Author Archives: Joel

Joel's avatar

About Joel

Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 10 October 2005 · 9:35 pm

Anti-DDT Trumps Antimalaria in the West

An op-ed by Sebastian Mallaby in today’s Washington Post hits on a topic that was once close to my liver and is now closer to my heart, enforced disarmament in the battle against malaria.

Some 500 million people still get the disease annually, and at least 1 million die, but the World Health Organization refuses to recommend DDT spraying. The U.S. government’s development programs don’t purchase any of the chemical. In June President Bush made a great show of announcing a new five-year push against malaria; DDT appears to play no part in his plans.

But the worst culprit is the European Union. It not only refuses to fund DDT spraying: In the case of at least one country, it has also threatened to punish DDT use with import restrictions.

That country is Uganda, which suffered a crippling 12 million cases of malaria in a population of 27 million in 2003. The Ugandans know perfectly well that DDT can help them: As Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute recently testified to Congress, DDT spraying in one part of the country in 1959 and 1960 reduced the prevalence of malaria from 22 percent to less than 1 percent. Ugandans also know the record in South Africa, where the cessation of DDT spraying in 1996 allowed the number of malaria cases to multiply tenfold and where the resumption of spraying in 2000 helped to bring the caseload down by almost 80 percent.

So the Ugandans, not unreasonably, would like to use DDT. But in February the European Union waved an anti-scientific flag at them. The Europeans said Uganda might need to institute a new food monitoring program to assuage the health concerns of their consumers, even though hundreds of millions have been exposed to DDT without generating any solid evidence that the chemical harms people. The E.U. proposal might constitute an impossible administrative burden on a poor country. Anti-malaria campaigners say that other African governments are wary of even considering DDT, having seen what Uganda has gone through.

Please read the rest.

I’ve only experienced the mildest form of malaria, Plasmodium vivax. It was unpleasant enough, but P. falciparum is the true killer. And it’s spreading.

UPDATE: Two discussion threads in diametrically opposed blogs question Mallaby’s take and tease out some of the finer points of the DDT vs. malaria issue. Enviro-hawk Tim Lambert argues that the E.U. is only concerned to prohibit the use of DDT on agricultural products that it imports. Everyone seems to agree that’s a dangerous and counterproductive use of DDT, in that it fosters DDT-resistant strains of malaria more quickly than localized use does and can endanger other species. So agricultural use should be banned. There seems to be much less agreement about how much and how widespread DDT resistance already is. The most effective use of DDT seems to be spraying it on the inside walls of houses or on mosquito nets. Libertarian Ron Bailey‘s piece sparks a debate about how effective DDT is relative to other chemicals, what the relative costs are, and how important human life is relative to that of other living creatures.

Leave a comment

Filed under malaria

by | 10 October 2005 · 9:20 pm

Belated Happy Hangul Day!

Hangul Day (한글날) was 9 October. The ever-observant Language Hat has more, and Language Log has much, much more.

Leave a comment

Filed under Korea, language

by | 10 October 2005 · 9:12 pm

A Nondiplomat at a Nonembassy in Taiwan

In Taiwan I had to get used to the unusual situation of conducting diplomacy in a country with which America wasn’t supposed to have diplomatic relations. To wit, at AIT [American Institute in Taiwan] we were officially consultants under contract to the State Department working in an unofficial capacity at a nonembassy to advance America’s interests in Taiwan. It was a mouthful, and the semantics and diplomatic gyrations that American representatives in Taiwan had to go through were at times humorous, at times frustrating.

Starting with the mundane, we had to develop a new vocabulary to conduct diplomacy. The embassy became an institute in 1979, and I was its second director, following veteran diplomat and fellow China hand Chuck Cross. At the institute, there were no American flags flying, no national days celebrated, nor Marines in red, white, and blue. Instead of a political section, we had a general affairs section or GAS, perhaps an appropriate acronym for political reporting. Rather than a consular section, there was a travel service section. In our daily lives, we had to be careful to adhere to certain rules. If I were addressed by a Taiwanese journalist as ambassador, I had to ignore him. If at some function or performance we were seated in the special section reserved for diplomats, we had to suggest that this was not quite right. Most of the time we ended up sitting there anyway. Should the agressive Taiwanese press have caught wind of any protocol slipup on our part and used it to trumpet recognition of an upgrading of the relationship, we would have caught hell from both Washington and Peking.

The most frustrating part was that we were prohibited from meeting with Taiwanese Foreign Ministry and Defense officials as well as with the president himself in their offices, nor could they visit us in ours. We could meet with a designated group of Taiwanese foreign service officers who staffed AIT’s counterpart organization on the Taiwan side. But we had to transact the majority of our discussions in other venues, like restaurants, country clubs, golf courses, and private homes. Perhaps the most serious casualty of such restrictions was our waistlines. Dinners and cocktail parties–the staple of most diplomatic posts–took on added importance in Taiwan. A rich Chinese diet can wreak havoc with an American-fed body, as it did with mine.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), pp. 238-239

Leave a comment

Filed under China

by | 9 October 2005 · 9:36 am

Asashoryu Loses in Las Vegas

After narrowly winning last month’s Aki Basho in Tokyo, Asashoryu has lost again, this time in Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS — Ozeki Tochiazuma beat yokozuna Asashoryu in the final to win the first-day tournament of sumo’s exhibition tour of Las Vegas on Friday.

Thirty-eight wrestlers in the top-tier makuuchi division took part in the competition, which will be followed by similar one-day mini tournaments for two more days during the tour. The spectators Friday were entertained by humorous introductions of each wrestler and explanations of techniques by Hawaiian-born former ozeki Konishiki in the opening ceremony and between bouts.

Warms my heart to hear it. I hope Asa loses a bit at the casinos, too. He can well afford it.

The Las Vegas Sun reports:

Tourists gawked as the athletes drank, smoked, played slots and held court at the Baccarat tables.

The buffet at Mandalay Bay, the hotel-casino hosting the event, added 2,500 pieces of sushi, pickled daikon and miso soup to its spread, just feet away from a steaming heap of mashed potatoes.

Japundit has a reporter on the scene!

BTW, here‘s a thorough analysis of September’s Aki Basho that trashes Bulgarian upstart Kotooshu’s actual performance during his bouts.

The Bulgarian’s 12-0 start was highly inflated. There’s no denying that Kotooshu is extremely athletic, agile, skilled, and well-rounded in his technique. There’s no denying Kotooshu’s future in this sport. And, there’s no denying that Kotooshu’s sumo this basho sucked. I’m not talking about his magical escapes at the tawara because he did snatch victory from the jaws of defeat numerous times. I’m talking about his approach to the bouts and his execution. We were onto this early on in the basho. Not a single word of praise over the first three days, and then on day four this statement: “if he keeps this up and manages a 12-3 record, the Association will hesitate to consider Kotooshu’s promotion to Ozeki because his sumo content this basho is so poor.” Sex symbol Makiko Uchidate of the Yokozuna Deliberation Council also wasn’t fooled. She had nothing positive to say about the Sekiwake after the basho, and she also publicly stated that she doesn’t think he will secure promotion to Ozeki in Kyushu. It wasn’t all bad. After being called out by Asashoryu mid-week, Kotooshu did finally win a bout moving forward against Kyokushuzan on day 8. He followed that up with an excellent win against Iwakiyama on day 9, and he thoroughly dominated both Ozeki (Tochiazuma on day 11 and Chiyotaikai on senshuraku). But that’s it; only four solid bouts. Other than that it was bad sumo.

Leave a comment

Filed under sumo

by | 8 October 2005 · 5:37 pm

Gannon on Afghanistan’s Abandonment in 1992

After the Soviet Union withdrew, the world’s interest in Afghanistan flagged. When the Najibullah government didn’t collapse, the international community did not have the wherewithal to deal with Afghanistan, plot its future, find sustainable leaders. World events quickly overshadowed Afghanistan. By the end of 1989, just months after the Soviet withdrawal, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, Reagan declared communism defeated, and the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. Afghanistan was yesterday’s war. The wider world had done the most dangerous of things. It had stuffed this tiny country with massive amounts of weapons, including the precious Stingers, had turned over the countryside to the volatile discordant mix of mujahedeen factions, and then had walked away. For the United States, the war it was really interested in had been won; the proxy war was of little interest. The mujahedeen were the victors, the Communists were the losers. It didn’t matter that the mujahedeen leaders had proved themselves to be murderous men who had signed and broken several accords. They vowed to put aside their territorial, ethnic, and religious divides, even traveling to Saudi Arabia to visit Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, to seal their promise. But they never kept their promises. And no one cared.

Najibullah was forced to negotiate his own removal, and the mujahedeen were eventually given Kabul, despite their bitter rivalries and bloodletting. The task of negotiating this was handed over to the United Nations. In April 1992, the United Nations fulfilled its mission and Najibullah agreed to step down, despite the fact that there was no coherent alternative government ready to replace him. No sustainable form of a mature government had been cobbled together. No one had even tried. The world had moved on without making even one attempt to find an alternative to the warfaring mujahedeen leaders. The United States wanted to give the spoils of its last Cold War battle to its mujahedeen allies and get out. The world had no interest in carefully assembling a unified government to rule Afghanistan, to rebuild and bring stability. That would have taken sustained involvement, and the forceful removal from the scene of some of the more vicious mujahedeen. Instead, the international community opted for a quick exit.

It was a ludicrous mistake to hand over Kabul to the mujahedeen. It set in motion the chaos that would eventually bring the Taliban to power. But the international community wasn’t looking to Afghanistan’s future. It wanted out.

And so Afghanistan was handed over to the fractious, feuding mix of tribal warlords, who had been elevated to the status of mujahedeen factional leaders to fight the Soviet Union. Their stature had been enhanced by the billions of dollars and weapons they had received from the United States and the rest of the world.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. 8-9

Leave a comment

Filed under Afghanistan

by | 8 October 2005 · 4:20 pm

The Nearly Invisible Japanese Military

The Times (of London) on 6 October carried a report by Richard Lloyd Parry and Robert Thomson on the ambiguous status of the Japanese military.

IF YOU encountered Tsutomu Mori as he travels to work in central Tokyo, you would never guess what he does for a living. Every day, hundreds of people like him in well-pressed suits and shiny shoes converge upon a well-guarded compound in the Ichigaya district.

Only there does he put on his olive uniform with its rows of medal ribbons and four stars. Safely concealed from public gaze, he emerges as General Mori, chief of staff of the Ground Self-Defence Force.

For 40 years he has risen up the ranks of one of the best-equipped military forces in the world. He meets his military counterparts from all over the globe (General Sir Mike Jackson was a recent visitor). But 60 years after the end of the Second World War, during which his father fought the British in Burma, he is constrained from wearing his uniform in public or from referring to his organisation as an army.

“It’s a delicate and complex question,” he told The Times. “For people like me it’s difficult to wear a uniform in a crowded train.” This is the continuing paradox of the Japanese military: despite being more active in the world than at any time since 1945, it remains close to an embarrassment for many of its countrymen.

That reminds me how embarrassed I was during the one day a week that we had to wear our uniforms to class during my only year of ROTC at the University of Richmond in 1967-68. (It would have been worse than embarrassing at a lot of other colleges, both then and now.) I ended up dropping ROTC for journalism class going into my sophomore year, but then dropped out of school altogether at midyear.

My only personal experience relevant to any “resurgent Japanese militarism” during my recent 2 months in Japan involved the combined recruiting office for all branches of the SDF on the outside ground floor of the busy Ashikaga Tobu line train station (60+ trains daily to and from Tokyo). The glass-fronted office was as big as the travel agency offices that can be found at any such train station. It had several large posters, like any travel office, but no racks of flyers and no visible customers. In fact, I never saw any activity whatsoever in that office, despite passing it several dozen times during normal business hours.

The way Japanese demographics are headed, the SDF is going to have to either recruit foreign legions or rely more heavily on robots in order to sustain itself, just as many Japanese factories are already doing.

via Foreign Dispatches

Leave a comment

Filed under Japan, military

by | 7 October 2005 · 9:58 pm

Bush and Deng Strike an Oil Bargain, 1977

On the business front, the trip with [George H.W.] Bush [in 1977] was more of a success. Hugh Liedtke, the chairman of Pennzoil, met with Minister of Foreign Trade Li Qiang, and during a meeting with Deng Xiaoping at which Bush and I were present, Bush made significant headway in persuading Vice Premier Deng to allow American oil companies to work in China. At that point in 1977, Deng, who had been restored to his posts earlier in the year with the help of powerful backing in the military, was about a year away from introducing his initial plans for economic reform in China. An old oil man himself; Bush “sold” Deng on the concept of a “risk contract” in which U.S. companies would assume the significant costs of exploration for oil in places like the South China Sea and then share the proceeds from production if oil were discovered. Deng liked the idea because it would allow China to bring into the country free of charge the technology and capital needed to exploit oil resources and then still share in the profits. Deng also knew that his own oil people had oversold him on their capabilities, leaving China with semi-submersible rigs that no one knew how to use and jack-up rigs that had turned over in the Gulf of Bo Hai in northeast China. The concept of “risk contracts” became the basis for joint ventures in oil exploration between the United States and China.

Bush’s meeting with Deng built on the acquaintance they had formed during his posting in China and laid the foundation for future meetings, including two more in the next three years that I would also be privileged to attend. In spite of their diminished political statures in 1977–Bush being out of power and Deng having just returned to his government posts from being temporarily purged–I believe that Bush and Deng sized each other up as future leaders. Just as former President Nixon and Henry Kissinger had forged personal ties with Deng’s predecessors, Mao and Chou En-lai, Bush was developing a relationship with Deng that eventually became critical in sustaining U.S.-China ties in troubled times and advancing them in better times. When the two men ascended to the tops of their respective governments, their personal connection facilitated a blending of American and Chinese interests into a workable formula. This congeniality of leaders at the highest levels is, I believe, one of the keys to managing the Sino-American relationship.

SOURCE: China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, by James Lilley with Jeffrey Lilley (PublicAffairs, 2004), pp. 203-204

Maybe not just the Sino-American relationship.

Leave a comment

Filed under China

by | 7 October 2005 · 9:26 pm

A Council of War in Afghanistan, 1996

[A] high-level secret meeting brought together some of the most radical of groups and nations, who accused the West then in 1996, a full five years before the September 11 attacks, of waging a war against Islam. The participants urged a counteroffensive and spoke of attacking the United States and the West. They spoke of their hatred for the West and their revulsion for governments in the Middle East that sympathized with the West.

Fundamentalist organizations in Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and other Gulf states were represented, as were militant groups from Pakistan, Algeria and Sudan. They sat beside dissidents who lived in London, Tehran, and Beirut. They had come together to plot a war against American and Western interests.

Convinced that the West had already begun a war against Muslims, they wanted to retaliate, go on the offensive, and take the battle to the enemy on their own terms. This was not their first gathering. There had been at least one earlier meeting in Iran to lay the ground for this gathering, to settle religious and ideological differences that would allow these men to come together to wage a single war against a single enemy–the West….

The men talked for another two hours until Osama bin Laden joined the gathering. At his side was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. It was Sayyaf who spoke first. Bin Laden listened. Sayyaf shared bin Laden’s revulsion for U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. He praised the violent bombing one month earlier in al-Khubar in Saudi Arabia that had killed more than twenty U.S. servicemen, for which al Qaeda had been held responsible. Sayyaf’s small brown eyes seemed to glow as he recounted the bombing. He reveled in the description of it, saying it should be a lesson to America to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia. He likened it to the 1981 and 1983 bombings in Beirut of the U.S. Embassy and its military compound that had killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and led to the American withdrawal from Lebanon.

Sayyaf’s speech inspired an Iranian to call for an all-out offensive against America. He was frenzied. He warned that the Muslim world was facing its gravest conspiracy. It wasn’t clear whether he had been sent by the government or whether he represented a jihadi group. Another speaker joined in, this time from Bahrain. His words were angry, his voice rising as he spoke: “We are enduring coercion and humiliation in our own country.” Then an Egyptian spoke. He castigated his own government for spurning an offer from Syria to mediate its differences with Iran….

In this way, in mid-1996, high in the lawless tribal lands of northern Pakistan, the terrorist networking began…. Sayyaf’s men had been among those who had welcomed bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996, along with others from that mujahedeen government who had also been returned to power by the United States in 2001. The same men had encouraged and allowed terrorist training camps when they were in power from 1992 until 1996. They had lied to the CIA in September 1996 when the agency had requested their help in finding bin Laden. The CIA’s intelligence was so flawed that it wrongly said that the Taliban brought bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996 and that the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, knew bin Laden before he came to Afghanistan in 1996. He didn’t. It was Abdul Sayyaf, America’s “ally,” who had welcomed bin Laden.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. xvi-xviii

Leave a comment

Filed under Afghanistan, Iran

by | 6 October 2005 · 8:47 pm

The Inspirational Abdul Rasul Sayyaf

In 1992-96, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf was a “factional leader who controlled interior ministry, whose soldiers committed atrocities, operated training camps and welcomed Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan from Sudan” under the U.S.-supported Mujahedeen warlord government that drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Nowadays, the same Abdul Rasul Sayyaf serves as a key advisor to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

One August day in 2004, when I was having breakfast with Hamid Karzai on the lush green lawns of the presidential palace in Kabul, he described Sayyaf as an ideologue in a way that sounded complimentary. But Sayyaf is a vicious man, whose followers have carried out unspeakable atrocities and horrific massacres of Afghanistan’s ethnic Hazaras.

Abdul Rasul Sayyaf inspires violence in others: Abu Sayyaf, a Philippine terrorist organization, was named for him by its founder, Abdurajak Janjalani. Janjalani was a disciple and a student of Sayyaf’s who received military training from him. The Indonesian Mohammed Nasir Bin Abbas, alias Solaiman, who was arrested in Indonesia in April 2003, was trained under Sayyaf between 1987 and 1991. Bin Abbas used the terrorist training he received from Sayyaf to set up Camp Hodeibia in the Philippines, according to Maria Ressa’s account in Seeds of Terror (New York: 2003). This camp was later taken over by Umar Patek, an Indonesian who has been implicated in the 2002 bombing on the resort island of Bali in which more than 200 people were killed.

SOURCE: I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan, by Kathy Gannon (PublicAffairs, 2005), pp. ix-x, xv

Leave a comment

Filed under Afghanistan, Indonesia

by | 5 October 2005 · 7:40 pm

Impearls on Entrepreneurism and Its Enemies

Impearls is back to blogging more regularly in his trademark long and thoughtful essays with footnotes. His latest post bemoans the derision of all corporate entrepreneurism by too many on the political left.

It’s been obvious and has disturbed me for some time the way in which supposed “liberals” demonize private enterprise and those institutional vehicles which comprise it — companies and corporations — as the veritable Princes of Darkness.

The whole essay is worth reading, but I’ll cite just a couple of his supporting quotes.

Andrew Sullivan:

Thank God for the evil pharmaceutical companies. One day, when the history of this period is written, I have a feeling we will look back with astonishment as we recognize that advances in medical science, particularly pharmaceuticals, were arguably one of the most significant developments of this era. And yet the people who pioneered these breakthroughs were … demonized and attacked. Baffling and bizarre. I’m merely grateful the attacks haven’t stopped the research progress. They’ve merely slowed it.

Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America:

On the left bank of the Ohio work is connected with the idea of slavery, but on the right with well-being and progress; on the one side it is degrading, but on the other honorable; on the left bank no white laborers are to be found, for they would be afraid of being like the slaves; for work people must rely on the Negroes; but one will never see a man of leisure on the right bank: the white man’s intelligent activity is used for work of every sort. […]

The white man on the right bank, forced to live by his own endeavors, has made material well-being the main object of his existence; as he lives in a country offering inexhaustible resources to his industry and continual inducements to activity, his eagerness to possess things goes beyond the ordinary limits of human cupidity; tormented by a longing for wealth, he boldly follows every path to fortune that is open to him; he is equally prepared to turn into a sailor, pioneer, artisan, or cultivator, facing the labors or dangers of these various ways of life with even constancy; there is something wonderful in his resourcefulness and a sort of heroism in his greed for gain. [emphasis added –Imp.]

Virginia Postrel notes related ironies in a recent article in Forbes on Criminalizing Science.

U.S. scientists and their supporters tend to assume biomedical research is threatened by know-nothings on religious crusades. But as the Canadian law illustrates, the long-term threat to genetic research comes less from the religious right than from the secular left. Canada’s law forbids all sorts of genetic manipulations, many of them currently theoretical. It’s a crime, for instance, to alter inheritable genes.

Where do these truly evangelical beliefs of the secular left come from? Medieval agrarian repulsion at urban corruption (like the Moravian Brethren)? High-born disdain for the commoners who produced the surplus wealth that funded noble endeavors? A combination of both?

Leave a comment

Filed under economics