The Radical Centrist

So Much for European Outrage

2005-03-30T17:23:00.000-05:00

The Guardian reports -- very regretfully, I'm sure -- that the EU will agree to Paul Wolfiwitz's appointment to head the World Bank:

The EU gave the nod today to the contentious appointment of Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, to head the World Bank.

European commissioner Olli Rehn "was satisfied with everything he heard from Mr Wolfowitz concerning free trade and also on poverty reduction and development policy," a spokeswoman told reporters.

The German development minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, said: "I expect that he will get the European and German support."

The World Bank board is due to choose a successor to James Wolfensohn tomorrow, and Mr Wolfowitz's appointment as president seems assured after his charm offensive in Brussels.

The prime minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, made it all but official when he described Mr Wolfowitz as the "incoming president of the World Bank".

After his meeting with senior EU finance and development ministers to discuss his vision for the world's leading development institution, Mr Wolfowitz - a key Bush administration hawk - said he believed deeply in the work of the World Bank and was committed to helping the world's poor. "Helping people lift themselves out of poverty is truly a noble mission," he said.

And with that, I leave for warmer environs until Tuesday... Or, as Eric Cartman would say: "Screw you guys, I'm going to the Caribbean..."

Very Reassuring...

2005-03-28T17:05:00.000-05:00

Hmmm... No sooner do I post on the precariousness of the global nuclear situation, than I learn from Dangerous Logic that the Moscow Times is reporting this:

A serviceman of the strategic missile unit in Russia’s Siberia has been detained for smoking marijuana while on duty and selling drugs to his comrades, the Interfax news agency reported.

A warrant officer at military unit No. 28151 of the Glukhov Guards Division of the Strategic Missile Forces was detained on March 23 while selling marijuana to fellow soldiers. He did not resist arrest and military police chose not to place him in custody demanding a written pledge not to leave his unit instead.

During questioning the serviceman confessed that he had smoked marijuana for over a year, both in joints and through a home-made pipe. He also said that he had repeatedly been on combat duty while under the influence of drugs.

Commanders of the unit were quick to announce that the soldier had no access to the ’nuclear button’. They said the warrant officer served as a technician at a communications post.

I just hope al-Qaeda doesn't read the Moscow Times.

The Atomic Cocktail

2005-03-28T11:18:00.000-05:00

Well, via Drezner, I see that the purpose of blogging is not just “to circulate ideas that are new, or at least new to us…. But every now and then there is something to be said for sheer repetition of the important.”

With that in mind, I’d like to direct your attention to Jimmy Carter’s pretty standard “nuclear proliferation is a major problem and Bush is not doing enough to prevent it” op-ed in the Post today. The column doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It could have been written a year ago, probably even two or three years ago. But it does provide a fairly decent summary of the anti-proliferation movement’s arguments -- if any readers are unfamiliar with the subject. Of course, once Carter moves from general critiques to specific policy prescriptions, his suggestions are pretty unhelpful. For instance, with regard to Iran, Carter declares that “Iran must be called to account and held to its promises under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.” Thank you, Captain Obvious.

On a similar topic, but much more interesting, are Greg Djerejian’s comments on some remarks by Fred Ickle’s at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ickle had this to say about 60 years of non-use of nuclear weapons:

You probably recall that right after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in '45, military historians asserted that every new powerful weapon has eventually been used in war and so they predicted the atomic bomb would also be used. Now instead we can look back on 60 years of the most extraordinary, most unique revolution in military affairs that I think you'll find anywhere in military history. Namely the uninterrupted non-use of nuclear weapons, the most powerful weapons now in the arsenals of eight countries. At first blush perhaps you'll find this point time-worn and trite. Please reconsider. It's not trite. What happened is that we all became habituated to nuclear non-use among nations. We almost assume it's the law of nature. We do not realize that we are walking on thin ice and the ice is getting thinner because of proliferation.

I'm alluding here not primarily to the often-mentioned threat of nuclear terrorism, but rather to the more pervasive instability of the international system. What I have in mind is illustrated by the agonizing choice that statesmen have to face frequently in deciding between appeasement and escalation. Rolf already referred to that. Presidents, Prime Ministers, often have to agonize, fearing they may be called another Neville Chamberlain, another Munich agreement, or fearing, conversely, that they be condemned by history for dragging the nation into another Vietnam, another quagmire. Now imagine that a serious nuclear use has suddenly occurred, say between India and Pakistan, or between Iran and Iraq, or Iran and Israel, or between North Korea and South Korea, or North Korea and Japan. If that happened,the whole global security system would be transformed within a split second, leaving no time for long consultations, whether or how to counter-attack, whether to appease or to escalate. And it would leave no solution, akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis solution, where it was possible, essentially, to restore the status quo. Once the era of non-nuclear use should end, all the strategic expectations and military plans will radically change.

In these post-9/11 years our anti-proliferation efforts have tended, for good reason, to focus on the threat of nuclear terrorism by al-Qaeda-type, transnational actors. But as Greg notes:

…there remains plenty of instability in the state system itself…that could lead to state actors employing nuclear weaponry…. [M]ore thought at places like the CSIS and Brookings of the world should be given to what the world would look like, say, the day after North Korea lobbed a nuclear warhead at Osaka. It seems improbable perhaps in the extreme, but so were the Twin Towers crumbling to the ground. History is never neat and we still cannot be sure the 21st Century will be less bloody than the 20th. The specter of nuclear terrorism or state use of nuclear weaponry is one of the biggest reasons why. Above and beyond the critical attention that needs to be paid to non-proliferation regimes and efforts.

I agree. There needs to be more focus not just on strengthening non-proliferation regimes, but on how to respond/cope if those regimes fail. What would we do if there were a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India? At the moment, I don’t think anyone has a clear answer...

Weekly History Quote -- Purim Edition

2005-03-25T14:18:00.000-05:00

"It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thundering and lightnings of Mt. Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain."

-- Judah Benjamin, US Senator from Lousiana (1852-1861) responding on the Senate floor to charges made by Sen. Ben Wade of Ohio that Benjamin was an "Israelite in Egyptian clothing."

ps. After a strange and terrible two weeks of being offline, full Internet connectivity is expected to return Saturday. Expect regular blogging to resume then as well....

George Kennan, 1904-2005

2005-03-18T09:35:00.000-05:00

"For the love of God, for the love of your children and of the civilization to which you belong, cease this madness. You are mortal men. You are capable of error. You have no right to hold in your hands -- there is no one wise enough and strong enough to hold in his hands -- destructive power sufficient to put an end to civilized life on a great portion of our planet."

-- An impassioned plea for nuclear disarmament written in the twilight of Kennan's life. There is much I want to say about this complex, and often misunderstoond, author of "containment." But it will have to wait until later today or the weekend...

UPDATE: Both Daniel Drezner and Oxblog have thoughtful posts on Kennan's life and legacy. Also, you can read Kennan's famous 1947 Foreign Affairs article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," here -- seriously, you can't get foreign affairs writing like this anymore.

Bolton and Wolfiwitz and Their New Homes

2005-03-17T13:37:00.000-05:00

First John Bolton to the UN, and now Paul Wolfiwitz to head the World Bank. Is this evidence of the continued neo-con ascendancy in the Bush administration? Keven Drum seems to think so, as do the Europeans. But Greg Djerejian, Daniel Drezner, and Matt Yglesias disagree. And of course, they are correct.

First off, as Yglesias notes, "preventative wars are not, I take it, something the Bank head is able to launch." Indeed, instead of regime change in Iran, Wolfiwitz will be promoting international economic development, a far easier case to make. But more importantly, at the UN and at the World Bank, Bolton and Wolfiwitz will be far removed from the inner-circles of policymaking inside the beltway -- out of the loop, so to speak. Drezner points out, "No neocon worth their salt would want Bolton at the UN or Wolfowitz at the Bank -- because neocons don't believe these institutions are particularly relevant." And combined with the fact that Doug Feith will be leaving the Pentagon this summer, and Richard Myers' term as Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair will expire in December, it looks as if management is finally breaking up Team Rumsfeld. In fact, Djerejian bets that Rumsfeld himself will be gone by mid-to-late 2005. So contra the mainstream print media, what we're seeing is hardly a revival of Bush's first term foreign policy team.

Still, regardless of what it means for the direction of US foreign policy, will these appointments be effective ones? I am skeptical but optimistic about both.

The UN is undoubtedly in need of some tough love. Confronted with scandals, impotence, and zero accountability, the last thing the UN needs is another ambassador who, because of a fetish for multilateralism, refuses to confront its problems. Even Kofi Annan has acknowledged this, with his spokesman responding to Bolton's appointment by stating that Annan had “nothing against people who hold [the UN] accountable.” And Bolton will certainly do precisely that. But unlike some, I will refrain from lauding the appointment as a "Nixon goes to China" move, and I have my doubts that Bolton will become a latter-day Daniel Patrick Moynihan. That said -- provided his tendency towards inflammatory rhetoric does not get the best of him -- Bolton, at the very least, will offer a dose of reality and hard truth-telling to an organization that badly needs it.

Now on to Wolfiwitz. Wolfiwitz, as it happens, is my favorite neocon in the Pentagon (Bob Kagan being my favorite neocon in all). Yes, he was badly wrong about many aspects of the Iraq War (necessary troop levels, being greeted with flowers, oil revenues paying for the war), but of all the war's neo-con advocates, Wolfiwitz was the most idealistic about the war's humanitarian and democracy-promotion aspects. Further, when many conservatives opposed the Balkan interventions of the late-90s, Wolfiwitz stood strong in support of Clinton. He's also argued for higher spending on aid to Liberia and the Sudan. In other words, Wolfiwitz accepts and believes in the World Bank's raison de'etre -- that the rich world can and should help the poor world through economic development.

That being said, Wolfiwitz is not an economist and he has had limited experience in development work. So it remains to be seen that he can master the myriad details that running the World Bank requires. Still, at the World Bank he'll be able to put his great intellect to use on aid and democracy promotion, while being restrained from pursuing his more controversial ideas on regime change and preventive war... Everybody wins.

The Tragedy of Torture

2005-03-16T17:26:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan possesses a frustrating ability typical of exceptional writers -- to be able to express a sentiment that you had been struggling to find words for, far more articulately than you ever could. When such is the case, it is best just to excerpt liberally. And so excerpt I shall:

The last time I checked, the official number of murders by torture in U.S. custody was five, with 23 other deaths under investigation. Now we have 26 criminal homicides of detainees. There will be more to come. The standard conservative defense is that this was restricted to one night in Abu Ghraib and that even that wasn't torture. Anyone who has read even the white-wash reports, like the Church report, knows that what happened at AG was torture under any definition. Anyone who reads the NYT this morning will note that only one of the murders took place at Abu Ghraib. This was systemic mistreatment of detainees. It still is. And this doesn't even deal with the CIA, which has been given carte blanche to torture or kidnap anyone it suspects of terrorism, even if innocent, or to send them to Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia to get hung from hooks in the ceiling. The second conservative response is that this has nothing to do with official policy and that therefore no one in the administration should be held accountable. First, Donald Rumsfeld didn't think so. He offered to resign twice because of his responsibility (he had signed two torture warrants by then and known of Abu Ghraib for months). Second, the administration's reversal of its own 2002 memo sanctioning torture implicitly acknowledges that it had responsibility for this astonishingly widespread phenomenon of torturing prisoners to death or treating them so badly they died. The numbers of detainees tortured or mistreated who didn't die is, of course exponentially larger. The administration included as part of its war-plan legal memos arguing that the usual ban on mistreatment of prisoners was no longer operable and that any "military necessity" could justify torture or abuse of detainees. How much more evidence do we need? Now we have the latest ACLU document dump in which one soldier reports that General Ricardo Sanchez said, ""Why are we detaining these people, we should be killing them." Well, why should anyone be surprised when these prisoners were indeed killed?

It’s baffling that the same administration which has dedicated itself to ending tyranny and spreading democracy throughout the Middle East could be so willing to adopt interrogation procedures that are inimical to the liberal democracy it is trying to promote. Actually it’s not baffling, it’s sickening. And it threatens to undo the progress made in the region so far. (One of my major problems with John Kerry was his craven refusal to call the President out on the interrogation practices that his administration had condoned). The image of the hooded Iraqi man standing on a small box with wires attached to his genitals could be just as influential as the image of the joyous Iraqi man voting with a child in his arms.

It is important to note here that, although torture has been widespread, it is still practiced by only a small percentage of our military and intelligence personnel. Indeed, the large number of Army and CIA officials who have condemned and reported such behavior is quite heartening. But it is also important to note that torture continues still.

There must be an investigation into detainee abuse that is unconnected to either the Pentagon or the CIA. It is the first step to undoing the damage that we have wrought. Hopefully, it won’t be too little, too late.

Issues with the Internets

2005-03-15T11:15:00.000-05:00

Don't worry, all ten of you who read this blog, I am still alive -- just unable to post much. The fortified compound in northwest Washington, DC that the Radical Centrist calls home is experiencing Internet problems -- which may require drastic measures to solve. I'd post from work, but right now I'm way too busy to spend the day pontificating on world events.

So until connectivity is restored, you may read this article about the increasingly pro-Western/anti-regime sentiments of the Iranians, and you may check out this coverage of the 1 million anti-Syrian protesters in Beirut yesterday.

Weekly History Quote

2005-03-11T16:40:00.000-05:00

"If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development."

-- Aristotle

What Happened to Tom Friedman?

2005-03-10T12:11:00.000-05:00

Is it just me, or has Jim Hoagland totally been kicking Tom Friedman's ass lately when it comes to center-left, slightly hawkish commentary on the Middle East? Both have op-eds today about the so-called "Beirut Spring." But Friedman's is full of all the usual "tom-friedmanisms" and generalities and pretty much nothing that I haven't already heard, or that he hasn't already written. Hoagland, meanwhile, manages to combine heady optimism, a healthy dose of realism, and some insightful historical context to present a solid sum-up/analysis of the current situation in Lebanon. Here are the highlights:

This is a moment that should be celebrated, supported and expanded, as President Bush suggested by predicting on Tuesday that "the thaw has begun" for the region. ... But it is also a moment to keep expectations from racing too far ahead of Lebanon's complex reality and the differing views its troubles still provoke from outside powers, principally France and the United States. The best way to aid Lebanon's rebirth as a nation is to keep the focus on the intricate set of political negotiations over power-sharing that the Lebanese themselves must initiate, manage and make succeed once the Syrian boot is off their neck.

The United States can help most by catalyzing and then shielding the process of reconciliation [of Lebanon's three large population groups] from outside interference, as it now does by pushing the Syrians to leave. Overreaching because of early, inflated optimism is to be avoided not only for Lebanon's sake but for the sake of the larger U.S. project for regional transformation.

Exaggerated optimism about Iraq -- mine included -- gave rise to post-invasion bitterness and exaggerated pessimism inside and outside the administration. ...Something similar could easily happen in Lebanon, a country that provides a study in contrasts, physical and political... But the country's deep social chasms make Lebanon a weak reed for the Bush administration to lean on in pursuing its Greater Middle East ambitions. Those in search of historical analogies may eventually have to consider Europe's promising but stillborn revolutions of 1848 instead of the collapse of the Soviet empire and the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the model.

Initially successful uprisings in France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and elsewhere in 1848 were reversed by authoritarian governments. But to say the revolutions "failed" is to misread history. The impulses they generated continued to course through those societies and guide them toward national unity and democracy long afterward. A rush to judgment concerning the coming difficult weeks in Lebanon might also miss their fundamental importance.

So there you have it. Let's not repeat the mistakes of Iraq, and may we remember that even "failed" revolutions can sow the seeds for future success. After that, Friedman's not even woth the read. Indeed, the Times' entire op-ed page doesn't hold a candle to the Posts'. I've been less than impressed with David Brooks as a columnist, Friedman has fallen into a rut, and Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd are...well, they're Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd. Maybe John Tierny can inject some life back into them, otherwise it's the Post all the way.

A Test for Arik

2005-03-08T22:02:00.000-05:00

After working myself into a frenzy last night, imagining grey-suited FEC bureaucrats storming into my apartment screaming about campaign finance reform and confiscating my laptop, I had hoped for some more laid-back blogging tonight...something mellow, like comparing the moustaches of Tom Friedman and John Bolton. But no. Instead, the mojo-wire spits this out at me:

A damning official report will on Wednesday accuse the Israeli state of funding the creation of Jewish settler outposts in the West Bank even though the government itself regards them as illegal. Talia Sasson, a former state prosecutor commissioned by Ariel Sharon, prime minister, to investigate the outpost issue, found "blatant violations of the law" by officials and state institutions.

According to leaks of the document to the media, Ms Sasson concludes: "The process of outpost expansion is profoundly under way." ... Ms Sasson is expected to report that some of the outposts were established on private Palestinian land with the help of housing ministry architects. She will also report that defence ministry officials allocated such land for outpost construction to the quasi-official Jewish Agency and that the housing ministry funded many of the trailers.
However, the first stage of the international peace "road map", which Israeli has accepted, specifically calls for the removal of all unauthorised outposts established since Mr Sharon came to office four years ago. ... Government officials declined comment until Wednesday's official publication of the report, which was to be delivered to Mr Sharon on Tuesday night.

Already fragile, the ceasefire -- indeed the entire peace process -- now dangles on the edge of a precipice. Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, remains unwilling to provoke a Palestinian civil war by trying to forcibly disarm the militants. Likewise, Sharon is unwilling to provoke a parallel Israeli civil war by forcibly removing the West Bank settlers (to Sharon's credit, he is pursuing a limited version of this with the Gaza pullout, but the real test has always been in the West Bank).

The current uneasy and incomplete lull in the violence is predicated upon Abbas' ability to convince Palestinian militants to observe the ceasefire volutarily. But for this srategy to work he needs Sharon to make concessions. Palestinians must be able to see that the ceasefire is benefiting them, and not just Israel. To put it mildy, news that Israel's own government has been illegally expanding the West Bank settlements in direct violation of the "Road Map" which that very government has endorsed, will not help matters.

Much will depend on how Sharon responds to this news tomorrow. The fact that he commissioned the investigation in the first place is heartening. But for the peace process to survive, Sharon must make it clear that he condemns the expansion of the settlements and take tangible steps to curb that expansion.

Developing...

Why Oh Why, John McCain...

2005-03-07T20:16:00.000-05:00

did you put your good name on this sorry piece of legislation. The Radical Centrist typically does not wade into the muddy waters of partisan domestic disputes, but this issue surely transcends partisanship.

The Radical Centrist is one part left-of-center pragmatist, one part raving libertarian conservative, and one part dylanologist. The raving libertarian side of me, fueled by one too many George Will columns, has always viewed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill through a prism of healthy skepticism. But recent events have driven me into outright hostility.

At this point, some you may be thinking, "Is he crazy? Campaign finance reform is a good thing!" I'll just say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions (and Wings albums).

But first some background. On the heels of 2000's bitter, disputed election, Congress enacted the "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act" -- sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Russ Feingold (D-WI). The Act, in many ways, is an affront to the First Amendment's right to free speech, but the vague language of one passage is causing the current problems. This passage states that the Act regulates

"any broadcast, cable or satellite communication, newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising facility, mass mailing or telephone bank to the general public, or any other form of general public political advertising."

In 2002, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) concluded that this portion of the law did not extend to the Internet. This past September, however, a U.S. District judge overturned that decision, finding that "[t]he commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines the campaign finance law's purposes."

So now -- you guessed it -- the FEC is preparing to begin regulating blogs.

"In just a few months...bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines."

Well the Radical Centrist will not be intimidated. I plan to arm myself...to the teeth. Any attempt by an FEC agent to regulate this blog will be met with extremely violent, and perhaps lethal, force.

Off Like A Prom Dress

2005-03-04T18:28:00.000-05:00

I'm off to North Carolina for the weekend so blogging will be even lighter than usual. When I return I want to engage more fully with the fundamental question raised by the Carter/Glastris article. This question is not whether we should institute a draft -- in the absence of another major terrorist attack that question, good policy or not, is politically moot. The real question is whether, with a military that is unequiped to effectively play the role designed for it in our "Grand Strategy" (massive peacekeeping / humanitarian interventions), we need to restructure the military or restructure the strategy. I tend to favor the former, with a bit of the latter thrown in. But more later. Now I'm off...

In the meantime you can read this essay on Bob Dylan in the New York Review of Books.

Weekly History Quote -- The Generals' Edition

2005-03-04T15:03:00.000-05:00

"I don't believe the truth will ever be known, and I have a great contempt for history."

-- General George Meade

"History is a myth that men agree to believe."

-- Napoleaon

When Ya Get Drafted

2005-03-02T22:23:00.000-05:00

Jello Biafra might disagree, but the article to read right now is Phil Carter's and Paul Glastris' endorsement of the draft in the center-left Washington Monthly. Although I don't know much about the foreign policy/national security bonafides of Glastris -- except that he's the editor in chief of the Monthly -- I have great respect for the opinions of Phil Carter, especially in the area of military affairs.

Until now, calls from the Left for instituting the draft have been aimed at raising the threshold for committment of military force; the idea being that if more people were directly affected by military interventions (i.e. having brothers, sisters, sons, or daughters called up to serve), they would be less willing to support such ventures. The Glastris/Carter approach is nothing like that . Their argument in a nutshell is:

America's all-volunteer military simply cannot deploy and sustain enough troops to succeed in places like Iraq while still deterring threats elsewhere in the world. Simply adding more soldiers to the active duty force, as some in Washington are now suggesting, may sound like a good solution. But it's not, for sound operational and pragmatic reasons. America doesn't need a bigger standing army; it needs a deep bench of trained soldiers held in reserve who can be mobilized to handle the unpredictable but inevitable wars and humanitarian interventions of the future.

Before reading the article, I had been a proponent of increasing the size of the active duty army. But Carter and Glastris are pretty convincing on why this is not a great idea:

...it's the long-term cost issues that most militate against making the all-volunteer force bigger. Generals today are fond of saying that you recruit a soldier, but you retain their families. One reason the Army has resisted Congress' attempts to raise its end strength is that it does not want to embrace all of the costs associated with permanently increasing the size of the military, because it sees each soldier as a 30-year commitment—both to the soldier and his (or her) family. According to the Congressional Budget Office, each soldier costs $99,000 per year—a figure which includes medical care, housing, and family benefits.

The United States does not necessarily need a massive standing military all the time. What it needs is a highly trained professional force of a certain size—what we have right now is fine—backed by a massive surge capacity of troops in reserve to quickly augment the active-duty force in times of emergency. Sure, right now, the Army is light several hundred thousand deployable ground troops. But over the long term, the demands of Iraq will subside, the need for troops will decline, and it could be another decade or two before another mission that big comes along.

That said, the "draft" that Carter and Glastris propose is nothing like our Vietnam-era conception of a draft:

A better solution would fix the weaknesses of the all-volunteer force without undermining its strengths. Here's how such a plan might work. Instead of a lottery, the federal government would impose a requirement that no four-year college or university be allowed to accept a student, male or female, unless and until that student had completed a 12-month to two-year term of service. Unlike an old-fashioned draft, this 21st-century service requirement would provide a vital element of personal choice. Students could choose to fulfill their obligations in any of three ways: in national service programs like AmeriCorps (tutoring disadvantaged children), in homeland security assignments (guarding ports), or in the military. Those who chose the latter could serve as military police officers, truck drivers, or other non-combat specialists requiring only modest levels of training. (It should be noted that the Army currently offers two-year enlistments for all of these jobs, as well as for the infantry.) They would be deployed as needed for peacekeeping or nation-building missions. They would serve for 12-months to two years, with modest follow-on reserve obligations.

Check out Irregular Analyses for a critique of this proposal in terms of military policy; mainly that "draftees are not well trained enough - through no fault of their own - to demonstrate the skills necessary for successful [counterinsurgency] work: cultural sensitivity, extreme patience and the nerve to ask questions first and shoot later." For critiques from the western side of the Atlantic see Matt Yglesias here and Kevin Drum here. The major thrust of the Yglesias/Drum critque goes like this: "the problem isn't that our military is too small, [but] that our strategy is too big."

Although I'm unsure if I buy into the Carter/Glastris draft argument, I find the "our strategy is too big" critique deeply unsatifying. Matt offers the fact that the US accounts for "almost half of global military spending" as proof that our military can't possibly be too small. I beg to differ.

For good or ill, the developed world essentially has ceded its security requirements to the United States. Whether it's stopping genocide, distributing aid after an environmental catastrophe, or toppling an aggressive dictator, the US has to provide the bulk of the military force if a credible international response is to occur. Like it or not, this is the reality, and it doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon. And somehow, we've got to adapt our military to this reality. So if nothing else, Carter and Glastris have performed a vital service by igniting the debate over the best way to equip our military to safeguard global security over the coming decades.

Breaking News From Beirut

2005-02-28T14:54:00.000-05:00

The latest from the mojo-wire:

Prime Minister Omar Karami resigned Monday evening after a day of angry street protests against his government and its chief supporter, the Syrian government. The surprise announcement was the most dramatic sign yet of the government's instability following the murder two weeks ago of Rafiq Hariri, who had preceded Karami as prime minister but left the post and had been an increasingly strident voice against Syria's presence here...

.... Karami had asked parliament, meeting Monday for the first time since Hariri's assassination, to cast an up-or-down vote on his government in the next few days. He was widely expected to win the no-confidence motion, given that pro-Syrian members control roughly two-thirds of the 128-seat parliament.

But his resignation before the vote reflected the bitterness of Monday's session and the passions of the crowd outside, who are engaged in what they describe as the red-and-white revolution against the Syrian-backed government and Syria's deep-seated presence in Lebanon. Hariri, a secular Sunni Muslim whose wealth and competence made him a favorite of the international community and many Lebanese, died in a bomb blast Feb. 14 as his motorcade traveled along Beirut's fashionable waterfront. Sixteen others died in the attack, now under investigation by a U.N. committee.

Opposition legislators, wearing lengths of red-and-white cloth around their necks in solidarity with the demonstrators outside, during a bitter 10-hour session directly accused Karami's government of having a hand in Hariri's murder. Karami rose at the end to announce his resignation, although his cabinet is expected to remain in place in a caretaker capacity through the parliamentary elections scheduled for later this spring...

.... On the streets Monday, demonstrators held up banners reading, "We Want Our Freedom," and, to the Lebanese government, "Puppets: The Show Is Over."

Georgia, Ukraine, and now Lebanon? The story is, as they say, developing...

The Tide Turns

2005-02-28T00:00:00.000-05:00

Some views from around the Middle East:

"The election of a president will be through direct, secret balloting, giving the chance for political parties to run for the presidential elections and providing guarantees that allow more than one candidate for the people to choose among them with their own will."

-- Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, announcing that he would ask the parliament to change the constitution to permit multiparty popular elections.

"I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.... The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

-- Walid Jumblatt, leader of the new Lebanese "intifada," speaking of his determination to defy the Syrian troops in Lebanon.

"...the time of one-party rule is over. What we are seeing here is the birth of our democratic system."

-- Mustafa Barghouti, independent runner-up in the January Palestinian presidential election, expressing support for Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei's promise to replace his proposed new government with a cabinet made up almost exclusively of technocrats.

Now, any idiot can string together a series of quotes that express any sentiment he wishes to. But if life were a J.R.R Tolkien novel, I'd like to think that we are currently at the part in the Two Towers where Gandalf says -- upon revealing himself to Aragon, Gimli, and Legolas -- "We meet again. At the turn of the tide." Here's to hoping, at least.

Could I Get Some Plutonium with That Nuclear Fuel?

2005-02-27T22:35:00.000-05:00

Not good, but hardly unexpected.

Russia and Iran signed a deal Sunday that would deliver nuclear fuel to the Middle East country for the startup of its first reactor -- a project the United States had for years pushed Moscow to drop, claiming Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb.

Iranian Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh and Russian Atomic Energy Agency chief Alexander Rumyantsev signed the agreement at the Bushehr nuclear power plant. The signing, which was delayed by a day, came after the two senior officials toured the $800 million complex.

.... Both officials refused to discuss the details of shipping the nuclear fuel to Iran and the spent fuel back to Russia, but insisted that the agreement conforms to international nuclear regulations.

..... Russia, which helped build the plant, has agreed to provide the fuel needed to run it -- but only if Iran returns the spent fuel to prevent any possibility Tehran would extract plutonium from it to make atomic bombs. Tehran has agreed to return the spent fuel, but the sides disagreed on who should pay for its return.

In an earlier post I lamented the dilemma that Russia poses to US foreign policy -- how on the one hand we've got to promote both political and economic liberalism, while on the other, we've got to promote Russian cooperation in the securing of its nuclear materials. And I'll acknowledge that, in the vien of achieving the latter, the US might have to turn a blind eye to some of Putin's authoritarian impulses. But for Putin to agree (less than a week after meeting with Bush) to begin supplying Iran with nuclear fuel, from which bomb-usable plutonium could be readily extracted, strikes me as a big slap in the face to the US -- albeit, one we could see coming.

In announcing the deal, Russia is acting directly against the security interests of the US and the EU. The two should have no qualms about making Putin pay a political price for this. They should exert whatever forms of international pressure they possess to let Putin know that his undemocratic behaviour is unacceptable. The vitalness of Russian stability to global security allows Putin to get away with some dictatorial antics that he wouldn't otherwise. But if Putin is unwillling to work in the interests of global security, the US and EU no longer should be willing to tolerate such antics.

Weekly History Quote

2005-02-25T17:34:00.000-05:00

"History never repeats itself; at best it sometimes rhymes."

-- Mark Twain

The Radical Centrist Is Lazy

2005-02-24T22:08:00.000-05:00

So seeing as how Iran's quest for a nuclear weapon is shaping up to be one of the major foreign policy challenges of the next few years, I thought I'd post something on a solid Ken Pollack and Ray Takyeh Foreign Affairs article on the subject. My plan was to excerpt a few passages from the article interpersed with my own comments and opinions. But then I realized that Greg Djerajian had already done the same thing over at Belgravia Dispatch. And since I'm too lazy right now to come up with anything to add to his analysis, I suggest you either read the entire article, or at least read Greg's take on it. For those of you too lazy to do either of those, I'll excerpt here what Greg and I agree is the article's most fascinating part -- on the divisions within Iran's conservative bloc:

Iran's conservative bloc is riddled with factions and their contradictions. But whereas reformers and conservatives differ over domestic issues, the divisions within the conservative faction chiefly relate to critical foreign policy issues. Stalwarts of the Islamic revolution launched by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 still control Iran's judiciary, the Council of Guardians (the constitution's watchdog), and other powerful institutions, as well as key coercive groups such as the Revolutionary Guards and the Islamic vigilantes of the Ansar-e-Hezbollah. The hard-liners consider themselves the most ardent Khomeini disciples and think of the revolution less as an antimonarchical rebellion than as a continued uprising against the forces that once sustained the U.S. presence in Iran: Western imperialism, Zionism, and Arab despotism. Ayatollah Mahmood Hashemi Shahroudi, the chief of the judiciary, said in 2001, "Our national interests lie with antagonizing the Great Satan. We condemn any cowardly stance toward America and any word on compromise with the Great Satan." For ideologues like him, international ostracism is the necessary price for revolutionary affirmation.

The pragmatists among Khomeini's heirs believe that the regime's survival depends on a more judicious international course. Thanks to them, Iran remained a regular player in the global energy market even at the height of its revolutionary fervor. Today, these realists gravitate around the influential former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and occupy key positions throughout the national security establishment. One of the group's leading figures, Muhammad Javad Larijani, a former legislator, argues, "We should not have what I would call an obstinate policy toward the world." Instead, the pragmatic conservatives have tried to develop economic and security arrangements with foreign powers such as China, the European Union, and Russia. In reaction to the United States' overthrow of two regimes on Iran's periphery--in Afghanistan and Iraq--they have adopted a wary but moderate stance. Admonishing his more radical brethren, Rafsanjani, for example, has warned, "We are facing a cruel and powerful U.S. government, and we have to be cautious and awake.

In a similar vein, the issue of Iraq is also fracturing the theocratic regime. In the eyes of Iran's reactionaries, the Islamic Republic's ideological mission demands that the revolution be exported to its pivotal Arab (and majority Shiite) neighbor. Such an act would not only establish the continued relevance of Iran's original Islamic vision but also secure a critical ally for an increasingly isolated Tehran. In contrast, the approach of Tehran's realists is conditioned by the requirements of the nation-state and its demands for stability. For this cohort, the most important task at hand is to prevent Iraq's simmering religious and ethnic tensions from engulfing Iran. Instigating Shiite uprisings, dispatching suicide squads, and provoking unnecessary confrontations with the United States hardly serves Iran's interests at a time when its own domestic problems are deepening. As a result, Tehran's mainstream leadership has mostly encouraged Iraq's Shiite groups to participate in reconstruction, not to obstruct U.S. efforts, and to do everything possible to avoid civil war. Hard-liners, meanwhile, have won permission to provide some assistance to Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and other Shiite rejectionists.

Teetering between the two camps is Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei. As the theocracy's top ideologue, he shares the hard-liners' revolutionary convictions and their confrontational impulses. But as the head of state, he must safeguard Iran's national interests and temper ideology with statecraft. In his 16 years as supreme leader, Khamenei has attempted to balance the ideologues and the realists, empowering both factions to prevent either from achieving a preponderance of influence. Lately, however, the Middle East's changing political topography has forced his hand somewhat. With the American imperium encroaching menacingly on Iran's frontiers, Khamenei, one of the country's most hawkish thinkers, is being forced to lean toward the pragmatists on some issues.

Ivan Meets GI Joe

2005-02-23T23:50:00.000-05:00

Two major aspects of the US' current foreign policy strategy are: 1) to actively promote democracy throughout the world; and 2) to work to curb the proliferation of nuclear material and other weapons of mass destruction. But when it comes to those two goals, Vladimir Putin's Russia represents somewhat of a dilemma.

One the one hand, it is unquestionable that under Putin's rule Russia is sliding back into authoritarianism -- and that Thursday's meeting between Bush and Putin in Bratislava, Slovakia would be a perfect time for Bush to demonstrate that his commitment to democracy is genuine and that it applies to dictators everywhere, not just to those who refuse to aid America's "war on terror." But Russia also contains a considerable amount of loose nuclear material, much of which is horrifyingly unsecured, and the US will have to work cooperatively with Russia to secure it. So as much as I'd like Bush to bitch-slap Putin into introducing some democratic reforms, Bush can't afford to piss off Putin so much that he refuses to help us secure Russia's nuclear sites.

Somewhat hopefully, the Washington Post reports Wednesday night that the US and Russia may have made some progress, on the proliferation front at least.

President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin plan to announce a package of measures today to counter the threat of nuclear terrorism, a threat highlighted in a new U.S. intelligence report warning that Russian nuclear material could still fall into terrorist hands, according to U.S. officials familiar with the accord.
Under the planned agreement, U.S. and Russian officials would accelerate long-delayed security upgrades at Russia's many poorly protected nuclear facilities, jointly develop emergency responses to a nuclear or radiological terrorist attack, and establish a program to replace highly enriched uranium in research reactors around the world to prevent it from being used for weapons, the U.S. officials said

Somewhat less hopefully, the same article later down reports:

But negotiators were unable to break an impasse that has held up a multibillion-dollar program to dispose of 68 tons of plutonium usable for nuclear weapons despite last-minute talks. U.S. and Russian officials rushed to London and met in Moscow in a bid to resolve a technical dispute over liability that has frozen the program, first announced by Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin in 1998 and still unrealized seven years later.

I really don't know how to resolve the dilemma that Russia poses. The spread of liberal democracy is the best way for the US to guarantee its security, and the world's, in the long term. But nuclear weapons -- especially the unsecured ones in Russia -- scare the shit out of me.

Is France the Poster Child of Anti-Americanism? Not So Fast, Mon Ami

2005-02-23T00:16:00.000-05:00

Some interesting tidbits buried in an Economist overview of anti-Americanism (unfortunately, the article is subscription only). First, we learn that -- get ready to spit out your freedom fries -- the French actually are not that anti-American, at least comparatively:

In a poll conducted in 21 countries by the BBC World Service last month, only a small majority (54%) of those interviewed in France said they viewed American influence unfavourably—not much more than in Australia (52%), and rather less than in Mexico (57%), Canada (60%) and Germany (64%).

This certainly surprised me. I always had thought anti-Americanism to be far more pervasive in France than in Germany. The reason for my false impression, according to the Economist, is that while France's political class is extremely strident in their anti-Amercanism, the rest of the population doesn't much care. (We have, in America, a similar situation regarding the idea -- perpetuated in the media -- of a hyper-partisan and divided electorate. The reality is that, while America's political classes are increasingly estranged, there is remarkable consensus on issues amongst the general population. [A centrist consensus? - ed Exactly!] ) But the Economist article really gets interesting once it asks why the French politically active are so "bombastic" in expressing their hostility towards America. One reason? Because America and France are so similar:

...the rivalry between France and America [is] based on their remarkably similar self-images: the two countries both think they invented the rights of man, have a unique calling to spread liberty round the world and hold a variety of other attributes that make them utterly and admirably exceptional.

I think the Economist is onto something here. The world today is pretty much the product of three great political revolutions -- the American, the French, and the Russian -- which along with Great Britain's Industrial Revolution, have shaped the past 200 years of history. During the Cold War, and maybe even since 1917, the USA and the USSR competed in spreading the ideological fruits of their respective revolutions. One of the philosophical barriers preventing the two powers from ever reaching a mutually-acceptable settlement (except to deal with the extreme, but short-lived, threat to them both poised by Germany and Japan) was that the ideological underpinnings of each nation were fundamentally opposed to the other.

Almost the opposite situation exists between the USA and France. Indeed, throughout most of the 19th Century France played a role in world politics that would be quite familiar to US citizens and politicians today -- a symbol of "liberty, justice, and fraternity"; the gurantor of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man." And just as the Shias revolted against Saddam in 1991 expecting America to aid their struggle, so did the masses of Europe's great cities during the 1848 revolutions expect the help of the French armies. Both were disappointed.

So, even though the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of the French political class can be quite annoying, it's important to remember that at least their hearts are in the right place -- they're just jealous. And although so many of our political and legal traditions are British in origin, we share a powerful bond with France in that both of our countries are products of revolutions by, for, and of, the people.

Last Thoughts on Hunter Thompson

2005-02-21T15:22:00.000-05:00

“Livin’ on the road, my friend, was supposed to keep us free and clean.”

So it was. But in reality, it never seems to work out that way. And now, the Road has taken another one…Hunter S. Thompson, dead at 67, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Hunter S. Thompson, whose savage pen chronicled the gruesome excesses of the “American Dream”; who harnessed wit and sarcasm, fact and fiction, insight and absurdity to depict a Truth that perhaps only he really saw; who in many ways embodied the very Dream that he claimed had died.

Hunter S. Thompson, the Horatio Alger of the counter-culture. A character that only America – with its rivers and highways and mountains and outlaws – could have produced. A wild Kentucky boy who found himself in the Air Force as part of a parole deal, and eventually developed a writing style that could be bitter, poignant, utterly hilarious, and always unique – a style that brought him fame, fortune, and now, death.

I had long suspected that Thompson’s time was approaching. One can only endure the regimen of drugs and alcohol and insanity that he subjected himself to for so long. And at 67 he outlasted so many of the other “greats” of his era. But the manner of Thompson’s death – suicide – leaves me disheartened.

Thompson was at his best describing events that deeply depressed him – the end of the sixties, the rise of Nixon:

“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

But what made his writing powerful was that even in the midst of the cruelties and excesses that he witnessed, his writing maintained an undying optimism (The Gipper of Journalism?). He refused to take events, or even himself, too seriously. However ugly things got, Hunter Thompson always would be there to point out their absurdities. But apparently, only to a point, then Life became too much for him. And if Life was too much for Hunter, what does that mean for the rest of us?

Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic. Maybe the drugs, the paranoia, and the psychosis just took their inevitable toll – the proverbial “chickens” coming home to roost and all that. Regardless, Thompson’s death leaves a void in American culture and letters that we will be hard pressed to fill. His voice will be missed. And tonight we should all celebrate his memory in a way he would have wanted – by drinking massive quantities of Wild Turkey and listening to “Mr. Tambourine Man” on repeat.

Also, check out Ben Volin's blog for some more heartfelt thoughts.

Weekly History Quote

2005-02-18T15:11:00.000-05:00

"Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis."

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Intelligence in the American Civil War

2005-02-16T11:35:00.000-05:00

I urge anyone interested in the American Civil War to check out this article from Studies In Intelligence, a journal published by the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence (thanks to CivilWarriors for the hat tip). The article deals with an amazing, and mostly untold, story of the period -- the dramatic role that black American freedmen played in intelligence gathering for the Union army. The most profound result of these "Black Dispatches" -- as they were called -- was the Army of the Potomac's occupying of the high ground outside Gettysburg before the full Confederate force arrived. The superior position of the Federal force proved to be dicisive in the battle that ensued. Read the article.

More Missile Defense

2005-02-15T10:57:00.000-05:00

A reader asks:

We're going to perfect missile defense technology by ... decreasing the R&D budget? Seems to me like that would retard the development of missile defense and bleed money over a longer period of time.

Perhaps I failed to make myself clear. The $10.7 billion spent last year and the $9.6 billion to be spent this year is not just for research and development -- only about $3 billion of that goes into R&D (and that's a liberal estimate). The Pentagon is using the vast majority of those funds to actually deploy a missile defense system -- a system that doesn't work (see blelow).

There's no rational reason to be building a missile defense system at this time, since whatever we build won't be able to stop a missile. It's a huge waste of money, especially when you've got an overstreched military already occupying a huge country. So what I'm suggesting is that we maintain funding for research and development and either scrap the other $7 billion or spend it more wisely elsewhere. Research on missile defense is still worth pursuing because one day we'll have the technology to build an effective system, and it's at that point that it should be built.

An $88 Billion Failure

2005-02-14T22:37:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post reports:

For the second time in as many months, the Bush administration's new missile defense system failed to complete a key test today, automatically shutting down a few seconds before an interceptor missile was to launch toward a mock enemy warhead. [snip]

Monday's miscarried test was created to duplicate a Dec. 15 trial that also failed. Both tests were to have marked the first flights of the advanced interceptor missile. Earlier tests had used a slower, less sophisticated interceptor. [snip]

In both recent tests, the mock enemy warhead was launched successfully from Kodiak, Alaska, but the interceptor failed to get off the ground. Defense officials said each test appears to have failed for a different reason.

Now, I don't have anything against the idea of missile defense in theory. I mean, if we could feasibly build a missisle intercept shield around the US that could thwart missile attacks with a near 100 percent success rate, I'd say to hell with the Russians and the Chinese and anti-ballistic missile treaty obligations, let's build the damn thing. But after 20 years of research and nearly $88 billion poured into the program, it's not even clear that such a system is theoretically possible, let alone whether we could build it in the not-too-distant future at a not-too-outrageous price tag.

It comes down to costs and benefits. Missile Defense is one of many possible ways to secure the homeland. But the Dept. of Defense has a limited budget. And at the moment, it is dead set on dumping billions into deploying a missile defense system that will only work if (via Fred Kaplan): 1) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it's going; 2) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; 3) it's transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; 4) only one target missile has been launched; and 5) the "attack" happens in daylight. See pages 12-13 of this Defense Dept. annual report on the "limitations" of the missile defense deployment program .

Basically, there are more effective ways to be spending the tax-payer's dollar. I'm not suggesting we cut the program entirely. Merely, that we bring spending levels back down to those appropriate for research and development, until we've actually developed a program that is worth deploying. This would constitute almost a $7 billion reduction. And there are plenty of programs that could use that $7 billion. For one, we could fully fund the Nunn-Lugar Act (1991) -- which finances the dismantlement of nuclear weapons and the securing of loose fissile material in the former Soviet Union -- and we could even extend it to other nuclear powers who've decided to do the right thing and disarm (think Libya). Or we could use the funds to increase the size of the army -- with the additions concentrated in peacekeeping troops and military police. If only we had done this three years ago.

The Defense Dept. FY 2006 budget allocates $9.6 billion for missile defense (slightly down from $10.7 billion last year). Given the unpracticality of the program, and other more pressing security needs, this number really should be no higher than $3 billion. Enough said.

For those interested in international security issues...

2005-02-14T19:36:00.000-05:00

Be sure to check out GlobalSecurity.org. This site was recently pointed out to me by my friend, and fellow radical centrist, Andy Stearns. As he says, it's "sort of like having access to CIA files and satellite images..."

Osama's V-Day Message

2005-02-14T11:07:00.000-05:00

Via the Onion, we learn that Osama Bin Laden has wished us all a crappy Valentine's Day:

Bin Laden called for "romantic humiliation for all Americans of courting and betrothal age."

"Allah willing, embarrassment and tearful rejection shall rule this day," bin Laden said. "Paper hearts shall be rent and trod upon,and dreams of love delivered stillborn. Body language shall be misinterpreted, crushes unrequited, and sincere expressions of affection mocked. Invitations to dinner will be rejected, just as Americans have rejected Allah, the one true God."

. . .Bin Laden added: "May your special Valentine's Day dinner be spent at an overrated restaurant that impoverishes your purse and leaves your stomach churning with indigestible Western cuisine."

Sullivan Is Right

2005-02-13T22:16:00.000-05:00

"The president continues to lie about what he is sanctioning and has sanctioned. The least we should demand is an honest public debate: what techniques are now permissible for the CIA and other agencies? Do they constitute torture? What is in the second Bybee memo that explicitly details these approved techniques? Who has approved the use of religious abuse as part of anti-Muslim interrogation practices? We are in a surreal situation where reports of torture come in every day, where the administration denies what is patently true and where the Congress and even the blogosphere is deliberately looking the other way."

A Question

2005-02-13T22:08:00.000-05:00

"How can this president ask Egypt to liberalize while he is depending on its security forces to tortue American-captured inmates?"
-- Andrew Sullivan

Some Rice with Your Totalitarianism?

2005-02-11T19:17:00.000-05:00

"Totalitarianism" is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. And especially in light of the recent brouhaha over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's use of the term to characterize Iran, I thought this might be a good time to attempt to clarify just what the word actually means. Once we understand what totalitarianism is, then maybe we can figure out if the regime in Iran fits the bill.

Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascists originally coined the term during the 1920s to self-describe the regime they were creating. Ironically, most scholars now agree that Fascist Italy never remotely approached being "totalitarian" -- as we now understand the term. In her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt popularized the use of the term "totalitarianism" to illustrate the similarities between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union. In this sense, "totalitariansim" -- in the words of Eric Hobsbawm -- represented

an all-embracing centralized system which not only imposed total physical control over its population but, by means of its propaganda and education, actually succedded in getting its people to internalize its values.

It was in this sense that the word began to be used with frequency among academics, journalists, and politicians during the Cold War, and continues to be used to this day. [Didn't you quote Hobsbawm in a blog entry last week? -- ed I guess blogging is bringing out the Marxist historian trapped inside me!] The most vivid portrayal of our current understanding of totalitarianism, in all its unadulterated, dystopian evil, is George Orwell's 1984.

But while the "Oceania" of Orwell's imagination was undoubtedly totalitarian, it's much less clear that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union -- along with all the other subsequent regimes who've had the term slung at them -- ever were. Geoffrey Hosking -- a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union -- has identified six characteristics which, if fulfilled, may dub a regime "totalitarian": (i) central direction of the economy; (ii) a single mass-party mobilizing the population; (iii) an official monopoly of mass communications; (iv) supervision of everyone by a terroristic security police; (v) adulation of a single leader; and (vi) a single official ideology projecting a perfect final state of mankind and claiming priority over both the legal order and the individual conscience.

On the face of it, Stalinist Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, Nazi Germany fulfill most, if not all, of these criteria. One could even argue that North Korea and Iran fit the bill as well. But problems arise when we attempt to take "totalitarianism" as a theoretical term, and apply it to actual regimes. For one, the idea of "totalitarianism" rests on the assumption that citizens of a totalitarian regime are passive cogs in the centralized-machine of the State. In reality, though -- from the Soviet Union to Iran -- citizens are hardly passive, and their aspirations can profoundly influence the evolution of the system.

In other words, true "totalitarianism" is impossible. Hitler and Stalin may have wanted and attempted to build totalitarian states, but in actuality, they could never control their citizens' thoughts and emotions. Citizens simply found more private, circumspect ways to express their independence. One could say perhaps the same thing about Kim Il-Sung and Ayatollah Khomeini, although in my own opinion Stalin and Hitler came much closer than the latter two.

But even if, for argument's sake, we classify Stalinist Soviet Union as totalitarian, I simply cannot see how we could put present-day Iran in the same category. Admittedly, I'm far from an Iran expert, but from all accounts there is a large opposition movement in the country, and the majority of the Iranian population is disengaged from, if not completely dissaffected with, the regime. Further, many Iranians are even openly pro-American, or at least, pro-Western. What I'm trying to say is that Iran hardly constitutes an "all-embracing centralized system which not only impose[s] total physical control over its population but, by means of its propaganda and education, actually succed[s] in getting its people to internalize its values."

Which leads me to wonder, "what the hell was Condi thinking?" As an academic expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, Ms. Rice certainly is aware of the shortcomings of the term in even describing Stalin's State -- so how could she apply it to an even more dubious case? I think this may be just another example of the current gulf between politics and academia. In acaedemia these days, "totalitarianism" is used as a mostly theoretical term to describe a type of state that a few 20th Century dictatorships attempted, but eventually failed, to build.

In policital discourse, however, the term is used to characterize regimes whose aspirations are totalitarian, regardless of whether those regimes actually are. The mullahs in Iran, if they could have their way, would no doubt create a society with definite totalitarian leanings. And so would Kim Jong-Il. Unfortunately for Condi, since she is both an academic and a political figure, she has to take heat from people like me when she makes these assertions that I normally would let slide if uttered by a Joe Biden or a John McCain. But Ms. Rice should know better. Iran is not a totalitarian state. And if anyone disagrees with me, I'd love to hear your arguments.

History Quote of the Week

2005-02-11T16:28:00.000-05:00

"Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it."

-- Oscar Wilde

The Radical Centrist is Stupid

2005-02-09T21:07:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's because, unlike Daniel Drezner, I lack a Ph.D in political science, but I am confused as to why the "interesting question will be the extent to which the improving tranatlantic relationship reflects a greater recognition of shared interests -- or a greater willingness to amicably agree on disagreeing." It seems to me that Drezner is missing the forest for the trees.

I am firmly in the camp of Timothy Garton Ash when it comes to the importance of the transatlantic alliance in the ongoing struggle between freedom and tryanny. Despite our differences, the combined economic might and shared values of the US and the EU could be a major force for democracy, if we could only agree on a way to project that force. One of my problems with Bush's first-term foreign policy was his refusal to recognize the importance of this alliance, and -- in some instances -- his needless antagonizing of it. Consequently, I have been much-heartened by the conciliatory and hopeful noises coming out Europe during Condoleezza Rice's visit.

But back to Drezner. I don't see why this renewed diplomacy has to be either a "greater recognition of shared interests," or "a greater willingness to amicably agree on disagreeing." Why not both? Once two powers recognize that their "shared interests" are largely in line with one another's, and they then embark on a cooperative effort to re-strengthen diplomatic ties, doesn't it follow that they will more "amicably" disagree on the points of argument that remain? The whole point of an alliance is to cooperate on joint strategic interests, while remaining "amicable" during the disagreements that pop up. [Didn't you steal the idea behind this post from Kausfiles? -- ed Immature writers imitate, mature writers steal.]

Deja Vu All Over Again

2005-02-08T20:19:00.000-05:00

I don't why, but I feel like we've been here before:

“For the first time in a long time there exists in our region hope for a better future for us and our grandchildren”

Thus saith Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, earlier today after his first summit with Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas. Count me as a committed pessimist on this one. Still, I'll acknowledge that Yasser Arafat's absence from the peace process allows a tiny part of me to feel hopeful. The Economist elaborates:

The summit, held on Tuesday February 8th in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, was intended to seize the best opportunity for Middle East peace since the start of the Palestinian intifada (uprising) against Israeli occupation more than four years ago (see our chronology). It achieved an unequivocal pledge by both sides to cease all hostilities immediately—in Mr Abbas’s case, effectively declaring the intifada at an end. It also produced a renewed commitment by Mr Sharon to the internationally backed “road map” peace plan and to its intended outcome of an independent Palestinian state—four months after one of his closest advisers had said that Israel was “freezing” these commitments.

What has provided this opportunity for peace is the death last November of Yasser Arafat. Since then Mr Abbas, a determined advocate of talks rather than armed struggle, has succeeded him as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and, in an election last month, as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA). After 40 years steering the course of Palestinian history—for good or ill—Arafat was relegated to a mere footnote to it: at the summit, the man who for so long personified the Palestinian national struggle was barely mentioned.

But there have been cease-fires before. And the reason they always fail is because:

...while Mr Sharon has control of his generals and thus is well-placed to keep his part of that bargain, Mr Abbas, so far, is not. The militant groups, be they Islamist ones like Hamas or even those attached to Mr Abbas’s own Fatah party, are not under his command, though he hopes to persuade them to accept this, eventually. They have not so far agreed to a formal ceasefire. All they have offered is a voluntary respite from attacks, whose continuance (and any eventual truce declaration) will depend on concessions from Israel.

And of course, the Israelis contribute their fare share to the failure as well:

On the streets of the occupied territories, a wider prisoner release is the most pressing matter but there is also the question of Palestinian refugees; the status of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians demand as their capital; the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, which continue to expand; and the controversial Israeli barrier, which is carving chunks out of the West Bank. Palestinians will also expect to see the easing of the tight restrictions that Israel imposes on their movements.

I give the cease-fire a less than 10 percent chance of holding, but I would love to be surprised. Nevertheless, I'm not one of those people who believes that peace between Israel and Palestine is a necessity to defeating "Islamo Fascism," or "Jihadism," or whatever you want to call suicide terrorism carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Sure, tyrannical regimes from Saudi Arabia, to Egypt, to Syria use the conflict as an excuse for why they can't politically liberalize their governments. But do we really believe that if we managed to forge peace between the Israelis and Paelstinians, the Saudis would just say, "Well, you did it...I guess we'll have to democritize now"? My bet is that they would just come up with another reason to avoid political reform.

In sum, an independent and (hopeully) somewhat democratic Palestine living peacefully next to Israel would, at best, be a useful public relations boost on the "Arab Street" -- whatever that is. But it would not do much to end "Jihadism" or to democritize the Middle East. In fact, I think it's quite likely that a solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis may not be possible until after there is significant political reform in the Middle East. On that note I end this post, to go drink whiskey and listen to Johnny Cash.

They're so wonwee

2005-02-07T22:53:00.000-05:00

I wonder if Hans Bwix ever inspected the Pyongyang Metro system? (link via Yglesias)

Bush the Anarchist?

2005-02-07T13:09:00.000-05:00

Bush's foreign policy views have been called Wilsonian, neo-Wilsonian, neo-conservative, etc... Well how about "neo-anarchist"? In Sunday's Post Outlook section, Michael Kinsley compares Bush's views on the roots of terrorism -- as expressed in his State of the Union address -- with those of anarchist writer, Emma Goldman. According to Bush:

"the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder. If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America. . . . "

According to Goldman:

"the despair millions of people are daily made to endure...drives some of them to acts of terror. Can one question the tremendous, revolutionizing effect on human character exerted by great social iniquities?"

Now, Bush's foreign policy rhetoric always has been more appealing than its reality. But this willingness to speak about the "root causes" of terrorism -- typically a conservative anathema -- certainly is a far cry from the days when terrorists hated us simply because we were free. It gives me another reason to hope that Bush's handling of foreign policy will improve in the second term.

Stalin Blogging and Rethinking the Second World War

2005-02-06T14:04:00.000-05:00

BEWARE -- long post alert. But if you feel like plunging into our memory of WWII and the Cold War, read on.....

In the introduction to her book about the Soviet Union's concentration camp system, Gulag, Anne Applebaum comments on how the symbols of Stalinism are not nearly as taboo in the public mind of Western Europe and North America as the symbols of Nazism, even though as a mass-murderer, Stalin far out-slaughtered Hitler. For instance, one can stroll down the streets of Moscow or Prague and buy all sorts of Soviet paraphenalia -- hammer and sickle pins, Red Army caps. But can you imagine hawkers selling swastikas on the streets of Berlin? Or if instead of those ubiquitous red CCCP t-shirts, college kids wore black ones emblazoned with NSDAP (National Socialist German Worker's Party)? As Applebaum writes, "to many people, the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of Hitler." And consequently, "the symbol of one mass murderer fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murderer makes us laugh." I am guilty of this sentiment myself on a regular basis (I once tried to call a rock band I was in "Mike Green and the Bolshevik All-Stars").

Of course, most people realize that Stalin was a brutal dictator, and that Soviet citizens sufferred horribly under his rule, but in everything from high school history classrooms to hollywood docu-dramas to history channel documentaries, Stalinism takes a backseat to Nazism as Evil Ideology Numero Uno. There are convincing reasons for why this has happened. But the argument that I find most persuasive -- and I think Applebaum would agree with me -- is that focusing on Stalin's crimes with the same intensity that we do Hitler's would shatter our public memory of the Second World War. Applembaum writes, "We have, at present, a firm conviction that the Second World War was a wholly just war, and few want that conviction shaken." The defeat of Germany and Japan would not have been possible without the combined efforts of the United States and the USSR. But the idea that, for a good portion of the European continent, the main result of that effort merely was to replace one totalitarian regime with another, is understandably unpleasant.

Thinking about the Second World War as an extraordinary "Good vs. Evil" narrative is not just prevalent among lay people. It is espoused by many historians as well, albeit in a more nuanced and articulate form. This scholarly version of the narrative sees the war as a singular experience in the history of humanity. Nazi Germany, it argues, could not have been dealt with by any form of Realpolitik and the war to destroy it represented an ideological struggle for the existence of Liberal civilization (I use the term "Liberal" in its classical sense). It was the uniqueness of the circumnstances of the time that made the alliance between the USA and the USSR possible. The historian, Eric Hobsbawm, eloquently expresses this viewpoint in his book Age of Extremes:

"What eventually forged the union against Germany was the fact that it was not just any nation-state with reasons to feel discontented with its situation, but one whose policy and ambitions were determined by its ideology.... [A]s the 1930s advancedit became increasingly clear that more was at issue than the relative balance of power between nation-states.... Indeed, the politics of the West [during the Second World War]...can best be understood, not through the contest of states, but as an international ideological civil war.... [T]he crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions...; on the other, its oponents. ... Hitler Germany was both...ruthlessly and manifestly committed to the destruction of the values and institutions of...'Western Civilization'...,and capable of carrying out its barbaric project."

I find many aspects of this analysis persuasive and, until several days ago, bought into the theory entirely. First off, it's undoubtedly true that Hitler's Germany was neither Bismark's Germany nor the Kaiser's Germany. Unlike in the First World War -- where some deft diplomacy, especially on the part of Britain, probably could have headed off the conflict, or at least prevented it from developing into the European suicide-pact it became -- Realpolitiking of any sort with the Nazis was bound to fail because Nazi Germany was not a typical nation-state. And Hobsbawm also is correct that, as different as they are, the writings of Adam Smith and Karl Marx belong to the same tradition of Liberal thought that was born during the Enlightenment -- a tradition which Hitler rejected.

But the scholarly narrative, like that of the lay person, cannot help but fall short once the crimes of Stalin's regime are considered closely. Indeed, the idea that Stalin's Soviet Union in any way represented the ideas of the Enlightenment is ridiculous. I doubt Marx would have recognized anything in the terror-backed, totalitarian state that was the Soviet Union in 1938, except maybe in the regime's rhetoric. In fact, in their subservience of the individual to the needs of the State, their use of mass-propaganda and personality cults to manipulate public opinion, their mantainence of a camp system to seperate out political or racial prisoners, and their general urge to control all aspects of their citizens' lives, the Stalinist and Nazi systems were remarkably similar to one another -- far too similar to explain their enmity during the Second World War as due to their occupying opposite sides of an "ideological civil war."

So another framework for thinking about the Second World War is needed. I have two suggestions. The first rejects the "ideological civil war" narrative, and the second, extends it. The rejection would argue that, far from an ideological civil war, the Western Allies' effort against the Nazi's was essentially a sideshow. The "real" Second World War was Hitler and Stalin's titanic struggle for dominance of Eastern and Central Europe. After all, in terms of geographical space, the size of the armies, military casualties, civillian deaths, and the scope and enormity of the destruction, the war in the east dwarfed that of the west. Soviet losses were 70 times that of the US. And, to Hitler, the invasion of the west was almost an afterthought. It was the colonization and depopulation of the east that were his war goals.

The major shortcomings of this framework are that it fails to take account of the war against Japan and that is a bit too blithely dismissful of the liberation of Western Europe, which made possible, for at least half of Europe, the gradual rebirth of Liberal democracy and capitalism during the latter half of the century. So perhaps instead of rejecting Hobsbawm's "ideological civil war," we should extend it, so that our narrative of the Second World War continues through 1945 all the way to 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union. This narrrative would explain that the extended-Second World War was indeed a war between the ideological children of the Enlightenment and their enemies, as represented by Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Militarist Japan. (Fascist Italy is excluded from this list because, despite its policy and rhetoric, it was too militarily impotent to pose any threat to the Liberal order. The other three nations had the power to destroy that order.) The framework I propose would argue that, facing defeat during the initial phase of the struggle, the surviving Liberal powers (US and Britain) allied themselves with the least expansionist and hostile of their three enemies, the Soviet Union. At great cost, then, this alliance was able to defeat the gravest threats to the Liberal system.

But in 1945 the conflict did not end, it merely shifted. Two out of three of Liberalism's great enemies had been defeated, yet Stalin remained. The Soviet Union, however, was not nearly as aggressive or expansionist as Nazi Germany or Militarist Japan had been. And Liberalism was in a much stronger position, as the war with Germany had exhausted the Soviet Union utterly, while the USA was at a zenith of economic and military power. Vastly simplifying years of complex and still-controversial history, further direct, armed conflict was in neither hostile camp's interest, so "cold war" descended on the world. Thus, the Second World War between Liberal civilization and Totalitarianism did not truly end until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

This narrative has its problems. But at least it would provide Western public discourse with a framework for thinking about the Second World War which would allow us to acknowledge Stalin's crimes head on, without abandoning the notion that the Second World War was a war that needed to be fought to save Western civilization. Thanks to any readers who have stuck with me to this point. And I promise some shorter, more current-events -related posts in the near future....

Friday History Quote

2005-02-04T15:49:00.000-05:00

"History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another."

-- Max Beerbohm

Total War's Late 20th Century Hiatus

2005-02-01T21:56:00.000-05:00

I'd like to respond to, and elaborate on, an insightful post by Anthony Cormack over at "Irregular Analyses," a foreign policy blog run by far more qualified minds than mine. Cormack notes how attitudes toward civillian populations during wartime have evolved in the sixty years since the end of the Second World War. Regarding the nuclear attacks on Japan, Cormack writes:

...the obliteration of an entire city's population with a single bomb is of course something with which the human mind is not well equipped to cope. But it needs to be put in context. In fact, the dropping of the nuclear bombs came as the culmination of a lengthy conventional bombing campaign in which most of Japan's urban concentrations had already been reduced to charcoal by firestorm attacks of a potency that made most of the raids on Germany seem limp wristed.

Now, we can debate whether area bombing campaigns in the Second World War, especially the use of incendiaries on a wide scale, were in any way able to meet reasonable standards of either utility or Just War theory.... The point is that the nuclear bombings must be placed within a broader context. Judged by the standards of the day (which we may or may not ultimately reject) they were unusual only in the fact that one bomb could cause so much damage - in absolute terms the scale of destruction was not especially unusual.

Essentially, what made the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki uniquely horrifying was that one bomb was able to destroy each city, not that each city was destroyed. Cities had been destroyed by bombing all over Europe and Asia. Cormack continues:

.... In the Second World War, it was an accepted fact that the populations of Japan and Germany were not only key cogs in the overall military machine but also active supporters of those regimes.

In large measure this situation no longer exists. Let's think of some of the major conflicts that have taken place since the end of the Cold War. What do the Gulf War, the Iraq War, the Kosovo War, The Afghan campaign and to some extent the Bosnia intervention all have in common? The fact that - at least in Western rhetoric - the populations of the countries aligned against us were not seen as analogous to the regimes we were fighting. Great pains were taken to differentiate between, for example, the people of Iraq and Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime.

Cormack is undoubtedly correct. But why this shift in attitudes and rhetoric? Was it the triumph of enlightenment ideals? A lingering memory of the horrors of WWII? Perhaps a little of both. But mostly, I believe, this shift is a reflection more of the changing nature of war than of any change in human attitudes toward war. Targeting the civillians of an enemy nation during wartime is a charactersitic of what we now call "Total War." Cormack places the end of Total War with the fall of the Soviet Union. I would push it back another fifty years.

Maybe it's because I just watched Thomas Barnett deliver his The Pentagon's New Map lecture to the Naval War College on CSPAN, but I think the West's loss of interest in Total War can be explained by the fact that between 1946-2005 the West did not fight the same type of wars that it fought between 1914-1945 (perhaps 1861-1945?). The wars of the earlier period were Great Power struggles. They were wars between countries of more or less equal military capabilities. But two Great Powers have not fought each other for sixty years. Indeed, the wars of the last half-century have been been "asymmetrical," with one side enjoying such dominance that it would hardly need to destroy "the will" of belligerent civillians to make war. Perhaps this is why Total War has not reared its ugly head, and not because of any triumph of ideals or changing attitudes.

So we've not seen the last of Total War, but only a hiatus until the Great Powers begin fighting each other again.... thankfully, that doesn't look like it will happen anytime soon....

Iraq and Vietnam, Historical Parallels?

2005-01-31T17:20:00.000-05:00

Since this is primarily intended to be a foreign affairs and history focused blog, it makes a grim sort of sense for my first substantive post to discuss the historical parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. Basically, I don't think there are many. But the issue is worth addressing after a number of commentators have noted gloomily that South Vietnam had an election of its own amid violence in September 1967, the result of which was pretty irrelevant to the course of the US' disastrous involvement in the region. Luckily, I don't have to say much on the subject because Christopher Hitchens is hot on the case today in Slate (full story at http://slate.msn.com/id/2112895/). On a sidenote, Hitchens posseses a highly unorthodox set of political beliefs, thus making him a prime candidate for membership in the radical centre. Here's what he says with regard to Iraq and Vietnam:

To begin with, Vietnam had been undergoing a protracted struggle for independence since before World War II and had sustained this struggle militarily and politically against the French empire, the Japanese empire, and then after 1945 the French empire again. By 1954, at the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu, the forces of Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Giap had effectively decided matters on the battlefield, and President Eisenhower himself had conceded that Ho would have won any possible all-Vietnamese election. The distortions of the Cold War led the United States to take over where French colonialism had left off, to assist in partitioning the country, and to undertake a war that had already been lost.

Whatever the monstrosities of Asian communism may have been, Ho Chi Minh based his declaration of Vietnamese independence on a direct emulation of the words of Thomas Jefferson and was able to attract many non-Marxist nationalists to his camp. He had, moreover, been an ally of the West in the war against Japan. Nothing under this heading can be said of the Iraqi Baathists or jihadists, who are descended from those who angrily took the other side in the war against the Axis, and who opposed elections on principle. If today's Iraqi "insurgents" have any analogue at all in Southeast Asia it would be the Khmer Rouge.

This is the key difference between Iraq and Vietnam. In Vietnam we were fighting against a bonafide national independence movement whose leader enjoyed broad national -- and not only communist -- support. In Iraq, as the election on Sunday proved, we are fighting against an insurgency whose goals only a small minority of Iraqis share. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh saw himself as a nationalist first and a Marxist second; mainly because he believed Marxism offered the most effective blueprint for overthrowing a colonial power. He even initially thought that he would have US support during the struggle for independence against the French and sent Eisenhower eight letters during the 1950s; all of which were ignored. Hitchens goes on:

Vietnam as a state had not invaded any neighbor (even if it did infringe the neutrality of Cambodia) and did not do so until after the withdrawal of the United States when, with at least some claim to self-defense, it overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime. Contrast this, even briefly, to the record of Saddam Hussein in relation to Iran and Kuwait.

Vietnam had not languished under international sanctions for its brazen contempt for international law, nor for its building or acquisition, let alone its use of, weapons of mass destruction.

I agree with all of this, but I should note here that I don't agree with the headline of the article: "Why Iraq and Vietnam Have Nothing Whatsoever in Common." Obviously, anytime the US fights a guerilla war in the developing world there are going to be similarities to Vietnam. And in Iraq we have certainly seen some echoes -- especially in the Sunni Triangle --of the "destroy the village in order to save it" mentality, which proved so calamitous to our endeavor in Indochina. Also, our armies of both wars have witnessed the difficulties of winning "hearts and minds." But I continue to believe, despite the incompetence of the occupation and the "near impeachable" lack of a postwar plan, that the basic strategic conditions of Iraq continue to favor us in a way they never did in Vietnam. I say this because a vast majority of each ethnic group (including, but to a lesser extent, the Sunnis) share the same goals for Iraq that we do -- a stable, federal democracy that is influenced by Islam, but not dominated by it -- even if they do object to the occupation.

Having said that, just because Iraq is not Vietnam does not mean that Iraq is not a mess. Even after Sunday's incredibly moving, heartening, and successful vote, an unbelivable amount of problems persist. Too many to go into here (maybe in a later post). Much must be done to salvage the situation, and despite how conflicted we are over the decision to invade, I think we can all agree that the Iraqis deserve our help now. And it may turn out that the best way we can help Iraqi democracy is by pulling out. But alas, I stray from the historical point of this post, which means its time to end it.... mohalo

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog

2005-01-31T16:57:00.000-05:00

Last year blogs may have "jumped the shark," but since when has that stopped any of us? I figure this is a bandwagon I'd be a fool not to jump on.

So here it is, folks, yet another (mostly) politics / foreign affairs blog full of the pontifications of someone who has no basis to pontificate -- a glimpse into my twisted views of international relations, history, and culture (or lack thereof). enjoy