What kinds of security impacts will climate change produce?

The LA Times has an article that is somewhat skeptical about the climate change/security nexus. This skepticism comes in the form of quotes from two experts, both commenting on the Center for Naval Analysis's just-released report on how climate change poses a "threat multiplier" for national security:

Other experts who were not involved in the report said national security concerns, though real, were probably not the most significant threats posed by global warming.

"Everything's a national security issue these days," said Scott Barrett, director of the International Policy Program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "It's a bit of a marketing ploy."

[snip!]

"Global warming's impacts on natural resources and climate systems may create the fiercest battle our world has ever seen," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the newly formed House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Markey will introduce legislation to fund climate change planning by the Department of Defense.

Those battles may force the demise of weak governments in the developing world, creating power vacuums for terrorist groups to exploit, the report found.

Deteriorating conditions in Africa and the Middle East could prompt a wave of migration to Europe. As a result, the report said, some of America's most dependable allies could find themselves too distracted to participate in international coalitions or other efforts aimed at preventing regional conflicts.

Other experts called those risks unlikely. Climate change will certainly lead to more failed states, but it is not clear that the result would be an increase in terrorism, said Steve Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley.

The Sept. 11 hijackers "came from Saudi Arabia, not the floodplains of Bangladesh," he said.

He also downplayed the notion that migration spurred by climate change would be an important factor in U.S.-European relations.

But Weber agreed with the report's authors that the opening of shipping channels through the now-frozen Arctic could become a significant source of conflict.

"There aren't well-specified and agreed-on rules as to who owns what," he said. Russia, which has lots of land above the Arctic Circle, and China, which does not, could have very different views about how to address access to new waterways there. "There could be some pretty big fights over that," he said.

Full disclosure: I've got a bit of a dog in this fight, since Steve Weber and I have collaborated professionally on the topic of climate change and security. The article here positions him as something of skeptic on the connections between climate change and security. But I think a more accurate account of Weber's position is that he is trying to shift some of the emphases of the report. Construed narrowly, I agree with Weber's comments.

For example, it's not clear to me that migration spurred by climate change would be an important factor in U.S.-European relations. On the other hand, it is much more likely to be a factor in, say, US-Mexican relations. (The reporter just asked the wrong question.) Likewise, I agree with Weber that the security threat associated with climate change is not primarily terrorism-related. The direct security impacts of climate change are much more likely to be (a) humanitarian catastrophes; and (b) resource competition between states. These latter may in turn produce an environment more conducive to terrorism, but that's a second-order (or, actually, fifth order) effect.

What exactly are the security threats associated with climate change? With a nod to our friends over at ARC, I would suggest that it might be useful to identify four categories of security risks associated climate change.

First are the direct impacts of climate change on the military. These are the primary focus of the CNA report: how will climate change directly effect our military forces in terms both of capacity and of new demands? On the one hand, if it's hotter and drier in places where we fight, what does that mean for supply? What kinds of diseases should our medics be prepared to deal with in various regions? On the other hand, might new areas and regions become objects of military contestation (e.g. the Arctic), and what does that imply for military requirements?

Second, how will states or their institutions be threatened as a direct result of climate change -- e.g. flooding that destroys a national capital? Will there be borders that cannot be defended? These threats are real but I would argue relatively remote in time, compared to the next two categories of threat.

Third are climate change-related threats to the well-being of civilian populations. Starting in the nineteenth century, modern states increasingly defined themselves around their ability not just to defend their borders and maintain civil order, but also by their ability to deliver basic services to the population, notably public health and various other kinds of "social welfare." Even though states have in many cases backed off the notion that they should be the sole providers of these services, instead choosing to outsource these services to private sector companies or nonprofits, citizens of modern states still look to the state to ensure the delivery of these services, and a failure to do so is likely to compromise the ability of a state to command the allegiance of its citizens. There is considerable evidence that climate change will severely stress many countries' ability to provide this kind of population security. The BRICS may be particularly vulnerable on this count, since their rising geopolitical status may increase citizen demand for these services just as climate change begins to compromise the ability to deliver these services. "Population security" is perhaps the key form of security that will be threatened by climate change.

Fourth, are the climate change-related threats to critical infrastructure, notably electricity generation and distribution, telecommunications, water supply, food production and distribution, heating and cooling, and transportation systems. The impact of climate change on these systems varies a lot, with agriculture and water supplies particularly vulnerable. The key analytical point about these systems, however, is not necessarily that they are directly vulnerable to climate change, but rather that these are the systems that provide a society and a country with the resiliency for dealing with any kind of major shock, be it weather-related, military, or economic. The countries that are already weak in these dimensions of security are the ones that are least likely to be able to deal with the inevitably non-linear climate shocks. Looking at the countries that are already weak across multiple vital systems therefore provides the best clue for divining which countries are most vulnerable to climate change. The form that this vulnerability will take is likely to be humanitarian disaster, however.

Public health & climate change

WHO on global warming and public health:

The health impacts of global climate change will depend not only on the biological consequences of this change but also on the overall vulnerability of societies and populations. In high-income countries, which are more likely to be located on the temperature-sensitive edge of disease-transmission, public health measures are sufficiently effective to prevent diseases like malaria from reemerging even when rising temperatures support the survival of vectors. In contrast, in many low-income countries in tropical climates, already in the midst of transmission zones, public health infrastructures are often much weaker, and the increasing vogue for cutting back on government expenditure means this is unlikely to change soon. How these countries cope with the relationship between climate change and disease transmission, therefore, may be more dependent on long-standing challenges for the public health system than on climate change per se.

Moreover, as poor countries face the consequences climate change, they are likely to have to deal with multiple catastrophes simultaneously: shortfalls in agricultural production, destruction of infrastructure during storms and flooding, ecosystems collapsing, mass migration and refugees, and so on.

Countries will have to figure out which problems to prioritize. General investments in preventive public health, already on the chopping block today, are unlikely to rank as high priorities, compared to efforts to deal with the more visible and acute crises that climate change may provoke, such as storm recovery and breakdowns in civil order.

An added wrinkle in this analysis is the fact that many of the organizations charged with providing the vital services that offer societal resiliency to climate change -- such as water delivery, health care, education, mass communications, etc -- are no longer being run by the state, but are de facto or de jure being outsourced, either to for-profit companies or to nonprofits. This decentralization of delivery over vital services, while celebrated for its ability to deliver efficiency gains, will also greatly increase coordination and control challenges in the face of acute climate-change-related crises. Having excess or "surge" capacity may not be economically efficient, but it is often a requirement for effectiveness in the face of crisis.

And there's every reason to believe that the crises will in fact be severe, and nonlinear, as the same paragraph goes on to explain:

There continues to be a debate on the relative vulnerability of populations, with the UN reporting that lower-income countries would be worst hit by the predicted rises in global temperatures during the next century. Others argue that population responses to ecological changes are usually non-linear, leading to a sudden deterioration or improvement in infection control once a threshold is crossed.

Predictive mapping of climate-related conflict

The Wilson Center last month sponsored a very interesting discussion about how climate change (and resource scarcity more generally) may cause social and political conflict. In the discussion Marc Levy and Charles Vörösmarty discuss their effort to map the regions where climate change may lead to conflict:

[The project] overlay[s] geospatial information with demographic and conflict data to assess the connections between environmental factors—particularly shocks to water supply—and conflict. The researchers hypothesize that the links connecting environmental scarcity and conflict are found between groups at the local—not the state—level, and that changes in availability and distribution of local resources, and the context in which scarcity occurs, are the true indicators of increased risk of environmental conflict....

Looking at the local level, Levy and Vörösmarty's team discovered that changes in rainfall patterns can contribute to conflict indirectly through economic shocks. Increased scientific understanding of the water cycle and more accurate models now allow researchers to compare the amount of surface water available for human consumption with actual consumption data to identify potential sources of conflict. Additionally, overlaying demographic data with other datasets—such as water extraction, climate variance, and land cover change—allows researchers to identify particularly vulnerable regions.

Using data-overlay maps, Vörösmarty pointed to potential "hospots" where conflict could occur, such as regions that are severely overdrawing their water resources to produce and export food, and those where climate change may increase rainfall variability. Such maps, which reveal the relationships between vulnerable societies and water (or other resources), may provide information that can be applied to management and policy decisions, he noted: "We take these kinds of maps and our estimates of local water supply and we combine them and make a series of calculations that now are beginning to embed the human perspective. So instead of just talking about the excess water…we can talk about how much of that runoff supports how many people and how many times those people use and reuse that water supply and impart pollution signatures into the mix."

Global Warming as Security Threat

The New York Times picks up the story:

In March, a report from the Global Business Network, which advises intelligence agencies and the Pentagon on occasion, concluded, among other things, that rising seas and more powerful storms could eventually generate unrest as crowded regions like Bangladesh’s sinking delta become less habitable.

One of the authors of the report, Peter Schwartz, a consultant who studies climate risks and other trends for the Defense Department and other clients, said the climate system, jogged by a century-long buildup of heat-trapping gases, was likely to rock between extremes that could wreak havoc in poor countries with fragile societies.

"Just look at Somalia in the early 1990s," Mr. Schwartz said. "You had disruption driven by drought, leading to the collapse of a society, humanitarian relief efforts, and then disastrous U.S. military intervention. That event is prototypical of the future."

"Picture that in Central America or the Caribbean, which are just as likely," he said. "This is not distant, this is now. And we need to be preparing."

Darfur may also be a current replay. One of the things that scenaric thinking teaches is to look for events that may provide the prefigural tracings of tomorrow's wider patterns -- the indicators to emerging issues. Conflict in the dessicating Sahel in the 1980s is one such indicator. Katrina was another: a whole city destroyed in a single storm. Where will the next Katrina-like event take place? Look for anarchic cities sitting in river-deltas in hurricane alley....

Sea level rise map

A cool new Google mashup that allows you to see how different amounts of sea level rises will affect global shorelines. East Anglia, the Sacramento delta, and South Florida are particularly striking.

Mandarins of the Future

My intellectual history of modernization theory, Mandarins of the Future, has just appeared in paperback. I have recently been in dialog with a reader in Germany about the context in which I wrote the book. In the spirit of friendly critique, he argues that the turn I make at the end of the book to promote a chastened new mode of development is actually at odds with the bulk of the book, which he read as a stinging indictment of the entire project of development.

His reading is certainly shrewd about the emotional arc of the book. I wrote it more or less in the order in which the chapters appear, and as I did so my view of development and its prospects undoubtedly changed, becoming if not more optimistic about development, at least more convinced of the necessity of trying. Where this reader saw a "contradiction," however, I preferred to admit only to a "productive tension": my proposal is for a renewed and chastened quest for a welfare-oriented mode of developmentalism, one that makes an attempt to learn from the mistakes of the past while still affirming what was done right and what was good in the hopes of the earlier era. As I say in my introduction, I have a melancholy regard for the social solidarist vision of the postideological, democratic, secular welfare state: it was a beautiful dream.

The book operates in two different modes. The first 300 or so pages are devoted to an historical analysis of a specific set of ideas, intellectuals, and the environments that nurtured them. The approach is historicist, strictu sensu. Here what I try to do is to understand the modernization theorists in their own context. I try to recognize that they were responding to a real policy problem -- decolonization in the context of the Cold War -- and they tried very sincerely, with the best social scientific tools available, to come up with innovative ways to deal with this policy problem. I try to show that the political choices they made (which they denied were political) were not the most sinister available: they were neither Stalinists nor Maoists (e.g. industrialize at gunpoint, and if a million peasants die, who cares?) nor Churchillians (e.g. racists interested in maintaining the formal colonial system by force) nor isolationists (which in the context of global politics in the 1940s and 1950s would have meant conceding the field to one of the former two groups). Moreover, their vision for what they wanted to achieve in "developing" postcolonial countries was the beautiful dream referred to above -- it was far more admirable than the neoliberal dystopia of the Washington Consensus. For all these reasons, I do not much like the formulation that development theory (or modernization theory, specifically) should be seen primarily as a Kampf-Ideologie, a tool of Empire, or even of soft power (I am not sure I understand what the latter means). Although it undoubtedly was about extending the power of "the West" it must be compared to the other actually available ways in which the power of the West might have been extended. The proper counterpoint is not some post-Marxist fantasy of human beneficence. One must consider the actual choices available to a Nehru or a Sukarno in 1945. From that standpoint, I believe that modernization theory, in its softer forms, fares reasonably well.

Now, even with all that said (and this is a lot), the theory was nonetheless fatally flawed, for all the same reasons that it was admirable. This is the sense in which the larger story of the book is about the collapse of a certain liberal (small-l, American liberal) dream of society. Modernization theory was arrogant, elitist, nationalist, and excessively optimistic about the prospects for development. Worst of all, it was ultimately compromised by the fact that when forced to make an unpleasant decision -- for example: whether to allow countries to choose socialism, or to engage in (sometimes overt but usually covert) military oppression of these countries -- it was, theoretically speaking, unable to prevent the wrong choice. Modernization theory always had this other possibility within it, the militarist moment, which was never denied by the theory, and this way of thinking is what eventually resulted in Vietnam. The American invasion of Vietnam may not have been necessitated by modernization theory, but certainly wasn't denied by the theory. Rostow and Pye, in particular, reasoned themselves into a militarist corner. So was revealed the iron first beneath the velvet glove of mid-century American welfarist liberalism.

The second dimension of the book (the last ten pages or so) is oriented toward contemporary policy. As such, it is methodologically distinct from the historicist project of the book. As I wrote it, I tried to imagine what I would say to James Wolfensohn if I had a chance to speak with him about what the project of development today is missing. This was clearly a conceit, perhaps a naive one, but this was the spirit in which I wrote those last pages. I also wanted to use those last pages to strike out at what the methodological cowardice of the post-modern "development stinks" and "everything would be great if capitalism hadn't happened" way of thinking about the world. Anyone who has studied even cursorily what life was like for commoners in Ming China or Aztec Mexico or ancien regime France or even pre-1950 Tibet cannot possibly think that these are worlds we should romanticize. They had their merits, but their destruction is to be lamented only for its barbarism, not for its taking place.

My friend wasn't having it with this explanation for the closing pages of the book (which, by the way, are available online here). He said that rather that write an imaginary exhortation to the President of the Bank, it would be better to ask why people like he or I will never be selected to run the Bank--ideologically, institutionally, etc. His argument goes to the heart of the basic lameness of my conceit: anyone running the Bank would almost certainly (perhaps by definition) be uninterested in the views that I express about development. However, I chose to suspend my disbelief on this point, in favor of the hope that these institutions are reformable in a positive direction. And indeed, I believe these institutions are reformable, in part because they have been reformed in the past. The Bank's mission as it exists today is a product of reforms rooted in the same Kennedy-era liberalism that I describe as underpinning modernization theory, in large measure in order to implement a vision of development very similar to the one described by modernization theory. These reforms replaced a vision of development that focused well nigh exclusively on infrastructure investments (hence mirroring the original pre-modtheory economists' definition of development) with a much more encompassing mission based on vision of development that included education, health care, family planning, and so on. And guess who implemented those reforms at the Bank? None other than the human embodiment of the technocratic "mandarin of the future," the perfect incarnation of all that was good and bad about postwar liberalism, and the critical architect of the Vietnam War: Robert McNamara.

P.S. For anyone interested in the debate about the actual policy-impact of modernization theory, it is worth comparing Bruce Kuklick's Blind Oracles and Michael Latham's Modernization as Ideology. Kuklick (who describes me as a "left" scholar!) argues that the actual policy impact of Rostow and Rostowism was quite minimal, that it merely provided a figleaf for policies that would have been pursued for reasons of Machtpolitik. I disagree quite strongly, in part because I dispute his narrow view of historical causality: I believe policy ideas are important not just in a direct causal sense, but also for creating an ambient sense for what is possible and legitimate, for creating a "climate of opinion" that frames a range of acceptable policy options. In this sense, modernization theory was, in my view, very important from a policy perspective. This is of course my final point, which is that, despite everything, modernization theory in some sense has never disappeared, because its dream of a single human ecumene, united in a single developmental trajectory, remains far more seductive than anything that has come along since, with the possible exception of religious fundamentalism. This is what Washington today should be thinking about: if you get rid of the dream of universal human welfare, what the masses will choose as their alternative dream will not be neoliberalism, but fundamentalism. To paraphrase Rosa Luxembourg, the choice is welfarism or barbarism.

Anything but Kind

As I argued earlier, global warming's impact on Russia is likely to be anything but kind. One commentator suggested that I ought to provide evidence for why Russia will be worse off. Well, the Washington Post just supplied some excellent coverage of just one way Russia is likely to suffer:

Experts have long feared that Earth's warming climate would cause tropical diseases such as malaria to spread into more temperate zones, but a dramatic example of an apparently climate-related disease outbreak cropped up this winter in a cold place -- Russia.

More than 3,000 cases of infections caused by hantaviruses have been reported so far in Russian cities and towns, including many that are within a few hundred miles of Moscow, such as Voronezh and Lipetsk. The viruses can cause a serious, and sometimes deadly, disease known as hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, or HFRS.

During Russia's more typically frigid winters, scientists believe, HFRS-causing viruses die off in the consistently below-zero temperatures. But this winter has been anything but cold. On Dec. 7 Moscow hit a record 46 degrees Fahrenheit. HFRS was last on a rampage in Russia in 1997, coinciding with another very warm winter. By mid-spring that year, the number of cases reached more than 20,000.

The real problem is that Russia lacks a functional public health system, which means it will be unable to respond to these kinds of public health shocks. This is not a place that will be made nicer by global warming.

There's also a nice graphic associated with this article:Hat tip: CD.

Warmer

Our "Climate Impacts" white paper gets play on ABC News. I wish I could say that Peter is exaggerating, but the truth is we're standing on the edge of apocalypse.

Backfire

The LA Times suggests that all the saber-rattling against Iran "may have backfired." Geez, ya think so? Here's what the Iranian view of the matter is:

"Because the U.S. military configurations in the Persian Gulf are very similar to those before the Iraq invasion, and because the neoconservatives in the American administration are prone to this sort of stupidity and craziness, we have been fully prepared in terms of hardware and military arsenals but also software and information for electronic warfare," said Hamidreza Taraghi, head of the international affairs office of the Islamic Coalition Party, a conservative parliamentary group close to the Iranian leadership.

Every single last aspect of foreign policy that the neocons touch goes up in flames. They've been wrong on every foreign policy issue of the last thirty years. How these people have a shred a credibility left in Washington is frankly amazing to me.

The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child

What right-wing Dems are guilty of

This line pretty much captures exactly the problem I have with Tom Friedman and all the other Dems who tried to make nice-nice with Bush in his first term:

Centrist pundits'... past wrongness is partly responsible for our current state of affairs, [in] that they successfully marginalized early liberal anti-Bush voices as extreme while simultaneously blinding themselves to the genuine extremism of the party running the entire Federal government, thus helping land us in the current mess.

The point is that these centrists have shown incredibly poor judgment, both in the domestic politics of trying to compromise with the Bushies, who played them like fiddles, and in the policy arena, where they have played the role of enablers in the worst policy debacles of the past forty years. These are the people Carville and Begala are referring to when they say that the problem with the Democrats "is not ideological, it's anatomical. We lack a backbone."

State GDPs in transnational perspective

A map of each U.S. state's economic output equated to another country's GDP:I don't know whether the data is accurate, but it looks about right.

Hat tip: NF, via Big Picture, via Carl Størmer.

Israel's sincere desire for peace

Joseph Massad provides food for thought on Israel's desire for peace with its Arab neighbors:

Israel's struggle for peace is a sincere one. In fact, Israel desires to live at peace not only with its neighbours, but also and especially with its own Palestinian population, and with Palestinians whose lands its military occupies by force. Israel's desire for peace is not only rhetorical but also substantive and deeply psychological. With few exceptions, prominent Zionist leaders since the inception of colonial Zionism have desired to establish peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs whose lands they slated for colonisation and settlement. The only thing Israel has asked for, and continues to ask for in order to end the state of war with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours, is that all recognise its right to be a racist state that discriminates by law against Palestinians and other Arabs and grants differential legal rights and privileges to its own Jewish citizens and to all other Jews anywhere. The resistance that the Palestinian people and other Arabs have launched against Israel's right to be a racist state is what continues to stand between Israel and the peace for which it has struggled and to which it has been committed for decades. Indeed, this resistance is nothing less than the "New anti- Semitism".

Actually, what Israel practices is not racism, but religion-ism. It's as if the United States were defined as a Protestant country, and had laws and practices that dictated that anyone who is not a Protestant could not be a full citizen of the country.

The sound of the Right in collapse

The National Association of Evangelicals, representing roughly 45,000 churches across the U.S., condemns the Bush regime's torture policy:

As American Christians, we are above all motivated by a desire that our nation's actions would be consistent with foundational Christian moral norms. We believe that a scrupulous commitment to human rights, among which is the right not to be tortured, is one of these Christian moral convictions.

About time. As predicted on this site years ago, the Iraq War is doing to American conservatism what Vietnam did to American liberalism.

Climate Change Certainty = Waiting for Godot

One of the key themes of our recent climate change report is that one must act even in the face of inevitable uncertainty. Part of the reason for the impasse over climate change is that climate change is among the most fiendishly complex scientific subjects, and one that for that very reason is very difficult to make statements about with "scientific certainty." But the standard for policy-makers cannot be the same as the standard for scientists; policy-makers need to act on the basis of the best evidence available, weighing the possible consequences of action against the risks of inaction. Decision-making of this sort is by nature an art, not a science -- hence the tendency of scientists and policy-makers to talk past each other on climate change.

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, makes exactly this point, referencing our report:

Uncertainty about the details of global warming shouldn't make us feel less alarmed -- the more uncertainty there is about our climactic future the more alarmed we should become.... The less we understand the precise consequences of messing with the concentrations of greenhouse gasses, the more careful we should be to minimize such changes. If we knew exactly what the weather would be like in 50 years, maybe we could get ready for it -- but not knowing anything except that the weather will be less predictable is what's really scary.

Peter Schwartz of the Global Business Network makes exactly this point in his new study for the military, "Impacts of Climate Change." Schwartz points out that it is the unpredictable and non-linear impact of climate change that will "push systems everywhere towards their tipping point." Schwartz's piece is one of the very best I've seen at explaining how policy makers and the public need to respond to the scientific reality. Every public official should have to read it.

Climate scientists might not understand this because they study the climate, not human societies.... We should be ferociously intent on changing our course before we hit the tipping point, precisely because it is hidden in a fog of uncertainty.

Hat tip: DB.

Oops...

In another entry for our Wonkette imitation day, apparently they had a little mishap down at the NBC affiliate in Phoenix:

A cable news program was temporarily replaced with hard-core pornography, shocking viewers who had been watching a health show featuring former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw.

The incident on KPPX-TV was "an act of human sabotage" at the Phoenix-area station, said Ion Television, which operates the station.

"We have launched a rigorous investigation, and any implicated employees will face strict disciplinary action and termination," spokeswoman Leslie Monreal said.

Hat tip: MR.

You Can't Make This Up, Dept.

From the Washington Post:

Tsuriel Raphael, Israel's ambassador to El Salvador, was yanked after local police found him in the embassy yard "naked, bound and drunk." According to reports, a number of sexual toys and devices surrounded the "longtime" envoy who informed police of his identity after they removed a ball-gag from his mouth.

Update: More from the UK Guardian, which says the incident raises issues of "transparency in recruitment and promotion procedures" for the Israeli foreign ministry:

As an Israeli ambassador, Tsuriel Raphael was accomplished at putting a gloss on delicate subjects, be it Tel Aviv's nuclear programme, the treatment of Palestinians or the invasion of Lebanon. When San Salvador police discovered him in his official embassy residence yard in the capital San Salvador, however, smooth talk was not really an option. For starters there was the gag and the rubber ball in his mouth. There was also the matter of being drunk. And naked. And bound. And surrounded by sex toys. Once he was untied and the gag and ball were removed Mr Raphael identified himself as the ambassador but for perhaps the first time in his diplomatic career, this was a crisis he could not explain away.

The ambassador did not break any law so for the Salvadorean police the case is closed.

What went wrong in Iraq

What about our strategy in Iraq was problematic? Matthew Parris has the answer:

The strategy failed because of one big, bad idea at its very root. [Namely, the neocons'] idea that we kick the door in. Everything has flowed from that.

We were not invited. We had no mandate. There were no "good" Iraqis to hand over to. We had nothing to latch on to, no legitimacy. It wasn't a question of being tactful, respectful, munificent, or handing sweets to children. We were impostors, and that is all.

Read the whole thing, which goes on to eviscerate all the excuses the neocons now make.

Some wars you're just going to lose, regardless of the brilliance of your strategy. Postcolonial wars of occupation, without an exception I can think of, all fall into that category.

The right way to think about climate impacts

My last post mentioned the problems with The Atlantic's approach to climate change, which started from a set of (simplified) predictions about the future of the weather, and thus reached startlingly wrong-headed conclusions about the likely winners and losers from those changes. By contrast, the current issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization offers a much more useful approach, rooted in this case in an examination of climate-vulnerable public health systems, and then trying to reason as to how those systems might react (or fail to do so) to the challenge of climate change. Note in particular the way that the interaction effects between different vital systems are linked together (highlighted):

Some essential principles are already clear. A global problem requires a strategy of international dimensions that can translate into regional and local actions. Just as climate change's underlying causes are global, its health implications do not respect national boundaries. Impacts in one location, such as infectious disease epidemics or population displacements caused by droughts or rising sea levels, quickly spread across national borders. Coordinated investments in preventive measures therefore contribute to the "global public good" of reducing the risk of health emergencies. The challenge is simplified somewhat by the fact that climate change is expected to lead mainly to changes in existing health issues rather than to the emergence of new and unfamiliar diseases....

One emerging environmental health threat is the decline in global freshwater resources, caused mainly by increasing rates of water extraction and contamination. Climate change is expected to worsen this decline in water quality and quantity, particularly in already dry regions such as the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa. Scaling up water and sanitation services and providing point-of-use disinfection would reduce the current burden of disease and ameliorate the health impacts of decreasing water supplies. Such interventions already have a very high cost–benefit ratio; the threat of climate change makes these preventive health measures an even wiser investment. As water stresses intensify, governments could protect health by strengthening and enforcing their regulatory frameworks to ensure the safe use of new water sources that will become increasingly important: wastewater, excreta and greywater in agriculture and aquaculture....

Many climatic risks to health lie at least partly outside the health sector’s normal sphere of action. Perhaps most critically, climate change has the capacity to suppress agricultural yields, with the greatest risks in Africa, where malnutrition is already the largest single contributor to disease burdens. Some of the most effective actions by health professionals may therefore involve supporting other sectors’ efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

It's all about the vital systems, all of which are interconnected in a series of overdetermined feedback loops.

The wrong way to think about climate change impact

An excellent example of the wrong way to think about the future of climate change appears on the cover of this month's Atlantic. Gregg Easterbrook addresses the important topic of who will be the winners and losers in climate change. But his approach to answering that question goes dramatically astray because of a basic methodological flaw: he starts his impact analysis by looking at the change to the weather (which he reduces to "warmer everywhere," ignoring regional variations and the perhaps even more important hydrological shifts that climate change will produce), thereby ignoring the crucial question of which places are in the best position to adapt to the changes in the weather. He simply assumes that all places are equally well positioned to respond to increases in temperature, concluding that places that are already really hot are going to be in trouble, whereas places that are currently cold are going to be better off.

The point is clearest in his discussion of how climate change may impact the price of Russian real estate:

Russia! For generations poets have bemoaned this realm as cursed by enormous, foreboding, harsh Siberia. What if the region in question were instead enormous, temperate, inviting Siberia? Climate change could place Russia in possession of the largest new region of pristine, exploitable land since the sailing ships of Europe first spied the shores of what would be called North America. The snows of Siberia cover soils that have never been depleted by controlled agriculture. What’s more, beneath Siberia’s snow may lie geologic formations that hold vast deposits of fossil fuels, as well as mineral resources. When considering ratification of the Kyoto Protocol to regulate greenhouse gases, the Moscow government dragged its feet, though the treaty was worded to offer the Russians extensive favors. Why might this have happened? Perhaps because Russia might be much better off in a warming world: Warming’s benefits to Russia could exceed those to all other nations combined.

This is a classic statement of linear reasoning about the impact of climate change: Russia's problem is that it's too cold; ergo, in a hotter world, Russia becomes a nicer place. It's also a dramatically wrong conclusion.

The main determinant of the price of real estate is whether the property is located in a place that is nice to live, to vacation, to extract resources, or to farm. A huge determining factor for that "niceness" is whether the place has effective and reliable vital systems -- e.g., energy generation and distribution; telecommunications; water supply; food production and distribution; public health; transportation systems (fuel supply, railway network, airports); and security services (police, military). All of these vital systems are liable to be put under severe stress by climate change. To determine which places are likely to win or lose as the climate changes, you need to start by figuring out the places that have the most resilient vital systems.

Although Russian elites may find it convenient, given their grand strategy of wielding influence by controlling global hydrocarbon supply, to tell themselves that a warmer Russia is a better Russia, the sad truth is that climate change is likely to be disastrous for the country, given the awful state of many of its vital systems. Food production and distribution is tenuous, public security is awful, and the health care system has already cratered. Do you really think a place like that is likely to be the site of a great property boom? Is a Siberian steppe which is again a malarial swamp going to be a good place to buy real estate? Is a place where the rich can't walk down the street without a bodyguard really going to replace St.Tropez as a destination of choice? Is a place where the aquifers have been destroyed likely to be the world's next great breadbasket?

British may bring climate change to Security Council

A spot of good news that people are waking up to the real seriousness of the climate change problem:

The British government is considering putting climate change on to the agenda of the UN security council for the first time to underline the urgency of the issue.... Global warming has thus far been considered outside the remit of the council, which is mandated under the UN charter to maintain "international peace and security".

The British government - led by key figures including Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Miliband - has come to the view that it is a matter of international security as it will cause mass migrations and aggravate disputes over borders, water and other resources.

The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, raised what she called climate security in her speech to the UN general assembly in September. "Our climate presents us with an ever-growing threat to international security. Dealing with climate change is no longer a choice, it is an imperative," she said.

A report commissioned by the US government warned at the weekend that the US must prepare to intervene in a growing number of major crises across the world brought on by climate change, such as water shortages, collapses in civil order and "the implosion of one or more major cities".

Unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions and the expected temperature rise over the coming decades could provoke social unrest in vulnerable places from Delhi and Mexico City to Lima, said the report by Global Business Network (GBN), a consultancy group in San Francisco.

It said action may be needed soon to "forestall the worst effects of collapsing ecosystems, water systems, or radical restructuring of the global insurance industry" and warned that US policies on global warming could threaten its strategic interests abroad and weaken its bargaining power on key issues such as trade and security.

Systems vulnerability

The central argument of the climate change paper we released today is that the right place to start an analysis of where climate change is going to hit hardest is by looking not at the places where climate will change most or fastest, but rather by looking at the places where vital systems are already stressed. These are the places where even a small amount climate change can potentially precipitate a collapse of the economy, the public health system, civil order, or all of the above. By contrast, places with resilient vital systems are likely to be able to accommodate mild change and even quite drastic change.

Consider the contrast between the Netherlands and Bangladesh. Here are two countries that, on the face of the climate evidence alone, would seem equally vulnerable to climate change: both are densely populated countries, at or below sea level, and at risk of violent storms. Yet Bangladesh is far more vulnerable to climate change, and the results of climate change, as they unfold, are likely to be much more dramatic there than in the Netherlands. How do we know that? We know not because the climate science has improved dramatically in its ability to forecast regional impacts of climate change in South Asia versus Northwest Europe. Rather, we know this because we know that the Netherlands's various vital systems -- communications infrastructure, public health system, water delivery system, food supply system, transportation infrastructure, public security, and so on -- are in much better shape than Bangladesh's. Although an acute, climate-change-driven weather event may impact any one of those systems in either country (and you can't predict exactly when or how that will happen), Bangladesh with its many stressed vital systems, is far more likely than the Netherlands to experience not only the failure of a single vital system, but also a cascading series of failures across vital systems. And we know this not by looking at the climate science, but by looking at the social science.

When Peter says that 60 to 100 million people may be displaced in the Bangladesh, he's not kidding. Check out this image from the LA Times:And the line on that map represents merely the place where the new permanent shoreline will be. Keep in mind that the water level will be far further inland during a big storm surge. When some Katrina-style typhoon roars in from the Bay of Bengal, the amount of land under water will be vastly greater. This is why Peter's estimation is not only not exaggerated, it's almost inevitably going to happen.

The next step is to imagine what a displacement of 60m people looks like. What kind of a humanitarian mission gets mounted? Where do the refugees go? Do the Indians let them in? Do they stay? How does the worldwide Muslim community react to the crisis? This is why a publication as sober as The Economist labels climate change one of the three greatest security challenges of the 21st century, alongside terrorism and failed states.

Climate Change

I try to avoid self-promotion on this site (inasmuch as blogging ever avoids such). But I am nonetheless proud to announce that the results of a project I led last fall on how to think more clearly about the impact of climate change are finally seeing the light of day, and in the Washington Post, no less:

The scientific debate about whether there is a global warming problem is pretty much over. A leading international group of climate scientists reported last month that the evidence for global warming is "unequivocal" and that the likelihood it is caused by humans is more than 90 percent. Skeptical researchers will continue to question the data, but this isn't a "call both sides for comment" issue anymore. For mainstream science, it's settled.

The question now is what to do about global warming. This is a political problem more than a scientific one. The solutions (if we can agree on any) will require political will and imagination -- and also pain. That was my only reservation about the Oscar night celebration of Al Gore's leadership on this issue. The gowns and black ties and the celebrity back-slapping made it look like dealing with global warming will be fun, a walk down the red carpet. But it's more likely to be about catastrophe and how to share the pain.

These issues come into focus in a startling new report by futurist Peter Schwartz. He turns the usual discussions upside down: Rather than starting with detailed estimates of climate change (how much temperatures will increase; how much sea levels will rise; what new diseases will be spawned), he looks instead at systems that already are vulnerable to such stresses.

What Schwartz discovers with his stress-testing makes climate change even scarier: The world already is precarious; the networks that maintain political and social order already are fragile, especially in urban areas; the dividing line between civilized life and anarchy is frighteningly easy to breach, as the daily news from Iraq reminds us. We look at the behaviors of butterflies and migratory birds as harbingers of climate change. But what about early effects on human beings? "The steady escalation of climate pressure will stretch the resiliency of natural and human systems," writes Schwartz. "In short, climate change pushes systems everywhere toward their tipping point."

Schwartz's report, "Impacts of Climate Change," was prepared by his consulting group, Global Business Network, for a U.S. government intelligence agency he doesn't identify. The text of the report is available at the online discussion forum PostGlobal ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/postglobal). Here's a brief trek through the ravaged landscape Schwartz describes.

A first set of disasters waiting to happen involves stressed ecosystems. Human actions -- deforestation, overfarming, rapid urbanization -- have created special vulnerabilities to catastrophic natural events that are likely as the climate changes globally. In an interview, Schwartz cited the example of Haiti, which because of deforestation and loss of topsoil is "an ecosystem at the edge." A prolonged drought or a devastating hurricane could tip Haiti over that threshold -- and produce a refugee crisis of tens of thousands of boat people fleeing a devastated country.

Or take the problem of rising sea levels: Climate scientists are uncertain how fast the icecaps will melt and the seas will rise. But in Bangladesh, where millions of people live at or near sea level, even a small increase could produce a catastrophe. In a severe monsoon, 60 million to 100 million people could be forced to flee inundated areas, Schwartz warns, producing "the single greatest humanitarian crisis we have ever seen."

Lack of water may be as big a problem as flooding. Schwartz notes that more than 700 million people now live in arid or semi-arid areas. Climate change could tip this balance, too, producing severe water shortages and even "water wars." Tens of millions of people may become water migrants. The world's feeble political systems can't cope with existing migration patterns, let alone this human tide.

And finally, there is the problem of maintaining social order in a stressed world. You don't have to go to Baghdad to see how quickly the social fabric can be shredded; just look at New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The stresses come in part from rapid urbanization. Schwartz notes that in 1900, one in 20 people lived in cities; today it's about half, and the percentage is rising fast. Without strong and supple governments, this could become a world of vigilantes and militias, desperate to control scarce resources.

The big problems in life aren't the ones that hit you by surprise but the ones you can see coming. That's surely the case with climate change: We can measure it, we can imagine its catastrophic effects. But can we do anything to stop it? If we let ourselves visualize how bad it could get, as Schwartz does in this report, will we make changes that might reduce the disaster? That's the real stress test: It's coming at us. What are we doing about it?

Thank you Peter, Stewart, Doug, Derek, Rebecca, Nancy, and above all, the many brilliant people we interviewed on this project.

Voting on "Armenian Genocide"

I just got back from spending a few days in the Near East, interviewing various worthies on the state of play in their countries, and in particular on how they view the United States. I was struck in particular by the situation in Turkey, where literally every single person I talked to, from cab drivers to CEOs of huge companies, mentioned the issue of the forthcoming vote on whether the U.S. should declare the slaughter of Armenians in the late phases of World War I to be an official "genocide." The reaction from the Turks to this forthcoming vote, which has barely hit the radar screen of anyone in the U.S. outside the Armenian-American community and those whom they lobby, was unadulterated horror. Congressmen preparing to vote on whether the United States shall officially declare the World War I-era Turkish massacres of Armenians a genocide should consider how such a -- let's face it -- purely symbolic vote is likely to impact real American interests in the Middle East.

Should Congress make such a declaration, the consequences for American interests in Turkey and the surrounding neighborhood (including Iraq and Iran) could be momentous. Turkey is a longtime ally of the United States, a member of NATO since 1952 (with NATO's second biggest Army), and a stalwart participant in the global war on terror. It is also a bellwether in the underlying cultural struggle that defines that war. A historically pro-Western Muslim country, Turkey straddles many of the world’s critical geopolitical and cultural fault lines: it is both European and Middle Eastern, both multicultural and fiercely nationalist, both liberal and ruled by moderate Islamists (the AKP). Each of these tensions within Turkish society is fiercely contested, however. There are stark debates about whether Turkey should orient toward secularism, liberalism and the West, or instead look East, including perhaps to Iran. How the United States (and the European Union) treat Turkey has a material impact on this question. Insofar as Turkey sees itself as being rejected or insulted by the West, the more likely it is to turn away from the West, something Joschka Fischer has perceptively stressed.

My research in Turkey entailed meeting with people from a diverse swath of Turkish society, to better understand the underlying dynamics of change in Turkey and its neighborhood, including the European Union to the West; Iraq, Syria, and Israel to the south, and the Caucasus and Iran to the East. I met people from across the political spectrum, including Kemalist-nationalists, liberals living with official protection because of personal threats from Islamists, pro-democratization activists, Turkish professors of political science, and others.

My purpose in visiting to Turkey was to explore how the United States is viewed in Turkey. With stunning consistency, the first response by Turks to this line of inquiry was to refer to the upcoming vote in the Congress on the Armenian matter. Regardless of their political stance, the Turks I spoke with universally regarded it as horrific that the United States should so much as consider a bill regarding the Armenian genocide. To be sure, it was unsurprising to hear Kemalists, who have always denied the notion of an Armenian genocide, denounce the bill. What was remarkable, however, was to hear anti-Kemalists, many of whom themselves recognize the 1915 massacres as a "genocide," worry that the passage of such a bill would only create a nationalist backlash within Turkey, strengthening the hands both of those who seek to deny the genocide, and of those who seek to turn away from the West.

Many Americans, and many in Congress, feel an understandable desire to stand in solidarity with the historical injustices perpetrated on Armenians. In contemplating the Armenian genocide bill, however, Congressmen should recognize that a vote in favor of declaring these injustices a "genocide" would be almost universally interpreted within Turkey as an unprovoked, unnecessary, and unpardonable affront to Turkey’s national honor. As one leading Turkish businessman, a thoroughly Westernized liberal, put it, "Imagine how the United States would react if China passed a bill demanding that the United States make reparations to African-Americans." Another informant, a professor of management at the American University, suggested that were the Armenian genocide bill to pass, it might no longer be safe for Americans to travel within Turkey. (The murder last month of the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink by a nationalist fanatic suggests that such worries are not idle.) A sizable majority of those I spoke with believe that should the genocide bill pass, everything about the United States-Turkish strategic relationship would be up for renegotiation, including U.S. basing rights in Turkey and Turkey's active cooperation with the United States in counterterrorism. It is worth asking what the United States gains by knowingly provoking such potential reactions.

To understand why many Turks might react so violently to the passage of this bill, one must appreciate the anxieties many Turks have about the territorial integrity of their country. Not only did Turkey lose nearly two thirds of its territory after World War I, it was also left with large, regionally-based ethnic minorities, several of which today continued to harbor armed separatist movements. Some in Turkey consider the United States to be conspiring with these forces, either out of inattention, or (some mutter) because of an active desire to weaken the Turkish state. For example, for more than a decade and at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, Turkey has been fighting its own "war on terror" against the Kurdish People's Party (PKK), an organization the U.S. State Department designates as a terrorist organization. A major military challenge for Turkey is that the PKK uses northern Iraq as a staging area for its insurgency in southeastern Turkey, something the United States has largely turned a blind eye to, for fear of alienating our only friends Iraq, the Kurds. In Turkey’s eyes, however, American passivity in the face of Turkey's #1 terrorist threat betrays the rhetoric of a "global war on terror." Should the PKK become more aggressive, or if an independent Kurdistan emerges in Northern Iraq, a Turkey outside American influence might not hesitate to intervene militarily in Iraq, both to quash the PKK and perhaps to renew its historical claims on Mosul.

I don't have a position on whether the tragedies and atrocities of 1915 amount to "genocide" -- a matter best decided by historians than by politicians in foreign countries. But even assuming it was a genocide, the United States should still ask what it has to gain by passing a resolution declaring it so. This gain should then be weighed against whatever harm such a vote might do to American national interests in Turkey and the Middle East. Insofar as American national interests involve having Turkey on our side in the war on terror, oriented toward the West, and committed to a moderate form of Islam, should the United States take the risk of alienating this key regional ally just to make a symbolic point about horrors that took place nearly a century ago?

Claudio Guillen

My great uncle Claudio Guillén died yesterday evening. Claudie, as the family called him, was an intellectual in the best European tradition: man of bottomless learning and infinite curiousity, yet at the same time fundamentally humble and always open to new experiences. He was also a great academic innovator: one the earliest practitioners of the discipline of comparative literature, he spent much of his career setting up departments of comparative literature at universities across the world: from Princeton to San Diego to Buenos Aires to Barcelona. Despite being the son of one of the most famous literateurs in all of Spain, he moved out of his father's shadow and became recognized as a great mind in his own right.

Here's the obituary in El Pais:

Un sabio de la crítica literaria
El maestro de la literatura comparada
Claudio Guillén, académico y crítico ejemplar, falleció ayer en Madrid a los 82 años

Claudio Guillén, académico, profesor, era el amigo de todo el mundo: en la Real Academia, en la Universidad, en su generación, en las que vinieron. Su muerte, ocurrida repentinamente a medianoche del sábado en Madrid, mientras veía la película La Reina de África en La 2, llenó de consternación y de pena a los muchos que le conocieron. Tenía 82 años, y mantenía el porte juvenil que Domingo Yndurain, académico también fallecido, calificaba como de "noble elegantemente desmadejado".

Fue soldado en la II Guerra Mundial y luchó por la República en España

Era un maestro de la literatura comparada; la introdujo en España, la enseñó en Harvard y en otras universidades del mundo. Fue soldado en la II Guerra Mundial con De Gaulle, y también luchó a favor de la República en la guerra civil española. Era hijo de Jorge Guillén, el gran poeta de la generación del 27. Pero nunca presumió de nada; estuvo en mil batallas, pero nunca contó batallitas.

Su compañero Ángel González estuvo el jueves con él en la Academia. Claudio se le acercó, charlaron, y en algún momento evocaron a don Jorge; Claudio se llevó a un lado al poeta y le dijo al oído: "Escucha esto de mi padre; a ti sí te lo puedo decir...". Estaba hecho de la elegancia de los que no son presuntuosos.

Natacha Seseña, historiadora del arte, amiga suya desde 1955, decía ayer tarde: "Era muy guapo, de una sensibilidad extraordinaria. Amaba España, pero quizá una España que no existía. El que mejor estudió la literatura española. Iba al fondo de las comparaciones". Beatriz de Moura, directora de Tusquets, su editora, lo recordaba como "un hombre humilde, muy humilde; acaso esa humildad contribuyó a que en España fuera menos reconocido que en el resto del mundo". El director del Cervantes, César Antonio Molina, abundó: "Era una autoridad. Un día me dijo George Steiner que era el único especialista en literatura comparada que merecía la consideración de un maestro, similar a la del propio Steiner".

Claudio Guillén nació en París en 1924; su madre era francesa, y en Francia vive ahora su hermana Teresa. Claudio y su esposa habían estado trabajando, hasta las ocho de la noche del sábado, en el epistolario de don Jorge y en el prólogo que formará parte de la edición especial de Cien años de soledad, de Gabriel García Márquez, que prepara la Academia para rendir homenaje a Gabo cuando se celebren en Colombia el Congreso de la Lengua, los 80 años de hijo del telegrafista de Aracataca y los 40 de la aparición de su texto más célebre.

Claudio Guillén dio por concluido su exilio en 1982; obras suyas fueron Entre lo uno y lo diverso y Múltiples miradas; ingresó en la Academia en febrero de 2003.

Víctor García de la Concha, el director de la Academia, estaba consternado. Él recibió la primera noticia, y ayer, cuando habló, manejaba ese texto introductorio de Cien años de soledad. Lo habían estado comentando el jueves último Francisco Rico y él con el propio Claudio, poco antes de que la institución le dedicara un homenaje a Francisco Ayala.

Estaba lleno de vida, y de proyectos, decía el director de la Academia; el epistolario de don Jorge le llenaba de ilusión. Quería trabajar con José Manuel Caballero Bonald en las cartas que se intercambiaron éste y su padre; Caballero (que el año pasado entregó a Guillén el premio de su fundación por la obra Entre lo uno y lo diverso) se mostraba "anonadado"; era, dijo, "un gran crítico, un hombre que luchó siempre por superar los nacionalismos culturales, y consiguió en este terreno logros magníficos. Heredó de su padre esa pinta magnífica, la caballerosidad, los buenos modales". Francisco Ayala, en cuyo homenaje académico cumplió Guillén su último acto público, tenía la misma impresión cuando ayer supo que su compañero había muerto. "Era un hombre de gran erudición en cuyo talante personal podía el afán de la amistad. Un amigo".

Víctor García de la Concha aseguró: "No sólo es el introductor de la literatura comparada en España: la introdujo en el mundo; empezó en 1958, cuando era profesor en Harvard; su obra es casi un autorretrato, cosmopolita, universal; estaba equipado para las categorías, no para las anécdotas; era un hombre esencial, respetuoso con lo importante; un gran filólogo viajero, estudió todas las literaturas modernas; vivió el privilegio de ser hijo de la generación que supuso para España un renacimiento literario; es muy europeo, y muy americano; enseñó por todo el mundo; su concepto de la literatura partía del contraste de los arraigos y los estímulos universales". Y eso era lo que estudió, precisamente, en su último trabajo, sobre "el lenguaje de las cosas" en Cien años de soledad.

Su entierro parte hoy del tanatorio de la M-30, a la una de la tarde, hacia el Cementerio Civil de Madrid.

I'll have more personal reflections later.

The partisan point on the war

1. The Republicans started the war. It was their idea, and their choice.
2. The Republicans lost the war. Either it was never winnable, or they bungled it -- but either way, they lost the war.
3. Now, the Republicans are too prideful to admit they have lost he war. They continue and so want to throw good money after bad on their failed political investment, while at the same time desperately looking for ways to pass the bad political debts to others. Sorry, but no: you get to pay.

Rent-a-Demonstrator!

Nice business model:

A German Web site has come up a novel niche market -- renting out demonstrators for public protests. Good-looking protestors can help an organization get its political message to the public for as little as €145 a day....

Judging by their profiles, most of the 300-plus people currently listed in the "rent a demonstrator" category are young and attractive. Potential agitators looking for support for their public protests can choose, for example, Steffen, age 22, 190 cm tall (6 feet 2 inches), "athletic" and with a shoe size of 45. He's available for gigs all over Germany, but says he prefers the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Or Manuela, who has green eyes and "very long" hair and is available within a 100-kilometer range of Berlin. Included in the extensive personal information -- which at times seems more suited to a dating site -- are skin color and "appearance type," which can be for example "European," "African," "South American" or "Asian."

Best of all, you can book them online.

A Marriage Proposed in Hell?

Concerning the recent revelation that the French prime minister in 1956 proposed subsuming France within Great Britain, the Independent wonders how it might have turned out if they plan had gone forward:

Could such a marriage, between mutually jealous and perennially quarrelling siblings, ever have worked? Fifty years on, we might have blended the best of France and the best of Britain. On the other hand, we might have shared our faults. France might have had our public transport and health systems. We might have had the ramshackle, French university system. We might have had French rates of unemployment. They might have had the London Tube, instead of the Metro.

We both might have ended up with French TV, British hospital waiting lists, the French police, British estate agents, French trades unions, British school dinners, French plumbers and Scottish joie de vivre.

This is of course a gloss on the old joke about "European Heaven and European Hell," which usually goes something like this: in European Heaven, the Italians are the lovers, the French are the cooks, the the Swiss are the bankers, the Germans are the intellectuals, and the English are the police; in European Hell, on the other hand, the Swiss are the lovers, the English are the cooks, the Italians are the bankers, the French are the intellectuals, and the Germans are the police.

"Don't be scared," one of them said. "Feel free."

Sebastian Junger provides an amazing view of Nigeria, and his own pluck:

Mike and I stepped out onto land and were immediately blessed by a man who dipped a handful of leaves into what might have been palm wine and splashed us twice. No one blesses someone before killing him, I thought.

Read the whole thing....

Dirty Kuffar

It's YouTube day here at Small Precautions.

Here's an amazing video example of dark globalization -- a rap video (an originally American artistic genre itself with deep roots in African-American musical forms and the social experience of oppression and resistance) that celebrates jihadi resistance to the U.S.

Footage from Barajas

Surveillance cameras at Madrid's Barajas airport in the very moment that the ETA car bomb explodes (bomb goes off at 0:15).

Apparently the people in the walkway above somehow survived.

The "hail mary" metaphor

The blogosphere is awash with descriptions of Bush's decision to escalate in Iraq as a "hail mary."

The "hail mary" metaphor is actually too kind to Bush. Hail mary passes make a morbid kind of sense when you are down to the last few seconds of a game and have to score a touchdown to win, in a binary win-lose situation. That metaphor may be fairly accurate as a description of Bush's personal political fortunes and place in history, but it is far from the truth about the grand strategic situation for the U.S.

For the United States--as opposed to for Bush personally--the global situation is bad, but not (yet) nearly so dire. The situation in Iraq undoubtedly poses an existential threat to Bush's legacy, but not (yet) does it pose an existential threat to the United States. Come what may, the country will lumber on after January '09, and a realistic assessment of the country's options at this point do not point to a binary win/lose situation, but rather to a nuanced lose/lose-worse situation. However, instead of focusing on our country's long-term real interests, Bush and team are throwing a hail mary for his legacy.

In other words, the better football metaphor is that Bush is like a quarterback who has thrown three interceptions in the first half of the game; but even as the coach responds to the quarterback's incompetence by calling running plays, the quarterback goes to the line and unilaterally overrides the coach by calling an audible for a hail mary pass, hoping for a miracle that can salvage his reputation. If this were a football game, the coach would certainly bench the quarterback at this point; alas, in our game of political football, we have little realistic possibility for such.

Confidence, Requiescat In Pace

My old high school pal and sometime neocon fellow-traveller, tells it like it is about Bush's plan for limp-wristed escalation in Iraq:

This is really either (more likely) a bunch of hot air (additional carrier strike group, destroying "networks", etc), masquerading as resolve (as Teheran and Damascus will likely smell out), or the beginning of a colossal blunder of epic proportions well beyond the very significant fiasco and disaster we've already witnessed in Iraq. With this team one can't really ever know, of course, a fearful reality indeed as we run out the clock until January '09.

Political valences

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a political questionnaire that puts you on a matrix of left to right and (social) libertarian to authoritarian. I scored as a moderate left-libertarian, and more libertarian (14/20) than left (13.13/20) -- a slightly more pro-business version of Gandhi (ha!).

Orwell lives!

Nationalist Socialism

How and why the Bush regime still refuses to come clean with the American public about the real costs of the disaster in Iraq, even as they demand escalation:

For some who continue to support the war, a substantial increase in the tax burden might diminish their support. In fact, taxes have not byeen raised at all since the war began and the cost of the war has been heavily deferred to future taxpayers. Thus, the Bush administration’s tax policy insulates consumers from a truer sense of the cost of the war they are buying.

We can think of this tax policy as a form of artificial government price control that deprives consumers of the price information needed to decide how much to consume of a product. In this case, the product is war. Artificial price (tax) control makes the war seem relatively cheap to the consumer, so war will be over-consumed. The result is a shortage of war supplies, and more specifically, a shortage in the number of troops needed to wage this war.

Hat tip: ZB.

Civil Liberties

Commenting on how the Bush regime has assaulted civil liberties by holding people without charges, suborning torture, spying on Americans without a warrant, and issuing "signing statements" that baldly state the President's plan not to uphold the law, the New York Times exhorts Democrats not to be

swayed by the absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now "look ahead" rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush’s one-party rule.

This is a false choice. Dealing with [how the Bush regime has eroded civil liberties] is not about the past. The administration's assault on some of the nation's founding principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.

Mission Accomplished

This article nicely captures the horror in Iraq:

An interview with the family of a man recently mutilated and killed, a prominent sheik considered to be the prince of the Tamim tribes, gives a glimpse into the complicated underworld that is, in part, responsible for the trucks full of bodies collected around this city every day.

The man, Sheik Hamid Mohammed al-Suhail, 75, was found Wednesday in the Shuala neighborhood of Baghdad, a Shiite redoubt, by members of his tribe, which is mixed Shiite and Sunni, who were searching for him. He disappeared last Sunday, and his mutilated body was found wrapped in a blanket, covered in blood. The search party recognized his body by the distinctive way the beard was trimmed.

He had been an outspoken critic of the sectarian fighting and participated in a recent conference in Cairo on national reconciliation.

The kidnappers, whom his relatives hinted they knew but would describe only as “militiamen” for fear of reprisal, initially called his family asking for $100,000, said a nephew, Sheik Ali Sammi al-Suhail.

The family told the kidnappers they did not have the money, the nephew said.

“The body was mutilated in a brutal way,” he said. “They used a drill on him and perhaps other tools.”

One hand and one leg were almost completely severed.

The nephew said he had been told by people who said they witnessed the killing that after his uncle was tortured, his body was thrown from a two-story building. He survived the fall but was brutalized further before finally being killed.

And this is just what's in the bottom half of the article.

Ethnic Baghdad

The real international criminal trafficking conspiracy

From Naylor, The Wages of Crime, p.10:

The great majority of what is conventionally described as [transnational organized] crime is the province of small-time losers; if they really possessed the kind of initiative routinely inputed to them, they would long ago have realized that the serious money lies not in dealing dime bags of dope but in rigging defense contracts. That view further suggests that the real threat to economic morality comes from seemingly legitimate business types intent on seeing how far they can bend the rules before they have to pay politicians to change them.

Los Angeles

Amy Wilentz, on loving to hate L.A.:

L.A. has long been viewed as an embarrassment by America. Because it is the city at the end of the continent, it is commonly regarded as the newest, freshest, best thing the country has to offer, so its every flaw is interpreted as a sign of our collective national failure. As McWilliams writes, "What America is, California is, with accents, in italics." Europeans — among them De Tocqueville, Trollope and, more recently, Bernard Henri-Levi — look to the West and see Americans as uncultured, loutish, self-indulgent materialists. And Americans do the same: In Los Angeles, they see what they take to be a more babyish, dumber version of themselves and they shudder.

Where I've been, as of 2006

I'm hoping soon to add some countries in Africa. You can create your own map here.

The Playboy townhouse

The Playboy ideal of urban living, c. 1962. Actually, it still looks pretty sweet.

The worst ever?

Eminent historian Eric Foner suggests that Bush is the worst President in the history of the country:

Historians are loath to predict the future. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to rank Bush below Andrew Johnson, but that certainly does seems to be the league he's playing in.

Islam in Africa

Cool flash map

The rise and fall of empires in the Middle East.

Dolchstosslegende

Kevin Drum, on the right's forthcoming effort to airbrush history:

The whole wingnut universe is preparing for another decades-long rerun of Vietnam, in which they pretend that we could have won in Iraq if only liberals and Democrats hadn't poisoned the American will to win.

Richard Haass

Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations talks about whether it matters whether or not Iraq is in a "civil war":

It's not simply a semantic issue. If Iraq is seen as in a civil war by the administration, it has all sorts of policy consequences, and it will more than anything accelerate tremendously the drive or the push to get U.S. forces largely out of Iraq. It's not clear U.S. forces have any useful role if, in fact, you think there's a civil war. This is actually a distinction with a difference.

It may not be an all-out civil war, but it sure looks like one. And I would say that Iraq right now is something of a cross or a blend between a civil war and a failed state. What you do not have is effective central authority. You have the growing war between and among militias.

Trippiest web site ever

Channeling Albert Hoffmann's problem child.

Naomi Klein, on the postwar plan for Iraq

2+ years later, this is still the best insight on why things went so wrong in Iraq:

The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war's ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist environmentalists.

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.

The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.

To see the pervasiveness of this laissez-faire thinking, check out this article on gasoline smuggling in Iraq.

Kissinger on Iraq

Henry Kissinger, on the prospects for military victory in Iraq:

If you mean by "military victory" an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible.

Kissinger always was a charter member of the real[politik]ity-based community, after all.

Welfare "reform" results, ten years on: more hungry Americans

With the usual GOP-administrator's Orwellian touch:

The number of hungriest Americans has risen over the past five years. Last year, the total share of food-insecure households stood at 11 percent.... The USDA said that 12 percent of Americans -- 35 million people -- could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of them reported going hungry at times.

Beginning this year, the USDA has determined "very low food security" to be a more scientifically palatable description for that group.... Three years ago, the USDA asked the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies "to ensure that the measurement methods USDA uses to assess households' access -- or lack of access -- to adequate food and the language used to describe those conditions are conceptually and operationally sound." Among several recommendations, the panel suggested that the USDA scrap the word hunger, which "should refer to a potential consequence of food insecurity that, because of prolonged, involuntary lack of food, results in discomfort, illness, weakness, or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation."

Emphasis added.

Optimistically, maybe the fact that the Republicans have decided to redefine hunger as a "security issue" means that they actually intend to do something about it, rather than merely regarding hunger as a bracing incentive for the morally feckless to pull themselves together.

Baby Chalabis

From Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman's wonderful Ethical Realism:

Among the enormous numbers of analysts in Washington still employed in the study of Russia, the number who are actually capable of placing themselves in the skins of most Russians can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They themselves, of course, sincerely believe otherwise. But that is because the Russians whom they know well, and feel they understand, have been selected and self-selected to confirm American attitudes and prejudices. Those Russians who disagree just do not get Western grants and jobs, and are not interviewed as "serious" and "objective" sources of analysis by Western journalists.

Mostly, the copulation of illusions is just designed to secure financial and career benefits for the West's local informants. But it also continually lays the U.S. establishment open to manipulation by the likes of Iraqi opportunist and neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi for their own political ends. Indeed, several leading Washington think tanks are virtual nurseries for flocks of Baby Chalabis, all mewling into the doting ears of their foster parents about how the freedom-loving people of Ubangi-Gangi or Khakistan love America, support American policies, want America to intervene in their countries to "restore democracy"--and above all, want their beloved Ahmed Junior to get back his old job as minister for corruption. You think we exaggerate? Look at Benazir Bhutto's record in office, and then ask how large parts of the U.S. establishment can possibly believe that her return to power would be good for Pakistan.

From p. 76-77. Read the whole thing.

Microsoft

Redmond, making all the right moves with Zune:

"I've never seen a business so blatantly screw its business partners," says Peter Sealey, a professor at Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

To Wilfred Owen

Tomorrow it will be 88 years since the end of World War One. Wilfred Owen died in combat one week before the end of the war, just eight months after completing the greatest poetic ode to twentieth century warfare:

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime ...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

"A little list"

From the Daily Telegraph, good news:

"As the Lord High Executioner said in The Mikado, 'I have a little list'," John Dingell, the veteran Michigan Democrat, said recently.

Mr Dingell, who was first elected to Congress in 1955, earned a reputation as an aggressive chairman of the Commerce Committee during Ronald Reagans's administration. It is a role he intends to play again. Mr Dingell has announced that he plans investigations into everything from the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina to energy policy by way of environmental policy, the Food and Drug Administration, port security, nuclear waste management and trade policy.

"Choice": not the same thing as "opportunity"

Tony Woodiwiss:

"Choice" has today replaced "opportunity" at the core of official discourse: "choice," however, merely simulates "opportunity." Although it is spoken of as if it means the same thing, it does not; "choice" is socially safer than "opportunity" in that it carries no implication that anything needs to be equalized and therefore nothing need change as regards the disposition of power or resources; and "choice" is better than "opportunity" in that it is impossible to improve on freedom.

Quote of the day: Reagan

Ronald Reagan, acceptance speech, RNC, 1980:

Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, "Well done"? Can anyone compare the state of our economy when the Administration took office with where we are today and say, "Keep up the good work"? Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, "Let's have four more years of this"?

Pelosi

The Economist, on Pelosi: "It's like listening to a cross between a Stepford wife and Jesse Jackson." The article blithely assumes the Dems are taking control. I'm not counting my chicken yet.