Brontides

This isn’t a tech blog, obviously, but the new Photoshop looks incredible

Photo: GETTY

The coming election will be dominated by the economy. Anything else would be nonsensical; of all of the issues that face Britain today, the economic downturn is the one with the greatest capacity to cause long-term harm.

Such is the prevailing mood, anyway. But in truth, the pendulum of public debate may have swung too far into pessimism. The important thing to remember about economic crises is that, while the immediate pain of sharp inflation and redundancies that they cause is real, they do not intrinsically determine the overall fiscal health of a nation’s finances. While they can exacerbate, or be exacerbated by, underlying weaknesses, they can also be ameliorated by sensible policies. Quoth the Economist:

Britain has always paid its debts; investors don’t yet doubt the ability of a British government to get a fiscal grip after the election; and Britons tend to pay their taxes.

Despite the reverses of the past couple of years, the British economy retains important strengths, not least its openness to trade, capital flows and, more recently, migration. There is much talk of rebalancing the economy, of finding new sources of growth now that financial services and the housing market have taken a hit. Yet Britain’s economy is already surprisingly varied. It is still the world’s sixth-biggest manufacturer. The outlook for financial services may have darkened but London’s streets are no less thronged with lawyers, management consultants, accountants and ubiquitous marketing types. Cultural output is strong, with films and video games and edgy fashion pouring forth. Foreigners still want to buy British businesses—and Britain usually does well by it.

[...] The prospects for growth look reasonable. Britain’s record on improving productivity before the crunch was better than its neighbours’. Flexible labour markets have helped restrain wages, so unemployment has not risen nearly as much during the recession as was once feared. Although unions can still damage companies and disrupt public services, they are comparatively small and weak. And, whereas the weaker members of the euro zone are shackled to the stronger countries, Britain has been able to regain competitiveness by allowing its currency to fall. Growth will probably settle down at somewhere between 2% and 2.5%—well below its rate during the long boom, but not that bad historically.

Add to this a high level of informational integration – Britain has a higher level of home broadband and more wi-fi hotspots than any other country – and the advantage, at present, of not being in the Euro, and it seems that Britain has fundamental advantages that make it a strong candidate for a rebound after the election. A U-shape (when the economy goes down, stays down for a while, but then recovers to something like its previous shape) is still far more likely than an L (when the economy goes down and stays down, effectively continuing its normal pattern of growth from the new, lower base). Of course, it still needs to be underpinned by some hard, sensible choices by the incoming government. But the signs are good.

America and Russia just agreed a massive nuclear arms reduction deal. Great!

Well, great-esque. As giddy as I am about the prospect of fewer nukes, this isn’t going to get passed. As a treaty, it needs to pass the Senate with an excruciating 67 votes. Meanwhile:

• Republicans hate arms control
• Conservatives are invested in the re-demonisation of Russia
• Barak Obama likes it
• Republican Senators ain’t feeling real co-operatey right now

So where are the extra seven votes going to come from, assuming that every Democrat plus Joe Leiberman votes FOR?

Photo: Reuters

I’d be lying if I tried to pretend that I wasn’t secretly pretty psyched that Britain is expelling an Israeli diplomat.

Diplomatic work between Britain and Israel needs to be conducted according to the highest standards of trust. The work of our Embassy in Israel, and the Israeli Embassy in London, is vital to the cooperation between our countries. So is the Strategic Dialogue between our countries. These ties are important and we want them to continue. However I have asked that a member of the Embassy of Israel be withdrawn from the UK as a result of this affair, and this is taking place.

My own gut reaction is tempered by the fact that the reasoning is pretty dreadful, though. That Israel can get away with bloodshed and theft in Palestine, but only manages to elicit a response when it clones some passports for an assassination in Dubai, speaks volumes about the priorities of the British Foreign Office and its gutless toad of a Foreign Minister. This reeks of opportunism; Israel is a tarnished brand, this week anyway, and if it gets Miliband’s name in the papers only a few weeks before an election – and, doubtless, a Labour leadership campaign – then so much the better.

Either way, it’s been a miserable week or two for Israel and its foreign policy. Between the Biden insult, the Turkey spies debacle, and now Mauritania – one of the first Muslim states to normalise relations with Israel – severing ties, Israel’s rebranding mission seems to have tanked catastrophically.

Juan Cole tells it like it is:

Top Ten Reasons East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the American Israel Public Affairs Council on Monday that “Jerusalem is not a settlement.” He continued that the historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel cannot be denied. He added that neither could the historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem. He insisted, “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today.” He said, “Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.” He told his applauding audience of 7500 that he was simply following the policies of all Israeli governments since the 1967 conquest of Jerusalem in the Six Day War.

Netanyahu mixed together Romantic-nationalist cliches with a series of historically false assertions. But even more important was everything he left out of the history, and his citation of his warped and inaccurate history instead of considering laws, rights or common human decency toward others not of his ethnic group.

So here are the reasons that Netanyahu is profoundly wrong, and East Jerusalem does not belong to him.

1. In international law, East Jerusalem is occupied territory, as are the parts of the West Bank that Israel unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907 forbid occupying powers to alter the lifeways of civilians who are occupied, and forbid the settling of people from the occupiers’ country in the occupied territory. Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, its usurpation of Palestinian property there, and its settling of Israelis on Palestinian land are all gross violations of international law. Israeli claims that they are not occupying Palestinians because the Palestinians have no state are cruel and tautological. Israeli claims that they are building on empty territory are laughable. My back yard is empty, but that does not give Netanyahu the right to put up an apartment complex on it.

2. Israeli governments have not in fact been united or consistent about what to do with East Jerusalem and the West Bank, contrary to what Netanyahu says. The Galili Plan for settlements in the West Bank was adopted only in 1973. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave undertakings as part of the Oslo Peace Process to withdraw from Palestinian territory and grant Palestinians a state, promises for which he was assassinated by the Israeli far right (elements of which are now supporting Netanyahu’s government). As late as 2000, then Prime Minister Ehud Barak claims that he gave oral assurances that Palestinians could have almost all of the West Bank and could have some arrangement by which East Jerusalem could be its capital. Netanyahu tried to give the impression that far rightwing Likud policy on East Jerusalem and the West Bank has been shared by all previous Israeli governments, but this is simply not true.

3. Romantic nationalism imagines a “people” as eternal and as having an eternal connection with a specific piece of land. This way of thinking is fantastic and mythological. Peoples are formed and change and sometimes cease to be, though they might have descendants who abandoned that religion or ethnicity or language. Human beings have moved all around and are not directly tied to any territory in an exclusive way, since many groups have lived on most pieces of land. Jerusalem was not founded by Jews, i.e. adherents of the Jewish religion. It was founded between 3000 BCE and 2600 BCE by a West Semitic people or possibly the Canaanites, the common ancestors of Palestinians, Lebanese, many Syrians and Jordanians, and many Jews. But when it was founded Jews did not exist.

4. Jerusalem was founded in honor of the ancient god Shalem. It does not mean City of Peace but rather ‘built-up place of Shalem.”

5. The “Jewish people” were not building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BCE. First of all, it is not clear when exactly Judaism as a religion centered on the worship of the one God took firm form. It appears to have been a late development since no evidence of worship of anything but ordinary Canaanite deities has been found in archeological sites through 1000 BCE. There was no invasion of geographical Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 1200s BCE. The pyramids had been built much earlier and had not used slave labor. The chronicle of the events of the reign of Ramses II on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave revolts or flights by same into the Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 12 plagues & etc. Jews and Judaism emerged from a certain social class of Canaanites over a period of centuries inside Palestine.

6. Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent “Jewish people” in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon. So Jerusalem was not ‘the city of David,’ since there was no city when he is said to have lived. No sign of magnificent palaces or great states has been found in the archeology of this period, and the Assyrian tablets, which recorded even minor events throughout the Middle East, such as the actions of Arab queens, don’t know about any great kingdom of David and Solomon in geographical Palestine.

7. Since archeology does not show the existence of a Jewish kingdom or kingdoms in the so-called First Temple Period, it is not clear when exactly the Jewish people would have ruled Jerusalem except for the Hasmonean Kingdom. The Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 722. The Babylonians took it in 597 and ruled it until they were themselves conquered in 539 BCE by the Achaemenids of ancient Iran, who ruled Jerusalem until Alexander the Great took the Levant in the 330s BCE. Alexander’s descendants, the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem until 198 when Alexander’s other descendants, the Seleucids, took the city. With the Maccabean Revolt in 168 BCE, the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom did rule Jerusalem until 37 BCE, though Antigonus II Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, only took over Jerusalem with the help of the Parthian dynasty in 40 BCE. Herod ruled 37 BCE until the Romans conquered what they called Palestine in 6 CE (CE= ‘Common Era’ or what Christians call AD). The Romans and then the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium ruled Jerusalem from 6 CE until 614 CE when the Iranian Sasanian Empire Conquered it, ruling until 629 CE when the Byzantines took it back.

The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 and ruled it until 1099 when the Crusaders conquered it. The Crusaders killed or expelled Jews and Muslims from the city. The Muslims under Saladin took it back in 1187 CE and allowed Jews to return, and Muslims ruled it until the end of World War I, or altogether for about 1192 years.

Adherents of Judaism did not found Jerusalem. It existed for perhaps 2700 years before anything we might recognize as Judaism arose. Jewish rule may have been no longer than 170 years or so, i.e., the kingdom of the Hasmoneans.

8. Therefore if historical building of Jerusalem and historical connection with Jerusalem establishes sovereignty over it as Netanyahu claims, here are the groups that have the greatest claim to the city:

A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.

B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second millennium BCE.

C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 CE.

D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under the Sasanids.

E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and introduce a Syrian one.

F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.

G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin’s dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.

9. Of course, Jews are historically connected to Jerusalem by the Temple, whenever that connection is dated to. But that link mostly was pursued when Jews were not in political control of the city, under Iranian, Greek and Roman rule. It cannot therefore be deployed to make a demand for political control of the whole city.

10. The Jews of Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine did not for the most part leave after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in 136 CE. They continued to live there and to farm in Palestine under Roman rule and then Byzantine. They gradually converted to Christianity. After 638 CE all but 10 percent gradually converted to Islam. The present-day Palestinians are the descendants of the ancient Jews and have every right to live where their ancestors have lived for centuries.

Lots of people (apparently galvanised by the New South Wales Government) are claiming that Australia is the first country to recognise ‘non-specified’ gender.

This is nonsense. Even if we ignore simple iterations of cultures with a third gender, there are hundreds of examples stretching into prehistory of ambiguous gender specifications. India has an ancient and firmly established tradition of non-binary gender which Pakistan has recently adopted. Indigenous North American cultures had Two-Spirit, which allowed for an array of gender roles to be filled – or dispensed with altogether. Ethiopia, Kenya and Congo all recognise non-gender, as do Indonesia, Polynesia and the Phillippines. Going back into history, Mesopotamia and Sumeria recognised non-gender states, and Sumerian myth even speaks of the goddess Ninmah, who fashioned a being “with no male organ and no female organ”, for whom Enki finds a position in society: “to stand before the king”. In Akkad, Enki is remembered as instructing Nintu, the goddess of birth, to establish a “third category among the people” in addition to men and women, that includes demons who steal infants, women who are unable to give birth, and priestesses who are prohibited from bearing children. Ancient Egypt had a third gender category for “non-gendered” while Indic cultures – including the ancient texts of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism – all refer to non-gender thanks to the influence of Vedic culture.

So: yes, well done Australia, I’m very pleased that you have taken this step. But let’s have less of this blinkered Eurocentricism!

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Last night, the US House of Representatives passed a controversial healthcare reform bill. This is the final, decisive part of a process that has been rumbling away ever since the election of Barack Obama, over a year ago, and has been the focus of one of the bitterest and most devisive political fights in recent history.

The background to this is that America is, according to the Institute of Medicine of the United States National Academies, the “only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have [healthcare] coverage” – in other words, unlike most other wealthy contries, America provides no medical care to its citizens, forcing them instead to procure expensive health insurance to ensure that they are able to pay for any treatment they may need. Most middle-class workers get healthcare as a perk from their employers, and the very poorest citizens are covered via. a government programme called Medicaid, but there remain many who fall between those two stools – particularly the self-employed – who have been historically uncovered, as well as many who commercial insurers rejected on the basis that they had pre-existing medical conditions. In 2007, that corpus included 15.3% of the population, or 45.7 million people. Meanwhile, even for the rest, American healthcare was disproportionately expensive and somewhat substandard when compared to that of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Scandinavia.

The bill that was passed last night actually fixes very little of that. It will make healthcare in the US somewhat cheaper – The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate is that the bill will decrease the federal deficit by $138 billion over the 2010–2019 period, generating more savings further out. It does this by taxing the commercial health insurance providers, and specifically high-value “Cadillac” health plans – in other words, taxing the rich. Medicaid has been extended up the property ladder, meaning that those somewhat above the poverty line are also automatically covered. Another programme subsidises healthcare for those somewhat wealthier – those earning up to 400% of the poverty line can now get insurance at a reduced rate.

The bill also makes it harder for health insurers to reject applicants with pre-existing conditions, as well as criminalising employers with more than 50 staff who do not provide health insurance to their workers. What it does not do, however, is provide a mechanism by which the state can offer healthcare; this does not establish an American NHS or anything like it. Finally, abortion is explicitly excluded from any public spending; subsidised plans may not be used to pay for such procedures.

Dryly, it seems uncontroversial. It costs less than the status quo ante, extends coverage and doesn’t kick any sacred cows. Instead it has inspired vitriol, and not all of the arguments have been entirely insane.

Conservative objections
The Republican Party, institutionally, has a nuanced position on healthcare despite the shrill tenor of the Conservative debate. They do not oppose the concept of universal healthcare reform, it just opposes the current Bill’s methods. The problem with healthcare in America, they say, is not a lack of government regulation; it’s the lack of a free and open market. Both sides agree that the main reason why healthcare is the US is so expensive is because most of it is procured via. insurance, which is expensive and invites waste. To the Republicans, this means that a system of tax credits should be set up and patients should be enouraged to shop around before spending their tax dollars, providing an incentive to consumers and providers to demand better-quality and lower-cost protection. The bill that passed last night is the opposite to that; by ensuring that money is transferred, directly and impersonally, from an insurance company (or government body) to a healthcare provider, it actually reinforces the perverse incentives that drive costs up and quality down. This is the argument that has been obscured by allegations of “socialism;” a Republican looks at institutions like Britains NHS, and sees that while it may be cheaper and better than what is offered in the US, it can be made cheaper and better still by removing government intervention.

They further object on the grounds that the excise tax on high-end insurance premiums reduces the amount of money available to invest in developing new medical discoveries – new vaccines, better machinery, and scientific research. There is some evidence to suggest that this may be justified.

Slightly less justifiable is the complaint, from some Conservatives, that a nationally funded healthcare programme is obligated to fund coverage “self-inflicted” ailments – the effects of drink and drug abuse, diet-related conditions, so on – which is arguably not in the public interest.

Finally, there’s the usual raft of demented and religiously-inspired objections – death panels, abortion funding, anything said by Glenn Beck etc.

Liberal objections
Liberal opposition has mostly coalesced around the opinion that the current proposals don’t go far enough. And, in truth, they don’t. The money saved by the programme is too little over too long – $100b over a decade may seem like a lot, but over the same period the programme will actually cost ten times that, and it can be substantially cheaper. The lack of a public option means that some will still miss out, and the Conservative complaint that the bill continues to prop up the insurance companies that have parasitically leeched off of the healthcare industry ring true.

So between those two poles – the orgiastic carnival of the ruling Democrats’ wishes that the bitter restraint of the Republican objections – was strung a bill that, really, no-one wanted. The process of passing it was ugly, but eventually the electorial arithmatic demanded that it be pushed through. For the Democrats, not least amongst them the President, the magnitude of the process demanded an outcome to avert electorial disaster. And in truth, while it’s not a great bill, passing it was the right thing to do. It’s statute now; it can be improved, its provisions can be extended, the backroom deals and inefficient compromises can be weeded out.

The big loser in all this is Congress; not necessarily Congressional Republicans, but the Congress as a whole. Otton von Bismark said that laws are like sausages; you don’t want to see how either are made, and in this case Congress has been the sausage factory. In some ways the whole business has demonstrated Congress at its worst, its most corrupt, disfunctional and venal, and while the President’s ratings may have slipped during the passage of the Bill, the Congressional leaderships of both parties have tumbled to sickening lows. But in another sense this is unfair. Heathcare wasn’t easy to pass because no consensus existed for it. Congress simply reflected the will of the people who elected it.

But the role of the politician is to lead as well as to follow, and the debate was ineptly framed by both sides. The Democrats must carry much of the blame for that – theirs was the duty to push for their policy; they had all the advantages, but squandered their goodwill on dead-end compromises and ephemeral policies that were doomed to fail, leaving their most evangelical advocates disillusioned and unenthused. The Republicans had fewer responsibilities but their conduct was deeply dishonourable. Instead of making a reasoned case for a free market intervention, and thus allowing a proper debate about the healthcare choices that America was presented with, they dragged the discussion into the mud, and suffered heavily for it.

Further reading:
The Economist’s Democracy in America
Matt Yglesias
Outside the Beltway
Fivethirtyeight

Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Two more bits of bleg that surfaced this morning:

First, a typically overwordy piece of analysis by Stratfor sees signs of weakening in Al Qaeda. A video offered by as-Sabab, AQ’s media outlet arm, on March 7th is the usual treat for counterterrorism cryptologists, and does appear to signal a weakening of central AQ’s efforts to cause havok – advocating, as it does, individual and “lone wolf” activity rather than a reliance on big, centrally-planned schemes.

It has come a long way from the early days of as Sahab, when bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders issued defiant threats of launching a follow-on attack against the United States that was going to be even more destructive than 9/11. The group is now asking individual Muslims to conduct lone-wolf terrorist attacks and to follow the examples of Hasan [the soldier who perpetrated a massacre at Fort Worth in Texas] and Mir Amal Kansi, the Pakistani citizen who conducted a shooting at a stoplight outside CIA headquarters in January 1993 that killed two CIA employees [...] this video is a clear indication that the trend toward decentralization is continuing.

While lone-wolf terrorists remain a threat, research – covered previously in this blog – suggests that, without a sense of cohesive community, the terrorist spirit may find fewer and less fruitful purchases.

Secondly, Ayatollah Akhbar Rafsanjani, the massively influential, famously mercurial and ruggedly individual Iranian cleric and politician, has finally pinned his colours to the mast, throwing his weight behind Khamenei and the government at the expense of the Green Movement. At this stage he had little choice – the Green Movement has more or less run out of steam and no longer possesses the will or capability to project its power onto the streets. But it is not a cause for untrammelled pessimism for Iran:

Rafsanjani has much in common with mainstream conservatives who have long supported Khamenei, but he will never align himself with the new generation of influential hard-liners, led by Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

[...]

In exchange for Rafsanjani’s loyalty, the supreme leader appears to have given him power over a new bill that will establish a National Elections Commission to reform the electoral process. Not only is this issue at the heart of Iran’s political crisis, but the commission would also determine the eligibility of individuals to stand as candidates in elections. And the Expediency Council, which monitors legislation and is responsible for any conflicts that might result over Iranian laws, will also decide the members who serve on the National Elections Commission.

That’s a huge change, and wrests a significant amount of power away from the hard-liners and the Guardian Council. Instead of being a defeat, Rafsanjani’s decision to throw his lot in with the Supreme Leader can be seen as a pragmatic compromise, which has a good chance of bearing greater fruit than the spent reform movement – whose capacity to persist as a political actor he has, effectively, killed.

In centuries to come, the early 21st Century will come to be regarded as the moment at which Brazil emerged from a long dark age.

Probably “discovered” by the Portuguese at the start of the 16th Century, it underwent just over 300 years of Colonial surpression as its lands and resources were contested by a variety of European powers. Portugal was more successful here than it had been elsewhere; while its African and Eastern properties were gradually stripped from it by more predatory Empires, it stubbornly clung onto Brazil in the face of mounting French and Dutch opposition, eventually even shifting its metropole from Portugal to Brazil in the early 1800s to avoid the worst of the Napoleonic Wars. The absence of the King and Court from Portugal caused unrest at home, however, and after just thirteen years King João VI returned to Europe, leaving in charge his son Pedro, who promptly declared independence.

The “Empire of Brazil” lasted for some sixty years, before falling to a military coup in 1889. The ensuing parliamentary democracy also fell to a junta in 1930, which led to a period of uneasy governance, which vascillated from military dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, before resolving definitively into a full military dictatorship after another coup in 1964. Since 1989, Brazil has been steadily redemocratising, and has been governed since 2002 by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or “Lula” for short. Elected on a platform of reducing Brazil’s extreme inequality (Brazil has one of the most pronounced splits between rich and poor in the world), Lula is probably one of the most popular democratically elected politicians in the world; even after 8 years in power his popularity remains in the high 70s. His chosen successor, Dilma Roussef, seems to be cut from the same mould and is likely to win by a landslide. Brazil is now one of the more significant emerging economic powers; with a huge – and cheap – labour force, abundant mineral deposits, a growing middle class and rapidly developing infrastructure, Brazil has the potential to grow into a major player over the course of the next century.

With economic swagger comes political, of course, although until recently Brazil had been content to make an exception of itself in this. He is regarded as a key US ally in Latin America almost by default – by virtue of being peaceful, democratic, opposed to Chavez-esque populism and open to free-market liberalism. Although he has lobbied strongly for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Lula had – until recently – been pursuing a modest foreign policy – possibly designed to demonstrate responsibility on the world stage – best described as Oman-esque:

[...] Oman from 1970 has explicitly taken the policy to adapt to changing circumstances, remain non-aligned, never harbor hostile intentions, and avoid confrontation.

Over the last few weeks, though, something seems to have changed, and Lula has slowly, iteratively, but decisively been lowering himself into a more decisive foreign policy. His caution is justified, as his chosen point of insertion is possibly the most divisive and unstable geopolitical fracas of our times. He has refused to yeild to American pressure on Iran, saying “It is not prudent to push Iran against a wall [...] The prudent thing is to establish negotiations.” He has visited Palestine. And now, he is criticising Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, saying that he is willing to talk to Hamas and caliming that Israel’s continued settlement building was “extinguishing the candle of hope”. He has also shown himself willing to kick the US about for violating international trade law. So much for avoiding confontation.

Could this presage a more muscular Brazilian presence in world politics? While I admire Lula’s adherence to a series of principles which must seem obvious to most observers who do not rely on America’s patronage, this will do his immediate chances at gaining a permanent seat on the Security Council no good. In the long run, however, he may be gambling on the strength of a non-aligned movement in a multipolar world. What is certain, however, is that as Brazil’s strength grows it will become increasingly hard to ignore.

Apologies if this post is somewhat short of being lucid – I’ve not been sleeping well lately and am thus struggling with articulation.

Hosni Mubarak, President-for-life of Egypt, re-emerged overnight after a protracted stay in a German hospital, quelling rumours of comas, juntas, illegitimate children and unannounced deaths, although the internet of course persists in contriving elaborate conspiracy theories. For a moment, though, it did look touch-and-go; and sources continue to report that Mubarak won’t seek another term in office following this recent health scare.

Which is doubtless what prompted Stratfor to hold forth on what course a post-Mubarak Egypt might take. Like the good folk at arabist.net, I’m not convinced by the idea that current intelligence chief General Suleiman will place-hold for young Jamal Mubarak; although I have no doubt that there are sections of the Egyptian government who believe that that is, or are counting it being, the plan, but the factionalism that exists within the Egyptian government and the ruling NDP is such that any multi-stage transition of this kind seems unlikely. If General Suleiman were to take power then I’d consider it far more likely that he will keep power, rather than handing it off to a comparative neophite with no firm powerbase of his own.

Questions about who will run Egypt tomorrow, however, should not distract from the question of who is running Egypt today:

This is new. For all its faults, Egypt’s political system generally makes clear who is in charge [...] Is it the security apparatus? His son? High members of the National Democratic Party? What is the role of his wife, a visible figure in Egyptian public life? Most important of all, who will follow him? Mubarak’s illness has catapulted these questions from the rumor mill to the headlines. But it has not answered them.

Aside from its overenthusiastic punctuation, the al-Shuruq article calmly reported that Husni Mubarak had deputized Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif to take on day-to-day presidential responsibilities. But Nazif is no Alexander Haig asserting that he is in control. If there is an Egyptian Haig, he is not in sight. The article made clear that Nazif’s authority is limited and that in important matters (such as those related to security) he consults with named and unnamed responsible authorities. [...]

While it is not clear who wields power — or who will run things if Mubarak’s absence becomes permanent — it is clearer how that power is being wielded. There are, to be sure, some signs of disarray, of different institutions and power centers pulling in different directions. But that disarray only goes so far. The overall direction is clear: Egypt is now in the midst of an uneven political clampdown.

Pity Egypt.

The Course of Empire: Desolation, by Thomas Cole

There’s a great article in the current edition of Foreign Affairs by Niall Ferguson, the British economic and colonial historian. It’s called Complexity and Collapse, and it deals with the idea that civilisations face a “life cycle” – that they must, inevitably, began, expand, reach an apex then decline and collapse. You can’t read it unless you’re a member, sadly, but it argues quite successfully that the cyclical view of empirical supremacy may be misguided.

The crux of the argument is that, while trends can build up over time that make an empire susceptible to collapse, the collapse itself is virtually always sudden, swift and decisive. Therefore, the long-standing trends that contributed to the collapse event in question cannot be usefully thought of as being factors of causation in the collapse; they are, in fact, common features in a complex system – which an empire will successfully encounter, navigate and expurgate plenty of over the course of a multi-century lifespan, potentially indefinitely. Thus, long-term trends of weakness that, in retrospect, appear to have presaged a collapse are in fact not signifiers of a structural weakness in systemic power nor proof that empire decline is cyclical or inevitable.

These seems to fly in the face of established reason and observed experience, but Ferguson shows that destabilising trends are only really noticeable when they successfully destabilise. Even then, their effects can be over-interpreted. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes takes a long view, ascribing said fall to factors ranging from the personality disorders of individual rulers to the rise of monotheism. Certainly, one factor that he highlights did play a significant role: the trend towards civil war, following the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180AD, never really went away. But to say that Rome’s decline stuttered along for 200 hears seems to misunderstand the nature of complex human society. By the time Rome got to the 4th Century it was no more collapsed than it had been in 180; it was simply changed, as a complex adaptive system should, from a normally functioning society dealing with one set of circumstances to a normally functioning society with another. Political intrigue, barbarian migration and Sassanid ambition were features of the times, but even at this stage the collapse of Rome was not a fait accompli.

The actual collapse of Rome can, according to Oxford historians Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins, be measured more or less exactly from 406, when Germanic invaders crossed the Rhine into Gaul and then Italy. Within 5 decades, the Western Roman Empire was dispossessed of most of its most valuable properties – including Carthage, Britain and most of Spain – and the population of Rome had collapsed by almost 75%.

This may seem like a slightly deterministic attitude. The drive to narrativise history compels us to question: can we really accept Sassanid expansion and civil war as simple influencers? Should we not also examine which Roman policies may have led to those trends achieving the prominence that they did? A fair question, as in its development Rome certainly provided space and encouragement for these trends to develop. The distinction is not to simply allow that “things happen”, however, but to differentiate between events that are the product of a complex system behaving normally (even if they produce outcomes that may appear to be desirable) and events that are the cause or product of a period of systemic collapse.

However fuzzy and ephemeral that distinction may appear, it’s important. States do not drift serenely from Arcadia to Apogee to Armageddon. The complex system that we call “Rome” encountered and subsumed many problematic factors in the course of its development – the threat posed by Hannibal of Carthage, or the transition from Republic to Empire. It survived those, but eventually succumbed to a sudden and catastrophic malfunction. From the perspective of learning from history, then, we can look to the civilisations of our own times – particularly the US – and think more broadly about the signs of impending collapse. There have been occasions when kingdoms have risen, dwindled, and then risen again; but final collapse tends towards the swift and definite.

50 years ago, the CIA drove a small French town mad for a day by spiking its bread with LSD.

In an ideal world, that would be totally made up. Sadly, it is apparently “for realsies”.

Here’s a list of the demands that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to “restore confidence” in the US-Israel relationship:

Earlier Sunday, Netanyahu continued to consult with the forum of seven senior cabinet ministers over a list of demands that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made in a telephone conversation Friday. ….Haaretz has learned that Clinton’s list includes at least four steps the United States expects Netanyahu to carry out to restore confidence in bilateral relations and permit the resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians.

1. Investigate the process that led to the announcement of the Ramat Shlomo construction plans in the middle of Biden’s visit. The Americans seek an official response from Israel on whether this was a bureaucratic mistake or a deliberate act carried out for political reasons. Already on Saturday night, Netanyahu announced the convening of a committee to look into the issue.

2. Reverse the decision by the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee to approve construction of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo.

3. Make a substantial gesture toward the Palestinians enabling the renewal of peace talks. The Americans suggested that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners be released, that the Israel Defense Forces withdraw from additional areas of the West Bank and transfer them to Palestinian control, that the siege of the Gaza Strip be eased and further roadblocks in the West Bank be removed.

4. Issue an official declaration that the talks with the Palestinians, even indirect talks, will deal with all the conflict’s core issues – borders, refugees, Jerusalem, security arrangements, water and settlements.

Zesty stuff. Like most (including Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren), I expected this crisis to run out of steam towards the end of last week. Instead, the US Administration is escalating. Netanyahu will not meet all four of those steps; he probably won’t even attempt to meet the second or third. It would be too strong a repudiation of his existing policies in this area. One wonders if the White House truly has the courage to fight the fight it’s picking.

Last week, Anna Arrowsmith (aka Anna Span) declared her intent to become the Lib Dem MP for Gravesham. Interesting in and of itself because she was Britain’s first female, and self-avowed feminist, pornographer – here’s the article for the Guardian in which she elaborated on her candidacy. She stands an very remote chance of winning – the seat’s a CON-LAB marginal, having gone Blue in 2005 with less than 700 votes to spare, and one in which the Dems have always come a distant third, but she’s had a lot of press since announcing last Thursday, and with a few thought-out media appearances and some considered policy talk, such a situation can ignite a candidacy.

Of course, badly thought-out appearances and ill-considered policy talk can go straight through ignition and all the way to immolation, but that’s the gamble. The Dems are casting the bones on the possibility that, off the back of the current Party Conference and the televised debates, they’re going to get some momentum going – and those indecisive Con-Lab marginals might just start thinking about third parties, especially those in the media glare.

Her candidacy has had exactly the reaction that you’d expect – Ann Widdecombe thinks that having a pornographer run for parliament is “inappropriate,” while leftie bloggers, like Hopi Sen, reject the fuss as middle-England’s usual strident puritanism, and in the meanwhile columnists in all sections of the media have fallen over themselves chortling at their own clever double entendres and witty conflations of politics and the sex trade.

All well and good, but personally, I’m not convinced that this is a question that really requires a moral dimension – I’m just interested in whether she’d make a good enough politican to be worth voting for. Initial signs aren’t promising; the Guardian article linked to above is, in fairness, a bit of a rambling, narcissistic mess. She claims that she can fix the Westminster boy’s club, on the grounds that she’s “been here before; last time [she] changed [her] industry for ever;” I must respectfully disagree. Anna Arrowsmith may have entered the pornography arena with the best of intentions, but it is no less grubby, fundamentally unrealistic and driven by underlying mysogyny than it ever was – if anything, it’s getting worse. One must question the judgement of anyone who thinks that a single person could fundementally change the nature of pornography from within.

On the other hand, it’s probably fairly safe to assume that she doesn’t have any skeletons in her closet. And she’d probably be a rather more worthwhile MP than the incumbent.

The site’s undergone some pretty major cosmetic changes. Opinions?

Vice President Joe Biden is not a happy man.

He went all the way to Israel to calm some tattered nerves, to salve some egos, to smooth some furrowed brows with talk of unshakable bonds and “happy ends” (don’t ask) – not to mention with an intent to kick-start a new round of “proximity talks” between Israel and the PLO.

And how was he greeted?

Well, I’m glad you asked! On the day that he arrived, Israel approved 1600 new housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of Jerusalem. Ramat Shlomo is itself a fairly new neighborhood in north Jerusalem that lies just west of the Arab neighborhoods of Shu‘afat and Beit Hanina, not far from the Shu‘afat refugee camp. What’s more, Harat Shlomo is an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) neighborhood. It’s east of the Green Line, of course – meaning that it’s well into what the international community would consider to be Palestinian territory – and not far from the East Jerusalem to Ramallah road.

Whatever the future of Jerusalem ends up being, though, this really looks like a deliberate affront to Biden. Netanyahu has disavowed all knowledge, and the stroy goes that Interior Minister Eli Yishai, who heads the hard-line Shas Party, was freelancing. This seems implausible, to say the least; Netanyahu’s hold on his coalition is not so shaky as to allow such an obvious and major insult to sneak through without clearance. It’s too overt; it’s as if someone in the Prime Minister’s office said to themselves, “Where could we approve new construction that would be the most offensive to the US right now?” Yes, Israel insists it has the right to build in all parts of Jerusalem, but the timing here looks like a blatant “in your eye, Joe” to the Vice President, and it sounds like he took it that way:

“I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel. We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them. This announcement underscores the need to get negotiations under way that can resolve all the outstanding issues of the conflict. The United States recognizes that Jerusalem is a deeply important issue for Israelis and Palestinians and for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We believe that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome that realizes the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem and safeguards its status for people around the world. Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues. As George Mitchell said in announcing the proximity talks, “we encourage the parties and all concerned to refrain from any statements or actions which may inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks.”

Pat Lang said it best:

Joe! Joe! If you kiss their butts and say that they are we and we are they, then you have to expect to be treated like the servant that you are. Just today you snuggled up to them and told the world that there is no “space between Israel and the US.” They took you at your word, that’s all. You got what you asked for.

The real question is: how far can Israel push before the US public allows its government to push back?

Hayek and Keynes were undeniably dudes.