I’ve just returned from the UAE, where the Center on International Cooperation, NYU’s Abu Dhabi Institute and Brookings organized a conference on “Emerging Powers, Global Security and the Middle East”. Discussions ranged pretty far and wide but (unsurprisingly) kept coming back to whether or not the U.S. and China are trapped in a cycle of confrontations, and how this will affect the Iran issue this year. Julian Borger of the Guardian was there, and gives an excellent summary of this strand of debate:

The conference was under Chatham House rules, but broadly speaking: the Chinese were furious about the Taiwan arms sale, arguing it had come at a time when relations between the island and mainland China were at their best for years. They warned that Chinese nationalism was slowly awakening and should not be provoked. The current political turmoil in Iran actually serves to harden China’s resistance to sanctions, because it makes them appear more like interference in another country’s affairs – anathema to Beijing.

Others hit back at a rising nation they saw as seeking more global power than responsibility. The westerners urged China to play more of a broader role in the Middle East, beyond its immediate energy needs. India is angry at what it sees as China’s increased assertiveness along their common border. The Gulf Arabs accused China of allowing Iran to get away with its nuclear manoeuvring. Interestingly enough, it was clear at a public function put on as part of the conference, that “ordinary” Arabs, outside the government and think-tanks, were more sympathetic to Tehran’s case.

More broadly, I was struck by the fact that most participants – not only from the US and China, but also from India – were hung up on “old” hard security issues. There was a rough agreement that the Copenhagen climate talks were a mess, but that it should be possible to start making some real progress on climate again soon – although not through the UN framework. By contrast, almost everyone was extremely downbeat about the odds for alleviating classic inter-state competition (be it over Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Sino-Indian border or the Gulf). A number of participants highlighted the need for great power cooperation to handle failing states, but this was overshadowed by talk of big power rivalry – an excellent panel on Afghanistan concluded that the odds for real Sino-US-Indian cooperation there are low.

Given conversations like these, we need to take a long hard look at how we think we advance international cooperation. Good multilateralists like the authors of this blog are very good at saying “transnational threats require transnational responses” and assume that new threats like climate change and pandemic disease can be used to persuade governments to think beyond classic inter-state rivalries. David, Alex and Bruce Jones make a compelling version of this case in their recent paper on Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization:

In his 1948 classic, Politics Among Nations, Hans Morgenthau exhorted his readers to “assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power.” This assumption, he argued, allowed all foreign policy decisions to be placed on a single “intelligible, rational continuum, by and large consistent within itself, regardless of the different motives, preferences, and intellectual and moral qualities of successive statesmen.” While this focus on national interest and the primacy of nation-states had explanatory power in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is outmoded in the post-Cold War context.

Now, David, Alex and Bruce know me well enough to know that I’m unlikely to agree with this. And, yep, I think it’s fallacious. They argue that today’s statesmen are constrained by so many transnational factors (capital flows, etc.) and threats (H1N1, etc.) that a state-centric approach falls apart. And so it should in theory. But in practice, today’s statesmen seem extraordinarily adept at sticking with “national interest”-based thinking – and many are having to struggle with rising nationalist and populist forces at home. Territorial disputes still get people awfully worked up. Military-industrial complexes still follow their own logic. And politicians assume, not wrongly, that there are more votes in these issues than in swine flu.

Oddly, it’s possible to believe all that and still share Alex and David’s concerns about transnational threats. Actually, they terrify me. And we need to completely retool how we respond to them (again, when it comes to the threat-by-threat specifics, I concur with my GD colleagues on what needs doing).  But I’m increasingly convinced that we can only construct our responses to those threats on a traditional, balance of power foundation – which means prioritizing hard security talks, and basing deals on transnational threats on agreements on the global division of influence.

Goddamit, I feel like John Bolton this morning.

- With the UK election campaign under way in all but name, the FT’s Martin Wolf explains why he doesn’t fear a hung parliament – arguing that it might be just what’s needed to achieve fiscal restraint. “So poorly has single-party despotism governed the UK”, he suggests, “that I would welcome a coalition or, at worst, a minority government.” The Institute for Government, meanwhile answers all your hung parliament-related questions here, placing things in international and historical perspective.

- The Cable highlights the Obama administration’s key people on Iran. Richard Haass, meanwhile, suggests that the West’s strategy must do more to help the Iranian people – with the US and EU acting to “energise and lend rhetorical support to the opposition, helping it to communicate with the outside world”.

- Elsewhere, Der Spiegel profiles the five main risks to the Euro – namely Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy – assessing their economic woes. Charlemagne, meanwhile, interviews Cathy Ashton. And The Economist also has news that Dominique Strauss-Khan, current IMF head, is considering running against Nicolas Sarkozy in France’s 2012 presidential elections.

- Finally, this week saw a group of British Academy experts writing to the Queen about the failure to foresee the credit crunch – a follow-up to a question from the monarch at the LSE last summer. Their suggestion: the need for a better-coordinated government horizon scanning capacity – something that could take the form of a monthly economics briefing to the Queen, which would serve – as Professor Peter Hennessy has commented – to “sharpen minds” of officials. Read the full letter here (pdf).

December was a veritable smorgasbord of top 10s of the decade, top 100 foreign policy intellectuals and what have you, but now that the new year is underway, it’s clear that there’s really only one list to be seen on: the Iranian government’s new blacklist of  60 external organisations that it’s banned its citzens from being in touch with.

Some of the organisations on the list are just as you’d expect: the Open Society Institute, Freedom House, or Human Rights Watch.  Most of the big US think tanks are there, too: Brookings, Aspen, the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Enterprise Institute. The New America Foundation’s call for a grand bargain with Iran has pissed them off so much that they put it on the list twice.

But only one UK non-profit organisation has made the cut – step forward and take a bow, Wilton Park!

Full list here.

‘Call it the power of inevitability’, scroll the white letters on a black background, as a woman wails in Islamic fervour. ‘You know you have to be here.’ Cut to a speedboat racing across the bay towards a mighty skyscraper. ‘Believing is seeing’, flash the white letters.  A sports car approaches the skyscraper, and a dapper figure climbs out. It’s…it’s Tyler Brûlé!

No, it’s the latest advert for the Trump Tower in Dubai, one of the many vanity real estate projects announced in the boom years, that have now hit the rocks. ‘The thrill that every whim will soon become a reality’, the advert coos. Well, maybe not that soon. Local developer Nakheel, owned by the Dubai emirate, is struggling to pay back its $10bn in debt, and may have to be bailed out by the UAE government. Its Palm Deira and Waterfront projects, once planned to be bigger than Hong Kong, have also been delayed.

So too has the Pad, a high-tech residential complex built by Omniyat, in which each apartment would be ‘intelligent’, which means, apparently, it would monitor residents’ body temperatures and their taste in entertainment, so your apartment would know when you bring back a girl, and would intelligently turn up the temperature, dim the lights, and play Barry Manilow. Alas, the developers proved slightly less intelligent than the apartments, and the project has been delayed.

So many new properties are coming onto the market in the next two years, that Nomura estimates 150,000 jobs would need to be created to fill all the new office space. Alas, the trend is going the other way – Jones Lang La Salle estimates the population of Dubai will fall 10% this year.

Still, analysts are optimistic that Dubai will remain the main financial and trading hub for the Middle East, despite the best efforts of Riyadh, Doha, Beirut and Manama to challenge it. There’s no booze in Riyadh, Doha is incredibly boring, Manama is even less financially transparent, and Beirut is constantly being dragged to war by Hesbollah.

So the Biblical prophecies of the collapse of Dubai are unlikely to come true in the near future, much to the disappointment of Simon Jenkins, who started foaming at the mouth at the prospect earlier this year:

This off-the-shelf city state has been built on laundering the profits of oil, drugs, arms and western aid, he raved [western aid? shurely not]..the towers of Dubai will become casualties not of human greed but of architectural folly. Their lifts and services, expensive to maintain, will collapse. Their colossal facades will shed glass. Sand will drift round their trunkless legs. Animals will inhabit their basements.

Thousands of residential properties, if occupied at all, will be squatted by a migratory poor, like the hotel towers of the Spanish littoral or Corbusier’s blockhouses of Chandigarh in India. Refugees will colonise the camps where Indian workers have lived as they built Dubai. Gangs will seize the gated estates and random anarchy will rule the soulless boulevards.

If it is lucky Dubai will at least be a refuge from the political cataclysms that could engulf countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But mostly the dunes will reclaim the place. In centuries to come, tourists will share with Ozymandias the message: “Look on my works ye mighty and despair.’” With Shelley they will see how, “round the decay /Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare /The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Not a big traveller, are you Simon? 

When swine flu first hit, Egypt killed its pigs. All of them. Now this senseless decision has left Cairo with a major public health problem on its hands.

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.

Ramadan Hediya, 35, who makes deliveries for a supermarket, lives in Madinat el Salam, a low-income community on the outskirts of Cairo.

“The whole area is trash,” Mr. Hediya said. “All the pathways are full of trash. When you open up your window to breathe, you find garbage heaps on the ground.”

The pigs belonged to the city’s traditional waste collectors, Christians who lost their animals and their livelihoods. “They killed the pigs, let them clean the city,” says one. “Everything used to go to the pigs, now there are no pigs, so it goes to the administration.”

Update: It doesn’t make me feel any better about this story to see that the pigs seem to have been buried alive.

I’m also reminded of the 4 million or so cows the UK ended up slaughtering and burning during the BSE crisis, because we couldn’t be bothered to maintain basic standards of animal husbandry.

From a Jerusalem Post article on Eish L’Yahadut (Fire for Judaism) – a group that exists to break up relationships between Arab men and Jewish girls:

Every night, dozens of young men in Jerusalem’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood take to the streets and go out searching for girls.

But theirs is not a promiscuous search. In fact, the group of some 35 volunteers is looking to prevent such interaction and to stop what neighborhood residents have overwhelmingly complained is a growing problem in Pisgat Ze’ev – Arab men going out with Jewish girls.

What was once a rare occurrence, residents say, has become the norm in this north Jerusalem suburb, which shares a side of the security barrier with the Palestinian village of Anata and the scattered dwellings on the edge of Shuafat refugee camp.

“A rare occurrence?” a shopkeeper in the local mall asked sardonically this week when asked about the situation. “My friend, it’s not rare at all, this has become the reality. Pisgat Ze’ev has turned into one gigantic whorehouse, please excuse the expression.”

Residents now say that, due to Pisgat Ze’ev’s location and increasingly mixed Arab-Jewish population, the phenomenon of mixed dating has grown, with violent outbursts breaking out frequently between Arab and Jewish youth over the matter, and with growing communal anger over what many here feel is simply unacceptable.

According to the group, “our mission is not against Arabs, but it is for the protection of Jewish women, wherever they may be.”

- With the news that President Obama has nominated Ben Bernanke for a second term, over at the New Republic Noam Scheiber assesses the merits of continuity at the Fed. Stephen Roach, meanwhile, examines the case against the incumbent chairman, arguing that Obama’s decision should open a “broader debate over the conduct and role of US monetary policy”.

- Taking us back to the depths of last September’s financial meltdown, Faisal Islam has some interesting insights into the collapse of Lehman Brothers as viewed from British shores.

- Elsewhere, debate continues apace about the rights and wrongs of releasing the Lockerbie bomber. Suggesting that “cock-up offers as convincing an explanation as conspiracy for the handling of Mr Megrahi’s release”, Philip Stephens argues that the decision highlights the “price of realism” in foreign policy.

- Speaking of which, in the latest edition of FP Magazine none other than Paul Wolfowitz assesses the realist credentials of President Obama; providing at once a telling insight into the mindset of a man at the heart of foreign policy making during the Bush years.

- Mark Easton’s BBC blog, meanwhile, takes a look at how the British government is looking to influence public behaviour in light of the Chief Scientist’s warning of a “perfect storm” of energy, food and water scarcity by 2030.

- Finally, as President Obama holidays on Martha’s Vineyard, the White House announces what he’ll be reading on the beach. Slate offers its take here.

- With the fortieth anniversary of Muammar Qaddafi’s rule fast approaching, Chatham House’s Molly Tarhuni takes a look (pdf) at Libya’s gradual reemergence onto the international stage. Four decades on, she suggests, and the basis of Anglo-Libyan relations remains much the same however.

- Over at Atlantic Monthly, Amanda Ripley profiles Craig Fugate, the new head of FEMA and a man with “a reputation for telling it like it is”. “Already”, she suggests, ”Fugate is factoring citizens into the agency’s models for catastrophic planning, thinking of them as rescuers and responders, not just victims”. Moreover, Ripley continues,

he has changed FEMA’s mission statement from the old, paternalistic (and fantastical) vow to ‘protect the Nation from all hazards’ to a more modest, collaborative pledge to ‘support our citizens and first responders to ensure that as a nation we work together’.

A far cry, it would seem, from Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown.

- Harvard academic Joseph Nye, meanwhile, explores the importance of good communication for effective leadership. Obama’s ability to convey a resonant narrative has succeeded in rebuilding some of the US’s soft power, he argues, though the jury is still out on whether actions can match the towering oratory.

- Elsewhere, Victor Sebestyen reflects on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan during the 1980s – “Defeat in the hills around Kabul”, he suggests, “led directly – and swiftly, within months – to the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

- Finally, fast-forward to next week’s Afghan elections and the NYT takes a look at the campaign of presidential hopeful Ashraf Ghani. Reuters has some of the key election details here. Stephen Colbert, meanwhile, jests with the “Ragin’ Cajun”, James Carville, former political consultant to Bill Clinton and who regular readers will know has been advising Ghani. Don’t miss the video.

Okaay:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia.

The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

From the Nation, who also have the full sworn depositions – in which it just goes on and on. Such as:

“Mr Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar [sic], the warriors who fought the Crusades.”

“Mr Prince generated substantial revenues from participating in the illegal arms trade … [including] on Mr Prince’s private planes.”

The other deposition goes on,

“When I first arrived in Baghdad, I was asked to assist with unloading bags of dog food into the Armory. As I unloaded the bags of dog food, another Blackwater employee opened the bags and pulled out weapons from the dog food. Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq.”

See also this.

Palestinian President Abbas and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority face regular criticism that they are being “more Israeli than the Israelis” in their efforts to control Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank. While leading Israelis and Americans are impressed by the PA’s efforts to oust terrorist cells and arrest suspects in Jenin, Nablus and other West Bank towns, sceptical Palestinians are beginning mockingly to refer to General Dayton, the US military adviser, as the “Palestinian minister of defence”. Members of Abbas’s Fatah party are also reportedly concerned that its leaders’ efforts to quell “resistance” against the Israeli occupation will limit its popularity among ordinary Palestinians. 

Now Hamas, Fatah’s main rival, has begun to adopt an Israeli tactic too: closure. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that 

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, denied Fatah members permission to travel to the West Bank to take part in an internal Fatah election. The 400-odd Gazans want to to to Bethlehem, where they would be among 1,550 Fatah officials voting to elect the organisation’s leadership. But Hamas has announced that it will not allow them to attend until “the issue of political arrests in the West Bank is resolved” – meaning, until Hamas men are released from Palestinian Authority prisons.

Israel has long used its capacity to deny movement between the West Bank and Gaza as a way to control Palestinian political developments.  The fact that the occupied are beginning to adopt the tactics of the occupiers in their efforts to prevent progress by their domestic political rivals is a sad indication of the dire state of inter-Palestinian politics.

Oh Good Lord, what fresh lunacy is this?

22 July 2009 – United Nations peacekeepers are no strangers to working in some of the world’s most hazardous regions, and they are now helping out on a new battlefront: combating climate change.

“The care and protection of our environment is everybody’s concern,” said Lieutenant Colonel Um Bello, who heads the Alpha Company of the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia (UNMIL).

He is leading his troops in a new exercise: planting 1,000 trees in the country’s west this year, as part of the tree-planting campaign of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which seeks to plant 7 billion trees – or one for every person in the world – by the end of 2009.

“As a contingent, we have resolved to join efforts with the international community” and others to ensure that the war against climate change “is fought, won and our planet Earth is saved,” he said.

Well, it’s pretty quiet in Liberia these days, I suppose. Anywhere else the UN has troops twiddling their thumbs? Why, yes:

Blue helmets have already planted nearly 30,000 saplings in 11 peacekeeping missions worldwide, in countries including Timor-Leste, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Georgia and Lebanon.

That’d be the Congo that’s teetering on the edge of chaos while the UN mission is still 3,000 troops short? The Georgia from which the UN was just expelled? And the Lebanon where 14 peacekeepers were wounded this month in rioting after two Hezbollah arms dumps blew up? Any other trouble-spots requiring landscaping?

For its part, the joint African Union-UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur, known as UNAMID, has embarked on a scheme to plant 1,000 seedlings at all of its compounds in the war-ravaged Sudanese region by December.

What are we planning here, to fight the janjaweed off with sticks? Sod the war on climate change and go on patrol, I say. Someone else can handle the tree stuff…

Groups such as the World Organization of the Scouts Movement, with 28 million members in 160 countries, committed to plant 65,000 trees as well.

Standards are soaring at the New York Times. For the self proclaimed  ’newspaper of record rumour’, it seems that news is now “defined as anything juicy that catches our eye on Twitter”.

Hossein Derakhshan - or Hoder as he is often known – has been dubbed the Iranian blogfather. Back in 2001, his efforts to tailor Blogger for a Persian character set were a catalyst for Iran’s ealy uptake of blogging, which outstripped that of any country in the region.

When I helped run a blog at the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003, we were besieged by Iranian bloggers, with Hoder at the forefront. Here’s Aaron Scullion’s account of our confrontation with Ahmad Motamedi, then Iran’s minister for Information and Communication Technology. We repeatedly pressed the Minister on Internet censorship and arrests of bloggers in Iran – all based on Hoder’s work and encouragement.

Hoder visited Israel in 2006 and wrote widely about it, including for the BBC:

For me, an Iranian raised in post-revolutionary Iran, Israel has always had three great qualities: unknown, forbidden and therefore extremely intriguing. That’s why I finally decided to visit Israel.

But unlike all Iranians who have visited Israel, I decided to publicise my visit to the 20,000 daily readers of my blog – even though I knew I would not be able to go back to Iran again.

I had a mission, though, which would make the risk worthwhile. I wanted to break the stereotypical images both governments use to advance their radical policies.

He then made the extraordinary decision to go back to the Iran, appearing to have had some kind of rapprochement with the Iranian regime. In November 2008, however, he was arrested, and has not been heard of since. There’s been no charge and, as far as I know, no news.

Time then, for the NYT to charge into the fray with a claim that Hoder is – and may always have been – a spy for the Iranian secret services:

Suspicion that Iran’s blogging community has been infiltrated by double agents has sown fears and doubt online. For instance, a few days ago Omid Habibinia, an Iranian now blogging from Switzerland, wrote on Twitter about a rumor that a significant figure in Iran’s blogging community is a double agent: “some bloggers [are] saying Hossein Derakhshan (missing since 8 month ago) is working with intelligence agents.”

They have good reasons to make this appalling accusation, you’d think. Er no.

While there is no evidence to support the rumor that Mr. Derakhshan is cooperating with the authorities in their battle against Iran’s opposition bloggers, the Revolutionary Guard does seem to have established what it calls a “cyber army.” Last month a series of updates were posted on Twitter by a blogger who identified himself as a member of the Revolutionary Guard who seemed to be dedicated to finding and helping to arrest opposition protesters and bloggers. Even if Mr. Derakhshan has not defected to the side of Iran’s security forces, it is clear that some Internet-savvy people have taken the fight to suppress the opposition’s protests online.

Now it’s possible that Hoder has agreed to cooperate – perhaps under torture. Maybe, he even did a deal before he went home. Perhaps, too, the Times’ editor, Bill Keller, is still shagging his reporters. Point is we don’t know whether any of these assertions are true.

You have to hand it to the cowardly shits at the Times, though. If you’re going to libel someone, it makes sense to do it when your target is locked away in a jail cell. Then you can publish whatever the hell you like.