Maybe it's time to start panicking

The Nation:

The Nation has learned that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have issued orders for a major "strike group" of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1...

Colonel Gardiner, who has taught military strategy at the National War College, says that the carrier deployment and a scheduled Persian Gulf arrival date of October 21 is "very important evidence" of war planning. He says, "I know that some naval forces have already received 'prepare to deploy orders' [PTDOs], which have set the date for being ready to go as October 1. Given that it would take about from October 2 to October 21 to get those forces to the Gulf region, that looks about like the date" of any possible military action against Iran. (A PTDO means that all crews should be at their stations, and ships and planes should be ready to go, by a certain date--in this case, reportedly, October 1.) Gardiner notes, "You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It's a very significant order, and it's not done as a training exercise." This point was also made in the Time article....

"I think the plan's been picked: bomb the nuclear sites in Iran," says Gardiner. "It's a terrible idea, it's against US law and it's against international law, but I think they've decided to do it." Gardiner says that while the United States has the capability to hit those sites with its cruise missiles, "the Iranians have many more options than we do: They can activate Hezbollah; they can organize riots all over the Islamic world, including Pakistan, which could bring down the Musharraf government, putting nuclear weapons into terrorist hands; they can encourage the Shia militias in Iraq to attack US troops; they can blow up oil pipelines and shut the Persian Gulf." Most of the major oil-producing states in the Middle East have substantial Shiite populations, which has long been a concern of their own Sunni leaders and of Washington policy-makers, given the sometimes close connection of Shiite populations to Iran's religious rulers.

And if that weren't enough, there's this to worry about:

Of course, Gardiner agrees, recent ship movements and other signs of military preparedness could be simply a bluff designed to show toughness in the bargaining with Iran over its nuclear program. But with the Iranian coast reportedly armed to the teeth with Chinese Silkworm antiship missiles, and possibly even more sophisticated Russian antiship weapons, against which the Navy has little reliable defenses, it seems unlikely the Navy would risk high-value assets like aircraft carriers or cruisers with such a tactic. Nor has bluffing been a Bush MO to date.

I have to say, I'm a bit skeptical. During the Gulf War, the navy was extremely concerned about their carriers, to the point of frustrating Schwarzkopf with their timidity. Now the Iranian missile threat is real enough, so I'm kind of puzzled why the Navy would order the Eisenhower in to the Gulf, rather than keeping it out in the Arabian Sea. It's also weird because, given the bases in Iraq, America doesn't need a whole lot of cover in Iran's west. Assuming the Nation's info is accurate, it seems that the Navy isn't as worried about the missile threat as I am. Take that as you will -- either well-earned confidence, or hubris. I'd be surprised if the Iranians managed to sink a ship (though ask the British what it's like to be surprised like that) but a ship can be damaged and rendered inoperative short of sinking it. I don't want to be a sailor in the Ike battle group if the Iranians get a lucky shot off.

A Convenient Lie

In comments, Kursk writes about Vic Toews' hatred for Charter Rights:

You do know that this is a common place way of conducting a trial in Quebec...It's based on the Napleonic code of reverse burden of proof.

This is one of those things that gets said, and everyone says "yeah, I heard that too."

It's false. Simply false.

The Quebec (provincial) Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms says the following:

33. Every accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law.

Moreover, it's silly to think this could be true, at least since the Canadian Charter was brought in. Whether Quebec signs or not, the Constitution is in force, and the Supreme Court has the right to strike down any aspect of Quebec law. More importantly, criminal law is within federal jurisdiction, so any criminal conviction would by definition be under the Charter. If Canadian citizens were being presumed guilty, it would be flatly unconstitutional, and would be struck down.

It's not even clear to me that this is true of Civil Code legal systems in general - Wikipedia says this is a common misperception about the Civil Code.

Now, having shown himself to be ignorant of basic matters of Canadian law, it might be gratuitous to keep the spotlight on Kursk, but here's the rest of his comment:

And really,if you have been convicted of previous violent crimes,and are therefore a violent recidivist,what problem do you have in making this person prove to the courts why he does not belong in jail?

It has been the lefts soft approach on crime that has led to this..too many people walking the streets that should be in jail,but are free to roam and cause mayhem because of lax and short sentences.

Right... because the courts never make mistakes, the innocent are never convicted, and the constitution says clearly that Canadian citizens lose their inherent rights after the third criminal conviction. I'm sure it must, or else Kursk here would just look like an idiot.

But he's right about one thing - it's all the left's fault that criminals are on the loose. I know - living in Canada's biggest city - that I can't step out my door without being mugged or raped. I live in constant terror of being shot or stabbed.

Look, Canada has real problems, and some of them even involve violent criminals. But if we actually want to "get tough" (as if prison is currently a spa) then simply increase the sentences. I don't think it will work, but that at least would be logical. This - undermining basic constitutional rights for an election campaign - is just stupid. And did I mention the constitution?

Interesting

Ezra has a post about a New Republic article that seems to be behind their paywall:

In late 2000, even as the result of the presidential election was still being contested in court, George W. Bush's chief pollster Matt Dowd was writing a memo for Rove that would reach a surprising conclusion. Based on a detailed examination of poll data from the previous two decades, Dowd's memo argued that the percentage of swing voters had shrunk to a tiny fraction of the electorate. Most self-described "independent" voters "are independent in name only," Dowd told me in an interview describing his memo. "Seventy-five percent of independents vote straight ticket" for one party or the other. Once such independents are reclassified as Democrats or Republicans, a key trend emerges: Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of true swing voters fell from a very substantial 24 percent of the electorate to just 6 percent. In other words, the center was literally disappearing. Which meant that, instead of having every incentive to govern as "a uniter, not a divider," Bush now had every reason to govern via polarization.

This ran counter to Rove's previous thinking. In 2000, he had dismissed the tactic of running on divisive issues like patriotism, crime, and welfare as "an old paradigm." And Bush had followed his advice by explicitly reaching out to the center-left. For instance, during the campaign, he held a press conference with a dozen gay Republicans and sharply criticized the GOP Congress for a plan to save money by slowing distribution of tax credits for the working poor. But Dowd's memo changed all that.

I've always thought the idea about the "independent voter" has been the most ridiculous concept in American politics. Repeated articles have shown that the most flexible voters are also the least informed, the least rational, and the most likely to be susceptible to negative advertising. We disdain partisans in modern politics, but the reality is we'd be in better hands with a government of partisans than one of "independents". These people don't know what they want, nor how to get it.

I keep reading Democracy

With better results this time. G. John Ikenberry (whose name sounds like it should be a down-home folk song) argues that America is in a "security trap" because it has failed to properly build a role in the international order. Instead, the US - before, and probably after, Bush - has insisted on a unilateral excercise of power without any meaningful constraints on US actions since the fall of the Berlin Wall. So far, so good. But what is this "security trap", you ask? Ikenberry explains:

Because of this, the Bush Administration has run into trouble–as I would put it, the United States has gotten caught in a "security trap." When America tries to solve the nation’s security problems by exercising its power or using force, it tends to produce resistance and backlash that leaves the country bereft of authority, isolated, and ultimately more insecure than it was before it acted.

No no no no no. America has never gotten "in to trouble" because of a use of military force in a legitimate security matter. The Persian Gulf war was a legitimate military matter, and the US solved it using US force. Controversial? No. The Balkans were not a conventional military problem, but the international community accepted that peacekeeping was no longer working, so NATO was allowed to bring Serbia to the table first at Dayton, then later with Kosovo. The attacks of Sept. 11 made the invasion of Afghanistan entirely uncontroversial at the time, to say the least.

(This isn't to say that even the "uncontroversial" examples I cited above were without dissent, only that on balance the international community accepted them at the time, or very shortly after the fact.)

America gets in to problems not when it uses it's power for security problems, but when it uses its power for non-security problems. I want to put this very clearly for Sensible Liberals out there: the price of oil, and the volume of oil available for purchase, is not a military matter. It is a matter for the marketplace to decide, and the Carter Doctrine is therefore a prescription for the illegitimate use of American force. Far, far too many Americans confuse their national interest (which the price of oil arguably is) with a military matter (which it absolutely is not.) Countries all over the world have learned to pursue their national interest without brute displays of power. I'm sure America can learn.

How much easier would American lives be today if there had never been a permanent American presence in Saudi Arabia?

Worse still, the American military demands the widest possible spectrum of violence to prosecute Washington's demands - keeping America out of both the ICC and the land mines treaty. So not only does Washington demand the right to settle non-military matters with military force, they give the military the cover to do so without the restrictions that the rest of the liberal world agrees to. This is why America has gotten in to a security trap - because Washington has insisted on using power for illegitimate ends, and has done so condoning illegitimate means.

Vic Toews is a neanderthal

...who couldn't start a fire if you gave him two stones, kindling, and a can of gasoline. None of that is news, however. What's news is that he also hates the Canadian constitution:

OTTAWA -- The federal government is preparing three-strikes legislation that would make it easier to label criminals as dangerous offenders after a third serious conviction.

Unlike California's famous three-strikes-you're-out law, the proposed federal bill will not trigger an automatic life sentence for repeat offenders. What it will do is reverse the burden of proof in dangerous-offender hearings for people already found guilty of three violent crimes.

That means that once someone has been convicted a third time they will be considered guilty until proven innocent of being a dangerous offender.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

11. Any person charged with an offence has the right... d) to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal

Obviously, there's a difference between sentencing and criminal guilt, but even in sentencing the presumption of innocence stands.

If any kind of sense prevails at the Supreme Court, this law will be struck down. I think the Tories know that, and I think they know it will be a hard on to pass in any case. Frankly, I don't think they expect it to pass this parliament. They're setting up an issue to run an election campaign on next time.

Keep your heads up, everyone.

Reason #1,356 why I can never be a (International Relations) liberal

I've mentioned before that I do not, naturally, find myself comfortable in the same club as Henry Kissinger. Yet the sometimes incredibly frustrating thinking of American liberals drives me to shrill, unholy realism. The latest example comes from the Journal Democracy, where Naazneen Barma and Ely Ratner write that China poses a unique and novel ideological challenge to America's liberal hegemony. But this is a rather long post, so I've hidden the rest of it here.

To break down their argument:

• "The rise of China presents the West, for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, with a formidable ideological challenge to that paradigm."
• "The "China model" powerfully combines two components: illiberal capitalism, the practice and promotion of a governance strategy where markets are free but politics are not;..."
• "...and illiberal sovereignty, an approach to international relations that emphasizes the inviolability of national borders in the face of international intervention."

First of all, if there is a "China model", then there's a "Korean model", a "Taiwan model", a "Japan model" and a "Singapore model" too. Not to mention a "Spanish model", a "Brazilian model", an "Argentinian model" as well. All of these countries combined illiberal capitalism and a demand for inviolable national sovereignty throughout their history as well. In Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, it turned out that illiberal capitalism was unsustainable - increasing wealth led for demands of political change. You would think at the very least, having raised the Asian tigers as examples of countries where growth produced democratic regimes, you would then have to explain why the same doesn't apply to China. Barma and Ratner concede that some China moderates make this argument - that economic growth will make China a more friendly nation - and effectively ignore it for the rest of their article.

This is an important point: Barma and Ratner are arguing that China poses a present and future ideological rival to the United States, but nowhere do they state or argue that China's current authoritarian government is sustainable over the long term. The most they say is that

Although Western analysts often have claimed to see the buds of freedom–such as in the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, the spread of Internet usage since the mid-1990s, and the recent uptick in rural social protests–the regime’s grip on power has yet to crack, and liberty has yet to blossom. Underpinning its state-controlled capitalist experiment, the Chinese Communist Party has constructed a new rationale for totalitarian political rule that no longer relies on Marxist economic ideology.

Okay, here it's important to use proper words. The first important point is that calling the surge in rural protests an "uptick" is like calling the 2004 Asian tsunami "kind of a big wave." From the Rand Corporation:

The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) reports that the number of mass incidents (e.g. various forms of protest) has skyrocketed from about 8,700 in 1993, to 32,000 in 1999, to about 50,000 in 2002, and surpassing 58,000 in 2003 (See table in Appendix). Especially noteworthy has been the steady rate of increase: protest incidents have apparently increased every year since 1993 (although 2001 data are unavailable), and in no year did they increase by less than 9 percent.

Nobody thinks that the current levels of protests threaten the regime, but we aren't seeing the protests level off, or even slow down. We're seeing exponential growth in protests, doubling in volume in less than a decade. For Ratner and Barma to dismiss this is astonishingly dishonest.

Secondly, the current Chinese regime is authoritarian and illiberal without question. But it is "totalitarian" only if we define "totalitarian" so broadly as to be meaningless. Indeed, the historical trend is exactly the opposite of what B&R charge - since the reforms of the 1970s, China has become a far more "privatized" society in the sense that religious freedoms and other forms of association outside of the Chinese Communist Party have become far more common. Outside of politics, it is possible to form independent associations (obviously, there are limits to these freedoms.) This is the exact opposite of the traditional definition of totalitarian - where all forms of social organization are controlled by the state.

Aside from their linguistic sloppiness, B&R engage in some truly stupid association:

As a result, Chinese illiberalism is fast becoming a popular export throughout the developing world, even to those who don’t expect to replicate its dramatic success. In South America, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales have embraced the China model. The latter visited China in January 2006 less than a month after being elected and, when asked why he had made the trip, Morales explained that he considered China a "political, ideological, and programmatic ally of the Bolivian people." In the Middle East, Iran’s conservative media have explicitly advocated following a "China Model" of development in the wake of President Mohammad Khatami’s failed reformist agenda. Iranian diplomats have traveled to Beijing to learn more about China’s governance strategy, subsequently returning to help the government enact components of illiberal capitalism, such as reaching out to foreign investors while clamping down on political dissent at home. In Africa, Nigeria has been drawn by the luster of what its Senate president called "a good model for Nigeria in its quest for an authentic and stable development ideology."

Boy, you'd think that Latin America had no history of charismatic populists using resource nationalism as the foundation of their power. And I'm sure that, until they visited Beijing, the Iranian Mullahs had never thought of shutting down newspapers or interfering with elections before. Yup, if it weren't for China, the Venezuelan and Bolivian poor would be just so happy to sell their oil to the US at $5/barrel, and pro-American (and dare I say it, pro-Israeli?) liberals would have won the last elections in Tehran. This kind of thinking is idiotic, and is beneath serious liberal thinking.

Moreover, it simply isn't liberal. Liberals are supposed to believe that humans are rational creatures with agency. Morales and Chavez have faced popular challenges, the democratic process, and have retained the majority support of the populations of their countries. That's simply a fact. Nobody except the embittered Venezuelan opposition seriously contends that these elections were rigged. So presented with that fact, you can either conclude that a) it's possible for leaders to do things American liberals disagree with, and still retain democratic legitimacy, or b) anyone who does anything that American liberals disagree with is by definition an autocrat in league with the ChiComs. Guess which one Barma and Ratner choose?

A side note: If Beijing really were capable of exporting "illiberal capitalism", you'd think that as a first step they'd have sold the Chinese people on it. They manifestly have not:

Chinese authorities have shut down an online survey that found most respondents would prefer a different nationality if they were born again.... Of the more than 10,000 respondents, 64% said they would not want to be Chinese if they were reincarnated. The main reason, given by almost 40% of the respondents, was that Chinese citizens lacked human dignity.

Chinese "illiberal capitalism" doesn't even pose a serious ideological challenge in China, yet Barma and Ratner want us to believe it has global reach.

So at this point, Barma and Ratner have argued that China poses a new, long-term ideological rival to liberalism (false, or at least highly questionable) and that illiberal capitalism is new, dangerous, and is being exported by China to the developing world (simply false.) The final claim - that "illiberal sovereignty" undermines (American) "democratic liberalism" is similarly unsound. Basically, B&R argue that because of Beijing's largesse with foreign aid, the IMF and the World Bank can no longer force developing countries to adopt Washington's preferred policies on trade and human rights. This, according to B&R, is a bad thing. There's so much sloppiness here that we've got to take this one at a time.

1) When liberals say that Washington was promoting "trade and human rights" throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it's as noxious a rhetorical ploy as when Republicans say there's a problem with "Social Security and Medicare." There is no fundamental problem with SS, and a massive one with Medicare. Lumping them together is deliberately dishonest and serves an obvious political purpose. Similarly, there is no combined "trade and human rights" treaty. What there was, for almost all of the 1980s and 1990s, was a strict, enforceable, multilateral organization devoted to expanding trade, privatizing services, and opening countries to foreign investors. During the same time, there was only the barest, unenforceable, fig-leaf of a commitment to human rights. Washington's priorities were clear, and it wasn't making sure that Indonesians could vote.

2) There was never any coherent form of "liberal sovereignty" for China to undermine, even if we concede that's what China is doing. Washington aided and abetted the mass killings in Turkey and East Timor, and never tried to intervene against the Russians in Chechnya. During the same time, America twice went to war in Yugoslavia to stop the killing there. Given the respective contexts of these decisions, all of these actions may all be defensible, but they certainly can't fit in to any coherent idea of liberal sovereignty. Barma and Ratner:

Unlike the United States and Europe, China does not subscribe to evolving international norms of multilateral intervention on the grounds of human rights and political freedoms, does not promote democracy overseas, does not demand open markets from its trading partners, and does not advocate selective violations of a nation’s sovereignty even in the extreme cases of genocide and the harboring of terrorists.

Here's the thing: neither did the United States or Europe until maybe 10 years ago. The idea of "selective sovereignty" only became accepted by the United Nations last year as part of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine. It is still incredibly controversial around the world, and highly contentious. Hell, I find the idea troubling some days. The fact that China does not agree with this idea is not an ideological challenge, unless - once again - simply disagreeing with American liberals makes you an autocrat. And American liberals need to stop talking about "promoting democracy overseas" for a while. Just sayin'.

3) There's no mystery to why China is finding so many countries willing, nay eager, to abandon the IMF and World Bank programs - they have singularly failed to produce the rapid growth that the developing world needs. Period. Full stop. Mark Weisbrot & Dean Baker, 2001:

Economic growth over the last twenty years, the period during which the policies advocated by the authors (and their institution) have been put into place, has been dramatically reduced. It may well be true, as Dr. Dollar argues, that "to ignore the importance of growth-enhancing policies is an injustice to the poor."[5] But to assume that the World Bank and the IMF have brought "growth-enhancing policies" to their client countries goes against the overwhelming weight of the evidence over the last two decades....

By any measure of economic performance, the last two decades have shown these rigid applications of orthodox economic theory to be a failure. Rather than defending this record of failure, the Bank and Fund researchers should be trying to discover what has gone wrong. And most importantly, they should allow governments to pursue their own, country-specific paths to growth and development.

The results of IMF policies since that paper was published have been even worse (Argentina, anyone?) Furthermore, note Baker and Weisbrot's emphasis that development policies should allow countries "their own... paths to growth." Gee, sounds an awful lot like the sovereignty of national governments should be respected, don't you think?

So there was only a laughable attempt by Washington to promote human rights, there was never any coherent formulation of "liberal democratic sovereignty" for China to undermine, and even if that's exactly what China is doing, it might actually be a good thing for the poor of the world.

All told, Barma and Ratner have made not a single argument that can stand on it's own, and they certainly can't support their claim that China poses a unique or novel ideological threat western liberalism. What, then, is this argument really about? Ah, here we are:

Thus, rather than arguing over how best to guide, manipulate, or suppress China’s power, the United States must meet the illiberal challenge head-on. The continued ideological dominance of democratic liberalism is crucial to the permanence and projection of American power, and to creating a world that lives up to universal ideals of freedom, equality, and justice.

This is the nut of the issue, isn't it? American liberals have yet to formulate a foreign policy that doesn't rely on continuing the "permanence and projection of American power", as they put it. (Though Matthew Yglesias seems to be trying.) The growth of China's influence in the world may (or may not) be a threat to America's power, but it's hard for non-American leftists and liberals to see that as a bad thing either way. It's especially hard for countries who have been on the receiving end of American power to regret Washington's diminished importance.

Barma and Ratner want the rest of the world to weep for the end of American hegemony as much as they do, and they're not above trying to scare us about China to do so. It's factually wrong, it's logically incoherent, and it's dangerous to boot.

How very Republican of them.

All done!

The Hell?

Israel is training Kurds? This isn't going to end well.

The BBC has obtained evidence that Israelis have been giving military training to Kurds in northern Iraq.

A report on the BBC TV programme Newsnight showed Israeli experts in northern Iraq, drilling Kurdish militias in shooting techniques.

Kurdish officials have refused to comment on the report and Israel has denied it knows of any involvement.

Because obviously, if you want a sustainable government in the heart of the Muslim world, your best bet has got to be tying yourself to Israel.

My guess is the Kurds have decided that "Iraq" as a state won't survive the American departure. They're probably right, but they've also obviously planned on some kind of Kurdish state surviving post-Iraq. That's... unlikely. The only thing that Shia and Sunni in Iraq agree on is that the Kurds can't have a state. Hell, it's something Syria, Turkey, and Iran all agree on too. Simply put, the Kurdish state will be a very short-lived creature indeed. If that weren't already true, the propaganda bonus of having the Kurds tied to Israel will guarantee that after the dust settles between the Iraqi Shia and Sunni, the victors will turn on the Kurds.

The big question for me is this: Israel and Turkey have been - perhaps until now - very close. As close as a Jewish and Muslim state can be, at any rate. Israeli politicians have publicly, and forcefully, defended Turkey against charges of genocide against the Armenians, among other things. But the one thing Turkey cannot abide is a Kurdish state on it's southern frontier. The Turks have already waged a Chechnya-style war against their own Kurds, killing 30,000, and the idea that Israel (Turkey's close ally) is arming the Kurds can't sit well.

So why is Israel doing this? I don't see any percentage in this unless a) the American government has demanded it, or b) Israel has (correctly, if coldly) decided that they're safer if Iraq is never put back together again.

Wish I had caught it

Tim at POGGE (see, I reference properly!) brings us this nugget:

Asked point-blank whether the United States is winning in Iraq, Abizaid replied: "Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we're winning the war."

Well it's a good thing that America has unlimited time and unlimited support, or else I'd start worrying!

This makes me happy

via Atrios, Eric Boehlert:

Here then, is some much-needed historical perspective to put Bush's standing in context:

* According to Gallup, on the eve of President John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination, he was suffering the worst job-approval ratings of his presidency -- 58 percent.

* In 1968, when the war in Vietnam was claiming hundreds of U.S. casualties each week, President Lyndon Johnson was considered so unpopular that he didn't even run for re-election. Johnson's average Gallup approval rating for that year was 43 percent.

* When Reagan's second term was rocked by the Iran-Contra scandal, his ratings plummeted, all the way down to 43 percent.

* This year, according to the Gallup numbers, Bush has averaged an approval rating of 37 percent.

Things take a turn in Japan

Boy, the LDP really knows how to pick a leader. First the unapologetic dick Koizumi, now a man with even greater levels of dick-ishness, Shinzo Abe surprises no one by winning the leadership of Japan's ruling party.

The article is coy, saying it's "unclear" whether this will affect South Korean and Chinese relations. I'd say it'll become pretty clear the next time Abe opens his mouth about history texts, or goes to Yasukuni.

Arctic, cont.

Woo! The good news comes in faster than I can post it!

The global sea level rise caused by climate change, severely threatening many of the world's coastal and low-lying areas from Bangladesh to East Anglia, is proceeding faster than UN scientists predicted only five years ago, Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, said yesterday....

The present prediction of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from its third assessment report in 2001, is that global sea levels will rise by between 9cm and 88cm by 2100, depending on a number of factors including how far emissions are controlled, with a best guess of about 50cm over the century....

But the new evidence, from a series of scientific papers published this year, indicates that this rate would be exceeded, said Professor Rapley, who runs the world's leading institute on Antarctic science - although he could not say what any new rate would be....

Last week, two American studies showed that the melting of the winter sea ice in the Arctic had accelerated enormously in the past two years, with a section the size of Turkey disappearing in just 12 months.

Just so we're clear, Turkey's total surface area: 780,580 km². If that loss of polar ice continues without accelerating - and the whole point is exactly that it is accelerating, but stay with me - the entire arctic polar ice cap (upper range: 12 million km²) would be gone in 15 years. That's probably overstating the case (I imagine the ice cap would reform to a small extent in winter) but nevertheless, the ice-free arctic seems to be coming, whatever we do.

If there's any good news here - and yes, I'm reaching - it's that Canada's northern resources will be more accessible. But don't worry, I'm sure we'll find a way to screw the First Nations like we always do. We've got a reputation to uphold, after all. Additionally, maybe Churchill, Manitoba will finally be the bustling port of call we've always wanted it to be.

Sailing north

...until you can't get north no more. Apparently, scientists were "shocked" to discover that there was an ice-free passage all the way to the North Pole this summer.

PARIS (AFP) - European scientists voiced shock as they showed pictures which showed Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself.

The satellite images were acquired from August 23 to 25 by instruments aboard Envisat and EOS Aqua, two satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Perennial sea ice -- thick ice that is normally present year-round and is not affected by the Arctic summer -- had disappeared over an area bigger than the British Isles, ESA said.

Vast patches of ice-free sea stretched north of Svalbard, an archipelago lying midway between Norway and the North Ple, and extended deep into the Russian Arctic, all the way to the North Pole, the agency said in a press release.

Still, I'm not sure why anyone would be shocked at this point. If it wasn't this summer, it was going to be next. Or the one after that. This, in case you're curious, is the area we're talking about:



Summer ice normally retreats to the north coast of Greenland, but this seems to be new - large bodies of open water large enough to sail a ship in, all the way North.

Bolsheviks

The New Government of Canada? Who do they think they are?

...sorry, stupid question. Obviously, they think they're the New Government of Canada. But last I saw, there've been no Constitutional Ammendments, no changes to Parliament or the Governor General's office. So no, Harper et al. inherited the same mantle as every political party since John A. Macdonald (his poor liver aside, a truly great Tory), the Government of Canada.

It's a trifle, I admit. But it's stupid, and it's wrong. Part of the legitimacy of democratic governance comes from continuity, not disruption.

Can you do anything? No? Then STFU.

Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, gets the "heartless contrarian award" for the day, writing about Darfur:

To call the conflict genocide is wrong, unless the word now covers any ethnic war. This is a separatist struggle in which land, religion, clan and mere survival brought people into contention; in which tens of thousands died and from which hundreds of thousands fled. We can sympathise, but what is the point of telling such peoples to stop squabbling and behave? How would we react if they lectured us on Northern Ireland?...

If Sierra Leone, why not Somalia? If East Timor, why not Aceh? Why so tolerant of that nuclear host to terror, dictatorial Pakistan, and so hysterical about semi-democratic Iran? It is no good muttering that we cannot be everywhere. We can at least talk the talk. Kant's moral imperative must be universalisable or it loses all force as both a rule and a deterrent....

The swelling chorus of something-must-be-done-in-Darfur argues that bombast "raises awareness". They ask, what would I do about the janjaweed, and what about the 1.9 million refugees? My answer to the first is identical in substance to theirs: nothing really. They just get the T-shirt. The janjaweed are not in my country, not my business and, most important, not a problem within my power to solve.

It's worth remembering that while we call it genocide, Jenkins is right - Darfur has many of the marks of what's going on in Iraq right now. (Calm down, wingnuts: I'm talking about sectarian violence, not the Americans.) One is being called genocide, the other is conspicuously not. Meanwhile, even when we call it genocide, that's pretty much where we limit our actions - hollering from the sidelines. Nevermind that as signatories to the Convention Against Genocide, the United States is required - with or without the UN - to prevent or end genocide where it sees it. As a rhetorical device, it's useful for Bush. As an effective strategy, rhetorical devices generally suck.

Gwynne Dyer: Pope is a douchebag

Well, not his words exactly, but he makes a strong case that yes, the current Pope is, in fact, an anti-Islamic bigot and isn't just being misinterpreted. Have at it:

Just before he became pope last year, Benedict declared that Turkey should not be allowed into the European Union because its Islamic culture is incompatible with Europe's "Christian" culture. But the real case for the prosecution rests on his invitation to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci to visit him last September.

Fallaci (who died last week) was an atheist, and her fame as a war correspondent and interviewer was decades behind her. But she carved out a second career as the most extreme anti-Muslim writer in Europe, producing two bestselling books since 2002 that vilified Muslims as dirty subhumans who multiply "like rats," and portraying Islam as an irrational religion that breeds hatred....

So now we know that the new pope is a parochial and intolerant man -- but anybody who paid attention to Cardinal Ratzinger's previous career knew that already. Now he is in a position to do much more damage.

I don't have the stength of will to resist

I read this story yesterday, and something - maybe you'll notice it too - stuck out to me, but I thought it was nothing and let it pass.

After she became pregnant by a man who is now in jail, her parents allegedly resorted to extreme tactics: Police say they tied her up with rope, gagged her with duct tape, and put her in the family Lexus and drove her across state lines, intent on forcing her to have an abortion.

The parents -- prominent Portland, Maine, property owners Nicolas KAMPF, 54, and Lola KAMPF, 53 -- were arrested Friday at a strip mall in Salem, N.H., after their daughter escaped and called police.

I figured I was being silly, so I let it pass and moved on. Then today, I read this:

SALEM, New Hampshire (AP) -- A Maine couple accused of tying up their 19-year-old daughter, throwing her in their car and driving her out of state to get an abortion were upset because the baby's father is black, a Maine sheriff said Tuesday.

Uh-huh. Kampfy kampf kampf. Where have I heard that before. Oh yeah...

Lying bastards

John Bolton, on CNN just now, says that Iran can't reasonably want to replace oil and natural gas with nuclear power because they've got "300 to 400 years of oil and gas left."

Gee, if only there were a US government institution that could confirm the known liar Bolton's words. Say, the CIA:

Oil - production: 3.979 million bbl/day
Oil - proved reserves: 133.3 billion bbl
Reserves/Production: 33,500 days (91 years)

So plenty of time left. But it would be nice if we could trust that the government of the United States had the math skills of a fourth-grader.

At least in one sense, Bolton and the US position is right - it makes no sense to replace oil and gas with nuclear, and I do believe that Iran is probably covering for a weapons program. That said, it's a cover they're allowed under international law, and the program is probably a decade or more away from being usable. This is not a crisis, except for the fact that Bush is facing election troubles. Why Iranians should die for that is left for you to figure out.

From the mailbag - longish post

Olaf, in comments, regarding China's unconditional loans vs. the highly-conditional IMF & World Bank loans and aid:

Are these conditions not what the left has been fighting and marching and protesting years to set up, in order to place environmental restrictions on corporations and governments?... I still have to wonder why China is willing to "offer more money at lower prices", but the IMF and WB aren't? I mean, if these loans are likely to be repaid, you'd think the IMF and WB would be interested, and if they're not likely to be repaid, you wonder why China IS interested.

The left has indeed been marching for some conditions to loans, such as human rights, environmentalism and accountability. On that score, the World Bank and the IMF is still pretty pathetic. The main conditions that the Bretton Woods institutions have added in the last half-decade have been about "corruption", which was dodgy enough to begin with. Post-Enron, post-Worldcom, to have Washington lecture developed countries about corruption and transparency became... less tenable. Maybe not rightly, but that's the facts.

In general, I don't believe the left wanted more conditions on IMF loans - which were already onerous. Maybe different conditions, and less of them. In particular, I think the whole idea of "conditionality" needs to be abandoned when we're talking about some of the poorest places on Earth. Build roads, dams, and whatever else is necessary to give people the basic security that comes from leaving poverty, and then work on more substantive change. Additionally - and this is where the World Bank and the IMF failed miserably - work for development should use indigenous labour as much as possible.

In any case, the biggest plus to China's unconditional loans is that they aren't - as far as I've seen - coming with the baggage of the IMF's structural adjustment programs. These have, since the 1980s, totally dominated the foreign aid scene. There's little evidence they've stabilized the global financial scene, because various crises (Russia, Asia, Argentina, Turkey) all stemmed from following the IMF's advice, not disobedience.

(For some good reading on this score, see Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker, or Robert Wade.)

Why isn't the World Bank or the IMF extending these loans? Probably because the countries in question can't swallow the IMF's conditions, and the IMF is still operating on the mentality that it's the only player that matters. Dean Baker has called the Bretton Woods institutions "the OPEC of money" because between the IMF and the World Bank, they could collectively decide whether a developing country has any access to capital at all. That was a position of incredible power, and they used it pretty mercilessly throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Why is China extending these loans - even if we assume they won't be paid back? Two levels of self-interest here: One, investments that help the Pacific economy function more smoothly are, by definiton, good for China. So even if the loan doesn't get paid back, a bridge over the Mekong connecting Cambodia with southern China is A Good Thing.

The deepwater port the article mentions in Myanmar is part of China's long-term strategy of trying to route as much of its imports as possible in to China without going through the Straits of Malacca - pirate-infested waters when they're not controlled by the Americans. Either way, it makes Beijing nervous. More broadly, Chinese investments in Myanmar's (Burma's) infrastructure, especially roads and bridges, could (and I have no evidence of this, just speculating) be an attempt to increase land trade with India. Currently, all of the main connections between India and China are along the Tibetan plateau, which means the travel times are slow and the passes are treacherous. More serious roads would greatly help Chinese-Indian trade, but it's difficult to carve roads and railways out of mountains. Consider that China just this year opened a rail line to Lhasa in Tibet, after controlling that country for decades.

So land connections along the Chinese-Indian border (Tibet) are possible, but not ideal. That leaves the option of roads and bridges through Myanmar, connecting with Indian trade along the Brahmaputra. There already seem to be road connections, based on this map, but Wikipedia describes Myanmar's economy thusly:

Today, Myanmar lacks adequate infrastructure. Goods travel primarily across the Burmese-Thai border, whence most illegal drugs are exported, and along the Ayeyarwady [Irriwaddy] River. Railroads are old and rudimentary, with few repairs since their construction in the 1800s. Highways are normally unpaved, except in the major cities.

So it's pretty clear Myanmar needs some cash before Chinese-Indian trade can really take off. In theory, a solid system of roads from India, through Myanmar, to Kunming could give Indian exports a much faster route between India and the Pearl River Delta (Guangzhou, Shenzen, Hong Kong) and the southern coast more generally. In theory, increased land traffic in the south would supplement the existing routes which connect India to Chengdu and Chungking in the interior.

Land connections between China and India via Burma have a history, however - the Japanese threatened to invade India during WWII after their quick victory over British, Chinese and American forces in Burma. Anyway, like I said I have no evidence of this, it's all just speculation based on map-reading and some educated guessing.

The second form of self-interest, and I think the more basic explanation for why China is throwing money at loans that may not ever get repaid, is simply that it's in Beijing's interest to make itself look like a more generous, benevolent, less actively imperial agent of development in Asia. This doesn't come cheap, but Beijing isn't trying to spend money everywhere. In Africa and the poorer parts of Asia, China is spending money smartly and creating a wedge between Washington and Beijing. Actually, that's not true: there was already a wedge between Washington and the developing world, created by the IMF and World Bank's arrogant assumption that it could dictate the terms of development ad infinitum. Beijing isn't pushing this wedge - yet - but unless Washington can come up with more attractive money (read: Cheaper and more plentiful) I don't see the US winning this game.

Whenever I write a number of posts about how competently China is playing the geopolitical game, I feel the need to write a disclaimer that, NO, I do not think Beijing is particularly benevolent, and NO I do not like the idea of a powerful authoritarian government supporting governments like Myanmar's or Sudan's. Nevertheless, China is not Doing Bad Things by building dams, roads, and bridges throughout Asia and Africa. Do we like the governments? No. Does that mean the people should live in poverty? Not on your life.

Terrifying

Just when you think they can't get any worse:

At this point, I think I need to bring up what one might call the Craziest Goddamn Thing I've Heard In a Long Time. This story came to me last week from an anonymous individual who I would say is in a position to know about such things. According to this person, the DOD has (naturally) been doing some analysis on airstrikes against Iran. The upshot of the analysis was that conventional bombardment would degrade the Iranian nuclear program by about 50 percent. By contrast, if the arsenal included small nuclear weapons, we could get up to about 80 percent destroying. In response to this, persons inside the Office of the Vice President took the view that we could use the nukes -- in other words, launch an unprovoked nuclear first strike against Iran -- and then simply deny that we'd done so. Detectable radiation in the area of the bombed sites would be attributed to the fact that they were, after all, nuclear facilities we'd just hit.

Does it not occur to them that maybe, just maybe, other people will have observers in Iran? I know they say it will be "small" nuclear weapons, but even a small atomic fireball is pretty distinctive.

God. Remember when the people planning pre-emptive nuclear war were the people we were supposed to hate?

Coup in Thailand

The so-called "Council of Political Reform" they announced is apparently loyal to sacked military commander Lt Gen Sonthi Boonyaratglin and has declared its loyalty to the king.

However, the BBC's Kate McGeown in Bangkok says King Bhumibol is held in high esteem by all Thais, and the declaration of loyalty does not necessarily imply that he backs the takeover attempt.

Some thoughts: 1) After the attempt of King Gyanendra in Nepal, is it possible that the Thai king is trying - despite what the BBC says - is trying for direct rule instead of his current (minor) role? 2) CNN is saying the Army has revoked the constitution, so this sounds like a bad sign. The Thai PM is in New York, saying the coup cannot succeed.

Bad news for the Thais, I suppose.

The (now-deposed?) PM is apparently a bit of a Chavez figure, in the sense that his loyalties lie mainly with the poor, despite an alienated middle class. But all of the above needs the gigantic caveat that my knowledge of Thai politics is about 30 minutes old.

Why China is winning

A simply fantastic article in the NYT about how China is winning hearts and minds across Asia by doing something as breathtakingly rational as opening the purse.

Nearby, engineers from the China Shanghai Construction Group have sunk more than a dozen concrete pylons across a tributary of the mighty Mekong River, a technical feat that will help knit together a 1,200-mile route from the southern Chinese city of Kunming through Laos to the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville on the Gulf of Thailand.

This is the new face of China’s foreign aid to poor Asian countries: difficult construction in remote places that benefits the recipient, and China, too....

For poor countries like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, and somewhat better-off countries like the Philippines, China’s loans are often more attractive than the complicated loans from the West.

The Chinese money usually comes unencumbered with conditions for environmental standards or community resettlement that can hold up major projects. The aid does not carry penalties for corruption that are being increasingly used by the World Bank president, Paul D. Wolfowitz. And China’s offers rarely include the extra freight of expensive consultants, provisions that are common to World Bank projects.

For its part, China benefits from the added infrastructure — roads, ports and bridges — in the underdeveloped but growing region around it, to help increase trade and to move natural resources from China’s periphery to its heartland.

Gee, investment in infrastructure that a) helps the local economy and b) assists China in it's long-term development. It's like the textbook definition of what foreign aid should be, but too often isn't. What's stunning - but shouldn't be - is how successful this strategy is proving, even in places where Washington's influence should make it difficult:

In the Philippines, China is also making a big splash, offering an extraordinary package of $2 billion in loans each year for the next three years from its Export-Import Bank.

That made the $200 million offered separately by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank look puny, officials from those banks said, and easily outstripped a $1 billion loan under negotiation with Japan....

And why did the Phillipines spurn the World Bank and Japan (aside from the obvious reasons above?)

After being a favorite of the Bush White House, the Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, fell out of favor when she pulled her country’s troops out of Iraq in 2004.

Here we have it: a direct example of the war in Iraq totally ruining America's interests in Asia. This isn't exactly Manila falling to the Japanese, but it's a blow to US influence in Asia nonetheless.

There's precious little evidence that the anti-corruption clauses in World Bank and IMF contracts actually have any effect. Hell, there's precious little evidence that corruption affects development - the PRC is notoriously corrupt on a number of levels, but it hasn't slowed China's growth appreciably. All the clauses and caveats that the west has demanded in lending were only acceptable so long as there was no alternative. Now China is providing a competitor in the aid marketplace.

So here's the question: will the free marketeers at the IMF actually try and compete with China by offering more money at lower prices, or will they try and get the powerful governments of the west to rig the marketplace in their own favour?

Yes yes exactly right yes

The Globe and Mail's Barrie McKenna makes me happy first thing in the morning:

The flavour of the month is to dump on the peak oil thesis -- that world oil production has maxed out and is condemned to fall.... In the past few weeks, as the price of oil has plunged more than 20 per cent from July's record high of more than $78 (U.S.) a barrel, economists have begun to second-guess and even joke about what last year was considered sound analysis.

On Friday, BMO Nesbitt Burns issued a report about the implications of cheaper oil titled Trough Oil Theory. After Chevron announced its recent big Jack 2 oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, The Globe and Mail's headline the next day was: "Peak oil theorists don't know Jack."....

The problem in all this is that the peak oil theory isn't about $78-a-barrel oil. And the price of abundance isn't necessarily $63.

The factors that pulled oil futures prices from $78 to $63 are short-term realities in a very long cycle. The forecasted hurricanes never came. Chevron hit pay dirt. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was suddenly sounding less like Dr. Strangelove on his nuclear intentions. Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries met in Vienna and said they won't lower production quotas....

Long-term futures prices of oil remain significantly higher. Futures prices for most of 2007 and 2008 suggest crude will stay near $70 a barrel.

And don't forget that even at $63, oil is twice as expensive as it was last year when the OPEC cartel raised its production to current levels. It's also twice as pricey as it was just three years ago.

The idea of stock brokers and oil speculators all having a party because oil is only at $63 is ridiculous. Not three years ago, $30 was considered dangerously high and destabilizing for the world market. It turns out the world market can adapt, and the $30 number was really just self-serving BS on the part of western industry and governments.

The long-term trends haven't changed: net negative discovery rates, shrinking production growth, accelerating demand growth. All those factors together spell P-E-A-K-O-I-L.

"And they invaded us."

I finished reading Dresden by Frederick Taylor a while ago, and there's on passage in particular that's stuck in my head. It's near the end of the book, where Taylor is discussing what happened as the Soviets moved in on Dresden.

When the first Soviet troops pushed across the German border into East Prussia toward the end of 1944, looting and raping and burning as they advanced, they were, as Anthony Beevor records, "disgusted by the plenty" they found everywhere, in town and country alike. The neat houses, the evidence of comfort and material well-being at every turn, served only to enrage them further. A Red Army sapper said to his superior:

"How should one treat them, Comrade Captain? Just think of it. They were well off, well fed, and had livestock, vegetable gardens, and apple trees. And the invaded us. They went as far as my oblast of Voronezh. For this, Comrade Captain, we should strangle them."

It's not that I agree with what the Russians did - I don't. It was cruel, horrible, and unnecessary. It was also understandable - in the driest possible sense of that word. I mean I understand why, but I don't agree and I don't empathize.

That said, I can imagine two Iraqis getting off a plane in New York tomorrow, and being "disgusted by the plenty", too.

The rest of Dresden is excellent, and it nicely challenges a lot of assumptions that the West has about Dresden in particular, and strategic bombing in particular. Dresden, Taylor argues, was not nearly as innocent a target as historians have previously suggested. Rather, it was a thoroughly militarized city, as all major German cities were by 1945. If there are moral problems with Dresden - and this is Taylor's explicit argument - then there are moral problems with aerial bombardment in general, not with Dresden in particular.

That said, Taylor tries to refute the absolutist anti-airpower argument, that says the aerial bombing of Germany was totally ineffective at ending the war sooner. (This is an argument I've made here, and has a long pedigree so you can't blame me too much.) While Taylor doesn't buy the 8th Air Force's spin about how crucial bombing was to ending the war in Europe, he does nonetheless point to a great deal of testimony from average Germans who say that, after Dresden, the nature of the war changed for them. After Stalingrad, and until Dresden, they say, most Germans believed that the Nazis would be defeated but that the German state would continue and there would be a negotiated peace.

Dresden ended those illusions. With the calamity of Dresden - and the bombings that followed - the German people lost any illusions that the war could be won, or even ended with dignity. The Nazis - and with them, the German state - were going to be destroyed thoroughly. Taylor even says that the Wehrmacht's fighting weakened after Dresden, but he doesn't explicitly say Dresden was the cause.

Call it the Weak Airpower Argument - Dresden wasn't crucial to ending the war, but it did hasten the end. Color me unconvinced, but Taylor's book is excellent in any case.

Krill? Really, Krill?

How in God's name are we overfishing krill? How desperate are we for protein that we're overfishing krill?

Krill? My God. Seriously, krill?

I wish I had something more substantive to say, but merciful God. We're like locusts.

The End of Bretton Woods?

For those who don't know, at the end of WWII, the British and Americans got together at a place called Bretton Woods and, more or less in a month, put together the post-war economic order. The IMF and World Bank both come from Bretton Woods, and both have had a huge role in directing what is "permissible" for developing countries that want to get wealthy. Until, maybe, now. via China digital times:

SINGAPORE -- African countries are increasingly looking to borrow money from China because the flow of funds from the World Bank and other donors has been slow and contain too many conditions, several African finance ministers said Sunday.

China's economic surge over the past decade has boosted demand for oil and commodity exports from Africa, helping spur growth in some of its major economies like Nigeria and Kenya.

Meanwhile, Beijing is steadily strengthening its economic and political ties with Africa by investing in the continent and offering loans. In June, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited several African nations, signing a string of investment and loan agreements in Egypt, Angola and Ghana.

It must be truly puzzling for American liberals (at least, the Friedman/Krugman economic axis) to see China so successfully undermining American influence around the world. Developing countries are clamoring for an alternative to the Bretton Woods institutions, having had their economies ruined and stagnated for so long by Bretton Woods policies. (It is slightly unfair to lumpy the World Bank pragmatists with the IMF extremists, but only slightly.) China is obviously looking for way to steer it's investments away from the United States, the better to avoid enmeshing itself too deeply in the economy of a potential rival.

For the people who, not too long ago, were telling us how vital the IMF and the World Bank were to global prosperity, this must look awfully confusing. But this is only because those same people spent years dismissing all contrary evidence that the IMF and World Bank were in fact severely harming the global poor. No wonder that Africa is banging down China's door.

Why torture?

Krugman, and Ezra, ask the same question: why is Bush so obsessed with torture? I think Ezra comes close with the immaturity angle:

The Bush administration's approach to the War on Terrorism has bespoke a profound immaturity on the subject. While the intelligence community easily separates the current conflict from an episode of 24, there's precious little evidence that Bush is similarly adept. I'd guess that some tough-talking hero-type from the CIA has Bush's ear and trust and has convinced him that torture is a necessary element of America's strength in this conflict.

One key data point would be this story, from Gary Trudeau:

Trudeau said he penned his very first cartoon to illustrate an article in the Yale Daily News on Bush and allegations that his fraternity, DKE, had hazed incoming pledges by branding them with an iron.... The article in the campus paper prompted The New York Times to interview Bush, who was a senior that year. Trudeau recalled that Bush told the Times “it was just a coat hanger, and ... it didn’t hurt any more than a cigarette burn.”

So Bush is clearly a mental juvenile - not something we needed further evidence of. But he's also clearly a sadist - eager to inflict pain, equally eager (in a newtonian sense) to downplay any possibility that the pain is meaningful. He likes to hurt people, and have them hurt, but wants to deny any responsibility or consequence for having caused that pain. To that end, he a) claims with zero credibility that this sadism is necessary (we can be certain he said the same to his frat pledges) and b) says, as a matter of law, that if he is held to any standard of accountability - any standard at all - he will stop interrogating prisoners altogether. On balance, that might even be a net gain. Nevertheless, it speaks to a profound petulance and sociopathy in the President.

Or, as I said a while back, paraphrasing Galbraith the Elder:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for sadism.

Mature

It's so very heartening to see Canadian political debate take this form:

Afghan troops "still have a long way to go," before they can stand alone," Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier said Sunday, "so it's going to be two to five years before we can do the change."

Harper's government has dug in its heels on the issue, linking political critics with the insurgents.

"The UN, NATO, every country on earth wants us to be there, except some members of the Liberal party, the Taliban and the NDP," said Tory House leader Rob Nicholson.

The people of Afghanistan, apparently, were unavailable for comment. The people who are available for comment are the people of Canada (refresher: Your employers, Mr. Nicholson) who are increasingly wary of supporting the war in Afghanistan.

Currently, 49 per cent of Canadians oppose the Afghanistan mission, 38 per cent support it and 12 per cent have no opinion, according to an EKOS poll done for the Toronto Star.

The article also implies - but doesn't state clearly - that positions are hardening: The undecideds/no answer have been relatively stable at 20% until recently, and they're now almost half that. So support is lower, and opinions are more firm. And Stephen Harper and his party are on the wrong side of the issue. So I suppose it's no surprise they'd resort to such idiocy.

The Liberals made a smart tactical choice in minimizing their connection with Afghanistan while they were in power. Harper - for reasons known only to him - thought it would be a great idea to jump head first in to the Afghanistan file. Judged simply on political skill alone, this might mean that Harper is that rare breed: A political leader with even less natural skill than Paul Martin.

On the plus side (if you support this war) the Canadian Forces is seeing a boom in recruitment. Soldiers are, according to recruiters (grain of salt mandatory) coming in eager to go to Afghanistan. It's no secret that Canada needs more troops, nor should that be controversial at this point. Even if we don't stay in Afghanistan much past the next election, we need to figure out a way to hold on to our troops.

Whatever the political decisions made at home, it's natural and understandable that the soldiers coming home will feel like they weren't given a chance to win. This, though understandable, is not by itself a sufficient reason to keep the soldiers there. The situation has to get pretty fucking bad - and wars are already pretty bad - before the military loses hope for victory. The objective for political leadership is always to end the war before the military thinks it's time to go, because by the time the military gives up, you've seriously hurt your forces manpower and morale. Put bluntly, Generals historically do not (with exceptions, obviously) have a great track record of understanding when the war needs to end. To be fair, however, neither do a lot of politicians.

An example or two: When was the right time to leave Vietnam: 1968, or 1973? When was the right time to leave Iraq? Now, or long before now? Speaking strictly in terms of preserving the military, the answer to both is the earlier one. Whether "victory" is still possible in Afghanistan is an answer that eludes me. What I do believe is that this war cannot be allowed to do to our army what Iraq has done to the American one.

Latest post at Grist

It's up, and if I say so myself, it's pretty good. Masturbatory self-quoting follows:

Peak oil in particular carries a seduction for a certain critic of modern life -- and here I think most prominently of James Kunstler, though he's not alone. Faced with the conclusion that current modes of living are unsustainable, we're given additional ammunition to say "See? I was right!" Kunstler, for his part, was viciously criticizing suburban living long before he learned about peak oil, and his enlightenment seems to have done nothing but sharpen his disdain. Having built his cart for years, he was overjoyed to finally discover the horse.

That, fundamentally, is my problem with proclaiming that peak oil, the climate crisis, or any other time of pronounced stress will finally "wake people up." We're taking our pre-existing beliefs and fitting data around it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is exactly the thinking that led to the Iraq War.

Huh?

via TPM reader DK, Brian Williams described the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana as a meeting place for "America's biggest enemies" on NBC's Friday netcast.

Excuse me? You can get a list of the NAM's members here, and let's just say it's not an alliance of super-powers. Indeed, some members are America's staunchest supporters and biggest recipients of military aid (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Colombia, Indonesia, and the Phillipines.)

The NAM can rightly be criticized for having been a minor cat's-paw for the USSR during the Cold War, and perhaps it would be more credible if Ahmedinejad hadn't shown up. But calling it a group of "America's biggest enemies" does nothing except make America look paranoid and extremist.

Third Lie's a Charm

I have family in the (Canadian) media, so I'm always wary of out-and-out condemnations of the news business for allegations of incomepetence, ideologically favoring the right, or many of the other accusations that get thrown around. I admit that family ties aren't the most logically sound reasons for caution, but what can I say.

That said, it seems to me that with the Washington Post's front-page story of GOP patronage in Iraq today, we now have three stories that the mainstream media - two of them from the WaPo, one from the New York Times - that should have been widely known and repeatedly cited during the 2004 election campaign, and were not (to my memory.)

The first example comes from James Risen and the New York Times, who sat on the revelations that Bush and the NSA were illegally spying on American citizens for over a year, claiming the need for "additional reporting." In fact, the White House asked for, and received, a delay in the NYT's publication. Whether the article was delayed for over a year because of the White House's request, as has been alleged, or because Risen wanted to bump his own book sales, is really immaterial. The facts are pretty clear that the Times had this story, it was ready to run before the election, and this information was deliberately witheld from the public.

The second example comes from Thomas Ricks, who's recent book, Fiasco, documents the history of the Army's pointed refusal to apply, or even learn, the lessons of Vietnam and counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq. Ricks accounting of these errors begins well before November, 2004, and indeed Billmon has pointed out that his book flat-out refutes much of his earlier reporting from the war in Iraq. The fact that the US Army was blowing any possibility of success in Iraq is something that the American people should have known before the election, but Ricks, like Risen, sat on the story until he had a book contract.

The final example is from today's WaPo, and is not "news" to anyone who's been following blogs, but I suspect it never got A1 placement in a Sunday edition of a national newspaper before today. Chandrasekeran's piece today is also an example of a story that was sat on to husband the impact for future book sales. Once again, the fact that the Republicans were turning Iraq in to a summer camp for Young Republicans might, just maybe, have been a useful piece of data for the media to bring to national attention before the 2004 election.

Let me be clear: I don't believe that it's the media's job to win elections for Democrats. I don't believe it's the media's job to act as hitmen for hire, attacking the Republicans for everything. But here we have three concrete examples of government criminality, military incompetence, and political patronage that have collectively led to disaster for the American people. These are issues of national importance, and they could all have been widely reported in time for the American people to make a decision on whether or not they wanted to re-elect George W. Bush.

Not only could they have been reported, they should have been, if the media actually believes that it has any responsibility to the American public. Not only did they not do so, they actively and knowingly concealed these stories from the public in the first two cases. Even if this wasn't at White House request, the more venal explanation of bumping book sales is hardly exculpatory.

The problems of the American political system go way beyond the current case of one-party rule. If the media believes it is more important to increase book sales than inform the electorate in a timely fashion, the whole justification for freedom of the press is threatened. While the Democrats are busy holding hearings to get to the bottom of the tar pond that is the Bush Administration, they might spare some time to ask Ricks, Risen, and Chandrasekeran some questions, too.

Army woes, cont.

Two data points for the US Army. First, the New Republic:

Combat-readiness worldwide has deteriorated due to the increased stress on the Army's and the Marines' equipment. The equipment in Iraq is wearing out at four to nine times the normal peacetime rate because of combat losses and harsh operating conditions. The total Army--active and reserve--now faces at least a $50 billion equipment shortfall. To ensure that the troops in Iraq have the equipment they need, the services have been compelled to send over equipment from their nondeployed and reserve units, such as National Guard units in Louisiana and Mississippi. Without equipment, it's extremely difficult for nondeployed units to train for combat. Thus, one of the hidden effects of the Iraq war is that even the troops not currently committed to Iraq are weakened because of it.

The Marine Corps, America's emergency expeditionary force, is also under unprecedented strain. The Marines have compensated for equipment shortfalls in Iraq by drawing down their pre-positioned reserve equipment stocks in the Pacific and Europe by up to 70 percent. These stocks include things like tanks and armored vehicles that enable the Marines to respond rapidly to crises around the world without the logistical delay associated with major long-range equipment transport. The Marines are also running out of helicopters, including the essential heavy-lift CH-53E Super Stallion. They are down to 150 CH-53Es from the required 160 and will continue to lose these helicopters due to their heavy use in Iraq. With the replacement for this aging helicopter still more than a decade off, this is a problem that will be hamper Marine readiness for years to come.

But the decline in equipment readiness is nothing compared with the growing manpower crisis. The Army is trying to keep the dam from breaking, but it is running out of fingers and toes. After failing to meet its recruitment target for 2005, the Army raised the maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 40 in January--only to find it necessary to raise it to 42 in June. Basic training, which has, for decades, been an important tool for testing the mettle of recruits, has increasingly become a rubber-stamping ritual. Through the first six months of 2006, only 7.6 percent of new recruits failed basic training, down from 18.1 percent in May 2005.

So on the one hand, Iraq is chewing up American equipment and personnel faster than is sustainable. The next piece is from TomDispatch, and is too long to summarize fairly. Needless to say, the US Army is so depserate for recruits that they've eliminated any reasonable quality control just to keep numbers up.

Bush and Rumsfeld either know this and are neglecting it, or they've made it clear they don't want to know. Either way, these wars are destroying America's ability to wage a ground war with any reasonable assurance of success. This is insane.

At the end of Vietnam, America was fortunate enough to be given time to recover because the Soviet Union was getting itself deep in the Afghanistan mess. This time, America's rivals aren't distracted, and if you're a China Hawk you could simply note that China's economy is growing, it's defense spending is growing, and it's forces are modernizing - the opposite was true of the Soviet Union after Vietnam. If it hadn't been for George W. Bush, I think it's reasonable to conclude that China would have a very, very hard time approaching US power in the world. Now... I'm not so sure.

My reading lately

So I'm waiting for Cobra II and Fiasco (two books about the Iraq War) to come in from the library, and while I wait I'm reading The General's War (about the first Gulf War) by the same guys who wrote Cobra II. I'm not terribly far in yet, but I'm already struck by two things. The first is that whatever else their failings were, the commanders during the Gulf took the Iraqi forces seriously - indeed, more seriously than they deserved, as it turned out. There were numerous examples of the US applying massively overwhelming force during the war, and TGW explains this as deriving from the commander's real concern that Iraq had one of the largest, battle-hardened armies in the world.

The second thing that strikes me comes from the chapter on the drawing up of the air war against Iraq. The original architect of the air war believed that the objectives of the war (Iraq out of Kuwait) could be achieved by airpower alone. So he drew up a plan where the air force effectively ignored Iraqi ground forces and instead went after command and control facilities in Baghdad. However, the plan did not survive unadulterated. First Gen. Horner (commander of air forces in the Gulf) then Schwarzkopf and then finally Colin Powell himself all forced major changes on the plan by asking a simple question: what if it doesn't work? That is, what if we drop all your bombs on all your targets, hit them all perfectly, and Hussein still doesn't leave Iraq? It was an important question, and the architect of the plan didn't have a good answer, so the plan was changed.

Those two elements - a real concern over your enemies' strengths, and doubt over your own abilities - served the US forces enormously well in the Gulf War. There is no evidence that the civilians at the Pentagon, or even the uniformed commanders in Iraq, gave any serious thought to the strength of Iraqi resistance, or had any doubts about their own abilities. And look where it got them.

The Man, the Legend

I started watching The Daily Show after the Iraq War started, so I never caught Jon Stewart's tear-filled post-911 speech. Man. Watch it. This is a guy who gets it.

The Mythical Defense of Liberalism

Furthering the argument made by Max here, I'd like to say that I think the Euston Manifesto, the so called "Liberal Hawks", and anyone who thinks that The Left needs to be reminded about the virtues of "enlightenment values" need to be kicked to the curb, like yesterday.

The idea that I oppose the war in Iraq or even the war in Afghanistan because I'm insufficiently serious about my Charter rights is insane. Any even cursory glance at history would see that the biggest danger to liberalism is war - not dangers from outside invaders, but dangers from our own governments. It was not, after all, the Japanese government which locked up Canadian citizens and seized their territory without trial during WWII. We did that all on our own.

Bin Laden doesn't pose a threat to my right to free speech. Stephen Harper does, and so did Martin, Chretien, and Mulroney before him. Not because these men are especially evil, but because these men have - during their terms in power - the ability to throw me in jail for what I say. (While I appeal to the courts, I'll still be in jail.) Bin Laden does not, will not, and can not.

You seriously want to defend liberal values, end the war. You want to engage in some juvenile fantasy that if we just bomb brown people enough, they'll see the virtues of Locke and Rousseau, fine. But don't pretend you're doing me any favours. All these alleged Liberals are doing is putting my liberty at a far greater risk than it was before.

It's even more ridiculous considering the people who most want to convince us to fight this war are de facto backing Bush, who seems to think that liberals only value our thirty pieces of silver. I don't need to be taught that free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press are good things. Bush does. I don't need to be taught the virtues of spirited - even acrimonious - political debate. Bush does. I certainly don't need to be taught the virtues of a secular state separate from the church. Bush does.

This war in defense of liberalism and enlightenment values would be a lot easier of one side wasn't constantly trying to restrict the press, jail protesters, fund their personal churches, and ignore the rule of law. Hint: it's not the Left.

Max Speak, you listen!

Not that we needed one, but now we have a U.S. counterpart (Via Timberite Chris Bertram) to the "Euston Manifesto," the latter a British project to put a liberal face on neocon ambitions....

The "now ossified and unproductive political polarization of American politics rooted as it is in the conflicts of the 1960s" looks pretty good to me. After all, on the two major pivots of this polarization -- Vietnam (military intervention) and race (cf. Katrina) -- national policy is still in the shitter....

All must concede that terrorism is not an easy problem to solve. The dilemma for this project is the implicit advocacy of a facile and short-sighted resort to force. Upholding liberal values, edifying in and of itself, will be no protection from the whirlwind reaped by yet another U.S. military adventure in the Middle East.

People dismiss the politics of the 1960s, but until Democrats start opposing aggressive war from the beginning and not just when it turns to shit on them, the lessons of Vietnam have not been learned.

And anyone who argues that racism has been solved in America needs to be slapped. Hard.

Hmmm....

China's investing in high-speed hovercraft that are made for amphibious landing of combat troops.

Any actual posession of these things, much less use, is at best years away. But China's not leaving much to guess about when it comes to Taiwan, is it?

No, I'm not becoming a wild-eyed China Hawk. But still.

The Army's Woes

Here's what I don't understand: if we're in the fight for civilization - Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever - where's the draft?

Now, I don't actually believe that we are, in fact, in the fight for civilization. And I don't believe we need a draft for Afghanistan. Nevertheless, if Harper, Ignatieff et al are serious about wanting to win this war, the fact is we need more troops. (It might also be a fact that more troops won't help.)

At the beginning of the Korean War, Prime Minister St. Laurent went on television and, Parliamentary mandate behind him, asked for 20,000 volunteers for the fight in Korea. Given that exactly zero terrorists had launched attacks on New York or Washington from the DPRK, you could argue that there's an even more compelling argument for soldiers today. Nevertheless, there's been no call for volunteers outside of the already-planned manpower increase.

A major call for volunteers would also - potentially - give Canada the leverage we need to influence NATO to whatever strategy we want to see followed. If we think more manpower is all that's required, we can raise the soldiers but refuse to send them until other countries ante up too. If we want the strategy to change, having a manpower reserve to negotiate with is at least a better negotiating position than we have now - nothing.

Finally - and here I'll defer to others with experience - my understanding is that the Canadian army has historically (post-WWII) been more officer- and NCO-heavy with the expectation that, if fighting ever started in Europe, the force could be expanded quickly. If this is true (again, deference) we are uniquely positioned to play a larger role relatively quickly. Relatively, because even a quick expansion would take many months.

Given that none of the other NATO members have ponied up so far, and the United States literally has no more troops to send, we could play a major role if we were so inclined.

As I've said, I'm becoming increasingly wary of furthering our committment to Afghanistan. But for those who continue to support it - given that NATO is effectively ringing the alarm bells over manpower issues - this is a no-brainer.

Sound familiar?

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

Officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report. A copy was hand-delivered to Gregory L. Schulte, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna.

But don't you know, we can't let the final signal - the smoking gun, as it were - to come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

UPDATE: It turns out I'm a plagiarist. Pogge had this first, and with the exact same title. I believe I'd read that post earlier today, and simply spaced out. The duplication was unintentional. No wonder people think I'm unserious about intellectual property...

More bad news from the arctic

Sea ice is retreating, even in the winter:

The amount of Arctic sea ice is shrinking not only in the summer but in the winter as well, a NASA scientist reported on Wednesday. Researchers are linking the change directly to global warming.

In 2005 and 2006, the extent of winter ice was about 6% smaller than the average amount over the past 26 years. The retreat is also significantly larger than the long-term decrease of 1.5% to 2% in winter ice cover observed per decade over the same time period....

Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist for the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, who is not on the team, agrees. "There is lots of natural climate variability – it is a complex science – but the best explanation of what we are seeing is the emerging signs of greenhouse warming,” he said. “What we see in the Arctic is a [dead] canary in the coal mine.”

“I hate to say we told you so,” Serreze said of predictions on global warming from the past five years, “but, we told you so.”

The adventures of the slightly-fresher lake continue.

Google.org looking to build cars

via Grist, Google.org - the foundation set up by Google, inc. - has a mandate to tackle poverty, disease, and global warming. Their first big project? The NYT tells us:

One of its maiden projects reflects the philanthropy’s nontraditional approach. According to people briefed on the program, the organization, called Google.org, plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.

The philanthropy is consulting with hybrid-engine scientists and automakers, and has arranged for the purchase of a small fleet of cars with plans to convert the engines so that their gas mileage exceeds 100 miles per gallon. The goal of the project is to reduce dependence on oil while alleviating the effects of global warming.

As much as I love plug-in hybrids, this needs something else if it's truly going to help global warming. Conventional ethanol is no help, gasoline obviously won't help, and most US electricity comes from coal. Moreover, the Google boys either haven't been paying attention or they're more interested in competing in the private market, because plenty of companies are already working on exactly this.

I don't mean to be down on this, but there are far more underserved aspect of the global warming problem - carbon-neutral liquid fuels, renewable electricity generation - that Google could be spending it's money on.

All the same, the more money we have working on this, I suppose the more credibility it will have. Now if only GM, Toyota, and Ford could get their asses in gear.

Some videos for you all

This: We are all monkeys. Learn it, love it, live it.

This: Nevertheless, we are clever monkeys getting cleverer all the time. Like trying to find ways to green the desert.

This: One of our cleverer monkeys, who adorably calls himself "Amory Lovins", tells us about how to get off of oil for good. For an hour and a half.

I love the 21st century

So, this Shakira woman. She's a mighty fine-looking gal.

Most denizens of this planet who've heard "Hips Don't Lie" probably heard it off of the radio or from buying the CD. But not me, no sir. I had to follow a youtube link from a blog about Indian pop culture talking about Shakira's Bollywood-inspired performance at the MTV video awards. Now I realize I have heard it before, in the way it's impossible to avoid hearing these kinds of songs in malls, bars, etc.

Still, the first time I heard this incredibly-popular song in full was through a path of blogs, youtube links, and my interests in Asia. Which, come to think about it, it about how I find everything on the Internet anymore.

More, please.

Seeking Balance

Andrew Leonard, at Salon's blog, How the World Works, writes:

Fine. China's citizens think the U.S. is trying to contain China, and they're right. But what about another poll result -- a two year old BBC survey of 23,000 people in 22 countries that found 48 percent considered China "a positive global influence," as compared to 38 percent thinking the same about the U.S.

That's some pretty bad public relations management by the United States government. China routinely jails human rights activists and journalists, operates state censorship on a more massive scale than any other country on earth, suffers from devastating pollution and vast (and growing) inequality, props up some of the worst governments in the world, and allows ruthless exploitation of its workers by foreign companies to depress wages for everyone else around the world. And it still comes off smelling like a rose compared to the U.S. Wacky.

There are two psychological games at work here in the public's mind. The first is a simple matter that, with America having been dominant in the world for more than two generations, it's racked up a pretty impressive history of environmental destruction, civil rights abuse, and most critically oppression of various national movements abroad. So a litany of China's problems is automatically compared to the kinds of things that the US has done, which while aren't nearly of the same degree of nastiness (in most cases) are comparable to those who want to compare.

The second game is related to the first, and has more to do with geopolitics, I think. Given the American dominance post-Cold War (a period, we should remember, we're 15 years in to now) there is an understandable - though admittedly unfair - tendency among nations who feel they've been marginalized under the US behemoth to a) overplay the evils of the American government, and b) underplay the severity of Beijing's real crimes. "Marginalized" nations don't just include the developing world, neither. South Korea (in my view, correctly) sees the American obsession with war against Pyongyang as a larger threat to their security than Pyongyang itself. Other middle powers see themselves as lacking any kind of autonomy in the global environment so long as America is the unchallenged hegemon. The idea that animated the better parts of the non-aligned movement was the belief that, by eschewing an allegiance with either of the Cold War powers, small nations would be able to achieve more national autonomy.

So there's a real, understandable desire to see China - even authoritarian, polluted, unequal China - as some kind of counterweight to the US. That said, China is not the only rival for the US' affections: The EU has been getting a lot of love as a potential counterweight, driven by the French (and the German left) who want the EU to play a countering role. Less noticed is that Russia has, since before it was Russia again, wanted the EEC to develop in to a security role sans America. Russia continues to see the US on European soil as a strategic threat - a view that wasn't lessened by putting US troops in Ukraine this year.

That same poll which said that people saw China as a positive global influence also saw Europe as having a positive global influence, with people wanting Europe to play a greater role in the world. People want a counterweight to America, and they aren't exactly being choosy. They'd probably prefer the Swedes as a global superpower, but if Bejing is all they get, that's what they'll take.

The same poll showed that 55% of Americans saw greater European influence as a bad thing, which I can only describe as insane. But as I've said before, there is a pronounced (and insane) desire in American public debate to see America rule the world forever, and an expectation by the American public that this will continue to be the case. So the idea even that the Europeans - about as non-threatening a rival as you could ask for - would increase their influence is seen as a bad thing by more than half of the population. Brilliant.