Fragilecologies

Tag: conflict

  • “I’m not 24 anymore: Up Close and Personal” Mickey Glantz August 27, 2010

    Perhaps this is just a 70 year-old’s lament: alas, he’s not 24 anymore. For those of us at this end of the age spectrum, even for those who are still pretty energetic, there is an on-going conflict between mind and body. As always, the body sets the physical limits on what we can do on a sustainable basis, one-off activities notwithstanding.

    mind over matter?

    The conflict I am talking about is taking place constantly these days between a 24 year-old mindset and this 70 year old’s bodily constraints. As much as I might hate to admit it, this body is slowly but increasingly imposing new constraints on what I can physically do in a sustained way. Herein lay the source of my particular conflict: I still want to engage in strenuous physical activities, like a typical 24 year old.

    I see guys play soccer, shoot basketballs and engage in Frisbee games, and I have the urge to ask if I can join them. Recently, I played in a tennis tournament but refused to be assigned to my age bracket, 70 and over. Instead, I chose to play in the 4.5 level in which a player of any age could compete. I lost, as most people, including myself, expected. But I lost to a 40 year old in a 2-hour, 3-set match that ended in a tie-breaker. Though I thought I would likely lose playing a 40-something, I did not expect the match to take so long or to be so close.

    The real reason I decided to play in a tournament, after having been absent from them for two decades or more, was a desire to relive the feeling of one-on-one competition that I used to have in tournaments. Would I feel pressure to win my matches or feel anxiety with each point, game or set? Would I become hungry for victory? The fact is that I just wanted to feel once more the ambiance of tennis competition. I wanted to see if it would be like it had been several decades earlier, when I started to compete as a teenager. Little did I think that I would walk away with a psychological victory. Indeed, I lost but I won. I took a much younger guy to 3 sets and a tie-breaker.

    Near the end of the match I started to think “What if I were to win?” I would have had to play another prolonged match in the hot midday sun. It was not an appealing scenario, especially when I had already gotten what I had hoped for by participating in the tournament; I felt like I was 24 again. Subconsciously, I got to thinking that stamina-wise and ego-wise I had already won, so now it was OK to lose. In this instance at the age of 70 I got to relive my tennis youth for a couple of hours.

    It’s worth a try!

    But my mind continues to act like that of a 24 year old, posing other physical tests for my body to endure. For example, during a recent trip to Brazil, I spent considerable time and energy, mine and that of others, trying to find a school for Brazilian jiu jitsu, capoeira, in order to take a few basic lessons. I have been fascinated by its need for balance and flexibility, which is something we seem to have diminishing quantities of at my end of the age spectrum. I can get them at home but wanted to get them in the country of origin of capoeira. Between conference lectures, I tried to find a capoeira master to teach me basic stuff but to no avail. My Portuguese level of fluency was not high enough to make clear that I just wanted to “feel” what capoeira movement would be like (the mind) and to “see” what the body could endure.

    The awareness of my subliminal mind-body conflict came to me during a trip to Shanghai earlier this year. Early in the morning on a main pedestrian street I watched people of all ages exercising in unison to chants or to music. I was attracted and amazed watching the most elderly of these groups by their balance and apparent minds over—or at least harmony with—their bodies. As old as they were, they were amazingly agile, and I thought of my early morning ritual of putting on socks while standing, of how lose my balance and fall over most of the time.

    typical scene early in a Shanghai morning

    I got to thinking that I could learn from them and others on how to maintain physical balance by focusing my thoughts on the need for balance. It seems to me that those elderly Chinese people exercising, like those who engage in capoeira as well as in other sports activities that typically favor young people (volleyball, Frisbee games, soccer, etc.), had been able to find a compromise between mind (what one thinks they can do) and body (what they are physically capable of doing).

    Aging is, well, just that, aging. But I’ve come to believe that the conflict between mind and body is a healthy one, until one reaches its limit. Personally, I hope to continue to think like a 24 year old as long as I can and in doing so continue to think about and try to engage in activities that allow me to taste, even briefly, the ambiance of physical competition I enjoyed when I was a lot younger. I am sure that my body will let my mind know when its time to compromise and accept the limits imposed by my age. Only then will I have to settle for watching rather than doing.

    Here is a mind-over-body experiment

    EPILOGUE

    While writing this, an incident came to mind. I was at work one day walking at a fast pace down the hall (my normal pace) when a 20-something researcher came out of his cubicle on purpose to ask me a question as I passed his door: “Why do you always walk so fast in the corridors,” he asked. A weird question, so I had no stock answer. I thought for a second (not breaking my stride) and said over my shoulder as I passed him, “because I have something to do.”

  • ”Dreaming the Impossible Dream: Swords into Plowshares (and other economic development tools).” DAY 6 thoughts at COP 15. Mickey Glantz December 17, 2009

    {NOTE to the Reader to avoid misinterpretation: The Following editorial is about money and military expenditures for maintaining armies and for fighting wars or staying in power. The US started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and have put at least $1 trillion into the effort. Could those funds have been used for development purposes both in the USA and in the developing world? If there were no wars and the militaries around the globe could reduce their budgets because of a reduction in conflict (at present terrorism is seen as the major threat to government; also dictators maintain their military establishments to stay in power [the list of these is long and we all know who they are!]), governments worldwide could turn attention and funds to economic development activities with substantial funds available to do so. That is the spirit in which the following is written}.

    On the way to COP 15 at the Bella Convention Center in Copenhagen one morning, I got to thinking about both the COP 15 official UN-sponsored conference and the KlimaForum09, the public’s climate change conference. That led me to wonder about a missing element in the conferences: There was no hint anywhere of the United Nations’ basic unofficial slogan and underlying theme “Beating swords into plowshares.” Yet everyone these days is referring to climate change as a security issue.

    Just about every country in the world provides a relatively large portion of its national budgets to its military establishment. Worldwide military expenditures have been estimated at $1.1 trillion around 2005. An estimated $500 billion was from the rest of the world while the US expenditure was about $600 billion. That is just the cost to maintain the military establishments. It does not include the cost of a hot war (for example, the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to the United States has been estimated to date at more than $1 trillion).

    We have learned from previous war efforts that there seldom is a “peace dividend”, that is, when a war ends, the funds used for the war are never available for peace-building activities.

    Developing countries demand that industrialized countries (e.g., the rich countries) pay hundreds of billions of dollars annually into the future to cope with a changing climate due to the emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases since the mid-1700s. The demands are based on the claim that the developing countries are the victims. The demands are made in the midst of a major financial worldwide meltdown.

    The US has already spent (officially) $1 trillion on its Central Asian wars; the costs will surely rise. What if those wars were to be brought to an abrupt end and the equivalent amount of the war funds could be diverted to help developing countries successfully prepare for and cope with climate change?

    However, the fact is the US and other countries are currently besieged by terrorism. For national security they –build (or create) super-sized military establishments compared to the size of their national budgets. In the absence of threats, military establishments could in theory at least be reduced and development activities increased. So, how about considering the following scenario to fund developing country programs and projects in the face of a changing climate: Governments that support terrorist groups (morally, politically or financially) must stop terrorists from operating within their borders. If this were done funds could be transferred from the anti-terrorist hot conflicts to activities that develop their countries economically. This would constitute a “peace dividend”.

    Because governments continue to support terrorist groups, funding from rich countries will continue to flow to fight terrorists and not to development. It is ludicrous that several governments that are members of the “Group of 77 + China” (this is the largest group of developing states in the United Nations. There are now 130 members) demand large sums of financial support to cope with climate change causes and consequences, while at the same time some of these countries are supporting terrorist groups whose hostile activities requires large sums of money to combat. For example, the Sudanese representative speaking for the “Group of 77 and China” to the COP 15 climate negotiations demands $200 billion for developing countries while his government supports terrorism. Sudanese representative to the Group of 77 Lumumba Dia-ping stated the demand in the following way: “You approve billions of dollars in defense budgets. Can’t you approve 200 billion dollars to save the world?”

    Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe addressed COP 15, challenging the industrialized “North” to provide more climate change related funds to developing countries. Is he the best spokesperson for more funds, because his human rights record in his country in abyssmal.

    Governments must begin to consider scenarios centered on “beating swords in to plowshares” as a way to provide the community of nations with a tangible peace dividend. Not only should they pursue equity among states in the international community but should pursue equity within their own borders as well. Not to work toward a ‘peace dividend’ scenario means business as usual, that is, hot wars, large military establishments worldwide, not to mention a thriving international arms trade. Does the slogan “Give Peace a Chance” ring a bell?
    John Lennon singing \”Give Peace a Chance\”

  • “End Run Wars” are not only for the weak, OR Know your enemies before you act!

    Mickey Glantz in Tokyo

    22 May 2009

    “End Run Wars” are not only for the weak, OR Know your enemies before you act!

    When I was in graduate school back in the second half of the 1960s, the heart of the Cold War rivalry between the USA and the USSR, I took several classes on conflict. The conflicts that captured my attention were hot conflicts, wars particularly, and especially revolutionary wars. Such wars at that time were being carried out by political, cultural or ideological groups wanting to gain independence from the control of a larger hegemon whom they felt did not care for the well being of the people they claimed to represent.

    At that time certain books were fairly prominent, but at least to a graduate student the writings of his or her professor took on an added value (such as higher grades for citing their works in an essay exam in addition to the value of the usable information within the books). One title that I recall that had a lasting influence on me apparently was a book by Dr. Robert Strausz-Hupe entitled “Protracted Conflict”. I recently perused the book in order to see if more than the title was still relevant to an enhanced understanding of today’s post Cold War conflicts. Many of the writings before 2000 seem to be lost among young researchers today as they were written “in the last century” and there is a feeling (I suffer from it too) that if the publication was not done after the turn of the millennium than there must be better, more current and more relevant stuff written today. Of course this is a dumb assumption, given that by now we are likely to be reading the latest book’s summaries of summaries of original works. In other words, as a result of this process we are highly likely to be losing information, as each summarizer is like a filter that sifts out what he or she feels is relevant for access by future readers.

    The truth is that I did not re-read “Protracted Conflict” closely but I felt it did not really have a lot of direct relevance to an improved understanding of today’s conflicts, like the ones in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So, I went to the Internet to search for a definition of a concept I heard somewhere in those Dark Ages of graduate school. The concept — an end run war — has been popping into my mind of late, and I am not sure why. So today, in a Tokyo Starbuck’s I could not find commentary on end run wars. So, now I have to wing it (lest I be forced, oh no!!! to go to a gasp, real library and do old-fashioned search).

    As I recall the concept of an end run war, it was a war started by a weaker power who perceived that the stronger power was involved in some sort of quagmire — political, financial, military — and that it would be a good time to attack in order to gain some long sought after gain. That is what I recall as being an end run war. While perhaps successful at the outset, over time the weaker power tends to show up as just that, weaker, and the early gains on the battlefield are reversed as the major power regains its focus and rallies to pushback, if not overrun, the weaker power that attacked it.

    Fast forward now to the present: Looking back at the origins of the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the attempt to topple Saddam Hussein from power, one could argue that the US-Iraq war was an end run war precipitated by a strong power in the belief that the weaker power would collapse. All signs looked that way as US troops (or the troops of the so-called “coalition of the willing”) made their way so quickly to Baghdad with little military opposition. It appeared and was presented to the public that Hussein’s army had collapsed in short order. Of course, that led to the premature disastrous and embarrassing ‘photo-opportunity’ by President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” staged event on a US carrier. And then the real war began. The infusion of foreign fighters joining Al-Queda, local dissidents, abandoned army and police members, rivaling ethnic groups caused a military backlash against the allies that converted what seemed like a quick-victory end run war and into a 6-year nightmare for the US President, his administration, the Republican Party (and fellow-traveling Democrats) and the American and Iraqi people.

    Now we have a new president, He has inherited the falling out of the worst outcomes of what was to have been a successful end run war. While the war effort in Iraq winds down and the US government tries to put a happy face on it as it prepares to leave in the next couple years, that smiley face will begin to frown as the US troops are not sent home to American soil but into harm’s way in Afghanistan to fight the growing number of Taliban who in the last few months have spilled into neighboring parts of Pakistan. The region is in turmoil with Iran emerging as a regional superpower, Iraq unstable and a war in Afghanistan that is increasingly intractable.

    It seems that end run wars regardless of whether weak attack strong or strong attacks weak, victory is not so assured for the perpetrators. Wars as we now are reminded are often easier to start than to finish. The escalating engagement in Afghanistan will be no different.

  • “A rose by any other name is still a rose”. Similarly, the Republic of Macedonia by any other name is still the Republic of Macedonia

    Michael Glantz

    I have been trying to organize a meeting in Macedonia. Not in Greece’s northern region of Macedonia but the other Macedonia. The UN officially calls the other Macedonia “FYR Macedonia”, or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Those inside the Republic of Macedonia (e.g., the ‘other’ Macedonia) hate the use of the modifier “FYR” and to tell the truth I can’t blame them.

    To someone not so interested in the politics of naming a new country, I find the conflict bordering on ridiculous over the name of the other Macedonia. More than 140 countries recognize the country as the Republic of Macedonia including many European countries and four of the five members of the UN Security Council. Many cities around the globe use the same name, even cities like Athens, Georgia and Athens, Ohio in the USA hijacked the use of the name of Athens, Greece. I assume that Greece never protested the use of Athens by the US states of Georgia or Ohio.

    fl-macedonia

    But let’s assume that the use of such modifiers as FYR was a commonly accepted practice around the globe. The United States of America would be called the FBC America (the Former British Colony of the United States). Germany would be the FPE Germany (the Former Prussian Empire of Germany). The Republic of Mali in West Africa would be referred to as the FFWAC of Mali (the Former French West African Colony of Mali). And then we’d need to reconsider the names of the republics of the Former Soviet Union (FSU). So, FSU then become the modifier for all of the newly independent states: the FSU of Kazakhstan; the FSU of Uzbekistan; the FSU of Azerbaijan, and so forth. Seems silly doesn’t it? Almost all countries would have to modify their names adding “the Former Something in front of the ‘new’ name of the country, out of deference to an earlier name in their history.

    Greece apparently did not oppose the name “Republic of Macedonia” when the republic was a part of Yugoslavia. Why now? I was talking to a psychiatrist friend of mine recently about my trip to Macedonia and reluctance to accept the newly independent country as anything other than the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia. He told me that the controversy over the name reminded him of Sigmund Freud’s 1917 concept of “narcissism over small differences”. This concept refers to the belief that individuals that are very similar to each other engage in conflicts that are more violent than those between individuals who have little in common. Most recently, Greece proposed that Macedonia be called the Republic of Northern Macedonia, but, alas, there is no such place as Southern Macedonia. Macedonians are Macedonians wherever they live. That may be the problem for Greece, worried about a possible call from the Republic of Macedonia, its independent neighbor to the north, to reunite its citizens with those Macedonians in northern Greece. Agreeing that the Republic can continue to use the name it has used since 1945 as a part of Yugoslavia would be a great gesture on the part of Greece. It would enable the Republic of Macedonia to join the European Union which if nothing else would allow Macedonians to travel freely in Europe without going through the onerous and humiliating task of filling out visa forms to enter several of its neighboring countries.

    Don’t you think it is time for Greece to get over it and accept Macedonia for the independent Republic that it is, and move on to deal with much more serious issues? I do.

  • “End Run Wars” are not only for the weak, OR Know your enemies before you act!

    Mickey Glantz in Tokyo

    22 May 2009

    “End Run Wars” are not only for the weak, OR Know your enemies before you act!

    When I was in graduate school back in the second half of the 1960s, the heart of the Cold War rivalry between the USA and the USSR, I took several classes on conflict. The conflicts that captured my attention were hot conflicts, wars particularly, and especially revolutionary wars. Such wars at that time were being carried out by political, cultural or ideological groups wanting to gain independence from the control of a larger hegemon whom they felt did not care for the well being of the people they claimed to represent.

    At that time certain books were fairly prominent, but at least to a graduate student the writings of his or her professor took on an added value (such as higher grades for citing their works in an essay exam in addition to the value of the usable information within the books). One title that I recall that had a lasting influence on me apparently was a book by Dr. Robert Strausz-Hupe entitled “Protracted Conflict”. I recently perused the book in order to see if more than the title was still relevant to an enhanced understanding of today’s post Cold War conflicts. Many of the writings before 2000 seem to be lost among young researchers today as they were written “in the last century” and there is a feeling (I suffer from it too) that if the publication was not done after the turn of the millennium than there must be better, more current and more relevant stuff written today. Of course this is a dumb assumption, given that by now we are likely to be reading the latest book’s summaries of summaries of original works. In other words, as a result of this process we are highly likely to be losing information, as each summarizer is like a filter that sifts out what he or she feels is relevant for access by future readers.

    The truth is that I did not re-read “Protracted Conflict” closely but I felt it did not really have a lot of direct relevance to an improved understanding of today’s conflicts, like the ones in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So, I went to the Internet to search for a definition of a concept I heard somewhere in those Dark Ages of graduate school. The concept — an end run war — has been popping into my mind of late, and I am not sure why. So today, in a Tokyo Starbuck’s I could not find commentary on end run wars. So, now I have to wing it (lest I be forced, oh no!!! to go to a gasp, real library and do old-fashioned search).

    As I recall the concept of an end run war, it was a war started by a weaker power who perceived that the stronger power was involved in some sort of quagmire — political, financial, military — and that it would be a good time to attack in order to gain some long sought after gain. That is what I recall as being an end run war. While perhaps successful at the outset, over time the weaker power tends to show up as just that, weaker, and the early gains on the battlefield are reversed as the major power regains its focus and rallies to pushback, if not overrun, the weaker power that attacked it.

    Fast forward now to the present: Looking back at the origins of the Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the attempt to topple Saddam Hussein from power, one could argue that the US-Iraq war was an end run war precipitated by a strong power in the belief that the weaker power would collapse. All signs looked that way as US troops (or the troops of the so-called “coalition of the willing”) made their way so quickly to Baghdad with little military opposition. It appeared and was presented to the public that Hussein’s army had collapsed in short order. Of course, that led to the premature disastrous and embarrassing ‘photo-opportunity’ by President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” staged event on a US carrier. And then the real war began. The infusion of foreign fighters joining Al-Queda, local dissidents, abandoned army and police members, rivaling ethnic groups caused a military backlash against the allies that converted what seemed like a quick-victory end run war and into a 6-year nightmare for the US President, his administration, the Republican Party (and fellow-traveling Democrats) and the American and Iraqi people.

    Now we have a new president, He has inherited the falling out of the worst outcomes of what was to have been a successful end run war. While the war effort in Iraq winds down and the US government tries to put a happy face on it as it prepares to leave in the next couple years, that smiley face will begin to frown as the US troops are not sent home to American soil but into harm’s way in Afghanistan to fight the growing number of Taliban who in the last few months have spilled into neighboring parts of Pakistan. The region is in turmoil with Iran emerging as a regional superpower, Iraq unstable and a war in Afghanistan that is increasingly intractable.

    It seems that end run wars regardless of whether weak attack strong or strong attacks weak, victory is not so assured for the perpetrators. Wars as we now are reminded are often easier to start than to finish. The escalating engagement in Afghanistan will be no different.

  • “A rose by any other name is still a rose”. Similarly, the Republic of Macedonia by any other name is still the Republic of Macedonia

    Michael Glantz

    I have been trying to organize a meeting in Macedonia. Not in Greece’s northern region of Macedonia but the other Macedonia. The UN officially calls the other Macedonia “FYR Macedonia”, or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Those inside the Republic of Macedonia (e.g., the ‘other’ Macedonia) hate the use of the modifier “FYR” and to tell the truth I can’t blame them.

    To someone not so interested in the politics of naming a new country, I find the conflict bordering on ridiculous over the name of the other Macedonia. More than 140 countries recognize the country as the Republic of Macedonia including many European countries and four of the five members of the UN Security Council. Many cities around the globe use the same name, even cities like Athens, Georgia and Athens, Ohio in the USA hijacked the use of the name of Athens, Greece. I assume that Greece never protested the use of Athens by the US states of Georgia or Ohio.

    fl-macedonia

    But let’s assume that the use of such modifiers as FYR was a commonly accepted practice around the globe. The United States of America would be called the FBC America (the Former British Colony of the United States). Germany would be the FPE Germany (the Former Prussian Empire of Germany). The Republic of Mali in West Africa would be referred to as the FFWAC of Mali (the Former French West African Colony of Mali). And then we’d need to reconsider the names of the republics of the Former Soviet Union (FSU). So, FSU then become the modifier for all of the newly independent states: the FSU of Kazakhstan; the FSU of Uzbekistan; the FSU of Azerbaijan, and so forth. Seems silly doesn’t it? Almost all countries would have to modify their names adding “the Former Something in front of the ‘new’ name of the country, out of deference to an earlier name in their history.

    Greece apparently did not oppose the name “Republic of Macedonia” when the republic was a part of Yugoslavia. Why now? I was talking to a psychiatrist friend of mine recently about my trip to Macedonia and reluctance to accept the newly independent country as anything other than the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia. He told me that the controversy over the name reminded him of Sigmund Freud’s 1917 concept of “narcissism over small differences”. This concept refers to the belief that individuals that are very similar to each other engage in conflicts that are more violent than those between individuals who have little in common. Most recently, Greece proposed that Macedonia be called the Republic of Northern Macedonia, but, alas, there is no such place as Southern Macedonia. Macedonians are Macedonians wherever they live. That may be the problem for Greece, worried about a possible call from the Republic of Macedonia, its independent neighbor to the north, to reunite its citizens with those Macedonians in northern Greece. Agreeing that the Republic can continue to use the name it has used since 1945 as a part of Yugoslavia would be a great gesture on the part of Greece. It would enable the Republic of Macedonia to join the European Union which if nothing else would allow Macedonians to travel freely in Europe without going through the onerous and humiliating task of filling out visa forms to enter several of its neighboring countries.

    Don’t you think it is time for Greece to get over it and accept Macedonia for the independent Republic that it is, and move on to deal with much more serious issues? I do.