The New Demographics

The World, 2050

A new study discussed in Le Monde argues that the peoples of the South will age much faster than the already comparably old peoples of the North. This would be primarily due to the spread of sanitary and health technologies at a far faster pace than that experienced in 19th Century Europe, the first region to undergo such a demographic shift. It claims that by 2050, while the world population will increase by a third, the number of over 65s will triple.

The article cites in particular the example of China in which infant mortality dropped from 200 per 1000 to 40 per 1000 over 1950-1990, and it took only 12 years (1974-1986) to halve birth rates. By way of comparison, it took France 150 years to achieve either feat. One might think China is an exception as it is developing rapidly and has a one child policy. But it is a trend occurring gradually across the world including the entire developed world, the post-Communist world and most of East/Southeast Asia.

To counter those inclined to cultural determinism, the CIA claims that several Muslim countries including Algeria, Tunisia and Iran have birth rates of 1.7-1.8, rather less than France's 1.98. Note that France probably (!) has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and it is largely of Algerian descent. It puts a rather awkward twist on the Eurabia thesis when the mother countries of the allegedly relentless hordes of Arab-Muslim immigrants begin having less children than Europeans..

Not all countries have reached the peak of their demographic transition however. Notwithstanding the above, South Asia (and in particular India), Africa and much of the Middle East will continue to grow massively, partly because of longer lifespans and sustained high birth rates. The population of Africa will probably triple in our lifetime. The Middle East, where in many countries people under 25 outnumber the rest, will in all likelihood for that among other reasons suffer from a degree of instability.

What does this mean? Who knows. Historically this is an absolutely unprecedented situation, a product of modern technical civilization. I am not however inclined to think it is an altogether bad thing. We don't need more human beings, especially at our current (and growing) rates of consumption. And we can only laud that the more technically and economically advanced countries of the world - that is those with the greatest latent destructive powers - should have more old people. Nations of pensioners have less money and less inclination to fight one another or revolutionary upheaval than nations teeming with frustrated, unemployed young men.

The study and in depth look at demographics, mostly in French, is available at the INED website. It includes a cool population pyramid predictor application a fascinating little faq which answers questions you've always pondered, like whether the French have most of their babies out of wedlock.

Building Armies during Guerrilla Wars

History isn't really meant to be studied for direct relevance to contemporary issues. If you do, you risk reading into the past based on your conceptions of the present, or drawing a forced meaning out to influence a contemporary debate.

Nonetheless, my choice of study of my dissertation I have admit is not entirely innocent. I am looking at the training by the French of a Vietnamese National Army (1950-54) during the Indochina War. Time and place are always marked by differences - here they are too numerous to list - but I did choose the subject as a case study of a recurrent strategy of wars in the Third World. The explicit aim of fighting a war in a country with the end-goal and exit strategy being the creation of a sustainable government and training of indigenous forces to replace your own. This pattern has been repeated in the U.S.'s wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan (and the Soviets too) and Iraq.


Graduation: Class of 2008

So as I read Tom Ricks, I am uneasy:

Several times the Bush administration tried to transfer responsibility for security to Iraqi army and police forces, only to see them unable to handle the burden. Now, once again, the Americans are trying to get Iraqi security forces to take over, as most U.S. troops withdraw from Iraqi's cities. Will the Iraqis be able to keep the population relatively secure? To be honest, I don't know, and no one else does. It's a matter of faith. And the leap comes tomorrow.

General Ray Odierno assures us: 'I do believe they are ready.'

Having spent a good chunk of the last week combing through U.S. foreign policy documents and the personal papers of then French President Vincent Auriol, I admit I am even more wary of politicians and generals telling us anything about how good a job they're doing.

I think the act of fighting a war can impose a kind of doublethink. Whether or not the Iraqi Army and the war are going well, the effort itself if it has any chance to be successful requires a degree of cheerleading. And in your own mind, your rhetoric can prevent you from having a more clear-headed view of the situation.


Combat: Class of 1953

I can’t help think of those French generals in Indochina who promised – every year – that within two years they’d have enough Vietnamese troops to knock out the Communists. And this, despite the continuous problems in training competent officers, in draft dodging and desertion and the fact that every time they handed areas to ‘their’ Vietnamese, the results went from mixed to disastrous. And this kind of optimistic discourse existed in both public and private as French leaders in charge of the war 'over there' tried to sell it to the public and political elite at home. All the while, their rather more detached American colleagues filed consistently negative reports.

This example from 1952 is typical: as a Marshal of France assured his government that the extra Vietnamese troops could allow them to deal 'decisive blows to the [Communist] Viet Minh]' by 1953, American diplomats reported from their conversation with the top French commander that despite his optimism he 'did seem to gloss over one very important aspect of the matter – the fact that there is a lack of confidence by the French High Command in both the ability and the reliability of Vietnamese effectively to assure security.' And this kind of dissonance, between vaguely hopeful wishful thinking by French leaders and the wry commentary of Americans repeats itself all the way to Dien Bien Phu and the establishment of the dysfunctional state of South Vietnam.

What does all this mean? For now, I'll just note that to make an army out of nothing and fight a guerrilla war at the same time - depriving that army of accountability and limiting the period of training to few extremely costly years - is a task of extreme difficulty. I am not aware of any examples of this strategy having succeeded (as opposed to fully destroying an insurgency and then having many peaceful years to create a viable army). I'll no doubt have more to say once the paper is done.

Solar Plane

I have recently wondered how cheap airlines like EasyJet and Ryan Air are going to keep costs down and be environmentally friendly when airplanes are going to need fuel for the foreseeable future. The new prototype plane by Solar Impulse tells me alternative energy isn't going to be of much help in that regard for a while: it has the wingspan of an airbus, the weight of a car, and a cockpit for one (1) passenger.

It is, however, pretty cool and will hopefully fly without any fuel at all and able to go around the world in 25 days. Dr Bertrand Piccard, who runs the project, will fly the finished plane in Spring 2010 and attempt to go around the Earth in 5 hops. It sounds like there are many risks: the flight has to match the simulations and the weather has to be decent, too much turbulence would wreck a plane which is also a 60 meter hang-glider.. It all feels very adventurous, pioneering and sci-fiesque. Cool interview with him on the BBC page.

Sterile and Marginal

Is anyone else struck by how sterile the 'debate' over Obama's rhetorical support (or lack of thereof) for the Iranian protesters is? Does it really make that big a difference either way? Aren't the events in Iran basically internally driven? It seems to me this 'controversy' only has any traction if one assumes the U.S. president's words have omnipotent powers.

That the Republicans have seized upon this as an issue I think is the product of two things. The first rather base and cynical, which is their need for a political football. It is all very theatrical and opportunistic, but hey, that's part of the game. The second is a sincere belief that Ronald Reagan huffed and puffed and blew the Berlin Wall down. Hence we have precedent.

I wouldn't touch the long, complicated and sterile (there's that word again) debate about the merits of the 'Reagan Victory Thesis' with a ten-foot-poll. But I will say this: in the absence of something big - like armed conflict with the outside world - these revolutionary/reformist processes are in the immediate basically internal. After all, the 'tough' rhetoric had stopped before the Soviet Union was disintegrating. By May 1988, Ronald Reagan was in Moscow proclaiming that the U.S.S.R. was no longer an Evil Empire and when East Germans broke through the Iron Curtain, George H. W. Bush repeatedly made the point of not 'dancing on the Berlin Wall'.

Not that words are wholly without influence. But it does strike me as rather marginal in the current situation. If and when the crackdown comes we can start discussing more unequivocal condemnation and sanctions. (Not that they particularly work.) But at the end of the day, neither the U.S. nor the West generally is able or willing to put any hard material backing - military or otherwise - behind the protesters. As soon as we've established that, the debate is academic. Rhetoric may have done great deal to encourage dissent - say - in Hungary in 1956 or Iraq in 1991. But it seemed like nothing but false hypocrisy when the West watched impotently as guns were fired and blood ran in the streets.


Incidentally, George F. Will I think is the only prominent conservative to have not jumped onto the bandwagon.

Ivan Rioufol

A fellow blog has made a cottage industry on commenting on the 'Rioufolliene' thought-of-the-day coming out of the op eds of the Figaro. It has everything: vicious attacks on Barack Hussein Obama (no one else has their middle name so relentlessly emphasised), invocations of Islamo-fascism and the Axis of Evil, assertions that the leaders of Iran desire something like nuclear suicide, lamenting of postcolonial 'guilt', and - yes - a narrative that includes Nicolas Sarkozy riding as knight in shining armour to the rhetorical rescue of democracy in Iran.

Read it, just to be reminded that no one has a monopoly on bad faith and the production of mean-spirited, reactionary garbage.

'Minarets of Menace'

The Daily Show has been reading my mind..

An hour with McNamara (1996)

And that [our gasoline consumption] is disgraceful. In the first place, our automotive fuel consumption per capita is roughly twice that of, say, Germany. And this is a problem. It's an environmental problem: we are putting more greenhouse gas emissions in the upper atmosphere that are going to lead to climate change. It's a financial problem: it costs us far more. It's a security problem, this fuel comes out of the Middle East and we are more dependent on a very volatile region. We are not buying anything for it. We are not buying greater comfort, more convenience, or greater mobility...

Now I come back to contemplation. I think it is the responsibility of a leader, an action-oriented individual in our society, whether public sector leader or private sector leader, to contemplate as well as to act and to think about his role in society. And I want to suggest that the role in society of a petroleum executive today, in addition to making profits for his company, ought to be to help society increase efficiency in the use of petroleum. I don't think they think of themselves that way. They should.

Honestly, how great is Robert S. McNamara? I highly recommend this hour-long interview of him on his upbringing, the Depression, business over academia, 'action vs. contemplation', liberalism, Vietnam, cars/gas/climate change.. And this was in 1996.. Forget the end of the Cold War, forget 9/11, the trends that dominate our world today have been in place since at the 1970s if not earlier.

I don't know if Errol Morris saw this interview prior to shooting his The Fog of War. McNamara covers a lot of the same ground, even using phrases identical to those in the documentary, but he also talks about different stuff, often in the specific context of Nineties. Well worth watching.

Reflections on the Revolution in Iran

It was not so long ago that that Iran was made a member of the 'Axis of Evil' by George W. Bush. It was a crude, almost childish example of speech writing, awkwardly meshing a similarly cartoonish phrase Ronald Reagan used to describe the Soviet Union with a Hitlerite term that evokes the most terrible force, the darkest years the world has ever seen.

It did not square all that well with the actual members of the new 'Axis'. The governments of Iraq, Iran and North Korea had indeed varying degrees of 'evil' but it did seem profoundly misleading to compare their tin-pot dictatorships with Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. - two vast empires that had literally had the potential to destroy the United States and, perhaps, dominate the world. Never mind that the members of this supposed 'Axis' did not have particularly close relations and two of them - Iraq and Iran - had been at each others' throats for decades. Nonetheless, the totalitarian imagery was evocative, and served the administration's purpose of instilling a lurid and demonic, albeit somewhat blurry, image of the enemy into public opinion as the necessary prelude to all war and confrontation.

I can't help but be struck by the colossal number of spectacular images and video coming out of Iran right now (some here, TPM has lots) and how it will affect the country's image abroad. I think of the extent to which they both confirm and contradict preconceptions. Yes, there are big, intimidating rallies with foreign chants and banners with alien script. Yes, there are upturned cars and buses burn. Indeed, supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad show off disturbing anti-American imagery and slogans. But much more striking is how normal the people of Iran must seem to those expecting a more terrorist-totalitarian-'Islamofascist' vibe. These people do not look like the submissive, deprived citizens of the Soviet Union or oppressively robotic North Koreans on parade. Nor do they for the most part look like the ghostly burqa-clad women that float around Kabul or the scraggly old crackpots in turbans that appear in Al Qaeda's periodic videos.

Instead, we witness a society that seems much like our own and yet enticingly exotic. Red-White-and-Green take the place of our own colors at the rallies. The ubiquitous green of everything - banners, shirts, faces, glasses - evoke not a frightening fundamentalism, but happy memories of Kiev. We see 40something males sporting their polos and paunches, marching in orderly fashion. There are long-haired young men in T-shirts and jeans that look like they were grabbed off some London campus. Pretty girls walk in their summer clothes - their modesty assured by a light scarf covering half their hair - sometimes with braids, sunglasses, make-up or even tank-tops.

And we see them all gallantly face off with troopers wielding batons and wearing black body armor.

Instead of 1979, this feels like 1989. It is as though watching East Germans rallying against Communism as we hold our breath to see if the Russian tanks are rolled out. We look with apprehension for a repeat of Tiananmen. But would that be possible in the age of Facebook, cameraphones and YouTube? These tools, so frivolous in their normal usage, would ensure that every household knows the face of violence and tyranny. These events hold the potential to stir change in both the United States and Iran. That when gazing at the other, there would not be the ugly, distorted reflections of the "Great Satan" and the "Axis of Evil", but two nations might see each other for the first time.