Archive for September, 2009
The US is preparing to push for new sanctions against Iran in light of its nuclear program, aiming to interfere with Iranian trade more broadly.
A comprehensive sanctions approach has more chance of success than efforts so far, and Iran might be more susceptible to pressure in the wake of the post-election political and societal divides that have opened up. But analysts note that sanctions may be weakened by Russian and Chinese resistance, and that sanctions may simply may not be enough to change Iran’s course. One problem is that Iran is fixing one vulnerability, building up its capacity to refine gasoline.
Some US politicians are talking about regime change in Iran in place of more gradual measures. Sanctions might bring this about, but the US lacks leverage, and pushing for it might delegitimize the very forces that might replace the current government. In any case, regime change would not guarantee an end to the nuclear program: support for aspects of it is widespread among Iranians, and Iran’s strategic situation will remain largely the same.
A military strike is also put forward as plausible, but most analysts see it as at best a delaying tactic. It also has severe potential downsides:
- It might well mean an angrier, more aggressive Iran, possibly more determined to pursue nuclear weapons.
- A strike might rally the populace around the regime and even around the nuclear program, reducing the impact of sanctions or regime change.
- Iran has substantial ways to retaliate against the US, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond.
- If Israel carries out an attack, it runs the risk of turning the Iranian-Israeli struggle from a cold war to a hot one, increasing the danger to Israel in the medium- and long-term, especially when Iran acquires nuclear arms anyway.
Pew reports that most Mexicans see life in the US as better than that in Mexico, and 33% of Mexicans would like to come to the US. Some 18% would do so even if it were illegal.
They identify these issues as “very big” problems in Mexico:
- crime — 81%
- the economy — 75%
- illegal drugs — 73%
- corruption — 68%
That is a lot of people interested in a life in the United States, given that Mexico has a population of 111 million, of whom 68 million are over 19.
- 33% = 22 million adults
- 18% = 12 million adults
The poll was of adults over 18 generally, while likely immigrants would be concentrated among young adults, but they would tend to create chain migration that can bring in children and older people.
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Russian-Ukrainian tensions are building. “Now, for the first time in years, the word ‘war’ is being used here, and it’s not dismissed as impossible,” Ukrainian analyst Valeriy Chaly told the Washington Post.
This is driven by specific issues, such as the Crimean issue, and by the larger Russian skepticism that Ukraine is a permanent, independent state.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told the Post that the debate in Moscow “is between moderates who want to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and ensure that it continues delivering Russian gas, and officials calling for a proactive strategy aimed at ’soft dominance’ over the country.”
Either path could lead to greater instability, amongst Ukraine’s divided citizenry, and between the two countries.
Researchers are creating digitized versions of cities from thousands of photos that people have shared online, Physorg.com reports.
The program used 150,000 photos of Rome to create a 3-D digital rendering of the city, for instance.
This capability is another step toward truly open-source intelligence: publicly available images and other information will be able to generate increasingly detailed snapshots of places, people, and particular moments. And the ability to analyze this information will steadily democratize, and grow more powerful: Google is experimenting with facial recognition software that could reveal the locations and activities of millions of people who aren’t even the primary subject of a given photo, as just one example.
This idea has historic antecedents, by the way. During WW II, the OSS collected American’s tourist photos of Europe, cataloged them and made them partially machine-accessible, and used them to plan bombing raids. (Nicholson Baker, “Deadline,” New Yorker, July 24, 2000, 47.)
(Tip from @Changeist)
(Image: Creative Commons from gruntzooki, Flickr)
People are not that certain of China’s rise. Majorities or pluralities in only half of the countries surveyed “believe that China will — or already has — replaced the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower.” Sensibly, only minorities believe that the handover has already occurred — 4 to 17% think so, with no clear pattern emerging in countries with larger percentages within this range. Only 8% of Chinese believe that they are already on top.
People in developed countries –and thus likely higher education levels — are more likely to expect Chinese dominance.
Two exceptions set the stage for future clashes of expectations: only 26% of Americans foresee being replaced by China, with 57% doubting that this will ever happen, while 59% of Chinese expect to replace the US, and only 20% are skeptical that this will occur.
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Writing in Foreign Policy, Paul Quinn-Judge outlines a scenario in which “the fighters of the Caucasus Emirate link up with their jihadi allies in Central Asia, turning much of the southern rim of the former Soviet Union into a zone of low-intensity warfare.”
He writes that “The absolute worst-case scenario — a gradual linking-up of insurgents in Central Asia with the North Caucasus’ young Islamist fighters — might be remote, but it is now possible. Such a link-up would require at least three factors.”
- “Russia’s policy of blind brutality in the North Caucasus would have to continue, ensuring a steady stream of recruits to the Islamist cause.”
- “The Taliban would have to consolidate along Afghanistan’s frontiers with Central Asian countries such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, or Tajikistan, turning the borderlands into safe havens and creating a series of conduits allowing fighters to move from Afghanistan into Central Asia and beyond.”
- “Central Asian jihadists from countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan would have to emerge as a fighting force large enough to exert serious regional pressure.”
As to their likelihood, Quinn-Judge suggests that
- “The first is already happening.”
- “The second is a matter of time.”
- “The third cannot be ruled out.”
Jon Norris at Foreign Policy points out that Sudan is scheduled to self-destruct — probably — in two years.
In 2011, the African south of the country is supposed to vote on separation from the more Arab and Muslim north. “Almost every observer has concluded that if this referendum happens, the South will vote overwhelmingly for independence, sundering in half the largest country in Africa,” Norris writes.
The split could be bloody. Norris notes reports that the Sudanese government is likely arming proxy forces, including the Christian cultist Lord’s Resistance Army, possibly with the goal of halting the referendum or seizing territory from the southern regions.
And, suggests Norris, events in Darfur would suggest to Sudan that the consequences of misbehavior in the south are likely to be low.
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Iran may now have enough nuclear fuel “to make a rapid, if risky, sprint for a nuclear weapon,” the New York Times reported this week.
However, design work on an actual nuclear weapon may have been halted in 2003, and “it is unclear how many months — or even years — it would take Iran to complete that final design work, and then build a warhead that could fit atop its long-range missiles.” This makes the US believe it would have ample warning if Iran actually began pursuing a nuclear weapon in earnest — the Times notes that the official estimate is that Iran could have a bomb between 2010 and 2015, with later dates in that range more likely.
It also remains unclear how much effect the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran would have. NPR explored this issue late in August.
- Experts interviewed for that story suggest, as others have, that Iran is not ruled by a suicidal regime, and could likely be deterred, just as more radical regimes (such as Mao’s China) have been in the past.
- “If Iran gets the bomb, we’re going to have a period of experimentation in the beginning, where Iran is trying to figure out how much power this new capability has conferred,” says Gary Milhollin, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, noting that this could lead to a confrontation stemming from miscalculation.
- Mike Shuster of NPR notes: “If Iran does eventually build nuclear weapons, its deterrent is unlikely to grow beyond a handful of bombs. Iran’s own supply of natural uranium is believed to be quite small and dwindling already. Acquiring uranium from other nations could be difficult if Iran sought to keep it secret.”
China has plans to create a 25-square-mile photovoltaic solar farm. The array would have a two-gigawatt capacity; this could power three million homes, ABC News reports.
Of course, China has announced a lot of sustainability projects that haven’t quite panned out. Still, ABC notes that China is the world’s largest producer of solar panels, and is about to be the world’s largest wind turbine maker.
The first marker for this solar project will be whether the 30 megawatt demo is completed in the next couple of years. The full-scale project’s target for completion is 2019.
Twenty-five square miles is ambitious at the moment, but may come to be seen as just a start. The current National Geographic asserts that the entire US electricity supply could be powered by a solar farm occupying a 100-mile-by-100-mile square (10,000 sq miles). (George Johnson, “Plugging into the Sun,” National Geographic, September 2009, 39) This might seem like a lot, but, by comparison, it is less than a tenth of the acreage planted in corn alone each year.
(PV panel image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)