September 2007
Monthly Archive
September 30, 2007
In today’s LA Times, Matthew Brzezinski warns that George Bush’s anti-missile system deployment to Russia’s doorstep could have regrettable consequences. He looks at another time, back in te 50’s, when Washington thought it was a good idea to use a sharp stick to poke at the Russian bear:
Under the stewardship of John Foster Dulles, his hawkish secretary of State, Eisenhower devised a new defense doctrine to counter the spreading “Red menace,” which had recently claimed Eastern Europe and was infecting Asia.
To keep the Soviets sufficiently frightened and in check, the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, or SAC, began a systematic and sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation. Every day, U.S. planes took off from bases around the world and penetrated Soviet airspace, probing for weaknesses in Russian radar defenses. Huge exercises with ominous names like Operation Power House scrambled hundreds of nuclear-laden long-range bombers that charged across the Atlantic, headed for Moscow. At the last minute, they would turn around, but in some war games, squadrons of B-47 Stratojets would take off from Greenland, cross the North Pole and fly deep into Siberia in attack formation — in broad daylight. “With any luck, we could have started World War III,” the SAC commander, Gen. Curtis LeMay, famously declared.
The Russians were not amused. Had the Soviets tried the same stunt, Khrushchev indignantly responded, “it would have meant war.”Throughout the campaign to demonstrate overwhelming American air superiority, the United States violated Soviet airspace more than 10,000 times. Our thermonuclear stockpile increased tenfold, while LeMay publicly speculated about the 60 million Soviet citizens targeted for annihilation under the Dulles doctrine of massive retaliation. The term was a bit of a misnomer because Soviet planes at the time did not have the range to reach U.S. soil and never once infringed on U.S. territory.
Unfortunately, the massive retaliation doctrine was too effective. “Soviet leaders may have become convinced that the U.S. actually has intentions of military aggression,” the CIA warned in a 1955 report. And the intelligence agency was right. “We were very afraid, and saw the Americans clearly as the aggressors,” recalled Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, who now lives in Rhode Island. And so the Soviet Union started a crash program to build an ICBM.
Sputnik was the ICBM’s public unveiling, Moscow’s turn to demonstrate its air superiority. Ten times more powerful than any operational U.S. missile of the era, it instantly redressed and reversed the strategic imbalance and catapulted the Soviet Union into superpower status as America’s technological equal.
The Eisenhower administration’s own actions, which some historians now call reckless, inadvertently sped up the Soviets’ quest for a missile. It’s a historical lesson the current occupants of the White House should ponder.
September 30, 2007
The familiar refrain is “when they stand up, we’ll stand down” which means our troops will leave Afghanistan when the Afghan army is able to take their place. Fair enough. Why, then, don’t we put our money where our cliched mouth is?
During WWII, Canada hosted the BCATP or British Commonwealth Air Training Plan where many thousands of young men from the Commonwealth and occupied Europe were brought to Canada to learn to become combat fliers. It was a fabulous success. Canada was away from the fighting and a great place to teach young men the trade of war.
Why not do the same thing for the Afghan army? Gear up a training programme that could induct, say, a thousand at a time. Bring recruits over here, properly train and equip them (NATO members who shun the fighting could at least pay for their equipment and training) and send them back, already “stood up” and able to begin securing their own country.
Three months of basic, three months of advanced training. 2,000 Afghans at any given time. Four thousand fully trained, properly equipped soldiers returned to Afghanistan every year. We’d more than replace our own people in the first year alone.
It may sound like a dumb idea but I think it beats hell out of treading water over there.
September 30, 2007
Just how much Hillary Clinton can America bear? Eight years as activist First Lady, eight more as Senator Clinton, and now the prospect of eight long years as President of the United States? Can America stand 24-unbroken years of Hillary in their faces? Can anyone? That’s the premise of a Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times in which she really brought focus on the unease a lot of people feel about Hillary Clinton:
As Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, once told me: “She’s never going to get out of our faces. … She’s like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you about it until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone.”
An earlier generation had the entwined political dynasties of the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. Now, as Nancy Benac of The Associated Press wrote on Friday, 116 million Americans — nearly 40 percent of the nation — “have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House.”
Without nepotism, Hillary would be running for the president of Vassar. But then, without nepotism, W. would be pumping gas in Midland — and not out of the ground.
I don’t think dynasties serve any democracy well. Prime Minister Ben Mulroney? No – Mulroney, Trudeau, Bush, even Clinton – one is enough. This is especially true for America today, a country desperately in need of political rebirth. It wasn’t just George w. Bush who created the mess that the US finds itself in today. Hillary Clinton’s congress also has to shoulder its share of the blame.
September 30, 2007
It’s been a busy year for earthquakes along the Pacific Rim and this month has been no exception. The map above shows major (6+ Richter) quakes for the last 30-days.
Living on Vancouver Island can make one a little more sensitive to reports about quakes that hit Japan or Indonesia or the two today that hit Guam. They seem to be happening everywhere along the Rim, but there’s one stretch where there’s been nothing. As you can see from the map that stretch is coastal British Columbia.
At the risk of tempting fate I’ll ask “what gives?” I can’t remember the last time I felt a quake here. Maybe we’ve just caught a break. I hope.
September 30, 2007
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman grates on a lot of people with his overblown sense of his own brilliance. That’s why it was welcome to read Friedman finally admit he, and most of his fellow countrymen, went deeply off-balance about 9/11:
I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don’t need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12. I will only vote for the 9/12 candidate.
What does that mean? This: 9/11 has made us stupid. I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again.
It is not that I thought we had new enemies that day and now I don’t. Yes, in the wake of 9/11, we need new precautions, new barriers. But we also need our old habits and sense of openness. For me, the candidate of 9/12 is the one who will not only understand who our enemies are, but who we are.
Before 9/11, the world thought America’s slogan was: “Where anything is possible for anybody.” But that is not our global brand anymore. Our government has been exporting fear, not hope: “Give me your tired, your poor and your fingerprints.”
You may think Guantánamo Bay is a prison camp in Cuba for Al Qaeda terrorists. A lot of the world thinks it’s a place we send visitors who don’t give the right answers at immigration. I will not vote for any candidate who is not committed to dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans. Guantánamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
I’d love to see us salvage something decent in Iraq that might help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive pathway. That was and is necessary to improve our security. But sometimes the necessary is impossible — and we just can’t keep chasing that rainbow this way.
Look at our infrastructure. It’s not just the bridge that fell in my hometown, Minneapolis. Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. I still can’t get uninterrupted cellphone service between my home in Bethesda and my office in D.C. But I recently bought a pocket cellphone at the Beijing airport and immediately called my wife in Bethesda — crystal clear.
We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy. Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July — which is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced.
Uncommon wisdom from a man whose shown far too little of it for the past six years.
September 29, 2007
It’s the lead story on the Globe’s web site: Afghan President Seeks Peace With Taliban After Suicide Bomb.
According to the G&M: A Taliban suicide bomber wearing an Afghan army uniform set off a huge explosion Saturday while trying to board a military bus in the capital, killing 30 people, most of them soldiers, officials said. Hours later, the Afghan president offered to meet personally with the Taliban leader for peace talks and give the militants a position in government.
Within hours? This is the same Karzai who reads Canadian Forces’ speeches to our parliament and implores Canada to keep fighting lest the Taliban prevail in his country. He’s lost his nerve and, it seems, his appetite for the fight against the insurgency. The lives of our soldiers shouldn’t be just a bargaining chip for Karzai.
September 29, 2007
This is Canada’s latest attempt to respond to the ever-increasingly large improvised explosive devices used by the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. It’s a mine detection vehicle from South Africa called the “Husky”, not to be confused with a light armoured vehicle of the same name also operated by our army.
In the few years Canadian forces have been in Afghanistan, they’ve gone through several vehicle upgrades.
When we were tooling around the streets of Kabul in the early days, Canadian soldiers often travelled in these mini-jeeps known as the Itlis. If it looks like it might have been created by Volkswagen, it was. The unarmoured Itlis was built for the Canadian army by Bombardier. it quickly showed itself unsuitable for combat conditions in Kandahar.
The Itlis was soon replaced by the lightly armoured, Mercedes G wagon. At the time it was thought it would provide our troops with an adequate level of protection.
That didn’t last long as the G-Wagon was found just too vulnerable to mines although this one did save the lives of its occupants.
Next up was the South African Nyala, a much sturdier vehicle designed specifically to deflect and survive mine blasts.
In response to the introduction of heavier armour, the insurgents responded with larger mines. This Nyala was taken out by one of those larger weapons. Fortunately, in this case, the crew survived. They weren’t always that lucky.
Enter the Husky mine clearance system, again from South Africa. The Husky travels on balloon tires which, so the theory goes, create a much lower surface pressure that allow the vehicle to pass over mines. The Husky tows trailers behind it whose sole purpose seems to be to detonate the mines. A similar Husky system has a recovery vehicle that collects the destroyed trailers.
As far as these things go, I’m all for them. We owe it to our soldiers in Afghanistan to get them the very best, the very safest vehicles that we can lay our hands on.
What bothers me about these vehicles is that they reveal the dilemma of trying to fight a counterinsurgency campaign with an inadequate number of troops. It leaves our soldiers so vulnerable outside their bases that they have to travel in great, lumbering convoys of enormous, strange-looking vehicles.
What’s the message from this? It’s that we don’t control the territory we operate through and that the insurgents have enough control that they can place ever-larger, ever more lethal explosive devices to attack us. We don’t control the territory because we can’t occupy it because we don’t have nearly enough soldiers.
Remember, the Taliban are waging a political war, a war for the “hearts and minds” of the peasants. We’re giving them carrots (at least when we’re not bombing them into oblivion) while the Taliban are beating them with sticks. When we can’t keep the Taliban out of their villages, it’s a simple decision who they’ll be siding with.
The very things that protect us undermine the confidence the villagers place in us. They’re already afraid and in our own way we’re telling them we are too.
September 29, 2007
When it comes to groundwater it seems we just can’t help ourselves. From the US to India, China and many other places, man has become so dependent on our underground reservoirs – aquifers – that we’re pumping them dry. The real problem is we’ve grown enormous societies that are sustained by agriculture that relies heavily on that rapidly diminishing resource.
You’ve probably never heard of Shijiazhuang. It’s a boomtown provincial capital in northern China, population 2-million and ballooning. As reported in today’s New York Times, it’s also a city running headlong into the wall of groundwater exhaustion:
Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party. Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. A new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex, the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city’s water table.
Hundreds of feet below ground, the primary water source for this provincial capital of more than two million people is steadily running dry. The underground water table is sinking about four feet a year. Municipal wells have already drained two-thirds of the local groundwater.
For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China — even as demand keeps rising everywhere.
China is scouring the world for oil, natural gas and minerals to keep its economic machine humming. But trade deals cannot solve water problems. Water usage in China has quintupled since 1949, and leaders will increasingly face tough political choices as cities, industry and farming compete for a finite and unbalanced water supply.
China and India are facing a particularly severe water crisis. Climate change has caused the Himalayan glaciers to retreat. Key rivers in both countries, essential for irrigation, are fed by the glacial runoff. Think of the Ganges and the Yellow River and the hundreds of millions of people whose food is grown with irrigation from those rivers.
As the supply of surface or rainwater diminishes, more pressure is placed on groundwater. Unfortunately, aquifers have a limited “recharge” rate if they recharge at all. Recharge is the trickle of surface water that reaches some aquifers. But the rate at which water is drawn from aquifers rarely has any connection with the recharge rate. Imagine you’ve got a fire truck pumping water out of your backyard swimming pool through a four inch hose while you pour water into your pool through your garden hose. It’s pretty obvious that pool is going to be empty pretty quickly.
Critics of global warming theory like to point out that there’s just as much water on earth today as there was a century ago, a millennium ago, even hundreds of thousands of years ago. They’re absolutely right. It’s an endless cycle of rain, evaporation, condensation, rain. The water’s always somewhere in that cycle.
What’s conveniently ignored in that deceptive boast is what climate change is doing to the cycle and how that impacts mankind. Climate change is altering rainfall patterns. Any farmer will tell you that too much water is just as bad as not enough. Too much rainfall early in the season can prevent the farmer from getting onto his fields to plant his crop. Too much rainfall late in the season can prevent the farmer getting onto his fields to harvest his crop. Insufficient rainfall during the growing season can mean there’s little or no crop to harvest. The farmer needs rain, enough of it but not too much, at the right time of the year. If it arrives in unusable amounts at unusable times it can increase his dependence on groundwater and lead, in time, to groundwater exhaustion.
Around the world from Britain to Africa, Asia to America, people are being hit by floods and droughts. You can’t read the papers without knowing that. But there’s no reason for us to be smug here at home.
Consider this. Our bountiful prairie is a region that quite naturally experiences mega-droughts ranging from 60-years to a few centuries in duration. The past couple of centuries have been unusually cool and wet which has allowed us to settle that region and grow all that grain. Now imagine Alberta and Saskatchewan with almost no rainfall for six decades. Imagine a whole lot of empty.
This isn’t the dark fantasy of some tree hugger. It’s a reality fully understood by the man many consider Alberta’s greatest premier, Peter Lougheed. He’s very worried that other provinces, such as BC, could get into the business of selling freshwater, especially to the Americans. He wants that water reserved for his province, for Alberta, when the day comes that it will be needed. He wrote quite a lengthy opinion piece in the Globe & Mail on this a few years back that you can get from the paper’s archives.
The perfect irony is that greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming that causes climate change that brings precipitation change that threatens the viability of particularly vulnerable places like Alberta. Go figure. Yet they can’t suck water out of the Athabasca fast enough to use it to pump bitumen to the surface and then leave it contaminated. As far as Alberta, Harper and Big Oil are concerned, Alberta has water to burn.
September 29, 2007
When George w. Bush speaks, he speaks for America. That once meant something. People listened, average Joes and world leaders alike heard the message of the president of the most powerful country on earth and usually got that message. Shrub has changed that. Oh sure people still listen but they’re increasingly dismissing the message. The world, it seems, has learned that taking this guy at face value can be a huge – and costly – mistake.
The Bush government spent the last two days trying to persuade the leaders of the major nations of the world to buy Washington’s vision for tackling climate change. They listened, politely, but left angry at having wasted their time on more empty Bush rhetoric.
Even China and India who, together with the US, are poised to be the planet’s top greenhouse gas emitters have rejected Bush’s “voluntary” proposal. They accept the core principal of binding limits or greenhouse gas caps even though they’re not yet willing to accept the European limits proposals.
Since Bush wasted two days pulling their legs, the attendees left angry and weren’t pulling any punches about how they felt. From The Guardian:
A senior European diplomat attending the conference, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the meeting confirmed European suspicions that it had been intended by Mr Bush as a spoiler for a major UN conference on climate change in Bali in December.
“It was a total charade and has been exposed as a charade,” the diplomat said. “I have never heard a more humiliating speech by a major leader. He [Mr Bush] was trying to present himself as a leader while showing no sign of leadership. It was a total failure.”
John Ashton, Britain’s special envoy on climate change, who attended the conference, said: “It is striking here how isolated the US has become on this issue. There is no support among the industrialised countries for the proposition that we should proceed on the basis of voluntary commitments.
That’s not to say that Bush feels entirely isolated on his hapless vision. It is, after all, embraced warmly by mini-Bush, our own furious leader, Harpo. Stevie knows when it comes to this country and climate change, it’s a choice between Canada and his precious tar sands and on that score he’s Bitumen Boy.
September 28, 2007
“By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem, and by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it” – George W. Bush
According to CNN, that’s what Bush told those in attendance at his 2-day climate change conference in Washington. It sounds good, George knows that. It’s also meaningless, George knows that too.
Bush isn’t offering any specifics about the “problem” and, as for “setting this goal“, he hasn’t set anything. Now, anyone who has listened to this guy over the past seven years understands that what George says is pretty much meaningless. If he’s not lying, he’s spinning his message so thoroughly that he might just as well be lying. George w. Bush is a wanton liar. There I said it.
To make any sense of what this you have to shake off the soothing assurances and look at what he’s really saying, and not saying. If it isn’t there in black and white, indelible ink on paper, it probably isn’t there at all. But, what else was he saying?
“It was said that we faced a choice between protecting the environment and producing enough energy. Today we know better. These challenges share a common solution: technology.”
“We must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and we must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people.”
Bush claims that his government’s figures for 2006 show that that carbon dioxide emissions fell 1.3% while the economy grew 2.9%. CNN, however, points out that Bush has made this very claim in each year up to 2005 and, in each case, GHG emissions actually increased.
Just in case you’re wondering, buried in all the claptrap was the solution – intensity based reductions. In a world already plagued by excessive GHG emissions, intensity-based reductions are ineffective, even destructive. However IBR is music to the ears of Big Oil, Bush and his clones like Harper.
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