President Obama roundly castigated by a member of the Irish parliament

YouTube link.

This occurred earlier this summer during the president's state visit to that country.  A hat tip to reader Peter for bringing it to my attention.

"Who speaks for the human species?"

YouTube link.

Carl Sagan lived and spoke in an era when nuclear war and nuclear winter were paramount concerns.  That risk has not gone away, but were Carl Sagan alive today, I suspect his attention would be focused on environmental degradation.

Via The Dish.

Tourism in Iran

With its ancient ruins, glittering mosques and spectacular landscapes, Iran is home to some of the world's cultural treasures, but ever since the 1979 revolution, these have largely remained unseen by international tourists... Now, however, the new administration of Hassan Rouhani is taking steps to open up Iran to foreigners in an effort to improve its international image after the gloomy years under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – and to bring in much-needed foreign currency to an economy reeling from years of sanctions...

Chinese tourists are a priority. "World figures show that China sends more tourists to visit other countries than anywhere else," Najafi said. "With help from our embassy in China, we have spoken to Chinese tourism officials and we have invited a number of them to come to Iran."..

Brandon Stanton, an American citizen who travelled to Iran last year, attracted attention on returning home by posting an itinerary, along with pictures of Iran, on the Human of New York photo blog.

"Americans are especially loved," he wrote with astonishment. "This was noted in every travel account that I read, and I can confirm the fact. You will be smiled at, waved at, invited to meals, and asked to deliver personal messages to Jennifer Lopez. American music, movies, and media are thoroughly consumed by the people of Iran."

Amos Chapple, a photographer from New Zealand who has visited Iran on a number of times, said the Iran he saw was utterly different from the one represented in the west. "Every traveller I met felt the same way: they had arrived expecting hostility and danger, but ended up amongst the most cosmopolitan and generous people in the Middle East," he said.

"Having visited three times it's just heartbreaking to see what damage the sanctions are doing to ordinary people who have nothing but goodwill towards America."

Further details at The Guardian.

Where are they now? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"After the expiry of his second term he decided to withdraw from political life and started working again as a professor and teaches at the University of Science and Technology.

A situation where the highest state official and a man who wielded enormous power subsequently returns to his  humble position as a university professor job is hard to imagine.

However, the former Iranian president now takes the a bus to work every day and, judging by the photo, looks content."

Photo credit RTS, via In Serbia.  Discussed at Reddit.

You've got mail. From Vladimir Putin.

Most people have heard about the "open letter" to the American people from Vladimir Putin; probably few have read it.  Herewith some excerpts:

Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies...

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization...

Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria...

From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression.

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists...

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”..

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.  

Full-text at the New York Times.

"Catalan Way" on the National Day of Catalonia (9/11)

YouTube link

Catalan Way, also known as The Catalan Way towards Independence, was a 400-kilometre (250 mi) human chain in support of Catalan independence. It was organized by the Assemblea Nacional Catalana (ANC), and took place in Catalonia on 11 September 2013, which is the National Day of Catalonia. Catalonia's Department of the Interior estimated the number of participants at about 1.6 million.

The protest was supported by 14 nongovernmental groups. The human chain followed the ancient Via Augusta, from El Pertús (Vallespir) up to Alcanar (Montsià). According to Carme Forcadell, president of the ANC, it was "a symbol of the unity of Catalan people to achieve national sovereignty"...

Further details at the Wikipedia link.  There are an abundance of relevant videos at YouTube;  I thought the one embedded at the top was the best.  This was a promotional video:

YouTube link.

And this one focuses on the activities around the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona:

YouTube link.

I suspect my cousin Karl is in one of those human chains.

About those chemical and biological weapons

An op-ed piece at The Guardian presents some viewpoints that may make Americans uncomfortable:

Obama warned last week that Syria's use of poisoned gas "threatens to unravel the international norm against chemical weapons embraced by 189 nations"... In 1997 the US agreed to decommission the 31,000 tonnes of sarin, VX, mustard gas and other agents it possessed within 10 years. 

In 2007 it requested the maximum extension of the deadline permitted by the Chemical Weapons Convention – five years. Again it failed to keep its promise, and in 2012 it claimed they would be gone by 2021. Russia yesterday urged Syria to place its chemical weapons under international control. Perhaps it should press the US to do the same. 

In 1998 the Clinton administration pushed a law through Congress which forbade international weapons inspectors from taking samples of chemicals in the US and allowed the president to refuse unannounced inspections. In 2002 the Bush government forced the sacking of José Maurício Bustani, the director general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He had committed two unforgiveable crimes: seeking a rigorous inspection of US facilities; and pressing Saddam Hussein to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, to help prevent the war George Bush was itching to wage.

The US used millions of gallons of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It also used them during its destruction of Falluja in 2004, then lied about it. The Reagan government helped Saddam Hussein to wage war with Iran in the 1980s while aware that he was using nerve and mustard gas. (The Bush administration then cited this deployment as an excuse to attack Iraq, 15 years later).

Smallpox has been eliminated from the human population, but two nations – the US and Russia – insist on keeping the pathogen in cold storage. They claim their purpose is to develop defences against possible biological weapons attack, but most experts in the field consider this to be nonsense. While raising concerns about each other's possession of the disease, they have worked together to bludgeon the other members of the World Health Organisation, which have pressed them to destroy their stocks.

More at the link.

The NSA is capable of conducting corporate "economic" espionage

From Bloomberg:

The U.S. government spied on Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Globo TV reported, citing classified documents obtained by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The television network, which reported a week ago that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted phone calls and e-mails of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, aired slides from an NSA presentation from 2012 that explained the agency’s capability to penetrate private networks of companies such as Petrobras, as the oil company is known, and Google Inc...

The NSA allegedly shared its spying capabilities and information with peer agencies in the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, according to Globo. American journalist Glenn Greenwald collaborated with Globo News to report tonight’s story...

The presentation appears to contradict a statement made by an NSA spokesman to the Washington Post in an August 30 article, in which the agency said that the U.S. Department of Defense “does not engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

Petrobras declined to comment in an e-mailed response to questions. An official at the NSA told Globo that the agency gathers economic information in order to monitor for signs of potential instability in financial markets, and not to steal commercial secrets, according to tonight’s program. 

Oh, yes.  We believe that...  Just image how much that information would be worth to Big Oil.

Via BoingBoing.

Britain says "NO" to an attack on Syria

"The last time a British prime minister was defeated by the Commons on a war motion was 1782 when MPs refused to go on fighting – of all people – the restless Americans wishing for independence. It’s taken Tony Blair, Iraq and the dodgy dossier to bring about such a historic moment again in our land. The travesty, the falsehoods went deep over Iraq. Last night we found out just how deep into the political psyche of the nation. After Iraq, if a PM said there are trees in the rainforest you’d need to send for proof...

The PM said the evidence could never be 100 per cent and that it required a judgement call. But post Iraq, no government can rely on YouTube and shadowy intelligence as a pretext for bombing another country as David Cameron did (as Kerry and Biden have done in the US). Equally, what politician – post-Iraq – would reasonably even attempt the ploy of saying to the British public that we have evidence but we cannot show you? Trust daddy, he knows best. Once upon a time – ante Blair, ante Iraq – it might have worked. Now it looks either desperate or plain daft. Worse, even had he produced intelligence-based evidence, many would still not believe it. When the credibility of MI6 and 5 have been damaged to that extent, you begin to see the Iraq legacy for the catastrophe that it is in terms of voter confidence in the key public institutions of state...

So, irony of ironies, it may well prove that that most abject and dutiful slave to US foreign policy, Anthony Blair, is the man who finally made it possible for the British parliament to think and decide upon matters of warfare all by itself and, on occasion, to say no – not just to the prime minister, but to the White House. "

The U.S. supported chemical warfare by Saddam against Iran

The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America's military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned.

In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent...

U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein's government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture. "The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn't have to. We already knew," he told Foreign Policy.

According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. At the time, Iran was publicly alleging that illegal chemical attacks were carried out on its forces, and was building a case to present to the United Nations. But it lacked the evidence implicating Iraq, much of which was contained in top secret reports and memoranda sent to the most senior intelligence officials in the U.S. government. The CIA declined to comment for this story.

 In contrast to today's wrenching debate over whether the United States should intervene to stop alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, the United States applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein's widespread use of chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered, the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be muted...

You can read more about this at Foreign Policy.

The CIA confirms it overthrew Iran's Prime Minister, Mohammed Mosaddegh

Excerpts from an article at the National Security Archive:

Washington, D.C., August 19, 2013 – Marking the sixtieth anniversary of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the National Security Archive is today posting recently declassified CIA documents on the United States' role in the controversial operation. American and British involvement in Mosaddeq's ouster has long been public knowledge, but today's posting includes what is believed to be the CIA's first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan and execute the coup.

The explicit reference to the CIA's role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily
excised version of the account in 1981 in response to an ACLU lawsuit, but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release. Additional CIA materials posted today include working files from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. They provide new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency's actions before and after the operation...

The issue is more than academic. Political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country's historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to respect Iran's sovereignty, or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference before better relations can occur...

While the National Security Archive applauds the CIA's decision to make these materials available, today's posting shows clearly that these materials could have been safely declassified many years ago without risk of damage to the national security...

But all 21 of the CIA items posted today (in addition to 14 previously unpublished British documents — see Sidebar), reinforce the conclusion that the United States, and the CIA in particular, devoted extensive resources and high-level policy attention toward bringing about Mosaddeq's overthrow, and smoothing over the aftermath.  

The aftermath included the return to power of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ("The Shah of Iran"), and the establishment of the SAVAK (secret police), whose torture methods included "electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails."

One can't emphasize enough that Mosaddeq had been democratically-elected by the people of Iran.  The U.S. and Britain had him overthrown in order to gain access to Iran's oil resources.

Does anyone still wonder why many Iranians distrust and/or dislike the U.S.?

Additional details in the relevant Wikipedia entry.  Via Reddit, where other relevant coups are listed.

Hope for Egypt...

YouTube link.

... in the words of a 12-year-old. You will be amazed by the sophistication of this young man as he expresses his disdain for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Via reddit, where Egyptian readers vouch for the accuracy of the translation.

Morsi's ouster

Live streaming coverage on Al Jazeera (English) TV (click for fullscreen video).

 Not anymore. The offices were stormed.

A forerunner of worldwide "water wars" ?

Most people anticipate that within our children's lifetimes wars will be fought over access to water for drinking and agriculture.  A story at the Washington Post focuses on one current dispute, between Egypt and Ethiopia.

[T]race the Nile about 1,400 miles upstream and there’s a rising colossus that threatens to upset a millennia-old balance. There, in the Ethiopian highlands, one of the world’s largest dams is taking shape.

For Ethiopia, the dam promises abundant energy and an escape from a seemingly permanent spot in the lowest rungs of the world’s human development index. But for Egypt, the consequences could be dire: a nationwide water shortage in as little as two years that causes crop failures, power cuts and instability resonating far beyond even the extraordinary tumult of the recent past.

For a country facing daily domestic crises in the aftermath of its 2011 revolution, the dam is a foreign threat that Egypt can ill afford. And that may be the point. Analysts say Ethiopia is seizing on Egypt’s distraction and relative fragility to plunge ahead with plans that have long been on the drawing board but have always been thwarted by Egyptian resistance...

The country, [Morsi] told a crowd of cheering supporters, is ready to sacrifice blood to ensure that “not one drop” of the Nile is lost...

Egypt and Ethiopia each have more than 80 million people, double the population that existed just 30 years ago. By 2050, the combined population of the two countries is expected to rise by 100 million, even as climate change could reduce the supply of water...

Ethiopian officials say the dam will be used to generate electricity, not to irrigate fields, meaning that all the water will eventually make its way downstream to Egypt...

Egypt may be the gift of the Nile, as the Greek historian Herodotus once remarked, but the Nile is not Egypt’s alone. Eleven countries share the basin of the world’s longest river... Ethiopia has won the majority of those countries to its side with the promise of electricity exports for a region that desperately needs new sources of energy...

More at the link.

Criticism of Obama's Middle East war policy

Excerpts from an op-ed post at The Dish, presumably authored by Sullivan:

This was a president elected to get us out of conflict in the Middle East, not to enmesh us even further in a cycle of sectarian conflict and metastasizing warfare. This was a president who said he didn’t oppose all wars, just dumb ones. Is there a conceivably dumber war to intervene in than Syria’s current civil one? I can’t see one.

You can forgive a president once – even though his misguided, counter-productive and destabilizing war in Libya was almost as nuts as this latest foray. But by deciding to arm the Sunni radicals fighting the Shiites in Syria and Lebanon, the president has caved to the usual establishment subjects who still want to run or control the entire world. I don’t buy the small arms qualifier. You know that’s the foot in the door to dragging the United States into the middle of a civil war we do not understand and cannot control. If it has any effect, it will be to draw out the conflict still longer and kill more people. More staggeringly, he is planning to put arms into the hands of forces that are increasingly indistinguishable from hardcore Jihadists and al Qaeda – another brutal betrayal of this country’s interests, and his core campaign promise not to start dumb wars. Yep: he is intending to provide arms to elements close to al Qaeda. This isn’t just unwise; it’s close to insane...

I am asking what on earth is the American national interest in taking sides militarily? I see precisely none. Do we really want to hand over Syria’s chemical arsenal to al Qaeda? Do we really want to pour fuel on the brushfire in the sectarian bloodbath in the larger Middle East? And can you imagine the anger and bitterness against the US that this will entail regardless? We are not just in danger of arming al Qaeda, we are painting a bulls-eye on every city in this country, for some party in that religious struggle to target.

I understand why the Saudis and Jordanians, Sunni bigots and theocrats, want to leverage us into their own sectarian warfare against the Shiites and Alawites. But why should America take sides in such an ancient sectarian conflict? What interest do we possibly have in who wins a Sunni-Shiite war in Arabia?

Is Iraq also heading toward civil war?

We don't hear much about Iraq in the mainstream media these days.  Here are excerpts from a story at Truthdig, which may or may not be important:

After the deadliest month of political fighting in five years, Iraq appears to be sliding rapidly into a new civil war that “will be worse than Syria,” leaders say. The escalating violence has residents of Baghdad stocking up on rice, vegetables and other foods in case fighting or curfews prevent them from getting to shops. “It is wrong to say we are getting close to a civil war,” a senior Iraqi politician said. “The civil war has already started... 

“The crises in Iraq and Syria are now cross-infecting each other. The two-year-old uprising of the Sunni in Syria encouraged their compatriots in Iraq, who share a common frontier, to start their own protests...

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is floundering in its response. In dealing with the four-month-old protest movement by the Sunni Arabs, a fifth of Iraq’s population, who say they are treated as second-class citizens, he varies between denouncing them as terrorists and admitting that they have real grievances...

The Iraqi government depends on an alliance between the Shia and the Kurds who, before the US invasion of 2003, were oppressed by the Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein.

This is the America we created for ourselves

In view of the new regulations re pocket knives on airplanes, I was reminded of this (in)famous image (via Boing Boing back in 2010).   I wonder how different procedures are now.

The myth of "peak oil"

[E]very time we think we’re starting to run out of it, new technologies arise that find us more. The widely circulated fears of a few years ago that we were approaching “peak oil” have turned out to be completely wrong. From the Arctic to Africa, nanoengineered materials, underwater robots, side-scanning 3-D sonar, specially engineered lubricants, and myriad other advances are opening up titanic new supplies of fossil fuels, many of them in unexpected places—Brazil, Australia, and, perhaps most significantly, North America. “Contrary to what most people believe,” declares a recent study from the Harvard Kennedy School, “oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption.”..

Countries that have never had an energy industry worth mentioning are on the brink of becoming major players, while established fossil fuel powerhouses are facing challenges to their dominance. We are witnessing a shift that heralds major new opportunities—and dangers—for individual nations, international politics and economics, and the planet...

We human beings have consumed, over our entire history, about a trillion barrels of oil. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there is still seven to eight times that much left in the ground. The oil that’s left is just more difficult, and therefore more expensive, to get to...

But prices have risen dramatically in the last decade. They have been averaging well above $80 a barrel for the last couple of years. That’s partly due to ever-increasing demand from developing nations and partly due to political factors (such as fears that Iran’s nuclear ambitions could cause serious turmoil in the Persian Gulf). But the price rise is also partly due to another kind of technology: computer algorithms that enable quantitative hedge funds to place thousands of ultrafast buy and sell orders, a practice known as high-frequency trading, which came into widespread use with oil futures in the middle of the last decade. No less an authority than Rex Tillerson, head of ExxonMobil, told Congress in 2011 that such speculation is a key reason why the price of a barrel of oil has stayed so high...

Fracking is about as popular with the general public as puppy kicking, but it’s very big business. It’s producing so much natural gas from shale fields in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere that the commodity’s price has cratered, dropping from over $10 per thousand cubic feet five years ago to about $3.25 today. Fracking can also produce oil, which is the main target in North Dakota. As many as 200 new wells are being drilled every month in the state to exploit the Bakken formation, a 25,000-square-mile subterranean swath extending into Montana and Canada that may contain hundreds of billions of barrels...

And the fracking boom is only just beginning. There are believed to be oceans of yet-untapped shale gas and oil in Argentina, China, and several countries in Europe... What’s more, the earth holds other fossil fuels we haven’t even begun to tap. Governments and corporations are researching a number of long-shot energy sources, from a not-fully cooked type of oil called kerogen to methane hydrates in the ice of Alaska. 

Extended excerpts from Pacific Standard, via The Dish.

Khruschev, Ahmadinejad, Clinton, Roosevelt

At the height of the cold war, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a speech in which he uttered a phrase that interpreted from Russian as "we will bury you." It was taken as chilling threat to bury the U.S. with a nuclear attack and escalated the tension between the U.S. and Russia. However, the translation was a bit too literal. The sense of the Russian phrase was more that "we will live to see you buried" or "we will outlast you." Still not exactly friendly, but not quite so threatening.

I find that very interesting, because in the 50+ years I've heard the story of Khruschev's speech, I've never heard this interpretation of it.  I am however aware that a similar thing may have happened during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech to the United Nations several years ago:

..this was the man who, in 2005, generated wide outrage in the West for suggesting that Israel should be "wiped from the map." But even that case said as much about our limited understanding of him and his context as it did about Ahmadinejad himself. The expression "wipe from the map" means "destroy" in English but not in Farsi. In Farsi, it means not that Israel should be eliminated but that the existing political borders should literally be wiped from a literal map and replaced with those of historic Palestine. That's still not something likely to win him cheers in U.S. policy circles, but the distinction, which has been largely lost from the West's understanding of the Iranian president, is important.

In 2008 Hillary Clinton was less vague in her pronouncement:

Yesterday, as the BBC reports, she "was asked how she would respond if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel. She replied that: "If I'm the president, we will attack Iran... we would be able to totally obliterate them."

And this from President Theodore Roosevelt speaking of Cuba:

"I am so angry with Cuba that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth."

Khruschev quote from Mental Floss, via Neatorama.

Sovereignty claims in the Arctic overlap

Since the Arctic reportedly has abundant reserves of oil, and is now becoming progressively ice-free, these overlapping boundaries will probably assume greater importance in world geopolitics.

Infographic from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.