Today's the big day, and turnout seems to be high (which experts have emphasized would likely be a boon to Ahmadinejad's opponent, Mir Hossein Moussavi):
Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi makes the worthwhile point that, while attention is focused on the Iranian elections, the country's human rights record remains far below par.
Conserving trees for money can be a messy business.
Again from The Economist, a pretty even-handed report card marking the halfway point of Ban Ki-moon's tenure.
(image from flickr user Steve Rhodes under a Creative Commons license)
This is very bad news:
Relief groups in Pakistan will be forced to stop or cut back supplies of aid to more than one million people fleeing a military offensive in the northern Swat valley unless the worst funding crisis in a decade is resolved.
Nine aid agencies said on Thursday they faced a shortfall in excess of 26 million pounds, which was needed to provide food, medicine, tents and clothes to families uprooted by Pakistan's campaign to expel Taliban militants from Swat.
Why such a paltry response to such a devastating humanitarian crisis? Well, the economic contraction is surely one explanation. The fact that the Taliban-induced displacement in Swat is not, unlike the earthquakes in Pakistan and China last year, the 2004 South Asia tsunami, or last year's cyclone in Burma, a natural disaster also likely contributes, unfortunately, to people's willingness to donate.
But the particularly confounding factor of this crisis, as others have pointed out, is that much of the displaced population -- upwards of 80% -- is being absorbed into neighboring Pakistanis' homes. This is outstanding generosity, to be sure, but it neither obviates the need for humanitarian assistance nor creates a sustainable solution to the problem. And as I've said before, "even the most hospitable of families can only host 85 people in their home for so long."
(image of a refugee camp in Pakistan's Swat Valley, from Al Jazeera English under a Creative Commons license)
Responding to a Marty Peretz post mocking the UN for General Assembly elections won by some of his favorite countries, this commenter sounds a welcome note of reality to Peretz's sarcastic jibes:
All well and good, but do you imagine that Ambassador Bolton would have prevented the elections of Libya, Sudan, Algeria, and Iran? It is surely regrettable that the UN does not do what the US would like, but why would one expect that it would? Given that most of the world is governed by regimes for which we have little regard, we can confidently expect that they will take self-serving actions (just as we do) for which we will have little regard.
The UN, in short, is composed of 192 countries. Railing against the world body for the existence of these countries is neither productive nor particularly insightful. Nice to see a TNR commenter call Peretz out on that.
In fact, Bolton crookedly argues that a pre-emptive attack on Iran should actually have occurred under the Bush Administration, which at least did not engage in the kind of "apologetic" outreach that just might undo some of the ill will that a good bombing campaign could generate in the Muslim world. (His answer to the problems that a regional attack on Iran would cause? Unsurprisingly, more bombs!) What is truly unfathomable, though, is that Bolton somehow thinks that we can just attach a nice note of diplomacy alongside the missiles that should rain on Tehran.
Many argue that Israeli military action will cause Iranians to rally in support of the mullahs' regime and plunge the region into political chaos. To the contrary, a strike accompanied by effective public diplomacy could well turn Iran's diverse population against an oppressive regime.
Bomb first, negotiate later.
The other strikingly dense aspect of these two sentences is how utterly -- but unsurprisingly -- Bolton has failed to learn the lessons of Iraq. There is absolutely nothing to back up his blithe assertion that Iranians would most likely "turn against" the regime in the face of an Israeli bombing campaign. The same sort of forecast, equally unsupported by fact, was precipitously used to simply explain away any complicating reactions from Iraqis beyond their relief at the ousting of a tyrant (and one with much, much more blood on his hands than Ahmadinejad). This strategy, of course, proved disastrous in its oversimplification. Millions of Iranians have been rallying during their country's election campaign, but an unprovoked military assault would only sow disorder and antagonism.
Europe: "We'll go completely green by 2050."
China: "2050 -- ha! We'll out-green you by 2020."
Okay, not completely green, but still:
"We are now formulating a plan for development of renewable energy. We can be sure we will exceed the 15% target. We will at least reach 18%. Personally I think we could reach the target of having renewables provide 20% of total energy consumption."
This would surpass the goal that Europe has set out for 2020, which is even more impressive given how much more China pollutes. And don't doubt the Chinese -- they already invest more in renewables than does Europe, and they're way ahead on that whole banning plastic bags thing, which they did over a year ago.
Maybe Japan -- whose paltry proposed emissions cuts left the UN's climate head "lost for words" -- can be spurred to more ambitious targets by its mainland neighbor...
Of all the commentary and analysis of Iran's upcoming elections that I have read, this strikes me as definitively the worst. Titled "Iran's Potemkin elections" and penned by Con Coughlin, of London's Daily Telegraph, the piece ledes off (pun intended) with this bombshell: "Only candidates vetted by the ruling clerics have been allowed to stand." No! You mean that the Ayatollah had some say in determining who was allowed to run for election? I am shocked. Shocked.
Sarcasm aside, it is indeed puzzling why anyone would be surprised by the one part of Iran's power structure that seems relatively transparent. Twelve members of what is called the Guardian Council -- six picked directly by the Ayatollah, six more or less indirectly so -- are the ones to pre-approve candidates. This year, though more than 400 offered their name -- including women, who were allowed to do so for the first time -- only four survived the cut.
While many Iran hawks spend the bulk of their time pointing to Ahmadinejad's hostile and ham-handed provocations, others contend that Iran is the plaything of the "mad mullahs." Neither of these oversimplifications is accurate. The Ayatollah and his clerics exercise a good deal of power, for certain. But, in a telling example, Khamenei did not, by all accounts, prefer Ahmadinejad to win the first time around -- nor was he at all expected to do so -- and it is not clear whether Ahmadinejad or Mir Hossein Moussavi (who is not, as Coughlin calls him, a "conservative hard-liner") will prevail this year. That all we can expect out of what has been a very interesting election campaign is "more of the same" is also very much not necessarily true.
And I know the phrase "Potemkin" has come to mean any sort of façade, but Coughlin definitely has his history backwards. The original Potemkin village was designed to deceive the Empress Catherine the Great; in this case, it's the Supreme Leader who knows more about what's going on than anyone else -- though not, most probably, who's going to win this election.
(image from flickr user Shahram Sharif under a Creative Commons license)
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said today that some 25,000 Afghans call the Independent Election Commission (IEC) every week to get information on the 20 August presidential and provincial council elections.
Providing details on voter registration, polling place, and the election date, the hotline is one of those small, subtle ways that technology can further the UN's -- and Afghans' -- goals. The fact that operators sometimes receive threats from callers claiming to be part of the Taliban may make their job more dangerous, but it also underscores how important this service is to the growth of Afghan democracy.
(image from flickr user rybolov under a Creative Commons license)
A day after representatives from more than 35 countries and international organizations met in Rome to discuss piracy off the coast of the Somalia, the UN today reports the astonishing figure that over 100,000 Somalis have been displaced in the last month. Even by the standards of Somalia's recent turmoil, this is a shockingly high rate -- the highest, in fact, in "many, many years." Amidst this gross displacement, all sides of the conflict have committed egregious human rights violations, with an appalling frequency of rape, impressment of child soldiers, and reckless shelling of civilians.
Compared with the widespread travesties faced by these thousands of Somalis, the international community's focus on piracy, whatever its impact on the global economy, seems almost an affront to human dignity. Yet there are signs that leaders in Rome yesterday understand the connection between Somalia's humanitarian crisis and the headline-grabbing antics of pirates. From Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini:
The minister said that piracy is linked to phenomena like the "criminality and infiltration of extreme elements easily recruited also by Al-Qaeda".
"Piracy is only the tip of the iceberg," Frattini said. "We are convinced that piracy is related to the political and socioeconomic crisis on land, not on the sea.
He said piracy and terrorism, illegal immigration, human trafficking are " a threat not only to Somalia but to the entire international community".
How they choose to address this larger problem is, of course, the big question. Pirate courts and an enhanced Somali coast guard are nice steps, but the iceberg is much, much bigger.