Tag: United States

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Mazar-e-Sharif

Mazar-e-Sharif

The publication, in New Zealand, of Hit & Run by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson has drawn our attention to the remote Tigran valley, north of Kabul, in the millisphere of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Tigran is divided from Kabul by a high mountain range, and those wanting a description of the countryside should read Eric Newby’s travel writing classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

Tigran, in the Baghlan province, is situated on the historic trade route from Kabul north to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, but the New Zealand SAS wouldn’t have followed Newby’s horseback route; they would have taken a one-hour flight directly to Baghlan. Quicker and safer.

I discussed dividing Afghanistan into millispheres with a friend, who had worked for the Red Cross in Kabul in 1991.

Shew said Afghanistan had never really been one country, but a collection of regions dominated by ethnic warlords. For a start the country is roughly 85 percent Sunni Muslim and 15 percent Shi’a.

Kabul is the fifth fastest growing city in the world; a decade ago it didn’t qualify as a millisphere but now, with an urban population around 3.7 million, it does.

Kabul is roughly 45 percent Tajik, 25 percent Hazara and 25 percent Pashtun, and these three ethnic groups are spread throughout the country in roughly those proportions.

Baghlan province, where the NZ SAS Operation Burnham took place, is in a region dominated by the “northern alliance” of Tajiks and Uzbeks. Mazar-e-Sharif, after the largest city in the region, is the name I’ve given this millisphere, and geophysically it is the upper Amu Darya river catchment that drains north into the Aral Sea.

North is also the direction Afghanistan’s opium takes on its journey to the West.

When the Taliban seized control in 1996, opium production fell to less than 20 percent of what it was during the decade long 1980s Russian/Mujahideen war.

Since the American invasion in 2001, opium production has climbed to greater than pre-Taliban levels – despite the Americans spending $US7.6 billion on poppy eradication programmes.

During the Russian occupation, the Americans supplied money and arms to the Mujahideen. Joining this “jihad” against the Russians were 25,000 Arab fighters including one Osama bin Laden, who famously turned from being an ally of convenience to a sworn enemy of the US.

Working in Wellington earlier this decade, I met Monroe, a Maori soldier, who after serving his time in the New Zealand Army, signed up with the US-led ISAF and worked in Kabul, training Afghan armed forces.

His take on the situation was that only those on the bottom in Afghan society would sign up with the invaders. He called recruits “homos and junkies” whom he thought would never beat the Taliban.

It is estimated that the Taliban have only 25,000 farmer/fighters in the field. Despite a ratio of 12:1 in favour of the US and its allies, backed by sophisticated military equipment, the Taliban still control large areas of Afghanistan.

Before the Taliban, Baghlan province was controlled by the Hazara warlord Sadat Jafat Naderi who belongs to the Ismaili Shi’a sect which comprises about 20 percent of all Shi’a Muslims. There are about six million Ismaili Shi’a in Afghanistan and about 25 million worldwide.

The Ismaili Shi’a give their allegiance to the Aga Khan who, with a personal wealth of $US800 million, is one of the richest royals in the world. The current Aga Khan was born in Geneva to an English mother and lives in France.

The Taliban use asymmetrical warfare, such as suicide bombers, and their sanctuary over the border in the Pashtun tribal areas in Pakistan mean they are still a force to be reckoned with.

In the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great said: “May the Gods keep you away from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the revenge of the Afghans”.

The New Zealand army lost four soldiers during its time in Afghanistan; Britain lost 450 and the Americans 2,300.

Should we have been there and identified as a ally of the American?

As the Dutch said before becoming one of the first Nato countries to bail out: “We came to help rebuild, not to take sides in a civil war”.

The Dutch also couldn’t stomach the corruption.

 

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Chilangolandia

It didn’t matter who became the next president of the Nation of Darkness (POTNOD). Nothing will change very fast. Their toxic food, drug and gun culture will remain and the American empire will continue to spend half its annual budget on “defence” i.e. weapons of mass destruction.

Currently the world is fixating on travel restrictions, imposed by the new POTNOD, but crossing a United States border could be an unpleasant experience already, whether it is entering the “homeland” or crossing between states.

In Europe your details will have been processed while you are still in the air and when you land at Schiphol or Frankfurt you just walk straight in, and it’s the same driving from one country to the next. In the EU there will be a sign beside the road as you drive across the border, not a state trooper asking to see your passport yet again as in “the States”.

I remember the first time I entered the United State of America I was presented with the following sentence: Have you ever been arrested or convicted of an offence or crime involving moral turpitude or a violation related to a controlled substance; or been arrested or convicted for two or more offences for which the aggregated sentence or confinement was five years or more; or been a controlled substance trafficker; or are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities?

A country, which has been known to engage in assassination and torture and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands civilians in some military adventure abroad, was asking me if I had committed a moral turpitude! Tempting as it was to ask the border person what a turpitude was and whether Uncle Sam had the blood of innocent people on his hands, I thought it was safer to just tick the no box.

I once discovered that if you want to experience bad tempered American border guards at their rudest try crossing from Mexico, at night and without a visa (coming from a visa waiver country New Zealanders don’t need a visa). And then there is the lengthy process of standing on two yellow footprints and looking at a camera, as a machine, a good deal more intelligent than its operator, computerises your iris, finger and thumbprints.

Unfortunately if you place a string on a globe east from Auckland to Heath Row in London it will pass directly over LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) which most travellers to and from Europe use as their half way transit hub.

There are Air New Zealand flights direct to San Diego and Houston (for those wanting to travel on to Cuba, Mexico and Central America) and one to Vancouver, which means it is possible fly east around the north of the USA.

Mexico City International Airport (MEX) would be a convenient transit hub for both the Caribbean and Central America or onwards to Europe but as yet there are no direct flights from NZ to MEX for travellers who want to avoid the Nation of Darkness

MEX is Latin America’s second busiest airport and air traffic there “exceeds current capacity.” A new international airport will be completed next year and with the capability to move 120 million passengers per year it has the potential to become the busiest airport in the world.

A media spokesperson said Air New Zealand was not considering a direct flight to Mexico City anytime soon.

Given the choice of stopping over in LAX or MEX I would recommend the later. It helps if you can speak a little Spanish but the art galleries and museums, the street life and music, the food and the Hispanic style are well worth the journey. By distancing itself from the drug wars Mexico City is a safe city, of sorts.

The United States of Mexico is a federation of 31 states and one federal district. In the heart of Mexico City is the old “Districto Federal,” population 8.9 million, which has last year been given the status of a state and is now known as the “State of the Valley of Mexico.”

Greater Mexico City has an urban population of over 21 million and counting the surrounding municipalities Mexico City is the centre of a “megalopolis” of 34 million (2015) the sheer scale making it one of the largest economies of any “global city.”

Mexicans refer to Mexico City as “Chilangolandia” – a chilango being a loud, arrogant, ill-mannered, loutish person.

Now that the chilango gringo POTNOD north of the border has scrapped the TPP the Mexican government has initiated direct trade talks with the New Zealand government. What an economic opportunity. New Zealand prime minister Bill English should tell Mexican president Enrique: the first thing we need is a direct flight to MEX as soon as the new international airport is operational in 2018.

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Miami (Pahayokee)

Millisphere, n. a discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

This column is on the millisphere of Pahayokee (Seminole Indian for Grassy Water). Pahayokee (population 6.9 million) covers the southern third of the State of Florida, is only a few metres above sea level and mostly covered by the Everglades swamp – actually a very shallow and very wide river slowly flowing from north to south.

For a century and a half “developers” have attempted simultaneously to drain the Everglades for agriculture and to build dikes to protect the Miami Metropolitan Area from flooding.

Today the Everglades are significantly degraded, subject to periodic droughts, fires and floods; salt-water contamination of freshwater aquifers; phosphorus and mercury contamination from agriculture and urbanisation and the invasion of exotic flora and fauna like the Paper-bark (Melaleuca quinquenerria), from Australia, and the Burmese Python, which grows over six metres long.

Realising the magnitude of the environmental damage both the Bush and Obama administrations have approved expensive Everglades environmental repair programs ($US 10 billion to date) and voted to buy out US Sugar’s manufacturing and production businesses, but there have been delays in implementation and urbanisation continues creeping in from the coast.

Meanwhile on the coast the urbanised strip is experiencing “sunny day flooding,” where higher-than-normal tides are bubbling up from the stormwater drains, flooding roads, gardens and apartments. Miami is raising roads, installing pumps and valves and the US Army Corps of Engineers is planning for a 300mm rise in sea level by 2045 at the Kennedy Space Centre further up the coast at Cape Canaveral.

Barack Obama has said that if sea-level-rise, caused by global warming, is a reality; “South Florida is ground zero”. After Guangzhou, in China, South Florida has the highest value of assets subject to flooding with less than half a metre of sea level rise.

Despite these environmental threats the Miami Metropolitan Area is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the US, with, at present, 25,000 new condominiums proposed and under construction.

Florida’s governor Rick Scott has warned state workers not to discuss climate change or sea-level-rise and instead to refer to “nuisance flooding” and Florida’s senator the Cuban-American Marco Rubio confidently says, “humans are not responsible for climate change”. Florida has about 1.5million Cuban-Americans, many living in Miami’s “Little Havana.”

America’s first Jewish senator, David Levy Yulle, represented Florida in the nineteenth century. Described as “more Jewish than Tel Aviv” Miami Beach has been a favoured retirement destination for Jews from New York, and Jewish immigrants from both Israel and Russia.

Palm Beach is a favoured retirement destination for the super wealthy. Before being locked away for the biggest fraud in American history Bernie Madoff had a home there and was a member of the Palm Beach Country Club. Donald Trump last year sold a Palm Beach mansion to Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovev for $US 95 million.

US president-elect Donald Trump has his beachfront “winter White House”, Mar-a-lago, at Palm Beach West and has taken a “King Canute” position on sea-level-rise, claiming, “global warming is a hoax”, that he is “not a big believer in climate change” and “nobody really knows”; right in the middle of “ground zero” Mar-a-lago is one of the best places in the US to find out though.

Since taking over Mar-a-lago Donald Trump has engaged in series of court actions relating to his property. The first involved a 6m x 9m American flag he put up a 24m pole. Palm Beach regulations limited flagpoles to 13m and the county charged him with violating their code. Trump, naturally, counter-sued, gained a number of concessions, accepted a 21m flagpole and then dropped his suit.

The second case involved repeated actions by Trump against the Palm Beach County to stop noisy aircraft from the Palm Beach International Airport from flying over Mar-a-lago. Trump went so far as to charge the US Federal Aviation Administration with deliberately and maliciously directing aircraft over his property. In 2015 the judge ruled against Trump’s arguments but since winning the American presidency in 2016 Trump can now make Mar-a-lago a no fly zone for reasons of national security – and because he is now the president he can fly a flag as big as he likes!

Donald Trump may be ideally suited to lead the American empire hell bent on consumption at the expense of the environment, but can he hold back the tide at Pahayokee?

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Cuba

                            Fidel Castro (1926 – 2016)

When news came out that Fidel Castro had died I got a call from my friend Blackie in Auckland. It has been a sad year for us baby boomers of a certain cultural bent – David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and now Fidel.

In the ‘90s Blackie had worked as a “cowboy carpenter” in Canada and had flown down to Cuba for some holiday sun. “It reminded me of my youth in Northland in the ‘50s,” he said when I asked him about his impressions. “The Cubans I met spoke highly of Fidel and were proud that they had seen off America.” We agreed that Donald Trump’s characterisation of Castro as a “brutal dictator” was predicably shallow and hugely ironic given American dictatorial intervention in Cuban affairs for more than a century.

The flash point for the Spanish-American war was the explosion of the Battleship USS Maine in Havana harbour in 1898. The Americans claimed it was a Spanish mine, but in all probability it was an accidental gas explosion in the coalbunker, igniting the ship’s magazine. “Remember the Maine, down with Spain,” crowed the American media, alleging sabotage and a reason to go to war with Spain and invade Cuba. It was a bit like the “weapons of mass destruction” ruse used by George Bush to invade Iraq.

The defeat of Spain lead eventually to Cuban independence (actually an American protectorate) with the USA awarding itself the lease of a small port in Guantanamo Bay for a coal-bunking station and for “no other use.” Since the 1959 revolution Cuba has disputed American claims to “Gitmo.” Every year America sends a cheque for the lease – which the Cubans decline to bank. Before Fidel, Cuba was described as a brutal kleptocracy with links to American organised crime.

In 1961, CIA trained mercenaries, supported by B52 bombers from Florida, invaded Cuba at the Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) south of Havana. Partly due to President Kennedy loosing his nerve and calling off air support the Cuban Army defeated the invaders. America retaliated by locking into place a complete embargo on Cuba for the next fifty years

Under Barrak Obama there has been a softening of US relations towards Cuba. American tourists are now allowed to travel there and George Bush before him allowed US food exports to Cuba. A majority of Americans now favour normalising relations with Cuba, but Donald Trump doesn’t.

Tourism is now Cuba’s number one foreign currency earner. There are two currencies in Cuba, CUCs (for tourists) and CUPs (Cuban Pesos). There are about 25 Pesos to the CUC and there is talk about unifying the two currencies sometime soon. Remittances from the two million Cuban Americans (1.4million in Florida) amount to nearly $US 3 billion per year.

I spoke with Charlotte, a young New Zealand backpacker who had visited Cuba the month before Fidel died. “It was like no other country I have visited, old cars, not many goods in the shops, no advertising, no media celebrities, Fidel is their hero not the Kardashians,” she told me, but things were changing, there was now Internet. “In a park, at night, for a couple of CUCs, I bought a black market password which got me onto WiFi, it was like buying drugs,” she laughed.

Beverley, from Whanganui, who takes tour groups to Cuba, had also noticed changes. “Before people were allowed to open restaurants and takeaways in their own houses there was no rubbish, no plastic in the street, now there is, it’s sad.” She told me what the others had told me. Cuba was safe for travellers and that all Cubans loved Fidel and were proud of their socialist country. “I have a real soft spot for the Cuban people, the music, the relaxed way of life, I hope it all works out for them,” she concluded.

It is predicted that next year Raul Castro will step down and be replaced by Miguel Diaz Canel, who is seen as a pragmatic moderniser. Some worry that there will not be enough money, some that there will be too much, too fast. Some say that meaningful change can only be equivalent to another revolution.

There are a number of pessimistic scenarios: rape by the United States of America (again), theft by the communist party oligarchy (as in the USSR), hyperinflation, armed Cuban Americans led by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio claiming their lost property back and Havana turns into another Miami.

Optimists pray for a soft landing and sketch out a more hopeful scenario: normalisation with America, a high-speed car-ferry to Key West in Florida (140km from Mariel), creative and meaningful work to progress careers, building on Cuban advances in health and education, tourism based on their built heritage and their natural environment – preserved by Fidel’s conservation initiatives.

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Los Angeles

The Millisphere of LA

By my definition a millisphere is a “sphere of interest” of one thousandth of the total world population; a region of roughly 7 million, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million, people. I use it as a “lens,” a human geography model, through which to attempt to make sense of the world.

In a previous column I had sketched out the millisphere of Te Moananui, covering all the islands of the Pacific. In that column I incorrectly stated that Los Angeles was now the world’s largest Polynesian city, fact checking revealed that Auckland still holds that record.

Los Angeles is one of about 40 millispheres fronting onto Te Moananui, 20 to the East and 20 to the West.

Los Angeles County (population around 10 million) has the second largest urban population (after New York) in the USA and owed its initial 20th century growth spurt to the extraction of oil in California; but it was the Second World War that made it what it is today.

During the Second World War, Los Angeles was home to six of the USA’s major aircraft manufacturers. “We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen or dreamed possible,” commented one general after the war.

That Los Angeles has an African American population has its foundation with the 300,000 black workers brought from the American South to work the LA munitions factories during the Second World War.

Both Lockheed and Martin, later to merge and form Lockheed Martin, the world largest arms manufacturer, were started in LA. The worlds second largest firm, Northrop Grumman, is based in LA.

Excluding China, the world’s arms producers’ total sales in 2013 were somewhere between $US four and seven billion, with six American companies in the top ten.

Lockheed Martin, a sponsor of the “NZ Defence Industry Assn Conference,” in Auckland last week, employs 125,000 (security cleared) workers worldwide and in New Zealand Lockheed Martin have 200 staff embedded in NZ military bases, undertaking prosaic work such as the $446 million upgrade on Te Mana and Te Kaha frigates, and weapon and instrument repair; as well as wiring us into the “five eyes” cyber-surveillance infrastructure run out of Pearl Harbour.

“With today’s attacks, you are clueless about who did it or when they will strike again. It is not cyber-war but cyber-terrorism,” said Eugene Kaspersky, an American Internet security firm CEO describing this new form of warfare. The United States has been both a victim and an agent of cyber-attacks.

Arms manufacture has been described as state sponsored research and development and a Keynesian stimulus to the wider economy, this is certainly true of the USA, it’s what built Los Angeles.

Arms manufacture is big business and they amass export earnings for their host state by selling their wares to the developing world.

One theory on the development of the Chinese economy, links its rise to the Vietnam War in the ‘70s. The shipping container was in its infancy until the US Defence Department gave it the 8ftx8ftx10ft ISO standard for a trial run from Los Angeles to Saigon to supply the American forces in Vietnam.

Within a decade the standardised shipping container had gone global, in turn distributing Chinese manufactured goods to a now global market.

In 2015 Long Beach and Los Angeles were America’s largest container ports, but globally they were only 16th and 18th; most of the rest being in Asia, with Shanghai as number one.

The idea of warfare driving cultural development is not new. That the Scientific Revolution happened Europe in the seventeenth century and not somewhere else was, some have suggested, because of Europe’s peculiar geography of competing waring states.

Violent deaths in European wars peaked in the 20th century with death rates of between 10 and 20 million per year during the Second World War, which was then followed by a long period of peace (in terms of the numbers of deaths).

These days globalisation has produced so many shared interests in trade and finance that states prefer to go to arbitration than to war. There are now remarkably few wars between states. Conflicts are now civil wars and these conflicts within states kill fewer people than war between states.

In 2011 the world’s three deadliest conflicts were in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan but deaths in those conflicts were far fewer than the murders carried out in Mexico’s drug wars with America being the main buyer of the drugs and the seller of the arms. The street gangs of LA are a legend in that ‘plaza’.

The arms industry continues to move with the times; now there is growth to be had as the state polices its own citizens in an increasingly, militarised, American way.

Just as we got used to helicopters and black-clad, para-military NZ police with all the latest equipment swooping on the Kim Dotcom mansion in Auckland (on behalf of the Hollywood) they were doing the same (minus the helicopters) to our local criminal family in Abbot Street in Gonville.

’High intensity policing’ and ‘low intensity warfare’ is threatening to merge, at least in LA. The US Army Medical Corps has its training hospital in South LA because of the nationally high numbers of gun shot wounds presenting there.

All the while Hollywood, once again based in LA, presents a constant stream of propaganda, a summary of which is: a gun solves all problems.

What America now needs to consider in its “War on Terror”. How could you wage war on an abstract noun and how could you ever declare victory?

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Syria (part two)

Asi, Halab, Furat, Rojava – and the three-step peace plan for Syria.

Imaginary speech to the United Nations Security Council.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nation Security Council, in our speech last week we said that the conflict in Syria was a proxy war between Russia and America. In this our second speech, we declare once again that empires cause war and we put forward a peace plan based on this supposition.

The first step of our peace plan we call “Russki and Yankee go home.” Russia must give up its Mediterranean naval and air bases in Latakia and withdraw from Syria. The United States has military personnel stationed in 133 countries around the world and it is high time for them to all go home, starting with those in the Middle East. All other member states of the United Nations must then halt arms sales to the various parties to the Syrian conflict.

The second step we call the “Millistate solution,” based on a proposal by the Marquis of Bath: that to avoid warring empires the world should consist of one thousand roughly equal population states. This means the creation of states with an average population of around seven million people.

The third step we call the “Bio-region solution.” When drawing the boundaries of these new “millistates” we should attempt to follow geophysical boundaries not geopolitical ones – ideally water catchments and river systems. We propose redrawing the map of Syria into the separate regions where the various factions have dug in and ground to a halt. Some of these millistates will straddle the borders of neighbouring countries.

The Asi River catchment and Damascus together form the millistate of Asi. It includes the Russian base at Latakia and a small piece of Turkey that the Asi flows through on its last few kilometres to the Mediterranean. Safely wrapped around their ally “sister Lebanon” Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite, Shia aligned clan can remain in charge and the military bases in Latakia can be converted into holiday parks for sun starved Russian tourists.

Halab (Aleppo) was the Mediterranean terminus of the Silk route from China. When the Ottoman Empire was split up, after the First World War, the region around Aleppo was divided between Turkey and Syria. Restored Halab would have a connection to the sea at Iskenderun (in Turkey) and Aleppo would again be a terminus for highways leading north, south, east and west. The bombing of Aleppo must cease immediately and interim power should devolve to the people who have been driving the ambulances, staffing the hospitals, reconnecting the power, water and sewage and keeping the roads open (whether they be Sunni, Shia, Christian, Jew or Kurd).

Terrorism is a consequence of the Syrian war; it did not cause it. Maps of ISIS held territory show lines through the Syrian Desert that are either roads or the Euphrates River (al Furat). Sunni tribes all the way from Jarabulus on the Turkish border to Ramadi and Fallujah near Baghdad largely control the millistate of Furat. The withdrawal of Assad’s forces from their last base in Dayr az Zawr would give the Sunni tribes control of this stretch of the Euphrates straddling the Sykes-Picot on the Iraq/Syria border.

North of Furat, on the border with Turkey, is the semi-autonomous region the Kurds call Rojava. There are about 40 million Kurds in the Middle East, enough for six or seven millistates on their own. History has drawn the red lines of national borders through the middle of their homelands, which straddle the borders of Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The Syrian army has all but withdrawn from Rojava and the Kurds there should be left to manage their own affairs – as they do in the Kurdish autonomous region of Northern Iraq.

Mr Chairman, members of the Security Council, our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel. How right she is.

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Syria (part one)

Fred’s speech to the United Nations about the war in Syria

Mr Chairman

This speech marks the end of the two-year period in which New Zealand has been one of the ten elected members of the United Nations Security Council.

Last year New Zealand pointed out that the Security Council is an institution with failings. This year we go further and call the United Nations Security Council a failed institution. The problem is a structural one. The power of veto given to the five permanent members of the Security Council (USA, Russia, China, UK and France), merely because they were victors of the Second World War, means that the P5 negotiate positions before engaging us, the ten elected members, and that no action is taken if any one of the permanent five does not agree. This extraordinary imbalance of power is what is preventing action on Syria.

New Zealand challenges the authority of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council for reasons other than structural ones. The Russian Federation was not one of the winners of the Second World War, it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) who helped defeat Hitler’s Third Reich, therefore we challenge the right of Russia to be a permanent member of the security council.

Equally we question the right of the United States of America to still be a permanent member. The Security Council was originally set up to resolve conflicts and prevent wars such as we are seeing today in the Syria. Since the Second World War the USA has developed a massive global arms industry that has an economic interest in fuelling conflict, therefore we believe that America has lost any moral right to a permeant seat.

In summary New Zealand believes that the superpowers are part of the problem; that what we are seeing in Syria today is actually a proxy-war between Russia and America – the shared rationale being, to quote Henry Kissenger, “he who controls oil controls the world.”

Our previous Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has said that a solution to the war in Syria would take the “wisdom of Solomon” and would involve external actors from both within the region and beyond, referring to both the USA and Russia as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel.

Some of the causes for the war in Syria go can be traced back to the First World War and the division of the Ottoman Empire, but there are others. Resource depletion from overpopulation is one – although the Syrian birth rate has fallen from seven children per woman in the1960s to three at the present day. From 2006 to 2009 Syria experienced its worst drought in living memory resulting in a million pastoralists moving to the towns and cities, joining the 1.5 million refugees from the war in Iraq that Syria was already hosting. This contributed to overcrowding, worsening unemployment and rising tensions.

The first thing that is required on the ground is a nationwide ceasefire. The main suppliers of arms to the conflict are in order of magnitude, starting with the largest: America, Russia, China and then Israel (recently moving from position six to position four). If the flow of arms from the superpowers, either directly or indirectly, to the various factions in Syria were to stop then the conflict would simply run out of bullets and the process of reconstruction could begin – it is estimated that there are over a thousand different armed militias with constantly shifting alliances operating in Syria today.

The sheer complexity of the situation on the ground is compounded by various religious disputes. As the numerous sects of Judaism, Christianity and Islam embrace fundamentalism and then turn inhumanly on one another it is useful to remember that Moses, Jesus and Mohamed were all Middle Eastern Semites.

Mr Chairman, members of the United Nations Security Council, thank you for giving us the time to present what we think are the causes of the awful conflict in Syria. Next week we will outline our plan to bring peace.

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Juarez/El Paso

Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton reality television show

Two American elections ago during their primaries, when Barak Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the candidacy of the Democrat Party, we found ourselves in El Paso USA. That night we had crossed from Juarez on the Mexican side. George Bush had recently given the Mexican government US 1.4 billion dollars worth of weaponry to fight the ‘war on drugs’, much of which ending up in the wrong hands. When we passed through, we were blissfully unaware that the Juarez police were holed up in their police stations, too frightened to come out, as two cartels battled for possession of the ‘plaza.’

‘Safe’ in the USA, I was outside our hotel winding down with a cigarette and met a fellow smoker sheltering from a bitter winter wind. He was attending a political meeting around the corner and invited me along. In a bar, a rally of Ron Paul libertarians supported their candidate, running against John McCain for the Republican nomination. They were an interesting bunch of outsiders: small businessmen, blacks, Navahos, gays and intellectuals for the unfettered right. A city councillor engaged me in conversation. “How does the rest of world see America?” she asked. “As a nation or individuals?” I asked. “As a country, how do you see the United States?” “Well for me,” I replied, “an arrogant bully.” “Can you give me an example?” she continued. “Good question,” I told her, “ in a motel in Chihuahua last night I watched CNN; ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ CNN said, referring to George Bush’s recent trip to Israel, the following item reported his next stop, Saudi Arabia, where he gave them US ten billion dollars worth of military equipment, well,” I concluded, “blessed indeed are the peacemakers, and cursed are the arms dealers.” There was a sharp intake of breath from the councillor – but she had asked.

Barak Obama went on to win the presidency and CNN opined about how far civil rights in their country had come when a black man could be installed in the oval office and there was hope that Obama could disentangle America from the war in the Middle East. By the end of Obama’s two terms, American police have become militarised with surplus equipment from the Middle East and blacks are getting increasingly vocal about being shot down in the street.

Meanwhile the Donald Trump/Hillary Clinton reality television show, currently beaming out of the USA on the global infotainment channels, shows us that life does indeed mimic art. A veteran reality TV star, Trump understands the value of shock for increasing ratings.

Just as ‘America needs a black president,’ was part of Obama’s appeal, now ‘America needs a woman president,’ is part of Clinton’s pitch. Should a woman become the next American president, expect CNN to celebrate gender equality at the highest levels of power – as the daughters of the’ Third Wave’ feminists aspire to be Kardasians, and their granddaughters star in their own porn movies. Either way expect America to continue spending half of its annual budget on ‘defence.’

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Te Moananui

mapTemoananui
The millisphere of Te Moananui

A Samoan geographer once said about the island nations of the Pacific that “The rest of the world sees us as islands in a far sea; we see ourselves as a sea of islands.”

The ‘millisphere’ is one ‘lens’ through which to look at the Pacific. By my definition a ‘millisphere’ is the ‘the sphere of interest’ of roughly one thousandth of the world’s total population. By this analysis we are looking for entities of roughly eight million people, let ‘s say less than four million is too small and over sixteen million too big.

By this standard Aotearoa/NZ  fits, (five million, 2020) but all the other Pacific island nations are too small. By adding them all to NZ we get a total population of roughly ten million – and the millisphere I call Te Moananui. (It is estimated that the population of Te Moananui will be nearly ten million by 2020).

What then are some of the characteristics of Te Moananui? 500 years ago, when Magellan was the first European to sail across the Pacific, one language covered the largest area of any language group on earth. Whether it was aloha, alofa or aroha, the word for love could be understood from Hawaii to Tonga and Aotearoa.

The indigenous flora and fauna of Te Moananui had developed in isolation and the effects of introduced species were profound, and irreversible. Historical nuclear testing and dumping, predatory fishing practices on a vast scale, the accumulation of floating plastic pouring out of the industrialised ‘Pacific rim’ and sea-level rise from climate change are some of the unique environmental issues facing Te Moananui in the new millennium; problems that have their making in the rest of the world but impacting on Te Moananui.

The American travel writer Paul Theroux, who lives in Hawaii, covers some of the human geography of Te Moananui in his book ‘The Happy Isles of Oceania’. One characteristic is that many of the people go elsewhere for work. Former US president Barak Obama, from Hawaii, was one notable example; Tongan/English basketball player Steven Adams is another, and there are now Polynesian players in most American NFL teams. One in five New Zealanders are currently working overseas, primarily in Australia, and whereas Auckland is the world’s largest Polynesian city, now there are significant Polynesian populations, both Maori and Pacific Island, in Los Angeles, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Remittances back constitute an important part of many island states’ economies.

Te Moananui is made up of over twenty independent states, protectorates and territories – and one state of the United States of America. The Pacific Island Forum, which has observer status at the United Nations, is one emerging governance entity; with the potential to manage the $6 billion dollar plus annual tuna fishing industry, for example. The appointment of the ex-Labour MP, Shane Jones, as an economic development ambassador to the Pacific, recognised the growing importance of the Forum.

When Hone Harawira was still in parliament a delegation from Rapanui (Easter Island) met with him, calling for separation from Chile and monetary union with NZ and in Hawaii some native Hawaiians fly the flag upside down as a protest against the continuing American occupation following the Dole coup of 1894, which ended the rule of the Hawaiian Kamehameha royal family.

The NZ geographer Kenneth Cumberland, in the seventies, described the Pacific as “an American lake.” This is reinforced today with American super-bases in the Pacific – primarily world’s largest ‘gas-and-go’ military arsenal on the island of Guam and the whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, revealed the importance Pearl Harbour in Hawaii as a “five-eyes” cyber-spy base.

One of the last things George W Bush did before leaving office was to create the world’s largest fishing reserve in the Mariana Trench, near Guam. Laying claim to the deepest part of world’s oceans naturally appeals to American exceptionalism; but were the Pacific Island Forum members ever consulted?

In the1980s David Lange’s Labour government declared New Zealand “nuclear free.” The American position, that they would “neither confirm nor deny” if their ships carried nuclear weapons lead to a thirty year standoff between the USA and NZ.  It was resolved with the pragmatic “don’t ask” position taken by John Key’s National government in 2010.