The Mound of Sound

It looks as though Harper and Dion have found a compromise on Afghanistan – stay until 2011 and then out.

Excuse me while I wretch.

What these clowns have compromised on is a big bag of nothingness. It is less than a joke, darker than a farce. Where to begin?

Let’s start with the absence of the most important players at the negotiating table – NATO and Washington. Harper and Dion can agree to anything they like. Without the agreement and binding committment of NATO and Washington, it’s as meaningless as the previous agreement to extend “the mission” to 2009.

When we said “out in 2009” what did that comedian de Hoop Scheffer do in recognition of our offer to extend our nation’s committment, to sustain further losses? He did nothing. The Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization took it as a freebie and gave absolutely nothing in return. He didn’t begin pestering other NATO members to have replacements ready to take over in early 2009. Neither did Washington which, after all, intends to maintain permanent garrison forces in Iraq and needs NATO soldiers to make that possible by carrying America’s baggage in Afghanistan.

Surprise, surprise – here we are long after the deadline has passed to muster a replacement force and Brussels and Washington have done SFA. So, now we’ll draw another line in the sand, this one two years further down the road, 2011, and – naturally – we’ll neither demand nor obtain any committment from the US or NATO.

So let’s flash forward to 2010. That’s the year the Dutch say they’re pulling out of Afghanistan. What are the chances Scheffer is going to be bothered with Canada’s deadline in 2010? We’ve shown him what Canada’s deadlines mean – nothing. Ignore us and we’ll bitch and then roll over.

Better yet, what does 2011 mean to the Taliban? Two years is essentially meaningless to a nationalist insurgency. “We have all the watches, they have all the time,” remember?

And what of Afghanistan’s New Government, Karzai’s Kabul Klan? There’ll be elections next year and word has it that the Americans want to get rid of the hapless Karzai in favour of a more reliable water boy. But power in Afghanistan has already passed into the hands of the warlords who have ensured the countryside is safely contained in fundamentalist feudalism. If we don’t have even a small fraction of the soldiers needed to combat the Taliban, just how are we to wrest power from the iron fists of the warlords and drug barons?

And what of Pakistan? Now that the Pakistani army has been “militarily defeated” in the autonomous Tribal Lands and the Northwest Frontier to the point where it has again negotiated a ceasefire with al-Qaeda and the Taliban forces, what will staying until 2011 do to ease that threat? Is it A: Nothing, B: Nothing or C: Nothing. Full points if you chose “Nothing.”

So, if staying until 2011 isn’t likely to result in any significant change on the ground in Afghanistan, then why stay at all? Of course if you’re interested in fighting a political war at home and indifferent to the military war abroad, you can duck that question entirely.

By the way, who do you think will be leading the Liberals and the Conservative parties when 2010 rolls around and we find ourselves still stuck firmly in Afghanistan and playing politics over whether to stay or leave?

New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has slammed a new US energy law that he says will raise global food prices and spread death through starvation.

“People literally will starve to death in parts of the world, it always happens when food prices go up,” Bloomberg told reporters after addressing a U.N. General Assembly debate on climate change.

The new U.S. law, which came into force late last year, increased fivefold the required amount of blending of biofuels like corn ethanol — creating higher demand for the grain that will push up corn prices.

America subsidizes its own corn ethanol production while levying duties on imported ethanol from sugar cane. Bloomberg also attacked the efficiency of corn ethanol production which uses about the same amount of energy to produce, transport and distribute as it yields.

Bloomberg didn’t pull any punches in his assessment of the dangers of global warming. “Terrorists kill people, weapons of mass destruction have the potential to kill enormous numbers of people, global warming has the potential to kill everybody.”

Both the Demutantes and the Repuglicans are facing internal turmoil in their presidential nomination campaigns.

The “movement conservatives” of the Rove/Cheney camp detest their frontrunner, John McCain, while on the Democratic side, relations between the Clinton and Obama camps are positively toxic.

Of the two sides, the Republican dissent appears the least debilitating. McCain may never be right wing enough for his party’s base but he can ease their discontent by chosing the right running mate and relying on the endorsements of key Republicans – like the nod he just got from George w. Bush. Also he’s got eight months to win over the dissenters.

The Dems seem to be in worse shape. A lot of Hillary supporters say they’ll stay home on election day rather than vote for Obama and that seems to be echoed in reverse by many in the Obama camp. Despite their fleeting moments of civility, it appears these candidates are in store for a lot more bloodletting that could continue right up to the convention. That, right now, may be the Republican’s best hope for retaining the White House.

The Dems’ best hope might be for a Clinton-Obama ticket, something to reconcile both warring camps. Clinton for president, Obama in the wings to succeed her. Unfortunately the Clintons have shown themselves less than helpful to their vice-president in the past. Hillary stepped all over Gore while Bill was president and Bill was probably Gore’s greatest drawback in the Gore-Bush runoff.

Could Obama trust Hillary if he joined her ticket? Probably not. However the idea of an Obama-Clinton ticket isn’t realistic. Hillary would never take second place. She’s already been a vice president.

But Hillary may not be able to win without Obama and he may not be able to win without her supporters. Unless someone can find a way to defuse the bitterness and anger between the two candidates’ supporters, they might just hand John McCain the presidency.

Brian Mulroney was in a spot. He needed to explain why he received cash-stuffed envelopes from Karlheinz Schreiber, money about which he kept very quiet until Schreiber’s bank records became public sending Mulroney racing off to Revenue Canada to file a belated, “voluntary disclosure.”

The answer? He was retained by Schreiber to lobby foreign governments on behalf of Schreiber’s German customers, outfits like Thyssen. Now you would have expected that Thyssen would be delighted to have a former Canadian prime minister working to flog its products to new customers and it might have – if it had ever known about it. But, it seems, this was a secret Mulroney kept from everyone, even the companies he was supposedly earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote. From the Globe & Mail:

“In interviews with The Globe and Mail and CBC, a former Thyssen executive and a spokeswoman for the company, which has changed names after merging with another company in 1999, said they are not aware of the lobbying that the former prime minister says he did for Thyssen in China, Russia and France between 1993 and 1994.

“He never worked for Thyssen,” Winfried Haastert, a former Thyssen executive, said in a phone interview.

“I cannot imagine how he could expect to sell something like this to Russia or even to China. It’s absolute nonsense. Maybe he tried to support us. I don’t know.”

Anja Gerber, a spokeswoman for ThyssenKrupp Technologies, also said that Mr. Mulroney had “no official business with Thyssen.”

So that means that there’s just one person who can substantiate Mulroney’s bizarre claims – Karlheinz Schreiber – who vociferously disputes Mulroney’s story.

Our Liberal leader needs to confront reality and make a reality-based decision. Do Canadian troops remain in Kandahar beyond 2009 or do we leave? Those are the two options – the only options – that reality affords us.

Yet that didn’t stop Stephane Dion from taking to the national airwaves yesterday going on about a “process” that, in the reality world, doesn’t exist:

“It is the rotation process. You will have a country or set of countries that will do the combat after Canada doing three years, and Canada then will be able to focus its efforts elsewhere,” Dion told CTV’s Question Period yesterday.

“You will have a country or set of countries…” What country or set of countries? Surely if there is such a thing as a “rotation process” there must be countries’ soldiers to be rotated in as Canadian soldiers are rotated out. Unless, of course, there is no process and it’s merely a fictional device to allow a politician to avoid saying he’d unilaterally yank Canadian soldiers out of their combat role in Kandahar.

I think a solid case can be made for withdrawal if a leader was prepared to show the courage to stand up and argue the point. But to tie the issue to a nonexistant “process” is to reduce that argument to a level of sophistry. And for a man already perceived as weak that can only reinforce those negative perceptions.

Here’s an idea. Leaving Kandahar in 2009 is already pretty much impossible. There simply isn’t time for NATO to recruit a replacement force and then to have that force trained for the mission by that deadline. However 2010 should still be a viable option. And that’s the year the Dutch are leaving, something they’ve made quite clear.

We should also make it clear that we’re not going to depend on NATO finding a non-combat role for our forces somewhere else in Afghanistan. If NATO can find a suitable role for us, fine. If it can’t – or won’t – fine, we’ll accept we’re not needed in any other capacity and leave the place entirely.

Karlheinz Schreiber may be a sideshow in the financial affairs of Brian Mulroney. It was always thought that Schreiber received the $20-million in Schmiergelder, or grease (bribe) money, paid out by Airbus Industries in the course of the Air Canada deal. Schreiber says that money went, instead, to GCI (Government Consultants International), a lobby firm owned by Mulroney croney, the late Frank Moores.

GCI is gone and Frank Moores is dead so getting to the bottom of this is going to be more difficult than it otherwise might. That said, the records of Air Canada and its board during the Mulroney years do exist and might shed a lot of light on what happened.

Why did Mulroney sack some 15-Air Canada directors and why did he include among the replacements he appointed Frank Moores? Why did Frank Moores hurriedly resign this directorship? Why did Moores repeatedly deny claims that he and GCI acted for Airbus on the sale (although correspondence has emerged plainly showing just that)? Why did Moores run off in lockstep with Mulroney to make his own “voluntary disclosure” to Revenue Canada when Schreiber’s Swiss bank records became public?

One thing, however, stands out. It’s been reported that Mulroney repeatedly pressured the Air Canada board to pay GCI a $5-million fee of some sort related to the Airbus purchase. Did Mulroney, while prime minister, really lobby for the lobbyist and, if so, why and what did he get out of it? Why would Air Canada pay a fee to GCI if it was acting as lobbyist for Airbus? Did any money pass from Air Canada to GCI or Frank Moores and, if so, how much and for what?

Norman Spector did ponder what the Commons ethics committee might have learned had it held the current enquiry back in 2002 while Moores was still alive. It’s too bad he was never asked to expand on that thought.

We’ve been sold the line that biofuels hold the promise of great GHG emission cuts. Maybe not. In fact, dirty old fossil fuel that biofuel is supposed to replace may actually be less harmful. From the New York Times:

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded.

The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These latest studies, published in the prestigious journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.

The destruction of natural ecosystems — whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America — not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel.

“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,” said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”