Showing posts with label foreign policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreign policy. Show all posts

September 15, 2012

We have always been at war with YouTube!

Rev. Right comments:
Jay Carney, White House spokesman, yesterday: 
"The reason why there is unrest is because of the film...it is not in response not to United States policy, and not to, obviously, the administration, or the American people, but it is in response to a video, a film that we have judged to be be reprehensible and disgusting...This is in response to the film...The cause of the unrest was a video...These protests were in reaction to a video that had spread to the region...This is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy, this is in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims."

Nothing the matter with American foreign policy, the whole problem is that some gold-chainer posted something on YouTube. Who could have foreseen that?

September 13, 2012

We have always been at war with Libya!

I realize the national conversation isn't supposed to be about the Commander-in-Chief's strategic decision-making, but I want to peer back deep into the mists of time to March 17, 2011 when I was idly browsing on the Internet only to discover that, with negligible public discussion, much less a Congressional declaration of war, President Obama had launched America into a war with a country that had been considered one of the success stories of recent American diplomacy. In puzzlement, I blogged:
Are We at War with Libya? 
In theory, this shouldn't be all that hard to blast Gadaffi's air force and tanks in open desert. There's a difference between a land war in Asia and a land war in North Africa. We already won one of those 68 years ago, against a better general than anybody working for Gadaffi. 
But, then what happens? I don't know.

I still don't know.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming: Let's Talk About How Mitt Romney Is a Big Doo-Doo Head Instead.

Forty-five years ago, Romeny's dad, a leading GOP candidate for the 1968 Presidential nomination, came out against the Vietnam War. When asked why he had supported it after returning from a quick visit in 1965, he said he'd been "brainwashed" by the diplomats and generals. This proved the end of his White House hopes. His son drew the lesson that caution in the face of the Establishment was crucial. 

The problem we face on foreign policy is the Establishment monoculture in Washington: in the run-up and follow-up to the Iraq War, many of the sensible people were purged and the loonies rewarded.

Obama is one of the few to benefit from being right: he gave one speech against the Iraq War and got the White House. Howard Dean gave a hundred speeches and got a life of leisure. Hillary Clinton was for the war and got to be Secretary of State.

Today, the acceptable limits of foreign policy discourse in America are set by: 

- The good old military-industrial complex
- Saudi bribery
- Liberal Democratic Zionists
- Right 2 Protect liberal crypto-imperialist/busybodies
- Angry Likudniks
- Quasi-CIA "democracy" endowments that organize color-coded revolutions
- Foreign policy thinktanks (who are more important the more activist the foreign policy)
- White guys who need to serve in the military so they can get affirmative action points to become firemen
- Yahoos who should be apprised that when football isn't on TV, professional wrestling can always be found year-round, so there's no need to watch the news
- Oil companies (who are left to quietly play the "Can't we all just get along?" Rodney King role)

They are all overseen by a national media that sometimes seems most concerned about the looming threat that an isolationist Father Coughlin could arise again.

So, the only feasible foreign policy alternative to stake out is: "The President's foreign policy isn't quite crazed enough!"

April 7, 2012

Mitt & Bibi: An Unpromising Accident of Biography

Trying to guess what Mitt Romney really thinks about anything can be a full time operation, especially when it comes to foreign policy, because of Mitt's rather insular career. 

I had hoped that the personal key to Mitt's foreign policy was how his father George Romney had scuttled his run for the 1968 GOP nomination by saying that he had supported the Vietnam War after his 1965 visit to that country because he'd been "brainwashed" by the brass and diplomats. Mitt's sister says that from this incident, Mitt learned never to say anything too clearly. I had hoped that he had also learned from his beloved father to be skeptical about the conventional wisdom. 

An NYT article today reveals that there might be another personal key to Mitt's foreign policy: 
But in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, briefly but indelibly, in the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group, where both had been recruited as corporate advisers. At the most formative time of their careers, they sized each other up during the firm’s weekly brainstorming sessions, absorbing the same profoundly analytical view of the world. 
That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue. Mr. Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is making the case for military action against Iran as Mr. Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, is attacking the Obama administration for not supporting Mr. Netanyahu more robustly. 
The relationship between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Romney — nurtured over meals in Boston, New York and Jerusalem, strengthened by a network of mutual friends and heightened by their conservative ideologies — has resulted in an unusually frank exchange of advice and insights on topics like politics, economics and the Middle East.

Uh, oh. 

I'm a big admirer of Bibi. The main problem I see with Bibi is that he happens to play for a different team. And he already has no shortage of boosters and rooters on our team pushing him and his team forward at our team's expense. We don't really need Bibi, with all of his other advantages, having a special backdoor friendship with the President of the United States in which he can exert his energetic personal magnetism over Mitt's Mormon blandness.

It's like if somebody was interviewing to be the next coach of the Indianapolis Colts and he mentioned that he frequently had long, heartfelt talks with Bill Belichik of the New England Patriots. I don't know, maybe that would work out well ...

March 23, 2012

The New Cold War: The Axis of Ice Cream

Hugo Chávez, right, with Cuba's president, Raúl Castro, last week.Chávez Strengthens Cuban Ties With Plan for Ice Cream Factory 
Venezuela, one of Cuba’s closest allies, announced a plan to produce a favorite brand of Cuban ice cream domestically.

Alert Rick Santorum to this new strategic threat!

January 17, 2012

"False Flag"

From Foreign Policy:
False Flag 
A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran. 
BY MARK PERRY | JANUARY 13, 2012 
Buried deep in the archives of America's intelligence services are a series of memos, written during the last years of President George W. Bush's administration, that describe how Israeli Mossad officers recruited operatives belonging to the terrorist group Jundallah by passing themselves off as American agents. According to two U.S. intelligence officials, the Israelis, flush with American dollars and toting U.S. passports, posed as CIA officers in recruiting Jundallah operatives -- what is commonly referred to as a "false flag" operation.

Jundallah is supposedly a Sunni terrorist group from Baluchistan, the desert on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border, that blows up people in Iran to show their opposition to Iran being a Shi'ite state. Perry goes on:
The memos, as described by the sources, one of whom has read them and another who is intimately familiar with the case, investigated and debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah -- a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization. Jundallah, according to the U.S. government and published reports, is responsible for assassinating Iranian government officials and killing Iranian women and children. 
But while the memos show that the United States had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah, according to both intelligence officers, the same was not true for Israel's Mossad. The memos also detail CIA field reports saying that Israel's recruiting activities occurred under the nose of U.S. intelligence officers, most notably in London, the capital of one of Israel's ostensible allies, where Mossad officers posing as CIA operatives met with Jundallah officials. 
The officials did not know whether the Israeli program to recruit and use Jundallah is ongoing. Nevertheless, they were stunned by the brazenness of the Mossad's efforts.
"It's amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with," the intelligence officer said. "Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn't give a damn what we thought." 
Interviews with six currently serving or recently retired intelligence officers over the last 18 months have helped to fill in the blanks of the Israeli false-flag operation. In addition to the two currently serving U.S. intelligence officers, the existence of the Israeli false-flag operation was confirmed to me by four retired intelligence officers who have served in the CIA or have monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government. 
... The [2008 CIA] report then made its way to the White House, according to the currently serving U.S. intelligence officer. The officer said that Bush "went absolutely ballistic" when briefed on its contents. 
"The report sparked White House concerns that Israel's program was putting Americans at risk," the intelligence officer told me. "There's no question that the U.S. has cooperated with Israel in intelligence-gathering operations against the Iranians, but this was different. No matter what anyone thinks, we're not in the business of assassinating Iranian officials or killing Iranian civilians." 
Israel's relationship with Jundallah continued to roil the Bush administration until the day it left office, this same intelligence officer noted. Israel's activities jeopardized the administration's fragile relationship with Pakistan, which was coming under intense pressure from Iran to crack down on Jundallah. It also undermined U.S. claims that it would never fight terror with terror, and invited attacks in kind on U.S. personnel. 
"It's easy to understand why Bush was so angry," a former intelligence officer said. "After all, it's hard to engage with a foreign government if they're convinced you're killing their people. Once you start doing that, they feel they can do the same." 
A senior administration official vowed to "take the gloves off" with Israel, according to a U.S. intelligence officer. But the United States did nothing -- a result that the officer attributed to "political and bureaucratic inertia." 
"In the end," the officer noted, "it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat." Even so, at least for a short time, this same officer noted, the Mossad operation sparked a divisive debate among Bush's national security team, pitting those who wondered "just whose side these guys [in Israel] are on" against those who argued that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." 
The debate over Jundallah was resolved only after Bush left office when, within his first weeks as president, Barack Obama drastically scaled back joint U.S.-Israel intelligence programs targeting Iran, according to multiple serving and retired officers. ...
What has become crystal clear, however, is the level of anger among senior intelligence officials about Israel's actions. "This was stupid and dangerous," the intelligence official who first told me about the operation said. "Israel is supposed to be working with us, not against us. If they want to shed blood, it would help a lot if it was their blood and not ours. You know, they're supposed to be a strategic asset. Well, guess what? There are a lot of people now, important people, who just don't think that's true." 

In tribute to Obama, you gotta figure that this realization probably wasn't as big of a surprise to him as it was to Bush.

Anyway, lately, I have a hard time getting too worked up over this kind of thing. It's a little bit like when some college football team puts together a dynasty and then, surprise, surprise, gets suspended by the NCAA (e.g., USC). They just kind of wanted it more. These days, Israel just kind of wants to win at the Great Game more. It's their hobby.

December 14, 2011

Great Moments in Invade the World

I've long felt that Americans aren't really cut out for world domination. We tend to be a cheerful, positive-minded, naive, and insular people, while the imperial mission demands vast reserves of worldliness and cynicism. 

The Derb points me toward this Washington Examiner article by Sara A. Carter, "Afghan Sex Practices Concern U.S., British Forces" and related blog commentary on the popularity of homosexual pedophilia among those Pathan soldiers and interpreters who claim to be our allies. (Although the British officers who are old public school boys might be less baffled than they are admitting to their American counterparts.) In from the Cold comments:
And, the impact of those experiences is already being felt in portions of Afghanistan, putting American forces squarely in the middle of complex moral, social and sexual issues. A source at Army Special Operations command tells In From the Cold that Afghan women, emboldened by the presence of U.S. troops. have complained about beatings they've suffered at the hands of their husbands. The domestic violence reportedly stemmed from the inability of the women to become pregnant and produce sons, highly valued in Afghan society. 
When U.S. civil affairs teams (and other special forces units) quietly investigated the problem, they quickly discovered a common denominator. Virtually all of the younger men who beat their wives (over their inability to become pregnant) had been former "apprentices" of older Afghan men, who used them for their sexual pleasure. Upon entering marriage, whatever the men knew of sex had been learned during their "apprenticeship," at the hands of the older man. To put it bluntly, some of the younger Afghans were unfamiliar with the desired (and required) mechanics for conception. 
To remedy this situation, the Army called in its psychological operations teams, which developed information campaigns in Pashtun areas, explaining the basics of heterosexual relations and their benefits, in terms of producing male offspring. It may be the only time in the history of warfare that an army has been required to explain sex to the native population, to curb the abuse of women and young boys--and retain U.S. influence in key geographic areas. 
Army psy op specialists declined to discuss their efforts in great detail. But one of the "preferred sex" campaigns was (reportedly) a direct result of the 2009 survey, and the problems encountered by NATO troops working with their Afghan counterparts.

I'm not sure I totally believe this (although the "dancing boys" stuff is definitely true -- the Taliban are more averse to it as being un-Islamic, which is one reason they got popular in the 1990s when two major pre-Taliban warlords started a civil war over a youth), but this example of Your Tax Dollars at Work is too good to pass up.

October 24, 2011

Who Kills Whom?

The Book Review Editor of the NYT, Sam Tanenhaus, thumbsucks over the Growing Threat of Republican Isolationism despite finding little evidence of that menace among GOP presidential candidates, who, with the exception of Ron Paul, mostly express the Invade-the-World conventional wisdom:
Right, Less Might 
By SAM TANENHAUS
Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.
THE Republican debate Tuesday night included many heated exchanges, but relatively few on the subject of foreign policy. There was instead surprising unanimity, whether it was Mitt Romney and Rick Perry debunking foreign aid, Ron Paul warning that America has become an empire, or Michele Bachmann, in what now seems an ill-timed critique, objecting to President Obama’s having “put us in Libya.”

Obviously, Bachman was wrong because, since then, Obama killed Gadaffi, which therefore permanently debunks all skepticism about the wisdom of America starting a war with Libya. The bottom line of sophisticated globalist thought is: Who kills whom? Obama started an international war with Libya, and then conclusively proved he was right to do so by killing the ex-leader of Libya.
Collectively, the candidates were channeling a broad shift in thinking on the right about America’s global responsibilities. It has been only a few years since George W. Bush labeled himself a “war president” leading a crusade for worldwide democratization. And the sentiments were not his alone. In December 2004 a majority of conservative Republicans agreed “it is best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs,” according to the Pew Research Center. 
In 2011, a roughly equivalent majority believe America “should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems at home.” 
In a time of severe economic woe — a “national emergency,” as Mr. Obama termed it in mid-September — foreign policy issues often lose their immediacy.

Well, foreign adventurism not just loses its "immediacy," it's objectively harder to pay for.
But with the exception of impassioned support for Israel, conservatives have been embracing a retreat from the greater world that recalls the isolationism of a bygone age in which belief in American “exceptionalism” combined with distrust of other countries and “entangling alliances,” even with other democracies. The most conspicuous example is the strong anti-interventionist sentiment in the period leading up to World War II, when conservatives flocked to rallies organized by the America First Committee, with its slogan “England will fight to the last American.”

In other words, skipping over the implied logical links ... Nazis!
... Of course that was before Mr. Obama’s election and the rise of the Tea Party movement. Its ascendancy is “proof positive of the rise of isolationism on the right,” Lawrence F. Kaplan, a columnist for The New Republic and co-author, with William Kristol, of “The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission,” wrote in an e-mail. “It’s no coincidence that the Tea Party has adopted the Don’t Tread on Me flag as its own,” Mr. Kaplan added. “My bet is they have the federal government, not far-away Islamists, in mind.”

My prejudice is for "Don't tread on me ... and I won't tread on you," but that just shows what a prejudiced ignoramus I am. All the sophisticates like Kaplan and Kristol believe in "Don't tread on me while I tread on you." What could possibly go wrong?
Even as the Republican presidential contenders have tapped into isolationist anxieties, they have sat for foreign-policy tutorials with holdovers from Mr. Bush’s presidency, many of them standard-bearers of the aggressive interventionism that Tea Partiers reject. Mr. Romney’s team includes the authors Eliot A. Cohen and Robert Kagan, both identified with the Iraq war. Mr. Perry has met with Donald H. Rumsfeld. Herman Cain has professed his admiration for the writings of John R. Bolton, a hawkish figure in the administrations of both Bushes. 

In other words, the Establishment maintains its chokehold on Republican elites despite all that we've learned in the last few years.
This position assumes that America, which remains, after all, the world’s one superpower, has no choice but to assert its leadership in a complex world — as, perhaps, Mr. Obama demonstrated in his Libya policy. He followed a middle course criticized by neoconservatives, who found it too timid, and by isolationists, who warned against “mission creep.” But it seems to have been vindicated last week with the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Who kills whom. What more do you need to know?

By the way, new cell phone footage suggests Gadaffi was sodomized while being lynched. Ha-ha, what a loser! I've watched enough TV detective shows to know that, unlike in the bad old days, prison rape is now considered a great topic for gloating jokes. (This evolution of social norms must be part of what Steven Pinker calls The Civilizing Process.) This new information about Gadaffi's end just proves how right Tanenhaus and the rest of respectable opinion are, and how wrong sickos like Ron Paul are for not wanting America to be involved in things like this.

So, forget "Who kills whom?" The new international cosmopolitan standard of right and wrong that only scary kooks like Pat Buchanan express doubts about is "Who sodomizes whom?"

October 22, 2011

McCain v. Buchanan

With John McCain issuing a vague death threat against Vladimir Putin following NATO's hit on Gadaffi, it's worth considering that McCain is an elder statesman of mainstream Republicanism, while Patrick J. Buchanan is a terrifying extremist. We similarly saw this back in August 2008, when little Georgia, then proposed for membership in NATO, invaded Russian-held territory. McCain responded with bellicose support for the aggressor, while Buchanan thought it was nuts for the U.S. to get militarily involved 600 miles south of Stalingrad.

As I mentioned in my review in VDARE of Buchanan's Suicide of a Superpower, Buchanan is one of the few people in Washington who took the end of the Cold War as a signal for anything other than self-congratulation. The struggle with the Soviets meant we had had to do many things that were painful, costly, dangerous, or distasteful; therefore, Buchanan reasoned in the early 1990s, let's now stop doing them. 

For example, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had been an improvisation made necessary by superpower conflict. It had preserved the peace by heightening the stakes to a "balance of terror" via a mutual defense pact. It had done its job, so it was now time to wind it down. 
"As Russia had gone home, some of us urged back then, America should come home, cede NATO and all the U.S. bases in Europe to the Europeans, and become again what UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick called 'a normal country in a normal time.' Our foreign policy elites, however, could not accept that the play was closing after a forty-year run ..."

That heresy made Buchanan an outcast among the Serious Thinkers, to whom NATO wasn't an adventure, it was a job. (Brussels is lovely this time of year.) Their slogan became "NATO must go out of area or go out of business."

Hence, globalist leaders have gone looking far afield for wars, such as bombing Serbia and Libya, to keep NATO "relevant." The U.S., Buchanan points out, also repeatedly violated its pledge to Mikhail Gorbachev not to expand NATO "one inch to the East," in return for which the last Soviet leader agreed to West Germany taking over East Germany. Moscow's resentment of NATO backstabbing was then cited as proof that Moscow has a Bad Attitude, which requires NATO to encroach even more upon their natural sphere of influence.  

But, as Buchanan points out in Suicide of a Superpower, this empire-building-on-autopilot has reached economic, political, and geographic limits. The U.S. spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. And the strategic logic of expanding NATO to unstable and unimportant countries such as Georgia or Ukraine, as once planned, is derisible. 

There's the public history of modern Europe that lauds the expensive international institutions that keep bloodthirsty nations from starting new wars, and then there's the hidden history: Stalin's massive ethnic cleansing in 1945 of nearly all Germans from Eastern Europe left Europeans with relatively little to fight over (other than their domination by the extra-European superpowers, the Soviet Union and the U.S).

Ross Douthat's column in the New York Times last Sunday does a good job of summing up the Buchananite critique of Pinkerian optimism. (Although Douthat doesn't mention Buchanan, he does namecheck the Derb). Buchanan and Douthat both cite Jerry Z. Muller, who wrote in 2008:
"The creation of ethnonational states across Europe, a consequence of two world wars and ethnic cleansing, was a precondition of stability, unity, and peace. With no ethnic rivals inside their national homes, European peoples had what they had fought for, and were now prepared to live in peace with their neighbors."

To say that Buchanan is pessimistic about American foreign policy, however, is to miss the key point: there isn't much reason to fight. Sure, we should continue to promise to defend Taiwan with our Navy, but are the Chinese really going to try to conquer Taiwan? Both sides are making too much money doing business with each other to have time for a war. 

Or, imagine that a majority in Ukraine decide to reunite with Russia, while a minority rebel. Would the American public agree to fight the Russo-Ukrainian army fighting the rebels? Would we be willing to reimpose the draft to liberate West Ukraine?  (Buchanan helped out way back in 1967 with Richard Nixon's hugely popular decision to phase out conscription.) Buchanan thinks the idea of the U.S. going to war in the ex-Soviet Union is politically absurd. 

Thank God lunatics like Buchanan are marginalized while thoughtful statesmen like McCain are accorded the respect their wisdom has earned.

June 7, 2011

Stop the Presses!

The Washington Post's banner headline is:
Report: Afghan nation-building effort in peril 
Karen DeYoung 4:25 AM ET 
EXCLUSIVE | Hugely expensive U.S. effort has had only limited success and may not survive an American withdrawal, according to the findings of a two-year congressional investigation to be released Wednesday.

I figured that out from watching a movie on VHS in September 2001.

Fun fact:
The report also warns that Afghanistan could slide into a depression with the inevitable decline of the foreign military and development spending that now provides 97 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Operation "Murder Qathaf'y" Rolls On

From the NYT:
NATO Attack Destroys Much of Qaddafi Compound 
By JOHN F. BURNS 
TRIPOLI, Libya — In a sudden, sharp escalation of NATO’s air campaign over Libya, warplanes dropped more than 60 bombs on targets in Tripoli on Tuesday, obliterating large areas of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya command compound.

Obama's basic foreign affairs philosophy appears to be that it's stupid to invade some third world country when you can score just as many political points by shooting or exploding one guy (along with various bystanders, of course).

May 24, 2011

Basically, we're trying to murder Gaddafi, right?

The WSJ reports:
North Atlantic Treaty Organization warplanes bombarded targets in Tripoli early Tuesday in what appeared to be the heaviest night of bombing of the Libyan capital since the alliance launched its air campaign against Col. Moammar Gadhafi's forces. 
The airstrikes, which struck around Col. Gadhafi's residential compound, came as the U.S. invited Libya's rebel leadership on Tuesday to open a representative office in Washington and NATO moved toward considering adding ground-attack helicopters to its military campaign in hopes of breaking a stalemate between the Libyan leader and rebels seeking to overthrow him. 
A spokesman for the U.K. Ministry of Defence said Royal Air Force Jets attacked a large military vehicle depot within Col. Gadhafi's Bab Al Aziziyah complex in the center of Libya on Tuesday, as part of a "major" NATO operation over Tripoli. 
Jeffrey Feltman, U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said during a visit to the eastern city of Benghazi on Tuesday that he delivered an oral message to members of the rebels' National Transitional Council from President Barack Obama that promised further support and reiterated America's position that Col. Gadhafi has "lost legitimacy to rule; he cannot regain control of Libya and he must step down immediately, thereby allowing the Libyan people to determine their own future."

If Obama really gets addicted to solving his political problems by killing his enemies, Osama, Gaddafi, etc., well, The Paw better keep on him at all times that pimp's knife.

On the other hand, I can't imagine Bibi has anything to worry about.

Golf and Baseball Diplomacy?

Cuba is finally getting around to approving second through fifth golf courses for foreign tourists. The country has 2100 miles of coastline, and there's nothing golfers like more than playing next to the sea. There's a recently discovered golf course grass that thrives despite salt spray, so it's become easier to build courses next to the ocean than in the past. 

After 50 years of Castro, Cuba is so ridiculously poor that all sorts of financially feasible win-win deals could be worked out between the U.S. and Cuba. Back in 2008, I suggested Baseball Diplomacy to President Bush. Perhaps Obama could try Golf Diplomacy?

But, you never hear much about Cuba as a foreign policy topic. I guess it's too close to America to think about.

March 31, 2011

The view from Pyongyang

In "Protips for Increased Dictator Longetivity," The Cold Equations draws attention to the view of a North Korean official on the fate of Libya's seven-year-long accord with Washington:
An unidentified North Korean Foreign Ministry official condemned the ongoing coalition airstrikes on Qadhafi forces and told state media that Tripoli was tricked by the West into giving up its nuclear-weapon technology in "an invasion tactic to disarm the country."

In exchange for diplomatic recognition and economic aid, Tripoli surrendered technology that included a largely complete warhead design and 4,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges capable of generating fissile material ...

"The Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson," the official said, emphasizing that the North's strategy of building up its own military was "proper in a thousand ways" and the only assurance of stability for the Korean Peninsula.

High-ranking officials in Pyongyang tracking the air assaults on Libya "must feel alarmed, but also deeply satisfied with themselves," Korea University professor Rüdiger Frank wrote in a web posting.

The Qadhafi case was "at least the third instance in two decades that would seem to offer proof that they did something right while others failed and ultimately paid the price," Frank said. He cited the former Soviet Union's determination to stop its military buildup and to "abandon the political option to use their weapons of mass destruction," along with ex-Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's acceptance of international WMD monitors into Iraq.

"To put it bluntly in the eyes of the North Korean leadership all three countries took the economic bait, foolishly disarmed themselves, and once they were defenseless, were mercilessly punished by the West," Frank said.

"It requires little imaginative power to see what conclusions will be drawn in Pyongyang," the professor said, asserting that any high-level North Korean voices who supported nuclear disarmament "will now be silent." 

March 2, 2011

The Toyota War

From Wikipedia, about Kaddafi's 1980s invasion of Chad to the south, which led to classic battles between Libyan tanks vs. the impoverished black country's Toyota pickup trucks:
The Toyota War is the name commonly given to the last phase of the Chadian–Libyan conflict, which took place in 1987 in Northern Chad and on the Libyan-Chadian border. It takes its name from the Toyota pickup trucks used as technicals to provide mobility for the Chadian troops as they fought against the Libyans.[6] 

The War Nerd explains what a "technical" is:
Habre's rebels took it from the Libyans in a battle which might've been the debut of one of the major new weapons systems of the late 20th century, the "technical." If you've read up on Somalia, you know that a "technical" is just a Toyota 4wd pickup with a big machinegun or grenade launcher welded onto the bed. 

Wikipedia goes on:
The 1987 war resulted in a heavy defeat for Libya, which, according to American sources, lost one tenth of its army, with 7,500 troops killed and 1.5 billion dollars worth of military equipment destroyed or captured.[7] Chadian losses were 1,000 troops killed.[5]

... Apparently formidable, the Libyan military disposition in Chad was marred by serious flaws. The Libyans were prepared for a war in which they would provide ground and air support to their Chadian allies, act as assault infantry, and provide reconnaissance. However, by 1987, Gaddafi had lost his allies, exposing Libya's inadequate knowledge of the area. Libyan garrisons came to resemble isolated and vulnerable islands in the Chadian Sahara. Also important was the low morale among the troops, who were fighting in a foreign country, and the structural disorganization of the Libyan army, which was in part induced by Gaddafi's fear of a military coup against him. This fear led him to avoid the professionalization of the armed forces.

February 3, 2011

A cynical view of the Camp David Accords

A friend writes:
In my opinion, Jimmy Carter decided to buy a foreign policy success.  One with zero content.  But I guess noticing that Sadat has kicked out the Soviets years earlier, that the Suez canal was already open, that even before Camp David  the Mossad had already tipped off Sadat about an assassination plot hatched by Qaddafi - Palestinians backed by Libya  - that'd be cynical. Begin thought that Sadat was satisfied, someone he could live with. And Sadat was satisfied. The purpose of the '73 war had been regaining the canal and self-respect among the Egyptian military, who had been totally humiliated in 67.  That had been achieved.

Real peace happens when the players have decided that they have compatible strategic goals.  That had already happened before Camp David. I guess someone people think that signing treaties is what really defines peace, but of course that is nonsense.   Peace was already a fact well before we paid anyone off.

In much the same way, people seem to think that some clever diplomat caused the rapprochement between China and the US  in the early 1970s. Some silver-tongued devil.  But the real cause was the Soviet threat: they came real close to a nuclear strike [on China's nascent nuclear weapons capability.]  In those circumstances, even _I_ could have been an effective diplomat, even if I had continually addressed the Chinese  as  the "Yellow Peril" in the negotiations.

That reminds me that my son had one of those excruciatingly meta assignments in high school history that have become fashionable: how has the "historiography" of events has changed over time? E.g., how did Northern views of abolitionist terrorist John Brown change from 1859 to 1862 to 1885 to 1975? (The history of history is a great topic for grad school, but just absurdlyhard for high school students who need to learn history first.)

This one was about how have views of the Camp David Accords changed over the last three decades? 

The answer, he found, was that nobody's views had changed at all. The kind of people who had liked it in 1978 -- Washington, Israel, American Jews, and a few at the top of the Egyptian government -- still liked it 30 years later. The kind of people who didn't like it in 1978 -- Palestinians, other Arabs, Russians, and American Arabists -- still didn't like it.

February 1, 2011

The Deal

The deal struck at Camp David in 1978 was, very roughly, that, in return for no more war, the U.S. would give Israel $3 billion per year and Egypt $2 billion per year, or $50 per Egyptian per year. That wasn't bad money back then. 

But the payoff hasn't gone up since then. And the population of Egypt has doubled, so now rather than $50 per Egyptian per year in 1978 dollars, the bribe is now $25 per Egyptian per year in crummy 2011 dollars.

Meanwhile, the wealth of the American wing of the Israel Fan Club has skyrocketed. This is not a secret in Cairo: they can go to the Forbes 400 website and do the math.

This doesn't mean that a new Egyptian government would want war with Israel. War is stupid; it kills people and breaks stuff. War doesn't pay. 

On the other hand, perhaps under a new regime, the Egyptian border guards who currently keep the Egypt-Gaza Strip border locked down pretty tight might get, say, a little sleepy. And maybe a few shipments of longer range missiles might get through to the hotheads in Gaza, with unfortunate but predictable incidents to follow. 

War doesn't pay, but maybe, ambitious younger men in Egypt might be thinking: Peace can pay. And a lot better than a stinking $25 per head. Mubaruk just wanted to die in luxury and hand his throne over to his son. Younger men might have more to prove.

If peace was worth $2 billion per year in the 1970s, they might reason, what would it be worth in the 2010s? $20 billion? Younger, more energetic Egyptian politicians with less to lose might  have some strong opinions on this subject.

But how could the Egyptians intimidate Israel? Perhaps they could co-opt the Jewish State. After all, if Egypt were to demand an order of magnitude cost of living adjustment up to $20 billion, then it would only be right and fitting for Israel to get $30 billion from the U.S. taxpayers. 

December 14, 2010

Northeast Asians outpacing Muslims at complicated tech stuff

From the New York Times:
North Korean Nuclear Ability Seen to Far Outpace Iran’s
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has concluded that North Korea’s new plant to enrich nuclear fuel uses technology that is “significantly more advanced” than what Iran has struggled over two decades to assemble, according to senior administration and intelligence officials.

North Korea is smaller and much poorer than Iran, has no oil money, and is run by people who make the Iranian rulers look like George Washington for sanity.

Looking at 2009 PISA test scores (p. 155-157), North Korea didn't take the test, but 26% of South Korean 15-year-olds scored in the top two ranks of math tests, the fifth best performance out of 65 regions, behind only Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Iran didn't take the test, but trying to find remotely similar countries, we see Turkey with a respectable 6%, Qatar 2%, and Jordan with under 1%. In science, 12% of South Koreans scored in the top two ranks versus 2% of Turks and vanishingly small percentages of most other Muslim countries. 

Moreover, unlike North Korea, Iran lets people emigrate. A lot of smart Iranians have wound up in Southern California. My wife knows an upper crust Iranian lady who arrived from Iran a decade ago and her son then majored in physics at Caltech. Probably a better decision for the family, all in all, than staying in Iran, having the son get drafted into the nuclear program, and then having the Israelis someday drop a bomb on his head. (In contrast to Iran, there hasn't been a notably large outflow of smart Turks from Turkey. If you've got some money, Turkey is a pretty okay place to live.)

And then there's an interesting game theory paradox to how hard you would work on building a Bomb in Iran v. North Korea if you were an engineer. If you actually got to the verge of a working Bomb, the Israelis would likely drop a bomb on your head, so better to putter around and give each other Powerpoint presentations forever. It's a living! The North Korean engineers aren't too worried about a pre-emptive strike because North Korea already has a deterrent in artillery and small rockets trained on Greater Seoul. The North Koreans have freedom to build a deterrent because they already have a deterrent.

This is all reminiscent of eight years ago when we were assured by The People Who Know that Saddam Hussein was this close to building his own Bomb using crack Iraqi scientists and engineers.

December 1, 2010

What I really want WikiLeaks to leak

The WikiLeaks' State Dept. cables revealed so far have been mildly entertaining. For example, American diplomats reported on President Sarkozy of France (according to the NYT):
But the cables also convey a nuanced assessment of the French leader as a somewhat erratic figure with authoritarian tendencies and a penchant for deciding policy on the fly. ... By January 2010, American diplomats wrote of a high-maintenance ally sometimes too impatient to consult with crucial partners before carrying out initiatives, one who favors summit meetings and direct contacts over traditional diplomacy.
... Mr. Sarkozy was criticized by European diplomats referred to in a cable for an “increasingly erratic” last half of his 2008 European Union presidency.
“Combined, these stories have bolstered the impression that Sarkozy is operating in a zone of monarch-like impunity,” said an Oct. 21, 2009, cable. 

In December 2009, Mr. Rivkin told Mrs. Clinton: “Sarkozy’s own advisers likewise demonstrate little independence and appear to have little effect on curbing the hyperactive president, even when he is at his most mercurial.” He added: “After two years in office, many seasoned key Élysée staff are leaving for prestigious onward assignments as a reward for their hard work, raising questions as to whether new faces will be any more willing to point out when the emperor is less than fully dressed.”

Nothing terribly surprising here, but gossip is fun. I especially look forward to (hopefully) forthcoming cables about Berlusconi.

What I'd really like WikiLeaks to leak, however, is the exact counterpart of this: what French diplomats are telling Sarkozy about Obama. It would probably be a lot more interesting than what the American press has told the American public about Obama.

For example, if Sarkozy tends toward mania, the obvious question is: does Obama tend toward depression? 

Obama's own memoirs suggests that the President suffered through significant depressive episodes in roughly 1981-1983 (a period when his sister asked his mother during a visit, “Barry’s okay, isn’t he? I mean, I hope he doesn’t lose his cool and become one of those freaks you see on the streets around here”) and 2000-2001 (of the 18 months following his crushing defeat by Bobby Rush, Obama wrote, "Denial, anger, bargaining, despair -- I'm not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance -- of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality.")

But some Googling on "Obama" and "depressive" brings up mostly an Onion piece and me.

Is Obama entering a third depressive phase?

I don't know, but it would seem both interesting and important. Of course, the American press hardly noticed Obama's references to his first two depressive phases, so we can hardly count on them to be on top of this question. 

On the other hand, I would suspect the energetic Sarkozy has been pestering his diplomats in Washington to keep him apprised of the Most Important Man in the World's mood swings. Maybe some day we'll be able to read what they've found out.

September 2, 2010

The Value of Vapidity

From Slate:
Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor. Really. We Mean It.
Economists are making the case politicians are afraid to: Immigration is great for the U.S.
By James Ledbetter

If you pay attention only to politics, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the current debate about immigration in America is limited to how severely it should be restricted—whether we need only to seal the border or actually change the birthright citizenship clause in the Constitution.

But among economic pundits, the discussion is heading in exactly the opposite direction. Pro-immigration arguments are booming, and reached a zenith this week with the publication of a paper by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank [i.e., Giovanni Peri], arguing among other things that immigrants, despite popular misconception, do not displace American workers. This has led a number [Felix Salmon] of economic bloggers [Kevin Drum] to make the very rational argument that one of the best things America could do now to fix our sagging economy is to encourage more people to come here and work.

According to the econo-blogosphere lately, immigration is a cure-all for America's economic ills. We'll get to the question of whether anyone is listening, but here is a guide to the virtues-of-immigration arguments that have been making the rounds in recent weeks.

Immigrants will solve our housing crisis. ...

Immigrants are needed to replenish the American workforce. ...

Immigrants make the economy better. ...

I'm always getting accused of being obsessed with IQ, but it seems an awful lot of people are obsessed with showing off how smart they are. In general, that would be a good thing, except that our culture has got itself into a culdesac whereby a proof of being "thoughtful" is by how little thought you give to crucial topics such as immigration, and by how mindlessly you sneer at those who actually have thought hard on the subject.

August 30, 2010

"How Immigration Boosts Your Pay"

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum quotes economist Giovanni Peri's latest study correlating immigration levels by state and income up through 2007. (Don't worry about what happened in high immigration states like California after 2007. I'm sure all the trends stayed the same.)
Why does immigration increase average income? How does it increase productivity and efficiency? Here's the scoop:
The analysis begins with the well-documented phenomenon that U.S.-born workers and immigrants tend to take different occupations....Because those born in the United States have relatively better English language skills, they tend to specialize in communication tasks. Immigrants tend to specialize in other tasks, such as manual labor. Just as in the standard concept of comparative advantage, this results in specialization and improved production efficiency.
If these patterns are driving the differences across states, then in states where immigration has been heavy, U.S.-born workers with less education should have shifted toward more communication-intensive jobs. Figure 3 shows exactly this....In states with a heavy concentration of less-educated immigrants, U.S.-born workers have migrated toward more communication-intensive occupations. Those jobs pay higher wages than manual jobs, so such a mechanism has stimulated the productivity of workers born in the United States and generated new employment opportunities.

What's really striking about this is that the very mechanism that provides the productivity boost — the fact that immigrants don't speak English well and therefore push native workers out of manual labor and into higher-paying jobs — is precisely the thing that most provokes the immigrant skeptics. They all want immigrants to assimilate faster and speak English better, but if they did then they'd just start competing for the higher paying jobs that natives now monopolize.

Isn't it nice that immigrants "push native workers out of manual labor and into higher-paying jobs" in fields where English skills are crucial. Who hasn't known some American-born construction worker who got pushed out of low paying manual labor when the whole construction site switched to Spanish-speaking so he became a $100,000 per week script doctor for Ridley Scott movies? Or at least as a Human Sign pointing the way to the theatre showing Robin Hood? They're both communications work!

To better understand this mechanism, it is useful to consider the following hypothetical illustration. As young immigrants with low schooling levels take manually intensive construction jobs, the construction companies that employ them have opportunities to expand. This increases the demand for construction supervisors, coordinators, designers, and so on. Those are occupations with greater communication intensity and are typically staffed by U.S.-born workers who have moved away from manual construction jobs.

Right. In, say, California's Inland Empire in 2007, Americans who used to be construction workers but were displaced by immigrants moved into "greater communication intensity" jobs like, say, peddling subprime mortgages for Countrywide or flipping houses using zero downpayment mortgages from Washington Mutual.

What could possibly go wrong?