All right. You tell me.
July 2007
Monthly Archive
July 31, 2007
July 31, 2007
Those who say Iraq can’t be compared to Vietnam are right. As John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, writes in the Guardian, Vietnam pales in comparison to the mess George w. Bush has crafted in Iraq:
America was able to walk away from Vietnam because that country was peripheral in the world economy and the knock-on effects of US withdrawal were comparatively slight; Iraq, by contrast, is a key factor in global oil supplies, and if the US pulls out its ability to protect its allies in the region will be called into question. Another crucial difference is that Vietnam had an effective government in the north that could take over when the US exited. No such entity exists in Iraq. The feared domino effect in south-east Asia did not occur, but Iraq could be the scene of a domino effect in reverse in which the country’s warring neighbours fall into the void left by the Americans’ departure. By any standard, defeat in Iraq would be a more devastating blow to US power than Vietnam.
The most important – as well as most often neglected – feature of the conflict shaping up around Iraq is that the US no longer has the ability to mould events. Whatever it does, there will be decades of bloodshed in the region. Another large blunder – such as bombing Iran, as Dick Cheney seems to want, or launching military operations against Pakistan, as some in Washington appear to propose – would make matters even worse.
The chaos that has engulfed Iraq is only the start of a longer and larger upheaval, but it would be useful if we learned a few lessons from it. There is a stupefying cliche which says regime change went wrong because there was not enough thought about what to do after the invasion. The truth is that if there had been sufficient forethought the invasion would not have been launched. After the overthrow of Saddam – a secular despot in a European tradition that includes Lenin and Stalin – there was never any prospect of imposing a western type of government. Grotesque errors were made such as the disbanding of the Iraqi army, but they only accelerated a process of fragmentation that would have happened anyway. Forcible democratisation undid not only the regime but also the state.
Liberal interventionists who supported regime change as part of a global crusade for human rights overlooked the fact that the result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing. Equally they failed to perceive the rapidly dwindling leverage on events of the western powers that led the crusade. If anyone stands to gain long term it is Russia and China, which have stood patiently aside and now watch the upheaval with quiet satisfaction. Neoconservatives spurned stability in international relations and preached the virtues of creative destruction. Liberal internationalists declared history had entered a new stage in which pre-emptive war would be used to construct a new world order where democracy and peace thrived. The result of these delusions is what we see today: a world of rising authoritarian regimes and collapsed states no one knows how to govern.
What the world needs from western governments is not another nonsensical crusade. It is a dose of realism and a little humility.
July 30, 2007
If media reports can be believed (and who would doubt them?) the key plotters behind the Air India bombings have been unmasked.
According to the taped confession of Babbar Khalsa International leader Talwinder Singh Parmar, who was later believed executed while in police custody, Lakhbir Singh Brar “Rode”, nephew of the late Bhindranwale and head of the banned International Sikh Youth Federation, was the mastermind of the bombing. Rode, who is now said to be holed up in Lahore, has never figured in the investigations of either the CBI or the Canadian authorities.
The confession is said to implicate two others, Inderjit Singh Reyat and Manjit Singh as participants in the bombings.
Harmail Singh Chandi, a former Punjab police officer, says he was present when Parmar admitted his involvement in the June 1995 bombing during an intensive interrogation over five days in October 1992.
He provided detailed information to Indian magazine Tehelka Magazine, which quotes Chandi saying Parmar implicated Inderjit Singh Reyat, a long-identified suspect named Lal Singh and Lakhbir Singh Brar, a founder of the International Sikh Youth Federation who once lived in Vancouver.
Chandi said he kept a tape-recording of the confession even though senior officers told him to destroy it prior to ordering Parmar’s in-custody execution
July 30, 2007
We’ve become preoccupied with waging war. Whether it’s “the mission” in Afghanistan or Bush’s war of whim in Iraq or the looming next war in Iran, warfare is grabbing far too much of our attention.
Even in Afghanistan we were too busy pretending to be defeating the Taliban to put much effort into relieving the famine there last year. Who is dropping everything to send badly needed help to Iraq’s millions of dispossessed? What about the refugees of Darfur? Then there’s the million Bangladeshi’s displaced by the current flooding. The biggest of all, however, is the Congo.
According to the Congolese humanitarian affairs minister, Jean Claude Muyambu, a staggering six million of his countrymen have been driven from their homes where, despite truces, fighting continues. That’s six million atop the four million dead from fighting during the 1998-2003 war that drew in six African countries.
July 30, 2007
July 30, 2007
KatrinaA new study directly links increases in the frequency and severity of hurricanes to global warming. From BBC:
This new study, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London, looks at the frequency of these storms from 1900 to the present and it says about twice as many form each year now compared to 100 years ago.
The authors say that man-made climate change, which has increased the temperature of the sea surface, is the major factor behind the increase in numbers.
“Over the period we’ve had natural variability in the frequency of storms, which has contributed less than 50% of the actual increase in our view,” said Dr Greg Holland from the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, who authored the report.
“Approximately 60%, and possibly even 70% of what we are seeing in the last decade can be attributed directly to greenhouse warming,” he said.
July 30, 2007
There’s been an epiphany at NATO. The alliance has realized that chasing Taliban insurgents through civilian villages with 2,000 pound aerial bombs was a really dumb idea. So in future NATO warplanes will be using smaller bombs. Just how much smaller remains to be seen. But the encouraging news is a change in attitude about letting the Taliban draw NATO in to slaughtering civilians:
Alliance commanders have also recently delayed attacks on Taliban forces in some situations where civilians were at risk.
“We realise that if we cannot neutralise our enemy today without harming civilians, our enemy will give us the opportunity tomorrow,” [Nato secretary-general de hoop Scheffer] told the Financial Times. “If that means going after a Taliban not on Wednesday but on Thursday, we will get him then.”
Great thinking, long overdue – if it actually turns out to be true.
July 30, 2007
Some bloggers suggest that the National Post is on the verge of bankruptcy, a flagship furiously sucking equity out of its CanWest parent. I hope they’re right. The paper is nothing so much as a far-right, politically bent propaganda rag. It would be a small loss to Canada if it went under.
Columnist Don Martin is an example of why we don’t need NatPo. He’s been on assignment in Afghanistan where the heat must’ve given him brainwaves such as calling for Canadian forces to issue body counts to pump up support at home. Martin even wanted us to count the “pink mist” that resulted from NATO’s aerial bombardments, not particularly worried that mist could be the mortal remains of some kid we exterminated.
Martin leaves Afghanistan today and, predictably, is doing it with a column that comes with everything but pom-poms. He also shows that he just doesn’t get it.
Hundreds of Soviet tanks, troop carriers, trucks and artillery guns, perfectly preserved by Kandahar’s desert-dry environment right down to goggles and binoculars, lie abandoned in a gated compound within sight of Canadian base headquarters.
For nine bloody years in the 1980s, the Soviet Union tried to prop up a Communist government in Kabul and annihilate the mujahedeen insurgency. Finally, the fading superpower ditched its military hardware here in the rush to flee a fight it couldn’t win.
There’s a reason the arsenal sits in a gated compound under the watchful eyes of Canadian forces and it isn’t because the stuff was abandoned by the Soviets when they left. It’s because all this weaponry was put to use by one of the many sides to the civil war that wracked Afghanistan for many years after the Soviets left. This stuff wasn’t abandoned, it was surrendered and impounded.
Then Martin comes up with this gem: Right off the bat, let me argue that Canada cannot impose a political timetable on successfully ending this military mission. Earth to Martin, no one is suggesting that Canada can “impose” any manner of timetable on “successfully ending this military mission” whatever that may mean – and it does mean very different things to different people. Does this guy just pull this stuff out of his backside?
This one is precious: Soldiers who believed they had a Churchillian prime minister now know he’s just another political weather vane, twisting in response to the winds of public opinion. What soldier in his right mind would have thought Harper “Churchillian”? It would take an incredible ignorance of Winston Churchill to ever draw that comparison, not a problem for Don Martin.
The war against the poppy is lost.
Even with eradication activity picking up under British supervision, the opium-producing plant is setting record high harvests. Detection is not a problem — soldiers often remark how beautiful the poppy fields look when they’re in full red bloom. But British military officials tell me it’s a struggle to convince farmers to switch their illegal crop for less lucrative melons, grapes or even marijuana.
Fair enough, Don, but what does that mean to “the mission”, to NATO and to the Kabul government? Do the math.
The combined air and ground firepower of the joint forces here is a sight to behold. How so much destructive technology can be neutralized by a few thousand religious extremists armed with ancient rocket launchers, last-generation rifles and old anti-tank mines boggles the mind.
I can’t imagine what it would take to boggle a mind like Martin’s but his schoolboy fascination with firepower means he has no idea that massive firepower can contribute to losing a guerrilla war. Seven weeks in Afghanistan and he still hasn’t grasped that this is classic, asymmetrical warfare and that is precisely how so much destructive technology can be neutralized by a few thousand religious extremists armed with ancient rocket launchers.
Martin goes on to rave about how Kandahar city is bustling with construction and commerce, just as Kabul did previously. What hasn’t dawned on him is just what is driving all that activity. It’s drug money. Kandahar’s very prosperity speaks of our failure to establish an alternative to the narco-economy of the countryside. Kabul too flourished – until the Americans laid into the poppy fields in that region. When the opium money dried up, so did Kabul.
Martin concludes by noting that the job (whatever that is) won’t be finished by 2009 which, he says, makes it imperative that Canadian forces stay here until the job is done, even if the surrender monkeys in Ottawa think it’s politically convenient to leave.
It’s sad, really, that despite almost two months in Afghanistan, Martin has grasped so little of its history and its reality. Of course, if you go there to be a cheerleader, deep thoughts need not be a priority.
Martin is just plain wrong on so many levels. He completely ignores the corruption-riddled Kabul government that, of itself, virtually guarantees that “the mission” cannot succeed. He doesn’t get that. He ignores the narcotics driven prosperity that leaves the welfare of the country in the hands of insurgents and criminals, some of them politicians. An economy based on lawlessness cannot give rise to a civil society, end of story. He doesn’t realize that we don’t control our own war in Afghanistan. We’re a part, an important part, but still a part of a far larger campaign and, even if we notionally succeed in Kandahar (which we’re not), our contribution can be rendered insignificant if the rest of the place is a failure.
It’s unfortunate that the National Post thought so little of this story that it sent a guy of Martin’s calibre to analyze it. Really unfortunate.
July 30, 2007
David Walsh is dead. So, apparently, is Michael de Guzman. That leaves only one principal of mining fraud Bre-X to take the heat – geologist John Felderhof.
The company imploded a full decade ago wiping out $3-billion of investor equity. Some got rich, most lost their shirts. When the dust settled the company was worthless, no vaste horde of Indonesian gold.
Today’s Report on Business has a detailed account, from the former Mrs. Felderhof, about the Bre-X aftermath and her ex-husband’s plight. Ingrid Felderhof doesn’t have a lot good to say of her former spouse but she insists he was as much a victim of the fraud as anyone else.
July 30, 2007
Is the massive Hummer really more eco-friendly that the hybrid Prius?
According to CNW Marketing Research of Oregon, it is. A controversial study by CNW holds that hybrids, at least the technology being fielded today, are more energy intensive throughout their lifetimes than Detroit’s most massive gas-guzzlers. From the Globe & Mail:
CNW identified 4,000 “data points” for each car, ranging from the energy consumed in research and development to energy consumed in junkyard disposal. It calculated the electrical energy needed to produce each pound of parts. It calculated greenhouse gas emissions. It calculated mileage, too – adjusting for the differences between rush-hour Tokyo and rural America.
To keep it relatively free of technical jargon, the company expresses energy requirement as the dollar cost of energy for every mile across a vehicle’s anticipated years of use – “U.S. dollars per lifetime mile.” Thus it reports the lifetime energy requirement of a Hummer as $1.90 a mile; the lifetime energy requirement of a Prius as $2.86 a mile.
It reports by model name and by category. For 22 models of economy cars, the average lifetime energy cost is $0.85. For six models of pickup trucks, it’s $2.58. For 14 models of smaller-sized sports utility vehicles, it’s $2.07; for nine models of larger-sized SUVs, it’s $3.98. For 10 models of gas-electric hybrids, it’s $3.65.
Toyota, however, still has some of the greenest vehicles on earth. The Scion has the lowest energy cost of all at 48 cents a mile. The Corolla, at 72 cents, and the Echo (Yaris), at 77 cents, are also in the best-on-earth class. Low-energy competitors include Dodge’s Neon (64 cents) and Saturn’s Ion (67 cents). Cars with the highest energy requirement include the Rolls Royce ($10.97) and the equally elegant German-made Maybach ($15.83).
I’m not convinced. Hybrid technology is still in its infancy. New technologies tend to be flawed and need years of refinement. What is also not apparent is how much of the energy consumption attributed to these various machines is “fossil fuel” energy, the dirtiest kind? If you want to compare apples to apples, it’s the Yaris at 77 cents to four bucks for a full-size SUV. That, in my view, is where the focus needs to be.
The Mound of Sound 