Anyone know how to say "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated," in Japanese? Not suprisingly, the land of the rising sun blows away the competition on IEEE Spectrum's robot density map:

I guess it's impressive, but this sort of thing makes me very worried for them.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

The debate continues on Steve Walt's "thought experiment." Today, David Rothkopf joined Chris Brose in taking on Walt's hypothetical Jewish Gaza. Ross Douthat also weighed in over at the Atlantic. Walt seems to be taking the impressive buzz he's generated in his blogosphere debut in stride and has just posted a follow-up experiment.

But it's not just Israel's critics who can play the analogy game. Blogging for Haaretz, Bradley Burston proposes this one:

A fanatical religious party wins a string of elections in Mexico's northern states, then stages a civil war to drive out the federal government and take full control.

The party's charter demands the return to Mexico of the occupied territories of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Texas.

Firing homemade rockets and more advanced projectiles smuggled in from Iran and China, the party's gunners can hit a total of one of every seven Americans, or 43,598,000 people, in a broad swath which includes Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Austin, San Antonio and Houston, and Las Vegas.

In all of these areas, pre-schools, grade schools, and universities are all forced to shut down. Families sleep in bomb shelters, and return to them several times a day during air raids. Businesses are shuttered, and the economy shuts down.

I dunno. I must admit I'm a little confused by which part of Mexico corresponds with which Palestinian faction and the model pretty much ignores five decades of Israeli history.

I find this need to put Israel in context by pretending that it's something else a little strange. Why, in order to understand this country's situation, do we need to imagine that Israelis are actually Arabs, or that the Palestinians are Mexicans, or that Israel never existed, or that it existed but was in Alaska?

Analogies and hypotheticals can be useful for putting a complicated situation in context, but can also be dangerous if you're altering your perception of reality in order to fit your chosen narrative. In a conflict as ideologically divisive as Israel/Palestine, they're rhetorically useful but pretty rarely enlightening.

Believe it or not, Israel is a real place. So is Gaza. No theoretical construct is going to absolve either side of responsibility for inflicting violence or get them any closer to a resolution. 

Who'd have guessed it? U.S. President George W. Bush might be going down as the greatest protector of the seas ever. Later today, he is to announce the establishment of the "largest area of protected sea in the world." Commercial fishing and mining will be largely prohibited in protected zones of the remote Pacific that include some of the most biologically diverse locations on Earth.

Critics say that any benefit from the establishment of protected areas will be cancelled out by the effects of greenhouse gases and climate change. Nevertheless, Joshua Reichert of the Pew Environment Group told the BBC that Bush has "protected more special places in the sea than any other person in history."

It just might be another achievement to add to Bush's legacy.

Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Richard Dawkins -- famed evolutionary biologist, bestselling atheist, and delightful interviewee -- has launched a new campaign in Britain to get atheists to "come out." All over central London, the tube, and on the sides of buses will be the following slogan:

There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life"

Don't you feel better already?

Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has castigated Israel and U.S.-allied Arab countries as Israeli troops press further into Gaza, but he has also refused to unleash Hezbollah’s rockets, which could wreak havoc in northern Israel. So why, as Tom Ricks wonders, hasn’t Nasrallah joined the battle?

Because he isn’t suicidal. IDF generals have made clear that another war with Hezbollah would likely be far more destructive than the 2006 confrontation and would likely include a ground invasion. Hezbollah is adept at fighting an insurgency in South Lebanon because they have always been able to draw on the support of the Lebanese Shia and capitalize on a weak or complicit central government in Beirut. If Hezbollah initiated a war with Israel, there is no guarantee that it would benefit from either of these factors.

“If they start something, they know the biggest loser will be their constituency, the Shia community of Lebanon,” former UN Interim Force in Lebanon spokesman Timur Goksel told me. Many of the predominantly Shia villages in South Lebanon have not yet been fully reconstructed from the Israeli assault in 2006. The Shia support Hezbollah because it represents their sectarian interests, provides social services, and defends them from Israel. Hezbollah does not want to test whether their constituency is ready to once again pay the price for furthering its international agenda.

In the larger Lebanese political scene, this is an awkward time for military adventurism. The pro-Western forces in the government have insisted on a “national dialogue” to determine a national defense strategy, which could constrain Hezbollah’s use of its militia. Hezbollah and its allies have managed to stall this discussion, but if Hezbollah were to unilaterally launch a war against Israel they would be subject to renewed pressure from their domestic opponents.

Lebanon is also gearing up for parliamentary elections on June 7, and Hezbollah hopes to win enough seats to be the primary player in a government of its own. The near-unanimous condemnation of Israel’s actions in Lebanon plays into Hezbollah’s hard-line stance towards Israel, and puts America’s allies in Lebanon in a difficult position. For Hezbollah, using the Gaza issue to sweep into power is a far better option than launching a war it cannot hope to win.

Photo: ANWAR AMRO/AFP/Getty Images

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus has an analysis of Robert Gates recent articles and media appearances. He writes:

A longtime Russia analyst during his years with the CIA, Gates today sees Moscow as less of a threat than do many inside and outside the U.S. military establishment.

Pincus is referring to statements like this one, from Gates' piece in the new Foreign Affairs:

Russian tanks and artillery may have crushed Georgia's tiny military. But before the United States begins rearming for another Cold War, it must remember that what is driving Russia is a desire to exorcise past humiliation and dominate its "near abroad" -- not an ideologically driven campaign to dominate the globe. As someone who used to prepare estimates of Soviet military strength for several presidents, I can say that Russia's conventional military, although vastly improved since its nadir in the late 1990s, remains a shadow of its Soviet predecessor. And adverse demographic trends in Russia will likely keep those conventional forces in check.

Good point, but do "many inside and outside the U.S. military establishment" really disagree with it? I find it hard to believe that even those who think the military is neglecting conventional threats by focusing on counterinsurgency would argue that Russia today is a comparable threat to the Soviet Union.

If there actually is a real debate about this, I'm glad Gates is the one in charge. Here's hoping he and his colleagues continue the recent strategy of basically ignoring Russia's pointless military posturing and focusing their attention where real damage can be done.

Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The Wall Street Journal thinks Europe's trust in Gazprom is dangerously naive.

Juan Cole blogs about the global implications of Israel-Palestine on political unrest.

The Jerusalem Post wants Turkey to pick a side in the conflict.

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar says Mumbai terror shouldn't hurt Indian stock markets.

Johann Hari says pirates aren't justified, but they do have their reasons.

For more news and commentary from around the world, check out FP's continually updated Must Reads feed every day.

Richard Perle and Doug Feith think Leon Panetta, a Democratic insider if there ever was one, is just the man to clean up the CIA:

Panetta is "a very smart, very capable guy with a lot of experience - I think he's the right sort of person to take a shot at improving the place," said Perle, an agency critic who, as chairman of President Bush's Defense Policy Board, was an architect of the Iraq war, and called the quality of the CIA's analysis "appalling."

"It's going to take somebody from outside to right that ship, if it can be done," Perle said. [...]

"One possible implication of appointing somebody from the outside is that the president recognizes that there are serious problems at the CIA and he wants somebody who is not a part of those problems," said Feith, who was Bush's Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Senate Democrats aren't so thrilled, particularly Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein, who will oversee Panetta's confirmation process and believes that "the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge."

Panetta may have been an "any port in a storm" pick as time ran out for the transition, but may in the end turn out to be a great one for an agency in dire need of a fresh set of eyes. That said, this clumsy leak is certainly not the way Obama wanted his outside-the-box pick rolled out. As Ezra Klein notes:

It doesn't look good that the worst leak of the Obama administration came in its spymaster.

Hope you've all enjoyed the first day of the new ForeignPolicy.com. This is still very much a work in progress and we're only just beginning to figure out how to take advantage of the new format. In particular, it looks like the interaction between our all-star lineup of bloggers is going to be fun.

I also wanted to take this chance to heap much-deserved praise on two of the unsung heroes of this endeavor, Web Developer Blaine Sheldon and Webmaster Tom Stec. Even under normal circumstances there's no way we could function without these guys and in the runup to the relaunch, they worked ridiculous hours to get the site running smoothly and looking fantastic.

Thanks also to everyone who wrote in or blogged with feedback, both positive and (constructively) negative. Keep it coming!

The Year of the Ox starts Jan. 26. An "ox," according to Webster's New World College Dictionary (4th edition), is "esp., a castrated, domesticated bull (Bos taurus), used as a draft animal."

In a recent report predicting that Southeast Asian stocks will make a limited comeback this year, CIMB-GK Research analyst Toh Hoon Chew wrote:

The year of the castrated bull seems appropriate given our expectations for 2009.

But some are still hoping for a virily bullish year in the stock markets. South Korea's Financial Services Commission chairman, Jun Kwang-Woo, second right, adorns a bull with a crown of flowers to celebrate the 2009 opening of the stock market at the Korea Exchange (KRX) in Seoul on Jan. 2.

Meanwhile, the folks at the Tokyo Stock Exchange seem to have the ox theme down. Kimono-clad women and a cuddly, cartoon-like ox celebrate the first day of 2009 trading today, Jan. 5.

In recent days, the number of pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia has started to fall. French troops arrested eight pirates on January 1st, turning them over to the Somali government. The EU mission also saved a Greek tanker from kidnapping on January 2nd. A Danish warship sunk yet another pirate vessel after warning flares set that ship on fire (the pirates were rescued from the wreck, and remain onboard the Danish vessel). And a Chinese cargo ship flat out-maneuvered the pirates on January 2nd.

A round of applause might be in order. After a slew of hijackings last fall, the world's navies finally seemed to get serious about fighting the pirates. Previously, many countries feared that arresting pirates could lead to awkward legal proceedings and even amnesty suits by suspects claiming they could be put to death at home if extradited. All good points. But then, so are the tens of thousands of ships that pass through the Gulf of Aden each year. From the looks of it, squeamish fighters once reluctant to pick up pirates are increasingly keen to do just that. Whatever they're doing, it seems to be working.

On land, however, few are noticing the calm at sea. Ethiopian troops are at last pulling out of Somalia, as they promised to do late last year and the mortars are still flying in Mogadishu.

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

With the U.S. presidential election over, are you going through campaign withdrawal? Why not look overseas to get your fix?

2009 will see elections in Afghanistan and Iran, which will be vital to the Obama Administration's hopes for progress in that region. Israel and the Palestinian Authority will hold elections which will determine the course of the Israeli-Palestinian peace track, and serve as a referendum on Israel's campaign in Gaza. In Sudan, there will be the first election campaign in 20 years -- an important milestone for the country's Comprehensive Peace Agreement, but also a possible spur for political violence.

So check out our new list of the most important elections of 2009. (Sadly Palin-free.)

Photo: Majid/Getty Images

Having bid farewell to the Green Zone last week, U.S. forces today opened the brand new Baghdad embassy, which will house "1,200 employees, including diplomats, troops and staff from 14 federal agencies."

For a detailed look at America's new digs in Iraq, it's worth revisiting architectural historian Jane Loeffler's analysis of the structure from the September/October, 2007 issue of FP, written before it was constructed:

It will be six times larger than the U.N. complex in New York and more than 10 times the size of the new U.S. Embassy being built in Beijing, which at 10 acres is America’s second-largest mission. The Baghdad compound will be entirely self-sufficient, with no need to rely on the Iraqis for services of any kind. The embassy has its own electricity plant, fresh water and sewage treatment facilities, storage warehouses, and maintenance shops. The embassy is composed of more than 20 buildings, including six apartment complexes with 619 one-bedroom units. Two office blocks will accomodate about 1,000 employees. High-ranking diplomats will enjoy well-appointed private residences. Once inside the compound, Americans will have almost no reason to leave. It will have a shopping market, food court, movie theater, beauty salon, gymnasium, swimming pool, tennis courts, a school, and an American Club for social gatherings. To protect it all, the embassy is reportedly surrounded by a wall at least 9 feet high—and it has its own defense force.[...]

If architecture reflects the society that creates it, the new U.S. embassy in Baghdad makes a devastating comment about America’s global outlook. Although the U.S. government regularly proclaims confidence in Iraq’s democratic future, the United States has designed an embassy that conveys no confidence in Iraqis and little hope for their future. Instead, the United States has built a fortress capable of sustaining a massive, long-term presence in the face of continued violence.

Yeah, it's safe to say there's going to be a sizeable U.S. presence in Iraq for a while.

Interesting choice. The New York Times' caucus blog reports:

President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic officials said Monday.

Panetta has managerial chops and a close relationship with Obama but virtually no hands-on intelligence experience. Perhaps more importantly, he's not tainted by associations with Bush-era detention, interrogation of surveillance policies like some of the other candidates who were considered. He's also a much bigger name.

Langley may be in for a shakeup.

Update: Our new colleague David Rothkopf calls the pick a reminder to the "knowledgeable intel community (IC) insiders just how wrong they can be about key issues."

Update 2: Another of our new colleagues, Laura Rozen, has reactions from former intelligence officials over at The Cable. RAND's Greg Treverton tells her that Panetta's White House experience might actually be more valuable than time spent in the intel trenches:

"One of my experiences with people like Panetta who have been chief of staff is that they have a clear sense of what is helpful to the president that most senior officials don't," Treverton told me. "They get it. What he could do and couldn't do. And that's an interesting advantage Panetta brings. Knowledge of what the presidential stakes are like, how issues arise, and what they need to be protected from, for better or worse."

This makes sense. In his CIA history "Legacy of Ashes," Tim Weiner writes that Harry Truman originally envisioned the agency's mission as producing a "secret newspaper" for the president's eyes only. As the CIA's secretive culture developed during the Cold War and emphasis shifted away from simple intelligence gathering toward special operations, the mission got a lot more complicated.

Picking an executive branch guy like Panetta may signal that Obama wants to push the CIA back toward something closer to Truman's original vision of an agency who's primary mission is to keep the president better informed than his international rivals.

If so, it won't be easy. The diverging views in Rozen's post gives a good preview of how this fight may play out.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is hitting all the Middle East power centers in a two-day tour of the region. First, he held talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at Sharm el-Sheikh. Then it's off to Ramallah to meet with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, before landing in Jerusalem in time for dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. On day two, Sarkozy jets off to Lebanon and Syria.

The French president has tasked himself with the modest goal of negotiating an immediate ceasefire to the carnage in Gaza. Even if he fails to score a diplomatic victory, his whirlwind tour will no doubt represent a triumph of travel booking.

Sarkozy's extremely personal brand of diplomacy has taken him to over 40 countries in the first year and a half of his Presidency. His hyperactive travel schedule has spawned a long list of diplomatic initiatives: he went to Damascus to meet with President Bashar al-Assad, and attempted to enlist the Syrian president in joining his Union of the Mediterranean. He traveled to Moscow and Tblisi during the Russian invasion of Georgia, attempting to arrange a ceasefire.

He visited Abu Dhabi to sign a deal establishing a French naval base in the emirate, making it the only Western power other than the United States to have a permanent military installation in the Gulf. He paired with Gordon Brown to launch an initiative aimed at ending the genocide in Darfur, caused a diplomatic row with its traditional ally Morocco by first visiting its regional rival Algeria, and enraged many Africans by highlighting the positive aspects of European colonialism during a speech in Senegal.

All this travel has caused France's 2009 travel and entertainment budget for Sarkozy to balloon 29% over the previous year, to $55 million. The French taxpayers are getting precious few diplomatic victories for their money, but many headlines. And that seems to suit them just fine. Sarkozy's trips have raised France's international profile, much to the pleasure of many French voters. Whether the people of Gaza will reap any of the benefits of Sarkozy's diplomacy, however, remains to be seen.

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

After Kenya's, Zimbabwe's and Nigeria's recent election mayhem, observers worried Ghana might fall into the same electoral dissaray. In the runup to the recent presidential vote, both major candidates claimed they were set for victory.

Initial polls in December left a tightly contested race -- with the two leading candidates within just one percent of each other. The governing party candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo and the opposition leader and former professor John Atta Mills bitterly contested the second round of elections. After being seperated by just 23,000 votes, Ghana's final constituency voted on Saturday and catupluted Mills to the presidency.

And thus Ghana avoided the election trap. The first African country to gain its independence in 1960 holds its reputation as a democracy where power has been transfered peacefully and often, with only minor incidents (like this one). The outgoing president didn't try to extend his term, and he urged a peaceful transition. Mills' opponent conceded gracefully and the incoming president promised to be a "president for all."

Good. But now, as many governments have learned the hard way, the more difficult part is yet to come, and Ghana finds itself in an unusually precarious (or promising) turning point.

Ghana is a commodity-dependent economy in a market reeling from bubble and burst. Gold, cocoa and timber make much of the country's GDP, and agriculture employs over half the population. The fall in commodity prices spells hope and disaster all at once; lucrative exports will suffer, as will farmers' bottom lines. But urban food prices -- once crushing for the average Ghanaian -- will come down from sky high.

And despite Ghana's healthy growth rate, the impoverished majority is hungry for prosperity to trickle down. Offshore oil -- found in the summer of 2007 -- once promised to pay for a host of new public services. Now, the sunken petrol price stop drilling before it even begins.

The incoming president seems to have a good head about the economic policies needed to move forward. But he'll need the world economy, the increasingly corrupt bureaucracy, and his country's belief in democracy to be on his side, as well.

Photo: PIUS UTOMI EKPEI/AFP/Getty Images

Another cold Russian winter, another dispute about Russian gas prices. Time's Yuri Zarakhavich has a useful summary:

In the buildup to Dec. 31, Russia accused Ukraine of having arrears of more than $2 billion on its expired gas contract. Ukraine said that it had paid all its debt. Moscow said it would start charging a new price, which it presented as both the "market" price and a "preferential" rate—just $250 rather a sharp rise on the 2008 price of $179.5 per 1000 cubic meters of gas. Ukraine said that it could pay $201.

In response, Gazprom, Russia's state-run natural gas monopoly, dropped its "preferential" offer and said it would have to charge the real "market" rate of $418. It also insists that Ukraine still owes Moscow $ 614 million, and, at 10am on Jan. 1, turned off gas taps to Ukraine.

Pretty much the same thing has happened for the last three winters. Worried about its own supply, the EU is anxiously working to broker a compromise between Ukraine and Russia. As a European Commission representative said:

"Since we are the main market for Russian gas ... we have an obvious interest in applying pressure on these parties to reach as soon as possible an agreement which is definitive."

It's easy enough to cast Gazprom -- a state monopoly with a penchant for heavy-handed ultimatums -- as the villain in this recurring drama. But that lets Europe off the hook a bit too easily. As energy investor Jérôme Guillet wrote for FP during the 2007 edition of the dispute, Gazprom doesn't behave all that differently from any other company and it's demonization is a convenient way for European leaders to divert attention from their lack of a coherent energy policy:

[I]t’s a bit rich to see the supposedly pro-market Westerners calling for heavy subsidies. And a country like Ukraine that’s angling to join NATO (an organization that Russia understandably perceives as anti-Russian) can hardly expect a discount on its gas. So why is Russia getting demonized for defending its interests? The answer lies with European leaders, who are trying to distract the public from the mess they’ve made of European energy policy. Europeans themselves are to blame for their dependency on Gazprom, which is doing what any company would do in its place. [...]

As for European leaders, they have no one but themselves to blame for turning worrying domestic gas problems into a major international crisis. Europe, led by the United Kingdom, has made a conscious choice to rely on gas as its main new source of energy at a time when its domestic supplies are declining—and declining a lot faster than everybody expected. And Europe’s economic liberalization encourages market players to build easier-to-finance gas-fired plants, thus feeding demand for more gas. If political leaders were really worried about gas supplies from Russia, they should change that structural feature of the market rather than wailing about Gazprom’s clumsy—but ultimately harmless—fights with its neighbors.

Two years after Guillet wrote that, Europe is still just as dependent on Russia for its energy supply, meaning that this New Year's tradition is likely to continue. If the corner store continually rips you off, yet you continue to patronize it, can you really keep blaming the store?

Photo: SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images

Maybe I've just had Web design on my mind, but the placement of this pop-up ad on the Haaretz Website yesterday was pretty unfortunate given the rest of the stories on the page:

Somehow I don't think there are too many opportunities for white water rafting in Gaza right now.