In defense of the Iraq drawdown

Last night I worked late at the office. My co-workers and I had a long discussion about the ongoing Iraq situation and what we should do regarding our troops.

I believe we should drawdown our troops.  It is time.

So I thought I would share an opinon or two.

Of course critics of the U.S. drawdown in Iraq claim that we are foregoing hard-won gains - years of blood, toil and tears - by getting out now. This is what Liz Cheney said on Fox the other day. I disagree. Let’s review the gains of the Iraq War: You have an Iraq that is not ruled by a brutal, tyrannical dictator, Saddam Hussein; you have some kind of democracy in Iraq; and the Kurds have been given an even greater measure of autonomy.

These are all important developments but they are not core security gains for the United States. And they are not really threatened by our leaving.

The original goals of the Iraq War were to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and to change the dynamics of the Middle East. We now know that WMDs did not exist. Historians will debate whether the Iraq War changed the dynamics of the Middle East more broadly. I think it did have an impact but it was part of a broader trend after 9/11 when America began reducing its support for dictators like Mubarak. Those moves were probably more important than Iraq.

Moving forward we can be sure that no matter what happens in Iraq, the future of Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia will be determined by none other than the Moroccans, Egyptians and Tunisians. If Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki becomes more dictatorial, does anyone really think that will affect what’s happening in Egypt?

Another great concern with the drawdown is that Iraq will become a pawn of Iran. This is not an insignificant concern. But if the worry is Iranian influence, the time to have addressed it was when we invaded Iraq in the first place. The United States empowered Shia exiles that had spent nearly a decade in Iran. The Bush Administration made significant mistakes in allowing too much Iranian influence in Iraq, all while professing to be highly anti-Iranian. I don’t think it was intentional; it was just one in a series of blunders the Bush Administration made in Iraq.

Nevertheless, I don’t think Iraq will become a pawn of Iran in the wake of the American drawdown. National interest always drives foreign policy and Iraq has its own sense of nationalism. In the Iraqi imagination, Iran is not a friendly big brother. Iran is the country against which Iraq fought an eight-year war. Iraq lost hundreds of thousands of people in that war. A foreign policy seen as ceding Iraqi interests to Iran today would not be very popular among Iraqis.

So the question becomes whether this drawdown is too fast and too complete. Would it have been better if a few thousand American troops stayed behind? Possibly. But that proved difficult for domestic political reasons within Iraq. And it misses the larger point, which is that the drawdown is actually very beneficial for American foreign policy.

The U.S. needs to transition to a foreign policy in which its core interests can be preserved without occupying vast swathes of land and nation building in difficult societies. America’s foreign policy must take advantage of the fact that it is a distant power with a flexible, high-tech military. America should focus on protecting itself through targeted counterterrorism measures. It should leverage the flexibility and political space that it gains by notbeing an occupying force. This will make the U.S. far stronger and safer in the long run than sitting in Iraq trying to control more real estate.

Russian billionaire, NBA owner, challenges Putin

Is it possible that Brooklyn's Coney Island and Little Odessa neighborhoods will be annexed into Russia?

Check this out!

Mikhail Prokhorov, one of Russia's richest tycoons and the owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team, said Monday he will run against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the March presidential election.

Prokhorov, whose wealth the Forbes magazine has estimated at $18 billion, has been cautious not to cross Putin's path in the past. But the tycoon's candidacy may now pose a serious challenge to Putin, whose authority has been dented by his party's poor showing in Russia's Dec. 4 parliamentary election and allegations of widespread fraud during the balloting.

Putin's party only won about 50 percent of that vote, compared to 64 percent four years ago, and the fraud allegations have allowed opposition parties to successfully mount massive anti-Putin protests in Russia.

"The society is waking up," Prokhorov said at the news conference he held in Moscow to announce his candidacy. "Those authorities who will fail to establish a dialogue with the society will have to go."

On Sunday, President Dmitry Medvedev promised on his Facebook page that the alleged vote fraud during the parliamentary election will be investigated. But Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, predicted Monday the probe will show that little vote fraud occurred and that it had no effect on the outcome.

"If you take all the cases of these alleged violations or whatever was published online, the total will be less than 1 percent of the overall number of votes," Peskov told The Associated Press in an interview. "And even hypothetically speaking, if they are all appealed in court, it will in no way affect the legitimacy of the election."

"60 Minutes" profiled Prokhorov in August 2010. Watch video at left.

Peskov's comment signaled that Putin — who served as Russia's president in 2000-2008 and only became prime minister because of term limits — is holding firm, despite the protests, which have been the largest here since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. On Saturday, tens of thousands of people in Moscow and smaller numbers in more than 60 other cities protested election fraud and called for an end to Putin's rule.

Prokhorov, 46, said he hopes to win the support of Russia's growing middle class, which formed the core of Saturday's demonstrations. However, he said he agrees with only some of the anti-Putin and anti-government slogans that were shouted out at the rallies. He also did not say whether he plans to attend a follow-up protest in Moscow later this month.

He is one of several candidates who have said they will oppose Putin in the presidential election, including Communist chief Gennady Zyuganov, who has finished second in past presidential elections.

Prokhorov's presidential bid follows his botched performance in the parliamentary race when he formed a liberal party under tacit support of the Kremlin, then abandoned the project under what he called Kremlin pressure.

The Quest For Immortality

Our wonderful pastor gave a lecture this past week about immortality and man's desire to live forever.  It made me think a whole lot about the concept of Heaven.  A 'Heaven' I still believe in.

So I did a little online research and found this article about our Quest for immortality I thought I would share:

We begin our journey to the outer limits with a gentle trip down the River Cam, floating by that center of British learning, Cambridge University. Our guide and helmsman: Dr. Aubrey de Grey. He ponders while he punts.

"When I was a student, I bought my own punt, a secondhand one for a few hundred pounds. And I used it in the summer to do what's called chauffeur punting," says de Grey. "People come along, tourists, and you tell them lies for money."

Today he's pondering his favorite premise: eternal youth.

While most scientists talk about increasing longevity by a few years, de Grey says he is talking about the "indefinite extension of longevity."

"Average life spans would be in the region of 1,000 years," he says. "Seriously."

De Grey and his wife Adelaide are fixtures around Cambridge. She's a researcher in genetics; he's an academic maverick. While still in his early 30s he published groundbreaking work in theoretical biology and earned an international reputation. His day job is managing a fruit fly database.

But the work that consumes him involves larger game – humans. And he does his best thinking in the same 17th century pub where Watson and Crick refreshed themselves while unlocking the mysteries of DNA. De Grey believes he has unlocked the mysteries of immortality.

"The aging process is really a buildup of side effects of being alive in the first place," he says.

De Grey has identified the biological processes he thinks are responsible for aging, including the mutations that cause cancer and the gradual buildup of useless, toxic junk.

What does this accumulation of junk within the cells lead to?

"It depends on the tissue. In the eye, there is a type of junk that accumulates in the back of the retina that eventually causes us to go blind. It's called age-related macular degeneration. In the arteries, you have a different type of cell which accumulates a different type of junk that eventually causes arteriosclerosis," he says.

But de Grey has gone way beyond describing the causes of degeneration. In a series of papers he has developed a theory he calls "Engineered Negligible Senescence". Simply put, it says science will soon enable us to grow old without aging.

De Grey says that not all of the conditions that cause our bodies to age can be avoided or prevented…yet. "But I do claim that we have a fighting chance of developing ways to prevent them within the next 25 years or so."

So humans will be just as spry at 500 as we were at 25?

"If you have difficultly imaging this, think about the situation with houses. With moderate maintenance they stay up, they stay intact, inhabitable more or less forever. It's just that we have to do a bit of maintenance to keep them going. And it's going to be the same with us," says de Grey. 


But Dr. Jay Olshansky disputes de Grey's conclusions.

Dr. Olshansky studies longevity and aging at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He says de Grey's predictions are more science fiction than science.

"Currently, life expectancy in the United States is roughly about – well, it's 80 for women, about 75 for men. They're talking about numbers that are simply way beyond comprehension," he says.

Olshanksy goes on to say that humans are simply not built to last.

"From an evolutionary perspective, we're designed to make it, to grow and develop and to reproduce, pass our genes on to the next generation, and ensure the reproductive success of our offspring," says Dr. Olshansky. "So you know, early 60s, one might argue, is where evolution has us surviving optimally. But we go well beyond that, well beyond the end of our reproductive period. So it's no surprise that we see things go wrong with these bodies when we use them beyond their warranty period. And that's exactly what we're doing."

De Grey admits his conclusions about people living to 1,000 are very extreme, "and so the natural reaction is to say, 'Well, this can't possibly be right.' But then if you look at my reasoning, how I get to those conclusions, it becomes very much harder to actually identify anything that I'm saying that is unreasonable," he says.

Would he compare such critics with those who believed that the Earth was flat and continued to believe it even when it was only theoretically proven to be round?

"I think that's a pretty good parallel, yes," says de Grey.

"I have no doubt science will make breakthroughs. But how do you develop a model or a forecast of a life expectancy based on a technology that doesn't exist?" says Olshansky.

But de Grey insists that it will exist soon enough. Our success in mapping the human genome will produce amazingly rapid strides in technology, like smart drugs designed for individuals, gene therapies to cure hereditary disease, and stem cells that rejuvenate organs like the heart and brain. And beyond that, microscopic robots that travel through our bloodstream curing what ails us.

Progress will be such that each generation will keep us one step ahead of the Grim Reaper.

"The first generation will give us maybe 30 extra years of healthy lifespan," says de Grey. "So, beneficiaries of those first therapies will still be around to benefit from improved therapies that will give them another 30 or 50 years and so on. So this is basically staying one step ahead of the problem."

But realistically, who wants to live to age 500 or 1,000?

"What I'm after is not living to 1,000. I'm after letting people avoid death for as long as they want to," he says.

And de Grey acknowledges that immortality will not be cheap. "We are talking about serious expenditure here. We are talking about expenditure in excess of what's being spent on the war in Iraq, for example."

That money will only be forthcoming when ordinary people become convinced that they have a shot at radical life extension.

"The people who are watching this probably still think about serious life extension in the same way that they think about teleportation. You know, they think it's not really foreseeable and they'll worry about it when it is," says de Grey.

That's where the Methuselah Mouse Prize comes in. It's a multi-million dollar contest designed by de Grey and others to spur anti-aging research. The goal is to demonstrate that radical life extension is possible by producing a so-called 'ageless' mouse within the next 10 years.

"And that is when the real pandemonium is going to happen because people will want to maximize their chance of making the cut," says de Grey. 


Not all mice are created equal – at least not in the laboratory of Dr. Christian Sell, a research scientist at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In a separate facility, his mice come in two sizes – 'regular' and 'midi'. The midi mice are 40 percent smaller than regular mice because one gene has been altered.

The altered gene, one that all mammals including humans have, regulates a hormone called IGF-1 that affects an animal's size. If the gene is active, a lot of the hormone is produced and the animal grows large. A less active gene produces less of the hormone and a smaller animal. Dr. Sell hopes to prove that the gene also affects longevity. If he's right, his smaller mice, with less of the hormone, will live longer than the two- to two-and-a-half year average of their larger cousins.

"Small seems to live longer, within your own species. Across species, small is shorter. Mice live shorter than elephants," says Sell. "But within mice, the smaller mice seem to live longer. Within dogs, smaller dogs live longer."

Could one conclude that this hormone produced by this gene is the longevity hormone?

"Why don't we say it's a longevity gene?" says Dr. Sell, laughing. "Because there's certainly more than that."

Three years into his research, Sell's midi mice are living longer than the control group, but it's too soon to tell if one of them will break the record of almost five years and win the Methuselah prize.

Is the prize stimulating longevity research?

"It's stimulating discussion," says Dr. Sell, "and whether one agrees with the idea that one will be able to intervene to radically extend life span or not, well, that's a good point for discussion."

Dr. Sell doesn't think that a fairly radical change in human longevity is a real possibility in the near term.

But it's human nature to want to live as long as possible in reasonable health, and Olshansky says there are plenty of snake-oil salesmen out to cash in on that desire. For them he has his own prize: the Silver Fleece Award.

"This was a Silver Fleece Award for my favorite product. You know, I have my favorite, and this one was called 'Longevity.' It says here 'it drastically slows the aging process.' The person who invented it and many of the people who were listed as having used it, including John Wayne, Yul Brenner , Anthony Quinn, Russian and German party leaders and many other worldwide dignitaries, all share one common characteristic. They're dead. They have all died," says Olshansky.

So what does Olshansky say about guys like de Grey, legitimate scientists?

"What I like about Aubrey is, he's not selling anything except ideas. He's set forth a series of testable research hypotheses, which is what science is all about, and he said 'test them'. I love that. That is what we should be doing in the world of science," Olshansky says. "I just wouldn't hold out immortality or 5,000-year life expectancies as the end result or the promise of what you're going to get from this."

But what if de Grey's vision really does come to pass? Are we prepared to deal with a whole new set of problems?

"We're talking about saving 100,000 lives a day. And it takes a lot of problems to match that," says de Grey.

De Grey acknowledges that some people will say those 100,000 lives lost a day are just in the nature of things. "But, you know, it didn't stop us from using treatments for infectious diseases when we found out how to develop them," de Grey responds.

What about the social issues, like overpopulation, that would come with longevity?

"Sure, it will be difficult," de Grey says. "All I say is that this is a choice that the society of the future that has these therapies at its disposal is entitled to make for itself."