It isn't just the EU's frankenfoods phobia that makes African lives miserable by manipulating their agricultural practices. The EU's collective shudder that somebody somewhere, might be saving lives by spraying DDT does the same thing. Uganda's the latest to feel the EU's displeasure as their organic crops are blackballed for indoor malarial spraying away from the fields.
If the PRC is smart, they're already negotiating to secure Ugandan markets for agricultural exports to the PRC. The PRC will want high yields and be less interested in indoor spraying of DDT and other practices that don't actually affect the crop. As Europe continues to fuss, they will find africans less willing to listen and more willing to turn to alternate markets, reducing the damage european phobias do to the global agricultural market.
HT: Instapundit
One of the things that infuriates me about the EU's "frankenfoods" phobia is how their resistance to genetic engineering impoverishes the African farmer. Africa ends up with low yielding seeds and Europe doesn't hold itself morally accountable for the resulting poverty. But the chinese don't care about GM and if the PRC takes an interest in African agriculture on a scale with its present interest in mining and timber, African leaders will no longer need to kowtow to irrational EU fears and will be able to increase yields using GM seeds. That will significantly increase both global food supply and energy supply through biofuel acreage.
HT: Thomas Barnett
I had hopes for Vladimir Putin. If he would just keep his word and retire after two terms, the frequency of power changes would eventually clean up the russian political swamp. That was the big chance. But after reading about Russia's upcoming switcheroo with Putin just playing musical chairs and running the country from his new role as Prime Minister that's gone.
Napoleon said.., but no, let Richard Brookheiser say it better:
When Napoleon was on St. Helena, one of the remarks he made in his table talk was "They wanted me to be another Washington." Then he went on to explain, in Napoleonic fashion, how this was not possible in his circumstances. Ambition always finds reasons.Ambition always finds reasons — except when you refuse to look for them. Dictators always have trouble with Washington.
Putin seems to have the same trouble Napoleon did with Washington. May he have the same end too.
My April 25th note certainly generated a lot of interest, an early prediction of a win in Iraq. Now it seems that Vice President Cheney agrees that Iraq's provinces are well on their way to self-governance and the job will be done by the end of the Bush administration, which means that the dynamic of "the majority of Iraq is already handed over" will be in full swing for the election cycle.
It's nice when an "out there" prediction gets the VP seal of approval but you heard it here first.
Now I didn't get things entirely right. I thought at the time that the US would finesse the kurdish provinces to help keep the Turks out. The US did not. I also didn't predict that other criteria would overtake the province handovers to awaken a significant portion of the american people to the reality of Iraqi progress. But the province handovers are happening and will change the US domestic political dynamic and give enough cover to avoid betraying free Iraq.
Just was reading about how Ramadi is now and the following section struck me:
As I was sitting atop a sand bag wall interviewing a sergeant, a Marine 1st Lieutenant approached me. He explained that he was going to confront an Iraqi Policeman (who we’ll call Mohammad to protect his true identity) who was suspected of being involved in the insurgency during 2005. The situation was all the more extraordinary since Mohammad and the lieutenant are friends. As the Lt. casually mentioned that I would be able to ask some questions, I jumped off the wall, quickly gathered my gear, and wondered about what I would be witnessing.Sitting in a small room lined with cots and gear, the lieutenant talked to Mohammed through an Iraqi interpreter. “We know you were an insurgent during the fighting – you’re in no trouble – I just want you to tell me the truth.” Mohammad was now visibly shaking and appeared nervous before he quietly answered “yes.” “Did you ever fire on any Marines,” was the lieutenant’s first question. Mohammad was clearly concerned and replied with a long answer, but ultimately ended with a simple yes. “I was in Ramadi during the same time, so you could have possibly been shooting at me,” stated the lieutenant. “It’s okay Mohammad - if you were shooting at me then I was firing back at you,” joked the lieutenant. The rest of the session involved the lieutenant and Mohammad exchanging promises to never fight again, and to work together to protect the city of Ramadi. Furthermore, pledges were exchanged that this new understanding, between friends, would not affect their friendship.
I've heard that uniforms sometimes don't matter in Iraq, that institutions are heavily infiltrated by insurgents and militia. I've heard that the tribal allies, the insurgent allies are all allies of convenience. I've heard that there is no military solution to Iraq. And all that is likely true. But it's not the only truth.
Small, very personal conversations like this are happening all over Iraq. Personal pledges between new friends are being made. It is a very retail form of politics, written in blood and the intimate, uniquely close bonds that combat seems to forge. It is largely (though likely not only) being committed by our uniformed armed forces. The big bosses may have started this as alliances of convenience with the Americans and the government but I suspect that it's not turning out that way on the ground.
Our military studies Clauswitz, studies him seriously and have fully internalized his famous statement that "politics is war by other means". So politics, a very limited, circumscribed form of politics, is well within their bailiwick. And our uniformed politicians are winning the peace, one insurgent at a time.
And our media is missing it, as it is missing so many other things.
As so many other optimists, I'm very aware that we can still foul this up, undo all those personal pledges won by our uniformed politicians. The biggest danger is that all these political efforts will be undone by some sort of spectacular clowning by anti-war Democrats on the Senate floor. Sen. Reid call your office.
This article brings up an interesting fact. When Saudi Arabia and Israel got their latest round of weapons deals, they did not condemn the weapons received by the other country. Apparently this is unprecedented, a real sign that Iran is replacing all the old enemies in today's Middle East.
Putin cries out It wasn't us who initiated a new round of arms race. And it's true that the US has made a bunch of military moves in what Russian imperialists would consider their rightful zones of control. But it takes two to create an arms race. A simple lack of reaction will eventually get the message across that we really aren't trying to humiliate Russia.
When Russia upgrades their nukes or changes the deployment of their conventional forces, the US and the EU will have a choice, to react or not to react. The best confidence building mechanism is to simply smile and say to Russia that it's welcome to deploy systems that would overwhelm the proposed missile shield because that system is not aimed at them and our evaluation of its effectiveness is not altered no matter how Russia reconfigures its force structure so long as Russia remains committed to engaging with the world and maintains a non-imperialist policy.
So long as sane military and political actors rule in the Kremlin, a thin shield is adequate. And if the insane return to power, we'll have plenty of time to thicken that skin.
Russia has enormous oil and gas reserves. It's currently using that fact to keep the EU in check, forcing them to overlook Russia's various sins against democracy, economic liberty, and human rights because these governments couldn't survive sanctions against Russia and everybody knows it while Russia could route its exports around the EU and have enough revenue to survive. And where are the EU governments going to go for morally superior energy supplies, Saudi Arabia?
VOLZHSKY UTYOS, Russia (AP) - President Vladimir Putin, emboldened by Russia's vast oil and gas wealth, bluntly rejected European criticism of his crackdown on political foes, saying Friday that ``like it or not'' Russia's Western neighbors would have to accept it as a partner.
But Caspian Sea energy, were it to find a route to the EU without Russia getting its fingers in the pie, would upset this equation in a manner most threatening to Russia's current government (though not necessarily to Russia's detriment). Simply reading a map can inform you of Russia's likely strategies if you keep your eyes open and your mind in gear.
Russia has an interest in making the safest, most moral route for that energy westward to be through Russia's pipeline network. Russia has an interest in instability and odious governments arising in Georgia (or separatist region's thereof) and Azerbaijan. It has an interest in Turkey's romance with the EU ending in failure. Most intriguing of all, it has an interest in keeping the mullah regime staggering along in Iran.
It's the southern route that is most threatening to Russia because unlike the Caucuses, Iran is not historically "bandit country" where grievances are relatively easy to stir up and profound instability is just a few strategic tribal/clan murders away. Iran is historically its own creature, a regional and sometimes world class power that is difficult to disrupt. It's also the swiftest route for Caspian energy to hit the sea at which point it can go all over the world, including the EU. Russia's strategy of political impunity through energy dominance of Europe is history if a stable post-mullah regime emerges in Iran.
Is Russia reading the map the same way? Or do they see overriding interests that make them act differently? Just read the headlines and Russian moves cease to be puzzling, bearish orneriness and start fitting into a pattern pretty quickly.
Inspiration HT: Instapundit
The two major currents in Shia today are Grand Ayatollah Sistani's quietism and Iranian khomeinism. They are unalterably opposed to each other, one shunning direct political activity, the other wholeheartedly embracing it. This conflict, like many others had its lid kept on by Saddam's Baathist dictatorship. Iraqi quietism is probably the best vector we have to implement a firm kill as opposed to Tom Barnett's soft kill option (killing via connectivity), a scenario that I've never quite got with regards to Iran since the Iranians aren't stupid and know how to make themselves repulsive enough that they will always be able to limit connectivity sufficiently (through foreign disconnection campaigns) to maintain a grip on power.
Yet Barnett has a real point when he says:
We have Iran over the barrel but can't see the opportunity because of our strange fixation on global gun control.
Thus the solution to the Iranian problem is making the government of Iran our friend (at least to the level of friendship with France) no matter which faction is in power. But the US is singularly ill equipped to fight a religious conflict. We would tear apart our 1st amendment if we were to do such a thing. Here is where Grand Ayatollah Sistani comes in.
For his own reasons and completely independently of the US, he is the mortal enemy of khomeinism. He wants quietist Shiism to prevail. And he is winning.
In Tehran's storied central bazaar, an increasing number of merchants are sending their religious donations, a 20 percent tithe expected from all who can spare it, to Iraq's most senior Shi'ite cleric -- rather than to clerics closer to Iran's state power structure, said Jawad al-Ghaie, 48, a wholesaler of false eyelashes and nail extensions and a respected lay donor.Speaking carefully to avoid directly challenging the Iranian government, he and several fellow merchants suggested that Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani holds more spiritual sway because of his lifelong commitment to quietism. That is the school of thought that says Shi'ite leaders should stay out of government, and Sistani has stuck to it despite the great temptation to wade into the chaos of Iraqi politics.
Wolfowitz 'Must Go' reads the headline and it's a reasonably common one these days. But I wonder if that's enough. Let's say that all the Wolfowitz detractors are correct and Wolfowitz has acted improperly. What does that say about the Ethics Committee that twice approved his actions? Shouldn't they go as well? Isn't their position just as compromised as Wolfowitz? But that consistent position appears to be held by exactly zero people out there. The ethics reviewers are never called to account for their actions, only Wolfowitz must go.
Why?
I've written plenty about the need for Iraq to have its own foundational myths, often borrowing the concept of planting liberty trees. In practical terms, this translates to Iraq being supported while it evolves but not coddled so they shed little or no blood. Well Iraqi blood is flowing, rivers of it, and the progress is appearing. The end state will be a state that people have fought for, bled for, governors whose family members have died for that state. In the end game, Iraq won't just be a bunch of tribes with a flag but a real nation that will stand on its own, capable of starting to reverse the multi-century decline of Islam and the Middle East.
You can certainly argue that this sanguine attitude on my part is less then laudable. After all, what happens if the blood flows and the liberty trees don't take. A shrug of the shoulders and turning our backs on our friends is too easy from halfway around the world.
That may be, but at least there's a "world worth creating" at the end of the process, a goal worth fighting for. When the left does a "let them bleed", there often isn't even that.
Colombia's fight against the FARC and ELN terrorists has become harder, due to the fact that $55 million in military aid has been frozen by a U.S. Senate subcommittee led by Senator Patrick Leahy. This freeze holds the potential to greatly aid FARC and ELN, simply by preventing Colombia from keeping up the pressure, and shows how the change in control of Congress affects the global war on terror.
Colombia's efforts, backed by U.S. aid, not only have managed to get the AUC to disarm, but they also have put FARC and ELN on the ropes. FARC has, in recent months, fled across the Colombian-Ecuadorian border, seeking a safe haven. While a number of left-leaning parties and officials in Europe have abandoned FARC and ELN, recognizing their status as terrorists, they still draw a lot of sympathy, particularly among the American left.
But virtually all well-ended civil wars end up with governments that have members who have had connections with all sorts of violent players in the war. If having friends in the AUC is out of bounds as far as the US is concerned, friendly contacts with the FARC and ELN should be just as out of bounds. You couldn't staff a government with the politicians and bureaucrats left in Colombia if those were the rules of the game. No, the stated reason for the aid cutoff is a pretext but for what legitimate cause of US interest? I frankly can't see a one.
The US was supposed to be the country that couldn't get along without enemies. But every time missile defense is offered to the Russians the US shows that it can get along without a hostile Russia just fine. Russia, on the other hand, seems to have real psychological problems accepting the fact that we don't think that they're some mad ravening beast but rather a potential partner that we can work with.
Until the underlying source of the gulf between us (the Great Schism of 1054) is resolved, this is likely to be a continuing theme.
A small note:
I was reading the comments on a catholic analysis of the Iraq war when it just floored me how limited the discussion was regarding the nature of warfare. It was all, but all, laid out and argued in westphalian terms, pro and contra. But the pro side of the argument is much enhanced if one does not limit oneself to westphalian warfare. Iraq did not declare war or act in westphalian war terms but it certainly was at war with a good portion of the rest of the world if one takes any reasonable definition from pre-westphalian days.
When one paid mercenary companies to burn ones' enemies crops, kill their people, and generally make nuisances of themselves, this was an act of war. Since Saddam did this openly, the whole conversation about "pre-emptive war" disappears and the Iraq war turns into a more conventional discussion on a defensive war.
Enlarging the circumstances to be considered in war analysis isn't something new for me though. What was new is the insight on how internalized catholicism has made westphalianism as a moral argument on war. So far as I can tell, the Peace of Westphalia has almost no moral force. It was a political solution to the religious wars of Europe. It imposed political blinders and the acceptance of a number of polite fictions that were useful to keep the peace. When a country rejects its strictures, Catholic moral thought should put aside westphalianism and look at the war's justness without those blinders. But we just don't do it. The prospect of perpetual and growing mercenary war (under cover of islamic religious zealotry) just doesn't get its due and you can see it in the comments, especially on the opportunities that the pro-just war side repeatedly misses.
Saddam was at war with Israel via Hamas, with the Philippines via Abu Sayyef, with a dozen other nations via his support of terrorists, many of which had defense treaties with the US. Since the political entity called the USA is full on committed to the polite fictions of westphalianism, its moral justifications for its actions can only be confused. It does not follow that Catholicism need maintain those polite fictions though it's somewhat understandable that flesh and blood catholics may fall prey to those errors. That doesn't change the fact that it's a mistake.
The Catholic Church is 2000 years old. Westphalia was signed in 1648. The wars that confront us going forward are mostly going to be non-westphalian wars. It behooves the Church to do better.
Tom Barnett has an intellectual gem of an article on India that provoked two completely seperate riffs on my part. Here's the second.
America's monomaniacal focus on means over motivations continues apace. So exciting to have the realists back running things!
I believe the problem is largely one of poor connectivity in the media sphere. The world is woefully underinformed as to the actual state of american politics (as we're underinformed about the rest of the world's take on things). Go read the international press and you will find the most fantastic stories about how the US runs its countries and not just in far off Bangladesh or Zaire. A good deal of Canadian and UK coverage is downright clueless despite the shared language (and in Canada's case, shared border).
That leaves the depressing question of how to right the global media sphere so that it is possible for free polities to make realistic judgments of foreign intentions and relegate the means over motivation crowd to the dustbin of history. It's a tough job.
The only thing that I can come up with is a radical improvement in freely available tools for analysis and volunteer and professional open databases at least at the sophistication level of Wikipedia that assemble the raw data into something that can build enough confidence that we will bet our country's future on it. Couple that with much improved automatic translation software and you have the ability to view not only the dominant media that somebody is willing to pay to professionally translate but the underground media that may be highly influential and informative regarding the question of national motivation/intention without ever making it outside the border of a country.
Conceptually it's not that hard to do. The practicalities are going to take years but when it happens, we're going to gain a big jump in our ability to process states from the Gap and into the Core.
Tom Barnett has an intellectual gem of an article on India that provoked two completely seperate riffs on my part. Here's the first.
India's now demanding to be allowed to continue testing nuclear weapons and the Americans (those gun control nuts--on the international level, that is)
Why would anybody think that gun control on the national level is bad while gun control on the international level is not bad? First of all, it's a misnomer because nuclear weapons aren't guns but rather ordnance which doesn't really have 2nd amendment protection. You've never had the right to bear bombs or rockets as a 2nd amendment right (though you can make a 9th/10th amendment argument for it). But individual rights and rights of states are an inexact mapping at the best of times so let's just go with the flow on that distinction.
Let's look at the full text of the amendment to see whether it's worth agreeing or disagreeing with Barnett on this one because taken literally, he seems to be advocating not only for an Indian bomb but also a North Korean one (to be clear, Tom's advocating regime change for the Norks so he's not really advocating for a Nork bomb).
Going back to the original text is always useful:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
I think that the key entry is one that is not usually analyzed in terms of US political discourse, "free state". We don't really want tyrants to be well armed and it would be a worthwhile exercise to formalize that sentiment into a diplomatic position and let it permeate into the collective subconscious of the global power elite. Because India is a free state, our concern with the state of India's military should be that they maintain a reasonable level of protections so that their arms do not end up in the wrong hands under any circumstances.
North Korea, on the other hand, is decidedly not a free state and we should work whatever influence we can handle to defang the North Korean military to enable them to become a free state as soon as possible, by the best method possible. That they are also a proliferation nightmare, willing to strengthen the militaries of other non-free states is a separate, though equally disturbing, issue.
The realist fetish for arms control and balance of terror calculations in the US does not totally discount the distinction. Nobody calculates how many missiles we should have to deter the UK. Probably nobody calculates the nuclear deterrance of France either. But India is not in that club and there seems to be disagreement inside the US' halls of power as to whether they should be.
This internationalist restatement of the 2nd amendment is utterly alien to the UN system as well, with their polite/pernicious fiction that free states and tyrannies are equal in the international system. The UN has so far been incapable of intellectually dealing with the commonsense idea of bringing on new world powers like India into the 1st rank of powers by not standing in the way of their nuclear ambitions.
In the end Barnett's shot from the hip on India is right, though I think that he's getting there by a suboptimal path which leads to our continuing disagreements on Iran policy. But that's for another post.
Putin's still resisting the call of Caeser. They'd hand it to him on a silver platter. It's downright expected in a Russian political context but he's pulling a Washington in this respect, leaving voluntarily in order to make room for a successor. It's a remarkably healthy data point in a political scene that otherwise seems to be becoming quite bleak. Whatever his successor does (and it'll likely be a stage managed election and a coronation), hopefully he'll follow the same model of two terms and out.
Thomas Barnett calls it just more posturing but I think there's something more to the latest Iranian threats to explicitly embrace "illegal actions" on the NPT front. Since their position is that enrichment to nuclear energy plant grade material is within their NPT rights illegal actions can only mean something else coming out of their mouths. It cannot mean peaceful nuclear development at all.
But we've known that they have some sort of program for some time now so the threat can't be that they'll start researching weapons. Everybody knows that that horse left the barn a long time ago. So what is the threat, really?
I believe that the most likely threat is to make explicit and public what has been known for sure only to those with access to spy networks, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. This fires the starting gun on all the arab nuclear weapons programs that will inevitably follow such an announcement. It's a painful setback on worldwide proliferation. It requires little effort on Iran's part. It will make the Core's job to bring in the ME much more difficult because the ultimate logic of the NPT's punishment regime is disconnecting. The US will have suffered a major blow in its ability to pace its crises. Worst of all, we'll still have to buy Iranian crude so we can't even disconnect "properly".
But I'm reminded of some conversations I had way back in 1988-1989. Nicolae Ceausescu, feeling the pressure of democratization sweeping E. Europe, started to make cryptic references to a Romanian bomb in a couple of speeches. I had the pleasure of speaking with someone who served in Romania's rocket forces as a draftee who mentioned, rather quietly, that their training covered the full gamut of how to launch their missiles and those missiles had chemical, biological, and nuclear variants as well as conventional warheads that Romania admitted to. It is quite possible that Ceausescu was reaching for the nuclear card in an effort to survive the tide of reform and avoid the hangman.
It didn't work. Instead came the 12/89 "revolution" which was so murky that even today there is a considerable body of opinion inside Romania that it was no revolution but a Soviet engineered coup. I've seen enough odd things in my own exploration of the question that I wouldn't discount it entirely. It wasn't soft kill but it wasn't tanks rolling across the borders. It was a firm kill, KGB style.
Are we getting ready for a replay?
Russia's thirst for warm water ports is legendary. This is an interest that transcends ideology. The commissars had the fever just as badly as the tsars did. Putin and his crew are no different. A firm kill by the Russians right now would be a masterstroke. The US cannot intervene militarily as they are too busy in Iraq. The Europeans are too weak to do it no matter how militarily idle they are. If Putin can keep Russian involvement as hidden as his predecessors have, he has the best chance in a century to get those warm water ports. The mullah regime certainly has enough skeletons in their closet to justify popular revolution. Some groups have been fighting for quite some time. Russia wouldn't even mind too much if the Azeris, Baluchis, even Arabs peeled off of the core of Persia. Achieving a multi-century goal of Russian leadership is worth some secession movements, especially if the pot is kept stirred. They can be an asset if people can be distracted enough to take their eyes away from the ports prize.
So will Putin go for it? It's tough to tell without a security clearance. From a russian foreign policy perspective though, he'd be a fool not to.
In this scenario, Iran's making noise to scare off the agents it's already quietly caught plotting coups, making an argument that any attempt will cause so much chaos that oil prices will skyrocket, harming the global economy. This will certainly give consuming nation spies from NATO countries pause but where's the down side for major producer Russia?
I've been writing about how the US and Al Queda are fighting on a meta-battlefield of serialization and parallelization since at least 2003. The US is fundamentally trying to slow things down, occasionally biting where it chooses, chewing, and swallowing chunks of Al Queda and company at its convenience. Al Queda tries to make it politically impossible to maintain a sustainable pace so that the US is forced by political realities into burnout, leading to an opportunity where Al Queda can actually claim a durable military victory.
Given that well established dynamic, Glenn Reynold's post on losing momentum is so badly framed that it's better to toss it out and start over again. The US Army is now taking 42 year olds. This is a sign of force stretching that is currently manageable but it's a warning sign that Al Queda's efforts are not without effect. Al Queda wants us to speed up, overextending ourselves. We're not there yet but we could get there. Additional force commitments will get us to Al Queda's preffered scenario. So count me as having a different opinion than both Glenn Reynolds and Mohammed of Iraq the Model who would like the US to move much faster. Unfortunately, Mohammed is engaged in magical thinking. We aren't going further and faster because we can't sustain that sort of effort.
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It is astonishing to me that most coverage in Lebanon talks as if Hezbollah were the only voice of Lebanese Shia. This has never been true. Amal used to be the big voice of the Shia until Syria put its thumb on the scale and ensured that Hezbollah would win the internal Shia power struggle in Lebanon. So where is Amal today?
A quick google of Amal Lebanon led to this, a fascinating article offering the possibility of a sane Shia leadership for Lebanon. What was most jarring was this little bit:
Politically, moderate Shiites support the Amal party, headed by Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese Parliament. Despite revelations of corruption in its ranks over the past years, and despite the loss of considerable support owing to the efficient social services that Hezbollah has extended to the destitute, Amal's popularity still exceeds that of Hezbollah.
One thing that might put the stake in Hezbollah for the long haul may be to expropriate their social service networks as a punishment for launching a war and transferring those groups to Amal. If that could be accomplished, not only will Hezbollah be hurting for recruits but it will also wither due to Amal's usurping of its traditional role as helper of the poor.
As Hezbollah gets pasted by Israeli ordnance, few are noting its huge political success in shifting world opinion. This is because the success it has had is of the nature of a "dog that did not bark". Israel, in the past, has used war language with reference to Hamas and Hezbollah. The diplomatic community came down on Sharon like a ton of bricks for saying such things because as non-state actors, you cannot go to war with them.
Today, Israel is joined by everybody else in using war language with respect to Hezbollah. Who protests? Nobody (or at least nobody important) seems to care that we have made a fundamental shift in how we treat non-state movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. Frankly, nobody has seemed to notice.
This is a great victory for these two movements and the entire jihadist community. They are devoted to a political form that is nonwestphalian and by language and action, the world has taken a large step in recognizing their view of the world as objective reality. The consequences are large, and very poorly thought out by the world diplomatic community so far.
What is the need for the UN except the management and pacification of the parties that can declare and wage war? Sure, there are lots of ancillary functions beyond that but that is its central duty. So, does Hezbollah get a seat? Of course it doesn't, as a practical matter. But why shouldn't it get a seat if the world now recognizes it as a party that can declare and wage war?
A Russian businessman once offered me his view of the Russian national character. It went like this: "Russians are like small children. Generally they are sweet and lovable and innocent -- but now and then, without warning, without provocation, without any discernable reason, they bite you on the neck. Don't even ask them to explain why -- they would have no idea themselves; the question would be meaningless." He chuckled. "Yes, they've done this to me," he admitted.
But is Putin just a consummate surfer or is he engaging in structural work that will permit Russia to move forward on a sustainable basis past the upcoming crisis as the PRC hits the wall and the oil age ends? I wish I had more confidence that there is something larger behind Putin than a thirst for power.
When viewing the Islamist enterprise as a real, human project instead of the stuff of stories to scare little children, it's essential to look at their strategic goals. The strategic struggle of Islamism is a struggle to create a connected 'counter-core' just as functional as the global Core but distinct, disconnected from that Core, and in contention to integrate the Gap to it rather than the Core which it views as infidel dominated. The project seems to have hit a few snags in Iran where apparently President Ahmadinejad cannot even keep a campaign promise to visit every province in Iran to address local problems. The visits were supposed to all take place within his first year in office. Not only has that not taken place but the danger to national government figures has meant that some provinces are unlikely to be visited at all during Ahmadinejad's term of office. Counterinsurgency operations do take a long time as we are learning all over again in Iraq. Iran has similar issues, but inside its own borders.
These restive provinces constitute a Gap within the very heart of the Shia counter-core. They are a weak point that can be exploited by any outside agency that cares to because they are real problems, sore points that can be easily exacerbated at whim. Pushed hard enough, they can even form the basis of a "firm kill" solution where the regime is overthrown due to flames started in this counter-core Gap.
The EU is suspending direct aid to the Hamas run PA until Hamas recognizes Israel and otherwise undertakes to fulfill past PA agreements. It's been touch and go for awhile with some predicting that the EU would fold and fold relatively quickly, unwilling to stop payments to the PA.
It's a small bit of hope that they have not. Perhaps this will be a positive and significant component in the project of forcing Hamas to choose beetween the welfare of the palestinian people and fidelity to its maximalist demands.
The Bush administration is in a bit of a bind now that the EU is starting to officially fund Hamas. I really didn't believe that they would be that stupid. We're giving arab states who finance terrorism a hard time. Do EU officials think that they're going to be exempt?
Brian J Dunn usually does better than this:
When I've discussed dealing with Iran I've mostly focused on the need for regime change. But I've always assumed that it would be a military coup-driven change resting on the support of the people who will be grateful that Iranians are toppling the mullahs. I've not had much faith in the ability of the Iranian people to pull down the regime in an Insert-Your-Color-Here Revolution.Strategypage notes that people power revolts rely on a regime too reluctant to unleash the forces of the security apparatus on the people--either from moral sensibilities or fear the guys with guns won't shoot at the people if ordered to do so. And the Iranian regime is more than happy to kill and has the killers reliable enough to do the job:
It's crucial for any sort of internally driven revolution to understand these men and what motivates them. If it's money and power, can they be bought? If it's fear of the hangman, can they be given pardons or guarantees of comfortable exile? If it is out of religious fervor, are their mullahs that could turn them with a well written fatwa declaring that they must change sides?
No matter what the answers are, it is in the details of the motivation of the hard men defending the mullahs that will determine if a people power revolt is possible. Not all of them have to be turned, just enough to make resistance hopeless and demoralize the regime to the point where it negotiates a surrender.
It is very likely that intelligence agencies from various countries have pursued this information and that a pretty good map of regime military/paramilitary/police motivations exist, unit by unit. That's not the kind of thing that is going to go open source intelligence anytime soon. But it behooves us on the open side to recognize the limits of our analysis and to point to where the obvious holes are instead of filling them in with our own prejudices.
President Bush laid out two conditions for normalization of Hamas with the US. Stop maintaining separate military/paramilitary units and recognize Israel's right to exist. Israel's right to exist was established as part of the League of Nations Mandate system which carried through to the UN. According to several articles, Hamas has rejected the latter. This is going to isolate the regime. It's a regrettable outcome, but it was always the most likely one. That doesn't mean that jumping to the most likely outcome would have been the right thing. Russia was right to meet with Hamas in order to clarify which way they are going, though it will do them no favors for their own reputation. I suspect the Quartet drew straws on who was going to have the honors.
Now the palestinian people, and just as importantly the palestinian elite, have to be taught that democratic choice is not just an isolated event but it's a repeated process that has consequences. With Hamas choosing isolation and nonrecognition of Israel, the process will unfortunately be painful.
Iraq is starting to float the idea that Iran is behind the Samarra Golden Mosque bombing. If this is followed up by a trail of more and more clear indications that it was Iran, this really lays the trail for Iraqi action against the current Iranian regime, what we have here is an early effort to create the conditions for a new war, this time not against Iran per se, but merely its current regime.
So, how should Iran be taken out? Should it be by a "hard kill" invasion? Or should we "soft kill" the regime by connectivity? Or is there a door #3? Evidence for a middle-road, let's call it "firm kill" is emerging:
In the southwest, where most of Iran's oil, and Arabs, are found, two bombs went off in government offices. There were four injuries. These bombings have been going on since last Summer. The government blames foreign instigators. That may be true, but not the British foreigners the government names, but Iraqi Shia Arabs who feel the connection with their fellow Shia Arabs across the border in Iran.
Is the bombing campaign being done to destabilize the regime directly or to invite such severe repression that a Sistani/Najaf fatwa against the heretical Iranian government becomes inevitable? Such a situation would put Moqtada Sadr in a heck of a bind. The puppet would have to decide to either cut his strings or become useless to his Iranian masters by becoming too obviously their agent.
It's a nice play and it's occurring in plain sight.
Watching America is a news aggregator and translation service taking a distinctly leftish view of the world press, translating and assembling it for convenient consumption. It's a useful exercise in getting out of the self-congratulatory praise fest that is the constant danger of our narrowcast, niche, new news world.
It's scary what's out there, though.
Take this bit of foolishness by Linda Mcquaig in the Toronto Star
Take the question: Why are there so many suicide bombers in the Muslim world?Of course, there's a rote answer to this that we hear all the time: Muslims have a culture of death; their blind rage against our freedom leads them to sacrifice their lives to spite us.
Another explanation - one you rarely hear - is that they're blowing themselves up to fight military incursions into their lands. (In this sense, they're not that different from people throughout history who sacrificed their lives to defend territory against foreign armies.)
One person who's been saying this - and getting little attention - is Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Based on the comprehensive databank he's developed as director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, Pape concludes there's been a strategic goal common to nearly every act of suicide terrorism in the past 25 years: "To compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland."
Afghanistan was supposedly taken because we needed a stable government that would protect a pipeline to bring natural gas to the south asian market and possibly for export further. Unseating the Taliban who had provided Al Queda with sanctuary as they plotted and executed a plan to kill thousands of americans has nothing to do with it. It's all about the oil (or in this case, natural gas).
The reality is that a pipeline likely will be built as the security situation improves but the motivation is exactly backwards. We encourage pipelines to transit through shaky regimes we like in order to stabilize them with transit fees. We acquired the responsibility for gifting Afghanistan with something better when we justifiably ejected the Taliban.
Today, Afghanistan is in desperate need of money to replace poppy cultivation one of its few economic success stories. Pipeline income can be part of the long-term success story of removing Afghanistan as the #1 source of raw materials for heroin production.
Admittedly, it is hard to get a good handle on motivations, especially for projects that are likely to last decades and have already been around at least a decade. This is a sword that cuts two ways though. When the US might have good, honorable motivations or dastardly, power hungry ones, a commentator has a choice over which motive to assign (or just present them all and let the reader decide). It's something of a test of the writer. Linda Mcquaig exposes herself as an unabashed partisan by excluding the alternatives and just assuming the worst motivation on the part of the US. It is anti-americanism in full flower.
The LA Times has a fascinating, and disappointing, betrayal of Palestinian dignity penned by Khaled Meshaal, Hamas' political director. The fundamental truth of international aid is that it is a gift, a favor given by one country to another (or to groups inside another) country. When the Marshall plan ended, was the US punishing Germany or any of the other recipient countries? Of course not.
International aid is often, even usually attached with certain conditions. In the case of the Palestinian Authority, the conditions were that the Authority recognize Israel's right to exist and not war on the state of Israel. Fatah agreed to those conditions. To date, Hamas has not done so. To say that the Palestinian people are being threatened or punished because aid will be pulled if aid conditions are not fulfilled is to adopt the ugly manner of the welfare queen, the risible figure of fiction and reality that felt entitled to live by the sweat of others without any personal contribution to their own sustenance.
Welfare queens are contemptible and deserving of scorn because they can support themselves but choose not to. They voluntarily abase themselves, humiliate themselves, and say the world owes them. Sad to say, very often the world gives them enough to keep them out of sight, out of hearing, and out of mind.
By adopting the welfare queen attitude that aid is owed without any compromise or other effort, Mr. Meshaal betrays the dignity of the Palestinian people. Hamas knew the conditions for aid long before they went to the polls. They should have had a plan to survive without the aid for Palestine to thrive in independent dignity. Instead, we have this pathetic mau mau, this roaring welfare queen. It is betrayal. Palestinians deserve better.
Via Instapundity I learn that Egypt wants Hamas to recognize Israel. What's more interesting is the report in the same article that Egypt has convinced President Abbas to delay asking Hamas to form the next government until Hamas recognizes Israel and promises to abide by previous agreements.
This puts Hamas in a terrible bind. They can stick to their present position but only at a price of profound misery to the palestinian people with little chance of succor from Egypt or Jordan or they can abandon terrorism and almost guarantee schism inside Hamas and a more complicated civil war than already was brewing.
President Bush is currently looking pretty good on how he's playing things. Let's see if this continues.
Although the folks at The Corner may not see it, Hamas just gave George Bush 50% of US demands that Hamas no longer have an armed wing and recognize Israel's right to exist. This confirms that Hamas can count past its fingers and toes and knows what "making payroll" means for a government. This is encouraging. As the old song says, "one down, one to go, another town and one more show".
Hamas can bluster and fuss all it wants. They can keep their dignity and never admit they are giving in. That doesn't change the fact that they are giving in. Democracy forces people to grow up. Let's hope that the process is fast and relatively painless. When the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is folded into the Palestinian military structure, we'll really have made progress on ending the good cop/bad cop game of palestinian irresponsibility.
At that point, funding cutoffs become realistic because violence against Israel is violence initiated by the State. The PA will be responsible because they will have all the guns. Hopefully, Hamas will never lose the ability to count and never forget that they have to meet payroll and are utterly unable to do so without major outside help, 40% of their budget coming from the West (US & EU).
After reading this condemnation of the left, I guess I better put my marker down on the Google/PRC censorship brouhaha. I think that Google, on balance, should move into the PRC. There is nothing, at least as far as I can tell, that would prevent them from providing a penance for their sins. If Google is to remain committed to its "do no evil" ethos, it has to explicitly work to overcome the necessary compromise in censorship.
It could do so by providing the list of censored terms in real time. By providing the list, it both aids in working around the censorship and also gives a fascinating bit of information for the world to see, what is the PRC government afraid of its people learning? A lot of the list would be unsurprising. Tibet, Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, are almost guaranteed to be on the list. But I would be very surprised if the full list didn't also provide information on certain sensitive spots that virtually nobody knows the PRC is paranoid about. Who on the CCP purged list is also on the Internet censorship list?
There's no reason to just pick on the PRC. What search terms is Google blocking in France or Germany? Are there any blocks in the US? What are they? Engagement isn't worth a damn if you don't try to move the societal pile towards freedom. Boycotts aren't worth much either if you don't give the target a way out. Here's a way out. Here's a way to move the pile.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa critiques the too common (and too emotional) fears that Latin America is swinging back to leftist radicalism and a resurgence of communist revolutionary excess. The labels of left and right are too limiting, according to Mr Vargas Llosa. Instead, the left should be divided between herbivores and carnivores. The carnivores are Castro and Chavez, leaders who are not only leftist but toxic to civil society and political freedom. The herbivores, though no less wrong on economic theory are tolerable in their practice, not least of which is that they simply will not try to retain power once the people want a new choice. This latter brand of leftist seems to be what is currently on the rise.
The right has its herbivores and carnivores too. Pinochet was a carnivore, for instance, as were many of the military juntas of yore. But today's right is decidedly not dominated by carnivores. In fact, I can't think of one right-wing latin american carnivore in power or likely to get power in the future.
For Latin America to become a normal political zone, the left has to go through this process too. The herbivores must triumph and only then will the people be safe.
An old conversation cycles through my head lately. Dr. Thomas Barnett, in email wrote repeatedly that the US should go after the soft-kill in Iran. He just did it again on his blog. Connect with them and drown the mullah's madness in outside interdependence and relationships that compete with loyalty to the regime. I reject the idea, feeling that it's just not going to work, not that it couldn't in some idealized world but that the real world craziness of the mullahs would make it impossible. I fear I didn't carry my argument off very well, certainly not well enough to convince.
President Ahmadinejad seems to be fixated on carrying my argument for me. He's playing a special mullah version of 'crazy Nixon'. Nixon ran heavy bombing raids against North Vietnam during the Paris Peace Conference according to later reports in order to convince the PRC that Nixon was somewhat unhinged and that the US shouldn't be pushed too hard. President Ahmadinejad seems to be setting up a scenario specifically tailored against letting "soft kill" work. In all conflicts, the enemy gets to have a vote and the Iranian government seems to have voted to protect itself from the soft kill.
Iran doesn't fear the hard kill because it perceives that nobody who has the force levels necessary to accomplish the goal is free to act. The soft kill is the major threat so the Iranian hardliners will make themselves as repulsive as necessary to make it politically impossible to strategically coopt them by economic and social contacts with the West combined with political engagement. Iranian policy for hard liner survival must be all connectivity shall be mediated connectivity with safe implicit villains filtering out the unwanted aspects of international contact. This is a real, practical motivation behind the apocalyptic statements of President Ahmadijenad.
This takes care of western contact but what is left is the Iraqi threat. Iraq's religious scholars have a consensus belief that Khomeinism is heresy. If they are successful at establishing a superior alternative in Iraq, they are a deep threat to the regime as they have influence with the regime's strongest supporters, the ultra-conservative minority that forms the backbone of what's left of regime support (which putters around 30%). These scholars are neutralized by Iranian influence in Iraqi movements like the SCIRI and the Sadrists. Placing assassins near enough to the scholars so that they can remove anybody who writes anti-Khomeinist fatwas as an object lesson to silence the others neutralizes the threat from Najaf and Karbala.
Iran's doing a very good job at defending on both the hard kill of invasion (fomenting trouble in Iraq to keep US forces occupied) and the soft kill of connectivity. No matter how open and inviting the West resolves to be, we must maintain a level of self-respect and dignity. Ahmadinejad will ensure that we must degrade ourselves further than we can bear to avoid the soft-kill's deadly embrace of reforming connectivity.
It appears that the PRC is not quite ready to go completely mad. An announcement has been made that the officer that recently gave an order to shoot protesting peasants has been arrested. As in my original report, it's still too soon to tell where things are going. It's quite odd for somebody to give a shoot to kill order, be arrested for it, and to remain anonymous. We don't even know his rank and/or organizational affiliation.
Still, even if it's fake, an announcement of an arrest order gives a signal that the government is aware that such incidents are profoundly disturbing to foreign investors and destabilizing for the country even if the PRC could completely suppress domestic knowledge and reaction to these sad events.
The PRC remains far too close to the edge of the cliff for geopolitical comfort.
It's very unlikely that this is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back but chinese villagers getting shot over eminent domain compensation complaints is a new level of disorder in a rolling wave of rural protests that have spanned years. As long as it was truncheons and tear gas, deaths were rare and you could legitimately say that the PRC was not in crisis.
Now, it's more difficult to maintain the "all is well" mantra. It's still too soon to say definitively that there's a crisis but if protests don't slacken, if gunfire turns into a pattern instead of a one-time aberration, the entire world is going to have to rethink making the PRC its low-cost workshop. That would have disastrous consequences as the PRC's heretofore virtuous cycles turn into vicious ones.
The PRC risks everything, every day on several fronts. Pollution, courts and police that can be bought, a rickety banking system, a state employment sector that is still way too big, a system of crony capitalism that defies description, there are plenty of ticking time bombs in the PRC today. Any one of them can bring down the regime and provoke dissolution of the present order.
Each of these problems, and the several others that I didn't bother to list, are not especially high probability events. Collectively, though, they seem to me to be the more probable outcome of the great PRC experiment with authoritarianism than the popular "theory of a peacefully rising China" that PRC scholars push out to the world and among themselves as the future they are trying to create.
We can watch. We can try to provide help to reduce the chance of international spillover. What we cannot do is intervene more than nibbling around the edges because these problems are chinese and the PRC will either solve them or founder on them. Hopefully a Gorbachev will be at the helm if they founder.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is suggesting uprooting Israel and moving it to Europe. In doing this, he's accepting the principle that borders are not sacrosanct and can and should be adjusted to ease diplomatic tensions. This is a huge can of worms that demonstrates that Ahmadinejad is fundamentally not a serious politician.
Iran's vulnerability to claims that would adjust the map of Iran's own borders is substantial. If Iran were to be reduced to its Farsi speaking core it would lose a substantial amount of its territory, approximately half of its coastline on the Caspian sea (and related under-sea oil deposits).
In short, a country that is so vulnerable to border adjustment grievances, whether from within or provoked from without is best leaving the map redrawing business to others. Ahmadinejad should know that. He does not evidence it. He either needs to get a better education in the diplomatic arts or leave such statements to those who would be qualified to make them without embarrassing the country.
I've been sitting on a theory (actually on several but this post is about only one of them) because I thought that speaking about it, even to my limited readership, provided enough possibility of harming our side in the war on terror that it would be better to shut up. I've reassessed and toss my two cents in. I think that the CIA runs zero prisons in E. Europe.
The prisons alleged to exist are there. The bigwig international terrorists speculated about throughout the world are there. They just simply were transferred over to the Polish and Romanian governments and, under well established cooperative agreements, the CIA et al gets access to such prisoners of international interest. No doubt, some very discreet visitors from lots of countries have been visiting.
This scenario has the benefit of everybody in all governments telling the truth. The CIA says they do not run prisons in E. Europe: Truth.
The Polish and Romanian governments say that they have no secret US prisons: Truth.
Nobody seems to be asking whether Poland or Romania hold terrorists in their own prisons. Of course they do. Everybody has some terrorists. Everybody seems to be exercised about the violation of sovereignty that US prisons would mean. But if the Poles and the Romanians already had facilities that were up to snuff in terms of security, why would it be necessary for the CIA to construct its own facilities? What would be the benefit for all that cost?
Let's even say that the CIA built it all. What's the benefit of keeping the title of the facility in the US' name? There is none.
As long as there is an agreement with these countries to turn them over elsewhere if political pressure on their governments starts to get serious, there is little risk to have the prisoners out of US custody. All that will happen is that there will be a great shell game over the years maintained by various allied governments until these prisoners die of old age.
The fact of the matter is that countries are allowed to interrogate terrorists under their own control. This is both normal and desired under any sane system. Furthermore, most national laws give much more leeway than the US with regards as to when such prisoners have to surface in the court system. I don't see any moral dilemma over Poland, Romania, Germany, the UK, France, Spain, or Italy having a go at Khalid Sheikh Muhammed. It's not a particularly nice thing to do but is hardly the stuff of moral nightmares.
The protests over extraordinary rendition have always been about sending people to countries that regularly torture their prisoners. This is because that's the easy case. It's much tougher to protest if you're rendering a prisoner to France.
The game will go on. "Human rights" campaigners will be mesmerized by the shell game while national governments pass these men back and forth on secret flights whenever the campaigners grow too bothersome or the jihadi brigades get too close to executing a successful prison break out. It's a life sentence for terrorist leaders caught up in the system, without the benefit of being able to strike propaganda blows in their trials.
I just got through a 500+ comment thread on the recent resolution by the House to immediately withdraw from Iraq. The vote was 400-4. The commentary would be hysterical if it wasn't so pathetically childish.
Here's the comment I put at the end of this monstrosity:
The vote isn’t important about the domestic effects. The vote is important because it sends a clear message that there are 4 votes for pullout and 400 votes against when push comes to shove.The Senate voted for regular reports and shifting the burden over to Iraqis in 2006. Lots of people called that stupid because it sends a message that we’re going to leave people high and dry.
Murtha provided a nice excuse to the House leadership to create a counter-message. The resolution was stripped down to such a short length that there’s no excuse not to read it out on Al Jazeera in full as well as print it in full in every muslim newspaper along with the vote total, 400-4 against. This is a shot in the arm for any waverers who started getting nervous when they get the (inevitably garbled) message of the Senate vote.
Short, clear, simple, unspinnable by Al Queda and its mouthpieces. That was the goal of the resolution put up to vote and it accomplished its task. The domestic theater is just a sideshow. The foreign message is the main event.
Here's food for thought in a throwaway line:
"A vast army of young unemployed Muslims ... stands at the disposal of the would be Napoleons of radical Islam, and they have no choice but to lead it," wrote the Asia Times commentator known simply as "Spengler." "The outcome well might be a new Algerian war, fought on French soil."
The war to restore the Caliphate is not going to be a short war, even by its most optimistic of proponents. Such dreams have died as dead as the dreams of a quick Civil War died at First Bull Run. The new "french troops" in the jihad army, are they good for suicide bombing? Are they faithful, pious muslims? Are they disciplined, trained? Are they ideologically compatible with the new Napoleons or their other troops? Are they assimilable and willing to take on the faiths and ideologies of their muslim brothers at arms?
After only a little thought, the answers come quickly, no, no, no, no, and no. This spells trouble for our new little corporals, especially the last. It is one thing to create tactical alliance with a Saddam. There is leadership on both sides of the table and agreements can be made with the other without having to sully your own ideological purity.
As the Hohenzollern's learned upon taking up the crown of Romania, when a people comes to you for leadership, you must become part of them or eventually you will be rejected by them. Hohenzollern fought Hohenzollern in WW I and the Romanian branch was denied the name thereafter. What is the price the new Napoleons would have to pay to reliably command the loyalty of their French cohorts?
There is tremendous risk for the Islamists in rushing to head the French banlieus in their smoldering revolt against France. I am astonished that nobody else comments on it.
A thought occurs on next steps in France, not ours, but theirs. The current troubles seem bent on proving that the government cannot discharge its responsibilities to police the country and protect society. What if they turn to discrediting the government by attacking its electoral legitimacy. Given the limp response that seems to be well-underway, is it so far-fetched that at an electoral cycle coming near you, it won't be cars, but polling stations that are firebombed?
To pull off an election while under attack from insurgents, you have to have a very heavy police and military presence. If France is unwilling to provide this, if they choose appeasement, why wouldn't the "marginalized" strike to delegitimize the French state? Why wouldn't they disrupt elections? The whole edifice is rotten, they might say. Why not pull it all down? It makes no difference which faction of the political class divides the spoils for the next few years.
And then what?
Brian Dunn is a tad bitter about Russian/Iranian cooperation on satellite launches and speculates that when the Iranians decide to march north, we'll just sit on our hands.
Dunn gets some things right and a march north can make sense for Iran (if Iran's current government lasts a couple of decades while Russia weakens), we won't sit on our hands. Russia will do what Russia usually does in these circumstances. They'll raise the banner of Orthodoxy and Christendom and the US will respond.
The US will respond for two reasons. Orthodox allies like Romania will be saddling up, marching, and calling in their chits with the US. But the big prize for the US will be a chance to demonstrate that things have changed, that western christianity gives a damn about eastern and will provide solidarity when the chips are down.
I hope the scenario never plays out to see who's right but we absolutely won't sit on our hands.
I picked up The Peking Duck into my regular blog reading because I think I should get more information about the PRC in my news diet. The header of the comments page was really optimistic:
Note to commenters: All viewpoints are tolerated. Comments will never be deleted or edited except in cases of blatant disrespect or maliciousness as determined by the site owner. Thank you for commenting.
My rejected comment below:
A US that were imperialist, colonialist, would be a miserable failure if this is the result of our imposed government in Afghanistan. A US that is trying to set up a process whereby real governments, chosen by Afghans, start the long process of reconciliation with the modern world would view the Karzai government as a success.Ultimately, the lash punishments will fall if the people want them to in a free Afghanistan. The forces that support such punishments would have already killed the author and possibly the publisher of the magazine in question. Today, they're submitting the article for the government to decide whether charges should be filed. If you can hardly see a difference between the two, get better glasses.
After the Oil for Palaces scandal, reading articles like this lead me to just one question. Who has Tehran bought in the FRG government?
Germany, Russia's key ally in Europe, threw its weight behind Moscow's call, saying Iran's talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency watchdog and European negotiators were key to ending the stand-off."The Iran negotiations are not yet a topic for the Security Council, rather the negotiations should be revived," said Wolfgang Gerhardt, Germany's most likely next foreign minister after the September 18 election.
Is it honest opinion, or is it paid for by bribes under the table? This, ultimately, is the cost of the international community's acceptance of Saddam's dirty money. Saddam has really narrowed the space that the social democrat left has to differentiate themselves from the center-right as well as the EU to differentiate itself from the US.
Any significant internal dissension in the West will, for the near future at least, raise questions about its sincerity. The worst is yet to come. The vast center has not heard all the details of how corrupt the international political scene became and the dots have not been linked in a way that makes it perfectly clear. What Baghdad did, Tehran could do and might, in fact, be doing right now.
While reading this Balloon Juice post and especially its subsequent commentary, it became clear that it was time to come out of my Iraq hibernation and recap why, in August, 2005, I still think that the Iraq invasion was worth doing and would, if it were to do over again with perfect foreknowledge of the cost and waste, advocate that we do it again.
1. There is a toxic nexus in the Middle East. It is complex, spans the sectarian and governing model divides, and its existence spawns the fertile support ground that has made Al Queda a global threat and worthy of a worldwide war against them. The first and foremost reason to invade Iraq is that it was the most vulnerable practical invasion site that was a member of this toxic nexus of Middle East dictatorships. You can't reduce the 4th generation network of Al Queda to irrelevance without eliminating their common support matrix which is governmental, civic, and religious. Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) was the dynamite explosion that broke up a very stubborn, interlocking geopolitical system and continues to have positive effects in many different ways, some expected ( like the fact that the KSA is now serious about hunting Al Queda at home as it never was when the US had troops there), others a complete surprise (the Cedar Revolution).
2. One of the major components of Al Queda's attack on the US (and the West in general) is to eliminate westphalianism and to let us kill each other, sapping our strength in internecine war. We were already at war with Iraq. This is of supreme importance if we're going to sustain the Westphalian system long enough for us to come up with a sustainable, superior, successor system. We don't have enough body bags for all the corpses that will be produced around the world if we go back to the pre-Westphalian system. It would have taken us further down the slippery slope if we had not repurposed the old war into OIF.
3. The post 1991 sanctions regime, like all sanctions regimes, was cruel. Ending it with regime change had been official US policy since 1998. The US Congress passed that for a reason. Bill Clinton signed it for a reason. Those reasons were good, just, and we did our best to do it every which way but invasion prior to OIF implemented that 1998 legislation with quick finality. Anybody who breezily says that the sanctions were working "just fine" either are ignorant of the effects on the Iraqi people or are moral lepers who don't mind the death toll.
4. The sanctions regime led to a great moral rot in national institutions across the world and in our international system. Saddam acted like Capone in Cicero. He bought influence, safety, and UN cover for himself. It wasn't going to get any better as long as the oil-for-food regime was in place. We still don't know the extent of the rot but we know enough to say that it was a huge operation and we'll be many years in cleaning it up. Nobody on the anti-war side has ever explained how they would have cleaned up the UN and the national political corruption absent Saddam's removal. The best information we've gotten is the treasure trove of documents coming out of Baghdad. We have a hope of curing the rot because of OIF.
5. Saddam had a desire for WMD and a plan to get them. At best (for us), his plan was to get rid of sanctions, be certified WMD free, and get hip deep into the business of building them as fast as possible. Tales of stockpiles spirited into the Bekaa valley would make Saddam's Iraq even worse but even taking the most optimistic construction, Saddam's ambitions could not have been tolerated. Maintaining the sanctions and inspection regime was getting more and more difficult and would have meant escalating costs to the US, forcing us to choose between getting help on Al Queda or on Saddam isolation. We just couldn't afford that neverending commitment.
6. Iraq borders three major state sources of terrorist support. There simply isn't a better place to plant the tree of liberty if you want to create an example. For those who guffaw at the idea that arabs can become democrats, I would suggest that the electoral returns will prove me right over time. After all, if the arabs cannot become democrats, why do we allow them to vote in Detroit? As long as universal suffrage is maintained, the people will eventually correct any initial false steps.
7. Iraq has a coast and has invasion staging grounds accessible to the US (Kuwait and we-had-hoped Turkey). This makes things enormously easier. Afghanistan was a miracle of inland force projection. We shouldn't count on two miracles.
8. Iraq has a large majority of arabs. While Islam is not exclusively an arab religion, the arab ethnicity is at the heart of Islam and it seems to be largely at the heart of the Islamist enterprise (which, it's safe to say, is a subset of Islam). There's an awful lot of racism/arab supremecist in Islamist practice and it is unlikely that any efforts in, say Sudan (with its large black population), would affect those arab Islamists as much as the takedown of an unabashadly arab nation. Afghanistan certainly didn't do the trick.
9. Iraq was a state sponsor terrorist innovator. Saddam was growing more bold, openly creating a bounty market for terrorist acts in Israel. Just like the Central Asian muslim terrorist practice of beheading victims spread far beyond its modern Chechen genesis, a state-sponsored bounty market in dead infidels was an idea which needed to be strangled in its crib. Post-OIF, nobody has stepped into Saddam's role as the primary issuer of suicide bombing bounties.
10. Iraq's regime was an evil tyranny. There's something to be said for killing off tyrants, destroying their regimes on general principles. We can't afford to do it everywhere but we should not pass up the opportunity to do it when it is in our national interest.
It is a matter of both history and reality that if you pick a fight with a country that is militarily superior and you lose the resulting war, territory loss will occur. The winner might take your entire country or just a little bit like France and Germany swapping Alsace and Lorraine back and forth.
Has anybody ever run the famous Middle East "land for peace" equation backwards? It's an interesting variant. For each rocket launched out of Gaza, take a square meter. If it hits something valuable, take 5. If it hurts somebody, make it 10. If it kills someone make it 20. A suicide bomber will cost per victim in similar proportions.
But don't take the land back as occupied territory subject to future negotiations. Take the meter, 10 meters or 20 and annex it. Push all non-Israeli citizens out of the new Israeli territory and level what is there. Take little bits of land for every act of war and keep them as arab free as Palestinians want their country of Palestine to be jew free.
Let the Prime Minister of Israel have the right, on his own authority, to certify that a particular attack was carried out despite the best efforts of Palestine's authority and that no territory should be taken for that attack. Let the PM of Palestine sweat whether the certification will be given.
Until now, territory has always been acquired by Israel in defensive war and negotiated away to secure peace. After 30 years, it's not too far fetched to try a new variant.
I just posted this to Winds of Change on a thread proclaiming gloom and doom regarding Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia may very well be as corrupt as advertised. In fact, it likely is. That doesn't mean that we're up a creek without a paddle.
Since the article was published in the Atlantic in 2003, Fahd has died, and the Crown Prince is now king. The succession went smoothly and the new king will be given some time by even the most radical of the royal family's enemies to see whether his more austere personal style will translate into changes that they want in whatever direction they are pushing things to move. While that goes on, quietly, quietly, the West prepares for the hydrogen age. This will not be an age where the oil sheiks are left penniless. It will, however be one where they do not have the same stranglehold on the world economy. My comment on the thread is below.
The effect on the US economy of a Saudi shutoff is less devastating this year than last and will be less devastating still next year. The reason for this is that the cost for the next energy system, in the form of hydrogen fuel cells and the multiple feedstocks that will provide that hydrogen (including, but not limited to natural gas and oil) is becoming cheaper and more practical by the year. 2010 is the best guess at which point the two systems (fuel cell and petroleum burning internal combustion engines) will hit parity at which time, we'll be weaning ourselves off the oil age and into the hydrogen age.A saudi collapse would still hurt, but it would be less painful every year thereafter because a large number of new sources of energy would be coming on line that are now wasted because the energy you get out of them doesn't justify a separate infrastructure of different engines to burn each of these sources. With fuel cells, they all feed into the same energy carrier, the fuel cell which powers electric motors.
The key points are not to panic, not to cause a panic, and to put off the day of Saudi reckoning until new technology shrinks Saudi importance to the point where we can survive the shock without major disruption of our way of life. I'd give us good odds of doing so.
For quite some time, people have been wondering whether President Bush's pro-democracy calls are just lip service or a real change in US foreign policy that the US is prepared to pay a price to sustain. The key area, many thought, would be in Central Asia where we were cutting deals to create a network of bases in order to get a handle on Central Asian terrorism and also to supply operations in Afghanistan.
The evidence is now in and it looks like the naysayers have some apologies to hand out. Uzbekistan is so cross with us over our promotion of liberty and democracy that they're willing to forego a fairly serious chunk of change ($15M since 2001) and plunge relations into a deep freeze. Perhaps they fear that the pressure the US is putting on the regime is working well enough that an isolated Uzbekistan is considered better than an Uzbekistan under different, more democratic management.
I'd hoped that Hillary Clinton's turn to the center might hold a bit, might even bring the Democrats back to some sort of policy sanity for awhile.
Foolish me.
Writing in the Washington Post and teaming with the unpromising liberal dinosaur Carl Levin, Hillary just lost her mind over North Korea. Before I get to that, a little history.
The Clinton administration negotiated seriously with North Korea so that it would stop its progress towards nuclear weapons in violation of its treaty obligations. The product of those negotiations, the "Agreed Framework" was supposed to have kept us from the nightmare of a NE Asia nuclear race with S. Korea, Taiwan, and Japan all needing to build a bomb to deter N. Korea. The Agreed Framework failed. We had detected one of their nuclear initiatives, the plutonium one. They had been running two in parallel and their uranium program continued apace. The 1 to 2 nuclear weapons that were produced out of that uranium program are what stays our hand while Pyongyang shamelessly tramples on their NPT and Agreed Framework commitments today.
Senator Clinton praises the Agreed Framework agreement and wants us to move back to the days when we were being hoodwinked by the N. Korean government. That's bad policy no matter how you slice it.
What really got my goat was this section, blasting President Bush's insistence on multilateralism
This is about more than the stability of the Korean Peninsula and the fate of South Korea and U.S. troops stationed there, important as those things are. What is at stake is the stability of Northeast Asia and, arguably, the global economic and political order. The administration must get serious. It doesn't matter who is at the table as long as we and the North Koreans are there, and as long as both sides negotiate with seriousness and urgency. The administration must inject both into the process.
Beyond that, if Hu and Kim sat down over some dim sum and kim chee and hammered out an agreement that would verifiably get rid of N. Korea's nuclear weapons and dismantle its programs, would it really bother anybody here that the US was not at the table? I wouldn't lose a moment's sleep over it and would tip my hat to the savvy PRC diplomats who could think far enough ahead to see what an increase in world stature that would mean for their country.
The US seems to be promoting a system of regional powers that keeps their areas reasonably well running with a US supplied backstop. Nigeria is being promoted for that role in Africa, for example. Iraq needed to be a US show because there are no remotely acceptable regional powers as of our decision date to invade Saddam's Iraq. In NE Asia there are plenty of contenders for the role. That's why including all of them in talks is important. We don't want to be a world policeman. We don't want to infantilize serious nations and serious governments. It's too expensive and dangerous to boot.
I think that Brian Dunn is doing good work in raising the alarm that the PRC could invade Taiwan. I also think he's getting the motivation wrong. The PRC has a pretty good deal going. If they could keep things as they are, they likely would. Thomas Barnett's connectivity thesis does have validity. Where it breaks down is when actors do not behave rationally. The problem is one of transparency or, more accurately, lack of transparency.
If the PRC is much less stable than we think it is. If the leadership sees itself getting ousted because the money to subsidize the great economic frauds of the SOEs is running out, it is a realistic possibility that they will take Taiwan for the money, cut loose the SOEs, and blame their resultant recession on the inevitable economic boycott that the rest of the world will impose on the PRC. Since so much manufacturing is based out of China, they are probably in for only a temporary period of economic isolation.
A few window dressing changes of leadership and things could get to normal pretty quickly. How would the US react if the KMT were legalized after a forcible Taiwan takeover and a third to a half of the Communist party cadres left to join the KMT? The two, after all, are no longer at war. They also both agree that Taiwan is part of China.
This fanciful scenario entirely depends on very secret data, the actual state of the PRC's economy and the regime's ability to surf the discontents of a peacefully rising China. Frankly, I'm not sure anybody on the North American continent (official or unofficial) is really sure what the fracture points are.
Donald Sensing has a good article on the subject of military compulsion, how combat is a great deal about compelling your enemy to do what you want them to. As an endnote, he chides Callimachus for saying
We can be building up a strong and stable Iraq. Or we can be setting up a permanent battlefield there to draw in jihadis (the "flypaper effect") and fight them there because it's better than fighting them there.But not both. If we are deliberately attempting seriously to do both, we're making a mistake.
I think that Donald Sensing is right because I think that if we pack up our bags and go away, the jihadis will not. The flypaper backing is stuck to Iraq and the flypaper strategy can only be abandoned by an islamist government takeover. Given that reality, setting up Iraqi flypaper as we have will give us a bonus effect after we leave the bulk of our forces or even leave entirely. The jihadis will continue to go after Iraq until it falls. After all, they have not stopped attacks on the government of Saudi Arabia because US troops have left that kingdom.
The diplomatic bonus for the US in the islamic world is significant. Iraq can only cease to be a major focus for jihadi efforts if other countries join it as free and democratic nations, whether as constitutional monarchies or as republics. Thus, for their own national security and apart from any feelings of national gratitude for liberation from Saddam, Iraq's policy on muslim democratization and liberalization is pretty much fixed in a position that is favorable to long-term US goals as long as the current government stands and islamists remain a violent force.
If the Iraqi government is not strong, if Iraq is not stable, the diplomatic bonus we have bought with 1700+ casualties will be short lived, ephemeral. We've paid the piper let us at least enjoy the tune.
Lee Harris opines that the US is a duck of a society, unique in fact. He's not too happy with the idea that we're trying to promote liberty and free markets around the world.
Paradoxically, America can only help the world if it remembers how profoundly different we are from the rest of the world. By assuming that other nations can copy us, we are forgetting that we are, in every sense of the word, inimitable -- the product of an exceptional set of circumstances that occurred in one spot of the globe at one particular moment in the history of mankind. That is why any foreign policy that refuses to recognize our own uniqueness is inevitably doomed to failure.
There's nothing else there in the piece. There's no examination whether there might be certain lessons that can be drawn from the US system without blind imitation. Certainly imitation of the US educational system of the 40s served Japan quite well in its quest to move ahead post WW II. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples that are out there.
Inimitability may well be a factor of the overall US system. That says nothing about the imitability of system components, nor whether following the same direction (free markets, free governments) requires more detailed imitation at all.
The NY Times is finally dispelling the myth of a unified insurgency fighting against the Iraqi government and its coalition allies. The article admits that this is nothing new
Marines patrolling this desert region near the Syrian border have for months been seeing a strange new trend in the already complex Iraqi insurgency. Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west. The observations offer a new clue in the hidden world of the insurgency and suggest that there may have been, as American commanders suggest, a split between Islamic militants and local rebels.A United Nations official who served in Iraq last year and who consulted widely with militant groups said in a telephone interview that there has been a split for some time.
"There is a rift," said the official, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks he had held. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."
It's actually sort of sad that I don't think that this will happen. I've lost my faith in a large portion of the american left that they're a loyal opposition. I don't think that there are many elected officials in the Democrat party that fit that description but enough of their activist base fits that they're pushed into insane positions.
It's important not to let revisionism escape unanswered when it is pernicious to our war aims and abusive of the truth. Fallujah was a successful operation whose reconstruction has been hampered by insurgency war crimes necessitating strict security.
The article *is* quite thorough, almost as educational as Lord Haw Haw. Sieges succeed when the administration of a city falls. The article does not actually contend that the US actually failed in its siege but that reconstruction is a problem. Maybe that's just a problem of headline writing. What cannot be fairly laid at the feet of propagandists at the Asia Times is the unsubstantiated assertion that "There are daily war crimes being committed in Fallujah, even now," and that a group is honestly working to "document the war crimes and illegal weapons that were used during the November siege" without making even one credible assertion of a war crime that the US perpetrated.There were war crimes aplenty in Fallujah when it was under insurgent control. They were running torture chambers, raping and killing innocents, abusing all sorts of sanctuary provisions including the sanctuary of surrender, hiding among civilians, pretending to be wounded, using mosques for military purposes, fighting without uniform, etc. I do not think that this sort of thing is what Mohammed Abdulla, the executive director of the Study Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Fallujah is complaining about.
It is those abuses of the normal sanctuaries of war that require extraordinary security measures be imposed on the civilian population of Fallujah. That greatly slows down reconstruction and makes complaints and resentment inevitable. The war crimes are the insurgency's though and we should not forget it.
I can't understand why the French diplomatic corps is so blind they don't put people like these front and center in their diplomatic efforts vis a vis the US. A great deal of the problem between the US and France is that many in the US believe that nobody over there likes us. We're aware that Germany has the CDU and when they inevitably kick out the SPD from power some day, things will be looking up diplomatically between the US and Germany. What, exactly, is the pro-american party in France?
Highlighting, instead of obscuring, the existence of philo-american frenchmen would be a relatively cost-free way of letting americans know that we're not perennially doomed to have ankle-biting frenchman pissing us off.
When a major geopolitical player does something incomprehensible, there are generally competing explanations for it. Two of the most popular are that they're stupid or they are incapable of the behavior because of constraints external to the problem. Brian J Dunn thinks the PRC's both. He calls the Chinese too prideful to make the verbal concessions that the EU wants and titles his post "China Too Dense to Play Along".
It might very well be pride that is keeping the PRC from verbally giving what the EU wants but I don't think that denseness has anything to do with it. Verbal concessions of this nature are too easily spun into national humiliation and a good reason to throw the bums out. The PRC would rather do without European arms than without its ability to portray itself as a strong, nationalist force.
John Cole took issue with my use of the term "whines" in email. On further reflection it was somewhat harsh. In any case, he admits he was snookered as he hadn't understood that Yalta bashing has been US policy for a decade now and is thus bipartisan. I still think that he's missing a turn in making this more about the US and less about Russia but his current position is vastly improved.
John Cole whines about Yalta and really steps in it when he thinks that it's all about the US. The problem of condemning Yalta isn't that it dirties up FDR and Churchill but rather that condemnation is designed to dirty up Stalin.
Putin is fighting to reestablish Russia. For this he needs to have a suitable civic mythos. Liberal Democracy isn't cutting it in Russia so he has three alternatives.
1. Stalinism - A modified limited restoration of communist heroes, Stalin in the forefront is in order to rally the nation.
2. Monarchy - This is mostly a non-starter since the USSR made sure the world ran out of available Romanovs though the house technically still exists.
3. Orthodoxy - Russia has raised the banner of christendom before when it is in deep trouble.
4. Peasant Mythos - You see some of this in the current national anthem.
Out of the four options, Putin seems to have tossed out option 2 entirely, looked at option 4 and is seriously working on option 1. I cannot begin to tell you how bad it will be for world stability if Russia starts turning out high school students that are neo-stalinists. All of E. Europe would become a danger zone for nuclear proliferation. The long-term dream of pulling Russia fully into the Core would be dead for as long as that nonsense continued. Stalin is a very powerful force for disrupting connectivity.
President Bush is absolutely correct to condemn Yalta. It was not absolutely necessary to win the war against Hitler and Tojo and made the second half of the campaign to rid the world of 20th century totalitarianism unnecessarily long and costly. We did not have to go to war against Stalin. We just had to not stand in the way of the many, many people who wanted out from under his yoke.
Stalin admiration is as dangerous to the world today as Hitler admiration is. We should be ware.
Pat Buchanan entirely misses the boat by putting the Bush Doctrine and Deterrence as opposites. They are not. Deterrence is a doctrine of defense. It creates stasis where all sides on the playing field are slowed or even totally paralyzed for fear of some other side lighting off a nuclear weapon in response. The Bush Doctrine creates motion. It is a sword given in aid to ripe local movements (the color revolutions of the CIS) for freedom and democracy and in very rare circumstances (Iraq) it is akin to a pearl cultivator inserting a grain of sand in order to provoke the creation of a pearl. In either case it is a tool of geopolitical offense.
There is no particular reason why sword and shield cannot be used in combination. In fact, there is every reason in the world for them to be used in that fashion. Buchanan's taunt that we're using our deterrence shield is just stupid as tone, not as observation. Of course we're going to deter other powers. We never gave that up. But we're also going to create (Iraq) or recognize (Nigeria, PRC) regional responsible powers who will reign in their local loony toons neighbors. That's not going to go away and hasn't gone away.
N. Korea, if it actually lights off a nuclear explosion, could significantly impact the willingness of people to invest in the PRC. N. Korea maybe could get a missile to San Francisco but they certainly can reach Beijing which means that the economic blackmail that N. Korea must engage in to survive is more likely to be pointed towards the PRC than the US. The US can and is creating a missile defense system that makes such blackmail less effective. The PRC does not have the money to fund that same sort of research.
The negative effect on future PRC investment has likely led to frank and clear advice that bluster and threats at any level are OK but actual nuclear detonations are a very different matter. I would not be surprised if a nuclear detonation would lead to a sealed border between the PRC and N. Korea, a result that would cause regime collapse in a matter of under a year.
In a stunning bit of projection, supposed realist Fred Kaplan believes the PRC has no ability to overthrow N. Korea. Only the US, in his world view, has the ability to act regarding N. Korea.
In one sense, President Bush was right at his press conference: It is better to have several voices sending the same message to Kim Jong-il. But these voices don't matter if the one voice among them that can do something—that can turn the message into policy and action—chooses to do nothing.
Kaplan derides President Bush in this article that he doesn't understand power. Heaven help us if "understanding power" means adopting a patronizing attitude that belittles a rising power like the PRC and does not recognize that, in their neighborhood, they are capable of taking decisive action. Insulting the PRC in that fashion is a good way to keep them on the side of N. Korea. How realist is that?
Fred Kaplan has me steamed. He wants to assert that President Bush is wrong to say "there are still some in Iraq who aren't happy with democracy. They want to go back to the old days of tyranny and darkness and torture chambers and mass graves." But President Bush isn't wrong. In fact, he's exactly spot on.
I can't think of any of the several elements of the Iraqi insurgency that is not seeking to impose a tyrannical regime on Iraq that is an echo of the past. The difference is which style of tyranny, what vision of the past would be imposed. The dead would not care much if they died for defying a hyper-strict vision of Islam or for making a joke about the Baathist party. The grave is just as cold.
Kaplan misunderstands the nature of the US system because President Bush did not give a complicated breakdown of the various elements, he obviously is uninformed about the complexity of the situation. That's not the way a democratic republic works. The job of the president is to inform the people sufficiently so that they can make the big decisions come next election time and leave the details and the day-to-day direction to specialized representatives. President Bush did exactly that.
The US public doesn't much need to know whether it's going to be Sunni swords chopping off heads for relatively minor offenses, Shiite hangmen stringing up 14 year old girls who talk back to judges, or Baathist knives slitting throats in the street just for the heck of it. They're all despicable scum and President Bush thinks that we should be against them and for the working majority in Iraq that want a peaceful, free society that they can build out of their own faith and dreams