There is another report of chemical weapons being used in Syria. The video of the aftermath of the attack is certainly horrifying, but the attack is unlikely to provoke a meaningful response from the world community. The Obama Administration is highly unlikely to take effective action, for a variety of reasons. Ahram Online is reporting that 1,300 people died in the attack in Damascus.
The BBC has a fascinating graphic on the city of 2050. It is a highly speculative study of some emerging technologies and how they might transform the urban landscape. It’s a little more than simple science fiction, and parts of it might be operating long before 2050.
China’s extraordinary transformation over the last thirty years will rightly be regarded as one of the most admirable developments of the 20th century. However, that transformation has purchased at a very high price, and there are signs that the strains on the land will constrain China’s future development. No where is this issue more apparent than in the agricultural sector. As China has moved dramatically into the industrial age, the rural and farming sectors show signs of neglect. Whether China will be able to feed its people in the future is a genuine question.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body comprised of hundreds of scientists specializing in climate and set up in 1992 to monitor the process of climate change, had its most recent draft report leaked to the press. Although only a draft, and therefore subject to revision, the report is sobering. It finds that the panel “is 95 to 100 percent confident that human activity — largely from burning fossil fuels — is the main cause of global warming since the 1950s.” The strong statement is unlikely to change the minds of those who profit from the sale and use of fossil fuels, but the science is becoming overwhelmingly persuasive.
Pakistani ex-President Pervez Musharraf has been charged with the murder of Benazir Bhutto in 2007. Musharraf ruled Pakistan for seven years after he led a coup in 1999. He was ousted from power and left the country, only to return this year to compete in the national elections. The political situation in Pakistan is already fragile and the charge is certainly going to unsettle the politics of Pakistan even more.
The Indian economy, a rapidly growing one in recent years, has seen a very rapid decline in recent months. The growth rate of the GDP has slowed down, the rupee has sunk to record low rates, bonds yields are rising rapidly, and the stock markets have declined by over 10 %. The Indonesian economy is also being rattled, and the general view in South and South East Asia is that the economic situation is deteriorating largely because of the slowdown in China. Generally speaking, the regional situation seems very dicey, but few are confident that the data being published by the governments are accurate.
Saudi Arabian Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Foreign Minister, announced that Saudi Arabia would be willing to replace any aid that Egypt might lose if the US and the European Union cut off aid in disapproval of the military coup. The Saudi offer is a real slap to the US, ostensibly a strong Saudi Arabian ally. It also aligns the Saudis with the Israelis who also support the military takeover. The offer separates Saudi Arabia from Turkey and Qatar who support the Muslim Brotherhood. The situation in Egypt, like the one in Syria, is quickly becoming a regional war as outsiders begin to place their bets on the outcome.
The threat of a cutoff of US aid to Egypt does not simply rattle the Egyptian military. The threat will also seriously unnerve the US defense contractors that supply the Egyptian military. Here are the top ten US defense contractors that get paid by US taxpayers via the Egyptian military:
1. Lockheed Martin — Fort Worth, Texas and Orlando, Fla.
2. DRS C3 and Aviation — Horsham, Pa.
3. L-3 Communication Ocean Systems — Sylmar, Calif. and Garland, Texas.
4. Deloitte Consulting — Arlington, Va.
5. Boeing — Mesa, Ariz. and St. Louis.
6. Raytheon — Tucson, Ariz. and Andover, Mass.
7. AgustaWestland — Reston, Va.
8. US Motor Works — Cerritos, Calif. and Grand Prairie, Texas.
9. Goodrich Corp. — Chelmsford, Mass.
10. Columbia Group — Washington, D.C.
One can be certain that these corporations will be lobbying the US government not to stop its military assistance to Egypt.
There is serious flooding, not only in the US southeast, but also in the far eastern parts of Russia and in many parts of China. The flooding has forced the evacuations of almost a million people and is not expected to subside quickly. Extreme weather seems to be the order of the day. A study by the World Bank estimated that coastal cities in the world may suffer more than a trillion dollars of losses because of flooding by 2050.
Mahmoud Badr, one of the co-founders of the “Tamarud-Rebel” movement in Egypt that toppled President Morsi, has a grim view of the possibilities for a quick return of democracy to Egypt. He is quoted by Reuters as saying that “the bloodshed that has followed is a necessary price for saving the nation from the Muslim Brotherhood.” Moreover he seems unmoved by the threat that the US might suspend its aid to Egypt if the military does not take steps to reconcile with the Muslim Brotherhood: “Obama can keep it – and ‘go to hell’.” The rhetoric augurs ill for a quick end to the current violence and suggests that Egyptian “liberals” are settling in for a long civil war with the Brotherhood. The US has succeeded in alienating virtually all its allies in the Middle East by its dithering over the coup. All its allies except Israel, which has welcomed the return of the Egyptian military,
Last week, Doctors Without Borders announced that it was pulling out of Somalia because conditions on the ground were too dangerous for its personnel. Now we learn that Somali is experiencing an explosive outbreak of polio, more than in all other countries combined. Polio is a devastating disease which has largely been controlled by aggressive vaccination programs. But many of the children in Somalia are in territory controlled by the group, Al Shabab whose rule is opposed to any Western presence.
The leaders of several South African countries have endorsed the re-election of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. The loser in the election, Morgan Tsvangirai, had charged fraud in the election and both the US and the European Union have raised many questions about the conduct of the election. The endorsement, however, seems to settle the controversy, at least in a regional sense.
Mostafa Hegazy, an adviser to the Egyptian President, labeled the protesters who support the return of President Morsi “terrorists.” In so doing, he joins many others in the world who dismiss protest with allegations of criminal and immoral behavior. Delegitimizing protest is a stale tactic of those who really have no new ideas to offer. There is little question that all sides in the Egyptian violence have engaged in reprehensible acts, but painting all protesters with the broad brush of “terrorist” is an excuse not to face the genuine issues raised by the military coup in Egypt. But Hegazy is mimicking those who treat dissent as treason, and the US is a prime offender in that diversion as in the case of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning.
World politics is rife with irony, since realism allows for quickly shifting alliances depending on circumstances. Just two years after Iraq demanded that the US military leave the country, Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari has asked the US for military assistance, including drones, to deal with the security problems associated with the influx of Syrian refugees. It is hard to imagine the US responding favorably to the request since Iraq has allowed Iran to use Iraqi territory and air space to support President Assad in Syria. The likely refusal of the US is unfortunate, since the Syrian refugees deserve much greater support. But the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is probably the more appropriate agency for the needed assistance.
The news and images out of Egypt are so discouraging that I took refuge in some old songs. The process of political change is fraught with all sorts of emotions: the exhilaration of believing that a better world can be created; the sense of betrayal when reality diverges so blatantly from rhetoric; the sadness of misdirected and uncontrolled violence. Most of the time, however, the violence of political change leaves us speechless. For me, music is often a road out of places where words fail. These last few days, words have really felt empty.
In 2011, the protests were against the dictator Mubarak. The husband of a former student had an apartment in Tahrir Square when the protests were going on. When I asked him how the historical moment unfolded for him, he said he was humbled by the magnitude of the event. Then he said that there was one unfortunate aspect of the protests: a small group of protesters played this song over and over again. The song was a fixture during the anti-war movement in the 1970s. I immediately felt a connection with the student protesters.
The situation in Egypt continues to deteriorate. Max Fisher has a great background on the turmoil in Egypt that is relatively succinct and accurate (nothing is ever fully accurate if one relies on a single source), and it’s a good place to start if you’re just catching up on the violence there. As the country falls deeper into violence, the US has to take a large measure of responsibility for the crisis. It is important to remember that President Morsi was democratically elected, and the fact that he was not a true “democrat” or that he was messing up the economy is not a reason to support his ouster or to deny that there was a “coup.” [There were many times during the administration of George W. Bush that I had wished that someone else were President, but I would never had supported a military intervention.] The US has great leverage over the Egyptian military, and if President Obama had told it to sit tight until the next scheduled election, I am certain that the military would not have intervened. If a state professes to believe in democracy, then it has to take the good with the bad. Not coincidentally, this year marks the 60th anniversary of the US-supported overthrow of President Mossadegh in Iran, a similar intervention in democratic politics that continues to haunt the US.
In the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, the fear of the anti-war movement was that the war would be “brought home,” something which did happen in the shootings of protesters at Kent and Jackson State by the National Guard in May of 1970. We have a similar fear of the “war on terror” launched by the Bush Administration after the violence of 11 September 2001. Domestic police forces are more and more closely resembling armed forces, with SWAT teams being the most obvious manifestation of the militarized approach to domestic crime. The figures about the use of SWAT teams in the US are rather chilling. Here is a video of a former Marine who served in Iraq about his city’s (Concord, NH) decision to buy a heavily armed vehicle for their domestic policing. His views are something to consider seriously as the war on terror is “brought home.”
Somalia is one of the most fragile states in the world, and the violence in that country has been unremitting for years. The clearest evidence for that assessment is the decision by Doctors Without Borders to leave the country. Doctors Without Borders is one of the most heroic non-governmental organizations in the world and it has sent medical personnel into some of the most dangerous places in the world. The decision leaves thousands of innocents without any medical help at all.
The NSA surveillance program has generated a great deal of controversy, but there are other intelligence gathering systems that are available to the state that are perhaps more insidious and have not been subjected to intense scrutiny. One of the more troubling surveillance techniques is crowd-sourcing, something which most regard as relatively benign. But it is widely used and very dangerous, largely because there is no attempt to verify the accuracy of the rumors flying around. We all need to be more careful about what we say on the web–we may think that no one is really listening. The truth is that most states now actively patrol that universe.
The military government in Egypt cracked down on the pro-Morsi supporters who have been protesting the coup. The bloodshed has been extreme, and ongoing. The number of dead in at least in the hundreds, and the Muslim Brotherhood claims that about 2,000 people have been killed. Egypt is now under a curfew in order to limit the violence, but such efforts were not effective in 2011 when Mubarak was toppled. Al Jazeera has a compendium of world reactions to the violence in Egypt. The US is in a very awkward situation since it failed to condemn the coup against Morsi.
After 18 months of negative economic growth, Europe finally registered positive economic activity–a 0.3% increase over the last three months. The rate is hardly something to celebrate, but for many in Europe it signals a turning of the corner. I personally doubt that we’ll see robust economic growth for many more years, but any economic activity is better than none.
One of the characteristics of a “nation” is a shared emotional bond among the citizens of a “state.” One of the more interesting bonds is language, and those nations with a single shared language are generally more unified. But many unified nations have different languages, and the US is one such nation. The Pew Foundation did a study of the languages spoken in the home in the US in 2011 and the results are quite intriguing.
Benjamin GInsberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, has written a very provocative essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled, “Why Violence Works.” It is a very thoughtful and learned essay that is hard to acept but difficult to refute. I recommend it highly.
The trial of Bo Xilai in China is scheduled to begin soon. One of the most powerful (and wealthy) politicians in China, he is on trial for economic crimes and his role in the murder of a business associate. Primarily, however, he is on trial for being a strong contender for power with Xi Jinping, the current ruler of China. Xi won the power struggle and Bo lost, but Bo remains popular with the “leftist” (Maoist) wing of the Chinese Communist Party. The trial will be closely watched for evidence of the rival factions within China right now.
Spain and Britain have been squabbling over Gibraltar, a British possession that has long been claimed by Spain. The immediate issue has to be with fishing rights and transit fees, but the dispute has a history that stretches back to the War of Spanish Succession. Gibraltar remains one of 14 British “Overseas Territories,” the last formal remnants of the British Empire.
Max Fisher of the Washington Post posted an interesting piece today: “40 Maps that Explain the World.” The maps are incredibly useful in distilling information about a variety of subjects in a very succinct way. Some of the maps, such as the missionary’s map of Africa in 1908, reveal a great deal about the mind set of empire.
World Politics News 