I am afraid that many of my postings for the immediate future will be on the violence in the Gaza Strip. We’re still trying to parse out the motives for the manner by which Israel has broadcast its attacks–a sharp deviation from its previously close-mouthed approach to its activities. The consensus so far is that Israel is trying to bait Hamas into a wider conflict. This possibility is real, but it could also be the case that the Israelis have decided that the advent of social media has rendered its previous silence irrelevant. No matter what the reason, it remains to be seen whether Hamas will attempt to widen the war.
Coordinated protests against the economic austerity programs broke out in 23 European countries. Even though millions of Europeans participated in the protests, the American media has pretty much ignored them, choosing instead to focus on the extra-marital affair of General Petraeus. The economic situation in Europe is sharply deteriorating and it is hard to imagine that slowdown not seriously affecting the rest of the world.
The Chinese have finally announced their new leadership for the next ten years. Scholars are still going over the names to glean some hints about the future direction of the country, but the initial analyses tend to suggest a more conservative and less reform-minded leadership.
The Israeli Defense Forces released a You Tube video showing the assassination of Ahmed Jabri, the Hamas military chief. At the same time it released the following Tweet:
We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.
Such actions are specifically designed to be inflammatory–Live Blogging a war is truly in bad taste. It appears as if Israel is hoping to provoke Hamas so that a larger Israeli strike can be justified.
Interestingly, as the Israelis were using social media to broadcast their interests, other parts of social media were blocking the dissemination of other interests, specifically the photographs of a group called The Uprising of Women in the Arab World. Consistency is hard to implement in the decentralized world of the web.
The United Nations Population Fund has declared that access to contraception is a universal human right. The declaration has no legal force, and it is difficult to determine how a unilateral statement by a UN Agency can achieve legal status. Meanwhile, a woman in Ireland died after being denied an abortion in accordance with Irish law.
France has recognized the Syrian opposition as the Syrian government in exile. It is the first western government to do so, although many Arab states have already made the move. In essence, France has determined that the opposition movement now represents the Syrian people and is the sovereign power in Syria. We will have to see whether other governments follow suit. We will also have to find out what agreements were made between France and the opposition about military assistance and financial assistance.
The “troika” (the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) is publicly disagreeing about the pace of the austerity programs imposed on Greece. Interestingly, the IMF seems to be the party holding the harder line (one would expect Germany to be the bad guy on the issue). But it is a good sign that at least some outsiders are coming to the conclusion that continued austerity is not the correct strategy to help Greece out of its economic difficulties. Spanish banks have gotten the message after two suicides induce a freeze on evictions.
Latin America is the only region in the world that has not faced a dramatic increase in income inequality in recent years. It is also a region that has experienced strong economic growth. The World Bank suggests that the two trends are clearly causally related. If true, the finding lends significant support to those who argue that income redistribution is good for economic growth, a conclusion flatly rejected by most neoliberal economists.
The publication of a very good essay on Just War Doctrine in the New York Times is an opportunity that I cannot pass up. To emphasize its importance, I won’t post any other articles today.
For the first time since the war in 1973, Israel has fired on Syrian territory. As is usually the case, the incident provoking the attack is unclear: the initial attack might have been fired by the Syrian army or by the rebels. Regardless of the source, the opening of armed hostilities in a conflict already joined by Lebanon and Turkey is a very destabilizing event.
Another European state, Poland, has experienced an outbreak of right-wing violence. In a parade marking Polish Independence Day, some protesters became violent and chanted anti-Jewish slogans. Parts of Polish society are deeply conservative, and some Poles feel quite threatened by the Polish accession to the EU. The right-wing will always have strong local roots even if some of the right-wing themes are shared across borders.
We live in a world of cyberwarfare, but we never hear about the computer attacks the occur on a daily basis against virtually all governments and corporations. The US and Israel developed a computer virus called Stuxnet to disrupt the computers in Iran’s nuclear program, and, at the time, it was viewed as a peaceful solution to a serious problem. However, Stuxnet has made it into the wild, and it now appears to be infecting many non-Iranian computers. I’m not sure how the US and Israel believed that such a consequence was not going to happen, but both states sowed the wind and are soon to reap the whirlwind.
More tension in the Gaza Strip. The violence between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has been escalating steadily, but these most recent attacks signal more than the usual tension. Unfortunately, it seems as if matters are building to a crisis stage.
Counterfactual questions are always intriguing: asking the question “what if?” stimulates our thought processes in novel ways, even though there are never any answers. The US election prompted a massive “what if” question in China, with bloggers asking the question, “what would China look like if it help an election along the lines of an American election?” The question was allowed to circulate by the censors, and the results are quite interesting.
The country of Mali has been troubled by a serious internal dispute that emerged after the collapse of the Qaddaffi regime in Libya. After the collapse in Libya, the Tuareg people, who had long bristled under the rule of the central government in Mali, rebelled, and elements of al-Qaeda have moved into northern Mali. Efforts by other African states to quell the unrest in Mali have been unsuccessful, and it seems clear that a more significant outside effort has to be launched.
A rather dramatic shift in the Cuban-American population in Florida was documented in the recent US presidential election. That population historically has supported a hard-line against Cuba and voted rather reliably for Republicans. It now appears as if a younger generation has emerged and voted in considerable numbers for President Obama and his more flexible approach toward Cuba. A change in Cuba policy is long overdue.
Stephen Walt has written a great piece entitled, “Why the United States Should Help China Get More Involved in World Affairs.” In the essay Walt articulates a authentic realist argument–hardly a conclusion that one might expect from a realist.
We are getting a little more information about the Iranian attack on a US drone over the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The US insists that the drone was over international waters–an assertion that likely depends on whether the waters include the islands claimed by Iran in the Gulf. It is also unclear what part of the Iranian military was involved in the attack. The Revolutionary Guard is separate from the Iranian military strictly defined and is generally less disciplined and controlled.
And now, a little comic relief. Navel-gazing is a full-time preoccupation of many people, but few have probably ever wondered what life-forms exist within that tiny part of our bodies. Fortunately, science has come to our aid. Consider the wonders of the bacteria living in our belly buttons. This article will not be on the quiz on 14 November.
The news about the European economy is steadily getting worse, and now that the US election is over I suspect that we will start getting more news about it. Perhaps the most distressing bit of information are the rates of youth unemployment in Europe: those rates are a harbinger of things to come as young people are statistically more likely to engage in political protests.
The Pentagon is reporting that Iran fired on a US drone while it was in international airspace. I’m not sure why the media are so breathless about this event. I sincerely doubt that firing on an unmanned device designed for spying would be considered by most as a major act of war. The US could probably ask the Iranians to pay for the drone, but a casus belli? Please.
The dramatic protests against Chinese rule in Tibet are continuing and increasing in frequency as a record number of young Tibetans immolate themselves. The protests are clearly timed to embarrass the Chinese while the Party Congress is going on, but there is little indication that the Chinese government is paying much attention. The outside world will have to make sure that these protests cannot be ignored.
Der Spiegel is one of the pre-eminent newsmagazines in Germany. Its staff has compiled a long essay, “Notes on the Decline of a Great Nation,” which addresses the decline of American power in the world . It is both insightful and provocative: an important perspective by one of America’s strongest allies. Since the essay is quite long, I will not post other articles today.
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