AND THE GIANT SUV

THAT IS AMERICA

GOES OFF THE CLIFF...

The Long Emergency
Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Disasters of the Twenty-First Century

by James Kunstler
Grove/Atlantic, 2005

by Tim Corrigan

Hate Walmart and Hummers? Good news! The end of them is nigh--but you'll have little time to enjoy their demise as you huddle in the cold and dark ten years from now and scramble for food to avoid your own end... James Kunstler's The Long Emergency is about the approach of the peak of global oil production and its aftermath, and he argues that the foreseen disasters will happen much sooner than we expect and without much warning. He also argues that our blinders on this issue and lack of preparation will make the ensuing disaster even worse than it might otherwise be.

Peak oil is the idea first described by M. King Hubbert, a geologist working for Shell Oil, who created a mathematical relationship to describe the time between the peak of exploration and the peak of production, and how production will decline over time. In other words, some time after you realize you are finding less new oil fields, you can use this curve to figure out approximately when you will start producing less oil, and from that you can roughly determine when your lights will go out.

The peak of global oil discoveries was in 1964, and the peak of global production may have already occurred. At current rates of consumption, that would give an absolute maximum of about 37 years between the peak and the definitive end of the oil-based economy--and, as he emphasizes, the first half was the oil that was easy to find and extract. Additionally, global consumption is growing as China and India ramp up their consumer economies.

Due to what he calls "the rear view mirror" effect, we'll only wake up to the decline after we're already in it. Some disruptive global event similar to the 1973 OPEC embargo will occur, and prices will find a new level far higher than now. The high oil-consuming nations realize that we have entered the era of permanent scarcity.

Kunstler's argument is that we have already reached the point he calls "overshoot," where no matter how well-intentioned and hard-working we are in addressing the issue (assuming, for a second, our country had any serious intention of working hard on this issue) we are in for a hard landing that may disrupt civilization for an indefinite amount of time. We're using what he calls a one-time endowment of millions of years of accumulated solar energy in the form of oil to subsidize American civilization's greatest "achievement"--sprawl. We can't get that energy back, and he argues that no other form of fuel will allow that level of energy concentration needed to make car culture possible. And the very size of our investment in the suburbs and our sense of entitlement as Americans will, he argues, prevent us from taking any steps to start dealing with our energy issues seriously. For suburbanites, it is literally unthinkable that we would have to give up our cars.

When you wish upon a star…

Kunstler attacks what he sees as the American tendency to think that because we have solved many technical problems in the past, we will auto-magically come up with something that will fix our lack of oil, just in time. He calls this the "Jiminy Cricket effect," where we seem to believe that just wishing will make it so. In one chapter he quickly runs through half a dozen alternative energy technologies, and dispatches almost all of them in a few pages. To one extent or another, he describes them as being either simply infeasible or indirectly dependent on oil to create. For example, the production of solar panels is dependent on oil energy. Panels are made out of plastic and silicon - the manufacturing process requires oil, and some of the actual material comes from oil products. And panels are useless without batteries created from petroleum byproducts. Hydrogen is simply a storage medium for energy, but is not energy itself. He sees nuclear as one option that would produce more juice than it loses, but argues that at this point America will not be able to build enough of a nuclear infrastructure to keep the lights on--partly because people aren't scared enough yet to overcome NIMBY attitudes.

Kunstler dismisses a huge number of new technologies, many of which have already reached feasibility on a limited scale. It's true that renewables are a tiny fraction of a percent of our energy use now, but the technologies are still maturing, and people have not had a reason yet to use them on a large scale because oil was at $10 a barrel only three years ago. To use an analogy from digital technology: we had digital cameras for consumers for almost a decade before they became popular, and then they went from no penetration to virtually supplanting film cameras in less than a decade. Solar cells have roughly tripled in efficiency in the last 15 years, become common in certain applications, and are spreading to new ones every day. Wind power has reache economic viability in many places without subsidies.

To say that all of these technologies are impossible to build without oil is ludicrous--many forms of metal production actually use electricity as their main form of power. Wind is not as convenient or high-grade a power source as oil (you can't plug your car into a windmill; some storage mechanism is required), but we have a lot of plains and coastlines where it could be easily exploited.

Wind power also requires aluminum and steel, and Kunstler says that we will not be able to extract the raw materials for this renewable energy push when we need them. On the other hand, if we are moving beyond SUV's and Walmarts, obviously a lot of recyclable raw materials--metals and plastics in particular--will already be close at hand in the vast lots of suddenly immobilized Hummers and Excursions.

To be fair, his argument is that these technologies might be possible for a large portion of the power we will need, but they will not allow suburbia to continue as it has. He may be right about this, or maybe not. The needs of most commuters could be served fairly well by a number of technologies that exist, or are close to economic viability--for example, a car in Italy was developed to use compressed air as its power source. It might look more like a scooter with a roof than a Hummer, but if that was the car that your typical American could afford they'd no doubt take it over a bicycle or trains. The suburbs may become smaller and more dense, but there is no reason we could not rebuild streetcar lines where we currently have major highways.

However, Kunstler may still be correct in his overall scenario, since even if the renewable energy technologies end up being feasible, we may not choose to deploy enough renewable energy soon enough to prevent the disasters predicted in The Long Emergency.

Kunstler seems driven to quickly get these alternative energy sources out of the way so he can get on to his main topic--the collapse of suburbia and the drive-thru lifestyle. He has written several other books about suburbia and its impact on American life--most notably 1993's The Geography of Nowhere--and he sets up a scenario where our sprawl will simply disintegrate as people are unable to get the energy they need to commute. All of us who don't like the Walmartization of American culture will have some reason to cheer--as the oil that makes the products cheaply and transports them 12,000 miles runs out, we will find the big box stores drying up and blowing away. The very scale that they operate at will make them unable to continue, as consumers can no longer drive 80 miles round trip to buy tchotchkes from China. The problem is, however, that we will be looking to replace everything we currently import with things produced locally--which we don't have the expertise or supply chain to do any more--just around the time that we're running out of energy and dealing with the impact of global warming.

The stuff we buy used to be made in the town where we lived--there were local clothing mills, shoe makers, metal smiths, not to mention farmers nearby. First with the railroad, and then with trucks and planes, we've stretched this to the point where if we aren't bringing containers in from China, we will have no clothes. Our produce is increasingly from Mexico. Car parts are also from China and Mexico. Electronics are almost entirely produced overseas. In other words, we can't maintain our current way of doing things if international trade shuts down for any length of time. Worse yet, the chain of human skills necessary to get the factories going again is gone.

In fact, the way he sees things, the big, looming, obvious disaster is likely to distract us from seeing the equally huge but less obvious disasters to follow. Networks that we have built around plentiful energy will suddenly stop working, with additional disastrous, unforeseen side effects. One example is the natural gas network--right now this is the cooking and heating fuel for millions of urban consumers; however, the natural gas supply depends on a minimum level of pressure in the lines. Below that, air gets into the lines, and the utility companies are forced to shut off the supply temporarily to rebuild the pressure. Some of the pilot lights in hot water heaters around the country might not go back on by themselves, causing gas explosions. If all of this happened during winter, skyscrapers could face a situation where their heat is off and forty stories of plumbing freezes and explodes--a scenario he claims almost happened in the winter of 2003. (A similar unexpected follow-on happened during the blackout of summer 2003, where people found that after the electricity went out they also couldn't get gas because the pumps were all electric.)

The end result of these disasters, Kunstler believes, is that it will be impossible to organize a rational response to the problem as many different systems crucial to our society break down simultaneously. For instance, Kunstler predicts disruption of our food supply. Hydrocarbons are the feedstock of our "green revolution." Beyond the fact that the fixings for the average Caesar salad travel 2,000 miles before they reach your plate, hydrocarbons are the base for the fertilizers and pesticides that we liberally spray on our fields and crops to increase yields to unnatural levels. He argues that really without hydrocarbons the "green revolution" does not exist, and we are in a situation where we will have billions of people more than we can support.

"One might take the view that World War Three has already started and we are well into it."

While Kunstler argues for the end of big box stores and for a return to a more sustainable, local life, he is more a follower of realpolitick than a liberal. He was for the war in Iraq--because it was for oil.

"Of course [the war] was about oil…But members of the anti-war lobby were just as likely to be car-dependent suburbanites as Bush supporters were. At least that was my observation among my fellow middle aged yuppies in upstate New York. One family in my neighborhood had a sign in their yard that said 'War is Not the Answer'--and had two SUV's parked in the driveway."

He argues that the war was the only rational response that a society as oil-dependent as ours could have had, as our supply was put in great danger by the erratic Baghdad regime. He thinks we should have eliminated Hussein and left. It seems Kunstler believes we should have gotten our society to a sustainable point long ago so all of this wouldn't be necessary--but since we haven't, we will have less and less latitude to act rationally as the crisis comes on us. Once we're cold and hungry, we'll support anyone who can keep the lights on, including, as he puts it "corn pone Nazis."

At that point, we'll still be in the Middle East, but current fig leaves of pretending to care about democracy there (or here) will vanish, as we are "forced" to occupy all of the Persian Gulf states to secure our fix of oil. Once we've alienated the Muslim world, they will destroy enough of the oil infrastructure to force us to withdraw (or make it pointless to stay), and China will be there to pick up the pieces--assuming there are pieces left to pick up. The global disaster could happen in a way that we don't initially realize is connected to the struggle for oil--in much the same way that World War I was (to appearances) ignited by an assassination of one man.

Kunstler also predicts the crisis will bring world regionalization. Once the cheap transportation fuel is gone, globalization will be over--so over, in fact, that all regions of the world, and even constituent parts of large countries, will be left to muddle through as best they can on their own. Europe is very well prepared for this future already, since the cities there have little suburban sprawl, and distances are small. Local agriculture using sustainable methods has continued uninterrupted, and many of the European countries are well along in preparing for the end of oil--for example Denmark gets 15% of its power from wind already, and France gets 70% of its power from nuclear. Europe's main problem is that a little ice age may occur as global warming shuts down the Gulf Stream conveyor of warm water that keeps the continent from freezing over.

In the United States, in contrast, the size of our country and the scale of the disaster will leave our regions to very different fates. Residents of the Southwest will wake up to the fact that they are in the desert, and 30 million or more people will need to move somewhere else--but not before a small war is fought with local Chicano insurgents seeking to establish the region as the Mexican-American homeland "Aztlan," or re-unite it with Mexico.

The Great Plains will be marginally better off, and will largely de-populate as the current method of farming with fossil water becomes impossible with depletion of the aquifers. The Southeast will return to its agricultural, feudal roots. The Northeast and the Northwest will fare the better than the rest of the country due to climate, water supplies and culture, but the Northwest may be beset by Asian pirates.

This is one of the strangest predictions of The Long Emergency. For some reason, although he predicts the Gulf Stream conveyor will shut down and Europe will suddenly be in a little ice age, and "everything will become more local," Asian pirates will ravage our West Coast after sailing 7,000 miles across the Pacific. It's hard to understand why Europeans plunged into a new Dark Age will not also be a problem on our East Coast. I guess he never heard of the Vikings. Meanwhile, Mexicans will overthrow El Norte to reclaim an uninhabitable desert. Much of this seems to be a little bit of sensationalism to make the book more exciting. As I read these perhaps slightly racist sections, I found myself thinking that if Kunstler's nightmare scenario ever does happen, we're going to need every campesino we can find to teach us how to survive again as subsistence farmers.

Kunstler's sheer catalog of catastrophes leaves a reader overwhelmed - global warming, but also a potential new ice age, the end of fossil water in the Great Plains, new diseases, natural gas shortages, economic collapse, wars for oil, wars for water, famine, piracy, rioting, and the list goes on. The Long Emergency ends up being like a Khmer Rouge fantasy of all of humanity forced to move back to the land in one huge Peak Oil Year Zero. If you follow this vision of the future--if you don't just give up immediately--your next move should be to quickly acquire a skill like candle-making or shoeing horses and move out of the city. He offers some consolations in this nightmare future, as local communities rebuild--but to get there we end up abandoning many of our larger cities, and incidentally millions of people starve to death, kill each other or die in disease waves.

Kunstler is at his most effective where he is talking about our social and political obstacles to change. Our investment in the suburbs is such at this point that any talk of change would mean destroying virtually our entire economy as it now exists. In fact, he argues that except for the illusory industry of building the suburbs, we haven't really had any economic growth of any kind in the last forty years--and that seems about right. He assails the assumption that we could have an entire economy based on cutting each other's hair as being a fantasy. The parts of the book that critique suburban culture are good. The main problem with The Long Emergency is its use of questionable science to close off entire parts of the debate. It still provides a sobering look at a near worst-case scenario of where our culture's momentum might take us if we fail to change our direction.

RESOURCES:

The Long Emergency excerpt, Rolling Stone, March 2005, online at TruthOut: http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/38/9893

See also WW4 REPORT's ongoing coverage of the global oil crisis
http://www.ww4report.com/node/729

----------

Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Aug. 1, 2005

Posted at 12:09 pm by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

NEOCOSERVATISM, WHERE TROTSKY MEETS STALIN AND HITLER
by Srdja Trifkovic

The neoconservatives are often depicted as former Trotskyites who have morphed into a new, closely related life form. It is pointed out that many early neocons—including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohlstetter—belonged to the anti-Stalinist far left in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and that their successors, including Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came to neoconservatism through the Socialist Party at a time when it was Trotskyite in outlook and politics. As early as 1963 Richard Hofstadter commented on the progression of many ex-Communists from the paranoid left to the paranoid right, clinging all the while to the fundamentally Manichean psychology that underlies both. Four decades later the dominant strain of neoconservatism is declared to be a mixture of geopolitical militarism and “inverted socialist internationalism.”

Blanket depictions of neoconservatives as redesigned Trotskyites need to be corrected in favor of a more nuanced analysis. In several important respects the neoconservative world outlook has diverged from the Trotskyite one and acquired some striking similarities with Stalinism and German National Socialism. Today’s neoconservatives share with Stalin and Hitler an ideology of nationalist socialism and internationalist imperialism. The similarities deserve closer scrutiny and may contribute to a better understanding of the most influential group in the U.S. foreign policy-making community.

Certain important differences remain, notably the neoconservatives’ hostility not only to Nazi race-theory but even to the most benign understanding of national or ethnic coherence. On the surface, there are also glaring differences in economics. However, the neoconservative glorification of the free market is more rhetoric, designed to placate the businessmen who fund them, than reality. In fact, the neoconservatives favor not free enterprise but a kind of state capitalism—within the context of the global apparatus of the World Bank and the IMF—that Hitler would have appreciated.

Some form of gradual but irreversible and desirable withering away of the state is a key tenet of the Trotskyite theoretical outlook. The neoconservatives, by contrast, are statists par excellence. Their core belief—that society can be managed by the state in both its political and economic life—is equally at odds with the traditional conservative outlook and with the non-Stalinist Left. In this important respect the neoconservatives are much closer to Stalinism and National Socialism. They do not want to abolish the state; they want to control it—especially if the state they control is capable of controlling all others. They are not “patriotic” in any conventional sense of the term and do not identify themselves with the real and historic America but see the United States merely as the host organism for the exercise of their Will to Power. Whereas the American political tradition has been fixated on the dangers of centralized state power, on the desirability of limited government and non-intervention in foreign affairs, the neoconservatives exalt and worship state power, and want America to become a hyper-state in order to be an effective global hegemon. Even when they support local government it is on the grounds that it is more efficient and responsive to the demands of the Empire, not on Constitutional grounds.

The neoconservative view of America as a hybrid, “imagined” nation had an ardent supporter eight decades ago: in Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler argued for a new, tightly centralized Germany by invoking the example of the United States and the triumph of the Union over states’ rights. He concluded that “National Socialism, as a matter of principle, must lay claim to the right to force its principles on the whole German nation without consideration of previous federated state boundaries.” Hitler was going to make a new Germany the way he imagined it, or else destroy it. In the same vein the Weekly Standard writers are “patriots” only insofar as the America they imagine is a pliable tool of their global design. Their relentless pursuit of an American Empire overseas is coupled by their deliberate domestic transformation of the United States’ federal government into a Leviathan unbound by constitutional restraints. The lines they inserted into President Bush’s State of the Union address last January aptly summarized their Messianic obsessions: the call of history has come to the right country, we exercise power without conquest, and sacrifice for the liberty of strangers, we know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation: “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity.”

Such megalomania is light years away from a patriotic appreciation of one’s nation. A psychotic quest for power and dominance is the driving force, and the “nationalist” discourse its justification. The reality is visible in ultimate distress: Towards the end of the Second World War Josef Goebbels welcomed the Allied bombing for its destruction of the old bourgeois cuckoo-clock and marzipan Germany of the feudal principalities. Driven by the same impulse, Bill Kristol’s “national greatness” psychosis seeks to sweep away the old localized, decentralized America of bingo parlors and little league games.

Most heirs of the Trotskyite Left are internationalists and one-world globalists, whereas all neoconservatives are unabashed imperialists. The former advocate “multilateralism,” in the form of an emerging “international community” controlled by the United Nations or through a gradual transfer of sovereign prerogatives to regional groupings exemplified by the European Union. By contrast the neoconservative urge for uninhibited physical control of other lands and peoples bears resemblance to the New European Order of six decades ago, or to the “Socialist Community” that succeeded it in Eastern Europe. Even when they demand wars to export democracy, the term “democracy” is used as an ideological concept. It does not signify broad participation of informed citizens in the business of governance, but it denotes the desirable social and political content of ostensibly popular decisions. The process likely to produce undesirable outcomes—an Islamic government in Iraq, say—is a priori “undemocratic.”

Whereas the Trotskyite Left is predominantly anti-militarist, the neoconservatives are enthusiastically militarist in a manner reminiscent of German and Soviet totalitarianism. Their strategic doctrine, promulgated into official policy last September, calls for an indefinite and massive military build-up unconnected to any identifiable military threat to the United States. Their scribes demand ‘citizen involvement,’ in effect, militarization of the populace, but the traditional ‘citizen soldier’ concept is reversed. Their goal is to get suitably indoctrinated young Americans to go and risk their lives not for the honor and security of their own country, but for the missions that have to be misrepresented to the public (e.g. the non-existant Iraqi WMDs) in order to be made politically acceptable. As Gary North has pointed out, neoconservative foreign policy is guns before butter: “Butter always follows guns, but this is regarded as the inescapable price of American regional presence abroad.”

The neoconservatives’ deep-seated distaste for the traditional societies, regimes, and religion of the European continent, particularly Russia and East European Slavs, is positively Hitlerian. The sentiment was most glaringly manifested in the 1999 NATO war against the Serbs: William Kristol’s urge to vicariously “crush Serb skulls” went way beyond the 1914 Viennese slogan “Serbien muss sterbien.” In terms of strategic significance for the United States, however, the neocons’ visceral Russophobia is mush more significant. In the aftermath of the Cold War the neoconservatives have continued to regard Moscow as the enemy, enthusiastically supporting Chechen separatists as “freedom fighters” and advocating NATO expansion. Their atavism is comparable to Hitler’s obsession with Russia, an animosity that was equally unrelated to the nature of its regime. It is only a matter of time before some neocons start advocating a new Drang nach Osten, in the form of an American-led scramble for Siberia.

The neoconservative mindset is apocalyptic (which is a Nazi and Stalinist trait), rather than utopian (which characterizes the Trotskyite Left). The replacement of the Soviet threat with the more amorphous “terrorism” reflects the doomsday revolutionary mentality that can never rest. New missions and new wars will have to be engineered, and pretexts manufactured, with the same subtlety that characterized the “attack” on the German radio station at Gleiwitz on August 31, 1939. Even the tools for the enforcement of domestic acquiescence are not dissimilar: the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the Reichstag fire. Echoing the revolutionary dynamism and the historicist Messianism equally common to fascists and communists, Michael Ledeen wrote that “creative destruction” is America’s eternal mission, both at home and abroad, and the reason America’s “enemies” hate it: “They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.”

The neoconservatives’ mendacity apparent in the misrepresentation of the Iraqi crisis to the American people recalls the Goebbelsian “hypodermic needle approach” to communication, in which the communicator’s objective was to “inject” his ideas into the minds of the target population. “Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Goering said when it was all over, in his prison cell in Nuremberg in 1946:

Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a communist dictatorship ... That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

It does indeed. Goering’s observation is echoed in our time by the Straussian dictum that perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is necessary because they need to be led, and they need to be told what is good for them. On this, at least, Trotsky, Stalin, and Hitler would all agree. (As Hitler had said, “The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble.”) In the Straussian-neoconservative mindset, those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.

That mindset is America’s enemy. It is the greatest threat to the constitutional order, identity, and way of life of the United States, in existence today. Its adherents have only modified the paradigm of dialectical materialism in order to continue pursuing the same eschatological dream, the End of History devoid of God. They are in pursuit of Power for its own sake—thus sinning against God and man—and the end of that insane quest will be the same as the end of the Soviet empire and of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Posted at 05:15 am by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

Strategic Chess Moves Across Eurasia

By K Gajendra Singh

08/08/05 "ICH" -- -- The Kyrgyz government decision allowing continued use of its Manas air base by the US forces , after the 25-26 July visit of US Secretary of Defence , Donald Rumsfeld, followed a few days later by the Uzbek government’s courier delivered note to the US Embassy in Tashkent demanding that Washington wind up its Karshi-Khanabad (K2) base in south Uzbekistan in 180 days , along with the announcement of joint Russian Chinese military exercises scheduled for August , in the wake of 5 July notice to USA by Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to set a time table to withdraw its troops from bases in central Asia, are some of the strategic moves being made on the Eurasian chess board to counter US led Western expansion into eastern and even central Eurasian lands , by Russia as well as its former Soviet republics , with China now joining hands.

Russia has separated the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) into a core group which with measures being proposed could transform it into a full-fledged collective security organization.

Along with India, Iran and Pakistan were admitted as Observers to the SCO , at its Moscow summit.

History never ends as a reading of world history would tell anyone. After the fall of the Berlin Wall , U.S.-led West moved first stealthily , then rampantly to roll back Russia from the strategic space it occupied as a 2nd world war victor , beginning with the removal ofMilosevicofSerbia,anOrthodoxSlavpeople,traditionalfriendsofOrthodoxSlavRussians.opopSPANP

US then brought about regime changes in Georgia and Ukraine and installed its puppets and allowed Ilham Aliev succeed his father Haidar Aliev , President of Azerbaijan , an US ally , in a disputed 2003 election. In this 21st century struggle for the control of strategic space, energy sources and raw materials, US has built up a million barrel a day Baku-Tibilsi-Ceyhan pipeline, an energy corridor to squeeze Russia and Iran out from energy transportation to Europe . Stationing of troops in Georgia and Azerbaijan to guard it would be a strategic menace for the region, specially Azerbaijan‘s southern neighbour Iran , part of US Axis of evil and off and on its hit list .

But when the US financed and supported franchised street revolutions to bring about favourable regime changes reached into the very heart of central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan , it was too close for comfort not only for Russia but also for Kyrgyzstan’s eastern neighbour China ,which is also facing US moves to hem it in from east and south. Whether USA, caught in the Iraq quagmire with its forces thinly spread, can succeed in is objectives is another matter.

In history ,the former Soviet Union steppes have been the scene of decisive battles and wars by chariot riding Indo-Europeans and horse riding Turkish, Mongol and other tribes who moulded the history of the then known civilized world in Asia , Middle East , Eastern Europe and Mediterranean. Once again it occupies a central space.

Unprecedented joint military exercises by China and Russia ;

In a clear message to the United States and others , in an unprecedented move China and Russia would carry out a joint military exercises scheduled for August 18 to 25 near Russia's far-east port city of Vladivostok, before moving to the Yellow Sea and then to an area off the coastal Chinese province of Shandong. Apart from 2000 Russian troops, the exercises would involve Russia's Il-76 transport planes with paratroopers, Tu-95MS bombers firing cruise missiles at targets in the sea and Su-27SM fighter jets simulating coverage of ground forces.

The exercises are said to concentrate on anti-terrorist drills, when a fictitious state becomes plagued by terrorist violence and seeks assistance from neighboring states (ie Russia and China) to restore law and order. But why the strategic bombers and submarines ! Reports indicated differences over the location, with Russia wanting it near Xinjiang , while China wanted to locate it near Taiwan ,but it is now quite far away from both these places. Sixty five percent of Izvestia ‘s readers in an internet poll indicated that the exercises were aimed at USA .

Russian and Chinese Generals, including defense ministers , Russian Chief of General Staff Yury Baluyevsky and his Chinese counterpart Liang Guanglie, are expected to attend the exercises . This exercise was first included in a memorandum of understanding between Chinese Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Guo Boxiong, and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov in July 2004 but made public in December 2004, when Ivanov visited China.

US base in Kyrgyzstan;

After meetings with Rumsfeld on 26 July in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, its leaders were persuaded that as Afghanistan remained volatile and the Manas base was needed to provide logistical support for US operations . "The base at Manas will stay as long as the situation in Afghanistan requires," acting Kyrgyz Defense Minister Ismail Isakov said during a news conference with Rumsfeld. "Once there is stabilization, there will be no need. But now I agree with [Rumsfeld], who said the situation in Afghanistan is far from stable." This was Rumsfeld’s second visit to Bishkek this year .

President Kurman Bakiyev thanked Rumsfeld for the US support and said that a new period began with the change in Kyrgyz administration on March 24, culminating with the presidential elections on July 10, ( which he won). He thanked USA for its contribution in ensuring that the elections were democratic and legal. He said that the US administration was always with Kyrgyzstan in its democratic and economic development since its independence. The US has reportedly provided $750 million in aid to Kyrgyzstan since its independence in 1991.

Assuring Bakiev of continued US support for the development of democracy in Kyrgyzstan , Rumsfeld said that the 10 July presidential elections was a victory for the people for Kyrgyzstan and Bakiyev. The base built to serve their mutual interests had done no harm to the region and played a significant role in the US war on international terrorism, extremism and narcotics, added Rumsfeld.

About the SCO deadline for the US evacuation from the region, Rumsfeld remarked in his inimitable style "I don't really know. I wasn't at the meeting. We are not a member of that organization. And I don't know what their motives might have been." Rumsfeld emphasized that the situation in Afghanistan was not yet stable. He said that independent countries made decisions without any pressure or outside intervention.

Bakiyev, who was elected the new Kyrgyz President on July 10 after a popular uprising in March had toppled former US poster boy Askar Akayev, had expressed doubts about the need for the U.S. presence at Manas . He told reporters on July 11 “This issue was raised at the SCO summit, since the situation in Afghanistan has changed. The situation in Afghanistan will soon stabilize. The country has had presidential elections and is getting ready to elect a parliament, so the question about the coalition base’s presence in Kyrgyzstan arises.”

US claims that the bases serve as important conduits for humanitarian aid and military equipment sent to Afghanistan .But they are seen as part of a shift in Pentagon strategy that establishes near the world's hot spots , small, rapid response outposts that can be quickly ramped up during crises. Central Asia, home to numerous Islamic extremist and terrorist groups, is one of those hot spots. But since 2001 USA has done really little to stop Pakistan from sending terrorists to India or controlling Kurdish PKK militants from Turkey , now holed up in north Iraq under US protection, which even commit terrorist acts inside Turkey.

Continued Tajikistan support to USA;

Rumsfeld visited Tajikistan after Bishkek and announced that US troops would continue to use Tajik airspace and plants. Rumsfeld and President Imamali Rahmonov said in Tajik capital Dushanbe that Tajikistan remained a close US partner in its Afghan operations, a "solid partner in the global struggle against extremism." Later Rumsfeld described US ties with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in excellent shape.

During his visit to Bishkek and Dushanbe, Rumsfeld clarified that the United States had no intention to withdraw its bases from Central Asia in the near future. He added that the U.S. forces were deployed on the bases according to bilateral agreements for mutual benefits.

Bases in Uzbekistan;

Although the US had expected the Uzbek decision, the manner of the delivery of the notice to vacate the K2 base without assigning any reason surprised USA, although it put up a brave front . After the Andijan uprising USA and its pillion rider UK soft pedaled their criticism of the violent confrontation, in which after the rebels had killed many security personnel and soldiers and taken over government buildings, in the act of suppressing it , according to Human Rights organizations over 700 persons were killed , while Tashkent maintained less than 180 were killed .

K2 has been a hub to transfer goods to be taken by road into northern Afghanistan, particularly to Mazar-e Sharif -- with no other alternative during the winter. K2 is also a refueling base with a long runway to handle large military aircraft, the alternative being costly midair refueling. A few months ago Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman had described the airfield "undeniably critical in supporting our combat operations" and humanitarian deliveries, for which USA paid $15 million to Uzbekistan since 2001.

On 25 July, Rumsfeld told reporters traveling with him that losing access to K2 would not jeopardize U.S. operations in Afghanistan. "We're always thinking ahead. We'll be fine," Pentagon spokesman Lawrence T. Di Rita emphasised that the U.S. did not depend on one base in any part of the world. "We'll be able to conduct our operations as we need to, regardless of how this turns out. It's a diplomatic issue at the moment," Di Rita said.

In a way there was a battle of nerves between the two governments since the May uprising in Andijan. President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan had cut off U.S. night flights and some cargo flights, forcing Washington to move search-and-rescue operations and some cargo flights to Bagram air base in Afghanistan and Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan , with further deterioration in relations .

The quit notice was given soon after 439 Uzbek political refugees were flown out from neighboring Kyrgyzstan -- over Uzbek objections -- by the United Nations to Romania on temporary asylum . How ever 15 refugees were held behind in Kyrgyzstan named by Uzbekistan. Tashkent had wanted all the refugees be returned but the Bush administration had pressurised Kyrgyzstan not to do so..

The termination note was delivered 4 days before Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns was to pressurize Tashkent to allow an international investigation into the Andijan protests, Burns was also going to warn the government, to open up politically or risk the kind of upheavals witnessed recently in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. officials said. But surely Buns would have made another try to make Tashkent relent on the base.

After the May Andijan rioting some commentators viewed it as an important test for the Bush administration - whether the anti-terrorism efforts or promotion of democracy took priority. "We all knew basically that if we really wanted to keep access to the base, the way to do it was to shut up about democracy and turn a blind eye to the refugees," said a senior official, on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive diplomacy. "We could have saved the base if we had wanted."

This is as usual a false claim which only true info-challenged Americans might believe. Because ,in reality , top US officials did whatever they could to make Tashkent regime change its mind on the US troops' presence, including a well known attempt to block UN action calling for an official investigation into the massacre. Closeness between European nations and the US, a product of years of cooperation, is however often taken for granted for US benefit. So, Europeans did not blink an eyelid when they saw the US block the UN effort to call Uzbek leaders to question on atrocities in Andijan. So much for the tall talk on human rights by USA and its European allies.

It is unlikely that US will give the promised $22 million in aid to Uzbekistan as in its view it has not complied with the provisions on political and economic reforms included in a 2002 strategic partnership agreement with Washington. Last year, USA withheld almost $11 million.

View of an insider –Former British Envoy to Tashkent;

Former British Ambassador to Tashkent, Craig Murray, who was relieved of his charge for openly protesting against US and British coddling of Karimov ,said that Washington was only trying to cover its retreat behind a smokescreen of belated concern for human-rights abuse in Uzbekistan. It suddenly discovered “one of their most intensively courted allies – in shock horror - to be an evil dictator. (Remember Saddam?) But the reality is much more complex.”

It might be noted that Tashkent received in 2002 alone $120 m in US aid for the army and $82 m for the security services. Prior to the decision, there was no indication at all that the US was going to review its military links with Uzbekistan - in fact US General Richard Myers had specifically stated that they would continue. Britain gave no indication of stopping cooperation either. Nor “ that we will stop the practice whereby the Uzbek security services share with the CIA and MI6 the so-called intelligence extracted from Karimov's torture chambers. So much for the pretence of moral repugnance. ”

Craig also disclosed that Germany had leased a base at Termez in southern Uzbekistan , with Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister a frequent visitor and admirer of Karimov “Karimov has never intended to move Uzbekistan towards democracy or the free market. His very limited experimentation with attracting western investment in the mid-1990s convinced him that western-style capitalism was incompatible with containing all economic clout in the hands of his family and immediate cronies. Since then he has turned to Russian and Chinese state companies for investment.”

At the end of last year, Karimov finally came off the fence and opted for Russia's Gazprom rather than US firms to develop Uzbekistan's massive gas fields thus “ questioning the viability of the hydrocarbons pipeline over Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea, the holy grail of US policy in central Asia since before the Afghan war.”

The US franchised revolutions in former Soviet republics made up Karimov’s mind .An angry Eduard Shevardnadze visited him after being ousted and warned him against Soros and other NGOs. Karimov immediately kicked out the Open Society Institute and put crippling restrictions on other NGOs, setting his face against US promoted democracy. This helped increasing a warm relationship with Vladimir Putin.

Karimov was, on the face of it, an unlikely man for Putin to embrace. After independence he had encouraged anti-Russian nationalist sentiment, and 80% of ethnic Russians - more than 2 million people - fled Uzbekistan. But Putin and Karimov share many things.

“Uzbekistan has half the population of central Asia, a dominant geo-strategic position and the region's largest and best-equipped armed forces. But to the north, Kazakhstan, under President Nazarbayev, has far outstripped Karimov in economic performance, and not only because of greater hydrocarbon resources. He has kept a balance between Russia and the west, and the economy is relatively open, with much more western investment.”

But Bush in his penchant for rhetoric to promote democracy called for fair elections in Kazakhstan and upset President Nazarbayev. In a recent letter to him, Bush urged him to allow fair elections later this year when the latter seeks a third term. "The latest events in the region have stressed the importance of a balanced economic growth, responsible governance and democratic development. I urge you to make sure that economic reforms are backed up with bold democratic reforms," said an edited version of the Bush letter. Like US ally late Haidar Aliev of Azerbaujan , both Karimov and Nazarbayev have ambitions that their daughters succeed them .Has it not happened in USA , where Bush senior helped his son with little real federal level political experience and passed on his own his advisers like Dick Cheney , Colin Powell and others.

Recently Ms Rice said in Cairo that for 60 years US had promoted stability over democracy but would now promote democracy. But US ally President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt , who has ruled for 25 years with emergency powers and has not allowed any other Presidential contender , is again gearing to get himself re-elected in a similar fashion without a whimper from Washington . Ever since Pakistan’s independence, US has been happier dealing with military rulers in Pakistan . Except for those persuaded by ‘manufactured consent’ in USA who re-elected George W. Bush , rhetoric or spin by US leadership and its corporate controlled media , makes little impact elsewhere and only brings down US credibility

James O' Halloran, editor of the annual publication "Jane's Land Based Air Defence" said the K2 closure could have significant impact. "The [K-2] airfield itself is a forward operating base [in the southern part of Uzbekistan] which, logistically, gives the U.S. a very good jumping off point into Afghanistan when it needs to move troops and logistics in that area," O'Halloran said. But he added that Tashkent's decision did not come as a surprise.

"I believe that the U.S. has expected to lose the K-2 base for some time now as political pressure has been applied through various sources to hold back the U.S. expansion, shall we say, into the former Soviet empire," he said. "A lot of people are saying that [the United States is] expanding a little too quickly now. They're over-stretching things. And I do believe it is politics which has forced the expected closure of K-2."

O' Halloran also believed that Putin put political pressure on Uzbekistan to demand for the U.S. withdrawal. "On the world scale of things, I don't think [the U.S. reaction to the Andijon crisis] played a major part in this," he said. "I think the politics coming out of Moscow probably has more to do with it than anything else."

According to Eurasia net , while Kyrgyz and Tajik leaders might see value in maintaining strategic cooperation with the United States, there are many signs that officials in both countries now see Russia as their primary security partner. Soon after Rumsfeld left Bishkek, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass published on July 26, an interview with President Bakiyev, who said that Moscow has "always held and will hold a special place in Kyrgyzstan’s foreign policy." He added that Kyrgyzstan would boost strategic cooperation in the future.

"We think Russia’s presence in the Central Asian region is, first of all, a safeguard of stability and security," Bakiyev continued. "International terrorism, religious extremism, illegal trade in drugs and arms, organized crime and various kinds of violence – all this requires ever closer cooperation and joint actions based on complete trust."

At the same time Tajikistan ‘s strategic and economic relations with Russia have been strengthened over the past year. During the October 2004 visit of Putin to Tajikistan, Russia agreed to forgive $350 million in debt in exchange for a satellite surveillance complex in Nurek. Russian companies also signed agreements to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Tajik infrastructure and industrial projects. Dushanbe made Russia’s military base permanent after the visit.

Russia maintained silence on Rumsfeld’s visits to Bishkek and Dushanbe .But some claims in the Russian media that the United States granted $200 million in financial assistance for continued access to the Manas air base were denied by Kyrgyz officials .However political observers expect that Moscow will continue to use regional multilateral organizations, including the SCO and the CSTO to undermine the American position in Central Asia.

It is not that the Manas base pumps about $156,000 a day into the local economy and accounted for about 5% of Kyrgyzstan's GDP but the period of laissez faire under deposed President Akayev helped infiltrate US friends in to positions of power in Kyrgyzstan. The country is too infested with US supporters .The training provided to police and military personnel by USA in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan ( there was furor in some US circles that US trained soldiers had fired in Andijan ) is very useful in subverting the loyalty to wards it .This was a routine Cold War game played by the two super powers .That is how Soviets infiltrated into Afghanistan before moving fully in 1970s .

Other bases in the region;

Russia also has a base at Kant in Kyrgyzstan which has about 500 Russian troops and 20 combat and transport planes and helicopters. Moscow is planning to double the number of troops Russian troops which stayed put in Tajikistan after the collapse of the USSR. A recent agreement between Moscow and Dushanbe legalized the Russian presence.

In April, Afghanistan's Defence minister General Abdul Rahim Wardak said that details were being worked out for permanent basing of US forces in the country , including permanent air bases or “pre-positioned” military equipment that would be used by rapidly deployed US forces in a crisis. Gen Wardak tried to mollify neighbouring countries about permanent US presence, that any agreement with the US would come along with security pacts with regional powers. Iran is worried about reconnaissance operations by USA , which handed over control of a civil-military unit based in the western city of Herat, close to the Iranian border, to Nato. There were reports of even a Pakistan payback for the US largesse in letting its territory be used for spying over Iran, which of course, Pakistan denied.

As part of Pentagon’s overall policy to rearrange its forces around the world including 13 in south Germany ,11 around Wuerzburg in Bavaria would be handed over to the German government by September 2007 with two later on . It is a part of plans to relocate, convert and deactivate parts of the US Armed forces at home and abroad. Plans are afoot for USA to use air bases in Romania and Bulgaria , although after reprisals against countries helping US led war in Iraq ,such projects are now shrouded in silence .While Romania has a small Muslim population , mostly Tatars , tens of thousands of Israeli citizens holiday in their ‘home’ Romania .Hundreds of Israeli citizens are migrants from Romania and many speak Romanian .They could be targeted as were a synagogue and Jews in neighbour Turkey’s commercial capital Istanbul in end 2003.

Enough is enough and SCO call;

The call for withdrawal of US military bases in Central Asia was most likely decided in the meetings between Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao at the Moscow summit from June 30 to July 3, just before the SCO summit. In a bilateral statement, “World Order in 21st Century,” issued on July 2, China and Russia warned of the danger of “unilateralism” in international relations and called for a greater role for the United Nations, and stability in the Korean Peninsula. Hu told reporters after his talks with Putin: “We reinforced our mutual support on key issues like Taiwan and Chechnya, which concern our vital interests.”

Russia might be concerned about China's growing influence and engagement in Central Asia, and China might have been keen to weaken Russia's influence over these countries by strengthening its economic links with them ,but seeing what USA was up in Eurasia made them close ranks.

A significant aspect of the SCO summit was granting of observer status to Iran, India and Pakistan. While India , faced with terrorism from Jihadis operating from Pakistan and Afghanistan , like other members of SCO , was keen to join SCO for some time but for Chinese opposition ,who wanted Pakistan too in the organization , which is a problem and not a solution and certainly does not fit in with the anti terrorism objectives of SCO. Iran in spite of its defensive connections with Hizbullah , now under US threats has become an economic partner with China and India with long term energy deals and technical partner with Russia for arms supply and nuclear energy reactor technology.

All the SCO states are also opposed to a possible US plan for a regime change in Tehran. The Central Asian republics will have then problems next door as Iraq’s neighbours , even US allies have learnt to their cost . They are concerned at the US bases on their territories being used for aggression against Iran. Not only Russia and China but most other countries do not want to see another major oil producer being transformed if not into a US client state but a source of turmoil.

China signed a long-term $70 billion agreement with Tehran for a 51 percent stake in Iran’s largest onshore oilfield. At the SCO summit, Iranian vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, declared his country could become the “bridge” that connected the SCO states to the resources of the Persian Gulf. India , Pakistan and Iran are negotiating for a pipeline to transfer Iranian gas to Pakistan and energy hungry India , in spite of illogical opposition by USA .

China , with a ruling Communist party is now a status quo power , with a capitalist mode of production with some free market features .It is as unlikely a combination as between luxury loving Saudi Princes and puritan Wahabi ideology and could face strains sooner or later , with very destabilizing repercussions .But as for now China has invested heavily in Central Asia for its energy and other resources . It is constructing a 1,000-kilometer pipeline from Kazakhstan's central Karaganda region to its own adjoining Xinjiang region. Likely to be completed by the end of 2005, the Karaganda pipeline will be a vital link in a 3,000-kilometer project that would link China further west to the Caspian Sea.

China-Russian Cooperation;

After forming a “strategic relationship”, bilateral trade between Russia and China rose dramatically to $21.2 billion in 2004 and is expected to grow 20 percent this year. It could touch $60-$80 billion by 2020. Oil imports from Russia by will go up 50 percent this year to 70 million barrels. Chinese oil companies are looking for major investments in Russian energy sector. Rosneft, the main state-owned oil exporter to China has been granted over $6 billion in Chinese loans.

It appears that the main Chinese energy focus is on Siberia which has half of all the proven oil reserves of the former USSR and 70 percent of total Russia’s coal reserves. The region is Russia’s largest producer of oil, the second for coal and a major centre of metal industries. Some 140 out of some 200 largest enterprises in Siberia are weapon manufacturers, whose main customer is China.

China is also working with Uzbekistan to develop its gas fields in the Ferghana Valley and has invested in hydroelectric projects in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. China is greatly interested in Central Asian markets for its products. An unstable Central Asia could result in a spillover of conflicts into its already restive Xinjiang province. It has sought to secure its borders by firming up its relations with Central Asian governments. It has invested resources and time in enlarging the scope of the SCO more than any other member.

The American presence in Central Asia is clearly a challenge and danger to China’s energy security and stability. But China itself is signing energy deals and agreements not only with Iran but in Africa and Latin America , traditionally US oil companies backyard . It even made a bid for US oil giant UNOCOL .( remember it , when Afghan Taleban government reneged on a deal with UNOCOL for energy transport from central Asia via Afghan territory to the Arabian Sea , relations between Talebans and UNOCOL and hence USA went from bad to worse and Talebans welcomed Osama bin Laden. The rest is history.)

Andrei Grozin, director of the Central Asia section of the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] Institute, told the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta on July 4 that the SCO might “create a working, functioning structure to support stability and to preserve those political systems that have taken shape in the post-Soviet Asiatic states”.

Sergei Markedonov, a researcher at Russia’s Institute of Political and Military Analysis, told the Moscow-based RIA Novosti newspaper on July 13 that the recent political unrest in Central Asia [ encouraged by US financed institutions] showed that Russia, in cooperation with China, needed to function as “a regional policeman”.

Collective Security Treaty Organization to counter aggression and interference;

According to RIA Novosti of August 2 a press release by the CSTO based in Moscow has drawn up a draft protocol for providing military aid and equipment to member countries in emergency situations. CSTO includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. Member countries would now discuss the draft protocol for approval.

CSTO ‘s secretary general Nikolai Bordyuzha explained that the protocol would apply in situations which ‘include preparations for aggression and actual aggression as such, the plotting and carrying out of international terrorist attacks, and external threats to the security, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of one or more CSTO members.’ The protocol also lays down guidelines for the interaction between state and interstate CSTO bodies in such situations.

Bordyuzha said aid would be provided if requested by one or more parties and should be sent to the chairman of the Collective Security Council, the supreme CSTO body comprising of heads of state. Requests should include a list of required military equipment, in addition to the amount of equipment and the terms of the requested aid. The aid could include military equipment free of charge or on privileged terms to maintain and restore the combat efficiency of CSTO armed forces.

Before the Russian Chinese Summit on 2nd July, on June 22-23, Moscow hosted a meeting of the heads of state of CSTO ( also members of Commonwealth of Independent States –CIS ) in conjunction with meetings of CSTO countries' ministers of foreign affairs, defense ministers, and secretaries of the national security councils. The meetings approved a framework plan on CSTO development in two stages -- through 2010 and beyond -- as well as plans to upgrade the Collective Rapid Deployment Forces in Central Asia and to create an inter-state commission for handling deliveries and servicing of military equipment at preferential prices. These measures on the agenda have been taken up in view of recent developments.

Coming in the wake of the so called US franchised ‘Tulip’ revolution in Kyrgtzstan and failed uprising in Andijan in Uzbekistan , the summit decided to separate the CIS Joint Air Defense System (nominally of ten countries) from that of the CSTO's planned United Air Defense System (six member countries). While the Joint System lets forces function under national command, with periodic military exercises coordinated from Russia, with each member's airspace as distinct and sovereign, the proposed United System would place all forces under a single ie Russian planning system and command. It transforms CSTO airspace as a single entity . Russian officials explained the separation because some CIS countries aspired joining NATO.

Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov, and CSTO Secretary-General Nikolai Bordyuzha described the the Andijan uprising unambiguously as an act of international terrorism and radical Islam against Uzbekistan.

Russian leaders and officials including President Putin criticized the failure of U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan to suppress "terrorist training bases, including those supported by certain intelligence services" and for tolerating the booming export of Afghan heroin to Russia and Europe. It was said that the CSTO was prepared to help and assist Afghanistan, as well as setting up "a working group to coordinate with Afghan structures" and a joint anti-drug authority.

But Kazakh Defense Minister General Mukhtar Altynbayev opposed a Russian initiative to create a joint standing conventional military force for Central Asia within the CSTO's framework and told the media, "Creating a cumbersome force for permanent stationing would be worthless." This issue was deferred for the next meeting. The differences on budgeting and financing of the CSTO office , command and control systems and the Rapid Deployment Forces were not fully resolved .

President Robert Kocharian of Armenia (which is ranged against US ally Azerbaijan ) found comfort "in the CSTO's lineup, one in which we do not disagree among ourselves, but strive for practical results" , while current US bete noire in the region Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka praised the CSTO as a counter weight to the "unipolar dictatorship of a single super-power" [the United States]. For the first time, the Russian military now plans to hold joint ground-force exercises in 2006 at the command-and-staff level in the CSTO's "western region" and "southern region" -- that is, in Belarus and in Armenia so far held in its Central Asian region only. Putin also took over the annual chairmanship of the Collective Security Council (the top political authority of the CSTO) from Kazakhstan President Nazarbayev.

Caspian Sea Basin ;

The US objectives for bases was to stem the flow of drugs, illicit nuclear material, and small arms illicitly crossing borders. But the Caspian basin is also rich in energy resources, and the United States supported construction of a new oil pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Ceyhan, Turkey. This has led to the charge that the United States was really after the region's oil. "[Washington is] killing two birds with one stone," fighting terrorists while securing energy sources

In Azerbaijan , Ilham Aliev , son of late President Haidar Aliev , former Politburo member in Moscow and called father of the Azeri nation , who was allowed to succeed his father in a controversial election in 2003 , might find the US embrace too suffocating .He could be set aside if found not amenable to US designs in the region both for security of oil transportation which begins from Baku and in US aims to attack or destabilize Iran from Azerbaijan .

As of next year, Central Asia will come fully online to Western energy markets, as twin oil and gas pipelines linking the Caspian sea to Turkey will begin to deliver .Ever since the region's oil wealth was freed after the collapse of the USSR, US policymakers worked hard to get Baku on its side and vice versa. The completion of this key strategic asset, 'East-West energy transit corridor' would run through Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia with oil also from Kazakhstan but exclude Iran and Russia.

Though U.S. officials deny that their forces are already stationed in Azerbaijan, they concede that the country is vital for the future of the US bases in the region. Stratfor website reported in April that some U.S. aircrafts , troops and materiel were already in the country, and more forces and aircraft would be deployed later this year. It claimed that Azerbaijani government sources also confirmed that there was an agreement between Baku and Washington on locating U.S’s "temporarily deployed mobile forces", in a deal struck at the Baku airport by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's and the Azerbaijani Prime Minister Artur Rasizade and Defense Minister Safar Abiyev ,acting on behalf of Ilham Aliyev who was conveniently out of the country at the time.

The recently forged access to a base in Azerbaijan, situated next to Iran, was reportedly subject to some heavy coercing. Discussions between the US secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and officials representing president Ilham Aliyev, publicly might have passed for negotiations but were first hand example of the very bullying that the US officials accuse Russia and China of in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Recently, Nato’s Assistant Secretary-General for Defence Planning and Operations , John Colston visited Baku and reported that "Special reports will be prepared soon, which will identify the main directions of cooperation between the alliance and Azerbaijan.” It is expected Azerbaijan is ready to join the alliance 2006. The issue of disputed Nagorno Karabakh is likely to be the key here.

Georgia has also been compensated and was recently paid US$ 64 million as part of a two-year "train and equip" mission, in which US Special Forces trained a 2,000 strong antiterrorist force that patrols the Pankisi Gorge, which is where Chechen rebels and AI Qaeda fighters hide out. This easily outstrips the country's annual income from overseas workers and tourism. The company building the barracks and other facilities for the US trainers is Kellogg Brown & Root division of Halliburton industries, the former business of US vice president Dick Cheney, which is building plenty of other facilities in this region, as well as in Iraq.

Some facilities are quite advanced notably in Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova , all Members GUAM, an organization modeled on NATO's Conventional Forces in Europe, which was launched in 1996. The countries coordinate their defense policies and pool their diplomatic resources to oppose Russia. The main reason for the organization encouraged by USA was to create more security through collaboration against possible destabilizing action by Russia .But all countries except Azerbaijan are dependent on supplies of oil and gas either from or through Russia which can employ tactics like suspending the supplies or redirecting export routes to manipulate the foreign and domestic policies of the members .

US failed to persuade its Nato ally Turkey in joining and letting US troops use Turkish territory in South East to open another front in north of Iraq in March 2003 . There are reports that in case US decides to attack Iran and ,plans for such contingencies are being formulated in Washington, among others by the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) ,it would involve "a large-scale air assault employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons", reported Counterpunch columnist Gary Leupp, in an article entitled 'Is Iran being set up?' "Do they even realize that southern Iraq and Iran constitute the heartland of historical Shiism, and that an attack on Iran will negate any goodwill among Shiites, U.S. forces have acquired in Iraq?", he wondered.

This could explain Baku’s preference to delay the arrival of the major U.S. forces' or its formal announcement until after the elections this November. "The current government would be accused of election fraud and treated accordingly by the West and Western-encouraged opposition", according to the Stratfor analysis. It might meet the fate of US loyalist Sheverdnazde , ex President of next door Georgia., Ilham Aliyev favors a pluralistic foreign policy, having resolved differences with Russia over its troops in the Qabala base , northwest of Baku. It is believed that President Putin has tentatively agreed to allowed US troops ( for pipeline security ) being stationed there, but wants that he must be kept informed.

Like the complex Sunni , Shia and Kurd relationships in Iraq , which US did not take into account before invading Iraq , it might like to ponder that Azerbaijan is also a Shia nation , while Iran has twice as many Azeri ( Turkic language cousin) speaking Iranians , including its spiritual leader Ali Khameini . The Muslim masses have seen through US game and its ruthless pursuit of interests .Instead US might worry over Azeris and others sabotaging Baku Tiblsi Ceyhan pipeline .

Changing USA’s Global preparedness;

In a reorganization of its military bases beyond the stability of cold-war bases in Europe and the Far East , USA is now looking for new alliances with nations from Southeast Asia to the Horn of Africa which promise quick access to the remotest corners of the globe. "We're going to be fighting this global war against irregular forces in much different places than we were willing to fight in the past," says Robert Work, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments here. "And in [these places] there are no long-term allies."

"We're going to find this is going to be a rolling process," Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's undersecretary for policy, told Congress last year. "Some of what we're planning to do is either not doable because we can't get the kind of legal arrangements or other commitments that we want, in which case we're going to have to make adjustments, or we may find that some countries are so eager to work with us on certain things that the deals they're offering induce us to change some of our plans," he added.

The shift is part of the Pentagon's Global Posture Review, which looks at overseas bases in much the same way that the Base Realignment and Closure process is now looking at domestic bases. The Pentagon believes that its current network of home and overseas bases is a relic of the cold war and needs change which should be flexible enough to meet unforeseen demands.

During the cold war, "we had forward garrison forces configured to fight near and where they were based," said Ryan Henry, the Pentagon's principal deputy undersecretary for policy, in congressional testimony. "Today we no longer can predict where, when, or in what manner our forces may be called on to fight." "It's a reshuffling of the deck," says Charles Peña, a defense analyst at the Cato Institute.

Already, the American military has expanded its presence to unfamiliar areas, from Senegal to Singapore. Yet that is taking American forces into more volatile areas. There, they can help stabilize unsettled regions through their presence and training. But in these regions allegiances to America can easily ebb and flow. As happened with Turkey and Saudi Arabia when invading Iraq .Of course it is too much for these worthies to study history and interstate relations . From the corporate sector they believe countries can be treated like machines, bought and sold at will.

The arrival of American troops at their doorstep after September 11 did trigger worry in Russia and China but neither country objected vigorously to the US setting up bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. But soon it transpired that US had plans to invade Iraq to control its oil and the region as well as bases in central Asia were part of plans of US administrations to control central Asia’s energy and other resources.

By now it is quite clear that the US War on Terror, beginning with the attack on Afghanistan was exploited by Washington to place its forces for strategic control of regions , as spelt out by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a controversial organization whose members dominate the echelons of power in Washington.

The idea that that the US should control the oil and gas resources and territories of Central Asia was highlighted in the early 1970s by Zbignew Brzezinski and later explained in his book ‘The Grand Chessboard’. A former advisor to Rockefeller and President Jimmy Carter Brzezinski's book reads like a document for strengthening the neo-cons case for the war on Iraq for its oil . But seeing the mess in Iraq , Brzezinski is now singing a different tune .

(K Gajendra Singh, served as Indian Ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan in 1992-96. Prior to that, he served as ambassador to Jordan (during the 1990-91 Gulf war), Romania and Senegal . He is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies, in Bucharest . The views expressed here are his own.- Email-Gajendrak@hotmail.com)

Posted at 07:11 pm by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

Why Iran will lead to World War 3

"As President Bush scans the world's horizon there is no greater potential flashpoint than Iran, the President and his Foreign Policy team believe the Islamic regime in Tehran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons." Chris Wallace, FOX News

by Mike Whitney

08/08/05 "ICH" -- -- The facts about Iran's "alleged" nuclear weapons program have never been in dispute. There is no such program and no one has ever produced a shred of credible evidence to the contrary. That hasn't stopped the Bush administration from making spurious accusations and threats; nor has it deterred America's "imbedded" media from implying that Iran is hiding a nuclear weapons program from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). In fact, the media routinely features the unconfirmed claims of members of terrorist organizations, like the Mujahedin Klaq, (which is on the State Depts. list of terrorist organizations) to make it appear that Iran is secretively developing nuclear arms. These claims have proved to be entirely baseless and should be dismissed as just another part of Washington's propaganda war.

Sound familiar?

Iran has no nuclear weapons program. This is the conclusion of Mohammed el-Baradei the respected chief of the IAEA. The agency has conducted a thorough and nearly-continuous investigation on all suspected sites for the last two years and has come up with the very same result every time; nothing. If we can't trust the findings of these comprehensive investigations by nuclear experts than the agency should be shut down and the NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty) should be abandoned. It is just that simple.

That, of course, is exactly what the US and Israel would prefer since they have no intention of complying with international standards or treaties and are entirely committed to a military confrontation with Iran. It now looks as though they may have the pretext for carrying out such an attack.

Two days ago, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman formally rejected a plan submitted by the EU members that would have barred Iran from "enrichment-related activities". Foreign Minister Hamid Reza Asefi said, "The Europeans' submitted proposals regarding the nuclear case are not acceptable for Iran."

Asefi did the right thing; the offer was conspicuously hypocritical. The United States doesn't allow any intrusive inspections on its nuclear weapons sites even though it is the only nation that has ever used nukes in battle and even though it is developing a whole new regime of tactical "bunker-buster" bombs for destroying heavily-fortified weapons sites buried beneath the ground.

The US is also the only nation that claims the right to use nukes in a "first-strike" capacity if it feels that its national security interests are at stake.

The NPT is entirely designed to harass the countries that have not yet developed nuclear weapons and force them to observe rules designed by the more powerful states. It was intended to maintain the existing power-structure not to keep the peace.

Even so, Iran is not "violating" the treaty by moving ahead with a program for "enriching uranium". They don't even have the centrifuges for conducting such a process. The re-opening of their facility at Isfahan signals that they will continue the "conversion" process to produce the nuclear fuel that is required in nuclear power plants. This is all permitted under the terms of the NPT. They temporarily suspended that right, and accepted other confidence-building measures, to show the EU their willingness to find a reasonable solution to mutual concerns. But, now, under pressure from the Bush administration, the EU is trying to renege on its part of the deal and change the terms of the treaty itself.

No way.

So far, Iran has played entirely by the rules and deserves the same considerations as the other signatories of the treaty. The EU members
(England, Germany, and France) are simply back-pedaling in a futile effort to mollify Washington and Tel Aviv. Besides, when Iran re-opens its plant and begins work, the UN "watchdog" agency (IAEA) will be present to set up the necessary surveillance cameras and will resume monitoring everything that goes on during the sensitive fuel-cycle process.

Iran has shown an unwillingness to be bullied by Washington. The Bush administration has co-opted the EU to enforce its double-standards by threatening military action, but that doesn't' conceal the duplicity of their demands. Why should Iran forgo the processing of nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes if it is written right into the treaty? Would Israel or Pakistan accept a similar proposal?

Of course, not. Both countries ignored the treaty altogether and built their own nuclear weapons behind the back of the international community. Only Iran has been singled out and punished for COMPLYING with the treaty. This demonstrates the power of Washington to dictate the international agenda.

Iran's refusal puts the EU in a position to refer the case to the IAEA, where the board members will make their determination and decide whether the case should be sent to the UN Security Council. Whether the IAEA passes the case along or not makes little difference. Bush, Sharon and the western media will exploit the details in a way that condemns Iran and paves the way for a preemptive attack. The drive to war will not be derailed by mere facts.

Iran has weathered the media criticism and the specious claims of the Bush administration admirably. They have responded with caution and discipline seeking reasonable solutions to thorny issues. Never the less, they have been unwavering in defending their rights under the NPT. This consistency in behavior suggests that they will be equally unswerving if they are the targets of an unprovoked attack. We should expect that they will respond with full force; ignoring the threats of nuclear retaliation. And, so they should. One only has to look at Iraq to see what happens if one does not defend oneself. Nothing is worth that.

The Iranian people should be confident that their government will do whatever is their power to defend their borders, their national sovereignty and their right to live in peace without the threat of foreign intervention. That, of course, will entail attacking both Israel and US forces in Iraq. Whether or not the US actually takes part in the initial air raids is immaterial; by Mr. Bush's own standards, the allies of "those who would do us harm" are just as culpable as those who conduct the attacks. In this case, the US has provided the long-range aircraft as well as the "bunker-busting" munitions for the planned assault. The administration's responsibility is not in doubt.

We should anticipate that the Iranian government has a long-range strategy for "asymmetrical" warfare that will disrupt the flow of oil and challenge American interests around the world. Certainly, if one is facing an implacable enemy that is committed to "regime change" there is no reason to hold back on doing what is necessary to defeat that adversary. So far, none of the terrorist bombings in London, Spain, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or the US have implicated even one Iranian national. That will certainly change. Iranian Intelligence has probably already planned covert operations that will be carried out in the event of an unprovoked attack on their facilities. Iran is also likely to become an active supporter of international terrorist groups; enlisting more recruits in the war against American interests. After all, any attack on Iran can only be construed as a declaration of all-out war.

Isn't that so?

If Iran retaliates against Israel or the US in Iraq, then both nations will proceed with a plan that is already in place to destroy all of Iran's biological, chemical and conventional weapons sites. In fact, this is the ultimate US strategy anyway; not the elimination of the "imaginary" nuclear weapons facilities. Both the US and Israel want to "de-fang" the Mullah-regime so that they can control critical resources and eliminate the possibility of a regional rival in the future.

In the short term, however, the plan is fraught with difficulties. At present, there is no wiggle room in the world's oil supply for massive disruptions and most experts are predicting shortages in the 4th quarter of this year. If the administration's war on Iran goes forward we will see a shock to the world's oil supplies and economies that could be catastrophic. That being the case, a report that was leaked last week that Dick Cheney had STRATCOM (Strategic Command) draw up "contingency plans for a tactical nuclear war against Iran", is probably a bit of brinksmanship intended to dissuade Iran from striking back and escalating the conflict.

It makes no difference. If Iran is attacked they will retaliate; that much is certain.

It is always the mistake of extremists to misjudge the behavior of reasonable men; just as it is always the mistake of reasonable men to mistake the behavior of extremists.

We should not expect the Bush administration to make a rational choice; that would be a dramatic departure from every preceding decision of consequence.

The President of the United States always has the option of unleashing Armageddon if he so chooses. Normally, however, sanity prevails.

When the bombs hit the bunkers in Iran; World War 3 will be underway.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

Posted at 06:41 pm by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

Revisiting Hiroshima

By Noam Chomsky

08/02/05 "ICH" -- -- THIS month’s anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts only the most sombre reflection and most fervent hope that the horror may never be repeated.

In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the world’s imagination but not so much as to curb the development and spread of infinitely more lethal weapons of mass destruction.

A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before 9-11, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into the hands of terrorist groups.

The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could escalate, unpredictably, even to a point horrifically worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

The world’s reigning power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defence" that covers any contingency it chooses. The means of destruction are to be unlimited.

US military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in Canada) account for over 60 per cent of the world total (which rose 25 per cent since 2002).

There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival hangs. The most important is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which came into force in 1970. The regular five-year review conference of the NPT took place at the United Nations in May.

The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of the nuclear states to live up their obligation under Article VI to pursue "good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States has led the way in refusal to abide by the Article VI obligations. Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasizes that "reluctance by one party to fulfil its obligations breeds reluctance in others."

President Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including antiballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating ‘bunker buster’ and perhaps some new ‘small’ bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states."

The thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, repeatedly. The best known case was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, "the most dangerous moment in human history," as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and former adviser to President John F. Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a retrospective conference in Havana.

The world "came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear disaster," recalls Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s defence secretary, who also attended the retrospective. In the May-June issue of Foreign Policy, he accompanies this reminder with a renewed warning of "apocalypse soon."

McNamara regards "current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous," creating "unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own," both the risk of "accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch," which is "unacceptably high," and of nuclear attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the judgment of William Perry, President Bill Clinton’s defence secretary, that "there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade."

Similar judgments are commonly expressed by prominent strategic analysts. In his book Nuclear Terrorism, Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison reports the "consensus in the national security community" (of which he has been a part) that a "dirty bomb" attack is "inevitable," and an attack with a nuclear weapon highly likely, if fissionable materials — the essential ingredient — are not retrieved and secured.

Allison reviews the partial success of efforts to do so since the early 1990s, under the initiatives of Sen. Sam Nunn and Sen. Richard Lugar, and the setback to these programmes from the first days of the Bush administration, paralysed by what Sen. Joseph Biden called "ideological idiocy."

The Washington leadership has put aside nonproliferation programmes and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq. The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism.

A high-level review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion "focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple years," Susan B. Glasser reports in The Washington Post. "Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called ‘the bleed out’ of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. ‘It’s a new piece of a new equation,’ a former senior Bush administration official said. ‘If you don’t know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?"’

US terrorism specialist Peter Bergen says in The Boston Globe that "the president is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created."

Shortly after the London bombing, Chatham House, Britain’s premier foreign affairs institution, released a study drawing the obvious conclusion — denied with outrage by the government — that "the UK is at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United States, has deployed armed forces in the military campaigns to topple the Taleban regime in Afghanistan and in Iraq ... (and is) a pillion passenger" of American policy, sitting behind the driver of the motorcycle. The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. While speculation is pointless, reaction to the threat of another Hiroshima is definitely not.

On the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United States, because of Washington’s primary role in accelerating the race to destruction by extending its historically unique military dominance.

Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. ©2005 by Noam Chomsky

Posted at 05:38 pm by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

Old Enemies' Wargames Send a Powerful Message to the US

By Jane Macartney

Russia and China hope to sign a massive arms deal after staging joint exercises for the first time

RUSSIA will show off its most modern bombers to its best military customer and China will have a chance to demonstrate that it is a force to be reckoned with when the giant neighbours hold their first joint military exercises this month.
The decision to hold the drills off the east China coast in the Yellow Sea came after a disagreement over Beijing’s initial desire for the games to take place further south, opposite the island of Taiwan — which it hopes one day to recover, by force if necessary.

Yesterday’s announcement that 100,000 troops would mass from August 18 to 25 marked the culmination of years of rapprochement between countries that were once bitter enemies, which went to war in a minor territorial dispute in the 1970s, but now see themselves as strategic partners.

Their common interests include the sale of Russian oil to help to meet the energy needs of China’s fast-growing economy as well as the strategic goal of showing the United States that other powers were rising in the East.

History has enabled them to leave behind old enmities. Shi Yinhong, Professor of the School of International Studies at Renmin University, Beijing, said: “China needs to buy Russian military equipment and resources. For Russia, China is an important market and a source of hard currency.”

Peace Mission 2005, involving army, navy, air force, marine, airborne and logistics units, will begin on August 18 near the Russian Pacific Fleet headquarters in Vladivostok, moving to the Yellow Sea and then to an area off the Jiaodong peninsula in the coastal Chinese province of Shandong. “The exercises neither aim at any third party nor concern the interests of any third country,” the Chinese Defence Ministry said.

Russian paratroops will jump on to the peninsula, while Russian ships will engage in amphibious landing exercises.

Air force exercises involving Sukhoi Su27 fighter aircraft and Tupolev TU95MSs and TU22M-3s will round out the drills, with long-distance bombing runs and cruise missile attacks. The exercises could also involve China’s nuclear submarine fleet and antisubmarine warfare capability.

Analysts say there is little doubt that China is keen to send a message to the US. Not only is it gradually expanding its influence in Asia, eroding decades of dominance by Washington, but it also has the cash to go on a spending spree to update its military.

Russia’s TU160, TU95MS and TU22M3 strategic bombers and the improved Su27SM fighters will scream through the skies. It is not only their high-tech cockpits that Russia wants to show off. China may want to update its fleet of old, lumbering bombers with TU22M3s and TU95s capable of carrying long-haul nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Russian nerves tingled when the European Union considered lifting its arms embargo on China earlier this year and since then Moscow has shown an interest in offering higher-technology arms to its top buyer.

The war games will involve a Russian airlift of an airborne unit to the training location by Il76 transport aircraft, launching a cruise missile to an imaginary target with TU22M3 medium-range bombers and bombing ground units with Su27SM fighters.

The two governments have invited observers from other governments in the six-nation Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a security group led by Beijing and Moscow. The group, meant to combat separatism and Islamic extremism in Central Asia, includes Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

The show of strength is enough to shake China’s neighbours, but may not go too far in tipping the balance of power in the Pacific. So China is relying on diplomacy as well to boost its influence, quietly eroding the pre-eminence of the United States in the process. Li Zhaoxing, the Chinese Foreign Minister, has had a helping hand recently from Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State. She stayed away last week from an annual strategic forum involving the US, Japan and China in a meeting of South-East Asian nations. That left the stage to Mr Li, who dropped in to show Asia that China cared. The unspoken message was that Washington had seen fit to send only less-senior officials.

Vadim Solovyov, the Chief Editor of the Independent Military Survey, said: “These exercises are a challenge to the US and its allies — a new military alliance is forming. Now there is a unipolar world. Russia and China can make a second pole.”

Posted at 05:03 pm by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

03 August 2005
''The 'Great Game' Heats Up in Central Asia''

ussia and China delivered a one-two punch to Washington's ambitions in Central Asia on the eve of the G8 summit with a joint statement on "international order" followed by a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (S.C.O.) that was hostile to U.S. interests. While this combination was not enough to knock the U.S. out of the region, it was the most forceful challenge to U.S. interests in Central Asia since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. [See: "Intelligence Brief: Shanghai Cooperation Organization"]

Seeking to prevent any further damage to Washington's position in the "Great Game," last week U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld traveled to the region to shore up support for maintaining its bilateral agreements with the key players. This was followed by Uzbekistan announcing a deadline for U.S. withdrawal from a military base in its territory. These moves indicate that even though fighting in Afghanistan has yet to cool down, the traditional power politics of Central Asia are heating up.

China and Russia Coordinate Their Central Asian Policies

Before the S.C.O. meeting, Russia's and China's leaders met at the Kremlin on July 1 to discuss their goals in Central Asia and the upcoming G8 summit. The meeting signaled a shift toward greater cooperation between the two states, completely solved their long-standing border disputes from the legal perspective, and laid the foundation for greater integration of their state-controlled oil companies and banking sectors. One reason that the atmosphere in the Kremlin was so unusually amiable was the perception that a shared threat loomed larger than their differences in policy goals; that threat was Washington's role in Central Asia.

The "Joint Statement of the People's Republic of China and the Russian Federation Regarding the International Order of the 21st Century," signed by Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 2, addresses U.S. hegemony in several less-than-oblique passages. The text emphasizes "non-interference in internal affairs," "mutual respect" for other nations' "sovereignty," and stresses the role of "multipolarity" in dealing with conflicts.

In a passage aimed at Washington's perceived encroachment in Central Asia, the document states, "The peoples of all countries should be allowed to decide the affairs of their own countries, and world affairs should be decided through dialogue and consultation on a multilateral and collective basis. The international community should thoroughly renounce the mentality of confrontation and alignment, should not pursue the right to monopolize or dominate world affairs, and should not divide countries into a leading camp and a subordinate camp." This last statement could also easily be read as a preemptive dismissal of the G8 on the eve of the Scotland meeting. Though Russia is now a member and China an observer of the grouping, they feel that the organization is dominated by the West's agenda.

This dismissal of Western-style multilateralism is further expanded in a passing broadside aimed at the World Bank and the I.M.F. and their emphasis on reform in exchange for aid or loans: "The international community should establish an economic and trade regime that is comprehensive and widely accepted and that operates through the means of holding negotiations on an equal footing, discarding the practice of applying pressure and sanctions to coerce unilateral economic concessions, and bringing into play the roles of global and regional multilateral organizations and mechanisms."

Beijing and Moscow resent the West demanding economic reforms before further integrating China and Russia into the existing globalization power structures. They wish to present an alternative marketplace for developing countries to sell their goods -- one that does not tie economic access to reform or transparency. China has been able to successfully use the widely expected expansion of its domestic market to sell this alternative source of revenue to countries irked by the I.M.F. or World Bank, from South America to Africa. Now it hopes to further cement such a relationship with the states of Central Asia.

In the joint statement, China and Russia sent a clear message to the other members of the S.C.O. -- Washington poses a threat to Central Asia's sovereignty; China and Russia can offer a similar economic and security package, only it will be designed to preserve the current status quo not to encourage market economies or democratic reforms. Fearing future waves of "color" revolutions in the region, these states were eager to receive this message.

A Bigger and Stronger S.C.O.

On July 5, the members of the S.C.O. -- China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- met in Astana, Kazakhstan to discuss the changing political situation in Central Asia. While previous meetings focused nearly exclusively on the "three evil forces" -- terrorism, separatism and extremism -- and were dominated by China's desire to control the Uighur population in its Xinjiang region and protect its access to energy resources, this meeting demonstrated that the organization, which represents nearly 50 percent of the world's population when including members with observer status, desires to be a serious force in international affairs. This can be seen in the granting of observer status to India (at Russia's request), Pakistan (at China's insistence) and Iran (to the delight of all members).

The environment of the S.C.O. meeting was most influenced by the reaction to Uzbekistan's violent suppression of the May rebellion in Andijan. Western criticism of Uzbek President Islam Karimov's tactics brought to the surface the fears that the clan-based governments of Central Asia might fall in a wave of "color" revolutions, similar to that of Ukraine's "orange" revolution. Russia and China provided blanket support for Karimov after the suppression, while Washington could only offer nuanced criticism, fearing that intense criticism of Karimov would result in the loss of access to the Karshi-Khanabad air base, or K2, used to support U.S. operations in Afghanistan; nevertheless, the loss of this base now appears a likely scenario.

Washington's criticism was enough to spread fear throughout the ruling clans of Central Asia that the U.S. is engaged in covert operations to undermine or overthrow the current ruling regimes. This fear does not even escape Kyrgyzstan's subsequently elected government -- which swept into power in a similar manner as Ukraine's government -- because its support still rests on a shaky foundation of clan alliances.

In this environment, the S.C.O. sought to limit Washington's presence in the region -- Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan shifted their support to China and Russia in order to protect their sovereignty from U.S. meddling. The joint declaration issued at the end of the summit took aim at Washington by rejecting attempts at "monopolizing or dominating international affairs" and insisting on "non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states." The members further urged the U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan to declare a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Uzbek and Kyrgyz bases in the region that were established to support the Afghan operations. The Central Asian states see it in their interests to fill the power vacuum that the withdrawals would create with that of China and Russia, which they believe would better ensure the longevity of their regimes.

Top U.S. General Richard B. Myers summed up Washington's interpretation of the shift in blunt terms: "It looks to me like two very large countries were trying to bully some smaller countries." Ten days later, Rumsfeld landed in Kyrgyzstan to ensure that the world's only superpower wasn't elbowed out of the region.

Washington Pushes Back

The U.S. secretary of defense's visit to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan was aimed at shoring up support for the continuation of the U.S. military presence in each country, which was successful at least for the mid-term. Kyrgyzstan hosts a U.S. military base at the Manas air base, and Tajikistan offers the U.S. military and N.A.T.O. fly-over rights and hosts a small contingent of French soldiers involved in Afghan operations. French Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie was in Dushanbe on July 21 to firm up that arrangement. Notably, Rumsfeld did not visit Uzbekistan, the other S.C.O. member-state that hosts a U.S. military base. Whether his absence was the result of an Uzbek request or a calculation of Washington's, it demonstrated how the U.S. plans to address the shifting power relations in the region.

Washington has approached Central Asia on bilateral terms, never treating the S.C.O. members as a bloc. In terms of leverage in the relations, this shifts the fulcrum to Washington's advantage. China and Russia encourage the S.C.O. states to act multilaterally in an effort to limit Washington's reach. Rumsfeld's trip demonstrated Washington's ability to act bilaterally with Kyrgyzstan, which has a newly elected government and has yet to fully congeal its foreign policy, and Tajikistan, which has traditionally been the S.C.O. member that follows a balanced approach with its foreign suitors.

Recently, the relations between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have shown the strengths of Washington's bilateral approach. When over 500 Uzbeks crossed over into Kyrgyzstan following the crushing of protesters in Andijan, Kyrgyzstan initially reacted instep with the Uzbek government. Eighty-seven Uzbek refugees were sent back, prompting outrage from the U.N. and Washington. This led to negotiations between the U.N. and officials in Kyrgyzstan, which, by Washington's design, left out any avenue for input from Uzbekistan. On July 29, a plane with 440 Uzbek refugees left Kyrgyzstan for Romania. This demonstrated Washington's ability to directly influence the geopolitics of Central Asia only a few weeks after the united front presented by the S.C.O. called for a U.S. withdrawal.

However, in dealing with Karimov's government in Uzbekistan, Washington's bilateral approach is no longer effective, in part because of its success in Kyrgyzstan. The Uzbek suspicion of Washington's involvement in the Kyrgyzstan revolution and uprising in Andijan has caused Karimov to throw his government's support behind China's and Russia's vision for the region. As such, the same day that the plane carried refugees out of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan asked Washington to leave the K2 air base within 180 days. The immediate reaction from Washington was to hold back on sending a high-level representative to renegotiate the arrangement while waiting for things to "cool down."

This seems to suggest that the U.S. is leaning toward the future goal of regime change in Uzbekistan and is willing to sacrifice the air base if necessary. This does not mean that Washington will cut off all relations with Uzbekistan, but if it becomes apparent that future negotiations will not lead to an extension of the air base use agreement, Washington can be expected to pursue further bilateral agreements with the other governments in Central Asia to isolate Karimov's government.

Conclusion

Beijing, Moscow and Washington are once again using Central Asia, the setting for the "Great Game" between Tsarist Russia and Victorian England over 150 years ago, as their game board in a region rarely neglected by the world's great powers. In the contemporary version of the game, Washington approaches each state bilaterally, offering incentives to support the operations in Afghanistan while undermining the consensus put forth at the recent S.C.O. meeting.

China and Russia are acting in tandem to shore up support for S.C.O. policies by offering blanket support for the current regimes and implicitly calling attention to U.S.-led efforts to undermine their governments. The states hosting the game board will continue to swing their support from China and Russia to the U.S., and back again, so long as they keep their hold on power. The past month has seen a flurry of activity in the Great Game, and it can be expected that things will not cool down anytime soon.

Report Drafted By:
Adam Wolfe

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an independent organization that utilizes open source intelligence to provide conflict analysis services in the context of international relations. PINR approaches a subject based upon the powers and interests involved, leaving the moral judgments to the reader. This report may not be reproduced, reprinted or broadcast without the written permission of inquiries@pinr.com. All comments should be directed to content@pinr.com.

Posted at 04:55 pm by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

The Iraq Infection

Matthew Herper, 08.02.05, 6:00 AM ET

Military doctors are fighting to contain an outbreak of a potentially deadly drug-resistant bacteria that apparently originated in the Iraqi soil. So far at least 280 people, mostly soldiers returning from the battlefield, have been infected, a number of whom contracted the illness while in U.S. military hospitals.

Most of the victims are relatively young troops who were injured by the land mines, mortars and suicide bombs that have permeated the Iraq conflict. No active-duty soldiers have died from the infections, but five extremely sick patients who were in the same hospitals as the injured soldiers have died after being infected with the bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii.

"This a very large outbreak," says Arjun Srinivasan, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. public health service and a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control.

Breaking This Threat Down To Numbers.

Acinetobacter was the second most prevalent infection for soldiers in Vietnam, but the military did not expect to see it as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Researchers are still working to understand where it came from and how patients were infected. (See: "Military Chases Mystery Infection.")

Doctors worry not only about soldiers who are already infected but also those who are carrying Acinetobacter on their skin even though they themselves are not infected. Lt. Cmdr. Kyle Petersen, an infectious disease specialist at National Naval Medical Center (NNMC) in Bethesda, Md.,says his hospital treated 396 patients who had been wounded in Iraq between May 2003 and February 2005. About 10% were infected and another 20% were found to have Acinetobacter bacteria on their skin but were not infected. The rate of appearance of the bacteria has "been flat-out steady," says Petersen.

The same has been true at Army hospitals that include Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Tripler Medical Center inHawaii and Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where there has been a total of about 240 cases of patients infected, while another 500 have carried the bacteria, according to Col. Bruno Petrucelli, director of epidemiology and disease surveillance for the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine.

Petrucelli says the five patients who died were at Army hospitals—most of them at Walter Reed. They were already suffering from serious health problems before they contracted the bacteria. "These were the sickest of the sick," says Petrucelli. The infections are split evenly among wound infections, respiratory infections and a mix of bloodstream and other infections.

Preventing the bacteria's spread has required doctors to take extreme care, putting all patients who are returning from the theater of war into isolation. "It's one of those pathogens that once it gets into a population and a chain of care, it can set up shop. Trying to contain the spread of this infection to other people is very difficult," says Andrew Shorr, a doctor who recently left Walter Reed for Washington Hospital Center. "What has happened over the past 18 months is every patient who shows up, we assume they're positive until they are demonstrated negative."

One of those infected in Iraq was Marine Cpl. Sean Locker. On July 10, he was attacked by a suicide bomber in a car while guarding a convoy. Shrapnel hit him in his nose, his right index finger and his right eye, blinding him. His left lung collapsed. But the worst damage was done to his left arm. It was amputated, and Locker says he knew it would be as soon as he looked down at it. "I tried to stay level-headed," he says.

Locker, 25, was flown to an army base in Landstuhl, Germany, and then to NNMC in Bethesda. There, doctors found that what was left of his arm after the amputation had been infected with Acinetobacter. For Locker, the prognosis was good, as two years of hard experience treating patients who had returned from war had taught doctors how to deal with the infection—and to prevent it from spreading to sicker patients. Using imipenem, one of three intravenous antibiotics effective against Acinetobacter, doctors are treating Locker's infection. He hopes to go home soon and buy a new truck.

But other patients have been less fortunate, as they have suffered from infections of the bone, the bloodstream or of internal organs, which have complicated their care. Lt. Cmdr. Petersen says that NNMC's annual bill for the kind of antibiotics Locker received has increased tenfold to $200,000.

Besides imipenem, which carries a risk of seizure, two other drugs have worked. Another is amikacin, which does not work for bone infections and has not been effective against some strains of the bacteria. A third is colistin, an antibiotic doctors had stopped using because of its toxic effects on the kidneys.

"It is a scary thing about any drug-resistant bacteria, when you grow it for the very first time out of a patient and you've only got three antibiotics, one so old that we had to bring it back from the archives," says Col. Joel Fishbain, chairman of the infection-control committee at Walter Reed.

The methods used by the military in dealing with Acinetobacter represent a model for preventing drug-resistant infections, which kill some 100,000 patients per year in the U.S.

Patients arriving are swabbed in the armpit and the groin. Until the cultures show they are negative, the soldiers are kept in isolation. Doctors and nurses make sure to wear gloves and gowns when coming into contact with them. At NNMC, the cost of gowns and gloves to help prevent infection has jumped 80% to $12,000, according to Petersen. Soldiers and their family members are not confined to the room, however—the main point is to keep doctors and nurses from spreading bacteria from one patient to another.

At NNMC, an added step has been taken by making sure infected and contaminated patients are kept in clusters of rooms separate from those who don't test positive for Acinetobacter.

A patient such as Locker might not even think much about Acinetobacter if the infection can be treated quickly and doesn't cause other problems. But some others feel they weren't given enough information about the bug—perhaps because military researchers themselves were still putting together answers.

Merlin Clark, a civilian contractor who was in Iraq doing humanitarian de-mining, was also infected with Acinetobacter and treated at Walter Reed, according to his wife, Marcie Hascall Clark. "My biggest problem," she says, "isn't so much that my husband had it, but why didn't they tell me about it?"

http://www.forbes.com/2005/08/02/iraq-war-infection-bacteria-cx_mh_0802iraqinfect_print.html

Posted at 10:25 pm by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

The Failed States Index

By FOREIGN POLICY & the Fund for Peace

1

July/August 2005

About 2 billion people live in countries that are in danger of collapse. In the first annual Failed States Index, FOREIGN POLICY and the Fund for Peace rank the countries about to go over the brink.

Visit the Fund for Peace Website for more data and analysis.

Media Inquiries:
For a list of
available experts or to request an interview, click here.

America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” That was the conclusion of the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy. For a country whose foreign policy in the 20th century was dominated by the struggles against powerful states such as Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union, the U.S. assessment is striking. Nor is the United States alone in diagnosing the problem. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has warned that “ignoring failed states creates problems that sometimes come back to bite us.” French President Jacques Chirac has spoken of “the threat that failed states carry for the world’s equilibrium.” World leaders once worried about who was amassing power; now they worry about the absence of it.

Failed states have made a remarkable odyssey from the periphery to the very center of global politics. During the Cold War, state failure was seen through the prism of superpower conflict and was rarely addressed as a danger in its own right. In the 1990s, “failed states” fell largely into the province of humanitarians and human rights activists, although they did begin to consume the attention of the world’s sole superpower, which led interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. For so-called foreign-policy realists, however, these states and the problems they posed were a distraction from weightier issues of geopolitics.

Now, it seems, everybody cares. The dangerous exports of failed states—whether international terrorists, drug barons, or weapons arsenals—are the subject of endless discussion and concern. For all the newfound attention, however, there is still uncertainty about the definition and scope of the problem. How do you know a failed state when you see one? Of course, a government that has lost control of its territory or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force has earned the label. But there can be more subtle attributes of failure. Some regimes, for example, lack the authority to make collective decisions or the capacity to deliver public services. In other countries, the populace may rely entirely on the black market, fail to pay taxes, or engage in large-scale civil disobedience. Outside intervention can be both a symptom of and a trigger for state collapse. A failed state may be subject to involuntary restrictions of its sovereignty, such as political or economic sanctions, the presence of foreign military forces on its soil, or other military constraints, such as a no-fly zone.

How many states are at serious risk of state failure? The World Bank has identified about 30 “low-income countries under stress,” whereas Britain’s Department for International Development has named 46 “fragile” states of concern. A report commissioned by the CIA has put the number of failing states at about 20.

To present a more precise picture of the scope and implications of the problem, the Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and FOREIGN POLICY have conducted a global ranking of weak and failing states. Using 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators, we ranked 60 states in order of their vulnerability to violent internal conflict. (For each indicator, the Fund for Peace computed scores using software that analyzed data from tens of thousands of international and local media sources from the last half of 2004. For a complete discussion of the 12 indicators, please go to www.ForeignPolicy.com or www.fundforpeace.org.) The resulting index provides a profile of the new world disorder of the 21st century and demonstrates that the problem of weak and failing states is far more serious than generally thought. About 2 billion people live in insecure states, with varying degrees of vulnerability to widespread civil conflict.

The instability that the index diagnoses has many faces. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Somalia, state failure has been apparent for years, manifested by armed conflict, famine, disease outbreaks, and refugee flows. In other cases, however, instability is more elusive. Often, corrosive elements have not yet triggered open hostilities, and pressures may be bubbling just below the surface. Large stretches of lawless territory exist in many countries in the index, but that territory has not always been in open revolt against state institutions.

Conflict may be concentrated in local territories seeking autonomy or secession (as in the Philippines and Russia). In other countries, instability takes the form of episodic fighting, drug mafias, or warlords dominating large swaths of territory (as in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Somalia). State collapse sometimes happens suddenly, but often the demise of the state is a slow and steady deterioration of social and political institutions (Zimbabwe and Guinea are good examples). Some countries emerging from conflict may be on the mend but in danger of backsliding (Sierra Leone and Angola). The World Bank found that, within five years, half of all countries emerging from civil unrest fall back into conflict in a cycle of collapse (Haiti and Liberia).

The 10 most at-risk countries in the index have already shown clear signs of state failure. Ivory Coast, a country cut in half by civil war, is the most vulnerable to disintegration; it would probably collapse completely if U.N. peacekeeping forces pulled out. It is followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Chad, Yemen, Liberia, and Haiti. The index includes others whose instability is less widely acknowledged, including Bangladesh (17th), Guatemala (31st), Egypt (38th), Saudi Arabia (45th), and Russia (59th).

Weak states are most prevalent in Africa, but they also appear in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Experts have for years discussed an “arc of instability”—an expression that came into use in the 1970s to refer to a “Muslim Crescent” extending from Afghanistan to the “Stans” in the southern part of the former Soviet Union. Our study suggests that the concept is too narrow. The geography of weak states reveals a territorial expanse that extends from Moscow to Mexico City, far wider than an “arc” would suggest, and not limited to the Muslim world.

The index does not provide any easy answers for those looking to shore up countries on the brink. Elections are almost universally regarded as helpful in reducing conflict. However, if they are rigged, conducted during active fighting, or attract a low turnout, they can be ineffective or even harmful to stability. Electoral democracy appears to have had only a modest impact on the stability of states such as Iraq, Rwanda, Kenya, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Indonesia. Ukraine ranks as highly vulnerable in large part because of last year’s disputed election.

What are the clearest early warning signs of a failing state? Among the 12 indicators we use, two consistently rank near the top. Uneven development is high in almost all the states in the index, suggesting that inequality within states—and not merely poverty—increases instability. Criminalization or delegitimization of the state, which occurs when state institutions are regarded as corrupt, illegal, or ineffective, also figured prominently. Facing this condition, people often shift their allegiances to other leaders—opposition parties, warlords, ethnic nationalists, clergy, or rebel forces. Demographic factors, especially population pressures stemming from refugees, internally displaced populations, and environmental degradation, are also found in most at-risk countries, as are consistent human rights violations. Identifying the signs of state failure is easier than crafting solutions, but pinpointing where state collapse is likely is a necessary first step.

Copyright 2005, The Fund for Peace and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. All rights reserved. FOREIGN POLICY is a registered trademark owned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

FOREIGN POLICY welcomes letters to the editor.
Readers should address their comments to fpletters@carnegieendowment.org.

Posted at 11:53 am by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

Strategy for Pandemic Needed, Experts Say

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 31, 2005; Page A01

Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.

Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear in decades -- the H5N1 "bird flu" in Asia -- is showing up in new populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, global health officials say.

If the virus were to start spreading in the next year, the world would have only a relative handful of doses of an experimental vaccine to defend against a disease that, history shows, could potentially kill millions. If the vaccine proved effective and every flu vaccine factory in the world started making it, the first doses would not be ready for four months. By then, the pathogen would probably be on every continent.

Theoretically, antiviral drugs could slow an outbreak and buy time. The problem is only one licensed drug, oseltamivir, appears to work against bird flu. At the moment, there is not enough stockpiled for widespread use. Nor is there a plan to deploy the small amount that exists in ways that would have the best chance of slowing the disease.

The public, conditioned to believe in the power of modern medicine, has heard little of how poorly prepared the world is to confront a flu pandemic, which is an epidemic that strikes several continents simultaneously and infects a substantial portion of the population.

Since the current wave of avian flu began sweeping through poultry in Southeast Asia more than 18 months ago, international and U.S. health authorities have been warning of the danger and trying to mobilize. Research on vaccines has accelerated, efforts to build up drug supplies are underway, and discussions take place regularly on developing a coordinated global response.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will spend $419 million in pandemic planning this year. The National Institutes of Health's influenza research budget has quintupled in the past five years.

"The secretary or the chief of staff -- we have a discussion about flu almost every day," said Bruce Gellin, head of HHS's National Vaccine Program Office. This week, a committee is scheduled to deliver to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt an updated plan for confronting a pandemic.

Despite these efforts, the world's lack of readiness to meet the threat is huge, experts say.

"The only reason nobody's concerned the emperor has no clothes is that he hasn't shown up yet," Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, said recently of the world's efforts to prepare for pandemic flu. "When he appears, people will see he's naked."

Other scientists are sounding the alarm as well.

The most outspoken is Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. In writing and in speeches, Osterholm reminds his audience that after public calamities, the United States usually convenes blue-ribbon commissions to pass judgment. There will be one after a flu pandemic, he believes.

"Right now, the conclusions of that commission would be harsh and sad," he said.

In hopes of slowing a pandemic's spread, public health specialists have been debating proposals for unprecedented countermeasures. These could include vaccinating only children, who are statistically most likely to spread the contagion; mandatory closing of schools or office buildings; and imposing "snow day" quarantines on infected families -- prohibiting them from leaving their homes.

Other measures would go well beyond the conventional boundaries of public health: restricting international travel, shutting down transit systems or nationalizing supplies of critical medical equipment, such as surgical masks.

But Osterholm argues that such measures would fall far short. He predicts that a pandemic would cause widespread shutdowns of factories, transportation and other essential industries. To prepare, he says, authorities should identify and stockpile a list of perhaps 100 crucial products and resources that are essential to keep society functioning until the pandemic recedes and the survivors go back to work.

Deadly Potential

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since late 2003, 109 people are known to have been infected with the emerging H5N1 virus in Asia. About half -- 55 -- have died.

Ironically, for the current H5N1 strain of avian flu to gain "pandemic potential," it will have to become less deadly. Declining lethality is a key sign that the microbe is adapting to human hosts. That is one reason the 34 percent mortality observed in the most recent outbreak -- a cluster of cases in northern Vietnam -- has scientists worried.

Pandemic influenza is not an unusually bad version of the flu that appears each winter. Those outbreaks are caused by flu viruses that have been circulating for decades and change slightly year to year.

Pandemics are caused by strains of virus that are highly contagious and to which people have no immunity. Such strains are rare. They arise from the chance scrambling and recombination of an animal flu virus and a human one, resulting in a strain whose molecular identity is wholly new.

In the 20th century, pandemics occurred in 1918, 1957 and 1968. Although the 19th-century record is less certain, there appear to have been four flu pandemics -- in 1833, 1836, 1847 and 1889. On a purely statistical basis, the nearly 40 years since the last one suggests the time may be ripe.

The microbe called influenza A/H5N1 appeared in East Asia in 1996 and has flared periodically since. It is highly contagious and lethal in chickens, but it can be carried without symptoms in some ducks -- a combination that helps keep it in circulation.

Birds occasionally infect humans, and scientists recently found evidence that the virus is sometimes passed person to person. That form of transmission is now difficult and rare, but the virus could evolve so that it becomes easy and common.

If H5N1 never becomes easily transmissible in human beings, it will never become a pandemic. If it does become transmissible, the consequences are difficult to imagine. But history provides some clues.

The "Spanish flu" in 1918 and 1919 was the biggest and, along with AIDS, the most important infectious disease outbreak of the 20th century. It is on the short list of great disasters in human history.

At least 50 million people, and possibly as many as 100 million, died when the world's population was 1.9 billion people, one-third its current size.

The Best Defense

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tests are underway at three U.S. hospitals on an experimental vaccine against H5N1. But it is not the first H5N1 vaccine.

When a slightly different strain of the virus surfaced in Hong Kong in 1997, killing thousands of chickens and a half-dozen people, researchers used viruses from birds and people to make experimental vaccines. But neither offered much protection in lab tests, and nobody knows why.

Instead of working on the problem, researchers dropped it. First SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), and then a different avian flu strain that arose in Europe (H7N7), took their attention.

"The urgency around this issue kind of dissipated," said John Treanor, a physician at the University of Rochester and one of the leaders of the vaccine project. "I think it's an example of how unpredictable things are. We got distracted."

The urgency is back.

As the first, small hedge against disaster, the government last fall ordered 2 million doses of H5N1 vaccine from Sanofi Pasteur, one of the country's three flu vaccine makers, even though nobody yet knows whether it works.

A half-dozen other countries are also working on pandemic vaccines. But making enough to fight an outbreak is a tall order.

About 300 million flu shots are made worldwide each year. The vaccine protects against three flu strains. If the global production capacity were directed to make only H5N1 vaccine, the output could be 900 million shots.

Unfortunately, virologists are almost certain people will need two doses about a month apart to mount a successful immune response against a wholly new strain such as H5N1. That would cut the theoretical number of recipients worldwide to 450 million. If each shot requires a larger-than-usual amount of vaccine to work, the number will be even smaller.

Can the world produce more flu shots? Not easily.

Because nearly all flu vaccine is made by growing the virus in fertilized chicken eggs, special factories and a steady supply of eggs are required. Consequently, a key element of pandemic planning is getting more people to get yearly flu shots, which will give companies a larger market and an incentive to expand their plants.

Around the world, flu vaccine production has risen by just one-third in the past decade. New plants in Brazil, South Korea and the Netherlands will boost global production by an additional 25 percent in the near future.

In theory, even a modest amount of vaccine might be useful. Fighting disease outbreaks is like fighting fires. You do not have to hose down the whole world to put the fire out, but you do have to hose down the perimeter to keep it from spreading. It might be possible to contain an H5N1 outbreak at its source if the surrounding population were immediately vaccinated.

Would the United States, Europe and Japan be willing to donate their precious vaccine supply to mount this long-shot defense? This is perhaps the biggest unanswered question in pandemic flu planning -- and one likely to be answered only at the moment of truth.

Officially, it is a possibility.

"If it was done in consultation with the WHO [World Health Organization] -- and with other governments that would make contributions, as well -- we would be more likely to consider it," said Gellin at HHS. But observers both in and out of the government said, not for quotation, that they doubt the U.S. government would ever send a significant amount of its vaccine stockpile overseas.

Only One Drug

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the absence of a vaccine, the only pharmaceutical bulwark against H5N1 is oseltamivir. It can shorten the illness's duration, and if taken immediately after exposure, it can even prevent infection. But the world's supply of the drug is limited.

Sold as Tamiflu, it is manufactured by just one company, the Swiss giant Roche, in a laborious, expensive process that takes eight months.

Twenty-five countries have ordered oseltamivir to stockpile, and five others have expressed interest, a Roche spokesman, Terence J. Hurley, said recently.

The United States already has a stockpile, but it is enough to treat less than 1 percent of the population. The government has ordered enough to treat 3 million more people, or about 2 percent total.

At a congressional hearing in late May, the company's medical director, Dominick A. Iacuzio, said it will begin producing oseltamivir in the United States soon. The company says it could supply 13 million more courses of treatment in 2006 and an additional 70 million in 2007 -- provided the government orders them.

Would having lots of vaccine or oseltamivir make a difference?

In a study published last year, Ira M. Longini Jr. of Emory University ran a mathematical model of what might happen if a pandemic such as the 1957 Asian flu, which was caused by a virus far milder than bird flu, hit the United States.

He and his colleagues estimated that with no vaccine or antiviral drugs, there would be 93 million cases and 164,000 deaths. Vaccinating 80 percent of people younger than 19 -- the group most responsible for spreading the virus -- "would reduce the epidemic to just 6 million total cases and 15,000 total deaths in the country."

Giving that group eight weeks of oseltamivir would have the same effect, at least temporarily. But it would take the equivalent of 190 million courses of treatment -- more than anyone thinks the country will have in the next few years.

Somewhat more realistic is deploying the drug to where the outbreak begins. One researcher, Neil M. Ferguson of Imperial College in London, said in an interview that results of his not-yet-published mathematical modeling "are encouraging."

But unless antiviral drugs squelch a pandemic at the outset, their ultimate usefulness will be small. Without widespread immunity through vaccination or infection, the virus will simply move into a population when the drugs run out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/30/AR2005073001429.html?referrer=email

Posted at 09:22 am by R7fel
Make a comment Permalink

AND THE GIANT SUV THAT IS AMERICA GOES OFF THE CLIFF...

Breaking This Threat Down To Numbers.

AND THE GIANT SUV

THAT IS AMERICA

GOES OFF THE CLIFF...