“They went because they wanted to go and see what was over the horizon.”

Why do some prayers get answered, and others don’t? This may very well be the best sermon on prayer that you will ever hear: part one and part two.

Famous last words.

Obama gets a beer named after him in Kenya.

New research on religion in America. Some interesting trends are highlighted.

The piano.

A very sad story from Burundi.

Muslims want democracy.

This video brought back a lot of memories. Interface was my first cross-cultural experience.

“we will not drink often, but we will drink well.” and “The Cruel Edges of the World.”

Cowboys of the deep.

Greg Boyd, Shane Claiborne, and Chuck Colson. Good stuff.

Robert Mugabe lost touch with reality a long, long, time ago.

So everyone knows that Bush’s plans to send more troops into Baghdad won’t work, right?

The primary, horrific problem in Iraq right now is the violence that touches nearly everyone (aka “lack of security”). To quote journalist Nir Rosen:

I think people don’t understand how terrible the violence is. It effects everybody in Iraq. Everybody is a target. You’re a target for being a Sunni, a Shia, a Kurd, a Christian, secular, religious, a doctor, a businessman, for working in the former regime, working for the current regime. Nobody is safe in Iraq, death can come to anybody.

People are afraid to leave their homes, go to work, send their kids to school, etc. And this violence comes from three main sources: the Sunni-led insurgency, the Shia-Sunni civil war, and secular criminal violence.

The Sunni insurgency is aimed at both the American occupiers, the new Iraqi government (seen as illegitimate, for obvious reasons), and anyone who works for either the Americans or the Iraqi government.

The civil war is a battle of mutual ethnic cleansing. In areas with high concentrations of Sunni, Shia are being driven out. In areas of high Shia concentration, Sunnis are being driven out. And where there is a more even mix, there is a lot of killing.

And honestly, I don’t know enough about the criminal violence to say much on it.

Of course, the Iraqi government, police force, and army, are predominantly Shia, and many are supporters of the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Some are even members of Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and are carrying out executions, kidnappings and tortures of Sunnis while on duty. This sectarian allegiance means that when the US asks the Iraqi government to stop the insurgency, they are telling Shia to fight Sunni. And when they tell the government to stop the civil war, they are asking Shia to fight Shia (which doesn’t happen) and Sunni. Which has made the ethnic cleansing of the Sunni the de facto US policy in Iraq.

I think the US is trying to change that. The “surge” of troops in Baghdad seems to be just a hit on Sadr, with the naive hope that killing him off will shift the balance of power to more moderate Shia, who will be willing to negotiate peace and power-sharing with the Sunni. As if murdering the leader of a group of radicals will make that group of radicals settle down and follow a new guy who’s friendly with the murderers. Killing Sadr would make him a martyr and likely make the Sadrists even more militant.

Not that I think they’ll actually get Sadr. Large segments of the Iraqi army and police unlikely to go after their hero, but Sadr is also drafting every able-bodied Iraqi male in Sadr City to join his Mahdi army. Sadr City has a population of about 2 million people. If his call is heeded, that gives him, what, another 100,000 soldiers? 500,000? To fight off the 20,000 extra American soldiers? On Sadr’s turf, in a sympathetic neighborhood, where the Americans won’t really know the lay of the land? Welcome to Stalingrad.

Bush also mentioned sending more troops to Al-Anbar province. The Sunni heartland, home of the insurgency. And we’re going to send in an extra 4000 troops to solve the problem. Good luck with that.

Has anyone told Bush that counterinsurgencies rarely succeed? The insurgents have nowhere else to go, and the occupiers can never afford to stay indefinitely.

But it’s much worse than all that. Iraq is not a civil war, it’s become a regional war between Shia and Sunni. All nations in the region have an interest in this war ending up with either Shia or Sunni victorious, and they’re supporting their boys. Let me quote Nir Rosen again:

This is only the beginning of the end. The civil war in Iraq will continue for many years to come. What’s more frightening is that it’s also going to involve the countries of the region. A good model might be the complex war in central Africa, which involves several countries—Congo, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi—they’re all going to get involved. In this case: Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and you’ll have volunteers coming from elsewhere. The entire region is going to be sucked into this larger conflict, and the borders won’t remain the same. You’re going to have hundreds of thousands more dead, and millions more refugees. And eventually, I imagine, it will disrupt the economy so Americans might start caring, when their gas prices go up. But until then, I just don’t think that Americans care anymore.

Check the map. Iran is supporting Iraq’s Shia. Saudi Arabia and Syria are actively supporting the Sunni. Turkey wants to put down the Kurds. Most Middle East experts I listen to say that it’s likely the government of Jordan is likely to fall, and that the governments of Syria and Saudi Arabia will also be at risk. Not that these are governments worth supporting, but their demise means that much more chaos and bloodshed.

But 20,000 exhausted American troops in Baghdad will stop the regional war. Right.

It’s simply arrogant and insane to think that the US can control the situation here. The American government and military are extremely ignorant about the Middle East, and don’t realize that everything is connected to everything else. The United States is trying to do delicate brain surgery by punching the patient in the side of the head.

There is even one scarier scenario than the one in front of us, and that involves a direct US war with Iran. I hear rumors about “America’s exit strategy for Iraq being through Iran”. This would mean provoking the Iranians in some way, giving the US an excuse to attack Iran, bomb its nuclear facilities from the air, and say “we’ve got to pull out troops out of Iraq because we need them to fight Iran.” Yes, the president is that stupid, and invading Iran has been a neocon fantasy for decades. In his recent speech, Bush essentially threatened Iran and Syria, has moved aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf, and apparently US soldiers stormed the Iranian Embassy in Iraq (which, if I’m not mistaken, counts as an invasian of Iranian territory under international law). He seems to truly think that he is leading the fight against Evil, and that willpower and grit will win the day. Not when you’re single-handedly fighting wars with four different countries it won’t.

Sadly, I can’t think of any way that this broad Middle East crisis can be avoided. I think that the US can get out, and the invasian of Iran can be stopped, but it seems that that will only happen if a) Congress outright refuses to fund it, and/or b) the military stands up publicly and says that Bush’s plans won’t work. The American people don’t want this war, the Iraqi people don’t want this war, the US military don’t want this war. The only people who want it are Bush and the American Enterprise Institute, who apparently have replaced Bush’s National Security Council.

Blogger Arthur Silber found the absolute most ironic part of Bush’s speech, and it’s worth mentioning. Speaking about what will happen if we leave Iraq and the Islamic extremists “win” if we leave Iraq:

They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions.

Sound familiar?

Dan Martin is a political scientist with interests in the effects of biodiversity and environmental change on geopolitical crisis. He is also a Republican who strongly supports the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008. Listen to his remarks on Friday, February 29 on the campus of Ohio State University through this audio podcast, or read a text transcript of his thoughts in the transcript below:

You’re getting a little bit of “True Confessions” here with Bob having been an official in the Clinton administration and Cam being a neighbor and friend of Senator Obama. My true confession is that I’m a Republican. I was attracted to the Obama campaign for two very simple reasons. One is that I earnestly believe we have to reduce the partisan warfare that has stymied good government at the federal level. He is the best-positioned person running for president to do that. It’s in his bones. It’s how he got elected as the president of the Harvard Law Review. It’s just his gift to work with people that he disagrees with (I’ll give you my second point in just a minute). The epiphany I had the other day that demonstrated this to me: I met him very briefly when I lived in Chicago, but we weren’t friends and neighbors like Cam.

But in December of 06, World AIDS Day, which is a UN event that happens annually, Rick Warren (the President, Pastor and Founder of an enormous megachurch in Orange County, California and author of a book that sold millions of copies called Purpose-Driven Life) invited Senators Sam Brownback (who’s very much anti-abortion, very much a fundamentalist Christian) and Barack Obama to speak to his congregation. Because I had worked in the population field, I saw a video of their talks, with Barack Obama expressing continually the points at which he and Sam Brownback agreed as well as the points at which they differed, and expressing respect for Brownback. He finished his talk — which got into things like U.S. policy in developing countries and providing condoms and the current policy which prohibits U.S. foreign aid for any kind of population-related organizations that might conduct abortions — by saying with reference to the distribution of condoms that his personal religious faith did not allow him to think that people who made mistakes about their sexual behavior deserved the death penalty. Standing ovation from this fundamentalist Christian congregation of 3,000 people! Something as electrifying as that with an audience that might be considered hostile to the things that he was advocating said to me, “Here’s something very special.” So I started paying attention.

The other simple point for me besides that reducing the partisan warfare in Washington that is so counterproductive is to restore the lost standing of the United States in the rest of the world. Much of my work has been international. I’ve been the only American on several international boards, and let me tell you in the last few years it’s been very uncomfortable when friends from Western Europe and Canada and Mexico and other parts of Latin America and East Asia say, “What on Earth has happened to this country that we’ve respected for so long?” I think it’s clear that electing Barack Obama as president of the United States would alter the world’s view of the United States in stunning ways. To have an American president who has a grandmother living in Kenya would really be quite a change. His capacity to work with people in developing countries as well as industrial countries around the world I think would be instantaneous. He would be a rock star at this. So the experience I’ve had that led to that conclusion and then working on these committees with Bob and Cam has just reinforced that.

And the thing that I’ve worked in was biodiversity conservation as part of the whole set of environmental problems. And that illustrated to me very quickly in working for a private foundation that made grants all around the world for trying to save the places that have the greatest species diversity, which we call “biodiversity hotspots.” Starting out with the biological criteria of where that greatest species diversity occurred, with the fact that something like fifty to sixty, probably 60% of all known species of plants and animals around the Earth occur (terrestrial plants and animals, I have to say) occur in about 2% of the Earth’s surface. So the diversity of life forms is hyper-concentrated on land (it’s a little different in the oceans). In those places — I’m a political scientist, not a biologist — where the greatest number of species were found we also found the highest cultural diversity. Biological diversity, cultural diversity and a whole set of overlays that make those hotspots very hot spots for the national security of the United States, because you get out of cultural diversity ethnic conflict, ethnic cleansing, genocide. Over-competition for natural resources. You get the worst health statistics, you get the most profound rural poverty, the lowest status of women and the highest illiteracy, the greatest incidence of infant mortality, of maternal mortality. On and on and on.

Malaria: I once met the director of the malaria suppression program in Mexico, who said they mobilize the resources they have in the public health institute in Mexico to deal with Malaria by using satellite images. Now how could that possibly be? You’re pursuing a microscopic parasite with satellite images. Doesn’t quite hang together, does it? The reason that they were using satellite images is that the satellite can tell them where the most recent deforestation had occurred. Disruption of the hydrologic cycle, stagnant water, people getting bitten by Anopheles mosquitoes and contracting Malaria.

What that points out is how we live in systems, and I think many universities are developing Earth systems studies programs, which really make sense. You even get these multiple-named programs like “BioGeoPhysics” which is really pretty interesting. And that is a very good development because it counters the traditional sense that the world has problems and the university has departments and they don’t go together really well. So as we need to think about systems that are social systems as well as natural systems, we begin to see how these things affect each other and how the metaphor for systems thinking about the butterfly beating its wings in Central America starts a motion that leads to a typhoon in Japan, or some such metaphor isn’t totally ridiculous. It’s meant to be illustrative. So because we live in a world that’s so highly systemic with relationships like this that are not commonly observed, I had a chance to experience by following only the biological criteria and discovering that all these things stacked on top of it.

So how does that relate to the Obama campaign? First off, here is this history that Cam described of the personal commitment of this politician to environmental issues. Second, you get the opportunity to pull people together not just in the United States, not just Democrats and Republicans, but people around the world in which the traditional leadership role of the United States has been AWOL for the last seven years. In fact, the United States has been the holdout, has been the drag on the necessary global agreements to reduce carbon emissions, and to get some — at least to slow it down. But Obama, the campaign principles in foreign policy, have a significant connection to our environmental concerns because the second biggest source of carbon emissions is deforestation in the Tropics. Energy generation is number one, tropical deforestation is number two, transportation is number three. More than transportation which we hear so much about in the United States because we’re so bad on that score. So paying attention to that, which is the way that poor countries contribute to climate change (while rich countries contribute through generating a lot of electricity and through driving a lot of vehicles with China and India trying to catch up real fast and burning a lot of coal), we have to think about that whole range of ways of dealing with a set of global challenges that result from greenhouse carbon emissions and other gases and have all these other consequences. And sources in developing countries: poverty and repressive governments and ethnic conflict and lack of education, lack of economic opportunities. All of these are things that contribute to deforestation and carbon emissions. So the Obama campaign promises a doubling of U.S. foreign aid investments. The money itself isn’t necessarily a solution. But if it’s supplied with environmental principles of sustainability and substitutes for tearing down the forests and therefore contributing to climate change, that can be a very significant source of reducing the threat that climate change poses.

But there’s even more to that story, in that unlike efforts to mitigate carbon emission by changing the way that we generate electricity, or the way we fuel and drive our vehicles, is that the growth of our forests is the simplest way to diminish not the rate of carbon emissions, but to diminish the amount of carbon. That mitigation is essential. But that’s flattening out the curve of further contributions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So we have to think about, “Are there some ways that we can actually counteract that?” And there are certainly various suggestions, but the one that’s most low-tech and perhaps the simplest is to have more trees in Tropical countries where they grow fast and take a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere. Very different from adding less. You take it out. And this is where a sensible foreign aid program can contribute to that source of climate change in very dramatic ways.

Now, the other thing is the military dimension to all of this. It’s the results of bad management, repressive governments, climate change and the like that are producing many of the new kinds of threats to American national security. There are leaders in our military despite the White House that are paying attention to this because they know they will get the missions that result from these environmental problems, whether it’s the competition for very scarce and diminishing natural resources which is a big part of the Darfur situation, the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. Serious difficulties of that kind that exist in Uganda and Western Kenya are the product of very high population density in those places because they have fertile soil from volcanoes in East Africa is one example, and that cultural diversity. So you get the sense of, “We have to duke it out so our people have the access to the natural resources on which their economies depend and on which their future lives depend.” And that sets up humanitarian crises, and circumstances of failed states like Somalia, the situation in Afghanistan can be interpreted that way.

So my point here is that the Obama campaign can address these environmental issues, these global issues, in a variety of ways and some of the things that have already been said in the foreign policy area as well as specifically in the environment come together in ways that can give us some reason to be optimistic about contending with these things that if not dealt with will create unbelievable crises. Sea level rise alone with the amount of humanity that lives very close to coastlines, very poor places like Bangladesh, where you then set off mass migrations of people because their land is under water, might be exponentially greater than the kind of impact that we saw in New Orleans. But we have some understanding about how that can look and how people respond to it. So this is just a way of saying environmental issues can’t be encapsulated and separated from the whole range of political issues and concerns that need to be considered in an election of an American president, and I believe we have the kind of sophisticated candidate in Barack Obama who will reverse course and make the United States a leader in doing the right things globally and at the same time protecting the national security of Americans by doing so. Thank you.

Martin was not the only environmental authority to speak on behalf of Barack Obama on February 29. We’ve also podcasted and posted the transcript of former EPA administrator Robert Sussman’s remarks at the same event, along with those of Cameron Davis, an advocate for the restoration of the Great Lakes and other water resources. Look for a transcript and audio podcast of the question-and-answer session between the panel and its audience to be posted tomorrow.

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