Hope is not a plan

The issue of repatriation of looted antiquities is, in a sense, in the same broad family as the issue of general international human rights. The effort to push for an open-ended period to make a claim for recovery of items that were originally acquired under unethical conditions - wartime looting, for example - serves the purpose of making future looting of precious goods and antiquities have a presupposed lack of value.

Or, in simpler terms, if you can always have your looted item seized, even if you're the hundredth person to buy it legitimately following the looting, then the market for looting itself will be reduced.

In a fairly spectacular example of what we might have to call "international civil disobedience," auction house owner Cai Mingchao put in a significant winning bid ($36 million total) on two artifacts originally looted from the Summer Palace during the nineteenth century and then sold onward through time between European owners. The civil disobedience comes from Cai Mingchao's public statement that he's not paying for the artifacts, effectively stuffing the Christie's auction and forcing them to run through the time and expense of another one if they want to sell the items off.

"What I need to stress is that this money cannot be paid," Cai told a news conference in Beijing. "At the time, I was thinking that any Chinese would do this if they could ... I only did what I was obliged to."

This is an interesting new twist to civil activism, with a person in a position of access and wealth using both of those features to disrupt an international process in defense of his cultural heritage. One of the most intriguing features here is that although this may be damaging to Cai Mingchao's auction business, he almost certainly won't be accessible to Christie's in any other manner - and he has earned significant credibility from many of his fellow Chinese.

AP article

The International Criminal Court just issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the current president of Sudan, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Specifically:

He is suspected of being criminally responsible, as an indirect (co-)perpetrator, for intentionally directing attacks against an important part of the civilian population of Darfur, Sudan, murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing and forcibly transferring large numbers of civilians, and pillaging their property.

Mr. Bashir has naturally declined to peacefully turn himself in, and the government of Sudan is not planning on handing over its head of state. Unsurprisingly, they have turned to the stock Zimbabwe defense, claiming that the entire thing is a neocolonialist plot to destabilize Africa:

"This decision is exactly what we have been expecting from the court, which was created to target Sudan and to be part of the new mechanism of neo-colonialism," Mustafa Othman Ismail told Sudanese TV.

The neo-colonialist defense plays on the very real history of abusive colonialism in Africa, but has been unhelpfully applied to defend the abandonment of Africans to disease and the mistreatment of Africans by other Africans.

It does, of course, play well in Khartoum, much as xenophobia has played well in the U.S..

This is also the first time the ICC has put out a warrant against a sitting head of state. This nominally requires that signatories to the Rome Statute arrest Omar al-Bashir and hand him over to the ICC should he happen to enter their territory. Roughly half of Sudan's neighbors are signatories. If he's picked up, that would be an important precedent.

BBC article
al Jazeera article
IHT article
VOA article

I've been talking with a friend recently about the incredibly damaging dichotomy that exists in how we treat individuals and their finances versus corporations and their finances. CNBC in particular has been going after homeowners, couching the concept of walking away from a failing mortgage as somehow immoral, even as they happily push for the necessity of the feared Federal government subsidizing significantly more poorly made decisions at the corporate level by buying up "toxic" debts.

With that in mind:

The last few years have been mixed for former single-source star and war profiteer KBR. They've been awarded some incredibly valuable contracts on very sketchy terms, only to see these awards rightly protested by its competitors. They've also lost contracts, based on their prior failure to perform.

Now, KBR has been dealt another clear blow as the GAO has rejected its protest against yet another denied contract. This time around, KBR was bidding on a contract covering combat support services in the Kuwait Area of Responsibility. The $77 million contract instead went to DynCorp.

The Army rejected KBR's proposal, on the very sound basis that the company was attempting to put itself in a position to demand specific force protection levels and activities from the Army. The sticking point was this language in KBR's assumptions section:

The U.S. Government will provide necessary force protection and security for KBR personnel. This includes, but is not limited to, the security at the KBR work site and movement throughout the Area of Operations, to include between work sites, living/messing areas and ingress/egress to the Area of Operation. It is assumed soldiers will be positioned in over watch of the site and where KBR personnel encounter a hostile threat, it is further assumed U.S. Army personnel will intervene without delay.

The Army cogently points out that it can't be beholden to any contractor in terms of ordering specific levels or types of force protection. KBR responded by insisting that it wasn't trying to actually make demands of or give orders to the Army, and that:

"[n]owhere in KBR's proposal is there any explicit or implicit statement by KBR that its performance is contingent upon the [force protection assumption]," and that the "assumption can have no effect on the cost that KBR would ultimately charge to the Army" because of other RFP provisions that require Army approval under "stringently defined conditions" before the contractor can incur force protection costs.

The Army counters, however, by pointing out that the force protection assumptions in the KBR proposal include specific tasks (such as protection between work and living areas) that necessarily are a boosting of the force protection described in the original request for proposals. In other words, KBR said it expected more than the Army had already said it was allowed to expect. This at the very least undermines the KBR proposal, if that's one of their core assumptions. However, what about that KBR claim that the force protection issue wouldn't affect performance or cost?

Finally, with regard to KBR's argument that its force protection assumption should not cause the agency concern because "KBR included a nearly identical assumption in its proposal for this same work under the LOGCAP III proposal, and the solicitation and task order for this work under the LOGCAP III contract contains similar force protection provisions," see Protest at 11 n.1., the agency notes that "force protection has been a contentious issue" under that contract. Contracting Officer's Statement at 8; see AR at 7. The agency specifically states here, and the protester does not argue otherwise, that KBR has requested "reimbursement for costs of force protection, and when denied KBR submitted a claim of $19 [million]." AR at 7.

In other words, KBR included exactly this language last time they won this kind of contract, and then tried to bill the Army for the difference between what the Army said it would do and what KBR wanted them to do, despite that not being a component of the proposal.

To reframe that, imagine accepting a contract to refurbish someone's kitchen with the express condition that you wouldn't be paid for travel to and from their house, and then trying to bill them for your gas money at the end of the contract. This is, apparently, the KBR way.

Perhaps in the absence of a good friend in power, KBR's ability to bilk the American public by pushing faulty bids and fraudulent claims through the military procurement system has been, thankfully, eroding.

I first learned about the character of KBR through enlisted friends who had been forced to scrounge for food by KBR undersupplying their bases to make a profit. I am glad, then, to see that they are increasingly being called on their unethical and frankly damaging practices. They've been a leech on our soldiers for far too long.

One of the fears associated with our upcoming planned withdrawal from Iraq, and indeed, one of the fears that was promoted by the Bush administration to warn all of us off a timetable, is that Iraq will collapse into 2004-style chaos and bloodshed as our troops leave. In this commentary piece, RAND political scientist Lowell Schwartz lays out his understanding of why things turned around to the extent they did in the last couple years in Iraq, and explains why this militates against the idea of a general collapse on the wake of an American exit.

I've spoken in the past about the driving force of community self interest in opposing fanatic organizations. Briefly, this is the crossover moment when a community reaches the realization that a former ally does not have their best interests at heart, and places those best interests above that former alliance. This is very much Schwartz's point in his piece, where he discusses how neighboring nations have realized that al-Qaeda in Iraq is a general force for destabilization, and the "upshot" of injuring the U.S. is countered by the massive downside of funding a group of unfocused fanatics who may well bomb hotels and other public sites within neighboring nations. A failed state ends up being a deeply problematic neighbor.

Schwartz cites this self-interest effect as half the reason for the relative 'calm' in Iraq. The other half, unfortunately, amounts to ethnic cleansing. During the height of the violence in Baghdad, somewhere over a million Sunnis fled the city, pushing the ethnic mix from 35% Sunni to 10-15% Sunni. There just aren't as many mixed neighborhoods to be at war with each other anymore.

Schwartz concludes that Iraq is likely to remain relatively stable as American troops leave, and that we can now rely on a more intrinsically stable Iraq that is being buttressed rather than battered by its neighbors.

This week has seen two attacks in Northern Ireland, perpetrated by post-IRA detritus with such awesome names as "Real IRA" and the even better "Continuity IRA." In general, the backlash has been immense, with political figures including former paramilitaries on both sides excoriating this subset of thugs who can't let go.

When a movement has basically achieved its cause, those leftovers who continue with the violence are the losers for whom the violence is fulfillment, and who aren't actually going to be satisfied by achieving their nominal goals. If there weren't any specific movement for them to attach to, they might have ended up hating immigrants, fantasizing about being international mercenaries, or just forlornly watching action movies and downloading online porn.

In the U.S., we have problems when these losers acquire guns. In Northern Ireland, unfortunately, the former prevalence of paramilitaries means that the guns are a given, and the losers were pre-recruited. In time, they will be marginalized even more, until they all age out, get a life, or end up in prison. Then it'll be back to the generic fantasies and normal, day-to-day criminality for people like this. It's something to look forward to.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

Pope Benedict is headlining his upcoming visit to Africa by claiming that distributing condoms will make the HIV problem worse, and that abstinence education will honestly work this time. Really.

Also, Africa needs a great, big hug:

Pope Benedict said on the eve of his trip that he wanted to wrap his arms around the entire continent, with "its painful wounds, its enormous potential and hopes".

The United States is a very faithful country - if you travel abroad you'll notice how much more overtly religious we are than many other areas. Regardless, our rate of premarital sex is 95%, and it has been for the last half century. If our country, a country that is about 85% religious nonetheless manages to screw up abstinence 95% of the time, why do you expect other countries to do better?

The Vatican is naturally a faith-based institution, but I can't recommend its current faith-based approach to public health.

BBC article

I've wondered for a long time when someone's economic malfeasance would prompt death threats (or outright killings). It surprised me that the collapse of Enron, for example, did not lead immediately to someone taking a rifle to an Enron executive.

I'm not advocating that, incidentally. But it clearly reflects the way we assign risk and value damage, where it is easier to comprehend the damage to society of a violent criminal yet much harder for people to properly gauge the societal harm caused by people who are structurally disruptive, such as highly irresponsible financial players. Perhaps it might help to quantify the uptick in health problems and deaths caused by financial malfeasance, whether that's from individual bankruptcies leading to neglected health care or a systematic increase in West Nile virus due to home foreclosures.

The public furor this week has been, naturally, over the payout of significant bonuses to executives at crippled insurance giant AIG. Putting aside for the moment some excellent questions about why such an ineffective deal was made with them during the previous administration, consider the following from current AIG overseer Edward Liddy:

"We have to continue managing our business as a business -- taking account of the cold realities of competition for customers, for revenues and for employees," he commented. "Because of this, and because of certain legal obligations, AIG has recently made a set of compensation payments, some of which I find distasteful."

This reflects one of the general issues with a number of American corporations - high reward regardless of performance, and the concomitant illusion of a competition for talent. There's no quantitative basis for asserting that simply replacing the entire AIG executive structure with executives willing to take lower pay would significantly reduce AIG's performance (and as been noted, it would be difficult to actually reduce AIG's performance from its current position). It's reasonable to accept the assertion that AIG is competing for customers and revenue, but there's no reliable evidence that they have a performance-based need to compete for executives at the current level of remuneration.

On that topic, consider this piece by MIT's Dan Ariely, discussing his research on the impact of rewards on performance. Specifically:

The results defied conventional wisdom. The group offered the highest bonus did worse than the other two groups - in every single task. On top of that, the people offered medium bonuses performed no better or worse than those offered low bonuses.

...and...

We found that as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as we usually expect: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But when the task required even rudimentary cognitive skill (as we hope investment banking does), the outcome was identical to the India study: A higher bonus on the line led to poorer performance.

In these studies, when rewards clearly were not scaling appropriately with the task and the person doing the work - when they outpaced reasonable levels - performance dropped off significantly. Ariely charitably attributes that dropoff to anxiety under the pressure of added rewards, but empirically, we don't care why it happens. We care that these out-of-scale rewards for high-level financial executives may not only be competitively unnecessary, they may actually degrade the performance of those same executives.

Can Liddy or any current AIG executive offer a quantitative comparison indicating that they wouldn't be doing just fine with individuals in the financial community who are willing to take half as much pay? A quarter? I imagine there is some level of experience required, and that we don't want, say, an expert chef taking over AIG while an AIG exec tries to run a five-star kitchen, but that doesn't mean we must accept the longstanding assertion that "this pay is required to keep top talent."

The topheavy nature of executive salaries suggests that companies as a whole have been pushed away from the lean, competitive, capitalist ideal by people with an interest in sinecure over career.

Marketwatch article at Yahoo