Month: February 2007

by Charles

A little over a year ago I wrote about Hugo Chavez’s grasping quest for power in Venezuela and I thought it would be helpful to recap some of his "accomplishments" in the past twelve months.  I refer to him as a communist because, according to the Economist, he refers to himself as one.  As for him being a dictator, well, dictator is as does.  The mindset is there.  Considering the policies he is pursuing, it looks clear to me that there are strong similarities in the actions of Chavez and Mugabe and Castro.  The primary difference is that Venezuela is fortunate enough to be sitting on huge oil reserves, thus softening the damaging impacts felt from his bad decisions.  Mugabe and Castro don’t have that geological luxury, and their tenures have been much longer, so there’s been more time to see how their decisions have unfolded.  But before opining further, some examples of Chavez’s moves.

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by hilzoy

Peter Beinart has a piece in TNR about why he supported the war:

“For myself, perhaps the most honest reply is this: because Kanan Makiya did. 

When I first saw Makiya–the Iraqi exile who has devoted his life to chronicling Saddam Hussein’s crimes–I recognized the type: gentle, disheveled, distracted, obsessed. He reminded me of the South African exiles who occasionally wandered through my house as a kid. Once, many years ago, I asked one of them how the United States could aid the anti-apartheid struggle. Congress could impose sanctions, he responded. Sure, sure, I said impatiently. But what else? Well, he replied with a chuckle, if the United States were a different country, it would help the African National Congress liberate South Africa by force.”

He also writes about why he got it wrong:

“I was willing to gamble, too–partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn’t gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn’t think I was gambling many of my countrymen’s. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. It’s a truism that American intellectuals have long been seduced by revolution. In the 1930s, some grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, some felt the same way about Cuba. In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States. 

Some non-Americans did, too. “All the Iraqi democratic voices that still exist, all the leaders and potential leaders who still survive,” wrote Salman Rushdie in November 2002, “are asking, even pleading for the proposed regime change. Will the American and European left make the mistake of being so eager to oppose Bush that they end up seeming to back Saddam Hussein?” 

I couldn’t answer that then. It seemed irrefutable. But there was an answer, and it was the one I heard from that South African many years ago. It begins with a painful realization about the United States: We can’t be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That’s why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force–because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it’s why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time. That’s not to say the United States can never intervene to stop aggression or genocide. It’s not even to say that we can’t, in favorable circumstances and with enormous effort, help build democracy once we’re there. But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war–as they did in Vietnam and Iraq–because they think we’re deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they’re probably right. Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn’t have trusted ourselves.”

I admire Peter Beinart’s willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he’s right to say that we can’t be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be — a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force — there’s another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:

It’s not just that we aren’t the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it’s that war is not the instrument he thought it was.

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by hilzoy

From the International Herald Tribune:

“It sounds like some incredibly dark Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Each night before the sun sets, thousands of children march in grim procession along dusty roads that take them from their rural villages to larger towns. The children are afraid to sleep in their beds, terrified that they will be abducted by a madman who will force them into a marauding guerrilla army that hunts down their friends, families, and loved ones.

The fleeing children sleep in churches, empty schools, makeshift shelters, and alleyways. And every morning at sunrise, the children walk home, free for another day.”

These are the ‘Night Commuters’ of northern Uganda:

(photo copyright Bruno Stevens.)

For years, they have walked from their homes to the nearest large town each night to avoid being kidnapped by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, which uses children as soldiers, servants, and sex slaves. Normally, there are 30-40,000 night commuters; more when times are bad.

Times have not been so bad recently, but they are about to get worse.

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by hilzoy

From Ha’Aretz (h/t TPM)

“The United States demanded that Israel desist from even exploratory contacts with Syria, of the sort that would test whether Damascus is serious in its declared intentions to hold peace talks with Israel.

In meetings with Israeli officials recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forceful in expressing Washington’s view on the matter.

The American argument is that even “exploratory talks” would be considered a prize in Damascus, whose policy and actions continue to undermine Lebanon’s sovereignty and the functioning of its government, while it also continues to stir unrest in Iraq, to the detriment of the U.S. presence there. (…)

According to senior Israeli officials, the American position vis-a-vis Syria, as it was expressed by the secretary of state, reflects a hardening of attitudes.

When Israeli officials asked Secretary Rice about the possibility of exploring the seriousness of Syria in its calls for peace talks, her response was unequivocal: Don’t even think about it.”

About six weeks ago, word first surfaced of a set of earlier, unofficial negotiations between Israel and Syria, which had resulted in a draft agreement between the two countries. The agreement provides for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, most of which would then be turned into a park accessible (without visas) to both Syrians and Israelis. (Personally, I think this is a very imaginative solution.) It also provides for demilitarization of the border, Israeli control of water rights from the Sea of Galilee and the upper Jordan, and verification. Moreover:

“According to Geoffrey Aronson, an American from the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, who was involved in the talks, an agreement under American auspices would call for Syria to ensure that Hezbollah would limit itself to being solely a political party.

He also told Haaretz that Khaled Meshal, Hamas’ political bureau chief, based in Damascus, would have to leave the Syrian capital.

Syria would also exercise its influence for a solution to the conflict in Iraq, through an agreement between Shi’a leader Muqtada Sadr and the Sunni leadership, and in addition, it would contribute to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the refugee problem.”

It goes without saying that there are always reasons to be skeptical of such things, and that even if all parties are negotiating in complete good faith, lots of things can go wrong between an initial round of unofficial talks and a final peace treaty. That said:

What could we possibly have been thinking?

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by hilzoy

One of the fun things about having a blog is that when I find an obscure story that I think ought to be more widely known, I can just write about it, and voila! my millions throngs dozens of readers all find out about it. So when I read this, I thought: hey, I should post this, for all those people who have worried about the possibility that clean, wonderful wind power could produce seafowl carpaccio as an unfortunate side effect. Apparently not:

“Uncertainty surrounding wind power’s impact on wildlife–particularly the potential for deadly collisions between birds and turbines–has tarnished its image and even delayed some wind farms. Indeed, the first large offshore wind farm proposed for U.S. waters–the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts’s Nantucket Sound–has been held up in part by concerns that its 130 turbines could kill thousands of seabirds annually. Now a simple infrared collision-detection system developed by Denmark’s National Environmental Research Institute is helping clear the air.

The Thermal Animal Detection System (TADS) is essentially a heat-activated infrared video camera that watches a wind turbine around the clock, recording deadly collisions much as a security camera captures crimes. The first results, released this winter as part of a comprehensive $15 million study of Denmark’s large offshore wind farms, show seabirds to be remarkably adept at avoiding offshore installations. “There had been suggestions that enormous numbers of birds would be killed,” says Robert Furness, a seabird specialist at the University of Glasgow, who chaired the study’s scientific advisory panel. “There’s a greater feeling now among European politicians that marine wind farms are not going to be a major ecological problem, and therefore going ahead with construction is not going to raise lots of political difficulties.” (…)

TADS was mounted on a Nysted wind-farm turbine that was situated in the most common flight path, and during more than 2,400 hours of monitoring that concluded last fall, it spotted only fifteen birds and bats and one moth flying near the turbine, and it recorded one collision involving a small bird or bat. Furness says that this provides confidence in estimations by Danish researchers that the Nysted wind farm would kill few common eiders.”

If you think about it, that’s an astonishingly small number of collisions, given that it involves 130 huge wind turbines whose blades, according to the article, can slice through the air, and thus through a bird, at 80 meters per second at the tip. It has been clear all along that a lot of birds are smarter* than we think; this is one more bit of evidence.

The humans involved are fairly clever too:

“What makes TADS practical for continuous operation is software Desholm wrote to activate recording when a warm object enters the video camera’s field of vision. According to Furness, the need to sift through thousands of hours of film was a major limitation for researchers who had previously tried infrared monitoring. He says that other automated collision monitoring that relies on vibration sensors on the blades and towers has failed to produce a reliable system. “This is the first system which has really functioned,” says Furness.”

This study will have to be repeated at different locations, and with different species, before we can safely extrapolate from it. But it’s wonderful news for those of us who care about both cutting our consumption of fossil fuel and birds.

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