Obama v. Cheney

Yesterday, both President Barack Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney gave speeches about terrorism, torture and national security. If you didn't watch them and don't have time or inclination to read them -- I'd advise watching this 100 second video mashup courtesy of the people at Talking Points Memo:



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Ducking in

Today, at the Duck of Minerva group international relations blog, I posted "Ire of Newt." Former Speaker of the House Gingrich is calling for the head of successor Nancy Pelosi because of her accusing the CIA of lying about what they told her about waterboarding in 2002. I reveal the frequent occasions when Newt himself has called out the CIA and State Department during wartime.

Yesterday, I posted "KSM: NIMBY?" which is about the hullabaloo surrounding the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. KSM is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. NIMBY = "not in my backyard."

Wednesday, April 29, I posted "Neorealists as Critial Theorists: Film Edition." I examined the favorite IR films of Harvard academic (and blogger) Stephen Walt in light of my film class (and work on "comedy of global politics").

Tuesday, April 28, I posted "The flu: context," which discussed the broad human security implications of the flu in an ordinary year (without swine flu).


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Supreme Court

Who will be the next Supreme Court justice? I do not know the answer to that question, but I do know that President Obama will soon name someone to replace the outgoing Justice David Souter. Meanwhile, read this to remind yourself why these decisions are so important:

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, [John] Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than [Justice Antonin] Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

That line is from Jeffrey Toobin's excellent profile of Roberts in the May 25 issue of The New Yorker. Check it out.

By the way, the "crowd" at Intrade seems to think the next Justice is likely to be Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayer, or Diane Pamela Wood.


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Primary objective? Oil security

Here's another item that I forgot to blog in 2008. From Naomi Klein's piece in The Nation, July 21/28, 2008:

Several of the architects of the Iraq War no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator. On National Public Radio's To the Point, Fadhil Chalabi, an Iraqi advisor to the State Department in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as "a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future." Chalabi, who served as Iraq's oil under secretary, described this as "a primary objective."

You can hear Chalabi say these things yourself yourself at the KCRW website. I can confirm Klein's account.

To provide an up-to-date take on this issue, consider that declining oil prices reduce Iraq's ability to defend itself. That's fairly important since the U.S. certainly wants to leave Iraq in the hands of a stable and secure government.

Additionally, oil remains a potential major area of dispute among Iraq's sectarian communities. Recently, as Reuters reported, the Oil Ministry denied efforts by the "largely autonomous Kurdish region" to export petroleum from oil fields in northern Iraq. Optimists want you to believe that this problem can be resolved peacefully, though licenses granted to private oil companies to develop new oil fields are being called "illegal."


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The Princeton Project

In The Nation May 4, David Milne argued that the recent report prepared by the Princeton Project on National Security may one day have tremendous influence on foreign policy in the new Democratic administration --comparable to the influence often attributed to the 1997 neoconservative report by the Project for a New American Century.

future historians may identify [the Princeton Project] as a blueprint for President Obama's foreign policy--in the same way that the 1997 Project for the New American Century foretold the direction of the Bush administration.

I'm not sure that's true, but it's something to think about when preparing a new course on U.S. foreign policy.

Here's a good press synopsis of the report's view of US grand strategy:

The new strategy seeks to absorb the rising powers like China, India, Brazil and others into a law-based global economic and diplomatic structure that avoids open conflict by making them stakeholders within the system, and thus encouraged in their own interests to play by the rules...

The strategy they have devised, titled 'Liberty Under Law," seeks to chart of long-term course in the way that George F. Kennan in 1946 drafted the concept of "containment" that broadly defined U.S. policy in the Cold War for the next 45 years.

"The difference is that we soon came to realize that there is now no single threat as there was in 1946, so there can be no single theme like "containment," Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson school of public and international affairs and one of the directors of the project, and a former president of the American Society for International Law.

"There are now a series of threats, including global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, the rise of Asia, the energy crisis and threats emanating from the Middle East becoming too numerous to count," Slaughter added.

Slaughter is now the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department.

The elite press noted Obama's link to the Princeton Project some 18 months ago.

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File under "political hack"

Last Saturday, May 9, Senator Mitch McConnell gave the convocation address at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. It created a small stir locally -- probably because the Senator did not shy away from controversial political subjects. And his take was purely partisan.

Of course, McConnell was also dead wrong on several key facts. For example, McConnell wants to pretend that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been unique evil-doers:

the current Administration has announced a deadline to close the secure detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within nine months—without having any kind of plan to contain these deadly killers.

“I hope it does not take that step without a plan to make America safer as a result. And I certainly hope it does not transfer these terrorists to American soil. Such a move will likely raise more legal questions than it settles. And it will increase the risk to the American people.

“The men housed at Guantanamo are ruthless killers.

Yet, as Ken Ballen and Peter Bergen reported last October, this is factually incorrect:

...according to the Pentagon itself, only 5 percent of detainees at the prison were ever apprehended by U.S. forces to begin with. And only another 4 percent were ever alleged to have actually been fighting at all.

Why is that? Almost all of the detainees were turned over to U.S. forces by foreigners, either with an ax to grind or, more often, for a hefty bounty or reward. After U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, they doled out rewards of about $5,000 or more to Pakistanis and Afghans for each detainee turned over. Contrary to standard law enforcement practice, the U.S. military accepted the uncorroborated allegations of the award claimants with little independent investigation.

Now, under much pressure, the Pentagon has released more than 500 detainees over the past three years ...new statistics provided to us by the Ministry of Interior in Riyadh, zero of the 121 Guantánamo detainees received by the Saudis were deemed dangerous and ineligible for release.

It gets worse. Of those detainees returned to Saudi Arabia from Guantánamo, more than half have been released and are now free, most after spending a period of time in a halfway house designed to promote a smooth return to society. Only six former Guantánamo detainees have been rearrested in Saudi Arabia for any reason—an astonishingly low recidivism rate of less than 9 percent among those released.

Although the Saudi efforts to reintegrate these prisoners into society are certainly commendable, the only reasonable explanation for such a low recidivism rate is that the detainees were never guilty of terrorist acts in the first place.

Don't want to take the word of the Saudis? Consider this:

Information released in May by the Department of Defense further buttresses the Saudi findings of a very low recidivism rate. The department’s list of named released detainees who have subsequently engaged in militant or terrorist activities anywhere in the world shows that 12 have done so, a recidivism rate of just 2 percent. In fact, the Pentagon can cite only six instances in which an inmate released from Guantánamo actually took up arms against the United States.

...new statistics from the Saudi Ministry of Interior, corroborated by the Pentagon’s own findings, show that the overwhelming majority of individuals detained at Guantánamo not only were not terrorists, but were likely innocent of any crime.

McConnell also played fast and loose with the facts about the interrogation memos recently declassified by the Obama administration:

It was a mistake for the administration to reveal to al Qaeda terrorists the interrogation methods they can expect to face if captured. Releasing those memos has made America less safe.

As I've blogged before, scholars have been studying American torture techniques for years. They are well-known already.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel pointed out that the Bush administration had already disclosed most of the techniques:

Let me say this, one of the reasons the president was willing to let this information out was that much of the information was already out. So if they're saying that you've basically exposed something, it's been written . Go get the New York Review of books. It's there. So the notion that somehow we're exposing something -- it's already out. In fact President Bush let a lot, a lot of this information out. So the notion that somehow this is all of a sudden a game-changer, doesn't take cognizance that its already in the system and in the public domain. Therefore, it's not new.

If you don't believe Emanuel, look at this article in the October 4, 2007, NY Times. Or this piece from June 2004 in the NY Review of Books.

Numerous Bush officials were questioned about waterboarding by Congress over the past few years, especially after the November 2006 Democratic victory. John Kerry opposed Bush Attorney General Mike Mukasey over this issue in 2007.


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Republican Fratricide

For months, Kentuckians have been hearing rumors that Republican Senator Mitch Mcconnell wants his colleague Jim Bunning to retire and abandon his quest for reelection. McConnell apparently worries that Bunning will lose the seat to a Democrat in the next home state election.

This week, Bunning popped off about McConnell:

"Do you realize that under our dynamic leadership of our leader (McConnell), we have gone from 55 and probably to 40 (seats) in two election cycles," Bunning said in a conference call with reporters. "And if the tea leaves that I read are correct, we will wind up with about 36 after this election cycle.

"So if leadership means anything, it means you don't lose … approximately 19 seats in three election cycles with good leadership."

Apparently, McConnell forgot that Hall of Famer Bunning was once notorious for hitting opposing players with pitches.


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Profiling the Terrorist Identity

Are you traveling to Europe this summer? Do you think you could spot a terrorist if you saw one? Bet against that.

In June 2007 (I'm still cleaning out my home office), The Atlantic Monthly ran a short piece based on the research of Edwin Bakker of Netherlands Institute of International Relations:

The author profiled 242 European Muslim terrorists nabbed since September 2001: 40 percent of them had been born in Europe; many were poor and had criminal records; almost all were single (or divorced) men; and they ranged widely in age, from their teens to near retirement. But none of these factors distinguished them in any significant way from the broader population of European Muslims.

Basically, as the magazine reported, profiling efforts in Europe are doomed to round up lots of innocent people.

You can read Bakker's latest publication on this topic here (that's a pdf):
"Muslims in the Netherlands: Tensions and Violent Conflict," Tinka Veldhuis & Edwin Bakker, in: Ethno-religious Conflict in Europe: Typologies of Radicalisation in Europe’s Muslim Communities, Michael Emmerson ed. 1 May 2009, pp. 87-114.



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Don't love that dirty water

I turned in the last of my grades yesterday and have spent part of today sorting out my home office. It didn't take long to find a stack of clippings torn from newspapers and magazines -- mostly articles I intended to blog about over the past year or so. Oops.

From June 2008, for example, I had pulled a Maude Barlow piece in The American Prospect on water-borne disease:

Every day more and more people are living without access to clean water. As the ecological crisis deepens, so too does the human crisis. More children are killed by dirty water than by war, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and traffic accidents combined.

...the World Health Organization reports that environmental factors, including contaminated water, are implicated in 80 percent of all sickness and disease worldwide. In the last decade, the number of children killed by diarrhea exceeded the number of people killed in all armed conflicts since World War II. Every eight seconds, a child dies from drinking dirty water.

Barlow is head of the Council of Canadians and her article was part of a special insert on the global fresh water crisis.

A sidebar piece a few pages after Barlow's article (adapted from her book Blue Covenant) noted that "The annual death toll from water-related diseases is estimated at more than 5 million."


Title apologies to the Standells, who played a terrific guitar riff in their song "Dirty Water."

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Washington Natinals

No, I didn't make a typo in that title. But Majestic Athletic company did make an error. From ESPN:

It was the uniform company's fault that Washington Nationals Adam Dunn and Ryan Zimmerman wore jerseys reading "Natinals" during a game last week.

Dunn and Zimmerman donned the shirts that were missing an "o" for the first three innings of Washington's 3-2 loss to the Florida Marlins on Friday night...

"All of us at Majestic Athletic want to apologize to both the Washington Nationals and Major League Baseball for accidentally omitting the 'o' in two Nationals jerseys," Majestic Athletic president Jim Pisani said in a statement distributed at Nationals Park on Tuesday.

Amazing, but true.

See it for yourself here.


Update: Apparently, this kind of error has occurred throughout baseball history -- as I learned on a SABR listserv.


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Louisville Climate Action Report

The city of Louisville, together with the University and public school system -- aka "The Partnership for a Green City -- this week released a climate action report in time for Earth Day. This press release is on the University's website:

The report’s bottom line is this: People in Louisville Metro will have to collectively cut carbon emissions by more than 2 million tons to achieve the goals set forth in a climate protection agreement signed by a group of U.S. mayors in 2005. By signing it, the mayors pledged to seek to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from city operations and the community at large to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

According to a recent report issued by the Brookings Institution and quoted in the Climate Action Report, GHG emissions per capita within the Louisville Metro area are among the highest in the nation for large municipalities. The Louisville Metro area has the fourth highest per capita GHG emissions among the 100 largest metropolitan areas and is well above the estimated national average.

The report notes that 29% of emissions locally result from residential electricity consumption and 29% more are from transportation. The cheapest way to cut emissions is to reduce energy consumption.

I served on the Utility Regulations, Policies and Practices Subcommittee, though I also attended a meeting of the Education and Outreach subcommittee and met informally with other members over the past couple of years.

For the past three semesters I've been active in the College of Arts & Sciences "Green Team," which is trying to reduce energy consumption on campus.


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Quick quacks

Today, at the Duck of Minerva group IR blog, I posted "Can recession cause regime change?" This piece, exploring whether regimes in autocratic states like Russia and China can survive the recession, continues my blogging on the alleged "upside of the downturn."

Sunday, I posted "Iraq: The Undead and the Dead," which concerns the reduced media scrutiny of the Iraq war and the apparently large (and overlooked) number of suicides (and acts of family violence) by returning veterans.


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Bolts from the Blue 2009

For the past few seasons, I've been posting the roster of my entry in the Hardy House fantasy baseball league. On Saturday, April 4, in Lexington, KY, I attended my 21st consecutive auction draft. We rarely pick rosters before opening day, but the season started a week late this year because of the World Baseball Classic.

My 2008 squad finished second in the league and I was hopeful going into the draft because my retained players seemed fairly strong to me.

As a reminder: the league has 12 teams and uses American League players exclusively to accumulate statistics in the traditional 8 categories (HR, RBI, SBs, BA, Wins, Saves, ERA and WHIP). One roster quirk now in its second year: we added a 10th pitcher and subtracted an outfielder. We thought this better reflected a change that real baseball teams made over the past 20 years.

The 2009 Bolts from the Blue (7 retained players in blue)

C Chad Moeller (BAL) $1
C Kelly Shoppach (CLE) $5
1B Billy Butler (KC) $23
2B Alexei Ramirez (CHX) $13
3B Scott Rolen (TOR) $7
SS Derek Jeter (NYY) $21
MI Akinora Iwamura (TB) $11
CR Jed Lowrie (BOS) $10
OF Grady Sizemore (CLE) $40
OF Ben Francisco (CLE) $13
OF Felix Pie (BAL) $5
OF Delmon Young (MIN) $20
DH Mark Teahan (KC) $11
Hitting $180

P Roy Halladay (TOR) $28
P Felix Hernandez (SEA) $25
P James Shields (TB) $8
P Rich Hill (BAL) $1 (DL)
P Gio Gonzalez (OAK) $1 (AAA the next day)
P Grant Balfour (TB) $6
P Jerry Blevins (OAK) $5
P Jose Arredondo (LAA) $3
P Joe Smith (CLE) $1
P Ramon Ramirez (BOS) $1
Pitching $79

I left only $1 on the table, but I had some extra cash in the endgame and clearly overpaid for Jerry Blevins when I was trying to find a relief pitcher with an outside shot at saves. Oakland's Joey Devine had just been placed on the 60-day DL and most of the A's bullpen sold at inflated prices.

Butler, Jeter and Sizemore were on my 2008 team and I drafted them again.

To replace Hill and Gonzalez on my active roster, I picked up free agent relievers Joe Nelson (TB) and Robinson Tejeda (KC). Hopefully, Hill can find his control and return to form and Gonzalez will either get a shot at Oakland's rotation or closer job (a common spot for failed starters).

Clearly, I'm a big believer in drafting players John Hunt used to call "post-hype." Those are guys who are still young, but their disappointing performance to-date has caused their value to decline. Young and Pie are my main post-hype picks, though Teahan may belong in this category too.

As usual, I didn't pay for a "proven closer" at the draft. I last paid big bucks for a closer in 2007. Hours later, $34 Blue Jay B.J. Ryan pitched his last game of the season. Luckily, I had picked teammate Jeremy Accardo in the final round of the reserve draft.

Here are my reserve picks this year:

1. OF Matt Joyce (TB) $3
2. OF Gabe Gross (TB) $2
3. UT Jose Bautista (Tor) $1

Gross will be active this coming week thanks to the Lowrie injury, which moves Teahan to the infield.

You can find posts about the 2005, 2007 and 2008 drafts elsewhere on this blog.


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Commodification

The University of Kansas bookstore is selling debate championship t-shirts!

I don't know anyone would believe debate is sponsored by the NCAA.


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Upside of the downturn?

Economic recessions cause all kinds of personal and public hardship. However, I've noticed a number of articles explaining the upside of the downturn. Michael Dresser of the Baltimore Sun:

The number of traffic deaths in the United States dropped to the lowest level since 1961 last year as skyrocketing gas prices and economic recession cut into the number of miles Americans drove. The estimated 37,313 deaths reported by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration represent a 9.1 percent decline from the 41,059 fataliities recorded in 2007.

I don't know about you, but I think this is a big deal. It means there are more than 3,700 inhabitants of this country alive today than would have been if the figure had remained flat. It's akin to avoiding a tragedy of 9/11 proportions.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attributes some of this decline to increased use of seat belts.

Previously, I noted that the recession had reduced greeenhouse gas emissions. USA Today had a followup report on this claim on April 8:

The worldwide economic slowdown is having an unexpected positive impact in the fight against global warming: Emissions of carbon dioxide are falling, records collected by governments show.

From the United States to Europe to China, the global economic crisis has forced offices to close and factories to cut back. That means less use of fossil fuels such as coal to make energy.

US power plant emissions were apparently down 3% from 2007-2008 while "Carbon dioxide from industrial facilities in 27 European nations in 2008 plummeted 6%, according to Point Carbon's analysis of data published last week by the European Commission."

As I noted in March, however, reduced economic activity does not necessarily mean good news for the environment:

Some experts fear lower emissions may make companies and governments less likely to spend money to cut carbon output. "There's a risk that it will push back needed investment into … cleaner production," [Emilie] Mazzacurati [of Point Carbon] says.

I happened to read this issue of the paper in Portland, where I was giving a talk -- and not blogging.

You can find a brief report of my visit to Lewis and Clark College at Duck of Minerva.


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2009 Louisville Sluggers

I know readers have been eager to learn the lineup of my fantasy baseball teams for 2009. When last in action, the Louisville Sluggers of the Original Bitnet Fantasy Baseball League won the 2008 season B World Series. The league crowns champions for both the "A" first half (pre-All Star game) and "B" second half of the baseball season.

The OBFLB is a 24 team head-to-head fantasy baseball league using 10 categories: HR, SB, batting average, runs produced average, plate appearances, innings pitched, wins, saves, ERA and "ratio."

Here are the 2009 Sluggers (players in red were retained from 2008). Since I retained 13 players, I started the draft in round 14:

Starters
C: Kurt Suzuki (OAK) (16th round)
1B: Joey Votto (CIN)
2B: Aaron Hill (TOR) (14th round)
3B: Edwin Encarnacion (CIN)
SS: Troy Tulowitzki (COL)
OF: Carlos Beltran (NYM)
OF: Adam Jones (BAL)
OF: Carlos Gomez (MIN)
DH: Billy Butler (KC)

SP: Tim Lincecum (SF)
SP: Josh Beckett (BOS)
SP: Rich Harden (CHC)
SP: Ricky Nolasco (FLA)
SP: Fausto Carmona (CLE)
RP: Chris Perez (STL) (AAA)
RP: Rafael Soriano (ATL) (15th round)
RP: Carlos Villanueva (MIL) (19th round)
RP: Josh Kinney (STL) (21st round)

Bench
C: George Kottaras (BOS) (27th round)
1B: Kevin Millar (TOR) (28th round)
IF: Alberto Callaspo (KC) (20th round)
IF: Gordon Beckham (CHX) (17th round)
IF: Willy Aybar (TB) (23rd round)
OF: Ben Francisco (CLE) (18th round)
OF: Gabe Gross (TB) (24th round)

SP: Wade Davis (TB) (26th round)
SP: Jason Hammel (COL) (22nd round)
RP: Damasco Marte (NYY) (25th round)

The Beckham pick indicates the premium my league puts on talented young prospects, especially at skill positions (SS in this case). In other words, I was drafting for the future -- or perhaps for a mid-year trade in case I have an injury.

I made one pre-season trade that may prove disastrous, dealing SP Josh Johnson (FLA) for RP Chris Perez. When I made the deal, most analysts thought Perez was going to be the closer in St. Louis. Instead, he's pitching in Memphis. I had a lot of depth at starting pitcher and couldn't get any value in trade for Carmona.


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Ducking out

Today, at the Duck of Minerva group IR blog, I posted "The new neighbors." It is about the Obama administration and Europe, with a focus on the latest climate change negotiations.

March 25, I posted "Overseas contingency operations," which is apparently the new name for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan (previously known as the "war on terror").


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National champions!

The University of Kansas debate team of Brett Bricker and Nate Johnson has won the 2009 National Debate Tournament in Austin, Texas. They defeated defending champ Wake Forest in the final round on a 4-1 decision.

Congratulations to Brett and Nate (nice guys who I met at the last KU debate reunion), to Coach Scott Harris, and to everyone associated with the program. Debate is truly a team activity and winning NDT takes a great deal of hard work.

This is KU's fifth championship as the school also won in 1954, 1970, 1976 and 1983. That last date, 26 years ago, makes me feel old -- but this victory will put a skip in my step today!

This is just terrific news.


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