Once the US squandered its post-Sept. 11 leverage with Pakistan it was left with only bad options for coping with the nuclear-armed jihadist incubating country. And these too, it has ignored in favor of the chimera of democracy and elections.
After Sept. 11, President George W. Bush declared war on the forces of global terror and their state sponsors. But as the years have passed since then, he has done more to lose the war than he has to win it simply by ignoring it.
Bhutto’s murder is not a sign that elections and democracy frighten al-Qaida and therefore must be pursued. It is a sign that the Taliban and al-Qaida – together with their supporters in the Pakistani military and intelligence services and Pakistani society as a whole – don’t like people who are supported by the US. Her assassination was yet another act of war by the enemies of the West against the West.
If democracy and freedom are the US’s ultimate aims in this war, the only way to achieve them is to first fight and win the war. Bhutto – like her Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese counterparts – was a sideshow.
History
Daimler Dingo
It is funny how things work out sometimes.
I am a big fan of reading about armored cars and other types of scouting vehicles from the WW2 era. There have been millions of pages written about the famous tank battles like Kursk. On top of that, there are many, many picture books that feature WW2 tanks. A few subjects that don’t get quite as much attention are armored cars, scout vehicles, and transports. Heck, Patton once said that his greatest weapon was the good old two ton truck.
Verdun, Passchendaele, Berlin, Cassino
One of the great things about being a military historian is that you get to ask yourself and others a lot of “what if” questions. They don’t really solve any mysteries but are fun to run through, and help your understanding of certain situations.
Just recently I was doing a purge of my library at home as I need to do every five years or so. I took stacks and stacks of books to Half Price Books and got a little scratch from the sale of those. Others I sent to my friend Carl to get them out of my house as a Christmas present.
America the Hyperpower
Kevin of The Smallest Minority fame has posted an interview with Amy Chua, the author of Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance–and Why They Fall. Fascinating stuff if you are interested in that sort of thing.
I was having a discussion a year or so back with a career academic (an astronomer, if it matters) who was bemoaning how the Global War on Terror has caused anti-American feeling to grow in many Western countries. His position was that it was bad for the US militarily since many democratic governments could not openly aid us if the voters back home were opposed.
I thought this was a totally unrealistic view since just about every Western democracy except the Australians and British have gutted their defense budgets to the point that they no longer have the ability to project military might, and the Brits and Aussies were aiding us anyway. Why should anyone care if the people who can’t help don’t approve? What are they bringing to the table to offer us if we should pay attention?
Prof. Chua is the very first person since 2001 who offers a realistic justification as to why we should care about anti-Americanism. She says that the main reason that we enjoy being so far ahead of the rest of the world in just about every category is due to the fact that the best and the brightest from other countries wanted to come here. The flow of talent from every corner of the globe towards the US is the only reason we were able to pull ahead.
Go ahead and watch the interview. I think I’ll have to pick up a copy of Prof. Chua’s tome and give it a read.
(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)
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Related:
James McCormick’s review of Chua’s World on Fire.
Retro-Authoritarianism in Russia
I’m reposting this here due to the interest in Russian and Soviet affairs among my CB co-bloggers:
TIME magazine, as most are no doubt aware, named Russian President Vladimir Putin as its 2007 “Man of the Year. The editors explained their choice in a way that also attempted to articulate Putin’s stabilitarian “siloviki ideology”:
“But all this has a dark side. To achieve stability, Putin and his administration have dramatically curtailed freedoms. His government has shut down TV stations and newspapers, jailed businessmen whose wealth and influence challenged the Kremlin’s hold on power, defanged opposition political parties and arrested those who confront his rule. Yet this grand bargain-of freedom for security-appeals to his Russian subjects, who had grown cynical over earlier regimes’ promises of the magical fruits of Western-style democracy. Putin’s popularity ratings are routinely around 70%. “He is emerging as an elected emperor, whom many people compare to Peter the Great,” says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and a well-connected expert on contemporary Russia.
Putin’s global ambitions seem straightforward. He certainly wants a seat at the table on the big international issues. But more important, he wants free rein inside Russia, without foreign interference, to run the political system as he sees fit, to use whatever force he needs to quiet seething outlying republics, to exert influence over Russia’s former Soviet neighbors. What he’s given up is Yeltsin’s calculation that Russia’s future requires broad acceptance on the West’s terms. That means that on big global issues, says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former point man on Russia policy for the Clinton Administration, “sometimes Russia will be helpful to Western interests, and sometimes it will be the spoiler.”
Putin’s rule can (and typically has been) analyzed from the perspective of Sovietology and Russian history. Articles feature the usual, superficial, observations that Russians like a strong vozhd (supreme leader) in the tradition of Stalin, Alexander III, Nicholas I, Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible; that Putin’s regime is a Cheka-KGB front (actually, KGB veterans are among the most competent and least ideological technocrats of the Soviet era officials – who would YOU hire? The guys who ran Soviet agriculture?); that Russians yearn for a return to the Cold War and so on. While there is some truth to these statements regarding the Russian national character and unhappy history, to use them as a fundamental explanation of Russia’s current political system is mostly rubbish. The truth is that Russia’s liberal and democratic parties self-destructed and discredited themselves among Russian voters in the waning years of Yeltsin’s tenure and that Putin enacted a moderately nationalist and anti-oligarchical agenda that catered to the tastes of the vast majority of his countrymen. When Putin centralized power in his hands as a quasi-dictator, he did so in a political vacuum.
This pattern is hardly uniquely Russian. We have seen populist, plebiscitary yet police-state regimes long before Vladimir Putin’s New Russia. Napoleon Bonaparte was the modern innovator, abolishing the decrepit Directorate and constructing a regime that offered a little something for everybody who wanted a glorious France; his cabinet included Jacobin Terrorists, Monarchists, Girondins, aristocracy, bourgeoisie and the chameleon-like Talleyrand. Napleon made use of “new men” and flattered the old nobility even as he created a broad class of “notables” and answered the desire of the French for both greatness and order. Propaganda was used liberally but so too were the police-spies of Fouche to cadge Napoleon’s impressive plebescitary majorities out of the electorate. How different, functionally speaking, is Vladimir Putin? Or for that matter, Hugo Chavez?
We could go back still further to the Caesars – Julius and his canny heir Augustus. Both men understood well that truly revolutionary changes in a political system were most placidly accepted when cloaked in the guise of adhering to old forms and restoring order and normality (it must be said though, that Octavian understood this better than his martial Uncle). After periods of disorder, want or uncertainty there have always been many people who are all too willing to trade liberty for economic security.
Whenever authoritarianism has the added attraction of marshaling competence and cultural values behind its standard, democrats should beware.
ADDENDUM:
Thomas P.M. Barnett – “Putin Positions himself as Russia’s Lee Kwan Yew”
The Guardian – “Putin, the Kremlin power struggle and the $40 bn fortune”
The Russia Blog – “Why Russia Loves Putin”
Michael Barone – “Putin: Odd Choice for Person of the Year”
Cross-posted at Zenpundit