International Affairs: February 2007 Archives
Herbert Meyer, former special assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council during the Reagan Administration, has written a brilliantly concise essay titled "A Global Intelligence Briefing For CEOs" in which he describes the four major transformations going on in the world today.
- The War in Iraq
- The Emergence of China
- Shifting Demographics of Western Civilization
- Restructuring of American Business
I highly recommend reading the whole thing for an excellent overview of what's going on in the world today.
In another outrageous statement from Mexico's government, Mexico's congress has complained about alleged border crossings by American workers building our wall.
Mexico's Congress has condemned what it says is a border violation by US workers building a controversial barrier between the two countries.Legislators say workers and equipment building a section of the barrier have gone 10 metres (yards) into Mexico. ...
Mexican legislators said they had photographs and video, taken on Monday, of the workers and heavy-duty construction equipment that showed them about 10 metres inside Mexico near the border city of Agua Prieta and the town of Douglas, Arizona.
No word yet from Mexico's congress on the bazillions of Mexicans living millions of yards over our side of the border.
The most ridiculous part of the story though is that America actually apologized for the "incursion". Our leaders are pathetic, spineless wussies. That wall can't get built high enough, long enough, or fast enough to suit me.
Apparently a "preference for sons" is creating a gender imbalance in some regions of the world, though the New York Times neglects to mention how this could be happening.
More and more South Korean men are finding wives outside of South Korea, where a surplus of bachelors, a lack of marriageable Korean partners and the rising social status of women have combined to shrink the domestic market for the marriage-minded male. Bachelors in China, India and other Asian nations, where the traditional preference for sons has created a disproportionate number of men now fighting over a smaller pool of women, are facing the same problem.
Sounds like there's a story just begging to be reported! How can a "preference" for one gender actually result in a population imbalance? I've written about using abortion and infanticide for gender selection in the past, but perhaps the barbarity is more widespread that I had previously imagined. I expect that the left-wing media shies away from the story because they want to avoid any incriminating the blessed sacrament of abortion in any way.
(HT: James Taranto.)
The United States' ambassador to Iraq has apologized for the arrest of a leading Iraqi politician's son who was held by American soldiers who were suspicious of his travel between Iraq and Iran.
U.S. troops detained the son of Iraq's most powerful Shiite politician Friday as he returned to the country from Iran, keeping him in custody for nearly 12 hours before releasing him, Shiite officials said. The U.S. ambassador apologized for the arrest.Amar al-Hakim, son of Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, was taken into custody at a crossing point and was transferred to a U.S. facility in Kut, according to the elder al-Hakim's secretary, Jamal al-Sagheer. ...
U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the arrest was being investigated but stressed that Washington did not mean any disrespect to al-Hakim or his family.
"I am sorry about the arrest," he said. "We don't know the circumstances of the arrest and we are investigating … but he is being released."
The specifics may not be out yet, but the general circumstances are pretty clear:
U.S. authorities have complained about Iranian weapons sales and financial aid to major Shiite parties in Iraq, especially the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Both Washington and Iraqi leaders have vowed that no one would be exempt as a major security operation is under way in Baghdad.
President Bush should retract the ambassador's apology and issue a statement supporting the American soldiers doing a dangerous job protecting the Iraq-Iran border. Even if the arrest turns out to have been unnecessary, we don't need to apologize for vigorous border enforcement. Our troops aren't in Iraq fighting and dying so that Amar al-Hakim can shuttle back and forth to Iran uninspected.
Anyone with an interest in the gritty details of the planning behind the 9/11 attacks should read Edward Jay Epstein's summary of Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon's investigation into the connection between the hijackers and a Spanish al Qaeda cell.
In an interview, Mr. Garzon explained to me through an interpreter that the support of the Spanish cell began in the early days of the plot and continued up until the attack. He described evidence that ranged from video tapes that Spanish police had confiscated from the home of one of the Spanish conspirators, which methodically surveyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center from five different angles in the late 1990s, to a phone call intercepted by Spanish intelligence in August 2001 (at a time when the hijackers were buying tickets on the planes they planned to commandeer), in which an operative in London informed Yarkas that associates in "classes" had now "entered the aviation field," and were beheading "the bird." After drawing a diagram for me on a blackboard of how the Spanish cell connected to Atta's and Binalshibh's recruiters in Germany, he said it was "supporting the operation at every level."
As with most of what the 9/11 Commission's work, their investigation into the planning behind the hijackings is turning out to be woefully inadequate. We may never know the whole picture, but it's naive to accept on faith that the 19 hijackers were acting in isolation from America's other enemies.
I've posted about some of Dubai's eccentric and excessive construction projects, and reader JV sent along this article that describes Dubai's Sheikh and culture.
As a sweepstake in national pride—Arabs versus Chinese—this frantic quest for hyperbole is not of course, unprecedented; recall the famed competition between Britain and imperial Germany to build dreadnoughts in the early 1900s. But is it an economically sustainable strategy of development? The textbook answer is probably not. Architectural gigantism has always been a perverse symptom of economies in speculative overdrive, and each modern boom has left behind overweening skyscrapers, the Empire State Building or the former World Trade Center, as its tombstones. Cynics rightly point out that the hypertrophic real-estate markets in Dubai and urban China are the sinks for global excess profits—of oil and manufacturing exports, respectively—currently being pyramided by rich countries’ inability to reduce oil consumption and, in the case of the United States, to balance current accounts. If past business cycles are any guide, the end could be nigh and very messy. Yet, like the king of the enigmatic floating island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels, al-Maktoum believes that he has discovered the secret of eternal levitation.The lodestone of Dubai, of course, is ‘peak oil’ and each time you spend $50 to fill your tank, you are helping to irrigate al-Maktoum’s oasis. Fuel prices are currently inflated by industrial China’s soaring demand as well as growing fears of war and terrorism in the global oil patch. According to the Wall Street Journal, ‘consumers will [have paid] $1.2 trillion more in 2004 and 2005 together for oil products than they did in 2003’. [15] As in the 1970s, a huge and disruptive transfer of wealth is taking place between oil-consuming and oil-producing nations. Already visible on the horizon, moreover, is Hubbert’s Peak, the tipping point when new petroleum reserves will no longer offset global demand, and thereafter oil prices will become truly stratospheric. In some utopian economic model, perhaps, this windfall would become an investment fund for shifting the global economy to renewable energy while reducing greenhouse gas output and raising the environmental efficiency of urban systems. In the real world of capitalism, however, it has become a subsidy for the apocalyptic luxuries that Dubai is coming to epitomize.
Take it with a grain of salt!
My brother pointed me to this story about a Missouri family who rescues enslaved children from around the world. I love these examples of private charity by American Christians that get completely ignored when the international community denounces American "imperialism" or "selfishness".
Two weeks ago Cope returned from Ghana, where she had financed the rescue of seven children who were working as indentured servants on fishing boats for as little as $20 a year. The youngest of them, a 6-year-old named Mark Kwadwo, had labored in dire conditions under a brutal fisherman who beat him when he failed to get up at midnight to bail out canoes.Working with a small Ghanaian charity, Cope paid $3,600 to free the children and found them a new home in an orphanage near the Ghana capital of Accra. After months and years of privation, the children were dumbstruck by a plentiful breakfast, caregivers said.
Cope's trip to Ghana followed journeys to Vietnam and Cambodia, where she and her husband help finance shelters for needy children and their families, and where the Copes adopted two Vietnamese children.
The little hair salon is a dim memory. Cope is now a fund-raiser and executive of Touch a Life Ministries , an organization she and her husband started to help desperate children in faraway places. By their calculations, the group has spent about $150,000, mainly in Cambodia and Vietnam, on such tasks as financing shelters for children who are abused, handicapped, living on the street or orphaned by AIDS.
This is God's work, and it's just too bad the masters of these enslaved kids get paid for the kids' freedom rather than being tossed into jail.
