The Mound of Sound

Representatives from 100-nations are meeting today in Wellington, New Zealand to discuss the final issues leading to an international treaty to ban the production, sale and use of cluster bombs.

At the same time the New York based Human Rights Watch has released a report estimating the number of cluster bomblets Israel fired into Lebanon in 2006 at 4.6-million. From the UN Humanitarian Affairs Office:

“HRW’s estimate – an increase on the UN figure of about 4 million – is based on information gathered from Israeli soldiers who re-supplied Multiple Launch Rocket System units with cluster bombs during the July-August 2006. The number is more than were used in recent conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq combined, it said.

“Israel fired cluster bombs, either US-supplied or manufactured in Israel, on nearly 1,000 individual strike sites across 1,400sqkm of southern Lebanon, an area slightly larger than the US state of Rhode Island.

“Each cluster bomb can release up to 2,000 bomblets, and about a quarter of the bomblets failed to explode on impact in Lebanon. Since the war, unexploded bomblets have killed at least 30 people and injured some 200 others.”

Human Rights Watch also reports that Hezbollah fired some cluster weapons into Israel during the conflict. How many is unclear.

Kosovo, or at least its ethnic Albanian majority, has declared its independence from Serbia. The seminal words there are “ethnic Albanian.” Kosovo has historically been Serbian through and through. It’s cherished by the Serbian people. But, mainly as a result of centuries of wars between the Slavs and the Ottomans, they allowed ethnic Albanians into the area and those folks settled in and bred themselves into a tidy majority. A dust up ensued and “bingo” they’ve taken the place as their own.

Israel is facing a similar demographic problem. Can’t live with the Palestinians but not prepared, at least not yet, to live without them. The window may be closing on the two-state option and that’s terrifying to a lot of Israelis. If the situation defaults to a one-state solution, the Palestinians would quickly be the majority, capable of voting their interests – if they were ever given a vote. Israel would have to maintain a South African-style apartheid or lose Israeli control of their homeland. Yikes!

Best of all there’s the American southwest. A lot of Americans are becoming alarmed at the demographic explosion of the Latinos. It’s believed that Latinos could become an ethnic majority in various southwestern states before too long. What then? What if they use their voting power to “have it their way”? It’s not too hard to imagine that “their way” wouldn’t be entirely comfortable for America’s caucasian majority.

Hasta la vista, Yanquis! You’re not the only ones who “Remember the Alamo.”

Nothing like a good old-fashioned arms race to spice up the world’s problems.

It’s curious how they always seem to follow the same course – first the guns, then the paranoia and then… well, let’s leave that for a moment.

Guns. Nobody likes them more than the United States of America. Its economy may be in decline, it may be struggling to breathe under a suffocating blanket of debt, but there’s nothing known to man or earth that’ll stop it from spending more on its military than every other nation combined. Think about that. Five per cent of the world’s population, twenty five per cent of its greenhouse gas emissions, fifty per cent of its military spending. Wowee, zowee!

It’s a scary world when the hillbillies have all the guns.

Imagine you live in a big, old house with a big verandah where you like to sit to catch the cool evening breezes in the height of summer. In the big, old house across the street your somewhat strange neighbour also sits out in the evening. But one day you notice something different. Lined up along the porch railing you see the neighbour has leaned a couple of rifles and a shotgun. It’s enough that you notice it but you don’t react. Then the following night you see that he’s added an automatic assault rifle. The next night it’s a sniper rifle. About this time you might be getting a little worried about all this firepower and just what the guy has in mind. When you see him actually pointing a cannon at you, just that once, you realize you can’t keep giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Now take that situation to the global stage. You have one country that has served notice that it reserves the right to launch “pre-emptive” war against any nation that it perceives as an emerging rival, militarily or even economically. That’s right. If your economy stands to surpass his economy, he claims the right to attack you. If your military or your military and that of other countries with which you may ally yourself threaten to surpass his military might, he claims the right to attack you. On what basis? Because he can. Because might is right.

That little bit of madness is enshrined in today’s Bush Doctrine. It’s a perverse form of American exceptionalism that has other nations paying a lot of attention to the goings on in Washington. So, what do they see when their gaze shifts to the Potomac?

They see a nation that has gone for its guns, arming itself as though it was already in a total war and preparing for another. They see a nation bent on achieving superiority, on a generational scale, in everything from ships and submarines, to aircraft, to nuclear weapons and the militarization of space itself. They see a nation that has commercialized not just its armaments industry but warfare itself, a government whose elite friends (outfits such as Halliburton) now rake in unconscionable profits from actual warfare, an industrialized mercenary cash cow.

Bush/Cheney & Company cherish fear. It’s a weapon they use on everyone, including their own people. To them, it’s far easier and infinitely more effective to use fear as a motivator than to employ legitimate means of persuasion. Get’em afraid enough and they’ll do anything. The trouble is, other nations aren’t as easily intimidated as the American people.

As America has gone for its guns so have others. Russia, China, India, the Koreas, even Japan are all in the midst of one or more arms races. It’s even rumoured Brazil may seek to establish a nuclear hegemony in South America. What else do all these countries have in common? They’re all emerging economic superpowers. They’re all looking to expand trade with each other. And, with the exception of Brazil, they’re all geographically contiguous.

Asia Times Online has a good article on the Asian arms race: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JB14Ad02.html

Russia’s Vlad Putin has been outspoken about his nation’s insistence that it will not be cowed by American threats. Recently Putin said that Russia will soon field its own advanced weaponry and its own next-generation nuclear weapons with new missiles specifically designed to defeat Bush’s anti-missile defence systems. He has scrapped the Coventional Forces treaty and has promised to target Russian missiles at any nation that participates in the Bush anti-missile system.

First the guns, then fear, then more guns and, inevitably, the paranoia. This is the potentially lethal cocktail produced by mixing fear, a lack of confidence, and a powerful shot of suspicion.

Here’s the latest example. The United States has announced it will use a missile next week to destroy a defective spy satellite. Washington claims the satellite was launched just over a year ago, failed immediately, and now threatens to smash into earth with a deadly cargo of hydrazine fuel.

Russia, however, suspects an ulterior motive. From BBC:

Russia’s defence ministry said the US planned to test its “anti-missile defence system’s capability to destroy other countries’ satellites”.

“Speculations about the danger of the satellite hide preparations for the classical testing of an anti-satellite weapon,” a statement reported by Itar-Tass news agency said.

“Such testing essentially means the creation of a new type of strategic weapons,” it added.
“The decision to destroy the American satellite does not look harmless as they try to claim, especially at a time when the US has been evading negotiations on the limitation of an arms race in outer space,” the statement continued.

The Russian defence ministry argued that various countries’ spacecraft had crashed to Earth in the past, and many countries used toxic fuel in spacecraft, but this had never before merited such “extraordinary measures”.

It troubles and perplexes me that, as far as our leaders seem to be concerned, these arms races aren’t even on their radar. No one on our side speaks out demanding this be stopped and I can only assume that’s because it is the United States that is driving this lunacy. The good news is that not every arms race leads to major power war. The Cold War is an example, although there was a lot of luck involved and it had an abundance of troubles of its own. However the First and Second World Wars clearly did trace back to arms races.

There are political and economic shifts underway of a tectonic scale. It’ll be tough enough travelling that rocky road without everyone pointing guns with hair triggers.

It’s called “sophistry,” “unsound or misleading but clever, plausible, and subtle argument or reasoning” and it fits Rex Murphy to a T. Anyone who has heard or read this devout contrarian go on about the “theory” of global warming will know that no amount of scientific study will ever inform his tightly locked mind on this subject.

Murphy routinely ridicules the scientific community, the IPCC, environmentalists and anyone else calling for action to arrest man-made greenhouse gas emissions and, curiously, as the science builds his skepticism never truly recedes. For Rex Murphy there is no reality tipping point. He is the hi-brow Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter of anthropogenic global warming.

Here are excerpts from Murphy’s latest adventure into denial and deceit from the Globe & Mail:

“I am under no illusion about the force of the global warming consensus.
It is the grand orthodoxy of our day. Among right-thinking people, the idea of expressing any doubts on some of its more cataclysmic projections, to speak in tones other than those of veneration about its high-priests, such as Mr. Suzuki or Al Gore, is to stir a response uncomfortably close to what in previous and less rational times was reserved for blasphemers, heretics and atheists.”

(ah, nice try, Rex. Set yourself up as the latter day Galileo. There was a difference, Rex. Galileo sought to advance science, you seek to ridicule it, not with any reference to contrary science, but with the power of empty rhetoric. Just like your mentors, Ann and Rush.)

“But wherever we are on global warming, and on the models and theories supporting it, it is not yet The Truth, nor is it yet Science (with a capital S) as such. And to put a stay on our full consent to its more clamorous and particular alarms is not, pace Dr. Suzuki, either “ignoring science” or complicity in criminal endeavour. Nor is reasoned dissent or dispute, on some or all of the policy recommendations that global warming advocates insist flow, as night follows day, from their science.”

(nice, Rex. Yes, anthropogenic global warming is a scientific theory. Gravity and evolution are also theories. Since gravity is a theory, Rex, maybe you would like to see how well your 767 flies when the wings fall off at 35,000 feet. Theories sometimes kill, Rex, and, until you come up with some meaningful science of your own, it’s best to bear that in mind.

Here Murphy sets himself up as a voice of “reasoned dissent” while providing no reason, no justification, no explanation. A misleading and superficial argument typical of this clown.)

“It’s worth pausing on this point. What global warming is, what portion of it is man-made, is one set of questions properly within the circle of rational inquiry we call science. What to do about it – shut down the oil sands, impose a carbon tax, sign on to Kyoto, mandate efficient light bulbs or hybrid cars – are choices within a range of public policy that have to be made outside any laboratory whatsoever. Global warming’s more fulminating spokespeople are apt to finesse that great chasm between the science and the politics. They are further apt to imply a continuum between the unassailable authority of real and neutral science and their own particular policy prescriptions. (I notice that late in the week that something called Environmental Defence has hailed the Alberta oil sands as “the most destructive project on Earth.” It goes on to say that “your desire to tackle global warming is being held hostage by the Tar Sands.”

If global warming is primarily a “man-made” phenomenon, then what to do about it is a political discussion before it is anything else at all.”

(Fair enough but, again, misleading and superficial. This is a scientific issue and, while remedial actions fall within the political realm, the “discussion” needs to be informed by science. Rex, quite craftily, avoids drawing the essential link. Going to war is, likewise, a political decision but it’s always best if the politicians are first properly informed by their military chiefs. Look what happened in Iraq when Bush refused to listen to his top general, Eric Shinseki. Same idea, Rex.

Since when is the issue whether “global warming is primarily a man-made phenomenon”? Man is certainly a critical source of GHG emissions but which is the “primary” source is irrelevant. See how cheesy T-Rex can get when he slips irrelevant and misleading considerations into his arguments?)

“If Environmental Defence or Dr. Suzuki thinks shutting down the oil sands is not a political choice, I advise both the group and the man to visit Alberta and acquaint themselves, while they are at it, with the history of the national energy program – and what its consequences were for the West and Confederation.

Shutting down the oil sands would make the storm over the NEP feel like a soft rain on a sultry day by comparison. It would break the Confederation.”

(“Break confederation?” Why, because you say so Rex? Nothing to see here, move along, eh? So, what’s the alternative, Rex, give up? Just ignore it? Oh, that’s right, Rex doesn’t come up with alternatives or factual responses. He doesn’t have to. He’s T-Rex.)

I watched the Liberal Party clip of Stephane Dion presenting and explaining his motion on the future of “the mission” in Afghanistan.

The motion was obviously an exercise in political posturing and nothing more. It demands that the Canadian government “address” Afghanistan’s opium problem. Address as in what exactly? How is a force that controls just a small portion of just a single province in a lawless and corrupt narco-state supposed to address a national problem of the scope of Afghanistan’s opium industry?

Dion notionally insists that NATO honour the non-existant “rotation” principle of sending in a force of soldiers to relieve Canada’s soldiers so they can get on with training and security. Yet he leaves more than ample wiggle room in the proposal as to render it virtually meaningless so long as the Tory demand for another thousand troops is met.

If we’re going to continue as America’s Foreign Legion until February, 2011, then we’ll need NATO to furnish Canada with its own, mini-Foreign Legion to handle the fighting in Kandahar until we leave, is that it? So, we’re going to remain in control of Kandahar province and other countries are going to send their soldiers there to serve under us as our battle group? Say what?

Then there’s the sleight-of-hand insistence on a “firm end date” of February, 2011. Dion wants Harper to write a letter to NATO saying this time we mean it, we’re really leaving, seriously folks – no, seriously, this isn’t a joke, we’re going in February, 2011. Stop laughing. We mean it, there’s nothing to laugh about. We’re serious. Really, this time we’re serious.

If we’re going to have a “firm end date” there’s only one way to get it. We need to negotiate a binding agreement, with NATO and with the US, under which both acknowledge we’re out in February, 2011 and with an express American guarantee that, if NATO doesn’t come up with a replacement force by February, 2010, the US will begin assembling and training an American force to be in place no later than February, 2011 to relieve Canada’s forces. We need that deal BEFORE we approve any extension because you can’t get it afterward.

We’re in the mess we’re in now because we extended to 2009 without that very agreement from NATO and the US. We didn’t bind them to our deal and they weren’t about to jump in to find replacements for the Canadian mission as the deadline approached.

NATO and the US are not our faithful friends in this. They knew what was needed for Canadian forces to “rotate” out in 2009 and they did absolutely nothing – nothing – to facilitate that end. We were stupid to believe they would do otherwise. Yet here we are, once again, extending a mission to another deadline without the firm commitment of the two key players, NATO and the US, a glaring omission that virtually assures we will be stuck in the same situation in 2010 that we’re in today. If anything it’ll be worse for us because NATO will be scrambling to find someone to fill in for the departing Dutch contingent.

Another precondition of the Liberal motion is described as, “development of sound judicial and correctional systems.” Given that another NATO member, I believe Italy, has assumed responsibility for development of an Afghan judicial system it’s unclear how this condition can have any relevance to the mission extension except as meaningless window dressing.

This is followed by demands for, “addressing freshwater shortages and addressing the drug economy.” Just what does Mr. Dion have in mind that Canada should do to address Afghanistan’s freshwater shortages from our dangerous little perch in Kandahar?

These conditions are plainly demands on Kabul or NATO or both so it’s difficult to conceive what purpose there is in incorporating them into the extension. It is neither coincidence nor oversight that completely absent in these supposed demands is any discussion of just what Canada is to do if development of sound judicial and correctional systems isn’t achieved or if the opium economy isn’t addressed (whatever that may mean) or if the freshwater shortages aren’t addressed (ditto). Do we leave? Do we throw a tantrum? Do we speak harshly to Hamid Karzai?

These policies and conditions don’t even pretend to be more than meaningless, irrelevant drivel. We seem to have arrived at an era where we use proud words to mask the absence of ideas rather than to convey courageous solutions; to construct the appearance of decisiveness as a facade to hide angry confusion and indecisiveness; to stand fact and logic completely on their heads to create the bare illusion of leadership where none exists. It’s bad enough that Stephen Harper insists on modelling himself after the flawed image of his American Idol. Why does the Liberal leader feel obliged to follow suit?

The Canadian people don’t support the mission and their knowledge barely scratches the surface of the true situation on the ground in Afghanistan. The more they know, the less they’re bound to like it. NATO isn’t committed to winning this, neither is the United States, so what conceivable reason can there be to extend the mission beyond 2010 when the Dutch are leaving in their neighbouring province?

Stand on principle, draw a line, if necessary fight an election on 2010. But that’s not going to happen, is it.

One of the main themes on this site, other than Afghanistan, has been the environment and, especially, the looming freshwater/groundwater crisis that is spreading rapidly around the world. As Maude Barlow points out in the following excerpts from her interview in Alternet, it’s a razor-sharp, double-edged sword that is both a result and a cause of global warming:

“By farming in deserts and taking up water from aquifers or watersheds. Or by urbanizing — massive urbanization causes the hydrologic cycle to not function correctly because rain needs to fall back on green stuff — vegetation and grass — so that the process can repeat itself. Or we are sending huge amounts of water from large watersheds to megacities and some of them are 10 to 20 million people, and if those cities are on the ocean, some of that water gets dumped into the ocean. It is not returned to the cycle.

“We are massively polluting surface water, so that the water may be there, but we can’t use it. And we are also mining groundwater faster than it can be replenished by nature, which means we are not allowing the cycle to renew itself. The Ogallala aquifer is one example of massive overpumping. There are bore wells in the Lake Michigan shore that go as deep into the ground as Chicago skyscrapers go into the ground and they are sucking groundwater that should be feeding the lake so hard that they are pulling up lake water now, and they are reversing the flow of water in Lake Michigan for the first time.

“We are interrupting the natural cycle. And another thing we are doing is something called virtual water trade. That is where you send water out of the watershed in the form of products or agriculture. You’ve used the water to produce something and then you export it, and about 20 percent of water used in the world is exported out of watershed in this way, because so much of our economy is about export. In the U.S. you are sending about one-third of your water out of watersheds — it is not sustainable.

“This is not a cyclical drought. We are actually creating hot stains, as I and some scientists call them, around the world. These are parts of the world that are running out of water and will be, or are, in crisis. Which means that millions more people will be without water. I argue that this is one of the causes of global warming. We usually hear water being a result of climate change, and it is, particularly with the melting of the glaciers. But our abuse, mismanagement and treatment of water is actually one of the causes, and we have not placed that analysis at the center of our thinking about climate change and environmental destruction, and until we do, we are only addressing half the question.”

Barlow was being interviewed in connection with the release of her new book, “Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.” You can read the entire interview here:

http://www.alternet.org/water/76819/?page=2

The Guardian has managed to get its ink-stained hands on a leaked copy of a UN study that finds CO2 emissions from shipping may be treble what was previously believed.

The report suggests that shipping contributes 1.12 bn tonnes of CO2 annually, far more than the 650 m tonnes attributed to the aviation industry. The revised figures leave shipping as contributing 4.5% of global GHG emissions.

If unchecked, shipping emissions are predicted to increase as much as 30% by 2020.

US Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia says some physical interrogation could be used on a suspect in the event of an imminent threat, such as a bomb set to go off.

Scalia told BBC, “You can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and say, ‘Oh, it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good.”

Justice Scalia said it would be “extraordinary” to assume that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment applied to “so-called” torture in the face of imminent threat. He said that the Constitution “is referring to punishment for crime.”

But “is it really so easy,” he said, “to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the Constitution?”

“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that,” the justice said. “And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?”

This is just the sort of thinking we ought to expect from Cheney hunting partner and fellow moral reprobate Scalia. It glibly masks what’s not said.

For example, who on this planet believes that security services wouldn’t freely smack someone in the face if they believed that necessary to discover the whereabouts of a hidden bomb? But this isn’t about a smack across the face, is it? Scalia tacitly admits that when he concedes the issue becomes one of justification of torture – cause and extent. How close does the threat have to be and how severe can the infliction of pain be?

What Scalia deliberately omits is the real issue – how legitimate does the threat have to be? His sanction would absolve a torturer who could claim an “honest but mistaken” belief that something dire was imminent. What if it’s nothing more than a perceived threat, something based on ginned-up “intelligence” of the sort that Bush manipulated to justify invading Iraq? With enough wiggle room, anything is excusable, there is no excess.

No, I’m sorry. Torture needs to remain illegal because claiming that it all depends on circumstances admits just too many vagaries into the calculation of right and wrong, so many as to render judgment virtually impossible and meaningless.

Scalia then went on to show the BBC audience what a knuckle-dragger he is by wading into the death penalty issue:

“If you took a public opinion poll, if all of Europe had representative democracies that really worked, most of Europe would probably have the death penalty today,” he said. Excuse me, Tony, “representative democracies that really worked?” You mean like your own, the United States of America? This man is positively delusional.