On The Margins

Tuesday November 13, 2007

[ Economics ] Wars' Cost

Josh White of The Washington Post summarizes the findings of "The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War," a report issued by the Democratic staff of U.S. Congress's Joint Economic Committee. I do not believe the cost analysis takes account of the immeasurable human toll involved.

If, instead of a dogged focus on imperial goals powered by fear, people demanded that this money be spent, prudently, on making U.S. economy more competitive, i.e. if they demanded that government-driven investments be focused on people, institutions, facilities and technologies that help people get on with their lives, work and play, the U.S. would not be facing the economic problems it is facing now and will be in a much better economic, political and social position globally.

2007-11-13 18:17:33.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Thursday September 20, 2007

[ Art (هنر) ] Zero Degree Turn -- Persian TV mini-Series

Farnaz Fassihi of The Wall Street Journal ("Iranian Unlikely TV Hit"), Washington Post, Nasser Karimi of Associated Press ("Iran's Newest Hero Aids WWII Era Jews"), a certain teenage family member ("Persian Stuff: Zero Degree Turn") and now NPR ("Romance on Iranian TV Crosses Cultures") have all published stories and bits and pieces about "Zero Degree Turn," an Iranian TV mini-series shot in Paris and Budapest.

The mini-series involves a love story between an Iranian-Palestinian Muslim man and a French Jewish woman during World War II. It is based on the true story of an Iranian student-diplomat in Paris who saved some 1,000 French Jews by issuing Iranian passports to them as a means of passage to the safety of neutral Iran.

YouTube seems to have some pieces of some of the episodes. I hear that the theme song of the mini-series has become quite a hit in Iran, and every Monday night people gather to watch it. Here, in the U.S. it broadcasts every Friday night on JJTVN through free satellite connection.

(I also ran into a CNN character and political analysis of the mini-series on YouTube. Unfortunately, it was grossly, almost purposefully, inaccurate. While commenting on the mini-series, the reporters don't even bother with getting any of the characters correctly and blatantly confuse very minor characters for the major ones. However, I am hardly surprised. Much of the mainstream media's bar on accuracy in reporting on Iran remains fixed shamefully low.) 

2007-09-20 23:52:18.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Wednesday August 08, 2007

[ Society ] Sometimes, pictures ...

Sometimes, pictures can tell or cover-up whole stories—more than any news report or any press conference can.

In the English-speaking world, John Berger, more than any art critique I know, has shown how pictures and looking can disclose a great deal about events, people and places. (See his Ways of Seeing and class of the same name by Professor Lori Landay at UC Berkeley.)

When I write this entry, i.e. during lunch hour on August 8, 2007, two of the three pictures above are less than 24 hours old.

What do these pictures tell you?
 

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Saturday May 12, 2007

[ Economics ] Security Consequences of Urban Planning

Modern urban planning in the U.S., as it has been conceived and implemented in the urban sprawl since WWII, poses serious security concerns that arise from its economic vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities are both explicit, in terms of direct transaction costs such as transportation to work, and more implicit, in terms of aggregate and individual worker productivity. Thus, did The Economist ("In a Jam," May 5, 2007, p. 38) describe the situation in the area where I live:

[The] Bay Area is not set up like a European metropolis. Most suburbanites have quite a drive just to get to an underground station, and must then win a vicious struggle for parking to make it onto a train.

The description fits well with my family's experience here.

In major American cities, workers have to drive long distances (of the order of 80 - 200 km / day) from home to work and back, and a significant increase in gas prices, without a similar increase in better communications technologies (that allow people to reduce trips to work to compensate for other losses) or a similar increase in energy efficiency of automobiles (at the same unit price) can cause perturbations towards lower growth rates.

Lack of adequate and efficient public transportation is not limited to major cities. One in eight who live in the U.S. live in California, just as I do. The state by itself has consistently accounted for one of the top 10 largest GDPs in the world for multiple decades, and it drives the U.S. economy with its vast consumption, tax base, farming and real estate, not to mention high technology. And yet, there are no super fast trains connecting any of its major metropolitan areas together: Los Angeles, Orange County, San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento Valley, etc.

The economic inflexibility of urban sprawl leads not only to higher overall transaction costs throughout the economy but also to instabilities in various sectors. For example, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that 51 leading retail store chains have reported a collective 2.3% decline in same-store sales. Michael Niemira, chief economist of the New York-based International Council of Shopping Centers says this is the weakest showing since he began tracking the closely watched industry measure of performance in 1970. People have blamed this on a soft housing market, bad wheather in March, a fast Easter or fuel prices. Fuel prices and a soft housing market seem to be the most likely explanations for why this drop has been as large as it has been. While the real estate industry benefits from generally cheap gas prices (which lead to better possibilities for greater urban sprawl) and may be willing to go to war for it (observe how the representatives of American economic power offered almost universal support, in 2002-2003, for aggression against and occupation of Iraq), the spending for war might come back to bite the real-estate and other industries in the form of rampant deficits and inflation, higher interest rates, higher fuel prices and general asset attrition. One would expect that the economic elites and political leaders of a super power to comprehend that peace, justice, stability and truly open commerce (of course, not in commerce of aggressive war machinary) remain the solid base and the best guarantors of mutual understanding and development, economic vitality and growth. However, "stability" is often confused with the extension of imperial rule. In the meantime, a rampant political jargon and an infected moral language equates mass aggression with liberation, injustice with natural rights, murder with "collatoral damange," etc. Such infection of moral language, publicly spread, will always fog people's minds and provide a kind of self-belief among the elites to perpetuate the rule of what becomes a militaristic economy unashamedly pursuing its ends until it exhausts all resources at its disposal (and reaches its own end) at a huge toll in human life and well-being.

2007-05-12 08:16:40.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Saturday March 31, 2007

[ History ] Inquisition, Fact and Fiction

Some say The Inquisition ended centuries ago. They may be right but, in 21st century, torture (depending on how you define torture) continues as a means to extract the required confessions from the victims. Whether the confessions are truth or false, may matter not, as long as they perpetuate the necessary fears and the required propaganda.

2007-03-31 00:20:06.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Wednesday January 10, 2007

[ History ] Modern Diplomacy

The "gunboat diplomacy" which was a constant feature of British Empire's 19th and 20th century dealings with Persia has been picked up for a dreamy revival by the new empire -- a dream that this time may prove ready to turn into a real nightmare! Other perspectives seeing recent developments in the U.S. occupation of Iraq can be found here, here, here and here. President Bush's speech can be found here. (Unfortunately, the latter speech blames others for the problems caused directly by the occupation and the consequent and gradual destruction of Iraq's civil society. It seems that Iraq must bleed more before it is left to its own account: "We must expect more American and Iraqi casualties"!) Financial Time's editorial about the same, can be found here. The Washington Post reports the story and some poll results here and elsewhere in an editorial. Unfortunately, the editorial, while advocating some pragmatism, accepts some of the fiction told earlier repeating several false mantras when it comes to the region.

The WP also carries Zbigniew Brzezinski's column analyzing the president's speech. Of the old guard of U.S. diplomacy, he has the keenest view of the trends in the region. He observes: "America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq. But the age of colonialism is over. Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating. That is the fatal flaw of Bush's policy." [Some have produced evidence that Brzenzinski, who served in President Carter's administration, was the American diplomat who gave the green light to Saddam to attack Iran when Iran had disbanded its military after the revolution and the hostage crisis. See for example, Noam Chomsky's Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There (1982 edition). So, Brzezinski is no dove.]

2007-01-10 18:53:09.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Monday January 08, 2007

[ Society ] Green Colonialism

[Preamble: Before asking me again why I've written about something that might be construed as political, see my note on our social taboos here.] 

Guy Dinmore, the Washington reporter for Financial Times, has today (January 8, 2007) written one of his best pieces of journalism about the largest embassy in the World being finished in Baghdad.

It is not the Saudi, Iranian, Turkish or Syrian embassy in Baghdad whose acreage puzzles Dinmore. One would expect these neighboring countries to have large embassies in Iraq. If not for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, these countries would probably continue to have even larger trade with their neighbor.  (All accounts seem to point to the fact that such trade continues despite the new barriers.) For example, Iranian durable goods were reported to be flooding Baghdad bazars before the U.S. invasion and for quite some time after it. (This trend may in fact be continuing. As a larger-scale example, Iran continues to provide electric energy to Iraq.) History also has some facts that would suggest Iraq's neighbors may probably want to maintain larger embassies in Baghdad. Baghdad was built with the remains of Persia's capital (Ctesiphon) some 1300 years ago. Iraq continues to have family, ethnic and religious ties to modern-day Persia, Iran. (In fact, one of the candidates in the last presidential race in Iran was born in Najaf, Iraq.) Many noted Persians are buried in what became Iraq some 80 years ago. Prior to that time, Iraq was an Ottoman province jointly ruled by the Ottomans, Persians and the Arab tribes to the South. I did learn about that one in my mother-in-law's 1908 Encyclopedia Britannica, not to mention Persian, Turkish and Arabic historical sources that the English-language world may dispute. (Really EB should have all of its old versions online and available for archival and research purposes! This would be a service that the British Museum Library, the embodiment of "The World's Knowledge" could provide with the government budget that should be directed to it after the British troops currently deployed in Basra return to the U.K.) You may check for yourself if you can get your hands on a 1908 EB ... but you may not be as luck as I, who have an antique dealer for a mother-in-law.

Furthermore, we're told about Iranian, Saudi, Syrian and Turkish interference in Iraq on a daily basis on our most esteemed news media. So shouldn't these "interfering" countries maintain large embassies and staff in Iraq and vice versa? Presumably, well-equipped embassies can advance the cause of interference ... Oh ... I forgot that it is the U.S. troops that have come from 12 time zones away and invaded Iraq and that it is the occupying forces that have in the past arrested diplomats from these countries who had come to Iraq based on the invitation of the government in Baghdad ... but wait ... That's not invasion, occupation and interference in sovereign states of another country .... It is just humanitarian good will .... Sorry, I forgot the propaganda for a moment ... It happens every once in a while.

Here is what FT's Guy Dinmore writes about the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the world's largest embassy ever built ("US Twists Civilian Arms To Fill Fortress Baghdad," FT, January 8, 2007, page 2):

The embassy compound being built inside Baghdad’s Green Zone covers 104 acres, making it six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York. A city within a city for more than 1,000 people, it will have its own water, sewers and electricity, six apartment buildings, a Marine barracks, swimming pool, shops and some walls 15 feet thick.

The State Department has told the Financial Times that the US civilian presence in Iraq has “grown considerably beyond the numbers projected for the new embassy compound”, which is scheduled for completion by September 1 at a cost of $592m (€455m, £307m).

The department and other agencies, such as the Pentagon and Treasury which also supply staff, are working out how to accommodate the extra numbers that Mr Bush is expected to announce this week. Recruits are being attracted to one-year posts by a mix of cajoling and inducement – an almost doubling of their salary, four trips outside Iraq and guarantees of favourable postings afterwards.

...

“Baghdad dwarfs everything else. It is becoming a monster that has to be fed every year with a new crop of volunteers,” says one diplomat.

So far the State Department has not resorted to compulsory or “directed” assignments, a practice last used during the Vietnam war. But it has warned it would put assignments elsewhere on hold “if Iraq and Afghanistan and other priority posts are not staffed”.

Among the many recommendations of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq, issued in December, was that diplomats and other US personnel should be obliged to serve in Iraq if there were not enough volunteers.

Financial Times, January 8, 2007, page 2

And, of course,  only the rarest of individuals understand the significance of all this:

John Brown, who resigned as a US diplomat in protest against the 2003 invasion and now teaches public diplomacy, says the embassy “will be a symbol of the US occupation and the near-total separation of US embassy staff members from the society with which they are supposed to interact”.

“Indeed, the planned embassy reminds me of the huge, cavernous buildings that housed Soviet missions in eastern Europe during the cold war. They were hated by the local population for all they stood for: secrecy, arrogance and domination.”

Of the 1,000 or so US civilians staffing Baghdad at present – not including large numbers of private-sector bodyguards – there are about 200 career diplomats, plus some 70 in the provincial reconstruction teams that are set to expand.

Many other staffers are so-called “3161s” – recruited ad hoc and, according to the State Department, “fully qualified for their highly technical jobs”. Diplomats question this, saying many are incompetent and have been hired for their loyalty to the Republican effort.

Financial Times, January 8, 2007, page 2

Well-done to Dinmore for once again proving the value of good journalism -- telling the truth honorably and as it is, with few wrinkles if any -- and to John Brown for having a keen sense of seeing things as they are and for taking a stand from within his profession when it most mattered!

2007-01-08 12:41:49.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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Thursday January 04, 2007

[ Society ] The Barbarians, Beautiful Basra and Natural Law

The beautiful city of Basra has a sad history involving, among other less glorious moments, multiple British occupations over the last 100 years or so.

So, in that context, I wonder why some news reports from Basra take so long to get to me and why it has become taboo to report and aggressively investigate this video on the BBC. Why have such crimes related to occupation been overlooked or forgiven simply because they may have occured some months prior to the start or conclusion of investigations, and what sort of people actually manned the video cameras which capture them? (You have to watch the whole video to understand the meaning of these questions. Wikipedia does have a short mention of the incident in its entry on Basra and also here. Or perhaps, we need to turn to the Swedish media for an investigation.)

Note that we purportedly live in the 21^st century and not "1984" when talk of human rights comes from the same institutions and corners where the greatest violations seem to be tolerated and propagated.

Occupation and aggression begets resistance, ultimately by all means. No matter in which part of globe and what part of history you look, people will resist occupation when occupiers overstay and stretch their welcome to its natural limit. To borrow a phrase from the author of Leviathan (a certain Mr. Thomas Hobbs), the premise that overstay leads to resistance is surely a "natural law," if there ever was a "natural law." If this "natural law" applies to guests in the West, how much more true should one expect it to be in the guest-welcoming East with occupation even when occupiers are originally invited and welcomed--and truer yet when uninvited and unwelcome?

Basra's distinguished history includes other sad moments such as the Battle of Camel some 1400 years ago. However, despite war and occupation, like for all ancient  and honorable cities, there has been millenium when Basra has lived in peace and prosperity -- exactly what she deserves and wants again if left to her own account.

2007-01-04 22:50:38.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
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