It kind of seems like Bush is trying to implement Obama's foreign policy before Obama gets a chance to do it. 

He's agreed to a "time horizon" for withdrawal from Iraq (from an article in The Washington Post by Dan Eggen and Michael Abramowitz):

President Bush and Iraq's prime minister have agreed to set a "time horizon" for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as part of a long-term security accord they are trying to negotiate by the end of the month, White House officials said yesterday.

The decision, reached during a videoconference Thursday between Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, marks the culmination of a gradual but significant shift for the president, who has adamantly fought -- and even ridiculed -- efforts by congressional Democrats to impose what he described as artificial timetables for withdrawing U.S. forces.

In recent weeks, Bush and senior officials have hinted that they would be open to "aspirational" goals for removing U.S. troops, as Maliki and other Iraqi politicians have voiced increasing discontent with the idea of an open-ended U.S. troop presence in their country.

and we're talking to the Iranians (from an article in The Wall Street Journal by Jay Solomon):

On Saturday the U.S. will hold its highest-level contacts with Iran since 1979, a marked thaw in the two countries' troubled relationship. At the same time, the U.S. is fine-tuning a package of new financial penalties against Iran that target everything from gas imports to the insurance sector.

U.S. and European officials said they will intensify efforts to impose these penalties should their diplomatic drive fail to induce Iran to freeze its nuclear program. The sanctions effort could also include measures to impede Iran's shipping operations in the Persian Gulf and its banking activities in Asia...

but it sounds like the new sanctions will be coming since Iran has preemptively said that halting enrichment is off the table.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What great allies we have in our quest nurture flourishing democracy in the Middle East!

From an article in the NY Times by Jane Perlez and David Rohde titled "Pakistan Rounds Up Musharraf’s Political Foes":

The government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, making no concessions a day after seizing emergency powers, rounded up leading opposition figures and said Sunday that parliamentary elections could be delayed for as long as a year.

Police officers in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, stood outside a press club Sunday. Journalists vowed to resist the crackdown.

Security forces were reported to have detained about 500 opposition party figures, lawyers and human rights advocates on Sunday, and about a dozen privately owned television news stations remained off the air. International broadcasters, including the BBC and CNN, were also cut off.

The crackdown, announced late Saturday night after General Musharraf suspended the Constitution, was clearly aimed at preventing public demonstrations that political parties and lawyers were organizing for Monday.

“They are showing zero tolerance for protest,” said Athar Minallah, a lawyer and a former minister in the Musharraf government.

Another NY Times article by David Sanger and David Rohde is titled "U.S. Is Likely to Continue Aid to Pakistan."

From an article in The Sunday Times by Nick Fielding and Sarah Baxter titled "Saudi Arabia is hub of world terror":

[In Saudi Arabia King Abdullah] is regarded as a modest reformer who has cracked down on home-grown terrorism and loosened a few relatively minor restrictions on his subjects’ personal freedom.

With oil prices surging, Saudi Arabia is growing in prosperity and embracing some modern trappings. Bibles and crucifixes are still banned, but internet access is spreading...

Yet wealthy Saudis remain the chief financiers of worldwide terror networks...

Extremist clerics provide a stream of recruits to some of the world’s nastiest trouble spots.

An analysis by NBC News suggested that the Saudis make up 55% of foreign fighters in Iraq. They are also among the most uncompromising and militant.

Half the foreign fighters held by the US at Camp Cropper near Baghdad are Saudis. They are kept in yellow jumpsuits in a separate, windowless compound after they attempted to impose sharia on the other detainees and preached an extreme form of Wahhabist Islam.

In recent months, Saudi religious scholars have caused consternation in Iraq and Iran by issuing fatwas calling for the destruction of the great Shi’ite shrines in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, some of which have already been bombed. And while prominent members of the ruling al-Saud dynasty regularly express their abhorrence of terrorism, leading figures within the kingdom who advocate extremism are tolerated.

With friends like these...

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So says the byline of an article in The Economist from last week.  It makes the case that for those of us who desire to see abortion numbers drop (I think we're pretty much all in that category), legislation is not a tool that anyone should expect to be effective for achieving that outcome:

[According to] the largest global study of abortion ever...Restricting abortions...has little effect on the number of pregnancies terminated. Rather, it drives women to seek illegal, often unsafe backstreet abortions leading to an estimated 67,000 deaths a year. A further 5m women require hospital treatment as a result of botched procedures.

In Africa and Asia, where abortion is generally either illegal or restricted, the abortion rate in 2003 (the latest year for which figures are available) was 29 per 1,000 women aged 15-44. This is almost identical to the rate in Europe—28—where legal abortions are widely available. Latin America, which has some of the world's most restrictive abortion laws, is the region with the highest abortion rate (31), while western Europe, which has some of the most liberal laws, has the lowest (12).

Between 1995 and 2005, 17 nations liberalised abortion legislation, while three tightened restrictions. The number of induced abortions nevertheless declined from nearly 46m in 1995 to 42m in 2003, resulting in a fall in the worldwide abortion rate from 35 to 29. The most dramatic drop—from 90 to 44—was in former communist Eastern Europe, where abortion is generally legal, safe and cheap. This coincided with a big increase in contraceptive use in the region which still has the world's highest abortion rate, with more terminations than live births.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Week magazine summarizes a section from GQ's interview with Colin Powell:

Colin Powell has come to believe that democracy is not for everyone, says Walter Isaacson in GQ. As secretary of state, it was part of Powell’s job to promote President Bush’s message of self-determination and representative government around the world. But in Middle Eastern capitals, he found that this idealistic vision didn’t have universal appeal. “When I dealt with the Arab world, the word ‘democracy’ frightened them,” Powell says. “A Saudi leader said to me, ‘Colin, please, give us a break. Do you really want to see Jeffersonian democracy in Saudi Arabia? Do you know what would happen? Fundamentalists would win, and there wouldn’t be any more elections.’” Powell heard the same thing in Egypt and in other Islamic nations. “They all were saying, ‘Take a look at our history and where we are. You can talk to us about reform, but don’t tell us to become Jeffersonian democracies tomorrow. It’s not possible.” In hindsight, Powell has come to doubt that America can remake the world in its own image. “We have a tendency to lecture and perhaps not think things through. We have to be careful what we wish for. Are we happy with the democracy that Hamas gave us? There are some places that are not ready for the kind of democracy we find so attractive to ourselves. They are not culturally ready for it and they are not historically ready for it.”

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In recent years I've been confused by a couple things I've read.

On the one hand, I read that Americans lead the world in charitable giving, setting a record in 2006 by giving $300 billion.

On the other hand, I read that America is near the bottom of the industrialized nations in terms of foreign aid as a fraction of its GNP.  That is, it's total giving is big but not so much as a fraction of its economy.  The $20 billion number quoted in the Wikipedia article is a lot smaller than the $300 billion mentioned above.  From this I assumed that the US is a great giver but mostly gives to itself.

An editorial in the LA Times by Robert Reich (Is Harvard a charity? Most donations go to institutions that serve the rich; they shouldn't be fully tax-deductible) reveals another side of this issue.

This year's charitable donations are expected to total more than $200 billion, a record. But a big portion of this impressive sum -- especially from the wealthy, who have the most to donate -- is going to culture palaces: to the operas, art museums, symphonies and theaters where the wealthy spend much of their leisure time. It's also being donated to the universities they attended and expect their children to attend, perhaps with the added inducement of knowing that these schools often practice a kind of affirmative action for "legacies." 

It turns out that only an estimated 10% of all charitable deductions are directed at the poor. 

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently watched the documentary "Bhopal: The Search for Justice." From Wikipedia:

The Bhopal Disaster took place in the early hours of the morning of December 3, 1984, in the heart of the city of Bhopal, India, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. A Union Carbide subsidiary pesticide plant released 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas, immediately killing nearly 3,000 people and ultimately causing at least 15,000 to 22,000 total deaths. Bhopal is frequently cited as the world's worst industrial disaster. The International Medical Commission on Bhopal was established in 1993 to respond to the disaster.

My employer, Dow Chemical, purchased Union Carbide in 2001 and has been under pressure to do something about Bhopal. From Dow's web page about the issue:

Bhopal was a terrible tragedy that none of us will ever forget. However, it is important to note that Dow never owned or operated the plant, which today is under the control of the Madhya Pradesh state government. Dow acquired the shares of Union Carbide Corporation more than 16 years after the tragedy, and 10 years after the $470 million settlement agreement – paid by Union Carbide Corporation and Union Carbide India, Limited – was approved by the Indian Supreme Court.

Although Dow never owned nor operated the plant, we — along with the rest of industry — have learned from this tragic event, and we have tried to do all we can to assure that similar incidents never happen again.

While Dow has no responsibility for Bhopal, we have never forgotten the tragic event and have helped to drive global industry performance improvements.

I understand Dow's argument: Union Carbide was a part of Dow neither when the tragedy occurred nor when Union Carbide settled with the Indian government. But Union Carbide did become part of Dow, and the settlement Union Carbide made does not seem to have adequately remedied the situation. According to the film, the site has never been cleaned up, so the pollution continues to affect the people living in the area. Though perhaps Dow has no legal responsibility for Bhopal, it seems like is does have a moral responsibility to try to make things right. If you (Union Carbide and now Dow) pay someone (the Indian government) to fix a mess you made (disaster in Bhopal) but the mess isn't cleaned up (due to either inadequate funds or failures of the Indian government), you still have a moral responsibility to clean up the mess.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've had some millipedes invading our house lately. Speaking of pests, check out this story about what's going on in China. It's hard to imagine. From the current issue of The Week magazine:

Billions of mice are swarming across Hunan province, devouring rice paddies and clogging village paths. The mice were driven from their holes last month, when officials opened the sluice gates on Dongting Lake to relieve flooding from other waterways. The annual occurrence usually displaces thousands of mice, but this year, because of the major flooding, the swarm is many times larger. “They are like troops advancing,” said farmer Zhang Luo. Villagers have killed an estimated 2 billion mice so far, beating them with shovels or using homemade poison. Tons of mouse corpses are now rotting in the fields and must be collected and buried. The poison has also killed hundreds of cats and dogs.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this week I watched the documentary China Blue from PBS' Independent Lens series. From Wikipedia:

China Blue is a 2005 documentary film directed by Micha Peled. It follows the life of Jasmine, a young worker in a Chinese jeans factory, hence the title. The documentary discusses both alleged sweatshop conditions in factories in China and the growing importance of China as an exporting country on a global scale.

I thought it was really interesting. The poor living conditions, the ridiculously long working hours, the contrast betwen the workers and the boss, etc. It reminds me that the extremely cheap price we pay, for a pair of jeans for example, necessarily comes at the expense of someone making them for next to nothing.

I give it 5 out of 5.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From an article titled "Administration foiled by own Iraq goals" in the LA Times:

The Bush administration's decision to set benchmarks for measuring the progress of the Iraq mission is now seen by some U.S. officials as a costly blunder that has only aided the White House's critics in Congress and its foes in Iraq.

Administration officials saw them as realistic goals that would prod the Iraqi government toward reconciliation, while helping sustain political support for the effort at home. The yardsticks include steps vital to Iraq's stability: passage of a law to divide oil revenue among the key communities, reforms to allow more members of Saddam Hussein's party back into the government, and elections to divide power in the provinces.

Yet now, with the major goals still out of reach, the administration is playing down their importance. With an interim report on the U.S. effort due out today, administration officials instead are emphasizing other goals — some of which are less ambitious but have been attained.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, recently told reporters that while the benchmarks remain important, "We have to look on a wider scale than the benchmarks themselves."

In private, many officials were more scathing in their critique, saying that defining the goals in such a way galvanized resistance in Iraq and gave war critics a way to argue that the U.S. mission was falling short.

I think this is a fine illustration of one of the big problems. These guys see this as a game. Therefore, they think that defining goals was a mistake because it has aided war cirtics in arguing that the effort is falling short. The problem isn't how short the effort is falling. It's that people know how it is failing.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the current issue of The Week magazine:

Beijing A shortage of names.

China is overrun with Wangs and Lis—93 million and 92 million, respectively. Fully 85 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people have one of just 100 traditional surnames. This week, the Ministry of Public Security declared the situation a security hazard, because it is too difficult to track down any particular Wang Tao, say, among China’s nearly 100,000 Wang Taos. The ministry announced it therefore would let couples give children either parent’s surname—or a combination of both. A Wang and a Li, for example, could name their child Wang, Li, Liwang, or Wangli. The child of a Zhou and a Zhu could be called Zhouzhu. Double-naming is already permitted in Hong Kong, where it has become trendy.

- Jonathan

Posted by Jonathan at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)