International Politics Links (15 June 2009)

Almost all of the significant stories this past week in international politics focused on the Iranian election. Juan Cole wrote a number of blog posts throughout the week about that election, with the more recent posts up top. Moon of Alabama doesn't buy Dr. Cole's ideas about the election results. I hate to use this particular slogan, but "We report, you decide," seems to be appropriate in this instance. ;) There are a couple of other stories on Afghanistan, the recent Lebanon election, and North Korea.


Middle East:
Afghanistan: Northern Supply Lines Under Attack (Moon of Alabama)

Former GITMO Detainee Speaks Out! YES! I WAS TORTURED! (Crooks & Liars)

Biden: 'Real doubt' about Iran's presidential election (Crooks & Liars)

TYT: Neocons Rooting For Ahmadinejad To Win (Crooks & Liars)

Reza Aslan Takes Chris Matthews to Task for Fear Mongering on Iran's Nuclear Program (Crooks & Liars)

Clashes, Claims of Election Fraud in Iran (Informed Comment)

Terror Free Tomorrow Poll Did not Predict Ahmadinejad Win (Informed Comment)

Post-Election Demonstrations, Violence, Arrests (Informed Comment)

Class v. Culture Wars in Iranian Elections: Rejecting Charges of a North Tehran Fallacy (Informed Comment)

Stealing the Iranian Election (Informed Comment)

Rafsanjani Blasts Ahmadinejad as a Counter-Revolutionary ; Charismatic Rahnevard Attracts Crowds for her Husband Mousavi (Informed Comment)

Ahmadinejad Defends Himself on Iranian Television (Informed Comment)

Tens of Thousands Rally for Mousavi in Tehran (Informed Comment)

Some Dots You May Want To Connect (Moon of Alabama)

More on the Iran Election (Moon of Alabama)

March 14 Faction Wins in Lebanon (Informed Comment)


Asia:
North Korea: We Will Weaponize Nuclear Stockpiles (Crooks & Liars)

As Tensions Between North Korea and U.S. Rise, Clinton Hints At Weapons Interdiction (Crooks & Liars)


Other:
Joe Scarborough Blames Obama's Cairo Speech for Ayatollahs Rigging Iranian Election--But That's a Good Thing ("Joe Scarborough seems to think the ayotollahs [sic] rigged the election because Obama's Cairo speech scared them into over reaching and making sure he didn't get credit for the reformers winning in Iran, but if they did, it's a good thing in the long run for the United States. ... If they rigged the election Joe, it's likely for the same reasons the Republicans have rigged elections in the United States...to stay in power. Not because they're worried about American politics.") (Crooks & Liars)

Dutch to Rent Out Prison Cells

An odd story out of the Netherlands. The US should be so lucky!

The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty.

During the 1990s the Netherlands faced a shortage of prison cells, but a decline in crime has since led to overcapacity in the prison system. The country now has capacity for 14,000 prisoners but only 12,000 detainees.

Deputy justice minister Nebahat Albayrak announced on Tuesday that eight prisons will be closed, resulting in the loss of 1,200 jobs. Natural redundancy and other measures should prevent any forced lay-offs, the minister said.

...

Some reprieve might come from a deal with Belgium, which is facing overpopulation in its prisons. The two countries are working out an agreement to house Belgian prisoners in Dutch prisons. Some five-hundred Belgian prisoners could be transferred to the Tilburg prison by 2010.

The Netherlands would get 30 million euros in the deal, and it will allow the closing of the prisons in Rotterdam and Veenhuizen to be postponed until 2012.

HT: Moon of Alabama

Links for 25 May 2009

Sorry for the lack of link posts the last few days; it's been a busy weekend. Today's post is very short (due to Memorial Day back in the U.S.)

Politics:
Tom Ridge disses Limbaugh as 'too shrill,' says Cheney is out to lunch too (A glimmer of intelligence in the Republican party.)

Colin Powell on the Trouble With The Republican Party Base ("You can only do two things with a base. You can sit on it and watch the world go by, or you can build on it. I believe we should build on it.")

Empire Media ("One issue I have with the U.S. media is its complete inability to reflect on what the U.S. is actually doing when they report on foreign reactions. ... Today the Washington Post's Craig Whitlock is outraged that Spanish prosecutors and judges care about international crimes against humanity. He does not spend a second on thinking about how much of that may be really justified when one takes into account the openly admitted misdeeds of the U.S.")


Miscellaneous:
Carina Nebula Panorama from Hubble (APOD has featured this photograph before, but it's still an awesome pic.)

Salt and Pepper Shakers that look like Batteries (Cool!)

384 – Does My Metro Area Look Big in this Ring Road? (Ring roads of the world.)

Jeremy Harding: The Money That Prays

Moon of Alabama linked to a longish essay on Islamic finance at the London Review of Books (LRB). That's an odd place, I thought, for an essay on this topic, so I read the article with a little fear (you know, expecting the usual Islamophobe's-got-an-axe-to-grind-type rant). However, the essay turned out to be rather fair, although, to be honest, I'm still not sure what the author's purpose was in writing the essay to begin with.

Below are three excerpts from the essay; while it may look rather long, this is only a small portion of the entire article, which prints out at 11 pages.

The prohibitions for Muslims are puzzling to the modern commercial mind. The first obstacle for a pious Muslim trading and banking in conventional economies is interest, the term I’ve been using for the Arabic riba, though its literal sense is closer to ‘excess’ and it is sometimes translated as ‘usury’. Often, in the Hadith and even more in recent proselytising on the internet, riba is said to be ‘eaten’. One of the objections to riba is its propensity to up-end the social order. A person who consumes riba bungles the proper management of need – his own and his debtor’s – whereupon the grand plan of give and take, sufficiency for rich and poor alike, begins to come apart. This, as Charles Tripp explains in Islam and the Moral Economy, is also a challenge to ‘the balance and proportion of God’s ordering of the universe’, which must be reflected in ‘human relations’. Islamic tradition warns that riba is likely to lead to injustice and exploitation.

There’s a categorical objection, too: that money may not be conjured up from money to generate like from like. The goods that served (we’re told) as currency in Islamic tradition – gold, silver, salt, grain and dates – can only be exchanged ‘hand to hand’, i.e. in a spot transaction, without deferment; and only at parity, one quantity for its exact equivalent, no more, no less. It’s not clear why you’d want to swap something – a gold weight, say – for its identical other, but the point here is probably that units of currency, unlike the shirt or the saddle for which they’re exchanged, must be beyond any cavilling with regard to value for the system to hold up: an Islamic marker set down 14 centuries ago against arbitrage. In a story told by Abu Said al Khudri, one of Muhammad’s younger companions, the Prophet describes the transaction of a greater number of low-grade dates for a smaller number of quality dates as riba.

The most famous chapter and verse on riba is in sura 2 of the Koran. It warns that dealing in riba will bring on madness or ‘torment’ (via ‘Satan’s touch’), and that if you’re not prepared to waive a mark-up on a debt, war will be waged against you by God and the Prophet. One sharia-compliant banker I met last year told me that’s about as bad as it gets. There is also an injunction to forgive debt in a broader sense: ‘If the debtor is in difficulty, then delay things . . . Still, if you were to write it off as an act of charity, that would be better for you, if only you knew’ (the rules followed by HSBC Amanah try to catch something of this). The charging of riba, it follows, is always a missed opportunity to act generously, to give where a gift is in order, a gesture highly prized in Islamic tradition. In a faith embodied by a trader prophet and espoused by an impressive trading community for which, at its height, knowledge was a key commodity, believers are admonished not to confuse riba with trade. From the second sura, again: ‘God has allowed trade and forbidden usury.’

...

Riba catches many non-Muslims out. After a long study of Islamic finance, the anthropologist Bill Maurer couldn’t settle on ‘interest’ as the perfect translation: it seemed clear at first but became streaky as he looked closer. ‘Usury’ is the obvious alternative, but are we to rely on the older sense of the term – any charge, however small, for the use of borrowed money – or on the way it’s understood today, as extortionate interest only? Wilson, a professor in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham who is intrigued by ‘the influences of religious belief on economic behaviour’, holds that riba is usury in the first sense. That’s the view of most practising Muslims; it seems to echo the meaning of the word in Deuteronomy, where Moses instructs the people of Israel not to lend to their own kith and kin at a rate: ‘Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.’ Very close to ‘interest’ after all then. Yet if, like Melanie Phillips, you believe Islamic banking in the UK merely hastens the day when a green flag is raised over Westminster, it’s important to think of ‘usury’ in the later sense, in order to insist that Muslim law is either deluded or deceitful: ‘The whole issue of sharia finance,’ Phillips wrote last year, ‘is based on a fabrication . . . sharia does not proscribe interest. It proscribes usury.’ Were riba just a term for exploitative lending, however, one or two countries might have shuffled nearer to a unitary sharia banking system. But the sharia has few attractions for exchequers and central banks in a modern economy, where the interest rate is a basic tool of monetary policy. The appeal of sharia-compliant banking and investing is in essence to the individual conscience.

The emphasis on risk-sharing in HSBC Amanah’s products – and all Islamic products – is related to the prohibition on interest: it’s obvious to the devout Muslim that collecting interest on a debt involves no risk worth the name; all that’s required, in this view, is for a creditor to sit back and wait. The exposure involved in the mere lending of money – self-evident to a non-Muslim – is an unticked box in Islamic tradition, while savings, for which non-Muslims see interest as a fair reward, give rise to worries about hoarding: money should be out there doing the work that enables trade to flourish. A Treasury expert would say Islamic tradition approves of narrow money; a historian would remember Bacon’s essay ‘Of Seditions and Troubles’ and his famous dictum that muck is ‘not good except it be spread’. (The essay goes on: ‘This is done chiefly by suppressing, or at the least keeping a strait hand upon the devouring trades of usury.’)

Risk-sharing, like generosity, puts human relations on an even keel in the Islamic view. A capitalist can weigh a risk but shouldn’t accept a promise from a partner to eliminate it: that would be ‘risk-transfer’, which denies the inherent truth of risk. (In the eyes of sharia scholars it also opens up a vista of potential exploitation, especially when risk is passed on in unknowable ways, say in the form of a mortgage-backed security with a dodgy rating.) No one must guarantee investors’ money, except against fraud.

...

Debt is a problem in its own right. Borrowing on a regular, matter-of-fact basis is open to question since sharia scholars are wary of conventional banking’s dependence on interbank borrowing. The ideal Islamic bank, Rodney Wilson told me, is financed entirely by its depositors’ money. In practice, there is plenty of imperfection, but a compliant bank will want to stay as close as possible to this model. Like riba, debt also raises fears about poverty and injustice (some Muslim NGOs are as evangelical about Third World debt as their Christian and secular counterparts). In the Hadith, debt presents a troubling face once the possibility of deferment arises, as it might with a debtor in difficulty. Is it a good thing or a bad thing to put off repayment? Does it matter whether the debtor is wealthy or poor? Bad faith is always threatening to break in on the relationship between a debtor and a creditor: a debtor says he can pay back a loan but how can he be sure? All this drags human relations into the realm of uncertainty – gharar – from which faith, the discourse of absolute certainty, was supposed to protect them. In commerce, gharar is best avoided. Whence the persistence of doubts about contracting for things that don’t (yet) exist: tradition might allow for a joiner taking orders on furniture he hadn’t yet made, but it disqualified the sale of a foal that was still in the body of the mare. Even the benign, textbook version of the forward contract – a farmer and a miller agreeing a grain price ahead of the harvest – brings a sense of uneasiness.

The concept of gharar doesn’t just apply to goods whose status is in doubt, but to bargains whose terms are ambiguous and contracting parties whose liability is vague. Though it’s often translated as ‘hazard’, it’s not the same as risk, which Muslim societies understand as well as anyone. Business risk is unavoidable and begins when a cargo plane taxis towards the runway. Gharar has more to do with the commercial imagination running ahead of itself: speculation still troubles Islamic scholars; many take a dim view not just of credit derivatives, the villains of the banking crisis, but of any instrument whose value is based on a contract for an underlying asset rather than the asset itself. This is changing, slowly, as a growing number of experts wrestle with intellectual tradition till they get to a place where derivatives, some in any case, appear acceptable. But no sharia adviser would approve of an Islamic financial institution bundling toxic mortgage debts into securities and packing them off to market, still less buying them up. To a conscientious Muslim, this is the perfect storm, in which opaque liabilities, the unknown nature of the underlying debt, fair-weather forecasts by ratings agencies, plus risk transfer and riba, conspire to wreck large parts of the fleet. Is there anyone clinging to the flotsam, post-9/15, who disagrees?

George Will, Snob

George Will shows how much of a snob he is today in a column devoted to demonizing (of all things) denim jeans. More comments below.

Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults ("Seinfeld," "Two and a Half Men") and cartoons for adults ("King of the Hill"). Seventy-five percent of American "gamers" -- people who play video games -- are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six -- so far -- "Batman" adventures and "Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps," coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling -- thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism -- of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.

Do not blame Levi Strauss for the misuse of Levi's. When the Gold Rush began, Strauss moved to San Francisco planning to sell strong fabric for the 49ers' tents and wagon covers. Eventually, however, he made tough pants, reinforced by copper rivets, for the tough men who knelt on the muddy, stony banks of Northern California creeks, panning for gold. Today it is silly for Americans whose closest approximation of physical labor consists of loading their bags of clubs into golf carts to go around in public dressed for driving steers up the Chisholm Trail to the railhead in Abilene.

This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.

I came across this article through the blog Moon of Alabama, where I made the following comment:

On the one hand, Will has a point about how badly most Americans dress. This point was driven home to me when I lived in South Korea; Koreans dress extremely well, even on occasions when one might not expect them to. In short, Koreans make most Americans look like slobs.

On the other hand, Will only shows himself to be out of touch with the public by writing such a column. Most people will give a rat's @$$ about why people like Will think they shouldn't wear jeans or what clothing Astaire and Kelly wore.

(And, for the record, I gave up jeans long ago, when I lived in Arizona, but that was because it's too hot there to wear denim; I prefer khakis, myself. ;) )

One other comment at M of A was very interesting, where anna missed wrote:

This is one of my favorite and insightful passages by Guy Debord:

The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of speaking in the name of all the other activities. It is hierarchical society’s ambassador to itself, delivering its official messages at a court where no one else is allowed to speak. The most modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic.

Of course what Will is ranting about is the "absurdity" of the elites masquerading as commoners wearing blue jeans as a signifier of our wonderful egalitarian society, when nobody, especially himself, really believes it. And, as the veneers of the great society of spectacle continue to delaminate like cheap plywood in the rain, people like Will gaze wistfully back to a 19th century Dickens world where instead, the poor imitated the rich, wearing filthy collars and threadbare top hats, and not the reverse - thus broadcasting their class. Nonetheless though, like Debord says the grand illusion of modernity is in fact archaic at its root - some of which we are now beginning to witness. And it ain't very pretty.

Update: BTW, did you notice this little gem in the first paragraph I quoted above?

Seventy-five percent of American "gamers" -- people who play video games -- are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote.

Apparently, in Will's Bizarro World, if you play video games, you're much too immature to be allowed to vote. I guess it's not only "George Will, Snob," but "George Will, Closet Aristocrat" as well.

George, why do you hate democracy?