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Climate Progress

Introducing Eric Roston who corrects Tim Flannery about Bjorn Lomborg

By Climate Guest Blogger on Sep 10, 2007 at 3:06 pm

Climate Progress is happy to introduce Eric Roston as a guest blogger. Eric is a former Time magazine writer and author of the forthcoming book, THE CARBON AGE: How Life’s Core Element Became Civilization’s Greatest Threat. You can read his full bio here. Eric is one of the people responsible for Time‘s great coverage on climate change over the years, and I first met him five years ago when TimeWarner was looking for help on becoming greener. Welcome, Eric!

Tim Flannery takes apart Danish statistician Bj¸rn Lomborg in yesterday’s Washington Post Book World. Flannery, whose The Weather Makers is one of the great popular works on climate science, rightfully lambastes Lomborg for cherry-picking climate research. He sees only areas of opportunity to help the world’s poor, dismissing the big picture.

Flannery is dead-wrong on two words in the last paragraph, in a sentence that reads, “On the surface, [Lomborg's book is] a cry from a compassionate conservative not to waste money on combating climate change when that money could be better spent helping the poor.” In fact, Lomborg is not a “compassionate conservative,” in the sense that the phrase was coined and would be understood by Washington Post readers.

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Security

Petraeus Falsely Claims That Six Months Ago, ‘No One Would Have Forecast’ Anbar’s Success

By ThinkProgress on Sep 10, 2007 at 3:06 pm

Today in his testimony to the House, Gen. David Petraeus cited the reduced violence in the Anbar province as evidence that President Bush’s “surge” is working. He added that it would be “premature” to withdraw U.S. troops now, because in January, “no one would have dared to forecast that Anbar Province would have been transformed the way it has in the past 6 months“:

However, in my professional judgment, it would be premature to make recommendations on the pace of such reductions at this time. In fact, our experience in Iraq has repeatedly shown that projecting too far into the future is not just difficult, it can be misleading and even hazardous. The events of the past six months underscore that point. When I testified in January, for example, no one would have dared to forecast that Anbar Province would have been transformed the way it has in the past 6 months.

Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/09/PetraeusAnbar.320.240.flv]

Yet in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Commitee six months ago — just two weeks after Bush first announced his escalation plans — Petraeus admitted that in Anbar, there already appeared “to be a trend in the positive direction where sheikhs are stepping up”:

You’ve seen it, I know, in Anbar province, where it has sort of gone back and forth. And right now there appears to be a trend in the positive direction where sheikhs are stepping up and they do want to be affiliated with and supported by the U.S. Marines and Army forces who are in Anbar province. That was not the case as little as perhaps six months ago, or certainly before that. [Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, 1/23/07]

Bush’s “surge” is not responsible for progress in Anbar. The Sunni sheik who forged the alliance with the Americans “traced the decision to fight al-Qaeda to Sept. 14, 2006, long before the new Bush strategy.” Nevertheless, the Bush administration “dispatched another 4,000 U.S. troops to Anbar to exploit the situation.”

Last week, CNN correspondent Michael Ware also noted that the Sunni insurgency in Anbar offered to work with U.S. troops — not the Iraqi government — to fight al Qaeda in 2003, but the United States rejected the offer. Only “after four years of bloodshed” was the United States “finally ready to accept those terms.”

UPDATE: The Gavel has video of the opening statements by House Armed Services Committee chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) and Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA).

Yglesias

Hope: The New Plan

By ThinkProgress on Sep 10, 2007 at 2:51 pm

Check out this briefing slide from General Petraeus’ presentation:

theplan.png

Basically, the idea is that about nine months from now, we’ll be back to the number of troops we had in Iraq about nine months ago. After that, more stuff is supposed to change . . . maybe . . . sometime . . . if all goes well . . . maybe . . . at some point.

Culture

Mod Your iPhone

By ThinkProgress on Sep 10, 2007 at 2:24 pm

It’s come to my attention recently that some iPhone owners still don’t know how to install third-party software on their phones. That is, perhaps, reasonable since the earliest methods developed were quite complicated and not necessarily appropriate for the faint of heart. These days, though, it’s very simple. Basically, you need to download the Installer.app beta from Nullriver Software’s website and follow the instructions for installing it on your phone. With that done, the Installer’s icon will appear on your phone’s Springboard, and it will allow you to install (and, as necessary, update) the other programs that are available.

The software offerings thus far are a little limited and not all of the programs work very well. But progress is being made rapidly. There are a couple of neat games, the Apollo IM program is a very usable AIM client (and one hopes it’ll soon be expanded to other services), and there are also a bunch of useful utilities. In particular, you’ll probably want things like MobileFinder and SummerBoard to help you access your new software as you add programs.

Media

“Post-Kinetic Environment”

By ThinkProgress on Sep 10, 2007 at 2:24 pm

Ambassador Crocker made a reference to reconstruction teams making funds available for projects in “post-kinetic environments.” In case you don’t get that reference, a “post-kinetic environment” is, for example, a neighborhood that’s been leveled by American military action.

Politics

Rumsfeld: Afghanistan Has ‘Been A Big Success!’

By Amanda Terkel on Sep 10, 2007 at 1:40 pm

rumsfeldup2.jpg In a new interview with GQ, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld makes it clear that he’s not ready to discuss any of his “regrets.” “I mean you’d always wish things were perfect, but they never are,” he states. One area where he has no regrets is on the war in Afghanistan:

“Look at Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, 28 million people are free. They have their own president, they have their own parliament. Improved a lot on the streets.”

All your theories worked there, in other words.

“It’s been a big success!”

Perhaps in comparison to Iraq, Afghanistan has been a “big success.” But in reality, the country has been abandoned in the war on terrorism:

– Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, recently said that security in his country had “definitely deteriorated.” A former national security official called it “a very diplomatic understatement.”

– At least 20 Afghans were killed in two suicide bombings today. Such attacks are on the rise, with the Taliban carrying out “103 suicide bombings in Afghanistan in the first eight months of 2007, a 69 percent increase over the same period last year.”

– For the second year in a row, “Afghanistan produced record levels of opium in 2007,” led by a “staggering 45 percent increase in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand Province.”

Despite taking credit for the toppling the Taliban, Rumsfeld had a role in Afghanistan’s deterioration. In Feb. 2002, then Secretary of State Colin Powell proposed that “American troops join the small international peacekeeping force patrolling Kabul and help Karzai extend his influence beyond the capital.” Yet Rumsfeld blocked his proposal. Rumsfeld only “reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops” when the situation was clearly spiraling out of control.

When asked by the GQ interviewer whether he misses President Bush, Rumsfeld gave a “wry Rummy smile” and replied, “Um, no.” But he said he still sees Cheney. He also claimed that he continues to receive “hundreds and hundreds” of letters “complimenting” him on his service to the country.

Yglesias

They Really Hate Us

By ThinkProgress on Sep 10, 2007 at 1:28 pm

mosquesmall.jpg

During his opening statement, Rep. Ike Skelton referenced a poll just released today showing that Iraqis don’t believe the surge is working. It seems that Skelton, like me, made the mistake of reading The Washington Post‘s summary of the poll, rather than the BBC writeup which highlights the much more striking fact that “nearly 60% see attacks on US-led forces as justified.”

This is something we’ve seen several times in polls of Iraqi opinion, but it never seems to penetrate. It seems to me that even 10-25 percent of the population actively approving of attacks on American troops might make our mission there impossible. But when an actual majority support killing our soldiers, then how, exactly, are the soldiers supposed to help Iraq’s population? It just doesn’t make sense, on any level, to think that a giant military deployment can play a constructive role under these circumstances.

Politics

O’Hanlon pushes Iraq line in right wing press tour.

By Matt Corley on Sep 10, 2007 at 1:27 pm

This morning, Brookings analyst Michael O’Hanlon published a column on National Review Online pre-emptively defending Gen. David Petraeus’ testimony to Congress about Iraq. He followed it up with an appearance on Laura Ingraham’s conservative radio show. As Matthew Yglesias points out, O’Hanlon appears to now be casting “himself out of the broad left-of-center community in favor of becoming a conservative movement propagandist whose salary just happens to be paid by Brookings.”

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