The view from the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan

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rory stewart.jpgScottish author and diplomat Rory Stewart has packed a lifetime of fascinating experiences into his 33 years. In this interesting interview tucked into the weekend Wall Street Journal ($), the WSJ’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg talks with Stewart, who has become one of the foremost authorities on the day-to-day problems involved in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan after years of brutal totalitarian governments.
Born in Hong Kong, Stewart went on to receive undergraduate and master’s degrees in Modern History and Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Balliol College, Oxford University, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Granta and the London Review of Books. After college, Stewart served in the British Army and Foreign Office in a variety of capacities before electing in 2000 to set off on a two-year, 6,000 mile walking journey through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. He chronicled his journey through Afghanistan during the the winter of 2002 in The Places in Between (Picador/Macmillan 2004), which Harcourt Harvest published this past May in paperback.
Stewart returned to public service in late 2003 as Deputy Governorate Coordinator (Amara/Maysan) and Senior Adviser and Deputy Governorate Coordinator (Nasiriyah/Dhi Qar) in which Stewart established the governance structures of Maysan province, resolved tribal disputes to restore security and consolidate the authority of the Iraqi government and the police, set up NGOs and civil society organizations, ran municipal elections, inaugurated a new Provincial Council in Dhi Qar and saw the province through to the transfer of sovereignty in June 2004. Stewart was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by the British Government for his service in Iraq.
Last week, Harcourt published Stewart’s second book — The Prince of the Marshes — in which Stewart describes his recent experiences in Iraq, including the troubling problem of persuading the Iraqis to embrace the Coalition’s mission there and the abject failure of a Coalition military unit from Italy to come to Mr. Stewart’s rescue when his compound came under a brutal mortar attack. During the WSJ interview, Stewart provides many insights into the practical problems involved in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, including the following:

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Colbert on “wikiality”

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colbert12.jpgYou have to hand it to Stephen Colbert. He sure has a way of keeping things lively.
First, Colbert does a segment on his Comedy Central show on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and the phenomenon of “wikiality” — the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you, it becomes reality.
Thousands of viewers then get online and storm Colbert’s Wikipedia entry and engage in widespread wikiality.
Hilarity ensues.

MotherRock’s bad bet

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natural gas flare.jpgThis Bloomberg article is reporting that former Nymex president and former El Paso Merchant Energy trading chief J. Robert “Bo” Collins sent investors in his hedge fund MotherRock L.P. a letter yesterday informing them that MotherRock is shutting down after betting big and losing on trades in the volatile natural gas market during June and July.
Collins formed MotherRock in early 2005. At its peak, the fund managed about $430 million in assets and reported net gains of 20% for 2005. Although its energy fund was up slightly as of the end of May, that MotherRock fund lost $230 million as investors fled and the natural gas prices moved contrary to MotherRock’s positions. After an unusally high draw in natural gas from storage last week and a a heat wave across much of the country, natural gas prices rose 17% during the week of July 24 and 14% this past Monday. Guess which way MotherRock was betting prices would go?

A $43 million limousine service

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Metrorail car-Houston.jpgAnne Linehan and Kevin Whited, and Tory Gattis continue to do a good job of covering Houston Metro Rail’s ever-present expansion plans, which seem to be impervious to whether the expansion is actually needed. Previous posts on the boondoggle of rail systems in cities such as Houston are here.
Although not as slick as a trendy Metro economic report analyzing the projected benefits of an expansion of the light rail system in Houston, this Bill Schadewald/Houston Business Journal ($) op-ed describes his rather compelling analysis of Metro Rail’s ridership on one portion of the existing rail line:

As Yogi Berra once observed, sometimes you can see a lot just by looking. Neighborhoods can change character in a just a year.
Today I’m revisiting the outer Texas Medical Center area with a stroll down Fannin past Reliant Stadium along the light rail line.
It’s half-past five on a Tuesday afternoon. The walk from South Braeswood to the end of the line is about a mile, give or take. . . .
A Metro train passes, whistle wailing. The trains regularly come and go in opposite directions every few minutes.
I’m focused on heart rate and rock, not paying much attention to the rhythm of the rails. Then I happen to look over. Staring back is a single solitary face on an entire train.
The cell phone says a quarter to six. Just one rider? During rush hour? It doesn’t make sense.

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The latest boom

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bubblepop.jpgThe Wall Street Journal’s ($) Ann Davis reports from Houston on the funny money flowing into oil and gas investment opportunities, even those that do not own any oil and gas yet:

Barry Kostiner traded electricity and natural gas for eight years on Wall Street. Last fall, he reinvented himself — as a Texas oilman.
With no assets beyond plans to buy oil and gas fields, he set up shop as Platinum Energy Resources Inc. He had never worked in the oil industry or managed a company. Yet he carried out an initial public offering of stock and within two months persuaded several New York hedge funds to buy a large chunk of the shares, raising $115 million in all. . .
Energy-related endeavors of all kinds are a magnet for cash these days, thanks to the gravity-defying rise of oil prices and the recent boom in investment pools that cater to deep-pocketed institutions and the wealthy. Some energy investments, to be sure, are relatively low-risk and involve industry veterans. But private-equity firms, hedge funds and other professional speculators are also pouring billions into unconventional loans, management teams with limited track records and IPOs on lightly regulated stock markets.[. . .]
The fevered pitch reminds some of the Silicon Valley boom a few years back. “Energy’s about as hot right now as tech was in 2000,” says Ben Dell, an energy analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. [. . .]

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Judge Young swings for the fences again

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sentencing.jpgDoug Berman’s remarkable Sentencing Law and Policy blog notes another key sentencing decision from U.S. District Judge William G. Young of Massachusetts, the jurist who declared the federal sentencing guidelines unconstitutional a few months before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Booker decision. In this well-reasoned 125-page decision, Judge Young concludes that the existing sentencing scheme is unworkable in theory or in reality. “Juries can and should perform” sentencing “as a matter both of practice and of constitutional procedure,” Judge Young reasons. He begins his treatise by hammering home a point that has been made continually on this blog during the Justice Department’s dubious criminalization of business interests in the post-Enron era — i.e., the enormous cost of such criminalization:

For seventeen years federal courts had been sentencing offenders unconstitutionally. Think about that. The human cost is incalculable — thousands of Americans languish in prison under sentences that today are unconstitutional. The institutional costs are equally enormous — for seventeen years the American jury was disparaged and disregarded in derogation of its constitutional function; a generation of federal trial judges has lost track of certain core values of an independent judiciary because they have been brought up in a sentencing system that strips the words “burden of proof”, “evidence”, and “facts” of genuine meaning; and the vulnerability of our fair and impartial federal trial court system to attack from the political branches of our government has been exposed as never before in our history.

Jury hung already in the natural gas trader case?

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traders natural gas2.jpgShortly after getting the case, the jury in the criminal trial of former Dynegy and El Paso natural gas traders Michelle Valencia and Greg Singleton (previous posts here) sent U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas a series of questions that — according to this Kristan Hays/AP article — prompted the judge to observe “they just don’t understand the [the prosecution’s] theories” and may be hung already.
Yesterday, I noted the defense’s gamble in electing not to put on a case after the prosecution rested based on the bet that the defense could persuade the jury during closing argument that the prosecution had not met its burden of proving that the defendants committed a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. That bet is usually a bad one, but it’s sure looking better in this particular case.
Update: The Chornicle’s John Roper reports that the jury has reached a verdict on wire fraud charges, but has advised Judge Atlas that the jurors are deadlocked on the conspiracy and false reporting charges. Until Judge Atlas decides whether to declare a mistrial or direct the jury to continue deliberating, the nature of the verdict on the wire fraud charges will remain confidential.
Update II: The jury is back and has found Valencia guilty of seven counts of wire fraud and Singleton guilty on a single count of wire fraud. The jury either acquitted or deadlocked on all the other charges against the defendants.

The best local source for hurricane info and analysis

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hurricane Chris.gifLast August, the Chronicle’s fine science writer, Eric Berger, began his popular SciGuy blog shortly before Hurricane Katrina hammered the central Gulf Coast. On the Saturday morning before Katrina hit, Eric and I were two of the earliest bloggers to recommend that people get out of New Orleans immediately and, in so doing, discovered each other. Since that time, Eric has become my go-to source for science information generally and hurricane information, in particular.
In this Chronicle article and related blog post, Eric predicts that there is a good chance that Tropical Storm Chris will become this season’s first Gulf hurricane by early next week (but maybe not, too). As a result, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to bookmark Eric’s blog and check it regularly — there is no better local source for hurricane information and analysis. His blog is yet another example of how weblogs have revolutionized the way in which specialized information is disseminated in American society.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

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jail10.jpgSeveral posts from last year (here, here and here) addressed one of the constants of my 27-year legal career in Houston — the chronically abysmal condition of the Harris County Jail. With this article, the Chronicle’s Steve McViker continues the Chronicle’s series on the problem that no Harri County official seems to want to solve. Despite showing a “good faith effort” to correct problems at the jail, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards has concluded that the jail will remain decertified for the third straight year.
During an inspection of the jail earlier this month, commission officials found that “although there were over 700 available beds, there were 548 inmates without bunks,” which followed a 2005 commission report in which it noted that just under 1,300 inmates were sleeping on the floor. Meanwhile, Harris County officials continue to dawdle over increasing staffing at the jail and even are dragging their feet in regard to the Chronicle’s open records requests regarding jail matters.
Last year, Scott Henson over at Grits for Breakfast wrote a fine series of posts that addressed the reasons for the problems at the Harris County Jail and what needed to be done to correct those problems. As has been the case for decades in Houston, Harris County officials continue to do the minimum necessary to avoid a state-mandated closing of the jail while avoiding the difficult work of actually addressing the causes of the jail’s problems by implementing necessary changes in the jail’s administration and the local criminal justice system.
A community’s soul is often reflected by how the community deals with constituencies who are unpopular and have no political power. In the case of Houston and the people most impacted by the Harris County Jail, that reflection is ugly and — as shown by this community’s remarkable response to the Gulf Coast evacuees last year after Hurricane Katrina — not an accurate indication of our community’s conscience. It is well-past time that Harris County officials prepare and implement a plan to resolve the local jail’s chronic problems once and for all, and here’s hoping that the Chronicle and the TCJS stay on their tails until they do. Houston deserves better.

Another Stros problem

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Garner4.jpgThe Stros won at San Diego last night, but a situation during the game highlighted another among the many problems with this particular Stros team — manager Phil Garner.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Garner’s less-than-average ability as a Major League Baseball manager is nowhere near as big a problem as the Stros’ chronic hitting woes or this season’s overall lackluster pitching performance. Moreover, he is a genuinely nice man who is impossible to dislike personally. But the fact of the matter is that he is not a good manager. Among recent Stros managers, not as bad as Jimy Williams, mind you, but certainly not as good as Larry Dierker.

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