Saving face in international relations has been a stereotype of Asian, especially Japanese, diplomacy, but it’s clear tonight after this New York Times report on covert operations against Iran that saving face has profound implications for avoiding war:
The interviews also indicate that Mr. Bush was convinced by top administration officials, led by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, that any overt attack on Iran would probably prove ineffective, lead to the expulsion of international inspectors and drive Iran’s nuclear effort further out of view. Mr. Bush and his aides also discussed the possibility that an airstrike could ignite a broad Middle East war in which America’s 140,000 troops in Iraq would inevitably become involved.
Instead, Mr. Bush embraced more intensive covert operations actions aimed at Iran, the interviews show, having concluded that the sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies were failing to slow the uranium enrichment efforts. Those covert operations, and the question of whether Israel will settle for something less than a conventional attack on Iran, pose immediate and wrenching decisions for Mr. Obama.
What this says is, a visible, overt attack will ignite a multi-country full-scale war, but an invisible, covert attack will result in no overt reprisal. Specifically, for Israel with American help to eliminate the Iranian reactor at Natanz with a tactical raid or aerial bombardment, that would cause a region-wide war, inevitably involving the 140,000 American troops in Iraq. But to achieve the exact same result—the elimination of the Natanz reactor—through espionage, no overt retaliation could occur without Iran admitting that its security isn’t up to snuff.
The latter sounds much better.
It makes me thankful that we have people willing to do just that, at least given legitimate ends and a strong chain of command.
While my announcement of Katie’s labor was premature—Satchmo is still refusing to come out and say hi, not even a wave—I’m pleased to highlight two engagements: that of my friend/best man Patrick and that of friend/coworker Geoff.
I’ve known Patrick since the summer of 1992, when his parents invited over a few boys who were new to Mater Dei, the Catholic school I was starting for middle school. I recall being very annoying and Patrick being very patient as I struggled to make new friends throughout seventh grade in a radically different environment than my co-ed elementary school. But then eighth grade came along, and we discovered a mutual love of recording our own play-by-plays, of playing NHL ’93 until the Sega Genesis burned out, and of hand-animating the reproductive organs of dissected frogs.
Paddy and I have helped each other through tough times, even while sticking the man-code of refusing to talk on the phone to just “catch up”. So I’m thrilled that he’s engaged to Rachel, someone with ties to his roots in both D.C. and Chicago, someone caring, and someone, quite possibly, brighter than one of the brightest people I know.
And congrats to Geoff as well, whom I found out is engaged as well, though I’m going to need details, Geoff.
And another round of congratulations to Sharon and Mike, whose baby, Adam Nicholas, is way cuter now that he’s more than two days old like when we first saw him. (Babies look weird when they’re brand new!)
“We had to treat this coffee like fine wine,” he said, describing the taste as “mouth-bursting” with an extreme heavy body rich with notes of floral, jasmine and cocoa flavor.
If allowed in Cambridge, Bourbon Rwanda would be the first coffee shop of its kind in the country.
Karuletwa was born in Uganda and grew up as a refugee, fleeing to Kenya and then to Rwanda in 1994 after the war subsided. He moved to California in 1996 on a basketball scholarship, went back to work in Rwanda for six years, before ending up in Cambridge where he now lives.
Karuletwa said he wants to be sure people know where his coffee comes from. The café would include tracing technology that allows customer to get a virtual tour of how their beverage went from “crop to cup” with testimony from farmers, map locations and delivery facts.
According to the Cambridge Chronicle, the Cambridge Licensing Board will meet January 20th to decide whether to transfer the building’s license to Karuletwa.
When I opened my eyes this morning, the sky was yellow. Not the sun, because it was overcast and a little rainy. The sky was literally yellow. I got a reply-tweet from an MIT student who confirmed she saw the same thing:
@akwhitacre Glad I’m not crazy. I spent a while wondering if my eyes were going wonky.
The weirdness of the yellow sky captures the mood today, because I’m watching my wife get one piece of weird news after another. Her father found out he has five herniated disks. Her cousin went to the hospital and was diagnosed with diverticulitis and may need surgery. She checked Newsday to find out a) a woman was beaten a couple blocks from the church where we were just married and b) an old classmate of hers has gone missing.
I pray for healing backs, healthy colons, a lot of justice, and a safe return. But mainly I pray that I don’t see that yellow sky again.
After being in Alaska the past week, I have a rudimentary but legit appreciation for how a minority of Alaskans could want to secede from the U.S. The main grievance of secessionists there is that the Lower 48 has too much control over Alaska’s resources. Well, how are they going to feel now that the banking system is being bailed out not just by the federal government but by European governments?
I hope to post a bunch of short posts over the next week about the honeymoon and generally about things in the news I’ve missed. But as a Democrat with libertarian leanings, I can really only begin to imagine what free-marketers (not to be confused at all with modern conservatives) think about this story:
After a weekend of crisis talks on both sides of the Atlantic, European nations and the United States unveiled on Monday a staggering and coordinated series of multibillion-dollar rescue packages to shore up teetering banks and guarantee credit to free up lending between them.
While the broad outlines of some of the deals represented a concerted response to plummeting stock markets and frozen credit markets, the leading European economies also embraced some individual steps, underlining the differences of approach they have sought to bury in the face of the worst financial crisis of the post-war era.
On Sunday, European leaders agreed to act at a national level from what officials called a “toolbox” of measures fitting their individual requirements.
“The time of everyone moving alone is over,” President Nicolas Sarkozy of France told a news conference in Paris.
Don’t get me wrong, this has to happen. But the number of things allowed to go wrong in the market because of a mish-mash of regulation and non-regulation (or willful ignorance) is dispiriting to anyone who thinks markets should work with no government involvement whatsoever.
In case you aren’t aware of how freaking awesome Serbian food and music is, now’s your chance. Here’s the location, which is pretty easy to get to by the #77 bus from Harvard Sq.
It’s pretty despicable when largenewsoutlets argue that minor hiccups at Apple might have something to do with the CEO’s health. Their argument is that Apple is misleading investors by not releasing Steve Jobs’ health record (Jobs is a survivor of pancreatic cancer) after Jobs looked “dramatically thinner” at recent appearances.
There’s a visceral disgust at covering a company this way. Then there’s this from the Wall Street Journal:
The dearth of information has led investors to do their own digging over the years. In 2004, one hedge fund hired private investigators to tail Mr. Jobs to hospital appointments in the hopes of figuring out how sick he was, said a portfolio manager at the fund. Eventually, he said, Mr. Jobs “seemed to catch on,” and became harder to track.
Why is it disgusting? . . .
Because the privacy of one’s own health status is sacrosanct. Just ask Americans who lived under Roosevelt.
And practically speaking, what difference does a non-disclosed health condition have on a company’s performance? If that’s what investors are focusing on, doesn’t it mean they haven’t properly valued the company’s succession plan for any hardship that might hit a company’s leadership? For an investor to demand that Jobs make his health record publicly available is admitting that that investor has no idea what the company is actually worth should something unexpected happen. Countering that stalking Jobs to his doctors appointments is therefore good business sense turns every CEO into a means to an end. That might make sense in the short term, but to convince every CEO that their own humanity is worthless is a bad long bet.
Man, it makes me wish actuaries invested my money.
And there’s how much, it turns out, I like martinis, despite growing up around and enjoying cheap beer—both amongst my parents’ friends and especially at college, when we’d drive two hours out-of-state to get a few cases of Yuengling, still the cheapest greatest beer in America.
But, in a larger context, what’s really caught me off-guard is the idiocy of leaders who weren’t caught off-guard by the current financial crisis. In 2005, when my father and I started looking for a home loan to buy the condo Lindsay and I live in now, we knew we could game one company and immediately refinance. It was pretty easy.
Those same people are the ones now wallowing in the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae crises, companies that owe or guarantee $5.2 trillion in mortgages.
A long-term virtue in both Lindsay’s and my family is the assumption that at some point things will go wrong. (In Catholicism this is called prudence.)
How is it that lenders could have been so imprudent? The reality is that individuals in these companies had little to lose, they didn’t enjoy the right the fail as they should have: as publicly traded companies, these people could enrich themselves, but even if the stock collapses, they have their salaries and the supposition that the government would step in at the first sign of systemic failure.
So, for example, as leaders they were encouraged to go after the boom in sub-prime mortgages. Nevermind that booms are followed by busts—but who cares when your salary is guaranteed? Moreover, who cares when your company is both publicly traded and implicitly (and now explicitly) backed up by taxpayers? As the Economist writes in this week’s lead, “the profits were privatised, but the risks were socialised.”
One could argue, as I would, that this is indicative of bad government. Good government overseers would have said, “You’re welcome to fit this niche in the mortgage market”—those marginal borrowers who may have been too risky for private companies—”so long as you keep long-term stability as your key goal.” Instead, leaders at Fannie and Freddie helped design a business model that took as its key assumption that house values would continue to rise (ignore the fact that southern California’s market is down more than 25%, and that takes it merely to 2004 levels). And why wouldn’t you take that as your key assumption if the potential reward enriched you but the potential failure wasn’t your problem?
The lesson for me is the libertarian one: governments cannot be trusted to do thorough oversight of an industry over which it doesn’t have 100% discretion, because industry will always find ways to relax that oversight, usually through successful lobbying.
The other libertarian lesson is that consumers must educate themselves. Diane McLeod is just one example of a consumer who didn’t think through her purchases and is now hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
I’m not someone free of debt myself. I have student loans from graduate school that my father pays, and he and I, along with Lindsay, pay the mortgage on my condo, roughly a third each. I don’t underestimate my good fortune.
Then again, I’ve always paid my credit card bill in full, every month, because I’m terrified of outstripping my means.
Anyway, beyond personal responsibility is corporate responsibility. . . .
My question for lenders is simply this, which honestly I don’t think they ever consider: What do you do when you succeed?
In other words, these adjustable rate mortgages and credit card rewards programs and derivatives—what in the world did you think would happen when they did what you’d hoped? The only way they have a return for you and your company is if people take on more debt than they can truly afford, and if millions of people are doing that, then hundreds of thousands, if not these same millions, are outstripping their means, are about to default. Meaning your company implodes dramatically or gets bailed out.
In the short term it must be great to rake in that dough. But when those schemes fail, as they inevitably must when they’re premised on lending to the financially weak, why is the public the one picking up the pieces?
While Freddie and Fannie need to be bailed out in this situation to avoid catastrophe, it’s another lesson in what should be an inalienable right to fail. In order for an economy to function at its best, companies that seek rewards should bear the brunt of its failures.
