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[5] From: "editor@countercurrents.org" <editor@countercurrents.org> Date: Wed Sep 28, 2005 Subject: CC News Letter 28/09-Are Global Oil Supplies About To Peak? Hello Kindly forward this newsletter to your friends and encourage them to join this mailing list. http://www.countercurrents.org/subscribe.htm In Solidarity Binu Are Global Oil Supplies About To Peak? By George Monbiot http://www.countercurrents.org/po-monbiot280905.htm Are global oil supplies about to peak? Are they, in other words, about to reach their maximum and then go into decline? There is a simple answer to this question: no one has the faintest idea Bush In A Bottle By John Chuckman http://www.countercurrents.org/us-chuckman280905.htm There have been rumors of Bush taking to the bottle again. Since alcoholics are never cured, this is possible. The stress of having his ineptitude so publicly displayed as it was in New Orleans and of having his every major policy collapsing before his eyes would certainly tend to push him in this direction The Decline And Fall Of Senator Bill Frist By Jason Leopold http://www.countercurrents.org/us-leopold280905.htm It's one thing to lie in politics. It's another to be caught in a lie. Bill Frist has been caught in a lie. His political future is over. The immediate question is, can he survive as Majority Leader? My First Time By Cindy Sheehan http://www.countercurrents.org/us-sheehan280905.htm The rumors are true this time. I was arrested in front of the White House today. It was my first time ever being arrested More Dissent, More Censorship By Dahr Jamail http://www.countercurrents.org/us-jamail280905.htm As we prepared to leave his hotel last night, my colleague Stelios Kouloglou half-jokingly offered, ???You can come visit Greece anytime, whether for vacation or for political asylum.??? I only half-laughed as I shook his hand Iraq's Draft Constitution By Baghdad Burning http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-burning280905.htm The final version (Version 3.0) of the Iraqi draft constitution was finally submitted to the UN about ten days ago. It was published in English in the New York Times on the 15th of September Iyothee Thass & The Politics Of Naming By Ravikumar http://www.countercurrents.org/dalit-ravikumar280905.htm Today, even uttering the name of Iyothee Thass in the Tamil public sphere has become an act of a rebellion. The Dravidian parties, communists and Tamil nationalists - nobody has any regard for Thass. No wonder his name has been dropped from the National Center for Siddha Research. This is an insult not just to Dalits but Tamils as such --------------------- [6] From: rkurian1@vsnl.com Date: Wed Sep 28, 2005 Subject: Hurricanes, Global Warming and Global Politics.. http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/links_2870.jsp Hurricanes, global warming, and global politics D??ith? Stone Dave Frame 27 - 9 - 2005 A new research paper providing scientific underpinning for links between global warming and the increasing regularity of hurricanes is a challenge to policy-makers to think afresh, report Dave Frame & D??ith? Stone. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina and the subsequent development of hurricane Rita have invited speculation about the role of greenhouse warming in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. Over the last decade many scientific studies have attempted to examine the links between the two. The evidence has generally been mixed: many studies have asserted increases in intensity or frequency of hurricanes, but none have convinced the research community of a definite link. However, a recent, eerily timed paper by Kerry Emanuel from MIT shows compelling evidence that there has been an increase in the destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the last thirty years. While the paper has its critics, it has also captured the research community??s attention as a potentially important line of inquiry. In the paper, Emanuel develops an index of hurricane destructiveness based on the dissipation of energy (over the lifetime of the hurricane). This index is plausibly linked with observed climate signals, including multi-decadal cycles in the north Atlantic and north Pacific, and global warming. The results suggest that continued warming may lead to an increase in hurricane destructiveness, which, combined with the accumulation of coastal risk that has resulted from urbanisation along vulnerable coasts, may lead to a substantial increase in socio-economic damage over the coming century. But the establishment of a highly credible link between climate change and hurricane destructiveness, while extremely important, is only part of the story. To know what we ought to do in response to this growing threat, we need to get some sort of quantification of the increase in risk. It??s one thing to say ???the risk is rising or decreasing???; it??s another to say how much. Measuring the risks New techniques available to researchers which exploit the probabilistic turn in climate science can, in some instances, allow us to examine the degree to which an event becomes more or less common in a world with increased greenhouse gases. Peter Stott and co-workers applied this technique to the European summer 2003 heatwave and concluded that the risk of such a heatwave was strongly amplified in our 2003 (378 parts per million [ppm] CO2) world, when compared to a non-industrial world (278ppm). This is a softer sort of causal link than the sort of deterministic cause-effect chain that people customarily associate with science, but the complexity which characterises the earth system make such determinism elusive. As many others in the climate research community have noted it is and will remain impossible to say ???this particular flood or drought was caused by global warming??? (just as it is impossible to say that ???this particular case of cancer was caused by smoking???) but we may be able to discuss changes in the likelihood or risk of such events. Attempting such a ???fractional change in risk??? or ???fractional attribution??? study for hurricane Katrina is a theoretically inviting idea, but given the difficulties the current generation of climate models have in simulating processes smaller than several hundred kilometres, one that may have to wait for modelling to catch up (at least a little more) with the real world. Even once the risks of such events are quantified, decision-makers have to plan around them. This introduces another set of complexities: climate events and political decisions are taken at a wide variety of scales. The most literal sense of global greenhouse warming is that the Earth??s average surface temperature is expected to rise by a few degrees over the coming century because of increasing atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases. But climate impacts are felt on a range of scales beneath this: El Ni?ħo affects much of the Pacific region; the heatwave that beset Europe in 2003 was pretty much continent-wide; and hurricane Katrina affected one large city and the surrounding regions. Political decisions occur on a similarly wide range of scales. Decisions to try to prevent disaster, ameliorate it or insure against its presence are made all the time, at all scales. The United Nations is involved in trying to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases; the levees of Louisiana are a way of trying to alleviate climate threats. So is the consumer??s purchase of an air-conditioner. Where risks remain constant we can continue as before; when risks change, we need to try to quantify the magnitude of those changes and adapt accordingly by figuring out what the new odds are. We may need a more sophisticated air-conditioner, or more levees. But these adaptations only deal with the symptoms of climate change: on the prevention side we may need to develop agreements and incentives to emit less carbon into the atmosphere. Planning for disaster It is important to recognise that these decisions take place on a very wide range of scales, and that focusing exclusively on any one scale leaves most of the problem unaddressed. It??s also important to note that these decisions change from private-good problems at localised scales (skimping on your air-conditioning affects only you) to much more public-good-type problems at larger scales (such as levees). The provision of public goods usually falls to local or national governments because markets alone usually underprovide them. Polities face resource pressures, and if something doesn??t happen very often, or isn??t fresh in the memory, then there is a temptation to cut corners and to skimp on prevention, preferring to insure a cure. This is exacerbated when risks change over time, because the community??s precautions no longer fit the real risks they face. A hundred-year flood in a pre-industrial climate may become a forty-year flood in a 21st-century climate, and though modelling can help identify some of these risks, most communities will find out about changes in climate risks the hard way. Climate scientists may be a little way off being able to quantify these sorts of changes in risk for all but the largest-scale events, but the identification of plausible physical mechanisms linking the statistical properties of extreme events to long-term fluctuations and trends in climate is an important and necessary step along the way. The next steps, and the ones that are most crucial to our long-term risk exposure, are to deepen our understanding of the systems in which such extreme events are embedded, and to communicate the right sort of information to people in language they can base decisions on. That way, even if scientists can??t always predict the precise details of heatwaves and hurricanes, at least they can provide people with the right odds. As hurricane Rita bore down on the US Gulf coast, responses ranged from individuals driving to higher ground, to organised evacuation of vulnerable areas, to deployment of emergency services. In the event, the scale of the impact was smaller than feared, and in any case such responses helped on this occasion to avoid the major loss of life and deleterious economic impacts associated with hurricane Katrina. But even if society??s reactions to major climatic events go smoothly and we manage to avoid the horrors witnessed in and around New Orleans after Katrina, such reactive endeavours can only ever be part of the story: as increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases cause various aspects of climate to change rapidly over the coming decades, we should expect to be surprised by climatic phenomena on a more regular basis. The only certainty is that we don??t yet know exactly how. -------------------------------- [7] From: rkurian1@vsnl.com Date: Wed Sep 28, 2005 Subject: The Unravelling of India's Persian Puzzle myserenityin Date:27/09/2005 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2005/09/27/stories/2005092703011000.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Opinion - Leader Page Articles The unravelling of India's Persian puzzle Siddharth Varadarajan By voting against Iran in the IAEA, India has put its alliance with the United States above any concern of national interest, energy security or international law. FOR ALL its pretensions to a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, India on Saturday flunked its first real test as a rising world power. Where no less than 11 countries smaller and less powerful than us ?? Venezuela, Algeria, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Vietnam, and Yemen ?? had the courage and good sense to join Russia and China in refusing to endorse the U.S.-backed agenda of confrontation with Iran, India threw in its lot with Washington and the European troika. Scared by a well-choreographed bout of shadow boxing at the start of Congressional hearings on the July 18 Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, the Manmohan Singh Government convinced itself that it had to side with Washington's unreasonable pressure on Iran. In doing so, the Government has betrayed its own lack of strategic confidence ?? this at a time when the fine print of the nuclear deal is about to be negotiated and the slightest sign of diplomatic weakness will be used by Washington to push the envelope on issues like the scope of international safeguards and inspections India must accept in order to see the July 18 agreement through. Moreover, the Government has chosen to go along with a confrontationist move against Iran, which undercuts a key legal argument India has been making for 50 years ?? that countries can only be held to account for international agreements they sign. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) gives Iran the right to pursue the nuclear fuel cycle subject to safeguards. It gives Iran the right to build a heavy water reactor. The Additional Protocol Iran has signed specifies the kind of intrusive inspections it must allow. But the International Atomic Energy Agency resolution India voted for makes demands that go far, far beyond Iran's legal obligations. This is a dangerous precedent for India to agree to since this means the safeguards agreement and additional protocol it has committed to sign with the IAEA also one day need not be the final word on its legal obligations. The vote India cast in the IAEA Board of Governors (BoG) was in favour of a resolution finding Iran in "non-compliance" with its safeguards obligations under the NPT and expressing "the absence of confidence that Iran's nuclear programme is entirely for peaceful purposes." The finding is under two Articles, XII and III, of the IAEA Statute, both of which mandate referral of the matter to the Security Council. Unlike the referral under Article XII.C, which is more of a procedural nature, the referral under III.B.4 invokes the Security Council's responsibilities for maintaining international peace and security and holds out a thinly veiled threat of sanctions and other punitive measures. In what is supposed to be a major "compromise," Britain, France, and Germany (the E-3) dropped earlier language stipulating that the referral to the Security Council should be immediate. The timing of this referral has been left to a future BoG meeting, presumably the one that will be convened in November. The Indian Government, in justifying its decision to back the resolution, has cited this two-step approach as a big concession. Indian officials claim this delay provides the time and space needed for dialogue and diplomacy to work, a claim of extraordinary naivety and even double-speak. First, Saturday's resolution is more likely to close the door on dialogue than re-open it since it demands Iran surrender even more of its rights under the NPT than ever before. Secondly, the U.S. itself did not necessarily want an immediate referral because there is little practical significance to dragging Iran before the UNSC where China and Russia would exercise their veto. What it rea lly wanted was for the international community to recognise Iran's civilian nuclear energy programme as a threat to international peace and security requiring potentially endless "special verification" inspections, which go far beyond that required under the normal safeguards agreement and Additional Protocol. Armed with this broad endorsement, Washington can now choose the time and place for the political ?? and even military ?? escalation that is surely in the offing. Given the composition of the BoG, securing a majority had never been an issue for the U.S. and its allies. But in the absence of consensus, which was an impossibility anyway, engineering India's defection from the ranks of the developing countries was crucial. The U.S. needed to undercut the charge that the West was ganging up on the Third World in denying Iran the right to nuclear fuel cycle-related facilities. Winning over Ecuador, Peru, Ghana, and Singapore was not good enough since these are not countries known for the independence of their foreign policy. The U.S. needed India to provide a cover of credibility for the unreasonable indictment against Iran and the Manmohan Singh Government happily went along. That is why U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns has hailed India's vote as "a blow to Iran's attempt to turn this into a developed world versus developing world debate." Of all the demands the IAEA resolution makes, three are highly problematic and ultra vires. First, it says Iran must implement "transparency measures ... which extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol." Calling Iran a "special verification case," the BoG said this requires an expansion in the "limited" legal authority of the IAEA to conduct inspections. Specifically, this must include "access to individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual use equipment, certain military owned workshops and research and development locations." In this way, the road has been cleared for an Inspection Raj of the UNSCOM/UNMOVIC type, which, even after physically checking every possible location in Iraq several times over, never had the ability to say Baghdad possessed no weapons of mass destruction. The resolution's demand for access to individuals is also quite rich, considering that the source of the technology Iran is suspected of possessing ?? A.Q. Khan ?? is sitting pretty in Pakistan, beyond the reach of IAEA inspectors. Secondly, Iran has been told to resume the suspension of enrichment-related and reprocessing activity. Unlike all previous resolutions of the BoG, which called on Iran to suspend its enrichment, this resolution makes no explicit mention of the voluntary, non-legally binding nature of Iran's commitment to suspend those activities. By this subtle act of elision, a voluntary, non-legally binding undertaking is being elevated to the status of a legally binding commitment. Thirdly, the resolution says Iran must "reconsider the construction of a research reactor moderated by heavy water." This is a new and illegal demand that did not figure in the last resolution passed by the BoG on August 11, 2005, and represents a further shift of the goalpost. The irony of the Indian capitulation on Iran is that its display of political weakness comes at a time when the U.S. has finally become aware of India's strategic weight and significance and is attempting desperately to harness these for its own ends. When President George W. Bush offered Dr. Manmohan Singh full civilian nuclear cooperation, he did so in full knowledge that India has tended to side with the rest of the developing world on the question of Iran. Either his decision to support India's nuclear industry was taken independently of the Iran equation or it was conditional on New Delhi ditching Teheran both as a source of energy security and as a conduit for the integration of India and Central Asia. If the former is the case, the Manmohan Singh Government had nothing to fear from sticking to its earlier stand of "consensus" in the IAEA BoG. And if it was the latter, then surely this amounts to a hidden ?? and onerous ?? cost India is now being forced to pay in order t o see the nuclear deal through. Any deal or partnership that hangs on such a slender thread, which attempts forcibly to rewrite India's strategic equations, and undermines the country's strategic autonomy cannot possibly be in the national interest. Nuclear power of the kind that might flow from this deal will never be a substitute for hydrocarbons in the medium-term. Even in the long-term, India will depend on gas imports from Iran and Central Asia, preferably via pipeline. If not today, then five years from now, the logic of India's economic growth will compel a rewriting of the rules of international nuclear commerce for the country ?? this time not as a concession or favour from the U.S. but as the product of objective market forces. By blackmailing India into voting against Iran, the U.S. hopes to undermine Indo-Iranian economic relations to such an extent that New Delhi becomes a stakeholder in the drive for "regime change" there. How much the world has changed in a year. A country that once condemned the invasion of Iraq and refused to send its soldiers there is today in danger of becoming an accessory to the strangulation and targeting of Iran. 2005 The Hindu -------------------------------------- [8] From: Shiva Shankar <sshankar@cmi.ac.in Date: Wed Sep 28, 2005 Subject: No Exit; Descending into hell with George Bush (fwd) sshankar@cmi.ac.in http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10357.htm No Exit; Descending into hell with George Bush By Mike Whitney 09/21/05 "ICH" -- -- The bodies of the mangled and bloated corpses are no where to be found on America's news programs. Like the countless dead in Iraq they're purged from the coverage and stripped from the public record. They've been replaced by the well-scrubbed visage of the Potemkin-president issuing his comforting words for his people. "New Orleans will rise again," Bush crowed, invoking the worn phraseology of the slave era. For a White House that prides itself on appearances and spends over $62 million per year on public relations firms; the Bush monologue on national TV was a dismal performance. His limp promises of restoration, all ringing with the same free-market timbre that has left Kabul and Baghdad in a shambles, fell well short of the mark. The ruinous affects of his tenure are now everywhere to be seen and even the media's impenetrable smokescreen seems to be lifting. |
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