GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT 02.13.2007
Russia's Great-Power Strategy
By George Friedman
Most speeches at diplomatic gatherings aren't worth the time it takes to listen to them. On rare occasion, a speech is delivered that needs to be listened to carefully. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave such a speech over the weekend in Munich, at a meeting on international security. The speech did not break new ground; it repeated things that the Russians have been saying for quite a while. But the venue in which it was given and the confidence with which it was asserted signify a new point in Russian history. The Cold War has not returned, but Russia is now officially asserting itself as a great power, and behaving accordingly.
At Munich, Putin launched a systematic attack on the role the United States is playing in the world. He said: "One state, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way ... This is nourishing an arms race with the desire of countries to get nuclear weapons." In other words, the United States has gone beyond its legitimate reach and is therefore responsible for attempts by other countries -- an obvious reference to Iran -- to acquire nuclear weapons.
Russia for some time has been in confrontation with the United States over U.S. actions in the former Soviet Union (FSU). What the Russians perceive as an American attempt to create a pro-U.S. regime in Ukraine triggered the confrontation. But now, the issue goes beyond U.S. actions in the FSU. The Russians are arguing that the unipolar world -- meaning that the United States is the only global power and is surrounded by lesser, regional powers -- is itself unacceptable. In other words, the United States sees itself as the solution when it is, actually, the problem.
In his speech, Putin reached out to European states -- particularly Germany, pointing out that it has close, but blunt, relations with Russia. The Central Europeans showed themselves to be extremely wary about Putin's speech, recognizing it for what it was -- a new level of assertiveness from an historical enemy. Some German leaders appeared more understanding, however: Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier made no mention of Putin's speech in his own presentation to the conference, while Ruprecht Polenz, chairman of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee, praised Putin's stance on Iran. He also noted that the U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic was cause for concern -- and not only to Russia.
Putin now clearly wants to escalate the confrontations with the United States and likely wants to build a coalition to limit American power. The gross imbalance of global power in the current system makes such coalition-building inevitable -- and it makes sense that the Russians should be taking the lead. The Europeans are risk-averse, and the Chinese do not have much at risk in their dealings with the United States at the moment. The Russians, however, have everything at risk. The United States is intruding in the FSU, and anideological success for the Americans in Ukraine would leave the Russians permanently on the defensive.
The Russians need allies but are not likely to find them among other great-power states. Fortunately for Moscow, the U.S. obsession with Iraq creates alternative opportunities. First, the focus on Iraq prevents the Americans from countering Russia elsewhere. Second, it gives the Russians serious leverage against the United States -- for example, by shipping weapons to key players in the region. Finally, there are Middle Eastern states that seek great-power patronage. It is therefore no accident that Putin's next stop, following the Munich conference, was in Saudi Arabia. Having stabilized the situation in the former Soviet region, the Russians now are constructing their follow-on strategy, and that concerns the Middle East.
The Russian Interests
The Middle East is the pressure point to which the United States is most sensitive. Its military commitment in Iraq, the confrontation with Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and oil in the Arabian Peninsula create a situation such that pain in the region affects the United States intensely. Therefore, it makes sense for the Russians to use all available means of pressure in the Middle East in efforts to control U.S. behavior elsewhere, particularly in the former Soviet Union.
Like the Americans, the Russians also have direct interests in the Middle East. Energy is a primary one: Russia is not only a major exporter of energy supplies, it is currently the world's top oil producer. The Russians have a need to maintain robust energy prices, and working with the Iranians and Saudis in some way to achieve this is directly in line with Moscow's interest. To be more specific, the Russians do not want the Saudis increasing oil production.
There are strategic interests in the Middle East as well. For example, the Russians are still bogged down in Chechnya. It is Moscow's belief that if Chechnya were to secede from the Russian Federation, a precedent would be set that could lead to the dissolution of the Federation. Moscow will not allow this. The Russians consistently have claimed that the Chechen rebellion has been funded by "Wahhabis," by which they mean Saudis. Reaching an accommodation with the Saudis, therefore, would have not only economic, but also strategic, implications for the Russians.
On a broader level, the Russians retain important interests in the Caucasus and in Central Asia. In both cases, their needs intersect with forces originating in the Muslim world and trace, to some extent, back to the Middle East. If the Russian strategy is to reassert a sphere of influence in the former Soviet region, it follows that these regions must be secured. That, in turn, inevitably involves the Russians in the Middle East.
Therefore, even if Russia is not in a position to pursue some of the strategic goals that date back to the Soviet era and before -- such as control of the Bosporus and projection of naval power into the Mediterranean -- it nevertheless has a basic, ongoing interest in the region. Russia has a need both to limit American power and to achieve direct goals of its own. So it makes perfect sense for Putin to leave Munich and embark on a tour of Saudi Arabiaand other Persian Gulf countries.
The Complexities
But the Russians also have a problem. The strategic interests of Middle Eastern states diverge, to say the least. The two main Islamic powers between the Levant and the Hindu Kush are Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Russians have things they want from each, but the Saudis and Iranians have dramatically different interests. Saudi Arabia -- an Arab and primarily Sunni kingdom -- is rich but militarily weak. The government's reliance on outside help for national defense generates intense opposition within the kingdom. Desert Storm, which established a basing arrangement for Western troops within Saudi Arabia, was one of the driving forces behind the creation of al Qaeda. Iran -- a predominantly Persian and Shiite power -- is not nearly as rich as Saudi Arabia but militarily much more powerful. Iran seeks to become the dominant power in the Persian Gulf -- out of both its need to defend itself against aggression, and for controlling and exploiting the oil wealth of the region.
Putting the split between Sunni and Shiite aside for the moment, there is tremendous geopolitical asymmetry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia wants to limit Iranian power, while keeping its own dependence on foreign powers at a minimum. That means that, though keeping energy prices high might make financial sense for the kingdom, the fact that high energy prices also strengthen the Iranians actually can be a more important consideration, depending on circumstances. There is some evidence that recent declines in oil prices are linked to decisions in Riyadh that are aimed at increasing production, reducing prices and hurting the Iranians.
This creates a problem for Russia. While Moscow has substantial room for maneuver, the fact is that lowered oil prices impact energy prices overall, and therefore hurt the Russians. The Saudis, moreover, need the Iranians blocked -- but without going so far as to permit foreign troops to be based in Saudi Arabia itself. In other words, they want to see the United States remain in Iraq, since the Americans serve as the perfect shield against the Iranians so long as they remain there. Putin's criticisms of the United States, as delivered in Munich, would have been applauded by Saudi Arabia prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But in 2007, the results of that invasion are exactly what the Saudis feared -- a collapsed Iraq and a relatively powerful Iran. The Saudis now need the Americans to stay put in the region.
The interests of Russia and Iran align more closely, but there are points of divergence there as well. Both benefit from having the United States tied up, militarily and politically, in wars, but Tehran would be delighted to see a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq that leaves a power vacuum for Iran to fill. The Russians would rather not see this outcome. First, they are quite happy to have the United States bogged down in Iraq and would prefer that to having the U.S. military freed for operations elsewhere. Second, they are interested in a relationship with Iran but are not eager to drive the United States and Saudi Arabia into closer relations. Third, the Russians do not want to see Iran become the dominant power in the region. They want to use Iran, but within certain manageable limits.
Russia has been supplying Iran with weapons. Of particular significance is the supply of surface-to-air missiles that would raise the cost of U.S. air operations against Iran. It is not clear whether the advanced S300PMU surface-to-air missile has yet been delivered, although there has been some discussion of this lately. If it were delivered, this would present significant challenges for U.S. air operation over Iran. The Russians would find this particularly advantageous, as the Iranians would absorb U.S. attentions and, as in Vietnam, the Russians would benefit from extended, fruitless commitments of U.S. military forces in regions not vital to Russia.
Meanwhile, there are energy matters: The Russians, as we have said, are interested in working with Iran to manage world oil prices. But at the same time, they would not be averse to a U.S. attack that takes Iran's oil off the market, spikes prices and enriches Russia.
Finally, it must be remembered that behind this complex relationship with Iran, there historically has been animosity and rivalry between the two countries. The Caucasus has been their battleground. For the moment, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is a buffer there, but it is a buffer in which Russians and Iranians are already dueling. So long as both states are relatively weak, the buffer will maintain itself. But as they get stronger, the Caucasus will become a battleground again. When Russian and Iranian territories border each other, the two powers are rarely at peace. Indeed, Iran frequently needs outside help to contain the Russians.
A Complicated Strategy
In sum, the Russian position in the Middle East is at least as complex as the American one. Or perhaps even more so, since the Americans can leave and the Russians always will live on the doorstep of the Middle East. Historically, once the Russians start fishing in Middle Eastern waters, they find themselves in a greater trap than the Americans. The opening moves are easy. The duel between Saudi Arabia and Iran seems manageable. But as time goes on, Putin's Soviet predecessors learned, the Middle East is a graveyard of ambitions -- and not just American ambitions.
Russia wants to contain U.S. power, and manipulating the situation in the Middle East certainly will cause the Americans substantial pain. But whatever short-term advantages the Russians may be able to find and exploit in the region, there is an order of complexity in Putin's maneuver that might transcend any advantage they gain from boxing the Americans in.
In returning to "great power" status, Russia is using an obvious opening gambit. But being obvious does not make it optimal.
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185) Ialta: conferencia de 1945 decide fim da Alemanha nazista
The New York Times, Feb. 11, 1945
President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin signed the Yalta Agreement during World War II.
Big 3 Doom Nazism and Reich Militarism; Agree on Freed Lands and Oaks Voting; Convoke United Nations in U.S. April 25
YALTA PARLEY ENDS Unified Blows at Reich, Policing Spheres and Reparations Shaped FRANCE TO GET ROLE Broader Polish, Yugoslav Regimes Guaranteed -- Curzon Line Adopted
By Lansing Warren
RELATED HEADLINES
Big 3 Agreement Lauded by Hoover: 'Strong Foundation' for New World, He Says -- Austin Asks Bipartisan Planning
Pacific War Role for Soviet Hinted: Date of United Nations Parley Follows 'Denouncing' Time of Russo-Japanese Treaty
OTHER HEADLINES
Roosevelt Presses World Money Plan: He Asks Congress for Action on Monetary Fund and on Bank of Reconstruction
Cleve, Pruem Fall: Allies Capture Two Key Westwall Positions in North and Center: Opposition is Light: Germans Draft Women for Volkssturm -- New Clashes Reported
Manila Trap Shut; Luzon Is Crossed: U.S. Forces Unite to Squeeze Capital as Armored Push East Reaches Coast
Red Army Is at Bober River After 16-Mile Gain in Silesia WPB Takes Charge Of Match Output
Monday Meat Ban Flouted Again; Cafes Exhibit and Serve Steaks
Elliott Roosevelt Made Brigadier By Senate 53 to 11, on War Record
Washington, Feb. 12 -- Allied decisions sealing the doom of Nazi Germany and German militarism, coordinating military plans for Germany's occupation and control and maintaining order and establishing popular governments in liberated countries were signed yesterday by President Roosevelt, Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill near Yalta in the Crimea, the White House announced today.
The conference, held in the summer palace of former Czar Nicholas II on the black Sea shore, also called for a United Nations security conference in San Francisco on April 25.
The parleys, hitherto shrouded in secrecy except for a brief outline of the agenda issued Feb. 7, were held day and night from Feb. 4 until the final signatures were affixed. The announcement did not refer to President Roosevelt's future movements except that he had left the Crimea.
Main Points of Accord
Major decisions of the conference include:
(1) Plans for new blows at the heart of Germany from the east, west, north and south.
(2) Agreement for occupation by the three Allies, each of a separate zone, as Germany is invaded, and an invitation to France to take over a zone and participate as a fourth member of the Control Commission.
(3) Reparations in kind to be paid by Germany for damages, to be set by an Allied commission. The reparations commission, which will establish the type and amount of payments by Germany, will have its headquarters in Moscow. [Secretary of State Stettinius and Ambassador Harriman arrived in Moscow Monday.]
(4) Settlement of questions left undecided at the conference at Dumbarton Oaks and decision to call a United Nations conference at San Francisco April 25 to prepare the charter for a general international organization to maintain peace and security.
(5) Specific agreements to widen the scope of the present Governments in Poland and Yugoslavia and an understanding to keep order and establish Governments in liberated countries conforming to the popular will and the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
(6) A general declaration of determination to maintain Allied unity for peace.
German People Apart
The statement announced common policies for enforcing unconditional surrender and imposing Nazi Germany's doom. The document draws a distinction between the Nazi system, laws and institutions, the German General Staff and its militarism, which will be relentlessly wiped out, and the German people.
"It is not our purpose," it declared," to destroy the people of Germany, but only when nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the community of nations."
Until this conference the Allies had laid down no iron-clad program for the control and complete reorganization of Germany. Military plans will be made known only "as we execute them," said the statement, and the surrender terms "not until the final defeat has been accomplished."
Coordinated administration and control has been provided in a central Control Commission, which will be established with headquarters in Berlin. Part of its work will be to insist on the destruction of all German military equipment, elimination or control of all German industry that could be used for military production, the punishment of war criminals and the wiping out of all Nazi institutions from the German economic and cultural life.
The document mentioned no discussion of plans in the Far eastern theatre of the war or any understanding with the Soviet Union for entry into the war against Japan, but the fact that the date for the United Nations conference, April 25, comes one day after the date determining of a renewal of the Russo-Japanese agreement was remarked as significant.
That San Francisco had been chosen as the site for the next security conference of the United Nations, along with the date, aroused considerable interest here because of the city's remoteness from the European theatre of war and its position nearer the Far Eastern theatre.
New Cabinet Indicated
Special dispositions with regard to Poland include the widening of the present Provisional Government to include other democratic leaders in Poland and abroad.
The agreement sets the Polish eastern boundary, with a few alterations in favor of Poland, along the Curzon Line and recognizes that Poland must acquire substantial territory in the north and west but leaves these decisions to the peace conference. This is the first official mention to confirm the Allies' contemplation of a general peace conference.
With regard to the conflict for power in Yugoslavia the Allies have agreed that Marshal Tito and Dr. Ivan Subasitch shall set up the Government they have proposed but to include former members of the Parliament who did not collaborate with the enemy.
These Governments, it is provided, will be succeeded by those formed in conformity with desires expressed in popular elections and in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter. The statement does not deal specifically with the situation in Greece or other countries but declares that the conference also made a general review of other Balkan questions.
Fascism to Be Uprooted
In a declaration on the liberated areas, the Allies announced the intention of consulting in the interests of the liberated peoples and to cooperate in rebuilding the national economic life in these countries. Vestiges of nazism and fascism are to be destroyed, and the Allies will cooperate to establish internal peace, carry relief and form interim governments broadly representative in the Axis satellite states as well as in liberated Allied countries.
An important feature of the international security discussions was contained in the announcements that the three powers had reached agreement on the disputed question of voting procedure, which prevented completion of the work at Dumbarton Oaks. No indication of the solution was given.
The three Chiefs of State were assisted by their Foreign Ministers, chiefs of military staffs and numerous other experts, as was the case in the previous three-power meetings. Besides Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., President Roosevelt was accompanied by Harry L. Hopkins, his special assistant, and Justice James F. Byrnes, Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.
Other United States delegates included W. Averell Harriman, Ambassador to the Soviet Union; H. Freeman Matthews, the State Department's Director of European Affairs; Alger Hiss, Deputy Director of Special Political Affairs, and Charles E. Bohlen, assistant to the Secretary of State.
Throughout the Conference President Roosevelt occupied apartments in the former palace of the Czars. Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill were housed in separate establishments near by.
Three women were with the delegations. Though they did not participate in the discussions, they were received as conference guests. They were Mrs. Anna Boettiger, daughter of President and Mrs. Roosevelt; Mrs. Sarah Oliver, daughter of Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, daughter of the Ambassador to Moscow.
President Roosevelt's party also included Edward J. Flynn of New York, who did not attend conference meetings but was invited as a personal friend when Mr. Roosevelt learned that he was planning a visit to Moscow.
Leahy Also in Party
Others in the President's personal party were Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to the President; Mr. Byrnes, Vice Admirals Ross T. McIntyre and Wilson Brown, Maj. Gen. Edwin M. Watson and Stephen Early, the President's secretary.
President Roosevelt, whose movements have been obscured by censorship for more than three weeks, left Washington for the Crimea conference almost immediately after his inauguration ceremonies on Jan. 20. The details of the voyage were not made public, but it was revealed that the President met Prime Minister Churchill on the island of Malta, which the British and American delegations reached Feb. 2. President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill made a prolonged exchange of views and there were formal discussions between the British and United States Military chiefs of staff.
President Roosevelt left Malta the night of Feb. 2, going by air direct to Yalta, where he was met by Foreign Commissar Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff, who extended greetings for Marshal Stalin.
The Presidential party proceeded along the Black Sea shore two miles southwest to Livadia, where stands the magnificent Summer Palace.
Meetings began the next day on the arrival of Marshal Stalin, who flew from his headquarters on the Russian front, where the Silesian Offensive was just getting under way. The delegates met either in committees or as a group. Besides daily meetings of the three heads of Governments and the Foreign Secretaries, separate meetings of the Foreign Secretaries and their advisers were held daily.
The Foreign Secretaries arranged for regular conferences every three of four months. The meetings will be held in rotation in the three capitals, the first to be called in London after the San Francisco meeting.
At the close of the conference President Roosevelt presented to Marshal Stalin a number of decorations awarded by the United States to military men in the Red Army. Those to be decorated will receive the rank of commander in the Legion of Merit. They include Marshal Alexander M. Vasilevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army; Air Chief Marshal Alexander A. Novikoff, commanding general of the Red Air Forces; Gen. A. K. Repin, Chief of the Soviet Military Mission to the United States; Lieutenant General Brendal, Lieutenant Colonel Krolenko, Major General Levanovich, Major General Slavin, Deputy Chief of the Red Army Staff, and Colonel Byaz.
The decorations were given in recognition of distinguished services in connection with their cooperation in American Air Force shuttle-bombing operations in Germany.
The first news of the historic consultation at Yalta was issued at the White House by Jonathan Daniels, administrative assistant to the President, who opened his announcement to the impatient correspondents with the statement: "This is it."
Announcement of the Allied report on the conference made in the Senate was greeted with cheers, which continued while the upper house adjourned.
President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin signed the Yalta Agreement during World War II.
Big 3 Doom Nazism and Reich Militarism; Agree on Freed Lands and Oaks Voting; Convoke United Nations in U.S. April 25
YALTA PARLEY ENDS Unified Blows at Reich, Policing Spheres and Reparations Shaped FRANCE TO GET ROLE Broader Polish, Yugoslav Regimes Guaranteed -- Curzon Line Adopted
By Lansing Warren
RELATED HEADLINES
Big 3 Agreement Lauded by Hoover: 'Strong Foundation' for New World, He Says -- Austin Asks Bipartisan Planning
Pacific War Role for Soviet Hinted: Date of United Nations Parley Follows 'Denouncing' Time of Russo-Japanese Treaty
OTHER HEADLINES
Roosevelt Presses World Money Plan: He Asks Congress for Action on Monetary Fund and on Bank of Reconstruction
Cleve, Pruem Fall: Allies Capture Two Key Westwall Positions in North and Center: Opposition is Light: Germans Draft Women for Volkssturm -- New Clashes Reported
Manila Trap Shut; Luzon Is Crossed: U.S. Forces Unite to Squeeze Capital as Armored Push East Reaches Coast
Red Army Is at Bober River After 16-Mile Gain in Silesia WPB Takes Charge Of Match Output
Monday Meat Ban Flouted Again; Cafes Exhibit and Serve Steaks
Elliott Roosevelt Made Brigadier By Senate 53 to 11, on War Record
Washington, Feb. 12 -- Allied decisions sealing the doom of Nazi Germany and German militarism, coordinating military plans for Germany's occupation and control and maintaining order and establishing popular governments in liberated countries were signed yesterday by President Roosevelt, Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill near Yalta in the Crimea, the White House announced today.
The conference, held in the summer palace of former Czar Nicholas II on the black Sea shore, also called for a United Nations security conference in San Francisco on April 25.
The parleys, hitherto shrouded in secrecy except for a brief outline of the agenda issued Feb. 7, were held day and night from Feb. 4 until the final signatures were affixed. The announcement did not refer to President Roosevelt's future movements except that he had left the Crimea.
Main Points of Accord
Major decisions of the conference include:
(1) Plans for new blows at the heart of Germany from the east, west, north and south.
(2) Agreement for occupation by the three Allies, each of a separate zone, as Germany is invaded, and an invitation to France to take over a zone and participate as a fourth member of the Control Commission.
(3) Reparations in kind to be paid by Germany for damages, to be set by an Allied commission. The reparations commission, which will establish the type and amount of payments by Germany, will have its headquarters in Moscow. [Secretary of State Stettinius and Ambassador Harriman arrived in Moscow Monday.]
(4) Settlement of questions left undecided at the conference at Dumbarton Oaks and decision to call a United Nations conference at San Francisco April 25 to prepare the charter for a general international organization to maintain peace and security.
(5) Specific agreements to widen the scope of the present Governments in Poland and Yugoslavia and an understanding to keep order and establish Governments in liberated countries conforming to the popular will and the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
(6) A general declaration of determination to maintain Allied unity for peace.
German People Apart
The statement announced common policies for enforcing unconditional surrender and imposing Nazi Germany's doom. The document draws a distinction between the Nazi system, laws and institutions, the German General Staff and its militarism, which will be relentlessly wiped out, and the German people.
"It is not our purpose," it declared," to destroy the people of Germany, but only when nazism and militarism have been extirpated will there be hope for a decent life for Germans, and a place for them in the community of nations."
Until this conference the Allies had laid down no iron-clad program for the control and complete reorganization of Germany. Military plans will be made known only "as we execute them," said the statement, and the surrender terms "not until the final defeat has been accomplished."
Coordinated administration and control has been provided in a central Control Commission, which will be established with headquarters in Berlin. Part of its work will be to insist on the destruction of all German military equipment, elimination or control of all German industry that could be used for military production, the punishment of war criminals and the wiping out of all Nazi institutions from the German economic and cultural life.
The document mentioned no discussion of plans in the Far eastern theatre of the war or any understanding with the Soviet Union for entry into the war against Japan, but the fact that the date for the United Nations conference, April 25, comes one day after the date determining of a renewal of the Russo-Japanese agreement was remarked as significant.
That San Francisco had been chosen as the site for the next security conference of the United Nations, along with the date, aroused considerable interest here because of the city's remoteness from the European theatre of war and its position nearer the Far Eastern theatre.
New Cabinet Indicated
Special dispositions with regard to Poland include the widening of the present Provisional Government to include other democratic leaders in Poland and abroad.
The agreement sets the Polish eastern boundary, with a few alterations in favor of Poland, along the Curzon Line and recognizes that Poland must acquire substantial territory in the north and west but leaves these decisions to the peace conference. This is the first official mention to confirm the Allies' contemplation of a general peace conference.
With regard to the conflict for power in Yugoslavia the Allies have agreed that Marshal Tito and Dr. Ivan Subasitch shall set up the Government they have proposed but to include former members of the Parliament who did not collaborate with the enemy.
These Governments, it is provided, will be succeeded by those formed in conformity with desires expressed in popular elections and in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter. The statement does not deal specifically with the situation in Greece or other countries but declares that the conference also made a general review of other Balkan questions.
Fascism to Be Uprooted
In a declaration on the liberated areas, the Allies announced the intention of consulting in the interests of the liberated peoples and to cooperate in rebuilding the national economic life in these countries. Vestiges of nazism and fascism are to be destroyed, and the Allies will cooperate to establish internal peace, carry relief and form interim governments broadly representative in the Axis satellite states as well as in liberated Allied countries.
An important feature of the international security discussions was contained in the announcements that the three powers had reached agreement on the disputed question of voting procedure, which prevented completion of the work at Dumbarton Oaks. No indication of the solution was given.
The three Chiefs of State were assisted by their Foreign Ministers, chiefs of military staffs and numerous other experts, as was the case in the previous three-power meetings. Besides Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., President Roosevelt was accompanied by Harry L. Hopkins, his special assistant, and Justice James F. Byrnes, Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.
Other United States delegates included W. Averell Harriman, Ambassador to the Soviet Union; H. Freeman Matthews, the State Department's Director of European Affairs; Alger Hiss, Deputy Director of Special Political Affairs, and Charles E. Bohlen, assistant to the Secretary of State.
Throughout the Conference President Roosevelt occupied apartments in the former palace of the Czars. Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill were housed in separate establishments near by.
Three women were with the delegations. Though they did not participate in the discussions, they were received as conference guests. They were Mrs. Anna Boettiger, daughter of President and Mrs. Roosevelt; Mrs. Sarah Oliver, daughter of Prime Minister and Mrs. Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman, daughter of the Ambassador to Moscow.
President Roosevelt's party also included Edward J. Flynn of New York, who did not attend conference meetings but was invited as a personal friend when Mr. Roosevelt learned that he was planning a visit to Moscow.
Leahy Also in Party
Others in the President's personal party were Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to the President; Mr. Byrnes, Vice Admirals Ross T. McIntyre and Wilson Brown, Maj. Gen. Edwin M. Watson and Stephen Early, the President's secretary.
President Roosevelt, whose movements have been obscured by censorship for more than three weeks, left Washington for the Crimea conference almost immediately after his inauguration ceremonies on Jan. 20. The details of the voyage were not made public, but it was revealed that the President met Prime Minister Churchill on the island of Malta, which the British and American delegations reached Feb. 2. President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill made a prolonged exchange of views and there were formal discussions between the British and United States Military chiefs of staff.
President Roosevelt left Malta the night of Feb. 2, going by air direct to Yalta, where he was met by Foreign Commissar Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff, who extended greetings for Marshal Stalin.
The Presidential party proceeded along the Black Sea shore two miles southwest to Livadia, where stands the magnificent Summer Palace.
Meetings began the next day on the arrival of Marshal Stalin, who flew from his headquarters on the Russian front, where the Silesian Offensive was just getting under way. The delegates met either in committees or as a group. Besides daily meetings of the three heads of Governments and the Foreign Secretaries, separate meetings of the Foreign Secretaries and their advisers were held daily.
The Foreign Secretaries arranged for regular conferences every three of four months. The meetings will be held in rotation in the three capitals, the first to be called in London after the San Francisco meeting.
At the close of the conference President Roosevelt presented to Marshal Stalin a number of decorations awarded by the United States to military men in the Red Army. Those to be decorated will receive the rank of commander in the Legion of Merit. They include Marshal Alexander M. Vasilevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army; Air Chief Marshal Alexander A. Novikoff, commanding general of the Red Air Forces; Gen. A. K. Repin, Chief of the Soviet Military Mission to the United States; Lieutenant General Brendal, Lieutenant Colonel Krolenko, Major General Levanovich, Major General Slavin, Deputy Chief of the Red Army Staff, and Colonel Byaz.
The decorations were given in recognition of distinguished services in connection with their cooperation in American Air Force shuttle-bombing operations in Germany.
The first news of the historic consultation at Yalta was issued at the White House by Jonathan Daniels, administrative assistant to the President, who opened his announcement to the impatient correspondents with the statement: "This is it."
Announcement of the Allied report on the conference made in the Senate was greeted with cheers, which continued while the upper house adjourned.
184) Aquecimento global: a controversia continua...
Aquecimento global: Afinal, quem tem razão?
Fonte: Gazeta do Sul – Santa Cruz do Sul, 5 de fevereiro de 2007
Site: www.gazetadosul.com.br
Autoridades científicas disseram que aumento da temperatura do planeta pode causar catástrofes, mas há grupos de pesquisadores que contrariam essas afirmações
Quando cientistas de 130 países ligados ao Painel Internacional sobre a Mudança Climática (IPCC) se reuniram em Paris, no último dia 2, e apresentaram um relatório com dados assustadores sobre o aquecimento global, uma pergunta ficou no ar. As secas que dizimaram a produção agrícola ou chuvas excessivas e as altas temperaturas seriam sinal de que o fim dos tempos se aproxima?
Para os pesquisadores a resposta é sim e a causa de tudo isso seria a ação do homem. No mais completo relatório sobre clima, eles fizeram previsões pessimistas para os próximos cem anos e afirmaram que se não forem adotadas medidas eficazes há riscos de as águas dos oceanos cobrirem cidades costeiras e a falta de chuva acabar com a agricultura.
Mas o relatório que colocou em alerta as principais autoridades mundiais pode não passar de uma mera especulação. É isso que defendem alguns meteorologistas que, baseados em dados históricos, fazem afirmações contradizendo a teoria apocalíptica lançada do IPCC. Para eles, embora o aquecimento global seja um fato irrevogável, não há provas suficientes para justificar tanto alarde em torno do assunto.
Não se trata de amenizar os riscos, mas sim de levar à opinião pública um contraponto para uma questão que ganhou repercussão mundial e alimenta as mais mirabolantes especulações. O que os meteorolgistas querem é dizer que períodos de aquecimento excessivo ou de calores ocorreram ao longo dos séculos e nem por isso o mundo acabou. As opiniões são divergentes, mas abrem margem para uma questão. Quem, afinal, tem razão? A Gazeta do Sul ouviu defensores das duas teses e mostra o contraste de argumentos.
O QUE DIZ O RELATÓRIO
- 95% do aquecimento global é causado pelo lançamento na atmosfera de gases como o carbônico.
- A temperatura da Terra teria aumentado de 13,78 graus, há um século, para 14,5 graus.
- Há 125 mil anos, a temperatura chegou a 18 graus. O nível do mar teria subido até seis metros.
- Até 2100 o aquecimento global pode fazer com que a temperatura chegue a 16,5 graus.
- O aumento das emissões de gases causaria o derretimento do gelo do Ártico elevando o nível dos oceanos.
- Ventos, chuvas intensas e ciclones serão mais fortes, elevando o risco de destruições.
- O volume de precipitações, nas regiões mais secas, no entanto, tende a diminuir. Pelo menos 3,2 bilhões de pessoas podem ser atingidas por esse problema, que afeta, hoje 1,1 bilhão de habitantes.
- Espécies da flora e fauna seriam extintas por não conseguir se adaptar às mudanças climáticas.
- No Brasil a Floresta Amazônica corre risco de desaparecer com o aumento das temperaturas em torno de 4 e 8 graus e redução do volume de chuvas.
- O Sul do País sofreria tornados e furacões. A agricultura seria prejudicada e a economia também.
Outras matérias:
10/02/2007 Comportamento do clima é natural
10/02/2007 Situação tende a se agravar mais
10/02/2007 As soluções quase impossíveis para o megaproblema
Fonte: Gazeta do Sul – Santa Cruz do Sul, 5 de fevereiro de 2007
Site: www.gazetadosul.com.br
Autoridades científicas disseram que aumento da temperatura do planeta pode causar catástrofes, mas há grupos de pesquisadores que contrariam essas afirmações
Quando cientistas de 130 países ligados ao Painel Internacional sobre a Mudança Climática (IPCC) se reuniram em Paris, no último dia 2, e apresentaram um relatório com dados assustadores sobre o aquecimento global, uma pergunta ficou no ar. As secas que dizimaram a produção agrícola ou chuvas excessivas e as altas temperaturas seriam sinal de que o fim dos tempos se aproxima?
Para os pesquisadores a resposta é sim e a causa de tudo isso seria a ação do homem. No mais completo relatório sobre clima, eles fizeram previsões pessimistas para os próximos cem anos e afirmaram que se não forem adotadas medidas eficazes há riscos de as águas dos oceanos cobrirem cidades costeiras e a falta de chuva acabar com a agricultura.
Mas o relatório que colocou em alerta as principais autoridades mundiais pode não passar de uma mera especulação. É isso que defendem alguns meteorologistas que, baseados em dados históricos, fazem afirmações contradizendo a teoria apocalíptica lançada do IPCC. Para eles, embora o aquecimento global seja um fato irrevogável, não há provas suficientes para justificar tanto alarde em torno do assunto.
Não se trata de amenizar os riscos, mas sim de levar à opinião pública um contraponto para uma questão que ganhou repercussão mundial e alimenta as mais mirabolantes especulações. O que os meteorolgistas querem é dizer que períodos de aquecimento excessivo ou de calores ocorreram ao longo dos séculos e nem por isso o mundo acabou. As opiniões são divergentes, mas abrem margem para uma questão. Quem, afinal, tem razão? A Gazeta do Sul ouviu defensores das duas teses e mostra o contraste de argumentos.
O QUE DIZ O RELATÓRIO
- 95% do aquecimento global é causado pelo lançamento na atmosfera de gases como o carbônico.
- A temperatura da Terra teria aumentado de 13,78 graus, há um século, para 14,5 graus.
- Há 125 mil anos, a temperatura chegou a 18 graus. O nível do mar teria subido até seis metros.
- Até 2100 o aquecimento global pode fazer com que a temperatura chegue a 16,5 graus.
- O aumento das emissões de gases causaria o derretimento do gelo do Ártico elevando o nível dos oceanos.
- Ventos, chuvas intensas e ciclones serão mais fortes, elevando o risco de destruições.
- O volume de precipitações, nas regiões mais secas, no entanto, tende a diminuir. Pelo menos 3,2 bilhões de pessoas podem ser atingidas por esse problema, que afeta, hoje 1,1 bilhão de habitantes.
- Espécies da flora e fauna seriam extintas por não conseguir se adaptar às mudanças climáticas.
- No Brasil a Floresta Amazônica corre risco de desaparecer com o aumento das temperaturas em torno de 4 e 8 graus e redução do volume de chuvas.
- O Sul do País sofreria tornados e furacões. A agricultura seria prejudicada e a economia também.
Outras matérias:
10/02/2007 Comportamento do clima é natural
10/02/2007 Situação tende a se agravar mais
10/02/2007 As soluções quase impossíveis para o megaproblema
183) Biocombustiveis: uma chance para o Brasil
Biocombustíveis - a chance do Brasil
Suely Caldas
O Estado de São Paulo, 11/02/2007
Em seu plano estratégico a Petrobrás faz uma aposta ousada: até 2011 ela vai suplantar os EUA e passará a ser líder mundial de vendas de biocombustíveis, com a produção nacional de etanol e biodiesel. Para alcançar essa meta a estatal já começou a agir: 1) Acaba de montar a empresa japonesa Nipaku, em sociedade com estatal Nippon Alcohol Hanbai, que vai comercializar o etanol brasileiro no Japão e em outros países da Ásia; 2) decidiu construir um alcoolduto de 600 km, entre a Região Centro-Oeste e São Paulo, para transportar o etanol até o Porto de Santos e daí exportar para o mundo; 3) além de duas plantas-piloto em produção, busca parcerias privadas para montar mais três fábricas de biodiesel e ampliar a produção em mais 150 milhões de litros; 4) neste momento intensifica as pesquisas técnicas para utilizar mamona e pinhão manso na produção de biodiesel.
“Aqui temos matéria-prima, cana-de-açúcar e oleaginosas, mercado combustível, logística de distribuição em todo o País, máquinas e tecnologia própria e uma indústria automotiva tecnicamente preparada para usar gasolina e álcool simultaneamente”, lembra o presidente da Petrobrás, José Sérgio Gabrielli. “E tem mais: 30 anos de Proálcool, 300 produtores e longa experiência em exportação colocam o Brasil na dianteira do etanol. Daí a atingirmos a liderança mundial não é nenhum sonho”, avalia Gabrielli.
Falar em liderança mundial e desbancar os EUA quando o presidente Bush lança o desafio de, em dez anos, substituir 20% da gasolina consumida nesse país por combustíveis renováveis pode até não ser sonho, mas se o Brasil fizer as coisas certas, o governo regular o mercado com regras claras, garantir que a expansão da lavoura de cana e de oleaginosas não se dê à custa de devastação de florestas ou da escassez e do encarecimento de alimentos. E é fundamental, indispensável, abolir o antiamericanismo ideológico, que, além de atrasado, como definiu o ex-embaixador Roberto Abdenur, é bobo, burro e contra os interesses do Brasil. Sozinhos, os EUA não têm condições de multiplicar por sete sua produção de etanol para suprir a substituição dos 20% de gasolina. Por isso o presidente Bush vem pessoalmente negociar com Lula parceria na produção de etanol, mirando a garantia de suprimento futuro dos EUA. A preponderância brasileira é reconhecida entre os norte-americanos, tanto que o o jornal The Wall Street Journal chamou recentemente o Brasil de “Arábia Saudita do álcool”.
Apesar das advertências do Protocolo de Kyoto, em 1997, a demanda por energia limpa no mundo pouco cresceu. Hoje, além de EUA e Brasil, só Alemanha, Suécia, Índia e Colômbia misturam álcool à gasolina e poucos outros países têm programas de produção de biocombustíveis em implementação.
Mas essa pasmaceira global pode mudar agora, com a divulgação do relatório da ONU sobre aquecimento global, que estarreceu o mundo. Diante do preocupante quadro descrito pelos cientistas, muitos países passaram a se preocupar com a saúde do planeta e de seus habitantes. A França, por exemplo, passou a vincular acordos comerciais a cláusulas ambientais. Essa demanda por energia limpa e o preço do petróleo acima de US$ 50/barril, sem dúvida, criam um novo mercado para fontes renováveis de energia e abrem uma enorme janela de oportunidades para o Brasil, que nesta corrida leva a vantagem de 30 anos de estrada do Proálcool e um programa de biodiesel em plena evolução.
Na última quarta-feira, o ministro Celso Amorim combinou com o subsecretário americano para Assuntos Políticos, Nicholas Burns, uma reunião, até o final deste mês - portanto, antes da visita de Bush -, entre Brasil, EUA, Índia, China, União Européia e África do Sul para discutir a padronização global para o etanol, etapa obrigatória para este produto virar commodity e ser negociado em Bolsas no mundo inteiro, competindo com o petróleo.
“Vamos liderar, sem nenhuma dúvida. No mundo inteiro há uma enorme curiosidade pelo nosso álcool porque, além de pioneiro, o Brasil é o único país no mundo com um programa massivo, que ocupa 40% do mercado de combustíveis.” Gabrielli exagera, é verdade. Mas o Brasil não pode perder esta chance.
Suely Caldas
O Estado de São Paulo, 11/02/2007
Em seu plano estratégico a Petrobrás faz uma aposta ousada: até 2011 ela vai suplantar os EUA e passará a ser líder mundial de vendas de biocombustíveis, com a produção nacional de etanol e biodiesel. Para alcançar essa meta a estatal já começou a agir: 1) Acaba de montar a empresa japonesa Nipaku, em sociedade com estatal Nippon Alcohol Hanbai, que vai comercializar o etanol brasileiro no Japão e em outros países da Ásia; 2) decidiu construir um alcoolduto de 600 km, entre a Região Centro-Oeste e São Paulo, para transportar o etanol até o Porto de Santos e daí exportar para o mundo; 3) além de duas plantas-piloto em produção, busca parcerias privadas para montar mais três fábricas de biodiesel e ampliar a produção em mais 150 milhões de litros; 4) neste momento intensifica as pesquisas técnicas para utilizar mamona e pinhão manso na produção de biodiesel.
“Aqui temos matéria-prima, cana-de-açúcar e oleaginosas, mercado combustível, logística de distribuição em todo o País, máquinas e tecnologia própria e uma indústria automotiva tecnicamente preparada para usar gasolina e álcool simultaneamente”, lembra o presidente da Petrobrás, José Sérgio Gabrielli. “E tem mais: 30 anos de Proálcool, 300 produtores e longa experiência em exportação colocam o Brasil na dianteira do etanol. Daí a atingirmos a liderança mundial não é nenhum sonho”, avalia Gabrielli.
Falar em liderança mundial e desbancar os EUA quando o presidente Bush lança o desafio de, em dez anos, substituir 20% da gasolina consumida nesse país por combustíveis renováveis pode até não ser sonho, mas se o Brasil fizer as coisas certas, o governo regular o mercado com regras claras, garantir que a expansão da lavoura de cana e de oleaginosas não se dê à custa de devastação de florestas ou da escassez e do encarecimento de alimentos. E é fundamental, indispensável, abolir o antiamericanismo ideológico, que, além de atrasado, como definiu o ex-embaixador Roberto Abdenur, é bobo, burro e contra os interesses do Brasil. Sozinhos, os EUA não têm condições de multiplicar por sete sua produção de etanol para suprir a substituição dos 20% de gasolina. Por isso o presidente Bush vem pessoalmente negociar com Lula parceria na produção de etanol, mirando a garantia de suprimento futuro dos EUA. A preponderância brasileira é reconhecida entre os norte-americanos, tanto que o o jornal The Wall Street Journal chamou recentemente o Brasil de “Arábia Saudita do álcool”.
Apesar das advertências do Protocolo de Kyoto, em 1997, a demanda por energia limpa no mundo pouco cresceu. Hoje, além de EUA e Brasil, só Alemanha, Suécia, Índia e Colômbia misturam álcool à gasolina e poucos outros países têm programas de produção de biocombustíveis em implementação.
Mas essa pasmaceira global pode mudar agora, com a divulgação do relatório da ONU sobre aquecimento global, que estarreceu o mundo. Diante do preocupante quadro descrito pelos cientistas, muitos países passaram a se preocupar com a saúde do planeta e de seus habitantes. A França, por exemplo, passou a vincular acordos comerciais a cláusulas ambientais. Essa demanda por energia limpa e o preço do petróleo acima de US$ 50/barril, sem dúvida, criam um novo mercado para fontes renováveis de energia e abrem uma enorme janela de oportunidades para o Brasil, que nesta corrida leva a vantagem de 30 anos de estrada do Proálcool e um programa de biodiesel em plena evolução.
Na última quarta-feira, o ministro Celso Amorim combinou com o subsecretário americano para Assuntos Políticos, Nicholas Burns, uma reunião, até o final deste mês - portanto, antes da visita de Bush -, entre Brasil, EUA, Índia, China, União Européia e África do Sul para discutir a padronização global para o etanol, etapa obrigatória para este produto virar commodity e ser negociado em Bolsas no mundo inteiro, competindo com o petróleo.
“Vamos liderar, sem nenhuma dúvida. No mundo inteiro há uma enorme curiosidade pelo nosso álcool porque, além de pioneiro, o Brasil é o único país no mundo com um programa massivo, que ocupa 40% do mercado de combustíveis.” Gabrielli exagera, é verdade. Mas o Brasil não pode perder esta chance.
quinta-feira, fevereiro 08, 2007
182) A campanha de Suez em 1956: passo decisivo na consolidacao do Estado de Israel
Artigo retirado do:
The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2007
The Second War of Independence
The Sinai campaign of 1956 established that Israel was here to stay.
BY MICHAEL B. OREN
WSJ, Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Fifty years ago, at dawn on Oct. 29, 1956, Israeli paratroopers under the command of Col. Ariel Sharon dropped into the Mitla Pass deep in the Sinai Peninsula, 25 miles from the Suez Canal. The action was the first phase in a plan secretly forged by representatives of France, Britain and Israel, triggered by Egypt's nationalization of the canal three months before. According to the scheme, the paratroopers' landing would provide a pretext for the French and British governments to order both Egypt and Israel to remove all of their forces from the canal area. The Europeans anticipated that Cairo would reject that ultimatum, thus allowing them to occupy the strategic waterway. Israel dutifully executed its part of the scheme, smashing the Egyptian army in four days and conquering all of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. The Anglo-French armada, however, was late in arriving, and soon withdrew under intense international pressure. The Suez War--known in Israel as the Sinai Campaign, or Operation Kadesh--was over within a week, but the battle over its interpretation was merely beginning.
Numerous books and articles have been written about the Suez Crisis, the first post-World War II crisis to pit nationalism against imperialism, and the West against the communist bloc. Historians have long agreed that the invasion was an unrelieved catastrophe for Britain and France, precipitating their expulsion from the Middle East and their decline as great powers. By contrast, the first three decades after the crisis saw debate over Israel's fortunes in the war, with some scholars asserting that Israel had benefited from the destruction of the Egyptian army, the opening of the Straits of Tiran, and the strategic alliance with France. Starting in the 1980s, however, a movement of self-styled New Historians, dedicated to debunking the alleged "myths" of Israeli history, depicted the Sinai Campaign as no less disastrous for the Jewish state. "Israel . . . paid a heavy political price for ganging up with the colonial powers against the emergent forces of Arab nationalism," wrote Avi Shlaim of Oxford University. "Its actions could henceforth be used as proof . . . that it was a bridgehead of Western imperialism in the . . . Arab world."
Twenty years later, Shlaim's analysis of the 1956 war has become universally accepted in academia, and not only among revisionists. In a New York Times article marking the 50th anniversary of Suez, Boston University's David Fromkin, author of the widely acclaimed study of the origins of the modern Middle East, "A Peace to End All Peace" (1989), similarly portrayed Israel's victory as Pyrrhic. "Israel compromised itself through its partnership with European imperialism," Fromkin alleged, echoing Shlaim. "The more Israel won on the battlefield, the further it got from achieving the peace that it sought."
Those who have challenged the magnitude of Israel's victory in 1956, however, fail to take into account the incompleteness of Israel's triumph in its 1948 War of Independence. Customarily, states that win on the battlefield dictate the terms of the peace. But while Israeli forces had repulsed the invading Arab armies and compelled them to sue for truce, Israeli negotiators failed to transform that military accomplishment into a diplomatic device for ending the conflict. The armistice agreements that Israel signed with its four neighboring Arab states between February and July 1949 did not, for example, extend recognition or legitimacy to the Jewish state; nor did they endow that state with permanent borders.
Further complicating this anomalous situation, the agreements created various demilitarized zones of uncertain sovereignty along Israel's frontiers--at the foot of the Golan Heights, for instance, and in Nitzana, along the Sinai-Negev border. Most deleterious of all for Israel, the armistice did not provide for peace. On the contrary, the agreements allowed the Arabs to insist that a state of war continued to exist between them and the "Zionist entity." This state of war, the Arabs argued, enabled them to fire at Israeli settlements in the demilitarized zones, to conduct an economic boycott of the Jewish state, and to blockade Israeli ships and Israel-bound cargoes through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran. Arab states engaged in a relentless anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, designed to prepare their publics for a "second round" with Israel, this time to annihilate it. Propaganda did not suffice for some Arab countries, however, like Syria and Egypt, which sponsored cross-border terrorist (Fedayeen) attacks like that which killed eleven Israelis at Maaleh Akrabim in March 1954.
For the Arab states, the Palestine War, as they called it, had never really ended. Yet they were not alone in regarding Israel as an impermanent and unwanted presence: The Great Powers--the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union--routinely treated Israel as a passing phenomenon and ignored its fundamental interests. Indeed, for the Powers, Israel was little more than what United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called "a millstone around our necks."
The period of 1948 to 1956 was one of profound upheaval in Great Power diplomacy in the Middle East. The United States was on the one hand striving to oust the old colonial powers, Britain and France, from the region, while on the other working with its European allies to prevent Soviet penetration. In response to the American threat, Britain and France sought to strengthen their alliances with local states--Britain with Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, and France with Syria and Lebanon--by guaranteeing their security and selling them modern arms. Israel, which was in no Power's interest, was completely left out of these arrangements. Worse, Israel's clashes with Egypt in 1949 and Jordan in 1956 nearly resulted in direct conflict between the IDF and British forces.
Viewed antagonistically by both Britain and France, Israel was hardly valued as an asset by the United States. The Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower owed nothing to the Jewish vote, and was closely aligned with State Department Arabists and American oil companies active in the Middle East. Apart from parade items such as helmets and batons, the United States adamantly refused to sell arms to Israel, even laboring to prevent Israel from purchasing weaponry from its allies. Such transactions, the administration reasoned, would push the Arabs into the Soviet sphere and endanger vital oil supplies.
For their part, the Soviets had also thrown their support behind the Arabs. Though they had provided crucial diplomatic and military backing to the Jewish state in 1948, the Soviets, having secured their objective of ousting the British from Palestine, proceeded to change sides. By 1951, they were unremitting in their hostility to Israel, and after Stalin's death in 1953, the Kremlin adopted a policy of nurturing "bourgeois nationalist" regimes opposed to the West, such as those of Egypt and Syria.
America and Britain reacted to the Soviet threat by trying to organize Middle Eastern states into a regional defense organization similar to NATO. The alliance, known first as the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO) and later as the Baghdad Pact, was to include Iraq, Jordan and hopefully Egypt. Israel, though it repeatedly petitioned for admission to the group, was continually rejected.
Moreover, while actively fortifying the Arabs, the Powers also implicitly upheld their own interpretation of the armistice. They refused, for example, to pressure the Arab states to end their economic boycott and blockade of Israel or to stem armed infiltration. Rather, they condemned Israel's attempt to establish settlements in the demilitarized zones, to send ships through the canal and the straits, and to retaliate against Fedayeen strongholds. They also opposed Israel's construction of a national water carrier that would transfer Galilee water to the Negev, thus facilitating the desert's settlement. The Negev, the Americans and the British determined in 1949, would eventually be detached from Israel and transferred to Arab sovereignty as part of a land-for-peace deal. Indeed, an Anglo-American plan, inaugurated in 1954 and codenamed "Alpha," called for the transfer of large swaths of the Negev to Egypt as a means of incentivizing it to join MEDO; the Egyptians, in turn, would grant nonbelligerency--not peace--to Israel. Though Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rejected Alpha, American and British leaders were prepared to exert immense pressure on him to implement the plan should Cairo accept it.
Indeed, the Egyptians had long demanded the Negev as a land bridge between them and the Arab world. In secret meetings with Israeli diplomats after the armistice, Egyptian representatives repeatedly demanded that Israel forfeit all of the Negev--62% of its territory--as the price of ending the conflict. But the Egyptians were also express in stating that peace with the Jewish state was inconceivable for the foreseeable future. That position remained unchanged after the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952 and the ascendance of Col. Gamal Abd el-Nasser to power. Though Nasser continued the secret contacts with Israel, at one point even exchanging letters with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, at no time did he waver from the demand for all of the Negev, or change his rejection of immediate and full peace. In fact, starting in December 1954, Nasser embarked on a campaign to extend his primacy over the entire Arab world--an effort that required escalated hostility toward Israel and intensified opposition to the West. He proceeded to tighten the blockade and boycott of Israel, to order the Egyptian army to occupy parts of Nitzana, and to set up Fedayeen units to operate out of Gaza. He also declared war against the Baghdad Pact, rejecting Alpha and signing, in September 1955, the largest-ever Middle Eastern arms deal with the Soviet bloc.
This, then, was the regional and international situation that Israel confronted in the period before the Sinai Campaign. Surrounded by Arab states that were conducting acts of war against it--indeed, were arming themselves to obliterate it--Israel had no allies, no diplomatic support and no reliable supplier of weapons. Moreover, saddled with tens of thousands of new immigrants, many of them indigent, and a near-bankrupt economy in the wake of a devastating war that had killed 1% of its population, Israel was scarcely capable of maintaining its existence, much less of defending itself against Nasser, a regionally beloved and lavishly armed leader committed to its destruction. "O Israel! Weep . . . and await your end at any time now," declared the Egyptian-run Voice of the Arabs radio in 1955. "The Arabs of Egypt have found their way to Tel Aviv."
Israel's plight indeed seemed hopeless when, suddenly, in July 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The event prodded the French, who had begun to view Israel as a possible ally against Nasser and his support for Algerian rebels, to open secret discussions on a joint operation in Egypt and undertake to arm the IDF. The French, in turn, urged the British to cease threatening the Israelis and join in the clandestine talks. The result was the Sevres agreement, named after the Paris suburb in which it was surreptitiously signed. According to the document, Israel agreed to commence hostilities against Egypt. One month later, Sharon and his paratroopers descended into the Mitla Pass and the Sinai Campaign began.
The fighting was brutal, but the Israeli forces succeeded in crushing Nasser's troops with their newly supplied Soviet arms, conquering all of the Sinai and Gaza, and reaching the Suez Canal. Though a combination of Soviet military and American economic threats eventually persuaded Ben-Gurion to evacuate these territories, in return he received American pledges for Israel's future defense, along with the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers along the border with Egypt and in Sharm al-Sheikh, overlooking the Straits of Tiran. Finally freed of the danger of Egyptian attack and strengthened through commerce with Asia by way of the straits, Israel enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. It took advantage of those years to absorb waves of new immigrants and to galvanize its civil society. Many Israelis who lived through that time remember the decade after 1956 as the most halcyon in their lives, and in their country's history. And though Nasser unilaterally evicted the U.N. force in May 1967 and again blockaded the straits, the security guarantees Israel had obtained from the United States in 1956, and the international commitments it received regarding the inviolability of its borders and shipping rights, proved essential to generating support for Israel in the Six Day War.
Equally important, at least, was the permanence that Israel achieved as a result of the Sinai Campaign. In the aftermath of the war, the Powers ceased to regard Israel as a temporary entity whose territory could be bargained off to the Arabs. There would be no more Alphas, no more attempts to deprive Israel of the Negev or of any other part of its sovereign land. Nor did the United States endeavor to block Israel's acquisition of modern arms, which continued to flow from France. Indeed, with French assistance, Israel built the nuclear reactor that endowed it with capabilities unequaled except by those of the world's greatest powers.
Finally, though Israel did, by virtue of its collusion with Britain and France, confirm the Arab charge that the Jewish state was little more than a beachhead for imperialism, in truth that charge exists far more in the minds of contemporary Western historians than in Arab thinking of the late 1950s. An examination of Arab broadcasts and newspapers from the period reveals no substantial change in Arab hostility toward Israel--it was absolute before the war, and no less total after it. Similarly, the war could not have lessened chances for the success of a peace process that simply did not exist and, according to Nasser, would not for many, many years.
Contrary, then, to the conventional wisdom in academic circles today, Israel emerged from the Sinai Campaign economically, diplomatically, and militarily strengthened. It had forged vital alliances and earned the respect, if not yet the affection, of the Great Powers, while also enhancing its citizens' security. The situation that existed after 1948, in which Israel was denied legitimacy, permanence, and such fundamental rights as safe borders and freedom of shipping, had ended. The 1956 war allowed Israel to realize, finally, the unfulfilled aspirations of 1948, and in this represents the culmination of Israel's fight for independence.
Mr. Oren is a senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a contributing editor of Azure and author of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present" (Norton, 2007).
The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 2007
The Second War of Independence
The Sinai campaign of 1956 established that Israel was here to stay.
BY MICHAEL B. OREN
WSJ, Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Fifty years ago, at dawn on Oct. 29, 1956, Israeli paratroopers under the command of Col. Ariel Sharon dropped into the Mitla Pass deep in the Sinai Peninsula, 25 miles from the Suez Canal. The action was the first phase in a plan secretly forged by representatives of France, Britain and Israel, triggered by Egypt's nationalization of the canal three months before. According to the scheme, the paratroopers' landing would provide a pretext for the French and British governments to order both Egypt and Israel to remove all of their forces from the canal area. The Europeans anticipated that Cairo would reject that ultimatum, thus allowing them to occupy the strategic waterway. Israel dutifully executed its part of the scheme, smashing the Egyptian army in four days and conquering all of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip. The Anglo-French armada, however, was late in arriving, and soon withdrew under intense international pressure. The Suez War--known in Israel as the Sinai Campaign, or Operation Kadesh--was over within a week, but the battle over its interpretation was merely beginning.
Numerous books and articles have been written about the Suez Crisis, the first post-World War II crisis to pit nationalism against imperialism, and the West against the communist bloc. Historians have long agreed that the invasion was an unrelieved catastrophe for Britain and France, precipitating their expulsion from the Middle East and their decline as great powers. By contrast, the first three decades after the crisis saw debate over Israel's fortunes in the war, with some scholars asserting that Israel had benefited from the destruction of the Egyptian army, the opening of the Straits of Tiran, and the strategic alliance with France. Starting in the 1980s, however, a movement of self-styled New Historians, dedicated to debunking the alleged "myths" of Israeli history, depicted the Sinai Campaign as no less disastrous for the Jewish state. "Israel . . . paid a heavy political price for ganging up with the colonial powers against the emergent forces of Arab nationalism," wrote Avi Shlaim of Oxford University. "Its actions could henceforth be used as proof . . . that it was a bridgehead of Western imperialism in the . . . Arab world."
Twenty years later, Shlaim's analysis of the 1956 war has become universally accepted in academia, and not only among revisionists. In a New York Times article marking the 50th anniversary of Suez, Boston University's David Fromkin, author of the widely acclaimed study of the origins of the modern Middle East, "A Peace to End All Peace" (1989), similarly portrayed Israel's victory as Pyrrhic. "Israel compromised itself through its partnership with European imperialism," Fromkin alleged, echoing Shlaim. "The more Israel won on the battlefield, the further it got from achieving the peace that it sought."
Those who have challenged the magnitude of Israel's victory in 1956, however, fail to take into account the incompleteness of Israel's triumph in its 1948 War of Independence. Customarily, states that win on the battlefield dictate the terms of the peace. But while Israeli forces had repulsed the invading Arab armies and compelled them to sue for truce, Israeli negotiators failed to transform that military accomplishment into a diplomatic device for ending the conflict. The armistice agreements that Israel signed with its four neighboring Arab states between February and July 1949 did not, for example, extend recognition or legitimacy to the Jewish state; nor did they endow that state with permanent borders.
Further complicating this anomalous situation, the agreements created various demilitarized zones of uncertain sovereignty along Israel's frontiers--at the foot of the Golan Heights, for instance, and in Nitzana, along the Sinai-Negev border. Most deleterious of all for Israel, the armistice did not provide for peace. On the contrary, the agreements allowed the Arabs to insist that a state of war continued to exist between them and the "Zionist entity." This state of war, the Arabs argued, enabled them to fire at Israeli settlements in the demilitarized zones, to conduct an economic boycott of the Jewish state, and to blockade Israeli ships and Israel-bound cargoes through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran. Arab states engaged in a relentless anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, designed to prepare their publics for a "second round" with Israel, this time to annihilate it. Propaganda did not suffice for some Arab countries, however, like Syria and Egypt, which sponsored cross-border terrorist (Fedayeen) attacks like that which killed eleven Israelis at Maaleh Akrabim in March 1954.
For the Arab states, the Palestine War, as they called it, had never really ended. Yet they were not alone in regarding Israel as an impermanent and unwanted presence: The Great Powers--the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union--routinely treated Israel as a passing phenomenon and ignored its fundamental interests. Indeed, for the Powers, Israel was little more than what United States Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called "a millstone around our necks."
The period of 1948 to 1956 was one of profound upheaval in Great Power diplomacy in the Middle East. The United States was on the one hand striving to oust the old colonial powers, Britain and France, from the region, while on the other working with its European allies to prevent Soviet penetration. In response to the American threat, Britain and France sought to strengthen their alliances with local states--Britain with Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, and France with Syria and Lebanon--by guaranteeing their security and selling them modern arms. Israel, which was in no Power's interest, was completely left out of these arrangements. Worse, Israel's clashes with Egypt in 1949 and Jordan in 1956 nearly resulted in direct conflict between the IDF and British forces.
Viewed antagonistically by both Britain and France, Israel was hardly valued as an asset by the United States. The Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower owed nothing to the Jewish vote, and was closely aligned with State Department Arabists and American oil companies active in the Middle East. Apart from parade items such as helmets and batons, the United States adamantly refused to sell arms to Israel, even laboring to prevent Israel from purchasing weaponry from its allies. Such transactions, the administration reasoned, would push the Arabs into the Soviet sphere and endanger vital oil supplies.
For their part, the Soviets had also thrown their support behind the Arabs. Though they had provided crucial diplomatic and military backing to the Jewish state in 1948, the Soviets, having secured their objective of ousting the British from Palestine, proceeded to change sides. By 1951, they were unremitting in their hostility to Israel, and after Stalin's death in 1953, the Kremlin adopted a policy of nurturing "bourgeois nationalist" regimes opposed to the West, such as those of Egypt and Syria.
America and Britain reacted to the Soviet threat by trying to organize Middle Eastern states into a regional defense organization similar to NATO. The alliance, known first as the Middle East Defense Organization (MEDO) and later as the Baghdad Pact, was to include Iraq, Jordan and hopefully Egypt. Israel, though it repeatedly petitioned for admission to the group, was continually rejected.
Moreover, while actively fortifying the Arabs, the Powers also implicitly upheld their own interpretation of the armistice. They refused, for example, to pressure the Arab states to end their economic boycott and blockade of Israel or to stem armed infiltration. Rather, they condemned Israel's attempt to establish settlements in the demilitarized zones, to send ships through the canal and the straits, and to retaliate against Fedayeen strongholds. They also opposed Israel's construction of a national water carrier that would transfer Galilee water to the Negev, thus facilitating the desert's settlement. The Negev, the Americans and the British determined in 1949, would eventually be detached from Israel and transferred to Arab sovereignty as part of a land-for-peace deal. Indeed, an Anglo-American plan, inaugurated in 1954 and codenamed "Alpha," called for the transfer of large swaths of the Negev to Egypt as a means of incentivizing it to join MEDO; the Egyptians, in turn, would grant nonbelligerency--not peace--to Israel. Though Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rejected Alpha, American and British leaders were prepared to exert immense pressure on him to implement the plan should Cairo accept it.
Indeed, the Egyptians had long demanded the Negev as a land bridge between them and the Arab world. In secret meetings with Israeli diplomats after the armistice, Egyptian representatives repeatedly demanded that Israel forfeit all of the Negev--62% of its territory--as the price of ending the conflict. But the Egyptians were also express in stating that peace with the Jewish state was inconceivable for the foreseeable future. That position remained unchanged after the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952 and the ascendance of Col. Gamal Abd el-Nasser to power. Though Nasser continued the secret contacts with Israel, at one point even exchanging letters with Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, at no time did he waver from the demand for all of the Negev, or change his rejection of immediate and full peace. In fact, starting in December 1954, Nasser embarked on a campaign to extend his primacy over the entire Arab world--an effort that required escalated hostility toward Israel and intensified opposition to the West. He proceeded to tighten the blockade and boycott of Israel, to order the Egyptian army to occupy parts of Nitzana, and to set up Fedayeen units to operate out of Gaza. He also declared war against the Baghdad Pact, rejecting Alpha and signing, in September 1955, the largest-ever Middle Eastern arms deal with the Soviet bloc.
This, then, was the regional and international situation that Israel confronted in the period before the Sinai Campaign. Surrounded by Arab states that were conducting acts of war against it--indeed, were arming themselves to obliterate it--Israel had no allies, no diplomatic support and no reliable supplier of weapons. Moreover, saddled with tens of thousands of new immigrants, many of them indigent, and a near-bankrupt economy in the wake of a devastating war that had killed 1% of its population, Israel was scarcely capable of maintaining its existence, much less of defending itself against Nasser, a regionally beloved and lavishly armed leader committed to its destruction. "O Israel! Weep . . . and await your end at any time now," declared the Egyptian-run Voice of the Arabs radio in 1955. "The Arabs of Egypt have found their way to Tel Aviv."
Israel's plight indeed seemed hopeless when, suddenly, in July 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The event prodded the French, who had begun to view Israel as a possible ally against Nasser and his support for Algerian rebels, to open secret discussions on a joint operation in Egypt and undertake to arm the IDF. The French, in turn, urged the British to cease threatening the Israelis and join in the clandestine talks. The result was the Sevres agreement, named after the Paris suburb in which it was surreptitiously signed. According to the document, Israel agreed to commence hostilities against Egypt. One month later, Sharon and his paratroopers descended into the Mitla Pass and the Sinai Campaign began.
The fighting was brutal, but the Israeli forces succeeded in crushing Nasser's troops with their newly supplied Soviet arms, conquering all of the Sinai and Gaza, and reaching the Suez Canal. Though a combination of Soviet military and American economic threats eventually persuaded Ben-Gurion to evacuate these territories, in return he received American pledges for Israel's future defense, along with the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers along the border with Egypt and in Sharm al-Sheikh, overlooking the Straits of Tiran. Finally freed of the danger of Egyptian attack and strengthened through commerce with Asia by way of the straits, Israel enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity. It took advantage of those years to absorb waves of new immigrants and to galvanize its civil society. Many Israelis who lived through that time remember the decade after 1956 as the most halcyon in their lives, and in their country's history. And though Nasser unilaterally evicted the U.N. force in May 1967 and again blockaded the straits, the security guarantees Israel had obtained from the United States in 1956, and the international commitments it received regarding the inviolability of its borders and shipping rights, proved essential to generating support for Israel in the Six Day War.
Equally important, at least, was the permanence that Israel achieved as a result of the Sinai Campaign. In the aftermath of the war, the Powers ceased to regard Israel as a temporary entity whose territory could be bargained off to the Arabs. There would be no more Alphas, no more attempts to deprive Israel of the Negev or of any other part of its sovereign land. Nor did the United States endeavor to block Israel's acquisition of modern arms, which continued to flow from France. Indeed, with French assistance, Israel built the nuclear reactor that endowed it with capabilities unequaled except by those of the world's greatest powers.
Finally, though Israel did, by virtue of its collusion with Britain and France, confirm the Arab charge that the Jewish state was little more than a beachhead for imperialism, in truth that charge exists far more in the minds of contemporary Western historians than in Arab thinking of the late 1950s. An examination of Arab broadcasts and newspapers from the period reveals no substantial change in Arab hostility toward Israel--it was absolute before the war, and no less total after it. Similarly, the war could not have lessened chances for the success of a peace process that simply did not exist and, according to Nasser, would not for many, many years.
Contrary, then, to the conventional wisdom in academic circles today, Israel emerged from the Sinai Campaign economically, diplomatically, and militarily strengthened. It had forged vital alliances and earned the respect, if not yet the affection, of the Great Powers, while also enhancing its citizens' security. The situation that existed after 1948, in which Israel was denied legitimacy, permanence, and such fundamental rights as safe borders and freedom of shipping, had ended. The 1956 war allowed Israel to realize, finally, the unfulfilled aspirations of 1948, and in this represents the culmination of Israel's fight for independence.
Mr. Oren is a senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a contributing editor of Azure and author of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present" (Norton, 2007).
sábado, fevereiro 03, 2007
181) O anti-sovietico numero 1 (com muita honra): Robert Conquest
Da edição deste sábado, 3 de fevereiro de 2007, do The Wall Street Journal:
Today's Featured Article
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Anti-Sovietchik No. 1
Robert Conquest's is the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny.
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Saturday, February 3, 2007
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Those who were born in Year One of the Russian Revolution are now entering their 10th decade. Of the intellectual class that got its vintage laid down in 1917, a class which includes Eric Hobsbawm, Conor Cruise O'Brien and precious few others, the pre-eminent Anglo-American veteran must be Robert Conquest. He must also be the one who takes the greatest satisfaction in having outlived the Soviet "experiment."
Over the years, I have very often knocked respectfully at the door of his modest apartment ("book-lined" would be the other standard word for it) on the outskirts of Stanford University, where he is a longstanding ornament of the Hoover Institution. Evenings at his table, marvelously arranged in concert with his wife Elizabeth ("Liddie"), have become a part of the social and conversational legend of visitors from several continents.
I thought I would just check and see how he was doing as 2007 dawned. When I called, he was dividing his time between an exercise bicycle and the latest revision of his classic book "The Great Terror": the volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn. Its 40th anniversary falls next year, and the publishers need the third edition in a hurry. Had it needed much of an update? "Well, it's been a bit of a slog. I had to read about 30 or 40 books in Russian and other languages, and about 400 articles in journals and things like that. But even so I found I didn't have to change it all that much."
One of his lifelong friends, the novelist Anthony Powell, once wrote that all classes of Englishmen employ the discourse of irony and understatement. This would itself be an understatement of Mr. Conquest's devastatingly dry and lethal manner, expressed in the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny. His diffidence made me inquire what else might be keeping him busy. "My publisher wants me to do a book called 'How Not to Write About History,' and I thought, yes. Then I'm doing an essay on the importance of India, and something about the U.N. and internationalism."
I know that he used to serve in the British delegation at the U.N. But India? "My mother was born in Bombay, and I've always been impressed by how Indians have mastered English literature and culture." What about the collection of limericks that he's been promising for a while, in his capacity as the last remaining master of the form after the deaths of his other friends Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin? "I'm getting round to that, but there's first my latest collection of poems, which I'm calling 'Penultimata.' Didn't I mention it? Would you like a copy?" Yes, I would and--oh, what about the memoirs? "Starting tomorrow, when I'm finished with doing 'The Great Terror.' I'm going to try dictating them into this new machine . . . Liddie, what's it called?" Mrs. Conquest--a scholar of English who first told me that Henry James always dictated his novels--comes up with the name of the new voice-activated software. "It's called 'Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine.'" Golly. "Well, my handwriting's pretty bad and my typing is worse," says Mr. Conquest apologetically. That's true enough, as I know, but I can't help thinking that if "Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine" really works, and if it had been available in the 1960s, then the Soviet Union would probably have fallen several years before it actually did.
A history here, an anthology of poems there, an assortment of limericks, a memoir, a lineup of contributions to learned journals and--I forgot to mention--a festschrift of essays in his honor to be edited by the Hungarian-born scholar Paul Hollander. This seems enough to be going on with. Meanwhile, his other great work on the Ukrainian terror-famine of the 1930s, "Harvest of Sorrow," is being produced and distributed, with no profit going to the author, by a Ukrainian charity associated with President Viktor Yushchenko. Is it sweet to be so vindicated? As always, I have to crane slightly to hear the whispery answer. "There was a magazine in Russia called Neva, which found its circulation went up from 100,000 to a million when it serialized 'The Great Terror.' And I later found that at the very last plenum of the Soviet Communist Party, just before the U.S.S.R. dissolved, a Stalinist hack called Alexander Chakovsky had described me as 'anti-Sovietchik No. 1.' I must say I was rather proud of that."
Somewhere in the apartment is the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Mr. Conquest in 2005 at a ceremony which also featured Aretha Franklin and Muhammad Ali. I have a picture of him sitting next to the Queen of Soul, smiling demurely, having paid his own way to come to Washington. And it comes back to me that he rang me up on the day of President Bush's first inaugural. "Did you see that line in the speech about the angel that rides the storm? Any idea where it's from? I'm sure I know it."
I wasn't able to help, but I knew I would get a later call, which I duly did, identifying the line as coming from John Dryden. All part of the Conquest service. Like the limericks, some of which cannot be reproduced in a family-oriented newspaper but many of which are literary and intellectual mnemonic masterpieces. An instance? His deft compression of the entirety of Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech:
First you get puking and mewling
Then very p---ed off with your schooling
Then f---s and then fights
Then judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers--then drooling."
Just as one can never imagine Mr. Conquest raising his voice or losing his temper, so one can never picture him using an obscenity for its own sake. A few years ago he said to me that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that what was really needed was "a United Front against bulls--t."
For all that, his life has been lived among the ideological storms of the 20th century, of which he retains an acute and unique memory. He was himself a communist for a couple of years in the late 1930s, having been radicalized while studying in France and observing events in Spain. "I was even a left deviationist--my best friend was a Trotskyist and when King George V was crowned we decorated the college at Oxford with eight chamberpots painted in red, white and blue." He left the party after asking what the line would be if Chamberlain ever declared war on Hitler, and receiving the reply: "Comrade, it is impossible that the bourgeois Chamberlain would ever declare war on Hitler." This he found "oafish." "I didn't like the word 'impossible.' "
Wartime service in Bulgaria, which made him an eyewitness to Stalin's takeover of the country at the end, was proof positive. From then on, working as a researcher and later as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office, he strove to propose a social-democratic resistance to communism. "I'd always been a Labour man and somewhat on the left until the 1970s, when I met Margaret Thatcher and she asked my advice." That advice--which translated into the now-famous "Iron Lady" speech--was to regard the Soviet system as something condemned by history and doomed to fail. If that sounds easy now, it wasn't then (though Mr. Conquest insists that it was George Orwell who first saw it coming).
Like many people with a natural gift for politics, Mr. Conquest finds that he distrusts those who can talk of nothing else. His affiliations are undogmatic and unfanatical (he preferred Tony Blair over Margaret Thatcher's successor John Major), and he does not bother to turn out at election times. "I'm a dual national who's a citizen of the U.S. and the U.K., so that voting in either place seems rather overdoing it." On the events of today he is always very judicious and reserved. "I have my own opinions about Iraq, but I haven't said a great deal about the subject because I don't know all that much about it."
How often do you hear anyone talking like that? If he had done nothing political, he would still have had a life, and would be remembered as the senior figure of that stellar collection of poets and writers--John Wain, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis--who became known in the Britain of the 1950s as "the Movement." Liddie Conquest happens to have written rather authoritatively about this group, though that's not how they met. "I was teaching at the University of Texas in El Paso and he came to give a poetry reading. But it wasn't until I met him later in California that something 'clicked,' as people like to say."
Mrs. Conquest might be described as a force of nature, and also as the wielder of a Texan skillet that yields brisket of a rare and strange tenderness; Anthony Powell in his "Journals" was again committed to understatement when he wrote of her engagement to "Bob" that "she is charming, and he a lucky man."
"I know you meet different lefties from the ones I know," he says, referring obliquely to some recent tussles between your humble servant and the Michael Moore faction. "But I've always been friends with what I call 'the good left.' " In the days of the old Soviet Union, he kept up a solid friendship with the radical Russian scholar Steve Cohen, author of a study of Nikolai Bukharin and husband of Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, and admired his objectivity. "I helped out Scoop Jackson against Kissinger on the Soviet Jewish question. Pat Moynihan helped me get a job at the Wilson Center in Washington in the 1970s."
I remind him that I once introduced him to that other great veteran of the Bay Area, Jessica "Decca" Mitford, and that in the course of a tremendous evening she was enchanted to find that this dreaded friend of Mrs. Thatcher was the only other person she'd ever met who knew all the words to the old Red songbooks, including the highly demanding ditty: "The Cloakmaker's Union Is a No-Good Union," anthem of the old communist garment district. At the close of that dinner I challenged him to write her a limerick on the spot, and he gallantly and spontaneously produced the following:
They don't find they're having to check a
Movement of homage to Decca.
It's no longer fair
To say Oakland's "not there" She's made it a regular Mecca.
The old girl was quite blown away by this tribute, and kept the inscribed napkin as a souvenir.
An agnostic in religion ("did you know that Milton Friedman was an agnostic, too?") Mr. Conquest is likewise suspicious of anything too zealous or systematic in human affairs. He is also refreshingly empirical in his judgments. Asked why he, the great anatomizer and accuser of Stalinism, still regards Nazism as morally worse than the Gulag, he replies mildly but somehow irrefutably: "I simply feel it to be so." In his most recent books, "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" and "The Dragons of Expectation," he goes beyond the usual admonitions against Jacobinism and more recent totalitarian utopias, and argues for "the Anglosphere," that historic arc of law, tradition and individual liberty that extends from Scotland to Australia and takes in the two largest multicultural democracies on the planet--the U.S. and India.
There was a time when this might have seemed quixotic or even nostalgic (at least to me), but when one surveys the wreckage of other concepts, and the increasing difficulties of the only rival "model" in the form of the European Union (of which he was an early skeptic) the notion seems to have a future as well as a past. One very much feels, as one also very much hopes, that the same can be said of the Grand Old Man of Stanford.
Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
Today's Featured Article
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
Anti-Sovietchik No. 1
Robert Conquest's is the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny.
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Saturday, February 3, 2007
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Those who were born in Year One of the Russian Revolution are now entering their 10th decade. Of the intellectual class that got its vintage laid down in 1917, a class which includes Eric Hobsbawm, Conor Cruise O'Brien and precious few others, the pre-eminent Anglo-American veteran must be Robert Conquest. He must also be the one who takes the greatest satisfaction in having outlived the Soviet "experiment."
Over the years, I have very often knocked respectfully at the door of his modest apartment ("book-lined" would be the other standard word for it) on the outskirts of Stanford University, where he is a longstanding ornament of the Hoover Institution. Evenings at his table, marvelously arranged in concert with his wife Elizabeth ("Liddie"), have become a part of the social and conversational legend of visitors from several continents.
I thought I would just check and see how he was doing as 2007 dawned. When I called, he was dividing his time between an exercise bicycle and the latest revision of his classic book "The Great Terror": the volume that tore the mask away from Stalinism before most people had even heard of Solzhenitsyn. Its 40th anniversary falls next year, and the publishers need the third edition in a hurry. Had it needed much of an update? "Well, it's been a bit of a slog. I had to read about 30 or 40 books in Russian and other languages, and about 400 articles in journals and things like that. But even so I found I didn't have to change it all that much."
One of his lifelong friends, the novelist Anthony Powell, once wrote that all classes of Englishmen employ the discourse of irony and understatement. This would itself be an understatement of Mr. Conquest's devastatingly dry and lethal manner, expressed in the softest voice that ever brought down an ideological tyranny. His diffidence made me inquire what else might be keeping him busy. "My publisher wants me to do a book called 'How Not to Write About History,' and I thought, yes. Then I'm doing an essay on the importance of India, and something about the U.N. and internationalism."
I know that he used to serve in the British delegation at the U.N. But India? "My mother was born in Bombay, and I've always been impressed by how Indians have mastered English literature and culture." What about the collection of limericks that he's been promising for a while, in his capacity as the last remaining master of the form after the deaths of his other friends Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin? "I'm getting round to that, but there's first my latest collection of poems, which I'm calling 'Penultimata.' Didn't I mention it? Would you like a copy?" Yes, I would and--oh, what about the memoirs? "Starting tomorrow, when I'm finished with doing 'The Great Terror.' I'm going to try dictating them into this new machine . . . Liddie, what's it called?" Mrs. Conquest--a scholar of English who first told me that Henry James always dictated his novels--comes up with the name of the new voice-activated software. "It's called 'Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine.'" Golly. "Well, my handwriting's pretty bad and my typing is worse," says Mr. Conquest apologetically. That's true enough, as I know, but I can't help thinking that if "Dragons Naturally Speaking Nine" really works, and if it had been available in the 1960s, then the Soviet Union would probably have fallen several years before it actually did.
A history here, an anthology of poems there, an assortment of limericks, a memoir, a lineup of contributions to learned journals and--I forgot to mention--a festschrift of essays in his honor to be edited by the Hungarian-born scholar Paul Hollander. This seems enough to be going on with. Meanwhile, his other great work on the Ukrainian terror-famine of the 1930s, "Harvest of Sorrow," is being produced and distributed, with no profit going to the author, by a Ukrainian charity associated with President Viktor Yushchenko. Is it sweet to be so vindicated? As always, I have to crane slightly to hear the whispery answer. "There was a magazine in Russia called Neva, which found its circulation went up from 100,000 to a million when it serialized 'The Great Terror.' And I later found that at the very last plenum of the Soviet Communist Party, just before the U.S.S.R. dissolved, a Stalinist hack called Alexander Chakovsky had described me as 'anti-Sovietchik No. 1.' I must say I was rather proud of that."
Somewhere in the apartment is the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to Mr. Conquest in 2005 at a ceremony which also featured Aretha Franklin and Muhammad Ali. I have a picture of him sitting next to the Queen of Soul, smiling demurely, having paid his own way to come to Washington. And it comes back to me that he rang me up on the day of President Bush's first inaugural. "Did you see that line in the speech about the angel that rides the storm? Any idea where it's from? I'm sure I know it."
I wasn't able to help, but I knew I would get a later call, which I duly did, identifying the line as coming from John Dryden. All part of the Conquest service. Like the limericks, some of which cannot be reproduced in a family-oriented newspaper but many of which are literary and intellectual mnemonic masterpieces. An instance? His deft compression of the entirety of Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech:
First you get puking and mewling
Then very p---ed off with your schooling
Then f---s and then fights
Then judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers--then drooling."
Just as one can never imagine Mr. Conquest raising his voice or losing his temper, so one can never picture him using an obscenity for its own sake. A few years ago he said to me that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that what was really needed was "a United Front against bulls--t."
For all that, his life has been lived among the ideological storms of the 20th century, of which he retains an acute and unique memory. He was himself a communist for a couple of years in the late 1930s, having been radicalized while studying in France and observing events in Spain. "I was even a left deviationist--my best friend was a Trotskyist and when King George V was crowned we decorated the college at Oxford with eight chamberpots painted in red, white and blue." He left the party after asking what the line would be if Chamberlain ever declared war on Hitler, and receiving the reply: "Comrade, it is impossible that the bourgeois Chamberlain would ever declare war on Hitler." This he found "oafish." "I didn't like the word 'impossible.' "
Wartime service in Bulgaria, which made him an eyewitness to Stalin's takeover of the country at the end, was proof positive. From then on, working as a researcher and later as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office, he strove to propose a social-democratic resistance to communism. "I'd always been a Labour man and somewhat on the left until the 1970s, when I met Margaret Thatcher and she asked my advice." That advice--which translated into the now-famous "Iron Lady" speech--was to regard the Soviet system as something condemned by history and doomed to fail. If that sounds easy now, it wasn't then (though Mr. Conquest insists that it was George Orwell who first saw it coming).
Like many people with a natural gift for politics, Mr. Conquest finds that he distrusts those who can talk of nothing else. His affiliations are undogmatic and unfanatical (he preferred Tony Blair over Margaret Thatcher's successor John Major), and he does not bother to turn out at election times. "I'm a dual national who's a citizen of the U.S. and the U.K., so that voting in either place seems rather overdoing it." On the events of today he is always very judicious and reserved. "I have my own opinions about Iraq, but I haven't said a great deal about the subject because I don't know all that much about it."
How often do you hear anyone talking like that? If he had done nothing political, he would still have had a life, and would be remembered as the senior figure of that stellar collection of poets and writers--John Wain, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis--who became known in the Britain of the 1950s as "the Movement." Liddie Conquest happens to have written rather authoritatively about this group, though that's not how they met. "I was teaching at the University of Texas in El Paso and he came to give a poetry reading. But it wasn't until I met him later in California that something 'clicked,' as people like to say."
Mrs. Conquest might be described as a force of nature, and also as the wielder of a Texan skillet that yields brisket of a rare and strange tenderness; Anthony Powell in his "Journals" was again committed to understatement when he wrote of her engagement to "Bob" that "she is charming, and he a lucky man."
"I know you meet different lefties from the ones I know," he says, referring obliquely to some recent tussles between your humble servant and the Michael Moore faction. "But I've always been friends with what I call 'the good left.' " In the days of the old Soviet Union, he kept up a solid friendship with the radical Russian scholar Steve Cohen, author of a study of Nikolai Bukharin and husband of Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, and admired his objectivity. "I helped out Scoop Jackson against Kissinger on the Soviet Jewish question. Pat Moynihan helped me get a job at the Wilson Center in Washington in the 1970s."
I remind him that I once introduced him to that other great veteran of the Bay Area, Jessica "Decca" Mitford, and that in the course of a tremendous evening she was enchanted to find that this dreaded friend of Mrs. Thatcher was the only other person she'd ever met who knew all the words to the old Red songbooks, including the highly demanding ditty: "The Cloakmaker's Union Is a No-Good Union," anthem of the old communist garment district. At the close of that dinner I challenged him to write her a limerick on the spot, and he gallantly and spontaneously produced the following:
They don't find they're having to check a
Movement of homage to Decca.
It's no longer fair
To say Oakland's "not there" She's made it a regular Mecca.
The old girl was quite blown away by this tribute, and kept the inscribed napkin as a souvenir.
An agnostic in religion ("did you know that Milton Friedman was an agnostic, too?") Mr. Conquest is likewise suspicious of anything too zealous or systematic in human affairs. He is also refreshingly empirical in his judgments. Asked why he, the great anatomizer and accuser of Stalinism, still regards Nazism as morally worse than the Gulag, he replies mildly but somehow irrefutably: "I simply feel it to be so." In his most recent books, "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" and "The Dragons of Expectation," he goes beyond the usual admonitions against Jacobinism and more recent totalitarian utopias, and argues for "the Anglosphere," that historic arc of law, tradition and individual liberty that extends from Scotland to Australia and takes in the two largest multicultural democracies on the planet--the U.S. and India.
There was a time when this might have seemed quixotic or even nostalgic (at least to me), but when one surveys the wreckage of other concepts, and the increasing difficulties of the only rival "model" in the form of the European Union (of which he was an early skeptic) the notion seems to have a future as well as a past. One very much feels, as one also very much hopes, that the same can be said of the Grand Old Man of Stanford.
Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
sexta-feira, fevereiro 02, 2007
180) Reforma agraria no seculo XXI
Reforma agrária no século XXI
José Graziano da Silva
Jornal Valor Econômico, 25/01/2007, pág. A10
América Latina assiste ao crepúsculo da oligarquia agrária e do latifúndio, mas a pobreza e a fome no campo não declinaram
Socializar uma experiência histórica é a melhor forma de transformá-la em base de apoio para impulsionar sua própria evolução e assim influenciar a sua trajetória futura. Não só no Brasil, na América Latina de um modo geral, há uma percepção crescente de que a agenda da reforma agrária vive o grande momento dessa travessia.
A experiência de uma dezena de países ao longo de mais de quatro décadas atingiu um ponto de mutação. Mais que isso. A saturação das estruturas coincide com a emergência de uma nova realidade latino-americana, refletida na emergência de um colar de governos progressistas que dá à região a necessária credibilidade para promover um "aggiornamento" de suas políticas agrárias, adequando-as à realidade do século XXI.
Antes de mais nada, é preciso ressaltar que a reforma agrária não é um conceito anacrônico na política do século XXI . Sua pertinência não deriva apenas da vontade dos atores sociais, mas das estruturas existentes. O índice de concentração das terras agricultáveis supera os níveis de concentração de renda. Menos de 3% dos proprietários detém 57% da área disponível no globo. Nos países mais pobres esse desnível patrimonial solapa aspirações por justiça, dificulta o manejo do desenvolvimento e continua a asfixiar o desenvolvimento local.
Ao mesmo tempo, há uma profunda renovação das expectativas da sociedade em relação ao campo e à natureza. O velho reducionismo de um espaço rural encarado como mero entreposto de safras e insumos, caducou. Da dimensão territorial à cultural, passando pela ecológica, as fronteiras entre o rural e o urbano desbotam e chegam a se tornar invisíveis em algumas regiões, cobrando um tratamento articulado de políticas de desenvolvimento inovadoras. As condições de mercado impostas pela globalização, em contrapartida - alta produtividade, escala elevada e sofisticação comercial -, tornam cada vez mais complexas a produção e a sobrevivência no campo. O conjunto descarta utopias agrárias ancoradas na mera repartição de lotes entre famílias de produtores isolados para sua própria subsistência.
Contradições como essas não constituem um defeito da História. Antes, formam a expressão dinâmica da sua evolução, algo que não pode ser negado sob pena de concentrarmos esforços na batalha do dia anterior.
O Escritório Regional da FAO convidou especialistas e autoridades do Chile, Brasil, Paraguai, Bolívia, Venezuela e Peru, para aprofundar as discussões iniciadas em Porto Alegre, em março de 2006, na Conferencia Internacional sobre Reforma Agrária e Desenvolvimento Rural (CIRADR).
A convergência de relatos e diagnósticos nesses encontros é reveladora. Ao contrário do que asseveram análises simplistas à direita e à esquerda, o embate histórico entre reforma e contra-reforma no continente deixou um legado positivo para o século XXI: o latifúndio e as velhas oligarquias agrárias foram derrotados. Embora ainda persistam, até com certa força, em bolsões isolados, como categoria histórica perderam a centralidade econômica e política para a grande escala empresarial.
No Chile, por exemplo, até 1955, quase a metade das 345 mil famílias existentes no campo não dispunham de terra. Iniciada no princípio dos anos 60, a reforma agrária chilena expropriou 10 milhões de hectares. A ditadura militar reverteu quase a metade disso. Mas a retomada da democracia mostrou que a oligarquia rural foi desmontada, ainda que às custas de um processo de modernização conservadora, similar ao ocorrido no Brasil pós-1964.
A reforma agrária mais radical já feita no continente aconteceu no Peru entre 1968 e 1975 , durante o ciclo de governos militares reformistas. Eles praticamente aboliram a grande propriedade rural no país. Hoje 70% das terras peruanas estão nas mãos de pequenos e médios produtores. Na Bolívia, o reformismo agrário começou em 1953 e repartiu 57 milhões de hectares, mais da metade do território nacional; mas a maioria da população mais pobre, de origem indígena, continua sem aceso à terra. No Brasil, só entre 1995 e 2006, o processo envolveu grandezas da ordem de 940 mil famílias assentadas e 50 milhões de hectares repartidos. Embora acelerado nos últimos anos, o ritmo de acesso à terra é considerado insuficiente pelos movimentos de trabalhadores rurais. Na Venezuela, que ostenta um dos mais elevados índices de concentração fundiária da América Latina (5% dos proprietários detém 75% das glebas), a reforma intensificou-se a partir de 1999, mas ainda não atingiu sua maturidade. A nota destoante fica por conta do Paraguai: país de economia predominantemente agrícola, aí a reforma engatinha há mais de 40 anos diante de uma fila de 350 mil pessoas sem acesso à terra.
O crepúsculo estrutural do binômio latifúndio/oligarquia na América Latina, sem que se observe um declínio proporcional dos indicadores pobreza e fome no campo, reflete uma nova contradição, não um defeito da História. O descompasso reafirma a insuficiência de um ciclo reformista calcado em concepções agrárias desprovidas de um projeto de desenvolvimento nacional a elas integrado, que hoje requer a incorporação de novas funções econômicas e ambientais nessa fronteira da sociedade.
Legítimo e necessário, o acesso à terra é insuficiente para consolidar a renovação das forças políticas que podem comandar esse "aggiornamento" estratégico. As implicações práticas e teóricas desse fato vão animar novos projetos que a FAO pretende incentivar na América Latina nos próximos anos. Entre eles, a disseminação da ponte nova da bioenergia que pode resgatar o elo perdido entre desenvolvimento e justiça agrária no campo. Desde já, porém, emerge um balizador dessa travessia. Para que ela seja bem sucedida, os Estados nacionais não podem persistir numa atitude reflexa, quase pavloviana, diante das demandas emitidas pelos movimentos sociais organizados no campo. A equação agrária do século XXI requer um projeto de desenvolvimento legitimado por toda a sociedade. Trata-se de um novo passaporte para o futuro. Diante dele o Estado não pode ser um passageiro caudatário, a mercê de rotas inconsistentes e destinos obscuros.
José Graziano da Silva é representante regional da FAO para América Latina e o Caribe.
José Graziano da Silva
Jornal Valor Econômico, 25/01/2007, pág. A10
América Latina assiste ao crepúsculo da oligarquia agrária e do latifúndio, mas a pobreza e a fome no campo não declinaram
Socializar uma experiência histórica é a melhor forma de transformá-la em base de apoio para impulsionar sua própria evolução e assim influenciar a sua trajetória futura. Não só no Brasil, na América Latina de um modo geral, há uma percepção crescente de que a agenda da reforma agrária vive o grande momento dessa travessia.
A experiência de uma dezena de países ao longo de mais de quatro décadas atingiu um ponto de mutação. Mais que isso. A saturação das estruturas coincide com a emergência de uma nova realidade latino-americana, refletida na emergência de um colar de governos progressistas que dá à região a necessária credibilidade para promover um "aggiornamento" de suas políticas agrárias, adequando-as à realidade do século XXI.
Antes de mais nada, é preciso ressaltar que a reforma agrária não é um conceito anacrônico na política do século XXI . Sua pertinência não deriva apenas da vontade dos atores sociais, mas das estruturas existentes. O índice de concentração das terras agricultáveis supera os níveis de concentração de renda. Menos de 3% dos proprietários detém 57% da área disponível no globo. Nos países mais pobres esse desnível patrimonial solapa aspirações por justiça, dificulta o manejo do desenvolvimento e continua a asfixiar o desenvolvimento local.
Ao mesmo tempo, há uma profunda renovação das expectativas da sociedade em relação ao campo e à natureza. O velho reducionismo de um espaço rural encarado como mero entreposto de safras e insumos, caducou. Da dimensão territorial à cultural, passando pela ecológica, as fronteiras entre o rural e o urbano desbotam e chegam a se tornar invisíveis em algumas regiões, cobrando um tratamento articulado de políticas de desenvolvimento inovadoras. As condições de mercado impostas pela globalização, em contrapartida - alta produtividade, escala elevada e sofisticação comercial -, tornam cada vez mais complexas a produção e a sobrevivência no campo. O conjunto descarta utopias agrárias ancoradas na mera repartição de lotes entre famílias de produtores isolados para sua própria subsistência.
Contradições como essas não constituem um defeito da História. Antes, formam a expressão dinâmica da sua evolução, algo que não pode ser negado sob pena de concentrarmos esforços na batalha do dia anterior.
O Escritório Regional da FAO convidou especialistas e autoridades do Chile, Brasil, Paraguai, Bolívia, Venezuela e Peru, para aprofundar as discussões iniciadas em Porto Alegre, em março de 2006, na Conferencia Internacional sobre Reforma Agrária e Desenvolvimento Rural (CIRADR).
A convergência de relatos e diagnósticos nesses encontros é reveladora. Ao contrário do que asseveram análises simplistas à direita e à esquerda, o embate histórico entre reforma e contra-reforma no continente deixou um legado positivo para o século XXI: o latifúndio e as velhas oligarquias agrárias foram derrotados. Embora ainda persistam, até com certa força, em bolsões isolados, como categoria histórica perderam a centralidade econômica e política para a grande escala empresarial.
No Chile, por exemplo, até 1955, quase a metade das 345 mil famílias existentes no campo não dispunham de terra. Iniciada no princípio dos anos 60, a reforma agrária chilena expropriou 10 milhões de hectares. A ditadura militar reverteu quase a metade disso. Mas a retomada da democracia mostrou que a oligarquia rural foi desmontada, ainda que às custas de um processo de modernização conservadora, similar ao ocorrido no Brasil pós-1964.
A reforma agrária mais radical já feita no continente aconteceu no Peru entre 1968 e 1975 , durante o ciclo de governos militares reformistas. Eles praticamente aboliram a grande propriedade rural no país. Hoje 70% das terras peruanas estão nas mãos de pequenos e médios produtores. Na Bolívia, o reformismo agrário começou em 1953 e repartiu 57 milhões de hectares, mais da metade do território nacional; mas a maioria da população mais pobre, de origem indígena, continua sem aceso à terra. No Brasil, só entre 1995 e 2006, o processo envolveu grandezas da ordem de 940 mil famílias assentadas e 50 milhões de hectares repartidos. Embora acelerado nos últimos anos, o ritmo de acesso à terra é considerado insuficiente pelos movimentos de trabalhadores rurais. Na Venezuela, que ostenta um dos mais elevados índices de concentração fundiária da América Latina (5% dos proprietários detém 75% das glebas), a reforma intensificou-se a partir de 1999, mas ainda não atingiu sua maturidade. A nota destoante fica por conta do Paraguai: país de economia predominantemente agrícola, aí a reforma engatinha há mais de 40 anos diante de uma fila de 350 mil pessoas sem acesso à terra.
O crepúsculo estrutural do binômio latifúndio/oligarquia na América Latina, sem que se observe um declínio proporcional dos indicadores pobreza e fome no campo, reflete uma nova contradição, não um defeito da História. O descompasso reafirma a insuficiência de um ciclo reformista calcado em concepções agrárias desprovidas de um projeto de desenvolvimento nacional a elas integrado, que hoje requer a incorporação de novas funções econômicas e ambientais nessa fronteira da sociedade.
Legítimo e necessário, o acesso à terra é insuficiente para consolidar a renovação das forças políticas que podem comandar esse "aggiornamento" estratégico. As implicações práticas e teóricas desse fato vão animar novos projetos que a FAO pretende incentivar na América Latina nos próximos anos. Entre eles, a disseminação da ponte nova da bioenergia que pode resgatar o elo perdido entre desenvolvimento e justiça agrária no campo. Desde já, porém, emerge um balizador dessa travessia. Para que ela seja bem sucedida, os Estados nacionais não podem persistir numa atitude reflexa, quase pavloviana, diante das demandas emitidas pelos movimentos sociais organizados no campo. A equação agrária do século XXI requer um projeto de desenvolvimento legitimado por toda a sociedade. Trata-se de um novo passaporte para o futuro. Diante dele o Estado não pode ser um passageiro caudatário, a mercê de rotas inconsistentes e destinos obscuros.
José Graziano da Silva é representante regional da FAO para América Latina e o Caribe.
quinta-feira, fevereiro 01, 2007
179) Victor Hugo: um escritor exemplar
Resenha da biografia de Victor Hugo por Max Gallo, publicada no jornal Valor Econômico. Gostei, sobretudo, deste trecho:
"E Victor Hugo produzia muito, era uma verdadeira máquina de escrever. "Ele acordava de madrugada para trabalhar e não parava nunca", diz Gallo. Era tão rápido que podia terminar uma peça de teatro em 15 dias. Escreveu 17.500 páginas ao longo da vida, passando pelos mais diversos gêneros literários. Seu segredo? "Uma energia incrível."
Pois é, para escrever é preciso energia, mas são necessárias, sobretudo, idéias...
A estética da pobreza em Victor Hugo
Por Joana Calmon
Jornal Valor Econômico - caderno EU&Fim de Semana, 26/01/2007
Retrato de Victor Hugo: o maior autor romântico da língua francesa foi também fotógrafo, pintor, político e um cidadão engajado que lutou pela liberdade e pelos direitos humanos
Dono de uma vocação precoce e ambições imensas, Victor Hugo, ainda garoto, estava decidido a se igualar a um dos maiores escritores de sua época: "Quero ser Chateaubriand ou nada", escreveu, aos 14 anos, em seu diário. Em pouco tempo, chegou aonde queria. E foi além. Na hora da morte, teve a chorá-lo, nas ruas de Paris, mais de um milhão de pessoas. Seu corpo foi exposto sob o Arco do Triunfo e depois levado para o Panthéon, templo supremo dos heróis da pátria, onde repousam Voltaire e Rousseau, só para ficar nos grandes nomes da literatura.
Mas Victor Hugo não entrou para a história apenas como um dos maiores autores românticos da língua francesa. Além de poeta, dramaturgo e romancista, foi fotógrafo, pintor, político e cidadão engajado. Lutou pela liberdade e pelos direitos humanos, revoltou-se contra a pena de morte e conquistou a imagem de "pai dos pobres". Graças a sua obra famosa, "Os Miseráveis", o povo ganhou destaque na literatura.
"Antes dele, nenhum escritor havia atribuído um papel aos pobres. Ele introduziu valores até então inéditos no mundo das letras, como a justiça social e a fraternidade. E isso influenciou a literatura em diversos países, inclusive no Brasil", explica o historiador e escritor Max Gallo, que lança "Victor Hugo", biografia em dois volumes - "Eu Sou uma Força Que Avança", que aborda o período entre 1802 e 1843, e "Este Sou Eu", que retrata os anos entre 1844 e 1885.
Ao longo de mil páginas, o autor segue, passo a passo, a trajetória de uma das mais importantes figuras da França, desde o seu nascimento - antes ainda, já que começa o livro pelo momento em que ele foi concebido - até a morte. Ao contrário de outros biógrafos de Victor Hugo, Max Gallo não aborda apenas a obra literária e as realizações do homem público. Adentra também sua vida privada. Esse mergulho na intimidade do poeta exacerba aspectos geralmente pouco explorados, como a relação complicada com o pai na juventude e a quase obsessão sexual na velhice.
Para reunir o material necessário, Gallo viajou aos lugares onde o escritor viveu, analisou o depoimento de pessoas que atravessaram seu caminho e leu os jornais da época, assim como todas as suas correspondências. Também decifrou, com a ajuda de especialistas, as anotações que ele fazia em seus caderninhos e diários. "Ele escrevia todos os detalhes de sua vida amorosa em código, mas conseguimos interpretá-los e reconstituir fielmente mesmo as cenas mais picantes, sem trair a realidade", garante o autor. "Victor Hugo foi um grande amante até o fim de seus dias."
E com a mesma intensidade com que amou as mulheres ele lutou por seus ideais. Em 1851, num ato de resistência contra o arbítrio dos poderosos, opôs-se ao golpe do imperador Napoleão III e partiu para um longo exílio, de quase 20 anos, nas ilhas britânicas de Jersey e Guernsey , no Canal da Mancha, e em Bruxelas.
Foi nesse período que Hugo começou a esculpir sua estátua de herói nacional. Jurou só pôr os pés na pátria quando a liberdade tivesse sido plenamente reconquistada. Mesmo depois da anistia concedida aos exilados políticos, recusou-se a voltar. "E, se sobrar apenas um, serei ele", declarou. Quando o império finalmente caiu, uma verdadeira multidão foi aguardar o trem que o trazia de volta à capital francesa. Ao desembarcar, Victor Hugo deparou com o povo, eufórico, gritando trechos de suas obras. Emocionado, não conseguiu conter as lágrimas.
Mesmo com momentos de glória, Victor Hugo levou uma vida sofrida, marcada por separações e pela morte de vários entes queridos. Na opinião de Gallo, o episódio mais dramático de todos foi a perda da filha Léopoldine, que morreu afogada. É justamente aí, no ano de 1843, que termina o primeiro volume de sua biografia. "Essa tragédia significa uma guinada na existência de Victor Hugo e inspirou uma parte importante de sua obra", explica.
No livro de Gallo, cada capítulo corresponde a um dos 83 anos de uma vida tumultuosa e cheia de contradições. Aos fatos históricos intercalam-se citações de Hugo, assim como seus sentimentos e sensações diante do que está acontecendo: uma espécie de autobiografia na terceira pessoa. Ao longo da história, percebe-se que o titã das letras, apesar de um sucesso estrondoso que poucos escritores tiveram o privilégio de conhecer, se angustiava muito com as vendas de seus livros.
"Victor Hugo ficou muito rico com a sua obra, mas tinha de sustentar muita gente, filhos, netos, amantes, agregados etc. Essa responsabilidade era motivo de preocupação constante. Por isso, estava sempre em contato com os editores, discutindo as estratégias de divulgação, pressionando para que eles investissem em publicidade. Ele nunca escondeu que a pluma e o tinteiro eram suas fontes de renda. Queria que cada lançamento fosse um best-seller", conta o historiador.
E Victor Hugo produzia muito, era uma verdadeira máquina de escrever. "Ele acordava de madrugada para trabalhar e não parava nunca", diz Gallo. Era tão rápido que podia terminar uma peça de teatro em 15 dias. Escreveu 17.500 páginas ao longo da vida, passando pelos mais diversos gêneros literários. Seu segredo? "Uma energia incrível. Quando esteve exilado, caminhava diariamente pela praia e mergulhava nas águas gélidas do Canal da Mancha para revigorar."
Passados 120 anos de sua morte, Hugo permanece no olimpo da literatura mundial. Mas, se milhões de pessoas conhecem os enredos de seus romances, como o "Corcunda de Notre Dame" ("Notre Dame de Paris") e "Os Miseráveis", são poucos os que lêem de fato suas páginas, consideradas por alguns críticos prolixas e rebuscadas.
Com um texto fluido e fácil de ler, Max Gallo - ele próprio um grande intelectual francês - consegue mostrar ao grande publico que Victor Hugo é muito mais do que um desenho animado dos estúdios Disney ou um espetáculo de sucesso na Broadway. E desperta nos leitores dessa magistral biografia a vontade de correr às livrarias e devorar, de verdade, a obra de seu personagem principal.
"E Victor Hugo produzia muito, era uma verdadeira máquina de escrever. "Ele acordava de madrugada para trabalhar e não parava nunca", diz Gallo. Era tão rápido que podia terminar uma peça de teatro em 15 dias. Escreveu 17.500 páginas ao longo da vida, passando pelos mais diversos gêneros literários. Seu segredo? "Uma energia incrível."
Pois é, para escrever é preciso energia, mas são necessárias, sobretudo, idéias...
A estética da pobreza em Victor Hugo
Por Joana Calmon
Jornal Valor Econômico - caderno EU&Fim de Semana, 26/01/2007
Retrato de Victor Hugo: o maior autor romântico da língua francesa foi também fotógrafo, pintor, político e um cidadão engajado que lutou pela liberdade e pelos direitos humanos
Dono de uma vocação precoce e ambições imensas, Victor Hugo, ainda garoto, estava decidido a se igualar a um dos maiores escritores de sua época: "Quero ser Chateaubriand ou nada", escreveu, aos 14 anos, em seu diário. Em pouco tempo, chegou aonde queria. E foi além. Na hora da morte, teve a chorá-lo, nas ruas de Paris, mais de um milhão de pessoas. Seu corpo foi exposto sob o Arco do Triunfo e depois levado para o Panthéon, templo supremo dos heróis da pátria, onde repousam Voltaire e Rousseau, só para ficar nos grandes nomes da literatura.
Mas Victor Hugo não entrou para a história apenas como um dos maiores autores românticos da língua francesa. Além de poeta, dramaturgo e romancista, foi fotógrafo, pintor, político e cidadão engajado. Lutou pela liberdade e pelos direitos humanos, revoltou-se contra a pena de morte e conquistou a imagem de "pai dos pobres". Graças a sua obra famosa, "Os Miseráveis", o povo ganhou destaque na literatura.
"Antes dele, nenhum escritor havia atribuído um papel aos pobres. Ele introduziu valores até então inéditos no mundo das letras, como a justiça social e a fraternidade. E isso influenciou a literatura em diversos países, inclusive no Brasil", explica o historiador e escritor Max Gallo, que lança "Victor Hugo", biografia em dois volumes - "Eu Sou uma Força Que Avança", que aborda o período entre 1802 e 1843, e "Este Sou Eu", que retrata os anos entre 1844 e 1885.
Ao longo de mil páginas, o autor segue, passo a passo, a trajetória de uma das mais importantes figuras da França, desde o seu nascimento - antes ainda, já que começa o livro pelo momento em que ele foi concebido - até a morte. Ao contrário de outros biógrafos de Victor Hugo, Max Gallo não aborda apenas a obra literária e as realizações do homem público. Adentra também sua vida privada. Esse mergulho na intimidade do poeta exacerba aspectos geralmente pouco explorados, como a relação complicada com o pai na juventude e a quase obsessão sexual na velhice.
Para reunir o material necessário, Gallo viajou aos lugares onde o escritor viveu, analisou o depoimento de pessoas que atravessaram seu caminho e leu os jornais da época, assim como todas as suas correspondências. Também decifrou, com a ajuda de especialistas, as anotações que ele fazia em seus caderninhos e diários. "Ele escrevia todos os detalhes de sua vida amorosa em código, mas conseguimos interpretá-los e reconstituir fielmente mesmo as cenas mais picantes, sem trair a realidade", garante o autor. "Victor Hugo foi um grande amante até o fim de seus dias."
E com a mesma intensidade com que amou as mulheres ele lutou por seus ideais. Em 1851, num ato de resistência contra o arbítrio dos poderosos, opôs-se ao golpe do imperador Napoleão III e partiu para um longo exílio, de quase 20 anos, nas ilhas britânicas de Jersey e Guernsey , no Canal da Mancha, e em Bruxelas.
Foi nesse período que Hugo começou a esculpir sua estátua de herói nacional. Jurou só pôr os pés na pátria quando a liberdade tivesse sido plenamente reconquistada. Mesmo depois da anistia concedida aos exilados políticos, recusou-se a voltar. "E, se sobrar apenas um, serei ele", declarou. Quando o império finalmente caiu, uma verdadeira multidão foi aguardar o trem que o trazia de volta à capital francesa. Ao desembarcar, Victor Hugo deparou com o povo, eufórico, gritando trechos de suas obras. Emocionado, não conseguiu conter as lágrimas.
Mesmo com momentos de glória, Victor Hugo levou uma vida sofrida, marcada por separações e pela morte de vários entes queridos. Na opinião de Gallo, o episódio mais dramático de todos foi a perda da filha Léopoldine, que morreu afogada. É justamente aí, no ano de 1843, que termina o primeiro volume de sua biografia. "Essa tragédia significa uma guinada na existência de Victor Hugo e inspirou uma parte importante de sua obra", explica.
No livro de Gallo, cada capítulo corresponde a um dos 83 anos de uma vida tumultuosa e cheia de contradições. Aos fatos históricos intercalam-se citações de Hugo, assim como seus sentimentos e sensações diante do que está acontecendo: uma espécie de autobiografia na terceira pessoa. Ao longo da história, percebe-se que o titã das letras, apesar de um sucesso estrondoso que poucos escritores tiveram o privilégio de conhecer, se angustiava muito com as vendas de seus livros.
"Victor Hugo ficou muito rico com a sua obra, mas tinha de sustentar muita gente, filhos, netos, amantes, agregados etc. Essa responsabilidade era motivo de preocupação constante. Por isso, estava sempre em contato com os editores, discutindo as estratégias de divulgação, pressionando para que eles investissem em publicidade. Ele nunca escondeu que a pluma e o tinteiro eram suas fontes de renda. Queria que cada lançamento fosse um best-seller", conta o historiador.
E Victor Hugo produzia muito, era uma verdadeira máquina de escrever. "Ele acordava de madrugada para trabalhar e não parava nunca", diz Gallo. Era tão rápido que podia terminar uma peça de teatro em 15 dias. Escreveu 17.500 páginas ao longo da vida, passando pelos mais diversos gêneros literários. Seu segredo? "Uma energia incrível. Quando esteve exilado, caminhava diariamente pela praia e mergulhava nas águas gélidas do Canal da Mancha para revigorar."
Passados 120 anos de sua morte, Hugo permanece no olimpo da literatura mundial. Mas, se milhões de pessoas conhecem os enredos de seus romances, como o "Corcunda de Notre Dame" ("Notre Dame de Paris") e "Os Miseráveis", são poucos os que lêem de fato suas páginas, consideradas por alguns críticos prolixas e rebuscadas.
Com um texto fluido e fácil de ler, Max Gallo - ele próprio um grande intelectual francês - consegue mostrar ao grande publico que Victor Hugo é muito mais do que um desenho animado dos estúdios Disney ou um espetáculo de sucesso na Broadway. E desperta nos leitores dessa magistral biografia a vontade de correr às livrarias e devorar, de verdade, a obra de seu personagem principal.
quinta-feira, janeiro 18, 2007
178) Irlanda, um artigo de Marcio Coimbra
O Tigre Celta
Por Márcio C. Coimbra*
marciocoimbra@gmail.com
Se buscarmos qualquer palavra para definir a Irlanda atual, sem dúvida será liberdade. As reformas de cunho liberalizante iniciadas em 1997, conduzidas com enorme inteligência, levaram o país a ostentar indicadores invejáveis. Durante uma recente reunião da The Mont Pèlerin Society, na Guatemala, foi apresentado um trabalho que cruzava dados de todos os indexes de liberdade elaborados por diversos institutos de estudos pelo mundo. Depois de analisar todas as informações, a Irlanda foi considerada o país mais livre do mundo, ou seja, uma nação que possui baixa carga tributária, excelentes níveis de educação, respeito ao cumprimento dos contratos e das leis, independência do Judiciário, respeito à propriedade intelectual, instituições fortes, baixos níveis de corrupção e pouca regulação do Estado na economia. Tudo com o objetivo de incentivar o empreendedorismo. Sua pujante economia liberal, responsável por gerar ótimos indicadores sociais, levou o país a receber o apelido de Tigre Celta.
A mudança começou a ser gestada durante uma cisão política em 1985, com a criação da Democracia Progressista ou simplesmente Partido Democrático (An Páirtí Daonlathach). Este novo grupo político introduziu os conceitos de valorização da livre-iniciativa, baixos impostos, economia competitiva, privatizações e equilíbrio orçamentário com o objetivo de criar um ambiente de comércio dinâmico. Mesmo com Partido Republicano (Fianna Fáil) ocupando a Presidência e a Chefia de Governo (Taoiseach), a habilidade política da Democracia Progressista forneceu a possibilidade de influenciar nas políticas da administração federal por intermédio da Vice-Chefia (Tánaiste), desde a formação do governo de coalizão de 1997, primeiro com Mary Harney (1997-2006) e atualmente com Michael McDowell.
A Irlanda, entretanto, nem sempre foi livre e rica. Durante muitos anos viveu com grande interferência do Estado em sua economia. O desemprego, que hoje é de cerca de 4%, já alcançou 19% em 1987. Os problemas já foram enormes, como crises econômicas que geraram ondas de fome, secas que destruíram plantações e levaram a morte mais de 1 milhão de irlandeses ainda no século XIX. Neste período, mais de 2 milhões deixaram o país, que perdeu por volta de 35% da população. Os problemas continuaram com a interferência dos britânicos e as fortes reações irlandesas, como o Levante da Páscoa em 1916. A independência total veio aos poucos, primeiro com o estabelecimento de um Estado Livre, depois com a Constituição de 1937 e finalmente a República em 1949. Hoje, aberta, soberana e livre, a Irlanda se tornou uma nação de forte imigração, de braços abertos, especialmente aos descendentes dos antigos irlandeses que deixaram o país no passado.
O surgimento do Tigre Celta, na década de 90, é creditado a diversos fatores, entretanto, o mais interessante é observar o processo de ruptura com a interferência do Estado na economia e o surgimento de um país moderno, desenvolvido e socialmente saudável. A entrada na Comunidade Econômica Européia em 1973 é uma parte importante do processo, embora não explique o progresso espetacular a partir de 1997. O mesmo vale para a Espanha, que conheceu um governo de características similares que iniciou no mesmo período que o irlandês. A simples entrada da Espanha na Comunidade Européia em 1986 não foi responsável pelo seu magnífico progresso. Espanha e Irlanda implementaram políticas liberalizantes, responsáveis por seu fabuloso progresso muito tempo após sua adesão ao bloco econômico europeu. O crédito, neste caso, deve ser dado a coalizão entre Democracia Progressista e Partido Republicano na Irlanda, a partir de 1997 e ainda em curso, e ao Partido Popular na Espanha, entre o período de 1996 e 2004.
Durante meu período em Dublin, tive a felicidade de conhecer um país aberto, com liberdades plenas, sem interferência do Estado na economia, o que gerou pleno emprego e um ambiente socialmente desenvolvido. A experiência da Irlanda, sem precedentes em sua história, é uma lição aos países irresponsáveis, toscos e ignorantes que flertam que o populismo e políticas de assistência, como o Brasil e alguns de seus pares na América Latina. As políticas de plena liberdade levam invariavelmente ao sucesso, ao progresso e aos melhores indicadores sociais. “There is no free lunch”, como dizia o saudoso Milton Friedman. Ele estava certo. É só observar no que se transformou a Irlanda.
Artigo redigido em 31.12.2006
Em Dublin, Irlanda.
* Márcio Chalegre Coimbra. Analista político. Habilitado em Direito Mercantil pela Unisinos. PIL pela Harvard Law School. MBA em Direito Econômico pela Fundação Getúlio Vargas. Especialista em Direito Internacional pela UFRGS. Mestrando em Ação Política pela Universidad Francisco de Vitória e Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, em pesquisa para Fundación FAES (Partido Popular), em Madri, Espanha.
Membro da The Mont Pèlerin Society. Conselheiro do Instituto Liberdade. Membro do Conselho Consultivo do Instituto Federalista. Sócio do IEE - Instituto de Estudos Empresariais. É editor-chefe do site Parlata.
Possui artigos e entrevistas publicadas em diversos sites nacionais e estrangeiros (www.urgente24.tv e www.hacer.org) e jornais brasileiros como Jornal do Brasil, Gazeta Mercantil, Zero Hora, Jornal de Brasília, Correio Braziliense, O Estado do Maranhão, Diário Catarinense, Gazeta do Paraná, O Tempo (MG), Hoje em Dia, Jornal do Tocantins, Correio da Paraíba e A Gazeta do Acre. É autor do livro “A Recuperação da Empresa: Regimes Jurídicos brasileiro e norte-americano”, Ed. Síntese - IOB Thomson (www.sintese.com).
Por Márcio C. Coimbra*
marciocoimbra@gmail.com
Se buscarmos qualquer palavra para definir a Irlanda atual, sem dúvida será liberdade. As reformas de cunho liberalizante iniciadas em 1997, conduzidas com enorme inteligência, levaram o país a ostentar indicadores invejáveis. Durante uma recente reunião da The Mont Pèlerin Society, na Guatemala, foi apresentado um trabalho que cruzava dados de todos os indexes de liberdade elaborados por diversos institutos de estudos pelo mundo. Depois de analisar todas as informações, a Irlanda foi considerada o país mais livre do mundo, ou seja, uma nação que possui baixa carga tributária, excelentes níveis de educação, respeito ao cumprimento dos contratos e das leis, independência do Judiciário, respeito à propriedade intelectual, instituições fortes, baixos níveis de corrupção e pouca regulação do Estado na economia. Tudo com o objetivo de incentivar o empreendedorismo. Sua pujante economia liberal, responsável por gerar ótimos indicadores sociais, levou o país a receber o apelido de Tigre Celta.
A mudança começou a ser gestada durante uma cisão política em 1985, com a criação da Democracia Progressista ou simplesmente Partido Democrático (An Páirtí Daonlathach). Este novo grupo político introduziu os conceitos de valorização da livre-iniciativa, baixos impostos, economia competitiva, privatizações e equilíbrio orçamentário com o objetivo de criar um ambiente de comércio dinâmico. Mesmo com Partido Republicano (Fianna Fáil) ocupando a Presidência e a Chefia de Governo (Taoiseach), a habilidade política da Democracia Progressista forneceu a possibilidade de influenciar nas políticas da administração federal por intermédio da Vice-Chefia (Tánaiste), desde a formação do governo de coalizão de 1997, primeiro com Mary Harney (1997-2006) e atualmente com Michael McDowell.
A Irlanda, entretanto, nem sempre foi livre e rica. Durante muitos anos viveu com grande interferência do Estado em sua economia. O desemprego, que hoje é de cerca de 4%, já alcançou 19% em 1987. Os problemas já foram enormes, como crises econômicas que geraram ondas de fome, secas que destruíram plantações e levaram a morte mais de 1 milhão de irlandeses ainda no século XIX. Neste período, mais de 2 milhões deixaram o país, que perdeu por volta de 35% da população. Os problemas continuaram com a interferência dos britânicos e as fortes reações irlandesas, como o Levante da Páscoa em 1916. A independência total veio aos poucos, primeiro com o estabelecimento de um Estado Livre, depois com a Constituição de 1937 e finalmente a República em 1949. Hoje, aberta, soberana e livre, a Irlanda se tornou uma nação de forte imigração, de braços abertos, especialmente aos descendentes dos antigos irlandeses que deixaram o país no passado.
O surgimento do Tigre Celta, na década de 90, é creditado a diversos fatores, entretanto, o mais interessante é observar o processo de ruptura com a interferência do Estado na economia e o surgimento de um país moderno, desenvolvido e socialmente saudável. A entrada na Comunidade Econômica Européia em 1973 é uma parte importante do processo, embora não explique o progresso espetacular a partir de 1997. O mesmo vale para a Espanha, que conheceu um governo de características similares que iniciou no mesmo período que o irlandês. A simples entrada da Espanha na Comunidade Européia em 1986 não foi responsável pelo seu magnífico progresso. Espanha e Irlanda implementaram políticas liberalizantes, responsáveis por seu fabuloso progresso muito tempo após sua adesão ao bloco econômico europeu. O crédito, neste caso, deve ser dado a coalizão entre Democracia Progressista e Partido Republicano na Irlanda, a partir de 1997 e ainda em curso, e ao Partido Popular na Espanha, entre o período de 1996 e 2004.
Durante meu período em Dublin, tive a felicidade de conhecer um país aberto, com liberdades plenas, sem interferência do Estado na economia, o que gerou pleno emprego e um ambiente socialmente desenvolvido. A experiência da Irlanda, sem precedentes em sua história, é uma lição aos países irresponsáveis, toscos e ignorantes que flertam que o populismo e políticas de assistência, como o Brasil e alguns de seus pares na América Latina. As políticas de plena liberdade levam invariavelmente ao sucesso, ao progresso e aos melhores indicadores sociais. “There is no free lunch”, como dizia o saudoso Milton Friedman. Ele estava certo. É só observar no que se transformou a Irlanda.
Artigo redigido em 31.12.2006
Em Dublin, Irlanda.
* Márcio Chalegre Coimbra. Analista político. Habilitado em Direito Mercantil pela Unisinos. PIL pela Harvard Law School. MBA em Direito Econômico pela Fundação Getúlio Vargas. Especialista em Direito Internacional pela UFRGS. Mestrando em Ação Política pela Universidad Francisco de Vitória e Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, em pesquisa para Fundación FAES (Partido Popular), em Madri, Espanha.
Membro da The Mont Pèlerin Society. Conselheiro do Instituto Liberdade. Membro do Conselho Consultivo do Instituto Federalista. Sócio do IEE - Instituto de Estudos Empresariais. É editor-chefe do site Parlata.
Possui artigos e entrevistas publicadas em diversos sites nacionais e estrangeiros (www.urgente24.tv e www.hacer.org) e jornais brasileiros como Jornal do Brasil, Gazeta Mercantil, Zero Hora, Jornal de Brasília, Correio Braziliense, O Estado do Maranhão, Diário Catarinense, Gazeta do Paraná, O Tempo (MG), Hoje em Dia, Jornal do Tocantins, Correio da Paraíba e A Gazeta do Acre. É autor do livro “A Recuperação da Empresa: Regimes Jurídicos brasileiro e norte-americano”, Ed. Síntese - IOB Thomson (www.sintese.com).
quarta-feira, janeiro 17, 2007
177) On education (2): da inutilidade de certos cursos universitários
Dando continuidade à série iniciada com o artigo anterior (ver o post 176), o autor trata agora dos cursos universitários.
Aqui, bem mais do que no ciclo médio ou elementar, os ensinamentos para a experiência brasileira são relevantes, sobretudo porque continuamos a exibir esse culto do "canudo" universitário e porque o governo insiste em privilegiar o ensino de terceiro ciclo, em detrimento do ensino fundamental, médio e técnico profissional.
Acredito também que muitas pessoas poderiam fazer "colleges" de dois anos e ficarem plenamente habilitadas para uma vida produtiva, sem precisar de todas essas milhares de faculdades de direito de 4 anos, que liberam outros tantos milhares de "analfabetos funcionais" na própria área em que são supostas formar mão-de-obra de qualidade.
Para ler e refletir.
=================
ON EDUCATION
What's Wrong With Vocational School?
Too many Americans are going to college.
BY CHARLES MURRAY
The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, January 17, 2007
The topic yesterday was education and children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Today I turn to the upper half, people with IQs of 100 or higher. Today's simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.
Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.
These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.
In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one's inability to recognize one's own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.
There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.
No data that I have been able to find tell us what proportion of those students really want four years of college-level courses, but it is safe to say that few people who are intellectually unqualified yearn for the experience, any more than someone who is athletically unqualified for a college varsity wants to have his shortcomings exposed at practice every day. They are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because "vocational training" is second class. "College" is first class.
Large numbers of those who are intellectually qualified for college also do not yearn for four years of college-level courses. They go to college because their parents are paying for it and college is what children of their social class are supposed to do after they finish high school. They may have the ability to understand the material in Economics 1 but they do not want to. They, too, need to learn to make a living--and would do better in vocational training.
Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses--probably a majority of them--are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation's colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it's ridiculously inefficient.
Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.
For a few occupations, a college degree still certifies a qualification. For example, employers appropriately treat a bachelor's degree in engineering as a requirement for hiring engineers. But a bachelor's degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies nothing. It is a screening device for employers. The college you got into says a lot about your ability, and that you stuck it out for four years says something about your perseverance. But the degree itself does not qualify the graduate for anything. There are better, faster and more efficient ways for young people to acquire credentials to provide to employers.
The good news is that market-driven systems eventually adapt to reality, and signs of change are visible. One glimpse of the future is offered by the nation's two-year colleges. They are more honest than the four-year institutions about what their students want and provide courses that meet their needs more explicitly. Their time frame gives them a big advantage--two years is about right for learning many technical specialties, while four years is unnecessarily long.
Advances in technology are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. Research resources on the Internet will soon make the college library unnecessary. Lecture courses taught by first-rate professors are already available on CDs and DVDs for many subjects, and online methods to make courses interactive between professors and students are evolving. Advances in computer simulation are expanding the technical skills that can be taught without having to gather students together in a laboratory or shop. These and other developments are all still near the bottom of steep growth curves. The cost of effective training will fall for everyone who is willing to give up the trappings of a campus. As the cost of college continues to rise, the choice to give up those trappings will become easier.
A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason--the list goes on and on--is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?
Even if forgoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class, with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as exemplars. It will expand for the most natural of reasons: A college education need be no more important for many high-tech occupations than it is for NBA basketball players or cabinetmakers. Walk into Microsoft or Google with evidence that you are a brilliant hacker, and the job interviewer is not going to fret if you lack a college transcript. The ability to present an employer with evidence that you are good at something, without benefit of a college degree, will continue to increase, and so will the number of skills to which that evidence can be attached. Every time that happens, the false premium attached to the college degree will diminish.
Most students find college life to be lots of fun (apart from the boring classroom stuff), and that alone will keep the four-year institution overstocked for a long time. But, rightly understood, college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults--perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is the second in a three-part series, concluding tomorrow.
Aqui, bem mais do que no ciclo médio ou elementar, os ensinamentos para a experiência brasileira são relevantes, sobretudo porque continuamos a exibir esse culto do "canudo" universitário e porque o governo insiste em privilegiar o ensino de terceiro ciclo, em detrimento do ensino fundamental, médio e técnico profissional.
Acredito também que muitas pessoas poderiam fazer "colleges" de dois anos e ficarem plenamente habilitadas para uma vida produtiva, sem precisar de todas essas milhares de faculdades de direito de 4 anos, que liberam outros tantos milhares de "analfabetos funcionais" na própria área em que são supostas formar mão-de-obra de qualidade.
Para ler e refletir.
=================
ON EDUCATION
What's Wrong With Vocational School?
Too many Americans are going to college.
BY CHARLES MURRAY
The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, January 17, 2007
The topic yesterday was education and children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Today I turn to the upper half, people with IQs of 100 or higher. Today's simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.
Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.
These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.
In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one's inability to recognize one's own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.
There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.
No data that I have been able to find tell us what proportion of those students really want four years of college-level courses, but it is safe to say that few people who are intellectually unqualified yearn for the experience, any more than someone who is athletically unqualified for a college varsity wants to have his shortcomings exposed at practice every day. They are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because "vocational training" is second class. "College" is first class.
Large numbers of those who are intellectually qualified for college also do not yearn for four years of college-level courses. They go to college because their parents are paying for it and college is what children of their social class are supposed to do after they finish high school. They may have the ability to understand the material in Economics 1 but they do not want to. They, too, need to learn to make a living--and would do better in vocational training.
Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses--probably a majority of them--are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation's colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it's ridiculously inefficient.
Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.
For a few occupations, a college degree still certifies a qualification. For example, employers appropriately treat a bachelor's degree in engineering as a requirement for hiring engineers. But a bachelor's degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies nothing. It is a screening device for employers. The college you got into says a lot about your ability, and that you stuck it out for four years says something about your perseverance. But the degree itself does not qualify the graduate for anything. There are better, faster and more efficient ways for young people to acquire credentials to provide to employers.
The good news is that market-driven systems eventually adapt to reality, and signs of change are visible. One glimpse of the future is offered by the nation's two-year colleges. They are more honest than the four-year institutions about what their students want and provide courses that meet their needs more explicitly. Their time frame gives them a big advantage--two years is about right for learning many technical specialties, while four years is unnecessarily long.
Advances in technology are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. Research resources on the Internet will soon make the college library unnecessary. Lecture courses taught by first-rate professors are already available on CDs and DVDs for many subjects, and online methods to make courses interactive between professors and students are evolving. Advances in computer simulation are expanding the technical skills that can be taught without having to gather students together in a laboratory or shop. These and other developments are all still near the bottom of steep growth curves. The cost of effective training will fall for everyone who is willing to give up the trappings of a campus. As the cost of college continues to rise, the choice to give up those trappings will become easier.
A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason--the list goes on and on--is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?
Even if forgoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class, with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as exemplars. It will expand for the most natural of reasons: A college education need be no more important for many high-tech occupations than it is for NBA basketball players or cabinetmakers. Walk into Microsoft or Google with evidence that you are a brilliant hacker, and the job interviewer is not going to fret if you lack a college transcript. The ability to present an employer with evidence that you are good at something, without benefit of a college degree, will continue to increase, and so will the number of skills to which that evidence can be attached. Every time that happens, the false premium attached to the college degree will diminish.
Most students find college life to be lots of fun (apart from the boring classroom stuff), and that alone will keep the four-year institution overstocked for a long time. But, rightly understood, college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults--perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is the second in a three-part series, concluding tomorrow.
176) On education (1): uma discussao relevante nao apenas para os EUA
O The Wall Street Journal, conhecido por suas posições conservadoras -- mas nem por isso menos pragmaticas, preocupadas com custos e resultados, como é característico da cultura capitalista e liberal -- está publicando uma série de três artigos sobre educação nos EUA.
Ainda que o contexto, a história e as características sejam totalmente diferentes do Brasil, sempre se pode aprender alguma coisa com a experiência alheia em matéria educacional.
Afinal de contas, todas as pessoas do mundo nascem absolutamente iguais, isto é, igualmente providas de algumas habilidades inatas -- que são as reações e sentimentos primários -- e totalmente desprovidas de cultura e conhecimento, ou seja, zero em matéria de educação. O que as pessoas serão na vida adulta depende em grande medida do ambiente familiar e da educação recebida. Nesse sentido, todas as pessoas são intercambiáveis, pois podemos ter (ou não) habilidades técnicas que podem ser colocadas ao serviço de qualquer economia nacional.
Nesse sentido, qualquer discussão sobre educação, em qualquer lugar do mundo, deveria nos interessar, pois não existe "teoria da jabuticaba" no que se refere aos conhecimentos básicos que toda pessoa produtiva deve ter em sua vida útil.
É com esse espírito que, neste post e nos dois seguintes, transcrevo as matérias do WSJ. (Depois falarei sobre o autor, que tem trabalhos controversos na área de QI.)
==============
ON EDUCATION
Intelligence in the Classroom
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.
BY CHARLES MURRAY
The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.
One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.
Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.
Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.
How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability--"g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.
There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.
Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.
What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.
The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."
This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.
To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones--for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.
While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is the first in a three-part series, concluding on Thursday.
Ainda que o contexto, a história e as características sejam totalmente diferentes do Brasil, sempre se pode aprender alguma coisa com a experiência alheia em matéria educacional.
Afinal de contas, todas as pessoas do mundo nascem absolutamente iguais, isto é, igualmente providas de algumas habilidades inatas -- que são as reações e sentimentos primários -- e totalmente desprovidas de cultura e conhecimento, ou seja, zero em matéria de educação. O que as pessoas serão na vida adulta depende em grande medida do ambiente familiar e da educação recebida. Nesse sentido, todas as pessoas são intercambiáveis, pois podemos ter (ou não) habilidades técnicas que podem ser colocadas ao serviço de qualquer economia nacional.
Nesse sentido, qualquer discussão sobre educação, em qualquer lugar do mundo, deveria nos interessar, pois não existe "teoria da jabuticaba" no que se refere aos conhecimentos básicos que toda pessoa produtiva deve ter em sua vida útil.
É com esse espírito que, neste post e nos dois seguintes, transcrevo as matérias do WSJ. (Depois falarei sobre o autor, que tem trabalhos controversos na área de QI.)
==============
ON EDUCATION
Intelligence in the Classroom
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.
BY CHARLES MURRAY
The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.
One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.
Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.
Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.
How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability--"g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.
There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.
Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.
What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.
The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."
This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.
To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones--for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.
While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is the first in a three-part series, concluding on Thursday.
terça-feira, janeiro 09, 2007
175) Sobre a Russia, a mesma velha Russia de sempre...
Reflections from Europe
Russia Hopping Along on Clay Feet
Anthony de Jasay*
EconLib, January 8, 2007
Fast growth and price controls, glory and misery, ambition and sloth do not mix well. Russia is relapsing into its old ways.
The first half or so of Vladimir Putin's presidency started to look as if Russia were embarking on its history's third great attempt at becoming a "normal country" with a middle class filling the vacuum between her thin ruling elite (if "elite" is the fitting word) and her mostly miserable, passive masses, and with the benign consequences of such a structure for the country's stability, prosperity and good-neighbourly conduct. This column, under the timidly hopeful title of "Third Time Lucky" (5 April 2004), speculated that after the liberation of the serfs in the 1860s and the Stolypin reforms of the 1900s, both of which ended in miscarriages that seem so typical of Russia, the Putin experiment might turn out to be the one that defies and lifts the old curse that sits on the country. Privatisation of more than 60 per cent of non-farm production seemed to have passed the point of no return that would be followed by an irreversible loosening of the government's grip on the economy, on people's livelihoods and hence also on their political obedience. It is now clear that this was a false hope.
Anatoly Chubais, the privatisation tsar under Boris Yeltsin, held that it did not much matter who got hold of state assets and by what corrupt manoeuvres. The important thing was to get the greatest possible volume of state property into private hands as fast as possible before the political climate changed and further privatisation was stopped. He thought that there might be no time to arrange for a wide distribution of state property and for thus laying the foundations of a property-owning middle class of small shareholders and small entrepreneurs. The result was that many, probably a majority, of state enterprises were simply stolen by their previous "red directors" and wheeler-dealer insiders, creating some astronomical fortunes out of thin air. But unlike Schumpeter's "private fortresses" (the great business empires that acted as counterweights to the state), these concentrations of wealth depended to no small extent on the Kremlin's grace and favour, if only because their illegitimate origin gave the authorities some hold over them. The fate of Mr. Khodorkovsky, now in an obscure Siberian prison, and his giant oil company Yukos, driven into bankruptcy by bizarre tax claims, was a shrill warning signal to the other "oligarchs" to very closely heed Mr. Putin's wishes. By all accounts, they now do. And are repaid with favours.
Ambition and Squalor
Mr. Putin rose from middle-level provincial KGB officer in occupied East Germany to all-powerful president, reputedly as part of a complex and secret deal between his secret service and military backers and the Yeltsin family. The deal has supposedly secured immunity for Mr. Yeltsin's daughter Tatiana for amassing a fortune by unorthodox means. His elevated role fitted President Putin like a glove. He soon perceived that the common Russian's and his wife's desire for normalcy, an end to queuing, more variety, less drabness, a modicum of free speech and foreign travel was really not their first priority. He did satisfy it to a limited extent, though in time-honoured Potemkin for-show fashion the effect was mainly confined to central Moscow shop windows, with the provinces and in particular the villages getting little uplift from their Soviet-era squalor.
However, the real priority of the Russian people has proved to be the restoration of their pride in holy Russia, her greatness and virtue. They did not want it to be like "any normal country"; they wanted it to be unlike any other, once again a colossus feared by its adversaries and admired by the rest. The deep humiliation of the failed Soviet experiment, the bitter insult of the Baltic states, the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbeijan, Kazakhstan and some smaller fry all rushing to shake off Moscow's rule the weakness of the Yeltsin years, the shame of the 1998 financial collapse, left deep wounds in Russian self-respect. The first priority of politics became to reassert Russian might. It is proving a stretch to do it with inadequate means.
In the service of this ambition, incipient democracy is now giving way to barely veiled dictatorship and covert re-nationalisation of what they call "strategic" resources. Such liberal economists as Greef and Ilianorov who had directed much of economic policy until recently, have little or no influence left and the winner of the 2008 presidential elections, reputedly already chosen by Mr.Putin, is likely to be an army Marshal.
Clay Feet Showing
The perception in the West is that Russia is advancing by leaps and bounds. To a critical eye, the advance is more like hopping along on clay feet. Admittedly, economic growth is proceeding fast at about 6 per cent p.a. and has done so since 2000. However, some of this growth is clearly a catching-up after the shrinking during the 1990s. More sobering, though, is that once past the catching-up phase, little or no growth might have occurred if the oil price had stayed at its turn-of-the-century levels. Now, with $60 a barrel, oil money is pouring in and sloshing around the economy, forcing up prices and wages (the latter at a hardly sustainable rate of the order of 15 per cent p.a. for industrial wages), sucking in imports and making non-oil exports uncompetitive. Oil slipping back to $40 or less a barrel would be a nightmare scenario for Russia.
Another weakness, this time actual and not just potential, is the severely strained power generating capacity. Present capacity is 150 gigawatts, still below its Soviet-era peak. This is wholly inadequate. Many industrial companies are now rationed, and in Moscow no new consumer may be connected to the power grid, which has led to new housing being connected in exchange for fabulous bribes.
The root cause is not so much the typical Russian vice of careless, slothful maintenance, but rather the equally typical waste of power brought about by low state-controlled tariffs. The giant state-owned power utility UES which controls 70 per cent of all generating capacity needs to install 23 gigawatts of new generating capacity by 2010 to meet demand and needs $83 billion to do it. It has neither the money nor the extra supply of natural gas to fuel the new power stations if it contrives to build them. Ironically, it is money and natural gas that Russia is supposed to have most of. The key reason is price control. Controlled prices in most provinces are either just below or just above break-even for "social reasons." De-control is promised, but comes slowly. In 2007, only an extra 5 per cent of power consumption will be de-controlled. Meanwhile, UES is seeking investment from abroad. In 2007, it plans to float between 5 and 10 of its constituent companies on the admirably patient and tolerant London Stock Exchange, raising $10 billion. Even that much would not begin to ward off the looming power shortage.
A word needs also to be said about the clay feet of the much-feared giant Gazprom. It is alternating between assurances to Western Europe about how reliable it will be as its principal supplier of natural gas, and flexing its muscles and threatening to restrict supplies if it gets no direct access to the retail market that is more remunerative than bulk contracts. At home, however, it must sell gas at small fractions of export prices, starving itself of investment funds. Consumption at these controlled prices is appallingly wasteful and rising fast. Pipelines are decrepit, poorly maintained and leaking badly (as do most of the oil pipelines). Gazprom has a monopoly of gas pipelines and exports from Russia, and is categorically refusing European demands to relax it.
Perhaps even more ominous than the rickety economic infrastructure is the biological future of the Russian people itself. Life expectancy, rising virtually everywhere else in the world, has fallen drastically in Russia. The population is already decreasing and a further and faster decline in the next two decades is written into the demographic statistics. Moreover, public health outside select spots is worthy of some poor third world country.
In this as in so much else, Russia conceals what the now happily defunct Marxist language used to call "internal contradictions" behind a bold front of sham greatness.
* Anthony de Jasay is an Anglo-Hungarian economist living in France. He is the author, a.o., of The State (Oxford, 1985), Social Contract, Free Ride (Oxford 1989) and Against Politics (London,1997). His latest book, Justice and Its Surroundings, was published by Liberty Fund in the summer of 2002.
The State is also available online on this website.
For more articles by Anthony de Jasay, see the Archive.
To post a followup to this essay, please send email to the Editor.
Register for announcements of new columns.
Russia Hopping Along on Clay Feet
Anthony de Jasay*
EconLib, January 8, 2007
Fast growth and price controls, glory and misery, ambition and sloth do not mix well. Russia is relapsing into its old ways.
The first half or so of Vladimir Putin's presidency started to look as if Russia were embarking on its history's third great attempt at becoming a "normal country" with a middle class filling the vacuum between her thin ruling elite (if "elite" is the fitting word) and her mostly miserable, passive masses, and with the benign consequences of such a structure for the country's stability, prosperity and good-neighbourly conduct. This column, under the timidly hopeful title of "Third Time Lucky" (5 April 2004), speculated that after the liberation of the serfs in the 1860s and the Stolypin reforms of the 1900s, both of which ended in miscarriages that seem so typical of Russia, the Putin experiment might turn out to be the one that defies and lifts the old curse that sits on the country. Privatisation of more than 60 per cent of non-farm production seemed to have passed the point of no return that would be followed by an irreversible loosening of the government's grip on the economy, on people's livelihoods and hence also on their political obedience. It is now clear that this was a false hope.
Anatoly Chubais, the privatisation tsar under Boris Yeltsin, held that it did not much matter who got hold of state assets and by what corrupt manoeuvres. The important thing was to get the greatest possible volume of state property into private hands as fast as possible before the political climate changed and further privatisation was stopped. He thought that there might be no time to arrange for a wide distribution of state property and for thus laying the foundations of a property-owning middle class of small shareholders and small entrepreneurs. The result was that many, probably a majority, of state enterprises were simply stolen by their previous "red directors" and wheeler-dealer insiders, creating some astronomical fortunes out of thin air. But unlike Schumpeter's "private fortresses" (the great business empires that acted as counterweights to the state), these concentrations of wealth depended to no small extent on the Kremlin's grace and favour, if only because their illegitimate origin gave the authorities some hold over them. The fate of Mr. Khodorkovsky, now in an obscure Siberian prison, and his giant oil company Yukos, driven into bankruptcy by bizarre tax claims, was a shrill warning signal to the other "oligarchs" to very closely heed Mr. Putin's wishes. By all accounts, they now do. And are repaid with favours.
Ambition and Squalor
Mr. Putin rose from middle-level provincial KGB officer in occupied East Germany to all-powerful president, reputedly as part of a complex and secret deal between his secret service and military backers and the Yeltsin family. The deal has supposedly secured immunity for Mr. Yeltsin's daughter Tatiana for amassing a fortune by unorthodox means. His elevated role fitted President Putin like a glove. He soon perceived that the common Russian's and his wife's desire for normalcy, an end to queuing, more variety, less drabness, a modicum of free speech and foreign travel was really not their first priority. He did satisfy it to a limited extent, though in time-honoured Potemkin for-show fashion the effect was mainly confined to central Moscow shop windows, with the provinces and in particular the villages getting little uplift from their Soviet-era squalor.
However, the real priority of the Russian people has proved to be the restoration of their pride in holy Russia, her greatness and virtue. They did not want it to be like "any normal country"; they wanted it to be unlike any other, once again a colossus feared by its adversaries and admired by the rest. The deep humiliation of the failed Soviet experiment, the bitter insult of the Baltic states, the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbeijan, Kazakhstan and some smaller fry all rushing to shake off Moscow's rule the weakness of the Yeltsin years, the shame of the 1998 financial collapse, left deep wounds in Russian self-respect. The first priority of politics became to reassert Russian might. It is proving a stretch to do it with inadequate means.
In the service of this ambition, incipient democracy is now giving way to barely veiled dictatorship and covert re-nationalisation of what they call "strategic" resources. Such liberal economists as Greef and Ilianorov who had directed much of economic policy until recently, have little or no influence left and the winner of the 2008 presidential elections, reputedly already chosen by Mr.Putin, is likely to be an army Marshal.
Clay Feet Showing
The perception in the West is that Russia is advancing by leaps and bounds. To a critical eye, the advance is more like hopping along on clay feet. Admittedly, economic growth is proceeding fast at about 6 per cent p.a. and has done so since 2000. However, some of this growth is clearly a catching-up after the shrinking during the 1990s. More sobering, though, is that once past the catching-up phase, little or no growth might have occurred if the oil price had stayed at its turn-of-the-century levels. Now, with $60 a barrel, oil money is pouring in and sloshing around the economy, forcing up prices and wages (the latter at a hardly sustainable rate of the order of 15 per cent p.a. for industrial wages), sucking in imports and making non-oil exports uncompetitive. Oil slipping back to $40 or less a barrel would be a nightmare scenario for Russia.
Another weakness, this time actual and not just potential, is the severely strained power generating capacity. Present capacity is 150 gigawatts, still below its Soviet-era peak. This is wholly inadequate. Many industrial companies are now rationed, and in Moscow no new consumer may be connected to the power grid, which has led to new housing being connected in exchange for fabulous bribes.
The root cause is not so much the typical Russian vice of careless, slothful maintenance, but rather the equally typical waste of power brought about by low state-controlled tariffs. The giant state-owned power utility UES which controls 70 per cent of all generating capacity needs to install 23 gigawatts of new generating capacity by 2010 to meet demand and needs $83 billion to do it. It has neither the money nor the extra supply of natural gas to fuel the new power stations if it contrives to build them. Ironically, it is money and natural gas that Russia is supposed to have most of. The key reason is price control. Controlled prices in most provinces are either just below or just above break-even for "social reasons." De-control is promised, but comes slowly. In 2007, only an extra 5 per cent of power consumption will be de-controlled. Meanwhile, UES is seeking investment from abroad. In 2007, it plans to float between 5 and 10 of its constituent companies on the admirably patient and tolerant London Stock Exchange, raising $10 billion. Even that much would not begin to ward off the looming power shortage.
A word needs also to be said about the clay feet of the much-feared giant Gazprom. It is alternating between assurances to Western Europe about how reliable it will be as its principal supplier of natural gas, and flexing its muscles and threatening to restrict supplies if it gets no direct access to the retail market that is more remunerative than bulk contracts. At home, however, it must sell gas at small fractions of export prices, starving itself of investment funds. Consumption at these controlled prices is appallingly wasteful and rising fast. Pipelines are decrepit, poorly maintained and leaking badly (as do most of the oil pipelines). Gazprom has a monopoly of gas pipelines and exports from Russia, and is categorically refusing European demands to relax it.
Perhaps even more ominous than the rickety economic infrastructure is the biological future of the Russian people itself. Life expectancy, rising virtually everywhere else in the world, has fallen drastically in Russia. The population is already decreasing and a further and faster decline in the next two decades is written into the demographic statistics. Moreover, public health outside select spots is worthy of some poor third world country.
In this as in so much else, Russia conceals what the now happily defunct Marxist language used to call "internal contradictions" behind a bold front of sham greatness.
* Anthony de Jasay is an Anglo-Hungarian economist living in France. He is the author, a.o., of The State (Oxford, 1985), Social Contract, Free Ride (Oxford 1989) and Against Politics (London,1997). His latest book, Justice and Its Surroundings, was published by Liberty Fund in the summer of 2002.
The State is also available online on this website.
For more articles by Anthony de Jasay, see the Archive.
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