Welcome. Here’s some of what’s happening in the world this week. Today is Saturday, October 14, 2023.
We have a lengthy report today. Just a quick look at the Israel/Hamas conflict for now, with more next week. We’re also talking Black Sea geography from the points of view of Russia, Georgia and Ukraine, industrial sabotage is suspected on a pipeline between Estonia and Finland, we have a couple of items from Sweden, news from Uzbekistan and a survey of news from Africa, the former French colonial coup belt of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, and more from Gabon, DR Congo, Somalia and Sudan. Plus, as always, some suggestions for your weekend reading.
Common Sense and Whiskey does two things: travel and politics. On Tuesdays there’s a travel article and on Saturdays a political week in review. Common Sense and Whiskey is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support what we’re doing here, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
ISRAEL, HAMAS AND THE MIDDLE EAST: For play by play particulars, strategies and tactics in Israel and Gaza there’s no shortage of information out there, and so many analysts have so much vastly superior knowledge and experience that I defer to them on the day to day. Next week we’ll consider at length some of the long term fallout from this week’s events. One Substack newsletter I find valuable is Foreign Exchanges, which publishes a daily world news roundup that usually starts in the Middle East.
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As it was one week after 9/11 in the US, there is no debate in Israel this morning about whether a military response is warranted or deserved; outside Israel it’s a different story. And it’s a pesky thing about democratic systems — public opinion can change fast.
Those Israeli symbols that shone on the Brandenburg Gate, 10 Downing Street, the Eiffel Tower and elsewhere last week: all that well-meant solidarity won’t hold up even until next weekend as Israel looks set to pound Gaza in its frustration and its rage, killing guilty and innocent alike with no declared strategy beyond ‘destroy Hamas.’ And that looks to be exactly what’s coming next.
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NATO foreign ministers met in Brussels on Thursday and were shown “uncensored video of Hamas atrocities” by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant via video link. Attendees described the video as “graphic and shocking.”
At the same meeting Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur claimed “100% support” from allies for an investigation into a damaged pipeline and telecommunications cable between Estonia and Finland. That damage occurred last Sunday.
In Finland Antti Pelttari, the director of the security intelligence service SUPO, said “Involvement of a state actor in this job cannot be ruled out.” Nato has promised a “determined” response if the pipeline damage turns out to be deliberate. Separately on Thursday, SUPO said relations between Finland and Russia had “significantly deteriorated.” (see the next story)
Also in that Thursday meeting, ministers made what is becoming a ritual call for Hungary and Türkiye to ratify Sweden’s accession to NATO.
We’re on shaky ground in international affairs and things may well degenerate into further strife by next weekend, even by the time this hits the internet on Saturday morning.
Al-Jazeera reported Thursday that “Israel has launched missile strikes on Syria’s two main airports in Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo, knocking both out of service,” and that “The Israeli military, which does not typically comment on its operations, did not release any immediate statement on the attacks.”
Under cover of last weekend’s Hamas atrocities bad actors are hard at work advancing their goals, as in the pipeline story below. Poland votes tomorrow amid electorally-inspired recriminations with Ukraine. The US House has no leadership. And the wider Middle East is as likely as not to tip into further violence at any moment.
For the record: former President Donald Trump praised Hezbollah as ‘very smart,’ and is claiming the Hamas attack would never have happened if the 2020 election was not 'rigged.'
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ESTONIA/FINLAND PIPELINE EXPLOSION:
Consider it an anniversary gift from sea monsters. A gas pipeline and a telecommunications cable have been damaged under the Baltic Sea between Estonia and Finland, apparently by “outside activity,” Finnish Prime Minister Peter Orpo said on Tuesday. The leak was discovered early last Sunday morning. The Nord Stream pipelines 1 & 2 to Germany were sabotaged on September 26th last year.
Finnish President Sauli Niinisto issued this statement: "It is likely that damage to both the gas pipeline and the communication cable is the result of outside activity. The cause of the damage is not yet clear, the investigation continues in cooperation between Finland and Estonia.”
The ship tracking site Marine Traffic recorded a Russian cargo vessel near the pipeline from Friday evening until 11pm Sunday, Finnish national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported on Wednesday.
Finnish officials were mostly tight-lipped, but Timo Kilpeläinen, head of the National Bureau of Investigation’s Investigation Department said "A sabotage of this calibre requires a certain amount of know-how and special equipment. It's probably not ordinary people who were behind this.”
By midweek NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had promised a "united and determined response” if the damage proved deliberate. On Wednesday US Secretary of State Blinken pledged generic support to Finland and Estonia on Twitter/X.
Pictures showed the pipeline’s concrete protective cover had been broken or torn off, as if a large ship had dragged its anchor over the pipeline, whether or not intentionally.
Gas can travel through this pipeline in either direction and at the time of the leak the pipeline “was transporting around 30 gigawatt hours (GWh) of gas per day from Finland to Estonia, Finnish gas system operator Gasgrid said,” according to Reuters. Finnish pipeline operator Gasgrid said repairing the pipeline “could take months or more if a puncture is confirmed.”
The pipeline opened in 2019 and Finland quit importing Russian gas after Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 2022.
Baltic Connector Oy, in Finland and Elering in Estonia are both wholly owned by their respective states. The pipeline consists of 21 kilometers in Finland, 77 kilometers underwater and 55 kilometers in Estonia, all west of the Tallinn/Helsinki axis. The Balticconnector runs to a depth of 100 metres (328 feet) at its deepest point, Gasgrid said.
The Estonian operator Elering said shortages of gas weren’t likely even if the pipeline were to remain inoperable through the winter, as supplies were still available from storage in Latvia and from Lithuania's LNG import terminal. Finland has two new LNG terminals that were fast tracked following Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion. It leased a floating LNG storage unit, located at Inkoo, that started operation last year. Lithuania also has a relatively new terminal at Klaipėda that went online in 2014.
As to the telecommunications cable, Finnish telecommunications operator Elisa told Reuters the distance from the cable to the Balticconnector pipeline was “significant.”
European gas prices rose on early in the week, just as Finnish national broadcaster YLE headlined a story, “Finland's economic outlook is bleak, Finance Ministry says.” Prices remained marginally higher on Friday, although the New York Times reported last week that “Gas storage facilities in Europe are nearly filled to capacity, easing fears about immediate shortages, and prices remain far cheaper than they were a year ago.”
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RUSSIA: President Putin met Sadyr Japarov, the President of Kyrgyzstan, at a Russian military base near the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek on Thursday. Mr. Putin was apparently en route to China, where he is due to attend a Belt and Road forum next week. This marks the Russian president’s first visit outside his own country this year. He is subject to an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest as a war criminal, but Kyrgyzstan is not a signatory to the ICC.
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BLACK SEA GEOGRAPHY: Georgia is in a tough spot. On October 5th Russia announced a new naval base in Abkhazia, on the eastern Black Sea coast. Trouble is, from Georgia’s point of view, Abkhazia doesn’t belong to Russia.
In 2008 Russia annexed Georgia’s Abkhazia region during a brief, ill-fated war that former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili started in the Georgian province of South Ossetia. Russia absconded with the Abkhazian coastline, promptly gave Abkhazians Russian passports and has since settled the province into one of President Putin’s trademark ‘frozen conflicts,’ as with Moldova in Transnistria and, until Russia’s wholesale invasion of Ukraine last year, with Ukraine in Crimea.
The Abkhazia/Russia border is scarcely 25 miles from President Putin’s prized Sochi. The new naval facility will be at the small town of Ochamchire (ოჩამჩირე, if you’re flexing your Georgian), and besides anything it might say about Russia not being a neighbor you can count on, it says one other important thing: Russia is deathly afraid of Ukrainian attacks on its navy and wants to store its naval assets as far from Crimea as it can.
I completely love this map, CEPA’s Black Sea from Moscow’s perspective. You can download it from CEPA’s website here.
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SWEDEN: Will increase its defense budget to about $11bn, doubling the 2020 budget – “which also means that Sweden will reach NATO’s defense spending target of 2% of GDP.”
Meanwhile “Stockholm has announced plans to become the latest European capital city to ban petrol and diesel cars from its centre, in an effort to slash pollution and reduce noise, the Guardian reports. “From 2025, 20 blocks of Stockholm’s inner city area, spanning its finance and main shopping districts, will be restricted to electric vehicle traffic only.”
In this, it joins:
Paris: Paris has announced plans to ban all diesel cars from the city centre by 2024 and all petrol cars by 2030.
Madrid: Madrid has announced plans to ban all petrol and diesel cars from the city centre by 2025.
Athens: Athens has announced plans to ban all petrol and diesel cars from the city centre by 2025.
Oslo: Oslo has already banned all petrol and diesel cars from the city centre, and it is planning to ban all petrol and diesel vehicles from the entire city by 2025.
And London is having that debate now.
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THE RISE AND RISE OF THE AfD: We’re halfway through the term of Chancellor Scholz’s “traffic light coalition” government in Berlin. Last weekend the upstart Alternative for Germany, the AfD, took 14.6 percent in Bavaria and to Bavaria’s northwest in Hesse it gathered 18.4 percent, the best it has ever done in western Germany. In both Bavaria and Hesse, all three parties that make up the traffic light coalition took losses.
Liana Fix and Constanze Stelzenmüller look ahead in Foreign Affairs:
“Regional elections in the fall of 2024 will bring in three of Germany’s eastern states: Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg. The AfD is currently polling as the strongest party in all three, at 32 to 35 percent.”
“The prospect of democratic parties being forced into potentially unmanageable coalitions of three or more parties to prevent the AfD coming to power in these states has triggered a heated debate among German conservatives about how best to deal with the AfD.”
In other words, will they follow the well-trod path of other European governments, co-opting themselves by, “copying its (the AfD’s) tone on hot-button issues such as migration….”?
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CHINA: This week’s better news. The whole story is in this Wednesday headline:
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AFRICA ROUNDUP: Africa is surely the most geopolitically interesting continent on the planet just now, roiled with intrigue. Consider:
Revolutionary change: the Niger coup in late July created “the world’s largest contiguous region of military rule, from Guinea on the Atlantic Ocean to Sudan on the Red Sea.” Western efforts at containment of jihadism across the Sahel are in ruins.
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Post-colonial retreat: President Macron has agreed to withdraw France’s remaining troops from Niger, but it was a tough call. As Geopolitical Monitor says, “France has a vital stake in this region, especially Niger, for two main reasons: its nuclear energy and its migration policy. Niger supplies France with 10% of the uranium it needs to power its nuclear reactors, which provide about 75% of its electricity.”
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Elections: in the Democratic Republic of Congo Denis Mukwege, a doctor who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on sexual violence in warfare, is running for the presidency; he announced in Kinshasa on Monday. Opposition leader Martin Fayulu, who came second to Tshisekedi in the last vote in 2018, said over the weekend he would be running, according to Reuters.
Thus the field facing incumbent President Félix Tshisekedi has grown to at least 23, including Moise Katumbi, a former governor of Katanga province in the economically vital southern copper belt. Last Sunday was the deadline to enter the race. Fayulu is already warning of electoral fraud. The election in DR Congo is December 20th.
On Thursday a court in Madagascar ordered a one-week delay of that country’s November election, from November 9th to 16th, and gave no reason, although the local situation is volatile. Former Madagascan President Marc Ravalomanana says he was injured during a rally to oppose incumbent president Andry Rajoelina’s re-election, apparently when police used tear gas to disperse Rajoelina’s supporters during the march. President Rajoelina opposed postponing the election.
And as of yesterday the election commission in Liberia was still counting votes from Tuesday’s elections.
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MALI, NIGER & BURKINA FASO: Last month the three former French colonial coup states signed a security pact under which they promise to come to each other’s aid in case of any rebellion or external aggression. Most immediately, this would be for the benefit of Niger, as the regional political organization ECOWAS has blustered about restoring President Mohamed Bazoum to power. Since the coup, former President Bazoum has been held at the presidential palace, along with his wife Haziza and son Salem.
But ECOWAS has done nothing and instead of international intervention, French troops began their withdrawal from Niger this week:
NIAMEY, Oct 10 (Reuters) - French military convoys have begun withdrawing from bases in southwest Niger, marking the start of a departure demanded by Niger's junta that has dealt a further blow to France's influence in West Africa's conflict-hit Sahel region.
Pickup trucks and armoured personnel carriers laden with French troops drove through the dusty outskirts of the capital Niamey on Tuesday, a Reuters reporter said, after the junta late on Monday said the withdrawal would kick off the following day.
In a statement read on state television, the military government called for citizens' cooperation with the troop movements that it said would involve some of the 1,500 French soldiers leaving Niger via road to Chad, a journey of hundreds of kilometres through sometimes insecure territory.
Meanwhile the United States has invested about $200 million in drone bases in northern Niger manned by 1,000 troops. Until Tuesday the U.S. had refused to call the Niger takeover a coup, but last week the U.S. recognized it as the coup it was, resulting in the US officially suspending assistance to Niger.
Reuters reported that “there are no plans to change the U.S. troop presence in the country, senior administration officials said,” and so far I have had a hard time finding an official reaction by the junta, which calls itself the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland.
The Defense Department said it had suspended security cooperation and counterterrorism operations and consolidated its Nigerian presence to locations in Niamey and Agadez.
The AP reports that “U.S. Ambassador to Niger Kathleen FitzGibbon remains in the country and has been in contact with the military junta … to address U.S. staff protection and logistical needs.”
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Meanwhile the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland has a budget problem. ECOWAS, the EU and the US all imposed sanctions, froze assets or halted aid after the July 26th coup. This year’s budget had been forecast at 3.29 trillion CFA francs ($5.3 billion). The junta has slashed to 1.98 trillion CFA, or a little over three trillion dollars.
Niger is the world’s seventh biggest uranium producer. It’s also one of the world’s poorest countries.
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GABON: Sylvia Bongo Ondimba Valentin, wife of deposed Gabonese President Ali Bongo, was jailed late on Wednesday and accused of forgery and falsification of records.
The coup leaders accuse Sylvia Bongo and her son, Nourredin Bongo Valentin, of manipulating the former president, who suffered a stroke in 2018, and effectively running the country for the past five years.
Honest though, if your family had run the country for the past 55 years, don’t you think the lines between your personal assets and those of the state might have grown a little blurred?
Gabon is a fascinating country, in which France has awlays been up to its neck in colonial chicanery. "Historically, (French multinational energy company) Elf was at the heart of French African policy," according to a twenty year old article by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius at legalaffairs.com. "It was the oil company that paid part of the finances of African chiefs of state, and returned to France money that financed the political parties."
(Further reading: Poisoned Wells, the Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson)
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SUDAN: “Under the guise of saving refugees, the United Arab Emirates is running an elaborate covert operation to back one side in Sudan’s spiraling war” says the New York Times, accusing the UAE of “supplying powerful weapons and drones, treating injured fighters and airlifting the most serious cases to one of its military hospitals.”
It goes on:
“The operation is based at an airfield and a hospital in a remote town across the Sudanese border in Chad, where cargo planes from the Emirates have been landing on a near-daily basis since June, according to satellite imagery and the officials, who spoke on the basis of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
It is the latest example of how the Emirates, an American ally in the Persian Gulf, has been using its vast wealth and sophisticated armory to position itself as a key player and sometimes kingmaker across Africa.
In Sudan, the evidence suggests it is backing the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., a powerful paramilitary group that has been linked to the Russian mercenary group Wagner and accused of atrocities. The R.S.F. has been battling the nation’s regular military in a civil war that has left 5,000 civilians dead and displaced more than four million people since April.”
ELSEWHERE IN AFRICA: Last month Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni offered to mediate between Somalia and the breakaway region of Somaliland to facilitate reunification after a more than three-decade split, Reuters reported, but Somaliland, the governing entity in Somalia closest to an actual state, batted down that idea.
The Somaliland Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement from its capital Hargeisa that it was ready to discuss how the two governments "can move forward separately” to coexist within Somalia’s borders.
"Any dialogue that transpires between Somaliland and Somalia will not discuss unification, but rather how the two previously united countries can move forward separately," Somaliland's government said.
Somaliland established its own republic in 1991.
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UZBEKISTAN/SWITZERLAND:
The late Islam Karimov ruled Uzbekistan as a dictator from the end of the Soviet Union until 2016.
His daughter, Gulnara Karimova, 51, has now been indicted in Switzerland on charges of heading an international crime syndicate, bribing corporate executives and government officials and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. She has been in jail in Tashkent since 2014.
Karimova is alleged to have laundered money and used safety deposit boxes at the Swiss private bank Lombard Odier to protect the loot.
Karimova seems to have fended off investigation in Switzerland for some time via diplomatic immunity granted to her by roles she performed at the UN in Geneva.
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AND FINALLY: I’m not sure if this came as a result of the Chris Christie line at the last Republican also-ran debate.
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PUNCTUATION MATTERS: Next time maybe best use the word “by.”
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CORRECTION: Last week I ran an item which cited an article on wired.com that claimed, among other things, that “Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations.” Wired.com has since retracted that story.
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WEEKEND READING
Every weekend I suggest worthwhile reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read ten articles, lose five pounds. Here we go:
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At the first barrier, a Talib smiles; he has orders to smile here. At the second barrier, a sign: Weapons Handover Point. Those who deposit their Kalashnikovs here will receive a locker number and get their weapon back upon leaving the hotel. Welcome to the InterContinental Hotel Kabul
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When Dr. Neil Martinson joined a call in April 2018, he was anxious for the verdict about a tuberculosis vaccine he’d helped test on hundreds of people.
The results blew him away: The shot prevented over half of those infected from getting sick; it was the biggest TB vaccine breakthrough in a century. He hung up, excited, and waited for the next step, a trial that would determine whether the shot was safe and effective enough to sell.
Weeks passed. Then months.
More than five years after the call, he’s still waiting, because the company that owns the vaccine decided to prioritize far more lucrative business.How a Big Pharma Company Stalled a Potentially Lifesaving Vaccine in Pursuit of Bigger Profits
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Every year, more than 500 Americans will be struck by lightning—and roughly 90 percent of them will survive. Though they remain among the living, their minds and bodies will be instantly, fundamentally altered in ways that still leave scientists scratching their heads. How to Survive a Lightning Strike
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On Florida’s Gulf Coast, a loose coalition of activists, officials and Trumpworld celebrities is building the world they want to live in. The MAGAmerican dream lives in Sarasota
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The federal government gave tens of billions of public dollars—along with critical decision-making power and knowledge—to vaccine companies through direct grants, purchase agreements, and low-cost licenses for government-owned patents on essential vaccine technology. Pfizer and Moderna earned extraordinary rewards and now claim nearly exclusive control over the results. They are now quadrupling prices. How Not to Do Industrial Policy
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Barentsburg: the Norwegian town feeling the chill of the Ukraine war
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More from Matt Lakeman’s series of country reports: “Ghana has a reputation for being the “easy mode” of West African travel, in contrast to Nigeria being “hard mode.” Ghana speaks English, is a democracy, has been politically stable for 30+ years, has little ethnic tension, low crime, and is one of wealthiest per capita West African states. Altogether, this makes Ghana the (relative) success story of West Africa and I wanted to find out how that happened.” Notes on Ghana
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Human voices evoke more fear among animals living in the South African savanna than do snarls from lions. Researchers set up speakers near 21 water holes, which played one of several sounds when triggered by animal movement. When they heard humans, giraffes, leopards, elephants and 16 other species were twice as likely to run as when they heard growling lions, barking dogs or guns. Animals find humans scarier than lions
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This was my fourth year working as an information officer with NWT Fire, staffing the public-information line during the annual fire season. This year was different. I evacuated from Yellowknife this summer
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A photo essay: The Nagorno-Karabakh Exodus
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There are something like 20,000 of my travel photos, currently from 113 countries and territories on EarthPhotos.com. And join 2,100 people who follow my constantly updated Twitter/X list of 200 experts whose job it is to follow Russia’s War on Ukraine.
In Tuesday’s travel tale we’ll discuss a few Þhings about Iceland.
Good weekend. See you Tuesday.
Bill! I’ve been pondering your question from yesterday, and I think we better cheer up because it’s gonna get a whole lot worse. How about you? Do you see this global unrest drastically changing the way we live in the next 5 years or will it take more time?