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STANBUL, Nov. 13 — Leaders from a variety of cultural and religious backgrounds on Monday announced a United Nations initiative to resolve the conflict between the West and the Muslim world.

They issued a framework for their effort, prepared over the past year, that singled out the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a primary source of the deepening split.

“No other conflict carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge among people far removed from the battlefield,” Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, said at a news conference. “As long as the Palestinians live under occupation, exposed to daily frustration and humiliation, and as long as Israelis are blown up in buses and in dance halls, so long will passions everywhere be inflamed.”

The report was drafted by 20 scholars and other leaders, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Mohammad Khatami, the former Iranian president, and others from many nations. It calls for collective action on issues of education, youth and immigration.

Members of the panel and Mr. Annan emphasized their view that the causes of tensions are primarily political, not religious.

The secretary general will appoint a representative to oversee the follow-up of the recommendations, which, Mr. Annan warned, will have little impact if Muslims in violent places — whether Iraqis, Afghans, Chechens or Palestinians — continue to perceive their situation merely as a case of being made victims by non-Muslims.

“If these conflicts or difficult situations can be resolved, it will have a positive impact on the work we are doing here,” Mr. Annan said.

The host of the event, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, emphasized the symbolic importance of holding it in Istanbul, which bridges East and West and is the leading city in a predominantly Muslim country taking steps to join the European Union.

Joining the European Union, he said, would “prove that the polarization between cultures is actually artificial and contrived.”

The Alliance of Civilizations Initiative was the idea of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain, who suggested it six months after terrorist bombings in Madrid killed 191 people in 2004.

“We’re going to immobilize extremists, prevent their actions,” Mr. Zapatero said here. “Nobody should doubt our victory.”

Mr. Annan said in a written statement: “The problem is not the Koran or the Torah or the Bible. Indeed, I have often said that the problem is never the faith, it is the faithful and how they behave toward each other.”

Source: New York Times  

The advent of smart metering was the most significant technology impact in the National Electricity Market (NEM) at present, the National Electricity Market Management Company (NEMMCO) said in its 2006 annual report on metering and retail market development.

All states investigating impact and benefits: NEMMCO said there was no national program in Australia but all state jurisdictions were investigating the impact and potential benefits of smart metering.

COAG encourages their use: A statement from the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) encouraged the use of smart meters to improve supply efficiency through effective price signals to customers.

No formally accepted definition in Australia: While there was no formally accepted definition of the term “smart meter”, a general definition of a “smart meter” was an advanced meter that identified electricity consumption in more detail than a conventional basic (accumulation) meter of the type now used in domestic situations.

More than 4000 readings in a quarter: While a “basic meter” accumulated the measurement of electricity consumption until it was read, providing the total energy volume for the period between reads, a “smart meter” would, typically, provide consumption data in half-hourly intervals (e.g. providing more than 4000 readings in a three-month period).

Readings can be delivered over communications network: A “smart meter” was therefore also referred to as an “interval meter”. The “smart meter” might also deliver the readings over a communications network to a remote location for monitoring and billing purposes, and provides other specialised functions.

Advanced metering infrastructure: This end-to-end arrangement of smart meters and data communications was referred to as AMI (advanced metering infrastructure).

Reference: 2006 annual report by National Electricity Market and Management Company (NEMMCO) on metering and retail market development. 26 October. Address: Level 12, 15 William Street, Melbourne. Vic. 3000. Phone: (03) 9648 8777. Fax: (03) 9648 8778.
http://www.nemmco.com.au

Erisk Net, 13/11/2006

By Mike Whitney

DONALD Rumsfeld never really understood the war he was fighting in Iraq. That’s why the results have been so terrible. He liked to say that “the war in Iraq is a test of wills”, but that just shows that he had no idea what he was doing and was in way over his head.

War shouldn’t be personalized; that just makes it a battle of egos which inevitably clouds one’s judgment. War is a means of using organized violence to achieve political objectives. Period. Rumsfeld never really grasped that point, so it was impossible for him to prevail. His statement just shows the shortsightedness of a man who is incapable of thinking politically and therefore wasn’t able to appreciate the larger strategic goals.

For people like Rumsfeld, violence and deception are the natural corollaries of their distorted views; they become an end in themselves. That is not only tragic, but it also ensures failure. According to the recently released Lancet report, over 650,000 Iraqis have been killed in the conflict so far. This proves that Rumsfeld didn’t know what he was doing so he simply ratcheted up the violence to conceal his ignorance. He had no plan for occupation, reconstruction, security, or victory. The whole thing was a sham predicated on his unflagging belief in over-whelming force. The outcome was not only predictable; it was predicted! Now, the country in a shambles, the society is irretrievably ripped apart, and the entire project is in ruins.

In his parting statement, Rumsfeld reiterated his belief that we are facing a “new kind of enemy” in a “new kind of war”. But this is just more buck-passing from a guy who wouldn’t listen to his subordinates and was thoroughly convinced of his own genius. Anyone who has seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib and Falluja are already familiar with Rumsfeld’s genius and his insatiable appetite for violence. They also know that, to great extent, he is fully responsible for the unspeakable tragedy that is currently unfolding in Iraq.

Besides, Rumsfeld is mistaken; we are not fighting a “new kind of enemy or a new kind of war”. The fundamentals of 4-G guerilla warfare are well known as are the strategies for combating them. Rumsfeld’s problem is that, rather than follow the advice of his generals who understand the nature of asymmetrical warfare; he chose to implement his own untested theories which consistently ended in disaster.

To his credit, he had a fairly decent plan for controlling the flow of information coming from the front (“embedded” journalists) and for quashing unflattering news-coverage. In fact, the DOD’s media-management strategy has been the most successful part of the war-effort. The American people have been effectively blocked from seeing the same kind of bloody-footage that flooded their TV screens a generation earlier during the Vietnam War. We haven’t seen the carnage, the body-bags, the flag-draped coffins; the wounded, maimed or killed civilians who are, of course, the greatest victims of the present policy.

In other words, the Iraq War has been a huge triumph for perception-management and censorship.

Score 1 for Rummy.

The media has played no role in undermining support for the war. Rather it has been the steady deterioration of the security situation, the up-tick in sectarian violence, and the absence of any tangible “benchmarks” for progress which left the American people believing that we were hopelessly trapped in another quagmire. At this point, no amount of media cheerleading will convince the public that the war is anything more than a dead-loss.

Rumsfeld saw himself as a master technician, singularly capable of tip-toeing through the abstruse details of his “new type of war” while developing entirely original tactics. Naturally, he favored blitzkrieg-type military maneuvers and massive, destabilizing counterinsurgency operations, both of which have had a catastrophic effect on Iraqi society thrusting the country into “ungovernable” anarchy.

Was that the point?

Rumsfeld seemed to believe that if he spread chaos throughout Iraq (“creative destruction”) US occupation forces would eventually come out on top. The policy is a reworking of the covert operations (The Contras) which were used in Central America during the Reagan administration. The basic concept is to use extreme violence (El Salvador option) against enemy suspects in a way that discourages others from joining the fight. That’s shorthand for “terrorism” which, of course, the US does not officially support.

Some critics suggested that the strategies which worked in Central America would not succeed in Iraq for various cultural and historic reasons. They turned out to be right; "one size does not fit all". The Iraqis are fiercely independent, proud, nationalistic, and hostile to all manifestations of imperial rule. Although Iraqi society has begun to splinter, the violence has only intensified as more and more people find refuge in tribal groups and well-armed militias. This has caused a steady rise in the number of attacks on American forces. It has also made the country completely unmanageable. Iraqis are not cowed by imperial violence. They are not the submissive, compliant sheeple that Rumsfeld imagined. This is another tragic misreading of history.

There is no antidote for the continuing crisis in Iraq. The inevitable American withdrawal will only hasten the looming battle between the competing political forces. It’s better to get out now and allow that process to begin.

Political pundits and historians will undoubtedly be harsh on Rumsfeld for his iron-fisted methods of trying to establish order, but occupying Iraq would have been difficult, if not impossible, under the best of circumstances. Rumsfeld’s poor decision-making sped up the process but, ultimately, the project was doomed from the beginning.

Ironically, Rumsfeld still refuses to accept any responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of casualties or the complete breakdown of Iraqi society. Instead, he has brushed aside any blame saying that Iraq is too “complicated” for normal people to understand.

Even after being forced to resign in utter disgrace, he still shows no sign of doubting his abilities as a military genius. His ego remains as impervious to criticism as tempered steel.

But the facts don’t lie. Rumsfeld was given the best-equipped, best-trained, high-tech, military machine the world has ever seen. He was given unlimited political and financial support and a ringing endorsement by the American media. All that was expected of him was to establish security and execute the smooth transferal of power from a "widely-despised" tyrant to a provisional government. At the same time, he was supposed to put down an “insurgency”, which (by the Pentagon’s own estimates) included no more than 5 or 6,000 “Islamic extremists and dead-enders”.

He failed completely.

Towards the end of his tenure, he became so desperate that he began to blame leftist web sites and “bloggers” for the escalating violence in Iraq.

If there is an “up-side” to the Rumsfeld saga, it is this. If it wasn’t for Rumsfeld’s sheer incompetence in every area of supervising the occupation, the Bush administration would have pressed on with their plans for toppling the regimes in Tehran and Damascus.

Rumsfeld’s ineptitude, along with the tenacity and steadfastness of the Iraqi resistance, has made that prospect seem far less likely.

Source: Information Clearing House