Reposted from Yellow Times.

Why France and Germany oppose War with Iraq

Erich Marquardt

When the Bush administration took office, international diplomacy received an injection of power politics. Beginning with the declaration that North Korea, Iran and Iraq comprised an “axis of evil,” and culminating in the current aggression toward Baghdad, Washington has relied on the threat of military and economic force in order to further its perceived national interests and geopolitical goals.

While in the past Washington has been able to rely on persuasion or “soft force” as an effective tool of international diplomacy, the Bush administration’s unilateralist policy has failed to convince former allies of the global benefits of current U.S. geopolitical strategy in the Middle East. President Bush alluded to this forceful approach in his recent State of the Union Address when he affirmed that “the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others.”

France and Germany, once bulwarks of U.S. foreign policy, have both broken away from their traditional supporting roles and are directly challenging Washington’s aspirations of removing Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Buoyed by support from Russia and China, the intensifying Franco-German alliance has withstood U.S. economic pressure and sharp criticism by Bush administration officials who have labeled France and Germany as being part of “old Europe,” following “shameful” policies which risk France and Germany’s “diplomatic isolation.” In addition to the current U.S. administration, Capitol Hill is also fused with anger as members of the U.S. Congress are calling for withdrawal of U.S. troops stationed in Germany, along with trade sanctions on French imports such as water and wine. As U.S. Representative Peter T. King of New York recently said, “Anything we can do to hurt [France and Germany] without hurting us, I support.”

Despite economic pressure from the United States, France and Germany have remained steadfast against the notion of a preemptive strike on Iraq. Instead of supporting current U.S. plans, Paris and Berlin have called for a boost in the number of U.N. monitoring teams working inside Iraq. Washington responded, calling the proposal “useless.”

The motivations for French, German and Russian refusal to participate in Washington’s Middle East policy are two-fold: economic concerns and the prevention of an unrestrained U.S. foreign policy.

Both Russia and France have economic stakes in the current Iraqi government. Russia, for example, has been granted tremendous oil contracts. LUKoil, the second largest Russian oil firm, has signed a multi-billion dollar oil production deal with Saddam Hussein, giving it a majority stake in West Qurna, a gigantic Iraqi oil field holding 11 billion barrels of oil.

TotalFinaElf, the French oil giant, was granted a deal giving it rights to Iraq’s largest oil field, the Majnoon, affording the company a 15 percent stake in Iraq’s 112 billion barrels of oil reserves.

With the removal of Saddam Hussein by the United States, LUKoil and TotalFinaElf would most certainly lose some of their potential profits as the new Iraqi government, directly supported by the United States, would possibly renege or at least forcibly renegotiate oil contracts established under Saddam’s regime.

Aside from economic concerns, the main factor motivating France, Germany and Russia is their angst toward U.S. power politics perpetuated through the Bush administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy and the U.S.’ attempt to project power into the Middle East. Significantly, these three powers are no longer persuaded that U.S. national interests are synonymous with their own. With Washington now warning that neither the U.N. nor NATO will block their national strategy, France, Germany and Russia have become diplomatically hostile toward what they perceive to be growing U.S. nationalism.

Besides these three powers, smaller nations are also concerned over U.S. nationalist foreign policy, especially Middle Eastern states who fear that the Bush administration is trying to reshape the Middle East in a form that will benefit the United States. Washington has publicly expressed its disdain for the governments of Iran, Libya, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, causing these nations to react cautiously to any form of increased U.S. presence in the region.

Many of these Middle Eastern autocratic governments are also having to take into account their own civilian populations that are overwhelmingly against not only a U.S. invasion of Iraq but of any cooperation between their government and the United States. Middle Eastern rulers are beginning to fear Islamic revolution, as Islamist groups in the Middle East have gained credibility in the eyes of civilians who are starting to believe that aggressive U.S. “imperialism” is threatening their way of life and needs to be repelled.

These factors are but only some of the most important that combine to explain why there is so much resistance to U.S. foreign policy. Both France and Germany, much closer allies to the United States than Russia and China, perceive a unilateralist United States, free from the restrictions of international restraining organizations such as the United Nations and NATO, to be a direct threat to their own national interests. This time around, Paris and Berlin may not back down.

Copyright © 2003 The Power and Interest News Report

Terence R. Wilken forwards the following article. It is reposted from Insight magazine.

Panic is Near if “The Gold is Gone”

Kelly Patricia O Meara

Media Credit: Greg Whitesell/Insight

Gold. It’s been called a barbarous relic, and those who focus on its historic role as a standard of value frequently are labeled “lunatic fringe.” Given the recent highs in the gold market, it looks like the crazies have been having a hell of a year. With the stock market taking its third yearly loss, gold returned nearly 30 percent to investors, moving from $255 an ounce to six-year highs of $380.

Just about every analyst and “expert” on Wall Street willing to mention any of this has been quick to explain that the increase in the price of gold is due to impending war with Iraq. But hard-money analysts are arguing that should the United States go to war it will be of very little consequence to the price of gold — a momentary blip — because gold is a commodity and its price a matter of supply and demand.

The “lunatic fringe” long has argued that the price of gold was being manipulated by a “gold cartel” involving J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve, but that the manipulation had been sufficiently exposed to require that it be abandoned, producing the steady upward increase in the price of the shiny, yellow metal.

In fact the “gold bugs,” as they’re known, are so sure of their research that not only do they believe the price of gold will continue to climb, but many are expecting to see prices of $800 to $1,000 an ounce. Until recently, most in the gold and financial worlds scoffed at such a prediction, but last month the Bank of Portugal made an announcement that shocked those who credit official gold-reserve data and added fuel to the contention of the gold bugs that the “gold-cartel” manipulation is in meltdown.

What the Bank of Portugal revealed in its 2001 annual report is that 433 tonnes [metric tons] of gold — some 70 percent of its gold reserve — either have been lent or swapped into the market. According to Bill Murphy, chairman of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA), a nonprofit organization that researches and studies the gold market and reports its findings at www.LeMetropoleCafe.com: “This gold is gone — and it lends support to our years of research that the central banks do not have the 32,000 tonnes of gold in reserve that they claim. The big question is: How many other central banks are in the same predicament as the Portuguese?”

Murphy explains: “The essence of the rigging of the gold market is that the bullion banks borrowed central-bank gold from various vaults and flooded the market with supply, keeping the price down. The GATA camp has uncovered information that shows that around 15,000 to 16,000 tonnes of gold have left the central banks, leaving the central-bank reserves with about half of what is officially reported.”

This is why those who follow such arcana are predicting an explosion in the price of gold. According to Murphy, “The gold establishment says that the gold loans from the central banks are only 4,600 to 5,000 tonnes,” but his information is that these loans are more than three times that number, which means “they’re running out of physical gold to continue the scheme.”

According to Murphy, “The cartel has been able to get away with lying about the amount of gold in reserve because the International Monetary Fund [IMF] is the Arthur Andersen of the gold world.” He has provided to Insight documents from central banks confirming that the IMF instructed them to count both lent and swapped gold as a reserve. “In other words, the IMF told the central banks to deceive the investment and gold world[s]. Once this gold is lent [or] swapped, it’s gone until such time as it can be repurchased. And with the skyrocketing price of gold we’re now seeing, it would be incredibly expensive, let alone nearly physically impossible, to get it back.”

What is important to understand, says Murphy, “is that there is a mine and scrap supply deficit of 1,500 tonnes, which is an enormous deficit when yearly mine supply is only 2,500 tonnes and going down. On top of that, there are these under-reported gold loans and other derivatives that are on the short side. There is no way to pay this gold back to the central banks without the price of gold going up hundreds of dollars per ounce. So the peasants and women of the world will have to sell their jewelry at say $800 an ounce to bail out these short positions or someone is going to have to tell the world that they don’t have the gold that they have reported,” shaking the world’s financial system to its core.

The gold bugs appear to be basing their identification of a world gold shortage on industry data, much of which has been summarized in two papers prepared by four different gold analysts at different times using separate methods. The first paper was written by governmental investment adviser Frank Veneroso and his associate, mining analyst Declan Costelloe. Titled Gold Derivatives, Gold Lending: Official Management of the Gold Price and the Current State of the Gold Market, it was presented at the 2002 International Gold Symposium in Lima, Peru, and estimates the gold deficit of the central banks at between 10,000 and 15,000 tonnes. The second paper, Gold Derivatives: Moving Towards Checkmate, by Mike Bolser, a retired businessman, and Reginald H. Howe, a private investor and proprietor of the Website www.goldensextant.com, estimates the alleged shortage of central-bank gold at between 15,000 and 16,000 tonnes — nearly a decade’s worth of mine production.

George Milling-Stanley, manager of gold-market analysis for the World Gold Council (WGC), a private organization made up of leading gold-mining companies that promotes the acquisition and retention of gold, is aware of these papers and shortage numbers but tells Insight that “there are no official [gold-reserve] reports.” That is, “The central banks are under no obligation to report what they lend into the market, what they place on deposit and what they do with their swaps, so there’s a conventional-wisdom view, and a couple of different bodies have done some fairly serious research in[to] this and have come up with a figure [of] around 4,500 to 5,000 tonnes.”

Stanley’s estimate is based on data provided by so-called “serious” researchers, including London-based Gold Fields Mineral Services (GFMS), one of the world’s foremost precious-metals consultants, and a report titled Gold Derivatives: The Market View, commissioned by the WGC to London-based Virtual Metals Consultancy. While these two groups appear to be the research choice of the official gold world, there are in fact no “official” figures, and both studies, like the Veneroso/Costelloe and Bolser/Howe reports, are based on interviews, data analysis and other research generally available to the industry.

Those who believe the central banks to have misrepresented their actual gold holdings place much of the blame for the lack of transparency on the shoulders of the IMF, which presents itself as being responsible for ensuring the stability of the international financial system. Although the IMF would not respond to questions about its gold-loan/swap requirements, what information has been made public appears to support GATA’s understanding of how central-bank reserves are reported.

For example, in October 2001 the IMF responded to questions posed by GATA by saying it is not correct that the IMF insists members record swapped gold as an asset when a legal change in ownership has occurred. According to this response, “The IMF in fact recommends that swapped gold be excluded from reserve assets.” Nonetheless, says GATA, there is abundant evidence that this is not the case, citing as an example the Central Bank of the Philippines (BSP).

A footnote on the Website of the Central Bank of the Philippines (www.bsp.gov.ph) in fact directly contradicts the IMF’s claim: “Beginning January 2000, in compliance with the requirements of the IMF’s reserves and foreign-currency-liquidity template under the Special Data Dissemination Standard (SDDS), gold swaps undertaken by the BSP with noncentral banks shall be treated as collateralized loans. Thus gold under the swap arrangement remains to be part of reserves, and a liability is deemed incurred corresponding to the proceeds of the swap.”

The European Central Bank (ECB) also made it clear that the IMF policy is to include swaps and loans as reserves. The ECB responded to GATA: “Following the recommendations set out in the IMF operational guidelines of the ‘Data Template on International Reserve and Foreign Currency Liquidity,’ which were developed in 1999, all reversible gold transactions, including gold swaps, are recorded as collateralized loans in balance of payments and international investment-position statistics. This treatment implies that the gold account would remain unchanged on the balance sheet.” The Bank of Finland and the Bank of Portugal also confirmed in writing that the swapped gold remains a reserve asset under IMF regulations.

Although the WGC’s Stanley stands by the data provided by the industry’s “serious” researchers, he insists he cannot say for certain that the numbers are accurate. “There is no requirement on any country to tell the IMF how much gold it owns,” says Stanley. “The requirement is to tell the IMF how much gold it has decided to place in its official reserves. Nobody knows whether that is the total of what they own or not. Obviously they can’t report more than what they own, but they can certainly report less if they chose to. That gold may have been lent out, but is nevertheless still owed to them. It’s a bit like any company reporting a cash position. It will report cash on hand and cash due — money owed by other people. I’m not saying this is ideal, but this is how it works.”

John Embry, the manager of last year’s best-performing North American gold fund and manager of the Royal Precious Metals Fund for the Royal Bank of Canada, says he is putting his and his clients’ money on the “lunatic fringe” in this dispute: “I’ve examined all the evidence gathered by GATA and everyone else, and I think these guys are anything but lunatics. They’ve done their homework and have unearthed a lot of interesting stuff. The problem, though, is that the market is sufficiently opaque that there is really no way to know who is right and who is wrong.”

“The fact is,” continues Embry, “a lot of this stuff is based on estimations. I do however believe that, based on the evidence dug up by Veneroso and Howe, they are presenting equally if not more credible numbers than the other side. I find the campaign to undermine their credence simply bizarre. I think these guys [GATA] are right and that the number put out by Gold Fields Mineral Services as the amount of gold loaned out by the central banks is definitely wrong. Now, whether it’s as much as 15,000 is up for interpretation. The recent release by the Bank of Portugal is important. When a central bank has 70 percent of its gold loaned or swapped, I don’t think it is operating independently, and I suspect there are an awful lot of them that have loaned out much more than has been reported.”

Embry says, “I’ve made a fortune for my clients investing in gold and gold stocks because I have operated on the premise that the Veneroso/Howe reports are right — that gold was significantly undervalued in the daily quote and that it was going a lot higher. The circumstantial evidence, and I bet my clients’ money on it, was very much in favor of the guys who said a great deal more central-bank gold had entered the market and driven the price down far too low. GATA has had this story from day one. I think that they’re right and that officialdom doesn’t want this exposed. GATA is willing to have a public debate but the gold world won’t debate. I think there is a tacit admission of anyone who has an IQ above that of a grapefruit that Veneroso and Howe have a pretty good point. I’m an analyst who has looked at both sides of the issue and I bet my money on GATA. So far they’ve been right.”

Whether the gold bugs are right about the reasons for the meteoric rise in the price of gold is uncertain, but, according to GATA’s Murphy: “It’s all the more reason to have the central banks come clean about the actual amount of gold that physically exists in their reserves. Either way, the price of gold will continue to rise because, as we already know and others are discovering, the gold is gone.”

Copyright © 2003 News World Communications, Inc.

 Kelly Patricia O’Meara is an investigative reporter for Insight magazine.

Reposted from The Moscow Times.

POLITICS: Russian Style

Yulia Latynina

Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov last week suspended the head of the State Fisheries Committee, Yevgeny Nazdratenko. The official reason was the committee’s prolonged failure to approve 2003 fishing quota allocations proposed by Nazdratenko’s successor as governor of Primorye, Sergei Darkin. This is hardly the first dispute over fishing quotas in Primorye. The first occurred a year ago, when Darkin took over as governor. Among his first acts was to allocate the entire regional pollock quota to a trio of friendly firms. When the proposed quota was sent to the State Fisheries Committee for approval, Nazdratenko rejected it and gave the pollock quota to companies that, shall we say, had flourished during his time as governor. In a way it’s not hard to understand Nazdratenko. Who is Darkin, after all? Just a run-of-the-mill businessman. After the death of a local crime boss called Baul, Darkin was caught up in the middle between two criminal bosses nicknamed Karp and Vinni-Pukh. They even unloaded a machine gun right under his nose. Nazdratenko is in a different league. No one leaned on him after Baul’s death. Quite the opposite: Local legend in Vladivostok has it that Baul drowned shortly after his relationship with Nazdratenko took a turn for the worse. Something about missing campaign funds. Governor Darkin, however, went running to Kasyanov with his problem. Nazdratenko had no authority to reject the proposed quota allocations, after all. State Fisheries Committee approval was supposed to be a mere technicality. Kasyanov became indignant, all the more so as he wanted to put his own man in charge of the committee. Nazdratenko promised to make everything right, and he did — about a month after the year’s pollock quota had been filled. What is at stake in the Russian fishing business? Insiders say that for every dollar you invest you clear $12 in profit. This is poaching, of course, conducted under the protection of gangsters, border guards and bureaucrats, who divide up quotas for bribes. According to rumors that have been making the rounds, the murder of the late Magadan Governor Valentin Tsvetkov was more than a little fishy. Fish like peace and quiet, however, and Nazdratenko was notorious for stirring things up. No sooner had rumors about his ouster begun to circulate than he launched an international battle to review the Baker-Shevardnadze line, the Russian-U.S. border in the Bering and Chukotka seas, claiming that Russia loses a minimum of 200,000 tons of pollock each year to the Americans. When Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref wanted to auction off fishing quotas to reduce the potential for bribery, fishermen in Primorye immediately took to the streets. In the White House, they suspected that Nazdratenko had been rather more than just an innocent bystander. This might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Bureaucrats can do almost anything in Russia: take bribes, exceed their authority, feud openly with other bureaucrats and even conduct their own foreign policy. But rocking the social boat by stoking popular passions in an attempt to defend one’s turf is apparently taboo. Nazdratenko was made head of the State Fisheries Committee in exchange for voluntarily vacating the governor’s office in Vladivostok. President Vladimir Putin wanted to set a precedent: When a governor resigns his post peacefully, he receives a plum consolation prize. Nazdratenko was not appointed to the fisheries job for life, however, and he did nothing to merit an extension. Nazdratenko won’t disappear. He could run for the governor’s post in Kamchatka, where he has already made inroads. During Nazdratenko’s tenure at the State Fisheries Committee, many companies in Kamchatka lost their licenses — which were subsequently bought up for pennies on the dollar by companies connected to Primorye Senator Oleg Kozhemyako. And it just so happens that the senator is considered a close ally of Nazdratenko. Copyright 2003 The Moscow Times Yulia Latynina is author and host of “Yest Mneniye” on TVS (a Russian Television channel) and a frequent contributor to The Moscow Times.

This week, two readers sent the following letters to Future Positive Yahoo Group.

Conversation Lost

C.J.R.Sumner

I have recently found myself staring in the face of an awkward dilemma. It seems I can no longer communicate with the vast majority of people on an effective and progressive level. I have been stripped of all the pleasures of intellectual conversation on stimulating and important topics and left with nothing more than mindless jibba- jabba. I have struggled to uphold the values of talking about the future of humanity, the destruction of our planet, the quest of the individual, scientific frontiers and political reformation. I feel it is of vital importance to humanity for individual intellects to interact in a forum of open-minded, open-ended discussions on subjects relevant to the well-being and longevity of our environments, both external (the planet, society, family), and internal (body, mind, soul).

Despite what I would like, the majority of people I meet have a different opinion altogether. They seem to be convinced that it’s much better to spend all conversations on sports and movies, music, making money, petty adventures of the past week, and putting each other down in a perpetual competition of verbal wit, grotesque humor, and displays of `coolness’. But I’m not naive enough to think these people have actually chosen this way over the other. Those who exercise this form of communication usually have something in common, something which plagues much of Western civilization.

The problem is what I like to brashly call “Ignorance of Reality” with a case of “Blinding Knowledge”. In my experience, this situation is most evident in the United States. These people have been brought up being taught to idolize the rich and famous, to focus their energy on making money, and to look out for number one. These are the strategies needed for survival in an extremely competitive, profit oriented economy. Since this is their survival guide, and there is direct reward for being corporately productive, basically identical groups of people are given the job of convincing each other of the necessity and grandeur of their products, whether it be a new car, a new business proposal, a movie or a rock band. Thus, with enough successes of the individuals, the group as a whole becomes convinced of its own lies and misprioritizations.

This leads to a society of misguided, shallow individuals whose top priority is not to miss this week’s episode of “Friends”. Don’t get me wrong, I think sports and music and things are great, but no moderation has yet been introduced. Teenagers around the world are convinced that idolizing a certain boy band or making the sports team is of great importance and helps define who they are. What’s worse is that friends and family usually reinforce those ideas and are themselves trapped in the same web of commercial personalities.

Is this not devastating to human development and progress? I have met many people from around the world. I lived in Germany for about 10 years and traveled around Europe a lot. I’ve lived in the United States about 12 years and currently reside in Gainesville, Florida. I’ve also visited Guatemala, Mexico, Morocco, and Israel. I’ve studied many ancient cultures and am currently working on an Anthropology degree. I’m only now about to turn 22. I’ve seen a lot for the time I’ve had and I’ve met a great deal of people from different cultures and socioeconomic environments. It’s amazing to note the diversity of the human mind, and the shaping of a person’s reality by the environment in which they grow up.

In the years of observing individuals and societies in the places I have lived and traveled, I have come to the conclusion that Western cultures have one of the most deeply, severely distorted grip on the priorities of human existence on earth. What I define as priorities are the well-being of the planet, sustainable economies, political stability, equality and rights, food and housing, the pursuit of happiness, the advancement of technology and solutions for peace on earth. This list can be extended and modified, but the basic idea is that these are topics that deal with love and respect for ourselves, each other, and our non-human environment.

So if people are obsessed with cars and bikinis, and talk only about the lies and dreams they’ve sold each other, then these most vital issues go completely unrecognized. That defines what I mean by “Ignorance of Reality”. What makes matters worse is that people are rewarded for buying into this delusion with immediate and obvious benefits. They become successful, they start making tons of money. They can afford to buy all that nice stuff that they’ve always been told was so desirable. Now they make the mistake that will keep them from ever waking up: they think they know how to play the game. They think they are solely responsible for their successes and that they have triumphed against the pitfalls of the world to become a successful, respected citizen in a society of competitive individuals where everyone has to fight for themselves or go down trying.

In a way they are right, but only from their own narrow perspective. In reality, they’ve played the perfect pawn to the vicious cycle of commercial lies and propaganda fueled by a bloodthirsty drive for profit and self-indulgence. They’ve grown up in a corporate-created culture and now they themselves have a hand in continuing to produce future generations that will one day also present the gluttonous advantages of capitalist, free-market economies to their kids. Where is this all leading to?

This is what I refer to as “Blinding Knowledge”. When you think you know how everything works, you become a slave to the system that you’ve so proudly conquered. You create limits and boundaries for yourself, consequently seeing the rest of the world through a very narrow hole in the wall. This is why I hear so many people insist that the poor “deserve to be poor”. This is why Americans are in complete denial of the fact that their high-consumption life-styles are completely out of the ordinary and horrifically destructive to the environment and foreign economies. Few American soccer moms will admit that starvation in Africa is directly related to American energy and wealth consumption, and even fewer people realize that their everyday patterns of existence need to be changed right now.

This is more than a matter of opinion of what’s important and what’s not. This is not some pointless rant about how I think people should change. This is about giving people the choice of whether or not they truly want to live life the way they do. I see so many people who hate their jobs and hate their spouses. The suicide rate and depression in America are at all-time highs. Teenagers violently protest against the world they’ve been raised in to. Are these the signs of a healthy society, or a society covered in a blanket of false reality, prompting people not to act on the very things that make them so miserable, because that’s “just the way things are” and “life is hard”?

I hope more people can find their way out of this maze of self- delusion.

Write the author

Ecological and Social Sustainability

Jan Hearthstone

Any of the remedies that either are being currently pursued, or that might still be contemplated, meant to address the many, with time rapidly increasing environmental and social problems of this planet, cannot keep pace with the proliferation of those problems. The only certainty that could be entertained about our collective, global future is, for an informed person, that whatever problems the world might have had in the past, and is facing presently, the future will have those problems also, but multiplied and greatly amplified. Although technical and scientific knowledge is increasing astoundingly, the more so is increasing the world’s misery. The more computers we have (to put it simplistically), the proportionally more homeless, hungry, abjectly poor, and socially dissatisfied there are in the world. And also, thanks to our increasing knowledge, and by observing the trend that modern warfare is following, we can with certainty expect any future armed conflicts to be very much more devastating than any armed conflicts of the past. It is only a tiny fraction of humanity who could expect their future to be better than their past. Incidentally, this tiny fraction of humanity is also the portion of humanity that is responsible for the greatest exploitation of resources both – natural (including very many other than human species) and human.

Very many people feel a great concern about the state of the world, very many people are trying to find a course for meaningful actions, but despite of a growing awareness of the need to do something to save a decent future for this world, the prospects are not improving. This, I feel, might be due to the fact that most actions that are being done in order to “save the world” are based on methods learned from our forbears, methods that might be considered adequate, perhaps, but such that can never result in any significant amelioration of the world’s plight. What I am saying goes against every grain that we have inherited from our ancestors, it might even sound sacrilegious, but, if we look at the record that our ancestors left, we should note that despite teaching the future generations the best they had, their legacy has been increasingly more problemsome and lethal with every generation of our ancestors entering upon the world’s stage. This is undeniable: Warfare gets “improved” with each generation (meaning that weapons can kill more people more effectively), the exploitation of resources gets more sophisticated, the general quality of life worsens. All the foregoing statements are well founded on statistics, whereas any optimism about future happiness there might be anywhere is not so well founded.

I speculate that perhaps a significant betterment, and also healing of all the persistent wrongs from past could be obtained should we stop basing our “remedies” for the world’s ills on our models from the past, and turn instead to an ideal projected into the future. I am not implying that we should resort to relying on the still non-existent time machines (although – would those find much good in the future considering current trends?), but rather that we collectively, globally, and consciously design a future that would accommodate all life on Earth most optimally.

Consider this: Most of life on Earth is planning for the future, most people do. Those plans entail visions of a place to live, nourishment to be procured, and leisure to be experienced. The trouble is that most of these plans are done by individuals for those individuals alone mainly, and that the majority of those plans for future disregards plans for future that others might hold. When it comes to realizing of those plans, it is no wonder that those individual realizations clash more often than not, and because of that most of the plans for future are not possible to bring into being at all. What is needed is to synchronize all the plans for future there might be, match them with all the knowledge we have about the Earth, and about human society, and thus create a model of Life on Earth that would be available for an inspection by virtually anyone on Earth. Naturally enough, such a model could never be really finished. It would keep dynamically adjusting itself to the ongoing input of all concerned, and to the ever-increasing knowledge of the Earth and human society. Creating of such a model would be certainly technically possible – the technology for accomplishing of this exists already and is not complicated – already individual PC’s are being harnessed together for a variety of tasks, and their capacity together is greater than any “supercomputer´s; but it is not the technology that matters as much as the principle. In contrast to any methods of organizing the world’s future known to me, coordinating the future from a grassroot level would have the advantage of not leaving anyone behind; any- and everybody’s future would be based on valid grounds, which cannot be said of most processes that, to lesser or greater extend, control the creation of our collective future currently. Such a model would put anyone’s contemplated future into a right perspective – the model would “teach” any individual what might, and what might not be possible, realistic, and what complications might ensue should such an advice be disregarded. The crises that we are heading into globally is an emergency; any science contributed towards the construction of this model could be the best instance of an applied science – after all – we need adequate knowledge to face any crisis, and should the knowledge humanity possesses already exist for knowledge’s sake only? The model could also serve as a basis of unifying of all scientific knowledge; a feat that would otherwise would be impossible to achieve. Last, but not least – this model of our collective global future would serve as a gigantic “round table”, always in session, ready to deal with any emergencies as they arise.

I would like to point out that although there have been many global models already actualized, all of them were a creation of just a few people, incorporating only certain aspects of possible futures, and most of these models were limited by partisan interests and purposes. If the energy and all the intentions to improve the state of the world of all the myriad of individuals and organizations that professedly strive to better our collective lot, and indeed of anyone at all, were coherently brought together to co-operate together on a realistic global future on the basis of all available knowledge, creating together a realistic goal to strive towards, this combined energy and knowledge might give our global future a viable hope.

During my graduate years I hope to elaborate and substantiate on all the above. I know that already there exist paradigms and ideologies that might provide epistemological grounds for creating of such a model. It will be left to show that our present barbaric Homo sapiens (judged by our own human standards) could yet become a Homo intelligentes. Else – the possible scenarios based on the trends currently observable could result in outcomes that no one could really relate to at all. If we really care about our offspring, we should make sure that we don’t hand them over an Earth that would be if only less perfect than the one we received from our forbears.

Write the author

Six Deadly Fears: What could go wrong in Iraq!

Mark Mazzetti & Kevin Whitelaw
US News and World Report

Donald Rumsfeld likes making lists. This is a man, after all, who lives by a collection of maxims known as “Rumsfeld’s Rules.” Yet few lists the defense secretary has ever compiled are more ominous than the one that now sits on his desk at the Pentagon. It is a collection of things that could go wrong if the United States goes to war with Iraq, and for months he has been steadily adding to it. He has yet to cross anything off.

With Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations ratcheting up pressure on Saddam Hussein (related story) and a military conflict drawing ever closer, there is remarkable consensus among war planners about one thing–that the United States would win a second Gulf War, and in short order. “On the military side, the outcome is not in doubt,” says one top officer. Iraq’s ramshackle and ill-trained Army, they argue, would be little match against overwhelming U.S. military superiority. With 125,000 troops already in the region and the northern half of Kuwait converted into a vast marshaling yard, the Pentagon last week launched another round of deployments, sending the 101st Airborne Division and the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk toward the Persian Gulf. More than 42,000 British troops are poised for an attack, and cargo ships continue to bring a stream of tanks and armored vehicles into Kuwaiti ports. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, whose 24th Mechanized Infantry Division helped execute the famous “left hook” attack against an Iraqi Army stronger than today’s in Operation Desert Storm, puts it this way: “The Iraqis have no good military options. There is no technique, no tool that they can now adopt that will have any military significance on the outcome of the conflict.”

Yet beneath the confidence among U.S. officials about the outcome, a general unease exists about the unintended consequences of trying to take down Saddam Hussein’s regime. It could go smoothly: Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution estimates that as few as 100 U.S. soldiers may be killed. If things go badly, he predicts, that figure could hit 5,000. Saddam, many fear, like the biblical Samson, will bring the walls of the temple down around himself. “Based on a fair amount of trying to figure Saddam and his cronies out, I wouldn’t try to predict how they will behave,” remarks one senior Pentagon planner. “That’s what makes them so dangerous.” The following are scenarios that war planners tell U.S. News keep them up at night. Some of their worst-case scenarios they refuse to divulge, for fear of giving Saddam any more ideas.

1. Iraqi forces unleash their chemical or biological weapons arsenal.

After the 1991 Gulf War, the CIA reported that Saddam Hussein had ordered his troops to use chemical weapons if American troops crossed a certain line in Iraq. They didn’t, and a fusillade of deadly gases was never launched. This time around, any war would go all the way to Baghdad, and U.S. intelligence is reporting that Saddam recently authorized his field commanders to use chemical weapons to combat a U.S. invasion. Most likely, Saddam would use artillery-delivered mustard gas and nerve agents against U.S. ground elements advancing on Baghdad. If so, says McCaffrey, “it’s going to create conditions of abject misery, but it will have no impact on the pace of the operation.”

U. S. military planners are working to confound Iraq’s ability to use these weapons. The invasion plan is designed to move swiftly, sow confusion, and cut off Saddam’s command and control. Already, U.S. forces are conducting psychological operations to persuade local commanders to ignore orders to use weapons of mass destruction or face war-crimes charges in the aftermath. But the orders could still be carried out by the Special Security Organization, a powerful agency headed by one of Saddam’s sons.

Iraq is most experienced at loading chemical weapons into artillery shells that could be used on the battlefield. Unprotected Iraqi civilians could be killed, and U.S. forces might still take casualties despite their protective gear, but U.S. forces could take out artillery batteries relatively quickly. Biological weapons could be scarier still, particularly if Saddam employed a nonconventional delivery system, such as aerosol sprayers hidden along major roads. “We might not even realize we’ve been slimed,” says Michael Eisenstadt, a military expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Defenses against exotic agents like botulinum toxins are limited.

According to Powell, Iraq retains several dozen long-range Scud missiles it could use to hit nearby U.S. military command posts or against Israel in order to draw a response that could provoke the Arab world. But U.S. Scud-hunting techniques have improved since the last war, and special operations troops may already be scouring the western Iraqi desert to neutralize any remaining launchers.

In his presentation to the United Nations last week, Powell revealed a newer, more serious threat: Iraq has been testing unmanned aerial vehicles with a range of more than 300 miles. Combined with spraying technology that Iraq has previously developed, these could deliver deadly biological agents to a number of neighboring countries and nearby U.S. military bases.

2. Saddam Hussein makes a bloody last stand in Baghdad.

Baghdad is the one true prize in the fight for Iraq, but it could prove a costly one for U.S. troops. Many analysts think most Iraqis would simply hunker down in their homes and wait out the war. But the streets of the capital could provide a last-ditch defense for Saddam’s most loyal troops: the Special Republican Guard and his fiercely disciplined security forces. “If you have 100,000 people willing to defend Saddam, that can cause a lot of casualties,” says Kenneth Pollack, an Iraq analyst at the CIA during the Gulf War. Troops and tanks that make easy targets in the open desert are harder to attack in an urban setting, and war planners worry that civilian casualties and so-called collateral damage could weaken support for the U.S. war effort.

The Army’s 1993 experience in Mogadishu, Somalia, where 18 Rangers were killed by Somali militiamen, is still fresh in the minds of officials at the Pentagon. In recent months, U.S. soldiers and marines have been assaulting mock cities in Louisiana, California, and Guam to prepare for what they might encounter in Baghdad. Marine Corps officials have also traveled to Israel to study how the Israeli Defense Forces quelled the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank town of Jenin. Yet military officials are still hopeful that after a massive bombardment of Saddam’s power centers and wholesale defections of Iraqi troops, they might never have to apply what they’ve learned.

3. Iraq’s oil wells are turned into fields of fire.

As they retreated from Kuwait in 1991, Iraqi troops committed one final indiginity: They torched the country’s oil wells. It took oil-field workers nine months to put the fires out, and Central Command is expecting Sadadam would use the same tactic if the U.S. invades. According to intelligence officials, there are signs that Saddam has already wired some of Iraq’s 1,500 oil wells to explode on his orders.

This time, war planners would try to dispatch U.S. or coalition forces to protect the oil fields before he could set them ablaze. But if he did, the result could be far worse than in 1991. Besides the fact that Iraq has more than twice as many wells as Kuwait, oil-field firefighters say the natural pressure in Iraq’s oil wells may be double that of the Kuwaiti wells, meaning that fires would be more intense. In addition to polluting the air, the wells could foul the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, sources of water for drinking and irrigation, as well as dump 2 million to 3 million barrels of oil a day into the Persian Gulf.

Jeff Miller of Cudd Pressure Control, one of the oil-field firefighting companies the Pentagon has retained to cap burning wells, says that while firefighters were able to extinguish the 1991 fires at the rate of one blaze per day, it would take much longer in Iraq. “This looks like six to seven days per well in some locations, and multiply that by the number of wells, and you’ve got a huge environmental disaster.” According to Miller, the Defense Department has contingency plans in place for his 38 employees as well as dozens of other firefighters from three other companies. “They all have pagers, kind of like doctors,” he says. If called, it would probably take them 24 to 48 hours to arrive, probably on military and civilian cargo planes that also carry their equipment.

4. Saddam puts civilians in harm’s way.

As Air Force planners methodically pore over target lists, there is one wild card they can’t control: a decision by Saddam to use human shields in Baghdad or other Iraqi cities. The opening phase of the war would be a massive air campaign on Baghdad to cut off Saddam’s command and control. Military officials worry that Saddam could put Iraqi civilians or western reporters inside high-value targets, which the Pentagon may have to strike regardless. “It could be a very dangerous situation,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers recently acknowledged. Central Command also fears that Saddam might kidnap U.N. weapons inspectors, holding them hostage before the United Nations was able to pull them out of the country.

Such tactics could be part of a larger scorched-earth campaign Saddam would execute in his final days. The United States has gathered intelligence indicating that he would destroy mosques and power plants in an attempt to pin blame on western invaders. Saddam could even destroy the four key dams controlling the water supply in Iraq, flooding the southern marshlands and potentially killing thousands. During Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military considered such a tactic to flood Baghdad, and now planners face the threat of Saddam’s pulling out every stop to slow down a U.S. advance. Says Judith Yaphe of the National Defense University, “I don’t trust him to leave anything sacred.”

5. Terrorists acquire Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Whether or not Saddam is currently allied with al Qaeda, a war could push them closer. Indeed, the CIA has assessed that Saddam may well deliver chemical or biological weapons to terrorists as his “last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.”

Even if this didn’t happen, the chemical and biological weapons stocks could still slip out of the country in the chaos following an invasion. “You can take one of the mobile biological labs and drive it across the border,” says Pollack. “The greater possibility is they get across into the open arms of Syrian and Iranian border guards.” These regimes already have their own programs to build weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But terrorists could well obtain smaller quantities of harmful agents, especially if, as U.S. officials allege, the stocks have been secreted all over the country. “There’s nothing to say that an Iraqi bioscientist doesn’t have a pile of the stuff in his freezer,” says one former defense official.

For the U.S. military, anything connected to WMD is a top-priority target. Air Force planners have spent months trying to locate these stockpiles and determine whether or not they are safe to bomb. U.S. ground forces would blanket the country as quickly as possible, using defectors and scientists to locate the stockpiles.

Even short of a WMD attack, the risk of terrorism would be much higher if there is war. Iraq, for one, would try to hit U.S. targets. “They’re putting terror teams out there,” says one source with access to intelligence. More broadly, al Qaeda and other groups could use the war as further motivation to go after Americans.

6. Once Saddam is ousted, Iraq descends into chaos.

After war, Iraq could prove hard to control. The fate of Saddam himself is perhaps least worrisome because, even if he somehow escaped, few experts believe he could ever mount much of a guerrilla campaign. “If he is able to thumb his nose at us like Osama bin Laden, the United States is going to look ridiculous,” says Edward Walker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. “But he won’t be a threat once he’s out of power, so it’s more symbolic.”

But Iraqis, freed from Saddam’s repressive grip, could unleash a wave of revenge killings that could spin out of control. “After a period of bloodletting, there will have to be law and order,” says one U.S. official. This would most likely take thousands of U.S. soldiers camping out in Iraq for many months. While most Iraqis probably would be happy to be rid of Saddam, there is great resentment after years of American-led sanctions. If the Iraqi death toll in a war is high, U.S. forces could be greeted very coldly.

American planners have devised a process for ruling Iraq that begins with an American general in charge and evolves over a period of more than 18 months into an Iraqi government. But no decisions have been made about who exactly would govern Iraq then. Iraq’s numerous tribes, for example, could end up battling one another in a power struggle. U.S. officials think they can control it. “If we’re the most powerful player in the region, they will want to be allied with us,” says one planner. “If we have to pay for it, so be it.”

Experts can spin out countless other scary scenarios. Kurdish parties could be tempted to push for independence. The country could split between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Or neighbor Iran could meddle. “On some days, I get up thinking this will be relatively quick and we will be left with a pretty good situation afterwards,” says one U.S. official involved in the planning. “On other days, I wake up and think, `Holy sh – -.’ “

Copyright 2003 by US News and World Report