March 31, 2011
What's "Humanitarian" About It?
Most of those who sought U.S. intervention in Bosnia consciously exaggerated the "humanitarian" dimension of the problem. By a lot. An average American reading the papers might easily have gotten the impression that Serb militias were killing every Muslim man they could get their hands on and raping every woman (often in lurid, legendary "rape camps"). Exaggeration showed up most significantly in the numbers. "250,000 dead." "350,000 dead," wrote Holbrooke in his subsequent book on Bosnia. The assumption being, those were almost entirely Muslims. It wasn't until 2005 that not unreasonable, widely accepted estimates of the dead began to appear, based upon authoritative sources. Maybe about 100,000 died in Bosnia's civil war, on all sides. In the lead up to NATO's 1999 war against Serbia the same thing happened regarding the numbers of Albanians who the Serbs had allegedly killed in Kosovo. According to the New York Times, for example, the State Department said that up to 500,000 Albanians were missing and feared dead. After the war it became clear that the actual number of dead Albanians was several thousand, perhaps fewer than two thousand. But by then, who cares?
March 29, 2011
Lies, Lies, Lies
I could barely force myself to watch the President last night, but I did. If you couldn't but are curious, the text of his remarks is enough. Out of a sense of frustration and perversity, and without troubling to itemize and explain every one, this morning I looked at the text and noted on some scrap paper the times Mr. Obama said something untrue or duplicitous. My count: thirty four lies. It's probably not a record breaking example of presidential mendacity but it shows, again, that Mr. Obama belongs in a championship class.
March 26, 2011
Found Text: Attributed to John Cleese
The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved." Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." The English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.
March 25, 2011
Bottles or Cans?
Heather John has the social consciousness of a sea urchin. It's often embarrassing to read her blog at the Foodinista but she works so hard at Yuppiedom, with such patent sincerity, that it's just too easy to forgive her multitude of sins. Besides, for a thirty-something she frequently has good ideas, like finding the virtues of beer in cans. I hadn't realized that beer in cans can be as good, or better, than beer in bottles. It has to do with there being less light and less oxygen. I still worry about chemicals from the plastic liner leaching into the beer but since I'm mostly a red wine guy I don't worry too much. As far as taste goes, yes, this is fresher beer. The difference is noticeable. Heather writes about Dale's Pale Ale, which is great, but I think that maybe Boont Amber Ale is even better. "Yes We Can!"
Who Are the Libyan Insurgents?
As reported in Le Figaro, and expanded upon by Diana Johnstone, in mid-March the French pseudo-intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy brought several leaders of the Libyan Benghazi faction to Paris and somehow used them to work President Sarkozy into a frenzied determination to attack Libya. What Rasputin-like powers BHL employed remain a mystery but his activation of Sarkozy, clearly, was the catalyst that set the U.S. administration's Amazons into action. What Samantha Power and Susan Rice subsequently said to Mr. Obama to convince him to go along with Sarkozy also remains a mystery but my guess is that it had to do with irresponsible, wild — indeed, delusional — speculation about the kind of massacres Col. Gaddafi might commit. This sequence of events between Paris and Washington amounts to what I would call an "accidental foreign policy" and it's only possible because the institution of the American presidency, wrongfully but inexorably, has accumulated the powers of an Emperor. Today, it's the whim of an Emperor based upon advice from a few courtiers, not the considered judgment of a democratic process, that casts America into war...
A Programming Note
One of the editors from In These Times (I'm on their Board of Editors) noticed "War Number Three" at the Huffington Post and republished it at In These Times, where a Russian TV producer read it. She liked it, so she booked me for Monday at 2:00 p.m. (Eastern) on RT Television. If you get a chance, please tune in. You might have the channel in your cable package or, if not, you could watch it streaming from the RT website. I've done hundreds of TV interviews in the past but none for a long time — I'm feeling kind of rusty. I hope I haven't forgotten 'the three BBC rules': Relax, relax, and relax! (See the segment here — scroll down slightly more than half-way on the page for the video.)
March 22, 2011
A Heads-Up On Scheduled Maintenance
For some period between 11:00 p.m. tonight and 7:00 a.m. tomorrow (Eastern Time), Wednesday, March 23d, Bluehost will physically move the Electric Politics server into a new data center. So, temporarily, the site will be down. The new data center should be more secure, stable, and reliable, with dozens of improvements for better service. Thanks for your patience!
March 20, 2011
War Number Three
Demonstrating the law of unintended consequences, the UN Security Council's Resolution 1973, adopted last Thursday evening, drew a swift response from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's government: it launched the battle for Benghazi. Further unintended consequences will surely follow the UN/NATO coalition's use of its brand new license for military force. But air power by itself may not amount to much except in a symbolic sense. Which begs the question, what next? Or, more properly, what's the goal?
March 19, 2011
Coffee and Donuts
Hot coffee and a couple donuts. Guaranteed to wake you up. These plain glazed donuts are fresh, fresh, fresh: I had to wait for the baker to glaze them. And the coffee is hot, strong, and full of flavor. A nice mouth feel. Percolated from a stove-top percolator
March 16, 2011
Nightwish — The Islander
March 14, 2011
Poor Japan
The first reports from the earthquake/tsunami had a few hundred dead. Awful, but things happen. Now it seems a lot, lot worse. Thousands, maybe ten thousand, maybe even twenty thousand or more, perished! A tragedy of epic scale. Yet the Japanese seem to heroically, and stoically, cope. Bless them... And let's hope that on top of everything else there isn't a Japanese Chernobyl, though the failing nuclear power stations seem to be tending toward that horrific, unthinkable outcome...
March 12, 2011
Ka-Boom!
It's not the best time for schadenfreude but one can hope that the explosion in Japan's reactor reinvigorates the anti-nuclear power movement. In the first place, nuclear power costs much more to produce, considering the entire fuel cycle from ore extraction to waste storage, than the market value of the electricity. So it's just a giant give-away to the nuclear industry. In the second place nobody has "solved" the storage problem, so it's imprudent to hope for a technological fix for lethal toxic waste with a half life, depending upon the isotope, measured from millennia to millions of years. Hope is not a policy. In the third place nuclear reactors are inherently unsafe. Accidents happen. And a worst-case melt down could be very bad indeed. It should be of special public interest that it's impossible for the operators of nuclear reactors to buy privately issued comprehensive insurance; only governments have the wherewithal to "insure" them; which means, in reality, to legislate against potential litigation. And, a related point, nuclear reactors are potential terrorist magnets. To blow them up you just cut off their cooling systems... If terrorists haven't figured that out yet doesn't mean that they eventually won't. Nuclear power is a very bad idea all around.
From 2011 to 2012
With budget negotiations underway, the White House has entered its glide path to the 2012 election. For some reason it seems to be calculating that by further 'moving to the center' the President's popularity — and the unpopularity of the Republicans — will overwhelm economic considerations and, particularly, a lack of American jobs. Good luck with that! What's interesting is that the election may be shaping up to be an atypical split ballot: a no-nonsense repudiation of Mr. Obama's whinging but at the same time, following the drama in Wisconsin, strong support for Democratic congressional and gubernatorial candidates. At least, that's how I hope it works out... Even better would be a successful primary challenge, but as of now that still looks like long odds...
March 9, 2011
A Modest Proposal
Yesterday I interviewed Terry Tamminen about his latest book, Cracking the Carbon Code
March 7, 2011
The U.S. Should Not Make War On Libya
In the early phases of the Bosnian civil war I thought — wrongly, in retrospect — that the west had a narrow window of opportunity to throw in our lot with a genuinely multi-ethnic Bosnian government, to bring the war to a swift and just resolution. One of my mistakes was in not seeing that the Sarajevo government contrived to maintain the veneer of multi-ethnicity but was, in fact, a Muslim enterprise whose penchant for atrocities was only slightly inferior to that of the official international villains, the Serbs. Nor did the Muslims have a much lower atrocity count than the historically blood-thirsty Croats. (It took me a couple trips wandering around the battlefield to become convinced.) The best outcome had always been a negotiated settlement but Washington waited almost five years before accepting that reality. By the end, in 1995, when all three sides were exhausted — front line fighters had largely stopped shooting — a few minor bombing campaigns got undeserved credit for clinching the Dayton deal but the bombing's harmful, longer term fallout became obscured.
March 6, 2011
Imperial Hubris
A Review of The Pentagon Labyrinth
By Werther*
In a recent radio interview, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash stated that his overall impression of the United States was one of dynamism and entrepreneurial spirit, such as in the Silicon Valley. But Washington, D.C., he said, reminded him of Moscow in the former Soviet Union.
In the context of the interview, he probably intended that as a criticism of the U.S. capital as being stagnant, status quo, and wedded to obsolete theories. But in a more pointed way he may not have consciously meant, it is equally true that Washington is remarkably like late-Brezhnev era Moscow in the sense of being very visibly the capital of a garrison state. With its billboard adverts for fighter aircraft in local Metro stations, radio spots recruiting for "the National Clandestine Service," its ubiquitous Jersey Wall checkpoints, and its electronic freeway signs admonishing motorists to report suspicious activity (whatever that may be), the District of Columbia quite accurately simulates the paranoid atmosphere of a cold war era capital of Eastern Europe, say, East Berlin or Bucharest, albeit at two orders of magnitude greater cost.
March 4, 2011
A Shout-Out To Shorpy
We all know that history can be confusing. It's not so easy to sort through nonsense histories, whether intentionally misleading or of the accidental persuasion. And it's easy to miss what's interesting. Documents are good correctives. So are photographs. One of my favorite "guilty pleasures" on the web is checking Shorpy (which I do almost every day), a repository of all sorts of old photographs. I don't know whether each photo is worth a thousand words, but it's fascinating to observe the way people carried themselves, and the way things were. And to think that people back then had no idea where the march of progress would take them...
March 2, 2011
"Humanitarian" Intervention in Libya?
"Humanitarian relief" has a modern history that goes back at least to Biafra. But it really came into its own with Fred Cuny in 1991, in Iraq, where Fred managed — virtually as a one man operation — to move the Iraqi front lines back a hundred klicks or so, to protect the Kurds. Fred had finally figured out how "humanitarian" goals could be the thin end of the wedge for military intervention. "Humanitarian relief" has had a mixed if not vexed relationship with military interventions ever since.
Fred almost perfected his technique in Bosnia and would have proved its utility in locating "lost" live nuclear warheads in Chechnya, in 1995, if he hadn't disappeared. No verifiable trace of his body has ever been found.
