KGB Resurrection?

Jamie Glazov brings together at FrontPageMagazine Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former acting chief of Communist Romania’s espionage service, James Woolsey, CIA Director from 1993-95, and Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet dissident, for a discussion of the supposed "re-Sovietization" of Russia. Their opinion is damning.

FP: So Mr. Bukovsky, Putin is clearly consolidating his powerful control of Russia. He is placing myriad former KGB officers in his presidential administration posts and has appointed Mikhail Fradkov, also KGB, as chief of government. The Russian media is increasingly practicing self-censorship and political opponents face increasing violence and intimidation. Russia is clearly going back to an authoritarian security state and Putin has made himself somewhat of an oligarch.
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Woolsey: Once again, I have no substantial disagreement with the views of these two remarkable men. It seems to me that the direction of Russia is decidedly negative and that the question for us in the West is the one Lenin was fond of posing: "What is to be done?"... Putin has used the economic prosperity produced by a strong oil market to consolidate his power and lead Russia toward a form of fascism -- oil prices have given him the idea that he can do anything he wants. Oil can tend to centralize power in any society except in a mature democracy such as Norway.

While I would agree that Russia's foreign policy in Yugoslavia and the Middle East has been atrocious, compared to the chaos it experienced in terms of economics and national security in the 1990s, I think Putin's reforms have been mostly positive. To call them fascism is a bit more than ridiculous, and smacks of the anti-national security rhetoric usually reserved by the far left for Israel and the U.S. (and rightly criticized by FrontPage).

One could talk about a "re-Sovietization" if Putin was running the country while ignoring the wishes of the people. He remains incredibly popular, however.

In response to Woolsey, I don't think oil has necessarily negatively affected Russian politics that much more than it has U.S. politics.

Kerry's Man in Iraq

Cuba and Libya on the UN Human Rights Commission, oil-for-food corruption, and now this? Kerry's plan for a large UN role in Iraq may be backfiring big time, and will cost him in Florida. His great hope in Iraq happens to be the former Algerian foreign minister with certain "interesting" political views.

"[Lakhdar Brahimi is] one of the most skilled and capable people with respect to Iraq and the Middle East," Kerry said. "He can talk to all the parties. He would be a perfect example of somebody whom you could ask to really take over what Paul Bremer's doing, de-Americanize the effort and begin to put it under the United Nations' umbrella."

Brahimi told France's Inter radio on Thursday that Israeli policies toward Palestinians and Washington's support for them hindered his search for a caretaker Iraqi regime that would take power on June 30 when the U.S.-led occupation ends.

"The big poison in the region is the Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians."

Brahimi said his job was complicated by Iraqi perceptions of "Israel's completely violent and repressive security policy and determination to occupy more and more Palestinian territory."

What's interesting, of course, is that the Bush administration has been relying heavily on Brahimi, as well. And it was Brahimi who helped forge an interim government in Afghanistan after the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban. Hmmmm.

P.S. A less somber aside, via Reuters:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has a problem with Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy to Iraq -- his name.

The Massachusetts senator has the vowels down but can't seem to corral the right consonants.... For two days last week, Kerry referred to the envoy as Brandini, not even taking a stab at Lakhdar.

P.P.S. A more somber one: Human Rights Watch is upset with the UN Commission on Human Rights... because the U.S. is on it!

Bowling for Fallujah

What the World Needs Now Is DDT

A fascinating piece in the New York Times Magazine touching on Africa, malaria, and global warming:

Yet what really merits outrage about DDT today is not that South Africa still uses it, as do about five other countries for routine malaria control and about 10 more for emergencies. It is that dozens more do not. Malaria is a disease Westerners no longer have to think about. Independent malariologists believe it kills two million people a year, mainly children under 5 and 90 percent of them in Africa. Until it was overtaken by AIDS in 1999, it was Africa's leading killer.
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Today, westerners with no memory of malaria often assume it has always been only a tropical disease. But malaria was once found as far north as Boston and Montreal. Oliver Cromwell died of malaria, and Shakespeare alludes to it (as ''ague'') in eight plays. Malaria no longer afflicts the United States, Canada and Northern Europe in part because of changes in living habits -- the shift to cities, better sanitation, window screens. But another major reason was DDT, sprayed from airplanes over American cities and towns while children played outside.
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In 1970, the National Academy of Sciences wrote in a report that ''to only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT'' and credited the insecticide, perhaps with some exaggeration, with saving half a billion lives.
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In her 297 pages, Rachel Carson never mentioned the fact that by the time she was writing, DDT was responsible for saving tens of millions of lives, perhaps hundreds of millions.

DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment. ''Silent Spring'' is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind.

Obviously, Richard Tren and the libertarians at Africa Fighting Malaria have been advocating DDT use for years now. To read something like this coming from the pen of an editorial writer at the New York Times though is groundbreaking. Let us remember, when we hear of scare reports, like, ‘World Health Organisation report concludes that "global warming could cause the spread of malaria and other tropical diseases to millions of people presently free of them,"’ that malaria is a poverty disease that requires just a bit of development and social organization to be combated, not for a stop to the world’s economic engine, as some, including Greenpeace, would insist.

Tina Rosenberg deserves great kudos for this article. I do however have to take issue with her statement that "Rachel Carson started the environmental movement." Influenced by Romanticism, the evil movement that gave us “orientalism” and bourgeois revolutions,

by the end of the nineteenth century an explicit concern with the environment was at the centre of a wide range of works, from Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'Binsey Poplars' (1879) to Sarah Orne Jewett's 'A White Heron' (1886) and Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1897).

At the end of part one of "Uncle Vanya" (David Mamet's translation, which is very close to the original), Dr. Astrov, the country doctor, says:

"Billions of trees. All perishing. The homes of birds and beasts being laid waste. The level of the rivers falls, and they dry up. And sublime landscapes disappear, never to return, because man hasn't sense enough to bend down and pick fuel up from the ground. Isn't this so? What must man be, to destroy what he never can create?"

Is the environmental movement today saying anything all that different? Are its policies being driven by any more facts than a hundred years ago? (Via Jens 'n' Frens)

Sept. 11 Might Have Been Different If ...

James Lileks, via Jens 'n' Frens:

Maybe. If. If George W. Bush had phoned the Saudis on the first day of his administration and told them any act of Islamist terror would result in a mushroom cloud over Mecca, and that he would consider it "what we call in bowling a practice frame," it might have been different. It might have been different if B-52s had taken out the Taliban in February 2001 -- and we all know how Ted Kennedy et al. would have exploded in a rain of bile had Bush kicked off his term with a pre-emptive war. The articles of impeachment would have been drawn up before the first wave of bombers returned to base.