Is This The Decisve Week In The Ukraine Crisis?

The situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate heading into what looks like a crucial week for the country.

The political unrest took an ugly turn over the weekend when more than 30 protesters were killed in a fire in Odessa after storming the city's trade union building.  As with many of the recent events in Ukraine, the exact details of what occurred are murky, though this series of first-person accounts from the BBC offers perhaps the best picture of events.  Competing pro-Kiev and pro-Russian rallies turned into a string of running street fights between the two groups that culminated in the pro-Russian side storming the trade union building.  Accounts on what happened next differ.  The building was set on fire by molotov cocktails, though it is unclear whether the petrol bombs were being thrown at the building or by those inside as well.  The pro-Russian group claims that the pro-Kiev protesters prevented the pro-Russians from fleeing the building, while the pro-Kiev demonstrators say that they tried to help rescue people from the fire.  Some 30 people are said to have died in the fire with several others dying as they jumped from the building to escape the burning building.  All sides though seem to agree that Odessa's police were ineffective, doing little to either stop the fighting or to control the scene around the burning trade union building and facilitate a rescue of those inside.

The situation in Odessa is shocking because the city is far removed from the Ukraine/Russia border region that has previously been the site of the pro-Russian unrest.  According to the BBC report, Odessa had been quiet up until this weekend's violence, with tourists – even Russian tourists – enjoying springtime on the streets of this city by the Black Sea.  Ukraine's government is once again blaming Russia for fomenting unrest in Odessa, claiming that Russian agitators snuck into the region from Moldova's pro-Russian breakaway region of Trans-Dniester, which is near to Odessa, to cause trouble in the city.  Both sides are seizing on the death toll from Odessa as proof of the brutality of the other, further ratcheting up tensions in the country and making the successful staging of the May 25^th presidential election seem even more unlikely. 

In addition to Odessa, there are two other factors that could make this the decisive week in whether or not there will be a full-scale war in Ukraine.

This Friday, May 9, is Victory Day in Russia, a national holiday to commemorate Germany's surrender in what most of the world calls World War II, but what Russia still refers to as the “Great Patriotic War”.  While Victory Day serves the same purpose as Memorial Day does in the United States, it also traditionally is the most patriotic day on the Russian calendar, a time to celebrate Russia's armed forces and the date of a massive military parade in Moscow.  The key symbol of Victory Day – the black-and-gold St. George's ribbon (analogous to the Memorial Day poppy in the US and Great Britain) – has already been appropriated by Ukraine's pro-Russian separatists as a sign of their solidarity with Russia.    It is possible then that Russia could use this very patriotic holiday to launch their long-threatened military action to rescue the supposedly threatened Russian minority in Ukraine.

The second reason has to do with the make-up of the Russian military itself.  Russia still relies on conscription for the bulk of their armed forces, with men over the age of 18 (supposedly) required to serve at least one year in the military.  As Pavel Felgenhauer explains here in Foreign Policy, conscripts are typically taken into service in two cohorts per year and the hitch for one of those cohorts is reaching its end, meaning that these troops are, theoretically, at the peak of their military training.  Once their conscription period ends though, they will be replaced by a new batch of raw recruits who will have to go through the process of learning to be a soldier from scratch, greatly diminishing the effectiveness of the 40,000 or so Russian troops stationed along Ukraine's eastern border.  From a Russian military point of view, the time to strike is now.

Whether Russia will remains an open question.  By Pres. Vladimir Putin's benchmarks, with the deaths in Odessa and ongoing Ukrainian “anti-terrorist” operations being conducted in the pro-Russian separatist cities in eastern Ukraine, the causes belli exist.  Putin may also be emboldened by another round of relatively weak sanctions laid down by the United States and the European Union.  Plus, as discussed earlier, Putin's larger goal of destabilizing Ukraine would be set back if the country can stage a successful presidential election at the end of the month.  It is more likely than not then that Russia will conduct some type of direct military action against Ukraine in the coming days, though with Putin, nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Why The Road To Genocide Can Be Distrubingly Short

The ongoing situation in Ukraine is, sadly, another illustration of how quickly conflicts can explode, even among people who previously had lived together as neighbors and friends.

This was illustrated by a video clip shown by the BBC on Monday, April 14.  It showed the aftermath of the seizure of a police station in eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian militias.  Two men, presumably Ukrainian police officers, were being assaulted by a mob at the foot of a staircase.  The makeup of the mob at first was typical – a group of young men in their late teens/early twenties, but then something unexpected happened: two older women, perhaps in their forties, who had been watching the attack, stepped forward and got their own licks in on one of the prone men.  According to the BBC, the man thankfully survived his beating.

The video serves as an illustration of a disturbing, yet fascinating, phenomenon: how quickly peaceful, multi-ethnic communities can devolve into open sectarian - and often brutal - war.  

Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has been a nation with a large Russian minority population.  While there has been some occasional tension between the groups over issues like whether or not Russian should be recognized as an official language in Ukraine, the two ethnicities have basically lived together peacefully – there have been no reports of systematic violence between the two groups.  This is especially true in eastern Ukraine, where the bulk of Ukraine's Russian population is located.  There, the two ethnicities lived together and intermarried; it was not uncommon for families to be spread out between Russia and Ukraine and crossing the border of the two nations was usually given about as much thought as crossing the street.  Certainly there are no outward physical signs to distinguish a Russian from a Ukrainian.  Even just a few months ago such inter-ethnic violence in Ukraine would have been unthinkable.  Yet now, cities across eastern Ukraine are being roiled by just such attacks.  Ethnic Russians in Ukraine have been flooded by messages from Russian-based media outlets condemning the “Fascist putsch” that overthrew the government of President Viktor Yanukovych and ominous warnings that Fascist mobs were heading east from Kiev to brutalize the ethnic Russian population (a comprehensive United Nations report could find no evidence of these alleged attacks).  For their part, some ultra-nationalist groups that became involved with the Maidan protests in Kiev have talked openly about their desire for Ukraine to be “for Ukrainians” - meaning ethnic Ukrainians and not Russians who happen to also be citizens of Ukraine; though again, the anti-Russian, Ukrainian-nationalist mobs that the Russian media constantly warns about have not materialized.

The BBC video brings to mind another recent European conflict: the Yugoslavian Civil War in the 1990s.  Before the conflict – Europe's bloodiest since World War II – Yugoslavia had been a fairly prosperous multi-ethnic nation, of Serbians, Croatians and Bosniaks (Muslims from Bosnia), who peacefully co-existed.  Nowhere was this more apparent than in Sarajevo, a vibrant, multi-ethnic city that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.  A decade later, the city would lie largely in ruins, having borne witness to the worst acts of ethnic cleansing since the Holocaust.  The roots of the Yugoslavian Civil War can be traced back to then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, himself an ethnic Serb.  In an effort to bolster his regime, Milosevic filled the airwaves with Serbian nationalist rhetoric, some of it reviving ancient ethnic tensions that dated back to the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 between the Serbs and the Muslim Ottoman Empire.  A conflict soon emerged with neighbors who had lived together, sometimes for decades, beating, killing and raping each other in a brutal inter-ethnic war.

The Ukrainian crisis also comes along at the 20^th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the past century; the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.  Here again, two ethnicities – the Hutus and the Tutsi – who had lived side-by-side were soon embroiled in a genocide that would kill more than 800,000 people in the space of just three months.  The roots of that conflict can be traced back to Rwanda's time as a colony when the ruling Belgian empire used minor physiological characteristics to create a division between the two very similar Hutu and Tutsi peoples.  A century later, these differences would be exploited - again through a deliberate mass-media campaign - to sow division between the two groups that would eventually lead to the genocide.

In the United States even today tension exists between the Caucasian and African-American communities; occasionally the rhetoric employed around this tension can be ugly and hateful.  But with these two communities, there are outward signs of difference; a way for one to cite the “otherness” of the opposite community.  These outward differences are minor in the cases of the ethnicities involved in the Rwandan and Yugoslav conflicts and totally absent in Ukraine where the “Russian” and “Ukrainian” ethnicities are entirely social constructs with no basis in physiology.  Yet in each case it has been remarkably easy for some actors within one community to use the mass-media to portray the other ethnicity as something evil or dangerous, an existential threat to the welfare of the actor's ethnicity.  What is disturbing is how willingly people are to buy into the victimization narrative and turn on the others, even if they were their friends and neighbors.  During the heights of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda conflicts it was not uncommon for people to rape and murder the neighbors they had lived next to for many years just because they belonged to the other ethnicity.  

Ukraine has not sunk to that level of violence yet, but recent history has shown that it can sadly be a very short descent.

Possible Appeal In The Pussy Riot Verdict?

A quick follow up on three women who are likely the world's most famous political prisoners: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich; members of the Russian punk collective Pussy Riot, who were recently sentenced to two years in prison for their “punk prayer” performance in Moscow's Christ the Savior cathedral last February.

Or maybe not. Russia's Human Rights Ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, said he is ready to appeal the two year sentence unless it is commuted by higher authorities (i.e. President Vladimir Putin). “If the sentence stays as is, the ombudsman has a right to appeal it at higher levels, which I will consider,” Lukin said in an interview with RIA Novosti, adding that he considered the group's cathedral performance “not as a crime but an administrative misdemeanor.”

It is hard to tell what affect, if any, the Ombudsman's comments will have on the sentence handed down against the three women, who have already served six months in jail awaiting their trial earlier this month.  Commuting their sentences though could give Putin, who before the trial said that the judge should not act “too harshly” towards the women, a chance to appear as a benevolent ruler while also negating a verdict that has led to harsh criticism of Russia from the international community.

Of course, another comment made by Lukin is an indication of why Pussy Riot is unlikely to serve as a rallying point for Russia's political opposition; Lukin called the cathedral performance “I consider it tactless and silly.”  Public opinion polls have shown that a majority of Russians hold similar views of the Pussy Riot protest.

Meanwhile, over at The Mantle this week, I talk about why the Pussy Riot trial isn't the most important political prosecution in Russia today.

The Kremlin's If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em Social Media Strategy

Russia recently surpassed Germany as the European country with the most internet users.  While this could be taken as a positive sign of Russia's modernity and development from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, it's doubtful that the folks in the Kremlin are viewing it that way.

Part of the reason for the growth of internet users in Russia is that the internet is the one form of mass media not under tight de facto control by the state.  That's also the reason why the internet has played a large role in organizing the political opposition to Vladimir Putin during the past year; Alexei Navalny  for one has risen to national stature based on his blog, which freely criticizes the Putin administration.

Seeing that they missed the boat on setting up a web-filtering system like China's Great Firewall, the Kremlin is taking a new tack: they'll try to beat the opposition at their own social media game.  Last week, Kremlin officials announced that they would be launching their own, as yet unnamed, government-run social networking site for Russia, set up along the lines of Facebook. Officials have high hopes for the new networking site and say that private capital will be used to develop the web project.

But Russia already has its own privately-run Facebook clones: Vkontakte (“In Contact”) and Odnoklassniki (“Our Class”), the former of which bears an amazing resemblance to Facebook.  Since these social networks already exist, along with an official Russian-language option for Facebook as well, critics wonder why anyone would join a government-run social networking site, especially since it is reasonable to assume that the government would be monitoring content on the site and would likely take a dim view of any critique of the government.

“If the government creates some form of social network, then people will not join it,” said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia's security services and the internet in an article in The Guardian. “It is not realistic.”

Russia's Paranoid Air Disaster Response

Three weeks ago the future of Russia's civil aviation industry took a major step back when their showpiece Sukhoi Superjet 100 slammed into a mountain in Indonesia while on a six-nation publicity tour of Asia to drum up sales.

The stakes couldn't be higher, and the accident more costly, for Russia's civil aviation industry.  The Superjet is the first civilian jetliner designed since the collapse of the Soviet Union; in addition to bringing a new product to market, Sukhoi also had to fight widespread perceptions that Russian aircraft are inherently unsafe, a reputation earned by Russia's generally lousy civilian aviation record, and not helped by the high-profile crash of a passenger jet last October, which killed the entire Yaroslavl Lokomotiv hockey team.

Perhaps it is for these reasons that the GRU, the intelligence wing of the Russian armed forces is offering up this explanation for the Superjet crash in Indonesia on May 9: it was an act of industrial sabotage on the part of the United States meant to cripple the Russian aviation industry.  The GRU is apparently serious about this story, explaining in the pages of Moscow's Komsomolskaya Pravda that the “most plausible” explanation for the crash was electronic jamming that interfered with the Superjet's onboard navigational equipment, jamming apparently done by the United States.

The problem is that this is not the “most plausible” explanation, what's more plausible is that the still unexplained crash of the Superjet was due to error on the part of the pilot Alexander Yablontsev. The doomed flight of the Superjet was suppose to be a simple flight departing and returning to Jakarta, flying over the mountainous interior of Indonesia. But roughly midway through the flight, the aircraft ran into thunderstorms.  Yablontsev, who is regard as one of Russia's most-experienced test pilots, for some reason requested permission to fly below the storm, where pilots are typically trained to try to fly above such adverse weather.  Because of his years of experience, Yablontsev's unusual request was granted by air traffic controllers, according to Time magazine.  The Superjet soon flew into the side of a mountain.

It is possible then, that flying over unfamiliar terrain, Yablontsev simply did not know there were tall mountains ahead of him when he made his request, and couldn't see them due to the stormy conditions.  But there should have been an audible alarm warning of a possible collision.  Crews recovered the Superjet's flight voice recorder but have heard no sounds of an alarm in the cockpit.  It is here that Time offers two possible explanations: one that Yablontsev deliberately flew into the heavy weather to show off the Superjet's handling to the planeload of dignitaries; and that the alarm systems may have been shut off because guests on these show flights were freely allowed to enter the cockpit to get a better view of the Superjet in action.  These allegations are based in large part on Russian travel blogger Sergei Dolya who reported on the Superjet's trip, but who missed the fateful flight.  Pictures from an earlier flight show Dolya dressed as Poseidon performing a mock ceremony with the flight crew as they flew over the Equator (an old naval tradition for sailors crossing the Equator for the first time).  It is a clear example that the typical regulations regarding guests in the cockpit were not being followed during the Superjet's tour.

Time's explanation is frankly far more plausible than what's being offered up by the GRU, which seems like nothing more than spin to cover up a very embarrassing accident.  It's worth noting that some in Russia also tried to offer American sabotage as the reason for the failure of their recent attempted Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars.

Iran, The War, and Everything

Since it is now the Persian New Year (Happy Nowruz), it seemed like a good time to run the infographic below that illustrates how foreign powers nibbled away at the territory of Iran during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, which might just explain why the Iranians are rather particular about being ordered around by the international community.

 Meanwhile, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has come to the same conclusion that I did several months ago – that any attack on Iran's nuclear sites will only drive Iran towards building a nuclear bomb, rather than dissuading them from it.  “I am almost certain that such a decision will surely be taken after (any) strikes on Iran,”  Lavrov said Tuesday on Moscow's Kommersant FM radio, where he also claimed that the CIA and other American officials have admitted to not having any hard evidence of any political decisions on the part of Iran's leadership to actually authorize a nuclear weapons program.  Lavrov also repeated assessments made by military analysts in the West that have concluded airstrikes against Iranian facilities could slow any research program, but would not destroy it as the Israelis did with Iraq's nuclear program, which was effectively ended by an Israeli airstrike in 1981.

But energy industry analysts are becoming more convinced that a conflict with Iran is in fact imminent, based in part on an executive order signed on Friday by President Obama that, among other things, orders executive departments and agencies responsible for plans and programs relating to national defense to “be prepared, in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology for national defense requirements.”  Get that? Analysts say that the order effectively would, in a time of national emergency, give the President effective control over the country's natural resources.  And the only national emergency the analysts see on the horizon is a potential conflict with Iran.  The White House tried to downplay the impact of the executive order on Monday, saying that it was similar to executive orders signed by several other presidents in the past and should not be taken as a sign of an impending war.

The New York Times meanwhile, is reporting that the Iranian conflict could prove to be quite costly for America.  A leaked war game scenario carried out by the Pentagon earlier in the month projected up to 200 American casualties after a US warship was attacked by Iranian forces in retaliation for Israeli airstrikes against their nuclear research facilities.  This attack then draws the United States into a large-scale conflict with Iran.  Pentagon officials stressed that this was one of a number of possible outcomes, but admitted that an Israeli attack would spark off a series of reactions that were both “unpredictable and uncontrollable”.

My prediction is that if the Israelis launch their oft-threatened airstrike, it will be before our November presidential elections.  The clock keeps ticking...

Bill Gates' Brilliant Plan To Doom Humanity

I was just getting to the point where I kind of liked Bill Gates.  He'd left behind the arrogant persona he wore like a badge of honor during the 90s when Microsoft seemed like the monolithic company with designs of controlling every aspect of our lives, in favor of guise of the humanitarian, happy to humbly use his remaining years and billions of dollars to eradicate disease in the third world.  And then he goes and backs something like this and you remember how much you hate the guy.

Gates is part of a clique of the rich and powerful, which includes his fellow plutocrat Richard Branson among others, who have come up with a plan to fight the problem of global warming called geoengineering.  In simple terms, Gates, the computer genius, esentially wants to hack the environment. 

Geoengineering involves pumping huge amounts of sulfur dioxide particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect a portion of the sun's solar energy back into space.  The idea is that this reduction in solar energy hitting the Earth's surface where it would naturally warm the planet, would offset the concentrations of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, which act like a blanket wrapped around the Earth, preventing heat from naturally radiating off into space and thus causing global warming.  To offset future GHG emissions, you just pump more sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. Simple, right?

There are only two things wrong with this daft plan.  The first is that even geoengineering advocates admit that a side-effect of the sulfur dioxide plan is a “permanent whitening of day-time skies,” or as they go on to explain a “washed-out sky would become the norm.”  In other words, if you like sunsets and blue skies, you'll need to find yourself another planet.  The second little problem is that once you start pumping sulfur dioxide particles into the sky, you can never, ever stop.  The particles naturally settle out of the atmosphere, meaning they have to be replaced to maintain the reflective shield.  If you don't maintain the reflective shield, then there will be no offset to the now GHG-laden atmosphere, meaning global temperatures could suddenly spike up dramatically.

And these are just the whopping side-effects geoengineering advocates talk about.  You have to assume that none of these scientists, or Gates, Branson, et. al., have ever watched The Matrix (or Highlander II for that matter, which featured its own sky-scorching plan) or Jurassic Park, since the takeaway message from all of these films is that screwing with Mother Nature never works out well for us humans, something “unexpected” always goes wrong.

Members of the environmental community have a more mundane critique to level at the geoengineering clique – they say that the money and prestige men like Gates bring to the table could be better harnessed in crafting policies, legislation and techniques to reduce GHG emissions into the atmosphere in the first place, and that by touting a crackpot idea like geoengineering, they are taking money and attention away from theories and prototypes that could actually fight climate change without denying future generations the chance to see a blue sky.  Thankfully there's a United Nations moratorium in place to prevent any large-scale experiments into geoengineering, let's just hope that it stays in place and that Gates and his merry band of plutocrats are kept from dooming us all while in the safe and certain knowledge that they know better than the rest of us and Mother Nature put together.

Iranophobia!

Be afraid, be very afraid...

That was the message coming from Capitol Hill on Tuesday following a meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee (an oxymoron of a name if there ever was one), where US intelligence chief Gen. James Clapper (ret.) was grilled on the current standoff with Iran over that country's supposed nuclear weapons program.

According to Clapper, there is no credible intelligence of Iranian plans to stage terror attacks within the United States, yet the takeaway from the Committee meeting was that Iran has plans to stage terror attacks within the United States.  The one item offered as proof of Iranian subterfuge within the United States was last year's comically bad alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington DC.  If you recall, this was the plot that used an Iranian-American used car dealer with a sketchy past to hire a hitman from Mexico's Zetas drug cartel to blow up a DC restaurant where the Saudi ambassador was dining.  The plot was discounted by most experts as not being an official Iranian operation simply because it sounded like the plot of a bad spy movie and because the Iranian intelligence agencies pride themselves on being a professional and efficient organization.

Still, that didn't stop the Senate Intelligence Committee from buying into in on Tuesday.  They presented the specter - based on no credible information - of a network of Iranian sleeper cells waiting in America, ready to launch terror attacks if the US followed through on threats of military action against Iran's nuclear research sites.  The threat of retaliatory terror attacks was then used as evidence in favor of military action against Iran. 

And at this point my head really starts to spin at the circular logic being employed by our esteemed Senators.  To quote the great Yogi Berra, this is really starting to seem like deja vu all over again.  It all recalls the tortured logic that led up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Then we were told we had to act because of the threat of a “mushroom cloud” erupting over an American city.  Even though there was no evidence that Iraq had a nuclear program (and after the war we learned definitively that they did not), the Iraqis could not prove that they did not have a nuclear program, which to our leaders at the time was proof enough of a threat.  Once again we are tying ourselves up in logical knots as we rush headlong to what would be our third war in the region in just over a decade.  Considering that we've arguably gone 0-2 in regional conflicts, you'd think we wouldn't be in such a hurry.

It's A Small (Protest) World

There's an amusing story in The Guardian about the absurdist new tack that some political protesters are taking in Russia, and the police's equally-absurd reaction to them.

Activists in the Siberian city of Barnaul tried to get around opposition from local officials to pro-democracy/pro-reform political protests by recreating a political protest in miniature by setting up a collection of toy figurines – Lego men and the like – holding tiny political slogans on a streetside snowbank.  Some passersby were amused by the toy rally, the Barnaul police were not. The city's deputy police chief went so far as to say at a press conference, as reported by local media in Barnaul: “in our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event.” Police also reportedly jotted down the slogans carried by the Lego men and told the rally's human organizers that they would need to “rent” the pile of snow that served as a stage from the city.  A human spokeswoman for the toy rally said that they deliberately decided to stage an absurd protest to illustrate the ridiculousness of the official position against political rallies in Russia, it was nice then of the police in Barnaul to oblige them.

The Guardian reports that in December, the first political protest against the widespread belief that the December 4 parliamentary elections had been rigged in favor of Vladimir Putin's United Russia party drew nearly 2,000 people in Barnaul, a rather large number for a city of only 600,000 located in Siberia in the middle of winter.  Activists are planning another round of political rallies across Russia this Saturday to protest the upcoming presidential elections, which Putin is expected to win.  Officials in Moscow have granted a permit for humans to march this time, with organizers expecting 50,000 people to attend.

Ron Paul, Our (Bad) Ideas Guy

Michael A. Cohen is out with a good piece in Foreign Policy debunking the foreign relations plank of the latest top-tier Republican presidential candidate, Dr. Ron Paul. While he's cast himself staunchly in the conservative/libertarian camp, Ron Paul is drawing interest - and even some measure of support - from folks on the left; high-profile pundits like Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher have both voiced their approval for his foreign policy stances, so too have several of my more liberal/progressive friends.  Typically they cite Paul's belief that the United States needs to lessen its military footprint around the globe, along with his opposition to a possible war with Iran as factors that set him apart from the Republican crowd and reasons for their support.

But in reality, these positions are less examples of “good ideas” than they are simply of Paul having a more realistic view of America's current geopolitical situation than do any of his fellow Republican presidential candidates, all of whom have wrapped themselves in the cloak of “American exceptionalism” and all the rhetoric that entails.  The reality is that the United States spends too much money it doesn't have on maintaining a military presence in places that don't really affect life in the USA all that much, like say, Afghanistan, where the US spends billions of dollars a month to prop up the kleptocracy of Hamid Karzai.  In this regard, the US is following in the historic footsteps of other empires like the Roman and British, which spent much money and effort in their declining years meddling in the affairs of minor kingdoms at the fringes of Empire.  As for Iran, it is clear that no military intervention is going to achieve our desired result – the end of Tehran's nuclear research program – nor does our military have the ability to now fight a prolonged war after a solid decade of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Paul's position then is more an accurate assessment of the global situation than it is an example of groundbreaking “good ideas”.

And once you take a step past these Left-approved positions, Paul quickly goes off the deep end.  Paul pushes an isolationist policy, one that would see the United States withdraw from international treaties and bodies (Paul insists that he's not an isolationist since he would allow free trade with foreign nations, though like his defense of his 1980's era newsletters, it is a pretty weak insistence).  Under President Paul, the United States would withdraw from treaties like NAFTA, alliances like NATO, and organizations like the World Health Organization and the United Nations.  So at a time when the world is becoming “smaller”, and countries becoming more integrated, Paul's foreign policy would amount to “hey you kids, get off my lawn”.  For good or bad, the United States can't simply withdraw from the world, not if we expect to maintain our level of international prestige, or keep our economy running – the global economy works because countries are bound together by a host of treaties and compacts, one can't then simply drop these obligations and expect to keep your seat at the table. From the time of our founding, presidents have understood that the United States needs to be engaged with the world.  As a nation, our first military actions abroad were the “Barbary Wars” at the dawn of the 19^th century, where US sailors and marines fought with the pirates of the Barbary Coast (current-day Libya) over their harassment of American merchant vessels.  200 years ago, presidents realized you couldn't simply pull up the drawbridge and disengage from the world, a fact that seems to have escaped Paul today.

From isolationism, Paul's foreign policy musings quickly go into tinfoil hat land.  Part of Paul's opposition to NAFTA is a belief that it is the forerunner to the North American Union – a merger of the US, Mexico and Canada under a single government with a single currency allegedly to be called the “Amero”.  This conspiracy theory has been floating around the Internets since the mid-90s, though Paul has taken it seriously enough to introduce legislation to prevent it from occurring (one does have to wonder why, since clearly the United States would dominate such a union).  But it's not just the NAU that wants to subjugate the USA, the United Nations also has it in for us. According to Paul, the UN is merely a front for a one world government that will deprive Americans of their liberties, including their right to own guns.  Again, here Paul strays into the realm of far-right conspiracy fans, since anyone who has ever had any experience with the United Nations can tell you that the place is far too disorganized to ever come up with a one-world anything.

A fundamental misunderstanding of two centuries of American foreign policy and a penchant for taking far-right Internet ramblings way too seriously, things to consider next time Ron Paul is put forward, like Jon Stewart has done, as our “ideas guy”.

Bald Man's Comb Redux

The brief 1981 war between Great Britain and Argentina over possession of the Falkland Islands, a pair of rocky, windswept pieces of land in the stormy South Atlantic that are home to more sheep than humans, was once famously compared to two bald men fighting over a comb.  It seems like at least one of the bald men is up to his old tricks again.

Earlier this month, Argentine patrol vessels boarded and detained 12 Spanish fishing vessels off the Falklands as part of what Argentina contends is a “legal” blockade of their islands (Las Malvinas, to the Argentines), which are currently being illegally occupied by the British, stating that the Falklands, along with the even more remote South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands are a “integral part of Argentine territory.”.  The Spanish replied by saying that they had legally-issued fishing permits from the government of the Falklands and contested the legality of Argentina's boarding.

Argentina's President Cristina Kirchner though is unbowed, slamming the British for “occupying” Las Malvinas, and recently calling Great Britain a “crude colonial power in decline.”  Her comments and the boarding of the Spanish vessels have brought a stinging rebuke from British foreign policy analyst, and frequent American TV pundit Nile Gardiner.  Nile typically provides a hawkish, right-wing point-of-view (no surprise since he is also the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center at the Heritage Foundation), so perhaps it’s no surprise that his suggested reply to Pres. Kirchner is for Great Britain to go in guns a-blazing.  Gardiner says that the boarding of the Spanish vessels, licensed by the government of the Falklands to fish in their waters, should be regarded as “an act of war” and that the British should dispatch an infantry brigade, Typhoon warplanes and an attack submarine to the Falklands immediately, lest Argentina “strangle the Islands economically.”

Argentina raises the issue of sovereignty over the Falklands/Malvinas periodically; critics have charged that Pres. Kirchner uses the nationalistic fervor over the Islands to drown out critics of her domestic policies, particularly her economic ones.  Complicated the matter at the moment though is the fact that Prince William is due to be stationed in the Falklands next year as part of his tour of duty with the Royal Air Force – it is hard to imagine that the Brits would want to send the likely savior of the royal family into harms way, of course not sending him could send a message to Kirchner that maybe the British aren't all that serious about the Falklands after all...  Still, it is hard to imagine that Kirchner would want to do anything to put her country in a position of actually getting into another shooting war with Great Britain, considering how badly Argentina lost the first one and that the Argentine military really hasn't gotten much better since.

 

The whole sovereignty issue is a murky one since neither Great Britain nor Argentina have a particularly strong claim to the Falklands/Malvinas.  Typically, the preferred way a case like this would be solved is with a referendum among the disputed territory's residents, allowing them the right of self-determination.  But Argentina has steadfastly opposed this option since almost all of the Falklands 3,000 residents are of British ancestry and would surely vote for union with Queen and country, thus losing the Falklands as a nationalistic talking point for Argentine politicians for good. 

Boo Birds Redux

Last week I ran this post about Russia's Prime Minister/President-in-Waiting Vladimir Putin being booed at a martial arts match in Moscow.  In Wednesday’s web edition of Foreign Policy, writer Julia Ioffe offered a longish piece on the rumbles of discontent rolling around Russia these days, with some further information about the booing Putin incident.

Kremlin spokespeople quickly took to the air to explain that the 20,000 or so gathered spectators weren't actually booing Putin, but rather the defeated American fighter Jeff Monson who was supposedly exiting the ring off-camera.  But according to Ioffe, in the wake of that explanation, Russians flocked to Monson's Facebook page to comment that, no, they were booing Putin; or as one poster put it: “all whistles were only for Putin and for his party -- they are the greatest thiefs in our history.”  And while the martial arts boo-down was the only one of note aimed at Putin, people speaking in favor of the ruling United Russia party have recently been heckled at a hockey game and rock concert.

It's certainly not a sign that an Arab Spring-style revolt is just around the corner, but it should make it interesting to watch the results of this Sunday's elections for the Russian Duma (their parliament).

Real Housewives of the Kremlin

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has long been the United States' official journalistic voice to the world, and a source of quality reporting, which makes the appearance of this rather tabloid-y (but still interesting) story about Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rather interesting.  In it, journalist and German intelligence expert,  Erich Schmidt-Eenboom makes the claim that during Putin's time as a KGB agent in East Germany, a West German counter-agent was able to penetrate his inner circle and become a close confidant to Putin's wife Lyudmila, and that's where the juicy details come in.  According to the report, Lyudmila Putina confided to the agent, identified as a woman called “Lenochka”, that Putin was a womanizer who regularly beat her.  Lenochka herself was later removed from the assignment after falling in love with the KGB colonel who ran Putin's unit.

It is a description of the Putins relationship at odds at least with the carefully-crafted public image of the couple.  Shortly after Putin quickly rose from obscurity to become President Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, a biography of personal anecdotes from Putin's early years called First Person was published; one of the stories it contained was how in the early days of his marriage Putin nursed Lyudmila back to health after she was badly injured in a car accident.  However, as RFE/RL notes, Putin has otherwise been fiercely protective of his private life, with his daughters never appearing in public or the press and, as RFE/RL wryly notes, public appearances with Lyudmila “have become as rare as Siberian yeti sightings.”  Now it is one thing to keep his daughters out of the public eye, but politicians wives are expected to pubicly support their husbands, which makes Lyudmila's absence all the more unusual, fueling rumors that the couple had in fact divorced or that Putin was keeping a girlfriend on the side, possibly (according to Russia's version of gossip columnists) former Olympic gold medalist, gymnast and current member of parliament, Alina Kabayeva.

Beyond the sleazy salaciousness of the Putin story, I also find it interesting that RFE/RL chose to run such a gossipy piece in the first place.  You have to wonder if this is part of a subtle media campaign to undermine the public image of the once and future President of Russia, since the column has appeared shortly after Putin announced that he, rather than current President Dmitry Medvedev, would be representing the United Russia party in next year's presidential election.  And then there is the sinking popularity of United Russia itself.  While still the dominant party in Russian politics, United Russia's own popularity is waning.  In a recent poll, only 51% of Russians said they would support United Russia, a drop of 9% from the previous poll.  In an effort to boost their profile ahead of parliamentary elections in December, United Russia released an edgy TV ad designed to appeal to young voters: in it a young woman exchanges glances with a young man before stepping into the voting booth, her hand then shoots out from behind the voting booth curtain, grabbing him and dragging him inside.  After a few seconds, the two disheveled voters emerge from the booth with the tagline “Let's Do It Together” then appearing on screen (y'know, vote).  The racy ad is being roundly criticized by opposition politicians who note that voting is something one is suppose to do alone.   

Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan

Newly-minted top-tier Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain actually injected foreign policy into the seemingly-endless Republican nomination battle this past weekend; of course the way he chose to do it was pretty sad indeed.

When asked about so-called “gotcha” questions put to presidential candidates – those questions that the candidate really shouldn't be expected to know the answer to, yet by not knowing they look unprepared for the job – Cain said, basically, that in running for president he doesn't really need to know who the leader of Uzbekistan is; his reply referencing a question posed to George W. Bush that started the whole “gotcha” campaign question phenomenon. Now in a broad sense, I think Cain has a point. There are 193 member-nations in the UN, I don't think it is right to expect someone running for the US presidency to know the leaders of them all, though I would expect a candidate to know, in broad terms at least, what kind of relationship the US has with the country in question and the larger regional issues surrounding it. Unfortunately Cain didn't make that simple point, rather he said it didn't matter if he knew who was the president of “Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan”. Way to make a valid point while sounding like a jackass there Herman...

I suppose it would come as a surprise for Mr. Cain to learn that Uzbekistan is an vital ally in our War on Terror operations in Afghanistan: the Uzbeks operate a link in the Northern Supply Route that ships material into Afghanistan, so if the Uzbeks were to decide to drop out of the Route, we'd have a really, really hard time keeping our 100,000 troops in-country clothed and fed – you would kind of think that makes Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan at least worth a little of his attention (the president, by the way, is Islam Karimov).

And Cain's pithy answer illustrates at least a partial answer to that oft-asked US foreign policy question: “why do 'they' hate us?” In part, it is because of the stunningly arrogant view some (or many) Americans have towards the wider world; that not much of it really matters, so why should we care how others feel? We Americans think nothing of chest-thumping exhibitions of patriotism, yet we never seem to think that other people from other countries might be just as proud of their homelands as we are of ours; even folks from Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan. On a personal note, a friend of mine was recently traveling to Central Asia and told me she'd be traveling on Uzbekistan Airways; the image that immediately popped into my head was of Borat and a biplane. But she assured me Uzbekistan Airways was a modern operation, and a quick check on Wikipedia showed that indeed it is – their fleet is made up almost entirely of Boeings and Airbuses, most of which are newer than those aircraft flown by domestic US airlines. I felt appropriately chastised.

But I'm also not running for president. If the current crop of Republican candidates, Mr. Cain included, are truly the best our nation has to offer for the most-important job in the land, maybe we shouldn't feel so proud.

Chinese Carrier Kerfuffle

China made headlines this week with the launch of their first aircraft carrier. The move also made waves on op-ed pages as a host of columnists pointed to the launch as yet another sign of China's growing international clout, military might and territorial ambitions. Launching an aircraft carrier is being seen as a direct challenge to American control of the seas, since the United States has dominated the aircraft carrier field since the end of World War II; the US State Department added a little fuel to this fire on Wednesday by sending a formal request to China to explain why they feel the need for “this type of equipment”.

The ship in question is “Chinese” inasmuch as China currently owns it, but the ship began life back in the old Soviet Union as the Varyag. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Varyag spent years rusting away in a Ukrainian shipyard until being sold and towed to China (the Ukrainians sold the Varyag less its engines) where it sat rusting in another shipyard, possibly to become a floating casino in Macau, before the Chinese decided to refurbish it and put it into service as their very first aircraft carrier. Given that lineage, the Chinese aircraft carrier starts to sound a lot less intimidating. Add to that account two other stories from earlier in the year: an account from the Washington Post in January about how the Chinese air force remains dependent on Russian-built jet engines since the domestically-made versions just don't perform as well, and reports that the crews of the ships the People's Liberation Army Navy sent to participate in anti-piracy operations off of Somalia reported severe morale and supply problems due to the length and distance of their mission; the Chinese navy sounds even less formitable still.

The Varyag, or whatever the Chinese eventually decide to call her, isn't itself a game-changer in terms of naval power around the globe, but it plays nicely into an existing narrative of a China growing in economic/industrial power and a China that is becoming more aggressive with its neighbors. According to reports, the Chinese plan to field three carrier battlegroups by 2050. Of course 2050 is a long way off, forty years from now the aircraft carrier as a ship design may very well be obsolete. It also supposes that China will continue on an unbroken path as an emerging superpower, which is a pretty big assumption. It is easy to look at China, which recently became the world's second-largest economy, and presume that this is what will happen. But it ignores potentially serious problems within China that could derail their ascendancy: climbing rates of inflation, a potential economic housing bubble, a growing disparity between rich and poor and simmering ethnic tensions. In his new book, The Next Decade, George Friedman of the geopolitical risk group Stratfor makes a compelling case for the idea that China may now be near its peak of power, with internal problems dragging the country backward by the end of the decade.

It is a viewpoint to consider while reading tales about China's second-hand carrier.

Our Stupid Congress: Russia Edition

Much of the focus in the United States, and the world for that matter, has been on the totally manufactured crisis our Congress has whipped up over the ordinarily mundane act of raising the nation's debt limit. But its good to know that while plunging the national economy into peril, Congress can also screw up foreign policy at the same time.

Right now Congress is threatening to plunge US-Russian relations with a piece of legislation designed to scold the Russians for not living up to our standards of human rights. The “Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2011” is named for a noted Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died in a Russian prison in 2009 allegedly after being beaten by his captors, who then denied him medical treatment. The bill targets his captors, as well as any other Russian officials as deemed by our Congress “responsible for extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of human rights.” Now the treatment of Magnitsky was horrible and is yet another low point for the concept of the Rule of Law in Russia. But this bill is nothing more than some political grandstanding by a collection of blowhard American politicians whose view of Russia stopped evolving sometime around the release of the movie Red Dawn.

What they overlook is the deep cooperation between the US and Russia in several key areas, cooperation the Russians are threatening to curtail if the Magnitsky Act were to become law. Among these key areas of cooperation are logistical support for the ongoing military mission in Afghanistan , the so-called “Northern Route” into Afghanistan, which avoids Pakistan entirely; not to mention that the Russians are now our taxi service to and from the International Space Station, without the Russians our astronauts will have to hitchhike home.

If Congress really wanted take up the mantle of human rights, they could always introduce the Tienanmen Square (or Uighur or Ai Weiwei) Accountability Act demanding that China follow international norms in human rights or face a total ban on their imports to the United States, of course such an act would require our politicians to take a meaningful and principled stand on a serious issue that would have an impact on the lives of tens of millions of Americans, which is something the current Congress likes to avoid at all costs.

Or our Congress could simply stop telling the rest of the world how they should govern their affairs until they get their own house in order and stop behaving like a bunch of squabbling eight-year olds, since frankly the current state of affairs in our government is downright embarrassing.

Sister Sarah's Stalinist Supporters

By now you've probably heard about Sarah Palin's recent gaff regarding Paul Revere. During her family trip across the eastern United States, complete with campaign-style bus and media phalanx, Palin alleged that the famous midnight ride of Paul Revere was to warn the British not to try to take away our guns, rather than the actual purpose of warning his fellow rebellious colonists about the landing of British troops. Whether this was a sly attempt to pander to Nativist and Second Amendment advocates within her political base or simply an example of her stunning lack of knowledge of American history, we'll never know; but being Sarah Palin means never having to say you're wrong, in the following days Palin asserted her word salad version of history was the correct one.

So too did her online supporters, and here's where the irony kicks in. Palin supporters went onto the publicly-editable online dictionary Wikipedia and attempted to change the entry on Paul Revere to comport with the facts of Palin's story. It's ironic since Palin is quick to invoke charges of “Socialism” against the Obama administration for practically any policy move she disagrees with, yet the adjustment of history to support the political situation of the present was a hallmark of the one-time leader of the Socialist world, the Soviet Union. And no one practiced this tactic better than Josef Stalin.

Stalin started his own modification of the past early, blending photos to produce an image of him with the Father of the Soviet Revolution, V. I. Lenin as a way to polish his bona fides shortly after taking power. The tactic would continue on for decades: generals, ministers and cosmonauts who fell out of favor would quickly be edited out of official photographs, even ones that had been reproduced many times in the Soviet media. Sergei? Sergei who? There's no Sergei in this photo... Palin's supporters tried the same tactic with Wikipedia, attempting to edit the Paul Revere entry to state that he did ride to tell the Brits to keep their hands off our guns. And in a move that would make today's last Stalinist leader, North Korea's Kim Jong-il blush, they linked back to media reports of Palin making her Paul Revere statement as “proof” of its own historical accuracy.

It's a disturbing story on a few levels: first that Palin has such hubris she can't admit that she misspoke and move on, two that there are people who so value personality above someone who actually knows what their talking about that their willing to overlook any historical gaffes to support this person to be the leader of the nation, and finally that an online resource that has become the go-to site for many for historical reference can be so easily manipulated to fit the political will of the day. Maybe its time to go back to the old-fashioned bound sets of encyclopedias, and actually learning facts...

SuperPutin

We've had some fun here with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's exhibitions of manliness – his rides in fighter jets, his wading bare-chested through wild rivers, his riding fur-clad astride a horse across the Siberian steppe in winter – but now Russian artist Sergei Kalenik has gone one better casting the prime minister as a superhero in the online graphic novel “Superputin, A Man Like Any Other”, where Putin, clad in his judo gi, attempts to foil a terrorist plot with help from his sidekick, a giant bear that transforms into President Dmitry Medvedev.

Far from being an exercise in fanboy devotion, Superputin has a professional look about it, and it's pretty funny, loaded with inside jokes: The story incorporates elements of the movie Speed and the video game Mortal Kombat, while the last act is inspired by Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko 's wildly popular Night Watch series of novels. Medvedev's disguise is a play off of his name (medved is the Russian word for bear), while his superhero name “Nanoman” riffs off his attempts to launch a Russian version of Silicon Valley in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo. The story even takes a post-modernist, self-referential twist when Putin prods Medvedev to quickly disarm a bomb by saying “hurry Dima, only nine frames left [in the story].”




Since its launch in mid-May, Superputin has been viewed more than three million times and has drawn enough international attention to prompt Kalenik to post an English-language version of Superputin on the website. But the story has also drawn its share of critics, many of whom label Superputin as nothing more than ham-handed pro-Kremlin propaganda, albiet in a slick, new package. Much of the criticism centers around the story's “Twilight” sequence, where Putin and Medvedev confront a horde of zombies with blue buckets on their heads. The Blue Buckets have been a visual group of government critics, largely in Moscow, who wear blue plastic buckets on their heads. The genesis of their movement came from misuse by government officials of car-top flashing blue lights, meant for emergency use but often employed by mid-level bureaucrats to speed through traffic, occasionally with fatal results. In Superputin, the blue bucket zombies spout off protest slogans like “Let us elect governors!” and “Free Khodorkovsky!” as they confront Putin and Medvedev.

For his part, Kalenik denies any official connection to the Kremlin saying that he did the graphic novel in an attempt to inject some humor into Russia's “depressing political scene”, though he adds that he sent a link to Superputin to Pres. Medvedev and that he hopes he and Putin like it. And if Superputin is “official” propaganda, it is interesting since it casts both Putin and Medvedev as heroes – many political moves during the past few months have been percieved as attempts by the Putin and Medvedev camps to undermine each other ahead of next year's presidential elections. It also puts Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin in the role of an invisible gunman helping Putin and Medvedev fight off the zombies, an interetsing show of unity considering that in real life Medvedev recently moved to undercut Sechin's power by stripping him of his chairmanship of Russia's powerful energy firm Rosneft.

Thanks to the online popularity of Superputin, Kalenik is now looking for funding to produce up to a dozen sequels.

Laws Keep US From Cuban Oil Bonanza

Every now and then you come across a story that reenforces the enduring stupidity of the United States' decades-long embargo against Cuba. So it is with this story from an oil industry trade journal about how a deep-water drilling rig is beginning its long, slow journey from Singapore to the waters off Cuba to begin exploration in fields off the coast of the island nation. Specifically, the rig will be drilling in waters roughly 20 miles from Havana, and less than 60 miles from Key West, Florida. Surveys estimate there may be more than four billion barrels of oil off the coast of Cuba, along with sizable deposits of natural gas. Cuba is taking steps to exploit these resources with the goal of not only becoming energy independent but also of joining the club of oil exporting nations – a move that could breathe real life into the largely stagnant Cuban economy.

Now logically US-based firms should be all over these Cuban oil fields – with vast experience drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, such a partnership would make perfect sense. But that's not going to happen because of the economic embargo the US slapped on Cuba at the height of the Cold War to protest the takeover of Cuba by Marxist forces led by Fidel Castro. Of course not only has the embargo outlived the Cold War it also in six decades has failed to do the one thing it was designed to do, namely bring down the Castro regime.

But wait, it gets worse. If there were to be an accident with a Cuban well, like the kind that struck BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico last year, that oil would wind up on the beaches of Florida Keys within a couple of days and would, if enough oil was spilled, slip into the Gulf Stream and spread up the East Coast of the United States. But thanks to the embargo, any companies responding to this hypothetical accident could not request rescue or clean-up equipment from the United States, since that would be perceived as “doing business” with Cuba, something forbidden under the embargo. And, again thanks to the embargo, the United States does not participate in regular oil spill recovery drills with Cuba as it does with another regional oil producer, Mexico.

So not only is the now-pointless Cuba embargo preventing American companies and workers from earning money off the Cuban oil fields, it is also putting the country at risk should there be a spill. Can you say short-sighted government policy?

The Real Price Of Oil...

There's an incredibly thought-provoking piece out now from Time.com's military-focused blog Battleland on United States policy in the Persian Gulf. It talks about an analysis put together last year by Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University, who, after an exhaustive study, calculated the cost of the United States' military presence in the Gulf from 1975-2010 - a cost he puts at a whopping $8 trillion. Yes, that's trillion with a “T”. According to those calculations, the United States now spends as much each year ensuring that the oil from the Persian Gulf keeps flowing as it did in fighting the Cold War. And to make matters worse, Stern argues that it is not money well spent.

US policy towards the Gulf boils down to this: Thanks to the bottleneck created by the Straits of Hormuz, a military force could conceivably block the narrow shipping channels, cutting off the supply of oil and sending the world into an oil-fueled economic shock; therefore we must maintain a robust presence in the region to ensure that this does not happen (the US Navy's Fifth Fleet is currently based in the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain). Stern thinks this is nonsense. While it is conceivably possible that the Straits of Hormuz could be blocked by strategically sinking a few very large ships, the states of the Persian Gulf are too reliant on oil exports to ever do this, and countries outside of the Gulf (like China) are too dependent on oil imports ever to do it either.

History shows that Stern is probably right. Iran and Iraq spent eight years in the 1980s engaged in a brutal war with each other that featured, among other things, ballistic missile strikes on each others cities, the use of chemical weapons and suicide attacks carried out by children on the Iranian side. Yet neither the Iranians or Iraqis ever seriously tried to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, and oil prices were not only largely stable during the period of the war, they were also at near historic lows. If the Straits weren't shut down during that conflict, it is hard to imagine when they ever would be.

Yet much of current US foreign policy is built around just this scenario. Stern argues that this leaves the US overfocused on the Middle East while ignoring strategic threats in other parts of the world – say from China. I absolutely agree with him, especially since this is a point I've been arguing here for some time now. Consider for a moment that by the middle of this decade the United States will likely get as much oil from Africa as from the Persian Gulf, yet our investment/interest in Africa pales in comparison to our focus on the Mid-East. Unfortunately for as compelling as Stern's arguments are, they're not likely to change the minds of many decision-makers in Washington; his report originally came out in April 2010, a full year ago, to little public notice.