A World View

It's A Small (Protest) World

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:12:00 +0000

There's an amusing story in The Guardian about the absurdist new tack that some political protesters are taking in Russia, and the police's equally-absurd reaction to them.

Activists in the Siberian city of Barnaul tried to get around opposition from local officials to pro-democracy/pro-reform political protests by recreating a political protest in miniature by setting up a collection of toy figurines – Lego men and the like – holding tiny political slogans on a streetside snowbank. Some passersby were amused by the toy rally, the Barnaul police were not. The city's deputy police chief went so far as to say at a press conference, as reported by local media in Barnaul: “in our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event.” Police also reportedly jotted down the slogans carried by the Lego men and told the rally's human organizers that they would need to “rent” the pile of snow that served as a stage from the city. A human spokeswoman for the toy rally said that they deliberately decided to stage an absurd protest to illustrate the ridiculousness of the official position against political rallies in Russia, it was nice then of the police in Barnaul to oblige them.

The Guardian reports that in December, the first political protest against the widespread belief that the December 4 parliamentary elections had been rigged in favor of Vladimir Putin's United Russia party drew nearly 2,000 people in Barnaul, a rather large number for a city of only 600,000 located in Siberia in the middle of winter. Activists are planning another round of political rallies across Russia this Saturday to protest the upcoming presidential elections, which Putin is expected to win. Officials in Moscow have granted a permit for humans to march this time, with organizers expecting 50,000 people to attend.

China's Ace In The Hole

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:16:00 +0000

What exactly is China doing with Kim Jong-nam? That's the question asked in an interesting report from the UK's Telegraph newspaper. It seems that the eldest son of former Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is being carefully watched by Chinese authorities. Kim Jong-nam has lived in exile in China, splitting his time between Beijing and the former Portuguese colony of Macau, since publicly embarrassing the Kim regime after being caught trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport, reportedly to go to Disneyland Tokyo.

But since his father's death and his youngest brother's elevation to supreme leader status, China has taken a very protective stance towards Kim Jong-nam, according to Japanese jouranlist Yoji Gomi, who has written a book about the exiled Kim, a man he calls a friend. Kim Jong-nam has been reported as saying that his youngest brother Kim Jong-un is nothing more than a figurehead who is unready for the leadership position he has been thrust into. Kim Jong-nam was also critical of the lavish lifestyle of the Kims and of their “military first” policy – where members of the military get dibs on North Korea's scarce resources, rather than the Communist Party's supposed policy of “people first”. As for the Chinese monitoring, Gomi suggests that Kim Jong-nam could be a “political card” for China to play if the Kim regime falls apart.

This is an interesting theory for a few reasons. According to Korean tradition, power should have gone to the eldest son, Kim Jong-nam; so skipping him in favor of the youngest son is in many ways a jarring move. Then there's the fact many North Koreans didn't even know of the existence of Kim Jong-un until last year, when he was suddenly introduced as the designated successor. By contrast, Kim Jong-il spent almost two decades by the side of his father, the founder of the North Korean state, Kim Sung-il, a move that established a clear line of succession. It is unknown how much support then Kim Jong-un actually has among the military or the ruling cadres of the Korean Worker's Party (a.k.a. the Communists), so the idea that he could be ousted as the result of an internal power struggle isn't that far-fetched.

If North Korea were to fall apart, once the period of immediate chaos subsided, it could lead to a reunification of the two Koreas. This is something China has always been wary about, and a major reason why they have but up with the craziness of the Kim regime for all of these years – China doesn't want to have Korea unified under the South, which would put an economically-strong, Western-looking country flush up against their border. So, with this in mind, protecting Kim Jong-nam makes a certain amount of sense as a “political card” to use Gomi’s term. If North Korea were to fall apart, China could offer Kim Jong-nam up as a “rightful” successor based on his first son credentials and his statements in support of the North Korean people against the excesses of the Kim regime and over-reliance on the North Korean military. He could be put forward as someone who could “restore” the idea of the People's Republic of North Korea championed by the still-revered Kim Sung-il, and could thus keep South Korea from extending their influence up to the Chinese border.

Gadhafi's Revenge

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:14:00 +0000

Reports out of Libya on Tuesday are that loyalists to ousted (and deceased) leader Moammar Gadhafi have retaken control of the city of Bani Walid, defeating the local militia after a clash between the two forces. Libya's acting defense minister told Western reporters that the National Transitional Council (NTC) was still “assessing” the situation in Bani Walid, and suggested that the fighting might simply be a skirmish between rival militias. But USA Today quoted Mubarak al-Fatamni, the head of Bani Walid's local council as saying that the city had indeed fallen to pro-Gadhafi fighters and that he had fled to the city of Misrata. Other reports said that the Gadhafi-era green flag was seen flying over buildings across Bani Walid.

Bani Walid was one of the last cities in Libya to fall to the Libyan rebellion that ousted Gadhafi, the city was also reportedly the hideout for Gadhafi's son, and supposed heir apparent, Saif al-Islam until his capture. At the moment, it is unclear what is the goal of the pro-Gadhafi forces now holding Bani Walid; it is hard to imagine that there are enough people loyal to the old regime to drive the NTC from power at this point, not to mention the fact that Gadhafi is still dead and the son picked to be his successor is being held prisoner by the NTC ahead of a war crimes trial likely to take place in Libya. But it is estimated that there are thousands of well-armed and well-trained members of the former regime still in Libya. The raid on Bani Walid also shows the weakness of the NTC, which despite the word “national” is far from being a unifying government in Libya. During the uprising against Gadhafi, militias sprung up in many Libyan towns, these militias are still jockeying for power in the new Libya, occasionally even openly fighting with each other. In addition, a protest in Benghazi, the launching point of the Libyan revolt, spun out of control last week, with protesters sacking an office belonging to the NTC. The protest was over the NTC's lack of transparency and a belief that the NTC is putting foreign interests ahead of those of average Libyans. Bani Walid's al-Fatamni said that he had been warning Tripoli about the possibility of a loyalist attack for two months and had requested reinforcements, but none came before the attack.

Russia To US: Let's Go To The Moon

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:13:00 +0000

According to Russian media last week, Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, is proposing that the United States and European Union join forces to build human colonies on the Moon. Popovkin's vision would include a series of outposts in lunar orbit, along with human exploration of the Moon's surface and using deposits of ice at the lunar poles as a source of water. Russia also has two unmanned missions of their own on the drawing board, set to fly before 2020.

Popovkin's comments are surprising for two reasons; first is that NASA seemed to be unaware of his desire to team up on a lunar mission. “We believe Popovkin may be referring to the work of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) and its Global Exploration Roadmap,” NASA spokesman J.D. Harrington told SPACE.com in response to an inquiry about Popovkin's suggestion. NASA went on to explain that the ISECG was more of a framework for ideas rather than setting down plans for man's conquest of the Moon. The other reason why Popovkin's comments are so surprising is that just a few weeks ago Popovkin was all but accusing the United States of sabotaging Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars, which ended on January 15^th with an inglorious crash into the Pacific Ocean. According to Popovkin, the probe – which was suppose to land on the Martian moon Phobos, grab a sample of soil and return it to Earth – was vulnerable to “foreign influences”, building on speculation in some Russian media that Phobos-Grunt was blasted by a radio signal from an American radar installation either in Alaska or the Pacific (take your pick) that rendered it inoperative. You would wonder then why Popovkin would want to team up with the country that he thinks ruined Roscosmos' most high-profile exploration mission since the end of the Soviet Union.

In other space news, another Russian scientist is out with a bold claim of his own – that he has detected possible signs of life on Venus. The second planet from the sun has long been ruled out of the search for life in the solar system because of surface temperatures that are hot enough to melt lead. But now Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute at Russia's Academy of Sciences contends that he has seen evidence of what he thinks could be life by reexamining a set of 30-year old photographs from a Soviet space probe that survived the hellish conditions on the surface of Venus long enough to snap a few photographs. Ksanfomaliti identified structures within the photographs that resembled a disc, a black flap and even a scorpion.

“Let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living," Ksanfomaliti wrote in a scientific journal. Lacking any other proof, or evidence of life from other probes that have studied Venus, NASA analysts suggest the items are just data artifacts in the images beamed back from Venus combined with an active imagination.

Your Next War

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:10:00 +0000

In my latest piece over at The Mantle, I take a look at the ever more likely possibility of a conflict between the US and Iran (and maybe some others). Check out Stumbling Towards War: Iran Edition at The Mantle.

Things Fall Apart: Afghan Editon

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:45:00 +0000

For the latest indicator of just how screwed up things in Afghanistan truly are, there's this report based on a study of migration patterns in and out of the country by the International Organization for Migration. Last year more than 30,000 Afghanis sought asylum outside of Afghanistan, a jump of 25% from the year before, though the actual number of Afghans leaving the country though is likely much higher since human smuggling from Afghanistan and Pakistan has become a billion-dollar business. The numbers point to the reversal of a trend – following the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghanis flocked back to their homeland with the hope of starting a new life. But, according to the IOM, the situation reversed in 2007, when the security situation began to deteriorate. Fewer Afghans are now returning home, while the number trying to leave has increased each of the past four years.

The reason most cite is the rapidly deteriorating security situation within Afghanistan, a situation most only expect to get far worse once the United States and the rest of the coalition wraps up its peacekeeping mission in 2014. Europe remains the top destination for Afghan migrants, though for Afghans without the resources to get all the way to Europe, Iran is a low-cost option – a person can be smuggled across the border for just a few hundred dollars. Most who take this route hope to one day earn the funds to get on to Europe. And Afghan familes that can't afford to bring everyone out are choosing to send their sons abroad, a situation that will likely only make conditions in Afghanistan worse as the young men who could be rebuilding the country go abroad.

The migrant situation should be another indication of how badly the US-led coalition has managed reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and the woeful ineptitude of Hamid Karzai's government. Aside from its crushing levels of corruption, Karzai's government has failed in its most basic mission – providing security to the Afghan people. There have been reports from around the country that in some cases the Afghan armed forces and police behave so poorly towards their own people that some villages actually prefer to be back under Taliban control. And then there is the issue of Taliban infiltration into the Afghan Army.

There was another tragic example of this infiltration last Friday, when an Afghan Army soldier turned his weapon on the French troops instructing with his unit, killing four of the French soldiers and wounding 15 others. The attack by their supposed allies has the French so enraged that they are threatening to end their participation in Afghanistan and bring their troops home. “The French army is not in Afghanistan to be shot at by Afghan soldiers,” said France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy. This move would be a critical blow to the coalition, since the French are one of the few participating countries that is actually sending properly armed and trained troops into Afghanistan in the first place.

If Afghanistan is going to have any hope for the future, the trend of migration has to at least be stopped, if not reversed. For that to happen, Afghans have to believe that their country actually has a future, and that means that the US and coalition partners have to get serious about nation-building and in forcing the Karzai government to see itself as a servant to the people and not a wealth-extraction machine for the Karzai family.

Putin's Judo Tumble

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:49:00 +0000

When you think about it, it is amazing how the most mundane events can lead to a regime's downfall. For example, the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not to mention the start of World War I, came about when the car carrying Archduke Ferdinand made a wrong turn. It's just as possible that one day the end of the regime of Vladimir Putin in Russia will be traced to his mundane decision to attend a mixed martial arts event in Moscow last autumn.

That is part of the takeaway from this piece by the website Russiaprofile on Putin's reelection strategy ahead of March's presidential elections. The article talks about the “Olympiysky Effect,” which refers to the MMA match in question. Putin, whose love of martial arts is well-known, decided to talk to the winning Russian fighter in the ring following the end of the main event at Moscow's Olympiysky Arena. Russia's state-run television dutifully covered the Boss speaking from the center of the ring, what no one expected were the cascade of boos that came down from the 20,000 in attendance. In one fell swoop the mystique of Putin as the beloved alpha-male/man of the people had been shattered. The Kremlin later tried to spin the boos, which went out live to a national audience, as being directed at the defeated American fighter Jeff Monson, who they said chose Putin's speech as the time to make his off-camera exit from the ring. Web-savvy Russians responded by flooding Monson's Facebook page with messages of support and saying that no, the boos were in fact directed at Putin.

It is hard to imagine that without this public puncturing of the Putin popularity balloon the massive street protests following the apparently fixed December parliamentary elections would have occurred, or even if they had, that they would have drawn the tens of thousands of protesters from across the demographic spectrum that they did, rather than just the few hundred leftist intellectuals such protests previously drew. According to Russian polling firm VtiSOM, Putin is now the choice of just 48% of Russians in March's presidential elections. If these numbers were to hold, that would mean Putin would likely have to face Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Communist Party, and current number two candidate in a runoff election; quite a step down for a man whose popularity regularly measured in the 70%'s not too long ago.

It is likely that, by hook or by crook, Putin will once again be Russia’s President, it is just as unlikely now, that Putin will spend the next twelve years in office filling out his constitutionally-approved two additional terms in office as was once the plan, and it all started with some booing one night in Moscow.

Ethiopian Land Grab

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:49:00 +0000

Human Rights Watch is out with a damning report today accusing the Ethiopian government of forcing its own citizens off of their land so that the plots can then be leased to foreign farming interests. According to Human Rights Watch, as reported by Reuters, nearly 70,000 Ethiopians have so far been driven from their land, though as many as 1.5 million could eventually be displaced. The land is being leased to foreign corporations, primarily firms from China and states in the Persian Gulf, who then export the foodstuffs grown in Ethiopia. So far the Ethiopian government has leased an area approximately the size of the nation of Belgium to foreign companies.

Not surprisingly, Ethiopian officials dispute the HRW report, saying that the relocations are in fact part of a national “villagisation” program aimed at moving people from sparsely-populated regions of marginal farmlands to establish villages in more fertile parts of the nation. The Ethiopian government also defends the policy of leasing land to foreign farmers, saying that it is meant to be a kind of technology transfer arrangement, where Ethiopia can learn modern, more-efficient farming techniques. Of course the mass relocation begs the question of why foreign firms would be willing to lease what Ethiopia is describing as “marginal” farmland in the first place.

Such lease agreements aren't unique to Ethiopia though, other African nations have been leasing large swaths of their own lands to foreign farming concerns, chiefly from China, which has been investing heavily in Africa in recent years. While African nations were originally attracted to China's “no-strings-attached” approach to foreign investment – as opposed to investment from Western nations, which increasingly is tied to political reform and good-governance efforts – a slow change has been taking place. Some African nations are growing unhappy with the Chinese approach, where they not only underwrite a major infrastructure project, but also import much of the labor from China as well – African governments say that this prevents the type of technology transfer that Ethiopia is touting from occurring. One sign of this changing attitude came last year when challenger Michael Sata won Zambia's presidential election by running on an anti-China platform.

Trouble In Somaliland

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:53:00 +0000

Somaliland, the independent, though internationally-unrecognized, nation that broke away from Somalia in the early 1990s, has long tried to draw a distinction between itself and its much better-known neighbor to the south. While Somalia seems to be in a perpetual state of conflict and anarchy, Somaliland has remained relatively quiet and prosperous since breaking away from Somalia, Somaliland even completed a rarity for Africa – a relatively peaceful transition of power between rival political groups at the ballot box.

But government actions last week threaten to undermine this carefully crafted image that Somaliland is trying to present to the world. On Sunday, the government of Somaliland announced that they were shutting down the television network Horn Cable TV for allegedly airing “anti-government propaganda”. To make matters worse, the government then arrested 13 journalists who were part of a protest in Hargeisa (Somaliland's capital) against the closure of Horn Cable TV, according to the National Union of Somali Journalists, in what they called “a blatant misuse of powers”. The National Union of Somali Journalists contends that Horn Cable TV was shut down for reporting on a meeting by tribal elders who were pushing for increased autonomy from the Somaliland government. For their part, the Somaliland government says that the journalists' protest was illegal and that one of the journalists struck a student with the butt of a handgun he was carrying, which prompted his arrest.

Though still internationally considered part of Somalia, several neighboring African nations, like Ethiopia, maintain quasi-official diplomatic relations with the Somaliland government. Somaliland also issues its own currency and is trying to grow its tourism sector to boost the local economy.

More Than Just Bad Apples

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:57:00 +0000

By now you've probably seen, or at least heard about, the video showing a team of US Marine snipers urinating on the bodies of several Taliban militants whom they had just killed. Predictably, the Afghan government is outraged at the incident, so too is the leadership of the Pentagon, which has already identified two of the Marines from the video, and is promising to punish the entire team. Thursday morning on CNN, their resident military analyst, retired Gen. Spider Marks, tried to chalk the incident up to the actions of a few bad apples; it seems like this will be the official line on the matter.

Unfortunately it's not true, the video cannot simply be dismissed as an act of misplaced bravado by a few rogue soldiers. Rather it is a symptom of the kind of psychosis that comes along with the long-term occupation of a land and its people. The United States is ten years into its Afghan mission. We went to Afghanistan to avenge the barbaric acts of 9/11; we were indoctrinated to think that this land hosted individuals with no regard for human life, who would happily kill innocent men, women and children to further their own twisted view of religion. Al-Qaeda became conflated with the Taliban, who in turn, became conflated with the Afghan people. We can run all of the feel-good stories we want about American soldiers helping to open medical clinics or schools for girls in Afghanistan, but at home we continue to promote the idea that if we don't continue to fight “them” over there, terrorist acts will return to our shores, just look at some of the rhetoric from the presidential campaign that supports this very idea. For our soldiers on the ground, they are told of the need to constantly be on guard, that any Afghani they meet could be one of “them”.

The surprise then shouldn't be that a group of US Marines decided to dehumanize a group of enemies they had killed, the surprise should be that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often since it is the natural progression of any long-term occupation – the trend, perhaps the psychological need, to dehumanize those you are occupying, since how could you control every facet of someone else's life, down to their very right to have life at all, if you consider them a human being equal to yourself? The history of the 20^th century offers ample evidence to support this idea. Members of the Israeli political left and peace movements decry their nation's occupation of the Palestinian territories for this very reason, adding that Israeli soldiers' dehumanizing of the Palestinians also has a corrosive effect on Israeli society as well; one can also look at the occupations of various European nations during World War II, or Japan's brutal treatment of those in the regions of China they occupied; and, of course, there is also the entirety of Europe's Age of Colonization to consider as well.

Viewing the occupied as something less than human is a natural outgrowth of occupation as the Marine video reminds us. It should also serve as a powerful example of why it is time for the United States to end its Afghanistan mission once and for all.

Russia's Space Paranoia

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:17:00 +0000

The Russian space program faced a massive and embarrassing setback at the end of 2011 when their centerpiece Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars got stuck in low Earth orbit shortly after launch, destined for a fiery re-entry into the atmosphere sometime later this month. Now the head of Russia's space agency, Roscosmos' Vladimir Popovkin, says he knows what went wrong - “foreign forces” interfered with Phobos-Grunt, sabotaging its mission. “I wouldn't like to accuse anyone, but today there exists powerful means to influence spacecraft, and their use can't be excluded,” Popovkin said. His comments seem to echo an allegation made by a retired Russian general back in November, shortly after Phobos-Grunt ran into problems; he cast the blame on a high-power radar array operated by the US military in Alaska.

Popovkin told Russia's Izvestia newspaper that “some Russian [space]craft had suffered 'unexplained' malfunctions while flying over another side of the globe beyond the reach of his nation's tracking facilities.” While meant to blame foreign powers, Popovkin's comment gets to the heart of what really seems to have doomed Phobos-Grunt (along with explaining several other recent Russian space program failures), rampant cost-cutting in the Russian space program. During the heyday of Russian exploration during the 1960s, the Soviet Union maintained a network of ground tracking stations and specially-outfitted communication ships so that Russian space missions were in near-constant contact with Russian ground controllers. Today that network is gone. When something went wrong with Phobos-Grunt, Russian controllers could only attempt to talk to the probe in blocks of time just a few minutes long when it was orbiting directly over Russia; Russian controllers later borrowed the use of a few radio-telescopes around the world to better their chances of reaching Phobos-Grunt.

Today though the once mighty Russian space program is being hit by budget cuts and a loss of experience as older engineers retire, without younger ones to replace them. The result, predictably, has been a series of mission failures during the past year. Still, according to noted space analyst James Oberg, “the urge to shift blame seems strong.”

Tide Turning In Somalia?

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:14:00 +0000

An update now on the ongoing conflict in Somalia. We have been following Kenya's mission against the militant al-Shabaab organization in southern Somalia – Kenya launched a large-scale military operation designed to capture al-Shabaab's base of operations after the terrorist group attempted to stage several kidnappings of foreign tourists in northern Kenya. After the mission seemed to bog down, thanks in part to the arrival of the monsoon season and a strategic withdrawal by al-Shabaab, the Kenyans are reporting a number of successes.

According to a report in Bloomberg, the Kenyans claim to have killed as many as 60 al-Shabaab militants in an airstrike. Other actions in the previous week killed another 25 al-Shabaab fighters, according to the Kenyans, who put their own losses at six soldiers killed and 22 wounded since their offensive, dubbed Operation Linda Nchi, began last year. Along with the Kenyan military presence, or perhaps inspired by it, other nations in the region are increasing their cooperation in Somalia. The intelligence agencies of Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia are now coordinating their efforts in Somalia and also at preventing reprisal terror attacks in their respective countries from al-Shabaab, the working group claims to have thwarted several attacks planned around the New Year holiday season. While al-Shabaab has largely operated within Somalia, they did stage a high-profile suicide bombing in Kampala, Uganda, at a World Cup viewing party in 2010 that killed as many as 70 people; this attack was to protest Uganda's support of the African Union peacekeeping (or Amisom) mission in Mogadishu, Somalia, where Uganda currently supplies the bulk of the troops.

The three nations, along with the Amisom mission and some of Somalia's other neighbors like Djibouti, are also increasing their military cooperation. Ethiopia is also reported to have conducted military operations in the past few weeks within Somalia as well. All of this is making my prediction here that Somalia could turn into Africa's next Great War seem like more of a possibility. Some on the Kenyan side are predicting that based on their recent successes, al-Shabaab could be near collapse. While this may or may not be true, it is worth remembering that the last time a strong Islamic movement was defeated in Somalia – the Islamic Courts Union (or ICU) – a period of chaos followed as outside forces withdrew feeling like they had “won”, while the remnants of the ICU fought amongst themselves with the more militant al-Shabaab eventually emerging as the victor. The lesson here should be that if the Kenyans are right and al-Shabaab is defeated, that the victors need to stay engaged with Somalia providing security and allowing for the development of a legitimate government, rather than calling it a day, going home and letting something even worse than al-Shabaab emerge from the chaos.

Youssou Throws His Hat Into The Ring

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:51:00 +0000

Famed Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour made good on a promise that we reported on two months ago to become more involved in politics in his homeland by announcing that he would run for president of Senegal in elections scheduled for next month. In November, N'Dour promised to end all “artistic commitments” after January 2 and “enter the political arena”, though the comment made it unclear what N'Dour would actually do in politics.

Now we know that he means to square off against Senegal's sitting president Abdoulaye Wade, who is seeking a third term in office. The match-up is particularly interesting since Wade and N'Dour were once quite close, but fell out after Pres. Wade tried to pressure N'Dour to order a newspaper he owned to not run an embarrassing story about Wade's son. N'Dour refused. Anger in Senegal has been building against Wade for some time now, both over his attempt to change the laws to allow himself a third term in office and because of Senegal's ongoing economic stagnation and chronic shortages of electricity. Power outages of a day or longer are common in the capital, Dakar; blackouts are so frequent that the national power company, Senelec, has earned the nickname “Darkness, Inc.”

But observers aren't sure that N'Dour's personal popularity will translate to a winning margin over Wade. Despite a large pool of ill will towards Pres. Wade, he will face over a dozen challengers in February's vote. It is unclear yet whether the opposition to Wade will coalesce around N'Dour, or whether it will remain fragmented allowing Wade to slip back in for a third term as president.

Ron Paul, Our (Bad) Ideas Guy

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:23:00 +0000

Michael A. Cohen is out with a good piece in Foreign Policy debunking the foreign relations plank of the latest top-tier Republican presidential candidate, Dr. Ron Paul. While he's cast himself staunchly in the conservative/libertarian camp, Ron Paul is drawing interest - and even some measure of support - from folks on the left; high-profile pundits like Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher have both voiced their approval for his foreign policy stances, so too have several of my more liberal/progressive friends. Typically they cite Paul's belief that the United States needs to lessen its military footprint around the globe, along with his opposition to a possible war with Iran as factors that set him apart from the Republican crowd and reasons for their support.

But in reality, these positions are less examples of “good ideas” than they are simply of Paul having a more realistic view of America's current geopolitical situation than do any of his fellow Republican presidential candidates, all of whom have wrapped themselves in the cloak of “American exceptionalism” and all the rhetoric that entails. The reality is that the United States spends too much money it doesn't have on maintaining a military presence in places that don't really affect life in the USA all that much, like say, Afghanistan, where the US spends billions of dollars a month to prop up the kleptocracy of Hamid Karzai. In this regard, the US is following in the historic footsteps of other empires like the Roman and British, which spent much money and effort in their declining years meddling in the affairs of minor kingdoms at the fringes of Empire. As for Iran, it is clear that no military intervention is going to achieve our desired result – the end of Tehran's nuclear research program – nor does our military have the ability to now fight a prolonged war after a solid decade of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paul's position then is more an accurate assessment of the global situation than it is an example of groundbreaking “good ideas”.

And once you take a step past these Left-approved positions, Paul quickly goes off the deep end. Paul pushes an isolationist policy, one that would see the United States withdraw from international treaties and bodies (Paul insists that he's not an isolationist since he would allow free trade with foreign nations, though like his defense of his 1980's era newsletters, it is a pretty weak insistence). Under President Paul, the United States would withdraw from treaties like NAFTA, alliances like NATO, and organizations like the World Health Organization and the United Nations. So at a time when the world is becoming “smaller”, and countries becoming more integrated, Paul's foreign policy would amount to “hey you kids, get off my lawn”. For good or bad, the United States can't simply withdraw from the world, not if we expect to maintain our level of international prestige, or keep our economy running – the global economy works because countries are bound together by a host of treaties and compacts, one can't then simply drop these obligations and expect to keep your seat at the table. From the time of our founding, presidents have understood that the United States needs to be engaged with the world. As a nation, our first military actions abroad were the “Barbary Wars” at the dawn of the 19^th century, where US sailors and marines fought with the pirates of the Barbary Coast (current-day Libya) over their harassment of American merchant vessels. 200 years ago, presidents realized you couldn't simply pull up the drawbridge and disengage from the world, a fact that seems to have escaped Paul today.

From isolationism, Paul's foreign policy musings quickly go into tinfoil hat land. Part of Paul's opposition to NAFTA is a belief that it is the forerunner to the North American Union – a merger of the US, Mexico and Canada under a single government with a single currency allegedly to be called the “Amero”. This conspiracy theory has been floating around the Internets since the mid-90s, though Paul has taken it seriously enough to introduce legislation to prevent it from occurring (one does have to wonder why, since clearly the United States would dominate such a union). But it's not just the NAU that wants to subjugate the USA, the United Nations also has it in for us. According to Paul, the UN is merely a front for a one world government that will deprive Americans of their liberties, including their right to own guns. Again, here Paul strays into the realm of far-right conspiracy fans, since anyone who has ever had any experience with the United Nations can tell you that the place is far too disorganized to ever come up with a one-world anything.

A fundamental misunderstanding of two centuries of American foreign policy and a penchant for taking far-right Internet ramblings way too seriously, things to consider next time Ron Paul is put forward, like Jon Stewart has done, as our “ideas guy”.

The Grinch Who Stole The UN

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:29:00 +0000

I heard about this story while out with some friends last Friday. It is nice to think of the United Nations as a serious place where diplomats and experts sincerely try to come up with mature solutions to the world's most dire problems.

And then there's Mark Kornblau, the spokesman for the United States' Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice. In response to an ongoing feud between his boss and Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, Kornblau tweeted this picture of Churkin photoshopped into an image of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Glad to see that the US is sending mature boys and girls to represent our interests at the United Nations...

Rice and Churkin have recently had an increasingly testy round of exchanges over Syria and Libya. Basically, the United States is angry with Russia over that country's opposition to increased pressure on the Assad regime in Syria over their brutal crackdown of pro-democracy demonstrators. Russia, which has long-standing political and economic ties to Syria, is reluctant to punish the country any further. But Churkin has framed Russia's position as one of opposition to another US-led attempt at regime change in the Middle East/North Africa region, citing the NATO-led, US-backed campaign that led to the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya. Rice responded to Churkin's latest position statement against further sanctions in Syria by saying of the Russian position “it is duplicitous, it's redundant, it's superfluous and it's a stunt.” Churkin took a dig at Rice by saying those were the kind of big words one learns at Stanford, Rice's alma mater.

Of course a better tack for Churkin would have been to bring up Bahrain. While Rice is making an impassioned case for intervention (politically at least) in Syria by stating: “Welcome to December. Is everybody sufficiently distracted from Syria now and the killing that is happening before our very eyes?,” just as the United States had made a similar case for action in Libya once that regime started killing its own citizens, the US position towards Bahrain was quite different. When the small Persian Gulf state launched its own brutal crackdown against its own pro-democracy movement, which included the shooting of unarmed protesters and the arrest of doctors who tried to treat the wounded, the US was silent beyond a few bland calls for “restraint”. The difference is that Bahrain is the home to the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet, the Bahrani royal family is closely allied with the Saudis and that the protesters were largely Shiite Muslims (like their large neighbor to the east, Iran). Of course, if the United States is going to be the passionate supporter of human rights around the globe, then we should also call out our allies for their transgressions – a good point for Churkin to make.

Getting back to the Grinch thing. Not only was it stupid, it was childish. Given the beating the United States' image took at the UN during the term of Dubya Bush-era Ambassador John Bolton, who had all of the grace and diplomacy of a pit bull, there is a real need for the representatives of the United States now to appear mature and professional, Mark Kornblau has shown he is neither of these things. Firing Kornblau would be a good step in the process of rebuilding the United States' stature as a glopbal leader at the UN.

Santa's Soyuz Sleigh

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:25:00 +0000

The Russian space program inadvertently gave western Europe a Christmastime treat during the evening of the 24^th. People all across Belgium and Germany reported seeing a strange, bright object streaking across the nighttime sky. The object was alternately thought to be either a meteorite or Santa's sleigh.

In reality, the streaking object was the third stage of a Russian Soyuz rocket, which a few days earlier had delivered a new crew of astronauts to the International Space Station. Still, the timing of the reentry was fantastic.

The Russian space program managed to chalk up another amazing coincidence last Friday, though this time not as the result of a successful mission. On Friday, an unmanned Soyuz-2 rocket carrying a military satellite failed moments after launch from Kazakhstan. Debris rained down over an area of central Siberia, including a small tank from the rocket, which crashed through the roof of a house in the village of Vagaitsevo. The house was located on Cosmonaut Street – seriously, what are the odds of that happening?

Russian Protests, Round Two

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:03:00 +0000

Call it an unwanted early Christmas present for Vladimir Putin. Last Saturday, a crowd of perhaps as many as 100,000 people gathered in the streets of Moscow to protest against the Putin regime and parliamentary elections widely viewed as stolen; smaller rallies occurred in other cities across Russia. It was the second time since the December 4 elections that Russians took to the streets in mass protests, and a sign that anger over the elections directed towards the Kremlin was not subsiding.

The rallies on the 24^th were the second state-sanctioned protests since the elections earlier in the month. Officials in the Kremlin tried to downplay the impact of the rallies, and the amount of anger in the public, by apparently under-estimating the size of the crowd gathered on Moscow's Sakharov Avenue. The size of the crowd was officially put at 25,000, though one reporter from the BBC said that it appeared there were more people gathered than there had been at the previous rally, attendance at that rally was said to be 50,000; the stretch of Sakharov Avenue where the rally was staged is said to hold more than 100,000 people. Video from the event showed a packed street, as well as some clever signs. My personal favorite was one oversized placard, written in English, that said “Where's my money Hillary?”, an allusion to a charge made by Putin that the protesters were being paid by “Western” governments, and by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in particular, in an effort to undermine the Russian state.

It seems though that Putin & Co. will have to come up with some better rhetoric if they hope to diffuse the protest movement in Russia. That the opposition was able to organize a second, even larger, round of protests mostly through the Internet, is a clear sign of the depth of disapproval directed towards the Kremlin and Putin. The protesters are promising to stage a third series of rallies sometime in mid-January after Russia recovers from the New Years – Russian Orthodox Christmas holiday season, which typically brings Russia to a halt from the end of December through the first two weeks of January. According to a poll of those in attendance at the December 24^th rally, nine-out-of-ten say they will attend another protest rally in the future.

But even though the protest movement seems to have legs, for the moment at least, it seems to lack a leader – at least it lacks someone who could pose a serious challenge to Putin in the presidential elections which will take place in March. While each of Russia's three official opposition parties – The Communists, the Liberal Democrats and A Just Russia – are all expected to field candidates, it is unlikely that the opposition turning out in the streets across Russia will coalesce around any one of them. Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov has announced that he too will be a candidate in the elections, but he is still being regarded with suspicion as a candidate planted by the Kremlin to draw off opposition votes.

And the Soviet Union’s last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, weighed in following Saturday’s rally, urging Putin to follow his lead and retire from political life.

Shepherds and Settlements

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:58:00 +0000

Humble shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem play an important role in the Christmas story. But ask one of the remaining Christian shepherds tending their flocks in modern-day Israel the line from the famous Christmas carol about what they see and the reply is likely to be not a star, but a settlement wall.

The BBC reports this holiday season, that the shepherds tending their flocks near Bethlehem are saying their age-old way of life could soon be coming to an end, thanks to the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Israel has been expanding their massive housing developments - illegally built on Palestinian land, the BBC notes - in recent years. But security walls surrounding the settlements have cut shepherds off from many of their prime grazing lands, while the settlements themselves draw massive amounts of water from already marginal reserves in the arid region, leaving little behind for the shepherd's flocks of sheep. The result is that many of the current generation of shepherds are likely to be the last – their children don't want to go into an already difficult line of work, work now made nearly impossible thanks to the Israeli settlements.

Consider this – Israeli policies towards the West Bank and Gaza are staunchly supported by Conservative Christians in America, yet those very policies are now working to end a traditional way of life for a group of Christians that dates directly back to the time of Jesus. As Homer Simpson once said: “think about the irony...”

As Iraq Crumbles

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:57:00 +0000

Iraq is falling apart at breakneck speed. With the dust still settling from the US troop convoy out of the country, Iraq is showing every sign of coming apart at the seams. This morning, Baghdad was rocked by a series of coordinated blasts during the morning rush hour that killed at least 50 people and wounded more than 100 others. But those explosions are masking an even larger problem gripping the Iraqi government.

Earlier in the week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki issued an arrest warrant for Iraq's Vice President, Tariq al-Hashemi, claiming that al-Hashemi was running his own murderous hit squad. It's worth noting here that this is Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister trying to arrest Iraq's Sunni Vice President. In response, al-Hashemi fled to the northern city of Erbil, de facto capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, where he was granted protection by Iraq's Kurdish President Jalal Talabani.

So as of Thursday morning, Iraq's whole political system was in a three-sided stand-off broken down along ethnic/sectarian lines. Part of the reason that this kind of situation could even happen in the first place is that Iraq's national government has obviously taken a lesson from the US Congress and developed an amazing ability to avoid making tough decisions. The final status of Kurdistan within the Iraqi federal state has gone unresolved for years. The main sticking point is over oil revenues from the oil rich north, which the Kurds think should stay in their autonomous region and the Sunnis/Shiites think should be distributed to the country at-large. Some oil companies have signed contracts to develop resources in the north with the Kurdish government in Erbil, which the federal government in Baghdad hasn't decided yet whether to honor or not. And then there's the city of Kirkuk, which sits in the middle of Iraq's northern oil patch, that the Kurds say was historically Kurdish and should thus belong to them, but Iraq's Arabs say was repopulated by Saddam Hussein with Shiites and Sunnis and so should not.

Of course the situation involving Iraq's Vice President has sparked claims from the Republican critics in the United States that the possible pending collapse of Iraq is all President Obama's fault for withdrawing US troops too quickly and too soon. This line of argument ignores the fact that Pres. Obama's decision was motivated by the government of Iraq's refusal to sign an extension of the Status of Forces Agreement (or SOFA) that exempted US troops from prosecution under Iraqi law for any perceived misdeeds (you can only imagine how Obama's Republican critics would have howled if he had left US troops in Iraq without this protection). A larger question for the critics though is if after eight years Iraq's government was so fragile it would start to crack just days after the US withdrew from the country, when then would it be ready to govern? In another five years? Ten? Would the United States need a massive and permanent presence in Iraq to play referee to the feuding ethnic and sectarian groups, and is this what they're advocating?

The United States went to war in Iraq for dubious motives to remove the government of Saddam Hussein. Our plan for the “day after” Saddam’s fall was to install Ahmed Chalabi, a shifty Iraqi ex-pat, as the new leader, a plan the Iraqis balked at. It is clear that in the eight years following the rejection of Chalabi, the US never was able to come up with a Plan B other than to try to graft a federal system of government onto three groups with long and contentious histories, a plan that now shows signs, not surprisingly, of coming dramatically apart.

The Billion Year President

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000

The Gambia's Yahya Jammeh is a man who obviously has never heard of term limits. After winning re-election as president in a vote widely condemned by regional authorities as unfair, Jammeh said that he was ready to rule for “one billion years”, if God wills it, of course.

Jammeh has long been accused of political oppression since taking over as leader of this tiny West African state following a coup in 1994. On a personal note, I happen to know someone who had to flee The Gambia after his organization ran afoul of the Jammeh government, so the claims of oppression are real. The media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders notes that journalists who question the government are often arrested, while in their piece, the BBC discusses the case of Deyda Hydara, editor of a private newspaper in The Gambia who was murdered in 2004, a murder blamed on Jammeh's security forces and still officially unsolved.

ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States, refused to send observers to monitor the presidential election because they said the opposition had been effectively silenced, making the vote inherently unfair. For his part, Jammeh says that his critics can “go to hell”, and that he does not fear an Arab Spring-style uprising in his country.

It is hard to imagine what the world would be like at the end of Jammeh's billion-year rule, but thanks to our friends at NASA, we at least have an idea of what things might be like at the 250 million-year mark. According to computer projections, continental drift will carry West Africa to the northwest, placing The Gambia on a latitude roughly equal to present-day Alaska and pressing it up against northern Canada. Jammeh might want to start planning for the changes in location and environmental conditions now.

Powerless in Afghanistan

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:29:00 +0000

An engineering operation that the British called the most daring of its kind since the Second World War looks like it might fall, not to Taliban insurgents, but to penny-pinchers in the US Congress. In September 2008, British Royal Marines hauled a 220-ton generator across 100 miles of hostile territory in southern Afghanistan to the partially-completed Kajaki Dam hydroelectric plant after private contractors refused to move the equipment through Taliban-held territory. The new generator was meant to complete the hydroelectric plant and to ease chronic power shortages in this region of Afghanistan that includes the strategically-important city of Kandahar. But since the autumn of 2008, the new generator has sat uninstalled at the dam, and now it looks like it might stay that way permanently.

USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, is questioning whether it makes sense to complete the expensive project in the face of budget cuts from Congress. USAID's budget was slashed from $4 billion in 2010, to $2 billion this year, with further cuts for 2012 likely. Installation of the turbine at Kajaki would chew up a big part of USAID's Afghan budget. Officials are instead looking at other lower-cost options, like improving transmission lines in the region, as a way to ease the power shortages in the south of Afghanistan. That has the US military leaders in Afghanistan dismayed since Kajaki was to be the signature project for the coalition in the region, making its completion strategically-important in their minds.

The Kajaki hydro plant is just another example of what a muddled mess the Afghanistan mission has become. To dip into the big bag of writer's cliches, at this point the US needs to go big or go home (I vote for the latter myself), the problem is that the current strategy seems to be to do neither. We have convinced ourselves that Afghanistan is an area vital to our national security, so the US insists on maintaining our engagement there. But it is not enough to simply base a lot of troops in the country. In a very real sense Afghanistan doesn't exist as much more than a name on a map; a state and civil society needs to be built almost from scratch. But the US also insists that it does not want to be involved in nation-building, even though a nation clearly needs to be built. To make matters worse, we have a Congress that is looking to cut funding for everything that doesn't drop a bomb and the wholly-corrupt regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a partner, meaning that much of the money that is sent to Afghanistan never actually gets to its intended project.

Not installing the generator amazingly hauled through enemy territory at great cost may be seen as a fiscally-responsible move by some at USAID, though in reality it means that the money spent up to this point on the Kajaki generator project was simply wasted. It is another sign of an increasingly pointless mission, and another argument for why it is time to just leave before we waste more money (and likely more lives) on similar projects that will ultimately go unfinished.

More TIME Person Of The Year Lameness

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:00:00 +0000

So Time Magazine is out today with their annual Person of the Year award, and once again Time has missed the mark. While not as ridiculously bad as their 2006 selection of “You”, the computer user, this one is fairly bad in its own right.

Time has selected “The Protester” as the Person of the Year. Not a specific protester, or even a group like Occupy Wall Street, just protesters in general, so if you've formally bitched about anything this past year, congratulations, you are Time's Person of the Year. But beyond the generic banality of giving the award to a vague group of people defined by partaking in a poorly-defined action, Time makes their selection seem even more ridiculous with their press release about the POTY award.

“A year after a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself ablaze, dissent has spread across the Middle East, to Europe and the U.S., reshaping global politics and redefining people power,” the magazine explains. The problem is that Tunisian fruit vendor had a name: Mohamed Bouazizi. He passed away in early January after setting himself on fire after Tunisian authorities trashed his meager fruit stand because he couldn't afford a vendor's license. Before setting himself alight, Bouazizi complained that even after getting a college education, there were no jobs for young men like himself in Tunisia, and now the government wouldn't even let him sell fruit at the local bazaar. Bouazizi's act sparked protests that would eventually topple the government of Tunisia, an act that would go on to inspire Egyptians, Libyans, Yemenis, Syrians and others to rise up against their oppressive governments. If anyone met the criteria of being the individual who “most influenced the culture and the news during the past year, for good or for ill,” it was Bouazizi.

Yet somehow it wasn't enough for Time magazine to honor him as the POTY. Perhaps Time feared that giving the award to a man little-known to the American population, but with a Muslim-sounding name would spark a possible boycott from a group of ignorant yahoos in Florida, or perhaps no one at the great journalistic institution of Time Magazine bothered to learn the name of the “Tunisian fruit vendor”. Whatever the reason, by passing up honoring Mohamed Bouazizi in favor of the generic “Protester”, Time once again showed the irrelevance of the Person of the Year award, and of their magazine itself.

Durban FTW?

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:13:00 +0000

The latest round of negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (or UNFCCC) wrapped up over the weekend. Actually the talks, meant to strike an agreement on a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocols that limit global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, were suppose to end on Friday, but went on for an additional day and a half to allow delegates to hammer out a final agreement.

This is being spun in a lot of the media coverage of the talks as a win for the environment, since for the first time all of the 195 nations in attendance agreed in principle to be bound by legally-binding caps on future greenhouse gas emissions. But you need to read past the headlines on what was actually agreed upon for the full story: first a three-year band-aid was slapped on Kyoto, extending the provisions of the soon-to-expire treaty out to 2015; then the UNFCCC parties agreed to “discuss” a legally-binding pact that would impose emission caps on major GHG emitters that would kick in by 2020. String that all together and you get an agreement with more wiggle room than a six-year old's front tooth.

The parties in the UNFCCC were to have spent the past two years negotiating a replacement for the Kyoto Protocols to go into effect in 2013, once Kyoto expires. But the negotiating sessions – Copenhagen, Mexico and now Durban – have all been exercises in delaying action until the next round of discussions. There's no reason to think this pattern is now going to change during the next three years of “discussions”, especially since the core disagreements remain: the big polluters of the developing world, China and India, argue that it is not fair that they be held to the same emissions standards as the developed world, while the developed world's top emitter, the United States, ably assisted by our less polluting, but more vocal sidekick, Canada (which just pulled out of Kyoto entirely), argue that any future agreement is meaningless unless it binds all top emitters – be they developed or developing – to the same standard. It's hard to see either side moving from their position during the next three years, not to mention that even if President Obama, in a second-term effort at legacy-building, were to sign onto a binding agreement, it is unlikely Congress would ratify it since some Congressmen view Global Warming as something akin to voodoo and/or a Commie plot to enslave America. Durban also established a $100 billion fund to help developing nations to offset the costs of climate change (another reason why it is viewed as a “win”), though one country who feels that they may be entitled to payment from the fund is mega-wealthy Saudi Arabia, who argue they should be compensated for possiblefuture reductions in crude oil sales as the world moves on to greener sources of energy.

Frankly, I have a hard time then viewing Durban as anything more than another kick of the proverbial can down the road. As a friend said, when it comes to the topic of climate change, there are no adults in the room to make the hard choices necessary to actually accomplish something. Countries will talk about the need to mitigate climate change, but will stop short of any action that could impact the quality of life at home (and thus reduce their leaders chances of staying in power). And until the day comes that nations/leaders can act in the global interest rather than their own self-serving ones, we'll see more Durbans and more empty promises of change “sometime” down the road.

Putin's Prokhorov Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:11:00 +0000

The unfolding political drama in Russia took another unexpected turn on Monday as billionaire businessman Mikhail Prokhorov threw his hat in the ring as a challenger to Vladimir Putin in next March's presidential elections. His announcement came after an unusual series of Kremlin-sanctioned political protest rallies took place this weekend, with the largest in Moscow drawing a crowd officially estimated at 25,000. Prokhorov is apparently hoping that he can ride a wave of political dissent rippling across Russia over elections last weekend that are widely believed to have been fixed in the Kremlin's favor. “I made a decision, probably the most serious decision in my life: I am going to the presidential election,” Prokhorov said at a news conference on Monday to announce his independent bid for the presidency.

In fact, the timing of his announcement was so good that some are wondering if Prokhorov isn't just a stalking horse candidate for Kremlin critics- a safe outlet for disaffected voters that won't challenge the established leadership. Adding fuel to this theory are the statements over the weekend by one top Kremlin insider who said that Russia needed a new liberal party to serve the mostly urban protesters attending rallies in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities across Russia.

But I think that there are two factors going against this argument. The first is that there really is no need for a stalking horse-type candidate to ensure an electoral victory for Putin. While some Russians may be angry, and many more just fed up with the ongoing Age of Putin, none of the three opposition parties in the Duma (the Russian parliament) have anyone to offer up as a candidate with the popularity (albeit damaged popularity) or stature of Putin, meaning that for as much of a pounding as his image has taken in the past week, Vladimir Putin is still odds-on favorite to win the election in March.

Second, even if the Kremlin was going to try to offer up a straw man candidate, Prokhorov is a fairly poor choice since he was already burned politically by the Kremlin just earlier this year. In May, Prokhorov took leadership of the party Pravoye Dyelo, a name which is alternately translated as Just Cause or Right Cause. Prokhorov's new party was to be more populist-minded with a pro-business/anti-corruption platform that managed to steer clear of any cutting criticism of either Putin or current President Dmitry Medvedev – a delicate maneuver that left Right Cause open to charges that it was simply another Kremlin-approved opposition party in the mold of A Just Russia (in fact, much of Right Cause's platform seemed to echo the economic reform ideas being pushed by Medvedev earlier this year. In May, Prokhorov boasted that Right Cause would become the second largest party in the Duma (behind the ruling United Russia of course) following December's elections.

But Prokhorov seems to have taken his role as leader of Right Cause a little too seriously for some in the Kremlin. In September, a secret Congress (so secret Prokhorov didn't know about it) was held among some of Right Cause's leaders and Prokhorov was voted out of his leadership role, a move Prokhorov blamed on Vladislav Surkov, a presidential deputy chief of staff, who serves a role for Putin much the same that Karl Rove did for President George W. Bush, and a man who Prokhorov blasted following the secret vote as: “a puppeteer in the country who has long privatized the political system.” Prokhorov kept a low profile following his ouster from Right Cause, but stated on Monday that he had been planning and putting together the machinery needed to gather the two million ballot signatures required to get his name on the March presidential ballot.

There appears then to be some genuine animosity between Prokhorov and the Putin machine, so it would seem unlikely that he would then secretly be working with them on an ultimately unnecessary political maneuver. What's more plausible is that Prokhorov, an aggressive businessman who at just age 46 has amassed a fortune in the billions, sees an opening and is planning to take it in terms of Putin's now-waning popularity, and if it is a chance to get back at Putin, whose associate Surkov publicly humiliated him in the Right Cause affair, all the better.

With his declaration, comparisons are now rightly being drawn between Prokhorov and the last oligarch who challenged Putin publicly and politically, the former head of the Yukos oil conglomerate, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is currently languishing in a prison cell in Russia's Far East on some dubious tax evasion charges. But there is an interesting difference between the two men: in his book on the Khodorkovsky affair, Putin's Oil, author Martin Sixsmith describes how Khodorkovsky publicly sparred with Putin in the months leading up to his arrest in 2003. In the weeks before his arrest, Khodorkovsky was urged by friends to follow the lead of other oligarchs who had gotten on the wrong side of Putin and go into self-imposed exile outside of Russia. But Khodorkovsky instead feverishly tried to negotiate a merger between Yukos and Exxon, his belief was that forming a business alliance with a major Western corporation would provide him with protection against Putin (in Russian the term is krysha, literally: roof) who would not want to damage Russia's image as a place to do business by arresting the head of a multinational corporation on politically-motivated charges. Khodorkovsky ultimately wasn't able to complete the merger and wound up being arrested as he had feared.

For his part, Prokhorov has the Western business connections Khodorkovsky lacked; among Prokhorov's other holdings are the NBA's New Jersey Nets. Prokhorov then seems ready to test the Khodorkovsky theorem, how Putin, and the Russian voters, respond will be interesting to see.

Bald Man's Comb Redux

noreply@blogger.com (Ed Hancox) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:47:00 +0000

The brief 1981 war between Great Britain and Argentina over possession of the Falkland Islands, a pair of rocky, windswept pieces of land in the stormy South Atlantic that are home to more sheep than humans, was once famously compared to two bald men fighting over a comb. It seems like at least one of the bald men is up to his old tricks again.

Earlier this month, Argentine patrol vessels boarded and detained 12 Spanish fishing vessels off the Falklands as part of what Argentina contends is a “legal” blockade of their islands (Las Malvinas, to the Argentines), which are currently being illegally occupied by the British, stating that the Falklands, along with the even more remote South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands are a “integral part of Argentine territory.”. The Spanish replied by saying that they had legally-issued fishing permits from the government of the Falklands and contested the legality of Argentina's boarding.

Argentina's President Cristina Kirchner though is unbowed, slamming the British for “occupying” Las Malvinas, and recently calling Great Britain a “crude colonial power in decline.” Her comments and the boarding of the Spanish vessels have brought a stinging rebuke from British foreign policy analyst, and frequent American TV pundit Nile Gardiner. Nile typically provides a hawkish, right-wing point-of-view (no surprise since he is also the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center at the Heritage Foundation), so perhaps it’s no surprise that his suggested reply to Pres. Kirchner is for Great Britain to go in guns a-blazing. Gardiner says that the boarding of the Spanish vessels, licensed by the government of the Falklands to fish in their waters, should be regarded as “an act of war” and that the British should dispatch an infantry brigade, Typhoon warplanes and an attack submarine to the Falklands immediately, lest Argentina “strangle the Islands economically.”

Argentina raises the issue of sovereignty over the Falklands/Malvinas periodically; critics have charged that Pres. Kirchner uses the nationalistic fervor over the Islands to drown out critics of her domestic policies, particularly her economic ones. Complicated the matter at the moment though is the fact that Prince William is due to be stationed in the Falklands next year as part of his tour of duty with the Royal Air Force – it is hard to imagine that the Brits would want to send the likely savior of the royal family into harms way, of course not sending him could send a message to Kirchner that maybe the British aren't all that serious about the Falklands after all... Still, it is hard to imagine that Kirchner would want to do anything to put her country in a position of actually getting into another shooting war with Great Britain, considering how badly Argentina lost the first one and that the Argentine military really hasn't gotten much better since.

The whole sovereignty issue is a murky one since neither Great Britain nor Argentina have a particularly strong claim to the Falklands/Malvinas. Typically, the preferred way a case like this would be solved is with a referendum among the disputed territory's residents, allowing them the right of self-determination. But Argentina has steadfastly opposed this option since almost all of the Falklands 3,000 residents are of British ancestry and would surely vote for union with Queen and country, thus losing the Falklands as a nationalistic talking point for Argentine politicians for good.