From Saturday through Thursday I will be on the road driving from North Carolina to Illinois and back. I will be updating the site as circumstances allow. During this period, I will be posting fewer news items and more of the free-ranging items that I’m now clustering under my catchall — attention to the unseen. This brief message will remain at the top of the page throughout this period. PW
An edited version of this debate can be heard on this NPR page.
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The Guardian: “My dad was a slightly stricter version of Richard Dawkins,” says Alain de Botton. “The worldview was that there are idiots out there who believe in Santa Claus and fairies and magic and elves and we’re not joining that nonsense.” In his new book, Religion for Atheists, he recalls his father reducing his sister Miel to tears by “trying to dislodge her modestly held notion that a reclusive god might dwell somewhere in the universe. She was eight at the time.” It’s one of few passages in his unremittingly mellifluous and genteel oeuvre that sticks out with something like anger.
Before the interview, his publicists warned that De Botton didn’t want to talk about Gilbert de Botton, Egyptian-born secular Jew and multimillionaire banker. He was especially keen not to discuss his father’s business dealings and the repeated suggestion that his literary career was bankrolled with daddy’s money.
But asking about De Botton’s father is irresistible because Religion for Atheists is, he readily concedes, an oedipal book. “I’m rebelling,” he says. “I’m trying to find my way back to the babies that have been thrown out with the bathwater.” He’s elsewhere described his father as “a cruel tyrant as a domestic figure, hugely overbearing”. He was also surely crushingly impressive – the former head of Rothschild Bank who established Global Asset Management in 1983 with £1m capital and sold it to UBS in 1999 for £420m, a collector of late Picassos, the austere figure depicted in portraits by both Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and an atheist who thrived without religion’s crutch.
“He was extreme. I think it was a generational thing.” And yet Gilbert, who died in 2000, now lies beneath a Hebrew headstone in a Jewish cemetery in Willesden, north-west London because, as his son writes pointedly, “he had, intriguingly, omitted to make more secular arrangements”. Disappointingly, Alain doesn’t explore in book or interview what intrigued him about that omission.
Instead, he connects his father’s militant atheism to the affliction that he reckons made Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens so caustic in their bestselling attacks on religion. “I’ve got a generational theory about this. Particularly if you’re a man over 55 or so, perhaps something bad happened to you at the hands of religion – you came across a corrupt priest, you were bored at school, your parents forced it down your throat. Few of the younger generation feel that way. By the time I came around – I’m 42 – religion was a joke.
“I don’t think I would have written this book if I’d grown up in Saudi Arabia as a woman. It’s a European book in the sense that we’re living in a society where religion is on the back foot. It rarely intruded on my life.”
This isn’t quite true. In his mid 20s, De Botton had a crisis of faithlessness when exposed to Bach’s cantatas, Bellini’s Madonnas and Zen architecture. What was the crisis about? “It was guilt about my father. I was disturbed by the intensity of the feeling. Bach was moving, but not just because of music but because this guy was talking in a tremulous voice about death. Secular culture tells us to respect Bach, but it doesn’t tell us that we’re going to be moved. I felt like I might go to the other side.”
He didn’t. Rather, in Religion for Atheists, he writes as a non-believer cherry-picking the world’s religions. “I guess my insight was: ‘What is there here that’s useful, that we can steal?’” He admires 18th-century Jesuits. “They wanted to put a Jesuit priest into every aristocratic family in Europe because they’d get to eat with the family and teach the children. That’s a fantastic idea.” It’s tempting to think of De Botton as a latter-day Jesuit seeking to install his books in every home in order to make us, even if faithless, good. “Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don’t have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling us potted plants and pizzas while the thinkers are a little bit unworldly. Religions both think and do.”
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Reuters reports: As the European Union prepares to ban Iranian oil and the United States turns the screw on payments, oil executives and policymakers say China and Russia stand to gain the most and Western oil firms and consumers may emerge the biggest losers.
Iran will continue to sell much the same volume of oil – 2.6 million barrels per day or around 3 percent of world supply – but almost all of it will flow to China, they reason. And being pretty much Iran’s only remaining customer, Beijing will be able to negotiate a much reduced price.
The EU will ban Iranian oil from July. The United States plans sanctions on Iran’s central bank and possibly its shipping firm. European headquartered oil firms such as France’s Total and Royal Dutch Shell have already abandoned Iranian oil purchases or are in the process of doing so.
Japan and South Korea have signaled they may reduce purchases of Iranian oil to comply with U.S. sanctions designed to put pressure on Tehran over its nuclear program.
That leaves a growing number of buyers competing for alternative supplies. Inevitably attention has turned to Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest exporter and the only country that can quickly increase oil output and help the West avoid a price spike that would deal a severe economic blow.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that “Iran’s parliament could ban oil exports to Europe as early as next week, in a move that could hit economically weak southern European countries.” The EU recognizes that Greece, Spain and Italy need several months to secure alternative supplies to the ones they now rely on from Iran.
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Nima Khorrami Assl writes: The US and EU have announced new sanctions in the hope of persuading Iran to abandon its alleged nuclear weapons programme, though how effective these will be is questionable. China, India, Russia, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea have already refused to go along with the new measures. Iran also has the means to evade the sanctions – through its proximity to Iraq.
Iran has often been singled out as the main beneficiary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, as well as the biggest threat to Iraq’s stability in the post-Saddam era. Iran’s uninterrupted support for Shia militia groups in southern Iraq, particularly the Mahdi army, is seen as one indication of its involvement in Iraqi politics and its ability to cause problems for adversaries.
And yet Iran’s key interest in Iraq is less about realpolitik than about trade. Iran is one of Iraq’s most important regional economic partners, with an annual trade volume between the two sides standing at $8bn to $10bn (£5bn to £6.4bn). However, it is Iraq’s 910-mile border with Iran, and therefore its geographical suitability as a smuggling hub for sanctioned goods, which is of paramount importance to Iran at present.
Until 2010, most of the sanctioned goods smuggled into Iran came through the UAE and Oman. Backed by the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), “small-size” strategic goods, including aircraft components and sophisticated electronic equipment, were smuggled into the Iranian islands of Kish and Qeshm from Dubai, Ras al-Khaimah and Madha. Since the beginning of 2010, however, the US government has put immense pressure on the Emirati and Omani governments to curb smuggling, threatening that failure to do so would cost them access to US markets and technology.
Wary of this, the UAE and Oman have both made the obvious choice and cracked down on smuggling between the southern and northern edges of the Gulf. In response, the Iranian government has turned its attention to Iraq in order to bypass western sanctions, and has imposed restrictions on Iranian businesses in the Gulf.
So far, most of the smuggling through Iraq has taken place in the mountainous Kurdish regions. For instance, since June 2010, when the US and EU imposed tougher sanctions on Iran’s gasoline imports, hundreds of millions of dollars in crude oil and refined products from the Kurdish region, Kirkuk, and Baiji have been smuggled to Iran on a daily basis.
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Al Jazeera reports: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that global crude prices could rise as much as 30 per cent if Iran halted oil exports as a result of US and European Union sanctions.
If Iran halts exports to countries without offsets from other sources, it would likely trigger an “initial” oil price jump of 20 to 30 per cent, or about $20 to $30 per barrel, the IMF said in its first public comment on a possible Iranian oil supply disruption.
The IMF highlighted the risks of rising tensions over Iran sanctions in a note on Wednesday sent to deputies from G20 countries who met in Mexico City last week.
The price impact caused by a cut in Iranian exports could be exacerbated by below average oil stocks in many countries, the result of tight oil market conditions through much of last year, the IMF said.
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The Guardian reports: Iran is due to open talks with UN nuclear inspectors on Sunday in an attempt to allay their suspicions of a covert Iranian weapons programme, the first such discussions in more than three years.
The three days of meetings in Tehran between Iranian nuclear officials and a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) represent the only diplomatic progress in more than a year, as tensions mount over Iran’s nuclear programme and western attempts to cut off the country’s oil trade.
Diplomats familiar with the visit said that the IAEA team would seek assurances that they will be able to interview key Iranian scientists suspected of past involvement in weapons research, visit sensitive sites and see documents concerning the procurement of dual-use technology. The Iranian government denies it is seeking to make nuclear weapons, insisting its research is for scientific or civil power-generating purposes.
Diplomats and analysts have played down prospects of a quick breakthrough.
If the talks were to collapse, the pressure on Iran could intensify. The IAEA has warned that Tehran could be referred to the UN security council for possible further punitive measures if it fails to cooperate.
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Exceptionalism takes many forms but perhaps its most universal expression can be found among politicians and petty criminals. When contemplating doing something really stupid, they have an unusual capacity to become convinced that nothing can go wrong.
When it comes to Israel’s view of Iran, the contradictions seem boundless. The Islamic republic is the modern equivalent of Nazi Germany, Netanyahu and others like to say. But as for the risks involved in attacking Iran, the same fear-mongers claim that these risks have all been wildly overstated.
The lesson of the Holocaust, Netanyahu says, is: “We can only rely on ourselves.” So why does Israel still accept massive amounts of U.S. military aid and the support of such a powerful lobby in Washington?
The New York Times reports: Israeli intelligence estimates, backed by academic studies, have cast doubt on the widespread assumption that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would set off a catastrophic set of events like a regional conflagration, widespread acts of terrorism and sky-high oil prices.
The estimates, which have been largely adopted by the country’s most senior officials, conclude that the threat of Iranian retaliation is partly bluff. They are playing an important role in Israel’s calculation of whether ultimately to strike Iran, or to try to persuade the United States to do so, even as Tehran faces tough new economic sanctions from the West.
“A war is no picnic,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio in November. But if Israel feels itself forced into action, the retaliation would be bearable, he said. “There will not be 100,000 dead or 10,000 dead or 1,000 dead. The state of Israel will not be destroyed.”
The Iranian government, which says its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz — through which 90 percent of gulf oil passes — and if attacked, to retaliate with all its military might.
But Israeli assessments reject the threats as overblown. Mr. Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have embraced those analyses as they focus on how to stop what they view as Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons.
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