Pakistan's pain perturbs across the system
Thomas Barnett
¦"Aid Fails to Reach Thousands in Pakistan Quake Zone," by Carlotta Gall and David Rohde, New York Times, 12 October 2005, p. A12.
¦"Asian Quake May Be Serious Blow To Islamic Groups Hostile to U.S.," by Zahid Hussain and Peter Wonacott, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2005, p. A15.
¦"A World Turned Upside Down: The aftershocks of Pakistan's tremblor will be felt for years," op-ed by Russell Seitz, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2005, p. A16.
¦"Next: A War Against Nature," op-ed by Robert D. Kaplan, New York Times, 12 October 2005, p. A27.
Pakistan is way short on helos, and yet turns down India's offering of helos. Keep your eyes on that one as public frustration builds in country.
Who knows what happens when an immature nuclear power suffers such a System Perturbation? asks Mr. Seitz.
Who knows indeed.
Seems like the anti-American Kashmiri terror and insurgency groups suffered badly in the temblor, as this kind of quake is called. Seems like U.S. relations with the government can only improve with our big effort, and when we offer $50 million and India offers $116 million, you gotta believe that cross-border ties can only improve between Islamabad and New Delhi.
And Kaplan is right, this sort of event only highlights the long-time and rather huge and definitely hidden-from-view role of the U.S. military as the world's largest relief agency.
But Kaplan also engages in his usual queer hype, claiming that in the future more will die from natural disasters than ever before in history.
Actually, global deaths from natural disasters are down about 90% from the early years of the 20th century (Bjorn Lomborg, Skeptical Environmentalist), and there is no reason (nor statistics) to suggest that Kaplan's typical hyperbole is anything other than his usual bullshit about the future being so much worse than we can possibly imagine.
Still, Kaplan's bit about "the distinctions between war and relief, between domestic and foreign deployments, are breaking down." That part is way true.
The immoral logic of American food aid
¦"African Food for Africa's Starving Is Roadblocked in Congress," by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 12 October 2005, p. A4.
Our laws say the only food aid we can send overseas is stuff grown by our farmers and shipped by our shippers and-apparently-sold often on the side by our relief agencies to self-finance their own anti-poverty programs. Nice huh? CARE and Catholic Relief Services and five other biggies will take food designated for people in Africa and sell it in markets there to raise money for their programs in the region. Talk about starving Peter to finance Paul!
Well, Congress tried to change this stupid law, which basically results in 50% of our food aid disappearing in admin and transportation costs, but the Iron Triangle of food businesses, shippers and relief orgs successfully blocked the legislative change, despite firm White House support. The reform act was supposed to allow U.S. Agency for International Development to buy food locally for starving populations, thus simultaneously improving local agriculture conditions. Sounds pretty sensible given that poor local ag conditions is what gets your starvation in the first place.
But no, better for our companies and relief orgs to get their slice of the pie up front.
Immoral doesn't begin to cover this. This is homicide by negligence and greed.
Canada reminds the U.S. that connectivity goes both ways
¦"Canada Warns That Tariffs on Lumber Could Imperil U.S. Access to Oil," by Clifford Krauss, New York Times, 12 October 2005, p. A5.
We owe Canada $5 billion in wrongly assessed tariffs, says a NAFTA panel, but we're not paying.
So Canada's resource minister says, "If Nafta is called into question by U.S. action,it calls for us to diversify our trade and investment relations."
If that wasn't clear enough, Canada's guy gets on a plane to China, noting on his way that, "On the Chinese side, I am sure there will be receptivity."
Oh yeah, Canada's ready to lock in China at today's prices. When Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Canada last month, he spoke of "strategic partnerhship."
"Got China?"
Apparently Canada's gonna get some . . .
Right now Canada basically sends all its oil to the U.S., but China's investing already in the oil sands and a pipeline to carry the product to the Pacific coast.
Wanna say goodbye really fast to 8 percent of our total oil consumption?
China plan to make sure the caboose doesn't fall too far behind
¦"China Hopes Economy Plan Will Bridge Income Gap: Wages in cities are now three times the levels of rural areas," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 12 October 2005, p. A5.
¦"Chinese Leaders Set Out Priorities, Citing Challenges: Communist Party Produces Ambitious List to Address Social, Economic Inequities," by Kathy Chen and Cui Rong, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2005, p. A14.
The highest ranks of the Chinese Communist Party have taken the unusual step of describing the next five years as the key transition period during which the country must "grasp opportunities to . . . seriously solve outstanding conflicts and problems on the road ahead."
As I said to the Chinese last summer, the train's engine cannot travel faster than its caboose, and when the Party talks about "harmonious and sustainable development," that's what it's referring to: the rural poor, or the caboose in danger of being left behind by the country's rapid embrace of globalization.
This is caboose braking--big time.
Expect a war with China any time soon? Sounds like the Fourth Generation of Leadership has enough on its plate right now, huh? It wants to double per capita GDP from its 2000 level by 2010, and decrease energy consumption per dollar of GDP by 20% in the next five years. America wants to reform its social security, but China wants to create a basic social security system.
As the NYT piece put it, "China's market-oriented economy has partly outgrown the traditional five-year planning documents that used to control nearly all allocations of money, resources and talent." That basically means that most local authorities do what they damn well please, no matter what Beijing says.
Still, if China is no longer really on the five-year plan, then that really leaves only the Pentagon as a centrally-planned economy.
Oooh! The U.S. has filed charges on Kim!
¦"U.S. Files Charges In North Korean Counterfeit Probe," by Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2005, p. A3.
North Korea's been exporting counterfeit American bills for years, in very large quantities. A lot of it ends up in China (passed through Taiwan), which is why my wife and I carried large sums of uncirculated big American bills hidden in our shorts when we went to China last year to adopt baby Vonne Mei Ling Barnett.
Well, the U.S. has finally decided to do something formal about this:
In the latest move to break up North Korea's global criminal activities, the Justice Department indicted a leading member of an Irish Republican Army splinter group on charges of conspiring with Pyongyang to put millions of dollars of counterfeit U.S. currency into circulation in Eastern Europe and the United Kingdom.
Buddy, you can't bring that Gap trash into the Old Core! Maybe New Core China, where the rule sets are still embryonic on such things, but man! In the UK you're going to get busted if you start working with the IRA leftovers.
Now if we can start nabbing them on the bogus cigarettes and heroin, we'd be making some real progress.
One U.S. official put it well: "A country can't negotiate with you while also counterfeiting your currency."
Duh!
Earth to Germany: hyphens are good!
¦"No Hyphens, Please: Germany Tells Parents To Keep Names Simple; Young Leonhard's Parents Fight One of Many Rules; No Lenins and Schnuckis," by Mary Jacoby, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2005, p. A1.
Germany won't allow hyphenated last names for kids.
Why? What if a woman marries a man and hyphenates her last name, then wants her kids to share her hyphenated name? And then those kids marry other kids from similar hyphenated last-name families? I mean, do their kids end up with four last names all in a row? And what of their kids? And so on and so on?
You want to know why the Germans lost two world wars. This is a big clue!
Brazil keeps waging the good fight on AIDS
¦"Brazil and Abbott Reach Price Deal On AIDS Drug," by Reuters, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2005, p. B3.
Brazil works a deal with Abbott Labs "that almost halves the price it pays for an important AIDS drug, meaning it won't follow through on its threat to break the U.S. company's patent."
Good move by Abbott. Tough but defensible stance by Brazil, which becomes a key champion of the Gap and its pressing healthcare needs.
A one-sided clash within a civilization
¦"Leaders In Iraq Agree To Change In Constitution: Breakthrough In Talks; In Exchange for Support in Vote, Sunnis Could Help Revise Charter," by Robert F. Worth, New York Times, 12 October 2005, p. A1.
¦"Silence and Suicide: Anti-Shiite murders wound Sunnis, too," op-ed by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 12 October 2005, p. A27.
¦"Ramadan Ritual: Fast Daily, Pray, Head to the Mall," by Hassan M. Fattah, New York Times, 12 October 2005, p. A1.
Tell me the Shiites and Kurds aren't bending over backwards to make this constitution work for the Sunnis, who largely sat out its drafting but are now being offered a special panel in the first Parliament to revise the constitution--basically a mini-constitutional congress just for Sunnis, or a make-over, politically speaking.
In exchange for this, prominent Sunnis leaders promise to get out the vote on Saturday's referendum election.
Meanwhile, despite orders from the Al Qaeda central leadership to cease and desist on attaching Iraqi Shiites, the Sunni-based insurgency continue to target them, going so far as bombing mosques at the start of Ramadan.
Friedman wonders out loud why no one in the Sunni world condemns this, then takes the Bush Administration to task thusly:
"Inexplicably to me, the Bush team, which has finally settled on the right rationale for the war in Iraq--to help Arabs carve out a space in the heart of their world where they can create a decent, progressive future, instead of drifting aimlessly under autocrats and worshiping a glorious past--is equally silent. Instead of going to the U.N. and seeking a resolution declaring the Sunni terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his ilk war criminals, it sends Karen Hughes around the Arab world to get flagellated by Sunni Muslim women for how awful we are.
The Bush team calls that "public diplomacy." I call is losing a public relations war to mass murderers.
Friedman then goes on to self-flagellate on Abu Ghraib, etc. What he's really saying is that we need to be using these despicable acts to help build the global rule set in this Global War on Terrorism, but that takes a U.S. that can deal openly with an International Criminal Court and accepts some serious transparency on its own rendition program and overall treatment of prisoners. These are two big themes of Blueprint for Action: grow the rule set or suffer isolation. A rule set population of one is called unilateralism, a rule set population that encompasses the Core is called global leadership.
But don't worry, cause time is on our side and this administration, which is becoming more lame-duck by the day on foreign affairs, is out the door in just over three years. Meanwhile, the Middle East in general joins the Core bit by bit, suggesting the Zarqawi's strategic window is closing more rapidly than he realizes. In a dozen years or so, for example, Ramadan will be so close to the holiday season in the West that it will be unrecognizable to the hard-core Zarqawi types as anything except full-blown Westoxification.
Yes, yes, I know. Muslims are so different than Westerners: they fast and shop, we gorge and shop.
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