WhirledView

Obama and Romney on Foreign Policy

by CKR

Updated here. Additionally, I have abstracted the statements of Richardson, Edwards, and Giuliani and have added a few more comments.

The July/August issue of Foreign Affairs contains articles by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The magazine says that in its series “Campaign 2008,” it will present a series of essays by “top presidential candidates.”

All last week, the commentariat observed that foreign policy is a central part of this campaign, for both parties. I’m sure it’s a big part of the campaign for WhirledView’s readers. So let me try to summarize the main points of both articles. They’re both pretty wordy and stuffed with campaign-speak. What I want to do is to try to get to the substance. I’ll be glad to entertain comments from the campaigns if they think I’ve got something wrong.

I’m not trying to make a cheat-sheet, Cliff’s Notes for the two articles. I do think, however, that getting down to the bare bones of what is said in them is useful in comparing the candidates. I urge you to read the articles themselves; they contain the candidates’ perception of the problems and more that you can use to judge the candidates.

I have, in many cases, used the words of the essays, but I have truncated sentences so that I will not use quotation marks or indented quotes unless I am using significant portions of the essays.

Just two comments: I found this misleading in Obama’s essay:

As George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn have warned, our current measures are not sufficient to meet the nuclear threat.

He seems to be referring to an op-ed written by those men in the January 4, 2007 Wall Street Journal. But they were advocating eliminating nuclear weapons, and Obama’s recommendations fall far short of that.

It was much easier to work through Obama’s essay than Romney’s. This may be because of my inclinations on the subject matter, but I think it is more a matter that Romney spent much more time excoriating the weaknesses of the past (particularly, but not exclusively, under Democratic presidents) than providing his recommendations for the future.

Findings

by CKR

For some time now, Harper’s Magazine has devoted its last page to “Findings,” a sort of summary of what the magazine deems to have happened in the world of science during the issue’s month.

Although the print version does not give the collator/author of the section,* the web spills the beans. Roger D. Hodge is listed there. According to his bio, he has edited “the acclaimed Readings section” and oversaw redesigns of the web site and the print version of the magazine. “Findings” is described as sardonic.

When the section first appeared, I thought I should be pleased: a literary-political magazine takes note of science. For a while, maybe a year or two, I made a point of reading it all the way through. No big deal, only a page, not even all text, artwork across the top.

But with time, I have come to read it less and less. I suppose the juxtaposition of various scientific findings is supposed to highlight their political significance or to make us think differently about ourselves and the world, or perhaps to encourage us to admire the depth and breadth of Hodge’s mind. (Why sardonic?)

I became tired of the mini-riddles encased in the semicolonized sentences and the implications that went further than the science warranted. Too many of the juxtapositions seemed to me to be nonsequiturs, which, I realize, may indicate my own inability to attain Hodge’s heights of wit and brilliance.

I’ve been thinking about why “Findings” appeals to me less and less. I think there is something fundamentally wrong in a column that presents scientific findings in as little as a clause or phrase, and I find the sardonicism tiring.

The US and the House of Saud: Arms for Oil, Influence and More?

By PHK

Fraying at the Seams?

On July 15, Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times broke the story of the American military’s first time willingness to name names and provide numbers as a result of its exasperation with Saudi Arabia’s multi-pronged support for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.

According to Parker, “the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq” come from Saudi Arabia – not US archenemies Syria or Iran. The figures – obtained from a senior U.S. military officer were apparently the first of their kind released. They indicate that about 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia. 15 percent come from Syria and Lebanon and 10 percent from North Africa. The origins of the other 30 percent are left to our imagination.

The U.S. senior military officer also told Parker that about 50 percent of Saudi belligerents who went to Iraq were suicide bombers and that “nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis.”

The Saudi government, expectedly, responded that its citizens are free to go wherever they want and that regardless, the Saudi-Iraqi border is far too long to patrol effectively so Saudi border patrol couldn’t stop individuals from crossing it if they wanted to do so.

The “hear no evil speak no evil” Bush administration, also expectedly, refused to comment on the Saudi funding of Iraqi Sunni insurgents report but stories have been circulating of strains in the US-Saudi relationship at least since King Abdullah publicly called the U.S. invasion of Iraq an “illegal foreign occupation” earlier this year.

Since then, not only has the U.S. accused the Saudis of undermining the Maliki government in various ways but a lengthy front page feature appeared in Thursday’s (July 26) Wall Street Journal that recounts US government anxieties about the possible Al Rajhi Bank’s complicity in the transfer of funds to organizations that are known to have supported or support terrorism.

True, the Kingdom’s largest Islamic bank is privately owned – but one would also expect that the Saudi government would exercise greater control over a Saudi bank’s activities. Most likely, however, as the WSJ suggests, the House of Saud, has turned a blind eye for domestic political reasons: a close partnership that has developed between the bank’s powerful owners who are no friends of the Saudi royal family and the powerful Wahhabi clerical establishment.

Arms for Oil, Influence – and what else – containment of Iran? Buying off AIPAC?

Meanwhile, the Bush administration will announce Monday a “series of new arms deals worth at least $20 billion to Saudi Arabia and five other oil-rich Persian Gulf states as well as a new 10-year military packages to Israel ($30.4 billion in new US aid, an increase in nearly 43 percent) and Egypt ($13 billion).

Congress Moves on Arms Control - Updated

by CKR

The Bush administration doesn't believe in arms control. It won't negotiate a fissile material cutoff treaty because it might be hard to verify. It won't take the simple step of agreeing with Russia to an extension of the START I Treaty, now being used to verify Moscow Treaty reductions (no verification provisions in the Moscow Treaty) and set to expire in 2009. It withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

But Congress appears to think that arms control is a good idea, that more and more missiles and bombs do not make the world safer. A few weeks ago, they voted to withhold funding for the new-design Reliable Replacement (nuclear) Warhead until the administration came up with a policy on the use of nuclear weapons for the post-Cold-War world we've been in for almost twenty years now. That got the attention of the Secretaries of Energy, Defense and State, who prepared a statement to say they're working on a report.

The statement and the promise of a "report" sound like it's may not be much more than what we've seen before, no rethinking. But Congress got their attention. And if it judges that the report isn't much, Congress can continue to withhold money.

Now, according to a report from The Guardian, Congress is using its power of the purse to slow down the deployment of an American antiballistic system in the Czech Republic and Poland. However, it looks like Boeing has already been awarded a contract. That story was covered in Poland, Russia and India, but not so much in the US, although the Associated Press did get something out on it.

Congress's power of the purse is a blunt instrument, but as we see in the case of the RRW, it can begin to move even this administration.

But I'm wondering why we're not hearing about this in American newspapers. Or about Vice President Cheney's trip to India to hand them a privileged nuclear status, above that of the NPT nuclear weapon states.

Update (later in the afternoon): Mission accomplished for Vice President Cheney. Note that Robert Einhorn agrees with me. The question is why the administration is doing this. Congress still has to approve this deal, but the pressures will be immense, most likely greater than their newfound allegiance to arms control.

Further Update (7/28/07): Here's the Washington Post article. Note that Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, says something very similar to what Einhorn and I have said.

The issue on India's reprocessing of fuel supplied by the US is that this makes that fuel essentially an enriched uranium and plutonium supply to India. Even if India uses that uranium and plutonium only for more reactor fuel and not weapons, it increases its supply so that India can use more of its own uranium and plutonium for weapons. Generally fuel-supply agreements between any countries involve shipment of spent fuel back to the supplier country. This is quite an exception.

Berkeley Chem Engineering Department Discovers Gender Inequity

by CKR

I am a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, chemistry department. The chemistry and chemical engineering departments jointly publish a very slick magazine, Catalyst, for their alumni. The chairs of both departments write short opinion pieces for the magazine.

Jeffrey A. Reimer is chair of the chemical engineering department. He seems to have discovered Virginia Valian’s book, Why So Slow. Of course, Valian’s book is hardly the first to discuss the lack of women on prestigious science faculties. Reimer cites the atmosphere of 1977, when he was a graduate student and all things seemed possible, even that stereotypes of race and sex might fall.

He is puzzled that one-fifth of the Ph.D. students recently admitted to the ChE department are women, and only three of the seventeen faculty are women. He pats himself on the back that the national percentage of women on ChE faculties is half that of Cal’s, but notes that the department has no African-American professors.

Surely there have been no overt policies and practices of sexism.

Too bad he didn’t read the rest of that Spring 2007 issue of Catalyst.

“To be of use: Research in Pasteur’s Quadrant” is the theme of the issue. Four faculty and alumni are featured...

four very different individuals. Three were born in the United States—two in the east and one in the west—and the fourth was born in Asia. Their fields are different—one chemical engineer, one physical chemist, one synthetic chemist, and one chemical biologist.

They are all male, the one non-white having won the Nobel Prize, which may be what is required to be noticed by the reigning white guys.

In the short topics, we find four male professors (two white, one African-American, one Asian) honored with “prestigious national awards,” four articles focusing on technical advances, a two-page spread of alumni event photos (31 men pictured, 23 women, although eight of the women are in a single picture, apparently doing a dance routine), and then of course the class notes, which I will not attempt to quantify.

So hello, Dr. Reimer! Would you consider an alumni magazine almost totally devoted to men an “overt practice of sexism”? Ah yes the usual explanation: there has been such a predominance of men in the previous classes that of course the balance is tipped in their direction. We’re working on that, just like we were back in 1977. And working and working. But not too hard.

BTW: The cover on the Spring 2007 Catalyst is the famous portrait of Louis Pasteur in his laboratory by Albert Edelfelt. I didn't realize that Edelfelt was Finnish until I read this issue. It's a portrait that inspired me as a child who wanted to become a scientist. But still, another couple of dead white guys.

Today’s Nuclear Links

by CKR

One of the things that gets me down at times is that we seem to be smackdab back in the middle of all sorts of problems relating to nuclear weapons. Back when the Soviet Union broke up, I thought that we could be finished with all that. But Clinton dithered, and too much of the bureaucracy had too much invested in continuing something like the Cold War, and then we got a president who seems to like the things, or at least doesn’t have enough of a gut understanding of their destruction to get serious about minimizing them in the world. Here’s today’s news on a variety of nuclear problems.

The Guardian, continuing its recent sensational approach to any statements relating to treaties, trumpets that Iran said it might pull out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, as North Korea did. However, if you read the story carefully, you’ll find that that threat was ‘way down the list of planned actions. While Iran continues to be committed to its uranium enrichment program, it is also preparing to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors into its Arak reactor, now under construction and potentially capable of producing plutonium for a weapons program. In both of the news articles I’ve linked, the Iranians once again say that their program is not intended to produce nuclear weapons. Russia says that the Bushehr nuclear power plant will not be completed until 2008, which may be just the exigencies of engineering or foot-dragging related to the other negotiations.

Jeffrey Lewis tells us that Vice President Cheney appears to have instructed Nicholas Burns to yeah, give the Indians everything they want in the 123 agreement, which will be the basis of trading nuclear technology with one of the three non-signers of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Congress will have a role in the continuing saga; contrary to what we sometimes read in the news stories, the legislation they’ve passed on the India deal merely opens the way to approving an agreement. They did that rather perfunctively and supinely, but they may have grown some reproductive organs since then. (Links to Arms Control Wonk are dicey these days. The relevant news articles are here and here. Jeffrey, you need to bug your ISP!)

Hans Kristensen explains why President Bush’s plans to locate missile defense emplacements in Poland and the Czech Republic is causing such a strong reaction from Russia. The Cold War is not over.

Howard C. Berkowitz argues that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty needs to be modified to include India, Pakistan and Israel, the nuclear weapons states outside it. I don’t have time to fully analyze his article now, but it’s thoughtful, worth reading, and the issue of bringing those three states into something like compliance with the NPT is an important one.

Finally, a little ray of hope, or just the usual media misunderstanding? Ria Novosti seems to report that the US and Russia have agreed to talks to continue the START I treaty, which is the means by which the Moscow Treaty is being verified. The Moscow Treaty is to reach its goals by 2012, but START I runs out in December 2009. Until now, the United States has refused such talks, apparently part of the Bush administration’s dislike of verification. (Trust but verify, Ronald Reagan said, but not for Bush.) I guess I’ll put this one down to media misunderstanding, but I’ll be happy if I see the confirmation I can’t find just now.

Wednesday Leftovers Blogging

by CKR

The piñon jays seem to have moved on. It may be that I disrupted their schedule, or they may be responding to their own imperatives.

Early yesterday morning I took down the feeders and upended the birdbath so that the piñons could be sprayed for bark beetles. I’m not fond of spraying, but I lost a number of piñons to beetles a few years back. I think that northern New Mexico has become overforested in the past half-century or so, and I’m pleased with the way my yard is now, but I do have some piñons I don’t want to lose. One of them is perfectly symmetrical and full, almost like those sheared Christmas trees, but naturally that way. It will lose some of that look as it survives a few more years, but it’s fun to have it now.

Even when the jays were here, the cleanup crew arrived in the late afternoon. There were about four young doves, both white-winged and mourning doves. Yesterday both types of adults were present, along with young. Neighborhood babysitting co-op?

And I didn’t think that rabbits ate grain, but this one comes back regularly.

The black-headed grosbeaks eat from the block and on the ground. For a while I saw only one, but yesterday I saw two together, probably this year’s young. A rufous-sided towhee is part of the crew, too, but moves fast.

The jays consumed a large birdseed block and a small one. I was afraid I would have to buy some more this week, but maybe not.

Monday night I missed an opportunity to photograph the development of a thunderstorm about twenty miles south. It didn’t look like much as it started, but evolved into a nice anvil-shape with a companion cloud. I’ll be more alert to an opportunity like that. Our rainy season may be starting.

I’ve finally managed to plant all the plants I bought this spring. I was waiting to plant some cactuses in an area that I plan to make a cactus-and-rock garden, the rocks coming from the five large boxes in the garage of New Mexico minerals and fossils. I found some nice large chunks with fluorite crystals (mostly blue to purplish) and one galena crystal, along with quartz and feldspar (whitish, uninteresting), and put them in the area as a starter, along with five cactuses. One of them was called, I think, a peter pan cactus, although I can’t find that designation for this kind of cactus, clearly an Opuntia, on the web. It has no obvious spines, but when I bought it, the salesperson warned me about the glochids, those little sharp hairs that opuntias have around their spines.

I tend to be careless about handling cactuses; I usually avoid bleeding, but I get in between the spines and figure that I can remove the glochids while I watch television. They weren’t kidding about those glochids; the longest I’ve ever had penetrate my fingers, and lots of them, although they’re not at all obvious on the plant. I was wearing gloves, which picked them up and transferred them to my fingers every time I put them on again after taking them off to remove the glochids. I’ve still got a couple that will have to fester or be removed by my needle surgery.

BTW, that Wikipedia article I linked to has a terrible photo; I don’t think it’s of an Opuntia, and most of the glochids I’ve seen don’t look like that. I’ll take a better photo one of these days; I have a Tuesday blog devoted to cactuses in mind.

Time Out

By PLS

I'm afraid my last post really wasn't as polished as I'd like, but it's 9:45 pm. I have to catch a shuttle for the airport tomorrow at 6:00 am and I still haven't finished packing for a month in South Asia. The first couple of weeks will involve trekking in Ladakh. I'll be taking lots of pictures, of course, and gathering lots of impressions, but it's a little hard to blog when you're camping in some remote meadow at 14,000 feet. Thank God, some places are still (almost) totally cut off from the electronic nags that plague our lives today. So you won't be hearing from me for awhile. I do hope to be able to do a little writing once I'm back to civilization, Leh, Delhi and elsewhere. But who knows! Maybe I'll be having too much fun!

Islam and the West: Heaps of Forgotten History—and a Heartwarming True Tale of Today

By PLS

(In this post I’m going to talk about three recently published books: Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists by Michael Hamilton Morgan, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk and Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.)

People forget (or decide to ignore) all kinds of history. Bad things, of course. But sometimes it’s convenient to repress the memory of the good things, too.

Muslim Genius

Michael Hamilton Morgan’s Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists reminds us of the greatness of Muslim civilization. All humanity stands on the shoulders of the luminous human beings who lived in Bagdad, Damascus, Al Andalus, Tabriz, Nishapur, Isfahan, Basra, etc., just as those immortals stood on the shoulders of the ancient Greeks, who for their part learned much from ancient Egypt. For all the anxiety about economic globalization today, it’s well to remember that trade and cultural exchange are normal for human beings. The world of knowledge has always been globalized, as scholars, mathematicians, astronomers, poets and others move from court to court, country to country, university to university. In any era the center that attracts the most brilliant scholars of the day gains prestige and profits in innumerable ways.

When Europe went through the dismal period known as the Dark Ages, a term which some are now attaching to the current relatively retro phase of Muslim history, the Islam-enhanced, largely forgotten learning of the Western past was preserved in Muslim libraries and archives. Those intellectual achievements, further developed by Western thinkers over the past few centuries, are now waiting to be reclaimed when—No! I’m not forgetting the brilliant individual Muslims scattered in universities around the world—the Muslim world at large is ready to support the enthusiastic creation of new knowledge again.

Michael Morgan is providing a terrific springboard for making the most of recovered memories. It’s hard to see how a Muslim student at Al Azhar or any other university could fail to be inspired by this fast-paced and very readable introduction to these intellectual live wires who illuminated Islamic civilization from the eighth century to the sixteenth when Akbar, the Mogul Emperor of India, illiterate himself, sponsored lively debates on the great issues of the day among the great scholars of his time, including Hindus and Jesuits as well as representatives of his natal religion Islam. Such debates seldom take place even in our so called advanced time.

Morgan has a wonderful talent for bringing his heroes to life and allowing us an almost visceral participation in each moment of insight. We meet great physicians like Ibn Sina whose science-based Canon of Medicine became the guide for European practice for over 700 years. We meet the less well known, but equally influential Ibn Al-Haytham, who studied light, astronomy and optics in the eleventh century, and we share with him the excitement of watching what sun beams do. Empiricism was alive and well way back then!

Ibn Sina went way beyond Galen, whom he acknowledged as a master; Al-Haytham built on Ptolemy, who was no slouch. And Westerners could never have become masters of the sea, if they had not been able to count on the navigational aid of the astrolabe as refined by Muslim scholars like Al Majriti, who also used his more sophisticated device for land surveys in Muslim Spain that were more accurate than the Roman-based surveying still in use until then. To build on the past is no indication of inferiority. It’s the way knowledge advances. And Muslims helped mightily, in the past.

If you don’t know much about Muslim intellectual history, this engaging book will bowl you over. It’s the perfect corrective for insufficiently informed Muslims depressed by the pre-eminance of Westerners in the intellectual world—and for Westerners who equate Islam with nothing but violence and backwardness. The message to young Muslims is this: if Islamic civilization could inspire such accomplishment in the past, it can happen again—and you—Yes, you!—might make it happen. The related message to non-Muslims is that terrorism is a malignancy on the body of Islam, not its essence.

Western Hubris

But why terrorism in our time? Why do young Muslims (even those who study science) turn themselves into suicide bombers, with or without the assistance of jet liners? Some people in the West, especially in the U.S., believe the violence arises because young Muslims are jealous of the Western life style They hate “us” for our freedoms. They hate “us” for democracy. They hate “us” for having the high standard of living that only the wealthy among them can enjoy. Maybe they also hate the over-sexualizing of our culture, and lots of us would agree that we could do with a bit less of that!

Veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk has a more convincing answer in The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. It’s this: They hate us for what we’ve done to them, to their countries, to their autonomy, to their self-respect, “them” being the Muslim world and “we” being the West—first Great Britain and France during the Colonial Era and now the United States, which exercises imperial power mostly without occupying the territory it dominates.

Thinking the Unthinkable: Leaving Iraq with Dignity, Compassion and Iraqi Employees

By PHK

Kudos to the Danes for undertaking the unthinkable and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker for at least broaching the subject. Crocker’s advice and concerns are a cold dose of realism in a US foreign policy which under this administration has generally been devoid of it.

Yet will the Bush administration listen?

According to a July 21, 2007 article in the International Herald Tribune, the Danish government has “secretly airlifted about 200 translators and other Iraqi employees and their relatives out of Iraq to try to keep them from coming to harm after it withdraws its ground forces later this summer.” In a similar vein as reported in the Washington Post on July 22, Crocker, in a two page cable, “has asked the Bush administration to . . . grant immigrant visas to all Iraqis employed by the US government in Iraq because of growing concern that they will quit and flee the country if they cannot be assured safe passage to the U.S.”

It’s more than time for the US to get those departure ducks in a row. We turned a blind eye in Vietnam in 1975 and hundreds and thousands of loyal Vietnamese US government employees and their families were left to fend for themselves. This often meant “reeducation camps,” separation, loss of livelihood, personal hardship and finally, for the lucky, escape by small boat through treacherous waters. Some made it – others didn’t.

Given America’s poor track record on the taking-care-of-those-who-work-for-us front, it’s no wonder that current Iraqi employees of the U.S. government now demand assurances for the afterwards. They and their families will need to depart Iraq to survive. The US government on its part has a moral obligation to help them resettle elsewhere – most likely the US.

It’s that simple.

There's also the wide scope, character and history of the US occupation of Iraq, the numbers of refugees will be thousands more than the small contingent working for the Danes – but then the U.S. is also a far larger country.

If we do it right this next time, we won’t need to deal – years later – with thousands of displaced persons like we did with the Vietnamese boat people. When I was Cultural Affairs Officer in the Philippines from 1992-4, the final Vietnamese refugee camp only closed there nearly 20 years after the US withdrawal from Vietnam.

Cambodia and Vietnam: How to do it and how not

The evacuation of the US Embassy in Vietnam April 1975 was the most botched operation I witnessed during my nearly 28 year Foreign Service career. Not only did the evacuation leave Vietnamese employees behind but it also almost left my USIS American colleagues and the entire staff of one of our Consulates there too. I don’t remember the consulate story as well – but if my memory still serves me, the Consulate staff had not been told of the evacuation. They were left to learn by hearsay and find their own way out via private river boat down the Mekong.