WhirledView

Predators for Pakistan?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The New Hour’s Margaret Warner interviewed the Prime Minister of Pakistan on Monday. It was Raza Yusuf Gilani’s first trip to Washington since he acquired the position that the Bush administration had expected Benazir Bhutto to win on her return to Pakistan last winter. Warner wanted to know if Gilani and President George W. Bush had worked out how they’ll cooperate in dealing with militants in northern Pakistan. Above all, she wanted to know, what did the PM think about the U.S. launching attacks of any kind into Pakistan from Afghanistan. For example, if the location of an important al Qaeda figure suddenly becomes known, is it okay for the U.S. to take him out without seeking explicit permission? If not, will Pakistan give permission?

No—and never, Gilani replied. It’s our country. We must do it.

However, he conceded, there are complications. We have the will, he said, but not the capacity, so give us some Predators and then when you give us the coordinates of the bad guys, we will take them out.

Sounds nice. Sounds cooperative. But this week’s skirmishes in Kashmir between Indian and Pakistani forces should remind us that al Qaeda and a militant Taliban are, to the Pakistani leadership, an infestation of fleas compared to the never ending, mortal threat from India, as they see it.

Check out that interview between Gilani and Warner. It’s a masterpiece of evasion and very careful wording. Gilani appears to be very accommodating and concerned, but he has no role for the U.S. in Pakistan. He promises nothing. And his words about the reliability (from the U.S. point of view) of the Pakistani spy services are especially slick.

Gilani, like most Pakistanis of his class, is a master of appearances. It would be very hard for me to convince you of the elusiveness behind his rather bland facade, if it weren’t for that little clash in Kashmir and an important story appearing on the front page of the New York Times this morning. The U.S. is making downright public its long-standing belief that Pakistani agents are helping the very elements who are killing Americans and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.

So imagine this: the U.S. sends those coordinates and urges immediate action. Might not a warning reach the target well before the Predator can do its damage? Or maybe the package lands a little off the mark. Imagine the hand-wringing. Oh dear, oh dear, he got away.

If Pakistan is not likely to use Predators aggressively against al Qaeda or border-crossing Taliban militants, why does Pakistan need them?

It needs them for the war it really wants to fight. Not the American “war” against terrorism. The war against India, which flares up from time to time, especially when it is politically useful. Right now Pakistan’s government is an unstable coalition and the transition from military to civilian rule is anything but complete. How convenient it would be to divert attention from the government's failure to bring down food and gas prices and focus anxieties on an immediate need to resist Indian aggression—you know, to deal with those arrogant resentful Indians who have been trying to destroy us ever since Pakistan was carved out of British India in 1947.

Coincidentally, perhaps, such an incident materialized a couple of days ago, just as Gilani was starting his Washington visit. Indian and Pakistani forces facing one another in Kashmir exchanged fire for 12-16 hours. There have been further skirmishes since then, along with accusations that one or the other side crossed the Line of Control.

Frankly, we don’t yet know who was responsible for what. Nervous soldiers can trigger such incidents. But a crisis in Kashmir could draw attention from those nasty issues the Americans want to discuss. A series of skirmishes might also help to convince the Americans that Pakistan’s tendency to concentrate its Army on the Indian border isn’t neurotic. India is so big. We are so small. So, Uncle Sam, keep the military aid coming.

But wait. Might India also have a motive for instigating a clash right now? Oh, yes! A sweet little encounter with Pakistan might divert attention from the fact that the Indian government has not been able to prevent a series of bombs from going off in many Indian cities. A few days ago 42 were killed in Ahmedabad. On July 25, a lot of small bombs planted in Bangalore killed only two people, but on May 13th the toll was 62 deaths in Jaipur. In 2007, there were bombs resulting in fatalities in Lucknow, Varanasi, Faizabad, Ludhiana, Ajmer and Hyderabad. An obscure Islamic group is said to have claimed responsibility for the Ahmedabad and Bangalore incidents. Maybe they can be tracked down. Yet, successfully conducting and resolving an old-fashioned border conflict with Pakistan, however limited, might make more political sense. Putting the belligerent, never satisfied Pakistanis in their place could make the Indian population feel protected rather than vulnerable, an important consideration for the party in power with a general election not far over the horizon.

Whether or not the latest skirmish in Kashmir was accidental or premeditated, however, I do know this: when dealing with Pakistan’s political class, enjoy the conversation, but take all assurances with a cup or two of salt.

Wednesday Good News Buffalo Gourd Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

Yes! The stem is still alive and starting to make new leaves.

But even better, the recent rains and my watering have encouraged one of the seeds I planted last year to sprout.

And, better yet, that voracious towhee hasn't found it. She (or possibly one of the squirrels) tore apart an impatiens in a pot on the deck. Here's hoping she stays in that territory. Another of the young plants is still showing some green, but it's little enough that it's hard to see in a photo.

Now, please understand that that stem is maybe six centimeters tall and that first leaf on the seedling is maybe a centimeter long. We have some distance to go, but it's still two or three months until frost. I have some sprouted seeds indoors, and I will plant them soon, maybe this evening.

I was learning my new camera in the yard today. Here's a photo that's just pretty to celebrate the buffalo gourds. This one is puncture vine (Tribulus terrestris), which produces some of the nastiest thorny seeds I've ever had puncture my fingers. Weeds of the West says they can puncture bicycle tires. The whole plant is maybe three feet across, and I will pull it in the next week or so, before it sets seed.

As I google around to find a link or two satisfy your curiosity about puncture vines (Wikipedia, USDA), I see that some people are selling preparations from them to boost your testosterone. This site attributes the activity to glycosides, which can be poisonous, so I think I'd stay away from taking it. And, if you really hate puncture vines, this is the site for you! Attack with weevils and fire! Kill them!

This little plant really arouses some strong feelings.

The Question of Expertise

by Cheryl Rofer

The New York Times op-ed page today takes on flying saucers. More properly unidentified flying objects, UFOs, but the Times op-ed page has been more than a bit barmy for the past several months, so one term or the other will do.

But there’s a serious point underlying that article that keeps recurring: what role can expertise play in whom we take seriously?

Nick Pope, the author of the article, notes that some observers have reported “stars and planets, aircraft lights, satellites and meteors” as unidentified, but others have reported things in the sky that genuinely can’t be identified and that may constitute dangers.

Also today, Todd Gitlin points out that an expert currently being cited in newspaper articles on the financial mess was also one of the “most-quoted alarmists warning that Y2K was going to bring the sky crashing down because computers would misread 2000 as 1900.” Gitlin concludes

The same experts are quoted again and again with--so far as I can tell--no regard for their records.

Further, some experts are willing to put their names to newspaper articles others have written for them. Last night on the News Hour we saw a testy Steve Wasserman forced to share the airwaves with (horrors!) an online commentator, Kassia Krozer. The subject was the Los Angeles Times’s decision to discontinue its book review section, of which Wasserman was editor until 2005. It’s worth quoting him at length because he incorporates so intemperately so many of the objections to the Web that so many professional journalists (print variety) make.

Well, to oppose the Internet I suppose would be like to oppose climate change. I have no problem with the vast democracy wall that the Internet provides on which everyone, every crank and every sage can post his or her pronunciamento.

Deconstructing those Issues with Pakistan

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

President George W. Bush and Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani are holding talks in Washington, a visit which has significant substantive and symbolic implications, according to the Pakistani press. The Americans want to capture Osama bin Laden and destroy Al Qaeda elements operating in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. The Pakistanis want to preserve the appearance of sovereignty in their wild northwest while securing as much foreign aid as possible. Aid-for-action-on-the-frontier bribes are publically announced as focused on $115 million in food aid, but it is hard to believe that Gilani isn’t bargaining for plenty of military aid as well. The Pakistani military’s list of quid-pro-quo needs is always very long. In fact, members of Pakistan’s ruling elite have never shown much interest in the well-being of the less successful (despite the pillar of Islam which calls for charity), but inflation is hurting and if ordinary people in this hugely populous country can’t afford food, the political consequences to the unstable “odd couple” PPP-Muslim League coalition government could be dire. The affordability of chapatis aside, if the Army isn’t satisfied, its willingness to countenance the return to civilian rule may be short-lived.

As usual lots of buzz words about extremists and militants and terrorists are being thrown about in Washington, just now, but they aren’t very helpful, so let’s step back a little.

Deconstruction is a trendy concept as well as a highly technical term for literary theorists, but it’s also a useful policy-making tool. When political issues get too complicated, it’s helpful to break them down into little parts and see which have some potential for deeper understanding or useful action. Now that PM Gilani is making his first official visit to Washington, a visit which is apparently coinciding with the killing of an important al Qaeda figure by a U.S. drone sent without Pakistani permission into Pakistani territory, it makes sense to break these emotionally-charged security issues down into three categories. What are the bed rock actual demands that Washington should be making? What needs to be on the reasonable wish list for the relatively near future? What should we not be meddling in, however tempting?

And, oh yes, the far off dream, the fourth category, that which would largely de-muddle all the rest.

Where's the Line?

So let’s get that visionary part of the to-do list out of the way first. It has to do with the dubious legitimacy and, I might add, the mile-by-mile geo-social unrealism of the Durand Line that more or less forms the boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. By now, even non-specialists who pay attention to this part of the world may know that the boundary is a line of convenience drawn up by the British during the colonial period. Not only did it recognize that the Brits could in no way control what lay beyond it, although they wanted to, it provided British India with a kind of buffer zone to the south of it, a political no-man’s- land known now as the Federally Administered Territories or F.A.T.A. The relationship between British colonial authorities and tribal leaders was an essentially feudal truce, an always wary you-leave-us-alone- and-we’ll-leave-you-alone situation. Whether or not an agreement over this boundary was properly signed and ratified by all concerned parties in 1893 is a subject of intense dispute, but when Pakistan was created in 1947, the new country inherited the Durand Line, whose de facto recognition, for all its imperfections, has always since been preferable to opening the can-of-worms issue of where the boundary should actually be. That issue is now, willy-nilly, on the table, with some Taliban elements even claiming that there should be a Pashtunistan that incorporates large parts of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan into a modern revival of the ancient state of Khurasan. Other Talibs are closer to Al Qaeda. They do not recognize any boundaries anywhere in the Muslim world. All has to be reclaimed for a unified purified Muslim theocracy.

So who has sovereignty over what?

Unhappily, the urgent big issues between Pakistan and the U.S. converge on this murky territory, which is also very mountainous, because Osama bin Laden, the self-appointed reformer of Muslim society who masterminded the 9/11 attacks, has taken refuge and is rebuilding his al Qaeda there. I strongly suspect that many if not all tribal leaders who offered hospitality to the beleaguered bin Laden after the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul, had no idea of what they were getting themselves in for. They had to know he was a wanted man. But I do not think they wanted an end to their autonomy. I doubt if they wanted Arab outsiders to reshape their tribal mores any more than they they have ever wanted non-tribals from elsewhere in Pakistan to interfere in their affairs. As a woman, I don’t have any sympathy for tribal patriarchalism, but I feel some sympathy for them. I don’t think the traditional leaders of the F.A.T.A. were ready for the ruthlessness of the Talibanized Sunni reformers aka militants or extremists who tend to murder those who get in their way. However the war on terror ends, the tribal areas will have been transformed, I think. They will have lost much of their custom-protecting isolation.

All this history makes you wonder why anyone would want to be Prime Minister of Pakistan today. Mr. Gilani has serious problems and he needs help, which he is obviously going to get, because he is a smooth-talking Pakistani gentleman and he will say the right things, macho to macho, to good old boy George Bush. There’s only one way he could spoil his chances. He can’t let on that the military and many other Pakistanis still think that the greatest existential threat to modern Pakistan isn’t the Islamic revolution. It’s India, they think, which is why Pakistan is hoping for some upgraded F-16s as well as all that nice food.

Who Are These Guys?

So here is where I want to do some of that nasty deconstruction, focused on what the U.S. wants. In dealing with people in those restive tribal areas, distinctions must be made. There are the traditional tribals, who are Muslim and conservative, but not necessarily Taliban. They are interested mainly in keeping control over their traditional lands. Next, there are the aggressive Taliban-type religious leaders and their converts, mostly Pashtun, who are both Pakistani and Afghan, which suggests that their ambitions are confined largely to a reconquest of Afghanistan plus a conversion of Pakistan into their kind of Islamic state. Finally, there are bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, who include Arab and non-Arab foreigners, which is to say non-Pakistanis, since Al Qaeda recruits throughout the Muslim world. Al Qaeda’s ambitions presume operations world-wide. Needless to say, at any one moment in any one place, these tribal, Taliban and al Qaeda elements may or may not be cooperating with one another, which offers interesting political possibilities for those who are willing to give up the simple “terrorist” label. It may be that the Pakistani military makes it rather hard for U.S. operatives to play games on the ground, but intelligent policy-making on the basis of these complex realities might make that frustration less than crippling.

The Invisible Man and the Hatch Act

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Whatever one thinks about the contents and delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech to a ‘modest-sized’ crowd of over 200,000 at Berlin’s Tiergarten Park last Thursday or, for that matter any of the other stops on his week long overseas trip to meet the world, one has to marvel at the Bush administration’s head-in-the-sand reaction.

In short, the administration behaved as if the Senator from the Great State of Illinois didn’t exist – or at least his campaign related touch-downs in Europe and the Middle East had never happened. Now why the administration thought that if it played the invisible man game everyone else would follow is beyond me.

But I think that's what happened.

Now, I don’t blame the White House for not including a speech text – or video of any of the highlights – on the presidential webpage. That would, of course, be inappropriate. But you’d think the State Department, at least, would have included even just one or two tiny links to the speech or Obama’s trip otherwise on State.gov - its made-for-Americans-only webpage - if only for credibility’s sake.

Nope. Nada. Rien. Nein.

Ah, but last I checked, I could join a chat (or read the transcript) with the US Ambassador to Canada – although I don’t think Ambassador David Wilkins would have liked the questions I might have raised about his own questionable activities in support of a recent McCain campaign visit to Ottawa - or I could drink in photo after photo and video after video of Condi. I could also click on a banner news report of how happy the US government is that the Cyprus negotiations are supposed to resume on September 3 (that’s the good news – and it is good news because a Cyprus resolution is far too long in coming).

But even a whiff of a reference to Obama’s recent visit to Berlin, Paris, London or the Middle East just doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on State.gov. And yes, I did try the search engine.

Also nothing on Dipnote, the Department’s blog which somewhere along the line must have decided WhirledView no longer deserves a place on its blog roll. Now that’s OK. Dipnote is not on our blogroll either and we don't exactly toe the party line; but more to the point, Dipnote, like State.gov brims over with oversized Condi photos – post after post after post in a kind of cult of the personality rollout befitting, well you fill in the blank. Princess Sparklepony must be having a field day.

A trip almost airbrushed out?

The administration’s airbrushing out of Obama’s overseas trip, however, reminds me of the old Stalin Politburo pictures in which the cult of the personality’s personal and political enemies were disappeared one after the other by anonymous airbrush-wielding editors.

Now to be fair, I checked America.gov (the website officially kept away from the American public by the outdated Smith-Mundt Act despite the fact that our tax payers dollars finance its existence) and lo and behold discovered a “Campaign Trail blog” by Michelle Austein who tried to put Obama’s whirlwind international tour into perspective for a non-American audience as best she could, given possible State Department constraints. More power to her.

Her main point to foreign readers was that now the media is global, one should see Obama’s speech in Germany as primarily aimed at American voters at home. Well yes – after all he was accompanied by a raft of celebrity-type American journalists reporting his every comment to the home folk and one has to be an American citizen to vote; but no – the Tiergarten speech was clearly multi-faceted and from the way I read it, designed to address audiences foreign and domestic.

Austein made a good point, but the most useful part of the post for me was her link to the speech itself as carried by The New York Times. Now why she didn’t post a copy of the speech direct from the Obama campaign website is beyond me. When I worked in the same bureau under USIA leadership or as an Embassy Information Officer overseas I would have gone to the horse’s mouth for the text, in this case the Obama campaign, but times, I guess, have changed for those working for State today. Wouldn’t want to link directly to the “enemy” – now would we?

Political Appointee Ambassadors Above the Law?

Regardless, one of our apparently dimmer bulb political appointee Ambassadors refused to allow US Embassy staff assigned to Berlin to attend Obama’s speech. The rationale: such attendance by US career employees violated The Hatch Act and this part of the trip was paid for by the Obama campaign, not US taxpayers so it was, therefore, off limits.

Past Time to Deep-Six the War Metaphor

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Earlier this month, I gave a talk on the US Image Abroad and How It Can Be Fixed to the League of Women Voters here in Albuquerque. My first point was the need to drop the “War on Terror” metaphor from any new administration’s vocabulary.

The more I think about it, the more I become convinced – maybe it’s just me convincing myself – that the Bush administration’s war rhetoric is the first stumbling block this country needs to overcome to regain its reputation abroad.

I did not participate in the Blogger’s Roundtable with State’s new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy James Glassman a week ago Thursday because I was literally in the air between Houston and Reagan National at the time. I had nevertheless been chagrined by the overarching emphasis of fighting the war of ideas as laid out in at least one earlier Glassman-as-the-new Under Secretary speech and would have questioned him on it had I been at the other end of the phone.

What troubles me the most about America’s war rhetoric that the world has been subjected to – and the American people seduced by – since 9/11 is that it is a misnomer and a dangerous one at that. Painting the world in “us-versus-them” shoot-em-up vocabulary precludes dialog. It precludes mutual understanding. It also intimately relates to an exorbitantly expensive and unnecessary militarization of US foreign policy and foreign policy institutions that is at least partially responsible for precipitating the serious economic problems we currently face.

And above all, it is leading this country down the wrong track in dealing with the world effectively and obtaining the results we crave.

War of ideas? Oh, come on. Please spell them out. Radical Islam versus what? Or is it neocolonialism versus what? Democracy versus what? Lemonade versus orange juice? Now really but at least this latest, albeit poorly chosen metaphor, does not instantly evoke visions of an armed-to-the-teeth Mars speeding through the heavens or a mushroom cloud rising on the horizon.

Who are the protagonists and what are their aims? Is it really a simple “them versus us” equation? Fighting “the enemy over there” rather than having them crawl out from under our beds at home? (Remember the Commie-under-every-bed scare that, of course, never materialized? I kept looking but never found him or her although we did have bugs in the ceiling in our Moscow apartment during the Cold War.)

And is the military “solution” working? War, after all, is politics by other means – but in my view, military might should be used as the last resort, not the first – and the hyping of the war metaphor for either domestic or international political purposes has gone on for far too long, at too high decibels for too little gain.

A POSTSCRIPT: Well worth reading on Avuncular American: Jerry Loftus' "Obama Overseas: One Man Public Diplomacy Triumph."

Bringing the Bushmen to Justice

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Dennis Kucinich continues to call for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. Impeachment is probably warranted, on many grounds, all more important than Clintonian waffling about sex, though perjury is perjury. Lying under oath is always unacceptable.

Still, Congressional enthusiasm for impeachment is limited. The Democrats need to concentrate on getting a Democratic team elected in November.

Those who believe that some very big Bush administration fish must be held responsible for this administration’s trashing of the Constitution and of universally accepted human rights norms need not feel entirely discouraged, however. This Administration will never be off the hook for enthusiastically promoting the use of torture during U.S. conducted (or requested) interrogations.

If I were George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Douglas Feith, David Addington, George Tenet, et. al., I would be very nervously aware that a paper trail, little by little, is accumulating. Congress is taking testimony and following up. The A.C.L.U. is gaining access to damning documents, which may be examined on their website. Knowledgeable administration underlings are beginning to squeal, if not from principle, then from the natural instinct for self-preservation.

Here are some of the sorts of people who ought to feel insecure: those who drew up legal documents to legitimize torture, those who asked for those documents, those who approved the application of those documents, those who did the torturing, those who supervised the torturers, those who shipped victims for torturing abroad, Congress members who facilitated the torture, the commander in chief.

It may take years to get the evidentiary ducks in a row, but time is not necessarily on the side of the torturers. It took a long time for the Chilean legal system to catch up with Augustin Pinochet, who was responsible for so many extra-judicial killings in Chile. And only now are the generals responsible for the “dirty war” in Argentina being dealt with. From a news story datelined today:

A court in Argentina sentenced a notorious former military leader to life in prison for atrocities committed in 1977 at a clandestine torture center used by the military dictatorship where only 17 of more than 2,200 political prisoners survived.

Thanks probably to changes in government in Belgrade, another monster has recently been apprehended, after 13 years in hiding. Bosnian Serb wartime president Radovan Karadzic, who was responsible for the genocidal murder of thousands of Muslim men, should be extradicted to the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague shortly.

Given its fondness for torture and unilateral action on the international stage, one can easily understand why the Bush administration has tried to undermine the International Criminal Court.

The United States government has consistently opposed an international court that could hold US military and political leaders to a uniform global standard of justice. The Clinton administration participated actively in negotiations towards the International Criminal Court treaty, seeking Security Council screening of cases. If adopted, this would have enabled the US to veto any dockets it opposed. When other countries refused to agree to such an unequal standard of justice, the US campaigned to weaken and undermine the court. The Bush administration, coming into office in 2001 as the Court neared implementation, adopted an extremely active opposition. Washington began to negotiate bilateral agreements with other countries, insuring immunity of US nationals from prosecution by the Court. As leverage, Washington threatened termination of economic aid, withdrawal of military assistance, and other painful measures.

Needless to say, poor countries have made the necessary compromises to get the money they need.

Yet Dennis Kuchinich should not be discouraged. In the near future, he will find plenty of support for punishing leaders who have acted in contempt of U.S. law and also acted in brutish disregard of norms that Americans once stigmatized others for violating. The support for prosecution will come from many Americans. It will also come from the international community.

Bush supporters will call it a vendetta. The rest of us will call it justice. As George Bush himself likes to say, “The terrorists will be brought to justice.” Just substitute one T-word for the other. “The torturers will be brought to justice.”

Blog Tank: National Strategy for a Few Nuclear Weapons – What To Do With Them When You’ve Got Them

by Cheryl Rofer

Previous posts in this series:
Why They Want Them
Why They Don’t Want Them
Challenge

I apologize for taking so long to work this post out, but it’s the hardest so far, and real life does sometimes intervene.

We’ll skip over how the various countries may have gotten their nuclear weapons—although the methods were many and ingenious—and move to my central question: what does a country do with an arsenal of 1-5 nuclear weapons?

1. Protect them carefully. Deichman makes this point number one. They’re no good to you if terrorists, commandos or other unauthorized people can take them away from you. Arhering suggests that a protective force could be part of a bluff, making a show of protecting nothing.

2. Let the world know you have them. An effective way to do this is to stage an underground test (Deichman, Armchair Generalist, Arhering, ZenPundit, Fester). Eddie’s Iraqi Kurds take IAEA inspectors on a tour of a nuclear bunker while the Iranian Kurds explain their postion to the Iranian government; a dissident American official leaks classified papers, which contribute to the credibility of the Kurds’ claims. Fester suggests that the danger in a nuclear test is that it will fizzle.

3. Bluff to keep others guessing as to how many you have and where they are. Armchair Generalist suggests that both dummies and mobile launchers be used.

I'll need at least five nuclear missiles, just in case the United States offers my adversarial neighbor some Patriot launchers. Three of them will be in silos, two of them will be in mobile launchers, maybe a railroad platform. Probably will have to construct five dummy missiles to confuse the US satellites, keep 'em guessing which ones are which.

ZenPundit suggests that the methods in which the weapons might be employed also be subject to tactics of confusion.

4. Develop a propaganda campaign to tell the world (maybe even convince them) that you have developed nuclear weapons to protect your country (Deichman, Armchair Generalist). ZenPundit puts a twist on this to dissuade the United States and other biggies from pre-emptive strikes.

5. Pre-position small weapons to be used in nuclear blackmail (Arhering). The bluff here would be the positioning of dummy weapons in addition to the real ones. Fester suggests that the purpose of the positioning would be internal sabotage.

They can be emplaced under very strict command and control to destroy critical infrastructure that would severely negate the conquest value of a country. However they should not be counted on to prevent an invasion as the deterrant value may or may not be recognized as credible due to the limited number of weapons produce which would preclude the ability to credibly test the weapons.

6. ZenPundit suggests that the possession of nuclear weapons could be a lever for increased economic connectivity.

First, our diplomats and our economics ministries must try their hardest to connect to as many other centers of power as possible. The more great powers that benefit from economic connectivity with our country, the more IGO and NGO’s active and engaged in a process with our government, the greater the media attention the more restricted the options of those who seek to isolate us.

Andy has provided Stratfor’s classification of the purposes of nuclear arsenals. My opinion of Stratfor is not particularly high, but they do tend to be better at analysis than prediction. It seems to me that their classification doesn’t fit what we’re doing here very well.

I see some weaknesses in some of these scenarios, but I think that it’s time for the rest of you to chime in. That would include kibitizers as well as the scenario-writers. Have I gotten something wrong or left something out? Good points in the scenarios? Bad points? Would you change your scenario? How?

Terrorism is Harder Than It Looks

by Cheryl Rofer

We don't know yet that the big hole that got blown in that Qantas 747 was anything other than an accident. But it illlustrates a point I've been making on the hysteria surrounding possible airplane terrorism.

Airplanes are pretty strong, and airline personnel are pretty good at what they do.

So if you have an explosive with a slow detonation velocity, like the kind that might get made by mixing two liquids together if you have a cooling bath and filtration apparatus, you need a lot of it to blow a hole in an airplane that would take it down. My guess is that even if the shoe bomber had managed to detonate his shoes, something like this would have happened.

Pilots, being on the airplane too, are highly motivated to bring it down safely. And the doors to the cockpit are now reinforced and locked. And I'll bet that the cabin attendants now have some additional training in dealing with unruly passengers. And we other passengers are willing to attack the attackers.

The explosive decompression on the Qantas 747 could have been a lot of things. The word explosive does not necessarily signify the use of chemical explosives. The pressure inside the cabin is enough higher than the outside pressure at crusing altitude that a structural failure could have caused a noise like an explosion. The air rushing out can cause quite a bit of damage. Or it could have been a pressurized can in someone's checked baggage.

Or it could have been a terrorist bomb. If that's the case, we've got a nice data point. But I suspect that the passengers won't be getting their checked baggage back any time soon.

Making Space for Negotiation?

by Cheryl Rofer

Yesterday, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that US participation in the latest round of talks was recognition of Iran's right to acquire nuclear technology.

Yes, Ahmadinejad says all sorts of things. Yes, he is claiming more than can be justified. But there seems to be no reflexive denial/argument/condemnation from Ms. Rice or Mr. Bush.

And Iran has a right to civilian nuclear technology under the NPT, which has been its continued claim, of which this is one more example, bolstered (according to Ahmadinejad) by William Burns's presence at Saturday's talks. It's the kind of thing that Iran needs to save face, unlike the unilateral surrender hitherto demanded by the Bushies.

That's not saying it's a definite move toward negotiation, just that it could be.