Archive for the 'Middle East' Category

It’s been obvious for some time that Obama simply cannot stand Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s also increasingly obvious that the President feels a real sense of liking for and fellow-spiritedness with Turkish leader Recep Erdogan, who has moved his country away from secular democracy and disturbingly far in the direction of Islamic fundamentalism and hostility to Israel.


Which says plenty about the kind of leadership we are getting from Obama himself.


More here.

Martin Kramer on Facebook:

Some pro-Palestinian ‘activists’ may make it onto flights to Ben-Gurion Airport for tomorrow’s ‘flytilla.’ (Many of them won’t, since Israel provided foreign airlines with lists of persons who will be denied entry, and the airlines have been canceling their reservations in compliance.) Those who do get through will be sent right back, but not before being handed this letter. Have a nice flight.

The letter is well worth a click. Read it here.

UPDATE: One of the initial commenters in response to Kramer’s FB post takes the Israelis to task for producing this “childish” letter. I disagree. The letter isn’t for the benefit of a few anti-Israel activists who are never going to change their minds. It’s a clever PR move that costs nothing and will get a lot of exposure. The Israelis should do more of this kind of thing and we should too.

Via Martin Kramer, who asks: “What happens to aging ’60s American Jewish radicals after the kids move out, the dog dies, and their parents (may they rest in peace), who so valued and cherished Israel, have passed on to their heavenly reward?”

If the trailer is representative, this is a slick piece of agitprop packaged as folksy interviews with thoughtful Jewish intellectuals who just happen to have doubts about Israel, no doubt because their integrity and independent-mindedness let them see clearly the evils of Israel that other Jews (and most non-Jewish Americans) are brainwashed into overlooking. In fact this is a bunch of leftist hacks repeating buzzwords (apartheid etc.) and citing events pruned of context to single out Israel for demonization. The woman in the last interview gives the game away by blaming Israel for the “stateless” condition of Palestinian refugees, even though Palestinian Arab statelessness, to the extent it still exists, is a racket maintained by Arab governments and the Palestinians themselves, and even though the post-WW2 world has had many refugee populations that dwarfed the Palestinian Arab refugee population and that, unlike the Palestinians, were mostly resettled within a few years. The difference is that people like those in this movie couldn’t use those other refugee populations as a weapon against the Jews. You would have to be profoundly ignorant to find this movie convincing, but ignorant people seem to be the target audience. Watch it for yourself.

I was fortunate to have had in high school a leftist, anti-Semitic history teacher, a man who was an enthusiast of Third World “liberation” movements run by kleptocrats and gangsters but who put Israel under a moral microscope. The Israeli Jews, as he saw it, had treated the Palestinian Arabs unjustly by (he would quote a particular historian whose book he always had at the ready) expelling them and this unjust treatment colored everything that Israel did subsequently. Two wrongs — an allusion to the Holocaust — don’t make a right. We should all be citizens of the world and should drop our parochialisms and be happy. Of course he mainly applied this argument to the Jews, and I was not clever enough to point out that the Jews’ enemies had often persecuted them for supposedly being too worldly. I argued, and learned a great deal in that class, and watching this movie trailer transports me right back to it. Shabbat shalom.

As the election approaches, Obama is turning up the volume on his assertions that he’s been a great friend to Israel.

This video tells a different story, and I think clearly a much truer one.

The video is long…30 minutes…but it is well-done. If you value the safety and survival of Israel…if you are concerned about the threat of terrorism to Americans and others around the world…if you believe it would be a very bad thing for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons…and if you are even remotely considering voting for Barack Obama or sitting out the election, then you owe it to yourself to watch this video.

link via Robert Avrech

CommodityOnline:

India’s crude oil imports from Iran is facing a risk of potential disruption as increasing US and EU sanctions make it impossible for Indian ships to obtain insurance.

Greg Scoblete, The Compass Blog (Real Clear World):

I imagine if I were an Indian official, I’d be a bit peeved to learn that acting “responsibly” means privileging the interests of the United States over my own country. Nevertheless, Burns has a point. After all, India may rely on Iran for 12 percent of its oil imports, but look at what the United States has been willing to do for India:
 

Presidents Obama and Bush have met India more than halfway in offering concrete and highly visible commitments on issues India cares about. On his state visit to India in November 2010, for example, President Obama committed the U.S. for the very first time to support India’s candidacy for permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council.

 
I don’t know about you, but if the U.S. was asked to forgo 12 percent of its oil imports in exchange for another country’s endorsement for a seat on a multilateral forum, I’d make the trade. I mean, c’mon, 12 percent? The U.S. gets about that much from the Persian Gulf – and we barely pay that area any attention at all…

Europa:

“The EU-India free trade agreement will be the single biggest trade agreement in the world, benefiting 1.7 billion people,” said president Barroso. “It would mean new opportunities for both Indian and European companies. It would mean a key driver for sustainable growth, job creation and innovation in India and Europe.”
 
The EU is India’s largest trading partner, accounting for about €86bn of trade in goods and services in 2010. Bilateral trade in goods rose by 20% between 2010 and 2011.”

Asia Times Online:

Last year Israel supplied India with $1.6 billion worth of military equipment and is India’s second-largest defense supplier after Russia. Sales are only going to rise. Indian defense procurements from Israel in the period 2002-07 have touched the $5 billion mark.

And this doesn’t even get into the China-EU-US-Israel-Saudi Arabia wheels-within-wheels complications when it comes to arms deals, hoped for arms deals, trade deals, hoped for trade deals, energy politics, and the rest of it….

It’s not 1985, now is it? The past is a different country, a Russian (Soviet)-oriented Cold War country used to thinking in terms of “Kissengerian” alliances and blocs. An intellectual adjustment may be needed. It’s like 3-D chess out there….

Speaking of energy:

“Was Saudi Arabia involved?” (Asia Times Online.) If it makes you feel better, let me point out that Saudi petrodollars continue to fund all sorts of interesting educational activities on the subcontinent, in Africa, and elsewhere, along with Iranian monies. So that’s nice.

Cross-posted from zenpundit.com

Mr. Nyet 

World affairs are much more like spider’s web than the neat little drawers of an apothecary’s cabinet. In the latter,  the contents of each drawer are cleanly isolated and conveniently compartmentalized. What you do with the contents of one drawer today has no bearing on what you do next week with those of another. By contrast, with a spider’s web, when you touch a web at any point, not only do you find it to be sticky in a fragile sort of way, but your touch sends vibrations through every centimeter of the lattice.

Which alerts the spiders.

Read the rest of this entry »

As Russia and China stand steadfastly by their ally Syria in spirit and in more material ways (like Russia supporting them with ammunition) it is important to realize how poisonous their world view actually is. There really is a critical moral distance between the US and Western values and those of the Russians and Chinese, which presume that regime stability at all costs as the absolute pinnacle of a governments’ function.

Here is a great set of satellite photos that show the use of heavy artillery (towed and self-propelled) along with rocket artillery that the Russians provided against civilian targets, basically just regular cities that happen to not be favored by Assad and his cronies in power.

Along with the photos comes some pithy but extremely true commentary about how there is no fair or logical manner to compare the “free Syrian Army” which Assad (and Russia and China) link to “terrorists” and “foreign elements” to those of the regime since Assad chooses to use these massive and powerful weapons against unarmed civilians. Frankly it is mind-boggling that a military, one entrusted to PROTECT its own citizens, would possibly use these horrendously powerful weapons against civilian areas.

Where did the Syrians get the idea to direct the massive firepower of modern artillery against unarmed civilians, who can’t possibly fight back (i.e. they don’t have airplanes or their own artillery for counter battery fire)? I am just speculating, but Russia’s own use of heavy artillery when they completely leveled THEIR OWN CITY of Grozny in Chechnya would be a logical example. This article describes the Soviet experience with Grozny and how eventually they were able to “win” the battle in the third battle for Grozny with the use of heavy artillery and the corresponding high casualty rate for non-combatants (civilians). It should be noted that these tactics would be unthinkable to Western leaders and collateral deaths of civilians are minimized whenever possible.

It is important that young people who read the media understand that these sorts of differences, that by standing steadfast with a brutal thug of an un-elected ruler who uses heavy artillery against his own, unarmed civilians and using their UN veto to ensure that this continues – that is the behavior of the Russians (and by their veto too, the Chinese, although they haven’t done anything like Grozny or Assad’s atrocities in recent years). They are not like us. And a world in which their values play a prominent role wouldn’t be a better world, or an “equivalent” world – it would be a barbaric Hobbsian world of the gangster-state.

Does this story mean that the US govt is not only not collaborating with Israel but is trying to undermine Israeli covert efforts? If so that is very bad news. We need more information. If the story is valid and our govt has decided to leak it to the press now, that suggests that we are 1) shockingly inept or 2) may be trying to cut a deal with the mullahs by sacrificing our ally or 3) both. Either way it sounds bad. I hope there’s more to the story.

A common refrain among the Left can be summarized as “moral equivalence” – i.e., comparing the negative events that the US is involved with (i.e., Abu Ghraib) or the inherent difficulties involved with attempting to turn a despotic state such as Iraq or a “failed state” such as Afghanistan into a functioning democracy with the horrors of the Russian invasion of Chechnya or the Chinese armed suppression of Tibet and then concluding that “we are all the same”.

While the individuals here at Chicago Boyz never bought into the “moral equivalence” model it is true that the US had to prop up and stand by some odious regimes for quite a while in order to win the Cold War. While South Korea today is a vibrant democracy and certifiably free country it wasn’t always this way and while that is the ideal there are other countries that are at varying steps along this path.

With the “Arab Spring” the US is looking at things differently. While we supported Egypt and Tunisia it was clear that we weren’t giving them unlimited support against their people; our contacts (the military) in fact minimized the violence in the overall situation and now at least these countries have an opportunity to have a democratic society.

On the other hand you can see how the former Soviet “client states” are treating the uprising – with unimaginable brutality against unarmed civilians protesting peacefully. Libya and Syria behaved (and are still behaving, in the case of Syria) with insane behaviors such as opening fire with anti-aircraft weapons and tank fire against peaceful citizens which is a slaughter. This type of behavior of course is perfectly acceptable to a Russian style client state trained military, which use all means of oppression available to preserve the power of the ruling class against the will of the people. There is no “state” or “populace” of value; there is only the power of those in control (Gaddafi or Assad’s clique, or Putin’s clique, for example) and thus an ever escalating chain of violence is OK in their interpretation of events if that is what it takes to control power.

As a country the US certainly has made mistakes but we LEARN from mistakes and are now on the side of freedom and voices for the people. And it isn’t only the US; France and Britain led the Libyan intervention much to the dismay of THEIR left wing.

And yet Russia today shows why moral equivalence was NEVER correct; they are fundamentally anti-freedom and supporting regimes with the same core values of their own. One of the best description of the former USSR was that they were just “third generation gangsters” and it is clear that Assad is just a “second generation gangster” (Gaddafi’s second generation were mostly hunted down and killed or about to stand trial, something Gaddafi would never have done for his opponents).

Russia continues to veto resolutions that would support unarmed citizens against Assad; their logic is clear – the goal of a regime is to CONTINUE TO EXIST and all means necessary to do this are OK. The will of their own populace is irrelevant, and the doctrine of “do not interfere in country’s affairs” provides the justification. There are obvious parallels to the situation in Putin’s Russia in that he will do everything to retain power (stuff the ballot box, threaten violence, blame foreign powers, or actually deploy violence in ever escalating levels if needed).

Whatever the sins of the US in the modern era there are no equivalents of using anti-aircraft weapons and tanks against unarmed citizens, and using scorched earth tactics against civilians. This never happened. Instead the US took great pains to shield civilians and grow nascent democratic institutions, although the outcome of this is never certain.

China too waits in the wings; the “third generation gangster” label could be applied there but they are more circumspect in the use of violence and do seem to believe that their goal as a regime does include raising the overall standard of living and giving people freedom (except to criticize the government, of course). Since Russia will block all effective sanctions against Syria, China has an out. This doesn’t stop China from crushing dissent where it suits them (Tibet) in a way that Western nations could never pull off; and a Beastie Boy concert or two obviously hasn’t dissuaded them a bit from their activities.

And yet there are no protests outside Russia or China’s embassies by the Left; this isn’t a battle that concerns them (Syria or Libya), because it doesn’t fit their narrative that all the governments are oppressive and of moral equivalence. There are no angry posts on left wing blogs about these issues. It doesn’t fit their pre-defined agenda that the US is an oppressive place since birth and that we are all the same.

That is the definition of moral bankruptcy.

The US could be almost self-sufficent for energy by 2030, while the EU will be the most vulnerable region for energy security, BP said on Wednesday.
 
Growth in shale oil and gas production would mean the US needed few imports, while North America as a whole could be self-sufficient, BP forecast at its Global Energy Outlook 2030.
 
BP forecast that Eurasia could also become self-sufficient, based on the prediction that Europe would being a net importer of energy, and the former Soviet Union countries net exporters by a similar amount.
 
In practice, this would leave the EU the most vulnerable region for energy security.

– The Telegraph

Friends, I have no particular knowledge of this subject. If you have anything to add in comments, I’d love to hear it.

Ah, age. One of the most daring aspects of this novel is that Lively is concerned with the hearts and problems of older characters. Her major players are well past their youth, and a boyish up-and-coming historian (the snake in Lord Henry’s mansion) doesn’t become important until much of the novel has passed. “How much remains when youth is gone?” Lively seems to be asking. And the answer is, “An abundance.” Here middle and old age are times of blossoming identity and possibility, miraculous bursts of sunshine.

– The New York Times on Penelope Lively’s “How it All Began.”

Even as a twenty-something, I was fascinated with literary representations of middle age. An odd one, that’s me.

Richard Fernandez:

There will always be those who’d like to abstract the candy from the candy store. But it is the shopkeeper’s responsibility to keep that from happening. Conservatives cannot simply hope that progressives will behave themselves. Boys will be boys and progressives will be progressives.
 
The supine acquiescence and collaboration in centralizing government over the last 3 decades has led to the point where a candidacy like Obama’s was not only possible but inevitable. His election is a symptom, not the primary cause of it of what ails the body politic.
 
The man himself can’t be blamed for taking his ambitions and ideology as far as they will go. It is those who let him pass that shows how low the rot within what passes for conservatism has fallen. Conservatism has basically been reduced to behaving well. To politely choose between the milquetoast offerings the press serves up and do nothing to make waves.
 
Anyone who so much as threatens to cause the slightest amount of controversy is branded a wacko — ironically not just by the Democrats but all too often by conservatives who are obsessed with the cult of respectability. Thus Palin, Bachman, Cain, Gingrich and Paul are faulted not so much for their personal failings — which any politician has — but for being disreputable. And being disrepute in today’s conservative world often consists in daring to think a single original thought.
 
By contrast, ‘progressives’ are psychologically conditioned to challenge and even subvert the system. They see that as their job. Others may criticize them, but their Base at least, will cheer them on. Implicit in the ‘progressive’ brand name is the idea of loyalty to the future, not so some transient present or disposable past. So when City Journal’s Siegel and Kotkin write that Obama is perfectly capable of trying to remake the US into a version of China they mean it. After all, politicians of 1940s dreamed of making America like the Soviet Union.
 

A victorious Obama administration could embrace a soft version of the Chinese model. The mechanisms of control already exist. The bureaucratic apparatus, the array of policy czars and regulatory enforcers commissioned by the executive branch, has grown dramatically under Obama. Their ability to control and prosecute people for violations relating to issues like labor and the environment—once largely the province of states and localities—can be further enhanced.

 
But it’s dollars to donuts that any ‘reputable’ conservative asked to comment on Siegel and Klotkin’s article would vehemently deny that such a thing is possible, not because it isn’t — which would be a good reason if it were true — but because it’s impossible for a conservative to admit a progressive can be a progressive.
 
CS Lewis wrote that the biggest trick the devil ever pulled was to make people believe he didn’t exist. Similarly the greatest conjury progressivism has ever peformed was to make their political opponents believe it was shameful to accept that progressives could ever be anything but slightly racier versions of themselves.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post, I asked a question about leverages in terms of foreign policy:

A key–an essential–question on leverages at Abu Muqawama (Dr. Andrew Exum):

Where things get tricky is when one tries to decide what to do about that. The principle problem is one that has been in my head watching more violent crackdowns in Bahrain and Egypt: the very source of U.S. leverage against the regimes in Bahrain and Egypt is that which links the United States to the abuses of the regime in the first place. So if you want to take a “moral” stand against the abuses of the regime in Bahrain and remove the Fifth Fleet, congratulations! You can feel good about yourself for about 24 hours — or until the time you realize that you have just lost the ability to schedule a same-day meeting with the Crown Prince to press him on the behavior of Bahrain’s security forces. Your leverage, such as it was, has just evaporated. The same is true in Egypt. It would feel good, amidst these violent clashes between the Army and protesters, to cut aid to the Egyptian Army. But in doing so, you also reduce your own leverage over the behavior of the Army itself.

Okay, so we have leverage with an Army cracking down on its own people, an Army fattened on US military aid and training. I thought bilateral military training was supposed to mitigate the worst instincts of some armies? Isn’t that the theory? What does it mean to have leverage? To what end? To what purpose? I don’t know the answer and I don’t think anyone does, so Dr. Exum has a point. We have no strategy (link goes to Zen) within which to place “trade offs”. Well, if we do, I can’t see it.

Greg Scoblete at The Compass (RealClearWorld) asks the question in a much better fashion (I enjoy reading that blog, whether I agree or disagree with specific points):

But all of this begs an important question – leverage for what? The idea is that the U.S. invests in places like Bahrain and Egypt because it needs or wants something in return. During the Cold War, it was keeping these states out of the Soviet orbit. In the 1990s and beyond, it was ensuring these states remained friendly with Israel and accommodative to U.S. military power in the region. Today, what? What is it that U.S. policy requires from Egypt and Bahrain that necessitates supporting these regimes during these brutal crack downs?

How should we view American policy toward the Middle East? What is the larger strategic framework within which we ought to view the various relationships? What is the optimal posture for the United States? Folks, I don’t know. I’d love to know your opinions on the subject.

Commenter Lynn Wheeler writes at zenpundit:

“….Boyd would comment in the 80s that the approach was having significant downside on American corporations as former WW2 officers climbed the corporate ladder, creating similar massive, rigid, top-down command&control infrastructures (along with little agility to adapt to changing conditions, US auto industry being one such poster child).”

Wheeler’s comment reminded me of the following post that I had meant to blog earlier:

One occasion in particular in the late 1970s brought this home to me. McNamara had come to one of our staff meetings in the Western Africa Region of the World Bank, where I was a young manager, and he had said he would be ready to answer any questions.
 
I felt fairly secure as an up-and-coming division chief and a risk-taking kind of guy. So I decided to ask McNamara the question that was on everyone’s lips in the corridors at the time, namely, whether he perceived any tension between his hard-driving policy of pushing out an ever-increasing volume of development loans and improving the quality of the projects that were being financed by the loans. In effect, was there a tension between quantity and quality?
 
When the time came for questions, I spoke first at the meeting and posed the question.
 
His reply to me was chilling.
 
He said that people who asked that kind of question didn’t understand our obligation to do both—we had to do more loans and we had to have higher quality—there was no tension. People who didn’t see that didn’t belong in the World Bank.

– Steve Denning

This too from a speech by Robert McNamara, “Security in the Contemporary World”:

The rub comes in this: We do not always grasp the meaning of the word “security” in this context. In a modernizing society, security means development.
 

Security is not military hardware, though it may include it. Security is not military force, though it may involve it. Security is not traditional military activity, though it may encompass it. Security is development. Without development, there can be no security. A developing nation that does not in fact develop simply cannot remain “secure.” It cannot remain secure for the intractable reason that its own citizenry cannot shed its human nature.
 

If security implies anything, it implies a minimal measure of order and stability. Without internal development of at least a minimal degree, order and stability are simply not possible. They are not possible because human nature cannot be frustrated beyond intrinsic limits. It reacts because it must.
[break]
Development means economic, social, and political progress. It means a reasonable standard of living, and the word “reasonable” in this context requires continual redefinition. What is “reasonable” in an earlier stage of development will become “unreasonable” in a later stage.
 

As development progresses, security progresses. And when the people of a nation have organized their own human and natural resources to provide themselves with what they need and expect out of life and have learned to compromise peacefully among competing demands in the larger national interest then their resistance to disorder and violence will be enormously increased.

Think about this in terms of the “armed nation building” of the past decade or so and in terms of successive Clinton, Bush, and Obama administration policies. Really not that much difference if you look at it in terms of securing stability through development – armed or otherwise. Not a novel observation in any way, but bears in mind repeating as the 2012 Presidential campaign continues its “running in place” trajectory….

Update:“Running in place” and “trajectory” don’t really go together, do they? Oh well. You all know what I mean….

A Terrorist’s Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri’s Islamic Jihad Manifesto by Jim Lacey (Ed.)

Cross-posted at zenpundit.com

Previously, I read and reviewed Brynjar Lia’s Architect of Global Jihad , about Islamist terrorist and strategist Abu Musab al-Suri. A sometime collaborator with Osama bin Laden and the AQ inner circle, a trainer of terrorists in military tactics in Afghanistan and an advocate of jihadi IO, al-Suri was one of the few minds produced by the radical Islamist movement who thought and wrote about conflict with the West on a strategic level. Before falling into the hands of Pakistani security and eventually, Syria, where al-Suri was wanted by the Assad regime, al-Suri produced a massive 1600 page tome on conducting a terror insurgency,  The Global Islamic Resistance Call, which al-Suri released on to the jihadi darknet.

Jim Lacey has produced an English digest version of al-Suri’s influential magnum opus comprising approximately 10% of the original  Arabic version, by focusing on the tactical and strategic subjects and excising the rhetorical/ritualistic redundancies common to Islamist discourse and the interminable theological disputation. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach.

Read the rest of this entry »

It sounds like a perfectly impractical and even risible notion – to remove the Pyramids of Giza from the view of the righteous by covering them with wax. Good heavens, what would happen on the first hot day of summer, assuming such a thing could even be accomplished? A vast puddle of melted wax, I am certain. Stick a wick the size of a Titan rocket made out of cotton string in the middle, empty in a couple of truckloads of essential perfume oils and you’d have a scented candle the size of Texas, the eighth wonder of the ancient world and something that could probably fumigate most of the Middle East.
Read the rest of this entry »

Via Peter Robinson and Ricochet (and Instapundit), this is worth watching both on the merits and because it reminds how people were thinking a decade ago:

Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post:

I still love novels, but fewer and fewer contemporary novelists (American ones especially) appeal to me, and I find it ever more difficult to avoid writing formulaic fiction reviews, which are no treat for me or my long-suffering readers.

Yardley’s two fiction recommendations from 2011 are “Saints and Sinners” by Edna O’Brien (a favorite writer of mine) and “The Cut” by George Pelecanos:

“The Cut” is his 17th book but the first featuring Spero Lucas, a veteran of the Iraq War who hires himself out to track down missing items of value to their owners….It also gives Pelecanos the opportunity to paint a remarkably broad and deep portrait of places in Washington that probably are little known, if at all, by people who read (or write) book reviews.

I confess, I am fascinated by the apparent intellectual “seediness” of Washington Beltway culture and its machinations. Fascinated and appalled. Fascinated because it is so appalling. And yet, I know there are good people embedded within the system, all trying to do good work. A mystery. An appallingly mysterious seediness. Why do you suppose this is so?

Peter J. Munson on Kennan:

Kennan took up this issue again in a 1985 Foreign Affairs article entitled “Morality and Foreign Policy.” He urged America to concern herself with the “interests of the national society” it governed, particularly “military security, the integrity of its political life and the well-being of its people.” This, in and of itself, was such a daunting task in Kennan’s mind that the government would have little capacity for other issues. This was a warning. He specifically stated that, “Democracy, as Americans understand it, is not necessarily the future of all mankind, nor is it the duty of the U.S. government to assure that it becomes that.” He indicted the tendencies of special interests pursuing their moral objectives as a major cause of America’s crusading bent, and of our overextension, stating that it was a duty to limit the country’s commitments to those which it had a reasonable chance of actually and predictably influencing the international environment. He was skeptical, however, (as am I) that this capability for influence was nearly as broad as many thought it.

I started out the decade of the “noughties” and post 9-11 thinking one thing, and now think I another. Flip flopping? Lack of steadiness in my character? Embarrassingly, I’d say it was my own ignorance. An ignorance I am only beginning to address.

A key–an essential–question on leverages at Abu Muqawama (Dr. Andrew Exum):

Where things get tricky is when one tries to decide what to do about that. The principle problem is one that has been in my head watching more violent crackdowns in Bahrain and Egypt: the very source of U.S. leverage against the regimes in Bahrain and Egypt is that which links the United States to the abuses of the regime in the first place. So if you want to take a “moral” stand against the abuses of the regime in Bahrain and remove the Fifth Fleet, congratulations! You can feel good about yourself for about 24 hours — or until the time you realize that you have just lost the ability to schedule a same-day meeting with the Crown Prince to press him on the behavior of Bahrain’s security forces. Your leverage, such as it was, has just evaporated. The same is true in Egypt. It would feel good, amidst these violent clashes between the Army and protesters, to cut aid to the Egyptian Army. But in doing so, you also reduce your own leverage over the behavior of the Army itself.

Okay, so we have leverage with an Army cracking down on its own people, an Army fattened on US military aid and training. I thought bilateral military training was supposed to mitigate the worst instincts of some armies? Isn’t that the theory? What does it mean to have leverage? To what end? To what purpose? I don’t know the answer and I don’t think anyone does, so Dr. Exum has a point. We have no strategy (link goes to Zen) within which to place “trade offs”. Well, if we do, I can’t see it.

The Bush Doctrine (theoretically and confusedly) meant to be a break from the old cosiness with illiberal regimes, but it turns out that we Americans are so connected to so many different nations given our “finger in every pie” national interests, that our “Foreign Policy Apparatus” is confused. Doesn’t matter which party and I am not really talking about any one person. Without a sense of national self–and without a larger grand strategy driven by sense of self–there is no way to understand what is essential. Our grand democratic rhetoric sounds hypocritical to large parts of the world and that is because it is hypocritical. The Bush administration continued the same relationships we had always had with the Saudi-Pakistan alliance for a variety of reasons (including nothing more than habit), but the bottom line is that American life doesn’t mean much when larger geostrategic concerns over “vital national interests” animate foreign policy thinking. Unfair? I think President Bush took protecting Americans very seriously but it all got out of control. It got out of control because when everything is a vital national interest, nothing is a vital national interest. Not a novel or original thought, but there it is. Pundita puts it this way:

Would the U.S. pay Pakistan’s military to help murder American troops if the U.S. had military conscription?

Through it all — throughout all the deceptions, denials, evasions, rationalizations and insultingly useless advice given over the years by Americans in civilian government, the military and academia — there is one question relating to U.S. tolerance for Pakistan’s proxy war against NATO and Afghanistan that towers above all others. And yet it’s the one question that has never been asked of a public figure. So in the title of this post I’ve put the question to the public.
I’d say the answer to the question is “Very unlikely.”

I’d say this is not about Pakistan which is the point of the linked post. It’s about us. I’ve heard all the rationalizations for why we did what we did. For anyone that knows anything about that part of the world outside the “Matrix” of conventional wisdoms pumped out by civilian and military officials over the years, the rationalizations don’t hold any water. I am NOT banging the war drum, or arguing for containment, or for discontinuing work with the Pakistani Army where our interests overlap. It didn’t have to be this way, though. That is my contention and that is where my thinking lies today.

(I came across this post in the old Daily Brief archives, and thought it would make a fantastic post for Halloween … for reasons that should become clear.)

The searchers found it, the ghost ship, when they were looking for something else; it lay, broken but deceptively complete, draped across the crest of a dune, like a seabird on the flat swells of a calm sea. But this metal bird had landed in a desolate and frozen sand sea, an aeronautical Mary Celeste, all of itself, and remained eerily preserved. Baked in the desert sun, wheels-up, pancake-landed and broken in half aft of the wings and entirely empty of its’ crew … but still, their gear, and extra ammunition was perfectly stowed, the guns functional … the radio worked, so did the compass and at least one of the engines. There were still-edible emergency rations, drinkable water, even a thermos of still-potable coffee … everything as it had been left. Read the rest of this entry »

Gaddafi is dead. That news is everywhere.

Ever since the uprising started I have been following it avidly not only because it involves a horrid dictator being taken down by his own people under NATO air cover but also because of past military historical knowledge of the region from following the Eighth Army vs. the Afrika Korps from the time I was a little kid. Most of that war was fought on Libyan soil (some in Egypt, and the end came in Tunisia).

There is footage of Gaddafi being captured alive. The scene is chaotic but Gaddafi is clearly alive. It is unknown how Gaddafi thought this was going to end, but he seems surprised. For a man who attempted to radiate manliness and strength you’d have thought he’d have died under his own hand rather than being captured alive.

He was holed up in Sirte for weeks, holding off the forces of the NTC, which mainly consisted of militias from Misrata and Benghazi. After fruitless attempts at negotiations, the militias moved up and back over a period of weeks, gaining ground over time but facing fanatical resistance. It is unknown what those resisting so fiercely thought they’d accomplish; there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do but surrender or die. It is ironic that Gaddafi’s forces fought so hard with little thought of their own survival while Gaddafi himself hid in a stinking drain pipe and awaited capture. I am only speculating but his hold on his bodyguards and remaining fighters must have been due to delusions of retaking the country or from fear of offending their leader, whom had run the country with an iron fist for over 40 years. Perhaps this is similar to German delusions of using “wonder weapons” like V2′s to turn the tide against the advancing allies in 1944-5 which helped to buoy morale when the end game was clear. Or perhaps it was a fear of violent reprisals at the hands of the Misrata militias, who had seen their city destroyed by pro-Gaddafi forces and suffered brutal atrocities. Only speculating but likely the latter.

Rommel was famously quoted saying something along the lines of

He who fights without command of the air fights like a savage

Per the BBC Gaddafi’s bodyguards attempted to break out this morning and their convoy of armed jeeps was struck by either a jet or predator drone and suffered severe damage. Just as NATO played a critical role in turning the tide as Gaddafi’s forces neared Benghazi, they apparently played a pivotal role in shooting up this convoy and allowing NTC forces to close in while Gaddafi hid.

There is a lot of discussion in certain parts of the media about darker skinned Libyans being targeted as mercenaries and allies of the regime; it likely won’t be helped that per the BBC in the end his remaining bodyguards (whose mauled and decapitated bodies were found near Gaddafi) were all black.

Exactly how he died is under dispute and perhaps we will never know. All that is documented is that he was captured alive and in a crowd of NTC fighters and wound up dead. Given the violence that he unleashed and the nature of the militias fighting him (not professional soldiers) it seems inevitable that it would end up this way. This wasn’t a “formal” war; it was a civil war, brother against brother, and unlike the US civil war those types of conflict often end up with bloody frontier style justice. So it happened here, as well.