Month: April 2013

Joe Biden is now on board with getting the most authoritative of the investigations into the Bush-Cheney war crimes out in the open. You’d think the veep and the Senate Intelligence Committee would be enough to over-rule the CIA’s bed-wetting. But the CIA seems to me increasingly a shadow government, immune to the constraints and governance of the real one. We’re going to get the truth about them once we seize it from their cold and bloodied hands.

Withstanding bears, frostbite and potential madness, Brian Phillips recently tracked the Iditarod by land and air. At one point his plane, named “Nugget”, froze up on the ground during a visit to the Diomedes Islands, the border between Russian and US territory:

We were stranded out there for three hours. It was the first time I ever understood why freezing to death is sometimes described as peaceful or soothing or just like falling asleep, descriptions that had always seemed to hint at some unfathomable mind-transformation within the freezing person, some power extreme cold had to enchant the brain’s basic mechanisms of homeostasis. It didn’t feel violent, that was the thing. Even with the wind ripping past you. It was like certain parts of your body just accrued this strange hush. Like you were disappearing piece by piece. I thought I’d be warmer outside and walking around than inside Nugget, so I would sort of exaggeratedly move one limb at a time, my left arm or whatever, and while I was concentrating on my left arm my right leg would start to be erased.

More than affecting my sense perceptions, though, the cold seemed to affect the way I thought about my sense perceptions. I’d take my glove off to adjust a zipper and lose feeling in my hand almost immediately and instead of thinking Holy no I need to get my glove back on right this second I’d sort of pause and go My, how interesting that my hand feels as though it’s visibly translucent. Then my brain’s inbox would gently ding. PLEASE DON’T DIE.

A personal anecdote: the priest who gave me my first Holy Communion and Sacrament of Reconciliation, and whom I served as an altar boy, died a couple of years’ ago. He was walking home on a cold night and was discovered the next day dead on the street. He had died of hypothermia. He was one of the gentlest priests I ever knew – a quietly devout and simple fellow – and it seemed horrifying that this man died on a street, alone, perhaps after a fall. But it’s also a relief to think that freezing to death is not as painful and as wretched as one might imagine. One reason I have not given up the faith is because of the kind of humility and sincerity I saw in that first priest. Others were not so lucky. But we shouldn’t let evil obscure the great good so many priests do every day, in ways others will never know about, but that, bit by bit, begin to heal the broken world.

(Photo: A herdsman whose fingers were injured by frost bite lies in a hospital January 9, 2006 in Fuyun County of Altay Prefecture, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwest China. A blizzard that swept in from Siberia and plunging temperatures to as low as 43 degrees below zero centigrade forced the evacuation of almost 100,000 people and stranded a further 220,000 in Xinjiang, according to the National Disaster Reduction Centre. By China Photos/Getty Images)

Matthew O’Brien fears that “Spain is beyond doomed”:

Spain’s labor market problems fall into two big buckets: too much regulation, and not enough education. It’s almost impossible for companies to get rid of older workers, which creates a horribly bifurcated labor market. There are permanent workers who can’t be fired, and temporary ones who can — and are. Indeed, as Clive Crook points out, about a third of Spain’s workforce are temporary workers who enjoy few protections and fewer opportunities. Companies go through these younger workers without bothering to invest much in their human capital, because why would they? These temporary workers will be let go at the first sign of economic trouble. Young people get stuck in a never-ending cycle of under-and-unemployment since firms are always hesitant to hire permanent workers who will always be on their books.

But it gets worse. The housing bust hasn’t just cast a shadow over household and bank balance sheets; it’s cast one over young people’s educations too. At its peak, building made up a whopping 19 percent of Spain’s economy, which, as Tobias Buck of the Financial Times points out, lured many young men into dropping out of school for well-paying construction gigs. But now that building has gone into hibernation, all of those young men are left with no work and no education to fall back on. And, again, even if they can find temporary jobs, it’s not as if the companies will spend money to develop their skills.

Before Jason Collins came out, Joel Anderson explained why male pro-atheletes in the most popular American sports have remained closeted:

Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com has reported at least one current NFL player may come out publicly as gay in the next few months. By and large, however, sports figures in major teams sports have stayed in the closet. Why are they waiting? What are the player’s concerns? Not with teammates or the reaction inside the locker room. “America is the greatest place in the world. But America is more homophobic than locker rooms,“ Charles Barkley said recently on The Dan LeBatard Show in Miami. Pro athletes “have played with gay players before. … The crowd is going to be shouting things more than it’s going to be uncomfortable in the locker room.” The particular player Freeman wrote about for CBSSports.com felt the same. “The player fears he will suffer serious harm from homophobic fans, and that is the only thing preventing him from coming out.”

Those big men on the football field cannot take some taunting from the stands? Go watch the Jackie Robinson movie – and grow some.

Stephen Walt doesn’t see why they should be:

Does it really matter whether Assad is killing his opponents using 500-pound bombs, mortar shells, cluster munitions, machine guns, icepicks, or chemical weapons? Dead is dead no matter how it is done.

The case against direct U.S. intervention never depended on believing that Assad was anything but a thug; rather, it rested first and foremost on the fear that intervention might make things worse rather than better. Specifically, it has rested on the interrelated concerns that 1) the fall of the Assad regime might unleash an anarchy of competing factions and warlords, 2) the opposition to Assad contained a number of extremist groups whose long-term agendas were worrisome, and 3) pouring more weapons into a society in the midst of a brutal civil war would create another Afghanistan, Iraq, or 1970s-era Lebanon. These prudential concerns still apply, irrespective of the weaponry Assad’s forces have chosen to employ. And if his forces have used chemical weapons, then one might even argue that it raises the risks of intervention and thus strengthens the case against it.

Max Fisher points out that half of Americans can’t identify Syria on a map:

[B]eing able to correctly identify Syria on a map obviously does not preclude an individual from expressing strong views about the country or what Obama should do about it. But it does add a bit more credence to the perception that Syria is not exactly at the center of America’s national attention right now. And that in turn might make some sort of assertive and potentially risky U.S.-led military action in Syria, whatever its merits or downsides, a bit less likely.

What’s striking to me is that even McCain and Butters are reluctant to send in troops. And I agree with Walt that the methods of mass extermination are a little irrelevant to the corpses. Still, the fundamental fear is the following: that intervention is insane; but that letting this conflict run its course could lead to chemical weapons being used by the al Nusri brigade, the major Islamist force now swearing allegiance to al Qaeda. For a chilling update, check out this report in the Telegraph.

The size of the chemical arsenal is perhaps the fourth in the world, hidden all over the country now teetering out of the dictator’s control. Air-strikes would be unlikely to work:

“Airstrikes aren’t reliable because they can just release all the chemical agents into the air,” [Dina Esfandiary, an expert on Syria’s WMD programme with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the London-based defence and security think-tank] said. “Alternatively, they only do half the job and then render a secure site open to looters.”

Nor, she added, would quick-fire raids by small teams of special forces be an alternative. “You would have to first secure the sites and then do a careful analysis of what was there, followed by controlled explosions. It is, frankly, a labour intensive job, and that is why the Pentagon assessed it as requiring 75,000 men. “Besides, there may be any number of caches hidden all over the place, and even if you could look for them properly – which is difficult with a civil war going on – you would run the risk of some being left behind.”

Recall that the entire rationale for the invasion of Iraq was to prevent chemical, biological or nuclear elements getting into the hands of al Qaeda. Those WMDs did not exist; but Assad’s do. And on a subway train in New York or London, just a small attack could wreak panic and havoc and death on a large scale.

Recent Dish on Syria’s chemical weapons here.

(Photo: A picture taken on April 26, 2013 shows a plastic bottle, coal, cotton, gauze, cola, and cardboard that are used by members of the al-Ezz bin Abdul Salam brigade to assemble homemade gas-masks for protection against chemical weapons, in Syria’s northern Latakia province. By Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)

“By now we know well the opposing worldviews that characterize our struggle with extremists.  The latter promote the cult of death, whereas we—the mainstream—promote the theology of life.  They believe that only they know the will of God, which they can impose on people, whereas we believe that the will of God is represented by the will of the people.  They believe Sharia is limited to draconian punishments to terrorize people, whereas we believe Sharia is the path to God—one defined by different groups that adhere to justice, mercy and compassion.  They believe grievances are irreversible facts that should be fuel for political violence, whereas we believe grievances can be redressed non-violently, and in partnership with others who, like us, respect human dignity.  They believe that recruiting young people to serve as their warriors will be their unending revitalization, whereas we believe that the mission of Islam is entrusting Muslim youth to be ambassadors of good will and future leaders,” – Salam al-Marayati.

The struggle of our time is not between religions so much as within them. The battle is between fundamentalist certainty and religious humility; between those who see divine truth and seek to live by it, and those who think they see divine truth and want to impose it on others; it is between Islam and Jihadism, between Christianity and Christianism, between the humane ethics of Judaism and the extremist bigotry of many West Bank Settlers. Until these internal struggles are resolved, the external dangers will endure.

(Photo: A crowd gathered during a vigil for the marathon bombing victims held at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Boston. By Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe via Getty Images.)