2000 and 2001, but 9/11 has unhinged the administration; its detention and other policies are counterproductive; it needs to be opposed.”
Class of 2003: People who in 2003 said, “I supported Bush over 2000-2002, but enough is enough. That’s it. I supported the invasion of Iraq because I was certain there was evidence of an advanced nuclear weapons program–otherwise invading Iraq was just stupid. Well, there was no advanced nuclear weapons program. Invading Iraq was just stupid. Plus there’s the Medicare drug benefit. These people need to be evicted from power.”
Class of 2004: People who in 2004 said, “I’ve been a Bush supporter. I’m a Republican and a conservative, but I’ve had enough: I’m voting for Kerry.”
Class of 2005: People who in 2005 said, “I voted for Bush in 2004. But I made a mistake. A big mistake.”
Class of 2006: People who in 2006 said, “I know I supported Bush up to last year, but that shows I’m not the brightest light on the clued-in tree.”
The class of 2007–people who are now opposed to Bush only because they think Bush will drag the Republicans down in 2008–doesn’t count. Dead-enders who are still claiming that Bush is Teddy Roosevelt don’t count. They aren’t honest conservatives. They are only worth scorn, and fit objects for nothing but mockery. One just doesn’t joust with them in honorable intellectual combat. It’s not done.
I say divide “honest conservatives” into the classes of 2000 to 2006, rank them by seniority according to the date of their public honesty, and use that as a ranking for who to read, who to respect, and who to promote as worthy intellectual adversaries.”
June 15, 2007
Exxon has come out swinging to lay claim to the mantle of environmental consciousness. Yeah, they get it, they really do. Really?
“Kenneth Cohen, vice-president of public affairs for Exxon, said: “Our company has been put in this bucket of not taking the climate issue seriously and that is flat wrong… Those who meet with us understand we are not a denier.
“‘We believed then and today that Kyoto is not the right approach… Our opposition to Kyoto has been seen as opposition to climate change and I regret that.'” He said Exxon’s long-term aims were to respond to rising energy demand but also to planetary warming.
The firm’s funding of third-party thinktanks, which have produced papers questioning the human role in climate change, has recently been heavily criticised in a Greenpeace report.
Exxon retaliated yesterday by saying some of Greenpeace’s facts were “just flat wrong” and in one case “absurd”, though the company hinted that it may stop funding the controversial thinktanks.”
Yeah, right. Exxon long ago promised the Royal Society that it would stop funding these supposed thinktanks yet its cash is still finding its way into their budgets. So long as that continues, don’t rely on Exxon’s hints.
June 14, 2007
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has shoved a thorn in George Bush’s side with the announcement that Venezuela will purchase five and up to nine submaries from Russia. A Russian news agency reports Chavez will be in Moscow next week to sign a deal for five Project 636 diesel subs with an option to buy four Project 637 Amur subs at a later date.
Chavez has indicated he wants the subs to thwart any attempted US embargo of Venezuela and to protect the country’s oil rich offshore shelf. Last year Venezuela puchased two dozen SU-30 fighters, a number of helicopters and 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles. The country is the second largest customer for Russian arms.
The 636 is an updated version of the Russian Kilo submarine.
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