Thursday, January 28, 2016

Iran - Iraq war by Pierre Razoux LRB book review

The Iran-Iraq War by Pierre Razoux, translated by Nicholas Elliott
Harvard, 640 pp, £29.95, November 2015, ISBN 978 0 674 08863 4
Predicting what will start a war, and when, is an unrewarding business. Long-term trends (‘causes’) are often clear enough, but not the proximate causes, or triggers. We can assess the comparative significance of competition for resources, hunger for power, the nature of political systems, the psychology of leaders. What precipitates a conflict, though, may be a sudden, unforeseen event: an accident, misreading or miscalculation, or a temperamental leader’s flash of hubris. Often, of course, it is a combination of such things. Yet there is nothing inevitable about the outbreak of conflict. (Bear in mind when I say this that I work for an NGO that operates on the premise that conflicts can be prevented.)
We face the same obstacles in analysing what will bring a war to an end, and how long it will take – or, to put it differently, what would persuade the warring parties to seek to reach peace. Take the war in Syria. Its participants blundered into it, responding to each provocation by their adversaries with an escalation of their own, so that gradually a local popular protest turned into a civil war wrapped up in a regional power struggle folded into a confrontation between superpowers that so far has cost more than a quarter of a million lives and displaced almost 11 million Syrians – about half the population – within and outside the country’s borders. How will it end? How can it be ended, when the participants themselves show no sign of being ready to end it?
The Iran-Iraq War offers as useful a case study as any in how conflicts begin and are brought to an end. The war started in September 1980, when Saddam Hussein, perceiving a significant threat in Iran’s recent Islamic Revolution, sent his troops across the border with the intention of dealing his neighbour a quick and humiliating blow. He was worried that the Islamic Republic’s radical ideology and revolutionary zeal might incite Iraq’s majority Shia population to revolt against his own secular rule. He also sensed a momentary weakness on Iran’s part, as the new regime was busy eliminating its internal enemies. Strategically, he hoped to rein in Iran’s hegemonic pretensions in Iraq and the Gulf, a region with a significant Shia population.
After eight years of war, and hundreds of thousands of dead and injured on both sides, Iran’s younger generation was dangerously depleted, its troops exhausted and its population demoralised. The new republic had also become isolated internationally as a result of the 1979-81 US hostage crisis. By contrast, Iraq, while vulnerable on a number of fronts, was gathering strength with the help of Arab and Western support. Yet the war was brought to an end, and what clinched it, Pierre Razoux argues in his new history of the conflict, was the Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. This made possible a rapprochement between Tehran and Moscow, which the Soviets were eager to achieve, afraid that a defeat for Iran would permit the US to extend its influence in the Gulf. According to Razoux, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed that if the Soviets put pressure on Iran to end the conflict, Washington would persuade Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to facilitate the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The broader point is that no headway can be made in negotiations for peaceful settlement of local conflicts until the international context allows for it. Arguably the war in Syria won’t end without an agreement, or at least an accommodation, between Iran and Saudi Arabia – which, in turn, would have to be facilitated by Russia and the US. It is heartening that, despite their significant differences, both Russia and the US are now sponsoring an inclusive process to end the war in Syria.
*
In Iran, the experience of the war still reverberates. A great deal continues to be written about military and strategic decision-making during the war. Yet the Iranian debate, while valuable, is limited. Controlled by the Revolutionary Guard war research centre, it overemphasises military strategy, highlights the heroism of Iranian soldiers, and reflects a very particular perspective, based as it is on a daily record (thirty thousand cassette tapes) of wartime discussions between commanders.
In Iraq, the study of history is hardly a priority now, with its middle class severely damaged by two wars (Iran then the first Gulf War), 13 years of crippling UN sanctions, then the second Gulf War and the mayhem ensuing that continues to this day. What remains of the educated elite is just trying to get by, or trying to leave. US military researchers debriefed Iraqi generals after 2003, but their views are useful only in relation to wartime decision-making and operational matters; some of their more outrageous claims about the regime, or about Iran or the Kurds, went unchallenged by their questioners, who appeared knowledgeable about individual battles but clearly had little or no understanding of the political and historical context in which they took place. The Kurds themselves, who chose Iran as their ally in an attempt to free themselves from the Iraqi yoke and suffered grievously in consequence, have undertaken very little historical inquiry, with the exception of a few autobiographical accounts.
So we have reason to be grateful to Razoux, who between chapters zooms out of the battlefield to focus on the international power struggles and diplomacy that helped shape various confrontations in the war. What emerges is that the mindsets driving state policy in Iran and Iraq today, or the actions of sub-state actors, including Islamic State, are largely rooted in the instincts that propelled the war in the 1980s. The war wasn’t simply a conflict between two states but a clash between two cultural traditions, political philosophies and nations – all intertwined – that transcended state borders: Arab v. Persian, Sunni v. Shia, secular v. theocratic.
Each side drew on its religious traditions in its propaganda, using a coded language that would be clearly understood by the other, and was meant to injure. Saddam had a particular knack for it, referring to the war in its entirety as his ‘Qadisiyyah’ (to invoke the decisive defeat of Persians by Arab Muslim forces in 636 ce), and naming the ballistic missile with which the Iraqi military struck cities as far away as Tehran the al-Hussein, not after himself but after Hussein ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib, the third imam of Shia Islam, who was killed and beheaded by his (Arab Sunni Muslim) rivals in the battle of Karbala in 680.
Battles deriving from the seventh-century schism between Sunni and Shia continue to be waged in the popular imagination. The divide, which concerns lineage more than religious practice (although it has evolved ritual differences as well), is deep, but doesn’t necessarily generate violent intercommunal conflict. There have been long historical periods of peaceful commingling and extensive intermarriage. Politicised by the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, however, it now drives the proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen. To put the genie back in the bottle will require Iran and Saudi Arabia to find a new balance of power in the Gulf, but even this may no longer be enough to suppress the region’s conflicts.
What emerges in illuminating detail from Razoux’s study is the impact of the power struggle between Ayatollah Khomeini’s two protégés, the men he promoted and protected till the end of his life in June 1989, and left in charge of a house divided by their rivalry: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Hosseini Khamenei. Rafsanjani was the gregarious son of wealthy pistachio farmers, Khamenei the ascetic product of a Shia theological seminary. The war was Rafsanjani’s handiwork, especially after mid-1982, once Iran had succeeded in expelling Iraqi forces from its territory. He continued to press the case for continuing the fight even in the face of the growing realisation that Iran couldn’t sustain it. As the war drew to a conclusion, he made sure that his mentor, Khomeini, took the responsibility for ending it, thereby securing his own political survival.
By contrast, Khamenei alternately supported and opposed continuing the war, making sure never to contradict the Supreme Leader. Razoux may be correct when he says that Rafsanjani made the only mistake of his long political career by allowing Khamenei to succeed Khomeini, giving him the last word on all major decisions. As a result, over time, Rafsanjani has largely been sidelined, though this has done little to temper his ambition or cramp his ability to promote his disciples, including the current president, Hassan Rouhani. They belong to the political wing that, while wanting to preserve the revolution and the regime it produced, sees the value of opening Iran up to the outside world – an approach Khamenei fears will be the beginning of the end.
Razoux gives a good account of Rafsanjani’s push to establish the Revolutionary Guards and Basij volunteers as rivals to the army, which the ruling clerics associated with the shah and the revolution’s secular wing. The use of militias to counteract established state institutions as a way of protecting the Islamic Revolution is a model that Iran is replicating today in Lebanon (Hizbullah), Iraq (the Popular Mobilisation Forces) and Syria (the National Defence Forces). But healthy state institutions would potentially be far more effective in projecting Iran’s power beyond its borders.
*
The crisis over Iran’s nuclear aspirations has its origins in the war too. The shah had established the programme under US tutelage; Iran’s revolutionary leaders cancelled it, saying the use of nuclear weapons contradicted the principles of Islam. Once the Iraqi nuclear threat had been removed by the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor in June 1981, Iran no longer felt the need to pursue a nuclear path. But Iraq’s extensive use of poison gas during the conflict forced Iran’s leaders into a recognition that they had left the country dangerously exposed. (To be clear, both sides repeatedly committed atrocities during the war, targeting civilians at will and, in Iran’s case, dispatching children to the front for suicidal tasks such as minesweeping.)
Iran’s frequent, emphatic remonstrations with the UN, based on its careful reading of international law, were largely ignored. It had, in its view, made rightful, reasonable and responsible appeals to the world’s highest political body and been rebuffed. It was only then that Iran’s revolutionary leaders considered restarting the nuclear programme; they also decided to build up their own arsenal of chemical weapons so as to be able to counter Iraq. (The war ended without Iran having deployed these weapons. Iraq, in addition, had started to develop biological weapons, but at war’s end had only reached the testing stage.)
The deal between Iran and the existing nuclear powers, concluded last year, shouldn’t be seen merely as a political fix to a technical problem. The decision to pursue nuclear weapons is primarily rooted in fear and can only be adequately addressed by a building of trust. In this respect, the US and Iran still have a long way to go. One of the potential obstacles will be the US’s perceptions of Iran’s role in the region, and its support of proxies in Lebanon and Syria in particular. But Iran argues that Western states have no business throwing their weight around in the Middle East, that Western military interventions, rather than solving problems, have created a whole host of new ones, and that the root cause of instability – the failure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict – remains unaddressed. Moreover, Iran claims it has legitimate security interests in the region, and that Syria is a long-time partner which came to Iran’s aid when its existence was threatened in the 1980s; it is only reasonable, from Tehran’s perspective, that Iran should support the Assad regime now that it finds itself besieged. (What Iran leaves unsaid is that one of its primary motivations is its need for a corridor through Syria to its principal ally, Hizbullah in Lebanon.) As for Iraq, Iran has an abiding interest in seeing a nominally friendly Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, presiding over a weak state in no position to threaten its neighbour.
Finally, Razoux highlights the critical role of oil, which, even if it wasn’t the casus belli, informed the actions of all the key players, Iran and Iraq included, as in their repeated targeting of oil infrastructure and shipping. One way of describing the war in the most basic terms is that it pitted Iran’s vastly greater reservoir of young men against Iraq’s easy access to loans, credit and bank guarantees, which it used to finance its war machine. When Saudi Arabia, prodded by the US, began flooding the market with oil in July 1985, precipitating a dramatic drop in the price to below $10 per barrel, it caused severe financial difficulties in the Soviet Union and Iran, as well as Iraq. Saddam’s backers in Riyadh helped him out with new loans; after the war, the debt added to the pressure on an Iraqi economy struggling to revive itself, eventually resulting in the Kuwait fiasco. But Iran suffered the most, its income reduced by a half or even two thirds in a very short time. This, and the continuing high rate of casualties, resulted in a surge of domestic criticism of the war that could no longer be ignored or appeased. It would still take three years for Iran to sue for peace, and another three for the Soviet Union to collapse, but the US-Saudi manipulation of oil prices may have been a determining factor in both cases.
This part of the story has echoes today, even though the circumstances are quite different. In the face of a falling oil price, in part caused by the extraction of shale oil and gas in the US, Saudi Arabia has refused to reduce output (it argues, reasonably, that others will promptly seize its market share), and this is placing enormous pressure on Russia, Iran and Iraq, as well as Saudi Arabia itself. There is no overt manipulation, but everyone knows that Saudi Arabia – which has built up significant financial reserves and imposed austerity measures – is likely to be in a better position to weather the storm than states which are strapped for cash and may face a reduced capacity to project their power abroad. The longer Saudi Arabia can hold out, the thinking perhaps goes, the harder it will be for the others to maintain their level of engagement in Syria.
*
There is another important dimension to the war, to which Razoux doesn’t quite do justice. Some twenty years ago, not long after I began researching Iraq, I noted that Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s had lost not only their lives but also their history. The pervasively repressive Iraqi police state and the mayhem caused by the Iran-Iraq war had made it more difficult to gain access to Iraqi Kurdistan, and more dangerous to stay there. The Iraqi regime’s widespread use of poison gas and the systematic murder of tens of thousands of noncombatants went largely unnoticed, unchallenged and unpunished. At that time, in 1994, not a single serious study of the post-1975 history of the Iraqi Kurds had been published. Moreover, the Kurds’ decision to ally themselves with Iran in the war, which the West castigated because of the Islamic Revolution and the hostage crisis, resulted in a bias in Western intelligence reporting on the conflict that is glaringly evident in declassified documents from the time.
The basic facts are straightforward. In 1975, when Saddam and the shah struck a deal over the contested Shatt al-Arab waterway (the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates as they reach the Gulf), Iraqi Kurds, who had fought an insurgency with the shah’s support, were hung out to dry and faced imminent total defeat. The rebels under Mustafa Barzani fled into exile in Iran; their families were deported to camps in southern Iraq. Subsequently, the Kurdish movement split along political, ideological and linguistic/geographical lines, and by the time Saddam started the war with Iran in 1980, the two main factions, under Mustafa’s son Masoud Barzani and his rival Jalal Talabani, were pursuing shifting alliances with neighbouring states, just as the Kurds have often done and still do today, the better to compete with each other. In 1983, Barzani’s fighters served as Iran’s scouts in battles in corners of Iraqi Kurdistan, while Talabani entered into a one-year truce with Saddam; meanwhile, the two groups were fighting each other in the mountains, either directly or through tribal proxies.
Three years later, Iran had managed to convince the two leaders to work together under Tehran’s authority. By opening a front in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran hoped to relieve pressure on its forces in the south, and by early 1987 the strategy had been so effective that Saddam saw the need to mount a counterinsurgency. He appointed his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid as overseer of security operations in the north. In February 1988 the regime launched what it called the Heroic Anfal Operation, a six-month-long campaign in eight numbered stages designed to cover all of rural Kurdistan. Each stage was preceded by the extensive use of chemical weapons against Kurdish strongholds: this drove people out of the countryside and into the arms of the Iraqi military, which dispatched them in convoys to execution sites in the south. It’s estimated that between eighty and one hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, died this way.
In a separate operation, as part of the war, the Iraqi regime attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with poison gas in March 1988 after it was captured by a combination of Iranian and Kurdish forces. The attack killed thousands of civilians, while leaving the fighters, who had protective clothing, mostly unscathed. (This wasn’t the first Iraqi gas attack on a population centre: that took place in the Iranian Kurdish town of Serdasht in June 1987.) Significantly, the Iraqi army couldn’t have been as successful as it was in dislodging Kurdish villagers, who had grown inured to constant shelling and air attacks, had events at Halabja not sent a powerful message as to what might befall them if they stayed. After Halabja, as chemical clouds wafted down in selective locations during the Anfal campaign, the merest rumour or hint of a gas attack would be enough to send people running, just as the army intended.
*
Regrettably, the scarcity of research on the Kurds I observed in 1994 hasn’t markedly improved since. Razoux’s otherwise excellent study is no exception: in these matters his book strays even from the basic facts, including the events and timing of the Anfal campaign. This is quite unnecessary, as access to Iraqi Kurdistan hasn’t been a problem for more than twenty years, and the war generation is alive and there to be interviewed. Yet without a proper understanding of what happened in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1980s and how it has shaped the Kurds’ worldview it’s hard to grasp what drives them today, and what sacrifices they would be willing to make to avoid ever again falling under Baghdad’s rule, regardless of who is in charge (which today, arguably, is nobody). Iraq’s Kurds are engaged in a long struggle for greater autonomy – and ultimately independence – that includes a demand for absolute control of additional territory, including its oil. This struggle is far from settled, and Western states, by providing unquestioned military support to the Kurds in the fight against Islamic State, are aggravating local conflicts that will persist beyond IS’s defeat, should it come to that. What happens in and around Mosul is likely to be of particular importance.
Razoux has a somewhat limited understanding of the extent and significance of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons throughout the conflict, but especially during its final year. Poison gas may, to some, be merely one tool among many to be used on the battlefield, but its psychological impact – the terror it inflicts, especially on civilians, who are usually unprotected – can be enormous, a so-called force multiplier. For Iraq’s military, it was an asymmetrical advantage. Iran’s forces were reaching exhaustion point in early 1988. Knowing this, the Iraqis dropped huge quantities of gas onto Iranian lines on the first day of each of the five stages of the Tawakalna ‘ala Allah operation, a few months after the attack on Halabja. The gas attacks preceded a concerted effort with conventional weapons to drive demoralised troops out of the remaining pockets of Iraqi territory Iran was holding. The gambit was an overwhelming success; little actual fighting was required during these final ‘battles’ of the war.
At the same time, the Iraqi regime had found a diabolic way of eroding Iranians’ morale at home. The ‘war of the cities’ had involved direct missile attacks on Tehran in February 1988, prompting a massive evacuation of its population. Days after the Halabja attack the Iraqi media began broadcasting threats that Iraq would place chemical warheads on its modified Scud missiles, the al-Husseins. Now Iranians fled Tehran in even greater numbers, while its hospitals began preparing for the arrival of large numbers of casualties from chemical strikes. For many Iranians this was a psychological turning point.
In the event, Saddam failed to make good on his threat: he may have realised he didn’t need to. In hindsight it’s clear that the actual and threatened use of chemical weapons proved instrumental in undermining public support of the Iranian war effort, just as it had done wonders in draining the Iraqi Kurdish countryside of a population that had enabled the rebels to move about with ease. The impact of this smart, strategic, depraved use of poison gas is missed by Razoux, as it is by many others writing on the war. This is surprising, in that the significance of the gas attacks wasn’t lost on the international community, which gathered for the Paris Conference on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons immediately after the war; some years later, this led to the adoption of the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Iraq’s escalating use of chemical weapons – greater quantities, ever more lethal and diverse agents, and an expanding set of targets reached over larger distances – may have been the precipitating factor in Iran’s decision not to pursue any longer a conflict it had come to acknowledge it couldn’t win. But this alone wasn’t enough to end the war. A combination of structural factors – dwindling oil revenues, international isolation, a decline in recruits to what was essentially a volunteer army, war exhaustion, popular demoralisation, the US engaging Iran in naval battles in the Gulf, and a changing international context with the thaw in the Cold War and the start of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in May 1988 – paved the way for Iran’s obstinate leader finally to bow to reality. To predict what may bring the Syrian civil war to an end, or the war in Yemen, or any other of the world’s current conflicts, will require a close analysis of the key factors influencing the course of events in each case, and of what might be needed to tip that course in the right direction.

Türk diplomatlarının katili Yanıkyan'ın portresi

HALUK ŞAHİN'in, Hürriyet Daily News gazetesinde İngilizce olarak yayınlanan "The anatomy of a forgotten Armenian assassination" başlıklı yazısında, 27 Ocak 1973 cumartesi günü Los Angeles' deki T.C. Başkonsolosu Mehmet Baydar ve Başkonsolos Yardımcısı Bahadır Demir'i katleden Ermeni Yanıkyan'ın kişiliği ve adli siciliş hakkında şu bilgiler veriliyor:
"Kısa süre önce, açıklanan FBI arşivlerine göre, Mehmet Baydar ve Bahadır Demir’in katili Gurgen Yanıkyan’ın sanıldığı gibi ent...ellektüel biri olmadığı, dosyası incelendiğinde, çocuklara taciz suçlamasıyla yargılandığı, bankadaki hesabında sadece 12 doları bulunduğu ve bir kaç yıldan beri soysal yardım aldığı anlaşılmaktadır.
Yaşam öyküsü uydurma değilse bile kuşkulu niteliktedir. FBİ ajanlarının elde ettiği bilgilere göre, Los Angeles’deki Ermeni cemaati kendisini güvenilmez bir karakter yapısına sahip, huzursuz ve böbürlenen birl olarak tanımlamaktadır. Amerikalı Ermenilerin işlerine ya da Osmanlı Ermenilerinin tarihi trajedilerine hiç ilgi göstermemiştir. Yanikyan yaşamının son kertesinde şerefli bir sayfa yazmak isteyen bir sahtekar olarak nitelenebilir."

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Türkiye - İran: sağlık, AR-GE, y.teknoloji


Türkiye ve İran: Sağlık, Ar-Ge ve yüksek teknoloji – 21 Ocak 2016

 

Orhan Bursalı

Hazır İran gündemdeyken, şu “aydınlar vb bildirisi” üzerine, ancak tamamen iktidarın değirmenine su taşıyan zırvalıkların hızla dışına çıkalım ve komşumuza yeniden bu kez başka açıdan bakalım. 
Önce şu grafiğe bakın. Renk sayfada görünür mü bilmem, ama aşağıdan tepeye tırmanan çizgi İran. Konu da İran ve Türkiye’nin bilimsel makale sayısındaki gelişimi. Kaynak Dünya Bankası.

[Haber görseli]

İncelerseniz, 2011 yılında grafik eğrimiz öpüşüyor. 1997’de biz uluslararası bilim dergilerinde 2480 makalede, İran 391 makalede idi. 16 yıl içinde füze gibi geldi. Bugün bilimsel makale sayısını dünyada hızla artıran üç ülke arasında. 
Şimdi eğitim harcamalarında bize göre nasıl fark attığını görelim: 
Türkiye ve İran’da Eğitim Harcamalarının Ulusal Gelir İçerisindeki Payı, Ortalama ve Beklenen Eğitim Süresi:

[Haber görseli]

Hani bizim devletlilerimiz eğitime ne kadar büyük paylar ayırdıklarını söyler ya, İran’ın eğitim harcamalarının ulusal gelir içindeki payı yüzde 4.7, bizim ise 2.9 (2014). Bu eğitilmiş insan gücüne verdikleri önemi gösteriyor. 
Üstelik İran’ın gayri safi yurtiçi hasılası ve adam başına düşen milli geliri yarımıza yetişemiyor: 
GSYH (2013): İran: 242.5 milyar dolar. Türkiye: 653 milyar dolar.
Kişi başına GSMH (2013): İran: 3.131 dolar; Türkiye 8.717 dolar 
Parasal gücü bu kadar düşük olmasına rağmen, İran eğitime çok daha fazla harcama yapıyor. Şüphesiz eğitime verdikleri önem bilim ve teknolojiye de yansıyor. Şimdi sizle bir kıyaslama daha paylaşıyorum:

[Haber görseli]

İran’ın toplam imalat sanayi ihracatı içerisindeki yüksek teknoloji payı bizim iki katımızdan fazla. Biz yıllardır yüzde 2’nin altındayız. Bu gösterge ülkelerin yüksek teknoloji gelişmişlik düzeyini gösteriyor. Bizim milli gelir içindeki Ar-Ge harcamamız ise İran’dan biraz daha yüksek. Bu da, İran’ın Ar-Ge harcamalarını daha verimli ve etkin kullandığını gösteriyor.

Sağlık harcamalarında ileride 
İnsani gelişmişlik göstergelerinde Türkiye en çok sağlık harcamalarında artışı sağlar. Aşağıda iki ülkenin, GSYH içinde sağlık harcamalarının değerleri var. Ulusal gelirden sağlık harcamalarına ayrılan kaynak kıyaslamasında, İran Türkiye’yi geride bırakmış. İran bize göre daha yoksul, ama eğitime ve sağlığa daha çok harcıyor paralarını!

[Haber görseli]

İran’ın tasarruf ve yatırım oranları da Türkiye’ye fark atıyor.

[Haber görseli]

Gördüğünüz gibi, biz habire tüketir ve az üretirken İran kıt kaynaklarını tasarruf edip yatırıma yönlendirmeyi beceriyor. 
Dünkü yazıda YÖK’ün izlenimlerini paylaşmıştım. Prof. Hasan Mandal’ın bazı notları daha vardı: Hem temel bilime önem veriyorlar hem de araştırmalarını ürüne dönüştürme güçleri yüksek. Laboratuvarlarında çok fazla kadın araştırmacı var. İran üniversitelerinde bizden öğrenci yok gibi. Gidenler de Farsça öğrenmek için oradalar. Bir zamanlar Türk öğrenciler çok tutulurdu Avrupa ve ABD’de. Şimdi İranlı doktora öğrencileri bu pozisyonu kapıyor. 
Not: Yukarıdaki verileri, Bayram Ali Eşiyok’un, bir zamanlar CBT’nin 1140 sayılı makalesinden aldım.

 

İRAN : Bilimde büyük çıkış


İran: Bilimde büyük çıkış

19 Ocak 2016 Salı

Bunlarla da ilgilenebilirsiniz

  • Bıktınız mı siyasetten? CHP kurultayı üzerine fazla yazacak, benim açımdan yeni olabilecek bir yön bulamadım. Olayı biraz akışını bırakmakta yarar var. Ama bir ay önceden beri izlediğim ve hepinizin de ilgisini çeken, kapsamlı bir siyasi analiz dizisiyle gündeme getirdiğim RTE’nin üçüncü seçim olasılığı, geniş siyasi çevrede tutuldu ve benimsendi. Artık bu olasılık konuşuluyor. Bu konuyu tükettim, artık herkes yazabilir! Bizde, analizin kaynağını anmak, atıfta bulunmak gibi bir gelenek yoktur. Böyle bir beklentim olduğunu sanmayın, okurlarımın ayrıcalıklı olarak bundan öncelikle haberdar olması yeter.
Bugün siyasetten kaçıyorum. İran’a ve Türkiye’ye bakıyorum, ama bilimsel açıdan. Dünya İran’la barıştı. İyi oldu. Biri nükleer silah üretimini verdi, diğerleri ambargoyu kaldırdı. İran uzun süredir ambargo altında inleyip duruyor ve normal ekonomik gelişmesini izleyemiyordu.
Aralık ayında, bazı rektörlerin de eşlik ettiği YÖK heyeti (Başkanı Prof. Yekta Saraç, Prof. Hasan Mandal) İran’ı ziyaret etti. Ben de merak ettim ne konuştular diye. İran önemli bir ülke, komşumuz, ilişkilerin harika olması gerek (bilirsiniz tüm komşularımız için öyle düşünürüm). Sordum, Mandal Hoca yardımcı oldu ve bilgiler verdi. İlginç konular var, paylaşacağım.

Yetenekli 4500 İranlı öğrencimiz var
Görüşme girişimi bizden gelmiş. Üniversitelerimizde 4500 İranlı öğrencinin lisans sonrası eğitim yaptığını biliyor muydunuz? Bu da vesile olmuş. Peki İranlı öğrencilerin yüksek lisans ve doktora programlarında başarılı olduklarını ve bilimsel projelerin gerçekleştirilmesinde bilgi ve becerileriyle özellikle tercih edildiklerini?
İranlılar birinci sınıf protokolle karşılamışlar heyeti. Gece 1.30’da bakan yardımcısı havaalanına gelmiş karşılamaya. İranlı Bilim, Araştırma ve Teknoloji Bakanı Muhammed Ferhadi ve Cumhurbaşkanı’nın BT konularında yardımcısı Sorena Settari ile görüştüler. İki üniversite Şerif ve Tahran Bilim ve Teknoloji üniversiteleri gezildi, rektörleriyle görüşüldü, bazı işbirliği kararları alındı...
Bütün bunlar iyi güzel, ama niyetim başka: İran’daki bilimsel atılıma değinmek. Siz de şaşıracaksınız şimdi!

Nano teknolojide dünyada 7. sırada
Bizim hocalar etkilendiler İran’ın bilimsel düzeyinden. Çünkü yıllardır ambargo altında yaşayan İran, bilimsel araç gereç edinme konusunda da büyük sıkıntılar yaşayınca, pek çok cihazı da kendileri üretmeye soyunmuşlar. Laboratuvarları bizimkilerin düzeyine ulaşamıyor, dahası ilkel bile kalıyor; ama orada çalışan insan kalitesinin bize kıyasla yüksek olduğu görülüyor.
Mesele insan kalitesidir her zaman için. Dünyanın en iyi laboratuvarlarını kurabilirsiniz ama orada projeniz ve yüksek düzeyde kadronuz yoksa, laboratuvar size, siz de makinelere bakar, uzaktan birbirinizi seversiniz.
İran, çok önemli bir yüksek teknoloji alanı olan nano teknoloji konusunda
uluslararası dergilerde yayımlanan makale sayısına göre dünyada 7. sırada. Türkiye ise 20. sırada.
2014 sayılarına göre İran’ın 5525 makalesi, Türkiye’nin ise 1594 makalesi var.
Bu nano makalelere yapılan atıflara göre sıralamada ise İran 5.043 atıfla 9. sırada. Türkiye ise 1313 atıfla 23. sırada
Aradaki büyük farka bakar mısınız!

Tıp - sağlık bilimlerinde
Biyokimya, genetik ve moleküler biyoloji konusunda iki ülkenin karşılaştırması (2014):
Türkiye 34.421 makale ile dünyada 24’üncü sırada.
İran 27.026 ile 20. sırada. Ama iki ülkenin makale başı sitasyon payları aynı: 15.20

Fen bilimlerinde öndeler
Enerji konusunda, Türkiye 9522 makale ile 19. sırada.
İran ise 11.724 makale ile 17. sırada. Bizden iyi.
İranlılar fen bilimlerinde bize fark atıyorlar.
Biz ise sağlık/tıp bilimlerinde bir adım öndeyiz. Ama İran bu alanda da gelişme içinde.

Hangi alanlarda kim önde?
İki ülkenin en başarılı oldukları 6’şar bilim alanının başarı sıralaması şöyle:
Türkiye: Klinik tıp (%3.02), tarım (2.52), matematik (2.34), mühendislik (2.33), bitki/hayvanbilimi (2.33), malzeme bilimi (1.98).
İran: Mühendislik (%4.05), kimya (2.86), malzeme bilimi (2.80), matematik (2.54), tarım (2.47), bilgisayar bilimi (2.18).
Görüyorsunuz, İran yokluklar içinde hızla yükseliyor, Türkiye “varlıklar” içinde yürüyor...

 

Saturday, January 16, 2016

Einstein'ın kızına mektubu

Einstein, ölümünden 20 yıl sonra yayımlanmak kaydıyla, kızı Lieserl' e 1400 adet mektup bırakmış. Bir değerli meslektaşımın ilettiği bu mektuplardan birinin metnini aşağıda aktarıyorum.
Einstein, bu mektubunda, özetle, "henüz bilimin tam olarak açıklayamadığı son derece büyük bir güç var. Bu güç, diğerlerini kapsıyor ve yönetiyor ve hatta, evrende hareket eden her türlü oluşumun arkasında o var. Bu evrensel güç AŞK (Love)'tır. Aşk için yaşar ve ölürüz. Aşk, Tanrı'dır ve Tanrı Aşk'tır. Aşk'ı görünür yapabilmek için, ünlü denklemimde bir yer değişikliği yaptım.
E = mc2 denkleminde, dünyayı sağlıklı hale getirmek için gerekli enerjiyi, aşk' ı ışık hızı karesiyle çarparak elde edebiliriz. Böylece Aşk'ın en büyük güç olduğu sonucuna varırız; zira sınırsızdır." demektedir.
Bir diğer değerli meslektaşım, "kız babası olarak, Einstein'ın duygularını anlıyorum" yorumunu yaptı. Ben de bir kız babası olarak bu yoruma katılıyorum.
Ayrıca, Einstein'ın bu gözlemi, bana Mevlana ve Yunus Emre'yi de çağrıştırdı.
Söz konusu mektubun metni (İngilizce) aşağıdadır.
In the late 1980s, Lieserl, the daughter of the famous genius, donated 1,400 letters, written by Einstein, to the Hebrew University, with orders not to publish their contents until two decades after his death. This is one of them, for Lieserl Einstein. More can be found about Lieserl here.
”When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.
I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.
There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.
This universal force is LOVE.
When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force.
Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it.
Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others.
Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals.
For love we live and die.
Love is God and God is Love.
This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.
To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation.
If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.
After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy…
If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.
Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet.
However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.
When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.
I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer! “.
Your father Albert Einstein
( Einstein'ın bu mektubunu internet ortamında ileten değerli meslektaşımız Betin K. Yiğit'e teşekkürler.)