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| 5/25 |
| 2006/4/1-4 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:42605 Activity:high |
4/1 The fellow who as been the editor of the e'ist for the entire adult
lives for most of you is stepping down. Interesting farewell
restrospection at:
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=6744590
Main topics: 1. globalization 2. poverty 3.iraq
--psb
\_ Synopsis: fact #1 fact #2 ... fact #n ... that's why
the Iraq War is a good thing and we should redouble our effort."
Economist's view is that "Conservative think tanks are the
answer to liberal academia." Go figure.
\_ thanks for the article. his big cop out was arguing that
his support for the Iraq war was right, but that George Bush
let us down. Please ... you cannot decide whether to support
a war without taking into consideration the capabilities of
the leadership taking charge of the war and its aftermath.
Even a really good leadership would have a very difficult
time in the case of Iraq, and would likely make things worse
instead of better, and also tie us up for a long time.
That's why the war is a bad idea. He
should just say, "we're wrong", and I will have more
respect for him. I like Economist better before him
Economist also become more pro-American from a
politics standpoint instead of representing a more multi-
faceted worldview. I don't necessarily disagree with that,
but alternate viewpoints tend to be fresher and more
interesting, as opposed to feeling like just another
US based rag.
\_ He should have been more skeptical, but many thinking people,
myself included, had no inkling of a clue that this would be
so horribly mismanaged. Afghanistan was pulled off fairly
handily, and despite it being pretty obvious from the get-go
that the whole WMD thing was a sham, I am still in favor of the
invasion of Iraq, for reasons I've stated repeatedly. There
is no inconsistency in that article whatsoever. -John
\_ Actually many thinking people, myself included, know that
the aftermath would be terribly difficult to manage.
That he didn't have a clue, doesn't mean he was dumb,
but it does mean he was wrong. Afghanistan was a country
that was totally exhausted from years of war, and anything
was better than the Taliban, and there was international
support, and Osama bin Laden was there, so our goal and
aim was clear. OBL was our target. Nation building was
a secondary goal. If it worked out, great, if it didn't,
it was okay.
\- I wish he had used stronger words of condemnation too
but he does say: 1. maybe we should have been more skeptical
of governments, as we are inclined to be 2. recall they did
run a cover story called RUMSFELD RESIGN ... did any other
not-obviously left papers say anything comparable?
not-obviously-left papers say anything comparable?
I supported an Administration I didnt
trust believing that the consequences
would repay the gamble. Now I realize
that intentions do shape consequences.
--Michael Ignatieff, NYT Magazine
--psb
\_ I wrote the above before reading the last
paragraph, so yes, it's a little bit better,
but I think my above comments stand.
The other change for the worse, at least from
my standpoint, is a shift in weight towards
an Atlantic centric coverage. There also seems to
my standpoint, is a slight shift in weight towards
a Atlantic centric coverage. There also seems to
my standpoint, was a shift in weight towards
an Atlantic centric coverage. There also seemed to
be a change in the people covering asia, or at
least east asia. I find the analysis and
insights not as astute as before. One example
was the coverage of Taiwan politics, for
instance. The Economist was all enamoured
was the coverage of Taiwan politics.
The Economist was all enamoured
with the "upstart" DPP and Chen Shui Bian,
Taiwan's current president. I haven't read
Taiwan's current president. I haven't read a
single article even slightly negative about
him since his first election 6 years ago.
Such one-sided coverage is more akin to
Newsweek as opposed to the old Economist.
Newsweek than to the old Economist.
Economist is still good, but my favourite
these days is WSJ. And I agree with the
poster below about the jab at China. China
pretty much laid out its bottomline pretty
laid out its bottomline pretty
clearly. And the likeliest miscalculation
would be from the Taiwan side, at least for
the coming few years. 15 years from now, it's
the coming few years. 10 years from now, it's
harder to say. What do you think of the
Economist's coverage of South Asia? I don't
know enough about the region to judge.
Economist's coverage of India? I don't know
enough about India to judge.
\_ I think he completely down-played China's role on reducing
proverty. Instead, he emphasis on China might 'mis-calculate"
over issue of Taiwan. If he actually pays attention to the issue
of two Chinas, he will know it's Taiwan that has been provoking
the mainland for past 10-13 years.
\_ There is only one China.
\_ Agree, and it is called Taiwan. -FreeTai Troll
\_ you mean Chinese Republic :p
\- the e'ist takes jabs at lots of people. like the "greetings
earthlings" cover, the man-mountain kohl cover, poking at the
french, the notorious "chink in their armor" comment etc.
\_ I second the thanks for the link and the frustration with
his analysis of the Iraq war. Most galling is his comment that
given the information at the time, invasion was the right decision.
Regardless of whether or not Saddam was trying to develop WMD,
it was clear that he was not a threat to anyone in the region,
much less the Europe or the US. Unfortunately, at the time, it was
made to seem that the opposition to the war came mainly from
intelligent, though admitedly lunitic fringe types like Chomsky and
Said, but many respectable people who concede that force is
occasionaly necessary were also against it. Here's Ken Waltz's take
on it at the time:
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Waltz/waltz-con6.html
(I'm not sure who this is aimed at, as psb probably knew that, and
the ecst doesn't read the motd...) Bill Emmott did win points in
my book when he wrote that letter to Dan Savage, though.
\_ What about all those blank missiles Chine fired towards
Taiwan? What do you call that? Fuck you ChiCom. -Free Taiwan
\_ It's very simple: Taiwan will never willingly join the PRC
until the PRC gets its shit together and creates
until the government gets its shit together and creates
a predictable, fair and democratic form of government.
\_ It's not so simple. TW's government is so fucked up and
current government is not even legit in many people's eye
due to election fraud back in 2004.
\_ Which govt? Taiwan, PRC, or US?
\_ All three. When all of them function with integrity
and honesty like Denmark, we'll all live in harmony.
\_ ^government^PRC
\_ I was under the impression Taiwan was basically an oligarchy
these days anyway.
\_ And what in the world gives you that impression? They
have more parties that could legitimate win the election
each year than we have here in the US with our two party
system.
\_ you have no idea. The comment on oligarchy is actually
a more accurate description of TW's politics today.
\_ Feel free to qualify your statements at any time. |
| 5/25 |
|
| www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=6744590 Leaders Valedictory A long goodbye Mar 30th 2006 From The Economist print edition Bill Emmott, who stands down as editor on March 31st, offers his parting thoughts REX WITH April Fool's Day as the publication date on my final issue as editor, it is tempting to pretend that my resignation was just a joke, such is the privilege of presiding over The Economist. But after 13 years in the most interesting and satisfying job in journalism it really is time for a change, both for me and for this paper. Departing editors are allowed, however, to give themselves one final consolation: a signed, valedictory editorial as an occasion for some reflection, some explanation, much self-indulgence and usually a little ancestor-worship. The first thought of a departing editor is to abolish this ancient tradition. One of the exceptional characteristics of this newspaper is the degree to which it still follows the principles and methods begun 163 years ago by its founder, James Wilson, and perfected by his son-in-law, Walter Bagehot. The Economist was launched to campaign for free trade and all forms of liberty, what proponents and detractors alike today call globalisation, blended with what George Bush likes to call "the freedom agenda". It did so with a formula that was three parts factual description and one part strongly held opinion or argumentative analysis. We do not do so merely out of loyalty to our founders: if those principles had turned out to be wrong, they would have been ditched long ago. I, for one, had Bagehot grumbling in his grave when, in 1994, we declared the British monarchy to be "an idea whose time has passed", in flat contradiction to his great 1867 book, "The English Constitution". But in general what is striking about the past 13 years is how strongly this period has fitted Wilson's original view, how it made his principles feel more relevant than ever, and how in some respects our world is one whose issues he would have recognised. The unstupid economy To a degree, it is hard even now, in 2006, to recognise the world of 1993: a time when the Soviet Union was fresh in the memory, when China's development remained in the shadow of Tiananmen, when America was thought militarily powerful but economically passe, when few had mobile phones, e-mail was in its infancy and the internet was strictly for nerds. Yet the potential was there for the spread of economic development to what were newly known as "emerging markets", emerging from communism, autarky, war or hyperinflation, and also for the spread of democracy to those same benighted lands. It was there too for a wave of technological innovation analogous to that brought by the railway boom, the electric telegraph and the steamship in the early decades of Wilson's Economist. The phrase "irrational exuberance" may not have been familiar to him, but the word "bubble" assuredly was. Just as early editors devoted thousands of words to a 19th-century version of Arthur C Clarke's famous observation that the effects of technological innovations are typically overrated in the short run but underestimated in the long run, so did we. The economic and political impact of the liberalisation of domestic and international markets for goods, services, technology and capital--globalisation, in short--is only just beginning. In 1993 overall growth in real world GDP was 12% and annual inflation was running at almost 35%. Things looked glum in the rich world and decidedly difficult in the poor world. Yet over the whole 13 years of wider competition and spreading liberalisation, the annual average rate of real GDP growth was 30%, and total growth over the period was about 45%; the figures rise to 39% and 65% respectively if you weight national GDPs to account for purchasing power differences between countries (known as PPP). Inflation, measured for the globe as a whole, slowed dramatically to reach 37% in 2005. World population increased by more than 18% during the period, but world GDP per head--a proxy for living standards--rose by nearly 40% on a PPP basis, at an annual average rate of 25%. Progress on poverty Economic statistics bemuse and baffle in equal measure. What matters is the human effect, and in that regard nothing matters more than the reduction of poverty. According to the World Bank, the proportion of the world's population living on $1 a day or less was 22% in 1993, or 12 billion people. Detractors wave even this aside by saying it is "just Asia". Well, it is true that Africa is the continent that has tragically had regress, not progress, because of war, the ravages of disease, and decisions by too many governing elites to stick to kleptocracy. But given that "just Asia" takes in half the world's population, we should still be encouraged by what has happened. Martin Ravallion, a poverty expert at the World Bank, estimates that if present trends persist the number living on less than $1 a day will have dropped to a little over 620m by 2015, or about 9% of world population. Plenty of people would like to stop them, even some who think they care about poverty. In much of the rich world, globalisation is seen as a threat, to jobs, incomes and the environment. On jobs at least, the facts suggest the opposite: unemployment in the OECD countries in 1993 was 78% of the workforce; What has occurred, though, is an increase in inequality within the rich countries. The huge expansion of the global labour force represented by the liberalisation of China and India has held down the incomes of the unskilled in all countries; the spread of information technology has had the same effect. The politics of that inequality is finding expression in the rise of economic nationalism in Europe and America. Protectionism is always a danger and always will be: those who lose out from competition make louder noises about it than the more dispersed, albeit larger groups who gain. Deplorable though all such protectionist lobbying is, however, it does not currently pose a serious threat to globalisation. The economic forces in favour of liberalisation remain strong. The most serious threats lie in the murkier world of international politics. From Belgrade to Baghdad There, too, the facts reassure. By the reckoning of Freedom House, a think-tank, 20% of the world's population in 1993 lived in countries that were fully free, in terms of political rights and civil liberties, and a further 40% in countries that were partly free. By last year the fully free had risen to 46% of global population. Full democracy has thus been spreading quite rapidly, even if it has sadly not yet reached China. Other things spread too, during the past 13 years, and they were not nearly as reassuring. As my editorship began, war raged in the former Yugoslavia: whether it was civil, or regional, or ethnic, or religious hardly mattered to the hundred thousand or more who died. The question that hung over editorial after editorial was whether, or when, the outside world should intervene with military force. We argued that western intervention would not end the conflict, certainly not unless ground troops were sent in, and that it might make things worse. When NATO's second bombing campaign began, in 1999, our cover headline was "Stumbling into war". That intervention cost some civilian lives but saved many more, as did the earlier one in 1995. The aftermath has shown how difficult it is for outside powers to rebuild the institutions of other countries and to repair the psychological wounds that war leaves behind. The West left Afghanistan alone in the misery of its sovereignty, which provided a home for Osama bin Laden and his training camps. Meanwhile it dealt with the legacy of the first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein by trying to use sanctions and no-fly zones to contain him, and UN inspectors to police his weapons ambitions. That process led to alarming discoveries, to bombing raids that killed Iraqi civilians, to the deaths of perhaps half a million Iraqi children, to the maintenance of America's air bases in Saudi Arabia, to a deterioration of the West's reputation in the Muslim world--and to Saddam and his sons remaining comfortably i... |
| globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people3/Waltz/waltz-con6.html Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley Theory and International Politics: Conversation with Kenneth N Waltz, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Columbia University; February 10, 2003, by Harry Kreisler Photo by Jane Scherr Page 6 of 7 Deterrence and Rogues The perception of the Bush administration and the men of ideas around the Bush administration, however faulty, is that there is a new configuration in the world. And in that configuration, the threat -- even to the most powerful country in the world, but also the world in general -- is the links among so-called rogue regimes. Rogue states are getting the capacity to act with weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, biological, and chemical -- and there are links to transnational terrorist organizations. That is the primary rationale for the new preemptive strategy. What is your analysis of that apparent configuration of power, as a Realist? In the first case, in the first instance, one wants to point out that the word "preemption" here is entirely misleading. "Preemption" by its dictionary usage, by its common usage among people who think about military strategy, is what occurs when you have good and very strong reasons for believing that the adversary is just about to strike. This would make sense if you knew that, and knew it pretty much for sure, to strike first. Now, we have no reason to think that Saddam Hussein is about to strike anybody -- not anybody in the region, let alone Europe or the United States. The rationale of prevention is that over time, the adversary will become so strong that you'd better fight him earlier while he's relatively weak and you can win easily, instead of waiting until he becomes strong, and then you would have a more difficult war. We're spending almost $400 billion on our military alone. Much weaker than it was in 1991, when we fought the Gulf War. So the question becomes the one that you posed: Might a country, such as Iraq, develop nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction and then share them with terrorists? The first point to make about that is they can't use them, themselves. No matter how often the Bush administration people say "containment and deterrence do not work," it works as well as it ever did for the purposes that we always thought it was designed to accomplish. That is, it deters other countries from using their weapons in ways that would endanger the manifestly vital interests of the United States or those it supports. So the question reduces to: Might they give these things away? Well, I don't think we have to worry about Saddam Hussein doing that, because if any terrorist ever got weaponry that they could not well get from sources other than Iraq, we would say, "Saddam Hussein did it," and we'd slam him. It's a funny thing, that over and over again, people say -- and we hear it every day -- that these rogues are undeterrable. George Bush has said, "I do not want to rely on the sanity of Saddam Hussein." People who are insane do not maintain themselves in power against a host of enemies, internally as well as externally. I mean, they have been able -- this is true of Kadaffy in the old days, who we used to think of as being very roguish (we don't think of him being so roguish anymore). I mean, these rogues, these guys we call rogues, are survivors. How can you at once be foolhardy to the point of insanity and be a survivor in a very difficult world? It's much more difficult than winning a second term for President of the United States. These guys are pressed from all sides, as I say, internally and externally as well, and they survive. They've got power and they want to hold it and they want to continue to hold it. They want to pass it on to their progeny, as a matter of fact. They have proved themselves able to calculate where that line is. Crossing that line means you're going to be put out of business. If you invite intense retaliation upon yourself, you're dead, and your country is destroyed as a going political entity. What is your answer to people who would say that you are too focused on the state as a unit in addressing these current problems? Obviously, Iraq and North Korea are states, but when you begin to talk about al Qaeda and what they might accomplish, these are not states. They are units or entities that could obtain weapons, whether from North Korea or Saddam Hussein, that conceivably could steal them from the former Soviet Union, and could act in a way that would affect us and our national security, if not our relative position in the world. threats, in a way that's consistent with a Realist's view of the world? It's almost impossible to believe that Saddam Hussein -- and these states do act as units; Remember the Israelis destroyed their nuclear facilities at Osirak in June of 1981. There has been a persistent sustained effort on the part of Saddam Hussein to acquire this military capability. Now, if he ever were to achieve it, he certainly would not want to share it with anybody. It's possible to control a small amount of nuclear materials and a small number of nuclear warheads, a small number of delivery systems, in a way that is very difficult if you have hundreds, or especially if you have thousands, as we and Russia do. book cover If you're going to steal something, it's a much better bet stealing it from Russia than it is trying to steal it from a new (and because new, necessarily very small) nuclear power. The United States has lost track of some of its nuclear material, which a lot of people overlook or forget about. But, boy, if you have ten or twenty or fifty, that's pretty easy to keep track of. It's also very easy to believe, and Saddam Hussein would have to believe this, that if somehow a terrorist got hold of the nuclear materials or nuclear warheads, we would say, "We have evidence that this came from Saddam Hussein." Let's say that al Qaeda or factions of al Qaeda would come to power in Pakistan, which is a possibility -- a very divided country and so on. Would that situation change the equation in the sense that the rationality, which we can assume that Saddam Hussein has as a survivor in power, would that be the same of a group? Or might they do things because of their ideology, a deviant form of Islam, which, at one level, seems to say that to die is good? One of the striking things about nuclear deterrence is that it has worked, no matter what country we're talking about, no matter what kind of government the country has, no matter what kind of ruler the country has had. The most striking case, of course, is Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. It lasted from 1966 to 1976 in China, where China was in seemingly unheard-of chaos. And yet China, a country with a fair number of nuclear weapons at the time, managed to take care of those weapons very well indeed! The government separated foreign policy to a certain extent, and nuclear policy completely, from the Cultural Revolution. The one thing about those governments -- millenarian or whatever they may be like -- is that they almost surely will want to stay in power. The difficulty is if irregular groups, terrorists, get control of weapons of mass destruction. Something like biologicals are much more of a worry (and chemicals to a certain extent, but biologicals, especially) than nuclear weapons, I think. We've always known that deterrence does not cover this kind of situation. The cliche now is, of course, and has been for a long time, that you have to have "an address." you can't threaten retaliation against terrorists, because you can't find them. So if it is the responsibility of the most powerful country in the world, as part of its own interest, to do some of the management of the whole system, what is a sensible policy for addressing this threat, which might come from a transnational terrorist group that does not have power? Everything possible to prevent nuclear materials, including nuclear warheads, from getting into their hands. We've subsidized Russia to enable it to dismantle its nuclear weaponry and to guard the nuclear weaponry that it does have. We should continue to deter and contain other countries that do ... |