Michael Deibert: Australia’s Parched Landscape

Elections & InstitutionsEnergy & EnvironmentHuman Well Being

When Australia was ravaged by wildfires that killed over 200 people earlier this month, the acts of arson that police suspect were behind at least some of the blazes were made even worse by the decade-long dry spell the country has been enduring.

Though this heavily eroded and sparsely populated continent has experienced two other major droughts over the last century, both the intensity and duration of the current lack of rainfall has scientists worried that the country’s environment may be permanently shifting to a drier regime.

The Murray-Darling Basin—a river system in the southeast that drains one-seventh of Australia’s land mass—has been particularly hard hit, with official figures showing that, from 2006 until 2007, the amount of water flow into the basin was just 1,000 gigaliters. Normal inflows into the basin previously measured about 10,000 gigaliters a year.  From 2007 until 2008 it improved marginally to a still-meager 3,000 gigaliters. The region had record low inflows of water between 2006 and 2008, with the inflows for 2006-2007 less than 60 percent of the previous minimum—a figure based on 117 years of records. Helping to irrigate such states such as Victoria, the site of the worst wildfires, as well as New South Wales and Queensland, the basin was once wet enough to irrigate crops that produced 1.2 million metric tons of rice. Last year, the rice harvest fell to 18,000 metric tons.

Across southern Australia, scientists have also witnessed an intensification of the subtropical ridge phenomenon, a swath of high pressure characterized by a reduction in the amount of rainfall in autumn and late winter. The expansion of the ridge has been closely linked to global warming.

Jocelyn McCalla: Obama & Haiti’s Window of Opportunity

EconomyEnergy & Environment

Barack Obama delivered a sober yet forceful speech at his inaugural as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. The speech covered a lot of ground in a relatively short period of time. He balanced a reality check on the state of the union with an appeal to the American people that, with their help and support, the country would be better off in the years ahead, and that the obstacles that stand in their path to a better future today would be but history when their grandchildren looked back on the historical record.

Obama spoke mainly to the American people, but he had a few choice words for allies and foes abroad. What should Haitian leaders take away from his words? Two things: a warning and a promise.

The warning: “To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West—know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Since these words were preceded by others meant to convey to the Muslim world that the United States was not its enemy, some may very well say that such warnings were directed at terrorists and their international supporters rather than poor Haiti. Au contraire.

Jodi Liss: Farewell to the Year of Oil Power

Citizenship & IdentityEconomyEnergy & Environment

As we stagger into 2009, the financial and economic world of the past 30 years is crumbling and in chaos. Where is the bottom of this mess? How much more pain? No one knows and all dread the answer.

It is not just the United States; it is a global shift. Whatever the world comes to think about the United States and its debunked Washington Consensus, last year was, if anything, the Year of Oil Power. The radical plunge in prices we’re witnessing now may change the global balance of power even more in the other direction this year.

Whether due to speculation or wishful thinking, in 2008, geopolitics seemed to hinge on commodities in a positively unnatural way, especially among those who knew better. Anyone familiar with the boom-and-bust cycle of oil (and gas) so memorably captured in Daniel Yergin’s The Prize knows that for every delirious rise, the oil busts, such as those of the 1930s and the 1980-90s, have been long, painful, and hard for the producers to end.

Jonathan Power: Obama’s Inheritance and the Gitmo Problem

Elections & InstitutionsEnergy & Environment

The courtrooms of America sometimes take us by surprise. Last week, Charles “Chuckie” Taylor, the son of the former Liberian president and notorious warlord, Charles Taylor, was sentenced in a Miami court to 97 years in prison for torture. It was the first time that an American court had applied a law passed in 1994 allowing the prosecution of citizens who commit torture overseas. (Taylor was born in the United States, but then moved to Liberia to join his father.)

Is there now one law in America for those who commit torture overseas and those who commit it at home with the authority of government? Perhaps not for much longer. In a recent television interview, President-elect Barack Obama said that his designate for attorney general, Eric Holder, would investigate whether some senior members of the Bush administration should be prosecuted for their part in torture, although he said that his belief was that “what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future.”

Also, last week, Obama said that he had given his new appointees to top intelligence positions a clear charge to restore the nation’s stance on human rights. “Under my administration the United States does not torture.” Obama should also have reminded his audience that it was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that the U.S. helped push for the United Nations to agree to a legally binding treaty against torture, and then propelled Congress to rapidly ratify it. (It is this treaty, mind you, that provides the legal underpinning for the prosecution of Taylor.)

Ian Williams: Untangling the Oil for Food Knot

Elections & InstitutionsEnergy & Environment

Ian WilliamsMichael Soussan’s Backstabbing for Beginners: My Crash Course in International Diplomacy (Nation Books, 2008) is a compelling, fascinating, and humorous account of his years working with the UN’s Oil for Food program. This by no means a definitive account of the program, but rather a personal and highly impressionist view from an insider. But his impressions have the ring of truth for anyone who has observed the UN at close range and even more so for anyone who knows the characters with whom he worked. As a writer, he was blessed, since the Oil for Food program was short on gray bureaucrats and big on distinctively eccentric characters.

In fact, he does not appear to realize just how much the pugnacity and stubborn-ness of his boss, “Pasha” Benon Sevan, may have been critical in getting the program up and running. If he had played by the bureaucratic rules, Iraqis would have been waiting for their rations while memos piled up on desks across the Secretariat.

But eccentricity has its limits. There are echoes of Catch 22 in Soussan’s narrative, not least of which is a female ex-PFC Wintergreen, “Cindy,” the administrative assistant, whose attempt to secure promotion and recognition included fighting a war of bureaucratic attrition that at times almost brought the program (that was feeding the bulk of the Iraqi population) to a halt.

Inexperienced and idealistic, Soussan soon realized that had joined “an organization riddled with internal turf wars, petty office politics, dramatic personal rivalries, and in our case, a shameless competition for control over more money than the UN system had ever seen.”

Sumit Ganguly and Paul Kapur: Mumbai’s Perilous Implications

Energy & EnvironmentRisk & Security

Security officials and cleanup crews are now combing through the carnage in Mumbai, following last week’s terrorist attacks in the city. As the citizens of this vast metropolis seek to restore some semblance of normalcy to their lives, it is important to probe the sources of the violence in Mumbai, and consider the attacks’ implications for regional security in South Asia.

How and why did the Mumbai attacks occur? Information at this stage is still incomplete. Nonetheless, a few points seem clear.

There is considerable evidence that Pakistan-based entities were behind the Mumbai attacks. The sole surviving terrorist is Pakistani. He claims that the attackers trained with the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba for months inside Pakistan prior to launching their assault. And Indian officials have determined that the terrorists took a boat from Karachi to the Mumbai coast, leaving behind cell phones that had been used to call Pakistan.

None of this directly implicates the Pakistani government in the Mumbai attacks. It does, however, suggest that Pakistan bears some measure of responsibility for recent events; the Pakistani government is either unable or unwilling to prevent its territory from being used to launch terrorist attacks against India.

Richard Horowitz: Pan Am 103, Revisited

CultureEnergy & Environment

Richard HorowitzJuval Aviv, an Israeli-born New York private investigator, gave a presentation on August 8 at the annual American Bar Association (ABA) convention held in New York. Aviv is president of Interfor, Inc., which describes itself as an “international investigations firm offering comprehensive domestic and foreign intelligence services to the legal, corporate, and financial communities” with offices in thirty-six countries.

Aviv has created a mystique about himself by claiming to be the “Avner” character in Steven Spielberg’s Munich, hand-picked by former Prime Minister Golda Meir to lead a team of Israeli assassins to avenge the deaths of the 11 Israeli athletes killed by Black September during the 1972 Munich Olympics. As Aviv told the ABA audience, “Steven Spielberg bought the rights to my life story and Munich is based on that.”

Last week, however, Aviv was removed as the keynote speaker at a security conference scheduled for October after I and another security professional brought our concerns about Aviv to the conference director.

Aviv gained notoriety when Pan Am hired him to investigate the downing of Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. His investigative conclusion: the Central Intelligence Agency was responsible for the explosion on board the flight. According to his report, the CIA had allowed Syrian drug dealers to ship narcotics to the United States via U.S. aircraft in exchange for intelligence. Someone, however, slipped a bomb into the shipment aboard Pan Am 103, bringing down the plane.

While this defense did not help Pan Am in court, Aviv’s report, commonly referred to as the “Interfor Report,” merited a chapter in The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen (Citadel Press, 2004) and can be found on websites and discussion boards across the Internet. (See number 9 in Another Ten Conspiracy Theories, right after the famous Beatles rumor “Paul is Dead.”)

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir

Alon Ben-Meir: Mediating the Nuclear Impasse

EconomyElections & InstitutionsEnergy & Environment

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir

Iran’s insistence on enriching uranium in defiance of three UN Security Council resolutions, combined with a bevy of antagonistic threats aimed at Israel’s existence has created an explosive recipe that may well precipitate a horrifying regional conflagration. For Iran’s own best interests, its contentious leaders would be well advised to tone down their anti-Israeli threats, which have not been taken lightly thus far, and find a diplomatic solution to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program. The recent Israeli air force exercises and American naval maneuvers in the Persian Gulf, which were countered by Iran’s test-firing of a variety of missiles, have only heightened an already tense atmosphere.

It is now critical to look at who might be in a position to defuse the tension and restore some stability to a volatile region already battered by a devastating war in Iraq. At this point, Turkey has made itself well positioned geopolitically to play such a significant role. The fact that the Bush administration has shifted policy after nearly three decades and agreed to participate in the international talks with Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in Geneva may well open the door for future direct talks to be facilitated by the Turks.