SIMPLE TEMPLATE CREATION
Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File
Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File 1
Notes on the File 9
AT: Accidental Launch/Nuclear War 10
AT: Acid Rain 11
AT: Afghanistan 12
Ext #1 – Alt Cause 13
AT: Afghanistan Economy 14
AT: Afghanistan Secession 15
AT: Afghanistan Spills Over To Pakistan 16
AT: African Economies 17
AT: African Nuclear Wars (Deutch) 18
Ext #1 – Emperically Denied 19
Ext #2 – Don’t Escalate 20
AT: Agroterror 21
AT: AIDs 22
Ext #1 – AIDS will not Cause Extinction 23
Ext #2 – AIDS Inevitable 24
Ext #4 – No Mutation 25
AT: AIDS causes Conflict 26
AT: AIDS Global Spread (Africa Specific) 27
AT: AIDS Hurts Infrastructure 28
AT: AIDS ( Instability (Africa Specific) 29
AT: AIDS ( National Insecurity 30
AT: Air Polution 31
Ext #2 – Quality Improving 32
Ext #3 – No Impact 33
AT: Air Power 34
Ext #1 – Ground Forces Key 35
AT: Amazon 36
AT: Antibiotic Resistance 37
AT: Arctic War 38
AT: Asian Economies 39
AT: Australian Prolif 40
AT: Auto Industry Collapse 41
AT: Balkan Instability 42
AT: Biodiversity Impacts 43
Ext #1: No Extinctions Now 44
Ext #2 – Emperically Denied 45
Ext #3 – Captive Breeding 46
Ext #4 – Resillience 47
AT: Biofuels Kill Environment 48
AT: Biopower 49
AT: Bioterrorism 50
Ext #1 – No Risk 51
Ext #2 – No Extinction 52
AT: Bioweapons (In General) 53
AT: Bird Flu 1/2 54
AT: Bird Flu 2/2 55
Ext #1 – Vaccines Solve 56
Ext #3 – No Mutation 57
Ext #4 – Mutation Slow 58
Ext #5 – No Human Spread 59
AT: Blackouts 60
Ext #1 – Not Key to Econ 61
Ext #2 – Preventable 62
Ext #3 – Blackouts are Constructive 63
AT: Brazilian Economy 64
AT: Business Confidence 65
AT: California Economy 66
AT: Caribbean Economies 67
AT: CCP Collapse 68
AT: Central Asian War 69
Ext #1 – No War 70
Ext #2 – No Escalation 71
AT: Civil-Military Relations 72
AT: Chavez 73
AT: Chemical Industry Collapse 74
AT: Chemical Terror 75
AT: Chemical Weapons 76
AT: Child Abuse 77
AT: China Agression 78
AT: China Bashing 79
AT: Chinese Economy 80
AT: China India War 81
AT: China Japan War 82
AT: Chinese Military Modernization 83
AT: China Rise 84
Ext #2 – Preaceful Rise 85
AT: China (Rouge States Impact) 86
AT: Chinese Soft Power 87
AT: Chinese Start War In Africa 88
AT: China-Taiwan War 89
AT: Civic Engagement 90
Ext #1 – Civic Engagement Fails 91
AT: Civilian-Military Relations 92
AT: Competitiveness 93
AT: Competitiveness Key to Economy 94
AT: Competitiveness Key to Heg 95
AT: Coral Reefs 96
Ext #1 – Non Unique 97
Ext #2 – Alt Cause 98
AT: Cultural Diversity 99
AT: Customary International Law 100
Ext #1 – ILaw Fails 101
Ext #4 – Domestic Law Better 102
AT: Cyber Terrorism 103
AT: Deficit 104
AT: Deforestation 105
Ext #2 – Alt Cause 106
AT: Dehumanization 107
Ext #3 – Gov’t = Dehumanizing 108
Ext #4 – War = Dehumanizing 109
AT: Democracies Solve Wars 110
Ext #4 – Transition Wars 111
AT: Deterrance 112
AT: Dirty Bomb 113
AT: Diseases ( Extinction (Generic) 114
Ext #1 – NO Extinction 115
Ext #1 – No Extinction 116
AT: Disease Threatens National Security 117
AT: Dollar Decline 118
AT: Dollar Dump 119
AT: Double Dip Recession 120
AT: Drug Use 121
AT: East Asian Arms Race 122
AT: East Asian War 123
AT: Ebola 1/2 124
AT: Ebola 2/2 125
AT: Economy 1/2 126
AT: Economy 2/2 127
Ext #1 – Econ Resilient 128
Ext #2 – Doesn’t Cause War 129
Ext #3 and 4 – Safeguards Prevent 130
Ext #5 – U.S. Not Key to Global Econ 131
AT: Econ Key to Heg 132
AT: Ecosystems 133
AT: Egyptian Instability 1/2 134
AT: Egyptian Instability 2/2 135
AT: Electricity Prices Spikes 136
Ext #1 – No Impact to Economy 137
Ext #2 – Innevitable 138
AT: Endocrine Disruptions 139
AT: Energy Security 140
AT: Environmental Leadership 141
AT: Environmental Racism/Justice 142
AT: EU Soft Power 143
AT: Europe Wars 144
AT: Failed States 145
AT: Failed States ( Terrorism 146
AT: Failed States ( Prolif 147
AT: Failed States ( Organized Crime 148
AT: Famine 149
AT: Federalism 150
Ext #1 – N/U (Federalism Down) 151
AT: Federalism (Modeling) 152
AT: Fertilizer 153
AT: Flu (The Regular One) 154
AT: Food Price Spikes 155
Ext #2 – Food Price Increase Innevitable 156
AT: Free Trade Impacts 157
Ext #1 – Doesn’t Decrease Conflict 158
Ext #2 – Trade Inevitable 159
Ext #3 – No Escalation 160
AT: Free Trade Solves Interdependance 161
AT: Gay Rights (and other Impacts) 162
AT: Genocide 163
Ext #2 – Nuclear War 164
AT: Global Warming Impacts 165
Ext #1 – Not Real 166
AT: Global Warming (Coral Reefs) 167
AT: Global Warming (Oceans Scenario) 168
AT: Global Warming Causes Wars 169
AT: Greek-Turkish Conflict 170
AT: Grid Terror 171
Ext #1: No Impact 172
Ext #2 – Solving Now 173
AT: Grid Terror (EMP) 174
AT: Grid Terror (Alaskan Pipeline) 175
Ext #2 – Pipeline Safe 176
AT: Grid Terror (Cyber Terror) 177
AT: Ground Forces (Land Army Heg) 178
AT: Hegemony 179
AT: Honeybees 180
AT: Hunger 181
Ext #3 – War ( Hunger 182
AT: Human Rights 183
AT: Hurricanes Kill Economy 184
AT: Ice Age 185
AT: Imperialism 186
AT: Indian Economy 187
AT: India Iran Conflict 188
AT: Indian Space Race 189
AT: Indonesian Instability 190
AT: Indo-Pak War 191
AT: Industrial Agricutlure 192
AT: Iran Attacks Israel 193
AT: Iran Blocks Strait of Hormuz 194
AT: Iran – Central Asian Expansion 195
AT: Iran Prolif 1/2 196
AT: Iran Prolif 2/2 197
Ext #1 – Sanctions Solve 198
Ext #2 – China 199
AT: Iran Strikes (By Israel) 200
AT: Iran Strikes (By the US) 201
Ext #1 – No Strikes 202
AT: Iraqi Instability 203
AT: Iraqi Democracy 204
AT: Israel Wars (From Terrorist Attack) 205
AT: Israel Wars (Other Countries) 206
AT: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 207
AT: Israeli-Turkish War 208
AT: Japanese Economy 209
AT: Japanese Nationalism 210
AT: Japanese Rearm 211
AT: Japanese Soft Power 212
AT: Japanese-South Korean Relations 213
AT: Korean Reunification 214
AT: Kuwaiti Economy 215
AT: Language (K) 216
AT: Latin American Economies 217
AT: LNG Explosion 1/2 218
AT: LNG Explosion 2/2 219
AT: LNG Terror 220
AT: Malaria 221
Ext #1 – Vaccines Solve 222
AT: Malnutrition 223
AT: Mexico Collapse 224
Ext #1 – Drug Wars 225
AT: Mexico Drug Wars 226
AT: Middle East Instability 227
AT: Middle East Wars 228
AT: Military Budget 229
AT: Military Education 230
AT: Military Morale 231
AT: Military Overstretch 232
AT: Military Quality 233
AT: Military Recruitment 234
AT: Monoculture 235
Ext #2 – Alt Cause 236
AT: Nanotech 237
AT: Narcoterror 238
AT: NATO 239
Ext #1 – NATO Not Key 240
AT: Natural Gas Price Spikes 241
AT: North Korea Aggression 242
AT: North Korea-South Korea War 243
AT: North Korea Prolif 244
AT: Nuclear Radiation 245
AT: Nuclear Reactor Meltdowns 246
Ext #1 – Reactors Safe 247
Ext #2 – No Probability 248
AT: Nuclear Terrorism 249
Ext #1 – No Risk 250
Ext #2 – No Tech 251
AT: Nuclear War ( Extinction 252
AT: Nuclear Waste 253
AT: Obesity 254
Ext #3 – Obesity Doesn’t Kill 255
AT: Oceans 256
Ext #1 – Resilient 257
Ext #3 – Alt Causes 258
AT: Oil Dependency 259
Ext #1 – No War 260
AT: Oil Dependence (Terrorism Impact) 261
AT: Oil Peak 262
Ext #1 – Oil Companies Lie 263
Ext #2 – Oil is Still There 264
Ext #3 – Timeframe 265
Ext #4 – Reserves 266
AT: Oil Shocks 267
Ext #1 – Oil Shocks Gradual 268
AT: Organized Crime 269
Ext #2 – Move to Other Crimes 270
AT: Overfishing 271
Ext #2 – Subsidies 272
AT: Overpopulation Impacts 273
AT: Oxygen 274
AT: OZONE Depletion 275
Ext #1 – Ozone Holes Shrinking 276
AT: Pakistani Economy 277
AT: Pakistan Gives Nukes to Terrorists 278
AT: Pakistani Instability 279
AT: Pakistani Loose Nukes 280
AT: Palestinian Collapse 281
AT: Patriarchy Impacts 282
AT: Patriarchy ( War 283
AT: Pesticides 284
AT: Phytoplankton 285
AT: Pollution 286
AT: Port Terror 287
AT: Positive Peace 288
AT: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder 289
AT: Poverty (Gilligan) 290
AT: Poverty (Global) 291
AT: Poverty (Moral Ob.)(Nuclear War Outweighs) 1/2 292
AT: Poverty (Moral Ob.)(Nuclear War Outweighs) 2/2 293
AT: Poverty (U.S.) 294
Ext #1 – Rate Flawed 295
Ext #2 – Poverty Down 296
Ext #3 – Material Conditions Improving 297
AT: Poverty ( Terrorism 298
AT: Proliferation 299
AT: Protectionism 300
AT: Quebec Secession 301
AT: Racism 302
Ext #1 – Root Cause 303
Ext #2 – No Global Spillover 304
Ext #4 – Racism Declining 305
Ext #5 – Capitalism 306
AT: Railroads 307
AT: Rape 308
AT: Readiness 309
Ext #1 – DADT 310
Ext #3 - Retention Solves Readiness 311
AT: Resource Wars 1/2 312
AT: Resource Wars 2/2 313
Ext #1 – No Conflict 314
Ext #2 – Global Inequalities 315
Ext #3 – Corruption 316
AT: RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) 317
Ext #4 – RMA Fails 318
AT: Russian Accidental Launch 319
AT: Russian Agression in the Caspian 320
AT: Russia-China War 321
AT: Russian Civil War 322
AT: Russian Economy 323
AT: Russian Expansionism 324
AT: Russian Loose Nukes 325
AT: Russian Nationalism 326
AT: SARS 327
AT: Saudi Arabian Instability 328
AT: Saudi Arabian Prolif 329
AT: Science Diplomacy 330
AT: Secession 331
Ext #1 – Don’t Want It 332
AT: Single Species Collapse 333
AT: Small Businesses 334
AT: Smallpox 335
AT: Soft Power 336
Ext #1 – Obama Solves 337
Ext #2 – Alt Cause 338
Ext #3 – Hard Power Key 339
AT: Soil Erosion 1/2 340
AT: Soil Erosion 2/2 341
Ext #2 – Erosion Decreasing 342
AT: South Asian Prolif 343
AT: South China Sea War 344
AT: South Korean Diplomacy 345
AT: South Korean Econ 346
AT: South Korea Prolif 347
AT: Space Colonization 348
AT: Space Junk 349
AT: Space Militarization 350
AT: Spratly Islands 351
Ext #3 – Agreements 352
Ext #4 – No Excalation 353
AT: Sprawl 354
AT: Sri Lankan Economy 355
AT: State Economies/Budgets 356
AT: Steel Industry 357
AT: Superbugs 358
AT: Swine Flu 1/2 359
AT: Swine Flu 2/2 360
AT: Syrian WMD Use 361
AT: Taiwanese Prolif 362
AT: Taliban 363
AT: Tar Sands 364
AT: Teen Pregnancy 365
AT: Terrorism – Generic 1/2 366
AT: Terrorism – Generic 2/2 367
Ext #1 – Terrorism Declining 368
Ext #3 – No Attack 369
Ext #4 – Terror Exaggerated 370
Ext #5 – No Money 371
AT: Terrorism – Economic Fallout 372
AT: Terrorism – U.S. Lashout 373
AT: Tuberculosis 374
AT: Turkish Economy 375
AT: Turkish Loose Nukes 376
AT: Turkish PKK Conflict 377
AT: Turkish Prolif 378
AT: Ukrainian Economy 379
AT: U.N. Credibility 380
AT: U.S. Australian Relations 381
AT: U.S. Brazil Relations 382
AT: U.S. Canada Relations 383
AT: U.S. China Relations 384
Ext #1 – Relations High 385
AT: U.S. China War 386
Ext #1 – Not a Threat 387
Ext #1 – Not A Threat 388
Ext #3 – No Taiwan Conflict 389
AT: U.S. Civil War 390
AT: U.S. E.U. Relations 391
AT: U.S. India Relations 392
AT: U.S. Iraqi Relations 393
AT: U.S. Japanese Relations 394
AT: U.S. Kuwait Relations 395
AT: U.S. Mexican Relations 396
AT: U.S. North Korea War 397
Ext #3 – No China 398
AT: U.S. Pakistani Relations 399
AT: U.S. Qatari Relations 400
AT: U.S. Russian Relations 401
AT: U.S. Russia War 402
Ext #2 – No War 403
AT: U.S. Saudi Relations 404
AT: U.S. South Korean Relations 405
AT: U.S. Turkish Relations 406
AT: Water Polution 407
Ext – Alt Cause 408
Ext – Alt Cause 409
AT: Water Terror 410
AT: Water Wars 1/2 411
AT: Water Wars 2/2 412
Ext #1 – No Link to Conflict 413
Ext #2 – Cooperation 414
Ext #4 – Wars too Costly 415
Ext #5 – No Escalation 416
AT: WTO 417
Ext #1 – WTO Fails 418
AT: Yucca Mountain 419
AT: Zoonotic Diseases 420
Notes on the File
The purpose of this file is so that we can control the impacts read in any given round. While it’s true in many cases that the 1AC will probably outweigh the disad simply because the 1AC has more impacts, it’s always a safer bet if the DA doesn’t have an impact at all, or vice versa when you’re neg, you will probably want to mitigate the impacts of the aff’s advantages.
This is updated from the file that was put together at the beginning of the year and has an index based off of the index for Emory’s impact file, courtesy of William Rains. It is alphabetized, to make things easy to find, and you might just want to read through the index so that you know what impact answers you have.
Note: this file is large and cumbersome, and it might be to each team’s individual advantage to make their own condensed version of this file for their own use of impact that they want, and then print that, keeping the rest on computer to both save paper, and increase organization, in fact, if I were you, I would choose my 31 favorite impacts and put them into a file, and then expando it.
For that matter, this is what I would take:
1. Accidental Launch 12. Heg 22. Prolif
2. AIDS 13. Human Rights 23. Racism
3. Biodiversity 14. Indo-Pak War 24. Soft Power
4. Bioterror 15. Iran Prolif 25. State Budgets
5. Competitiveness 16. Mexico Collapse 26. Swine Flu
6. Deficits 17. Middle East War 27. Terrorism (put nuclear terror in the same pocket)
7. Democracy 18. Oil Peak 28. U.S. China War
8. Disease Spread 19. Overpopulation 29. U.S. North Korea War
9. Economy 20. Patriarchy 30. U.S. Russian War
10. Free Trade 21. Poverty 31. WTO
11. Global Warming
Anyway, enjoy and take out some impacts!
AT: Accidental Launch/Nuclear War
1. No risk of accidental/unauthorized war.
Dr. Leonid Ryabikhin, General (Ret.) Viktor Koltunov and Dr. Eugene Miasnikov, June 2009. Senior Fellow at the EastWest Institute; Deputy Director, Institute for Strategic Stability of Rosatom; and Senior Research Scientist, Centre for Arms Control, Energy, and Environmental Studies, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. “De-alerting: Decreasing the Operational Readiness of Strategic Nuclear Forces,” Discussion paper presented at the seminar on “Re-framing De Alert: Decreasing the Operational Readiness of Nuclear Weapons Systems in the U.S.-Russia Context,” system/files/RyabikhinKoltunovMiasnikov.pdf.
Analysis of the above arguments shows, that they do not have solid grounds. Today Russian and U.S. ICBMs are not targeted at any state. High alert status of the Russian and U.S. strategic nuclear forces has not been an obstacle for building a strategic partnership. The issue of the possibility of an “accidental” nuclear war itself is hypothetical. Both states have developed and implemented constructive organizational and technical measures that practically exclude launches resulting from unauthorized action of personnel or terrorists. Nuclear weapons are maintained under very strict system of control that excludes any accidental or unauthorized use and guarantees that these weapons can only be used provided that there is an appropriate authorization by the national leadership. Besides that it should be mentioned that even the Soviet Union and the United States had taken important bilateral steps toward decreasing the risk of accidental nuclear conflict. Direct emergency telephone “red line” has been established between the White House and the Kremlin in 1963. In 1971 the USSR and USA signed the Agreement on Measures to Reduce the Nuclear War Threat. This Agreement established the actions of each side in case of even a hypothetical accidental missile launch and it contains the requirements for the owner of the launched missile to deactivate and eliminate the missile. Both the Soviet Union and the United States have developed proper measures to observe the agreed requirements.
2. Unpredictable timeframe – accidental launch might not happen for years – it might never happen – prefer our impacts
3. No need to de-alert --- systems stable.
William J. Perry and James R. Schlesinger et al, 2009. Former Secretary of Defense, Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor at Stanford University, senior fellow at FSI and serves as co-director of the Preventive Defense Project, and former Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Energy and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Counselor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, lecturer @ SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, PhD International Relations @ UPenn. “America’s Strategic Posture,” Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, media.reports/strat_posture_report.pdf.
The second is de-alerting. Some in the arms control community have pressed enthusiastically for new types of agreements that take U.S. and Rus- sian forces off of so-called “hair trigger” alert. This is simply an erroneous characterization of the issue. The alert postures of both countries are in fact highly stable. They are subject to multiple layers of control, ensuring clear civilian and indeed presidential decision-making. The proper focus really should be on increasing the decision time and information available to the U.S. president—and also to the Russian president—before he might autho- rize a retaliatory strike. There were a number of incidents during the Cold War when we or the Russians received misleading indications that could have triggered an accidental nuclear war. With the greatly reduced tensions of today, such risks now seem relatively low. The obvious way to further reduce such risks is to increase decision time for the two presidents. The President should ask the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command to give him an analysis of factors affecting the decision time available to him as well as recommendations on how to avoid being put in a position where he has to make hasty decisions. It is important that any changes in the decision process preserve and indeed enhance crisis stability.
AT: Acid Rain
The most comprehensive studies prove that the harmful effects of acid rain are myths.
Doug Bandow, 1998. Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and worked with the Natural Resources and Environment Cabinet Council while a Special Assistant to President Reagan. “Environmentalism: The Triumph of Politics,” Action Institute, .
Politicians are also remarkably vulnerable to scaremongering by special-interest groups and activists. One apocalyptic vision is Acid Rain. In 1980 the Environmental Protection Agency claimed that Sulfur Dioxide emissions caused Acid Rain, which had supposedly increased the average acidity of Northeast lakes one-hundred-fold over the last forty years and was killing fish and trees alike. A year later the National Research Council predicted that the number of acidified lakes would double by 1990. So, naturally, Congress included stringent provisions to cut so2 emissions (already down 50 percent from the 1970s) at a cost of billions of dollars annually when it reauthorized the Clean Air Act. Yet in 1987, epa research raised doubts about the destructiveness of acid rain. Then came the most complete study of Acid Rain ever conducted, the half billion dollar National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project (napap), which concluded that the allegedly horrific effects of Acid Rain were largely a myth.
Studies that conclude that acid rain is dangerous are biased.
National Center, 8/20/1996. “Myths and Facts About the Environment -- Part IV: Acid Rain,” National Center for Public Policy Research, .
Myth: Data taken by proponents of the acid rain theory is accurate and conclusive. Fact: Proponents of the acid rain theory have rested their claims on a deeply flawed series of articles by G.E. Likens and his co-workers in the 1970s. A careful evaluation of Likens' research conducted by a group of scientists at Environmental Research and Technology, Inc., reveals that his data collection and selection was deliberately biased to support the desired conclusions.
AT: Afghanistan
1. Afghanistan collapse inevitable --- corruption, ineffective police, lack of intel sharing
United Nations 10/14/08 US Fed News, “Build on Positive Trends to Reverse Deteriorating Situation in Afghanistan,” Lexis, 10/14/08
ZALMAY KHALILZAD (United States) said that, in order for UNAMA to implement its revised mandate and face the new challenges, his country supported an immediate surge in the Mission's capabilities based on the proposals made by the Special Representative. The United States was gravely concerned about humanitarian conditions as many lives were in jeopardy, both from food shortages and cold weather. Planning for winter should aim to help Afghans deal with both, and the United States, as the largest donor, was prepared to do more. He said the security situation had become more challenging as the Taliban and their allies continued to wage deadly attacks on military and civilian targets. Success in the fight against them could be achieved, despite recent doom-and-gloom talk. Success required that the Government implement its National Development Strategy and improve local governance, combat corruption, reform its police forces and increase its counter-narcotics efforts, among other things. The United States welcomed the fact that Afghan security forces were taking on increasing responsibility for protecting the people. The 2009 elections were very important and it was therefore imperative that the international community redouble efforts to ensure they were credible. The United States called on the Afghan Government to hold the elections as scheduled. Underscoring the importance of the role of neighbouring countries, he said the new Government in Pakistan offered an opportunity to battle regional terrorism. That should mean, among other things, an end to sanctuaries for hostile forces, the use of terrorism for national interests, and increased intelligence sharing and reconciliation, all of which were necessities for stability and development. Both Afghans and Pakistanis needed international support to resist terrorist efforts, and the United States urged the Secretariat to ensure that the Special Representative had the support and means needed to carry out his mission. Expressing his deep regret for the accidental loss of civilian lives, he said he shared the Secretary-General's grave concern about civilian casualties. The United States would do everything in its power to ensure that ISAF and Operation Enduring Freedom prevented civilian casualties and acknowledged them when they occurred. However, the fundamental cause of the casualties was the fight waged by the Taliban, who used civilians as shields and were increasingly resorting to asymmetric attacks against population centres. There was a need for better coordination, and the United States chain of command had been streamlined. More forces would be sent to Afghanistan.
2. No impact – failure empirically doesn’t cause conflict – post 9/11 invasion proves
3. No escalation – Afghan neighbors have power to contain war
BBC Monitoring South Asia, 2009, bbc is a credible news network, BBC Monitoring South Asia, “Paper says neighbors can end Afghanistan War,” December 19 2009, lexis.
One of the issues related to the war in Afghanistan has been the role of Afghanistan's neighbours in this war and effects of their policies on war and political processes related to war in Afghanistan. It has been believed that if Afghanistan's neighbours do not support the war, it cannot last long. Taking this belief into consideration, it has been argued on many occasions that Afghanistan's neighbours especially Pakistan have not had a genuine interest in ending this war. Although Pakistan has constantly spoken about its cooperation with the government of Afghanistan and the international community for peace and stability in Afghanistan, Pakistani claims have not been believed. US Commander in the Middle East and Central Asia, General David Petraeus, recently asked Pakistan to put pressure on Taleban on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This demonstrates that the international community is not convinced that Pakistan has changed its policy on extremist groups in the region. Although Pakistan is at war with local Taleban in that country, it has a different policy on Afghan Taleban and does not want pressure on this group. Another country that can play an important role in the war in Afghanistan is Russia. NATO secretary general recently asked [Dmitry] Medvedev Wednesday last week to play a bigger role in supporting NATO troops in Afghanistan by dedicating more helicopters to these forces. It was reported some time ago that NATO forces have shown interest in using Russian made helicopters in their war in Afghanistan. Reports explained that NATO forces want to use Russian helicopters in Afghanistan because they are more suitable to Afghan terrain and climate and can be more effective in peace operations. Meanwhile, there are reports that Taleban are receiving Iranian weapons. According to Commander of US forces in Middle East and Central Asia, General David Petraeus, that these weapons are supplied to Taleban mainly in Western border areas between Afghanistan and Iran. Previously, such reports were unofficially discussed and even the Taleban were quoted as confirming these reports about their access to Iranian weapons. The Iranian government, however, has repeatedly rejected these reports and claims. Taking the negative relations between Iran and the United States into consideration, a number of political analysts believe that American military presence in Afghanistan has raised serious concerns for Iran. Therefore, Iran will do favours to the Taleban. These reports demonstrate that the negative role of Afghanistan's neighbours in the war in Afghanistan and their lack of support political process for peace and development in Afghanistan have resulted in the failure to achieve the desired results in this country despite spending heavy sums of money and investing human capital in Afghanistan for eight years. Efforts should therefore be made to ensure that these countries change their policies on Afghanistan and play a positive role in the political processes initiated by the government in this country. Experts believe that this can be possible only when Afghanistan's government is able to establish close relations with countries neighbouring Afghanistan and close to Afghanistan and if Afghanistan can convince them that a strong central government in Afghanistan will not pose any problems to those countries.
Ext #1 – Alt Cause
Lots more alt causes--
A. Drug trade
Seth G. Jones, Fellow at the RAND Corporation and Adjunct Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown, “Averting Failure in Afghanistan” Survival March 2006
The cultivation of opium poppy also undermines security because insurgent groups profit from the drug trade.18 Indeed, the drug trade is a source of revenue for warlords, insurgents and criminal organisations in control of Afghanistan's border regions, as well as for members of the Afghan government.19 This strengthens the power of non-state actors at the expense of the central government. The cultivation of opium poppy has markedly increased since reconstruction efforts began in 2002. Poppy cultivation rose from 74,045 hectares in 2002 to 131,000 hectares in 2004, and then dipped slightly to 104,000 in 2005. The income of Afghan opium farmers and traffickers is equivalent to roughly 40% of the gross domestic product of the country, which includes both licit and illicit activity. Afghanistan's share of opium production is also 87% of the world total. The number of provinces where opium poppy is cultivated increased from 18 in 1999 to all 32 in 2005.20
B. Lack of a criminal justice system
Seth G. Jones, Fellow at the RAND Corporation and Adjunct Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown, “Averting Failure in Afghanistan” Survival March 2006
Finally, the absence of a viable criminal justice system has made it difficult to ensure security. World Bank data indicate that Afghanistan is in the bottom 1% of countries worldwide in the effectiveness of its rule of law.21 There have been several barriers to improving the justice sector. First, the central government's inability to exert control over the country affects justice sector reform. Warlord commanders, who maintain de facto control over areas seized following the overthrow of the Taliban, have established authority over some local courts. Factional control of courts has led to intimidation of centrally appointed judges. Secondly, the government's inability and unwillingness to address widespread and deep-rooted corruption reduces the effectiveness of the justice system. Corruption is endemic, partly because unqualified personnel loyal to various factions are sometimes installed as court officials. The Supreme Court and Attorney General's Office have been accused of significant corruption.22 A corrupt judiciary is a serious impediment to Afghanistan's ability to establish security and a viable rule of law, since it cripples the legal and institutional mechanisms designed to curb corruption.
C. Afghanistan failure inevitable---demographics and lack of women’s rights
Potts 09 – UC Berkeley professor, chairman of the university's Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability
(Malcolm, 8/23. “The war for Afghanistan's women.” )
There are two wars going on in Afghanistan. One is to defeat the Taliban, and that war is not going well. The other is to liberate women, and that war has hardly begun. If the first war is won but the second is lost, Afghanistan will turn into a failed state -- a caldron of violence and misery, home to extremism and totally outside the Western orbit of influence. Last week's election, however imperfect, is welcome, but it means little as long as women remain enslaved in this patriarchal, tradition-bound culture. In most of the country, a woman needs her husband's permission to leave her home. Domestic violence is tragically common. Indeed, the government elected in 2004 passed, and President Hamid Karzai signed into law, legislation legalizing marital rape. Older men use their wealth and power to marry young women. In April, according to news reports, when a teenage Afghan girl called Gulsima eloped with a boy her own age instead of marrying an older man, she and the boyfriend were shot to death in front of the mosque in the southwest province of Nimrod. Currently, Afghanistan is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman, and -- as is the case everywhere women's rights are nonexistent or in decline -- the birthrate is high. Afghan women have an average of about seven children, and the population has been doubling about every 20 years. Today it is 34 million. According to U.N. estimates, by 2050 it could reach a staggering 90 million. That rapid population growth and the demographics that go with it drive most of Afghanistan's worst problems. All too often, demography is overlooked in developing countries, as I experienced in 2002 when I wrote the budgets for a U.N. agency working to rebuild Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Part of our job was to write a 10-year financial plan. As my colleague from the World Bank was closing his computer, I said, "You do realize in 10 years' time there will be almost 50% more people needing healthcare?" He hadn't. After an expletive and some more hitting of computer keys, the budget totals rose considerably. I made my first visit to Afghanistan in 1969. Even then it was clear that slowing population growth was a prerequisite for feeding Afghanistan, for its socioeconomic progress and for any shred of hope for a stable democracy. One result of rapid population growth is that two-thirds of the Afghan population is below the age of 25. The primary role models for the volatile, testosterone-filled young men in this group are local warlords. The reason Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (who, incidentally, is the 17th child of a man who had 54 children) have found a haven in Afghanistan is largely because of the mixture of loyalty and anger generated among males in such a society, in which there are no genuine economic opportunities for advancement. The word "taliban" means "student." The men who condemned Gulsima and her young boyfriend were probably 18 or 19 years old. So in a country where women have had their fingers cut off because they painted their nails, where the Taliban threw acid on girls trying to go to school, is there any possibility of improving the status of women? Yes. When Karzai signed the law demeaning and controlling women, he did so as an ugly deal to buy the support of the very traditional Shiite minority in the west of the country. But linguistically, culturally and religiously, this population is simply an extension of eastern Iran. And Iran happens to be a powerful example of how family planning can liberate women and change a society for the better. In the 1980s, the typical Iranian woman had almost as many children as her counterpart in Afghanistan today. Even an oil-rich country could not support that rate of population growth. The Koran mentions contraception in a positive light, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the religious leader and founder of Iran's Islamic Republic, endorsed family planning. Iran began to offer a full range of contraceptive choices and even voluntary sterilization. Before young couples could marry, they were required to receive family-planning instruction. The typical Iranian woman now has 2.1 children. The transition in Iran from high to low birthrates was as rapid as that in China, but without a one-child policy, and it has had similar social benefits. Maternal and infant mortality have fallen, and, despite repressive politics, the U.N. Human Development Index, using such measures as education and individual wealth, shows that the country is better off. How would this translate to Afghanistan, which is far behind Iran in so many ways? From my experience, I know that teenage girls in Afghanistan want to be in school, despite the cultural obstacles. And having seen firsthand Afghan women suffering from botched abortions, I am sure some, at least, want fewer children. In addition, Westerners are training female health workers. Private pharmacies often dispense drugs smuggled from neighboring countries. It would be possible to introduce contraceptives, even in remote areas. A stable, modern and functioning Afghanistan is the West's goal. But it is not worth risking the death of one more American or British soldier fighting there unless there is a bold, achievable plan to educate women, enhance their autonomy and meet their need for family planning. This feudal, fundamentalist, warrior society will never join the 21st century -- or even the 16th century -- unless we win the war to liberate women. Unless women are given the freedom to choose whether or when to have a child, by 2050 there will be millions more angry men age 15 to 25 in Afghanistan. If only a tiny percentage are potential insurgents or suicide bombers, no Western army, however large and however strongly backed at home, has the slightest chance of prevailing.
AT: Afghanistan Economy
Long timeframe --- best case scenario for big growth is 10 years
Seema Patel, consultant for the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at CSIS, leading an evaluation study of reconstruction efforts, “Breaking Point: Measuring Progress in Afghanistan” CSIS 2-23-2007 ()
Even with full international support and sound policies and programs, Afghanistan in 10 years will likely still be a poor and underdeveloped country. Sustained growth in the economy and trade will not provide enough jobs and steady income for Afghan families. The central government will struggle to retain legitimacy, to collect revenues for the sustenance of its military and bureaucracy, to eliminate corruption, to deliver social and judicial services, and to extend its presence to the whole country. Pockets of territory will remain or fall under the influence of local strongmen, and Afghans will rely on local and tribal institutions to fill the vacuums left by the state. Historical social divisions between tribes, ethnicities, and regions will persist, and populations will remain isolated from one another and from the center. Neighbors will meddle in Afghanistan’s domestic economy and politics.
Substantial economic growth impossible --- Afghanistan’s too weak
Peter Bergen, Professor at Johns Hopkins, Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, , “Afghanistan Outlook” FNS, Congressional Testimony Before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, 2-15-2007
But I think the overarching point is Afghanistan is a classic sort of glass half empty, half full problem, but the (train ride ?) is definitely going down. And I think we also have to say what a success in Afghanistan -- Afghanistan is never going to become Belgium. It's going to be a poor, weak, fragile state for the foreseeable future. But it's one where security can be improved and it's one where the economy can be slightly improved. And I am optimistic about those things, and we need some of the things that President Bush is talking about today. I think they'll play in quite well with that.
AT: Afghanistan Secession
No Risk of Pashtun secession- they’re too weak
NightWatch, 2010, a member of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), NightWatch, “NightWatch for June 21,” June 21, 2010,
Internal instability, however, always is centripetal. Since the Pashtuns are not fighting to secede, they must capture Kabul if they hope to return to government for all Afghanistan. Otherwise they fail, remaining a chronic, but not terminal, security problem. At this point, they are unable to capture Kabul or to hold territory against NATO. The scale of violence has increased but control of the land has not changed much, based on open source reporting.
AT: Afghanistan Spills Over To Pakistan
No spillover from Afghanistan to Pakistan – Pakistan already maintains ties
Tiedemann 9 (KATHERINE TIEDEMANN 09 policy analyst in the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative specializing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “Withdrawal without winning” )
A second argument, made most recently by Frederick Kagan inthe September 5-6 Wall Street Journal, is that, to quote from its headline, "A stable Pakistan needs a stable Afghanistan." But does it really? Are there reasonable prospects for a stable Afghanistan over the next decade no matter what we do? Isn't there a good argument that part of the problem in Pakistan stems from our continued presence in Afghanistan? We are told that bases in Pakistan are used to support the insurgents in Afghanistan, while simultaneously being told that it is the fighting in Afghanistan that is endangering Pakistan. Reciprocal causation is certainly possible, but this modern version of the turbulent frontier doctrine is not backed by solid logic. Pakistan's ISI and army clearly maintain ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and although they cannot exert anything like complete control, once the danger of a Taliban defeat by the U.S. passes they would have every incentive to reign in their clients. Furthermore, the stability of Pakistan does not depend on pacifying the tribal areas. While the recent efforts by Pakistan to regain control of some of its territory may owe something to our combating the Taliban, I wonder if the effect is a large one. In parallel, it can be argued that we gain general influence over Pakistan by fighting i n Afghanistan, but here not only the magnitude of the effect but its sign is open to question.
Afghan instability won’t affect Pakistan—Pakistani affairs will be affected by internal forces
Pillar, PhD, CIA retiree, 2009 [Paul, “Counterterrorism and Stability in Afghanistan,” 10-14, cpass.georgetown.edu/documents/AfghanHASCPillarOct09_1.doc]
The possible connection of events in Afghanistan to Pakistan has, of course, become a major part of debate on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. Although influencing developments in Pakistan is not why we intervened in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s importance requires that the connections, if any, be addressed. Two questions must be asked. One is how much effect anything happening in Afghanistan is likely to have on the politics and stability of Pakistan. There is a tendency to think of such questions in spatial terms, with visions of malevolent influences suffusing across international boundaries like a contagious disease. But the future of Pakistan will be influenced far more by forces within Pakistan itself. Those forces include the inclinations of the Pakistani population and the will and capabilities of the Pakistani military, which is by far the strongest—in several senses of the term—institution in Pakistan. Pakistan has more than five times the population of Afghanistan and an economy ten times as large. Pakistani policymakers and the Pakistani military have a keen interest in Afghanistan, partly because of concerns about Pashtun nationalism and mostly as a side theater in their rivalry with India. But events inside Afghanistan will not be decisive, or anything close to it, in shaping Pakistan’s future. The other question is exactly what sort of influence, for good or for ill, events in Afghanistan are likely to have on Pakistan even if that influence is marginal rather than decisive. Again, the spatial model of spreading instability tends to dominate thinking, but it is unclear exactly how the model would materialize in practice. Establishment of a hostile regime on one’s borders (and we should note that Islamabad’s relations with the current Afghan government of Hamid Karzai have been anything but cordial) may weaken one’s own internal stability if it offers substantial new resources to an internal opposition or provides a base of operations that the opposition previously lacked. But even establishment of an Afghan Taliban state or proto-state would not do these things to Pakistan. Even if the Afghan Taliban—who have been beneficiaries more than enemies of the Pakistani government—decided to turn their attention away from consolidating domestic power to try to stoke an Islamist fire in Pakistan, they would have few additional resources to offer. And the Pakistani Taliban already have bases of operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which appear as part of Pakistan on maps but which Islamabad has never effectively controlled. In the meantime, an expanded U.S.-led counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is more likely to complicate than to alleviate the task of Pakistani security forces, insofar as it pushes additional militants across the Durand line. A larger U.S. military presence in the immediate region also would make it politically more difficult for the Pakistani government to cooperate openly on security matters with the United States, in the face of widespread negative sentiment inside Pakistan regarding that presence.
AT: African Economies
African economies are resilient --- many conflict states prove
Hawkins 04 Tony Hawkins, University of Pretoria, Institute for Strategic Studies, “The Zimbabwe Economy: Domestic and Regional Implications,” Lexis, 4/1/04
Since the launch of president Robert Mugabe's 'fast-track' land resettlement programme in early 2000 there have been numerous forecasts of the imminent collapse of the Zimbabwe economy. Nearly five years on (June 2004), although it is the world's fastest-shrinking economy, it remains remarkably resilient--a testament to the old adage that African economies do not collapse, but simply fade away into informality and subsistence. That, certainly, was the lesson of conflict economies like Angola and the DRC.
African economies are resilient --- reforms solve
Africa News 99 “Africa At Large: Treasury's Schuerch Discusses Africa Debt Policy,” Lexis, 4/15/99
Mr. Chairman, I would like to take a moment to review the sub-Saharan Africa economic position. I would say that here we can find cause for both encouragement and concern. The immediate road ahead presents a formidable challenge and we need to see a sharp reversal in many trends if positive growth is to be sustained. Africa remains the most protectionist region in the world. In many cases, the process of fundamental reform has just begun. Low investment is a chronic problem, with investment rates still only about 18 percent compared to 25 percent in low-income countries on average. The re- emergence of conflict has been devastating. Some 20 percent of Africans live in countries formally at war or disrupted by war, according to World Bank estimates. Corruption is a serious economic cost -- an area where the World Bank is making a strong push. †††But some underlying trends are the basis for optimism. There has been significant progress in improving social indicators such as education and infant mortality. While there was some weakening in overall economic performance in 1998, it reflected primarily declines in prices of key commodities, including oil, cocoa, and copper, and economic crises in many of Africa's Asian markets. But overall, given the events and forces which have buffeted African economies in the last two years, economic growth proved surprisingly resilient. We believe this resilience reflects the level of basic and continuing economic reform in many countries -- including gains in fiscal stability, decontrol of prices, and liberalization of exchange rates.
Alt caus – corruption and rule of law
Africa News in ‘7 (“Nigeria; Health Workers Are Under Pressure -- Comrade Wabba”, 11-10, L/N)
As a result of this "neo-liberal reform" which was implemented by the immediate past president of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo there have been serious deformities in the healthcare sector, the union boss said. The union boss also lamented that thousands of workers who were retrenched were not paid their severance package up to this moment in the health parastatals. The theme of this year's conference "towards a new agenda of quality healthcare delivery in Nigeria" is aimed at setting a new target for the health workers, to meet the challenges ahead. The conference which has in attendance healthcare service workers' union from West Africa sub-region is also taking stock of the performance of the workers in healthcare delivery in the region. The union boss who also attributed corruption and disobedience to rule of law by health workers as the major cause of mass poverty and diseases in the suba-region also stressed the need for a safe workplace for health workers and professionals in Nigeria and African sub-region.
Poverty is decreasing
Zambia Daily Mail, 9 – 3 – 08
(BBC Monitoring Africa – Political, “World Bank urges Zambians, media to ensure good governance”, L/N)
Meanwhile, the World Bank says that poverty in Africa has reduced even though the reduction was not much. Mr Bruce, however, pointed out that African countries were reducing poverty faster than what was being seen in south Asia. "There is hope for Africa and with so many countries growing at above five per cent, with or without natural resources, the prospects are good," he said.
AT: African Nuclear Wars (Deutch)
1. War in the Congo disproves your impact—it drew in all regional powers and international interests—didn’t go nuclear or escalate
Porteous 04 (Tom, London director of Human Rights Watch and syndicated columnist, writer and analyst who has worked for the BBC and the U.K. Foreign & Commonwealth Office, October. “Resolving African Conflicts.” )
If a storm can be described as perfect, then the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) in the second half of the 1990s was the “perfect war”. Precipitated by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the fall of the West’s client kleptocrat, President Mobutu, and his rotten state, the war in DR Congo was dubbed Africa’s First World War. It directly involved the armed forces of six neighbouring states. It drew in factions and rebel groups from other African wars, the remnant armies of defunct neighbouring regimes, and the usual crowd of international profiteers, would-be peacemakers and humanitarians. It was closely connected with armed conflicts in several neighbouring countries, including those in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Central African Republic, Congo Brazzaville, and Angola. According to one estimate published in 2003 the war may directly and indirectly have caused the deaths of over 4 million people in DR Congo since 1996. As has become increasingly common in Africa the victims were almost all civilians. The war in DR Congo was but one demonstration of the emptiness of the promises of a post Cold War political and economic renaissance for Africa. There was, it is true, the remarkable transition from apartheid to majority rule in South Africa in 1994. There were also instances of handover to multiparty civilian rule in former one-party or military-ruled states like Ghana, Tanzania, Senegal, Mali, Zambia, Malawi, and even Nigeria. But by the end of the 1990s, any political and economic progress since the end of the Cold War had been overshadowed by a series of old and new wars that now engulfed many parts of the continent and were tipping whole regions further into instability and poverty.
2. African wars don’t escalate—this postdates Douche and is more qualified
Porteous 04 (Tom, London director of Human Rights Watch and syndicated columnist, writer and analyst who has worked for the BBC and the U.K. Foreign & Commonwealth Office, October. “Resolving African Conflicts.” )
It would be futile to search for a single explanation for what appears for now to be a trend towards the resolution of African conflicts. Africa’s wars are as heterogeneous as its many nations and communities. The reasons why Angola’s conflict came to end are quite different from the reasons why the belligerents in Sudan’s civil war have been willing to engage seriously in peace talks. However some of the successes of the past three years can be attributed in part to a mixture of fatigue on the part of those fighting African wars and to the fact that both Africans and non-Africans are learning lessons from the many failures of the past fifteen years, are coming up with more creative proposals and solutions to tackle the problem of conflict, and are readier to take risks in implementing them. Although the details vary widely from conflict to conflict, the basic ingredients of resolution remain the same – a combination of military, diplomatic, humanitarian, and economic action delivered by a more or less complex coalition of local, regional and international actors.
3. No escalation – the Cold War is over
Cilliers, 2k - Institute for Security Studies (Jackie, “International Policies, African Realities”, 3/18, )
During the Cold War regional conflicts were at once internationalised and subsumed within the superpower competition and controlled to avoid escalation into nuclear conflict. In the process the strategic relevance of regions such as Africa was elevated as part of the global chess board - pawns in a much larger game. At the beginning of the twenty first century the situation is much changed. Africa has lost its strategic relevance. Apart from humanitarian concerns, only selected areas with exploitable natural resources demand the attention of the larger and more powerful countries. A blurring in the clear demarcation of roles between sub-regional, regional and international organisations - the UN in particular has occurred after the end of the Cold War. During the bi-polar era, the division of labour was clear. The UN mounted peacekeeping operations and deployed political missions, while regional organisations concentrated on preventive diplomacy. The proliferation of internal conflicts after the fall of the Berlin Wall has confounded this clear division. Almost as if to mirror this trend, the increase in the number and the nature of the various actors involved in internal conflicts have further complicated the ability of state-centred negotiations and mediation to succeed. Direct conflict between African states has, in fact, been a relatively isolated phenomenon and those that have taken place have not involved any substantial commitment of resources for peacekeeping operations. Virtually all African conflicts that have involved some type of peacekeeping effort have been conflicts within states. An important reason for this feature is the permeability of African borders and the weakness of African states themselves. This does not deny the fact that virtually all of these internal conflicts have had a regional dimension. In many cases neighbouring countries have involved themselves in the internal affairs of others or allowed their territory to be used as a springboard for such involvement. In others countries do not control their own territory and cannot end cross-border actions, particularly when international boundaries cut through rather than follow broad ethnic and tribal divides. Globally a new security paradigm seems to be emerging. This consists of regions accepting co-responsibility and sharing the burden to police themselves and a dilution of the central role that many had hoped that the United Nations would play in this regard. This agenda is primarily, but not exclusively, driven by the United States that is seeking co-option and burden sharing by others in the hegemonic role that the demise of the Soviet Union had thrust upon it.
Ext #1 – Emperically Denied
Wars across Africa have had all the characteristics that should have triggered Deutsch—denies the impact
Porteous 04 (Tom, London director of Human Rights Watch and syndicated columnist, writer and analyst who has worked for the BBC and the U.K. Foreign & Commonwealth Office, October. “Resolving African Conflicts.” )
In West Africa another regional complex of conflicts, also driven by greed and political disintegration, was in full swing. The late 1990s saw the culmination of the diamond and corruption fuelled rebellion in Sierra Leone that had been going on for a decade. At the start of 2000 a recently signed peace agreement in Sierra Leone was on the brink of failure. Guinea was in danger of being dragged into the conflict. Liberia, nominally at peace after its own war in the first half of the decade but little more than a façade of a state benefiting no one but its gangster-like regime, was still fomenting conflict in all of its neighbours (Sierra Leone, Guinea and Côte D’Ivoire) and was itself edging towards a renewed civil war. Côte D’Ivoire too, once a beacon of prosperity and stability, was increasingly beset by its own internal political troubles that were to develop into armed conflict in 2002. Nigeria, the regional hegemon, was ruled for most of the 1990s by a repressive and corrupt military regime which thrived in part on fomenting ethnic and religious tensions. In the Horn of Africa, Somalia was still without a central government almost a decade after the fall of the last one (the Siad Barre regime which had been backed and armed alternately by both sides in the Cold War). The vacuum of state authority in Somalia left the country in a state of low level conflict and chronic economic weakness, on the one hand vulnerable to external interference and on the other a source of regional instability. To the north of Somalia, border skirmishes between Ethiopia and Eritrea developed into full scale war in 1999. Meanwhile in Sudan, the second phase of the post independence rebellion was well into its second decade and there were no signs of resolution. One peace initiative after another had failed. At the other end of the continent, in Angola, another war that had in an earlier phase been fomented by Cold War rivalry was still raging. Now deprived of their superpower sponsorship, but aided by international businesses which continued to buy the Angolans’ oil and diamonds and sell them weapons, the leaders of both sides (MPLA government and UNITA rebels) were plundering the country to support their war efforts and to fill their foreign bank accounts. In a country fabulously rich in natural resources, including agriculture, the majority of the peasant population were living in desperate poverty, many of them living on food handouts from the international humanitarian relief system. Africa’s wars in the 1990s were all very different in their specifics. But they shared a number of important characteristics. First, one of the main underlying causes of these wars was the weakness, the corruption, the high level of militarization, and in some cases the complete collapse, of the states involved. Secondly, they all involved multiple belligerents fighting for a multiplicity of often shifting economic and political motivations. Thirdly, they all had serious regional dimensions and regional implications. And fourthly they were all remarkable for the brutality of the tactics (ranging from mass murder and ethnic cleansing, to amputation, starvation, forced labour, rape and cannibalism) used by belligerents to secure their strategic objectives.
Existing conflicts should have trigged the impact
The New Times 08 (8/29, Africa News, “Rwanda; PM Encourages EASBIRG States to Contribute Funds,” Lexis.)
Makuza reiterated the need for a speedy establishment of the Standby Brigade because of several conflicts in the region that have hampered development. "The Eastern Africa region is one that has been plagued with conflicts and calamities. Existing conflicts such as those in the Horn of Africa, Darfur, the presence of threats to Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi in Eastern Congo are clear examples of the need to have a robust peace and security mechanism," said the Premier. The director of the EASBRIG Coordination Mechanism (EASBRICOM), Simon Mulongo, said that so far, the organization has finalized an eight objective strategic plan which include elaboration on the structures and processes that can support the full range of the standby force. "Also incorporated in the plan is the development of a force support system capable of sustaining regional capabilities," said Mulongo, who heads the Nairobi-based EASBRICOM. Earlier in the week, he had informed the meeting that brought together Chiefs of Defence Staff that the operational exercise of the force will be conducted in November this year. Rwanda has already made available one battalion as her contribution to the brigade.
Ext #2 – Don’t Escalate
No escalation—U.N., African initiatives, great power incentives for cooperation
Porteous 04 (Tom, London director of Human Rights Watch and syndicated columnist, writer and analyst who has worked for the BBC and the U.K. Foreign & Commonwealth Office, October. “Resolving African Conflicts.” )
At the UN, following the publication of a hard hitting report2 in 2000 on UN peacekeeping operations, there has been significant improvement in planning and capacity at the Department for Peacekeeping Operations. There also appears to be a new readiness on the part of the Security Council (which prior to the Iraq crisis devoted a majority of its time to deliberating about conflicts in Africa) to equip UN missions in Africa and elsewhere with the mandate and capacity to do their job (once the UN operation in Liberia is fully deployed, the three largest UN peacekeeping operations in the world will all be in Africa). Crucially there is also now a UN Security Council acknowledgement of the imperative to incorporate the protection of civilians into the mandates of UN and other peace support operations. Other UN mechanisms have also been deployed to help nudge African conflicts towards resolution including special panels to monitor sanctions in Angola, Liberia and Somalia, a special panel monitoring the links between conflict and the exploitation of resources in DR Congo, international war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and Sierra Leone and the establishment of a special UN office headed by a senior official to examine the many regional dimensions of conflict in West Africa. In Africa itself, there is a new recognition among leaders like South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade, Ghana’s John Kuffuor, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, and the new Chairman of the African Union (AU), Alpha Omar Konare, of the negative impact of Africa’s wars on the prospects for the whole continent and a determination that Africans themselves should play a more active and creative role in ending wars. As usual there is a lot of rhetoric. But there is some substance too. The new mood (symbolised by Mbeki’s ambitious blueprint for an African renaissance, the New Partnership for African Development3) has been translated into some successful African peace initiatives on the ground (e.g. in Burundi and DR Congo) and into a programme to reform Africa’s own regional security communities4 and to increase Africa’s own peacekeeping capacity. Among the big Western powers, particularly the US, the French and the UK, there has been a greater engagement on Africa at a higher political level and a greater willingness to bury past differences on Africa and co-operate. This has been in part because of a real sense of guilt at the failure of the West to prevent or halt the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. But it is also because of a new post 9/11 consensus in the West that, quite apart from humanitarian concerns, there are compelling strategic reasons (oil, Islam and terrorism) for preventing Africa from slipping further into poverty and conflict. In policy terms these factors have led to greater support for Africa’s own efforts to deal with conflict, support for beefed up UN operations and, when all else fails, a greater preparedness to commit Western troops in response to African crises.
AT: Agroterror
1. No FMD attack – lacks shock value, terrorists prefer spectaculars
Seebeck 07 – Professor of Complex Systems Anaylsis @ Queensland University of Technology [Lesley Seebeck (Ph.D from the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Queensland University), “Responding to Systemic Crisis: The Case of Agroterrorism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 30, Issue 8 August 2007, pages 691 – 721]
With high target vulnerability and ease of access to resources, the key question is one of intent: a judgment concerning the achievement of political coercion. Of itself, it's not likely that an FMD attack would be an effective means of coercion—certainly AQ and others have not been attracted to strictly infrastructure attacks in Western nations. That an agroterrorist attack lacks the shock value of immediate and bloody human carnage could prove the best defense against such a possibility. Still, other factors need to be considered where AQ—and its subsidiaries—are concerned. AQ has established itself as favoring “spectaculars,” which it achieves through leveraging organization, local cells with local knowledge, and using the everyday in an innovative fashion. Although the pressures of the global war on terror have led AQ and its subsidiaries to focus on more limited tactical strikes, AQ by nature is adaptive,112 and should the opportunity arise is likely to seek more adventurous operations. In judging the attractiveness of FMD as a terrorist tool, one needs to consider organization, coordination, and escalation. For example, an FMD attack may be synchronized with multiple point sources, synchronized with other forms of attack, or signaling intent to escalate.
2. No military retaliation
A. No perceived as a proportional response
Chalk 04 - Analyst at RAND specializing in international terrorism and emerging threats. [Peter Chalk, Hitting America’s Soft Underbelly: The Potential Threat of Deliberate Biological Attacks Against the U.S. Agricultural and Food Industry, RAND Corporation]
In addition, the mechanics and potential impact of agroterrorism give this type of aggression a sizable payoff in the form of extortion and blackmail. Unlike with human-directed biological threats, terrorists could firmly establish the credibility of their intention to carry out a bio-assault by proceeding with an attack, safe in the knowledge that they are unlikely to elicit massive retaliation from a government that feels all limits on coercive counteraction have been lifted. Certainly, destroying cattle en masse would not elicit the same sort of institutional counterterrorist response as would killing thousands of civilians with the plague or anthrax. Moreover, given the potential immediate and latent damage that could be inflicted by repeated attacks, both state and federal governments would have a strong incentive to negotiate with the terrorists. Pg. 27
B. Public anxiety prevents
Huddy et al. 05 – Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY [Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman (Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY), Charles Taber (Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY) & Gallya Lahav (Professor of political science @ Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY), “Threat, Anxiety, and Support of Antiterrorism Policies,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 49, No. 3, July 2005, Pp. 593–608]
The findings from this study lend further insight into the future trajectory of support for antiterrorism measures in the United States when we consider the potential effects of anxiety. Security threats in this and other studies increase support for military action (Jentleson 1992; Jentleson and Britton 1998;Herrmann,Tetlock, and Visser 1999). But anxious respondents were less supportive of belligerent military action against terrorists, suggesting an important source of opposition to military intervention. In the aftermath of 9/11, several factors were consistently related to heightened levels of anxiety and related psychological reactions, including living close to the attack sites (Galea et al. 2002; Piotrkowski and Brannen 2002; Silver et al. 2002), and knowing someone who was hurt or killed in the attacks (in this study). It is difficult to say what might happen if the United States were attacked again in the near future. Based on our results, it is plausible that a future threat or actual attack directed at a different geographic region would broaden the number of individuals directly affected by terrorism and concomitantly raise levels of anxiety. This could, in turn, lower support for overseas military action. In contrast, in the absence of any additional attacks levels of anxiety are likely to decline slowly over time (we observed a slow decline in this study), weakening opposition to future overseas military action. Since our conclusions are based on analysis of reactions to a single event in a country that has rarely felt the effects of foreign terrorism, we should consider whether they can be generalized to reactions to other terrorist incidents or to reactions under conditions of sustained terrorist action. Our answer is a tentative yes, although there is no conclusive evidence on this point as yet. Some of our findings corroborate evidence from Israel, a country that has prolonged experience with terrorism. For example, Israeli researchers find that perceived risk leads to increased vilification of a threatening group and support for belligerent action (Arian 1989; Bar-Tal and Labin 2001). There is also evidence that Israelis experienced fear during the Gulf War, especially in Tel Aviv where scud missiles were aimed (Arian and Gordon 1993). What is missing, however, is any evidence that anxiety tends to undercut support for belligerent antiterrorism measures under conditions of sustained threat. For the most part, Israeli research has not examined the distinct political effects of anxiety. In conclusion, the findings from this study provide significant new evidence on the political effects of terrorism and psychological reactions to external threat more generally. Many terrorism researchers have speculated that acts of terrorist violence can arouse fear and anxiety in a targeted population, which lead to alienation and social and political dislocation.8 We have clear evidence that the September 11 attacks did induce anxiety in a sizeable minority of Americans. And these emotions were strongly associated with symptoms of depression, appeared to inhibit learning about world events, and weakened support foroverseas military action. This contrasted, however, with Americans’ dominant reaction, which was a heightened concern about future terrorist attacks in the United States that galvanized support for government antiterrorist policy. In this sense, the 9/11 terrorists failed to arouse sufficient levels of anxiety to counteract Americans’ basic desire to strike back in order to increase future national security, even if such action increased the shortterm risk of terrorism at home. Possible future acts of terrorism, or a different enemy, however, could change the fine balance between a public attuned to future risks and one dominated by anxiety. Pg. 605-606
AT: AIDs
1. HIV is not capable of wiping out the world’s population – science and history prove
Caldwell, 03 George, PhD in Biology and Political Science,
Disease could wipe out mankind.[sic] It is clear that HIV/AIDS will not accomplish this – it is not even having a significant impact on slowing the population explosion in Africa, where prevalence rates reach over thirty percent in some countries. But a real killer plague could certainly wipe out mankind. The interesting thing about plagues, however, is that they never seem to kill everyone – historically, the mortality rate is never 100 per cent (from disease alone). Based on historical evidence, it would appear that, while plagues may certainly reduce human population, they are not likely to wipe it out entirely. This notwithstanding, the gross intermingling of human beings and other species that accompanies globalization nevertheless increases the likelihood of global diseases to high levels.
2. They have zero internal links about solving globally – even if they protect one critical area there is no evidence that medicine would be distributed globally – the problem lies within poverty and lack of education and access
3. Their statistics are horrendously inaccurate
The Nation (Nairobi), Wandera Ojanji, Africa News, November 16, 2000
Statistics quoted by most development agencies suggest millions of Kenyans are sick and dying. Expert opinion is questioning the authenticity of these figures. About thirty per cent of all Kenyans (8.4 million) are infected with tuberculosis, with about 16,700 dying every year. Seventy per cent or 20 million are exposed to malaria every year with 26,000 children below five years dying every year (or 72 children a day). More than 2.2 million Kenyans are infected with HIV, with 240,000 dying every year from Aids Between 20 and 30 per cent of Kenyans are either suffering from typhoid or are carriers of the disease, of which a third (over 1.9million) eventually die even after seeking medical treatment. The figures are far much above the official figures given by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). Take for instance Aids. According to the estimates, it is said to be killing 182,500 people annually. The total reported deaths, from all causes, by CBS were 185,576 in 1997 and 221,543 in 1998. Consequently this would mean only about 3000 people died from other causes than Aids in 1997. The head of Health Information Systems at the Ministry of Health Mr. Godfrey M Baltazar says of the quoted HIV/Aids cases: "These estimates are subject to wide margins of error. They are based on blood samples taken from pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in a few sentinel sites, all of which are in urban areas and assumed to be representative of the entire Kenyan population, which they are not. Their extrapolation to non-pregnant women, males and the rural population are based on assumptions which have little empirical foundation." Until mid this year, Mr. Baltazar was an epidemiological officer at National Aids and STI Control Council ( NASCOP) . He argued that in the absence of a population or community survey, these figures cannot be accepted as credible. Kenya has not done any. "Such surveys are very critical as this is the only way to validate the data." Health statistics estimated are mainly done by the WHO. It is said that after the ministry forwards the figures to WHO. The latter will then subject the data to farther mathematical processes, apparently to take care of the 'low under- reporting rates' of government agencies. This has in the past created glaring discrepancies between government figures and those floated by private or non- governmental agencies. This argument is strongly supported by Prof Charles Geshekter of California State University, USA who accuses the players for deliberately adopting very misleading ways of determining HIV cases in Africa that generate very wrong and scary figures. In Africa, the Western public officials determine the presence of Aids based on a set of symptoms rather than on the confirmation by blood testing, the standards used in America and Europe. In Africa, Aids is defined, according to WHO, as a combination of fever, persistent cough, diarrhoea and a 10 per cent loss of body weight. "It is impossible to distinguish these common symptoms from those of malaria, TB or the indigenous diseases of the impoverished lands." argues Geshekter
4. No mutation – it’s not likely and viral mutations always short-circuit
Bernard Fields, M.D., Adele Lehman Professor and Chairman of the Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School, “Emerging Viruses,” edited by Stephen S. Morse, 1993
I think the answer has to lie in the fact that there is an enormous difference in the selective pressures faced by a virus growing in the relatively undemanding environment of cell culture, which illustrates the capacity of a virus to change, and life in the real world, where the virus must survive in a specific environment and as well as within a host, providing the virus with a series of constraints and selective pressures (Tyler and Fields, 1991). When the virus enters a host, there are a series of sequential steps within the host, each of which places further constraints on the virus (Sharpe and Fields, 1985). Because of these constraints, at many points in the life cycle of the virus, much of the potential of the virus to change results in viruses that cannot survive since it will be missing critical properties. We are dealing with a constantly shifting interaction between the virus in the host and its own intrinsic capacity to change. The viral lifestyle thus places constraints and selective pressures on viral evolution. This lifestyle involves infecting host cells, then using the viral genetic information to direct cellular machinery to make viral products. Unlike other organisms, viruses reproduce themselves or make viral products only when a host cell can do this for them under the genetic control of the virus. Because of this, the host-virus interaction is key to many aspects of viral disease.
Ext #1 – AIDS will not Cause Extinction
No extinction – drugs are getting stronger
Andrew Sullivan, editor of The New Republic, Love Undetectable, 1998, p.8
You could see it in the papers. Almost overnight, toward the end of 1996, the obituary pages in the gay press began to dwindle. Soon after, the official statistics followed. Within a year, AIDS deaths had plummeted 60 percent in California, 44 percent across the country as a whole. In time, it was shown that triple combination therapy in patients who had never taken drugs before kept close to 90 percent of them at undetectable levels of virus for two full years. Optimism about actually ridding the body completely of virus dissipated; what had at one point been conceivable after two years stretched to three and then longer. But even for those who had developed resistance to one or more drugs, the future seemed tangibly brighter. New, more powerful treatments were fast coming on- stream, month after month. What had once been a handful of treatment options grew to over twenty. In trials, the next generation of AZT packed a punch ten times as powerful as its original; and new, more focused forms of protease inhibitor carried with them even greater promise. It was still taboo, of course, to mention this hope—for fear it might encourage a return to unsafe sex and a new outburst of promiscuity. But, after a while, the numbers began to speak for themselves.
AIDS will NOT cause extinction
Andrew Sullivan, editor of The New Republic, Love Undetectable, 1998, p.7
So I do not apologize for the following sentence. It is true- and truer now than it was when it was first spoken, and truer now than even six months ago- that something profound in the history of AIDS has occurred these last two years. The power of the new treatments and the even greater power of those now in the pipeline are such that a diagnosis of HIV infection in the West is not just different in degree today than, say, in 1994. For those who can get medical care, the diagnosis is quite different in kind. It no longer signifies death. It merely signifies illness. This is a shift as immense as it is difficult to grasp. So let me make what I think is more than a semantic point: a plague is not the same thing as a disease. It is possible, for example, for a plague to end, while a disease continues. A plague is something that cannot be controlled, something with a capacity to spread exponentially out of its borders, something that kills and devastates with democratic impunity, something that robs human beings of the ability to respond in any practical way. Disease, in contrast, is generally diagnosable and treatable, with varying degrees of success; it occurs at a steady or predictable rate; it counts its progress through the human population one person, and often centuries, at a time. Plague, on the other hand, cannot be cured, and it never affects one person. It affects many, and at once, and swiftly. And by its very communal nature, by its unpredictability and by its devastation, plague asks questions disease often doesn't. Disease is experienced; plague is spread. Disease is always with us; plagues come and go. And some time toward the end of the millennium in America, the plague of AIDS went.
Ext #2 – AIDS Inevitable
OVERLAPPING SEXUAL RELATIONS AND MAKES THE SPREAD OF HIV/AIDS INEVITABLE.
Andrew RICE, The Nation, 6-11-07 (“An African Solution,” Vol. 284 Issue 23, p25-31, 5p, Ebsco)
There is an important difference, though, and Epstein believes it explains Africa’s ex ceptional susceptibility to AIDS. Americans tend to leave one relationship for the next. Ugandans—or, rather, Ugandan men—don’t have to choose. Another way of describing this phenomenon is to say that Europeans and Americans typically have lovers consecutively, while Africans— men and women alike—are commonly involved in several overlapping relationships. Studies have found that such “concurrent or simultaneous sexual partnerships are far more dangerous than serial monogamy,” Epstein writes, “because they link people up in a giant web of sexual relationships that creates ideal conditions for the rapid spread of HIV.” In any given sexual encounter, an HIV-positive person has around a 1-in-100 chance of passing on the virus. That’s a long shot in the context of a one-off tryst with a prostitute, but extended over the course of an enduring relationship, the chance of infection rises to near-certainty. Also, in many African cultures, men are not circumcised, which considerably increases their vulnerability. (Recent studies suggest this simple procedure cuts in half a man’s risk of infection.) Epstein produces a series of charts that the reader can view like a flip book, showing how a single case of HIV can spread through a network of concurrent relationships in just a few months.
HUNGER IS THE MAIN PRIORITY – AIDS HAS BEEN ACCEPTED AS INEVITABLE UNDER TRADITIONAL BEHAVIOR.
GLAUSER, AND BLAKE, 07 (Wendy, Blake, “With the Best Intentions” Canadian Business; 4/9/2007, Vol. 80 Issue 8, p21-26, 5p, Ebsco)
Why? For those living in the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where many people don't live past 40 and avoiding hunger is the main priority, the pandemic is not necessarily a major concern, according to Mwenda. "The NGOs assume that people are stupid, that if you just give them the information, the next day they'll be lined up buying condoms," he says. "But it doesn't work like that. Only if NGOs can sort out the mortality rates will peoples behaviour change." Mortality rates, however, will be solved only with improved transportation, better health care, proper medicine and the money to pay for it.
Ext #4 – No Mutation
Virus fatality is determined by the host, not the microbe – mutations won’t matter
Alison Jacobson, Department of Microbiology at the University of Cape Town, excerpts from “Emerging and Re-Emerging Viruses: An Essay,” 1995, bocklabs.wisc.edu/ed/ebolasho.html
These constraints on viral evolution are not surprising when one considers the selective pressures imposed by the host at each stage of the virus life cycle. Tissue tropism determinants, include site of entry, viral attachment proteins, host cell receptors, tissue- specific genetic elements (for example promoters), host cell enzymes (like proteinase), host transcription factors, and host resistance factors such as age, nutrition and immunity. Host factors contribute significantly: sequences such as hormonally responsive promoter elements and transcriptional regulatory factors can link viral expression to cell state. The interaction of virus and host is thus complex but highly ordered, and can be altered by changing a variety of conditions. Unlike bacterial virulence, which is largely mediated by bacterial toxins and virulence factors, viral virulence often depends on host factors, such as cellular enzymes that cleave key viral molecules. Because virulence is multigenic, defects in almost any viral gene may attenuate a virus. For example, some reassortments of avian influenza viruses are less virulent in primates than are either parental strain, indicating that virulence is multigenic (Treanor and Murphy 1990).
AT: AIDS causes Conflict
AIDS doesn’t cause state collapse or widespread conflict
Whiteside ‘06
(Alan, Dir – Health Economics – U Kwazulu-Natal, Et al., Oxford U. Press, “AIDS, Security and the Miltary in Africa: A Sober Appraisal”, 1-18)
One well-argued means whereby HIV/AIDS is likely to undermine national stability is through an increase in crime. Regarding this assertion, there is one well-established association and many speculations. The demonstrable link is through a change in the demographic structure of a population affected by AIDS, principally an increase in the proportion of young men in the total population. A society’s crime rate is generally correlated with the proportion of its members that are young men, the demographic category most likely to commit crimes.24 The speculations surround the possibility that children orphaned by AIDS are more likely to become criminals. However plausible the postulated links, there is no empirical evidence for this.25
A second correlation is between economic performance and regime stability. Many studies show that weak economic performance is an indicator of political instability and particularly that democracies are imperilled by economic downturns. Insofar as HIV/AIDS increases economic strains, it follows that it contributes to political instability. However, like all correlations in political science, this one is based on data pertaining to a particular historical period. Who is to say that the circumstances of contemporary Africa, which involve important changes in governance structures and norms, and which include both the AIDS epidemic and the international response to that (including massive financial assistance), will not lead to major changes in the patterns of regime change? For example, it is notable that since the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) ruled that forcible changes of government are unacceptable, the number of successful coups d’etat has fallen markedly.
Moreover, even if the correlation were to remain good, what does it tell us? One of the most celebrated statistical correlations is between infant mortality rates and state survival, a link that led farsighted demographers to predict the demise of the Soviet Union many years before it actually occurred. But no one would claim that the increasing infant mortality rate in the USSR actually caused its collapse. Those who argue that no state can retain legitimacy while presiding over the catastrophic mortality increases that follow an AIDS epidemic need to explain exactly how such state crisis could occur.
Some of the speculative links between AIDS and state crisis can be readily dismissed. For example, it is highly improbable that one nation will see that its neighbour’s military has been heavily hit by AIDS and decide this is the opportunity to invade. No serious observer of contemporary Africa would consider such a scenario. Similarly, it is unlikely that a group that believes itself disadvantaged in the distribution of ARVs would stage a coup or take over the ministry of health. There do not appear to be any empirical links between AIDS and terrorism whatsoever — the idea of people living with AIDS flocking to volunteer as suicide bombers collapses at the first scrutiny.
More serious attention needs to be directed to the ways in which the HIV/AIDS epidemic erodes institutional capacity, creates poverty and despair, and intensifies dependence on international aid. These are all serious pressures which jeopardize the development of sound democratic governance and can intensify crisis. The case for AIDS contributing to national insecurity is best stated in its minimal form: there is no element in the HIV/AIDS epidemic that contributes positively to good governance, with the possible exception of the epidemic sparking social mobilization.
AT: AIDS Global Spread (Africa Specific)
LARGE OUTBREAKS OF AIDS ARE LIMITED TO AFRICA, SPREAD IS EMPIRICALLY DENIED.
Andrew Rice, The Nation, 6-11-07 (“An African Solution,” Vol. 284 Issue 23, p25-31, 5p, Ebsco)
For all our worrying, the “HIV rate in the United States never exceeded one percent,” Helen Epstein writes in her new book, The Invisible Cure. “At first, some UN officials predicted that HIV would spread rapidly in the general population of Asia and eastern Europe, but the virus has been present in these regions for decades and such extensive spread has never occurred.” Sub-Saharan Africa is a different story. In some countries there, well over 30 percent of adults younger than 50 are thought to be infected with HIV. To appreciate the scale of the epidemiological disaster, consider this: Hear disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, killed some 650,000 Americans in 2004. If AIDS had hit this country as hard as it has Zimbabwe or Botswana, 3–4 million Americans would be dying of AIDS every year.
AT: AIDS Hurts Infrastructure
COUNTRIES WON’T BE INCAPACITATED BY AIDS – STABLE INFRASTRUCTURE CAN SUSTAIN AN OUTBREAK.
Landis Mackellar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis William McGreevey Futures Group, 2003 (Foreign Affairs; Jul/Aug2003, Vol. 82 Issue 4, p211-212, 2p, Ebsco)
According to Eberstadt, hivffiaids will have two negative impacts on the three countries' economic output. First, deaths from aids will reduce the size of the labor force, and second, the epidemic will reduce output per worker. Even if one accepts the former, the latter is still a dubious proposition. Eberstadt assumes that these societies and economies will have absolutely no capacity to adjust in any way, or to cope with the negative socioeconomic effects of the disease. Yet such total incapacitation is quite contrary to the nature of human societies. In order to find credible the consequences of the hivffiaids epidemic in Russia posited by Eberstadt, one must believe that the disease's impact on investment and productivity will be not only serious but catastrophic and unprecedented in the era of modern economic growth. His results for India and China are equally flawed. They too assume that output per worker moves in lock step with life expectancy, there being no possibility for coping strategies or adaptation. Decision-makers and opinion leaders should beware of any conclusions based on such a faulty premise.
AT: AIDS ( Instability (Africa Specific)
AIDS DOESN’T CONTRIBUTE TO CONFLICT AND REPRESSION IN AFRICA. POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT AND DEMOCRACY STILL SPREAD DESPITE INFECTIONS.
Alex DeWaal 07, program director at Social Science Research Council and a lecturer on the Department of Government, Harvard University, author of AIDS and Power: Why There is No Political Crisis—Yet, 2007 (“The Politics of a Health Crisis” Harvard International Review; Spring2007, Vol. 29 Issue 1, p20-24, 5p)
Some of these fears are indeed materializing. Others still loom. But some have been proven unfounded or at least exaggerated. Foremost among the dire predictions that have not come true is the expectation that the epidemic would cause a governance crisis, leaving conflict, repression, and anarchy in its wake. Africa has these ills aplenty, but AIDS has not been indicated in their etiology. Since 1999, the University of Cape Town has conducted public opinion surveys in a growing number of African countries. These "Afrobarometer" surveys are a rich source of data on what ordinary citizens think. They have revealed a simple but surprising fact about public opinion; namely that AIDS is never at the top of the list of issues of concern for a population. That position is occupied by unemployment, poverty, famine, and crime, depending on the country in question. Although "health" occasionally comes in at number two, AIDS very rarely breaks into the top three, or even top five issues, though in some countries, notably South Africa, it has been climbing the ladder of concern. AIDS occupies a commensurately marginal place in African political life. No African government has been overthrown because of its AIDS policies. No election has been decided on this issue. In fact, in South Africa, die ruling African National Congress (ANC) was reelected with an increased majority in 2004 despite President Thabo Mbeki's notorious denial that HIV' causes AIDS. True, South .Africa has seen street protests over access to treatment, but the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which organizes them, has no counterparts elsewhere in the continent. Furthermore, its agenda is reform and not revolution. Surprising as it may seem to AIDS activists from else where, many TAC leaders remain loyal ANC members. Their dispute with Mbeki is not the insurrectionary fervor of the ANC toppling apartheid, but rather one wing of the new political establishment struggling to bring its errant colleagues back in line. Why is it that a disease which will kill one in six adult Africans and more than half of adults in the continent's southernmost six countries is not the subject of overwhelming political passion? The demographer John Caldwell noted that life expectancy In many African cities is comparable to that in France during World War I—and bas been over a much longer period than those four years of war but while France was traumatized by the death of so many young men, political life in Africa continues in a remarkably normal way; democracy is actually spreading
AFRICA’S AIDS CRISIS WON’T SPILL OVER INTO MILITARY CONFLICT OR GLOBAL ECONOMIC PROBLEMS.
Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, Senior Adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research, Foreign Affairs November 2002 - December 2002
Africa's AIDS catastrophe is a humanitarian disaster of world historic proportions, yet the economic and political reverberations from this crisis have been remarkably muted outside the continent itself. The explanation for this awful dissonance lies in the region's marginal status in global economics and politics. By many measures, for example, sub-Saharan Africa's contribution to the world economy is less than Switzerland's. In military affairs, no regional state, save perhaps South Africa, has the capacity to conduct overseas combat operations, and indeed sub-Saharan governments are primarily preoccupied with local troubles. The states of the region are thus not well positioned to influence events much beyond their own borders under any circumstances, good or ill -- and the cruel consequence is that the world pays them little attention
AT: AIDS ( National Insecurity
Empirically the U.S. and E.U. have grown stronger as a result of AIDS – won’t be taken out by disease spread
David P. Fidler, Professor of Law, Indiana University School of Law, 2003, George Washington International Law Review, 35 Geo. Wash. Int'l L. Rev. 787, p. 818-9
The more general threat from infectious diseases proves harder to connect with the realpolitik perspective on national security. The literature on the public health-national security linkage posits two kinds of threats from naturally occurring infectious diseases: direct and indirect. The direct threat comes from pathogenic microbes "invading" a state through global travel and trade, undermining military, economic, and political capabilities and thus the state's foundations of power. The indirect threat manifests itself when infectious diseases contribute to "state failure" in other regions of the world, causing military, political, and economic instability that adversely affects the strategic interests of other states. HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is an example experts frequently employ in the public health-national security linkage literature to argue that infectious disease problems in other countries represent an indirect national security threat to the United States. From the realpolitik perspective, the "direct threat" argument is hard to maintain in connection with the national security of the great powers, which are the primary focus of realism. HIV/AIDS "invaded" the United States and European nations during the 1980s and caused epidemics. Infectious disease morbidity and mortality, and the economic costs associated with dealing with the consequences, have climbed in the United States and other nations over the past twenty years. The increasing problems associated with microbial invaders specifically and infectious diseases generally did not, however, undermine or challenge the great power status of the United States and countries in Western Europe. Analysts of international politics generally recognized that the United States and Europe grew in absolute and relative power during the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the time period associated with emerging and re- emerging infectious diseases. n147 For the United States as a great power, the microbial incursion of HIV/AIDS and other pathogens has not affected its ability to defend the nation against external attack or project its power in other regions of the world. As Price-Smith concluded, "the globalization of disease is not a direct threat to the security of industrialized nations at the present time."
There is no link between disease outbreaks and national security
P. Fidler, Professor of Law, Indiana University School of Law, 2003, George Washington International Law Review, 35 Geo. Wash. Int'l L. Rev. 787, p. 795-6
Despite the Clinton administration's claim that infectious diseases, especially HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, represented a national security threat to the United States, the administration behaved in ways that indicated it did not practice what it preached. The most glaring discrepancy on this issue came in the hard line the Clinton administration took against developing countries, such as South Africa, that sought to increase access to antiretroviral therapies for HIV/AIDS-ravaged populations. Reviewing the National Intelligence Council's report on The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States in Foreign Affairs, Philip Zelikow argued: "The analysis is fascinating, and the case for international humanitarian action is compelling. But why invoke the "national security" justification for intervention? The case for direct effects on U.S. security is thin. Frustration also accompanied efforts to delineate the linkage. CBACI and the CSIS International Security Program engaged in an eighteen-month research project on the question of whether the "growing number of intersections between health and security issues create a national security challenge for the United States" only to conclude that "we still cannot provide a definitive answer."
Perception is key – disease outbreaks are not perceived as a security threat
David P. Fidler, Professor of Law, Indiana University School of Law, 2003, George Washington International Law Review, 35 Geo. Wash. Int'l L. Rev. 787, p. 839-41
As analyzed above, arguments that infectious diseases coming from other countries through international trade and travel constitute a direct national security threat to the United States were not persuasive. "Germs don't recognize borders" did not impress the national security community in the United States, and the seismic shift precipitated by the anthrax attacks reinforces this skepticism. At the time of this writing, for example, the global spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) - a new, contagious disease causing severe public health and economic problems in Asia and Canadan226 - was not being discussed in the United States as a national security issue, except in connection with how SARS may affect U.S. military efforts in Iraq. The emerging concept of public health security in the United States only weakly recognizes the national security importance of the globalization of infectious diseases. This argument does not mean that the globalization of infectious diseases is entirely absent from the post-anthrax U.S. foreign policy agenda. The Bush administration's national security strategy includes frequent references to the foreign policy importance of HIV/AIDS, and President Bush's announcement in January 2003 of an Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief represented a dramatic proposal for increased U.S. humanitarian assistance to nations in Africa and the Caribbean significantly affected by HIV/AIDS. n229 As indicated earlier in this Article, not all foreign policy issues rise, however, to the level of being national security concerns. As a consequence, global infectious disease problems do not feature strongly in the emerging scope and substance of public health security in the United States.
AT: Air Polution
1. Air pollution has tons of causes – no way to solve them all
BROOK et al 04 M.D. and several other doctors writing for Circulation magazine from the American Heart Association [Circulation magazine Robert D. Brook, MD; Barry Franklin, PhD, Chair; Wayne Cascio, MD; Yuling Hong, MD, PhD; George Howard, PhD; Michael Lipsett, MD; Russell Luepker, MD; Murray Mittleman, MD, ScD; Jonathan Samet, MD; Sidney C. Smith, Jr, MD; Ira Tager, MD, “Air Pollution and the Cardiovascular Disease” June 1, 2004, ] k ward
A brief description of several individual air pollutants is provided first for background. A complete discussion is beyond the scope of this statement, and interested readers may find a more comprehensive review on this subject elsewhere.26 Particulate Matter Airborne Particulate Matter consists of a heterogeneous mixture of solid and liquid particles suspended in air, continually varying in size and chemical composition in space and time (Figure 1). Primary particles are emitted directly into the atmosphere, such as diesel soot, whereas secondary particles are created through physicochemical transformation of gases, such as nitrate and sulfate formation from gaseous nitric acid and sulfur dioxide (SO2), respectively. The numerous natural and anthropogenic sources of PM include motor vehicle emissions, tire fragmentation and resuspension of road dust, power generation and other industrial combustion, smelting and other metal processing, agriculture, construction and demolition activities, residential wood burning, windblown soil, pollens and molds, forest fires and combustion of agricultural debris, volcanic emissions, and sea spray. Although there are thousands of chemicals that have been detected in PM in different locations, some of the more common constituents include nitrates, sulfates, elemental and organic carbon, organic compounds (eg, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), biological compounds (eg, endotoxin, cell fragments), and a variety of metals (eg, iron, copper, nickel, zinc, and vanadium).
2. air quality improving – will continue
Schwartz 03 Adjunct Scholar @ Competitive Enterprise Institute [Joel Schwartz, “Particulate Air Pollution: weighing the risks” April 2003 ] Kevin W. Prep ‘11
America’s air quality has vastly improved in recent decades due to progressive emission reductions from industrial facilities and motor vehicles. The country achieved this success despite substantial increases in population, automobile travel, and energy production. Air pollution will continue to decline, both because more recent vehicle models start out cleaner and stay cleaner as they age than earlier ones, and also because already-adopted standards for new vehicles and existing power plants and industrial facilities come into effect in the next few years.
3. Air pollution has no negative impact - multiple studies prove PLUS their evidence relies on media hype
Schwartz 03 Adjunct Scholar @ Competitive Enterprise Institute [Joel Schwartz, “Particulate Air Pollution: weighing the risks” April 2003 ] Kevin W. Prep ‘11
PM and other air pollutants have been declining for decades. Current trends in vehicle-fleet turnover and already-adopted regulations for industrial sources of pollution ensure continued pollution declines in coming years. The case for long-term harm from current levels is relatively weak, while short-term changes in PM levels likely shorten life by no more than a matter of days. Despite this relatively optimistic picture, the public’s view of air pollution is just the opposite of reality. Numerous polls show most Americans believe that air pollution has been getting worse or will get worse in the future, and that air pollution is a serious threat to most people’s health.136 One reason for Americans’ misperception may be a series of reports from activist groups featuring alarmist rhetoric and misleading portrayals of air pollution levels and health effects.137 These reports come under scary titles such as “Darkening Skies;” “Death, Disease and Dirty Power;” and “Power to Kill;” and claim that power plant PM pollution causes 30,000 deaths per year, mainly from coal-fired power plants in the eastern United States. Each of these reports sources the 30,000 deaths claim back to a study commissioned by the Clean Air Task Force, a coalition of environmental groups, and carried out by consultants from Abt Associates.138 The Abt study bases its PM-induced mortality estimates on PM2.5 effects reported in the ACS cohort study. But, as shown above, the ACS results are likely spurious, suffering from confounding by non-pollution factors not accounted for in the ACS analysis. In addition, the Veterans study and the County study concluded that PM2.5 either has no effect on long-term mortality, or that the threshold for harm is somewhere above 20 μg/m3—well above PM2.5 levels at 97 percent of U.S. monitoring locations. Furthermore, the areas that do have PM2.5 greater than 20 μg/m3 are mainly located in southern California and California’s southern Central Valley, where there are no coal-fired power plants and electricity generation produces no sulfur dioxide and contributes only about 2 percent of regional NOx emissions. The evidence from toxicology studies also shows that sulfates—the portion of PM from coal-fired power plants—have no effect on health. Indeed, inhaled magnesium sulfate is used therapeutically to treat asthmatics. Given this evidence, the Abt report and the activist reports derived from it have vastly exaggerated the health damage from current levels of PM pollution and the health effects of power plant emissions. Readers of these reports would also never know that PM levels have been dropping and will continue to drop. For example, the Public Interest Research Group’s (PIRG) “Darkening Skies” reports that 300 power plants increased their SO2 emissions between 1995 and 2000. Once emitted, some SO2 gets converted into sulfate particulates through chemical reactions in the atmosphere. But PIRG never mentions that overall SO2 emissions declined 33 percent between 1973 and 1999; that total power plant SO2 emissions declined 29 percent from 1990 to 2000; and that federal law requires an additional 20 percent SO2 reduction from power plants between 2000 and 2010.139 PIRG also fails to mention that sulfate PM levels across the eastern U.S. have declined by 10 to 40 percent since the late 1980s, due to these SO2 reductions.140 Indeed, “Darkening Skies” contains no information at all on actual trends in pollutant emissions or actual PM levels in any community, despite the wealth of data available from hundreds of monitoring locations in populated areas around the country. Instead of providing the public with a realistic assessment of air quality, PIRG’s report misleads readers to draw conclusions grossly at odds with reality. Other activistgroup reports followed similar recipes, using superficially scary, but misleading statistics, while omitting information on actual air pollution levels, trends, and risks.141
Ext #2 – Quality Improving
US has pollution under control – we are making advances
Schwartz 03 Adjunct Scholar @ Competitive Enterprise Institute [Joel Schwartz, “Particulate Air Pollution: weighing the risks” April 2003 ] Kevin W. Prep ‘11
There is no question that high levels of air pollution can kill. About 4,000 Londoners died during the infamous five-day “London Fog” episode of December 1952, when soot and sulfur dioxide soared to levels tens of times greater than the highest levels experienced in developed countries today, and visibility dropped to less than 20 feet.1 A number of other high-pollution episodes up through the 1970s exacted a similarly horrifying toll.2 Fortunately, the United States has been very successful in reducing air pollution. Due to a combination of technological advances and regulatory intervention, pollution levels have been declining for decades, despite large increases in population, energy use, and driving. Nevertheless, many health researchers, regulators, and environmental activists are concerned that airborne particulate matter (PM), especially smaller particulates known as PM10 and PM2.5,3 might still be causing tens of thousands of premature deaths each year,.4 Policymakers and environmental activists have recently focused special attention on the health effects of power-plant emissions, which are a significant contributor to PM2.5 levels in parts of the eastern United States. Bills introduced by Senator James Jeffords (I-VT) and the Bush Administration would require cuts in power plant emissions well beyond current requirements; advocates for both proposals claim they would save thousands of lives per year.5 Environmental groups have published a series of reports claiming substantial harm to public health from power plant emissions.6 These groups ardently oppose the Clear Skies Initiative as well as the Bush Administration’s proposed reform of the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review regulation, arguing that it would allow substantial increases in power plant emissions.7
Air pollution in the US low –studies shows
Schwartz 03 Adjunct Scholar @ Competitive Enterprise Institute [Joel Schwartz, “Particulate Air Pollution: weighing the risks” April 2003 ] Kevin W. Prep ‘11
Air pollution sources and trends. Appropriate policy depends not only on current pollution levels, but also on expected future pollution levels. This paper begins with a summary of air pollution trends, current levels, and prospects, based on pre-existing trends and regulations already on the books. It shows that PM and other kinds of air pollution have been declining for decades—few areas of the United States now have high air pollution levels, relative either to current health standards or past levels. The study concludes that baseline trends—mainly turnover of the vehicle fleet—combined with existing requirements for industrial sources, will result in large reductions in all major air pollutants in coming years. This means that air pollution has been largely addressed as a long-term problem, but also that these already-adopted measures will take time to come to fruition.
US government makes better standards – the people are complying
Schwartz 03 Adjunct Scholar @ Competitive Enterprise Institute [Joel Schwartz, “Particulate Air Pollution: weighing the risks” April 2003 ] Kevin W. Prep ‘11
Ambient air pollution levels have been declining almost everywhere in the United States for decades. Average levels of carbon monoxide (CO) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) declined 75 percent during the last 30 to 40 years, while nitrogen oxides (NOx) declined more than 40 percent.12 Virtually all areas of the country now comply with federal health standards for these pollutants.13 Eighty-seven percent of monitoring locations now comply with the federal one-hour ozone standard, up from 50 percent in the early 1980s. Only 60 percent comply with EPA’s new, more stringent ozone standard, known as the “eight-hour standard.” However, most eight-hour ozone non-attainment locations are relatively close to the standard, with 70 percent exceeding the standard by 10 percent or less.14
AIR POLLUTION will be solved inevitably – developed countries address it
LOMBORG 01- Statistician at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” [Bjorn Lomborg, “Environmentalists tend to believe that, ecologically speaking, things are getting worse and worse.”August 9. 2001. ]
Fourth, pollution is also exaggerated. Many analyses show that air pollution diminishes when a society becomes rich enough to be able to afford to be concerned about the environment. For London, the city for which the best data are available, air pollution peaked around 1890 (see chart 2). Today, the air is cleaner than it has been since 1585. There is good reason to believe that this general picture holds true for all developed countries. And, although air pollution is increasing in many developing countries, they are merely replicating the development of the industrialized countries. When they grow sufficiently rich they, too, will start to reduce their air pollution.
Ext #3 – No Impact
Pollution doesn't increase morbidity - at worse it shortens lives by a day
Schwartz 03 Adjunct Scholar @ Competitive Enterprise Institute [Joel Schwartz, “Particulate Air Pollution: weighing the risks” April 2003 ] Kevin W. Prep ‘11
Studies that have attempted to estimate directly when death occurs in relation to increases in pollution by estimating the size of this frail population have concluded that acute changes in pollution levels shorten life expectancy by a matter of days at most.113 The putative effects of PM based on epidemiologic results are consistent with the harvesting hypothesis. For example, if daily variations in pollution mainly affect an already-frail population, it may be that it’s not so much the type of external stress that is important, but that any modest external stress would be enough to cause death. This is consistent with the finding that many different types of pollution—e.g., fine and coarse PM, various gases—appear to have effects on mortality of similar magnitude, as do changes in temperature, atmospheric pressure and other weather variables.114 If PM and other pollutants were shortening healthy people’s lives by months or years, it would be an odd coincidence if several different pollutants, each with a different intrinsic toxicity and each present at different levels in different cities, all happened to exert roughly the same effects, regardless of the pollutant or its ambient concentration. On the other hand, if PM is actually shortening life by months or years in otherwise healthy people, biological plausibility is still an issue. Various pollutants are always present at some level in ambient air, and pollution levels vary from day to day. It is not clear why apparently healthy people would be suddenly killed on a given day by relatively low PM levels that they have experienced many times in the past.115 The frailpopulation hypothesis would explain the possible lack of a threshold for the effect of PM on mortality, since changes in pollution, even at low levels, might be enough to cause death in very frail people.116
AT: Air Power
1. Ground forces are key to heg—they outweigh air power.
Mearsheimer 1 (John, Professor of International Relations at the University of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 85)
For more than a century strategists have debated which form of military power dominates the outcome of war. U.S. admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan famously proclaimed the supreme importance of independent sea power in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 and his other writings. General Giuldo Douhet of Italy later made the case for the primacy of strategic airpower in his 1921 classic, The Command of the Air. Their works are still widely read at staff colleges around the world. I argue that both are wrong: land power is the decisive military instrument. Wars are won by big battalions, not by armadas in the air or sea. The strongest power is the state with the strongest army.
2. No airpower challenger – every other country is decades behind us in air tech – they buy our old planes.
1 3. Airpower will inevitably collapse – the Air Force is overstretched and is cutting end strength
Kreisher ’08 (Otto is a military affairs reporter for Air Force Magazine, “The Ground Force Taskings to go,” March)
(The steady state assignment of more than 6,000 airmen to these tasks—called “in lieu of” missions, in that they have been assigned to airmen in lieu of soldiers and marines—will likely persist even though the Army and Marine Corps are raising end strength and the Air Force is cutting its.) The ILO taskings also continue despite Air Force charges that well-trained personnel are being put to poor use. Amn. Kevin Cook stands watch at Ali Air Base, Iraq. (USAF photo by A1C Jonathan Snyder) The Air Force has been sending its airmen to Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the US Central Command theater to perform ILO taskings since February 2004. They have been performing a variety of tasks normally handled by soldiers or marines. Those requirements came in response to Pentagon concerns that the ground services were being overstressed from repeated combat deployments and shortened periods at home bases. The assignments come in addition to the normal Air Force deployments in support of the war against extremists. Of the 25,453 airmen deployed to the theater late last year, 6,293 were filling ILO taskings, Maj. Gen. Marke F. Gibson, Air Force director of operations, told a House Armed Services readiness subcommittee.
Ext #1 – Ground Forces Key
Ground forces are key—US needs them to gain territory in conflict.
Grayson 1 (Daryl, Assistant Professor of Government and Research Fellow at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth, “The Myth of Air Power in the Persian Gulf War and the Future of Warfare,” International Security, 26(2), Project Muse, AD: 7-6-9) BL
Second, the geography and foreign policy of the United States require that it maintain a balanced military force structure. Because the United States has global military commitments, it must have a military that can deploy rapidly to defend faraway allies. Air power is ideal for this mission: It can get to distant battlefields quickly and -- as al-Khafji and the Highway of Death show -- it can be lethal against enemy ground forces on the move. However, because its allies are far away, the United States often joins wars late. Allied territory often must be recaptured, and sometimes enemy territory must be taken. For these missions, the United States needs ground forces that can dominate the battlefield. Unless the United States military maintains large, well-trained, and wellarmed ground forces, it will not be prepared to achieve more one-sided victories like the Gulf War.
AT: Amazon
No impact—a) the Amazon is recovering and b) even if it was totally destroyed there’s no impact
NEW YORK POST 6-9-2005 (Posted at Cheat Seeking Missiles, date is date of post, )
"One of the simple, but very important, facts is that the rainforests have only been around for between 12,000 and 16,000 years. That sounds like a very long time but, in terms of the history of the earth, it's hardly a pinprick. "Before then, there were hardly any rainforests. They are very young. It is just a big mistake that people are making. "The simple point is that there are now still - despite what humans have done - more rainforests today than there were 12,000 years ago." "This lungs of the earth business is nonsense; the daftest of all theories," Stott adds. "If you want to put forward something which, in a simple sense, shows you what's wrong with all the science they espouse, it's that image of the lungs of the world. "In fact, because the trees fall down and decay, rainforests actually take in slightly more oxygen than they give out. "The idea of them soaking up carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen is a myth. It's only fast-growing young trees that actually take up carbon dioxide," Stott says. "In terms of world systems, the rainforests are basically irrelevant. World weather is governed by the oceans - that great system of ocean atmospherics. "Most things that happen on land are mere blips to the system, basically insignificant," he says. Both scientists say the argument that the cure for cancer could be hidden in a rainforest plant or animal - while plausible - is also based on false science because the sea holds more mysteries of life than the rainforests. And both say fears that man is destroying this raw source of medicine are unfounded because the rainforests are remarkably healthy. "They are just about the healthiest forests in the world. This stuff about them vanishing at an alarming rate is a con based on bad science," Moore says.
Amazon does not regulate oxygen—their argument doesn’t factor decomposition which consumes all the oxygen rainforests create
NEW WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA 2009 (“Rainforest,” date is last mod, March 27, )
It is commonly believed, erroneously, that one of the key values of rainforests is that they provide much of the oxygen for the planet. However, most rainforests do not in fact provide much net oxygen for the rest of the world. Through factors such as the decomposition of dead plant matter, rainforests consume as much oxygen as they produce, except in certain conditions (primarily swamp forests) where the dead plant matter does not decay, but is preserved underground instead (ultimately to form new coal deposits over enough time).
Amazon is not key to oxygen—decomposition makes it net neutral
LOMBORG 2001 (Bjorn, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen, The Skeptical Environmentalist, p. 115)
There are two primary reasons for viewing the tropical forests as a vital resource. In the 1970s we were told that rainforests were the lungs of the Earth. Even in July 2000, WWF argued for saving the Brazilian Amazon since “the Amazon region has been called the lungs of the world.” But this is a myth. True enough, plants produce oxygen by means of photosynthesis, but when they die and decompose, precisely the same amount of oxygen is consumed. Therefore, forests in equilibrium (where trees grow but old trees fall over, keeping the total biomass approximately constant) neither produce nor consume oxygen in net terms. Even if all plants, on land as well as at sea, were killed off and then decomposed, the process would consume less than 1 percent of the atmosphere’s oxygen.
Amazon is not key to oxygen
LA TIMES 6-8-2005 ()
Even without the massive burning, the popular conception of the Amazon as a giant oxygen factory for the rest of the planet is misguided, scientists say. Left unmolested, the forest does generate enormous amounts of oxygen through photosynthesis, but it consumes most of it itself in the decomposition of organic matter. Researchers are trying to determine what role the Amazon plays in keeping the region cool and relatively moist, which in turn has a hugely beneficial effect on agriculture - ironically, the same interests trying to cut down the forest. The theory goes that the jungle's humidity, as much as water from the ocean, is instrumental in creating rain over both the Amazon River basin and other parts of South America, particularly western and southern Brazil, where much of this country's agricultural production is concentrated. "If you took away the Amazon, you'd take away half of the rain that falls on Brazil," Moutinho said. "You can imagine the problems that would ensue." A shift in climate here could cause a ripple effect, disrupting weather patterns in Antarctica, the Eastern U.S. and even Western Europe, some scholars believe. This is what worries ecologists about the continued destruction of the rain forest: not the supposed effect on the global air supply, but rather on the weather. "Concern about the environmental aspects of deforestation now is more over climate rather than [carbon emissions] or whether the Amazon is the 'lungs of the world,' " said Paulo Barreto, a researcher with the Amazon Institute of People and Environment. "For sure, the Amazon is not the lungs of the world," he added. "It never was."
AT: Antibiotic Resistance
1. Too many alternative causes to solve for
Savert ‘8 (Richard S., Associate Professor of Law & Co-Director, Health Law and Policy Institute, University of Houston Law Center. J.D. Stanford Law School, B.A. Harvard University, Boston University American Journal of Law and Medicine, “In Tepid Defense of Population Health: Physicians and Antibiotic Resistance,” P. Lexis//DN)
Effective strategies for combating antibiotic resistance unfortunately remain elusive. This reflects the fact that antibiotic resistance has numerous, complex root causes, including: weak surveillance for resistance: n10 aggressive promotion of antibiotics by pharmaceutical companies: n11 lax infection control practices: n12 patients' irrational demand for antibiotics even when they may not be effective: n13 unwarranted clinical variation in the way physicians prescribe and monitor use of antibiotics; n14 inappropriate patterns of antibiotic use in agriculture and food-animal products that may impact human health; n15 and a possible downturn in discovery and commercial development of new antibiotics. n16 Recent reform proposals attracting considerable interest focus a great deal on supply side solutions. For example, the influential Infectious Diseases Society of America and other groups advocate tinkering with patent rights to provide pharmaceutical companies stronger incentives to discover novel antibiotics and to resist overselling their newer drugs already on the market. These strategies generally aim to encourage stockpiling of newer [*434] medications for future public health threats and to extend the useful life of antibiotics. n17 Congress has also considered legislative bills that would leverage intellectual property rights in this manner. n18 This Article argues that a primarily supply side focus unfortunately misses the mark. Attempts to increase the general supply of effective antibiotics of course remain important. But reform proposals also need to do much more in directly confronting the powerful demand side influences. Ordinarily expected supply side effects do not always occur in the complicated health care market. Because of agency relationships and information asymmetries, physicians perform as the key intermediary, in a position to induce, control, or at least heavily influence, overall demand and utilization of many goods and services, sometimes seemingly irrespective of changes in supply. n19 Considerable attention needs to be paid, therefore, regardless of any changes in the supply of effective antibiotics, to the physician's necessarily significant, yet traditionally neglected and problematic, role in antibiotic conservation. It must be remembered that, as in many other areas of health care, the physician performs a critical role as gatekeeper to limited resources. The ideal physician gatekeeper makes referrals and grants patient access to health care services and technology on a discretionary basis, considering effectiveness and cost as well as the patient's needs in an attempt to manage [*435] limited resources equitably for the benefit of patients as a whole. n20 Gatekeeping is often associated with health care cost control, particularly in managed care settings, a subject that continues to attract considerable debate and scholarly attention. n21 Yet there has been far less recognition in the academic literature of the important connection between physician gatekeeping and protection of public health. Indeed, in the antibiotic context, effective gatekeeping takes on increased importance for public health reasons because "[o]ther than certain vaccines, antibiotics are the only drug class whose use influences not just the patient being treated but the entire ecosystem . . . with potentially profound consequences." n22 This arises due to the "antibiotic paradox" - prescribing an antibiotic can have dual, contradictory effects as it combats targeted bacteria while also possibly increasing selection pressures in the larger environment for bacterial strains that are resistant to that antibiotic, potentially jeopardizing the medication's effectiveness when used again for future health threats. n23 It remains critically important, therefore, that physicians prescribe antibiotics prudently, preserving the limited arsenal of effective medications for socially optimal use. Arguably, this becomes as important for public health purposes as ensuring that physicians use the drugs at all.
2. Solves itself – we’ll just make new drugs.
3. Awful probability of an awful timeframe, animals have used antibiotics for over 60 years.
Dale Rozeboom et. al.Michigan State Swine Specialist and Prof. of Animal Science at Michigan State University, April, 2008 “Antibiotics in the Environment and Antibiotic Resistance,” Michigan State University
Antibiotics have been used in animals over 60 years. However, antibiotic resistance only recently has become a major medical concern in hospitals. Whenever a population of bacteria, of importance to animals or humans, is exposed to an antibiotic it encourages the predominance of the most resistant strains of the bacteria. The most well-known example of this is how rapidly gonorrhea became resistant to penicillin. It is possible for resistant bacteria from animals to make their way into humans, but many barriers stand in their way. Most bacteria that cause animal diseases are specialized for that species (species-specific) and poorly invade humans. Zoonotic bacteria, such as certain species of Escherichia coli and Salmonella are of greater concern as they are transmissible from animals to humans. Usual precautions of washing hands and thoroughly cooking of foods eliminate the spread of these to humans, but these procedures do not help prevent environmental transmission (e.g., to drinking water).
4. Impact Inevitable: Europe and Asia
Epoch Times 6/24/2k9 (“Animal Agriculture Boosts Antibiotic Resistance,” pg online @ //ef)
Researchers have found the presence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) on pig farms, where strains of MRSA have been discovered that can jump from swine to humans. These strains have been isolated in several countries, including Canada and the U.S. “Right now what’s been shown is that in Europe, the U.S., Canada, and I think in some Asian countries as well, contact with pigs has definitely been shown to be a risk factor for carrying MRSA, and some people who carry MRSA are going to get sick and then transfer it to other people who will get sick,” says Steve Roach, spokesperson for Keep Antibiotics Working. To prevent disease outbreaks and to stimulate growth, the hog industry adds more than 10 million pounds of antibiotics to its feed, according to UCS. The organization estimates that 70 percent of antibiotics and related drugs used in the U.S. are used in animals.
AT: Arctic War
1. No actual conflict – the arctic war will be settled legally, with other countries simply caving to Russia
Bronwen Maddox (Chief Foreign Commentator) 5/14/2009: Kremlin keeps up James Bond theme with talk of Arctic war.
It is, no doubt, a coincidence that the Kremlin’s musings on whether there will be a war over the Arctic — the theme, couched, of course, in hypothetical terms, tucked into a high-profile defence review — should appear on the same day as a United Nations deadline for filing claims to the seabed.
This has the air of a stunt, and in Arctic stunts Russia has no equal. No other country would have conceived of the showy James Bond literalness of using a submarine to put a flag on the Arctic seabed (to no legal consequence). Nonetheless, that added a frisson to the rising agitation about who will eventually get what. Countries are jostling for rights to previously inaccessible oil and gas, now within reach because of the summer melting of Arctic ice and new deep-water drilling kit.
But to talk of war is to ignore the vast legal effort under way to settle just those questions. Yesterday’s deadline is part of it. Reading the Kremlin’s fierce and gloomy strategic review, which foresees threats and competition for Russia on all sides, other countries are presumably intended to tremble and surrender their claims.
2. Deterrence solves – if Russia wasn’t willing to fight during the cold war, they won’t fight now.
AT: Asian Economies
1. Asian economies swift stimulus mean it will recover quickly from the recession and remaining heavily resilient
Prime Sarmiento 9-22-2009: Resilient developing Asian region to lead global economic recovery.
Developing Asia is expected to register a stronger-than-expected 3.9 percent growth this year as timely economic policies and programs implemented by Asian governments will keep the region afloat amid the global recession. The Asian Development Bank has forecast in March that the region will only expand by 3.4 percent as most of its export driven economies are expected to be crippled by falling demand. But on Tuesday, the Manila-based lender revised its forecast to a higher 3.9 percent. ADB also upgraded its growth forecast for 2010to 6.4 percent from 6 percent forecast in March. In its flagship annual economic publication, Asian Development Outlook 2009, the Manila-based bank said the regional governments' "quick and decisive response" to the global downturn softened its impact to developing Asian economies. Massive stimulus packages, tax cuts, monetary easing policies and social assistance encouraged consumption and investments. "Almost every large economy in developing Asia has implemented measures to stimulate aggregate demand through fiscal and monetary expansion. In turn, households were relatively quick to spend fiscal windfalls that came in the form of tax cuts and income support, giving a fillip to consumption that began to boost GDP by the second quarter of 2009," ADB said in its report issued on Tuesday. More than keeping the region's economies resilient, these measures will also help in supporting its recovery. The ADB said the region is poised to achieved a V-shaped rebound, and will in fact lead the recovery from the global slowdown. "Despite worsening conditions in the global economic environment, developing Asia is poised to lead the recovery from the worldwide slowdown," ADB Chief Economist Jong-Wha Lee said in a statement. India and China the world's fastest growing economies and developing Asia's largest economies will lead developing Asia's rebound. Economic growth in East Asia is upgraded to 4.4 percent as China is seen to grow by 8.2 percent, beating the previous forecast of 7 percent. ADB forecasts the South Asian economies to grow by 5.6 percent from the previous 4.8 percent as the Indian economy is poised to expand by 6 percent.
2. Asian economies too dependant on the US – makes growth impossible
Adeline Teoh 10/27/2009: Asian economies must turn domestic: Japan.
Growth for Asian economies will need to be rebalanced by becoming less dependent on the USA and instead turning to their respective domestic economies, according to Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.
While the global economy has shown signs of recovery, “the employment situation is still getting worse and in dire condition”, and Asia needs to stimulate domestic demand for more sustainable growth, he relayed through foreign ministry spokesperson Kazuo Kodama: “The economic conditions of the global economy seem to have bottomed out, yet there is no room for complacency.”
3. Alt cause – war in Iraq kills economy – US importing less, and oil prices are higher
S. Pushpanathan (assistant Director for External Relations in the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, Indonesia) 2009: ASEAN Economies Could be Affected by a Protracted War
The commencement of the war has started to weaken the US dollars driven by market sentiments that the war would be short and swift. The US Federal Reserve could be cutting interest rates, which are already low, to mitigate the low confidence and spending in the US economy due to uncertainties about the duration of the war and its likely consequences.
Many Asian countries are taking steps to tide over the economic impact of a prolonged war. These steps will include tightening monetary policy, ensuring stability in the financial markets and other fiscal measures to spur the economy. The announcement of Japan to inject US$8.3 billion into money markets will help to stabilize the global financial system.
The ASEAN Foreign Ministers who held a retreat in Sabah recently were divided on the support for the US-led war in Iraq but all recognized the repercussions of a long war on the ASEAN economies. The ASEAN Secretary General Ong Keng Yong said that the war would hurt the region's shaky recovery and that a prolonged war could cut ASEAN's economic growth by up to one percent.
A protracted war could affect the ability of the US market to absorb ASEAN exports due to the likelihood of slumping US demand for consumer goods and the sinking US dollar which may push up the prices of ASEAN exports. This would have a negative impact on the export-dependent ASEAN economies which require a steady flow of exports to consolidate their recovery and to keep jobs.
Oil prices could increase again. Should President Saddam launch massive retaliatory attacks on Kuwait and other countries, light up the oil wells and use chemical and biological weapons on the advancing coalition forces, market sentiments would change and drive the oil prices up. Some have argued that the oil prices could hit the US$40-$45 dollars a barrel range if the war continues beyond weeks despite the assurance of OPEC to increase the supply to keep prices stable.
Except from Indonesia and Malaysia who are net oil exporters, other ASEAN countries would be affected. Higher oil prices will put inflationary pressures on ASEAN economies even though the inflation rates are still reasonably low in most ASEAN countries.
AT: Australian Prolif
No risk of Australian prolif
Berry 9 (Ken, Research Coordinator – International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, “The Beginning of the End…? Devaluing Deterrence”, 9-18, )
It is probably also useful to point out in this general context that Australia is perhaps the exception to the presumed rule that if the nuclear umbrella were withdrawn too quickly, it might itself seek to acquire nuclear weapons. That was certainly the case in the 1950s and ’60s when active consideration was given to Australia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, regardless of the ANZUS Treaty and the US nuclear umbrella. However, sanity prevailed, and it can be fairly confidently predicted that is not a prospect likely to raise its head ever again in Australia.
AT: Auto Industry Collapse
The collapse of the auto industry is inevitable – Iraq War
Chicago Sun-Times 06 (Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun-Times, December 12 2006, “Another Iraq Casualty: U.S. Auto Industry,” )
One casualty of the debacle in Iraq seldom gets much press, but the inevitable focus on the mess in Iraq too often overshadows other vital challenges. The American automobile industry is hemorrhaging. Today, Ford will announce that it will offer buyouts to 85 percent of its salaried work force. Ford is looking to lay off a staggering 52,000 employees by September 2007. Chrysler has already been merged with the German automaker Daimler-Benz. General Motors is gushing red ink. This industry has been America's industrial stronghold since Henry Ford perfected the assembly line. After World War II, President Eisenhower's defense secretary, Charlie Wilson, wasn't far off when he said, ''What's good for America is good for General Motors and vice versa.'' GM was America's signature company. Its unionized employees won what became the foundation of the American Dream: secure jobs that paid a family wage, with health care, pensions and paid vacations. Now that social contract is being shredded by the global marketplace. The foolish, ideological commitment to mindless trade policies over the last several decades has devastated Detroit. U.S. automakers must now compete with companies from Europe and Japan that bear no health care costs. General Motors has about three retirees for every one autoworker; Ford has two for every active employee. Toyota in this country has about 100 retirees in total. The health care and pension costs put U.S. automakers at a staggering cost disadvantage: over $1,200 a car. If they compete on price, they lose money. If they don't compete, they lose market share. At the same time, we desperately need the industry to move to hybrid and alternative-fuel cars. Detroit is ready to build cars that use alternative fuels made from corn or grasses. But the oil industry that resists putting in the E85 (85 percent ethanol) pumps. These would cut the demand for oil drastically -- and put a crimp in their record profits. The Ford layoffs alone will hit Michigan, New Jersey, Georgia, Missouri and Ohio big-time, and states like Kentucky will feel the pain. It won't stop with the auto jobs. The auto suppliers, housing markets, hotels, the retail industries that depend on the demand generated by relatively well-paid auto employees will be depressed. We see the pain caused by the steel industry's decline. But the steel industry is a pimple compared with the rash of economic losses that the decline of Detroit will cause. Obviously, this crisis requires urgent, intense national action. Are we prepared to let the auto industry die? If not, what steps can be taken to relieve the burdens of their health care and pension costs? What should be expected from the automakers in return in terms of investment, jobs guarantees, fuel efficiency and alternative-fuel cars? What penalties or incentives should be provided to the oil industry to force proliferation of alternative-fuel pumps in gas stations? How does all this fit into a concerted drive for energy independence? Yet when the CEOs of the auto industry sought to meet with George W. Bush before the election, he canceled two meetings with them. When they finally met, an obviously distracted president gave them all of one hour, and nothing was decided. This is catastrophic. Understandably, the president and his advisers are focused on what may be the worst foreign policy debacle in our history, in Iraq. But the collapse of Detroit may well be the equivalent defeat in our economic history. Surely our auto companies' futures cannot be left to a market in which their competitors enjoy massive state subsidies and mercantile trade policies. We need a considered national policy for our industrial future. We tend to think of Iraq as a crisis ''over there.'' In fact, it is taking casualties here at home. The cost of the war is evinced not just by the brave men and women who are sacrificing life and limb, not just by the literal trillions of dollars that will be wasted, but by the collapse of America's own economy. It remains neglected as our leaders focus on troubles abroad rather than threats here at home.
The US auto industry is in a recession – too many factors
Krisher 08 (Tom Krisher, Canadian TV, Globe and Mail, May 13 2008, “US auto industry is in a recession, GM exec says,” )
The U.S. auto industry is in a recession, General Motors Corp. president and chief operating officer Fritz Henderson said Tuesday. The automaker's No. 2 executive said GM is selling below trends for the third straight year. He blamed the sales drop on the troubled housing market, tight credit and higher gasoline prices that are sending consumers from trucks to cars at a rate much faster than the company has ever seen. But Mr. Henderson told a conference of banking and insurance industry officials in Warren, Mich., that it has cut costs and rolled out new products. GM also is seeing sales growth in emerging markets. He also said the first quarter was about in line with GM's expectations, but April's sales drop surprised the company. He said GM sees more downside risk than upside opportunity for the remainder of 2008. The Detroit-based auto maker cut its industry wide U.S. sales outlook for 2008 to between 15.3 million and 15.5 million light vehicles from 16 million at the beginning of the year, largely due to plummeting sales of trucks and sport utility vehicles. That's still higher than Ford Motor Co., which is forecasting 15 million. Some industry analysts have gone below 15 million, a 14-year low. Mr. Henderson said the 11-week strike at parts supplier American Axle and Manufacturing Holdings Inc. has had only a minimal effect on the company's retail sales, largely because it had built up a large inventory of pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles at a time when the market shifted to smaller vehicles. American Axle makes axles, drive shafts and stabilizer bars mainly for GM's larger vehicles. Mr. Henderson said the strike cost GM $800-million (U.S.) in earnings before taxes in the first quarter, and he said the company agreed to American Axle's request to kick in $200-million to help end the work stoppage by the United Auto Workers. "We agreed to do that because we think it would be the most helpful thing we could do" to end the strike, mr. Henderson said. "We're working hard to not be involved in those day-to-day negotiations." Mike DiGiovanni, GM's executive director of global market and industry analysis, told the conference the economy will rebound in the second half of the year but the pace would be sluggish. "We're starting to think that perhaps the trough of this downturn is going to occur in the second quarter," he said. Mr. DiGiovanni said the threat of a huge credit crunch has passed, and he predicted home prices likely are to fall further. Home construction, which has a big impact on pickup truck sales, may be near the bottom of a slump, and the rate of decline is slowing, he said. "I guarantee you pickup sales will come back," he said. GM in the past has focused its advertising too heavily on trucks, but is in the process of shifting that "to a new plan that's really going to focus on miles per gallon," Mr. DiGiovanni said. He also said GM will roll out 14 new cars and crossover vehicles in the next 18 months, but only one new truck. GM shares fell 36 cents, or 1.7 per cent, to $20.40, in morning trading.
AT: Balkan Instability
1. Instability inevitable – Kosovo and Bosnia tensions without EU oversight
Wall Street Journal 2009: Balkan Troubles.
Bosnia and Kosovo have largely disappeared from public view. Washington and Brussels are hoping the promise of European Union accession will ultimately triumph over remaining ethnic tensions in the region. Would that this were so. Rather, a divided EU is allowing the Balkans to slide toward greater instability, while the U.S. remains mostly on the sidelines. America's massive investment in the region in the 1990s may go the way of the subprime market. Bosnia is a nonfunctioning state living under the constant threat its autonomous Serb region to hold a referendum on independence. The Bosnian Muslim prime minister wants to throw out the Dayton agreement that concluded the Bosnia war in 1995, end Serb autonomy and form a unitary state. Western oversight has failed to ease the tensions among ethnic groups. The wounds of war are still raw. Newly independent Kosovo, unrecognized by two-thirds of the world's states -- including five EU members -- barely functions after 10 years of U.N. rule. It has high unemployment and little foreign investment and needs enormous foreign assistance. Most politically damaging to the new state is the largely Serb-inhabited northern part of Kosovo, which continues to be run from Belgrade without vigorous objections from the EU or the U.S. This in effect partitions the fragile Kosovo state and cements continued ethnic tensions. The root cause for most of this instability still rests in Belgrade. Although its new government is eager to become part of the EU, it insists on governing Serbs in Kosovo and is doing everything possible to reverse its independence. In Bosnia, Belgrade is working with Moscow to strengthen Serb autonomy with political and particularly economic support. Despite its constant assurance to seek a European future, Serbia remains mired in the past, failing to turn indicted war criminal Ratko Mladic over to the Hague Tribunal. The EU, which believes that Serbia is the center of the Balkans, is doing little to pull it out of the muck. All member states seem to subscribe to the assumption that, under pro-EU President Boris Tadic, Serbia must be permitted to pursue the process of EU accession -- irrespective of its policies toward Kosovo and Bosnia and the fact that Serbia does not meet EU requirements for political and economic reform.
2. Empirically denied – wars in Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosovo during the 90’s should have caused the impacts.
3. NATO solves the impact – can bargain within its political institutions and member states to force conflict resolution
Erik Yesson (Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University and specializes in international security and military affairs) 2003: Sending Credible Signals: NATO’s Role in Stabilizing Balkan Conflicts.
There is also no question that NATO members employed a lowest common denominator approach during the Kosovo campaign. This process bid down the intensity of the opening air strikes against Yugoslavia. It was difficult for the allies to signal their resolve because they rules out the use of ground forces and bombed from an altitude that insured ground fire could not down allied aircraft. Allied states creatively avoided domestic audience costs. Those contributing directly to the air attacks had a great deal of support from the public and opposition politicians. Meanwhile states whose publics and political opposition rejected the air campaign—Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Czech Republic, for example—did not participate directly in offensive military operations against Yugoslavia, sparing them from public rebuke. But these difficulties were surmountable within NATO’s existing political institutions. In the end air strikes far less punishing than those launched on Iraq in 1991 imposed sufficient political costs on Belgrade to force a settlement. NATO is a “consensus-making machine.” This means that the allies will make compromises. While the allies should be prepared for hard bargaining and internal debate—inevitable in any democratic alliance—they need not overhaul their alliance to pursue out-of-area peace and security operations. Current structures allow for building a consensus and sending credible signals. The reality is simply that some out-of-area operations are harder than others. In the future, intra-alliance debate on out-of-area interventions will likely focus on the degree of difficulty such operations pose. Answers to that question will inform first-order decision making on whether to intervene in the first place.
4. Balkan war won’t happen–regional powers have incentives to cooperate and relations are too solid
BURNS 2006 (Nicholas, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, U.S. Department of State, “Knocking on NATO’s Open Door,” Feb 19, )
A decade ago, the countries of Southeast Europe were reeling from the impact of Europe's bloodiest war in half a century. With the determined intervention of NATO, genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia were brought to an end; a few years later in Kosovo, NATO again intervened to end ethnic cleansing in the region. Southeast Europe seemed to some a tangle of intractable inter-ethnic conflicts in which only massive international peacekeeping deployments could keep the warring parties apart. But the United States and its friends in the region looked to tell a different story: one that would require friends to make hard choices for the sake of a peaceful and prosperous future for their people. Today's story is indeed different, in part thanks to the tremendous efforts of Albania, Croatia and Macedonia. The region's nascent democracies have largely normalized their relations. Peacekeeping contingents have downsized, and a return to war is unlikely. The region is not only increasingly stable, but it contributes to international coalitions that work to end conflicts elsewhere. Southeast Europe is on the path to changing from being a consumer to a provider of security. On February 13 in Washington, the United States hosted the Foreign Ministers of Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia to discuss recent accomplishments of these members of the Adriatic Charter, or "A3." Founded in May 2003, the A3 brings Albania, Croatia and Macedonia into a partnership with the United States to advance their individual and collective candidacies for NATO and other Euro-Atlantic institutions. Serbia and Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina were present as observers. At the meeting, we reviewed A3 progress on their individual NATO Membership Action Plans, and sought ways to bring NATO membership closer. We also shared lessons learned from deployments in international coalitions. Finally, we recommitted ourselves to our cooperation as friends and, if reforms continue to meet necessary standards, full Allies in the greatest Alliance in history: NATO. Not so long ago, such goals would have been impossible to imagine. The countries of the region have worked hard to gain this new status. With fresh memories of war and dictatorship, the A3 partners share a resolve to strengthen their democratic institutions, market economies and human rights, and to fight corruption and crime. The path to NATO and the European Union promotes a positive cycle of change: the more candidate countries do to pursue reforms required for membership, the more support they get for the accession process. Though difficult, the reforms are key to lasting peace and prosperity in the region.
AT: Biodiversity Impacts
1. Global biodiversity at its highest point ever
Bjorn Lomborg, Professor Political Science, University of Aarhus (Denmark), 2004, The skeptical environmentalist: measuring the real state of the world, p. 249
However, the rate at which species have become extinct has fluctuated over the various periods, and the number of species has generally increased up to our time, as can be seen in Figure 130. Never before have there been so many species as there are now. The growth in the number of families and species can be accredited to a process of specialization which is both due to the fact that the Earth’s physical surroundings have become more diverse and a result of all other species becoming more specialized. Even so, there have been several major occurrences of extinction—the best known of these is probably the last break in the curve 65 million years ago when most of the dinosaurs became extinct, but the most serious one occurred 245 million years ago when around half of all marine animals and four-legged vertebrates and two-thirds of all insects were wiped out.
2. Empirically denied – human impact on extinction rate nothing new—we have historically extended our influence
We do not agree with the gendered language in this card
Bjorn Lomborg, Professor Political Science, University of Aarhus (Denmark), 2004, The skeptical environmentalist: measuring the real state of the world, p. 251
In the natural environment species are constantly dying in competition with other species. It is estimated that more than 95 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. A species typically survives 1-10 million years. Translated to the case of our described 1.6 million species, we must reckon with a natural extinction of around two species every decade. Table 6 shows that about 25 species have become extinct every decade since 1600. Thus, what we see is clearly not just natural extinction. Actually, mankind has long been a major cause of extinction. Around the time of the last ice age, about 33 major families of mammals and birds were eradicated—an extremely large number, considering only 13 families had become extinct within the 1.5 million years prior to that. It is presumed that Stone Age man hunted these 33 families to extinction. The Polynesians have colonized most of the 800 or so islands in the Pacific over the last 12,000 years. Because the birds on these islands had developed without much competition they were extremely easy to catch and were therefore frequently hunted to extinction. By studying bones from archaeological excavations it has been estimated that the Polynesians in total have eradicated around 2,000 species of birds, or more than 20 percent of all current bird species. Mankind, then, has long been a cause of an increase in the extinction rate.
3. Captive breeding prevents extinction
Richard B. Primack, Professor of Biology @ Duke University, 2002, Essentials of Conservation Biology,
Captive breeding and subsequent re-introduction of a threatened species is an important and in some cases very successful tool for species conservation. Critics point to the need to conserve/restore habitat, list examples of failures, decry the cost, and argue we should rescue species before they are on the brink of oblivion. Fair enough. But, captive breeding saved the bison. Wolves roam Yellowstone and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the Peregrine Falcon is off the endangered species list, golden-lion tamarins thrive in the Brazilian forests, whooping cranes perform their mating dances along river banks in the west, and many more species might similarly be rescued. Zoos, botanical gardens and aquaria have found new purpose and direction, providing a safety net when other protective measures have failed.
4. Loss of a single species does not collapse ecosystems: resiliency prevents any big impacts
Roger A Sedjo, Sr. Fellow, Resources for the Future, 2000, Conserving Nature’s Biodiversity: insights from biology, ethics and economics, eds. Van Kooten, Bulte and Sinclair, p. 114
As a critical input into the existence of humans and of life on earth, biodiversity obviously has a very high value (at least to humans). But, as with other resource questions, including public goods, biodiversity is not an either/or question, but rather a question of “how much.” Thus, we may argue as to how much biodiversity is desirable or is required for human life (threshold) and how much is desirable (insurance) and at what price, just as societies argue over the appropriate amount and cost of national defense. As discussed by Simpson, the value of water is small even though it is essential to human life, while diamonds are inessential but valuable to humans. The reason has to do with relative abundance and scarcity, with market value pertaining to the marginal unit. This water-diamond paradox can be applied to biodiversity. Although biological diversity is essential, a single species has only limited value, since the global system will continue to function without that species. Similarly, the value of a piece of biodiversity (e.g., 10 ha of tropical forest) is small to negligible since its contribution to the functioning of the global biodiversity is negligible. The global ecosystem can function with “somewhat more” or “somewhat less” biodiversity, since there have been larger amounts in times past and some losses in recent times. Therefore, in the absence of evidence to indicate that small habitat losses threaten the functioning of the global life support system, the value of these marginal habitats is negligible. The “value question” is that of how valuable to the life support function are species at the margin. While this, in principle, is an empirical question, in practice it is probably unknowable. However, thus far, biodiversity losses appear to have had little or no effect on the functioning of the earth’s life support system, presumably due to the resiliency of the system, which perhaps is due to the redundancy found in the system. Through most of its existence, earth has had far less biological diversity. Thus, as in the water-diamond paradox, the value of the marginal unit of biodiversity appears to be very small.
Ext #1: No Extinctions Now
EXTINCTION RATE IS AND WILL REMAIN LOW
Bjorn Lomborg, Professor Political Science, University of Aarhus (Denmark), 2004, The skeptical environmentalist: measuring the real state of the world, p. 255
In fact, the latest model calculations seem to back the observations. Biologists Mawdsley and Stork have shown, on the basis of information from Great Britain, that there is a fairly constant relationship between the rates of extinction of different species. If this model is used it is actually possible to estimate the number of extinct birds from the number of extinct insects and, amazingly, these figures fit very well. Using this model it is possible to show that since 1600, 0.14 percent of all insects have died out, or 0.0047 percent per decade. But as we saw above, the extinction rate is on its way up. For this reason – and for safety’s sake – Mawdsley and Stork use an extremely high estimate by Professor Smith which says that the extinction rate will increase 12- to 55-fold over the next 300 years. This still means that the extinction rate for all animals will remain below 0.208 percent per decade and probably be about 0.7 percent per 50 years.
WE HAVE PASSED THE PERIOD OF MASS EXTINCTIONS—NO MORE EXTINCTIONS COMING
Alison Motluk, Freelance Writer, 2002, , book review, “Future Evolution” by Peter Ward, January 29,
But Ward's Big Idea is a fascinating one. (Good thing, too, as this isn't the first book he's written on the topic.) Unlike the doomsayers out there, he doesn't think there's another mass extinction looming. Rather, he's convinced it's well underway, and that the worst is already over. Most of the big mammals that are going to die off already have. Among those no longer with us are the mastodons, the mammoths, the saber-toothed tiger, the giant short-faced bear. "It is visible in the rear-view mirror, a roadkill already turned into geologic litter -- bones not yet even petrified -- the end of the Age of Megamammals," he writes.
ACTUAL EXTINCTION RATE IS LOW -- .08% PER YEAR
Bjorn Lomborg, Professor Political Science, University of Aarhus (Denmark), 2004, The skeptical environmentalist: measuring the real state of the world, p. 254-5
The result can be read in the book by Whitmore and Sayer published in 1992 – and its conclusions do not exactly make boring reading. Heywood and Stuart point out that the recorded extinction figures for mammals and birds (see Table 6) are “very small.” If the extinction rates are similar for other species and if we assume 30 million species, we get an annual extinction rate of 2,300 or 0.8 percent a decade. Since the area of the rainforest has been reduced by approximately 20 percent since the 1830s, “it must be assumed that during this contraction, very large numbers of species have been lost in some areas. Yet surprisingly there is no clear-cut evidence for this.”
EXTINCTION RATE LESS THAN 1% PER YEAR
POLICY REVIEW, December 2001, p. (WFU67)
The loss of thousands of species per year? About 1,600,000 species have been identified. Estimates of the actual number of species range from 2,000,000 to 80,000,000. No one knows the rate of extinction or the rate at which new species are arising. The best current estimate based on actual observations, and using an extremely high estimate of the likely increase in the extinction rate, is that about seven-tenths of 1 percent of species may go extinct over the next 50 years.
SPECIES EXTINCTION FIGURES EXAGGERATED
Bjorn Lomborg, Professor Political Science, University of Aarhus (Denmark), 2004, The skeptical environmentalist: measuring the real state of the world, p. 249
Although these assertions of massive extinction of species have been repeated everywhere you look, they simply do not equate with the available evidence. The story is important, because it shows how figures regarding the extinction of 25-100 percent of all the species on Earth within our lifetime provide the political punch to put conservation of endangered species high on the agenda. Punch which the more realistic figure of 0.7 percent over the next 50 years would not achieve to the same degree.
Ext #2 – Emperically Denied
HUMAN-INDUCED EXTINCTIONS NOTHING NEW
Environment 1997, No. 7, Volume 39, September, p. 16
Humans have been causing the extinction of plants and animals for thousands of years. Large mammals such as horses and mammoths disappeared from the Americas and Australia between 15,000 and 35,000 years ago when humans first moved onto these continents. Similarly, human colonization of the islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans some 1,000 to 2,000 years ago (and the resulting introduction of domestic animals such as rats, dogs, and pigs) may have led to the extinction of as many as one-fourth of the world’s bird species.
ECOSYSTEMS RECOVER FROM HUMAN DAMAGE
Douglas Boucher, Center for Environmental and Estuarine Studies, Fall 1996, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY, p. 283 (BLUEOC 0120)
Humans have been able to drive thousands of species to extinction, severely impoverish the soil, alter weather patterns, dramatically lower the biodiversity of natural communities, and incidentally cause great suffering for their posterity. They have not generally been able to prevent nature from growing back. As ecosystems are transformed, species are eliminated - but opportunities are created for new ones. The natural world is changed, but never totally destroyed.
Ext #3 – Captive Breeding
CAPTIVE BREEDING PROGRAMS HAVE PREVENTED EXTINCTION
Kirsten Weir, editor, Current Science, 2005, “Born to be wild: can zoos save endangered animals from extinction?” January, 7,
Despite those obstacles, several captive-born species have been successfully reintroduced to their native habitats--including some that had gone extinct in the wild. (See "Success Stories.") Such happy endings suggest that captive breeding can play a valuable role in conservation plans.
ZOOS HAVE SHIFTED TOWARD CONSERVATIONISM AS THEIR MAIN ETHICAL OBJECTIVE*
Donald G. Lindburg, Zoology Society of San Diego, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 471*
It is widely recognized that the original objective of zoos in maintaining collections of wild animals can no longer be condoned. Modern-day zoos, therefore, have redefined their missions in light of questions about the right to hold animals captive and the relevance and humaneness of this practice. They have done so by aligning themselves with conservationist objectives, a process that has entailed the investment of substantial resources in education, improved training of staff, modernization of exhibits, breeding, and in some cases, reintroductions, and research designed to improve health, welfare, and propagation efforts. The modern zoo also takes note of the world-wide decline in populations and their habitats and increasingly envisions a time when at least some species will exist only within their confines. For the vast majority of those who labor in the profession, therefore, pride of achievement and a personal sense of fulfillment are commonly found. Indeed, for most it is a pursuit to be nobly and passionately held.
ZOOS COMMITED TO THE HOLISTIC GOALS OF SPECIES PRESERVATION – DOES NOT MEAN THAT ANIMAL WELFARE IS DISCOUNTED*
Donald G. Lindburg, Zoology Society of San Diego, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 478-9*
It is fair to presume that zoo professionals are strongly committed to animal welfare, but less so to animal rights. Theirs is a profession that, by its very nature, shares the holistic ethic, viz., that preservationist goals can only be achieved by unfailingly giving highest priority to collections of individuals. Zoo professionals frequently find individual welfare and species preservation to be in conflict and in such cases will give higher priority to the preservation of species. It does not follow, as it often claimed, that there is indifference to the interests of individuals or lack of respect for them. In fact, goals of species preservation are more likely to be realized where the lives of individuals are given the highest respect, and where every effort is made to safeguard their interests. These dual concerns indicate that those who toil in zoos readily embrace the ethical pluralism that offers a basis for reconciliation with any who question the morality of their acts.
Ext #4 – Resillience
ECOSYSTEMS HISTORICALLY RESILIENT –LITTLE EXTINCTION DESPITE MASSIVE ECOSYSTEM DISRUPTIONS
Niles Eldredge, Curator-in-Chief of “Hall of Biodiversity” American Museum of Natural History, 2000, Species, Speciation and the Environment, October,
Instead of prompting adaptive change through natural selection, environmental change instead causes organisms to seek familiar habitats to which they are already adapted. In other words, "habitat tracking," rather than "adaptation tracking" is the most expected biological reaction to environmental change -- which is now understood to be inevitable. For example: During the past 1.65 million years, there have been four major, and many minor, episodes of global cooling resulting in the southward surge of huge fields of glacial ice in both North America and Eurasia.
Yet, despite this rhythmically cyclical pattern of profound climate change, extinction and evolution throughout the Pleistocene was surprisingly negligible. Instead, ecosystems (e.g., tundra, boreal forest, mixed hardwood forest, etc.) migrated south in front of the advancing glaciers. Though there was much disruption, most plant species (through their seed propagules) and animal species were able to migrate, find "recognizable" habitat, and survive pretty much unchanged throughout the Pleistocene Epoch. Botanist Margaret Davis6 and colleagues, and entomologist G. R. Coope7 have provided especially well-documented and graphic examples of habitat tracking as a source of survival of species throughout the Pleistocene.
GENERAL BIODIVERSITY ADVANTAGES DON’T APPLY TO SAVING PARTICULAR SPECIES – MARGINAL BENEFITS OF PARTICULAR BIODIVERSITY SMALL
Roger A Sedjo, Sr. Fellow, Resources for the Future, 2000, Conserving Nature’s Biodiversity: insights from biology, ethics and economics, eds. Van Kooten, Bulte and Sinclair, p. 120-1
Some biodiversity is necessary for human existence, so in some sense some biodiversity is infinitely valuable. However, at the margin, biodiversity is less critical to human life and thus less valuable. How valuable is biodiversity as an input into pharmaceutical products? There are two possible answers to this question. First, the values may be substantial, but the absence of clear, well-defined property rights may make the resource rents difficult to capture. The absence of property rights may result in the market and the social system substantially undervaluing these resources. Hence the inadvertent losses of wild genetic resources may reflect not their low value, but the inability to capture that value due to the absence of adequate property rights. Second, it may be that biodiversity, like a lottery, has only limited value at the margin. For example, there may be so much wild genetic resources available that any particular part of this stock has only a very low expected value. Reviewing the evidence, we find that there has been some emergence of property rights for valuable common property resources, as anticipated by Demsetz. However, the evidence also finds relatively few natural product based drugs being developed by pharmaceuticals, and there is some evidence that developers are losing interest. Furthermore, a recent study by Simpson et al (1996) suggests that the marginal value of wild genetic resources as input into pharmaceuticals is at most modest and probably very small. The conclusion therefore, is that the contribution of biological diversity to the production of products and services (viz, ecosystem function) is small, mainly because such values are relevant only at the margin. Unless biodiversity has significant value as a final consumption “good”, principally existence value, the economic case for incurring large costs to protect biodiversity at the margin is weak.
LITTLE SUPPORT FOR INVISIBLE THRESHOLD OR CATASTROPHIC, NON-LINEAR ECOSYSTEM IMPACTS FROM SPECIES LOSS
R. David Simpson, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future, 2000, Conserving Nature’s Biodiversity: insights from biology, ethics and economics, eds. Van Kooten, Bulte and Sinclair, p. 100
Another important assumption underlying much of foregoing discussion is that things are generally continuous. This means that small actions have small effects. Reducing habitat by a small amount, for example, results in small reduction in biodiversity supported in that habitat. This assumption is not innocuous, because many biologists are concerned with radical discontinuities. The state of a system may change suddenly when a threshold is exceeded, or a little additional degradation may result in an irreversible unraveling. At the risk of sounding cavalier about such an important issue, let me just say that natural scientists have failed to convince this reasonably inquisitive layperson of the likelihood and imminence of such threats.
AT: Biofuels Kill Environment
Second-generation biofuels solve environmental concerns
United Press International 9, Ecoworld, October 1, “Trash Based Biofuels May Solve Critical Environmental Problems”,
Singaporean and Swiss scientists say using trash to produce biofuels might help solve the world’s growing energy crisis and also reduce carbon emissions. The researchers said current biofuels produced from crops require an increase in crop production, which has its own severe environmental costs. However, second-generation biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol derived from processed urban waste, might offer dramatic emissions savings without the environmental catch. “Our results suggest that fuel from processed waste biomass, such as paper and cardboard, is a promising clean energy solution,” said Associate Professor Hugh Tan of the National University of Singapore. “If developed fully this biofuel could simultaneously meet part of the world’s energy needs, while also combating carbon emissions and fossil fuel dependency.” The team found 82.93 billion liters of cellulosic ethanol could be produced from the world’s landfill waste and by substituting gasoline with the resulting biofuel, global carbon emissions could be cut by figures ranging from 29.2 percent to 86.1 percent for every unit of energy produced. The study that included researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich appears in the journal Global Change Biology: Bioenergy.
AT: Biopower
Biopower is neither inherently good, nor bad. Our specific context is more important than their sweeping generalization.
Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)
This notion is not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states; these systems are not “opposites,” in the sense that they are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept “power” should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression, manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are essentially or effectively “the same.” Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, “tactically polyvalent.” Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern societies create “multiple modernities,” modern societies with quite radically differing potentials.91
Biopower is not genocidal when it is deployed by a government which also respects rights.
Dickinson 04 - Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley - 2004 (Edward Ross, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About “Modernity,” Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, 1–48)
At its simplest, this view of the politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historically speaking, however, the further conjecture that this “micropolitical” dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of the state does not seem very tenable. Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy —in Germany left liberals and Social Democrats —have been also the greatest advocates of every kind of biopolitical social engineering, from public health and welfare programs through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from the perspective of the first years of the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century appears to be the great age of democracy in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence. What is more, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen — including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes have created an ever more restrictive “iron cage” of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the opposite seems in fact to be at least equally true.
Not all biopolitics bring about genocide—it trivializes Nazism to say that all enactments of the state of exception are equivalent.
Rabinow & Rose 03 (Paul, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, Nikolas, Professor of Sociology @ the London School of Economics, “Thoughts On The Concept of Biopower Today,” December 10, 2003, pdf/RabinowandRose-BiopowerToday03.pdf, pg. 8-9)
Agamben takes seriously Adorno’s challenge “how is it possible to think after Auschwitz?” But for that very reason, it is to trivialize Auschwitz to apply Schmitt’s concept of the state of exception and Foucault’s analysis of biopower to every instance where living beings enter the scope of regulation, control and government. The power to command under threat of death is exercised by States and their surrogates in multiple instances, in micro forms and in geopolitical relations. But this is not to say that this form of power commands backed up by the ultimate threat of death is the guarantee or underpinning principle of all forms of biopower in contemporary liberal societies. Unlike Agamben, we do not think that : the jurist the doctor, the scientist, the expert, the priest depend for their power over life upon an alliance with the State (1998: 122). Nor is it useful to use this single diagram to analyze every contemporary instance of thanato-politics from Rwanda to the epidemic of AIDS deaths across Africa. Surely the essence of critical thought must be its capacity to make distinctions that can facilitate judgment and action.
AT: Bioterrorism
No risk of bioterror – it’s too technically difficult
Washington Post 04 (12/30, “Technical Hurdles Separate Terrorists From Biowarfare.” John Mintz, staff writer. Lexis.)
In 2002, a panel of biowarfare experts concluded in a report co-published by the National Defense University (NDU) that while terrorists could mount some small-scale bioattacks, larger assaults would require them to overcome many technical hurdles. Some key biotechnologies would be achievable only three to four years from then, the panel found. "When we sent out the report for review to [hands-on] bench scientists, we got the response, 'What do you mean we can't do this? We're doing it now,' " said Raymond Zilinskas, a co-author of the report who heads biowarfare studies at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a California think tank. "It shows how fast the field is moving." Those skeptical of the prospect of large-scale bioattacks cite the tiny number of biological strikes in recent decades. Members of the Rajneeshee cult sickened 750 people in 1984 when they contaminated salad bars in 10 Oregon restaurants with salmonella. Among the few others were the 2001 anthrax attacks through the U.S. mail that killed five people. One reason for the small number of attacks is that nearly every aspect of a bioterrorist's job is difficult. The best chance of acquiring the anthrax bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, is either from commercial culture collections in countries with lax security controls, or by digging in soil where livestock recently died of the disease -- a tactic Aum Shinrikyo tried unsuccessfully in the Australian Outback. Once virulent stocks of anthrax have been cultured, it is no trivial task to propagate pathogens with the required attributes for an aerosolized weapon: the hardiness to survive in an enclosed container and upon release into the atmosphere, the ability to lodge in the lungs, and the toxicity to kill. The particles' size is crucial: If they are too big, they fall to the ground, and if they are too small, they are exhaled from the body. If they are improperly made, static electricity can cause them to clump. Making a bug that defeats antibiotics, a desired goal for any bioweaponeer, is relatively simple but can require laborious trial and error, because conferring antibiotic resistance often reduces a bioweapon's killing power. Field-testing germ weapons is necessary even for experienced weapons makers, and that is likely to require open spaces where animals or even people can be experimentally infected. Each bioagent demands specific weather conditions and requires unforgiving specifications for the spraying device employed. "Dry" anthrax is harder to make -- it requires special equipment, and scientists must perform the dangerous job of milling particles to the right size. "Wet" anthrax is easier to produce but not as easily dispersed. Experts agree that anthrax is the potential mass-casualty agent most accessible to terrorists. The anthrax letter sent in 2001 to then-Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) contained one gram of anthrax, or 1 trillion spores.
Even if terrorists have bioweapons, there’s no way they can disperse them
Smithson 05 (Amy E., PhD, project director for biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center. “Likelihood of Terrorists Acquiring and Using Chemical or Biological Weapons”. ]
Terrorists cannot count on just filling the delivery system with agent, pointing the device, and flipping the switch to activate it. Facets that must be deciphered include the concentration of agent in the delivery system, the ways in which the delivery system degrades the potency of the agent, and the right dosage to incapacitate or kill human or animal targets. For open-air delivery, the meteorological conditions must be taken into account. Biological agents have extreme sensitivity to sunlight, humidity, pollutants in the atmosphere, temperature, and even exposure to oxygen, all of which can kill the microbes. Biological agents can be dispersed in either dry or wet forms. Using a dry agent can boost effectiveness because drying and milling the agent can make the particles very fine, a key factor since particles must range between 1 to 10 ten microns, ideally to 1 to 5, to be breathed into the lungs. Drying an agent, however, is done through a complex and challenging process that requires a sophistication of equipment and know-how that terrorist organizations are unlikely to possess. The alternative is to develop a wet slurry, which is much easier to produce but a great deal harder to disperse effectively. Wet slurries can clog sprayers and undergo mechanical stresses that can kill 95 percent or more of the microorganisms.
(__) No extinction
Gregg Easterbrook, The New Republic Editor, 2001 ["The Real Danger is Nuclear: The Big One," 11/5, ]
Psychologically, it may be that society can only concentrate on one threat at a time. But if that's the case--anthrax letters notwithstanding--the focus is in the wrong place. Biological weapons are bad, but so far none has ever caused an epidemic or worked in war. And it is possible that none ever will: Biological agents are notoriously hard to culture and to disperse, while living things have gone through four billion years of evolution that render them resistant to runaway organisms. Having harmed only a few people thus far, the anthrax scare may tell us as much about bioterrorism's limitations as about its danger.
(__) Doctors and treatment check bio terror
Gregg Easterbrook, The New Republic Editor, 2003 [The New York Times, "The Smart Way to be Scared," 2/16, ]
None of this means bioweapons are not dangerous. But in actual use, biological agents often harm less than expected, partly for the simple evolutionary reason that people have immune systems that fight pathogens. Also, as overall public health keeps improving, resistance to bioagents continues to increase. Conceivably, being in a duct-taped room could protect you if a plane dropping anthrax spores were flying over. Smallpox, on the other hand, must be communicated person to person. Those in the immediate area of an outbreak might be harmed, but as soon as word got out, health authorities would isolate the vicinity and stop the spread. By the time you knew to rush to your sealed room, you would either already be infected or the emergency would be over. Another point skipped in the public debate: smallpox is awful and highly contagious, but with modern treatment usually not fatal. Anthrax doesn't necessarily kill, either, as the nation learned in 2001. Only in movies can mists of mysterious bioagents cause people to drop like stones. In reality, pathogens make people ill; medical workers rush in and save most of the exposed. If germs merely leave sick people whom doctors may heal, terrorists may favor conventional explosives that are certain to kill.
Ext #1 – No Risk
No risk of bio terror – almost every other form of terrorism is more feasible and there is not risk of extinction from it
Anthony Lake, G-Town Diplomacy Prof, 2001
[The Georgetown Public Policy Review, "Bioterrorism: Interview with Anthony Lake," Spring, LN]
It's much harder to develop a biological weapon than a chemical weapon and much, much harder than using computers for terrorist action. So, if you're calculating probabilities, then bioterrorism, probably even more than some forms of nuclear terrorism, is relatively unlikely. I do not walk around everyday worrying that people are dumping microbes in the ventilation ducts of the building I'm in. If we allow ourselves to become scared of this, then in a way, the terrorists have won. If we alter our behavior too much beyond prudent or preventative and preparatory efforts, then the terrorists have won. I don't think the chances are at all high that this will happen; in fact, I think they're very very low. However, the fact is that the Aum Shirinkyo was trying to develop biological weapons and probably used sarin because the Japanese police were closing in on them. (I believe they lost a scientist in the process of trying to develop biological weapons.) We should lament any death, anywhere, but that would be low on the list of lamentations. So while it's very unlikely, it is possible, and in fact we have entered the age in which there have been active efforts to try to develop biological weapons.
No risk of chemical or biological terrorism – tech is difficult to produce and it wouldn’t lead to extinction
Steve Bowman, CRS Researcher, 1999
["Weapons of Mass Destruction- the Terrorist Threat," 12/18, w/ Helit Barel, ]
Chemical. Toxic industrial chemicals such as chlorine or phosgene are easily available and do not require great expertise to be adapted into chemical weapons. Nerve agents are more difficult to produce, and require a synthesis of multiple precursor chemicals.15 They also require high-temperature processes and create dangerous byproducts, which makes their production unlikely outside of an advanced laboratory. Blister agents such as mustard can be manufactured with relative ease, but also require large quantities of precursor chemicals. The production and transfer of CW precursor chemicals is internationally monitored under the Chemical Weapons Convention, providing some degree of control over their distribution16 Aerosol or vapor forms are the most effective for dissemination, which can be carried out by sprayers or an explosive device. However, agents are vulnerable to temperature, moisture and wind, and would therefore be most effectively used on an indoor population. The Aum Shinrikyo again provides an example of the unpredictable effectiveness of chemical weapons. Although the cult was able to produce the nerve agent Sarin and release it in a closed environment — the Tokyo subway — the attack resulted only in 12 fatalities and injury to hundreds of others, whereas there were 301 fatalities and 5,000 injured in the conventional bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Too many obstacles—technical difficulties
Audrey Kurth Cronin, Specialist in Terrorism Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division. March 28, 2003 “Terrorist Motivations for Chemical and Biological Weapons Use: Placing the Threat in Context” CRS
There are at least four reasons why terrorist groups like Al Qaeda might avoid using chem-bio agents in attacks against the United States and its interests. First and most important, the technical difficulties in carrying out such attacks continue to be significant. Aum Shinrikyo is a good example of a group that had unusually favorable circumstances for producing chemical and biological weapons, including money, facilities, time and expertise, yet they were unable to do so effectively. Some experts argue that Aum Shinrikyo’s experience, which included problems ranging from obtaining biological seed cultures to effectively disseminating them to chemical leaks and accidents, is as easily a warning of the technical challenges involved as it is an example for future groups.20 For most nonstate actors, difficulties with acquiring materials, maintaining them, transforming them into weapons, and disseminating them effectively are numerous. While many technical advances have occurred in recent years, arguably reducing the barriers somewhat, there are still considerable obstacles to terrorist development of chemical and biological weapons.21
Ext #2 – No Extinction
Biological warfare wouldn’t cause extinction – diseases can be contained
Gregg Easterbrook, The New Republic Editor, 2003
[Wired, "We're All Gonna Die!" 11/7, ]
3. Germ warfare! Like chemical agents, biological weapons have never lived up to their billing in popular culture. Consider the 1995 medical thriller Outbreak, in which a highly contagious virus takes out entire towns. The reality is quite different. Weaponized smallpox escaped from a Soviet laboratory in Aralsk, Kazakhstan, in 1971; three people died, no epidemic followed. In 1979, weapons-grade anthrax got out of a Soviet facility in Sverdlovsk (now called Ekaterinburg); 68 died, no epidemic. The loss of life was tragic, but no greater than could have been caused by a single conventional bomb. In 1989, workers at a US government facility near Washington were accidentally exposed to Ebola virus. They walked around the community and hung out with family and friends for several days before the mistake was discovered. No one died. The fact is, evolution has spent millions of years conditioning mammals to resist germs. Consider the Black Plague. It was the worst known pathogen in history, loose in a Middle Ages society of poor public health, awful sanitation, and no antibiotics. Yet it didn't kill off humanity. Most people who were caught in the epidemic survived. Any superbug introduced into today's Western world would encounter top-notch public health, excellent sanitation, and an array of medicines specifically engineered to kill bioagents. Perhaps one day some aspiring Dr. Evil will invent a bug that bypasses the immune system. Because it is possible some novel superdisease could be invented, or that existing pathogens like smallpox could be genetically altered to make them more virulent (two-thirds of those who contract natural smallpox survive), biological agents are a legitimate concern. They may turn increasingly troublesome as time passes and knowledge of biotechnology becomes harder to control, allowing individuals or small groups to cook up nasty germs as readily as they can buy guns today. But no superplague has ever come close to wiping out humanity before, and it seems unlikely to happen in the future.
Bio-Chem weapons not effective
Audrey Kurth Cronin, Specialist in Terrorism Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division. March 28, 2003 “Terrorist Motivations for Chemical and Biological Weapons Use: Placing the Threat in Context” CRS
Second, as mentioned above, there are far easier and potentially more “effective” (at least in terms of casualty numbers) alternatives to chemical and biological weapons. On the rare occasions when they have been used, CBW have not resulted in large death tolls, especially compared to conventional weapons such as truck bombs and individual explosive devices.22 It is worth bearing in mind that the attacks of September 11th accomplished mass destruction without any unconventional weaponry. If measured strictly in terms of their proven capacity to kill people or the frequency of terrorist use in the past, CBW weapons are not the most worrisome.
AT: Bioweapons (In General)
No risk of Bio-weapons: (1) unpredictable (2) permant (3) unpopular
Anwar 1999
(Afian, “Biological and Chemical Agents”, August 12, )
The biggest disadvantage of using biological weapons is that they are really quite unpredictable. Who’s to say that you won’t end up infecting your own troops? Another disadvantage is that these agents last for quite some time. Anthrax, for example, can live for up to 50 years in soil. Therefore, it would be impractical to send in troops to occupy the area. No use killing everyone in your enemy’s country and then finding out you can’t occupy it. It’s just like getting a toy without batteries. Don’t you just hate it when you wake up on Christmas morning to find that the wonderful remote controlled car your dad bought for you came without batteries and all the shops are closed? The last major disadvantage is that people, in general, don’t like biological weapons. These people hate it even more when someone actually uses these weapons (particularly, when they are used on them. Actually, come to think of it, if the biological weapons were used on them, they wouldn’t be able to complain much since they’d be dead pretty soon). Now imagine the ruler of that country being accused by the media and in the Oprah Winfry Show of using biological weapons for military gain. Chances are, that person won’t get too popular with the people for very long.
AT: Bird Flu 1/2
1. Vaccines solve 100% of your impacts – researches have found new techniques to supplement vaccinations
ABC News March 3, 2009: Aust researchers closer to bird flu vaccine.
A Melbourne University research team has found boosting T-cell immunity would help rid people's bodies of the virus by finding and destroying infected cells. In a report published today, the researchers say scientists should concentrate on modifying vaccines to boost T-cell levels in order to effectively fight flu strains. Associate Professor Stephen Turner says a compound known to increase immunity could be added to existing flu vaccines in Australia. He says there has been a 50 per cent death rate among people infected with the disease overseas. "A particular concern is the fact that there's ongoing outbreaks of this pathogenic bird flu in Indonesia," he said.
"With continued human infections from this bird flu, we're just waiting to kind of see whether or not the virus will ever gain the capacity to transmit from human to human." Since 2003, the H5N1 avian influenza virus has infected 408 people in 15 countries and killed 254 of them. It has killed or forced the culling of more than 300 million birds as it spread to 61 countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Associate Professor Turner says there is no pre-existing immunity in the population, and existing vaccines would be useless. "We can add this compound, this potent immune modulator, to induce killer T-cells," he said. "So it has two advantages; it can provide this pre-emptive immunity against any pandemic, but it would also help with current influenza, the seasonal influenza that we get every winter."
2. Even the head UN official on bird flu concedes there’s no risk of an immediate outbreak
International Herald Tribune 10/23/06
UNITED NATIONS More than 30 countries reported outbreaks of bird flu this year and the number of people dying every month is increasing, but the world escaped an immediate influenza pandemic possibly because of the energetic global response to warnings a year ago, the U.N. bird flu chief said Monday.Dr. David Nabarro said his warning last year that a mutation of the virulent H5N1 virus which has ravaged poultry stocks since late 2003 could appear anytime and cause an influenza pandemic in humans that kills millions of people was not "overblown." "There will be an influenza pandemic one day. I don't know — you don't know — when it will be. When it does come along, it will have really major economic and social consequences," he said.
3. Biology experts agree that mutation is unlikely and even if it does it won’t kill that many people
Sarina Observer 5/24/06 p.LN
"Ridiculous," scoffed Wendy Orent, an anthropologist and author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease." She said public health officials have vastly exaggerated the potential danger of bird flu. Several factors make it unlikely that bird flu will become a dangerous pandemic, Orent said: the virus, H5N1, is still several mutations away from being able to spread easily between people; and the virus generally attaches to the deepest part of the lungs, making it harder to transmit by coughing or breathing. "We don't have anything that makes us think this bug will go pandemic," Orent told the Associated Press. "Yes, it's virtually certain in human history there will be another pandemic strain ... but there's no reason for it to happen now, or 10 years from now or 20 years from now." Our own medical officer of health, Dr. Richard Schabas, says predictions of a bird flu pandemic are specious and may be making people sick just worrying about an outbreak among humans on a global scale. "Our science just isn't strong enough for us to know that and it's not strong enough for us to be making these kinds of alarmist predictions that we're hearing from the WHO and others," Schabas told CBC News in a recent interview. "This is the third time the WHO has told us were on the brink of an avian influenza pandemic. They said it in 1997 and they were wrong. They said it a year ago and they were wrong." With that poor track record, our medical officer of health wonders why we're so quick to bite again.
4. Bird flu won’t mutate and even if it does it will take forever and then some
Irish Health 2005
While Governments and health authorities around the world, including the HSE and Department of Health here, are, as they have to, preparing for the worst, and are currently making provisions for a possible pandemic, many would feel that the risk of a major outbreak has been exaggerated. Experts have also pointed to the fact that there is much confusion about the difference between the current avian H5N1 influenza, and a possible future flu pandemic, and that this confusion has added to the panic. To date, the virulent H5N1 avian influenza strain has largely been confined to poultry in Asian countries, with hundreds of millions of birds culled; 116 human cases have been reported to date in Asia with 61 deaths, mostly in Thailand. In the majority of cases where humans in Asia have developed bird flu the victims have been people who have handled live poultry. The H5N1 strain of the flu was recently discovered in poultry in Turkey and Romania, but to date there have been no cases reported of humans contracting the bird flu in Europe. There is no risk of contracting avian flu from eating cooked poultry. So the overall message at its simplest is that while countries should be prepared should the worst happen, it might not happen and even if a pandemic-type flu does occur in the near future, it may not be as devastating as has been predicted.
AT: Bird Flu 2/2
5. Genetic predispositions effect the ability of bird flu to effect humans- which means human to human spread is unlikely
Xinhua News Service 11/2/06
Genetic factors might influence human infection of bird flu, which may explain why some people get the disease and others don't, and why it remains rare, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday. Scientists suspect some people have "a genetic predisposition" for bird flu infection, and others don't, the UN agency said in a report, which generalized conclusions of a WHO expert meeting in September. The theory is based on data from rare instances of human-to-human transmission in genetically-related persons. "This possibility, if more fully explored, might help explain why human cases are relatively rare, and why the virus is not spreading easily from animals to humans or from human to human," the WHO said. The evidence to the theory is mainly from a family cluster of cases last May in North Sumatra, Indonesia, when seven people in an extended family died. Only blood relatives were infected in the Karo district of North Sumatra, the largest cluster known to date worldwide, "despite multiple opportunities for the virus to spread to spouses or into the general community," the WHO said.
Ext #1 – Vaccines Solve
Vaccines prevent bird flu spread – and its expansion is nowhere near likely
Newsweek 05
Most researchers think our luck won't hold—that as the trillions of flu viruses at loose in the world replicate and mutate, it's only a matter of time before one evolves the ability to spread by way of a cough or a handshake. Then our fate will be decided in a race between the virus's inherent lethality and the tendency of all germs to evolve toward a less deadly form because their own spread depends on not killing the host—us—too quickly. Some researchers like our odds. In 1918, millions of soldiers and civilian refugees on the move in crammed trains and ships created an ideal situation for spreading flu, and there was nothing like today's techniques for surveillance and isolation of patients. "I actually have confidence about this," says Paul Ewald, a biologist at the University of Louisville. "It won't race around the world like a new 1918 virus." We also have medical resources undreamed of in 1918. Last year molecular virologist Richard Webby of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Mem-phis, Tenn., announced he had "reverse engineered" a version of the H5N1 virus that could be the basis for a vaccine, keeping the parts that are recognized by the human immune system while disabling a critical disease-causing function. It took just "a few weeks," says Linda Lambert, who is coordinating the government's bird-flu-vaccine program. The resulting vaccine has been tested on 450 volunteers, and preliminary results are promising, at least for the highest doses tested; like many vaccines, it will probably have to be given in two shots, a month apart. On the assumption it will work, but also in part just to get a production line up and running, the government last month awarded a $100 million contract to Sanofi Pasteur of France, aiming for a stockpile of 20 million doses. The vaccine is tricky to manufacture, because it requires injecting virus into live chicken eggs; under a separate contract, the same company is researching a cell-based production system that could show results by the end of the decade.
US provided 10 million dollars for bird flu vaccinations in developing countries
Washington File 10/23/06
Assistance to developing countries is critical, according to the report. Such countries will need help to assess the impact of flu on their populations and to develop and implement seasonal flu vaccination programs. This includes the purchase of seasonal flu vaccine, which now costs $3 to $7 per dose.“If a country is to protect its own people, it must work together with other nations to protect the people of the world,” Leavitt said. “In that spirit,” he added, “the United States has provided $10 million to the WHO to support influenza vaccine development and manufacturing infrastructure by institutions in other countries as they develop sustainable programs for vaccines to prevent avian H5N1 or other novel influenza viruses in humans.”
The WHO’s global stockpile of Tamiflu would eliminate the pandemic strain of Avian Flu
The Economist, October 20, 2005, (“Avian Influenza”
University of Pittsburgh scientists say they've genetically engineered an avian flu vaccine that has proven 100 percent effective in mice and chickens. The vaccine was produced from the critical components of the deadly H5N1 virus that has devastated bird populations in Southeast Asia and Europe and has killed more than 80 people. Since the newly developed vaccine contains a live virus, researchers say it may be more immune-activating than avian flu vaccines prepared by traditional methods. Furthermore, because it is grown in cells, it can be produced much more quickly than traditional vaccines, thereby making it an extremely attractive candidate for preventing the spread of the virus in domestic livestock populations and, potentially, in humans. "The results of this animal trial are very promising, not only because our vaccine completely protected animals that otherwise would have died, but also because we found that one form of the vaccine stimulates several lines of immunity against H5N1," said Dr. Andrea Gambotto, an assistant professor and lead author of the study. The research is detailed in the Feb 15 issue of the Journal of Virology and made available early online.
Ext #3 – No Mutation
Avian Flu will take generations to mutate and isn’t spreading rapidly
US Fed News 11-3-2005
Foreign affairs editor Pramit Pal Chaudhuri analyzed in nationalist Hindustan Times (10/27): "The present outbreak of avian influenza...will not kill even 200 people. It will devastate a lot of chicken farmers and ruin a lot of Christmas turkey dinners. Finally, by next spring, the world will have found a new disease to get panicky about.... This strain was detected in 1997 and is known to have killed about 75 people since then.... In comparison, tuberculosis and malaria knock off three million people each year. Bird flu panic, on the other hand, has spread like wildfire across the globe.... The H5N1 avian virus has taken the first step.... In other words, the world is still two and a half Darwinian degrees of separation from a pandemic. And bird flu is taking its sweet time about evolving further.... To stop a disease that has killed less than 100 people, tens of thousands of small farmers in Asia have been ruined by bird culls that have run past the 140 million mark.... In the meantime, governments are spending billions on actions that are often more about symbolism than science.... When patents come under threat so do profits, private firms stop doing research about that disease and the chances for a genuine cure recede.... Tamiflu, a non-cure for a hypothetical pandemic, is a poor case for the extreme action of patent breaking. No one should think that bird flu is not a threat. Given the right conditions and enough time, the virus will jump through the genetic hoops needed to make it a mass killer.... The present bird flu crisis will burn itself out in the next few months. Its legacy, however, is shaping up to be the worst of all worlds: unenlightened public, unreformed poultry industry and less medical research.... Don't stock up on Tamiflu. Don't socialize with South-east Asian chicken farmers. Eat Christmas turkey or butter chicken or whatever, just cook it well."
The last 8 years proves the risk of mutation into human to human transfer is low
Irish Health 2005
The risk of avian flu transferring to the human population is extremely low and this can be borne out in the relatively small number of human cases recorded to date in the vast continent of Asia. Experts predict that if avian flu did come to Ireland (and we are regarded as a relatively low risk country for the flu arriving here) workers handling live poultry would be given bird flu vaccine and anti-viral drugs. So if avian flu did break out in poultry and birds in Ireland, the risk of humans contracting it are relatively low, although the risk of a human dying from it if they get it are fairly high. Experts also stress that even if the H5N1 bird flu arrived here it would not increase the possibility of a human flu pandemic in Ireland.
Bird Flu can’t spread and mutate-Science Proves
Univeristy of Wisconsin Madison News, 06 ( Terry Devitt, “Cell Barrier Slows bird flu’s spread among humans”, March 22nd 2006) < >
Flu viruses, like many other types of viruses, require access to the cells of their hosts to effectively reproduce. If they cannot enter a cell, they are unable to make infectious particles that infect other cells - or other hosts. Our findings provide a rational explanation for why H5N1 viruses rarely infect and spread from human to human, although they can replicate efficiently in the lungs," the authors of the study write in the Nature report. By looking at human tissues, Kawaoka's group noted that the cells in the upper portions of the respiratory system lacked the surface receptors that enable avian H5N1 virus to dock with the cell. Receptors are molecules on the surface of cells that act like a lock. A virus with a complementary binding molecule - the key - can use the surface receptor to gain access to the cell. Once inside, it can multiply and infect other cells. "Deep in the respiratory system, (cell) receptors for avian viruses, including avian H5N1 viruses, are present," explains Kawaoka, who also holds an appointment at the University of Tokyo. "But these receptors are rare in the upper portion of the respiratory system. For the viruses to be transmitted efficiently, they have to multiply in the upper portion of the respiratory system so that they can be transmitted by coughing and sneezing." The upshot of the new finding, says Kawaoka, a professor of pathobiological sciences at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, is that existing strains of bird flu must undergo key genetic changes to become the type of flu pathogen most feared by biomedical scientists. "No one knows whether the virus will evolve into a pandemic strain, but flu viruses constantly change," Kawaoka says. "Certainly, multiple mutations need to be accumulated for the H5N1 virus to become a pandemic strain
Ext #4 – Mutation Slow
Threat of mutation is low- if it happens it will take tons of time to mutate
Chicago Tribune 11-1-2005
How imminent a threat the bird flu might be depends on factors that scientists don't fully understand. For example, how many changes in the virus' genetic makeup would it take before it could easily infect and spread among humans? Influenza viruses are constructed of RNA, the genetic cousin of the much more stable DNA. As an RNA virus reproduces itself from inside a human cell, its copying mechanism makes numerous small errors in genetic translation--as though every time a newspaper article were reproduced another word was misspelled. Those errors--or mutations--are why last year's vaccine does not protect against this year's strain. As a result, for many in the U.S. and other highly developed countries, getting an annual "flu shot" has become a winter ritual. Although flu viruses constantly mutate in small ways, the more mutations needed to easily infect humans, the longer such an adaptation would probably take--and the less likely it would be to occur at all. Palese thinks the evidence suggests that relatively large numbers of mutations would be required, indicating the threat is probably not immediate. The first human cases of the new avian flu were reported in Hong Kong in 1997. So the virus has been circulating and mutating for at least eight years without adapting to move from person to person, Palese noted. And other data suggest that a related virus--or possibly the same virus--has been circulating in large areas of China for even longer, perhaps since before 1992, he said.
Even if they win it mutates, it won’t happen for 50 years-
CNN News 10/10/05
CNN) -- A physician monitoring the threat of avian influenza says a key question is whether the strain of bird flu in Asia has mutated into a flu that could result in a human pandemic. Dr. Marc Siegel, author of "False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear," said it's likely that such a pandemic could occur "over the next 50 years and maybe even over the next 10 or 20," but he said "it may very well not be this bug." The first case of avian influenza type A (H5N1) spreading from a bird to a human was recorded in Hong Kong during a 1997 outbreak of the flu in poultry, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. (Watch why many companies aren't interested in making vaccine -- 1:29)
Siegel said there are still many unanswered questions regarding whether this strain of bird flu could be a pandemic trigger. "If it does mutate or another one does, we don't know for sure what it will do," he said. "That's, you know, really speculation at this point."
Ext #5 – No Human Spread
Study shows the spread of the flu is tied to genetic predispositions- even if they win it mutates it will be slow and ineffective
Australian News 11/3/06
"A genetic predisposition for infection is suspected based on data from rare instances of human-to-human transmission in genetically-related persons,'' the WHO said. "This possibility, if more fully explored, might help explain why human cases are comparatively rare and why the virus is not spreading easily from animals to humans or from human to human,'' it added. Bird flu remains mainly an animal disease, but has infected 256 people since late 2003, killing 152 of them, according to the United Nations agency. Experts fear the virus could mutate and spark a human influenza pandemic, which could kill millions. Overall, the H5N1 virus continues to show "inefficient spread'', both from animals to humans and among humans, it said.
The Avian Flu will never be transmittable among humans
International Herald Tribune 11-9-05 ( Gina Kolata, “ Hazards in the hunt for flu bug” ,November 9th 2005) < >
Some experts like Peter Palese of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York said the H5N1 viruses are a false alarm. He notes that studies of serum collected in 1992 from people in rural China indicated that millions there had antibodies to the H5N1 strain. That means they had been infected with an H5N1 bird virus and recovered, apparently without incident. Despite that, and the fact that those viruses have been circulating in China for a dozen years, almost no human-to-human spread has occurred. "The virus has been around for more than a dozen years, but it hasn't jumped into the human population," Palese said. "I don't think it has the capability of doing it."
Even if the virus mutates- it is weaker than the original and will not spread among humans
Medical News Today, 06 - the largest independent health and medical news website on the Internet. - ( “ Mutated Bird Flu Virus Might Not Spread Easily”, August 1st 2006) < >
Although many scientists have been concerned that the H5N1 bird flu virus may mutate one day and become easily human transmissible, a recent study seems to indicate that it might not spread easily among humans. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), USA, tried to combine a common human flu virus with H5N1 and found it does not spread easily. This could mean that the mutated virus may not be such a giant threat to global human health. You can read about this study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2. Scientists infected ferrets with genetically engineered H5N1 viruses and found that the infected animals did not spread their illness to other healthy ferrets - all the animals were very close to each other. They also found that the 'mutated' virus was not as virulent as the original H5N1.
Mutations don’t increase likelihood of human transmission
World Health Organization, 06 (“ Avian Influenza: Significance of Mutations in the H5N1 virus”, February 20th 2006) < >
Several recent media reports have included speculations about the significance of mutations in H5N1 avian influenza viruses. Some reports have suggested that the likelihood of another pandemic may have increased as a result of changes in the virus. Since 1997, when the first human infections with the H5N1 avian influenza virus were documented, the virus has undergone a number of changes. These changes have affected patterns of virus transmission and spread among domestic and wild birds. They have not, however, had any discernible impact on the disease in humans, including its modes of transmission. Human infections remain a rare event. The virus does not spread easily from birds to humans or readily from person to person.
AT: Blackouts
1. No impact on the economy
Thomas 1/18/01 – Associate Director of Advisory Services at NFF, Senior Economic Correspondent for [Rebecca, “An Energy Crisis—but Not an Economic One,” Smart Money, 1/18/01, ]
Wall Street also downplayed the potential nationwide impact of California-specific electricity disruptions, with the Nasdaq posting a healthy two-day bounce and the Dow Jones Industrial Average joining in on Thursday. While California accounts for about one-eighth of U.S. gross domestic product, not all of its economic activity requires the input of electricity, Credit Suisse First Boston economists note. Moreover, they say, some economic activity that would have occurred in California will now be moved to other states, offsetting any potential loss in national GDP. When it comes to inflation, the national impact of higher electric rates should be similarly muted. Even if statewide electric bills increased by 50%, the overall consumer price index (CPI) would rise by just 0.2%, notes Lehman Brothers chief economist Stephen Slifer. And if you figure that California consumers will ultimately pay the entire $12 billion in losses incurred by the utilities — a worst-case scenario — national personal income would fall by only 0.1%, he says. Finally, although several banks —including Bank of America (BAC), J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM) and First Union (FTU) — are vulnerable to potential loan losses from Edison and PG&E, the likelihood of a systemic financial meltdown remains low. That's because California policy makers are unlikely to let utilities go bankrupt and because few other utilities in the U.S. face similar problems. Moreover, banks' exposure to utilities is small relative to their overall capital base, Lehman economists say.
2. Prevention measures taken to prevent massive blackouts & escalation
DoE 9-10/04 – U.S. Department of Energy [Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, “Is Our Power Grid More Reliable One Year After the Blackout?”, State Energy Program, Sept.-Oct./04, ]
3. Impact is empirically denied – if the massive 2003 blackout didn’t trigger the impacts, nothing will
4. Blackouts encourage conservation methods.
Suzuki 8/22/03 – co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, host of CBC’s The Nature of Things, professor emeritus with Sustainable Development Research Institute, [Dr. David T., “Blackout shows the need for conservation,” David Suzuki Foundation, ]
California has been adopting such efficiency standards and is working to reduce its electricity usage. Two years ago, California's electrical grid was also at the breaking point, much like it is in Ontario today. But rather than spend huge amounts of money on more polluting, fossil-fuel fired power plants, the state elected to push energy conservation. It worked. California dramatically reduced power consumption over just a few weeks and prevented rolling blackouts and the economic disruption they would have entailed. It also reduced greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of six million cars! This is the direction Ontario, and indeed all of Canada must head. We need to reduce our dependence on a centralized, outdated and overstressed electrical grid. We can do this by adopting better standards for efficiency, focusing on conservation and shifting to renewable energy supply and a decentralized power system that is less vulnerable to large failures. Sitting out and watching the stars is something we should all do more often, but it's nice to know we can always turn the lights on.
Ext #1 – Not Key to Econ
Blackouts happen monthly – means its empirically denied
Apt and Lave 8/10/04 - former NASA astronaut, executive director Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center; co-director of the center [Jay Apt and Lester B. Lave, “Blackouts Are Inevitable,” Washington Post, 8/10/04, p. A19, ]
The state of current engineering is such that we cannot verify that any particular change won't impose problems larger than those it is designed to remedy. Nor can we eliminate all problems. Further, with a bit of "luck" and sufficient resources, an informed, intelligent terrorist organization could get around any protective structures and software to bring down the system.
Ext #2 – Preventable
Blackouts largely preventable – caused by small errors
Biever 11/20/03 – staff writer [“Celeste, ‘preventable’ failures caused U.S. power blackouts,” ,New Scientist, 11/20/03, ]
Blackouts inevitable. Coping – not prevention – should be the primary goal.
Apt and Lave 8/10/04 - former NASA astronaut, executive director Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center; co-director of the center [Jay Apt and Lester B. Lave, “Blackouts Are Inevitable,” Washington Post, 8/10/04, p. A19, ]
This approach is very different from the debate with which congressional conferees are dealing. They should know that, despite the rhetoric, we will not be able to prevent all future power failures. While some investments to decrease the frequency of future outages are worthwhile, the Energy Department, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and state regulators need to focus on lowering the cost and disruptive effect of future blackouts. We need to be able to accomplish the essential missions of the electricity system despite a blackout -- and to do so at the lowest possible cost.
Ext #3 – Blackouts are Constructive
Blackouts increase investments to harden transmission
Peter Fairley, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Spectrum 2004. [director of the Society of Environmental Journalists,. “The Unruly Power Grid,” August, ctrum.aug04/4195]
One, an optimization model, championed by Caltech's Doyle, presumes that power engineers make conscious and rational choices to focus resources on preventing smaller and more common disturbances on the lines; large blackouts occur because the grid isn't forcefully engineered to prevent them. The competing explanation, hatched by a team connected with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, views blackouts as a surprisingly constructive force in an unconscious feedback loop that operates over years or decades. Blackouts spur investments to strengthen overloaded power systems, periodically counterbalancing pressures to maximize return on investment and deliver electricity at the lowest possible cost.
AT: Brazilian Economy
Brazilian economy resilient and officially out of the recession – real estate market, industry, and low unemployment proves
Leslie Richards (investment consultant to Brazil land Invest and wrote this piece on the Brazilian economy and affordable housing sector) 9/18/2009: Brazilian Economy Resilient And Affordable Housing Is Attracting Foreign Investment.
The Brazilian domestic real estate market is attracting huge foreign investment, helped by a strong and resilient Brazilian Economy.
Second quarter real GDP increased 1.9% from the first quarter in figures released by the Brazilian Government. The data was released by The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and showed a reduced drop in GDP from last year causing Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and BNP Paribas to revise their 2009 GDP forecasts higher following the announcement.
Brazils predicted growth has now been revised upwards to 4%, according to a weekly central bank survey of 100 economists. This coupled with a prediction of 0.16 per cent contraction for the whole year has led the Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega to state publically Brazil’s economy has rebounded from the global financial crisis.
The Brazilian Central Bank president Henrique Meirelles said GDP growth in this second quarter is excellent news and shows that Brazil has already come out of recession. Finance Minister Mantega said This growth is based upon positive trends in industry, services and employment rates.
A major factor in the quick turnaround experienced by the Brazilian economy is a series of measures introduced by the Government to incentivise the domestic real estate market and construction industry. Minha casa, Minha Vida has been a huge success and has contributed to the 2.1 per cent increase in domestic spending over last months figures.
This programme has poured R$60bn into Brazils housing market and given that the construction industry accounts for 5 per cent of Brazils gross domestic product this scheme is giving a valuable boost to employment and earnings.
The Brazilian Government announced that it would plow another R$10 Billion into its flagship affordable housing scheme, Minha Casa, Minha Vida in 2010. The key to this scheme is the Government providing subsidies of up to 90%, which keeps the buyers mortgage payments below 10% of their income. Mortgage payments are guaranteed by a Treasury fund.
Following the French and German economies, Brazil is the latest Group of Twenty economy to emerge from recession. Germany, the Euro regions largest economy, and France, the second largest, both expanded 0.3 percent in the period.
Brazilian economic shocks inevitable – oil dependency and vulnerability to oil shocks
Sandra Polaski et al (deputy undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs ) 2009: Brazil in the Global Economy. pg. 62
In the model base year of 2004, Brazil was a net importer of both crude oil and refined petroleum products, representing the fourth and fifth most important import commodities together accounting for 20 percent of total imports. Moreover, imports account for 37 percent of consumption of crude oil and 12 percent of consumption of refined petroleum. In combination, these data indicate that the Brazilian economy is likely to continue to experience, at least in the short term, substantial disruption following sustained increases in the price of imported oil. However, Brazil’s exports of oil-based commodities – currently crude oil only accounts for 2.3 percent and refined petroleum for 4.9 percent of total exports are likely to grow over time, which suggests the adverse implications of oil price increases will wane with future exploitation of petroleum reserves.
AT: Business Confidence
Actual business condition overshadow biz con – it’s resilient
Johannesburg 9 (Mail & Guadian Online, "Business confidence remains resilient," Jun 9, , AD: 6/29/09) jl
As was the case during the first quarter, the decline in business confidence levels is surprisingly small in view of the poor actual business conditions. This points to perceptions that the economy is approaching the lower turning point of the present cycle. Confidence declined in the building and construction sector (-10), the manufacturing sector (-5) and the retail sector (-5), though it recovered somewhat in the both the wholesale (+5) and motor trade (+7) sectors. Since the end of last year, the local business environment has been overshadowed by the effect of the global financial and economic crisis. The impact of the global crisis arrived on top of an already moderating local business cycle since the end of 2007. Mining and manufacturing real GDP contracted at real annualised rates of 30% and 20% respectively during the first quarter of 2009, while the tertiary sector, excluding government, slowed to year-on-year growth of only 0,6% from 5% to 6% at the end of 2007. Following on a real GDP growth momentum of 4% to 5% at the beginning of last year, actual GDP began contracting during the final quarter of 2008 (-1,8% annualised) and this decline intensified during the first quarter of this year (6,4% annualised). "The SARB has responded quite aggressively, cutting its repo rate at five meetings since December 2008 by a cumulative 450 basis points; in February the minister of finance also announced an expansionary budget for the 2009/10 fiscal year. The global economic situation also stabilised from March this year, and equity and commodity markets have recovered, though much uncertainty remains," the survey's sponsors said.
Massachusetts proves that bizcon is resilient and rising now.
Reidy 9 (Chris, ADP Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, The Boston Globe, "Business confidence index edges up," May 6, Lexis, AD: 6/29/09) jl
Associated Industries of Massachusetts said its monthly Business Confidence Index added 1.9 points from March to reach 35.4 in April. February's 33.3 reading, (on a 100-point scale, with 50 as neutral) was a historic low. Established in 1915, AIM describes itself as a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that represents Massachusetts employers. A statement from Raymond G. Torto, chief economist at the real estate company CB Richard Ellis Group and chairman of AIM's board of economic advisers, said: ``Though two small gains barely constitute a trend, we have been seeing signs in the AIM survey since February that the economic decline - now the longest of the post-World War II era - could bottom out soon.''
US biz con is resilient – Trends indicate optimism is prevailing in the market.
Piovano 9 (Carlo, AP Business Writer, " World Stocks Recover on Resilient US Earnings," May 18, , AD: 6/30/090 jl
World stock markets recovered early losses Monday after Lowe's, the second biggest U.S. home improvement chain, said first-quarter profit fell less than feared. The report boosted hopes among investors that the worst of the U.S. recession is over and offset weak earnings news out of Asia, which had weighed on markets early in the day. Standing out Monday was India's stock market, which vaulted more than 17 percent higher on the results of elections over the weekend. In afternoon European trading, Germany's DAX was up 1.1 percent at 4,789.35 and Britain's FTSE 100 was 1.2 percent higher at 4,400.69. France's CAC 40 rose 0.7 percent to 3,191.14. All of them had dropped as much as 1.0 percent after the open. U.S. futures pointed to gains on Wall Street. Dow Jones industrial average futures rose 38, or 0.5 percent, to 8,305. Standard & Poor's 500 index futures rose 5.50, or 0.6 percent, to 888.50. On Friday, the two indexes had fallen 0.8 percent and 1.1 percent. News that net profit at Lowe's Cos. fell to 32 cents per share in the quarter ended May 1, topping analysts' forecast of 25 cents a share, helped sentiment after two of Japan's leading companies — Panasonic and Mizuho Financial — reported colossal losses for the last fiscal year. Price movements were limited as investors juggled backward-looking economic indicators — such as weak GDP data and earnings reports — with more forward-looking measures of business and consumer confidence, which have been on the rise. "The rally in equity markets during March and April may hint that the optimists have won, but the fact that this has now petered out instead suggests that we have merely removed the extreme pessimism from the market," said Daragh Maher, deputy head of global forex strategy at Calyon.
AT: California Economy
California’s economy is screwed anyways – no chance of recovery until at least 2011
Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times, Staff Writer, 7 22, 2009 “No recovery in California until 2011, forecast says”
Unemployment in California and Los Angeles County will increase well into 2010, continuing to exceed the highest levels since at least the end of World War II, according to a local economist whose projections for the Southland economy are among the most negative to date. Continued sluggishness in key industries such as construction, retail, international trade and hospitality will keep the state from a full recovery until 2011, said the report, released by the Kyser Center for Economic Research at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
Personal income will drop 2% in the state this year, the report said, the first annual decline since 1938.
"Most people haven't experienced anything like this in their lifetimes," said Jack Kyser, founding economist of the Kyser Center. California's jobless rate, which was 11.6% in June, will average 12.6% next year, according to Kyser, who also projected that Los Angeles County's unemployment rate will be even higher, averaging 12.8% in 2010. The county's jobless rate was 11.3% last month.
And they’re already doing everything they can to solve it
Associated Press, is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations, 7-24-09,
When people have to struggle and suffer because of those kind of cuts, you can't declare victory," he said. "I think what we have done is steered away from the iceberg and we are coming out of it and we're going to rebuild California as quickly as possible and get our economy back." The attempt to take or borrow nearly $5 billion from cities and counties over two years became one of the most difficult issues. Several big-city mayors criticized the raids Thursday and said at least 130 local governments have agreed to sue the state to block the transfer of some money. Under the budget package, the state would borrow $2 billion from local governments' property tax revenue and repay it with interest within three years. It would take another $1 billion in redevelopment money and nearly $2 billion over two years in local transportation funds — a measure Assembly leaders were considering rejecting Friday.
AT: Caribbean Economies
Caribbean economies resilient – IMF report and this recession proves
Mary Swire 2008: Latin America and the Caribbean Region Resilient So Far, But Risks Ahead.
Economies in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region have generally held up well so far in the face of recent global financial strains, according to the IMF's latest Regional Economic Outlook: Western Hemisphere, released late last week.
Many countries in the region are benefiting from stronger fiscal and external positions and improved credibility of policy frameworks, according to Anoop Singh, Director of the IMF's Western Hemisphere Department.
The IMF observed that stresses in US financial markets have had less impact on the region's financial markets and external funding than in past episodes of global financial disruptions.
Although external funding conditions have tightened, especially for the LAC corporate sector, this has been by less than in the past, and also less than in some other emerging markets. However, Mr Singh noted that a deteriorating global environment will weaken fiscal and external positions, especially because public spending continues to be procyclical in many countries.
Mr Singh added that the prospects for a number of countries have been strongly supported by still-strong commodity prices.
AT: CCP Collapse
No risk of CCP collapse – they have censored internet and the most effective secret police in the world to silence all dissenters
Minxin Pei (senior associate and director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) 3/12/2009: Will the Chinese Communist Party Survive the Crisis.
Economic crisis and social unrest may make it tougher for the CCP to govern, but they will not loosen the party's hold on power. A glance at countries such as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba, and Burma shows that a relatively unified elite in control of the military and police can cling to power through brutal force, even in the face of abysmal economic failure. Disunity within the ruling elite, on the other hand, weakens the regime's repressive capacity and usually spells the rulers' doom.
The CCP has already demonstrated its remarkable ability to contain and suppress chronic social protest and small-scale dissident movements. The regime maintains the People's Armed Police, a well-trained and well-equipped anti-riot force of 250,000. In addition, China's secret police are among the most capable in the world and are augmented by a vast network of informers. And although the Internet may have made control of information more difficult, Chinese censors can still react quickly and thoroughly to end the dissemination of dangerous news.
Since the Tiananmen crackdown, the Chinese government has greatly refined its repressive capabilities. Responding to tens of thousands of riots each year has made Chinese law enforcement the most experienced in the world at crowd control and dispersion. Chinese state security services have applied the tactic of "political decapitation" to great effect, quickly arresting protest leaders and leaving their followers disorganized, demoralized, and impotent. If worsening economic conditions lead to a potentially explosive political situation, the party will stick to these tried-and-true practices to ward off any organized movement against the regime.
Alt cause to collapse – elite disunity is the ONLY scenario of CCP collapse and its inevitable because of the economic crisis
Minxin Pei (senior associate and director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) 3/12/2009: Will the Chinese Communist Party Survive the Crisis.
If popular unrest is not a true threat to the party's continued rule, then what is? The answer could likely be disunity among the country's elite. Those who talk of China's "authoritarian resilience" consider elite unity to be one of the CCP's most significant achievements in recent decades, citing as evidence technocratic dominance, a lack of ideological disputes, the creation of standardized procedures for the promotion and retirement of high officials, and the relatively smooth leadership succession from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao.
But there are reasons to remain skeptical of such apparent harmony -- arrangements of power that are struck in times of economic prosperity often come undone when crisis hits.
The current Chinese leadership is a delicately balanced coalition of regional, factional, and institutional interests, which makes it vulnerable to dissension. To most Western eyes, China is blessed with strong, capable, and decisive leaders. But to the Chinese leaders themselves, the situation looks somewhat different. Their resumés are remarkably similar, as are their records as administrators. No single individual towers above the others in terms of demonstrated leadership, vision, or performance -- which means that no one is beyond challenge, and the stage is set for jockeying for preeminence.
AT: Central Asian War
1. No risk of major central asian war now
Weitz in 6 Richard Weitz is a senior fellow and associate director of the Center for Future Security Strategies at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. Averting a New Great Game in Central Asia The Washington Quarterly 2006 Summer.
Central Asian security affairs have become much more complex than during the original nineteenth-century great game between czarist Russia and the United Kingdom. At that time, these two governments could largely dominate local affairs, but today a variety of influential actors are involved in the region. The early 1990s witnessed a vigorous competition between Turkey and Iran for influence in Central Asia. More recently, India and Pakistan have pursued a mixture of cooperative and competitive policies in the region that have influenced and been affected by their broader relationship. The now independent Central Asian countries also invariably affect the region's international relations as they seek to maneuver among the major powers without compromising their newfound autonomy. Although Russia, China, and the United States substantially affect regional security issues, they cannot dictate outcomes the way imperial governments frequently did a century ago. Concerns about a renewed great game are thus exaggerated. The contest for influence in the region does not directly challenge the vital national interests of China, Russia, or the United States, the most important extraregional countries in Central Asian security affairs. Unless restrained, however, competitive pressures risk impeding opportunities for beneficial cooperation among these countries. The three external great powers have incentives to compete for local allies, energy resources, and military advantage, but they also share substantial interests, especially in reducing terrorism and drug trafficking. If properly aligned, the major multilateral security organizations active in Central Asia could provide opportunities for cooperative diplomacy in a region where bilateral ties traditionally have predominated.
2. Central asia war won’t escalate
Collins and Wohlforth ’04 (Kathleen, Prof PoliSci – Notre Dame and William, Prof Government – Dartmouth, “Defying ‘Great Game’ Expectations”, Strategic Asia 2003-4: Fragility and Crisis, p. 312-3)
Conclusion The popular great game lens for analyzing Central Asia fails to capture the declared interests of the great powers as well as the best reading of their objective interests in security and economic growth. Perhaps more importantly, it fails to explain their actual behavior on the ground, as well the specific reactions of the Central Asian states themselves. Naturally, there are competitive elements in great power relations. Each country’s policymaking community has slightly different preferences for tackling the challenges presented in the region, and the more influence they have the more able they are to shape events in concordance with those preferences. But these clashing preferences concern the means to serve ends that all the great powers share. To be sure, policy-makers in each capital would prefer that their own national firms or their own government’s budget be the beneficiaries of any economic rents that emerge from the exploitation and transshipment of the region’s natural resources. But the scale of these rents is marginal even for Russia’s oil-fueled budget. And for taxable profits to be created, the projects must make sense economically—something that is determined more by markets and firms than governments. Does it matter? The great game is an arresting metaphor that serves to draw people’s attention to an oft-neglected region. The problem is the great-game lens can distort realities on the ground, and therefore bias analysis and policy. For when great powers are locked in a competitive fight, the issues at hand matter less than their implication for the relative power of contending states. Power itself becomes the issue—one that tends to be nonnegotiable. Viewing an essential positive-sum relationship through zero sum conceptual lenses will result in missed opportunities for cooperation that leaves all players—not least the people who live in the region—poorer and more insecure. While cautious realism must remain the watchword concerning an impoverished and potentially unstable region comprised of fragile and authoritarian states, our analysis yields at least conditional and relative optimism. Given the confluence of their chief strategic interests, the major powers are in a better position to serve as a stabilizing force than analogies to the Great Game or the Cold War would suggest. It is important to stress that the region’s response to the profoundly destabilizing shock of coordinated terror attacks was increased cooperation between local governments and China and Russia, and—multipolar rhetoric notwithstanding—between both of them and the United States. If this trend is nurtured and if the initial signals about potential SCO-CSTO-NATO cooperation are pursued, another destabilizing shock might generate more rather than less cooperation among the major powers. Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan are clearly on a trajectory that portends longer-term cooperation with each of the great powers. As military and economic security interests become more entwined, there are sound reasons to conclude that “great game” politics will not shape Central Asia’s future in the same competitive and destabilizing way as they have controlled its past. To the contrary, mutual interests in Central Asia may reinforce the broader positive developments in the great powers’ relations that have taken place since September 11, as well as reinforce regional and domestic stability in Central Asia.
3. Alt cause – water conflicts
Golovnina, Reuters staff writer, 6/12/2008
[Maria, "Water squabbles irrigate tensions in Central Asia," ]
Central Asia is one of the world's driest places where, thanks to 70 years of Soviet planning, thirsty crops such as cotton and grain remain the main livelihood for most of the 58 million people. Disputes over cross-border water use have simmered for years in this sprawling mass of land wedged between Iran, Russia and China. Afghanistan, linked to Central Asia by the Amu Daria river, is adding to the tension by claiming its own share of the water. Water shortages are causing concern the world over, because of rising demand, climate change and swelling populations. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said water scarcity is a "potent fuel for wars and conflict". Analysts say this year's severe weather fluctuations in Central Asia -- from a record cold winter to devastating spring floods and now drought -- are causing extra friction. "Water is very political. It's very sensitive. It can be a pretext for disputes or conflicts," said Christophe Bosch, a Central Asia water expert at the World Bank. "It is one of the major irritants between countries in Central Asia."
Ext #1 – No War
No Central Asian war – the SCO checks conflict
Maksutov in ‘6 (Ruslan, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: A Central Asian Perspective”, August, )
As a starting point, it is fair to say that all Central Asian countries—as well as China and Russia—are interested in security cooperation within a multilateral framework, such as the SCO provides. For Central Asia this issue ranks in importance with that of economic development, given the explosive environment created locally by a mixture of external and internal threats. Central Asia is encircled by four of the world’s eight known nuclear weapon states (China, India, Russia and Pakistan), of which Pakistan has a poor nuclear non-proliferation profile and Afghanistan is a haven for terrorism and extremism. Socio-economic degradation in Central Asian states adds to the reasons for concern and makes obvious the interdependence between progress in security and in development. Some scholars argue that currently concealed tendencies evolving in various states of Central Asia—such as the wide-ranging social discontent with oppressive regimes in the region, and the growing risks of state collapse and economic decline—all conducive to the quick growth of radical religious movements, could have far-reaching implications for regional stability once they come more into the light. 41 At first sight, the instruments established by the SCO to fulfil its declared security- building objectives seem to match the needs that Central Asian states have defined against this background. While the existence of the SCO further reduces the already remote threat of conventional interstate war in the region, 42 it allows for a major and direct focus on the non-state, non-traditional and transnational threats that now loom so large by comparison.
Ext #2 – No Escalation
Won’t draw in Russia, China, or the U.S.
Weitz ’06 (Richard, Senior Fellow – Hudson Institute, Washington Quarterly, Summer, Lexis)
Concerns about a renewed great game are thus exaggerated. The contest for influence in the region does not directly challenge the vital national interests of China, Russia, or the United States, the most important extraregional countries in Central Asian security affairs. Unless restrained, however, competitive pressures risk impeding opportunities for beneficial cooperation among these countries. The three external great powers have incentives to compete for local allies, energy resources, and military advantage, but they also share substantial interests, especially in reducing terrorism and drug trafficking. If properly aligned, the major multilateral security organizations active in Central Asia could provide opportunities for cooperative diplomacy in a region where bilateral ties traditionally have predominated.
Central Asian conflict won’t escalate
Olga Oliker, Senior International Policy Analyst at RAND and David Shlapak, acting director for strategy and doctrine for RAND, 2005, “U.S. Interests in Central Asia,” , p. 41-42
Broadly speaking, there are two primary military reasons the United States would seek to maintain a long-term military presence on for- eign shores. The first has already been mentioned: the existence of an imminent threat to key U.S. interests. For half a century, for exam- ple, the United States has kept Army and Air Force units stationed in South Korea to deter a second North Korean attack and to help de- feat it, should deterrence fail. Putting aside the question of whether or not U.S. interests in Central Asia are sufficient to justify an American defensive shield, even if an external threat to the area existed, the facts appear to support the conclusion that no such danger exists. Although Russia is certainly angling to restore its influence in these ex- Soviet territories, there is no hint of a serious military threat. The new Russian base in Tajikistan, which evolved from many years of pres- ence by its 201st Motor Rifle Division, will keep some 5,000 troops in the country, including an air component. Russian border guards have now left the mission in Tajik hands, leaving only an advisory presence. Moreover, Russian forces in Tajikistan are seen by many as bolstering the Dushanbe regime. Similarly, the air base outside the Kyrgyz town of Kant does not appear to threaten Kyrgyz sover- eignty.4 China, the neighborhood’s other heavy hitter, is also anxious to enhance its relationships with the Central Asian republics; it is the lead nation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and has participated in multiple military exercises with various Central Asian countries. Beijing’s military attention is focused elsewhere and its designs on the region are economic and political—they do not threaten the Central Asian states militarily.5 While aggression among Central Asian actors is sometimes touted as a possibility, none of the region’s militaries appear capable of mounting serious offensive operations and there are few if any issues at stake between Central Asian nations that would warrant large-scale military action
AT: Civil-Military Relations
1. Civil military relations will always be strained – opposing values
Cohen 2000 Former Secretary of Defense.
Eliot A. Cohen. Why the Gap Matters - gap between military and civilian world. The National Interest. .
To do so, they must begin by purging themselves of the notion that if there is no threat of a coup, there is no problem. The truth is that the civil-military relationship in a democracy is almost invariably difficult, setting up as it does opposing values, powerful institutions with great resources, and inevitable tensions between military professionals and statesmen. Those difficulties have become more acute in the United States as a result of two great changes: the end of a centuries-old form of military organization, and a transformation in America's geopolitical circumstances.
2. Military doctrines inevitably tank relations
Cohen 2000. Former Secretary of Defense.
Eliot A. Cohen. Why the Gap Matters - gap between military and civilian world. The National Interest. .
The major doctrinal statements about the use of force in the last twenty years--Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's six rules for intervention, and General Powell's doctrine of overwhelming force--reflect views dominant in the officer corps, views in turn molded by the military's understanding of the Vietnam War. They were echoed by politicians who believed, or found it convenient to declare that they believed, that the job of politicians was merely to set objectives, not scrutinize military plans, monitor the conduct of operations, and adjust strategy to circumstances. This trend reflects a combination of developments, including a common (mis)reading of the Vietnam War, an unwillingness on the part of civilian leaders to accept the responsibilities levied upon them by their offices, and a confidence in the technical expertise of soldiers. Recent doctrine, however, has flaws of the most terrible kind, for it presumes a kind of universal, apolitical and objective military expertise, when military judgmen t is, in fact, highly contextual and contingent, intimately connected with the politics of a situation and subject to a variety of prejudices and personal experiences. Still, the truth is that for the most part civilian political leaders have given up on the kind of hard questioning and probing that characterized the leadership style of those presidents who believed in civilian control and exercised it best--Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower among them. Each of these leaders, in different and large ways, violated massively the simplistic doctrine of civilian control that is current in the military and Congress: namely, politicians should set objectives and then get out of the way.
3. Impact is exaggerated
Cohen 2000. Former Secretary of Defense.
Eliot A. Cohen. Why the Gap Matters - gap between military and civilian world. The National Interest. .
THE PARADOX of increased social and institutional vulnerability on the one hand and increased military influence on narrow sectors of policymaking on the other is the essence of the contemporary civil-military problem. Its roots lie not in the machinations of power hungry generals; they have had influence thrust upon them. Nor do they lie in the fecklessness of civilian leaders determined to remake the military in the image of civil society; all militaries must, in greater or lesser degree, share some of the mores and attitudes of the broader civilization from which they have emerged. The problem reflects, rather, deeper and more enduring changes in politics, society and technology. The challenge to American policymakers and soldiers lies in admitting that there is a problem without exaggerating its size and scope. There is no danger of a coup, but there is dry rot. There is no threat even of a MacArthur-sized crisis between political and military high commands, but there is a level of mistrust, antipathy and condescension that is worrisome. There is no fear of collapse of civilian control, but there is erosion in some areas, distortion in others, and, more than anything else, confusion about the meaning of military professionalism under the new conditions--plus sheer ignorance and forgetfulness about what civilian control entails. What are the solutions?
AT: Chavez
We should ignore Chavez rather than try to isolate him -- he uses US opposition to increase support and influence
Jennifer McCoy Professor, Political Science Georgia State University CQ Congressional Testimony July 17, 2008
The Bush Administration has learned to ignore rather than respond to much of Chavez' inflammatory rhetoric. This change in attitude will help to mitigate the U.S. role as a "foil" to Venezuela's anti-imperialist stance and should be continued.
The U.S. refusal to extradite to Venezuelan citizen Luis Posadas Carriles on charges of terrorism (accused of masterminding the 1976 bombing of a Cuban plane) presents a U.S. double-standard on issues of terrorism.
Lessons for the future - what can and should the U.S. do?
A new U.S. administration offers the opportunity to begin anew with Venezuela in a more amicable and cooperative relationship. However, Washington should not expect major change given the fundamental foreign policy goals of the Chavez administration and the Bolivarian Revolution: to increase Venezuela's national autonomy, to increase the global South's autonomy vis-a-vis the North, and to lessen U.S. dominance in the region and the world. Venezuela will continue its attempts to diversify its oil export markets and to build coalitions to create a more multipolar world and a more integrated South.
A new U.S. foreign policy toward Venezuela should start with positive signals and focus on pragmatic concerns of interest to both countries - commercial relations, counter-narcotics, and security on the Venezuelan-Colombia border. The U.S. should make clear that it respects the sovereign right of the Venezuelan people to choose their leadership (as they have done consistently in voting for Hugo Chavez) and that the U.S. has no intent to engineer regime change in Venezuela. A more consistent policy across the executive branch would help to reinforce this message, as in the past the Pentagon has continued negative descriptions of the Chavez administration even while the State Department tried to moderate its rhetoric.
Chavez's own policies are bringing him down
The New York Times June 15, 2008
It turns out that Hugo Chavez is an adaptable man. The Venezuelan president, who has championed -- and almost certainly helped arm -- Colombia's FARC rebels, called last week for the rebels to lay down their weapons and unconditionally surrender their hostages.
We suspect this change of heart has been driven more by self-interest than conviction. Mr. Chavez is increasingly unpopular at home and increasingly isolated abroad, especially as evidence has mounted of his meddling in Colombia. The change nevertheless is welcome and well timed.
The FARC, which long ago chose drug trafficking over liberation, has been under assault from Colombia's Army and looks as if it is unraveling. The United States, Colombia and all of Venezuela's neighbors should press Mr. Chavez to use all of his influence to get the rebels to demobilize.
There is good news inside Venezuela too. On the same weekend that Mr. Chavez turned on the FARC, he suspended a chilling new law he had enacted by decree that would have forced Venezuelans to cooperate with the intelligence services or go to jail. He has also withdrawn a school curriculum that blasted capitalism as a force to subjugate the people.
With Venezuela's economy slowing and its inflation rate the highest in Latin America, Mr. Chavez's approval rating has plunged since December, when he narrowly lost a referendum that would have given him even more power and allowed him to run for re-election indefinitely. With gubernatorial elections coming in November, he apparently decided he needed a political makeover.
AT: Chemical Industry Collapse
Chemical industry has been through worse and empirically bounces back
Chemical and Engineering News, 2001 (12/24, )
To call 2001 merely a difficult year for the chemical industry downplays the severity of events that eventually influenced general economic, business, political, and social circumstances. The repercussions of terrorist attacks late in the year only made a tough situation worse. The industry was already in a downturn at its start. This spawned an increasing number of job reductions, production cutbacks, business divestitures, and company mergers in the days that followed. For the first time in several years, a handful of companies declared outright bankruptcy, failing to find a way to survive the hard times. High energy and raw material prices were significant factors early on, only to come full circle and end the year at dramatically lower levels. Weakening international economies, slackening demand, overcapacity, the strong dollar, and a squeeze on prices and margins contributed to some of the poorest financial results in years. Chemical sales and earnings continued to decline. Mergers and acquisitions created some entirely new companies and others with new focuses. In the end, the Top 50 global chemical producers got shuffled and mixed, with a few new behemoths emerging. The decisions of government regulators had considerable consequences in these transactions, as well as in environmental and trade policies. The chemical industry has faced added challenges since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Concerns about energy prices shifted to ones about production and supply security. Pharmaceutical producers were drawn into discussions about ensuring the supply of antibiotics and vaccines. And site security--long a key consideration for employee, community, and environmental safety--has been heightened as chemical plants and refineries are feared to be potential targets. On a positive note, advances in sequencing the human genome brought excitement to pharmaceutical discovery. Chemical companies advanced new production technologies and planned to slightly increase their investment in R&D. They also moved ahead with expansion plans around the world, while shutting down older, less efficient plants. The Internet continued to bring changes in how the industry conducts business, with many companies asserting themselves in the online world.
Top CHEMICAL ECONOMY. Even in a lackluster year, the state of the economy is news, but given the precipitous declines of 2001, this year it is big news. Declining growth rates and contraction of gross domestic product in the U.S., exacerbated by many other negative factors, put enormous pressure on the U.S. chemical industry. Similar circumstances played out around the world, especially in Europe and Asia. The strong dollar made U.S. chemicals less attractive to foreign customers. For the first nine months of 2001, the latest data available, U.S. producers exported $60.8 billion in chemicals, a slight increase of 2.7% over the same period last year. At the same time, the U.S. became the place for foreign producers to sell to, with chemical imports into the U.S. up 9.0% to $59.4 billion. This caused the chemical trade surplus, long a point of pride in the industry, to fall 70% to just $1.4 billion.
The trade situation also affected chemical shipments. Imports supplied some U.S. demand, but the U.S. recession had an even greater impact--shipments of chemicals through October contracted by about 3% to a total of $359.6 billion for the year to date, according to Commerce Department data. Of even greater concern has been the increase in inventories relative to shipments as the economy slowed throughout this year. Although chemical inventories have actually declined somewhat, the sell-off has not kept pace with the drop in shipments and has produced a high inventories-to-shipments ratio of about 1.50, which represents 1.5 months of demand. In December of last year, the ratio was 1.39. This inventory overhang has impacted both production and prices throughout the year, especially among commodity chemicals. After reaching an all-time high in February as producers tried to offset the high energy and feedstock costs, the government's producer price index for industrial chemicals has fallen 8.4%. Production of industrial chemicals and synthetics, based on government data, declined about 9% from last year. The downward spiral of the chemical economy this year has of course put tremendous pressure on sales, earnings, and profitability. For the first nine months of 2001, aggregate results for the 25 chemical companies regularly tracked by C&EN show year-to-year declines of 6% in sales and 44% for earnings. The aggregate profit margin for the group fell to 4.6% from 7.9% in the first nine months of last year.
Economic conditions forced Borden Chemicals & Plastics to file for bankruptcy in April and Sterling Chemicals to file in July. Penn Specialty Chemicals also filed in July, and its assets were sold off in December. During the year, W.R. Grace also filed for bankruptcy, but to protect itself from asbestos liability litigation. However, Pioneer Cos., which filed in August, has reorganized and expects to emerge from bankruptcy by the end of December. After selling and closing some its businesses, LaRoche Industries emerged from bankruptcy in October. With earnings and profitability declines, one might think that Wall Street would be less than keen on chemical company stocks. However, stocks of chemical companies, as well as those in many other "old economy" industries, have actually benefited this year from the highly publicized technology meltdown as investors looked for safer havens for their money. Despite the ups and downs of the stock market throughout the year, by mid-December C&EN's stock index--based on the same 25 companies used for earnings--was down just 3% from where it closed in 2000. At the same time, the Dow Jones industrial average was off 8%.
AT: Chemical Terror
1. Aum Shinrikyo proves even if terrorists had the resources – the impact would be low
Smithson, 2005. (Amy E., PhD, is a the project director for biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center. “Likelihood of Terrorists Acquiring and Using Chemical or Biological Weapons”. ]
The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo was brimming with highly educated scientists, yet the cult's biological weapons program turned out to be a lemon. While its poison gas program certainly made more headway, it was rife with life-threatening production and dissemination accidents. After all of Aum's extensive financial and intellectual investment, the Tokyo subway attack killed a dozen people, seriously injured just over fifty more, and mildly injured just under 1,000. In 96 percent of the cases worldwide where chemical or biological substances have been used since 1975, three or fewer people were injured or killed.
2. [insert cards from AT: Chemical Weapons (next page)]
AT: Chemical Weapons
1. Chemical weapons are dangerous to manufacture and producing large quantities is too difficult
Smithson, 2005. (Amy E., PhD, is a the project director for biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center. “Likelihood of Terrorists Acquiring and Using Chemical or Biological Weapons”. ]
Chemical weapons formulas have been published and publicly available for decades. Mustard agents came of age during World War I, and nerve agents were discovered in the mid-1930s. The production processes used over seventy years ago are still viable. The ingredients and equipment a group would need to produce these agents are readily available because they are also the same items that are used to make various commercial items that we use everyday---from ballpoint pens to plastics to ceramics to fireworks. Scientists with a solid chemical background could likely make certain agents in small quantities. However, two factors stand in the way of manufacturing chemical agents for the purpose of mass casualty. First, the chemical reactions involved with the production of agents are dangerous: precursor chemicals can be volatile and corrosive, and minor misjudgments or mistakes in processing could easily result in the deaths of would-be weaponeers. Second, this danger grows when the amount of agent that would be needed to successfully mount a mass casualty attack is considered. Attempting to make sufficient quantities would require either a large, well-financed operation that would increase the likelihood of discovery or, alternatively, a long, drawn-out process of making small amounts incrementally. These small quantities would then need to be stored safely in a manner that would not weaken the agent's toxicity before being released. It would take 18 years for a basement-sized operation to produce the more than two tons of sarin gas that the Pentagon estimates would be necessary to kill 10,000 people, assuming the sarin was manufactured correctly at its top lethality.
2. No impact to chemical weapons – they are minimally destructive
O’Neill 8/19/2004 [Brandan, “Weapons of Minimum Destruction” ]
David C Rapoport, professor of political science at University of California, Los Angeles and editor of the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, has examined what he calls 'easily available evidence' relating to the historic use of chemical and biological weapons. He found something surprising - such weapons do not cause mass destruction. Indeed, whether used by states, terror groups or dispersed in industrial accidents, they tend to be far less destructive than conventional weapons. 'If we stopped speculating about things that might happen in the future and looked instead at what has happened in the past, we'd see that our fears about WMD are misplaced', he says. Yet such fears remain widespread. Post-9/11, American and British leaders have issued dire warnings about terrorists getting hold of WMD and causing mass murder and mayhem. President George W Bush has spoken of terrorists who, 'if they ever gained weapons of mass destruction', would 'kill hundreds of thousands, without hesitation and without mercy' (1). The British government has spent £28million on stockpiling millions of smallpox vaccines, even though there's no evidence that terrorists have got access to smallpox, which was eradicated as a natural disease in the 1970s and now exists only in two high-security labs in America and Russia (2). In 2002, British nurses became the first in the world to get training in how to deal with the victims of bioterrorism (3). The UK Home Office's 22-page pamphlet on how to survive a terror attack, published last month, included tips on what to do in the event of a 'chemical, biological or radiological attack' ('Move away from the immediate source of danger', it usefully advised). Spine-chilling books such as Plague Wars: A True Story of Biological Warfare, The New Face of Terrorism: Threats From Weapons of Mass Destruction and The Survival Guide: What to Do in a Biological, Chemical or Nuclear Emergency speculate over what kind of horrors WMD might wreak. TV docudramas, meanwhile, explore how Britain might cope with a smallpox assault and what would happen if London were 'dirty nuked' (4). The term 'weapons of mass destruction' refers to three types of weapons: nuclear, chemical and biological. A chemical weapon is any weapon that uses a manufactured chemical, such as sarin, mustard gas or hydrogen cyanide, to kill or injure. A biological weapon uses bacteria or viruses, such as smallpox or anthrax, to cause destruction - inducing sickness and disease as a means of undermining enemy forces or inflicting civilian casualties. We find such weapons repulsive, because of the horrible way in which the victims convulse and die - but they appear to be less 'destructive' than conventional weapons. 'We know that nukes are massively destructive, there is a lot of evidence for that', says Rapoport. But when it comes to chemical and biological weapons, 'the evidence suggests that we should call them "weapons of minimum destruction", not mass destruction', he says. Chemical weapons have most commonly been used by states, in military warfare. Rapoport explored various state uses of chemicals over the past hundred years: both sides used them in the First World War; Italy deployed chemicals against the Ethiopians in the 1930s; the Japanese used chemicals against the Chinese in the 1930s and again in the Second World War; Egypt and Libya used them in the Yemen and Chad in the postwar period; most recently, Saddam Hussein's Iraq used chemical weapons, first in the war against Iran (1980-1988) and then against its own Kurdish population at the tail-end of the Iran-Iraq war. In each instance, says Rapoport, chemical weapons were used more in desperation than from a position of strength or a desire to cause mass destruction. 'The evidence is that states rarely use them even when they have them', he has written. 'Only when a military stalemate has developed, which belligerents who have become desperate want to break, are they used.' (5) As to whether such use of chemicals was effective, Rapoport says that at best it blunted an offensive - but this very rarely, if ever, translated into a decisive strategic shift in the war, because the original stalemate continued after the chemical weapons had been deployed. He points to the example of Iraq. The Baathists used chemicals against Iran when that nasty trench-fought war had reached yet another stalemate. As Efraim Karsh argues in his paper 'The Iran-Iraq War: A Military Analysis': 'Iraq employed [chemical weapons] only in vital segments of the front and only when it saw no other way to check Iranian offensives. Chemical weapons had a negligible impact on the war, limited to tactical rather than strategic [effects].' (6) According to Rapoport, this 'negligible' impact of chemical weapons on the direction of a war is reflected in the disparity between the numbers of casualties caused by chemicals and the numbers caused by conventional weapons. It is estimated that the use of gas in the Iran-Iraq war killed 5,000 - but the Iranian side suffered around 600,000 dead in total, meaning that gas killed less than one per cent. The deadliest use of gas occurred in the First World War but, as Rapoport points out, it still only accounted for five per cent of casualties. Studying the amount of gas used by both sides from1914-1918 relative to the number of fatalities gas caused, Rapoport has written: 'It took a ton of gas in that war to achieve a single enemy fatality. Wind and sun regularly dissipated the lethality of the gases. Furthermore, those gassed were 10 to 12 times as likely to recover than those casualties produced by traditional weapons.' (7) Indeed, Rapoport discovered that some earlier documenters of the First World War had a vastly different assessment of chemical weapons than we have today - they considered the use of such weapons to be preferable to bombs and guns, because chemicals caused fewer fatalities. One wrote: 'Instead of being the most horrible form of warfare, it is the most humane, because it disables far more than it kills, ie, it has a low fatality ratio.' (8) 'Imagine that', says Rapoport, 'WMD being referred to as more humane'. He says that the contrast between such assessments and today's fears shows that actually looking at the evidence has benefits, allowing 'you to see things more rationally'. According to Rapoport, even Saddam's use of gas against the Kurds of Halabja in 1988 - the most recent use by a state of chemical weapons and the most commonly cited as evidence of the dangers of 'rogue states' getting their hands on WMD - does not show that unconventional weapons are more destructive than conventional ones. Of course the attack on Halabja was horrific, but he points out that the circumstances surrounding the assault remain unclear. 'The estimates of how many were killed vary greatly', he tells me. 'Some say 400, others say 5,000, others say more than 5,000. The fighter planes that attacked the civilians used conventional as well as unconventional weapons; I have seen no study which explores how many were killed by chemicals and how many were killed by firepower. We all find these attacks repulsive, but the death toll may actually have been greater if conventional bombs only were used. We know that conventional weapons can be more destructive.' Rapoport says that terrorist use of chemical and biological weapons is similar to state use - in that it is rare and, in terms of causing mass destruction, not very effective. He cites the work of journalist and author John Parachini, who says that over the past 25 years only four significant attempts by terrorists to use WMD have been recorded. The most effective WMD-attack by a non-state group, from a military perspective, was carried out by the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka in 1990. They used chlorine gas against Sri Lankan soldiers guarding a fort, injuring over 60 soldiers but killing none. The Tamil Tigers' use of chemicals angered their support base, when some of the chlorine drifted back into Tamil territory - confirming Rapoport's view that one problem with using unpredictable and unwieldy chemical and biological weapons over conventional weapons is that the cost can be as great 'to the attacker as to the attacked'. The Tigers have not used WMD since.
AT: Child Abuse
1. There are numerous reasons for child abuse- can’t solve them all.
Lesa Bethea. March 15, 1999. (Clinical assistant professor of family medicine in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. “Primary Prevention of Child Abuse” The American Family Physician. . KK)
Child abuse is 15 times more likely to occur in families where spousal abuse occurs. Children are three times more likely to be abused by their fathers than by their mothers.10 No differences have been found in the incidence of child abuse in rural versus urban settings.
Personal Factors
Parents who were abused as children are more likely than other parents to abuse their own children. However, the retrospective methodology of research in this area has been criticized.8 Lack of parenting skills, unrealistic expectations about a child's capabilities, ignorance of ways to manage a child's behavior and of normal child development may further contribute to child abuse.8,18 It is estimated that 40 percent of confirmed cases of child abuse are related to substance abuse.19 It is also estimated that 11 percent of pregnant women are substance abusers, and that 300,000 infants are born each year to mothers who abuse crack cocaine.20 Domestic violence also increases the risk of child abuse.21
Other factors that increase the risk of child abuse include emotional immaturity of the parents, which is often highly correlated to actual age (as in the case of teenage parents),22 poor coping skills, often related to age but also occurring in older parents,8,15,22 poor self-esteem and other psychologic problems experienced by either one or both parents,8,15 single parenthood and the many burdens and hardships of parenting that must be borne without the help of a partner,8 social isolation of the parent or parents from family and friends and the resulting lack of support that their absence implies,8,23 any situation involving a handicapped child or one that is born prematurely or at a low birth weight, any situation where a sibling younger than 18 months of age is already present in the home,8,24 any situation in which the child is the result of an unwanted pregnancy or a pregnancy that the mother denies,25-27 any situation where one sibling has been reported to child protective services for suspected abuse28 and, finally, the general inherent stress of parenting which, when combined with the pressure of any one or a combination of the factors previously mentioned, may exacerbate any difficult situtation8,15,16 (Figure 1).
2. Substance Abuse Accounts for 70 percent of child neglect cases.
Child Welfare Information Gateway. 2009. (A service of the Children's Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “Acts of Omission: Child Neglect” . KK)
Some CPS agencies estimate that substance abuse is a factor in as many as 70 percent of all the child neglect cases they serve. But what is the connection between substance abuse and neglect, specifically?
A number of researchers have explored the relationship between parental substance abuse and child neglect. They have found that substance abusing parents may divert money that is needed for basic necessities to buy drugs and alcohol. Parental substance abuse may interfere with the ability to maintain employment, further limiting the family's resources. The substance abusing behaviors may expose the children to criminal behaviors and dangerous people. Substance abusing parents may be emotionally or physically unavailable and not able to properly supervise their children, risking accidental injuries. Children living with substance abusing parents are more likely to become intoxicated themselves, either deliberately, by passive inhalation, or by accidental ingestion. Heavy parental drug use can interfere with a parent's ability to provide the consistent nurturing and caregiving that promotes children's development and self-esteem. According to Magura and Laudet, "Substance abuse has deleterious effects on virtually every aspect of one's life and gravely interferes with the ability to parent adequately".
AT: China Agression
Even if China was aggressive, the impact is mitigated --- only wants to tweak and anything else would take too long
Jones, 07 – foreign affairs at University of St. Andrew (“China’s Rise and American Hegemony: Towards a Peaceful Co-Existence?” E-International Relations, 2007, )
However, the degree to which a state attempts to change the status quo can vary. Thus, China does not currently demonstrate a fundamental revolutionary wish to overthrow the entire international system, but rather a minor tweaking. Indeed, China’s rise has come by playing by Western capitalist rules. Therefore, this essay cautions against sensationalism. In the regional sphere, China now appears unimpeded by either Japan or Russia for the first time in two centuries, and thus is beginning to project its influence in the region. Cooperation on North Korea illustrates that the United States is willing to collaborate with China to reach its regional security goals. Additionally, China has also used liberal institutionalism to increase political power and further engage with the region. The recent October 2006 ASEAN-China Commemorative Summit sought to deepen political, security and economic ties, and concluded that the strategic partnership had ‘boosted…development and brought tangible benefits to their peoples, [and] also contributed significantly to peace, stability and prosperity in the region.’ China’s gradual, natural progression of influence should not be feared. Alluding to soft power, liberal theorist Joseph Nye illustrates China’s slow shift by contending that ‘it will take much longer before [China] can make an impact close to what the U.S. enjoys now.’
No Chinese Aggression --- ASEAN checks
Weissmann, 09 --- senior fellow at the Swedish School of Advanced Asia Pacific Studies (Mikael Weissmann, “Understanding the East Asian Peace: Some Findings on the Role of Informal Processes,” Nordic Asia Research Community, November 2, 2009, )
It has been important for ASEAN’s attempt to socialise China into becoming a responsible big power in the regional community, in order to ensure that the Chinese interests would gradually become integrated with the interests of East Asia as a whole. Over time, China has re-interpreted its role and interests as a rising power and has engaged in the ASEAN+3 process and embraced multilateralism and the ASEAN Way. This has been a reciprocal process between China’s ‘soft power diplomacy’ and ASEAN’s ‘constructive engagement’ policies. It is difficult to say what has caused what, i.e., to what extent China has been socialised by ASEAN to accept current practices and to become what seems to be a more benign power, and to what extent the Chinese policies have influenced ASEAN’s increased acceptance of China as a partner and a (relatively) benign, peacefully rising power. It is most likely that it is not an either–or question, but a transformation where there have been synergy effects between ‘soft-power diplomacy’ and “constructive engagement”. Regionalisation has also ensured that China (and others) adheres to an ‘economic first’ foreign policy focus, and that the overall peaceful relations in East Asia have developed and have been institutionalised. Although multilateralism and institutionalisation have only been identified in the South China Sea and Sino–ASEAN relations, they still have a spill over effect on Chinese behaviour in other conflicts. If China would behave badly in one case, it would risk losing its laboriously built trust towards ASEAN.
AT: China Bashing
1. US politicians won’t let China bashing get out of control:
AFP, 6/22/2008 ()
China has also challenged longstanding US military dominance in Asia, and some experts say that in five years, the Asian giant with an exploding manufacturing sector may be able assemble the "building blocks" of a military superpower. President George W. Bush and his recent predecessors all determined that they had to make the relationship between the world's most developed nation and biggest developing economy work, the experts said, and senators Obama and McCain would also very quickly come to that conclusion.
"When you are dealing with an economic superpower of that magnitude one does not give the impression of a desire for a confrontation unless one is pushed to the wall," said John Tkacik, a former China expert at the State Department. "And China is simply too big an economic actor to confront head on if one doesn't have to," he said.
2. China won’t allow protectionism to spiral into a trade war:
Scott Tong, 6/24/2008
()
Tong: Well, there's talk of protectionism in Congress, that China isn't proceeding quickly enough. From China's perspective, the technicians who are trying to tweak the economy, most people tell me that this push back rhetoric right now at least is not going to lead into protectionism from the Chinese side, that what motivates them principally is political stability and if they can go in the right direction in a way that's politically stable, they're going to keep going in that direction and for all the rhetoric and finger wagging globally, it's going to be motivated by domestic concerns first.
3. Any US protectionism will be rolled back—steel tariffs prove:
Seattle Times, 1/5/2004; Lexis
Next, freeing international trade from heavy regulation. Dean says he will not sign trade agreements unless they include labor and environmental standards. Whose standards? Ours? Poor countries cannot afford them. There is room for compromise, but recent debates on trade suggest industries or unions often push for protectionism under the cloak of fairness. A protectionist trade policy, no matter how it is camouflaged, can't exist for long in today's global economy. Look at President Bush's failed steel tariff as an example.
AT: Chinese Economy
Chinese economy resilient – has powered through natural disasters and the economic meltdown
IHS Global Insight 7/17/2009: Momentum of Chinese Growth Proves Resilient to Natural Disasters, Global Risks.
Although momentum moderated, the Chinese economy showed resilience in the first half of 2008 in the face of a string of natural disasters and mounting downside risks in the global economic outlook. Data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) today revealed that the economy expanded by 10.4% y/y in the first half of the year, after expanding by 10.1% in the second quarter. In the three months through March, the economy expanded by 10.6%. Severe snowstorms at the beginning of the year, the huge earthquake in Sichuan province in May, and recent flooding in other areas had been expected to rob growth of some traction, compounded by reversals in U.S.-led global demand. The second-quarter outturn marked the slowest rate of growth since 2005, but also the 14th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.
No impact to the Chinese economy and the CCP solves econ collapse
Coonan 08 (10/25, Clifford, , “China's stalling boom has globe worried,” )
All of this downbeat news feeds into a growing suspicion that China has had its cake and eaten for way too long, and that there is simply no precedent for a country growing and growing without some kind of respite. Establishing what that pause will look like and what it means to the rest of the world is the latest challenge facing global analysts. A hangover is considered inevitable and the Olympics, while meaningless economically, are widely considered the psychological trigger for China to face a slowdown. Despite all this gloom, however, writing China off is premature. The Beijing government is well placed to help protect the economy from the worst ravages of a global downturn. It has spent the last two years trying to fight inflation and cool the overheating economy, so it's a lot easier for it to take the foot off the brakes than it is to put them on in the first place. The central bank has lowered its benchmark interest rate twice in the past two months, the first time in six years. The State Council is increasing spending on infrastructure, offering tax rebates for exporters and allowing state-controlled prices for agricultural products to rise. Expect significant measures to kick-start the property market to avoid house prices falling too drastically. China has a lot of plus points to help out. Chinese banks did not issue subprime loans as a rule, and the country's €1.43 trillion in hard-currency reserves is a useful war chest to call on in a downturn. The currency is stable and there are high liquidity levels, all of which give China the most flexibility in the world to fend off the impact of the global financial crisis, says JP Morgan economist Frank Gong. China is now a globalised economy, but its domestic market is still massively underexploited, and it is to this market that the government will most likely turn. While it is a globalised economy committed to the WTO, China is also a centralised economy run by the Communist Party, and it has no real political opposition at home to stop it acting however it sees fit to stop sliding growth. Should the economy start to worsen significantly, public anger will increase, but China has been so successful in keeping a tight leash on the internet and the media that it is difficult for opposition to organise itself in a meaningful way. Recent years of surging growth in China have certainly done a lot to keep global economic data looking rosy, but perhaps China's influence has been somewhat oversold. It is not a big enough economy by itself to keep the global economy ticking over, accounting for 5 per cent of the world economy, compared to the United States with a muscular 28 per cent. And whatever about slowing growth, 9 per cent is still an admirable rate, one that European leaders gathered this weekend in Beijing for the Asian-Europe Meeting would give their eye teeth to be able to present to their constituencies.
AT: China India War
No risk of war – relations are resilient despite lots of reasons for conflict, China and India are bffls
Jing-dong Yuan (director of the Nonproliferation Education Program at the Center for Non-proliferation Studies and an associate professor of international policy studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies) 2007: The Dragon and the Elephant: Chinese-Indian Relations in the 21st Century. 07summer_yuan.pdf
Despite unresolved territorial disputes, mutual suspicions over each other’s military buildup and strategic intent, potential economic competition, and the changing balance of power and realignments, China and India have enjoyed 10 years of mostly uninterrupted progress in their political, economic, and security relationship. President Hu Jintao’s November 2006 visit to India, the first such visit by a Chinese head of state in a decade, marked an important milestone in the bilateral relationship. During Hu’s visit, the two governments issued a joint statement highlighting a 10-point strategy to elevate the relationship and signed more than a dozen agreements to strengthen cooperation in trade, investment, energy, and cultural and educational exchanges.
AT: China Japan War
No Sino-Japanese conflict – Japanese cooperation on trade is key to China’s rise.
Yang Bojiang (professor and director of the Institute for Japanese Studies at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR) in Beijing) 2006: Redefining Sino-Japanese Relations after Koizumi.
Sino-Japanese cooperation on trade, investment, environmental pollution management, and energy efficiency are important for China’s social and economic development. Japanese Official Development Assistance projects in China started in the late 1970s, around the same time that China began its economic opening and reform policies, and played an important role in China’s initial success. Although Japan’s importance in Chinese foreign trade has decreased in recent years, Japan, as the second-largest economic power in the world, is still an important long-term international strategic resource for China’s peaceful rise.
China, based on its development strategy, hopes to cooperate with Japan. Since the 2005 demonstrations, the Chinese government has repeatedly stated that it will not change its mutually beneficial and cooperative policy toward Japan and that it hopes to return to a healthy Sino-Japanese relationship soon. Yet, Chinese support for a Japanese role in international affairs hinges on a better understanding of Japan’s future strategy. An official Beijing-Tokyo dialogue would help each one understand the other’s positions. China and Japan have mixed histories regarding being the most powerful East Asian countries and also being humiliated and marginalized, which has left both with superiority and inferiority complexes. As a result, nationalism has a stronger influence on Sino-Japanese relations than Chinese relations with other countries. Furthermore, as Chinese society has become increasingly open, Beijing’s diplomatic decisionmakers have paid closer attention to public opinion. An official dialogue could help both countries manage these conflicting pressures by clarifying the problems and potential solutions.
Bilateral cooperation and strong Sino-Japanese relations solves for stability --- mitigates risk of impact
ISDP, 08 (Institute for Security and Defensive Policy, “Sino-Japanese Relations,” China Initiative, )
Throughout history, the relationship between China and Japan has more often than not been marked by mistrust and animosity, or even violent conflict. Despite three decades of normalized bilateral relations, several past and present issues serve to complicate the relation between the two states. Since a positive and functioning relationship between China and Japan, the two great powers in Northeast Asia, in many ways is a prerequisite for peace and stability in the region, a souring bilateral relationship is not only problematic for the states involved, but has implications for neighboring states and the international community at large. Against this background, it has become increasingly important to understand, identify and implement measures that can prevent and manage conflicts and disputes between these two states. This said, the Sino-Japanese relations have been on the mend since Shinzo Abe (安倍 晋三) assumed the Prime Minister's office in September 2006. His visit to China in October 2006 and the reciprocal visits of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (温家宝) in April 2007 and President Hu Jintao in May 2008 facilitated the further thawing of bilateral relations under the framework of "mutually beneficial relationship based on common strategic relationship." A substantial number of additional events have indicated the continuation of the positive trend in the strengthening of the bilateral relations. As one example, in one attempt to initiate debate on the issue of historical perception on the 20th century Sino-Japanese relations, a joint committee of Chinese and Japanese historians was established in an effort to reach a certain understanding of each other´s perception of common history, mainly the atrocities from the Second World War. On the military side, the establishment of a hot-line in November 2007 and the port visits by the fleets represented important confidence building measures. Furthermore, China and Japan are in fact sustaining injured US dollar economy under current severe financial crisis. This may provide more opportunity for cooperation between the two countries. All of these bilateral efforts have been very positive.
AT: Chinese Military Modernization
1. Military Modernization does not trigger conflict
A. Cooperation checks – China’s rise is not zero sum
Zweig, Hong Kong University China Transnational Relations Center Director, and Jianhai, Hong Kong University China Transnational Relations Center Director Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2005 [David, Bi, "China's Global Hunt for Energy," Foreign Affairs]
For now, Washington's views about China's possible militarization remain divided and in flux. In February, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that although the Pentagon was watching China's growing naval power, he could not confirm reports that in a decade the size of the Chinese fleet would surpass that of the U.S. Navy. But in May, Rumsfeld challenged Beijing to explain why it is increasing its military investments when China faces no major threat. Assistant Secretary of State Hill, for his part, does not perceive China as a serious threat to the United States; he has said that China's rise is not a zero-sum game for Washington. Others claim that China will need to expand more than its military capacity to remain secure. Bernard Cole of the National War College, for example, has argued that "Beijing will not be able to rely on its navy alone to protect its vital [sea-lanes], but will have to engage [in] a range of diplomatic and economic measures to ensure a steady supply of energy resources." Cui Tiankai, the director general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Asian Affairs Department, has confirmed the view that whatever Beijing's efforts to boost its navy, China will continue to rely heavily on diplomacy and cooperation. Speaking at a conference at Hong Kong University last February, he argued that countries along the Strait of Malacca have the main responsibility to protect the strait and that China is willing to cooperate with them. He also expressed the hope that China, Japan, and South Korea could work together to ensure the flow of energy to Northeast Asia. And although he said that he believes U.S. influence is expanding in the Strait of Malacca, he expressed no concern about it. Thus, although Beijing is trying to build its own capacity to secure sea-lanes, it clearly wishes to continue to cooperate with -- and sometimes free-ride on -- the United States, as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, to keep the straits open.
B. No intent
Pan, CFR staff writer, 6/2/2006 [Esther, "The Scope of China's Military Threat," ]
But some critics say the Pentagon is exaggerating the military threat from China, and accuse defense officials of "threat procurement," building up China as an enemy in order to justify massive military spending on new defense and weapons systems. "I'm not sure why the Pentagon always uses a worst-case scenario when assessing the military threat from China, but it does," says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Richard C. Bush III, director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, says, "Most experts would define 'threat' to mean a combination of capability and intentions. There's no question that China is building up its capabilities, but China has displayed no intentions of using those capabilities against the United States."
2. Military modernization inevitable – Taiwan tensions
Pan, CFR staff writer, 6/2/2006 [Esther, "The Scope of China's Military Threat," ]
Experts say much of China’s recent military buying—including of long- and short-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, submarines, and advanced aircraft—is directed at Taiwan. “Most credible experts would agree that China’s capacity building is focused on a Taiwan contingency,” Bush says. “It’s primarily deterrence, persuading Taiwan not to do what China fears it will do: irreversibly and unilaterally change Taiwan’s legal status.” Beijing currently has from 700 to 800 short-range missiles pointed across the Taiwan Strait. “China is worried about the functional equivalent of a [Taiwanese] Declaration of Independence,” Bush says. The Pentagon report “expresses concern that China’s capability is shading beyond deterrence into coercion, trying to force Taiwan to negotiate on China’s terms,” he says. And a good deal of China’s military expansion is also “designed to deter a U.S. response to a Taiwan Straits crisis,” Segal says. Over the last decade, China has also invested in a new class of amphibious assault ships that would be critical for any invasions by sea.
China will never have the same military capabilities as the US
Blair and Hills 07 Dennis C. Blair, Former United States Director of National Intelligence, retired United States Navy Admiral. Carla A. Hills, former US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, former US Trade Representative, Co-Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chair of the National Commiittee on United States-China relations, primary negotiator of NAFTA, 2007. [Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. China Relations: An Affirmative Agenda, A Responsible Approach]
The principal area in which the mission sets of the United States and China currently come into potential conflict is Taiwan. China can damage Taiwan with missiles, but it can only take and hold Taiwan if it can win and sustain control of the space, air, and waters around Taiwan—a difficult task without U.S. intervention, and nearly impossible should the United States intervene in a China-Taiwan war. The Task Force finds that as a consequence of its military modernization, China is making progress toward being able to fight and win a war with Taiwan (absent U.S. intervention), and it is also beginning to build capabilities to safeguard its growing global interests. The mere existence of these capabilities—including anti-satellite systems—poses challenges for the United States. China does not need to surpass the United States, or even catch up with the United States, in order to complicate U.S. defense planning or influence U.S. decision-making in the event of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere. Looking ahead as far as 2030, however, the Task Force finds no evidence to support the notion that China will become a peer military competitor of the United States. By virtue of its heritage and experience, its equipment and level of technology, its personnel, and the resources it spends, the United States enjoys space, air, and naval superiority over China. The military balance today and for the foreseeable future strongly favors the United States and its allies.
AT: China Rise
1. Rise is inevitable – by 2015, China will surpass the US as the world’s superpower
Dylan Kissane - professor at the University of South Australia - 2005 (“2015 and the Rise of China,” )
The United States peaked in its share of system power mid-century (1941) and has been in decline since. The accession of China and the European Union to the major power system has further assisted in the decline in the relative share of system power maintained by the world’s sole superpower. The decline remains slow but consistent, in stark contrast to the rising fortunes of China and even the relatively gentle rise in the Japanese power cycle. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret this decline as evidence of the United States experiencing any significant decline in any specific capabilities. Indeed, between 1981 and 2001 the US saw actual increases in four of the six capability indicators.29 As Doran and Parsons note, it is not enough that a state experiences growth in the assessed capabilities in order to ‘grow’ their power cycle curve – the state must also ‘out-grow’ the rate of change of other states in the system under investigation.30 In effect, a state must be ‘running to stand still’ else it will face a decline in relative power as the United States has in the period post-1941. These somewhat superficial results, however, should not distract from the more integral and ultimately more significant implication which can be drawn from the power cycle curves of the United States, Japan and China. By extrapolating the polynomial power cycle curves over a longer time period, that is, continuing the current trend forward over time, the aforementioned critical points are seen to emerge within a short ‘window’ between 2015 and 2030. For strategists imagining future security challenges for Australia – and particularly those with an interest in Australia’s position in the Asia-Pacific – this is the most important of the results which can be gained from power cycle analysis of international power politics. According to power cycle analysis, it would seem that the year 2015 is the beginning of the end for US predominance in international power politics. Figure 5 (below) illustrates graphically the continuing rise and decline of the three Asia-Pacific powers in the coming decades. By the year 2015 China will have overtaken the United States as the predominant actor in the major power system. Between them, the US and China will account for more than 50% of the total major power systems relative power, with Japan accounting for almost another 20%. Thus, when Paul Krugman questions whether the United States can ‘stay on top’ of the world economically, the answer must be a clear ‘no’.31 Further, as the forecasts here are based upon a power cycle methodology that balances military and economic capabilities, it may not even be possible to claim that US military dominance will also continue. The reality is that a new ‘Asian Century’ will begin to emerge around 2015 with the West, including Europe and particularly the geographically close Australia, forced to realise that the centres of global politics will not be in London, Paris and New York but rather in Beijing, Tokyo and on the American west coast. The rise of China and the resultant – because in a relative system the rise of one is the fall of others – decline of the US will be the defining features of early twenty-first century power politics. The world will not turn to the West but rather the West will turn to the new heart of global politics: the Asia-Pacific.
2. Rise will be peaceful - China desires global preeminence and is currently engaging in peaceful means to achieve it
Zbigniew Brzezinski- national security affairs advisor to the Carter administration - 2/05 (“Make Money, Not War,” Foreign Policy, )
There will be inevitable frictions as China’s regional role increases and as a Chinese “sphere of influence” develops. U.S. power may recede gradually in the coming years, and the unavoidable decline in Japan’s influence will heighten the sense of China’s regional preeminence. But to have a real collision, China needs a military that is capable of going toe-to-toe with the United States. At the strategic level, China maintains a posture of minimum deterrence. Forty years after acquiring nuclear-weapons technology, China has just 24 ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. Even beyond the realm of strategic warfare, a country must have the capacity to attain its political objectives before it will engage in limited war. It is hard to envisage how China could promote its objectives when it is acutely vulnerable to a blockade and isolation enforced by the United States. In a conflict, Chinese maritime trade would stop entirely. The flow of oil would cease, and the Chinese economy would be paralyzed. I have the sense that the Chinese are cautious about Taiwan, their fierce talk notwithstanding. Last March, a Communist Party magazine noted that “we have basically contained the overt threat of Taiwanese independence since [President] Chen [Shuibian] took office, avoiding a worst-case scenario and maintaining the status of Taiwan as part of China.” A public opinion poll taken in Beijing at the same time found that 58 percent thought military action was unnecessary. Only 15 percent supported military action to “liberate” Taiwan. Of course, stability today does not ensure peace tomorrow. If China were to succumb to internal violence, for example, all bets are off. If sociopolitical tensions or social inequality becomes unmanageable, the leadership might be tempted to exploit nationalist passions. But the small possibility of this type of catastrophe does not weaken my belief that we can avoid the negative consequences that often accompany the rise of new powers. China is clearly assimilating into the international system. Its leadership appears to realize that attempting to dislodge the United States would be futile, and that the cautious spread of Chinese influence is the surest path to global preeminence.
Chinese influence isn’t zero sum with the west --- shared regional values mitigate the risk of conflict
Bitzinger & Desker, 08 – senior fellow and dean of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies respectively (Richard A. Bitzinger, Barry Desker, “Why East Asian War is Unlikely,” Survival, December 2008, )
The argument that there is an emerging Beijing Consensus is not premised on the rise of the East and decline of the West, as sometimes seemed to be the sub-text of the earlier Asian-values debate.7 However, like the earlier debate, the new one reflects alternative philosophical traditions. The issue is the appropriate balance between the rights of the individual and those of the state. This emerging debate will highlight the shared identity and values of China and the other states in the region, even if conventional realist analysts join John Mearsheimer to suggest that it will result in ‘intense security competition with considerable potential for war’ in which most of China’s neighbours ‘will join with the United States to contain China’s power’.8 These shared values are likely to reduce the risk of conflict and result in regional pressure for an accommodation of and engagement with an emerging China, rather than confrontation.
Ext #2 – Preaceful Rise
China is rising peacefully - a confrontational policy by the US would only lead to Chinese economic slowdown
Zbigniew Brzezinski- national security affairs advisor to the Carter administration - 2/05 (“Make Money, Not War,” Foreign Policy, )
Today in East Asia, China is rising—peacefully so far. For understandable reasons, China harbors resentment and even humiliation about some chapters of its history. Nationalism is an important force, and there are serious grievances regarding external issues, notably Taiwan. But conflict is not inevitable or even likely. China’s leadership is not inclined to challenge the United States militarily, and its focus remains on economic development and winning acceptance as a great power. China is preoccupied, and almost fascinated, with the trajectory of its own ascent. When I met with the top leadership not long ago, what struck me was the frequency with which I was asked for predictions about the next 15 or 20 years. Not long ago, the Chinese Politburo invited two distinguished, Western-trained professors to a special meeting. Their task was to analyze nine major powers since the 15th century to see why they rose and fell. It’s an interesting exercise for the top leadership of a massive and complex country. This focus on the experience of past great powers could lead to the conclusion that the iron laws of political theory and history point to some inevitable collision or conflict. But there are other political realities. In the next five years, China will host several events that will restrain the conduct of its foreign policy. The 2008 Olympic Games is the most important, of course. The scale of the economic and psychological investment in the Beijing games is staggering. My expectation is that they will be magnificently organized. And make no mistake, China intends to win at the Olympics. A second date is 2010, when China will hold the World Expo in Shanghai. Successfully organizing these international gatherings is important to China and suggests that a cautious foreign policy will prevail. More broadly, China is determined to sustain its economic growth. A confrontational foreign policy could disrupt that growth, harm hundreds of millions of Chinese, and threaten the Communist Party’s hold on power. China’s leadership appears rational, calculating, and conscious not only of China’s rise but also of its continued weakness.
China is committed to a peaceful rise
Bijian 05 – Chair of the China Reform Forum
(Zheng Bijian, Summary of the article: “China’s Peaceful Rise to Great Power Status.” Foreign Affairs, October/September 2005. Pg.1 , )
Despite widespread fears about China's growing economic clout and political stature, Beijing remains committed to a "peaceful rise": bringing its people out of poverty by embracing economic globalization and improving relations with the rest of the world. As it emerges as a great power, China knows that its continued development depends on world peace -- a peace that its development will in turn reinforce.
AT: China (Rouge States Impact)
No link – China not obstructing international efforts anymore
International Crisis Group, Belgium Based Think Tank, June 2008
[China's Thirst for Oil," ]
While continuing to shield these countries from criti- cism, China is shifting from outright obstructionism to a more nuanced strategy of balancing its short-term resource needs with its desire to be seen as a respon- sible power. It is playing a more constructive role in multilateral processes and supporting some forms of international intervention in ways that were unimag- inable just a few years ago.165 In particular, its coop- eration is becoming an increasingly central factor in diplomatic efforts to find solutions to the crises in North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Myanmar/Burma.166 And it now contributes more troops to UN peacekeep- ing missions than any other P-5 Security Council member.167
While this shifting approach can be attributed in part to a desire to project a good international image in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, it also reflects the need to protect more basic national interests. Beijing is learning the perils of entrusting its energy security to unpopular and, in many cases, fragile regimes.168
While non-interference may have been useful to it in signing initial energy deals, it is less helpful in secur- ing these interests over the long term in the face of mounting risks to its investments, citizens and secu- rity. Political crisis and conflict lead to defaults on loans and investments and threaten equity oil. Escala- tion of the Darfur conflict, for example, jeopardises China’s investments in Sudan, as the conflict’s spread threatens its nascent investments in Chad. Direct threats to Chinese citizens are growing, as seen in at- tacks and kidnappings in Ethiopia and the Niger Delta,169 as well as Sudan, and in anti-Chinese demon- strations in Zambia.170 These human and political costs are causing some in the leadership to question the merits of the “go out” strategy.171
Darfur crisis inevitable – China can’t influence Sudan
International Crisis Group, Belgium Based Think Tank, June 2008
[China's Thirst for Oil," ]
China cannot single-handedly solve the Darfur cri- sis.243 Nor is the Sudanese government easy to influ- ence. It has a wide network of supporters, including a number of Arab countries, and has benefited from powerful voices in the AU supporting the need for its consent to any peacekeeping operation. Nevertheless China is in a position to use more diplomatic, eco- nomic and military leverage than it currently employs and to work more closely with the rest of the interna- tional community on coordinating a united stance. It has been willing to tighten the screws on clients else- where: for example, it was quick to denounce Py- ongyang and agree to Security Council sanctions fol- lowing North Korea’s October 2006 nuclear test – a position that was essential to the subsequent denu- clearisation agreement.
China will never coop on Iran – they believe Iran has a right to nuclear power
International Crisis Group, Belgium Based Think Tank, June 2008
[China's Thirst for Oil," ]
Beijing fundamentally believes that as long as Iran honours its NPT commitments not to use nuclear tech- nology for military purposes, it should not be obliged to forgo its rights under that treaty to the technology. Behind this is a belief in “fairness for weaker powers” (ie, non-nuclear) as a normative goal and a desire to demonstrate, as the fastest growing developing nation, that it does not belong to what it considers a bullying clique lead by the U.S.269 China has long advocated that the U.S. negotiate directly with Iran and cease in- sisting on preconditions for such negotiations.
AT: Chinese Soft Power
China’s attempts to gain soft power are failing – lack of human rights, free speech, and democracy
Ford, 10 (4/29/10, Peter, Christian Science Monitor, “On eve of Shanghai Expo 2010, China finds 'soft power' an elusive goal; Chinese authorities have seized on the Shanghai Expo 2010 - the largest in history - as another chance to enhance 'soft power' that is generated by the spread of cultures, values, diplomacy, and trade. The expo opens this weekend” Lexis)
At the heart of the Shanghai World Expo stands the host nation's pavilion, a giant latticed crown painted crimson. Packed with exhibits portraying daily Chinese life, China's ethnic diversity, and the standard bearers of Chinese philosophy, the display shows China's friendliest face to the world. Hard on the heels of the Beijing Olympics, the authorities here have seized on the Expo - the largest in history - as another chance to improve the rising giant's international image. Learning how to win friends and influence people is a task to which the government has attached the highest priority in recent years. It appears, however, to be failing. A BBC poll released in April found that only one-third of respondents in 14 countries believe China is a positive influence, down from one-half just five years ago. IN PICTURES: Shanghai World Expo 2010 "The government is putting a lot of resources and a lot of attention into boosting China's 'soft power,' but they've got a lot of problems with the message," says David Shambaugh, head of the China Policy Program at George Washington University in Washington. "The core aspects of their system" - such as one-party rule, media censorship, and suppression of critics - "are just not appealing to outsiders." Chinese policymakers and academics are increasingly fascinated by "soft power," whereby nations coopt foreign governments and citizens through the spread of their cultures, values, diplomacy, and trade, rather than coerce them by military might. Frustrated by Western domination of global media, from entertainment to news, and by what it sees as unfair coverage, China has launched a $6.6 billion campaign to tell its own story to the world by building its own media empires. Li Changchun, the ruling Communist Party's top ideology official, was blunt in a 2008 speech: "Whichever nation's communications capacity is the strongest, it is that nation whose culture and core values spread far and wide ... that has the most power to influence the world," he said. Is the message convincing? But this is not enough, says Li Xiguang, head of the International Center for Communications Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Even the best-paid messengers need a convincing message. "The United States has built its soft power by making its value and political system ... universal values," he says. "China will not beat the US in soft power until we have a better and newer form of democracy, freedom, and human rights." China has had some success in projecting soft power in developing countries, especially in Africa. "Wherever you go in Africa, roads are being built, and the people building them are Chinese," says Aly Khan Satchu, a financial analyst in Nairobi. "China expresses its soft power through building infrastructure." China's rapid economic development is an inspiration to many Africans, says Mr. Satchu. "The Chinese are selling themselves as having experienced catch-up and offering to help African governments do the same," he says. Chinese firms are also preparing to bid on high-speed railroads in California and elsewhere in the United States. Americans are familiar with some Chinese cultural icons. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000) was a blockbuster movie, and Houston Rockets basketball star Yao Ming is a household name. But China lacks a Hollywood or a US-style TV industry. Part of the problem, suggests Pang Zhongying, of Beijing's Renmin University, is that English, unlike Chinese, is an international language. Even with the creation of more than 200 Confucius Institutes around the world teaching Chinese, "I don't think China can overcome this difficulty in the short term." At the same time, says François Godement, director of the Asia Centre in Paris, however admired Chinese culture may be, "it is less easily translatable" to other cultures. Political control issuesAdding to the government's difficulties is its insistence on controlling all expressions of contemporary Chinese culture. Beijing squandered an opportunity at last year's Frankfurt book fair, which showcased Chinese literature, by pressing for a ban on exiled writers. Press coverage focused not on Chinese authors but on Beijing's heavy hand. This desire for complete political control, says Professor Godement, means that "they don't give creators the freedom to create works that would project soft power." "There is a huge gap between the official Chinese judgment and that of outsiders," adds Professor Pang. "There are many intellectuals in China, but a good intellectual is not necessarily an officially recognized one." The government has opted instead to pursue public diplomacy, or "overseas propaganda," as it is known here. Rarely does a month pass without a visit to Beijing by media managers and journalists from one developing country or another. But this is not the same as projecting soft power, Mr. Shambaugh notes. "China has a huge soft power deficit," says Pang. "The current Chinese model solves problems, of course, but it is also part of the problem. People outside China will pick China's virtues, but try to avoid its disadvantages. We should learn from such natural choices, from the impression that China can only build roads and schools. That is a problem we must address." IN PICTURES: Shanghai World Expo 2010 Related: China earthquake: day of mourning Official and grassroots relief groups rally in wake of China earthquake Web, religious freedom on agenda as US-China rights dialogue resumes All China coverage
Chinese soft power won’t solve – human rights abuses and lack of freedom
The Economist, 10 (1/9/10, “From the charm to the offensive: Banyan,” Lexis)
China's smile diplomacy shows its teeth IF A single impulse has defined Chinese diplomacy over the past decade, it is its smile: near and far, China has waged a charm offensive. With its land neighbours, India excepted, China has amicably settled nearly all border disputes; it has abjured force in dealing with South-East Asian neighbours over still unsettled maritime boundaries. On the economic front, the free-trade area launched on January 1st between China and the Association of South-East Asian Nations is the world's biggest, by population. China's smiling leaders promise it will spread prosperity. Farther afield, China has scattered roads and football stadiums across Africa. By the hundreds, it has set up Confucius Institutes around the world to spread Chinese language and culture. More than anything, the Beijing Olympics were designed to showcase gentle President Hu Jintao's notions of a "harmonious world". In all this, the leaders appear not simply to want to make good a perceived deficit in China's soft power around the world. A more brutal calculus prevails: without peace, prosperity and prestige abroad, China will have no peace and prosperity at home. And without that, the Chinese Communist Party is dust. Yet of late smiles have turned to snarls. The instances appear unrelated. Last month China bullied little Cambodia into returning 22 Uighurs seeking political asylum after bloody riots and a brutal crackdown in Xinjiang last summer. On December 25th, despite China's constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, a veteran human-rights activist, Liu Xiaobo, received a long prison sentence for launching a charter that called for political freedoms. Western governments had urged leniency. Britain had also called for clemency for Akmal Shaikh, a Briton caught smuggling heroin into Xinjiang. Mr Shaikh seems to have been duped by drugs gangs. His family insist he suffered mental problems and delusions. Yet the courts refused a psychiatric evaluation. Britain's prime minister, Gordon Brown, said he was "appalled" by Mr Shaikh's execution. In turn, China lashed out at this supposed meddling and ordered Britain to "correct its mistakes". Sino-British relations, painstakingly improved in recent years, have come unravelled. It is harder to complain of foreign meddling when Chinese actions have global consequences. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 the Chinese held the yuan steady as currencies all about them crumbled. Not only did that avert a round of tit-for-tat devaluations. The regional respect China earned, its diplomats argue, paved the way for the charm offensive that soon followed. New-found respect gave China a taste for more. In contrast, during this downturn many complain that China's dogged pegging of its currency to the dollar harms others. As the world's fastest-growing big economy, with the biggest current-account surplus and foreign reserves, its currency ought by rights to be rising. By several yardsticks the yuan is undervalued and Americans and Europeans fear this leaves them with the pain of global rebalancing. ASEAN furniture-makers and nail foundries also beg for relief from the mercantilist advantage that a manipulated currency gives China. Most striking of all were China's actions at the Copenhagen summit on climate change, where the world's biggest emitter appeared churlish. In a bid to avoid being pinned down to firm commitments, China insisted that all figures and numerical targets be stripped out of the final accord, even those that did not apply to China. Further, China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, at first did not deign to sit down with President Barack Obama on the final day, sending relatively junior officials instead. China may have got a deal it liked, but at the cost of a public-relations disaster. Some think this a prelude to a prickly, more unpleasant China in the decade ahead, but it is too soon to conclude that. More likely, China will now try to patch up relations with Britain, and keep putting a positive gloss on Copenhagen. Peace and prosperity is still the calculus. China is spending billions cranking up its state media to go global, taking Mr Hu's message of "harmony" to a worldwide audience. But the message of harmony will ring hollow abroad if it is secured by muzzling voices at home. Besides, there is now less goodwill to go around. A smile is fresh at first, but loses its charm if held for too long. One problem with China's smile diplomacy, says the man who coined the phrase, Shi Yinhong of Renmin University in Beijing, is that China's global impact—its demand for resources, its capacity to pollute—is so much greater than a decade ago. " For all we may smile, you can still smell us," he says. That even applies in places, such as Africa, where enthusiasm for China was once unbounded. China has more than a presentational problem. For instance, it sends Africa both destabilising arms and peacekeepers, the one generating demand for the other. China's manufactures destroy local industries. Many Africans resent Chinese firms' deals with their unpleasant leaders and blame them when leaders pocket the proceeds. China's clout makes a mockery of two guiding tenets of its charm offensive: relations on the basis of equality; and non-interference. That calls for a new diplomacy. China's presentational problems with the old one speak of an abiding lack of sophistication, and an attachment to a ritualistic diplomacy ill-suited to fast-moving negotiations, such as in Copenhagen, where the outcome is not pre-cooked. Over the case of Mr Shaikh, the official press indulged in the predictable and puerile ritual of railing about the historical indignity of the Opium War. Yet even many Chinese recognise that the world—and even drug-pushing British gunboat-diplomacy—has changed, and that it may be time to move on. Banyan demands that China correct its mistakes.
AT: Chinese Start War In Africa
1. China won’t start a war with the US—they can’t win
Kane 06 (Lieutenant Colonel Gregory C. U.S. Army War College. “The Strategic Competition for the Continent of Africa” )
In short, while the PLA and the PLAN have made great improvements in their equipment and organizations, developed doctrine based on recent wars, completely revamped their professional education systems, they are still a long way in terms of capabilities and a long time away from competing with the current US military. Sheer numbers and modern weapons may tip the scales in their favor close to the Chinese mainland, but the Chinese conventional military in their current state lacks the power projection and operational capabilities to be a deterrent force in any conflict in Africa. Consequently, China will continue to have to rely on economic and diplomatic elements of power to implement foreign policy in Africa.
2. China’s involvement in Africa is exaggerated
Bates Gill and James Reilly 2007 (Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS, East Asia representative for the American Friends Service Committee, “The Tenuous Hold of China Inc. in Africa,” Washington Quarterly, Summer, ln)
Most analysts, however, tend to exaggerate the prospects of China's corporate engagement in Africa. As it deepens, the Chinese government will more likely find itself hamstrung by what theorists call a powerful "principal-agent" dilemma: an increasing set of tensions and contradictions between the interests and aims of government principals--the bureaucracies based in Beijing tasked with advancing China's overall national interests--and the aims and interests of ostensible agents--the companies and businesspersons operating on the ground in Africa.
AT: China-Taiwan War
1. Economic concerns prevent Chinese invasion of Taiwan
Ivan Eland, Cato director of defense policy studies, January 23, 2003, Cato Policy Analysis no. 465, “Is Chinese Military Modernization a Threat to the United States?”
Hostile behavior toward Taiwan could disturb China’s increasing economic linkage with the rest of the world—especially growing commercial links with Taiwan. Because China’s highest priority is economic growth, the disruption of such economic relationships is a disincentive for aggressive Chinese actions vis-à-vis Taiwan. Any attack short of invasion (using missiles or instituting a naval blockade) would likely harm the Taiwanese economy and disrupt Chinese trade and financial contacts with Taiwan and other developed nations without getting China what it most wants—control Taiwan. An amphibious invasion—in the unlikely event that it succeeded—would provide such control but would cause even greater disruption in China’s commercial links to developed nations.
2. China won’t use an amphibious assault – it won’t succeed
Ivan Eland, Cato director of defense policy studies, January 23, 2003, Cato Policy Analysis no. 465, “Is Chinese Military Modernization a Threat to the United States?”
An amphibious assault on Taiwan is the least likely Chinese military option because of its low probability of success. Even without U.S. assistance, the Taiwanese have the advantage of defending an island. An amphibious assault—that is, attacking over water and landing against defended positions —is one of the hardest and most risky military operations to execute. In the Normandy invasion of 1944, the Allies had strategic surprise, air and naval supremacy, crushing naval gunfire support, and a ground force coming ashore that was vastly superior in numbers to that of the Germans. Yet even with all those advantages, the Allies had some difficulty establishing beachheads. In any amphibious assault on Taiwan, China would be unlikely to have strategic surprise, air or naval supremacy (Taiwanese air and naval forces are currently superior to those of the Chinese),38 or sufficient naval gunfire support, and its landing force would be dwarfed by the Taiwanese army and reserves. Also, China has insufficient amphibious forces, dedicated amphibious ships to carry them to Taiwan’s shores, and naval air defense to protect an amphibious flotilla from Taiwan’s superior air force. According to the study by Swaine and Mulvenon of RAND, “Mainland China will likely remain unable to undertake such massive attack over the medium-term, and perhaps, over the long-term as well.”39 In addition, probably for the next two decades, China’s lack of an integrated air defense system could leave its homeland open to retaliatory attacks by the Taiwanese air force, which could deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan in the first place. In the long term, even if China overcomes those deficiencies and Taiwan lags behind China in military improvements, the Taiwanese could use a “porcupine strategy” against a superior foe. That is, the Taiwanese armed forces would not have to be strong enough to win a war with the Chinese military; they would only have to be able to inflict enough damage to raise the cost of a Chinese invasion significantly. In this regard, Taiwan may be helped by modern technology. Sea mines, precision-guided munitions (including anti-ship cruise missiles), and satellite reconnaissance, which makes surprise difficult, may render any amphibious assault an exceptionally bloody affair. In fact, some defense analysts believe that such technology has made large-scale amphibious assaults a thing of the past.
3. China can’t effectively implement a naval blockade of Taiwan
Ivan Eland, Cato director of defense policy studies, January 23, 2003, Cato Policy Analysis no. 465, “Is Chinese Military Modernization a Threat to the United States?”
Although more likely than an amphibious invasion of Taiwan, a naval blockade using Chinese submarines and surface ships would face some of the same problems as an amphibious flotilla. The poor air defenses on Chinese surface ships would render them vulnerable to attack by superior Taiwanese air power. In addition, Chinese naval command and control is probably inadequate to manage a naval quarantine. Although China has more submarines and surface warships in its navy than does Taiwan, the Taiwanese navy has superior surveillance and anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capabilities. Currently, the Chinese might very well be able to disrupt Taiwan’s commerce to a limited extent with their modest mine-laying capability and submarine attacks (submarines are less susceptible than surface vessels to attack from the air), but even establishing a partial blockade of certain ports would be difficult. By 2025, Swaine and Mulvenon predict that China could deny the use of the sea and air out to 500 nautical miles from China’s coastline and attempt a naval blockade within 200 nautical miles of that coastline.40 So even in 2025, China might not be able to enforce a complete naval quarantine of Taiwan.
4. Missile attacks on Taiwan backfire
Ivan Eland, Cato director of defense policy studies, January 23, 2003, Cato Policy Analysis no. 465, “Is Chinese Military Modernization a Threat to the United States?”
In 1996 China tried to intimidate Taiwan with missile tests in the Taiwan Strait during Chinese military “exercises” at the time of the Taiwanese presidential elections. Those actions had the opposite effect of that intended—the election outcome was not what the Chinese government had desired. Actual missile attacks on Taiwan for the purpose of terrorizing the Taiwanese population would probably cause an even greater backlash against China in Taiwan and the international community and could trigger retaliatory raids on the mainland by the superior Taiwanese air force. Neither the accuracy nor the numbers of Chinese missiles now permit them to have a significant effect when used against Taiwanese military targets. As Chinese missiles become more numerous and accurate, such missile attacks would become more militarily consequential. But passive defense measures could reduce significantly the effectiveness of Chinese mis-----sile attacks on military targets.
AT: Civic Engagement
1. No connection between civic engagement, social networks, and democracy—Weimar Germany proves
Ariel Armony (assistant professor of government at Colby College) 2004: The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization, pp. 98-9)
Undemocratic civic engagement can take different forms. In this chap- ter I have analyzed patterns of associational activity whose effect was inimical to democracy by looking at the intersections between social cleavages, political conditions, and their link to civic engagement. Events in Weimar Germany challenge the assumption that civil society necessarily leads to democracy. As Max Weber argued in the late nine- teenth century: "The quantitative spread of organizational life does not always go hand in hand with its qualitative significance" (quoted in Koshar 1986a: 4). Active involvement in social clubs and other volun- tary associations, work-based networks, religious organizations, and informal social connections may be linked to the production of social capital, but there is nothing inherent in these dimensions of civic en- gagement that connects them to democratic outcomes. In the Weimar Republic, Nazi voters and supporters (outside of the party's activist core) were not ideological zealots. The growth of the Nazi project was facilitated, using Putnam's (2000) terminology, by both machers and schmoozers (pp. 93-95). "In Yiddish," Putnam explains, "men and women who invest lots of time in formal organizations are often termed machers—that is, people who make things happen in the com- munity. By contrast, those who spend many hours in informal conver- sation and communion are termed schmoozers" (p. 93). Weimar citizens organized at an unprecedented rate, leadership skills became available to wider sectors of the public, and membership in voluntary organiza- tions increased dramatically, but German machers and schmoozers con- veyed antipolitical beliefs and antidemocratic ideas (see Koshar 1986a: 161, 276). German civic activists built networks of reciprocity and so- ciability, but these networks did not produce democratic results. The analysis of civic engagement requires that we understand not only political processes at the level of the state, but also social processes pertaining to the unmaking (and remaking) of collective identities and social boundaries (across class and other social cleavages) (Koshar 1986a: 282). Berman (1997b), for example, has argued that one "factor to examine in determining when civil society activity will bolster or weaken a democratic regime ... is the political context within which that activity unfolds" (p. 567). Emphasizing the importance of strong political institutions for successful governance, Berman focused on in- stitutional variables in her assessment of the impact of context on civil society activity. However, the political sphere (e.g., political institution- alization) does not account for the interaction between conflicts in soci- ety and the characteristics of the political regime, which in turn influ- ences patterns of civic engagement. As the case of Germany illustrates, the intersections of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and age—analyzed in light of the broader political context—are critical to understanding participation in civil society. This is a case in which civil society con- tributed to corroding democracy to the point of its breakdown in a con- text of fragile political institutionalization, heightened social polariza- tion, and severe economic dislocations. By contributing to (rather than breaking) a "vicious circle," civil society offered a venue for disaffected citizens and this participation in turn deepened their dissatisfaction with political institutions, hardened their grievances, and made them more willing to support antisystem solutions.
2. Civil society will inevitably disengage from the state
Ariel Armony (assistant professor of government at Colby College) 2004: The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization, pp. 149
Table 4.3 summarizes the most significant dimensions in the rela- tionship between civil society and the state.16 First, in a pattern of con- frontation, the civil society-state relationship tends to be reduced to a zero-sum conflict.17 For some groups, human rights could only be pro- moted in opposition to the state. In their view, the state was only capa- ble of violating such rights. Second, in setting their strategic priorities, civic groups consider their objectives to be inherently opposite to those of the state and thus assume no common ground for cooperation. For instance, some organizations in my study employed polar categories (democratic / authoritarian) to define themselves in relation to a specific state agency (e.g., the Interior Ministry) and rejected any possible (for- mal or informal) links with that agency. Third, the perception of the state held by participants in civil society organizations is important be- cause it shapes the type of relationship that a group seeks with state agencies. Several organizations in my study depicted the state as inher- ently authoritarian and corrupt, perceiving the state apparatus as a monolithic entity, which convinced them that it was in their best inter- est not to cooperate with government officials.
Ext #1 – Civic Engagement Fails
Societal inquality prevents an effective public sphere
Ariel Armony (assistant professor of government at Colby College) 2004: The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization, pp. 34-5
One of the main tasks of studies on civil society, some argue, is to ex- amine the processes of communication in civil society and how debates in the public sphere enter the sphere of the state (Cohen 1999: 71). For instance, as some studies have shown, the connection between civil so- ciety and parliaments played a fundamental role in the development of prodemocratic civil societies in nineteenth-century Europe (Bermeo 2000: 244-46). Associational life may contribute to "public opinion and public judgement," as Mark Warren (2001) said, "especially by provid- ing the social infrastructure of public spheres that develop agendas, test ideas, embody deliberations, and provide voice" (p. 61). This function, which he refers to as "public sphere effects," has the potential to "gener- ate the 'force' of persuasion, as distinct from the forces of coercion and money" (pp. 34, 61, 77-82). As explained, the public sphere is a fundamental locus for delibera- tion over political and social issues. However, it is important to qualify the idea of the public sphere as an arena of discursive debate among peers (Habermas 1989: 36). Indeed, given the unequal distribution of so- cial resources in all societies, the public sphere cannot stand as an arena where people produce a consensus about an all-encompassing "com- mon good" (Fraser 1993: 4; Cohen 1999: 58). Societal actors in the pub- lic sphere cannot "deliberate as if they were social peers" because the "discursive arenas" in which they interact are placed "in a larger socie- tal context that is pervaded by structural relations of dominance and subordination" (Fraser 1993: 12). Understanding the implications of this idea requires attention to two issues. First, we cannot ignore the role of inequality, social exclusion, and attacks on people's dignity (discrimination, racism, and so on) in the analysis of the processes of interaction in civil society (Uvin 1999: 50-54. See the section "Civil Society and Context," below). The struc- tural position of individual and collective actors in society is a funda- mental element of relations within civil society. Second, any analysis of the public sphere should examine how organized actors in society es- tablish alliances with sectors of the state in order to ensure that their in- terests "emerge on top and that the requirements rooted in these special interests get taken as society's requirements" (Oilman 1992: 1015). In- deed, certain groups may exert a dominant influence within civil soci- ety (and the public sphere in particular), which they may utilize to le- gitimize a monopoly of authority in the broader society (Lomax 1997: 61; Sparrow 1992: 1013).
Civil society can’t translate views into policy outcomes
Ariel Armony (assistant professor of government at Colby College) 2004: The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization, pp. 170-1
Figure 4.1 includes all bills rated as “democratic” (N = 95) according to the coding criteria explained above. The figure shows a pattern of reactive congressional activity to variations in the level of police violence. The number of bills introduced in Congress followed almost identically the variations in the measure of police violence (with only one major difference in 1995). This pattern suggests that congressional activity to democratize the police was a response to police violence, especially because an increase in the level of police violence resonated in the media and thus influenced public opinion. If legislators submitted bills as an immediate response to peaks of police violence, it follows that most legislative proposals were geared to appease public opinion and probably resulted from a superficial analysis of the problems of law enforcement and citizen security. Few legislators could attest to having a consistent and informed approach to police reform and the problem of citizen security. As interviews with congressional aides and civil society activists revealed, congressional commissions seldom sought the expertise of civil society groups, and there were no formal channels for introducing input from civil society. Indeed, input from some sectors of civil society was incorporated into the legislative debate only in se- lected cases that received a high level of media attention. As civic ac- tivists told me, the reactive nature of congressional activity made it vir- tually impossible for them to establish sustained, effective cooperation with legislators in matters of police reform. The interest of Congress in the question of police brutality was limited to responses to specific crises—as the data in Figure 4.1 show.
AT: Civilian-Military Relations
Policy disagreements don’t undermine overall CMR and don’t spill over
Hansen 9 – Victor Hansen, Associate Professor of Law, New England Law School, Summer 2009, “SYMPOSIUM: LAW, ETHICS, AND THE WAR ON TERROR: ARTICLE: UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF MILITARY LAWYERS IN THE WAR ON TERROR: A RESPONSE TO THE PERCEIVED CRISIS IN CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS,” South Texas Law Review, 50 S. Tex. L. Rev. 617, p. lexis
According to Sulmasy and Yoo, these conflicts between the military and the Bush Administration are the latest examples of a [*624] crisis in civilian-military relations. n32 The authors suggest the principle of civilian control of the military must be measured and is potentially violated whenever the military is able to impose its preferred policy outcomes against the wishes of the civilian leaders. n33 They further assert that it is the attitude of at least some members of the military that civilian leaders are temporary office holders to be outlasted and outmaneuvered. n34
If the examples cited by the authors do in fact suggest efforts by members of the military to undermine civilian control over the military, then civilian-military relations may have indeed reached a crisis. Before such a conclusion can be reached, however, a more careful analysis is warranted. We cannot accept at face value the authors' broad assertions that any time a member of the military, whether on active duty or retired, disagrees with the views of a civilian member of the Department of Defense or other member of the executive branch, including the President, that such disagreement or difference of opinion equates to either a tension or a crisis in civil-military relations. Sulmasy and Yoo claim there is heightened tension or perhaps even a crisis in civil-military relations, yet they fail to define what is meant by the principle of civilian control over the military. Instead, the authors make general and rather vague statements suggesting any policy disagreements between members of the military and officials in the executive branch must equate to a challenge by the military against civilian control. n35 However, until we have a clear understanding of the principle of civilian control of the military, we cannot accurately determine whether a crisis in civil-military relations exists. It is to this question that we now turn.
No risk of a spillover---many checks exist even after explicitly overruling the military
Hooker 4 - Colonel Richard D. Hooker, Jr., Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in international relations and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, served in the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Winter 2004, “Soldiers of the State: Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations,” Parameters, p. 4-18
Clearly there have been individual instances where military leaders crossed the line and behaved both unprofessionally and illegitimately with respect to proper subordination to civilian authority; the Revolt of the Admirals and the MacArthur-Truman controversy already have been cited. The increasingly common tactic whereby anonymous senior military officials criticize their civilian counterparts and superiors, even to the point of revealing privileged and even classified information, cannot be justified.
Yet civilian control remains very much alive and well. The many direct and indirect instruments of objective and subjective civilian control of the military suggest that the true issue is not control—defined as the government’s ability to enforce its authority over the military—but rather political freedom of action. In virtually every sphere, civilian control over the military apparatus is decisive. All senior military officers serve at the pleasure of the President and can be removed, and indeed retired, without cause. Congress must approve all officer promotions and guards this prerogative jealously; even lateral appointments at the three- and four-star levels must be approved by the President and confirmed by Congress, and no officer at that level may retire in grade without separate approval by both branches of government. Operating budgets, the structure of military organizations, benefits, pay and allowances, and even the minutia of official travel and office furniture are determined by civilians. The reality of civilian control is confirmed not only by the many instances cited earlier where military recommendations were over-ruled. Not infrequently, military chiefs have been removed or replaced by the direct and indirect exercise of civilian authority.37
No backlash - the military will follow orders even if they disagree with them
Ackerman 8 [Spencer, The Washington Independent, 11/13, “Productive Obama-Military Relationship Possible,” ]
Some members of the military community are more sanguine. Several say that if they disagree with the decision, they respect Obama’s authority to make it.
“In the end, we are not self-employed. And after the military leadership provides its best military advice, it is up to the policy-makers to make the decision and for the military to execute those decisions,” said a senior Army officer recently back from Iraq, who requested anonymity because he is still on active duty. “Now, if those in the military do not like the decision, they have two choices. One, salute smartly and execute the missions given them to the best of their ability. Or, the other, leave the military if they do not feel they can faithfully execute their missions. That is one way the military does get to vote in an all-volunteer force.”
Moss agreed. “The military will just follow the order,” he said. “The great majority of Americans want U.S. forces out of Iraq. This is part of the reason Obama was sent to the White House.”
AT: Competitiveness
1. Your authors failed econ 401 – competitiveness is a flatly wrong theory used solely to get readers
Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1994
Competitiveness: A dangerous obsession, Foreign Affairs,Vol. 73, Iss. 2, pg. 28-45, Proquest
On the side of hope, many sensible people have imagined that they can appropriate the rhetoric of competitiveness on behalf of desirable economic policies. Suppose that you believe that the United States needs to raise its savings rate and improve its educational system in order to raise its productivity. Even if you know that the benefits of higher productivity have nothing to do with international competition, why not describe this as a policy to enhance competitiveness if you think that it can widen your audience? It's tempting to pander to popular prejudices on behalf of a good cause, and I have myself succumbed to that temptation. As for fear, it takes either a very courageous or very reckless economist to say publicly that a doctrine that many, perhaps most, of the world's opinion leaders have embraced is flatly wrong. The insult is all the greater when many of those men and women think that by using the rhetoric of competitiveness they are demonstrating their sophistication about economics. This article may influence people, but it will not make many friends.
2. US competitiveness is doomed – China is already surpassing our economic leadership
Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008. (Research News and Publications. “Study shows China as World Techonology Leader.” Jan 28. )
A new study of worldwide technological competitiveness suggests China may soon rival the United States as the principal driver of the world’s economy – a position the U.S. has held since the end of World War II. If that happens, it will mark the first time in nearly a century that two nations have competed for leadership as equals. The study’s indicators predict that China will soon pass the United States in the critical ability to develop basic science and technology, turn those developments into products and services – and then market them to the world. Though China is often seen as just a low-cost producer of manufactured goods, the new “High Tech Indicators” study done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology clearly shows that the Asian powerhouse has much bigger aspirations. “For the first time in nearly a century, we see leadership in basic research and the economic ability to pursue the benefits of that research – to create and market products based on research – in more than one place on the planet,” said Nils Newman, co-author of the National Science Foundation-supported study. “Since World War II, the United States has been the main driver of the global economy. Now we have a situation in which technology products are going to be appearing in the marketplace that were not developed or commercialized here. We won’t have had any involvement with them and may not even know they are coming.”
AT: Competitiveness Key to Economy
Competitiveness has no necessary correlation with economic conditions.
Krugman, 1994. (Paul Krugman, “Competitiveness- A Dangerous Obsession”, Foreign Affairs, March 1994, Volume 73, Number 2, (1994).pdf.)
THE COMPETITIVE metaphor -- the image of countries competing with each other in world markets in the same way that corporations do -- derives much of its attractiveness from its seeming comprehensibility. Tell a group of businessmen that a country is like a corporation writ large, and you give them the comfort of feeling that they already understand the basics. Try to tell them about economic concepts like comparative advantage, and you are asking them to learn
something new. It should not be surprising if many prefer a doctrine that offers the gain of apparent sophistication without the pain of hard thinking. The rhetoric of competitiveness has
become so wide-spread, however, for three deeper reasons. First, competitive images are exciting, and thrills sell tickets. The subtitle of Lester Thurow's huge best-seller, Head to Head, is "The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America"; the jacket proclaims that "the decisive war of the century has begun . . . and America may already have decided to lose." Suppose that the subtitle had described the real situation: "The coming struggle in which each big economy will succeed or fail based on its own efforts, pretty much independently of how well the others do." Would Thurow have sold a tenth as many books? Second, the idea that U.S. economic difficulties hinge crucially on our failures in international competition somewhat paradoxically makes those difficulties seem easier to solve. The
productivity of the average American worker is determined by a complex array of factors, most of them unreachable by any likely government policy. So if you accept the reality that our
"competitive" problem is really a domestic productivity problem pure and simple, you are unlikely
to be optimistic about any dramatic turnaround. But if you can convince yourself that the problem
is really one of failures in international competition that -- imports are pushing workers out of high wage jobs, or subsidized foreign competition is driving the United States out of the high valued sectors -- then the answers to economic malaise may seem to you to involve simple things
like subsidizing high technology and being tough on Japan. Finally, many of the world's leaders have found
the competitive metaphor extremely useful as a political device. The rhetoric of competitiveness turns out to provide a good way either to justify hard choices or to avoid them. The example of Delors in Copenhagen shows the usefulness of competitive metaphors as an evasion. Delors had to say something at the Ec summit; yet to say anything that addressed the real roots of European unemployment would have involved huge political risks. By turning the discussion to essentially irrelevant but plausible-sounding questions of competitiveness, he bought himself some time to come up with a better answer (which to some extent he provided in December's white paper on the European economy -- a paper that still, however, retained "competitiveness" in its rifle).
By contrast, the well-received presentation of Bill Clinton's initial economic program in February 1993 showed the usefulness of competitive rhetoric as a motivation for tough policies. Clinton proposed a set of painful spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the Federal deficit. Why? The real reasons for cutting the deficit are disappointingly undramatic: the deficit siphons off funds that might otherwise have been productively invested, and thereby exerts a steady if small drag on U.S. economic growth. But Clinton was able instead to offer a stirring patriotic appeal, calling on the nation to act now in order to make the economy competitive in the global markets with the implication that dire economic consequences would follow if the United States does not. Many people who know that "competitiveness" is a largely meaningless concept have been willing to indulge competitive rhetoric precisely because they believe they can harness it in the service of good policies. An overblown fear of the Soviet Union was used in the 1950s to justify the building of the interstate highway system and the expansion of math and science education. Cannot the unjustified fears about foreign competition similarly be turned to good, used to justify serious efforts to reduce the budget deficit, rebuild infrastructure, and so on? A few years ago this was a reasonable hope. At this point, however, the obsession with competitiveness has reached the point where it has already begun dangerously to distort economic policies.
AT: Competitiveness Key to Heg
Competitiveness doesn’t translate into power
Niall Ferguson, Hoover senior fellow, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, 2003
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: What Is Power? Which global players have power today—and which are likely to acquire it in the coming decades? Hoover Institute Digest, no. 2,
It’s certainly tempting to assume that power is synonymous with gross domestic product: Big GDP equals big power. Hence many analysts point to China’s huge economy and rapid growth as evidence that the country will soon gain superpower rank, if it hasn’t already. Just project forward the average annual growth rates of the past 30 years, and Chinese GDP will equal that of the United States and exceed that of the EU, within just two decades (see figure 3). Gross Domestic Product in 1998 and Projected GDP in 2018 (millions of constant 1990 international dollars) But GDP doesn’t stand for Great Diplomatic Power. If the institutions aren’t in place to translate economic output into military hardware—and if the economy grows faster than public interest in foreign affairs—then product is nothing more than potential power. America overtook Britain in terms of GDP in the 1870s, but it was not until the First World War that it overtook Britain as a global power.
AT: Coral Reefs
1. Coral is dying at a quick pace in the squo
US Dept. of Interrior and National Park Services 6 (“Coral Bleaching and Disease Deliver “One – Two Punch” to Coral Reefs in the US Virgin Islands” < > October accessed 6/29/09) SC
Monitoring programs that were in place before the bleaching began allowed NPS and USGS to quantify the effects of bleaching and disease. The NPS/ South Florida-Caribbean Inventory and Monitoring Network Program (SFCN) has permanent, randomly selected transects (=120) at 6 sites (up to 15 m deep) in St. John and St. Croix, including Virgin Islands NP and Buck Island Reef NM. An average of 90% of coral cover bleached at these sites in September and October 2005. Many corals began to recover their normal coloration but then suffered a “one-two punch” from disease (primarily white plague). Historically, sites were monitored annually using digital video, but frequency of monitoring increased to every 2-6 months to document the effects of the bleaching and disease event. Although bleaching was associated with record -warm seawater temperatures, some corals remain discolored and mortality from disease has continued despite cooler seawater temperatures in 2006. Coral cover has declined 48.7% at the long-term study sites as of July 2006. Two New Approaches to Evaluate Change In addition to the analysis of the digital videotapes for changes in percent coral cover over time, two other approaches are being used to examine the responses of corals to this event. First, the amount of disease affecting the coral reefs is being estimated on each sampling date by measurement of lesions (areas that have recently been killed by disease) on coral colonies one meter on either side of the permanent transects. Within our study sites, mortality from disease ranged from 4 to 80-times more extensive following bleaching than before bleaching began. Second, videotapes from successive time periods at each long-term site are being compared side-by-side to follow the condition and fate of 4153 selected coral colonies.
2. Coral Reefs have been dying in drastic numbers since the 70’s due to disease and coral bleaching
Telegraph 9 (“Coral Reefs collapse amid Global Warming” < > June 10 accessed 6/29/09) SC
Scientists spotted the trend after analysing 500 surveys of 200 reefs conducted between 1969 and 2008. They found 75 per cent of the reefs were now largely "flat" compared with 20 per cent in the 1970s. Today, most of the reefs across the Caribbean are significantly flatter and more uniform than they used to be, the researchers reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The most complex reefs are virtually wiped out, said the scientists. Disease and warming sea temperatures both have the effect of levelling and flattening coral reefs. In the late 1970s reefs were flattened when large amounts of Caribbean coral were killed off by widespread disease. More recently intense and frequent coral bleaching events, a direct result of rising sea surface temperatures due to global warming, have caused much more reef flattening, say the researchers. Study leader Dr Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip, from the University of East Anglia's School of Biological Science, said: "For many organisms, the complex structure of reefs provides refuge from predators. This drastic loss of architectural complexity is clearly driving substantial declines in biodiversity, which will in turn affect coastal fishing communities. "The loss of structure also vastly reduces the Caribbean's natural coastal defences, significantly increasing the risk of coastal erosion and flooding." Reversing damage to coral reefs poses a major challenge for scientists and policy-makers alike, said the researchers.
3. Sharks, not Coral, are key to biodiversity and current overfishing has collapsed current coral level
Physorg 5 (“Research Shows Overfishing of Sharks Key Factor in Coral Reef Decline” April 15 accessed 6/29/09) SC
Jordi Bascompte and Carlos Melián of the Integrative Ecology Group, Estación Biológica de Doñana, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, in Sevilla, Spain, and Enric Sala of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, developed an unprecedented model of a Caribbean marine ecosystem and details of its intricate predator-prey interactions. This food “web” covered 1,000 square kilometers to a depth of 100 meters and included some 250 species of marine organisms. The study, published in the April 12 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, included an intricate network of more than 3,000 links between these species. The project was one of the largest and most detailed investigations of marine food webs and the first study to integrate food web structure, dynamics and conservation. One of the most striking products of the study is a stark picture of human impacts on marine ecosystems and the consequences of targeted fishing. In the Caribbean, overfishing of sharks triggers a domino effect of changes in abundance that carries down to several fish species and contributes to the overall degradation of the reef ecosystem. Overfishing species randomly, the study shows, is not likely to cause these cascading effects. “It appears that ecosystems such as Caribbean coral reefs need sharks to ensure the stability of the entire system,” said Sala, deputy director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps. When sharks are overfished, a cascade of effects can lead to a depletion of important grazers of plant life. This is because there are fewer sharks to feed on carnivorous fish such as grouper—causing an increase in their numbers and their ability to prey on parrotfishes. The removal of plant-eating animals such as parrotfishes has been partly responsible for the shift of Caribbean reefs from coral to algae dominated, the authors note. Thus overfishing of sharks may contribute further to the loss of resistance of coral reefs to multiple human disturbances. “The community-wide impacts of fishing are stronger than expected because fishing preferentially targets species whose removal can destabilize the food web,” the authors conclude in their report. Because of their comprehensive approach in developing the intricate food web, the authors say their study and its results address more than individual species protection and speak to larger ecosystem protection issues. “The paper presents a community-wide approximation of conservation problems,” said Bascompte. “We cannot asses all of the implications of overfishing by only looking at the target species or a few others. Species are embedded in a complex network of relationships and this network has a particular shape. This has large implications for the propagation of the consequences of overfishing through the whole food web.”
Ext #1 – Non Unique
Coral dying now due to a lack of herbivorous fish this non-uniques and functions as an alternative causality
Toon 8 (John, Manager of Georgia Tech Research and Publications “Diversity of plant-eating fishes may be key to recovery of coral reefs” October 8 accessed 6/29/09) SC
For endangered coral reefs, not all plant-eating fish are created equal. A report scheduled to be published this week in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that maintaining the proper balance of herbivorous fishes may be critical to restoring coral reefs, which are declining dramatically worldwide. The conclusion results from a long-term study that found significant recovery in sections of coral reefs on which fish of two complementary species were caged. Coral reefs depend on fish to eat the seaweeds with which the corals compete, and without such cleaning, the reefs decline as corals are replaced by seaweeds. Different fish consume different seaweeds because of the differing chemical and physical properties of the plants. "Of the many different fish that are part of coral ecosystems, there may be a small number of species that are really critical for keeping big seaweeds from over-growing and killing corals," explained Mark Hay, the Harry and Linda Teasley Professor of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Our study shows that in addition to having enough herbivores, coral ecosystems also need the right mix of species to overcome the different defensive tactics of the seaweeds." By knowing which fish are most critical to maintaining coral health, resource managers could focus on protecting and enhancing the highest-impact species. In situations where local peoples depend on fishing, they might better sustain the reefs on which they depend by harvesting only less critical species. "This could offer one more approach to resource managers," Hay added. "If ecosystems were managed for critical mixes of herbivorous species, we might see more rapid recovery of the reefs."
Ext #2 – Alt Cause
Coral Reefs are being damaged in the squo- 4 reasons
Science Daily 5 (“Coral Reefs Declining—Not Just Overfishing” < > August 31 accessed 6/29/09) SC
Coral reefs, the rainforests of the sea, feed a large portion of the world's population, protect tropical shorelines from erosion, and harbor animals and plants with great potential to provide new therapeutic drugs. Unfortunately, reefs are now beset by problems ranging from local pollution and overfishing to outbreaks of coral disease and global warming. Although most scientists agree that reefs are in desperate trouble, they disagree strongly over the timing and causes of the coral reef crisis. This is not just an academic exercise, because different answers dictate different strategies for managers and policymakers intent on saving reef ecosystems. The cover story published this month in Geology helps focus the debate. A team led by Richard Aronson of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama took cores through reef frameworks in Belize to reconstruct the history of the reefs over the past several thousand years. Although some scientists have suggested that reefs began their decline centuries ago due to early overfishing, Aronson's team found that coral populations were healthy and vibrant until the 1980s, when they were killed by disease and high sea temperatures. The research effort was supported by the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Science Foundation. As Aronson points out, "Protecting fish populations is important in its own right, but it won't save the corals. Corals are being killed at an unprecedented rate by forces outside local control. Saving coral reefs means addressing global environmental issues--climate change in particular--at the highest levels of government."
AT: Cultural Diversity
1. Warming makes their impacts inevitable
The Guardian ‘3 (Duncan Campbell, “Global warming may turn deadly route through ice into plain sailing: The perilous dream of a North-west Passage is likely to become a commercial and problematic reality”, 1-20, L/N)
"It's something no one would have dreamed up for our lifetime," said Lawson Brigham, deputy director of the US Arctic Research Commission and former captain of the US coastguard icebreaker Polar Sea, which made the passage in 1994. Green lobbyists point to a threat to indigenous peoples. "Climate change upsets the dynamics of marine and coastal ecosystems and native cultures that depend on them," Greenpeace said in a 1998 report, Answers from the Ice Edge. "The consequences of global warming are affecting the subsistence way of life of Alaska's Native people now . . . Climate-caused changes in subsistence ways of life may be the greatest threat to the continued existence of indigenous cultures."
2. No impact – its just evolution
Lynn 74 (Richard, Prof. Emeritus of Psych @ U. Ulster, Irish Journal of Psychology, “A Review of "A New Morality from Science: Beyondism"”, 2:3, Winter, )
Now evolution takes place where there is a variety of different types who compete against one another, and in this competition the fittest survive and the unfit become extinct. This, therefore, should be the first principle in the design of human society. The requirement of diverse competing types applies both to societies and to individuals. Among societies the unit should be the nation and there should be the widest variety of different cultures. Some will be capitalist, some socialist, and some mixed economies. Some will be democracies, others oligarchies, and yet other dictatorships. They will have different religions, or none; and they will have different kinds and distributions of intelligence and personality qualities. The nations will compete, and in the competitive struggle the fittest will survive. If the evolutionary process is to bring its benefits, it has to be allowed to operate effectively. This means that incompetent societies have to be allowed to go to the wall. This is something we in advanced societies do not at present face up to and the reason for this, according to Cattell, is that we have become too soft-hearted. For instance, the foreign aid which we give to the under-developed world is a mistake, akin to keeping going incompetent species like the dinosaurs which are not fit for the competitive struggle for existence. What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of "phasing out" of such peoples. If the world is to evolve more better humans, then obviously someone has to make way for them otherwise we shall all be overcrowded. After all, ninety-eight per cent of the of the species known to zoologists are extinct. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality. As a general rule it would be best for national cultures to keep themselves to themselves and not to admit immigrants. There are several reasons for this. Isolation would give rise to societies with greater diversity and individuality, both culturally and genetically. Indeed, it would be desirable if the human race could evolve several different non-interbreeding species, since this would increase the options for evolution to work on. Another reason for discouraging migration is that migrants are often people of low genetic quality who reduce the efficiency of the population they join. The first principle for evolutionary progress is therefore competition between diverse cultures, but we have to think also of the principles conducive to the efficiency of individual nations especially that of our own if we wish to be among the survivors.
AT: Customary International Law
1. ILaw won’t be enforced – even the UN is weak on the issue
Eviatar, staff writer, 1/23/09 (Daphne, “The Pitfalls of International Law,” Washington Independent, )
There’s no question that international law is supposed to govern the Israel-Hamas conflict; but the persistent recriminations raise an important question: Does it matter? So what if Israel and Hamas are violating international humanitarian law, or even intentionally committing war crimes? Who’s going to stop them? It’s an age-old problem of international law; while the laws have been carefully negotiated and in some cases, interpreted over centuries, they’re notoriously difficult to enforce. And because they rely heavily on international pressure, advocates say the United States’ own refusal to apply international humanitarian laws such as the Geneva Conventions to its own conflicts with al Qaeda and the Taliban has undermined the influence of these laws on conflicts around the world. “In general when you’re talking about international law enforcement, measures are weak and uneven,” said Jessica Montel, Executive Director of B’Tselem, a human rights group in Israel that monitors the occupied territories. “You don’t have an international court and police force and prosecutor’s office to investigate and arrest and try people the way a domestic court would function.” As a result, perpetrators can often dismiss accusations of legal violations as biased and vindictive. The UN Human Rights Council, for example, is dominated by Muslim nations and their allies, and has managed to shield such countries as Iran and Zimbabwe from official investigations and condemnation, while issuing more than 15 different resolutions criticizing Israel in less than two years. Even toward Sudan, widely believed to have supported genocide, it has expressed only “deep concern.” So when the Council issued its condemnation last week, Israel was able to easily dismiss it as one-sided and reflecting the “fairytale world” of the 47-member Council.
2. Other countries solve the impact—US not key
Benvenisti 8 –Professor of Law, Tel Aviv University (Eval, “Reclaiming Democracy: The Strategic Uses Of Foreign And International Law By National Courts,” 102 A.J.I.L. 241, )
It wasn’t so long ago that the overwhelming majority of courts in democratic countries shared a reluctance to refer to foreign and international law. These courts conformed to a policy of avoiding any application of foreign sources of law that would clash with the position of their domestic governments. For many jurists, recourse to foreign and international law is inappropriate.1 But even the supporters of the reference to external sources of law share the thus-unexplored assumption that reliance on foreign and international law is inevitably in tension with the value of national sovereignty. Hence the scholarly debate is framed along the lines of the well-known broader debate on “the counter-majoritarian difficulty.”2 This Article questions this assumption of tension. It argues that for courts in most democratic countries – even if not for U.S. courts at present – referring to foreign and international law has become an effective instrument for empowering the domestic democratic processes by shielding them from external economic, political and even legal pressures. Citing international law, therefore, actually bolsters domestic democratic processes and reclaims national sovereignty from the diverse forces of globalization. Stated differently, most national courts, seeking to maintain the vitality of their national political institutions and to safeguard their own domestic status vis-à-vis the political branches, cannot afford to ignore foreign and international law. In recent years, courts in several democracies have begun to engage quite seriously in the interpretation and application of international law and to heed the constitutional jurisprudence of other national courts.
3. ILaw cannot produce change – status quo legal standards solve
Estreicher, professor of law @ NYU, 3 (Samuel, professor of law @ NYU, Virginia Journal of International Law Association, Fall, Lexis)
As for the subsidiary law that an increasingly interdependent world needs in advance of treaties, traditional CIL could not easily play this role as it was essentially backwards looking. The new, instantaneous customary law tries to play this role, but in a way that hardly comports with legitimacy. Without relying on CIL, states, intemational organizations, and other actors have ample means of identifying problems requiring interstate cooperation, drafting instruments that might command state support, and marshaling the forces of moral suasion. It is hard to see that the “law" aspiration of CIL offers the prospect of a signiticant incremental gain. ln any event, the ultimate question is whether any such benefit warrants the accompanying costs—to which I now turn.
4. Ilaw good impacts aren’t responsive—domestic law is comparatively superior
McGinnis and Somin 7 – *Professor of Law at Northwestern and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice and **Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University (John O. and Ilya, Stanford Law Review, “Should International Law be Part of Our Law?” 59 Stan. L. Rev. 1175, Lexis)
If we are right to argue that raw international has a relative democracy deficit compared to U.S. domestic law, this conclusion undermines claims that the United States should simply evaluate international law norms on a case-by-case basis, following only those that have beneficial consequences. The key question is: who does the evaluating? If it is the ordinary domestic lawmaking process, then this approach is fully in accord with our position: that the United States should only allow international law to override domestic law if the former has been ratified by the domestic political process. If, on the other hand, the mere existence of a norm of raw international law is taken as justification for the claim that it is likely to have beneficial consequences, then the democracy deficit provides good reason to reject this conclusion. To the extent that international law suffers from a comparative democracy deficit, allowing it to override domestic law will, on average, result in beneficial norms being replaced by relatively more harmful ones. n104 This point holds true even if most rules of raw international law actually produce beneficial results. For example, let us assume that raw international law promotes "good" results 70% of the time, but because of its relatively smaller democracy deficit, domestic law does so 75% of the time. Even in this stylized situation, domestic law is likely to produce better results than raw international law when the two conflict. Assuming that there are only two alternative legal rules, one "good" and the other "bad," in this scenario domestic law is likely to pick the good option and international law the bad one in about 56% of the cases where the two diverge. n105 It is important to remember that our argument is comparative. International norms are less likely to be of sound quality than those created by an established democracy such as the United States. This will be true both in cases where U.S. [*1199] law and international law directly conflict and in those situations where international law seeks to regulate an issue that American law has left to executive discretion or to the private sector. A domestic decision to leave an issue to official discretion or to private initiative is just as likely to be superior to a competing international law norm as a domestic decision to impose a legal rule by statute.
Ext #1 – ILaw Fails
International law is too weak to prevent conflict
AEI 5 (American enterprise inst, april, book review, inst for public policy research, “The Limits of International Law” Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, ) "As the twentieth century ended, optimism about international law...degradation and human rights abuses"
As the twentieth century ended, optimism about international law was as high as it had ever been—as high as it was at the end of World War I and World War II, for example. We can conveniently use 9/11 as the date on which this optimism ended, but there were undercurrents of pessimism even earlier. The UN played a relatively minor role in bringing the conflicts in the Balkans to the end. Members of the Security Council could not agree on the use of force in Kosovo, and the NATO intervention was thus a violation of international law. The various international criminal tribunals turned out to be cumbersome and expensive institutions, they brought relatively few people to justice, and they stirred up the ethnic tensions they were meant to quell. Aggressive international trade integration produced a violent backlash in many countries. Treaty mechanisms seemed too weak to solve the most serious global problems, including environmental degradation and human rights abuses.
Ilaw fails - International Criminal Court proves
Schaefer and Groves 10 [Brett D. Schaefer is Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs at the Heritage foundation andSteven Groves is Bernard and Barbara Lomas Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. 5/28/10. "The ICC Review Conference: A Threat to U.S. Interests" ]
Performance. Although the court’s proponents claim that the ICC has achieved significant success in its first eight years, scant evidence supports this claim. An honest stocktaking would conclude that the ICC as an institution has performed little, if any, better than the ad hoc tribunals that it was created to replace. Like the Rwandan and Yugoslavian tribunals, the ICC is slow to act. The ICC prosecutor took six months to open an investigation in Uganda (referred to the ICC by the Ugandan government in 2004), two months in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (referred by the Congolese government in 2004), over a year in Darfur (referred by the Security Council in 2005), and nearly two years in the Central African Republic (referred by the national government in 2005). The ICC prosecutor began a preliminary examination in early 2008 of alleged crimes committed in Kenya. The prosecutor opened an official investigation in March 2010. The ICC has issued 14 warrants related to these cases, but it has yet to conclude a full trial cycle nearly eight years after being created. This is notable because one argument for establishing the ICC was that it would be faster and more effective than ad hoc tribunals, such as the tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Deterrence. Moreover, like the ad hoc tribunals, the ICC can investigate and prosecute crimes only after the fact. The alleged deterrent effect of a standing international criminal court has not ended atrocities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Darfur, where cases are ongoing. Fear of ICC prosecution has not deterred despotic regimes from committing crimes against their own peoples. The ICC did not deter Russia from its 2008 invasion of Georgia, an ICC party. Nor has ICC party Venezuela stopped supporting leftist guerillas in Colombia. Peace and Justice. The ICC’s contributions to peace and justice are also very much in question. ICC decisions to pursue investigations and indictments can, and arguably already have, upset delicate diplomatic situations. For instance, the ICC decision to indict and issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir[12] for his involvement in crimes committed in Darfur arguably has only further entrenched his determination to punish those opposed to his regime in Darfur on the basis that he has little to lose. The desire to see Bashir face justice for his complicity in the crimes committed in Darfur is understandable and should not be abandoned. However, the ICC’s efforts to bring Bashir to justice prior to resolving the ongoing conflict may be counterproductive, ultimately leading to more suffering. Enforcement. A related issue is the ICC’s inability to enforce its own rulings. It entirely depends on the cooperation of governments to arrest and transfer perpetrators to the court. This flaw was also present with the ICTY and the ICTR, although they could at least rely on a Security Council resolution mandating international cooperation in enforcing their arrest warrants. In contrast, the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals could rely on Allied occupation forces to search out, arrest, and detain the accused. This “jurisdiction without enforcement” flaw lies at the heart of the Rome Statute and cannot be cured by an amendment. No change to the Rome Statute would give the ICC enforcement power, which requires the ability and willingness to use force. Even if the court could be invested with such power—a dubious prospect—governments would likely wisely refuse to give a largely unaccountable judicial body the power and resources to enforce its decisions.
Ext #4 – Domestic Law Better
US law is a better model—key to peace
McGinnis 6 – Professor of Law at Northwestern and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice (John O., Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, “The Comparative Disadvantage of Customary International Law”)
Even in activities where there are spillovers, such as law on the use of force, American law is probably better than international law. The United States is the world’s great power, some‐ times called the global hegemon in international relations theory.26 It stands to gain the lion’s share of resources from the peace and prosperity of the world. Its political process has incentives to provide laws that contribute to peace and prosperity, such as appropriate use of force. Moreover, as a hegemon composed of immigrants who remain concerned about the welfare of their former nations, America affords citizens from all over the world some virtual representation in its political process. These guarantees of beneficence for foreigners are surely imperfect, but they seem better than those provided by customary international law. Thus, by insisting that United States courts follow American law and not raw international law, Americans serve both themselves and others around the globe. America helps the world most by remaining true to her own democratic genius.
AT: Cyber Terrorism
1. Countries are boosting cooperation and establishing an international center to solve cyber terrorism
IHT, 8 (Associated Press, International Herald Tribune, “Countries worldwide need closer cooperation to curb cyber terrorism threat, officials say,” 5-20-2008, )
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: The world's countries must cooperate more to fight the threat of cyberterrorism attacks, which could threaten facilities such as nuclear power plants, officials said Tuesday at an international conference. Government authorities and technology experts from more than 30 nations made the call at the opening of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Information technology has "changed the dynamics of terrorism," said Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, the U.N.'s leading information technology agency. "The harsh reality is that (information technology) has become a tool for cybercrime and cyberterrorism," Toure said in a speech. "Cybersecurity must become a cornerstone of every aspect of keeping ourselves, our countries and our world safe." Delegates came from countries including Australia, Canada, France, India, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand and the United States. Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said cyberattacks could trigger "truly catastrophic consequences" by disrupting systems that control telecommunications networks, emergency services, nuclear power plants or major dams. "Cyberthreats are not something that modern societies and their governments can ignore," the prime minister said. "It is necessary for governments and countries throughout the world to work in concert." Malaysia will be home to a new center to be run by the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Terrorism, a project involving both the public and private sectors. The center is expected to open by the end of year and will serve as emergency response, training and resource center to counter cyberthreats. "The bottom line is the threat is real," said Howard Schmidt, a former U.S. adviser to the White House on cybersecurity. "It'll be from criminals, it'll be from state-sponsored activity, it'll be from organized crime, so the idea of this is to reduce the vulnerability" of countries.
2. No risk of a serious cyber attack – groups lack capabilities
Fisher 2009 – editor of [Dennis, 10/23. “Report: Cyber-Terror Not A Credible Threat.” ThreatPOST: rror-not-credible-threat-102309]
A new report by a Washington policy think tank dismisses out of hand the idea that terrorist groups are currently launching cyber attacks and says that the recent attacks against U.S. and South Korean networks were not damaging enough to be considered serious incidents. The report, written by James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, looks at cyber-war through the prism of the Korean attacks, which many commentators have speculated originated in North Korea. However, there has been little in the way of proof offered for this assessment, and Lewis doesn't go down that road. Instead, he focuses on whether the attacks constituted an act of war and whether they could have been the work of a terrorist group. "The July event was not a serious attack. It was more like a noisy demonstration. The attackers used basic technologies and did no real damage. To date, we have not seen a serious cyber attack. That is only because the political circumstances that would justify such attacks by other militaries have not yet occurred and because most non-state actors have not yet acquired the necessary capabilities. As an aside, this last point undermines the notion of cyber terrorism. The alternative to the conclusion that terrorist groups currently lack the capabilities to launch a cyber attack is that they have these capabilities but have chosen not to use them. This alternative is nonsensical," Lewis writes.
3. Hackers are inevitable – deal with it
Steven P. Bucci– P.h.d IBM's Issue Lead for Cyber Security Programs, 6/12/09 “The Confluence of Cyber Crime and Terrorism”
Terrorists will recognize the opportunity the cyber world offers sooner or later. They will also recognize that they need help to properly exploit it. It is unlikely they will have the patience to develop their own completely independent capabilities. At the same time, the highly developed, highly capable cyber criminal networks want money and care little about the source. This is a marriage made in Hell. The threat of a full nation-state attack, either cyber or cyber-enabled kinetic, is our most dangerous threat. We pray deterrence will continue to hold, and we should take all measures to shore up that deterrence. Terrorists will never be deterred in this way. They will continue to seek ways to successfully harm us, and they will join hands with criminal elements to do so. A terrorist attack enabled by cyber crime capabilities will now be an eighth group of cyber threats, and it will be the most likely major event we will need to confront. Some would say that cyber crime is a purely law enforcement issue, with no national security component. That is a dubious "truth" today. This is not a static situation, and it will definitely be more dangerously false in the future. Unless we get cyber crime under control, it will mutate into a very real, very dangerous national security issue with potentially catastrophic ramifications. It would be far better to address it now rather than in the midst of a terrorist incident or campaign of incidents against one of our countries. Terrorism enabled by cyber criminals is our most likely major cyber threat. It must be met with all our assets.
AT: Deficit
1. No impact to deficits. History proves.
Nugent ‘3 (Tom, Exec. VP & CIO – PlanMember Advisors, National Review, “The Great Budget-Deficit Myth”, 2-12, )
Our recent history of large budget deficits and strong economic growth contradict these Democratic claims. [See chart.] All during the Reagan era of budget deficits, the economy grew at an above-average rate. The late '90s surge in the budget did little to augment economic activity. As a matter of fact, the record budget surplus may have contributed to the economic decline of the early 21st century. So there is little substance to Democratic claims that budget deficits are evil. One argument against President Bush’s proposed stimulus package is that large budget deficits drive interest rates higher. (Investors could benefit from a little boost in interest rates from record-low levels — if such a relationship held.) If the enemies of increased spending and lower taxes could establish this relationship, they could argue that higher interest rates would stymie economic activity and make the likelihood of meaningful fiscal stimulus problematic. Recent economic studies have attempted to prove that such a relationship exists, although these studies appear to avoid analyzing all of the economic variables. In the real world, these “other” economic variables must be taken into account before the conclusions of such studies can justify forecasting any relationship between budget deficits and interest rates. Before economists and politicians go off on a rant about how increased deficits will raise U.S. interest rates, they should take a serious look at the Japanese experience over the last 10 years. [See chart.] In 1993, yields on ten-year Japanese government bonds were a little over 3% and the budget deficit as a percent of GDP was approximately 4.5%. All through the '90s, budget deficits as a percent of GDP rose and reached a peak in 2002 of over 8% of GDP. Interest rates, meanwhile, continued to decline. In comparison, the estimated $200 billion U.S. deficit for 2003 amounts to about 2% of GDP. Don’t even think about comparing short-term interest rates and the budget deficit in Japan — short rates are well below 1%. Some economists will dismiss the lack of any correlation between large budget deficits and long-term interest rates because the Japanese economy works differently than the U.S. economy. In other words, there are reasons for the dichotomy between budget deficits and interest rates in Japan. However this dichotomy is at the very heart of understanding why, only in isolation, there can be a relationship between budget deficits and interest rates. For example, in the real world, deficit spending triggers economic growth as government expenditures impact the private economy and contribute to an increase in private saving. This increase in private saving benefits fixed income markets, i.e. increases the demand for government bonds. This demand will offset the increased supply of government bonds that will be issued to finance a rising budget deficit. Therefore, interest rates remain stable. During the 1980s, record budget deficits were accompanied by dramatic declines in interest rates as the U.S. economy grew out of an early-decade recession. [See chart.] From 1980 through the mid '90s the U.S. accumulated an enormous amount of government debt. However, during this same period, long-term interest rates declined by over 50%. Whether the budget was in deficit or surplus over the past twenty years, long-term interest rates were in a downtrend. [Click on chart link above.] One must also remember that the central bank in Japan and the Federal Reserve in the U.S. have something to say about interest-rate levels. Since the Fed controls short-term interest rates, they also influence long-term interest rates. If the Fed so desired, they could maintain interest rates at low levels no matter what happened to the federal deficit. In Japan, where short-term interest rates are near zero, it appears that the Japanese central bank is keeping rates low. Record budget deficits are having no impact on interest rates. The U.S. and Japanese experience clearly point out the importance of doing your economic homework in the real world, not in the laboratory, before making projections regarding interest rates and budget deficits. We must not lose sight of the fact that stimulative fiscal policy is the critical economic variable in getting the U.S. economy back on a growth path. If wayward economists and biased politicians are successful in convincing the public that budget deficits are bad because they will increase interest rates, then our economy will suffer the consequences.
2. Alt Causes:
a. Social security and Medicare.
CNN ‘8 (“SHOW: ANDERSON COOPER 360 DEGREES 10:00 PM EST”, 2-21, L/N)
SANCHEZ: Oh, I can go on and on about that.Well, But, no, with respect to how -- I do think it gets lost. I thought Barack Obama did a good job talking about garnishing wages. Those are the types of things that people all of a sudden pay attention to. And when she talked about, you know, you wouldn't have Social Security or Medicare unless you forced it on people, those are the two largest entitlements our federal government has and the biggest part of budget deficits and difficulties that we have today, and it -- not to mention the insolvency of them, looking forward. So, I don't think those are two good examples to give.
b. Bush tax cuts.
Martire, 6 – 30 (Ralph, Ex. Dir. – Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, State Journal-Register, “Deficit Hawks Wrong to nix Jobless Benefits Extension”, 2010, L/N)
Oh, and according to Citizens for Tax Justice, 70 percent of Bush's tax break - or just over $200 billion in fiscal 2010 - goes to the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans. Certainly, helping everyday folks who've lost jobs put food on the table and sleep indoors is worth one-fifth of the welfare given to the wealthiest by Bush's tax cuts. Moreover, the $40 billion for extending UI is a one-time, short-term cost, while the Bush tax cuts are long-term, recurring costs that drill holes in the budget every single year, are the greatest single cause of the long-term deficit and account for more of the problem than the recession and Barack Obama's stimulus programs combined.
c. Deficit interest and bailout.
CNC ‘8 (Computers, Networks & Communications, “FEDUPUSA; FedUpUSA States That $700 Billion Bailout Threatens U.S. Democracy, Sovereignty”, 10-9, L/N)
Currently, interest on the national debt is the second largest expenditure besides military (this excludes Social Security and Medicare which are included in the Unitary Budget, but funded separately). The $700 billion bailout, which could potentially end up costing much more, will add even more debt interest. Debt interest has the potential of becoming the largest budget item, dwarfing the entire budget. This in turn could lead to capital flight from the United States and a devaluation of the U.S. dollar, already significantly depreciated under Secretary Paulson, among other things.
AT: Deforestation
1. Google Earth solves deforestation – google gives indigenous tribes computers to let them see and stop it – Brazil proves
CLAIRE MORGENSTERN (staff writer) 2008: Brazilian Tribe Uses Google Earth To Combat Deforestation
What happens when an indigenous tribe fearing deforestation comes into contact with modern mapping technology? Ask Almir Suruí, chief of the Paiter Suruí tribe that lives on the Sete de Setembro Reserve in western Brazil. The Paiter Suruí, along with dozens of other tribes around the world, use Google Earth technology to monitor their vast reserves in an effort to catch loggers and other groups that threaten the conservation of their lands for future generations.
The Sete de Setembro Reserve consists of 612,000 acres in the western Brazilian state of Rondônia. Today, the land is almost completely surrounded by loggers, miners, and ranchers, all of which pose a threat to the longevity of the reserve. The only way Almir and his tribe could learn of the deforestation was to walk for days until they reached territory that had been encroached upon. And, due to such a large landscape, keep tabs on what was happening in every corner of the reserve all the time – or even conduct semi-frequent monitoring, for that matter – was a difficult task. In 2006, the Paiter Suruí partnered with the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), an NGO that works with local tribes in Brazil, Suriname, and Colombia. By 2008, ACT and the Suruí had drafted a 50 year environmental management plan, coming up with a protocol to help the Suruí better prepare for increased interaction with the agribusiness industry and the effects of the globalized economy. However, it was a glimpse that Almir Suruí caught of his home-all 612,000 acres of it – using Google Earth at an internet café – that radically altered the course and capabilities of the tribe’s conservation management plan. Looking at the satellite image, Almir noticed pockets of deforestation that he didn’t know were there. With the use of Google Earth, the Suruí could do in mere seconds what use to take days of walking to accomplish. Moreover, they would have visual proof that deforestation was taking place, which would put them in a better position to preserve or reclaim land that is rightfully theirs. Almir and representatives of ACT met with Google Earth’s philanthropic branch, Google Earth Outreach, at Google’s offices in San Francisco. Google donated computers, smart phones, and GPS devices to the tribe so they could monitor their territorial borders for deforestation and encroachment, but also so they could share information about their culture and daily rituals with the online world – a big jump for a tribe that made their first contact with the modern world just 40 years ago. Back in Brazil, ACT helped the Suruí establish a training center with additional computers and networking tools to teach members of the tribe how to operate and maximize the effectiveness of the donated devices. Now, the Suruí have a sustainable method – not to mention some cutting-edge technology – of minimizing deforestation using the talents and skills of the local community.
2. Too many alt causes to solve all of them – a highly focused approach can only fail
World Rainforest Movement 98: What are underlying causes of deforestation?
During the last few decades, the forest crisis has prompted many international, regional and national preservation initiatives, yet many have had little success. There is general agreement that this is due to the fact that these strategies were too focused on the immediate causes of deforestation, and neglected the underlying causes which are multiple and interrelated. In some cases they are related to major international economic phenomena, such as macro-economic strategies which provide a strong incentive for short-term profit-making instead of long-term sustain ability. Also important are deep-rooted social structures, which result in inequalities in land tenure, discrimination against indigenous peoples, subsistence farmers and poor people in general. In other cases they include political factors such as the lack of participatory democracy, the influence of the military and the exploitation of rural areas by urban elites. Overconsumption by consumers in high-income countries constitutes another of the major underlying causes of deforestation, while in some regions uncontrolled industrialization is at the heart of forest degradation with widespread pollution resulting in acid rain.
3. New zero deforestation policy solves
American Quarterly 10/29/2009: Zero-Deforestation Goal Sought in World Forestry Congress Talks in Buenos Aires.
Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay are working toward a proposal that, by 2020, would completely eliminate deforestation of the Atlantic forest basin. After centuries of agricultural development 93 percent of the forest, which originally covered over 193,000 square miles, has been destroyed. The negotiations follow comments earlier this month from Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, Brazil’s lead climate negotiator, that his country intends to dramatically reduce deforestation in the Amazon rain forest within the same timeframe.
Discussions in Latin America on climate change have blossomed in recent months, in preparation for December’s UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. Rodney Taylor of the World Wildlife Federation has said that a “zero deforestation” goal would require the establishment of strict limits on logging in protected areas, government support for environmentally responsible companies and efforts to educate communities throughout the region.
Ext #2 – Alt Cause
Alt cause – agriculture
World Rainforest Movement 98: What are underlying causes of deforestation?
The most important direct causes of deforestation include logging, the conversion of forested lands for agriculture and cattle-raising, urbanization, mining and oil exploitation, acid rain and fire. However, there has been a tendency of highlighting small-scale migratory farmers or "poverty" as the major cause of forest loss. Such farmers tend to settle along roads through the forest, to clear a patch of land and to use it for growing subsistence or cash crops. In tropical forests, such practices tend to lead to rapid soil degradation as most soils are too poor to sustain agriculture. Consequently, the farmer is forced to clear another patch of forest after a few years. The degraded agricultural land is often used for a few years more for cattle raising. This is a death sentence for the soil, as cattle remove the last scarce traces of fertility. The result is an entirely degraded piece of land which will be unable to recover its original biomass for many years. It is a major mistake to think that such unsustainable agricultural practices only take place in tropical countries. Many parts of North America and western Europe have become deforested due to unsustainable agriculture, leading to severe soil degradation and in many cases abandonment of the area by the farmers.
Logging
World Rainforest Movement 98: What are underlying causes of deforestation?
In other countries, clearcut logging practices have been the main reason for forest loss. In the early nineties, Canada and Malaysia were famous examples of countries where logging companies ruthlessly cleared mile upon mile of precious primary forests. Here too, the historical perspective should not be overlooked. Countries like Ireland and Scotland used to be almost entirely forested, but were nearly completely cleared under British rule to provide timber for English shipbuilders. Today, logging still forms the most important direct threat to forests in regions like the Guianan shield (stable area of low relief in the Earth's crust), Central Africa, East Siberia and British Columbia.
Consumption
World Rainforest Movement 98: What are underlying causes of deforestation?
It should be emphasized that it is seldom the production of food for the poor which causes deforestation, as the largest areas of forests converted to other uses are currently being dedicated to the production of cash crops and cattle. These products, which vary from coffee and beef to coca and soy bean, are in many cases almost exclusively produced for export markets in OECD countries. It is absurd to defend the production of these goods with arguments about food security, as some governments and international institutions (including the FAO) do, since Northern countries have excessively high levels of consumption.
Under the current free-trade oriented ideology, the standard solution of institutions like the International Monetary Fund for these problems is increasing exports, instead of decreasing imports. Meanwhile, it is the import of luxury goods for the wealthy, as well as weapons, which tend to lie at the roots of trade balance and balance of payments distortions, both in industrialized and in low income countries. One of the major contributory factors in deforestation is the failure of macro-economic bodies like the Bretton Woods Institutions to recognize this relationship between consumption patterns and macro-economic problems.
Military
World Rainforest Movement 98: What are underlying causes of deforestation?
Weapons imports constitute an important socio-economic, and thus ecological burden in many countries. Every dollar spent on weapons is one dollar less spent on education, health-care, sustainable technology development and sustainable development in general. It is also one dollar on the wrong side of the balance of payments. The export of weapons constitutes big business for many - particularly Northern - countries. Naturally, war and violence themselves place a major direct and indirect burden upon forests. In some cases, the military have direct interests in logging concessions or the production of cash-crops like coca. The influence of the military on governmental policies in many countries is profound. For the military, the inaccessibility of forests is a strategic problem. Indigenous peoples and other isolated groups of society can pose a threat. Opening up the forest and stimulating migration of people from the centre of the country to these isolated areas serves a strategic purpose. Oil and mineral exploitation within the nation is strategically important, even when one has to attract foreign companies with conditions which allows all profits to flow out of the country.
More indirectly, the continuing dominance of Cold War mentalities cause some of the world's macro-economic institutions to be so ruthlessly free-market oriented. Despite these obvious and not-so-obvious relationships, there seems to be a strong taboo on discussing the influence of the military on deforestation and other social and ecological problems. Clear figures are absent and little research has been done.
AT: Dehumanization
1. Otherization has existed for centuries – impacts empirically denied, and Native Americans and Hispanics aren’t otherized.
Thomas, Professor, Gov, Politics, Global Studies, 08 (George Thomas, Professor, School of Government, Politics, and Global Studies, Ph.D, Stanford University, author, 8/22/08, “The Ugly Underside of an Ugly Underside,” )
About a decade ago a “Pacific Rim” candidate for political office – I have forgotten who it was, where, and for what office – took a Democratic candidate to task for his failure to broaden the racial discourse to include mention of minorities other than the usual black vs. white. Gypsies in Europe (called “Rom” in polite company) have endured “otherization” for so long and so pervasively that even well-positioned social scientists dismiss Rom studies to be less-than-legitimate. (For color-conscious bigots out there, many European terms for the Rom/Gypsies translate as “black,” for hair color). American “Otherization” survived a long history as well. Slaves were taken in war, and people were respected or deprived on the basis of language and custom. It wasn’t until the Anglicization of North America that skin color became the primary criterion for how humans were classified and cubby holed. Today’s Hispanic population and, for that matter, other Native American descendants, cannot be placed in one such hole, whether pigeon or cubby. North American Indians have issues different from those to the south. Additional issues stemming from the reservation system suggest deep-seated internal conflict between the need to marginalize Indians while simultaneously providing real estate and special government support. Others in society, black, white, Hispanic, or other “others,” adopt the Hollywood stereotype toward reservation Indians with many of the expected non-complimentary generalizations. And of course Mexican-Americans exchange ridicule with Dominicans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, and the love fest parties on.
2. Holocaust was epitome of dehumanization – impacts empirically denied.
2. Each group of “other” otherizes one another, contributing to an unbreakable cycle.
Thomas, Professor, Gov, Politics, Global Studies, 08 (George Thomas, Professor, School of Government, Politics, and Global Studies, Ph.D, Stanford University, author, 8/22/08, “The Ugly Underside of an Ugly Underside,” )
It remained for the special social histories of the United States for the symbiotic cycle of bigotry to be completed. Today, blacks, Hispanics, white supremacists and…. Who have we left out unintentionally? exchange ideas for use in ridiculing some other “other.” Indeed if one reads classic studies of (or has actual experience observing) “The Nature of Prejudice” at work, one sees that our neighbors often operate by means of social defenses developed through generations. I have heard many Hispanic Texans fight back against exclusionary American Black politics. Some of my Hispanic relatives hold advanced degrees and have successful law practices, yet refuse to vote Obama based solely on race. Some Hispanic declarations against Obama sound every bit as racist as the Jim Crow sentiments reminiscent of the worst of deep southern white supremacy.
3. The law is inherently dehumanizing. Working through the government cannot solve dehumanization.
Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law School, 06 (Steven R. Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law School, Criminal Law, Fall 06, Dartmouth Law Journal, “Dehumanization and Recreation: A Lacanian Interpretation of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, pp. 108-109, )
Lacan clearly suggests that the law tends to dehumanize people and recreate them as less than human but more suitable for governance. Marvin Frankel has described the "gross evils and defaults in what is probably the most critical point in our system of administering justice, the imposition of a sentence." Frankel goes on to assert a need to "humanize criminal sentencing." He calls to Lacan in stating that "the Guideline range is not sufficiently broad to accommodate relevant differences among offenders. The judge’s power to depart therefore became the crucial mechanism for avoiding undue rigidity." This argument derives from Lacan’s notion of law that "universalizes significations," meaning that law does away with individuality. It ignores individual uniqueness and instead installs a system with a philosophy of human sameness, a kind of blind equality. The FSG thus, by universalizing the offender, become "offensive to the whole notion of human dignity" by ignoring the offender’s personal characteristics.
4. War is dehumanizing to the aggressors, turning the case.
Shahabi, Political activist, 08
(Mehrnaz Shahabi, Political activist, anti-war campaigner, translator, 4/25/08, )
The shameful exposition by the American presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton, of her mass genocidal intentions towards Iranians was tragic proof of the dehumanising impact of warmongering on an elite western mind. It is said that humanity is the first casualty of war and this has been starkly clear, not only in the murderous boasting of the presidential candidate's preparedness to "totally obliterate" an entire nation, to prove her appeal as the American president, but worse still, in the meek and acquiescent response or no response at all of the western mainstream journalists, politicians and intelligentsia.
Ext #3 – Gov’t = Dehumanizing
The state is dehumanizing because of bureaucracy and the ability to make war.
Stephens, software engineer, 04
(Robert L. Stephens, software engineer, 6/2/04, )
Dehumanization, of a sort, is yet one more inevitable consequence of the sheer size and structure of the modern state. There is simply no way for the agents of an organization claiming to "serve" hundreds of thousands (or hundreds of millions!) of people to know anything about the vast majority of those individuals beyond some disembodied entries on a tax return, or an arbitrary accounting convenience like a Social Security number. To borrow a phrase often used by critics of large private enterprises, the modern state is "beyond human scale."
Another, more insidious, form of dehumanization is inseparable from the political process that is the very essence of the state. To see this, let's first consider the most extreme act of the state: war. In order to break down people's natural resistance to the killing of other human beings, states have historically made dehumanization of the enemy one of the major components of their war propaganda. With the enemy reduced to less-than-human status, it's easier to justify the use of lethal force against him.
The government is inherently dehumanizing because it seeks to control people.
Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law School, 06
(Steven R. Morrison, J.D., Boston College Law School, Criminal Law, Fall 06, Dartmouth Law Journal, “Dehumanization and Recreation: A Lacanian Interpretation of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, pp. 120-121, )
At this point, we have discussed how the law denies a person’s humanity. However, it creates something new in its place, since "[a]t each instant of its intervention, this law creates something new. Every situation is transformed by its intervention." The re-creation of an individual depends on what will best eliminate discordant ideas, since "[a] discordant statement [is] unknown in law." This may be seen as Lacan’s way of saying `that the law as a master will do what it must to preserve its power, that is, to preserve "the existing relations of production and the moral and social order." Therefore, if society views minorities as criminal, then the PSG will shape itself to fulfill that prophesy. If judges are seen as abusive of their discretion in judging, then the FSG will create judges that are "mere automatons, permitted only to apply a mathematical formula." lf the Sentencing Commission becomes sympathetic toward the idea of downward departures and the rigid strictures of PROTECT, then Congress will create a Commission that becomes a mere tool for a tough-on-crime policy of sentence increases. The master wants uniformity, predictability, and severity, and will censor and recreate others in its drive to achieve these goals.
Ext #4 – War = Dehumanizing
War dehumanizes victims and aggressors, turning the case.
Bennett, former director of the International Crisis Group in the Balkans, 97
(Christopher Bennett, former director of the International Crisis Group in the Balkans, author of Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse, 97, The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Migration, compilation edited by Montserrat Guibernau and John Rex, pp. 128-129)
The key to an understanding of the inhumanity of the Yugoslav wars is the phenomenon of war itself. The state of mind which is capable of committing atrocities is one which has been disturbed by war, not some mythical Balkan mentality. For war is dehumanizing; it destroys the very fabric of society and leaves psychologically unstable people in its wake, people who have lost contact with reality and are no longer in control of their own actions. After almost half a century of peace in the Western world, in which time many people have grown up without experiencing conflict, the brutality of war, albeit via a television screen, has come as a nasty shock. But war, and especially a protracted civil war, is brutal. Moreover, Westerners who are sucked into wars, such as the US troops who were engaged in Vietnam, are by no means above committing atrocities themselves.
AT: Democracies Solve Wars
1. Democracy won’t prevent wars if there is regional tension
Karen Kaiser & William Thompson, Department of Political Science, Indiana University, JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH, August 2001, p. 674
We infer from these results that regime type is an important predictor of dispute involvement, but rivalry conditions the relationship significantly. Democratic dyads are less likely to be involved in disputes, but that probability declines substantially in the presence of rivalry. Autocratic and mixed dyads, or non-democratic dyads in general, are more likely than democratic dyads to be involved in disputes, but the probability of dispute involvement increases dramatically when combined with the presence of a rivalry. We view these findings as support for hypothesis 3’s prediction that rivalry is a more important factor than dyadic regime type.
2. Their studies are flawed – Democracies don’t solve wars
George Kaloudis, Ph.D, International Journal on World Peace, March 2003 v20 i1 p93(2)
Professor Henderson, in this excellent work, examines the impact of democracy on war. More specifically, in Chapter I he provides an overview of the democratic peace proposition, the argument that democratic states are more peaceful than non-democratic states. In Chapter II, Dr. Henderson examines the extent to which democracies are less likely to fight each other by replicating one of the most compelling studies, Oneal and Russett (1997), of the democratic peace proposition. The results suggest that Oneal and Russett's conclusions are "the result of several questionable research design choices" that seriously undermines their thesis. In Chapter III, Dr. Henderson examines the proposition "that democracies are more peaceful, in general, than non-democracies." Professor Henderson concludes that these studies also rely "on faulty research design." In Chapter IV, Dr. Henderson "focuses on the role of democracy in extrastate wars." He finds that "democracies are less likely to become involved in these wars; however, the Western democracies are more likely to become involved in them." In Chapter V, Dr. Henderson examines the extent to which the democratic peace proposition applies to civil wars. He concludes that the democratic peace proposition "does not seem to be operative for international or civil wars." In Chapter VI, Dr. Henderson suggests "an alternative explanation of the postwar absence of interstate war between democratic states." He argues that "a combination of factors including bipolarity, alliance membership, and trade links reduced conflict among many jointly democratic and jointly autocratic states."
3. Their argument is empirically denied – as long as there are some democracies that will still fight, wars will continue
James Ostrowski; Attorney at Law, Buffalo; March 14, 2002 (Does Democracy Promote Peace? )
Rummel’s thesis crumbles at the very beginning for want of a cogent definition of peace. It is true that Rummel, at varying times and places expresses sympathy for the classical liberal state with fairly limited powers, this sympathy is not consistently manifest. He boasts that special interest group politics is a normal feature of democracy. He refers to the “ideological baggage” of classical liberalism. His enthusiasm for “democracy”, however, is repeated continuously and with little reservation. Further, his apparent personal sympathy for classical liberalism appears to play no role whatsoever in his theory. That theory vindicates modern democratic states, none of which is a classical liberal minimal state. Thus, if power kills, one should not support democracy, but a republican minimal or ultra minimal state or no state whatsoever (self-government). Asking the wrong question. Does it really matter whether democracies in general promote peace? Let’s assume that the vast majority of democracies are peaceful, but that a few are not. Would not that scenario allow for the generation of statistics which show that democracies are generally peaceful? Rummel considers this prospect, but casually dismisses it. He calls focusing on a few bellicose democracies a “methodological error.” However, let’s assume that the bellicose democracies are the most powerful democracies. Is it not then a distortion of reality to still maintain that democracies generally are peaceful? Imagine you are visiting an aquarium that features a large shark tank. There are 100 sharks in the tank. Ninety-five of the sharks are either docile or too small to injure a human. There are, however, five hungry great whites. Certainly, the overwhelming majority of the sharks are harmless, but would you swim in that tank? Similarly, we should not ask, are democracies peaceful, but is the United States peaceful? Are the other militarily powerful democracies—United Kingdom, France, India, Israel, peaceful? History shows they are not. See, Figure No. 7. As Gowa writes, “Theory suggests and empirical studies confirm that major powers are much more likely than are other states to become involved in armed disputes, including war.
4. Even if democracies are less likely to cause wars, wars will still occur in transition
Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Professor of Political Science and director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania, THE NATIONAL INTEREST, WINTER 2005-6,
THE BUSH Administration has argued that promoting democracy in the Islamic world, rogue states and China will enhance America's security, because tyranny breeds violence and democracies co-exist peacefully. But recent experience in Iraq and elsewhere reveals that the early stages of transitions to electoral politics have often been rife with violence.
Ext #4 – Transition Wars
THE FIRST STAGE OF DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS IS FILLED WITH NATIONALISM
Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Professor of Political Science and director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania, THE NATIONAL INTEREST, WINTER 2005-6,
FROM THE French Revolution to contemporary Iraq, the beginning phase of democratization in unsettled circumstances has often spurred a rise in militant nationalism. Democracy means rule by the people, but when territorial control and popular loyalties are in flux, a prior question has to be settled: Which people will form the nation? Nationalist politicians vie for popular support to answer that question in a way that suits their purposes. When groups are at loggerheads and the rules guiding domestic politics are unclear, the answer is more often based on a test of force and political manipulation than on democratic procedures.
AT: Deterrance
Actors are psychologically unpredictable making deterrence useless.
Record 4(Jeffery former professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee “Nuclear Deterrence, Preventive War, and Counterproliferation” July 8 The CATO Institute)AQB
That said, nuclear deterrence, like its nonnuclear varieties, is a psychological process and therefore inherently difficult to manage. Colin Gray astutely points out that “the intended deterree is at liberty to refuse to allow his policy to be controlled by foreign menaces.” In other words, “Whether or not the intended deterree decides he is deterred is a decision that remains strictly in his hands.”17 And his decision may be governed by not only an entirely different set of values than that of the deterrer but also a much greater stake in the outcome of the crisis at hand. Keith Payne at the National Institute for Public Policy and Dale Walton at Southwest Missouri State University observe that the presumption of rationality “does not . . . imply that the decision-maker’s prioritization of goals and values will be shared by or considered sensible to outside observers. Nor does rationality imply that any particular moral standard guides the selection of goals and values.” In fact, “rational decision making can underlie behavior judged to be unreasonable, shocking, and even criminal by an observer because that behavior is so far removed from any shared norms and standards. Rational leaders with extreme ideological commitments, for instance, may have goals that appear irrational to outside observers.”18 Johnson administration decision makers in 1965 fatally underestimated North Vietnam’s strength of interest in the struggle for South Vietnam and believed that Hanoi could be brought to heel via a coercive bombing campaign. They failed to understand that a reunified Vietnam under communist auspices was a nonnegotiable war aim for Hanoi and, for that very reason, that the Vietnamese communists were prepared to make—and made—manpower sacrifices “irrational” in magnitude.19 Additionally, the deterree, whatever his values and priorities, might not regard a deterrent threat as credible. The foundation of successful deterrence is the deterree’s conviction that the deterrer means what he says, that he has the will to do what he threatens to do. Nonnuclear deterrence was a significant problem for the United States in the years separating defeat in Vietnam and the 9/11 attacks. The so-called “Vietnam syndrome,” enshrined in the Weinberger-Powell doctrine and reinforced by humiliating military evacuations under fire in Lebanon and Somalia and by agonizing indecision in the Balkans, conveyed an image of military power greatly in excess of a willingness to use it and use it decisively. Both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were motivated to attack U.S. interests in part out of a low regard for America’s willingness to sustain bloody combat overseas.
9/11 proves that deterrence fails against non-state actors like terrorists.
Record 4(Jeffery former professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee “Nuclear Deterrence, Preventive War, and Counterproliferation” July 8 The CATO Institute)AQB
The Bush administration believes that the 9/11 attacks demonstrate a diminished efficacy of nuclear deterrence. With respect to nonstate enemies, especially fanatical terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, deterrence is clearly inadequate. How does one deter an enemy with which one is already at war and which presents little in the way of assets—territory, population, governmental infrastructure, and so forth—that can be held hostage to retaliation? Preventive military action, in contrast, is integral to the prosecution of hostilities against state and nonstate enemies; once a war is underway, military action to deny the enemy the ability to fight another day is inevitable and imperative, whether that “another day” is tomorrow or a potential future war years away. To destroy and disrupt is to deny and prevent. Striking first inside a war is not an issue. Thus, in the war against al Qaeda, having “already been attacked, it is logical for the United States . . . to strike first against al Qaeda and similar groups whenever doing so is militarily feasible and effective,” noted Betts before the Iraq War. “The issue arises in regard to states who have not attacked us—at least not yet. This distinction between Iraq and al Qaeda, obscured in much discussion of this issue, must be clearly maintained.”5
AT: Dirty Bomb
Impact of dirty bomb would be minimal
San Francisco Chronicle, 2 (March 7, 2002)
The most likely threat is from a dirty bomb, experts testified yesterday. Such a device could be made by taking radioactive material commonly found in X-ray machines or used to sterilize medical instruments and food, in a variety of industrial uses and at nuclear power plants. The device would be detonated with conventional explosives. "I believe that the deliberate dispersal of radioactive materials is a significant and plausible threat," said Steven Koonin, Caltech's provost in Pasadena. The good news, if there is any, is that not many people would die from such an attack, perhaps none immediately. Koonin calculates that dispersal of just three Curies of a radioactive isotope, equal to a fraction of a gram, over a square mile would mean that for every 100,000 people exposed, four cancer deaths would be added to the 20,000 cancer deaths that would have occurred anyway.
Dirty bombs don’t cause catastrophes
San Francisco Chronicle, 1 (September 16, 2001)
In theory, terrorists could use a small rocket or explosive to disperse radioactive materials and extend the damage. However, experts know how to clean up such a radioactive spill, and it would not "cause a catastrophe like a (nuclear) fission weapon would," Pate said. Asked whether any terrorist groups might have independently developed nuclear weapons, Pate scoffed, pointing out the extreme difficulty of obtaining the crucial ingredient: fissionable enriched uranium or plutonium. Even "countries with nuclear power infrastructures . . . have worked for years and years and years trying to develop nuclear weapons and have failed," he said.
AT: Diseases ( Extinction (Generic)
(__) No impact to disease – they either burn out or don’t spread
Posner 05 (Richard A, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Winter. “Catastrophe: the dozen most significant catastrophic risks and what we can do about them.” )
Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of the human race is probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a lust time.
(__) Technology will cure all diseases—stem cells
Han Dingchao, July 9, 2008 “Can We Cure All Diseases In The Future?”
Now let’s be back to the title, can we cure all diseases in the future? This is a complicated question, it is difficult to make an definite answer for it, but one thing is sure, as long as we don’t stop researching and we have fair eyes on everything, we will have ability to cure most diseases in the future. And now we have ability to expand the great results of stem cell research, we will use them perfectly in the coming years, this will be a great news in medical industry. So now we have enough faith to believe we will have enough ability to cure all disease in the future.
(__) Apocalyptic disease impacts are just constructs of pop culture hysteria
Schell 97 Heather Schell, Ph.D. candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford, teaches Women's Studies and English at Miami University, Winter 1997, Configurations, Vol. 5, Issue 1, “Outburst! A Chilling True Story about Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change,”
No matter who specifically gets blamed, we must also recognize the sincere apocalyptic fear from which such analyses spring. The film Outbreak opens with Joshua Lederberg's ominous warning that "the single biggest threat to man's continued dominance on the planet is the virus." A molecular geneticist, Lederberg is president emeritus and university professor at Rockefeller University and a past Nobel Prize winner. He perceives himself as one of "a relatively small number of investigators" worried about the potential for a viral epidemic. 66 A recent spate of academic conferences, articles, and edited books on emerging viruses and viral evolution seem to indicate that Lederberg is not alone anymore. 67 Of course, hemorrhagic fevers legitimately frightened medical personnel long before their current popularity. For example, in the wake of the 1976 Ebola outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan, a laboratory technician in England accidentally pricked himself with an Ebola-contaminated needle. He was quarantined in an isolation unit in the hospital during his illness. The medical personnel who attended him also decided to quarantine themselves, despite the substantial barriers between themselves and the patient. They reached this decision after a good portion of the doctors and nurses attending the patient developed a fever that they suspected might be Ebola. All recovered within a few days, having [End Page 110] succumbed to an apparently psychosomatic fever. 68 The current consciousness-raising project about the risk of viral epidemics also shares intimate concerns alongside the more global considerations. If future epidemics mirror past epidemics, suggests one medical historian, modern medicine will not be much help because "doctors would simply be the first to go." 69 The journalists who are writing about emerging viruses are also uneasy and ready to be frightened. The rapidity of viral evolution makes anything seem possible, to the extent that the postponed arrival of viral apocalypse continually startles the writers. For example, Barbara Culliton, a science writer for Nature and head of the respected program in science writing at Johns Hopkins University, marvels that "none of the people who handled the five now dead monkeys [at the Reston primate quarantine facility] has gotten sick from the virus, but no one is sure how to explain that bit of good fortune." 70 Richard Horton, U.S. editor of the Lancet, similarly considers the absence of human death resulting from the Reston outbreak "a stroke of unbelievable and unexpected good fortune." 71 Mary Roach, a contributing editor to Health, exults: "By pure, outrageous luck, the virus turned out to be a mutated strain, far less virulent to humans." 72 [End Page 111] To date, suspected importations of Ebola and other hemorrhagic fever viruses into the United States have all been false alarms. Preston's entire book details a disaster that never happened: Milton Frantig, grimly heralded as a potential "hot agent" victim in the United States, turns out to have had the flu. 73 This recalls the tense U.S. medical response in 1969 when a returning Peace Corps worker was diagnosed with Lassa fever: more than five hundred potential contacts were identified and monitored in Sierra Leone, Japan, Great Britain, Washington, D.C., and twenty-one U.S. states; the patient recovered without spreading the disease to anyone. 74 Some virologists in the 1970s were clearly anticipating the possibility that a major epidemic could sneak into our country; the AIDS epidemic confirmed this and convinced many others that pandemics of virulent superviruses were a real concern. It seems as though many people now sincerely believe that the world could end in pestilence, almost as though viruses have now taken the place of nuclear weapons in our apocalyptic imaginations. We seem to live in a fragile world--in Garrett's terms, "a world out of balance"--where some small social change might push the button that instigates viral Armageddon.
Ext #1 – NO Extinction
Disease won’t kill us- humans are evolving faster to resist them.
Clover, 08,Charles Clover, Daily Telegraph Environment Editor 2008,
A major genetic survey shows how we are changing, reports Roger Highfield Evidence that humans will evolve to shrug off diseases such as type 2 diabetes and obesity has emerged. - Humans 'evolving to have children later' - Dmanisi fossil sheds new light on human evolution - Language development mirrors species evolution A survey of the human genetic code has shown that our resistance to malaria, diabetes and other diseases is changing in response to our environment. Dr Lluís Quintana-Murci of the Institut Pasteur, Paris, and colleagues analysed more than 2.8 million single letter spelling mistakes in the human genetic code to distinguish the usual random changes over the last 60,000 years from those that seem to be occurring in response to the environment, when a genetic mutation gives people an advantage over their peers. People are surprisingly similar at the DNA level and the work "abolishes the idea of race" he says. But when it comes to the few differences, those showing the strongest signature of this effect, called positive selection, are involved in skin pigmentation and hair development, as is already obvious from how white people live in darker climates. "You do not need genetics to know this, but it shows our method works." In the journal Nature Genetics the team reports that several traits are sometimes linked to the same gene, so that when people in the Far East evolved a different version of a gene called EDAR to sweat differently, the same gene gave them much denser hair and changed their teeth too, an effect he calls "hitchhiking." Genes that protect against disease are also evolving. For example, one called CR1 helps to cut the severity of malaria attacks and is now present in eight Africans in every ten, yet is absent elsewhere, a novel finding. Several genes, such as ENPP1, are involved in the regulation of the hormone insulin and in metabolic syndrome - a combination of adult diabetes and obesity. These are present in 90 per cent of non-Africans and their relative absence could explain why African Americans are particularly at risk of obesity and high blood pressure. The work suggests they are adapted to an African environment and have not adapted to an American lifestyle. "They have not had the time to readapt," says Dr Quintana-Murci. Prof Steve Jones of University College London comments: "They have shown that man was once more like other animals than we might like to imagine, for Nature imposed her rules on us in the same way as she did on rats or flies. "There are three great eras of history; the age of disaster, when we were killed by cold or sabre-toothed tigers, the age of disease - the epidemics which began with farming - and the age of decay, in which most of the developed world now lives, and dies of old age. "DNA now shows how much we were moulded by the force of natural selection during first two; but my guess is that in future, now that we nearly all survive for long enough to pass on our genes, much less will happen. Perhaps you can ask me again in ten thousand years." An earlier study by a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist Prof John Hawks suggested that humankind has evolved more rapidly in the past 5,000 years, at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. This work counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, since in modern society the survivors no longer have to be the fittest.
Through natural selection and the growth in population the world can outrun disease.
Orlow, 05 Elizabeth Orlow, Millersville University, Summer 2005,
The origin of disease in the New World and the Old World is very different. In the Old World, Europeans had already come in contact with various types of infectious disease and acquired immunity. The European’s genes also became resistant overtime. Through natural selection the relative frequency of a gene appears to change over generations. For an example, people who have acquired resistant genes over generations are more likely to survive various types of diseases. Also, when the human population becomes larger a disease is sustained better. One of the reasons why the Europeans acquired immunity to various diseases was due to domesticated animals.
Disease spread won’t cause extinction
Peters and Chrystal 03, (Dr. Clarence, Director of Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases @ UT, and Dr. Ronald, Chairman of Genetics Medicine @ Cornell, FDCH Political Transcripts, “U.S. REPRESENTATIVE CHRISTOPHER COX (R-CA) HOLDS HEARING ON COUNTERING THE BIOTERRORISM THREAT”, 3-15, L/N)
PETERS: I think we have one example from the movement of the Conquistadors to the New World. They brought measles, smallpox and a variety of other diseases with them. They didn't wipe out the Indians, but they destroyed their civilization and were instrumental in the Spaniards being able to conquer the New World with relatively few people. I think we have something going on right now with SARS that we don't know exactly what the end of it's going to be, but we already know that Asian economies are suffering tremendously. My prediction is that they will not be able to control it in China. If that's true, then we will be dealing with repeated introductions in this country for the indefinite future so that we may see a change in our way of life where we are taking temperatures in airports, in addition to taking your shoes off and putting them through the X-ray machine. And we may see emergency rooms rebuilt so that if you have a cough you go in one entrance and go into a negative pressure cubicle until your SARS test comes back. So I think that while wiping out human life is extremely unlikely, we have unengineered examples of bugs that have made great impacts on civilizations. COX: Dr. Crystal? CRYSTAL: The natural examples of what you suggested were, as hundreds of years ago, with smallpox and also with the plague. The plague wiped out one-third of the civilization. We now have treatments for ordinances (ph) like the plague because they were engineered to be resistant. And if they infected a number of people and had the capability of being spread rapidly from individual to individual, it would cause enormous havoc. I agree with the panel -- I don't think it would wipe out civilization, but the consequences to our society would be enormous.
Ext #1 – No Extinction
Virulence reduction solves – humans will outgrow disease
National Geographic ’04 (“Our Friend, The Plague: Can Germs Keep Us Healthy?” September 8, )
Whenever a new disease appears somewhere on our planet, experts invariably pop up on TV with grave summations of the problem, usually along the lines of, “We’re in a war against the microbes” – pause for dramatic effect – “and the microbes are winning.” War, however, is a ridiculously overused metaphor and probably should be bombed back to the Stone Age. Paul Ewald, a biologist at the University of Louisville, advocates a different approach to lethal microbes. Forget trying to obliterate them, he says, and focus instead on how they co-evolve with humans. Make them mutate in the right direction. Get the powers of evolution on our side. Disease organisms can, in fact, become less virulent over time. When it was first recognized in Europe around 1495, syphilis killed its human hosts within months. The quick progression of the disease – from infection to death – limited the ability of syphilis to spread. So a new form evolved, one that gave carriers years to infect others. For the same reason, the common cold has become less dangerous. Milder strains of the virus – spread by people out and about, touching things, and shaking hands – have an evolutionary advantage over more debilitating strains. You can’t spread a cold very easily if you’re incapable of rolling out of bed. This process has already weakened all but one virulent strain of malaria: Plasmodium falciparum succeeds in part because bedridden victims of the disease are more vulnerable to mosquitoes that carry and transmit the parasite. To mitigate malaria, the secret is to improve housing conditions. If people put screens on doors and windows, and use bed nets, it creates an evolutionary incentive for Plasmodium falciparum to become milder and self-limiting. Immobilized people protected by nets and screens can’t easily spread the parasite, so evolution would favor forms that let infected people walk around and get bitten by mosquitoes. There are also a few high-tech tricks for nudging microbes in the right evolutionary direction. One company, called MedImmune, has created a flu vaccine using a modified influenza virus that thrives at 77 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the normal human body temperature. The vaccine can be sprayed in a person’s nose, where the virus survives in the cool nasal passages but not in the hot lungs or elsewhere in the body. The immune system produces antibodies that make the person better prepared for most normal, nasty influenza bugs. Maybe someday we’ll barely notice when we get colonized by disease organisms. We’ll have co-opted them. They’ll be like in-laws, a little annoying but tolerable. If a friend sees us sniffling, we’ll just say, Oh, it’s nothing – just a touch of the plague.
No chance viruses will kill us all
Posner 05 (Richard, Judge 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Skeptic, “Catastrophe”, 11:3, Proquest)
AIDS illustrates the further point that despite the progress made by modern medicine in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, developing a vaccine or cure for a new (or newly recognized or newly virulent) disease may be difficult, protracted, even impossible. Progress has been made in treating ATDS, but neither a cure nor a vaccine has yet been developed. And because the virus's mutation rate is high, the treatments may not work in the long run.7 Rapidly mutating viruses are difficult to vaccinate against, which is why there is no vaccine for the common cold and why flu vaccines provide only limited protection.8 Paradoxically, a treatment that is neither cure nor vaccine, but merely reduces the severity of a disease, may accelerate its spread by reducing the benefit from avoiding becoming infected. This is an important consideration with respect to AIDS, which is spread mainly by voluntary intimate contact with infected people. Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been enormously destaictive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would cause the extinction of the human race is probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a first time.
AT: Disease Threatens National Security
There is no link between disease outbreaks and national security
P. Fidler, Professor of Law, Indiana University School of Law, 2003, George Washington International Law Review, 35 Geo. Wash. Int'l L. Rev. 787, p. 795-6
Despite the Clinton administration's claim that infectious diseases, especially HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, represented a national security threat to the United States, the administration behaved in ways that indicated it did not practice what it preached. The most glaring discrepancy on this issue came in the hard line the Clinton administration took against developing countries, such as South Africa, that sought to increase access to antiretroviral therapies for HIV/AIDS-ravaged populations. Reviewing the National Intelligence Council's report on The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States in Foreign Affairs, Philip Zelikow argued: "The analysis is fascinating, and the case for international humanitarian action is compelling. But why invoke the "national security" justification for intervention? The case for direct effects on U.S. security is thin. Frustration also accompanied efforts to delineate the linkage. CBACI and the CSIS International Security Program engaged in an eighteen-month research project on the question of whether the "growing number of intersections between health and security issues create a national security challenge for the United States" only to conclude that "we still cannot provide a definitive answer."
Perception is key – disease outbreaks are not perceived as a security threat
David P. Fidler, Professor of Law, Indiana University School of Law, 2003, George Washington International Law Review, 35 Geo. Wash. Int'l L. Rev. 787, p. 839-41
As analyzed above, arguments that infectious diseases coming from other countries through international trade and travel constitute a direct national security threat to the United States were not persuasive. "Germs don't recognize borders" did not impress the national security community in the United States, and the seismic shift precipitated by the anthrax attacks reinforces this skepticism. At the time of this writing, for example, the global spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) - a new, contagious disease causing severe public health and economic problems in Asia and Canadan226 - was not being discussed in the United States as a national security issue, except in connection with how SARS may affect U.S. military efforts in Iraq. The emerging concept of public health security in the United States only weakly recognizes the national security importance of the globalization of infectious diseases. This argument does not mean that the globalization of infectious diseases is entirely absent from the post-anthrax U.S. foreign policy agenda. The Bush administration's national security strategy includes frequent references to the foreign policy importance of HIV/AIDS, and President Bush's announcement in January 2003 of an Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief represented a dramatic proposal for increased U.S. humanitarian assistance to nations in Africa and the Caribbean significantly affected by HIV/AIDS. n229 As indicated earlier in this Article, not all foreign policy issues rise, however, to the level of being national security concerns. As a consequence, global infectious disease problems do not feature strongly in the emerging scope and substance of public health security in the United States.
AT: Dollar Decline
Any decline in the dollar is small and self-correcting.
Trevor Williams, 1/15/2008. Lloyds TSB Financial Markets. “Macroeconomic themes for 2008: another strong performance by emerging economies,” FX Street Economics Weekly, .
Economic growth to be strong once again… Despite the doubling of oil prices and the credit crisis, global economic growth last year was above the long run average for a fifth year in succession. It was also clear that though growth in the main economies held up very well, this strong outcome was primarily due to the emerging markets, in particular China, India and Russia. But growth was also strong in all of the major oil exporters and commodity exporters of metals and minerals. There are few signs from these economies in recent months that the pace of growth is yet slackening. Oil prices remain high and demand for commodities from the emerging market giants (in terms of population) of China and India is still strong. However, we project that higher interest rates in many of the emerging market economies and currency appreciation over the past year - and likely to persist into this year - will slow down growth in 2008 compared with 2007. ...led by emerging markets... But with oil prices still high and commodity prices in general still strong, emerging market growth will remain broad based and not confined to the largest developing economies. Continued growth in the emerging economies will also help growth in the developed economies to stabilise at or near trend rates this year. This means growth for the UK of 2.3% and for the eurozone 2%. For the US, growth is likely to remain below trend, at some 2%, as a result of the fallout from an extremely overvalued housing market slowing down and the bursting of the credit market bubble. This should be seen as good news in the medium term as the US has been consuming too much and saving too little in recent years, which meant that it was running an ever larger external deficit that threatened the stability of the global economy. A weaker currency will help to rebalance the global economy and make growth more sustainable in the years' ahead. With continued weakness in the US dollar likely this year, we look for faster export growth and sharply lower interest rates to spur economic recovery in the second half of 2008. However, once growth starts to recover, and it is clear that interest rates have peaked, the US$ could well reverse some of its decline.
Weak dollar is self-correcting.
N. Gregory Mankiw, 12/23/2007. Professor of economics at Harvard, and he wrote my econ textbook last semester. “How to Avoid Recession? Let the Fed Work,” New York Times, .
By making United States bonds less attractive to world investors, lower interest rates from a monetary expansion also weaken the dollar in currency markets. A depreciation of the currency is not in itself to be feared. Treasury secretaries often repeat the mantra of favoring a strong dollar, but these pronouncements are based more on public relations than hard-headed analysis. A weak currency is a problem if it results from investors losing confidence in an economy. The most damaging cases are the episodes of sudden capital flight, as occurred in Mexico in 1994 and several Asian countries in 1997. This outcome is unlikely for the fundamentally sound American economy, but fear of it is one reason that Treasury secretaries maintain public fealty to a strong dollar. But if a weakened currency comes about because the central bank is trying to stimulate a lackluster economy, the story is very different. In that case, depreciation is not a malady but just what the doctor ordered. A weaker currency makes domestic goods more competitive in world markets, promoting exports and bolstering the economy. The dollar’s falling value is one reason exports of goods and services have grown more than 10 percent in the past year.
No risk of dollar collapse-Japan proves
Money Week 7 (“Why investors fear a China Treasury dump” )
Last month, China announced it was investing $3 billion of its dollar reserves in Blackstone Group LP, manager of the second-largest buyout fund, to boost its returns. What if China were to shoot itself in the foot and dump its entire Treasury portfolio in one fell swoop? “It just so happens we have a real-world example of what it would mean, according to Bianco. The Bank of Japan bought $244 billion of Treasuries in the 12 months ended August 2004. During that time, U.S. long-term interest rates rose and the dollar fell versus the yen. “By April 2006, the BOJ was a net seller of U.S. Treasuries (on a 12-month basis) to the tune of $26 billion, a swing of $270 billion. U.S. interest rates fell during that period while the dollar rose. “‘The BOJ bought a quarter-trillion dollars of Treasuries and then abruptly stopped and no one noticed,’ Bianco says.
AT: Dollar Dump
No risk of dollar dump- China diversifies its holdings within US companies cuz nobody wants to buy T-bills.
Money Week 7 (“Why investors fear a China Treasury dump” )
Greenspan says there is nothing to fear: “Former Federal Reserve chairman dismisses fear of China dumping U.S. Treasuries”: “There is little reason to fear a wholesale pullout by China from U.S. government bonds, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Tuesday. “While expressing concerns about China's runaway growth rate and what he described as overvalued stocks, Greenspan played down the prospect that Chinese authorities would sell Treasuries in earnest, forcing a sharp spike in U.S. interest rates. “Asked at a commercial real estate conference if investors should be worried about this oft-cited concern, Greenspan said: ‘I wouldn't be, no.’ “Still, Greenspan said the reason such a withdrawal was unlikely was that China would not have anyone to sell the securities to… “Greenspan said that a global liquidity boom, which he traced back to the end of the Cold War, would not go on forever. “‘Enjoy it while it lasts,’ he told the audience. “Now a private-sector consultant, following more than 18 years at the U.S. central bank, Greenspan reiterated his prediction that China's latest growth spurt had come too far, too fast. “‘We cannot continue this rate of growth in China and the Third World. This cannot continue indefinitely,’ Greenspan said in a speech. ‘Some of these price-earnings ratios are discounting nirvana.’” Now, there's a comfort... China won't sell them because 'China would not have anyone to sell the securities to.' So instead of accumulating more Treasuries, China is plowing U.S. dollars into inflated U.S. stocks, agencies (tied to horrendous fundamentals in the U.S. housing market), junk bonds, and other garbage.
No dollar dump-China has nobody else to buy from.
Financial Times 9 (5/24, “China stuck in ‘dollar trap’” )
China’s official foreign exchange manager is still buying record amounts of US government bonds, in spite of Beijing’s increasingly vocal fear of a dollar collapse, according to officials and analysts. Senior Chinese officials, including Wen Jiabao, the premier, have repeatedly signalled concern that US policies could lead to a collapse in the dollar and global inflation. But Chinese and western officials in Beijing said China was caught in a “dollar trap” and has little choice but to keep pouring the bulk of its growing reserves into the US Treasury, which remains the only market big enough and liquid enough to support its huge purchases. In March alone, China’s direct holdings of US Treasury securities rose $23.7bn to reach a new record of $768bn, according to preliminary US data, allowing China to retain its title as the biggest creditor of the US government.
AT: Double Dip Recession
A “double-dip” recession has no impact on the economy and no Congressional policy will change the economy unless it addresses the multiple economies of US.
Time 2009 (“A Double Dip Recession? Who Cares?” , Zachary Karabell , )
What should be most striking about these concerns, however, is how little they matter. A double dip is a period of economic contraction that follows a brief recovery after a recession. It's a useful prop for framing economic and political debates but doesn't describe what's actually happening across the country. The reality is that if you are doing well in this economy, either as a company or an individual, you will continue to do well regardless of a statistical double dip. If you are doing badly, you will continue to struggle whether or not the economic data are improving. (See 10 big recession surprises.) But for tens of millions of others, there is no recession. For the college-educated, the unemployment rate is 4.4% (for college-educated women, less than that). For them, wages have been rising, since more-skilled workers command higher salaries and industries ranging from technology to health care have been hiring and expanding. Those workers are enjoying — in relative moderation — the fruits of modern society, including owning homes, buying millions of cool gadgets like iPhones and BlackBerrys, taking summer vacations, sending their children to costly but worthy colleges and worrying over their retirement accounts, which means that they have retirement accounts to worry about. (See the best business deals of 2009.) And then there are millions of others who fall on the spectrum in between. Very few of these groupings will be altered by a double-dip recession. If the economy expands by 3% over the next quarters, there is little indication that the millions currently struggling or the many more in limbo will suddenly be less in limbo. Nor is there any reason to suppose that companies will suddenly start hiring again. They have integrated productivity-enhancing technologies, understand the dynamics of inventories and had been trimming workforces for years before the 2008-09 crisis. Better policy from Washington won't change that; nor is worse policy truly the cause of it, though it is a convenient excuse. On the flip side, if the economy contracts a bit, there is no reason to expect fewer iPads will be bought. After all, save for a brief few months at the very end of 2008 and the very beginning of 2009, the economic activity of the haves showed remarkable resilience. While contraction will lead to more negative sentiment, sentiment is already negative and is not a reliable indicator of activity. People can feel bad and spend money — and often do. So the double-dip question is yet another rabbit hole that distracts from the structural realities and challenges that the U.S. — and the rest of the world — faces. The debate speaks to a false belief that our macro statistics tell us something truly meaningful when in fact they are no better than shadows of shadows that offer at best a blurry facsimile. Until we begin to have a discussion about the multiple economies that constitute the U.S., our attitudes and our answers will fail to generate the desired — and shared — outcome of a more secure and prosperous future for all.
Double-dip recession won’t be bad – limited downside
7/30 (7/30/10, " How The Risk of a Double Dip Recession is Being Overblown ", )
Let’s assume for the sake of the argument that I am horribly wrong, and that the economy continues to dive right into a double dip recession. Let’s tack on other assumptions, too, including a double dip in Europe (which does seems likely, though no one is talking about it), persistently high unemployment and a bleak outlook for home prices. Let’s also assume our political leaders remain reasonably rational in their response to this scenario ‐ or at least that they fake it for a while. Should a double dip occur, even under those circumstances, it’s hard to see it being anything other than a mild recession. Housing is already near a bottom, banks have already been re‐booting themselves with new capital, and big companies have already gone through rounds of deep layoffs – and they’re sitting on historically high piles of cash. And whether you’re a supply‐sider or a Keynesian, that we’re coming up on election season means that a double dip will certainly not go unaddressed in D.C. So even if I’m wrong, I believe the downside is limited ‐ at least in terms of investing. You are on your own if you quit your job to flip condos in Vegas again. This, by the way, is also why you need a margin of safety in the companies you buy shares in, too – in case things go south for reasons you don’t originally contemplate.
AT: Drug Use
1. Multiple alternative causes for drug use
LHS 07’ Lakeview Health System 2007 acc: 07/22/09
There are many life events that can be described as drug addiction causes, but what they really are, are triggers for drug use. Some common triggers might be death of a loved one, divorce, physical pain or an overall unhappiness with oneself or feeling like an outsider. When a person suffers from a mental illness, such as depression or anxiety to name just two, they will sometimes turn to drug use as a form of self-medication in order to relieve the feelings that they are unable or unwilling to deal with. The coexistence of a mental disorder and a drug addiction is known as a dual diagnosis, and both can and should be treated concurrently.
2. Status Quo solving for Drug use
CDE 08’ California Department of Education Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act September 17, 2008 acc: 07/22/09
On January 8, 2002, the President signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which reauthorizes the Elementary And Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. The Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act (SDFSC) as Title IV, Part A of the NCLB became effective on July 1, 2002. The purpose of the SDFSC is to support programs that prevent violence in and around schools; that prevent the illegal use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs; that involve parents and communities; and that are coordinated with related federal, state, school, and community efforts and resources to foster a safe and drug-free learning environment that supports student academic achievement. The Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs (ADP) also receives SDFSC funds to support community efforts to keep youth drug and alcohol free. The ADP now requires that the SDFSC funds allocated to community-based grantees through competitive Request for Applications (RFAs) are used to support programs or activities that complement and support activities of local educational agencies (LEAs). The mission of the Safe and Healthy Kids Program Office (SHKPO) is to provide leadership to keep youth safe and alcohol, tobacco and drug free. Drug, alcohol and tobacco-use prevention programs are part of this effort as well as violence prevention and school safety are part of this effort. Programs to promote youth development, resiliency, buffers, protective factors, and assets are also part of this effort. The purpose of our prevention programs and youth development efforts is to foster a positive learning environment that supports academic achievement.
3. Drug use decreasing in status quo
Goliath 04’ Goliath News September 16, 2004 SAMHSA: marijuana use decreasing among youth. acc: 07/22/09
A new survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) show marijuana use by young Americans has decreased, while overall illicit drug use showed no measurable change, although the use of some drugs decreased sharply. The 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health also shows that overall, 19.5 million Americans ages 12 and older--representing 8 percent of that population--currently used illicit drugs. The report shows a 5 percent decline in the number of youth between ages 17 and 17 who had ever used marijuana, while current use of marijuana dropped nearly 30 percent among 12- and 13-year-olds. Important Positive Change SAMHSA reported that "an important positive change" detected by the survey was "an increase in the perception of risk in using marijuana once a month or more frequently" on the part of youth and young adults. For youth 12 to 17 years of age, past year use of Ecstasy and LSD dropped 41 and 54 percent, respectively. Of the 16.7 million adult users (18 years and older) of illicit drugs, approximately 74 percent were employed full- or part-time in 2003. Alcohol Dependence The survey found 19.4 million adults with abuse of or dependence on alcohol in 2003, with 77 percent of those individuals employed full- or part-time, representing over 10 percent of the workers in each group, SAMHSA noted.
AT: East Asian Arms Race
No Impact to East Asian proliferation –military spending doesn’t spill over and regional security cooperatives solve conflict and territorial disputes
Feng, professor at the Peking University International Studies.10 [Zhu, “An Emerging Trend in East Asia: Military Budget Increases and Their Impact”, ]
As such, the surge of defense expenditures in East Asia does not add up to an arms race. No country in East Asia wants to see a new geopolitical divide and spiraling tensions in the region. The growing defense expenditures powerfully illuminate the deepening of a regional “security dilemma,” whereby the “defensive” actions taken by one country are perceived as “offensive” by another country, which in turn takes its own “defensive” actions that the first country deems “offensive.” As long as the region doesn’t split into rival blocs, however, an arms race will not ensue. What is happening in East Asia is the extension of what Robert Hartfiel and Brian Job call “competitive arms processes.” The history of the cold war is telling in this regard. Arm races occur between great-power rivals only if the rivalry is doomed to intensify. The perceived tensions in the region do not automatically translate into consistent and lasting increases in military spending. Even declared budget increases are reversible. Taiwan’s defense budget for fiscal year 2010, for instance, will fall 9 percent. This is a convincing case of how domestic constraints can reverse a government decision to increase the defense budget. Australia’s twenty-year plan to increase the defense budget could change with a domestic economic contraction or if a new party comes to power. China’s two-digit increase in its military budget might vanish one day if the type of regime changes or the high rate of economic growth slows. Without a geopolitical split or a significant great-power rivalry, military budget increases will not likely evolve into “arms races.” The security dilemma alone is not a leading variable in determining the curve of military expenditures. Nor will trends in weapon development and procurement inevitably induce “risk-taking” behavior. Given the stability of the regional security architecture—the combination of U.S.-centered alliance politics and regional, cooperation-based security networking—any power shift in East Asia will hardly upset the overall status quo. China’s military modernization, its determination to “prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” hasn’t yet led to a regional response in military budget increases. In contrast, countries in the region continue to emphasize political and economic engagement with China, though “balancing China” strategies can be found in almost every corner of the region as part of an overall balance-of-power logic. In the last few years, China has taken big strides toward building up asymmetric war capabilities against Taiwan. Beijing also holds to the formula of a peaceful solution of the Taiwan issue except in the case of the island’s de jure declaration of independence. Despite its nascent capability of power projection, China shows no sign that it would coerce Taiwan or become militarily assertive over contentious territorial claims ranging from the Senkaku Islands to the Spratly Islands to the India-China border dispute.
AT: East Asian War
East Asian war is unlikely --- all potential conflicts are solved by regional stability initiatives throughout the region
Bitzinger & Desker, 08 – senior fellow and dean of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies respectively (Richard A. Bitzinger, Barry Desker, “Why East Asian War is Unlikely,” Survival, December 2008, )
The Asia-Pacific region can be regarded as a zone of both relative insecurity and strategic stability. It contains some of the world’s most significant flashpoints – the Korean peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, the Siachen Glacier – where tensions between nations could escalate to the point of major war. It is replete with unresolved border issues; is a breeding ground for transnationa terrorism and the site of many terrorist activities (the Bali bombings, the Manila superferry bombing); and contains overlapping claims for maritime territories (the Spratly Islands, the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands) with considerable actual or potential wealth in resources such as oil, gas and fisheries. Finally, the Asia-Pacific is an area of strategic significance with many key sea lines of communication and important chokepoints. Yet despite all these potential crucibles of conflict, the Asia-Pacific, if not an area of serenity and calm, is certainly more stable than one might expect. To be sure, there are separatist movements and internal struggles, particularly with insurgencies, as in Thailand, the Philippines and Tibet. Since the resolution of the East Timor crisis, however, the region has been relatively free of open armed warfare. Separatism remains a challenge, but the break-up of states is unlikely. Terrorism is a nuisance, but its impact is contained. The North Korean nuclear issue, while not fully resolved, is at least moving toward a conclusion with the likely denuclearisation of the peninsula. Tensions between China and Taiwan, while always just beneath the surface, seem unlikely to erupt in open conflict any time soon, especially given recent Kuomintang Party victories in Taiwan and efforts by Taiwan and China to re-open informal channels of consultation as well as institutional relationships between organisations responsible for cross-strait relations. And while in Asia there is no strong supranational political entity like the European Union, there are many multilateral organisations and international initiatives dedicated to enhancing peace and stability, including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. In Southeast Asia, countries are united in a common eopolitical and economic organisation – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – which is dedicated to peaceful economic, social and cultural development, and to the promotion of regional peace and stability. ASEAN has played a key role in conceiving and establishing broader regional institutions such as the East Asian Summit, ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and South Korea) and the ASEAN Regional Forum. All this suggests that war in Asia – while not inconceivable – is unlikely.
No escalation --- economic interdependence checks
Weissmann, 09 --- senior fellow at the Swedish School of Advanced Asia Pacific Studies (Mikael Weissmann, “Understanding the East Asian Peace: Some Findings on the Role of Informal Processes,” Nordic Asia Research Community, November 2, 2009, )
Economic integration and interdependence (EII) and the interlinked functional cooperation have been important, as they have pushed positive relations towards a durable peace. This includes not only increasing cooperation and economic growth and development, but also developing a feeling of security as the economic integration and interdependence decreases the fear of others. EII and functional cooperation have also encouraged and created a need for diplomatic relations and intergovernmental communication and agreements. They have also been catalysts for all forms of cross-border contacts including being a driving force for regionalisation. This is clearly seen in Sino–ASEAN relations and the ASEAN+3 process, but also across the Taiwan Strait where it was part of the cause of the shift in power in the 2008 elections. Together with the Chinese acceptance of multilateralism and its shift from big-power oriented foreign policy to a focus on soft power and the building of good relations with China’s neighbours, EII has been essential for the medium to longer-term overarching peace-building process in East Asia. In this context, what has been of particular importance for peace is both the high degree of economic interdependence that has developed, as well as the forces of the pan-regional ‘economics first’ policy focus. Here, the general acceptance of the ASEAN Way as the norm for diplomacy, with its emphasis on conflict avoidance, has worked together with the economic incentives in preventing conflict escalations and building peace.
No East Asian war --- informal processes secure and maintain East Asian peace
Weissmann, 09 --- senior fellow at the Swedish School of Advanced Asia Pacific Studies (Mikael Weissmann, “Understanding the East Asian Peace: Some Findings on the Role of Informal Processes,” Nordic Asia Research Community, November 2, 2009, )
The findings concerning China’s role in keeping peace in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and on the Korean Peninsula confirm the underlying hypothesis that various informal processes and related mechanisms can help explain the relative peace. Virtually all of the identified processes and related mechanisms have been informal rather than formal. It should be noted that it is not necessarily the same types of processes that have been of importance in each and every case. In different ways these informal processes have demonstrated that the relative lack of formalised security structures and/or mechanisms have not prevented the region from moving towards a stable peace. Informal processes have been sufficient both to prevent tension and disputes from escalating into war and for moving East Asia towards a stable peace.
AT: Ebola 1/2
1. Ebola is all hype – no risk of mass death. Not only to key treatment measures exist now but research into it is heavily over funded and there’s no risk of spread.
Fumento, 01 – author, journalist, photographer and attorney specializing in science and health issues – 2001 (Michael, “Hysteria strain of Ebola Fever,”)
"There is a crisis brewing in the world that we ignore at our peril. The Ebola virus is back, and it’s spreading." So declared the opening line of a December Business Week article: "Ebola Could Soon Be the West’s Problem, Too."
Soon? Ebola fever is already sweeping the West. But this pathogen is hysteria. And clearly initial infection confers no immunity, because we’ve been through all this before. Five years ago, after an African epidemic in the Congo, the disease spawned the hit movie Outbreak, with an Ebola-like virus threatening to wipe out the United States, and a TV movie, Virus, starring Ebola itself. CNN gave us a special report, "The Apocalypse Bug," while Newsweek's cover blared: "Killer Virus." The death toll for the 1995 Congo epidemic: 244. Too many? Yes. But not even a blip on the radar screen of African infectious disease. But the virus is back and so is the media mayhem. Talk about an outbreak! From the apparent inception date of the current epidemic in Uganda last October 14th to January 25th of this year, 427 Ebola cases have been reported with 173 deaths. During the same time there were over 1,900 media references to the disease on the Nexis database. That’s 11 media mentions per fatality. And while the news is clearly exciting to many of us, it’s also terribly misleading. Yes, Ebola is a gruesome disease. It causes massive hemorrhage of the internal organs, eyes, and orifices. But a few facts can dispel a lot of fear. Ebola is not nearly as lethal as represented. While Garrett has put the figure as "90-plus percent," the media boilerplate is "Ebola has a mortality rate as high as 90%." But how about as low as? According to a 1996 World Health Organization (WHO) document, the mortality range even back then was 50% to 90%. If the victims had first class hospital care rather than 3rd World treatment, it would be far lower yet. Further, as treatments have improved, the death rate has dropped. The ratio of deaths to cases in the current outbreak is 40%. Reporters try to circumvent this inconvenient reality with such rhetoric as "There is no vaccination for Ebola. There is no cure." True. But the first sentence applies to most viruses, including those causing colds and warts. The second applies to all viruses. That said, an Ebola vaccination has successfully protected monkeys, with human testing coming soon. Ebola is also terribly difficult to spread. A news report in the Toronto Star claimed, "Ebola is unspeakably evil, and as contagious as the common cold once it gains a foothold." Aside from pretending that tiny bits of protein have the capacity to make moral decisions, the assertion as to transmissibility is flatly wrong. Colds are spread through touch and aerosolized droplets, while Ebola is only "transmitted by direct contact with the blood, secretions, organs or semen of infected persons," according to WHO. That’s why those who contract the disease are so often health care workers or family members who prepare the bodies for burial. Ms. Garrett and Business Week have both asserted that a single airline passenger could be a "patient zero" for a Western epidemic. "It is only a matter of time before an infected person boards a plane and arrives in one of those countries that pays little attention to Africa now," Business Week cluck-clucked. Wrong. "It's possible that someone with Ebola might leave a remote area where the disease is occurring and might even get sick here," Dr. C.J. Peters, chief of the Special Pathogens branch at the federal Centers for Disease Control told me. But, "Because our socioeconomic level allows high standards in hospitals . . . there would be a few cases but they would be controllable under our circumstances." Ebola has as much chance of spreading in the North America as malaria does in the Arctic. Finally, even in Africa, Ebola as an infectious disease killer is a pipsqueak. We hardly need be reminded of the continent’s AIDS problem. But additionally each year sub-Saharan Africa suffers half a million deaths from tuberculosis, and almost 700,000 from malaria. Diarrhea – often a laughing matter in First World countries – kills about 900,000. That’s not particularly funny, is it? Clearly, some believe Ebola has tremendous entertainment value. But if you’re scared of the virus landing at JFK airport and spreading throughout North America, you’re better off worrying about rabid polar bears in Miami. And if you’re concerned out of sheer compassion, you should realize that money, researchers, and even worry are all scarce resources and that Ebola has gotten far more than its share.
2. Transmission of Ebola is difficult – no risk of mass death.
Drogin, 95 – Los Angeles Times Writer – 1995(Bob, “Ebola Outbreak Continues in Kikwit; Further Spread Feared,” The Tech, 5-16-95)
"WHO experts expect a significant increase in cases during the next two to three weeks among people who are incubating the disease having been exposed to it in the care of relatives or neighbors," Leclair said.
He said the WHO still hopes that improved information about Ebola would eventually contain the spread of the disease. "In two or three weeks we will have higher numbers but from that point it should start going down quite rapidly, but we have no way of guaranteeing it," he said.
Earlier Moday, WHO spokesman Thomson Prentice said in Geneva that, even if Ebola were confirmed in the Zairian capital, that wouldn't represent an acceleration of the epidemic.
"It would not be a great surprise if one case or more than one case occurred in Kinshasa," he said, adding: "It doesn't follow that more people will get infected because transmission is quite difficult."
AT: Ebola 2/2
3. Effective and cheap vaccines for ebola are coming now – successful animal tests
Science Daily March 5, 2009: Experimental Vaccine protects animals from deadly Ebola virus; may prove effective in developing the first human vaccine
Protection against Ebola, one of the world’s deadliest viruses, can be achieved by a vaccine produced in insect cells, raising prospects for developing an effective vaccine for humans, say scientists at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR) in San Antonio. “The findings are significant in that the vaccine is not only extremely safe and effective, but it is also produced by a method already established in the pharmaceutical industry,” says SFBR’s Ricardo Carrion, Ph.D., one of the primary authors of the study. “The ability to produce the vaccine efficiently is attractive in that production can be scaled up quickly in the case of an emergency and doses can be produced economically.” The new study was published in the January 2009 issue of the journal Virology, and was supported by the National Institutes of Health. Jean Patterson, Ph.D., also of SFBR, participated in the research. Ebola viruses, which cause severe bleeding and a high fatality rate in up to 90 percent of patients, have no effective treatment or vaccine. Since its first identification in Africa in 1987, Ebola outbreaks have caused some 1,800 human infections and 1,300 deaths. Outbreaks have become increasingly frequent in recent years, and are likely to be caused by contact with infected animals followed by spread among humans through close person-to-person contacts. Ebola viruses cause acute infection in humans, usually within four to 10 days. Symptoms include headache, chill, muscle pain, followed by weight loss, delirium shock, massive bleeding and organ failure leading to death in two to three weeks. Ebola viruses are considered a dangerous threat to public health because of their high fatality rate, ability to transmit person-to-person, and low lethal infectious dose. Moreover, their potential to be developed into biological weapons causes grave concern for their use as a bioterrorism agent. While some vaccines show protection in non-human primate studies, the strategies used may not be uniformly effective in the general human population due to pre-existing immunity to the virus-based vaccines. In the new study, a vaccine using Ebola virus-like particles (VLPs) was produced in insect cells using traditional bio-engineering techniques and injected into laboratory mice. A VLP vaccine is based upon proteins produced in the laboratory that assemble into a particle that, to the human immune system, looks like the virus but cannot cause disease.
Two high-dose VLP immunizations produced a high level immune response in mice. And when the twice-immunized mice were given a lethal dose of Ebola virus, they were completely protected from the disease. In contrast, mice that were not immunized had a very low immune system response and became infected. In another experiment, a three low-dose VLP immunization effectively boosted immune system response in mice and protected them against the Ebola virus. This finding is important because it demonstrates that since the vaccine produces immunization in dilute quantities, many more vaccine doses can be generated compared with a poorly immunogenic vaccine. VLPs are attractive candidates for vaccine development because they lack viral genomic material and thus are not infectious, are safe for broad application, and can be administered repeatedly to vaccinated individuals to boost immune responses.
4. Alt cause + no harms: The root cause of ebola will be solved – gorillas are being vaccinated.
News-, 2007 (“Controlling impact of Ebola - new vaccines could control impact of Ebola on wild apes,” 4-18-07, )
Why have large outbreaks of Ebola virus killed tens of thousands of gorillas and chimpanzees over the last decade? Observations published in the May issue of The American Naturalist provide new clues, suggesting that outbreaks may be amplified by Ebola transmission between ape social groups.
The study provides hope that newly developed vaccines could control the devastating impact of Ebola on wild apes.
Direct encounters between gorilla or chimpanzee social groups are rare. Therefore, when reports of large ape die-offs first surfaced in the late 1990s, outbreak amplification was assumed to be through "massive spillover" from some unknown reservoir host. The new study, conducted by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Cambridge University, and Stony Brook University at three sites in northern Republic of Congo, suggests that Ebola transmission between ape groups might occur through routes other than direct social encounter. For instance, as many as four different gorilla groups fed in the same fruit tree on a single day. Thus, infective body fluids deposited by one group might easily be encountered by a subsequent group. Chimpanzees and gorillas also fed simultaneously in the same fruit tree at least once every seven days.
The study also provided the first evidence that gorillas from one social group closely inspect the carcasses of gorillas from other groups. Contact with corpses at funerals is a major mechanism of Ebola transmission in humans. Together with other recent observations on patterns of gorilla mortality, these results make a strong case that transmission between ape social groups plays a central role in Ebola outbreak amplification.
The study has important implications for controlling the impact of Ebola, which has killed roughly one quarter of the world gorilla population. "It means that vaccinating one gorilla does not protect only that gorilla, it also protects gorillas further down the transmission chain," said Peter Walsh of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the lead author on the study. "Thus, protecting remaining ape populations may not require vaccinating a high proportion of individuals, as many people naively assume." Walsh and collaborators are currently searching for funding to implement a vaccination program using one of the several vaccines that have now successfully protected laboratory monkeys from Ebola.
AT: Economy 1/2
The economy is resilient – GDP, employment, personal income, and inflation prove. Prefer our evidence, it assumes skeptics that don’t put the economy into perspective.
Hamilton, CEO, Sageworks Inc., 9 Brian, January, Texas Society of Certified Public Accountants, “The United States Will be Just Fine”,
There is probably something in humans and in every generation that makes us think that the problems we face are uniquely difficult. Much has been written about the economy and, if you accept certain assumptions from what you read, you might think that we are in the midst of a global depression. Yet, it is important to put the current economy in perspective. We might even try reviewing and analyzing some objective data. Last quarter, GDP fell at a rate of 0.5%, which means that the total value of goods and services produced in the U.S. fell by a half of one percentage point last quarter over the previous quarter. (1) For the first two quarters of this year, GDP grew by 0.9% and 2.8%, indicating that economic growth is relatively flat this year, but that it is not falling off a cliff. This isn’t the first time GDP has fallen and it won’t be the last. A decrease in GDP after almost 6 years of increases is not positive, but almost predictable. No economy grows indefinitely and consistently; there are always temporary lapses. In fact, if you consider the media coverage of the economy over the past year and the consequent way people have been scared, it is remarkable that anyone is buying anything. Some would say that we cannot only look at GDP, so let’s look at other factors. Interest rates remain at historically low levels. (2) This means that if you want to borrow money, you can borrow money inexpensively as a bus iness or as a person. Loan volume in the country, according to the FDIC and contrary to what you read about the credit crisis, actually increased last quarter compared to the same quarter last year. (3) Someone is getting loans and they are not paying excessive interest rates for them. How about employment? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment sits at 6.7%. At this time last year, unemployment was 4.7%. The decrease in employment is not favorable, but historically an unemployment rate of 6.7% is not close to devastating. The 50-year historical rate of unemployment is 5.97%. (4) Most economists agree that the natural rate of unemployment, which is the lowest rate due to the fact that people change jobs or are between jobs, is around 4%. So, today we sit at 2.7% above that rate. Once again, the very recent trend is not good but it is certainly not horrifying. I have noticed many recent media references to the Great Depression (the period of time between late 1929 and around 1938 or so, depending upon the definitions used and personal inclinations). It might be illuminating to note that by 1933, during the height of the Depression, the unemployment rate was 24.9%. During that same time period, GDP was falling dramatically, which created a devastating impact on the country. Americans have good hearts and empathize (as they should) with those who are unemployed, yet it would be easy to go too far in our assumptions on how the working population is currently affected in aggregate. If 6% of the people are unemployed, approximately 94% of the people are working. We should always shoot for full employment, but why would we view our efforts as poor when we don’t quite make that mark? A good student might try to get straight A’s, but getting an occasional “B” or “C” won’t end the world. Look at personal income today Personal income is income received by individuals from all sources, including employers and the government. Personal income rose last quarter compared to a year ago according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Compared to five years ago, personal income has risen by 32.1% . Even considering that inflation was 18.13% over this period, people are generally making more money than they used to. This is another one of those statistics that can easily get bent to fit a story. You often hear things like “personal income fell last month by 23%”, but writers tend to leave larger and more important statistics out. In this case, wouldn’t you be more interested in trends over a quarter or a year? using isolated statistics to fit your view is something that has become accepted and rarely challenged. Next, there is inflation The inflation rate measures the strength of the dollar you hold today as compared to a year ago. The inflation rate is currently 3.66%. Over the past 50 years, the inflation rate has averaged about 4.2% . Inflation remains well within control. Yet, would you be surprised to read a story next month citing an X% jump in inflation over the last day, month? I wouldn’t be. (Ironically, the one thing about the economy that is alarming from a historical standpoint is our national debt, which gets some but not enough media coverage. We now owe $10.6 trillion and have become a debtor nation over the past several decades. We now depend on the goodwill and investments of outside countries, while we continue to spend more than we make). Now, the skeptics reading this will undoudebtly point to other (I believe, far lesser) statistics that validate their gloomy view of the economy and the direction of the country. I ask the reader: if people are employed, are making good wages, can borrow inexpensively, hold a dollar that is worth largely what it was worth a year or five years ago, and live in a country where the value of goods and services is rising, tell me exactly where the crisis is? There is no doubt that the economy has slowed, but slowness does not equal death. It is true that the financial markets are a mess (and the depreciation of the value of equities is both scary and bad), but analysts typically go too far in ascribing the fall of the financial markets with the fall of a whole economy. The markets are an important component of the economy, but the markets are not the totality of the economy. No one can say whether conditions will worsen in the future. However, we have learned that the United States economy has been tremendously resilient over the past 200 years and will probably remain so, as long as the structural philosophies that it has been built upon are left intact. Americans are hard-working and innovative people and the country will be just fine.
2. Economic decline doesn’t cause war
Ferguson 6 Niall, Professor of History @ Harvard, The Next War of the World, Foreign Affairs 85.5, Proquest
There are many unsatisfactory explanations for why the twentieth century was so destructive. One is the assertion that the availability of more powerful weapons caused bloodier conflicts. But there is no correlation between the sophistication of military technology and the lethality of conflict. Some of the worst violence of the century -- the genocides in Cambodia in the 1970s and central Africa in the 1990s, for instance -- was perpetrated with the crudest of weapons: rifles, axes, machetes, and knives. Nor can economic crises explain the bloodshed. What may be the most familiar causal chain in modern historiography links the Great Depression to the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II. But that simple story leaves too much out. Nazi Germany started the war in Europe only after its economy had recovered. Not all the countries affected by the Great Depression were taken over by fascist regimes, nor did all such regimes start wars of aggression. In fact, no general relationship between economics and conflict is discernible for the century as a whole. Some wars came after periods of growth, others were the causes rather than the consequences of economic catastrophe, and some severe economic crises were not followed by wars.
AT: Economy 2/2
3. IMF checks
Business Week 2010 (7/19, IMF to Seek $250 Billion Boost to Lending Capacity, , WEA)
July 19 (Bloomberg) -- The International Monetary Fund is seeking a boost in its lending capacity to $1 trillion, from the current $750 billion, at a Group of 20 summit in South Korea in November, according to a Korean government official. The increase would help strengthen a global financial safety net to counter crises, the official said on condition of anonymity because the talks are private. South Korea is chair of the G-20 this year. IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told the Financial Times that a boost to $1 trillion in IMF lending firepower was a “correct forecast.” Strauss-Kahn has sought to enhance the IMF’s role in serving as a buttress against financial crises, already overseeing a trebling in the fund’s war-chest to $750 billion since early 2009. While the IMF doesn’t foresee the global economy sinking back into a recession, the European debt crisis and elevated U.S. unemployment threaten to curtail the recovery. “They will have to increase the lending capacity over time to contain a crisis more effectively,” said Ham Joon-Ho, a professor of international economics and finance at Yonsei University in Seoul. Ham added that the IMF will also need to work to encourage members to line up contingency financing with the fund, which most have steered clear of given concern such a step would carry the “stigma” of signaling financial trouble.
Takes out their impact—it’s a financial safety net
AFP 2010 (7/19, IMF to boost lending resources: report, , WEA)
SEOUL — The International Monetary Fund is seeking to boost its lending resources from 750 to 1,000 billion dollars to better handle future financial crises, a report said Monday. The Financial Times, citing IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said the bigger credit lines should be used to help prevent, rather than address, crises. "Even when not in a time of crisis, a big fund, likely to intervene massively, is something that can help prevent crises," IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told the Financial Times. "Just because the financing role decreases, doesn't mean we don't need to have huge firepower... a 1,000 billion dollar fund is a correct forecast," he said. The Financial Times said the IMF wants to agree financing deals in advance that will be specially tailored to individual countries, rather than respond to crises with conditional loan packages. The aim would be to cool market nervousness over any nation facing an imminent liquidity crunch, the paper said. Strauss-Kahn was in South Korea -- which chairs the Group of 20 leading economies this year -- last week to attend a conference. South Korea's presidential panel for the Group of 20 leading economies, confirmed it was cooperating with the IMF to work out a better safety net.
4. The fed will prevent economic collapse
Washington Post 7/21/2010: Bernanke says Fed would act if necessary to boost economy.
The Federal Reserve would take action if necessary to keep the economic recovery on track, its chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Wednesday. Yet he expressed confidence that the expansion continues. It was the first public acknowledgment by Bernanke that the agency could take more policy steps if the economic recovery continues to disappoint. In his semi-annual testimony on monetary policy to the Senate Banking Committee, he gave a dual message: cautious optimism about growth and recognition that risks that the recovery will falter have risen in recent months. Even as the Fed continues "prudent planning" for how to exit its steps to support the economy, "we also recognize that the economic outlook remains unusually uncertain," Bernanke said in prepared testimony. "We remain prepared to take further policy actions as needed to foster a return to full utilization of our nation's productive potential in a context of price stability." Bernanke did not say what policy actions he had in mind, but potential steps include cutting the interest rate paid on bank reserves, reaffirming the Fed's promise to keep short-term interest rates low for the foreseeable future, or buying enough mortgage securities to replace those that are paid off. If the economy appeared at serious risk of returning to a recession, the Fed would consider large-scale purchases of Treasury bonds or mortgage-related securities to try to head off another crisis.
5. American economic slowdown won’t bring down the rest of the globe
The Economist, February 4, 2006 “Testing all engines,” p.
Alongside stronger domestic demand in Europe and Japan, emerging economies are also tipped to remain robust. These economies are popularly perceived as excessively export-dependent, flooding the world with cheap goods, but doing little to boost demand. Yet calculations by Goldman Sachs show that Brazil, Russia, India and China combined have in recent years contributed more to the world’s domestic demand than to its GDP growth. They have chipped in almost as much to global domestic demand as America has. If this picture endures, a moderate slowdown in America need not halt the expansion in the rest of the world. Europe and Japan together account for a bigger slice of global GDP than the United States, so faster growth there will help to keep the global economy flying. A rebalancing of demand away from America to the rest of the world would also help to shrink its huge current-account deficit. This all assumes that America’s economy slows, rather than sinks into recession. The world is undoubtedly better placed to cope with a slowdown in the United States than it was a few years ago. That said, in those same few years America’s imbalances have become larger, with the risk that the eventual correction will be more painful. A deep downturn in America would be felt all around the globe.
Ext #1 – Econ Resilient
The economy is very resilient
Investors Chronicle, 9 June 15, “The indestructible US economy”, LexisNexis
ECONOMICS: The US non-financial economy is doing very well in the face of disaster. Isn't it amazing how resilient the US non-financial economy is? This sounds like a silly thing to say during the worst recession since the 1930s. But it's the message that comes out of the latest flow of funds figures published by the Federal Reserve. This show that, in effect, the financial system ceased to exist in the first quarter. For the first time since records began in 1952, the financial sector became a net borrower from the rest of the economy during this time. Before the crisis, its net lending was over a third of GDP. This retrenchment, as my chart shows, is wholly unprecedented. The natural effect of the closure of the financial system has been to increase the aggregate savings of the rest of the economy. The reason for this is simple. Some households and companies that wanted to borrow have been unable to do. Whereas in normal times, their borrowing would have dragged down aggregate savings, this is no longer happening. So simple arithmetic means aggegate savings ratios have risen. However, the turnarounds here are relatively small. Households saved 4.4 per cent of their disposable income in Q1. Yes, this is well up from the minus 0.7 per cent recorded at the pow point in Q3 of 2005. But it's still quite low by historic standards; before the mid-90s, the savings ratio was typically twice this. The increase in corporate savings has been smaller. At its trough in 2007Q3, non-farm non-financial firms' net financial investment (the gap between retained funds and capital spending) was minus 1.6 per cent of GDP. In Q1 it was 2.4 per cent of GDP - though this was the highest ratio since 1953. There's a simple reason why these changes have been small. Most spending, by companies or households, has traditionally been financed internally, by income or retained profits. Equally, much of the financial system's lending was between financial firms. It was, if you want, like a casino with few links to the outside economy. With behavioural changes relatively small, another remarkable fact makes sense - that corporate profits have held up well. Fed figures show that, in Q1, non-financial firms' pre-tax profits were 5.1 per cent of their tangible assets. Though this is well down from the cyclical peak of 9 per cent reached back in 2006, it is above 2003's levels, and above mid-80s levels. Judged by the ability of non-financial firms to generate profits - which in a capitalist economy is the most important metric of all - the US economy is doing better now than it was at the height of the Reagan era, with all the triumphalism that surrounded it. None of this, of course, is to deny the reality that the US economy is in deep trouble. A big reason for the resilience of profits, of course, is that the pain of the crisis is being borne by workers; the unemployment rate, at 9.4 per cent, is at its highest since 1983. But in a capitalist economy, it's profits that matter, not people. My point is simply that non-financial corporate America is surviving one of the greatest economic disasters in history remarkably well. In this sense, capitalism is still surprisingly healthy.
Econ resilient
Associated Press, Wednesday, January 23, 2008 “Rice Says US Economy Resilient”
Her remarks came after two days of wild market swings worldwide and the surprise Federal Reserve interest rate cut on Tuesday lowered its benchmark rate to 3.5 percent from 4.25 percent in between regular policy-setting meetings."I know that many are concerned by the recent fluctuations in U.S. financial markets, and by concerns about the U.S. economy," she said. "President Bush has announced an outline of a meaningful fiscal growth package that will boost consumer spending and support business investment this year."She said U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who canceled his own visit to the World Economic Forum annual meeting at the last minute, was "leading our administration's efforts and working closely with the leaders of both parties in Congress to agree on a stimulus package that is swift, robust, broad-based, and temporary."The U.S. economy is "resilient, its structure sound, and its long-term economic fundamentals are healthy," Rice said. "And our economy will remain a leading engine of global economic growth," she added."So we should have confidence in the underlying strength of the global economy _ and act with confidence on the basis of the principles that lead to success in today's world."
Empirically, the economy is resilient – no risk of a downturn
Michael Dawson, US Treasury Deputy Secretary for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Compliance Policy, January 8, 2004 Remarks at the Conference on Protecting the Financial Sector and Cyber Security Risk Management, “Protecting the Financial Sector from Terrorism and Other Threats,”
Fortunately, we are starting from a very strong base. The American economy is resilient. Over the past few years, we have seen that resilience first hand, as the American economy withstood a significant fall in equity prices, an economic recession, the terrorist attacks of September 11, corporate governance scandals, and the power outage of August 14-15. There are many reasons for the resilience of the American economy. Good policies – like the President’s Jobs and Growth Initiative – played an important part. So has the resilience of the American people. One of the reasons are economy is so resilient is that our people are so tough, so determined to protect our way of life. Like the economy as a whole, the American financial system is resilient. For example, the financial system performed extraordinarily well during the power outage last August. With one exception, the bond and major equities and futures markets were open the next day at their regular trading hours. Major market participants were also well prepared, having invested in contingency plans, procedures, and equipment such as backup power generators. The U.S. financial sector withstood this historic power outage without any reported loss or corruption of any customer data. This resilience mitigates the economic risks of terrorist attacks and other disruptions, both to the financial system itself and to the American economy as a whole.
Ext #2 – Doesn’t Cause War
Empirical studies show no causal relationship between economic decline and war
Miller 1 Morris, Professor of Economics, Poverty: A Cause of War?,
Library shelves are heavy with studies focused on the correlates and causes of war. Some of the leading scholars in that field suggest that we drop the concept of causality, since it can rarely be demonstrated. Nevertheless, it may be helpful to look at the motives of war-prone political leaders and the ways they have gained and maintained power, even to the point of leading their nations to war. Poverty: The Prime Causal Factor? Poverty is most often named as the prime causal factor. Therefore we approach the question by asking whether poverty is characteristic of the nations or groups that have engaged in wars. As we shall see, poverty has never been as significant a factor as one would imagine. Largely this is because of the traits of the poor as a group - particularly their tendency to tolerate their suffering in silence and/or be deterred by the force of repressive regimes. Their voicelessness and powerlessness translate into passivity. Also, because of their illiteracy and ignorance of worldly affairs, the poor become susceptible to the messages of war-bent demagogues and often willing to become cannon fodder. The situations conductive to war involve political repression of dissidents, tight control over media that stir up chauvinism and ethnic prejudices, religious fervor, and sentiments of revenge. The poor succumb to leaders who have the power to create such conditions for their own self-serving purposes. Desperately poor people in poor nations cannot organize wars, which are exceptionally costly. The statistics speak eloquently on this point. In the last 40 years the global arms trade has been about $1500 billion, of which two-thirds were the purchases of developing countries. That is an amount roughly equal to the foreign capital they obtained through official development aid (ODA). Since ODA does not finance arms purchases (except insofar as money that is not spent by a government on aid-financed roads is available for other purposes such as military procurement) financing is also required to control the media and communicate with the populace to convince them to support the war. Large-scale armed conflict is so expensive that governments must resort to exceptional sources, such as drug dealing, diamond smuggling, brigandry, or deal-making with other countries. The reliance on illicit operations is well documented in a recent World Bank report that studied 47 civil wars that took place between 1960 and 1999, the main conclusion of which is that the key factor is the availability of commodities to plunder. For greed to yield war, there must be financial opportunities. Only affluent political leaders and elites can amass such weaponry, diverting funds to the military even when this runs contrary to the interests of the population. In most inter-state wars the antagonists were wealthy enough to build up their armaments and propagandize or repress to gain acceptance for their policies. Economic Crises? Some scholars have argued that it is not poverty, as such, that contributes to the support for armed conflict, but rather some catalyst, such as an economic crisis. However, a study by Minxin Pei and Ariel Adesnik shows that this hypothesis lacks merit. After studying 93 episodes of economic crisis in 22 countries in Latin American and Asia since World War II, they concluded that much of the conventional thinking about the political impact of economic crisis is wrong: "The severity of economic crisis - as measured in terms of inflation and negative growth - bore no relationship to the collapse of regimes ... or (in democratic states, rarely) to an outbreak of violence... In the cases of dictatorships and semi-democracies, the ruling elites responded to crises by increasing repression (thereby using one form of violence to abort another)."
An economic depression does not cause war
Lloyd deMause, director of The Institute for Psychohistory, “Nuclear War as an Anti-Sexual Group Fantasy” Updated December 18th 2002,
The nation "turns inward" during this depressed phase of the cycle. Empirical studies have clearly demonstrated that major economic downswings are accompanied by "introverted" foreign policy moods, characterized by fewer armed expeditions, less interest in foreign affairs in the speeches of leaders, reduced military expenditures, etc. (Klingberg, 1952; Holmes, 1985). Just as depressed people experience little conscious rage--feeling "I deserve to be killed" rather than "I want to kill others" (Fenichel, 1945, p. 393)--interest in military adventures during the depressed phase wanes, arms expeditures decrease and peace treaties multiply.
No impact – collapse is slow and the economy will have recovered by the time war begins
Bruce Russett, Dean Acheson Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Yale University, December 1983
International Studies Quarterly, v27 n4, “Prosperity and Peace: Presidential Address,” , p. 384
The ‘optimism’ argument seems strained to me, but elements of Blainey’s former thesis, about the need to mobilize resources before war can be begun, are more plausible, especially in the 20th century. Modern wars are fought by complex organizations, with complex and expensive weapons. It takes time to design and build the weapons that military commanders will require, and it takes time to train the troops who must use them. Large bureaucracies must plan and obtain some consensus on those plans; and even in a dictatorship the populace in general must be prepared, with clear images of who are their enemies and of the cause that will justify war with them. In short, preparations for war take time. Just how long a lag we should expect to find between an economic downturn and subsequent war initiation is unclear. But surely it will be more than a year or two, and war may well occur only after the economy is recovering.
Ext #3 and 4 – Safeguards Prevent
Safeguards prevent a depression
Atlanta Journal Constitution, November 17th 2002
In place now are regulatory agencies, stock market safeguards and social safety nets that did not exist in the 1930s to cushion the Depression's impact. They exist now because of what happened in the '30s.
No one says "it can't happen again," but most strategists believe another depression is improbable.
"If you look at the world economy, at stock valuations and earnings, the chances we will continue to spiral down as in the 1930s are pretty slim," says SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst Gary Tapp. "The government isn't likely to make the major policy mistakes that we had then."
Different Fed strategy
This time, the Federal Reserve has gone to the opposite extreme from its policies during a comparable period of the 1930s. It has lowered interest rates a dozen times over two years and increased the money supply to stimulate the sluggish economy. In the '30s, the conventional wisdom held that government intervention was not necessary to right a weak economy.
Ext #5 – U.S. Not Key to Global Econ
U.S. isn’t key to the global economy
Kohn 2008 – PhD in economics from Michigan, Chairman of the Committee on the Global Financial System, Vice Chairman of the Fed(Donald, speech at the International Research Forum on Monetary Policy in Frankfurt, “Global Economic Integration and Decoupling”, , WEA)
What about our more recent experience? During the first three quarters of 2007, the U.S. economy was growing at a solid pace of about 3 percent at an annual rate. Over the next two quarters, U.S. growth slowed to an average of about 3/4 percent, while growth in other industrialized countries stayed much closer to trend rates at about 2-1/2 percent, and growth in the emerging market economies, at 6-1/2 percent, held up quite well. It is important to keep in mind, however, that we are still in the midst of the current episode. Financial markets remain stressed; housing markets in many countries are adjusting after a sharp run-up in prices; and the effects of the turmoil on economic activity in the United States and elsewhere are still working themselves out. Accordingly, it is too early to tell how correlated U.S. and foreign activity will have been in this period. One piece of research on business cycles in G-7 economies, done by staff at the Federal Reserve Board, shows how difficult it is to establish with any confidence that business cycles have become more synchronized in recent decades, despite trade and financial integration having clearly increased.11 Other research, which shows a modest convergence of business cycles across a larger group of industrial economies, fails to find an increase in the correlation of industrial country cycles with emerging market economy cycles.12 The other dimension of recent linkages is financial, where the evidence is clearer. First, few question the importance of financial linkages between the United States and other industrial economies, which is an area where decoupling clearly has not occurred during the recent episode. While industrial country markets for stocks and bonds have displayed a high degree of co-movement for years, in the current episode we are seeing notable new correlations across money markets, with disruptions in funding markets showing up in the euro area, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Canada, as well as in the United States. Some of the effects of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis on financial markets in these countries occurred as a result of direct or indirect balance sheet exposures by their financial institutions to U.S. securities. Other adverse consequences for foreign financial institutions occurred when entire markets, such as that for asset-backed commercial paper, became impaired. In contrast, some have pointed to the apparent resilience of financial conditions in emerging market economies during the past year as an example of decoupling. In particular, the disruptions in the advanced economies have had only limited impacts on money markets in emerging market economies, and other financial market indicators in emerging market economies appear to have held up relatively well. For example, the spreads of emerging market sovereign bond yields over U.S. Treasury securities have risen since June of last year, but by only about 1/3 of the rise in the average U.S. corporate high-yield spread over U.S. Treasury securities. That rise is roughly half the average in several previous episodes of pressure on U.S. corporate bond prices over the period from 1998 to 2005; these episodes include, among others, the Russian and Long-Term Capital Management crisis of 1998, the 2002 surge in corporate defaults and bankruptcies, and growing concerns about U.S. auto companies in 2005. In addition, while stock prices in some emerging market countries have not performed well, a broad aggregate for these markets shows stock prices up over the past year, while the advanced economy indexes have exhibited double-digit declines, on average.13 Certainly, stock prices in the emerging market economies moved downward during acute periods of U.S. financial stress over the past year. However, these movements were similar in scale to those seen in industrial country equity markets, and during the intervening periods when global pressures were less intense, the prices of emerging market equities rebounded more substantially than those of industrial countries.
America no longer drives the global economy – Asian economies will fill in
The Economist, February 4, 2006 “Testing all engines,” p. Lexis
American consumers have been the main engine not just of their own economy but of the whole world’s. If that engine fails, will the global economy nose-dive? A few years ago, the answer would probably have been yes. But the global economy may now be less vulnerable. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Jim O’Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, argued convincingly that a slowdown in America need not lead to a significant global loss of power. Start with Japan, where industrial output jumped by an annual rate of 11% in the fourth quarter. Goldman Sachs has raised its GDP growth forecast for that quarter (the official number is due on February 17th) to an annualised 4.2%. That would push year-on-year growth to 3.9%, well ahead of America’s 3.1%. The bank predicts average GDP growth in Japan this year of 2.7%. It thinks strong demand within Asia will partly offset an American slowdown.
U.S. Economy not key to the global economy
The International Herald Tribune, March 6, 2002, p. 11
Weinberg contends that U.S. consumption of the world's products no longer has the power to sway global economies the way it did in the past. "The decline in U.S. imports from their peak to their apparent trough in this business cycle will add up to only a few tenths of a percent of world GDP," Weinberg argues. "By reversing the logic, the case can be made that the U.S. economic recovery -- the one that people in the rest of the world now perceive as having begun -- will not boost the economies in Europe and Asia by more than the same few tenths of a percent that the slowdown subtracted." Weinberg believes that once the current stock market rally subsides, sober minds will turn again to the individual factors underpinning the economies around the world. In Europe, he sees an eventual recognition that the slowdown was caused by a drop in real incomes over the past two years and that the problem will need its own solution, regardless of U.S. growth. In Japan, some insist that the stock- market spree was inspired more by investors covering positions after the government changed the rules on short-selling than by genuine expectations that the United States will dig Japan out of its rut. As Weinberg puts it: "Over the last 12 years, Japan's economy has managed to contract almost continuously as the United States swung from recession to prosperity."
AT: Econ Key to Heg
Economic decline doesn’t kill heg—American leadership is unique and their predictions have been denied for decades
Blackwill 2009 – former associate dean of the Kennedy School of Government and Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Planning (Robert, RAND, “The Geopolitical Consequences of the World Economic Recession—A Caution”, , WEA)
First, the United States, five years from today. Did the global recession weaken the political will of the United States to, over the long term, defend its external interests? Many analysts are already forecasting a “yes” to this question. As a result of what they see as the international loss of faith in the American market economy model and in U.S. leadership, they assert that Washington’s influence in international affairs is bound to recede, indeed is already diminishing. For some, the wish is the father of this thought. But where is the empirical evidence? From South Asia, through relations with China and Russia through the Middle East peace process, through dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions and North Korea’s nuclear weaponization and missile activities, through confronting humanitarian crises in Africa and instability in Latin America, the United States has the unchallenged diplomatic lead. Who could charge the Obama Administration with diplomatic passivity since taking office? Indeed, one could instead conclude that the current global economic turbulence is causing countries to seek the familiar and to rely more and not less on their American connection. In any event, foreigners (and some Americans) often underestimate the existential resilience of the United States. In this respect, George Friedman’s new book, The Next Hundred Years,14 and his view that the United States will be as dominant a force in the 21st century as it was in the last half of the 20th century, is worth considering. So once again, those who now predict, as they have in every decade since 1945, American decay and withdrawal will be wrong 15— from John Flynn’s 1955 The Decline of the American Republic and How to Rebuild It,16 to Paul Kennedy’s 1987 The Rise and Fall of Great Powers,17 to Andrew Bacevich’s 2008 The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,18 to Godfrey Hodgson’s 2009 The Myth of American Exceptionalism19 and many dozens of similar books in between. Indeed, the policies of the Obama Administration, for better or worse, are likely to be far more influential and lasting regarding America’s longer-term geopolitical power projection than the present economic decline. To sum up regarding the United States and the global economic worsening, former Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, in his new book, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy,20 insists that a nation’s power is what it always was—essentially the capacity to get people to do what they don’t want to do, by pressure and coercion, using one’s resources and position. . . . The world is not flat. . . . The shape of global power is decidedly pyramidal—with the United States alone at the top, a second tier of major countries (China, Japan, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Brazil), and several tiers descending below. . . . Among all nations, only the United States is a true global power with global reach. Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of the Republic of Singapore, agrees: “After the crisis, the US is most likely to remain at the top of every key index of national power for decades. It will remain the dominant global player for the next few decades. No major issue concerning international peace and stability can be resolved without US leadership, and no country or grouping can yet replace America as the dominant global power.”21 The current global economic crisis will not alter this reality. And the capitalist market model will continue to dominate international economics, not least because China and India have adopted their own versions of it.
AT: Ecosystems
1. The environment is resilient- it has withstood ridiculous amounts of destruction
Easterbrook 95, Distinguished Fellow, Fullbright Foundation
(Gregg, A Moment on Earth pg 25) MI
IN THE AFTERMATH OF EVENTS SUCH AS LOVE CANAL OR THE Exxon Valdez oil spill, every reference to the environment is prefaced with the adjective "fragile." "Fragile environment" has become a welded phrase of the modern lexicon, like "aging hippie" or "fugitive financier." But the notion of a fragile environment is profoundly wrong. Individual animals, plants, and people are distressingly fragile. The environment that contains them is close to indestructible. The living environment of Earth has survived ice ages; bombardments of cosmic radiation more deadly than atomic fallout; solar radiation more powerful than the worst-case projection for ozone depletion; thousand-year periods of intense volcanism releasing global air pollution far worse than that made by any factory; reversals of the planet's magnetic poles; the rearrangement of continents; transformation of plains into mountain ranges and of seas into plains; fluctuations of ocean currents and the jet stream; 300-foot vacillations in sea levels; shortening and lengthening of the seasons caused by shifts in the planetary axis; collisions of asteroids and comets bearing far more force than man's nuclear arsenals; and the years without summer that followed these impacts. Yet hearts beat on, and petals unfold still. Were the environment
fragile it would have expired many eons before the advent of the industrial affronts of the dreaming ape. Human assaults on the environment, though mischievous, are pinpricks compared to forces of the magnitude nature is accustomed to resisting.
2. Environmental threats exaggerated
Gordon 95 - a professor of mineral economics at Pennsylvania State University
[Gordon, Richard, “Ecorealism Exposed,” Regulation, 1995,
Easterbrook's argument is that although environmental problems deserve attention, the environmental movement has exaggerated the threats and ignored evidence of improvement. His discontent causes him to adopt and incessantly employ the pejoratively intended (and irritating) shorthand "enviros" to describe the leading environmental organizations and their admirers. He proposes-and overuses-an equally infelicitous alternative phrase, "ecorealism," that seems to mean that most environmental initiatives can be justifited by more moderate arguments. Given the mass, range, and defects of the book, any review of reasonable length must be selective. Easterbrook's critique begins with an overview of environmentalism from a global perspective. He then turns to a much longer (almost 500- page) survey of many specific environmental issues. The overview section is a shorter, more devastating criticism, but it is also more speculative than the survey of specific issues. In essence, the overview argument is that human impacts on the environment are minor, easily correctable influences on a world affected by far more powerful forces. That is a more penetrating criticism than typically appears in works expressing skepticism about environmentalism. Easterbrook notes that mankind's effects on nature long predate industrialization or the white colonization of America, but still have had only minor impacts. We are then reminded of the vast, often highly destructive changes that occur naturally and the recuperative power of natural systems.
3. overpoopulation makes the impact inevitable
Herald, The (UK) 1/20/04
[The world population awareness website, The Herald] The Earth's Life-support System is in Peril - a Global Crisis. ]
The Earth's Life-support System is in Peril - a Global Crisis. Our planet is changing and many environmental indicators have moved outside their range of the past half-million years. If we cannot develop policies to cope with this, the consequences may be huge. We have made progress. Life expectancy and standards of living have increased for many, but the population has grown to six billion, and continues to grow. The global economy has increased 15-fold since 1950 and this progress has begun to affect the planet and how it functions. For example, the increase in CO2 is 100 PPM and growing. During the 1990's, the average area of tropical forest cleared each year was equivalent to half the area of England. The impacts of global change are complex, as they combine with regional environmental stresses. Coral reefs, which were under stress from fishing, tourism and pollutants, are now under pressure from carbonate chemistry in ocean surface waters from the increase in CO2. The wildfires that hit the world last year were a result of land management, ignition sources and extreme local weather probably linked to climate change. Poor access to fresh water is expected to nearly double with population growth. Biodiversity losses, will be exacerbated by climate change. Beyond 2050, regional climate change, could have huge consequences. The Earth has entered the Anthropocene Era in which humans are a dominating environmental force. Global environmental change challenges the political decision-making process and will have to be based on risks that events will happen, or scenarios will unfold. Global environmental change is often gradual until critical thresholds are passed. Some rapid changes such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet would be irreversible in any meaningful timescale, while other changes may be unstoppable. We know that there are risks of rapid and irreversible changes to which it would be difficult to adapt. Incremental change will not prevent climate change, water depletion, deforestation or biodiversity loss. Breakthroughs in technologies and resource management that will affect economic sectors and lifestyles are required. International frameworks are essential for addressing global change. Never before has a multilateral system been more necessary. Will we accept the challenge or wait until a catastrophic, irreversible change is upon us?
AT: Egyptian Instability 1/2
1. Alternate causes to political instability—
A. Climate Change
Carbon Control News in ‘7 (“In The Air”, 4-23, L/N)
Participants of the teleconference, sponsored by the National Environmental Trust, also pointed to a recent report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which predicted the climate change effects on economically vulnerable regions of the world. Participants said Egypt and Pakistan were two examples of areas that would suffer economic and political instability from global warming.
B. Discontent over Mubarak
Straits Times in ‘8 (John R. Bradley, “Rumblings of discontent grow louder”, 4-26, L/N)
Other Arab countries, including Morocco and Yemen, have witnessed riots in recent weeks as a result of hikes in basic food prices. The growing bread queues in Egypt - the result mainly of a global hike in wheat prices - have certainly added to popular anger and discontent. But Egypt is unique in the region, and not only because it is by far the most populous Arab country (one in four Arabs is Egyptian). This anger in Egypt, tapped by a vibrant opposition print media, has deeper roots and the potential to spiral out of control. When riots broke out during the April 6 strike in an industrial town in the Nile Delta, it was telling that billboards with pictures of Mr Mubarak quickly became the focus of the rioters' wrath. Many posters of Mr Mubarak were slashed with knives or were torn down and trampled underfoot. About half of Egyptians live on less than $2US ($2S.80) a day and depend on subsidised bread, cooking oil and other basic commodities to survive. Food prices have risen more than 50 per cent in the past six months. The head of the World Bank said last month that it will take 'a generation' for Egypt's poor to see any benefits from the country's economic restructuring. The question is whether they are prepared to wait that long. The fact that the number of industrial actions continues to grow suggests that they are not. The daily Al-Misry Al-Youm recently reported a total of 222 strikes, demonstrations and protests in 2006 and 580 in 2007. There were 27 collective actions in the first week of January this year alone. Estimates of the number of workers involved in this movement range from 300,000 to 500,000. Opposition groups say some 80 per cent of the population participated in some form or another in the April 6 general strike, albeit mainly by staying at home after an unprecedented show of intimidation from the Egyptian security forces in all the main squares and traffic junctions of the country's major cities. Most dangerously for the regime, last year the strikes began to spread from the textile and clothing industry to encompass workers from the building materials, transport, food processing, baking, sanitation and even oil industries. Private-sector industrial workers comprised a more prominent component of the movement than ever before. The movement has since broadened to encompass white-collar employees, civil servants and professionals. The single largest collective action of the movement was last December's strike of some 55,000 real estate tax collectors employed by the local authorities. And doctors, lawyers, and university professors are all planning nationwide industrial action in the coming months. The regime finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place. It has been forced to add a further 15 million Egyptians to those already eligible for subsidised food, and is promising government workers significant pay increases. But this has effectively put on hold neo-liberal economic policies so crucial for attracting foreign investment, the cornerstone of government economic policy and much favoured by home-grown crony capitalists. The truly awful thing about the Mubarak regime is how ideologically bankrupt it appears to be as it muddles aimlessly along, resorting to quick-fix bribes and brute force to silence criticism. Those injured during the April 6 riots were actually handcuffed to their hospital beds. The regime's hope seems to be that things will peter out rather than explode. Egyptians, this common interpretation has it, are notoriously passive, used as they have been for thousands of years to being ruled by pharaohs and living according to agricultural patterns determined by the alluvial flow of the River Nile. But a quick glance at the past 100 years of its history tells a much different story. Egypt has been rocked every three decades or so by serious unrest: a 1919 nationalist revolution that led to partial sovereignty; riots in January 1952 against British rule that left half of Cairo burnt to ashes, followed by the overthrow of the monarchy in July that year; bread riots in 1977 that almost led to the overthrow of then president Anwar Sadat. Three decades on, Egypt is ripe for another popular uprising. If there is widespread chaos, only one group is poised to fill the vacuum: the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 and a constant thorn in the regime's side. A report this week by the government-controlled Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic and Political Studies claims that the officially outlawed group now has 2.5 million Egyptian members. The situation in Egypt today is eerily similar to that in Iran in the years leading up to the 1979 Islamic revolution. It was not foreordained that the radical Islamists led by Ayatollah Khomeini would take power in Iran: They were simply one of many groups opposing the Shah, and arguably not even the leading or most popular one. Before the Iranian revolution, the opposition to the Shah's rule was diverse. Similarly, the opposition to the Mubarak regime is diverse, made up of students, secularists, Marxists, Islamists and anti-imperialists. Moreover, the Iranian revolution began, as in Egypt today, with wildcat, uncoordinated and inchoate strikes that built upon each other. These were joined by groups with better organisation and clearer political goals, and were met by a waffling government that neither wanted to give up power nor was capable of quashing the opposition with the full force it had at its command. Islamists triumphed in Iran in 1979 because they proved themselves to be the most disciplined and ruthless force. The Muslim Brotherhood knows this history well. It is monito ring events unfold in Egypt, aware that its chance to seize power may at last be arriving.
2. No impact – Musim brotherhood is moderate, not radical
Leiken and Brooke ‘7 (Robert, Director of the Immigration and National Security Program, and Steven, Resaercher, Nixon Center, Foreign Affairs, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood”, March/April, L/N)
The Muslim Brotherhood is the world's oldest, largest, and most influential Islamist organization. It is also the most controversial, condemned by both conventional opinion in the West and radical opinion in the Middle East. American commentators have called the Muslim Brothers "radical Islamists" and "a vital component of the enemy's assault force ... deeply hostile to the United States." Al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri sneers at them for "lur[ing] thousands of young Muslim men into lines for elections ... instead of into the lines of jihad." Jihadists loathe the Muslim Brotherhood (known in Arabic as al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen) for rejecting global jihad and embracing democracy. These positions seem to make them moderates, the very thing the United States, short on allies in the Muslim world, seeks. But the Ikhwan also assails U.S. foreign policy, especially Washington's support for Israel, and questions linger about its actual commitment to the democratic process. Over the past year, we have met with dozens of Brotherhood leaders and activists from Egypt, France, Jordan, Spain, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom. In long and sometimes heated discussions, we explored the Brotherhood's stance on democracy and jihad, Israel and Iraq, the United States, and what sort of society the group seeks to create. The Brotherhood is a collection of national groups with differing outlooks, and the various factions disagree about how best to advance its mission. But all reject global jihad while embracing elections and other features of democracy. There is also a current within the Brotherhood willing to engage with the United States. In the past several decades, this current -- along with the realities of practical politics -- has pushed much of the Brotherhood toward moderation.
AT: Egyptian Instability 2/2
3. No Impact – instability won’t topple the government – security forces solve
Bradley in ‘8 (John, British Journalist and Author of “Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution”, FrontPageMagazine, “Egypt: On the Brink of Revolution?” 4-30, )
FP: Yes, your book is extremely timely. Egypt is presently witnessing an endless series of strikes, demonstrations and riots. What is the cause? And what are the chances of them leading to serious instability? Bradley: There are many causes: extreme poverty, endemic torture, rampant corruption, political oppression, the complete evisceration of the middle class, the theft of the country's vast wealth by the fat cats under the guise of privatization and opening up the economy to foreign investment. Then there's the ideologically bankrupt regime itself that has absolutely no interest in solving any of these problems -- indeed, which is the root cause of them all. There's no indication that the latest wave of strikes and riots will in and of itself topple the Mubarak regime. There are 1.4 million members of the Egyptian security forces, and their brutality in stifling dissent is legendary. As I write in my book, these thugs even beat, rape, and murder little boys for allegedly stealing packets of tea, apparently just for fun of it, so they can be completely relied upon to beat protestors in the street to a pulp.
4. No governmental overthrow – analysts agree
Washington Post in ‘5 (Anthony Shadid, “Egypt's Political Opening Exposes Frailty of Opposition”, )
Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president for 24 years, will announce his candidacy for a fifth term Thursday, officials say. The event will be carefully scripted: He will declare his intention in Shibin al-Kom, the gritty Nile Delta village where he was born 77 years ago. Protocol will be followed, they say, and his party will then nominate him to stand for election Sept. 7. But as Mubarak looks past the barely contested vote, little else in the largest Arab country seems assured. After months of expectations -- high hopes for change that followed this spring's protests in Lebanon and Mubarak's own hints at more political freedom -- the longest-serving ruler of modern Egypt today is struggling through a season of discontent. There is nascent dissent against him, and far broader frustration over decades of perceived stagnation. Three nearly simultaneous bombings Saturday in the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, which killed as many as 88 people, have undercut the mantra of his government -- security and stability. Beyond his election this fall is another for parliament in November that will be viewed in the United States and elsewhere as the barometer of whether Mubarak will inaugurate long-awaited reform. "Everything in the next year will depend on what happens in the next few months," said Diaa Rashwan, an analyst at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "It's a critical moment." Hardly anyone in Egypt views Mubarak's days as numbered, barring problems with his health or a decision to step down. Always more tactician than visionary, he has proved himself a survivor through assassination attempts, a stubborn insurgency in the 1990s and regional crises that once led him to war. This time, he may benefit from the very irony of change: The new liberties provided to his opposition have revealed its divisions and weakness. The bombings, Egypt's worst terrorist attack, have cowed fiery opposition newspapers, at least for now. Frustration aside, many of Egypt's 77 million people seem reluctant to enter the political fray.
AT: Electricity Prices Spikes
1. Markets will self-correct- no risk of any damage to the economy
Michaels and Ellig 98 [Robert J. Michaels is professor of economics at California State University, Fullerton, and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Jerry Ellig is senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University., Electricity: Price Spikes by Design?, summer, ]
We believe that the evidence suggests the wholesale electricity market operated with surprising efficiency under difficult circumstances and that regulators should not take the price spikes as evidence of the need for price controls or other guidance. Remarkably, both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (ferc) and commissions in the affected states largely agree with us. Unlike their counterparts in the Northeast and West, self-sufficient midwestern utilities traditionally have relied sparingly on market purchases of power. In the extreme conditions of last summer, the market flourished and helped keep the lights on. The reliable supply of electricity depends on complex coordinated networks. The United States is learning that markets can perform much of the necessary coordination.
2. High electricity prices are inevitable - volatility has emerged because of flawed structure and lack of information on consumption
Journal of Property Management 01 [A periodical from Chicago, Illinois on property management., A new energy economy: Valuing information, Mar/Apr, ]
Market volatility. A distressingly high degree of volatility has emerged in the commodity markets in response to growing regional disparities in supply and demand for both electricity and natural gas. In the case of California, volatility and concern has risen as a result of an incomplete and/or flawed deregulatory structure. Marketers and utilities attempt to protect themselves from this volatility through risk management (hedging) and other forward-pricing strategies and by offering their customers value-- added services and products. This is why many utility companies now offering telecom and broadband services, energy audits and conservation incentives, customer assistance centers, and electronic bill presentation and payment.
If they possess the necessary information about their consumption, energy users can dampen some of their exposure to price volatility by better defining supply contract terms and by implementing load-- management strategies, such as demand aggregation (buying pools) or onsite (distributed) generation.
Ext #1 – No Impact to Economy
Spikes don’t change anything and the markets behave normally regardless
Michaels and Ellig 98 [Robert J. Michaels is professor of economics at California State University, Fullerton, and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Jerry Ellig is senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University., Electricity: Price Spikes by Design?, summer, ]
Within the spike days, prices behaved competitively. Low demand and plentiful transmission in off-peak hours produced prices below $15/MWh on the spike days, the same as before and after the spike days. Onpeak, a confidential survey of power marketers by Tabors Caramanis and Associates (tca) showed a normal intraday pattern, rising with the sun and cresting prior to the late afternoon peak for deliveries to be made in the following hours. In a given hour, the risks of shortfalls (which can cause systemwide outages) and the uncertainty about transmission produced large differences between reported high and low prices. Both high and low prices, however, showed the same pattern over the day.
Electricity price spikes are absorbed by the economy and have little chance of allowing the prices of energy to soar
Poole 07 [William, President, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Energy and the U.S. Macro Economy, July 24, ]
In contrast, the real price of coal fell steadily from 1976 to 2003 and has since risen only slightly. In 2006, the real price of coal was less than half of its 1982-4 value. The real retail price of gasoline has increased continuously since 2003, but in 2006 exceeded the average price of 1982-4 by only 12 percent. The relative price in 2006 is roughly 10 percent below its historical high reached in 1981. The real price of electricity fell by about 35 percent from the early 1980s until 1999, leveled off, and has increased about 12 percent since 2003. Nevertheless electricity remains 23 percent cheaper in real terms than it was on average during 1982-4. As painful as recent energy price increases have been, this historical perspective helps us to understand why the economy has been able to absorb the price increases with little effect on the aggregate economy. Perhaps the most direct way to understand the impact of energy prices on consumers is to examine the fraction of household budgets devoted to energy. After 1981, the share of consumer expenditures on energy out of nominal disposable personal income trended downward, from a high of over 8 percent to about 4.1 percent in 1998 (see Figure 6). Disposable personal income, by the way, is essentially all household income including transfers such as Social Security benefits less direct taxes, which are mostly income taxes. Real disposable personal income is the nominal or dollar amount adjusted for changes in the general price level. With the increase in energy prices documented in Figures 2 and 3, the energy share of disposable personal income rose from 4.1 percent in 1998 to almost 5.8 percent in 2006. This increase simply returns the share to about its 1985 level. It is important to recognize, however, that the increase in energy prices, though of limited impact in the aggregate, has forced difficult choices on lower-income households for whom the burden has been much higher as a proportion of income. The recent price increases are having the expected negative impact on the quantity of energy consumed, relative to total goods and services consumed, but the total amount spent on energy has nevertheless increased. The increase in the energy share of nominal disposable personal income reflects the inelastic short-run demand for energy by consumers. Put another way, as energy prices have surged, the quantity of energy consumed has grown more slowly than real disposable personal income but not slowly enough, given the price increases, to prevent the amount spent on energy from rising significantly.
Spikes don’t cause inflation
Humpage and Pelz 03 [Owen F. Humpage is an economic advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Eduard Pelz was recently a senior economic research analyst there., Do Energy Price Spikes Cause Inflation?, Apr 1, ]
Many people mistakenly believe that a sharp rise in the price of energy is necessarily inflationary. They fail to understand that energy prices adjust to the demand and supply of energy, whereas inflation responds to the demand and supply of money. This Economic Commentary explains that the Federal Reserve can do nothing about relative energy prices, but it can determine how relative energy price shocks are reflected in the overall level of prices. Over the last 20 years, the inflationary consequences of energy price shocks, while significant, have been fairly subdued.
Socks don’t cause economic collapse- their ev assumes 20 years ago- recessions would at least be mild
Humpage and Pelz 03 [Owen F. Humpage is an economic advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Eduard Pelz was recently a senior economic research analyst there., Do Energy Price Spikes Cause Inflation?, Apr 1, ]
Our model suggests that the impact of energy price shocks on the U.S. economy— both on prices and output—has not been very dramatic over the past 20 years. Prior to the early 1980s, energy prices apparently had a profound effect on business cycle activity. In 1983, for example, economist James Hamilton noted that energy price spikes preceded nearly every U.S. recession since World War II, and he verified this relationship statistically. More recently, however, the connection between energy price spikes and business cycle patterns has seemed less certain. By 1996, Mark Hooker could find little evidence of a relationship. Although energy price spikes preceded the two recent recessions, the downturns were conspicuously mild (see figure 1).
Increased energy efficiency may be the most obvious reason that energy price spikes have less of a macroeconomic impact. According to Energy Department estimates, we now consume only half as many Btu of energy per unit of GDP as we did in early 1970s (see figure 2). Conservation should dampen both the business cycle consequences and the inflation impact of energy price hikes. (We did attempt to control for energy efficiency in our model.)
Ext #2 – Innevitable
Natural gas prices make electricity price increases inevitable
Houston Chronicle 5/31 [Texas: Electricity price flies off the grid, ]
The price of electricity already was rising toward records because of climbing natural gas prices. Now it's getting an extra boost from unexpected spikes in the wholesale markets where electricity is bought and sold in bulk.
For several days this month and in April, the price of power briefly spiked in the so-called balancing market where the state's grid operator buys electricity at 15-minute intervals to keep supply and demand in balance.
Those prices didn't show up directly on any homeowners' bills, but they may have helped push two smaller electric retailers out of business, dumping almost 25,000 customers back into the market.
Alt causes- consumer and seasonal load, supplier risk, and non-energy costs
Rose 07 [Kenneth Rose is an independent consultant and a Senior Fellow with the Institute of Public Utilities (IPU) at Michigan State University, The Impact of Fuel Costs on Electric Power Prices, June, ]
While natural gas prices have certainly played a role, looking at the data shows that simply attributing electricity price increases to only the cost of fuels used to generate electricity is overly simplistic at best. Other important factors that determine electricity prices are the level of customer load and the seasonal variation of load, and supplier risks and other non-energy costs. In addition, it is likely that other unaccounted for factors may also help explain electricity price changes.
California electricity meltdown spilled over to the rest of the US and makes spikes inevitable for years
Penner 01 [Dr. Peter S. Fox-Penner, Principal of The Brattle Group, Inc., Before the Senate Committee on the Budget January 30, 2001; ]
Mr. Chairman, much has been written and said about the electricity crisis in California, and I will not dwell on it in these remarks. However, there are four irrefutable features of the California crisis. First, there is a critical shortage of natural gas pipeline capacity into the state. Second, there is an equally critical shortage of generation and transmission capacity in California and across much of the West. Third, the state failed to maximize its conservation and demand reduction opportunities, both of which are critical for effective electric markets. Fourth and finally, all these factors ensure very high prices for power throughout the West for the next several years. Today, throughout this region, wholesale power prices are six times as high as last year’s levels and the highest they have been in at least 60 years. These features are more troubling, Mr. Chairman, because they are likely to occur - - or are already occurring - - in much of the rest of the United States. Parts of the U.S. have ample generating capacity, but other regions are perilously low on reserves, and new transmission lines are not getting 3 built. Amazingly, in a nation whose electric demand has increased over 14% in the last six years, total industry investment in transmission assets has declined, and very few major new lines are underway anywhere in the U.S. The implications of this situation are that high and volatile natural gas and power prices are likely to be with us for several years, especially in the West and transmission-constrained urban areas. In contrast to oil prices, which are not at levels high enough to cause a major dislocation, electricity and gas prices are projected to remain sufficiently high and volatile so as to introduce an unprecedented degree of uncertainty over the economy during the next few years.
Different markets make increases inevitable
Purdue News 01 [Electricity prices could rise if wholesale markets function poorly, Nov 7, ]
Before 1996, utilities purchased electricity strictly from other utility companies because federal regulations prohibited independent power producers from entering the wholesale market. But since that restriction was removed, many so-called "merchant plants" have been springing up in the Midwest and across the nation. In Indiana alone, six such plants have come online since the federal change and another 14 new plants have been proposed so far, Sparrow said.
Electricity from merchant plants is especially needed during the hottest summer months, as the power grid strains to meet energy demands, he said.
If enough of the producers that sell wholesale electricity to utilities merge in the near future, the result could be drastically higher peak-demand prices. That's because the fewer, merged companies that remain could, independently of each other, decide to withhold electricity during times of peak demand, increasing their own profits but causing the wholesale price of electricity to spike upward dramatically.
AT: Endocrine Disruptions
Alt causes to endocrine disruptions
NRDC, 98 (National Resources Defense Council, “Issues: Health; Endocrine Disruptors,”
)
Exposure to endocrine disruptors can occur through direct contact with pesticides and other chemicals or through ingestion of contaminated water, food, or air. Chemicals suspected of acting as endocrine disruptors are found in insecticides, herbicides, fumigants and fungicides that are used in agriculture as well as in the home. Industrial workers can be exposed to chemicals such as detergents, resins, and plasticizers with endocrine disrupting properties. Endocrine disruptors enter the air or water as a byproduct of many chemical and manufacturing processes and when plastics and other materials are burned. Further, studies have found that endocrine disruptors can leach out of plastics, including the type of plastic used to make hospital intravenous bags. Many endocrine disruptors are persistent in the environment and accumulate in fat, so the greatest exposures come from eating fatty foods and fish from contaminated water.
AT: Energy Security
Alt causes to volatility
1. Middle East
People’s Daily in ‘7 (“Variables cause of crude oil price volatility”, 4-13, )
Of course, neither a price rise nor a price crash is in the long-term interests of oil-producing and consuming countries. Everyone hopes that oil prices can be stabilized at a reasonable level. On the one hand, overly-high oil prices would encourage non-OPEC oil producers to step up oil production, which would lead to chaos in the oil market, and have a negative impact on the development of the world economy. On the other hand, it is unrealistic to return to the era of cheap oil. This is mainly because oil is a non-renewable source of energy. With global demand increasing rapidly, oil reserves are decreasing quickly. It is a difficult problem. In particular, oil-producing giant OPEC will not sit idly by if oil prices slump, having made so many petrodollars from higher oil prices. Reportedly, OPEC's bottom line crude oil export price is no less than $60 a barrel. If oil prices fall below this, OPEC will do everything possible to revive the market. In fact, it has twice taken action to reverse the sharp decline of oil prices by reducing daily production levels to 1.7 million barrels. In any case, oil prices will be volatile while war, turmoil and fear prevail in the Middle East. The fragile balance between demand and supply in the world oil market means that any sign of trouble could cause serious turmoil. In the Gulf region, there are many variables. In particular, the tit-for-tat conflict between Iran and the United States makes the general situation unpredictable. If there is a conflict between the two countries, oil prices might run out of control, pushing oil prices to the highest point ever.
2. Speculation
IANS in ‘8 (Indo-Asian News Service, “OIL PRICE SWINGS DUE TO SPECULATION: SAUDI ARAMCO CHIEF”, 11-26, L/N)
Speculation was the cause of the intense volatility in the oil prices rather than any other factor, the head of Saudi Arabia's national oil company said here Wednesday. "It is obvious. When our King called for a meeting (in June), oil was around 130 (dollars per barrel). But, there was no shortage," Abdallah S. Jum'ah, president and CEO of Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil company, said while delivering the GreatCorps World Business Statesman lecture. "There was no need for the price to be where it was at that time. It's obvious now that speculation played a lot (of role)," he said. Further, he noted that the current steep drop in oil prices was due to "people dropping their contracts in order to monetize them". "(The fall in prices is) not determined by supply and demand," said Jum'ah, who has headed Aramco for over 14 years and is slated to retire at end of December 2008.
3. Market complexity
Yergin et al, 08 (12/15, Daniel, Chairman @ Cambridge Energy Research Associates formerly Chair of US DOE Task Force on sTrategic Energy Research and Development, David Hobbs, CERA Head of Research, Julian West, CERA Senior Associate and Expert in Strategic Analysis and Portfolio Management, and Richard Vital, CERA Director, ““Recession Shock”: The Impact of the Economic and Financial Crisis on the Oil Market”, )
Faced with the potential for more violent swings in the oil price—resulting from timing effects and market reactions, all adding to the bias toward underinvestment that is created by volatility—it is only natural to ask if there are ways to remove this volatility. If only producers could enjoy greater security of demand. If only consumers could rely on uninterrupted supply. If only inventories alone were sufficient to dampen price volatility and there were no need for the market to guess about future changes in spare production capacity. If only institutional investors were consistent in their demands on the energy companies in which they invest. The oil market is too big, complex, diversified, and international. There are too many participants with major national, economic, or commercial interests at stake. The lead times are too long and the supply side too “lumpy.” There are also too many variables that can shock the market. CERA sees no escape from some degree of volatility in the oil market—indeed, volatility may be an unintended side effect of periods of consensus about expected future oil prices. Such periods are characteristic of the industry worldwide. The oil industry’s responses to such consensus frustrate expectations. However, episodes of extreme volatility such as in 2008 (or the early and mid-1980s and 1998–99) exacerbate imbalances between supply and demand because the more volatile the oil price, the more cautious the investment planning of oil companies.
AT: Environmental Leadership
1. No solvency – US efforts lack credibility, the plan would be perceived as desperate political spin.
Geiselman 6/11/2007 Staff Writer for Waste News
(Bruce - Waste News, “Bush Pledges Leadership on Global Warming,” Lexis-Nexis, EA)
President Bush has pledged the United States would spearhead an international effort to address global climate change, but environmental advocacy groups immediately voiced skepticism. Bush, speaking to reporters in Washington on May 31, unveiled a plan for the United States to convene a meeting between nations that are major emitters of greenhouse gases. Bush said he wants to complete a new framework before the end of 2008 for reducing greenhouse gas emissions after 2012 when the Kyoto protocol expires. The United States refused to ratify the 1997 international agreement. Bush said it would be essential for nations with rapidly growing economies, including China and India, to participate in talks. Those countries, with rapidly growing energy demands, also have resisted mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. White House spokesmen said the president's proposal would address both energy and economic security by accelerating the development and use of clean energy technologies. The participating countries would agree to international targets, but each country would achieve its emissions goal by establishing its own programs and interim targets. The United States would assist other countries by providing them with access to emerging clean energy technologies and eliminating tariffs and other barriers to those technologies. Bush also called on international development banks to make low-cost financing readily available for developing countries. Bush said the United States has been a leader in developing cleaner, cheaper and more reliable energy technologies - including solar, wind, nuclear and clean coal technologies. ``In recent years, science has deepened our understanding of climate change and opened new possibilities for confronting it,'' Bush said. ``The United States takes this issue seriously.'' Leaders in the environmental movement critical of the Bush administration's record on global warming quickly rejected the president's latest proposal unveiled before the start of an international summit. ``This is a transparent effort to divert attention from the president's refusal to accept any emissions reductions proposals at [the June 6-8] G8 summit,'' said Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust. ``After sitting out talks on global warming for years, the Bush administration doesn't have very much credibility with other governments on this issue.''
2. Obama solves – a legitimate push for cap and trade was perceived as well as EPA regulation
3. No solvency – countries don’t want the US to lead but rather to contribute.
Clifton 4/19/2007 IPS staff
(Eli – Inter Press Service, “World Opposed to US as Global Cop,” CommonDreams, , EA)
WASHINGTON - The world public rejects the U.S. role as a world leader, but still wants the United States to do its share in multilateral efforts and does not support a U.S. withdrawal from international affairs, says a poll released Wednesday.The survey respondents see the United States as an unreliable “world policeman”, but views are split on whether the superpower should reduce its overseas military bases. The people of the United States generally agreed with the rest of the world that their country should not remain the world’s pre-eminent leader or global cop, and prefer that it play a more cooperative role in multilateral efforts to address world problems. The poll, the fourth in a series released by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and since the latter half of 2006, was conducted in China, India, United States, Indonesia, Russia, France, Thailand, Ukraine, Poland, Iran, Mexico, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, Argentina, Peru, Israel, Armenia and the Palestinian territories. The three previous reports covered attitudes toward humanitarian military intervention, labour and environmental standards in international trade, and global warming. Those surveys found that the international public generally favoured more multilateral efforts to curb genocides and more far-reaching measures to protect labour rights and combat climate change than their governments have supported to date. Steven Kull, editor of , notes that this report confirms other polls which have shown that world opinion of the United States is bad and getting worse, however this survey more closely examines the way the world public would want to see Washington playing a positive role in the international community. Although all 15 of the countries polled rejected the idea that, “the U.S. should continue to be the pre-eminent world leader in solving international problems,” only Argentina and the Palestinian territories say it “should withdraw from most efforts to solve international problems.”
4. Alternate causality – failure to ratify chemical control treaties tanks environmental credibility.
Schafer 9/6/2006 staff – Foreign Policy in Focus
(Kristin S. – With other authors and editors, Foreign Policy in Focus, “One More Failed US Environmental Policy,” , EA)
Back in 2001, two global toxics treaties offered a rare opportunity for U.S. leadership in the international environmental policy arena. Today not only is the opportunity for leadership lost, but the United States seems bent on undermining the effectiveness of these important treaties while the rest of the world moves ahead on implementation. The issues at hand are global elimination of persistent chemicals and control of trade in toxics, and the two international treaties that address these challenges are the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade. As of August 2006, at least 127 countries had ratified the Stockholm Convention, and 110 had confirmed the Rotterdam Convention. Both conventions have been in force for more than two years, but the United States has yet to approve either.
AT: Environmental Racism/Justice
1. Claims of environmental racism are flawed – studies show there is no discriminatory siting.
Glasgow 5 (Joshua, Yale Law School JD candidate, Buffalo Environmental Law Journal, 13 Buff. Envt’l L.J. 69, Fall, ln)
In addition to courtroom difficulties, the environmental justice movement was challenged by a number of studies in the mid-1990s challenging the evidence of discriminatory siting and exposure. [*76] An influential University of Massachusetts study conducted in 1994 examined over five hundred hazardous waste facilities and found no evidence of discriminatory siting. 27 Additionally, scholars challenged the earlier studies' methodologies, including the sample selection, the definition of minority, the geographic scope examined, and the failure to control for other variables. 28 In a series of articles, Vicki Been set forth a particularly powerful critique of environmental justice studies. 29 Been notes that most studies examined the contemporary makeup of a neighborhood impacted by a LULU, not its makeup at the time of siting. 30 This method ignores the possibility that a LULU would lower nearby housing prices, causing affluent residents to move away. These residents would be replaced by lower-income individuals, attracted by the lower housing prices. As a result of these market dynamics, even LULUs located in a wealthy neighborhood could later become surrounded by the poor. 31 This "chicken-or-the-egg" dilemma has plagued the environmental justice literature. 32
2. No environmental racism – the market makes it inevitable and their studies are flawed.
Evans 98 (Jill E, Samford U associate law prof., “Challenging the Racism in Environmental Racism: Redefining the Concept of Intent”, Arizona Law Review, 40 Ariz. L. Rev. 1219, p. 1252-1256, ln)
Despite the evidence of race-based inequities in the distribution of toxic waste facilities, critics of the "environmental racism" theory attack either the methodology underlying the empirical studies 166 or the conclusions drawn from the empirical evidence. 167 Methodological criticisms have challenged the parameters [*1253] used to define "minority community," 168 population densities, 169 the statistical significance of the results, 170 and the failure of environmental justice studies to include information regarding the correlation between the actual population risk and exposure. 171 [*1254] A more frequent criticism asserts that the use of zip codes as opposed to census tract data to establish the boundaries of the "community" renders the data less reliable. A study by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst ("UMass"), where census tract data as opposed to zip codes was used to compare demographics, found minorities were no more likely to live in neighborhoods 172 with commercial hazardous waste facilities than in neighborhoods without them. 173 Waste Management Inc., using the same methodology employed by the UCC Report, contends that of 130 waste disposal units in their system, 174 76% were in communities with a white population equal to or greater than the host state average. 175 However, an update of the UCC Report authored by Benjamin [*1255] Goldman, using 1990 census data and again using zip codes as the defining parameter, found "a continued disturbing correlation between the location of hazardous waste facilities and communities where people of color live." 176 Goldman acknowledges the contradictory findings of the UMass study, asserting that its conclusions are due largely to design decisions, but contends that other studies using census tracts as the geographic unit found "significant disproportionate impacts by race." 177 The most prominent and frequent criticisms, however, question whether the empirical evidence supports the inference or conclusion of racial bias or whether it merely reflects an economic reality. 178 In other words, detractors contend it is not race per se that defines and determines siting decisions but rather a community's location on the socio-economic scale. 179 These economic realities [*1256] focused on cost as the primary consideration. Kent Jeffreys, Director of Environmental Studies for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, testified before a congressional subcommittee that "poor people and minorities do not attract polluters. Low-cost land does, and for the same reasons that it attracts poor people." 180 The UCC Report acknowledged that land values tended to be cheaper in poorer neighborhoods and therefore more attractive to polluting industries. 181
3. Their claims of environmental racism are misconceived – the environmental justice movement overlooks differences in communities to misevaluate environmental harm.
Popescu and Gandy 4 (Mihaela and Oscar H Jr., profs. of communication at U PA, Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation, 19 J. Envtl. L. & Litg. 141, Spring, p. 161, ln)
The commentators of the environmental justice movement have usually overlooked the fact that the notion of community encompasses very different social space and treats communities interchangeably. The difference between a suburban community and a city neighborhood, for example, rests both in the array of concerns and in the social organization of the residents around different notions of space. Since toxic landfills are usually located in the suburbs, claims of discriminatory noxious sitings are more characteristic for suburban communities. In contrast, concern for the discriminatory enforcement of public policies such as zoning, housing, and access to public services is likely to be in the realm of neighborhoods.
AT: EU Soft Power
1. Alt caus – low relations with Russia
APW 07 (Associated Press Worldstream, 11/27. “EU needs closer ties with Russia to increase global influence, Gorbachev says.” Lexis.)
The European Union will not have true global influence until it finds a way to achieve closer ties with Russia, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said Tuesday. Gorbachev said that while it was impossible for Russia to become an EU member in the foreseeable future, the two sides needed to draw up a document setting the rules for "advanced cooperation" If the EU and Russia do not improve relations, "we will fail to make Europe a center of power in the world," Gorbachev said at start of a session of the World Political Forum, which he founded in 2003. "For Europe to become a power center ... is important for the world balance and if this doesn't happen, global processes will be even more unpredictable," Gorbachev said. "The EU needs to get a clear and independent voice in global affairs, which has not happened since the end of the Cold War," said the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner, whose policies of glasnost and perestroika openness and restructuring helped end communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites. "This is one of the reasons why we have seen major problems and mistakes in international politics the involvement of Europe should be clear and visible," Gorbachev said, mentioning the wars in the Balkans and Iraq as scenarios where Europe "did not quite measure up to its potential" and allowed the United States to achieve a "monopoly leadership." He also expressed concern that more and more Russians wanted to "choose a non-European path," desiring instead to redirect Russia's economic and political links toward Asia, while Europe doubted Russia's ability to build a true democracy. "Alienation between Russia and the EU is a very dangerous tendency and we must not allow it to happen," Gorbachev said, adding that the EU remained Russia's most important partner in economic issues, as well as in modernizing the country. "Russia will continue to move along its democratic path, but we are at best only halfway in this process. We still have a long way to go," Gorbachev concluded.
2. Partnership with the U.S. solves
DPA 08 (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 9/5. “ROUNDUP: EU looks to close ranks with US to keep global influence.” Lexis.)
The European Union must close ranks with the United States if the two powers are to keep their global influence during the rise of states like China, India and Russia, EU foreign-policy chiefs said at an informal meeting on Friday. "The new American administration will, as we all of course also,have to cope with the new emerging countries: apart from Russia,which is an old power with a new assertiveness, India, Brazil andChina," EU foreign-policy commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said. "We want to be more equal partners with the US, but how can we do that? We have to raise our own game, we have to be more clear andunited in the positions we are taking, we have to be more effectiveand forthcoming in using our policy and our instruments," she said. At an informal meeting in the French city of Avignon, the foreign ministers of the EU's 27 member states discussed how to cooperate with the next US president on questions of global security such asclimate change and energy security, French Foreign Minister BernardKouchner, who chaired the meeting, said. "The world is dangerous, the return of nationalism andmicro-nationalism impose on (the EU and US) a common vision andcommon steps," he warned. "We want to set up a sort of better process, not to be surprised,not to be completely bare-handed, and not always to be obliged tothreaten someone else," he said. Ahead of the US election, scheduled for November 4, the EU is therefore set to draw up a list of the areas in which it would like to work more closely with the US, to be sent to President George WBush and the two candidates in the election. "It's not to take advantage (of the change of administration), but knowing that our American friends ... also wish that the EU should be politically present in the world's problems, and take its political place, not just as a fund-raiser but a player in its matters of peace, and sometimes of war," Kouchner said. But at the same time, he also criticized the policies of current US Vice-President Dick Cheney, who on Friday visited Ukraine on a whirlwind tour of the former Soviet Union aimed at boosting ties in the wake of August's Georgian-Russian war. Cheney "has a certain sense of protecting people, but I'm not so sure he got a lot of success with this particular sense," he said. Also at the meeting, ministers discussed with the EU's top foreign-policy figure, Javier Solana, how the bloc should update itscommon security strategy - a document written in December 2003. "There are questions like climate change and energy security whichneed an answer," Solana said, adding that he hoped to present a"short and useful" new document to EU leaders by the end of the year. Tellingly, however, the original strategy of 2003 stresses the need for the EU to project its values round the world by working withinternational organizations such as the UN and WTO. "The best protection for our security is a world of well-governeddemocratic states," it says, listing political and social reform andthe defence of human rights as "the best means of strengthening theinternational order." And the rise of Russia, China and India has alarmed EU diplomats,with the Russian-Georgian war and the collapse of WTO talks in a rowbetween China, India and the US both seen as signs that Westerndomination of the international agenda can no longer be assured. "Over the last few years, you've seen a determined effort on the part of Europe and the Americans to forge common positions on issues as diverse as Iran, Russia, and international development," British Foreign Minister David Miliband pointed out. "There's still an opportunity to work together, not at the expense of the rising powers in China and India, but as a way of binding them into the global system and making sure that responsibility is shared by all the powers in the modern world," he said.
AT: Europe Wars
No European wars
Peter Liberman, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Queens College of the City University of New York, Winter 2000/2001, Security Studies, “Ties That Blind,” Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 103-4
With the disappearance of the Soviet Union and no other potential superpowers on the horizon, the United States has little to fear from would-be Eurasian hegemons for the foreseeable future. The United States is the world’s sole superpower, with an unrivaled combination of economic resources, advanced technology, and military capabilities. China, Russia, France, and Britain each have robust nuclear deterrents, virtually precluding their conquest or domination by others. Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and Russia are all democracies, and—assuming they stay that way—domestically impeded from absorbing other modern nations. If democratic peace theory is correct, they are unlikely to fight each other at all. Even if, however, China were to absorb Japan, Russia to conquer Germany, or Europe to unify politically, this would still not create the kind of Eurasian behemoth so feared during the First World War, the Second World War, and the cold war. At worst, such regional hegemonies would return the international system to bipolarity, and only at this point would threat require renewed U.S. balancing. It seems reasonable to conclude that, as Robert Jervis has put it, “few imaginable disputes [in the post–cold war era] will engage vital U.S. interests.”
War is impossible between European powers
MANDELBAUM 99 (Michael Mandelbaum is Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC; and Director, Project on East-West Relations, Council on Foreign Relations, New York Survival, Winter 1998-99)
Armaments are both a cause and a consequence of the insecurity that anarchy creates for all sovereign states. Because they feel insecure, states equip themselves with weapons that in turn make others feel insecure. Even with the purest of benign intentions, no country would be willing to do without any means of self-defence. Total disarmament is thus not possible. But a series of treaties signed at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the post-Cold War period regulate both nuclear and non-nuclear arms in ways designed to engender confidence throughout Europe that no country harbours aggressive intentions towards any other signatory.2' Two features of these treaties convey reassurance. First, the treaties make military forces more suitable for defence than for attack. For nuclear weapons, concentrated in the hands of two countries, the US and Russia, this involves, ironically, ratifying the unchallengeable supremacy of the offence. When the assured capacity to destroy the other side is mutual, it serves as a deterrent against attack. The 1995 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty reconfigures military forces on the continent according to the principle of 'defence dominance' by mandating numerical equality and reducing the size of the forces - numerical advantage ordinarily being required for a successful attack and by limiting the types of weapons on which an attacking force would rely. The second confidence-inspiring feature of the European arms agreements is transparency. Every country in Europe knows which armaments the others have and what each is doing with them. (Limits are set on the scope and frequency of military exercises lest they be used to camouflage actual attacks.) Satellite photography and on-site inspections have turned Europe, where armed forces are concerned, into a larger version of a department store continuously and comprehensively monitored by video cameras to prevent shoplifting. This common security order is the result of a common renunciation of the motives for war among the countries of Europe and North America, a common recognition that even in the absence of such motives arms remain necessary but create insecurity, and the common adoption of measures to alleviate, if not entirely eliminate, this insecurity. As such, it is the descendant of the informal series of understandings and practices that emerged in Europe in the second decade of the nineteenth century after the wars of the French Revolution, which were designed to prevent another major conflict and were known, collectively, as the Concert of Europe.22 Democracy, which has become the predominant, if not always perfectly realised, form of government in Europe, is conducive to common security. Democracies are more likely than others to subscribe to such a system because they are more likely to fulfill its fundamental condition: rejecting the motives for which sovereign states have traditionally gone to war. It is, moreover, easier for democracies than for others to adopt one of common security's central practices - transparency - because politics within democratic systems is normally conducted in transparent fashion.
AT: Failed States
No emperocal evidence of failed states causing destabilization or regional spillovers – only look to detailed scenarios of specific states
Stewart Patrick (research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.) 2006: Weak States and Global Threats: Fact or Fiction?
It has become a common claim that the gravest dangers to U.S. and world security are no longer military threats from rival great powers, but rather transnational threats emanating from the world’s most poorly governed countries. Poorly performing developing countries are linked to humanitarian catastrophes; mass migration; environmental degradation; regional instability; energy insecurity; global pandemics; international crime; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD); and, of course, transnational terrorism. Leading thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama have said that, “[s]ince the end of the Cold War, weak and failing states have arguably become the single-most important problem for international order.”1 Official Washington agrees. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declares that nations incapable of exercising “responsible sovereignty” have a “spillover effect” in the form of terrorism, weapons proliferation, and other dangers.2 This new focus on weak and failing states represents an important shift in U.S. threat perceptions. Before the September 11 attacks, U.S. policymakers viewed states with sovereignty deficits exclusively through a humanitarian lens; they piqued the moral conscience but possessed little strategic significance. Al Qaeda’s ability to act with impunity from Afghanistan changed this calculus, convincing President George W. Bush and his administration that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.”3 This new strategic orientation has already had policy and institutional consequences, informing recent U.S. defense, intelligence, diplomatic, development, and even trade initiatives. The U.S. government’s latest National Defense Strategy calls on the U.S. military to strengthen the sovereign capacities of weak states to combat internal threats of terrorism, insurgency, and organized crime. Beyond expanding its training of foreign security forces, the Pentagon is seeking interagency buy-in for a U.S. strategy to address the world’s “ungoverned spaces.”4 The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which has identified 50 such zones globally, is devoting new collection assets to long-neglected parts of the world.5 The National Intelligence Council is assisting the Department of State’s new Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization in identifying states at risk of collapse so that the office can launch conflict prevention and mitigation efforts. Not to be outdone, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has formulated its own “Fragile States Strategy” to bolster countries that could breed terror, crime, instability, and disease. The Bush administration has even justified the Central American Free Trade Area as a means to prevent state failure and its associated spillovers.6 This new preoccupation with weak states is not limited to the United States. In the United Kingdom, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit has advocated a government-wide approach to stabilizing fragile countries,7 and Canada and Australia are following suit. The United Nations has been similarly engaged; the unifying theme of last year’s proposals for UN reform was the need for effective sovereign states to deal with today’s global security agenda. Kofi Annan remarked before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 2004 that, “[w]hether the threat is terror or AIDS, a threat to one is a threat to all.… Our defenses are only as strong as their weakest link.”8 In September 2005, the UN endorsed the creation of a new Peacebuilding Commission to help war-torn states recover. The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in January 2005 also launched a “Fragile States” initiative in partnership with the World Bank’s Low-Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS) program.9 It is striking, however, how little empirical evidence underpins these sweeping assertions and policy developments. Policymakers and experts have presumed a blanket connection between weak governance and transnational threats and have begun to implement policy responses accordingly. Yet, they have rarely distinguished among categories of weak and failing states or asked whether (and how) certain types of developing countries are associated with particular threats. Too often, it appears that the entire range of Western policies is animated by anecdotal evidence or isolated examples, such as Al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan or cocaine trafficking in Colombia. The risk in this approach is that the United States will squander energy and resources in a diffuse, unfocused effort to attack state weakness wherever it arises, without appropriate attention to setting priorities and tailoring responses to poor governance and its specific, attendant spillovers. Before embracing a new strategic vision and investing in new initiatives, conventional wisdom should be replaced by sober, detailed analysis. The ultimate goal of this fine-grained approach should be to determine which states are associated with which dangers. Weak states do often incubate global threats, but this correlation is far from universal. Crafting a more effective U.S. strategy will depend on a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms linking poor governance and state incapacity in the developing world with cross-border spillovers.
Failed states impacts are inevitable from stable states like Russia and China
Stewart Patrick (research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.) 2006: Weak States and Global Threats: Fact or Fiction?
Third, the relationship between state weakness and spillovers is not linear. It varies by threat. Some salient transnational dangers to U.S. and global security come not from states at the bottom quintile of the Governance Matters rankings but from the next tier up, countries such as Colombia, the world’s leading producer of cocaine; Saudi Arabia, home to a majority of the September 11 hijackers; Russia, a host of numerous transnational criminal enterprises; and China, the main source both of SARS and avian flu. These states tend to be better run and more capable of delivering political goods; nearly half are eligible or on the threshold of eligibility for the MCA in 2006. Nevertheless, even these middling performers may suffer from critical gaps in capacity or political will that enable spillovers.
Many countries empirically deny the impact
Impact Lab 10 (6/21, “The 2010 Failed States Index.” )
Given time and the right circumstances, countries do recover. Sierra Leone and Liberia, for instance, no longer rank among the top 20 failing states, and Colombia has become a stunning success story. Few remember today that the Dominican Republic once vied with its neighbor Haiti for the title of “worst Caribbean basket case.” But the overall story of the Failed States Index is one of wearying constancy, and 2010 is proving to be no different: Crises in Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, and Nigeria — among others — threaten to push those unstable countries to the breaking point.
AT: Failed States ( Terrorism
Failed states don’t lead to terrorism
Stewart Patrick (research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.) 2006: Weak States and Global Threats: Fact or Fiction?
A closer look suggests that the connection between state weakness and transnational terrorism is more complicated and tenuous than often as sumed. First, obviously not all weak and failed states are afflicted by terrorism. As historian Walter Laqueur points out, “In the 49 countries currently designated by the United Nations as the least developed hardly any terrorist activity occurs.”27 Weak capacity per se cannot explain why terrorist activity is concentrated in particular regions, particularly the Middle East and broader Muslim world, rather than others such as Central Africa. Other variables and dynamics, including political, religious, cultural, and geographical factors, clearly shape its global distribution. Similarly, not all terrorism that occurs in weak and failing states is transnational. Much is self-contained action by insurgents motivated by local political grievances, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), or national liberation struggles, such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka. It is thus only tangentially related to the “global war on terrorism,” which, as defined by the Bush administration, focuses on terrorists with global reach, particularly those motivated by an extreme Salafist strand of Wahhabi Islam. Third, not all weak and failing states are equal. Conventional wisdom holds that terrorists are particularly attracted to collapsed, lawless polities such as Somalia or Liberia, or what the Pentagon terms “ungoverned spaces.” In fact, as Davidson College professor Ken Menkhaus and others note, terrorists are more likely to find weak but functioning states, such as Pakistan or Kenya, congenial bases of operations. Such badly governed states are not only fragile and susceptible to corruption, but they also provide easy access to the financial and logistical infrastructure of the global economy, including communications technology, transportation, and banking services.28 Fourth, transnational terrorists are only partially and perhaps decreasingly reliant on weak and failing states. For one, the Al Qaeda threat has evolved from a centrally directed network, dependent on a “base,” into a much more diffuse global movement consisting of autonomous cells in dozens of countries, poor and wealthy alike. Moreover, the source of radical Islamic terrorism may reside less in state weakness in the Middle East than in the alienation of de-territorialized Muslims in Europe. The “safe havens” of global terrorists are as likely to be the banlieues of Paris as the wastes of the Sahara or the slums of Karachi.29 In other words, weak and failing states can provide useful assets to transnational terrorists, but they may be less central to their operations than widely believed. If there is one failed state today that is important to transnational terrorism, it is probably Iraq. As CIA director Porter Goss tes- tified in early 2005, the U.S.-led invasion and occupation transformed a brutal but secular authoritarian state into a symbol and magnet for the global jihadi movement.30
AT: Failed States ( Prolif
Failed states don’t have the resources to proliferate
Stewart Patrick (research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.) 2006: Weak States and Global Threats: Fact or Fiction?
As with terrorism, the risk of proliferation from weak states is often more a matter of will than of objective capacity. This is particularly true for WMD proliferation. The technological sophistication and secure facilities needed to construct such weapons would seem to require access to and some acquiescence from the highest levels of the state apparatus. This may be less true for small arms proliferation. Some weak states simply lack the capacity to police the grey or black market and to control flows of such weapons across their borders.
AT: Failed States ( Organized Crime
Failed states not a root instigator of organized crime – no profit bed or operations infrastructure to work with
Stewart Patrick (research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.) 2006: Weak States and Global Threats: Fact or Fiction?
Yet, if state weakness is often a necessary condition for the influx of organized crime, it is not a sufficient one. Even more than a low-risk operating environment, criminals seek profits. In a global economy, realizing high returns depends on tapping into a worldwide market to sell illicit commodities and launder the proceeds, which in turn depends on access to financial services, modern telecommunications, and transportation infrastructure. Such considerations help explain why South Africa and Nigeria have become magnets for transnational and domestic organized crime and why Togo has not.39 Criminals will accept the higher risks of operating in states with stronger capacity in return for greater rewards.
AT: Famine
1. New diseases will wipeout food supplies
Holly Ramer 7/2 /09 “Plant disease hits eastern US veggies early, hard”
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Tomato plants have been removed from stores in half a dozen states as a destructive and infectious plant disease makes its earliest and most widespread appearance ever in the eastern United States. Late blight — the same disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s — occurs sporadically in the Northeast, but this year's outbreak is more severe for two reasons: infected plants have been widely distributed by big-box retail stores and rainy weather has hastened the spores' airborne spread. The disease, which is not harmful to humans, is extremely contagious and experts say it most likely spread on garden center shelves to plants not involved in the initial infection. It also can spread once plants reach their final destination, putting tomato and potato plants in both home gardens and commercial fields at risk. Meg McGrath, professor of plant pathology at Cornell University, calls late blight "worse than the Bubonic Plague for plants." "People need to realize this is probably one of the worst diseases we have in the vegetable world," she said. "It's certain death for a tomato plant."
2. Famine inevitable – oil vs. food
Debora MacKenzie 6/16/09 “Obesity and hunger: The problem with food”
Unfortunately not. We produce our record harvests by harnessing fossil-fuel energy for farming. Thermodynamics rules: you can't get something for nothing. Oil prices have begun to climb, and will keep climbing as oil sources diminish. Meanwhile, demand for food grows. So food prices are on the rise, boosted further by climate change, demand for biofuel, and limits on soil and water. Higher food prices mean that the impoverished eat less nutritiously - or simply less.
3. Demographics will escalate even the most minor disaster
Juniper Russo Tarascio, November 26, 2008 “Famine in America? Why 99% of the U.S. Is in Danger of Starvation”
This transition is a distressing one indeed. While demographic shift from rural to urban lifestyles may seem like a blessing to many who loathe the hard labor associated with rural, agrarian life, it may spell disaster for those who are struggling through life in the Big City, hundreds or even thousands of miles from their food sources. During the Great Depression, formerly wealthy executives stood in line for hours waiting in ragged clothes for a hand-out of hot soup, while the rural "poor" went about life as usual, barely noticing the Depression. Survivors of the Depression who lived in agrarian regions often joked that they were "too poor to notice the stock market crash", but they were, in fact, better off than the majority of inner-city workers in that they never went hungry. As a result of this, the one-half of Americans with access to their own home-grown foods were exempt from the horrors of the Great Depression. Now imagine that, instead of 50% of the population suffering from the woes of an economic collapse, it was the 99.2% who are not involved in agriculture full-time. The comparison makes 1929 look like a walk in the park. Worse still, our food transporation services are now fully dependent on massive amounts of petroleum for transport, and the distances of food transporation have increased from tens of miles to thousands, which makes the modern grocery network look even more fragile by comparison.
AT: Federalism
Federalism tanked- Obama rolling back states rights- especially in the area of Social Services.
The Heritage Foundation 6-15 (“Obama’s Health Care Reform: The Demise of Federalism,” 2009 )
Flexibility in Name Only: States have played a significant role in developing unique and innovative approaches to address the health care needs of their citizens. During the 08 campaign, then-candidate Obama promoted the idea of state flexibility, but as President he replaced this embrace of flexibility with an embrace of federal standards. Obama has already taken numerous steps to roll back many of the flexibilities extended to states in administering Medicaid and SCHIP.
Courts will check any snowball
Robert F. Nagel, Law Professor, University of Colorado, March 2001, ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, p. 53
In what appears to be an ambitious campaign to enhance the role of the states in the federal system, the Supreme Court has recently issued a series of rulings that limit the power of the national government. Some of these decisions, which set boundaries to Congress's power to regulate commerce and to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, establish areas that are subject (at least in theory) only to state regulation. Others protect the autonomy of state governments by restricting congressional authority to expose state governments to suit in either state or federal courts and to "commandeer" state institutions for national regulatory purposes. Taken together, these decisions seem to reflect a judgment held by a slight majority of the justices that the dramatic expansion of the national government during the twentieth century has put in jeopardy fundamental principles of constitutional structure.
Congress checks a destruction of federalism
Justice Breyer, 5-15-2000, “United States v. Morrison et al.,” Dissenting Opinion,
The majority, aware of these difficulties, is nonetheless concerned with what it sees as an important contrary consideration. To determine the lawfulness of statutes simply by asking whether Congress could reasonably have found that aggregated local instances significantly affect interstate commerce will allow Congress to regulate almost anything. Virtually all local activity, when instances are aggregated, can have "substantial effects on employment, production, transit, or consumption." Hence Congress could "regulate any crime," and perhaps "marriage, divorce, and childrearing" as well, obliterating the "Constitution's distinction between national and local authority." Ante, at 15; Lopez, 514 U. S., at 558; cf. A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U. S. 495, 548 (1935) (need for distinction between "direct" and "indirect" effects lest there "be virtually no limit to the federal power"); Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U. S. 251, 276 (1918) (similar observation). This consideration, however, while serious, does not reflect a jurisprudential defect, so much as it reflects a practical reality. We live in a Nation knit together by two centuries of scientific, technological, commercial, and environmental change. Those changes, taken together, mean that virtually every kind of activity, no matter how local, genuinely can affect commerce, or its conditions, outside the State--at least when considered in the aggregate. Heart of Atlanta Motel, 379 U. S., at 251. And that fact makes it close to impossible for courts to develop meaningful subject-matter categories that would exclude some kinds of local activities from ordinary Commerce Clause "aggregation" rules without, at the same time, depriving Congress of the power to regulate activities that have a genuine and important effect upon interstate commerce. Since judges cannot change the world, the "defect" means that, within the bounds of the rational, Congress, not the courts, must remain primarily responsible for striking the appropriate state/federal balance. Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U. S. 528, 552 (1985); ante, at 19-24 (Souter, J., dissenting); Kimel v. Florida Bd. of Regents, 528 U. S. , (2000) (slip op., at 2) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (Framers designed important structural safeguards to ensure that, when Congress legislates, "the normal operation of the legislative process itself would adequately defend state interests from undue infringement"); see also Kramer, Putting the Politics Back into the Political Safeguards of Federalism, 100 Colum. L. Rev. 215 (2000) (focusing on role of political process and political parties in protecting state interests). Congress is institutionally motivated to do so. Its Members represent state and local district interests. They consider the views of state and local officials when they legislate, and they have even developed formal procedures to ensure that such consideration takes place. See, e.g., Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995, Pub. L. 104-4, 109 Stat. 48 (codified in scattered sections of 2 U. S. C.). Moreover, Congress often can better reflect state concerns for autonomy in the details of sophisticated statutory schemes than can the judiciary, which cannot easily gather the relevant facts and which must apply more general legal rules and categories. See, e.g., 42 U. S. C. §7543(b) (Clean Air Act); 33 U. S. C. §1251 et seq. (Clean Water Act); see also New York v. United States, 505 U. S. 144, 167-168 (1992) (collecting other examples of "cooperative federalism"). Not surprisingly, the bulk of American law is still state law, and overwhelmingly so.
Ext #1 – N/U (Federalism Down)
Federalism down- Obama government is top heavy and power grabbing states rights.
WSJ 2009 (“Divided we stand,” June 13th )
This perspective may seem especially fanciful at a time when the political tides all seem to be running in the opposite direction. In the midst of economic troubles, an aggrandizing Washington is gathering even more power in its hands. The Obama Administration, while considering replacing top executives at Citigroup, is newly appointing a “compensation czar” with powers to determine the retirement packages of executives at firms accepting federal financial bailout funds. President Obama has deemed it wise for the U.S. Treasury to take a majority ownership stake in General Motors in a last-ditch effort to revive this Industrial Age brontosaurus. Even the Supreme Court is getting in on the act: A ruling this past week awarded federal judges powers to set the standards by which judges for state courts may recuse themselves from cases. All of this adds up to a federal power grab that might make even FDR’s New Dealers blush. But that’s just the point: Not surprisingly, a lot of folks in the land of Jefferson are taking a stand against an approach that stands to make an indebted citizenry yet more dependent on an already immense federal power. The backlash, already under way, is a prime stimulus for a neo-secessionist movement, the most extreme manifestation of a broader push for some form of devolution. In April, at an anti-tax “tea party” held in Austin, Governor Rick Perry of Texas had his speech interrupted by cries of “secede.” The Governor did not sound inclined to disagree. “Texas is a unique place,” he later told reporters attending the rally. “When we came into the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.”
And Secessionist backlash against government control coming now- plan isn’t key
WSJ 2009 (“Divided we stand,” June 13th )
Secessionist feelings also percolate in Alaska, where Todd Palin, husband of Governor Sarah Palin, was once a registered member of the Alaska Independence Party. But it is not as if the Right has a lock on this issue: Vermont, the seat of one of the most vibrant secessionist movements, is among the country’s most politically-liberal places. Vermonters are especially upset about imperial America’s foreign excursions in hazardous places like Iraq. The philosophical tie that binds these otherwise odd bedfellows is belief in the birthright of Americans to run their own affairs, free from centralized control. Their hallowed parchment is Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, on behalf of the original 13 British colonies, penned in 1776, 11 years before the framers of the Constitution gathered for their convention in Philadelphia. “The right of secession precedes the Constitution—the United States was born out of secession,” Daniel Miller, leader of the Texas Nationalist Movement, put it to me. Take that, King Obama.
AT: Federalism (Modeling)
U.S. federalism isn’t modeled
Will Kymlicka, Professor of Philosophy at University of Toronto, July 2000, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence
3. Can the Model be Exported? Given this success in the West, one might expect that there would be great interest in multination federalism in other countries around the world, from Eastern Europe to Asia and Africa, most of which contain territorially-concentrated national minorities. The phenomenon of minority nationalism, including the demand for [*217] territorial autonomy, is a truly universal one. The countries affected by it are to be found in Africa (for example, Ethiopia), Asia (Sri Lanka), Eastern Europe (Romania), Western Europe (France), North America (Guatemala), South America (Guyana), and Oceania (New Zealand). The list includes countries that are old (United Kingdom) as well as new (Bangladesh), large (Indonesia) as well as small (Fiji), rich (Canada) as well as poor (Pakistan), authoritarian (Sudan) as well as democratic (Belgium), Marxist-Leninist (China) as well as militantly anti-Marxist (Turkey). The list also includes countries which are Buddhist (Burma), Christian (Spain), Moslem (Iran), Hindu (India), and Judaic (Israel)." n12 Indeed, some commentators describe the conflict between states and national minorities as an ever-growing "third world war", encompassing an ever-increasing number of groups and states. n13. We need to think creatively about how to respond to these conflicts, which will continue to plague efforts at democratization, and to cause violence, around the world. I believe that federal or quasi-federal forms of territorial autonomy (hereafter TA) are often the only or best solution to these conflicts. To be sure, TA is not a universal formula for managing ethnic conflict. For one thing, TA is neither feasible nor desirable for many smaller and more dispersed national minorities. For such groups, more creative alternatives are needed. So it would be a mistake to suppose that TA can work for all national minorities, no matter how small or dispersed. But I believe it would equally be a mistake to suppose that non-territorial forms of cultural autonomy can work for all national minorities, no matter how large or territorially concentrated. What works best for small and dispersed minorities does not work best for large, concentrated minorities, and vice versa. n14 Where national minorities form clear majorities in their historic homeland, and particularly where they have some prior history of self-government, it is not clear that there is any realistic alternative to TA or multination federalism. Yet TA is strongly resisted in most of Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. And it is resisted for the same reasons it was resisted historically in the West: fears about disloyalty, secession and state security. n15 In many countries, majority- minority [*218] relations are "securitized"--e.g., viewed as existential threats to the very existence of the state, which therefore require and justify repressive measures. n16 Where ethnic relations become securitized in this way, states are guided by a series of inter-related assumptions: (a) that minorities are disloyal, not just in the sense that they lack loyalty to the state, but also in the sense that they are likely to collaborate with current or potential enemies; (b) that minorities are likely to use whatever power they are accorded to exit or undermine the state; (c) that a strong and stable state requires weak and disempowered minorities. Put another way, ethnic relations are seen as a zero-sum game: anything that benefits the minority is seen as a threat to the majority; and (d) that the treatment of minorities is above all a question of national security. Where one or more of these premises is accepted, there is virtually no room for an open debate about the merits of federalism. The perceived connection between federalism and destabilizing the state is too powerful to allow such a debate. Indeed, in many countries, for a minority to demand federalism is itself taken as proof of its disloyalty. It is not only advocates of secession who are put under police surveillance: anyone who advocates federalism is also seen as subversive, since it is assumed that this is just a covert first step to secession. Under these conditions, the whole question of what justice requires between majority and minority is submerged, since national security takes precedence over justice, and since disloyal minorities have no legitimate claims anyway. This resistance is so strong that TA is typically only granted as a last-ditch effort to avoid civil war, or indeed as the outcome of civil war. n17 On this issue, therefore, there is a wide and perhaps growing gulf between most Western countries and most countries in the rest of the world. In the West, it is considered legitimate that national minorities demand TA, and indeed these demands are increasingly accepted. Most national minorities in the West have greater autonomy than before, and none have been stripped of their autonomy. The idea of TA is accepted in principle, and adopted in practice. The old self-image of states as unified nation-states is being replaced with the new self-image of states as multination federations and/or as partnerships between two or more peoples. By contrast, in many countries in Eastern Europe or the Third World, many national minorities have less autonomy than they had 30 or 50 years ago, and it is considered illegitimate for minorities to even mention autonomy, or to make any other proposal which would involve redefining the state as a multination state. These countries [*219] cling to the old model of unitary nation-states, in which minorities ideally are politically weak, deprived of intellectual leadership, and subject to long-term assimilation.
U.S. federalism isn’t modeled
Alfred Stepan, Wallace Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University, 1999, Journal of Democracy Volume 10, “Federalism and Democracy: Beyond the U.S. Model,”
The U.S. model of federalism, in terms of the analytical categories developed in this article, is "coming- together" in its origin, "constitutionally symmetrical" in its structure, and "demos-constraining" in its political consequences. Despite the prestige of this U.S. model of federalism, it would seem to hold greater historical interest than contemporary attraction for other democracies. Since the emergence of nation-states on the world stage in the after-math of the French Revolution, no sovereign democratic nation-states have ever "come together" in an enduring federation. Three largely unitary states, however (Belgium, Spain, and India) have constructed "holding-together" federations. In contrast to the United States, these federations are constitutionally asymmetrical and more "demos-enabling" than [End Page 32] "demos-constraining." Should the United Kingdom ever become a federation, it would also be "holding-together" in origin. Since it is extremely unlikely that Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland would have the same number of seats as England in the upper chamber of the new federation, or that the new upper chamber of the federation would be nearly equal in power to the lower chamber, the new federation would not be "demos-constraining" as I have defined that term. Finally, it would obviously defeat the purpose of such a new federation if it were constitutionally symmetrical. A U.K. federation, then, would not follow the U.S. model. The fact that since the French Revolution no fully independent nation-states have come together to pool their sovereignty in a new and more powerful polity constructed in the form of a federation would seem to have implications for the future evolution of the European Union. The European Union is composed of independent states, most of which are nation-states. These states are indeed increasingly becoming "functionally federal." Were there to be a prolonged recession (or a depression), however, and were some EU member states to experience very high unemployment rates in comparison to others, member states could vote to dismantle some of the economic federal structures of the federation that were perceived as being "politically dysfunctional." Unlike most classic federations, such as the United States, the European Union will most likely continue to be marked by the presumption of freedom of exit. Finally, many of the new federations that could emerge from the currently nondemocratic parts of the world would probably be territorially based, multilingual, and multinational. For the reasons spelled out in this article, very few, if any, such polities would attempt to consolidate democracy using the U.S. model of "coming-together," "demos-constraining," symmetrical federalism.
AT: Fertilizer
Fertilizer does not harm the Environment
Bos, 07 (M.G., February, Irrigation & Drainage Systems; Feb2007, Vol. 21 Issue 1, p1-15, 15p, )
To meet the food-challenge, there are two options; use current agricultural practices and expand the cropped area at the same rate as the growth of world population or improvepractices so that crop yield per hectare increases. To illustrate the impact of (horizontal) expansion of agricultural land, it is good to visualize the area needed. At present about 16,000,000 km2 land is used for agriculture. A growth of 2.8% per year, matching the growth of world population, would each year require the reclamation of about 45,000 km2 nature for agriculture. We recommend focusing on the second option so that we can avoid the unwanted infringement into nature areas. In order to grow, the crop should be sufficient healthy to consume water. Thus plant diseases should be controlled through the sustainable use of pesticides. For the crop to grow, this water must contain “food” that can be transferred into bio-mass. This in turn, asks for the sustainable use of fertilizer. Sustainable rural development is seen as a process that promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land and related resources, maximizing the subsequent social and economic benefits in an equitable (or fair) manner, without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems. The sustainability of agriculture therefore has been viewed from five perspectives within the “people, planet, profit” concept. They are related to the; social position of the rural community, availability of water, soil fertility, crop protection and the rural economy.On February 1, 2008, President George W. Bush said "the fundamentals of the economy are strong; we're just going through a rough patch right now" (UPI). Even while the economy was crumbling all arou...
AT: Flu (The Regular One)
Influenza pandemic improving now and controllable – technology and vaccine production
W. H. O. -07,
(World Health Organization, 10-23-07, “Projected supply of pandemic influenza vaccine sharply increases”)
Recent scientific advances and increased vaccine manufacturing capacity have prompted experts to increase their projections of how many pandemic influenza vaccine courses can be made available in the coming years. Last spring, the World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine manufacturers said that about 100 million courses of pandemic influenza vaccine based on the H5N1 avian influenza strain could be produced immediately with standard technology. Experts now anticipate that global production capacity will rise to 4.5 billion pandemic immunization courses per year in 2010. "With influenza vaccine production capacity on the rise, we are beginning to be in a much better position vis-à-vis the threat of an influenza pandemic," Dr Marie-Paule Kieny, Director of the Initiative for Vaccine Research at WHO, said today. "However, although this is significant progress, it is still far from the 6.7 billion immunization courses that would be needed in a six month period to protect the whole world." "Accelerated preparedness activities must continue, backed by political impetus and financial support, to further bridge the still substantial gap between supply and demand," she said. This year, manufacturers have been able to step up production capacity of trivalent (three viral strains) seasonal influenza vaccines to an estimated 565 million doses, from 350 million doses produced in 2006, according to the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations. According to experts working in this field, the yearly production capacity for seasonal influenza vaccine is expected to rise to 1 billion doses in 2010, provided corresponding demand exists. This would help manufacturers to be able to deliver around 4.5 billion pandemic influenza vaccine courses because a pandemic vaccine would need about eight times less antigen, the substance that stimulates an immune response. Vaccine production capacity is linked to the amount of antigen that has to be used to make each dose of the vaccine. Scientists have recently discovered they can reduce the amount of antigen used to produce pandemic influenza vaccines by using water-in-oil substances that enhance the immune response. The progress was reported Friday at the first meeting of a WHO Advisory Group on pandemic influenza vaccine production and supply. The Global Action Plan Advisory Group, an independent, international committee of 10 members, met at WHO headquarters one year after eight new strategies to increase pandemic influenza vaccine were identified and published in the WHO Global pandemic influenza action plan to increase vaccine supply. At the Advisory Group meeting, other progress on the Global Action Plan was discussed. WHO reported it is setting up a training hub that would serve as a source of technology transfer to developing countries.
AT: Food Price Spikes
1. Food Prices fluctuate all the time, this is nothing new.
Wade 07, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), July 26, 2007 Thursday, First Edition, Matt Wade, Economics Writer, “It's the underlying inflation, stupid;” , THE ECONOMY, NEWS AND FEATURES; Pg. 4, Nexis
BORROWERS have been warned to brace for an interest rate rise after the next Reserve Bank board meeting in a fortnight. But why is an increase on the cards when the inflation rate is near the bottom of the central bank's target range at just 2.1 per cent? The answer lies in the difference between the headline inflation rate and the underlying rate. Measures of underlying inflation eliminate the one-off distortions in the consumer price index often caused by items like fresh fruit, vegetables and petrol, which can fluctuate wildly from quarter to quarter. The value in doing this has been underscored over the past 18 months as the dramatic rise and fall of banana prices, drought-related food price fluctuations, and the ups and downs of bowser prices have played havoc with the headline inflation rate. The Reserve relies heavily on measures of underlying inflation to guide its decisions on interest rates because they give the most accurate indication of real inflationary pressures in the economy.
2. Food Prices in the U.S. will gradually increase for the time being for four main reasons.
China Daily, 07 .cn, September 28, 2007 Friday, PRICE INCREASES ARE A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE,
Though the consumer price index (CPI) keeps rising rapidly, the producer price index (PPI), a leading indicator of production costs, shows a declining trend. This suggests that the increase in the CPI is mainly the result of price hikes for food. The decline of the growth rate for non-food prices shows that supply and demand are stable, providing the basis for a gradual descent in prices later this year. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the PPI grew by 2.4 percent in July, compared with 3.3 percent in January. The PPI growth was 0.2 percentage points higher in August than in July, but the overall trend is still downward. The slowing growth in the PPI is mainly the result of declining production costs. Though the cost of living rises with food prices, the slowing growth of production costs means an overall trend of slow growth of the PPI. The rate of CPI growth hit 6.5 percent in August, leading to 3.9 percent year-on-year growth from January to August. Higher food costs have led the faster rate of CPI growth. The prices of industrial consumer goods and services have risen by less than 1 percent this year, while food prices have soared, which has been a major factor in increasing the CPI growth rate. The relationship between supply and demand affects price levels in the short term. The huge supply potential, together with restricted growth in demand, is a basic reason for the declining growth rate of non-food prices. The most recent round of economic growth kicked off after the shortage economy was eliminated. In this new phase, output has reached a certain scale, productivity is increasing, the supplies of capital and labor are abundant and the supply of applied technologies is expanding. As the recent round of reforms takes hold, enterprises' ability to react to market fluctuations will improve. This means the potential to expand production and supply is huge. When there is demand, there will be a corresponding growth in supply. On the other hand, demand is getting more and more restricted. Since 2003, the central government has tightened its control of land and capital. It has put in place multiple measures, such as raising the threshold to control the unchecked binge on fixed assets investment. Since last year, the government has controlled the export of energy consuming, polluting and resource-intensive products by lowering tax rebates and collecting export tariffs. It has also tightened control of the export of products affected by trade conflicts. Generally speaking, the control of demand growth has improved. Having a high supply potential and controlled demand means a coordinated relationship between supply and demand. The possibility of a supply shortage or inflation is slight. What is more, partial oversupply and overcapacity could be possible in the future. Rising food prices, which have a huge impact on the CPI growth rate, do not mean there is something wrong with agricultural production. Grain production increased every year from 2004 to 2006. That continued this summer, when output saw a 1.3 percent year-on-year increase. The foundation for the grain supply is good. Four short-term reasons contribute to the rising food prices. First, world grain production decreased last year, and major producers such as the United States have been using corn to make fuel. Second, the State grain reserve has not caught up with the changing market. Third, the domestic capacity for making ethanol from corn has improved. Fourth, food prices were affected by epidemics and seasonal factors. Considered from a long-term perspective, these factors reflect a normal trend in economic development. The prices of agricultural and food products will gradually increase with industrialization, urbanization and rises in income levels. This reflects a natural adjustment of industrial-agricultural and urban-rural income distribution patterns. It also means farmers and rural residents are enjoying the fruits of economic growth.
3. High food prices are not necessarily bad—poorer farmers make more money too.
Carey 2008 (John, senior correspondent in BusinessWeek's Washington bureau and received awards from the American Institute of Biological Sciences and former editor of The Scientist and the National & International Wildlife magazines, “Is Ethanol Getting a Bum Rap?” May 1)
Certainly, a rapid rise in food prices brings misery to poor countries. But over the long haul, "it's not obvious that high grain prices are inherently bad," asserts Nathanael Greene, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Years of cheap, subsidized grain in the U.S. and Europe have left farmers in the developing world unable to compete. They can't invest in better seed, machinery, or cultivation practices (page 26). As a result, global average yields for corn, wheat, and rice are less than half what the world's top 10% of farmers achieve. While American corn farmers produce 150 bushels per acre, farms in the developing world often get only 30. "If there is a crime against humanity, it is these low yields," not biofuels, says Richard Hamilton, CEO of Ceres Inc., a Thousand Oaks (Calif.) startup developing biofuel crops. Those low yields will improve if farmers make more money. In the long term, "high prices will lead these countries to produce more of their own food," says Morris, easing the supply shortages.
Ext #2 – Food Price Increase Innevitable
Famine is Inevitable in the Status Quo, the Dollar Decline Plummits Food Prices
Scott Thrill 6/6/08 (staff writer “Is Famine Inevitable” pg. online @ )
These inconvenient truths generate a logical but nevertheless callous question: Who will starve, and who will survive? Even that has a profit motive, as it should, considering that the oil sector's economic shenanigans -- occupations, ethanol, record-setting paydays -- under the Bush administration have brought us to this disturbing tightrope. The cold pursuit of profit promises to kick-start further genetic experimentation to make up for what nature cannot provide, thanks to hyperproduction and global warming's incoming floods, droughts and fires. And the fact that we grow food now to put not into our bodies but into our cars only draws that dystopian future closer. Shifting the auto market to another fuel source would go a long way to staving it off, if political and popular will could only be galvanized from its comfy couch to start saving and not wasting money and food."The best way to avert future famines on the supply and price side," concludes Woodall, "is to ensure that there are enough food reserves that can feed the hungry in countries in crisis, (and) offer reasonable prices to consumers in the developed world and fair prices for farmers. Under the current agriculture policies, the supply and price of food staples has been very volatile, and there is no safety valve to ensure that the supply of commodities can match the need of consumers. Farmer-owned reserves and the re-establishment of some government supply management policies could greatly ease the year-to-year price shocks faced by development agencies, grocery store consumers and farmers."But that would be a solution for those interested in finding one. Considering that billions are already on the edge of starvation, interest in earnings rather than solutions seems to be the main problem. Until that changes, the poor as always will remain the petri dish for such economic speculations and resource shortages. They are already at ground zero in the war against an inevitable famine."Skyrocketing prices are hitting them the hardest," Luescher continues, "those who already spend 60 percent, sometimes even 80 percent, of their budget on food. These groups include the rural landless, pastoralists and the majority of small-scale farmers. But the impact is greatest on the urban poor. And the rises are producing what we're calling the "new face of hunger" -- people who suddenly can no longer afford the food they see on store shelves because prices have soared beyond their reach."
AT: Free Trade Impacts
(__) Increased trade has no effect on decreasing risk of conflict between nations
Gelpi and Greico 05, Associate Professor and Professor of Political Science, Duke University (Christopher, Joseph, “Democracy, Interdependence, and the Sources of the Liberal Peace”, Journal of Peace Research)
As we have already emphasized, increasing levels of trade between an autocratic and democratic country are unlikely to constrain the former from initiating militarized disputes against the latter. As depicted in Figure 1, our analysis indicates that an increase in trade dependence by an autocratic challenger on a democratic target from zero to 5% of the former's GDP would increase the probability of the challenger’s dispute initiation from about 0.31% to 0.29%. Thus, the overall probability of dispute initiation by an autocratic country against a democracy is fairly high (given the rarity of disputes) at 23 nearly .3% per country per year. Moreover, increased trade does little or nothing to alter that risk. Increases in trade dependence also have little effect on the likelihood that one autocracy will initiate a conflict with another. In this instance, the probability of dispute initiation remains constant at 0.33% regardless of the challenger’s level of trade dependence.
(__) Trade inevitable – globalization.
BRAINARD 08 Vice President and Director for Global Economy and Development [Lael, Senate Committee on Finance, “America’s Trade Agenda: Examining the Trade Enforcment Act of 2007,” Senate testimony, 5/22/2008, brookings.edu/testimony/2008/0522_trade_brainard.aspx]
We are experiencing a period of breathtaking global integration that dwarfs previous episodes. Global trade has more than doubled in the last 7 years alone. The entry of India and China amounts to a 70 percent expansion of the global labor force—with wages less than a tenth of the level in wealthy economies. This expansion is more than three times bigger than the globalization challenge of the 1970s and 80s associated with the sequential advances of Japan, South Korea, and the other Asian tigers. It is also far larger than the more recent integration of the North American market. If, as is now widely expected, these trends in population and productivity growth continue, the time will soon approach where the balance of global economic heft flips. According to my colleague, Homi Kharas, the so-called emerging BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies will account for over half of world income by 2050, up from 13 percent today, while the share of the G7 wealthiest economies will slip from 57 percent today to one quarter of world income in 2050. And by 2030, 83 percent of the world’s middle class consumers will reside in what are today considered emerging markets.
(__) Single blows against trade don’t spread—no impact
Ikenson 2009 – director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies (Daniel, Center for Trade Policy Studies, Free Trade Bulletin 37, “A protectionism fling”, , WEA)
Still even more importantly, the trade rules are not so restrictive that governments obsess over finding ways around them. It is not the existence of the rules that compels countries to liberalize trade. Governments typically are not looking for excuses to raise trade barriers. If compliance were the primary motivation for countries to liberalize trade, we would not observe applied tariff rates that are so much lower than the maximum allowable rates. And we would likely observe much greater use of the various trade remedies across industries and more invocation of restrictions in the name of health and other technical barriers to trade. Trade liberalization is motivated by self-interest, and the disparities between bound and applied rates are explained by the fact that most members have a preference for openness. There are real benefits, beyond the reciprocal openings of others' markets, to keeping one's own trade barriers low. Nevertheless, governments have been invoking protectionist measures over the past several months. Here are just a few examples:6z * In India, tariffs and other restrictions have been raised on some steel products; * Ecuador raised tariffs on 940 different products by a range of 5 to 20 percentage points; * Indonesia limited the number of points of entry into domestic commerce for imported products and is requiring its civil servants to buy only Indonesianmade products; and * Argentina made licensing requirements more onerous for so-called sensitive products, such as auto parts, textiles, TVs, and shoes. And here is how a top-circulation American daily newspaper described the global flirtation with trade barriers in December: Moving to shield battered domestic manufacturers from foreign imports, Indonesia is slapping restrictions on at least 500 products this month, demanding special licenses and new fees on imports. Russia is hiking tariffs on imported cars, poultry and pork. France is launching a state fund to protect French companies from foreign takeovers. Officials in Argentina and Brazil are seeking to raise tariffs on products from imported wine and textiles to leather goods and peaches.7 There may be nothing necessarily incorrect about the facts reported. But the tone and implications are possibly misleading. It is hard to accept the otherwise marginally significant facts without also accepting the provocative metaphors and sense of impending doom. Those actions have less antagonistic explanations and more benign interpretations. The actions of Indonesia, Argentina, and Brazil are consistent with their rights under the WTO agreements and will have a negligible collective impact on world trade. Russia is not even a member of the WTO and frequently behaves outside of international norms, so its actions have very limited representative value. And France has intervened to block foreign takeovers of French companies on other occasions this decade, so its actions are not particularly noteworthy. The popular media usually lacks nuance in its accounting of trade policy events and often intones that the present will be a replay of the 1930s.
(__) Trade only pacifies some constituencies—it can’t solve in the countries with the biggest impacts
GOLDSTONE 2007 (P.R., PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and a member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a non-resident research fellow at the Center for Peace and Security Studies, Georgetown University, AlterNet, September 25, )
American policymakers should beware claims of globalization's axiomatic pacifying effects. Trade creates vested interests in peace, but these interests affect policy only to the extent they wield political clout. In many of the states whose behavior we most wish to alter, such sectors -- internationalist, export-oriented, reliant on global markets -- lack a privileged place at the political table. Until and unless these groups gain a greater voice within their own political system, attempts to rely on the presumed constraining effects of global trade carry substantially greater risk than commonly thought. A few examples tell much. Quasi-democratic Russia is a state whose principal exposure to global markets lies in oil, a commodity whose considerable strategic coercive power the Putin regime freely invokes. The oil sector has effectively merged with the state, making Russia's deepening ties to the global economy a would-be weapon rather than an avenue of restraint. Russian economic liberalization without political liberalization is unlikely to pay the strong cooperative dividends many expect. China will prove perhaps the ultimate test of the Pax Mercatoria. The increasing international Chinese presence in the oil and raw materials extraction sectors would seem to bode ill, given such sectors' consistent history elsewhere of urging state use of threats and force to secure these interests. Much will come down to the relative political influence of export-oriented sectors heavily reliant on foreign direct investment and easy access to the vast Western market versus the political power of their sectoral opposites: uncompetitive state-owned enterprises, energy and mineral complexes with important holdings in the global periphery, and a Chinese military that increasingly has become a de facto multi-sectoral economic-industrial conglomerate. Actions to bolster the former groups at the expense of the latter would be effort well spent. At home, as even advanced sectors feel the competitive pressures of globalization, public support for internationalism and global engagement will face severe challenges. As more sectors undergo structural transformation, the natural coalitional constituency for committed global activist policy will erode; containing the gathering backlash will require considerable leadership. Trade can indeed be a palliative; too often, however, we seem to think of economic interdependence as a panacea; the danger is that in particular instances it may prove no more than a placebo.
Ext #1 – Doesn’t Decrease Conflict
Statistical analysis shows free trade doesn’t decrease the probability of war
Gelpi and Greico 05, Associate Professor and Professor of Political Science, Duke University (Christopher, Joseph, “Democracy, Interdependence, and the Sources of the Liberal Peace”, Journal of Peace Research)
Clearly these results do not support hypotheses 2, 3, or 4. That is, the net impact of challenger trade dependence remains slightly negative but does not approach statistical significance across the full range of variation in target trade dependence. This pattern of 17 coefficients suggests two central conclusions about the impact of trade on conflict. First, trade dependence on the part of a potential challenger does not – either by itself or in combination with trade dependence on the part of the potential defender – reduce the probability that the potential challenger will initiate a dispute. And second, challenger trade dependence also does not exacerbate the incidence of dispute initiation.
Free trade threatens democracy – cedes political control to multinational corporations.
Kuttner 4/22/2001 Editor of the American Prospect (Robert, The Boston Globe, “NAFTA-Style Trade Bad for Democracy,” CommonDreams, , EA)
NAFTA pays lip service to labor and environmental protections, but the weak laws on Mexican lawbooks are honored more in the breech. As a result, American companies that shift production to Mexico outrun hard-won labor and environmental protections in the United States. Business, in other words, is keen to harmonize property rights, but not labor, environmental, or consumer rights. And if NAFTA becomes a hemisphere-wide arrangement, the social balance tilts even more dramatically to business, at the expense of both sovereignty and social regulation. Brazil, for example, takes a very different view of pharmaceutical patent protections than the United States. Brazil treats life-saving drugs as social goods. American pharmaceutical companies, not surprisingly, treat Brazilian policy as patent infringement. It is the defiance of the big global drug companies by Brazil (and by India) that has sharply brought down the cost of AIDS drugs in the Third World. But if NAFTA is extended, Brazil and its independent drug companies could be more easily sued by American rivals who have a very different set of public health priorities. Beneath the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas and kindred arrangements lurks an intriguing new ideology. This ideology holds that corporations are really agents of the spread of democracy. I recently participated in a debate at Columbia University sponsored by the Reuters Foundation, on the health of democracy. One debater was Nancy Boswell, the managing director of a worldwide organization called Transparency International. This well-intentioned group, funded by businesses, banks, and foundations, has branches in some 80 countries. It sees itself as fighting corruption in Third World countries and thereby alleviating poverty, by pressing for US-style corporate accounting, enforceable strictures against bribery, and the openness to investment characteristic of the United States. In this view, nothing promotes democracy as much as the spread of free-market capitalism. It's an audacious claim, and it may even be half-true. In Mexico, NAFTA probably hastened the downfall of the single-party regime. But in South Korea, a reformist government had to abandon half of its social program to reassure foreign investors. Historically, democracy has been spread mostly by social movements, not by corporations. The free-market ''transparency'' promoted by business actually promotes a narrow brand of democracy that is a sanitized version of American capitalism, circa 1890 - full rights for investors and for corporations, at the expense of laws that protect labor, the environment, and consumers. Today, some business leaders are cautious reformers and business is beginning, grudgingly, to accept some minimal social standards as part of free trade agreements, but only because of strenuous citizen and labor organizing. However, this social rebalancing works much more effectively within one country, where voters and social movements can be direct counterweights to corporations by recourse to democratic politics. There are no citizens of the republic of NAFTA. That's why these trade deals threaten democracy, even as they claim to spread it.
Ext #2 – Trade Inevitable
Zero risk of protectionist backsliding
Anderson 2009 – head of Asia-Pacific economics for UBS (8/17, Jonathan, Cajing, “Economist: Reality Check for Prophets of Protectionism”, , WEA)
One of the greatest fears among investors today is that the global economy will be affected by the return of protectionism. Many remember the 1930s as a disastrous time for trade. Not only did rich countries sink in the Great Depression, but they gradually closed doors to global trade and capital flow, starting with the passage of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the United States in 1930. International trade spiraled down. It's been estimated that total global trade volume fell by nearly two-thirds between 1929 and 1933, dealing a crushing blow to growth and development hopes around the world. Now, here we are again, at the beginning of what some commentators call the "Great Depression II." And according to the World Trade Organization, we are seeing a sharp uptick in protectionist measures around the world. Are we risking another wave of trade destruction that closes the world's doors? And could a new wave crush China and the rest of the emerging world? The short answer is no. We do not worry much about the protectionism issue. We think these fears are vastly overstated for four reasons. First, conditions in the global economy are not that bad. If we look back at the Great Depression in the 1930s, we find the United States economy contracted nearly 30 percent in real terms, and more than a quarter of the entire workforce was unemployed. Up to one-third of the economy simply disappeared. In many European economies, the impact was greater still. How do things look today? At last count, the United States, euro zone countries, and Japan had seen a cumulative GDP contraction of 6 percent or so, with average unemployment nearing 9 percent. And this is probably as bad as it will get; the world economy is now expected to stabilize and recover in the second half of 2009. Of course, the recovery may be extremely weak. But even if developed countries don't grow at all over the next 18 months, the situation still compares favorably with the events of 75 years ago. In other words, there's just no reason to look for the same kind of protectionist reaction today. We should add that we're not seeing it. The WTO has reported a sharp increase in various protectionist actions, claims and cases, but the overall economic impact of these measures is still small by any standard. This is likely to be the worst it will get. Second, the effects of "plain vanilla" protectionism are highly exaggerated. Although Smoot-Hawley passed in 1930, raising tariffs on thousands of products, most economists agree the real attack on global trade didn't come until the breakup of the international monetary and exchange rate arrangements in 1931, and a corresponding collapse of global finance. Of course, many pundits now worry about the fall of the U.S. dollar as a global invoicing and reserve currency, and that this could have a similarly negative impact on trade and financing. However, we should stress that as bad as the U.S. economy looks at present, it's still the best thing we have. The European Union is beset by crushing regional disparities and political pressures, with significant basket cases hiding inside its borders. Japan simply doesn't have the necessary dynamism or commitment to globalization. And as far as fiscal balance sheets are concerned, all three major regions have equally significant problems. The United States stands alone in terms of how fast the Federal Reserve has expanded its monetary balance sheet, raising specific concerns about U.S. inflation and its impact on the dollar. But as one can see by looking at U.S. economic data, we are still falling into a deflation cycle for the time being, with nary a hint of inflationary pressure yet. We fully expect the Fed to be able to rein in the monetary expansion quickly if these pressures arise. We should add that, although it's fashionable to look at China and the yuan as a rising competitor to the dollar, this is simply not a realistic theme for the next 10 years – and perhaps for much longer. China doesn't have an open capital account, which means there is little opportunity or interest in holding the yuan as a serious asset. If anything, the impact of the current global crisis is likely to convince mainland authorities to be slow in opening their borders. China also doesn't have the kind of deep, domestic financial markets required of a global reserve currency; the bond market in particular is still in its infancy. As a result, it will be a long time indeed before the yuan starts playing a real role on the global stage. Third, even if we do see an unexpected wave of protectionism, emerging countries have less to lose than the developed world. Let's start by asking this question: When we talk about "protectionism," what exactly are we trying to protect? The answer is, of course, domestic workers and domestic jobs. In what areas do the labor forces of the United States, Europe and Japan work? The vast majority are in services and construction, sectors that don't compete much directly on the international arena. Only 10 to 15 percent are manufacturing jobs, and these are mostly in capital intensive, high-tech industries such as autos, precision machinery and high-end electronics. By contrast, manufactured goods that China and other emerging markets sell – toys, textiles, running shoes, sporting goods, light electronics, etc. – are barely made at all in the G3 countries. Rich countries outsourced most of these low-end, labor-intensive jobs a long time ago. A related point holds for commodities and raw materials, which make up much of the rest of the exports from the low-income world. All three major, developed regions are heavily dependent on imported resources, and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. The bottom line here is that even if we do get a big wave of protectionism in developed countries, it unlikely to be aimed specifically at low-end goods from the developed world. Rather, it makes more sense to protect the auto industry along with high-end equipment and chemical manufacturers. Moreover, any tariffs and barriers placed on toys and textiles are much more likely to raise consumer prices than crush volumes, given the absence of competitive domestic industries that could take advantage of protection to grab local market shares. The final point concerns financial leverage. There has never been a time in recent global economic history when the developed world was so dependent on low-income countries for financial resources. For the first time, the emerging world is a net financial creditor. Given the rapid expansion of public debts, the major developed countries are extremely interested in seeing China and other low-income countries continue to buy U.S. Treasuries, Japanese Government Bonds and various European debt instruments. The impact of a big, potential pullout from global bond markets actually could be much more negative than positive in terms of protecting domestic industries. So emerging markets now are in a much better bargaining position than at any time in the past. Protectionist fears are likely to continue to bother investors over the next year or two, and perhaps longer. But we don't think the real situation supports these fears.
Ext #3 – No Escalation
Zero risk of a trade war
Suominen 2009 (transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and trade economist at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, 2009 (Kati, “A New Age Of Protectionism? the Economic Crisis And Transatlantic Trade Policy”, the German Marshall Fund Of The United States, , March 2009)
This paper makes three arguments First, fears of an all-out trade war and spiraling protectionist backlash are exaggerated. There are a great many insurance policies in place to pre-empt anything akin to the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s, including a solid multilateral system with bound tariffs and a credible dispute settlement mechanism, dozens of bilateral free trade deals with often deep tariff commitments, solid intellectual backing for free trade, well-organized export lobbies, and the unprecedentedly large stake that countries around the world have in the policies of their trading partners and the fortunes of the global trading system.
AT: Free Trade Solves Interdependance
Trade is not key to economic interdependence
STREETEN 2001 (Paul, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Boston University and Founder and Chairman of the journal World Development, Finance and Development, Vol 38, No 2, June)
Trade is, of course, only one, and not the most important, of many manifestations of economic interdependence. Others are the flow of factors of production—capital, technology, enterprise, and various types of labor—across frontiers and the exchange of assets, the acquisition of legal rights, and the international flows of information and knowledge. The global flow of foreign exchange has reached the incredible figure of $2 trillion per day, 98 percent of which is speculative. The multinational corporation has become an important agent of technological innovation and technology transfer. In 1995, the sales of multinationals amounted to $7 trillion, with these companies' sales outside their home countries growing 20-30 percent faster than exports.
Interdependence does not solve war—both world wars disprove this
COPELAND 1996 (Dale, Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, International Security, Spring)
Liberals argue that economic interdependence lowers the likelihood of war by increasing the value of trading over the alternative of aggression: interdependent states would rather trade than invade. As long as high levels of interdependence can be maintained, liberals assert, we have reason for optimism. Realists dismiss the liberal argument, arguing that high interdependence increases rather than decreases the probability of war. In anarchy, states must constantly worry about their security. Accordingly, interdependence - meaning mutual dependence and thus vulnerability - gives states an incentive to initiate war, if only to ensure continued access to necessary materials and goods. The unsatisfactory nature of both liberal and realist theories is shown by their difficulties in explaining the run-ups to the two World Wars. The period up to World War I exposes a glaring anomaly for liberal theory: the European powers had reached unprecedented levels of trade, yet that did not prevent them from going to war. Realists certainly have the correlation right - the war was preceded by high interdependence - but trade levels had been high for the previous thirty years; hence, even if interdependence was a necessary condition for the war, it was not sufficient. At first glance, the period from 1920 to 1940 seems to support liberalism over realism. In the 1920s, interdependence was high, and the world was essentially peaceful; in the 1930s, as entrenched protectionism caused interdependence to fall, international tension rose to the point of world war. Yet the two most aggressive states in the system during the 1930s, Germany and Japan, were also the most highly dependent despite their efforts towards autarchy, relying on other states, including other great powers, for critical raw materials. Realism thus seems correct in arguing that high dependence may lead to conflict, as states use war to ensure access to vital goods. Realism's problem with the interwar era, however, is that Germany and Japan had been even more dependent in the 1920s, yet they sought war only in the late 1930s when their dependence, although still significant, had fallen.
AT: Gay Rights (and other Impacts)
1. Squo Solves
Nico Sifra Quintana policy analyst for the American Progress Institute July 1 2009
Every day the LGBT community seems to be experiencing a new expansion of civil rights. President Barack Obama signed on June 17 a Presidential Memorandum on Federal Benefits and Non-Discrimination that grants non-discrimination protections and some same-sex partner benefits for LGBT federal employees. On May 6, Maine Governor John Baldacci (D-ME) signed into law a bill legalizing same-sex marriage, making Maine the fifth state—along with Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Iowa—to allow same-sex marriage. And the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, would expand protections under the federal hate crimes law to LGBT people.
2. Employment discrimination is an Alt Caus
Nico Sifra Quintana policy analyst for the American Progress Institute July 1 2009
Equal rights and protections under federal law would provide LGBT Americans with increased employment security and help protect them from falling below the federal poverty level. According to the Williams Institute, separate surveys have revealed that 16 to 68 percent of LGB people report experiencing employment discrimination. And the Transgender Law Center found that 70 percent of transgender people surveyed in California experienced workplace harassment related to their gender identity. Approximately half of survey respondents also reported experiencing some loss of employment either as a direct or possible result of their gender identity. Nevertheless, no federal laws currently exist protecting all LGBT workers from employment discrimination.
3. Military discrimination is an Alt Caus
ABS News 3/8/09 “Wage 'all-out war' vs discrimination, LGBT group urges AFP”
"We welcome the statements made by top military officials declaring that lesbians and gays are now accepted in the military. However, this is not insufficient. There has to be a concrete and comprehensive non-discrimination policy in the military," Project Equality spokesperson Jonas Bagas was quoted as saying. "There has to be a clear policy explicitly stating that anyone, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity, can join the military provided that they qualify for military service," Bagas said. Project Equality also urged the AFP to address other forms of discrimination within the AFP, particularly discrimination once gays and lesbians enter into service. "Once inside, LGBT soldiers can encounter other forms of discrimination and abuse. That, too, should be prohibited," Bagas added. "The military is a macho establishment. Hearing pro-LGBT statements from its officials may be refreshing, but they cannot hide the strong anti-LGBT sentiment in the military," Bagas said.
AT: Genocide
1. Status quo measures prevent genocide
A. Early warning system
CSM, 2004 (Abraham McLaughlin, 4/7, )
There are, for instance, new anti-genocide structures: The UN and US now have officials devoted exclusively to the prevention of mass killings. New forums for crimes against humanity have emerged with the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague last year, Belgian courts has tested the limits of "universal justice" in human rights cases, and the ongoing Yugoslav and Rwanda war-crimes tribunals. UN chief Kofi Annan is expected to announce Wednesday a new early-warning system to help prevent genocide.
B. The ICC
Daily News Leader, 2002 (7/5, l/n)
The International Criminal Court serves as a deterrent to monsters; it provides a venue for the powerless to have a voice. Anyone committing genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity - Americans included - in the 74 nations that have ratified the treaty could be prosecuted for those crimes. Unless we have some reason to fear, something to hide, we should be supporting this treaty, not deriding it.
C. Tribunals
Waldorf, 2001 (Lars, International Justice Tribune, 7/27, l/n)
In his letter, Philpot raises the real possibility that sending Akayesu to Mali and Ruggiu to Italy could create "inequality among detainees" if Italy has more favorable rules governing parole. That's because, under the Tribunal's rules, eligibility for pardon or commutation of sentences depends on the legislation of the state where the sentence is being served. Dieng pointed out that it will be up to President Pillay to decide where Akayesu serves his sentence. Without referring to Philpot's letter, the Registrar's spokesman, Kingsley Moghalu stated: "We feel that if the sentences are enforced in Africa ... the work of the Tribunal will have a greater deterrent effect in the continent. The Rwandan genocide is simply the fundamental problem of the continent writ large, that is, impunity."
2. Nuclear war outweighs.
Kahn 99 (Paul W, Professor of Law, Yale Law School, Journal of International Law and Politics, 31 N.Y.U. J. Int'l L. & Pol. 349, Winter/Spring, l/n)
If the law of human rights protects individuals from physical abuse at the hands of state officials, but leaves them open to nuclear holocaust, it appears to be arbitrary and irrational. Again, on what principle can the genocide convention protect groups from intentional efforts to destroy them, 86 but be indifferent to the far greater destruction such groups would suffer in a nuclear war? And if environmental law is about protection of nature, what is the principle that would protect nature from particular pollutants but not from total destruction? If international law purports to be principled, how can these principles fail to apply to the use of nuclear weapons? But is contemporary international law defined by these normative justifications or is it about state interests as perceived by the nation-states of the world and expressed in their consent to specific legal propositions?
3. No moral obligation to help the victims of genocide – responsibility falls on the targeted group
Kuperman, 2002 (Alan, Visiting Scholar for Center for International Studies, USC, )
As the above discussion should make clear, there is no humanitarian intervention policy that the international community can adopt that is likely to eliminate completely massive civilian violence from communal conflicts. However, two key lessons from this study can help to inform a more enlightened intervention policy. First, although perhaps disconcerting, we must acknowledge that such tragedies are most often the direct result of conscious decisions taken by leaders of the subordinate groups that become the primary victims of massive civilian violence. These subordinate-group leaders launch violent challenges against the state in full knowledge that the state will retaliate violently against members of their own group. When thousands of subordinate group civilians are slaughtered, the international community is shocked, but leaders of the group are not because they intentionally pursued this disastrous outcome. International voices of opinion – politicians, media, NGOs, the UN and other international organizations – react to such violence by proclaiming that the international community has a “responsibility” to protect the innocent civilians of the subordinate group. However, regardless of whether one believes in a general cosmopolitan responsibility to those outside one’s own political community, most observers would agree that the primary responsibility for protecting a group falls on the group itself, and by delegation upon its leaders. If a group chooses to sacrifice its own civilians, it is not obvious that the international community automatically has a responsibility to deny the group that choice.
Ext #2 – Nuclear War
And, our impact turns yours – nuclear war means genocide
Lippman, 1998 (Matthew, Counsel for Bosnia and Herzegovina in its Suit Against Yugoslavia in the ICJ – International Lawyer, Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, 15 Ariz. J. Int'l & Comp. Law 415, l/n)
In July 1996, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons which, intra alia, addressed whether the deployment of atomic armaments contravened the Genocide Convention. 545 The majority noted that the number of deaths resulting from the use of nuclear weapons would be "enormous" and that the victims, "in certain cases" may include persons of a particular national, ethnic, racial, or ethnic group. 546 The intention to destroy such groups "could be inferred from the fact that the user of the nuclear weapon . . . omitted to take account of the well-known effect of the use of such weapons." 547 The Court then cautioned that the intent to commit [*503] genocide could not be solely inferred from the resort to such weapons and that "due account of the circumstances specific to each case" must be considered. 548 Judge Weeramantry, in his dissenting opinion, argued that decisionmakers deploying nuclear weapons must be presumed to comprehend the resulting catastrophic circumstances. 549 The ability of nuclear weapons to "wipe out blocks of population ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions" leaves "no doubt that the weapon targets, in whole or in part, the national group of the State at which it is directed." 550 Nuremberg held that the extermination of a civilian population, in whole or in part, is a crime against humanity -- "this is precisely what a nuclear weapon achieves." 551 In summary, the majority opinion concluded that when employed with the necessary intent the use of nuclear weapons would constitute genocide. The requisite intent ordinarily must be independently established, but could be implied from circumstances such as the unannounced and massive first-strike targeting of cities or population centers. 552 Judge Weeramantry, on the other hand, argued that the resulting damage made the use of nuclear arms inherently genocidal; the requisite intent could be implied from the act of launching such weapons. 553 The World Court judgment was significant in suggesting that under the appropriate circumstances a genocidal intent may be implied and need not be independently established. Judge Weeramantry extended this argument, contending that the deployment of nuclear weapons was inherently genocidal. He argued that it was unnecessary to independently establish the requisite intent -- an individual deploying nuclear armaments must comprehend that the attack will result in the mass extermination of a national group. 554
AT: Global Warming Impacts
(__) Even if we stop greenhouse gas emissions, warming is inevitable
Longley 8 (Robert, “ Global Warming Inevitable This Century, NSF Study Finds” )
Despite efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and a greater increase in sea level are inevitable during this century, according to a new study performed by a team of climate modelers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. Indeed, say the researchers, whose work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), globally averaged surface air temperatures would still rise one degree Fahrenheit (about a half degree Celsius) by the year 2100, even if no more greenhouse gases were added to the atmosphere. And the resulting transfer of heat into the oceans would cause global sea levels to rise another 4 inches (11 centimeters) from thermal expansion alone. The team's findings are published in this week's issue of the journal "Science." “This study is another in a series that employs increasingly sophisticated simulation techniques to understand the complex interactions of the Earth,” says Cliff Jacobs of NSF’s atmospheric sciences division. “These studies often yield results that are not revealed by simpler approaches and highlight unintended consequences of external factors interacting with Earth’s natural systems.”
(__) Warming is slow—their impact is on the scale of centuries
(__) Warming is natural- satellites prove
Spencer 08 (Roy Spencer, Ph.D, report to congress, “ NASA’s Spencer Tells Congress Global Warming Is Not a Crisis,” , 10/9/8)
Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Another way of saying this is that the real climate system appears to be dominated by “negative feedbacks”—instead of the “positive feedbacks” which are displayed by all 20 computerized climate models utilized by the IPCC. (Feedback parameters larger than 3.3 Watts per square meter per degree Kelvin (Wm-2K-1) indicate negative feedback, while feedback parameters smaller than 3.3 indicate positive feedback.) If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, as we will see, it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end—if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now.
(__) Apocalyptic warming scenarios are exaggerated
"Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr 01/24/2005 “How Global Warming Research is Creating a Climate of Fear”
The pattern is always the same. The significance of individual events is turned into material suitable for media presentation and is then cleverly dramatized. When the outlook for the future is discussed, the scenario that predicts the highest growth rates for greenhouse gas emissions -- which, of course, comes with the most dramatic climatic consequences -- is always selected from among all possible scenarios. Those predicting significantly smaller increases in greenhouse gas levels are not mentioned. Every prediction has to trump the last. Melting Antarctic ice is one of the current horror scenarios du jour. Who benefits from this? The assumption is made that fear compels people to act, but we forget that it also produces a rather short-lived reaction. Climate change, on the other hand, requires a long-term response. The impact on the public may be "better" in the short term, thereby also positively affecting reputations and research funding. But to ensure that the entire system continues to function in the long term, each new claim about the future of our climate and of the planet must be just a little more dramatic than the last. It's difficult to attract the public's attention to the climate-related extinction of animal species following reports on apocalyptic heat waves. The only kind of news that can trump these kinds of reports would be something on the order of a reversal of the Gulf Stream. All of this leads to a spiral of exaggeration. Each individual step in this process may seem harmless, but on the whole, the knowledge imparted to the public about climate, climatic fluctuations, climate shift and climatic effects is dramatically distorted.
(__) Adaptation sovles the impact – empirically proven
Michaels ‘7 (Patrick, Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies @ Cato and Prof. Environmental Sciences @ UVA, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Global Warming: No Urgent Danger; No Quick Fix”, 8-21, )
We certainly adapted to 0.8 C temperature change quite well in the 20th century, as life expectancy doubled and some crop yields quintupled. And who knows what new and miraculously efficient power sources will develop in the next hundred years. The stories about the ocean rising 20 feet as massive amounts of ice slide off of Greenland by 2100 are also fiction. For the entire half century from 1915 through 1965, Greenland was significantly warmer than it has been for the last decade. There was no disaster. More important, there's a large body of evidence that for much of the period from 3,000 to 9,000 years ago, at least the Eurasian Arctic was 2.5 C to 7 C warmer than now in the summer, when ice melts. Greenland's ice didn't disappear then, either. Then there is the topic of interest this time of year — hurricanes. Will hurricanes become stronger or more frequent because of warming? My own work suggests that late in the 21st century there might be an increase in strong storms, but that it will be very hard to detect because of year-to-year variability. Right now, after accounting for increasing coastal population and property values, there is no increase in damages caused by these killers. The biggest of them all was the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. If it occurred today, it would easily cause twice as much damage as 2005's vaunted Hurricane Katrina. So let's get real and give the politically incorrect answers to global warming's inconvenient questions. Global warming is real, but it does not portend immediate disaster, and there's currently no suite of technologies that can do much about it. The obvious solution is to forgo costs today on ineffective attempts to stop it, and to save our money for investment in future technologies and inevitable adaptation.
Ext #1 – Not Real
No warming- models flawed—
a. discoveries of NASA data glitches
Young 11- 21 (2k8)(Gregory, Dr. Gregory Young is a neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England. He is currently involved with a privately funded think-tank engaged in experimental biophysical research., “Global Warming? Bring it On!”, )
(2) The reported NASA temperature data glitch discovered by Canadian Computer Analyst Steve McIntyre that wrongly kicked all temperature records up several tenths of a degree was a severe setback for AGW modelers. This software "failure" was overseen by one of AGW's fiercest proponents, the notorious Dr. James Hanson. NASA's GISS and Hanson have recently come under fire again for poor data collection methods and questionable accuracy.
b. Discoveries of wrongly sited weather stations
Young 11- 21 (2k8)(Gregory, Dr. Gregory Young is a neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England. He is currently involved with a privately funded think-tank engaged in experimental biophysical research., “Global Warming? Bring it On!”, )
(4) Finally let us not forget the astute investigation of automated weather stations by US Meteorologist Anthony Watts. Watts painstakingly discovered that a large fraction of the nation's 1,200 stations have been wrongly sited in man-made heat-absorbing centers. (Examples include locations on rooftops, on slabs of heat absorbing concrete, next to air conditioners, diesel generators and asphalt parking lots, even at sewage treatment plants. Some are located in areas experiencing excessive nighttime humidity, and at non-standard observing heights, including one actually sinking into a swamp.) Watts' discovery profoundly undermined the veracity of historical temperature data documented in the United States -- data that had been used by AGW proponents.
Your models are flawed- IPCC conflates politics with science.
Young 11- 21 (2k8)(Gregory, Dr. Gregory Young is a neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England. He is currently involved with a privately funded think-tank engaged in experimental biophysical research., “Global Warming? Bring it On!”, )
There are three indisputable and fundamental facts that were wantonly ignored in the UN's IPCC sham of a report. The UN breathlessly but insidiously "forgot" to include the specifics that: (1) The Earth has largely benefited by past warming cycle's and that these previous "warmings" had nothing to do with man's activities. These earlier natural cycles were not catastrophic events; they were, in fact, beneficial to all life forms. They provided warmer and longer growing seasons, more areas available for crops, etc. We know, for instance, that Greenland was once green, that Eric the Red planted and grew grapes in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada, that the Romans planted grapes in England, etc. (2) Solar/Sun Spot activity is the originator of most climatic change and most weather patterns on Earth. It is king. There is no larger factor of influence. CO2 influence is negligible and pales in comparison. CO2 follows the trend of temperature; it does not cause it. (3) Subordinate to solar activity alone, atmospheric water vapor/cloud formation and movement is the largest known variable that influences temperature changes in the atmosphere of the earth, and the earth's oceans. Water vapor in the atmosphere is around 1000-10,000 times as important as atmospheric CO2. These three quintessential and pivotal factors are not even discussed in the UN's IPCC report. This exclusion should raise a red flag in any intelligent mind. That's why so many of us are yelling from the rooftops about the absurdity of the report itself! Instead of a true and open discourse, we see the daily dribble from the MSM and various liberally usurped science journals, dishonestly and falsely alleging a "consensus" when there is none. Indeed, arrayed against the arcane burlesque of the United Nations IPCC with its politically selected 2500 Scientists, of which a core group of 600 exists, and a relatively small number of mediocre "scientists" here and there across the American landscape who have suddenly found notoriety or grant money in the global warming cause, are 31,072+ legitimate and viable scientists (of which I am one) who signed the American Petition Project declaring the Global Warming Hypothesis bogus found here, here and here. We openly refute the UN's conclusions. Here's the Petition Statement we dissenters signed in opposition: "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth." Let me assure you that we're not in good humor, nor take it kindly to be slurred and ridiculed by taking the other side in this debate. And our numbers are still growing. Indeed, we're angry that the vast majority of American Scientists will not be heard by the media. We're dismayed over the fact that the Global Warming fiasco has become politically popular and expedient to those left-wing politicians and power-brokers whose sole aim is to literally tax everything with a carbon footprint and give them control over all life, hidden within their PC guileful pretence to save the planet. They wish to save no one but themselves. And the tide turns further. Of the 2500 originally aligned scientists and putative authors of the UN's IPCC report some 500 are no longer faithful to Big Al's errand. Many of these scientists discovered that their individual findings and comments were willfully misrepresented. All participant conclusions were unilaterally changed to adhere strictly to the United Nations objective of building support for world taxation and rationing of industrially useful energy. Since the original IPCC report (and there have been some 4 others now formally issued), the defecting 500 scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. Approximately 100 of these scientists are now open defectors. Others are currently suing the UN for the misuse of their good names and research. It is difficult to see why a thinking person would even consider the IPCC report as legitimate. The entire IPCC process is but obfuscation by the secular and atheist Left. It has allowed the Left to conflate the vanity of secular opinion with scientific and/or moral truth. There is an easy and immediate remedy for their debacle. Will Rogers stated it simply: "When you are in a hole ... stop digging.... Please!"
AT: Global Warming (Coral Reefs)
Multiple factors allow reefs to recover from stress
International Union for Conservation of Nature 9 (Jan 9, ) LL
Resilience - A promising paradigm Even though climate change and coral bleaching pose a serious threat to the future survival of coral reefs, there is still hope that these ecosystems will be able to survive increased SSTs. Some coral reefs are able to withstand stresses to a greater degree (are more resistant) while other coral reefs are able to recover from bleaching events more rapidly (are more resilient) depending on a number of oceanographic, ecological and physiological factors. The principles of resistance and resilience are emerging as a promising paradigm to aid the management of coral reefs in the face of climate change, and give hope in the face of adversity. The figure below illustrates the stages in the coral bleaching process where it is possible for a coral or coral reef to survive the disturbance. It illustrates four main processes that can allow a coral reef to survive: protection, resistance, tolerance and resilience. Protection Oceanographic and other environmental factors that create pockets of reduced or non-stressful conditions where ecosystems are protected from disturbances (Salm et al, 2001). A coral reef can be protected against increased SSTs or light levels and therefore against bleaching by local upwelling, fast water flow, shading and screening. Resistance The ability of an organism or ecosystem to withstand disturbance without undergoing a phase shift or losing neither structure nor function (Odum, 1989). For example a coral reef’s ability to withstand bleaching and mortality. Coral morphology, different zooxanthellae clades and coral acclimatisation can all influence a coral reef's resistance to bleaching. Tolerance The ability of an organism to absorb a disturbance and not suffer mortality (Obura, 2006). For example, a coral’s ability to bleach, and then recover its zooxanthellae to become healthy again. Resilience The ability of a system to absorb or recover from disturbance and change, while maintaining its functions and services (Adapted from Carpenter et al, 2001). For example a coral reef’s ability to recover from a bleaching event. Factors that can improve a coral reef's resilience to a mass bleaching event include good species and functional diversity, good connectivity to larval sources, appropriate substrates for larval settlement and protection from other anthropogenic impacts.
AT: Global Warming (Oceans Scenario)
New data proves- oceans cooling.
Young 11- 21 (2k8)(Gregory, Dr. Gregory Young is a neuroscientist and physicist, a doctoral graduate of the University of Oxford, Oxford, England. He is currently involved with a privately funded think-tank engaged in experimental biophysical research., “Global Warming? Bring it On!”, )
(3) As recently presented in American Thinker, Lord Monckton competently summarizes for us that many of the highly publicized AGW "facts" are simple documented anomalies of natural climate cycling -- designedly misrepresented for the cause of AGW.
To wit: The Oceans are not catastrophically rising nor are they warming. In fact, the oceans have been cooling since 2003. The Snows of Kilimanjaro are not melting but ablating because of friction due to a cooling atmosphere and natural cooling trends. The world's 160,000 glaciers are not suddenly receding, but appear to be re-advancing, including those ice shelves in Antarctic and the polar ice sheets, all of which cycle regularly in ice mass. Lord Monckton, a science-journalist, provides even more evidence here.
AT: Global Warming Causes Wars
No link between warming and war.
Tol & Wagner ’08 [Richard & Sebastian, Economic & social Research Institute for Coastal Research, Jan 15, “Climate Change and Violent Conflict in Europe over the Last Millennium,” ]
In this paper, we study the relationship between climate change and violent conflict over the past millennium in Europe. Our results do not show a clear-cut picture: We present some evidence that abnormally cold periods were abnormally violent, as do Zhang et al. (2006). However, we also show that this evidence is not particularly robust. If one has strong priors that climate change causes conflict, our results provide confirmation. However, if one has strong priors that there is no link, our results do not overthrow such doubt. If anything, cold implies violence, and this effect is much weaker in the modern world than it was in mediaeval times. This implies that future global warming is not likely to lead to (civil) war between (within) European countries. Should anyone ever seriously have believed that, this paper does put that idea to rest.
Many examples disprove the warming results in conflict.
Salehyan ’07 [Idean, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UNT, “The New Myth About Climate Change: Corrupt, tyrannical governments-not changes in the Earth’s climate-will be to blame for the coming resource wars,” ]
First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and changing environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several studies have shown that an abundance of natural resources is more likely to contribute to conflict. Moreover, even as the planet has warmed, the number of civil wars and insurgencies has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala University and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between 1989 and 2002, some 100 armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. If global warming causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward trend. Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in Darfur, why have scores of environmental catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the U.N. World Food Programme warns that 5 million people in Malawi have been experiencing chronic food shortages for several years. But famine-wracked Malawi has yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed hundreds of thousands of people, generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe shortages of shelter, food, clean water, and electricity. Yet the tsunami, one of the most extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to an outbreak of resource wars. Clearly then, there is much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural disasters.
AT: Greek-Turkish Conflict
1. Greece-Turkey conflict won’t escalate to war.
Stephen Mann, Lieutenant, US Navy, 2001. [US Navy War College, ?view&doc=36621&coll=public]
The basic issues in the Aegean and Cyprus have yet to be resolved, but relations between Turkey and Greece have improved, especially in the last year. Infrequent eventssuch as the Imial Kardak crisis still show the escalatory nature of their relationship, but atthe same time it is clear that both sides will almost certainly always stop short of the act of war; the risks are too great, the potential rewards to little, and the outcomes toouncertain. Both governments have some common sense in this regard and they must nowuse that common sense to move toward resolution of the overall problem. How to movetoward that resolution is the question; many possibilities exist but some options andconsiderations, discussed in the next chapter, seem more likely to work than others.
2. Greece-Turkey relations are better than ever.
F. Stephen Larrabee, Ph.D., Distinguished Chair in European Security at RAND, 2010. [RAND, Troubled Partnership U.S.-Turkish Relations in an Era of Global Geopolitical Change, pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG899.pdf]
However, since 1999, relations between Greece and Turkey have significantly improved.14 Today, bilateral relations are better than they have been since the Atatürk-Venizelos era in the 1930s. Trade has increased visibly, as have tourism and people-to-people exchanges. Energy cooperation has also intensified, bolstered by the opening of a $300-million gas pipeline that creates an energy corridor connecting the rich natural-gas fields in the Caucasus with Europe. The improvement in Greek-Turkish relations has been facilitated by a significant shift in Greek policy toward Turkey’s membership in the EU. For years, Greece sought to block Turkish membership in the EU in an effort to force changes in Turkish behavior favorable to Greek interests. Since 1999, however, Greece has become one of the strongest advocates of Turkey’s EU membership. Today, Athens sees a “Europeanized” Turkey as strongly in its own interest. From the Greek perspective, the more Turkey conforms with European norms and standards of international behavior, the better Greek-Turkish relations are likely to be.
3. No war-Greece needs Turkish gas pipelines
Reuters, June 2010 [UPDATE 1-Turkey, Italy and Greece sign MOU for gas pipeline, Reuters Africa]
Turkey's state natural gas company Botas signed a memorandum of understanding on Thursday for a pipeline connecting Turkey with Greece and Italy. The project, to be built along with Italy's Edison and Greek state natural gas company Depa, should be completed by 2017, Turkey's Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said. Yildiz said it surplus gas Turkey imports from Azerbaijan will probably be piped to Greece and Italy.He declined to give details on the estimated cost of the Italy-Turkey-Greece Inter-connector (ITGI) pipeline. The ITGI project is considered a possible threat to the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline project which is targeting access to the same Azeri Shah Deniz gas for its planned start-up phase.
AT: Grid Terror
1. Even if terrorists attack the US grid, the system could easily overcome the attack
Eben Kaplan Council on Foreign Relations 2007. [Associate Editor. “America’s Vulnerable Energy Grid.” Council on Foreign Relations. April 24, 2007. americas_ vulnerable_energy_ grid.html]
Attacks on infrastructure are an almost daily fact of life in Iraq. Experts caution the war in that country will produce a whole generation of terrorists who have honed their skills sabotaging infrastructure. In his recent book, The Edge of Disaster, CFR security expert Stephen E. Flynn cautions, “The terrorist skills acquired are being catalogued and shared in Internet chat rooms.” But when it comes to Iraq’s electrical grid, RAND economist Keith W. Crane says terrorists are not the main cause of disruptions: “Most of the destruction of the control equipment was looting,” he says. Either way, Clark W. Gellings, vice president of the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry research organization, thinks the U.S. grid is an unlikely target. “It’s not terribly sensational,” he explains, “The system could overcome an attack in hours, or at worst, days.” That said, attacks on electricity infrastructure could become common in future warfare: The U.S. military has designed and entire class of weapons designed to disable power grids.
2 2. Homeland Security programs are minimizing the risk of power grid attacks
CNN 2007 [ Sources: Staged cyber attack reveals vulnerability in power grid September 26, 2007]
The White House was briefed on the experiment, and DHS officials said they have since been working with the electric industry to devise a way to thwart such an attack. "I can't say it [the vulnerability] has been eliminated. But I can say a lot of risk has been taken off the table," said Robert Jamison, acting undersecretary of DHS's National Protection and Programs Directorate. Government sources said changes are being made to both computer software and physical hardware to protect power generating equipment. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it is conducting inspections to ensure all nuclear plants have made the fix.
Ext #1: No Impact
Terrorist attacks on the grid will have limited impact – studies prove
Detlof von Winterfeldt, 2004, Professor and Director, Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, [“New Terrorist Study Analyzes Attacks on Portws and Power Grids,” , August 9 2007]
A dirty bomb attack in the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex would result in serious economic and psychological consequences, and could produce tens to hundreds of latent cancers. But if terrorists caused a blackout in Los Angeles County, various forms of resilience would give electricity customers the ability to lower the potential damage to their businesses. These are the findings of two new studies by scientists affiliated with the University of Southern California Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events
Terrorist attacks won’t have a major impact on electricity reliability – redundant transmission and generation reserves
Michaels, 8 – Adjunct Scholar at CATO and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute (Robert J., Electricity Journal, “A National Renewable Portfolio Standard: Politically Correct, Economically Suspect,” April 2008, vol. 21, no. 3, Lexis-Nexis Academic) // JMP
National security and "energy independence." There are few if any important relationships between renewables and energy security for the nation. Security centers on oil, but only 2 percent of the nation's power comes from it and some oil-fired plants can also burn gas. Interruptions of conventional fuel supplies are rare and usually local, but intermittent renewables have their own reliability risks. Some advocates see a national RPS as deterring terrorist attacks on large power plants, but there are surely cheaper ways to achieve this end.59 Security is better addressed directly by facility owners and government formulating a national policy on infrastructure. Electricity requires redundant transmission and generation reserves to maintain reliability, whether outages are caused by lightning or bombs. The destruction of an isolated wind farm achieves less than that of a large generator, but in most scenarios the loss of either will have little effect on reliability.
Redundancies in the grid solve for disruptions due to terrorism
Washington Post, 4 (Justin Blum, “Bandaged Grid Still Vulnerable - 2003 Blackout Shed Light on Weaknesses, But Power System Fixes Fall Short of Need ,” 8-10-2004, p. E01, ) // SM
Homeland security officials also worry that electricity could be disrupted by terrorism. Industry executives said that they have taken precautions and are working with the government. They said that the electrical grid has redundancies that should minimize serious disruptions in the event of an attack on a power plant or transmission line. In April, a joint U.S.-Canadian task force concluded that the power grid needed to be more closely regulated. A task force report focused blame on FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron, Ohio, whose major transmission lines tripped, causing the failure of the grid. The report said that "unsafe conditions" that day resulted from violations of the voluntary guidelines by FirstEnergy, one of the nation's largest utilities. The task force concluded that FirstEnergy, which recently agreed to pay $89.9 million to settle shareholder lawsuits partly related to the blackout, should have cut power to some of its customers to prevent the blackout from spreading but failed to do so. The company also failed to trim trees near power lines.
The terrorist risk to the grid is negligible and could be fixed quickly
Kaplan, 7 – Associated Editor at the Council of Foreign Relations (Eben, “America’s Vulnerable Energy Grid,” 4-27-2007, ) // SM
Attacks on infrastructure are an almost daily fact of life in Iraq. Experts caution the war in that country will produce a whole generation of terrorists who have honed their skills sabotaging infrastructure. In his recent book, The Edge of Disaster, CFR security expert Stephen E. Flynn cautions, “The terrorist skills acquired are being catalogued and shared in Internet chat rooms.” But when it comes to Iraq’s electrical grid, RAND economist Keith W. Crane says terrorists are not the main cause of disruptions: “Most of the destruction of the control equipment was looting,” he says.
Either way, Clark W. Gellings, vice president of the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry research organization, thinks the U.S. grid is an unlikely target. “It’s not terribly sensational,” he explains, “The system could overcome an attack in hours, or at worst, days.” That said, attacks on electricity infrastructure could become common in future warfare: The U.S. military has designed and entire class of weapons designed to disable power grids.
Ext #2 – Solving Now
1 The government has programs to protect the energy grid from Terrorists
Charles Trabandt, Capitol Hill Hearing Testimony, FDCH, 10-10-01
In the area of infrastructure and transmission grid security, the Congress, the Administration and industry have responded in quick order to the heightened threat of terrorism. The Subcommittee provided leadership with the hearing on September 20th with Administration witnesses and related activities. The Department of Energy was scheduled to make legislative recommendations on security on October 9th with immediate Committee mark-up of emergency legislation in the Senate this week. NERC has been in a readiness state of high alert and an EEI task force has been working with NERC, NEI, other energy trade groups and DOE on enhanced security measures. All of these initiatives, and undoubtedly many more in the context of homeland defense, will parallel the preparations for Desert Storm a decade ago. Government and industry worked in close cooperation then to ensure adequate protection of our vital energy sector. And, I 'm confident that today's efforts ultimately will be just as successful in the face of the new terrorist threat.
AT: Grid Terror (EMP)
1. The Threat of an EMP attack is conservative media hype and Iran Bashing – even the US military doesn’t have the capability yet
The Raw Story July 14, 2008 (David Edwards and Muriel Kane, “Fox: Terrorist nukes could ‘fry every electronic gizmo civilization needs to survive’”, Danger_of_electromagneti c_pulse _terrorism_0714.html)
Fox News has found a fresh terrorism threat to be panicked about -- the menace of electromagnetic pulses (EMP). "There is a new terror study out ... warning the US of a clear and present danger on a massive scale," anchor Bill Hemmer began. The question of whether EMP poses a threat to the United States has been a matter of debate since the 1990's. In 2001, the House Armed Services Committee established a Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack. The Commission released its initial report in 2004, concluding that a nuclear-generated EMP "has the potential to hold our society seriously at risk." The House Armed Service Committee held an update hearing last week with testimony by the chairman of the EMP Commission. Conservative Paul Weyrich also recently drew attention to that 2004 report, writing, "The conclusions of this study are the most frightening I have seen concerning modern-day threats. Few have heard of it because the report has yet to be made public. ... When the American people realize as much, the outrage will be palpable." However, other experts have downplayed the technological feasibility of an EMP attack and point to the fact that most of those appointed to the Commission had close ties to the defense industry. Fox News turned for insight on the EMP threat to former White House terrorism director R.P. Eddy, who currently heads the Center for Policing Terrorism. Eddy warned that "a nuclear explosion or another weapon that releases a wave of electrons ... will fry every electronic gizmo or tool that civilization needs to survive. ... Not only would the power grid be out ... but every piece of electronics that we use, from pacemakers to phones to cars." "Major civilizations, major nations have built electromagnetic pulse weapons," Eddy asserted, "but they're not that complicated to make, and it's likely that terrorists could actually make some of the weapons." Despite Eddy's claim, a recent article in the Register suggests that even the Pentagon has not yet successfully developed an electropulse weapon. However, aerial nuclear explosions do remain a credible means of achieving the same result, and Fox displayed a graphic showing that a nuclear burst 300 miles over Kansas could take out all of the United States. “Countries like Iran or North Korea could use some of their nuclear weapons to create an electromagnetic pulse," Eddy proposed. "It's very hard to defend against a missile." He added that the US military has been attentive to hardening its own electronics for decades, but "it doesn't mean that civilization in this country is paying attention to it." "You can use a nuclear weapon, and you don't have to have as accurate or as long-range a missile to deliver it," Eddy concluded, suggesting that Iran might shoot a nuclear-tipped Scud missile at the United States from a barge anchored off the coast. Right-wing sources have been trying for years to tie Iran to the threat of EMP attacks, particularly after it was reported in 2005 that Iran had been testing mid-air explosions of its ballistic missiles. At that time, the conservative website World Net Daily claimed, "Iran is not only covertly developing nuclear weapons, it is already testing ballistic missiles specifically designed to destroy America's technical infrastructure, effectively neutralizing the world's lone superpower, say U.S. intelligence sources, top scientists and western missile industry experts."
2. Our grid has been hardened - it will mitigate an EMP attack.
Defense News July 10 2008 (William Matthews, “Little Congressional Interest in EMP Threat”, )
There is "a high likelihood" than an EMP attack would damage the "electrical power systems, electronics and information systems upon which American society depends." The effect "on critical infrastructures could be sufficient to qualify as catastrophic to the nation," Graham said. But disaster need not occur. Large-scale, long-term disastrous consequences can be limited if the U.S. government and critical industries would spend three to five years and billions of dollars hardening power grids and electronic equipment to withstand large electromagnetic pulses, he said.
AT: Grid Terror (Alaskan Pipeline)
1. Pipeline operators have responded to the terrorist threat and have increased security and cooperation
Paul Parfomak 2004 Specialist in Science and Technology Resources at CRS [“Pipeline Security: An Overview of Federal Activities and Current Policy Issues.” CRS Report for Congress. February 5, 2004. sgp/ crs/RL31990.pdf]
While their security programs traditionally tended to focus on personnel safety and preventing vandalism, some have been more comprehensive. For example, security at the trans- Alaska pipeline during the Gulf War included measures such as armed guards, controlled access, intrusion detection and dedicated communications at key facilities, as well as aerial and ground surveillance of the pipeline corridor.41 However, the events of September 11, 2001 focused attention on the vulnerability of pipelines to different terrorist threats. In particular, the terrorist attacks raised the possibility of systematic attacks on pipelines by sophisticated terror groups in a manner that had not been widely anticipated before. After the September 11 attacks, natural gas pipeline operators immediately increased security and began identifying additional ways to deal with terrorist threats. Gas pipeline operators, for example, through the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA), formed a security task force to coordinate and oversee the industry’s security efforts. The INGAA states that it ensured that every member company designated a senior manager to be responsible for security. Working with DOT, the Department of Energy (DOE), and non-member pipeline operators, the INGAA states that it assessed industry security programs and began developing common risk-based practices for incident deterrence, preparation, detection and recovery. These assessments addressed issues such as spare parts exchange, critical parts inventory systems, and security communications with emergency agencies, among other matters. The INGAA also worked with federal agencies, including the OPS and Homeland Security, to develop a common government threat notification system.42
2. TSA pipeline security measures are working now
Paul Parfomak 2004 Specialist in Science and Technology Resources at CRS [“Pipeline Security: An Overview of Federal Activities and Current Policy Issues.” CRS Report for Congress. February 5, 2004. sgp/crs/ RL31990.pdf]
TSA’s Pipeline Branch is implementing its plans with respect to pipeline security inspections, standards development, and critical asset analysis. According to TSA, the agency expects pipeline operators to maintain security plans based on the OPS/industry consensus security guidance circulated in 2002 and subsequent revisions.61 In 2003 the agency visited 24 of the largest 25-30 pipeline operators to review their security plans and inspect their facilities. The agency plans to complete the remaining large operator inspections by April 2004, and then begin inspections of major gas distribution systems. During the reviews, TSA evaluates whether each company has followed the intent of the OPS/industry security guidance, and seeks to collect the list of assets each company has identified meeting the criteria established for critical facilities. According to TSA, nearly all operators visited by the agency have met the minimum security guidelines, and some have gone “way beyond” the minimum requirements. All but two of the 24 operators have provided TSA with copies of their security plans and system maps, as well as critical infrastructure information. The two operators declining to provide this information did not believe they had adequate assurances the information would be protected from public disclosure. The OPS joined TSA on approximately one-third of its operator inspections in 2003.62 TSA seeks the OPS’ participation in these reviews, but does not require it.63
3. Even if the pipeline is vulnerable, terrorists will not attack it because it can be repaired easily.
USA Today ’06 (Mary Pemberton, “Official: Alaska pipeline not that vulnerable”, February 12, news/nation/2006-02-12-pipeline-threats_x.htm)
While the pipeline would be easy to blow up, it is not an attractive target for terrorists, said Henry Lee, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. The center focuses on international security. Lee said terrorists blow up pipelines more as an irritant, pointing to a pipeline in Colombia blown up more than 100 times by rebels. "Pipelines can be blown up, and they are fairly easy to blow up," Lee said. "The day they did it, it would get headlines in all the papers. The problem is you would have it fixed in a matter of days." Chris Kendall, a petroleum geologist at the University of South Carolina who is an expert on the impact of war on oil supplies, described the pipeline as a "soft boundary" target. "Of course it is vulnerable," he said.
Ext #2 – Pipeline Safe
The Alaskan pipeline is safe – it is well supervised, easy to fix and hard to get near with weapons
USA Today ’06 (Mary Pemberton, “Official: Alaska pipeline not that vulnerable”, February 12, .usatoday .com/news/nation/2006-02-12-pipeline-threats_x.htm)
ANCHORAGE — The trans-Alaska pipeline looks like it would be an easy target for terrorists intent on destroying a valuable American asset, but those responsible for its safekeeping say looks can be deceiving. The 800-mile pipeline — which carries nearly 17% of domestic crude oil production — snakes north to south across Alaska, from the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez, where tankers are loaded for delivery to West Coast refineries. About half of the 48-inch diameter pipeline lies underground. The other half is visible — a huge silver cylinder that parallels two Alaska highways and sits nearly in the backyards of some Fairbanks homes. The Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the company that operates the pipeline, even has a visitors center outside Fairbanks where tens of thousands of people have gone to get an upclose look at the pipeline. "You can walk right under it," said Alyeska spokesman Mike Heatwole. Terrorism experts say pipelines in general are easy targets, but tend to be low priority because they can be repaired so quickly. And officials with an intimate knowledge of the pipeline say it's far less vulnerable than it appears — in part because of the difficulty a saboteur would have getting any weapon capable of serious damage into Alaska. The pipeline has state, federal and local agencies keeping an eye on it, said John Madden, deputy director of the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. When Madden was asked what would keep someone from, say, firing a shoulder-mounted rocket at the pipeline, he cited the difficulty of getting such a weapon near the pipeline. "The very act of a shoulder-fired weapon suggests transport of that weapon," he said. Agencies including customs, immigration, border control and state troopers, work to make sure that such a weapon would never make it into Alaska, he said. "There are quite a bit of those layers of defense and observation which the public will never see," Madden said.
The pipeline is safe – Alaska is too cold for terrorists
USA Today ’06 (Mary Pemberton, “Official: Alaska pipeline not that vulnerable”, February 12, )
However, the pipeline's isolation in Alaska probably works to its advantage, Kendall said. Terrorists need a certain amount of "internal synergy" to be effective, he said. "They need each other socially," Kendall said. He doubted terrorists had that much interest in Alaska. "Fortunately these idiots, the nihilists, are preoccupied with other focuses. They're probably running away from people in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They are preoccupied with surviving and fighting in Iraq," Kendall said.
AT: Grid Terror (Cyber Terror)
1 1. Minimal risk of cyber attacks on the power grid – government and industry protections and there has never been a successful attack on the grid
CNN 2007 [ Sources: Staged cyber attack reveals vulnerability in power grid September 26, 2007]
Despite all the warnings and worry, there has not been any publicly known successful cyber-attack against a power plant's control system. And electric utilities have paid more attention to electronic risks than many other industries, adopting voluntary cyber-standards. "Of all our industries, there are only a couple -- perhaps banking and finance and telecommunications -- that have better cyber-security or better security in general then electric power," Borg said. And DHS notes that it uncovered the vulnerability discovered in March, and is taking steps with industry to address it. While acknowledging some vulnerability, DHS's Jamison said "several conditions have to be in place. ... You first have to gain access to that individual control system. [It] has to be a control system that is vulnerable to this type of attack." "You have to have overcome or have not enacted basic security protocols that are inherent on many of those systems. And you have to have some basic understanding of what you're doing. How the control system works and what, how the equipment works in order to do damage. But it is, it is a concern we take seriously." "It is a serious concern. But I want to point out that there is no threat, there is no indication that anybody is trying to take advantage of this individual vulnerability," Jamison said. Borg notes that industry will have to remain forever vigilant at protecting control systems.
2. FERC is addressing the Cyber security of utilities
Washington Post 2008. [“Hackers Have Attacked Foreign Utilities, CIA Analyst Says.” January 19, Page A04. 01/18/AR2008011803277.html]
On Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved eight cybersecurity standards for electric utilities. They involve identity controls, training, security "perimeters," physical security of critical cyber equipment, incident reporting and recovery. The U.S. electricity grid has always been vulnerable to outages. "Cybersecurity is a different kind of threat, however," Joseph T. Kelliher, the commission's chairman, said in a statement this week. "This threat is a conscious threat posed by a single hacker, or even an organized group that may be deliberately trying to disrupt the grid."
AT: Ground Forces (Land Army Heg)
1. Man power is not important in the military
Jack Spencer is Senior Policy Analyst for Defense and National Security in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation. August 1, 2003 (“Reducing Stress on an Overstretched Force” )
While U.S. forces are not adequate to sustain the current rate of deployment, simply adding manpower is not necessarily the answer. Clearly, the U.S. needs more capabilities. However, while adding manpower may seem like the quickest way to fill the capabilities gap, it is not the best way to solve the problem. People are expensive The most effective weapons in the U.S. armed forces are soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. They are also, understandably, the most expensive. Only about a third of the defense budget is spent on developing and buying weapons. Most of the rest goes to personnel and operational costs. Maintaining personnel beyond the number needed to fulfill U.S. national security requirements takes resources away from important efforts such as modernization and transformation. The result can be inappropriate deployments A perceived excess of manpower tempts political leaders to deploy forces on operations that have little or nothing to do with U.S. national security. After the Cold War, this perception arguably contributed to heavy U.S. involvement in peacekeeping efforts in places like Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans. It is not the only measure of capability Although manpower end-strength is important, it does not by itself determine capabilities. For example, a force trained and equipped for the Cold War, regardless of size, would be inappropriate for the war on terrorism. Similarly, a military unit using old technology may not be as capable as a unit half its size using new technology. Structuring the force to reflect modern national security requirements accurately is more important than investing resources in outdated and wasteful organizations.
2. The military must downsize to meet contemporary threats
Charles V. Pena, a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, February 9, 2006, Science Direct
The defense budget can be reduced and the U.S. military downsized because (1) the nation-state threat environment is markedly different than it was during the Cold War, and (2) a large military is not necessary to combat the terrorist threat. In fact, the Islamist terrorist threat is relatively undeterred by the U.S. military presence abroad, and U.S. forces abroad, particularly those deployed in Muslim countries, may do more to exacerbate than to diminish the threat. The arduous task of dismantling and degrading the terrorist network will largely be the task of unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation, not the application of large-scale military force. To the extent the military is involved in the war on terror, it will be special forces in discrete operations against specific targets rather than large-scale military operations.
3. Current Threats make a large military useless
Charles V. Pena, a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, February 9, 2006, Science Direct
The United States is in a uniquely safe geostrategic position against traditional, nation-state threats. No nearby foreign power is capable of projecting power to attack the United States, while the U.S. nuclear arsenal is a powerful deterrent against any countries with long-range nuclear capability. So the United States does not need a large, conventional military to defend the homeland against nation-states. Today, the major threat to the homeland comes from transnational networks of Islamist terrorists, and in the war on terror, large-scale military operations will be the exception rather than the rule. Al Qaeda does not command a military force, and as a transnational terrorist organization, it does not have physical infrastructure and high-value targets that can be easily identified and destroyed by military force.
The military's role in the war on terror mainly involves Special Operations Forces in discrete missions against specific targets, not conventional warfare aimed at overthrowing entire regimes (such as Operation Iraqi Freedom). The rest of the war to dismantle and degrade Al Qaeda will largely be the task of unprecedented international intelligence and law enforcement cooperation. Therefore, an increasingly large defense budget—the Department of Defense projects the budget to grow to more than Image 492 billion by fiscal year 20101—is not necessary either to fight the war on terror or to protect America from traditional nation-state military threats.
AT: Hegemony
1. Heg is unsustainable for many reasons; be skeptical about their authors, who blindly assume heg is sustainable
Pape, 9 (Robert A., Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, “Empire Falls,” 1/22/09, )
AMERICA IS in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq War, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back at the Bush administration years as the death knell for American hegemony. Since the cold war, the United States has maintained a vast array of overseas commitments, seeking to ensure peace and stability not just in its own neighborhood—the Americas—but also in Europe and Asia, along with the oil-rich Persian Gulf (as well as other parts of the world). Simply maintaining these commitments requires enormous resources, but in recent years American leaders have pursued far more ambitious goals than merely maintaining the status quo. The Bush administration has not just continued America’s traditional grand strategy, but pursued ambitious objectives in all three major regions at the same time—waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, seeking to denuclearize North Korea and expanding America’s military allies in Europe up to the borders of Russia itself. For nearly two decades, those convinced of U.S. dominance in the international system have encouraged American policy makers to act unilaterally and seize almost any opportunity to advance American interests no matter the costs to others, virtually discounting the possibility that Germany, France, Russia, China and other major powers could seriously oppose American military power. From public intellectuals like Charles Krauthammer and Niall Ferguson to neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan, even to academicians like Dartmouth’s William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks, all believe the principal feature of the post-cold-war world is the unchallengeable dominance of American power. The United States is not just the sole superpower in the unipolar-dominance school’s world, but is so relatively more powerful than any other country that it can reshape the international order according to American interests. This is simply no longer realistic.
2. Empirically, heg doesn’t solve conflict
Hachigan and Sutphen 2008 (Nina and Monica, Stanford Center for International Security, The Next American Century, p. 168-9)
In practice, the strategy of primacy failed to deliver. While the fact of being the world’s only superpower has substantial benefits, a national security strategy based on suing and ratiaing primacy has not made America more secure. America’s military might has not been the answer to terrorism, disease, climate change, or proliferation. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea have become more dangerous in the last seven years, not less. Worse than being ineffective with transnational threats and smaller powers, a strategy of maintaining primacy is counterproductive when it comes to pivotal powers. If America makes primacy the main goal of its national security strategy, then why shouldn’t the pivotal powers do the same? A goal of primacy signals that sheer strength is most critical to security. American cannot trumpet its desire to dominate the world military and then question why China is modernizing its military.
3. Burden sharing solves conflicts best – deterrence
Posen, Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 07
(Barry R., “The Case for Restraint,” )
The United States must also develop a more measured view of the risks of nuclear proliferation. Without the promiscuous use of preventive war, it will not be possible to stop all possible new nuclear weapons programs. Nuclear weapons are no longer mysterious, but neither are they easy to get. It is costly and technically difficult to produce fissionable material in quantities sufficient for nuclear weapons, and only a few countries can do it. It has taken a good bit of time for those smaller states who wished to develop nuclear weapons to get them. Though an imperfect regime, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency do provide obstacles to the development of nuclear weapons, and some early warning that mischief is afoot. Good intelligence work can provide more warning, and well-crafted intelligence operations could presumably slow the diffusion of nuclear know-how, and even the progress of national nuclear programs, if need be. It is worthwhile to keep proliferation relatively costly and slow because other states require time to adapt to such events, and extra time would be useful to explain to new nuclear powers the rules of the game they are entering. U.S. policymakers feel compelled to trumpet that all options, including force, are on the table when dealing with “rogue” state proliferators. True enough: The United States is a great military power and on vital security matters its forces can never be off the table. But preventive war must never become either a casual or a default policy choice. It has serious and probably enduring political costs, which the United States need not incur. Deterrence is still a better strategy. The United States is a great nuclear power and should remain so. Against possible new nuclear powers such as North Korea or Iran, U.S. capabilities are superior in every way. In contrast to the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, where neither country would have survived a nuclear exchange, it is clear which nation would survive such an exchange between the United States and North Korea or Iran. Indeed, these states should be made to worry that they will be vulnerable to preemptive nuclear attacks by the United States in the unhappy event that they attempt to make nuclear threats over important issues. Similarly, new nuclear states ought not to be encouraged through loose talk to believe that they can give nuclear weapons to others to use on the United States and somehow free themselves of the risks of U.S. retaliation. Clear deterrent statements and strong nuclear forces are preferable to preventive war, because deterrence is both a more credible and more sustainable policy.
AT: Honeybees
Honeybees are not key to survival
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE 5-2-2007 ()
The scientist who wrote the paper, Stefan Kimmel, e-mailed The Associated Press to say that there is "no link between our tiny little study and the CCD-phenomenon ... anything else said or written is a lie." And U.S. Department of Agriculture top bee researcher Jeff Pettis laughs at the idea, because whenever he goes out to investigate dead bees, he cannot get a signal on his cell phone because the hives are in such remote areas. Also on the Internet is a quote attributed to Albert Einstein on how humans would die off in four years if not for honeybees. It is wrong on two counts. First, Einstein probably never said it, according to Alice Calaprice, author of "The Quotable Einstein" and five other books on the physicist. "I've never come across it in anything Einstein has written," Calaprice said. "It could be that someone had made it up and put Einstein's name on it." Second, it is incorrect scientifically, Pettis said. There would be food left for humans because some food is wind-pollinated.
No impact to honeybee dieoff
SMITH 2007 (Heather, Slate, July 13, )
But is CCD such a tragedy? The honeybee may be the only insect ever extended charismatic megafauna status, but it's already gone from the wild (and it wasn't even native to North America to begin with). Sure, it makes honey, but we already get most of that from overseas. What about the $14.6 billion in "free labor"? It's more expensive than ever: In the last three years, the cost to rent a hive during the California almond bloom has tripled, from $50 to $150. Good thing the honeybee isn't the only insect that can pollinate our crops. In the last decade, research labs have gotten serious about cultivating other insects for mass pollination. They aren't at the point yet where they can provide all of the country's pollination needs, but they're getting there. This year the California Almond Board two-timed the honeybee with Osmia lignaria—the blue-orchard bee: Despite CCD, they had a record harvest.*
Impact is empirically denied—massive dieoffs have occurred in past
OLDROYD 2007 (Dr. Benjamin P. Oldroyd is with the Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Biological Sciences, University of Sydney, PLoS Biology, June, )
Some winter losses are normal, and because the proportion of colonies dying varies enormously from year to year, it is difficult to say when a crisis is occurring and when losses are part of the normal continuum. What is clear is that about one year in ten, apiarists suffer unusually heavy colony losses. This has been going on for a long time. In Ireland, there was a “great mortality of bees” in 950, and again in 992 and 1443 [3]. One of the most famous events was in the spring of 1906, when most beekeepers on the Isle of Wight (United Kingdom) lost all of their colonies [4]. American beekeepers also suffer heavy losses periodically. In 1903, in the Cache valley of Utah, 2000 colonies were lost to a mysterious “disappearing disease” following a “hard winter and cold spring” [5]. More recently, there was an incident in 1995 in which Pennsylvania beekeepers lost 53% of colonies [6].
No single factor is key—alt causes exist
GERBER 2007 (Richard, On Health Blog, March 23, )
The unusual phenomenon was first noticed by eastern beekeepers starting last fall. Researchers, including some connected with the Penn State University College of Agricultural Sciences, have identified some of the possible contributors, but have not yet found a single cause. Initial studies on bee colonies experiencing the die-offs have revealed a large number of disease organisms, with most being “stress-related” diseases but without any one agent as the culprit. Climate chaos and extreme weather seem to be a major factor. It is hard to tell if wild honey bee populations have been affected by the CCD disorder because Varroa mites have “pretty much decimated the wild honey bee population over the past years,” said Maryann Frazier of The Pennsylvania State University Department of Entomology. “This has become a highly significant, yet poorly understood problem that threatens the pollination industry and the production of commercial honey in the United States… Because the number of managed honeybee colonies is less than half of what it was 25 years ago, states such as Pennsylvania can ill afford these heavy losses.” Dennis van Engelsdorp, acting state apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture said “Every day, you hear of another operator, It’s just causing so much death so quickly that it’s startling.” Lee Miller, director of the Beaver County extension office, said the deaths appear to be stress-related, but that stress could come from several sources. Dennis van Engelsdorp of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture said that initial studies found a large number of disease organisms present, with no one disease being identified as the culprit. And while studies and surveys have found a few common management factors among beekeepers with affected hives, no common environmental agents or chemicals have been identified.
AT: Hunger
1. U.S. Agriculture at record harvests
Charles Abbott, Fri Jul 10, 2009 10:11pm IST , UPDATE 2-U.S. growing record soybean crop, No 2 corn – USDA, )
WASHINGTON, July 10 (Reuters) - U.S. farmers will harvest their largest soybean crop and the second-largest corn crop ever, averting a potential supply squeeze while also leading to softer prices for the commodities, the government said on Friday.The U.S. Agriculture Department said corn farmers face "sharply lower summer price prospects." Good weather and boosted plantings bode for a bumper crop. Crop prices will return to "more normal" levels after last summer's problems in the world's top corn and soy producer helped drive prices to record highs, said Gerald Bange, chairman of the USDA's World Agriculture Outlook Board."The crop conditions are really not bad in most of the places where we're looking," Bange said on USDA's radio service.The government boosted its corn crop forecast to 12.29 billion bushels, the second largest on record due to the second-largest plantings since 1946.New-crop December corn futures CZ9 at the Chicago Board of Trade dropped 3 percent to $3.30 per bushel on Friday, pressured after the USDA said stocks were larger than traders had expected."The old-crop ending stocks (for corn) ballooned up here," said Don Roose, analyst at U.S. Commodities. "In the end, the government took the very conservative road and left the yields unchanged on corn and soybeans."Soybeans SX9 were down 2 percent to $8.96 per bushel and wheat futures WU9 also dropped. Overall, USDA monthly crop data for corn, soybeans and wheat came in near expectations. In its monthly update, USDA projected a soybean crop of 3.26 billion bushels, the largest on record. It would replenish a stockpile forecast to shrink to 110 million bushels, the smallest in three decades and less than a two-week supply." We were looking for a bearish report and we got it," said Jack Scoville, vice president at Price Futures Group. "The soybeans are probably a bit negative and the wheat production was at, or just above, trade expectations." The wheat crop was estimated at 2.112 billion bushels, including 1.53 billion bushels of winter wheat, 81.2 million bushels of durum and 506 million bushels of other spring wheat. U.S. crop prices soared to record levels since 2006 but will moderate in the 2009/10 marketing year, USDA said. It projected an average farm-gate wheat price of $5.30 a bushel, corn $3.75 a bushel and soybeans $9.30 a bushel. By comparison, the farm-gate price for 2008's crops are estimated at a record $6.78 for wheat, $4.05 for corn and $10 for soybeans. USDA lowered its forecast of corn used to make ethanol for this marketing year by 100 million bushels, to 3.65 billion bushels, due to lower U.S. fuel use. (Editing by Marguerita Choy.
2. Hunger being solved for now
Whitney Winer, student participant, "Hunger and Obesity in the United States" August 11, 2005,
Hunger, on the other hand, has only one sole cause, which is poverty. A person who lives in poverty cannot acquire adequate housing, medical, or meet daily needs. Many parents who do not make enough money for food skip meals, so their own children can eat. On average, children living in poverty receive one meal a day. Hunger in the United States will be solved. Millions of jobs are being created for unemployed people every year, giving them hope that one day they will be able to feed their families and live a life without hunger.
3. Turn – Nuclear war would eliminate the global food supply
Carl Sagan, Director of the Laboratory for planetary studies at Cornell University. 84, Winter. Foreign Affairs. “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe”
The immediate human consequences of nuclear explosions range from vaporization of populations near the hypocenter, to blast-generated trauma (from flying glass, falling beams, collapsing skyscrapers and the like), to burns, radiation sickness, shock and severe psychiatric disorders. But our concern here is with longer-term effects. It is now a commonplace that in the burning of modern tall buildings, more people succumb to toxic gases than to fire. Ignition of many varieties of building materials, insulation and fabrics generates large amounts of such pyrotoxins, including carbon monoxide, cyanides, vinyl chlorides, oxides of nitrogen, ozone, dioxins, and furans. Because of differing practices in the use of such synthetics, the burning of cities in North America and Western Europe will probably generate more pyrotoxins than cities in the Soviet Union, and cities with substantial recent construction more than older, unreconstructed cities. In nuclear war scenarios in which a great many cities are burning, a significant pyrotoxin smog might persist for months. The magnitude of this danger is unknown. The pyrotoxins, low light levels, radioactive fallout, subsequent ultraviolet light, and especially the cold are together likely to destroy almost all of Northern Hemisphere agriculture, even for the more modest Cases 11 and 14. A 12° to 15°C temperature reduction by itself would eliminate wheat and corn production in the United States, even if all civil systems and agricultural technology were intact.' With unavoidable societal disruption, and with the other environmental stresses just mentioned, even a 3,000-megaton "pure" counterforce attack (Case 11) might suffice. Realistically, many fires would be set even in such an attack (see below), and a 3,000-megaton war is likely to wipe out U.S. grain production. This would represent by itself an unprecedented global catastrophe: North American grain is the principal reliable source of export food on the planet, as well as an essential component of U.S. prosperity. Wars just before harvesting of grain and other staples would be incrementally worse than wars after harvesting. For many scenarios, the effects will extend (see Figure 2) into two or more growing seasons. Widespread fires and subsequent runoff of topsoil are among the many additional deleterious consequences extending for years after the war. Something like three-quarters of the U.S. population lives in or near cities. lin the cities themselves there is, on average, only about one week's supply of food. After a nuclear war it is conceivable that enough of present grain storage might survive to maintain, on some level, the present population for more than a year. But with the breakdown of civil order and transportation systems in the cold, the dark and the fallout, these stores would become largely inaccessible. Vast numbers of survivors would soon starve to death.
Ext #3 – War ( Hunger
War causes hunger
Hughes 09’
Scott Hughes, “ The inherent link between war and hunger”. World Hunger and Poverty. Online.6/17/09. . 7/20/09
Sure, those who want to end world hunger also happen to often want to end war. Sure, sympathetic activists sympathize with both causes - the fight against hunger and the fight for peace. However, the reason war and hunger are linked is not just that these two movements happen to be motivated by similar sympathy. There is also an inherent link that conflates both war and hunger into an irreducibly complex problem. Although in the abstract these two problems - war and hunger - may seem like separate humanitarian issues, in practice they are just opposite sides of the same two-faced monster. As if the devastation of war wasn’t enough, social stratification also causes poverty & hunger. The world has enough resources to feed, clothe, house, and employ the entire world. The problem isn’t caused by a lack of resources, but rather by social inequality - the powerful few using war to hoard the wealth, so they can plate their bathtubs gold while children die of starvation.
AT: Human Rights
1. Burma and Sudan erode human rights credibility
Joshua Muravchik June 29, 2009 “The Abandonment of Democracy”
Many human rights activists have been shocked at the administration's apparent willingness to consider easing sanctions on Burma and Sudan. The Obama presidential campaign was scornful of Bush's handling of the killings in Sudan's Darfur region, which Bush labeled as genocide, but since taking office, the administration has been caught flat-footed by Sudan's recent ousting of international humanitarian organizations. While it is hard to see any diplomatic benefit in soft-pedaling human rights in Burma and Sudan, neither has Obama anything to gain politically by easing up on regimes that are reviled by Americans from Left to Right. Even so ardent an admirer of the President as columnist E. J. Dionne, the first to discern an "Obama Doctrine" in foreign policy, confesses to "qualms" about "the relatively short shrift" this doctrine "has so far given to concerns over human rights and democracy."
2. Individual policies don’t influence credibility
Fettweis 7 [Christopher J., assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, “Credibility and the War on Terror”, Political Science Quarterly, Winter 2007/2008. Vol. 122, Iss. 4;, p. Proquest]
A series of other studies have followed those of Hopf and Mercer, yielding similar results. The empirical record seems to suggest that there have been few instances of a setback in one arena influencing state behavior in a second arena.42 Daryl Press began his recent study expecting to find that perceptions of the opponent's credibility would be an important variable affecting state behavior.43 He chose three cases in which reputation would presumably have been vital to the outcome-the outbreak of the First World War, the Berlin Crisis of the late 1950s, and the Cuban Missile Crisis-and found, to his surprise, that in all three cases, leaders did not appear to be influenced at all by prior actions of their rivals, for better or for worse. Crisis behavior appeared to be entirely independent; credibility, therefore, was all but irrelevant. Mercer's conclusions about reputation seem to have amassed a good deal more supporting evidence in the time since he wrote.
3. Human rights won’t spread worldwide.
Anthony Pagden, Apr. 2003 (Professor at UCLA and Oxford, “Human Rights, Natural Rights and Europe’s Imperial Legacy”, Sage Publications Inc. AR)
In 1947, the Saudi Arabian delegation to the committee drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protested that the committee had "for the most part taken into consideration only the standards recognized by Western civilization," and that it was not its task "to proclaim the superiority of one civilization over all others or to establish uniform standards for all the coun- tries of the world." Since then similar complaints have become commonplace. The widespread Islamic objection to the concept of "human rights" has been joined by appeals on the part of Asian despots, and in particular Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, for the recognition of the existence of a specific set of "Asian Values" which supposedly places the good of the community over those of individuals. The concept of "human rights" has also been denounced from within the Western, predominantly liberal, academic establishment as overly dependent upon a narrow, largely French, British, and American, rights tradition. Until very recently, and still in some Utramontane quarters, the Catholic Church has also been a source of fierce opposition to what it saw as the triumph of lay individualism over the values of the Christian community. What all of these criticisms have in common is their clear recognition of—and objection to—the fact that "rights" are cultural artefacts masquerading as universal, immutable values. For whatever else they may be, rights are the creation of a specific legal tradition-that of ancient Rome, and in particular that of the great Roman jurists from the second to the sixth centuries, although both the concept and the culture from which it emerged were already well established by the early Republic. There is no autonomous conception of rights outside this culture. This may be obvious. But whereas those who are critical of the idea take it to be the self-evident refutation of the possibility of any kind of universal or natural human entitlement, champions of rights, in particular of "human rights," tend to pass over the history of the concept in silence. In his famous article on natural rights H. A. L. Hart argued that there may be codes of conduct termed moral codes... which do not employ the notion of a right, and there is nothing contradictory or otherwise absurd in a code or morality consisting wholly of prescriptions or in a code which prescribed only what should be done for the realization of happiness or some ideal of personal perfection. As Hart pointed out, neither Plato nor Aristotle, nor indeed any other Greek author uses a term which could be rendered as "right," as distinct from "justice," and most Greek law, and jurisprudence belonged to the category of prescriptive codes about how to achieve the highest good. When Hart wrote his article in 1955 he added that such codes would be properly described as "imperfect."5 Many modem commentators, in the wake of decades of discussions of cultural and moral pluralism, might shy away from even that. Yet the attempt to avoid the evident culturally-specific nature of the entire enterprise of defining rights has all too often resulted in surrender to the notion that the creation of one specific culture-particularly as that is also a powerful Western one-must necessarily be invalid for all other cultures, something which, if taken seriously, would deprive us of any means of establishing agreed modes of conduct between differing peoples. It is undeniable that, at present, the "international community" derives its values from a version of a liberal consensus which is, in essence, a secularized transvaluation of the Christian ethic, at least as it applies to the concept of rights.
AT: Hurricanes Kill Economy
1. Economy resilient to Gulf hurricanes—oil companies are prepared for storms and safety procedures prevent oil spills.
IHS Media Center, 6/4/2008. Leading global source of critical information and insight for customers in a broad range of industries. “IHS: Despite 2005 Hurricane Damage in Gulf of Mexico, Average Annual Hurricane Disruptions to Production are Modest,” .
HOUSTON, TX (June 4, 2008) – As the hurricane season begins, IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS) said today that the average impact on oil and gas production from hurricanes over a 45-year period is relatively modest and its impact on supply is typically short-lived. IHS came to this conclusion after analyzing production data spanning 1960 to 2005 to better understand the overall impact of hurricanes on Gulf of Mexico production. “Based on our IHS production data from 1960 through 2005, which includes record levels of damage from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and significant hurricane impact from four other hurricanes in the last decade, an average Gulf of Mexico hurricane season would likely disrupt only 1.4 percent of the annual oil production and 1.3 percent of the annual gas production,” said Steve Trammel, a senior product manager at IHS. “While Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were an exception, historically, our data shows the overall impact to be much less than most people might expect.” Trammel said this historically low impact on production is primarily attributable to industry planning. “The oil and gas companies are very focused on the safety of their personnel,” he said. “Operators make the decision to pull crews off rigs well before a storm moves into the Gulf. Therefore, most disruptions to production are caused by suspension of operations as a safety precaution in the event that an approaching hurricane does threaten offshore production. As a result, average hurricane disruptions are short-lived with full production re-established within a month.” When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, they combined to impart record damage to offshore Gulf of Mexico oil and gas production and facilities, which helped push oil and gas prices to record levels by January 2006 and increased fears about oil and gas supply shortages. Following the two storms in 2005, The U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) reported that 3,050 or 75 percent of the platforms, 22,000 miles or 67 percent of the pipelines, and about two-thirds of the region’s refineries were in the path of the storms. By mid-December 2005, IHS data showed that cumulative shut-in oil was 101.7 million barrels, 18.5 percent of yearly Gulf oil production, and shut-in natural gas production was 526.2 billion cubic feet, 14.4 percent of yearly Gulf natural gas production. Trammel added that the last decade recorded six major hurricanes (including Katrina and Rita) that caused significant production curtailments in the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the production from hurricanes Opal (1995), Georges (1998) and Lili (2002) was restored within a month, he said, although Hurricane Ivan (2004), disrupted 471 million barrels of oil production and 140 billion cubic feet of gas production. According to a May 22, 2008 press release issued by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, the outlook for the 2008 hurricane center calls for considerable hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin, with a “90 percent chance of an above-normal season in the Atlantic Basin this year.” The Center’s outlook calls for a potential of 60-70 percent chance of 12-16 named storms, including six to nine hurricanes and two to five major hurricanes (category 3, 4 or 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale). The Center defines an average season as yielding 11 named storms, including six hurricanes and two major storms. Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 storm, achieved 175 mph winds before it dropped to Category 3 and struck Louisiana on August 29, 2005, making it the most destructive storm to ever strike the U.S. in terms of economic impact. Hurricane Rita struck the Texas coast on September 24, 2005 as a Category 3 storm having achieved sustained winds of 180 mph. In response to the increase in major hurricanes striking the Gulf of Mexico in recent years, Trammel said the petroleum industry has improved evacuation plans, and shut-in and restart procedures to ensure safety and to mitigate leaks and production loss. “Within economic limits,” he said, “offshore structures are being engineered to withstand Category 5 hurricanes. In addition, the MMS has mandated new design specs for offshore facilities and has issued a series of Notices to Lessees and Operators, called NTLs, for rig fitness requirements, platform tie-downs and ocean current monitoring, which are all tied to hurricane season.”
2. Empirically denied – Katrina should have caused their impacts
3. Overall impact to hurricanes is neutral.
CBO, 9/7/2005. Congressional Budgetary Office. “Overall economic impact of hurricane close to neutral,” Copy of a Letter Sent from the CBO to Bill Frist, Mongabay, .
Summary: The CBO projects 400,000 people will be unemployed due to Hurricane Katrina. Further, the hurricane is unlikely to have much impact on overall economic growth in the United States. Generally, the overall impact of natural disasters is often close to neutral since lost output from destruction and displacement is then compensated for by a big increase in reconstruction and public spending. The government may spend as much as $200 billion in the aftermath of the most costly hurricane in U.S. history.
AT: Ice Age
1. No uniqueness – no impending ice age now.
Thompson ’08 [Andrea, Live Science, Jun 12, “Could Waning Sunspots Bring On New Ice Age?” ]
No impending ice age
Though there is debate about how and whether the Maunder minimum actually caused the Little Ice Age, scientists have proposed a few hypotheses as to how it could have done so. One idea springs from the fact that the sun emits much more ultraviolet radiation when it is covered in sunspots, which can affect the chemistry of Earth's atmosphere. The other is that when the sun is active, it produces tangled magnetic fields that keep out galactic cosmic rays. Some scientists have proposed that a lack of sunspots means these cosmic rays are bombarding Earth and creating clouds, which can help cool the planet's surface. But these ideas aren't yet proven, and anyway, the sun's contribution is small compared to volcanoes, El Niño and greenhouse gases, Hathaway notes. Even if there were another Maunder minimum, he says, we would still suffer the effects of greenhouse gases and the Earth's climate would remain warm. "It doesn't overpower them at all," Hathaway said.
2. The next ice age won’t cause extinction.
Snook ’07 [Jim, Geologist, Ice Age: Cause and Human Consequences, p. 172]
The next glacial breakup phase will be very had on living things because of a major decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide and lower precipitation. However, I suspect that the next breakup phase will not cause the extinction of many animal genera like the last one did, for several reasons. With all of the fossil fuels burned, there will be an increase of carbon dioxide in the ocean-atmosphere system. Many compensating mechanism that will affect the carbon dioxide in the system include deposition of carbonates in shallow seas and utilization by ocean plants. In addition, we do not know how much carbon dioxide will be added to the system by volcanism. Glacial cycles after the next one are too remote for us to make any viable predictions. We do not know if there will be another great extinction with the same cause as the one that occurred near the end of the last ice age, but it is a possibility.
AT: Imperialism
1. The U.S. mischaracterized as an empire—reciprocal economic partnerships and democratic agreements are the norm.
Ikenberry, 04. Professor of Geopolitics. G. John Ikenberry. “Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004.
Is the United States an empire? If so, Ferguson's liberal empire is a more persuasive portrait than is Johnson's military empire. But ultimately, the notion of empire is misleading -- and misses the distinctive aspects of the global political order that has developed around U.S. power. The United States has pursued imperial policies, especially toward weak countries in the periphery. But U.S. relations with Europe, Japan, China, and Russia cannot be described as imperial, even when "neo" or "liberal" modifies the term. The advanced democracies operate within a "security community" in which the use or threat of force is unthinkable. Their economies are deeply interwoven. Together, they form a political order built on bargains, diffuse reciprocity, and an array of intergovernmental institutions and ad hoc working relationships. This is not empire; it is a U.S.-led democratic political order that has no name or historical antecedent.To be sure, the neoconservatives in Washington have trumpeted their own imperial vision: an era of global rule organized around the bold unilateral exercise of military power, gradual disentanglement from the constraints of multilateralism, and an aggressive effort to spread freedom and democracy. But this vision is founded on illusions of U.S. power. It fails to appreciate the role of cooperation and rules in the exercise and preservation of such power. Its pursuit would strip the United States of its legitimacy as the preeminent global power and severely compromise the authority that flows from such legitimacy. Ultimately, the neoconservatives are silent on the full range of global challenges and opportunities that face the United States. And as Ferguson notes, the American public has no desire to run colonies or manage a global empire. Thus, there are limits on American imperial pretensions even in a unipolar era. Ultimately, the empire debate misses the most important international development of recent years: the long peace among great powers, which some scholars argue marks the end of great-power war. Capitalism, democracy, and nuclear weapons all help explain this peace. But so too does the unique way in which the United States has gone about the business of building an international order. The United States' success stems from the creation and extension of international institutions that have limited and legitimated U.S. power.
2. Hegemony doesn’t equate to empire—other nations can choose to disengage from US security guarantees.
Ikenberry, 04. Professor of Geopolitics. G. John Ikenberry. “Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004.
Johnson also offers little beyond passing mention about the societies presumed to be under Washington's thumb. Domination and exploitation are, of course, not always self-evident. Military pacts and security partnerships are clearly part of the structure of U.S. global power, and they often reinforce fragile and corrupt governments in order to project U.S. influence. But countries can also use security ties with the United States to their own advantage. Japan may be a subordinate security partner, but the U.S.-Japan alliance also allows Tokyo to forgo a costly buildup of military capacity that would destabilize East Asia. Moreover, countries do have other options: they can, and often do, escape U.S. domination simply by asking the United States to leave. The Philippines did so, and South Korea may be next. The variety and complexity of U.S. security ties with other states makes Johnson's simplistic view of military hegemony misleading.
3. Global pluralism makes empire impossible—the US has influence but not the control they describe
Zelikow, 03 “Transformation of National Security” Philip Zelikow. Professor of History and Public Affairs, University of Virginia. National Interest, Summer 2003, pg. 18-10 Lexis).
But these imperial metaphors, of whatever provenance, do not enrich our understanding; they impoverish it. They use a metaphor of how to rule others when the problem is how to persuade and lead them. Real imperial power is sovereign power. Sovereigns rule, and a ruler is not just the most powerful among diverse interest groups. Sovereignty means a direct monopoly control over the organization and use of armed might. It means direct control over the administration of justice and the definition thereof. It means control over what is bought and sold, the terms of trade and the permission to trade, to the limit of the ruler's desires and capacities. In the modern, pluralistic world of the 21st century, the United States does not have anything like such direct authority over other countries, nor does it seek it. Even its informal influence in the political economy of neighboring Mexico, for instance, is far more modest than, say, the influence the British could exert over Argentina a hundred years ago. The purveyors of imperial metaphors suffer from a lack of imagination, and more, from a lack of appreciation for the new conditions under which we now live. It is easier in many respects to communicate images in a cybernetic world, so that a very powerful United States does exert a range of influences that is quite striking. But this does not negate the proliferating pluralism of global society, nor does it suggest a will to imperial power in Washington. The proliferation of loose empire metaphors thus distorts into banal nonsense the only precise meaning of the term imperialism that we have. The United States is central in world politics today, not omnipotent. Nor is the U.S. Federal government organized in such a fashion that would allow it to wield durable imperial power around the world-it has trouble enough fashioning coherent policies within the fifty United States. Rather than exhibiting a confident will to power, we instinctively tend, as David Brooks has put it, to "enter every conflict with the might of a muscleman and the mentality of a wimp." We must speak of American power and of responsible ways to wield it; let us stop talking of American empire, for there is and there will be no such thing.
AT: Indian Economy
Indian economy resilient – flexible and resilient to shocks and good advisors
Suman Berry (director general, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER)) 2008: Indian economy more resilient than its peers.
Terming the global financial crisis as unprecedented in scale and complexity, Suman Berry, director general, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), said despite openness, the Indian economy is far more resilient since it allows for rapid adjustment. He exuberates confidence in the way the team of experienced policy makers is handling the situation. In an exclusive chat with noted economist Ila Patnaik, Berry talks about the global economic crisis, Raghuram Rajan Committee report and financial sector reforms.
NDTV: The US economy entered a recession in December 2007, as a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research said. The latest export figures from India have shown a sudden sharp decline. Do you think the Indian economy has the resilience to weather crisis?
Berry: What is unprecedented is the pace of deteriorating global economy. This kind of development at national level is also unprecedented. As former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Bimal Jalan said, “God does look after India” which is because we once again have a very experience team be it the PM, outgoing FM, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman, to take care of economy. The Indian economy has been through ups and downs at various stages and it has survived very well. But what is remarkable about India is that we seem somehow to emerge as a much more resilient economy post liberalisation.
AT: India Iran Conflict
No conflict – Inida sees Iran as a stepping stone to global aspirations, especially against Pakistan, and Iran sees India as a shield against the rest of the world.
C. Christine Fair (senior research associate at the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the Unites States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.) 2007: India and Iran: New Delhi’s Balancing Act. 07summer_fair-1.pdf.
Despite episodically coming under pressure for its ties with Tehran, India sees broad relations with Iran, not just on energy agreements, as supporting its growing global aspirations. India wants to be seen by others as an emerging global power having security interests apart from its intractable security competition with Pakistan. Keeping with its extraregional interests, New Delhi has promulgated a “look east” policy to develop and sustain a multifaceted presence in Central Asia, setting up air bases in Tajikistan and expanding its footprint in Iran and Afghanistan. India eyes Central Asia as an important element of its efforts to diversify its energy needs. Moreover, it wants to expand its presence in this prized geography to deny Pakistan its much-sought strategic depth. Iran offers India a unique asset that is fundamental to New Delhi’s power projection aspirations: geographical proximity and access to these various countries.
Apart from India’s aspirations, bilateral ties between the two are moored by an expansive set of shared interests and objectives. First, both states are uncomfortable with a unipolar world – a euphemism for U.S. predominance – and with the role that the United States has played and will likely continue to play in the Middle East, particularly its military interventions in Iraq and possibly Iran. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukkherjee, during high-level meetings in Tehran in February 2007, reiterated New Delhi’s position that the nuclear impasse cannot be resolved through military means and demands “dialogue, howsoever strenuous it may be.”
No conflict – Inida needs energy from Iran, and Iran needs a new market
C. Christine Fair (senior research associate at the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the Unites States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.) 2007: India and Iran: New Delhi’s Balancing Act. 07summer_fair-1.pdf.
Iran and India have an explicit interest in advancing commercial and energy ties. With the world’s third-largest reserve of oil and second-largest proven reserve of gas, Iran is anxious to get its hydrocarbons out of the ground and into new markets, while energy-starved India wants access to those resources. Despite this confluence of interests, however, progress on the energy relationship has been slow, with Iranian crude oil accounting for a mere 7.5 percent of India’s total crude imports.
AT: Indian Space Race
India has no capabilities to develop space technology. No risk of escalation.
Chellaney 7 (Brahma. "India's Vulnerability Bared." Japan Times. February 9, )KM
Before it can think of developing a counter-capability to shield itself from an ASAT menace, it will have to deal with two obtrusive mismatches that hobble its deterrence promise. The first mismatch is between its satellite and launch capabilities. Greater operational capability necessitates large satellites. While India has first-rate satellite-manufacturing expertise, it still needs a foreign commercial launcher like the Ariane 5 of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company to place its INSAT-4 series satellites in geostationary orbit. The second mismatch is in the military realm -- between the technical sophistication to build nuclear warheads and the extent to which they can be delivered reliably by missiles. Nearly a decade after it went overtly nuclear and almost a quarter-century after the missile program launch, India still lacks the full reach against China. The thermonuclear warhead India tested with a controlled yield in 1998 still awaits a delivery vehicle of the right payload range.
India lacks infrastructure, funding, and planning to implement any space programs.
Asia Times 8 ("India goes to war in space.". June 18, )KM
India's expression of its intentions to set up an aerospace command and its announcement of the Integrated Space Cell has raised concern in some quarters that India is entering the arms race in space. Such fears might be premature, given that the Integrated Space Cell is at a very rudimentary stage. "India is just putting in place a very minimal budget initiative that will take several years to develop," argued Prabhakar. "Besides satellites in space, India's space architecture of offensive and defensive systems are yet to be conceived, built and deployed," said Prabhakar, pointing to the different kinds of satellites, space-based laser systems, space stations and ground-based laser stations for offensive space operations that the "space superpowers" - the United States, Russia and China - have.
India doesn’t have rudimentary defense capabilities – space is a long way away.
Asia Times 8 ("India goes to war in space.". June 18, )KM
In the event of their satellites being knocked out by enemy action during a crisis, the US, Russia and China have the capability to launch substitute satellites into space at short notice. The US can move its satellites from one orbit level to another, higher level to escape being taken out by an enemy anti-satellite system (ASAT). India can program a satellite launch only on a programmed sequence basis and not on short notice for rapid launches to replenish lost satellites, Prabhakar said. "India doesn't have even preliminary capability to defend its satellites," he said, adding "it will take another 15 to 20 years or more before India can put these systems in place." For all its impressive achievements in building and launching satellites, India is decades away from establishing a fully-operational aerospace command. It has formidable capability in building satellites. It is now trying to find a way to defend them.
AT: Indonesian Instability
1. Indonesia no longer weak enough to collapse – new army chief, better economy, fewer regional conflicts, and lower corruption
Jusuf Wanandi (founder and member of the board of trustees of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (Indonesia)) 2002: Indonesia: A Failed State? .
In the last two months, the government has begun attending to some of the priorities mentioned above, slightly stabilizing Indonesia’s weak state. In April 2002, Megawati proposed a new commander in chief for the military, former chief of staff of the army General Endriartono Sutarto. He is professionally inclined and able to unite the armed forces, which are still divided and demoralized five years after the fall of Suharto. If Sutarto is successful, the government will be able to push the military to do its job once more and support the police against insurgencies, without worrying too much that the military could again cause mischief. The economy has also improved recently, as the government slowly implements reforms. In part, increases in domestic consumption and in the price of oil have driven growth. Despite more than two years of political resistance, the BCA Bank, the biggest asset of the IBRA (Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency), was sold, exemplifying the government’s promising decisiveness. The Indonesian currency, the rupiah, has strengthened by 10– 12 percent; economic growth is expected to be nearly 4 percent; and unemployment appears to have decreased. Exports are also expected to rise in the second half of 2002 as the U.S. and European Union economies recover. In the meantime, regional conflicts have subsided. The Poso conflict in Central Sulawesi has basically ended, and the agreement negotiated by Jusuf Kalla (coordinating minister for people’s welfare) is working. The situation in the Moluccas Islands conflict has improved, although not completely ended due to implementation problems, namely how to remove the Laskar Jihad and some army and police members from the islands. The conflict in Aceh has entered a negotiating mode again and is moving in the right direction. At this stage, 60 percent of the Aceh people are considered to be pro- Indonesia, as opposed to two years ago when 90 percent were considered to be pro-independence. Megawati has even established an ad hoc human rights tribunal to prosecute the abusers of human rights in East Timor during the time of the referendum in 1999. Officials are making progress in the fight against corruption. The attorney general’s office has again brought more serious accusations against Tommy Suharto, the son of President Suharto, for masterminding the killing of a Supreme Court judge in 2000. Authorities have detained some shady businessmen, who have not made any serious attempts to pay their debt, for interrogation and prosecutorial purposes. Even high-ranking officials such as the governor of the Central Bank, Syahril Sabirin, who was sentenced to three years in prison, have been tried in court, while officials detained the speaker of Parliament, Akbar Tandjung, for interrogation in a corruption case.
2. Impact is empirically denied – the Aceh rebellion should have caused the impacts
Jusuf Wanandi (founder and member of the board of trustees of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (Indonesia)) 2002: Indonesia: A Failed State? .
Regional conflicts are the most visible sign of the breakdown of the central government’s authority, and no clear strategy to overcome these problems seems to exist. One has a sense of drift. The political elite knows only one way to solve conflicts: by force, a method used many times. Yet, force has never been completely successful; simply repeating tried tactics will not solve these problems. The most debilitating conflict is in the province of Aceh, where three rebellions have occurred in the last 20 years. The government is still looking for a military victory even though it could not solve the problem through force even at the height of its military might in the early 1990s. The government had subdued the rebellion twice by military means, but the conflict resurfaced after several years. At the same time, 10,000 people, many of them innocent civilians, have become victims; hundreds of thousands have become internal refugees. The problem began when the Acehnese felt the Suharto regime had neglected and marginalized them and they exhibited their defiance. Because Golkar, the government’s party, had never won a majority in Aceh, the government marginalized the province. Military abuses were so horrendous that the situation turned into a full-fledged rebellion. The Acehnese now demand, first and foremost, judicial condemnation for the perpetrators of human rights violations, especially those conducted at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. They also demand a fairer share of the revenues from their abundant natural resources.
AT: Indo-Pak War
1. War between India and Pakistan is unlikely, although tensions may last for a few months
Zhongfa, staff writer for China View, 1/12/09
(Li Zhongfa, staff writer for China View, 1/12/09, )
The tensions between Pakistan and India might last for another three or four months until the general elections held in India, a Pakistani analyst said on Monday, adding that there is very little possibility of war.
"Perhaps the tensions will continue for the next three or four months until the elections are held in India," said Khalid Rahman, Director General of Islamabad based Institute of Policy Studies, in an interview with Xinhua.
Before India's general elections in May, political parties in India will take a hard stance against Pakistan to win popularity at home, said Rahman.
Pakistan-India tensions were heightened as the Indian side accused Pakistan-based militant groups of involvement in November's Mumbai attacks, which killed more than 170. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said last week that "official agencies" in Pakistan were also involved in the Mumbai attacks. But Islamabad has denied the allegations.
Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said Sunday that it would respond to a dossier of evidence from India in the next few days.
The spiraling tensions between the two nuclear-armed countries have sparked speculations among the media that India might carry out surgical strikes inside Pakistan.
Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said on Sunday that Pakistan's defense is in strong hands and the nation will not be frightened by any threats.
"That is just a war of words... there is very little possibility of war between the two countries," said Rahman.
"The two countries can not afford a war" because they both have nuclear weapons, Rahman said. Rahman also said the international community, particularly the United States, don't want a war or conflict between the two countries.
2. Indo-Pak nuclear conflict unlikely.
The Michigan Daily ’02 (“Experts say nuclear war still unlikely,” )
University political science Prof. Ashutosh Varshney becomes animated when asked about the likelihood of nuclear war between India and Pakistan. "Odds are close to zero," Varshney said forcefully, standing up to pace a little bit in his office. "The assumption that India and Pakistan cannot manage their nuclear arsenals as well as the U.S.S.R. and U.S. or Russia and China concedes less to the intellect of leaders in both India and Pakistan than would be warranted." The world"s two youngest nuclear powers first tested weapons in 1998, sparking fear of subcontinental nuclear war a fear Varshney finds ridiculous. "The decision makers are aware of what nuclear weapons are, even if the masses are not," he said. "Watching the evening news, CNN, I think they have vastly overstated the threat of nuclear war," political science Prof. Paul Huth said. Varshney added that there are numerous factors working against the possibility of nuclear war. "India is committed to a no-first-strike policy," Varshney said. "It is virtually impossible for Pakistan to go for a first strike, because the retaliation would be gravely dangerous." Political science Prof. Kenneth Lieberthal, a former special assistant to President Clinton at the National Security Council, agreed. "Usually a country that is in the position that Pakistan is in would not shift to a level that would ensure their total destruction," Lieberthal said, making note of India"s considerably larger nuclear arsenal. "American intervention is another reason not to expect nuclear war," Varshney said. "If anything has happened since September 11, it is that the command control system has strengthened. The trigger is in very safe hands." But the low probability of nuclear war does not mean tensions between the two countries who have fought three wars since they were created in 1947 will not erupt. "The possibility of conventional war between the two is higher. Both sides are looking for ways out of the current tension," Lieberthal said.
3. India-Pakistan nuclear war doesn’t escalate
The Hamilton Spectator, 5/24/2002
For those who do not live in the subcontinent, the most important fact is that the damage would be largely confined to the region. The Cold War is over, the strategic understandings that once tied India and Pakistan to the rival alliance systems have all been cancelled, and no outside powers would be drawn into the fighting. The detonation of a hundred or so relatively small nuclear weapons over India and Pakistan would not cause grave harm to the wider world from fallout. People over 40 have already lived through a period when the great powers conducted hundreds of nuclear tests in the atmosphere, and they are mostly still here.
AT: Industrial Agricutlure
Impossible to solve industrial agriculture.
Stuart Staniford, 1/22/2008. Stuart Staniford is a consultant (Invicta Consulting) who earned a PhD in Physics (UC Davis) with an MS in Computer Science (UC Davis) and lead editor of The Oil Drum. “The Fallacy of Reversibility,” The Oil Drum, .
This implies that the process of industrialization and development is a reversible process. We in the developed world have evolved from low-energy high-agriculture societies into a high-energy low-agriculture society. So the thinking goes that we can/should/will reverse that process and go back to something like what we were 200 years ago (at least on these large macro-economic variables). Now, coming from a background as a scientist, there are many reversible processes familiar in science (and indeed in everyday life), but there are also a lot of irreversible processes. Some examples of reversible processes - if you lift up a weight, you can set it back down again into the same position it was in before. If you blow up a balloon, then, up to a certain point, you can let the air out and get back more or less the uninflated balloon you had before you started. If you pump water from a lower reservoir to a higher reservoir, you can let it down again, and the lower reservoir will be in little different condition than if you hadn't bothered. If you freeze a liquid by cooling it, you can warm it up again and have the same liquid. Here are some examples of irreversible processes. If you let grape juice ferment into wine, there's no way to get grape juice back. If you bake a cake in the oven, there's no way to turn it back into cake dough. If you ice and decorate the cake, but then accidentally drop it on the floor, there's no way to pick it up and have anything approaching the same cake as if you hadn't dropped it. So when you industrialize a society, is that a reversible process? Can you take it on a backward path to a deindustrialized society that looks in the important ways like the society you had before the industrialization? As far as I can see, the "second wave" peak oil writers treat it as fairly obvious that this is both possible and desirable. It appears to me that it is neither possible or desirable, but at a minimum, someone arguing for it should seriously address the question. And it is this failure that I am calling the Fallacy of Reversibility. It is most pronounced in Kunstler, who in addition to believing we need a much higher level of involvement in agriculture also wants railways, canals, and sailing ships back, and is a strong proponent of nineteenth century urban forms. I am going to christen this general faction of the peak oil community reversalists. This encompasses people advocating a return to earlier food growing or distribution practices (the local food movement), folks wanting to bring back the railways and tramcars, people believing that large scale corporations will all collapse, that the Internet will fail and we need to "make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers." And before moving on, I stress that I'm not making an argument that our time is in all ways better than earlier times and that nostalgia for the past is entirely misplaced. Nor am I making an argument that peak oil does not pose a massive and important challenge to us. Instead, I'm making an argument that society is unlikely to reverse its trajectory of development, regardless of what we might like. Calls for it to do so are a distraction and get in the way of figuring out what we really need to be doing, and what the real options and dangers are.
AT: Iran Attacks Israel
Iranian threats to destroy Israel are ideological bluster.
Ted Galen Carpenter 2007 “Toward a Grand Bargain with Iran” MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY
Such a comment is certainly reprehensible, but does it negate the long-standing realities of deterrence? Israel has between 150 and 300 nuclear weapons of its own. Even if Iran can go forward with its nuclear program, it will not be able to build more than a dozen or so weapons over the next decade—even assuming that the most alarmist predictions of the current state of the program prove valid. Moreover, Israel is moving to expand its submarine fleet to have at least one nuclear-armed submarine on station at all times, giving the country a secure second-strike capability.15 Once that process is complete, Tehran could not hope to launch a "decapitation" sneak attack based on the (already remote) possibility that Israel would be unable to retaliate. As in the case of contemplating an attack on the United States, it would be most unwise for Iran to contemplate attacking Israel. The same realities of deterrence apply, albeit on a smaller scale. In all likelihood, Iranian rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map is merely ideological blather. Israel has more than a sufficient capability to deter an Iranian nuclear attack.
Iran will not attack Israel – fear of retaliation is too strong.
Barry R. Posen 2006 “A Nuclear-Armed Iran: A Difficult but Not Impossible Policy Problem” CENTURY FOUNDATION
A few fission weapons would horribly damage the state of Israel, and a few fusion weapons would surely destroy it. But neither kind of attack could reliably shield Iran from a devastating response. Israel has had years to work on developing and shielding its nuclear deterrent. It is generally attributed with as many as 200 fission warheads, deliverable by several different methods, including Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile.12 Were Iran to proceed with a weapons program, Israel would surely improve its own capabilities. Though Iran’s population is large, and much of it is dispersed, about a quarter of Iranians (over fifteen million people) live in eight cities conservatively within range of Israel’s Jericho II missile.13 Much of Iran’s economic capacity is also concentrated in these cities.14 Nuclear attacks on these cities, plus some oil industry targets, would destroy Iran as a functioning society and prevent its recovery. There is little in the behavior of the leaders of revolutionary Iran that suggests they would see this as a good trade.
Iran won’t attack Israel with nuclear weapons – would be vulnerable to U.S. retaliation.
Barry R. Posen 2006 “A Nuclear-Armed Iran: A Difficult but Not Impossible Policy Problem” CENTURY FOUNDATION
On the other hand, it is virtually impossible for Iran to achieve a first-strike capability versus the United States. Any risks that Iran took in its basing mode and alert posture to get ready for a first strike against Israel could easily make it more vulnerable to a first strike from the United States. Spending its nuclear forces on Israel would leave Iran politically and militarily vulnerable to a huge U.S. retaliation. By striking first, it would have legitimated a U.S. nuclear attack, while simultaneously weakening its own deterrent with the weapons it had expended. The United States is the greater threat to Iran because it is much more powerful than Israel, and has actual strategic objectives in the Gulf. It is strategically reasonable for Iran to focus its deterrent energies on the United States, which it can only influence with a secure retaliatory force, capable of threatening U.S. forces and interests in the region.
AT: Iran Blocks Strait of Hormuz
Iran would not and could not block the Straits of Hormuz: Empirical examples and allies prove
Fattouh 07
(Bassam, Consultant Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, specialist in the international oil pricing system, “How Secure are Middle East Oil Supplies?”, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, September)
Many believe that the narrowness of shipping lanes and the difficulty of oil tankers to manoeuvre make the Straits of Hormuz vulnerable to politically-motivated disruptions. However, history suggests otherwise. In 1983, the Iranians threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz following the delivery of French planes to Iraq. In a radio announcement, Hashimi Rafsanjani (the Speaker of the Parliament) threatened that Iran would block the Straits of Hormuz by sinking a VLCC at the mouth of the Persian Gulf (El-Shazly, 1998). In what was known as the Iraq–Iran ‘Tanker War’, there were 554 attacks on oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz which resulted in the deaths of 400 sailors and the wounding of 400 more. These attacks did not result in a full blockage of transit. Even when the fight was at its most intense, it disrupted no more than 2% of ships passing through the Persian Gulf (Blair and Lieberthal, 2007). In the current confrontations between the US and Iran on Iran’s nuclear program, threats to block the straits of Hormuz are again being made. In 2006, the Iranian deputy Basij commander, General Majid Mir Ahmadi, threatened to block oil traffic if the West hurt Iran’s economy over its nuclear program. It is, however, very difficult to envisage a scenario in which the Straits of Hormuz would be blocked for a long period of time. Blocking the Straits of Hormuz would defy international conventions and would increase Iran’s isolation. The closure of this oil transit route would alienate Iran’s allies in Asia and elsewhere as the adverse impacts of the blockade would spread across the globe. In other words, the use of this ‘weapon’ is completely indiscriminate and if Iran attempted to block international shipping, it would face a very wide and powerful coalition.
AT: Iran – Central Asian Expansion
Iran can’t expand into Central Asia, there are differences in Islamic ideology
Amland – US Army Colonel 4/7/03 (George S., USMC, United States Army War College “GLOBALIZATION AND US FOREIGN POLICY WITH IRAN” ) MFR
On the northern borders of Iran, a different form of economic globalization is affecting US containment policy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US took immediate steps to recognize the independence of all the former Central Asian Republics. By mid-1992 all 5 new states received US diplomatic missions and in October 1992 the US Congress had passed the Freedom Support Act to provide aid to the new Eurasian states. Ostensibly the US also admitted to the dangers the region faced from Iranian sponsored fundamentalism and was determined not to let the opportunity of exerting regional influence pass by.73 An interesting phenomenon of this northern Iranian geo-strategic region is that while the adjoining states are predominantly Muslim, the long term secular Russian presence has made their form of religious ideology incompatible with that of Iran.74 Across central Asia, a parallel form of Islam existed during the Soviet domination. Sufi orders established a pervasive form of Islam that is founded on private piety and not in political activism.75 Iran erroneously assumed that with the fall of the Soviet Union it would fill the void with a more fundamentalist and revolutionary Islamic presence in order to consolidate its position in the Caspian region. Fortunately for US policy, the years of Marxist ideology and Russian technocracy appears to have irretrievably altered the religious complexion of regional Muslims.76 The best that Iran can hope for in the future is some form of economic cooperation with its northern neighbors.77 An interesting political irony also has evolved throughout this process. Despite the overwhelming Islamic prominence in this region, the acceleration of the integration of Central Asia into the global economy is strongly supported by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. As this is one of the founders of the Jewish political lobby in the US, this support has sent strong signals to the European, Asian and Middle East Jewish communities and created implications for Iranian integration in the process.78
AT: Iran Prolif 1/2
1. The U.S. will apply sanctions, which solve the impact
Michael Jacobson (senior fellow in the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior adviser in the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the U.S. Department of the Treasury) 2008: Sanctions against Iran: A Promising Struggle.
The Treasury Department’s role at the center of a major national security initiative is part of a broader shift in the department’s post–September 11 mission. In the past, the department, like other finance ministries around the world, focused largely on economic and financial issues and was often reluctant to get involved in these types of matters. Although there are several reasons for the Treasury Department’s relative success, the most important factor relates to the United States’ status as the world’s leading financial center. Paulson stated that the Treasury Department “can effectively use these tools largely because the United States is the key hub of the global financial system; we are the banker to the world.”25 Losing access to the U.S. market is not a worthwhile risk for most banks for the sake of maintaining business ties to designated terrorists or WMD proliferators.26 As such, banks from around the world refer to the Treasury Department designation list, which exists not only for Iran-related targets, but also for terrorists, drug traffickers, and other rogue actors, and implement U.S. unilateral sanctions voluntarily. As a result, according to the department, U.S. unilateral sanctions are “anything but.”27 Financial institutions are particularly eager to avoid being the “next ABN AMRO,” the Dutch bank fined $80 million by the United States in 2005 for having an inadequate program in place to ensure compliance with the U.S. sanctions against Iran and Libya. The Financial Times noted that the fine sent “seismic waves through the international banking system” and that “reverberations are still being felt today.”28 The specific warnings issued by Treasury Department leadership have greatly amplified the impact of U.S. unilateral measures. In a March 2007 speech, Stuart Levey, undersecretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, stated that “those who are tempted to deal with targeted high-risk actors are put on notice: if they continue this relationship, they may be next.”29 Although the speech itself received little public attention, it was duly noted by financial institutions throughout the world.30 Recent reports that two British banks, Lloyds TSB and Barclays, are under investigation by the Department of Justice and the Manhattan district attorney’s office for possible violations of the Iran sanctions regime should only heighten the financial sector’s concern.31 The fact that the oil market has traditionally been priced in dollars gives the United States additional leverage against Iran. To complete oil-related transactions, foreign banks convert assets into dollars, generally through the U.S. system, thus exposing their institution to potential U.S. sanctions. Stuart Eizenstat, former deputy secretary of the treasury, explained that this is why “[s]anctions involving banks and financial institutions are the most significant” aspect of the U.S. government’s overall Iran strategy.32 The financial institutions’ decisions have also been driven by reputational risk considerations. Maintaining stellar reputations is one of a bank’s top priorities. Avoiding the type of specific risk outlined by the Treasury Department makes sense from a business perspective.33 Furthermore, as Paulson observed, once some private-sector entities have taken action, it becomes “a greater reputational risk for others not to follow, and so they often do.”34 Targeted financial measures themselves also have a number of advantages over traditional, broad-based trade sanctions. First, targeted financial measures are designed to be regime hostile and people friendly, causing economic harm to the entities designated but not to innocent civilians.35 Second, the Treasury Department has employed these tools in a graduated manner, giving Iran numerous opportunities to alter their behavior before further measures are imposed. As a result, the department is able to demonstrate that the purpose of such measures is not simply to punish the Iranian regime, but also to encourage a change in behavior. This has facilitated U.S. efforts to build international support for these actions, which is key to their overall success.36
2. UN action will prevent a nuclear Iran – China will be on board
Dingli Shen (professor and executive dean at the Institute of International Studies and deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai) 2006: Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions Test China’s Wisdom.
The Iranian nuclear issue has reached a turning point. Iran claims that it is entitled to nuclear sovereignty over civilian nuclear power and has denied that it has had a nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not been able to present definitive evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program over the past two decades1 or for the UN Security Council to take action until March 2006.2 Meanwhile, in his 2002 State of the Union speech, President George W. Bush signaled his intention to keep a spotlight on Iran when he labeled it part of the “axis of evil,” alongside North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.3 In the years since, however, Washington has not been able to thwart Iran’s pursuit of uranium enrichment diplomatically4 or to reach a political consensus to use force. For the past two years, the European Union-3 (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) have been making reconciliatory efforts with Iran but have met with little success. The EU-3 have proposed to offer Iran a lightwater reactor (LWR), nuclear fuel, and technology, but such offers are contingent on Iran suspending its uranium conversion.5 Otherwise, the EU-3 will not help to resolve this issue within the IAEA. Efforts to deal with the Iranian nuclear issue through an even broader concert of global powers, the permanent members of the UN Security Council (P-5) and Germany, could lead the Security Council to consider the matter in March unless a settlement can be reached, such as the Russian enrichment offer.6 In the face of these past failures and present challenges, China, a P-5 member, could be forced to consider acting with the other major powers to curb Iran’s nuclear ambition. The Iranian nuclear case thus presents China’s leaders with a prime opportunity to demonstrate their ability to balance their domestic interests with their responsibilities as a growing global power. China’s rise has brought its multifaceted national interests to the fore and into competition with one another, including securing stable and cooperative relations with other major powers; developing peaceful relations with neighbors and nearby states, including Iran; and gaining access to sufficient and reliable resources to sustain the nation’s growing economy. On one hand, China has been increasingly supportive of the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, eager to be viewed as a “responsible stakeholder” within the international community.7 At the same time, however, China’s economic boom has resulted in an energy thirst that is now affecting Beijing’s foreign policy. Conventional wisdom holds that the friendly relationships that Beijing is cultivating with Iran, Myanmar, Sudan, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, among others, all of which have strained relations with the United States, are more or less tied to its petroleum needs.
AT: Iran Prolif 2/2
3. No Iran nukes-it just wants energy, and Obama ensures it’s isolated
Reuters 10 [Reuters, “U.S. to pursue ‘aggressive’ Iran sanctions, Obama vows”,3/18/10, ]
Obama, who had made the goal of pursuing dialogue with Iran a cornerstone of his administration's foreign policy at the beginning of his presidency, said he had been successful in getting the international community to isolate Tehran. "As we've seen, the Iranian government has been more concerned about preventing their people from exercising their democratic and human rights than trying to solve this problem diplomatically," Obama said in an interview with Fox News. "That's why we're going to go after aggressive sanctions. We haven't taken any options off the table. We are going to keep on pushing," Obama said. Iran denies it is seeking to build a nuclear bomb and says its nuclear program is aimed at generating electricity. Obama said preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon was one of his administration's highest priorities.
4. No Iranian nukes – it’s against the laws of Islam
Munayyer 4/21/10 – executive director of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development, former policy analyst with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee [Yousef, April 21, 10, “Why Iran Won’t Attack Israel” ]
Palestinians are in Israel today because they managed to survive the depopulation of 1948, the year the Jewish state was founded (Arabs constitute about 20% of Israel's population). Ironically, while Benny Morris' scholarship suggests that the mere existence of these Palestinians in Israel -- and millions more in the occupied territories -- irks him, Israel's substantial Arab population also blows a hole in his argument about the need to deal with the supposed Iranian nuclear threat. Morris is part of an increasingly vociferous chorus warning of an impending apocalypse for Israel at the hands of a nuclear Iran eager to rid the Middle East of its Jews. Yet Iran's religious leaders have repeatedly stated that such weapons are "un-Islamic" or "forbidden under Islam."
5. Iran prolif doesn’t cause war
Hasson 10 (Nir Hasson, MIT Grad Student and writer for Haaretz News, “Clinton: U.S. has no plan to strike Iran over nuclear program”, February 17, 2010, )
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. is not planning a military strike on Iran over its nuclear program, in a television interview broadcast on Wednesday. "Obviously, we don't want Iran to become a nuclear weapons power, but we are not planning anything other than going for sanctions," Clinton told Al-Arabiya television.
Ext #1 – Sanctions Solve
Sanctions solve – even though Iran says they won’t work, it’s starting to crack
Michael Jacobson (senior fellow in the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former senior adviser in the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the U.S. Department of the Treasury) 2008: Sanctions against Iran: A Promising Struggle.
What is most problematic is that the sanctions have yet to persuade Iran to cease activity on its nuclear program. Recent reports indicate that Iran has developed its own advanced centrifuge, which could accelerate the pace of enrichment activities.64 Several months earlier, Ahmadinejad bragged that Iran had 3,000 centrifuges running.65 Although the accuracy of the statement was questionable at the time, it illustrates Iran’s eagerness to proceed with its nuclear ef forts.66 Iranian leaders have also publicly claimed that sanctions and other forms of international pressure will have no effect on their nuclear activities. In reference to the potential third round of UN sanctions, Ahmadinejad charged that the UN would lose credibility if it took action against Tehran after the NIE.67 Although Iran has not yet backed down, the U.S.-led campaign has played a role in causing domestic political problems for Iranian hard-liners. In September 2007, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a moderate opposed to the regime’s confrontational approach, was elected as the speaker of the Experts Assembly.68 Several days earlier, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dismissed Yahya Rahim Safavi, the IRGC’s commander since 1997, who was blacklisted by the UN in March 2007. Safavi’s replacement, Muhammad Ali Jafari, confirmed that Safavi was removed primarily “due to the United States’ threats.”69 Finally, Motjtaba Hashemi Samarah, one of Ahmadinejad’s close allies, was removed from his position as the deputy interior minister.70 Some observers believe that the political and economic problems are starting to have an effect on the Iranian regime’s thinking about the nuclear issue. Eizenstat noted, “I think it’s one of the reasons there’s at least the beginning of a debate in Iran about whether it’s wise to go forward with the nuclear program.”71 Iran expert Kenneth Katzman argued that the political developments indicate that the U.S. strategy is working, adding, “[W]e do see signs of a strategic reassessment in Iran.”72 In fact, the recently released NIE gives cause for optimism that Iran might actually modify its behavior on its entire nuclear program in the face of the right mix of carrots and sticks. The NIE noted that Iran’s nuclear-related decisions are guided by a “cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.”73 According to the NIE, Iran’s decision to halt its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003 was in response to “increasing international scrutiny,” suggesting that “Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue that we judged previously.”
Ext #2 – China
China will be on board with UN action – needs Middle East stability for energy security
Dingli Shen (professor and executive dean at the Institute of International Studies and deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai) 2006: Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions Test China’s Wisdom.
Regionally, as the Chinese economy continues its rapid growth, Beijing’s interest in the Middle East is also expanding. Because it promotes a smooth, predictable relationship with the region, China needs a peaceful and stable Middle East. A more proliferation-prone environment complicates and likely harms China’s interests. Beijing appears to believe that the emergence of a regional nuclear power or a nuclear arms race in the region would destabilize the Middle East and undercut China’s pursuit of energy security.
AT: Iran Strikes (By Israel)
Israel will not attack Iran – would require American consent, risking retaliation.
Christopher Layne (grandson of realism and deterrence theory, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University) 4/10/2006 "Iran: The Logic of Deterrence" THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
The administration has flirted with the idea of farming-out to Israel the task of attacking Iran’s nuclear installations. But this—to recall what one Soviet official said about Nikita Khruschev’s decision to deploy missiles in Cuba—truly would be “harebrained scheming.” To reach targets in Iran, Israeli planes would have to overfly Iraq, which would require not only American consent but active co-ordination between the Israeli air force and the U.S. military. Absolutely no one would be fooled into thinking the U.S. was an innocent bystander. The whole world—and most important, the whole Islamic world—would know that Washington’s hand was the directing force behind an Israeli strike on Iran, which means that the U.S. would be the main target of an Islamic backlash.
Political and military deterrence prevents Israeli first-strike.
Ehsaneh I. Sadr (graduate student in the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park) SUMMER 2005 “THE IMPACT OF IRAN’S NUCLEARIZATION ON ISRAEL” MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. XII, NO. 2
The military and political ramifications of an attack on Iran cannot, however, be so easily remedied by clever planning or arms acquisitions. The worst-case scenario, which cannot be entirely dismissed, is that Iran already has a deliverable nuclear weapon that might survive and be used in retaliation for an Israeli attack. A more likely result is that the Israeli attack, far from permanently eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, will delay it by only a few years while simultaneously stimulating (and justifying) Iranian efforts to acquire such weapons as quickly as possible. Conventional responses are also likely. Iran’s medium-range Shahab-3 missiles are likely to be launched at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor or at an easier target like Tel Aviv. Shorter-range Scuds might be fired by the Iranian-supported Hezbollah from its bases in south Lebanon. Even more troubling is the possibility of attacks against military or civilian targets by sleeper cells of Israeli Arabs that would be activated by Israeli actions against Iran. An indication that such attacks are well within the realm of the possible is the recent arrest of Israeli Mohammad Ghanem for alleged espionage on behalf of Iran.34 The United States, widely perceived as the source of Israel’s power and protection, is also likely to bear the brunt of retaliatory action. U.S. vulnerabilities in Iraq would surely be exploited by an Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC) that is intimately familiar with the players and how they might be motivated or manipulated to cause trouble for the United States or its allied Iraqi government. Were the Islamic Republic to seriously commit its resources to the funding and training of anti-Western jihadist groups like al-Qaeda, Americans might even be confronted with further attacks on the homeland. The political consequences of Israeli action are sure to include increased anti- Americanism and anti-Zionism, not only among Arabs but also Europeans and much of the developing world. Increased instability in the Middle East will strengthen the hand of extremists, making a political solution to the Palestinian issue much more difficult and likely precluding any possibility of Arab-Israeli peace. Given the difficulty of military action against Iran, the very small likelihood of its nuclear capabilities being damaged in any meaningful and non-recoverable way, and the exceedingly high military and political costs associated with such an attack, it is important and necessary that Israel consider whether the costs of allowing Iran to go nuclear might not be more tolerable.
The United States won’t green-light Israeli preemption.
World Tribune 1/5/2007 “Security official: U.S. no longer trusts Israel to strike Iran nukes” SPECIAL TO WORLD
The former Israeli official said he doubted whether the White House, out of fear that the operation would fail, would approve Israeli air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. "There is a harsh disappointment of us in the United States," Eiland said. "We didn't supply the goods. It embarrassed our friends in the United States, our friends in Congress. It has long-range repercussions."
AT: Iran Strikes (By the US)
1. Obama won’t strike Iran – even if it gets nuclear weapons, Obama’s preferred option is diplomacy
Donald Lambro 2/11/08 (The Washington Times, “Iraq aside, Democrats mum on foreign policy”, lexis)
Last year, though, Mrs. Clinton came under fire from antiwar activists when she voted for a bipartisan Senate resolution condemning the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization that was responsible for roadside bombings and other attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. Antiwar critics saw the vote as an attempt by the Bush administration to prepare to go to war against Iran unless it abandoned its ambitions to develop nuclear weapons. Mr. Obama opposed the resolution but missed the vote because he was campaigning. Many of Mr. Obama 's foreign policy advisers are also from the Clinton administration, including former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, Susan E. Rice, an assistant secretary of state during Mr. Clinton's second term, and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig. Also on his team are Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brezezinski, and former National Security Agency counterterrorism specialist Richard Clarke. A key foreign policy clash that developed during debates between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama arose when he called for a change in dealing with rogue nations, saying he would hold unconditional talks with leaders of Iran, North Korea and Cuba. Mrs. Clinton called his proposal "irresponsible and, frankly, naive." Mr. Obama shot back, charging that her approach was outdated and represented a continuation of the Bush-Cheney policies. Mr. Obama 's foreign policy emphasizes personal diplomacy, economic development and humanitarian aid, and he rejects the pre-emptive policies of the Bush administration that led to the war in Iraq. "For most of our history, our crises have come from using force when we shouldn't, not by failing to use force," he told the New York Times. "The United States is trapped by the Bush-Cheney approach to diplomacy that refuses to talk to leaders we don't like. Not talking doesn't make us look tough; it makes us look arrogant," he says on his campaign Web site. But Mr. O'Hanlon thinks Mr. Obama 's eagerness for one-on-one meetings with leaders of rogue nations "would cheapen the value of a presidential summits." "You don't want a president using his time by being lied to by foreign leaders. Hillary would be much more pragmatic. She suggested midlevel talks with Iran. Obama would look weak, and Hillary would not look weak," he said.
2. No impact to Iran retaliating against a military attack
Chuck Freilich, Jerusalem Post, June 26, 2008, p.
There is little doubt that Iran will respond to a direct attack, or a blockade, but its options, heated rhetoric notwithstanding, are actually limited. What can it truly do? Attack American ships, block the Gulf? Maybe a pinprick to make it look good at home, but beyond that, the risks of escalation and the costs to Iran's economy are too great. Iran is extremist, not irrational. It may very well cause the US greater difficulty in Iraq, and increased terror can be expected against US and Western targets. It is highly unlikely, however, that Iran would be willing to go beyond limited actions and risk direct military escalation, not when the US has 150,000 soldiers on its doorstep. Moreover, US preparations can greatly reduce, though not eliminate, the dangers of Iran's potential responses.
Oil prices will further skyrocket and Iran could add to the crisis by cutting output, but anything beyond temporary measures would be tantamount to cutting off its nose to spite its face. There will be a strong public reaction in the Moslem world, though Arab regimes will be quietly relieved to be free of a nuclear Iran. If the US plays out the diplomatic route first, international reaction will be muted.
3. No risk of Iran strikes—any discussion is just political posturing that isn’t taken seriously
Steve Clemons, 7/23, 2010, The Progressive Realist, “Stop Hyperventilating: Obama Will Not choose War with Iran,” , RG
While there are individuals in the Obama administration who are flirting with the possibility of military action against Iran, they are fewer in number than existed in the Bush administration. They are surrounded by a greater number of realists who are working hard to find a way to reinvent America's global leverage and power -- and who realize that a war with Iran ends that possibility and possibly spells an end to America presuming to be the globally predominant power it has been. There are also political opportunists in the Obama administration -- who after a horrible year of relations between the President and Israeli Prime Minister -- want to spin the deep tensions over Israel-Palestine away long enough to get through the next set of 2010 elections. There are many who worry too much that Obama's recent highly scripted, positive, buddy-buddy encounter with Benjamin Netanyahu means that the United States is acquiescing to Israel's view of Iran, of settlements, and of the world. This would be a misread of the situation. Come December 2010, my hunch is that all of those who have recently placed faith in a White House posture of Israel uber alles will be as disappointed in the Obama White House as many other interest groups have been who thought that Obama would deliver on their single issue. In this case, Obama will stick to script and offer a similar line as Ariel Sharon once offered after being criticized by his supporters on Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza: "One has to weigh many different options in determining our nation's security needs Things look different when sitting behind the Prime Minister's desk." This will be true for Barack Obama as well -- who knows that there is no winning outcome for the US and its allies if he chooses a military course with Iran, even if some of his team seem to enjoy flirting with that option.
Ext #1 – No Strikes
Obama won’t strike Iran – only sanctions will make Iran stop its nuclear program
The Guardian 11/3/07 (“Iran: Stopping nuclear ambitions”, lexis)
Bombing Iran would be a disaster. Even if bombs busted Iran's nuclear bunkers, they would still miss their target. A military strike on the uranium-enrichment centrifuges would hasten an Iranian weapons programme, not delay it. A pre-emptive strike would turn a covert programme into an overt one, this time with the full backing of a wounded nation. Iran would leave the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), spelling the end of visits by international nuclear inspectors. Iran has already violated the NPT by failing to declare experiments with nuclear materials, but its formal departure from the regulatory regime would leave it free to pursue its nuclear programme unfettered by inspection. And Iran would have 154,000 US targets in Iraq to fire back at. But letting Iran pursue its nuclear ambitions would be no less cataclysmic. The arrival of the Iranian bomb would set off an arms race among the Sunni states in the Gulf unparalleled in the history of nuclear proliferation. The absence of Arab reaction to the Israeli bombing of a suspected nuclear facility under construction in the Syrian desert was a telling sign of the fear spreading in the region. Even assuming Tehran would not pass fissile material to its proxies, Hizbullah and Hamas, the mere possession of a nuclear capability would give an unstable populist regime untold military and diplomatic clout. International negotiations are logjammed. A grand bargain offered four years ago, whereby Iran stops uranium enrichment in return for uranium for its fuel cycle, generous aid packages and a full return to the international stage, is still on the table. Iran has refused to comply with two previous rounds of UN sanctions and the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany were struggling yesterday in London to come up with a third round. The threat of military action does not give the diplomats more force. It muddies their efforts by dividing world opinion and allowing Iran to believe that it can stall indefinitely. If the military option can not be used, it must be removed from the table. What the Iranian regime fears is a unified international response, because only then would it face a genuine choice between the bomb and penury. Russia and China would have no choice but to support tougher economic sanctions, and Germany and Italy might even stop their export credit guarantees. The Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama said he would personally negotiate with the regime if it forgoes pursuit of nuclear weapons. The desire to solve this issue needs that sort of commitment, if the west is not to find itself igniting another fire in the Middle East that it can not put out.
Obama won’t strike Iran
NPR 8/13/07 (“Obama: Iran requires direct diplomacy”, )
Sen. Barack Obama says that as president, he would use direct diplomacy to constrain Iran's role in Iraq, encouraging Iran to cooperate with the United States through non-military means. In an interview with NPR's Andrea Seabook from a campaign stop in Iowa, Obama said that he'd use whatever military force is necessary to protect U.S. citizens, but that "the military option is not the only option in the toolbox." "I think Iran understands what military threats we pose. You know, they're not surprised that we could strike them, and strike them hard," Obama said. "What we haven't suggested in any way is what advantages they would have in acting more responsibly in the region. That's been the missing ingredient." The Illinois Democrat's comments follow a week of sparring over Iran with his main rival Sen. Hillary Clinton, who has a commanding lead in the polls. On Thursday, Clinton said she'd meet with Iranian leaders "without preconditions" — a position she criticized Obama for taking earlier in the summer. Obama also questioned Clinton's judgment in voting for last month's Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which identified the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Obama said the amendment included language that empowers the president to attack Iran."This is a lesson that I think Sen. Clinton and others should have learned: that you can't give this president a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it," Obama said.
Obama will not strike Iran
, 7- 9, 2008 “MCCAIN, OBAMA STAKE OUT DIFFERENCES ON IRANIAN MISSILE TESTS”
“I would want to talk to the national security team to find out whether this indicates any new capabilities on Iran’s part. At this point, the reports aren’t clear. It’s still early,” Obama told CBS’ “Early Show.” “But I think what this underscores is the need for us to create a kind of policy that is putting the burden on Iran to change behavior. And, frankly, we just have not been able to do that over the last several years. Partly because we’re not engaged in direct diplomacy,” he said. His campaign released a statement saying: “These missile tests demonstrate once again that we need to change our policy to deal aggressively with the threat posed by the Iranian regime. “Now is the time to work with our friends and allies, and to pursue direct and aggressive diplomacy with the Iranian regime backed by tougher unilateral and multilateral sanctions. It’s time to offer the Iranians a clear choice between increased costs for continuing their troubling behavior, and concrete incentives that would come if they change course.” McCain told reporters in South Park, Pa., that the reported tests prove Iran is a threat to the surrounding region. “Channels of communication have been open and will remain open, but the time has now come for effective sanctions on Iran,” he said. “Diplomacy plays a key role … but history shows us when nations embark on paths that can jeopardize the security of the region and the world then other action besides diplomacy has to be contemplated and taken, and that’s why meaningful and impactful sanctions are called for at this time.” McCain said there is “continuing, mounting evidence that Iran is pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons,” a statement that appears at odds with a December U.S. intelligence report that concluded the country’s nuclear weapons program was halted in the fall of 2003.
AT: Iraqi Instability
1. Unstable now - Post-election Iraq is an unstable sectarian mess – no chance of national unity
Ricks, 10 [Thomas, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who covered the war in Iraq for The Washington Post, is the author of “Fiasco” and “The Gamble.” He also writes the Best Defense blog for Foreign Policy magazine. February 23, 2010, “Extending Our Stay in Iraq ,” ]
IRAQ’S March 7 national election, and the formation of a new government that will follow, carry huge implications for both Iraqis and American policy. It appears now that the results are unlikely to resolve key political struggles that could return the country to sectarianism and violence.
If so, President Obama may find himself later this year considering whether once again to break his campaign promises about ending the war, and to offer to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for several more years. Surprisingly, that probably is the best course for him, and for Iraqi leaders, to pursue.
Whether or not the elections bring the long-awaited political breakthrough that genuinely ends the fighting there, 2010 is likely to be a turning-point year in the war, akin to the summer of 2003 (when the United States realized that it faced an insurgency) and 2006 (when that insurgency morphed into a small but vicious civil war and American policy came to a dead end). For good or ill, this is likely the year we will begin to see the broad outlines of post-occupation Iraq. The early signs are not good, with the latest being the decision over the weekend of the leading Sunni party, the National Dialogue Front, to withdraw from the elections.
The political situation is far less certain, and I think less stable, than most Americans believe. A retired Marine colonel I know, Gary Anderson, just returned from Iraq and predicts a civil war or military coup by September. Another friend, the journalist Nir Rosen, avers that Iraq is on a long-term peaceful course. Both men know Iraq well, having spent years working there. I have not seen such a wide discrepancy in expert views since late 2005.
2. Iraq won’t escalate – tons of other civil wars disprove
Yglesias, 07
(Matthew Yglesias, “Containing Iraq”, 9/12/07, )
Kevin Drum tries to throw some water on the "Middle East in Flames" theory holding that American withdrawal from Iraq will lead not only to a short-term intensification of fighting in Iraq, but also to some kind of broader regional conflagration. Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, as usual sensible but several clicks to my right, also make this point briefly in Democracy: "Talk that Iraq’s troubles will trigger a regional war is overblown; none of the half-dozen civil wars the Middle East has witnessed over the past half-century led to a regional conflagration."
3. US military is already withdrawing from Iraq – instability is inevitable
CNN 09
(CNN, 2/27/09, )
President Obama said Friday he plans to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of August 2010. Between 35,000 to 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq, he said. They would be withdrawn gradually until all U.S. forces are out of Iraq by December 31, 2011 -- the deadline set under an agreement the Bush administration signed with the Iraqi government last year. "Let me say this as plainly as I can: By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end," Obama said in a speech at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. "By any measure, this has already been a long war," Obama said. It is time to "bring our troops home with the honor they have earned." Obama's trip to Camp Lejeune, a Marine Corps base, was his first trip to a military base since being sworn in. Administration officials, who briefed reporters on the plan, said the remaining troops would take on advisory roles in training and equipping Iraqi forces, supporting civilian operations in Iraq and conducting targeted counterterrorism missions, which would include some combat. But the ultimate success or failure of the war in Iraq, Obama said, would rest with the Iraqi people themselves. The U.S. "cannot police Iraq's streets indefinitely until they are completely safe," the president said. It is up to the Iraqis, he said, to ensure a future under a government that is "sovereign, stable and self-reliant." "We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein's regime and you got the job done," he said, referring to the troops.The U.S. military had also "exceeded every expectation" suppressing the insurgency in the years that followed. Al Qaeda in Iraq had been dealt "a serious blow," the president added. "The capacity of Iraq's security forces has improved, and Iraq's leaders have made strides toward political accommodation" through steps such as January's provincial elections.
AT: Iraqi Democracy
No chance of Iraqi Democracy – corruption kills it
Brinkley 10 [Joel Brinkley, Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, “Iraqi democracy crippled by widespread corruption”, The San Francisco Chronicle, ]
As American troops withdraw from Iraq this summer, expect the democratic freedoms Iraqis have enjoyed in recent years to recede as well. Already, the Iraqi government is restricting freedom of the press, expression and assembly. It's toying with Web censorship, torturing political prisoners and killing political opponents. Even with all of that, Iraq remains freer than every other Arab state except Lebanon. The United States wrote democratic freedoms into Iraq's constitution, including protections for women and minorities, offering as a tacit guarantee the active presence of 150,000 American troops. But now the guarantors are leaving. A large part of the problem is corruption. Under American stewardship, Iraq has become one of the half-dozen most corrupt nations on earth. "Significant widespread corruption" afflicts "all levels of government," the State Department says. Nothing can so quickly cripple a democracy as the need by the nation's leaders to protect their cash flow and hide all evidence of their thefts. That leads, at least, to electoral fraud and press censorship. How can corrupt officials survive if the press is free to rep
AT: Israel Wars (From Terrorist Attack)
Conflict from terrorism against Israel won’t escalate – states won’t get involved
Rubin, 2006 - Director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel (Barry, Foreign Affairs, July-August, “Israel's New Strategy”, p. lexis
At the same time, a number of other developments suggested that although the conflict would continue, it would not spread or escalate. For one, Saddam's fall removed a major threat. Meanwhile, other Arab regimes -- challenged by Islamists and strategically weak -- started to be willing to sacrifice some of their support for the Palestinians in exchange for improved relations with the United States. Even if they would not make peace with Israel, they also did not want war, and their support for the Palestinians hit rock bottom. And all of this reinforced the trends set off by the ending of the Cold War and the consequent shift in the international balance of power. Israel's security environment started to look very different. Arab armies and arms appeared less dangerous, and occupying territory became less important than having clear defensive lines that did not enclose a hostile population.
AT: Israel Wars (Other Countries)
War against Israel won’t escalate – just small proxy wars
Sappenfield, 06 - staff writer (Mark, Christian Science Monitor, “Wider war in Middle East? Not likely”, 6/18, lexis)
Of the dangers presented by the conflict between Israel and Hizbullah in southern Lebanon, the possibility of a broader Middle East war is among the less likely.
In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war - and repeatedly since - Israel has shown its clear military supremacy. So dominant has been Israel's advantage in both technology and tactics that former foes such as Jordan and Egypt sued for peace in those wars, while Tel Aviv's avowed enemies - Syria and Iran - have turned to backing terrorists.
At this moment, the calculus doesn't appear to have changed. There is no coalition of Arab governments willing to unite militarily against Israel. Syria's military prowess has crumbled since the fall of the Soviet Union - its greatest benefactor - while Iran remains too geographically remote to strike effectively.
The result is a new paroxysm of the proxy war that has existed in the region for a generation - ebbing and flowing as Hizbullah, armed and financed by Iran and Syria, harass Israel without provoking a major Middle East war, military analysts say.
"No state is willing to deal with Israel conventionally," says Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corp.
The shape of the conflict so far - sparked by Hizbullah's raid into northern Israel and capture of two Israeli soldiers - reveals both the capabilities and limitations of each side.
Historically, Hizbullah has been able to do little more than nip at Israel's northern border with incursions and sporadic rocket attacks. By and large, its arsenal is primitive, comprising various short-range rockets that can destroy buildings only with a direct hit, yet are difficult to aim with any precision. It has continually fired rockets into northern Israel.
AT: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
1. Israel Palestine conflict won’t escalate or spark other conflicts
Luttwak, 07 - senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (Edward, American Prospect, “The Middle of Nowhere”, May, )
Yes, it would be nice if Israelis and Palestinians could settle their differences, but it would do little or nothing to calm the other conflicts in the middle east from Algeria to Iraq, or to stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, or the different varieties of inter-Muslim violence between traditionalists and Islamists, and between Sunnis and Shia, nor would it assuage the perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists towards the transgressive west that relentlessly invades their minds, and sometimes their countries.
Arab-Israeli catastrophism is wrong twice over, first because the conflict is contained within rather narrow boundaries, and second because the Levant is just not that important any more.
2. No escalation—Israel will strategically minimize any threat
Alpher 05 (Yossi, former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. “The Future of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Critical Trends Affecting Israel.” United States Institute of Peace Special Report No. 149, Sept. 2005. )
The elimination of the Iraqi armed forces in 2003 has, for the first time in Israel's fifty-seven-year history, minimized the danger of all-out conventional war between Israel and a coalition of its neighbors attacking from the east, thereby reducing the strategic value for Israel of the West Bank. Even before the removal of the Iraqi threat, Israel found that it could isolate a concerted Palestinian armed campaign against it—the second intifada of 2000–2005—and thwart the Palestinian goal of generating regional military escalation. Since 2003 the reality of Palestinian military isolation has become more stark than ever; it will only be compounded by the completion of the security fence being erected by the Sharon government around the West Bank with the primary goal of preventing incursion into Israel by Palestinian terrorists.
3. No spillover to the rest of the Middle East
Kohr ’07 (Howard, executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, February. “Missing the link.” Deep South Jewish Voice, Vol. 17, Issue 4.)
As the situation in Iraq remains dire, various detractors of Israel have once again rolled out an old and long-discredited fantasy. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the core regional issue, they say; end it, and all other Middle Eastern problems - including Iraq - will resolve themselves. Known as "linkage," this theory fails the test of simple logic and is thoroughly refuted by history. It should be evident to the most casual Middle East observer that even if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were to be satisfactorily resolved, Sunnis and Shia would continue to fight each other in Iraq and in other countries throughout the Middle East. This conflict is a schism within Islam that stretches back to the seventh century. It has absolutely nothing to do with Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian problem isn't the reason why Syria is meddling in Iraq and seeking to re-assert control over Lebanon. It doesn't explain why Iran is attempting to develop nuclear arms and pursuing its age-old ambition of dominating the Persian Gulf region. And it has little to do with al-Qaeda's quest to topple Muslim governments deemed insufficiently committed to the principles of Islamic fundamentalism. Neither does Israel have any effect on the region-wide problems identified in the authoritatively documented reports issued by the U.N. Development Program: corruption, illiteracy, economic stagnation and a lack of political freedom. Only the most outrageous of the world's conspiracy theories could hold Israel responsible for imposing these problems on its neighbors. The emergence of a Palestinian state would yield no material benefit to the one in five Arabs who lives on less than two dollars per day. It wouldn't diminish the temptation for unelected autocrats to steal from their people. And it would not affect the region's staggering illiteracy rates or provide education to the 10 million Arab children who receive no schooling at all.
AT: Israeli-Turkish War
Turkey-Israel nuclear war impossible- economic disincentive
Hallinan 6/24 [Conn, Staff Writer, World Bulletin, ] KLS
Ankara’s falling out with Israel is attributed to the growth of Islam, but while Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party does have a streak of Islamicism, Turkey’s anger at Israel is over policy not religion. The current Israeli government has no interest in resolving its dispute with the Palestinians, and leading members of the Netanyahu coalition have threatened war with Iran, Syria and Lebanon. A war with any of those countries might go regional, and could even turn nuclear if the Israelis find their conventional weapons are not up to the job of knocking out their opponents. Ankara has much to lose from war and everything to gain from nurturing regional trade agreements and building political stability. Turkey has the 16th largest economy in the world and seventh largest in Europe.
AT: Japanese Economy
Japan’s economy is resilient – no external shocks
New York Times, 08 (“Bank Chief Says Japan’s Economy Resilient,” The New York Times, February 22, 2008 )
He said there was no change to the bank’s basic monetary policy stance, which is to adjust rates by closely examining upside and downside risks. Market adjustments amid repricing of risks would take time, making it unavoidable for banks to incur losses, Mr. Fukui said. At a financial committee in parliament’s lower house, Mr. Fukui said that Japan’s economy had become more resilient to external shocks, but that “downside risks to the global economy are heightening and their impact on Japan’s economy remains uncertain. “We will fully examine not just our main economic scenario” but the risks to the country in guiding monetary policy, said Mr. Fukui, whose term expires next month. The Bank of Japan has long said it will raise rates gradually, as its current policy rate of 0.5 percent is so low it could lead to overheating in the economy in the long term. But shaky global markets, concern over slowing American growth and growing pessimism over Japan’s economic outlook have kept the bank from raising rates for a year. A recovery in share prices since late January has led investors to cut back expectations of a rate cut this year. Mr. Fukui said Japan’s growth was slowing partly because of a slump in domestic housing investment. But it has become more resilient to external shocks than in the past and a positive cycle of output, incomes and spending remains intact, he said. “It is highly likely that the Japanese economy will continue to expand moderately,” he said.
Japanese economy will stay high --- capital investment and strong exports sustain recovery
Mochizuki, 10 --- Dow Jones reporter and economic writer (Takashi Mochizuki, “Update: Japan Lifts Economic View as Export-Driven Recovery Continues,” The Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2010, )
TOKYO (Dow Jones)--The Japanese government Friday upgraded its assessment of the economy, saying it "has been picking up" as a result of recovering capital investment and strong exports. The government also said in its monthly economic report for June that "the foundation for a self-sustaining recovery is being laid." It was the first time for the government to raise its economic view since March. Last month, it said the economy was picking up but lacks autonomous growth factors. "The gradual economic recovery trend is intact," Economy Minister Satoshi Arai said at a press conference after the release of the monthly economic report. "A self-sustaining recovery is coming into sight." Steady overseas demand for Japanese exports and rebounding corporate capital spending helped the economy grow at a 5.0% annualized pace in the first quarter. New Prime Minister Naoto Kan has called for policies to encourage strong economic growth and fiscal health in the world's second largest economy. The ruling Democratic Party of Japan, which Kan leads, aims for average real growth of over 2% in the decade ahead.
Japanese economy is improving and resilient
Paul Danis (CFO of Lehman Brothers) 2008: US Housing Market Crunching Banks, Earnings and Economy.
“The outperformance of Japanese stocks over the past few months looks set to continue, believes Paul Danis, equity strategist at Lehman Brothers.
“‘After strongly underperforming from early 2006 to March this year, Japan has outperformed the global equity market by 14% in dollar terms and 24% in local currency terms since mid-March,' he says. ‘We think that the rally has legs.'
“Mr Danis notes that the total cash yield in Japan has bucked the global trend and kept rising as net stock buybacks have increased, in contrast to the US and UK. ‘We view this development as supportive for two reasons. First, it reduces equity supply. Second, it is a vote of confidence from the Japanese corporate sector.'
“Mr Danis also says that while the economic backdrop in Japan is far from great, he expects growth to be strong relative to the rest of the world. ‘Some key Japanese economic indicators are showing resilience, and there are continued signs that Japan's economy is exiting a deflationary period.'
AT: Japanese Nationalism
Nationalism doesn’t kill the alliance or cause rearm
The Washington Quarterly, 2006 ("Japan’s Goldilocks Strategy", Autumn,
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A third choice, the one preferred by the middle-power internationalists, would be to achieve prestige by increasing prosperity. Japan’s exposure to some of the more difficult vicissitudes of world politics would be reduced but only if some of the more ambitious assaults on the Yoshida Doctrine were reversed. Japan would once again eschew the military shield in favor of the mercantile sword. It would bulk up the country’s considerable soft power in a concerted effort to knit East Asia together without generating new threats or becoming excessively vulnerable. The Asianists in this group would aggressively embrace exclusive regional economic institutions to reduce Japan’s reliance on the U.S. market. They would not abrogate the military alliance but would resist U.S. exhortations for Japan to expand its roles and missions. open, regional economic institutions as a means to reduce the likelihood of abandonment by the United States and would seek to maintain the United States’ protective embrace as cheaply and for as long as possible. The final, least likely choice would be to achieve autonomy through prosperity. This is the choice of pacifists, many of whom today are active in civil society through nongovernmental organizations that are not affiliated with traditional political parties. Like the mercantile realists, they would reduce Japan’s military posture, possibly even eliminate it. Unlike the mercantile realists, they would reject the alliance as dangerously entangling. They would eschew hard power for soft power, campaign to establish Northeast Asia as a nuclear-free zone, expand the defensive-defense concept to the region as a whole, negotiate a regional missile-control regime, and rely on the Asian Regional Forum of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for security. 19 Their manifest problem is that the Japanese public is unmoved by their prescriptions. In March 2003, when millions took to the streets in Rome, London, and New York City to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only several thousand rallied in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park. 20 Pacifist ideas about prosperity and autonomy seem relics of an earlier, more idealistic time when Japan could not imagine, much less openly plan for, military contingencies.
Japanese nationalism isn’t militaristic
Varma 7 [Lalima, is a Professor in the Japanese studies programme of the Centre for East Asian Studies, Japanese Nationalism: Response to Changing Regional and International Environment, CHINA REPORT 43 : 1 (2007): 57–68]
Just as power has been described as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power, similarly nationalism can be described as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’. Countries like the US are considered ‘hard’ powers since they possess both economic and military might whereas Japan has been referred to as a ‘soft’ power since it is only an economic might and is a major source of ODA and FDI to developing countries, but has no military prowess. Providing economic and technical assistance is not sufficient to acquire a prominent role in international affairs. It is also not always an effective tool to mend or strengthen ties with countries as is evident in the case of Japan’s relations with China. Japanese nationalism which prevailed during the pre-War period can be referred to as ‘hard’ since it was aggressive, militaristic, and the Japanese people were not only proud of their traditions, culture and the purity of their race but also believed that they were superior and destined to rule over the Asians. However, the kind of nationalism that is emerging in Japan since the last one decade in particular is ‘soft’ because it does not seem to nurture the ambition of unilaterally attacking any country or imposing its culture on other countries. The Nationalism emerging in Japan is basically geared towards seeing that Japan occupies an important place in the world community which is commensurate with the status of the world’s second largest economy and a major contributor to international organisations such as the UN, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Restoring pride in Japanese traditions and virtue is the main goal, which to a great extent was responsible for Japan’s economic success story.
AT: Japanese Rearm
1. No chance Japan will go nuclear—too many things prevent it
Yokota 2009 (Takashi, Newsweek Journalist, “The N Word; Why Japan won't go nuclear.”, Newsweek, June 22, 2009, Lexis, Lin)
Yet this is all just rhetoric. For one thing, despite North Korea's threats and China's growing military and political power, the Japanese people remain dead set against building nuclear weapons. Polls conducted over the past three years show that less than 20 percent of the public currently says it favors possessing such a deterrent. For another, Japan--a crowded island nation--lacks the space to test a bomb. Japan has large stockpiles of plutonium for its nuclear-energy industry. But plutonium-type bombs require physical testing to verify their efficacy. (Uranium bombs are considerably simpler and so may not need physical testing, but Japan doesn't have the weapons-grade uranium to make such a device.) While some experts argue that Japan could test a plutonium weapon by detonating it underground, others--including former defense chief Shigeru Ishiba--insist that there is simply nowhere to do so in such a densely populated nation. Simulations would not be sufficient; those only work after at least one actual test. Japan, moreover, now occupies the nuke-free high ground and would risk losing its innocence if it went nuclear. According to an internal 1995 study by Japan's defense establishment, reversing the country's no-nukes policy would trigger the collapse of the Nuclear Non--Proliferation Treaty regime, as the withdrawal of the world's only nuclear victim could fatally undermine confidence in the system. Such a move would also severely damage relations with Washington--Tokyo's most important ally--and the alarm in Beijing and Seoul could set off a nuclear race across East Asia. Japan would get the blame. The consequences for Japan's energy supplies and economy could be equally catastrophic. If Japan broke out of the NPT, the countries that now supply it with nuclear fuel, including Canada, Australia and the United States, would surely hold back their shipments, which are currently conditioned on the fuel's peaceful use. That would be a nightmare for Japan, which relies on nuclear energy for nearly a third of its electricity. There's one other roadblock to consider: Japan's top nuclear hawks have seen their power weaken considerably in recent years. Abe lost most of his clout after abruptly resigning as prime minister two years ago. In February, Nakagawa resigned as finance minister in disgrace after appearing drunk at a news conference. And Aso is practically a lame duck these days, with little room for bold moves. Of course, the political environment may change if North Korea continues to act belligerently or if China proves to be a real threat, as Japanese hawks fear. But even then, most Japanese experts believe that their country would stop short of building a bomb of its own. At most, it might temporarily allow the United States to base nukes on Japanese territory. Another option would be to develop the means to stage a conventional strike against North Korea's launchpads. But even the strike plan won't become reality anytime soon, as senior lawmakers and experts say current proposals are "amateurish" and poorly thought out. And any revision of the non-nuke policy would be a much greater stretch, given the weakness of the hawkish wing of the ruling LDP. There are still many good reasons to try to rein in North Korea's nuclear program, and its attempts to build missiles that could deliver those weapons to the U.S. and Japan. But the risk that Japan will go nuclear is not one of them.
2. No risk of your aggression arguments – Japan would opt for a limited re-arm
Carpenter (Ted Galen Carpenter, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute) 1995
( November 1“Paternalism And Dependence: The U.S.-Japanese Security Relationship” )
Moreover, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Japan can probably protect its security interests without a massive rearmament effort. A modest increase in military spending, say to 1.5 percent of GDP, might well be sufficient--and only the most paranoid would be alarmed by a buildup of that magnitude.(39) Such an increase would produce decidedly more potent air and naval capabilities sufficient for a more credible, wide-ranging Japanese security role. But it would hardly be enough for a new wave of imperialism--especially if Japan was careful not to greatly expand its ground forces. Without a potential army of occupation, Tokyo would clearly lack the ability to subjugate its neighbors, and the existing ground Self-Defense Force, some 150,000 active duty personnel, is obviously far from being such a force. The most worrisome development would be a decision by Tokyo to acquire nuclear weapons. That possibility cannot be ruled out in the long term--especially if North Korea or other aggressive or unstable regimes develop nuclear arsenals--but it is not inevitable. The Japanese public has a pronounced dislike of nuclear weapons, and the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not likely to fade soon. In addition, given the technological sophistication that Japan can bring to bear on the development of its military forces, Tokyo might conclude that an arsenal of precision-guided weapons, together with appropriate aircraft and missile delivery systems (and comprehensive air and missile defenses), would be sufficient to counter the nuclear arsenals of its neighbors. As the Persian Gulf War demonstrated, precision-guided conventional weapons can be extremely effective.
3. No chance for a Japanese rearm—they just adopted a non-proliferation resolution
BBC 2009 (BBC, British broadcasting corporation that provides extensive media coverage, it is the world’s largest broadcaster, “Japanese parliament adopts non-proliferation resolution”, BBC, June 16, 2009, Lexis, Lin)
Prompted by US President Barack Obama's call in April for a nuclear-free world and then by North Korea's May 25 nuclear test, the resolution says Japan, as the only country attacked by atomic bombs, "has the responsibility of spearheading the campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons." It warns that "such threats as development of not just nuclear weapons, but also missiles that can carry nuclear bombs, outflows of nuclear materials and nuclear technologies, and nuclear proliferation are rather increasing even in this post-Cold War era." Against this backdrop, Japan should "put forth efforts on nuclear arms reduction and non-proliferation, and work proactively towards establishing an effective inspection system," it says. The resolution was proposed by the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan after President Obama, in his speech in Prague on April 5, pledged that the United States will take "concrete steps" to help realize a nuclear-free world. As for North Korea's second nuclear test last month, it says the UN Security Council presented "steadfast refusal" by adopting Resolution 1874 to impose a broad range of additional sanctions. Taking these opportunities, the Japanese government "should strive to develop the drive for eliminating nuclear arms, particularly regional responses on the matter including the nuclear issue of North Korea, into a global trend," it says. The House of Councillors is expected to endorse a similar resolution during a plenary session Wednesday. This is not the first time the Japanese parliament has adopted a resolution seeking government efforts towards nuclear abolition, as it did so, for example, in 1982 before a special UN disarmament conference.
AT: Japanese Soft Power
Japan will inevitably lose soft power- structural problems prevent retention of power
Yoel Sano, Asia Times, ‘The Rising Sun slowly sets,” Apr 27, 2006,
As Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi celebrates his fifth anniversary in office, there is a general feeling that Japan is finally recovering from more than a decade of intermittent recession. While Japan may indeed experience faster economic growth over the coming years, the country's myriad structural problems - especially in economic and demographic terms - suggest that its global influence will wane substantially over the next few decades. None of this portends disaster for Japan. Rather, the country will gradually be eclipsed by other newly ascendant nations, China and India among them. Moreover, it will be impossible for Japanese politicians to reverse this decline, since most of the solutions would be unacceptable to the public and to Japan's neighbors.
Lack of media outlets, universal language, and restrictive immigration and academic policies check soft power
Peng 7 (Peng Er, East Asia, vol. 24, Columbia U.)
Other limits to Japan’s “soft power” include the lack of a CNN or BBC-like institution to project its voice globally, the reluctance of its universities to hire foreign faculty members beyond language teachers, the relatively closed nature of its society to foreign immigrants to maintain ethnic homogeneity and social order, and the fact that Japanese is not a global language. The best students in Asia would head toward the American Ivy League and Britain’s Oxbridge but not necessarily the Universities of Tokyo, Waseda and Keio.
Lack of values-based foreign policy prevents soft power
Peng 7 (Peng Er, East Asia, vol. 24, Columbia U.)
Moreover, Japan does not represent any universal values and ideals while certain Western nations, especially the US, champion human rights and democracy. Even though Tokyo recently adopted the rhetoric of democracy and human rights, other Asians do not necessarily view Japan as the paragon of these values given its poor treatment of ethnic minorities (Japan-born Koreans and the Burakumins) and memories of wartime atrocities among the Chinese and Koreans.
Japanese soft power will stay high --- culturally and economically resilient
Nye, 05 – distinguished expert on soft power and professor at Harvard (Joseph S. Nye, “Soft Power Matters in Asia,” Belfer Center, December 5, 2005, )
Asia's resurgence began with Japan's economic success. By the end of the century, Japan's remarkable performance not only made the Japanese wealthy, but also enhanced the country's soft power. As the first non-Western country that drew even with the West in modernity while showing that it is possible to maintain a unique culture, Japan has more potential soft-power resources than any other Asian country. Today Japan ranks first in the world in the number of patents, third in expenditure on research and development as a share of GDP, second in book sales and music sales, and highest for life expectancy. It is home to three of the top 25 multinational brand names (Toyota, Honda, and Sony). The decade-long economic slowdown of the 1990s tarnished Japan's reputation, but it did not erase Japan's soft-power resources. Japan's global cultural influence grew in areas ranging from fashion, food and pop music to consumer electronics, architecture and art. Japanese manufacturers rule the roost in home video games. Pokemon cartoons are broadcast in 65 countries, and Japanese animation is a huge hit with filmmakers and teenagers everywhere. In short, Japan's popular culture was still producing potential soft-power resources even after its economy slowed down. Now, with signs of a reviving economy, Japan's soft power may increase even more. But there are limits. Unlike Germany, which repudiated its past aggression and reconciled with its neighbors in the framework of the European Union, Japan has never come to terms with its record in the 1930s and 1940s. The residual suspicion that lingers in countries like China and Korea sets limits on Japan's appeal that are reinforced every time the Japanese prime minister visits Yasukuni Shrine.
AT: Japanese-South Korean Relations
Japan-South Korea relations will stay strong – deeply related and interconnected
Pan, 05 – staff writer on the Council on Foreign Relations (Esther Pan, “Japan’s Relationship with South Korea,” Council on Foreign Relations, October 27, 2005, ) Experts say the leaders of both countries, in calmer moments, know they’re deeply interrelated on many levels and must depend on each other. Their societies have become deeply connected: Japan and South Korea jointly hosted the successful 2002 World Cup, and Korean culture is currently a huge hit in Japan. A South Korean soap opera, Winter Sonata, is wildly popular in Japan. The show’s star Bae Yong Jun has become a heartthrob to millions of Japanese women, who make pilgrimages to sites in South Korea where the show is filmed. 2005 was designated the Korea-Japan Friendship Year to mark forty years of diplomatic relations. While it’s been a bit rocky so far, the overall picture is still good, experts say. “Relations are not as bad as they appear from the outside,” Armstrong says. “Much of the protest is for domestic consumption.” Even the hubbub over the Yasukuni shrine will blow over, Kang predicts. “The shrine issue is diplomatic squabbling,” he says. “It’s very low on the scale of conflicts.”
Current governments represent a new era in Japan-South Korea relations
Jee-Ho, 09 – JoongAng Daily writer and Asian correspondent (Yoo Jee-Ho, “Korea Hopes for New Era in Japan Relations,” JoongAng Daily, September 1, 2009, )
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak yesterday said he hoped for a new era in South Korea-Japan relations in a congratulatory call to Yukio Hatoyama, the leader of the Democratic Party of Japan that ousted the Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide election victory on Sunday.According to Blue House spokeswoman Kim Eun-hye, Lee noted Hatoyama’s “politics of friendship” and said the two close neighbors would enter a new phase in relations. In response, Hatoyama said he believed he and Lee could realize a progressive relationship between the two countries because “we’re both able to view history correctly.” Lee said in return that the historical issues between the two countries “are quite difficult” to resolve, but as long as the two can share a proper sense of history, “We can move toward the future hand in hand.” Hatoyama said Lee was the first head of state to contact him after his victory. In June, Hatoyama chose South Korea as his first destination for an overseas trip after taking over the DPJ leadership the previous month. South Korean officials yesterday expressed cautious optimism that the change of leadership in Japan would help improve Korea-Japan relations, while academics said they don’t foresee major changes in the diplomatic stances of the two countries. In Sunday’s landslide election victory, the Democratic Party of Japan upended the Liberal Democratic Party, which had ruled Japan for all but 11 months since 1955. In light of the DPJ’s win, South Korean government officials offered guarded hopes about the chances for improved relations between South Korea and Japan. An official at the Blue House said late Sunday, as the exit polls projected a victory for the DPJ, the results of the election were a “reflection of the Japanese people’s desire for change and reform.” He added, “We hope this will be an opportunity to take South Korea-Japan relations to another level.” Another Blue House official pointed out that Hatoyama, leader of the DPJ and the likely successor to Taro Aso as the next prime minister, has repeatedly highlighted the importance of Japan’s relations with South Korea. The Foreign Ministry in Seoul, on the other hand, refrained from predicting major changes to South Korea’s policy toward Japan, or to South Korea-Japan relations. Foreign Ministry spokesman Moon Tae-young said it is premature to predict where Seoul-Tokyo relations will go from here. “Rather than comment on the issue in the immediate aftermath of the election, we will offer our view after the new Japanese government is inaugurated,” Moon said. “But we are aware that the Democratic Party of Japan has emphasized Japan’s ties with South Korea.”
AT: Korean Reunification
1. The United Korean military will be defense based instead of war based, and will concentrate on solving internal instability
Derek J. Mitchell (a senior fellow in the International Security Program at CSIS) 2002: A Blueprint for U.S. Policy toward a Unified Korea.
One of the first acts of a unified Korean state will be to reassess its longterm security strategy and orientation carefully. The Korean military will likely move toward a defense-oriented, crisis-management strategy and away from a war-fighting posture. Korea will be preoccupied for some time with internal instability as South Korean authorities focus on decommissioning the DPRK military and integrating its personnel productively into popular Korean society. The ROK military will need to safeguard and account for residual DPRK military equipment and material, particularly any weapons of mass destruction and the delivery systems or laboratories associated with them.
2. Unified Korea will have no interest in WMD – fears over regional arms race
Derek J. Mitchell (a senior fellow in the International Security Program at CSIS) 2002: A Blueprint for U.S. Policy toward a Unified Korea.
A unified Korea would be expected to have no interest in WMD development or deployment as such an act would likely spur a regional arms race and create tensions with the international community, especially the United States, over nonproliferation. This calculation will ultimately depend on the state of the regional security environment at the time of unification, including the status of Korea’s alliance with the United States as well as its confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella, Korea’s relationship with Russia and China, and whether or not Japan develops nuclear weapons.
3. Unified U.S. Korean relations will remain strong – key to its economic development and regional security
Derek J. Mitchell (a senior fellow in the International Security Program at CSIS) 2002: A Blueprint for U.S. Policy toward a Unified Korea.
Arguably, Korea’s interest will continue to lie in the retention of its alliance with the United States following unification. Despite some frictions, the alliance has served to help preserve Korea’s essential freedom of action and to facilitate its historic political and economic development over many decades. Maintaining an alliance with the United States will also help preserve the U.S.-led, alliance-based security structure in East Asia that has served as a stabilizing force in the region, hedged against the rise of an aggressive regional power, and protected Korea from becoming the political if not military battleground upon which the major Asian powers have historically sought regional advantage. Indeed, a unified Korea will need the stability and reassurance engendered by its alliance with the United States more than ever during the many years of transition following unification, particularly under collapse or war scenarios.
4. Korea will continue to host U.S. military forces on the peninsula – ensures security
Derek J. Mitchell (a senior fellow in the International Security Program at CSIS) 2002: A Blueprint for U.S. Policy toward a Unified Korea.
A unified Korea also will arguably have a substantial interest in accepting a U.S. military presence on the peninsula following unification. This presence would serve as a key component of continued alliance relations and the overall U.S. regional military presence to preserve stability throughout East Asia. Korea’s continued hosting of U.S. forces would sustain the special relationship between the governments and armed forces of both sides, facilitate their coordination of regional strategy, and continue to serve as a deterrent to others seeking advantage on the peninsula.
AT: Kuwaiti Economy
Kuwait economy not key to world- dependent on global trends
Jamieson 6/11 [Lee, Staff Writer, Arabian , ] KLS
However, recent economic turbulence has made Kuwait acutely aware of how reliant it is on the global economic system. The Kuwait Stock Exchange experienced a loss of US $10 billion early last year, high inflation is an ongoing concern and the number of expatriate workers, which make up 50% of its overall population, has dropped for the second year in a row.
Kuwaiti economy resilient – oil
Oxford Economic Country Briefings 8 (1/18/8, “Kuwait,” Oxford Economic Country Briefings [Magazine] ) JPG
Kuwait has a relatively undiversified economy, dominated by the oil industry and government sector, with oil accounting for about half of GDP, 95% of export revenues and around 80% of government revenues. During the 1970s, the economy grew strongly on the back of rapidly rising oil prices, but in the 1980s it was hit by a securities market crash and sharply lower oil prices, followed up by the 1990 Iraq invasion. In exile during the Iraqi occupation, the government drew down over half of its US$1 OObn in overseas investments to help pay for reconstruction. The economy has enjoyed a period of prosperity since the US-led invasion of Iraq, with many companies in Iraq establishing offices in Kuwait and procuring goods through Kuwaiti companies, with banking and construction having grown particularly strongly. Sharply higher oil prices in the last few years have also given the economy another big boost, with real GDP growth jumping to over 15% in 2003 and averaging about 10% in 2004-05. The oil sector has led the way, climbing to almost 60% of GDP in 2005, but non-oil sectors, in particular services, have also been boosted by the impact of booming oil revenues. However, the pace of economic reform has been slow, hampering the growth of private sector involvement in the economy. * Crude oil reserves are officially said to be almost 10Obn barrels, or 8% of world reserves, making Kuwait a key player within OPEC and world oil markets. The Saudi-Kuwaiti neutral zone, shared by the two countries, holds an additional 5bn barrels, lifting Kuwait's total oil reserves to over 100bn barrels, enough for over 100 years of production at the 2005 level of around 2.5m b/d. Under the US$7bn Project Kuwait, the government is hoping it will reach 3.0m b/d by 2008 and 4m b/d by 2012, but these plans are thought unlikely to be met. And there have also been industry reports that proven oil reserves are only about half of the officially quoted level, which in turn would cast doubt over the sustainability of any sharp increase in production. * As a result of booming oil revenues, the country's traditional balance of payments surpluses have been swollen further in recent years, with the current account surplus rising to over US$50bn in 2006, equal to about 50% of GDP. These surpluses have enabled the government to rebuild its external assets, which were heavily depleted after the Iraq invasion but are now thought to be approaching the US$100bn level again. As well as rising external surpluses, which have helped to support the dinar (KWD, pegged to the US$ from January 2003 to May 2007 and now to a trade- and investment-weighted basket of currencies), the government has also posted rising budget surpluses, estimated at 30% of GDP in 2005 and 2006. These have enabled total gross debt to be brought down to 13% of GDP at end-2005, and the acquisition of foreign assets has made Kuwait one of the world's largest net external creditors. Along with the other states in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Kuwait is planning to form a currency union by 2010, but doubts about the feasibility of this plan have surfaced in the past year, especially following the May 2007 KWD revaluation.
Kuwait econ resilient- banking, liquidity, efficiency
Thabet 6/15 [Mokhtar, Staff Writer, 2010 Global Arab Network ] KLS
Thanks to a comfortable banking sector’s aggregate equity to total assets and a good liquidity system supported by the availability of ample government funding, Kuwaiti banks are able to weather significant pressure. Nonetheless, despite some improvement, banks’ risk management practices need further enhancement, as shown by the significant portfolio concentrations on the stressed Kuwaiti investment company and real estate and construction sectors. Unlike excellent profitability undergone by Kuwaiti banks before the financial crisis (benefiting from the booming local and regional economies), Moody’s expects the yearend 2009 results to show a significant increase in system NPLs due to increased provisioning charges and adversely affecting returns. Elevated provisioning charges are likely to continue to affect some banks’ profits throughout 2010. Moody’s expects banks with higher concentrations in their loan books or weaker credit standards to report weaker results than those of their peers. The Central Bank of Kuwait (CBK) relaxing its rule on the loans to deposits ratio did not impede a loan growth slowdown since the crisis started. Eventually, the efficiency of Kuwaiti banks in terms of cost-to-income ratios is excellent in global terms, although some deterioration in efficiency ratios as a result of the weakened operating conditions could exert pressure on profits.
AT: Language (K)
Language isn’t inherently violent – violence exists independent of it
Apressyan, 98, Ruben G. Chair – Department of Ethics – Institute of Philosophy in Moscow, Director – Research and Education Center for the Ethics of Nonviolence, and Professor of Moral Philosophy – Moscow Lomonosov State University, Peace Review, v. 10 i. 4, December,
There is another aspect, however. Language per se is not violent; although, it easily may become an object of violence. This defenselessness against violence, means that violence exists beyond language. Speech is a prerogative of reason: violence is speechless. This means that violence has no need of language. With the help of language, violence may mark itself, give itself a kind of justification, allude to itself, or hide itself in various forms of reserve and awesomeness. Potential violence may resolve into speech or disembodied words. But in turn, words themselves, or words inserted into certain contexts or articulated with a certain intonation may appear as potentially violent. Thus language becomes a means of violence which "keeps silence."
AT: Latin American Economies
Latin American economies resilient – IMF report and this recession proves
Mary Swire 2008: Latin America and the Caribbean Region Resilient So Far, But Risks Ahead.
Economies in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region have generally held up well so far in the face of recent global financial strains, according to the IMF's latest Regional Economic Outlook: Western Hemisphere, released late last week.
Many countries in the region are benefiting from stronger fiscal and external positions and improved credibility of policy frameworks, according to Anoop Singh, Director of the IMF's Western Hemisphere Department.
The IMF observed that stresses in US financial markets have had less impact on the region's financial markets and external funding than in past episodes of global financial disruptions.
Although external funding conditions have tightened, especially for the LAC corporate sector, this has been by less than in the past, and also less than in some other emerging markets. However, Mr Singh noted that a deteriorating global environment will weaken fiscal and external positions, especially because public spending continues to be procyclical in many countries.
Mr Singh added that the prospects for a number of countries have been strongly supported by still-strong commodity prices.
AT: LNG Explosion 1/2
1. Their impact of LNG explosion is false – explosion presents less threat than fire, an impact that has been contained.
Parfomak 03 (Paul W., Specialist in Science and Technology , Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Infrastructure Security: Background and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service - Library of Congress. September 9, 2003. (Acrobat PDF file, 25 pgs, 228 kb))
The potential hazard from terror attacks on LNG tankers continues to be debated among experts. One recent study of tankers serving the Everett LNG terminal assessed the impact of 1) a hand-held missile attack on the external hull, and 2) a bomb attack from a small boat next to the hull (similar to the Limberg attack). The study found that “loss of containment may occur through shock mechanisms caused by small amounts of explosive.”59 The study concluded that “a deliberate attack on an LNG carrier can result in a ... threat to both the ship, its crew and members of the public.”60 However, the study also found the risk of a public catastrophe to be small. For example, the study found that the LNG pool hazard would be less than that for a gasoline or liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) pool.61 The study also concluded that a vaporized LNG explosion would be unlikely because a missile or bomb presents multiple ignition sources. Other experts have calculated that an LNG fire under “worst case” conditions could be much more hazardous to waterfront facilities.63 Impact estimates for LNG tanker attacks are largely based on engineering models, however, each with its own input assumptions–so it is difficult to assert definitively how dangerous a real attack would be.
2. LNG explosion won’t create a huge plume or massive deaths
Melhem et al 06 – PHD Professor of Structural Engineering (Dr. G. A. Melhem, Dr. A. S. Kalelkar, Dr. S. Saraf “Managing LNG Risks: Separating the Facts from the Myths” updated 2006, )
Myth No. 3 An LNG tanker accident could cause the release of all five tanks LNG content. This will create a plume that would extend 30 miles. Upon delayed ignition thousands of people within the plume would be instantly killed. Fact LNG is not flammable until it is vaporized, mixed in the right proportions with air, and then ignited. The measured minimum ignition energy of LNG vapors is 0.29 mJ (milli-Joules). Flammable LNG vapors are easily ignited by machinery, cigarettes, and static electricity. Static electricity discharged when one walks on a carpet or brushes his/her hair is 10 mJ, or 35 times the amount required to ignite LNG vapors. A large LNG vapor cloud cannot travel far into developed areas without igniting and burning back to the source. A scenario describing LNG vapor clouds impacting entire cities is “pure fiction”. The vapor cloud and subsequent pool fire will have a potentially significant impact on the immediate release area and downwind to the first ignition source. This significantly limits the extent of impact. It is not realistic to imagine that all five tanks on an LNG tanker can be instantaneously released. To instantaneously remove the double hulled side of an LNG ship would require an enormous amount of explosive. The explosive used to breach the hull would cause more damage to the surroundings than the subsequent LNG spill and pool fire. To mount such an attack on an LNG ship would require the equivalent of a full-scale military operation, not a clandestine terrorist operation. Since the early 1980s, the scientific community clearly demonstrated that a Gaussian dispersion model (the same model used to estimate the 30 mile dispersion distance) is not appropriate for LNG vapor dispersion. Dispersion estimates using a proper heavy gas model are reported in the recent Sandia study. The potential to realize major injuries and significant damage to property resulting from an intentional breach scenario extends less than ½ mile from the spill origin.
3. An LNG explosion would do minimal damage – this specifically indicts their impact evidence
Lloyd's Register, 4 – Leading participants in the safety and verification of LNG facilities around the world (“Statement on LNG risks from Lloyd's Register North America, Inc.” 9-23-2004, ) AMK
LNG. The real risks In the US, regulators and other interested parties have identified as key concerns the possibility of a terrorist attack involving an LNG terminal or an LNG carrier, and the consequences for the surrounding population and infrastructure. Global terrorism is certainly a major threat and all reasonable measures should and must be taken to mitigate the risks and consequences of any actions, however, commentators and observers are incorrect if they believe that a terrorist attack on an LNG carrier would have the impact of a nuclear explosion. There are several technical reasons which bear this out: 1. LNG is transported globally in insulated tanks on specialised ships. These tanks provide four physical barriers and two layers of insulation between the LNG and the outside environment. Further, the separation between the inner and outer hulls of an LNG carrier is typically over two meters. These two factors combined mean that LNG cargo carried at sea has a very high in-built level of protection from external blast sources. 2. In the event of an attack, even if a one-meter hole were to be formed in the inner hull, the resultant holes in the primary containment barrier would be significantly smaller due to the increased separation distance from the blast source combined with the pressure absorption properties of the secondary containment barrier and insulation materials. 3. It is unrealistic to imagine that the entire cargo of any ship can be instantaneously released. To mount an attack on an LNG carrier that would result in the instantaneous release of all of its cargo would require the equivalent of a full scale military operation, not a clandestine terrorist operation like those carried out against the USS Cole and the Limburg. 4. The idea that LNG carriers are potential nuclear devices is erroneous. There is a lot of energy in LNG and natural gas, as in any hydrocarbon. However, the 'nuclear explosion' statement describes the total energy an LNG carrier contains, not the rate at which the energy would be released in an incident. For example, a lump of coal contains lots of energy, but when set on fire, its energy doesn't all come out instantly like a bomb. Instead, the coal burns over a period of time releasing its energy as it goes. Similarly, LNG carriers contain large quantities of energy, but the energy can only be released slowly in the event of a spill or a fire. 5. An LNG spill in open air will not result in a bomb-like explosion. This has been consistently demonstrated in experiments. Not everything that is ignited explodes like a bomb. For example, when a match is lit, it burns but does not explode. Similarly, the natural gas vapour that could result from an LNG carrier spill also falls under the category of substances that will burn but not explode like a bomb. Reason and caution Paul Huber, Director of LRNA, says: "There are risks associated with the transport and storage of LNG, as there are with any hydrocarbon energy source, and these are precisely the reasons that the LNG industry operates with extensive international and national regulations which govern the safety of LNG transport and storage. The effectiveness of these regulations is apparent in the LNG shipping sector, which has an unblemished safety record spanning 40 years - a track record which is unrivalled by any other maritime sector and most land-based industries. It should also be remembered that LNG itself is one of the cleanest-burning and most environmentally friendly energy sources currently available on a global scale. "While the shadow of terrorism hangs over us, we have to do as much as we can to protect ourselves and our borders, but it is misleading to state, as some have, that an attack on an LNG carrier would be similar to a nuclear event. It is difficult for us to know the rationale behind the assertion contained in the speech to the Houston Forum, but it is clear that it is not supported by fact.
AT: LNG Explosion 2/2
4. All of your LNG Impacts have low probability .
ASPEN ENVIRONMENTAL GROUP, 2005 (INTERNATIONAL AND NATIONAL EFFORTS TO ADDRESS THE SAFETY AND SECURITY RISKS OF IMPORTING LIQUEFIED NATURAL GAS: A COMPENDIUM , January, p 41)
The committee determined that earthquakes are the most likely events to initiate an LNG hazard rather than man-made causes, but the likelihood that an earthquake could lead to a large release of LNG (e.g., caused by sufficient damage to a carrier or an onshore storage tank) was unlikely to very unlikely. Other findings from the study were as follows: • The proposed terminal and the carriers serving it are potential targets for acts of terror, but an actual attack is unlikely. • The chance of a maritime accident in San Pablo Bay and in the vicinity of the Carquinez Strait of a severity sufficient to release LNG is unlikely. • The authority of the USCG and the measures it applies to similar High Consequence Vessels (HCVs) in other United States LNG terminals reduces the threat from acts of terror or sabotage substantially. • A fireball presents the worst case for radiating heat. It is very unusual for LNG to form a fireball when released and ignited, because fireball formation requires the violent mixing of fuel and air prior to ignition. • LNG will not support a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE), because it is exceedingly cold and is stored at ambient pressure in very strong tanks. • A pool fire involving the entire contents of a storage tank, or the entire contents of a single LNG carrier cargo tank released onto San Pablo Bay at the terminal will not cause radiant heat levels dangerous to people and homes in Vallejo, because the circumstances leading to such a large LNG release are more likely to ignite the LNG before it reaches populated areas.
AT: LNG Terror
No impact—the worst case scenario kills 8,000
Kaplan, 6 – Associate Editor of the Council on Foreign Relations (Eben, “Liquefied Natural Gas: A Potential Terrorist Target?” February 27, 2006, ) -CMM
Are LNG ships and terminals potential terrorist targets? Yes, because of LNG's explosive potential, experts say. Al-Qaeda, for example, has specifically cited LNG as a desirable target, says Rob Knake, senior associate at Good Harbor Consulting, LLC, a homeland-security private consulting firm. Pipelines are not as attractive because the flow of gas can quickly be cut off and an explosion easily contained. Terminals make better targets because an attack could result in a massive fire that could potentially kill scores of people. They are also good targets because "if you take out those terminals, you could have a significant disruption [in the U.S. gas supply,]" Knake says. But an attack on an LNG terminal might not be so damaging. Terminals are equipped with emergency fire detection mechanisms designed to minimize the impact of fires resulting from terrorist attacks or accidents. The most attractive targets are the boats: 1,000-foot tankers with double hulls and specially constructed storage tanks that keep the LNG cold. A report, put out by Good Harbor Consulting assessing the risk of a proposed LNG terminal in Providence, Rhode Island, concluded that a successful terrorist attack on a tanker could result in as many as 8,000 deaths and upwards of 20,000 injuries. It is important to keep in mind that this is the worst case scenario. A report on LNG safety and security by the University of Texas' Center for Energy and Economics explains LNG "tanks require exceptionally large amounts of force to cause damage. Because the amount of energy required to breach containment is so large, in almost all cases the major hazard presented by terrorists is a fire, not an explosion."
Tankers aren’t terrorist targets and the impact will be limited
Melhem et al 06 – PHD Professor of Structural Engineering (Dr. G. A. Melhem, Dr. A. S. Kalelkar, Dr. S. Saraf “Managing LNG Risks: Separating the Facts from the Myths” updated 2006, )
Myth No. 2 LNG tankers and land based facilities are vulnerable to terrorism; An LNG potential disaster (explosion of an LNG tanker) is greater today because of the threat of terrorism. The gigantic quantity of energy stored in huge cryogenic tanks is what makes LNG a desirable terrorist target. Tankers may be physically attacked in a variety of ways to destroy their cargo or used as weapons against coastal targets. Fact As discussed earlier, LNG ships are not attractive “mass casualties” terrorist targets. Any explosive charge used on an LNG ship will cause immediate ignition of the LNG vapors. The subsequent LNG pool fire will have a potentially significant impact on the immediate release area only. This will significantly limit the extent of impact. There are also new Coast Guard security regulations (33 CFR Part 105) for LNG tanker movements and terminals. In addition, IMO and the USCG have established stringent security requirements for vessels in international and United States waters.
There are too many precautions for there to be a terrorist attack
O’Malley- Chief, Ports and Facilities Activities United States Coast Guard- 8 (Mark, “SAFETY AND SECURITY OF LIQUID NATURAL GAS,” May 7, 2007, Lexis) –CMM
In addition to undergoing a much more rigorous and frequent examination of key operating and safety systems, LNG vessels are subject to additional measures of security when compared to crude oil tankers, as an example. Many of the special safety and security precautions the Coast Guard has long established for LNG vessels derived from our analysis of "conventional" navigation safety risks such as groundings, collisions, propulsion or steering system failures. These precautions pre-dated the September 11, 2001 tragedy, and include such measures as special vessel traffic control measures that are implemented when an LNG vessel is transiting the port or its approaches, safety zones around the vessel to prevent other vessels from approaching nearby, escorts by patrol craft and, as local conditions warrant, coordination with other Federal, state and local transportation, law enforcement and/or emergency management agencies to reduce the risks to, or minimize the interference from other port area infrastructure or activities. These activities are conducted under the authority of existing port safety and security statutes, such as the Magnuson Act (50 U.S.C. 191 et. seq.) and the Ports and Waterways Safety Act, as amended. Since September 11, 2001, additional security measures have been implemented, including the requirement that all vessels calling in the U.S. must provide the Coast Guard with a 96-hour advance notice of arrival (increased from 24 hours advance notice pre- 9/11). This notice includes information on the vessel's last ports of call, crew identities and cargo information. In addition, the Coast Guard now regularly boards LNG vessels at- sea, where Coast Guard personnel conduct special "security sweeps" of the vessel and ensure it is under the control of proper authorities during its port transit. In order to protect the vessel from external attack, LNG vessels are escorted through key port areas. These armed escorts afford protection to the nearby population centers by reducing the probability of a successful attack against an LNG vessel. These actions are in addition to the safety and security oriented boardings previously described. Of course, one of the most important post-9/11 maritime security improvements has been the passage of the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002 (MTSA). Under the authority of MTSA, the Coast Guard developed a comprehensive new body of security measures applicable to vessels, marine facilities and maritime personnel. Our domestic maritime security regime is closely aligned with the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code. The ISPS Code, a mandatory requirement of the SOLAS Convention, was adopted at the IMO in December 2002 and came into effect on July 1st 2004. Under the ISPS Code, vessels in international service, including LNG vessels, must have an International Ship Security Certificate (ISSC). To be issued an ISSC by its flag state, the vessel must develop and implement a threat-scalable security plan that, among other things, establishes access control measures, security measures for cargo handling and delivery of ships stores, surveillance and monitoring, security communications, security incident procedures, and training and drill requirements. The plan must also identify a Ship Security Officer who is responsible for ensuring compliance with the ship's security plan. The Coast Guard rigorously enforces this international requirement by evaluating security compliance as part of our ongoing port state control program. Any LNG vessel entering Long Island Sound would be subject to strict safety and security standards. There would be a moving security zone around the LNG carriers and a fixed safety zone around the proposed Floating, Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU). Coast Guard enforcement activities would be based on the most current threat assessment as well as standing Coast Guard policy and procedures which account for known and unknown threats. State and local law enforcement agencies could assist the Coast Guard with the enforcement of these safety zones. Another element of the extensive layered security system established by MTSA is Coast Guard approved facility security plans. Implementing the facility security plan for the FSRU would be Broadwater Energy's responsibility. An element of the facility security plan for the FSRU would include the employment of private security guards to conduct on-water security patrols in the vicinity of the FSRU. Private security guards would not have the authority to enforce the fixed or moving safety zones.
AT: Malaria
1. New malaria drugs will solve any outbreak because it works against resistant strains.
By Donald G. McNeil Jr. December 22, 2008 (Science and health reporter for the New York Times specializing in plagues and pestilences. He covers diseases of the world's poor, AIDS, malaria, avian flu, SARS, mad cow disease and so on. New York Times, “Malaria Drug May Soon Be Set for U.S. Debut”) KM
The Food and Drug Administration is expected soon to approve the first malaria drug in the United States to contain artemisinin, the wormwood derivative from China that is the latest and much heralded cure for malaria in Africa and Asia. Although there are only about 1,500 cases of malaria treated in the country each year — virtually all in people just back from the tropics — the approval would also make the drug available to the military and to Americans planning to go abroad. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most of those travelers returning from the tropics with malaria had been visiting relatives in Africa, India, Haiti or Central America. About 10 percent went abroad as tourists and about 2 percent as members of the military. The drug, Coartem, is made by the Swiss company Novartis. It combines artemether, an artemesinin derivative, with lumefantrine, a drug developed by Chinese scientists, which does not kill parasites as quickly but lingers in the blood longer. By mopping up parasites that artemisinin misses, lumefantrine helps prevent resistance that would defeat the drug, as happened with previous so-called miracle cures like chloroquine. Novartis saysthe F.D.A.’s legal deadline for a decision is this Friday. On Dec. 3, an F.D.A. advisory committee of independent experts voted 18 to 0 to endorse the drug’s effectiveness. The agency usually takes its committees’ advice. About the expected approval, Dr. Claire Panosian, president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, who treats malaria cases in Los Angeles, said: “I’m thrilled. It’s a great breakthrough to have another antimalarial in the U.S.” Novartis sells Coartem (pronounced koh-AHR-tem) to the World Health Organization and medical charities for about 80 cents per course of treatment, which it says is the production cost. It has sold nearly 200 million treatments for use in Africa and claims they have saved 500,000 lives. Coartem was introduced in 2001; it is approved in more than 80 countries, including 16 in Europe. Novartis had had little interest in registering it here because the market is so small and the food and drug agency’s requirements are expensive — even when the application fee, more than $1 million for a new drug, is waived, as it was for Coartem. Novartis came under pressure to register it here because so much taxpayer money was being spent on it after the $1.2 billion President’s Malaria Initiative passed in 2005.
2. The United States is taking steps to solve Malaria worldwide.
Thomas Fuller. January 26, 2009. (Staff writer for the New York Times. “Spread of Malaria Feared as Drug Loses Potency.”
To prevent a recurrence with artemisinin therapies, the United States has put aside political considerations and approved a malaria monitoring center in military-run Myanmar, formerly Burma. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest donors to malaria research, is giving $14 million to the Thai and Cambodian governments to help pay for a containment program.
That program includes efforts to supply the area with mosquito nets, a screening program for everyone living in affected areas and follow-up visits by health workers to assess the effectiveness of the drugs, said Dr. Duong Socheat, director of Cambodia’s National Malaria Center. On the Thai side of the border, the government has “motorcycle microscopists” who take blood samples from villagers and migrant workers, analyze them on the spot and distribute antimalaria drugs.
Ext #1 – Vaccines Solve
Extremely effective vaccines being developed now – solves their short term impacts and solves long term – Malaria will not exist in 30 years
Guy Steyner (Reporter, Lateline) July 15, 2008: Scientists one step closer to Malaria vaccine
There's been a breakthrough in the fight against the global malaria pandemic.
The parasite kills two million people each year.
Scientists from Melbourne have identified key proteins in infected blood cells. The team is now targeting the proteins in the search for a vaccine.
GUY STEYNER, REPORTER: This scientist is feeding malaria parasites with fresh human blood.
DR ALEX MAIER, WALTER AND ELIZA HALL INSTITUTE: And they have to be looked after every 48 hours because they multiply in the red blood cells and they basically run out of nutrients.
ALEX STEYNER: It might sound horrible, but cultivating the parasites has enabled ground breaking research on malaria, which infects red blood cells making them sticky so the parasite can't be flushed through the spleen.
PROFESSOR ALAN COWMAN, WALTER AND ELIZA HALL INSTITUTE: We wanted to know how the parasite sticks because that is the key thing that causes disease and the key thing that you need to target in order to treat malaria.
GUY STEYNER: After five years of painstaking research these Melbourne scientists have identified the eight proteins that make the infected red cells adhesive.
ALAN COWMAN: We can then start to concentrate on these proteins and develop drugs that interfere with the function of these proteins and that would stop the parasite from sticking in organs such as the brain or placenta and would therefore circulate into the spleen and then be eaten by cells in the spleen who's function is to clear infections such as malaria.
GUY STEYNER: The discovery could lead to a vaccine.
ALEX MAIER: You have to endure a lot of frustration and false leads and when it all comes together it really, really makes you very happy.
GUY STEYNER: It's estimated 600 million people are infected with malaria worldwide. The research team here hope their discovery will help eradicate malaria within the next 30 years.
Vaccines solve – new vaccines will be ready by next year
Rosanne Skirble 2005: HEALTH BRIEFS 2005-1: Malaria Vaccine; Avian Flu Clues from Canine Virus; Appetite-Suppressing Hormone Discovery.
Scientists and health policy experts gathered in Cameroon recently to discuss ways to fight malaria, the leading cause of death among African children. The Pan Africa Malaria Conference 2005 released findings that suggest there is progress in efforts to create a vaccine for the mosquito-borne disease.
A study in 2004 -- in collaboration with the Mozambique Health Ministry -- indicated that the trial vaccine RTS, S-AS02 cut severe malaria episodes in half. Eighteen months later its effectiveness had dropped as feared, but not significantly.
Vaccine inventor John Cohen told conference goers that if the findings hold up, the vaccine could save hundreds of thousands of lives. Three million people die of malaria each year. Ninety percent of the cases are in sub-Saharan Africa.
RTS, S-AS02 is one of several malaria vaccines now in development. Dr. Cohen says the American pharmaceutical company Glaxo-Smith-Kline is working on a new formulation of the vaccine, which the company hopes to field test within a year. The product could be on the market by 2010.
AT: Malnutrition
1. Can’t solve it – it’s a lifestyle choice to eat healthy
2. Infections are the root cause of malnutrition not the plan
Ulrich E. Schaible and Stefan H. E. Kaufmann. May 1, 2007. (Ulrich E. Schaible is at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, Immunology Unit, London, United Kingdom. Stefan H. E. Kaufmann is at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Department of Immunology, Berlin, Germany. PLoS Medicine. “Malnutrition and Infection: Complex Mechanisms and Global Impacts” )
Infection itself contributes to malnutrition. The relationship of malnutrition on immune suppression and infection is complicated by the profound effects of a number of infections on nutrition itself. Examples of how infections can contribute to malnutrition are: (1) gastrointestinal infection can lead to diarrhea; (2) HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and other chronic infections can cause cachexia and anemia; and (3) intestinal parasites can cause anemia and nutrient deprivation [13].
Stimulation of an immune response by infection increases the demand for metabolically derived anabolic energy and associated substrates, leading to a synergistic vicious cycle of adverse nutritional status and increased susceptibility to infection. Under inflammatory conditions such as sepsis, mediators increase the catabolic disease state characterised by enhanced arginine use. Furthermore, arginase is induced during infection and uses up arginine as substrate. It has been suggested that depletion of this amino acid impairs T cell responses [14], and exceeding the body’s arginine production leads to a negative nitrogen balance [15].
3. No timeframe to the impact – malnutrition has been around for a while, and we haven’t seen any big impacts
4. Too many barriers to solve malnutrition.
The PLoS Medicine Editors Nov. 08 (Public Library of Science “Scaling Up International Food Aid: Food Delivery Alone Cannot Solve the Malnutrition Crisis”)
Other proven malnutrition interventions must also be scaled up. For example, the Ending Child Hunger and Undernutrition Initiative, a global partnership started by UNICEF and the World Food Programme, is calling for the global scale-up of a range of “practical measures” [21]. These include health, hygiene, and nutrition education and promotion, micronutrient supplementation, household water treatment, hand washing, deworming, and “situation-specific household food security interventions” [21]. National and international development strategies and policies, together with political will and financing, are also required [22]. It will cost about $US8 billion a year to assist 100 million families to protect their children from hunger and malnutrition [21]—and yet current donor spending on programs to reduce undernutrition is only about $US250–$US300 million annually [23].
AT: Mexico Collapse
1. Drug wars collapse Mexico.
The San Diego Union Tribune 7/9/00 “A special report” Lexis [ev]
Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo describes narcotics trafficking as the greatest threat to Mexico's national security. A report produced by his own government warned that increasingly powerful drug cartels threaten Mexico's political stability and, if left unchecked, could render Mexico ungovernable. Something close to that is already happening a mere 20 miles from downtown San Diego, just across the border in Tijuana: Two police chiefs assassinated by drug traffickers in six years, dozens of prosecutors and police investigators killed and a murder rate at least seven times that of San Diego. For the past decade, the Arellano Felix Organization, the most violent drug cartel in Mexico, has waged this deadly war against the rule of law. The cartel has proved itself stronger than the Mexican government in the Tijuana-Mexicali-Ensenada triangle that is the Arellanos' base territory. Mexican officials estimate that the Tijuana cartel provides at least 15 percent of the entire U.S. cocaine supply, a share representing 45 tons or more of cocaine a year. That's nearly a ton of cocaine every week shoved across our borders by the Arellano organization.
2. Rising corn prices are draining the government budget.
Prairie Pundit 4/18/08 “Half baked energy policy food for thought” Lexis [ev]
The Mexican government knows corn's price is politically sensitive. In January 2007, published the following short commentary: "Mexican authorities are concerned that a rise in the price of tortillas will lead to civil unrest. The price of tortillas rose 10 to 14 percent in 2006. The cause: international demand for corn." Mexico planned to import "duty free" several hundred thousand tons of corn to stabilize prices. Corn prices continue to climb, this month hitting an all-time high of six dollars a bushel, up 30 percent since then end of 2007. Take the all-time high, however, with a dose of mathematics. The Iowa Corn Growers Association argues that the $3.20 a bushel of 1981 would be around eight bucks today.
3. Collapse inevitable – Mexican oil running fry.
4/25/06 “Mexico: Oil Depletion and Illegal U.S. Immigration” [ev]
Mexico's oil industry is, in large part, a direct reflection of the country's economic well-being. As those who have been following global oil output are aware, production in Mexico has started to wane, and just might decline very rapidly. Since the Mexican federal budget depends very heavily on oil revenues, the country may be faced with some tough times ahead, leading to increased pressures among its citizens to migrate north into the U.S.
Ext #1 – Drug Wars
Drug war means collapse inevitable.
Human Events Online 11/26/07 “Drug War Allies” Lexis [ev]
It's just as clear that Mexico and the United States share an urgent national security imperative. Drug cartels threaten the rule of law in Mexico, a country that shares an 1,800-mile border with the United States. Left unchecked, they might ultimately imperil Mexico's political stability and economic development. And, as noted, Mexico is either the source or the trans-shipment point for 90 percent of all narcotics entering the United States. The violence and gang warfare spawned by the drug trade have long since crossed the U.S.-Mexico border right along with the tons of drugs coming from Mexico.
AT: Mexico Drug Wars
Mexico will pretend to be fighting the drug cartels, but secretly prop them up
Friedman 10 chief executive of STRATFOR, a private global intelligence firm he founded in 1996
George, 4/6, “The Political Machine, Drugs and Pinata: Mexico, failed state?”
From Mexico’s point of view, interrupting the flow of drugs to the United States is not clearly in the national interest or in that of the economic elite. Observers often dwell on the warfare between smuggling organizations in the northern borderland but rarely on the flow of American money into Mexico. Certainly, that money could corrupt the Mexican state, but it also behaves as money does. It is accumulated and invested, where it generates wealth and jobs. For the Mexican government to become willing to shut off this flow of money, the violence would have to become far more geographically widespread. And given the difficulty of ending the traffic anyway — and that many in the state security and military apparatus benefit from it — an obvious conclusion can be drawn: Namely, it is difficult to foresee scenarios in which the Mexican government could or would stop the drug trade. Instead, Mexico will accept both the pain and the benefits of the drug trade. Mexico’s policy is consistent: It makes every effort to appear to be stopping the drug trade so that it will not be accused of supporting it. The government does not object to disrupting one or more of the smuggling groups, so long as the aggregate inflow of cash does not materially decline. It demonstrates to the United States efforts (albeit inadequate) to tackle the trade, while pointing out very real problems with its military and security apparatus and with its officials in Mexico City. It simultaneously points to the United States as the cause of the problem, given Washington’s failure to control demand or to reduce prices by legalization. And if massive amounts of money pour into Mexico as a result of this U.S. failure, Mexico is not going to refuse it. The problem with the Mexican military or police is not lack of training or equipment. It is not a lack of leadership. These may be problems, but they are only problems if they interfere with implementing Mexican national policy. The problem is that these forces are personally unmotivated to take the risks needed to be effective because they benefit more from being ineffective. This isn’t incompetence but a rational national policy.
AT: Middle East Instability
Alt cause – religion and ethnicity – multiple historical examples.
Library Index 6 []
The Middle East is at the heart of some of the worst tension and violence in the world, much of it in the form of terrorism. Some of this tension stems from ethnic and religious differences. Since the end of World War II there have been several major interstate conflicts—including the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Gulf War of 1991—civil wars in Jordan and Lebanon, and continuing tensions between various factions throughout the region. The Arab-Israeli conflict alone has erupted into war six times since 1948. Iraq has been involved in six skirmishes, including the ongoing war with the U.S.-led coalition that began in 2003. Afghanistan is not always included as a Middle Eastern country, but its history, language, and culture are closely linked to those of Iran, so the U.S. invasion there, which began in late 2001, may also be considered a Middle Eastern conflict.
Alt cause – water is the main concern for Middle East conflict.
Darwish 3 [Adel, BBC News, ]
King Hussein of Jordan identified water as the only reason that might lead him to war with the Jewish state.
Former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali warned bluntly that the next war in the area will be over water.
From Turkey to Uganda, and from Morocco to Oman, nations with some of the highest birth-rates in the world are all concerned about how to find enough water to sustain urban growth and to meet the needs of agriculture, the main cause of depleting water resources in the region.
All of these countries depend on either the three great river systems which have an average renewal rate of between 18 days to three months, or on vast underground aquifers some of which could take centuries to refill.
Alt cause – Western intervention, arms dealers, military spending, and poverty.
War on Want 1 [most recent citation,
20instability20in20Iraq20and20the20Middle20East+4372.twl]
We fully understand from our work in Palestine, Western Sahara and other areas in conflict that stability and justice are central to defeating poverty. The instability in the Middle East stems partly from years of inappropriate Western intervention. Oil interests and arms dealers have played a major role in this. Regional military expenditures, at an average of 7%-8% of GDP, are significantly more than any other region of the developing world. Despite 30 years of large oil revenues, the Middle East has fallen behind in human development terms - with one in five Arabs living on less than $2 a day.
Alt cause – exclusion from politics increases conflict.
May 6 [Deidre, ]
''The dilemma is clear, exclusion from political stakeholding radicalises, moderates, and legitimises violence,'' said Talal, the outgoing moderator of the WCRP. "For the Middle East to be pulled back from the brink of all-out chaos, we must take the first difficult steps on that road.''
AT: Middle East Wars
1. Middle East wars don’t escalate
Yglesias, ‘7
[Matthew Yglesias is an Associate Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, “Containing Iraq,” The Atlantic, 12 Sep 2007,
Kevin Drum tries to throw some water on the "Middle East in Flames" theory holding that American withdrawal from Iraq will lead not only to a short-term intensification of fighting in Iraq, but also to some kind of broader regional conflagration. Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, as usual sensible but several clicks to my right, also make this point briefly in Democracy: "Talk that Iraq’s troubles will trigger a regional war is overblown; none of the half-dozen civil wars the Middle East has witnessed over the past half-century led to a regional conflagration." Also worth mentioning in this context is the basic point that the Iranian and Syrian militaries just aren't able to conduct meaningful offensive military operations. The Saudi, Kuwait, and Jordanian militaries are even worse. The IDF has plenty of Arabs to fight closer to home. What you're looking at, realistically, is that our allies in Kurdistan might provide safe harbor to PKK guerillas, thus prompting our allies in Turkey to mount some cross-border military strikes against the PKK or possibly retaliatory ones against other Kurdish targets. This is a real problem, but it's obviously not a problem that's mitigated by having the US Army try to act as the Baghdad Police Department or sending US Marines to wander around the desert hunting a possibly mythical terrorist organization.
2. Impacts empirically denied
David, ‘97
David, expert on international politics and security studies who is often consulted by members of the media about American foreign policy in the Middle East, David earned his BA from Union College, an MA from Stanford, and his PhD from Harvard. 97 (Steven. U.S-Israeli relations at the crossroads. Pg 95 )
It is no great revelation to identify the Middle East as an unstable region. Since the establishment of Israel there have been at least six Arab-Israeli wars, several inter-Arab conflicts, and countless assassinations, coups, insurgencies and civil wars. This is in marked contrast to the “developed” world (North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) where here has been no major conflict since the end of the Second World War.
AT: Military Budget
Excess military money is wasted anyway
The Atlantic 6-16 ()NAR
The other reason is that Congress tends to think about boondoggle weapons systems in the context of jobs, not deficits. Killing a turkey is viewed as eliminating a major employer. (Last month, Frank voted over the objections of the defense secretary to fund a duplicate F-35 engine built in Lynn, but says he'd kill the fighter altogether if it came to a vote.) So we still buy useless weapons, over the protests of reformers and defense officials. That kind of backward thinking could start to change. Bringing the deficit under control is a zero-sum game. Eventually, we'll have to raise taxes and cut spending. As budget pressure grows, the nearly $1 trillion in military cuts proposed by the task force could look appealing. One way of getting this done is through the president's Deficit Reduction Commission, which will recommend a package of cuts to Congress in December for an up-or-down vote. The Sustainable Defense Task Force is lobbying the commission to do what Obama wouldn't: consider military cuts, and in the context of the entire federal budget. Members like Frank and Paul say they'll vote against any package that doesn't, and encourage congressional colleagues to do likewise.
Gates is already making programs to save money
Government Executive 7-4 ()NAR
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is ordering a department wide, five-year effort to find more than $100 billion in cost savings in the Pentagon's budget and redirect that money to pay for military weapons systems and force structure. In the next several days, Pentagon leaders will direct the military services and defense agencies to scrub their budgets to find $7 billion in savings for the fiscal 2012 budget, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said Friday. Each of the three services will be responsible for coming up with $2 billion in savings for the fiscal 2012 budget request. But as a strong incentive, the services will keep within their budgets whatever costs they cut over the next five years to pay their force structure and modernization bills. The initial cost-savings plans are due by July 31, Lynn said. After the $7 billion savings in fiscal 2012, the annual cost savings appear to increase significantly to reach a total of $100 billion by fiscal 2012.
AT: Military Education
1. Military education fails – post-conflict missions that result from traditional training result in failure
Carafano, Ph.D., 08
(James Jay, July 31, “On Teaching War: The Future of Professional Military Education” )
Compounding the ambiguous state of teaching the military craft is a long list of lessons learned from the first years of the Long War. The service's Cold War practice of linking promotion and education proved a tragic mistake. Post-Cold War military operations have been highly decentralized, requiring men and women at all levels and throughout the force to exercise complex leadership and management tasks. It turns out in the new world disorder, everybody, not just the best and the brightest destined for generalship, requires a very high-degree of professional military competence. Neglecting the professional education of the reserves, particularly in regard to joint education, was a painful lesson as well. Reserve soldiers serve in staffs at every level on every battlefield and they need to be educated to the exact same standards as their active duty counterparts. Perhaps the most difficult lesson learned was what the real scope of professional military education should be. The military's role in warfighting was always unquestioned, but its responsibilities in peace operations are both controversial and poorly understood. This reflected the military's traditional approach to post-conflict missions, homeland security, and other interagency operations (where soldiers have to work hand-in-hand with a variety of civilian agencies), which have always been ad hoc and haphazard. The old adage that the military's job is to "win the nation's war" was just stupid. Nations, all the parts of the nation that contribute the war effort, win wars. And, "winning the peace" is part of winning the war as well, and many parts of the nation, including the military, have a role here as well. When American forces prepare to undertake post-conflict missions, they try, as much as possible, to make them mirror traditional military activities. Such an approach can result in the misapplication of resources, inappropriate tasks and goals, and ineffective operations. In addition, the armed forces largely eschew integrated joint, interagency, and coalition operations, as well as ignoring the role of non-governmental agencies. The result is that most operations lack cohesion, flexibility, and responsiveness.
2. Military education doesn’t increase readiness, it trades off with other vital defense spending and teaches concepts that are relics of the Cold War
Carafano, Ph.D., 08
(James Jay, July 31, “On Teaching War: The Future of Professional Military Education” )
Changing a Military Saving professional military education from the relentless budgetary pressures to fund other military priorities is continuing challenge. Folding the lessons learned from the Long War into the professional military education system is another. Sustaining the education system is largely a question of maintaining adequate defense budgets--a major battle that will have to be fought in the years ahead. Institutionalizing the lessons of the Long War, however, will require both money and change.
3. Military education fails – military culture prevents effectiveness
Carafano, Ph.D., 08
(James Jay, July 31, “On Teaching War: The Future of Professional Military Education” )
The obstacles to making the military learn more effectively are largely cultural in origin. Therefore, changing military culture could well require a set of initiatives that cut across the services' education, career professional development patterns, and organization. To start with, the skills needed to conduct effective post-conflict tasks require "soft power," not only the capacity to understand other nations and cultures, but also the ability to work in a joint, interagency, and multinational environment. These are sophisticated leader and staff proficiencies, required at many levels of command. In the present military education system, however, much of the edification relevant to building these attributes is provided at the war colleges to a relatively elite group being groomed for senior leader and joint duty positions. This model is wrong on two counts. First, I think these skills are needed by most leaders and staffs in both the active and reserve components, not just an elite group within the profession. Second, this education comes too late in an officer or NCO's career. Virtually every other career field provides "graduate level" education to members in their mid-20s to 30s. Only the military delays advanced education until its leaders are in their mid-40s. That has to change.
AT: Military Morale
1. Can’t solve troop morale – operational tempo outweighs
Philpott 7/8
Tom, covered the military for more than 25 years as senior editor, 2k9, What congress can and can't do for troops, families, The Progress Index,
Finally, there’s growing recognition that costly personnel initiatives haven’t relieved the greatest source of strain today on service members and their families -- the tremendous pace of operations. This was emotionally described in early June by spouses called to testify before the Senate armed services subcommittee on military personnel. The spouses’ collective message was that what military families need more than anything is more time together. In that regard, perhaps the most critical initiative in the defense bill are permanent increases in end strength for ground forces, and authority to raise active Army strength by another 30,000 by 2012 if the Obama administration decides to budget for it. Sheila L. Casey, wife of Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, told senators that families are so stressed “everything is becoming an issue.” Couples who have seen their marriages deteriorate “don’t have time to get divorced,” she said. “I am…seeing signs of a force under immense strain, and this concerns me greatly,” Casey said. “These signs, these indicators, include cases of domestic violence, child neglect as well as increases in suicides, alcohol abuse and cases of post-traumatic stress.” The strain is especially acute on “our young, newly married Army families because, with repeated deployments bearing down on them, these young families don’t have enough time together to build a strong bond. So they are particularly vulnerable to be stressed by the war.” But what keeps her awake at night, Mrs. Casey said, are the cumulative effects on children of repeated deployments by parent soldiers. She recalled one soldier’s wife at Fort Drum, N.Y., “through her sobs,” sharing her fear that her two children were growing up without knowing or even attaching emotionally to their father because he was away so often. The “cumulative effects of nearly eight years of war” will not be easy to reverse, Casey warned. “My concern is that we are going to see these things appear again later when families have the time to really reintegrate.” Despite extraordinary support programs, better than any provided to past generations, she said, “Army families are sacrificing too much.”
2. Visible overextension and perception is more important than US morale – plan can’t resolve this
Perry 6
William, Senior Fellow @ Hoover Institution, The US Military: Under Strain and at Risk, The National Security Advisory Group, January 2006, pg. National_Security_Report_01252006.pdf
• In the meantime, the United States has only limited ground force capability ready to respond to other contingencies. The absence of a credible strategic reserve in our ground forces increases the risk that potential adversaries will be tempted to challenge the United States. Since the end of World War II, a core element of U.S. strategy has been maintaining a military capable of deterring and, if necessary, defeating aggression in more than one theater at a time. As a global power with global interests, the United States must be able to deal with challenges to its interests in multiple regions of the world simultaneously. Today, however, the United States has only limited ground force capability ready to respond outside the Afghan and Iraqi theaters of operations. If the Army were ordered to send significant forces to another crisis today, its only option would be to deploy units at readiness levels far below what operational plans would require – increasing the risk to the men and women being sent into harm’s way and to the success of the mission. As stated rather blandly in one DoD presentation, the Army “continues to accept risk” in its ability to respond to crises on the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere. Although the United States can still deploy air, naval, and other more specialized assets to deter or respond to aggression, the visible overextension of our ground forces has the potential to significantly weaken our ability to deter and respond to some contingencies.
AT: Military Overstretch
1. Overstretch empirically denied - the military faced extreme shortages and lack of military readiness with no impacts last year
National Security Network ’08 (The National Security Network was founded in June 2006 to revitalize America's national security policy, bringing cohesion and strategic focus to the progressive national security community, “The progressive approach: The Military restore American military Power”, 5-13-08, )
Our military is second to none, but eight years of negligence, lack of accountability, and a reckless war in Iraq have left our ground forces facing shortfalls in both recruitment and readiness. Every service is out of balance and ill-prepared. We need a new strategy to give the military the tools it needs for the challenges we face today. And we need leadership that meets our obligations to the men and women who put their lives on the line. Overview The U.S. military is a fighting force second to none. It didn’t get that way by accident – it took decades of careful stewardship by civilian as well as military leaders in the Pentagon, the White House, and on Capitol Hill. But eight years of Administration recklessness, and a lack of oversight from conservatives on Capitol Hill, have put the military under enormous strain. Active-duty generals at the highest levels have said that “the current demand for our forces is not sustainable… We can’t sustain the all-volunteer force at the pace that we are going on right now” (Army Chief of Staff George Casey, April 2008); that in terms of readiness, many brigades being sent back to Afghanistan and Iraq were “not where they need to be” (Army Vice-Chief of Staff Richard Cody, SASC subcommittee hearing, April 14, 2008); and that “we cannot now meet extra force requirements in places like Afghanistan” (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen on National Public Radio, April 2008). Readiness and Response: Two-thirds of the Army – virtually all of the brigades not currently deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq – are rated “not combat ready.” The dramatic equipment shortages of a few years ago have been improved but not completely remedied. Recruitment and Retention: These conditions of service, and the strains they place on military family members, have hindered Army efforts (and to a lesser extent those of the Marine Corps) to recruit and retain the requisite number and quantity of service members. The Army has been forced to lower its educational and moral standards and allow an increasing number of felons into its ranks. It is also struggling to keep junior officers, the brains of the force, who represent the height of the military’s investment in its people – and whose willingness to stay on represents a crucial judgment on Administration policies. The Marine Corps, America’s emergency 911 force, is under similar strain. The Commandant of the Marine Corps said in February 2008 that the Marines will not be able to maintain a long term presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The National Guard and Reserve are already suffering from severe shortages of equipment and available combat personnel. In many states, the Army National Guard would struggle to respond to a natural or man-made disaster – just as the Kansas National Guard struggled to respond to the severe tornados last year. How, and whether, we rebuild our military in the wake of the fiasco in Iraq will likely shape it for the next generation. Too much of our military posture is left over from the Cold War. Our forces are being ground down by low-tech insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the most immediate threat confronting the U.S. is a terrorist network that possesses no tanks or aircraft. We must learn the lessons of Iraq and dramatically transform our military into a 21st century fighting force ready to confront the threats of today and tomorrow.
2. The Military will ALWAYS have enough troops due to immigrants serving
Boston Globe 2-19-09 (“Faster citizenship in uniform”, Lexis Nexis)
THE MILITARY has long had a policy of offering accelerated citizenship to legal immigrants with green cards who volunteer for service. Now it is going to offer the same inducement to immigrants who are refugees or on temporary work or student visas. While thorough background checks will be needed to make sure the recruits aren't sleeper agents for enemy states or terrorist organizations, the program should help the Pentagon cope with two wars and the need to be prepared for other conflicts. The Army, which is taking the lead on the new policy, hopes to use it to draw immigrants who have medical training or linguistic skills and familiarity with foreign cultures. The service is quick to point out that the new program is not a means of meeting overall recruitment goals. Until the recession hit, the Army could meet its goals only by admitting higher percentages of enlistees without high school diplomas or who need waivers for medical conditions or criminal records. The poor economy is expected to make recruitment easier, as young people turn to the military for job opportunities. But the two wars of this decade have taught the military how critical it is to have troops with the ability to speak languages used in the world's hot spots, from the Pushtu of Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Somali and Swahili of East Africa. The new program also recognizes the large number of immigrant doctors and nurses working in this country, whose skills are also needed in the military. To qualify for enlistment, the immigrants will need to have been in the United States at least two years. Once sworn in, they can immediately apply for citizenship and can get it in as little as six months. To protect against sleeper agents, all the recruits will be subject to screening by the Department of Homeland Security, in addition to the initial DHS screen done before they received their visas. Further checking will be done if anything questionable turns up. Fingerprints of recruits will be checked against those picked up by US officials at terrorism sites overseas. While the new troops can qualify as "translator aides," none of the immigrant recruits will serve in any capacity requiring a security clearance until they have become citizens. The new policy has strong historical roots. Non-citizen immigrants have served in all the nation's wars. Still, an official of the American Legion veterans organization, while approving careful recruitment of visa holders, worries about any "great influx of immigrants" to the United States. Veterans - and active-duty troops - should be the first to recognize the value of service members who can be the voice and ears of the military on unfamiliar ground. The program is a sound one that the Army should move on as quickly as possible.
AT: Military Quality
1. Quality of the force is irrelevant—it’s just a question of having quantity to deal with insurgent tactics
Peters, 6 – retired Army Officer – 2-6-2006 (Ralph, The Weekly Standard, “The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs; Fashionable thinking about defense ignores the great threats of our time,” )
REVOLUTIONS NOTORIOUSLY IMPRISON THEIR MOST committed supporters. Intellectually, influential elements within our military are locked inside the cells of the Revolution in Military Affairs--the doctrinal cult of the past decade that preaches that technological leaps will transcend millennia-old realities of warfare. Our current conflicts have freed the Pentagon from at least some of the nonsensical theories of techno-war, but too many of our military and civilian leaders remain captivated by the notion that machines can replace human beings on the battlefield. Chained to their 20th-century successes, they cannot face the new reality: Wars of flesh, faith, and cities. Meanwhile, our enemies, immediate and potential, appear to grasp the contours of future war far better than we do. From Iraq's Sunni Triangle to China's military high command, the counterrevolution in military affairs is well underway. We are seduced by what we can do; our enemies focus on what they must do. We have fallen so deeply in love with the means we have devised for waging conceptual wars that we are blind to their marginal relevance in actual wars. Terrorists, for one lethal example, do not fear "network-centric warfare" because they have already mastered it for a tiny fraction of one cent on the dollar, achieving greater relative effects with the Internet, cell phones, and cheap airline tickets than all of our military technologies have delivered. Our prime weapon in our struggles with terrorists, insurgents, and warriors of every patchwork sort remains the soldier or Marine; yet, confronted with reality's bloody evidence, we simply pretend that other, future, hypothetical wars will justify the systems we adore--purchased at the expense of the assets we need. Stubbornly, we continue to fantasize that a wondrous enemy will appear who will fight us on our own terms, as a masked knight might have materialized at a stately tournament in a novel by Sir Walter Scott. Yet, not even China--the threat beloved of major defense contractors and their advocates--would play by our rules if folly ignited war. Against terrorists, we have found technology alone incompetent to master men of soaring will--our own flesh and blood provide the only effective counter. At the other extreme, a war with China, which our war gamers blithely assume would be brief, would reveal the quantitative incompetence of our forces. An assault on a continent-spanning power would swiftly drain our stocks of precision weapons, ready pilots, and aircraft. Quality, no matter how great, is not a reliable substitute for a robust force in being and deep reserves that can be mobilized rapidly. There is, in short, not a single enemy in existence or on the horizon willing to play the victim to the military we continue to build. Faced with men of iron belief wielding bombs built in sheds and basements, our revolution in military affairs appears more an indulgence than an investment. In the end, our enemies will not outfight us. We'll muster the will to do what must be done--after paying a needlessly high price in the lives of our troops and damage to our domestic infrastructure. We will not be beaten, but we may be shamed and embarrassed on a needlessly long road to victory. Not a single item in our trillion-dollar arsenal can compare with the genius of the suicide bomber--the breakthrough weapon of our time. Our intelligence systems cannot locate him, our arsenal cannot deter him, and, all too often, our soldiers cannot stop him before it is too late. A man of invincible conviction--call it delusion, if you will--armed with explosives stolen or purchased for a handful of soiled bills can have a strategic impact that staggers governments. Abetted by the global media, the suicide bomber is the wonder weapon of the age.
2. Worse yet, the perceived inability to counter guerrilla and terrorist tactics will actually make their use more prevalent by future enemies
Boot, 5– Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations – 2005 (Max, Foreign Affairs, “Affairs, “The Struggle to Transform the Military,” March-April, vol. 84, no. 2, p. 103)
Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as secretary of defense will continue to be marked by his attempt to transform the military into a lighter, nimbler force better able to take advantage of new technology and respond to new threats. Despite (or perhaps because of) the rancor he has generated within the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has managed to shake up a hidebound institution that, if left to its own devices, would probably prefer to endlessly refight the 1991 Gulf War. The continued fighting in Iraq, however, shows the limits of what he has accomplished. The U.S. military is superb at defeating conventional forces--as its three-week blitzkrieg from Kuwait to Baghdad in the spring of 2003 demonstrated--but not nearly as good at fighting the kind of guerrilla foes it has confronted since. To be sure, many of the current problems in Iraq result from Rumsfeld's failure to send enough troops there and from the precipitous disbandment of the Iraqi military. But they also reveal more fundamental shortcomings in U.S. capabilities for dealing with unconventional threats. Many policymakers and military officers will no doubt react to the problems in Iraq by trying to eschew this type of conflict in the future. Just as there was an aversion to fighting guerrilla wars after Vietnam (manifested in the Powell Doctrine), there will be a similar backlash after Iraq, no matter how it turns out. Most U.S. soldiers understandably prefer to focus on what they do best: beating conventional foes in the open field. Unfortunately, the United States cannot determine the nature of its future wars; the enemy has a vote, and the more evident the U.S. inability to deal with guerrilla or terrorist tactics, the more prevalent those tactics will become. There is a limit to how much "smart" weapons can achieve against a shadowy foe. Recall the ineffectual cruise-missile strikes on targets in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, which served only to highlight U.S. weakness. Defeating terrorism, as Washington has learned in Afghanistan, requires putting boots on the ground and engaging in nation building. Yet it is precisely those areas in which the United States remains weakest and that Rumsfeld's high-tech defense transformation agenda has neglected. Strengthening those capacities should be the goal for the next stage of military transformation, and continuing that revolution should be a top priority in President George W. Bush's second term.
AT: Military Recruitment
1. Recent wars prevent recruitment
Knight 8
Dee, U.S. military morale and capacity plummet, Worker’s World,
The heavy use of the Guard and Reserve, of “stop loss” extensions of active duty, and of three and four combat tours all underscore the recruitment problem faced by today’s military commanders. As the Army’s official newspaper for the troops put it, “The military is spending a ton of money on recruiting enough troops to maintain the overall force. ... Yet it’s doing so in a field that is increasingly difficult to plow—fewer eligible recruits, fewer parents willing to back a military career and a falling propensity to serve.” (Army Times, March 10) In other words, with more than two thirds of the population opposing the war, it has become harder and harder to convince troops to fight it or to motivate parents to encourage their children to join the military. One major difference between the Vietnam era and the present has begun to be a significant factor. Unlike the Vietnam period, the U.S. is currently facing a gigantic economic crisis. Active duty GIs themselves, along with their families and parents, are suffering the ravages of mortgage foreclosures, loss of jobs and increasing worries about the future. These worries, combined with bitter disillusionment about politicians’ invented reasons for the war, have stimulated a new level of opposition within the ranks of the military.
2. The military is increasing services to troops – Solves recruiting
-wartime pay, benefits, and social support
Philpott 7/8
Tom, covered the military for more than 25 years as senior editor, 2k9, What congress can and can't do for troops, families, The Progress Index,
This year’s defense bills – both the version passed by the House, and the Senate bill to be debated on the floor after the July 4th recess – call for a 3.4 percent military pay raise next January, continuing a string of increases that have surpassed private sector wage growth every year since 2000. Otherwise, the fiscal 2010 defense bill is lighter than usual on significant personnel initiatives. There are many possible reasons for this. First, much has been done already to raise wartime pay, benefits and support programs. Indeed these gains, along with a dismal civilian job market, have the services meeting recruiting and retention targets despite 200,000 U.S. troops continuing to rotate through Iraq and Afghanistan.
3. U.S. military strength is dictated through technological strength, not military size
William C. Martel, 2001 (Professor of National Security Affairs, “Technology and Military Power,” National Security Affairs, Vol.25:2 pgs. 179-180) GL
For generations, U.S. military strategy rested on developing military forces that were technologically superior to that of the adversary. This national style for military preparation was in full play during the Cold War, when the U.S. military deliberately produced smaller numbers of more technologically advanced weapons than the Soviet Union. To succeed, the United States invested trillions of dollars in defense, thus vastly outspending the economically inefficient Soviet defense complex. For decades, American policymakers and government officials have argued that the United States will be able to successfully defend the nation’s interests with military forces that are without equal. In the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review the Department of Defense reaffirmed that “it is imperative that the United States maintain its military superiority…” During that same year, the National Defense Panel reported that if the United States does “not lead the technological revolution; we will be vulnerable to it.”3 Furthermore, according to the Senate Armed Services Committee Report, the priority is “to maintain a strong, stable investment in science and technology in order to develop superior technology that will permit the United States to maintain its current military advantages…and hedge against technological surprise.”4 It is evident that the United States is the preeminent technological state so far in this century. By virtue of its significant resources in technology as well as the breadth and depth of its technologies, other states cannot compete militarily with the United States and are likely to fail when they try. There are two reasons for these likely failures. The first is that the span of technologies being developed by private firms, defense contractors, universities, and government laboratories in the United States exceeds that which is being developed by other states. The second reason is that the depth of technological knowledge existing in the public and private sectors of the United States is without precedent. With its gross national product of approximately nine trillion dollars, the United States uses its economic power to invest billions of dollars in military and commercial research and development programs.5 While the absolute level of U.S. investment has declined as other economies have expanded in recent decades, the United States still remains the preeminent technological state. These technology investments established the basis for U.S. military power during the last century that even great military powers cannot challenge. The best example is the Soviet Union, whose military machine was considered roughly equal to U.S. military power. However, the United States had greater economic power. As a result, Russia’s efforts to compete with the level of investment in the United States have left it bankrupt, barely able to feed, clothe, and house its military, and unable to significantly invest in defense technologies.6 For the foreseeable future, Russia’s military forces are likely to remain moribund and unable to represent a serious threat to the United States. China, the other great military power, has an aggressive program to expand and modernize its military forces, and purchased submarines, aircraft, and other advanced military technologies from Russia during the 1990s. While these actions increased its military capabilities, it remains a regional military power that cannot seriously threaten the United States, which provides limited support to China’s military
AT: Monoculture
1. No impact to monocultures --- wild variations prove.
Anthony Trewavas, 3/22/2001. PhD in Biochemistry from the University College of London, Professor of plant physiology and molecular biology at the Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, University of Edinburgh. “Urban Myths Of Organic Farming: Organic Agriculture Began As An Ideology, But Can It Meet Today's Needs?” Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology,
Application of any ecological approach to agriculture is fraught with uncertainty. Ecosystems are thought to maintain stability as a result of diverse species composition. Modern agriculture, with its single-crop monoculture system, is claimed by organic proponents to be inherently unstable and unsustainable. It is true that crops rapidly disappear from fallow fields as they cannot compete with weeds, but wild, stable monocultures of species such as phragmites, wild wheat, (genetically uniform) spartina and mangroves indicate that ecological stability is not understood (11). Furthermore, although mixed cropping (supposedly mimicking ecological diversity) can reduce disease, other crop combinations accelerate disease spread (12, 13). Farms are land-management systems maintained to produce food, in which farmer activity replaces normal ecosystem feedback controls.
2. Monocultures of other crops make your impact inevitable
Alex Roslin, 4/17/2008. “Monocrops bring food crisis,” , .
Rising costs for staples like rice have sparked unrest across Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa this month, including food riots in Haiti that have killed five, strikes in Jordan, and rice-hoarding in the Philippines and Hong Kong. Exploding fuel prices are largely to blame for a 65-percent jump in the cost of food globally since 2002. But that’s not the main reason for the current crisis. Ground zero is in the world’s rice bowl in Southeast Asia. A nasty epidemic of disease and pests has struck Vietnam, the world’s third-largest rice exporter, sharply cutting supplies of the food staple of half of the world. The problems in Vietnam have quickly rippled beyond its borders. In neighbouring Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter, the price of medium-grade rice for export has doubled since the beginning of the year. In the Philippines, the world’s largest importer of the staple, the government has deployed soldiers to guard rice stocks, while President Gloria Arroyo has threatened to jail for life anyone who steals supplies. Some exporting countries have started to limit rice sales abroad in order to build up domestic stocks, and the UN says food riots due to exploding prices for rice and other staples have hit a dozen countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, with 37 countries altogether facing food crises. What caused the disease and pest outbreak in Vietnam? Some rice experts have said that’s unclear. “We’re faced with a lot of unknowns,” said Robert Zeigler—head of the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute, which developed high-yield rice strains in the 1960s—in an Agence France-Presse dispatch. “The fact is, they got taken by surprise and they had some significant yield losses that they were just not expecting.” Devlin Kuyek begs to differ. He says the cause is no big mystery. It’s monoculture. Kuyek is the author of a book titled Good Crop/Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada, which came out in December. He says the rice crisis is an example of the food-related calamities we can expect in growing numbers due to a looming “perfect storm” combo of self-imploding crop monocultures and global warming.
3. Gene banks solve
Sanford D. Eigenbrode, 2/18/1996. Chemical Ecology Program, Department of Plant, Soil and Entomological Science at University of Idaho. “Host Plant Resistance and Conservation of Genetic Diversity,” .
In the early 1970s, international concern escalated to alarm over the continuing erosion of crop genetic resources despite efforts to forestall it. The devastating epidemic of southern corn leaf blight (Helminthosporium maydis) in the USA in 1970 occurred because 70% of the corn in grown the USA had been developed using a single source of cytoplasm that was susceptible to the pathogen. This and other evidence that genetic uniformity was dangerous triggered a more concerted effort to conserve crop genetic diversity. The The National Plant Germplasm System of the USDA (NPGS) was restructured, and the International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs) were united under the direction of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the International Board of Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR). Today germplasm in these collections and those of other private and public institutions around the world contain over 3,600,000 accessions (genetically distinct germplasm samples) representing at least 100 crop species and their wild relatives. Among the over 200 national collections, the largest is the NPGS with over 500,000 accessions. Another 500,000 accessions are held in collections of the IARCs. These collections consist of propagative tissues, usually seeds, maintained in cold storage and periodically propagated to preserve their viability and genetic identity. This technique is known as ex situ conservation. The collections are curated to provide plant breeders and other scientists ready and free access to facilitate crop improvement. The ex situ collections are essentially the only genetic resource used for crop improvement.
Ext #2 – Alt Cause
More alt. causes -
Palm oil
GRAIN, June 2006. “Sustainable Monoculture? No, thanks!” .
This cheap oil carries hidden costs. For the most part, palm oil is sourced from industrial monoculture oil palm plantations that are notorious for pesticide use and poor working conditions. Plus, new oil palm plantations are generally grown in tropical forests. In Malaysia alone, oil palm plantations were responsible for 87% of the deforestation from 1985-2000.[3] The conversion of forests to monoculture plantations leads to an irreplaceable loss of biodiversity and, in Malaysia, several species of mammals, reptiles and birds have been completely lost to oil palm development. But the forest clearing has not only infringed on the habitat of the animal kingdom. Since the expansion of oil palm plantations typically encroaches upon native customary lands, indigenous communities are regularly displaced and robbed of their forest-based livelihoods, further compromising their identity and survival as peoples.
Soybeans
WRM Bulletin, August 2004. World Rainforest Movement. “Oil palm and soybean: Two paradigmatic deforestation cash crops,” .
Deforestation of tropical forests took place at a rate of 10–16 million hectare per annum during the last two decades, and is showing no signs of slowing down. 16% of the whole Amazon forest has already disappeared and every day, another 7,000 hectares of forest is lost – a surface of 10 kilometers by 7 kilometers. The causes are complex and often interrelated, but among them is the role of large-scale commercial agriculture. In recent years, some of the fastest expanding crops in the tropics have been oil palm and soybean primarily planted as export driven large scale monocultures. Globally, the oil palm area increased by 43% (10.7 million hectares) and the soy area by 26% (77.1 million hectares) during 1990-2002. Government policies have facilitated this expansion which has occurred primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia (for oil palm), and in Argentina, USA and Brazil (for soy). In Brazil, in 1940 there were only 704 hectares of soy fields, by 2003 there were 18 million hectares. The most direct impact of this process has been the deforestation of approximately 2 million hectares of tropical forest in the case of Indonesia by 1999, and the loss of vast areas of forests in the Centre-West region of Brazil to make way for oil palm or soy plantations. Pesticides and herbicides inherent to these monocultures kill off the last vestiges of biodiversity able to co-exist with the plantations, and significantly diminish the chances of habitat restoration. In Indonesia and Brazil, oil palm and soy companies have been linked to devastating forest fires, that in 1997-98 alone destroyed over 11.7 million hectares of forest and other vegetation in Indonesia, and 3.3 million hectares of forest and other vegetation within the northern Amazonian state of Roraima, Brazil. Soybean is a crop very suitable for capital intensive, large scale cultivation. The main products derived from soybeans are soy meal (the world’s main oil meal for animal feed) and soy oil (the world’s most consumed vegetable oil). Only a small part of the global harvest is processed as whole bean for human consumption, mostly in Asia. The growing demand for cattle feed in Europe has driven the production of soybean, but recently also by a growing market in China for the production of oil.
AT: Nanotech
NANOTECHNOLOGY IS INEVITABLE
Perkins in 95
[Anthony, October, “The Incredible Shrinking World,” Red Herring Magazine, ]
NANOTECH INEVITABLE
R21 in 2002
[May 20, ]
AT: Narcoterror
Multiple programs like the ACI check narcoterrorism
Charles 4
Robert B. Charles, Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Testimony Before the House Government Reform Committee Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, Washington, DC, March 2, 2004
Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation to discuss the Andean Counterdrug Initiative (ACI) and the State Department’s continued efforts in this critical region. The Initiative represents a significant investment by the American people in a region that produces the vast majority of the drugs arriving in the United States. If this initiative were targeted just at saving some of the 21,000 lives lost to these drugs last year, it would be the right thing to do. But there is more to this bipartisan, multi-year initiative than even that noble aim. It is also a bulwark against the threat of terrorism in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. In short, it is a regional hemispheric and national security program, with direct implications, for homeland security and for our well being here in the continental United States. One need only look as far as Haiti to see that drug money, and the instability that follows it, can be institutionally corrosive, to the point of breakdown. In Colombia, and elsewhere in the hemisphere, the link between drug money and terrorism is incontrovertible. All of this reinforces the wisdom of Congress in empowering the State Department, and the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) in particular, to protect Americans and our allies in this hemisphere by strengthening the rule of law, building law enforcement and justice sector capacity, cultivating non-drug sources of income, and stopping heroin and cocaine from being produced and shipped to our shores. In the future, as in the past, strong congressional support will be critical to fully achieving the endgame. The endgame is a hemisphere in which drug-funded terrorism, corruption of struggling democracies by drug traffickers along with drug violence and drug abuse from the streets of Bogotá to the streets of Baltimore, are reduced dramatically. We are making real progress toward that end state, and the Andean Counterdrug Initiative is a major part of that palpable progress. Let me pause here to say something unexpected. Management of these programs is also essential. Congress provides the money, but we at INL must provide the proper management for these program dollars. I have a special duty, as custodian of these dollars; to make sure they go where they are intended. Accordingly, I have ordered a top-to-bottom program review of the entire stable of INL programming, put penalties in government contracts, moved from cost-plus to performance contracts, insisted that bonus justifications match awards, imposed new performance measures, moved to multiple contracts where possible, sat with senior executives of these contracts, and begun reviewing past financial practices. All of this is good government and basic oversight. It will make sure that dollars in the ACI account go where they are intended -- to stop drug production and drug-funded terrorism before those menaces arrive on U.S. soil, in our towns, in our counties, in our schools. The investment we have made is bearing fruit – drug production is down, traffickers are being arrested and extradited, legitimate jobs created, and the rule of law expanded. Our security, development, and institutional assistance to the judicial and law enforcement sectors are having a positive impact. The job is only half done, but the results are coming in and we are approaching what may well be a tipping point.
Ramirez capture proves successful US commitment to combating narco terrorism
Seth 7/21(Sachin, 7/21/09, “FARC Commander extradited to US”, Lexis)
He likes to be called Cesar. He's a prominent member of the leftist ultra-violent Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, otherwise known as FARC, the number one manufacturer of cocaine in the world. A former "comandante" of the 1supstsup Front of FARC, Gerardo Aguilar Ramirez has been extradited to the United States on "cocaine importation conspiracy charges" the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports. Ramirez was arrested on July 2, 2008 during a high-profile hostage rescue mission. At the time of his capture Ramirez was holding 15 hostages including anti-corruption activist and former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who had been held captive for more than six years. Three Americans were also being held by FARC. While in command of the hostages Ramirez tried to barter their release for the liberation of FARC terrorists held in the U.S. and Columbia, as well as other political and safety demands. None were accepted, and eventually, thanks to Operation Jaque, Ramirez was arrested and the hostages freed. His extradition to Washington comes after an indictment filed by the United States against 50 of the highest-ranking FARC members. The file, released by the DEA, accuses Ramirez of leading the 1supstsup Front of FARC and as such, being responsible for all criminal acts it carried out. The acts include manufacturing and distributing thousands of tons of cocaine with the knowledge that they would enter the U.S. drug market, as well as plotting with other FARC members to kidnap and kill U.S. citizens to discourage the United States from fumigating and disturbing FARC's cocaine plants and distribution efforts. Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin reiterated the United States' commitment to fighting narco-terrorism. "We are committed, together with Colombian authorities and United States law enforcement agencies, to attacking FARC's criminal leadership. The extradition of Aguilar Ramirez, alleged to be a high-level FARC commander, is another milestone in this offices fight against narco-terrorism worldwide," he said, the DEA reports. Ramirez, 50, is also charged with four counts of hostage taking for the kidnapping of Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes, Keith Stensell and Tom Janis after their plane crashed in FARC-occupied jungle territory in early 2003. Janis was executed while the rest were held captive with Betancourt and 11 others until their release in the summer of 2008. Ramirez will be tried in Washington D.C. federal court scheduled to begin on Jan. 5, 2010. The DEA reports that Special Assistant Attorneys from the Southern District of New York will be prosecuting the case in D.C. The State Department is also offering $75 million in rewards for any information that leads to the capture of high-ranking FARC members.
AT: NATO
1. NATO no longer key.
John R. Schmidt is the senior analyst for Europe in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State, served as director of the NATO office at the State Department and as director for NATO affairs at the National Security Council, “Last Alliance Standing? NATO after 9/11,” Washington Quarterly, Winter, 2007
The real problem is that the United States does not really know what it wants from NATO. It continues to perceive the alliance through what is essentially a Cold War prism, as the key mechanism through which the United States attempts to project influence in Europe. The successes of the NATO enlargement process, which addressed genuine security concerns among newly freed former Communist states, and of NATO involvement in the Balkans have only helped to sustain this perception. Current U.S. efforts to give NATO a more global reach also reflect the same perception of NATO preeminence, with the alliance moving out from its European core to embrace the wider world. It is undeniably a grand vision, but it is also clearly at odds with reality. The notion of giving pride of place to a military alliance made sense during the Cold War, but it does not make sense today when the most critical threats are more varied and diffuse. NATO is of limited use as a diplomatic actor, which is why the United States has never really used it in this capacity. Other vehicles and partners are preferred for U.S. diplomatic activity, the EU increasingly among them, and this is unlikely to change. Even in the military sphere, NATO is no longer the primary instrument of choice and has at best only a circumscribed, if still important, role to play.
2. NATO is dead—EU, lack of purpose and internal disagreements
Harlan Ullman, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 10/31/2007. “Winning in Afghanistan,” Washington Times, .
Brussels -- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been the most successful military alliance in history. But NATO is confronting massive challenges today, in many ways more perplexing and explosive than during the Cold War, when its existence was credibly justified to its publics by the threat of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union disintegrated long ago. And new threats and dangers to the alliance and its cohesion are neither state actors nor confined to Europe, NATO's traditional area of responsibility. NATO has bet its future on succeeding in Afghanistan, where, for the first time ever, the alliance is fighting a land war. The European Union has eclipsed NATO as the pre-eminent European structure in European political, social and economic integration. NATO suffers from inter-alliance strains, such as with Turkey and America's global war on terror and intra-alliance tensions over enlargement of member states and missile defense that antagonize Russia. And it must resolve the most profound and testing dilemma of all — maintaining a strong, cohesive military alliance long after the military threat that created it has imploded.
Ext #1 – NATO Not Key
NATO doesn’t matter—EU fills in.
Barbara Conry, foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, 9/18/1995. “The Western European Union As NATO's Successor,” CATO Policy Analysis no. 239, .
It is inaccurate to suggest, as NATO partisans often do, that the only alternative to Atlanticism is a return to the dark ages of the interwar era: nationalized European defenses, American isolationism, xenophobia, demagoguery, and the other evils associated with the rise of Hitler and World War II. Former U.S. senator Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) warns that weakening NATO will have dire consequences. "As we have thrice before in this dreadful century, [we will] set in motion an instability that can only lead to war, shed blood, and lost treasure. Pray that we are wiser."(4) Lawrence di Rita of the Heritage Foundation similarly defends NATO as an "insurance policy" against a future world war. "If keeping 65,000 young Americans in Europe will prevent 10 times that many new headstones in Arlington cemetery once the Europeans turn on themselves again--as they have twice this century--then it's a small price to pay."(5) Such alarmism underestimates the significance of 50 years of economic and political cooperation among the West European powers and the role of pan-European institutions such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. It also ignores the fact that a viable institutional alternative to NATO--the Western European Union--already exists. With the proper resources and recognition on the part of Washington and the Europeans that an independent European defense is essential in the post-Cold War era, the WEU is a promising alternative to Atlanticism. Far from being a lame second choice to NATO or defense on the cheap, a robust WEU would be superior to NATO in many ways, better suited in the long run to protecting European and, indirectly, American interests.
AT: Natural Gas Price Spikes
1. Natural Gas Price spikes have minimal impacts – and no effect on the macro-economy
KLIESEN 06 an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
[Kevin L., “Rising Natural gas Prices and Real Economic Activity,” November/December, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, ]
Beginning in early 2002, prices of crude oil and natural gas began to trend upward. By September 2005, as the damage to the production, refining, and distribution facilities in the Gulf Coast by hurricanes Katrina and Rita became clearer, natural gas prices rose to record-high levels in both nominal and real dollar terms. Although crude oil prices rose to a record-high level in nominal terms, they remained below the record high levels in real terms seen in early 1981. Previous research has shown that sharply higher oil prices have preceded all but one of the post- World War II recessions. However, less is known about the relationship between rising natural gas prices and macroeconomic activity, despite the fact that many manufacturing industries and, increasingly, electric utilities are heavy consumers of natural gas. Accordingly, one might reasonably assume that record-high levels of natural gas prices might have significant adverse consequences for U.S. macroeconomic activity. This article examines developments in natural gas prices and highlights recent trends in natural gas usage at both the industry and national levels. The article concludes with some empirical findings that generally suggest that rising natural gas prices predict growth in only a handful of manufacturing industries. Perhaps surprisingly, higher natural gas prices do not predict slower growth for the three industries where expenditures on natural gas are a relatively large share of total industry shipments: primary metals, nonmetallic mineral products, and chemicals. In terms of the aggregate economy, increases in crude oil prices significantly predict the growth of real gross domestic product (GDP), but increases in natural gas prices do not.
2. No impact – Katrina caused the all time gas price high
KLIESEN 06 an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
[Kevin L., “Rising Natural gas Prices and Real Economic Activity,” November/December, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, ]
Eventually, natural gas prices peaked in 1984 at $2.66 per mcf (nominal). Prices subsequently retreated modestly and then remained fairly stable for several years: From 1986 to 1999, natural gas prices averaged $1.87 per mcf, with a standard deviation of $0.24 per year. Following the 2001 recession, natural gas prices began to rise noticeably. By 2004, gas prices in both real and nominal dollars were at record-high levels. In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, Louisiana, and then about one month later, Hurricane Rita made landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border. These two hurricanes caused significant damage to the Gulf Coast’s production, refining, and distribution facilities. In response, natural gas prices surged. Over the first seven months of 2005, natural gas prices at the wellhead averaged $6.06 per mcf. By August 30, a day after Katrina’s landfall, prices in the spot market, which typically include a premium above the wellhead price, had surged pass $12 per million British thermal units (BTU), and by September 22, 2005, the day before Rita’s landfall, the spot price had risen to $15.00 per million BTU.3
3. Spikes don’t hurt growth – minimal impacts on small industries
KLIESEN 06 an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
[Kevin L., “Rising Natural gas Prices and Real Economic Activity,” November/December, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, ]
Table 7 also reports tests of whether changes in natural gas prices predict real GDP growth. The evidence presented in the table suggests that that is not the case. Unlike increases in crude oil prices, increases in natural gas prices do not significantly predict real GDP growth using either of Hamilton’s specifications. These results are generally consistent with the total manufacturing results reported earlier. CONCLUSION In the aftermath of the disruptions caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, natural gas prices faced by consumers and producers rose to record high levels. Because natural gas is the second most important energy source for the economy, there was widespread concern that these high prices might cause a significant slowing in the economy and among those manufacturing industries that depend heavily on natural gas as a source of energy. The analysis presented in this article offers some support for the latter contention, but only when prices are transformed according to the specification suggested by Hamilton. However, the results using Hamilton’s specifications indicate that changes in natural gas prices do not cause significant output effects for the two manufacturers that are the most-intensive users of natural gas (primary metals and nonmetallic mineral products), although they do cause significant output effects for other, less-intensive manufacturers (such as machinery and computers and electrical products). While perhaps significant, this result must be balanced against the finding that, when the analysis is extended to the macroeconomy (real GDP), increases in crude oil prices significantly predict real GDP growth, but natural gas prices do not.
AT: North Korea Aggression
South Korea military spending alone solves North Korean aggression
Bandow (Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties. Special assistant to President Reagan) 2009
(June 23, 2009 “Dealing With the New Japan: Washington Wont’ Take “No” for Answer”. )
It's the same strategy that Washington should adopt elsewhere around the globe. The Marine Expeditionary Force stationed on Okinawa is primarily intended to back up America's commitment to South Korea. Yet the South has some 40 times the GDP of North Korea. Seoul should take over responsibility for its own defense. Even more so the Europeans, who possess more than ten times Russia's GDP. If they don't feel at risk, there's no reason for an American defense guarantee. If they do feel at risk, there's no reason for them not to do more--a lot more.
North Korea wouldn’t Use a nuclear weapon, to many complications
Quester, Professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, 2005 (George Quester, Professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, Spring 2005, Naval War College Review, If the Nuclear Taboo gets broken, )
Yet on the more positive note, the history of successful nuclear deterrence suggests that nations have indeed been in awe of nuclear weapons, have been deterred by the prospect of their use, even while they were intent on deterring their adversaries as well. Would the nations that have been so successfully deterred (sinceNagasaki) fromusing nuclear weapons not then be stopped in their tracks once deterrence had failed, once the anticipated horror of the nuclear destruction of even a single city had been realized?2 Another of the more probable scenarios has been a use of such weapons by North Korea, a state perhaps not quite as “undeterrable” as the suicidal pilots of 11 September 2001 but given to rational calculations that are often very difficult to sort out. This use could come in the form of a North Korean nuclear attack against Japan, South Korea, or even the United States.3 The nearest targets for a North Korean nuclearweaponwould be South Korea and Japan, but therewould be many complications should Pyongyang use such weapons against either.
War won’t escalate – China and Russia won’t back North Korea
Bandow, 8 - senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Reagan, he is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire (Doug, “Seoul Searching”, 11/11,
)
Moreover, the North’s one-time military allies, Russia and China, both recognized Seoul as the cold war concluded. The ROK now does more business with Beijing than with America. The likelihood of either Moscow or Beijing backing North Korea in any new war is somewhere between infinitesimal and zero. The rest of East Asia would unreservedly stand behind South Korea.
Deterrence solves North Korean aggression
Bolton 2009 – former US ambassador to the UN (7/3, John, Fox, “North Korea Fires Four More Test Missiles: Should U.S. Be Worried?”, , WEA)
VAN SUSTEREN: Is any risk they're going to turn it towards Seoul? I mean, there's -- I mean, it -- I mean, it's not that far away. And if they're really so unwilling and irrational, why do we think they're rational and won't hit Seoul?
BOLTON: Well, I think, fundamentally, they recognize that if they were to attack South Korea, particularly if they were to use chemical or biological weapons, the retaliation would be unbelievable. Secretary Colin Powell, when he was a civilian, after he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, used to say to people that if North Korea ever attacked the south with chemical or biological weapons, that we would turn North Korea into a charcoal briquette. And I think even they understand that.
AT: North Korea-South Korea War
No Korean war – South Korea wants to cooperate and North Korea is dependant on South Korean aid – also recent economic ties prevent war.
Sunhyuk Kim (an associate professor in the Department of Public Administration at Korea University) and Wonhyuk Lim (a fellow at the Korea Development Institute and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.) 2007: How to Deal with South Korea.
Most importantly, the anti-Communist, that is, anti–North Korean, propaganda that maintained a sense of emergency and repressed pro-democracy movements during the Park and Chun authoritarian regimes no longer proves persuasive. Meanwhile, the withering of the North weakens the argument that South Korea needs to maintain positive relations with a strong patron such as the United States to deter an aggressive North. Finally, the horrific images of undernourished children during the North Korean famine of the late 1990s have had a significant impact on the South Korean psyche, undermining the traditional image of North Korea as a belligerent neighbor ready to attack South Korea at any moment.
At the same time, economic and social ties between the North and South are growing stronger. Since the historic summit between then-President Kim Dae-jung and Chairman Kim Jong-il in June 2000, there have been a series of successful collaborative projects between the South and the North. Railroads are being connected, and an increasing number of South Koreans are visiting North Korean tourist attractions. In 2005 alone, nearly 300,000 South Korean tourists visited Mt. Kumgang, which that year turned a profit for the first time. At the Kaesong Industrial Complex, just north of the demilitarized zone, South Korean companies employ more than 10,000 North Korean workers to make clothes, shoes, and many other products for the countries’ mutual benefit. It would be an exaggeration, however, to claim that South Korea no longer regards North Korea as a threat. Although they see North Korea as a needy neighbor, South Koreans do not dispute that it is also a potential troublemaker that can wreak havoc on the Korean peninsula and around the globe.
No risk of escalation – South Korea has developed into new world power – no one would support North Korea
Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute, 3/26/10 “South Korea Needs Better Defense” Forbes,
Yet the South is capable of defending itself. Over the last 60 years it has been transformed from an authoritarian wreck into a prosperous democratic leader internationally. The ROK's economy ranks 13th in the world. South Korea's GDP is roughly 40 times that of the North. Should it desire to do so, Seoul could spend more than the entire North Korean GDP on defense alone. The international environment also has changed. Both China and Russia recognize South Korea; neither would back aggression by Pyongyang. The ROK could count on support from throughout East Asia and around the world. Rather than accept a military position of quantitative inferiority, Seoul could use the threat of an arms build-up to encourage a more accommodating attitude in the North. Pyongyang can only squeeze its people so much to wring out more resources for the military. In any case, the ROK should spend as much as it takes to defend itself without subsidy from Washington.
Experts agree no possibility of Korean War even if tensions are rising
Kim Yong Hun, Reporter, 6-02-10, “Consistent Strength is Key, Say Experts”,
In political circles the notion of it being a choice between war and peace is being promoted by pro-North Korea and left-wing forces with the Democratic Party at their center, leading the office of the President to reiterate, "We do not want war," and the ruling Grand National Party to add, "Even though tensions are rising, there is no possibility of a full frontal clash between North and South Korea."Some domestic and foreign media are also publishing concerns about the possibility of war and hypothetical war scenarios. Indeed, the South Korean government has backtracked on one of its countermeasures already; to restart psychological warfare activities like loudspeaker broadcasts and the distribution of leaflets. North Korea strongly rejected this, stating a readiness to attack any such activities, and for this reason the Ministry of National Defense postponed the resumption of leafleting. They appear to be trying to avoid a worst case scenario. Yet, while the “Northerly Wind” and war crisis claims spread and spread, experts of all hues agree that war is highly unlikely. In order to back this assertion, experts mostly point to the nature of the Kim Jong Il dictatorial government, the existing deterrent against North Korean attack, primarily delivered through the ROK-US military alliance North Korea’s relationship with China, which seeks stability in the region, and the domestic condition of North Korea itself. Hwang Jang Yop, the president of Committee for Democratization of North Korea and a former secretary of the ruling Chosun Workers’ Party, has said on innumerable occasions things like, "Maintaining the system is the most important thing to Kim Jong Il. He would never do anything like start a war or reform the economy, things which could destroy the system."Kim Hee Sang, chairman of the Korea Institute for National Security Affairs and a former Ministry of National Defense aide has said, "Kim Jong Il is a cowardly dictator who values his own life above everything else, so he will unite the country via building tensions instead of via a full-scale war which would destroy the system." Kim Yeon Soo, a professor at Korea National Defense University, agrees with these sentiments. "Kim Jong Il’s strategy for South Korea does not include war,” Kim says. “Escalation, which will bring a deadly crisis, is wanted by neither North nor South Korea, and, especially to maintain Kim Jong Il’s system, a war cannot be risked. They are just threatening by pretending to be tough."
AT: North Korea Prolif
Increased Proliferation in North Korea unlikely to spark conflict- actions done in self-defense.
China Daily, 2009 (China Daily, “Nuke Arms Race ‘unlikely’ in Northeast Asia.”, Pacific Freeze, June 28, 2009, page 1, )
TOKYO: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) nuclear test is unlikely to spark a nuclear arms race in Asia, but analysts say Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) may seek to beef up their missile defenses and pre-emptive capabilities against Pyongyang. Pyongyang’s second nuclear test came weeks after it fired a long-range rocket that flew over northern Japan, a clear message that the DPRK is developing a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it. But analysts say the DPRK’s actions are defensive, while its neighbors are already under a US deterrent.“The barriers to developing nuclear weapons are extremely high and both countries come under the US nuclear umbrella, so the chances of them actually developing nuclear weapons are slim,” said Shi Yinhong, an international security expert at Renmin University in Beijing.
President Barack Obama was quick to reaffirm the US commitment to the defense of both the ROK and Japan yesterday, perhaps in a sign of Washington’s concern that both countries stay out of the nuclear club.“At the end of the day, what do nuclear weapons buy North Korea (DPRK)?” asked Brad Glosserman of Hawaii-based think tank Pacific Forum CSIS. “It buys them a deterrent. It allows them to say ‘you can’t come after us’. But I don’t see how North Korea can use it to extort anything. It has a limited number of weapons and it has to know that if it uses them, it’s ‘game over’.” Few in neighboring Japan are calling openly for the development of nuclear bombs, though some hawks say the idea should at least be debated. The ROK’s biggest daily Chosun Ilbo yesterday urged the government to go nuclear, but analysts say it, too, is unlikely to risk alienating the US by doing so.
AT: Nuclear Radiation
1. Radiation fears are just that, nuclear industry workers have best health record
Brian Downing Quig (program director Decentria) March 22 1997 The Journal of History, “The integral fast reactor could usher in the hydrogen economy”, ]
There is a very unscientific media fed phobia of anything nuclear in this country. Except for the slightest short lived perturbations following atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons there has never been a measurable increase in background radiation that our most delicate instruments could detect. If low level radiation was so harmful, it would make sense to filter radon gas which accounts for more than half of the 360 millirems exposure of average US citizens. The health of nuclear workers in the U.S. is measurably better than other occupations. They are essentially the only persons receiving even the slightest elevated dosage.
2. Empirically denied – if the impact were true, we should all already be dead from radiation poisoning – nuclear plants have been around since the 50’s.
AT: Nuclear Reactor Meltdowns
1. Nuclear plants are safe – no risk of meltdowns
Kart 08 (Jeff Kart, Bay City Times, NUCLEAR ENERGY: THE 'NEW' ALTERNATIVE TO COAL?, Feb. 6, 2008, )
Forrest J. Remick, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Penn State University, calls nuclear power "very safe." The industrial accident rate for nuclear plants is 14.6 times less than for all manufacturing industries, Remick asserts in an article on the Penn State Web site. As well, no member of the public has been killed or injured from radiation during the nearly 50 years that commercial nuclear plants have been operating in the U.S., according to Remick and others. Gard said the money spent on another Fermi plant would be better used to help reduce energy demand in Michigan, by offering incentives for homes and businesses to install energy- efficient appliances and equipment, for instance. If forced to choose, Gard said he'd rather see a coal plant that captures its carbon dioxide than a new nuclear plant generating more nuclear waste. For their part, Consumers Energy officials have said it would take too long to permit a nuclear plant here before demand outpaces supply. The utility plans to install additional pollution controls for a new coal plant in Bay County, leaving room for carbon capture technology in the future, said Jeff Holyfield, a Consumers spokesman. Last year, Cravens, of Long Island, N.Y., published a book, with references, called "Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy." She said most people don't realize that a nuclear plant can't explode like a nuclear bomb, and the industry's two most prominent accidents weren't as catastrophic as many people believe. According to a fact sheet from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the partial meltdown of the reactor core at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 "led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community." The accident caused the NRC "to tighten and heighten its regulatory oversight" and "had the effect of enhancing safety," the agency says. The 1986 Chernobyl accident in the Ukraine was much worse, but involved a bad reactor design that is not used in the U.S., Cravens and others argue. Twenty-eight workers died in the first four months after the Chernobyl accident, but the majority of 5 million residents living in contaminated areas around the site received only small radiation doses, according to the NRC. Soot in the air from coal generation, on the other hand, is estimated to cause more than 20,000 premature deaths a year in the U.S., according to a study done by a consultant to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Radiation from nuclear plants is a concern. But that's why the reactor at Fermi is shielded by 10-12 inches of steel and about 12 feet of concrete, said John Austerberry, a DTE spokesman. The plant also has numerous backup water and power systems to make sure the reactor operates safely. Adrian Heymer is a senior director at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in Washington, D.C. After a 30-year lull following the Three Mile Island incident, U.S. utilities have recently submitted 17 applications for as many as 30 new reactors around the country, Heymer said. The NRC has revamped its licensing process, and the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides incentives for utilities to construct new plants. DTE could be eligible for up to $300 million in incentives for Fermi 3. France already gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. The U.S. gets more than half of its power from coal, and 20 percent from more than 100 nuclear reactors. The next generation of U.S. nuclear plants will be even safer than the current fleet, Heymer said. The industry hopes to move to an integrated spent fuel management system, with advanced recycling and processing. That would reduce waste and eliminate generating a stream of plutonium during recycling "that makes things go bang," Heymer said. "The systems are very reliable," he said of the next generation of nuclear plants. "You've got less to go wrong. They are simpler, with fewer components, fewer moving components, so there's less to break down. Your probability of having an event that causes the fuel to melt is a lot lower. ... "The probability of having a Three Mile Island type event today, with existing plants, is about 1 in 100,000. "The probability on some of the new designs is close to 1 in 500 million."
2. The probability of this impact is non-existent - one accident every billion years of operation.
(Bernard L. Cohen (no date given) “The Nuclear Power Advantage “
)
The same reasoning applies to nuclear reactor accidents. Situations causing any number of deaths are possible, but the greater the consequences, the lower is the probability. The worst accident the RSS considered would cause about 50,000 deaths, with a probability of one occurrence in a billion years of reactor operation. A person's risk of being a victim of such an accident is 20,000 times less than the risk of being killed by lightning, and 1,000 times less than the risk of death from an airplane crashing into his or her house.7
3. No impact – one reactor meltdown will not lead to their impact – unless they can prove a chain of reactor meltdowns, the impacts won’t happen.
4. Don’t evaluate disease spread impacts – they won’t cause extinction and would not be widespread. Their impact evidence doesn’t assume diseases from nuclear plants, it assumes current diseases which means the impact would be inevitable anyway.
Ext #1 – Reactors Safe
The industry has learned from past mistakes- there won’t be any meltdown
(Mike Stuckey 1-23-07 “New nuclear power ‘wave’ — or just a ripple?” )
In the U.S., chastened nuclear operators focused on improving safety and efficiency at existing plants. They were successful: There have been no notable U.S. accidents since Three Mile Island and the U.S. reactor fleet has produced at about 90 percent of licensed capacity since 2001, up considerably from efficiency figures of the early 1980s. Nuclear plants today produce about 20 percent of the electricity used in the United States. Industry improvements are “an outgrowth, in all honesty, of the Three Mile Island accident," NEI's Kerekes said, "because the steps that were taken after that do a better job of sharing information in our industry and applying best practices.”
New safety measures solve the impact
Holt 07 (Mark Holt, Specialist in Energy Policy, Resources, Science, and Industry Division, “Nuclear Energy Policy,” July 12, 2007, )
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States raised concern about nuclear power plant security. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 includes several reactor security provisions, including requirements to revise the security threats that nuclear plant guard forces must be able to defeat, regular force-on-force security exercises at nuclear power plants, and the fingerprinting of nuclear facility workers.
Ext #2 – No Probability
Nuclear accidents aren’t probable
Holt 07 (Mark Holt, Specialist in Energy Policy, Resources, Science, and Industry Division, “Nuclear Energy Policy,” July 12, 2007, )
In terms of public health consequences, the safety record of the U.S. nuclear power industry in comparison with other major commercial energy technologies has been excellent. During approximately 2,700 reactor-years of operation in the United States,15 the only incident at a commercial nuclear power plant that might lead to any deaths or injuries to the public has been the Three Mile Island accident, in which more than half the reactor core melted. Public exposure to radioactive materials released during that accident is expected to cause fewer than five deaths (and perhaps none) from cancer over the subsequent 30 years. A study of 32,000 people living within 5 miles of the reactor when the accident occurred found no significant increase in cancer rates through 1998, although the authors noted that some potential health effects “cannot be definitively excluded.” The relatively small amounts of radioactivity released by nuclear plants during normal operation are not generally believed to pose significant hazards, although some groups contend that routine emissions are unacceptably risky. There is substantial scientific uncertainty about the level of risk posed by low levels of radiation exposure; as with many carcinogens and other hazardous substances, health effects can be clearly measured only at relatively high exposure levels. In the case of radiation, the assumed risk of low-level exposure has been extrapolated mostly from health effects documented among persons exposed to high levels of radiation, particularly Japanese survivors of nuclear bombing in World War II. The consensus among most safety experts is that a severe nuclear power plant accident in the United States is likely to occur less frequently than once every 10,000 reactor-years of operation. (For the current U.S. fleet of about 100 reactors, that rate would yield an average of one severe accident every 100 years.) These experts believe that most severe accidents would have small public health impacts, and that accidents causing as many as 100 deaths would be much rarer than once every 10,000 reactor-years. On the other hand, some experts challenge the complex calculations that go into predicting such accident frequencies, contending that accidents with serious public health consequences may be more frequent.
AT: Nuclear Terrorism
1. Only a tenth of a percent risk of a terrorist attack that will kill millions in the next 50 years – prefer our impacts on timeframe and probability
Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor, University of Manitoba, POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 31(2): June 2005, 201–236
Good arguments can be made for seeing terrorist actions as a shocking (also painful and costly) but manageable risk among other risks and to point out the general tendency to exaggerate the likelihood of new, infrequent, but spectacular, threats. On the other hand, it is understandable why a responsible political leadership would tend to see terrorism as an unprecedented, and intolerably deadly, challenge to the perpetuation of modern open societies. In any case, nobody can assign any meaningful probabilities to these different outcomes, whereas a clear judgment is possible regarding any future natural catastrophes: in order to leave a mark on world history they would have to be on scales not experienced during the historic era and would have to claim, almost instantly or within a few months, many millions of lives. Events of sufficient magnitude to produce such a toll took place within the past million years, but none of them has probabilities higher than 0.1 percent during the next 50 years
2. No nuclear terrorism. If they haven’t done it with more power over 15 years, they won’t now.
Sigger, 1 – 26 (Jason, Defense Policy Analyst focusing on Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense issues, “Terrorism Experts Can Be Alarmists, Too”, )
You find the famous bin Laden 1998 quote about WMDs, references from George "slam dunk" Tenet's book on al Qaeda intentions and actions in the desert, meetings between Muslim scientists and suppliers, statements by terrorists that were obtained under "interrogations," and yes, even Jose Padilla's "dirty bomb" - a charge which people may remember the US government dropped because it had no evidence on this point. And no discussion about AQ would be complete without the "mobtaker" device that never really emerged in any plot against the West. That is to say, we have a collection of weak evidence of intent without any feasible capability and zero WMD incidents - over a period of fifteen years, when AQ was at the top of their game, they could not develop even a crude CBRN hazard, let alone a WMD capability. Mowatt-Larsen doesn't attempt to answer the obvious question - why didn't AQ develop this capability by now? He points to a June 2003 article where the Bush administration reported to the UN Security Council that there was a "high probability" that al Qaeda would attack with a WMD within two years. The point that the Bush administration could have been creating a facade for its invasion into Iraq must have occurred to Mowatt-Larsen, but he dodges the issue. This is an important report to read, but not for the purposes that the author intended. It demonstrates the extremely thin thread that so many terrorist experts and scientists hang on when they claim that terrorists are coming straight at the United States with WMD capabilities.
3. Impossible for terrorists to deploy nukes
Asia Times 10 [Asia Times Online, 4/16/10, “Terrorism: The nuclear summit’s ‘straw man’”, ]
In actuality, the threat of terrorists acquiring a working nuclear device are relatively remote. Building nuclear weapons is a complex and resource intensive business; if it were not, more countries would already possess them.
That leaves the option of stealing a weapon. But pilfering a nuclear weapon is not simply a case of planning a sophisticated smash-and-grab operation. Nuclear weapons have multi-layered security systems, both technological and human. For example, access to nuclear facilities and weapons follows strict chains of command. Warheads are usually stored in several different pieces that require a cross-expertise and technical sophistication to assemble. In addition, they employ security features called Permissive Action Links (PAL) that use either external enabling devices or advanced encryption to secure the weapon. Older security systems include anti-tamper devices capable of exploding the device without a nuclear chain reaction. Not to mention that effectively delivering a nuclear device comes with its own hefty challenges. Thus, there are many serious obstacles to terrorists actually obtaining and setting off a nuclear bomb.
4. No extinction
Gregg Easterbrook, The New Republic Editor, 2003 [Wired, "We're All Gonna Die!" 11/7, ]
If we're talking about doomsday - the end of human civilization - many scenarios simply don't measure up. A single nuclear bomb ignited by terrorists, for example, would be awful beyond words, but life would go on. People and machines might converge in ways that you and I would find ghastly, but from the standpoint of the future, they would probably represent an adaptation.
Ext #1 – No Risk
Terrorists, including al Qaeda, all lack the expertise to use a nuclear weapon.
Mueller ‘9 (John, Prof. Pol. Sci. – Ohio State U., in “American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear Threat inflation since 9/11”, Ed. A. Trevor Thrall and Jane K. Cramer, p. 197)
Moreover, no terrorist group, including al-Qaeda, has shown anything resembling the technical expertise necessary to fabricate or deal with a bomb. And contacts — "academic," it is claimed — between Pakistani scientists and al-Qaeda were abruptly broken off after 9/11 (Albright and Higgins 2003: 54-55; Suskind 2006: 69-70, 122). In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on January 11, 2007, FBI Director Robert Mueller, who had been highly alarmist about the terrorist potential in previous testimony, was stressing that his chief concern within the United States had become homegrown groups, and that, while remaining concerned that things could change in the future, "few if any terrorist groups" were likely to possess the required expertise to produce nuclear weapons — or, for that matter, biological or chemical ones. If dealing with enemies like that is our generation's (or century's) "central battle," it would seem we are likely to come out quite well.
Threat of US retaliation prevents WMD use.
James Campbell, United States Navy, Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on technology, terrorism and government information, April 22, 1998
Perhaps a much more compelling constraint to terrorist employment of WMD is the concept of "backlash."19 Backlash manifests itself in two distinct forms e.g., government reaction and public reaction. Backlash occurs when an "act" of terrorism exceeds the acceptable violence threshold of the public. The result of this is twofold: as first, a loss of constituency (popular support and legitimacy) for the terrorist group may occur; and second, the targeted regime or government may adopt extraordinary efforts to eliminate the terrorist group. Backlash therefore represents a significant constraint to the use of WMD. Backlash is also applicable to state-sponsored terrorism. Indeed, the state sponsor of a WMD attack would risk a response of massive retaliation from the United States following such an event. In both cases, WMD use can be convincingly self-defeating.
Ext #2 – No Tech
No risk of nuclear terrorism – can’t get WMD
Gerold Post, M.D., Elliot School of International Affairs, November 2, 2001 (RADIOLOGICAL/NUCLEAR TERRORISM: MOTIVATIONS AND RESTRAINTS, ) (MHHARV2168)
Moreover, this matrix is concerned only with motivations and constraints, and does not consider resource and capability. Weapons experts regularly identify weaponization as a major constraint to mass CBW terrorism. The resources and technological capability to carry out a large-scale attack would, in the judgment of many in the weapons community, require resources and technological skill only found at the state level. Similarly, the resources and technological skill required to develop a nuclear weapon would normally be found only at the state level, but a state supporting terrorism could supply a weapon to the terrorist group it supports, although given the risk of retaliation should its nuclear facilitation be discovered, there would be significant constraints against a supporting state releasing a weapon to a terrorist group without strict controls. Some of the perpetrators in the matrix, such as individual right-wing extremists, might be highly motivated to cause mass destruction, with no psychological or moral constraint, but would lack the technological capability and resources to mount more than a small local radiological attack.
Terrorists can’t build bombs with small amounts of material
Karl-Heinz Kamp, Political Scientist, AUSSENPOLITIK: GERMAN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REVIEW, 1995, p. (MHHAR3512)
Nuclear weapons initially require weapon-grade fissile material and a host of other "exotic" raw materials in sufficient quantities and quality. The amount of fissile material depends on the accessible level of development - the more basic the functional principle of the nuclear weapon, the greater them amount of fissile material required. Weapons which need no more than one kilogram of plutonium mare currently only realisable in the huge nuclear laboratories of the superpowers . They require technologies (such as, for example, what is known as supercompression), which are currently not even mastered by the other Western nuclear powers, let alone by any non-governmental nuclear aspirants. Apart from nuclear materials the production of nuclear weapons requires highly qualified personnel from the fields of physics, chemistry, metallurgy, electronics as well as a special know-how.
Terrorists will only use conventional weapons – stigma and lack of tech
Morten Bremer Maerli, Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, November 2, 2001 (THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR TERRORISM, ) (MHHARV2585)
Terrorists operate in contexts of enormous uncertainty and anxiety, and may thus prefer known means. If a target is regarded as too challenging, other targets may be chosen, while the tactics of the group remain the same. Alternatively, well-known tactics may be further developed, as painfully evidenced September 11, 2001.The use of weapons of mass destruction could, moreover, stigmatize the terrorist group and could render any political aspirations hard to accomplish. Conventional off-the-shelf weaponry and well-known approaches are thus likely to remain the major tools for the bulk part of traditional terrorists.
AT: Nuclear War ( Extinction
And, nuclear war doesn’t escalate globally.
Martin, 1982 (Brian, Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300 )
It often has been argued that the use of a few nuclear weapons could lead, gradually or suddenly, to an all-out nuclear war between the superpowers. But it is also at least possible that a nuclear exchange could occur without this leading to all-out war. A nuclear war might be waged solely in the Middle East; or an 'exchange' might occur consisting of nuclear attacks by the US on remote installations in southern Soviet Union and by the Soviet Union on remote US installations in Australia; or 'tactical' nuclear weapons might be used in a confrontation restricted to Europe, or to the border region between China and the Soviet Union. The likelihood of any such possibilities is a matter of some dispute. What should not be in dispute is the possibility - whatever assessment is made of its likelihood - that a nuclear war can occur which is less than all-out global nuclear war.
Anti-war people - and others - spend a lot of time arguing that limited nuclear war is virtually impossible. Their main reason for arguing against military strategies for limited nuclear war seems to be that this possibility makes nuclear war seem more plausible. But plausible to whom? Military leaders and national security managers are not likely to be swayed by arguments advanced by the anti-war movement (though they may be swayed by its political strength). So the argument that limited nuclear war is impossible has impact mainly on the public, which is pushed into all-or-nothing thinking, leading to apathy and resignation.
Much of the argumentation presented by anti-war people criticising the concept of limited nuclear war seems to be almost a reflex action against planning by militarists. It is important to realise that strategic planning about limited nuclear war is not automatically suspect just because such thinking is done by military planners. It is entirely possible for peace activists to think about and to prepare their own strategies to confront the political consequences of nuclear war, and furthermore to do this in a way which reduces the likelihood of nuclear war in the first place.[29]
And, even if war does escalate, it won’t cause extinction.
Martin, 1982 (Brian, Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300 )
To summarise the above points, a major global nuclear war in which population centres in the US, Soviet Union, Europe and China ware targeted, with no effective civil defence measures taken, could kill directly perhaps 400 to 450 million people. Induced effects, in particular starvation or epidemics following agricultural failure or economic breakdown, might add up to several hundred million deaths to the total, though this is most uncertain.
Such an eventuality would be a catastrophe of enormous proportions, but it is far from extinction. Even in the most extreme case there would remain alive some 4000 million people, about nine-tenths of the world's population, most of them unaffected physically by the nuclear war. The following areas would be relatively unscathed, unless nuclear attacks were made in these regions: South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Australasia, Oceania and large parts of China. Even in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere where most of the nuclear weapons would be exploded, areas upwind of nuclear attacks would remain free of heavy radioactive contamination, such as Portugal, Ireland and British Columbia.
Many people, perhaps especially in the peace movement, believe that global nuclear war will lead to the death of most or all of the world's population.[12] Yet the available scientific evidence provides no basis for this belief. Furthermore, there seem to be no convincing scientific arguments that nuclear war could cause human extinction.[13] In particular, the idea of 'overkill', if taken to imply the capacity to kill everyone on earth, is highly misleading.[14]
In the absence of any positive evidence, statements that nuclear war will lead to the death of all or most people on earth should be considered exaggerations. In most cases the exaggeration is unintended, since people holding or stating a belief in nuclear extinction are quite sincere.[15]
AT: Nuclear Waste
1. Waste is not an issue – it’s all political
Holt 07 (Mark Holt is head of the Energy and Minerals Section of the Congressional Research Service’s Resources, Science, and Industry Division since 1997, “Council on Foreign Relations Symposium: American Nuclear Energy in a Globalized Economy, Session II: What Is the Investment Climate for Nuclear Energy?” Council on Foreign Relations, June 15, 2007, )
I think the Keystone report they do make the point that most experts do not see it as a major physical problem dealing with the physical waste -- at least in the short term. So if there's no Yucca Mountain, if Yucca Mountain is delayed for decades even, that's a relatively short period of time as far as interim storage goes. It's not really a technical and safety issue, but the concern about surface storage being permanent, meaning -- we talked also last night about the millions of years. Once you get into that time frame, obviously, surface storage is not nearly as secure as a repository. So that would be a concern there. But as far as the near-term policymaking issue, it often is more of a legal and regulatory problem than perhaps a real physical safety problem.
2. New plants don’t create waste – it’s recycled
Freeman 07 (Marsha, Debunking the Myths About Nuclear Energy, Feb. 2, 2007, )
A: There is no such thing as nuclear "waste." This is a term used in popular parlance by anti-nuclear ideologues to frighten the public, and its elected representatives. More than 95% of the fission products created in commercial power plants can be reprocessed and recycled. The spent fuel from a typical 1,000 megawatt nuclear plant, which has operated over 40 years, can produce energy equal to 130 million barrels of oil, or 37 million tons of coal. In reprocessing, fissionable uranium-235 and plutonium are separated from the high-level fission products. The plutonium can be used to make mixed-oxide fuel, which is currently used to produce electrical power in 35 European nuclear reactors. The fissionable uranium in the spent fuel can also be reused. From the remaining 3% of high-level radioactive products, valuable medical and other isotopes can be extracted.
3. Impact is inevitable – nuclear waste produced by current reactors and other countries won’t just go away
AT: Obesity
1. Obesity science is not neutral, rather biased and highly problematic.
Julie GUTHMAN Community Studies @ Santa Cruz ‘7 “Fat Ontologies? Toward a Political Ecology of Obesity” Presented to Berkeley Environmental Politics Colloquium //AR
In terms of obesity’s etiology, the proximate causes seem to go without saying: that it is “simply”5 a surplus of calories taken in relative to calories expended on the part of individual people. Gard and Wright’s exhaustive review of obesity research shows that this mechanical notion of energy metabolism has not borne out in the research; at best, caloric metabolism appears to explain less than half of individual variation in body size, with much of the residual remaining “black boxed” by it attribution to “genetic factors.” Nor are claims that obesity is a primary cause of disease (not to mention a disease itself) uncontested. Many have pointed to the logical flaws of such a claim, chief among them that obesity may be symptomatic of diseases of concern, such as Type II diabetes (Campos et al., 2006; Gaesser, 2002; Gard and Wright, 2005). For all of these reasons, Gard and Wright argue that obesity research itself has become so entangled with moral discourses and aesthetic values that the “science of obesity” can no longer speak for itself. While others might insist that this sort of reasoning smacks of the tobacco industry’s defense of cigarettes, it pays to consider that food is not tobacco, nor is fatness lung cancer, nor does sitting next to someone eating a McDonald’s hamburger put one at risk for secondary fat. Clearly, the imposition of a particular aesthetic in the name of “our common future” has resonance with environmental narratives.
2. Obesity is not an epidemic
Clare HERRICK Geography @ University College (London) ‘7 “Risky Bodies: Public health, social marketing, and the governance of obesity” Geoforum 38 (1) //AR
To examine these ideas this paper first outlines the theoretical principles of social marketing before addressing some of the conceptual problems associated with the idea of ‘selling health’. It then explores the way obesity has been constructed as a public health ‘problem’ despite ongoing uncertainty and debate concerning its aetiology. Including obesity within the remit of public health is justified by the assumption of an inverse correlation between body weight and health, with prevention measures then acting on the factors that govern the risk of an elevated BMI. However, I suggest that the successful application of social marketing to obesity prevention is limited by recent discrepancies over one of the central statistical foundations of public health – mortality rates – and in the process, eroded the justificatory basis of treating obesity as a ‘disease’ or ‘epidemic’.
3. No correlation between disease/dying and obesity
Emma RICH School of Sport and Exercise Sciences @ Londonborough AND John EVANS School of Sport and Exercise Sciences @ Londonborough ‘5 “’Fat Ethics’ – The Obesity Discourse and Body Politics” Social Theory & Health 3 //AR
A key feature of the obesity discourse is the emphasis on ‘thinness’ and ‘weight loss’ as a universal good. This is because, as Campos (2004) suggests, much of the obesity discourse rests on the assertion that there is a correlation between being overweight and ill-health and that losing weight will cure associated ‘disease’. Campos goes on to suggest, however, that while various studies show a relation between weight and ill-health, that relationship is far more complicated than is suggested. A recent edition of the journal of the American Medical Association (Mark, 2005), for example, reported that ‘for many reasons it is much more difficult to estimate the burden of disease due to obesity’ than was previously thought and reported, and that ‘although weight is an easily measured characteristic, at a conceptual level attributing deaths to obesity requires many assumptions that are often not fully spelled out in most media’ (Mark, 2005). Indeed, weight and size may not be the problem at all when we consider now that many people who may be considered ‘overweight’ but are moderately active are actually healthier than their peers who are sedentary but thin. Losing weight may not provide the types of health benefits we are led to believe when we consider that ‘the data linking overweight and death, as well as the data showing the beneficial effects of weight loss, are limited, fragmentary and often ambiguous’ (Kassirer and Angell, 1998, cited in Aphramor, 2005). One of the key problems here then is the way in which obesity as a ‘weight’ issue leads to a discourse which encourages all of us to achieve an ‘ideal weight’. Consider, for example, the ways in which BMI charts and concepts such as ‘ideal weight’ are often used in mapping the prevalence and incidence of obesity. BMI is an individual’s weight in kilograms divided by height in metres squared, and defines 30 kg/m2 or higher as above stated ideals (World Health Organization, 1998). It focuses only on weight, rather than measuring fat, and may tell us very little about someone’s actual health. For example, BMI overestimates fatness in people who are muscular or athletic and may be ‘healthy’, and it is not considered a good index for children and adolescents. Despite this, BMI has become the standard for determining population levels of obesity. These charts, however, are now typically presented to the public as a way for them to assess their health in relation to their weight (this is in spite of the contradictory scientific evidence around whether weight can even act as a determinant of someone’s health). These are now littered in the public texts, available for all to assess their health and weight. The prevalence of BMI and ideal weight is clear to see. The health industry (health education experts, government agencies and academics) has wholeheartedly embraced the questionable concept of ideal weight – ‘the idea that weight associated with optimum health and longevity could be determined by height’ (Seid, 1994, p. 7).Yet, scientists are unclear as to the precise point at which weight threatens health. Brownell (1995, p. 386), for example, notes that the precise point at which scientists and health officials believe increasing weight threatens health ranges from 5 to 30% above ideal weight, a considerable spread’.
Ext #3 – Obesity Doesn’t Kill
Obesity doesn’t kill.
Clare HERRICK Geography @ University College (London) ‘7 “Risky Bodies: Public health, social marketing, and the governance of obesity” Geoforum 38 (1) //AR
Andrew Prentice and Susan Jebb’s landmark paper ‘Obesity in Britain: gluttony or sloth?’ argues that obesity prevention is “handicapped by uncertainty as to the aetiology of the problem” (1995, p. 437). Taken from a public health perspective, obesity is “one of the most important and avoidable risk factors for a number of life threatening diseases and for serious morbidity” (Prentice and Jebb, 1995, p. 437). However, the link between obesity and mortality has recently come under intense scrutiny after two conflicting articles were published in the same year in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) proposing a definitive obesity-related mortality rate in the United States. The US Surgeon General’s, 2001 Call to Action to prevent obesity is based on two rationales: that overweight and obesity are associated with an increased risk of disease and death and that weight loss reduces the incidence of risk factors for some diseases. These public health rationales have also been the foundation of social marketing campaign development. However, I suggest that the recently published papers have eroded this justificatory base and, in so doing, de-legitimised public health intervention permitting critical anti-obesity discourses to infiltrate the public realm. Writing in Science in April 2005, Jennifer Couzin suggests that the central question for obesity as a public health issue is how many people it kills. Since public health, as Brown and Duncan (2002) suggest, is the name given to a set of collective processes to ensure the good health of a given population, it is necessary to know disease prevalence and mortality rates so that these can be reduced by interventions such as social marketing or health promotion. As Michel Foucault (1976) has famously asserted, statistics have long been essential to the development of public health as they provide the basis for action (to reduce the disparity between the norm and the reality of statistics) and a measure of success (or how closely the new statistics match the norm). Health statistics are a powerful political tool, in that they provide quantitative proof of governments’ success in improving the wellbeing of the nation, in itself a central constituent of social rights. On the other hand, such statistics also expose the limits of government when it comes to reducing the risk of and vulnerability to conditions such as obesity. However, away from the question of success or failure, statistics also hold the potential to justify or destabilise policy priorities, especially when they appear flawed, uncertain or untenable. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published a study in March 2004 using National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data from the 1970s that put the death rate for obesity at 400,000 in 2000 in the US (Mokdad et al., 2004, p. 1238). This figure meant that obesity was poised to become the number one cause of death (above smoking) in the United States, and the news unsurprisingly made headlines across the nation. After the figures were published in JAMA, an article in Science questioned the validity of the methodology used. Then, in November 2004, The Wall Street Journal also attacked the validity of the figures. Dissent at the CDC provoked an internal inquiry, and the figure was subsequently revised downward by 9% to 365,000 deaths a year following a correction issued by Ali Mokdad and his colleagues in January 2005 (Mokdad et al., 2005, p. 291). This mortality rate still put obesity as the number two cause of death after smoking. With the health risks of smoking well accepted in both the US and UK, and smoker numbers falling year on year as a result, this death rate for obesity seemed to present unparalleled evidence that public health intervention was needed quickly. The media was swift to highlight the scale of the obesity epidemic and, in the UK, similar studies provoked the Department of Health to release the White Paper and start the process of NHS reforms needed to facilitate obesity prevention measures. On April 20, 2005, another paper using CDC data was published by Katherine Flegal et al. in JAMA. This study, using the same CDC NHANES data set but from later years, calculated that the number of annual deaths attributable to a BMI greater than 30.0 was 112,000. Of these, the authors calculated that 82,066 were among those with a BMI greater than 35.0. The authors also proposed that the risk of mortality among the overweight (BMI 25.0–29.9) was lower than those classified as underweight (BMI less than 18.5), relative to those of normal weight (BMI 18.5– 25.0). Flegal and colleagues concluded that while obesity prevalence was rising, death rates were in fact falling, most probably as a result of better treatment for coronary heart disease. Both studies used the ‘population attributable’ or ‘etiologic fraction’ (Mark, 2005, p. 1918) to calculate deaths from obesity. In brief, this is the proportion of morbidity in a population that can be attributed to a particular risk factor, such that the burden of disease from a risk factor is a function of the prevalence of that risk factor and the magnitude of its causal association with the disease (expressed as a relative risk). The greater the prevalence of the risk factor (i.e. obesity), the greater the relative risk and the greater the population attributable fraction. Since the population attributable fraction is “one of the most empowering concepts of the public health perspective on health” (Mark, 2005, p. 1918) as it assigns a numerical value to risk and probability of death, it is essential that this does not come into question. Statistics proclaiming the increased risk of death at higher body weights justify public health intervention to reduce the magnitude of the burden of disease. However, in this case, the justificatory basis for a public health discourse that constructs obesity as a disease or epidemic is eroded by statistics that show that being overweight could actually reduce mortality risk.
AT: Oceans
1. Ocean species are highly resilient
Dulvy et al in ‘3 (Nicholas, (School of Marine Science and Tech. @ U. Newcastle), Yvonne Sadovy, (Dept. Ecology and Biodiversity @ U. Hong Kong), and John D. Reynolds, (Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation @ School of Bio. Sci. @ U. East Anglia), Fish and Fisheries, “Extinction vulnerability in marine populations”, 4:1, Blackwell-Synergy)
Marine fish populations are more variable and resilient than terrestrial populations Great natural variability in population size is sometimes invoked to argue that IUCN Red List criteria, as one example, are too conservative for marine fishes (Hudson and Mace 1996; Matsuda et al. 1997; Musick 1999; Powles et al. 2000; Hutchings 2001a). For the (1996) IUCN list, a decline of 20% within 10 years or three generations (whichever is longer) triggered a classification of 'vulnerable', while declines of 50 and 80% led to classifications of 'endangered' and 'critically endangered', respectively. These criteria were designed to be applied to all animal and plant taxa, but many marine resource biologists feel that for marine fishes 'one size does not fit all' (see Hutchings 2001a). They argue that percent decline criteria are too conservative compared to the high natural variability of fish populations. Powles et al. (2000) cite the six-fold variation of the Pacific sardine population (Sardinops sagax, Clupeidae) and a nine-fold variation in northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax, Clupeidae) over the past two millennia to suggest that rapid declines and increases of up to 10-fold are relatively common in exploited fish stocks. It should, however, be borne in mind that the variation of exploited populations must be higher than unexploited populations because recruitment fluctuations increasingly drive population fluctuations when there are few adults (Pauly et al. 2002).
2. Current policies solves the impact
Houston Chronicle 08 (9/9. “Ocean preserve; A Bush plan to set aside vast swaths of pristine ocean recognized the need to protect this vital habitat”, L/N)
PRESIDENT George W. Bush, to put it mildly, has a less-than-stellar record on the environment. It has been the consistent practice of this administration to loosen standards for clean air and water, and to misrepresent the science that supports the need for protecting wildlife and habitats. That's the assessment not only of environmental activists but of scientists, medical experts and academics from a wide range of disciplines. But where praise is due, it would be wrong to withhold it. Happily, Bush does deserves great compliments for a plan he has devised to protect several huge swaths of pristine Pacific ocean within U.S. jurisdiction. The total area of the proposed protection zone is 900,000 square miles. If realized, the sites would comprise the world's largest marine sanctuary. According to news reports, Bush asked a number of Cabinet secretaries to work out a means for protecting areas of the Mariana Trench, the Rose Atoll in American Samoa and the Line Islands, which are a long spray of atolls and reefs in the central Pacific. The Mariana Trench is the deepest area on planet Earth, large enough to hold Mount Everest. The proposed zone of protection is so immense because the area is likely to include all the area of water within 200 miles of each island or reef that breaks the surface of the ocean. The action is stunning in an administration that typically has been more interested in allowing commercial interests to exploit federal lands for profit than in establishing environmental protectorates. Actually, though, this is not the first time President Bush has undertaken to safeguard marine life and habitat. In 2006, Bush set aside a group of remote islands covering 84 million acres to create a national maritime monument, now known as the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. It's an area that is, as the president pointed out, more than 100 times bigger than Yosemite National Park. The importance of creating such ocean preserves cannot be overstated. Today, there are some 150 dead zones covering from a few square miles to as much as 45,000 square miles of water. These are areas that are so oxygen-depleted from pollution runoff that they can sustain no life. One of the best known such zones is in our own Gulf of Mexico. Other ocean areas are polluted with vast flotillas of decomposing plastic that blot out the sun and choke off marine life. Overfishing in some places threatens to disrupt the ocean-based food chain on which humans depend for sustenance. Meanwhile, global warming is wreaking its own havoc on the delicate web of sea life. As vast as they are, it is now clear that the health of the planet's oceans cannot endure unlimited assaults by human beings. The Bush plan acknowledges this reality and takes concrete steps to preserve and protect priceless and irreplaceable marine life and habitat.
3. Alt causes –
A. Overfishing
SJMN in ‘2 (San Joes Mercury News, “Environmental group says overfishing is biggest threat to oceans”, 7-10, )
The world's oceans are in failing health today, mostly the result of years of overfishing, according to a report released Tuesday by the Ocean Conservancy, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental group. Overfishing is even more damaging than pollution or global warming, said Roger Rufe, president of the Ocean Conservancy and a retired Coast Guard vice admiral. ""It has had a more profoundly negative effect on ocean ecosystems than all other human impacts,'' he said.
B. Warming
Greenwire in ‘8 (9-30, “OCEANS: Spreading 'dead zones' pushing marine life to brink of collapse – study”, 10:9, L/N)
Oceanic "dead zones," water columns with so little oxygen that they are hostile to aquatic life, are growing worldwide, pushing coastal marine populations closer to collapse than previously understood, according to a study released yesterday. Many of the zones are caused by dying algae blooms, the product of excessive nutrients in the water often from fertilizer runoff, while others are products of shifting water conditions tentatively linked to climate change. Dead zones are growing globally at a rate of 5 percent per year and are "emerging as a major threat to coastal ecosystems globally," scientists from the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Spain reported in a report published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ext #1 – Resilient
Oceans resilient – tons of variety in species
The Economist in ‘6 (“The conundrums of the deep dark sea; Marine conservation”, 12-16, L/N)
The ocean contains even stranger and more resilient creatures than anyone imagined—but humans cannot agree on how to conserve them FRIGID, lightless waters, many fathoms below the ice of Antarctica and far from any open sea, might not sound like an ideal home—but there are scores of species, including jellyfish and crustaceans, who find that it suits them perfectly well. Where and how this newly discovered aquatic community gets enough food to sustain itself in such a dark, icy world remains a mystery. For militants in the cause of marine ecology, the latest revelations by the Census of Marine Life—a private initiative to probe the oceans of the world, at a cost of up to $1 billion—provide one more argument for reeling in the world's fishing fleets, and for denouncing governments that obstruct conservation agreements. Viewed one way, the census report might perhaps be read as evidence that life-forms are even more robust, and capable of adapting to extraordinary variations in the environment, than people suspected. For example, deep in the equatorial Atlantic the survey found fluids spewing from the Earth's interior at a temperature high enough to melt lead—and shrimps, mussels and clams which somehow took the heat. Other finds included furry crustaceans (pictured above) and lobsters as long as a man's arm.
Still resilient – deep ocean gene pools
IPS in ‘6 (Interpress Service, Sephen Leahy, “ENVIRONMENT: DEEP OCEANS TEEMING WITH EXOTIC MICROBES”, 7-31, L/N)
The world's oceans may contain 100 times more types of microbes than previously believed, scientists revealed Monday. A single liter of sea water drawn from the deep ocean contained more than 20,000 different types of bacteria, when just 1,000 to 3,000 were expected. This wealth of marine microbial diversity has major implications regarding the role of marine bacteria and the evolution of the oceans, report a group of international scientists in a paper published in the United States by the July 31 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. "Microbiologists have formally described 5,000 microbial 'species,' " says Mitchell Sogin, director of the Marine Biological Laboratory's (MBL) Josephine Bay Paul Center for Comparative and Molecular Biology and Evolution, located in Woods Hole, Mass. "This study shows we have barely scratched the surface," Sogin said in a statement. Water samples were taken at depths of 550 to 4,100 meters at eight Atlantic Ocean sites between Greenland and Ireland, as well as Pacific sites that included a hydrothermal vent on an underwater volcano 480 kilometers off the coast of Oregon. The vast majority of microbes are previously unknown, low-abundance organisms theorized to play an important role in the marine environment, Sogin said. Although not widely recognized, microbes have shaped life here on Earth, says Julie Huber, Sogin's colleague at the MBL. They play important roles in the global carbon and nitrogen cycles both in the oceans and on the surface of the planet, Sogin told IPS. "The marine microbial biosphere is the largest habitat on Earth, and the sub-seafloor is the least explored part," she said. More is known about the surface of Mars than the deep oceans, in large part because it is so difficult to "see" what is going on at the bottom of the ocean, most of which lies in utter darkness under the enormous pressures of 2,000 or more meters of water. This new discovery of microbial abundance required the use of a Canadian deep sea underwater robot vehicle called ROPOS that can dive to 6,000 meters to obtain samples around an active underwater volcano in the Pacific. In the Atlantic, a team lead by researchers from the Netherlands used an ingenious system of bottles that opened and closed at precise depths, Huber said. The main technical breakthrough, however, involved using a revolutionary new DNA technique, called "454 tag sequencing," that requires only small snippets of genetic code to identify an organism. "Peering through a laboratory microscope into a drop of seawater is like looking at the stars on a clear night," says marine microbiologist Victor Gallardo of Chile, vice chair of the Census of Marine Life. This study is part of the International Census of Marine Microbes (ICoMM), a project of the Census of Marine Life, a 10-year global initiative started in the year 2000 that now involves more than 1,700 researchers in 70-plus countries in efforts to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the oceans -- past, present, and future. "The '454 tag sequencing' strategy increases resolution like the Hubble Telescope. We can see marine microbial diversity to which we were blind before. These rare, ancient organisms are likely to prove a key part of nature's history and strategy," said Gallardo in a statement. To place the challenges of studying deep sea life in context, it was only last week that researchers announced in the science journal Nature the first cultivation of a bacteria from deep-sea hydrothermal vents in the lab, even though such vents were discovered more than 25 years ago. That is mainly because such bacteria grow under unique conditions where waters are very acidic or even poisonous, and temperatures are 100 degrees Celsius or more. And this expedition found tiny creatures that were stranger still. "We found some very unusual DNA that was different from anything ever seen before," said Huber. There were small numbers of very ancient bacteria from millions of years ago that may exist nowhere else now and could be useful in understanding how life in the oceans evolved. "They (the microbes) were the only kinds of life on Earth for approximately 80 percent of the planet's history," said Sogin. These very old microorganisms have survived a great deal of change and may have something to teach as the planet experiences global climate change, he said. "Exploration of this newly discovered 'rare biosphere' could become a major field of marine biology," the scientist added. Another mysterious finding was thousands of different types of bacteria that were only present in small numbers. "This may mean at one time, conditions in the deep ocean were very, very different," Huber speculates. Or perhaps, despite their low numbers, they play an important function such as producing some essential compound. Another hypothesis is that these are a kind of genetic backup system so that if species are wiped out elsewhere, the deep-ocean remnants could re-populate those areas. "That could make the oceans more genetically resilient," she said.
Ext #3 – Alt Causes
Global warming makes ocean collapse inevitable – creates dead zones, raises the sea level, creates more acidic ocean water and bleaches coral reefs.
LA Times 08 (2/15, “Dead Zones Off Oregon and Washington Likely Tied to Global Warming, Study Says.” )
Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera’s unblinking eye revealed nothing at all — a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish. “We couldn’t believe our eyes,” Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. “It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn’t swim or scuttle away had died.” Upon further study, Lubchenco and other marine ecologists at Oregon State University concluded that that the undersea plague appears to be a symptom of global warming. In a study released today in the journal Science, the researchers note how these low-oxygen waters have expanded north into Washington and crept south as far as the California state line. And, they appear to be as regular as the tides, a lethal cycle that has repeated itself every summer and fall since 2002. “We seem to have crossed a tipping point,” Lubchenco said. “Low-oxygen zones off the Northwest coast appear to be the new normal.” Although scientists continue to amass data and tease out the details, all signs in the search for a cause point to stronger winds associated with a warming planet. If this theory holds up, it means that global warming and the build-up of heat-trapping gases are bringing about oceanic changes beyond those previously documented: a rise in sea level, more acidic ocean water and the bleaching of coral reefs. Low-oxygen dead zones, which have doubled in number every decade and exist around the world, have a variety of causes. A massive dead zone off Louisiana is created each spring by a slurry of nutrient-rich farm runoff and sewage that flows out the Mississippi River, causing algae to bloom riotously, die and drift to the bottom to decompose. Bacteria then take over. In the process of breaking down the plant matter, they suck the oxygen out of the seawater, making it unable to support most forms of sea life. Off Oregon, the dead zone appears to form because of changes in atmospheric conditions that create the oceanic river of nutrient-rich waters known as the California Current. The California Current along the West Coast and the similar Humboldt Current off Peru and Benguela Current off South Africa are rarities. These powerful currents account for only about 1% of the world’s oceans but produce 20% of the world’s fisheries. Their productivity comes from wind-driven upwelling of nutrient-rich waters from the deep. When those waters reach the surface and hit sunlight, tiny ocean plants known as phytoplankton bloom, creating food for small fish and shellfish that in turn feed larger marine animals up the food chain. What’s happening off Oregon, scientists believe, is that as land heats up, winds grow stronger and more persistent. Because the winds don’t go slack as they used to do, the upwelling is prolonged, producing a surplus of phytoplankton that isn’t consumed and ultimately dies, drifts down to the seafloor and rots. “It fits a pattern that we’re seeing in the Benguela Current,” said Andrew Bakun, a professor at the University of Miami’s Pew Institute for Ocean Science who wasn’t part of the Oregon study. “It’s reasonable to think these hypoxic and anoxic zones will increase as more greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere.” The Benguela Current has seen sporadic dead zones. There, rotting clumps of algae have also released clouds of hydrogen sulfide gas that smell like rotten eggs and poison sea life. Residents along the coast of South Africa and Namibia have witnessed waves of rock lobsters crawl onto shore to escape the noxious gases. Bakun considers the Benguela, the world’s most powerful current, to be a harbinger of changes in other currents. His theory is that warm, rising air over the land makes upwelling more frequent and more intense. The phenomenon, he said, is complicated by decades of heavy fishing that has reduced schools of sardines to a tiny fraction of their former abundance. Not enough fish remain to consume phytoplankton before it dies and settles on the bottom, creating an anoxic dead zone.
Corn
, 08 (8/18. Allan Chernoff, “Gulf 'dead zone' suffocating fish and livelihoods”, L/N)
Scientists have been studying the Gulf's dead zone for about 20 years, although its existence has been known for decades. So why is oxygen disappearing from fishing waters in the Gulf of Mexico? The answer, scientists say, is found hundreds of miles to the north, up the Mississippi River in corn country. Farmers in Iowa and across the Midwest use tons of nitrogen and phosphorous to make their cornfields more productive, which allows the farmers to take advantage of high corn prices resulting from growing demand from ethanol factories and developing countries. Rain always causes some fertilizer to run off farmland, but this summer's historic flooding caused even more runoff into rivers that flow into the Mississippi. "That's the primary source of the nutrients that go to the Gulf of Mexico," Rabalais said. "And so the size of the low-oxygen zone has increased in proportion to these nutrients reaching the Gulf." Fertilizer flowing into the Gulf of Mexico triggers an overgrowth of microscopic algae, which eventually die and fall to the bottom. "When they die, they decompose, and decomposition requires oxygen," Pride said. "So these things will fall to the bottom, and as they decompose, they consume oxygen." So much oxygen is taken from the water that slow-moving sea life like clams, small crabs, starfish and snails suffocate. "We go diving down there quite frequently," said Melissa Baustain, a doctoral candidate at Louisiana State University. "The deeper we go down in the water, it gets kind of scary, because there's nothing there. There's no fish, there's no organisms alive, so it's just us. "It's dark, and it's turbid because all that algae that is dying, that's sinking through the water column." To find lots of shrimp, fishermen like Pizani have to travel to the edge of the dead zone. He calculated that it costs him $450 a day in diesel fuel to fish. "You just gotta keep going miles and miles and miles, and hopefully you'll run into something," he said. "The fuel costs are so high, it's just not feasible to get out there unless you can catch a boatload, really make any money out of it." So, many boats are idle. Others are staying away from their home port in Grand Isle, Louisiana, a disaster for seafood processor Dean Blanchard, who buys shrimp from fishermen. "All my boats have to go somewhere else to make a living. It's a shame," Blanchard said. "This is the prime shrimping ground in the country right here, and it shut us down. It just shut us down. It's unreal." With demand for corn growing, scientists say, the dead zone could expand in coming years.
AT: Oil Dependency
1. No Impact to oil economy— Fears of market instability prevent war.
Ismael Hossein-zadeh 9-8-2008, professor of economics at Drake University and author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, "Are They Really Oil Wars?,"
Now let us consider the widely-shared view that attributes the U.S. drive to war and military adventures in the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and central Asia to the influence of big oil companies in pursuit of higher oil prices and profits. As noted, this is obviously the opposite of the “war for cheap oil” argument, as it claims that Big Oil tends to instigate war and political tension in the Middle East in order to cause an oil price hike and increase its profits. Like the “war for cheap oil” theory, this claim is not supported by facts. Although the claim has an element of a prima facie reasonableness, that apparently facile credibility rests more on precedent and perception than reality. Part of the perception is due to the exaggerated notion that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were “oil men” before coming to the White House. But the fact is that George W. Bush was never more than an unsuccessful petty oil prospector and Dick Cheney headed a company, the notorious Halliburton, that sold (and still sells) services to oil companies and the Pentagon. The larger part of the perception, however, stems from the fact that oil companies do benefit from oil price hikes that result from war and political turbulence in the Middle East. Such benefits are, however, largely incidental. Surely, American oil companies would welcome the spoils of the war (that result from oil price hikes) in Iraq or anywhere else in the world. From the largely incidental oil price hikes that follow war and political convulsion, some observers automatically conclude that, therefore, Big Oil must have been behind the war [20]. But there is no evidence that, at least in the case of the current invasion of Iraq, oil companies pushed for or supported the war. On the contrary, there is strong evidence that, in fact, oil companies did not welcome the war because they prefer stability and predictability to periodic oil spikes that follow war and political convulsion: “Looking back over the last 20 years, there is plenty of evidence showing the industry’s push for stability and cooperation with Middle Eastern countries and leaders, and the U.S. government’s drive for hegemony works against the oil industry” [21]. As Thierry Desmarest, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of France’s giant oil company, TotalFinaElf, put it, “A few months of cash generation is not a big deal. Stable, not volatile, prices and a $25 price (per barrel) would be convenient for everyone” [22].
2. Non-Unique: The US is reducing its oil dependency
May 20 (“US Cuts Foreign Oil Dependency” 2008)
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For the first time in more than 30 years, the United States is reducing its dependency on foreign oil. That trend is expected to continue. Currently, the U.S. receives approximately 60 percent of its oil from other countries. That figure is expected to drop to 50 percent by 2015. The Financial Times attributes the drop in part, to the increased use of ethanol and more efficient cars. The government expects fuel efficiency to keep improving, as well as a substantial increase in U.S. biofuel production over the next 20 years.
3. Attempts to reduce dependency only displace the dependency and inevitably fail
Fattouh 07
(Bassam, Consultant Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, specialist in the international oil pricing system, “How Secure are Middle East Oil Supplies?”, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, September)
On the other hand, measures to enhance oil independence from the Middle East are unrealistic, costly and counter-productive.17 First, politically-induced oil disruptions in the Middle East have been the exception rather than the rule in the long history of the oil market. Second, reducing dependency on Middle East oil implies higher dependency on other exporting countries which are also unstable and suffer from the same problems that plague the region. Third, policies aimed at reducing dependency on the Middle East can backfire as countries may not feel the pressure to invest to increase production. In fact, it is an irony that many Western governments call for reducing dependency on Middle East, while at the same time are urging Middle East producers to increase investment in their oil sector to meet the expected rise in demand. In any case, policies to reduce dependency on the Middle East have all failed in the past and will meet the same fate if applied in the future.
Ext #1 – No War
Countries much more likely to cooperate over energy- the alternative is too risky
Robin Mills 2008, Master's Degree in Geological Sciences from Cambridge University and author of The Myth of the Oil Crisis: Overcoming the Challenges of Depletion, Geopolitics, and Global Warning," The Myth Of The Oil Crisis"
There is a real debate over how much oil the world holds. But ideas of a vast conspiracy involving some mix of OPEC, the US government and ‘Big Oil’ to exaggerate oil reserves are fantasy. Official figures are, if anything, somewhat under-stated, and, as recent massive finds in deep water offshore Brazil show, new exploration frontiers still exist. Out-dated environmental moratoria in the USA could be lifted to yield more domestic hydrocarbons. New technologies continue to wring more out of old fields. Most importantly, ‘unconventional’ oil sources hold many times the volumes of conventional oil - from the famous Albertan ‘oil sands’, to fuels from natural gas, coal and plants, to ‘cooking’ oil out of shales that hold trillions of barrels in the USA alone.
So there is no need to fight ‘resource wars’ to ‘secure’ oil. Invading oil-rich countries is vastly expensive and makes oil supplies less, not more, secure. The Middle East is a growing part of the world economy, not a nest of terrorists, desperate to cut off oil supplies in order to bankrupt themselves and invite vengeance. Propping up dictators in return for energy ‘favours’ is not a valid long-term strategy either. The West, China, India and the oil exporters will gain far more from co-operating on energy, than following the mirage of ‘energy independence’.
AT: Oil Dependence (Terrorism Impact)
Stopping oil dependence does not solve terrorism
Washington Post 08 (“Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit”, Robert Bryce, January 13, LexisNexis)
But the hype doesn't match reality. Remember, the two largest suppliers of crude to the U.S. market are Canada and Mexico -- neither exactly known as a belligerent terrorist haven. Moreover, terrorism is an ancient tactic that predates the oil era. It does not depend on petrodollars. And even small amounts of money can underwrite spectacular plots; as the 9/11 Commission Report noted, "The 9/11 plotters eventually spent somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 to plan and conduct their attack." G.I. Wilson, a retired Marine Corps colonel who has fought in Iraq and written extensively on terrorism and asymmetric warfare, calls the conflation of oil and terrorism a "contrivance." Support for terrorism "doesn't come from oil," he says. "It comes from drugs, crime, human trafficking and the weapons trade."
US Energy Independence doesn’t stop funding terrorists; the oil will just be sold elsewhere
Washington Post 08 (“Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit”, Robert Bryce, January 13, LexisNexis)
Fans of energy independence argue that if the United States stops buying foreign energy, it will deny funds to petro-states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Hugo Chávez's Venezuela. But the world marketplace doesn't work like that. Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set globally, not locally. Oil buyers are always seeking the lowest-cost supplier. So any Saudi crude being loaded at the Red Sea port of Yanbu that doesn't get purchased by a refinery in Corpus Christi or Houston will instead wind up in Singapore or Shanghai.
AT: Oil Peak
1. No oil peak coming - Oil producers vastly understate the amount of oil reserves – for economic reasons
Belfast Telegraph June 10, 2008: “Oil shortage is a myth, says insider” Belfast Telegraph
Explaining why the published estimates of proven global reserves are less than half the true amount, Dr Pike said there was anecdotal evidence that big oil producers were glad to go along with under-reporting of proven reserves to help maintain oil's high price. "Part of the oil industry is perfectly familiar with the way oil reserves are underestimated, but the decision makers in both the companies and the countries are not exposed to the reasons why proven oil reserves are bigger than they are said to be," he said.
Dr Pike's assessment does not include unexplored oilfields, those yet to be discovered or those deemed too uneconomic to exploit.
The environmental implications of his analysis, based on more than 30 years inside the industry, will alarm environmentalists who have exploited the concept of peak oil to press the urgency of the need to find greener alternatives.
"The bad news is that by underestimating proven oil reserves we have been lulled into a false sense of security in terms of environmental issues, because it suggests we will have to find alternatives to fossil fuels in a few decades," said Dr Pike. "We should not be surprised if oil dominates well into the twenty-second century. It highlights a major error in energy and environmental planning – we are dramatically underestimating the challenge facing us," he said.
Proven oil reserves are likely to be far larger than reported because of the way the capacity of oilfields is estimated and how those estimates are added to form the proven reserves of a company or a country. Companies add the estimated capacity of oil fields in a simple arithmetic manner to get proven oil reserves. This gives a deliberately conservative total deemed suitable for shareholders who do not want proven reserves hyped, Dr Pike said.
2. Their arguments about spare capacity are wrong, we don’t know how much oil is left in the ground
United States Government Accountability Office. Highlights, a report to congressional requesters, February 2007
Studies that predict the timing of a peak use different estimates of how much oil remains in the ground, and these differences explain some of the wide ranges of these predictions. Estimates of how much oil remains in the ground are highly uncertain because much of these data are self- reported and unverified by independent auditors; many parts of the world have yet to be fully explored for oil; and there is no comprehensive assessment of oil reserves from nonconventional sources.
3. Peak won’t happen- 50 years
John Wood (Energy Analyst for Department of Energy) 8/18/2004
In any event, the world production peak for conventionally reservoired crude is unlikely to be "right around the corner" as so many other estimators have been predicting. Our analysis shows that it will be closer to the middle of the 21st century than to its beginning. Given the long lead times required for significant mass-market penetration of new energy technologies, this result in no way justifies complacency about both supply-side and demand-side research and development
4. No peak oil, we have enormous reserves.
Ebeling, 2008 (Richard M., June 18, American Institute for Economic Research, “The Global Oil Crisis: The Supply Problem is a Government Problem”)
The recent and continuing surge in gasoline prices has raised concerns and fears about the future of oil-based energy in the coming years. Are we reaching the end of global petroleum supplies in the face of increasing demand that supply seems unable to keep up with? In fact, oil reserves around the world are plentiful, and can keep growing consumption and industrial uses humming for many decades to come. During the ten-year period, 1997-2007, global production of oil increased by 12.9 percent. Over this same time frame, global oil consumption rose by 15.8 percent, suggesting that demand is outstripping world oil supply. But oil actually extracted from the earth must be compared with proven oil reserves that represent the known quantities that remain under the earth’s surface, and serve as the basis for future years’ production. The table below shows that proven reserves have increased from 1,069.3 billion barrels of extractable oil in 1997 to 1,237.9 billion barrels in 2007, or a 15.8 percent increase. The knowledge of proven reserves available for extraction has increased, in other words, at the same percentage rate over the last ten years as global consumption has gone up. In 2007, global oil consumption was 31.13 billion barrels. At this current level of consumption, proven reserves in 2007 are sufficient to supply almost 40 years of annual production. Even if we were to assume that growing demand were to rise to 40 billion barrels a year by 2017 before, perhaps, leveling off, these proven reserves would still be enough to supply over 30 years of oil production.
But there is every reason to believe that further geological exploration and advances in oil extracting technologies will assure that even as existing proven reserves are used up to feed current use they will be at least partly if not completely replenished through new discoveries over the years and decades ahead. This was certainly the case during the last ten years when world consumption and proven reserves increased at the same rate. (And this completely sets aside the vast global known reserves of other energy-providing resources such as shale oil and coal, for example.) The current oil “crisis” therefore has not been caused by the world “running out of oil.” What has lagged behind global consumption is world-wide extracting and refining of oil into usable energy-supplying forms.
Ext #1 – Oil Companies Lie
Peak theory is false – oil producers estimates are off to drive up prices
Steve Connor June 11, 2008 Canberra Times (Australia) HEADLINE: Oil shortage myth: insider tells of dodgy calculations
There is more than twice as much oil in the ground as major producers say, according to a former industry adviser who claims there is widespread misunderstanding of the way proven reserves are calculated. It is widely assumed that oil production has peaked and proven reserves have sunk to roughly half of original amounts. But former oil industry man Richard Pike, who is now chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said this idea was based on flawed thinking. Current estimates suggest there are 1200 billion barrels of proven global reserves, but the industry's internal figures suggest this is less than half of what actually exists. The misconception has helped boost oil prices to an all-time high, sending jitters through the market and prompting calls for oil- producing nations to increase supply to push down costs. Dr Pike said there was anecdotal evidence that big oil producers were glad to go along with under- reporting of proven reserves to help maintain oil's high price. Part of the oil industry is perfectly familiar with the way oil reserves are underestimated, but the decision-makers in both the companies and the countries are not exposed to the reasons why proven oil reserves are bigger than they are said to be," he said. Dr Pike's assessment does not include unexplored oilfields, those yet to be discovered or those deemed too uneconomic to exploit. The implications of his analysis, based on more than 30 years in the industry,will alarm environmentalists who have exploited the concept of peak oil to press the urgency of the need to find greener alternatives. "We should not be surprised if oil dominates well into the 22nd century.
Ext #2 – Oil is Still There
Tons of oil exist- disproves the theory
Dr.Leonardo Magueri (Senior Vice President Eni Spa) 2003 July/Aug, Foreign Affairs
Dire predictions of scarcity go hand in hand with fears about oil security. The truth is that oil supplies are neither running out nor becoming insecure. Today, the average world recovery rate from existing oil reserves is 35 percent, as compared to about 22 percent in 1980. Given current oil consumption levels, every additional percentage of recovery means two more years of existing reserves. This evolution also partly explains why the life index of existing reserves is still growing even though the world is replacing only 25 percent of what it consumes every year with new discoveries and major new oil discoveries have decreased since the 1960s. Today's ratio of proven oil reserves to current production indicates a remaining life of 43 years for existing reserves, compared to 35 years in 1972 and 20 years in 1948. Advances in technology explain the apparent contradiction between fewer discoveries and more oil. Whereas an oil field does not change, knowledge about it does, sometimes dramatically.
Recoverable oil solves the peak- oil’s not finite
Sarah Barmak, staff-Toronto Star June 21, 2008 S The Toronto Star HEADLINE: Oil, oil everywhere? Well, just maybe; An English industry insider says we've grossly underestimated our reserves. Could he be right?
Ask him about oil, and Dr. Richard Pike has a rather sunny outlook. Oil and gas, he says confidently, will be around well into the next century. Pike can maintain his optimism because he knows something no one else knows. He believes that a simple mathematical error - the sort made by first-year university statistics students - is causing much of our panic over a worldwide oil shortage. It's an error that oil companies, riding high on skyrocketing crude prices, may want you to believe. "This might be hard for some of your readers to take," he warns. With oil at $132 a barrel yesterday, tensions over gas prices are at a boiling point. But listen, he says: at 1.2 trillion barrels, we have grossly underestimated the world's proven oil reserves. If he's right, we likely have double the amount of recoverable oil that we think we have in the ground, or perhaps even more.
The argument is attracting attention at a time when many governments are looking for new sources of oil; U.S. President George W. Bush reversed his long-held position against offshore drilling this week.
Skeptics say Pike is just recycling an old argument: that companies underreport reserves on purpose to keep prices up. He claims the problem is more systemic than a few corporations playing with the stats, however.
Pike is an oil industry insider, an engineer by training. An employee of British Petroleum for 25 years, he is now the chief executive of England's Royal Society of Chemistry. He explains the world's most epic math mistake patiently, like a vaguely bemused schoolteacher going over a problem with a dull student.
He first realized there was a problem two years ago, when he saw alarming discrepancies between figures the oil industry uses to estimate the world's crude and those used by everyone else. Calculating the amount of oil in a field is notoriously difficult, so companies issue a probability figure, called their proven reserves, to shareholders and outside bodies. It represents the amount of oil that has a 90 per cent chance of being met or exceeded by the field's actualproduction (giving it its name, P90). Apparently, no one bothered to let us know that oil companies have long been generating an entirely different number for their own internal use. Not content with the hard certainty of P90, which in practice is almost always exceeded by a field's output, oil companies use more sophisticated measurements to yield numbers often two or even three times as high, helping them decide things like how many wells they drill. Very often, those higher estimates are more accurate. Too bad they don't make it into the public domain. Instead, in order to get a picture of how much oil we have left, international organizations often simply add up the conservative, proven reserve estimates for every field in the world. That's when the real headaches begin. "Because it's a probability-based set of numbers, you can't add them like that," says Pike. "That's completely wrong." Think of estimating oil fields like rolling a pair of dice, Pike says. If youthrow just one die, the probability that you will roll higher than a one is five out of six. But if you throw two dice, the probability that you will roll higher than two - snake eyes - is not five out of six, it's 35 out of 36, since there are 36
different possible outcomes of a single throw of two dice. With two dice, you have a five-of-six chance of rolling not a two, but a four. "It's an interesting case where ... one plus one equals four," says Pike.Sooil is at $132 a barrel all because of ... a math screw-up? That, says Pike, and the fact that oil companies are likely turning a blind eye. "There are some very interesting mind games going on," he muses. Oil companies, particularly those in the Middle East, are happy to let our shoddymath stand if it helps push crude prices ever higher.
Ext #3 – Timeframe
Even if we’ve reached peak oil, we have 40 years before we reach a crisis point
The Guardian, 08 (The Guardian, Terry Macalister-industrial corespondent, June 11 2008, "World has enough oil reserves, say BP boss," )
The BP boss was talking at the launch of his company's annual statistical review of world energy which showed that world oil consumption grew by 1.1% in 2007, or 1m barrels a day, slightly below the 10-year average, while production fell by 0.2%, or 130,000 barrels a day, the first decline in five years. An increasing number of oil industry commentators have put forward the view that "peak oil" has now been reached - or shortly will be - and is responsible for a 40% rise in crude prices this year to record highs of nearly $140 a barrel. BP, though, said today that proved oil reserves at 1.24tn barrels are enough to meet current production for 41 years.
Ext #4 – Reserves
No peak oil now – the theory ignores alternative energy, new oil reserves, exaggerates demand and ignores temporary political causes.
Hossein-zadeh, June 25, 2008 (Ismael, Professor of Economics “Are they really oil wars?” , Asia Times Online)
Peak Oil theory is based on a number of assumptions and omissions that make it less than reliable. To begin with, it discounts or disregards the fact that energy-saving technologies have drastically improved (and will continue to further improve) the efficiency of oil consumption. Evidence shows that, for example, "over a period of five years (1994-99), US GDP expanded over 20% while oil usage rose by only 9%. Before the 1973 oil shock, the ratio was about one to one." [4] Second, Peak Oil theory pays scant attention to the drastically enabling new technologies that have made (and will continue to make) possible discovery and extraction of oil reserves that were inaccessible only a short time ago. One of the results of the more efficient means of research and development has been a far higher success rate in finding new oil fields. The success rate has risen in 20 years from less than 70% to over 80%. Computers have helped to reduce the number of dry holes. Horizontal drilling has boosted extraction. Another important development has been deep-water offshore drilling, which the new technologies now permit. Good examples are the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and more recently, the promising offshore oil fields of West Africa. [5] Third, Peak Oil theory also pays short shrift to what is sometimes called non-conventional oil. These include Canada's giant reserves of extra-heavy bitumen that can be processed to produce conventional oil. Although this was originally considered cost inefficient, experts working in this area now claim that they have brought down the cost from over US$20 a barrel to $8 per barrel. Similar developments are taking place in Venezuela. It is thanks to developments like these that since 1970, world oil reserves have more than doubled, despite the extraction of hundreds of millions of barrels. [6] Fourth, Peak Oil thesis pays insufficient attention to energy sources other than oil. These include solar, wind, non-food bio-fuel, and nuclear energies. They also include natural gas. Gas is now about 25% of energy demand worldwide. It is estimated that by 2050 it will be the main source of energy in the world. A number of American, European, and Japanese firms are investing heavily in developing fuel cells for cars and other vehicles that would significantly reduce gasoline consumption. [7] Fifth, proponents of Peak Oil tend to exaggerate the impact of the increased oil demand coming from China and India on both the amount and the price of oil in global markets. The alleged disparity between supply and demand is said to be due to the rapidly growing demand coming from China and India. But that rapid growth in demand is largely offset by a number of counterbalancing factors. These include slower growth in US demand due to its slower economic growth, efficient energy utilization in industrially advanced countries, and increases in oil production by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia, and others. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, claims of "peaked and dwindling" oil are refuted by the available facts and figures on global oil supply. Statistical evidence shows that there is absolutely no supply-demand imbalance in global oil markets. Contrary to the claims of the proponents of Peak Oil and champions of war and militarism, the current oil price shocks are a direct consequence of the destabilizing wars and geopolitical insecurity in the Middle East, not oil shortages.
AT: Oil Shocks
1. Current oil shocks are more gradual and only one-third as large as that of the 70s.
Nordhaus 07, William: Sterling Professor (the highest academic rank at Yale University, awarded to a tenured faculty member considered one of the best in his or her field), of Economics at Yale University, member of the National Academy of Sciences, on the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Carter administration
[“Who’s Afraid of a Big Bad Oil Shock?” September 2007, ]
So what should we conclude? To begin with, the oil shock of 2002-2006 was different from those of earlier period. If we measure the shock as the income effect per year of the price increases, the shock was substantially smaller than the shocks of the 1970s. It occurred more gradually, and the change was much less of a surprise in the context of past experience. Roughly speaking, the shock was about one-third as large as the shocks of the 1970s. In terms of effects, the impact of the shock on inflation was qualitatively similar although quantitatively different from the earlier shocks. The rise in PCE inflation in the recent shock was consistent with less than full pass-through of the energy-price increase. Unlike the shocks of the 1970s, there appears to have been no substantial pass-through of the energy-price increases into wages or other prices. The impact of the shock on output was completely different from earlier episodes – indeed the sign was opposite. Output continued to grow relative to potential output after the shock, and unemployment continued to fall. The reason for the anomalous output impact is unclear. One possible reason is that the shock was too small to affect the overall pace of economic growth. Additionally, there is modest evidence that the transmission mechanism from energy prices to output has changed from negative to neutral over the last three decades. The reasons for the declining sensitivity are not completely understood, but two underlying causes seem plausible. First, there is evidence that the Federal Reserve reacted more sensibly to energy prices in the 2000s.. ...A second and more speculative reason for the muted macroeconomic reaction is that consumers, businesses, and workers may see oil-price increases as volatile and temporary movements rather than the earth-shaking changes of the 1970s. ...All of these factors would tend to reduce the impact of energy-price shocks on the macroeconomy. In the end, this suggests that much of what we should fear from oil-price shocks is the fearful overreactions of the monetary authority, consumers, businesses, and workers. A cautious reading today suggests that policymakers should not be afraid of a Big Bad Oil Shock. The most recent evidence suggests that the economy is robust in the face of major energy shocks. The economy weathered an increase in real oil prices of 125 percent from 2002 to 2006 without any major strain. This suggests that policymakers should focus on fundamentals such as employment, real output, and containment of inflation as well as the instabilities caused by financial innovations and risk-taking. Oil-price shocks are neither so big nor as bad as in the 1970s.
2. Strategic Petroleum Reserves solve shocks.
United Press International 7-19-08 [“Murray: U.S. oil reserve should be used,” ]
WASHINGTON, July 19 (UPI) -- Congressional Democrats want the United States to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help bring down oil prices, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said Saturday. Murray said during the Democrats' weekly radio address that with gasoline prices reaching new highs, it is time to use the emergency reserves and urge oil companies to drill on leased federal lands. "We believe it's time for the oil companies to use that land and to make sure that it stays in America instead of shipping it to the highest bidder overseas," Murray said. "Democrats also think it is time to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Right now we have more than 700 million barrels of oil sitting underground in Texas and Louisiana that can be used in times of emergency." Murray also called for increased regulation of energy trading, which she contends is being affected by speculators seeking to profit from rising oil prices. Democrats, she said, "believe we must rein in Wall Street and traders who are unfairly driving up oil prices." "With regard for nothing but their own profits, some traders are bidding up oil prices by buying huge quantities of oil just to resell at an even higher price," she said.
3. High oil prices don’t affect the economy
CCTV International 08 (“Oil prices not to have big impact on world economy in long term,” 1/3/2008, )
Analysts say the high oil prices will continue, but are not likely to have a big impact on the world economy in the long run. Although the price of crude oil has been rising consistently in recent years, the world economy has maintained a growth rate of around 5 percent, and international trade has grown at a rate of between 7 to 9 percent. Analysts say, the impact of oil prices on the world economy is weakening. The main reason is energy-saving measures and new technology, which are improving the efficiency of energy consumption. The economic growth is less reliant on high consumption of oil. Secondly, the integration of global economies and technology innovation have raised production efficiency and reduced costs around the world, which has led to an increase in disposable incomes. Consumption has therefore remained strong. Another reason is that the world economy is in a phase of expansion, and macro-economic policies in many countries have been in place to withstand the impact of high oil prices. However, the International Energy Agency has estimated that until 2030, the demand for crude oil will increase by 35 percent to 116 million barrels per day and crude oil prices will remain high for the longer term. It will force the economies to change their growth model, innovate energy-saving technologies, and explore new energy resources to achieve sustainable development.
Ext #1 – Oil Shocks Gradual
Current oil shocks are more gradual and the economy is more resilient.
The Economist 5-29-08
[“The oil shock: Pistol pointed at the heart,” ]
Despite these disturbing precedents, until now the risk of a recurrence seemed almost as remote as that fated decade. More recent experience lulled fears. Between early 2004 and the spring of 2006, the real oil price in sterling doubled. That was a substantial shock by any reckoning, yet the economy absorbed it without undue damage. Output growth slowed in 2005, but GDP still expanded by nearly 2%, and then grew at an above-trend rate of around 3% a year in 2006 and 2007. There were several reasons why the economy coped better with the oil shock of 2004-06. For one thing, the rise in oil prices in that period was smaller and more gradual than the spectacular jumps of the 1970s. Furthermore, it was prompted mainly by rising demand in China and other emerging economies rather than by disruptions to supply. The economy has in any case become less vulnerable to oil shocks of any description because it is less oil-intensive than it was, using half the oil per unit of GDP that it did in the 1970s, according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
AT: Organized Crime
1. No impact: organized crime will just move elsewhere if regulated
Committee on the Judiciary, committee in the House of Representatives, 2000
[Committee on the Judiciary, forty members of the House, “Threat Posed by the Convergence of Organized Crime, Drug Trafficking, and Terrorism”, Subcommittee on Crime, December 13, 2000, ]
Moreover, due to the increased cooperation among transnational crime groups, the threats emanating from criminal groups which are already known by law enforcement suddenly move to a more borderless dimension. More and more investigations will have international implications, which makes these investigations both more lengthy and costly, and could ultimately result in less efficiency. The current difficulties of investigating and monitoring human trafficking activities around the globe clearly illustrate these problems.
2. Attempts to target organized crime fail – groups shift to other crimes
Loree, writer for Trends in Organized Crime, 2002
[Don Loree, involved with anti-organized crime efforts, “Organized crime: Changing concepts and realities for the police”, Trends in Organized Crime, June 2002, ]
The growth in the extent and scope of organized crime activity, especially in the transnational sphere, is particularly linked to improved transportation and communications, for example air travel, the internet and electronic banking. These have markedly reduced barriers, have opened new opportunities for organized crime expansion and diversification and, in the process, have created new victims. How many people have not received an invitation by mail or e-mail to participate in some form of international money scam? How many do not know someone, especially a senior, who has been approached by a telemarketing scam? The most successful organized crime enterprises are now linked, dynamically and flexibly. They are able to shift quickly from one commodity to another and can and do take advantage of the most up to date technology; often as good or better than that of the police who are trying to fight them.
3. Increased focus on human trafficking trades off with other crime enforcement
US Marshals Service, part of the USFG working on civil authority, 2009
[USMS, “FY 2010 Performance Budget”, April 2009, ]
The flow of human trafficking and narcotics into the United States, along with smuggling of illegal firearms and criminal monetary proceeds out of the United States has had a devastating effect on the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The violence perpetrated by organizations and elements associated with these criminal activities has brought greater federal law enforcement attention to all areas of the country. Immigration enforcement is as likely a problem in the Midwest as it is in the Southwest. The USMS has been forced to divert resources from fugitive apprehension activities and other mission areas in order to fill the gap which has resulted from increased judicial security in the courtrooms. In some cases, the sheer number of criminal aliens has overwhelmed courthouse cellblock capacity, creating untenable working conditions for Deputy Marshals. Searching prisoners is part of prisoner processing in a courthouse cellblock
Ext #2 – Move to Other Crimes
Organized crime groups use multiple activities – a switch from one would increase another
FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, No date
[FBI, Glossary on “Organized Crime”, Federal Bureau of Investigation, no date given, ]
The FBI defines a criminal enterprise as a group of individuals with an identified hierarchy, or comparable structure, engaged in significant criminal activity. These organizations often engage in multiple criminal activities and have extensive supporting networks. The terms Organized Crime and Criminal Enterprise are similar and often used synonymously. However, various federal criminal statutes specifically define the elements of an enterprise that need to be proven in order to convict individuals or groups of individuals under those statutes.
AT: Overfishing
1. No Impact to Fish Death – High Reproductive Rate
FishNet USA 6-10-2000
Marine fish and shellfish are characterized by their high fecundity, particularly when judged by terrestrial standards. Many release millions of eggs, and even the sharks - whose supposedly “low” reproductive potential puts them, in the conservationists agenda, in danger of overfishing - produce from several to dozens of fully functional young every year. Needless to say, this high reproductive potential is balanced, is in fact required, by naturally high mortality levels. If it weren’t, in fairly short order we’d be up to our ears in dogfish or codfish or scallops. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that at least 99.99% of all marine organisms spawned in the world’s oceans never come close to reaching maturity. As far as the biological success of those species are concerned it doesn’t matter what the source of that mortality is. On the average one spawning pair of red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico will produce two mature red snapper. Millions of fertilized eggs, hundreds of thousands of larvae, thousands of juveniles and hundreds of immature snapper produced by these spawners will die every year. Whether they become dinner for a larger fish, are a casualty of “catch and release” recreational fishing size limits, or end up on the deck of a shrimper makes no difference to the overall red snapper population.
2. Overfishing inevitable- Subsidies
The Raw Story 5-26-2008
Oceana's campaign has been recognized during a WTO public forum when Director-General Pascal Lamy said, "Today, negotiations on fisheries subsidies in the WTO are in full swing and they are being taken extremely seriously. The Membership realizes the magnitude of what is at stake if these negotiations were to fail. And just in case it would forget, you have placed banners all over Geneva to remind us all of the need to reach an agreement!" The WTO has the single best opportunity to address the fisheries subsidies issue on a global scale, and Oceana is working hard to make sure it does just that. More than 80 percent of the world's fisheries are at risk from over-fishing and the World Trade Organisation must act urgently to scrap unsustainable subsidies, lobby group Oceana said Monday. "The world's fishing fleets can no longer expect to find new sources of fish," said Courtney Sakai, senior campaign director at Oceana. "If the countries of the world want healthy and abundant fishery resources, they must improve management and decrease the political and economic pressures that lead to overfishing." Based on data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the report found that only 17 percent of the world's known fish stocks are under-exploited or moderately exploited. Particularly overfished are stocks in significant parts of the Atlantic Ocean, the Western Indian Ocean and the Northwest Pacific Ocean. The report said that in the Western Indian Ocean, for example, over 70 percent of known stocks have been fully exploited, while the remainder are overexploited, depleted or currently at a stage of recovery. Oceana also notes that emerging fishing grounds have large numbers of stocks with unknown status, saying that it opens them up to the risk of overfishing and depletion. The group estimated that current fishing subsidies are worth at least 20 billion dollars annually, or the value of 25 percent of the world's catch, giving strong economic incentives for overfishing. "The scope and magnitude of these subsidies is so great that reducing them is the single greatest action that can be taken to protect the world's oceans," according to the group. It urged countries to push to "reduce and control subsidies" during the current World Trade Organisation negotiations on fisheries subsidies. The WTO last November proposed the elimination of most subsidies for the fishing industry in a compromise package.
Multiple alternate causes mean the plan doesn’t solve –
A. fleet sizes from subsidies
OCEANA 08
Consider that many fish populations are significantly depleted and scientists project the permanent collapse of all commercial species within the next 50 years if significant action is not taken to reverse overfishing. Government subsidies to the fishing sector, totaling approximately $20 billion annually, represent one of the principal forces behind the overfishing crisis. These harmful subsidies push fishing fleets to fish longer, harder and farther away than would otherwise be possible. Critical negotiations are currently being conducted during the Doha round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to reduce these destructive fisheries subsidies. In late November 2007, the WTO took a tremendous step forward in the negotiations when it produced the first draft agreement on fisheries subsidies. The draft agreement contains a strong prohibition on capacity enhancing subsidies and provides for improved fisheries management.To help ensure the negotiations deliver meaningful and lasting changes to preserve the world's fisheries, Oceana is leading a global effort to increase international awareness of the issue through our Cut the Bait campaign, which has helped generate attention among media and stakeholders around the world.
B. Too many boats
5-8-2008
There are a 100,000 fishing boats in Vietnam - too many, say conservation experts, who warn of overfishing in Vietnam's coastal waters. But Vietnamese fishermen are hurting from rising fuel prices. To help them, the government is offering subsidies to build even more boats. Matt Steinglass reports from Hanoi. Vietnamese fisherman works on a basket-shaped boat locally called Thuyen Thung at a fishing village in Danang, Vietnam (File photo) Deputy Agriculture Minister Nguyen Van Thang told Vietnamese fishermen this week that the government will lend them a hand. Thang says any fisherman who buys a new boat with an engine of 90 horsepower or more will get a subsidy of about $3,500 a year. Thang says the subsidies will help fishermen to switch to more powerful boats that can fish further from shore. He says they will also soften the pain of high fuel prices.But the new policy seemed to contradict Vietnam's official strategy of shrinking its fishing fleet. Vietnam has nearly a 100,000 fishing boats. That is far too many, according to wildlife experts like Keith Symington of the international conservation group WWF, who say stocks of fish are declining. "In 2001, for tuna, on average 25 kilograms of tuna could be caught with 100 hooks on a long-line tuna boat. And in 2005, on average, that number's gone down to about 15. You have to fish harder to catch the same amount," said Symington. Overfishing like this could severely damage Vietnam's fisheries."In scientific terms they call it serial depletion. Which means you'll eventually hit a point where there's no recruitment of baby fish," he added. "And then there's really a crisis. The fishery can become quickly commercially extinct."
Ext #2 – Subsidies
Overfishing unavoidable- Subsidies lead to Exploitation
Bridges Weekly Trade Digest 3-28-2007
The US on 21 March launched a far-reaching proposal to modify international trade rules to prohibit most government subsidies to commercial fishing, in an effort to halt the depletion of marine life globally.The US is currently seeking input on the proposal from delegates and it has already elicited complaints from Japan, South Korea, Portugal, and Spain, all traditional opponents of constraints on fisheries subsidies. After receiving comments on the text, the US plans to submit a formal version at the next session of the Negotiating Group on Rules, tentatively scheduled for 30 April. The new text represents the US' first comprehensive framework for future disciplines on commercial fisheries subsidies. It builds on the country's past positions, and is believed to have the support of a broad coalition of countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Chile and New Zealand. Role of Doha in preserving marine fisheries Washington claims that its proposal represents an important step towards slowing the over-harvesting and depletion of fish stocks around the world. "Tough fisheries subsidy disciplines are an essential complement to strong fisheries management programs to ensure that wild fish stocks remain sustainable for future generations," said US Trade Representative Susan Schwab. She described the proposal as "a clear win for trade, the environment and sustainable development."A 2006 report by the University of British Columbia put worldwide annual government spending on fisheries subsidies at about USD 34 billion. Of that, environmentalists blame some USD 20 billion in harmful payments, such as those that go toward building new fishing boats, for three-quarters of the world's overfishing. Japan, the EU, and China are the biggest subsidisers, respectively doling out about USD 5.3 billion, USD 3.3 billion, and USD 3.1 billion annually. Scientists warn that global fish stocks risk irrevocable collapse within 50 years unless steps are taken to curb overfishing (see BRIDGES Weekly, 8 November 2006). According to Courtney Sakai, campaign director for marine advocacy group Oceana, strong WTO rules limiting fisheries subsidies could play a crucial role in doing so. "The international fishing fleet is so distorted by government subsidies that it is a wonder there are any fish left at all. It's about time we cut the bait and the WTO represents the best way to do that," she said. Under the Doha mandate, Members are supposed to "clarify and improve WTO disciplines on fisheries subsidies, taking into account the importance of this sector to developing countries… with a view to enhancing the mutual supportiveness of trade and environment." The negotiations on such subsidies have been described as offering the greatest potential environmental benefits of any issue in the round. The gains would not be limited to conservation: fish is a heavily-traded good, an important commodity for developing countries in particular, and the source of at least 20 percent of the daily protein intake of 2.6 billion people worldwide, especially in developing countries. Worldwide it is estimated that one billion people depend on fish for their livelihood. Broad ban, with negotiated exemptions The new proposal unveiled by the US calls for a broad prohibition on commercial fishing subsidies, targeting any initiatives that encourage wild-capture fishing for commercial purposes, such as payments for ships, fuels, and loan guarantees. Specific negotiated exceptions to this ban would be available to policies that do not encourage increased fishing capacity, such as the removal of boats through buyback schemes, re-education for fishermen, and research initiatives focused on marine conservation. However, the proposal stressed that these exemptions will need to be strongly disciplined to ensure that they do not become a loophole for promoting overcapacity. The US, along with the other members of a loosely-defined group of countries called the 'Friends of Fish', including Australia, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and New Zealand, has long supported a blanket ban with a list of negotiated exceptions. New Zealand in particular is viewed by marine conservationists as an early champion of aggressive disciplines on fisheries subsidies, and has worked with the US to get such an agreement at the WTO. In contrast, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have taken the opposite approach: instead of a blanket prohibition, they want a negotiated list of specific banned types of subsidy payments.Under the proposal, access fees would be counted as subsidies by the typically rich countries that pay them to developing country governments in return for the right to fish in their territorial waters, unless they meet certain conditions. They would not be treated as subsidies to the recipient coastal states. Access fees are an important source of revenue for some small island states. The paper also calls for a periodic review of the new rules' impact and points to methods for increasing transparency, avoiding circumvention of the regulations, and helping countries make the transition into conformity with the policy. The US' proposal does not outline any specifics on special and differentiated treatment for developing countries, but did refer to a recently revised Brazilian proposal (TN/RL/GEN/79Rev.4) that envisaged exceptions permitting payments to fisheries activities related to the subsistence of fishing communities in developing countries. Washington claims that the current subsidy rules enable inefficient economic practices and distort market forces, leaving many fishing industries at a distinct disadvantage against heavily subsidised fleets such as those of Japan and the EU. "Our proposal will help level the playing field for the US and other fishing communities that are disadvantaged by large subsidy programs," said Schwab.Following the release of the proposal, the US Congress passed a resolution encouraging the slashing of harmful fishing subsidies that lead to overfishing worldwide. Sources noted that despite their different approach to the issue, countries such as Japan and South Korea have been actively involved in the negotiations. The EU, whose position lies somewhere in between the Asian Members and the US, has been relatively silent, and delegates say that it is waiting to see how the negotiations evolve. The European Commission's own attempts to encourage member states to slash catches by their fishing fleets have been deemed inadequate by conservationists. Talks on the US proposal will continue over the coming weeks in the run-up to the end-April session of the negotiating group.
AT: Overpopulation Impacts
1. Overpopulation is just a media myth
D'Agostino 08’
Joseph A. D'Agostino Joseph A. D'Agostino is a freelance journalist writing a book tentatively titled "Triumph of Patriarchy." He is former vice president for communications at Population Research Institute and former associate editor of Human Events. 7/27/08
The world's population growth rate maxed out in 1965 and has been in sharp decline."The unprecedented fall in fertility rates that began in postwar Europe has, in the decades since, spread to every corner of the globe, affecting China, India, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America," says Mr. Mosher. "The latest forecasts by the United Nations show the number of people in the world shrinking by midcentury, that is, before today's young adults reach retirement age." The birthrate of Europe taken as a whole, from Ireland to Russia, is only 1.5 children per woman in her lifetime, far below the minimal replacement rate of 2.1. Latin America's is down to 2.4 and dropping fast. China's is 1.7. South Korea's is a mere 1.1. The United States is the only developed country at or above replacement rate; we're right at 2.1. Mr. Mosher provides the material to counteract the overpopulation myth still dominant in the mainstream media, and peppers his straightforward text with illustrative stories from real people's lives. Ever since he became the first Western social scientist to document the forced abortions going on as part of China's Western-supported population control program 30 years ago, Mr. Mosher has been waging a campaign against the population controllers of the Earth.
2. Overpopulation has peaked
Lugton & McKinney 05’
Mary Lugton, Phoebe McKinney, 2/24/05Population in Perspective: A Curriculum Resource, Amherst, MA: Population and Development Program, Hampshire College, , and United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “World Population Prospects, the 2004 Revision,”
World population is still growing and is expected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050. However, demographers agree that the era of rapid growth is over. Population growth rates peaked in the 1960s due to dramatic reductions in death rates and increased life expectancy. Since then, with increasing education, urbanization, and women’s work outside the home, birth rates have fallen in almost every part of the world. The average is now 2.7 births per woman. A number of countries, especially in Europe, are now concerned about declining population growth as many women have only one child. The UN projects that world population will eventually stabilize, falling to 8.3 billion in 2175.
AT: Oxygen
No impact to oxygen—even if every tree in the world was burned oxygen levels would remain high
NOWAK et al 2007 (David J. Nowak, Project Leader, USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station 5 Moon Library; Robert Hoehn, Biological Science Technician, USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station 5 Moon Library; Daniel E. Crane, Information Technology Specialist USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station 5 Moon Library. Arboriculture & Urban Forestry, May, )
The reason the oxygen production value of urban trees is insignificant has to do with the large amount of oxygen within the atmosphere (approximately 21% of the atmosphere’s volume is oxygen). As stated by Miller (1979): “We have a large number of serious ecological problems, but suffocation from lack of oxygen is not one of them (Broecker 1970; SCEP 1970). The oxygen content of the atmosphere remains essentially constant with the oxygen consumed by all animals, bacteria, and respiration processes roughly balanced by the oxygen released by land and sea plants during photosynthesis. The present atmospheric oxygen content seems not to have changed since 1910 (SCEP 1970). Furthermore, because air is about 20 percent oxygen, the total supply is immense (Broecker 1970).” Our atmosphere has such an enormous reserve of oxygen that even if all fossil fuel reserves, all trees, and all organic matter in soils were burned, atmospheric oxygen would only drop a few percent (Broecker 1996). Also, waters of the world are the main oxygen generators of the biosphere; their algae are estimated to replace ≈90% of all oxygen used (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1994). Thus, although urban trees do produce significant amounts of oxygen, it is not a significant ecologic benefit given the global nature of oxygen and the sheer volume of oxygen in the atmosphere.
AT: OZONE Depletion
1. Ozone holes shrinking now
CBS News, October 1, 2004,
The ozone hole over Antarctica appears to have shrunk about 20 per cent from last year's record size, scientists said Friday. The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand said its measurements show the hole peaked at about 24 million square kilometres, compared to 29 million square kilometres in 2003. Antarctic ozone hole on Sept. 17, 2001 (Courtesy: NASA) Satellite data from NASA back those measurements.
"Measurements from the ground at Scott Base suggest that there is slightly more ozone this year than the average for recent years," said Dr. Stephen Wood, an atmospheric scientist with the institute, in a release.
2. No impact to ozone depletion – UV radiation levels are at an all time low
S. Fred Singer, Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, 1994, “The southern ocean whale sanctuary”,
We need to keep in mind here that atmospheric ozone content is quite variable, both geographically and on many times scales. For example, the average intensity of UV radiation increased by 5000 percent between pole and equator; plankton drifting only 30 miles north or south would experience a five percent change. Day-to-day variations can be several hundred percent; seasonal variations several tens of percent. Even when these are averaged out, there still remains an 11-year sunspot cycle variation of ozone of the order of 3 to 5 percent, that should give rise to UV variations as large as those considered in the NMFS paper. In fact, the well-known existence of a strong correlation between sunspot number and ozone suggests that ozone content during the past two centuries (when sunspot numbers were generally low) was less than it is today - and UV fluxes should have been at least 10 to 20 percent greater than present values. Yet there is no reported evidence of ecological damage of collapse.
3. Alt cause – natural causes are more of a threat to the ozone
S. Fred Singer, Professor University of Virginia, 1994, A critique of the UN Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion,
A fair evaluation of the recent theory and of stratospheric observations leads to the conclusion that chlorine from CFCs is not the principal factor leading to ozone destruction below 25 km, where most of the ozone is located. Water, in the form of vapor or ice particles, and sulfates in the form of aerosols may play a more important role. Such a finding could have powerful significance for policy and strongly argues for at least delaying the ban on CFC production.
Ext #1 – Ozone Holes Shrinking
Ozone hole already shrinking
THE INDEPENDENT SPECTATOR, September 18, 2002, p. environment/story.jsp?story=334375. (DRGOC/B176)
The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is about to start shrinking and will close by 2050, Australian researchers say. Government scientists at Cap Grim in Tasmania said scientific data showed the level of ozone-depleting chlorine in the atmosphere was declining because of the ban on the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in fridges and air conditioners, agreed under the Montreal Protocol in 1987.
AT: Pakistani Economy
Pakistani economy resilient – multiple warrants
Javed Hafiz (Pakistan’s former ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman) 2008: The civil society has developed into a formidable force.
Despite global financial crisis, war on terror and security situation within Pakistan, Pakistani economy has shown resilience. When negative factors like load shedding and high interest rates are also factored in, this resilience stands out, all the more. The good news is that this year, due to good harvest, Pakistan may not have to import wheat. In the 1950s, with a fraction of this population, Pakistan had to import wheat. Camel carts transporting the US-granted wheat, out of Karachi port, carried placards “Thank You America”. Pakistanis, I remember, had felt insulted.
Some months ago, the Harvard Law School honoured Chief Justice Iftikhar Choudhry with its Medal for Freedom. This is the third time the coveted medal has been given since the inception of the Law School. Another individual to get it was iconic South African leader Nelson Mandela. On a different plane, a 19-year-old Pakistani student Ali Moeen Nawazish has made us proud by scoring 21 A’s in the A Level examination. His achievement has gone into the Guinness Book of Records.
The civil society in Pakistan has developed into a formidable force. Hundreds of NGOs are active in the protection of human rights, women’s issues, education, health and environment. Roedad Khan, IA Rehman, Asma Jahangir and Tahira Abdullah are not only household names in Pakistan but are also acknowledged and respected abroad.
Pakistan’s media today is as free as it could be. Private channels have mushroomed and they hold all kinds of discussions unencumbered by censorship of the past. The dynamics of freedom of expression has even changed the content and style of the government -controlled media. They also allow a degree of openness, to ensure credibility. When the government put some pressure on the GEO TV during the long march, Information Minister Sherry Rehman resigned in protest.
Pakistani road network has vastly improved over the years. In 1972, it took me nine hours to reach Peshawar from Lahore by car. Thanks to the motorway, now the same journey is possible in six hours.
Pakistani police is often perceived as discourteous and corrupt. This is not true of the Motorway Police and even the Islamabad Traffic Police. On the motorway, you can always count on the police for help. When it comes to traffic violations, the police does not even spare ministers. Payment of fine on the motorway and in Islamabad is transparent, documented and foolproof. Motorway and Capital Territory Police are cleaner and more efficient. The reason is merit, better salaries and training. This proves that given a merit-based system and proper training, the entire bureaucracy and governance in Pakistan can be radically improved.
Pakistan now has a sizeable middle class. This is the engine that drives the country. Technical experts and PhDs are getting six digit salaries. It is true that the public sector performance has declined, particularly in health and education sectors. However, good private sector institutions have come up to fill the vacuum. Country-wide chains like the Beaconhouse School System and hospitals of international repute such as Shifa International and Shaukat Khanum teach and heal with high standards.
Pakistan has high telephone density. The number of mobile connections is double that of fixed lines. Telephone calls have become affordable which in turn has helped all segments of society. Pakistan has varied topography, from high mountain peaks to vast fertile plains and a long coastline. Most regions have four clear seasons and grow tropical and sub-tropical fruits. Variety of climate and temperatures add to the variety of flora and fauna.
An average Pakistani is achievement-oriented. Given the right environment and incentives, he or she can achieve high standards. Nawa Killey, a village near Peshawar, has produced squash champions Azam Khan, Hashim Khan, Jahangir Khan and Jansher Khan. Pashtun and Baloch segments of Pakistani society have a lot of untapped sporting talent. There are hundreds of Younas Khans and Shahid Afridis waiting to be discovered.
AT: Pakistan Gives Nukes to Terrorists
The Pakistan army won’t allow the transfer of nuclear weapons to the Taliban
Simon, and Stevenson, 9 * adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, AND **Professor of Strategic Studies at the US Naval War College, (Steven and Jonathan, “Afghanistan: How Much is Enough?” Survival, 51:5, 47 – 67, October 2009 )
The United States' next logical move would be to intensify pressure, raising civilian casualties, increasing political pressure on the Kabul and Islamabad regimes, and ultimately weakening them, which would only help al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In fact, some evidence of this dynamic has already materialised, as the Pakistani government has faced difficulties in dealing with hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis displaced by the military campaign, undertaken at Washington's behest, in the Swat Valley. Certainly worries about Islamabad's ability to handle the Taliban on its own are justi fied. Some Taliban members are no doubt keen on regime change in favour of jihadists, as noted by Bruce Riedel, who headed up the Obama administration's 60-day policy review.29 But Pakistan's military capabilities should not be given short shrift. The Pakistani army, however preoccupied by India, is seasoned and capable, and able to respond decisively to the Taliban should its activities reach a critical level of destabilisation. Inter-Services Intelligence, devious though it may be, would be loath to allow the transfer of nuclear weapons to the Taliban.
AT: Pakistani Instability
Pakistan will stay stable – China and India check
(The Hindu 7/12/10 “Call for China-India initiative for Pakistan stability” )
A senior member of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Advisory Group has proposed that China and India cooperate for the stability of Pakistan in the present circumstances. The Ministry's Foreign Policy Advisory Group Member, Wu Jianmin, told TheHindu here his intention was to “present this idea to the Chinese government in due course.” He said this on the sidelines of a conference on “the role of the media in India-China relations,” organised by the Singapore-based Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and its Nalanda Sriwijaya Centre, the National University of Singapore, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. The participants included India's former Ambassador to China, C. V. Ranganathan, and author Sunanda K. Datta-Ray. On whether the idea of a China-India initiative for the stability of Pakistan would at all fly, Mr. Wu, formerly a career diplomat, said: “The rise of Asia requires peace and stability in this region. So, you can see that China's interest and the Indian interest coincide. … We [in China] do not regard Pakistan as a counterweight to India. It is not propaganda: you [only] have to put yourself in China's shoes. .... For the first time since 1840, we have a chance to modernise China. To achieve our goal, what we need is peace abroad and stability at home.”
AT: Pakistani Loose Nukes
1. No risk of nukes getting loose – U.S. taking extreme measures to protect them
Nathan Hodge (Wired Reporter) 4/4/2009: ‘Worst Downside’ of Pakistan’s Implosion: Loose Nukes (Updated).
With the Pakistani army is slugging it out with Taliban gunmen just 60 miles from Islamabad, the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is becoming an even more serious concern for the U.S. military. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently returned from a visit to the region. And while he expressed confidence that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was secure, he made clear his main worry: Pakistan’s nukes falling into the wrong hands. “We all recognize, obviously, the worst downside with respect to Pakistan is that those nuclear weapons come under the control of terrorists,” Mullen told reporters, adding: “I don’t think that’s going to happen.” So, is it time to worry about the worst-case scenario? For starters, it’s worth remembering that the United States has been keeping a watchful eye on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal for a while now, and the United States has provided money and equipment to improve Pakistan’s nuclear security. As the New York Times first revealed in 2007, the Bush administration committed over $100 million to help secure Pakistan’s nuclear materials; that assistance included night vision equipment, helicopters and detection gear.
2. Loose nukes aren’t the problem – officials will just sell of the technology anyway
David Albright and Corey Hinderstein (president and deputy director of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington, D.C.) 2005: Unraveling the A. Q. Khan and Future Proliferation Networks.
The most disturbing aspect of the international nuclear smuggling network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, widely viewed as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, is how poorly the nuclear nonproliferation regime fared in exposing and stopping the network’s operation. Khan, with the help of associates on four continents, managed to buy and sell key nuclear weapons capabilities for more than two decades while eluding the world’s best intelligence agencies and nonproliferation institutions and organizations.
Despite a wide range of hints and leads, the United States and its allies ailed to thwart this network throughout the 1980s and 1990s as it sold the equipment and expertise needed to produce nuclear weapons to major U.S. enemies including Iran, Libya, and North Korea.
3. Pakistani nukes are secure
CTC Sentinel, The Combating Terrorism Center is an independent educational and research institution based in the Department of Social Sciences at the West Point, 2009 (CTC Sentinel, The Combating Terrorism Center is an independent educational and research institution based in the Department of Social Sciences at the West Point, July 2009 )
Pakistan has established a robust set of measures to assure the security of its nuclear weapons. These have been based on copying U.S. practices, procedures and technologies, and comprise: a) physical security; b) personnel reliability programs; c) technical and procedural safeguards; and d) deception and secrecy. These measures provide the Pakistan Army’s Strategic Plans Division (SPD)—which oversees nuclear weapons operations—a high degree of confidence in the safety and security of the country’s nuclear weapons.2 In terms of physical security, Pakistan operates a layered concept of concentric tiers of armed forces personnel to guard nuclear weapons facilities, the use of physical barriers and intrusion detectors to secure nuclear weapons facilities, the physical separation of warhead cores from their detonation components, and the storage of the components in protected underground sites. With respect to personnel reliability, the Pakistan Army conducts a tight selection process drawing almost exclusively on officers from Punjab Province who are considered to have fewer links with religious extremism or with the Pashtun areas of Pakistan from which groups such as the Pakistani Taliban mainly garner their support. Pakistan operates an analog to the U.S. Personnel Reliability Program (PRP) that screens individuals for Islamist sympathies, personality problems, drug use, inappropriate external affiliations, and sexual deviancy.3 The army uses staff rotation and also operates a “two-person” rule under which no action, decision, or activity involving a nuclear weapon can be undertaken by fewer than two persons.4 The purpose of this policy is to reduce the risk of collusion with terrorists and to prevent nuclear weapons technology getting transferred to the black market. In total, between 8,000 and 10,000 individuals from the SPD’s security division and from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Military Intelligence and Intelligence Bureau agencies are involved in the security clearance and monitoring of those with nuclear weapons duties.5 Despite formal command authority structures that cede a role to Pakistan’s civilian leadership, in practice the Pakistan Army has complete control over the country’s nuclear weapons. It imposes its executive authority over the weapons through the use of an authenticating code system down through the command chains that is intended to ensure that only authorized nuclear weapons activities and operations occur. It operates a tightly controlled identification system to assure the identity of those involved in the nuclear chain of command, and it also uses a rudimentary Permissive Action Link (PAL) type system to electronically lock its nuclear weapons. This system uses technology similar to the banking industry’s “chip and pin” to ensure that even if weapons fall into terrorist hands they cannot be detonated.6 Finally, Pakistan makes extensive use of secrecy and deception. Significant elements of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons infrastructure are kept a closely guarded secret. This includes the precise location of some of the storage facilities for nuclear core and detonation components, the location of preconfigured nuclear weapons crisis deployment sites, aspects of the nuclear command and control arrangements,7 and many aspects of the arrangements for nuclear safety and security (such as the numbers of those removed under personnel reliability programs, the reasons for their removal, and how often authenticating and enabling (PAL-type) codes are changed). In addition, Pakistan uses deception—such as dummy missiles—to complicate the calculus of adversaries and is likely to have extended this practice to its nuclear weapons infrastructure. Taken together, these measures provide confidence that the Pakistan Army can fully protect its nuclear weapons against the internal terrorist threat, against its main adversary India, and against the suggestion that its nuclear weapons could be either spirited out of the country by a third party (posited to be the United States) or destroyed in the event of a deteriorating situation or a state collapse in Pakistan.
AT: Palestinian Collapse
PA won’t collapse – Israeli security operations prove its resilient
Moshe Yaalon (former Chief of General Staff, IDF) 2007: Israel, Hizbullah and Hamas. P. 24
The international community should not fear the collapse of the PA. The experience of Israel’s security operations in recent years shows that Palestinian society will not collapse – as the word is commonly interpreted – even under extreme conditions. Palestinian municipalities, for example, continued to operate and provide services even at the height of Israeli military actions against the PA following the Palestinian war of terror and particularly during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002.
AT: Patriarchy Impacts
1. No threshold to impact—the case isn’t large enough to solve all the impacts of patriarchy
2. Patriarchy cannot be explained by a single causality
Steven Goldberg (Chairman of the Department of Sociology, City College, City University of New York), “The Logic of Patriarchy,” Gender Issues. Summer 1999.
“Patriarchy is a result of the requirement of a hunting culture, or Christianity, or capitalism, etc.” If it is to be at all persuasive, an explanation of universality must be parsimonious; the explanation must invoke a causal factor common to the varying societies that exhibit the universal institution. Just as the explanation in terms of capitalism fails to explain patriarchy in the many non-capitalist societies, so do explanations in terms of any single factor other than the physiological fail to explain the host of societies for which that factor does not apply. Non-hunting, non-Christian, non-capitalist, etc. societies are all patriarchal. A single-cause theory of the limits constraining every society need not, of course, be the neuroendocrinological one I suggest. But the few alternative parsimonious explanations fail on empirical grounds.
3. Patriarchy is not the root cause of all impacts
Cat Maguire of EVE Online, an online feminist news source June 9 2005
It assumes patriarchy is the root cause of all our problems. While the patriarchal mindset is certainly accountable for much of humankind's dysfunctionality, patriarchy is only 5,000 years old.
Emerging theories from thinkers like Chellis Glendinning contend that our dislocation from nature (and hence from ourselves) goes back at least 20,000 years ago when humans moved from the gatherer/hunter stage to that of domesticating plants and animals. As such, we have come to believe that anthropocentrism and speciesism—the impulse to conquer and control nature—are conceivably a more accurate source of today’s problems than is patriarchy per se.
4. Patriarchy is inevitable—feminists admit
Allan C. Carlson 04/22/08 “The Natural Family Dimly Seen through Feminist Eyes” (MA 49:4, Fall 2007)
Patriarchy is inevitable, as the more gloomy of the feminist theorists have admitted. Sylvia Walby summarizes: “Women are no longer restricted to the domestic hearth, but have the whole society in which to roam and be exploited.” [36] She errors only in failing to recognize the real source of patriarchy and to appreciate her real choice. Paleoanthropologists now know that even before the first hominids on the African savanna had gone bi-pedal, these promising creatures were conjugal; that is, they were pairing off in long term bonds, where the females traded sexual exclusivity for the provisioning and protection provided by individual males. According to C. Owen Lovejoy, these social inventions of marriage and fatherhood—not expansion of the brain case—were the decisive steps in human evolution, and they occurred well over three million years ago. [37] Nothing important has changed since. Women cannot successfully raise children on their own. When they try to do so in large numbers, the results are poverty, violence, and misery (for proof, simply visit the average American urban ghetto). Women need some entity that will help them gain food, clothing, and shelter and that will control the boys. There are only two practical options: either the private patriarch (who is, in the end, simply the conventional husband), a figure who is adept at breadwinning and taming the lads; or the public patriarch (i.e., the welfare state), which provides food stamps, public housing, and day care subsidies and eventually jails a large share of the boys. The first choice is compatible with health, happiness, wealth creation, and political liberty. The second choice is a sure path to the servile state. The New York Times
5. Patriarchy isn’t just going to disappear – it’s a 4,000 year old system
Glenn Collins – NYT, 1986 “Patriarchy: Is it invention or inevitable” Lexis **Gerda Lerner, P.h.d, founders of the field of women's history**
Gerda Lerner, the historian, was talking about patriarchy, the form of social organization. ''As a system, patriarchy is as outdated as feudalism,'' she said on a recent morning after a meeting of historians at a Manhattan hotel. ''But it is a 4,000-year-old system of ideas that won't just go away overnight.''
AT: Patriarchy ( War
Patriarchy is only one cause of violence- feminists view it as the root cause of violence.
Douglas A. Brownridge, Shiva S. Halli “Living in sin” and sinful living: Toward filling a gap in the explanation of violence against women” Aggression and Violent Behavior, Volume 5, Issue 6, November-December 2000, Pages 565-583
Following Kurz, D., 1993. Physical assaults by husbands: A major social problem. In: Gelles, R.J. and Loseke, D.R., Editors, 1993. Current controversies on family violence, Sage, Newbury Park, CA, pp. 88–103 a.Kurz and Kurz, it has become conventional when discussing sociological approaches to violence against women to make a distinction between family violence and feminist approaches. The main difference between the two approaches is that while family violence theorists see patriarchy as one cause of intimate violence among many, feminist theorists view it as the cause, or at least the “ultimate root,” of violence among intimates.4 The implications of marital status differences in violence for feminist theory are unclear in the literature. To the extent that one focuses on male dominance within marriage, marital status differences can be seen as undermining the feminist argument. Yllö and Straus (1990) write, “Societal tolerance of wife beating is a reflection of patriarchal norms that … support male dominance in marriage. Traditional marriage, in turn, is a central element of patriarchal society” (p. 384). Pearson (1997), in critiquing feminist theory, argues:
That men have used a patriarchal vocabulary to account for themselves doesn't mean that patriarchy causes their violence, any more than being patriarchs prevents them from being victimized. Studies of male batterers have failed to confirm that these men are more conservative or sexist about marriage than nonviolent men. To the contrary, some of the highest rates of violence are found in the least orthodox partnerships—dating or cohabiting lovers. (p. 132)
AT: Pesticides
1. Impacts of pesticides are overrated
Boeke, 03 (Robyn c. The Importance of Pesticides to the Preservation of Public Health, )
On a hot August night a finger can slice the air. Its heaviness envelopes anyone brave enough to walk in this hour of dusk. Life moves languidly, affected and panting from the heat. When the sun sinks in the sky and the blanket of warmth falls over the neighborhood, mosquitoes begin their winged adventure: collecting red blood cells from humans and animals alike to feed as a meal to their larvae. Although mosquitoes are an essential part of nature’s fragile balance, their bite can be more than just an annoyance. Illnesses with consequences including fatality can be carried by these night flyers, and control of this insect colony is vital for the preservation of human life. Pesticides are an effective method of pest containment. These chemicals are safe for use in the environment and protect human life from disease, illness and annoyance.
Pesticides have received much misguided criticism over the years because some feel that the chemicals used hurt the environment. In fact, this is far from the truth. Routine contact with small dosages of pesticides is not harmful to the environment or the people residing in it. The synthetic chemicals used to spray for mosquitoes (usually malathion, sumithrin, or a combination of similar compounds) are no more dangerous than the natural chemicals we are exposed to and ingest on a daily basis. Plants produce these natural protective toxins as a method of self-preservation, and we consume around 1.5 grams of these daily in food (Most Pesticides Are Natural, 1). Although pesticides used for crops and food has come under fire for being pollutants, they have no more of a presence than the natural chemicals produced non-synthetically in our food. To blame synthetic pesticides for being an environmental contaminant is ignoring the fact that there are many chemicals in nature, and that the man-made variety aren’t necessarily the most dangerous. It’s much easier to assume that something “natural” doesn’t contain anything harmful to humans, but this isn’t always true. Humans put themselves in far greater danger (as far as chemical exposure) in the food that they eat daily. A dose of Phenobarbital (a common sleep aid) is 150 times more potent a cancer-causing agent than Captan, a pesticide. Beer offers many adverse side effects, one of its downfalls being the ethyl alcohol it contains. Ethyl alcohol is 1.8 million times stronger as a cancer-causing compound than Lindane, another pesticide (Green 1). Most write off beer and sleeping aids among the thousands of common household medicines and chemicals that do not present danger. The act of drinking a beverage or taking a sleeping pill to fall asleep does not appear to be as “dirty” as a truck spraying the environment with a chemical; therefore, many assume that the latter is much more destructive, when in actuality, spraying for mosquitoes does more good to the environment and its inhabitants than bad. As far as pesticides consumption goes, the amount of synthetic chemical in nature is so small that pesticide residue cannot even be traced inside a human body. In fact, a common method of spraying for mosquitoes (spraying at dusk to catch the adult mosquitoes mid-flight) uses ultra low volume equipment. This method only sprays up to 1-5 fluid ounces of a chemical within an entire acre (Walker, 4). Such a small amount is far less potent than what is contained in some natural chemicals and toxins found in food, making it less likely to be a dangerous presence in the environment. It is a common misconception that mosquito sprayings involve heavy application of pesticide, but if consumers were informed of the actual amount sprayed, many concerns would be alleviated. Despite the small amount that humans are actually exposed to, levels of pesticides are still lower than what is sanctioned by the government, and the compounds used don’t present a great risk to humans when used in the correct amount. In fact, a panel from the National Cancer Institute found that pesticides did not have any link to cancer (Green,1). This fact makes pesticide bans seem highly unnecessary. The danger the chemicals sprayed place on human health is far less dangerous than the cancerous effects of cigarettes that thousands of Americans smoke. Of course, not all types of pesticides come without a price on
human health, but those used on the environment have been researched, tested, and regulated by the government and independent organizations alike to verify their safety. Consumers have no reason to fear for their health from pesticides. Much more concern should be put towards preventing disease from mosquito bites.
2. Pesticides are better on the environment than alternatives
Boeke, 03 (Robyn c. The Importance of Pesticides to the Preservation of Public Health, )
In conclusion, pests are a problem with which Americans should be concerned. Mosquitoes can be carriers of deadly diseases for both human and animals alike and in the interest of preserving and protecting lifestyles and the environment, pesticides are the optimal choice. Such chemicals are not dangerous to human life, or the environment, and they are safer for use than many homebrew methods, as well as some of the natural alternatives on the market. Among the general public there is a stereotype that pesticides are “dirty” and this negative belief can slow the solution to America’s pest problems. To pave the way for improvement, more effort should be directed to informing the general public about the benefits and truths of pesticides. Environmental organizations should look into methods of educating consumers about the real-life risks of mosquitoes and the ways in which pesticides work effectively. If citizens were aware of the dangers and the necessity of a mosquito truck spraying chemical, more would understand and support the community effort against pests. Advancement of education on pest control programs should also include methods in which consumers can safely and effectively fight mosquitoes, such as removing stagnant water from property, using a repellent containing DEET, and effectively using commercial repellants. By providing this information, real steps can be taken to reduce the pest population, and many consumer concerns about pest control will be abated
AT: Phytoplankton
It’s inevitable
A) Ozone depletion inevitable
TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT 1-16-2004
Without this protection, there would be little life on Earth. So, ozone is formed by UV, destroyed by UV, and in the process it protects us from UV. What this means is that there is an "ozone balance" -a state in which ozone is being created and destroyed at equal rates -which keeps the ozone layer in being. The balance is naturally fragile and fluctuating, and anything that upsets it and increases the rate of ozone destruction is potentially life-threatening -hence the worry, since the 1980s, about the effect of the release into the atmosphere of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), such as those used in aerosols, refrigerators and air conditioners. These interfere with the ozone balance by promoting complex chemical reactions that speed up the breakdown of ozone. The problem is aggravated by the fact that CFCs were used for many years in the belief that they were inert, with no environmental penalties. Their very stability, however, means that even after they have been phased out, they will remain in the atmosphere for a long time.
B) Destroys phytoplankton
DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION 2007 (Montgomery County MD DEP, “Ground Level Ozone,” August 13, )
As the stratospheric ozone layer is depleted, higher UV-b levels reach the earth’s surface. Increased UV-b can lead to more cases of skin cancer, cataracts, and impaired immune systems. Many of our essential crops, such as corn, barley, hops, wheat and soybeans, may become damaged, decreasing their yield. Phytoplankton, a plant in the ocean, also is affected. Depletion of this important link in the marine food chain could reduce the number of fish in the ocean. It also can increase the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because phytoplankton absorbs carbon dioxide in their food and energy making processes.
AT: Pollution
Ignore their pollution arguments—fear of pollutant risks would justify wiping out all of humanity and perfect safety is impossible
SIMON 96 (Julian, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment, )
A safety-minded person might say, "With regard to pollutant X, perhaps the additional risk that is induced by a larger population is a small one. But would it not be prudent to avoid even this small possibility?" This question is related to the issue of risk aversion discussed in the section on nuclear energy in chapter 13. To state the problem in its most frightening form: In an advanced technological society there is always the possibility that a totally new form of pollution will emerge and finish us all before we can do anything about it. Though the incidence of general catastrophes to the human race has decreased from the time of the Black Death onwards, and though I'd bet that it is not so, the risk may have begun to increase in recent decades - from atomic bombs or from some unknown but powerful pollution. But the present risk of catastrophe will only be known in the future, with hindsight. The arguments in Part I about non-finite natural resources cannot refute the possibility of some explosive unknown disaster. Indeed, there is no logical answer to this threat except to note that life with perfect security is not possible - and probably would not be meaningful. It might make sense to control population growth if the issue were simply the increased risk of catastrophe due to population growth, and if only the number of deaths mattered, rather than the number of healthy lives lived. A flaw in this line of reasoning is revealed, however, by pushing it to its absurd endpoint: One may reduce the risk of pollution catastrophe to zero by reducing to zero the number of persons who are alive. And this policy obviously is unacceptable to all except a few. Therefore we must dig deeper to learn how pollution ought to influence our views about population size and growth.
Pollution is overhyped—instinctive aversion to waste has prevented rational assessments
SIMON 96 (Julian, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment, )
Perhaps there is an instinctive esthetic reaction to wastes as there seems to be to snakes or blood. Revulsion to excrement is seen in the use of such words as "crap" for anything we do not like. It may be that this instinct makes it difficult for us to think about pollution in a cool and calculating fashion. Indeed, nowadays washing dishes pertains mainly to esthetics rather than disease, though we "feel" that uncleanness is unhealthy. Another relevant analogy is that pollution is like sin; none is the ideal amount. But in economic thinking the ideal amount of pollution is not zero. It is no easier to wean environmentalists from the ideal of no radiation and no trace of carcinogens than it was to persuade the Simon kids that we should simply dilute the dirt to an acceptable extent. This mind-set stands in the way of rational choice on the path to the reduction of pollution.
The environment is getting cleaner—pollution only looks bad because our standards are higher
SIMON 96 (Julian, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment, )
What about more recent trends? Is our environment getting dirtier or cleaner? Shifts in the pollutions that attract people's attention complicate the discussion of trends in the cleanliness of our environment. As we have conquered the microorganism pollutions that were most dangerous to life and health - plague, smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, typhus, and the like - lesser pollutions have come to the fore, along with improvements in technical capacity to discern the pollutants. And some new pollutions have arisen.
No impact to pollution—we panic over nothing
SIMON 96 (Julian, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment, )
The extraordinary improvement in the cleanliness of the environment may be discerned from the types of pollutants that Americans now worry about - substances of so little harm that it is not even known whether they are harmful at all. Alar was a notorious false alarm, as was DDT (discussed in chapter 18 on false environmental scares). In 1992 alarm was raised over crabmeat from Canada, and anchovies from California, which supposedly contain an acid that might cause Alzheimer's disease. The substance in question is a natural one, and has always been there. We are only aware of it because, as the New England District Director of the Food and Drug Administration said when commenting on this issue, "There is equipment today that allows you to find a whole lot of nasty things in the food we eat". This does not imply that these substances hurt us. "The U.S. has a zero pathogen tolerance."
No impact to solid waste—landfills solve
SIMON 96 (Julian, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment, )
5. If all the U.S. solid waste were put in a landfill dug 100 yards deep or piled 100 yards high - less than the height of the landfill on Staten Island within the boundaries of New York City - the output for the entire 21st century would require a square landfill only 9 miles on a side. Compaction would halve the space required. Compare this 81 square miles to the 3.5 million square miles of U.S. territory. The area of the U.S. is about 40,000 times larger than the required space for the waste. Nine miles square is a bit less than the area of Abilene, Texas, the first city in the alphabetical list, and a bit more than the area of Akron, Ohio, the second city alphabetically. If each state had its own landfill, the average state would require only about 1.5 square miles to handle its next century's entire waste. I chose the period of a hundred years because that is ample time for scientists to develop ways of compacting and converting the wastes into smaller volumes and products of commercial value - twice as long as the time since we got rid of household coal ash.
AT: Port Terror
The Secure Freights Initiate solves past problems with port and freight security -
Goodby, Coffey, and Loeb 2k7 (James, served in ambassadorial assignments in the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton and was chief negotiator for Nunn-Lugar agreements with Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, Timothy, holds the Edison Chair for Technology in the Center for Technology and National Security Policy. He is also a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland, Cheryl, Research Associate at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University and is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Biodefense Program at George Mason University, "Deploying Nuclear Detection Systems A Proposed Strategy for Combating Nuclear Terrorism," July, Center for Technology and National Security Policy National Defense University, , AD: 6/30/09) jl
On December 7, 2006, the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy announced a new initiative called the Secure Freight Initiative, a collaborative program aimed at deploying a globally integrated network of radiation detection and container imaging equipment to seaports worldwide.27 The initial phase of the new program involves deploying nuclear detection technologies to participating ports in Honduras, South Korea, Pakistan, Oman, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. Beginning in early 2007, containers at the participating ports will be scanned for radiation and evaluated on risk factors before they are cleared for shipment to the United States and other international locations. If radiation is detected, an alarm will sound, simultaneously alerting homeland security officials and security personnel in the participating country. Data gathered on the containers will be combined with other intelligence and risk assessment data and shared among partnering countries to improve analysis of high-risk containers.28 The recent collaboration between the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy and the combination of intelligence and risk assessment in government-to-government information sharing are key components in the defense against nuclear terrorism. However, while progress is being made through the joint program, the legislatively mandated but unrealistic goal of one-hundred-percent coverage, coupled with little coordination among other U.S. programs, likely will diminish their effectiveness. Current U.S. programs to combat international illicit trafficking of nuclear material have focused on installing portal monitors or conducting checkpoints along seaports and major highways, usually selecting locations based on gross tonnage of cargo. While this has led to several seizures of nuclear and radiological materials, deployments of nuclear detection technologies in this fashion focus primarily on areas subject to extensive commercial and industrial activity. It has been shown that in seaports having advanced portal monitoring equipment, only 10–20 percent of the cargo is scanned for nuclear or radiological material due to the massive amounts of shipments traveling through these major ports.29 Our detection capabilities can be improved, however, by coordinating international activity through an established institution to spearhead and coordinate global nuclear detection and interdiction activities. Such an organization could operate under UNSCR 1540, which would provide a means for exchanging technology, sharing intelligence, correcting flaws in the operation of the system, and encouraging best practices, with the end goal of rapid emplacement of sensors at key locations identified through intelligence collection and risk assessment. Emplacement would be based not on gross tonnage estimates but on threat analyses. Such locations would include, for example, land, air, and sea ports and other locations along known smuggling routes and shipment lanes. A recent State Department initiative can provide lessons on how to collaborate internationally.
AT: Positive Peace
Positive peace is a justification for intervention and war.
Maley ’88 (William, Prof. and Founding Dir. Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy – Australian National University, The Australian Outlook, “Peace Studies: A Conceptual and Practical Critique”, 42:1, p. 30)
The deployment of a notion of positive peace has been a far from innocuous development in peace research. A comprehensive theory of needs, where needs are not defined simply as necessary means to an agreed end, can be the basis for a suppression of both democratic and liberal aspirations. Democracy and Liberty are both concerned with personal desires, the former in the sphere of the polity, and the latter in the sphere of the individual. Needs theory subjugates both the individual and the polity to the abstract ideology of the needs theorist. When Maxim Litvinov remarked in Geneva in the 1930s that peace is indivisible, he was referring to the negative sense of the term. 'Negative peace' is one of the few social values in whose name crimes can be committed only at the cost of self-contradiction. However, if 'negative peace' must be associated with 'positive peace' to give rise to peace in totality, then peace is no longer indivisible — since direct violence may be defended as a means of eliminating 'structural violence'. This defence is a familiar one, resembling the classic liberal justification for rebellion, and even in certain circumstances intervention. Christian Bay has argued that structural violence 'may be so extreme that a limited war must be deemed a lesser evil, if there is no other way to end or mitigate the structural violence, and if the war is sure to remain limited and brief in duration." This blithe assumption — that there could ever be circumstances in which one could be absolutely sure that a war would remain limited and brief in duration — is a splendid illustration of Bay's detachment from the real world. Nonetheless, the greatest danger in his claim stems from the extraordinary elasticity of the notion of structural violence. This is best brought out by the Danish peace researcher Lars Dencik, although using slightly different terminology. He defines conflicts as 'incompatible interests', and goes on to remark that 'incompatible interests are here defined objectively, i.e. by the observing scientist according to his theory and is [sic] independent of the actual subjective consciousness of the actors involved. This means that incompatible interests are conceived of as structural (actor independent), the structure defined according to the theory of the scientist.'" He draws the predictable conclusion that 'in certain situations "revolutionary violence" may be the necessary means to obtain conflict resolution proper'." This is irresistibly reminiscent of the conclusion of Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence, that it is `to violence that Socialism owes those high ethical values by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world'2°, and it is instructive, though for peace educators perhaps not very comforting, to recall that Sorel's ideas eventually were used in justification of Italian Fascism."
This turns their violence and militarism claims
Maley ’85 (William, Prof. and Founding Dir. Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy – Australian National University, Political Studies, “Peace, Needs and Utopia”, 33:4, Ebsco)
The well-entrenched minimali,st notion of peace has recently been augmented by a notion of positive peace, defined as the absence of structural violence. This paper opens with a critique of Johan Galtung's usage, which conflates ideas better approached separately. It then criticizes the notion of human needs used by Christian Bay as the normative foundation for his idea of positive peace, and by comparing positive peace with Berlin's notion of positive liberty highlights the danger that positive peace might be pursued with direct violence. Despite what Popper argues, the peaceful Utopias of Bay and Galtung need not be pursued with direct violence. However, as they could justify the instrumental use of direct violence, they demand stronger normative foundations than Galtung and Bay have hitherto provided.
AT: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
1. No Impact – PTSD is overstated and the military is already prepared
Pessin 8
Al, Study Estimates Huge Need for US Military Mental Health Care, VoA Pentagon,
The Rand study's co-leader, Terri Tanielian, agrees, and says while some brain injuries are clearly serious and have long-term consequences, some combat veterans may think they are suffering the aftereffects of such an injury when they are not. "There are a significant number of service members that may be concerned about that exposure and attributing problems or difficulties that they're having today with that brain injury, even though, based on the civilian literature, the majority of those cases are likely to be very mild forms, such as concussions, and that most of the symptoms associated with that type of injury would have resolved by now," said Tanielian. The researcher calls for more extensive screening and treatment to ensure brain injuries and mental disorders are properly diagnosed and treated, but she also acknowledges there is a nationwide shortage of people qualified to do that. The military has said mental health problems are particularly acute among troops assigned to long and multiple deployments to war zones, as many U.S. combat brigades have been. Colonel Sutton says the military has hired or contracted with thousands of practitioners to prepare for the return of tens of thousands of troops from Iraq in the coming months as the surge of U.S. forces ends.
2. Status quo solves – Congress is implementing new screening measures now
Great Falls Tribune 6/26
2k9, Senate panel backs PTSD screenings,
The Senate Armed Services Committee has unanimously agreed to make Sen. Max Baucus’ post-traumatic stress disorder screening bill part of the annual defense bill, Baucus spokesman Ty Matsdorf announced this morning. The legislation would require that all returning combat troops — active duty, National Guard and Reserves — would receive person-to-person mental health assessments after their return from combat, six months later, 12 months later and 24 months after their return. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of implementation at $40 million over the next five years. The bill now goes to the full Senate. It must be reconciled with the House defense bill before going to the president, but Baucus staffers anticipate no problem due to what they call the broad bi-partisan support in the Senate.
3. Alt caus – gay soldiers
Phillips 6/18
2k9, Bianca, Do Ask Do Tell,
One of the things we’re most concerned about is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). For gay soldiers who have the added stress of having to maintain a double life, they're likely to suffer from "double PTSD." In order to get help for that, they have to be truthful with a counselor. Because they can’t be honest about who they are, then they probably won’t even seek that help. That’s very unfortunate.
Let’s say someone comes back from serving overseas in Iraq, and they’re still active duty. They’re having problems, as so many people do. But they can’t really get help because they can’t be truthful about who they are. They can’t bring their spouse into the effort because they can’t let anyone know they have a spouse. It's much less likely that they’ll get the help they need with PTSD.
AT: Poverty (Gilligan)
Violence is too deeply entrenched into our society to end poverty, even Gilligan concedes
Alvarez, Professor in the department of criminal justice at Northern Arizona University and Bachman, Professor and Chair of the Sociology and Criminal Justice Department at the University of Delware 2007
(Alex Alvarez, Professor in the department of criminal justice at Northern Arizona University and Ronet Bachman, Professor and Chair of the Sociology and Criminal Justice Department at the University of Delware, 2007 Violence: the enduring problem Chapter 1 ,Pg. 19-20,
We also worry about violence constantly, and change our behavior in response to perceived threats of violence. We avoid certain parts of town, add security features to our homes, and vote for “get tough” laws in order to protect ourselves from violent offenders. At the time this chapter was written, Americans were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and news reports were full of fallen soldiers, car bombings, torture of prisoners, and beheadings of hostages. In short, whether domestically or internationally, violence is part and parcel of American life. In fact, the sociologists Peter Iadicola and Anson Shupe assert that violence is the “overarching problem of our age” and suggest that every social problem is influenced by the problem of violence.47 James Gilligan, a medical doctor who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School, put it this way: The more I learn about other people’s lives, the more I realize that I have yet to hear the history of any family in which there has not been at least one family member who has been overtaken by fatal or life threatening violence, as the perpetrator or the victim—whether the violence takes the form of suicide or homicide, death in combat, death from a drunken or reckless driver, or any other of the many nonnatural forms of death.48 So it’s safe to say that violence is not foreign to us, but rather is something with which we rub shoulders constantly.We know violence through our own lived experiences and the experiences of our family, friends, and neighbors, as well as through the media images we view. At a deeper level, this means that our identities as citizens, parents, children, spouses, lovers, friends, teammates, and colleagues are often shaped by violence, at least in part. Who we are as individuals and as human beings is shaped by the culture within which we live.How we define ourselves, the ways in which we relate to others, and our notions of what we stand for and what we believe in, are all determined in large part by the influences and experiences of our lives—or, as the great English Poet Alfred Lord Tennyson once wrote, “I am a part of all that I have met.”49 In a similar vein, although a bit less poetically, the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann suggest, “Identity is a phenomenon that emerges from the dialectic between individual and society.”50 In short, our life experiences shape who we are. Therefore, if violence is a part of our reality, then it plays a role in shaping us as human beings and influences how we understand the world around us. To acknowledge this is to understand that violence is part of who we are and central to knowing ourselves and the lives we lead. Because of this prevalence and its impact on our lives, some have suggested that Americans have created and embraced a culture of violence. Culture is a nebulous concept that includes values, beliefs, and rules for behavior. These qualities detail what is expected, what is valued, and what is prohibited.51 Essentially, then, this argument contends that our history and experiences have resulted in a system of values and beliefs that, to a greater extent than in some other cultures, condones, tolerates, and even expects a violent response to various and specific situations.52 Other scholars have further developed this theme by arguing that, instead of a culture of violence in the United States, there are subcultures of violence specific to particular regions or groups. First articulated by the criminologists Wolfgang and Ferracuti, this viewpoint suggests that members of some groups are more likely to rely on violence. As they suggest Quick resort to physical combat as a measure of daring, courage, or defense of status appears to be a cultural expectation . . . When such a cultural response is elicited from an individual engaged in social interplay with others who harbor the same response mechanism, physical assaults, altercations, and violent domestic quarrels that result in homicide are likely to be relatively common.53 This argument has been applied to various subcultural groups such as Southerners, young African American males, and others.54 The South historically has had much higher rates of violence than other regions of the country and many have suggested that it is a consequence of Southern notions of honor that demand a violent response to certain provocations. The argument suggests that Southern culture, in other words, is more violence prone than other regional cultures. Violence, then, is something that appears to be embedded in our values and attitudes, which is why some have suggested that violence is “as American as apple pie.”55
AT: Poverty (Global)
Alt. Causality- Population Growth is why poverty is increasing
The Internationl News 6 (“More Births, More Poverty, More Crime” June 30 accessed 7/1/09) SC
So, it’s an inconvertible truth that the weeds of runaway population growth choke development effort, beat individual quality of life or macro-economic goals. Fifty-one per cent of our total farms in 1980 were smallholdings of under-three acres, growing to 71% by 2000. When a family has six or eight children the same small piece of land gets divided into that many children and the holdings reduce. Such land fragmentation inhibits development as it becomes unviable for farm production and increases poverty because it’s insufficient to support even a small family. And that’s true of 2009 with 3.3 million more births a year. Attention the woman minister concerned! The elders of the twin cities, like educated youths, today realise the rise in population is alarming. They say it’s as disturbing to the mind as the behaviour of the politicians in February 2008 elections. They didn’t utter a word about the population explosion and its consequences—- for instance, increase in prices, poverty, joblessness, extremism and militancy, disease, hunger and crime of loot and murder. They preferred achievement of political power individually to the ultimate objective of the family’s welfare and well-being. Let’s glance at the figures (in millions) since Pakistan’s birth on August 14, 1947. The population was 32.5m in that year, 33m in 1950, 84.3m in 1981, 145.5m in 2002 and 148.723m in 2005. Pervez Musharraf put the figure at160m in 2006 while President Zardari raised it to 170m in 2008. And, according to some politicians, the figure is nearly 180m. Anyhow, the population growth rate was 2.45% in 1951-61, 3.66 % in 1961-72, 3.05 % in 1972-81, 2.61% in 1981-98 and 2.1% in 2002. The birth rate in the preceding year, according to an institute, was 11,517 children per day. Political and religious organisations haven’t cared to do any noble research from a socio-economic point of view to control the fantastically growing population. Isn’t it their moral, social and constitutional obligation? There’s no denying the fact that a three per cent annual increase in population has an adverse impact on the national resources. How many persons of the 170m, or say 160m, are living below the poverty line in the country? Independent estimates suggest that poverty may have taken in its fold up to 13/14m between 2005 and 2009. That means an increase in poverty from 22.3% of the population in 2005-06 to 30-35% in 2008-09. A study reveals that food security in 2007-08 worsened as a result of heart-breaking food price hike. How poor we really are may be judged from ‘The News’ story that 62m live under poverty line, 45m face severe food security and 30% can’t afford any healthcare. The unbridled population growth, accompanied by nepotism, has caused disappointment and despondency, depression and tension, bringing in its wake the germs of revolt in the youths. Not long ago, a B.Sc student was among the youths who had come to Islamabad from Lahore, Faisalabad and Sahiwal for test and interview. He had applied for a low-grade post of attendant in the Ministry of Special Education and Social Welfare, also desiring consideration for appointment as LDC if not UDC. The candidates stood on the roadside in sizzling heat with no drop of drinking water. During the long wait for interview call the student fell conscious. Such incidents created acrimony against the rulers. Hasn’t the head of state ever given his mind to population rise, future of the unemployed youths and opportunity for enlightened experienced men of emotional wisdom who can lend him a helping hand in dealing with the crimes and problems arising from an unplanned population growth? That’s in national interest.
Globalization has made poverty more likely
Cancian and Danziger 9 (Maria, La Follette School of Public Affairs, School of Social Work and Institute for Research on Poverty, and Sheldon Danziger Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Population Studies Center and National Poverty Center at U-Mich Ann Arbor, April 2009, “Changing Poverty and Changing Antipoverty Policies”)
Bane suggests that policymakers should consider changing their language. Instead of “helping the poor,” they should focus on “helping people who can’t take care of themselves,” “aiding struggling working families,” and “guaranteeing food and shelter.” She also suggests that American policy analysts 26 should pay more attention to the high poverty rates in developing countries, both because globalization has increased linkages between countries and because immigration to the United States would be likely to fall as living standards increase in sending countries, such as Mexico.
Alt Cause to poverty- Capitalism
Wilks 2k (Alex, studied the politics and economics of colonialism and decolonization at Oxford University, founder of the Bretton Woods Project. The Bretton Woods Project, “The World Bank And The State: A Recipe For Change?” June 15, 2000. AD 6/15/09) JM
The numbers in absolute poverty are growing North and South, as are income disparities. Thirty years ago, the combined incomes of the richest fifth of the world’s population were 30 times greater than those of the poorest fifth. Today, their incomes are over 60 times greater. With joint assets of $762 billion, just 358 billionaires now own more than the combined annual income of the world’s poorest two billion people. Moreover the gap between rich and poor is widening, in large part, according to the United Nations Committee on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), due to the uneven impacts of globalisation inequalities which UNCTAD believes could cause major social upheavals.90In the "transitional economies" of Central and Eastern Europe and of the former Soviet Union, for example, globalisation has brought: "growing income inequality and conjunctural poverty, even as liberalisation policies foster private entrepreneurship and bolster the prospects of structural change leading to sustained economic growth."91 According to World Bank estimates, the number of absolute poor in the economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia grew from 2.2 million in 1987 to 14.5 million, or 3.5 per cent of the population, in 1993.92This increase, notes UNCTAD, "has been due to the erosion of real wages and entitlements in recent years".93The Bank reports a similar picture for East Asia, where despite strong growth rates, more than two-thirds of people still lived in poverty, and inequality was increasing even before the 1997 economic crash.94 In Central and Latin America, too, inequality and poverty have accompanied liberalisation. Although the percentage of the population in absolute poverty in Latin America as a whole fell during the early 1990s, the numbers are again on the increase.95A recent study concludes that "the new economic model has done little to improve poverty and has a tendency to harm income distribution".96 Indeed, "real minimum wages fell substantially in almost all countries as local industries adapted to increased competition from imports".97In Mexico, between 1989 and 1992, the richest 5 per cent of the population increased its share of income from 24 per cent to 29 per cent of the total, while the income of the poorest 5 per cent fell from 0.6 per cent to 0.5 per cent.98 Globalisation and liberalisation have also increased regional inequality. Job creation increasingly relies on inward investment, so the pattern of inward investment determines whether or not people have jobs and what kind of jobs are on offer. Firms seeking to reduce labour costs, for example, tend to relocate to areas where labour is cheapest; firms seeking to establish retail outlets, to those areas where incomes are highest. Such inward investment reinforces existing regional disparities. In Europe, for example, a new division of labour is emerging as the EU workforce fragments into: "a slimmed down, highly-trained and skilled core of workers for electronics, research and ’sunrise’ industries, and a mass of ’flexible’ unskilled workers in, for example, building and construction, service industries, garment manufacture and food processing, who can be taken on, laid off, employed part-time and moved around... as required."9
Structural barriers prevent poverty from being solved – no personal accountability
Cancian and Danziger 9 (Maria, La Follette School of Public Affairs, School of Social Work and Institute for Research on Poverty, and Sheldon Danziger Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Population Studies Center and National Poverty Center at U-Mich Ann Arbor, April 2009, “Changing Poverty and Changing Antipoverty Policies”)
Other critics argued that the goal of eliminating income poverty should be replaced by the goal of changing the behaviors of the poor. An American Enterprise Institute task force concluded: Money alone will not cure poverty; internalized values are also needed. (T)he most disturbing element among a fraction of the contemporary poor is an inability to seize opportunity even when it is available and while others around them are seizing it. Their need is less for job training than for meaning and order in their lives. An indispensable resource in the war against poverty is a sense of personal responsibility (Novak et al. 1987)
AT: Poverty (Moral Ob.)(Nuclear War Outweighs) 1/2
Absolute justice and allowing nuclear war to happen for poverty guarantees extinction – there is no impact to their ethics when we’re all dead.
Hardin 74 (Garrett, Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor,” Sep, , 6/30/09) jl
So here we sit, say 50 people in our lifeboat. To be generous, let us assume it has room for 10 more, making a total capacity of 60. Suppose the 50 of us in the lifeboat see 100 others swimming in the water outside, begging for admission to our boat or for handouts. We have several options: we may be tempted to try to live by the Christian ideal of being "our brother's keeper," or by the Marxist ideal of "to each according to his needs." Since the needs of all in the water are the same, and since they can all be seen as "our brothers," we could take them all into our boat, making a total of 150 in a boat designed for 60. The boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe. Since the boat has an unused excess capacity of 10 more passengers, we could admit just 10 more to it. But which 10 do we let in? How do we choose? Do we pick the best 10, "first come, first served"? And what do we say to the 90 we exclude? If we do let an extra 10 into our lifeboat, we will have lost our "safety factor," an engineering principle of critical importance. For example, if we don't leave room for excess capacity as a safety factor in our country's agriculture, a new plant disease or a bad change in the weather could have disastrous consequences. Suppose we decide to preserve our small safety factor and admit no more to the lifeboat. Our survival is then possible although we shall have to be constantly on guard against boarding parties. While this last solution clearly offers the only means of our survival, it is morally abhorrent to many people. Some say they feel guilty about their good luck. My reply is simple: "Get out and yield your place to others." This may solve the problem of the guilt-ridden person's conscience, but it does not change the ethics of the lifeboat. The needy person to whom the guilt-ridden person yields his place will not himself feel guilty about his good luck. If he did, he would not climb aboard. The net result of conscience-stricken people giving up their unjustly held seats is the elimination of that sort of conscience from the lifeboat. This is the basic metaphor within which we must work out our solutions. Let us now enrich the image, step by step, with substantive additions from the real world, a world that must solve real and pressing problems of overpopulation and hunger.
Their ethics lead to paralysis – we must draw a line and save the greatest amount we can or risk extinction – the alternatives are all worse
Hardin 74 (Garrett, Professor Emeritus of Human Ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor,” Sep, , 6/30/09) jl
Clearly, the concept of pure justice produces an infinite regression to absurdity. Centuries ago, wise men invented statutes of limitations to justify the rejection of such pure justice, in the interest of preventing continual disorder. The law zealously defends property rights, but only relatively recent property rights. Drawing a line after an arbitrary time has elapsed may be unjust, but the alternatives are worse. We are all the descendants of thieves, and the world's resources are inequitably distributed. But we must begin the journey to tomorrow from the point where we are today. We cannot remake the past. We cannot safely divide the wealth equitably among all peoples so long as people reproduce at different rates. To do so would guarantee that our grandchildren and everyone else's grandchildren, would have only a ruined world to inhabit. To be generous with one's own possessions is quite different from being generous with those of posterity. We should call this point to the attention of those who from a commendable love of justice and equality, would institute a system of the commons, either in the form of a world food bank, or of unrestricted immigration. We must convince them if we wish to save at least some parts of the world from environmental ruin. Without a true world government to control reproduction and the use of available resources, the sharing ethic of the spaceship is impossible. For the foreseeable future, our survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat, harsh though they may be. Posterity will be satisfied with nothing less.
AT: Poverty (Moral Ob.)(Nuclear War Outweighs) 2/2
Your argument is absurd moralizing ---- context and consequences are necessary ---- we do not have an unconditional obligation to fight poverty or hunger
Kekes in ‘2 (John, Prof. Phil. And Public Policy @ SUNY Albany, Philosophy, “On the Supposed Obligation to Relieve Famine”, 77, , doi:10.1017/S0031819102000438)
The supposed obligation to relieve famine is based on a rationally indefensible rampant moralism. Moralism is to morality what scientism is to science. Both aberrations involve the illegitimate inflation of reasonable claims either by exaggerating their importance or by extending them to inappropriate contexts. As monetary inflation weakens the currency, so moralistic and scientistic inflation weaken morality and science. Those who value morality and science will oppose moralism and scientism. If moralism is rampant, it is, according to the unabridged Random House Dictionary, ‘1. violent in action or spirit, raging, furious … 2. growing luxuriantly, as weeds. 3. in full sway; prevailing or unchecked.’ Moralism is rampant. It is very hard to think of an area of life that is free of the exhortation of one or another group of moralizers. We are told what food is right or wrong to eat; how we should treat our pets; what clothing to wear; how we should spend our after-tax income; how precisely we should phrase invitations for sex; what kind of bags we should carry our groceries in; when and where we are permitted to pray or smoke; what jokes we are allowed to tell; who should pick the fruit we buy at the supermarket; how we should invest our money; what chemicals we should use in our gardens; by what method of transportation we should go to work; how we should sort our garbage; what morality requires us to think about cross dressing, sex change operations, teenage sex, and pot smoking; we are forbidden to inquire after the age, marital status, drug use, or alcoholism of job applicants; we are liable to be accused of sexual abuse if we spank our children or hug our neighbour’s; our 19 and 20-year olds are permitted to fight our wars, but they are not permitted to buy a beer; we are not supposed to say that people are crippled, stupid, mentally defective, fat, or ignorant; and we must not use words like ‘mankind,’ ‘statesman,’ or ‘He’ when referring to God. The aim of this paper is to examine one influential attempt to make a reasoned case for moralism. It is Peter Singer’s, and it endeavours to provide a utilitarian justification for the version of rampant moralism that Singer advocates. Singer has views on many controversial subjects, but only what he says about famine relief will be considered here. II Singer says that when people are starving it is immoral to have such things as ‘stylish clothes, expensive dinners, a sophisticated stereo system, overseas holidays, a (second?) car, a larger house, private schools for our children, and so on.’ (PE, 232).1 If the ‘so on’ is taken as broadly as Singer undoubtedly intends, it becomes obvious that a very large majority of people in affluent societies is immoral. If, for instance, we put the poverty level in America at 14%,2 then it is a reasonable estimate that about 86% of Americans are guilty of what Singer regards as immorality. Similar estimates hold in other affluent societies. Most people above the poverty level, and many below it, spend money on things that are not necessities. Those to whom this kind of moral exhortation gives an uneasy conscience may be cowed into thinking that there is something to Singer’s claim. But not many of them would think that the immorality they are charged with is terribly serious. If it is a sin to have more than what is necessary, it is a venal, not a deadly, sin. In a different moral vocabulary, it is a minor omission that involves a failure of generosity, not a major commission of a wrong that causes serious unjustified harm to others. Singer, however, strongly disagrees. He says that ‘by not giving more than we do, people in rich countries are allowing those in poor countries to suffer from absolute poverty [less than basic necessities], with consequent malnutrition, ill health, and death. This is not a conclusion that applies only to governments. It applies to each absolutely affluent [more than basic necessities] individual, for each of us has the opportunity to do something about the situation; for instance, to give our time or money to voluntary organizations like Oxfam … . ’ (PE, 222). In saying this, Singer states no more than a factual possibility: we are allowing absolute poverty and we could spend our time and money to try to alleviate it. The question is whether there is a moral obligation to do so, and, if there is, how strong is this supposed obligation. Singer’s moralism enters with vengeance in his answer. Since ‘allowing someone to die is not intrinsically different from killing someone, it would seem that we are all murderers.’ (PE, 222). This is not a slip or a momentary exaggeration. Singer really means it. When we stay at home after work and read a book, listen to music, watch TV, or, God forbid, go out to a restaurant, instead of doing volunteer work or writing a check to Oxfam, we are allowing someone to die, and we are murderers. He asks: ‘Is this verdict too harsh?’ He knows that ‘many will reject it as self-evidently absurd.’ (PE, 222). He allows that there are obvious differences between killing and allowing to die, but ‘these differences need not shake our previous conclusion that there is no intrinsic difference between killing and allowing to die. They are extrinsic differences, that is, differences normally but not necessarily associated with the distinction between killing and allowing to die.’ (PE, 224). It should not be overlooked that when Singer attempts to argue for his outrageous claim that we are all murderers, he drops the talk about murder and speaks instead of killing. But the concession he slips in makes the claim only a little less outrageous: we are merely all killers, not murderers, of people who live in absolute poverty. Singer also makes clear that the obligation to alleviate absolute poverty is very strong. It is not the obligation of charity, which is usually thought to be right to do, but not wrong not to do. The obligation is not just right to do, but also wrong not to do. It is a clear positive duty, and the failure to discharge it is equivalent to killing those whom we could have saved. He says: ‘we ought to give money away, rather than spend it on clothes which we do not need to keep us warm. To do so is not charitable or generous. Nor is it the kind of act which philosophers and theologians have called ‘supererogatory’—an act which it would be good to do but not wrong not to do. On the contrary, we ought to give money away, and it is wrong not to do so.’ (WEL, 110). Singer realizes that the general acceptance of what he says would lead to ‘the revision of our conceptual moral scheme’ and that it would have ‘radical implications,’ (WEL, 111), but given the suffering from absolute poverty, nothing less is called for. This makes obvious that what Singer is saying is that if people do not think about their moral obligations the way he does, then they should change the way they think. It will perhaps be seen that it is not inappropriate to describe what Singer is doing as rampant moralism. Describe it as we may, the question remains whether Singer is right. Reason may be on the side even of rampant moralism. Let us, therefore, see what reason Singer gives in support of his outrageous claim that affluent people are killers if they do not alleviate absolute poverty. He begins by saying: ‘Suppose that … I notice that a small child has fallen in [a pond] and is in danger of drowning. Would anyone deny that I ought to wade in and pull the child out? This will mean getting my clothes muddy … but compared to the avoidable death of a child this is insignificant.’ (PE, 229). And he goes on, ‘we have an obligation to help those in absolute poverty that is no less strong than our obligation to rescue a drowning child from a pond.’ (PE, 230). Those willing to use their critical faculties will notice that most people in absolute poverty are not small children and to think of them as such is a crass paternalistic insult. They will also notice that it makes a great difference who the person is who is in danger of drowning. If it is a contract killer in pursuit of a victim, we are unlikely to acknowledge a strong obligation to pull him out. Furthermore, if there is a lifeguard on duty whose job it is to rescue those in danger of drowning, we should let him do it. And, of course, the equivalent is precisely the job of the governments of the countries in which people in absolute poverty live. Singer’s putative analogy is a rhetorical stratagem that misleads the uncritical and infuriates the critical. The example, however, is dispensable to Singer’s argument. What he really wants to do is to propose and defend a principle that underlies the example. We shall call it the Prevention-Principle. The Prevention-Principle is: ‘if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance, we ought to do it.’ And he claims that ‘This principle seems uncontroversial.’ (PE, 229). But this claim is patently false, as the following considerations show. First, it obviously makes a great difference who is threatened by the very bad thing. If the very bad thing is defeat in war and it threatens unjust aggressors, or if it is imprisonment for life of justly convicted murderers, then the obligation to prevent it is hardly uncontroversial. Second, it is no less obvious that it is folly to prevent a very bad thing from happening without asking about the consequences of doing so. These consequences concern not those who could prevent it, but those who are prevented from suffering it. The consequences could be even worse than the very bad thing that is prevented. Death is presumably very bad, but if the consequence of preventing it is to live in great pain attached to a life support system, then an increasingly large number of people (including Singer) would not recognize the obligation to prevent it. Third, it is equally obvious that it affects the supposed obligation why the very bad thing is threatening some people. What if they brought it upon themselves by imprudent risks (such as taken by recreational drug users), or by lack of foresight that reasonable people can be expected to have (such as ignoring the notice to evacuate from the way of a flood or a rapidly spreading fire). Is the obligation to prevent the very bad thing that threatens obvious then? Fourth, it is similarly questionable whether the obligation holds if the people threatened by the very bad thing are proud, independent, and refuse help. Fifth, should it not be asked also how good are the chances of preventing the very bad thing from happening? Is it not more reasonable to prevent merely bad things from happening if the chances of success are good, rather than expend efforts and resources by risking the strong likelihood of failure to prevent very bad things? These considerations render the putatively uncontroversial Prevention-Principle controversial. The implication is that before it is reasonable to acknowledge the obligation whose violation, according to Singer, makes us killers, we should ask: are we obliged to prevent very bad things regardless of whether they are deserved? regardless of consequences? regardless of whether people have brought it upon themselves? regardless of people’s refusal of help? regardless of the likelihood of success? These questions should not be asked in order to justify doing nothing, but in order to determine whether our obligations would not be better met by concentrating on helping people in our own context where the answers could more easily be found rather than on distant contexts in which our unfamiliarity makes it unlikely that we can find reasonable answers. Singer, in offering his simple-minded argument, fails to consider these complexities. Of course, he could consider them. But then he would have to show that the answers to the difficult questions raised above would favour his case. That, however, he has not even begun to do.
AT: Poverty (U.S.)
1. The official poverty rate statistics distort actual poverty, overall trends show massive improvement
Eberstadt, 08 – senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Nicholas, The Poverty of “The Poverty Rate”
OPR = Official Poverty Rate
Taken at face value, these stark numbers would seem to be a cause for dismay, if not outright alarm. To go by the OPR, modern America has failed stunningly to lift the more vulnerable elements of society out of deprivation— out from below the income line where, according to the author of the federal poverty measure, “everyday living implied choosing between an adequate diet of the most economical sort and some other necessity because there was not money enough to have both.”3 This statistical portrait of an apparent long-term rise in absolute poverty in the contemporary United States evokes the specter of profound economic, social, and political dysfunction in a highly affluent capitalist democracy. All the more troubling is the near-total failure of social policy implied by such numbers. Despite the War on Poverty and all subsequent governmental antipoverty initiatives, official poverty rates for the nation have mainly moved in the wrong direction over the past three decades. If these numbers cast a disturbing and unfamiliar picture of their country for American citizens and policymakers, it is worth remembering that they would be regarded as utterly unsurprising by many of the most convinced critics of the American system, who would regard such results as exactly what they would expect. The apparent paradox of steady economic growth and persistent or increasing poverty, for example, conforms rather well with some of the Marxian and neo-Marxist critiques of industrial and global capitalism, which accused such systems of inherently generating “immiserating growth.”4 Among non-Marxists, these contours of the U.S. tableau are viewed today as affirming the critique of what is known internationally as “neoliberal reform,” and providing powerful particulars for vigorously rejecting the “American model.”5 But, as we shall demonstrate in the following chapters, the social and economic portrait afforded by America’s official poverty statistics is woefully distorted—almost bizarrely miscast. In reality, the prevalence of absolute deprivation in the United States has declined dramatically over the decades since the debut of the official poverty rate. In reality, the purchasing power of lower-income households is far higher today than it was in the 1960s or ’70s. In reality, the standard of living of the poverty population itself has improved manifestly, decade by decade, since the federal poverty measure was first introduced. The problem is, the statistical measure our democracy has devised for charting our national performance against poverty does not register these basic realities—and worse, cannot even recognize them.
2. Very few numbers of persons are in actual poverty
Rector, 08 – Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation (Robert, CQ Congressional Testimony, “REDUCING THE NUMBER OF FAMILIES LIVING IN POVERTY” 9/25, lexis
Point #2 Most "poor" Americans are not "poor" in any normally understood sense of the word. For most Americans, the word "poverty" suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter. But only a small number of the 37 million persons classified as "poor" by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity. Most of America's "poor" live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago. Today, the expenditures per person of the lowest-income one-fifth (or quintile) of households equal those of the median American household in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation.
3. Overall material conditions of the poor are improving across every major indicator
Eberstadt, 08 – senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Nicholas, The Poverty of “The Poverty Rate”
OPR = Official Poverty Rate
One additional and signal failure of the official poverty rate must be flagged in any empirical discussion of poverty and material well-being in America today. This is its manifest inability to provide an accurate reading of absolute poverty in the United States—the charge that the indicator was expressly assigned from the 1960s on. The OPR is, by explicit official designation, meant to monitor absolute poverty—that is to say, to measure poverty in relation to a set income threshold, rather than in relation to the current incomes reported by families or some other relative, and thus perennially changing, standard. Ever since the OPR’s original poverty thresholds were established back in 1965, they have been annually revised solely to take account of changes in the Consumer Price Index. In principle, this should mean that a fixed and unchanging income criterion is being used for determining the poverty status of families. Further, since the inflation-adjusted income threshold of those counted officially poor is supposed to remain constant over time, the material condition of those below the poverty line should similarly be more or less consistent from one decade to the next. Yet, as we saw, this supposition is completely refuted by biometric and other physical data on the living conditions of the U.S. poverty population. With regard to food and nutrition, anthropometric data demonstrate that our poor are incontestably better off today than in 1965; ironically, in fact, overweight and obesity are the prime problems that have emerged over this interim as major nutritional concerns with regard to this population. With respect to housing, the poor today live in decidedly less crowded, more spacious, and better-furnished dwellings than they did four decades ago—and those housing standards appear to have improved steadily, decade by decade. By a number of benchmarks, indeed, the officially poor today enjoy better housing conditions than the nonpoor in 1970, or the American population as a whole as recently as 1980. With respect to transportation, a steadily increasing proportion (by now, the vast majority) of officially poor households own cars, trucks, or other sorts of motor vehicles, and a significant and rising minority of officially poor families have two or more motor vehicles. Finally, utilization of medical and health-care services by the officially poor has progressively expanded over the decades—so much so that children in families below the poverty line in 2004 were more likely to have at least one annual doctor’s visit than were children in families with incomes well above the official poverty line only two decades earlier.
Ext #1 – Rate Flawed
The official poverty rate is statistically flawed, it doesn’t actually measure poverty in America
Eberstadt, 08 – senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Nicholas, The Poverty of “The Poverty Rate”
OPR = Official Poverty Rate
When we compare trends in the official poverty rate and other statistical indicators bearing upon want and deprivation in modern America, two striking and peculiar findings immediately jump out. First, the official poverty rate today does not at all exhibit what one might describe as a “normal and customary relationship” with any of the other important macroeconomic or demographic “poverty proxies” one would ordinarily wish to examine; to the contrary, against the backdrop of those other indicators, the soundings from the OPR often appear erratic, if not positively perverse. As our analysis will attest, nothing like a “normal” relationship exists today between the OPR and what should ordinarily be the main drivers of poverty reduction: economic growth; employment; education; anti-poverty spending.
Second, the mismatch between reported trends for the official poverty rate and practically all the other indicators bearing on poverty and want has been especially pronounced since 1973—the very decades for which the OPR has been reporting that the prevalence of poverty in the United States has been stagnating, or actually increasing.
Specialists on the poverty question commonly presume that the official poverty rate is strongly influenced by the state of the U.S. economy (that is to say, by macroeconomic conditions). This is not only a commonsensical premise; it is a notion confirmed in the past by empirical research. In a series of influential publications in the mid-1980s, for example, Harvard economists David Ellwood and Lawrence Summers argued that changes in the official poverty rate were mainly determined by “general economic developments.” In “reviewing trends in poverty, poverty spending, and economic performance,” they argued, “. . . it is immediately apparent that economic performance is the dominant determinant of the measured poverty rate over the past two decades.”1 Presenting a persuasive graphic that compared changes in the poverty rate and changes in median family income over time, Ellwood and Summers explained in words what the trend lines demonstrated visually: “Almost all of the variation in the measured poverty rate is tracked by movements in median family income” [emphasis in the original].2
Ellwood and Summers accurately described the correspondence between trends in the official poverty rate and real median family income— at the time of their writing. But that work was published over two decades ago. The time series data they were examining only ran from 1959 through the year 1983. Moreover, even back then they found it worth mentioning that “one does see a slight divergence of the trends in the eighties.”3 By now, that “divergence” amounts to a virtually complete disconnection. Indeed, over the decades the correspondence between the official poverty rate and median family income appears to have broken down altogether. We can see this by comparing trends since 1973 for the official poverty rate of the nonelderly population, on the one hand, and real median family income, on the other, as shown in figure 3-1. These are the same variables for which Ellwood and Summers found such a powerful association over the years 1959–83. For the period 1973–2005, there is no discernable relationship whatever between the measured poverty rate and median family income. In fact, over the past three-plus decades, the “correlation coefficient” for these two trends has been approximately zero. In other words, over the past generation, data on the median income for American families have basically provided no clue about the numbers that would be registered for the official poverty rate.4
If the true prevalence of poverty in the United States is indeed affected by “general economic developments”—as it is commonly taken to be— then this uncoupling of the official poverty rate and the median family income, their pronounced and dramatic transition to a new relationship characterized by utter randomness, should in itself raise serious questions about the reliability of the country’s primary poverty index. But this is hardly the worst of it. A quick review will confirm that the OPR has, for the period since 1973, severed what might be regarded as a commonsensical relationship with all of the other major statistical indices bearing on poverty and deprivation in contemporary America. Even worse: For the period since 1973, the behavior of the official poverty rate looks increasingly aberrant and perverse, registering retrogression when the other indices commonly record progress.
Ext #2 – Poverty Down
The official poverty rate ignores actual spending patterns by the poor, their actual income is substantially higher than what is reported
Eberstadt, 08 – senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Nicholas, The Poverty of “The Poverty Rate”
OPR = Official Poverty Rate
The OPR fails to match up with reality in other, less econometrically exacting ways as well. As initially constructed, and as it still operates to this day, the OPR assumes implicitly that a household’s reported annual pretax money income establishes its spending power for that same year; more than that, it presumes that these two quantities are identical. But reported annual pretax money income is not a reliable predictor of expenditure levels for lower-income households today; in fact, income has become an ever less faithful indicator of actual spending patterns for poorer Americans over time. As we have seen, spending already exceeded income for the poorest fourth of the American public in the early 1960s, when the now official poverty rate was being constructed. Today, however, reported annual expenditures exceed reported income for a third or more of all households in any given year—and, within the lowest fifth of households, reported spending is nearly twice as high as annual reported income.
Some part of this reported disparity may be a statistical artifact. Yet the great (and possibly still growing) discrepancy between reported incomes and reported expenditure patterns among our bottom quintile also appears to reflect genuine and important changes in the American economy, most notably the secular rise in year-to-year volatility in household income since 1973. All other things being equal, greater “transitory variance” in household incomes will mean a greater disproportion between annual spending and annual income for households at the lower end of the annual income spectrum. The material well-being of lower-income households is, of course, directly tied to their spending power—that is to say, to their expenditure patterns—but the OPR, by its very design, is incapable of tracking those same spending patterns.
US poverty rates are lower than Europe
Rector, 08 – Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation (Robert, CQ Congressional Testimony, “REDUCING THE NUMBER OF FAMILIES LIVING IN POVERTY” 9/25, lexis
Studies which claim that the U.S. has a higher poverty rate than European nations use a distorted technique that creates higher income standard for assessing poverty in the United States than in other nations. Because of these biased methods, many Americans are deemed "poor" when, in fact, they have higher real incomes than persons identified as "non-poor" in Europe. By contrast, if a fair, uniform standard of comparison is used, the lowest income tenth of the U.S. population is found to have a real income that is roughly equal to, or higher than, most European nations. The median income in the U.S. is also higher than nearly all European nations.
Ext #3 – Material Conditions Improving
Most of the poor are relatively well off
Rector, 08 – Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation (Robert, CQ Congressional Testimony, “REDUCING THE NUMBER OF FAMILIES LIVING IN POVERTY” 9/25, lexis
For example, according to the government's own data, nearly two thirds of households defined by Census as "poor" have cable or satellite television. Eighty five percent have air conditioning. Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, and cable or satellite TV reception. He has a VCR, a DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.
The official poverty rate is useless, it ignores substantial improvements in the living conditions of the poor
Eberstadt, 08 – senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Nicholas, The Poverty of “The Poverty Rate”
OPR = Official Poverty Rate
Unfortunately, this “indispensable” indicator of progress in our national struggle against poverty appears to be incapable of accurately tracking trends in material well-being for lower-income groups within the population. Over time, the flaws and biases in the OPR’s calculated results have become increasingly evident. Today, the contradiction between the numbers generated by the OPR, on the one hand, and an enormous mass of data from other U.S. statistical sources bearing upon domestic poverty and material wellbeing, on the other, is glaring—and all but impossible to ignore.
According to the official poverty rate, the early 1970s were the “golden age” of America’s struggle against poverty. The OPR reached its historical low point in 1973. The incidence of officially measured poverty is higher today than it was nearly three and a half decades earlier, back in the Watergate era of the Nixon administration.
On its own, this would surely be taken as an ominous—even alarming— sounding. But many other social and economic trends bearing directly on domestic poverty have actually registered significant progress over those very same years. Real per-capita income in America, for example, is up sharply since 1973; the educational attainment of the working-age population (by the metric of high school degrees) has steadily improved; antipoverty spending has soared. And although unemployment has fluctuated dramatically between 1973 and the present, the country’s civilian unemployment rate was actually lower in 2006 (4.6 percent) than it was back in 1973 (4.9 percent).1 Despite all these signs of improvement, the OPR stubbornly—and improbably—reports that the incidence of poverty was higher in 2006 (12.3 percent) than in 1973 (11.1 percent).
As we have demonstrated, this anomalous and counterintuitive contraposition of the OPR and other major indicators bearing upon domestic material deprivation is not an aberration, nor an atypical statistical artifact for a single “odd year.” To the contrary: Simple statistical analysis underscores the telling fact that changes in the OPR no longer correspond to changes in per-capita income, median family income, unemployment, educational attainment, or antipoverty spending through the sort of commonsense relationships one would ordinarily expect. Instead, in the years since 1973, the OPR has increasingly come to behave as a perverse and contrary arbiter of well-being, stubbornly in opposition to other—more transparent and perhaps self-evident—measures of material progress and material need.
The material conditions of the poor are increasing
Eberstadt, 08 – senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Nicholas, The Poverty of “The Poverty Rate”
OPR = Official Poverty Rate
While the OPR suggests that the proportion of the American population living below a fixed poverty line has stagnated—or increased—in this period, data on U.S. expenditure patterns document a substantial and continuing increase in consumption levels for the entire country, including the strata with the lowest reported income levels. And while the poverty threshold was devised to measure a fixed and unchanging degree of material deprivation (that is, an “absolute” level of poverty) over time, an abundance of data on the actual living conditions of low-income families and “poverty households” contradicts that key presumption, demonstrating instead that the material circumstances of persons officially defined as “poor” have improved broadly and appreciably over the past four decades.
AT: Poverty ( Terrorism
Empirical study proves poverty inequality and repression don't cause terrorism
Piazza in ‘6 (James, Assistant Prof. Pol. Sci. @ U. North Carolina, Terrorism and Political Violence, “Rooted in Poverty?: Terrorism, Poor Economic Development, and Social Cleavages”, 18:1, March, InformaWorld)
This study evaluates the popular hypothesis that poverty, inequality, and poor economic development are root causes of terrorism. Employing a series of multiple regression analyses on terrorist incidents and casualties in ninety-six countries from 1986 to 2002, the study considers the significance of poverty, malnutrition, inequality, unemployment, inflation, and poor economic growth as predictors of terrorism, along with a variety of political and demographic control variables. The findings are that, contrary to popular opinion, no significant relationship between any of the measures of economic development and terrorism can be determined. Rather, variables such as population, ethno-religious diversity, increased state repression and, most significantly, the structure of party politics are found to be significant predictors of terrorism. The article concludes that “social cleavage theory” is better equipped to explain terrorism than are theories that link terrorism to poor economic development.
Poverty irrelevant to terrorism
Krieger and Meierrieksy in ‘8 (Tim, Junior Professor @ University of Paderborn, and Daniel, Dept. Econ. @ U. Paderborn, “What causes terrorism?” 6-19, )
Regarding popular hypotheses on terrorism, (iv) no convincing evidence is found that economic factors { for example, economic growth, poverty, income disparity or the like { are closely connected to terrorism. Richer countries only seem to be more often targeted by transnational terrorism. There is only marginal evidence that religious or ideological affiliation { mainly, Islam and Islamism { is connected with terrorism risk. Additionally, higher levels of education or democratic political systems do not guard effectively against terrorism. Hence, (v) several popular policy advices { such as poverty alleviation, economic development, democratization or the like { should be watched critically, considering their efficiency in fighting terrorism. However, in reference to political instability, (vi) popular beliefs are confirmed insofar as governmental weakness and political transformation tend to systematically encourage terrorism. Surprisingly for Western leaders, installing stable democratic regimes is not a panacea for terror in this connection. Given the findings of our review, stable authoritarian regimes appear to combat global terrorism just as effectively, although related potential under-reporting biases should be considered carefully.
AT: Proliferation
1. Prolif is slow
Tepperman ‘9 (Jonathon, former Deputy Managing Ed. Foreig Affairs and Assistant Managing Ed. Newsweek, Newsweek, “Why Obama should Learn to Love the Bomb”, 44:154, 9-7, L/N)
The risk of an arms race--with, say, other Persian Gulf states rushing to build a bomb after Iran got one--is a bit harder to dispel. Once again, however, history is instructive. "In 64 years, the most nuclear-weapons states we've ever had is 12," says Waltz. "Now with North Korea we're at nine. That's not proliferation; that's spread at glacial pace." Nuclear weapons are so controversial and expensive that only countries that deem them absolutely critical to their survival go through the extreme trouble of acquiring them. That's why South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan voluntarily gave theirs up in the early '90s, and why other countries like Brazil and Argentina dropped nascent programs. This doesn't guarantee that one or more of Iran's neighbors--Egypt or Saudi Arabia, say--might not still go for the bomb if Iran manages to build one. But the risks of a rapid spread are low, especially given Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent suggestion that the United States would extend a nuclear umbrella over the region, as Washington has over South Korea and Japan, if Iran does complete a bomb. If one or two Gulf states nonetheless decided to pursue their own weapon, that still might not be so disastrous, given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior.
2. Deterrence checks your impacts – even countries that hate each other will not start nuclear wars – India and Pakistan are the proof AND new nuclear states reduce the incentive for others to attack them lowering the probability of nuclear war to near zero
David J. Karl, PhD, International Relations, University of Southern California, International Security, Volume 21, No. 3, Winter 1996/1997, p. 95-6 (MHHAR1518)
Because strategic uncertainty is seen as having a powerful dissuasive effect, optimists usually view the very increase in the number of nuclear-armed states as an additional element of stability. Dagobert Brito and Michael Intriligator, for instance, argue that uncertainty over the reaction of other nuclear powers will make all hesitant to strike individually. As an example, they point to the restraint the superpowers exercised on each other in the 1960s, when first the United States and then the Soviet Union contemplated military action against China's nascent nuclear weapon sites. The net effect of the uncertain reaction of others is that "the probability of deliberate nuclear attack falls to near zero with three, four, or more nuclear nations." Similarly, Waltz reasons that even in cases of asymmetric proliferation within conflict dyads, nuclear weapons will prove "poor instruments for blackmail" because a "country that takes the nuclear offensive has to fear an appropriately punishing strike by someone. Far from lowering the expected cost of aggression, a nuclear offense even against a non-nuclear state raises the possible costs of aggression to incalculable heights because the aggressor cannot be sure of the reaction of other nuclear powers.
NO ARMS RACE IMPACTS – NUCLEAR STATES WILL NOT ENGAGE IN ARMS RACES
Kenneth Waltz, Political Scientist, Berkeley, THE USE OF FORCE, 1993, p. 547 (MHDRWB081)
Britain and France are relatively rich countries and they tend to overspend. Their strategic forces are nevertheless modest enough when one considers that their purpose is to deter the Soviet Union rather than states with capabilities comparable to their own. China of course faces the same task. These three countries show no inclination to engage in nuclear arms races with anyone. India appears content to have a nuclear capabilities that may or may not have produced deliverable warheads, and Israel maintains her ambiguous status. New nuclear states are likely to conform to these patterns and aim for a modest sufficiency rather than vie with one another for meaningless superiority.
AT: Protectionism
The U.S. will never abandon free trade--institutions and self-interest check
Ikenson 2009 – director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies (Daniel, Center for Trade Policy Studies, Free Trade Bulletin 37, “A protectionism fling”, , WEA)
A Growing Constituency for Freer Trade The WTO/GATT system was created in the first place to deter a protectionist pandemic triggered by global economic contraction. It was created to deal with the very situation that is at hand. But in today's integrated global economy, those rules are not the only incentives to keep trade barriers in check. With the advent and proliferation of transnational supply chains, cross-border direct investment, multinational joint ventures, and equity tie-ups, the "Us versus Them" characterization of world commerce no longer applies. Most WTO members are happy to lower tariffs because imports provide consumers with lower prices and greater variety, which incentivizes local business to improve quality and productivity, which is crucial to increasing living standards. Moreover, many local economies now rely upon access to imported raw materials, components, and capital equipment for their own value-added activities. To improve chances to attract investment and talent in a world where capital (physical, financial, and human) is increasingly mobile, countries must maintain policies that create a stable business climate with limited administrative, logistical, and physical obstacles. The experience of India is instructive. Prior to reforms beginning in the 1990s, India's economy was virtually closed. The average tariff rate on intermediate goods in 1985 was nearly 150 percent. By 1997 the rate had been reduced to 30 percent. As trade barriers were reduced, imports of intermediate goods more than doubled. The tariff reductions caused prices to fall and Indian industry suddenly had access to components and materials it could not import previously. That access enabled Indian manufacturers to cut costs and use the savings to invest in new product lines, which was a process that played a crucial role in the overall growth of the Indian economy.16 India's approach has been common in the developing world, where most comprehensive trade reforms during the past quarter century have been undertaken unilaterally, without any external pressure, because governments recognized that structural reforms were in their country's interest. According to the World Bank, between 1983 and 2003, developing countries reduced their weighted average tariffs by almost 21 percentage points (from 29.9 percent to 9.3 percent) and unilateral reforms accounted for 66 percent of those cuts.17 The Indispensible Nation The United States accounts for the highest percentage of world trade and has the world's largest economy. The WTO/GATT system is a U.S.-inspired and U.S.-shaped institution. Recession in the United States has triggered a cascade of economic contractions around the world, particularly in export-dependent economies. Needless to say, U.S. trade policy is closely and nervously observed in other countries. But despite the occasional anti-trade rhetoric of the Democratic Congress and the protectionist-sounding campaign pledges of President Obama, the United States is unlikely to alter its strong commitment to the global trading system. There is simply too much at stake. Like businesses in other countries, U.S. businesses have become increasingly reliant on transnational supply chains. Over 55 percent of U.S. import value in 2007 was of intermediate goods, which indicates that U.S. producers depend highly on imported materials, components, and capital equipment. And there is also the fact that 95 percent of the world's population lives outside of the United States, so an open trade policy is an example to uphold.
AT: Quebec Secession
1. Quebec can’t secede without consent from the Canadian government – either the secession will be peaceful, which means no impact, or it won’t be able to
India Express 1998: Without Govt nod, Quebec can't secede: Canada SC.
TORONTO, AUG 21: In a historic verdict, Canada's Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the French-speaking province of Quebec had no right to secede without the Federal government's consent.
``Quebec does not have the right to separate either under the Canadian constitution, or under international law,'' a nine-judge Bench of the court held in a unanimous verdict.
2. No secession, the people of Quebec don’t want it – would have done it already but they like it as it is
Jeff Heinrich (a prize-winning reporter with the Montreal Gazette) February 19, 2008: No secession lesson for Quebec: ex-refugees 5,297 chose Canada.
"Quebec already had two chances to declare independence, and it didn't do it," Berisha said, referring to the failed referendums on sovereignty in 1980 and 1995.
"Quebecers like to make love, but they don't want a baby to be born - that's how it is with the politics here. Why? Because people have it too good. It's paradise here, so why change it?"
AT: Racism
1. Plan doesn’t address the root cause of racism
BB Robinson, Phd “Responding to Root Causes – Not Symptoms: White Supremacy as the Root Cause of Racism” 8/20/06
Getting down to brass tacks, most Americans will tell you that racism persists, and that racism contributes to the adverse outcomes that Black Americans experience. Moreover, if they are true to themselves, most Americans will identify the root cause of racism as “white Supremacy.” That is, racism exists because of the unfounded notion that Whites are superior to Blacks. Given that most Americans conclude that White Supremacy is the root cause of the problems that Black Americans face, why are so many efforts [are] initiated to solve Black American problems without addressing this root cause?
2. Plan doesn’t spillover to other countries – racism will still persist worldwide
3. U.S. foreign policy is a form of institutionalized racism
Anup Shah December 20, 2004 “Racism”
In the US, racism is a well known issue. From racial profiling to other issues such as affirmative action, police brutality against minorities and the history of slavery and the rising resentment against immigrants.
Since the horrific terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Security concerns have understandably increased, but so too has racial profiling, discrimination etc. In the early aftermath of the attacks some Americans that were understandably outraged and horrified, even attacked some members of the Sikh community where at least one was even killed, because they resembled certain types of Muslims, with beards and turbans. Various people of Middle East or South Asian origin have faced controversial detentions or questionings by officials at American airports. This web site’s section on the war against terror has more details on these aspects.
4. Racism declining in status quo – election of Obama and nomination of Sotomayor prove legislative racism is on the decline
5. Racism will always exist under a capitalist system
Saswat Pattanayak is an online journalist Thursday March 2007
What needs to be done at this juncture is not for black commentators attacking Asian press or South Asian commentators condemning Kenneth Eng. For all we know, Eng could well become a celebrity in a few months. The root cause of racism is not one bigoted mind. Its capitalism that we largely let go unchecked for in its practice. We must address the manner in which private capital creation safeguards specific group interests rather than working for the betterment of the world. The racial tensions in the US are economic in nature. There is no place for moral preachings here. No place for Crash finale! Lets admit and accept that as long as we refrain from critiquing the capitalist causes (private monopolies) we will have to accept racism as part and parcel of the deal. Till now, people other than white are being called in their suffixes. American history is differently noted than African-American history! How will we expect Engs of the world to even feel grateful for immense sufferings of generations of black people that must be acknowledged at every mention of America even as an idea? How will we expect white people to understand that Columbus was not after all some hero and that this land was indeed “made for you and me”, and not just for the English speaking elites. Such expectations will bear fruit only if people are treated equally irrespective of race in this country and elsewhere. However that would mean perhaps to quote Paul Robeson, “adopting the nature and politics of Soviet Union where people are treated as people, not as black or white”. Even adopting one-tenth of former Soviet policies would entail the reversal of centuries-old capital accumulation policies that are in place in a flourishing capitalism. As long as a society is built on bedrock of money as the only thing that matters--to buy health insurance to higher education--people will always be treated as secondary subjects. And where people need to be treated as secondary subjects, to refrain those very people from fomenting a revolution against their secondary status, it becomes imperative for the capital masters to wage a divide and rule policy that keeps people ignorant about their collective struggles in everyday lives. While at it, the economic system goes unchecked in its biases against working class by deliberately playing one group against another when it comes to economic parity, share holding and accountability. No wonder, thousands of discrimination cases at the workplace are filed every week based on racial disparities.
Ext #1 – Root Cause
1. White Supremacy – the notion of white superiority causes racism to constantly reproduce itself in structures of society
2. The plan is only a drop in a bucket – although the plan may solve an instance of racism, it doesn’t stop the cultural notion from spreading
3. Takes out their case – racism will just proliferate in another form of social service to exclude more minorities – even if the plan is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t prevent or lessen future racism
4. Prefer our card – Robinson has a PhD and assumes the plan’s efforts and still concludes its useless
5. The root cause of racism is grounded in identity – the aff is only an instance of stopping exclusion, not redefining identity
West Africa Review, Committee on Racism Conference in 7 September 2001
Racism lies solely in the human mind. The root cause of racism and discrimination is thus a crisis of identity at the individual and collective level. Bringing about the required change in attitudes and ways of life, and in equality and justice, requires a process of healing, accompanied by the rediscovery of the true self and re-identification with the unity of the larger human family. In that regard, it is both parties involved in discriminatory action who must be healed. Abuse defiles the victim, but its perpetrator also debases and dehumanizes himself. Ultimately, only we can deprive ourselves of our own self-respect. Understanding the sacredness of each person opens the door to perceiving the essential oneness of the human family. There is but one race - the human race.
6. Media perpetuates racist stereotypes
Associated Content, April 22, 2007 “The 4 Causes of Racism”
One of the most common causes of racism is stereotypes. Through television, through radio, through the internet, through music, through books, and the like, the potential for stereo types to build are a definite possibility. When a person, especially one that is very young, is exposed to stereotypes of a specific group for the first time, then that person will assume all are that way. Likewise, when a source is constantly displaying negative things about a particular race, then that will affect the overall opinions as well.
7. Unfamiliarity with other races
Associated Content, April 22, 2007 “The 4 Causes of Racism”
Another very common, and probably the most common cause of racism is unfamiliarity. People fear what they do not know or understand. If someone hasn't grown up around a particular race before, then there is more of a chance the person can be racist toward that particular group. Not all the time, but when the person has already been fed negative stereotypes, and does not have the actual real life experiences with at least one within the particular group, then the chances of racism are increased. This is why it is important for children to be around other races at a young age: to ensure they get their minds used and adapted to being around them, and also to help counterbalance any false stereotypes they may encounter in the future.
8. Even if they win some risk of solvency, racism will always sneak in through the back door
Sumi Cho, American Asian Studies Professor, December 1998 “The State Copts Movements designed to challenge Racism” Boston College Law Review., p. 159
Racially based social movements that arise in the form of political projects defy and define the racial state by creating ruptures that lead to the restoration of a new equilibrium. In turn, the racial state "co-opts" racial movements by absorbing the least threatening demands through the creation of new rules, policies, programs and agencies.
Ext #2 – No Global Spillover
1. Other countries will still be racist – the Darfur genocide proves there’s worse racism in other parts of the world
2. Nazism in Europe
Anup Shah December 20, 2004 “Racism”
Europe is often one of the first places people think of when racism is discussed. From the institutionalized racism, especially in colonial times, when racial beliefs — even eugenics — were not considered something wrong, to recent times where the effects of neo-Nazism is still felt. Europe is a complex area with many cultures in a relatively small area of land that has seen many conflicts throughout history. (Note that most of these conflicts have had trade and resource access at their core, but national identities have often added fuel to some of these conflicts.)
3. Aborigines in Australia
Anup Shah December 20, 2004 “Racism”
Australia has also had a very racist past in which apartheid has been practiced and where indigenous Aboriginal people have lost almost all their land and suffered many prejudices. In the past, the notorious policy that led to the Stolen Generation was practiced. This was the institutionalized attempt to prevent Aboriginal children (and thus future generations) from being socialized into Aboriginal culture. (This also ocurred in various parts of the Americas too.) Aborigines are the poorest group in Australia and suffer from very much preventable diseases. For more about these issues, you can start at these harrowing reports from John Pilger a prominent Australian journalist who has been critical of many western policies. The Sydney 2000 Olympics also brought some of Australia’s racist past and present to the fore. (On the positive side, many parts of Australia’s rich diversity in people is slowly helping relieve prejudism. However, some more traditional and conservative politicians are still openly racist.)
3. Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the Middle East
Anup Shah December 20, 2004 “Racism”
The situation of Palestine and Israel is also very contentious. Extreme views on both sides by perhaps a minority, but perhaps an influential and often violent minority, results in racism on both sides.
4. African countries
Anup Shah December 20, 2004 “Racism”
While most of the conflicts have resources at their core, and involve a number of non-African nations and corporations, additional fuel is added to the conflict by stirring up ethnic differences and enticing hatred. (Also not that the artificial boundaries imposed in Africa by European colonialism and imperialism during the divide and rule policies has further exacerbated this situation and plays an enormous role in the root causes of these conflicts compared to what mainstream media presents.) In Zimbabwe, there has been increasing racism against the white farmers, due to poverty and lack of land ownership by Africans. South Africa until recently suffered from Apartheid, which legally segragated the African population from the Europeans.
5. Innus in Canada
Anup Shah December 20, 2004 “Racism”
A report from Survival International about the plight of the Innu people in Canada also reveals how racism can be a factor. In the words of the authors, the “report reveals how racist government policies, under the guise of benevolent ‘progress’, have crippled the Innu of eastern Canada — a once self-sufficient and independent people.” (While this report is about the problems of an indigenous people in Canada, it is a common story throughout history for many peoples and cultures.
6. Overwhelms the plan – if we prove the aff can’t resolve ALL THESE ALTERNATE CASUALTIES, we win you shouldn’t evaluate racism in the status quo/counterplan
Ext #4 – Racism Declining
1. Current events – election of Obama and nomination of Sotomayor proves that minorities are able to advance in society without letting race be an issue.
2. Less people are experiencing racism now
Oakes 05, ( Daniel, Law Student, Published in “the Daily Bruin, Consider it: Racism is truly declining , )
The Bruin’s editorial board is troubled that “only” 22.7 percent of freshmen think that racial discrimination is a problem (“Study results on students’ racial views are worrying,” Feb. 4). I imagine they’d be really miffed at the Time/CNN (hardly a bastion of conservatism) study that revealed that 89 percent of black teens reported “little or no” racism in their lives. When white people fail to show much concern over racism, it’s easy to simply label them racist. I suppose when black teens do the same thing, we can label them ignorant. Much better than giving credence to their firsthand experiences. In regard to this “troubling” poll, I came up with a bizarre explanation. Maybe, just maybe, the decline in the number of students who believe that racial discrimination is a problem is not a reflection of ignorance and apathy on the part of complacent students. Maybe it’s a sign that racism is significantly less of a problem than it was in 1994, when the previous poll was taken. I know, I’m talking crazy here. Maybe those 89 percent of black teens are right. Now, this notion does not sell many newspapers, and it doesn’t help politicians in minority-heavy voting districts who love to ride racism into office. But when we get past students, academics and politicians, and when we get to people who have held private-sector jobs, people see something new. Maybe they realize that companies are so terrified of lawsuits that many of them lock their pay scales based purely on seniority, encourage diversity for good PR or social concerns and basically bend over backward to avoid not only impropriety, but the appearance thereof. But that’s certainly a story too frightening to tell here. Even in the context of a race-blind admissions process at UC campuses, there are still diversity scholarships and companies at job fairs that actively promote diversity. Now, one thing that equal opportunity will never do is guarantee equal results across groups. This is good news (pun intended) for the Daily Bruin, because any time there are unequal results, an intrepid reporter is free to infer that there must have been unequal opportunities. However, this produces at least two negative consequences. One is rather minor, and the other is rather major. The minor one, dear God, is tiresome. No matter how many days go by that you treat everyone you run into exactly alike, regardless of race, you can just about always open up a newspaper and read about how pervasive racism is. The major problem, though, is even more significant. There are minorities in elementary school through high school, and they are bombarded with messages of racism. They are told that white America is out to get you. They are told it almost doesn’t matter what you do, because the system is rigged and you’re pretty much screwed no matter what you do. It’s unfortunate that in the haste to get this message out, another message is ignored – there is unbelievable opportunity in this country. If you work hard and make good choices, you have a fantastic chance to succeed. And African and Latino/a and Asian Americans prove it every day, just like their white counterparts. We can see evidence of success among Asian Americans after previously stifled greatly by racist diversity policies, skyrocketed when those policies were lifted. Of course, we never see mention of the great benefit that accrued to this minority once the emphasis was on achievement, not diversity. Asian American students, not white students, were the ones most helped by Proposition 209. Personally, I’m encouraged by the 89 percent of black teens who are getting through their lives experiencing little or no racism. What’s troubling to me is not the 22.7 percent of freshmen who don’t think it’s a problem; I’m troubled by an editorial board that shoves racism down everyone’s throat even after the overwhelming majority of the most historically oppressed group in American history disclaims its existence in their lives.Proposition 209 was passed. Asian American enrollment, previously stifled greatly by racist diversity policies, skyrocketed when those policies were lifted. Of course, we never see mention of the great benefit that accrued to this minority once the emphasis was on achievement, not diversity. Asian American students, not white students, were the ones most helped by Proposition 209.
3. History proves – the 13th amendment and Brown vs. Board of Education prove society is self-correcting. Even if the plan might be key to stopping racism, that’s not to say endorsing the status quo now entrenches racism forever.
4. Obama solved the biggest internal link to racism
McWhorter 08 (John, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Racism in Retreat, New York Sun, )
In any case, to insist that we are hamstrung until every vestige of racism, bias, or inequity is gone indicates a grievous lack of confidence, which I hope any person of any history would reject. Anyone who intones that America remains permeated with racism is, in a word, lucky. They have not had the misfortune of living in a society driven by true sociological conflict, such as between Sunnis and Shiites, Hutus and Tutsis — or whites and blacks before the sixties. It'd be interesting to open up a discussion with a Darfurian about "microaggressions." To state that racism is no longer a serious problem in our country is neither ignorant nor cynical. Warnings that such a statement invites a racist backlash are, in 2008, melodramatic. They are based on no empirical evidence. Yet every time some stupid thing happens — some comedian says a word, some sniggering blockhead hangs a little noose, some study shows that white people tend to get slightly better car loans — we are taught that racism is still mother's milk in the U.S. of A. "Always just beneath the surface." Barack Obama's success is the most powerful argument against this way of thinking in the entire four decades since recreational underdoggism was mistaken as deep thought. A black man clinching the Democratic presidential nomination — and rather easily at that — indicates that racism is a lot further "beneath the surface" than it used to be. And if Mr. Obama ends up in the White House, then it might be time to admit that racism is less beneath the surface than all but fossilized. I know, I don't know what they'll do to him now. Let's just wait and see.
5. We don’t need to prove the status quo is perfect – all we need to win is that racism is and will decline to some extent now enough to mitigate their impacts.
Ext #5 – Capitalism
1. Oppression – the current economic system causes us to label some as inferior and others as superior. That’s the root cause of racism.
2. Empirically proven – slavery and imperialism was caused by the rich property-owning white males seeking profit and new markets. America didn’t enslave Africans because they thought they were better, but rather because they wanted cheap labor which resulted in racism.
3. This is not just another alt cause – the plan fails to address the capitalist system which is the root of ALL forms of oppression – the impact is the revival of a classist system that reproduces racism.
AT: Railroads
Railroads aren’t investing enough to meet demand – trucks will fill in in the squo
Congressional Budget Office, “Freight Rail Transportation: Long-Term Issues,” Congressional Budget Office Paper, January 2006,
The freight railroad industry plays an important role in the nation’s economy as a mainstay of transportation for many basic industries and, increasingly, for exports and imports that travel by rail to and from the nation’s ports. After a long period of excess rail capacity, the pendulum has begun to swing toward tight capacity—at least at cer- tain times and places.1 Some transportation experts have expressed concern that the railroads are not investing enough to meet rising demand for their services. If they cannot keep pace, the result could be higher costs not only for shippers and consumers but also for taxpayers, because demand that the railroads cannot satisfy is most likely to be handled by trucks and thus require more spending on the construction and maintenance of high- ways.
As freight transportation grows over the next ten years, the railroads will struggle to keep up and won’t expand to meet the nation’s transportation needs
John B. Ficker is President of The National Industrial Transportation League, “Testimony of The National Industrial Transportation League Before the Subcommittee on Railroads Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure,” in th eU.S. House of Representatives, March 31, 2004.
While the economic and services bar is being raised higher, the data suggests that, though the freight railroad industry is in far better financial shape than it was in the 1970s, it has not been able to maintain or expand its share of intercity freight transportation. Freight transportation overall is expected to grow significantly over the next decade. According to the report entitled “Freight – Rail Bottom Line” published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) in 2000, freight volume is expected to grow fifty percent between 2000 and 2020. Freight railroads need to be part of that growth. But if the trends of the past ten years discussed above are projected into the nation’s future in 2020, trucking activity will more than double, while the railroads’ share of intercity freight revenues will grow only slowly. Such a situation would result in a massive challenge to the nation’s existing highway infrastructure. The status quo thus does not appear to be a model that will result in a rail industry that will fully participate in the growth required to meet the nation’s increased transportation needs.
AT: Rape
1. Rape is inevitable-ethnic conflicts.
Africa News. November 25, 2008. (“Violence Against Women-Rape, Crime of Genocide.” LN)
underscores the use of rape as a weapon of war as the most notorious and brutal way in which conflict impacts on women.
Rape is often used in ethnic conflicts as a way for attackers to perpetuate their social control and redraw ethnic boundaries because women are seen as the reproducers and care takers of the community. Therefore if one group wants to control another, they often do it by impregnating women of the other community because they see it as a way of destroying the opposing community. Rape and sexual abuse are not just a by-product of war but are used as a deliberate military strategy. From the systematic rape of women in Bosnia, to an estimated 200,000 women were raped during the battle for Bangladeshi independence in 1971, to Japanese rapes during the 1937 occupation of Nanking-the past century offers too many examples of the use of rape as a weapon of war. The most recent examples include the 1994 Tutsi Genocide, the war tone zone of Eastern Congo and the Darfur crisis region.
2. Rape cannot be solved until governments change policies and treatment of victims.
The Korea Herald. June 2, 2008. ( “Punish War Criminals for Rape.” LN)
Yet the perpetrators of wartime mass rape and other forms of sexual violence usually are not prosecuted. Recently, the Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga became the first prisoner to be tried at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for the recruitment of child soldiers. Yet the indictment's failure to mention violence against women is a "huge shock" to the victims, according to Congolese human rights organizations. In a petition, they asked the ICC to investigate mass rapes committed by all parties in the conflict. The impunity that is characteristic of these heinous crimes must stop. Rape and other forms of sexual violence against women should be openly discussed by governments, members of parliament, militia leaders, and opinion leaders. Prosecution must become the rule. The ICC and other tribunals must give a clear signal to the perpetrators. For women who have been victims of rape, there are no monetary benefits, memorials or mourning rituals. That must change as well. There should be a monument to the Unknown Raped Woman at the ICC. Maybe then its judges would pay closer attention to sexual violence against women.
3. The number of rapes occurring in colleges and high schools is increasing.
Dr. Marc J. Yacht. April 2, 2009. (Yacht is the retired director of the Pasco County Health Department. St. Petersburg Time. “Right Time to Target Sexual Abuse.” LN)
Our colleges and secondary schools are often sites for violence against women with students taking inappropriate liberties with girlfriends or casual dates. Far more sexual abuse incidents occur in our schools than reported. Seniors now face a tough job market and unexpected career detours can be expressed with alcohol consumption, drug use, anger and violence against women.
It is estimated that 20 to 25 percent of college women in the United States experience attempted or complete rape during their college career. Sexual abuse starts early. Teens 16 to 19 were 3.5 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault. Of the women who reported being raped at some time in their lives, 21 percent were younger than 12 years of age. It is suggested that 86 percent of adolescent sexual assaults go unreported. Victims of rape are seven times more likely to be raped again, and sexual offenders often show a history of being abused. Most lawbreakers feel guilt and self loathing but will repeat their actions. Such guilt offers little solace to the seriously injured, dead partner, or targeted child. Young females of both college and high school age are targets along with wives, children and significant others. Female victims typically know their attackers and often have sex again with the men who attacked them.
5. Rape Harm over exaggerated
Baber 02 How Bad is Rape?” Director of Philosophy, University of San Diego
Now there is a tendency to exaggerate the harmfulness of rape, that is, to make much of the incapacitating psychological traumas that some victims suffer as a result of being raped One motive for such claims is the recognition that the harm of rape per se is often underestimated and hence that, in some quarters, rape is not taken as seriously as it ought to be taken Rape has not been treated in the same way as other crimes of violence A person, whether male or female, who is mugged is not asked to produce witnesses, to provide evidence of his good character or display bodily injuries as evidence of his unwillingness to surrender his wallet to his assailant In the past, however, the burden of proof has been placed wrongfully on the victims of rape to show their respectability and their unwillingness, the assumption being that (heterosexual) rape is merely a sexual act rather than an act of violence and that sex acts can be presumed to be desired by the participants unless there is strong evidence to the contrary This is not so Writers who stress the traumas rape victims suffer cite the deleterious consequences of rape in response to such assumptions
If this is made clear, there is no compelling reason to harp on the suffering of rape victims Furthermore, arguably, on balance, it may be undesirable to do so First, making much of the traumas rape victims allegedly suffer tends to reinforce the pervasive sexist assumption that women are cowards who break under stress and are incapable of dealing with physical danger or violence Secondly, it would seem that conceiving of such traumas as normal, expected consequences of rape does a disservice to victims who might otherwise be considerably less traumatized by their experiences.
AT: Readiness
1. DADT makes readiness collapse inevitable.
Michelle Garcia July 06, 2009 Veteran Takes the Lead on DADT Bill
U.S. representative Patrick Murphy, an Iraq War veteran who earned a Bronze Star, has become the lead sponsor of a bill that would lift the ban on openly gay personnel serving in the military, confirming earlier reports. "It is vital to our national security," Murphy, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said to The Morning Call newspaper. "We have troops that are fighting in two wars and we need every qualified able-bodied individual who is able to serve." Ellen Taucher, who is leaving Congress to take a position with the Obama administration, was the leading sponsor of the bill when it was reintroduced to Congress earlier this year. The legislation currently has 150 cosponsors in the House. President Obama and members of his administration have indicated that they are interested in repealing the ban through Congress and not by executive order. Murphy, 35, is a former prosecutor, West Point professor, and captain in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. In a 2008 hearing on "don't ask, don't tell," Murphy went toe-to-toe with Elaine Donnelly, the president of the Center for Military Readiness, which is fighting to keep the ban in place. "You're basically asserting that straight men and women in our military aren't professional enough to serve openly with gay troops while completing their military missions," he said. "You know, as a former Army officer, I can tell you I think that's an insult to me and to many of the soldiers. … 24 countries…allow [gay] military personnel to serve openly without any detrimental impact on unit cohesion." A Gallup poll in May shows that more than two thirds of Americans -- 69% -- favor lifting the ban; 26% remain opposed.
2. No impact – we’ve survived periods of low readiness
National Security Network 8 (May 13, )
Our military is second to none, but eight years of negligence, lack of accountability, and a reckless war in Iraq have left our ground forces facing shortfalls in both recruitment and readiness. Every service is out of balance and ill-prepared. We need a new strategy to give the military the tools it needs for the challenges we face today. And we need leadership that meets our obligations to the men and women who put their lives on the line. Overview The U.S. military is a fighting force second to none. It didn’t get that way by accident – it took decades of careful stewardship by civilian as well as military leaders in the Pentagon, the White House, and on Capitol Hill. But eight years of Administration recklessness, and a lack of oversight from conservatives on Capitol Hill, have put the military under enormous strain. Active-duty generals at the highest levels have said that “the current demand for our forces is not sustainable… We can’t sustain the all-volunteer force at the pace that we are going on right now” (Army Chief of Staff George Casey, April 2008); that in terms of readiness, many brigades being sent back to Afghanistan and Iraq were “not where they need to be” (Army Vice-Chief of Staff Richard Cody, SASC subcommittee hearing, April 14, 2008); and that “we cannot now meet extra force requirements in places like Afghanistan” (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen on National Public Radio, April 2008). Readiness and Response: Two-thirds of the Army – virtually all of the brigades not currently deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq – are rated “not combat ready.” The dramatic equipment shortages of a few years ago have been improved but not completely remedied. Recruitment and Retention: These conditions of service, and the strains they place on military family members, have hindered Army efforts (and to a lesser extent those of the Marine Corps) to recruit and retain the requisite number and quantity of service members. The Army has been forced to lower its educational and moral standards and allow an increasing number of felons into its ranks. It is also struggling to keep junior officers, the brains of the force, who represent the height of the military’s investment in its people – and whose willingness to stay on represents a crucial judgment on Administration policies. The Marine Corps, America’s emergency 911 force, is under similar strain. The Commandant of the Marine Corps said in February 2008 that the Marines will not be able to maintain a long term presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The National Guard and Reserve are already suffering from severe shortages of equipment and available combat personnel. In many states, the Army National Guard would struggle to respond to a natural or man-made disaster – just as the Kansas National Guard struggled to respond to the severe tornados last year. How, and whether, we rebuild our military in the wake of the fiasco in Iraq will likely shape it for the next generation. Too much of our military posture is left over from the Cold War. Our forces are being ground down by low-tech insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the most immediate threat confronting the U.S. is a terrorist network that possesses no tanks or aircraft. We must learn the lessons of Iraq and dramatically transform our military into a 21st century fighting force ready to confront the threats of today and tomorrow.
3. Retention solves readiness
Brook, 2006. (Tom Vanden Brook, “Army surpassing year's retention goal by 15%,”, USA Today; April 10 2006, Pg. 05, EBSCOhost.)
The Pentagon announced in March that each of the armed forces was on track to meet its retention goal for the year. Pay and re-enlistment bonuses help, Hilferty says. Bonuses range from nothing to $150,000 for a handful of special operations commandos. The average re-enlistment bonus is $6,000, Hilferty says. "It's not just pay," Hilferty says. "Our people want to be part of something greater than themselves, and they're willing to put up with a lot." Charles Henning, a national defense analyst with the Congressional Research Service, says strong re-enlistment allows the Army to maintain its strength. "Retention has been a very positive thing for the Army," Henning says. "That's an indicator of very high morale, high esprit de corps. It's a very solid indicator that soldiers are gratified, or they'd vote with their feet."
4. Internal failures and overstretching will cause US decline
David C. Hendrickson 2005 (Robert J. Fox Distinguished Service Prof. at Colorado College, World Policy Journal, Summer, )
A variant of the realist argument is the historical/structural perspective on the rise and fall of great powers. On the basis of its logic, some scholars argue that overspending, overstretching, and internal failures will eventually cause the United States' decline.13 Although the historical records of past great powers (e.g., Spain and Portugal) attest to the strength of this argument, one must be cautious of its application to the United States for three reasons. First, no previous empire had the benefit of capitalism in its highly developed form as the United States enjoys today. Second, several past empires and major powers managed to persevere, albeit in a weakened form, contrary to the expectations of perspectives that focus on automatic structural change. For instance, depending on the Western or Eastern manifestation, the Roman Empire lasted from 500 to 1,100 years. The Ottoman Empire survived for more than 400 years; the Mughal Empire in India more than 300; and the British Empire more than 250. Without World War II, the British Empire would probably have lasted even longer.
Ext #1 – DADT
DADT kills readiness and security.
Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes Mideast edition, Saturday, July 4, 2009
WASHINGTON — Rep. Patrick Murphy wants to repeal "don’t ask, don’t tell" as soon as possible, with or without the president’s help. "I don’t work for the president," the Pennsylvania Democrat said in an interview with Stars and Stripes. "We don’t need to wait." This week Murphy, a former Army captain who served in Iraq, will take over as lead sponsor of the House bill to repeal the 16-year-old law banning homosexuals from serving openly in the military. His office will unveil a new public push on the issue Wednesday: Face-to-face visits with every member of the House on the issue, a Web site listing facts and myths about the rule, and a goal of passing the legislation this year. The White House last week reiterated its goal of overturning the law, and Obama spoke on the issue at a reception with gay advocacy groups. “I know that every day that passes without a resolution is a deep disappointment to those men and women who continue to be discharged under this policy,” Obama said. “But what I hope is that these cases underscore the urgency of reversing this policy not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it is essential for our national security.” Gay rights advocates point out that Obama still has yet to show real progress on his campaign promise to change the law. Since the start of his presidency 277 troops have been discharged under the law, and about 13,000 have been discharged since 1994. Liberal think tank Center for American Progress released a road map for repeal last month, calling for a simultaneous executive order stopping the law and legislative action in an effort to move the issue ahead. “The longer you wait on this issue, the longer it takes to seize momentum,” said Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the center. “Congress can take the lead on this. It was Congress over opposition from the military that dropped the ban on women flying combat aircraft and serving on combat ships.” Korb and some advocacy groups have argued that Obama need not wait for Congress, and could simply overturn the law on his own with a wartime executive order allowing gays to serve openly. But both the White House and congressional leaders have stated that changes must come from the legislative branch, and officials from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network have argued that such an order could be vulnerable to legal challenges. Opponents of repealing the “don’t ask” law are girding for a fight. “If they go ahead with this, there are going to be protests, there are going to be lawsuits, and this is going to be taken to court,” said the Rev. Billy Baugham, executive director of the International Conference of Evangelical Chaplain Endorsers. Baugham said he believes any change in the “don’t ask” law will face an immediate legal challenge. His group is lobbying lawmakers to leave the law alone, but he said he would not rule out lawsuits to block servicemembers from serving openly. “This is a matter of readiness, and it’s going to break down the relationship between soldiers who are forced into close quarters,” he said. “ ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ is fine at this point, and for that to be destroyed is criminal and outrageous. Murphy is unconcerned about those challenges. He believes Congress can still repeal the law this year, and thinks his experience in the ranks will help convince some reluctant lawmakers to support the change. “People ask why does an Irish-Catholic guy who’s straight and married care so much about [overturning] ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ” he said. “And I tell them it’s because this is something I believe in. It’s a failed policy that hurts national security. “We all knew people who we served with who were gay, and it didn’t affect their job,” he said. “It didn’t affect me personally. But they were discriminated against, and that shouldn’t be.”
Ext #3 - Retention Solves Readiness
Re-enlistment solves
Griffin, 3-19-08. Writer for Fox News.
[Jennifer Griffin, “U.S. Army Isn't Broken After All, Military Experts Say” ]
But now, one year later, Scales has done an about-face. He says that he was wrong. Despite all the predictions of imminent collapse, the U.S. Army and the combat brigades have proven to be surprisingly resilient. According to Army statistics obtained exclusively by FOX News, 70 percent of soldiers eligible to re-enlist in 2006 did so — a re-enlistment rate higher than before Sept. 11, 2001. For the past 10 years, the enlisted retention rates of the Army have exceeded 100 percent. As of last Nov. 13, Army re-enlistment was 137 percent of its stated goal. Scales, a FOX News contributor, said he based his assessment last year "on the statistics that showed a high attrition among enlisted soldiers, officers who were leaving the service early, and a decline in the quality of enlistments," a reference to the rising number of waivers given for "moral defects" such as drug use and lowered educational requirements. "In fact, what we've seen over the last year is that the Army retention rates are pretty high, that re-enlistments, for instance, particularly re-enlistments in Iraq and Afghanistan, remain very high," Scales said. He noted that re-enlistments were high even among troops who have served multiple tours. A year ago, some military experts were comparing the Army of 2007 with the army of a generation ago, at the end of the Vietnam War, when it was considered "broken" due to morale problems and an exodus of the "best and the brightest" soldiers from service. Scales said he didn’t take into account that, unlike Vietnam, this Army is sending soldiers to fight as a unit — not as individuals. He also neglected the "Band of Brothers" phenomenon — the feeling of responsibility to fellow soldiers that prompts members of service to re-enlist. "The soldiers go back to the theater of war as units," Scales said. "They are bonded together, they know each other, they don't have to fight as an army of strangers.
AT: Resource Wars 1/2
1. Scarcity doesn’t cause conflict – no evidence otherwise
Salehyan 07 assistant professor of political science at the University of North Texas [Idean Salehyan, “The New Myth About Climate Change”, Foreign Policy, August 2007, ]
First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and changing environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several studies have shown that an abundance of natural resources is more likely to contribute to conflict. Moreover, even as the planet has warmed, the number of civil wars and insurgencies has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala University and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between 1989 and 2002, some 100 armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. If global warming causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward trend. Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in Darfur, why have scores of environmental catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the U.N. World Food Programme warns that 5 million people in Malawi have been experiencing chronic food shortages for several years. But famine-wracked Malawi has yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed hundreds of thousands of people, generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe shortages of shelter, food, clean water, and electricity. Yet the tsunami, one of the most extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to an outbreak of resource wars. Clearly then, there is much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural disasters.
2. Global inequalities make resource conflicts inevitable
Sharp ’07 Military Policy Analyst at Center for Arms Control and non-Proliferation (Travis, Published in Peace Review 19:3, 7-9/2007, 323-330, “Resource Conflict in the Twenty-Frist Century,” , EA)
The combination of rising resource consumption and unpredictable population growth is liable to exacerbate conflicts throughout the globe as resource-dependent nations become desperate to retain access to foreign-based commodities. Two persistent factors have driven resource scarcity. First, resources have geographical, ecological, and climatic limitations that mankind cannot control, as Waltraud Queiser Morales states in "Sustainable Development and Human Security." There are about 1047.7 billion barrels of proven oil reserves left in the world; once this supply is expended, according to Michael Klare in Blood and Oil, humans have no way of creating more oil and will have to either switch to alternative fuel sources or invent synthetic replacements. Second, resource scarcity stems from, in the words of Waltraud Morales, "...the social and political conditions of inequality and injustice that humankind has created and perpetuated in its struggle for power and dominance globally and within states." George Kennan vividly illustrated the risks and rewards of resource inequality in a secret policy brief written for American leaders at the beginning of the Cold War: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population...Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security." Franklin Delano Roosevelt anticipated Kennan's argument during the closing months of World War II and organized a now-infamous summit with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. This meeting cemented the special US-Saudi relationship by ensuring US access to Saudi oil and Saudi access to American arms. Although Saudi proven oil reserves are substantial - about 25% of the global total - they will assuredly not last forever and are contingent upon a whole host of unstable social and political factors, including the repressive nature of the Saudi regime. This has led some analysts to predict that the US military will soon be converted into a glorified "oil-protection service." Underlying this prediction, however, are some fundamental assumptions about resource conflict that need to be considered in more detail.
3. Corruption makes resource scarcity conflicts inevitable
Salehyan 07 - assistant professor of political science at the University of North Texas [Idean Salehyan, “The New Myth About Climate Change”, Foreign Policy, August 2007, ]
Be resourceful: Good governments don’t allow environmental crises to spiral into humanitarian disasters. Few serious individuals still contest that global climate change is among the most important challenges of our time. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is a very real phenomenon, that human activity has contributed to it, and that some degree of climate change is inevitable. We are no longer arguing over the reality of climate change, but rather, its potential consequences. According to one emerging “conventional wisdom,” climate change will lead to international and civil wars, a rise in the number of failed states, terrorism, crime, and a stampede of migration toward developed countries. It sounds apocalyptic, but the people pushing this case are hardly a lunatic fringe. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for instance, has pointed to climate change as the root cause of the conflict in Darfur. A group of high-ranking retired U.S. military officers recently published a report that calls climate change “a threat multiplier for instability.” An earlier report commissioned by the Pentagon argues that conflicts over scarce resources will quickly become the dominant form of political violence. Even the Central Intelligence Agency is reportedly working on a National Intelligence Estimate that will focus on the link between climate change and U.S. national security. These claims generally boil down to an argument about resource scarcity. Desertification, sea-level rise, more-frequent severe weather events, an increased geographical range of tropical disease, and shortages of freshwater will lead to violence over scarce necessities. Friction between haves and have-nots will increase, and governments will be hard-pressed to provide even the most basic services. In some scenarios, mass migration will ensue, whether due to desertification, natural disasters, and rising sea levels, or as a consequence of resource wars. Environmental refugees will in turn spark political violence in receiving areas, and countries in the “global North” will erect ever higher barriers to keep culturally unwelcome—and hungry—foreigners out. The number of failed states, meanwhile, will increase as governments collapse in the face of resource wars and weakened state capabilities, and transnational terrorists and criminal networks will move in. International wars over depleted water and energy supplies will also intensify. The basic need for survival will supplant nationalism, religion, or ideology as the fundamental root of conflict. Dire scenarios like these may sound convincing, but they are misleading. Even worse, they are irresponsible, for they shift liability for wars and human rights abuses away from oppressive, corrupt governments. Additionally, focusing on climate change as a security threat that requires a military response diverts attention away from prudent adaptation mechanisms and new technologies that can prevent the worst catastrophes.
AT: Resource Wars 2/2
4. Market adjustments solve the internal link
National Post 4/26/2008 (Canada, aka Financial Post, National Edition, “Don’t Panic,” Lexis-Nexis, EA)
The trouble with doom-and-gloom predictions -- whether they be about oil shortages, food scarcity, water wars or population explosions --is that most are based on the linear extrapolation of short-term trends. If, say, rice prices rise, alarmists assume they will keep rising indefinitely at the same rate -- and then produce scary-looking graphs that show trend lines veering up into the wild-eyed blue yonder. But history shows that human adaptation invariably intervenes --especially in parts of the world that have the benefit of a market economy. Scarcity drives innovations that pull the world back from the brink. Consumers take high prices as their cue to consume less; producers take the same cue to produce more. A new equilibrium is reached, just as college microeconomics textbooks would predict. That's why we aren't losing any sleep over the latest predictions from Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce chief economist Jeffrey Rubin, which were fronted prominently on Friday's National Post. New inventions, new oil discoveries and improvements in existing technologies will conspire to spare us Mr. Rubin's parade of horribles, which include $2.25-a-litre gasoline and tens of thousands of job losses in the auto-making sector. In a report entitled The Age of Scarcity, released on Thursday, Mr. Rubin predicts that by 2012, demand for oil, gas and diesel in the rest of the world will exceed that in OECD countries. As developing nations get richer, they will begin competing with the current industrialized world for diminishing resources. This will drive up the cost of everything from energy to food to computer components. Mr. Rubin predicts this will lead to the biggest economic disruption in North America since the 1973 oil crisis. But that same historical comparison suggests a reason Canadians should be suspicious of this ominous forecast: While the oil shortages of the 1970s displaced millions of assembly-line workers and led to a temporary slowdown of the North American economy, the adaptations they spurred ultimately made industry more efficient and ordinary people more prosperous. North American manufacturing is far more productive and energy-efficient now than it was 30 years ago, as well as producing far less pollution. (Many Canadians under 30, who have been reared on a constant diet of dire environmental claims, may have trouble believing this, but despite the rapid growth of our economy in the last three decades, smog is actually less toxic and our waters less polluted than in 1970.) In an interview with the National Post, Mr. Rubin fell into a common trap: He assumed growth is a zero-sum game, whereby someone must lose ground every time someone else gains it. "I think there will be fewer people on the road in North America in five years than there is right now," Mr. Rubin said on Thursday. "For everybody who's about to get on the road by buying a new Tata or a Chery car in the developing world, someone's going to have to get off the road in this part of the world. There's just not enough gasoline to go around." Anyone tempted to buy into this line of thinking would do well to remember the famous bet between Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the apocalyptic 1968 book The Population Bomb, and economist Julian Simon. Mr. Erlich predicted that by the late 1970s, the world would begin to run out of oil and metals, and that "wide-scale famine caused by declining food production" would cause hundreds of millions of deaths annually. Mr. Simon, on the other hand contended, that "natural resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource." In 1980, he bet Mr. Ehrlich $1,000 that by 1990 a basket of any five commodities of his choosing would cost less than it had 10 years earlier. By the end-is-nigh thinking embraced by Mr. Ehrlich (and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Rubin), he should have won easily. Instead, Mr. Simon won. The five commodities chosen were, after inflation, 40% cheaper in 1990 than they had been a decade before. The same pattern is beginning to unfold in 2008. In just a few short months, rising prices for fuel have prompted the sort of market-driven energy efficiencies and environmental solutions that the green movement has failed to achieve through years of hectoring, regulating and legislating. Full-sized SUV sales have plummeted, home builders are designing smaller, low-consumption houses, airlines and railways are switching to more efficient planes and engines and car makers are scrambling to lighten their models. Thanks to just a 30% increase in pump prices, the automobile sector is likely to raise fleet fuel efficiency more than all the laws demanding higher standards passed in the past 35 years combined. There is no doubt that our society is changing because of the scarcity in food and fuel that Mr. Rubin highlights. But it defies the principles of economics to imagine that such scarcity will persist indefinitely. If there is one trend we can depend on, it is that the law of supply and demand will intervene to blunt the economic shocks that even the most prosperous nations must inevitably face.
5. alternate causes to the impact
A. globalization
KLARE 08 Professor of Security Studies at Hampshire College Internationally renowned expert on resource conflict (Michael T., , EA)
Economic globalization: The growing internationalization of finance and trade is having an effect on many worldwide phenomena, including the demand for and consumption of basic resources. Globalization increases the demand for resources in several ways, most notably thought the spread and acceleration of industrialization. As nations become industrialize, their need for many resources—especially energy, timber, and minerals—grows substantially. Most manufacturing processes require large supplies of energy plus a wide range of raw materials. With globalization, therefore, we have seen a substantial increase in the consumption of these materials by the newly-industrialized countries (NICs). For example, the consumption of energy by the developing countries is rising by 3.7 percent per year—nearly three times the rate for the older industrialized countries (source: U.S Dept. of Energy, International Energy Outlook 2002). This means that the competition for access to energy supplies (and other vital materials) will grow ever more intense in the years ahead.
B. population growth.
KLARE 08 Professor of Security Studies at Hampshire College Internationally renowned expert on resource conflict (Michael T., , EA) tag spelling is intentional dummy
Population growth: The world’s human population is expected to grow by about three billion people between now and 2050 (rising from 6.2 billion people in 2002 to about 9.3 billion in 2050). Obviously, all of these additional humans will require food, shelter, clothing, energy, and other necessities. Theoretically, the early as a whole possesses sufficient stocks of the necessary materials to satisfy these needs, but unfortunately many of the countries with the highest levels of population growth are located in areas where the where the availability of some vital resources is in doubt. This is especially true for two critical materials: water and arable land. Severe scarcities of both have already developed in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America where population rates are especially high. This could lead to intense competition for access to these resources in the years ahead. In particular, it could provoke conflict over the distribution of shared water resources in such areas as the Nile and Jordan river basins, where water is already scarce and the combined population is expected to triple over the next 50 years.
Ext #1 – No Conflict
Resource Scarcity doesn’t increase the risk of conflict – statistical analysis proves
Sharp ’07 Military Policy Analyst at Center for Arms Control and non-Proliferation (Travis, Published in Peace Review 19:3, 7-9/2007, 323-330, “Resource Conflict in the Twenty-Frist Century,” , EA)
Brito and Intriligator's results have been supported more recently by the World Bank's Collier-Hoeffler (CH) model of civil war onset. The CH model maintains that the opportunities to organize and finance a war are more significant variables than any social or political grievances per se. Under this rubric, the CH model predicts that the chance a nation with limited resources will have a civil war in any five-year span is 1 in 100, but the chance that a resource rich nation will is 1 in 5, according to the March 2006 Harper's Index. Although mathematically-derived quantitative theories provide a rigorous and concrete demonstration of the causal relationship between resources and conflict, the historical record should verify any theory of war. I want to now use a specific case study to illustrate the historical link between natural resources and violence.
Ext #2 – Global Inequalities
Only a global policy overhaul stops resource wars.
Green 6/21/2008 Head of research at Oxfam, Author of From Poverty to Power (Duncan, The Guardian – London, “The Age of Scarcity: The Huge Challenge of Dwindling Resources and Climate Change Can Only Be Met by a Global New Deal,” p. 34, Lexis-Nexis, EA)
We are entering an age of scarcity - in food, water and energy. Rioting has broken out in dozens of countries as food prices spiral, driven upwards by the pressure on land to meet biofuels targets at the expense of food production. Meanwhile, the price of oil is rocketing and, as resources of carbon dwindle, arguments are breaking out over which economies should be allowed to emit greenhouse gases. Scarcity, especially of carbon, will transform the nature and language of politics. According to the recent report of the intergovernmental group the Commission on Growth and Development, avoiding catastrophic climate change while still allowing poor countries the chance to grow their way out of poverty will require the US and Canada to reduce their per capita emissions from 20 tonnes per head to roughly two. Rich countries have two options. First, they can increase the carbon efficiency of their growth. The depth of technological transformation required, however, is comparable only to the industrial conversion of the US and European economies to arms production during wartime. Given the time lag in disseminating new technologies, much of this conversion will have to be based on existing technologies, such as renewables. But so far the news is not good: the current levels of funding fall far short of the scale needed. If rich economies cannot clean up, they must cut down, accepting limits to their growth. The first option is a daunting political and technological challenge, while the second risks political suicide. Meanwhile, developing countries have to be helped to find a low-carbon growth path that has yet to occur in any country in history. Countries normally start dirty and then, sometimes, clean up as they get richer. The atmosphere's heavy load of carbon no longer permits such a luxury. If we fail to find a way of transforming the nature of growth, we face catastrophic climate change and economic decline. At worst, a "carbon curtain" will fall between the haves and the have-nots. Poor communities and entire countries will be left languishing in a new dark age. Avoiding such dystopian predictions requires massive and rapid redistribution of power, opportunities and assets. We need a global version of the US's New Deal. For a 21st century equivalent we cannot afford to wait for the shocks of war and catastrophe that delivered that change. Many impacts of climate change, such as melting glaciers or permafrost, are irreversible. World leaders must build the will and capacity to act before disaster strikes. That means reforming global institutions like the World Bank, the UN and the World Trade Organisation that are far too weighted towards the views and interests of powerful countries. But deep shifts in public attitudes are also essential. Changes of this magnitude, from the abolition of slavery to women's suffrage, have always been driven by public action, as well as the weight of evidence and argument. A change is needed in the actions of campaigners, media, academics and others to force governments to confront the challenge, rather than slide into denial. We do not yet know if Darwin or Gandhi will be the genius of the age of scarcity - whether we are facing the survival of the fittest or effective global co-operation. But the stakes could not be higher. As Martin Luther King wrote 40 years ago: "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable . . . Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilisations are written the pathetic words: Too late."
Ext #3 – Corruption
Good Governance is key to prevent resource wars from occurring – corruption is inevitable in the status quo
Salehyan 07 assistant professor of political science at the University of North Texas [Idean Salehyan, “The New Myth About Climate Change”, Foreign Policy, August 2007, ]
To be sure, resource scarcity and environmental degradation can lead to social frictions. Responsible, accountable governments, however, can prevent local squabbles from spiraling into broader violence, while mitigating the risk of some severe environmental calamities. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has observed, no democracy has ever experienced a famine. Politicians who fear the wrath of voters usually do their utmost to prevent foreseeable disasters and food shortages. Accountable leaders are also better at providing public goods such as clean air and water to their citizens. Third, dire predictions about the coming environmental wars imply that climate change requires military solutions—a readiness to forcibly secure one’s own resources, prevent conflict spillovers, and perhaps gain control of additional resources. But focusing on a military response diverts attention from simpler, and far cheaper, adaptation mechanisms. Technological improvements in agriculture, which have yet to make their way to many poor farmers, have dramatically increased food output in the United States without significantly raising the amount of land under cultivation. Sharing simple technologies with developing countries, such as improved irrigation techniques and better seeds and fertilizers, along with finding alternative energy supplies and new freshwater sources, is likely to be far more effective and cost saving in the long run than arms and fortifications. States affected by climate change can move people out of flood plains and desert areas, promote better urban planning, and adopt more efficient resource-management systems. Yes, climate change is a serious problem that must be addressed, and unchecked environmental degradation may lead to intensified competition over scarce resources in certain regions. The good news is that the future is not written in stone. How governments respond to the challenge is at least as important as climate change itself, if not more so. Well-managed, transparent political systems that are accountable to their publics can take appropriate measures to prevent armed conflict. If the grimmest scenarios come to pass and environmental change contributes to war, human rights abuse, and even genocide, it will be reckless political leaders who deserve much of the blame.
AT: RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs)
1. The technological basis for RMA is unsubstantiated and even if it was, RMA has to happen over time instead of remaking military technology
Aviation Week & Space Technology 00 ("Military Technology Changes Are Slower Than We Think" Aviation Week & Space Technology, volume 152 issue 9, February 28, p. 70, Lexis)
Is a revolution in military affairs (RMA) achievable at the turn of the 21st century, and if so does it necessitate a radical change in U.S. military equipment, combat structures and warfighting doctrine? Or can the U.S. continue to make security policy, and arrange Pentagon budget priorities, in a more continuous and evolutionary way? The RMA debate is performing the nation a service by forcing it to confront these questions directly. Victorious military powers tend to settle into strategic complacency, allowing their influence and security to decline over time. The military services tend to be conservative, and to resist bold innovation. That said, the contemporary RMA hypothesis is unconvincing, and the technological basis for a radical RMA transformation of the U.S. armed forces and U.S. security policy is unsubstantiated. . . . Even if an RMA does happen sometime in the early part of the 21st century, its scope will probably be more limited, and the time scale over which it is carried out longer, than most proponents now believe. And it may well result from a sustained period of rapid evolution in military technology and doctrine -- already the norm in U.S. defense policy for decades -- rather than an abrupt remaking of the armed forces. Given this prognosis, robust research, experimentation and prototyping make more sense than attempts to radically transform military hardware, organizations or warfighting concepts.
2. Multiple obstacles to RMA success – other systems do not progress as quickly and the technology isn’t practical
Aviation Week & Space Technology 00 ("Military Technology Changes Are Slower Than We Think" Aviation Week & Space Technology, volume 152 issue 9, February 28, p. 70, Lexis)
The reasons for skepticism about an imminent RMA are straightforward. Most trends in defense technology are not as impressive as RMA proponents argue. It is true that an electronics and computer revolution is occurring -- with important implications for warfare -- but in other important areas, progress is far slower. The propulsion systems and the basic aerodynamics and hydrodynamics of ships, planes, rockets and ground vehicles are generally changing at modest rates. The explosive power of conventional ordnance per unit weight is advancing only modestly. Armor is becoming lighter and stronger, but in increments of 10% and 20% improvement per decade, not 50% and 75%. Equally important obstacles stand in the way of radically improving sensors, despite the goal of RMA proponents of achieving dominant battlespace knowledge. Sensors will progress in important ways, largely because they will become smaller, making it possible to place them in greater numbers on a wider array of manned and unmanned platforms. Their abilities to see through substances like water, metal, wood, soil and buildings will remain seriously limited by practical engineering considerations, however, and even more so by the laws of physics.
3. Alt causes to military effectiveness – army leadership and organization are more important
Leebaert 6 (Derek, Adjunct Professor of Technology Management at Georgetown University "Shooint Ahead; Revolutions in military affairs, from the rise of gunpowder to the Iraq War" The Washington Post, November 19, Lexis)
Three years after history's most sophisticated military demolished Iraq's armed forces, Americans keep falling victim to primitive killers with improvised explosive devices. That makes Max Boot's overview of changes in warfare timely indeed. It arrives just before the latest of what defense intellectuals term "revolutions in military affairs": the Pentagon's incredibly complicated "force transformation" from Cold War-era weapons and formations to a 21st-century military in which robot planes and ground vehicles would be controlled by new targeting, imaging and communication technologies in order to allow small teams of networked soldiers to accomplish tasks that before had required divisions. Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Savage Wars of Peace, proposes to offer "fresh insights about the future" by demonstrating how technological advances have changed the course of landmark battles and campaigns -- from the early days of gunpowder; to the 19th century's extension of the Industrial Revolution onto the battlefield in the form of railroads, repeating rifles, the telegraph and mass-society armies; then to the 20th century's employment of radio, radar, blitzkrieg and long-range bombing; and finally to the military impact of today's ongoing information revolution. Boot follows five major themes: Technology by itself rarely brings conclusive military advantage, since organization, training and leadership are also necessary to achieve victory; countries that take advantage of military revolutions become "history's winners"; a winner must still "know the capabilities and limitations of its war machine"; no military revolution ever confers indefinite advantage; and innovation is speeding up. These are sensible but unremarkable premises: Yes, the next new thing arrives ever faster, and, no, technological advances alone don't dictate the fate of nations.
4. RMA is easily bypassed by adversaries – only ground combat troops can solve
Grossman 06 (Elaine, editor-in-chief of Inside the Air Force, “Critique of Army Redesign Proves Highly Contentious Inside Service”, , 3/2, )
Some proponents of the Army plan characterize the widespread skepticism about the value of electronic surveillance technologies as “old think,” evidence of a failure on the part of some to adjust to new realities. “Change is hard,” one advocate of the modularity design told ITP in January. Conversely, those emphasizing boots-on-the-ground insist they are anything but dinosaurs. They say a new generation of elusive and adaptive adversaries will place a premium on well trained U.S. forces and quickly make almost any technology obsolete. “The intel enhancements designed to provide total situational awareness won’t tell a commander in an Iraqi-like environment whether the residents of a particular village are going to detonate a [roadside bomb] or just sit and watch the patrol pass because they may not know themselves until the last minute,” says one retired senior officer. “Assuming that high-tech sensors and [unmanned reconnaissance drones] will predict enemy actions seems a little optimistic in a theater where the very definition of ‘enemy’ is often an after-action determination.”
Ext #4 – RMA Fails
Superior technology is easily overcome by adversarial ground forces – Afghanistan and Iraq prove RMA fails
Drayton 05 (Richard, senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University, "Comment & Debate: Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons: Iraq has shown the hubris of a geostrategy that welds the philosophy of the Leviathan to military and technological power" The Guardian, December 28, Lexis)
But darker dreams surfaced in America's military universities. The theorists of the "revolution in military affairs" predicted that technology would lead to easy and perpetual US dominance of the world. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters advised on "future warfare" at the Army War College - prophesying in 1997 a coming "age of constant conflict". Thomas Barnett at the Naval War College assisted Vice-Admiral Cebrowski in developing "network-centric warfare". General John Jumper of the air force predicted a planet easily mastered from air and space. American forces would win everywhere because they enjoyed what was unashamedly called the "God's-eye" view of satellites and GPS: the "global information grid". This hegemony would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress. Or at worst, the military geeks candidly explained, US power would simply terrify others into submitting to the stars and stripes. Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance - a key strategic document published in 1996 - aimed to understand how to destroy the "will to resist before, during and after battle". For Harlan Ullman of the National Defence University, its main author, the perfect example was the atom bomb at Hiroshima. But with or without such a weapon, one could create an illusion of unending strength and ruthlessness. Or one could deprive an enemy of the ability to communicate, observe and interact - a macro version of the sensory deprivation used on individuals - so as to create a "feeling of impotence". And one must always inflict brutal reprisals against those who resist. An alternative was the "decay and default" model, whereby a nation's will to resist collapsed through the "imposition of social breakdown". All of this came to be applied in Iraq in 2003, and not merely in the March bombardment called "shock and awe". It has been usual to explain the chaos and looting in Baghdad, the destruction of infrastructure, ministries, museums and the national library and archives, as caused by a failure of Rumsfeld's planning. But the evidence is this was at least in part a mask for the destruction of the collective memory and modern state of a key Arab nation, and the manufacture of disorder to create a hunger for the occupier's supervision. As the Suddeutsche Zeitung reported in May 2003, US troops broke the locks of museums, ministries and universities and told looters: "Go in Ali Baba, it's all yours!" For the American imperial strategists invested deeply in the belief that through spreading terror they could take power. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the recently indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, learned from Leo Strauss that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise. They read Le Bon and Freud on the relationship of crowds to authority. But most of all they loved Hobbes's Leviathan. While Hobbes saw authority as free men's chosen solution to the imperfections of anarchy, his 21st century heirs seek to create the fear that led to submission. And technology would make it possible and beautiful. On the logo of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, the motto is Scientia est potentia - knowledge is power . The IAO promised "total information awareness", an all-seeing eye spilling out a death-ray gaze over Eurasia. Congressional pressure led the IAO to close, but technospeak, half-digested political theory and megalomania still riddle US thinking. Barnett, in The Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action, calls for a "systems administrator" force to be dispatched with the military, to "process" conquered countries. The G8 and a few others are the "Kantian core", writes Barnett, warming over the former Blair adviser Robert Cooper's poisonous guff from 2002; their job is to export their economy and politics by force to the unlucky "Hobbesian gap". Imperialism is imagined as an industrial technique to remake societies and cultures, with technology giving sanction to those who intervene. The Afghanistan war of 2001 taught the wrong lessons. The US assumed this was the model of how a small, special forces-dominated campaign, using local proxies and calling in gunships or airstrikes, would sweep away opposition. But all Afghanistan showed was how an outside power could intervene in a finely balanced civil war. The one-eyed Mullah Omar's great escape on his motorbike was a warning that the God's-eye view can miss the human detail. The problem for the US today is that Leviathan has shot his wad. Iraq revealed the hubris of the imperial geostrategy. One small nation can tie down a superpower. Air and space supremacy do not give command on the ground. People can't be terrorised into identification with America. The US has proved able to destroy massively - but not create, or even control. Afghanistan and Iraq lie in ruins, yet the occupiers cower behind concrete mountains.
AT: Russian Accidental Launch
1. CTR solves Russian accidental launch
Robert Rudney and Willis Stanley, National Institute for Public Policy, 2000, Comparative Strategy, p.27
Through these initiatives, the CTR program has improved significantly Russian control over former Soviet nuclear weapons and expedited and monitored the destruction process under START. These substantive achievements have contributed significantly to diminishing the threat of accidental or unauthorized launch of Russian nuclear weapons, as well as reducing risks of proliferation.
2. Won’t escalate
Alexander K. Kislov, Professor and director of Peace and Research Institute (Moscow). 1993. Inadvertent Nuclear War. Pg. 239-240.
A deliberate nuclear war between East and West is out of the question; but what about a war caused by chance factors? An accidental or unauthorized launching of a missile or even of several missiles (in itself highly improbable) is unlikely to bring about a full-scale nuclear war when neither side has any incentive for it. We assume a very small probability of a very limited (“automatic” or unauthorized) reaction and a close-to-zero probability of a very limited authorized ‘retaliation’; this is the maximal assumption that is possible if we want to remain realistic.
AT: Russian Agression in the Caspian
The Caspian doesn’t need US help against Russia and Iran – empirically self-sufficient
Paul Horsnell, Assistant Director for Research, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, 1/99. “Caspian Oil and Gas: A Game, if not a Great Game,” Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
Perhaps the major surprise to many observers concerned with the region since the fall of the Soviet Union, has been the robustness of the new Caspian states themselves. Most early analyses placed great stress on the competition for influence between Turkey and Iran, assuming that the new states would simply divide into blocks determined by the interaction of forces led by considerations of language groups and religion. Indeed, large sums of money were pumped into the area by concerned countries in explicit attempts to stop the formation of any area of direct Iranian influence. Other early analyses concentrated on the thesis of a fast return to complete hegemony by Russia, reinforced by the fact that all the transport, communication and economic logistics of the area had been carefully designed over the 75 years of the Soviet Union to run to the centre and not radially, and thus to frustrate the viability of independence and so dampen any centrifugal forces. In the event neither scenario has come true, the new states in many cases have been fast to exert independence and forge distinct national identities, and have proved extremely adept at playing other interests against each other, plying courses between Iran and Turkey, between the USA and Russia, and between China and the West. To give but one example, the composition of interests in Azeri oil consortia is no direct result of economic forces, but the result of a very deliberate weighing up of Azeri foreign policy interests.
AT: Russia-China War
1. Russia has no way to fight a war – any escalation is just an attempt to rebuild respect for the old soviet military
Strategy Page February 21, 2008: The War with China.
So far, the attempt at getting back into the superpower business isn't going so well. A flotilla of Russian warships conducting exercises in the Mediterranean were observed to be hesitant and uneasy as they went through their paces. These were crews and officers who were out of practice. One of the support ships broke down and had to be towed to port. The increased number of long range bomber flights are mostly for show. They serve little military purpose. It's all about rebuilding some respect for the Russian military. The government is making a lot of noise about rebuilding the armed forces, and another Cold War with the U.S., but this is all talk, to make the government appear like it's doing something. The military would need massive amounts of money (over $100 billion a year, for a decade or more) to restore any meaningful amount of military power. Nothing near that amount is forthcoming. The government is trying to get the population stirred up, so there is less resistance to the purchase of many expensive warplanes and ships. A lot of this necessary because China is buying less, and starting to offer their own stuff, often containing stolen Russian military technology, on the world market. China is threatening to offer its copy of the Su-27 (the J-11). Currently, half of Russian weapons export sales are Su-27s. The Chinese ignore Russian complaints about the stolen technology. To keep Russian weapons manufacturers in business, the Russian military has to buy more, to make up for the lost Chinese sales. Western firms are also going after the lucrative Indian arms market, which Russia has dominated for decades. Last year, Russia sold $7 billion worth of weapons overseas, and may have a hard time topping that this year.
2. No Russia-China war – working together to counterbalance the U.S.
Ariel Cohen (senior research fellow in international policy at The Heritage Foundation) 2005: War Games: Russia, China Grow Alliance.
In foreign policy it’s critical to “know thine enemy.” So American policymakers should be aware that Russia and China are inching closer to identifying a common enemy — the United States.
The two would-be superpowers held unprecedented joint military exercises Aug. 18-25. Soothingly named “Peace Mission 2005,” the drills took place on the Shandong peninsula on the Yellow Sea, and included nearly 10,000 troops. Russian long-range bombers, the army, navy, air force, marine, airborne and logistics units from both countries were also involved.
Moscow and Beijing claim the maneuvers were aimed at combating terrorism, extremism and separatism (the last a veiled reference to Taiwan), but it’s clear they were an attempt to counter-balance American military might.
Joint war games are a logical outcome of the Sino-Russian Friendship and Cooperation Treaty (search) signed in 2001, and reflect the shared worldview and growing economic ties between the two Eastern Hemisphere giants. As the Pravda.ru (search) Web site announced, “the reconciliation between China and Russia has been driven in part by mutual unease at U.S. power and a fear of Islamic extremism in Central Asia.”
Relations between Russia and China have steadily improved since the mid-1980s. The recent military exercises may have helped renew a post-World War II alliance they forged against the U.S. It lasted several years before a bitter split, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (search) denounced dictator Joseph Stalin’s bloody purges and refused Chairman Mao (search) an honor to be a co-leader of the global communist movement.
Today, Moscow and Beijing want to build a multi-polar world. That would require diluting American global supremacy and opposing the U.S. rhetoric of democratization. Both sides are willing to bend to reach those goals. China, for example, supported Russia’s heavy-handed tactics in Chechnya (search). Russia, in turn, supported China’s demands that Taiwan (search) reunite with the mainland.
A sign of their newfound cooperation surfaced during the July 6 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (search) summit in Astana, Kazakhstan. China and Russia demanded the U.S. provide a timetable for withdrawing its troops and bases from central Asia.
Geopolitically, China and Russia share interests as well. They both want to keep insecure central Asian dictators in power, because those dictators are likely to serve as a counterweight to American influence. Unfortunately, the harsh regimes may boost the case of radical Islamists and lead to more extremism and violence in post-Soviet Muslim areas and the Xinjiang province.
3. No risk of Sino-Russian escalation—it’s empirically denied and all border disputes have been settled
Chicago Tribune, 10/15/04
China and Russia settled the last of their decades-old border disputes Thursday during a visit to Beijing by President Vladimir Putin, signing an agreement fixing their 2,700-mile-long border for the first time. The struggle over border areas resulted in violent clashes in the 1960s and 1970s, when strained Sino-Soviet relations were at their most acrimonious, feeding fears abroad that the conflict could erupt into nuclear war. Beijing and Moscow had reached agreements on individual border sections as relations warmed in the past decade. But a stretch of river and islands along China's northeastern border with Russia's Far East had remained in dispute.
AT: Russian Civil War
Empirically denied- economic collapse and instability proves would have already happened
World Policy Journal 3 (World Policy Journal, 12.22.3)
Using extensive interviews with participants in all three administrations, and memoirs by former officials, they paint a compelling picture of officials often over-whelmed by the challenge of an entirely new reality. The unexpected collapse of communism and of the Soviet Union, coming just after the GulfWar, left them with no road map to understand how Russia and other post-Soviet states might develop. Nightmare scenarios suggested themselves: nuclear war between Russia and Ukraine; weapons proliferation on a terrifying scale; Yugoslav-type ethnically based civil war on the territory of the former Soviet Union; mass starvation; economic collapse--the ominous possibilities were endless. That these "dogs did not bark" is testimony to the unwillingness of people in the post-Soviet space to engage in armed conflict and to Western assistance that staved off famine and economic collapse. The failure of catastrophic scenarios to come about is one indicator of success--but if one were to measure America's contribution to transforming Russia in more positive ways, the evidence is more mixed. If a minimalist definition of success was the absence of catastrophe, the maximalist definition was the creation of a fully functioning democracy in Russia with a transparent market economy and the rule of law. That has not happened yet, and it is unclear when it will. So far, there is no consensus about what would constitute a realistic timetable for Russia's democratic development.
Non unique- civil war with Chechnya right now
Moscotw Times 2k (Moscow Times, newspaper featuring objective, reliable news on business, politics, sports and culture 11.25.2)
Cohen takes a distinctly harsh view of Yeltsin, and notes that no Soviet leader was ever able to appoint their successor the way that Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin. (Putin's first official act, prohibiting the prosecution of his predecessor, brings to mind not a Soviet parallel, but an American one - Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon for whatever he might be charged with after Nixon had left the White House to him.) Above all, Cohen would have Americans confront the stark results of the vaunted "shock therapy" that U.S. doctors of economics prescribed for their Russian patients: Total capital flight estimated in the range of $ 150 billion -$ 350 billion; the number living in poverty in the former Soviet Union up from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million nine years later and a male life expectancy that fell below the age of 60. In short, "the literal de -modernization of a 20th-century country." In the hopes of finding something that might strike a more sympathetic chord among U.S. policy-makers than massive human suffering, Cohen continually hammers on the dangers inherent in the fact of the "destabilization of a fully nuclearized society." Already, in Chechnya, Russia has experienced the first civil war in a country with nuclear weapons. It lacks the funds to pay the security and maintenance personnel responsible for those weapons adequately and, in some cases, even regularly. A situation in which a nuclear arsenal was under tight control has devolved into a murky one. Yet the attention paid to it in the United States is minor, Cohen argues, compared to "the campaign against Iraq's infinitely lesser weapons of mass destruction." He suggests that American foreign aid payments targeted at helping Russia pay the costs of maintaining an adequate nuclear security system would prove a far better and cheaper investment than building ever more complex and expensive defense and weapons systems. But, unfortunately, the recent American presidential campaign displayed a bipartisan consensus for just such systems.
AT: Russian Economy
1. Russia’s economy is resilient – strong foreign investment and reserves
Garrels 2008 Roving foreign correspondent for NPR’s foreign desk. (Anne Garrels, “Russia Economy Strong Despite Commodity Fallout”, NPR, September 20, 2008, page 1, )
For the past six years, Russia's economy has boomed in large part because of soaring prices for oil and metals. Russia is strong in these areas — too strong, though, for a balanced economy. Russian shares have bled almost 50 percent of their value since May, but many analysts say Russia still remains a resilient economy. And after the Georgia invasion and weeks of harsh, anti-western rhetoric, both Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have tried to reassure foreign investors. When those commodities prices dropped, Russia's stock market was hit hard. "The question is if they fall significantly further," says James Fenkner with Red Star Assets in Moscow. Fenkner is one of the more cautious voices in Moscow, and other analysts like Roland Nash of Renaissance Capital look at other indicators, like direct foreign investment. "The level of foreign investment is twice the per capita of Brazil, four times that of China, and six times that of India this year," Nash says. "The market arguments for Russia are still very good and there is still a lot of money coming in." Too Dependent On Commodities The Russia government recognizes it is too dependent on commodities, and while their prices were high, it amassed huge reserves as a cushion. The country now has a balanced budget and financial analysts predict its economy will continue to grow at about six percent.
2. Russian economy resilient
Lucio Vinhas de Souza, May 16 8, Center for European Policy Studies, ()
This economic revival has made Russia an economic and political power and a country that can no longer be ignored, says de Souza. Russia's economic performance after the implementation of structural reforms remains impressive, argues de Souza, with a functioning market economy having been established. This means the macroeconomic framework has become more robust than it was in the 1990s, he observes. Despite structural reform slowing down in certain sectors, it has not stopped altogether, the author adds. De Souza believes the resumption of economic growth in Russia is down to the effects of economic and structural reform, as well as recent high energy prices. For him, the changing nature of the Russian economy can mostly be seen in the way the country has withstood the financial instability which has swept global financial markets. De Souza is suitably impressed by Russia's economic performance since 1999 compared with similar economies from the Commonwealth of Independent States – which gathers the former Soviet republics – both in terms of GDP and inflation.
AT: Russian Expansionism
NATO contains Russian expansion
Wilkinson 97 (Paul, Prof of IR at U of St Andrews, , AD: 7/6/10)
The fundamental geopolitical reality in Central and Eastern Europe is the inherent imbalance of power between Russia and its immediate and near neighbors, either individually or in combination. This age-old reality is reflected in Russian dominion over Poland, the Baltic nations, Finland, Belarus, and Ukraine in the 18th and 19th centuries, and over the vast imperium of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in the 20th century. The current eclipse of Russian military and economic power should not blind us to centuries-old realities of geography and economics. An expanded NATO remains an essential shield against a resurgence of Russian power. Even today, there is clear evidence of a revival of Russian expansionism: Russia has achieved a "reunion" with Belarus, a nation of 10.5 million the size of Romania. On April 2, 1997, Russian President Yeltsin and Belarussian President Lukashenka signed a treaty creating a union of the two countries with joint armed forces and common citizenship and currency, as well as a binational ruling body. The union will again bring Russian power, after an absence of only six years, to the eastern borders of Poland and the Baltic states--700 miles farther west. Russian commentators stressed that the "union" was a riposte to NATO expansion, and that it is open to other members. As a result, Russia will have achieved an expanded union before NATO does. Russia has serious border disputes with Ukraine, and has refused to define its thousand-mile border. Russia continues to claim the strategic Crimean Peninsula, as well as significant units of the former Soviet Black Sea fleet. Russia has repeatedly and brutally threatened the three Baltic Republics. TASS reported on January 9, 1997 that Russian Foreign Minister Y.M. Primakov stated at a cabinet meeting that "Russia should not be afraid to use economic sanctions" to in disputes with former Soviet republics over the status of their Russian minorities. A February 12, 1997 statement by the Russian Embassy in Washington warned that "entry of Baltic nations into NATO would... have an extremely negative impact on the prospects of formation of a long-term model of constructive cooperation in the region." That statement's insistence on "creating favorable transport conditions for the Kaliningrad region," prompted one analyst to observe: "If Poland becomes a member of NATO, Lithuania will be the only landbridge between the two. And Moscow is thus making it very clear it will demand a transit accord with Lithuania, something Vilnius is unlikely to agree to willingly." Russia maintains significant military forces in the Kaliningrad enclave bordering Lithuania and Poland--forces not restricted by the CFE Flank Agreement limitations. Russia's armed forces have seized control of portions of Moldava, a small state physically separated from Russia by 325 miles of Ukrainian territory, but contiguous to NATO candidate Romania. Russia has repeatedly intervened to destabilize and subvert the strategic Republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus Mountains--the latter of which has newly-found, exceptionally important gas and oil reserves whose transit routes westward Moscow seeks to control. Russia has stationed its armed forces in Ukraine, Armenia and Tajikistan. And while tolerating dramatic deterioration in its Soviet-era force structure, the bankrupt Russian state still commits vast resources to military research and procurement that will bear fruit in the intermediate future--like the defeated German Reichswehr of the 1920's. Russia’s revised military doctrine in essence neglects current military assets to concentrate on leapfrogging potential foes by developing next-generation technologies. Since Russia observed the performance of U.S. high-tech assets in Operation Desert Storm, its doctrine "places new emphasis on the need for military technology advancements in C4I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence), long-range smart weapons, and increased mobility, especially in air and space." Russian spending for research and development of high-technology weapons has increased nearly sixfold over the past three years, rising from $2.1 billion in 1994 to almost $13 billion today--versus other defense spending of $19 billion. Current high-priority projects include production of an upgraded mobile ICBM, tactical nuclear weapons, miniature nuclear warheads, and a new Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile--all already in development or production. And Jane’s of Britain reports that Russia has developed several new chemical and bacteriological weapons, including a new strain of anthrax which antibiotics cannot counteract. Russia’s entire negotiating posture on NATO expansion reveals not a fear of aggression--which Russia’s leaders from Boris Yeltsin on down have disclaimed--but a conscious desire to dominate both the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw Pact. Why else would the current Russian Foreign Minister (and former Soviet KGB head) Y.M. Primakov have opened negotiations with the following demands: That NATO accept a 10-year moratorium on the accession of any other Central European nation after the entry of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. That NATO forswear ever placing troops, nuclear or other heavy weapons, or even military infrastructure on the soil of those new members Moscow is prepared to countenance. That no former Soviet Union republic--including the Baltic states forcibly annexed by the USSR as part of the infamous 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact--ever be considered for NATO membership. These negotiating positions made sense only if Russia seeks the ability to blackmail or actually occupy the whole former Warsaw Pact, and direct military dominance over the mis-named "Commonwealth of Independent States." Indeed, given the unfolding sequence of events, NATO expansion might fairly be characterized as a Western response to accelerating Russian efforts to revive the Soviet imperium. Promoting Democracy and Stability in the Former Warsaw Pact Beyond defending Western Europe from Soviet imperialism during the Cold War, NATO proved essential to fostering democracy and the rule of law in Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. So too will NATO membership today lend stability to states still trying to revive or create capitalism and democracy after generations of Communist autocracy. NATO membership will in particular help inculcate the norm of civilian control of the military. And just as membership in NATO helped abate the historic rivalry between Germany and France and contain disputes between Greece and Turkey, so too will NATO membership help diminish longstanding animosities between Central European nations. Already, the mere prospect of NATO membership has helped promote settlement of outstanding issues predating the Second World War between Germany and the Czech Republic, and led Hungary and Romania to resolve their centuries-old territorial disputes.
Russian influence expansion ventures fail – Georgia proves.
Klitsounova 9(Elena, Centre for European Policy Studies “Russia’s Response: Sovereign Democracy Strikes Back” Oct. 30)
Yet, while Russian soft power instruments may predominate on paper in a wide variety of policy areas, they seem to lack power in practice. The Georgian crisis of August 2008 clearly showed Russia’s limited ability to expand influence over its immediate neighbours by pulling only on the levers of soft power. And the situation is likely to become even more complicated in the near future. As a result of the crisis, the Russian cabinet has already announced budget cuts, so establishing and expanding new areas of external aid on a shrinking budget will be extremely difficult. At the moment, some institutional features of Russia’s political model seem to be attractive to quite a number of regimes in the post-Soviet region. Moscow’s impetuous rebellion against the “intervention of democracy promoters” seems to be viewed with some sympathy in many post-Soviet capitals. Nevertheless, it is important not to overestimate Russia’s political attractiveness. With a younger generation of politicians soon to come to power, Russia’s leadership is likely to lose a large part of its capital of personalised relationships with post-Soviet political elites. The ongoing world economic crisis may dramatically change the structures of interest and power in the region and thus undermine the effectiveness and attractiveness of non-competitive political regimes. And last but not least, the EU’s serious attempts at projecting its own political influence far beyond its borders may also change the expectations of political actors populating the EU-Russia common neighbourhood.
There will be no red spread – economics and population issues will stop it.
Mearsheimer 6 (John, prof of international relations @ the U of Chicago, International Relations, 20(1), p. 119-120)
IR What about the prospect of another ambitious and powerful Russia, moving westwards and increasingly dominating a Europe which has been deserted by the United States? JM That is definitely not going to happen. Russia has roughly half the population of the former Soviet Union and it has a struggling economy, which is nowhere near as dynamic as the Chinese or German economies. IR But we are talking 20 or 30 years down the line, and your book importantly stresses the sweep of history. JM Most experts think that Russia’s population will shrink markedly over the next 20 to 30 years and that its economy will continue to face serious problems. I don’t think we have to worry about a second coming of the Soviet Union in the decades ahead.
AT: Russian Loose Nukes
Russians are empirically successful at protecting their nuclear weapons, having already broken up hundreds of plots already
Council on Foreign Relations 2006: Loose Nukes.
Have terrorist organizations ever tried to obtain Russian nuclear weapons?
Yes. Russian authorities say that in the past three years alone they have broken up hundreds of nuclear-material smuggling deals. In October 2001, shortly after the World Trade Center attacks, a Russian nuclear official reported having foiled two separate incidents over the previous eight months in which terrorists had “staked out” a secret weapons storage site. In the 1990s, U.S. authorities discovered several al-Qaeda plots to obtain nuclear materials, and former CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Osama bin Laden had sought to “acquire or develop a nuclear device.”
And nukes used by rogue groups won’t cause big damage- no impact
Mueller 99 (John, prof of poli sci @ U of Rochester, Foreign Affairs, May/June 99) ET
Nuclear weapons clearly deserve the "weapons of mass destruction" designation because they can indeed destroy masses of people in a single blow. Even so, it is worth noting that any nuclear weapons acquired by terrorist groups or rogue states, at least initially, are likely to be small. Contrary to exaggerated Indian and Pakistani claims, for example, independent analyses of their May 1998 nuclear tests have concluded that the yields were Hiroshima-sized or smaller. Such bombs can cause horrible though not apocalyptic damage. Some 70,000 people died in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki. People three miles away from the blast sites received only superficial wounds even when fully exposed, and those inside bomb shelters at Nagasaki were uninjured even though they were close to ground zero. Some buildings of steel and concrete survived, even when they were close to the blast centers, and most municipal services were restored within days. A Hiroshima-sized bomb exploded in a more fire-resistant modern city would likely be considerably less devastating. Used against well-prepared, dug-in, and dispersed troops, a small bomb might actually cause only limited damage. If a single such bomb or even a few of them were to fall into dangerous hands, therefore, it would be terrible, though it would hardly threaten the end of civilization.
AT: Russian Nationalism
1. Russian nationalism high
Greenfield 08 (Daniel, Israel News [] Understanding the New Russian Threat/ June 16, 2008)
Across the third world, Russia is busy providing weapons, building ports and bases and creating an anti-Western alliance based around its own oil and gas resources, that unites oil producing Latin American nations with leftist governments such as Venezuela with Arab OPEC nations to form a common front against America and Europe. On its own borders Russia is doing its best to push back NATO expansion while preparing for its own great project to reclaim the lost territories of the USSR, not in the name of Communism, but in the name of greed, power and Russian nationalism. The old rivalries with England and the US have been resumed and the KGB is active everywhere that Russian trade goes. The KGB's New Guard have learned from Communism's failures and they don't intend to repeat the same mistakes. They respect the achievements of the USSR but their goal is to build a great Russian Empire ruled by themselves. They are the crime syndicate which now rules Russia and is expanding across the world. Fueled by the energy boom, they have a great deal of wealth and while the system they run is corrupt and incompetent, it is not nearly as corrupt or incompetent as the old Communist system was.
2. Nationalism on the rise in Russia
Umland 08 (Andreas, The American Chronicle [] Russian Nationalism, Post-Soviet Political Discourse, and the New Fascist Danger/ June 26, 2008)
The roots of Russia´s currently rising nationalism are threefold: pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet. The idea of Moscow as the "Third Rome," i.e. of a special Russian mission in world history, goes back several centuries. Russian nationalism had been – contrary to what many in the West believed – an important element of Soviet ideology ever since the 1930s. Like in the early 19th century when Moscow´s so-called Slavophiles applied German nativist thought to Russian conditions, ideas of various Russian nationalist movements today are often imported from the West. A factor also accounting for Russia´s recent nationalist resurgence is the mode of thinking learned in Soviet schools and universities – a Manichean world-view which sharply distinguishes between "us" and "them." Although the basic definitions of "us" and "them" have changed, a number of Soviet stereotypes, for instance, about the US have survived glasnost until today.
AT: SARS
1. SARS Spread is small – transmission is low
Chan-Yeung, Professor of Medicine, University of Hong Kong and Loh, CEO of Civic Exchange, ’04 At the Epicentre: Hong Kong and the SARS Outbreak, edited by Christine Loh and Civic Exchange, Hong Kong University Press, page(s) 49]
However, despite fears about transmission of SARS, the SARS-coronavirus has a relatively low infectivity. It does not transmit from person to person efficiently and a fairly large dose of virus appears to be needed for transmission to occur. SARS is much less infectious than the typical flu. The concern is the virulence of the SARS-coronavirus, which can cause rapid and serious damage to human organs. A high number of patients require intensive care. At the height of the outbreak in Hong Kong, 14 percent of SARS patients were in intensive care units (ICUs). This put considerable pressure on the healthcare system
2. Dire predictions on SARS are wrong. It spreads slowly and natural immunity checks it
Lau ’04 [Alexis, Associate Director of the Center for Coastal and Atmospheric Research pf the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, He received Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from Princeton in 1991, “Chapter 6: The Numbers Trail: what the Data Tells Us,” in At the Epicentre: Hong Kong and the SARS Outbreak, edited by Christine Loh and Civic Exchange, Hong Kong University Press, page(s) 85-86]
During the outbreak, another important issue in which the public was interested was whether Hong Kong's healthcare system could cope as the number of SARS cases rose. From the initial growth rates of the disease, it appeared that, had transmission been more effective, hospitals would have come under much greater stress and may well not have been able to manage.
Early on, it was not clear how the disease would progress. One German newspaper went so far as to predict that everyone in Hong Kongwould be infected!' In fact, SARS spread relatively slowly. Dire predictions based on initial data were inaccurate because nobody knew how effective transmission of the virus would be. There were also other factors that affected the spread of the disease, including the community's response and the build-up of immunity among the population.
AT: Saudi Arabian Instability
1. Instability looms in Saudi Arabia, several reasons
AEI June 17, 2008
Whoever succeeds Abdullah in Saudi Arabia will face myriad problems. Saudi oil wealth has inhibited the advance of meaningful reform by cushioning the consequences of corrupt and inefficient governance. Even with oil prices near an all-time high, a population growth rate of 2.06 percent has left authorities in Riyadh scrambling to address an unemployment rate unofficially recorded at 30 percent.[24] As Saudi princes conspicuously siphon the kingdom's oil revenue, Saudis see the royal family's religious rhetoric as being at odds with its conduct. The sight of Saudi princes gambling, drinking alcohol, and cavorting with prostitutes aggravates popular resentment and the widening socioeconomic divide. After years of resistance, King Abdullah has acknowledged that Saudi Arabia has a terror problem.[25] Al-Qaeda struck at the kingdom and at foreigners it hosted in the years after 9-11. On May 12, 2003, suicide bombers killed thirty-four at a foreign national housing compound in Riyadh, and over subsequent months, there were nine attacks that took twenty-one lives.[26] In the face of such a terror campaign, the Saudi leadership enacted reforms to dampen Islamist fervor and became more aggressive in rooting out homegrown terrorists. The Saudi government began to arrest clerics who supported terrorism. Younger clerics remain undeterred, however, and continue to preach anti-Americanism and to incite violence. Saudi authorities tolerate many such clerics on the condition that they do not condone terrorist attacks against Saudi targets.[27] Many wealthy Saudis--including some in the royal family--donate money to charities or other organizations that support religious extremism abroad, leading Saudi Arabia to become an epicenter of the financing of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.[28] While Saudi authorities claim to have prosecuted individuals for terror financing and have frozen the assets of a number of other such malefactors,[29] such sanctions remain limited. Still, the Saudi government has created a number of laws to gain greater oversight of money transfers and charity expenditures such as limiting charitable organizations to the use of a single bank account and prohibiting such organizations from making or receiving cash payments.[30] Still, problems remain: Significant oil revenues are controlled by independent interests within the royal family, which do not necessarily lend themselves to monitoring by an incestuous Saudi government.[31] Saudi succession will come at a delicate time, both internally and externally. Saudi reforms are inchoate, succession unclear, and interest groups many. Any new Saudi leader will also face external challenges: The Iranian nuclear program has bolstered Iranian confidence and prestige, and Iranian authorities have agitated Saudi Arabia's large Shi‘i population, forcing Riyadh to worry about internal order. Primitive Wahhabi, anti-Shi‘i attitudes only exacerbate the internal challenges, despite recent moves to build a Saudi identity that transcends sect and regional origin. Saudi authorities often cite the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers U.S. military facility that killed nineteen U.S. servicemen and injured more than 350 as evidence of the Iranian threat: While the perpetrators were Saudi, Iran's Revolutionary Guards organized the attack and trained many of the terrorists who executed it.
2. Saudi Arabia has been hit with a campaign of violence from Al-Qaida, reducing stability
M&C News June 18, 2008
Saudi Arabia is expecting the worst from the al- Qaeda terror network because the group is changing its style and techniques but the kingdom is uncovering more details about its sources of funding, the Saudi Minister of Interior said in remarks published Wednesday. Saudi Arabia's war on terrorism is going ahead steadily but not without difficulty, which is caused by the fact that al-Qaeda is changing its techniques, Prince Nayyif bin Abdel-Aziz told the pan- Arab daily Alsahrq al-Awsat. This is why the Saudi security bodies are expecting the worst from al-Qaeda, the minister added. 'Investigation into sources that may be funding the network in the kingdom is making progress. But the information we have gathered has to be completed,' the minister said. The kingdom has been engulfed in recent years in a campaign of violence carried out by al-Qaeda, targeting foreigners working in the country's oil industry and security forces. The leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, is a Saudi national, who was incensed by the US military presence in the kingdom and his fight against the Saudi royal family initially focused on ousting Americans from the country. Saudi Arabia came under increasing international pressure to crack down on religious intolerance in the country after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Out of the 19 hijackers involved in the attacks, 15 were from Saudi Arabia. 'Some people belonging to al-Qaeda may be in Iran,' the minister said. But he ruled out the presence of Saudi detainees in Iran.
AT: Saudi Arabian Prolif
Saudi Arabia can’t and has no incentive to proliferate
Lippman ‘8 /Thomas, former Middle East correspondent and a diplomatic and national security reporter for The
Washington Post/
It is far from certain, however, that Saudi Arabia would wish to acquire its own nuclear arsenal or that it is capable of doing so. There are compelling reasons why Saudi Arabia would not undertake an effort to develop or acquire nuclear weapons, even in the unlikely event that Iran achieves a stockpile and uses this arsenal to threaten the Kingdom. Money is not an issue — if destitute North Korea can develop nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia surely has the resources to pursue such a program. In the fall of 2007, the Saudis reported a budget surplus of $77 billion, and with oil prices above $90 a barrel, Riyadh is flush with cash. But the acquisition or development of nuclear weapons would be provocative, destabilizing, controversial and extremely difficult for Saudi Arabia, and ultimately would likely weaken the kingdom rather than strengthen it. Such a course would be directly contrary to the Kingdom’s longstanding stated goal of making the entire Middle East a nuclear weapons free zone. According to Sultan bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, the Defense Minister and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons by their nature contravene the tenets of Islam. Pursuing nuclear weapons would be a flagrant violation of Saudi Arabia’s commitments under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and would surely cause a serious breach with the United States. Saudi Arabia lacks the industrial and technological base to develop such weapons on its own. An attempt to acquire nuclear weapons by purchasing them, perhaps from Pakistan, would launch Saudi Arabia on a dangerously inflammatory trajectory that could destabilize the entire region, which Saudi Arabia’s leaders know would not be in their country’s best interests. The Saudis always prefer stability to turmoil. Saudi Arabia and the NPT Saudi Arabia, like Iran, is a signatory to the NPT and participates in the safeguard regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It signed the treaty only under duress, but its reluctance was not based on a desire to develop nuclear wepons. The Kingdom’s position was that it would be happy to join the NPT system when Israel did so. But then in 1988 it was virtually forced to sign the NPT because of intense pressure from the United States.
AT: Science Diplomacy
1. Science diplomacy fails – politicizes science
Kerr, The Guardian staff writer, 6/28/2009
[David, "Using science for soft diplomacy," ]
With this new focus, however, come warnings about the dangers of mixing science and diplomacy. And of course if scientists were simply to become pawns in an inter-state power play then the whole thing collapses. Scientists should and do have more self-respect and dedication to their field of inquiry than that. Science diplomacy works when there is shared interest and that is scientific progress – not leveraging state power through the proxy of science.
2. US science diplomacy not key – not zero-sum
Kerr, The Guardian staff writer, 6/28/2009
[David, "Using science for soft diplomacy," ]
Science diplomacy need not be a zero-sum game in which what is good for one nation state is necessarily bad for another. The imperatives of globalisation have brought into sharp focus the need for countries to collaborate on a multitude of issues.
3. Status quo solves – Obama boosting science diplomacy now
Koenig, Science staff writer, 6/5/2009
[Robert, "Fuzzy Spots in Obama's Science Diplomacy," ]
Administration officials are scrambling to add substance to President Barack Obama’s new Middle Eastern science diplomacy initiatives, mentioned Thursday in his speech in Cairo. The President promised new “science envoys,” centers of excellence, and a “technological development” fund for the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. The State Department and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) were working today to bring those words into focus.
“Details of these initiatives will be crafted in discussion with officials in the nations where they will be based,” said OSTP spokesman Rick Weiss. Nina V. Fedoroff, science adviser to the Secretary of State and the Agency for International Development, said that proposals for centers of excellence “have been bubbling up from several different directions” with emphasis on issues such as agriculture and public health.
A State Department fact sheet explained that the United States “will work with educational institutions, NGOs and foreign governments” to decide the focus and location of such centers.
The new “science envoys” program could follow the lines of a bill sponsored by Sen. Lugar (R–IN) and approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that would deploy prominent scientists on missions of goodwill and collaboration. Fedoroff said such efforts would dovetail with evolving State Department science diplomacy programs.
Obama also announced a new regional fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries. The fact sheet said the fund would help pay for “S&T collaboration, capacity development” and innovations with commercial potential.
4. Cutting ITER funding is destroying U.S. credibility in science diplomacy
Steir, ’08 (Ken, “Using Scientists as Diplomats”, Time, 3/7, )
Scientific cooperation has long had a critical, if unsung, supporting role in international diplomacy, helping to rebuild economies from the ashes of World War II and eventually winding down the Cold War. But despite these successes, critics say Washington's record of integrating science and technology into foreign policy in recent years has been decidedly mixed. That was one of the themes raised at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where scientists lamented that Washington continues to short-shrift international scientific cooperation, which is increasingly regarded as a crucial tool of soft power for spreading prosperity and enhancing American competitiveness. Critics say this is particularly unfortunate at a time when science is more than ever a truly global enterprise, especially for solving challenges such as energy and climate change. The latest example of this, they claim, is Congress' recent failure to appropriate any funds this year to the $20 billion multi-national fusion power project (ITER) being constructed in southern France. The landmark R&D project is aimed at demonstrating the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion power, and the U.S. has pledged to cover 10% of the cost over 10 years. "That's unbelievable, a major international agreement, you worked on it for 24 years — that just confirms in people's mind our reputation as a really lousy international partner," said Norman Neureiter, who has had key roles in Washington's science and technology policy for over 40 years. "For the leading scientific nation in the world to have a reputation like that is really destructive in my view."
AT: Secession
1. Groups don’t want secession
Kamal Shehadi, Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, December 1993, Ethnic Self Determination And the Break Up of States, p. 74
The third objection to border changes is that allowing for such changes will lead to the proliferation of states, with detrimental effects on regional stability and economic development. The reality, however, is that few entities will attempt to secede and fewer still will survive if they do. Small entities with little or no indigenous bases of military or economic power cannot survive on their own and will want to join with other states.
2. Alt cause – governments are empirically unwilling to negotiate with secessionist groups – means conflicts are inevitable
Walter, 2003.(Barbara F., Associate Professor Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at University of California, San Diego, December, “REPUTATION AND WAR: Explaining the Intractability of Territorial Conflict,” International Studies Review. Vol. 5, no. 4)
The most intractable civil wars in the last half of the twentieth century were not ethnic civil wars or ideological civil wars. The most intractable conflicts were those fought over territory. Between 1940 and 1996, combatants fighting territorial civil wars were 70 percent less likely to initiate peace negotiations than combatants fighting any other type of civil war.1 And once begun, these negotiations rarely brought peace. In only 17 percent of the cases where a government faced rebels who sought independence or greater regional autonomy did the government agree to accommodate the rebels in any way. This pattern was confirmed in studies of inter-state disputes. Luard (1986), Holsti (1991), Goertz and Diehl (1992), and Vasquez(1993) each found that territorial issues are one of the most frequent sources of war, and that competing governments are less likely to resolve disagreements over territory than any other issue. And Hensel (1996) found that territorial disputes are more likely to escalate, to produce a greater number of fatalities, and be more conflictual than non-territorial confrontations. Unlike most other issues, governments show a surprising unwillingness to negotiate over land in order to avoid or end otherwise costly conflicts. Why do governments so often refuse to negotiate over territory, and under what conditions will they agree to negotiate and make some accommodation for greater autonomy or independence?
Ext #1 – Don’t Want It
Most indigenous groups wouldn’t choose secession
Glenn Morris, Professor of the Fourth World Center for the Study of Indigenous Law and Policy at the University of Colorado, 1999, Native American Sovereignty, p. 78-79
This brings us to another important point. Recognition of the right to self-determination does not compel a move to national independence. In applications of the right to non-self-governing territories, peoples may choose one of three options to express their self-determination. First, they may choose to pursue sovereign independence as a state; second, they may choose a relationship of free association with an independent state; or third, they may choose integration with an independent state. The assumption by states that indigenous peoples exercising a right to self-determination would automatically choose the first option appears unfounded. Given the difficult practical political and economic difficulties facing smaller states in the world today, most indigenous peoples may very well not opt for complete independent state status. Many would probably choose some type of autonomy or federation with existing states, preserving rights to internal self-governance and control as members of a larger state. Some however, may choose formal integration into a state, for reasons unique to their particular situation. Regardless of which status an indigenous nation might choose, the movement toward recognizing each nation’s right to make some choice other than unconsented to domination by a colonial or settler state appears consistent with historical notions of self-determination. To apply the conclusions of Nanda to indigenous circumstances, not only would the extension of the right to self-determination to indigenous nations, even if it meant secession, promote the expansion of rights in the world, it would also promote predictable international mechanisms of resolving disputes between indigenous nations and the states around them, leading to an overall expansion of global freedom, peace, and stability.140 Without recognition of the right, the liberation and survival of indigenous nations remains questionable, and the majority of global conflicts in the world will remain unresolved.
AT: Single Species Collapse
Ecosystems are sufficiently resilient to withstand the loss of one species
Sedjo 2k (Roger A Sedjo, Sr. Fellow, Resources for the Future, 2000, Conserving Nature’s Biodiversity: insights from biology, ethics and economics, eds. Van Kooten, Bulte and Sinclair, p. 114
As a critical input into the existence of humans and of life on earth, biodiversity obviously has a very high value (at least to humans). But, as with other resource questions, including public goods, biodiversity is not an either/or question, but rather a question of “how much.” Thus, we may argue as to how much biodiversity is desirable or is required for human life (threshold) and how much is desirable (insurance) and at what price, just as societies argue over the appropriate amount and cost of national defense. As discussed by Simpson, the value of water is small even though it is essential to human life, while diamonds are inessential but valuable to humans. The reason has to do with relative abundance and scarcity, with market value pertaining to the marginal unit. This water-diamond paradox can be applied to biodiversity. Although biological diversity is essential, a single species has only limited value, since the global system will continue to function without that species. Similarly, the value of a piece of biodiversity (e.g., 10 ha of tropical forest) is small to negligible since its contribution to the functioning of the global biodiversity is negligible. The global ecosystem can function with “somewhat more” or “somewhat less” biodiversity, since there have been larger amounts in times past and some losses in recent times. Therefore, in the absence of evidence to indicate that small habitat losses threaten the functioning of the global life support system, the value of these marginal habitats is negligible. The “value question” is that of how valuable to the life support function are species at the margin. While this, in principle, is an empirical question, in practice it is probably unknowable. However, thus far, biodiversity losses appear to have had little or no effect on the functioning of the earth’s life support system, presumably due to the resiliency of the system, which perhaps is due to the redundancy found in the system. Through most of its existence, earth has had far less biological diversity. Thus, as in the water-diamond paradox, the value of the marginal unit of biodiversity appears to be very small.
Multiple alternate causalities to the impact
Rosenzweig 01 (Michael L. Rosenzweig, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, 2001, PNAS, Volume 98, No. 10, May 8, p. 5404)
Human pressure may greatly accelerate the relaxation process by increasing accidental extinction rates. Various human activities suggest this. We increasingly commingle evolutionarily separate provincial biotas, creating the New Pangaea and introducing native species to predatory and competitive threats from exotics (47). We rapidly transport novel diseases and parasites around the world. We simplify biotic temporal regimes (for example by limiting disturbances such as fire). And we are warming the globe. The National Research Council (44) implicates exotic species or lack of adequate disturbance as the root cause in endangering a significant proportion of threatened U.S. species. But global warming may constitute the worst threat of all: by altering the basic abiotic conditions of reserves, it can destroy their ability to do much of their job. When the earth was covered with contiguous tracts of natural habitat, species could track such changes, moving to keep up with the shifts in location of their favored habitats and so avoiding extinction (48-50). But today, with natural habitats restricted to patches of reserves, this is not possible. Meanwhile, we show little sign of abandoning the destruction of habitat that brings deterministic extinction to species.
AT: Small Businesses
Despite declines in large business confidence, small business remain resilient.
Microsoft 9 ("Small businesses remain resilient in downturn," April 21, , AD: 6/30/09) jlConfidence in small and medium-sized enterprises remains resilient, according to new research. O2's Small Business Confidence Index questioned nearly 3,000 small business owners and found that while confidence was at a record-low for 49 per cent, 66 per cent of those questioned are determined to survive the current economic downturn. Some 21 per cent of respondents are anticipating their business will grow in the coming year, while seven per cent claim the recession has not impacted upon them. Four per cent stated that now is an exciting time to be involved in the business world. Despite this, the survey revealed that there are many challenges facing business owners, with financial issues causing the greatest concern. Cashflow was found to be the greatest threat to a small business, while lack of support from banks was also cited as a significant challenge. Simon Devonshire, head of small business marketing at O2, commented: "Whilst conditions are clearly very tough small businesses are determined not to fall victim to the recession and are scrutinising their business model to see where savings can be made and new business won." He adds that confidence is "essential" for small business owners and they must keep working to motivate their team. Many small businesses will be looking to the Budget, which will be announced tomorrow, to offer them support, with groups hoping for help in the form of automatic rate relief for small firms and higher income tax thresholds.
AT: Smallpox
1. Smallpox has been eradicated making natural resurgence highly unlikely
WHO 2009 (Specialized UN agency in charge of international health, “Smallpox”, WHO) SMB
Smallpox is an acute contagious disease caused by Variola virus, a member of the orthopoxvirus family. It was one of the world's most feared diseases until it was eradicated by a collaborative global vaccination programme led by the World Health Organization. The last known natural case was in Somalia in 1977. Since then, the only known cases were caused by a laboratory accident in 1978 in Birmingham, England, which killed one person and caused a limited outbreak. Smallpox was officially declared eradicated in 1979.
2. The U.S. government has enough smallpox vaccine to prevent an outbreak.
Elana Pearl Ben-Joseph 2006 (Medical doctor and consulting medical editor for KidsHealth, “Smallpox”, TeenHealth) SMB
The smallpox vaccine also would prevent the spread of disease because it can:
prevent people from becoming infected if they're vaccinated quickly after exposure to the virus
make the illness less severe in people who do become infected if they're vaccinated within a few days
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the anthrax scare that same year, the U.S. government took the precaution of asking several companies to begin making smallpox vaccine again. Today, there's enough vaccine on hand to protect the American people in the event of a smallpox outbreak. Public health officials have a rapid response plan ready to vaccinate anyone exposed to the disease, as well as people who come into contact with them. So although a person doesn't need to get vaccinated at the moment, the vaccine is there in case it's needed. Given that the vaccine can stop the spread of the disease, experts believe it's unlikely that terrorists will go to the trouble of producing and using smallpox as a biological weapon — it would take too long and have little effect.
3. Pandemics don’t cause extinction-empirically proven
Arie J. Zuckerman, (et al.) Jangu E. Banatvala, John Ridley Pattison, Paul Griffiths, Barry Schoub, May 2004(“Principles and Practice of Clinical Virology”) SMB
In addition to the above, history records nine pandemics since 1700, which began at a focal point and spread rapidly through the world to infect hundreds of millions of individuals; these are shown in Figure 5.3. Accurate documentation of pandemics is first seen in the pandemic which spread from Russia, into Europe and the USA in the years 1889-1892: infection presented as an upper respiratory tract infection of sudden onset and short duration; the total number of cases was high; and deaths were the most numerous amongst infants and the elderly, but were recorded in a relatively small percentage of approximately .05% of the 25-30% of the world population infected. The pandemic of 1918-1920 originated in China or the USA and is known as the Spanish influenza. This pandemic spread worldwide for some 6-8 months, and then gave rise to an infection of unusual virulence which commonly caused a severe form of pneumonia; some 40-50 million deaths occurred, principally among adults (Potter, 1998). The effects of the pandemic caused international panic.
AT: Soft Power
1. Obama restores soft power
Nye ’08 (Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations, was Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government from December 1995 through June, 2004. June 12, 2008, Barack Obama and Soft Power, )
I have spent the past month lecturing in Oxford and traveling in Europe where Barack Obama could be elected in a landslide. I suspect that this fascination with Obama is true in many parts of the world. In fact, as I have said before, it is difficult to think of any single act that would do more to restore America's soft power than the election of Obama to the presidency. Soft power is the ability to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than using the carrots and sticks of payment or coercion. As I describe in my new book The Powers to Lead, in individuals soft power rests on the skills of emotional intelligence, vision, and communication that Obama possesses in abundance. In nations, it rests upon culture (where it is attractive to others), values (when they are applied without hypocrisy), and policies (when they are inclusive and seen as legitimate in the eyes of others.) Polls show that American soft power has declined quite dramatically in much of the world over the past eight years. Some say this is structural, and resentment is the price we pay for being the biggest kid on the block. But it matters greatly whether the big kid is seen as a friend or a bully. In much of the world we have been seen as a bully as a result of the Bush Administration policies. Unfortunately, a President Obama will inherit a number of policy problems such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea where hard power plays a large role. If he drops the ball on any of these issues, they will devour his political capital. At the same time, he will have to be careful not to let this inherited legacy of problems define his presidency. Some time between November 4 and January 20, he will need to indicate a new tone in foreign policy which shows that we will once again export hope rather than fear. This could take several forms: announcement of an intent to close Guantanamo; dropping the term "global war on terror;" creation of a special bipartisan group to formulate a new policy on climate change; a "listening trip" to Asia, and so forth. Electing Obama will greatly help restore America's soft power as a nation that can recreate itself, but the election alone will not be sufficient. It is not too soon to start thinking about symbols and policies for the days immediately after the election.
2. Alt Cause – Iraq War, Overstretch and Middle East Policy
Jacques, 09 (Martin, co-founder of Demos, “A sense of an Ending”, July 6, 2009, New Statesman, Lexis)
The Bush administration was the exemplar par excellence. The invasion of Iraq mired the US in an expensive and debilitating war, making it deeply unpopular throughout the world and undermining its soft power. Furthermore, it became so preoccupied with the Middle East that it neglected American interests elsewhere, such as in east Asia, which is in fact far more important by most criteria, but where its position is declining rapidly. In contrast to the gung-ho mentality of its predecessor, the Obama administration has been anxious not to overreach itself, employing a rhetoric that emphasises limits to US power and the need to work with other nations. However, even this enlightened administration has greatly increased its military commitment to an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Declining imperial nations enter into military entanglements shaped by power and ambitions that they previously took for granted, but increasingly can no longer sustain. In other words, they overreach themselves in a manner that often ends in humiliating retreat; the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan is a case in point. Iraq, in a less drastic way, serves as a similar warning to the US. Of course, this has been considerably less humiliating than the US defeat in Vietnam, but it occurred at a different point in the arc of the country's global hegemony. In the mid-1970s, the US was very much the dominant power in the world and it was to remain so for another quarter-century or more. Today US power is palpably on the wane. The Middle East, more than any other region, is likely to ensnare a declining America in a costly and energy-sapping commitment. As we all know, the region is highly unstable, riddled with conflict and fraught with dangerous uncertainties. America's two closest allies in the region are Saudi Arabia, a deeply dysfunctional state, and Israel, whose future is utterly dependent on the United States. Both are living testimony to the extent to which the Middle East has been shaped by US power since 1945. Obama has been cautiously seeking a way of resolving the seemingly intractable problems of the region. He has sought to find a modus vivendi with Iran and has been pressurising Israel to accept a two-state solution and an end to the expansion of its settlements. But recent events illustrate just how difficult this will be: Iran remains firmly in its bunker, even more so since its disputed presidential election, and Israel is loath to make the slightest concession. If any American president is going to cut the Gordian knot of Palestine - the central impasse of life in the region, linked to so many other political difficulties - he will have to be far bolder and braver than any other leader we have seen.
3. Soft Power is not key to sustain US status as global superpower—military and economic strength sustaining it now
Kagan, 8 (Robert, Council on Foreign Relations member, “History's Back”, August 25, 2008, The Weekly Standard, ProQuest)
The apparent failure in Iraq convinced many people that the United States was weak, hated, and in a state of decline. Nor has anyone bothered to adjust that judgment now that the United States appears to be winning in Iraq. Yet by any of the usual measures of power, the United States is as strong today, even in relative terms, as it was in 2000. It remains the sole superpower, even as the other great powers get back on their feet. The military power of China and Russia has increased over the past decade, but American military power has increased more. America's share of the global economy has remained steady, 27 percent of global GDP in 2000 and 26 percent today. So where is the relative decline? So long as the United States remains at the center of the international economy, the predominant military power, and the leading apostle of the world's most popular political philosophy; so long as the American public continues to support American predominance, as it has consistently for six decades; and so long as potential challengers inspire more fear than sympathy among their neighbors, the structure of the international system should remain as the Chinese describe it: "one superpower and many great powers."
Ext #1 – Obama Solves
Election of Obama restores global faith in America
Anderson ’09 (Lindsay Hodges Anderson is a writer for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. March 6, 2009, Joseph Nye Analyzes the Soft Power Prospects for the Obama Administration, )
History will judge Barack Obama not by the color of his skin but by the success of his policies. That’s the assessment of Joseph Nye, university distinguished service professor. “By electing an African American president we changed our image in the minds of billions of people and that did a lot to restore the American dream and make us attractive again,” Nye said. “But Obama’s going to have to follow that symbolism with policies and if the policies are unattractive the election alone won’t be sufficient.” Nye, who coined the term “soft power” to describe the power of attraction as opposed to coercion in international relations theory, was interviewed Feb. 12 by Philadelphia Inquirer foreign policy columnist Trudy Rubin as part of an initiative sponsored by the American Academy of Political and Social Science in conjunction with their journal The Annals. Nye told Rubin that he agreed with her assessment that America has fallen from its pedestal on the global economic stage, but he stated that the long-term outcome depends on the framework established for the regulation of the nation’s top financial institutions. “It clearly has been costly to us not just economically but also in terms of our soft power,” said Nye. “The Wall Street model, which was the envy of everybody in the economic area, has collapsed.” Rubin asked Nye how good will towards America was affected by some of the controversial policies pursued by the Bush Administration over the past eight years. “I think many people had their doubts…The way we were treating civil liberties in response to terrorism, the presence of Guantanamo – these things called into question our democracy,” he said. “The fact that an African American with a strange sounding name could rise from nowhere and become president, I think that restored a lot of faith in American democracy. But the key questions are going to be whether we can follow up on that election with other policies,” Nye concluded.
Obama increasing soft power now – tone and policy changes
John Feffer | April 27, 2009 This article appears in Thirsting for Change: Obama's First 100 Days, a report published by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Barack Obama promised a different foreign policy: more diplomatic, more modest, more in keeping with international institutions and international law. On some issues, such as torture, nuclear weapons policy, and climate change, he has made an early down-payment on his promises. But whether he's adding to an already gargantuan Pentagon budget or sending more troops to Afghanistan, the president has also maintained some disturbing continuities with Bush-era policies. Perhaps the most important change the Obama administration brought to the White House has been its new tone. The president has reached out to the Muslim world, giving his first press interview to al-Arabiya and telling Turkish audiences in his first trip to a Muslim country that the United States "is not and never will be at war with Islam." He has indicated, in general, a willingness to use diplomacy over force. This change in tone extends to a more positive attitude toward multilateral treaties and institutions.
Obama policy on the “War on Terror” increasing Soft Power now
John Feffer | April 27, 2009 This article appears in Thirsting for Change: Obama's First 100 Days, a report published by the Institute for Policy Studies.
In his first decisions as president, Obama fulfilled his election pledge by recasting counterterrorism policy. In a series of executive orders, the new president mandated the closure of the Guantánamo detention facility in Cuba within a year, outlawed the use of torture in interrogations, and put the CIA out of the secret prisons business. Obama announced that he wanted to "send an unmistakable signal that our actions in defense of liberty will be as just as our cause." After 100 days, the Obama administration has righted the most egregious of the Bush administration's wrongs in the realm of foreign policy. But whether it's the surge in Afghanistan, the ever-rising tide of military spending, or the continued commitment to missile defense, the new president hasn't yet escaped the long shadow of his predecessor. These immediate changes were part of an overall effort to signal a change in U.S. image in the world. During the eight years of the Bush administration, U.S. popularity in the world plummeted to new lows. U.S. reputation suffered tremendously because of the violations of international law committed at Guantánamo, the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, and the extraordinary renditions by which the CIA secretly abducted suspects and transferred them to third countries without trial. The Obama administration restored a good deal of confidence by bringing U.S. policy in line with the norms of international law.
Closing of Guantanamo and change in latin American policies increasing soft power now
Cynthia McClintock, ‘09, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University.
Former President Bill Clinton said that what matters most for the United States in the world is "the power of our example, not the example of our power." This is particularly true in Latin America, which shares American democratic values more than any other region except Europe. So President Barack Obama has gotten off to a good start by moving to close the Guantánamo detention facilities. Obama will have an excellent opportunity to strike a new tone with Latin America's leaders at the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago on April 17-19, 2009. First and foremost, the president should listen — which fortunately by all accounts he does very well. And, the president can show that he is listening by changing U.S. policies in the recommended direction. Also, given that Chávez and Bolivian President Evo Morales are expected to be at the summit, hopefully fists will be unclenched, handshakes made, and better relationships begun.
Ext #2 – Alt Cause
One policy not key – rebuilding requires multiple steps the aff doesn’t do – asia proves
Bush, 9 (Richard, Director of Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, “On the Eve of Obama's Inauguration: American Soft Power in Asia”, January 2009, gs.edu/opinions/2009/01_asia_bush.aspx)
Nor will it be easy or quick to restore the United States to a position where Asian countries will be inclined to accept U.S. proposals on major issues out of respect for what America is and what it has done. When, for example, will Asian economic leaders listen to—much less take—American advice on financial liberalization after the sub-prime mortgage scandal, the credit freeze, and the government takeover of American financial institutions? How long after Abu Ghraib will it be before the Chinese government takes seriously the entreaties of U.S. diplomats that it end torture? Creating influence through attraction is not going to be easy for a while. It will take time to regain the legitimacy to lead through soft power, which is the best way to lead. The United States therefore needs to consider what should be done to restore its soft power. Whether we want to do so is another question that bears on the question of domestic support. I would argue that our stakes in the stability and prosperity of the global system are still too great for us to not play a role in future agenda-setting, whatever other countries do. Some of the steps for rebuilding soft power have nothing to do with Asia, since the creation of our soft-power deficit was the result of policies outside the region. As Ashley Tellis says, it has to do with redefining the U.S. role in the world. It has to do with rebuilding our national strength and competitiveness, particularly economic. It has to do with reaffirming our core values in a meaningful way, particular those that were called into question by the conduct of the war in Iraq. It includes having a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” that is, accepting that the views of other states will set limits on U.S. action even as we seek to shape those views in an active way. In that regard, two capabilities of the U.S. government are badly in need of renovation. The first is classical diplomacy, instead of the current mode of “stating positions and then restating positions.” The second is public diplomacy, instead of “a pedestrian propaganda mill that is neither effective nor credible.”[11] With respect to Asia, rebuilding our soft power first of all means showing up. On the one hand, senior officials up to and including the president should make every effort to attend those meetings in Asia that their counterparts attend. Absence is taken as a sign disrespect. On the other hand, the practice of delegating key responsibilities for North Korea negotiations to the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs has meant that that person has had to rely on his subordinates to conduct diplomacy with all other East Asian countries. The new administration should end the practice. Second, we have to do a lot of listening to Asian governments, elites, and publics. Moreover, we have to be willing to reshape our understanding of East Asian realities and our resulting policies based on what we hear. Third, we need to participate more actively in the building of Asian regional architecture, showing we take it seriously but that we do not expect Asians to accept our solutions without question. We should certainly not reject or denigrate Asian nations’ image of themselves because that is the driver of nationalism. Specifically, with respect to the East Asian Summit, Washington should strongly consider signing the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, which is a prerequisite for participation in the summit. Fourth, we need to begin working vigorously and creatively on transnational issues like climate change to demonstrate that we are serious about being a leading part of the solution. Finally, the principal item on the East Asian agenda is adjusting to the revival of China as a great power. That is a big challenge and a big subject. It is a challenge faced by the United States and its friends and allies in Asia, who will look to Washington for guidance if they have confidence in our good sense. In this regard, we should certainly not assume that China will be our adversary, for if we do it will certainly become our adversary in its reaction to what it perceives as our hostility. By and large, China has acted as a status quo power thus far, and should be encouraged to continue to do so. Yet China’s conclusions regarding American intentions (and Japanese intentions, and so on) will be shaped by interactions on specific issues like Taiwan and North Korea. American, Japanese, and others’ perceptions of China’s intentions will be shaped in the same way. How we conduct those interactions will go a long way to determining what kind of great power China will be. In East Asia, American soft power is a resource that is depleted but not exhausted. It can be replenished, and our postwar record, the goodwill of friends in the region, and the special character of the 2008 presidential election create a basis on which to restore it. It is a strategic opportunity that should not be missed.
Cuba Policy
Cynthia McClintock 2/11/09 a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is a professor of political science and international affairs at
Current U.S. policies toward Cuba, drug control, and immigration have been in place for 20 years or more, and it's now very clear that they have failed. These policies are unwelcome in Latin America, where they are considered anachronisms, maintained only because they are responses to U.S. domestic politics. Given the robust agreement within the Democratic Party on the need for change in these policies, it's appropriate that they be the Obama administration's top priorities in the region. For nearly half a century, the U.S. has maintained a trade embargo and other sanctions against Cuba, with the expressed goal of a democratic transition on the island. Clearly, this hasn't happened. For decades, U.S. sanctions have been overwhelmingly repudiated in the United Nations and other forums. Every other government in the hemisphere has diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba.
US Soft Power low since Iraq
Taylor, 9 (Richard, security editor for The Guardian,“Insufficient Force in Afghanistan”, June 23, 2009, The Guardian, )
It is possible defence chiefs have been pushing for more troops to be deployed in Afghanistan partly out of concern for the reputation of Britain's armed forces, seriously dented among the US military after Iraq. "Credibility," Dannatt pointedly remarked in a speech at Chatham House last month, was "linked to the vital currency of reputation. And in this respect there is recognition that our national and military reputation and credibility, unfairly or not, have been called into question at several levels in the eyes of our most important ally as a result of some aspects of the Iraq campaign." He added: "Taking steps to restore this credibility will be pivotal - and Afghanistan provides an opportunity."
Ext #3 – Hard Power Key
Hard Power outweighs and is key to soft power
Bremmer, 9 (Ian, president of Eurasia Group, “Obama or not, U.S. still needs hard power”, 2/9/09, posts/2009/02/09/the_durable_value_of _hard_power)
But you don't have to be a hawk to believe that, over the longer term, it's the country's hard power advantages that will ensure that America remains indispensable for the world's political and economic stability -- even as its soft power loses some of its appeal relative to that of other states. The erosion of the U.S. soft power advantage has already begun. The global financial crisis has inflicted a lot of damage on the American argument that unfettered capitalism is the best model for steady economic expansion. The rise of "state capitalism," as practiced in China, Russia, the Persian Gulf states and several other places, has created an attractive alternative. Breakout growth over the past several years in several emerging market countries ensures that American brands now share shelf space around the world with products made in dozens of developing states. The icons of American popular culture, central to U.S. soft power appeal, now share stage and screen with celebrities from a growing number of other countries. The Bush administration's unpopularity in much of the world has merely added momentum to these trends. America's hard power advantages have their limitations, as well, but their value is less subject to the ebbs and flows of popular opinion and cultural attraction. The United States now spends more on its military than every other nation in the world combined. For all the fear in Washington (and elsewhere) that China's military spending continues to grow and that Russian foreign policy has become more aggressive, U.S. military spending outpaces China's by almost ten to one and Russia's by about 25 to one. It will be decades before any other state can afford to challenge the balance of global military power-assuming that any becomes willing to accept the costs and risks that come with global ambitions. U.S. military strength will remain useful for the next several decades -- not only for the waging of wars and not just for Americans. Governments around the world that depend on the import of oil and natural gas to fuel their economies are hard at work crafting plans for a technological transition toward a more diversified energy mix. But that's a long-term process. For the next several years, the world's oil and gas will continue to come from unstable (and potentially unstable) parts of the world -- the Middle East, the Caspian Sea basin, West Africa, etc. Only the United States has a global naval presence. That's why other countries will continue to count on Washington to protect the transit of all this oil and gas from threats like terrorist attack and even piracy. Why should China or India accept the costs and risks that go with safeguarding the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important energy bottleneck, when America will do it for them? That gives U.S. policymakers leverage they wouldn't otherwise have with their counterparts in other governments. The U.S. provision of global public goods will also extend to new military challenges. As Iran and others master uranium enrichment technology, their nuclear clout may provoke neighboring states toward even greater reliance on Washington as guarantor of regional security and stability. That's not a bad thing if it helps ease the fears and pressures that might otherwise beget a nuclear arms race. As several Eastern European governments worry over the implications of Russia's increasingly belligerent approach toward some of its neighbors -- an anxiety heightened by Europe's dependence on Russian natural gas, Moscow's demonstrated willingness to turn off the taps, and last August's war with Georgia -- they'll turn to a U.S.-led NATO to ease their fears. The U.S. military will also remain an essential weapon in America's soft power arsenal -- by delivering relief to victims of natural disasters abroad, for example. An Obama administration grappling with a financial crisis and a hard landing of the U.S. economy can't draw on American military resources as recent presidents have done. But a willingness to balance soft power with a credible promise to continue to provide global public goods -- and to defend US security with force where necessary -- will ensure that America remains an indispensable nation for many years to come.
US Hard Power key to Soft Power—China proves
Holmes, 9 (Kim, Former Assistant Secretary of State, “THE IMPORTANCE OF HARD POWER”, June 12, 2009, States News Service, Lexis)
For America to be an effective leader and arbiter of the international order, it must be willing to maintain a world-class military. That requires resources: spending, on average, no less than 4 percent of the nation's gross domestic product on defense. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's next proposed defense budget and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates' vision for "rebalancing" the military are drastically disconnected from the broad range of strategic priorities that a superpower like the United States must influence and achieve. If our country allows its hard power to wane, our leaders will lose crucial diplomatic clout. This is already on display in the western Pacific Ocean, where America's ability to hedge against the growing ambitions of a rising China is being called into question by some of our key Asian allies. Recently, Australia released a defense white paper concerned primarily with the potential decline of U.S. military primacy and its implications for Australian security and stability in the Asia-Pacific. These developments are anything but reassuring. The ability of the United States to reassure friends, deter competitors, coerce belligerent states and defeat enemies does not rest on the strength of our political leaders' commitment to diplomacy; it rests on the foundation of a powerful military. The United States can succeed in advancing its priorities by diplomatic means only so long as it retains a "big stick." Only by building a full-spectrum military force can America reassure its many friends and allies and count on their future support. The next British leader - and the rest of our allies - need to know they can count on the U.S. to intervene on their behalf any time, anywhere it has to. That will require hard power, not just soft, diplomatic words murmured whilst strolling serenely along "Obama Enhanced Coverage Linking Obama -Search using Biographies Plus News News, Most Recent 60 Days Beach."
AT: Soil Erosion 1/2
1. No impact to soil erosion – it stays local
Ruttan in ’99 (Vernon, Prof. Emeritus Econ. And Applied Econ. @ U. Minnesota, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “The transition to agricultural sustainability”, 96:5960-5967, May, )
The fact that the data is so limited should not be taken to suggest that soil erosion is not a serious problem. But it should induce some caution in accepting some of the more dramatic pronouncements about the inability of to sustain agricultural production (32). The impact of human-induced soil degradation and loss is not evenly distributed across agroclimatic regions, either in developed or developing countries. What I do feel comfortable in concluding is that the impacts on the resource base and on regional economies from soil erosion and degradation are local rather than global. It is unlikely that soil degradation and erosion will emerge as important threats to the world food supply in the foreseeable future. Where soil erosion does represent a significant threat to the resource and the economic base of an area, the gains from implementation of the technical and institutional changes necessary to reclaim degraded soil resources, or at least to prevent further degradation, can be quite substantial.
2. Soil erosion is decreasing - newest studies prove
US Fed News in ‘7 (“NATIONAL RESOURCES INVENTORY DATA SHOWS PROGRESS IN ILLINOIS SOIL CONSERVATION EFFORTS”, 1-30, L/N)
It isn't report card season right now for kids, but it is for Illinois agricultural landowners interested in seeing how they measure up in land use trends and environmental accomplishments. Data gathered through USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service's (NRCS) and the National Resources Inventory (NRI) has been released. While new data does not paint a complete picture it does indicate that private landowners across Illinois continue to make positive strides in the protection of soil and water resources. NRI is a statistical survey of natural resource conditions and trends on non-Federal land in the U.S. Until this latest release, NRI data was conducted only every five years and did not gather state-specific data. For years, NRI data was collected and analyzed based on twelve incredibly large watersheds that span Northern America. The Major River Basin that contains Illinois is called the Souris-Red-Rainy/Upper Mississippi Watershed. On this scale, Illinois' data is averaged with that of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota and North Dakota. Now NRI has been revamped. It gathers and compares annual data samples at both the large major river basin level and the state level. "This state data will really help state and federal decision-makers as well as private landowners get a clear picture of what's going on here at home," says NRCS' Resource Inventory Specialist James Johnson. Since this is the first year with new data collection standards, the latest data stands alone; there is nothing to compare it to. "What this means is that we can't appreciate the true value of this new NRI data until we see the next set of numbers. Only then can we actually calculate gains, losses, or steady activity occurring on the land. The next data set will be released late in 2007," says Johnson. By looking at the large watershed scale data, NRCS sees continued and steady declines in sheet and rill erosion on cropland. The entire watershed is down to an average loss of 3.0 tons of soil per acre per year. Similar 1982 data was 4.4 tons per acre per year. NRCS State Conservationist Bill Gradle explains that data and improvements in erosion control clearly demonstrate the impact that the initial provisions of the 1985 Farm Bill have had on Illinois' section of the nation. "The next data set will give us an even clearer picture of what the 1996 Farm Bill and landowner stewardship efforts have had on the state of our state," adds Gradle. Illinois Land Use Profile - 2003 Data Cropland: 23,980,500 acres Pasture: 2,254,000 acres Forestland: 3,949,300 acres Developed/Urban: 3,347,300 acres Water: 725,800 acres Total Surface Area: 36,058,700 acres Sheet & Rill Erosion: 4.0 tons/acre/year Key findings: * Between 1982 and 2003, soil erosion on U.S. cropland decreased 43%. * Total erosion amounts continue to decline across the nation with the most significant reductions in the Missouri and the Souris-Red-Rainy/Upper Mississippi Major River Basins. * In 1982 40% of all cropland was eroding above soil loss tolerance rates ("T") but by 2003, only 28% of all cropland was above "T." * Highly Erodible Land (HEL) cropland acres eroding above "T" declined 35% between 1982 and 2003. * Non-HEL cropland acres eroding above T decreased 45% between 1982 and 2003. Estimates provided only represent 2003 conditions and cannot be used to evaluate change from previous inventory cycles. State-level change estimates and associated trending information from the 2003 Annual NRI will be available for release late winter 2007. "Stay tuned for the next round of data," adds Johnson. "I expect to see more positive data and evidence of all the good conservation solutions that Illinois producers put on the ground. Many private landowners here continue to demonstrate a true commitment to soil and water resources and I expect the next data set will confirm that their commitment is solid and that it continues to grow," adds Johnson.
3. Alt causes to soil erosion--
A. Deforestation
PA in ‘8 (Public Agenda, Selorm Amevor, “NEWMONT GETS GREEN LIGHT TO MINE IN FOREST”, 6-13, L/N)
The Minister noted that Africa's enormous forests resources are coming under increasing pressure resulting in deforestation which has led to a significant loss of soil fertility, increased soil erosion, water depletion, soil water pollution and loss of biodiversity.
B. Ethanol
in ‘7 (Les Christie, “Ethanol fuels rural renaissance”, 3-8, L/N)
There are, however, practical limitations with ethanol production that could eventually put a damper on the party, according to Dave Pimentel, a Cornell University agronomist. "I wish ethanol production was a boon to the nation and the environment; it is not," he says. Even if every grain of corn went into ethanol production, it would still not make the United States oil independent, he notes. "Look at it on a per-gallon basis," says Pimentel. "Our latest study indicates it takes 40 percent more fossil fuel energy to produce ethanol than it creates." Fossil fuels run farm and factory machinery, provide heat for the factories and transport ethanol to distant markets. Pimentel says that corn, the No. 1 ethanol crop in the United States, requires more herbicides and insecticides to grow, needs large amounts of fertilizer and is responsible for more soil erosion than any other U.S. crop. Furthermore, many of the areas benefiting most from ethanol production face water shortages; it takes 1,700 gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol, according to Pimentel.
C. Cows
Post-Standard in ‘7 (“GOING MEATLESS COULD HELP FEED OTHERS IN THE WORLD”, 4-18, L/N)
Remember 250 pounds isn't even an entire cow! With an exponentially growing population, the 3.7 billion people that are malnourished in this world would probably appreciate that food. Also, raising cattle causes soil erosion and soil blows away, this causes farmland to degrade and it must be abandoned because it is useless to grow any desired or good crop there. Another tidbit: 10 million hectares of farmland per year are abandoned because of soil erosion; and because cattle is a large cause, it is another benefit to not eating or reducing your meat consumption.
AT: Soil Erosion 2/2
4. Pollution decreases are solving
Kaleita in ‘7 (Amy, Env’l. Studies Fellow @ Pacific Research Institute and Assistant Prof. Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering @ Iowa State U., “An Earth Day Meditation: Inconvenient Truths About Environmental Improvements”, 4-22, )
According to the latest edition of the Natural Resources Inventory from the U.S. Department of Agriculture soil erosion
dropped by 43 percent between 1982 and 2003 -- a remarkable improvement. In 2003, 72 percent of land was eroding at rates below the tolerable level for that area, compared to only 60 percent in 1982. Decreasing erosion rates generally mean improved soil quality and lower water pollution due to sediments.
5. GM crops solve
Fedoroff 08 (2/16. Nina, Special Advisory for Science and Technology @ US Department of State, States News Service, “AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS) PLENARY LECTURE”, L/N)
From 1996 through 2006, the total area planted in GM crops increased 60-fold, today exceeding 100 million hectares in 22 countries. The use of GM or biotech crops has increased yields, decreased pesticide use, and promoted no-till agriculture, markedly decreasing soil erosion. The fears that their widespread use would lead to the rapid development of Bt-resistance in insects and wipe out Monarch butterflies have not been realized. To date, the only unforseen outcomes of their use have been positive: Bt corn shows much lower levels of contamination with mycotoxins, which can be lethal, because the fungi that produce them follow the boring insects into the corn. No insects, no fungi, no mycotoxins.
6. No impact --- tech solves.
Bjørn Lomborg, 2001. Adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School. The Skeptical Environmentalist, p. 106.
For the US it is estimated that the total effect of soil erosion over the next hundred years will be about 3 percent. “By comparison with yield gains expected from advances in technology, the 3 percent erosion-induced loss is trivial.” Consequently, soil erosion may be a local problem and will often be a consequence of poverty, but the present evidence does not seem to indicate that soil erosion will to any significant degree affect our global food production, since its effects both up till now have been and in the future and expected to be heavily outweighed by the vast increase in food productivity.
Ext #2 – Erosion Decreasing
Soil erosion decreasing --- industrial techniques reduce tillage.
Dennis T. Avery, 1/20/2004. Director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues. “Welcoming Weeds Back to Civilization,” Hudson Institute, .
We can’t ban all weed-control weapons and still eat. I’ve visited “no weed control” test plots in agricultural experiment stations where I couldn’t find the crop plants. The weeds had stolen the moisture and soil nutrients, and ultimately outgrown the crop plants so they could steal all the sunshine. Weeds can easily cut crop yields in half—and we’re already farming half the world’s land that is not covered by deserts or glaciers. In fact, we can’t ban weed controls and still have playgrounds, parks, and safe neighborhoods. The city of Edmonton in Canada is considering a total ban on chemical weed killers, but the city park that’s been chemical-free since 1994 is unusable because of weeds. Some are big, some are poisonous; all are plants in the wrong places. Having started my own career in weed control at about age 5 in my family’s huge vegetable garden, I can assure you that there is no non-chemical way to control weeds without courting back problems. If you’ve ever used even a long-handled hoe, you know it can’t be used while standing up. Upright, your arms have little power, so you can’t slice through the soil or cut through tough weed stems. Upright, your hands have little control of the blade, so you may slice off your vegetables or flowers instead of the pigweed. One anti-pesticide website notes that using some herbicides exposes our kids to “growth hormones.” But they are growth hormones for plants, not people. The anti-pesticide websites scream that the weed-killers are “poison.” Virtually everything is a poison at high doses, including water, salt, and sunlight: but, the tiny residues allowed by government regulators are no health threat to kids, pets or anything else except targeted weeds and pests. Leonard Gianessi of the National Center for Food and Agriculture Policy says that if we used only cultivation and hand-weeding, the cost of controlling weeds would rise by $8 billion per year, and the additional crop losses would cost $13 billion. And then there’s soil erosion. When we used “bare earth farming” in 1938, our soil erosion losses totaled nearly 4 billion tons per year, says Gianessi. Today, soil erosion losses are only one billion tons—thanks in large part to herbicides that make it possible to disc or no-till instead of plowing and hoeing.
AT: South Asian Prolif
No impact to South Asian prolif – deterrence checks
Rajesh M. Basrur and Stephen Phillip Cohen, November 2002 [Rajesh M. Barur and Stephen Phillip Cohen, Director of the Centre for Global Studies in Mumbai, India, November 2002, “Bombs in Search of a Mission: India’s Uncertain Future”]
Many expert observers of India’s nuclear trajectory would agree on the following projection. There will be no breakthrough in India-Pakistan relations, but no war either. The future will see frequent crises, but nuclear deterrence will remain robust and escalation to nuclear war inhibited. There will be no significant change in the course of the India- China relationship. A nuclear dyad will gradually emerge, but it will be a stable one. China will continue to balance India by providing nuclear support to Pakistan. The global balance of power and the strategic relationships among the major players will remain substantially the same. There will be no serious rivalry or tensions among the big three the United States, Russia and China. In short, there will be no dramatic systemic impact on regional nuclear dynamics. Though the United States will retain an interest in cultivating long-term relationships with India and Pakistan, it will not intervene directly in the region, except during crises when Washington will play the role of crisis-manager. All of the region’s nuclear players, India, China, and Pakistan will remain internally stable. There will be no major change in the internal politics of any one of them that causes disequilibrium in the regional strategic relationships. There will be a gradual increase in the numbers of nuclear weapons possessed by India and Pakistan, and limited deployment of these weapons may occur. India and Pakistan may move to deploy mobile launchers. In 20 years, it is conceivable that India will have developed a sea-based deterrent, perhaps mounted on a surface vessel. China will have a relatively more robust arsenal, but it will not be seen as threatening by India. India’s and Pakistan’s command and control arrangements will be somewhat better than they are now, presumably keeping up with the slow accretion of numbers and increased dispersion of their nuclear forces. There will be little likelihood of a preemptive attack by India against Pakistan or against India by Pakistan or China, in part because the numbers will make such an attack difficult, and in part because of mobile basing. In the India-Pakistan case, both sides will be worried about miscalculations. Also, as the numbers increase, the possibility of significant fallout on one’s own country from even a successful attack will increase. Both factors thus enhance self-deterrence. There will be continued uncertainty and ambiguity over different escalation scenarios. It will remain unclear to outside analysts as to where Pakistani (or Indian) red lines are drawn, i.e., where a provocation crosses a certain threshold that triggers a nuclear response. Indeed, it is likely to remain unclear to Indian and Pakistani policymakers themselves, and both sides will continue to rely on ambiguity, coupled with verbal threats, to enhance deterrence.
AT: South China Sea War
South China Sea war won’t escalate
Scobell, phd, strategic studies institute, 01 [ Dr, Andrew, “The Rise of China: Security Implications”, ]
The South China Sea presents a very different kind of flashpoint --one quite unlikely to be the location of a major conflict. Most of the disputed islands there are uninhabited and remote, and rival claimants to the area all have very limited power projection capabilities. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei are among the states that claim some or all of the reefs, islets, and atolls that dot the area. China has the largest and most insistent claim. Beijing is very concerned with the sea lanes of communication and the natural resources of the region. China is increasingly dependent on Middle East oil that is shipped via the Strait of Malacca and through the South China Sea. Moreover, China is keen on tapping the fisheries and any energy reserves discovered in the area. Other nonmilitary security threats to the area are piracy--some estimates put about half of the world's pirates operating in the region. Environmental issues could exacerbate regional tensions and possibly lead to limited hostilities, but these are unlikely to escalate or directly involve the United States in a war.
AT: South Korean Diplomacy
Despite hiccups, South Korean diplomacy is effective now
Chapman 05. Editor of the Midweek. (Don Chapman, “Why the World Needs South Korea Diplomacy to Succeed,” Midweek, August 1, 2005, )
South Korea Diplomacy good now, even with difficult North Korea. Chapman 2005A person we can refer to only as a “very high ranking official at the U.S. embassy” told us, “South Koreans are very highly skilled at diplomacy.” And certainly he’s right — through diplomacy the South has been able to bring Kim Jung-Il back to the bargaining table at the Six-Party Talks. This has been no easy task in dealing with a neighbor, a cousin, which a Korea expert at Camp Smith refers to as a “mafia regime” for it’s involvement in the trafficking of humans, drugs and arms, and the production of counterfeit currencies (at which it excels). But South Korea diplomacy has achieved what many though impossible, not just bringing the North back to the table, but also creating for the first time since 1945 a growing sense of trust on the Korean Peninsula. Perhaps there’s no greater sign of Korea’s diplomacy potential than the behind-the-scenes work of Park Sun-Won, senior director of the Office of Strategic Planning at the National Security Office. The other gentleman we met who would be part of the Six-Party Talks, he briefed us at the Blue House — South Korea’s White House — press center. Although Mr. Park was too modest to say so, he was the one who, before his Foreign Secretary met with Kim Jong-Il, asked him to urge the North’s dictator to refer to President Bush for the first time as “Mr. Bush.” Similarly, he suggested to President Roh Moo-hyun that during his June visit to Washington he ask Bush and Vice President Cheney to tone down the hawkish axis-of-evil rhetoric. Both Bush and Kim followed through, and thus were both lured back to the Six-Party Talks and — perhaps more important — to bilateral talks behind the scenes. On such small building blocks can a peace be constructed. And that is why I think diplomacy could be the greatest export of the “Korean Wave” — far more important than all the Korean TV soaps and dramas, more than all the cool technology of Samsung. One day, I hope, the world will look back from the perspective of a unified, democratic Korea and remember South Korean diplomacy as one of the positive forces for peace in the early 21st Century. It certainly has that potential — one carrot, one stick, one changed POV at a time.
AT: South Korean Econ
South Korean economy is reactive to global trends- proves it’s not a front runner
Business and Technology Report 10 [May 1, ]
Q: What are the important problems the Korean economy is facing today and what are your solutions to those problems? A: South Korea is an export-based economy. When the international market isn't good, our exports decrease, but when the international market is vitalized, our exports also increase. So we need to make some changes to the export-based economy. The international market is in a period of recovery, so it wouldn't be a great hardship for us to change our export-based economy, however, in order for South Korea to be of help to the international economic recovery, we need to develop our domestic market as well. We need a new economic policy that can create a harmonious balance between our export-based economy and our domestic economy.
South Korean economy resilient- strongest Asian tiger
Roach and Lam 10 [Stephen, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia Lam, Korea and Taiwan Economist at Morgan Stanley April 27, The Business Times Singapore, Lexis]
SOUTH Korea sailed through the 2008-09 financial crisis with remarkable aplomb. Despite its heavy reliance on exports, South Korea registered only a single-sequential quarterly decline in real GDP during the global downturn, thus avoiding full-fledged recession. By the third quarter of 2009, South Korean growth had bounced back to nearly 3 per cent while unemployment - which even in the worst of the crisis never rose more than a single percentage point - had already begun to ease. Indeed, it took barely three quarters for South Korea's production and consumption to regain pre-crisis levels. Among Asia's 'tiger-economies' South Korea suffered least from the crisis and recovered the most rapidly. Why was the South Korean economy so resilient? Because its businesses and government leaders recognised the opportunity this crisis presented. The familiar rap on South Korea is that its economy is 'stuck in the middle', trapped between an advanced Japan and a rising China. South Korea's great dilemma - or so it's often said - is that it falls short of Japan on quality and can't hope to match China on price. And yet South Korean producers' performance in the wake of the financial crisis suggests the middle ground may offer advantages. In the post-crisis era, consumers the world over have turned cautious. The new mantra is value for money. South Korean companies are well positioned to capitalise on that new ethos with products that optimise the quality and price trade-off. South Korean exporters have, in fact, gained market share during the crisis. South Korea's global market share in phone handsets, for example, rose to 33 per cent in the third quarter of 2009, from 22 per cent at the end of 2007. In fact, in the US market alone, South Korean mobile phones are currently taking up almost 50 per cent of the market share. Its LCD-TV global market share also jumped to 37 per cent in 2009, from 27 per cent at the end of 2007, and it will soon replace Japan as the world's number-one LCD-TV supplier. South Korea's automobile global market share climbed to 9 per cent in the third quarter of 2009, from 6.5 per cent in the final period of 2007.
South Korean government deals effectively with econ crisis.
Roach and Lam 5/10 (Stephen and Sharon, writers for the Joong Ang Daily, [] AD: 6/22/10)JM
South Korea sailed through the 2008-09 financial crisis with remarkable aplomb. Despite its heavy reliance on exports, South Korea registered only a single sequential quarterly decline in real GDP during the global downturn, thus avoiding full-fledged recession. By the third quarter of 2009, South Korean growth had bounced back to nearly 3 percent while unemployment - which even in the worst of the crisis never rose more than a single percentage point - had already begun to ease. Indeed, it took barely three quarters for South Korea’s production and consumption to regain pre-crisis levels. Among Asia’s “tiger economies,” South Korea suffered least from the crisis and recovered the most rapidly. Why was the South Korean economy so resilient? Because its businesses and government leaders recognized the opportunity this crisis presented. The familiar rap on South Korea is that its economy is “stuck in the middle,” trapped between an advanced Japan and a rising China. South Korea’s great dilemma - or so it’s often said - is that it falls short of Japan on quality and can’t hope to match China on price.
AT: South Korea Prolif
South Korea won’t go nuclear. Public opposition will force government to find other solutions..
Yi ‘9 (Kiho, Dir. Nautilus Institute of Seoul and Prof. – Hanshin U., The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “The North Korean nuclear test: The South Korean reaction,” 6-5, )
But back to the domestic response in South Korea. Like the South Korean public, other than the two hours immediately following the test, the South Korean stock market remained pretty much unaffected by Pyongyang's actions last week. The country's most important investors seemed to dismiss the idea of a war between the North and South as unlikely, despite the North's rhetoric. As for Seoul's intellectual elite, they have made many political statements this week, but none of them involve North Korea. Instead, these statements involve Lee Myung-bak, as many professors at the country's major universities want him to apologize for prosecuting Roh and to support the basic rights of expression that make the South a democracy. A few statements from domestic civil society organizations did request that North Korea stop its nuclear program, but that was about it in terms of public outcry. Politically, the response has been more heated. Some members of the South Korean Parliament have seriously raised the idea of Seoul pursuing its own nuclear capability. Others want to discuss what options the South Korean government should take if the country's leaders decide the U.S. nuclear umbrella isn't enough to keep Seoul safe. But again, the South Korean people seem opposed to such actions. According to a recent poll done by Mono Research, 67 percent of everyday South Koreans said that Seoul needs to find a peaceful way in which to solve the North Korean nuclear crisis; only 25 percent answered that South Korea should take a strong stand against North Korean military provocations. So I am hopeful that such popular support for peace will lead to a practical process of denuclearization and disarmament on the Korean Peninsula.
AT: Space Colonization
1. Space Colonization is time consuming and dangerous.
Donald F Robertson, space industry journalist, 3/06,
Two largely unquestioned assumptions long ago took root within the space community. As we prepare to voyage back to Earth's Moon and on to Mars, it is time to question them both. The first assumption is that exploring the Moon, Mars, or any part of the solar system, can be accomplished in a generation or two and with limited loss of life. The second is that we can use robots to successfully understand another world. Both assumptions are almost certainly wrong, yet many important elements of our civil space program are based on one or both of them being correct. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, even within the space community most people don't have a clue how "mind-boggingly big space really is." Most of the major worlds in the solar system have surface areas at least as large as terrestrial continents -- a few are much larger -- and every one of them is unremittingly hostile to human life.Learning to travel confidently through former President John F. Kennedy's "this new ocean" will be difficult, expensive, time-consumingand dangerous.
2. Space Colonization is too expensive to do in a recession era especially when phase one of the plan will cost trillions of dollars.
3. The task is too hard for now because of economic and technical difficulties
Donald F Robertson, space industry journalist, 3/06,
Mr. Kennedy's rhetoric was more accurate than he probably knew. The only remotely comparable task humanity has faced was learning to travel across our world's oceans. We take trans-oceanic travel for granted, but getting from Neolithic boats to modern freighters cost humanity well over 10,000 years of hard work and uncounted lives. Even today, hundreds of people die in shipping accidents every year. We and our woefully inadequate chemical rockets are like Stone Age tribes folk preparing to cast off in canoes, reaching for barely visible islands over a freezing, storm-tossed, North Atlantic. The salient fact is, while it was much more difficult than most people care to remember, we did learn to ply the oceans, even arctic ones. Space is harder still, but many of the problems are similar: the environment is alien and deadly and most supplies must be carried along. Like our Neolithic friends, we can see our destinations in the distance. With Apollo, we visited the closest island and a series of progressively more sophisticated space stations has demonstrated long-term survival in the shoals close to home. The task may be far harder than we imagine, but it is not impossible.
4. Five alt causalities to space colonization
Pollack, 5 (Susan W., Ms. Pollack graduated as a member of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces class of 2005. Some of her assignments prior to attending ICAF include contracts specialist at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command and deputy director of the acquisition support cadre at the Missile Defense Agency. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in international relations from Saint Joseph’s University and has completed the Advanced Program Management Course at the Defense Systems Management College., THE FUTURE OF OUR NATION’S SPACE INDUSTRY WORKFORCE, bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA449454&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf)
Second, early outreach programs are vital to developing and sustaining a knowledgeable workforce. The Council on Competitiveness notes that we lose our future scientists and engineers around the junior high school years. 90 Successful outreach initiatives which expose children to the STEM subjects can help to reverse this trend. DoD implements a Starbase program which provides students in K-12 with a week of math and science based simulations and experiments in space-related fields. 91 The National Aeronautics and Space Administration educational outreach program, “Inspiring the Next Generation of Explorers”, influences youths to pursue science and engineering educational opportunities. The Boeing Company’s Summer Science Camp has successfully led students to pursue careers in science and engineering. 92 Third, the Federal government should lift the visa restrictions for foreign students applying to enter the US. Post 9/11 immigration controls have resulted in a 32 percent drop in the number of international student applications in 2004. 93 Foreign students graduating from US universities with degrees in science and engineering have been an important asset in our industry workforce and have contributed to basic science and new innovations. One-third of today’s US workforce of scientists and engineers were born outside the US 94 The challenge regarding foreign students is to find a balance between scientific exploration and security. 95 Fourth, Congress should resist R&D cuts proposed in the President’s FY 2006 budget. Federally-funded research has long been a significant factor in US patent productivity and economic strength. 96 As the government tries to reduce its budget deficits, R&D programs in mathematics and engineering are being reduced. 97 There is a real disconnect between the Administration’s plans for the new space exploration initiative, and the failure to fund basic R&D programs. These programs motivate STEM talent and lead to the innovation our space industry needs for competitive advantage. Congress should also assist entrepreneurs who have plans to build space components, but do not have the capital to go from concept to delivery. Fifth, the nation desperately needs to create an educational system of S&T schools. At a minimum, we should be offering and requiring advanced Earth and space science courses at the middle and high school levels while helping students integrate learning into future careers. Sixth, sufficient training for teachers is critical since they are the ones who inspire and motivate our nation’s children to dream and learn. President Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recently released a report which recommends improving our country’s K-12 education to ensure future innovation and improve the nation’s STEM capabilities
AT: Space Junk
Debris is inevitable and has no impact.
Dinerman 7 (Taylor. "Sticky airbags and grapples: kinetic ASATs without the debris." The Space Review. January 22, 2007, )KM
Dangerous space debris is both man-made and natural, in the latter case in the form of micrometeoroids. Confusing the two is a great way to make the issue into more of a problem than it already is. The environment around Earth is certainly filled with space junk, but if this was as dangerous as has been claimed, spacecraft would be breaking up on an almost weekly basis. Space junk is a problem and always will be. The international agreements designed to mitigate the dangers have been useful, but cannot halt the creation of more debris any more than recycling laws halt the production of garbage. The trend has been moving in the right direction, at least until our Chinese friends decided to make a statement.
Tech solves the impact – weapons can be developed with anti-debris capabilities.
Dinerman 7 (Taylor. "Sticky airbags and grapples: kinetic ASATs without the debris." The Space Review. January 22, 2007, )KM
Fortunately, a few years ago a proposal was floated for as class of weapons that would destroy target spacecraft without directly creating any debris. This type of "co-orbital" ASAT would approach its target and envelop it with an airbag covered in a type of sticky substance. It would then fire a thruster so that the conjoined satellites would burn up in the atmosphere. If it worked as designed, no debris would be created. In practice it would be no easy task to design, test, and operate such a weapon, but it is not beyond the state of the art and would not create any debris. Figuring out what kind of sticky material is right for such a system would, by itself, be a fascinating project. The substance might have applications in other military and perhaps civil space systems. If the sticky airbag solution proves too difficult, the same goals might be reached using an ASAT equipped with grappling arms that would grasp the target before pushing down towards the atmosphere. The challenges of such a system are evident, not the least of which would be the need for some sort of decision-making software that would choose the best places to seize the enemy satellite during the final moments before contact.
AT: Space Militarization
1. Space Militarization is forbidden right now under the Outer Space Treaty
U.S. Department of State, Signed at Washington, London, Moscow, January 27, 1967
The Outer Space Treaty, as it is known, was the second of the so-called "nonarmament" treaties; its concepts and some of its provisions were modeled on its predecessor, the Antarctic Treaty. Like that Treaty it sought to prevent "a new form of colonial competition" and the possible damage that self-seeking exploitation might cause. In early 1957, even before the launching of Sputnik in October, developments in rocketry led the United States to propose international verification of the testing of space objects. The development of an inspection system for outer space was part of a Western proposal for partial disarmament put forward in August 1957. The Soviet Union, however, which was in the midst of testing its first ICBM and was about to orbit its first Earth satellite, did not accept these proposals. Between 1959 and 1962 the Western powers made a series of proposals to bar the use of outer space for military purposes. Their successive plans for general and complete disarmament included provisions to ban the orbiting and stationing in outer space of weapons of mass destruction. Addressing the General Assembly on September 22, 1960, President Eisenhower proposed that the principles of the Antarctic Treaty be applied to outer space and celestial bodies. Soviet plans for general and complete disarmament between 1960 and 1962 included provisions for ensuring the peaceful use of outer space. The Soviet Union, however, would not separate outer space from other disarmament issues, nor would it agree to restrict outer space to peaceful uses unless U.S. foreign bases at which short-range and medium-range missiles were stationed were eliminated also. The Western powers declined to accept the Soviet approach; the linkage, they held, would upset the military balance and weaken the security of the West. After the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Soviet Unions position changed. It ceased to link an agreement on outer space with the question of foreign bases. On September 19, 1963, Foreign Minister Gromyko told the General Assembly that the Soviet Union wished to conclude an agreement banning the orbiting of objects carrying nuclear weapons. Ambassador Stevenson stated that the United States had no intention of orbiting weapons of mass destruction, installing them on celestial bodies or stationing them in outer space. The General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution on October 17, 1963, welcoming the Soviet and U.S. statements and calling upon all states to refrain from introducing weapons of mass destruction into outer space. The United States supported the resolution, despite the absence of any provisions for verification; the capabilities of its space-tracking systems, it was estimated, were adequate for detecting launchings and devices in orbit. Seeking to sustain the momentum for arms control agreements, the United States in 1965 and 1966 pressed for a Treaty that would give further substance to the U.N. resolution. On June 16, 1966, both the United States and the Soviet Union submitted draft treaties. The U.S. draft dealt only with celestial bodies; the Soviet draft covered the whole outer space environment. The United States accepted the Soviet position on the scope of the Treaty, and by September agreement had been reached in discussions at Geneva on most Treaty provisions. Differences on the few remaining issues -- chiefly involving access to facilities on celestial bodies, reporting on space activities, and the use of military equipment and personnel in space exploration -- were satisfactorily resolved in private consultations during the General Assembly session by December. On the 19th of that month the General Assembly approved by acclamation a resolution commending the Treaty. It was opened for signature at Washington, London, and Moscow on January 27, 1967. On April 25 the Senate gave unanimous consent to its ratification, and the Treaty entered into force on October 10, 1967. The substance of the arms control provisions is in Article IV. This article restricts activities in two ways: First, it contains an undertaking not to place in orbit around the Earth, install on the moon or any other celestial body, or otherwise station in outer space, nuclear or any other weapons of mass destruction. Second, it limits the use of the moon and other celestial bodies exclusively to peaceful purposes and expressly prohibits their use for establishing military bases, installation, or fortifications; testing weapons of any kind; or conducting military maneuvers. After the Treaty entered into force, the United States and the Soviet Union collaborated in jointly planned and manned space enterprises.
2. Impossible – too expensive
Two of the biggest members of the Space Race don’t want space mil US actions Will face some serious beating.
Norman Polmar, analyst, historian, and author specializ-ing in naval and strategic issues, 2/08
Russia and China -- enemies for most of the Cold War -- have joined together to propose a new treaty to ban space weapons. The proposal comes a little more than one year after China demonstrated that it possessed an Anti-Satellite (ASAT) capability. Russia (at the time the Soviet Union) and the United States had earlier demonstrated the ability to destroy satellites in orbit. In January 2007, the Chinese employed an SC-19 ballistic missile to fire directly at and destroy an outdated Feng-Yun-1C weather satellite at an altitude of 527 miles above the earth. Two previous ASAT attempts by China may have been intentional "misses" for test purposes. Reportedly, at the time of those earlier missile launches the U.S. intelligence community believed that China was close to proving the ability to hit an orbiting satellite, but some officials were taken by surprise when the ASAT capability was demonstrated, creating a massive field of space debris. Now China has joined Russia in proposing a ban on all weapons in space. The proposal was voiced by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on 12 February at an international disarmament conference in Geneva. "Without preventing an arms race in space, international security will be wanting," he told the conference. "The task of preventing an arms race in space is on the conference's agenda. It's time ... to start serious practical work in this field," he said. The existing Outer Space Treaty of 1967 -- formally known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies -- bans the build-up or stockpile of weapons, including nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction in orbit, and their installation on the moon. But the treaty does not address the shooting down of satellites. (To date 98 countries are states-parties to the treaty, while another 28 have signed the treaty but have not yet completed ratification.) In calling for a ban of all types of weapons in space including ASAT systems, Lavrov explained, "Weapons deployment in space by one state will inevitably result in a chain reaction. And this, in turn, is fraught with a new spiral in the arms race both in space and on the earth." He also criticized the U.S. government's plan to expand the ballistic missile defense system into Europe: "We cannot but feel concerned over the situation where ... there are increasing efforts by the United States to deploy its global ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] system," Lavrov said. "The desire to acquire an anti-missile 'shield' while dismantling the 'sheath', where the nuclear 'sword' is kept is extremely dangerous," he added. The U.S. government has ongoing talks at this time with the leaders in Warsaw and Prague that are address a proposal to install ten ABM interceptor missiles in Poland and associated ABM radars in the Czech Republic. The Eastern European-based ABM components are being put forward by the United States to deter rogue states -- presumably Iran -- from attacking Europe with ballistic missiles. While many individuals and groups in the United States as well as Europe question the need for and effectiveness of an ABM system, the anti-satellite issue is of general interest to all virtually all parties. The massive and all-encompassing use of satellites for intelligence collection, missile launch warning, navigation (especially GPS), communications, and weather forecasting make them invaluable to civil and military activities on a continuous basis.
AT: Spratly Islands
1. South China Sea no longer matters – China’s strategy is non-aggressive and there’s no reason for them to care – no oil and gas
Bitzinger and Desker 08 Dean of the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies and Senior Fellow with the Military Studies Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University
(Richard and Barry, Why east asian war is unlikely Survival, Volume 50, Issue 6 December 2008 , pages 105 – 128)
Nowhere, perhaps, is this new 'play-nice' strategy and good-neighbour approach more tangible than in China's recent handling of the Spratly Islands dispute. From its supposed flashpoint status during the 1990s, the Spratlys have calmed down considerably, and today the status of the islands is 'no longer discussed as a major security concern'.20 To its credit, China has made a concerted effort not to let the South China Sea issue become a major domestic political football (unlike the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute with Japan), nor has it seized or occupied additional islands in the Spratlys since 1995. In particular, in 2002 Beijing and ASEAN agreed to a joint Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, which affirmed the intention of the signatories to peacefully resolve their territorial and jurisdictional disputes, to exercise self-restraint in the South China Sea and to avoid actions that would 'complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and stability', including refraining from further construction on the presently uninhabited islands. In addition, in March 2005 Beijing also signed bilateral agreements with the Philippines and Vietnam for the joint exploration for oil in areas of overlapping sovereignty claims. (At the same time, estimates of likely oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea have been revised downward considerably, so there may be much less to fight over than originally believed.) This is not to say that the Spratly Islands dispute has been settled once and for all (fishing rights, for example, will continue to be important). It does stand a much better chance of being resolved peacefully, however, and without adding to tensions or hostility between China and Southeast Asia.
2. No Spratlys war – destroys China’s economy and power
Lloyd's List 1995 ("Asean forecast", 11-15, L/N)
CHINA is unlikely to go to war over the Spratly Islands because it would bring disaster to its economy and enable rivals US and Japan to consolidate their power in the region, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) speakers said at a three-day, 12-nation workshop, predicting that their members would close ranks against China.
3. Existing agreements solve
PDI 08 (3/13, "SPRATLYS DEAL NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT FVR", L/N)
FORMER PRESIDENT FIDEL RAMOS Yesterday allayed fears over the governments joint oil exploration deal with China inthe Spratlys, saying bilateral and multilateral agreements have long been in place to ensure the peaceful resolution of border disputes. We should not panic... Because there is so much goodwill already built up among the claimants especially between China, who is the big power in this area, and the other claimants, Ramos said in an interview. After addressing an international forum on the Asean Charter, Ramos told reporters yesterday that the controversial Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking (JMSU) should not be a cause for concern since military superpower China would honor previous agreements made to ensure the non-violent resolution of lingering border questions on the Spratly islands.
4. China’s avoiding Spratlys conflict and disputes won’t esclate
Teves 08 (Catherine J., 10/5, News.Balita, “Chinese aggression over Spratlys far-fetched: expert observer,” )
A Beijing-based Filipino journalist believes Chinese aggression over internationally disputed Spratly Islands is unlikely. ”China doesn’t want these Spratlys to be the bone of contention in Asia,” said ABC News Beijing Bureau chief producer Chito Sta. Romana at Kapihan sa Sulo forum, noting the Chinese prefer to maintain good relations with neighboring countries which are also their trading partners. He said China will likely handle the Spratly issue by continuing to use its ‘soft power’ approach consisting of investing in and aiding its neighbors instead. ”The Chinese want to avoid conflict as much as possible –- they’d rather negotiate and exert influence,” he said. Sta. Romana expressed this view as concern on possible Chinese aggression over the Spratlys re-emerged amidst Congress’ discussions on the baseline bill that’ll define the country’s territorial limits. Government is aiming to include several of the islands as part of Philippine territory. Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, China and the Philippines are pushing for respective claims over the Spratlys, a group of islands in South China Sea. Studies indicating possible presence of oil and natural gas reserves in the area further heightened these countries’ claims. China, Asia’s former ‘Sleeping Dragon,’ has financial resources for investments and aid to other countries as Sta. Romana pointed out the economy there is growing, placing it fourth worldwide. He cited trade liberalization, tempered State control and the Chinese’s determination to achieve progress as the major factors that drive their country’s economy. ”That country’s already an economic super power, having the biggest foreign reserves amounting to some US$ 1.8 trillion,” he said. If China continues such growth, he said its economy by the mid-21st century will surpass that of the United States. Sta. Romana however noted China dislikes the super power tag. ”China doesn’t want to be a super power and that means it doesn’t want to have troops worldwide,” he said. Despite economic progress, Sta. Romana said China’s armed forces still lags behind US military power. (PNA)
Ext #3 – Agreements
Chinese expansionism decreasing – new SCS agreement
Straits Times, 08 (6/20, Chua Chin Hon, China Bureau Chief, "Dawn of new era in China's regional relations?; Beijing's new deals with Taipei and Tokyo point way towards resolving disputes with others", L/N)
BEIJING - IN THE space of about a week, China has reached two remarkable new agreements with neighbouring Japan and Taiwan in breakthroughs that would have seemed improbable a year ago. The first pact, which was inked when Taiwanese negotiators visited Beijing last week, allowed for weekend direct flights between China and Taiwan, as well as for more mainland tourists to visit the island. The second, announced simultaneously by officials in Beijing and Tokyo on Wednesday, called for the shelving of a territorial dispute in the East China Sea in favour of cooperation and joint exploration of natural gas resources there. In both cases, Beijing showed a surprising willingness to put aside complex and emotional disputes over territory and sovereignty despite the obvious risks of a nationalistic backlash. While the back-to-back timing of these two deals could be sheer coincidence, the message behind this public display of flexibility and pragmatism would surely not be lost on neighbouring countries, such as Vietnam and India, which have outstanding border or maritime disputes with China. Beijing and Hanoi have long been at odds over the Paracel and Spratly islands in the South China Sea, which are claimed by both countries. Their bitter war of words has shown signs of escalation in recent years, particularly following skirmishes in the area between their fishing boats and armed vessels. Analysts and Chinese officials now believe the Sino-Japanese agreement this week could point the way towards resolving this row between China and Vietnam. 'The China-Japan deal is an example of how we should resolve disputes with other countries, such as those in the South China Sea,' said Professor Shi Yinhong of People's University. 'It's completely unreasonable to give up on cooperation and joint development just because we can't fully resolve certain disputes at this point.' Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Wu Dawei suggested as much at a press conference yesterday, though he did not mention Vietnam directly. 'We also hope the practice (shown in the East China Sea agreement) will help resolve the maritime differences between different countries, as well as those between China and other countries,' he said. Mr Wu sounded a similarly optimistic note when he spoke about the border dispute with India, suggesting that it should not stand in the way of strategic cooperation between the two Asian giants. Both countries waged a brief war in 1962 over the border issue, which has dragged on despite 11 rounds of talks. In public, Chinese officials say little, if anything at all, about their border negotiations with India. But as the East China Sea agreement suggests, official silence may not necessarily suggest a lack of progress. Granted, the breakthroughs with Japan and Taiwan took place after a change in their respective governments in favour of one with a more China-friendly approach. But their history of enmity with China also cuts much deeper, particularly in the case of Japan, whose World War II conduct still angers many mainlanders. The fact that such major breakthroughs were achieved raises the prospect that China's disputes with 'less rancorous'' rivals, such as India and Vietnam, could be addressed more smoothly.
Ext #4 – No Excalation
Military activity in the Spratlys for decades and no escalate – 1988 battle proves
Dunnigan 08 (James, 10/22, Strategy Page, “Chinese Victory at Sea,” )
Called Taiping Island by the Taiwanese, Ita Aba is one of the largest of Spratly Islands, at about 120 acres (489,600 square meters). It has been in Taiwanese hands since the mid-1950s, and has largely been used as a way station for fishermen. The island is also claimed by the Vietnamese, who call it Thai Binh. Taiwan has long maintained a small military presence on the island, and the new air strip is meant to cement that control. Protests were made by Vietnam, which controls the largest group of islands, and the Philippines, which also claims Itu Aba island. The Vietnamese earlier refurbished an old South Vietnamese airstrip on Big Spratly Island. In 1988, China and Vietnam fought a naval battle, off the Spratly islands. The Chinese victory was followed by Chinese troops establishing garrisons on some of the islands. In 1992, Chinese marines landed on Da Lac reef, in the Spratly Islands. In 1995, Chinese marines occupied Mischief Reef, which was claimed by the Philippines.
AT: Sprawl
1. There are multiple alternate causes for urban sprawl
Sakowicz 4 (J Celeste, Florida State U JD candidate, 19 J. Land Use & Envtl. Law 377, Spring, p. 383, LN)
The causes of American sprawl derive from "a complex result of market and economic forces, social factors . . . and government policies." 29 There are seven main causes of sprawl: 1) The American Dream of desiring less expensive housing on larger lots, improved schools, and less crime on the streets; 2) Companies in quest of lower taxes, skilled workers, and developable tracts of land that are less expensive; 3) Workers moving where the jobs are located and changing job locations more often; 4) Wholesale entry of women into the workforce and spouses traveling in different directions; 5) Local zoning and [the] federal interstate highway system; 6) Americans' increasing love affair[s] with their cars; and 7) Americans' dislike of density. 30
2. Eliminating urban sprawl takes 50 years.
Crain’s Detroit Business 8 (5/5, )
Change has been slow and will continue to be slow, Younger said. “The suburbs didn't exist until the 1950s,” she said. “To change those dynamics will take at least the 50 years it took to develop the suburbs.”
3. Sprawl is inevitable due to the nature of development – intervening just makes it worse.
Holcombe 99 (Randall G, FL State U econ prof., Feb., )
Specific policies to stop or slow down urban sprawl reflect a more general vision of how metropolitan development takes place. Planners assume that suburban areas spread out from a central urban core. They assume that people work in the central cities, commuting from the suburbs. Growth management policies are designed to keep people living and working in central districts. But this picture of metropolitan areas is not an accurate portrayal of today's actual commuting patterns. In Los Angeles, for example, only 3 percent of the total workforce works downtown. There are 19 major activity centers in the Los Angeles area, but even these areas account for only 17.5 percent of the area's total employment. Most people both live and work in the suburbs, and the average commute for individuals in the Los Angeles area is 20 minutes.(2) While the statistics for each metropolitan area will differ, patterns in many cities are likely to be similar; today's jobs are primarily in the suburbs.(3) If left to its own devices, development will occur in a decentralized manner, which will usually lead different types of activities to be conveniently located in relation to one another. Decentralized growth will provide nodes of development. People can live close to the node where they work, allowing a more efficient pattern of two-way traffic as people travel between nodes. Decentralized development keeps commuting distances short but allows the amenities of suburban living for those who want them. In sum, the invisible hand of the market guides property owners to develop their property in ways that result, over time, in efficient land-use patterns. When government land-use planning is examined, we find that land-use decisions made under the name of growth management will more likely hinder than help the development process.
AT: Sri Lankan Economy
Sri Lankan economy resilient – more basic economy curbs financial crises
Barry Rider (Professor @ University of Cambridge, whose academic interests include development studies and finance law) 2009: The most striking feature of the Sri Lankan Economy is its Resillience-Prof. Barry Rider.
Q. With regard to this regulation debate, what is your assessment of Sri Lankan banks and financial institutions?
A. I think Sri Lanka has been resilient in many ways. The economy is surprisingly robust given the demands that have been made particularly in recent years. For a variety of reasons, Sri Lanka is better off than most economies and financial systems in facing what the world has had to face. When one looks at the obsession with regulation and law in Britain, it was only a month ago that the City of London launched a new centre to make available the British expertise in financial regulation around the world. Now look at it it`s a laughing stock. It`s not just a question of bad management, I think it borders on the criminal, and certainly falls into the category of reckless conduct. There was this obsession with greed and the bonus culture that permeated the city of London and the incompetence in the regulatory bodies. You don`t have any of those problems. You don`t have them at the level that we`ve got in the UK.
Q. In the past, when one spoke of credit in Sri Lanka, the discussion always tended to centre on red tape all the things the local banks used to insist on in order to grant businesses credit. Would you see this red tape as a positive feature of Sri Lankan financial institutions?
A. Well I`m sure the red tape was not there solely to inhibit the banks from making the kind of investment decisions that banks elsewhere have made. But it has undoubtedly served as a protection. Banks in Sri Lankan for a variety of reasons have not been willing or able to engage in some of the highly speculative and quite clearly irresponsible investment that banks in the west have.
Q. What is the most striking feature of the Sri Lankan economy to you at this particular moment?
A. It`s the resilience. A country such as yours that can fund an expensive albeit necessary war, and at the same time be able to reclaim land as you have been doing around Colombo, and engage in the kind of infrastructure development that is taking place I think, is very good. Economists are like lawyers its not in their nature to agree about things so perhaps there would be different perspectives on this. But as a simple lawyer, it seems to me that you have a resilient economy. Of course it`s going to be affected by the downturn one has only to speak to someone in business to see that. But it could well be that you are in a much better position to weather the storm than many other countries. You do not see in Sri Lanka anything near the panic and concern that you see in the United Kingdom.
Q. What do you ascribe this resilience to?
A. Well, it`s a different kind of economy. I do not know what the figures are in terms of people having access to banking facilities in Sri Lanka and the kind of money that they would keep in deposits. But certainly in the United Kingdom, there is a very real fear. Now the British government has placed itself in a position where it has to guarantee retail bank accounts. But before that, people were running around spreading their money around various deposit taking organizations and there is a very real lack of confidence in the UK. I live in Cambridge which wouldn`t suggest itself as a vulnerable town in the United Kingdom but one just has to go around to see the number of shops vacant. One does not see that in Sri Lanka because effectively in a more basic economy, risk is spread more widely. I spend quite a lot of my time in the Phillippines and the reason why the people there are less vulnerable than the people in Europe is because income comes from a number of sources and only some of those sources are accounted for in the statistics. So there it is possible to economise and adjust in a time of downturn in a way that is not possible in more sophisticated and regimented societies.
AT: State Economies/Budgets
States are resilient and municipal bonds aren’t key
Alwine 2009-Chris Alwine is head of Vanguard's municipal bond fund operations, August 18, 2009 “Will state budget woes drag on municipal bonds?”
In our opinion, the likelihood of a state defaulting is very low. Historically, municipals have had low default rates because of their essentiality. They're ongoing concerns, generally not subject to competition. They also have the ability to raise taxes and fees, and have also shown the political will to make difficult decisions by either raising taxes or cutting spending when challenges are present. In addition, states are large issuers of debt and rely on market access. So any action that would prevent access to the market would seem very unlikely, in our mind.
Other options for states to balance their budgets
Alwine 2009-Chris Alwine is head of Vanguard's municipal bond fund operations, August 18, 2009 “Will state budget woes drag on municipal bonds?”
Well, states have a number of actions they could take to balance their budgets. The first is simply to cut spending; the second would be to raise taxes; third is to tap the reserve funds; and fourth is to rely on federal stimulus money, which amounts to about $150 billion through 2011. These actions should generally be sufficient to balance the budgets in this fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2010. The focus will then turn to fiscal-year 2011 and 2012, where a number of the one-shots will be at a smaller level. Our expectation is for fiscal challenges to remain for the coming years; but it's also worth noting that, as the economy recovers, revenue should increase—lessening the budgetary strain.
States and federal governments will do anything to prevent defaults
Gelinas 2010-Nicole Gelinas is the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, July 15, 2010“Beware the Muni-Bond Bubble”
The financial crisis has exploded plenty of long-held beliefs, including the idea that mortgage debt is a risk-free investment. But nothing has shaken the articles of faith that underpin another massive debt market: municipal bonds. Investors in municipal bonds don’t have to worry about a thing, the thinking goes, because the states and cities that issue them will do anything to avoid reneging on their obligations—and even if they fail, surely Washington will step in and save investors from big losses.
AT: Steel Industry
China’s rapidly expanding steel industry is already limiting the power of our domestic industry
Muellers 7 (Dr. Hans, The U.S. Steel Industry and national defense, 1/30, )
C: Major Threats There are two threats to the domestic steel industry’s ability to maintain its strength in the commercial market and, on that basis, its vital role as a defense industry supplier: States. The other is foreign government subsidies for the purpose of stimulating the growth of steelmaking capacity. China Unquestionably, steelmaking capacity in China has expanded at an unprecedented rate, as is illustrated by the relevant numbers contained in the Report. Unfortunately, much of the remaining discussion is considerably off the mark. This is difficult to explain, given the wealth of available information about the internal Chinese politics of industrial growth and the struggle among the fiefdoms of power. Are the authors of the Report so overburdened with work that they do not have the time to keep up with even the most essential readings? Alternatively, they might be unwilling to perform alterations on their slogans, once they set them afloat, for fear of not being consistent (consistency being a core virtue of the U.S. steel industry). At any rate, word must have gotten around to them by now that the central government of China lacks the capability of keeping a tight rein on its steel industry. In fact, no one seem to have much control over the entire industry. However, individual provinces hold a great deal of sway over the actions of steel companies operating within their boundaries. Each province is pushing for growth, because that is what maximizes their tax revenue. The provinces harboring the bulk of China’s steelmaking capacity have shown little interest in coordinating their policies regarding the steel companies in their respective domains or, for that matter, in promoting mergers across provincial boundaries. Consequently, there is a chaotic aspect to the manner in which the industry expands both capacity and export volume as well as to steel pricing. For this reason, any discussion of industrial or trade policy cannot totally circumvent some distinction regarding the division of labor and the division of power between the central government and the provincial governments. In many instances, local authorities as well have some influence over the actions of companies in their region. From their high-altitude view of China, the authors of the Report fail to discern such distinctions. Instead, they insist on the use of such non-specific and, in the case of China, not very meaningful terminology as “China’s government remains intimately involved in the steel industry,” “the growth of China’s steel sector has been heavily influenced by government intervention,” and “government-directed industrial policy.” As noted, they may have thought these terms up years ago, felt comfortable with them and—regardless of non-congruent evidence, decided to stay with them. How happy the (central) government bureaucrats in China would be if they commanded the kind of control over the steel industry which the Report attributes to them. Another problem has to do with the discussion of China as a non-market economy (NME). In NMEs, most businesses are publicly financed, owned and controlled. To call such funding a subsidy, as the authors of the Report do, therefore makes little sense. They also apply that appellation to acts of ”favorable tax treatment as well as export-credit and R&D support.” The question arises, compared to what? Did the authors take the trouble of thoroughly investigating the Chinese tax, export-credit and R&D systems and then to verify that, on average and over an extended period, the steel industry was taxed at a lower rate and received more support in the other two areas than a large sample of other heavy industries in China? If they did, they might have been so kind as to furnish a few of their sources plus some more detailed findings. Subsidization Any reader who made it this far should be warned, the worst is still to come. It comes in the form of a relentless pounding with sickeningly repetitious verbiage aimed at the ominous policies of unidentified foreign governments. There is “government support and aid” that “inevitably contribute to excess production and market-distorting international competition.” But it is the last two short paragraphs--bristling with references to “foreign government intervention,” “measures taken by foreign governments,” “inappropriate foreign government interventions,” and “continued foreign government interventions”—that should leave no doubt in a reader’s mind that foreign governments are insidious and they are trying to get us Many will not be able to resist being captivated by such a high-caliber and profoundly enlightening investigation. However, others may conclude that—to paraphrase an expression in the last paragraph—the domestic steel industry is in serious jeopardy, if this Report represents its best efforts in the area of economic analysis.
The innovation of more advanced weapons makes steel a necessity of the past
Arabe 1 (Katrina, journalist at ThomasNet Industrial Newsroom, Debating the Roles of Steel & Nuclear Recycling in the Military, September 7th, ) //am
Martin Anderson, a senior lecturer in management at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass, does not agree. He depicts the scenario of being cut off from a steel supply as highly unlikely. Rather, he says, the U.S. would probably "take over the foreign source with nuclear weapons." If the U.S. were cut-off, he believes recycling available scrap would be a sufficient enough source of materials. In addition, Anderson is opposed to the protection of domestic steel from foreign markets. In his words, "the easiest way to keep a domestic industry is to open it to the full forces of global competition." Robert Reich, a former U.S. Secretary of Labor and current professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass, takes a similar view. He feels that steel is less critical to national defense than in times past. He believes that, "new technologies [have] provided many substitutes for steel."
Breakthroughs in intelligence trump the need for domestic steel
Arabe 1 (Katrina, journalist at ThomasNet Industrial Newsroom, Debating the Roles of Steel & Nuclear Recycling in the Military, September 7th, ) //am
Finally, Edward Turzanski, a political science professor at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, believes that traditional assets such as provided by the steel and petroleum industries are no longer as important in the face of international conflicts. He would rather see the further development of breakthrough technologies that aid military intelligence. In Turzanski's words, "By far, the most important areas of technological challenge are maintaining qualitative advantage in air delivery of military personnel, material, and ordnance - - and [in] those technologies which allow the U.S. to discern the capabilities and motives of allies and adversaries."
AT: Superbugs
No super bugs – links of antibacterial products to resistance are science fiction
Charles Gerba, Ph.D., Professor of Environmental Microbiology at the University of Arizona 2009: Antibacterial Soap – doesn it really help?
One theory floating around scientific communities, the “hygiene hypothesis," speculates that by over-killing germs, we deny our immune systems enough common illnesses to protect us from later developing allergies and asthma. “Super bugs” are another fear, rising from overuse of prescription antibiotics so that some bacteria develop resistance against them. We haven’t seen germs respond to disinfectants and sanitizers this way, Gerba points out, likely because these products kill the microorganisms outright, giving them no chance to adapt. Antibacterial hand soaps remain under consideration in this department. Some in the medical community are wary of popular use of these products, believing super bugs may indeed develop in response to accumulations in groundwater, though as yet there is no proof of this. And, says Gerba, some studies show antibacterial soaps may not be any more helpful to consumers than traditional soaps. Dr. Stuart Levy, a professor at Tufts University, says people most likely to benefit from antibacterial hand soaps are those with weakened immune systems, such as pregnant women or the elderly, but that more widespread use is unnecessary. According to Brian Sansoni, spokesperson for the Soap and Detergent Association (SDA), neither the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) nor a number of scientific studies have found super bugs developing in response to antibacterial products. "The theories linking antibacterial products to antibiotic resistance are overstated," Sansoni says. "The real-world research just doesn't back up those claims."
Antibacterial resistance is media hype
The Record 2006: Why the Media Can’t Get It Right.
Food consumers—and their retailers—who rely strictly on the news media for information regarding the debate over antibiotic use in agriculture receive a daily helping of poor context, oversimplifi cation and plain old factual mistake. Why can’t the press get it right? ■ They confuse correlation with causation. If the world’s pre-eminent scientists often make unfounded assumptions about cause and effect in antibiotic resistance, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that reporters and editors follow. Data to prove true causation often either remains unavailable or confuses reporters not trained in science. ■ They rely too heavily on pet sources. Dependence on “experts” to explain that confusing science has led to what science novelist Michael Crichton labels a dangerous phenomenon: “consensus science.” True scientific breakthroughs, he notes, have historically occurred not by getting all scientists to agree on something, but by the checks and balances of scientific criticism and debate. Reporters either can’t or won’t do the legwork to uncover scientific critiques of the theory that using antibiotics in animals makes human drugs less effective. That makes them easy pickings for an effective activist PR machine that pitches such consensus science— and the appointed stable of pedigreed sources—as the final word on the issue. ■ They fall victim to good intentions. News reporters are human, and like most, they want to improve the world. Their opportunity to improve human health, combined with their ignorance about modern agri-technology, their mistaken assumption that limiting farm antibiotic use will only impact profits and not public health, and sometimes plain lazy reporting leads to stories that start with the assumption that ending the practice is good. ■ They don’t trust science. One of the 20th Century’s best science reporters and now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, Jon Franklin, notes a shift that occurred in science reporting over the past half century. Where post-war science reporters held research scientists in nearly the same awe reserved for clergymen, by the ’60s and ’70s reporters coming out of humanities departments either cared little about science or harbored suspicion about its motives. By the ’80s and ’90s, that apathy turned into investigative journalism, focused on fi nding dishonesty and malpractice in studies and their funding. That philosophy can be seen in today’s news stories insinuating that scientists who insist on sound science before political action are merely shills for the pharmaceutical industry and agricultural corporations.
AT: Swine Flu 1/2
1. No impact – it’s just another flu – media hype is overblown and we have everything we need to deal with it
Frank Furedi Professor of Sociology at University of Kent April 28, 2009: Swine Flu and the Dramatization of the Disease.
There is nothing unusual about the outbreak of flu. Every year, thousands of people die from the flu, and, in normal conditions, society has learned to cope with the flu threat. From time to time, an outbreak of flu turns into a global pandemic, leading to a catastrophic loss of life. However, there is no evidence that the so-called swine flu, which has so far claimed a relatively small number of lives, will turn into a pandemic. Rather, what we are faced with is a health crisis that has been transformed into a moral drama. Although swine flu is a relatively common hazard of pig-farming, it is worth noting that, so far, health inspectors have not found infected pigs anywhere in Mexico. So why call it ‘swine flu’? The main reason is that the last strain of flu that genetically resembled this one was found among swine. But it does not have to be called ‘swine flu’. The Israeli deputy health minister, Yakov Litzman, says his country will refuse to call the disease by that name because religious Jews do not eat pork. ‘We will call it Mexico flu’, he said. What Litzman’s comments demonstrate is that the name, and image, we give to a disease is principally influenced by culture rather than science. History shows that how people respond to a crisis determines the impact and the meaning of that crisis. People do not simply ‘suffer a disaster’. They engage with the terrible or threatening event, sometimes adapting to it and sometimes drawing lessons and meaning from it; at other times they can be disoriented and confused by a crisis, but they often learn to reorganise their lives around it, sometimes in a creative way. In principle, we have all the resources and technical ingredients we need to deal with swine flu. Compared with previous eras, we have a relatively effective warning and tracking system that allows the authorities to take the necessary precautions. Although at present there is no vaccine available to prevent this strain of flu, there are anti-flu drugs that have been shown to work once the virus has been contracted. However, although society has the science and technology to cope with this latest outbreak of flu, its cultural and moral coping mechanisms appear feeble and exposed. When, on 27 April 2009, the World Health Organisation’s emergency committee raised the pandemic threat level for swine flu from level three to level four (out of a possible six), it was acting on a script that was cobbled together in the early years of the twenty-first century. Since the turn of the new millennium, the term ‘pandemic’ has become normalised and is increasingly used to frame global anxieties and fears. ‘Health alerts’ have been transformed into rituals, through which fear entrepreneurs remind us, in a quasi-religious fashion, that human extinction is a very real possibility. Terms like ‘epidemic’ and ‘pandemic’ appear with increasing frequency in newspapers, and are now used in everyday conversation, too. This tendency to inflate the dangers that we face leads to a situation where fearmongers now speculate about hundreds of thousands, millions or even billions of casualties occurring as a result of some crisis or disaster. Even highly prestigious journals and media outlets seem incapable of resisting the temptation to spread alarmist high-casualty scenarios. On 5 February 2004, an editorial in the New Scientist warned that a bird flu outbreak, in which the virus was transmitted between people, could kill 1.5billion people. The dramatisation of bird flu really took off with the WHO announcement in December 2004, which exhorted all nations to overhaul their pandemic strategies. As one study of the campaign of fear around pandemics noted: ‘The heightening of pandemic awareness was achieved through the strategic use of what one can call “scare quotes” in leading scientific journals and press releases, scare statistics, such as the 1968 Hong Kong pandemic which killed 30,000 Britons and over one million people worldwide, [and] scare historical references, such as the flu pandemics of 1918 and 1997.’ (1) In this important study, titled ‘Avian Flu: The Creation of Expectations in the Interplay Between Science and the Media’, the authors drew attention to the strategy of linking current outbreaks of the flu to historic catastrophes, which in turn fostered a climate of panic. In relation to the recent panic about the threat of avian flu, they noted that ‘the shift of emphasis to past pandemics contributes to the rhetoric of fear by imbuing the as-yet minor flu outbreak with historical significance, which obscures the fact that the current strain of avian flu has, as yet, killed only a relatively small number of people who had direct contact with poultry’ (2). Increasingly, public health officials sound as if they are rehearsing their roles for a disaster movie. They frequently argue that, since we had deathly flu pandemics in the past, it is inevitable that we will face another one very soon. ‘Major pandemics sweep the world every century, and it is inevitable that at least one will occur in the future’, said Professor Maria Zambon, a virologist and head of Britain’s Health Protection Agency’s influenza laboratory. For good measure, she added that ‘we can never be completely prepared for what nature will do: nature is the ultimate bioterrorist’ (3). The fatalistic view of an inevitable global flu catastrophe is made more ominous still by linking it with our anxieties about terrorism. Leading British scientist Hugh Pennington also made this link, when he stated in 2005 that avian flu ‘is the biggest threat to the human race’ and it ‘far outweighs bioterrorism; this is natural terrorism’ (4). Inevitably, the dramatisation of the flu has spawned various apocalyptic stories about how viruses can be ‘weaponised’ and used to threaten human survival. Such stories warn the public that terrorists might try to infect our nations with bird flu. Consider the Institute of Public Policy Research’s Commission of National Security for the Twenty-First Century: one of its reports speculated that the threat from pandemic diseases such as SARS and avian flu is growing all the time, and because of inadequate preparation ‘a serious disease outbreak or bio-terrorism incident in the next 18 months could tip the global economy from serious recession into global depression’. In line with Hollywood fantasy plotlines, the report invited us to imagine the possibility of a terrorist purchasing ‘genes for use in the engineering of an existing and dangerous pathogen into a more virulent strain’ (5). Alongside fears about the ‘weaponisation’ of viruses, the internet is awash with rumours about the conspiracy responsible for the current outbreak of swine flu. ‘I find it odd that this recent outbreak of swine flu first appeared in Mexico about the time President Obama was visiting there’, writes one blogger, before asking: ‘Does anyone else find that suspicious?’ And far too many people are replying: ‘Yes.’ Far-right conspiracy theorists describe swine flu as the ‘latest bioterrorism attack by the New World Order’. Left-wing conspiratorial-minded crusaders, meanwhile, blame the Republicans in US Congress for cutting ‘pandemic preparedness’ funds out of Obama’s economic stimulus package. Environmental campaigners point the finger of blame at the big corporations that factory-farm pigs. Everyone seems to have their own version of a Hollywood disaster film, through which they can make sense of the outbreak of flu. It seems the swine flu outbreak has infected our imaginations, giving shape and tangibility to our anxieties about everyday life. We should give the pigs a rest, and get on with living.
2. The WHO has exaggerated the threat of Swine Flu-the most severe cases have already peaked.
Michael Fumento. June 19, 2009. (Director of the Washington, D. C.-based Independent Journalism Project, where he specializes in science and health issues. “The WHO’s Fabricated Pandemic” )
A global flu pandemic is a "when, not an if." So the World Health Organization (WHO) has been crying for five years. Now it can boast it was right. Problem is, the mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people worldwide, and old-fashioned seasonal flu strikes every nation yearly, killing an estimated 250,000 to 500,000. But only 144 people had succumbed to H1N1 swine flu when the WHO declared its pandemic -- far less than seasonal flu's daily toll. Further, in Mexico, where the outbreak began and where it has been the most severe, cases had already peaked.
AT: Swine Flu 2/2
3. Swine flu will not cause extinction-two reasons.
a. missing a molecular signature
b. cross-reactive immunities
Peter Palese 05-02-09 (chairman of the department of microbiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York., “Why Swine Flu Isn’t So Scary”, The Wall Street Journal) SMB
Still, there is more evidence that a serious pandemic is not imminent. In 1976 there was an outbreak of an H1N1 swine virus in Fort Dix, N.J., which showed human-to-human transmission but did not go on to become a highly virulent strain. This virus was very similar to regular swine influenza viruses and did not show a high affinity for the human host.Although the swine virus currently circulating in humans is different from the 1976 virus, it is most likely not more virulent than the other seasonal strains we have experienced over the last several years. It lacks an important molecular signature (the protein PB1-F2) which was present in the 1918 virus and in the highly lethal H5N1 chicken viruses. If this virulence marker is necessary for an influenza virus to become highly pathogenic in humans or in chickens -- and some research suggests this is the case -- then the current swine virus, like the 1976 virus, doesn't have what it takes to become a major killer.
Since people have been exposed to H1N1 viruses over many decades, we likely have some cross-reactive immunity against the swine virus. While it may not be sufficient to prevent illness, it may very well dampen the impact of the virus on mortality. I would postulate that by virtue of this "herd immunity," even a 1918-like H1N1 virus could never have the horrific effect it had in the past. The most likely outcome is that the current swine virus will become another (fourth) strain of regular seasonal influenza.
4. The Swine Flu won’t turn into the Spanish flu of 1918 there are too many safeguards.
Richard Martin. May 2, 2009. (St. Petersburg Times Staff Writer. “From swine flu to bubonic plague, epidemics have always stirred fear and terror” )
Alcabes sees no point in panicking. He and other scientists say it's false reasoning to imagine a reprise of the 1918 Spanish flu because there are now public health systems and agencies that make it their business to track the flu and educate the public on appropriate prevention measures. In a paper titled "Panic In Place of Public Health," Alcabes cited the two flu pandemics that have occurred since 1918 — in 1957 and 1968 — that resulted in far fewer deaths. And he added that if the Spanish flu had happened today instead of 1918, the number of deaths would have been limited by medical advances such as the timely use of antibiotics to treat secondary infections. Siegel agreed, pointing to the ability to discover viruses just as they're emerging. That's a new tool, he said. But with that comes a lot of responsibility. "One thing that hasn't occurred is learning a new language to describe risk so that we don't scare everybody," he said.
AT: Syrian WMD Use
1. Even the worst case Syrian use of WMD would only be a minor irritant
Elkis, 07 - Special to Defense and the National Interest (Adam, “Sideshow in the Desert”, 10/22, )
Needless to say, history has shown that such a development would be detrimental to Israeli national security. War with Syria also remains a possibility, due to continuing poor relations. In the event of war, Damascus’s aging Soviet hardware would not pose a serious threat to Israeli forces, but the regime could conceivably employ commando teams, ballistic missiles possibly armed with chemical weapons, newly acquired anti-tank weapons, and guerrilla networks in an attempt to draw out such a conflict until the Israeli public loses the will to win. Yet, as Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) fellow Anthony H. Cordesman noted in a report on Syrian military capabilities, Damascus’ asymmetric capabilities would be little than an “irritant” in the face of vastly superior Israeli firepower.
2. Syria fears Israeli retaliation too much
Diab, 97 - Syrian-born international security analyst living in London (Zuhair, The Nonproliferation Review, Fall, “SYRIA’S CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS: ASSESSING CAPABILITIES AND MOTIVATIONS”, )
Israeli doctrine makes it unlikely that Syria would ini-tiate chemical warfare at the start of a conflict, but it does not eliminate the possibility of a Syrian missile strike with conventional warheads against Israeli military tar-gets such as airfields, mobilization centers, and rear ech-elons. Another disincentive for a Syrian resort to chemical warfare is that it might invite Israeli retaliation in-kind. Unlike Israel, Syria has not equipped its entire civilian population with gas masks, which to some ex-tent would blunt the strategic impact of these weapons. Despite these disincentives for strategic CW use, how-ever, rational calculations could well be overwhelmed by emotions once war breaks out.
3. Geographic proximity, doctrine and battlefield norms prevents Syrian use of biological weapons
Diab, 97 - Syrian-born international security analyst living in London (Zuhair, The Nonproliferation Review, Fall, “SYRIA’S CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS: ASSESSING CAPABILITIES AND MOTIVATIONS”, )
While the U.S. government may possess secret infor-mation to back up its claim of an offensive Syrian BW capability, there is no hint of its existence from open sources. Syrian armed forces are equipped with defen-sive equipment but there are no reported exercises in-volving the offensive use of biological weapons, making it unlikely that they have been integrated into Syrian mili-tary doctrine. If security concerns have encouraged Syria to acquire and retain a CW capability, these motivations may not necessarily apply BW. Both Israel and Syria presumably recognize the negative military utility of BW because of the geographical proximity of the two states. Moreover, there is no modern precedent of employing BW on the battlefield, and the moral revulsion surround-ing biological warfare is also far stronger than for nuclear or chemical weapons. Since the military utility of BW is uncertain, the functions of denial and punishment in Syria’s deterrent posture could be met more efficiently with CW. Indeed, what advantage could be gained from threaten- ing the use of a completely untested method of warfare?
4. Chemical weapons have no military utility for Syria
Diab, 97 - Syrian-born international security analyst living in London (Zuhair, The Nonproliferation Review, Fall, “SYRIA’S CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS: ASSESSING CAPABILITIES AND MOTIVATIONS”, )
A more complicated situation pertains to the tactical use of CW, either at the outset of an offensive or to stop the advance of Israeli forces. Although Syrian forces are equipped with field protection and decontamination measures (protective suits, masks, and decontamination vehicles), it is not known whether all Syrian troops have such defenses. A more important disincentive for the offensive use of CW is that if Syria launched a surprise attack, its massed armor would have to advance rapidly to reach the 1967 border line (set by the Armistice Agree- ment of 1949) within 48 to 72 hours, before Israel had time to mobilize reserve units. Yet chemical protective measures are cumbersome and would significantly slow the tempo of military operations. Moreover, the geographic proximity of Syrian population centers, the relatively small size of the likely theaters of operations in the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, and unpredictable weather conditions (particularly wind direction) would place many constraints on CW use at the start of a Syr-ian offensive. Similar obstacles also militate against use of CW by Syrian forces in defensive positions to repulse an Israeli counterattack. In this case, the proximity of Israeli settle-ments in northern Israel means that Syria would risk a massive retaliatory strike, which would not be to its ad-vantage. Thus, the only realistic scenarios for Syrian tac-tical use of CW are: 1) if Israel launches an offensive involving first use of CW, forcing Syrian units to retaliate in-kind; or 2) if the defensive perimeter of Damascus, the Syrian capital, collapses as a result of an Israeli in-cursion through the Golan Heights or a flanking maneu-ver through the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.
AT: Taiwanese Prolif
Taiwan won’t go nuclear. No access to fissile material, launch systems and risk of exposure.
Doughert ‘8 (Mimi, Monterey Institute James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, WMD Insights, “Taiwanese Legislator Accuses President Chen of Nuclear Weapons Development,” February, )
While experts agree that Taiwan possesses the underlying technological capability and expertise to produce nuclear weapons, they also acknowledge that the country would face major obstacles before becoming a proliferator. Taiwan would still need to produce highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which would entail constructing a uranium enrichment or spent fuel reprocessing plant. Furthermore, Taiwan would also need a nuclear weapon delivery system, and it is not clear that the Hsiung Feng IIE cruise missile can meet this requirement. Under the watchful eyes of the United States, China, and the IAEA, Taiwan would have great difficulty hiding such a program, and most analysts believe that no Taiwanese government, of either party, would be prepared to risk the consequences of exposure.
Fear of abandonment by US prevents Taiwan prolif.
Hughes ‘7 (Christopher, PhD – U. Sheffield and Reader/Associate Prof. – U. Warwick, Asia Policy #3, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons: Implications for the Nuclear Ambitions of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan”, January, )
At present Taiwan appears, to lack sufficient drivers for it to reconsider the nuclear option. The island’s leaders clearly fear the build-up of China’s military capabilities, and nuclear weapons might provide a cheap “equalizer” in the balance of power. Yet such a strategy carries the danger of exacerbating the security dilemma. China could be provoked either to launch pre-emptive conventional attacks to prevent Taiwan from acquiring the security assurance of nuclear weapons or to switch to a nuclear first-use doctrine.71 Taiwan might also fear the alliance dilemma of abandonment by the United States, especially given the growing strategic importance of China for overall U.S. regional and global strategy. Additionally, Taiwan could possibly interpret Bush administration statements on Taiwan as showing an inconsistent U.S. determination to defend the island. Taiwanese calculations of the risk of U.S. abandonment, though, will surely be tempered by the fear that striking out on an independent nuclear path would only serve to alienate the United States entirely. Such a nuclearization would have destabilizing effects on Sino-U.S. relations and thus make abandonment a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”72 In fact, Taiwan’s military strategy is predicated on building up autonomous military capabilities, while at the same time enticing the United States into closer military ties.73 A renewed and serious Taiwanese attempt to acquire nuclear weapons would appear to largely undercut such a strategy. Pg. 100
DPP and the public oppose nukes.
Hughes ‘7 (Christopher, PhD – U. Sheffield and Reader/Associate Prof. – U. Warwick, Asia Policy #3, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons: Implications for the Nuclear Ambitions of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan”, January, )
Taiwan’s development of nuclear weapons might be driven by considerations of national prestige, identity, and norms, especially as a means to assert Taiwanese autonomy and eventually even independence. This impulse is countered, however, by the fact that the Democratic People’s Party (DPP), which is most likely to advocate independence, has assumed a non-nuclear stance and that the Kuomintang (KMT) remains opposed to any policy that would force a conflict with China. Meanwhile, there is strong sentiment in Taiwan against both civilian nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.74
AT: Taliban
1. The Taliban’s power in Afghanistan has already faded, so they don’t pose a threat
Friedman, staff writer for Stratfor, 08 (George Friedman, staff writer for Stratfor, “Strategic Divergence: The War Against the Taliban and the War Against Al Qaeda” February 25, 08, )
While Washington turned out an extraordinary political and covert performance, the United States did not invade. Rather, it acquired armies in Afghanistan prepared to carry out the mission and provided them with support and air power. The operation did not defeat the Taliban. Instead, it forced them to make a political and military decision. Political power in Afghanistan does not come from the cities. It comes from the countryside, while the cities are the prize. The Taliban could defend the cities only by massing forces to block attacks by other Afghan factions. But when they massed their forces, the Taliban were vulnerable to air attacks. After experiencing the consequences of U.S. air power, the Taliban made a strategic decision. In the absence of U.S. airstrikes, they could defeat their adversaries and had done so before. While they might have made a fight of it, given U.S. air power, the Taliban selected a different long-term strategy. Rather than attempt to defend the cities, the Taliban withdrew, dispersed and made plans to regroup. Their goal was to hold enough of the countryside to maintain their political influence. As in their campaign against the Soviets, the Taliban understood that their Afghan enemies would not pursue them, and that over time, their ability to conduct small-scale operations would negate the value of U.S. airpower and draw the Americans into a difficult fight on unfavorable terms. The United States was not particularly disturbed by the outcome. It was not after the Taliban but al Qaeda. It appears — and much of this remains murky — that the command cell of al Qaeda escaped from Afghan forces and U.S. Special Operations personnel at Tora Bora and slipped across the border into Pakistan. Exactly what happened is unclear, but it is clear that al Qaeda’s command cell was not destroyed. The fight against al Qaeda produced a partial victory. Al Qaeda clearly was disrupted and relocated — and was denied its sanctuary. A number of its operatives were captured, further degrading its operational capability. The Afghan campaign therefore had these outcomes:
Al Qaeda was degraded but not eliminated. The Taliban remained an intact fighting force, but the United States never really expected them to commit suicide by massing for U.S. B-52 strikes. The United States had never invaded Afghanistan and had made no plans to occupy it. Afghanistan was never the issue, and the Taliban were a subordinate matter. After much of al Qaeda’s base lost its sanctuary in Afghanistan and had to relocate to Pakistan, the war in Afghanistan became a sideshow for the U.S. military.
2. While the Taliban cannot be completely defeated, the U.S. has and can easily keep them in check
Friedman, staff writer for Stratfor, 08 (George Friedman, staff writer for Stratfor, “Strategic Divergence: The War Against the Taliban and the War Against Al Qaeda” February 25, 08, )
But vanquishing the Taliban simply was not the goal. The goal was to maintain a presence that could conduct covert operations in Pakistan looking for al Qaeda and keep al Qaeda from returning to Afghanistan. Part of this goal could be achieved by keeping a pro-American government in Kabul under Karzai. The strategy was to keep al Qaeda off balance, preserve Karzai and launch operations against the Taliban designed to prevent them from becoming too effective and aggressive. The entire U.S. military would have been insufficient to defeat the Taliban; the war in Afghanistan thus was simply a holding action. The holding action was made all the more difficult in that the Taliban could not be isolated from their sources of supply or sanctuary; Pakistan provided both. It really didn’t matter whether this was because President Pervez Musharraf’s government intended to play both sides, whether factions inside the Pakistani military maintained close affinities with the Taliban or whether the Pakistani government and army simply couldn’t control tribal elements loyal to al Qaeda. What did matter was that all along the Afghan border — particularly in southern Afghanistan — supplies flowed in from Pakistan, and the Taliban moved into sanctuaries in Pakistan for rest and regrouping. The Taliban was and is operating on their own terrain. They have excellent intelligence about the movements of NATO forces and a flexible and sufficient supply line allowing them to maintain and increase operations and control of the countryside. Having retreated in 2001, the Taliban systematically regrouped, rearmed and began operating as a traditional guerrilla force with an increased penchant for suicide attacks. As in Vietnam, the challenge in fighting a guerrilla force is to cut it off from its supplies. The United States failed to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and that allowed men and materiel to move into South Vietnam until the United States lost the appetite for war. In Afghanistan, it is the same problem compounded. First, the lines of supply into Pakistan are even more complex than the Ho Chi Minh trail was. Second, the country that provides the supplies is formally allied with the United States. Pakistan is committed both to cutting those lines of supply and aiding the United States in capturing al Qaeda in its Northwest. That is the primary mission, but the subsidiary mission remains keeping the Taliban within tolerable levels of activity and preventing them from posing a threat to more and more of the Afghan countryside and cities. There has been a great deal of focus on Pakistan’s assistance in its own northwestern regions against al Qaeda, but much less on the line of supply maintaining the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. And as Pakistan has attempted to pursue a policy of balancing its relations with the Taliban and with the United States, the Pakistani government now faces a major jihadist insurgency on its own turf. Afghanistan therefore is not — and in some ways never has been — the center of gravity of the challenge facing the United States. Occupying Afghanistan is inconceivable without a fundamental shift in Pakistan’s policies or capabilities. But forcing Pakistan to change its policies in southern Afghanistan really is pointless, since the United States doesn’t have enough forces there to take advantage of a Pakistani shift, and Washington doesn’t care about the Taliban in the long run.
AT: Tar Sands
Companies have committed to reject tar sand
Stockman 10 (Lorne, May 6, “Tar Sands Oil Means High Gas Prices”, ), Corporate Ethics International
Tar sands (also known as oil sands) oil production is the most expensive oil production in the world. The Keystone XL pipeline will create significant over capacity for tar sands crude into the U.S. raising pipeline tariffs and adding to the already high cost of tar sands production. The growth in tar sands production needed to fill the Keystone XL pipeline will only occur if oil prices keep rising. Tar sands production exerts little if any influence over global oil prices because it maintains no spare production capacity. Tar sands production is a symptom of high oil prices and not a basis for lower prices. Tar sands oil production is the most expensive oil production in the world today and has been labeled the ‘marginal barrel’ by the International Energy Agency. In April 2010 Marvin Odum, Shell’s head of tar sands, announced that the company would not go ahead with any new tar sands projects in the next five years and perhaps longer because of the expense of doing so. He said that, ‘the oil sands have become one of the most costly places on earth to pursue oil projects’. Referring to the company’s recent $14 billion expansion of its tar sands mining project he said that it represented, ‘some of the most expensive production that we have.’iii He stated that the 100,000 barrel a day (b/d) project will require minimum oil prices of $70-75 to turn a profit. Further, construction costs in Alberta are only going up. The rush to develop tar sands projects and the huge requirements for labor, cement, steel, engineering equipment and other resources mean that everything from rigs to housing are at a premium in the tar sands regions. A recent decline in costs spurred by the recession is already being reversed.iv In November 2009, one of Canada’s respected energy think tanks, the Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) produced its 2009 to 2043 forecast for the tar sands industry.v In this 35 year timeline it expects oil prices to rise to around $200/bbl stimulating growth in tar sands production of between 5 and 6 million b/d by the 2030s to 2040s. It calculates that the oil price required to facilitate this level of production ranges from $119 to $134/bbl. The last time oil prices were at this level, in mid-2008, U.S. gasoline prices averaged $3.96 per gallon.vi The tar sands industry is clearly betting on high oil prices in order produce much of the as yet undeveloped resource. However, there is a raft of economic analysis including that from the IEA and others that shows that high oil prices hinder economic growth and are therefore unsustainable. CERI and the tar sands industry are counting on a situation that would be devastating for the U.S. economy. If oil prices ever did reach $200/bbl, gasoline prices would probably be above $7 per gallon. Tar sands production is expensive primarily because it is bitumen, a solid or semi-solid form of degraded oil. Extracting and processing it requires more complex procedures than most conventional oil production. These processes require extensive specialized infrastructure leading to huge capital investment costs and high operating costs. Compare for example the estimated cost of developing a heavy oil field in Saudi Arabia with Shell’s recent tar sands mining expansion. The Manifa Field in Saudi Arabia is estimated to cost $15.75 billion to develop and as such is one of the most expensive developments in the country. It is slated to produce 900,000 b/d of oil as well as significant quantities of natural gas and condensate.ix In contrast, Shell’s Athabasca Oil Sands Project (AOSP) expansion cost $14 billion but only added 100,000 b/d of crude oil capacity.
AT: Teen Pregnancy
1. Status Quo is solving teen pregnancy.
Anitei 07’ Anitei, 07, Stefan, Softpedia, “Teen Pregnancies Have Reached Record Low”. 7/14/2009.
It seems that nowadays girls do not get fooled so easily anymore. A new report revealed that currently, less high school students are having sex, and condom use is on the rise. This triggered a record for the fewest teen pregnancies. Now more young people are also finishing high school and more little kids are being read to, as found by this governmental approach on the well-being of the nation's children. "The implications for the population are quite positive in terms of their health and their well-being. The lower figure on teens having sex means the risk of sexually transmitted diseases is lower," said Edward Sondik, director of the National Center for Health Statistics. In 2005, 47 % of high school students (6.7 million) stated to have had sexual intercourse, a decrease compared to 54 % in 1991, and this rate has remained constant since 2003. A 2005 investigation found that of those who had sex during a three-month period, 63 % (9 million) used condoms, a rise from 46 % in 1991. "The teen birth rate was 21 per 1,000 young women ages 15-17 in 2005 - an all-time low. It was down from 39 births per 1,000 teens in 1991," said the report. "This is very good news. Young teen mothers and their babies are at a greater risk of both immediate and long-term difficulties.", said Sondik. The birth rate in the 15-19 age category was 40/1,000 in 2005, also a significant drop from the previous decade. "Education campaigns that started years ago are having a significant effect. I think the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the efforts in the '80s and '90s had a lot to do with that. We need to encourage young teens to delay sexual initiation and we need to make sure they get all the information they need about condoms and birth control," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington-based nonprofit group that focuses on prevention of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The report was made gathering information from statistics and studies at 22 federal agencies.
2. T.V. causes teen pregnancy
Roan 08’ Shari, LA Times, “Sexual content on TV is linked to teen pregnancy”. 11/03/2008.
Teenagers who watch a lot of television programs that contain sexual content are more than twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy, according to a study published today in the journal Pediatrics. Researchers from RAND Corporation surveyed about 2,000 adolescents, ages 12 to 17, nationwide in 2001 about their television habits and sexual behavior. Researchers focused on 23 programs popular among teenagers that were widely available on broadcast and cable TV. The shows included dramas, comedies, reality programs and animated shows. Sexual content was defined as depictions of sex as well as dialogue or discussion about sex. The participants were surveyed again three years later. About 700 said they had engaged in sexual intercourse by the third survey. The teens who watched the most sexual content on TV (the 90th percentile) were twice as likely to have become pregnant or caused a pregnancy compared to the teens who watched the least amount of sexual content on TV (the 10th percentile). Adolescents who lived in a two-parent household had a lower probability of pregnancy while African Americans and adolescents with behavior problems were more likely to be involved in a pregnancy. Parents should consider limiting their teen's exposure to sexual content on TV, said the study's lead author, Anita Chandra, a behavioral scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. Television producers should consider more realistic depictions of the consequences of sex in their scripts, she says, noting that there is little content on the consequences of unprotected sex. About 1 million adolescents become pregnant each year in the United States. "Adolescents receive a considerable amount of information about sex through television and that programming typically does not highlight the risks and responsibilities of sex," said Chandra, in a news release. "Our findings suggest that television may play a significant role in the high rates of teenage pregnancy in the United States."
3. Many alternative causes to teen pregnancy
Mayor ‘6 Susan Mayor, “Teen pregnancy”. Solarnavigator. Online. 7/17/06. . 7/22/09
The root causes of teenage pregnancy might be: Peer pressure: 76% of girls and 58% of boys in a 1996 Seventeen magazine survey reported that teenage females had sexual intercourse in response to their boyfriend's desire for it. A 2003 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that one in three young men aged 15-17 said they had felt pressure from male friends to have sex. Contraceptive use: In a 1996 Kaiser Family Foundation study, 46% of adolescents surveyed said that they believed teenage pregnancy resulted from the failure to keep contraception at the ready. 23% of sexually active young women the 1996 Seventeen magazine poll admitted to having had unprotected sex with a partner who eschewed the use of a condom. 70% of girls in a 1997 PARADE poll claimed it was embarrassing to buy birth control or request information from a doctor. Parental relationship: 66% of girls in the 1997 PARADE survey said that the likelihood becoming pregnant as a teen increased if one had parents who were inattentive, unloving, or failed to instill moral values. A majority of respondents in a 1988 Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies survey attributed the occurrence of adolescent pregnancy to a breakdown of communication between parents and child and also to inadequate parental supervision. Mass media: In the 1997 PARADE survey, 57% replied that sexualized content in film, 55% in television, and 44% in music helped to influence teenagers to engage in sexual activity before they are ready. A 1996 U.S. News & World Report poll, which asked about how television programs might contribute to the incidence of teenage pregnancy, found that 46% thought TV played a large role, 30% that it had some effect, 14% that it had little effect, 9% that it had none. 36% in the 1997 PARADE survey said they believed that an adolescent might become pregnant to satisfy a desire for unconditional love. 24% said they believed that a girl might also become pregnant in an attempt to retain or win back a boyfriend.
AT: Terrorism – Generic 1/2
1. Al Qaeda is losing. Most comprehensive evidence proves.
Kemp, 1/26 (Colonel Richard, Former Chair – Gov. Cobra Intelligence Group, The Times (London), “Al-Qaeda is losing. Prepare for a daring hit; The latest supposed message from Osama bin Laden underlines his weakness, not his strength”, L/N)
'God willing, our raids on you will continue," said Osama bin Laden - or someone purporting to be him - in a message broadcast on al-Jazeera over the weekend. The blunt message to "Obama from Osama" is intended to reaffirm that, despite Barack Obama's overtures to the Islamic world, he and his country remain infidels, every bit as evil as they were under George W. Bush. But ignore the bloodcurdling rhetoric. That bin Laden was reduced to claiming that the failed Christmas Day attempt to blow up an airliner was comparable to 9/11 is a sign of al-Qaeda's current parlous state. The new recording also revealed another weakness: al-Qaeda fears that it is losing the battle for hearts and minds. President Obama and the Western world were not his true audience. His broadcast was aimed at Muslims - hence its focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a cause that has never been important to the leader of al-Qaeda. Bin Laden knows well the powerful emotion inspired around the globe by the Palestinians' plight. By feigning support for them he hopes to regain some of al-Qaeda's dramatically diminished popularity. Former sympathisers have become disillusioned by the death toll inflicted by bin Laden's terrorists in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan; they have killed many more Muslims than non-Muslims since 9/11. The Combating Terrorism Centre in the US concludes that only 15 per cent of the 3,010 victims killed by al-Qaeda between 2004 and 2008 were Westerners. But the loss of support is not bin Laden's only concern: al-Qaeda's leadership has been decapitated. After it was ejected from Afghanistan, key elements of the leadership fled to Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. Those who went to Iraq butchered thousands, mainly fellow Muslims, but have now either been killed or are barely able to operate. The so-called "management council" that ended up in Iran - along with one of bin Laden's wives, six children and 11 grandchildren - are under house arrest. The core leadership of al-Qaeda, on the run in Pakistan, are forced to spend most of their time and effort just staying alive. Pakistani military operations continue to damage their outer defence of Taleban fighters. And US drone strikes have killed key al-Qaeda figures, including the external operations chief, Abu Sulayman al-Jazairi, and the head of its weapons of mass destruction programme, Abu Khabab al-Masri. For those terrorists who remain at large, the operating environment has become tough, as the unprecedented numbers of arrests and convictions in the US and UK demonstrate. Politicians and security chiefs in most Muslim countries have greatly increased their co-operation with Western agencies. Today the US no-fly list for terror suspects stands at 4,000 names; before 9/11 it was just 16. But no security regime can ever be perfect, as the attempt to detonate a device on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit shows. This was one of a series of strikes planned by al-Qaeda in the past 12 months. We saw the targeting of the New York subway system last autumn and the Fort Hood shooting. In Saudi Arabia al-Qaeda terrorists carried out an abortive suicide attack against Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, the Deputy Interior Minister. Its greatest recent strategic coup was a suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers at a US forward base in Khost, Afghanistan. None of this, though, will satisfy bin Laden. To achieve his aim of a global caliphate he needs to inflict mass casualties against "the enemies of Islam". This means further spectaculars on the scale of 9/11 - or at least to compare with the crippling of the USS Cole in 2000 and the devastating attacks against US embassies in East Africa in 1998. But al-Qaeda cannot succeed without an Afghan-style base from which to plan, train and launch attacks. That's why the operations against al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan remain critical. Al-Qaeda does now have footholds in Yemen and Somalia. But its footing is not yet sure, and neither country adequately replicates the conditions of pre-9/11 Afghanistan.
2. Recent attacks prove they're only capable of small-scale mischief. No large attacks on the US.
Eurasia Review, 2 – 10 (“Analysis Of Al Qaeda's Current Strength And Leadership”, )
Though Al Qaeda affiliated groups have perpetrated numerous deadly terrorist attacks over the past two years, the core in Pakistan has demonstrated limited operational effectiveness in that time span. Because of the loss of top commanders and continued pressure from U.S. intelligence activities and foreign partners, the Al Qaeda core has been unable to orchestrate many spectacular attacks. Analysts routinely point to only two such attacks occurring in 2008: the suicide attack on the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, with a Saudi suicide bomber, and the bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad.10 The core organization’s apparent inability to commit large-scale attacks has led some analysts to question the relevancy, capabilities, and competency of the group.11 There is also some evidence that the Al Qaeda core, at times, struggles to retain recruits and raise funds. In June 2009, the group’s leader in Afghanistan, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, released an audio message stating that Al Qaeda members in that country were short of food, weapons, and other supplies.12 In light of the numerous smaller scale attempted terrorist attacks throughout 2009, and the most recent events directed at U.S. interests of the November shootings at Ft. Hood, Texas, and the December bombing attempt aboard a U.S. airliner, some analysts view these operations as evidence that the organization and its affiliates are no longer capable of launching a large-scale catastrophic terrorist attack directed at U.S. interests. These analysts suggest that recent acts are an acknowledgment that the destructive capabilities of corporate Al Qaeda and those individuals with similar philosophical goals are actually on the decline and are indicative of an organization desperate to prove its continued viability.
AT: Terrorism – Generic 2/2
3. No risk of an attack on US soil - exaggerated
Carle 7/16/08 - a member of the CIA's Clandestine Service for 23 years [Carle, L. Glenn, “ A member of the CIA's Clandestine Service for 23 years , ” The Salt Lake Tribune, July 16, 2008,
Sen. John McCain has repeatedly characterized the threat of "radical Islamic extremism" as "the absolute gravest threat ... that we're in against." Before we simply accept this, we need to examine the nature of the terrorist threat facing our country. If we do so, we will see how we have allowed the specter of that threat to distort our lives and take our treasure. The "Global War on Terror" has conjured the image of terrorists behind every bush, the bushes themselves burning, and an angry god inciting its faithful to religious war. We have been called to arms, built fences, and compromised our laws and the practices that define us as a nation. The administration has focused on pursuing terrorists and countering an imminent and terrifying threat. Thousands of Americans have died as a result, as have tens of thousands of foreigners. The inclination to trust our leaders when they warn of danger is compelling, particularly when the specters of mushroom clouds and jihadists haunt every debate. McCain, accepting this view of the threats, pledges to continue the Bush administration's policy of few distinctions but ruthless actions. I spent 23 years in the CIA. I drafted or was involved in many of the government's most senior assessments of the threats facing our country. I have devoted years to understanding and combating the jihadist threat. We rightly honor as heroes those who serve our nation and offer their lives to protect ours. We all "support the troops." Yet the first step for any commander is to understand the enemy. The next commander in chief should base his counterterrorism policies on the following realities: We do not face a global jihadist "movement" but a series of disparate ethnic and religious conflicts involving Muslim populations, each of which remains fundamentally regional in nature and almost all of which long predate the existence of al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden and his disciples are small men and secondary threats whose shadows are made large by our fears. Al-Qaida is the only global jihadist organization and is the only Islamic terrorist organization that targets the U.S. homeland. Al-Qaida remains capable of striking here and is plotting from its redoubt in Waziristan, Pakistan. The organization, however, has only a handful of individuals capable of planning, organizing and leading a terrorist operation. Al-Qaida threatens to use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, but its capabilities are far inferior to its desires. Even the "loose nuke" threat, whose consequences would be horrific, has a very low probability. For the medium term, any attack is overwhelmingly likely to consist of creative uses of conventional explosives. No other Islamic-based terrorist organization, from Mindanao to the Bekaa Valley to the Sahel, targets the U.S. homeland; is part of a "global jihadist movement"; or has more than passing contact with al-Qaida. These groups do and will, however, identify themselves with global jihadist rhetoric and may bandy the bogey-phrase of "al-Qaida." They are motivated by hostility toward the West and fear of the irresistible changes that education, trade, and economic and social development are causing in their cultures. These regional terrorist organizations may target U.S. interests or persons in the groups' historic areas of interest and operations. None of these groups is likely to succeed in seizing power or in destabilizing the societies they attack, though they may succeed in killing numerous people through sporadic attacks such as the Madrid train bombings. There are and will continue to be small numbers of Muslims in certain Western countries - in the dozens, perhaps - who seek to commit terrorist acts, along the lines of the British citizens behind the 2005 London bus bombings. Some may have irregular contact with al-Qaida central in Waziristan; more will act as free agents for their imagined cause. They represent an Islamic-tinged version of the anarchists of the late 19th century: dupes of "true belief," the flotsam of revolutionary cultural change and destruction in Islam, and of personal anomie. We need to catch and neutralize these people. But they do not represent a global movement or a global threat. The threat from Islamic terrorism is no larger now than it was before Sept. 11, 2001. Islamic societies the world over are in turmoil and will continue for years to produce small numbers of dedicated killers, whom we must stop. U.S. and allied intelligence do a good job at that; these efforts, however, will never succeed in neutralizing every terrorist, everywhere. Why are these views so starkly at odds with what the Bush administration has said since the beginning of the "Global War on Terror"? This administration has heard what it has wished to hear, pressured the intelligence community to verify preconceptions, undermined or sidetracked opposing voices, and both instituted and been victim of procedures that guaranteed that the slightest terrorist threat reporting would receive disproportionate weight - thereby comforting the administration's preconceptions and policy inclinations. We must not delude ourselves about the nature of the terrorist threat to our country. We must not take fright at the specter our leaders have exaggerated. In fact, we must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are.
4. Terror Threat Overblown- More likely to be hit by a comet
John Mueller, “Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?” FOREIGN AFFAIRS v. 85 n. 5, September/October 2005, p. 2+.
But while keeping such potential dangers in mind, it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaedalike operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000). Although it remains heretical to say so, the evidence so far suggests that fears of the omnipotent terrorist -- reminiscent of those inspired by images of the 20-foot-tall Japanese after Pearl Harbor or the 20-foot-tall Communists at various points in the Cold War (particularly after Sputnik) -- may have been overblown, the threat presented within the United States by al Qaeda greatly exaggerated. The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected since 9/11 may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most, and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists.
5. Al Qaeda is running out of money. Makes them incompetent for attacks.
Vardi, 2 – 11 (Nathan, Forbes, “Is al Qaeda Bankrupt?” )
Jihadists had a name for Abd al Hamid al Mujil--"the million dollar man." Al Mujil had forged a personal relationship with Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, spending parts of the late 1990s in Afghanistan. In those days the Kuwaiti-born al Mujil traveled to various Arab countries to meet with bin Laden's deputies. As recently as 2006 al Mujil conducted fundraising in Saudi Arabia, where he was executive director of the eastern province branch of the International Islamic Relief Organization, a charitable group. He provided donor funds directly to al Qaeda, says the U.S. government, and was particularly focused on helping al Qaeda affiliates in the Philippines by handing out cash to a supporter who pretended to be on an Islamic pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. These days al Mujil is out of business. That's largely thanks to efforts by the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.N. Security Council. Designating al Mujil as a terrorist financier and singling out the Philippine and Indonesian offices of his charity, they have prohibited U.S. financial firms from conducting any transaction with him or those offices and required U.N. member states to freeze his assets. The Saudi Arabian government has met that requirement, in addition to restricting the transfer of iiro funds outside of the kingdom. The charity's U.S. lawyer says the iiro is not a terrorist organization and has done nothing wrong. Al Mujil, he adds, no longer has a role with the charity. Such actions, across many fronts, have made a significant dent in al Qaeda's treasury. On the eve of the attacks on America al Qaeda was running a $30 million annual budget, according to the CIA. The terrorists were tapping into deep-pocketed Saudi and other Arab donors. Now they are hard up. Witness the pathetically ill-equipped and mistrained underwear bomber.
Ext #1 – Terrorism Declining
Terrorism is declining – the Human security brief proves
Stroehlein 08 Andrew Stroehlein worked at the Institute for War and Peace “Global terrorism decreasing” May 23, 08
The new Human Security Brief 2007, published this week and including a comprehensive review of the statistical data on global terrorism, shows a sharp drop in the incidence of terrorist violence around the world. Deaths from terrorist actions have declined by some 40 percent. The study from the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University’s School for International Studies in Vancouver, Canada, says the expert consensus that Islamist terrorism is rising simply has it wrong. It points out that “the loose-knit terror network associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda has suffered a dramatic collapse in popular support throughout the Muslim world”. Of course, the counting is complicated by a number of factors, but overall, this seems to burst the bubble of the doom-and-gloom crowd. The new study also contains an interesting section on “Why Most Terrorist Organizations Fail”, again pulling the rug out from under many who think violence against civilian targets is somehow a successful method for achieving political aims.
I wonder if any of those thoughtless voices in the media who have essentially been cooperating in spreading unnecessary fear might just want to reconsider how they cover terrorism. Probably not, I guess. “The Sky Is Falling” and “We’re All Going to Die” are still headlines that will sell papers and keep audiences from turning the channel.
Terrorism is declining – Death Tolls and bases prove
Stroehlein 08
Human Security Brief “Human Security Brief 2007” May 21, 08
Challenging the expert consensus that the threat of global terrorism is increasing, the Human Security Brief 2007 reveals a sharp net decline in the incidence of terrorist violence around the world.
Fatalities from terrorism have declined by some 40 percent, while the loose-knit terror network associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda has suffered a dramatic collapse in popular support throughout the Muslim world.
The Brief also describes and analyses the extraordinary, but largely unnoticed, positive change in sub-Saharan Africa's security landscape. The number of conflicts being waged in the region more than halved between 1999 and 2006; the combat toll dropped by 98 percent.
Finally, the Brief updates the findings of the 2005 Human Security Report, and demonstrates that the decline in the total number of armed conflicts and combat deaths around the world has continued. The number of military coups has also continued to decline, as have the number of campaigns of deadly violence waged against civilians.
Ext #3 – No Attack
There will be no major attack- several reasons
Brookings Institution 7 - 18 -08 – independent research and policy institute [“Have we exaggerated the threat of terrorism?” Brookings Institute, July 18, 2008,
One participant argued that terrorism presents minimal cause for concern. Discounting war zones, studies show that there have been very few people killed by “Muslim extremists” each year—in fact, more people drown in bathtubs each year in the United States. The FBI reported in 2005 that it had not found an al-Qaeda presence in the United States. Additionally, terrorism, by its very nature, can be self-defeating: many attacks by al-Qaeda have caused the group to lose popularity. This participant questioned both the intentions and capability of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden has threatened many attacks that he has not been able to execute. In specific, this participant thought it unlikely that that al-Qaeda would obtain nuclear weapons, despite fears to the contrary. Another participant agreed that the fears about terrorism are exaggerated and differentiated between the actual campaign against al-Qaeda and its supporters and the idea of a general “war on terrorism.” However, participants also detailed the larger problems that terrorism can create, regardless of the numbers it kills directly: terrorism often leads to insurgencies or civil wars; it could destabilize U.S. allies in the Middle East and the whole Middle Eastern architecture; terrorism keeps oil prices high; and it has psychological effects beyond the actual death tolls. Additionally, many planned attacks have been stopped before they were carried out; one participant noted that there have been several near-misses recently. One participant argued that the war on terrorism is actually about an ideological battle between the United States and its allies and radical forces. Another participant agreed with this assessment of the general struggle between the United States and “radical Islamic extremism.” This participant noted that the larger struggle is much more complicated to understand than terrorism in specific and that this leads to a disproportionate focus on terrorism and the accompanying misallocation of resources. Participants highlighted the difference between the risks presented by terrorism in the United States and around the world. The impact of terrorism in Iraq and Lebanon, for instance, is completely different than the impact in the United States, which one participant categorized as being essentially psychological. The relevance of the capability of governments at preventing terrorism was also addressed. Terrorism is particularly dangerous in places where there is weak government capacity and rule of law. Participants discussed why has there not been another terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001. One participant presented several reasons: the United States has a supportive domestic Muslim population; the would-be terrorists in the United States are not skilled; and U.S. counterterrorism policy has made it more difficult for the al-Qaeda core to plan complex attacks. This participant argued, however, that there are risks that this situation may change going forward. As the al-Qaeda core reconstitutes itself in Pakistan, it may be able to plan more complex attacks again. Additionally, the U.S. Muslim population may become less supportive overtime as a result of U.S. homeland security policy. However, another participant did not think the attitudes of the U.S. Muslim community were particularly relevant to this debate.
Terrorists won’t attack
Mueller 06 - Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University [Mueller, John, "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?: The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy" Foreign Affairs, September/ October 2006,
For the past five years, Americans have been regularly regaled with dire predictions of another major al Qaeda attack in the United States. In 2003, a group of 200 senior government officials and business executives, many of them specialists in security and terrorism, pronounced it likely that a terrorist strike more devastating than 9/11 -- possibly involving weapons of mass destruction -- would occur before the end of 2004. In May 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned that al Qaeda could "hit hard" in the next few months and said that 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack on U.S. soil were complete. That fall, Newsweek reported that it was "practically an article of faith among counterterrorism officials" that al Qaeda would strike in the run-up to the November 2004 election. When that "October surprise" failed to materialize, the focus shifted: a taped encyclical from Osama bin Laden, it was said, demonstrated that he was too weak to attack before the election but was marshalling his resources to do so months after it. On the first page of its founding manifesto, the massively funded Department of Homeland Security intones, "Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon." But if it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited? One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad. But this explanation is rarely offered. HUFFING AND PUFFING Instead, Americans are told -- often by the same people who had once predicted imminent attacks -- that the absence of international terrorist strikes in the United States is owed to the protective measures so hastily and expensively put in place after 9/11. But there is a problem with this argument. True, there have been no terrorist incidents in the United States in the last five years. But nor were there any in the five years before the 9/11 attacks, at a time when the United States was doing much less to protect itself. It would take only one or two guys with a gun or an explosive to terrorize vast numbers of people, as the sniper attacks around Washington, D.C., demonstrated in 2002. Accordingly, the government's protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched. Moreover, Israel still experiences terrorism even with a far more extensive security apparatus. It may well have become more difficult for terrorists to get into the country, but, as thousands demonstrate each day, it is far from impossible. Immigration procedures have been substantially tightened (at considerable cost), and suspicious U.S. border guards have turned away a few likely bad apples. But visitors and immigrants continue to flood the country. There are over 300 million legal entries by foreigners each year, and illegal crossings number between 1,000 and 4,000 a day -- to say nothing of the generous quantities of forbidden substances that the government has been unable to intercept or even detect despite decades of a strenuous and well-funded "war on drugs." Every year, a number of people from Muslim countries -- perhaps hundreds -- are apprehended among the illegal flow from Mexico, and many more probably make it through. Terrorism does not require a large force. And the 9/11 planners, assuming Middle Eastern males would have problems entering the United States legally after the attack, put into motion plans to rely thereafter on non-Arabs with passports from Europe and Southeast Asia. If al Qaeda operatives are as determined and inventive as assumed, they should be here by now. If they are not yet here, they must not be trying very hard or must be far less dedicated, diabolical, and competent than the common image would suggest.
Ext #4 – Terror Exaggerated
People have an irrational fear of terrorism – we can’t defend everything.
Schneier 9/8/05 – CTO of Counterpane Internet Security [Bruce, “Terrorists Don’t Do Movie Plots,” Wired, 9/8/05, ]
Australia reaffirmed its close security relations with the United States Saturday but said it has no plans to add more troops to its force in Afghanistan. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates and US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte met Foreign Minister Stephen Smith and Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon for the first annual review of relations under the new Labor government. "Both sides underlined that Australia and the United States benefit from substantial coverage in their strategic and security policy," they said in a joint statement. Gates praised Australia's "global leadership" and said the United States has "no better ally." "Above all it is clear we agree on the challenges we face together and the solutions we must forge together," he said. Among other things, they discussed the way forward in Afghanistan for Australia, which has nearly 1,000 troops serving in the violence-ridden southern part of the country, the ministers said. "We have no proposal to increase the 1,000 or so troops we have in Afghanistan," said Smith at a news conference. He said Australia was looking to shift its efforts toward non-military assistance in the form of police trainers, and work aimed at increasing the Afghan government's capacity to provide for its people. But, he said, "When it comes to Afghanistan, I wouldn't be quite so underwhelming about our contributions to Afghanistan: over a thousand troops in one of the toughest areas. "There are other nation states whose contributions are not nearly as profound, in not nearly as hard-fought areas, and in addition to that we are certainly not contemplating a drawdown," he said. The United States is sending in an additional 3,200 marines in anticipation of a possible Taliban offensive in the spring, and has been pressing NATO allies to fill shortfalls in troops and equipment under the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's centre-left government confirmed this week that it would honour an election pledge to pull 550 combat troops out of southern Iraq by the middle of the year. Australia will still have about 1,000 military personnel in and around Iraq, including a 110-strong security detachment in Baghdad and personnel for aircraft and a warship based outside Iraq. The two sides also discussed China, and shared views on developments in southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. Smith said Australia's growing economic ties with China were "win-win," with no adverse impact on its relationship with the United States. "Australia's economic engagement with China is only beaten by the United States economic engagement with China," he said. The pair are the most senior US officials to visit Australia since Rudd won office in November and Gates said he looked forward to an ongoing high-level dialogue to see where the new government in Canberra was headed. "We anticipate there will be a great deal of continuity. We have a lot of common interests," he told reporters on Friday. "Continuity doesn't mean there won't be change to tactics or approaches to certain problems," Gates said. "What I was referring to was continuity in the close relationship between the United States and Australia, and vice versa, for a long time." Australia has long been the United States' closest ally in the region, one whose previous conservative government provided troops and staunch political backing to US-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Rudd government's new tack on Iraq comes as the United States is wrestling with how quickly and deeply to draw down the 155,000-strong US force deployed there. The top US military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is expected to make recommendations as early as next month on whether further cuts can be made to forces after a drawdown of five combat brigades, about 20,000 troops, by July. Gates said Petraeus and his commanders had persuaded him that a brief pause would be needed to consolidate and assess the situation in July. "My hope still is that we will be able to further draw down our troops in Iraq over the course of the next 10 to 12 months," Gates said.
AT: U.S. Brazil Relations
US-Brazilian relations are at an unprecedented level, despite differences – Brazil is devoted to cooperation with the US.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 1-24-07 (“The Future of U.S.-Brazilian Relations”, )
Not a single action taken or decision made by the United States in the last three years has negatively affected Brazilian interests, claimed Ambassador Roberto Abdenur, before a packed conference room in what was his last public appearance as Brazil’s ambassador in Washington. When he took the position in 2004, Brazilian indignation with Iraq and over onerous visa procedures and poor treatment of visiting nationals had caused a temporary strain in the relationship. Other potential obstacles to strengthening the relationship that were successfully avoided include possible trade sanctions against Brazil over intellectual piracy, Brazil’s refusal to exempt U.S. troops and officials from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, mutual charges of dumping, and U.S. threat to removes its General System of Preferences for Brazil (which would have negatively affected approximately four billion dollars of Brazilian exports to the United States). Despite these challenges, Abdenur argued that the bilateral relationship has reached an unprecedented level of mutual understanding and deference to the other country’s positions and opinions, facilitated in no small part by President Lula’s pragmatism.
Despite the existence of differences, Brazil-U.S. relations are on a productive platform to foster positive developments in the future. Lula has put aside his misgivings about some U.S. policies and embraced the fact that it is in Brazil’s best interests to foster strong relations with the United States, argued Abdenur. Much to the disdain of Brazil, the United States has mistakenly withdrawn from certain international discussions and scenarios and erroneously engaged in others, such as climate change and the Middle East. Additionally, Latin America is overlooked by its Northern neighbor. However, if and when the United States decides to refocus its energies upon the region, Abdenur is assured that Brazil would be its natural ally in such an endeavor. Brazil has good relations with all of its neighbors and strategically occupies a moderate space between the region’s divergent interests and trajectories, as illustrated by its leading role in the current international efforts to stabilize Haiti and by its contribution to the resolution of the conflict between Peru and Ecuador in the 1990s—in both cases in close cooperation with the United States. Abdenur argued that the United States is not the only actor that must take decisive steps towards a convergence of interests between the two countries: Brazil must stop fearing the United States and instead embrace it as a partner.
AT: U.S. Canada Relations
Relations with Canada are deep and resilient.
Ek and Fergusson 07 – (Carl and Ian F., Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division congressional researchers, May 15, “Canada-US Relations,” Order code 96-397, )
Regardless of the occasional rancor of U.S.-Canadian trade disputes, there is little danger that such conflicts would ever escalate into a full-blown trade war. The Canadians in particular have a strong incentive to resolve feuds and maintain close trade ties with the United States. The Canadian economy is heavily export-oriented, and its largest trading partner by far is the United States, takes more than 80% of Canada’s exports and is the source of nearly two-thirds of its imports. And although sharp disputes still plague the enormous bilateral trade relationship, it is important to bear in mind that such disputes normally affect only 2% of trade.
AT: U.S. China Relations
1. Sino-US relations are high and the most important issue is the economy, not attacking
Lijuan 7/7 (Zhang, Reporter for , “S&ED: An upgraded dialogue between China and US,” .cn, International, , AD: 7/7/09) AN
A very recent signal of enhanced Sino-US relations is the creation of the new Sino-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED). This mechanism is an upgraded version of the Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED) established in September 2006. The implications of "upgrades" will include dialogues with the Secretary of State, and will cover a wide variety of strategic and economic topics ranging from economy and trade, to climate change and environment, as well as to world politics at both national and international levels. Five year ago, former US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick warned that "it is time to recognize China for what it is and may become, not what we imagine China to be." The creation of S&ED is tangible evidence that the US is facing the new practical realities of Sino-US relations. This is particularly true in light of the world financial crisis and economic recession. The S&ED will provide a top level forum for policymakers from both China and the U.S. to forge and enhanced bilateral economic cooperation and strengthening political cooperation. During the past few years, issues surrounding the Sino-US relations have covered the threatening power of China, the value of Chinese currency, and the disputes of intellectual property rights. While the world economic recession continues, however, none of the above is more important than stimulating the economy. If the United States is too big to fail, then China is too big to be ignored. For this reason, President Obama has sent both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to China to show the American willingness and emphasis of engaging China at this historical moment.
2. Relations resilient – disputes will not spillover or escalate
Lieberthal, Michigan University Professor, January 2007
[Kenneth, “China’s March on the 21st Century,” ]]
Second, the current U.S.-China relationship is not fragile. Indeed, it has become extraordinarily wide ranging,complex,and deeply embedded in the political and economic systems ofboth societies. Structurally,the financial,economic,and trade relationship is the most well-developed leg ofour current bilateral engagement. It has produced a situation ofsuch deep interdependence that only a very traumatic crisis could significantly change this in the short run. However,such disruption would palpably affect the standards of living in both countries. Despite well-known frictions, therefore,neither side is prepared to damage itselfby taking steps to fundamentally disentangle this economic interdependence. China has shown, moreover, that economic cooperation with the United States is sufficiently important to warrant serious concessions when necessary to keep this part ofour relationship in reasonably good working order. The existing U.S.-China engagement extends far beyond classic foreign policy and economic spheres. Indeed,almost every major agency in the U.ernment has serious programs and fre- quent contacts with its Chinese counterpart. This includes such bodies as the Department of Education, Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Energy, the Center for Disease Control,the Environmental Protection Agency,and so forth. In short,the overall U.S.-China relationship is mature:even very significant problems in any one issue area will not disrupt the entire relationship, and a very solid base already exists for future cooperative efforts. Considerable interests in each country have gelled around the specific forms ofengagement that the two countries have developed.
3. Sino-U.S. relations resilient – not a zero-sum game.
Christensen 3/27/07 – Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs [Thomas J., statement before the House Committee of Foreign Affairs, U.S. Department of State, 3/27/07, ]
Ext #1 – Relations High
Sino-U.S. Relations high – Cooperation proves bond
Bajoria 6-18/08 Staff writer for the Council on Foreign Relations [Jayshree Bajoria, Staff Writer, Council on Foreign Relations, “The China-North Korea Relationship,” ]
But Christopher R. Hill, U.S. envoy to the talks, in an interview with ABC News in February 2007 said: "This whole Six-Party process has done more to bring the U.S. and China together than any other process I’m aware of." Hill said the United States is working very closely with China and South Korea and hopes that "if the North Koreans were to ever think about walking away from this, they would understand they were walking away from all their neighbors as well."
U.S. and China work together to deal with the environment now
Christensen 3/27/07 – Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs [Thomas J., statement before the House Committee of Foreign Affairs, U.S. Department of State, 3/27/07, ]
AT: U.S. China War
1. China is not a nuclear threat – only regional
Howard 10/13/04 - Head of Department of Social Sciences, Director of the Combating Terrorism Center [Col. Russ, “The China Threat,” MIT Security Studies Program Seminar, 10/13/04, ]
The PLA has insufficient lift to project power. Advancement in the PLA is still based on party loyalty rather than military accomplishments and abilities. Overall, the PLA suffers from poor morale. With its large numbers, the PLA is irresistible in defense and incapable in offense. Although China is a nuclear power, it is not a nuclear threat. In the Q & A, Col. Howard briefly described a few of the actions he would recommend if he were in charge of PLA modernization. He suggested that he would thoroughly review the footage from the Gulf War, cut the Army by half, re-solidify the Sino-Russian relationship, modernize ground and air forces, and increase the capability of Special Operations Forces. Col. Howard concluded by suggesting that for the near-term, China is a regional threat, not an international one. By approximately 2015, the PLA may have developed the capability to sustain a coercive attack against Taiwan, but any threats to the United States will not materialize in the near-term.
2. War won’t escalate – neither country can conquer the other.
Record 12/6/01 – professor strategy and international security Air War College, senior research fellow Center for International strategy, Technology, and Policy [Dr. Jeffrey, “Thinking about China and war,” Aerospace Power Journal, 12/6/01, ]
3. No source of Sino-U.S. war – end of Taiwan independence.
Ross 3 - 4 - 06 – professor of political science at Boston College, associate at John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard [Robert S., “Taiwan’s Fading Independence Movement,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 85 no. 2, March/April 06, p. 141, ]
Ext #1 – Not a Threat
CHINA DOESN’T HAVE NEARLY ENOUGH NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Rosemont, 2/9/08 [Contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (), is distinguished professor emeritus at St. Mary's College of Maryland and a visiting scholar in the Religious Studies department at Brown University, ]
Finally, China has 100-400 nuclear weapons. But only the 18 in the silos mentioned above are capable of striking the western continental United States and these cannot be launched quickly. Unless fired as a first-strike weapon, they could easily be destroyed. The United States, on the other hand, has almost 10,000 nuclear warheads and sufficient delivery capabilities to obliterate every Chinese city with a population of a half-million or more, and still have more than enough of a stockpile to hold the rest of the world at bay.11
Ground forces are less well equipped, lack air support and are focused on protecting Chinese borders
Rosemont, 2/9/08 [Contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (), is distinguished professor emeritus at St. Mary's College of Maryland and a visiting scholar in the Religious Studies department at Brown University, ]
In terms of ground forces, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has an active duty component of 2.3 million personnel. That’s a lot of soldiers, but the United States has 1.4 million, with less than one-fourth of the population. True, the Chinese have reserve forces of another million plus. But they are responsible, among other things, for patrolling more than 8,000 miles of borders with India and Russia – not always the friendliest of neighbors in the past – functions the U.S. military does not perform at the Canadian and Mexican borders. Moreover, despite the supply breakdown scandal in Iraq, the 1.4 million U.S. troops are much better equipped overall than their Chinese counterparts, few of whom have state-of-the-art support materiel or personal safety equipment.3
Defense spending is over hyped – not in areas vital to fighting the US and still smaller than our spending in Iraq per year
Rosemont, 2/9/08 [Contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (), is distinguished professor emeritus at St. Mary's College of Maryland and a visiting scholar in the Religious Studies department at Brown University, ]
On the military question, the answer is much clearer. China is not a military threat to the United States. Only those who believe that Fu Manchu is alive and well in the Middle Kingdom and fulfilling his dreams of world domination through a large and aggressive army, air force, and navy still subscribe to a notion that China poses a global military threat. Several recent books on the Chinese military perpetuate this myth. Their titles reveal everything: Imagined Enemies: China Prepares for Uncertain War, for instance, or Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States. These and numerous similar narratives share an alarmist tone combined with a dearth of relevant facts in support of their claims. These books suffer from such flaws for good reason. The facts belie the claims, especially when placed in comparative perspective. When it comes to the putative Chinese military threat, the numbers simply don’t add up. Much has been made of the double-digit increase in Chinese defense spending over the last three years. China has indeed increased its spending. But much of the additional expenditures have been devoted to upgrading information, weapons, and communications systems. At the same, China has cut troop strength to almost half of what it was in 1990.1 Moreover, the estimate of military expenditures for 2006 is $35 billion. That is about 7% of the U.S. defense budget, once the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are factored in. Even before including these latter expenditures the U.S. military budget is now larger than the defense budgets of all other nations combined. Almost surely China’s actual military expenditures are larger than the 2006 estimate. But even if the military budget is twice as large, $70 billion is still less than 15% of the U.S. total and less than what was spent in Iraq and Afghanistan last year alone.2
The PLA is not a threat – the U.S. military dominates.
Howard 10/13/04 - Head of Department of Social Sciences, Director of the Combating Terrorism Center [Col. Russ, “The China Threat,” MIT Security Studies Program Seminar, 10/13/04, ]
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