The strangely narrowing argument linking climate change to global conflict [updated]

OP-ED: "Terror In the Weather Forecast," by Thomas Homer-Dixon, New York Times, 24 April 2007, p. A25.

Homer-Dixon is a smart guy, but he peddles the worst sort of mushy fear mongering, constantly declaring the world near collapse from all its brittleness, lack of ingenuity, system vulnerabilities and the like.

Naturally, he loves the potential of global warming, citing CNA's recent study by retired flags where they all opine ominously, but with no real sense of historical causality, about how climate change equates to a "threat multiplier."

History actually provides scant evidence that disasters or tough weather or water shortages cause war. Truly, the historical record portrays more the opposite: people tend to come together in hard times.

Now, if you want to say economic collapse, then your argument improves, but as I've said before, all indications are that it will pay to be rich in the global climate change future, and that it will suck to be poor--no matter where you live. My answer to that is to make people richer, especially those poor now, and I start that process with connectivity.

Read this concluding bit from Homer-Dixon:

By weakening rural economies, increasing unemployment and disrupting livelihoods, global warming will increase the frustrations and anger of hundreds of millions of people in vulnerable countries. Especially in Africa, but also in some parts of Asia and Latin America, climate change will undermine already frail governments--and make challenges from violent groups more likely--by reducing revenues, overwhelming bureaucracies and revealing how incapable these governments are of helping their citizens.

Okay, I'll buy that. I'll also buy that a lot of bad things in this world make those bad trends worse, and I'll also argue--in the vein of Bjorn Lomborg--that, bang for the buck, there's a ton of better ways to address every bad thing on Homer-Dixon's list before turning to global warming, the course of which we can tilt but slightly, but not without significant shorter-run costs (stretching across decades) whose unintended side effects--I'm gonna go out on a limb here--are far larger than we can imagine.

I'm not saying don't do whatever makes reasonable sense to cut CO2 emissions. I love new technology. I want it spread everywhere. I love new and better ways of making energy happen. I want those spread everywhere too.

But when I read Homer-Dixon on this stuff, I can't help but wonder how many other subject causes can easily be inserted into this generalized logic of his. I mean, a lot of things out there reduce revenues in frail states. A lot of things overwhelm bureaucracies in frail states. A lot of things reveal how incapable weak states are in meeting the needs of their citizens.

So why this amazing bandwagoning on the link between global climate change and increased instability and conflicts?

Because, I've got to tell you, if you think going after CO2 emissions is how we shrink the Gap, I think you're losing your grip on reality. To me, this rush to pile on here is just plain odd, reflecting that Calgon-take-me-away sense so many people seem to be getting on the Long War against radical extremism, which--yeah--will get more extreme if the Gap suffers more due to warming, but global warming sure as hell ain't its driver, nor the driver of frail states, nor the cause of disconnectedness, which tends to be complex even as--yes again--it will probably get worse with global warming.

I'm just saying, dealing with global warming is not rising to some great challenge of the future security environment. It's rising to the great challenge of the future environmental environment.

Yes, a great thing to pursue. But there are many great things to pursue, and while everything connects to everything, casting those connections in terms of simplistic one-way causalities is--to me--not very helpful.

I guarantee you, that whatever's freaking people out most is what Homer-Dixon is running with hardest. If tomorrow climate change gets boring, he's onto something else that will--naturally, inevitably, inexorably--lead to our civilizational downfall.

But to me, listening to security people all of a sudden fall in love with global climate change as "the next big thing" is somewhat sad. Security doesn't flow from one source, but from many, the most important one being rules. We have far more rules on the environment today than we did yesterday, and we'll have far more tomorrow.

That's all good.

But a rising environmental challenge itself is not a cause for security alarmism. It's logically a cause for better environmental policies, smarter business practices, and marketizing more opportunities for human ingenuity, which is--contrary to Homer-Dixon's patronizing tone--inexhaustible.

Update: Steve wrote about this same article today: Climate Terror

One example of the need for Chinese SysAdmin

ARTICLE: Ethiopian Rebels Kill 74 in Oil Attack, By ANITA POWELL, Associated Press, April 24, 2007

This is precisely what Tom's column is about this week and the links started to come to him just after he'd written it.

Thanks to Rob Johnson for sending the email I saw.

Nomad Wars?

POST: Anarchy in Somalia

ARTICLE: In Somalia, Those Who Feed Off Anarchy Fuel It, By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, New York Times, April 25, 2007

I find all the descriptions of clans in Somalia sort of confusing, because Somalia, according to every East African I've ever met, consists really of just one tribe.

In fact, my buddy from Kenya, BGen Ngewa Mukala, remarked that everyone assumes tribes are the source of clashes and yet here is the one country in East Africa that's all one tribe, and yet "look at the problems!"

So I'm assuming clans are just family groupings within proper tribes, yes?

The other causal expectation I've heard on Somalia's "5 stars" (the 3 regions of Somalia proper plus Ethiopia's Ogaden plus Djibouti) tension with its neighbors (the Somali flag still sports all 5) is that the real, old-school cause behind all its trouble with neighbors is that Somalis are serious nomad gatherers, so they've never adjusted to the whole border concept.

This story would fit that whole, we-don't-need-no-stinkin'-badges profile..

Thanks to Anton for sending this.

Tom's plane (and bomb) pix

From the family's visit to the Museum of the Air Force, Dayton OH:

B-18A nose. The great precursor to WWII workhorse B-17.

Mitsubishi Zero

B-25 with Jimmy Doolittle represented on the right.

Clearly, Alec Baldwin was a bit too tall to play him accurately.

The famous Doolittle silver goblets (all 80 of them) are missing from their display case. The annual reunion happened just last week in San Antonio.

Gotta wonder how many of the original crews are still alive.

Neat story: Disney Studios made 1,200 plane and unit insignias--free--during WWII, continuing a wartime cartooning tradition started by WWI ambulance driver Walt himself.

B-24 Liberator, with its famous plexiglass nose.

Fat Man replica

Little Boy

Tom's a top seller on C-SPAN!

ARTICLE: C-SPAN? In Indiana?, By Jason George, Chicago Tribune. April 25, 2007

Ben Limbaugh writes in to inform us that today's Chicago Tribune has a list of the 'the most-ordered videos and DVDs since C-SPAN created its West Lafayette archives in 1987.'

Check out #5 below.

Plus, I just can't resist adapting the title of this article to 'C-SPAN's #5 seller? In Indiana?' ;-)

1 Organized Religion Debate with Alan Dershowitz and Alan Keyes (2000)

2 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner with Stephen Colbert (2006)

3 State of the Black Union, 2005: Defining the Agenda (2005)

4 National Prayer Service after 9/11 attacks (2001)

5 The Pentagon's New Map (2004)

6 Rites of Passage: Boys and Fatherhood With Ron Johnson (1996)

7 State of the Black Union, 2006: Defining the Agenda, Part 2 (2006)

8 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner with President Bill Clinton (2000)

9 Role of Church in Black America, morning session (2003)

10 Strengthening the Black Family, morning session (2004)

Source: C-SPAN

You can't PR your way out of the Long War

ARTICLE: "Name That 'War'," By Max Boot, Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2007, Pg. 15

Great column by Boot.

I'm already catching this crap from Warren on my next piece, but my counter is: what do we call it instead?

Again, to me, not a great move by Fallon. You can't PR your way out of the Long War.

The quintessential headline on China

ARTICLE: "China Moves to Boost Transparency, but Much Is Kept Hidden," by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Juying Qin, Wall Street Journal, 25 April 2007, p. A6.

Doesn't get much more succinct than that, does it?

The new rules China unveils have to do with government information.

Power loss

ARTICLE: Anger at Iran dress restrictions, By Frances Harrison, BBC News, Tehran, April 23, 2007

Some see a sign of power. I see the growing lack of it.

Thanks to Pete Johnson for sending this.

The rush

Got up way early in a DC hotel today and cranked another 5k on the Esquire piece, sending it off to Warren at 1115.

He immediately checked out my ending and declared it the worst final line award-winner for 2007--preemptively since it's not even May.

Naturally, I covered my head in shame--or perhaps to shade my thinning crown (no metaphor there).

Then I rushed to a speech in the Navy Yard to a Naval Post Graduate School-sponsored conference on post-conflict ops. Maybe 75 in the room. Decent-to-good performance. Went 1:55 with 20 Q&A.

Then late to an Enterra meet with a major defense contractor who's bringing us aboard for a major gov contract bid proposal. Very technical but fascinating discussion with huge long-term implications.

Then rush to Enterra to fill out forms just before deadline for enrollment passes on all our new benes. We are seriously growing up as a company (skeletal benes when I started nearly two years ago, although great medical).

Then rush to Reagan in COB traffic.

Then hop plane, penning weekend column.

But 18-hourworkday all worthwhile just for limiting away time to a single night from home ....

Got Robb's "Brave New War" in the mail today

Nice looking book.

I've always liked Wiley books. Really nicely made.

Eager to read once this push is done.

My congratulations to John for getting it out. It's a big deal to publish a book with a name house. Lot harder than people think. Something to be proud of and celebrate.

Day's work

Wrote 5800 on the Esquire piece today.

Really happy with start, bit of teeth pulling the rest of the way.

All my previous brave talk aside, I have little confidence writing "reporting" pieces, but I do get somewhat better with each one (Rumsfeld to Monks of War to now this), making Warren's job a bit easier.

More than the other two, I am discovering this one in the writing itself, which is exciting and a bit scary, given the passing deadline.

I know this: Warren will return phone calls til this f--ker's done!

Surge, now urge

ARTICLE: US urges Iran to join Iraq talks, Financial Times, April 22 2007 22:21

Good sign, but poor set-up over past several weeks.

I am not optimistic this late in the Bush game. If I'm Iran, I think I'm still passing and seeing what the next few weeks bring.

Thanks to Brad B. for sending this.

Required reading

ARTICLE: Giuliani: Can hero of 9/11 win over his own party?, By Susan Page, USA TODAY,1/31/2007

Tom emails me yesterday asking how we could miss this and I don't know.

There was a profile of Giuliani in USA Today all the way back at the end of January, and he said he was reading PNM, and we missed it! Blast!

Left sidebar, bottom of "The Giuliani File":

Book currently reading: The Pentagon's New Map by Thomas P.M. Barnett.

Price and technology

ARTICLE: Japan, US eye emission-free coal plant, AFP, April 22, 2007

Oh so Friedmanesque!

A very nice indicator of a future worth creating.

I feel like the wise-cracking penguin leader from "Madagascar": Price and technology, boys, price and technology.

Thanks to Louis Heberlein for sending this.

Hoagland votes for walls

OP-ED: “A Korean Strategy for Iraq,” by Jim Hoagland, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 16-22 April 2007, p. 5.

POLITICS: “Wait and See: As patience fades in Washington, all sides agree: Success in Iraq looks years away,” by Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 16-22 April 2007, p. 13.

In PNM, I identified two ways out of “Black Hawk Down--the Series,” or my scenario for a failed Iraq occupation: one way was through Jerusalem, the other through a sequential processing of mini-Big-Bang-like reverberations spreading throughout the region.

Obviously, this route is the longer and less desired one, but it’s one we’re certainly familiar with--the scenario I dubbed The New Berlin Wall. Unlike the Arab Yugoslavia route, which presumed an Iraq cracking up would trigger further tumultuous change elsewhere, the Wall scenario has us thinking in terms of decades--sitting on walls along Israel’s border and now within and around Iraq itself (Saudi Arabia’s already building one).

Hoagland calls this the Korean model for Iraq: instead of working for the complete solution or allowing for the complete collapse, we wall off what we can stabilize from that which we cannot.

Joe Biden is looking smarter by the minute.

To the extent the Bush Administration goes down this path (and yes, it beats the alternative), the higher premium placed on the next administration’s ability to garner international support for long-term peacekeeping, meaning the same old, same old scenario lurks for the next president: repairing the diplomatic damage done by Bush-Cheney.

Think the SysAdmin/DoEE functions won’t loom large for the next, non/anti-Bush administration?

Think again.

Rwanda rewired

SPECIAL REPORT: “Rwanda Reborn,” by Kevin Whitelaw, U.S. News & World Report, 23 April 2007, p. 43.

The Balkans fires would never dim, we were told.

And yet somehow they did, and integration begun with the world at large. Not perfect, plenty slow, but few American casualties, yes?

We deserve no similar good news on Rwanda. There was a genocide completely preventable, with a presence only necessary for the madness to subside.

Ten years later, the madness seems completely gone, and the government successfully deep in a national re-education and re-unification process:

While Rwanda might not yet be the Switzerland of East Africa, its government has charted a surprisingly ambitious course for this tiny and startlingly green country known as the Land of a Thousand Hills. The goal is to become a regional stronghold for communications and computing, a place where ethnic divisions are a thing of the past. Fiber-optic cable is being laid throughout the country, and Rwanda soon will have perhaps the most advanced broadband wireless Internet network on the continent. “We will be the nervous system for the region,” says Romain Murenzi, the country’s minister for science and technology. While it still has a very long way to go, Rwanda’s broad-based government is winning praise from foreign governments and aid groups alike for its good intentions and surprising lack of corruption. It has doubled primary-school enrollment in the past decade and has established a national health insurance system. “They are,” says [U.S. ambassader Michael] Arietti, “doing all the right things.”

No, no, the Gap cannot be shrunk. Connectivity is not the answer.

I am only a dreamer, indeed--the only one.

The long, steady drum beat for American military strikes on Iran

EDITORIAL: “Bad Options on Iran,” by Mortimer B. Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report, 23 April 2007, p. 76.

Zuckerman is nothing if not consistent: in column after column he explains patiently why Iran getting nukes is America’s problem first and foremost and will inevitably force our use of military power.

Israel’s 200 nuclear warheads find no mention. China’s and Russia’s implicit villainy are routinely stoked for imagery. America, we are told, is the only country that can deal with this.

It’s us versus them, I tell you!

We offered Iran multilateral diplomacy if only Tehran would first give up the only reason why we’d offer them multilateral diplomacy in the first place, and no, it did not work. Go figure.

Therefore, war is the only option.

Get used to this drumbeat from some writers. It will persist through the end of this administration, in ever-dimming hope Bush will pull the trigger. It will persist also to shape the presidential election, hoping to make a willingness to war with Iraq a litmus test on support to Israel and thus the money and the votes attached to that sentiment.

If you feel like all this is designed to prep America for the next war in the Middle East, one that will fail dramatically and leave us more isolated than before, then you’re paying attention.

Nukes in the 21st century

ARTICLE: Congress Skeptical of Warhead Plan: Lawmakers and Experts Question Necessity, Implications of a New Nuclear Weapon, By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, April 22, 2007

I don't have any problem with exploring and developing a new warhead. I think nukes are good and keep the peace through deterrence.

I just don't believe in the myth of strategic missile defense (though I support a tactical version) nor in global gun control.

You want a nice lawn, then you grow grass instead of poisoning weeds.

Nukes provide the strategic top-cover for the end of great power war. and I see no reason to mess with that historical reality. When states knock on that door, I let them in and seek integration by other means.

Just look at all the middling powers we've successfully brought on board to some degree in the last quarter-century: only Pakistan, Israel and India have chosen to keep nukes. So many more walked or gave them up.

Now, with the whole nuke paradigm shifting due to energy/environment, the counter-proliferation model seems more counter-productive by the day.

Is neglect of training 'cut and run'?

ARTICLE: In a reversal, U.S. reliance on Iraqi army is fading: Training troops is no longer a priority, changing the role of American forces, By NANCY A. YOUSSEF, McClatchy Newspapers, Apr. 20, 2007

This, to me, seems more nakedly about leaving Iraq ASAP, and that worries me. A bit too close to the "cut and run" mentality long decried by the administration.

Between this and the walls going up, you get the feeling that partitioned Iraq is well under-way, which to me is realistic, but somebody better be getting the Saudis ready, cause the doorstep's gonna feel a whole lot closer once the Americans draw down.

The only good news in this (to the extent it's true, as so many reports from Iraq conflict) is that the timeline seems way to slow on the possible redirect on Iran, the precursor for which must be the Bush administration arguing a culmination of threats against Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and ... let's not forget Poland and the Czech Republic.

The price of locking in China...

'China seeks joint military exercise with ASEAN countries', Jane's Navy International, 16 April 2007

Under a bold policy initiative yet to be made public, China is seeking to expand its political and economic ties with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) through organising a first multilateral military exercise.Sources told Jane's that the Chinese proposal, which is still at an early stage, involves a joint naval drill. Beijing opened discussions at the start of 2007 with the aim of conducting the exercise around mid-2008.The initiative appears to have been presented to ASEAN members individually rather than collectively through the group's secretariat

As Sean noted when he passed this on, China's price for strategic alliance continues to rise.

Globalization is all about networks and networks are all about accessing new work-arounds.

The hedge strategy is rapidly being OBE, and forget about containment. China won't wait on our offer to lead Asia's next stage of integration, and so the days of bilat diplomacy and hub-and-spokes arrangements and "separate lanes" negotiations are all gone.

We're still waging largely 20th century diplomacy in a globalized, 21st century environment.

The leap-frogging is just beginning and we need to get our asses off the floor.

This is where the Bush post-presidency seems like such a drag: we're still busily closing doors on the last era while others are opening doors on the next.