WhirledView

What’s Wrong With This Frame?

by CKR

Condoleezza Rice has announced (WaPo, NYT) that the United States will sit down at a table with Iran and Syria, however multilaterally and under someone else’s aegis (if the government of Iraq qualifies as truly independent). The speculation begins that she could do this only because Vice President Cheney is out of the country (PHK in WhirledView Choice, Steve Clemons and others whose links I can’t find just now).

Part of my background is in chemical reaction mechanisms, the step-by-step analysis of how chemistry takes place, so please bear with me as I try to work this out, step by step.

Vice President Cheney said last week that “all options are still on the table.” This is an unexceptionable formula. No president ever takes any option off the table until treaties are signed. It’s rather a stupid question for reporters to ask, particularly knowing what this Vice President and President are likely to answer. But the Vice President repeated the formulation several times on his trip, so he was at least adamant and possibly sending a signal. Whether that signal was to other members of the administration,

But if Cheney is the power behind the no-negotiations-with-evildoers stand, then why would he go on a trip that would allow the mice to play? Certainly he has left minions carefully placed in the agencies who could, admittedly less effectively, block such nonsense. If he truly wanted to block this move, he’d stick at home. It’s possible that the President gave him some urgent messages to carry to the heads of state he’s visiting, like the schedule for the nuclear strikes on Iran, but that would seem to undercut this latest move, or vice versa.

Is it that, if Cheney were in town, he could barge into the President’s office as Rice is leaving with the press release in hand and talk the President into changing his mind? Is it that he would pull the strings to block actions at lower levels so that the putative Iranian weapons in Iraq would trump the Iraq government’s desire to talk to its neighbors? The second is plausible, given the reports of Cheney’s people in the agencies. The first suggests that the President decides on the basis of the last person he talked to, a phenomenon not unknown in weak leaders.

It’s easy to assume that Cheney is, to some degree, giving the President orders. But only if you make that assumption, along with the assumption that big decisions like this are made on the spur of the moment, can you conclude that the announcement of a conference including the US, Syria and Iran can take place only when Cheney is out of the country.

There is a lot of evidence supporting both of those assumptions. However, if they are accurate, Cheney would know better than to leave the country. So I remain just a bit agnostic on these points and just a bit puzzled as to how decisions actually are made in this administration.

Seymour Hersh’s “The Redirection” – A Must Read and Why

By PHK

I read Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker article "The Redirection" on the Bush administration’s Middle East policy shift while much of the rest of this country settled down to a night at the Oscars. (It's not that I don't like films; it's just that I don't like the Oscar night television hype.) Anyway, when two people from opposite sides of the US e-mail me a copy of the same article within hours of each other on a Sunday afternoon and CKR adds it to WhirledView Choice early Monday morning, alarm bells go off that this must be really important. They’re right. It is. It is also so packed with information that I’m only going to highlight seven of Hersh's observations that particularly resonated for me.

They corroborate, flesh out, and put into context various reports I have read over the past several weeks and months on the changed directions of the Bush administration’s muddled Middle East policies that take on ever more tortured Byzantine-style twists and turns as the minutes pass. "The Redirection" is 12 single spaced pages and available on the New Yorker website. The print edition should appear on the newsstands and in subscribers’ mailboxes sometime next week.

So here goes:

• The administration’s current preoccupation with undermining Iran and Syria has public and clandestine aspects. The clandestine aspect has been kept secret by “leaving the execution or funding to the Saudis or by finding other ways” to keep Congress in the dark. This also includes tapping into some of the “billions of dollars” of “black” greenbacks unaccounted for in Iraq as a result of the budgetary chaos there.

Links for Oscar Day

by CKR

Here are links, mostly provided to me by Science magazine, to enhance your Oscar Day. I reserve the right to reaward any category if a better site comes along.

And now the envelope...

Most Natural Sounds: The British Library Sound Archive has thousands of recordings of animal and bird sounds, as well as environmental sounds, weather, water, the wind in the trees, the sea lapping at the shingle. Listen to Nature arranges 400 of these recordings with commentary as an easy-to-use introduction to the collection. You can find more bird and animal sounds at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library. It’s a bit easier to use than the British Library’s site.

Greatest Variety of Photos: Just the first page of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative is a treat, with a selection of photos set to music. You can search in a conventional way, or you can get into one of those tagging things I haven’t mastered yet. I particularly liked the historic photos of technology, but there are lots of fascinating ones, from poison dart frogs to the first boat on Yellowstone Lake to Arshile Gorky. The photo at top of this post is from the Consolidation Coal Company, 1922, photographer unknown.

Subcategory: Best Historical Weather Photos: NOAA provides them for you in their Photo Library. Auroras, lightning, the Johnstown Flood, and The Great Dust Storm by Woody Guthrie are all here, along with topical commentary on the last two. Besides weather, there are photos of weather scientists in action and their tools.

Best Leading Dinosaur: The Plesiosaur Directory is “your online source for all things plesiosaur.” It contains a cladogram along with plesiosaurs in the movies, toys, and lots of pictures of these long-necked aquatic dinosaurs.

Longest Lists: I have to admit, what I really like in a guidebook or website on plants is pictures. The USDA Plants website boasts 30,000 of them, line drawing and photo. That may be enough to figure out the plants in my yard that aren’t in my guidebooks, but it could take some time. You can also get a (long) list of plants found in your state, or lists on various topics, like wetland and endangered plants. However, the length of the lists can be daunting. I’d like to see a more imaginative search function, through which I could find, say, small purple-flowered members of the crucifer family that live in New Mexico.

Another dangerous game in the theater of the absurd?

By PHK

Will some one please give me even half a sane reason as to why the Bush administration recently announced its plans to introduce anti-missile defense sites into Poland and the Czech Republic? Do the Poles or the Czechs really need or want them? Does Europe need or want them?

Sorry, but the stated US administration rationale of protecting these two relatively new and peaceful Central European NATO and EU members from an Iranian missile threat, in my view, doesn’t wash. I find it hard to believe that the Iranians even in their wildest dreams are likely to rain missiles down upon either Poland or the Czech Republic. It just doesn’t make sense.

So, a few questions:

Why would the Poles or the Czechs want anti-missile defense shields? Or even agree to accept them? Is there some kind of under-the-table US quid pro quo that’s part of the deal? And if so, what is it and is the price worth it?

Iranian missiles would presumably need to zoom over Russia, the Caucasus, the Ukraine, Turkey and/or the Balkans before hitting Polish or Czech soil. Frankly, from what I’ve read, I question whether loosing missiles on Central Europe would be at the top of an Iranian hit list anyway even if its powers that be produce, beg, borrow or steal sufficient missiles – or the missile technology (read North Korean according to US sources) to produce weapons that reach that far.

Let’s not even ask the question as to whether a US developed anti-missile defense shield is capable of deterring a missile or a barrage of medium and long range missiles. The last time I noticed, the rhetoric from the Star Wars folk was far more effective than the products they were then hawking. Or has something changed?

So it’s no wonder German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had some strong words for our erstwhile Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's Star Wars II announcement.

Maybe, just maybe, some of the Europeans do not see dealing with the Iranian threat W’s way. Perhaps they think there are other ways to deal with recalcitrant Iranians short of installing a questionably functioning missile defense shield in Central Europe whose very mention has provoked the Russians and could destabilize Europe politically as well as militarily.

Extreme Plausible Deniability

by CKR

Cernig has been burning up the tubes at Newshog lately on a number of issues. He brought the Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball “retraction” of some of the administration’s accusations against Iran to my attention.

I say “retraction” because I agree with Cernig that it looks like Isikoff and Hosenball are doing the administration’s dirty work for them. Cernig has exposed the internal contradictions in the Newsweek article. But it goes further than that.

It took the administration several weeks to marshal their “evidence” that Iran’s leaders are making trouble in Iraq. It finally came out in the form of a briefing by anonymous briefers, with reporters prohibited from taking photos. The briefers were identified as a “senior defense official,” a U.S. military “analyst” and a U.S. military “explosives expert.”

Judith Miller’s shilling for the adminstration brought the problem of anonymous sources to the attention of the newspapers that continue to use them. The people who used Miller and her colleagues in the buildup to the Iraq war seem to have ignored what anonymity does to credibility. They have one playbook, and they continue to use it.

Karl Rove’s electoral strategy playbook lost the 2006 elections for them. The neocon playbook on using intelligence information to foment wars worked so well for Iraq that they’re using it again, search and replace just one letter. Just as in the elections, it isn’t working so well this time around. So the administration has to find a way to distance themselves from it.

The distancing playbook says find someone who can’t fight back. So it was a highly blameable low-ranking briefer who messed up, just as it was those folks in the photos at Abu Ghraib and Walter Reed’s “lower-ranking officers and noncommissioned officers lacking ‘the right experience and the authority to be able to execute some of the missions!’” Further up the chain of command, responsibility is formulaically accepted, but no, nobody is fired.

Sons of the Conquerors: A Book Review Essay

By PHK

Hugh Pope’s Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World (Overlook, 2005/2006 paperback) is the one book I’ve read that covers the Turkic speaking world comprehensively seeking to explain its complexities as well as its strengths and weaknesses by a rendition of history, contemporary politics and culture as told through the author’s personal experiences.

Pope is a Turkish-speaking British journalist who has lived in Istanbul since 1987 and traveled extensively throughout a region that now extends into Western Europe and the U.S. and ends in China’s westernmost Xinjiang Province – although the chapters are not ordered geographically. They are also not structured chronologically. Instead, each chapter could almost stand alone.

Here is how Pope describes the less-than-at-first-glance-obvious organizational structure of his book. He writes that he divided Sons of the Conquerors into six sections based on his impressions of the “collective qualities of the Turkic peoples: their military vocation, their strong, quarrelling leaders; their shared history and neighbors; their pragmatic experience of the Muslim religion; their love-hate relationship with the West over issues like oil, corruption and human rights; and their conviction that the coming decades must bring better fortunes than the devastating experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries.”

And he states that his central premise is that the “Turkic peoples can no longer be treated as marginal players . . . (but that) they are becoming noteworthy peoples and prosperous states in their own right, and they are developing numerous new connections between each other.”

Sons of the Conquerors covers a wide expanse of territory that few westerners will ever experience in its entirety. This includes a visit to a pristine Turkish mosque in the Netherlands in which Pope portrays the intermingling of the Turkish and Dutch cultures as well as his hair-raising taxi ride across the Turkmenistan desert that ended with a just as hair-raising experience on a Caspian Sea ferry crossing to Azerbaijan.

Competing visions of Islam

In his section “Islam Allaturca,” I think Pope is at his most perceptive. This rings particularly true in his observations of the interrelationships between Islam and politics in the Turkic world.

“Turks,” he tells us, “have always had many competing visions of Islam” and today they range from those rooted in pre-Islamic beliefs including shamanism to westernized Islam and those “tinged with superstition and intolerance.” He even introduces us to a real live female red-fur-hatted shaman from Altay on page 268.

With respect to Muslims and politics in contemporary Turkey, Pope points out that “most Turkish Islamists rarely stray far from a national consensus that no longer wants Sharia Law” – and that the closer they are to that position – the better they do in elections. This includes current Tayyip Erdogan whom Pope interviewed shortly before Erdogan’s own election as prime minister of Turkey.

More on the Indonesian Mud Flood

by CKR

The 2 February Science magazine has a short article in its news section about the Indonesian Mud Flood (last WhirledView article here).

The mud volcano, as Science refers to it, is now called “Lusi.”

Whether it was caused by drilling or an earthquake is now being argued by scientists. It looks to me like they don’t have enough data and will keep arguing until they get a better picture of the subsurface in that area. The cause could well be some combination of both the drilling and the earthquake. And it still looks like the drilling was being done without proper casing and blowout preventers.

A relief well was to have been drilled to 2100 meters and then concrete poured down it to plug the flow. However, drilling was stopped at $40 million, before it reached the target depth.

An Indonesian environmental group is suing the Australian mining company Santos, which was involved in the drilling.

Here are links with some of the same information in the Science story, which is behind a subscription wall.

Terradaily (This report is mostly okay. Another I found at this website had multiple errors.)

New Scientist

PhysOrg.com (This photo can’t be of Lusi; the mud is too thick.)

Another PhysOrg.com (This photo looks more authentic.)

Connecting with the world’s youth: priority or publicity stunt?

By PHK

I recently gave a talk on the U.S. image abroad and the importance of Americans connecting with foreign youth – and American youth connecting with the world. I hadn’t thought much about youth for some time, but the club I spoke to is committed to helping the younger generation so I keyed the latter half of my talk to that aspect of public diplomacy – what my experiences had been as a US Foreign Service Officer and what the US government is now doing – and not doing – to engage with the younger generation. As I thought about it afterwards, a lot of my career was – one way or another – helping America connect with younger generations of Europeans and Asians and assisting American youth become personally acquainted with the world.

As I also thought about the talk, I realized that I should have, but didn’t, point out my understanding that people’s political attitudes are primarily formed when they are in their teens. We also know that such attitudes, however, are not set in stone – as the post World War II German experience with democracy demonstrated but nevertheless, it remains far harder to change basic political attitudes and mind-sets of adults than those of teenagers.

This thought troubles me a great deal because the longer the international prestige of the United States remains in the cellar or - worse - continues the downward spiral as the polls indicate, the more difficult it will be to reverse directions when the nightmare of W’s presidency is over – that is if, and I fervently hope so, we find ourselves with a president with brains and sensible foreign policy judgment.

Ignoring the younger generation could be lethal

The kids who were 12 when the US invaded Iraq are now 15 going on 16 and by the time this administration is out of the White House they will be 18. 16 year olds will be 22 – and so on. Too often disenchanted, disaffected, sometimes undereducated, un- or under-employed youth are those the most attracted to the siren’s call of militant radicalism regardless of their religious creed. They are, after all, looking for meaning and direction in their lives but see none. If the population of a country as a whole is anti-American, I shudder to think how its disaffected young people must view us and how many of them may join the ranks of militant groups whose weapons are aimed against us.

Disapproval of U.S. foreign policies remains the primary cause of the seemingly ever-declining popularity of Uncle Sam. It has been this way since at least the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

This is underscored in the latest poll of over 26,000 people’s attitudes in 25 countries towards US foreign policy by Globescan and the University of Maryland for the BBC. The one bright side, however, is found in a recent Zogby poll of the Middle East that tells us that democracy, technology, science and culture are qualities foreigners still admire about the US.

A summary of the latest Globescan/PIPA poll findings