With the World Watching, a Pot Boils

In a previous, very long blog entry I chronicled the events of the first 5 days following the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, a very large nuclear facility on the Pacific coast of rural Fukushima Prefecture, about 155 miles north by northeast of Tokyo.  The title metaphor metaphor exactly captures my thoughts as Japan braces for a worst-case outcome at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant: Partial meltdowns at multiple nuclear reactors, at least 2 of which have breached containment structures.  These developments occurred in the strangest manner possible–at a mostly well-designed (though significantly early-generation) and fully-staffed nuclear power plant that survived a magnitude-9.0 earthquake intact, where the reactors automatically powered down 2 weeks ago and the nuclear chain reaction has long-since ceased completely, where some of the best nuclear scientists in the World were readily-available and many of them were likely obsessing over this problem, where the whole World was watching and where the irony has already been acknowledged that Japan is the nation where the people have the deepest fears of nuclear catastrophe.

This is the setting for might still be the first textbook full-core nuclear meltdown in the World.  For want of water on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, as many as 3 nuclear reactor cores may be heating up into a pile of highly-radioactive slag, melting through their zirconium alloy casings at a temperature of about 2,200 degrees Celsius and plummeting in a molten heap at the base of the reactor’s inner containment structure–still heating further.  The worst-possible outcome would be this: If the uranium core at any of these 3 reactors melts through the hardened steel and concrete of that structure, it will burn its way into the Earth, bubbling down until it reaches the water table.  At that point the superheated water will blast back up through that hole in the Earth as if through the barrel of a rifle, scattering the entire disintegrated nuclear fuel mass into the atmosphere, to be borne where the wind will take it.  In theory the steel inner containment structure of these reactors should prevent the overheating fuel rods from melting through the slab of the reactor like that, but this is now a problem of applied engineering where all of the relevant information about the status of the containment structure and the reactor cores isn’t currently-known.

In any case this multiple meltdown happened in Japan, over the course of several days, with the World watching and with first 800, then a very-dedicated plant crew of 50 risking their lives to prevent it.  Nuclear catastrophe was an explicit fear in the Japanese popular consciousness long before it became a source of fearful speculation among many Americans.  Japanese filmmakers gave us Godzilla as a means of embodying and narrating the destruction caused by nuclear weapons without explicitly ascribing blame to the country that wielded first an atomic (Hiroshima) and then a nuclear (Nagasaki) bomb against them.  2 of the 8 dreams recounted in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams were intense nightmares about nuclear apocalypse.  The latter of these is of an unspecified origin, but the former, “Mount Fuji in Red,” is explicitly a nightmare of nuclear meltdown.  (It ends badly-with the great director hopelessly swatting at a large oncoming cloud of vaporized plutonium.)  Japan long-ago declared itself a nuclear weapons-free zone, and only uses nuclear power because its natural resource endowments are so small that it had to depend upon technical mastery and efficiency to drive its manufacturing powerhouse.

The relationship between nuclear power plant operators and regulators in Japan has come in for pointed criticism in the past for being too cozy, and both TEPCO and the Japanese government have been criticized at different points for not taking every precaution in estimating the danger posed to surrounding communities during this unfolding nuclear crisis.  Still, no one has denied that both the power utility and the government take the problem at Fukushima I completely seriously and are working around the clock to get that plant under control.  And while assisting officials of our Nuclear Regulatory Commission have voiced disagreements about the amount of attention the Japanese have given to cooling the plutonium-hybrid Reactor No. 3 while overheating spent fuel rods at Reactor No. 4 remain exposed to the air, there is no denying that plant workers have been working around the clock in sometimes-dangerous conditions.  So, how could the condition of 3 nuclear reactors get so completely out-of-hand?

The answer lies in a long succession of choices that may appear stupid in retrospect but which probably could not have been anticipated.  It’s ironic that the magnitude-9.0 earthquake that struck some distance off the eastern Honshu apparently caused no direct damage to Fukushima I, because the trouble started when 3 operational reactors there all successfully powered-down automatically in response to the strength of the quake.  3 specific events seem to have been the cause of the 2nd-worst incident in the history of nuclear power:

1.) Fukushima I’s automatic power-down at Reactors 1-3 removed primary power from their coolant systems.

2.) The earthquake destroyed some of the transmission towers that can bring electricity to the plant after a power-down, thus cutting off the coolant system’s primary backup.

3.) The tsunami destroyed the gas generators that provided secondary backup power to the coolant system.

With these 3 developments occurring over an hour or so 2 weeks ago, everything that has happened at Fukushima I has followed as a matter of course.  The odds of a dangerous malfunction at a nuclear power plant are very low, but to the Liberal Ironist–until about 2 Saturdays ago an unabashed defender of the potential of nuclear power–that sounds like another way of saying we are playing a game-of-chance.  We will have to play this game of chance not only with enriched uranium and plutonium nuclear fuel rods in use at nuclear power plants, but with spent nuclear fuel rods for the same reason.  We nearly lost this game of chance at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant back in 1979, and the Soviets lost this game most-famously at Chernobyl in 1986.  There have actually been several reported low-level civilian nuclear accidents every decade since the 1950s; for perspective, note that Soviet authorities initially tried to keep Chernobyl a secret.  Since we are already committed to play this game-of-chance with all the spent nuclear fuel we have yet to sequester somewhere for tens of thousands of years, we should ask ourselves now: How many times and in how many places do we want to play such an easy-odds but high-stakes game-of-chance, every day?

Or maybe we should be asking the Japanese, the people who take nuclear catastrophe as seriously as any and who now face a triple meltdown 155 miles away from the largest metropolitan area on Earth.  This is what those “long odds of a disaster” look like–this.  If this pessimism about nuclear power sounds too alarmist, the Liberal Ironist will explain himself in upcoming post.  Spoiler: You can have a safe nuclear power plant, but this requires a high level of state centralization for their construction and proper maintenance–and the expense will be so high that the paper efficiency of nuclear power will turn out to be an unreality.  Bite those 2 bullets (and thereby completely repudiate electricity deregulation for nuclear power), and the Nuclear Renaissance might still happen.

The President’s Efforts to Dodge Criticism on Libyan Intervention Have Earned Him Criticism

By Wednesday, February 23rd, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini had already admitted he considered reports that over 1,000 had been killed in 1 week of protests in Libya credible.  3 days before, a military mutiny delivered Benghazi to the protesters, breaking Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s grip on that city–permanently, it now appears.  The revolt in Libyas’s 2nd-largest city, a traumatized and relatively-impoverished place the size of San Francisco, simultaneously raised the prospect of a mounting humanitarian crisis and offered a gift: Here was a movement–diverse and politically-fractious though it was–committed to the overthrow of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.  In a previous blog entry I sought to explain the connection between Colonel Gaddafi’s basic character and his actions.  I have been in favor of a no-fly zone to neutralize Loyalist air power since the Benghazi mutiny.  Now this operation seems to have come only in response to a dramatic reversal of Rebel fortunes.

It has been difficult for pilots working for Gaddafi to defect to the Rebels; 2 fighter pilots defected and landed in Malta in the first week of the uprising in late-February; 2 pilots later ejected from their planes rather than bomb Benghazi, allowing the planes to crash in the desert.  Many pilots carried out glaringly-obtuse bombing operations against Rebel fighters as they advanced first south, then west from Benghazi.  The weird inability of Gaddafi’s pilots to hit Rebel formations on the highway in the desert led to 3 different explanations:

1.) Gaddafi wanted to scare rather than kill the Rebels (which is implausible considering Gaddafi Loyalists have killed as many as 1,500 Rebels by now).

2.) Many of Gaddafi’s pilots are simply incompetent (which is plausible, although they did manage to destroy several captured arsenals around Benghazi).

3.) The wide bombings were the pilots’ way of aiding the rebels by stalling the counterattack.

The rebels advanced as far Bin Jawad by March 5th with the intention of moving on Sirte; this town on Libya’s north-central coast is Gaddafi’s hometown and the headquarters of Libya’s special forces.  Because of their momentum up to that time, the Rebels seem not to have considered that Gaddafi was employing a defense-in-depth strategy, writing-off certain regions of the country at least temporarily because they were remote to the bulk of his military and mercenary forces and populated by hostile tribes traditionally repressed rather than integrated into his government’s patronage scheme.  When the Rebels attempted an advance on Sirte, they fell back precipitously to their provisional headquarters in Benghazi, suffering relatively high casualties all the way.

At this point President Obama changed tack, shifting from calling Gaddafi’s repression of the Rebels “unacceptable” to acting as if he actually believed it was.  The situation, unfortunately, was now urgent; Colonel Gaddafi’s son and heir-apparent, Saif al-Islam, claimed that “This will all be over in 48 hours,” adding on another occasion “I have just 2 words for our brothers in the east: We’re coming.”  This was a typical case of bluster by the regime, but it also reflected the Rebels’ rapidly-collapsing front.  On March 16th some Rebel forces and citizens actually fled Benghazi in anticipation of a heavy Loyalist assault; most remained, recognizing that this city was both central to the rebellion and (considering its large population) its strongest point.  The next day, Thursday, March 17th–1 week ago–the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973 authorizing both the institution of a no-fly zone over Libya and the use of “all necessary means” to prevent mass killing of civilians by the Gaddafi regime.  Gaddafi’s response on our Friday morning (his Friday afternoon) was to declare an immediate ceasefire–one which was not actually enforced.  On Saturday, French Mirage fighter jets took on their first target in Libya–an armored column approaching Benghazi.  These were destroyed in a fairly-liberal but probably prudent interpretation of the Security Council mandate to protect Libyan civilians.

Since that time the pressure has clearly been taken off of Benghazi, though about 30 civilians were reportedly killed in an assault on the west of the city.  Loyalist forces fell back in the west and are now trying to hold Ajdabiya.  The situation in western Libya has become serious, however, as several northwestern towns long-held by Rebel forces have been contested by Loyalists in the past few days.  Today Zintan, around 70 miles southwest of Tripoli, is under siege, and at Misurata, a medium-sized city around 120 miles east of Tripoli down the Libyan coast, the situation has become dire.  Today CNN reported that a doctor there claims 109 people have been killed and around 1,300 wounded in a callous siege there.  Misurata has been in Rebel hands, and isolated and repeatedly besieged, for a month now.

Conservative New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat reasoned that President Obama has insisted on a broadly-supported and -enforced mandate in Libya out of Liberal ideological sentiments; the Liberal Ironist thinks the President has been trying to dodge political criticism for the intervention in a post-Iraq, recently pro-opposition political climate.  This was foolish; such a tack wasn’t suggested by close but favorable support for the intervention.  The startling lack of a statement by the President on this intervention has invited critical questions.

The recent announcement of a plan to transfer control of the humanitarian operation in Libya to NATO is encouraging as an intermediate step of commitment to that operation; it may also be a political response to the President’s lack of engagement with its purposes.  President Obama’s low profile on this operation hasn’t deflected criticism; it has encouraged it.  Republican House Speaker John Boehner has demanded clarification from the President on the scope of our operations there; President Obama should have expected that his insistence of a US back-seat on this intervention going forward would have stimulated a lack of confidence in the operation rather than forestall it.  Speaker Boehner, of course, raised these objections about the lack of scope of commitment for partisan reasons; he didn’t express any such misgivings when President George W. Bush undertook a full-scale invasion and reconstruction of Iraq.  Still, the President should have wanted to address these questions on the eve of enforcement of the no-fly zone.  We should have had a statement from the Oval Office a week ago.  This is not just about cosmetics, it is an opportunity for the President to affirm that we are protecting key values of our foreign policy in preventing a massacre in Libya.  The Liberal Ironist approves of our involvement in a no-fly zone and operations against Loyalist forces on the ground to protect densely-populated Rebel enclaves in northern Libya; both in principle and as a matter of tactics the President should not look like he has committed our forces to this operation guiltily or furtively.

Egypt’s Referendum: The Revolution Goes Conservative

The 41% turnout for the referendum to amend the Egyptian constitution is the highest Egypt has had in an election in decades.  The New York Times quoted Mohamed Ahmed Attia, chairman of the Supreme Judicial Committee: “We had an unprecedented turnout because after Jan. 25 people started to feel that their vote would matter.”  While just a little bit higher than the turnout we Americans can expect in a midterm Congressional election, this is nonetheless a sign of an Egyptian voting public quickening to life: Establish a clear set of issues and terms, and turnout will reflect a sense of whether, when and how people want to vote.

So, what does the outcome tell us about Egypt’s political future?  Because the voters have endorsed this constitutional committee’s package of amendments by a margin of 77.2%-22.8%, the political system can simply adopt these changes and elections will proceed as previously-scheduled in September.  The changes include shortening a presidential term for 6 years to 4, term-limiting any president to 2 terms, requiring any president to appoint a vice president, making it harder for a president to declare a state of emergency, requiring a president to be at least 40 years old, and requiring the president’s wife to be an Egyptian citizen.  The Liberal Ironist thinks that this is good because it consolidates a set of constitutional changes that will reduce executive power and because it establishes a high level of confidence about when elections will happen.  But this outcome is also a legitimate cause for concern because the referendum was a plausible show of support for the parties campaigning for or against these constitutional changes.  As the Times article on the referendum outcome notes, the only 2 political parties that endorsed a “Yes” vote on the proposed constitutional amendments were former President-for-life Hosni Mubarak‘s National Democratic Party and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Does the 77.2% turnout in favor of these amendments exaggerate support for the 2 most-conservative parties in the race?  Yes–but likely not by much.  The young activists who formed the core of the democratic movement in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria mostly opposed the referendum–and visibly so.  What we’re seeing here is that democracy in Egypt will probably benefit much more-conservative forces than the street protesters themselves.

Last night I saw a debate on al-Jazeera English between a young woman activist who voted “No” on the referendum, a young male pro-democracy blogger who voted “Yes” on the referendum, and an older man who helped form one of the upstart secular liberal parties and who also voted “No” on the referendum.  These 3 persons seemed to have very similar politics–but they disagreed in their beliefs about what was to come next for Egypt.

The young woman–and I do take it as an ill omen that the men interrupted her significantly more-often than they were interrupted in turn–was understandably skeptical of what chance new political ideas had in Egypt when their expositors had no chance to organize, but she was naive about what a longer-lasting transitional government should look like, saying only that “the people” should rule, whatever that should look like in a country where the people have had no say in their own government since Gamal Abdel Nasser took power and built a political culture around pan-Arabism and resistance.

The young blogger made a reasonable argument–one I sympathize with–that consolidating the gains of the revolution quickly and re-normalizing civilian rule was more-important than establishing a constitutional convention without clear participatory or discursive parameters, and that the lack of experience of the Egyptian people with free and fair elections and the relative inexperience of the new political parties was a less-pressing matter than having sure terms on which those elections could be conducted.  To be frank, he defended this position far less-cogently than I just did, however, and it wasn’t clear that the concerns of the other 2 speakers about the long reach of Egypt’s political old guard and the Muslim Brotherhood loomed as large to him.

Finally, the older liberal party man seemed to grasp fully the extent to which Nasser and Mubarak had broken Egypt’s civil society and most political institutions and that a longer period of military government would be the inevitable result of the loss of the referendum and a call for a constitutional convention.  However, this man in turn couldn’t bring the skeptical idealist woman activist or the complacent pragmatist male blogger around to his darker vision of serious constitutional contention in the context of what could be a full year of military rule.

The Times report on the referendum noted a significant divided between anti-amendment Cairo and Alexandria and the pro-amendment towns and rural areas.  There is reason to believe that Egypt’s rural masses are comfortable with the Muslim Brotherhood and/or Mubarak’s old National Democratic Party.  While the power of the presidency is likely substantially-lessened with the passage of the referendum, the fact remains that the next president will likely wield reduced powers in the face of a parliament that will be less-corrupt but also significantly more-represented by the Muslim Brotherhood.  The current favorites for the next president are former IAEA Director-General Mohammed el-Baradei and the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa.  (The Muslim Brotherhood–and so far as I can tell, the National Democratic Party–aren’t fielding candidates in the upcoming presidential election.)  So, Egypt’s next president will probably be much more-liberal, but he will certainly be weaker for a number of reasons.

A friend responded to a recent post about the factions invested in Egypt’s political transition with an interesting blog entry by Ellis Goldberg.  I feel her words of equity from before the referendum more-succinctly express justified optimism than my words of equity from after the referendum:

“…(P)people will also be voting out of their hopes and their fears.  Oddly enough a similar mix of hope and fear seem to be driving people on both sides of the debate.  Fear that the forces arrayed against democracy will use a period that is either too long or too short to consolidate themselves and hope that the process of building an Egyptian democracy can go forward.  The most hopeful single aspect of what is going on at the moment is that partisans of both “yes” and “no” seem to recognize the legitimacy of the other side’s arguments.”

Egypt’s constitutional referendum was a compelling show of electoral force by the provincial masses of Egypt who exhibited far more deference to the traditional political brands than to calls by activists for extensive institutional redesign.  Does the Liberal Ironist think that democracy will still be good for Egypt if it is conservative?

Yes, absolutely–just so long as it functions.

Egypt’s Referendum on Proposed Constitutional Amendments: Details and Implications

Yesterday the Egyptian people voted on the constitutional amendment proposals by a constitutional reform panel.  The constitutional reform panel was appointed by the provisional military government of the Egyptian Supreme Armed Forces Council.  Objections were raised to the membership of the panel; the Supreme Armed Forces Council didn’t appoint a single woman to participate in these crucial debates on their country’s future.

Nonetheless, the panel debated, and while women’s issues have not received closer consideration in this amending stage, several proposed constitutional amendments mentioned in the above-cited BBC article sound like sensible reforms:

Presidential terms would be shortened from 6 to 4 years, and the president would be term-limited to no more than 2 terms;

The president would be required by law to appoint a vice president–something Mubarak didn’t do for about 30 years until in the midst of the recent protests he tried to salvage his presidency;

The president must be at least 40 years old, and his wife must be an Egyptian citizen.

…

But while these measures sound like commonsense reforms, it warrants mention that only the 2 best-established parties in Egypt–deposed President-for-life Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party and the Muslim Brotherhood–have explicitly-endorsed the series of proposed amendments in the recent referendum.  Absent from these measures, for example, are stronger controls on presidential power–and if the referendum passes and the constitution is amended now, this means elections will be held in September–and the pre-existing and well-organized National Democratic Party and Muslim Brotherhood will have a big organizational advantage.

Will Egypt end up with a 2-party political system and retain a unitary executive?  Such democratic systems aren’t necessarily disastrous, as our own in the United States attests.  If the referendum is voted down, it would be one of the most-powerful demonstrations yet of the resilience and independence of the Egyptian protest movement.  The Muslim Brotherhood strongly endorses quick constitutional changes and elections, and was strangely given responsibility for operating some polling stations rather than the transitional military government; the conservative military, for its part, has focused on more-obvious institutional and personnel changes and legal reforms, and then wants to have done with it.  But if the amendment package fails at the referendum, a constitutional convention will be called, allowing radical redrawing of the Egyptian constitution but unavoidably pushing elections back beyond September.

In that case both the opportunities and the inherent uncertainties surrounding Egypt’s future would be enhanced.  There will be a more in-depth update on Egypt’s constitutional amendment referendum soon.

Egypt’s Revolution: Outlook and Factional Pitfalls

Though the end is not yet, many of the threats to Egyptian democratization appear to have been slowly defeated or coopted.  I can think of 4 visible factions thought to pose a potential threat to a democratic transition in Egypt: Mubarak’s political class, the state security police, the Muslim Brotherhood and the military which leads the transitional government.  These 4 factions have gradually but measurably receded as a threat to a transition.

The Old Guard

First, there is the old guard.  Several members of Mubarak’s party have resigned; some, such as Interior Minister Habib el-Adly, have actually been arrested by the transitional government and brought under investigation–in his case, for official corruption, not the torture he is widely-suspected of.  But Adly isn’t the only official of the Mubarak regime or his National Democratic Party to be arrested.  While the house-cleaning of the ruling party in Egypt may not be as thorough as that in Tunisia, some powerful and feared men in Egypt face jail time; the former interior minister is currently residing in an Egyptian prison.

Members of the old guard haven’t simply been arrested.  President-for-life Hosni Mubarak of course resigned on March 11th; his Vice President-for-2-weeks General Omar Suleiman resigned along with him.  General Suleiman had been extensively discussed as a legitimate transition leader, but he had disqualified himself by acting as little more than a shill for Mubarak at a time when his actions were indefensible and even somewhat defiant of common sense.  More surprising was the insistence of demonstrators that the much more reasonable-sounding Ahmed Shafiq also resign as Prime Minister, seemingly because Mubarak chose him for that position.  Shafiq resigned on March 2nd, in the face of ongoing massive protests; the Egyptian Supreme Armed Forces Council announced this transition on its Facebook page.  What’s interesting to the Liberal Ironist about the intransigence of both Tunisian and Egyptian pro-democracy protesters is their unflagging insistence that principal figures of the old regime must step down; this appears to be motivated by an experience that dictates that corrupt regimes thrives on the presence of their personal contacts.  In fact, “subordination of the law to personal contacts” is the very definition of a corrupt regime.

The State Security Police

The hated and feared Egyptian state security police are broken.  Formal death for the organization came as new Interior Minister Mansur al-Issawi’s decision to disband them on March 15th.  But the organization suffered a blow from which it might never have recovered 2 weeks ago, when protesters rushed into state security headquarters in Cairo to stop police from shredding many volumes of documents detailing their extensive investigations into Egyptians and others.  The Egyptian Supreme Armed Forces Council requested the activists turn these documents over so they could be admitted as evidence in ongoing transitional justice investigations; they first copied many of them and submitted them to media, or posted them on social networking sites.

The Muslim Brotherhood

First, a word about the concern over the Muslim Brotherhood’s newfound freedom to run candidates in Egyptian elections openly.  The issue isn’t necessarily the Muslim Brotherhood’s animus (which might still be a reasonable cause for concern) but whether they can sweep the initiative from a movement that they clearly don’t lead.   The 1979 Revolution in Iran was the work of numerous parties, and French political theorist Michel Foucault discovered to his astonishment that the domestic political class apparently never believed Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had a major constituency.  The result of this complacency was the swift transformation of an anti-Shah revolution into an Islamist revolution.

But such a comparison between Iran in 1979 and Egypt in 2011 is based on a crude analogy–“So 2 impoverished Middle Eastern Muslim nations experienced a revolution against an autocratic ally of the United States; what’s the difference?”–that ignores the centrality, legitimacy and political independence of the Egyptian military and under the circumstances, belittles the protesters.  Any comparison to Iran in 1979 overlooks the absence of any Islamist remotely approaching an Ayatollah Khomeini’s stature in Egypt, far lower levels of animosity towards the United States, and an Egyptian civil society that so far has shown almost no affinity for theocracy.

The Liberal Ironist agrees that the Muslim Brotherhood is an x factor, and both the extent of poverty in Egyptian society and the lack of serious political experience outside of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the Egyptian Supreme Armed Forces Council, and the Muslim Brotherhood are troubling.

The Egyptian Supreme Armed Forces Council

Finally, a word on the Egyptian Supreme Armed Forces Council itself.  The military could be seen as either the most-obvious or the most-subtle threat to prospects for democracy in Egypt.  It is the most-obvious threat as, following Mubarak’s abdication on February 11th, control of the government fell to the military.  The military reserves sovereignty for the transition period, and appointed the panel responsible for proposing recommendations on constitutional amendments.  The more-subtle threat the military poses to Egypt’s democratic transition could in turn be thought of as either independent of or related to the obvious one–that is, it’s the oft-stated fact that the military is the most-respected national institution in Egypt.  I can think of 3 facts, however, that may constrain the Egyptian Supreme Armed Forces Council to responsibly manage a democratic transition:

1. The Egyptian military, as I’m sure you know, is the beneficiary of $1.3 billion in US military aid;
2. The Egyptian military, I’ve heard, is a 15% stakeholder in the domestic economy (though I haven’t confirmed the exact extent of their formal holdings) and business has a lot to lose from both further upheaval and repression;
3. The fact that protests continued in Egypt over labor rights and women’s rights even after Hosni Mubarak’s departure likely reduce the attraction to the Supreme Armed Forces Council of attempting control of the Egyptian political system directly or indirectly.  This is not to deny that the Egyptian military will remain a major and independent political interest in this country, particularly considering its substantial business interests and foreign ties, and its role as a major employer.

The political old guard, the state security police, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Egyptian Supreme Armed Forces Council: The democratic movement in Egypt succeeded in moving the first 2 and last of these factions apart from each other as they all sought cover.  This allowed the military to promote itself as being beyond politics, while consenting to or leading the charge against Mubarak’s cronies or the hated security police.  The Muslim Brotherhood likely has a major constituency but there is no evidence that it possesses either the political momentum or the singularity of purpose that would incline it or allow it to sweep up Egypt’s democratic transition.

The disharmony among Egypt’s past or prospective political elites is most promising.

At 12:45 pm, EST, a French Fighter Jet Fired the First Shot Against Gaddafi’s Ground Forces in Enforcement of UN Security Council Resolution 1973

Following Gaddafi’s last pathetic attempt to buy himself time with his announcement yesterday afternoon of a ceasefire that he did not honor, incredulous NATO participants nonetheless proceeded with preparations to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya in order to prevent an anticipated mass killing in Rebel home cities.  Today French President Nicholas Sarkozy announced that French planes were already in Libyan airspace, their pilots acclimating themselves to the tactical situation in that country.  Just over 15 minutes ago, this advance force initiated operations against Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi.  This first air strike occurred outside of Benghazi, in defense of the headquarters of the Rebels’ provisional government.  An al-Jazeera reporter characterized a French fighter jet’s night attack on Libyan Loyalist ground forces as being about as pitched as “a prize fighter taking on an average boxer while the latter was blindfolded.”  Less than half an hour later, it is confirmed that the fighter has destroyed the first target engaged under Resolution 1973.

The Security Council Votes, and the “Great Leader of the Libyan Revolution” Loses His Airspace

I’ve never been so happy to hear that the French were coming.

Just one week ago, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam (“Sword of Islam”) Gaddafi boldly threw down to foreign powers that, if they were to intervene in Libya, they would meet their match:

“The French, the Europeans, they should talk to the Libyan people…If they want to support the militia, do it. But I tell you: you are going to lose. We will win,” Saif al-Islam said. “And we are not afraid of the American fleet, NATO, France, Europe. This is our country. We are here. We will die here.”

Well, it seems that this sort of machismo (I know that technically isn’t the right word, but it gets the point across) had little effect, because shortly before 7:00 pm yesterday evening the United Nations Security Council voted to impose a no-fly zone on Libya.  In fact, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 goes farther than that, including in its mandate recourse to “all necessary measures” in order to protect Libyan civilians from the violence of the civil war erupting around them.  This represents a substantial and surprising vindication of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine of just foreign intervention.  More to the point, it is a broad-enough mandate that it might have been designed to permit broader participation in the war to advantage the Rebels over the Loyalists.  The vote was 10-0, with abstentions:

Voting in favor: France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Gabon, Lebanon, Portugal, Nigeria, and South Africa.

Abstaining: China, the Russian Federation, Brazil, Germany, India

Shortly after its abstention, the German government announced that it would assist military operations to enforce the no-fly zone.

To those worried that the resolution passed too late for a no-fly zone to protect the rebels, a spokesman for the French government gave assurances that the air strikes against Libyan air defenses necessary to establish a no-fly zone could be carried-out within a few hours–indeed, by the time of this writing.  The BBC and others report that the United States will provide assistance from the rear–at least initially, and that the United Kingdom, and France are prepared to deploy quickly; Norway has committed F16s and transport aircraft.  The CBC notes that Canada is planning to deploy 6 CF-18 fighter jets to participate in enforcement of the no-fly zone–and that Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are possible participant enforcers of the no-fly zone as well.

Col. Gaddafi (or Qaddafi, or Gadafi, or Ghadafi, or Gadhafi, or Ghaddafie as may be your preference) promised on Wednesday that the civil war in Libya would be ended over the following 48 hours.  “It’s already been decided,” he said.  It’s past noon on Friday in Libya, however, and so far the Rebels still securely control their headquarters in Benghazi.  Gaddafi has been “fudging” the extent of his advance eastward, pounding rebel positions with air strikes then running tanks into an out of coastal towns in an effort to push them back towards Benghazi.  The only way he has made this rapid progress, apparently, has been by declining to consolidate his gains along the road.  Gaddafi claimed to have taken Ajdabiya, a large town south of Benghazi on the Cyrenaica coast, but rebels flatly deny this.  While Gaddafi has regained some ground, these recent and precipitous gains appear to be cosmetic.

But it’s too early to declare victory for democracy in Libya, and the jubilation in Benghazi last night on the announcement of the Security Council’s resolution is understandable but presumes their rapid implementation.  The available data, while preliminary estimates, indicate that the Rebels have lost a lot of manpower.  This Friday morning, a now-desperate Gaddafi launched another attack on the city of Misurata, east of Tripoli.  For whatever (political) reasons President Obama and the several NATO and Arab League members who intend to enforce Security Council Resolution 1973 waited this long, they aren’t good-enough.  But while the Liberal Ironist has no illusions that “it’s never too late” to protect a democratic movement, as a more-forgiving Benghazi resident said during an al-Jazeera interview before the Security Council vote yesterday, the fact remains that it’s better late than never.

Meltdown at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant

This is the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, a 6-reactor commercial nuclear electricity-generating facility owned and operated by TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company). Though it cannot be seen at this angle, the Pacific Ocean is just down the bluff immediately to the right. The nuclear reactors are housed in the large, free-standing box-shaped outer containment structures. From front-left to rear-right: Reactor No. 4; Reactor No. 3; Reactor No. 2; Reactor No. 1; Reactor No. 5; Reactor No. 6.

Actually, we have probably seen a quadruple partial meltdown at Fukushima I (or “Fukushima Daichi,” or “Fukushima Dai Ichi,” or just “Daichi” to those who don’t know that it’s their way of designating “I”) Nuclear Power Plant in coastal Fukushima Prefecture, Japan.  It isn’t clear whether a full-core meltdown has occurred at any of these reactors–though Reactor No. 3, a mixed uranium and plutonium design that was recently breached, is the best contender for this status.

This will be the longest blog post I’ve written–not a habit I intend to continue, but I wanted to fix a sequence of events in my mind (and for the convenience of readers to whom these events might be unclear) as I write more about this incident in coming days.

The automatic power-down during Friday’s catastrophic magnitude-9.0 earthquake also shut off the coolant feed for the plant.  Coolant–in this as in most cases water–is most-crucial by far for the physical regulation of a nuclear power plant.  The water that cools a water-boiling reactor such as those at Fukushima I vents out from the top of it as steam, quickly running down a pipe and spinning a turbine before cooling in the large tanks with which nuclear power plants are most-often associated in our country.  Nuclear power plants are attractive in the sense that this process is incredibly efficient–it involves the release of energy from a pure metallic substance at the atomic level–and it is carbon-neutral.  In fact, breeder reactors, which start with uranium and actually produce plutonium as a by-product, are the most-efficient power source yet conceived by humankind.  But the Liberal Ironist doesn’t think any of that is going to matter now, because the coolant that moderates a nuclear power plant cannot be removed from fuel rods or they will start to melt-down.  This is true even if there is no chain reaction going on within them, or if they are spent.

If nuclear reactors power their own water coolant feed and a significant seismic reading (and the March 11th Sendai Earthquake, as it is now known, was definitely significant as it knocked northern Japan 8 feet to the east) triggers an automatic shut-off of the nuclear chain reaction, what is the big deal?  Hasn’t the plant automatically canceled the problem?  Well, no, because even when the insertion of the control rods prevents a chain reaction, the uranium or plutonium fuel rods in the reactor still emit an ambient level of radiation–at each other.  At Fukushima I’s Reactor No. 1, for example, this natural radioactivity is about a mere 3% of the reactors normal top operating capacity–but the unaided process of radioactive decay is enough to slowly heat the uranium or plutonium in a nuclear reactor until it begins to melt–they are metals, after all.  While a water-cooled reactor running at full capacity can maintain a temperature of about 250 degrees Celsius, a fully-moderated reactor without coolant can heat up through naturally-determined radioactive decay to around 3,000 degrees Celsius–the point at which the uranium or plutonium fuel will melt away its zirconium alloy casing and pile on the floor of the reactor container as molten slag.  When this process visibly begins it’s called a partial meltdown; when this transition to a liquefied state is more-or-less completed and this slag begins to eat away at the floor of the reactor, it is called a full-core meltdown.

Yes, the water that flows through a reactor is that important: Some reactors slowly begin to melt-down as soon as it is removed–regardless of whether the nuclear chain reaction continues.  When the reactors powered-down, they also stopped powering their own coolant loops.  The coolant systems for these reactors could have drawn power from the rest of Japan’s grid; but the primary transmission lines from which Fukushima I provides power for the Tokyo area apparently have been damaged, and electricity was unavailable from these.  So the coolant systems for the plant’s reactors had to depend on the gas-powered backup generators.  These switched on and powered the coolant feed without much trouble…until they were destroyed when the massive tsunami washed over Fukushima I’s protective sea wall about an hour later.

This westward view from the Pacific Ocean shows the plant's seaside situation. The backup generators that powered the plant's coolant circulation system were located between the main structures of the plant and the sea wall visible a short distance into the water. While the well-built nuclear plant survived the force of a magnitude-9.0 earthquake quite intact, the tsunami jumped the sea wall and destroyed those generators. Plant workers have desperately worked to keep Reactors 1-3 and spent fuel rods stored in the upper levels of Reactor 4 cool over the past 5 days. As of this writing, they're clearly losing that battle. Reactors 4 through 1 are housed from left to right in the large cubic structures in this picture. Photo courtesy of Agence France Presse and JIJI Press.

Plant workers had one last recourse for keeping their deactivated but excited reactors cool: Battery-powered backup generators.  These worked perfectly–for about 8 hours, at which time the batteries died.  (Batteries do that.)  By the wee hours of Saturday morning, Fukushima’s reactors were starting to boil-off their remaining water and get hot.  This situation led to the active transport of any freshwater available into the coolant intake pipes at recently-active Reactors 1, 2 and 3.

On Saturday afternoon, Japan’s time, a now-famous spectacle occurred at Reactor No. 1:

Fukushima I's Reactor No. 1 sustained an explosion in the upper levels of its outer containment structure. All day emergency cooling had fed water into a reactor that had slowly been heating up. The reactor had become hotter than plant workers realized, as flooding it with water didn't just evaporate the water now; it actually broke the water down into its base components, which they reacted with metlging zirconium alloy in the fuel rods. This case drifted up into the outer containment area of the reactor, where the volatile chemicals ignited a large explosion.

This explosion, of course, got a lot of media coverage (and makes for spectacular video), but mainstream media generally didn’t jump to any conclusions about what they were looking at, and many nuclear engineers brought on to comment said the same thing: “I know this is going to be hard to believe, but that probably isn’t a big deal in the scheme of things.”  Though it took a few hours to determine this, the explosion on Saturday afternoon was caused by hydrogen buildup in the cube-shaped outer containment structure surrounding Reactor No. 1.  The fact that the explosion didn’t involve inner containment or the nuclear fuel in any way was the good news; the bad news was the reason it had happened: Plant workers (numbering about 800 at this point in the crisis, or about 11 times its personnel on a “slow day”) had to let lightly-irradiated steam from the reactor core gather in outer containment before venting it out into the atmosphere, as it couldn’t be directed into the non-functioning coolant system.  The fuel in the core had grown so hot that water being piped in wasn’t just evaporating but actually being broken down into its base components of oxygen and hydrogen.  Oxygen is very reactive in large quantities, and hydrogen is extremely reactive–especially with the oxygen from which it was just separated.   As this built up in the upper levels of Reactor No. 1, it exploded, blowing those levels up.  The upper part of Fukushima I’s outer containment structure were designed to blow outwards rather than downwards in the event of an internal explosion, directing explosive force away from the inner containment structure.

As fresh water for manual supply became scarce, parent utility TEPCO decided to start pumping seawater and a boron compound into Reactor No. 1.  Seawater ruins a reactor, corroding a number of metal components inside it–but Fukushima I is next to the Pacific Ocean, the largest liquid water supply we’ve found.  Boron helps absorb radiation in the reactor–but its introduction to the core would ruin the chemistry that sustains the nuclear chain reaction.  Having been completed in 1969, this reactor was well towards the end of its useful lifespan and was scheduled to be decommissioned in a few weeks; this seemed like a small price to pay to get the situation there under control.  Pumping enough seawater into Reactor No. 1 would be a challenge, but it was definitely doable.

Then Reactor No. 3 began to heat-up to unacceptable levels.  This became clear on their Sunday afternoon–our wee hours of Sunday.  Suddenly plant workers had to double their efforts to keep water flowing into these 2 reactors, eventually giving up on Reactor No. 3 and using seawater there as well.  A second, more-dramatic and fiery hydrogen explosion at Reactor No. 3 Monday morning (our Sunday night) confirmed that the seawater was pumping into the reactor reliably, but that it was very hot.  While the event injured some workers and indicated how urgent it was to continue cooling the reactor, as with Reactor No. 1 the explosion itself posed a problem.  In a few hours, it would become quite clear that it did.

These 4 images show the larger, more-fiery hydrogen explosion at Fukushima I's Reactor No. 3 Monday morning. In terms of the impact on plant operations it was thought to be as innocuous as the hydrogen explosion at Reactor No. 1; it was not. Photo courtesy of the Associated Press/NTV.

Things really started to get out of hand at Fukushima I on Japan’s Tuesday morning: A third explosion was heard at Reactor 2, this one more-muffled than those that destroyed the outer containment structure at Reactors 1 and 3.  The outer structure remained intact, but the pressure gauge for the reactor core plummeted, and the radiation level within the reactor increased seriously.  It appeared that the inner containment structure had been cracked and the core, now partly-melted down, was exposed to the interior of the structure.

Earlier it had been discovered that the hydrogen explosion at Reactor No. 3 on Monday morning had wrecked four of Reactor No. 2’s five coolant intake pipes.  This was discovered after both temperature and pressure were found to have risen sharply.  Plant workers soon realized that Reactor No. 2, which had sent water lost through the broken pipes, had been high and dry for about 2 hours and 40 minutes.  This created a frantic race to pump seawater, the mark of long-term abandonment of Reactors 1 and 3, into Reactor 2 through the one surviving containment pipe.  This didn’t result in any drop in temperature or pressure to the reactor core, making one plant worker desperate.  He opened a steam release valve at the top of the reactor and increased the flow of water into the reactor.  This cause the exposion–a steam explosion inside the reactor.  The steam relief valve at the top of the reactor had jammed; water levels hadn’t risen inside the reactor and pressure was increasing because steam couldn’t be vented-off.

This was the first time a reactor encasement had cracked, exposing those inside a reactor structure to sustained significant radiation.  While such concerns had already been raised about Reactors 1 and 3, Reactor No. 2 now seemed very likely to have experienced partial meltdown.  With the damage to inner containment it wasn’t clear that it could be cooled, and radioactive steam could now spread from the reactor core to the rest of the facility.  It was at this point that TEPCO told 750 of the plant’s 800 on-hand workers to just go home.  From here on, a skeleton crew (under the circumstances) of 50 workers would try to keep the reactors cool.

Shortly after the reactor breach at Reactor No. led to an increase in radiation levels, the outer containment structure of Reactor No. 4–which doesn’t even have any fuel rods in its core right now–burst into flames.  At this point there were more hazards than there were anticipated causes.  In a situation that had either received inadequate attention or simply couldn’t be addressed because of a desperately-stretched manpower and water supply, the spent uranium fuel rods deposited in a “pool” (a standard means of on-site storage for spent fuel rods) had boiled off the top of their coolant water supply and begun to melt at their exposed tip, causing the fire.

This is a fact which actually makes me skeptical of nuclear power: For weeks after being removed from the chain-reaction fission process in a nuclear reactor, spent nuclear fuel rods are sufficiently-concentrated with unstable radioisotope byproducts of the fission process that they will still melt down under their own radiation unless they are also kept water-cooled.

At foreground-left is the mangled heap of Reactor No. 3 after a hydrogen explosion ripped through its outer containment structure Monday morning; in the background is the damaged Reactor No. 4 structure following the Tuesday fire. Reactor No. 4 didn't even have any fuel in its core at the time of Friday's earthquake and tsunami; however, on Tuesday the worst ambient radiation was apparently coming from the overheating spent fuel rods stored in a pool in the upper levels of that structure. The fire exposed those spent fuel rods, raising the first prospect of a significant health hazard to those on the plant grounds since the disaster began 4 days before. Photo courtesy Kyodo News Agency.

If not hopeless, at this point things began to look rather bad.  Radiation levels around the plant rose to around 400 millisieverts per hour, about 160 times Japan’s regulation yearly radiation limit and 40% of the dosage that will cause radiation sickness.  This was because the spent nuclear fuel rods stored atop Reactor No. 4 were exposed to the open air following this fire.  Shortly after this, radiation levels 20 times the normal background exposure are detected in Tokyo.  This increase in radiation exposure in itself is not threatening or even cause for alarm, but it is significant: At the time of this reading in Tokyo, a strong prevailing easterly wind is still blowing most radioactive steam straight out into the Pacific Ocean.

On Wednesday conditions really took a turn for the worse: Reactor No. 3, which contains a uranium-plutonium mix and which previously lost the upper levels of its outer containment structure to a hydrogen explosion during steam release Monday morning, suffered a second explosion which apparently tore open its inner containment structure, releasing higher quantities of radiation than any previously experienced in the vicinity of the plant.  Reactor No. 3 began venting large quantities of steam, and after a while Reactor No. 1 began smoking.  Attempts to keep spent nuclear fuel rods at Reactor No. 4 submerged again failed, and the rods again ignited a fire there; 2 plant workers were apparently lost when this fire broke out, though details are not yet available.  In a report on “the faceless 50” taking most of the risk to control rising temperatures and prevent radiation leaks at Fukushima, the New York Times reports that a total of 5 TEPCO plant workers have died at Fukushima since the trouble began on Friday.  Radiation levels in the air in the vicinity of the plant reached about 1,000 millisieverts per hour.  Exposure to 1,000 millisieverts of radiation in an hour will produce radiation sickness.  The Japanese government, which had overtaken operations at Fukushima I from TEPCO, ordered the remaining 48 plant workers to come back to avoid prolonged exposure to radioactive vapors.

During the hours of human inactivity at the plant, Reactor No. 3 steamed and Reactor No. 1 smoked.  Reactor No. 2, site of the most-troubling deterioration until a reactor with plutonium fuel suffered an interior breach, continued heating up (and probably melting-down) unchecked.  As they left the increasingly-dangerous plant after a long day’s struggle on their own, the plant workers were unable even to confirm that their second attempt to put out the fire by the spent fuel rods in Reactor No. 4 was successful.  Shortly before they left, there was evidence that Reactors 5 and 6, powered-down before the earthquake, were heating up without functioning coolant loops.

During these hours when Fukushima I was abandoned, the whole plant filled with steam until it was almost impossible to see anything there.

The Japanese government’s desperate plan to use a helicopter to airdrop water onto the overheating and exposed spent fuel rods at Reactor No. 4 was canceled on Wednesday–though it was tried to little effect on Thursday; the 48 plant workers returned to the plant late Wednesday after the radioactive steam cleared somewhat.  Overall radiation levels have fallen again to 1.5 millisieverts–far-above background radiation but no longer dangerous.  So, this is where the situation stands on Wednesday in Japan, 5 days after the most-powerful earthquake to strike Japan in over 1,000 years, as 4 dozen nuclear plant workers try to flood 3 increasingly hot and damaged nuclear reactors with seawater and boron in an attempt to cool their fuel rods and further-inhibit their process of radiative heating.  The Liberal Ironist isn’t optimistic about their prospects for getting this situation under control.  It is no longer clear to me that writing these reactors off while there is a prevailing easterly wind wouldn’t be a better strategy.  But in increasingly-unsafe conditions, these dedicated and diligent plant workers confront the worst nuclear incident at Chernobyl–trying, with depressingly-little success, to stop it from getting much worse each day.  The New York Times now makes regular updates on the status of each reactor at Fukushima I on its website.

Fukushima I on Tuesday, March 16, 2011 in aerial view looking west. From left to right: Reactor No. 4, where there was no fuel in the core but spent fuel rods were overheating and releasing radiation; Reactor No. 3, which contains some plutonium but at this time had only suffered a hydrogen explosion in the upper decks; Reactor No. 2, which that morning experienced a core breach that exposed the structure to radiation; Reactor No. 1, the oldest and the first to heat to the point of a hydrogen explosion. The visible damage wasn't caused by the earthquake or the tsunami, but by the inability of the plant's many desperate workers to find an efficient means of cooling these reactors over the previous 4 days. By this time all 4 reactors were overheating, and TEPCO didn't have a long-term plan besides dousing them continually in the seawater-boron mix. Photo by DigitalGlobe-Imagery.

Why I Haven’t Blogged on Japan’s Catastrophic Earthquake–Yet

I wanted to offer clarification about something.  There has been a big spike in home page visits on my blog this weekend; I can only assume this is because many occasional readers wondered what I thought or knew about the most-intense earthquake recorded in Japan–and its aftermath.

I am aware of the basic facts that are readily-available elsewhere.  At about 2:46 on their Friday afternoon, Japan suffered what is now rated as a magnitude-9.0 earthquake with an epicenter about 81 miles east of Sendai, the largest city in northern Honshu.  (This earthquake was actually preceded by a magnitude-7.2 foreshock, previously assumed to be a free-standing event.)  Minutes later, a tsunami 12 to 32 feet high slammed into Honshu’s eastern coast at about 500 miles an hour, disintegrating all but the strongest structures, and tossing cars, trucks, boats and trains inland like plastic toys floating in a bathtub.  The Sendai earthquake apparently was so powerful that it shifted the northern half of Honshu 8 feet to the east, and pushed the Earth itself 4 inches off its former axis.

On the day of the earthquake, of course, there was no conception at all of the death toll or the cost in both lost economic activity or future reconstruction costs.  The first death toll I heard was a positive count of observed and reported deaths: 8.  Obviously, no one was expecting that extremely-low figure to hold up, and yesterday the story broke that 10,000 people were missing from the small city of Minamisanriku, about 40 miles northeast of Sendai, alone.  This single “suddenly-emerging fact” seems to have driven-home the realization that it could be days before we truly have any means of taking stock of the damage done to Japan by the Sendai earthquake and the quickly-following tsunami.

Why wouldn’t I want to blog about this?  There are 2 reasons:

1st, the Liberal Ironist isn’t exactly a news site.  This blog often aggregates news stories and online reference sources when providing information, and I hope some readers find this approach useful.  But I’m not trying to break every story; I’m trying to offer context, analysis and opinion on stories I consider interesting.  I’m usually not in a race to say something timely, because I prefer to reflect on what I’ve seen or read.  (Andrew Sullivan has described blogging as a matter of sticking your neck out while a story is breaking news, of reacting in real time.  That’s just one approach, one far-removed from my purposes.)  When I feel I have something different to say, or at least a different way of telling a story that has broken, I write.

2nd, the Liberal Ironist is about the acts of men and women, not the acts of drifting continents.  I’ll not say I haven’t experienced that instinctual but perverse fascination we feel for big disasters–satirized by George Carlin in a classic routine–but that’s all the more reason why I don’t necessarily have something to say when a big story of this sort breaks.  We all watched video clips of a 20-foot wall of water churning about cars that may or may not be filled with unfortunate town dwellers who were headed for high ground as fast as they could get there; though I experienced a combination sense of awe, fascination and revulsion like many of you, I had nothing to contribute to that spectacle itself.  The Liberal Ironist definitely will have something to say about the mounting meltdown risks at 4 Japanese nuclear power plants.  The earthquake was always going to happen, as a physical consequence of the subduction of the Pacific Plate under the westernmost extension of the North American Plate (which is what northern Honshu is), while risk of multiple nuclear meltdowns is the result of human agency.  Japanese governments and power companies decided that the construction of a series of nuclear power plants was a prudent long-term investment in their nation’s economic development.  We don’t know yet whether that bold decision on their part will be made foolish by multiple critical failures of reactors over the next day or so.  We’ll see, and then the Liberal Ironist in his usual fashion will try to understand what we think it means.

In the meantime…

The New York Times has an extensive story on the frantic effort to manually cool reactors at 4 nuclear power plants, an interesting map and diagram of the known damage at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, and a good interactive map detailing earthquake damage around northern Japan.  The BBC, as far as I can tell, has had pretty good live coverage of the ongoing post-earthquake crisis in Japan, and has lately focused on the problem of cooling the reactors.

South Sudan’s Difficult Transition

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended Sudan‘s 22-year Second Civil War–one of the World’s bloodiest–has been a great success–in broad terms.  South Sudan–a remote non-Arab region where most people are Christians or animists–simultaneously deeply-impoverished and oil-rich, anglophile and mostly-illiterate–gained autonomy under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with a commitment from the government to honor the result of an independence referendum in January 2011.  The polls opened on January 9th and closed on , with over 95% turnout.  The result, announced on January 30th, was an extraordinary 99.57% voting in favor of secession from Sudan.  The voting was largely orderly, and Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who presided over the savage civil wars there and in Darfur, promised over preceding months and since that time that he would recognize the result of the referendum on independence.

That vote in South Sudan proper was orderly, jubilant, and quite decisive.  In the contested region of Abyei between Sudan and South Sudan, however, disagreements over which nomadic Arabs and Dinka warranted count as residents of the region prevented institution of a referendum on whether the region was a part of North or South.  At the time of the independence referendum, the New York Times reported, there was pervasive fear of future violent conflict within this region.

In the past week, however, the disputed status and simmering ethnic violence of the Abyei region has been completely overshadowed by a military mutiny in South Sudan, of all places, in the states of Jonglei and Upper Nile in the east and northeast of South Sudan.  George Athor, a former general of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army which fought Bashir’s government until the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was reached in 2005, mutinied and began an insurgency against the south after his apparent loss of the governor’s election in the state of Jonglei.  The BBC has covered various aspects of this story, mentioning that hundreds have been killed in clashes over the past month or so.  Now the transitional government of South Sudan, which has said it won’t declare independence until July on the terms of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, accuses Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who rules a genocidal Sudanese government that is a hybrid of theocracy and military dictatorship, of plotting to overthrow the transitional government of South Sudan through sponsorship of an insurgency before July.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement ended Sudan’s Second Civil War; the First lasted from the mid-1950s into the early-1970s until a peace agreement was reached under which Colonel Gaafar al-Nimeiry promised to grant South Sudan autonomy in governing its own affairs: Local languages could be taught in schools and used in official documents, Southerners would have a greater share in the region’s considerable natural resource wealth.  Sudan’s very conservative Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence wouldn’t be imposed on the South’s mostly Christian or animist residents.  But Colonel Nimeiry wasn’t constrained by the political system to respect that peace agreement, and after gradually dismantling this settlement, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement revolted again in 1983.  The return to violence must have been deeply-disheartening for Southerners, and they have spent 38 of the 55 years of Sudan’s independence in a state of civil war in their own country.  As this BBC map of Sudan shows, those many years of war (and the years of cultural and religious imperialism and resource expropriation during the earlier time of “peace”) have left South Sudan one of the poorest, most-malnourished and least-educated regions in the World.

The allegation of deliberate sabotage by the government of South Sudan is more than plausible.  When he took power in a military coup in 1989, Omar Hassan al-Bashir maintained an already 6-year-old brutal war on the people of South Sudan to prevent their independence.  By the time the Comprehensive Peace Agreement ended this 22-year civil war in 2005, it had caused the deaths of 2 million non-combatants through either infirmity or inhumanity.  Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s sponsorship of militias also made the still-partial genocide in Darfur possible, in which at least 300,000 civilians have been killed, and from which according to UN estimates 2,850,000 have been displaced.  In considering the Southern government’s claim of deliberate sabotage by Bashir, it’s worth remembering that John Garang de Mabior, who led the Sudan People’s Liberation Army to a favorable settlement of the civil war, was killed in a plane crash in November 2005.  There was no evidence–and as far as I can recall no allegation–of an assassination at the time, but South Sudan was deprived of its likely 1st president at the moment of reconciliation.  So, as South Sudan claims to have found weapons shipped from the North amidst a rebel arms cache they secured, let’s remember from his conduct in the South and Darfur (not to mention his past hospitality to Osama bin-Laden) that Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s 2 signature political talents are brutality and plausible deniability.  If South Sudan’s transitional government suspects Sudan of further support for the rebels, we should support it if it decides to declare independence early so that any Sudanese “pacification efforts” would be an invasion in the eyes of the World.  The United States should also be as ready to equip South Sudan’s new government with weapons and military vehicles to for its own defense as it is to provide the new country with much-needed development aid.

Last the Liberal Ironist checked, there are 32 T-72 tanks in Kenya that haven’t been allowed to reach their desination.