Are the Peacemakers Even Relevant?

President Bush recently announced his shiny new Middle East Peace Initiative, which he hopes, will restore some luster to his seriously tarnished image. He plans to have Secretary Rice lead an international peace conference that will bring to the table the Jordanians, Egyptians, Saudis, French, British, Russian, the Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, the Palestinian President Abbas, and his Prime Minister Fayyad. Despite the far-reaching implications of the Arab-Israeli conflict, President Bush has failed to invite to the conference any of the parties whose participation could actually lead to a meaningful, long-term peace between Palestinians and Israelis. And, by failing to engage those who could turn the tide towards peace, Bush is missing a prime opportunity to remake America’s image that he so blatantly squandered in Iraq.
The parties whose presence will ensure at least an opportunity for viable peace are Marwan Barghouti, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran. Any peace negotiations must involve the non-state actors who create the daily realities in the Middle East. No longer can we afford to sit back and play outdated Cold War politics that fail to take into account those non-state actors. Our only hope for bringing about a lasting peace is by addressing those who act without state sanction. Hamas and Hezbollah are prime examples of such groups, as are the more extremist elements within the Iranian government, who act without consulting their political leaders. This said, it appears that despite his good intentions our lame-duck president has failed to do more than introduce a non-starter to the conversation of Middle East peace.

Irrelevant: The Moderate Arab States (Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia):

These countries are seen as too pro-Western by the Palestinian street, and hold little sway over residents in Hebron or Ramallah. Both Egypt and Jordan exploited the Palestinians under their control from 1948 until they signed peace agreements with Israel in 1976 and 1992 respectively. Neither one attempted to integrate the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, instead choosing to funnel weapons to extremists in refugee camps. Their desire for proxy war with Israel meant guns and rockets instead of roads and power lines for the Palestinian people. Since peace was reached, the Hashemite King’s in Jordan have kept the West Bank as distant from Amman as possible, not wanting an influx of poor, Sunni Arabs to destabilize his regime. Egypt, not wanting to extend its already taxed government services has refused to give citizenship to its Palestinian population. In response to the recent events in Gaza, Egypt closed its embassy in Gaza City and stepped up its repression of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas’ parent organization). Saudi Arabia, despite its massive oil wealth, has done little to support to the Palestinian people. The Saudis give symbolic aid, but stop far short of providing anything meaningful. Because of their counterproductive actions in the PA and their close ties to America, none of these states hold enough sway over the Palestinians to get them to accept a peace deal.

Irrelevant: The Europeans (France, Great Britain, and Russia):

The British and French bid farewell to Mid East relevance back in 1956 when their serious miscalculations (see Suez Crisis) forced them to take a back seat in the region. The Russians lost prominence with the collapse of Arab nationalism at the hands of Israel in 1967 and 1973. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the flow of Russian arms to the region faded along with the Arab’s interest in what Moscow had to say.

Irrelevant: The Unpopular Israeli (Prime Minister Olmert)

The Israeli public has not, and will not, forgive Olmert for his severely botched war against Hezbollah last summer. With his popularity hovering around 10% it appears that only the delay of the Winograd Report is saving him from an almost certain vote of no confidence. Israelis are notorious for sacking failed leaders, as was the case with the Golda Meir following the 1973 war. Despite the fact that Olmert was elected on a ‘unilateral withdrawal’ platform, any move towards peace he makes will face staunch opposition in the Knesset. The Israeli population, despite yearning for peace sees their Arab counterparts as unwilling to denounce terrorism, throwing a wrench in any future peace negotiations.

Irrelevant: The Weak Palestinians (President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad)

It has been said that no leader ‘without blood on his hands’ will ever be able to credibly represent the Palestinian people, who still sees violent opposition to Israel as a prerequisite for achieving statehood. The new prime minister, Fayyad has no such credibility. The Western-trained economist has no history of jihad against Israel or participation in the Second Intifada. This will always make him appear weak to the Palestinians. The very reasons that Fayyad is appealing to the West (a background in economics and opposition to armed resistance) make him ineffectual as a leader. The man who appointed him, President Abbas, is suffering from a lack of credibility as well. His recent split with ex-prime minister Ismail Haniya cost him control of Gaza, and any peace deal he makes with Israel will essentially create two Palestinian states, one in Gaza, and one in the West Bank. The Palestinian people will find this solution completely unacceptable and the extremists will use all available means to destroy any such peace deal.

Most Relavent: Marwan Barghouti

The one man who does have ‘blood on his hands’ and thus maintains the credibility necessary to lead the Palestinians to statehood is currently locked in an Israeli jail. His name is Marwan Barghouti. Although he is serving two consecutive life sentences for killing five Israelis his Prisoners Letter proves that he is willing to work with Israel to create a sustainable, singular Palestinian state. He is essentially the Palestinian strong man whose career has evolved along the lines of Ariel Sharon, who transformed from fighter to peacemaker without loosing the legitimacy and trust of his people. Is Israel willing to free this convicted terrorist? The fact is that there may not even be a choice. Since he represents a legitimate path towards peace, the Israeli government must free him for the long-term good that he will bring to the Middle East.

Relavent: The Terrorists and Those who Fund Them (Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran)

By not inviting Hamas to the negotiating table, President Bush is essentially sinking the peace deal before it even has a chance to take form. Hamas is in complete control of Gaza. They are currently smuggling in weapons and explosives through the Philadelphi Corridor, which links Gaza to Egypt. Their ranks have swollen to 15,000 fighters and they continue to fire rockets into Israel. Daily, they demonstrate that they care more about killing Jews than improving the lives of Gazans. Their actions effectively veto any peace agreement signed by Abbas and Israel. Iran is actively financing Hamas and must be pressured to stop them from funneling the weapons into Gaza, an action that stalls the peace in its tracks. Syria and Hezbollah must also be brought into the conversation, as the ‘hot summer’ that Nasrallah promised (after meeting with the Iranian president Ahmadinejad in Damascus) will surely put any peace agreement on the backburner.

You make peace with your enemies not your friends. Bush, however, seems to be forgetting this paramount rule of realpolitik, it is not the moderate Arabs, Europeans, and Abbas we need to be talking with. We must reckon with the real players whose destabilizing actions would instantly torpedo any future peace deal. Gone are days when heads of states can sit down and sign comprehensive agreements ending hostilities. In today’s world non-state actors must be regarded as just as, or perhaps more important than the states they act within. President Bush must come to understand that a peaceful future in the Middle East depends on it.

The Future of our Cities: Sustaining Affluence Beyond Cheap Oil

The Twentieth Century saw the United States and many other nations complete the transition to an urbanized society, a process that included the centralization of commerce and population. The Twentieth Century also witnessed the suburbanization of the United States following World War II based on the widespread availability of personal transportation and highways. This allowed population centers to decentralize from commercial centers, which led to the massive and unnecessary usage of natural resources. Depending how you look at the issue of suburbanization, it either was a serious lack of planning or seriously short sided planning. Either way it was a great mistake, and it brings the United States to a unique predicament. Either we can right the mistake of the decentralization of society into suburbs with smart and innovative planning, or we can wait until we are forced by global disaster and a crumbling economy built almost solely on a finite resource. If we as a society opt to take the route of smart planning there is a number of issues we will need to address.

Water Availability

Because of the availability of cheap energy, water has been easily and unsustainably pumped to population centers far from natural sources. There are several poignant examples of this potentially dire, future problem. As a Northern Californian I feel I should address a problem in my own backyard. The California State Water Project that supplies a significant portion of Los Angeles’ water needs burns energy pumping water 2,000 feet over the Tehachapi Mountains -- the highest lift of any water system in the world. The amount of energy used to deliver that water to residential customers in Southern California is equivalent to approximately one-third of the total average household electric use in the region.[1] A number made essential by the positioning of ten million people in the Los Angeles River basin, a largely semi-arid desert. The Average Net Electricity use of the California State water project is 5.1 Billion kilowatt hours of electricity[2]. What will happen when the energy supply increasingly scarce? Will it still be considered prudent to spend our scarce energy resources bringing in water from far away to support certain communities.
A distinct problem awaits many coastal nations with limited water supplies, specifically in Africa and the Middle East. Such an example is the large portion of Dubai’s water that is sourced from desalinization plants run entirely on a finite supply of cheap crude oil, without which the processes costs would be astronomical. IPS news reports that

"the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have an urbanisation level of about 85 percent. As a result, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), for example, is the world's second largest consumer of water per capita after the United States. Its average daily domestic consumption is 353 litres (80 gallons) per person compared to 425 litres (96 gallons) in the U.S." (AEM 2007)

Without the desalinization plants that supply Dubai with water, the aspirations of the up and coming global cosmopolitan center that is Dubai would be but a pipe dream.


Food production

Cheap energy also brought about the so-called “green revolution” which created crops ill suited to local environments, heavily dependent on petroleum-derived products such as pesticides, and increased irrigation, leading to further water depletion[3]. Additionally, these genetically modified seeds are dependent on outside factors such as pesticides for their survival and they do not adapt to local environments like their indigenous cousins. They are also highly invasive; they destroy crop diversity in major global food staples such as corn, wheat, rice, barley, and oats, posing a dire problem for the future of many ecosystems. The lack of natural diversity can cause an entire harvest to be wiped out if insects or other natural disaster attacks it.
The practice of comparative advantage in global trade will have to cease if every country is to be able to feed their populations, the international transportation will simply be too expensive. Although in theory, it is supposed to reduce opportunity cost for the economies of countries in practice it evolves mostly from dictation of specialization by loans from global financial institutions.

Economic and Population growth

The fast-paced, perpetually growing, consumption-driven economy fuelled by cheap energy solutions allowed the US to have sustained long-term growth throughout the Twentieth Century. Fueling the growth of the suburbs were city planners who make the assumption that 3% economic growth would occur forever, despite the fact that a finite resource underpins this growth. The miracle of the development and economic growth has provided Americans—and citizens around the developed world—with a “culture of affluence” where it becomes almost a right to consume at will. This culture has long included the option to work in suburbs far away from home and from the resources that sustain their lifestyles, a practice that must end.
Rapid economic and population growth has been achieved by a myriad of private investment and free market policies, which are light on macro planning and heavy on consumption. Such an example is the strategy of GM in the early Twentieth Century to buy up electric urban light-rail systems all around the country and push for federally built highways on which their busses would cruise back and forth from newly built suburbs, with massive sub developments outside major cities.
None of this growth or infrastructure would have been possible without the presence of an extremely cheap and relatively efficient energy source: crude oil.

Alternative Energies

There are many creative solutions available to solve the problem of sustainable planning. There are a myriad of renewable energy sources could replace a significant amount of the fossil fuel consumption in the United States, however Ethanol is not one of them. Ethanol is touted as the greatest alternative to petroleum in the US, but unfortunately its benefits are largely political, providing a godsend to politicians seeking support in the Iowa caucuses. Ethanol is a feasible alternative fuel for a country like Brazil, which already has massive exportation in the more efficient ethanol from sugar cane industry. The corn-based ethanol from the US is a different story all together. To begin, corn-ethanol based biofuel is much more efficient of an energy source than its sugar-cane based cousin, which cannot feasibly be imported to the US because of tariffs in the US market. Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol has an efficiency ratio of 8-to-1, i.e. the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. Gasoline by comparison clocks in at just 5-to-1 says an oil-industry engineer at R-Squared Energy Blog. The US Department of Energy states that “The most recent findings show that corn ethanol fuel is energy efficient and yields an energy output: input ratio of 1.6” (DOE 2007). Industry experts predict that number will increase very slowly if at all, given that most corn ethanol in the US is heavily dependent of petroleum products.




Although there are many renewable energy sources that can help offset the Peak Oil crisis—a phenomenon where oil’s efficiency ratio will drop below 1:1—some geologists and energy experts have warned that no combination of renewable energy sources can replace the sheer amount of energy output the world currently attributes to petroleum-derived products. John Busby, a British scientist with background in power generation, chemical manufacture, agriculture, and food processing, along with experience in the economies of the developing world, wrote The Busby Report, an independent guide for the energy future of the UK. In it, he writes that

"…with the dwindling of global oil and gas reserves, international competition for supplies of coal, the demise of the indigenous coal industry together with the gradual termination of nuclear power mean that in order to be secure from the consequences of external events, the UK has to rearrange its economy to run with only around 25% of its current energy consumption.”

Although this will be a momentous challenge for Britain to undertake, the alternatives are far worse. To do no long-term planning for the coming difficulties would invite catastrophe and chaos as essential functions of the country simply shut down, think Iraq, 2007. The smarter our future planning is, the less likelihood these potential “water wars” will occur over the resources of coal and oil on a global scale. As far as the U.S. goes, our situation is no easier than the U.K.; in fact, it may be more severe. Britain does not suffer from decentralization and suburbanization, if anything we have farther to go them the UK.[4]

Solutions

The question we should be asking as a society is not how can plan to keep our lifestyles the same, what we should be asking is how can we re-plan our cities so that the transition from cheap oil can be made less-jarring, without mass rationing or conservation. The planning of our states and countries should have conservation and sustainability built in. Because we allowed city planners and the federal government to decentralize our society without an eye on the long term, we have more work to do for the coming transition.
To transition from a global economy in the world and a decentralized US society there are two important concepts. We can transition from a suburban society with New Urbanism, a movement dedicated to transforming our communities into walkable, neighborhood based development, what the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) calls “transforming growth patterns from the inside out.” This will help reduce energy use by reducing transportation energy costs by working and playing closer to where we live. The Local Government Commission is another New Urbanist group self-described as “local elected officials, city and county staff, planners, architects, and community leaders who are committed to making their communities more livable, prosperous, and resource-efficient.” Whether or not these organizations are effective, this philosophy is the one that is needed to bring cities into the future.
A modern version of Localism, what British Labour Party MP Alan Milburn calls "making services more locally accountable, devolving more power to local communities and, in the process, forging a modern relationship between the state, citizens and services”, will be dedicated to increasing local self-sufficiency in the areas of food production and commerce. One country has done an excellent job in many ways, developing government-run produce gardens in cities across the island. Although Cuba is by no means a model society, this is a great example of somewhere with limited resources creating a model project (Washington Post 1999). It shows the innovation and future planning can come from any source in the modern world.

[1] http://www.nrdc.org/water/conservation/edrain/execsum.asp
[2] http://www.publicaffairs.water.ca.gov/swp/swptoday.cfm
[3]http://www.macalester.edu/environmentalstudies/students/projects/citizenscience2007/geneticallymodifiedcrops/issues.html
[4] http://www.energybulletin.net/13737.html

July question: what will be the role of cities in the new century?

As of this year, according to the United Nations, humanity has officially arrived in the city. 2007 marked the first time that more than fifty-percent of people worldwide lived in cities, with a new word, "the megacity" (a city with more than ten million people) entering our international lexicon with some 21 examples to cite from all over the world with at least six more due to join their ranks soon (see complete list).

More cities, with greater, and increasingly more cosmopolitan populations could yield tremendous benefits for humanity on the whole. As resources and opportunities, both in the government and private sector are centralized, the benefits of either may be more widespread, better, and more easily sustained from generation to generation. After all, cities have been the centers for intellectual, technological and cultural development for millennia, even as they have been historically restricted from the greater populations that they serviced. Now, with more than fifty-percent of humanity living in one, will humanity enter a new era in which the benefits of urban life and progress may be brought to the majority?

That's a big maybe. But utopian visions aside, it's important to note that first, not every city that's growing by leaps and bounds is doing so because it wants to, or more importantly, because exponential growth is in its best interest. Cities like Lagos, Nigeria, the third fastest growing megacity in the world, and Karachi, Pakistan are seeing most of their growth in the worst place possible: the slums. As cultures clash with unbelievable poverty, terrorism, crime, and other concerns once considered foreign are now anything but. Diseases, including AIDS, spread more easily in slums, as well as water born infections such as diptheria and malaria. Even as healthcare may be more centralized in the city, at least in some places, demand is quickly out pacing supply. So, is it good news for the world that three quarters of its megacities are in the developing world? Potential may outweigh the harsh realities of today, but the reverse may be true as well. These are considerations to be applied to each city, and each region individually.

So what is the future of the city, and which cities, if not the new and most quickly expanding ones in the developing world, will most affirmatively secure their place in this new and emerging era? In the West, New York, London, Chicago and a spattering of European cities are battling it out for supremacy in financial markets, with no clear victor in sight. In the East, the Japanese capital of Tokyo is on the verge of a major demographic meltdown, as members of an increasingly older population prepare to leave their jobs without the necessary replacements. Other cities, whose international centrality are new to this century, are rising quickly (Mumbai, Shanghai), but not without their own host of problems which may soon stall developmental progress (read: massive overpopulation).

Will cities around the world compete with one another for power, in the way that only nations used to in the past, or is this "new era" really nothing new at all? Will cities in Nigeria, Pakistan and elsewhere turn their respective nations around, or bring them down entirely?

With that in mind, then, perhaps only one (albeit pressing) question remains: what about Dubai?

Opening remarks

Taking a lead from the predisposition that the world is changing in profound and unprecedented ways, as the shifting forces of international power dynamics, culture and climate intersect each with consequences that will only be fully understood in decades to come, this forum aims to better understand the changes at work, as they happen.

Believing that our emerging future is at once for everyone to influence and for no one to decide, the authors herein seek to gain clarity in the best, and most reliable place possible: At the intersection of multiple highly specialized perspectives, well versed in the most up-to-date trends, facts, and figures, but with an acute, and necessary regard given to those of the past as well. We do not pretend to know the future, just some of the forces at work which will shape it, past and present. Bringing our collective knowledge together may thus yield knowledge that is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts. We aim to reveal such possibilities.

Questions will be submitted by the authors to the group or through suggestions from readers on a monthly basis, and each author will respond in the form of an essay, referring to each other's remarks as they appear. Transcripts and summaries of discussions among group members and their guests may also appear.