Deaths in Iraq: how many, and why it matters
Michel Thieren
OpenDemocracy
18 - 10 - 2006
How many civilians have died in Iraq? Iraq Body Count and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health give widely different answers. Michel Thieren examines what is at stake in their contrasting approaches and estimates.
For the Johns Hopkins study, a civilian dies in Iraq every three minutes from a war that has long perverted the meaning of both the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello. That civilian would not have died if the coalition had not come. For Iraq Body Count, the same story is told almost twice per hour. How much of a difference does it make? That is the political question these two statistics convey to the world, even if statistics themselves cannot answer it.
Nicolas Sarkozy v. Ségolène Royal: French Politics Go Populist
A TABOO IS BROKEN
French Politics Go Populist
By Britta Sandberg
For years, the private lives of French politicians remained just that. Even sex scandals at the highest levels were hushed up. No longer. Both Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal have opened up in the hopes of winning the presidency.
In favor of a Green Fee at Virginia Tech
The Economics of a Prudent Homeowner
October 17th, 2006
Stephen Aultman
To understand what Virginia Tech values it is necessary to look not only at our motto and mission statement, but also at how we allocate our time and resources. In many respects I believe the university does a good job of living up to its stated goals and values. When it comes to investing and maintaining campus infrastructure, however, we have a long way to go. The problem is simple: We are needlessly wasting a great deal of energy and water resources. This is both fiscally and environmentally irresponsible. Using more heat and electricity than is necessary causes needless environmental degradation both from mining activities and via air pollution. This is not a small or isolated problem but a large and systematic one. There are millions of dollars worth of proposed efficiency projects, projects that more than pay for themselves, that have gone unfunded. This is the problem the green fee seeks to address.
The green fee is a $6 per semester fee that would be paid by both undergraduate and graduate students to fund projects that green the university’s consumption and disposal habits. The two types of projects that the green fee would fund are energy efficiency and recycling. The proposal calls for a committee of students, faculty and administrators to allocate the funds based on two key criteria: the return on investment that the project yields and the degree to which the project decreases Tech’s environmental footprint. In short, the green fee seeks to have Virginia Tech emulate the ethics and economics of a prudent homeowner. I am sure many of you are as weary as I am of further increases in our student fees and want to make perfectly clear that the green fee will not increase the cost of attending Virginia Tech. In 2005, the state legislature capped the rate at which certain types of fees could increase. Instead of being a new expense to students, the green fee is instead competing with other potential uses of the money.
To evaluate the wisdom of implementing a green fee, it is necessary to understand the problem it is trying to address. Why is it that the profitable and environmentally responsible projects have gone unfunded? After spending a great deal of time reading memos, projects proposals and meeting with numerous people within the administration, I believe that it is not a lack of caring or diligence on the part of employees that is to blame, but structural problems within the bureaucracy. These are problems that cannot be addressed by one or two people, but need the concerted attention of the highest levels of the administration. Due to limited space, I will detail only two such problems: inadequate cost accounting and a lack of dedicated funding.
Cost accounting is a system that organizations use to track and analyze the expenses associated with various activities. The way that this system is structured has important implications for how resources are allocated. The best way to illustrate this point is by comparison. When considering an investment in energy efficiency, a prudent homeowner weighs the upfront costs against the benefit of future energy savings. At Virginia Tech, however, the costs and savings of such projects often accrue to different administrative departments providing poor incentives for decisions makers. Aggravating the problem is a lack of dedicated funding for efficiency enhancing projects. Instead there exists a cruel dilemma where immediate, and often pressing, maintenance needs compete against cost-reducing efficiency projects for a single pot of money.
The proposed green fee is a first step in correcting these problems. Money raised by a green fee would provide a dedicated funding source for projects that improve Virginia Tech’s fiscal and environmental performance. The proposal also calls for the accounting office to work with the green fee funding committee to make sure that savings from efficiency projects funded by the committee return to the committee.
The green fee is not a radical proposal but an attempt to institutionalize the economic decision making of a prudent homeowner. The fee will not increase the financial burden on students, but will instead help to decrease long-run operating costs. The green fee is not an idealistic whim, but a proposal that seeks to address specific institutional and economic impediments to sound management. I ask for your support in engaging the administration with the issues that have been discussed here. The e-mail to contact those running the green fee campaign is greenfee.vt@gmail.com.
Lakoff: When Cognitive Science Enters Politics
by George Lakoff
A Response to Steven Pinker’s Review of Whose Freedom? in The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/doc_posts.mhtml?i=20061009&s=pinker100906
These questions matter in progressive politics, because many progressives were brought up with the old 17th Century rationalist view of reason that implies that, if you just tell people the facts, they will reason to the right conclusion — since reason is universal. We know from recent elections that this is just false. “Old-fashioned … universal disembodied reason” also claims that everyone reasons the same way, that differences in world-view don’t matter. But anybody tuning in to contemporary talk shows will notice that not everybody reasons the same way and that world-view does matter.
Gilpin: War is Too Important to Be Left to Ideological Amateurs
~NiK
War is Too Important to Be Left to Ideological Amateurs
http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/19/1/5
Robert Gilpin, Princeton University
International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 1, 5-18 (2005)
The 2003 American attack against Iraq was engineered by two powerful groups within the Bush Administration, the ultra-nationalists and the neo-conservatives. The ultranationalists’ motive was to gain control of the oil reserves in the Middle East and elsewhere in the region in order to gain and sustain American global primacy. While the neo-conservatives shared this objective, they also wanted a radical restructuring of geopolitical relations in the area in order to promote the long-term security of Israel. Supporting the Administration were powerful domestic constituencies, especially evangelical Christians. Opposition to the war was expressed by leaders of three professional services responsible for American security: the American army and marines, the Foreign Service, and Middle East experts in the CIA. Opponents of the war believed that there was no threat posed to the US by Iraq; they also believed that the civilian leadership of the Pentagon was not competent and that planning for securing and pacifying postwar Iraq was inadequate. The opponents of the Iraq War have proved correct.
WP: Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442_pf.html
The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.
Fascist, Fascist, Who’s A Fascist?
The article's position seems common enough. After World War Two Helmut Schmidt commented that WWII was “totally started, led, and lost by Adolf Hitler”. But doesn't this ignore the essentially democratic nature of Germany's transformation into a fascist state? By analogy, is it not possible that such scenes as Abu Ghraib in our present context speak to the emergence of a certain fascism? Many 'liberals' strain their voices trying to argue that Bush ordered Abu Ghraib or that his minions somehow ordered it. And it would be a scary thought to think that this were true. But isn't it essentially a more terrifying position to think that maybe Bush didn't order it? That this was a more locally organized phenomenon?
If fascism emerges from the micro-level of our own politics, then the fundamental terrain of our combat with it is essentially ourselves. Fascism is a potential in all of us. To suggest otherwise is somehow to absolve ourselves of our own complicity in its reproduction.
~NiK
Fascist, Fascist, Who’s A Fascist?
[10 October 2006]
The term "fascism" is being appropriated, inappropriately, by a range of political interests in the US – including the Republican Party.
by Robert R. Thompson
However one reads it, I don’t think the use of the label “fascist” by Bush opponents or supporters does anything but, as Pollitt suggests, inflame emotions, conjure up images of Nazism, and poison our politics. It may be, as Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes in the 24 September 2006 The New York Times, “no phrase has crashed and burned as fast as the President’s most recent entry into the foreign policy lexicon: Islamic fascists, or, Islamo-fascism.” She also suggests that while the terms “have disappeared from Mr. Bush’s oratory—they were nowhere to be found in his 9/11 anniversary speeches, for instance—questions about the phrases have not … All of which leaves the central problem—what to call the enemy—unresolved.” (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Islamo-Fascism Had Its Moment”, The New York Times, 24 September 2006).
The fact that questions and criticisms regarding the use of fascist terminology linger among those who’ve lived through a fascist regime demonstrates that “what to call the enemy” is far from the central problem. The brunt of the debate continues to be the deliberate use of language and images of the last century’s political brutality to score political points, and to confront (and define) the new century’s turmoil. Will the ploy succeed or fail? Only time will tell.