World roundup: October 22 2024

Stories from Lebanon, Sudan, Russia, and elsewhere

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TODAY IN HISTORY

October 22, 1859: The Spanish government declares war on Morocco, sparking the six month Hispano-Moroccan War. Repeated attacks by Berber tribesmen from the Moroccan Rif region against the Spanish North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla prompted the declaration. In a relatively anti-climactic conflict the Spanish army occupied the northern Moroccan city of Tétouan and that effectively ended the fighting. The Treaty of Wad Ras, signed in late April 1860, obliged Morocco to pay a hefty war indemnity, expanded the territories of both Ceuta and Melilla, and gave the southern Moroccan coastal city of Sidi Ifni to Spain as well. The Spanish government returned Sidi Ifni to Morocco in 1969.

October 22, 1884: The International Meridian Conference, which was a real thing, designates the line of longitude running through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as the international Prime Meridian. Previously most major seafaring countries, at least, designated their own separate prime meridians that often ran through their capital cities (Germany used the “Berlin Meridian,” for example, and France used the “Paris Meridian”). But such was the ubiquity of British map-making that the UK/Greenwich prime meridian had become the international standard by default even before this conference made it official. Nowadays the international Prime Meridian is the IERS Reference Meridian, which still runs through Greenwich but is around 100 meters east of the previous one.

INTERNATIONAL

I’m admittedly not a scientist, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this seems pretty bad:

In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.

There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.

“We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told an event at New York Climate Week in September.

“Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end,” he said.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Drop Site’s Yaniv Cogan and Jeremy Scahill look at one possibility the Israeli government is considering for a “post-Hamas” Gaza that might also offer a substantial payday for one American entrepreneur:

The Israeli government is actively considering a plan to deploy operatives from private U.S. logistics and security companies in the Gaza Strip under the auspices of delivering humanitarian aid, according to Israeli media reports. Israel’s security cabinet convened Sunday evening to discuss the proposal and is expected to approve a “pilot” program and begin conducting test runs in the next two months, according to Israeli media reports. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “agreed to examine” the plan last week, according to Haaretz.

The media reports portray the plan as the brainchild of Israeli-American businessman Mordechai “Moti” Kahana, the CEO of Global Delivery Company (GDC), who describes his for-profit business as “Uber for War Zones.” Kahana, a passionate supporter of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, has spent the past year aggressively trying to find a role for his company in Israel’s war on Gaza.

Among Kahana’s goals is to create a “gated community” in Gaza where Palestinians would be subjected to biometric screenings in order to receive humanitarian aid. For months, there has been discussion in Israel of creating “humanitarian bubbles” in northern Gaza where aid could be distributed after Israeli forces declare Hamas fighters have been eliminated from the areas. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has championed the idea. Rumors have been swirling in Israel about how this might be achieved and who might run the operations.

I am skeptical of the notion that the Israeli government intends to create “humanitarian bubbles” in northern Gaza, mostly because I am skeptical that the Israeli military (IDF) is planning to leave any human beings alive in that area once it has concluded its latest operation. But assuming this plan really is being considered it may be worth reading this opinion piece from Haaretz’s Noa Landau, who warns that it “would privatize military rule over Gaza by handing it over to private companies with private financial interests and nothing beyond that.” The absence of even the barest hint of accountability could leave GDC free to go even further than the IDF in terms of brutalizing the territory’s population.

IRAQ

Iraqi and anti-Islamic State coalition forces carried out a military operation in Iraq’s Saladin province overnight that resulted in the death of Jassim al-Mazroui Abu Abdul Qader, allegedly IS’s commander in Iraq, along with eight other IS officials. Two US soldiers were reportedly wounded in the operation.

LEBANON

Monday evening’s IDF airstrike near southern Beirut’s Rafic Hariri Hospital was deadlier than initially reported, killing at least 18 people including four children. The IDF has now killed over 1550 people in Lebanon since September 23, and its campaign is reportedly expanding to parts of Beirut and parts of Lebanon that have hitherto been mostly spared. Said expansion has coincided with a visit to the region by Biden administration envoy Amos Hochstein, in what I’m sure is a total coincidence. Additionally, the IDF said on Tuesday that it had confirmed the death of senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine in an airstrike earlier this month. Safieddine had been considered the likely successor to former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in another IDF strike last month.

Hochstein, per his previously established methodology, came to Lebanon carrying less a peace proposal than a list of Israeli demands. These were couched as changes to United Nations Security Council resolution 1701, which the Biden administration previously supported but now says is inadequate. Hochstein appears to have softened the list of demands he was given by the Israeli government a bit—so, for example, instead of the IDF being granted a blank check to operate inside Lebanon at will Hochstein’s proposal would give that authority to UN peacekeepers—but the upshot is still the elimination of anything approaching Lebanese sovereignty and so unsurprisingly Lebanese leaders were unwilling to accept it.

IRAN

Iranian naval commander Shahram Irani told state media on Monday that Tehran has extended invitations to the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia to engage in joint maritime drills focused on improving security in the Red Sea region. If this comes to pass it would be a significant development in terms of Iran’s regional stature at a time when Israel and the US are trying to isolate it (but seem to be isolating themselves instead). The Iranian Navy hosted an Indian Ocean joint exercise last week that included India, Oman, and Russia, while the Egyptians and Saudis sent observers.

ASIA

AZERBAIJAN

Eurasianet reports that the Azerbaijani government appears to be reserving the right to prosecute attendees at the UN’s COP29 climate summit next month, should any of them criticize its domestic policies:

The hosting agreement signed by Azerbaijan and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) covering the upcoming COP29 conference contains language that potentially gives Azerbaijani authorities the ability to muzzle criticism of their domestic policies, according to a copy of the document obtained by Human Rights Watch.

COP29 is scheduled to run from November 11-22 in the Azerbaijani capital Baku. The hosting agreement was finalized in August. At a meeting in Bonn in 2023, UNFCCC member states issued a report calling for hosting agreements to conform with basic human rights standards and its terms to be publicly available.

The copy obtained and published by HRW creates a free-speech gray area that can leave COP29 participants uncertain over whether they may face legal consequences for anything they say or do in Baku. One article in the agreement states that participants will have immunity “in respect of words spoken or written and any act performed by them in their official capacity in connection with their participation in the meeting.” But the agreement also creates room for Azerbaijani authorities to punish anyone who raises domestic policies and/or abuses, even if they have a plausible connection to environmental issues. 

INDIA

“Commandos” (I’m not entirely sure what that means in this context) killed at least five Naxalite rebels in India’s Maharashtra state on Monday. At least one of the “commandos” had to be evacuated for medical reasons during the clash.

CHINA

The Chinese government and the Catholic Church agreed on Tuesday to maintain their current arrangement over the appointment of Chinese bishops in place for at least the next four years. Their accord, first reached in 2018, gives the Church authority over appointments but allows the Chinese government considerable input into the selection process. It ended a situation whereby the Church was operating somewhat underground within China and has clearly worked to the Vatican’s satisfaction, though conservative elements within the Church argue that it cedes too much authority to Beijing.

SOUTH KOREA

Officials in the South Korean government say they’re considering several potential “countermeasures” in response to still-unconfirmed claims that North Korean soldiers are deploying, or at least preparing to deploy, to Ukraine as part of the Russian invasion force there. One such “countermeasure” could be the direct provision of weapons to Ukraine, a step that Seoul has so far refused to take despite pressure to do so from the US.

AFRICA

SUDAN

Sudanese emergency response volunteers are saying that a military airstrike killed at least 20 people (four of them children) and wounded another 27 in southern Khartoum on Tuesday. The Sudanese military has intensified its activities in Khartoum of late as it seeks to regain ground from the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group. A military airstrike also reportedly hit a mosque in the city of Wad Madani on Sunday, killing at least 31 people. Wad Madani is the capital of Sudan’s Gezira state, where an apparent defection by the RSF’s local commander may be breathing new life into the military’s efforts.

Meanwhile, the mystery over the RSF’s downing of a cargo plane in northern Darfur continues to defy easy explanation. RSF fighters say they shot down the “hostile” aircraft on Monday, but video they posted to social media indicates that the plane had previously been used by the UAE to ferry arms to the RSF, and the Russian government is investigating claims that Russian nationals were among its crew. Now the Kyrgyz firm New Way Cargo, which previously had leased the plane, says that its lease expired at the end of last year and the Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry is claiming that the plane was subsequently registered to Sudan.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The Congolese military claimed on Tuesday that it had retaken the town of Kalembe in North Kivu province, one day after M23 rebel fighters seized it amid clashes with the local pro-government Wazalendo militia. However, M23 is insisting that its forces still control the town. Either way, the Angolan government, which mediated a ceasefire between the Congolese government and M23 back in August, said definitively on Monday that M23’s latest advance had violated that accord.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

According to The New York Times, the severing of relations between Russia and the West has done irreparable harm to climate research in the Arctic:

Western scientists studying the Arctic are increasingly lost in the hunt for data, the result of the cutoff in relations with Russia.

Crucial climate science has been stymied as Russia, which makes up over half the Arctic, continues its war in Ukraine. Data flowing between Western and Russian scientists has slowed to a trickle with Western-imposed sanctions and other restrictions, interrupting work on a host of projects.

The stalled collaboration is setting back efforts to monitor the shrinking of the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the global average and accelerating the planet’s rise in temperature. That threatens to leave governments and policymakers without a clear picture of how fast the Earth is heating up.

“It may be impossible to understand how the Arctic is changing without Russia,” said Alessandro Longhi, an Italian permafrost scientist. He spoke as he trudged through snow earlier this month with a colleague near Toolik Field Station, a research outpost run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the northern part of the state. Western scientists, locked out of Russia, have increasingly turned to stations like these to work in the Arctic.

UKRAINE

The UN Population Fund’s Eastern Europe director, Florence Bauer, told reporters on Tuesday that the Russian invasion has cost Ukraine somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million people. That figure accounts for refugees, war dead, and declines in birth rate. The war has exacerbated a population decline that was already underway, as it has been in many former Soviet states. Russia has also suffered its own demographic collapse since the war began, particularly in terms of birth rate.

AUSTRIA

Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen on Tuesday asked Chancellor Karl Nehammer to form a new government following last month’s parliamentary election.

Van der Bellen and Nehammer meeting in Vienna on Monday (GEORG HOCHMUTH/APA/AFP via Getty Images)

This is something of a break in protocol, as van der Bellen might have been expected to ask the “winner” of that election, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), to take first crack at forming a government. But since every other party has rejected the possibility of entering a coalition with FPÖ the party has no apparent path forward, and Nehammer’s People’s Party (ÖVP) was next in line. A coalition between ÖVP and the third place Social Democratic Party seems the likeliest outcome.

AMERICAS

UNITED STATES

Finally, Responsible Statecraft’s Dan Grazier considers the longstanding problem known as the “defense death spiral”:

A basic truth in Washington is that almost every single new weapon system ends up costing significantly more than the one it is replacing.

As the cost of weapons increases, the number of systems produced decreases. That’s how the United States ended up with only 21 B-2s, 187 F-22s, and three Zumwalt-class destroyers, rather than the 132, 750, and 32 respectively the military initially promised. This phenomenon creates what is known as the Defense Death Spiral, when the unit cost of new weapons outrace defense budgets.

John Boyd and his friends in the Military Reform Movement during the late Cold War years warned us about the military industrial congressional complex 50 years ago. This small band of Pentagon insiders saw with their own eyes how the political economy created by the financial and political connections between the military elite, the defense industry, and society’s ruling class wasted precious resources and produced a series of deeply flawed weapons.

The end result of this phenomenon is fewer weapons that cost a lot more and do a lot less. Smarter procurement would break the spiral, but instead the Pentagon, with a big assist from Congress, just keeps throwing more money at the problem. That doesn’t work, but on the plus side it does make defense contractors rich.