Israeli Spy Chief to Discuss Iran Deal During US Visit
Iran
Asharq Al-Awsat
The Iranian flag waves in front of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters, before the beginning of a board of governors meeting in Vienna, Austria, March 1, 2021. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner
The head of Israel's Mossad spy agency will visit the United States in early September for talks on the possible revival of the Iran nuclear deal, an official said Sunday. The announced visit is the latest in Israel’s push to sway Western powers from a deal to return to the landmark 2015 deal with Tehran. Israel says a deal would facilitate the funding of Iran-supported militants, while not preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon -- a goal Iran has always denied. Mossad chief David Barnea will "be visiting Washington in a week to participate in closed door meetings in Congress on the Iran deal," a senior Israeli official told AFP on condition of anonymity, without providing further details. Earlier Sunday, Prime Minister Yair Lapid said that Israel's "diplomatic fight" against the deal included its national security advisor and defense minister holding recent meetings in the United States. "We are making a concerted effort to ensure the Americans and Europeans understand the dangers involved in this agreement," Lapid said, stressing what was signed in 2015 was "not a good deal," and that the one currently being formulated entails "greater dangers." In 2018, then-US president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement designed to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. His successor Joe Biden has sought to return to the deal, and after almost a year-and-a-half of talks, recent progress has put the Jewish state on edge. According to Lapid, a new agreement would have to include an expiration date, and tighter supervision that would also "address Iran's ballistic missile program and its involvement in terrorism throughout the Middle East." "We can reach such an agreement if a credible military threat is put on the table, if the Iranians realize that their defiance and deceit will exact a heavy price," Lapid said, adding that the army and Mossad had "received instructions from us to prepare for any scenario". On Wednesday, Lapid said a new deal would "give Iran $100 billion a year" that would be used by Iran-backed militant groups Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and noted he was holding talks with the leadership of Britain, France and Germany on the issue.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3842491/israeli-spy-chief-discuss-iran-deal-during-us-visit
They’ve been around for thousands of years but they’re still tripping up foreign investors in China. Company chops are the carved seals that, when used with a red inkpad to stamp documents, confer legitimacy on corporate actions. Investors accustomed to the norms of Western business may think they control the company when they hold a majority of the shares. Nuh-uh. The chops are the keys to the kingdom. He or she who possesses them is the master. The latest exhibit in a catalog of corporate misadventures featuring company chops is Nam Tai Property Inc. New York-based hedge fund IsZo Capital Management LP succeeded late last year in rallying foreign shareholders to wrest control of Nam Tai’s board from another Chinese developer, Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd., which it had accused of mismanaging the Shenzhen-based and US-listed company. From the perspective of an activist investor, Nam Tai offered a fairly simple story. The company’s land holdings in Shenzhen had soared in value as the city bordering Hong Kong developed into a technology metropolis, yet its valuation had been held down by the stewardship of its debt-laden controlling shareholder. The brief, then, was straightforward: Reconstitute the board, improve governance and management, and the stock would start to reflect the company’s intrinsic value, which IsZo estimated at $40. For a time, the market bought into that narrative, with the shares rising to a 2021 high of $36.90. Today, though, shareholders who backed the hedge fund’s campaign could be forgiven for wondering what they’ve got themselves into. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Kaisa-affiliated top management declined to go quietly, holding on to the all-important chops and sinking Nam Tai into a morass of lawsuits. There has been some progress. Last week, a court in Shenzhen froze the bank accounts and assets of former Chief Executive Officer Wang Jiabao and former Chief Financial Officer Zhang Yu. A month earlier, the company obtained an injunction preventing Wang and Zhang from using the corporate chops and business licenses of a Nam Tai subsidiary. Yet nine months after the defeat of Kaisa (which is also based in Shenzhen), the revamped Nam Tai board still doesn’t appear to have established onshore control. The New York Stock Exchange suspended the shares in late May because, without access to the books and records let alone possession of the chops, Nam Tai is unable to file an annual report. The stock last traded at $4.215, almost 90% down from its June 2021 high. It’s a situation that’s difficult to picture in much of the capitalist world, with its emphasis on private property rights, contract law and the prerogative of owners to hire and fire. Imagine the CEO of an American corporation who’s just been terminated after a successful takeover leaning back in his chair and saying: “You know what? I’m doing a pretty good job. I think I’ll just stay.” In China, though, it’s far from rare. The most prominent recent case was of Allen Wu, chief executive of the China unit of SoftBank Group Corp.’s Arm Ltd. Wu disregarded a board vote to remove him and took unilateral control of Arm China — including, naturally, holding on to the company chops. He was replaced only in April this year, almost two years after the chipmaker first tried to oust him. The China CEO of Sorbic International Plc, a food additives company that was once listed on London’s Alternative Investment Market, was another who defied his dismissal and kept the chops. As far back as 2004, the business memoir Mr. China offered insights into the importance of these official seals and the agonies they can inflict on the unwary overseas capitalist. The 1990s clashes chronicled by author Tim Clissold appeared to reflect the teething troubles of a country that was just emerging into the global economy. Three decades later, though, China has become a technologically advanced superpower and this archaic system persists — along with foreign investors’ inability to anticipate and deal with it. The importance of the company stamp extends beyond China’s borders into Southeast Asia, where overseas Chinese often set up many of the business practices currently in use. If a document isn’t chopped, it may be invalid, no matter whose signature is on it. If anything, the prevalence of chop-related disputes in China appears to be on the rise. Control Risks has been getting two to three such inquiries per week, compared with one a month five years ago, Kent Kedl, the consultancy’s Shanghai-based head of Greater China and North Asia, said in an interview. He attributes this to the pandemic, which has reduced human contact and caused a deterioration in business performance, eroding trust on both sides. Bestowing such power on an arbitrary piece of engraved stone might seem a bizarre system to Western executives — especially when it is so open to potential abuse. But any custom that has survived intact for millennia must have something to recommend it. Some argue the practice suits a business culture that prizes human factors and shared interests over the narrow issue of legal ownership. The first thing to understand for overseas protagonists convinced of the rightness of their case is that whoever holds the chops controls the organization and so, like it or not, they are engaged in what Kedl calls a “coercive negotiation.” Think of it like a hostage situation. All the moral and legal authority may be on one side, but the question is whether you want the subject back in one piece, or finger by finger in a series of envelopes. The lesson for overseas companies is that they need to know who has access to the chops, and put in place appropriate controls. As for those planning hostile takeovers or shareholder revolts, maybe look at another country. Or get ready to spend a lot of time in court. Bloomberg
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3842461/matthew-brooker/do-hedge-funds-have-chops-win-china
Türkiye Hits Back at Macron's 'Unacceptable' Criticism
World
Asharq Al-Awsat
File Photo: French President Emmanuel Macron (L) with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Elysee Palace in Paris in 2018. (AFP)
Türkiye on Saturday lashed out at what it described as French President Emmanuel Macron's "unacceptable" comments in Algeria on foreign powers spreading anti-French propaganda in Africa. On a visit to France's former colony aimed at mending troubled ties, Macron on Friday appeared to warn young Algerians and Africans against manipulation by "networks" influenced by Türkiye, Russia and China that present France as an "enemy", AFP said. "There is immense manipulation," Macron told reporters. "Many political Islam activists have an enemy: France. Many of the networks that are covertly pushed -- ... by Türkiye... by Russia... by China -- have an enemy: France." Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic slammed what he described as the French leader's "extremely unfortunate" comments. "It is unacceptable that... Macron, who has difficulties in confronting his colonial past in Africa, especially Algeria, tries to get rid of his colonial past by accusing other countries, including our country," he said in a statement. "We hope that France will reach the maturity to face its colonial past without blaming other countries, including our country, as soon as possible." Macron's three-day visit to Algeria this week has aimed to turn the page on months of tensions with the North African country, which earlier this year marked six decades of independence following 132 years of French rule. It also comes as European powers scramble to replace Russian energy imports after the invasion of Ukraine -- including with supplies from Algeria, Africa's top gas exporter.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3840946/t%C3%BCrkiye-hits-back-macrons-unacceptable-criticism
Najib Saab
Najib Saab - Secretary-General of the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED) and editor-in-chief of Environment & Development magazine
The phrase “unprecedented” has become a common description in the past years, in media reports about natural disasters such as forest fires, droughts and floods. It sounds as if the world is witnessing a streak of record-breaking calamities, matching breaking records in sports, except that those are not harmless competitions as in basketball and swimming. Natural disasters cause huge human losses and billions of dollars’ worth of damages to infrastructure and properties. What makes things worse is that these are expected to become more frequent and stronger, due to climate change, and what we consider “unprecedented” today will become a “precedent” a year later. While it is true that these natural disasters are in large part due to the effects of climate change, it is also true that one underlying cause is due to failure in planning, from land use to forests and water, and management of natural resources in general. Therefore, it shouldn’t be acceptable to stand by and wait for the required reduction in carbon emissions to limit rising temperatures and confront climate change. Climate change has become an excuse that some officials use to justify shortfalls, as if they had no power or ability to prevent deterioration. In many cases, action is almost limited to preparing to deal with disasters after they occur, such as spending huge budgets on firefighting equipment, including sophisticated vehicles, planes and gear, while neglecting the proper planning and personnel training. Forest fires will increase, and the Arab region will not be spared. This will not be the last time that fires destroy forests in Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, or dry up the waters of rivers and underground wells, from North Africa to West Asia, including the Nile Valley and the Gulf. Nor will the temperature in Basra reaching the maximum ever recorded on earth, as happened early this month, be a passing event. All these call for a rapid shift from disaster management to resource management, according to integrated scientific programs, in addition to developing proactive plans to confront emergency situations, starting with predicting them well before they occur. One of the basic measures in forest management is to plant several different types of trees. Some trees are more susceptible to drought and thereby more susceptible to burn, which helps the fire spread quickly to large areas. The diversity of forest trees also helps in the fight against diseases and harmful insects, such as one type of worm, whose flocks move in processions, and strike oak trees after they nest in them. In addition to killing trees, this poisonous worm with bristles has a dangerous effect on humans, as it causes fatal injuries to the eyes and respiratory system. Oak has spread in vast areas across Europe, for its ease of cultivation and rapid growth, while other species were neglected. The spread of the poisonous worm was aided by the diminishing of its natural enemies, such as birds and insects. For years, extensive campaigns have been carried out to restore diversity to forest trees, with the aim of giving them immunity. When some oak trees dry up and become an easy target for fire, other types of trees will remain to keep the forest surviving. While it was believed that dead leaves, twigs, and trunks should be left on the forest floor because they help nourish the soil, rapid climate changes today require the removal of a large part of them, because they cause fires. Contrary to what some environmental groups demand, in good faith, to not build roads within forests and to prevent any cutting of trees, it is necessary to build corridors and establish spaces free of trees, in order to divide the forest into different areas isolated from each other by spaces that block the spread of fires. This also facilitates the access of firefighting teams in case of emergency. A useful measure is to encourage grazing of animals in these areas to clear them of weeds. Some people were surprised to learn earlier this year that the US Forest Service had started fires that covered large areas of forests between the United States and Mexico. These fires, which got out of control due to errors in execution, were deliberately intended to prevent larger fires. It is a traditional practice known since old days, where the indigenous people set fire to a specific drought-stricken area, after isolating it from its surroundings, as a preemptive step to prevent the sudden outbreak of fire at an inopportune time and its spread uncontrolled to other areas. It is equally necessary to strengthen monitoring capabilities to detect the outbreak of fires at an early stage, whether by human monitoring or by installing sensors or via satellites, which can detect the rapid rise in the temperature of a particular area. This has to be accompanied by the identification of locations which are most at risk, and classifying them as hot spots requiring special attention. Since many of the forest areas are private properties, it is necessary to educate owners and residents of the neighborhood and train them on the ways of preventive care, besides techniques of responding to fires. No less important than wildfires are the recent exceptional droughts, which cannot be resolved by ad-hoc emergency measures, and cannot wait for reduction of carbon emissions. Climate change certainly exacerbates droughts and water scarcity, but this does not mean that there aren’t quick measures that can be implemented through better water management and sustainable food production. In the Arab region, the conviction is growing that before other countries can claim the inalienable right to a greater share of river water, the downstream countries must enhance water efficiency and reduce waste. They should also plan to enhance food security by choosing types of crops that are suitable for dry areas and require less water, even if this requires a shift in some food habits. The droughts that hit Europe this summer have prompted governments to discover major policy and management gaps, with a lack of proactive planning. The Netherlands, for example, found that low water prices do not encourage consumers to save water. Spain also discovered the danger of continuing to play the role of Europe’s vegetable and fruit garden, just to meet demands of greedy markets and generate more profits. Hundreds of dams that Spain had built in its dry regions are no longer enough to irrigate ever expanding land dedicated for cultivating profitable export crops, as well as to irrigate golf courses for tourists. The problem, therefore, cannot be reduced to the exacerbation of drought and water scarcity due to climate change, but also to the imbalance between the limited renewable resources and economic ambitions. Rational management of resources, which respects the capabilities and limitations of nature, is cheaper and more feasible than being satisfied with advanced equipment to confront disasters.
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3840856/najib-saab/disaster-management-resource-management
What Bill Clinton Understood About Big Government That Biden Doesn’t
Opinion
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ramesh Ponnuru -
President Joe Biden’s plan to have the federal government pay off hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans has received blistering criticism, all of it deserved. It’s a constitutional offense: Congress is supposed to authorize sweeping spending programs, not the president acting on his own. It’s economically risky, given our persistent high inflation. It’s perverse distributionally: A lawyer-doctor couple making $249,000 together will be able to walk away from debts. It solves none of the structural problems of higher education and its financing and may make them worse. It is socially destructive, too, threatening to exacerbate the growing divide between Americans who have college degrees and those who do not. To top it all off, it may not even pay the political dividends the Joe Biden administration seeks. A significant number of Democrats in tough races this fall have already repudiated Biden’s giveaway. Sometimes harshly: Tim Ryan, running for the Senate from Ohio, says that “waiving debt for those already on a trajectory to financial security sends the wrong message to millions of Ohioans without a degree working just as hard to make ends meet.” Ryan and the others are implicitly betting that Biden’s action will cost the Democrats votes, at least where they live. It’s a judgment that reflects a hard lesson many Democrats learned in previous decades. During the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins reportedly set forth the party’s basic political strategy: “We will spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect.” Biden’s student-loan gambit omits the second step, but otherwise the political rationale is the same: Help out millions of people, and they can be expected to be grateful — and to vote on their gratitude. It seemed to work for decades. But the New Deal majority started to show cracks in the 1960s and broke apart altogether by the end of the 1980s. Many, many books try to explain why. A common theme: The Democrats and big government ceased to be identified with middle-class values and interests. They were out of step with public sentiment on work and welfare, on racial politics and crime policy, on religion and patriotism. That’s why Bill Clinton, seeking to reclaim the presidency for the Democrats after they suffered three defeats in a row, carefully broadcast a different message. He made a show of supporting the death penalty for violent criminals. He promised to end welfare as we know it. And he chided a minor celebrity who had spoken glibly about murders committed by black people. At the same time, he stuck with the party’s core commitment to use federal power to help those who, in his words, “work hard and play by the rules.” At a low point in his presidency, he told a columnist the lesson he had drawn. He had run into trouble, he said, by forgetting: “Values matter most.” Clinton’s makeover was successful, so much so that in the decades since his presidency both parties have become friendlier to federal activism. But Democrats may have gotten so carried away by rising tolerance for big government that they have misunderstood why it happened in the first place. The most serious political vulnerability of Biden’s debt write-off is not that it will increase the deficit, although it will. It’s that it contradicts widely held values. Instead of helping people who are down on their luck or rewarding them for working — as government programs from the earned-income credit and Social Security do — it undoes part of a freely made bargain. The lawyer can still earn a handsome living from his degree, but he no longer has to meet the obligations he accepted in return for the expense of getting it. Millions of people who work hard and play by the rules, as Clinton put it, are made into suckers: the people who paid their debts or made sacrifices to avoid borrowing so much in the first place. Americans who never attended college at all but have other debts, from mortgages to car loans, will get no relief from Biden’s edict. But they may have to pay for it, through higher inflation or higher taxes, even though a lot of the beneficiaries are better off than they are. That’s going to strike many voters, even ones who favor expansive government programs, as unfair, because it is. Contemporary Democrats are already paying a price for the perception that they think Americans with college degrees are better than everyone else. Funneling hundreds of billions to Americans who have attended college — invoking something called the “Heroes Act,” no less — will reinforce that perception. Conservatives have often deluded themselves into thinking that big government as such is unpopular, and had many occasions to learn otherwise. But it’s popular only to the extent it aligns with voters’ values. Democrats might be about to get a sharp reminder of the point. Bloomberg
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3840841/ramesh-ponnuru/what-bill-clinton-understood-about-big-government-biden-doesn%E2%80%99t
There were reports on Saturday that the International Atomic Energy Agency has a team of experts ready to visit Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant within days. It would not be a minute too soon: Artillery shells are landing with chilling regularity in and around the facility, Europe’s largest nuclear power station. In the latest scare, shelling on Thursday damaged external power lines, threatening a critical power supply to the facility. Ukrainian technicians were able to reconnect the plant to the national power grid on Friday, averting disaster. Sanity is a hard sell in a war in which Russia is waging a scorched-earth campaign to bring Ukraine to its knees, and Ukraine is fighting for its survival. Yet the recent agreement to allow grain shipments out of Ukraine demonstrated that international pressure on Russia to prevent the conflict from spreading beyond the battlefields can work. And with Chernobyl as a shared traumatic memory, Russians and Ukrainians know better than most nations the horror of a nuclear catastrophe. I was the Times bureau chief in Moscow when Chernobyl erupted in April 1986, and remember well the eerie fear of an invisible, deadly threat permeating the clear spring air. Thirty-six years later, about 1,000 square miles around the wounded plant are still sealed off as a Zone of Alienation. No doubt those memories are behind reports that Ukraine is preparing evacuation plans for about 400,000 people living near the Zaporizhzhia plant. Zaporizhzhia is a more modern and far safer model than Chernobyl, theoretically capable of withstanding far greater damage. But the potential for a massive disaster when lethal shells land among the nuclear reactors, cooling towers, machine rooms and radioactive waste storage sites is real and present. Seized by the Russians shortly after they invaded Ukraine six months ago, the sprawling plant on the Dnipro River is now on the front line of the war. A Times report on Tuesday detailed what that means: artillery shells exploding and tracer rounds streaking through the complex, while a skeletal crew of Ukrainian technicians maintains the plant under the guns of an estimated 500 Russian soldiers. The Times reported that during the initial Russian invasion, a large-caliber bullet pierced an outer wall of one of the six reactors, while an artillery shell struck an electrical transformer filled with flammable cooling oil at another. Loss of electrical power to the plant could have led to a meltdown. Fortunately, it did not ignite. The director general of the I.A.E.A., Rafael Mariano Grossi, recently outlined seven indispensable conditions critical for nuclear safety and security, which included the physical integrity of the plant, off-site power supply, cooling systems and emergency preparedness. “All these pillars have been compromised, if not entirely violated, at one point or another during this crisis,” he warned. The plant — and all other Ukrainian nuclear stations, and all nuclear stations the world round — should ideally be regarded as demilitarized zones. That is essentially what UN officials have called for. But that is a tall order in a war of attrition and survival. A more immediate, urgent and achievable goal is for the experts assembled by the International Atomic Energy Agency to enter the plant. The I.A.E.A., the United Nations and Western leaders have arranged just such a mission. Ukraine and Russia claim they’re for it. But getting mortal enemies to stand back has not proved easy. Instead, the shelling has intensified this month, along with a war of words. The Ukrainians, joined by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have accused the Russians of using the plant as a “nuclear shield” for troops, weapons and ammunition, and of firing in and around it. The Russians have accused the Ukrainians of shooting at a plant that they say Russia’s soldiers are protecting. In an act of unsurprising chutzpah, Russia called for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council this week to broadcast its claims, which prompted the Ukrainian ambassador to deplore wasting “more than an hour to listen to a slew of fictitious sound bites.” It is all but impossible to determine who is doing the shooting. But the fact of the matter is that there would be no threat of a nuclear catastrophe had Russia not invaded Ukraine, and the danger would promptly end if the Russians left. After weeks of disagreement between Russia and Ukraine over how the I.A.E.A. would enter the plant, experts are set to check on its operation and to propose how to make it as secure as possible. Ukraine has called for international military and nuclear experts to be stationed permanently at the site to ensure that the power plant and its immediate surroundings are secure and free of heavy weapons. These are legitimate concerns and just demands; Russia, however, has rejected the creation of a demilitarized zone around the power plant. But these are differences that can be resolved, through quiet negotiations, if both sides agree on the larger imperative of avoiding a nuclear disaster, which be as disastrous for Russia as for Ukraine or any other territory the radiation might reach. The New York Times
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3840826/serge-schmemann/how-avoid-nuclear-disaster-ukraine
AIDS. SARS. H1N1 influenza. Ebola. Covid-19. Monkeypox. Infectious disease outbreaks often come and go, though some persist over the long haul, much like the man who has occupied the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984: Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci. I came of age in the 1980s — the age of AIDS — but in a way, this was the beginning of the age of Tony, as many call him, because he’d be there through all of it, for each and every one of the nation’s adventures with infectious diseases. The telegenic, calm guide with the unmistakably Brooklyn accent took heat from AIDS activists as they descended on the National Institutes of Health’s Building 31 in 1990. He hugged Nina Pham, a Dallas nurse, in front of cameras after she recovered from Ebola, to soothe a nation’s fears about the virus in 2014. He was a deadpan presence in the background of President Donald Trump’s news conferences on Covid-19. He has advised presidents since Ronald Reagan on what to do in the face of these scourges. As the Yale historian Frank Snowden has noted, from the middle of the 20th century until the advent of AIDS — during what he called “an age of hubris” — scientists had largely declared mission accomplished in terms of the battle against infectious diseases, as antibiotics put microbial threats distinctly into the past. If AIDS was the comeuppance for our arrogance as scientists, over the years, rightly or wrongly, Dr. Fauci gave the impression that science could handle these challenges eventually through the methodological, step-by-step work of research and the application of what we learned expeditiously into the clinic, into the field. This wasn’t the Pollyannaish scientism of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s — a notion that science would conquer infectious diseases once and for all — but the idea that at least there could be progress. When protease inhibitors arrived in the mid-1990s to change the course of the AIDS epidemic, giving life to many people who faced certain death, this optimism seemed borne out, at least to many of my friends and colleagues who had watched a generation perish from the disease. As Dr. Fauci prepares to retire at the end of this year, one has to wonder if this is the end of an era as well. Don’t get me wrong: No one I know thinks that our gains on AIDS and the progress we’ve made in other areas of infectious disease control — particularly on vaccine-preventable diseases — are trivial accomplishments. But with Covid-19, something has changed. It tested a fundamental equilibrium among science, public health and politics in America. Most administrations, I argue, simply don’t care much about science and public health; it’s not a priority for them. On AIDS, Mr. Reagan ignored it, and Bill Clinton paid lip service to it. George W. Bush came the closest to making it a priority, with the establishment of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, but by the time of Barack Obama, activists were protesting again about an administration’s neglect. But Covid-19 caught the attention of politicians, and not in a good way. For decades, Dr. Fauci and other scientists could advise presidents, even sway them for good on occasion, because so little was at stake politically for these leaders. But with Mr. Trump and President Biden, too much was riding on their short-term political fortunes to indulge scientific and public health evidence and advice too much or for too long. I’ll never forget an email I sent to Dr. Fauci and other health leaders during the Trump administration at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, begging them to speak up and provide scientific leadership in the chaos and mismanagement that scientists and the public saw happening around us. But there was little the good doctor could do, and he even acknowledged this was a unique situation. With the election of Mr. Biden, many in public health had hoped for someone to lead with the science, but soon pollsters were urging his administration to take the win over Covid-19, declare the crisis over, stop talking about mitigation efforts and get people to understand that Covid-19 would simply be with us for a long time. If the age of Dr. Fauci was one in which we looked forward to progress, even if always piecemeal, the current era is the age of “We have the tools.” It is a distinct new pessimism of spirit, cynicism of the will, born of the hubris of some physicians but mostly of the political calculations of others that doing more on this pandemic is untenable. The sound you hear is the thud of resignation in the face of the suffering of so many over the past two and a half years and a summer in which we add hundreds to the dead every day in the United States. In the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic, Dr. Fauci never gave up. We didn’t sit with the mounting dead and our pitiful armamentarium of weak drugs and suggest we had the tools. We fought, and we argued, for sure, but we moved ahead together, never satisfied with the status quo. If he weren’t retiring in December, I’d imagine him working to his very last breath until there was a cure for AIDS. We should all have his resolve and commitment, even if Dr. Fauci lives in a world of dire constraints, of the men and women of politics, who dream small and think about the next election always, rather than the nature and qualities of their legacies, of which Dr. Fauci’s is assuredly great. The New York Times
from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3840816/gregg-gonsalves/how-history-will-remember-fauci-era
