Crossposted from European Tribune.

Which makes it five years in a row. So, do we get to keep the trophy soon?

Certainly, the greasy stuff and the current price thereof are not unrelated to this. Nor are developments in China. Nonetheless: among starboard supply-siders, especially across the pond, there is a sense that Scandinavian “socialism light” guarantees stagnation - if not even stagflation. Can they really account for the following without farcical distortion?

Crossposted from European Tribune; Booman Tribune; and My Left Wing.

According to a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), fetuses cannot feel pain until the last few weeks of a pregnancy, reports the BBC.

I find the latter assertion untenable. In philosophy, there are two rival conceptions of what a ‘right’ is. On one analysis it is a norm protecting some rational agent’s opportunity to choose in some specific respect. Clearly, this is out as far as fetuses are concerned, inasmuch as they are not yet rational agents. On the other, more inclusive analysis, a right is a norm protecting a certain interest of some being, whether a rational agent or not. This is more promising for a rights-based pro-life position, since it could be argued that a fetus does have interests worth protecting.

But which are the minimum conditions for having an interest? One such, it seems to me, must be the capacity to have experiences. There must be a way in which events in the world can impinge on your consciousness for better or for worse. Thus a cat, for instance, has interests, but a tree does not, because only the former (as far as we know) has any mental states at all.

Now, the most primitive experience conceivable is the experience of pain. If a nervous system can’t even support that, it’s reasonable to infer that it can’t support any experience. And since having experiences is a necessary condition for having interests, which in turn is a necessary condition for having rights, the fetus cannot have any rights, including the right to life, until its brain is more developed. If the current findings hold up, that is not until the 23rd week of pregnancy.

To be sure, it is wise to err on the side of caution, so one might want to subtract a few weeks from that. But this is incidental to my point.

Also note that, in my view, it will not do to argue that the fetus, if left alone in the womb, would later develop the neural wiring for sustaining experiences. Rights are not assigned retroactively. Suppose you learn that some tree in your garden will develop mental states within three weeks if you don’t cut it down. Does that imply that the plant has a “right to life” now? Surely not.

There are of course other ways than the rights-based one to argue for a ban on abortion. I believe they fail too; but that is for another day.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Juan Cole files another objection to what he calls “the ‘US out now’ mantra”:

Well. I for one do appreciate the latter and am skeptical of the mantra in question. Yet I also consider the current situation a civil war, as do many specialists in the field. Reports the Christian Science Monitor:

The paper notes that the standard definition of a civil war is a conflict with at least 1,000 battlefield casualties, involving a national government and at least one nonstate actor fighting for power. Iraq’s constitution, it suggests, could be seen as a draft ‘peace pact’ for warring parties.

By the way, a new deadline for a constitution has passed without agreement being reached.

The astute Ami Isseroff complained this week about “the mountain of publicity generated over the molehill of disengagement” in Gaza:

As Isseroff wearily explains:

Furthermore, he notes, Gaza was never a central part of Greater Israel; in Biblical times it belonged to the Phillistines. (I might add that its sole religious significance is as the setting for mass slaying of Phillistines by Samson; who, by the way, has been diagnosed with a serious mental disorder and may not be the worst conceivable symbol of the settlers.) Isseroff is aware, of course, that Sharon has played a gambit to prepare for annexing large chunks of the West Bank, which, unlike Gaza, is rather essential to the Greater Israel idea. He thinks, however, that the settler movement made a fatal error in taking a stand over the dispensable Gaza Strip instead of Jerusalem or Hebron:

Much as I hope this analysis is correct, I surmise the reason they made such a fuss about Gaza, despite having long realized that the cause is lost, was to send this message: “Behold, such is the hell we can raise over 8,000 settlers on a dusty patch of land peripheral to Jewish history and religion. Just imagine, then, the consequences of removing 220,000 from Judea and Samaria!”

And though the evacuation proceeded as smoothly as could be expected, that message may well have gotten through to the recipient - not Sharon, but any Israeli leader even contemplating full withdrawal from the West Bank. Which, in turn, is critical to a just peace.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Utterly lost in the news mix of recent weeks was the report that a left-wing Catalan party has questioned the Spanish government about the massive use of mustard gas against indigenous resistance in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco some 80 years ago - war crimes Spain has yet to acknowledge. Resentment lingers in the region, however, reinforced by claims that the gassing continues to render land inarable; and worse, give rise to rampant cancer.

Nowadays the claim to fame of the Rif, fittingly rhyming with ‘kif,’ is to be one of Europe’s chief providers of hashish. But it wasn’t always so. There are still people alive who remember the region as the center of perhaps the most astounding insurgency in modern history, whereby ragtag mountain fighters demolished an imperial army.

The Rif mountains are home to some 19 ethnic groups speaking Tarifit, one of the ancient Berber languages of North Africa.

Morocco was an independent state (and notorious pirate haven) when European imperialist powers set upon it in the late 19th century. The stiffest resistance to colonization was offered by Berber tribesmen: descendants of North Africa’s original inhabitants, who once ruled all the land between Morocco and Egypt. Making zealous converts to Islam after the Arab invasion, Berbers were largely responsible for the conquest of Spain in 711. This time around, however, their effectiveness was crippled by ethnic strife and the tenuousness of tribal alliances. By 1912 most of Morocco was a French protectorate. Spain controlled the northern fifth, owing much to a British wish of insulating Gibraltar from the French.

Yet the inhospitable Rif mountains, whose particularly defiant Berber tribes had only nominally acknowledged the Sultans of Morocco, remained unoccupied. When this was rumored to change in 1919, the Spanish-educated Abd al-Karim (1882-1963), a disillusioned former functionary in the colonial administration, began uniting the tribes against the invaders. The sophisticated al-Karim was helped by his brother Mohammad, a rousing military leader. In July 1921 Spanish troops under the command of the adventurous General Manuel Fernández Silvestre crossed the Amekran River despite warnings by al-Karim that this would be considered an act of war; supposedly, the General laughed at this notification.

By mid-afternoon they were surrounded by Rifi. After five days of siege, several hundred Spaniards were killed and the rest expelled at the cost of 8 or 9 Berber irregulars. This launched a fierce guerrilla campaign of raids, ambushes, and attacks on overextended supply lines. In three weeks, 3,000 Berbers armed with outdated flintlock rifles killed more than four times as many Spaniards as the Americans have lost during two years of war in Iraq. An additional 13,000 fled in panic, leaving behind enough cannons, guns, ammunition, and other gear to equip a minor army. The ‘disaster of Annual’ remains one of the most throroughly repressed events in 20th century Spanish history, and conversely, one of the most celebrated in North Africa.

The smell is terrible as the Spanish Foreign Legion enters Nador town on September 18, 1921, after the disaster of Annual.

Still aided by his loyal brother, Abd al-Karim proceeded to seize the entire Spanish zone, except a few coastal outposts such as Ceuta and Melilla, and control it for about five years. On February 1 1923 he proclaimed the Republic of the Rif, a constitutional state with a formal administration. A modern army of 80,000 men was created, complete with machine guns, howitzers, and hired defectors from the French Foreign Legion. Abd himself held the title of Emir, refusing that of Sultan.

It was the intervention of the increasingly worried French that would spell the doom of the Rif Republic. When they advanced on the Berbers, the latter chased them back almost as far as Fez. But in 1925 the French and the Spanish joined forces - some 235,000 in total - to finish off the rebels. The cast of characters is remarkable; the French commander being none other than Marshal Henri Phillippe Pétain and the leader of the first wave of Spanish troops, landing in the heartland of al-Karim’s tribe, being the Spanish Foreign Legion’s second in command, Colonel Francisco Franco. Pinched between these two fascist dictators in spe, the Republic of the Rif collapsed the following year, ending what has rightly been called “one of the more astonishing bids for self-determination by a people bearing the yoke of colonialism.”

Abd al-Karim was exiled to the island of Réunion, Napoleon-style, until 1947 when he settled in Cairo. He continued opposing French rule in the Maghreb until his death. In 1949, at the behest of Ho Chi Minh’s government, he appealed to North African troops fighting for France in Indochina (Vietnam): “The victory of colonialism, even at the other end of the world, is a defeat for us and a setback to our cause. The victory of liberty in any part of the world is our victory, the sign of our approaching independence.”

This history, though all but forgotten, is undisputed. More contentious are the oral traditions in the Rif insisting that the Spanish deployed chemical weapons to quell the Rifi. Old people have described how a ‘yellow smoke’ burned the skin, causing asphyxiation. Among them is the nearly 100 years old Mohammad Farji, who told Islam Online how “the sky was pouring sulfur-similar liquids, people went blind and frail, cattle perished and vast swathes of farmlands became wastelands.” If true, this would be an unacknowledged crime against humanity, since chemical arms were internationally banned through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919; the year Britain used similar methods in Iraq.

In his book Historia Secreta de Annual (Madrid, 1999), Spanish historian Juan Pando confirms the use of German-produced mustard gas in aerial attacks from 1923 on. Gas being the treacherous weapon it is, official records abound with names of poisoned Spaniards. (Presumably, such self-toxication had graver effects than the Rifi attempts at retaliation: throwing bombs filled with chili powder.) And Sebastian Balfour, a British historian, shows in his Deadly Embrace (London, 2002) that Spain deployed chemical weapons as early as 1921 and intensively from 1924, killing thousands. Balfour believes it is high time for Spain to recognize this and offer apologies to the victims, as demanded by Moroccan NGOs.

Locals allege that the chemical weapons, as well as inducing cancer, are still rendering farmland arid.

Some of the latter - notably the local Association for Toxic Gas Victims - go further, asserting that the war crimes still produce fresh victims today. According to the activists, hospital records reveal that 60 percent of Morocco’s prevalence of larynx and stomach cancer is found in the affected parts of the Rif. As Pando notes, however, no such long-term harm is seen after the much more intensive gas use in Europe during World War I. Hence, if the Rifi are indeed abnormally prone to cancer, this must have other causes. Regardless, belief in the mustard gas theory holds strong in the region. It has not helped that the Moroccan government repeatedly has banned international conferences to look into the matter.

Half-forgotten conflicts have a way of weaving themselves into current affairs. Interestingly, it is my understanding that the Moroccans arrested for the Madrid Central Station attacks are Berbers from northern Morocco. If so, and given how local grievances are being reinterpreted to fit the narrative of the West attacking Islam, it is not inconceivable that resentment of the Spanish poison gas and its supposed late effects was among the motivating factors. Abd al-Karim, who defeated the Spanish invaders under the banner of jihad, is certainly likely to have been an inspiration.

The legacy of imperialism lives on in other ways as well. As Lee Smith has pointed out on Slate in respect to the incomplete decolonization of Morocco: “If the Spanish electorate believed that committing 1,300 troops to Iraq had needlessly exposed it to the jihadists’ ire, it ought to reconsider the 6,000 Spanish forces stationed in Ceuta and Melilla.”

There is much to ponder for the once proud colonial power.

My defense of dining on whale, also posted elsewhere, gave rise to this e-mail from an American save-the-whales’er:

Now, I did find this is a little rude, so I fired back (quote in bold):

Response:

I’m not signed up for your forum, so I can’t answer in public, although I would have been glad to do so. You’re right, I didn’t read through the entire diary, though I will now. I find it next to impossible though, to justify the eating of whale, no matter how nutricious. And, by posting of your feast in public, you will encourage others to do so as well. I’m not sure what is behind all of this. It is difficult for me to fathom the desire to eat of such an intelligent, endangered animal. Frankly, it isn’t my concern that you take me seriously. I hope though, that you received info from others that might encourage you to reconsider. The whale is an endangered species. Yes, I know you ate one of the types that is not endangered. In my view, this personal advertisement of your meal will not aid efforts to protect the species as a whole. That is my view. There are many ways to obtain the nutrition through other types of food and suplements. Seaweed is an excellent source of all that is needed from the ocean. Please reconsider…

elizabeth

I replied:

This retort, it seems, exasperated my correspondent:

Why, thanks! My parting words:

Yet she just might have a point about my personality. If this (rather crude) blogger personality test is to be believed, I am the INTP (Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving) type:

Well then; I guess it’s in my nature to choose the whale steak over the seaweed. Sorry, Liz.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Sunday philosophical food for thought: I have translated an essay by Toril Moi, a Literature professor at Duke University, from the current edition of the weekly Morgenbladet. Those so inclined can skim the text, whose point is the succint existential question of the final paragraph.

Short note on the characters: Henrik Ibsen does not really need introduction. He is widely regarded as the creator of the modern drama and the second greatest playwright of all time; his masterworks like Ghosts, Rosmersholm, and The Wild Duck are constantly performed around the world in ever new interpretations. Once seen (or even read) they are never forgotten, and could easily affect your life.

Then there is… Paul Heyse. Whoever is this? Well, read on to find out.

In 1874 Georg Brandes [Danish progressive critic, tr. n.] was 32 years old and on his way to making a name for himself on the European cultural scene. Three years earlier he had already given the first in the long series of scandalous lectures collectively known as Major Streams in European Literature. In June 1874, Brandes visited Ibsen in Dresden, whence he continued on to Munich. In a letter to his mother he wrote disparagingly about Ibsen:

As I read this, I raised my eyebrows. Who on earth was this Heyse whom Brandes esteemed so much higher than Ibsen? My astonishment was unabated as I discovered that when Ibsen moved to Munich in the spring of 1875, he wrote Brandes of his “great keenness to make the acquiantance of Paul Heyse,” and asked Brandes to “put in a few good words” for him with Heyse. If this man was so impressive, how come I had never heard of him? A quick quiz among colleagues and friends revealed that I was far from the only one who didn’t know who he was. Curiosity drove me to do some research. What I found gave ample cause for reflection.

In 1875 Heyse, not Ibsen, was the grand celebrity. Paul Heyse (1830-1914) was actually Germany’s unrivaled literary lord. People would flock to Munich to meet with Heyse, who was often called Goethe’s successor.

Born in Berlin, Heyse grew up in a cultivated family with the nation’s foremost artists and intellectuals in its social circle. At the tender age of 24 he was summoned to be poet laureate at the court of Maximillian II, King of Bavaria. The assiduous Heyse never lacked inspiration: He wrote a total of 150 short stories, eight novels, more than sixty plays, and countless poems.

But Heyse was not just prolific; he was also handsome and charming, and in time, extremely rich. He was honest, principled, and loyal. He was magnetically attractive to women and a sympathetic and hospitable host to a whole network of famous male friends. His second wife was an 18 year old beauty from the high society of Munich. In 1873 he built a splendid Italianate villa with a big garden, in which Brandes was a frequent guest. Villa Heyse was the scene of a flourishing social life. One of Heyse’s many soirées was in honor of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson [Norwegian author and liberal intellectual, tr. n.], and Ibsen was often there. No wonder that Brandes, in sheer entrancement, wrote that Heyse is “the chosen favorite of the gods, Fortuna’s own spoiled child.”

Not only was Heyse respected, he was also a bestselling author. In 1897, Hjalmar Johansen [Norwegian polar explorer, tr. n.] wrote Heyse to thank him for the great reading joys he had given the crew of the Fram as they were drifting about up there in the icy nothingness. In 1910, as he turned 80, Heyse was knighted. In December that year he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Paul Heyse died in 1914. In 1920, he was forgotten.

Ibsen never won the Nobel Prize. He was not in the least magnetically attractive, neither to men nor to women. The older he got, the more asocial he became. In an 1875 letter to Brandes, Heyse reports that he has now finally met Ibsen, who appeared stiff, formal, private, and uneasy. Heyse himself was of course worldy-wise, relaxed, warm, and empathetic.

Last year I went to Munich. In the city’s finest book store I requested books by Paul Heyse. Noone had heard of him. At the house in Maximillianstrasse where Ibsen’s apartment used to be, there is a big memorial plate. There is none at Heyse’s villa, which I only found after a thorough quest. Most of the house had been converted to a lace factory. Within two meters of the windows on what was once the facade to the garden, there is now a wall. There is a Paul Heyse Street in Munich. The short street is located in a down-market district and ends, symbolically enough, in a black hole: a subway underneath the railroad.

The question I am now left with is this: Which life is preferable? Ibsen’s, or Heyse’s?

By Toril Moi 2005. Translation by Sirocco.

Crossposted from European Tribune and My Left Wing.

A confession: I had whale steak for dinner today. And it was delicious, too. Served with potatoes, fresh vegetables, mountain cranberries, and a good Merlot, the meat - a staple food in my childhood - was reminiscent of moose but even tastier. No doubt some international readers will take strong exception to my choice of dinner and the practice which makes it possible. Below is my apologia.

I shall limit my defense to the Norwegian hunt of minke whales - the only avowedly commercial whaling season at present. Thus I do not necessarily endorse, say, the Japanese hunt of various species that arguably are endangered, though some of the ethical arguments apply to whaling generally.

For starters, a few facts.

* Of the about 80 known species of whale, the only one hunted by Norwegians is the minke. This is the smallest of the baleen whales and one of the smallest overall, with a typical adult weight of 4-5 tons. Written sources confirm that minke whales have been hunted in Norwegian waters for at least 1,200 years, but the practice may well be significantly older.

* This notwithstanding, there are no indications that the minke whale has ever been endangered. Certainly it isn’t now: By the latest estimate from the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) - the intergovernmental body for regulating whaling, more on which below - there are 112,000 specimens in the North East Atlantic alone. The Norwegian government sets annual quotas by an internationally uncontroversial, conservative method for calculating sustainable harvests. The latter is applied by the country’s own maritime researchers, who are leading in the field and operate independently of the government and commercial interests. This year’s season, to close on August 31, has a total quota of 797.

* Contrary to myth among certain activists, the Norwegian hunt is consistent with international law. The reason is that Norway lodged an objection to the moratorium on commercial whaling passed by the IWC in 1982, which exempts it from the ban under existing rules. Norway objected because the ban ignored the advice of the Scientific Committee and so contradicts the IWC’s express purpose: not to abolish whaling, but “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and the orderly development of the whaling industry.” Nevertheless, the hunt was not resumed until 1993, after the IWC repeatedly refused to evaluate the effects of the ban with an eye to establish new quotas as the agreement schedules for 1990 “at the latest.” The then PM, Gro Harlem Brundtland - formerly chair of the World Commission of Environment and Development - asked rhetorically upon announcing the decision in 1992:

* Though whaling is of no national economic importance, it fills a need for supplemental income during the summer on the part of many local fishing communities, especially in the far north. Proceeds from the sale of meat allow people to carve out a living in a region where agriculture and manufacturing are not viable alternatives. The small coastal vessels used, typically family owned, are converted fishing boats between 50 and 80 feet long, staffed by the owner along with a crew of two to seven. Only modern grenade harpoons are used, and only by governmentally licensed hunters who must pass an annual proficiency test.

* The hunt enjoys solid popular support across the political spectrum. Most Norwegians regard it as a natural and sensible harvesting of marine resources conducted as a matter of national sovereignty, and view the protest as so much irrational, sentimental clap-trap. There is no domestic anti-whaling movement; all the leading environmentalist groups support the hunt. Even the local branch of Greenpeace declined to set sail this season: The whaling brouhaha, it explained, distracts from real environmental issues like the pollution of the seas. As to the international protest, this has been subsiding lately to the extent that a DC lobbyist on the Norwegian government’s payroll since 1995 was laid off this year.

And now for the ethical arguments. Assuming that the Norwegian hunt is indeed sustainable, I will consider two main objections to same. The first one has three subdivisions.

1. Some claim it is inherently wrong to kill whales for food, regardless of whether this is sustainable or not. I will not argue here that they are necessarily mistaken. However, I will argue that their claim, to have any merit, must at least be consistently applied to all animals unless relevant ethical distinctions can be made. After all, the farm animals most of us eat on a weekly or daily basis are also killed prematurely, indeed, often in infancy; without a chance to avoid this fate; and frequently in violation of their trust in human beings. How exactly is whaling any more problematic than this? Why is the production of a whale burger (see photo) any more objectionable than that of a Whopper?

a) A common reply centers on the ’special beauty’ of cetaceans. But really that is hopeless on so many levels. First, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For instance, the foremost anti-whaling nation happens to be Australia, where kangaroos are legally slaughtered by the millions every year for meat and hides. Apparently the ‘cuteness’ of the kangaroo, which has made it the world’s most readily recognized symbol next to the Statue of Liberty, is insufficient in Australian eyes to end this practice. Second, to measure moral worth by visual appeal obviously leads down a dismal ethical road. Are the lives of physically attractive people more worth than others, for example? Surely not.

b) Somewhat more promising are arguments from whale intelligence, since most would agree that a high level of awareness is one quality that counts against the slaughter of any creature. Thus opponents of whaling note that certain cetaceans, specifically dolphins, score well on animal IQ tests. This, they suggest, boosts the likelihood that their relatives such as the minke whale have rich inner lives that should not be ended. There are several problems here, however. For one thing, while dolphins are undoubtedly among the smartest animals around, their cognitive capacity has proven extremely difficult to gauge. Apparently, all that can be said with certainty is that they are at least as smart as canines, although they tend to score lower than ferrets on tests of set inference. Secondly, bulkier whales - and especially the minke, a solitary species - do not exhibit the signs of intelligence found in certain species of dolphins. At present there is no scientific basis for ascribing to these a significantly higher intelligence than say, that of cattle, routinely butchered everywhere except in India. There is certainly nothing to indicate that minke whales are smarter than pigs, who are sometimes claimed, like dolphins, to have the intelligence of human toddlers.

Arguably, no complex animals should be killed, to be on the safe side. But a global moratorium on this has yet to be proposed; and absent that, a special prohibition of whaling is double standards.

c) At this point, anti-whalers often take refuge in an argument from redundancy. Whaling for meat, they maintain, is especially bad because ‘unnecessary’ to feed human beings. It is true that whaling is unnecessary in this respect, but so is all meat production under modern conditions. Plainly, since a vegetarian lifestyle is now easy to pursue, no meat is a necessary commodity in developed countries: Lamb chops and pork, no less than whale steak, are conveniences. And a whale kill provides more meat than does the slaying of other animals. Going vegan on ethical grounds may be admirable, but non-vegans are in no obvious position to condemn sustainable whaling, while even vegans should have no more of a beef with this than with other ways of obtaining flesh.

Especially not if they count themselves environmentalists: Whaling burns less fuel per unit meat produced than other kinds of meat production. In fact, producing a kilo of beef requires 30 times more energy than the harvest of a kilo of minke whale meat. Besides, the latter does not pollute the ground, erode the soil, or release methane into the atmosphere.

2. The other line of argument is concerned not with the killing of whales per se but with the suffering inflicted in the process. Undeniably, the putting to death of a whale involves a measure of suffering, and the question of whether this measure is acceptable is a serious one. In the Norwegian season of 2002/3, where inspectors clocked the time to death for every animal, an estimated 80 percent died instantaneously; the average time to death was about two minutes. Acceptable, or inhumane?

There may be no objective answer to that. What is clear, though, is that the methods of Norwegian whaling are at least as humane as those employed in other forms of big game hunting with respect to both death times and accidental maiming. So far I have heard of no international movement against, say, the Norwegian moose hunt (and how about those Australian kangaroos?).

Most importantly, compared to the standard way of meat production in the developed world - factory farming, whereby animals are locked up in concentration camps for their entire lives and denied basic natural behavior - whaling seems vastly superior in terms of animal welfare. As the philosopher Peter Sandøe, leader of the Danish Ethical Council concerning Animals, told the Danish newspaper Politiken on November 7 1993, in connection with the resumption of Norwegian whaling:

In Norway, I might add, there are severe restrictions on the industrial keeping of livestock, including limits on how much milk any cow can produce and an effective ban on the intensive confinement of sows. Now, it is of course possible that whaling and factory farming are both reprehensible practices which a more enlightened posterity will contemplate with horror. If so, the wrongness of the one does not justify the other. But there remain, after all, those wise words in Matthew 7 about the moat in one’s brother’s eye versus the beam in one’s own. The calls in such countries as Australia and the USA, both of which produce most of their meat in brutal factories, to impose sanctions on Norway over its harvest of minke whales do have an air of surreality about them. From an environmentalist perspective, furthermore, one feels that both should first get around to signing the Kyoto Agreement before lecturing others on green values.

In conclusion, while I am open to debate and may conceivably change my mind, I submit, with suitable trepidation, that my choice of dinner was legitimate as well as tasty.

Crossposted from European Tribune.

Mauritania’s army and internal security forces seized power today in a coup, taking advantage of President Maaoya Sid’Ahmed Taya being away for King Fahd’s funeral. The military junta, which calls itself the ‘Military Council for Justice and Democracy,’ claims to have deposed an oppressive regime and pledges to keep free and fair elections within two years. About the former it may be right; but there is no queue to bet one’s last euro on the latter.

A former French colony on the southwestern fringe of North Africa, Mauritania has a tiny population of 2,8 million and the world’s lowest population density. It was never a tremendous magnet for visitors either: “To some, this place is the pits - sand and an overwhelming sense of revulsion,” concludes the ingress to the chapter on Mauritania in Lonely Planet’s guide to Africa. At least the sand part can hardly be argued with. More than 80 % of the country is arid and the Sahara is encroaching on the rest.

There is also petroleum, estimated at more than a billion barrels of oil and 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas. Crude is expected to flow next year, with the usual problematic that entails for a third world country plagued by inequality and rampant corruption even at the outset.

Though officially abolished several times, an 800-year old practice of brutal racist chattel slavery persists in the east. Estimates of the slave population run from 100,000 to a million. Largely, if not exclusively, the slave owners are light-skinned Moors while the slaves are black. Since the institution officially does not exist, the organizations that oppose it have been banned. Mauritania is thus the only country where anti-slavery activists are prosecuted by the police.

The now deposed President Maaoya Sid’Ahmed Taya seized power in 1984 in a bloodless coup, ruling as a military dictator until 1992 when he was elected under a new, democratic constitution established by referendum the year before. He has since been reelected twice in polls the opposition has boycotted and condemned as fraudulent.

In recent years Taya, aligned with the US in the ‘war on terror,’ has been clamping down on Islamist opposition in the guise of ‘fighting terrorism.’ His government claimed to have foiled three attempted coups since 2003. But according to a report by the International Crisis Group, the noted Brussels-based think tank, there is little to connect the opposition with al-Qaeda. Rather, as is usual in the region, moderate Islamists have been denied democratic participation by the regime.

Stay tuned; Mauritania may have more surprises in store.

Crossposted from European Tribune and Booman Tribune.

Part I here.

Non-production and -supply of nuclear material

Yet another of the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to by the five recognized nuclear weapons states in 2000 is the creation of a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, informally known as ‘fiss-ban.’ Since the beginnings of the NPT, such a ban on the production of fissile material has been seen by the non-nuclear countries as a milestone toward the nuclear disarmament mandated by Article VI. Additionally, it was viewed as the best hope of bringing the three nuclear weapons states refusing to join the NPT - Israel, India, and Pakistan - into the nonproliferation regime. By ratifying a fiss-ban treaty, they would agree to freeze their nuclear capabilities at fairly modest levels.

To these ends, as well as to guard against nuclear terrorism, President Clinton first proposed the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty in 1993, vowing to “press for an international agreement that would ban production of these materials [highly enriched uranium and plutonium] for weapons forever.” That hopeful prospect was one of the incentives motivating non-nuclear states to accept an indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995.

When the five acknowledged nuclear powers promised a fiss-ban at the NPT review in 2000, it was meant to be an effectively verifiable one. Indeed, the stance of most countries is that it must have a verification mechanism, administered for example by the IAEA, to be at all credible. However, a year ago, in a sudden reversal of policy that baffled arms control experts and put the US at odds with close allies like Australia, Canada, and Japan, the Bush administration saw fit to discard the principle of ‘trust but verify.’ The Washington Post reported:

Which may well have been the goal. The move seems designed to benefit a select group of US allies: Israel, India, and, paradoxically, the latter’s arch-enemy Pakistan, whose fleet of nuclear delivery-capable F16s the Bush administration has been replenishing since 2002. Thus, besides the betrayal of its commitment to the non-nuclear countries, it callously boosts the South Asian arms race, which puts billions at risk from what a fresh report by the Congressional Research Service identifies as the most likely prospect for the future use of nuclear weapons by states.

Last month, in another radical about-turn undermining fiss-ban and reversing decades of US non-proliferation policy, President Bush unilaterally recognized India as a nuclear power. He did so by agreeing to share civilian nuclear technology with India, dropping the sanctions imposed on it since its 1998 underground tests. Thus he also ditched the fundamental principle that nuclear technology can only be shared if there are guarantees that it will not fuel nuclear arms production. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation nailed it:

Implementation of the agreement would break domestic US law, but Bush has pledged to lobby for these laws to be amended. Robert Einhorn, formerly the State Department’s top nonproliferation official, told an American Enterprise Institute program that the nuclear agreement will make it harder to advocate stricter rules for Iran and North Korea. “The administration lowered the bar too far,” he said.

The US move is widely seen as a geostrategic attempt to counterbalance China, which in result is less likely to join a future fiss-ban treaty even in the declawed form promoted by the USA. In one sense, however, the move merely codifies established policy, inasmuch as the sr. Bush administration sold at least 1,500 nuclear dual-use items to Israel despite requirements under the NPT that the existing nuclear powers not help another country’s nuclear weapons program ‘in any way.’

Needless to say, the jr. Bush administration continues the US policy of shielding Israel from pressures to sign the NPT and open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the IAEA - as Iran has done long ago and even North Korea is now signaling willingness to do. The policy contradicts US acceptance of the 1991 UN Security Council Resolution 687 with “the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons.”

The hypocrisy over Israel led to much contention at the NPT Review Conference in New York in May this year, where even close US allies like Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel, found it unacceptable. But perhaps the most vexing issue was one that the Bush administration declined to discuss at all: ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

Like the fiss-ban treaty but even more so, the CTBT has been seen as key to nuclear disarmament for over four decades. A complete ban on nuclear tests, it would prevent the nuclear quintet from developing new nuclear weapons, which only self-imposed moratoria on testing currently do. When the NPT was extended in 1995, the non-nuclear signatories - including Iran - agreed to do so on the background of the nuclear powers’ promise soon to finalize a CTBT.

Again, Clinton blazed the trail: Having lobbied hard for the treaty, he became the first world leader to sign it on September 24, 1996. And again, Republicans proceeded to quash his achievements. On October 13, 1999, the Republican Senate majority rejected ratification. Subsequently the Bush administration has not only refused to ask the Senate to reconsider but declared, in August 2001, that it will not provide financial or technical support for on-site inspections related to the treaty.  

It refused to allow ratification to even be discussed at the May 2005 review conference in New York, although such ratification is one of the 13 steps agreed to in 2000 and the treaty is ratified by 122 countries including all other NATO countries and Russia.
According to European diplomatic sources, progress toward a joint statement at the May 2005 conference foundered during the final days as the US refused to meet a Russian demand to promote the CTBT. The resultant non-result of the conference was described by delegates from around the world as “extremely regrettable” (Japan), “profoundly disappointing” (Norway), “unfortunate” (Ukraine), and a source of “frustration” (Chile and Brazil). One of the more instructive comments was made by the President, Sergio de Queiroz Duarte. Asked if the United States had been fully committed to success, he replied that every party to the Treaty was fully committed to the success of the Conference, “as each participant defines success.”

Quite so: Not a single high-ranking US official bothered to attend. According to the May 11 issue of Newsweek, US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton - now the recess appointee to the post of ambassador to the United Nations - cut off pre-conference negotiations six months in advance.

Non-deployment against non-nuclear states

Bolton, to be sure, has never missed a chance to sabotage the vision of a world free from nuclear fears. Back on February 21 2002, he single-handedly repealed the 24-year-old US pledge, issued by the Carter administration, not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. On the next day, a State Department spokesman dutifully reaffirmed US commitment to the pledge. But it soon turned out that Bolton may have been more forthright, or better informed. For the following month, a leaked Pentagon report revealed contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria and Libya. The plan “identified four areas where the US should be prepared to press the button”:

More disconcerting contingency plans were to be revealed. According to the Washington Post, in January 2003 Bush charged the Strategic Command (or Stratcom) with preparing a pre-emptively focused plan ignoring the 1978 ‘negative assurance.’ This is a plan for a ‘full-spectrum global strike,’ which Bush secretly defined as “a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives.” And sure enough; on March 15 this year, the Pentagon placed on its public Web site the ‘Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations,’ the executive summary of which declares that the line between nuclear and conventional attack has been obliterated and that the “integration of conventional and nuclear forces is therefore crucial to the success of any comprehensive strategy.”

Conclusion

So where, in all this, is the NPT with its vision of, and legally binding commitment to, a phasing out of nuclear weapons? Shockingly if unsurprisingly, the Bush administration has suggested that the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to in 2000 is now merely a ‘historical document.’ And presumably, so is the Non-Proliferation Treaty, negotiated by terminal enemies at the height of the Cold War but relegated to the dustbin of history by the winner - except for the bits that suit its interest.

The last Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, who contributed more than anyone to ending the Cold War on peaceful terms, does not mince his words:

Among the many who echo his words is one of the architects of US nuclear policy in the postwar era, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Robert S. McNamara:

This, then, is the moral context in which it is strongly rumored that top elected officials in the Bush administration are preparing, not just for sanctions, but for military action against Iran - a country which has not yet been proven to violate the NPT and which, even if it does in fact seek a nuclear deterrent, is only doing so to forestall such illegal invasion as the US carried out against its neighboring country based upon trumped-up charges of having weapons of mass destruction.

Which brings us back to Bush’s lofty words in March: “We cannot allow rogue states that violate their commitments and defy the international community to undermine the NPT’s fundamental role in strengthening international security.” Or, as he put it in February 2004: “See, free societies are societies that don’t develop weapons of mass terror and don’t blackmail the world.”

Good to know.

Crossposted from European Tribune and Booman Tribune.

As Iran begins preparations for the resumption of uranium processing, the US is repeating its threats of imposing sanctions through the UN Security Council. “We cannot allow rogue states that violate their commitments and defy the international community to undermine the NPT’s fundamental role in strengthening international security,” President Bush insisted recently.

As we approach the 60 years anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki annihilations, it is time for some perspective. Notably, it is time to reflect on how, while pretending to do the opposite, the Bush administration has waged total war on the precarious international framework for nuclear arms limitation. In so doing it has not merely violated legally binding commitments, but effectively thwarted humanity’s hope of a world free - or at the very least, nearly so - from nuclear weapons.

35 years ago, on March 5, 1970, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entered into force. Eventually ratified by all but three countries on earth, it would be the most widely recognized arms limitation agreement ever. The US, having of course been vitally involved in the negotiations, had signed it as soon as it was opened for signature on July 01 1968. The NPT was to be implemented with the help of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and reviewed in special conferences every five years.

In brief, the NPT allows only five states to have nuclear weapons: the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China. These five - aka the permanent members of the UN Security Council - agree not to transfer nuclear weapons technology to others, who agree not to seek to develop nuclear weapons. But importantly, that is not all. In return for the vast majority of countries forever forswearing the right to have nuclear forces, the five also agreed agreed in Article VI of the NPT eventually to get rid of theirs.

While little known, especially in the US, this requirement is not in dispute. It was a central premise when on May 11 1995, the Cold War firmly behind them, 170 countries made the historic decision to extend the treaty indefinetely. And in 1996, the International Court of Justice unanimously held that Article VI obligates states to “bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.” Indeed, the five recognized nuclear weapon states recommitted themselves to this goal at the 30-year Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York, May 2000.

At this conference, all parties adopted by consensus a Final Document containing a Programme of 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament, including “an unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” These 13 steps are quite specific. They include the ratification of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT); negotiations on a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty; the preservation and strengthening of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty; nuclear disarmament by unilateral and multilateral means; and a “diminishing role for nuclear weapons in security policies.”

For a while, a spirit of optimism prevailed. Then the Bush administration took office, followed half a year later by 9/11. And suddenly the nuclear night engulfed us once again. As the International Herald Tribune would later observe:

The world was astonished. Shocked nuclear arms advocates noted how this “makes a mockery of 30 years of US commitments” under the NPT. Nevertheless, just four months later, as if nothing whatsoever had happened, Bush thundered in a graduation speech at West Point: “We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them.”

Let us look at some of the ways in which the United States has since systematically broken, not to say trampled on, the NPT and the 13 Practical Steps agreed upon in 2000. To begin with, there is the question of nuclear disarmament, or lack thereof.

Disarmament

Although no conceivable threat requires the US to maintain more than a few hundred warheads - for instance, fewer than 200 would suffice to annihilate Russia - the US maintains, fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, some 10,350 such. Of these, 5,300 are considered active and no less than 4,530 are strategic. 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch within minutes. Unbelievably, the average US warhead has a destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, which killed 200,000 people sixty years ago.

There has, to be sure, been some progress. On May 24, 2002, President Bush and President Putin signed to great fanfare the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (SORT), which requires both sides to shrink their deployed strategic nuclear warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012. However, if one reads the fine print, it turns out that SORT does not actually reduce nuclear forces! Flaunting one of the 13 Practical Steps - the ‘Principle of Irreversibility,’ which calls for the physical destruction of weapons by sawing up or otherwise - it merely requires a change in operational status. Each side can keep unlimited numbers in storage. And, as the Union of Concerned Scientists (USC) points out:

Thus, as one analyst expressed it, either party could defer cuts until December 31, 2012, at which point violations would be moot because the treaty expires on that day. And unlike most arms control agreements, either party can withdraw upon three months notice without any reason, whereas traditionally, abrogation requires six months notice and is only allowed if supreme national interests are threatened. To put the whole treaty into perspective, even if it survives and is fully complied with, the projected US and Russian arsenal in 2012 has a destructive power approximately 65,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb.

The Bush administration clearly wanted it this way. In a 2003 gesture of less than good faith, the US rejected Russian proposals to further reduce both nations’ nuclear stockpiles to 1,500 each. The USC sums it up: “Instead of ‘liquidating the Cold War legacy,’ this treaty has effectively locked-in the most dangerous leftover Cold War threat.”

This is not all. In the words of the Arms Control Association:

Anyhow, as stated in its Nuclear Posture Review and confirmed by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush administration plans to maintain some 6,000 warheads indefinitely and will retain its 2,000 active warheads on alert, able to be launched in a matter of minutes. Aside from the continuing menace of nuclear holocaust this represents, it is not exactly cheap. The US is now spending some $40 billion a year on its nuclear forces, far more than the total military spending for most countries and nearly a tenth of its own. It is also a stunning 150 per cent increase over its nuclear weapons spending during the Cold War.

To cap it off: In direct contradiction to the agreement on a ‘diminishing role for nuclear weapons in security policies,’ the US government is evidently preparing to develop a new class of such devices.

Abstention from further armament

In 1994, the US Congress wisely passed a law barring US research and development of a new low-yield weapon with a yield of 5 kilotons (1/3 Hiroshima bomb) or less. The law aimed to discourage other countries from developing such user-friendly ‘mini-nukes.’ In its FY2004 budget request, however, the Department of Defense requested a repeal of this law, which the Senate approved on May 20, 2003. The reason can only be that the US government intends to proceed with development of new nuclear weapons.

And indeed, the Bush administration has requested funding in its 2006 budget in order to continue research of nuclear ‘bunker busters’ under the Air Force-led Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) Project. The Senate recently voted 53-43 to fund this study with $4 million (though it did reject, for now, an additional $4.5 million for modifying the B-2 bomber to carry the weapon).

The RNEP is no academic exercise: The Department of Energy’s 2005 budget included a five-year projection of $484.7 million for US weapons laboratories to complete a warhead design and begin production by 2009. Nor is it necessarily a question of mini-nukes. According to the UCS, designers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory intend to use the 1.2-megaton B83 nuclear bomb - the USA’s largest, about 100 times more devastating than the Hiroshima one - in a more massive casing. This despite the fact that analysis by independent scientists, including Dr. Michael May, a former director of Lawrence Livermore, shows that such a weapon would be more likely to disperse than destroy any chemical or biological agents, and would generate nuclear fallout potentially killing millions.

But even if much smaller warheads are used, a congressionally established panel of the National Academy of Sciences recently concluded that “earth penetrating nuclear weapons cannot go deep enough to avoid massive casualties at ground level, and they could still kill a million people or more if used in heavily populated areas.” The study found that a bunker-buster, due to the huge amount of radioactive debris, would not be much better at sparing people nearby than an above-ground nuclear warhead of the same yield.

The ABM Treaty

Another of the 13 Practical Steps concerned preservation and strengthening of the 1972 ABM Treaty, a cornerstone of international arms control that limited the anti-ballistic missile systems defending against missile-delivered nuclear warheads. Seeking to maintain the balance of power implicit in the mutual nuclear deterrence of the superpowers, it marked a decisive change for the better in US-Soviet relations.

However, during his 2000 campaign, George W. Bush promised to resurrect the gargantuan ‘Star Wars’ missile defense program dreamed up by Reagan (though originally proposed by a team of conservative science fiction writers). He pledged to offer Russia amendments to modify the ABM Treaty. This he never bothered to do: On June 13, 2002, the United States officially withdrew from the Treaty in order to pursue the shield.

The missile defense idea is quite ridiculous. It has so far cost some $100 billion without yielding a deployable system, let alone one that guarantees effective protection against constantly evolving, and far more flexible, missile technology. Also it is useless against nuclear terrorism and probably even against deployment by small states, who are more likely to, say, launch cruise missiles from merchant ships off the coast than send up ICBMs. Insofar as it works, however, the missile shield is widely understood to be an offensive weapon because it would immunize the US to the nuclear deterrents of other countries, leaving it free to use conventional force against them. Consequently, it gives these other countries an incentive to beef up said deterrents as much as it takes.

The US intelligence community warned in 2002 that the abrogation of the ABM Treaty could lead to an increase in the number of warheads China deploys on long-range ballistic missiles from about 20 today to 75-100 by 2015. And indeed, some observers interpreted statements by US National Security Advisor (now Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice to suggest that the US would not mind an expansion of China’s arsenal allowing it to overwhelm the future US missile shield.

Part II here.