WhirledView

Jupiter and Venus!

by CKR

If it's clear in your area, get up an hour before sunrise to see Jupiter and Venus getting together! They were close this morning, but they will get closer until Friday. Going to be very cool, less than one degree apart!

Parallel Paths

by CKR

Oak Ridge and Los Alamos seem to be traveling parallel paths in the space-time continuum these days, with respect to two variables: contamination and secrecy. Perhaps the home-town newspapers that cover what’s going on in those nuclear installations are also traveling parallel tracks.

Jeffrey Lewis notes the secrecy at Oak Ridge. Apparently a manager there dared to speak of the Libyan centrifuges that they’ve been checking out and got his clearances pulled. That’s the equivalent of “you won’t work in this town any more.” Or Los Alamos or Hanford or Savannah River or any of those places. Frank Munger at the Knoxville News Sentinel is on the story.

Let’s switch to the parallel track in space-time. Ralph Damiani of the Los Alamos Monitor is not pleased with secrecy at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. I’m going to reproduce his editorial.

Russia Watching: Soft power, hard power but not very smart power

By PHK

Photo credit: PHKushlis, Kazimir Malevich's "Black Cross, Black Square and Black Circle," Maeght Foundation Exhibit of Russian Avant-Garde Artists, August 2003.

Why is it that the Russians are so good at projecting the arts – the very best of their culture – abroad, yet so ham-fisted with the rest of the relationship?

The blockbuster exhibit From Russia: French and Russian Master Painting 1870-1925 is on display at London’s Royal Academy until April 18 and FT’s superb art critic Jackie Wullschlager has given it not one, but two rave reviews. This exhibition, in Wullschlager's words, sets "the Russian paintings alongside key French masterworks which inspired them" for the first time slotting "together the pieces of the east-west jigsaw in detail." Yet the Russian government has simultaneously forced the British Council, the UK’s cultural and education institution abroad to close its doors in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg as a part of an escalating spat with the British government.

It’s as if Russia’s right and left hands fail to recognize what the other is doing. But that’s happened before: and the KGB, oops, FSB, certainly takes care of its own. This bilateral spat after all is all about a supposed “tit-for-tat” Russian reaction to Britain’s pursuit of former Russian spy turned British resident Alexander Litvinenko’s murder in London in 2006. But shuttering the British Council as a pawn in this political battle is the worst David and Goliath form of bullying.

Guess it’s just hunky-dory for the British exhibit-going public to have a chance to view the juxtaposition of these wonderful French and Russian paintings never displayed together before outside Russia but it’s not all right for ordinary Russians to have access to the Council’s English language training, educational programs, exhibits, books, periodicals and information on scholarships for study in the United Kingdom. That’s what shuttering the British Council’s doors in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg means.

If the Russians are not careful, it might also mean that the West will become less receptive to hosting Russian cultural offerings – from master painting exhibits like the one at the London Royal Academy to the Bolshoi and Kirov ballets or concerts by the myriad of beautifully trained Russian musicians who began gracing our concert halls decades before the Cold War ended.

I, for one, would hate to see that happen. Russia’s soft power is incredibly attractive.

Yet I also find the current Russian closure of the British Council offices and harassment of its staff reprehensible. The people most hurt are the Russians themselves – but then the KGB has never really cared about the Russian population - except to spy on them and keep them under control. During the Cold War, it didn’t trust its world class performers either because it sent KGB escort bodyguards on their tours of the West. These thugs were not along for the ride and as far as I know they didn’t carry the performers’ suitcases, music or overcoats or even protect from the mice released on stage in New York by the Jewish Defense League during a major Russian pianist’s Carnegie Hall performance (an aside: I was told the performer in question found the rodent run amusing) in the 1970s.

But I’m beginning to wonder if the Russian powers-that-be today realize how much the country is losing by its current anti-social behavior in the “war for the European mind.”

Counterproductive

In a perceptive article in Stratfor last week, analyst Peter Zeihan points out that Putin’s government fails to understand that playing its economic card for political purposes in Europe is backfiring. The fact that the Russian Federation produces and controls about 25% of the natural gas sold throughout Europe and through two poorly thought out natural gas pipeline proposals would increase it to 35% - not to enrich further its treasury but to gain political leverage over the Europeans - makes Brussels nervous. The EU is neither deaf, dumb, nor blind. Zeihan argues that the Europeans well understand the Russian petroleum game and are, therefore, reducing their dependency on Russian energy products through a variety of measures that include increased nuclear power and conservation.

If the Kremlin masterminds think playing the natural resources card will sever the European-American Gordian knot and keep both from expanding their economic and political influence in Russia’s “near abroad,” they also need to think again. Like George Bush’s stupider policies in the Middle East, this Russian chess move will lead to a kind of checkmate Moscow won’t like.

The road to strengthening NATO

A reversion to military intimidation as the Russian military tried on the Finns last year or even a cyber-war attack as the Russians pulled on the Estonians in retaliation for their moving a Soviet era statute from a prominent square to a graveyard won’t work either. The recent Ukrainian and Georgian applications to NATO and the EU also suggest that the all too traditional Russian-might-makes-right approach to dealing with its neighbors needs rethinking. To the far north, neither EU members Finland nor Sweden have yet filled out or sent in their NATO application forms as far as I know, but make no mistake this card is not off the table. Misplayed Russian hard power will be the straw that breaks those camels' backs.

If one of these two Nordic holdouts decides to do so, the other will likely to follow. NATO, I suspect, would welcome them with open arms. Surely at least Sergey Ivanov, one of the two top protagonists in the duel for the Kremlin throne after Putin, should understand this all too well since he spent, after all, several years of his KGB career at the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki.

Maybe Yeltsin’s get-along-with-the-West foreign policy wasn’t so misguided after all.

The Bloggers Develop Nuclear Weapons Policy: Getting the Word Out

by CKR

I've just posted a summary of our blog-tank and the consensus statement at TPM Cafe Reader Blogs. Let's see what happens.

Not too surprisingly, I guess, no word from the campaigns. Just a steady stream of contribution-grubbing emails.

Moving Forward in Pakistan

by CKR

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered Pakistan military help for joint operations against Islamist militants. According to the Los Angeles Times, the offer may indicate improving relations with Pakistan now that President Musharraf has relinquished his military role or

may represent increased administration pressure on Pakistan to take the Pentagon up on its offer to conduct joint military activities or additional training operations. Gates said the U.S. and its allies are concerned about the reestablishment of Al Qaeda havens in the border region.

Gates assures us that "You're not talking about significant numbers of U.S. troops," but I seem to recall something like that a long time ago, a bit further to the east...

Meanwhile, Pakistan has been testing its medium-range nuclear-capable missile. Just in case India started thinking that things were confused in Pakistan. So we're doing the nuclear deal with India and supporting Pakistan, which is determined not to fall behind India in their own private arms race.

At least in Vietnam, we were on only one side of the argument.

Check Out These New Sites!

by CKR

For Paul Krugman fans for whom twice a week isn't enough, the Princeton economist and political commentator now has a blog at the New York Times. It looks like it will be a real blog (as opposed to so much of what newspapers tack onto their sites under that name), with quick thoughts and graphs too wonky to be included in his regular columns. And, also unlike many of the Times "blogs," Krugman updates it regularly.

The Campaign for Responsibility in Nuclear Trade is the product of multiple organizations opposed to the US-India nuclear deal. It has many substantial articles and links to other resources. Just because the Indian parliament has slowed things down doesn't mean that this undermining of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is dead.

Thursday Raven Blogging

by CKR

A bunch of these guys showed up in the neighborhood a few days ago. I thought at first that they were American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos), but on looking more closely, I suspect that they are ravens (Corvus corax).

Problems a-plenty on the listing ship of State

By PHK

For those of you who are not Dipnote devotees, several recent Dipnote posts by high level State Department officials are well worth reading. So too are the comments that follow them. The controversial topic? This year’s annual survey (or “survey” according Dipnote blogger and Department Spokesperson Sean McCormack) of Foreign Service employees conducted by and published on the American Foreign Service Association’s website.

These Dipnote kiss-up-to-Condi posts by McCormack, along with Tom Shannon and Richard Boucher, two other State Department career senior officers, demonstrate – in my view - not only an all too transparent attempt to ingratiate themselves to Ms. Rice and her entourage upon whom their present and possibly next assignments depend, but they simultaneously, unfortunately and unnecessarily, also demean the integrity of a large number of their Foreign Service colleagues and the professional and labor organization which represents their interests. (For the record: As a retiree, I am also a member of AFSA.)

As 'Robert in Virginia' observed in Dipnote’s comments section:

”Folks, I can't address the substance of this dispute, but I would like you to know that putting the word survey in quotation marks does not strike me as very convincing. Instead, it strikes me as reflecting elitist arrogance and is inappropriate and potentially ineffective, especially when writing about an organization which represents employees.

I am prepared to believe that there has been way too much whining and second guessing on the part of Foreign Service worker bees, but it may well be that the public will draw the necessary conclusions from AFSA's own words. The Department does not serve it own interests by acting in an officious and condescending manner.”

Meanwhile, I thank my lucky stars that I don’t have to work for people who refuse to recognize that a near 40 percent return rate on a professional union’s questionnaire sent to all active duty members and completed by representatives of all ranks and specialties including employees serving in Iraq and Afghanistan should be taken seriously. In contrast, the “spin” from these three Dipnote spin-meisters at State – two of whom having spent considerable time as spin-meisters in the Bureau of Public Affairs and elsewhere as opposed to serving overseas in garden spots like Kabul, Baghdad or on a provincial reconstruction team - trivialize and denigrate the survey results.

Extreme hierarchy is outdated - and that's part of State's problem

I think the outdated hierarchical Foreign Service system which over-rewards a small caste of high-flying senior officers to the detriment of the rank-and-file should have been abolished years ago and replaced with a system that better fits today’s highly educated knowledge workers. If extreme hierarchy is still necessary in the 21st century in any information-based organization, then something is wrong with that organization.

Corporate America discovered this years ago as it went head-to-head with the then Japanese economic “threat” and made necessary adjustments to survive. Flattened hierarchies and team based management are part of the answer; treating colleagues and their concerns with respect is also.

State’s promotion and assignments system has been outdated for years. Not only too many cushy jobs (about 35% of all Ambassadorships under the W administration) are awarded to mostly unqualified political appointees who bought their posts for $100,000 a crack according to the FT in 2005, but too many of the relatively few professionals who made it to the very top of State's angels' head pinsized pinnacle did it by managing upward while ignoring, or worse, those who worked for them. Many also did it by staying in Washington and as close to the Seventh Floor and the Secretary's Office as possible rather than through overseas service in difficult places at difficult times which is what I think the Foreign Service should be all about.

These deficiencies, I’m told, have worsened under the Rice State Department. To make matters worse, Condi’s favorites are rarely even asked to “volunteer” for Iraq, Afghanistan or other hardship assignments – or so I’m told.

Please note that the closest Messrs McCormack, Shannon and Boucher, for instance, have come to serving in the troubled Middle East was Sean McCormack’s lone first tour in the Consular Section at the US Embassy in Ankara and another one in Algiers. He has not served overseas since.