International Affairs: April 2007 Archives

Here's a neat article in Wired about CIA efforts in 1979 - 1980 to sneak six Americans out of Iran after the seizure of our embassy. A fascinating look behind the scenes of a successful covert operation.

(For some reason I feel like I read this story years ago, but I can't remember where.)

(HT: Nick.)

Russia's plan to build a tunnel from Siberia to Alaska is not only a great idea, it might be essential if Russia wants to retain sovereignty over its sprawling eastern territory. Analysts have long predicted that demographic forces will eventually hand Siberia to China, and if Russia continues to allow the territory's population to decline the point of no return will be reached even more quickly.

The first area for consideration is one of demographics. Let us begin by addressing Russia’s demographic crisis. Few will doubt that Russia is experiencing a demographic crisis today as its population declines steadily with each passing year. What is most troubling is the fact that there seems to be no end in sight for the decline. The problem is especially acute in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, which is populated by only 7.5 million out of the 146 million in the Russian Federation as a whole. According to Garnett, the rate of Russians leaving Siberia in 1991 was 12 per 10,000, while in 1992 that rate jumped to 56 per 10,000. Overall, 225,000 left the area in 1990-1992 as the economic situation and standards of living plummeted in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet state.57 This demographic crisis has the potential to cause serious political instability in the region. Somewhat pessimistically, Trenin writes that "Russians must realize that if they cannot ensure development of the Far East and Siberia, Russia will lose those territories one way or another and somebody else will then develop them".58 When one looks across the border, it is easy to see where Trenin’s concern stems from: the Heilongjiang province on the other side is home to nearly 120 million Chinese. Furthermore, while Primorskiy Krai is home to 2.3 million Russian citizens, its neighboring region in China has a population of 70 million.

So the tunnel won't just be great for America, it will also facilitate the economic development that will be Russia's only chance at maintaining its hold on its eastern frontiers. Details about the tunnel:

Russia plans to build the world's longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65 billion project to supply the U.S. with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia.

The project, which Russia is coordinating with the U.S. and Canada, would take 10 to 15 years to complete, Viktor Razbegin, deputy head of industrial research at the Russian Economy Ministry, told reporters in Moscow today. State organizations and private companies in partnership would build and control the route, known as TKM-World Link, he said.

A 6,000-kilometer (3,700-mile) transport corridor from Siberia into the U.S. will feed into the tunnel, which at 64 miles will be more than twice as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel between the U.K. and France, according to the plan. The tunnel would run in three sections to link the two islands in the Bering Strait between Russia and the U.S. ...

The planned undersea tunnel would contain a high-speed railway, highway and pipelines, as well as power and fiber- optic cables, according to TKM-World Link. Investors in the so- called public-private partnership include OAO Russian Railways, national utility OAO Unified Energy System and pipeline operator OAO Transneft, according to a press release which was handed out at the media briefing and bore the companies' logos.

I hope it works out, because the project will give us cheaper access to non-Muslim oil sources as well as manufactured goods from the Far East. I expect that transporting goods on a trans-Siberia-Alaska railroad will be cheaper than moving them via ship across the Pacific.

I withdraw my earlier call for Paul Wolfowitz to resign from the presidency of the World Bank. Apparently his order to give his girlfriend a raise was the result of a decision by an ethics committee that formed when Wolfowitz tried to recuse himself from any supervisory responsibilities over the woman.

The paper trail shows that Mr. Wolfowitz had asked to recuse himself from matters related to his girlfriend, a longtime World Bank employee, before he signed his own employment contract. ...

That would have settled the matter at any rational institution, given that his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, worked four reporting layers below the president in the bank hierarchy. But the bank board--composed of representatives from donor nations--decided to set up an ethics committee to investigate. And it was the ethics committee that concluded that Ms. Riza's job entailed a "de facto conflict of interest" that could only be resolved by her leaving the bank.

Ms. Riza was on a promotion list at the time, and so the bank's ethicists also proposed that she be compensated for this blow to her career. In a July 22, 2005, ethics committee discussion memo, Mr. Danino noted that "there would be two avenues here for promotion--an 'in situ' promotion to Grade GH for the staff member" and promotion through competitive selection to another position." Or, as an alternative, "The Bank can also decide, as part of settlement of claims, to offer an ad hoc salary increase."

Five days later, on July 27, ethics committee chairman Ad Melkert formally advised Mr. Wolfowitz in a memo that "the potential disruption of the staff member's career prospect will be recognized by an in situ promotion on the basis of her qualifying record . . ." In the same memo, Mr. Melkert recommends "that the President, with the General Counsel, communicates this advice" to the vice president for human resources "so as to implement" it immediately.

And in an August 8 letter, Mr. Melkert advised that the president get this done pronto: "The EC [ethics committee] cannot interact directly with staff member situations, hence Xavier [Coll, the human resources vice president] should act upon your instruction." Only then did Mr. Wolfowitz instruct Mr. Coll on the details of Ms. Riza's new job and pay raise.

It looks like Wolfowitz did everything humanly possible to avoid a conflict of interest and that I was hasty in my call for his resignation. My apologies!

(HT: Commenter AllenG.)

Update:

I was wrong, Wolfowitz shouldn't resign.

I've long been a fan of Paul Wolfowitz and I think he's done a generally good job managing the World Bank, but having admitted to using bank resources to reward his girlfriend it's clearly time for him to resign. It's a really unfortunate situation and a loss for the world, but this sort of lapse in judgment is significant, even by public figures I quite like.

Paul Wolfowitz was under pressure to resign as president of the World Bank on Thursday after admitting he was personally involved in securing a large pay rise and promotion for a Bank official with whom he was romantically involved.

The Bank president issued a public apology, saying: “I made a mistake for which I am sorry”.

The apology came after the Financial Times revealed that Mr Wolfowitz ordered the World Bank’s head of human resources to offer Shaha Riza the pay rise and promotion as part of a secondment package.

I wasn't familiar with the world secondment before having read this article, so, bonus.

I hesitate to criticize the Brits -- they've been good allies for decades now and America owes them a lot of thanks -- but their government has been treating the Iran hostage crisis and its aftermath in a bizarrely unserious manner. First they hamstrung their troops with "de-escalatory" rules of engagement, then they essentially abandoned the hostages to Iranian torture rather than recognizing the escalation that had already occurred, and now the UK government is allowing the former hostages to cash-in on their ordeal due to the "exceptional circumstances". I suppose this deal is some sort of penance on the part of the government for letting the troops get screwed earlier, but it's still a continuation of fundamentally unserious behavior.

The 15 sailors and Marines have been told they can sell their stories to the media by the Ministry of Defence, which bracketed the "exceptional circumstances" surrounding their 13-day ordeal with winners of the Victoria Cross.

The most senior member of the crew Royal Navy Lieutenant Felix Carman defended the right of comrades to sell their stories, but admitted he found the subject of being paid "a bit unsavoury" and has said he will hand over any money he makes to charity.

He told GMTV: "In the case of Faye Turney, she has a young daughter and the money could set her up for life."

I'm not sure what I'd do, given the chance to get rich off such a horrible situation, but I think the government would have been wise to keep the choice out of my hands by enforcing the existing policy. Thousands of lives have been lost, and these folks get special treatment?

News that Mrs Turney alone is likely to make at least £100,000 was condemned by former Defence Ministers, ex-soldiers - and families who have lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At Westminster, even some Labour MPs suspected a Government spin operation designed to distract attention away from embarrassing questions over the capture itself.

Well whatever. I hate being hard on the hostages, because they suffered enormous trauma, but is it too much to ask that we and our allies take the Global War on Terror seriously?

Update:

The WSJ editorial page also questions the UK's handling of the hostage fiasco.

The British military has performed magnificently in Iraq, where 136 servicemen and women have been killed. Even so, with the release of the sailors, we would like to learn the full story of why the hostages seemingly cooperated so readily with their captors. Videotaped confessions, in which the accused apologize for misdeeds they didn't commit, are staples of Iran's authoritarian regime, and the British apologies to their captors may well have been coerced. Yet it's hard to know what to make of yesterday's pictures of the sailors--in suits, not uniforms--smiling and shaking hands with a beaming Mr. Ahmadinejad. These weren't civilians but sailors presumably trained to resist propaganda displays.

While the release of the Brits is cause for celebration, we hope the world won't forget those who aren't getting out--the myriad political prisoners, often democrats, in Iran's dungeons. These are the truly courageous people the West has paid too little attention to as it focuses on diplomacy and business with Iran. Given his regime's persecution of Iran's tiny Christian community, Mr. Ahmadinejad's invocation of Easter as a reason for freeing the sailors is particularly offensive.

Hopefully the embarrassment the UK government is suffering will harden all our nerves for the future inevitable confrontations with the Iranian terrorist state.

My respect for the Iraqi government continues to wane as they seem poised to award initial oil development contracts to China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia rather than to American companies. The amount of money the Iraqis owe us just for military operations is nearly incalculable, and a few oil deals would have been a worthy show of appreciation for all we've done for their country. Instead, the contracts go to our competitors and at least one potential enemy.

While Iraqi lawmakers struggle to pass an agreement on exactly who will award the contracts and how the revenue will be shared, experts say a draft version that passed the cabinet earlier this year will likely uphold agreements previously signed by those countries under Saddam Hussein's government.

I'd like America to step in and void these contracts as the price for doing business with a tyrannical, fascist thugocracy, but as Austin Bay notes it probably is best for the Iraqis to make their own decisions at this point. Still, a little gratitude wouldn't be out of order. Maybe I'm making a big deal out of nothing... I hope Antonia Juhasz is right and American companies do have a plan to participate in the Iraqi oil market.

Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, an industry watchdog group, criticized the draft oil law for allowing long-term oil contracts to be awarded to foreign oil firms, a practice he said was unique in the Middle East.

"Giving out a few crumbs to the Chinese and Indians is one thing," said Kretzmann, who noted the draft law was seen by both the Bush administration and the International Monetary Fund before it was given to Iraq's parliament. "But the real prize are the contracts that award long-term rights. I think the [Western oil companies] are biding their time."

(As a side note, the practice of giving long-term oil contracts to foreigners is required in the Middle East because few of the oil-producing nations in the region have the knowledge or expertise to exploit their own natural resources.)

Tawfik Hamid, a former member of the Islamist terror group Jemaah Islamiya, has written a brilliant indictment of the Western left's tolerance for violent Islam. He knows whereof he speaks.

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong. ...

Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals--who unceasingly claim to support human rights--have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror. ...

The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods. ...

Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand--but so far haven't--that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates."

It's hard to excerpt because the whole essay is worth reading.

Nancy Pelosi is obviously inept at international diplomacy and has inadvertently (?) handed the Syrian terrorist regime a moderate political victory by attempting to "open a dialog" with the thug Bashar Assad over the objects of President Bush.

"We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace," Pelosi said. She said she and her delegation "expressed [their] concern about Syria's connections to Hizbullah and Hamas," and discussed the issue of terrorists slipping across the Syrian border into Iraq.

"These are important issues not only in the fight against terrorism, but priorities for us for peace in the Middle East," she said.

Why approach murderers with friendship? They don't share Pelosi's "hope", and they aren't determined to make peace. It's nice that Pelosi is "concerned" about the decades of terror perpetrated by the Syrian regimes, but the Syrians clearly see her visit as an indication that there's some possible compromise to be reached between us and them.

"These people in the United States who are opposing dialogue, I tell them one thing: Dialogue is... the only method to close the gap existing between two countries," Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem told reporters after Wednesday's Assad-Pelosi meeting.

"Everyone knows there are different points of view between Syria and the United States," he said. "We are happy that Mrs. Pelosi and her delegation had the courage and determination to bridge these differences."

"Different points of view" means that they want to blow up innocent people and establish a Muslim Caliphate across the known world, and we don't. Maybe we can meet in the middle! Pelosi is a dangerous fool.

Update:

Paul Geary has a short post about Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria; the title of the post and the accompanying picture stand alone. "Feminist in the US; subservient in Syria."