Two extracts from an article published in Aljazeera.

“Jon Sawyer, the director for the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting, said US politicians had encouraged their Georgian counterparts to think they had the backing of the US when Tbilisi decided to launch its attack on South Ossetia last week. “The US has for several years now mishandled the situation in Georgia,” he told Al Jazeera.

“The way that Mikheil Saakashvili has approached this [has been by] thinking that he could be an extension of the west, a partner of the United States.”
“In many ways we have given him cause for thinking that, with the many visits to the United States, the talk of Georgia as a beacon for democracy.”

Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations, agrees that US encouragement may have made Saakashvili “miscalculate” and send Georgian troops into South Ossetia.”

…………………….

“Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the old Soviet Union, said the US had made a “serious blunder” by allying itself so closely with Georgia.
“By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its ‘national interest,’ the United States made a serious blunder,” Gorbachev said in an opinion piece to be published in the Washington Post US newspaper on Tuesday.

Other analysts say that US diplomats may have underestimated the level of anger the US recognition of Kosovo created in Moscow, leaving it fearful that Georgia would assert itself further in South Ossetia.”
“The Kremlin made abundantly clear that it would view Kosovo’s independence without Serbian consent and a UN Security Council mandate as a precedent for the two Georgian de facto independent enclaves,” Dimitri Simes, the president of the Nixon Centre, wrote in a post on the Washington Note blog.

“Furthermore, while president Saakashvili was making obvious his ambition to reconquer Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow was both publicly and privately warning that Georgia’s use of force to re-establish control of the two regions would meet a tough Russian reaction, including, if needed, air strikes against Georgia proper.” “

Full text here:

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/08/2008812204333715324.html

See also:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7557915.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7558619.stm

The genocide in Rwanda, in which about 500,000 – 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by more radical Hutus over 100 days in 1994, is one of the worst cases of genocide in the last 60 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide

There have been repeated stories in the press of French involvement, but now the BBC has published the following report:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7542418.stm

Extracts here:

“Rwanda has accused France of playing an active role in the genocide of 1994, in which about 800,000 people were killed.

An independent Rwandan commission said France was aware of preparations for the genocide and helped train the ethnic Hutu militia perpetrators.

The report also accused French troops of direct involvement in the killings.

It named 33 senior French military and political figures that it said should be prosecuted. France has previously denied any such responsibility.

Among those named in the report were the late former president, Francois Mitterrand, and two former prime ministers, Dominique de Villepin and Edouard Balladur.”

………..

“The BBC’s Geoffrey Mutagoma in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, says the commission spent nearly two years investigating France’s alleged role in the genocide.

It heard testimonies from genocide survivors, researchers, writers and reporters.”

I know little about the history and ethnicities of this part of Africa. What interest did France have in siding with the Hutus? Apparently, the massacres led to the Congo wars. The second Congo war, which began in 1998, cost about 5.4 million lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War

Should major western political figures be put before an international court, if evidence justifies it?

The international free trade negotiations, which could have led to a large increase in trade between countries, has collapsed, because of disagreements between India and China on the one and the USA on the other side. Apparently, nations could not agree on a safety mechanism which would have protected farmers in developing countries from a flooding of their markets by agricultural products from developed countries. Who is at fault? Or is there no sense in asking that question? After all, each government has to protect its citizens. However, whoever is responsible, the world’s poor will suffer most.

See here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d04389e4-5dcd-11dd-8129-000077b07658.html

Google has opened a new free encyclopedia “Knol” (abbreviation of Knowledge). It has certain advantages over Wikipedia, with which it will compete: 1) articles are published under their authors’ names; 2) authors have the option to exclude any changes by readers, allow changes which must be approved by the author, or allow any changes; 3) articles can be reviewed; 4) articles on the same topic by different authors are accepted; 5) it is possible to write comments on articles.
I published an article (in German) on Meeresparasiten (marine parasites) in Knol. Have a look:

http://knol.google.com/k/klaus-rohde/meeresparasiten-wirtschaftliche-und/xk923bc3gp4/2#

In his brilliant book “The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Penguin Books, 2007″ Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that unlikely, unforeseeable events are of extreme importance, much more so than probable ones, in history, politics, science, etc. However, attention is usually paid to the latter. This reinforces my view, expressed in several earlier posts, on the importance of nonequilibrium conditions in ecology, and on the danger of making political decisions based on equilibrium assumptions (click Nash equilibria in politics). In this post I briefly draw attention to his views on developments in modern philosophy, which agree with what I said about the hairsplitting in discussions of the “Nonidentity Problem”, and about “Postmodern Philosophy”.

Here are some extracts from his book (Prologue: pp. xxvii-xxviii):

“Talk is cheap.”

…

“Indeed those who read too much Wittgenstein ……. may be under the impression that language problems are important. They may certainly be important to attain prominence in philosophy departments”, but for not much else.

“Thus I rail against sterile skepticism”, the kind we can do nothing about, and against the exceedingly theoretical language problems that have made much of modern philosophy largely irrelevant to what is derisively called the “general public”. ” One reason, according to Taleb, is that academics in abstract disciplines depend on each other’s opinion, without having any external checks.

(Taleb is Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and author of the bestselling (in 18 languages) “Fooled by Randomness”)

I have just started reading the book and may return to it later. I know little about Wittgenstein, hence comments by professional philosophers and others would be most welcome.

As we hear, the U.S. president has removed Nelson Mandela from the list of terrorists, just in time for his 90th birthday celebrations. Congratulations, Nelson Mandela!

During two weeks away from Armidale, I have had time to read three very interesting books

Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, 2007 (The autobiography of the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve)

Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat, The Globalized World in the Twent-First Century, 2006 (an account of the causes and effects of globalization by the three times Pulitzer Prize winner)

and

Loretta Napoleoni, Rogue Economics, Capitalism’s New Reality, 2008 (an account of the effects of globalization by the author of the bestselling (in 13 languages) Terror Inc.: Tracing the Money behind Global Terrorism).

Each book is fascinating and stimulating. I shall discuss aspects of each in later posts (hopefully, if I have the time).

Today just a single quote from Greenspan page 463:

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil”.

There you have it. After all, Greenspan has had very close contacts with the most important figures in several presidencies, including the present one. He should know.

I have commented on this in a previous post. The full article is now available on the web.

Click here :

http://www.tilgher.it/biologiae.html

Go to “latest issue”, to “News and Views”, to “free full text”.

From the Sydney Morning Herald 1.7.08 (Full text here:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/talk-heats-up-on-iran-after-claim-of-raids/2008/06/30/1214677946330.html)

Excerpt:
“Talk heats up on Iran after claim of raids.

THE United States is running a covert operation into Iran funded by $US400 million ($416 million) siphoned from other programs with authorisation from Democratic congressional leaders, according to a report in The New Yorker.
The US Congress agreed to the request from the President, George Bush, late last year to fund a large escalation of secret raids against Iran, the foreign affairs reporter Seymour Hersh wrote.
“United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with presidential authorisation, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of ‘high-value targets’ in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed,” Hersh wrote.
The report, which did not name any sources, was flatly denied yesterday by the American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. Mr Crocker told CNN: “US forces are not operating across the Iraqi border into Iran, in the south or anywhere else.””

If true, is this aggression?

See earlier posts on Iran/Iraq, in particular

http://blog.une.edu.au/klausrohde/2008/03/12/an-ominous-sign-admiral-fallon-resigns/

Ball verloren, Spiel verloren, aus? Deutschland: Spanien 0:1. Aber immerhin, man hat es ins Finale geschafft. Und: völlig falsch: Deutschland Europa-Vizemeister, Hurra!!