Tag Archives: Not Europe

Turkmen Gas and Chinese Bombs

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After the Russian gas showdown with Ukraine, the Turkmen gas showdown with Russia. Two can play at that game, it seems. No doubt a lot of this is motivated, like the Ukraine crisis, by the decision makers’ own corruption interests in their Austrian, Swiss or God knows where nominee companies and numbered accounts. No doubt the futility of refusing to sell one’s only product will be apparent soon enough.

But it does point up something-first of all, despite the apparent ebbing of US influence in central Asia (airbase agreements being allowed to lapse, etc), the ‘Stans are very far from a calm hinterland for Russian energy geopolitics. Another thing is that the wider version of this politics – the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, aka “OPEC with Bombs” or the Dictators’ Club if you want to sound Hollywood – might not be as stable as its creators would like to believe. This cuts both ways.

One view of the SCO’s future is that of a gas and oil-empowered alliance of Russia, China, central Asia and maybe Iran, or rather, of their elites. Dedicated to staying that way. It’s not a nice thought, and is certainly one that should inform the debate about the British nuclear deterrent. Another version of it is as a club of toughminded realpolitiker dedicated to keeping the jihadis away from the pipelines, and in the near future the railways. Bolshy independence within it could weaken both these scenarios, although (given the traditional Russian and Chinese approach to central Asian Muslims) that might be quite a good thing.

ICRC admits Israel and Palestine

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According to this morning’s news, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent had admitted the Israeli Magen David Adom and Palestinian Red Crescent Society as full members, following the final passage of a text allowing the new “red crystal” symbol. The red crystal looks to me like a red Renault logo, but I guess at least it doesn’t have much religious significance for anybody.
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Somalia: As if the West’s lack of concern could be plainer

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So now, according to CNN, the US and various others are now talking about paying for an African Union peacekeeping force for Somaila. They just had some wanker on talking about how Somalia is a place where children don’t got to school, they join militias, where there’s no law and order, where “there’s been too much chaos for too long.”

Gee, fifteen years of it and only now they notice.

Of course, this “Islamic Court Union” seems to be the cause of all this new concern. As long as Somalia was a non-sectarian disaster area, or as long as it was merely unpleasant warlords in charge, it was just too hard to try to fix any of the country’s problems. But if an organization that claims adherence to a religion takes over, well, then we have to do something.

There’s a reasonable case for saying that outside intervention in Somalia is a bad idea – it hasn’t worked really well in the past. And, there’s a reasonable case for intervening on humanitarian grounds – the country really is an awful mess. But I really don’t see how there’s more of an argument for intervention today than there was a year ago. If anything, there’s a better argument against inteverntion. This “Islamic Court Union” seems to be relatively competent at reinstalling law and order, and has not so far (at least to the best of my knowledge) started chopping off hands or forcing women to wear burkas. In that part of the world, that may well be the best realizable outcome. The locals seem to prefer it to the US-backed association of local warlords the ICU displaced.

Doha Adieu?

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Steve Clemons, who’s quite adept at reading the Washington tea leaves, writes that the Doha round of trade negotiations is effectively over.

Why? For most of the present US administration, Bob Zoellick had been the US Trade Representative. Zoellick was an old hand, wise in the ways of both trade and Washington. But when Condelezza Rice was appointed Secretary of State, Zoellick went over to become her deputy. His successor, Rob Portman, was a Congressman from Ohio who had been involved with the nuts and bolts of trade legislation for many years. He was serious and experienced, with friends on Capitol Hill. Now Portman has resigned as Trade Representative to head the Office of Management and Budget; a bigger responsibility, but not connected to trade.

The upshot is that the USTR position will now be empty for some time, the current president’s authority to negotiate agreements that the Congress cannot amend is expiring soon, and the administration sees little hope of progress in the Doha round before it leaves office. Looks like it could be the end of the line for Doha.

The idealism of neocons

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Sadly, No!: What’s The Phrase I’m Looking For?

The real concern to neocons is that the democracy in question is pro- or anti-American (or -Israel). And whatever new excuse they come up with to finesse their latest instance of double standard-bearing with regard to democracies, it will rest on the same nationalist underpinning as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, disguised with a new false distinction (maybe the new “authoritarian vs totalitarian dictatorships” will be “liberal vs. illiberal democracies”).

One thing is certain: what is guaranteed to continue is neoconservative war-mongering.

Although in the days of detente neoconservatives often attacked Henry Kissinger (and always from the Right; he was never quite bloodthirsty enough for them, which is all you really need to know), they greatly resemble him in basic morality. The essential difference between neoconservatism and Kissingerian realism is not due to some high-minded idealism of the former, but rather due to neoconservatism’s greater love of aggression and its gift for manufacturing intellectual veneer. If Kissingerian realism can be described as pragmatically amoral, neoconservatism can be defined as aggressively immoral[.]

Take Me Out

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Once upon a time, before it became the Paris edition of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune published its late sports editor Dick Roraback’s ode to baseball’s opening day each year.

Under the fold, “The Crack of the Bat.”

(The fifth stanza is current again, after reflecting a bygone age for more than three decades. The Buc and the Nat refer to the Pittsburgh Pirates [buccaneers] and the Washington Nationals. In 1971, major league baseball left Washington, not returning until last season when the relocated Montreal Expos became the new Nationals. The fields in the stanza, Forbes and Griffith, are long gone. Forbes’ replacement is also gone, and Griffith’s replacement’s replacement is moving from drawing board to construction site this year.)
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More Troubling News

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Just off the wires from Iraq:

The sectarian cleansing that drove 68-year-old Abbas al-Saiedi from his home may be as alarming a sign of a country on the brink of civil war as the killings that have swept Iraq in the past week…….

Al-Saiedi’s story, a tale of fear and desperation told to The Associated Press on Wednesday, represents a growing phenomenon of religious cleansing in which members of each Muslim sect are driving the others from neighborhoods where they have long lived side by side.

The practice, which has been going on for some time in neighborhoods south of Baghdad, is a barometer of the degree to which the Shiites and Sunnis have moved on the path to civil war. The number of incidents cannot be fully gauged, but is not yet at the level of mass expulsions of the kind that took place in the Balkans during the civil war there in the 1990s.

For their part, Sunnis have long-standing claims of attacks by Shiite-dominated and, some say, government-linked death squads and eviction from homes in the very neighborhoods now being occupied by Shiites displaced from Sunni areas.

The Colour of Steel

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First of all many thanks to the kind folk of Afoe offering me the possibility of expressing my views on some European reactions to the Mittal Steel bid for the European steel giant Arcelor. By now most of you must have heard about this sitation. Mittal Steel is the world’s largest steelmaker and was founded (and is still currently run) by the Indian-born steel maker Lakshmi Nivas Mittal, the third richest man in the world.
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Good Lord!

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Good lord, this looks serious:

A dawn bomb attack devastated a major Shi’ite shrine in Iraq on Wednesday, sparking nationwide protests and sectarian reprisals against Sunni mosques despite appeals for calm from government and religious leaders. The attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest sites, provoked more violence than attacks that have killed thousands but the Shi’ite-led government insisted it would not provoke civil war…..

No one was killed in the attack on the mosque in Samarra. However a Sunni cleric was killed, police said, at one of 17 Sunni mosques in Baghdad fired on by militants. One mosque was damaged by fire, though most damage appeared relatively minor.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shi’ite, declared three days of mourning and called for Muslim unity. He said the interim government had sent officials to Samarra. Residents said police sealed off the mainly Sunni city, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad; police fired over demonstrators’ heads as they chanted religious and anti-American slogans.

Armed Mehdi Army militiamen loyal to radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr took up positions on streets in Baghdad and Shi’ite cities in the south, clashing in Basra and elsewhere with Sunnis; a Sadr aide said: “If the Iraqi government does not do its job to defend the Iraqi people we are ready to do so.”

Witnesses said rocket-propelled grenades damaged a Sunni mosque in Basra and there were heavy exchanges of fire after Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia attacked an Islamic Party office in the city. Thousands of people marched in Shi’ite towns across the country and through the capital, condemning the Samarra attack.

A different kind of clash.

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While I’m still struggling to put my reaction to the cartoon row into appropriate writing, today’s Spiegel Online’s English edition features an interesting and important article about a different kind of culture clash. It’s a timely story about the fact that Islam the religion and Islam the cultural practice are often quite distinct. It’s a story about the slow and violent death of traditional hiearchies during modernisation, particularly if modernisation is perceived as imperialist. But above all, it’s a story about allegedly legalised crime against a young woman and her incredible courage to resist what would have been her traditional duty: suicide. Her faith, she states, gave her the strength to keep telling her story. As Uwe Buse writes on Spiegel Online –

“Mukhtar Mai, the daughter of a Pakistani farmer, thought she was apologizing for the misdeeds of her brother. Instead, she was gang raped by men in her village. After the rape, Mai contemplated suicide. Today she is likened to Martin Luther King, Jr.”