THE DAILY BLADE: Thinking Outside The Box On Iran Nuke Standoff
Chinese general and military strategist Sun-Tzu advised: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
That’s the theory behind a controversial proposal by MIT scientists to build an internationally run enrichment facility inside Iran. The Boston Globe reports that bipartisan supporters of the idea in Congress argue it would “fulfill Iran's insistence on enriching uranium on its own soil, while preventing the dangerous material from being diverted to weapons.”
In 2005 Iran itself floated this idea, but was rebuffed by the Bush administration which instead pursued an ultimately unsuccessful strategy of tough sanctions and saber-rattling. The plan is seen as “a face-saving compromise” now that Iran seems to be “on the verge of mastering enrichment technology,” according to The Globe:
Thomas Pickering, the US ambassador to the United Nations under President George H.W. Bush, endorsed the idea in a March article in the New York Review of Books that was co-authored by Jim Walsh, a nonproliferation specialist at MIT, and William Luers, president of the United Nations Association, which organizes meetings with Iranian officials. The three have spent more than a year in informal talks with officials from Iran's foreign ministry and Atomic Energy Organization.
John Thomson, a former British ambassador to the United Nations who is now at MIT, and Geoffrey Forden, an MIT physicist and former weapons inspector in Iraq, have spent more than two years on separate research into the technology needed to safeguard such an international facility, including equipment that would prevent Iranian scientists from taking control of it or learning how it works.
Rep. Edward Markey (D- MA), chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming – who says the plan is "a creative, thoughtful, and productive potential solution” - is raising questions about an alternative strategy being pursued by the Bush Administration: Bankrolling Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions in a tit-for-tat.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Markey points to a recent trip by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Saudi Arabia to offer American tax dollars for “developing nuclear reactors, training nuclear engineers, and constructing nuclear infrastructure” at a time when “oil breaks records at $130 per barrel or more.” He adds:
Saudi Arabia, a champion and kingpin of the Sunni Arab world, is deeply threatened by the rise of Shiite-ruled Iran.
The two countries watch each other warily over the waters of the Persian Gulf, buying arms and waging war by proxy in Lebanon and Iraq. … By signing this agreement with the U.S., Saudi Arabia is warning Iran that two can play the nuclear game. …
At a recent hearing before my Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman shrugged off concerns about potential Saudi misuse of nuclear assistance for a weapons program, saying simply: "I presume that the president has a good deal of confidence in the King and in the leadership of Saudi Arabia."
[I]t was the U.S. who provided the original nuclear assistance to Iran under the Atoms for Peace program, before Iran's monarch was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Such an uprising in Saudi Arabia today could be at least as damaging to U.S. security.
Presumptive GOP nominee John McCain and presumptive Dem nominee Barack Obama have yet to weigh in on either Bush’s Saudi strategy, or the MIT proposal.
Monkeyfishing
You may recall that bogus story in Slate several years back about Lois Key, a “monkey-infested island” on which “[a] pharmaceutical company had released … rhesus monkeys … to breed, thereby supplying research labs … with a fresh supply of experimental test subjects” that inspired the local yokels to invent a new sport - “monkeyfishing” – which involved baiting “[s]turdy deep-sea poles” with fruit and reeling in a monkey whose paw got caught on the hook. Well it coulda been sorta true, if the article had been titled “Monkeys Fishing” instead of “Monkeyfishing” and described macaque monkeys catching fish instead of rhesus monkeys being caught like fish.
Fezzi The Freeloader
Economists studying social cooperation - putting the needs of the many above the needs of the few or the one – devised a multicultural experiment to determine “whether that public spirit of rebuke and reward is an innate human value or a byproduct of the particular society,” reports The Wall Street Journal, and found that how one balances “private gain against public good” is very much a learned behavior:
[E]conomists tested university students in 15 countries to see how people contribute to joint ventures and what happens to them when they don't. The European research team discovered startling differences in how groups around the world react when punishment is handed out for antisocial behavior. …
Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders [who did not pool their resources with the group, yet accepted an equal share of the pooled resources] most often took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously.
But Turkey was amongst a group of five countries in which freeloaders not only didn’t take the hint, but retaliated against those who most generously contributed to the benefit of the entire group - including them:
“They didn't believe they did anything wrong,” said economist Herbert Gintis at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute. And because the spiteful freeloaders had no way of knowing who had punished them, they often took out their ire on those who helped others most, suspecting they must be to blame.
Such a readiness to retaliate, researchers said, reflected relatively lower levels of trust, civic cooperation and the rule of law as measured by social scientists in the World Values Survey, which periodically assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80 societies. In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.
The Stiletto can’t say how accurately the findings reflect the cultures and mores of the other four countries, but the very essence of “Turkishness” is captured to a T. More than 90 years after the fact, Turkey’s government still refuses to acknowledge that its Ottoman forebears did anything wrong during “the events of 1915” when they very nearly exterminated the entire Armenian population, and spitefully retaliates against anyone suggesting otherwise by pursuing criminal charges against them (second item).
Editorial Note: the Wall Street Journal - which under former managing editors Paul E. Steiger and Marcus Brauchli relentlessly pushed the fiction that Turkey is democratic, pluralistic and secular – published the first honest assessment of the country and its authoritarian Islamist government in The Stiletto's memory. One paragraph that jumped out:
Rather than bridge the gap between Islam and the West, [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan] has widened it by encouraging the most virulent anti-American and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. According to the Pew Global Attitudes survey, Turkey is now the world's most anti-American country [emphasis, The Stiletto].
This, even after President Bush screwed Americans of Armenian descent, pulling out all stops to browbeat Congress into abandoning a vote on HR/SR 106, the symbolic resolution acknowledging the Armenian Genocide as historical fact - despite having pledged to the Armenian community that he would champion such a resolution as he trolled for their votes and campaign contributions in 2000 and 2004.
Comments