Haibane.info

I've started a little blog devoted to anime, science fiction, fantasy fiction, and other geek cultural pursuits. It's at www.Haibane.info. Do stop by if that's your thing.

bloody well done

Ali Eteraz is getting noticed by the right people. Well done, bhai.

To be honest after four years of blogging I am beginning to feel weary and frustrated (as my last post no doubt indicated). I am sincerely glad to see fresh voices like Ali enter the debate and continue.

And yet, I still see the canards of "silent muslims" and refuseniks heralded as moderates. Have any of our efforts truly borne any fruit? It's hard to fathom sometimes why we muslims, especially in America, continue to make any effort at all.

enough

Typical.

I think I'm done with the term "moderate muslim". I'm a muslim American. Most muslims are muslim americans. Let Manji claim the "moderate" ground.

I'm also wondering whether I should continue to make the connection in my mind between being an American and being "Western" - perhaps we should recognize that America is not Western. After all, democracy is not Western. Democracy precedes the West, as does capitalism. And America, synthesis of democracy and capitalism, is tapping into an older current than "the West".

I dunno. I'm tired of these foolish labels. Lets just be descriptive - "muslim american" - rather than symbolic ("western") or relative ("moderate").

"unnecessary at this time"

February, 2006:

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 17 -- President Bush on Friday called for doubling the number of international troops in the war-ravaged Darfur region of Sudan and a bigger role for NATO in the peacekeeping effort.

Bush has concluded that peace talks will not halt the violence that has left tens of thousands dead and more than 2 million homeless in Darfur and that a more muscular military response is required, administration officials said.

April, 2006:

The Bush administration has settled on the idea of sending up to several hundred NATO advisers to help bolster African Union peacekeeping troops in their efforts to shield villagers in Sudan's Darfur region from fighting between government-backed Arab militias and rebel groups, administration officials said.

The move would include some U.S. troops and mark a significant expansion of U.S. and allied involvement in the conflict. So far, NATO's role has been limited to airlifting African Union forces to the region and providing a few military specialists to help the peacekeeping contingent.

The proposal, which still faces uncertain approval within NATO because of concerns that it could be a distraction from operations in Afghanistan, falls well short of more aggressive measures that some have advocated, such as sending ground combat troops or providing air patrols to protect peacekeepers and prevent the bombing of villages. These options have been ruled out as unnecessary at this time, an administration official said.

In general, U.S. officials said, their aim has been to address shortcomings in the African Union force without upstaging that force and stirring resentment in a region highly sensitive to the presence of Western troops.

Bombing in Najaf

via WaPo

NAJAF, Iraq, April 6 -- Bombs packed inside a minibus exploded Thursday outside one of the holiest shrines in Shiite Islam, shattering ancient tombs and enveloping pilgrims in balls of flame.

The attack near the Imam Ali shrine here in the southern city of Najaf killed at least 13 people, police said. Striking at the heart of territory dominated by Iraq's Shiite religious parties, it also risked a new cycle of Sunni-Shiite violence.

you know, ever since March 2003, it has always felt like March 2003.

Fukuyama vs Krauthammer

I have to differ and say that I think that Fukuyama has it right - there is a need to separate the concept of fighting terrorism and the concept of promoting democracy. Wilsonianism never concerned itself with the former; neo-conservatism merged the two. What is needed is neo-wilsonianism, combining the idealism of the Carter era (tie foreign policy to human rights), the multi-pole approach to superpower influence advocated by Gary Hart, and a good dose of cowboy Jacksonianism.

Greg Djierjian writes an exhaustive defense of Fukuyama from Krauthammer's critique. The major excerpt:

Fukuyama is right. The time has come to, at least to some extent, decouple the war against terrorism from our forward democratization strategy. This doesn't mean that neo-Wilsonian instincts must be wholly shunted aside. Democracy exportation is part and parcel of a good deal of America's foreign policy history, and a strain of American exceptionalism that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But the democratization strategy has to be better understood as a very long generational effort, undertaken soberly and methodically with allies, and not over the barrel of a gun, or via short-term, hastily organized attempts at rather clumsily stoking revolutions via a few dollars disbursed hither dither and the like. The situation in the Middle East is very delicate at the present hour, and Islamists in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and points beyond are in the ascendancy, at least at the present time. Therefore order and stability, at least in the short term, need to trump fanciful talk of moving the entire broader Middle East region into post-Enlightenment democratic governance modalities. The Islamic world is not yet necessarily ready for a steady diet of Jefferson and Montesquieu, yes, even if we open up consulates in remote parts of Indonesia or near the corniche in Alexandria in some essay at 'transformational' diplomacy. This does not mean, as the easy straw man argument goes, that Arabs are not constitutionally capable of democracy, much like some said Confucians in Asia weren't after WWII. But the teeming Cairene masses, say, are likelier to gravitate towards the Muslim Brotherhood than Ayman Nour, alas, at least at this juncture. Let's be cognizant of such nettlesome realities, yes?

So rather than speak of Krauthammerian democratic globalism as some universalist panacea, we have to instead focus like a laser on fighting the most ruthless of the global terrorists, marshalling efforts on coordinating and obtaining intelligence to find and kill them, drying up their financing, and ensuring they no longer have quasi-sanctuaries in places like southeastern Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan, or portions of Iraq. Meantime, we need to continue to work to resolve the regional conflicts that contribute to a, yes, poisonous atmosphere in the region, foster economic development via increased trade ties and liberalization of economies (great job on Dubai!), and better employ 'soft power' through the region by better explicating the objectives of US foreign policy in the region to a very skeptical neighborhood. This is the kernel of our current struggle, not ensuring that everyone has the right to vote for Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas, at this very moment, in Lebanon and Egypt and Palestine.

The basic problem with Krauthammer's defense of the status quo is that it amounts to an empty statement rather than a game plan for victory. It is basically akin to saying, "Win!" - words are cheap, but hope is not a plan.

There are already many liberal advocates of what I have called neo-wilsonianism above. These include Greg, the team at American Footprints, and Abu Aardvark, to name but a few. I can't recommend these blogs highly enough for sustained discussion and serious analysis of the future of foreign policy. It looks to be at three years at a minimum before we ever see it put into practice, but this is going to be my single issue for '08.

UPDATE: see, this is exhibit A of the wrong approach:

While President Bush vows to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, his administration has been scaling back funding for the main organizations trying to carry out his vision by building democratic institutions such as political parties and civil society groups....The shortfall threatens projects that teach Iraqis how to create and sustain political parties, think tanks, human rights groups, independent media outlets, trade unions and other elements of democratic society.

...."Money keeps getting transferred away to security training. Democracy's one of the things that's been transferred," said Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's project on democracy and the rule of law. "Without that, all the other stuff looks like just background work."

Yet that's what Krauthammer defends, and what Fukuyama critiques.

Tags: neo-wilsonianism, city of brass

energy inputs

this is the kind of thing that physicists are always getting frustrated about:

CNW's findings indicate that a hybrid consumes more energy overall than a comparable conventionally powered model. It judged showed that the Honda Accord Hybrid rang up an Energy Costs Per Mile of $3.29, while a gas-powered Accord was significantly cheaper at $2.18/mile. The study concludes that the average of all 2005 U.S. market vehicles was $2.28/mile.

The reasoning goes that hybrids use up more energy to manufacture, as well as consume more resources in terms of the assembly (and eventual disposal) of things like batteries and motors. By CNW's reckoning, the intrinsically lower complexity of, say, a Hummer H3 ($1.949/mile) actually results in lower total energy usage than any hybrid currently on the market, and even a standard Honda Civic ($2.42).

While I am in no position to evaluate the methodology, I think that it is critical to assess overall net energy rather than simply energy at one stage in any supposed "green" initiative.

Many environmentalists seem to assume that hybrid vehicles magically appear - generated by fairy dust and Mother Gaia - and then at the end of their lifespan will simply be re-absorbed into the ecosystem.

I think that hybrid technology is important and that buying hybrids is a good idea because it will help reduce manufactring costs and increase economies of scale. After all, today's gasoline engine is orders of magnitude more efficient than the one in the Model T.

However, buying a hybrid is definitely a poor choice of you are out to save money. I'll leave the simple math as an excercise for the reader - just compare a 25 mpg vs a 50 mpg fuel economy, with the latter costing an additional $5000, and see how many years it takes to break even (with gasoline at $2.50 a gallon and driving 15,000 miles a year).

And as for the green aspects of hybrids, regardless of the specific numbers above, it is quite reasonable to assume that the overall energy cost of production is substantially higher than a conventional vehicle. Denying this fairly obvious fact is detrimental to credibility on green issues.

The irght long term solution for automobiles is to go fully electric. Hybrids provide an easy vector for improvement of battery technology with immediate fiscal incentive for the automakers to drop the big R&D bucks. But no one driving a hybrid has any real reason to feel particularly green.

I plan on considering a hybrid next, myself.

(via Brian)