How I learned to love the bomb

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The dirty secret of the atom bomb is that it is a "peace maker", as in "blessed be the peacemakers". 

The "inconvenient truth" is that the only one to have ever used the atomic bomb on human beings (twice) is the USA. 

The atomic bomb, like "the sound of a clod of earth falling on a coffin, is something perfect in its seriousness" (hat to A. Machado).

The bomb concentrates people's minds totally and suddenly they act rationally when contemplating war. 

How do I know that?

From direct personal experience, that's how...

I owe my life to the atomic bomb and I'm certainly not alone.

I think my whole (boomer) generation owe our lives to the atomic bomb... 

Without the bomb we would have gone to war with the USSR for sure.

My whole generation would have been drafted in both countries and the ensuing "conventional" war would have been even more brutal than WWII.

More brutal, why?

Because if we compare the conventional weapons that the Americans used in Vietnam and the Soviets used in Afghanistan with what both sides used in WWII (compare the M1 to the M16), millions of us on both sides would have died (probably me included).

So, I for one think that I owe my long and heretofore happy life directly to the proliferation of the atomic bomb.

It should be underlined that Iran's having the bomb does not mean they will ever use it. Persians are very sensible folk. A people like the Persians don't exist for thousands of years because of lemming tendencies.

What an Iranian bomb will mean is that the Israelis, for example, will not be able to periodically destroy half of Lebanon or massacre Palestinians in Gaza with impunity, as is their wont.

In an "bi" or "multi" lateral atomic Middle East something that brutal could spin out of control.

I remember with what care and caution the Soviet Union and the USA regarded each other.

What do you call an 800 pound gorilla?

"Sir".

When you stop and think about it, MAD (mutually assured destruction) is a rather beautiful thing.

It remains to be seen if the Israelis can lay down their "white man's burden" and deal with their neighbors without "gunboat diplomacy"... that is really what this issue is all about. That is what all the urgency is really about.

Proliferation means the end of colonialism: Sitting Bull gets the Gatling Gun. DS

From NATO to ONAN

Subtle metaphor of the current American political discourse

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The American presidential campaign is talking about everything but the central question facing the United States: it's rapid decline as the world's hegemonic superpower and the enormous dangers facing the United States and the world if America tries to maintain that fading hegemony.

This "primary contradiction", which could cause millions of lives to be lost and result in unimaginable chaos and impoverishment, is ignored except, perhaps, when presidential candidates suggest increasing military spending or promise to reassert American "leadership".

Both "solutions" are like a terminal cancer patient planning next year's summer vacation. An insane waste of precious time.

Today, I've posted excerpts from two important articles on this theme by John Gray, emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and my favorite political commentator, William Pfaff.

Please read them very carefully and be prepared to discuss:)

We are back to great-power politics, shifting alliances and spheres of influence. The difference is that the west is no longer in charge. With their different histories and sometimes sharply conflicting interests, Russia, China, India and the Gulf states are not going to form any kind of bloc. But it is these countries that are shaping world development at the start of the 21st century. The US - its bankrupt mortgage institutions nationalised and its gigantic war machine effectively funded by foreign borrowing - is in steep decline. With its financial system in the worst mess since the 1930s, the west's ability to shape events is dwindling by the day. Sermonizing about "law-based international relations" is laughable after Iraq, and at bottom not much more than nostalgia for a vanished hegemony. Deluded about its true place in the world, the west underestimates the risks of intervening in Russia's near abroad. Russia's weaknesses - demographic decline, cronyism in the economy and a seething sense of national humiliation - are well known, but western vulnerabilities are no less real. Our leaders bore on about Russia needing us as much as we need Russia. In fact, despite a recent blip, investment in Russia is a byproduct of the global market that will continue for as long as it continues to be profitable, whereas Russian energy supplies can be curtailed at will by the Russian government. Economists will tell you the country is too reliant on oil. But the world's oil reserves are peaking while globalisation continues to advance, and Russia stands to gain from any international conflict in which supplies are disrupted. Again, the west needs Russia if the Iranian nuclear crisis is ever to be defused peacefully, and without Russian logistical cooperation Nato forces will find it even harder to bring the aimless, unwinnable war in Afghanistan to any kind of conclusion.(...) Clearly, with the exception of some in "old Europe", our leaders do not know what they are doing. The grandstanding of David Miliband and David Cameron in Ukraine illustrates the point. Blathering about national self-determination and territorial integrity, they seem not to have noticed that the two principles are normally incompatible. Self-determination means secession and the break-up of states. In the Caucasus, a region of multi-sided national enmities, it means a wider war and worsening ethnic cleansing. The stakes are even higher in Ukraine. Deeply divided and with a major Russian naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, the new state will surely be torn apart if an attempt is made to wrench it from Russia's sphere of influence. The country would become a battlefield, with the great powers irresistibly drawn in. Playing with Wilsonian notions of self-determination in these conditions is courting disaster. John Gray - Guardian

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The United States has been invading troublesome Caribbean and Central American neighbors since the mid-19th century. It was what the U.S. Marine Corps did for a living – Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic. Ronald Reagan absurdly invaded Granada, officially to save American students from dangerous Cuban airport laborers. The senior George Bush invaded Panama to seize President Manuel Noriega, a former employee of the CIA. It has never been explained what those two invasions were really about. There were (widely publicized) clandestine operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador. All this has been taken for granted as the Monroe Doctrine at work.(...) Today the world’s only expansionist ideological power is the United States, aggressively pushing everywhere, persuading, promoting, and even invading countries for “democracy.” It wants to make everyone democratic “like us,” which in the end means to do as we want them to do. The ideology is meant to be generous, but it is a generosity devoted to the control of energy resources, raw materials, trade, and finance. This makes the U.S. the expanding and aggressive nation in the world today, the one with a “global ideology,” with military power to back it up. This frightens people. When the power doesn’t work as intended, as in the Caucasus, it makes other people frightened, the ones who have bet on the U.S. to advance their own agendas. That is what is changing the geopolitical map. William Pfaff

Meanwhile the American voters play with their dollies. DS

Ending the modern era

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We are looking at a sea change in international relations.

Since the nineteenth century everything has been predicated on the seigneur-vassal relationship between Europe/America and the rest of the non-white world. (with the Japanese as 'honorary caucasians'). That is finished. This is truly the end of the modern era.

Imperialism didn't end when the empires dissolved. When the former colonies became independent, nothing really changed at all. In the Cold War world, they simply became the vassals of either the USA or the USSR: rule takers, not rule makers.

China's engaging with capitalism on capitalism's own ground, but playing by Chinese rules, has put paid to hundreds of years of Eurocentric navel gazing. The rise of India's enormous, new, English speaking middle class, dynamic and voracious, only accelerates the tipping of the scales.

When something as massive and long standing as that relationship of "superior/Inferior" falls apart, many are hurt by the falling debris. Things like food, water and air can no longer be taken for granted anymore. We now enter terra incognita. That is the principal characteristic of our time. DS
Food: Cheap no more - The Economist
Abstract: In early September the world price of wheat rose to over $400 a tonne, the highest ever recorded. In May it had been around $200. Though in real terms its price is far below the heights it scaled in 1974, it is still twice the average of the past 25 years. Earlier this year the price of maize (corn) exceeded $175 a tonne, again a world record. It has fallen from its peak, as has that of wheat, but at $150 a tonne is still 50% above the average for 2006. As the price of one crop shoots up, farmers plant it to take advantage, switching land from other uses. So a rise in wheat prices has knock-on effects on other crops. Rice prices have hit records this year, although their rise has been slower. The Economist's food-price index is now at its highest since it began in 1845, having risen by one-third in the past year. Normally, sky-high food prices reflect scarcity caused by crop failure. Stocks are run down as everyone lives off last year's stores. This year harvests have been poor in some places, notably Australia, where the drought-hit wheat crop failed for the second year running. And world cereals stocks as a proportion of production are the lowest ever recorded. The run-down has been accentuated by the decision of large countries (America and China) to reduce stocks to save money. Yet what is most remarkable about the present bout of “agflation” is that record prices are being achieved at a time not of scarcity but of abundance. According to the International Grains Council, a trade body based in London, this year's total cereals crop will be 1.66 billion tonnes, the largest on record and 89m tonnes more than last year's harvest, another bumper crop. That the biggest grain harvest the world has ever seen is not enough to forestall scarcity prices tells you that something fundamental is affecting the world's demand for cereals.(...) Central bankers are determined to ensure that what could be a one-off shift in food prices does not create continuing inflation by pushing up wages or creating expectations of higher prices. So they are tightening monetary policy. China increased interest rates in August, Chile in July, Mexico in May. The striking thing about these rises is that they are the opposite of what has been happening in some rich countries. The Federal Reserve reduced rates by 50 basis points in September and 25 points in October; the Bank of Canada cut rates this week. The indirect effect of food-price rises has therefore been to widen the interest-rate differential between rich and emerging markets. And all this is going on as the economic balance of power is shifting. Growth in America and Europe is slowing; China and India are going great guns. Financial confidence in the West has been shaken by the subprime-mortgage crisis; capital flows into emerging markets are setting records. This shift will be tricky to handle. Such transitions always are. The risk is of a bubble in emerging markets. READ IT ALL

Globalization versus Islam: the unspeakable versus the inedible

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There is a movement afoot in the world's Muslim community, sometimes violent, sometimes democratic, at its center it is "anti-imperialist".

"Imperialism" here is taken to mean the domination of non-Christian, non-European peoples, by European or Euro-American-Christians (since roughly the 1950s the Jewish people of the United States under the neologism, "Judeo-Christian" have been given the status of "honorary Christians", in much the same way that the Japanese were considered "honorary whites" under the former apartheid regime of South Africa). Certainly for the inhabitants of Muslim countries the distinction between Zionists (read Jews) and "crusaders" (read Christians) has become rather blurred over time.

At first the political tools used by "third world" countries to resist this domination were nationalism (emphasizing local sovereignty, UN seat, nationalized-socialized economy, etc.) and in many cases simultaneous alignment with the Soviet block in "national liberation struggles". In order to weaken the allure of left-wing nationalism the United States and her allies often encouraged Islamic fundamentalism and encouraged the growth of movements such as the Taliban, Hamas and Hizbullah. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of globalization, secular nationalism and socialism lost practically all their usefulness as tools for loosening the grip of aliens on the economies, lives and customs of non-"European" peoples.

However, by now, many Muslims have discovered that, for better or worse, Islam is the one idea, culture and "way of life" that cannot be dissolved or co-opted by the omnivorous powers of synthesis and the economic and military hegemony of the "New World Order". Thus, as day follows night, with nowhere else to turn, "Islam is the Answer" has now become the default slogan of anti-imperialism among Muslims and may, who knows, begin to resonate among disaffected, heretofore non-Muslims, that find themselves helpless victims of American-led globalization. DS

Democracy, not terror, is the engine of political Islam - Guardian
Abstract: Six years after 9/11, throughout the Muslim world political Islam is on the march; the surprise is that its rise is happening democratically - not through the bomb, but the ballot box. Democracy is not the antidote to the Islamists the neocons once fondly believed it would be. Since the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been a consistent response from voters wherever Muslims have had the right to vote. In Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey and Algeria they have voted en masse for religious parties in a way they have never done before. Where governments have been most closely linked to the US, political Islam's rise has been most marked.(...) in concentrating on the violent jihadi fringe, we may have missed the main story. For if the imminent Islamist takeover of western Europe is a myth, the same cannot be said for the Islamic world. Clumsy and brutal US policies in the Middle East have generated revolutionary changes, radicalising even the most moderate opinion, with the result that the status quo in place since the 1950s has been broken. Egypt is typical: at the last election in 2005 members of the nominally banned Muslim Brotherhood, standing as independents, saw their representation rise from 17 seats to 88 in the 444-seat people's assembly - a five-fold increase, despite reports of vote-rigging by President Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Alliance. The Brothers, who have long abjured violence, are now the main opposition. The figures in Pakistan are strikingly similar. Traditionally, the religious parties there have won only a fraction of the vote. That began to change after the US invasion of Afghanistan. In October 2002 a rightwing alliance of religious parties - the Muttahida Majlis Amal or MMA - won 11.6% of the vote, more than doubling its share, and sweeping the polls in the two provinces bordering Afghanistan - Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province - where it formed ultra-conservative and pro-Islamist provincial governments. If the last election turned the MMA into a serious electoral force, there are now fears that it could yet be the principle beneficiary of the current standoff in Pakistan. The Bush administration proclaimed in 2004 that the promotion of democracy in the Middle East would be a major foreign policy theme in its second term. It has been widely perceived, not least in Washington, that this policy has failed. Yet in many ways US foreign policy has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against the corrupt monarchies and decaying nationalist parties who have ruled the region for 50 years. The irony is that rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed, Muslims have lined up behind parties most clearly seen to stand up against aggressive US intervention.(...) the religious parties tend to be seen by the poor, rightly or wrongly, as representing justice, integrity and equitable distribution of resources. Hence the strong showing, for example, of Hamas against the blatantly corrupt Fatah in the 2006 elections in Palestine. Equally, the dramatic rise of Hizbullah in Lebanon has not been because of a sudden fondness for sharia law, but because of the status of Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah's leader, as the man who gave the Israelis a bloody nose, and who provides medical and social services for the people of South Lebanon, just as Hamas does in Gaza. READ IT

The essential Iraq

David Seaton's News Links

The important things to keep in mind while following the political battle over Iraq in Washington is:

• The way the United States entered Iraq stinks

• The way the United States has acted in Iraq stinks

• The way the United States leaves Iraq, for sure, will... stink too. We've been through this before... The US always deserts its allies and leaves them holding the bag and then worries about its "syndrome". And Hollywood makes a lot of films about how we actually won... And people ask, "what would Jesus do?" as if Jesus would have ever gotten himself into such a mess.
  

The United States has destroyed its "brand" in Iraq. Nobody can take Americans seriously anymore except as shoppers.

What does that mean?

Imagine if Coca Cola had mysteriously poisoned several thousand people. "Great", you say, they go out of business.

Not so fast. What about all the jobs and the families that depend on them... Mortgages, health plans, pensions, children's education, etc, etc. As we saw with the Soviet Union, (and Enron) when a great structure collapses it is no joke. What would Coca Cola have to do to regain its lost prestige?

First, it would have to discover how the hypothetical poisoning happened, who and what was responsible. If there was criminal negligence or malice aforethought... people would have to go to jail, right up to the chairman and if the chairman's policies were responsible, especially the chairman. And then they would have to pay heavy reparations to all the victims and their families. Maybe then, only just maybe, people all over the world could hear again about how "things go better" or "the real thing" or about 'pauses that refresh' with out vomiting or running for the exits.

That is more or less where things are now. The world system ("really-existing-capitalism") depends to a great extent on America's credibility... even if we aren't in agreement with the system; like it or not we are all stakeholders and if it collapses we will suffer...

That credibility will not be restored by further martyrizing of the people of Iraq... There is no credibility to be gained in Iraq now if there ever was any to begin with. Credibility can only be restored by the USA, in the USA itself. How?

By holding public hearings, Nuremberg-type "show trials" if you will, publicly investigating how this war happened, punishing the offenders, especially Bush and Cheney... (Impeachment isn't good enough). And finally formal apologies to the people of Iraq and payments to the victims (not contracts for Halliburton to "reconstruct"). Cash they can spend any way they want, visas, scholarships, green cards, you name it. People everywhere would respect that and if they didn't respect it they could kiss our ass, because it would be the right thing to do. At least we could respect ourselves and that's a good place to start.

Is this possible? Well, America is a place where impossible things happen all the time and have been happening for hundreds of years... So, why not? The capacity to pleasantly surprise itself and others may be the only national characteristic that can save the USA now. DS

Getting whupped in Afghanistan

Pashtun tribal Zone, Afghanistan, 2004

NATO -- a transatlantic alliance -- is gambling its future in Afghanistan. The prestigious London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies' latest report minced no words: success or failure in a country where everyone from Alexander the Great to the British empire to the Soviet empire met defeat will determine whether NATO lives -- or withers. - Arnaud De Borchgrave - UPI

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Looking into the eyes of this darling, little Pashtun, valley girl, I am reminded of an old traditional melody from the American southland, which goes, "I gotta knife, I gotta gun, cut yez if yuh stand, shoot yez if yuh run."

I certainly would not like to get on the wrong side of this little hellion and much, much less, get on the wrong side of her daddy. Betting the future of NATO on whupping this little girl's daddy and her cousins doesn't seem to me such an intelligent proposition.

Certainly to think that with a hodge-podge of NATO's odds and sods you are going to succeed where Alexander the Great and Queen Victoria failed is the height of hubris, which I think is the classical Greek word for "dumb asshole".

Sensible old, William Pfaff, the anti-Thomas Friedman, explains why NATO is going to lose the war in Afghanistan. I love this quote, "You might think the American political class and public is convinced that war is the road to national success, whereas the American experience of war, from the Korean ceasefire to the present day, proves the opposite. " Isn't it wonderful? DS

Afghanistan: Reenactment of Iraq and Vietnam - William Pfaff
Abstract: The Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan – “students of religion” – are a nationalist and populist movement of puritanical Islamic fundamentalism which grew up among the Pashtun tribal people of Northern Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan in the early 1960s’s. The Pashtun tribal group is some 40-million strong, and has successfully resisted foreign domination since the time of Alexander the Great.(...) The Taliban eventually ruled Afghanistan between 1996 to 2001, eventually ousted by American bombing when they defied an American ultimatum to hand over Osama bin Laden, leader of al Qaeda, following the 9/11 attacks. Now 35 thousand NATO troops with a UN mandate are fighting to prevent them from returning to the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan.(...) General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, is uneasily looking on; he is an intelligent man who knows that there will be 40 million Pashtuns in his part of the world long after NATO and the Americans have left.(...) The Afghanistan intervention now is moving steadily towards failure for the same reasons that produced American failure, humiliation and national discredit in Vietnam and Iraq. Washington in this case is being unwisely supported by NATO and endorsed by the European Union. The three cases are alike in the following respect. The intervention has been launched against a phenomenon of local political and social origin, misidentified out of ideological bias and political ignorance as a threat to the United States and the West. In Afghanistan-Pakistan the Taliban is a nationalist and religious movement of indigenous origin and strictly local horizons, ambitions, and reach. Afghanistan under Taliban rule would to a westerner seem a very unpleasant place to live, as it was before. However that would seem a problem for the Afghans themselves to settle. In Vietnam the target was the national Communist movement, fundamentally an upheaval against foreign domination, originally French and subsequently American. In Iraq the local phenomenon was an Arab nationalist dictatorship controlling immense oil reserves, originally supported by the United States (through the period of the 1980-1990 Iraq-Iran war). It was subsequently identified by the senior George Bush administration as a threat to American and Israeli interests in the region, the former mainly commercial and the latter security interests. In all three cases the United States’ objective was not simple military victory but to change the political nature of the society so as to make it a liberal democracy. A cynical observer would say that Washington wanted to turn each into a client state, but this was not entirely true. The United States wanted, as it always wants, a conversion of hearts. It nonetheless has become a profoundly militaristic nation, which it never was before 1941. It now conceives of international relations primarily in terms of military coercion and war. The Bush administration budget that has just gone to Congress would devote a higher percentage of national expenditure to war and war preparations than in any year since the Korean war 55 years ago: higher than during the Vietnam war, or the cold war. You might think the American political class and public is convinced that war is the road to national success, whereas the American experience of war, from the Korean ceasefire to the present day, proves the opposite. Vietnam was a decade of disaster, leaving the U.S. divided and weakened. U.S. Caribbean and Central American interventions (the Dominican Republic, the Bay of Pigs, Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua) made the country look overwrought and ridiculous. The Iraq intervention now is collapsing into horror. Is it necessary to repeat this in Afghanistan? READ IT ALL

Losing it

"You run this town because people think you run it."
Miller's Crossing - quoted by Tony Karon in Haaretz

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When we talk about the war in in Iraq being a disaster, we are talking about a lot more than the terrible suffering of the human beings directly involved, we are talking about the crumbling of a system in which we are all stakeholders. Make no mistake: this massive loss of international influence will directly affect the average American's wallet. He or she is going to be sore as hell. DS

Zakaria: Preview of a Post-U.S. World - Newsweek
Abstract: Two things were missing from this year's world Economic Forum at Davos: snow (which arrived eventually) and America-bashing (which did not). There were, of course, lots of American businessmen, activists and intellectuals filling the panels and halls of the conference. There were even a few senior American officials—though no star speaker. But, for the first time in my memory, America was somewhat peripheral. There were few demands, pleas, complaints or tantrums directed at the United States. In this small but significant global cocoon, people—for the moment at least—seemed to be moving beyond America. "There has always been a talk by a senior American official as one of the centerpieces of the Forum," said a European who has advised the Forum for many years—and who asked to remain anonymous because of his relations with U.S. officials. "And in the past, people eagerly anticipated who that would be—Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice. This year, almost no one inquired. We expected disappointment. But there was none. No one even noticed."(...) The ball for every problem is in everybody's court, which means that it is in nobody's court. The problem is that this free ride probably can't last forever. The global system—economic, political, social—is not self-managing. Global economic growth has been a fantastic boon, but it produces stresses and strains that have to be handled. Without some coordination, or first mover—or, dare one say it, leader—such management is more difficult. The world today bears some resemblance to the 1920s, when a newly globalized economy was booming, and science and technological change were utterly transforming life. (Think of the high-tech of the time—electricity, radio, movies and cars, among other recent inventions.) But with Britain declining and America isolationist, that was truly a world without political direction. Eventually protectionism, nationalism, xenophobia and war engulfed it. In a provocative essay in Foreign Policy three years ago, the British historian Niall Ferguson speculated that the end of American hegemony might not fuel an orderly shift to a multipolar system but a descent into a world of highly fragmented powers, with no one exercising any global leadership. He called this "apolarity." "Apolarity could turn out to mean an anarchic new Dark Age," Ferguson wrote, "an era of waning empires and religious fanaticism, of economic plunder and pillage in the world's forgotten regions, of economic stagnation, and civilization's retreat into a few fortified enclaves." That might be a little farfetched. But for those who have been fondly waiting for the waning of American dominance—be careful what you wish for. READ IT ALL

Fatal American error in Somalia

"In the Cold War, "our son of a bitch" — the local anti-communist strongman — could be counted on to impose a brutal kind of order. Now, in the war on terror, the United States would rather see a country torn apart by multiple sons-of-bitches than ruled under Sharia law." Niall Ferguson

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In their rush to demonize Islam, those who attack the world's second largest and fastest growing religion, neglect one of its greatest practical virtues: its ability, proven since the days of the Prophet, to create order out of barbarity, and chaos. The Sharia is particularly effective where there is little or no state structure or where it is hopelessly corrupt... certainly a fitting description of post colonial Africa, or where tribal loyalties mean that no "majority rule" will ever be seen as equitable. In Rwanda, for example, (quoting Wikipedia)

"Muslims in Rwanda during the genocide were composed of both Hutus and Tutsis but their common identity was religious, shaped by their shared faith in Islam, and not racial. This absence of racial identity is what led to Muslim Hutus not attacking their fellow Muslim Tutsis but also actively engaging in acts which saved the lives of Christian Tutsis."

And as the Washington Post stated in an article about Rwanda,

"Islam has long been a religion of the downtrodden. In the Middle East and South Asia, the religion has had a strong focus on outreach to the poor and tackling social ills by banning alcohol and encouraging sexual modesty

The Sharia is like an "civil order kit" that can be quickly unpacked and installed and which immediately establishes an easily understood and practiced universal system of justice and best practice, one that does not depend on any distant authority for its force and prestige. Its advantages are obvious in a situation such as Somalia. Globalization is a powerful solvent of local customs and cultures and corrupter of third world elites. "Everything solid dissolves into air". As everything else in those areas is failing, the rise of Islam in many parts of the developing world is probably inevitable and seen from a human, if not a business perspective, not at all a bad thing. Certainly it should be supported and engaged by everyone that would like the "ungovernable" parts of the world to find some measure of stability. To harass Islamic law indiscriminately is to drive it irremediably into the arms of Al Qaeda. DS

Niall Ferguson: Promoting disorder in Somalia - Los Angeles Times

Abstract: Long before the arrival of European imperialism, Somalia was a country plagued by warfare. There were recurrent attempts by Ethiopia to subjugate the Somalis. There were also frequent feuds between the various Somali clans themselves, like the Hawiye clan, which has its base in Mogadishu. The new prime minister is in fact a Hawiye, but has forfeited much credibility by acting as an Ethiopian puppet. In the eyes of many Somalis, recent events are just the latest of many wars with Ethiopia. That is why the recent rout of the Islamists is unlikely to be the last act in the Somali tragedy. The Islamists offered Somalia order; not a Western order, to be sure, but order nonetheless. Under their rule, the price of an AK-47 in the Mogadishu markets slumped to $15, a sure sign that the warlords were being forced to downsize their militias. Young men no longer roared through the streets in the Mad Max-style vehicles known locally as "technicals" — trucks mounted with antiaircraft guns. Some were returning to school and university. Others were getting jobs with private electricity companies and airlines. Internet cafes were beginning to displace militia training camps. Kalashnikovs were being traded in for mobile phones. Now, with the Islamists gone, the most likely scenario is a return of the warlords. Worse, the Islamists may now revert to the tactic of suicide bombing to destabilize the new government. As has happened in Afghanistan, the overthrow of an Islamist government will be followed not by a new order but by the old disorder.(...) At least in the Cold War, "our son of a bitch" — the local anti-communist strongman — could be counted on to impose a brutal kind of order. Now, in the war on terror, the United States would rather see a country torn apart by multiple sons-of-bitches than ruled under Sharia law. But the more U.S. foreign policy promotes anarchy instead of order, the stronger the Islamists' appeal will be. And the darker the shade of mischief that will ensue. READ IT ALL

Bacevich cuts to the bone

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Professor Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, formerly Colonel Andrew Bacevich, US Army, is one of the most incisive political thinkers in America's intellectual panorama. The world of American think tanks has turned US geopolitical discourse into a massive, over-funded, Swiftian Academy of Lagado, where sunbeams are extracted from cucumbers and a quick journey to the heart of any matter would put a lot of scholars out of work. Bacevich, however, cuts to the bone. His book, "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War," is an absolute 'must read': an invaluable starting point for any serious discussion about the terrible situation that the US has created for itself. Obviously, without a keystone or linchpin, without finding the axis around which the problem revolves, we will never find our way out of the labyrinth. This article from The International Herald Tribune, which is quoted below, will give you some idea of Professor Bacevich's unerring instinct for constantly locating the center of gravity of these questions. DS
Bush's illusions - International Herald Tribune
Abstract: The world's only superpower no longer acts; instead, it reacts, usually to whatever happens to be the latest bad news out of Baghdad. As events in Iraq slip out of his control, President George W. Bush's strategy for waging his "global war on terror" lies in ruins. He is navigating without a compass. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Recall that for the architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom, taking down Saddam Hussein never qualified as more than a preliminary objective. Baghdad was not Berlin. It was Normandy, the jumping-off point for a much larger enterprise.(...) Skeptics saw the Freedom Agenda as little more than eyewash. The real object of the exercise, they insisted, was to assert U.S. control over the oil-rich Gulf. The aim of the global war on terror was not to share the blessings of liberty but to expand the perimeter of the American empire. Whether the name of the game was liberation or dominion, Iraq was a crucial test case. Iraq's transformation into the first Arab democracy — or (depending on your point of view) its conversion into a compliant protectorate — promised to validate the Bush administration's concept of global war. Victory in Iraq would also affirm key assumptions underlying that concept: that U.S. forces are invincible and unstoppable; that preventive war works; that the concerns of other major powers or the absence of a UN Security Council mandate need not constrain American freedom of action. In short, Iraq constituted step one. Success there would pave the way for the Bush administration to proceed along similar lines to steps two, three and four. The disappointments and frustrations resulting from that first step now leave the entire project in a shambles. If the United States cannot democratize Iraq, then to imagine that democracy will emerge from the barrel of an American gun in Iran, Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia is simply fanciful. If U.S. troops cannot pacify Iraq, then only the truly deluded would court a further military showdown that could oblige American forces to pacify Iraq's neighbors as well. The United States already has too much war for too few soldiers.(...) As if tacitly acknowledging that they have spent all their ammunition strategically, Bush and his lieutenants now preoccupy themselves with operational matters that ought to fall within the purview of field commanders.(...) Fighting the Battle of Baghdad does not qualify as presidential business. Devising an effective response to the threat posed by Islamic radicalism does. On that score, however, the most pressing question is this: Does open-ended global war provide the proper framework for formulating that response? Or has global war, based on various illusions about American competence and American power, led to a dead end? READ IT ALL

Middle East: getting worse and just beginning

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Tony Blair is making his umpteenth trip to the Middle East, joining this endless stream of "leaders" who appear deus ex machina to be photographed shaking hands with the local "leaders" and recorded making encouraging noises. It reminds me of hospital visits to a dying relative who keeps getting thinner and thinner, while everyone gets more and more cheerful and 'positive'. It might be better if all these "leaders" were silent for awhile and everyone meditated on the size and intractable complexity of the tragedy that has been set in motion. The only way this universal pustulence, born in cupidity and greed, will ever begin to heal is if the United States and the former colonial powers, France, Turkey and Britain, all begin by admitting their failure and assume their responsibility for it... Confession, penitence and restitution. DS
Ending illusions - Leader - Guardian
Abstract: It speaks volumes about the dire state of the Middle East that a foreign head of government visiting Iraq dare not stray beyond the heavily fortified "green zone" in central Baghdad and that the entire Gaza Strip - the centre of the region's latest escalating crisis - is now strictly out of bounds on security grounds. Tony Blair's pledge that British troops will stay in Iraq "until the job is done" had an unreal air as he stood by Nuri al-Maliki yesterday with the disastrous mayhem of daily life - mass kidnappings, bombings and shootings - continuing unabated, with "terrorists fighting democracy" in Mr Blair's words. Flying on to Jerusalem, the prime minister took with him another unshakeable belief - that he can help find a way out of the deadly impasse in which Palestinians and Israelis are so dangerously trapped. Mr Blair is right to want to help. The world's most intractable conflict is too volatile to be left alone even if few Arabs believe he is qualified to act as an honest broker. Not only is he George Bush's sole significant ally in Iraq but he also delayed attempts to secure a ceasefire as Israel went on the offensive in Lebanon during the summer war against Hizbullah. The phrase "perfidious Albion" may have gone out of fashion, but the sentiment is alive and well. And the phrase "kick-start" beloved of Whitehall briefings about reviving the peace process seems spectacularly inappropriate - in the sense that kicking a corpse can achieve little. READ IT ALL

Imperial shelf life: paying the cost to be the boss

David Seaton's News Links

The window of American imperialism, militarism and hegemony is closing for the simplest of reasons. After the Second World War the returning American soldiers fathered many children. This phenomenon was known as the "war baby boom" and its children have come to be know as the "boomers". This massive generation whose consumer habits have driven the US economy since they were teenagers will, thanks to that frantic consumption, soon reach retirement age practically without savings. If defense spending continues as at present or, as will probably be the case, rises and Bush's tax cuts for the super rich are maintained, there will be no money for pensions and health care for the doddering (but voting) boomers. At that point something will have to give. As another name for the boomers is the "ME generation", it is very easy to imagine their passive enthusiasm for living in abject poverty in order to finance America's military hegemony. DS
E.J. Dionne Jr: A War Bush Wouldn't Pay For - Washington Post
Abstract: Until recently President Bush's refusal to scale back any of his tax cuts was discussed as the question of shared sacrifice: How could we ask so much from a courageous group of Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan but not ask even the wealthiest of their fellow citizens to part with a few extra dollars to support an endeavor supposedly central to our nation's security? On the contrary, even after we committed to war in Iraq, the administration pushed for yet more tax cuts in dividends and capital gains. Now we know that the decision to put the war on a credit card is not simply a moral question. The administration's failure to acknowledge the real costs of the war -- and to pay them -- has put it in a corner. The president's options in Iraq are severely constrained because our military is too small for the foreign policy he is pursuing. Sending more troops would place even more excruciating burdens on members of our armed forces and their families. And the brass fears that an extended new commitment could, quite simply, break the Army. Yet, instead of building up our military for a long engagement and levying the taxes to pay for such an enterprise, the administration kept issuing merry reports of progress in Iraq. Right through Election Day this year, the president continued to condemn anyone who dared suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should raise taxes to pay for this war.(...) By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, since 2001 we've offered $2 in tax cuts for every $1 we have spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And conservatives wonder why we have deficits. At least the libertarians, who are against both high taxes and an interventionist foreign policy, have their philosophical story (and their numbers) straight. It has always been true that the administration and its allies couldn't have it both ways. Their illogic has finally caught up with them. They claimed to be against big government so they could justify big tax cuts. But they were also for a big, activist foreign policy, especially after Sept. 11, 2001, which required a big military, and -- sorry to break it to you, guys -- a big military is a big part of big government. They were not willing to pay for a large enough military, and so now we, and especially our armed forces, are paying for their deficit in logic and courage. READ IT ALL

Lance Corporal Daniel Smith: of rapists and empires

David Seaton's News Links
The case of convicted rapist, US Marine Lance Corporal, Daniel Smith, has important strategic ramifications for the far flung empire of US military bases around the world. Sentenced by a Manila court to life imprisonment for raping a 22 year old Filipino woman, Suzette Nicolas with what the court described as "chilling, naked sadism", reports say he showed "no emotion" while being led away. He is now in a Philippine jail awaiting appeal. You may ask, what is so important about a rapist being in jail? The problem would be if the rapist were not in jail, no? Well, not quite, because Lance Corporal Smith as a US Marine has special privileges in the Philippines under the "Visiting Forces Agreement". Here is how Wikipedia describes the agreement, "The primary effect of the Agreement is that it allows the U.S. government to retain jurisdiction over U.S. military personnel accused of committing crimes in the Philippines, unless the crimes are of "particular" importance to the Philippines. This means that for crimes without this significance, the U.S. can refuse to detain or arrest accused personnel, or may instead prosecute them under U.S. jurisdiction. The Agreement also exempts U.S. military personnel from visa and passport regulations in the Philippines." This sort of agreement is being questioned all over the world and there have been many ugly incidents recently in South Korea and Okinawa. These agreements are viewed as extremely humiliating wherever they are in effect and the popular pressure to rescind them is growing stronger by the day. To understand the potentially enormous significance of the Smith case and other cases like it, I strongly suggest reading Chalmers Johnson's ground breaking book, "The Sorrows of Empire". To end this post, I'll include this quote from an article in today's Financial Times, "The question of custody over L. Cpl Smith could develop into a sore point and weaken US-Philippine military co-operation against terrorism, analysts said. A legislative panel overseeing the visiting forces agreement voted to terminate the arrangement and stop all joint military exercises for the duration of the rape trial after the US refused Manila's request to take custody of the four servicemen after they were arraigned in February. Lawmakers were likely to revive moves to scrap the agreement if Manila gave up custody of L. Cpl Smith and allowed him to be confined at the US embassy again, said Theodore Te, a law professor." And to follow the updates to this important story as it develops, here is a link to Google News. DS

US base on the Moon... Sandino, where are you, now that we need you?

David Seaton's News Links
The old Nicaraguan Sandinista fighting song, refers to confronting the "yanqui, enemigo de la humanidad". The first time I heard it, I felt hurt and offended, excluded and discriminated against... As years past and by the well-worn method, of "walking a mile in another man's shoes," I got an inkling of what they were talking about. In Iraq and the Middle East, it doesn't take much imagination to answer the question, "Why do they hate us?". But, until today, I really didn't feel fully part of the "humanidad" that the "yanqui" is an "enemigo" of. If we are "yanquis", and want to be part of the "humanidad" and not some aliens from outer space set on world conquest, then we must locate and identify these "über-yanquis" from outer space in our midst, so that once identified we can exorcise them and join our brothers and sisters of the human race. Because I can see, by looking in the mirror, (try it) that this is my birthright too. DS

US plans permanent base on Moon - BBC News

US space agency Nasa has said it plans to start work on a permanently-occupied base on the Moon after astronauts begin flying back there in 2020. The base is likely to be built on one of the Moon's poles and will serve as a science centre and possible stepping stone for manned missions to Mars. The US has already said it plans to build a new lunar spacecraft to succeed the last Apollo mission in 1972. Funds will be moved from space shuttle flights, due to be scrapped in 2010. The structure of the base and the exact duties of the astronauts stationed there have not been decided. READ IT ALL