Flit(tm)

Compiling Life II

It was too good to be true. I hit my first misconfiguration in /openoffice/soltools/mkdepend which includes -lX11 even though I'd defined earlier that OpenOffice was to compile without it. Time to put out my first bug report... and there it is.

It's pretty easy to get around the bug but it needs to be fixed. Frankly, this sort of thing is not going to be a priority for the project maintainers but they'll eventually get around to it because it's such a trivial fix. But trivial fixes are what make polished programs and even an administrator type who mostly dabbles in code can contribute to the polish.

Compiling Life

I started compiling Open Office using the current work but without X11. This, theoretically should provide a native widget set and a semi-working version of Open Office but nobody's officially checked this for quite some time. The compile seems to be running fine with minor modifications to the install script I'm currently at the following step:

Begin consuming those cases of beer. You'll be waiting about a day. If you have a slower machine, you may want to invest in a few cases of PBR.

I think I'll pass on the Pabst Blue Ribbon but I'm wondering if it'll seriously take a day.

Is the PRC Crashing?

Stratfor's sample analysis this week (after this week, the same URL will point to a different article) points to what might be the beginning of the end for that country's economic miracle. The key graphs are below:

To understand China's problems, it is necessary to look at the structure -- and failures -- of other Asian economies. We have already seen two major systemic crackups in Asia during this generation. Japan went from being an economic superpower that was predicted to dominate the global economy in the 21st century to an economic cripple during the early 1990s. East and Southeast Asia, excluding China, similarly passed from economic miracles to economic catastrophes in 1997. In both cases, the striking characteristic was the speed at which overblown Western expectations turned into disappointment. It is our view that China, which got started later than other Asian economies, is on course to be the third Asian meltdown in this generation. The euphoria about China until very recently -- and China's assiduous attempts to stoke expectations -- tracks with what happened in the rest of Asia.

The core problem in Asia -- a problem that the Chinese government is trying to address belatedly -- is that its banking systems do not allocate capital based on market forces. Loan decisions are made out of political and social considerations, and real interest rates vary depending on these relationships. Long-term business relationships in Asia receive favorable treatment from banks regardless of the actual business case to be made for a loan.

Of equal importance, these are debt rather than equity driven economies. The major source of financing does not come from sale of shares in businesses, but from direct loans. There are two reasons for this. The legal structure of Asian corporations gives limited rights and protections to shareholders, who do not collectively control corporate boards. Therefore, maximizing shareholder value is not a driving consideration. It also means that a core measure of economic performance -- the rate of return on capital -- is not a critical variable.

Essentially the argument is that the PRC is making the same errors that every other asian country has lived through. It is aided by the fact that its currency is nonconvertible but that's no panacea. It is suffering from a plague of crony loans made to connected people who have hollowed out their economy. Essentially, we're in the end stages of the PRC's economic pyramid scheme.

The stakes are quite high. If the PRC falls into crisis, it is much less likely to survive than Japan and more likely to fracture into the traditional solution of warlord dominated regional entities.

Are we Japan/PRC's Power Projection In Iraq?

Thomas Barnett shows his Pentagon's New Map is not the only trick he has up his sleeve. He's on his media tour and in blogging about current events notes the following:

Japan and China hold almost $1Trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds. Increasingly, their view of the world will merge, with China’s moving closer to pragmatic Japan’s. The U.S. is looking at a dual strategic partner in this pair. We better get used to it, plan for it, and exploit it whenever possible. Those two countries bought the bulk of the sovereign debt we floated to pay for the Iraq war. We better make sure they get the outcome they thought they were buying when they purchased all that debt. Otherwise, next time they may not finance the war.

It's a truism that whoever pays the piper calls the tune. The PRC and Japan are paying the piper. What's the tune they're really calling? Asia is in deep trouble over energy supplies with Middle East oil being full dollars more expensive when shipped to Asia. This "Asian Premium" holds the region back by making everything more expensive than if they paid the same energy costs everybody else was paying.

If the PRC and Japan are both betting that US security efforts in the Middle East are something that they are willing to fund, the price for feckless withdrawal in Iraq would not just be in increased terrorist strikes against us. More significantly, there would be no reason for them to continue to float huge loans in order to rid themselves of their $3/barrel millstone around their necks.

US Torture

The sad spectacle of US troops abusing prisoners demonstrates (once again) that democracy and freedom isn't about having a much better government than any other. It's about finding the bad apples relatively early, punishing them, and excluding them from further service so the rot doesn't spread. If Saddam Hussein was given a 25 year hard labor punishment when he first demonstrated that he was part of Iraqi rot, Lietenant, Captain, or Major Hussein would be a sad, disgraced figure in Tikrit trying to live down his shame for the rest of his life and Iraq would have been spared his rule.

1st world democratic republics have all the venality and nastiness floating around in their governments that other countries have. Their advantage is in their superior willingness to remove the rot. We are shamed by it. But we know that it would be worse if we covered it up. It is a heavy responsibility of citizenship and CBS did right by airing the story.

This is the central element of what has been so frustrating about false charges of abuse. The problem is real, it always has been. It is real everywhere because human nature is the same everywhere and everywhen. As wise men have said, human nature has no history. But crying wolf and falsely maligning soldiers makes it more difficult to sort the truth of abuse from the fiction of it. Fortunately, the system still seems to work.

Why You Should Never Mess With the US (and the rest of the 1st world)

Because the US is chock full of people who amuse themselves like this. Good Morning Silicon Valley always has a quirky or humerous link at the bottom nder the label "Off topic" which is something that will amuse the geeks that are its normal audience. Today they thought it would be fun to link to a couple of enterprising geeks who decided to make a taser out of a $5 disposable camera.

Like probably half the geeks that read the article my first, instinctive impulse was to start asking how you could improve the thing, possibly by using two disposable cameras. I know that I'm not that abnormal for the technical minded. We're just like that, many of us and we're relatively harmless in that we limit our weaponeering impulses to intellectual exercises and web pages instructing how to make catapults, tasers, and other esoterica out of readily available items. We do this, not because we are incapable of violence, but because you have to generally have a long time horizon to absorb much geeky knowledge or culture and we're generally content with our political and social arrangements.

Free, inventive people with technical knowledge are best left alone with their amusements.

Parental Independence

I really wish I had read Steven Den Beste's current essay on the nature of independence when I was 14-15. It would have saved me a lot of trouble and been a shortcut to the destination I eventually reached. I always instinctively saw the cliques and mini cultures that I saw in my high school as sheep-like but it took my quite a while to sort out the whole rebellion/independence thing.

Of course, I'd want to have my kids see the essay but they're too young to need it now and when they'll need it, they won't trust it coming from me. Hmm... what a dilemma.

Another Reverse Acquisition

Everybody who's looked at the Apple/NeXT deal knows that it was NeXT that really acquired Apple. Apple had the better brand viability so it says Apple on all the business cards but the executives, the philosophy, the code, they very much scream NeXT computer Corporation.

Now it looks like this 'reverse acquisition' started a mini-trend with the same thing happening in the Gateway/eMachines deal. The cow style boxes will stay but the stores are all closing, the executives show a distinct tilt towards old eMachines alums and the headquarters is moving to Irvine, where eMachines used to work out of. Appearances are deceiving. Who buys who is going to be less clear at closing in the future I think.

Liquid Armor

Material science is making its usual unheralded contribution to health and safety. In this case, it's liquid armor. It's a liquid filling to put inside armor or even normal clothing items like boots that remains light and flexible in normal use but stiffens immediately to rigidity under sudden stress. After the stress goes away, it softens right up again. Not only is liquid armor useful in areas like limbs than kevlar with rigid plates it also has potential civilian uses like a steel toed boot replacement.

It also has the advantage of being better against stab wounds than regular body armor, a must for law enforcement/penal operations.

HT: defensetech

Proportional Casualties

In reading a WSJ piece on the attempted Al Queda attack in Amman I was struck by the top end figure of up to 80,000 casualties. Looking up Jordan's population, as near as I could figure it, it has somewhat shy of 6 million people in it. For the US, the proportionately equivalent figure for Jordan's 80k casualties would bee approximately 4 million. That's the equivalent of losing a major city.

This is grand drama and is getting very little coverage given how huge this is for Jordan and the entire Middle East. No doubt there are well off families living in nice houses in Amman who gave generously to Al Queda and its cousins. They are now realizing that they just barely escaped losing their lives to an attack that they may very well have helped pay for. No doubt they are, even as I post this, rethinking their prior financial commitments to this cause. No doubt many of the good citizens of Amman are also rethinking their tolerance for clerics who preach the Islamist version of jihad.

Indiscriminate area weapons against muslims are likely to be the worst blunder our enemies have made in years. It desperately deserves coverage, perhaps a nightline segment, maybe tomorrow?

The Coming Opportunity of Cheap Farm Land

Since agricultural products are no longer protected under the WTO under special rules as of December 31, knowledgeable observers have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. The first clatter has just occurred. The Wile E Coyote moment has ended and now the developing nations are likely to come at the WTO fast and furious with cases of excessive subsidies and protection.

But all the land that is under the plow in these rich countries today has a market value that is, in part, a reflection of these rich subsidies. With subsidies likely to be eviscerated by the WTO, agricultural states will either have to realign their crops to more profitable, specialty ones that are suited to the climate or they are going to go fallow, not being worth the energy to cultivate.

So what do we do with that land when the price craters?

80% of Oil For Food Contracts Disappear?

The New York Post is breaking the story that after the UN turned over all its records to the GAO for an investigation, 80% of the contracts aren't there. Where they shredded, burned, hidden away in a filing cabinet drawer like the Rwanda airplane black box (the plane crash ended up sparking the Rwandan genocide), or never received by the UN in the first place? Take all the private scandals of the past few years, Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Anderson, Parmalat, and you will find none of them missing 80% of their records.

And if they had, the repercussions would have been severe. I wonder how many, even now, have not even heard that there is an oil for bribes scandal going on at all?

HT: Instapundit

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XXIII

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XXIII is below:

What Democrats must offer is a sense of realism: when the United States goes to war it had better be prepared to stay where it has fought, to fix what it has broken, and to work with allies for years, if necessary, to consolidate its victories. We must demonstrate staying power, not just firepower, whether in the Balkans or Afghanistan or Iraq.

It just amazes me that a member of the administration that ran home from Somalia with its tail between its legs after one horrific incident (Black Hawk Down) can write the above paragraph and not even tangentially address the credibility chasm that Democrats bring to the table on the issue of sticking out reverses and staying the course in foreign interventions. But it's worse than ignoring Somalia and the other examples of Democrat ADHD (yes, there are Republican examples too but President Bush has already made it clear that they were a mistake, something that's lacking on the Democrat side). One of the scary features about our political system is that governments change regularly for domestic political reasons. If there is no consensus on foreign policy, the US will never manage to stay the course because the incoming party will have an entirely different course in mind and foreign partners and opponents will develop an entirely unhealthy interest in US domestic politics. They will have to in order to arrange their own affairs.

So where is the commitment to forging bipartisan consensus across party changeovers? It's nowhere to be found which means that we're likely to continue to get nasty last minute transition surprises when we go from Democrat to Republican administrations for the foreseeable future.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XXII

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XXII is below:

Of course, there will also be times when the war on terrorism tests our military, as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Yemen, and in the Philippines. What will the war on terrorism require in terms of new doctrines, tactics, equipment, and training? How will it change our military organization? How can we defeat this new enemy while upholding the values that protect our own troops in wartime and that define who we are? The Bush administration has not addressed these questions. A Democratic administration must answer them.

The Bush administration believes that our military should be reserved for war fighting; it came to office averse to peacekeeping and nation building and deeply suspicious of long-term U.S. military deployments overseas. This prejudice drove strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq -- with disastrous consequences. After driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, the administration delegated the building of a nation to the same warlords who destroyed the Afghan nation in the early 1990s. As for Iraq, it sent the minimum number of troops needed to defeat the enemy, without simultaneously deploying forces to occupy and secure the ground those troops were liberating. The result was postwar chaos that emboldened terrorists and soured the coalition's relationship with Iraqis.

This is bizarro world stuff. Yes, there's some truth to it but in a very backwards sort of way and any resemblence to the actual situation on the ground is somewhat coincidental. Yes the military will be called on to defeat terrorism. In fact, Democratic criticism to date has largely rested on the idea that it has been called on too much to deal with the subject. The Bush administration's redefinition of war in post-Westphalian terms is such a huge change that it's been given a soft open, ie it's been stated simply (we're at war with Al Queda) and matter-of-factly because it upsets so many applecarts that to engage in significant public analysis invites the panicked formation of a grand coalition against the idea. Tony Blair can get away with explicit references to post-Westphalian international systems. The US president can't without starting something that may not end well for us. There is a lot of ground work that has to be done and, like the rest of the Bush administration initiatives it imitates, it will probably surface, nearly fully formed, at an appropriate time.

It is an unexceptional truth that the Bush administration was focused conventionally in its military thinking prior to 9/11. But blame them for that and you might as well condemn FDR while you are at it. He too made a considerable U-turn from his original campaign ideas of national military strategy.

The Democrat party simultaneously does not want to give the military more money, wants it to have more troops, and is the most sensitized portion of the country to the idea of US casualties. The truth is that if you reduce per soldier spending you get more casualties. You have fewer protective devices, less training, less skills, less experience, and that means more dead soldiers. The fact that we are not in a time of exploding military expenditures is precisely because Democrats are salivating at the political drubbing they would administer to George W. Bush if he were to dare submit such a budget and the margins in Congress are so thin that the administration dares not give them that set piece battle.

So the military stretches.

Fallujah Urban Warfare Update

Wretchard has an excellent article detailing the military situation in Fallujah. It seems like his previous articles speculating on marine strategy were right on. The insurgents are now trapped in a slum and vulnerable to airborne fire whenever they can be identified.

Apparently there is a lot of moonlight in Iraq right now. The siege will probably last until the waning moon gives less illumination to our opponents eyes so look to see this wrapped up by month's end at the latest and more likely by mid-month. With an area 2000 meters on a side still under their control, there isn't a lot of retreating they can still do.

Update: One single instead of double quotation missed and it swallows the rest of the note. Sorry about that.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XXI

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XXI is below:

Most Democrats agree with President Bush that terrorists, and even recalcitrant regimes on occasion, must be confronted with force. The question should be how, not whether, our military and intelligence assets are employed, and whether we are adapting them rapidly enough to the challenges the United States faces today.

Since the Cold War ended, we have witnessed two generations of military reform: from amassing huge armored units to an emphasis on deploying light forces anywhere in the world, and from analog-based technology to the digital information age. The war on terrorism will require a third military transformation. Although we still need the capacity to fight conventional wars, we now must seek out and destroy enemies that hide in the shadows, often among civilians, without tanks or fighter planes. At heart, this effort will be an intelligence challenge. A new administration should launch a major retooling of our intelligence agencies, including appointing a director of national intelligence with authority over our entire intelligence budget, rather than the 20 cents on the dollar that the current CIA director controls.

This is theoretically very reassuring but I worry about the contrast between Democract and Republican response to military recalcitrance to the use of force. In Kosovo, purposeful delay removed Apache helicopters from the arsenal of usable military platforms. The civilians wanted them used and the military didn't. The military won that argument, but not honestly. Before Iraq was invaded Gen. Shinseki said in Congressional testimony that we would need several hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iraq, a figure we simply didn't have over the time necessary to transition to a free Iraqi government. Even today, it's clear that Shinseki's estimates were completely out of line and designed, once again, to dictate to civilian authorities whether military force could be used. Rumsfeld fired him for it.

There is a new transformation that needs to occur but it's not simply an intelligence transformation. It's the creation of Tom Barnett's Sys Admin force. If it is simply an intelligence operation, how are we supposed to get hold of these terrorists hiding in the shadows? Are we supposed to ask nicely of the governments who have been well bribed to protect them? Or perhaps we should just violate their national sovereignty and take them out. More likely, we will end up exactly where the Clinton administration was, with UAVs taking pictures of terrorists but us unable, legally, to do anything about them.

To go into these countries requires a new intellectual framework to go beyond the Westphalian strictures of national sovereignty. A revitalized intelligence operation won't get the job done because if they do what's necessary without the concomitant reform of post-Westphalianism, they'll go to jail, whether via some US trial or an ICC process. Remember, Democrats would bargain away our reservations on the ICC in exchange for more cooperation on the Global War On Terror so even if we don't try these people, you can be sure that an indictment will come out of the ICC and, at the very least, the usefulness of these agents will come to an end in any ICC signatory nation.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XX

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XX is below:

A Democratic administration should seek to strengthen global rules against proliferation more generally. The existing Non-Proliferation Treaty (npt) established an important norm. Since 1975, South Korea, Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, and now Libya have reversed course and given up their nuclear weapons programs under its auspices. But the npt remains flawed, because it permits countries to develop all the building blocks of a nuclear weapons program and then to withdraw from the treaty without penalty once they are ready to enrich uranium or produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

We should press for a new bargain. Nuclear powers such as the United States should help non-nuclear countries develop nuclear energy and provide them with uranium. But they should maintain control of the fuel cycle, taking back spent nuclear material and storing it securely so it cannot be used to build weapons. (Clearly, there are risks associated with how and where fuel is stored, but there is no risk-free alternative.) Any country that seeks to escape this strict system of controls should be subject to automatic UN sanctions. To hope to convince non-nuclear powers to agree to this arrangement, the United States should lead by example. That means giving up the Bush administration's irresponsible plan to develop a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons (which sends the message that nuclear weapons are a useful instrument of war) and joining the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

First, Libya gave up their WMD not because of the NPT but because the US led a coalition to go beyond the NPT inspection regime:

As a result of our penetration of the network, American and the British intelligence identified a shipment of advanced centrifuge parts manufactured at the Malaysia facility. We followed the shipment of these parts to Dubai, and watched as they were transferred to the BBC China, a German-owned ship. After the ship passed through the Suez Canal, bound for Libya, it was stopped by German and Italian authorities. They found several containers, each forty feet in length, listed on the ship's manifest as full of "used machine parts." In fact, these containers were filled with parts of sophisticated centrifuges.

The interception of the BBC China came as Libyan and British and American officials were discussing the possibility of Libya ending its WMD programs. The United States and Britain confronted Libyan officials with this evidence of an active and illegal nuclear program. About two months ago, Libya's leader voluntarily agreed to end his nuclear and chemical weapons programs, not to pursue biological weapons, and to permit thorough inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. We're now working in partnership with these organizations and with the United Kingdom to help the government of Libya dismantle those programs and eliminate all dangerous materials.

But the problem of peaceful nuclear development can be solved without having to import designs or expertise from current nuclear powers. What justification is there for interfering with a country that is creating their own nuclear program without outside aid or outside fuel? The reality is that there is nothing wrong with a free, stable nation developing and maintaining a nuclear program. It provides new competition in the nuclear field. The fundamental problem is and has always been the quality of national leadership and national institutions. As time goes on, unstable countries will gain the ability to gain the bomb. In fact, with Pakistan as a nuclear power we have arguably already crossed that threshold. The cure for this is not a new treaty but a new relationship with these countries, creating the conditions for them to join the Functioning Core. As they do so, the concerns we naturally have will dissipate as their stake in the maintenance of the present order grows.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XIX

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XIX is below:

We need the same kind of "overt action" plan for Iran, offering -- in full public view -- normal relations in exchange for total renunciation of nuclear aspirations and terrorism by Tehran. Let the Iranian government say no to such an offer and be the obstacle to its people's aspirations, a decision that would create its own dynamic inside Iran. We have other problems with Iran and North Korea, including their appalling human rights abuses. But those can best be addressed if we first bring them out of isolation.

President Wilson must be rolling over in his grave. To give the mullahs of Iran normal political relations with the United States as they internally repress their own people is not normal Democrat politics. When a regime like that in Iran is no longer even able to staff the machinery of repression with their own nationals but must import palestinians and other foreigners to crack heads and beat down dissent it's a regime on its last legs. Giving Iran a new lease on life will stifle Iraq's possible role as a safe haven for pro-democracy Shiites to come study and plan in Iraq's religious centers and create a genuine alternative to the distorted Islamic interpretations now in vogue among the governing mullahs of Tehran.

Sandy Berger, it seems, would rather play for a tie rather than to fight to win. That's a real shame because we need two parties willing to fight to win this war. War cannot be a permanent state and the only end to it is to win or surrender.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XVIII

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XVIII is below:

A Democratic administration must clearly and promptly test whether Kim Jong Il intends North Korea to become a nuclear factory or whether he will negotiate his way into the international community. U.S. officials must put a serious proposition on the table -- a nationwide, verifiable dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear programs in exchange for economic and political integration -- and be prepared to sequence implementation in a reciprocal way once the ultimate objectives are accepted. We must be prepared to take yes for an answer. And if Pyongyang's answer is no, South Korea, Japan, and China will join us in coercive actions only if they are convinced that we made a serious, good-faith effort to avoid confrontation. The worst option is one in which cash-starved North Korea becomes a supplier of nuclear weapons to al Qaeda or Hamas or to radical Chechens, who then deliver them to Washington, London, or Moscow.

And the North Koreans will simply say that they will not talk about such vital matters until the important issue of the shape of the table is resolved. The US will either confess to wanting a deal badly enough to give away the store or be stuck negotiating the shape of the table with neither a yes, nor a no available to use to convince our regional partners to take further action against North Korea. Indirect pressure can be used, but it is already being used.

The United States has already demonstrated that it is willing to take yes for an answer. The demonstration has quite publicly happened in the case of Libya, which is now well on the way to restoring its position in the community of nations despite a long history of bad behavior. The difference is that there is a demonstrated change in attitude and action. North Korea has not undergone the same change. It has not uttered a real yes so our behavior hasn't changed towards it.

Option This Iraqi War Story

Hollywood, or anybody smart enough to beat them, has a ready made war movie script playing out in Najaf:

There is apparently an Iraqi sniper operating in Najaf, killing al Sadr gunmen one by one. This, not surprisingly, has unnerved the al Sadr gangs, and caused them to act brutally towards Iraqis in attempts to find the mysterious sniper.

If he were still around and of an age for this kind of film, this would be a fantastic Charles Bronson vehicle. Iraqi everyman, tired of the thugs lording it over decent people goes out and takes them down, exposing them for the bullies and thugs that they are. This isn't even a US story so you can sidestep the whole "is the US right in Iraq" controversy.

When they figure out who this guy is, somebody ought to get him representation.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XVII

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XVII is below:

The one country that we know has the capacity, and conceivably the inclination, actually to sell a working nuclear weapon to a terrorist group is North Korea. Yet the administration has reacted with inexplicable complacency as North Korea has crossed line after line on its way to becoming the world's first nuclear Wal-Mart. Pyongyang is now capable of producing, and potentially selling, up to 6 nuclear weapons at any time -- possibly 20 a year by the end of this decade -- something that even the most dire intelligence estimates did not predict in Iraq. We do not know how much plutonium North Korea has reprocessed into useable nuclear fuel over the past 18 months, since it expelled international monitors while we were busy negotiating the shape of the table.

For those not familiar with the term, to negotiate the shape of the table is a diplomatic tactic, seldom used by the US, to engage in a contest of wills, insisting that certain trivial issues must be negotiated before any talk of substance starts. The loser is he who agrees to the other's proposal for 'the shape of the table' thus admitting that he is the weaker party who will be giving the bulk of concessions when it comes to the substantial portion of the negotiation.

In the Korean War, it literally took the form of negotiations of the shape of the table at which talks would proceed and the excruciating length of these negotiations are where the term comes from.

Sandy Berger is preemptively announcing that in any negotiation with North Korea under a Democrat administration following his advice, the US will be the weaker party and the N. Koreans can wear us down with delaying tactics at will. How he can possibly give away the store so early and so publicly is beyond me. What is he thinking?

The Missing Kerry Poll

Reading this Village Voice "dump Kerry" editorial the thought occurs that if dump Kerry becomes a serious meme in Democrat politics, shouldn't polling be done of Democrat party delegates and electors on the matter? And this isn't just an intramural Democrat party spat. If President Bush is wise, he'll look at what happened to the Republican candidate when Sen. Torricelli was pulled from the ballot late in the race. The presidency is a funny post. It's not elected directly.

What people vote for is a slate of electors. If the electors are willing to jump ship if Kerry sinks enough, the Bush campaign had better have a plan 'B' in mind because they are going to need one. There would be little time to do opposition research, prepare messages catering to the new candidate's weaknesses and change gears quickly enough to win. In fact, the electors have the (never actually exercised to date) right to vote somebody else into the White House than the candidate to whom they were pledged.

Now Kerry's been eulogized before, as recently as this very campaign. If he comes back, fine, we'll have a conventional presidential race. But it would be interesting to poll the delegates and the electors to see what Kerry's numbers are. It would be a unique media product and would genuinely provide new information about Kerry's base strength.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XVI

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XVI is below:

Another hopeful section:

The Bush administration's argument for invading Iraq rested, in part, on the belief that the United States cannot wait until a WMD threat is imminent before taking action. Yet its overall approach to combating WMD proliferation defies the logic of this position.

A Democratic administration should use every tool at its disposal to prevent WMD threats from arising before force becomes the only option. The most obvious early measure Washington can take to keep deadly weapons materials from falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue regimes is to secure them at source. Yet the current administration has shown little interest in accelerating or expanding programs to do this. Indeed, President Bush tried to cut back the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program for the former Soviet Union early in his term. At our current pace, it will take 13 years to complete security upgrades at every site containing plutonium and highly enriched uranium in Russia. With increased funding for Nunn-Lugar, this process could be accelerated to 4 years. Beyond Russia, dozens of research reactors contain the raw materials for making a radiological or nuclear weapon. We should lead a global effort to secure nuclear materials at all such sites.

I don't know why Nunn-Lugar spending fell victim to the budgetary ax. I wish it hadn't. If it is as effective as advertised above, it needs to be strengthened. If it's not working, don't starve it, scrap it, and tell Russia that now that its economy is running high on petrodollars it's going to have to shoulder its own responsibilities for keeping control of its own nuclear weapons material.

The present situation is one of my own difficulties with this administration and I wish they would sort this out better.

Oil For Food? Oil For Bribes!

If you're looking for a good article explaining exactly what all the fuss is about regarding the UN oil for food program, I found it. Here's a short summary of the importance of the affair

What lies at the core of this story is the United Nations, and how it came to pass that an institution charged with bringing peace and probity to the world should have offered itself up—willingly, even eagerly—as the vehicle for a festival of abuse and fraud.

Remember and consider this paragraph (and the explosive facts in the larger story) every time you hear calls for multilateralism and UN involvement and UN legitimacy. The US can't just prosecute and kill off the organization like it did with Arthur Anderson. So what were we supposed to do?

HT: RealClearPolitics

Update: The original rationale for this program was food and health supplies. By official count $15B of expenditures (not counting kickbacks in this part of the program) went to that amount on a total revenue of $65B. That means that less than a quarter went where it was supposed to (23.08%). How seriously would you treat a humanitarian organization that misdirected over 75% of proceeds?

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XV

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XV is below:

Iraq, too, will require a generational commitment by the international community. Regardless of whether the war was justified, everyone now has a profound stake in Iraq's success. The disintegration of that country along ethnic and religious fault lines would destabilize the Middle East and energize radical movements that threaten the world. A stable and democratic Iraq, on the other hand, would stimulate reform throughout the region. Attaining the latter outcome will require continuous involvement in Iraq's reconstruction and political development, as well as a proactive military posture that does not leave foreign troops hunkered down in bases and barracks, delegating security to an ill-prepared Iraqi security force. But that level of involvement will be unsustainable -- and will be considered illegitimate by ordinary Iraqis -- unless it is viewed as a truly international, rather than exclusively American, effort.

The irony is that the Bush administration's unilateralist approach has let our allies off the hook: it has given them an excuse to shirk these and other global responsibilities. A Democratic administration would not be so dismissive of our allies on the issues that matter to them. In turn, it would have authority to demand far more of them on the issues that matter to us -- whether stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, democratizing the Middle East, or combating the spread and potential use of WMD.

And if these allies say no thank you, they'll stay out of Iraq anyway? You end up right back where the "unilateralist" Bush administration has placed us, in a posture of selective cooptition, cooperation and competition balanced in the same relationship. They're not wholehearted allies, but not enemies either. They are self-announced strategic competitors but not competitors in raw geopolitical strength. They're ankle biters trying to draw down US strength so they don't have to climb what they feel are impossible heights to catch up with us.

Anybody can pick a pretext about which to be outraged. Kerry's support of the Sharon plan would do fine all by itself. Diplomacy is often the art of making mountains out of molehills and vice versa in the neverending pursuit of your country's permanent interests. If the French, German, and other governments who are balking now are doing so based on their permanent interests, no amount of calm soothing words will smooth their ruffled feathers. The feathers are ruffled as part of a political strategy, one that will not be denied.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XIV

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XIV is below:

As we re-engage in the peace process and rebuild frayed ties with our allies, what should a Democratic president ask of our allies in return? First and foremost, we should ask for a real commitment of troops and money to Afghanistan and Iraq. Now that NATO has finally agreed to lead an expanded peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, there is a desperate need for European forces to augment the existing U.S. military presence in the country, to ensure that it does not return to a state of chaos that threatens our interests. Afghanistan, with Pakistan, remains a frontline battleground in the war on terrorism. But given the state of transatlantic relations, there is little support in Europe for sending troops on dangerous missions there. A new administration will have to overcome this challenge if it is to restore security to Afghanistan and relieve the burden on U.S. forces.

This section denies the idea that transatlantic issues are anything more than one presidential administration's pique. If it weren't for that darn prickly George W Bush, France would not be talking about a multipolar world, trying to create a European Union that is a counterweight to the US. There would be no talk about an EU army competing with NATO. There would be no stereotypes of ugly americans floating around. But of course all this occurred during the Clinton administration too so it's very hard to tell where Berger is getting this idea that the only thing that has fundamentally changed has happened in the past few years and is exclusively on this side of the Atlantic.

Certainly the Bush administration is guilty of refusing to paper over differences and they did start off their relationship by stomping on the lit bags of feces left by the Clinton Administration (ICC & Kyoto). That didn't make things any better. But would smiling and playing nice, ignoring the ankle biting have improved things? Or would it just have worsened the US position. Without a frank recognition that the causes of friction exist on both sides of the relationship, it's impossible to even address the question. This is embarrassing for a senior diplomatic voice to offer up in a serious piece for a magazine like Foreign Affairs.

Nitpicking the Angry Economist

Healthcare is the Angry Economist's current rant. And unfortunately, he doesn't quite nail down the nature of healthcare. Healthcare is largely an economic good but it is a very special kind of economic good, not readily comparable to blue jeans and hot dogs. Bad hot dogs don't rampage across town corrupting the good hot dogs and making your life miserable even though you avoid them. Communicable diseases and antibiotic resistance are two specific factors that make healthcare different. This is why I would support subsidized vaccinations and base level emergency care including measures to stop antibiotic abuse. Multi-Drug-Resistent tuberculosis is a major pain in the butt and is significantly caused by poor people poorly exercising their free choices in the area of healthcare.

So yes, I'm in favor of the free market. I'm also in favor of describing things accurately so the free market solutions we devise actually solve the problems we face better than government. Treating healthcare purely as an economic good much as a regular consumer good doesn't get us good outcomes. We need something better. I just have little confidence that this better thing will be government.

Of Course Bush Has Nothing to do With It

Sudan orders Syrian WMD out of country is a welcome headline for any decent person to read but the question I have is what made them change their mind? Purchase, transport, risking seizure on the high seas, these are all real costs. Why go to all the trouble and just order them shipped back? And why do it in a public way that embarrasses the Syrians?

Libya first, now Sudan, of course prickly unilateralist George W. Bush has nothing to do with it. You hear about these things all the time. It's WMD buyer's remorse. They just want to take advantage of their three day 'change your mind' clause in their rogue state club contract. No, no, no, no secondary effect regarding Iraq here.

HT: InstaPundit

Battlefield 'Net VII

The Airforce is creating software to allow UAVs to conduct automated airborne refueling. This will help in providing persistence on the battlefield and is important for many reasons. One of these is that it would allow UAVs to serve as airborne wireless network access points. Motorala has a wireless system that has a range measured in miles not feet. Combine that with a flying wireless routing station and you can provide a persistent, inexpensive, generally inaccessible by insurgents, airborne network infrastructure.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XIII

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XII is below:

As part of a new bargain with our allies, the United States must re-engage in what the rest of the world rightly considers the cornerstone of a lasting transformation of the Middle East: ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So long as that dispute continues, Arab rulers will use it as an excuse to avoid reform and to resist open cooperation with the United States in the war on terrorism.

A point may have been reached where unilateral steps by Israel to protect its security are inevitable. For more than three years now, the people of Israel have been subjected to a brutal, unprecedented assault. But the Israeli government's moves must be a way station, rather than an illusory end point, advancing changes in Palestinian leadership that could help foster a negotiated settlement. If Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and the West Bank are coordinated with the Palestinians, and if an Israeli fence is seen as a temporary measure shaped by security and demographic concerns (as opposed to a land grab), hope for a real solution will be preserved. If not, the vacuum left by the withdrawals could result in a failed terrorist haven dominated by Hamas radicals. In this nightmare scenario, the suicidal Palestinian strategy of terror would continue, pushing Israel not to the sea but to the right. A long-term war of attrition would leave Israelis even more divided and disillusioned, and a whole new generation of children in the region would grow up seeing the United States as the problem, not the solution.

U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has traditionally rested on two pillars. We are Israel's staunchest ally. And we are an honest broker between the two sides, which has made us not impartial, but, rather, partial to an agreement that both assures Israel's security and guarantees a dignified life for Palestinians. A Democratic administration must return with energy and urgency to these principles. It should stand solidly behind Israel in its fight against terrorism and help ordinary Palestinians to liberate themselves from a leadership concerned with little more than its own survival. It should also lead the international community in offering a realistic vision of how life would look for Palestinians if they were to accept and respect the security and existence of the Jewish state of Israel. And it should offer the outlines of a two-state solution -- giving Palestinians something to gain and something to lose. The stakes are enormous and there is no way forward without active American engagement.

Likely this was written prior to the presentation of Sharon's unilateral Gaza withdrawal which seems to fit all the qualifications of a Berger foreign policy in this area. And the continuation of the suicide strategy is in doubt now that Israel has made it clear that being a pro-suicide bombing leader forfeits any immunity you might have against assassination. Sandy Berger should be happy.

Indeed, it seems he is happy and has convinced Kerry to come aboard the Sharon initiative. That's got to make a lot of the left spit nails but where are they going to go, Nader?

Hmmm....

Modern Antisemitism

What is wrong with the left in Germany? The indispensible Davids Medienkritik points out an odious example of modern day anti-semitism in regional German public TV. In his commentary he notes that anti-semitism has largely ceased to be a right wing problem in Germany and is now found largely in leftist political circles.

The left has no less an obligation than the right to stamp out anti-semitism and should be punished with the exact same severity when it falls down on the job. I'm looking forward to hearing about how the TV channel in question (NDR) got its head handed to them for this idiocy.

Hamas Leader Not Anonymous After All?

I had earlier talked about Hamas' leadership practices taking a page from papal instances of naming anonymous leadership. Apparently, the secret might be out of the bag. The new Hamas leader's name seems to be Mahmoud A-Zahar. I'm sure he'll be just as missile proof as the previous holder of the title (ie not very). Israel, I'm sure, is keeping a close watch on such things and barring a Labor resurgence there seems to be no end in sight for the policy of targeting leadership in their war against Hamas.

A Problem With Microsoft

I'm taking a small break (after browser crash) from my opus fisking of Sandy Berger's Foreign Affairs piece on the foreign policy of the next Democrat President and going through my mail read an XPNews item about Service Pack 2.

Some users are reporting problems with Norton anti-virus after installing SP2 (specifically, that NAV 2004 will no longer update its virus definitions). Other third-party programs that have been reported to have problems with SP2 include StyleXP, AOL and WinFax. Updated versions of these programs have been or will most likely be patched to work with the service pack after its final release.

This is where the government's failure to prosecute Microsoft for its crimes really hits me. You see every single one of these programs and thousands like them are written by Microsoft customers (using their development kits which must be paid for) on the promise that there will be a certain level of interoperability provided and that certain things will stay stable between versions. Yet Microsoft has admitted in court (DR-DOS case for example) and in the press that it has purposefully changed its software products so that its competitors will lose business because their current versions of software will no longer work properly.

So for anybody, like me, who has something of a sense of computer history whenever I see a paragraph like the above, I end up going through the computer equivalent of kremlinology. Are these programs strategic competitors of Microsoft? Is MS doing this on purpose to set the stage for the introduction of a competing product? What should I tell my clients?

Now the highest probability is that it's all innocent but Microsoft has employed people who purposefully and illegally break compatibility and they have never been dealt with by the justice system. You just don't know and will never know until some prosecutor gets an appropriate budget to look into this mess.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XII

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XII is below:

The Democratic approach to resolving disputes with Europe over treaties should be pragmatic, focused on improving flawed agreements rather than ripping them up. International law is not self-enforcing. It does not, by itself, solve anything. But when our goals are embodied in binding agreements, we can gain international support in enforcing them when they are violated. By the same token, nothing undermines U.S. authority more than the perception that the United States considers itself too powerful to be bound by the norms we preach to others.

A useful corollary might be not to sign things that can't get past the Senate. Kyoto would still be under negotiation if it were not for Sandy Berger's old boss Bill Clinton signing away what he knew would have to be unsigned. Signing treaties that you know are unacceptable to the national interest is a good way to set up talking points in the next election but is highly deleterious to our nation's standing. It is a poor principle that no matter what is signed at the 11th hour, no agreement is too lopsided, unfair, or unworkable to deserve repudiation by the next government. Truly adopting such an idea would be a step backwards for our system of government as we went back to the old style of transitions where hostility reigned and damn the national interest.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking XI

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part XI is below:

A Democratic administration will need to reaffirm the United States' willingness to use military power -- alone if necessary -- in defense of its vital interests. But it will have no more urgent task than to restore America's global moral and political authority, so that when we decide to act we can persuade others to join us. Achieving this reversal will require forging a new strategic bargain with our closest allies, particularly in Europe. To this end, Washington should begin with a simple statement of policy: that the United States will act in concert with its allies in meeting global threats as a first, not last, resort. When we ask our allies to join us in military action, or in nation-building efforts in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, we should be ready to share not just the risks but also the decision-making. That is what we did when NATO went to war in Bosnia and Kosovo, and what the administration irresponsibly failed to do when NATO invoked its collective defense clause to offer aid to the United States in Afghanistan. The U.S. side of the bargain must also include a disciplined focus on our true global priorities, starting with the war on terrorism, undistracted by petty ideological disputes over issues such as Kyoto, the ICC, and the biological weapons convention.

I expect that the US will not have to repeat the methods and tactics that we used in Afghanistan and Iraq because these were an artifact of the shift from peace to war. The cross-border entanglements where major political players are compromised by dictators are going to come out, have started coming out. As the scandalous behavior of all too many becomes clear, what will also come clear is that such behavior, no matter how profitable in the short run, will be exposed and will destroy reputation and livelihood when it is uncovered. A virtuous circle is starting to form and will emerge over the next few years cleaning up the politics both at home and abroad and reducing the influence that such compromised figures have in our foreign policy decisions.

This requires no new strategic bargain, merely a recognition that they've cleaned up their act and are acting in their own interest and no longer as shills for dictators. When we are truly negotiating with our allies, we can give them all that Sandy Berger says we should. The disturbing thought is when we have allied governments bought and paid for by our enemies Berger would still have us share command, share all information, and give them heavy influence over our actions.

It's also instructive that Kyoto, a treaty embodying principles preemptively rejected 95-0 by the US Senate is included in a list of 'petty ideological disagreements'. If anything is passed 95-0 in the US Senate, you can be very sure that this issue is not a subject of mere petty ideological disagreement.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking X

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part X is below:

Going into Iraq, the Bush administration believed that most of our allies would get on board if we made it clear that the train would leave without them. It also believed that we did not need the legitimacy UN authorization and involvement would have bestowed. Those theories did not stand up to reality. Washington's failure to gain the support of capable allies (France, Germany, and Turkey, rather than, say, the Marshall Islands) vastly increased the human, financial, and strategic costs of the war and has threatened the success of the occupation.

This section assumes that there was some magical method of overcoming the fact that powerful actors in our "capable allies" were bought by Saddam. It is still not laughable that such a scenario could have existed yet, just as it was not laughable for some time to defend Hiss or claim that the USCP was not controlled by the Soviets. Eventually the damning truth came out as it will in this case. I don't think Sandy Berger will be very proud of this statement a decade from now.

The administration continued to squander U.S. influence with its allies even after the war. Much has been said about the Pentagon's rash decision to deny Iraqi reconstruction contracts to companies from NATO allies such as Canada, France, and Germany, just as the United States was asking them to forgive Iraqi debt. But few people noticed the administration's even more bizarre decision to suspend millions in military aid to countries that supported the war because they refused to grant Americans full immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the end, we treated "new Europe" as shabbily as we treated "old Europe."

As for the UN, a few months after the Iraq invasion the administration found that the leader of Iraq's dominant Shia community would not even talk to American officials, much less accept our plan for elections in Iraq. So Washington begged the UN to step in on our behalf: a belated recognition that our actions are seen as more legitimate when the international community embraces them.

News Flash, high Democrat policy wise man advocates US allow troops to go before kangaroo court. We don't belong to the ICC because we think that the ICC is not a proper tribunal and will be filled with abuses. Berger doesn't take the stupid but defensible position that we should join the ICC. Instead he is saying here that we should not act in any way to actually defend our position. He is trying to forge a linkage between support for Iraq and permitting the prosecution of our troops via a court that we feel would create unjust prosecutions. Defending our interests is treating our allies shabbily. Much better, in Berger's eyes, to treat our troops shabbily and not insist on treaties that complicate our allies' relationships with the French.

The UN, of course, was the focus of two major successful resolution campaigns and a major speech at the UN by President Bush. Since this doesn't fit the mold of a presidential administration determined to sideline the UN, history is ignored for a good story line. What ended up happening was that we were forced into a choice between action and inaction with sanctions coming apart at the seams and Saddam in the home stretch of his campaign to get out from under the post-Kuwait restrictive regime. At the last possible minute before we lost our good weather, we invaded. It was a close run thing.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking IX

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part IX is below:

A posture of strength and resolve and a willingness to define clear terms and to impose consequences are clearly the right approach for dealing with our adversaries. But where the Bush administration has gone badly wrong is in applying its "with us or against us" philosophy to friends as well as foes. Put simply, our natural allies are much more likely to be persuaded by the power of American arguments than by the argument of American power. Democratically elected leaders -- whether in Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, or South Korea -- must sustain popular support for joint endeavors with the United States. When we work to convince them that the United States is using its strength for the common good, we enable them to stand with us. But when we compel them to serve our ends, we make it politically necessary, even advantageous, for them to resist us. It would have been hard to imagine a decade ago that leaders of Germany and South Korea -- two nations that owe their existence to the sacrifice of American blood -- would win elections by appealing to anti-Americanism.

The problem here is that Berger is thinking too much in terms of black and white compared to the nuanced position of the Bush administration. No, I'm not kidding and yes, you read that correctly. The a large part of the exercise of Westphalia was in reducing nuance. The complexities of a particular country were reduced to a broad unit called the state. Everybody was homogenized and restricted from interacting with the component pieces of the state. You just took whatever where the outputs of that state and dealt with the ruling government to fix any problems you had with what ever came out. The internal workings were none of your business.

In the Westphalian revisionist efforts of the Bush and Blair governments, we're opening up those units called states and finding out that a large part of why entities such as Iraq were fundamentally unfixable were because some people had long been forging non-Westphalian alliances for private gain. People in the Functioning Core who are well connected politically are taking money from dictators in the Non-Integrating Gap in order to frustrate efforts at overthrowing the tyrants and moving these societies into the Core. This is becoming public in the slow motion catastrophe that is the oil-for-food scandal.

In such a situation where your allies are riddled with traitors who are in foreign pay and the obstructionism of a friend who doesn't yet see reason is indistinguishable from the obstructionism of a paid enemy agent there has to be a period of clarification where we sort the sheep from the goats.

Berger provides no recognition of this reality on the ground and his simplistic and naive position ignoring these important realities handicaps and will continue to handicap his ability to give useful advice.

How, exactly, would a future Democrat president address our current and future Cardinal Richelieu-like plotters who wield enormous influence with governments all across the Functioning Core? How are we supposed to react the next time governments in the Core are bought off by dictators in the Gap?

Berger's Vision: The Fisking VIII

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part VIII is below:

Likewise, we must reject the convenient fallacies that free markets inevitably give rise to free societies or that globalization by itself will lead to peace. Nations and leaders are not captive to abstract historical forces but act in accordance with their interests and ambitions. For the foreseeable future, the United States and its allies must be prepared to employ raw military and economic power to check the ambitions of those who threaten our interests.

There are two forms of competition challenging the US right now, competition and friction within the Functioning Core and the dangers that are emerging from the Non-Integrating Gap. The competition and the friction within the Functioning Core is at its lowest ebb in centuries. There are no civilizational conflicts on the horizon. There are no alternative great ideas that people will die in their millions for. We are in a period of consolidation and cleanup in the victory of free market capitalism over other economic systems and pluralism in the Core as a social system.

Berger is right that globalization, by itself, does not inevitably lead to peace but that is a half-truth. The kind of frictions that it does not help out with are intra-Core frictions, the very problems that we can put on the back burner because of their low threat level. The chance of Islamists coming in and imposing Sharia is much higher than the French coming in and forcing us to recite in school how "our fathers, the Gauls" created everything.

Where globalization and adopting the Core's rulesets does promote peace is in the friction and danger coming out of the Non-Integrating Gap. Since this is our primary security challenge of this era it's disturbing that Berger isn't talking about the elephant in the room.

Berger's Vision: The Fisking VII

Sandy Berger was commissioned by Foreign Affairs to produce a foreign policy essay for the next president from a Democrat perspective.

This is much too long to analyze in one shot, thus the numbered title, Part VII is below:

And now, for a more hopeful section:

Bush administration hard-liners have not been bashful about defining and defending their vision. In an election year, Democrats must also be clear about what they believe and about what they would do to advance U.S. security, prosperity, and democratic ideals, to restore our influence, standing, and ability to lead. Democrats must outline a foreign policy that not only sets the right goals, but also rebuilds America's capacity to achieve them.

WITH US, NOT AGAINST US

Every postwar administration, Republican and Democratic, has believed that there are things in this world worth fighting: threatening regimes or individuals who deserve to be called evil and can be stopped only by force. And today, although we must try to change the political and economic conditions in which terrorist movements are spawned, we must recognize that simply addressing root causes will not stop committed terrorists from attacking the United States and our allies; such people must be apprehended or killed.

The only thing that I would add to this section besides a bravo, well done is that there is one other thing you can do with committed terrorists, you can attack their belief system. This is a crucial distinction and an important challenge for anybody seeking high political office in the US today. Getting the government to publicly challenge the Islamist's belief system is a very difficult thing to do because it runs smack into the first amendment's protection of religious expression and the religious peace treaty that marks the miracle of so many faiths sharing the same country peacefully where in other nations the same faiths fight and kill each other. It used to be that I'd idly wonder how we would handle a modern day thuggee, a religion that is a murder cult. Would we do better than the british who exterminated it or could we even do as well? We now have the chance to find out but Sandy Berger doesn't even address the issue in this otherwise admirable segment.