Author: Jason Ditz

White House Denounces Dennis Rodman

No, seriously, they did. The White House issued a whole statement condemning the Dennis Rodman visit to North Korea, and North Korea for allowing him to visit, insisting “celebrity sporting events” of this kind are unacceptable.

The administration’s position reflects the always sympathetic media’s own stance on Rodman’s visit, putting it somewhere between an outrage and a joke. Only ABC’s George Stephanopoulos even gave the basketball star anything resembling a fair hearing on his visit, and he faced a flurry of criticism for doing so.

Whether they’re more officially outraged at Rodman “propping up” North Korea (as though he was actually capable of doing so) or North Korea for propping up Rodman isn’t even clear, and the reality is that the reaction more reflects on North Korea’s status as faceless “bad guy state” and the discomfort of having anything happen there that isn’t a de facto outrage.

Official condemnation seems little more than a cursory nod at this point, as so eager is the administration to discredit Rodman’s visit, or pretend it never happened that they declined publicly to even debrief him on the matter, unheard of for a rare visit to North Korea

Sports have long played a special role in opening up nations, and if there’s one thing the Obama Administration seems determined to avoid it is an “opening up” of North Korea. How else can one explain that the US reacted with condemnation when North Korea offered to sign a peace deal officially ending the Korean War. It’s been 60 years since the war was really being fought, but US administrations seem more comfortable with keeping the war officially on, seeing a state of peace as an unacceptable “compromise.”

Having Dennis Rodman feted by North Korea’s leader, and worse yet, having him come back speaking of him as a friend undermines the official position of North Korea as a carefully sealed black box from which only vaguely-defined cartoonish bad guys can emerge.

After 60 years one would think the US would at least be resigned to North Korea’s existence, but officials seem stubbornly comfortable in the status quo. Even in 1995, when Japan sought to play a little “sports diplomacy” with North Korea, sending legendary pro wrestlers Antonio Inoki and America’s own “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, the US played no role. Nearly 20 years on, the US government still seems uncomfortable with the prospect of a thaw, and it is only a single basketball player with an unconventional reputation that manages to find time to visit. And he gets denounced for it.

Efforts to ban the military from sponsoring NASCAR cars on the grounds that they are a waste of money and simply don’t work have so far been foiled, with efforts to add a ban to military spending bill being removed after the fact. Controversy around it was enough to convince the Army to scrap their sponsorship deal.

Not so with the Air Force, however, which has announced it is going to keep sponsoring the No. 43 car as part of their “strategic marketing” strategy. Discussing the decision, Col. Marcus Johnson says that NASCAR events are attended by “the type of recruits that we look to attract.”

The No. 43 car is sponsored by Air Force, Best Buy and Valvoline. It hasn’t won a race since 1999.

Israeli officials loudly and eagerly condemn the right of return as it relates to Palestinians stuck in multi-generational refugee camps across the region, but the Israeli government itself recognizes the right of return, if you’re a member of the right religion.

According to reports, Israeli NGOs have been eagerly tracking down distant relatives of Jewish people who used to live in East Jerusalem before 1948. Under Israeli law, Jews who lived in “enemy territory” and left before it became occupied territory in 1967 can reclaim their land, evicting any Palestinians who are living there. If they are no longer alive, the NGO can get their heirs to sign over Palestinian homes and neighborhoods to them for settlements.

This exact same right to reclaim lost property is denied to Arabs expelled before 1948, and likewise Israel explicitly refuses to recognize any property rights at all in certain parts of the West Bank, namely the parts where Palestinians own land that settlements are built on.

“We have to produce security, not consume security.”

It’s a statement beautiful in its simplicity, and straightforwardness. Security is desirable – we all want to be secure, let us produce some security.

In context it is also a statement horrifying in its misguidedness, because Kosovo MP Rexhep Selimi, the source of the quote, used it as an argument for creating a military and joining NATO.

This is the ultimate over-simplification of what “security” really is and where it comes from. The assumption from this statement is that the deployment of troops from abroad is “security” being consumed, and creating another army is “security” being produced, to be consumed elsewhere.

This is of course readily disproven. Iraq’s “security” demonstrably and dramatically fell with the invasion of the “coalition of the willing” despite it being, in Selimist terms, an import of huge amounts of consumable security. Afghanistan, likewise, got less and less security throughout the past decade as the Bush and Obama Administrations added troops.

On the other hand, citizens of several nations with marginal militaries enjoy dramatically better security than in nations like North Korea or Myanmar, where the military is a huge portion of the economy and massive power over day-to-day life.

The deployment of thousands of NATO troops to attack the ethnic Serbs in the north of Kosovo is not “consuming security,” and creating a proper Kosovar Albanian army to launch those attacks themselves isn’t “producing security” either. Rather NATO is an importer of militarism into Kosovo, and Selimi is hoping to turn the nation into a net exporter of NATO’s favorite commodity, war. Needless to say, the US seems supportive of the idea, as indeed they always are when other nations begin dumping money into the never-ending sinkhole that is a military. Misery, it seems, truly does love company.

So late last week when John Glaser took apart the latest scare piece from the Associated Press’ George Jahn, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was mocking it as “amateurish and technically incorrect.” I didn’t personally notice that the graph was flawed on first sight, but it did look like the sort of thing I could’ve photocopied out of half a dozen of my college textbooks. Except then the graph would be right.

So now that the weekend has rolled around, Jahn is back with his “oops but seriously” defense for the first mistake, insisting now that even though the graph looks like (And indeed is) an amateurish hoax, he’s betting that the Iranians just made the graph look stupid and wrong intentionally, because that’s just how cagey they are. And that somehow the very wrongness of the graph “supports suspicions.”

Fool Jahn once, shame on you, fool Jahn in every single article he’s written on the subject in the last several years shame on Jahn.

“Lets you, and me, and all your money that’s in all our banks talk.”
– a hypothetical French prospectus

With its economy struggling like many others in the European Union, France is in bad need of foreign investment. And it’d like it to be in cash. And it’s already got that cash.

In what even by diplomatic standards seems to be an incredibly cynical effort, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg have headed to Libya to announce that they are “ready” to start releasing some seized Libyan assets to the nation’s sovereign wealth fund, and that they think it’d be swell if that sovereign wealth fund invested those assets in French businesses.

“France is committed through me to immediately begin unfreezing the funds of the Libyan Investment Authority estimated at $1.865 billion,” Fabius told Libya’s parliament, while Montebourg pointed out France can get them a really good deal on a refinery in Normandy.

All told France seized $8-$9 billion in Libyan assets last year, and has only given Libya $1.8 billion so far. The addition $5 billion or so above and beyond what was given was not mentioned, likely because France didn’t have anything juicy to sell them for that part of the money yet.

Putting aside the implied shakedown going on here, it would seem like Libya, which was pounded with airstrikes by France and other NATO members just a year ago, would have a lot of other uses for that money other than buying Norman oil refineries. With Libya’s oil-rich economy looking to rebound and the French economy staggering along at an estimated 0.3 percent annual growth, it seems like the sovereign wealth fund would also find their own nation a better return on investment.