by Alex Evans | Jul 26, 2007 | North America
Readers will already be aware from news coverage that US Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales’s testimony at the Senate didn’t go so well earlier this week (here’s the NY Times coverage if you want it; since then, Democrat Senators have issued a subpoena to Karl Rove and recommended that Gonzales be investigated for perjury).
But most of the coverage didn’t do justice to the sheer awfulness of it, according to Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, who reproduces the following list of highlights from the Washington Post’s coverage. It’s really funny, and really, really bad.
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by Alex Evans | Jul 25, 2007 | Conflict and security
Global Dashboard contributor (and my brother) Jules Evans has a superb piece in this month’s Prospect magazine about Stoicism and cognitive behaviour therapy.
The article’s based on his recent interview with Albert Ellis, the originator of CBT, who died yesterday (see also the obituary in today’s NY Times): it’s the last interview Ellis gave before he died. A must read.
by Alex Evans | Jun 25, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
Our second speaker: Bert Metz, the co-chair of the mitigation working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Metz regaled us with various numbers about the affordability of climate mitigation before noting parenthetically that, um, the figures didn’t take into account the costs of damages.
An analysis showing that stabilising at lower greenhouse gas levels is more expensive, but that doesn’t make any assessment of the damages?
Er… hello?
What you don’t usually get told in these kinds of presentations is why the damage costs have been left out. The short answer: because the mitigation ‘experts’ all remember what happened with IPCC’s second assessment report, back in 1995. It wasn’t pretty…
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by Elizabeth Sellwood | May 10, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
Noah Pollak’s National Review article, posted on Michael Totten’s blog today, reminds me of our internal debates during the Lebanon war last summer (when I was working for the UN) about peacekeeping options for south Lebanon.
Pollak’s article, subtitled “The UN organisation is ineffective as it is unaccountable” is a standard piece of UN-bashing. Pollak argues that unlike the Israeli government, which is being thrashed by the Winograd Commission and its fallout, the UN has “quite remarkably escaped any opprobrium for its own important contribution to the outbreak of war last summer”.
Pollak recalls that since 1978, when UNIFIL was established, “a concatenation of nearly identical UNIFIL-related resolutions has been issued by the Security Council, always with one thing in common: Events on the ground are never permitted to affect UNIFIL’s mandate. Through a combination of diplomatic foolishness and bureaucratic inertia, UNIFIL has remained impervious to any evaluation of its actual utility in bringing peace and security to southern Lebanon.” Pollak recounts a “long history of terrorist provocation in southern Lebanon”, from the PLO to Hezbollah, throughout which “the world’s diplomatic corps has maintained the self-congratulatory fantasy that more extensions of UNIFIL’s mandate will help the region”. (more…)
by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
US chat show presenter Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Senator John McCain (here) is interesting for what it says about US perceptions of statebuilding and peace support operations. Towards the end of an interview focused almost entirely on Iraq, Stewart gets one of the bigger audience rounds of applause of the night when he asks McCain with a rhetorical flourish:
How do you quell a civil war when it’s not your country?
Now, what’s really at issue in this debate is not so much the tactics of peacekeeping or peacemaking (though heaven knows the US has made an appalling hash of both in Iraq) nor even the exigencies of immediate post-conflict reconstruction (ditto), but a much longer term set of questions about what external actors can hope to achieve on governance in developing countries. What it really comes down to is this: can donors build effective states?
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