Pot Calling Kettle

Huffington Post AP Wire:

"GENEVA — Islamic countries pushed through a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday urging a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion _ a response largely to the furor last year over caricatures published in a Danish newspaper of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The statement proposed by the Organization of Islamic Conference addressed what it called a 'campaign' against Muslim minorities and the Islamic religion around the world since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

The resolution, which was opposed by a number of other non-Muslim countries, 'expresses deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations.'It makes no mention of any other religion besides Islam, but urges countries 'to take resolute action to prohibit the dissemination of racist and xenophobic ideas and material aimed at any religion or its followers that constitute incitement and religious hatred, hostility, or violence.'"

Of course, nowhere within this odious and pathetic resolution is the state-sponsored indoctrination programs of many Arab states addressed, such as the teaching of schoolchildren to hate "Jews and Crusaders." Similarly, the resolution fails to note the crude anti-Semitic rhetoric that fills the state-sponsored and religious media of Arab nations and the global Islamic umma. Although it is undeniable that what can be broadly considered "Islamophobia" has been promoted in the West by both non-state and some state actors, it pales in comparison to the sheer virulence and magnitude of state-sponsored xenophobia and eliminationist rhetoric in the Middle East and the hatred promoted in the tracts of radical Islamic preachers throughout the world.

This resolution is oddly perfect as a symbolism. Just like the corrupt postcolonial Third World kleptocracies and dictatorships who voted for this resolution , it seeks to mask overt repression (the idea of banning the criticism of religion and thus abjuring free speech) as an act of restorative justice. We should be thankful that it has no teeth.

Future War: The War on Terror After Iraq

A.E. "Future War: The War on Terror After Iraq." Jihad Monitor. 26 March 2007.

This was published as an occasional paper by the University of Granada's online think-tank on terrorism, the Jihad Monitor. For those of you who read the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor or Terrorist Focus, the Jihad Monitor's editor in chief Javier Jordan may be familiar.

My paper draws off some of the ideas I put out in a February 17 post on lone-wolf terrorism. The paper is around roughly 4,200 words long, with footnotes. Let me know what you think.

As much as I appreciate the President's sudden appreciation for bloggers, he's not really fooling anyone about the dangerous situation in Iraq. Omar and Fadhil should savor the moment for as long as it's worth. When the President of the United States mentions your blog in his speech--no, cites it as the sole evidence that his "surge" is working--there's a very good chance that the Mahdi Army or Al Qaeda in Iraq has every man with a computer trying to figure out your IP address.

New publication

A.E. "Why Conspiracy Theories Threaten Society." US Cavalry ON POINT. 29 March 2007.

The article examines the widespread conspiracy theories present in America, Britain, and Spain, theories that purport that Islamist suicide bombings were either aided or abetted by the government. I write that such false theories cause societal division and can be considered an unseen psychological side effect of suicide bombings.

Michael Jackson wants a giant robot that fires laser beams:

"Michael Jackson is in discussions about creating a 50-foot robotic replica of himself to roam the Las Vegas desert, according to reports. The pop legend is currently understood to be living in the city, as he considers making a comeback after 2004's turbulent child sex case. It has now been claimed that his plans include an elaborate show in Vegas, which would feature the giant Jacko striding around the desert, firing laser beams. If built, the metal monster would apparently be visible to aircraft as they come in to land in the casino capital."

Now, this is nothing new for Jacko. I think his next movie will be to come up with an entire religion with him as a prophet, although I think that's kind of already been done.

On the subject of robots, DARPA apparently wants powered suits a la Starcraft and Starship Troopers, and there are real-life hobbyists trying to build mechs. Whatever the result though, they probably won't look as cool as the Japanese giant robots we see in anime.

Thomas P.M. Barnett writes on the seizure of the British sailors:

"Count me among those who see this as a tit-for-tat on the recent sanctions announcement, plus the non-talks with US at regional Iraq conference. Iran wants our attention and this trolley car came down the street, so they jumped on. For the hard-liners with Ahmadinejad, they hope we'll bite on the "act of war" hyperbole that naturally flows from our neocons. For the non-hardliners, they're hoping they can force talks by striking against our proxy (UK) instead of us.

Me? I expect Bush and Co. to screw this up royally or simply use it as a pretext for striking--perhaps employing a proxy. But this was inevitable once we started arresting Iran's people in Iraq. Conflation, pure and simple. Like with Hezbollah last August, Iran's intent on proving it can conflate the region's various tensions at will, as always, striking against our proxies."

This is a very, very dangerous situation. I don't have any idea of how it will end.

I normally loathe Christopher Hitchens, but here I have to give him props for a great scoop. He went into the jungles of Uganda to build a profile of the psychotic leader of the LRA, Joseph Kony. As Hitchens details, this seems like something straight out of a horror film:

"Very few people, apart from his victims, have ever met or even seen the enslaving and child-stealing Joseph Kony, and the few pictures and films of him are amateur and indistinct. This very imprecision probably helps him to maintain his version of charisma. Here is what we know and (with the help of former captives and a Scotland Yard criminal profiler) what we speculate. Kony grew up in a Gulu Province village called Odek. He appointed himself the Lord's anointed prophet for the Acholi people of northern Uganda in 1987, and by the mid-90s was receiving arms and cash from Sudan.

He probably suffers from multiple-personality disorder, and he takes his dreams for prophecies. He goes into trances in which he speaks into a tape recorder and plays back the resulting words as commands. He has helped himself to about 50 captives as "wives," claiming Old Testament authority for this (King Solomon had 700 spouses), often insisting—partly for biblical reasons and partly for the more banal reason of AIDS dread—that they be virgins. He used to anoint his followers with a holy oil mashed from indigenous shea-butter nuts, and now uses "holy water," which he tells his little disciples will make them invulnerable to bullets. He has claimed to be able to turn stones into hand grenades, and many of his devotees say that they have seen him do it.

He warns any child tempted to run away that the baptismal fluids are visible to him forever and thus they can always be found again. (He can also identify many of his "children" by the pattern of lashes that they earned while under his tender care.) Signs of his disapproval include the cutting off of lips, noses, and breasts in the villages he raids and, to deter informers, a padlock driven through the upper and lower lips. This is the sort of deranged gang—flagellant, hysterical, fanatical, lethal, under-age—that an unfortunate traveler might have encountered on the roads of Europe during the Thirty Years' War or the last Crusade."

Hitchens' comparison to the Thirty Years War is very apt. Some people I've talked to about Kony write him off as yet another African militiaman, not at all dissimilar to the crazy gangsta-rap listening kids of the Liberian civil wars. But Kony is the model fighter of an age where religious fervor combined with the collapse of states makes for an increasingly gruesome contingent of nontrintarian warriors--Ralph Peters' "New Warrior Class," if you will.

It's very ironic that I've just cited both Peters and Hitchens in the same post, because I used to like them both a lot more. Though Hitchens sometimes grated on my sensibilities, I respected his writing in The Nation as eloquent and daring. Peters also wrote many interesting pieces, including one that inspired a great new blog. Unfortunately, Hitchens became a neoconservative zealot after 9/11 and Peters' slapshod columns for the New York Post contain none of the original thinking that characterized his best scholarly essays. His analysis of the Somalian conflict was embarrassingly bad, especially in light of recent events.

But Peters' "New Warrior Class" essay will be remembered for its prescience:

"The archetype of the new warrior class is a male who has no stake in peace, a loser with little education, no legal earning power, no abiding attractiveness to women, and no future. With gun in hand and the spittle of nationalist ideology dripping from his mouth, today's warrior murders those who once slighted him, seizes the women who avoided him, and plunders that which he would never otherwise have possessed. Initially, the totemic effect of a uniform, however shabby and incomplete, and the half-understood rhetoric of a cause lend him a notion of personal dignity he never sensed before, but his dedication to the cause is rarely as enduring as his taste for spoils. He will, however, cling to his empowering military garb. For the new warrior class, many of whose members possess no skills marketable in peace, the end of fighting means the end of the good times."

Mike Davis writes about IEDs and car bombs in today's TomPaine.com:

"Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the chlorine clouds and the truck bombs have deflected U.S. troops into a massive, desperate hunt for the "makeshift car-bomb factories" that surge spokesman Major General William Caldwell claims proliferate in the gritty suburbs and industrial estates that ring Baghdad. The image of a clandestine car-bomb industry, by the way, is rich with irony. Baghdad's factory belt contains hundreds of state-owned and private factories that once manufactured canned food, tiles, baby clothes, transit buses, fertilizers, commercial glass and the like.

Since the American invasion, however, the plants are idle, if not derelict, and their once integrated Sunni-Shiite workforces are bunkered down, jobless, in increasingly sectarian neighborhoods. Unemployment in greater Baghdad is variously estimated in the 40-60 percent range. It is unlikely that the current raids—using troops who would otherwise be securing streets and "winning hearts and minds"—will uncover more than a tiny fraction of the city's bomb "factories."

Indeed, the car bomb—even more than the roadside bombs (IEDs) that are filling the Humvee junkyards—has proven globally to be an almost invincible weapon of the ill-armed and underfunded, as well as the one weapon of mass destruction that the Bush administration has totally ignored. None of the American commanders in the field in 2003-2004, much less the imperial daydreamers in neoconservative think-tanks back in Washington, seem to have foreseen the ubiquity of its use.

According to a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, carried out by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Iraqi physicians (organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad), an estimated 78,000 Iraqis were killed by several thousand vehicle bombings between March 2003 to June 2006. Moreover, as I explain in my newly-published history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon, there is little hope for any technological fix or scientific miracle that will allow reliable detection of a stolen Mercedes with 500 pounds of C-4 in the trunk or a dump truck laden with chlorine tanks and high explosives idling in one of Baghdad's colossal traffic jams. (Checkpoints? Just a synonym for target of opportunity.)

In the meantime, the bombers are obviously wagering that if they can sustain current levels of carnage, the Shiite militias will be forced back onto the streets to protect their neighborhoods (as the American troops can't), risking a bloody, all-out confrontation with U.S. forces for the ownership of the vast Shiite slum of Sadr City and other Shiite areas in eastern Baghdad. On the other side, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, counterinsurgency expert and mastermind of the surge, must shut down the car-bombers by the beginning of the summer or face a likely popular revolt in Sadr City. With each explosion, his chances of success diminish."

There's a similarity here to the Israeli campaign against Lebanon last summer. The Katyusha rockets that rained down on Israeli northern towns are also cheap, portable, and easily hidden weapons that can directly target the civilian population, undermining the legitimacy of the government and sowing political division.

I have my own thoughts on the chlorine bombs, but first I am trying to find a publisher. Tomorrow, I have a piece in US Cavalry ON POINT about the increasing prevalence of conspiracy theories. I'll post it when its up.

New publications.

Two new updates to my Huffington Post Blog.

A.E. "Maoist Insurgency: A Blast From the Past." Huffington Post. 26 March 2007

A.E. "Maybe Iran Supports Terrorists--And Your Point Is?" Huffington Post. 15 March 2007

The first post is an analysis of the Naxalite insurgency in India. One point I made in the piece was that we shouldn't discount Leninist or Maoist insurgencies simply because we're used to dealing with ethnic, criminal, or religious non-state actors. Global inequality is rising, and with that we might very well see a revival of those dusty ideologies.

The second post (titled very provocatively, I know) is a straightforward argument against war with Iran. My main point is that (1) US support for anti-Iranian militants cancels out Iranian support for Iraqi groups as a casus belli and (2) invading would be a strategic disaster. It was written and posted on March 15--not up to date with changing events on the ground.

Rocket to Baghdad

The embassy is hit by another rocket:

"BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A rocket landed in Baghdad's heavily fortified international Green Zone on Monday, rocking the U.S. embassy but causing no casualties, witnesses said. U.S. embassy spokesman Lou Fintor would not say exactly where the rocket landed for security reasons but confirmed it had crashed into the sprawling international zone, which also houses the Iraqi government and other foreign embassies."

I wonder how long it will be until the Green Zone is hit by a serious terrorist attack. The insurgents must understand that a gruesome attack inside the only "safe" place in Baghdad would have a chilling effect on American morale. One of the most terrifying moments in the film Battle of Algiers is when the Algerian rebels carry out attacks within the urban, upscale European section of the city, machine-gunning random bystanders and bombing horse races. The siege of the U.S. embassy during the Tet Offensive also had a similar effect. Also worth mentioning here is John Robb's frighteningly plausible prediction of insurgents overrunning US-held ground.

On the lighter side, it appears someone in Hong Kong was really desperate to see their horse win:

It was a device worthy of Rube Goldberg or perhaps Wile E. Coyote: a dozen remote-controlled launching tubes secretly buried in the turf at Hong Kong's most famous horse racing track last week, armed with compressed air to fire tiny, liquid-filled darts into the bellies of horses at the starting gate.

No horses were hurt, because the tracks supervisor noticed something underfoot before racing started, discovered the elaborate mechanism concealed by grass-colored tape and called in a police bomb squad to remove it.

Terrorized?

Zbigniew Brzezinski has an op-ed in the Washington Post that's bound to attract some attention and controversy. His argument isn't particularly original--John Mueller made a more persuasive case in Foreign Affairs. Personally, I don't like using the term "War on Terror" myself--it isn't a war, at least in the sense people think of it, and it lends legitimacy to the President's (and the neoconservatives') vision of the world as a apocalyptic East-West clash of civilizations. But it is the preferred term for news agencies and it is instantly recognizable. When I write pieces, I almost always end up using it.

This part is key:

"A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival."

Terrorist networks do not have such a spatial limitation--the battlefield is anywhere a lone jihadi can attack, whether it is a café, movie theater, shopping mall, or home. Of course, some targets obviously have more value than others. But it's really impossible to ultimately predict and defeat every plot. And trying to do so will bust the bank, practically invite "intellipork,"government abuses of human rights and privacy, and give the public a false sense of security.

Ultimately, I think the American public has to come to live with the idea of terrorism as a unavoidable hazard of modern life. We can reduce terrorism and build up resilience--but we'll never eliminate it. And until America is eclipsed by another rising power (like China), we'll be a magnet for various foreign terrorist organizations. We also have to see terrorism as just one of many global threats on the horizon--it's not the only thing that could do us in. Check out the Lifeboat Foundation or Ray Kurzweil for some far-out things you'd expect that only would happen in Michael Crichton novels.

Also, check out the comments section of the Washington Post op-ed. Most of the commentators basically calling Brzezinski an American-hating leftist, which has pretty hilarious given his uber-hawkish record. Check out this 1965 Time article, for example:

"The hawks and the doves have been arguing their respective viewpoints on Viet Nam for some time now, but seldom before have they so clearly articulated the points on which they differ. In last week's New Republic Political Scientist Hans J. Morgenthau contends that escalation is dooming the U.S. to an all-out war. In a recent New Leader, Political Scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski maintains that escalation is just what is needed to end the war."

UPDATE: Also read Robert Fisk's recent column in the Independent for another perspective:

"Dr Michael Noll's students at Valdosta are as smart and bright-eyed as Dr El-Baradei's in Cairo. They packed into the same lecture I had given in Egypt and seemed to share a lot of the same fears about Iraq. But a sullen seminar that same morning was a miserable affair in which a young woman seemed to break down in anger. If "we" left Iraq, she said in a quavering voice, the jihadists, the "terrorists", could come here to America. They would attack us right here.

I sighed with frustration. I was listening to her voice but it was also the voice of the woman on Fox TV, the repeated, hopeless fantasy of Bush and Blair: that if we fail in Iraq, "they", the monstrous enemy, will arrive on our shores. Every day in the American papers now, I read the same "fear" transformed into irrationality. Luke Boggs - God, how I'd love that byline - announces in his local paper: "I say let the terrorists rot in Guantanamo. And let the Europeans ... howl. We are a serious nation, engaged in the serious business of trying to kill or capture the bad guys before they can do us more harm." He calls Guantanamo's inmates "hardcore jihadists".

And I realise that the girl in Dr Noll's seminar isn't spouting this stuff about "jihadists" travelling from Iraq to America because she supports Bush. She is just frightened. She is genuinely afraid of all the "terror" warnings, the supposed "jihadists" threats, the red "terror" alerts and the purple alerts and all the other colour-coded instruments of fear. She believes her president, and her president has done Osama bin Laden's job for him: he has crushed this young woman's spirit and courage."

I think this is a good visualization of my post on "black globalization." Plus, I really love this movie and needed an excuse to post a video of this scene.

American Insularity?

Gideon Rachtman:

"On Monday I went to a speaker-meeting at the New American Foundation – one of the plethora of DC-based think tanks, dealing with world affairs. The subject was the future of Pakistan and the speaker was a prominent Pakistani journalist. The room was packed. By contrast, I remember going to a speaker-meeting in London about a year ago with a much more obviously star-studded cast – Bill Kristol, a key neoconservative thinker; Tariq Ramadan, a central figure in the debate about Europe and Islam; and Phil Gordon, one of the leading experts on US foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. The meeting attracted maybe 30 people. You could get more people than that to turn up and listen to the deputy head of the OSCE, in Washington.

Nor is this American interest in the outside world an entirely Washington-based phenomenon. There is a Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and a Los Angeles World Affairs Council; I haven’t noticed their equivalents in Birmingham or Edinburgh. .

Or take book sales: Edward Luce, the FT’s Washington bureau chief, recently published a much-acclaimed book on India. You might expect it to do best in Britain - given that Luce is a Brit and given the historical connections between India and the UK. Not at all – “In Spite of the Gods” has sold about 5,000 copies in Britain and almost 30,000 in the US. Britain is interested in India all right – but the interest is essentially backward looking and nostalgic.

I’m sure if Ed had written a book about how his granny shot tigers while riding an elephant through Jaipur, it would have been a huge hit in Britain. But if you want to find a large audience that is genuinely interested in what is happening in modern India, you are more likely to find it in the United States than in Britain. Perhaps that is because Britain used to be an imperial power – while America is still enjoying its imperial moment."

It's arguing by anecdote, and I don't entirely buy it. But Rachtman's last paragraph rings true. A question--when America's imperial moment ends, as it inevitably will, how will it be seen in popular nostalgia, considering that American "empire" takes the form of indirect control (i.e UN, Bretton Woods institutions, neoliberalism, gunboat diplomacy) rather than something as direct and corporeal as the British raj? We never had viceroys shooting elephants while coolies fetched them hot tea.

Long War As Self-Inflicted Wound

See Mountainrunner's latest post linking to a new CSIS briefing. No further explanation needed.

5GW and Obama--Long Post

One further thought to the debate on the impact of the "Vote Different" ad, and whether it can be classified as 5GW: The Republicans have employed a form of 4GW for a long time. The Democrats did not field a comparable effort, and are only beginning to develop the capacity right now. Much of what follows is "conventional wisdom," but my attempt here to refocus it into the analytic framework of generational conflict, in the style of Dan TDAXP.

After the New Deal and WWII, the Republicans were faced with a number of seemingly insurmountable problems.

• They were a traditional conservative party, in the European sense. They had stood against the rapid social change represented by the loosening of post WWI social mores, the New Deal, and American internationalism.
  

• A centralized liberal architecture had consolidated control over most important centers of power--i.e the labor unions, the great old old political machines , and the media.
  

• Republicans had no effective base of support to rival this. Religious voters and the much-maligned evangelicals had yet to become the political force they are today.
  

Republicans adopted superficial elements of "Cold War liberal" positions, but merely imitating their adversary was not enough to deliver victory. However, what they did do was develop the beginnings of an intellectual movement, represented by Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and the National Review.

The 60's and 70's presented a number of opportunities to regain their lead.

• Liberal involvement in the civil rights movement and the loud emergence of the mainly middle to upper class New Left splinter movement separated Democrats from their working-class base. Southern whites (and some Northern ones, as represented by the Boston busing riots) were uncomfortable with the social change that they perceived was being forced on them. The New Left's anti-Americanism and the general shock of the counterculture alienated working-class Democrats.
  

• The United States experienced a crisis of modernity. The increasing encroachment of technology, media, and consumer capitalism began to erase the last vestiges of what was (perhaps falsely) idealized as classic "American Values." Crime, riots, government abuses and America's defeat in Vietnam contributed to a loss of public confidence in the future of the American Project.
  

• The power and diversity of media continued to grow by leaps and bounds. Instead of the centralized hierarchy seen in the late 19th to early 20th century, with a mass of media producers owned by a Hearst or a Pulitizer, we begin to see the beginning of today's freewheeling information landscape.
  

The Republicans reacted to these changes. The Democrats did not.

• Republicans, once playing the role of conservative isolationists, infiltrated and subverted the liberal foreign policy doctrine by transmuting it into neoconservatism, a extremely muscular form of liberal Wilsonian doctrine.

• Republicans, once derided as out of touch aristocrats, reached back into the era of Jacksonian populism to gain the loyalties of working-class and middle-class voters by appealing to their values. Thomas Frank correctly diagnosed this in his book What's The Matter With Kansas but made a crucial error in his thesis that Republicans fooled Democratic voters into voting against their own self-interests in favor of "moral values."
  

This is because Frank is an economic determinist, perhaps befitting his own left-wing background. Most people do not read long economic policy papers. Neither do they view such things as an accurate predictor of a politician's purpose. Character provides a tool that can be evaluated without a specialist background in policy. It is also something that plays well to mass communication, unlike 500-page Brookings Institute wonkfests.

We do this every day when we evaluate whom we form relationships with, business, romantic, or otherwise. And in a media age, what politicians are essentially doing are attempting to do is create the illusion of a personal connection to the public. In an era of widespread cynicism where people believe they have no influence over the government, one cannot overstate the importance of a politician who tries to make people feel connected to the government.

George Lakoff described this process as "framing," and its true that we can see this, on a superficial level as matter of clever linguistics. In Lakoff's view, Republicans "framed" their opponents as out of touch, wealthy, and deviant intellectuals with a soft attitude towards crime and Communism and a hatred of working-class faith and community. However, what are the purposes of "frames?"

• To isolate the opponent from his bases of support.
  
• To divide the opponent's organization.
  
• To ultimately disrupt the opponent's thinking (OODA Loops) and destroy his resolve.
  

How did Republicans accomplish this? By taking advantage of the communications boom and created a decentralized network of dependent media forms that maintained the illusion of independence from the main party but nonetheless repeated party talking points. Over a fifty year period starting with the founding of the National Review, conservatives built a network that could move faster than the centralized and sclerotic Democratic party and fight by "swarming" from multiple directions.

• Conservative journals, television shows, and talk radio
• Think-tanks, political action groups, and church organizations
  
• Emerging network of foreign policy professionals
  

By doing so, conservatives isolated liberals from every center of power (and created a new one in the emerging religious bloc), disrupted their internal decision-making process, and changed the political environment. Now the Left would have to play by rules that inherently favored conservatives. The Clintonite "New Democrats" and their neoconservative-influenced foreign-policy troop all adopted Republican talking points and framing, much like Eisenhower's GOP had parroted Truman. The hawkish Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in many ways functions as a Republican center of power operating behind "enemy" lines, disrupting the Democratic decision-making process by feuding with Left elements. And the Democrats have yet to build a comparable media/think tank operation to compete with conservatives.

However, it is increasingly apparent that the internet, which led to the creation of the "netroots," and the Bush-era decline of conservative legitimacy could lead to a similar moment for the Democrats. Stay tuned for later posts on this subject.

Hamster Blogging Continues

Outrage and Left-Wing Indulgence

Another screed from an ornery British "liberal" about the state of the "Left."

I want to point out these two paragraphs in particular:

"Large sections of liberal and left opinion have gone soft on their commitment to universal human rights. They rightly condemn the excesses of UK and US government policy, but rarely speak out against oppressors who are non-white or adherents of minority faiths. There are no mass protests against female genital mutilation, forced marriages, the stoning of women and gender apartheid in the Middle East...

In the name of defending "freedom", many conservatives defended the very unfree regimes of Franco's Spain and Pinochet's Chile. Alarmingly, this selective approach to human rights is now echoed by sections of the left, with their lack of protests against the murderous regimes in Iran, Zimbabwe and Sudan. President Mugabe has massacred more black Africans than PW Botha in South Africa. In contrast to the global anti-apartheid movement, there are no worldwide protests to support the Zimbabwean struggle for democracy. Why does a black tyrant murdering black people merit less outrage than a white tyrant murdering black people?"

I've seen this moronic meme repeated over and over. It arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of protest.

• In a democratic society, one can influence the opinions and action of governments, corporations, and other institutions through mass action.
  

• South Africa, Spain, and Chile were Cold War client states whose behavior could be changed by pressuring their Western backers or the companies that invested in them.
  

• However, Western governments do not have similar leverage over pariah states like Zimbabwe, and those committing human rights abuses probably don't give a damn what protesters in London or Los Angeles think. Additionally, short of direct military intervention (which is what liberal hawks want anyway) there is little other way for Western governments to force pariah states or states in areas of declining Western influence (such as the Middle East) to cease behaviors with deep local roots (such as forcing women to wear the burqa, etc) or dislodge tyrants guilty of gross human rights abuses. And as we're seeing in Iraq, interventions can actually provoke a backlash which turns local traditions into nationalist symbols of resistance. Additionally, building a durable post-war order after the departure of a dictator is incredibly difficult.
  

Liberals sobbing from the pages of the Guardian and the New York Times about this lack of protest do not conceive of protest as a coercive tool to compel change. Instead, to them protest is merely an outlet for "expression." They know that Robert Mugabe couldn't give two sh*ts about what a group of American protesters have to say, but these centrist pundits probably would feel better having spent a couple hours on the streets venting their outrage. This self-indulgence is not limited to liberal centrists--black bloc anarchists and dreadlocked "Free Mumia" types also use it as a license to "express themselves" in protests with nothing to do with their respective causes.

Additionally, the lack of outrage about Zimbabwe and et. all has less to do with the supposed indifference of "the Left" than a general apathy about world affairs on the part of the public. Most people, liberal, conservative, and libertarian alike, do not pay attention to the news. What people pay attention to tends to be things that receive a great deal of media attention and/or directly impact them, such as the war in Iraq. Instead of whining about why people haven't caught on to their pet cause, liberal centrists should fork over some of their money so an Iranian woman or Zimbabwean dissident can fly over to an American high school or British television show. After all, Save Darfur had remarkable success in demonstrating the human cost of the crisis by doing just that, and carrying out a remarkably well-planned media campaign.

No New Solutions

This article is rather depressing. Apparently the global counter-terror brain trust descended on St. Petersburg Florida to discuss how to best fight the gathering storm of terrorism. However, as the UPI report notes, most of the discussion seems to have been inspired by a bit too many episodes of 24:

"[Attendees] questioned the logic of the U.S. Department of State wanting to negotiate with what they term "rogue countries;" mainly Syria, Iran and North Korea.

Many would rather "not waste time" talking with governments they say will never keep its word. Instead, they would prefer to simply "kick butt," as one speaker put it, and making realistic plans to enable regime change in Syria and Iran through assassinations and intimidation. His comments were received with applause and cheers from the audience."

"Regime change" and gross violations of international law has really worked out for us, hasn't it? Also depressingly predictable is the idea that diplomacy is a tool of the weak, and that "kicking butt" is the only means of dealing with one's adversaries.

"But perhaps more important was the fact that while most panelists stressed the sources, logistics and strength of terrorist groups along with the need to be prepared in case of terrorist attack and the need to retaliate with overwhelming force, they failed to offer any long-term political solution to the crises facing the West.

For example, although much was said about Arab terrorism, no one ventured into the realm of why Arab and Muslim groups turned to violence. No one mentioned that al-Qaida, for example, was using the Palestinian cause as a recruiting poster to direct its hate against Israel and the United States.

No one, it seemed, tried to make the connection that al-Qaida was using the Palestinian cause. And just like no one mentioned that solving the Palestinian-Israeli dispute would go a along way in appeasing some of the Arab/Islamic world's gripes against the West."

Terrorism, as a (particularly gruesome) form of political violence, is a political problem. Sometimes I feel like standing on the street with a megaphone and repeating that sentence over and over again until it sinks into people's heads. This is not to say that force can't be part of the solution, but it can't be the be-all and end-all. I don't want to elaborate on this when Mountainrunner and his fellow Smart Power bloggers and Dreaming 5GW have done a great job at putting out ideas that don't involve Jack Bauer-type heroics.

Perhaps its simply a failure to adapt--the report mentioned that many of the attendees were old-school counter-terrorism experts and intelligence people. And conferences tend to bring out grandstanding, whatever your profession or political orientation. I remember being bored stiff at a Human Rights Watch dinner in Beverly Hills listening to a celebrity speaker ramble on about interventions and boycotts and the like without the slightest effort to explain how such things could be practically achieved. Political events in DC tend to be that way too, just without the Hollywood glamor.

The larger problem is that the dominant political culture--Democrats and Republicans--tends to reflect the viewpoint at the conference. The central leadership in both parties tends to embrace what Matthew Yglesias calls "The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics"--the idea that American military force has a magical property that can accomplish anything and everything. I think Fabius Maximus over at DNI has a much better idea. It's somewhat convoluted, but FM is hitting at something that Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman also thought of in their study Ethical Realism. I want to post an excerpt of the book from a Huffington Post blog they did (which reminds me, I probably should update my blog over there more often):

"Ethical realism was propounded in the past by some of the great figures of the American intellectual tradition, including Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan. They drew on a tradition stretching back through Edmund Burke to St Augustine. The Great Capitalist Peace involves a stable global order agreed to by all the major states of the world, and which guarantees all their vital interests. In the short-to-medium term, we believe that this is essential if these states are to succeed in containing the terrorism that threatens them all. In the longer term, we believe that it is essential if mankind is to have any chance of dealing with a whole set of global menaces including global warming.

Ethical realism points towards an international strategy based on prudence; a concentration on possible results rather than good intentions; a close study of the nature, views and interests of other states, and a willingness to accommodate them when possible; and a mixture of profound American patriotism with an equally profound awareness of the limits both on American power and on American goodness.

In ethical realism, a sense of national modesty and limits is linked to a capacity to see one's own nation as others see it - a capacity which in everyday human morality and interaction is generally seen as positive and attractive, while its opposite is seen as not merely unattractive but also somewhat ridiculous.

As Niebuhr put it, "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their self-esteem, are insufferable in their human contacts." In international affairs, this is above all true of the frequent U.S. demand that the rest of the world simply trust not just in the benevolence but also in the intelligent use of absolutely unconstrained American power. As Francis Fukuyama has pointed out this is a trust that Americans would never for a second place in any other country - and rightly so.

Moreover, ethical realism demolishes the shabby argument now being put out by former hardline supporters of the Iraq War, that we should excuse their responsibility for this disaster because their intentions were good. Neither in statecraft nor in common sense can good intentions be a valid excuse if accompanied by gross recklessness, carelessness, and indifference to the range of possible consequences. Such actions fail the test not only of general ethics, but of the sworn moral commitment of state servants and elected officials to defend the interests of their peoples, and not simply to pursue at all costs their own ideas of morality - another central point in realist ethics.

We need to bring morality in American statecraft down from the absolutist heights to which it has been carried, and return it to the everyday world where Americans and others do their best to lead ethical lives while facing all the hard choices and ambiguous problems which are the common stuff of existence in this "lower world".

Niebuhr wrote that the modern West thinks it "has an easy solution for the problems of anarchy and chaos on both the international and national levels of community, because of its fatuous and superficial view of man. It does not know that the same man who is ostensibly devoted to the "common good" may have desires and ambitions, hopes and fears, which set him at variance with his neighbors."

A prudential recognition of this on the part of the Founders is responsible for the checks and balances, the constraints on absolute power - even when exercised in the name of goodness - which are integral to the U.S. Constitution, and therefore to American democratic civilization and its positive example to the world."

Their book though, as Professor Jackson of Duck of Minerva noted a while ago, is pretty thin on policy ideas. Perhaps that's something for Lieven and Hulsman to do in their next one.

"Vote Different?"

The man behind the infamous "Vote Different" ad speaks.

"I made the "Vote Different" ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it--by people of all political persuasions--will follow.This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.

...The specific point of the ad was that Obama represents a new kind of politics, and that Senator Clinton's "conversation" is disingenuous. And the underlying point was that the old political machine no longer holds all the power."

Dreaming 5GW has an interesting analysis of this. Zenpundit also puts in a comment.

I am no Clinton supporter, but I think the last paragraph of this mea culpa is extremely unfair. Obama does not represent a "new kind of politics"--he is a slick, media-conscious politician who speaks in comforting platitudes and has done precious little to demonstrate why he is the clean break from D.C. politics that he claims to be. But the "Vote Different" creator is right in that citizen media is going to take off in 2008. However, it is unclear whether this will result in ideal citizen participation or a hyper-partisan bloodbath, given the height of political polarization right now.

"Escaping the Trap: The Case for Withdrawal from Iraq

POLICY FORUM
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
12:00 PM (Luncheon to Follow)

Featuring: Lt. Gen. William Odom, USA (Ret.), Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Director, National Security Agency, 1985-1988; Steven Simon, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; and Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute.

The Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001"

If anyone's in DC during this event, let me know how it goes. I'm interested to see what Odom has to say.

Via Kevin Drum, a WSJ story about innovative tactics in Iraq:

"With the work well under way last fall, Dr. Noori asked Capt. Cederman to see the renovations for himself, both men say. But the Iraqi stressed the importance of keeping the U.S. role secret. 'Can you come in without anyone seeing you come in?' Dr. Noori remembers asking...."I thought, why don't we just raid the place?' Capt. Cederman recalls. ....The U.S. raid took place last September. Dr. Noori, who had been alerted to the timing, stayed home the day of the strike to prevent his workers from finding out that he knew many of the soldiers....The ruse worked so well that Capt. Cederman decided to carry out a similar raid last month at the printing plant here that had been fixed up with U.S. funds.

....In recent days, meanwhile, U.S. forces staged a raid to solve a nettlesome -- and potentially life-threatening -- problem in the nearby city of Bayji. An Iraqi who worked as a translator for U.S. forces there was getting death threats from insurgents and asked the U.S. for help. The Americans responded by raiding his house, publicly arresting him, and holding him in jail for two days.'A lot of people there now think he's a bad guy," Capt. Cederman says. "It bought him a lot of street cred.'"

These are the kind of tactics the police employ with mob informants. Rough 'em up, throw 'em in the "meat wagon," have them spend a few nights in jail and then put them back out on the streets. Good in the short-term, but the larger issue is creating an environment where it isn't necessary to raid and arrest translators and businessmen to give them "street cred. "

Wired Magazine:

"CD sales have been on the decline ever since they enjoyed an artificial boom resulting from people replacing records and tapes with digital discs, and countless articles have been written about it. But judging from sales statistics for the first three months of 2007, the downward trend is now accelerating with fearsome speed, with sales of compact discs in the first quarter of 2007 dropping 20% compared to the same quarter last year.

Sales are so slow that you can have the number one album in the country without even selling 100,000 CDs that week (comeback kid the Notorious B.I.G. was the top seller with only 99,178 units of his "Greatest Hits" album sold in the week ending 3/11/2007)."

Online music revenue has failed to compensate for the decline in CD sales. But this isn't news. Music revenue in the US have been in the tank for a long time. It says something that the biggest seller right now has been dead for at least ten years. The record industry failed to adjust to the online marketplace, and hasn't found a way to wean consumers off of stealing music from file-sharing sites. However, the decline also has to do with the end of the "album."

We've long since passed the point where popular musicians created structured albums meant to be listened all the way through. Only indie musicians with relatively small audiences do that. It's a singles market now, where you have a couple of hot tracks and then an album full of filler. Thus, there's no reason to buy a whole album just to get those singles. You either buy them off iTunes or steal them from Limewire. This is a bad thing for the record company, especially since it spent valuable time and money recording the full album and promoting it only to see people buy just one or two songs on it, assuming they don't just steal them online. Perhaps popular artists should stop making albums and simply put out EPs or singles--the likes of 50 Cent and co. make most of their money off clothing lines and movie/videogame tie-ins anyway.

Finally, some sense on the Middle East from the Brookings Institute:

"Al-Qaeda sees a war between America and Iran as its fondest dream come true. For the terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 and have been waging war against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan ever since, a war between the United States and Iran would be a tremendous strategic victory since two of their most deadly enemies would bleed each other. The Sunni Arab jihadist community would kill two birds with one stone.

In February, the new head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the self proclaimed Amir of the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, issued a statement welcoming the surge of more American troops into Iraq and looking forward eagerly to an American nuclear attack on Iran. For al-Qaeda, the American occupation of Iraq has been an opportunity to attack U.S. forces in territory sympathetic to the terrorists. Osama bin Laden welcomed the U.S. invasion four years ago, and his lieutenants have openly called the occupation the best opportunity they have had since 9/11 to strike at Americans. As Omar put it 'in order to kill the beast, we must get it to leave its den ... the idiot Bush sent his army to where we laid ambushes.'"

It's also very similar to an argument I advanced a while ago. In the long run, jihadists prosper when we create as many "open fronts" as possible. The goal of American policy in an era of 4GW and non-state warfare should not be to destabilize and destroy governments and create more gaps for jihadists to fill.

Defense and the National Interest reports that there's a John Boyd conference this summer:

"Save the Date: 10th Anniversary Memorial Boyd Conference, July 13, at the Alfred M. Gray Center on the Marine Corps Base, Quantico, VA. Details to follow."

I always thought it was an incredible injustice that his theories aren't more widely known. Not the OODA loop, which pretty much has entered the business lexicon, but his ideas in "Patterns of Conflict," and his other long briefings.

I'm Not Dead

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I've been very busy finishing some articles. Links will be up when they're posted/printed.

Also, in today's NYT I'm seeing that the State Department is predicting a popular revolt in Zimbabwe. However, it appears Mugabe is bringing in the heavy hitters :

"About 2,500 Angolan paramilitary police, feared in their own country for their brutality, are to be deployed in Zimbabwe, raising concerns of an escalation in violence against those opposed to President Mugabe. ... Dubbed “Ninjas” for their all-black uniform of combat trousers and tunics, boots and balaclavas, the paramilitaries form part of the presidential guard of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has been in power since 1979. They patrol in pickup trucks, with mounted heavy machine-guns, and are notorious for their violence. “Angolans are terrified of them,” an Angolan resident said."

He's using them to plug the gaps in his police force, which is quickly deserting. It may be a good short-term measure, but relying on foreign mercenaries to guarantee security is going to erode whatever scraps of legitimacy his regime has left and is a potent sign of weakness.

Admin note

Just got back and saw Phil of Pacific Empire's criticism of my post on Al Qaeda and viral media. Too tired to respond at present, so I took the post down into Blogger's editing mode and will rethink and repost it tomorrow. It was a very good criticism, and in thinking of my response I thought of an interesting idea that I'll put into the revision.

If you need some geopolitical amusement, check out the Turkish-Armenian flamewar going on in the comments section of this Coming Anarchy post.

Gamers out there--agree or disagree?

Culture or Religon?

Yet another tiresome "Islam is barbarism" essay. This time it focuses on a Western woman who was held captive in Kabul by her Afghan husband. I feel sorry for this woman's plight, but at the same time it's unjust of her to condemn an entire religion simply because of her painful experience in Afghanistan.

One of the things I wanted to add to my post on Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is that it's very difficult to separate religion from culture and nationality. Many opponents of organized religion base their arguments in a formalist mode of criticism, examining religious texts as if they are hermetic documents and then using them to explain the barbarous behavior of some believers. Yet this ignores the degree to which the dominant cultural traditions and societal conditions of certain regions and human structures influence religious practice. A very good case in point is the influence of imperial Roman patronage on the Church after Constantine--it would have developed in a much different direction had Christianity still been an underground sect.

Chavez Games

Hugo Chavez is at it again.

I've never related to the enthusiasm with which he's been received in left circles. He consolidates power around himself in a manner extremely unhealthy for a democracy. And the results of his social spending programs are mixed, at best. Lastly, I've never been a fan of democratic leaders with an attachment to martial trappings--it blurs the line between civilian leadership and the military. And if if the history of Latin America is any guide, more military strongmen is the very last thing the region needs.

At home, Chavez is a product of people's anger over American meddling in Latin American affairs and the misguided "Washington Consensus" economic programs pushed by the IMF. Abroad, he's a popular symbol of resistance to a deeply unpopular United States. For many Western leftists, he's another Fidel Castro, without the political executions and secret police. In an era where authentic left heroes are few and far between and neoliberalism dominates throughout the West, he provides a potent symbol of "social democracy" in action. However, the fact that an unabashed authoritarian has become such a symbol is deeply troubling. At best, he's a Latin American Huey Long. At worst, he's another caudillo. Whether or not he pushes a "Bolivarian Revolution" or does yeoman's work for the United Fruit Company, Chavez is bad news.

Isolationism

Opposed Systems Design has a great post on grand strategy:

"The first and the third perspectives focus on great power war as the most significant danger to the US. Their major difference stems from the assumptions of each. The Isolationist perspective assumes that foreign entanglements represent the greatest danger while Selective Engagement assumes that - given 20th Century history - some situations of regional instability will explode into great power wars which will draw America into them. The Isolationists are left with the problem of explaining how we’ll know where to retailiate for the violence that America will inevitibly encounter, while the Selective Engagers are left with the challenge of creating a guide for when and where intervention is (and is not) needed.

The second perspective, Collective Security, at first seems like the most familiar, given our current understanding of the relationship between globalization and security. After all, it includes the proposition that 'peace is effective indivisible, and that the US has a huge national interest in world peace.' Small wars combined with the proliferation of conventional and nuclear weapons make it both a moral and a strategic imperative for the US to work with other powers to address these problems before they cascade through the international system."

Many people think back to George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances" and think isolationism is a belief in the danger and futility of American engagement abroad. This attributes too much of a strategic basis to isolationism. Washington was not an isolationist, but a cautious and pragmatic man.

Classical isolationism was a moralistic doctrine that grew out of Puritanism--it preached that the wider world represented sin, temptation and evil. This was combined with a populist agrarian suspicion of large institutions, particularly financial ones. Isolationists believed that in order to keep America's culture pure, contact with foreigners had to be limited. They viewed the foreign as degeneracy--a cultural virus that would subvert traditional American values.

After World War II, the isolationist right grudgingly acknowledged the massive threat posed by the Soviet Union. But not to America's strategic security--they saw the "Red Menace" as a threat to domestic values, a fear represented by McCarthy's incessant search for hidden Communists everywhere. Unlike Cold Warriors who made do with the secular Manichean metaphor of the conflict between the "free" and "slave" worlds, the far-right saw the Soviet Union as a literal tool of Satan come to corrupt America's culture.

Today, we see this reflected in the far-right conspiracy theories of "Aztlan"--the idea that illegal immigration is a conscious plot by Mexico to reconquer California and Arizona by flooding them with immigrants and changing the culture of the West. The solution to this, the far-right claims, is to build walls to prevent these immigrants from arriving. Another example of isolationism is the hard-right demonization, of the United Nations, the ultimate symbol of internationalism. Most conservatives merely view it as inefficient and favorable to human rights abusers and anti-Semites. However, there is select group of right-wingers who view it as a symbol of ultimate evil, an institution that will try to change America's culture for the worse.

Isolationism still survives as an overpowering fear of the foreign, even though it is not strictly isolationist in character. It still is a potent force in American life.

Baudrillard Disappears into the Simulation Pt. II

Read Arthur Kroker's memorial for Baudrillard. Stop the Spirit of Zossen has an interesting post relating Baudrillard's theories to the present situation.

Hamster Blogging Continues

Comic Books

So, apparently Marvel Comics has killed off Captain America. I really don't like the practice of killing off flagship characters. I don't have an attachment to them (they're not real), but every time they get killed off they're always brought back from the dead. This ruins whatever dramatic potential or meaning those deaths have.

However, its also pretty lame to have a Golden Age comics character like Captain America or Superman who never ages. Many of the superheroes created in the 1930s will turn 100 in the next thirty years. Aside from the question of continued relevance, there's also a huge dramatic inconsistency. Spider-Man, for example, has been living pretty much the same life ever since he graduated from college thirty years ago. And Peter Parker the married freelance photographer isn't quite as exciting as Peter Parker the adolescent first struggling with his powers.

That's why comic book writers often return to the hero's past in retcons. Because of the dramatic power of the hero's "golden age" material, the temptation to change it becomes irresistible.

Politics of Defeat

William Lind believes that the Democrats are betraying soldiers in order to get 2008 votes:

"'Supporting the troops'" is just another dodge. The only way to support the troops when a war is lost is to end the war and bring them home. Nor is it a challenge to design legislative language that both ends the war and supports the troops. All the Democratic majorities in Congress have to do is condition the funding for the Iraq war with the words, "No funds may be obligated or expended except for the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq, and for such force protection actions as may be necessary during that withdrawal." If Bush vetoes the bill, he vetoes continued funding for the war. If he signs the bill, ignores the legislative language and keeps fighting the war in the same old way, he sets himself up for impeachment. What's not to like?

For the Democrats, what's not to like is anything that might actually end the war before the 2008 elections. The Republicans have 21 Senate seats up in 2008, and if the Iraq war is still going on, they can count on losing most of them, along with the Presidency and maybe 100 more seats in the House. 2008 could be the new 1932, leaving the Republican Party a permanent minority for twenty years. From the standpoint of the Democratic Party's leadership, a few thousand more dead American troops is a small price to pay for so glowing a political victory."

Although I hesitate to ascribe that much calculation to the Democrats, who at the moment are very divided and disorganized, I think Lind is ultimately on the money. They see the Republicans running off a cliff, and they aren't too inclined to get in the way. They know they will be smeared as defeatists. They don't want to take the risk that the public associates them with the loss. However, as the majority party, it is now their responsibility.

It was also their votes in 2003 that enabled the rush to war. And if they are afraid of losing their majority, they should remember the words of civil rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964:

"Do you mean to tell me that your position is more important than four hundred thousand black people's lives? Senator Humphrey, I know lots of people in Mississippi who have lost their jobs trying to register to vote. ... Now if you lose this job of Vice-President because you do what is right, because you help the [Mississippi Freedom Democrats], everything will be all right. God will take care of you. But if you take [the nomination] this way, why, you will never be able to do any good for civil rights, for poor people, for peace, or any of those things you talk about. Senator Humphrey, I'm going to pray to Jesus for you."

If the Democrats truly believe that the war is wrong, they should be doing all they can to prevent more Americans from dying in it. This does not mean they need to throw all caution to the wind--it means they need to show some backbone for once. And if it costs them, then history will be kind to them for trying to do the right thing.

Shrinking the Gap in Europe

The British island of Sark is being pressed to jettison its feudal laws:

"Landownership is divided among 40 'tenants.' They are the descendants or successors of the 40 men with muskets recruited by the original seigneur, the ruling lord commissioned to defend the isle against pirates and buccaneers. Government administration is by fiat, with the island administrator, judge, constable and clerk appointed by the current seigneur, a 79-year-old former aeronautical engineer whose family has governed Sark since 1852."

Obviously, Sark's land system is verboten in the modern Europe. But in most of the developing world, such an arrangement would not be unusual. In fact, one of the main problems for Western countries intervening in the likes of Somalia and Afghanistan is that they have little idea of how to bargain through feudal and tribal structures. Without a functioning economy, civil sector, and mass industry, there are little other centers of power besides tribal elders or feudal warlords.

China is debating a law to protect private property:

"Though the Communist Party still believes the state owns all land, the growing economy has meant that private property "has been increasing with each passing day" and the protection of it is the "urgent demand of the people," the draft legislation states.

The latest draft of the property law seeks to strike a delicate balance between the need to continue greasing the wheels of the Chinese economy - which depends on private investment - and satisfying old guard officials reluctant to see the socialist ideals they have relied on since 1949 jettisoned."

Just thirty years ago, the mere suggestion of private property itself was probably enough to land someone in a re-education camp.

Lost in Space

MSNBC:

"NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn't enough money to pay for the task so it won't get done.

The cost to find at least 90 percent of the 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets by 2020 would be about $1 billion, according to a report NASA will release later this week. The report was previewed Monday at a Planetary Defense Conference in Washington."

The total cost of the Iraq war is projected to reach $456 billion by September 2007. Although the chances of a killer asteroid hitting the Earth are still pretty low, $1 billion seems like a very cheap investment towards preventing worldwide catastrophe.

Apparently Bill Maher said on TV that the world be a better place if the suicide bomber at Bagram airport last week had got Dick Cheney. Although it's completely reprehensible to call for the killing of a public official and sad that Maher would want to celebrate the death of any human being, the idea that the excesses of the War on Terror could be curbed with Cheney's death belongs in the realm of fantasy. If anything, the death of his vice president and close confidant would emotionally unhinge President Bush and cause him to employ harsher measures.

Those who call themselves liberals should not endorse distinctly illiberal things. This goes for both Maher and liberal hawks.

Baudrillard Disappears into the Simulation

Jean Baudrillard passed away today. He was much more than just a wacky post-Marx left postmodernist--he was the most exciting and controversial theorist of the information age. Pick up his writings on 9/11 and read them along with Slavoz Zizek, Paul Virilio, and Jacques Derrida's writings on the terrorist attacks. Baudrillard and the rest of the postmodernists' writings on terrorism look at it through the perspective of cultural studies, examining how terrorists form master narratives and use aesthetics and symbolism as weapons of war. These writings, along with Fredric Jameson's The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, are invaluable to understanding today's media landscape. They also are invaluable as a cultural studies complement to military and historical writings about fourth-generation war and terrorism.

However, in the end, I probably suspect Baudrillard will probably be remembered most not for his inflammatory theories (most infamously "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place") but as the guy whose book was on Neo's bookshelf in the first movie of the Matrix series.

(h/t Lawyers, Guns, and Money)

Overthrow

Today, I attended a Milken Institute event featuring Stephen Kinzer, a veteran New York Times reporter and author of Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq. Kinzer's presentation was mainly an overview of his book and a summary of his chapters on Cuba and Iran. Little of it was new to me (or much of the audience) but Kinzer did have some interesting research on the internal debates within the CIA over the wisdom of overthrowing foreign governments. Some station chiefs and agents on the ground were violently against such actions.

Kinzer's central point was very sound: interventions to protect commercial interests usually harm us more than the initial threat by empowering extremist actors. If Eisenhower were alive now, he'd probably prefer dealing with Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh instead of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

As I was driving away from the conference, I also thought of Saddam Hussein and a column that William Lind wrote for Counterpunch. Titled, "He's Tanned, Rested and Ready," the essay argued that Hussein was the only person who could end Iraq's civil war. While the argument was somewhat exaggerated, it did have a grain of truth. Had Hussein been overthrown by his own people instead of a foreign power, sectarian conflict would have been less likely. However, the biggest problem resulting from our intervention is Iran. The regime's actions are the result of American weakness--the Iranians know that our army is completely tied down and at the mercy of their Shiite proxies. Should America attack Iran, the Iranian-backed parties both in the government and the paramilitary militias would turn on us.

"Bin Laden at 50"

Robert Fisk remembers his first encounter with Osama Bin Laden in 1993. In particular, this stands out:

"But I wondered, as the years went by, if he was any longer relevant. Nuclear scientists invented the atom bomb. What would have been the point of arresting all the scientists afterwards? The bomb existed. Bin Laden created al-Qa'ida. The monster was born. What is the point, any longer, in searching for 50-year-old Bin Laden?"

If Bin Laden died tomorrow, little would change. The organization he built has not only survived the wrath of the world's hyperpower, but transcended the battlefield to become a idea, a brand. All Bin Laden has done since 2001 is hide, while those inspired by his example slaughter the innocent across the globe. Like all men, Bin Laden will eventually die--either violently or peacefully in some dingy Pakistani bed. But his death will not bring back the 3,000 who perished on 9/11, nor erase the sorrow of their loved ones. And it will not stop the murderous new legion of jihadis forged in the bloodbath of Iraq's sectarian civil war.

If international politics ever gets you down, you can always watch hamsters.



People tell me I'm too easily distracted. I think they're right.

Towards a Universalist Foreign Policy?

The Financial Times' blogger Gideon Rachtman on the crisis of "univeralist" policymakers:

"I can understand [former British diplomat Carne Ross’s] anguish that the real interests and suffering of the Iraqi people were ignored in the sanctions debates, which he helped to shape. But who exactly could have represented the authentic voice of Iraq? Given that Iraq was a dictatorship, the spokesmen would have been likely to be hand-picked representatives of Saddam or the much-abused “exiles” – neither of whom were exactly neutral in the argument. Similarly to argue for a more democratic foreign policy and a more universalist foreign policy simultaneously raises more questions than it answers.

Ross feels the west should have done a lot more to help the oppressed peoples of western Sahara and is ashamed of a memo he wrote saying that Britain “had no dog in this fight”. But my guess is that this would be pretty close to the position of most British voters. A universalist foreign policy would argue for helping the Sahawaris; a democratic foreign policy would argue against."

The problem I always have with "univeralists" is that they have a simplistic view of the complicated processes involved in intervention, nation-building, and culture.

For example, with Darfur, many NGOs advocate a UN intervention--regardless of whether the central government allows them to or not. There's no plan of how much force should be employed, whom it should be employed against, and under whose auspices the cannons will fire. There's little to no consideration of how it would be viewed by the Muslim world in the wake of Iraq, no plans to deal with the destabilization of the Sudanese state and the surrounding region, and no idea of how to rebuild Darfur (or maybe Sudan itself if the government collapses). Lastly, they haven't talked at all about the possibility that jihadists will flock to the new "front" created by the West and China may not like the idea of the UN destabilizing one of its larger resource client states. There's only a vague need to "do something'--in other words idealistic will without thought or responsibility.

It's remarkably similar to the ideas advanced by the Euston left in Britain--people like Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen who honestly believed that American power could unilaterally create a perfect liberal society out of the ruins of Saddam's Iraq. Or the New York Times' Thomas Friedman, who keeps naively calling for an Muslim "reformation," as if the bloody theological schism within Christianity responsible for religious oppression, conspiracy, and wholesale slaughter was either applicable to decentralized Islam or a desirable example to emulate. He may just get his wish though--the Sunni-Shiite civil war may prove to be just as horrifying as anything out of the Thirty Years War.

Ethnic Cleansing and Nation-Building

There's a thought-provoking article in The Nation examining the concepts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. This point in particular is worth highlighting:

"Lieberman argues persuasively that an intellectual focus on ethnic cleansing, rather than nation-building, generates a dramatic shift in our understanding of contemporary history. Ethnic cleansing has repeatedly proved a necessary component of twentieth-century nation-building: 'The story of the rise of the nation-state, a triumph of self-determination, becomes a story of tragedy for those who were driven out.' Among his examples is the Palestinian exodus of 1948, and the creation of the State of Israel. Historians still argue vociferously over how many Palestinians were expelled, evacuated or simply fled in panic. Lieberman sidesteps this, arguing that their exodus was not unique. Quite the opposite, in fact: 'The Arab departures from Israel seem mysterious only if viewed in isolation from all comparable examples. Ethnic war in other former Ottoman regions had displaced entire peoples, and ethnic war in Israel and Palestine had much the same effect, though this war left some Arabs in Israel.'"

The chief point here is that the moral foundations of the state's creation narrative are threatened by the state's original sins. This is the reason behind the Turkish reluctance to acknowledge the Armenian genocide--and the whitewashing of our own treatment of the native Americans. The suffering of minorities displaced or eradicated during the creation of the nation-state has a way of negating the triumphant national narrative necessary for patriotism. Of course, this was not a problem for much of the history of the modern nation-state--up until the late fifties, it was publicly acceptable to denigrate non-whites as subhumans. Their demise was seen as part of the march of "civilization." Now such bigoted sentiments must be expressed through subtle codewords and signifiers.

Is it possible to create a patriotic narrative that still does not whitewash the state's founding crimes? Is it even desirable to create a revisionist narrative? Should we even consider ethnic displacement and domination "ethnic cleansing?" Or is old history immaterial in a postmodern world where young people find 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg infinitely more compelling than Thomas Jefferson or George Custer? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Deterring China

Via the C4ISR Journal, an interesting look at Taiwan's efforts to deter China.

"Deterring and perhaps confronting the armed might of the People’s Republic of China might seem a tall order, but Taiwan is investing billions in modern defense systems, with new C4ISR technology at the top of the list.The Asian economic powerhouse is acquiring new and upgraded radar systems, long-range early warning ultra high frequency phased array radar, and upgrade of its air defense command-and-control capabilities, Link 16 and improved battlefield intelligence hardware.

Current projects include an expansion of regional air defense command centers (Anyu 4), installation of the Management Information and Commitment Control System, Ta Chen (Grand Conglomeration) C3I data link system ship-to-ship/ship-to-shore high-frequency (HF) communications project, domestic manufacture of a Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System (Sincgars), Link 16 (Po Sheng) project, and the Army Improved Mobile Subscriber Equipment (IMSE) program."

The catalyst for this info-war shopping spree was China's successful launch of the Dong Fen missiles across the Taiwan strait in 1996. China's growing influence is also probably making the Taiwanese nervous as well.

What I wonder is how well they would stack up to China's electronic war disruption strategies, outlined most succinctly in PLA strategists Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui's now-classic study Unrestricted Warfare. The study's chief achievement is that it shows how a state can employ the methods of non-state actors to frustrate a larger, but more vulnerable opponent. According to the article, Chinese military hackers have been probing Taiwanese information defenses for at least seven years. There's also the larger question of saturation missile attacks and steadily improving Chinese spacewar capabilities against American and Taiwanese satellites.

However, its hard to really speculate on whether such a strategy would be effective for China. Cyberwar and spacewar have yet to make a serious appearance on the battlefield--right now they're both little more than fodder for Tom Clancy novels.

Iraq Myths

John Robb has a more sensible post up this time.

"The demise of the mythical dream of nation-building will be short-lived. The following threads of thought will revive it in the post-Iraq environment:

• Support. We never really lost, the support on the home-front collapsed at the very moment we were starting to win.
• Spending. If we had made the investments in a civilian/military force that was adept at nation-building prior to invading, we would have won. Another variant of this: we need a bigger Army.
• Leadership. Mismanagement was to blame for the loss. We would have won with a competent Administration."

These are all very harmful myths, ones that will embroil us in another ruinous war if they are not dispelled. For one, anti-war sentiment still is marginalized as a political force--we see nothing like the mass marches of Vietnam. What passes for a political opposition is a deeply divided Democratic party, whose most subversive action is a "non-binding" resolution. It's true that public sentiment is turning against the war, but the public largely gave the President the benefit of the doubt until early 2006.

If public disapproval finally forces a withdrawal the administration only has itself to blame--in a democracy, citizens eventually reward repeated failure by pulling the plug. If Petraeus and Kilcullen can turn things around on the ground, then the public will support the war. I hope they do because the consequences of failure are harsh. But don't be surprised if they don't and the public completely loses patience. Even if public support didn't matter, I don't think there would have been much of a material difference in results. The Soviet Union, the most perfect totalitarian system of our time, lost in Afghanistan.

As for the "larger force" myth, war games conducted by the Pentagon in 1999 used 400,000 troops and still came up with remarkably similar results. The problem is not military but political--invading another country with precious little knowledge about its people, culture, and power dynamics and then imposing a Western nation-state at gunpoint. Additionally, the public would have not supported a large force in an intervention ultimately peripheral to national security. This leads into my next point.

There's no denying that the Bush administration was monumentally incompetent. But I take issue with the presumption that a more competent administration would have done better. A more competent administration would not have invaded Iraq in the first place, opting instead for a containment strategy. Given that most of the compelling evidence of Iraqi WMD presented in 2003 was cherry-picked by the Bush administration, there would have been no "mushroom cloud" justification for preventive war. Without the selling point of an immediate threat, the public would not have supported an invasion of Iraq --either for humanitarian reasons or security.

The One We Got Right?

Phil of Pacific Empire has written a chilling post about the situation in East Timor. It appears the international community has failed to create a durable order. Power is diffusing to rebels, cultists, and gangs. Australia, the largest contributor to the peacekeeping forces, is also suffering a popular backlash among the Timorese.

With Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Haiti, and Afghanistan all unable to govern themselves without a massive international troop presence, the track record of "nation-building," seems rather poor. I'm not ruling out success for any of these interventions, except for Iraq, which now has become a lost cause. But peacekeeping and management techniques need a steep revision. I'm going to a RAND event on peacekeeping on March 14th, so I'll look to see if they have any new insights.

Occidentalism

Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese general in charge of Iwo Jima's defense, has become famous in the West as a result of Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima. Capitalizing on the interest created by Eastwood's critically acclaimed film, a biography of Tadamichi has been translated and released. I haven't read it, but I felt this Popmatters review is very illuminating:

"If the American advance could not be stopped, [Kuribayashi] believed it was possible to kill so many U.S. soldiers that civilian support for an invasion of Japan would be blunted. ...Ironically, Kuribayashi’s spectacularly successful defense of Iwo Jima had the opposite effect he intended. The high American death toll did dampen civilian enthusiasm for further casualties, but instead of strengthening Japan’s negotiating position, this led directly to the deployment of the atom bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Kuribayashi's misreading of American strategy was just as great as that of the military dictators who decided to bomb Pearl Harbor. He perceived America as a weak society that would shrink from battle given high losses. Thus, his goal was to inflict as many casualties as possible to force the American government to sue for peace. This is not anything new. Many enemies of the West subscribe to a philosophy that Ian Buruma defines as Occidentalism :

"Calculation -- the accounting of money, interests, scientific evidence, and so on -- is regarded as soulless. Authenticity lies in poetry, intuition, and blind faith. The Occidentalist view of the West is of a bourgeois society, addicted to creature comforts, animal lusts, self-interest, and security. It is by definition a society of cowards, who prize life above death. As a Taliban fighter once put it during the war in Afghanistan, the Americans would never win, because they love Pepsi-Cola, whereas the holy warriors love death. This was also the language of Spanish fascists during the civil war, and of Nazi ideologues, and Japanese kamikaze pilots."

It's certainly true that in a post-colonial era, Western societies do not generally expound large amounts of blood and treasure on non-existential conflicts. But, when they are convinced they are engaged in life-and-death struggles, they will continue fighting as long as they are able. World War II was perceived as such a struggle by the government, the military, and the public. In particular, the American public had been on war footing since 1941 and had already tolerated steep losses. This is the essential difference between Iraq and World War II--a lesson that popular commentators and presidential speechwriters always seem to ignore.

It is interesting to speculate though, whether popular support for war would have lasted if the atomic bomb had not been deployed to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. By mid-1945, the situation was no longer as dire as it had been for much of the conflict. The Germans had surrendered, the offensive capability of the Japanese army had been shattered, and the Soviets were beginning to gobble up Japanese overseas territories.

An invasion of the Japanese territorial islands would have drastically prolonged the Pacific war. Japanese army units and civilian irregulars were prepared to mount a Stalingrad-style defense that would have cost countless American lives. Even once the cities had been secured, partisans would launch vicious guerrilla attacks. I suspect, however, that popular support would have remained steady. Being the nation whose surprise attack had thrust America into the war, Japan was always the main enemy in the public mind. It's not likely that harsher losses would have changed that.

On the lighter side of things, here is a list of "facts" you may not know about 24's Jack Bauer.