in this space

No flies on Chuck....

2007-10-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

Chuck Norris doesn't sleep. He waits. For the right presidential candidate. Clearly, while the chief export of Chuck Norris is pain, political influence is a close second.

Well what do you know....

2007-10-15T09:19:00.000-07:00

.... A terrorist organization I actually like the looks of. The freaky part is just how radical it manages to sound. I especially like the bit about the turnips.

Fortune is the Yellow River

2007-09-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

In Renaissance Florence, Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci collaborated on a now largely forgotten project to divert the river Arno from it's course through Pisa to an alternate route, cutting off Florence's enemy and, perhaps, bringing an inland seaport to Florence.

This remarkable engineering undertaking is now largely forgotten, because it failed--the river stayed right where is was. (Roger D Masters' book on the subject is a pretty good read).

China is currently at work on the largest water project in history, and it involves--surprise, surprise--redirecting a river. The NY Times has a great video piece here. The motivation here is different (getting water to the dry north from the lush south) and the risks are different as well (mostly environmental). On the whole, it looks like they'll probably succeed.

So, in the spirit of learning from history, I wonder if there isn't cause for concern. In Italy, several centuries ago, the only victims were the careers of two Florentine gentlemen at court. This time, at risk is the health and welfare of 1.3 billion Chinese and the environment beneath them.

It's a longshot, I suppose, but one hopes they hit the books first.

Methodology?

2007-09-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

Alright, folks--time for some academia.

This blog post by political scientist Seth Weinberger defends the importance of scientific methodology. This followup concerns the President of Iran's recent address at Columbia. They make for an interesting one-two routine on the importance of proper scientific methodology. As I happened to find myself militating against it in a seminar today, I thought it might be worth commenting on.

Weinberger's argument in the first entry is that the essential feature of political science is the science part--the method part. This is a fairly common claim--the stuff of any undergrad social sciences course. He then goes about rather incisively analyzing and criticizing a NY Times article, on a number of points (I'll leave it to you to read).

This is all well and good, but I'm not sure it's science. It's certainly good critical thinking, but there's usually more to science than that. The failures of the article are along rather the same lines--the Times may be a great paper, but there's an analytical disconnect at work in the article. It has a few hidden assumptions, and Weinberger nicely teases them out. Were it right though, it still wouldn't be science. It would just be less flawed journalism.

The point I found myself making earlier today (or perhaps trying to make) was that the modes of methodological thought one attributes to the natural sciences aren't always suited to the study of something as ephemeral as society and politics. In the case above, we're concerned with public opinion in Iraq as it relates (or doesn't) to attacks on US soldiers. Good polling techniques help with this, and that's certainly science, but they have numerous quite self-conscious limitations.

This is where any number of forms of nonscientific analysis come in handy--the sort Weinberger probably includes in his blog from time to time, the kind that appears in better non-academic publications across the political spectrum, and that kind that I aspire to here, on good days.

His second post argues that President Ahmadinejad should not have been permitted to speak at Columbia the other day. This I take issue with (see this previous post). Addresses like Ahmadinejad's at Columbia take place all the time--public figures give non-academic lectures about the areas they work in, and are generally welcomed, listened to, and criticized. This is more or less what happened.

Weinberger contends that the address should not have gone ahead because Ahmadinejad in effect lacks methodology. He is a source of opinion, not scientific fact, and thus has no place in a university. Trouble is, if we use this formula to cast his remarks out of the academy, we also silence other public figures we might more readily agree with. We throw out the baby of serious professional policy analysis, valuable experience in the political sphere, and any number of other forms of nonscientific knowledge with the bathwater of Ahmadinejad's misogynistic, homophobic, violent, dishonest, and otherwise offensive remarks.

I'll bet Weinberger tends to favor these sorts of events when they involve more respectable public figures. However if he does, he ends up judging the Iranian president's remarks based on his own opinion of them. This is, I want to emphasize, a good thing. Cogent, well thought out, well defended opinions are essential to academic progress, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But this being the case, we need to let these sorts of events go forward. We don't need to like what we hear or even accept its underlying logic. Our ability and willingness to assess it critically, and the insight we gain either from accepting or rejecting it, justify the event.

Blackwater

2007-09-25T12:51:00.001-07:00

I'm sure this has been pointed out, but does anyone else think it's funny that the folks behind Blackwater (the violent, hapless, irresponsible, etc, etc mercenaries working in Iraq these days) neglected to check their name's other uses before putting it on the letterhead? Just sayin'....

Academic Freedom

2007-09-24T09:10:00.002-07:00

It's been kind of a screwy week stateside for academic freedom. First, the University of California at Irvine hired, then fired, then rehired a dean for its new law school (all before the doors opened on the thing). The party in question seems to be guilty of publicly holding a number of rather liberal opinions, and may have been subject to a campaign from the right.

But all's well that ends well, right? Well meantime, over at UC Davis, ex-Harvard President Lawrence Summers had his invitation to speak on campus rescinded. Summers is now best remembered for getting himself run out of Cambridge, Mass after some comments he made a few years ago about racial and gender differences among natural scientists, and their correlation with rates of publication, success at achieving tenure, etc.

Summers' comments may well have been inappropriate or downright offensive (I'm not directly familiar with the details myself). They were certainly outside his area of expertise (he's an economist). In any event, no one much seems to agree with him. But doesn't the very straightforwardness of his inaccuracy make lynching him a bit wrong? Aren't there better ways to address this--like letting him speak and questioning him then and there?

So that's an even split on the question of academic freedom (both stories are recounted here). However, a third story out of New York throws things the other way.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has been invited to speak at Columbia while he's in town for the opening of the UN General Assembly. The invitation has been the subject of ongoing controversy, but Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger has to date stood by the decision. For his comments on this in a press release, see the link above and scroll down. They're class itself.

So two out of three aint bad, I reckon.

Meantime, the Iranian president has been barred from visiting Ground Zero while in NYC. This has been roundly applauded by almost all of the presidential candidates. Marginal Democrat Mike Gravel seems to be the only exception. His comments are here. His reasoning isn't quite mine, but this is an intelligent, principled stand. His party should be so lucky as to have more of this.

Update:

Looks like Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia went ahead as planned. Protesters were out in force, but seem to have been intelligent enough. They even broke their speeches for an hour and half so they could listen to an audio feed of his address. Have a look at the video on the link above. The students interviewed, while they generally oppose what the Iranian president stands for, are thoughtful, intelligent, clear, and well informed in their criticism. Maybe an Ivy League education aint so bad after all. President Bollinger was a bit, well, rude in his introductory remarks, but the fact of the event ought to outweigh the less than ideal tone it took on.

On This Site

2007-09-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

How y'all like the new look? I figured it was time to do away with the funny (not to mention unreadable) layout. Yes, I know the new banner loads a bit slow at the moment, and I'll probably play with the colors a bit, but I figured it was time to fix things in short order.

Stay tuned for details...

Rejoice!

2007-09-23T06:27:00.001-07:00

TimesSelect is dead! All hail the New York Times!

Well, it's not quite a coronation, but it's pretty cool. The NY Times has killed its online subscription service, meaning that its entire op-ed section, including columnists and several never-before-read-for-free blogs are not available to anyone who wants them.

At the moment, this includes a number of treats. We might start with Frank Rich's excellent argument that Larry Craig should be pardoned, exonerated, acquitted, or anything else that would make him not entirely guilty in the eyes of the law. The rest of the gang--Friedman, Krugman, Kristof, etc--are all free on demand. As is the entire archive (!).

Also kind of fun is the Times' meta-blog (for lack of a better term) The Opinionator. This is a clever little clearing house for current information on the topic of the day. For an interesting example, see Friday's post about Belgian national unity--or rather, the lack thereof.

Lastly, venerable academic loudmouth Stanley Fish has had his TimesSelect blog offered up for free. This is a neat trick indeed--it probably makes him, overnight, the most visible practicing academic in the country. I can't wait to waste hours reading this stuff.

Polish Immigration

2007-09-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

It's a fair indication of having arrived, more or less, as an integrated European state when people are willing to do this to cross your borders. A very sad little story. (It also indicates just how far Vladimir Putin's reconstruction of Chechnya has to go before it'll create the kind of place people will want to remain.)

Nukes

2007-09-07T09:23:00.001-07:00

Yes, I know, no entries for I don't know how long. But I thought it'd be fun to share this thought.

The US, victor in the cold war, recently flew a nuclear armed B-52 cross country by accident. This not long after Russia, who lost the cold war, resumed long range nuclear bomber flights. So is it worse to do this sort of thing on purpose or by accident? And why are the winners the ones making the mistake?

While we're at it, why is Russian President Putin putting bombers back in the air with nothing for them to do but grandstand, when everyone concerned (European governments, Washington, etc) are already more frightened than they're prepared to admit about Russian revanchism? And aren't their truckloads of international law intended to prevent this sort of thing?

Lastly, why the high hell are we so worked up about the nuclear weapons program Iran might have, when the two most powerful states in recent history (or maybe all of it) are unwilling or unable to keep their own nuclear stockpiles under lock and key?

I saw retired Canadian general Romeo Dallaire speak a while back, and he cited nuclear weapons as the big under-discussed issue in international security. And he wasn't just talking about Iran. He meant everyone that has them or might down the line. Given a half century or more to get used to having them the best in the business, often with decent intentions, seem to still have trouble handling them safely. Maybe the end of the cold war cost us something. Maybe more than a little fear of these things is healthy.

Feeding Africa...

2007-08-16T06:20:00.001-07:00

... is more complicated than one might have thought. See this NY Times article about CARE, which has recently decided to abandon tens of millions in aid from the US government because of the attached strings--namely, that the funds be used to buy American rather than African produced grain, potentially undercutting African economies. Looks to be lots of disagreement about this. Still, it rather makes sense, doesn't it? If you'd like to help a country grow economically, hence allowing it to stand on its own, wouldn't it help to spend money there?

Yes, I know I haven't posted in almost a month. Going to work on that. Look for a (slight) increase in the near future.

The End Is Nigh

2007-07-19T19:52:00.000-07:00

Think big for a moment. How big? Iraq war big? Bigger. International security big? Bigger still. Civilization big? Recorded history big? Yep, more like that—or at least pretty close.

See this NY Times piece for details. Apparently we’re running out of time, at least as far as this planet is concerned. Someone’s done some base-level probability/actuarial/whatever type calculations on how long we can reside on this rock, and things aren’t looking so good.

Here’s the gist. If we happen to live in a typical, unremarkable moment in history, and if our particular civilizational experiment is typical, then time’s running out on a new colonial project to escape the damage done to our current living quarters. Traditionally, human society has survived at least in part by expanding, and we seem to have stopped doing that. The longer we wait to colonize another planet (that being the next available place to expand to), the less likely it is, judging from experience, that we’ll bother doing so.

Thus: we’ve got a little under a half century to start expanding to another world, or we’re unlikely to bother. If we don’t, something or other (climate change, killer asteroid, take your pick) is likely to off us in the long run.

So how does this work? The governing assumption at work here is pretty simple: most likely we live at a typical moment in history. If so, the statistical probabilities at play in past comparable scenarios (past expansions of civilization, and so on) should be applicable now.

So the question to ask is this—just how typical is the present moment? Perhaps it’s arrogant to assume we’re different. Perhaps we’re just like all the others—eventually doomed to suffer for our own limitations.

Or, conversely, is it arrogant to assume we’re typical? The mistake might be to resign ourselves to a typical fate: our current situation is politically, technologically, and in many other ways unique in human history. How can the outcome fail to differ—and how can we not want to determine it?

The lesson is as old as the Chinese curse: we live in interesting times. We ought to seize them.

Poland, EU

2007-07-05T09:35:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the long silence, folks. I've been on the road. I'm in Kraków just now, and thought I'd share this rather instructive BBC blog entry. It speaks volumes about the current state of the EU and the relatively unique new place Poland has carved (hacked) out for itself in European politics.

Just to warn, posts will remain sporadic for a while yet. I hope neither of my regular readers will mind.

Baron Guy de Rothschild, 1909-2007

2007-06-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the obits theme, a long-time head of the French Rothschild bank died the other day.

I'm not sure this is the end of an era exactly--perhaps it's long over, and perhaps it lives on--but there's something interesting at work here nonetheless. The Rothschilds in France were once conversant with heads of industry. Baron Guy, as he was apparently known, once prominently employed George Pompidou, who later succeeded de Gaulle to the French presidency. North of the English Channel, the British branch of the family bankrolled the expansion of the British Empire for decades.

The Rothschilds were and perhaps are, thus, forefathers of the economic and financial globalisation of our own time. Love them or hate them (Baron Guy seems to have been rather enjoyable company), one should take note.

Atheists, etc

2007-06-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Nation has a nice little article today on the recent crop of books militantly promoting atheism. The books themselves—Christopher Hitchins God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins The God Delusion are both quite visible at the moment—are a bit virulent for my taste. Still the general argument is appealing to me—the suggestion being that religion plays too large a role in our public life, and that those who are not religious tend to be, if nothing else, a bit looked down on for their beliefs.

I should note that I haven’t read any of these books, but I wonder if the authors are perhaps not the best to be making this argument. Dawkins is a biologist and popular science writer, with no particular background in philosophy or politics. Hitchins, while certainly political, has become something of an apostate to both the left and the right. He is first and foremost a rather clever but angry blowhard (at times his writing can resemble a form of antisocial behavior).

What is called for I suspect (and as the article implies) is an argument for a more thoughtful, measured atheism, which respects the religiosity it rejects, and encourages the participation of all in a secular society separate from religion. Such an argument would not, I suppose, be terribly novel—the position is nothing more or less than a presupposition of western liberal democracy. That said, hemmed in as we are at the moment by radical Islam, Christian fundamentalism, and assorted religious nationalisms (Jewish, Hindu and others), we seem to need it just now.

Sadly, one writer who might have undertaken this died the other day. Richard Rorty, probably the most important living philosopher working in the English Language, and perhaps also the most controversial, died Friday, aged 75. Rorty, a committed atheist, liberal, and pragmatist, was the sort we could use more of just now. He will be missed.

Update: The Independent obit for Rorty is excellent, and probably more informative than the NY Times/Herald-Tribune one linked above.

Perle in the Guardian

2007-05-29T05:01:00.000-07:00

Richard Perle, occasionally known as the Prince of Darkness, often appears to be the ultimate neo-con: supporter of the war in Iraq, plotter against Iran, and proponent of poor foreign policy all round. However, he differs from his peers though in one respect: his tendency to talk to fairly liberal media outlets. Witness his recent appearance on Charlie Rose.

He's also taken to the interesting, and certainly rather ambitious, practice of blaming the uniformed military for the situation in Iraq. This is on full display in a Guardian interview with him, appearing today. I probably don't need to mention that he comes off rather badly. It's a great read--far more enjoyable than these things should be.

Kaplan again...

2007-05-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

Robert Kaplan, Atlantic correspondent, occasional travel writer, and neocon gadfly, has a new and embarrassingly thin assessment of the situation in Iraq. Embarrassing because it reduces the future of Iraq and the whole of American foreign policy to a mere two options. It shows Kaplan to be made of lighter stuff than I'd realised.

The two options, modes of assessment really, are Vietnam and Munich. The first is a now-classic argument for disengagement and the latter an equally classic argument for military intervention. It’s not hard to see how these map onto Iraq. What’s surprising, and this is an assumption endemic in most corners of American foreign policy thinking, is the idea that there are really only two options in important international military intervention or nothing at all.

There is, of course, any number of multilateral, diplomatic, and other methods available in the diplomatic toolbox. European states and others have been using them for centuries. But the Washington intelligentsia continues to view its actions in the broader world on a sliding scale between doing nothing and full scale war. The habit brings to mind a stock negative comment from kindergarten report cards: “Does not play well with others.” Washington has begun to look like an antisocial child: it acts as if it can only interact with its peers through violence.

For what it’s worth, Munich was probably never a useful analogy in Iraq. Saddam was never, by any measure, Hitler. At the outset of the war, Vietnam did indeed seem like a useful analogy for what might happen. Additionally, the wars in the Former Yugoslavia looked like relevant cases as well—a large multiethnic state breaking down violently into its component parts. The role of the Americans is inverted here—in Iraq they incited the war rather than stopping it—but the situation on the ground remains much the same.

Looking forward now, however, things appear altogether worse: a more useful analogy in Iraq and the surrounding countries is not so much the Second World War as the First (see my previous argument to this effect). Another useful analogy going forward might be the recent war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, wherein eight surrounding states were drawn into an ongoing civil war, leading to more deaths than in any conflict since WWII. If Iraq’s are drawn into a protracted war, no one anywhere will be able to control the outcome.

The risk of another Munich these days is probably none too great; certainly not compared to the risks of other historical events recurring: the Spanish Flu returning as Avian Flu, or Bosnia recurring in Darfur (arguably, it already has). For that matter, historical examples only get us so far. One need only think of climate change, which is unprecedented in recorded history.

These are interesting times yet—anyone wanting to understand them might do well to arm themselves with more than two historical examples.

Propaganda Blowback

2007-04-30T06:04:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has an interesting piece at the moment on the odd bind Republicans are in just now. Seems that part of the reason Republicans have remained largely loyal to failed policies in Iraq is that their constituents demand it.

The problem works like this. Elected Republicans, beholden to the voters who put them in office, have been forced to do what the conservative part of the electorate demands. Seems that Republican voters persist in believing either that the war was necessary or that it has been in some way successful. In any event, they remain convinced that any talk of withdrawal, disengagement, etc, is entirely out of the question. So their elected representatives, even if they're clever enough to disagree, are unable to publicly descent.

Call the phenomenon 'propaganda blowback'. Years after the Bush administration largely finished with lying to the American population about Iraq--at least about WMD, about the necessity for war., and so on--the Republican base acts as if it still believes things most of us now understand to be demonstrably false, if we ever believed them: that there was good reason to go to war, that a stable postwar situation was possible, that the current situation can be salvaged. Four years after Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz style propaganda ceased to serve a political purpose, it has become a genuine barrier to progress.

Core Republican voters seem to be as deluded on this as Bush himself.

NY Times on Somalia

2007-04-25T01:29:00.000-07:00

The New York Times, in its coverage of Somalia today, has an interesting example of a very good newspaper getting things slightly but importantly wrong. The story concerns an underclass of thugs, mercenaries, and other predatory sorts who have a common interest in seeing the country go ungoverned. The Times holds them responsible for undermining the transitional national government, implying that an endemic underground economy is one of the main barriers to peace in the country.

There’s probably some truth to this, but the story fatally lacks context. The internationally sponsored transitional government has largely become a front for an exceptionally violent occupation of the city by Ethiopian troops. Further, the rise of the government in the area came at the expense of a very real source of home-grown stability. A coalition of Islamic militias and judicial bodies had, at the time Ethiopian troops entered the country, largely stabilised the centre of the country around Mogadishu. Thus, the role of the transitional government is ambiguous, if not down right destructive.

The Times piece mentions all this in passing, but seems to miss the point—absent foreign intervention, there might well be a stable polity in Somalia today. In so doing, the Times is implicitly toeing the line set out by the Bush administration on the subject. It's a bit depressing to see this occurring in American print journalism, just as it's recovering from the fog of WMD stories and embedded reporting.

The lowlifes the story covers probably really are a barrier to stability in the country, but they’re hardly the biggest problem. The real problem is that the international community, chiefly the US, was unable to accept Islamic governance in the Horn of Africa region, even in an almost entirely Muslim country. After a decade and a half of chaos, one would have thought than any government would have been good enough.

Boris Yeltsin, 1931-2007

2007-04-24T01:35:00.000-07:00

About a decade and a half ago, as the Cold War appeared to be winding down, a group of communist hardliners in Moscow attempted to to overthrow their reformist government. The following morning Boris Yeltsin, then president of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, stood on top of a tank in central Moscow and, shouting through a megaphone, pounded nails into the coffin of Soviet Communism. The beast died obediently enough shortly thereafter, and by the time Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as head of the USSR a few months later it no longer existed.

As word of Yeltsin's death flooded out yesterday, it was interesting to see what he was first remembered for--certainly that speech, but just as much the very public alcoholism of his political dotage, the economic failure that followed disastrously mismanaged market liberalisation, and the horrors of the war he oversaw in Chechnya.

Despite all this, I for one hope that history will recall him first as someone who, on the occasion of the most important event of his political life, chose to push things as hard as he could in the right direction. Boris Yeltsin was a drunk, an erratic and often irresponsible leader, and an architect of economic disaster. He was also, when history most needed it, exactly the right man in the right place at the right time. Things might have been much worse without him.

Election Day

2007-04-23T04:05:00.000-07:00

Three elections of note this weekend: one unfolding disaster, one ominous sign of ‘rupture’ to come, and one odd but fascinating educational exercise.

It’s impossible to calculate, of course, just how bad the unfolding electoral disaster in Nigeria will get, but things pretty clearly aren’t going well. The event seems to have been troubled from the beginning, with the ruling party almost openly rigging regional elections in some part of the country, and the presidential election being weighted with such suspicion that it’s hard to imagine any result being viewed as legitimate.

It’s beginning to look decidedly worse than the relatively successful elections a little while back in DR Congo, where post-conflict elections occurred under massive international supervision. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, is a major oil exporter, is already fractiously divided along ethnic and religious lines, and is already subject to regional insurgencies. This is not a situation than anyone can afford to see go badly.

And then there’s France. This was a three way race going in, now reduced by electoral procedure to two candidates. The forthcoming runoff election will cast a socialist against a conservative, and the latter looks set to win. An centrist candidate, Francois Bayrou, has been eliminated (along with a field of extremists and also-rans), and the remaining contest looks simple enough—conservative Nicolas Sarkozy will handily defeat socialist Segolene Royal.

This is something Bayrou might have prevented had he made it to the next round, but then it’s not at all clear that Royal or Bayrou had any clear idea of how they would have led the country. The choice seems to have been between Sarkozy’s fairly radical reform programme, complete with ominous ethnic-cultural overtones surrounding immigration policy, or the other two, with few specific ideas at all. All agree that France needs some significant changes. It is not at all clear that Sarkozy’s vision is required.

The third election, about which much less has been reported, is occurring in the tiny Himalayan monarchy of Bhutan. This isn’t really an election at all—it’s a dry run. A year ahead of the first elections in the country’s history, mock elections are being held, complete with high school students standing in as candidates, and election monitors from neighbouring India. That democracy is on offer here at all is remarkable in itself (if only Nepal were lucky enough to have a monarch so enlightened). That it’s being tested so judiciously is impressive indeed.

The results may not matter, and the population will only learn so much, insofar as they won’t have to live with the consequences of their votes. Still, it’s significantly more heartening to watch than the failure of a much larger new democracy, or the ominous stagnation of one of the world’s oldest. Bhutan’s voters and administrators may not be the only ones in need of a little education.

Lights Are Going Out All Over the Middle East…

2007-04-20T01:50:00.000-07:00

…And, as the old saying goes, we may well not see them again in our lifetimes. The region is in what might politely be called an interesting situation just now, for at least four reasons above and beyond the war in Iraq. They'll likely determine the history of the region for decades to come.

First, Israel is clouded (very nearly seized) by political scandal, and they have the most unpopular Prime Minister in their history. The effective passing of Ariel Sharon has left the state largely rudderless. In the absence of the state’s traditional strong man, the extant leadership is increasingly desperate. Prime Minister Olmert has proposed negotiations in places and with people Sharon never would have. That he isn’t likely sincere is rather beside the point: he’s talking like a desperate man.

Line this up with the death of Yassir Arafat a few years ago--when deaths at the top are the best news out of a region, things aren’t good. This is the second thing—a power vacuum in the Occupied Territories. A government of national unity involving both Fattah and Hamas is all well and good, but it still does not fill the rather cavernous shoes left by Arafat. He may have been ineffectual, corrupt, obstinate and politically obtuse—he was all of these and more—but no one else can hold sway over the Palestinian people as he did. Never in their post-1948 history (at least to my knowledge) has there been a lack of legitimate political authority in both the Israeli and Palestinian camps.

Meantime, to the east, the major Arab states are beginning, slowly to line up behind a crisis. True, Syria is formally allied with Iran, and true the region is still shot through with any number of divisions, but something looks to be emerging: The Arab states (most Arabs are Sunni, and most but not all Arab states have a Sunni majority) are beginning to fear a common perceived enemy: Iran.

And this is the fourth thing—the rise of Iran. Iran is already the region’s most populous country except for Turkey, and looks well positioned to become the most powerful. There’s also an important cultural distinction at work here. Iranians speak a different language than Arabs and, and most have a different religion. A long history of mistrust , and an increasingly bellicose government in Tehran, may serve to do what nothing since the fall of the Ottoman Empire has—unite the Arab people, at least in large part, behind a common cause. Iranians on the street probably don't think of their country as having ambitions for regional power, and increasingly they don’t support their government, but that may prove cold comfort to the powerful in Riyadh and Amman.

Some of these things might turn out OK. The instability in Israel-Palestine may well leave an opening for peace in the Occupied Territories, especially if the Palestinians’ Arab patrons are too busy with other things to object. Loose Arab unity, or at least amity, hardly sounds like a bad thing either. But throw in trouble with Iran and you’ve got a real problem.

None of this would have a place to happen had one of the larger Arab states, with a mixed Sunni-Shiah population, not recently dissolved into civil war. This leaves Iraq in the unenviable position of hosting a wider regional war, rather as the Democratic Republic of Congo recently did in the Great Lakes region of Africa. As Sunni Arab governments line up behind Iraqi Sunnis, and Iran supports Iraq’s Shiah population, it’s hard to imagine how things could improve from here. Things only get worse if the Shiite minorities (and the occasional majority) in other Arab countries are inflamed in the process.

It all looks worryingly like Europe did a century ago, when an old, complicated network of allegiances finally hit a snag and drove the continent into the First World War. The irony is that the current geopolitical arrangement in the Middle East was largely created by European statesmen at the end of WWI. The result may be that the Sykes-Picot borders that currently carve up the Arabian Peninsula and the surrounding area may finally break down over the coming years or decades. If it happens, it won’t be a pretty sight.

US Primaries

2007-04-11T08:53:00.000-07:00

The new conventional wisdom on the American presidential election, which still a little over a year and a half away (only 500-odd polling days til Election Day, kids), is that the nominations will be neatly locked up early, owing to a clot of early primaries next year. I’d like to take a moment to debunk this—I just don’t buy it. My reasoning isn’t that the early primaries are themselves inclined to shake things up—indeed, they’ll have the effect they always have, to some degree. The problem is that neither party has anything remotely like a front runner.

On the Democratic side, the more disorderly of the two parties will do what it does best—it’ll divide internally while it’s ahead. Both Obama and Clinton are quite competent candidates, and will probably keep each other in check for some time. Edwards, while a little behind, will logjam the other two, and tie up potential supporters. None of them appear, to me at least, equipped to do anything to put them ahead.

The Republicans, usually a vision of good order, will be divided by a pair of deficiencies. First, they have to deal with the existing mess left by President Bush. Second, none of them has been, or likely will be, embraced by the religious right. They suffer from a problem of self definition—a move to either the left or the right would do them significant harm with a large part of the electorate: either their conservative base or the increasingly anti-war mainstream.

The two situations have different causes, and could be changed in different ways. A new Republican candidate might slide easily ahead of the field. No new Democrat is likely to effectively enter the race (barring Al Gore declaring), but fewer candidates would do the job. If Edwards (or either of the others) quit and endorsed another, that would easily seal the race.

The problem is that none of these is likely to happen. The religious right has, on most accounts, searched extensively for ‘their’ candidate, and found no one. The three Democratic frontrunners are all at least conceivably winners, so none will drop out any time soon. Further, all three can fairly legitimately expect to win the general election, making the stakes all that much higher.

There's a counter argument, to be sure. The first couple of primaries will set out a frontrunner in each party, as they always do, and that will seal the issue. The problem with this is that the rapid fire primaries may well not produce a clear winner. If the winner of one doesn't have time to lock up the others—I'd bet this is likely—then the race will be left open after far more ballots than usual have been cast.

All of which means that the most unpredictable US Presidential election in recent memory remains just that, and might well still be a year from now. If I had to guess (who doesn't want to?), I’d bet on Obama to beat McCain by a comfortable margin. But anyone would be a fool to put money on it.

Getting Away with Genocide

2007-04-09T01:01:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a slightly alarming piece today about the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) February verdict in Bosnia's genocide suit again Serbia. The suit had claimed that Serbia (then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) committed genocide in Bosnia through the Bosnian Serb army during the war there (1992-95). The court found in Serbia's favour. I was not alone in being unimpressed by this.

Apparently, a large volume of Serbian military records were excluded from the trial, despite already being in the Hague. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) had them in their possession, but the version passed on to the ICJ had large portions blacked out, in the 'security' interests of Serbia. Apparently they would have made a pretty clear case for Bosnia. The ICJ made little or no attempt to procure them.

This is worrying not only because it prevents the historical exposure of one of the worst crimes of the post-Cold War era, but because of what it says about the dispensation of justice in the Hague. The Dutch seat of government is now by a wide margin the global centre for the practice of international law. Not only were the the documents themselves kept sealed, the discussion surrounding them has come to light only through a patchwork of leaked facts and anonymous sources.

The process of justice, in this instance, is a murky as the submerged facts of the case. This does not bode well for those of us who would like international criminal law taken a bit more seriously, no for the prospect of justice itself.

Fukuyama right?

2007-04-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

A decade an a half late, after years of controversy, and a disastrous stint as a neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama seems to be coming round to an interesting view: if the the end of history looks like anything, it's probably not like the US. It's probably more like the EU.

This is a dicey position, to be sure: even the EU isn't sure it'll be the EU forever. Even if it is, it's an organisation in flux. Shouldn't the end of history be some sort of fixed state?

Still, he makes a pretty good point. A world composed of nation states is a messy thing, and semi-flexible networks of states probably have better odds of survival in the long run. The EU still has it's much vaunted record of preventing war in Europe for half a century, which would have been unthinkable a few hundred years ago. One can only wish that the Arab League or African Union had this sort of record.

It's also interesting to see Fukuyama, while still a rather bellicose theorist, leaning back toward both liberalism and pragmatism. He's hardly a good liberal democrat just yet, but a step back from purist faith in sovereignty and market economics represents a rather positive step. If only some of the other (probably very bright) neocon intellectuals saw things in the same light.

Rumsfeld Torture Suit Dismissed

2007-03-28T00:37:00.000-07:00

Fresh from the BBC News:

A US court has dismissed a lawsuit against former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld over claims prisoners were tortured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The court accepted that the nine men who sued had been tortured - and detailed the torture in its ruling.

But Judge Thomas Hogan ruled the five Iraqis and four Afghans did not have US constitutional rights, and also that Mr Rumsfeld was immune from such suits.

Not sure I have anything to add to this. Kinda speaks for itself, don't you think?

7 Things You Might Not Know Bush Has Done Wrong:

2007-03-27T02:59:00.000-07:00

Acquiesced in genocide in Darfur, in order to protect valued Sudanese government witnesses in the war on terror. Don’t believe me? Read.
Significantly increased aid to Musharraf’s Pakistan over a period of years, with few strings attached—even after the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation network was uncovered. Then, when finally trying to rein it in, he blamed the Democrats for asking too many questions about where the money would go.
Provided military support to both side of a potential nuclear conflict. The Bush’s America didn’t just provide military aid to Pakistan. It has also provided aid, and sold weapons, to India. The two states have been to war three times since decolonisation, and are now nuclear armed. If this isn’t playing with fire, I don’t know what is (source).
Pardoned a terrorist—or pretty close to it. Bush pardoned a 25 year old man for his role in a bombing that occurred in the context of a 1990 West Virginia mineworkers’ strike. While the incident was relatively small, the decision stands in sharp contrast to Bush’s usual position on political violence. It is all the more remarkable, given his willingness to hold suspected, would-be terrorists without trial, and his stubborn unwillingness to commute the sentences of the 100-plus people executed while he was governor of Texas.
Bought oil from a government that is openly and personally hostile to him. Everyone knows Hugo Chavez doesn't care for Bush much, but it's easy to overlook that Venezuela supplies more than 10%, the third largest share, of imported oil to the US. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is in the habit of calling Bush the devil publicly. I don’t care for either of them much, but it hardly seems good diplomatic practice to let this go on.
Bought almost as much oil from a region affected by an open insurgency. And no, it isn’t Iraq. Close to 10% of US oil imports are from Nigeria, primarily the Niger Delta region, which is inhabited by about 30 million exceptional poor people. The region has been environmentally brutalised by oil extraction, and the locals aren’t even seeing the money (source).
Appointed a war profiteer Energy Secretary. Again, this isn’t in Iraq. Sam Bodman used to run Cabot Corporation, which bought the high-tech mineral coltan (aka tantalite) from sources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the recent war there. Somewhere around 4 million people died in the war, which was largely financed through the minerals trade. (Bodman is also a world class polluter.)

Conservative Coalition Building

2007-03-27T02:21:00.001-07:00

Want to know how the current Conservative government in Canada will fair? Start by looking south.

The following passage is from a New Yorker article published some time ago (2005) on Grover Noquist, the American conservative strategist. It’s jarring enough to be worth quoting at length.

On the way back to Washington, he talked about how to build a broad coalition. "If you want the votes of people who are good on guns, good on taxes, and good on faith issues, that is a very small intersection of voters," he said. "But if you say, Give me the votes of anybody who agrees with you on any of these issues, that's a much bigger section of the population." To illustrate what he meant, Norquist drew three intersecting circles on a piece of paper. In the first one he wrote "guns," in the second he wrote "taxes," in the third he wrote "faith." There was a small area where the three circles intersected. "With that group, you can take over the country, if you start with the airports and the radio stations," he said. "But with all of the three circles that's sixty per cent of the population, and you can win politically. And if you add more things, like property rights and home-schooling, you can do even better."

Threats of armed insurrection aside, Norquist knows what he’s talking about. Coalition building has been the name of the game in the American conservative movement for decades now, and he’s about as important a coalition builder as you will find. A loose affiliation of gun owners, big business types, the very religious, and a smattering of libertarians have managed to govern the US for most of the last few decades mostly by burying their differences.

The reason this is especially important now is that the same strategy is being employed in Canada. A few years ago, a coalition of soft Quebec nationalists, Alberta conservatives, rich residents of the 905 belt and a few cantankerous Maritimers would have seemed bizarre. Now it governs the country.

The good news is that coalitions break down. This usually happens when they’re under stress. They stick together best when things are good—when they’re bad, as in the US right now, they tend to splinter. The term ‘coalition of the willing’ turns out to be have been an ironic choice in Iraq, as the Republican Party is itself one—at least insofar as it’s composed of people that shouldn’t necessarily agree with one another.

Economically marginal Christian conservatives in the Midwest shouldn’t support tax breaks for the wealthy. The wealthy shouldn’t want religious morals interfering in business. One can set this aside to win, but not to lose.

This is true of Canada as well. Quebeckers and Albertans have a rich history of not caring for one another much. Maritimes have an equally rich history of complaint about virtually the rest of the country. How long they can at hold together probably depends on how long they can keep Toronto Liberals from controlling parliament. Once they start to lose, they may well fall very much to pieces.

Quebec Elections

2007-03-27T00:43:00.000-07:00

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has just proven so politically adept that he's done the constitutionally impossible-- he's just won the provincial election in Quebec.

Jean Charest's Liberals were left in government, but hobbled by minority status. The Parti Quebecois has been virtually broken, and will soon eat its leader alive. The ADQ, under Mario Dumont, however ascendant it may be, can't form a government. The federal Conservative Party is the only real winner here--they get a provincial government they can work with, no risk of a referendum, and a plausible voter base for a federal election.

For those of us who call ourselves federalists (eg, more or less all of English Canada), this is a pretty good result--the sovereigntist movement has been all but crippled. For those of us who oppose the national conservatives, however, it's a worrying trend indeed.

Dumont, meantime, who the press seems to think is the man of the hour, looks a little scarier every day. His emphasis on opposing 'reasonable accommodation' is a bit scary. The practice of providing for the cultural and religious needs of minorities--eg, making pork-free baked beans available at sugar shacks--probably wouldn't raise any eyes in the rest of Canada.

Perhaps Quebec really is the most European part of North America. Language and culture aside, it appears to suffer the same sort of political intolerance towards immigrants that many Western European countries do. As such, Dumont resembles not so much other Canadian conservatives, as the populist, anti-immigrant politicians of the European far right--France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, for example.

If this is so, even Harper may find him a bit much in the long run. As he engineers a national conservative coalition, he may want to watch his step.

Water Baiting

2007-03-26T12:46:00.001-07:00

Wars, as it turns out, have cultures of a sort--practices, social patterns, ways to pass the time, even in the absence of social cohesion. Here's a sliver of daily Iraqi urban life under occupation and civil war.

Pretty ugly, I reckon. Maybe, at least, not how you'd want your kids treated by the prevailing authorities.

9 Years on in Northern Ireland

2007-03-26T12:32:00.001-07:00

"It’s the triumph of normal politics." So said a British governmental spokesman today, referring to what actually finally be a permanent settlement in Northern Ireland. And it's been almost a decade coming, after the 1998 Good Friday agreements.

There's a lesson in this, very much the same lesson we should learn from Bosnia, which has finally turned a corner over the last few years. The permanent resolution of ethic of sectarian conflict takes time. The secret, more than anything else, is patience. Wait long enough and the wounds begin to close.

Kirkuk

2007-03-22T07:59:00.000-07:00

In early- 1990s Bosnia, shortly before the war but after the onset of conflict in Croatia, they told a joke that went like this:

Q: Why has the fighting not reached Bosnia yet?

A: Because Bosnia has advanced directly to the final round.

The joke plays on the multi-ethnic nature of the Bosnian state, as an obvious source of conflict--why wouldn't there be a war there, if there was elsewhere in the region? People have been asking the same question of Kirkuk, a midsized city in Northern Iraq, for some time. Kirkuk, which has been compared to Sarajevo, has a mixed Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen population. No one seems to know who's in the majority, but everyone is happy to tell you they are. To date, there has been relatively little violence, despite high tensions.

Looks like that's changing. Meantime, a referendum on the city's status within federal Iraq looks likely to be delayed. It has 0nce been thought to be a potential cause of ethnic conflict. Instead, conflict looks likely to overtake events and prevent the referendum from taking place.

Bad to worse, in short.

Roundup

2007-03-21T03:32:00.000-07:00

Bits and bobs today... First, happy Norouz (Iranian New Year) everyone. A maybe conflict in Iran over nuclear arms is still slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Neither American nor Iranian leaders seem all that keen to talk their way out of it. In fact, on the American end, Dennis Kucinich is talking about impeachment over this. Why this specifically, on top of everything else, is anyone's guess.

Meantime, no less august an organ of the American conservative movement than National Review has, on its blog The Corner, taken to abusing President Bush--not for his policies, but for allowing himself to be seen as a lame duck. Apparently, illegally invading a sovereign state, and demolishing America's international standing are lesser order crimes than failing to look tough about it.

Lastly, the only thing I will ever write in this space about the trial of Lord Conrad Black. His wife Barbara Amiel, once a columnist for some rag or other, publicly called a group of reporters vermin the other day. Then she called a female TV producer a slut. She managed to do it on a slow news day, too. We're not quite sure how this was supposed to aid her husbands cause. Feel free to comment with possible explanations.

D'Souza

2007-03-20T04:48:00.000-07:00

The left wing paranoia documentary The Power of Nightmares advances the view that American neoconservativism and radical, violent Islamism share a common, or at least parallel, set of objectives. It's entertaining enough viewing, but I'd tended to think of it as a bit paranoid.

Until now, that is. The uber-conservative author and activist Dinesh D'Souza has published a book calling for a global religious conservative movement ('theoconservatism') to include radical Islamic elements as a reaction against individualist liberalism, which he holds responsible for 9/11. We are asked to believe that we should endorse religious conservatism in even extreme forms, as a bulwark against the radical individualism of secular liberalism, with all the moral depravity it apparently causes. It's quite literally breathtaking (as is, I felt pressure on my lungs as I read about it).

Here's Andrew Sullivan's pretty good review of the book over at The New Republic. He argues that D'Souza's position is really a quite logical extension of radical American rightwing politics, generalised across cultural boundaries.

Bush is Finally Right

2007-03-17T10:04:00.000-07:00

Bombs containing chlorine gas have been detonated in Baghdad, killing a number of people. Chlorine gas is, strictly speaking, is a chemical weapon. This is to say that there are finally weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The irony, needless to say, is appalling. Bush has, given several years of mindless violence to work with, managed to create roughly the situation he purported to have set out to destroy.

The Stage Manager

2007-03-16T03:38:00.000-07:00

"Managed democracy" is the new term of art for the assortment of election rigging, censorship, and political gamesmanship that typifies the putatively free elections of many developing countries. Variations on this occur throughout Africa and the Middle East (see 2006's Egyptian elections), but the it's perhaps most endemic in the former Soviet Union. And no one practices it as skilfully, or with as light a touch as Vladimir Putin.

The Economist has a nice gloss of the current electoral situation in Russia, covering some recent regional elections, and the run up to next year's parliamentary and presidential elections. Putin has rather elegantly stage managed the creation of an entirely fictitious two party state, complete with regional elections, and an apparent peace in Chechnya (however much it maybe sustain by state terror).

True to his constitutional role, he'll aparently step down next year on account of term limits, but he hardly has much to worry about. He gets to anoint a successor (or perhaps to rivals for the role, both loyal to him), and then quietly settle into life as head of Gazprom, the Russian state oil and gas conglomerate. Given the income this will afford him, the reduction in international attention to him personally, and a continued hand in policy at the Kremlin, it's hard to see what not for him to like.

Note: little bit of site news, I've cleaned out the (very) stale set of del.icio.us links in the right hand sidebar under the 'interest' expandable menu. New, and fresh, links should follow shortly.

Neocons

2007-03-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

The Financial Times has a nice little comment piece today on the passing of the American neoconservative movement, which seems oddly enough to have missed its own funeral. Reading--an account of a recent American Enterprise Institute gala--it I was struck by how much it resembled the last, decadent days of a failing autocracy. But then, that's roughly what we're talking about, isn't it?

While you're there, actually, they've also got a smart little editorial on hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. On the subject of which, it occurred to me the other day that Robert Mugabe, who is in his mid eighties, has more than doubled his own nations life expectancy. Zimbabwean life expectancy is currently somewhere around 37, the lowest in the world. Inflation, meantime, is 1730%. Really is about time for him to go, isn't it?

Kaplan on Iraq

2007-03-14T03:06:00.000-07:00

"The mistakes made in Iraq since 2003 were so many and so serious that it is reasonable to argue that toppling Saddam Hussein was a wise decision, incompetently handled in its occupation phase." Thus begins Robert J Kaplan's rather carefully parsed reading of the Iraq Study Group's report, in The Atlantic. He's right, I suppose--one can argue the case still, if one wants. Why one would want to though, in the face of the actual consequences (not what might have happened) is beyond me.

Kaplan's argument is a magnificently careful attempt not to apologise for his own endorsement of the war. His politics seem to be elastic enough to bob and weave through a remarkably complex set of positions without actually setting out much of a plan of his own. Maybe borrow this, maybe reject that from the Study Group's report, but don't, at all costs, produce the impression that the central policy--invading a large Middle Eastern country for politically opaque reasons--was anything like a mistake. Blame the unfolding disaster on what happened next, on poor middle management in the Pentagon, dithering generals, anything but the ideologues who set the thing up.

All this policy squirming probably fits pretty well with Kaplan's political profile as a sort of neocon lite. Belonging on a spectrum somewhere between Paul Wolfowitz and Thomas Friedman, he's managed to retain remarkable ideological flexibility. Here, he pulls out all the stops. At times he seems more realist than neocon idealist, as he defends what's left of American self-interest in the Mid East. He even cites Thucydides. He will do almost anything but admit that he was wrong about viability of the most significant American military venture since Vietnam.

Anyone who's read Kaplan's travel books probably finds this sort of thing a bit disappointing. Balkan Ghosts and Eastward to Tartary are entertaining and remarkably well researched. His politics have always been a bit wonky, but he should really know better than this.

Go North, Young Man

2007-03-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

Click here and scroll about two thirds down for a charming, if vague, argument that the Inuit will be the great beneficiaries of global warming. Welcome to the Wild North.

2007-03-09T05:31:00.000-08:00

When I was in Turkmenistan a few years ago, the only internet connection I could find (they wouldn't let me use the putatively public one at the American Embassy) was in a four-star hotel, priced well out of range of most Turkmens. The post-Niyazov government has recently set up public internet cafes--a nice move, except that they've been plagued by any number of technical problems and (more ominously) armed guards. Read all about it here.

Big Stuff

2007-03-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

Let’s think big for a few minutes. What are the main challenges facing American foreign policy in the Middle East? Here’s a quick list: Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine, and ensuring continued access to oil reserves. One might want to add Islamist terrorism to the list, but it’s largely a side-effect of these items.

What do they all have in common? Well, they’re all losing battles, to one degree or another. Iraq is the site of a failed occupation—a losing battle of Washington’s own creation.

Iran is emboldened, trenchantly anti-American (at least at the power-political level), and potentially nuclear armed. There is very little that American can easily do about this—military options are limited to air strikes that would probably accomplish little more than enraging the government and populace.

Things aren’t much better in Israel-Palestine. The line between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is as disputed as ever, and joint American-Israeli policy seems finally to be on the brink of destroying Palestinian political organisation in the Occupied Territories. Insofar as American interest in the conflict consists in preserving Israel, a long term solution is a far away as ever.

Lastly, comes the big one. Washington needs, perhaps above all else, to keep Saudi Arabia and the small Gulf states pumping oil. Even if they don’t always buy it themselves (they get a surprising amount elsewhere), someone always will, and the cumulative contribution to the global market helps keep the price of oil out of the stratosphere. And this is the part no one can dispute: sooner or later, the oil is running out. This is the most important part for a fairly straightforward reason: It’s the one problem the Americans can least easily opt out of.

What then of terrorism? If all these problems went away, so largely would the risk of militant Islamism to the US. While it certainly wouldn’t go away, there would be a reduced appeal to attacking America as a putatively imperial power, and this might help redirect Islamists’ rage toward targets closer to home, such as their own governments. Not a nice prospect exactly, but it might get Washington off the hook.

So what to do? Well, on at least some of these points, it looks likely that American influence will begin to wane in the region—Iran won’t be easily bullied out of its regional power ambitions, Iraq will get worse, and Israeli safety at home probably won’t be permanent for some time, barring a significant shift in Israeli policy itself (so the only solution is relatively independent of American behaviour in the region).

This is probably a good thing. The ability of the US to deal with the big one—energy security—will be largely dependent on its ability to make nice on the other big issues. The question, then, is whether or not Washington will be willing to go quietly. If it allows the region to stand, or fall, on its own two feet, it might have a relatively easy few decades of foreign policy ahead of it. If it kicks up a fight—by bombing Iran, for example—then things could get very nasty yet.

Dirty Bomb, Free to Good Home

2007-03-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

Anyone out there know what a Gammator is? Well, why would you? Apparently, it’s device that was distributed widely by the US government in the ‘70s, as part of a nuclear education programme. All well and good, but the things themselves were highly radioactive. Never mind that they were sent to institutions as publicly open as universities. Some of these were sent to high schools.

Now, flip forward two or three decades. While the US spent the post-Cold War years bankrolling the cleanup of nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union, and has spent the post-9/11 years bribing and strong-arming emerging nuclear powers, there seems to have been some difficulty about cleaning up closer to home. Gammators are equipped with radioactive material suitable for use in dirty bombs. Seems a number of them now can’t be accounted for.

To give a sense of just how ludicrous this is, here’s a newgroup posting, albeit from 1999, wherein an academic offers to give one away free to anyone with the right licensing paperwork willing to haul it away. I’m no expert, but I gather the 200 curies referred to (they’re a measure of radioactivity) are quite a bit to work with.

One can only hope things have improved a little, but it’s hard to say. Take a look at this handy Los Alamos PowerPoint, reviewing a project to collect these things. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry—it’s strictly duck and cover kind of stuff. By the looks of things, about a third of total units distributed had been recovered by the programme when this was issued in May of last year. (To view it through Google’s html conversion of the file, click here.)

The Gammator phenomenon, however comic, belongs to a broader problem. Radioactive materials within the US that fall outside the scope of actual nuclear weapons (eg, those useablein dirty bombs, rather than full-blown nukes) are far too broadly proliferated. One wonders also about a government more willing to endorse torture as an interrogation tactic than to put decent resources behind cleaning up this sort of thing.

Hersh on Bush in Mid East

2007-03-04T01:17:00.000-08:00

Seymour Hersh is as incisive and thoughtful as ever (as well as just plain scary) in this, an article on the new American policy in Iraq and the Middle East. The nut of it seems to be that the Bush admin has elected to actively encourage a broader divide between Sunnis and Shiites, so as to use the majority Sunnis of the region to hem in what they see as the more radicalised Shiites. It's a tricky argument to follow, and full of exceptions, but even with plenty of exceptions and qualifications it a) pretty frightening and b) a strategy with alarmingly little basis in fact.

On the other hand, here's pretty good evidence that regional leaders will resist any serious attempt to divide them. Perhaps--and it's an interesting thought--the region is simply to subtle, too complex to be that easily given over to foreign manipulation. Even by the most powerful country in history.

The Swiss Are Invading

2007-03-03T16:12:00.000-08:00

Well, they invaded Liechtenstein at least. Apparently even the most neutral state in history can't resist kicking the proverbial little guy now and then. In this instance, the Swiss army literally wandered across the border by accident during an exercise. Might make the Vatican want to consider looking for more reliable help.

Gore Again?

2007-03-01T02:06:00.000-08:00

Everything old is new again. By the looks of things, Dick Chaney may be the only dinosaur not running for president in ’08. The list of second run candidates, along with former administration officials and Washington gadflies, running is extensive on both sides: Clinton, Richardson, Biden, McCain, even the once-extinct Newt Gingrich. It’s enough to make Barack Obama look (perhaps rightly) thoroughly inexperienced.

However, the most fun one might have in American politics over the next while might be found in watching Al Gore not declare his candidacy. He looks pretty good these days, following an Oscar win, and is shorn of beard, extra pounds, and self-pity that have weighed down his post-presidential bid years. Actually, it’s hard to believe it’s been the better part of a decade since he lost (or didn’t lose) the 2000 election.

The web is flooded with draft Gore websites (here, here, here, here). James Carville has apparently been telling anyone who will listen for months that the former Vice President will jump in. Gore himself seems to have limited his ‘campaign’ to a few jokes on the Oscars and SNL. It's all far more entertaining than watching Senators Clinton and Obama spar about nothing, or Senator Biden make poor racial jokes by accident.

Given how early everyone else has gotten into the race, Gore would have to get serious pretty quickly. If he’s still joking about it six months from now, no one will be listening. Obama aside, he’d be Clinton’s only serious competition for the nomination. If he wants it. Which at this point is anyone’s guess.

This Year in the Free World

2007-02-08T05:57:00.000-08:00

It’s been an odd new year to date for dictatorial government. Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niazov (a.k.a. Turkmenbashi) suddenly died, leaving a bizarrely glaring power vacuum. Fidel Castro, the world’s longest serving state leader, appears to be on his deathbed. And the government of Zimbabwe, led by Robert Mugabe, wobbles above a state in near total collapse.

Niazov, a post-Soviet strongman, built an endemically corrupt mafia state around a North Korea-sized personality cult. He was perhaps the only post-Soviet head of state to actively lead his new nation-state away from democratic reform. The consequences have included relative international isolation (‘neutrality’, in his terms), a collapsed healthcare system, and agricultural policy so wrongheaded as to risk widespread malnutrition. All this in a state with some of the largest natural gas reserves on the planet. Recent elections were (in the interest, absurdly, of the sitting health minister), but it’s anyone’s guess what will happen in the long term. Neighbouring Afghanistan, Iran, and an unaddressed powder keg in Uzbekistan hardly helps matters.

What happens after Niazov might be an interesting test case for Cuba. Castro at least has an anointed successor in his brother Raul, but the younger Castro has none of his brother’s charisma, and in any event is only a few years younger and is an unreformed alcoholic. After Raul, it’s anyone’s guess.

Robert Mugabe is in his eighties, but if nothing else he’s in the best health of the three. That said, it would be hard to find many people given to celebrating this. His disastrous land reform programme (which involves neither positive reform nor programmatic policy) has turned the breadbasket of Southern Africa into a net importer of food, with a significant risk of famine. Meantime, the opposition is disorganised and repressed. Mugabe will go some day—in a coffin or at the hands of his own increasingly restive party—but no one really knows what will replace him.

The lesson, perhaps, is not that any of these leaders are anything less than appalling, but that its genuinely hard to imagine their respective states without them. No one seems to know what to do about them—or what to do without them. Indeed, pitching out a dictator at the wrong moment can lead to more of the same. Mugabe is himself the revolutionary replacement for the pariah regime of Ian Smith, Castro’s government replaced the Batista dictatorship, and Niazov arose only in the contact of the Soviet collapse.

These are big problems, and there are no easy fixes.

French Politics

2007-02-01T02:36:00.001-08:00

It's amazing the trouble one can get in for telling the truth, especially if one holds elected office.

It's been a gaffe-prone few weeks for French politics. First Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royale accidentally endorced Quebecois independence. Then, in a Thursday New York Times article, outgoing president Jacques Chirac intimated that he saw nothing terribly threatening about a nuclear armed Iran.

The funny thing here is that there's a fair sized kernel of truth in both instances. Quebecois independence probably poles pretty well in France these days, and Royale would not be the first French President to endorse it--one need think only of de Gaulle's "Vive la Quebec libre!" moment.

On the other hand, Chirac's gaffe is an outright statement of fact. A nuclear-armed Iran would be easily enough deterred from using any weapon it had. Further, any state launching a nuclear attack on Israel, the most obvious target, would promptly be removed from the map by a western counterattack. The real issue in this is that a nuclear power in the region would permanently reduce western (mostly American) influence in the region by providing the first regional great power in the Mid East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Chirac's slip will probably cost him a week's worth of bad press before we all forget--maybe less. Royale's comment, coming as it does among an assortment of such errors in the middle of the campagne, might be a bigger problem. But either way, we might all want to thank them for at least holding their noses and being honest about things--however questionable their views may be.

2007-02-01T02:36:00.000-08:00

It's amazing the trouble one can get in for telling the truth, especially if one holds elected office.

It's been a gaffe-prone few weeks for French politics. First Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royale accidentally endorced Quebecois independent. Then, in a Tuesday New York Times article, outgoing president Jacques Chirac intimated that he saw nothing threatening about a nuclear armed Iran.

The funny thing here, is that there's a fair sized kernel of truth in both instances. Quebecois independence probably poles pretty well in France these days, and Royale would not be the first French President to endorse it--one need think only of de Gaulle's "Vive la Quebec libre" moment.

On the other hand, Chirac's gaffe is an outright statement of fact. A nuclear-armed Iran would be easily enough deterred from using it, and any state launching a nuclear attack on Israel, the most obvious target, would promptly be removed from the map by a western counterattack. The real issue in this is that a nuclear power in the region would permanently reduce western (mostly American) influence in the region by providing the first regional great power in the Mid East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Chirac's slip will probably cost him a week's worth of bad press before we all forget--maybe less. Royale's comment, coming as it does among an assortment of such errors in the middle of the campagne, might be a bigger problem. But either way, we might all want to thank them for at least holding their noses and being honest about things--however questionable their views may be.

Tortilla Scare

2007-02-01T01:14:00.000-08:00

All politics may be local, but consequences can turn out to be global in the funniest ways. By some accounts, the rise of environmentally friendly fuels in the US threatens malnutrition in Mexico.

The story goes like this. Mexican torilla prices have recently risen 400%. The government has this largely down to hoarding, speculation, and so on. The problem may be, however, that cheaply grown American corn, once used to make bargain tortillas in Mexico, is now being consumed north of the border for the production of environmentally friendly fuels. Tortillas are, apparently, the chief source of calories for a majority of poor Mexicans, who are in turn most of the population.

I have, of course, no idea how this is best addressed, but it represents a fascinating little problem for lefties like me who tend to assume that feeding the hungry and protecting the planet are a) self-evidently good and b) generally compatible with one another. It's probably healthy now and then to be reminded how blindingly complex these issues can be.

As Seen on TV

2007-01-31T07:15:00.000-08:00

Boy do I wish I could get this on satellite....

Guardian on Iraq

2007-01-16T08:46:00.000-08:00

Another quick bit... I'mn probably the last to know, but the Guardian has quite good reporting coming out of the midst of the sectarian violence in Baghdad, by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. This offers fascinating insights in to the complex relationship between moderate Sunni militants and the American military, including the thorny issue of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Well worth a few minute's read.

Ahmadinejad

2007-01-16T07:31:00.000-08:00

Looks like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in a bit of trouble. A slight majority of MPs have signed a letter condemning his economic policies, and the Supreme Leader (the country's de facto leader) has apparenty made a habit of refusing to meet him. There's even talk of an impeachment. Funny how these things come around.

War and the Social Sciences

2007-01-12T06:09:00.000-08:00

Another interesting New Yorker thing here. It concerns a number of people, particularly an Australian officer and academic named Kilcullen, who have been pressing the Pentagon to make greater use of the social sciences in determining policy, specifically in dealing with counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

The project, speaking broadly, is to localise counterinsurgency efforts, making them more culturally sensitive, more efficient, and more geared to local politics and concerns. The idea is that Islamic militancy (and other problems like it) tends to be rooted and manifested locally, and that any good attempt to address them should be local as well.

The ethical concerns presented are simple enough, and are emblematic of the problems that generally face engaged intellectuals. On the one hand, trying to do change US policy in these sorts of places means signing on to the disastrous US grand strategy of the moment. On the other hand, signing on to big mistakes might make it easier to turn them into smaller ones. As one academic interviewed points out, the alternative is to “sit back and watch these mistakes happen over and over as people get killed, and do nothing.”

In any event, the effort doesn’t seem to be getting very far. Funding and staffing for an interdepartmental office dedicated to the project seems to have been limited, and American actions over the last week or so don’t seem much in tune with it. Air strikes in Somalia, air strikes and running battles in the streets of suburban Baghdad, and a five-digit troupe increase in Iraq do not suggest cultural sensitivity.

That said, ethical issues or no, these folks make a pretty good case, and are probably right in large part. If one is going to do what the Bush Administration insists upon, one might as well do it efficiently, carefully, effectively, right in short. That this opportunity will probably be missed represents one more tragedy in the current situation, the sort of footnote that makes it seem all the more unnecessary. In a few decades, the story of its failure may well be grimly fascinating.

Saddam Hussein

2007-01-10T09:07:00.000-08:00

The New Yorker has a nice editorial on Saddam Hussein’s execution, which I’ve been meaning to write on for some days now.

Quite the hash they’ve made of it, by all appearances. The Bush administration has apparently expressed displeasure at the heckling the former dictator received at the time of his death. I suppose this is reasonable enough. The jeering and so on were certainly inhumane—but then, so is hanging. It seems to me a poor response to the man’s truly abominable time in power to answer it in kind.

From what I gather, the American government attempted to have the execution delayed. The Iraqi prime minister of the moment apparently declined, out of fear that he could become a symbol of resistance if still alive (a martyr being evidently preferable). It is testimony to have far things have gone that he seems genuinely to have feared that the former president could go free, something that would probably have been unthinkable even a year or two ago.

But then, with running battles underway in Baghdad, and the Americans calling in air strikes on a city they putatively occupy, this is probably the least of anyone’s concerns. The former leader has written himself neatly, if appallingly, into his country’s history. The currently leaders have quite a long way to go, if they want to be anything more than footnotes to a disaster.

Iraq Again...

2006-12-17T05:50:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has turned up a new and truly frightening reason to be worried about the future of Iraq. Seems some folks in Dick Chaney's office have begun to think that trying to stop escalating violence in Iraq is a non-starter. I'm with them there, but their answer is that they should take sides--turn away from power-sharing and support Shiites in an inevitable open civil war.

Given that this would mean supporting Shiite death squads, and likely the outright opression of Sunni population, it would the most open American support for foreign atrocities in living memory. At its nader it could mean supporting ethnic cleansing and genocide, if things got bad enough. Add this to the genocide Bush Administration is already tacity supporting in Darfur, and the human rights record of the Bush Administration would be altogether worse even than one might generally imagine--which is pretty scary.

2008 really can't come soon enough.

Iraq Study Group

2006-12-14T08:16:00.000-08:00

A little late and a little brief on my part, but this New Yorker op-ed on the report of the Iraq Study Group is just about perfect, for anyone interested. Enjoy...

The Guys in Back

2006-12-04T05:57:00.000-08:00

Who really lost the Liberal leadership race? Well, seven candidates aside, the big loser might be the party machine itself. Not the Liberal Party of Canada, which will probably do just fine under Stephane Dion's leadership, and might even fair well in Quebec. What is in quite a bit of trouble is the much vaunted Liberal backroom. The largest old boy's network in Canadian politics backed a selection of the wrong horses, and they're about to find themselves in a fair bit of trouble.

I think there's a good argument to be made that this is exactly what the party voted for. By making a surprise hit out of the party insider with the least inside connections, they sent a clear enough message--what they want is political experience without the baggage of political machinery.

Dion has already moved to oppose the backroom, however gently, by appointing a couple of friend of his to run his transition rather than the usual party cronies. None of this is to say, of course, that one can change the party's institutional culture overnight, But this bodes well for its future suggesting it will be rather less committed to consuming itself from within.

That is, of course, if the camps surrounding Ignatieff and Rae don't harden and remain in place, pending another leadership race. This would turn Dion into a weak leader indeed.

Here's an interesting reason to think I'm wrong. CP has a great little story about the deal Dion and Kennedy cut, the deal Ignatieff and Rae couldn't bring off, and the incident that gave Dion his extra two votes on the first ballot. It suggests that some kind of deal making will be alive and well for the foreseeable future. And who the hell thought Martha Hall-Findley would be the spoiler?

From Behind....

2006-12-03T04:20:00.000-08:00

In the great Canadian spirit of underdog victories, Stephan Dion came in from the cold yesterday and became, odds are, a future prime minister. Canadian politics doesn’t get much more fun than the Liberal Party tied in knots over its leadership, even if the pickings are as slim as they appeared this time.

Drama? Well, I was genuinely surprised to see Kennedy back out so early—this probably made him the determining factor, without which Dion would never have had the momentum to do as he did. Rae’s outright elimination was genuinely shocking to me—I’d expected to see him on any final ballot—although it may well have been inevitable.

Dion himself slid cleanly in out of virtually nowhere. He was somehow the inside man who never managed to be the establishment candidate. Being the only major candidate with a real history in the federal government, he was still somehow passed over by the mighty Liberal backroom, in favour of flashier outsiders like Ignatieff and Rae. He was the other man—the other political scientist in the race behind Ignatieff, the other cabinet minister beside a genuine celebrity in Ken Dryden. He was the only Quebecker and the only Francophone at a time when no one much seemed to care.

But this might all be a good thing. In their desperate search for a new Trudeau, the Liberals may well have stumbled on something else—a new Pearson. True, Dion is Francophone, and well to Pearson’s left, but he’s a quiet moderate in the political game, a politician who—almost uniquely in Canadian Federal politics—has an agenda not at all tied to his regional identity. He is, this, not just a compromise candidate, but maybe the only national one, a French-speaking Quebecker who has stood for a united Canada and who’s progressive agenda is tempered by his moderate character.

He is, perhaps, not just the result of compromise, but a source of it. Not just the easy candidate to settle on, but one to settle disputes as well. He’ll also likely be the first major world leader anywhere to hold environmental sustainability as his publicly visible main issue. That, along with more national political experience than anyone else in the field, makes him stronger than anyone likely recognises just yet.

And that’s all pretty good news, especially with the next event to wait for being the eventual fall of the Conservative minority. There are indeed heady days yet.

Convention Night!

2006-12-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

After 10 months or so of frankly fairly bizarre political drift, the Liberal Party of Canada chooses a new leader over the weekend, or at least tries to. The most remarkable thing, really, is how clueless we all still are about the outcome. One would be pretty foolish to even peg a number of ballots at this point.

Being out of the country, I won't be watching the CBC coverage, but I'll be reading tomorrow's news, popcorn in hand. Where's my money? At this point, I have no idea...

Quebeckers and the Quebecois

2006-11-29T01:48:00.000-08:00

Just who are Quebeckers? Quebecois? Apparently the question contributed to the 15 Liberal dissenting votes on the recent Canadian Parliamentary vote on the nationhood of Quebec. It also goes to just who the people of Quebec are and who among them, if anyone, constitutes a nation.

The debate centres on whether or not residents of Quebec who are not francophone, born-in, culturally ‘pure’ Quebecois are included in the putative nation of Quebec. The question, really, is about ethnicity versus geography—it’s a variation on the distinction between ethnic/national identity and civic/political identity. That is, who you are on the paperwork versus who you are culturally.

The trouble in the federal Liberal Party seems to have been over the idea that the recent parliamentary motion on the subject might implicitly recognize only ‘pure laine’ Quebecois as a nation. Apparently this is supposed to be a bad thing.

I think it’s a pretty good idea. For one thing, it’s more accurate to call ‘ethnic’ Quebeckers a nation—immigrant and Anglophone Quebeckers are less historically attached to the cultural history of francophone culture. Further, this would mean recognising a nation without fixed ties to territory—one could be nationally Quebecois and live outside Quebec, or not be Quebecois and be a Quebec resident. Finally, as a pragmatic advantage for federalist politics, it would mean a smaller opposed group with a weaker territorial claim in any future independence negotiations.

Separatists probably know this, and have largely abandoned ethnic language. That said, ethnic nationalism remains at the heart of the separatist movement, and the federal government should be honest about that. Recognising that a relatively small portion of Quebec residents constitute a nation in the ethnic sense, without constituting the population of any future state, is probably a much better idea than identifying the nation with the province of Quebec, setting up the newly recognized nation as a political entity with territory attached.

In short, this would recognize a nation of Quebec within Canada, while also recognising it for what it is—an ethnically driven cultural movement at odds with the multicultural values of contemporary Canada. It is right to allow officially that a cultural distinction is at work in Quebec, but we should all be honest with ourselves about just what it is and what form it takes.

site changes

2006-11-25T05:03:00.000-08:00

Well, nothing much, really. I've replaced the increasingly awful BlogAd link exchange button on the lower part of the sidebar with an Amnesty International ad that shows rotating excerpts from blogs and websites that have been censored, blocked, shut down, or otherwise abused by ill-intentioned governments. A pretty good thing, I figure.

Russian Defector Dies

2006-11-24T07:33:00.000-08:00

Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian defector to Britain recently hospitalised after being poisoned, died yesterday in London. Shortly beforehand, he dictated a short but pretty hair-raising statement. CNN.com has carried it in full; its well worth reading.

The Nation of Quebec

2006-11-23T05:06:00.000-08:00

These are interesting times indeed for Canadian federalism. That the Quebecois should suddenly (if insubstantially) be recognised as a nation by the federal government is strange, at least within the context of Canadian history on the subject. That such a change should come down under a conservative government is truly bizarre.

The move is insubstantial because it takes the form only of a motion by the Prime Minister before the House of Commons. This is important, of course, and it sets precedent, but the fundamental status of Quebec and its people would more properly be recognised in the Constitution. Thus us that a far cry from the failed ‘distinct society’ ideas in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords.

It also recognises the Quebecois people rather than the political entity of Quebec. The Quebecois people may well constitute a nation (they almost certainly do by at least one of the dictionary definitions of the word) but they are not alone among the people of Quebec, many of whom are immigrant, Anglophone, native, and so on. The Quebecois could not constitute themselves as a nation-state—as the Bloc and the PQ would have it—without the political entity as well, with its territory, political machinery, etc, attached.

This is, thus, one more turn in a longstanding debate, rather than anything like a solution. Even as an idea, it’s not terribly radical—we’ve been calling Native Canadian groups First Nations for years. Nonetheless, its political significance is probably very real.

What’s really difficult to gage is how this will play politically for the Tories. PM Harper gets credit for a statesmanlike political move, and gets credit also for undercutting the Bloc, but this largely lets the Liberals out of an internal debate about Quebec’s nationhood, at a time when it stood to significantly damage their credibility. There could still be a divide in the Liberal Party when the motion comes to a vote, but it could cause as much dissent in the Conservative Party, which is the home both of Brian Mulroney’s distinct society and of hard-line Anglo Canadian nationalists, such as any exist. It’s hard to imagine the Alberta Conservative parliamentary contingent being too thrilled about this. On the other hand, three-party unity in the House, as has apparently happened on this, is rare indeed.

Of course, if Harper looses the next election to Michael Ignatieff, Bob Ray, or someone else, this might well be remembered as his largest symbolic contribution to Canadian politics, certainly on the issue of federalism at least. It may be more or less symbolic, but it stands nonetheless to be remembered and to have entirely unpredictable on federal party politics.

Poisoned in London!

2006-11-22T07:45:00.000-08:00

Just in time for the new James Bond flick, the Russian FSB (ex-KGB) has begun behaving like the cold war never ended.

There's nothing surprising about Russian politics being a bit Byzentine, or about their foreign policy being a it hard-minded, but this is the stuff of bad paperbacks. An asassination on foreign soil (a former imperial capital at the heart of the EU, no less) is pretty brazen stuff. If this is the price of letting an ex-spook govern a former superpower, we'd all best hold on tight.

Kissinger

2006-11-20T05:52:00.000-08:00

It was Henry Kissinger, as much as anyone else, who orchestrated the policy of Vietnamization that lead to American withdrawal from a failed war a few decades ago. His recent assessment of the current war in Iraq as unwinnable shows him in pretty good form as a policy analyst, but he still has frighteningly little to offer in the way of solutions.

There’s no withdrawal or anything like a ‘decent interval’ here. In fact, his position sounds oddly like Bush’s staying the course. The problem, as he assesses it, is that a speedy withdrawal (at the behest of an emboldened Democratic Congress) would likely produce a rise in violence and perhaps a spread of violence to neighbouring countries.

What to do then? Hold meetings. Kissinger proposes a conference of regional and world leaders to work out some sort of solution. On the one hand, he’s probably right that this is the only way forward. It’s hard to say what’s scarier about this.

For one thing, the vagueness of it is startling for an analyst so incisive. It’s generally nicer to have solutions rather than possible ways to find them. Conferences are nice, but putting American, Syrian and Iranian diplomats in a room together can only go so well, and throwing in a few Swiss and Norwegians is only likely to help so much.

Furthermore, Kissinger cuts against his own usual instincts. The situation is desperate enough to have turned the greatest foreign policy realist in recent American political history into an ad-hoc liberal internationalist. This is nice, but it’s pretty scary too.

The admission here, really, is that there are only bad options, only differing ways for things to get worse. It’s bad that the Iraqi people have to pay for Western mistakes, but worse that it could so easily do so much damage to the region, and to international relations generally if the Americans can’t find some new place for themselves in the global order.

Henry Kissinger doesn't seem to have much more than the rest of us to offer on this. One can like him or hate him, but it’s damned alarming to see someone that bright at a genuine loss.

Congo Again

2006-11-16T09:24:00.000-08:00

...And I've spoken too soon. The results are to be disputed. And have a look at the electoral map here (scroll down a bit). Kinda makes you worry, that big line down the middle. Clearly not over at all.

A Turkic Commonwealth

2006-11-16T06:33:00.000-08:00

The Turkic peoples of Central and West Asia have a long and complex history, both as founders and subjects of empire. For almost a century, all that has seemed to be a thing of the past. Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the absorption of most other Turkic peoples into the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, they have either been organized as discrete nation states (Turkey) or subjected to rule from afar (almost everyone else). Recently, most of these have emerged as a number of post-communist nation-states.

Set against this is the old idea of a pan-Turkic union, a state or association of states that would bring the members of these related ethnicities together, as a single voice on the global stage. Ankara, after a few years of silence on this, seems ready to have another go at it: they’re about to host a summit of Turkic heads of state.

The project makes lots of sense for the Turks themselves, at least in appearance. A Turkic Commonwealth makes a plausible Plan B should EU membership fall through, without all the troublesome human rights and economic reforms attached. True it would be a smaller pond, but Ankara would be by far the biggest fish—a Turkic international organisation would give it a significant sphere of influence, extending from the Mediterranean to the Chinese border, and controlling significant energy resources in and around the Caspian.

The other states, mostly one form or another of failed democracy or outright dictatorship, would get a club to join and a place they could belong without addressing their own quite significant political and developmental issues, which are far greater than those of relatively wealthy and progressive Turkey.

The big losers would be other former Soviet states, such as Georgia, which hosts an important international pipeline that is Turkic on either end. Armenia, is fenced in on two of four borders by hostile Turkic states. Tajikistan, the only non-Turkic Central Asian state and poorest former Soviet Republic, which would be more isolated than ever. A big coalition to the north and east might also scare Arab Middle Eastern states or Iran.

It would also scare the bejesus out of China, which has a large and potentially separatist Turkic region in its northwest, bordering Former Soviet Central Asia. Moscow probably wouldn’t like it much, in that it still likes to think of these countries as the ‘near abroad’—countries over which it has an imagined right of influence. It might annoy the Americans and the Europeans two, by disrupting energy security and slowing human rights reform.

All this, along with the possible cost of aiding the dilapidated states of Central Asia might well be enough to scar Ankara off, but it looks set to press ahead with at least an attempt at this. It will be interesting indeed to watch.

Congo results

2006-11-16T04:20:00.000-08:00

As of last night the numbers are in in DRC, and apparently Kinshasa is (provisionally) pretty calm. The long awaited election, one of the most complex in the history of international election supervision, has come off pretty well.

This is good news. It's also probably good news--well, not bad news--that Joseph Kabila has won. He's probably corrupt, possibly inept, and certainly not the great leader his campaign made him out to be. But then, neither would anyone else have been, and likely no one else had the broad base of support to maintain anything like peace and security over any large portion of the country.

This also means that relatively little tangible political change will have resulted from the bloodiest conflict anywhere since WWII. That we can call that good says something breathtaking about the condition of sub-Saharan Africa. Say what we will about the limits of peace and reconstruction, none of us should be comfortable with that.

Jagshemash!

2006-11-10T09:36:00.000-08:00

I saw the Borat flick with some friends the other night. I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair. I thought the muscles in my face were going to seize permanently. It was a beautiful thing. I was also a little concerned. On the one hand it’s genuinely, disarmingly funny. On the other, it’s worryingly hard to pin down the difference between this and comedy performed in blackface.

It isn’t the flagrant, if tongue in cheek, misogyny and anti-Semitism that bothers me. Most of us know better than that. The toilet humour wears a little thin after a while, but its remarkably resilient (A weird guy holding a bag of his own shit in his host’s dining room is simply too jaw dropping not to laugh at). What gets me is that too much of the humour is predicated on our own cultural ignorance.

Central Asia is, of course, a little on the sexist side and perhaps a little anti-Semitic too. At street level it’s dirt poor, a bit backward, and it feels like the edge of the universe. On the other hand, they don’t drink from toilets, give trophies to prostitutes, or do laundry in public parks. Predicating 90 minutes of humour on cultural awkwardness most of us just don’t know much better than to buy into is, well, just a little but ugly.

On the other hand, I did laugh my ass off. Some of it just plain works—jokes about naked fat guys are universal, and some of the cultural commentary about the Bible Belt is plain brilliant. Perhaps I shouldn’t complain.

Guy Fawkes

2006-11-09T04:59:00.000-08:00

Last weekend the English celebrated their annual effigy-burning festival, Guy Fawkes Day. This is, indisputably, an odd event, the only holiday in the world (to my knowledge) named after a terrorist. It’s also the only holiday marking an execution that I can think of, aside of Good Friday.

The story, for those not in the know, involves a former soldier from York, who attempted to blow up the English parliament and kill the king on 5 November, 1606. The plot was stopped; Fawkes was tortured, and was eventually executed.

Being a surrogate Londoner, I wandered down to the local celebration in Hackney the other night. The friend who accompanied me (another Canadian) warned me that the London version of this had become a bit watered down. It was indeed—there were no effigies in Victoria Park Sunday evening, burning or otherwise. The only open flames were gas torches set as backdrop for a pithy stage show, centring on a mythical political tax rebellion against an evil emperor, apparently based on a Bengali folk tale. Lots of pretty fireworks, but no connection especially British history.

Also no connection to the holiday’s bizarre overtones. Celebrating the torture and death of an attempted terrorist has, of course, rather queasy associations these days. But then, celebrating with a South Asian parable while British troops are in occupation of Afghanistan is pretty strange too. In the story told that night no one at all dies, and the theme is easy liberation—freedom without consequences. The historical event celebrated is shadowed by sectarian overtones (Fawkes was Catholic, James I was Protestant), and by questions about the limits of political activism.

The British are a fairly liberal and a famously pragmatic lot, and they have tended to either gracefully gloss over or simply openly embrace the occasion’s uneasiness. There is, however, no time like the present to find cause for debate in these events. The British polity survived the event and thrived afterward—democracy bloomed properly only long after the instability of the Reformation. One would hope that there were lessons in this not only for the British public—British electorate—but also for the outside world, not least their transatlantic ally who seem to have some degree of trouble dealing with the idea of political dissent and with political violence. Thus is hardly the time for folk tales with empty happy endings.

Midterm Exams

2006-11-09T02:19:00.000-08:00

American midterm elections probably shouldn’t be days of reckoning. They only shift some of the power base, only give voice to a portion of the nation’s political will. They can punish an American president, but they do surprisingly little to empower the opposition. They grant a platform to speak but offer the opposition remarkably little capacity to do anything more than slow things down. This is, more or less, what Americans voted for the other night.

Democrats having won control of the House and likely the Senate, and President Bush will be able to do very little without their consent. But then, the Democrats will be able to do very little without his. The risk for the Democratic Party is simple enough—they’ll be judged almost as much as Bush for whatever happens in the next two years, and with things likely to go badly (imagine a two year argument about troop withdrawals from Iraq) a crippled presidency can only be held accountable for so much.

Much of this falls to the incoming House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Nobody seems entirely sure what she’ll do once in the job, leaving aside her known liberalism. This is a good thing, but she also seems unlikely to set as measured or as subtle a tone as outgoing Republican speaker Dennis Hastert. She might turn out to be a well-intentioned and politically desirable loose cannon.

Bush’s presidency as we’ve known it—the moral highhandedness, the strident bellicosity—is more or less over. Sometime Wednesday morning, a long, ugly, and inevitably confused presidential campaign started. Neither party has a presumptive candidate. Neither clearly has a policy platform that will capture the American electorate or lead the country back into the political mainstream of the developed Western World. The Democrats will try to capitalize on very real failures of leadership, but they’re left mostly to criticism the Whitehouse for a war in which they themselves largely acquiesced.

The good news, at least if you agree with me on these things, is that some Democrat or other will probably still win in 2008, and this will represent some measure of improvement. It isn’t clear what they’ll do though about America’s damaged international reputation, much less the unfolding (and increasingly unmitigated) disaster in Iraq, but the proverbial bleeding might at least stop. The bad news is that the American electorate now has two full years to learn just how uninspired the Democrats are about these things. The political campaign will be bloody, messy and, frankly, a lot of fun to watch. In the meantime, foreign and domestic policy will stagnate at the worst of times.

Looks like a long wait—and there might not be much progress at the end of it.

Canada

2006-10-22T09:02:00.000-07:00

A couple of interesting bits about (or at least around) Canadian national identity in the globe the last couple of days. Most prominently, the Quebec wing of the national Liberal Party has passed a resolution identofying Quebec as a nation. The candidates for the party leadership apparently can't agree on whether or not this is a good thing. Disagreement, I suppose, is natural in this case, as it's difficult to say exactly what's being talked about--the word 'nation' is tremendously elastic. Ignatieff cheerfully endorsed the move, saying that he stood with those who recognise Quebec as their nation and Canada as their country, even supporting writing Quebecois nationhood into the constitution. The rest are a bit more cautious.

Nation, of course, needn't mean state or country. But if it doesn't one needs to know what it does mean.. Who are the members of this nation? Quebecois francophones? What of Anglophones? Immigrants and their descendants? And what on earth does that make English Canada? Does one then recognise Canada as a nation at all?

On balance, Ignatieff's probably right for the most part. Quebecois identity really is tremenbously different from the rest of the country, and this deserves recognition of one sort or another. Might be best done with some care, though.

On another note, a judge in Buffalo, NY has apparently mistaken Canada for a penal colony. He has effectively exiled a former teacher from the area, who has US citizenship, as punishment for sleeping with a 14 year old student. For the next three years, the convicted can return to the US only to visit his parole officer. He's apparently married to a Canadian, and has children north of the border, so there's a certain logic to it all. Still, it's a bit insulting to have one's country treated as a dumping groundfor sex offenders. An odd thing indeed.

North Korea Again:

2006-10-17T08:39:00.000-07:00

It's a strange thing, really, the strength with which the world has reacted to North Korea's nuclear test. Not that it isn't alarming in the scheme of these things, but it seems a bit odd to me how we react to these things in general.

Nuclear weapons, it is generally agreed, are bad things, so when one of them goes off (regardless of circumstances) the world reacts badly. There's no way around this. Nonetheless, testing a small device underground, especially when undertaken by a declared nuclear power, is not an unmitigated disaster.

No, really. Consider: everyone's been pretty sure the DPRK has had nuclear weapons for a little while now. They've been pounding the table and insisting this themselves for a few years. Arguably, they now have one less of them from a limited stockpile, and no one's been hurt in the process.

The North is, by all appearances, the most diplomatically incompetent state in the world. They threaten when they ought to suggest, demand when they ought to coax. They make their diplomatic equivalents in Tehran look subtle and down right skillful (the latter are in fact both). The DPRK diplomatic corps even helps lend an air of professionalism to their colleagues in the Bush Administration.

But then, none of this is criminal exactly, it's just deeply inconvenient. No one seems to much know what to do with the DPRK. They've reacted to sanctions by declaring them an act of war. This is true, oddly enough, according to the letter of international law, but it hardly helps the situation. This should be a relatively easy problem to solve, in that the things they want are relatively easy to provide: better diplomatic relations with the west, security guarantees, food aid, and so on. The shear blowhard intractability of the regime in Pyongyang, paired with the intransigence of Washington on the subject, makes this far more difficult than it probably needs to be.

Compare again Iran, where no one much seems to know what to offer the government there in exchange for disarmament. In North Korea at least there is a plausible framework of agreement--security and aid in exchange for disarmament.

Instead, perhaps not knowing what else to do, the North is now threatening an additional test. Since a military solution is more or less out of the question—it would be far too damaging to South Korea—the situation, as with that in Iran, appears inclined to drift slowly in the wrong direction, little effective international action being taken. There's nothing necessary about this any more than the failure of the North Korean economy or the country’s absolute isolation is necessary. In each instance, the government simply can't see its way to doing things properly. A second test, as they've threatening, will of course only make a needless problem worse. The DPRK may be the only country in recent memory to go to hell on grounds of sheer incompetence.

Israel-Palestine, etc:

2006-10-04T02:45:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the slow (well, no) traffic lately, folks. Here’s something small of interest: a statement through the International Crisis Group signed by a 130-odd former statesmen, including a fistful of Cold War leaders, and what feels like about half the retired leadership of Canada. The subject is a new push for negotiations in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s testament to the intractability of the conflict how unlikely this seems (my view) to produce results. (That almost all the signatories titles are prefixed by the word ‘former’ doesn’t much help either, though.)

Meanwhile, North Korea threatens big explosions (but only for test purposes), the Republican Party shelters a pederast, and a one nuclear state is accusing the other of terrorism against it (not for the first time). Oh, and Georgia got itself in trouble with Russia in a pretty bad way for a day or two there. Will write more when I can.

Fighting over Water

2006-09-18T02:54:00.000-07:00

Reuter's has good news, of sorts. Its been 4600 years since anyone went to war over water. Since two city states in what was is now Iraq fought over irrigation rights, water-driven conflicts have had more bark then bite, in that they are frequently threatened, but never carried out.

But then, the future, it is generally agreed, tends to be different from the past. Climate change, desertification, and increased population in the developing world threaten increased motivation to fight over an increasingly scarce resource that is less essential to human life only than oxygen.

Hydrocarbon rich Central Asia seems more likely to fight over water than oil, of which there is plenty. Arguably such a conflict is already under way in Israel/Palestine. Meanwhile, possession of large water reserves seems to have become grounds for jarringly nationalistic rhetoric. In Canada, it has become a commonplace of public opinion that fresh water reserves (claimed to be the largest in the world) are the national patrimony, and must not be sold internationally. Surely this will become a harder position to justify, if continents golbal warming leads to more frequent drouts elsewhere.

Arguments to the contrary include claims that collaboration is almost always more valuable--water can almost always be reused, for hydroelectric power, irrigation, or municipal supplies. Additionally, fighting over waterways requires fighting over the land that surrounds them. A state conquering these must provide for the occupying populations--including drinking water. Seizing and holding a freshwater supply is a tricky and difficult business.

The question, then, is just how desperate people and their leaders will become.

Non-Aligned Movement

2006-09-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

Wht becomes of an international body that has outlived its usefulness? That's the obvious question to ask, with the 2006 summit of the Non-Aligned Movement underway in Havana. The organisation made a real sort of sense during the Cold War, as a meeting point for states that wanted alternatives to association with the two superpowers. But with that period long gone, it seems to have become a kind of rogues' gallery of international outcasts. The gang's all here: Iran, Venezuela, Belarus, Burma, Zimbabwe, even reclusive North Korea--everyone's favorite misbehaving regimes are here.

True, they're united by their bad standing in Washinghton. And a bad relationship with the Bush Administration is hardly in itself a reason to resent a government. Nonetheless, these are pretty dodgy folks--with the marginal exception of Venezuela, none of the states just mentioned has even a passable human rights record.

These, of course, aren't the whole lot. India, South Africa, and a host of other state currently well integrated in the global order are present--118 in total, and most of the world's population. But the odd cases seem to dominate the speaking schedule. It's a fair question who's running the show.

What this suggests, to me at least, is that American pressure on these states has forced countries with little in common other then emnity with Washington into league with one another, hijacking a harmless relic of an organisation. It also, oddly, makes the US look like the truly non-aligned state, having as it does few reliable allies outside coalitions of convenience.

Other international bodies that have outlived the bulk of their usefulness often end up in a fairly reasonable condition. The OSCE does little other than monitor a few elections now and then, yet it continues to serve as a pleasant form of tax-free employment for volumes of retired diplomats in Vienna. In any event, the folks in Havana at the moment are probably harmless enough, insofar as the dodgy governments represented have little influence outside their own borders. Still, it seems unfortunate that the only states genuinely and openly resistant to poor American foreign policy are so poorly governed themselves.

The British Museum

2006-09-14T04:50:00.000-07:00

The British Museum houses what must surely be the largest and most valuable collection of stolen property anywhere in the world. From Bablyon to Egypt, to Greece, to the East Asia, there's no shortage of priceless cultural stuff that belongs someplace else. (It puts Belgium's far more jingoistic Africa Museum to shame.)

The justification for this has usually been the protection of valuables. Turn of the century Egypt, we were asked to believe, was unable to protect its own cultural heritage; hence the British stepped in to do so themselves (and enjoy it on their own turf). Such claims have, at least some of the time, been quite true. In Iraq recently, the British government managed to create the need for the protection of artifacts themselves, by manufacturing a failed state, utterly incapable of protecting its own history. Witness the looting of Bagdad's museums a few years ago. If only they'd stepped in with the same perservationist mindset in that case.

But then, how often does this argument hold up? Are we really to believe that the Greeks are still somehow incapable of taking good care of the Elgin Marbles? And why are they still named after the British general that stole them, anyway? All this vexed me the other day, as a friend and I strolled through the Greek and Mesopotamian galleries of the Museum, shortly before closing. I've often thought that a trip round the world should really end right there, in the Museum's stunning new Great Court. After seeing all cultures and all peoples, one could see their creations, gathered together in one place.

I suppose one can reasonably as whether or not it even makes sense to return these things after so long. I don't know, myself. There's a unique pleasure in being able to see that much in one place. The real tragedy is how many Greeks and Egyptians and Iraqis never get to see their own cultural heritage, because of this leftover of empire. What to do? Perhaps the UK government should think in terms of redressing this. If they learned to think of themselves as responsible for connecting cultural works with their cultures of origin, they might catch less flack for hoarding them. Alternately, it might simply make them more amenable to returning these things. Surely the Greeks have been around long enough to know how to take care of a few statues themselves.

***Sorry for the gap lately folks. It's likely to continue, I'm afraid, until I get situated in London. My best to all my people elsewhere in the would.

Exit Brussels

2006-09-07T03:56:00.000-07:00

As I spend my last 24 hours in Brussels, the BBC's Mark Mardell, comments in his European Diary (about halfway down) on the fate of Brussels in the face of Flemish nationalism. If Belgium, as secessionists demand, was divided into two EU member states, what on Earth would one do with Brussels itself? Technically it's in Flanders, but it's predominantly Francophone, and is defined not so much by the state to which it is capital as by the international institutions it houses. Mardell cites a recent report by a Flemish nationalist thinktank that recommends the city be jointly administered by both successor states and the EU itself. But would this work? Could Brussels handle that much more bureaucracy? And what would one do with Nato, left out in the cold in the new dispensation? But then, if such an arrangement worked anywhere it would be here, where Belgian national identity is burried almost entirely underneath international institutionalisation.

This will be my last entry from Brussels. Thanks again to all the folks who shared it with me. Best of luck in the future.

Belgian Sealing Ban

2006-09-03T01:45:00.000-07:00

In my last week in Belgium, I’d like to take a moment to congratulate the Belgian government for a proposed ban on Canadian seal products. The ban is a reaction to Canada’s needlessly brutal annual seal hunt. It’s nice to be reminded every now and again, as a Canadian, that we’re rather less than perfect. With a little luck the ban might make its way down the street from the Congress to the EU institutions.

Diamonds

2006-09-02T03:02:00.000-07:00

Even in the heady world of multinational enterprise, De Beer’s is a rarified case, a truly odd beast. It runs on something like a 17^th century colonial economic model, probably resembling Leopold’s Congo as much as, say, Dow Chemical or the like. Its business model is based on a near total monopoly on the world diamond market, and artificially created scarcity.

Or at least it was. The whole thing started to unravel a few years back, when the company’s longtime head died. That and the appearance of diamonds outside their sphere of influence (from Australia and elsewhere) has shaken the company badly—they now control slightly less than half the global diamond trade, a situation anathema to a business model dependant on monopolization.

Like any good monopoly De Beer’s operates quietly enough. Aside of extraordinarily plush advertising, the company is publicly visible mostly as a diminutive office in London through which something like half the world’s diamonds used to pass (its actually headquartered in Johannesburg). Anyone controlling enough of something doesn’t need to worry too much about selling. De Beer’s has always determined terms of sale unilaterally. Commercial buyers are lucky to have the chance at stones, and are expected to pay whatever is asked.

All this would be little more than an economic inconvenience to Western consumers, if the monopoly did not make the diamond trade almost completely opaque. It’s just about impossible to know where a diamond came from—if it funded an African civil war you’d never know it. The proliferation of conflict diamonds just adds to the colonial overtones of the business, making African warlords and dictators equivalent to the local stooges once employed by European colonial administrations.

But this too is changing. A new system of conflict-free certification is beginning to take hold. There’s nothing perfect about it, but it at least represents a chance for other diamond traders to begin taking up the business practices of the last century, if not the current one.

De Beer’s itself is an almost extravagant vestige of colonialism, a mechanism for the satisfaction of Western luxury tastes designed to operate necessarily at the expense of the third world, while bilking its customers on artificially overvalued goods. It’s a thief on both ends. The effect, really, was remarkable, and still is: a high value commodity from developing countries was sold to wealthy Western consumers in a way that benefited neither of them.

It would be interesting to know how much the company contributed to constructing the cult of the diamond in the West. It wouldn’t be so surprising to find out that they created the market as much as cornered it. In any case, that they’ve lost quite a lot of it is a good thing by almost any standard. With luck, diamond rich African nations will benefit properly from a newly opened and better regulated market—and the rest of us might more easily avoid funding amoral monopolists, tin-pot dictators, and African warlords. I reckon that’s pretty hard to argue with.

**Thanks to a good friend for pointing me toward this one…. Have a safe trip home, and have fun on that side of the pond.

Green Party of Canada

2006-09-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

The Green Party of Canada is in political limbo. They're not quite the real thing—they’ve never been elected to any public office—but they're not entirely insignificant either; they teeter on the edge of something big or of nothing at all.

Elizabeth May’s victory in the party leadership race might or might not change that. She represents a turn away from they party’s flirtation with free-market economics, but also comes as the party stands at least a slight chance of actually picking up a seat—if not in parliament then at least in a provincial legislature. That the country’s major polling organizations have started tracking it along with the big four parties, along with mainstream press coverage of the leadership race, suggests the party has arrived, made itself politically relevant.

Presumably, if anyone should be worried, it’s the NDP. Perpetually incapable of reform, and prone to knee-jerk moralizing, it’s the little party that could but couldn’t quite. It’s shackled constitutionally to organized labor. This is something that likely made good sense a generation ago, but seems an anachronism now. Unions are no longer the only game in town on the left, and blue collar union membership is probably more socially conservative than the left would like to let on.

Ideally, the Greens represent not the one-issue platform their name suggests, but a mixed bag, a broad political voice on the left the Canada mysteriously lacks. The NDP have had the breadth of voice for years, but not the depth. I can’t recall the last time I heard a policy speech from an NDP leader that was anything other than a sustained attack on a Liberal (or now Conservative) position. NDP policy has become alarmingly thin on the ground.

The Green Party looks almost set to capitalize on this. If the Liberal leadership goes to a progressive candidate, then the NDP might well be squeezed out between them, as thoroughly as the Tories were in the ’94 election. The left would stay split, but it would be split between two more thoughtful and politically astute actors than it is today.

I’m not sure I’d object.

Aside: apologies for silence lately, folks... I've been tying up a few loose ends. Should be back at it for a bit.

Iggy, Philosopher King

2006-08-28T09:19:00.000-07:00

The Globe has a really, really great profile of Michael Ignatieff online at the moment. It illustrates quite a bit of why he is the Liberal leadership frontrunner, perhaps as much as anything because no one seems capable of not talking about him. The article’s great. If you don’t have the time, here are my thoughts.

Ignatieff is the product of elevated status, both politically and intellectually. On his father’s side, he is two generations shy of Russian aristocracy, were it not for the Bolsheviks. On his mother’s side, he is descended from homegrown Canadian intellectuals. His blind, potentially amoral political ambition is as much a commonality with Nixon as with Trudeau.

As a political aristocrat in a fairly classical sense, however, he reminds me as much as anything of a would-be philosopher king. I spend too much of yesterday (for unrelated reasons) picking through Plato’s Republic. Might just be my immersion in both this and the Globe piece at the same time, but the similarity is striking. The impulse to intellectual leadership, the high-mindedness, the remarkably well-rounded education away from home, the dispassionate willingness to judge and praise or condemn—all of these either implicitly or explicitly typify Plato’s ideal ruler.

Regardless of what you think of Plato’s political scheme (I doubt anyone much takes it seriously these days), what’s interesting about the comparison is where it doesn’t measure up. The biographical cracks in Ignatieff include a cold aloofness, a palpable personal ambition, and an all too visible history of ruthlessness. Quite a bit of this is apparently typified in his poor treatment of his younger brother (the first to bear the nickname Iggy) as a child. His disowned his brother at boarding school and, later, wrote him entirely out of a magazine article about their family.

All this is belied by a social conscience—Ignatieff volunteered for years at a Massachusetts prison while completing a doctorate at Harvard. After a prison riot, he and a group of students he recruited volunteered to serve as civilian buffers between inmates and guards. Even here he seems to have been deeply single-minded, immersing himself completely in the project and volunteering to serve himself in the maximum security wing, containing the most dangerous offenders.

No one questions Ignatieff’s general brilliance or breadth of achievement. Never mind that he’s the only candidate to be a journalist, novelist, academic and filmmaker—he’d likely be the only Prime Minister to be all of these. His intellectual achievements might well outstrip Trudeau. His political waverings can largely be couched as an innate moral-political ambivalence. This is something with which I sympathize, frankly, and that I admire as a quality in a policymaker. I also share his preference for liberalism over socialism.

Nonetheless, for all his pragmatism and ambivalence, Ignatieff show a propensity for grand, extreme policies (like the war in Iraq) that is just plain dangerous. This is the worst of Trudeau, a temptation toward high-minded solutions without thought for their consequences. The careers of idealistic leaders tend to go either very well or very badly. Were Canada in crisis this might be a risk worth signing on for, but it isn’t— actually, it’s in great shape, by and large. Even as foreign policy stagnates and corruption appears at the top, what is wrong is that things are right. Things stay the same because we don’t have much we need to change. Caretaker Liberal governments resulted from a period of largely successful reform under Trudeau. The current Tory hiatus, if it is one, will likely give way to more of the same. At least, it should. Ignatieff represents something altogether different: the radical intellectualization and personalization of Canadian politics. This is something we can do without.

"God Doesn't Reject People"

2006-08-27T01:41:00.000-07:00

Progressive Christianity exists in the US, but one would be hard pressed to find it, given that the major networks apparently won't let them advertise. Of course, its a fair question why churches are advertising at all, but its hard to see what's so controvercial about this United Church of Christ spot. I think its kinda cute, actually.

Elsewhere in the vast Christian right-wing conspiracy, the Vatican managed to reject a new form of stem cell research that preserves the 'lives' of frozen embryos. Its hard for me to see this as anything less than a bit bizarre. I really can't think of another instance of a life-preserving ethos that habitually opposes a groundbreaking form of medical research.

What's the Texas of Nepal?

2006-08-26T01:06:00.000-07:00

A few friends and I concocted an amusing game over drinks the other night. Pick a country or region, and try to identify the subregion that most resembles the lone star state. Risk factors include libertarian conservatism, nationalism, oil wealth, and an entrenched culture of jovial bullheadedness. Bonus points for getting the geography right, by nominating a place in the central south of the region our country in question.

It’s trickier than it sounds. Austria, for example, is partially qualified to be the Texas of the EU, but it misses out on the geography and the oil. Scotland could be the Texas of the UK, having oil and nationalism, but it misses out on the geography, and perhaps fails the test on conservatism. Alberta is the Texas of Canada through and through, excepting geography, and gets extra credit for its volume of ranchland.

Anyone care to nominate the Texas of West Africa? Of the South Pacific? Of Peru?

"Foreign Policy" Reports

2006-08-25T03:59:00.000-07:00

Just a couple of fun links today, both from Foreign Policy magazine. Their annual Commitment to Development Report has some neat numbers, and surprising rankings. Canada’s commitment is around the same as the US, belying assumptions about its supposedly superior intentions, and Japan runs dead last among 21 ranked rich countries, despite its reputation as a generous donor. The top half a the chart is skewed towards Scandinavia and Australasia.

Also amusing is their failed states index, a Herculean effort to quantify the unquantifiable. How on earth does one represent something like “delegitimization of state” with a number between one and ten? Well, they’ve done it, for better or worse. The results are surprising, although I’d question them a little (how on earth does a state out-fail Somalia?). Interesting reading.

Perelman and the new Russia

2006-08-24T02:40:00.000-07:00

Russian geniuses tend to ere toward the inscrutable. Consider Garry Kasparov, probably the greatest chess player in the game’s long history, famed for his arrogance, who publicly played the world’s greatest chest computers and lost bitterly. He followed this by retiring from chess to launch a quixotic political career (all political careers are quixotic in Putin’s Russia).

Grigory “Grisha” Perelman, a St Petersburg mathematician has the formula down to an art. After studying in Russia then teaching in the US, he returned home to a St Petersburg college of mathematics. In the last few years, he has become an unemployed recluse, moved back in with his mother, and solved one of the great mathematical puzzles of our time.

Tall and bearded, Perelman eerily resembles popular images of Rasputin. His solution to Poincare’s Conjecture, a hundred year old puzzle in topology, first appeared a few years ago. Eschewing peer review, he published two articles on the internet, and has spoken in the US about his solution. To date, no one can find anything wrong with it.

Perelman has made the issue rather more newsworthy by apparently declining a Fields Medal for his work. This is the second time he has declined a cash prize. (By some accounts he refused the Fields because he could not afford to travel to accept it.) A million dollar one-time prize for a solution to the problem remains unclaimed, so his not-in-it-for-the-money resolve stands to be tested further.

Although the mathematician doesn’t look likely to run for office anytime soon, he and Kasparov make interesting points of reference for current Russian politics. The inscrutable, bullheaded authoritarianism of Putin’s government is reflected in these moody geniuses. Just as the two seem to experience fame with a certain removed arrogance, Russia has come to seem arrogant and intransigent to the outside world—unmoving on regional politics, and content to bully its neighbors, not long ago its colonial possessions, over natural resource issues. Putin, Perelman and Kasparov are not the types to explain their motives. They are far too concerned with carrying them out.

Kasparov’s pro-western, anti-Putin politics seem belied by his own personality—in any case they aren’t likely to get him too far, given the strength of support for Putin and the murky state of the Russian electoral system. Perelman’s politics don’t look likely to be anything other than a mystery to the rest of us. But they reflect the character of an increasingly revanchist and potentially imperial new Russia. Moscow and its intellectuals remain inclined to reveal their intentions through action.

Here’s a BBC bit on Perelman. The New Yorker apparently has a profile in the current issue, but it isn’t online and I’ve not yet read it. Here’s the wiki on Kasparov.

Ryanair

2006-08-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

Making political advantage out of terrorism is easy enough. Making economic advantage probably isn't much harder. Combining the two, however, is a neat trick, I reckon. Ryanair is currently running the following ad on their site (in the original Churchill actually waves). No word on whether or not freedom fries will be available on flights.

After Europe

2006-08-23T02:30:00.000-07:00

Gavrilo Princip, the man who killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, was emblematically Balkan—politically radical, culturally passionate, intensely nationalistic. Perhaps more importantly, though, he was classically European, for many of the same reasons. As the Balkans finally begin the process of integration into the European project, it might be worth looking back at the man, the curious nature of 20^th century Balkan politics, and why they are more European than anyone in the West cares to admit.

Arguably, the 20^th century as a period in western history begins and ends in Sarajevo. The assassination of the Archduke, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, triggered World War I, and in turn provided the catalyst for a second Great War, the Cold War, the division of Europe, the creation of the European Union, and the existence of the Euro-Atlantic alliance. It is among the defining facts of modern western history. 70-odd years later, the siege of Sarajevo in turn signaled the end of this period. It was the central event of the first major post-Cold War European conflict, and was emblematic of an ever-more-complex global order after the fall of the fall of the Soviet Union.

The siege represented everything European reconstruction was supposed to exclude—radical nationalism, political violence, irrational destruction, genocide. Nationalism was perhaps the central fact of pre-1914 European politics. The post-1945 (and post-1989) European order is arranged to efface nationalism. The EU is, in effect, a retirement community for states: a place where populations can enjoy a comfortable standard of living and an easy, relaxed internationalism, without much in the way of nationalist politics and without much concern for outside politics coming in. It imagines itself as a sort of post-historical world order, where radical politics no longer occur. Europe’s failure to intervene in the Bosnia represents this—as long as the conflict was outside, the poison of nationalism and the scourge of war belong to other peoples and other places.

Bosnia is, haltingly, becoming a nation. Reconstruction has been slow and faltering, but progress has been real. Brussels has acknowledges that eventually it and its neighbors will have to be admitted to the EU. Bosnia will recover from its violent role in the last century, and perhaps be permitted to live the new century for itself rather than in the historical service of bloodshed. A better question might be what will become of Europe itself, where radical far-right politicians still beg at the door of mainstream politics, and no one seems to quite know what they want the EU to do for them or for itself. The real European crisis has not occurred on the margins but at the centre. Europe has tried, since the last War, to retire from history. This has been a dangerous mistake, abandoning global geopolitics to American unipolarity, and setting Europe itself back from more concerted political change internally. If the EU institutions are to find a place for themselves in both Europe and the world, then the implicit fiction that a post-national Europe must be post-historical and post-political needs to die. Europe, which learned the lessons of war all too well, must learn to better articulate them to the rest of the world, especially to its partners across the Atlantic, who seem so forgetful of history.

Princip represents the worst not only of the Balkans but of Europe itself: an idealism that knows no peace. He is reflected today in the Tamil Tigers, in Chechen separatism and Russian ethnic oppression, in Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms. He is the neurosis not only of the Balkans, or even of Europe, but of the world. A retired Europe, one that fails to share its lessons with the rest of us, hasn’t learned them properly at all.

Princip monument in Sarajevo, on the site of Franz Ferdinand's assassination.

On Leaving Brussels

2006-08-22T01:33:00.000-07:00

Brussels is a city of impermanence, a drift-zone of short term bureaucrats and long term inertia. It’s the kind of place that never really changes, and where no-one ever intends to stay. I’m coming up on the end of a year here—one of my roommates has already left for good. I understand it no better than I did on arrival.

Among international cities (London, New York, etc) Brussels is rather the runt of the litter. It’s an odd town—barely a million people, far too many of them foreigners living here only for a year or two, the locals divided along linguistic lines, and an almost grand history of mediocrity. The result should be vibrant. Instead, it’s quite grey.

So what’s there for me to miss? A few good friends, all of them foreign and most of them leaving or already gone (I’m celebrating more departures in the present month or two than I have in the previous few years). A handful of conveniences—decent public transport, and so on—nothing one can’t replace anywhere in Europe and in much of North America. A favorite coffee shop, from which I write this.

North of here in Antwerp there’s a national identity, that of the Flemish, and it’s as strong as ever. In all directions, in fact, there are clearly demarcated European cultures—Dutch, French, German, even Luxembourg knows what it is and wants to be. Brussels is the exception. It would be nice to say that it represents European culture as such, but that isn’t true. The culture here is that of the EC—bureaucratic drag, confusion, an identity shaped in endless paperwork. The bars swell with Eurocrats and ‘European studies’ majors trawling for jobs at the Commission. They come from anywhere but here.

This is perhaps the cultural crisis of the place. Brussels is defined by foreign presence; it’s a city under willing foreign occupation. The capital of Belgium vanishes beneath the capital of Europe. The old capital city, the national identity of the Belgians (such as they are a single people at all), has been geopolitically bulldozed under the weight of the European project, a sacrifice on the altar of post-national politics. Brussels represents the hopes and fears of post-war Europe. It is Europe at peace. It is also Europe deprived of cultural identity. It’s a harder trade-off than one might think.

In a few weeks, perhaps a little over a month, this blog will start broadcasting from London, the most Eurosceptic capital in the EU (barring disaster, at least). It’s actually been a great year. Thanks to those who’ve share it with me—I hope you had as much fun as I did.

Columbia

2006-08-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

The International Crisis Group has a great little op-ed on their website about the conflict in Colombia, one of the longest ongoing civil wars in the world. Read here.

As I was reading it, it occurred to me that US foreign policy in Colombia is not only misguided and destructive (read the article for more), it represents monumentally misspent money: funds directed to destroying coca crops and arming the military, while new fields are planted, the FARC rebel group becomes more violent, and human rights abuses continue apace.

Here’s what I’d do: pull funds from crop destruction and from some military aid, and use them to buy up agricultural land. Replanting a burned off crop of coca is easy enough, but if the land in use is government owned and secured then there’s no question of growing on it. Farmers who take the buyout can relocate to urban areas, breaking the chain of connections between growers and cartels. The government can repurpose the land for other crops (eg, off season produce for northern consumption). New farmers can be brought in, the land leased to them at low cost, and the resulting income could be used to agricultural training. Successful farmers could be given their new land outright and the end of a trial period. Meantime, the cartels would be robbed of the only thing that is truly scared in a country awash in foreign cash and cocaine: farmland itself.

For this to work, it would have to be accompanied by a program of urban economic development—perhaps growth in manufacturing—to fund ex-farmers moving to the city. Also, the other recommendations of the ICG piece are probably at least as important—poverty reduction, fighting corruption, improved rural governance, rule of law, and so on. Perhaps most of all, the decommissioning of right-wing paramilitaries (whose numbers seem to be almost twice those of FARC) needs to be addressed. Confiscation of their financial resources might help to fund all of this.

Of course, the Bush administration would rather fund a policy that limps along by perpetuating a needless civil war, human rights abuses, and other mindless violence and poverty. The North American press pays no attention to speak of at all. Colombian president Uribe, perhaps a well enough intentioned leader, is eluded by the one thing he claims he wants: a peaceful nation.

Roundup

2006-08-16T01:23:00.000-07:00

Just bits and pieces today folks:

First up, this guy’s assessment of the fallout from the recent terror arrests in the UK. A bit loud, but he’s basically right. The police anti-terror system we’re got in place basically works—arrests prove it. Were the issue not being effectively dealt with, something a lot worse would be happening. As it happens, I don’t think there’s been a single terror-related death in North America in the last three or four years. (The link’s been drifting around several days now, but I just couldn’t resist.)

The winners from an Iranian contest for Holocaust-themed political cartoons are now pretty easy to find online. The contest was held in response to the Danish cartoon scandal of a while back. The Israeli government news agency had cleverly pre-empted their availability by making some of them available online themselves, with their own commentary. This has been so effective that I’ve had trouble finding any other source. (Surely Google will sort you out if you want one.) In any case, the Danish Mohammed cartoons are here. Both sets are pretty appalling—some of the Holocaust ones are truly bizarre. Nonetheless, free speech being a great thing, I thought I’d pass this along. I’m linking them strictly, as they say, for educational purposes. If you’re easily offended, feel free to read neither.

Lastly, the truce in Lebanon. No particular link for this, but I thought I ought to say something. Hezbollah and Israel have both gone to great lengths to declare victory in the last few days. It seems to me that the conflict, in addition to being needlessly bloody, was monumentally inconclusive for both. Neither achieved their objective, although the military weakening of Hezbollah probably represents a partial if bitter achievement for Israel. This is matched on the other side by Hezbollah’s increased political profiled regionally. Regardless, the only real losers or winners will be the Lebanese people and the Lebanese state—and their fate remains largely to be seen.

This is probably the last entry for a few days, as I’ll be out of town. Have a good weekend and all that. Will probably at it Monday.

Liberal Leadership

2006-08-15T02:49:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of Maurizio Bevilacqua’s withdrawal from the liberal leadership race, here are some predictions.

1. There will be no surprises. One of the four perceived frontrunners (Dion, Ignatieff, Kennedy, Rae) will win.

2. It’ll probably be Ignatieff or Kennedy.

3. Ignatieff wins if he can overcome his association with the war in Iraq (his fumbling on the war in Lebanon doesn’t bode well for this).

4. Kennedy wins if Ignatieff can’t overcome this, or if there is a strong enough anyone-but-Ignatieff vote, or if Rae fairs poorly in the first ballot and drops out to support him, as the other leading left-progressive candidate.

5. Rae wins only if Kennedy does poorly early on. Unlikely, in my view--Rae is likely to be be dragged by his status as a fence-jumper, and by the ghost of Rae Days. Bevilacqua's support cuts both ways, insofar as it brings in a small number of outside supporters, but risks alienating progressives because of Bevilacqua's right-leaning program.

6. Dion wins only if there is a need for a consensus candidate after several ballots. The advantage of his status as the only Quebecois candidate is dulled by his attachment to the Clarity Act.

7. Anyone else wins only if there is a need for a consensus candidate and none of the four frontrunners will do for some reason. This is quite unlikely in my view, but if it happens it’ll be Dryden, who has a clean record and a warm public image. Anyone else is pretty much in it to network at the convention at this point.

8. It'll probably be Kennedy, in the end. He is, quite simply, the frontrunner with the least baggage, and has momentum at the moment. Being a provincial Liberal makes him at once an outsider and an insider to the federal party. He represents a clean break for the party, an appeal to young voters, and an oppoartunity to snag NDP votes. None of the other three have his balance of electoral advantages without hindrances to match.

A more interesting question is what happens if the Liberals don’t win the next election. The new leader could become unpopular easily (none of these guys are exactly stars, barring Ignatieff marginally). The real prize might go to the runner up—the chance to enter the next leadership race with an edge.

Karimova Video

2006-08-14T00:23:00.000-07:00

Gulnara "GooGoosha" Karimova's music video, thanks to YouTube. Simply too weird for words (and rather expensive looking for the Uzbek market). It comes much recommended. Here, again, is a link to the relevant BBC story, and to an Uzbek source. Thanks to Farrah for the link.

Turkey, EU, Genocide

2006-08-13T00:40:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a pretty good 15 minute or so video interview with Turkish author Orhan Pamuk here. Subjects covered include Turkish EU accession, the Armenian genocide and the author's legal troubles to do with his public comments about it.

Uzbek Popular Music

2006-08-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

Apparently Gulnara Karimova is to Central Asian dictatorships what Paris Hilton is to the American hotel business. No, really--I'm not kidding. Read on.

Congo Again

2006-08-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

“People here see their state primarily as a predator. It is not there to serve its citizens but to run a massive extortion racket… In a recent survey carried out by the World Bank, Congolese were asked how they would treat the state if it was a person. “Kill him” was a frequent reply.”

—Jason Stearns and Michela Wong, International Crisis Group, in the Financial Times

We don’t know who won the Congolese elections yet, and we might not for a little while yet. Given the wait, it might be worth reflecting on a few things that are likely more important than the result itself.

First, the quote above suggests that the state itself in DRC appears to be in the midst of a worrying transition. It has emerged from abject state failure, insofar as violence has abated and some order returned across most of the country. However, it is becoming something not much better—a predatory state, providing few if any basic public goods, and praying on the socioeconomic wellbeing of the population through a pattern of bribery and extortion. The state has stopped doing nothing, but it isn’t doing much for the population. It’s doing things to people. Regardless of who is in power, a significant campaign of reform and reconstruction is badly needed in the most basic areas: security, health care, the prevention of hunger.

Second, the election result is a lot less important than the perception that it was reasonably fair. This is holding up pretty well so far. A perception of fairness will determine whether or not the result is peacefully accepted by an important constituency—the many losing candidates, who will be relied upon to fall in line behind the newly legitimized government. Given how many of them were until recently criminals, warlords, and the like, this is a big question. It's also important that accusations of vote mishandling are taken seriously and publicly cleared up. A perception that the election result was an inside job in which the international community acquiesced would not be a good thing for anyone.

Lastly, turnout matters. Voter turnout was high in the recent constitutional referendum. The legitimacy of the election, and the prospects for elections in future, depend not only on the cooperation of candidates, but on the level of participation.

This last point seems already to have been a success. Turnout was apparently fairly high again, suggesting that the population is serious about democracy, and that they believe it will help improve their standard of living. They probably believe this in part because it has been a large component of the international community’s message to them. The relative success of the elections so far is significant, but it isn’t everything. If the rest of the world fails to ensure follow through on developmental issues, irreparable damage will be done to Congolese faith in democratic governance as a vehicle for reconstruction.

New Torture Law

2006-08-10T00:04:00.000-07:00

The folks in the Bush administration have belatedly discovered the meaning of the word ‘prudence’.

A new draft law will protect some US personnel retroactively from legal action, by removing from existing law some tactics used in interrogations by the CIA and others. The draft, an amendment to legislation enacting the Geneva conventions, would remove the Geneva protection against “outrages upon personal dignity”: eg, the wearing of hoods, sexual humiliation, and so on.

The logic is reasonable enough. If something (the law) threatens your agenda, and you have the power to change it, then that’s what you ought to do. A court ruling in late June that guaranteed Geneva Convention protections to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, thereby confirmed made the use of these tactics there illegal. Given that the practices were entrenched by then, the administration had to protect itself and its people.

This is really just fairly basic political science. According to Hobbes, in the Leviathan, there is no distinction between the law and the sovereign—no distance between the content of law and the will of the government. Constitutional government is supposed to mitigate this, by imposing checks, balances, and so on, not least in this case the power of the Supreme Court to rule the actions of the executive branch illegal.

The effort to legalize certain instances of torture after the fact belongs to an ongoing pattern by Dick Chaney and his aids to cut through limitations on the power of the executive branch (they actually believe that the post-Watergate blocks again Whitehouse abuses of power were a mistake). It probably shouldn’t be surprising that this is going on. If you’re convinced that your right, and enough people appear to disagree with you (and are therefore wrong), then you’d better do what you can to protect your position.

What is worrying is how well it seems to be working. That an unpopular president and his inner circle are willing to short circuit the existing separation of powers to protect themselves probably comes naturally. That they might succeed is cause for alarm.

Kyrgyzstan:

2006-08-08T02:24:00.000-07:00

A popular Imam has been killed in Southern Kyrgyzstan, in what the state has reported as an attack on Islamic militants in the area. Two members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan appear to have been killed along with him. His family has denied his involvement with the group.

Kyrgyzstan is an unhappy country. It is troubled by an assortment of things left behind by Russian colonialism, in both its Tsarist and communist forms: poverty, corruption, crumbling infrastructure and rampant alcoholism.

It’s the only one of the former Soviet Central Asian states to have meaningfully cast off the remnants of communism. A couple of years back, they booted out the Soviet era ‘elected’ president in a more or less bloodless revolution. Instead of improving, though, the country’s been on a slow slide ever since. The government lost control of the prison system a while back, and for a time literally pulled all the guards out of the jails. Poverty, corruption and alcoholism have remained entrenched. Law and order have been in broad-based decline for years. The elected post-revolutionary government (in fact anointed when the two chief rivals for the presidency cut a deal) has proven unable to address any of this.

Perhaps these other failures help explain why the government has begun to attack Islamic fundamentalism with such gusto. As a foreign relations issue it’s a winner—Washington, Moscow, and the neighbors in Uzbekistan are all actively fighting it as well. It also works as a reliable domestic issue, insofar and almost any violence can be blamed on extremists.

However, rapprochement with the post-communist dictatorship of Uzbekistan might prove the new Kyrgyz government’s big mistake. The Karimov government in Tashkent represents everything the Kyrgyz revolution stood against—corruption, institutional violence, and an intrusive, totalitarian state that does almost nothing for its own people. Karimov appears to fear Islamists more than anything else, and rightly so. Armed extremism is the only channel of opposition open in a country where all peaceful resistance to the government is crushed. It’s the only serious challenge he faces.

So why would the Kyrgyz government associate with him? Well, no one likes to make an enemy of one’s neighbors, and Islamists are a genuine cause of instability in both countries. But the country might be better to attack the root causes of the issue—most pressingly, the grinding poverty that affects a large portion of the population. The country has serious unaddressed social issues, including unemployment, ethnic tensions, collapsed infrastructure and substance abuse—Afghan heroine has now joined vodka among the nation’s drugs of choice. The government needs to give its youth less reason to turn to violence.

Cozying up to the dictator next door and killing the clergy won’t do it.

Middle East, etc:

2006-08-07T01:37:00.000-07:00

Some Iran stuff. Here are Seymour Hersh’s two excellent (and rather frightening) articles for the New Yorker on the prospect of an American military action in Iran, one on the planning and another on the military chain of command’s resistance to the prospect. Neither are exactly brand new, but are extremely insightful. Anyone who hasn’t read ‘em should. Here’s a listing of Iranian and Iranian diaspora blogs. Also, some neat-o Iranian graffiti. Lastly, for anyone wanting to make travel plans, may I suggest the following: the Wikitravel article and a service for procuring an Iranian visa.

Back in Canada, something else I’ve let slide a bit. Michael Ignatieff’s reading of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict has gotten a bit uglier since I last wrote on it. Or maybe it always was—its hard to tell with him, frankly. Here’s a blog entry that quotes him extensively and criticizes well (if a bit harshly), and here’s Bob Rae and some others responding a few days ago. More recent analysis in the Ottawa Citizen and background to Canadian foreign policy in the region in the Toronto Star. A previous post of mine and the blog entry linked above both have access to a Star piece on the other 10 candidates views.

Lastly, rather a long way from the Middle East, the deputy leader of the Maoist insurgents in Nepal has announced that peace talks there are at the verge of collapse. The issue seems to be the fate of the Monarchy (whether it will recede to figurehead status or vanish entirely). On the other hand, they seem to be moving along nicely on the question of arms, on both sides. The Maoist announcement itself is probably not surprising exactly—there were bound to difficult patches on issues like this, and it might well just be a way to pressure the provisional government. A more interesting question might be what Maoists are doing making public statements to meetings of business leaders (see the first link). Doesn’t exactly suggest canonical communist values at work.

Citizen Mel

2006-08-05T01:06:00.000-07:00

I just couldn't resist.