World, except the United States, bails out auto industry

Yesterday Republicans in the Senate blocked a measure to bail out the "Big Three" domestic automakers. They took this action even after Republicans in the House of Representatives joined the Democrats in approving a version of the bailout package and despite calls from the White House, and dire warnings from Vice President Dick Cheney. Even Cheney realized that having one (or more) of the three companies go under would dump potentially over a million people onto the unemployment rolls at a time when the country is already mired in a deep recession.

And while it's true that the Big Three (Ford, Chrysler, and GM) have done a fairly poor job of running themselves for years now, they, like every other car builder, are also suffering from a huge downturn in the global economy - something that everyone in the world, save for a group of Senate Republicans from the South realizes. Governments from South Korea, to China, to Germany have stepped in to prop up their domestic auto industries. On Friday alone Canada and Sweden each pledged over $3 billion to keep their car builders afloat.

So why did the Senate Republicans fail to take the same sensible action as governments in Berlin, Beijing, Seoul, Stockholm and Ottawa? It seems to boil down to a desire to try to break the powerful United Auto Workers union and to potentially knock out the competition for foreign automakers that have assembly plants in their states (though even officials at Honda worry about the impact on the industry as a whole of having even one of the Big Three fold). Pretty petty reasons when the country is teetering on the edge of an economic depression.

The Senate Republicans apparently didn't get the message from the November elections: that the people want to move beyond partisanship and want solutions to the country's problems, not more inter-party bickering. Somehow I don't think it's a coincidence that also on Friday Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (the closest thing the Republicans have to a Barack Obama) all but ruled out a run for President in 2012 - why take up the banner for a party that so far seems committed to the same formula that worked so poorly for them in 2008?

Hopefully President Bush will step in and salvage something of his legacy by releasing the $15 billion in funds the Big Three need to stay afloat.

NATO suddenly finds it needs Russia

So after cutting off ties with Russia following this summer's Georgian conflict, now NATO needs their help.

NATO officials are negotiating with Russia and several Central Asian states to open a "Northern Corridor" into Afghanistan. The move comes after recent repeated attacks on NATO's main supply base in Pakistan that have so far destroyed more than two hundred trucks bound for Afghanistan. Lack of security along the route through the historic Khyber Pass (the gateway between Pakistan and Afghanistan) has stranded nearly another 1,000. The attacks have NATO officials worried that they won't be able to keep troops deployed in Afghanistan properly supplied, hence the talks with Russia about an alternate route into the country.

You have to wonder though how NATO can expect to run an operation to drive the Taliban and al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan when they can't even protect their own supply lines? (It seems to me like another example of NATO's utter ineffectiveness as a military organization these days) Past that, if NATO now has to rely on a supply line that runs through Russia, it's hard to imagine that either Georgia or Ukraine will be joining the alliance anytime soon, since Russia is dead set against their membership.

Meanwhile the United States is planning to increase its troop strength in Afghanistan by as many as 20,000 this summer.

Is the US heading back to Somalia?

Is the US about to go ashore in Somalia?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will present a draft resolution to the UN next Tuesday calling on countries already involved in the region to "take all necessary measures ashore in Somalia" to fight the growing piracy problem in the east African country. Pirates operating out of lawless Somali ports have seized dozens of ships this year, holding them, and their crews, for ransom. The pirates are causing serious problems for the world's shipping lines, which use the route off of Somalia as the fastest way to travel between Europe and Asia and the Persian Gulf.

In one sense Rice is right - the piracy problem can only be truly solved from the shore: the pirates have to lose the ports they use as bases and safe havens, the nearly non-existent Somali government is far too weak to do the job, so foreign forces are really the only way to tackle the problem. But this seems like a situation that could all too easily turn into yet another quagmire for US forces.


We finally learned the lesson in Iraq that it is basically useless to go into a city if you have no intention of holding it or turning it over to local forces who are unable to maintain security in it (see the first four years of the Iraq War, especially the city of Fallouja for more examples). So what would likely happen in Somalia is that US forces would go into one of the Somali pirate ports, there would be a small fight before the pirates retreated to the hills to wait until the Americans left, and once they did the pirates would return and get back to business as usual. That's why it's easy to see US forces getting bogged down in Somalia as they stay onshore trying to keep these Somali ports secure. Remember that Somalia is the setting for the movie "Black Hawk Down", which of course was based on the true story of the US mission in the Somali capital Mogadishu that turned from a humanitarian relief effort into a fight against Somali warlords that ultimately left18 servicemen dead.

The Somali government is incredibly weak and likely about to get weaker. Two years ago Ethiopian troops invaded southern Somalia and drove an Islamic group, the Union of Islamic Courts, from Mogadishu, letting the Somali provisional government return. But in the two years since the Somali government has lost control of almost all of southern Somalia to a collection of Islamic groups that splintered off from the UIC. The Ethiopians, who have been fighting a guerilla war against the Islamists on behalf of the Somali government decided it's had enough and announced a sudden withdrawal of their troops by the end of the year, leaving only an under-manned peacekeeping force from the African Union standing between Mogadishu and the Islamist rebels. The African Union is also now asking the UN to step in and send more troops.

We'll see if the UN decides to step up and send in the forces needed to deal with the piracy problem in Somalia, or if it becomes one last quagmire for the Bush administration.

Another atrocity in Zimbabwe

Another day, another terrible story out of Zimbabwe.

As if cholera wasn't killing off his citizens fast enough, today the Guardian is reporting that President Robert Mugabe has unleashed a brutal war against illegal diamond miners in Zimbabwe.

According to the Guardian, Zimbabwe security forces have begun firing indiscriminately from helicopters with machine guns at illegal diamond miners in the eastern part of the country. In past weeks police conducted bloody raids on the miners using tear gas, dogs and machine guns, often shooting miners as they fled. There are no good statistics on how many miners have been killed because some miners were quickly buried by friends in near the mines, while other bodies lie unclaimed at local hospitals.

Many of the miners who have turned up in the thousands are not really miners at all, they are former farmers, students, even professionals (like teachers and civil servants) who turned to digging for diamonds as the only way to make a living in Zimbabwe's wrecked economy. A few have struck it rich, but many just eek out a living by finding a few small, low-quality diamonds. Mugabe's government is eager to prevent illegal mining because the diamond region, supposedly, belongs in part to Mugabe's wife Grace, and because with the country's agriculture and tourism sectors in tatters, diamonds are one of the very few things Zimbabwe has that can earn the country money.

Meanwhile Mugabe has declared Zimbabwe's cholera outbreak "over". Of course Mugabe also claimed that elections earlier in the year were free and fair, so...The UN though tends to disagree with Mugabe, claiming that around 800 people have died so far with 16,000 believed to be infected and the outbreak no where near under control. The UN estimates that up to 60,000 people could be infected if no action is taken quickly. And South Africa has declared a state of emergency in a border province because of the cholera-stricken refugees streaming in from Zimbabwe.

President Bush has added his voice to the chorus of world leaders (including Nicolas Sarkozy from France and Gordon Brown from Great Britain) calling for Mugabe to step down. Calls from Western leaders though only strengthen Mugabe's resolve - he paints all of the problems he's caused Zimbabwe: the failing economy, food shortages, cholera outbreak, etc., as a plot by Western powers to turn Zimbabwe back into a colony.

Tiny Sark ends Feudalism in Europe

It's hard to believe that feudalism - that hereditary system of government based on land ownership from the Middle Ages - could have existed in Europe into the 21st century, but it did until just this past Wednesday when the tiny British isle of Sark finally held its first democratic election.

Just two square miles and home to 600 people, Sark (a small island in the English Channel) has been run on a feudal system by 40 families holding hereditary leases since the 16th century. Among the odd laws still in force in Sark are a legal requirement for each of the 40 families to keep a musket to defend the island and a prohibition on anyone but the seigneur, the hereditary owner of the island, owning either pigeons or unspayed female dogs.

But the modern world finally caught up to Sark. Worried that feudalism wasn't compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, the residents of Sark changed the law and turned the island's governing body, the Chief Pleas, from a body where seats are passed down through land-owning families into an elected one.

British settlers colonized Sark in the 16th century to keep French pirates from using it as a base of operations in the English Channel. Among some of the more interesting events in the island's history are the occupation by German troops during World War II and an attempted one-man invasion by an unemployed French nuclear physicist in 1990. The island's economy today is based mainly on tourism and finance.

Time to end the Cuban embargo?

Has the time finally come to end the US embargo on Cuba?

After the Cuban exile-led Bay of Pigs invasion failed to dislodge Fidel Castro's Communist government, President John Kennedy slapped an embargo on the island nation in 1962, hoping that economic pressure would remove Castro from power. For five decades the embargo has been the bedrock of the United States' policy towards Cuba, but now there are growing calls for the US to drop this relic of the Cold War.

On Monday Caricom, a bloc that represents 15 Caribbean nations, called on President-Elect Barack Obama to end the Cuban embargo when he is sworn into power in January. Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister W. Baldwin Spencer, the acting head of Caricom, said the "transformational change" under way in Washington should include repealing the decades-long embargo. The embargo also seems to be losing support from its most passionate supporters - the Cuban-American community in South Florida.

A poll conducted by Florida International University shows that 55% of Florida's Cuban-American community now supports a change in US-Cuban relations, including the repeal of the embargo. Analysts chalk the change in attitude up to the shifting demographics of the Cuban-American community, which is now being run more and more by American-born Cuban-Americans rather than Castro-era exiles that were born in Cuba. The younger generation has a different perspective than their elders and in general want more normal relations between the US and Cuba.

The Florida Cuban-Americans have been a major reason why the embargo has lasted so long, so if their attitude is changing it could signal an end for what at this point is a terribly outdated policy. The embargo never has the success nine US presidents had hoped it would. For much of the time Cuba was a patron state of the Soviet Union, which provided it with large subsidies and was a major buyer of their exports (like sugar). Today the beaches around Havana are filled with Canadian and European tourists, and Caribbean nations send students to Cuban medical schools, while Chinese and Russian companies are negotiating with the Cuban authorities to develop offshore oil fields. So in reality, the only country not doing business with Cuba is the United States.

If the embargo didn't bring down the Castro regime for the past 46 years, its not going to do so now, so why not put to rest this relic of the Cold War and try to normalize relations with one of our closest neighbors?

Newsweek's odd take on Ukraine

If you've read some of the posts here you probably have gotten the idea that I'm usually disappointed with the way the US media covers events in Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union. The latest issue of Newsweek hasn't changed my mind on that feeling.

Under the headline "How the West Won Ukraine" authors Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova talk about the current state of affairs in Ukraine (you can check the article out here, it's pretty short), I have a few problems with their take on things. For starters the article never makes the case that the West has "won" Ukraine, the first paragraph even states that support for joining NATO (one of the symbols of "Westerness" for former Soviet states) is actually waning among Ukrainians. The whole thrust of the article is that Ukraine is looking more towards the European Union rather than towards Moscow today, but this is far from saying the West has won.

Second the article doesn't even talk about Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, arguably the most popular politician in Ukraine today; instead it focuses on the solidly pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko, who also has approval ratings in the single digits. Could that be because Tymoshenko's balanced approach to relations with Moscow and the EU (she thinks Ukraine needs to be on good terms with both) doesn't support the premise of the article that the West has won Ukraine?

Finally, the article says that Ukraine shares basic "European values—including respect for its Russian ethnic minority", though just three paragraphs earlier it describes how Pres. Yushchenko barred Ukrainian schools from teaching in languages other than Ukrainian, even though the eastern portion of Ukraine is heavily populated by ethnic Russians and how he tried to get Ukrainian cable networks from carrying Russian-language television stations. Doesn't really sound like respect for minority rights to me...

This Newsweek article is another example of a too common story in the US press today - reporters looking at the situation in a part of the world (this time the former-Soviet part) and reporting the story they want to tell instead of the one that actually exists.

EU navies to tackle Somali pirates

The European Union is stepping up its efforts to fight pirates off the coast of Somalia by sending a task force of ships and planes to the region - the first time in its history that the EU has ever engaged in naval operations. Eight EU members will contribute six ships and three aircraft to the mission, which will be under the command of British Rear Admiral Phillip Jones.

The EU mission comes as Somali pirates continue to plunder ships in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden (the gateway to the Suez Canal and the main shipping route between Asia and Europe). On Monday a Danish ship reported that they successfully repelled a pirate attack 450 miles off the coast of Tanzania, Somalia's southern neighbor. This is the furthest from the Somali coast that pirates are reported to have operated, the oil tanker Sirius Star was snatched 500 miles from Somalia, the previous record.

And the EU is wrestling with another problem - what to do with pirates when they catch them. One EU law says that pirates should be turned over to the nation holding the registry of the ship they attacked to let that country prosecute them. But this can run into another EU law that bars extraditing alleged criminals to countries that still use the death penalty. As a compromise, Germany suggested turning pirates over to Kenya for the time being (since Somalia doesn't really have a functioning government), but in the long-term setting up a special UN court for piracy to deal with them.

The six EU ships will join vessels from the US, Russia, India and South Korea in patrolling the waters and will take over from a task force of four NATO ships (though frankly the EU mission is yet another reason to question the worth of NATO in today's world - if Europe is willing to get together for military missions, than what is the purpose of NATO?). But until Somalia has some kind of functioning government and security forces can go in and take control of port cities like Eyl that now basically rely on piracy for their bread and butter, it's hard to imagine the pirate problem in the Horn of Africa going away anytime soon.

Good news for democracy in Africa, thanks to Ghana

Since it feels like I’m always writing about the shortcomings of democracy in Africa (see the many posts on Zimbabwe for starters), I wanted to make sure to do a post about this weekend’s elections in Ghana.

They are remarkable for being entirely unremarkable – no riots, no threats of intimidation, no lost ballot boxes, just a well-conducted multi-party election. In fact one election observer from Nigeria remarked: “"it's really been excellent, peaceful. You cannot try to compare these elections to any other on the continent except with South Africa, that's the only country considered democratic.”

For much of its independence, Ghana was the all-too-typical story in Africa, a country stumbling from one coup to the next. But since 1992, the country has had now five peaceful elections. Even this year with pressures that historically could lead to problems – a leader stepping down, and newly-discovered oil fields about to come into production – things have gone well, with seven parties vying for power.

The results will not be official for a few days since two parties, the ruling New Patriotic Party and the main opposition group National Democratic Congress, are locked in a close race. But no problems are expected as the votes are tallied, one report said things were going “smooth as silk”.

Hopefully it’s a story that will become common in other countries across Africa.

Obama on Meet the Press

Incoming President Barack Obama dropped in on Meet the Press on Sunday for a long discussion with Tom Brokaw. As you would expect with the ongoing financial crisis, much of the discussion was on domestic policy, but they did spend a few minutes talking foreign policy.

It does seem like Obama is taking a measured, pragmatic approach to foreign policy. As far as Afghanistan goes, Obama sees the conflict as part of a bigger, regional picture – any solution there has to include dealing with problems in India, Pakistan and Kashmir (the territory that India and Pakistan both claim) as well. He also said that any plan to bring peace to Afghanistan has to include a large portion devoted to development to help raise rural Afghanis (the bulk of the population) out of poverty. One reason the Taliban still has influence over large parts of the country is that rural Afghanis haven’t seen any real improvement in their lives since Hamid Karzai was elected president. That has to change if we hope to establish a lasting peace and a stable government in Afghanistan.

In terms of Iran and Iraq, Obama didn’t cover much new ground. He again said that it was “unacceptable” for Iran to build nuclear weapons or fund terrorist organizations like Hamas, but said that he preferred a system of sanctions (coordinated closely with Iran’s big trading partners – China, India, Russia) to military action. In Iraq he stuck with his campaign pledge to ask his military and security advisors to draw up a timetable for withdrawing our troops (an easier task since Iraq approved the new SOF agreement that includes a timetable for withdrawal), while leaving behind a “residual force” to deal with security problems or fight terrorism as-needed. Brokaw couldn’t nail him down though on how large this residual force would be.

Finally, as for Russia, Obama said, “I think that it's going to be important for us to reset U.S.-Russian relations,” before adding that Russia has “to act in ways that are not bullying their neighbors.” Unfortunately the foreign policy talk ended there. It would have been interesting to hear what “reset” meant to Obama, or more of his views on Russia bullying its neighbors. Obama and Biden both supported Georgia in the conflict between the two countries last August, though that was before the many cracks appeared in Georgia’s claims of self-defense.

All in all, Obama does look like he plans to take a pragmatic view on foreign policy and has so far put together a top-notch team of advisors.