amnesty plz? check yes or no, thx.

In May, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent an 18-page letter to President Bush. But now, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has set up an e-mail address to communicate with insurgents. Holler back.

What's next, Ehud Olmert texting pics of his grandkids to Hamas members?

Dumb joke, but it is good folks are communicating, I suppose. Hopefully something good comes from it.

Nationalism's stock falling... wait, rising?

Dan Drezner writes about the Arcelor-Mittal Steel merger in Europe under the heading "Capitalism 1, Nationalism 0." True enough.

But then he writes about a SOCOM report that determines nationalism is on the rise in Latin America! Big surprise there.

Of course the reasons for the difference between the regions' actions are varied. Some might include: the Andes, domestic politics (bingo), a lack of integrated EU-like institutions in Latin America, Europe's a 50-year tradition of integration (or at least cooperation) that was originally somewhat forced by external pressure, etc. And those latter two points are really just focusing on Europe. There are traditions and trends in Latin America as well that come into play.

As far as America's role in the world, perhaps it's good that Latin America isn't banding together to counterbalance U.S. power. Maybe the United States isn't seen to be as much of a threat as some suggest. Then again, the European development isn't necessarily any sort of balancing act, but free trade winning out over nationalism - as Drezner discusses.

Bird flu passes from person to person

For the first time, the H5N1 virus passed from one human to another, according to the NY Times.

Scientists have suspected this has happened a few times - I recall one case in Turkey in particular - but this is the first times it's been confirmed. Just over 200 people have been diagnosed with the bird flu.

China-Africa energy pact 'based on equality'

China's new energy partnership with several African states is based on equality and mutual benefit. Sounds harmless enough. The benevolent source that reported this news was China Daily. Another newspaper with a similarly pleasant report is the People's Daily. This latter article also quotes the Chinese premier as pointing that "China had never taken one inch of land on the continent in its long history with Africa." True enough. The article didn't mention who might have done such a thing, though.

China Daily does point out, in another article, a fact of which I was not aware: China upgraded its relationship with South Africa in 2004 to a "strategic parternship," which probably rightly raised some eyebrows elsewhere in the world. South Africa doesn't have the bomb anymore, of course, and they're strategic partners with the United States, but still. Interesting.

Oh, and the China Daily article that mentions the relationship shift has another gem of a headline: Sino-S. Africa ties benefit developing world. Great!

Please excuse my cynicism, sarcasm, etc.

And while we're on the subject, the BBC reports some other items about recent China-Africa news. China and Zimbabwe signed an energy deal (China wants chrome; will build power plants), but it's not as if Robert Mugabe and Hu Jintao are high-fiving at press conferences. China has ben playing it cool: the Zimbabwean VP came to Beijing to sign the deal.

Russia, Italy in an ever closer union?

When the European Council - the leaders of the states in the EU - gathered last week, they mostly agreed to postpone more constitution talks, and agreed to disagree on some other issues. Not much content, not much accomplished.

But as Romano Prodi visits Moscow this week, reports the BBC, Italy and Russia are discussing cooperation of two types: energy and defense.

Examples like this show the need for the EU to get serious about a common foreign and security policy - or ditch the idea altogether. The UK is already best buds with the United States in the Joint Strike Fighter program, and now Italy is flirting with Russia. Clearly, member states are looking elsewhere.

But can the EU handle it? With Euroskepticism bubbling over in the UK in particular, perhaps the EU should give it up. If the value of Rapid Reaction Forces can be shown to be worth the cost (both monetary and in terms of sovereignty), the UK and other states might be more on board. But the EU has been so slow and visionless on the issue in the past few years that states might lose whatever faith they once had in the CFSP.

Pakistani journalist killed; government suspected

This is a few days old, but perhaps under-reported.

A Pakistani journalist was found shot dead Friday, which seems to be related to a photograph he took of a bomb site that showed what appeared to be evidence of a U.S. Hellfire missile - contradicting Pakistani government reports.

The government originally said an al-Qaida figure died while making bombs, but it now seems a U.S. drone (which have been reported in Pakistan) fired the missile.

Is the Pakistani government murdering journalists to hide U.S. operations in its airspace?

Using the euro in Slovenia

When Slovenia becomes, on the first day of 2007, the first former Communist country to adopt the euro, some math will be needed to determine new prices. So the government is giving everyone a calculator.

And how does one convert a price from Slovenian tolars to euros? Easy - just divide by 239.67!

Airbus seeks (more) state aid

The IHT reports that struggling Airbus might soon ask for more help from European governments to deal with the company's "crisis."

The U.S. Trade Rep, however, says that if Europe does provide the assistance, America will take the EU back to the WTO mat. And that will most likely be messy. Again.

As N. Korea reportedly prepares to launch a missile...

Some might think of reports of North Korean missile activity as a "Wag the Dog" distraction from bad news in Iraq. But the latest news on North Korea, as reported in today's New York Times, should not be taken lightly.

However, one should also realize that missile preparations don't mean missiles will necessarily launch - at least any time soon. The last time North Korea had the world in a tizzy was August 31, 1998, when it did in fact launch a satellite (on a Taep'o-dong rocket) directly over Japan.

That launch had been predicted, but it was almost a year earlier that "A U.S. military satellite detect[ed] the deployment of a Nodong-1 missile in possible preparation for a test launch," according to the Wisconsin project.

So yes this is serious, but it might be a little while before launch. Hopefully no such event occurs.

UPDATE: The AP says there's only a launch window of one month now that fuel has been loaded. So nevermind that 11-month gap that happened in the 1998 situation, perhaps.

Side note: I was in Japan in August of 1998, on a Marine base, and things did get rather tense after the launch. But I was in southern Japan, so it's not as if a missile passed directly over my head.

'What are your academic interests?'

I usually say security and the European Union. Honestly, though, in the most general sense, my single overarching interest is in states. These units of political division have been around for four or five hundred years, but one wonders how long they'll last. Why have the borders from colonialism largely remained intact? To what degree will states converge in a supranational world government, if they ever will? Will states break down into simply ethnic entities - as many states already are, to various and often slight degrees, but as we see increasingly in the Balkans and parts of Africa, for example?

But perhaps saying "states" is being too general. Studying the implications of global politics operating with states as the primary actors, though, is a worthy study, and has been the focus of many scholars who might list international organization, world politics, realism, and/or neoliberal institutionalism among their interests. (Neoliberal institutionalists probably wouldn't list "states" as an area of interest, but state-based realism "remains the bete-noire of every non-realist approach," according to Jeffrey Taliaferro).

And I most often list "security" and "the European Union" as the areas in which I'm most interested because they provide excellent arenas for the study of states. Security, in many ways, is the hallmark of the state - whether via the monopoly of legitimate force (Weber) domestically or in the international community. And although states might cede some sovereignty to international organizations on fishing rights and pollution standards, they almost always balk when they feel they're losing the ability to defend their borders or otherwise keep the military they see fit. Therefore, analyses of states' actions respective to security can provide indications of how those states value sovereignty.

Evaluating the actions of states in regards to security isn't the only way to measure perceptions of sovereignty. Other methods include surveying popular attitudes - on the subject of security integration, in the EU's case, but the citizens of any state on the subjects of immigration, border control, or economic interdependence. Perceptions of the value of sovereignty are a valuable indicator of people's opinions on the general concept of the state, I believe.

Any discussion of state sovereignty and security can transition into a discussion of the European Union, because a state's right to independent security is one asset that politicians of European states (note that I did not say "European politicians") don't dare give away to Brussels. This was the subject of my senior honors thesis at the end of my undergrad. There is a European Defense Agency, but it is operated intergovernmentally as opposed to supranationally.

The European Union is a unique organization, of course, and we shouldn't expect to see states of any other region, much less the entire world, join into a similar community. Ethnic identity does play a role in the formation of such organizations, which is part of the reason why Latin America might be the region with the most potential for a closer economic union - a stronger and more inclusive Mercosur. The Andean community would have to be included before the organization would be more comparable with the EU. And even then, Mercosur doesn't have the from-the-ashes-of-WWII-and-then-the-Cold-War mentality that has continued to inspire Western Europe. Other regional organizations, such as ASEAN and the proposed North American security and economic community, similarly lack a comparable 20th century experience. So the EU is unique, and won't be fully copied, at least for a long time. But it's fascinating to watch it evolve.

So perhaps I should say, "States in general, more specifically as a basis for studying security and the European Union, among other subjects."

The image of a journalist

Does it matter how a journalist dresses and grooms him or herself? Has televsion media - and more recently and more visibly, the talk show circuit - changed that? The above Washington Post icon for the new PostGlobal feature made me think of the subject.

David Ignatius, at left, has more of what I consider the traditional journalist's image. Open collar. Hair a little mussed. Sunburnt - perhaps he just got off the plane from some foreign shore? You can imagine him sleeping on a cot, or in one of the bombed out Lebanese hotels Tom Friedman describes so well.

Fareed Zakaria, at right, looks a bit more suave. Dark suit. Hair gel. If he just returned from reporting overseas, it appears he was in air conditioning 95 percent of the time. And hey, is that lip gloss?

Granted, some of these differences are involuntary: I'm thinking age and hairline. But the style of dress and grooming are different.

Of course, one dresses according to one's beat. Ignatius might be covering a warzone, while Zakaria might be covering diplomatic meetings and interviewing CEOs about globalization. Perhaps that's why we see the contrasting appearances.

The challenge, though, is to have combat-zone cred while not looking too bombed-out yourself. Ignatius looks like he's been there, worn the flak jacket. He's dressed informally, but do viewers really want to hear about conflict from someone who looks like a corporate VP?

On the other hand, perhaps Zakaria is more keen to the interests of talk-show circuit. Tweed and earth tones can be charming and add authenticity, but they might not command the respect of the viewer.

But on the third hand, maybe it's all superficial and doesn't matter.

Iran's VP goes to Nuremberg

Football, bringing the world together. Or at least bringing Iranian officials to the city where Nazi war criminals were prosecuted.

This BBC article begins with this sentence:

Hundreds of people have gathered in Nuremberg to protest against the Iranian leader ahead of a World Cup match between Iran and Mexico.

After reading the entire article, I was still stuck on the first word. Only hundreds?

Marine squad leader discusses Haditha killings

Newspapers today have what I believe is the first account of someone directly involved in the Haditha killings, a Marine sergeant squad leader.

The Washington Post's article (linked above), by Josh White - but with contributed reporting by USMC expert Thomas E. Ricks - has more insight than most. Check it out.

While 24 dead is obviously an unusually high number for civilians killed by small-arms fire, the accounts of the situation do make at least some of the deaths explainable. Picture it: You take fire from a building, you go in to clear the building, and civilians are mixed in with those who are/were shooting at you.

It is because of these kinds of situations that Marines are taught at recruit training about February 1968, when Marines suffered 75 percent casualties in urban combat in Hue City in South Vietnam. Urban combat is the worst kind, and to be avoided, Marine recruits are told. Of course, since we've been in Iraq, almost every month has been like February 1968.

Perhaps urban combat - also called Military Operations in Built-up Areas (MOBA) and Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) - needs to be re-evaluated... yet again. Seriously, what does one do?

The Marines did have the option of just driving away - leaving behind some people who had tried to kill them, chalking the potential firefight up as too dangerous. They also could have gone through the house more slowly, and been more hesitant to fire, which would have almost certainly resulted in more Marines dead. There must be some sort of middle ground, and that middle ground is the policy Marines usually follow: avoiding civilian deaths at almost all possible cost. Almost, not all.

Of course, I wasn't there, and perhaps they weren't hesitant at all, and there was some blind rage involved. I do refuse to believe that Marines went into the house with the mindset, "We're going to kill everyone in this building." But 24 is a hell of a high number for "collateral damage." And that's why John Murtha and others have immediately assumed Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

Again, 24 seems just about impossible to justify, but hopefully more folks will wait until an actual trial before making such judgments. The right has been just as bad. Sean Hannity, for example, has bent over backwards to justfiy the killings and come up with explanations for how they must have been the right thing to do.

I look forward to hearing more accounts of the situation.

American workers... we can do it!

If anyone ever tells you that American workers can't handle the tough jobs... that we can't handle hard work, or high-tech engineering jobs... tell them about this new factory!

(Sorry.)

Canada as a terrorist target?

I was listening to some David Cross comedy mp3s last weekend, recorded in 2003 or so. In one segment, he made the joke/argument that many others have, and it used to be a pretty solid point:

If Islam-inspired terrorists "can't stand freedom," as George W. Bush would have us believe, why aren't they attacking Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands?

And Cross did specifically mention Canada first. Well, the Canada arrests - assuming there is merit to the charges - are the latest in a series of reminders that this type of ideology knows no state boundaries, and any society seems fertile ground for its propagation. The Middle East is no stranger to terrorism, but in recent years Islamic fundamentalists have struck Africa, Russia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. More recently, Spain and Great Britain were hit, and then there was the case of Belgian Muriel Degauque - who blew herself up in Iraq. At first, attacks by radical Muslims outside of Southwest Asia seemed to be an exception, and attacks in a country by citizens of that country were quite rare. But the exception is becoming the norm.

The Edmonton Sun sums it up with the headline "Homegrown terrorism is the new reality," and has a pretty decent piece about the subject.

Note: The suggestion that terrorists "can't stand freedom" is still a gross oversimplification, but so is the notion of certain states being terrorism-free because they have comfy social safety nets.

The sins of the father

One of the two remaining candidates for Peru's presidency tries to find the proper distance from his father's racist - yet, of course, popular with some voters - views. It reminds me of when Mel Gibson's Holocaust-denying father was the subject of a NY Times Magazine cover story, right before "The Passion of the Christ" debuted.

The European-descent vs. indigenous power struggle is a fascinating aspect of Latin American politics. Fascinating, because it's not even a topic of discussion in the United States and Canada, where our indigenous populations were largely decimated, of course..