This weekend, as expected, the TV was plastered with the Russians in Georgia and the Beijing Olympics.

President Bush and Secretary Condaleezza Rice said that Russia will not get away with this like it happened in Hungary.

On CNN, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the man with the Kosovo and Bosnia experience, said this was not Kosovo. The Russians were ready to stage this action already two years ago. It happened now because there was a Russian provocation and there has been indeed a real ethnic cleansing going on in Ossetia and in Abkhazia that caused many thousands of refugees pouring continuously into Georgia. The US says the number is 150,000 displaced people.

Holbrooke looks back into history and thinks of Budapest of 19956, Prag of 1966, Afghanistan of 1968 - so this is the invasion of Georgia that was executed in similar methodology.

Dmitry Simes, President of the Washington DC Nixon Center, and Rose Gottemoeller, Director of Carnegie, Moscow, agree to the above and say that the fact that this happened again at the time of the Olympics, just shows the Putin self confidence and that Putin does not worry that this will harm Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014. That area is in fact just across the border from were fighting was going on now.

Governor Bill Richardson stressed that this is not time for high US talk, simply, “we have no leverage on Russia,” so we have to engage them and not isolate them. He knows the area, problems, has been there - all as part of his UN Ambassadorship.

Georgia was incorporated into Russia in 1801 and stayed under Russian rule for 190 years. They re-emerged as an independent state only in 1991. The Ossentians always considered themselves different from the Georgians - and also not similar to the Russians. The same goes for Abkhazia and Azaria as per Rick Stengel, editor of Time Magazine, who was this Sunday’s coordinator of the GPS program that is usually brought out by Fareed Zakaria.

So, can one ostracize Russia from world business? Will this bring about a renewal of the Cold War?

He does not think that Russia has become a revisionist State and that it is fighting for a larger Russia. His idea is that the area is specially complicated - something like the Balkans, and that there were many reasons to what went on.

———

***

Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals.

By BILL KELLER
Published in The New York Times August 16, 2008

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.

Related
Map
Russia Marches, Neighbors Check Their Cards (The New York Times, August 17, 2008)
Specter of Arrest Deters Demonstrators in China (The New York Tines, August 14, 2008)

Chrystia Freeland’s Article: The New Age of Authoritarianism  www.ft.com August 12, 2008)

So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us.

If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess.

Individualism has been confined between lane markers. The pre-Olympics promises that attention would be paid to international norms of behavior went unredeemed. The New York Times’s Andrew Jacobs followed one citizen who decided to take up the government’s Olympic offer of designated protest zones for aggrieved parties who had filed the proper paperwork. Zhang Wei applied for the requisite license and was promptly arrested for “disturbing social order.” Take that, International Olympic Committee.

The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback.

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning.

It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin. He watched the empire he had spied for disbanded. He endured the belittling lectures of a rich and self-righteous West. He watched the United States charm away his neighbors, invade his allies in Iraq, and, in his view, play God with the political map of Europe.

Mr. Putin is, in this sense of grievance, a man of his people, as visitors to the New York Times Web site can see in the sampling of breast-beating commentary from Russian bloggers. It is safe to assume that Mr. Putin’s already stratospheric popularity at home has grown to Phelpsian proportions, not least among the long-suffering military.

In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face.

The protesters on the Chinese pavilion held banners welcoming Mr. Gorbachev as a champion of the greater freedom they sought. Meanwhile, the visiting Russian delegation marveled at the abundance in Chinese stores, the bounty of a policy that chose economic liberalization without political dissent.

The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.

President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neoconservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. For a president who has made the export of democracy his signature doctrine, that looked to the stand-tough crowd like a “Pet Goat” moment.

Others argued that this was a crisis Mr. Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. By midweek, possibly goaded by the wailing of neoconservatives and the aggressively anti-Putin rhetoric of Senator John McCain, Mr. Bush had abruptly amped up his opprobrium and dispatched an American airlift of humanitarian aid. And by the weekend there was a cold war chill in the air.

But Mr. Bush’s predicament is not just his. The question of how to deal with these reinvigorated autocracies bedevils the Europeans and will surely rank high among the legacy issues that confound Mr. Bush’s successor.

This time it is not — or not yet — the threat of nuclear apocalypse that limits the West’s options toward our emboldened Eastern rivals. The Chinese, in fact, are acting as if they have gotten past the saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status; they lavish diplomacy on Taiwan and Japan, and deploy the might of capital instead. The Russians may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but Mr. Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with petroleum.

The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, estranged from much of the world, and bled by serial economic crises.

History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side.

Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the newspaper.

***

——————

The New Age of Authoritarianism.
By Chrystia Freeland
Published: August 12 2008 in The Financial Times.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, democracy was on the march and we declared the End of History. Nearly two decades later, a neo-imperialist Russia is at war with Georgia, Communist China is proudly hosting the Olympics, and we find that, instead, we have entered the Age of Authoritarianism.

It is worth recalling how different we thought the future would be in the immediate, happy aftermath of the end of the cold war. Remember Francis Fukuyama’s ringing assertion: “The triumph of the west, of the western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism.”

Even in the heady days of 1989, that declaration of universal - and possibly eternal - ideological victory seemed a little hubristic to Professor Fukuyama’s many critics. Yet his essay made such an impact because it captured the scale, and the enormous benefits, of the change sweeping through the world. Not only was the stifling Soviet - which was really the Russian - suzerainty over central and eastern Europe and central Asia coming to an end but, even more importantly, the very idea of a one-party state, ruthlessly presiding over a centrally planned economy, seemed to be discredited, if not forever, then surely for our lifetimes.

That collapse brought freedom and prosperity to millions of people who had lived under Soviet rule. Moreover, the implosion of Soviet communism inspired hundreds of millions of others around the world to embrace freer markets and demand more responsive governments. The great global economic boom of the past 20 years, which has brought more people out of poverty more quickly than at any other time in human history, would not have been possible had the Soviet way of ordering the world not been discredited first.

Yet today, in much of the world, the spread of freedom is being checked by an authoritarian revanche. That shift has been most obvious in the petro-states, where oil is casting its usual curse. From Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, the black-gold bonanza has given authoritarian regimes the currency to buy off or to repress their subjects. In Russia, oil has fuelled an economic boom that prime minister Vladimir Putin, and some of his foreign admirers, mistakenly attribute to his careful demolition of the chaotic democracy of the 1990s.

For Russians, that argument is strengthened by the fact that the rising economic power of the moment - China - is unashamedly sticking to its faith in one-party rule. The end of the cold war made it tempting to believe that as countries opened up their markets, and became richer in the process, they would inevitably open up their societies, too. George W. Bush, US president, reiterated that hopeful thesis on his Asia tour last week, insisting: “Young people who grow up with the freedom to trade goods will ultimately demand the freedom to trade ideas.”

But the Chinese mandarins and the Russian siloviki are taking a different view - and acting on it. As China scholar David Shambaugh recounts in his new book, China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation , the CCP studied the collapse of Soviet communism with great care. And rather than seeing it as proof of the inevitable, global triumph of western liberalism, the Chinese comrades treated the Russian example as a textbook case of what a ruling Communist party ought not to do.

In this version of history, sinologist Andrew Nathan tells me, 1989 is also a turning point, but not because that was when communism’s most notorious wall came down. Instead, the key event of that year was the bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square: “As a propaganda position they have put it out that we had a crackdown in 1989 and we saved the party and we saved the country,” he says. “We didn’t have a failure of will like the Russians. Without that, we wouldn’t have been a great, modern power.” That’s a point of view Mr Putin has embraced, too, describing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a tragedy and his own reconstruction of a neo-authoritarian state as the only way to restore Russian “greatness”.

The west has been remarkably sanguine about this resurgence of authoritarianism, and one reason is that, this time, the comrades have money. Even as the Kremlin repeatedly confiscates the assets not just of its own businesspeople but of foreign ones, too, investment bankers, and plain old investors, are flocking to a Moscow flush with petro-roubles. The same is true of the Gulf states. China, on a path to become the world’s largest economy, is the most attractive of all.

But the Age of Authoritarianism is bad news for all of us, not just the human rights campaigners that businesspeople and practitioners of realpolitik love to dismiss. Like all overly rigid objects, authoritarian regimes conceal a tremendous fragility in their apparent strength - and their leaders know it. It is this realisation that has driven Mr Putin’s systematic destruction of all forms of civil society - an eminently pragmatic measure, although it has mystified some outside observers, who wonder why so popular a leader needs to be so heavy-handed. China’s chiefs have figured this out, too, hence their anxiety about everything from the Muslim Uighurs to the internet to the former Soviet Union’s “colour revolutions”.

Of course, another way to ensure popular support for your authoritarian regime is by playing up nationalist sentiment. We are more tolerant of our home-grown bullies if we think we need them to fight our enemies abroad - as even democratic America has demonstrated in recent years. Mr Putin has understood this all along, launching a brutal attack on Chechnya even before his coronation as president in 2000.

Russia’s expert taunting of the hotheads in Georgia, followed by immediate and massive retaliation the moment Tbilisi took the bait, is the latest evidence that, for the Kremlin, neo-imperialism is an essential bulwark of neo-authoritarianism. Bringing down the walls really did make the world safer. Now that so many leaders are building them back up again, figuring out how to contain the 21st century’s monied authoritarians is our most pressing foreign policy dilemma.

 chrystia.freeland at ft.com

Eurozone swings closer to economic recession - Europe’s economy is shrinking while prices remain at record highs.
LUCIA KUBOSOVA, for the EUobserver, August 15, 2008.

The eurozone’s economy has slipped further towards recession, with fresh output figures pointing to an economic downturn in the 15-strong zone as well as in the whole of the European Union, while inflation remains at a record high.

According to early predictions by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, gross domestic product (GDP) in the euro area dropped by 0.2 percent during the second quarter of 2008. This makes it the very first time that the monetary bloc’s economy declined since the launch of euro.

Similarly, the GDP for the whole of the EU shrank by 0.1 percent during the same period, with the worst performance recorded in the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia.

The gloomy forecasts – published on Thursday (14 August) - have reinforced concerns about the European economy moving closer to recession, with both Germany and France as the two biggest countries showing signals of an economic slow-down. The German economy dropped by 0.5 percent - which was less than analysts had predicted – while France’s shrunk by 0.3 percent.

Amelia Torres, European Commission spokeswoman for economic and monetary affairs, refused to speculate on recession fears and suggested that the latest figures were of no surprise to the EU executive, referring to unexpectedly high growth rates in the first quarter of 2008.

“I think it’s a bit exaggerated to use that word,” she told reporters in Brussels. But she admitted that “the signs are not really very good for the future”.

According to eurozone figures, no eurozone country is yet officially in recession – seen as two consecutive quarters of economic decline – but within the whole of the EU, Estonia has officially slipped in recession.

Along with the declining growth, inflation in the eurozone remained at a record high of 4 percent in July, unchanged from June. A year earlier the rate was 1.8 percent.

Estonia urges EU peacekeepers for Georgia: The South Caucasus - Europe’s gateway to Central Asia’s oil and gas.

PHILIPPA RUNNER, for the EU observer from Brussels. August 5, 2008.

Estonia has called for EU soldiers to be sent to Georgia after a flare up in fighting in the country’s breakaway South Ossetia region, with the European Union increasingly keen to get involved in Georgian peacemaking.

“Peacekeeping in these regions is a suitable undertaking for the European Union,” he added, noting that the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, will visit Georgia “shortly.”

The Estonian statement comes after a shoot out between the Georgian army and separatist forces in South Ossetia over the weekend left six people dead and 22 wounded, with the Russian foreign ministry warning that “the threat of large-scale hostilities…is growing real.”

Rebel authorities in South Ossetia said the casualty figures were higher and that they are evacuating thousands of women and children to the neighbouring Russian province of North Ossetia, in claims rubbished by the Georgian government.

“Actions are being undertaken to create an illusion of large-scale armed conflict, as if we were on the brink of war…The Russian foreign ministry is obviously orchestrating and facilitating this process,” Georgian re-integration minister, Temur Yakobashvili, said. “All this is being done to derail the peace process in which the international community is becoming increasingly involved.”

“That’s why they have quietly reached out to Western capitals. An EU high representative, with a significant staff and peacekeeping contingent, would likely be welcomed by the Abkhaz,” Brussels’ Institute for Strategic Studies analysts Borut Grgic and Alexandros Petersen wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.

Nordic Climate Solutions – Scandinavia´s annual marketplace for low carbon economy leaders – takes place on November 25th and 26th, 2008, in Copenhagen. The event is jointly organized with the Nordic Council of Ministers and a series of industry leaders from the Nordic Region.

Nordic Climate Solutions takes form as a combined conference and trade show. While the conference identifies current challenges and opportunities, the tradeshow presents state of the art solutions for achieving a low carbon economy.

Towards and beyond the Copenhagen UN Summit, NCS gathers a significant number of business and industry leaders. In 2007 the event gathered more than 600 decision makers. This year more than 1000 delegates are projected for the event in November.

As we would like to offer our delegates key insight from experts WE ARE CURRENTLY LOOKING FOR SPEAKERS for the following sessions:

- Building the Future – Energy Efficiency:

What energy and carbon savings could be realized if older commercial buildings had the energy consumption of the newer commercial building stock? How can we improve the incorporation of different energy efficiencies into different types of domestic and non-domestic buildings? And what will it take to achieve mass deployment of carbon neutral buildings?

- Adaptation in the Third World – Markets Beyond China and India:

As a global problem, climate change demands global solutions – yet the majority of the technology and financing for these solutions are not accessible to emerging economies and developing nations. India and China are naturally the center of attention when it comes to CDM projects or other climate action projects and policies, but how can we ensure that countries in Africa, Asia and South and Central America also have the capacity and the technology to develop in a sustainable and climate friendly manner?

- The Future of CDM – The Post 2012 Scene:

At the moment, there are more than 3,000 CDM projects in progress. What is the potential of the CDM on the post 2012 scenario and what concrete measures will be presented a the COP15 to improve this mechanism and ensure that it is contributing to global emission reductions and to technology transfer to all developing nations

Climate Solutions for China:

China is on its way to become the largest energy market in the world, with the greatest environmental challenges. This creates an enormous potential for the Nordic companies. The current five-year plan of China contains 250 billion dollar for investments in energy savings and environmental considerations and a range of ambitious goals.

Thinking Outside the Barrel:

President George W. Bush has stated that: “America is addicted to oil.” At times when the price approaches $150 per barrel – it is an expensive addiction to have. Fortunately, several alternatives exist.

The Finance of Climate Change – A Guide for Governments and Corporations:

The financial markets hold an increasingly important role in government and corporate initiatives designed to fight climate change and make the transition to the low carbon economy.

Less is More – Energy Efficiency (End Use):

Improved energy efficiency is often the most economic and readily available means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, there exists a difference between the actual level of investment in energy efficiency and the higher level that would be economically beneficial from the consumer’s point of view.

The Local Market of the Nordic: Russia:

Recently the Russian economy has been developing at a very high pace and significant investments are being made in the energy and environmental sector, as well as in restructuring.

Adaptation - Urban Climate Solutions:

Even with substantial reductions in emissions today, the delay in the climate system means that emissions we have already released into the atmosphere will continue to affect the climate for years to come. The impact on cities and the people living there will be significant.

De-linking Economic Growth from Emissions – Bypassing the Western Route to Low Carbon Economy:

The interrelations between economic growth, energy and CO2 have a tremendous influence on the possibilities of a global ambitious treaty being drafted at the COP15.

EU – Framework Conditions:

This year a new EU energy market package has been submitted. The ambition is to create framework conditions for efficient and functioning sustainable energy markets. How can the EU balance energy policies between the aims of security of supply, competitiveness and sustainable energy?

Renewable Energy Production;

With a raising stream of billions of dollars into the sector, the investments in renewable energy production reach new records each year.The Nordic Region has great experience in renewable energy production from a wide spectrum of sources. How may this experience and knowledge be utilized in the global market and what are the barriers to expanding the renewable portfolio standard?
If you are an expert who could speak on any of these issues or know someone who is, we would greatly appreciate any recommendations you could pass on.

Please reply to  mwi at mm.dk

Thank you for any guidance/recommendations you can provide.

Meik Wiking
Project Manager
Nordic Climate Solutions

Monday Morning
Huset Mandag Morgen A/S
Valkendorfsgade 13
P.O. Box 1127
DK-1009 København K

T: +45 33 93 93 23
F: +45 33 14 13 94
E:  mwi at mm.dk
W: www.mm.dk

NORDIC CLIMATE SOLUTIONS - NOVEMBER 25TH AND 26TH - 2008. WWW.NORDICCLIMATESOLUTIONS.COM

July 3, 2008. Liberal leader expresses dismay at socialist populism over Lisbon Treaty.

On the margins of an ALDE Group meeting in Tallinn yesterday, European Liberal Democrat Leader, Graham Watson, met Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip to discuss the future of the Lisbon Treaty in light of the Irish referendum and recent unhelpful remarks by European socialists (notably PASOK President George A. Papandreou and Austrian Chancellor Gusenbauer) demanding referendums on changes to the Treaty.

“Recent moves by Socialist leaders to make all EU treaty changes dependent on national referenda is at best irresponsible and at worst - an ill-conceived bow to populist pressure. Pawning the solution to the treaty stalemate is a bid to court eurosceptic voters which makes us all hostages to fortune” said Watson after the meeting. “The Irish rejected the Treaty, so it is right that their Government be invited to come back with an alternative solution to the dilemma we now face. Their task will not be assisted by such unilateral declarations.”

Watson went on to praise Estonia’s constructive role in Europe and the country’s Liberal economic model combining a flexible labour market and strict fiscal policies.

OPEN CALL FOR PAPERS - “Development futures in a changing climate: shaping the invisible.”

To be held at DSA Annual Conference 2008, DEVELOPMENT’S INVISIBLE HANDS,

Saturday, 8th November 2008, Church House, Westminster, London.

A maximum of four papers will be selected for presentation at the DSA
Annual Conference due to the panel’s time constraints. However, as there are
high levels of interest in this topic, we propose to select a larger number
of papers to present at the DSA Study Group on Climate Change and Development
meeting in September 2008. This will enable presenters to receive specialist
feedback from participants, and will provide material for a special journal
issue on climate change and development which will be linked to these two sessions.

The Study Group meeting will be held in London during the last two
weeks of September; date and location to be confirmed.

Dates:
Deadline for abstracts (750-1000 words) for the Panel and Study Group: 20th June 2008.
Selection for the panel and Study Group: 15th July 2008.
Deadline for full papers: 15th September 2008.

Panel convenors: Dr Emily Boyd, Dr Natasha Grist, Dr Sirkku Juhola and Valerie Nelson.

For any further information, please contact: Dr Sirkku Juhola, Senior
Researcher, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University
of Jyvaskyla, Finland.  sirkku.juhola at yfi.jyu.fi

Climate change is arguably the greatest threat of the 21st Century to
developing countries, a threat that will become an increasingly visible
and irrefutable determinant of development. The urgency of climate change
puts development in a completely new light. Land degradation, food insecurity,
extreme weather events, migration and social fragmentation are some of
the anticipated effects that will exacerbate millions of vulnerable
livelihoods globally. Funds for climate adaptation are slowly being pledged and
carbon offsets for development are marketed to individual consumers in the North.

Aid organizations are starting to consider new frameworks (e.g.
resilience) to better understand the intertwined nature of climate change,
development and the environment. However, will these efforts positively transform
existing linear forms of risk management, underlying knowledge-power
structures, and ultimately, poor people’s lives in a globalising, urbanising, context-specific reality?

The panel aims to analyse the theoretical and practical challenges facing
the future of development resulting from climate change. The papers
will reflect on concepts and application of resilience, sustainable development,
adaptation and mitigation at different scales of decision-making. They will
seek to answer the question: what are the patterns and futures of
development in the light of climate change, and how can these be influenced
to benefit the global poor most effectively?

We propose to focus on five current development and climate themes in
our considerations:
i) food security: the challenge of responding to both climate
change and development imperatives;
ii) disaster risk reduction: lessons for climate policy;
iii) carbon markets and considerations for development: ethics,
policy and practice;
iv) development futures: strategising and operationalising change;
v) climate knowledge and power.

Sirkku Juhola, PhD
Senior Reseacher (Social and Public Policy)
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
University of Jyväskylä
PL 35 (MaB)
40014 University of Jyväskylä
Finland

Office hours Wed 9-11 (MaB217)
Email  sirkku.juhola at yfi.jyu.fi
Puh +358 (0)14 260 2828
Fax +358 (0)14 260 3101

 http://www.jyu.fi/en/

NATO picks Estonia for high-tech crime centre.

By Renata Goldirova from Brussels for the EUobserver - May 15, 2008.

One year after government websites in EU state Estonia were crippled by a series of cyber attacks, NATO has moved to set up a centre on cyber defence in the country’s capital, Tallinn.

Seven NATO members - Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain - signed a pact formally establishing a so-called Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.

“The need for a cyber defence centre to be opened today is compelling,” general James Mattis in charge of NATO’s transformation efforts, said after the ceremony, adding that the centre “will help the alliance defy and successfully counter the threats in this area.”

The centre - due to be up and running in August, but formally opened in 2009 - will conduct research and training on cyber warfare. It will have a staff of 30 people, half of them IT specialists from seven founding countries.

The United States will join the project as an observer, while other NATO allies are free to step in later.

The project is a direct response to three weeks of systematic cyber-attacks on Estonia’s government and private websites in April and May 2007 - something Tallinn claims was orchestrated by Moscow in response to a dispute involving a Soviet-era monument.

The Baltic state had moved a bronze statue of a soldier from central Tallinn to a military cemetery. The Bronze Soldier was erected by the then Soviet authorities in 1947 and is seen by many Russians as a testament to the Soviet Union’s painful contribution to the World War II effort.

But it is regarded by most Estonians as a symbol of 20th century Soviet oppression.

“We know how difficult it is to defend the sovereignty of our land and sea borders, and air space,” Estonian Defence Minister Jaak Aaviksoo was cited as saying by AP. “It is even more complicated in the borderless cyber space where there is no smoking gun, no fingerprints, no footprints.”

The 27-nation EU, for its part, has also moved to wage war against high-tech crime. The European Commission last May presented some ideas on how to cope with crimes such as online fraud, identity theft, hacking and child pornography.

A public consultation is still ongoing, but Brussels has made it clear it will act cautiously on the legislative front and rather focus on boosting cooperation between EU states.

At the five years’ mark, we still think that deposing Saddam was right - staying in Iraq for oil was wrong. Investing that over half trillion dollars waisted (costs are already over $800 billion considering also the fight to depose Saddam) in creating an economy less dependent on oil would have been a much more reasoned choice. What now?

www.SustainabiliTank.info posts the following Washington Post article as a memorial to what we were saying since the start of our website. Sure - the surge has started to work, but to what end? Will the US be able to hold Iraq together as one state common to all its communities? Is it really important to have it as one integrated oil exporting source, at a time that we will anyway start to decrease our economy’s dependence on oil? After removing Saddam we could have left the Iraqi’s to sort out their future by themselves. Had they come up with a Saddam-alike, the US could have gone in a third time - less cost and nothing lost. If the US still insists in keeping Iraq in one piece - will this not push the country even more into future collusion with Iran? The Shiia are the majority and the only part of Iraq that really seeks independence are the Kurds. Why hold them back from achieving their goal? Even Turkey starts to understand that a secure Kurdistan, cards played right, could be to their advantage, and the EU, without pressure from the US, would also shine some light in that direction. The Sunni monarchs of the League of Arab States are yet years away from understanding the emerging new neighborhood in which extreme religious interpretation is bound to highjack also their own states - this because they had that false hope that the oil-money can help them deflect the ire of their own people to targets abroad - the likes of Israel, and even their own benefactor - the United States. This sounds sick - but sick it is. It was that oil-money, that to different degrees, paved the way and paid for the radicalization of the world’s two billion Muslims.

And what did all of this do to the value of the dollar and to US economy at large?

Surely, The Washington Post does not make our points, but then it presents a reasonable description of how sad America feels on this day - after five years of war and just one year after the start of a real attempt to manage that war.

The EU Observer looks into the damages the continuation of the war did to EU-US relations and to the split it created within the EU. What is the value loss to the US from above? How long will take the healing process?

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con…

 http://euobserver.com/9/25856/?rk=1

Five Years In Iraq
Iraqis and Americans Offer Perspectives on the War
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 19, 2008; A01

The planning ministry in Baghdad explodes after being hit during the second day of U.S. raids on the Iraqi capital March 20, 2003. (Faleh Kheiber - Reuters)

For a majority of Americans, today marks the fifth anniversary of the start of an Iraq war that was not worth fighting, one that has cost thousands of lives and more than half a trillion dollars. For the Bush administration, however, it is the first anniversary of an Iraq strategy that it believes has finally started to succeed.

It has been about a year since Army Gen. David H. Petraeus arrived to command U.S. forces in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker took over as the chief U.S. diplomat, and the military deployed 30,000 more troops to protect and rebuild neighborhoods.

Officials now running the U.S. effort express frustration that the gains wrought by their new political, security and economic policies — in particular, sharply reduced violence — are continually weighed against the first four years of the war, when Iraq unraveled in insurgency and sectarian strife.

“I came to Washington to describe what we’re doing,” Charles P. Ries, Crocker’s senior deputy in charge of reconstruction and the Iraqi economy, said during a visit last week. “At almost every meeting, somebody wants me to describe what we used to do. . . . I know why people raise these questions, but I don’t feel it’s something I can speak to. The times were different then.”

Today’s policy is fundamentally different from the impatient mind-set of 2003, in both lowered U.S. expectations and a less imperious approach to dealing with Iraqi authorities. “In those days,” Ries said, “we decided what [the Iraqis] needed, and we built it.” Today, he said, Iraqis are asked what they want, and then told that while the United States will help, they will have to pay for most of it themselves.

Yet as the administration requests additional war funding and calls for a pause in promised troop withdrawals, some question its right to a second chance. “Like a tourniquet,” the troop increase “has stopped the bleeding,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a former Army Ranger and senior member of the Armed Services Committee, reported last week after his 11th trip to Iraq. What he has not seen, Reed said, are the surgery and recovery that would begin to heal the wound that Iraq has become. And even U.S. officials acknowledge that the “surge” has not led to the political reconciliation the administration had hoped for.

Others see the past year’s successes as fragile and reversible, and less consequential than the pain that preceded them. “I think they have it righter than they ever have before,” Daniel P. Serwer, an Iraq expert with the U.S. Institute of Peace, said of the administration. “But the fact is that those four other years did exist, and they condition a lot of what can and cannot happen now. There’s a history here, there’s a lot of blood and guts on the floor — literally.”

The White House tends to dismiss such longer memories. While it recognizes the inclination to “relitigate the past” when a milestone such as the fifth anniversary is reached, National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, “our focus is on the way ahead and making sure that the current situation and the future situation gets better.”

In addition to new directions on the ground in Iraq, officials