Annan Criticizes Bush In Farewell Speech

"permanent members, the world powers, "must accept the special responsibility that comes with their privilege." "The Security Council is not just another stage on which to act out national interests"



Annan Criticizes Bush In Farewell Speech
INDEPENDENCE, Mo., Dec. 11, 2006
(CBS/AP) Outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan offered a tough critique of the Bush administration's policies Monday in his last major speech before he leaves office. In remarks delivered at the Truman Presidential Museum and Library, the secretary general accused the White House of trying to secure the United States from terrorism in part by dominating other nations through force. "Human rights and the rule of law are vital to global security and prosperity," Annan said. When the U.S. "appears to abandon its own ideals and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused," he said. Annan, who leaves the United Nations on Dec. 31 after 10 years as secretary-general, has become an increasingly vocal critic of the war in Iraq. "The secretary general has become more outspoken in the final months of his tenure, giving more seasoned advice on how the U.N. could function more effectively and the responsibility of U.S. participation," said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk. "And his swan song lecture in Missouri was a serious rebuke of U.S. policy and its role at the U.N." Annan said that the U.S. has a special responsibility to the world because it continues to have extraordinary power. He also suggested the people of the United States need to be more active in reminding their leaders of what their country should be doing, CBS Radio News correspondent Dan Raviv reports. Annan summed up five principles that he considers essential: collective responsibility, global solidarity, rule of law, mutual accountability and multilateralism. He chose the Truman museum for his final major speech in part because it is dedicated to a president who was instrumental in the founding of the United Nations. His speech repeatedly praised the Truman administration but never mentioned Mr. Bush by name. "As President Truman said, 'The responsibility of the great states is to serve and not dominate the peoples of the world,"' Annan said. "He believed strongly that henceforth security must be collective and indivisible. That was why, for instance, that he insisted when faced with aggression by North Korea against the South in 1950, on bringing the issue to the United Nations," Annan said. "Against such threats as these, no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others." Annan also called for a reform of the Security Council, saying its membership "still reflects the reality of 1945." He suggested adding new members to represent parts of the world with less of a voice. He said the permanent members, the world powers, "must accept the special responsibility that comes with their privilege." "The Security Council is not just another stage on which to act out national interests," he said in another jab at Mr. Bush. Annan has had a strained relationship with the administration and with outgoing U.S. Ambassador John Bolton. He was criticized by some in the administration and in Iraq after saying earlier this month that the level of violence in Iraq is much worse than that of Lebanon's civil war and that some Iraqis believe their lives were better under Saddam Hussein. He also has urged the international community to help rebuild Iraq, saying he was not sure Iraq could accomplish it alone. Bolton also is leaving this month. He resigned in the wake of the November elections, which gave Democrats control over the next Congress, making his Senate confirmation unlikely. After a private dinner Tuesday night at the White House for Annan, Bolton joked that "nobody sang 'Kumbaya."' Told at the time of Bolton's comment, Annan laughed and asked: "But does he know how to sing it?"
©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc.

Nobel Winner Warns of Dangers of Globalization

Final Merger to one single worldwide corporation, one CEO, one phone number equals freedom

NYT December 10, 2006
Nobel Winner Warns of Dangers of Globalization
By WALTER GIBBS
OSLO, Dec. 10 — The Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus, who invented the practice of making small, unsecured loans to the poor, warned today that the globalized economy was becoming a dangerous “free-for-all highway.”
“Its lanes will be taken over by the giant trucks from powerful economies,” Dr. Yunus said during a lavish ceremony at which he was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. “Bangladeshi rickshaws will be thrown off the highway.”
While international companies motivated by profit may be crucial in addressing global poverty, he said, nations must also cultivate grassroots enterprises and the human impulse to do good.
Challenging economic theories that he learned as a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville in the 1970s, he said glorification of the entrepreneurial spirit has led to “one-dimensional human beings” motivated only by profit.
Dr. Yunus, 66, then took a direct jibe at the United States for its war on terror, telling about 1,000 dignitaries at Oslo’s City Hall that recent American military campaigns in Iraq and elsewhere had diverted global resources and attention from a more pressing project: halving worldwide poverty by 2015, as envisaged by the United Nations six years ago.
“Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size,” he said. “But then came Sept. 11 and the Iraq war, and suddenly the world became derailed from the pursuit of this dream.”
He said terrorism cannot be defeated militarily and the concept of peace requires broadening. “Peace should be understood in a human way, in a broad social, political and economic way,” Dr. Yunus said.
He called for legal recognition of a new category of corporation that would be neither profit-maximizing nor nonprofit. It would be a “social business,” like Grameen Bank, the Dhaka-based microcredit institution he started 30 years ago. The bank has lent nearly $6 billion to help some of the poorest people on earth to start businesses, build shelters and go to school.
Grameen Bank — with which Dr. Yunus shared the prize today — is an interest-charging, profit-making business with more than 2,200 branches. But it is owned primarily by its poor clients and run for their benefit. Similarly structured institutions, he said, could bring health care, information technology, education and energy to the poor without requiring infusions of aid.
“By defining ‘entrepreneur’ in a broader way, we can change the character of capitalism radically and solve many of the unresolved social and economic problems within the scope of the free market,” he said.
He traveled to Oslo with nine of the bank’s board members. Four of them are among Bangladesh’s nearly 300,000 “telephone ladies,” each of whom once borrowed money to buy a mobile telephone and now earns money charging rural villagers to use it.
Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes called microcredit “a liberating force” for women and Muslims, many of whom have traditionally shunned interest-charging institutions.
“All too often, we speak one-sidedly about how much the Muslim part of the world has to learn from the West,” said Prof. Danbolt Mjoes. “Where microcredit is concerned, the opposite is true: the West has learned from Yunus, from Bangladesh, and from the Muslim part of the world.”

The Golden Greedy Guts Prize Goes To...

A complimentory reason why Physics fell to the wayside. A fuller comprehension of the the trouble with physics and why it is not coping with the Survival Requirements of a Civilization is found on the sidebar evolution blog link

The Golden Greedy Guts Prize Goes To...
CBS 9, 2006
(The Nation) It's getting close to New Year's and time for annual awards. One of the most coveted is the Golden Greedy Guts Prize — a banana cream pie in the face — to the year's most disgusting rich guy. High up on the list of contenders is Robert H. Glassman, MD. Dr. Glassman is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School and not too many years ago was making a six-figure income practicing medicine and doing cancer research. With a wife and children you might think the good doctor was leading both an exemplary and fulfilling life, but no, not so. Apparently one morning he wakes up, decides he is not making enough money and hies himself off to Wall Street, where he joins Merrill Lynch and is now really, really rich. His job is to scope out investment opportunities in the drug business, an activity that is legal but hardly elevating and certainly not as important or necessary as the work he abandoned. On the plus side, he recently got a picture of himself and his family playing Monopoly on the front page of The New York Times. It looked like he was giving his children greedy lessons, teaching them that the ethos of medicine as lived by physicians since Hippocrates 2,500 year ago is passé. It all boils down to "gimme the money." After his conversion to the fraternity of the Golden Calf, Dr. Glassman began to see the world through free-market eyes. He says he went to a class reunion, and "There were doctors at the reunion — very, very smart people," he told the Times. "They went to the top programs, they remained true to their ethics and really had very pure goals. And then they went to the 20th-year reunion and saw that somebody else who was 10 times less smart was making much more money." Thus it appears that the greedy guts virus is infecting others who are giving up useful occupations for the pure money play. Making out big time on Wall Street is easier than distinguishing oneself in medicine — and the pay is much, much better. As Dr. Glassman puts it, "It has to be easier than the chance of becoming a Nobel Prize winner." The implication here is that any researcher who comes up short of that particular prize is more or less a chump for preferring to do real work rather than make shrewd investment guesses. Who can argue? Dr. Glassman is rich, which is the only marker that counts, assuming he and his stay healthy. Wouldn't it be something if he got sick one day, called his doctor and discovered that the physician he was counting on had taken him as a role model and moved to Citibank? Did Harvard fail with this man? He was in attendance there for years; the university graduated him twice. Considering the human effort, the time and, yes, the money that went into educating Dr. Glassman and what he did with that education, he turned out to be a rather poor investment if the school were grooming altruists. Dr. Glassman apparently does not see it that way. He holds up Warren Buffett and Bill Gates as men who have done inestimable good. "They are going to make much greater contributions by having made money and giving it away than most, almost all, scientists," the doctor declares. As obtuse self-justification goes, this one is a whopper. The doctor does not have a clear field for copping the Gold Greedy Guts. He has competitors. When it comes to oinking, few can keep up with Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive of IAC/Interactive and the travel site Expedia. Last year Mr. D's total compensation came to $470 million, or almost a half a billion bucks, which works out to about one-third of IAC/Interactive's cash flow. By one calculation Diller's compensation as IAC chairman represented one-third of the companies' profits, but the way Dr. Glassman thinks, that feat puts him in the same company as Galileo or Einstein. Regardless of what Mr. Diller did for his company — and by some lights it was not much — nobody can earn that kind of money. You can get it, snatch it, sneak it away, cop it, snag it, but you cannot earn it. No human can make a contribution sufficiently great to earn that kind of pay. As distasteful as Mr. Diller's performance is, Dr. Glassman's is worse. By turning the ancient professions into businesses, he aids in the corruption of medicine, law, science and education. What's amazing is that even after the Dillers and the Glassmans have done their worst, there are still thousands and thousands of doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, scientists and social workers who, struggling as they have to, continue to live up to their honored callings.By Nicholas von Hoffman

The 9/11 Truth Movement's Dangers

This article's interpretation, as in fractals, changes quickly as you add Physics to expand the equation of disconnected "Truths" bringing skewed beliefs more in line with reality and common sense. Calling it simple human error taking the human population to the brink with the forthcoming inconvenient truths 'just don't make a lick of sense'. (see sidebar link on Conspiracy)

The 9/11 Truth Movement's Dangers
Dec. 10, 2006
(The Nation) This column was written by Christopher Hayes
According to a July poll conducted by Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen in order to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East. This is at once alarming and unsurprising. Alarming, because if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens, they seem remarkably sanguine about this fact. By and large, life continues as before, even though tens of millions of people apparently believe they are being governed by mass murderers. Unsurprising, because the government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. What else are they hiding? This pattern of deception has not only fed diffuse public cynicism but has provided an opening for alternate theories of 9/11 to flourish. As these theories — propounded by the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement — seep toward the edges of the mainstream, they have raised the specter of the return (if it ever left) of what Richard Hofstadter famously described as "the paranoid style in American politics." But the real danger posed by the Truth Movement isn't paranoia. Rather, the danger is that it will discredit and deform the salutary skepticism Americans increasingly show toward their leaders. The Truth Movement's recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary "Loose Change." A low-budget film produced by two 20-somethings that purports to debunk the official story of 9/11, it's been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing "Loose Change" are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement's canon. Videos of their lectures circulate among the burgeoning portions of the Internet devoted to the cause of the "truthers." A variety of groups have chapters across the country and organize conferences that draw hundreds. In the last election cycle, the website www.911truth.org even produced a questionnaire with pointed inquiries for candidates, just like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the Sierra Club. The Truth Movement's relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt. Truth activists often maintain they are simply "raising questions," and as such tend to focus with dogged persistence on physical minutiae: the lampposts near the Pentagon that should have been knocked down by Flight 77, the altitude in Pennsylvania at which cellphones on Flight 93 should have stopped working, the temperature at which jet fuel burns and at which steel melts. They then use these perceived inconsistencies to argue that the central events of 9/11 — the plane hitting the Pentagon, the towers collapsing — were not what they appeared to be. So: The eyewitness accounts of those who heard explosions in the World Trade Center, combined with the facts that jet fuel burns at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,500, shows that the towers were brought down by controlled explosions from inside the buildings, not by the planes crashing into them. If the official story is wrong, then what did happen? As you might expect, there's quite a bit of dissension on this point. Like any movement, the Truth Movement is beset by internecine fights between different factions: those who subscribe to what are termed LIHOP theories (that the government "let it happen on purpose") and the more radical MIHOP ("made it happen on purpose") contingent. Even within these groups, there are divisions: Some believe the WTC was detonated with explosives after the planes hit and some don't even think there were any planes. To the extent that there is a unified theory of the nature of the conspiracy, it is based, in part, on the precedent of the Reichstag fire in Germany in the 1930s. The idea is that just as the Nazis staged a fire in the Reichstag in order to frighten the populace and consolidate power, the Bush Administration, military contractors, oil barons and the CIA staged 9/11 so as to provide cause and latitude to pursue its imperial ambitions unfettered by dissent and criticism. But the example of the Reichstag fire itself is instructive. While during and after the war many observers, including officials of the U.S. government, suspected the fire was a Nazi plot, the consensus among historians is that it was, in fact, the product of a lone zealous anarchist. That fact changes little about the Nazi regime, or its use of the fire for its own ends. It's true the Nazis were the chief beneficiaries of the fire, but that doesn't mean they started it, and the same goes for the Bush Administration and 9/11. The Reichstag example also holds a lesson for those who would dismiss the very notion of a conspiracy as necessarily absurd. It was perfectly reasonable to suspect the Nazis of setting the fire, so long as the evidence suggested that might have been the case. The problem isn't with conspiracy theories as such; the problem is continuing to assert the existence of a conspiracy even after the evidence shows it to be virtually impossible. In March 2005 Popular Mechanics assembled a team of engineers, physicists, flight experts and the like to critically examine some of the Truth Movement's most common claims. They found them almost entirely without merit. To pick just one example, steel might not melt at 1,500 degrees, the temperature at which jet fuel burns, but it does begin to lose a lot of its strength, enough to cause the support beams to fail. And yet no amount of debunking seems to work. The Internet empowers people with esoteric interests to spend all kinds of time pursuing their hobbies, and if the Truth Movement was the political equivalent of Lord of the Rings fan fiction or furries, there wouldn't be much reason to pay attention. But the public opinion trend lines are moving in the truthers' direction, even after the official 9/11 Commission report was supposed to settle the matter once and for all. Of course, the ommission report was something of a whitewash — Bush would only be interviewed in the presence of Dick Cheney, the commission was denied access to other key witnesses, and just this year we learned of a meeting convened by George Tenet the summer before the attacks to warn Condoleezza Rice about al Qaeda's plotting, a meeting that was nowhere mentioned in the report. So it's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth. Critics like The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann might lament the resurgence of the "paranoid style," but the seeds of paranoia have taken root partly because of the complete lack of appropriate skepticism by the establishment press, a complementary impulse to the paranoid style that might be called the "credulous style." In the credulous style all political actors are acting with good intentions and in good faith. Mistakes are made, but never because of ulterior motives or undue influence from the various locii of corporate power. When people in power advocate strenuously for a position it is because they believe in it. When their advocacy leads to policies that create misery, it is due not to any evil intentions or greed or corruption, but rather simple human error. Ahmad Chalabi summed up this worldview perfectly. Faced with the utter absence of the WMD he and his cohorts had long touted in Iraq, he replied, "We are heroes in error." For a long time the credulous style has dominated the establishment, but its hold intensified after 9/11. When the government speaks, particularly about the Enemy, it must be presumed to be telling the truth. From the reporting about Iraq's alleged WMD to the current spate of stories about how "dangerous" Iran is, time and again the press has reacted to official pronouncements about threats with a near total absence of skepticism. Each time the government announces the indictment of domestic terrorists allegedly plotting our demise, the press devotes itself to the story with obsessive relish, only to later note, on page A22 or in a casual aside, that the whole thing was bunk. In August 2003, to cite just one example, the New York dailies breathlessly reported what one U.S. official called an "incredible triumph in the war against terrorism," the arrest of Hemant Lakhani, a supposed terrorist mastermind caught red-handed attempting to acquire a surface-to-air missile. Only later did the government admit that the "plot" consisted of an FBI informant begging Lakhani to find him a missile, while a Russian intelligence officer called up Lakhani and offered to sell him one. Yet after nearly a dozen such instances, the establishment media continue to earnestly report each new alleged threat or indictment, secure in the belief that their proximity to policy-makers gets it closer to the truth. But proximity can obscure more than clarify. It's hard to imagine that the guy sitting next to you at the White House correspondents' dinner is plotting to, say, send the country into a disastrous and illegal war, or is spying on Americans in blatant defiance of federal statutes. Bob Woodward, the journalist with the most access to the Bush Administration, was just about the last one to realize that the White House is disingenuous and cynical, that it has manipulated the machinery of state for its narrow political ends. Meanwhile, those who realized this was the White House's MO from the beginning have been labeled conspiracy theorists. During the 2004 campaign Howard Dean made the charge that the White House was manipulating the terror threat level and recycling old intelligence. The Bush campaign responded by dismissing Dean as a "bizarre conspiracy theorist." A year later, after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge retired, he admitted that Dean's charge was, indeed, the truth. The same accusation of conspiracy-mongering was routinely leveled at anyone who suggested that the war in Iraq was and is motivated by a desire for the United States to control the world's second-largest oil reserves. For the Administration, "conspiracy" is a tremendously useful term, and can be applied even in the most seemingly bizarre conditions to declare an inquiry or criticism out of bounds. Responding to a question from NBC's Brian Williams as to whether he ever discusses official business with his father, Bush said such a suggestion was a "kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant." The credulous style can brook no acknowledgment of unarticulated motives to our political actors, or consultations to which the public is not privy. The public has been presented with two worldviews, one credulous, one paranoid, and both unsatisfactory. The more the former breaks apart, the greater the appeal of the latter. Conspiracy theories that claim to explain 9/11 are wrongheaded and a terrible waste of time, but the skeptical instinct is, on balance, salutary. It is right to suspect that the operations of government, the power elite and the military-industrial complex are often not what they seem; and proper to raise questions when the answers provided have been unconvincing. Given the untruths to which American citizens have been subjected these past six years, is it any surprise that a majority of them think the government's lying about what happened before and on 9/11? Still, the persistent appeal of paranoid theories reflects a cynicism that the credulous media have failed to address, because they posit a world of good intentions and face-value pronouncements, one in which the suggestion that a government would mislead or abuse its citizens for its own gains or the gains of its benefactors is on its face absurd. The danger is that the more this government's cynicism and deception are laid bare, the more people — on the left in particular and among the public in general — will be drawn down the rabbit hole of delusion of the 9/11 Truth Movement. To avoid such a fate, the public must come to trust that the gatekeepers of public discourse share their skepticism about the agenda its government is pursuing. The antidote, ultimately, to the Truth Movement is a press that refuses to allow the government to continue to lie.
By Christopher Haye

A Missile Defense System Is Taking Shape in Alaska

We are ready!

December 10, 2006
A Missile Defense System Is Taking Shape in Alaska
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
FORT GREELY, Alaska, Dec. 4 — Snow fences help keep drifts from piling up on the missile silos. Heat-sensing security devices that monitor the edges of this 800-acre installation are sometimes set off by wayward moose.
And the soldiers here, members of the 3-year-old 49th Missile Defense Battalion of the Alaska National Guard, were just selected to help field test for the Army the third generation of the Extended Cold Weather Clothing System, seven layers of synthetic meant to resist the brutal winds that rip past the snow-clad peaks of the Alaska Range.
Four years after President Bush ordered a limited missile defense system to be built and nearly a quarter century after Ronald Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, this sub-Arctic outpost, once a cold war training site and still a cold-weather training site, is where progress on the long-embattled missile system is perhaps most evident, military officials say.
Eleven interceptor missiles are installed in underground silos here, buried beneath the snow and a former forest of black spruce. This summer, when North Korea signaled that it planned to fire an intercontinental ballistic missile, Fort Greely, which has never fired a test missile, was put on alert status, ostensibly ready to respond if necessary.
After the test either failed or was aborted, “there was a little bit of a letdown” at the base, said Lt. Col Edward E. Hildreth III, commander of the 49th, “because we were prepared.”
That assertion, echoed by other commanders at Fort Greely during a limited tour of the base this week, comes a little more than three months after Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Fort Greely and expressed caution about the program’s readiness. Critics have noted that tests on some parts of the system have failed and a recent successful missile test — in California, shortly after Mr. Rumsfeld’s visit to Fort Greely — lacked decoys and was unrealistic.
Even as questions persist about capability, the missile defense program is pushing forward at a cost of at least $9 billion a year. About a third of that goes to the kind of operation that is based at Fort Greely, called Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, which is intended to shoot down enemy missiles while they travel through space. Vandenberg Air Force Base in California also houses two interceptors, but military experts say Fort Greely is better situated to interrupt the likely flight path of a missile from Asia or the Middle East.
Just a few years after being shut down, Fort Greely, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, is now the destination of about 1,700 people, including some 200 soldiers, and the rest defense contractors and family members. The base’s Brownie troop is at 16 girls and growing — Monday night they made root beer floats — just as the number of interceptors installed at the base is expected to expand to as many as 38.
Now, in a region with barely four hours of daylight in December, there is a new espresso shop on base and an expanded PX that sells flat-screen televisions.
Sgt. Jack W. Carlson III, an intelligence analyst, said he was assigned to Fort Greely before the Pentagon officials created the 49th Missile Defense Battalion. “We didn’t have a name,” Sergeant Carlson said. “We didn’t have patches. We just called ourselves G.M.D.,” for Ground-Based Midcourse Defense.
Sergeant Carlson married another soldier and has bought a house in nearby Delta Junction, population 840. He said he heated his house mostly with wood salvaged from the spruce left after a wildfire.
Before Fort Greely, he had been stationed in the Virgin Islands. He learned of openings in the missile defense program through an online posting, he said. “I’d been on the beach all my life, and it was time to see the snow.”
Alaska has been crucial to American military interests since long before it became a state in 1959. Now, Adak, in the Aleutian Islands, is scheduled to become the home port of the Sea-Based X-band Radar, a long-delayed system built on a converted oil rig that is critical to the ground-based system’s ability to track enemy missiles.
While the 49th is an Alaska National Guard unit, Colonel Hildreth reports to Col. Michael L. Yowell, commander of the 100th Missile Defense Brigade, based in Colorado.
Colonel Hildreth said he was well aware of criticism that missile defense was far from a perfected program. He said Fort Greely operated in a balance between operational mode and construction.
“We build a little, test a little,” he said. “It’s fluid.”
A 12th interceptor will be installed this month. Last summer, however, when American intelligence learned that North Korea might be preparing to launch an intercontinental missile, much of the bustle of contractors on the site stopped. Fort Greely went on alert. The system that had struggled through tests faced the possibility of firing a live missile.
“It got quiet,” said Col. Thomas M. Besch, director of Ground-Based Midcourse Defense for the Missile Defense Agency. “And all of a sudden no developmental activity occurred. You could feel in the atmosphere that people were on edge and ready. You were kind of waiting for something to happen, and it didn’t.

China Shows Signs of Shedding Its False Modesty

Resource wars on the near horizon? Or are we going to solve the science problem - THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS?

NYT December 9, 2006
China Shows Signs of Shedding Its False Modesty
By JOSEPH KAHN
BEIJING, Dec. 8 — China’s Communist Party has a new agenda: it is encouraging people to discuss what it means to be a major world power and has largely stopped denying that China intends to become one soon.
In the past several weeks China Central Television has broadcast a 12-part series describing the reasons nine nations rose to become great powers. The series was based on research by a team of elite Chinese historians, who also briefed the ruling Politburo about their findings.
Until recently China’s rising power remained a delicate topic, and largely unspoken, inside China. Beijing has long followed a dictum laid down by Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who died in 1997: “tao guang yang hui,” literally to hide its ambitions and disguise its claws.
The prescription was generally taken to mean that China needed to devote its energy to developing economically and should not seek to play a leadership role abroad.
President Hu Jintao set off an internal squabble two years ago when he began using the term “peaceful rise” to describe his foreign policy goals. He dropped the term in favor of the tamer-sounding “peaceful development.”
His use of “rise” risked stoking fears of a “China threat,” especially in Japan and the United States, people told about the high-level debate said. Rise implies that others must decline, at least in a relative sense, while development suggests that China’s advance can bring others along.
Yet this tradition of modesty has begun to fade, replaced by a growing confidence that China’s rise is not fleeting and that the country needs to do more to define its objectives.
With its $1 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, surging military spending and diplomatic initiatives in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Beijing has begun asserting its interests far beyond its borders. Chinese party leaders are acting as if they intend to start exercising more power abroad rather than just protecting their political power at home.
“Like it or not, China’s rise is becoming a reality,” says Jia Qingguo, associate dean of the Beijing University School of International Studies. “Wherever Chinese leaders go these days, people pay attention. And they can’t just say, ‘I don’t want to get involved.’ ”
Itself a major recipient of foreign aid until recently, China this year promised to provide well over $10 billion in low-interest loans and debt relief to Asian, African and Latin American countries over the next two years. It invited 48 African countries to Beijing last month to a conference aimed at promoting closer cooperation and trade.
Beijing agreed to send 1,000 peacekeepers to Lebanon, its first such action in the Middle East. It has sought to become a more substantial player in a region where the United States traditionally holds far more sway.
At the United Nations Security Council, China cast aside its longstanding policy of opposing sanctions against other nations. It voted to impose penalties on North Korea, its neighbor and onetime ally, for testing nuclear weapons.
Officials and leading scholars are becoming a bit less hesitant to discuss what this all might mean. The documentary, on China’s main national network, uses the word rise constantly, including its title, “Rise of the Great Powers.” It endorses the idea that China should study the experiences of nations and empires it once condemned as aggressors bent on exploitation.
“Our China, the Chinese people, the Chinese race has become revitalized and is again stepping onto the world stage,” Qian Chengdan, a professor at Beijing University and the intellectual father of the television series, said in an online dialogue about the documentary on Sina.com, a leading Web site.
“It is extremely important for today’s China to be able to draw some lessons from the experiences of others,” he said.
The series, which took three years to make, emanated from a Politburo study session in 2003. It is not a jingoistic call to arms. It mentions China only in passing, and it never explicitly addresses the reality that China has already become a big power.
Yet its version of history, which partly tracks the work done by Paul Kennedy in his 1980s bestseller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” differs markedly from that of the textbooks still in use in many schools.
Its stentorian narrator and epic soundtrack present the emergence of the nine countries, from Portugal in the 15th century to the United States in the 20th, and cites numerous achievements worthy of emulation: Spain had a risk-taking queen; Britain’s nimble navy secured vital commodities overseas; the United States regulated markets and fought for national unity.
The documentary also emphasizes historical themes that coincide with policies Chinese leaders promote at home. Social stability, industrial investment, peaceful foreign relations and national unity are presented as more vital than, say, military strength, political liberalization or the rule of law.
In the 90 minutes devoted to examining the rise of the United States, Lincoln is accorded a prominent part for his efforts to “preserve national unity” during the Civil War. China has made reunification with Taiwan a top national priority. Franklin D. Roosevelt wins praise for creating a bigger role for the government in managing the market economy but gets less attention for his wartime leadership.
Government officials minimize the importance of the series. He Yafei, an assistant foreign minister, said in an interview that he had watched only “one or two episodes.” He said the documentary should not signal changes in China’s thinking about projecting power, saying that colonialism and exploitation “would go nowhere in today’s world.”
But Mr. He also hinted at a shifting official line. He emphasized China’s status as a developing country. But he allowed that others may see things differently.
“Whether a country is a regional or a world power, it is not for that country to decide alone,” he said. “If you say we are a big power, then we are. But we are a responsible big country. We are a maintainer and builder of the international system.”
China has in fact emerged as a major power without disrupting the international order, at least so far. It has accepted an invitation by the Bush administration to discuss becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in the American-dominated international system.
Beijing places importance on many world institutions, especially the United Nations, where it holds a veto in the Security Council. It professes a strong commitment to enforcing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Last month Margaret Chan of Hong Kong became the first Chinese to head a major United Nations agency, the World Health Organization. She vowed to build a “harmonious health world,” echoing the slogan of harmony promoted by President Hu.
Yet critics say China is prepared to emerge in a less amicable fashion, if necessary. The Central Intelligence Agency says that China’s military spending may be two or three times higher than it acknowledges and that it allocates more to its military than any other country except the United States.
Beijing has cultivated close ties to countries that provide it with commodities and raw materials, regardless of their human rights records. Sudan, Myanmar and Zimbabwe have all escaped international sanctions in large part because of Chinese protection.
China’s increasing international engagement has also stimulated a more robust academic discussion about its global role and the potential for tensions with the United States.
Yan Xuetong, a foreign affairs specialist at Qinghua University in Beijing, argued in a scholarly journal this summer that China had already surpassed Japan, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and India in measures of its economic, military and political power. That leaves it second only to the United States, he said.
While the military gap between China and the United States may remain for some time, he argued, China’s faster economic growth and increasing political strength may whittle down America’s overall advantage.
“China will enjoy the status of a semi-superpower between the United States and the other major powers,” Mr. Yan predicted in the article, which appeared in the China Journal of International Politics.
He added, “China’s fast growth in political and economic power will dramatically narrow its power gap with the United States.”

As World Warms, Africa's Waters Going Dry

Where is the Physics of Energy evolution that can solve Every news item issue posted on this blog? I guess that's the Trouble With Physics

As World Warms, Africa's Waters Going Dry
JINJA, Uganda, Dec. 9, 2006
(AP) At Jinja pier the rusty red hull of a Lake Victoria freighter sat barely afloat in water just six feet deep — and dropping. "The scientists have to explain this," said ship's engineer Gabriel Maziku. Across the bay, at a fish packing plant, fishermen had to wade ashore with their Nile perch in flat-bottomed boats, and heave the silvery catch up to a jetty that soon may be on dry land and out of reach entirely. Looking on, plant manager Ravee Ramanujam wondered about what's to come. "Such a large body of water, dropping so fast," he said. At 27,000 square miles, the size of Ireland, Victoria is the greatest of Africa's Great Lakes — the biggest freshwater body after Lake Superior. And it has dropped fast, at least six feet in the past three years, and by as much as a half-inch a day this year before November rains stabilized things. The outflow through two hydroelectric dams at Jinja is part of the problem — a tiny part, says the Uganda government, or half the problem, say environmentalists. But much of what is happening to Victoria and other lakes across the heart of Africa is attributable to years of drought and rising temperatures, conditions that starve the lakes of inflowing water and evaporate more of the water they have. An extreme example lies 1,500 miles northwest of here, deeper in the drought zone, where Lake Chad, once the world's sixth-largest, has shrunk to 2 percent of its 1960s size. And the African map abounds with other, less startling examples, from Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, getting half the inflow it once did, to the great Lake Tanganyika south of here, whose level dropped over five feet in five years. "All these lakes are extremely sensitive to climate change," the U.N. Environment Program warned in a global water assessment two years ago. Now, in a yet unpublished report obtained by The Associated Press, an international consulting firm advises the Ugandan government that supercomputer models of global-warming scenarios for Lake Victoria "raise alarming concerns" about its future and that of the Nile River, which begins its 4,100-mile northward journey here at Jinja. The report, by U.S.-based Water Resources and Energy Management International, says rising temperatures may evaporate up to half the lake's normal inflow from rainfall and rivers, with "severe consequences for the lake and its ability to meet the region's water resources needs." A further dramatic drop in Victoria's water levels might even turn off this spigot for the Nile, a lifeline for more than 100 million Egyptians, Sudanese and others. "People talk about the snows of Kilimanjaro," said Aris P. Georgakakos, the study's chief author, speaking of that African mountain's melting glaciers. "We have something much bigger to worry about, and that's Lake Victoria." Each troubled lake is a complex story. Lake Chad's near-disappearance, for example, stems in part from overuse of its source waters for irrigation. Deforestation around Lake Victoria, shared by Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, makes the area a less efficient rain "catchment" for the lake, and overfishing and pollution are damaging its $400-million-a-year fishing industry. Kenya's Rift Valley lakes, some just a few feet deep, have always fluctuated in size, even drying up with drought. But African leaders say things are different this time, because long-term climate change may eclipse other factors. "These cycles, when they've happened, they haven't happened under the circumstances pertaining now — the global warming, overpopulation, degradation," said Maria Mutagamba, Uganda's water and environment minister. African temperatures rose an average 1 degree Fahrenheit in the 20th century — matching the global average — and even more in the past few decades in such places as Lake Tanganyika, climatologists say. If greenhouse gases continue to build in the atmosphere, temperatures may be several degrees warmer by this century's end. At Lake Victoria's receding shoreline, a place of scavenging storks, weedy expanses of water hyacinth, fishing boats derelict on dried lake bed, people see what's happening but don't understand why. "In just a few years, the lake pulled back from there, maybe 200 feet," said fisherman Patrick Sewagude, 24, pointing to old high-water marks at Ssese Beach, near Kampala, Uganda's capital. Someone had planted a few rows of corn on the exposed lake bed. Grass was taking over elsewhere. "It's tough. The fish have gone way out. You pull up stones in your nets," Sewagude said. Back in Jinja, 40 miles east of Kampala, researchers at the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization said falling water levels are the latest blow to the dying biology of Lake Victoria, where pollution has helped kill off scores of unique species of tropical fish in recent decades. Now tilapia, once a prime food fish, are declining because their inshore breeding grounds are vanishing. "People for many years haven't seen such a sudden change in the lake level," said the fisheries office's Richard Ogutu-Ohwayo, a biologist on the lake for 35 years. "Right now it's very difficult to say what will happen. It's a grim scenario, of worldwide climate change." Around the lake shore, everyone has his own theories. "The water's too hot, and the fish are going deeper, beneath the nets," said Modi Kafeel Ahmed, a Jinja fish processor. But the lake has been overfished, too, he said. "If it goes like this another five years, the lake will be empty of fish." For 30 million people living in its basin, Lake Victoria is a vital source — of livelihoods and food, of water, of transportation, of electric power. Almost 200 miles across the lake from here, Tanzanian authorities have reduced water supplies to the city of Mwanza because an intake pipe was left high and dry. The same is happening in Uganda, where German engineer Erhard Schulte is pushing work crews to finish refitting Entebbe's city water plant, extending its intake pipe 1,000 feet farther out into the lake. "The old Britisher who designed the original plant never expected the lake would drop this way," Schulte told a visitor. Perhaps the worst impact is on power supplies. Tanzanian factories have shut down because the rivers powering hydroelectric dams, and replenishing Lake Victoria, are running dry. Kampala, a city of more than 1 million, has endured hours-long blackouts daily. Uganda's two big hydro dams, side by side on the Victoria Nile, the lake's only outlet, are victims and — some say — prime suspects in the crisis. In 2003, facing growing Ugandan demand for electricity, the Nalubaale and Kiira dams produced a peak 265 megawatts of power. In the process, their operators began overshooting long-standing formulas regulating flow of water out of the lake, an independent hydrologist later concluded. That outside study, cited by environmentalists, contends 55 percent of the lake-level drop since 2003 is traceable to excessive outflow. But the dams' private operators and Ugandan officials strongly dispute that. Paul Mubiru, Ugandan energy commissioner, says the dams have had a "negligible" impact on Lake Victoria, and points to Lake Tanganyika's similar fall in levels — with no dams involved. Earlier this year, the operators announced they were reducing the dam outflows, "but our observations show that even with the reduced outflow, the water loss is still on the increase," Mutagamba, the water minister, told the AP. Falling lake levels, meantime, mean lower "head" pressure at the dams. Their output has dropped to 120 megawatts, pushing Uganda deeper into economic crisis. It is such unanticipated ripple effects — from abrupt environmental change — that underlie the warnings worldwide about global warming. Scientists find another unexpected example in Lake Tanganyika, where they say warmer surface waters may be depleting fish stocks. Many African lakes go unvisited by scientists, but what is known is troubling enough, says veteran researcher Robert E. Hecky, of Canada's University of Waterloo. "It is some of the most imperative data we have, that global climate change can be affecting these African water bodies," he said. A "very comprehensive, very realistic" study of Lake Victoria is needed, preferably conducted by U.N. specialists, said Frank Muramuzi, the head of Uganda's leading environmental organization. "Businesses are standing still, not working. Fishermen can't get enough fish. We do not have enough water supplies," Muramuzi said. "Rains alone won't bring back the lake levels, because there would still be climate change, a lot of heat, evaporation. It's reached a point where people don't know what to do."©MMVI, The Associated Press.