danalwyn

"Rich people spend a lot more money on their own problems, like baldness, than they do to fight malaria."

Bill Gates, who has just pledged $10 billion to develop vaccines for the world's poorest countries, speaking about Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of Italy, whose numerous public relations fiascoes, including the fallout of his hair transplant problems, have obscured the fact that he helped cut Italy's foreign aid budget in half for 2009.

Some good news from the morning round-up. Several web sites, including BBC, are reporting that, damage to the port aside, a freighter ship has finally managed to dock at Port-au-Prince. It's unclear how fast they can unload her cargo of bananas, but if they can get her up to the dock they can find enough hands to unload her one container at a time if necessary.

So far the relief effort has been going almost entirely through the airport, which has been so busy that they've had to put a stop order on it for non-registered flights. For reference, the largest US transport planes in common usage, the C-17s, with no passenger cargo, can carry 77.5 metric tonnes. A heavy Panamax freighter can carry up to 50,000 tonnes, and the largest freighters carry over 100,000. This could make up the difference between the 180 tons that the BBC is reporting having landed so far, and the 5-10,000 tons per day that Haiti probably needs. Every jetty they open will be more lives saved in the coming weeks, and if they've already managed to tie one ship to the docks, they're way ahead of where the pessimists thought we would be.

We'll know more about getting supplies to land once the amphibious ships are in place. They have the well decks, the helicopters, the landing craft, and the vehicles to get supplies ashore, so we're basically waiting for them and hoping.

Earlier I linked to a David Brooks column in the NYTimes of Jan 15, 2010 as a direct part of this post. However, it's been pointed out to me that even though we start at the same point, his final conclusions are sufficiently objectionable that attempting to relate the two arguments causes confusion. To that end, I have removed the reference, since it is irrelevant to the final post I made. I am leaving the rest of the post as-is to preserve the original source of the argument, although I am putting it under an LJ-cut since this is getting long. I should repeat that this affray was entirely my fault for not making myself clear.

( To preserve your friends-page )

A quick rundown of what I've dug out of the news on Haiti:

( From Good to Depressing )

It's been over a week since the Obama speech, and the bullets have mostly stopped flying. For now.

I've spent some time ruminating over various arguments, especially from the strategic minded, and I've come to three conclusions on Afghanistan, none of which I particularly like. I know that nobody bothers to read what I write when it comes to news and politics, but here they are anyway.

( Three Things About Afghanistan )

And so, after eight long years, we have come to this inglorious pass. When we first went to Afghanistan, that distant land where Empires go to find their limits, we were going for vengeance and protection, our own. It was easy to explain that we were going after those who had hurt us, to avenge our losses and ensure that they could never do so again (the word "never" is far too easy to use). Then, as time passed, we were going as liberators, to save the women forced to wear burkhas, the people trapped in an ideological prison so constrictive that it choked the life out of their ancient cultures. And now, at the end, we are going for Karzai. The President of Afghanistan has too much of a hold on the government and on the electoral process to be replaced, too much for him to be challenged in a fair election. Those elements that should be fighting him on the floor of Parliament are instead fighting him in the hills and mountains.

Karzai is not the leader Afghanistan needs. He has not demonstrated the ability to inspire his people, to weld them together. He has adamantly refused to fight the corruption that is slowly rotting away his country from within, and barely even stops to wipe up the occasional eruption of maggots from still-living skin. He is impotent, the leader of an army of a hundred thousand men, whom analysts believe will be swept out of office by less then ten thousand Taliban without the help of thousands of foreign troops.

We entered, as we are wont to do, into a civil war without realizing it. We blundered into the confused relations of the Pashtuns, the Tajiks, the Hazaras, and the thousands of other racial, religious, and historical groups whose intertwined cultures and patchwork lands make up the quilt that we attempt to quantify by calling it Afghanistan, and attempted to weave from it a cloth of a single color. Instead we have simply created a new tribe, the tribe of Karzai, for which we are sending men and women to fight and die for. We have grown better at fighting the enemy, but we are increasingly fighting for the benefit of a government that has shown no ability to serve the people who elected it, or even to hang on to the hard won gains.

The tribe of Karzai doesn't deserve wealth and triumph on the back of our soldiers. We need to either curb his excesses, get out, or prepare for a long, hard slog to a distant uncertain victory.

Wait, what? Seriously?

I mean, why? He hasn't done anything yet.

Let me make a point. Barack Obama has made great strides in returning the world to some sort of diplomatic normalacy. He's done this by re-opening diplomatic channels, and by striving to reconnect the world's strongest military power to the world that it threatens. He has made several statements about human rights, specifically in Africa, where of all the first world leaders he has special clout, that are commendable and deserve praise. He has made steps both in nuclear disarmament and in promoting peace that are laudable, and in the fullness of time may bear spectacular fruit. And he is reforging the kind of alliances that we hope will see the world through the rocky times ahead as the political landscape of the world changes.

But all this, all the uncertainties in that paragraph, underline a very serious flaw. None of his accomplishments, none of his speeches, none of his initiatives, and none of his overtures, have yet yielded serious results. He's being praised for getting Iran back to the bargaining table against a united front, for essentially pulling the plug on Chavez's South American block, for re-normalizing our relations with an internally unstable Russia, and for the message that he's sent to Africa. But none of these efforts have yet produced anything substantial. Maybe in a year or two we'll be celebrating a victory on the diplomatic front, but right now we just don't know. We don't know whether he has the skill, the persistence, or that all-important trait, the luck to pull it off. And to hand the prize out based on expectations, on good intentions instead of results, seems to me against what the prize should stand for. We reward people for what they've done, not for what they say they're going to do.

It was a lousy year for the peace prize, and I don't think there were many stand-out contenders for it, but to award it to someone in their first year on the global stage, without any real significant accomplishments under his belt, cheapens both the prize and the recipient more then they deserve.

(I may be the only disgruntled person on my F-list, but since when has that stopped me from making an ass of myself?)

So there's a lot of fighting in Guinea, and a bunch of people are being massacred for protesting against what looks like an attempt to turn a "temporary" coup into a permanent dictatorship. This is, broadly, not a good thing.

ECOWAS, the Economic COmmunity of West African States, who wields enormous economic influence over Guinea simply by being her neighbors, says that the violence should stop. The African Union, a large, pan-African organization formed in part to preserve stability and the rights of the citizens of Africa, which has on occasion deployed thousands of troops to combat zones to preserve certain peoples (albeit in a half-assed fashion), says that the violence should stop. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, the leader of the pre-eminent international organization, which not only speaks with the authority of all recognized nations in the world, but also has the right, in its charter, and the sacred and solemn duty to intervene in cases where rights are horribly abused, a duty they have seen fit to exercise in the past, and who has thousands of soldiers deployed to keep the peace throughout the world, says that the violence should stop. And the European Union, a fairly well-organized group of individual nations wielding tremendous economic and political influence, backed by the second most powerful military block in the world, who contain not one, not two, but a dozen nations with the raw ability to reign in a runaway regime, says that the violence should stop.

This is basically the same list of organizations that condemned the original coup in 2008. They didn't do anything then, and they're not going to do anything now. It's too expensive, too unpopular, and at root, too inconvenient for them to bother doing anything. Everyone knows it. Everyone's in on the game. It's like watching a bunch of baseball fielders chasing a runner after the ball has already been smacked over the back fence, as if they can frighten him into believing they can tag him out with their empty gloves.

Either we should do something about this, or not, but all this empty posturing by people who can do better is annoying, pointless, and it's wasting our time.

In Japan, in order to be executed apparently, you have to have your execution order signed by the Justice Minister. The new justice minister, Keiko Chiba, has spent twenty years of her life campaigning against the death penalty. Therefore it's unlikely that any execution orders will be signed in the immediate future.

This leaves the US as the only "developed" nation who regularly applies the death penalty to ordinary (read non-treasonous) crimes. Makes you wonder sometimes.

(The chances of this moratorium in Japan sticking may be low. Japan, for reasons I don't understand; apparently has no concept of life imprisonment; which could be a big sticking point in the abolition of the death penalty. But temporary moratoriums happen a lot; especially when the Justice Minister changes.)

So, if you've been following the news, you know that two European men in Africa have been sentenced to death for murdering their driver and, among other charges, spying for Norway.

Wait...Norway?

( Norway's Problem, Our Warning )

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times on the criticisms of the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, Admiral Mullen, of the entire concept of strategic communication.

Strategic Communication is the latest attempt by the US to reach out to the Muslim world, an attempt to combat the multi-level propaganda campaign put together by Islamic extremists, the narrative in which the US is a global empire, seeking to put the entire world under its sway. And, unfortunately, it hasn't been working very well. Mullen thinks he knows why, and points out the bear hiding in the telephone booth.

"That’s the essence of good communication: having the right intent up front and letting our actions speak for themselves,” Admiral Mullen wrote. “We shouldn’t care if people don’t like us. That isn’t the goal. The goal is credibility. And we earn that over time."

America may be a powerful nation, and an international brand, but at heart it is about an alarmingly simple idea, one that we have borrowed from and shared with the rest of the world. That we the people hold forth as self-evident the truth that all men are created equal, and that they must not be judged by their sex, their beliefs, or the color of the skin, but by the content of their character, and that protecting the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should be the goal of a government by the people, of the people, and for the people. To the billions of people who live under the hand of incompetent, corrupt, cruel and totalitarian governments around the world, it stands as a shining promise of liberation.

But America has not often lived up to her promise. The nation that supports freedom and equality at home supports those nations abroad which shun those very values; she turns her back on movements aligned with her own ideals while propping up dictators that serve her current interests, and is then surprised when those same dictators later prove intractable.

In the short term, nations, peoples, and the world will follow us when our interests coincide, but that does not often lead to long-term results. If we want the rest of the world to look upon us favorably for the next century, to stand by us when we need allies, and to ensure basic human rights, we will need the support and admiration of their people, a task beyond the scope of diplomatic agreements. This level of trust has to be earned, and it can only be earned by treating the world not as clay to be shaped, but as a garden to be cultivated. Sometimes a promising plant will bear no fruit, sometimes what we thought was an apple will turn out to be a pear, but we must not use that as an excuse to supplant, to tear down, but only see it as a minor check on our way to the harvest.

If we want a world full of friendly and trustworthy democracies, then we should start encouraging those movements and those people now, even if it hurts our short term interests. Otherwise we'll still be trying to reach out to our enemies in a hundred years.

God damn it Vlad, stop crashing the internet!

The Jewish Conspiracy to Rule The World
1 Zion Lane,
Hoboken, NJ

Dear Jewish Peoples,

Over the years we have genuinely enjoyed several of your schemes to control the world. Your brilliant takeover of international finance and business (too bad about that whole Lehman Brothers thing) looked set to dominate the entire world. Your takeover of the media was inspired; your conquest of Hollywood was very finely executed, and your final assertion of control over the entire western world from the shadows of your puppet booth in Washington DC was a masterpiece. Through the years we have eagerly awaited the fruition of the next of your many schemes for world domination, and have applauded your success.

However, this latest scheme of yours has us worried. Destroying the moral foundations of the world by making teenagers want to have sex? With chewing gum? I mean, we could understand mind controlling chewing gum, or some sort of addictive chewing gum, but chewing gum that makes teenagers want to have sex? Do you really need chewing gum for that? And what good does that do in the first place?

This latest scheme appears to be a desperate scraping of the bottom of the barrel. We have no wish to antagonize you, given our many years of close association, but we must regretfully inform you that unless the quality of your work improves soon, we will be forced to cancel our sponsorship of your organization.

Sincerely,
The Nerd Conspiracy to Rule The World

(hat tip to Foreign Policy's Passport, as usual)

The situation in Honduras is increasingly confusing, and most of us have better things to do then spend time learning about it, like mowing the lawn, or sanding bricks, or shoveling gravel, or basically anything. So, just for your convenience, I have written down a timeline of how the whole mess started, so that you don't have to sort through all those annoying "facts" in news broadcasts.

1) Everything starts when one morning Manuel Zelaya woke up and suddenly realized that, not only was he not a rich and successful millionaire playboy who took his battle against crime to the streets in honor of his murdered parents, but that he was actually President of the Honduras, which, in the international scheme of things is sort of like being kneecapped by athletes at the Special Olympics.

( And that's how it went down... )

Someone at the Latin America desk owes me a dollar over the Honduras. In Soviet Honduras, General fire YOU.

Then they owe me a contingency plan. Chavez is probably just talking out of his ass, but there's no point in taking chances.

Between this and the mess in Peru, it's going to be a messy week for the Latin America desk. I would predict what was going to happen in the Honduras, but all my Magic 8-ball is saying is "Answer hazy. Try again later."

ETA: Okay fine, it may or may not technically be a coup, but I'm still claiming that I was right.

One thing that President Obama has failed to do is to adequately explain his approach to Iran. I believe this to be due to two reasons: A) anyone who needs to know his strategy should be able to figure it out, and B) stating it in public invalidates it.

So let me give it a shot.

The hardliners in Iran hate the US. The reformists may not hate the US, but they really don't like us. Neither of them wants to take the "Islamic" part out of the government. And all of them have long enough memories that they remember that we replaced their last popular government with the Shah. Any side that the US supports will be undermined, and discredited, in the eyes of the Iranian people.

The logical approach is to do nothing other then to offer the usual platitudes about the "will of the people", and sit this one out as long as the situation remains mostly peaceful. It's tempting to support the hardliners (and make them look really bad), but the reputation damage will be too great. Better to sit this out and hope for the best result then to completely discredit the reformists in the process. Which is what we're doing; waiting for the Iranian regime to make a huge, and fatal mistake that we can pounce on. You might think that the neo-cons would be smart enough to figure that out.

There is a time and a place for actively supporting the right side, but Iran with its complicated history and confused relationship with the US, is probably not it. Wolfowitz and Krauthammer will just have to live with it.

If you were wondering if the world is still a fucked up place, well then I have your answer; it still is.

The survey size is small; the survey itself is geographically limited, but still. One in four? One in four? And more then once? I don't have to crunch the ugly statistics for you to get an idea of what this means on the victim side of the equation.

Witty and scathing are both failing me here. Maybe arson would be more apt method of demonstrating my opinion.

Who the hell is John Yettaw? And why did he give the Burmese government an excuse to jail Aung San Suu Kyi? Why did he breach the embargo on contacting her, not just once, but for a second time, swimming across a lake to do so?

The man has no internet presence, but speculation has to abound. Was he a well-intentioned foreigner with no comprehension of the fact that breaking the ban on visiting the activist would give them another excuse to jail her? Was he a self-centered fool seeking only to get attention? Was he an insane stalker? Or worse, was he a Burmese government stooge, a person paid to provide the junta with an excuse to put Aung San Suu Kyi back in jail? We may never know.

We were so close too. The charges against Suu Kyi were ludicrous, but even they would have run out at the end of May. The Junta would have had to invent another, equally ludicrous charge, to keep her under arrest. Now they're saved the effort of looking like total idiots by this man's stunt. Whatever his aims, he allowed the Burmese junta to have a pseudo-legal excuse to keep one of the world's most prominent democracy activists in jail, perhaps indefinitely this time.

So who are you Mr. Yettaw? And where do you come from, because if the Burmese ever let you come home, don't expect to find a friendly welcome waiting for you on this end.

The Sri Lankan Army continues to attack the last stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) today, and nobody knows why.The LTTE, which once controlled basically all of northern Sri Lanka and massed an army of probably around 20,000 effectives, are now constrained to a square mile of territory in the northeastern part of the island, caught between the ocean on one side, and the Sri Lankan Army in three other directions. With the remaining hundreds of fighters are thousands of civilians, who either fled the Sri Lankan Army, or were forced to move by the LTTE, and are currently caught in the cross-fire.

( Me Grumbling )

I know that everyone's sick to death of hearing about the Swine Flu, but if you live in Afghanistan, you'll be safe, because the government of Afghanistan has quarantined all the pigs in the country. All one of them. The pig, somewhat of an oddity in the Kabul Zoo, has been sealed away in a locked room. Experts refuse to comment about how the solitary pig could have gotten infected with the swine flu, have refused to indicate whether they believe the pig is a high-ranking member of the Taliban, and have not commented on whether CIA interrogators have access to the pig, or on the rise of radical Porkofacism in the Afghan region. Government sources have been unable to confirm early reports that Predator UAVs and US Special Forces teams were involved in the seizure of the pig. The pig's incarceration intensified the ongoing Civil War in Afghanistan for no apparent reason, and also raised a storm of controversy abroad, with some petitioning the UN to censure Afghanistan for the arrest, and American Republicans giving speeches about the rise of radical pig factions aiming at destroying the American way of life. Some animal rights groups claim that the pig is being prepared for deportation, either to Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, site of a controversial US detention facility, or to a private limited-time detention facility run by a mysterious figure known only as "Farmer John".

As of this time, the pig remains incarcerated at the Kabul Zoo.

Here is a picture of the pig in happier times.

(Hat tip to FP's Passport)

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Bill v. Silvio

It's Not Always Bad News...

Late to the party

Where they stand

Thoughts on Afghanistan

The Tribe of Karzai

Huh?

Empty Threats in Guinea

Harder to die in Japan

Really? Norway?

Adm. Mullen Discovers Elephant in Paper Bag

Evil Genius Strikes Again

An Open Letter

Honduras background

It's Always Something

Obama on Iran

WTF South Africa? WTFF?

Question of the Day

(no subject)

Swine flu stuff

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November 2017

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