News n Notes from the Web

Iraq woes haunt Bush in Vietnam
By Brian Barron - BBC News - 18 Nov 2006


When President Bush agreed months ago to attend the Apec summit in Vietnam, he may have pictured headlines about extending the hand of friendship to an old enemy. But instead, at the end of another week of distressing news from Iraq, many commentators are drawing uncomfortable parallels with Iraq. Occasionally during periods of war and public stress you come across a concrete statement of intent literally built to underscore national resolve. Nothing symbolised America's lost crusade in Indochina more than the enormous concrete embassy erected in Saigon in 1967, seemingly to last for ever, up the road from South Vietnam's presidential palace. Note that I used the past tense. Because this became an albatross as Washington's Vietnam adventure foundered just over 30 years ago.

And as I ran about the streets then, with a BBC cameraman filming South Vietnam's death throes, the looting, the mayhem, the futile casualties for a cause long lost to corruption, cowardice and wishful thinking, the very last American marine guards were hiding on the roof of the embassy above us praying for a helicopter from their evacuation fleet in the South China Sea.
It did come and flew them out, as the conquering North Vietnamese tanks rolled past us and smashed through the presidential palace gates. So much history compressed into a few short hours.

"Never Again!" vowed the US military establishment, ushering in pragmatic policies, including an end to conscription.

*** Iraq War ***
So it was that February 1991 I found myself flying at dawn in an American Chinook helicopter across the Kuwait desert wreathed in smoke and flames from scores of oil wells set ablaze by Saddam's retreating troops. We landed at an airbase in southern Iraq captured a few hours earlier by US forces, now a professional full-time army. I watched as half a dozen Iraqi generals, with Saddam look-alike moustaches and berets, were marched to a tent to sign a ceasefire with the American commander. It was surrender. That campaign by the first President Bush, to drive the Iraqis from Kuwait, was a text-book example of painstaking diplomacy sustaining an alliance of Western and Muslim forces, coupled with brilliant battlefield tactics, and recognition it would be unwise to seize Iraq itself. It was a difficult job, well done with an absence of what I would call missionary zeal - unlike the second President Bush's Iraq adventure.

*** Second Iraq War ***
In both conflicts, America's justifications for war were eventually discredited. Three years ago I watched it begin on board the US guided missile cruiser Mobile Bay, as the American fleet in the Gulf bombarded Baghdad far over the horizon.
The high tech military superiority was overwhelming - just like US forces in Vietnam. These days the parallels seem to be multiplying. In Iraq, there has been a similar, disastrous lack of intelligence about the country and people - reminiscent of American mistakes in Indochina.

In both conflicts, America's justifications for war were eventually discredited. Just as disturbing, was Washington's failure - initially at least - to learn from well-documented colonial blunders by the French in Vietnam and British in the 1920s in Iraq.
As for pressure to hand over to Iraqi forces, that resembles Vietnamisation, training South Vietnamese forces to replace departing Americans. But by the end, 58,000 Americans were dead and more than one million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. One big difference is that Vietnam poisoned the political mood of America, with tragic consequences.

Whereas the USA today is not shaken by anti-war protests - instead a majority just voted with calm common sense for bringing an end to what now seems an even bigger foreign policy blunder than Vietnam - in a region of far greater strategic importance. In the wake of the recent elections here, the supposedly open-ended military commitment to Iraq suddenly looks, well, almost rubbery. Now, on the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad, a huge new American embassy is rising. I cannot help remembering its now-demolished monumental forerunner in Saigon, packed with the best and brightest CIA and military types, under Washington's proconsul. They proved powerless as the country around them disintegrated. To be fair about that final meltdown, the American expeditionary force had completed its withdrawal three years earlier. From half-a-million troops to zero.

But it is the images of South Vietnam's death throes that endure - overladen helicopters abandoning a panic-stricken American ally. It was an exit strategy that failed ingloriously. For Mr Bush, the self-styled war president seeking a way out of the Iraq quagmire, his visit to what was Saigon, offers no comfort at all.
***

Report Warns of ‘Global Collapse’ of Fishing
New York Times - November 2, 2006 - By CORNELIA DEAN

If fishing around the world continues at its present pace, more and more species will vanish, marine ecosystems will unravel and there will be “global collapse” of all species currently fished, possibly as soon as midcentury, fisheries experts and ecologists are predicting.

The scientists, who are to report their findings on Friday in the journal Science, say it is not too late to turn the situation around. As long as marine ecosystems are still biologically diverse, they can recover quickly once overfishing and other threats are reduced, the researchers say.

But they add that there must be quick, large-scale action to protect remaining diversity, including establishment of marine reserves and “no take” zones, along with restrictions on particularly destructive fishing practices.

The researchers drew their conclusion after analyzing dozens of studies and fishing data collected by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and other sources. They acknowledge that much of what they are reporting amounts to correlation, rather than proven cause and effect.

And the data from the Fishing and Agricultural Organization have come under criticism from researchers who doubt the reliability of some nations’ reporting practices, said Boris Worm, a fisheries expert at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, who led the work.

Still, he said in an interview, “there is not a piece of evidence” that contradicts the dire conclusions.

Jane Lubchenco, a fisheries expert at Oregon State University who had no connection with the work, called the report “compelling.”

“It’s a meta analysis and there are challenges in interpreting those,” she said in an interview, referring to the technique of analyzing a host of previous studies. “But when you get the same patterns over and over and over, that tells you something.”

Twelve scientists from the United States, Canada, Sweden and Panama contributed to the work.

“We extracted all data on fish and invertebrate catches from 1950 to 2003 within all 64 large marine ecosystems worldwide,” they wrote. “Collectively, these areas produced 83 percent of global fisheries yields over the past 50 years.”

In an interview, Dr. Worm said, “We looked at absolutely everything — all the fish, shellfish, invertebrates, everything that people consume that comes from the ocean, all of it, globally.”

The researchers found that 29 percent of species had already been fished so heavily or were so affected by pollution or habitat loss that they were down to 10 percent of previous levels, a situation the scientists called collapse.

This loss of biodiversity seems to restrict the ability of marine ecosystems as a whole to recover from overfishing, Dr. Worm said. That results in an acceleration of environmental decay and further loss of fish, with potentially serious consequences to people and economies dependant on them.

Dr. Worm said he analyzed the data for the first time on his laptop while he was overseeing a roomful of students taking an exam. What he saw, he said, was “just a smooth line going down.” And when he extrapolated the data into the future “to see where it ends at 100 percent collapse, you arrive at 2048.”

“The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I said, ‘This cannot be true,’ ” he recalled. So he ran the data through his computer again. And then he did calculations by hand. The results were the same.

“I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know what the future will bring, but this is a clear trend,” he said. “There is an end in sight, and it is within our lifetimes.”