Iran's lethargic revolution

ARTICLE: Elite Guard in Iran Tightens Grip With Media Move, By MICHAEL SLACKMAN, New York Times, October 8, 2009

Iran waking up to the full extent of the putsch. It's not just the mullahs that are being marginalized by the Revolutionary Guards. It's the parliament too.

More and more, this silent coup looks very late Soviet in its outcome: the party that runs everything.

All revolutions, including China post-Mao, settle into such lethargy. Some, like Deng's China, pick the right exit strategy. Others, like Gorby's USSR, choose unwisely.

The gist from the piece:

Increasingly, it is the interests of the Guards and its allies that are driving the nation's policies, and those interests have often been defined by isolation from the West.

"I think they really see themselves comfortable in a situation where they are isolated and in control," said Michael Axworthy, a lecturer in Middle Eastern and Iranian history at the University of Exeter in England.

But as its role expands deep into society, the Guards also finds itself forced to balance its ideological inclinations with the practical aspects of protecting its own interests, the analysts said. For example, Iran has refrained from criticizing China, an important trade partner, over its crackdown on Uighurs, a Muslim minority.

And with inflation over 20 percent and manufacturing in serious decline, the Guards and its allies have appeared ready to take steps to head off new sanctions over the nation's nuclear program. The Guards oversees the nuclear and missile program, and the recently revealed enrichment plant near Qum is built into a mountain on a Guards base.

"A lot of it is about ideology, but a lot of it is about money, too," Mr. Nader [RAND expert] said.

Oh so very Brezhnevian.

My point: there is nothing unusual about the Iranian system's evolution, and the soft-kill logic only increases.

China's brittle middle class

OP-ED: China's class ceiling, By Ian Buruma, Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2009

A great exploration of yet another hidden deficit for "rising China." The middle class is coming, but the middle-class ideology is nowhere yet to be found, and therein lies the brittleness of the system--a huge vulnerability.

(Via WPR Media Roundup)

Saying Afghanistan isn't bad doesn't make it so

ARTICLE: Are Obama advisers downplaying Afghan dangers?, By Jonathan S. Landay, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers, October 11, 2009

Tell me this bit doesn't nail what I was saying about Jones in a recent post:

"I read in the paper that there are only 100 al Qaida fighters in Afghanistan," said another U.S. intelligence official, referring to an Oct. 4 CNN interview with National Security Adviser Jim Jones, a retired Marine general. "That might be true at a particular point in time, but an hour later there might be 200 or 250. The distinction between Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan is meaningless because as a practical matter, the border between them doesn't exist, and all the groups share sources of financing, training and weapons."

Team Obama cannot define this problem away.

(Via WPR Media Roundup)

Hypocrisy alert

ARTICLE: Pakistanis say U.S. hoards intelligence, By Sara A. Carter, Washington Times, October 12, 2009

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

(Via WPR Media Roundup)

Don't worry about Israel

ARTICLE: Diplomacy in the lead on Iran nuclear issue -- for now, By Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2009

Can I get a "duh!"?:

Agreement to open Iran's hidden nuclear complex to inspection has reduced talk of military action and put diplomacy back on track -- at least for a while. But even as the U.S. tries to build international pressure, emerging details suggest it might already be too late for an armed strike.

Everything about Iran's newly disclosed site near the holy city of Qom complicates the task for the two most likely attackers, the U.S. and Israel. Iranian officials say that's precisely why they built the facility on an elite military base, fortified with steel and concrete, and buried under a mountain.

Trust me, Iran is an "existential threat" to Israel only within the confines of the Netanyahu government's diplomatic argument that America should strike on its behalf.

In the end, between its several hundred warheads and very sophisticated missile defense system, Israel is more than ready for a nuclear Iran.

Would you expect anything less?

(Via WPR Media Roundup)

There's only one way to get what we want in AfPak

ARTICLE: U.S. Push to Expand in Pakistan Meets Resistance, By JANE PERLEZ, New York Times, October 5, 2009

Good argument for why we must stay and stay fairly big in Afghanistan for the meantime: we will never get the penetration nor cooperation desired in Pakistan, nor will we get the results by handing the Pakistanis money and leaving the neighborhood.

Pundits: Our age is most dangerous!

OP-ED: Our Three Bombs, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, New York Times, October 6, 2009

Classic additive reasoning from Friedman, who usually doesn't dip into such obvious fear-mongering.

He says he grew up with nuke bomb that only the Sovs could deliver, and now ANYBODY can deliver, so clearly a more dangerous world.

Then he adds on the debt and climate bombs, so clearly, the Cold War was better and nicer and safer than today.

It's a load of shit but nicely packaged.

Truth: back then we faced global destruction, and we face no such threat today. The likelihood of a small nuclear exchange between rising powers is no higher today than it ever was in the past. We just have different characters. The lucky strike by a terror group? More likely than during the Cold War, but where is the end of the world in that? How much more likely? Theoretically a bunch more, but in reality, it's still never happened.

Equating national debt to global nuclear war is cute, but unhelpful fear-mongering. Again, the potential for bankruptcy doesn't exactly equal the end of the world.

As for climate change, there we're getting the level of hyperbole usually associated with Al Gore. I would suggest reading Bjorn Lomborg's "Cool It" before I bought this vague sort of fear-mongering sale by Friedman.

Why are pundits always so quick and vigorous in defining our current age as the most "dangerous," when by all objective standards that statement is simply unsupportable?

Why, if the world is THAT scary and THAT complex and THAT dangerous, you better read me, the oracle--yes?

I prefer straight advertising to such disinformation. And if it ain't disinformation (as in, Friedman really believes this), then it's an ad for turning to more sensible and less hyperbolic analysis.

My point: be a skeptical consumer

Electricity as the long pole in the development tent

ENERGY: "Hungry for Power: Much of the developing world places the need for electricity above the need for climate controls," by Emily Wax, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 14-20 September 2009.

Per my recent WPR column: to grow a middle class is to grow electricity generation. India quadruples its middle class in two decades, but 500m Indians have no access to electricity.

You have electricity and you have the ability to create and sustain jobs. Otherwise, you're screwed.

As much as we focus climate change thinking on transportation, it's really electricity that matters far more, and it's becoming the great struggle for emerging markets in more ways than one.

Reform as contagion

BUSINESS: "The World Bank's Doing Business report: Reforming through the tough times; A World Bank report makes surprisingly cheerful reading," The Economist, 12 September 2009.

The report says most govs have handled the recent crisis well: despite the rise in protectionist measures, there's also been a 20% uptick in pro-biz reform measures. Low and middle-income economies accounted for 2/3rds of the reforms. Rwanda topped the list. It's the first time a sub-Saharan African nation has done so.

Others at top: Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Belarus, UAE, Moldova, Colombia, Tajikistan, Egypt and Liberia.

All these leaders spawn imitators in their regions.

Factoid: only one gov increased its corporate rates to cover the shortfall in tax revenues (Lithuania).

Takeaway: "The willingness of governments to keep reforming in such tough times strengthens the prospects for recovery."

Ah, but America needs to replace capitalism with democracy, says Michael Moore.

Thank God the rest of the world doesn't see it that way.

How could the Yankees not win?

ARTICLE: Hoping $243.5 Million of Pitching Will Go Far, By TYLER KEPNER, New York Times, October 6, 2009

A sign of nearly everything that's wrong with baseball: the question, Can the Yanks win the World Series with this nearly quarter of a billion dollars in acquired pitching talent?

That plus steroids is why I gave up on baseball years ago.

Where the NFL does better: the salary gap and the--until recently by those nasty Vike linemen--the strict line on drug testing. Please keep Jerry Jones at bay!

Tom was on BBC World Have Your Say today

Sorry we didn't let you know in advance. It was such short notice, I didn't even get a post up.

Here's the associated post: Has China become the world's best problem-solver?

And here's the mp3 to stream or download.

Tom had three points of speaking (first one pretty good, second one weak, and third one best), and he wasn't able to chime in at the end.

So he put this on the show's blog:

What I would have said if I had gotten one last comment in during the broadcast:

Single-party states are great for early development, or extensive growth (throwing more resources at problems), but they tend to vastly underperform to democracies once you enter the higher-order territory of intensive growth (more innovation-based). Why? More personal freedom equals more ideas equals more competition, and that beats a bunch of guys on top sitting around the table trying to solve complex problems on their own.

So it's all a matter of the complexity of where you're at in development: if you're still all about more more more infrastructure, steel production, manufacturing etc., then a single-party state can do quite well. But it can't keep up once you move into more complex development. Prime example? USSR.

My point: don't extrapolate China's "superior" model beyond its modest roots. China won't make it to 2035 as a single party state, unless it stays as relatively poor as it is today, with hundreds of millions of its citizens living on less than $2/day. If it develops the rest of its population like it has on the coast, then that'll be one big, demanding middle-class unlikely to stand for single-party rule-just like what happened in Japan and South Korea and Indonesia and is close to happening in Malaysia.

So, sure, the China model can work for Africa in the near term, but the long term? There you'd have to show me a large rich country with a single party state, and none exist.

More on Obama's Nobel

OP-ED: The Peace (Keepers) Prize, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, New York Times, October 10, 2009

Very nice, perspective-providing piece by Friedman.

Reminds me of the story when Time was picking its "man of the century" and decided on Albert Einstein. A key runner-up was the American G.I. for everything he did over the course of the century to conclude wars and safeguard stabilizing peace.

To me, there was no contest: somebody eventually does what Einstein did, but no American soldier and we live in a very different world.

Still, I don't have the chutzpah to tell the president what his speech should include. I think he's smart enough to know why he was chosen, and I don't seem him offering any speech that suggests he's symbolically refusing it by saying he's really accepting it on behalf of others. If there was ever a Nobel given to America as a whole, this one is it, and it's for changing course.

So, while I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment here (having repeatedly declared in my books that the U.S. military has been the greatest force for peace in human history--to much ridicule), I don't think Obama should engage in a long-winded recitation of why the world should always be grateful to the U.S. While America should be universally admired in this respect, the award was for changing course from Bush-Cheney.

Yes, almost nobody in America is comfortable in citing that reality alone, because there's a certain sense of complicit guilt in that (in effect, we all went off course by allowing Bush-Cheney to unfold as part of our intense post-9/11 anger, which was natural and naturally over-reached [hey, we're human!]), but the truth of the award is exactly that: we vastly underestimate how much we scared the world after 9/11 and how grateful that world is to see us calm down some and re-engage our global leadership in a way they find more fitting to the times.

And that's a hard message to accept, because we hate admitting that we ever do anything wrong. But we should accept that message and not try to dissemble its signal by claiming alternative rationales--however virtuous those arguments may be in the grand sweep of history.

Obama's Nobel Says 'Thank You, America'

America awoke last Friday to the stunning news that its young president, Barack Obama, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Naturally, in these hyper-partisan times, the award has elicited wild praise and unbalanced scorn back home, with darn near everybody trying to figure out why Obama was tapped for such a high honor just months into his first term. But as with all such awards, more was revealed about the selectors than the selected. So if the choice of Obama is inarguably premature, then what signal was Norway, one of America's oldest and most sensible friends, trying to send?

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

Nukes deserve the Nobel

ARTICLE: Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel, By David Von Drehle, Time, Oct. 11, 2009

This one I wholeheartedly endorse: nuclear weapons deserve the Nobel Peace Prize--year after year after year.

(Thanks: Ken Nalaboff)

For China to compete in media

ARTICLE: China Yearns to Form Its Own Media Empires, By DAVID BARBOZA, New York Times, October 4, 2009

The slippery slope begins ...

SHANGHAI -- China plans to spend billions of dollars in the next few years to develop media and entertainment companies that it hopes can compete with global giants like the News Corporation and Time Warner, and will in the process loosen some of its tight control of these industries.

An ambitious plan, set forth in guidelines last week by China's State Council, envisions the creation of entertainment, news and culture companies with a market orientation and with less government backing. China, in short, would like to consolidate its industry into companies resembling Bloomberg, Time Warner and Viacom, analysts say.

"There appears to be a feeling at the highest levels of government that they need a media machine commensurate to the rising status and power of China," says Jim Laurie, a former ABC News correspondent who teaches at Hong Kong University and recently met with Chinese state broadcasting executives.

As usual, greed and ambition overcome the desire for control.

Does this signal any sudden shift? Of course not. With the good (allowing outside financing) comes the careful (control of news media will remain with the gov for the foreseeable future).

But guess what? Media conglomerates tend to be defined by their flagship news organizations, so to truly compete, China will eventually need to de-ghetto-ize its news media.

Indonesia: continuing to impress

SPECIAL REPORT: "A golden chance: A special report on Indonesia," by Simon Long, The Economist, 12 September 2009.

Indonesia, we are told, has an image problem--as in, we only get news about it when bad things happen.

Long cites four big reasons for optimism, other than the stuff I've often cited about the place and its president, Yudhoyono:

1) the demographic sweet spot is coming (mostly workers, few kids and elders) and will last a good while.

2) recent gov fiscal restraint means more money available to work infrastructure bottlenecks

3) Yudhoyono's re-election gives him a good mandate on further reforms

4) the place is enjoying some widespread political stability.

Later article in report says "Muslims in Indonesia may be becoming more pious, but not necessarily more extreme."

"Chindonesia" is a term to describe the growing economic ties, meaning everything from the resource draw to waves of Chinese tourists.

Where Indonesia stays weak: it has not grown its inward foreign direct investment flow--just a bit too hard still to do biz there.

Manufacturing in America: the solutions are primarily political

IN DEPTH: "Can the Future Be Built in America?" by Pete Engardio, BusinessWeek, 21 September 2009.

Key quote from a former CEO: "Other countries actually pay you to create jobs. The rest of the world is chewing us up alive."

The good news? "The U.S. is at or near the cutting edge in most of the emerging product areas."

The problem is not cheap Asian labor, rather it's that "the U.S. is losing its lead in large-scale high-tech manufacturing."

The diagnosis:

Much of the blame lies with U.S. government policy. Nations in Asia and Europe aggressively court strategic high-tech industries with generous tax breaks, cash grants, cheap credit, low-cost utilities, and speedy regulatory approval.

Even when our tax breaks are factored in, the U.S. corporate taxes are among the highest in the world. Michael Moore may see this as good (taxing those inherently evil corporations), but it's cutting off our nose to spite our face.

States can't compete with foreign govs, so it's largely up to the Fed to get this right or we continue to suffer the consequences.

So far the judgment on Obama: lots of good tax incentives here and there, but they're stopgaps designed to reduce pain from the financial crisis. No strategy is perceived.

What manufacturers want: Washington to have a strategic national policy like other countries do.

OMYGOD! Another government "takeover"!

The part I fear most about old age

MEDICINE/ETHICS: "The Case for Killing Granny: Rethinking end-of-life care," by Evan Thomas, Newsweek, 21 September 2009.

Besides watching loved ones die first: being forced to die in some drawn-out manner in a hospital.

I feel now, at 47, that I've had a great and full life. I can't imagine thinking any differently 30-40 years from now (putting aside my dreams of life extension for a second here).

I mean, if I'm younger and there's a good fight to be put up, you know I'll be there for my kids' sake, because I don't think there's ever a good time to lose your parents.

But dragging out the last few months? No thanks.

I'd rather go super-recreational on drugs or alcohol and medicate myself to death than spend my last days suffering that sort of useless indignity. I want my own indignity!

And yet, look how our system, without particularly any forethought, delivers that endgame time after time?

Studies show that 70 percent of people want to die at home--but that about half die in hospitals.

Then there's usual bit about a third of Medicare spending goes to the last two years of life. That I find less amazing: most people get by until they spiral downward those last couple of years, so of course, a ton of money gets spent then.

Anyway, nice piece on something I am determined to avoid.

When the 5th replaces the 4th in China: from hard to soft

INTERNATIONALIST: "China's Soft Scientists," by Melinda Lu, Newsweek, 21 September 2009.

The current Chinese Politburo is full of hard-science technocrats, much like Gorby's was back in 1985, when I did my one great act of Kremlinology in analyzing that tipping point (a Harvard grad paper that was my first cited work--by an MIT prof whose class on the history of science I really loved).

The Sovs never got to run the experiment of moving beyond the hard technocrats to the soft variety, but this will happen with the 5th generation in China come 2012.

The guess for now? "As a result, experts say, the country's future leaders will be likely to focus on people-friendly solutions."

Okay, I'll buy that for now.

Why I'm coming close to not watching any cable news anymore

FEATURE: "The Story Behind the Story," by Mark Bowden, The Atlantic, October 2009.

Blistering piece by Bowden, who's never been better.

The gist: no one seems to be going into journalism anymore (especially the horrific TV version) with any pretense of being anything other than biased infotainer. It's getting really sad.

I mean, I still find newspapers pretty good, and certain mags are solid, but TV is more of a vast wasteland than it's ever been, with Jon Stewart preening as our "most trusted TV newsman," according to polls. Yuck, say I. Parody as a full-time news screen is just plain unhealthy, because it's still being fed to you in a highly packaged, biased manner. You simply don't develop your own screens or analytical capacity. I'm certain it also reduces your sense of humor for similar reasons, increasing only your cynicism.

Fox, in my opinion, not only ruined a lot of conservative thinking, it ruined CNN through and through--including my beloved Headline News (which is now MTV-like in spending most of its time providing everything but its primary product). Try listening to any of these channels without looking at the screen and you'll simply be amazed at the low-bit rate transfer--as in, there's almost no useful information and just a lot of speculation over the most minute tactical details. My favorites are the experts tapped to comment as news breaks. Seriously, just close your eyes when you listen to them and 99% of what they say is pure drivel--the equivalent of junk food. No wonder we have so many fatheads in this country.

I just find myself unable to watch most days, it's so bad. And I can't find anywhere to turn on TV, so I find myself just reading more widely--via the Net--in the "print" realm.

What's weird is that TV sports coverage in America arguably outperforms the news coverage by a ways, as does weather. There the bit rate flow is amazing. I watched the SNF tape of the Packers and Bears five times last week and Collinsworth was great. Just tons of useful backstory, quick descriptions and analysis, and wonderful displays of stats. Watch games from the 1960s and the difference is vast. But watch news from back then and you realize how bad it has become: people talk very fast today and say about 1/10th as much that's actually useful.