Holiday Break

I'll be taking a break from blogging in order to travel and unwind. Please stop back by around the first of the year.

Merry Christmas!

Ten Favorites

Before I take a break from blogging--and from just about everything else--for the holidays, I thought I might post a list of my favorite books from this past year. Just to be clear, not all of the books on this list were published in 2006. They just happened to be among the books I read over the course of the past twelve months.

1. James Carroll, House of War
2. George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
3. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
4. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
5. Moisés Naím, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
6. Philippe Sands, Lawless World
7. Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism
8. Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
9. Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By
10. Stephen Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy

There's not a lot of pleasure reading on this list. Two books that ranked high in my "just for fun" category were a brief and very readable work by historian Paul Johnson, The Renaissance, and a trip back to Charlottesville via the words of Garry Wills, Mr. Jefferson's University.

I think I'll need to work a little more fiction into my reading diet in 2007.

Parking and Corruption

The New York Times Magazine today published its "Ideas" issue--a fascinating compendium of studies and cultural observations from the past year. An interesting entry in this issue reviewed a study published during the summer by two economists, Raymond Fisman of Columbia and Edward Miguel of UC-Berkeley.

Fisman and Miguel decided to see if there was a correlation between the behavior of diplomats at the United Nations in New York and the level of corruption in the countries they represent. More specifically, they asked whether diplomats from countries ranking high on indices of official corruption were more likely to exploit their diplomatic immunity by parking illegally on New York's crowded streets. Here's an extended excerpt of the Magazine's summary:

The two scholars studied parking tickets that were racked up in Manhattan by diplomats from 146 countries who were posted to the United Nations. In a situation in which every diplomat essentially received an invitation to be corrupt, diplomats from nations with "clean" governments said, "No, thanks."

The study began with the observation that, until late 2002, there was essentially zero enforcement of parking rules where diplomats were concerned. Diplomats were ticketed, but few if any cars were towed, and no one demanded payment. Using public records stretching back to 1997, Fisman and Miguel identified which diplomats had delinquent tickets, and how many --150,000 in all, representing more than $18 million in fines.

If incentives trumped culture, you would suppose that diplomats from every nation would cheat. But in fact, attachés from Canada, Ireland, Scandinavian nations and Japan evidently drove around the block till they found a spot. (Diplomats with few or no unpaid tickets also tended to get few tickets, period.) The worst offenders, meanwhile, came from Kuwait (246 unpaid tickets per diplomat), Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, Mozambique, Albania, Angola and Senegal. This behavior correlated strongly with the scores of diplomats' home countries on a measure of public corruption compiled by World Bank researchers.

I'm hoping to conduct a similar study of the correlates of students who park illegally in the faculty lot at Pepperdine next semester.

Human Rights Day 2006

Augusto Pinochet has died--on Human Rights Day.

Pinochet, who ruled Chile for seventeen years after ousting democratically elected president Salvador Allende, voiced the aspirations of authoritarian dictators everywhere when he said, "Not a leaf moves in this country if I'm not moving it."

Killer Smog

With smoke from brush fires clouding the skies over much of southeastern Australia, it's worth recalling the Great Smog of 1952. It was on December 9, 1952, that the Great Smog finally lifted in London. An educational site maintained by the Met Office in London states:

The smoke-laden fog that shrouded the capital from Friday 5 December to Tuesday 9 December 1952 brought premature death to thousands and inconvenience to millions. An estimated 4,000 people died because of it, and cattle at Smithfield, were, the press reported, asphyxiated. Road, rail and air transport were almost brought to a standstill and a performance at the Sadler's Wells Theatre had to be suspended when fog in the auditorium made conditions intolerable for the audience and performers.

The spike in deaths due to the Great Smog was noticed only three weeks later when official mortality figures were published. The awareness that several thousand people had died for reasons directly related to air pollution, however, made a difference in public policy. Eric Nagourney of the New York Times writes,

The Great Smog is considered a turning point in environmental history. Although there had been other episodes where air pollution was held responsible for a spike in deaths--notably in the Meuse Valley in Belgium in 1930, and in Donora, Pa., in 1948--the numbers were much lower than those in London. In the aftermath, British officials passed laws banning the emission of black smoke and requiring industry to switch to cleaner-burning fuels.

These laws gradually produced dramatic reductions in some of the more unhealthy components of London's famous fog.

Trouble in Iran

If Iran has a special prosecutor, he may be needed to investigate President Ahmadinejad soon. According to this story from the Guardian earlier this week, Ahmadinejad watched females dancing during the opening ceremonies of the Asian Games in Doha, Qatar last Friday. Conservative religious leaders in Iran are not happy.

Blood Diamonds

Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, and Djimon Hounsou, opens on Friday. Pepperdine student Christina Tippitt, who has seen an advance screening, recommends the film enthusiastically.

Back on September 18, Amnesty International sponsored a National Day of Action on Conflict Diamonds during which AI members conducted surveys in 246 diamond retailers in eighteen states. Here are some of the results from that survey:

• Only 27% of shops were able assure us that they had a policy on conflict diamonds.
• 30% of the shops that said they had a policy were unable to produce a hard copy of or explain it.
• Only 13% of shops provided warranties to their customers as a standard practice.
• 37% of the shops we visited claimed to be aware of the conflict diamonds issue. But 54% of them reported an inaccurate definition of the crisis.
• Only 28% of the shops were aware of the Kimberley Process.
• 29% of those who were aware of the Kimberley Process had only a minimal or limited understanding of it.
• When asked whether consumers inquired about conflict diamonds, 83% of respondents answered rarely or never.
• 110 shops refused outright to take the survey.

If you have a chance to see the movie, come on back here and leave a comment about it.

Million Dollar Trials

According to the Miami Herald, the Pentagon has proposed diverting $75 to $125 million dollars in already appropriated military construction funds to Guantanamo for a courtroom complex where military commissions would conduct trials for 75 to 80 of the 430 or so remaining prisoners at the base. I could be wrong, but that appears to come to roughly $1 million per trial.

Even some Republican members of Congress are asking questions.

[Via Kevin Drum.]

Good Questions

Someone in the White House press corps raised some very good questions at yesterday's press briefing:

*****

Q I have a question about the Rumsfeld memo. At the time when he was saying to the President, in this memo, that things aren't working in Iraq, the President was saying two things publicly: One, that we're winning in Iraq, absolutely; and he was also lashing Democrats, saying that criticism was not a plan for Iraq, and that we -- the administration -- have a plan for victory in Iraq. So why wasn't the President leveling with the American people?

MR. SNOW: Actually, at the time that this came --

Q Why wasn't he saying publicly what top members of this administration who were running the war were saying privately?

MR. SNOW: Well, there are a couple of things. First, at that very time, he was actually saying, things are not getting well enough fast enough. That was a formulation he was using at the time. If you take a look at the Rumsfeld memo that was printed in The New York Times, what you end up having is what the President I think has made it clear that he wants, which are people thinking creatively and exhaustively about ways of getting better results in Iraq.

And this is not -- other than at the very beginning, he says, clearly U.S. forces -- it's not working well enough or fast enough, what they're doing. That is a phrase that the President had adopted and had been using. And I don't know whether it comes from Secretary Rumsfeld or from the President. And then you have a list of options.

So I don't think you've got a case where the President was saying one thing and advisors were saying another. What the President was saying is that you've got a sovereign government with the government of Prime Minister Maliki that is pursuing what it needs to pursue, but obviously needs to be doing so more effectively and more rapidly. And that would include security. It would include reconciliation. It would include economic measures. It would include things like the hydrocarbon law. So certainly we weren't trying to wrap it up into a neat little bundle, because it's a very complex situation.

Q But doesn't it strike you that at the same time that you and others in this administration were accusing the likes of John Murtha of cutting and running by suggesting redeployment of forces to the periphery of Iraq or to nearby Kuwait, that the Secretary of Defense is suggesting similar options?

MR. SNOW: What Mr. Murtha had suggested was -- he was never quite that specific, and I think I'd let him speak for himself, but I believe when he came on "Meet the Press," he was talking about redeploying to Okinawa. What you have in here is a description of possibly having forces --

Q But that's not the -- he talked about redeploying to Kuwait. You say you don't want to talk more, but you're not talking accurately.

MR. SNOW: No, here's what he says, is, "You can withdraw forces from vulnerable positions -- cities, patrolling, et cetera -- and move forces to a quick reaction force status operating from within Iraq and Kuwait." Now, it is one of many options that are described here. What it means is the administration is trying to take a look at every suggestion, as I think would be incumbent.

Q Wait a second. You're not really answering the question. You're trying to parse what Murtha's position was.

MR. SNOW: No, I'm not --

Q Wait a second, let me just finish.

MR. SNOW: Okay.

Q Isn't it striking that this administration was accusing the likes of John Murtha and other Democrats who suggested course correction, including phased withdrawal, of cutting and running --

MR. SNOW: No, let me --

Q -- at the same time that the Defense Secretary was suggesting just the same option?

MR. SNOW: No.

Q You don't see hypocrisy there?

MR. SNOW: No, because you're talking about apples and oranges. If you take a look at --

Q Really?

Hit the Road, John

John Bolton has finally resigned. And President Bush has finally accepted the fact that Bolton was never going to be confirmed by the Senate.

Commenting on Bolton's departure, Kofi Annan spoke, well, diplomatically: "As a representative of the U.S. government he pressed ahead with the instructions that he had been given, and tried to work as effectively as he could with the other ambassadors."

The faintest of praise.

For more, see the Bolton Watch, which just might be able to hang it up now.

Spying and Social Learning

Anyone interested in recent developments in intelligence-gathering (and, even more to the point, intelligence-sharing) must read this article by Clive Thompson published in the New York Times Magazine yesterday. While no brief excerpt can capture the full range of points made in the article, these paragraphs describing an idea presented by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the CIA's Center for Mission Innovation, suggest one of the ways that social learning can be (and, in fact, has been) developed within the intelligence community:

Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the "reader-authored" encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia's owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors--some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details--began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. "You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience," Andrus told me. What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia's self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them--and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it's an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours.

Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink--linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important--then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst's report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.

There's much more in the article, including an extensive discussion of some of the problems that wiki- and blog-related information-sharing pose in an organization in which the need to share information (in order to "connect the dots" when trying to unravel complex plots) must be balanced against the need to keep secrets.

Litvinenko

Today's New York Times traces the strange saga of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko from his investigation of a 1994 attempt on the life of Boris Berezovsky to his death by radiation poisoning last week in a London hospital. It's the stuff of spy novels and TV movies.

Port Calls in Mongolia

Most of the world's dry land would have to be covered by rising seas before Mongolia could come close to having an ocean port. (The country's lowest altitude is 532 meters above sea level.) But Mongolia's position astride some of the world's highest mountains is no barrier to registering ships.

Since 2004, the Mongolian flag has been numbered among the world's flags of convenience for ship owners. There's even a photo of a ship with Mongolian registry at Coming Anarchy.

World AIDS Day, 2006

Today is World AIDS Day. To learn a little about the history of AIDS and about its impact in the world, take a look at this interactive feature on the website of the Toronto Globe and Mail.

The Bard on Iraq

Shakespeare penned a lot of famous lines, but none is more famous than this one from Romeo and Juliet: "What's in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet . . ."

Because no one is coming out of Iraq smelling like a rose, a naming controversy has erupted over the conflict there.

On Sunday, the New York Times carried a story that asked whether Iraq's circumstances fit the academic definition of "civil war." The consensus was that there is in fact a civil war going on in Iraq.

This week, numerous media outlets began using the term "civil war," some with considerable fanfare. President Bush, however, remained unmoved. Yesterday, in fact, a headline in the New York Times read, "Bush Declines to Call Situation in Iraq Civil War."

On Monday, the Borowitz Report detailed the president's latest plan to deal with the situation:

President George W. Bush said today that he would not allow a civil war in Iraq to erupt on his watch, and said that in order to prevent that from happening the United States would aggressively search for new synonyms for the phrase "civil war."

In order to seek out the most sanitized alternatives to that phrase, the president announced that he was launching an ambitious new mission called Operation Noble Euphemism.

Showing his trademark steely resolve, Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House that the US was prepared to hunt down every last thesaurus on Earth and would not quit until the job was done.

What's in a name? Perhaps a constructivist should answer that question. Over at Duck of Minerva, one does. Peter Howard concludes that the naming controversy is "a political power play to set the terms of the discourse for national security policy."

Of course, it could be that the naming controversy is simply about reclaiming a connection with reality. Back in March, Ayad Allawi, who was formerly the United States' man in Iraq, said, "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

(For more on the debate from Jon Stewart and John Oliver, go here.)

Fish 'n' Chips

A cargo container full of Doritos fell off a ship and broke open at sea off of the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Beaches there were littered with thousands of bags of Doritos, most of which were completely intact.

There are a couple of additional pictures on the Virginian-Pilot's photo page here.

Those familiar with maritime law will no doubt be reminded by the photo above of MARPOL 73/78, the International Convention for the Prevention of Maritime Pollution by Chips. (Sorry. I couldn't resist.)

[Thanks to Michael Wang for bringing this to my attention.]

Energy Return on Investment

Thomas Homer-Dixon, a leading expert on environmental threats to security, writes in today's New York Times about the the world's energy situation. He points out that oil prices often reflect factors that are far more volatile than the long-term supply and demand situation, where the trends are not very promising. Homer-Dixon writes,

A better measure of the cost of oil, or any energy source, is the amount of energy required to produce it. Just as we evaluate a financial investment by comparing the size of the return with the size of the original expenditure, we can evaluate any project that generates energy by dividing the amount of energy the project produces by the amount it consumes.

Economists and physicists call this quantity the “energy return on investment” or E.R.O.I. For a modern coal mine, for instance, we divide the useful energy in the coal that the mine produces by the total of all the energy needed to dig the coal from the ground and prepare it for burning--including the energy in the diesel fuel that powers the jackhammers, shovels and off-road dump trucks, the energy in the electricity that runs the machines that crush and sort the coal, as well as all the energy needed to build and maintain these machines.

In the United States, the energy return on investment in oil and natural gas production has fallen from 25 to 1 in 1970 to 15 to 1 today. This, in part, is because we have pumped most of our easy-to-get-to oil so that now much domestic drilling activity involves wells that have more marginal potential.

Although Homer-Dixon doesn't make this specific point, it's worth noting nonetheless that some of the recent enthusiasm expressed for biofuels doesn't make much sense in terms of energy return on investment. Some biofuels, in fact, require more fossil fuels to produce than they are capable of replacing.

A President with Style

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia's president, wears bowties.

[Photo via the CBC.]

More on the "War"

Over at Balkinization, David Luban notes the recent discussion over whether we should call the conflict in Iraq a "civil war," but he quickly moves on to the issue of whether "war" is the right label for the conflict between the United States and Al Qaeda. He asks if it was "a disastrous mistake to label the conflict with Al Qaeda a 'war'" and acknowledges that many in the human rights community think that it was. He continues:

I don’t see matters that way. The U.S. government correctly interpreted 9/11 as an act of war, and retrospectively observed that Al Qaeda’s earlier attacks on the U.S.S. Cole and the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were also acts of war. That is because they formed a pattern, indicating a plan and a campaign. I think this is right. While it may sound peculiar to say that a nation could be at war for several years without knowing it, there is nothing odd about noticing a pattern among attacks where at first there seemed to be no pattern. Most importantly, what makes these patterns of attack a "war" was the political reason they took place. They were launched by an enemy that had a political aim (restoring the Arab world to the greatness of a unified caliphate), a grand strategy (inciting popular uprisings against despotic Arab regimes), and a set of tactics (high-visibility terrorist attacks against Western targets, selected on political grounds). If war is politics by other means, this is war. (However, the Al Qaeda grand strategy has been a dismal failure. No popular uprisings occurred in the Arab world after 9/11, and the only despot who has fallen is Saddam Hussein, thanks to the U.S. rather than to Al Qaeda. Through the ironies of the Law of Unintended Consequences, Al Qaeda’s long-term plan of a restored Sunni caliphate has instead led, via the U.S. Iraq misadventure, to a resurgence of Shi’ite power from Iran westward through Iraq and Syria all the way to Lebanon.)

While this is a better argument than most for saying that the conflict with certain Muslim extremists constitutes a "war," it requires equating acts of terrorism with battles in a war. As I have argued before, this is a bad idea because it confers on terrorists a form of legitimacy that they do not deserve and that, for political and legal reasons, it would be better to withold from them. Blowing up embassies is a crime even when a real war is ongoing; it can't be a good idea to say that political purposes pursued by terrorists can turn crimes into acts of war.

Although Luban doesn't have a problem with the "war" label, he does have serious concerns about how that label has been used to bolster executive power since 9/11.

The real fallacy does not lie in labeling the struggle with Al Qaeda a "war," but in the false constitutional theory that gives the President a vast set of "war powers" to be used everywhere he discerns a "battlefield," which of course can be anywhere on Earth. Nothing in the Constitution suggests anything of the sort, and it is hard to see why a democratic constitution ought to do so.

Incidentally, Luban mentions the Maher Arar lawsuit and adds a point that I neglected to mention as I discussed the case in International Organizations and Law today: A federal judge dismissed Arar's suit on national security grounds. That is, the judge ruled that forcing the United States Government to defend itself against the charge that it unlawfully rendered Arar to Syria where he was tortured for a year by Syrian authorities would jeopardize the security of the United States!

Memories of the Cold War

This, from the Guardian, is one of the more bizarre stories of the past week:

The mysterious death of a former Russian spy living in exile in London turned into an unprecedented public health scare yesterday when it emerged that he had been deliberately poisoned by a major dose of radioactive material.

Further traces of the substance were found at a sushi restaurant and at a central London hotel where Alexander Litvinenko met a number of people before falling ill, and at his home in the city.

He was killed by polonium 210, a rare radioactive isotope which is so toxic that there may never be a postmortem examination of Mr Litvinenko's body, for fear of causing further deaths.

Police and security sources said they had never encountered such an extraordinary death. "Nothing like this has ever happened before," said one Whitehall source. "It is unprecedented, we are in uncharted territory." One priority last night was to establish who has access to polonium 210 anywhere in the world.

Two days before his death, Litvinenko dictated an extraordinary statement from his hospital bed placing responsibility for his murder on President Vladimir Putin. After thanking hospital employees who cared for him and British authorities who were investigating the case, Litvinenko continued:

I thank my wife Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her and our son knows no bounds.

But as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death.

I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like.

I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.

You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value.

You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.

May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.

Putin has denied responsibility for Litvinenko's poisoning, but the British government has requested Russia's help in its investigation.

Litvinenko, living in exile in London, was a long-time critic of Putin. At the time of his poisoning, he was investigating the murder of a Russsian journalist who had exposed Russian war crimes in Chechnya.