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

April 7, 2010

"Upheaval in Kyrgyzstan Could Imperil Key U.S. Base"

Here's the #1 most important news story on NYTimes.com tonight:

Upheaval in Kyrgyzstan Could Imperil Key U.S. Base
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

Protests appear to have overthrown the government, calling into question the fate of a U.S. air base that supports the war in Afghanistan.

Whatever will America do without our key base in Kyrzygsrgtz ... ah, to hell with it. If I can't spell, I can't care about it.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 25, 2009

Afghanistan

I don't understand why some Americans are simply unable to grasp how important these tribal struggles over the best goat pasturage in the Hindu Kush are to the American national interest. I would refer you to the various outlets of the Washington Post Co. for voluminous elucidation on the vital goat lands issue.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 23, 2009

Afghanistan: The Future Is Feudal!

For most of the decade, I've been pointing out that feudalism would work better in Afghanistan than nation-building. Europeans came up with feudalism to defend themselves from the Vikings after the breakup of Charlemagne's empire. It's cheap, it doesn't require much organizational capital, it doesn't need a national language, and it doesn't require a Charlemagne. Feudalism doesn't work particularly well, but, for minimal security needs, it does work.

Now, they're finally thinking feudally in Washington. Fred Kaplan says in Slate:
... special-operations forces have begun to help anti-Taliban militias in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the insurgents are concentrated. These militias have risen up spontaneously in certain tribal groups, but U.S. commanders hope that they can use the example of these revolts "to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland." ...

... it has drawn high-level attention to a 45-page paper by Army Maj. Jim Gant, the former team leader of a special-ops detachment stationed in Konar province. The paper, called "One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan," recounts his experiences with organizing "tribal engagement teams" to help local fighters beat back the Taliban—and it spells out a plan to replicate these teams across the country. ...

The premise of his paper is that Afghanistan "has never had a strong central government and never will." Rather, its society and power structure are, and always will be, built around tribes—and any U.S. or NATO effort to defeat the Taliban must be built around tribes, as well. The United States' approach of the last seven years—focusing on Kabul and the buildup of Afghanistan's national army and police force—is wrongheaded and doomed. ...

A tribe-centered strategy may appeal to Obama in several ways. First, it keeps the Afghan people, not American occupiers, at the center of the operation. The U.S. soldiers live alongside the tribes, build trust, train them, supply them, gather intelligence from them, and fight with them. We are supporting players, not the lead.

But what happens when our friendly tribes stop fighting whoever it is we want them to fight, and start fighting our other friendly tribes?

That's where feudalism comes in.

Gant has no illusions about the difficulty of working with tribes. He spells out the risks of getting enmeshed in internecine feuds. Several times during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, our guerrilla allies called in U.S. air and artillery strikes on what they said were "Taliban targets" but in fact turned out to be gatherings of rival tribes.

An explicit and essential part of Gant's strategy is to draw the individual tribal teams into a network of tribes—first across the province, then the region, then the nation—tied in to the Kabul government through a web of mutual defenses and the supply of basic services. He's less clear on the mechanics of how this "bottom-up" approach to national unity takes hold, but he recognizes that without it the Taliban can gain advantage by playing the tribes off against one another.

Or, then again, maybe in Afghanistan the future is always futile.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 10, 2009

Noam Chomsky

In 2005, in a contest conducted by the magazines Foreign Policy and Prospect, readers voted Noam Chomsky the world’s top intellectual. To an American, this can seem surprising, since Chomsky is a distinctly marginalized figure in U.S. mainstream discourse.

He's popular on the left, but these days Chomsky is barely more popular in media-dominant neoliberal and neoconservative circles than is, say, Paul Gottfried. I can recall reading long articles by Chomsky in the LA Times in 1975-76 denouncing the Ford Administration for giving the greenlight to Indonesia to take over the decolonized Portuguese colony of East Timor (which look prescient in retrospect), but it doesn't appear that the LA Times has published anything by Chomsky in the last three years.

Still, a not implausible dual case can be made for Chomsky’s importance:

- As a scientist-philosopher, his work in linguistics going back to the late 1950s in which he attacked the dominant behaviorist assumptions of the time and implied the existence of a human language instinct had a crucial liberating effect on science, marking the return to a more realistic balance between nurture and nature.

- The ascent of America to the status of world's only superpower over the last 20 years just makes Chomsky's relentless critique of American foreign policy that much more relevant. Americans like to think of the U.S. as the plucky underdog, but, these days, we're the overdog.

Moreover, Chomsky’s negative critique of American foreign policy isn't much weighted down by his positive ideology -- which his former colleague Steven Pinker calls a sort of romantic left anarchism, epitomized briefly by the kind of spontaneously forming local workers’ collectives that Orwell saluted in Homage to Catalonia -- which seems too quaint to take seriously as a threatening alternative.

To this, I might add that Chomsky’s functional prose style probably doesn’t lose much in translation. And, of course, his default anti-Americanism is popular with non-Americans and unpopular with Americans.

Chomsky’s perspective on American foreign policy is, roughly, that nothing much has changed over the last century since, say, the Taft Administration. Just as Washington pushed around Latin American banana republics a century ago for the benefit of American business interests, so Washington pushes around the rest of the world today, and for similar reasons.

Chomsky’s standpoint is helpful. After all, if the U.S. found it rational to behave like that in the pre-ideological age of the early 20th Century, why wouldn’t it also behave like that in the post-ideological age of the early 21st Century? We know a lot about how Great Powers traditionally act, so why should all that knowledge be useless today?

At minimum, I would argue (Chomsky, of course, argues much more), the Greatest Power throws its weight around to dissuade Lesser Powers from throwing their weight around. Yet, even that it is seldom admitted in the neolib-neocon-dominated mainstream media. Instead, American muscle-flexing is due to the threat posed by Taliban sexism or whatever.

There is one successful alternative model to the Washington Consensus of globalist capitalism: what might be called "national capitalism," which worked well in East Asia. For that matter, tariff-protected national development worked well a century and more ago both in the Robber Barons' America and in Bismarck's Germany, which Chomsky often points out. To take a random example, here's a 2007 Harvard Crimson article where he sounds like a more politically correct Pat Buchanan:
Asserting that the U.S. had high tariff levels up through the 1950s, Chomsky attacked today’s global economic system for having served to transfer wealth from developing nations to the developed world.

He argued that the West had grown rich by relying on tariffs and industrial policy, and that whatever economic growth the developing world had seen following World War II had resulted from their use of similar protectionist trade policies.

“When these measures were banned during the neoliberal period of the 1970s, growth rates in the developing world decreased dramatically,” Chomsky said.

He said that if African nations want to achieve higher rates of economic growth, they should “look to the East Asian Tigers in the 70s and 80s, who expanded economically by violating the [World Trade Organization] rules.”

Still, Chomsky's can't get too excited about the success of, say, Samsung because of his old-fashioned quasi-Titoist workers' collectivist ideology. He worked on an Israeli kibbutz as a youth (where he was disturbed by the pro-Stalinist sympathies), and he remains, in some ways, The Last Kibbutznik.

In the mid-1980s, the South Korean Hyundai and the Yugoslavian Yugo both went on sale in the U.S. The Hyundai was bad, but not as awful as the Yugo. You'll notice that Hyundai is still around but the not the Yugo (nor Yugoslavia, either). Chomsky's economic theory is the Yugo of ideologies.

Nevertheless, you don't have to be a great fashion designer yourself to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

On the other hand, Chomsky can be rather naive about American power. Although he denies it, he often sounds rather like the tsk-tsking twin brother of advocates of "realist" foreign policy who overly reify Great Powers as if each were a single person playing the game of Risk. This was convenient simplification in, say, the days of Louis XIV ("L'etat, c'est moi"), but it's a misleading way to think about the shambling way foreign policy comes about in contemporary America. In Chomsky's mind, the real power is always "the multinational corporations," even in situations like the Iraq Attaq where the oil companies were unenthusiastic.

In Chomsky's view, for example, the American imperial dog must be wagging the Israeli tail for self-interested economic reasons of state -- any alternatives are too ridiculous to consider. Hence, Chomsky often sounds like Testing 99 / Whiskey / Evil Neocon, credulously repeating neocon talking points about how Israel must be highly useful to America: Israel is America's "cop on the beat" in the Middle East, etc.

You've got to admit that the Israeli tail wagging the American dog would be pretty ridiculous. What's even more ridiculous is the reality that so much of American foreign policy is influenced less by Israelis, who, after all, at least tend to be well-informed and clear-eyed about their own interests, but, as Francis Fukuyama pointed out when Charles Krauthammer accused him of anti-Semitism in 2005, by Israeli wannabes!

Chomsky's views on the evolution of Jewish opinion are insightful:
And you can date the beginning of the enthusiastic support for Israel in the culture pretty well, since 1967. Before 1967, the intellectual community was skeptical about Israel or uninterested in it. That changed.

If you look at Norman Podhoretz's book Making It, a kind of self-advertisement that came out in 1967, there is barely a mention of Israel. ...

That's when you start getting concern about the Holocaust. Before that, when people could have actually done something for Holocaust victims -- say, in the late 1940s -- they didn't do anything. That changed after 1967. Now you have Holocaust museums all over the country. It's the biggest issue, and you have to study it everywhere, mourn it. But not when you could have done something about it.

The Occam's Razor explanation for the change in Jewish-American attitudes in 1967 is that everybody loves a winner. Just as I haven't invested much of my ego in the sad fortunes of the Rice Owls college football team over the years since I graduated from Rice (but I did get interested last year when they went 10-3!), American Jews didn't invest much of their egos in Israel while it was in danger of getting crushed. Once the Jewish State was no longer at risk of defeat, however, Jewish-American egos got tied up in its continued dominance. After 1967, Israel became for many American Jews what the Notre Dame football team had been for American Catholics.

For Chomsky, however, it's always about the military-industrial complex, the oil companies, and class, and not about ethnicity:
There was a lingering concern that the Arabs might want to use the [oil] wealth of the region for their population, not for Western wealth and power, with a little bit raked off for the gangsters that run the countries. That's a major threat.

Okay ...
So, Israel smashed Nasser and destroyed the threat of secular nationalism. ... That's a major threat. Israel finished that, which firmed up the U.S.-Israeli alliance and led to a very quick change.

But, Chomsky's logic doesn't make sense on realpolitik grounds even on a simple post hoc, ergo propter hoc basis: the logical time for a U.S.-Israel alliance against Nasser would have been before Nasser was humiliated, not afterwards. For example, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were close allies when fighting Hitler, then diverged sharply after he was defeated. That's logical. The post-1967 American Jewish love affair with Israel isn't logical, it's emotional.

Now, you could make the argument that in 1969 Richard Nixon conspired with his chief advisors, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry Kissinger, to portray Israel as central to the Cold War to persuade some American Jews to be more pro-American and anti-Soviet, which indeed paid off with the rise of neoconservatism. But that doesn't have much to do with oil companies, so I doubt if Chomsky's much interested in it.

In summary, Chomsky has obvious obsessions that weaken his logic, but he remains a bracing controversialist.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 6, 2009

Is Obama being mau-maued in Afghanistan?

Tom Wolfe's classic study of War on Poverty handouts to "community organizers" in inner city San Francisco pointed out that most of the demonstrations and confrontations were largely staged to get money out of the government:

Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn't have known what to do without it. ... That was one reason why Summer Jobs was such a big deal. ... Nevertheless, there was some fierce ma-mauing that went on over summer jobs, especially in 1969, when the O.E.O. started cutting back funds and the squeeze was on. Half of it was sheer status. There were supposed to be strict impartial guidelines determining who got the summer jobs--but the plain fact was that half the jobs were handed out organization by organization, according to how heavy your organization was. If you could get twenty summer jobs for your organization and somebody else got five, then you were four times the aces they were ...

Reading the Afghanistan War website of Michael Yon, an ex-Green Beret who has been an embedded reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan, for some reason got me thinking about Mau-Mau the Flak Catchers. Especially the parts where people who are likely Taliban-affiliated show up at the British Army base where Yon is embedded and demand medical care for a wound no doubt suffered fighting the Brits or show up demanding compensation for their house that got blown up because guys were shooting at the Brits from it.

For a lot of the Pashtuns, no matter what side they nominally are on, the war seems to be not just about killing people and breaking things (which, being Pashtuns, they consider good clean fun), but, also, it's a living. If the war ever ends, will the rest of the world continue to funnel money and weapons into Afghanistan? Will they then have to get, like, jobs?

Moreover, consider the lessons the Afghans likely drew from the Iraq "Surge." Here in the U.S., the received lesson is that adding 15% more soldiers made all the difference, but what actually made the difference was what I'd been advocating all along: bribe the Sunni rebels to stop fighting us and start fighting the foreign fundamentalists.

If you are an Afghan, you probably figure that the same logic will play out in Afghanistan as in Iraq: the more problems you cause the Americans now, the more they will bribe you to switch sides, the same as the more you intimidated federal poverty bureaucrats in 1969, the biggerthe bribe they paid you.

Does Obama grasp that? This is one case where his pre-Presidential career experience ought to equip him to understand what's going on.

Yon's perspective is different. He implies that American soldiers didn't like the Iraqis, but at least they were civilized, in the sense that they mostly lived in houses that were designed with the expectation of some degree of law and order in Iraq. In contrast, while American and British troops tend to like the Afghans more on a personal level, they're basically uncivilized. Everybody in Afghanistan who can afford it builds his family a mud fort to call home, a mini-Alamo, because the expectationis that normal life in Afghanistan is Hobbesian.

For some reason, though, this doesn't discourage Yon:

We must face reality: Our reasons for continuing are not the reasons we came for. We are fighting a different war now than the one that began in 2001. Today's war is about social re-engineering. Given the horrible history of Afghanistan, and the fact that we already are here, the cause is worthy and worthwhile. ... Today, the war is still worth fighting, yet the goal to reengineer one of the most backward, violent places on Earth, will require a century before a reasonable person can call Afghanistan "a developing nation." The war will not take that long - but the effort will.

Well, as Sam Goldwyn would say, include me out.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 29, 2009

Afghanistan is becoming Mr. Obama's War

From the AP:
An American service member died Friday when his vehicle struck a bomb in eastern Afghanistan, making August the deadliest month for U.S. forces in the nearly eight-year war.

The grim milestone comes as the top U.S. commander prepares to submit his assessment of the conflict — a report expected to trigger intense debate on the Obama administration's strategy in an increasingly unpopular war. ...

That brought to 45 the number of U.S. service members killed this month in the Afghan war — one more than the previous monthly record, set in July.

American casualties have been rising steadily following President Barack Obama's decision to send 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to combat a resurgent Taliban and train Afghan security forces to assume a greater role in battling the insurgents.

Obama's decision was part of a strategic shift in the U.S. war against international Islamic extremism — moving resources from Iraq, which had been center stage since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion but where violence has declined sharply from levels of two years ago.

A record 62,000 U.S. troops are now in the country, with 4,000 more due before year's end. That compares with about 130,000 in Iraq, most due to leave next year.

Since the fresh troops began arriving in Afghanistan last spring, U.S. deaths have climbed steadily — from 12 in May to more than 40 for the past two months as American forces have taken the fight to the Taliban in areas of the country which have long been under insurgent control.

At least 732 U.S. service members have died in the Afghan war since the U.S.-led invasion of late 2001. Nearly 60 percent of those deaths occurred since the Taliban insurgency began to rebound in 2007.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 28, 2009

America needs college football in NYC and DC

Typically, college football rankings are dominated by public "flagship" universities (e.g., the University of Oklahoma) rather than second tier public universities (e.g., Oklahoma State). There are some well-known football powerhouse exceptions to this nomenclature rule, such as Penn State, which is actually the public flagship university of Pennsylvania (the University of Pennsylvania is private) and Ohio State (Ohio University doesn't emphasize big time sports).

Oklahoma State has had some good moments in football, such as when they had Barry Sanders, but the U. of Oklahoma has had more success. That rankles State alumnus T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire energy tycoon and financier, so he has given $265 million to State's athletic program. Pickens is an octogenarian, so he wants to win now. Oklahoma State is ranked 9th and 11th in the preseason polls.

I have to wonder how many opinion journalists somebody could buy for $265 million. (Answer: oodles.) Who cares about football, when for $265 million (assuming it was spent judiciously), you could more or less rent the U.S. military for your own personal war.

Personally, I think it's wonderful that across a broad swathe of America, incredibly competitive guys like T. Boone Pickens put their money into a non-lethal brand of pretend war.

Once again, I must point out that a major structural problem with American foreign policy is the lack of major college football programs in New York City and Washington D.C. to harmlessly absorb the competitive energies of the local personality equivalents of Pickens.

The problem with pro sports is that, other than taking the extreme step of buying a team, you can't give much money to an NFL team. You can buy season tickets, you can buy souvenirs, but you can't buy them a quarterback the way you can in college football.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 7, 2009

The Twitter-Facebook Gap

The revelation that yesterday's outages of Twitter and Facebook may have been due to Russian distributed denial of service attacks on a blogger in Tbilsi, Georgia blogger raises disturbing questions about whether America's 56,200 troops in Germany are sufficient in number and are based close enough to potential Facebook Fronts to safeguard vital American Twittering interests.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Trimming the cost of the Empire

Obviously, the U.S. government can't afford all its overseas commitments. So, which should we cut back and how much would we save by leaving Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, Puerto Rico, Germany, Kenya, and the like?

For example, almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have 56,200 military personnel based in Germany. Doing what, exactly? Protecting Germany from whom? France? Poland?

We have 33,000 troops in Japan, another expensive country, and 28,000 in South Korea.

Here's the strategic conundrum about having foreign bases with fairly large numbers of troops instead of either a huge number of troops, as during the Fulda Gap years, or just a caretaker staff to keep the base in shape in case it ever becomes needed. It's relatively cheap to keep the main battle tanks from the 1980s in storage in Germany and pay German civilian mechanics to keep them tuned up (Germans are good at tank maintenance). In case of war, we could easily fly in that many troops in a couple of days (the military has plans to borrow the fleets of Fed Ex and the big airlines, so restocking Germany with 56,200 soldiers would require, say, 112 flights of 747s), assuming we maintain air supremacy over the oceans.

Now, you might say, that's a Big If. But, if we've lost air supremacy over the oceans, well, then these poor bastards in these forward bases are dead. So, what's the war-fighting reason for deploying only moderately large numbers of troops overseas? It sounds like we have, in the unlikely event of a central European war, not enough troops in Germany to win, but, instead, just enough troops to suffer the worst defeat in American history.

Moreover, in a number of countries, most notably South Korea, leaving would do more for American popularity than anything else imaginable. For example, Seoul is a horribly overbuilt city with a gigantic green space in the middle of the city -- the U.S. military base, which we could simply give to the nation of Korea to become the Central Park of Seoul. Moreover, as Dennis Dale has pointed out from his Army service in Korea and Okinawa, thousands of horny 20-year-olds don't make the most diplomatic ambassadors for America.

The most overlooked cost-saving would be unilaterally granting independence to Puerto Rico, because we spends tens of billions each year bribing Puerto Ricans to stay home. PR no longer even has a Navy base. In the long run, the key American ally in the Caribbean will be the naturally dominant country, Cuba, making PR even more dispensable.

Maybe, it would be easier to start over with figuring out which overseas assets are truly useful. For example, Diego Garcia, the fortress island in the middle of the Indian Ocean is highly useful, and inexpensive because it's uncontested, having no real indigenous population.

Similarly, the various bases the U.S. has in friendly countries around the Persian Gulf, such as Turkey and Bahrain, seem well worth the price of guarding the flow of oil from the greatest prize in world history.

After that, well, there are a lot of refueling bases here and there, which shouldn't cost too much, and can be left with skeleton crews in times of peace.

So, what do we really need and what do we really not need?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Afghanistan: Why don't we just go home?

What is America's increasingly lethal war in Afghanistan about these days other than Barack Obama trying to to check off the Must Look Tough box on David Axelrod's re-election image strategy list?

I know it's supposed to now be all about Pakistan, but for decades the Pakistanis had a simple solution to Pushtun orneriness: the government just put up a big sign at the border of the northwest frontier territory near the Afghan border saying: "Sorry, but the Government of Pakistan does not guarantee your safety beyond this point. Cheer-i-o!" If Pathans tribal raiders came roaring down out of their mountains into the worthwhile land, they'd be slaughtered on flat ground by the Pakistani Army, and go back to their mountains, so, mostly they didn't. And the government of Pakistan didn't bother trying to control the mountains because A) They're mountains, and B) They're mountains that are are full of Puhktuns ... and why would anybody want to deal with them more than the minimum it takes to make sure they stay away from you?

But ever since Obama came to power, I keep reading (actually, I only glance at the headlines) about the Pakistani Army mounting punitive expeditions into the Swat Valley that sound very much like the one Winston Churchill took part in during the 1890s.

Churchill and friends won most of the battles, but in the very long run they lost the war, for the simple reason that, in the long run, people like Winston Churchill had some place nicer than the Khyber Pass to go home to, while the Pushtuns didn't, and the Pushtuns knew that.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 20, 2009

Whatever happened to the Saudi Menace?

After 9/11, which was mostly carried out by Saudi nationals, there were all these articles in the papers explaining how the Saudi royal family bribed Wahhabi fanatics in Saudi Arabia to leave the country and go spread extremism and terrorism somewhere else. It was widely argued that shutting down this mechanism was central to winning the War on Terror.

I recall that a number of investigations were begun into Muslim charities.

And then what happened?

I hardly ever hear about Saudi Arabia anymore. Was this problem fixed and somebody forgot to tell us? Did it not really exist in the first place? Did everybody just get bored with terrorism? Did the Saudis just pay off everybody in America to shut up about it? If so, where's my payoff? (Dear Saudi Royal Family: Please slip your envelope under the blue recycling trash can when I put it out on the street on Tuesday evening. I'll know what to do with it.) Have the Saudis just kept on doing what they do and nobody here bothers to even whine about it anymore? What's the deal?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 17, 2009

July 16, 2009

America's Cuba

I'd never thought about it much before, but reading Stephen Hunter's nonfiction book American Gunfight about the two Puerto Rican nationalist terrorists who came close to assassinating Harry Truman in his bedroom in 1950 turned me into a Puerto Rican nationalist.

Seriously, why does America rule a populous Spanish-speaking island in the Caribbean?

It's just a leftover from the era of Teddy Rooseveltian American imperialism, a war prize from the Spanish-American War of 1898. It's hard to figure out from Googling around why the U.S. government ever wanted Puerto Rico.

In contrast, there was at that time a popular notion that owning the Philippines would pay off for America because the Philippines were said to be the key to opening the door to the China trade, and if all 300,000,000 Chinamen bought a pair of American shoes, that would be 600,000,000 shoes! Well, maybe, maybe not, but at least the Philippines land-grab had a theory to explain it.

But what was Puerto Rico supposed to be the key to: the Haiti trade?

The only theory I've ever heard of why the U.S. wanted Puerto Rico was that it was supposed to protect the approaches to the Panama Canal. Yet, I don't see any evidence that Teddy's strategic oracle, Admiral Mahan, thought much of Puerto Rico's strategic value. In the chapters on naval strategy in the Caribbean in his 1911 book, Mahan barely mentions Puerto Rico, and instead spends many pages salivating over Jamaica's strategic location. (The U.S. closed its last naval base in Puerto Rico, Roosevelt Roads, in 2004, relocating its operations to Florida. In 2003, the Navy gave up on its Vieques firing grounds after protests.)

As far as I can figure, the U.S. kept Puerto Rico more or less as a souvenir of that "splendid little war" with Spain. We couldn't keep Cuba, which with its huge length, long coastline, and more developed economy, was sort of worth something strategically and economically, because we had gone to war in the name of Cuban independence. So we demanded Puerto Rico as an "indemnity" from Spain for making us declare war on them by their being so colonialist.

Cuba helped bankrupt the Soviet Union by costing the Russkies about $6 billion per year in subsidies. Economist Art Laffer estimates that Puerto Rico costs the U.S. government almost four times as much, mostly in tax breaks to corporations. And the cost of Open Borders between Puerto Rico and the U.S. has been sizable, especially to Eastern Seaboard cities during the decades before the government started bribing Puerto Ricans to stay home. And Puerto Ricans become instantly eligible for affirmative action benefits the moment they step off the plane in the 50 States, which doesn't do Americans any good.

The U.S. pays Puerto Ricans to conduct all their politics around the statehood v. commonwealth polarity, but nationalism remains in their hearts: Puerto Rico sends its own teams to the Olympics and the World Baseball Classic, and Puerto Ricans cheer loudly when their teams beat the Americans.

And why shouldn't they? It's only natural for an island nation to feel little emotional tie to the continental power that conquered them, especially if they have different languages.

Puerto Rico is never going to progress like Hawaii did into an English-speaking place where Americans would want to settle. It's full of Puerto Ricans. (Hawaii has almost twice the land mass of Puerto Rico but less than one-third the population.)

Recent referendums in P.R. have been slightly tilted toward staying a subsidized colony, but someday "statehood" will win a referendum. And then the Democrats will have a field day demanding that we respect the wishes of the Puerto Rican people and give the Democrats two more U.S. Senators.

It's time for Puerto Rican independence.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 3, 2009

The American Media's Bias toward English-Speaking Foreigners

The Iranian election protests have apparently sputtered out, significantly faster than the Mexican election protests of 2006 that excited far less interest in the American press. Obviously, there are a lot of specific reasons for this disparity, but I think there's a general pattern emerging.

As English has become the world's dominant language, it has become easier for Americans to be influenced by foreigners who are fluent in English. For example, Americans follow political controversies in Iran by reading blogs by Iranians -- Iranians who like to write in English, of course, which is hardly a representative sample of Iranian opinion.

This means that the American press will tend to be biased toward political movements who represent the better educated, wealthier, more cosmopolitan, Internet-savvy, and more elitist elements in a foreign country (i.e., those likely to speak English well), while the American media will be less sympathetic toward parties comprised of the less educated, poorer, more xenophobic, offline, and more populist elements.

Thus, the American media was sympathetic toward Mousavi's complaints about vote-counting in Iran because because his supporters were good at communicating them to Americans, while the populist Ahmadinejad draws his support from uncool people who don't speak much English. In contrast, the complaints of Lopez-Obrador, the populist mayor of Mexico City, about vote-counting in Mexico were greeted with yawns in the U.S. press because his supporters are generally not very articulate in English, and his party's ideology is fairly anti-American and anti-globalist.

Being biased toward the better English speakers is not just a custom of convenience for the American media and the American government. There's a moral feeling as well that the better English speakers deserve to win because they are more like us. Of course, this is self-serving: promoting the triumph of English-proficient classes also promotes the global dominance of American media institutions.

This is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. FDR's Administration routinely overestimated Chiang Kai-shek's regime in part because it possessed a facade of charming English-speaking UCLA and Berkeley-educated officials, even though the real decisions were made in very Chinese ways that Washington never understood. Meanwhile, Mao's rebels had few English speakers, so FDR underestimated them.

Similarly, why did the U.S. side with Maliki's Iranian-aligned Shi-ites in Iraq, when it would have made more strategic sense to side with the anti-Iranian Iraqi nationalist Shi-ites of Muqtada al-Sadr? A big reason is that Maliki's gang, who had spent decades in Iran while their rivals were holed up in the slums of Iraq (such as Sadr City), were more cosmopolitan -- i.e., were better at speaking English.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 24, 2009

Gaza

I frequently criticize the mainstream media for not writing about things that are boring and depressing. And yet, I found Israel's pummeling of the Gaza Strip to be boring and depressing, so I've barely mentioned it, other than suggesting some technical defensive solutions that Israel could try to counter the not-terribly-frightening threat of Gaza-launched flying pipebombs that turned out to be, according to better-informed commenters, not terribly feasible.

In contrast, I wrote much about Israel's fight with Hezbollah in 2006 because then there was a media mania for demanding that America take up the 51st State's burden and go start a war with Iran to help out Israel.

We Americans appear to have made a lot of progress since 2006 in grasping that Israel is actually a foreign country, and that Israel has its own national interests which are by no means identical with our national interests. Of course, that hardly implies that the U.S. should be active on the side of Israel's enemies, either.

I recognize that Israel faces a difficult strategic situation, and I'm not that motivated to either condemn or commend what it does, so long as it doesn't drag the U.S. along with it. Now that there is some indication that Israeli influence over the U.S. is beginning to slip (thanks due to the ugliness of the Gaza attack, the embarrassment of Bernie Madoff, but no thanks to Obama's appointments -- Obama's thinking on the Israeli Lobby's power, like his thinking on much else is so 2007), I'm not in the mood to kick Israel when it's down.

Realistically, U.S. policy will remain tilted in favor of Israel due to the power of the domestic Jewish lobby, just as U.S. policy has been tilted against Cuba due to the power of the domestic Cuban exile lobby. The important thing, more critical than our foreign policy, is that we here in America be free to publicly discuss why our foreign policy is biased toward Israel. That has been true regarding our bias against Cuba, but not, at least until very recently, regarding Israel.

Last summer, I outlined in VDARE.com a realist approach to thinking about America's relationship with Israel in "The Cuban Compromise: A Sustainable Model for the Jewish Lobby," which suggested that Americans should agree to Israel's fundamental interests in the same manner as America has treated the Cuban exile lobby's interests -- allowing Israel to push around the Palestinians, and a guarantee of refugee status for Israelis in the U.S. if the worst should somehow happen to Israel; on the other hand, America would not fight Israel's wars for it and, most importantly, Americans would be free to describe and criticize the power of the Jewish lobby.

I haven't seen anything since that has caused me to change my mind.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 15, 2008

Is Afghanistan a place to economize?

The U.S. has been fighting in Afghanistan for seven years now. We achieved excellent returns in the first few months, but since then we've mostly just been sucked into that useless place's endless knuckleheadedness.

Has the U.S. government ever explained to the vast Pashtun tribe on what terms honor would be satisfied and we would leave? (E.g., Deliver Osama alive or prove that he is dead? Rename their movement something other than "Taliban?" Understand that if they ever tolerate anti-American terrorists again, we'll be back, and really mad this time?) I suspect we could reach a meeting of the minds with the Pashtuns more easily if we phrased all our demands in terms of "honor demands that ..."

If Barack Obama wins, he should appoint McCain to be Ambassor to the Barbarian Tribes (which was Sir Richard Burton's de facto title within the British Foreign Office). McCain is exactly the kind of man the Pashtuns would feel sympatico with.

Still, the idea of negotiating a final peace agreement with the Pashtuns is probably unlikely. I'm not sure that the concept of "war" and "peace" as mutually exclusive periods of time is one that they subscribe to. To them, fighting is kind of like the professional golf season is to Americans -- something that, whether formally or informally, goes from early January to late December with a one week break for Christmas. Just as somebody somewhere is always playing golf for money, somebody somewhere in Pashtunland is always fighting somebody else.

But the Establishment view seems to be swinging in the direction of Obama's suggestion that we instead amp up the war in Afghanistan and widen the war into Pakistan, a country of 170,00,000. After Musharraf's fall, Bush has publicly allowed crossing the border into Pakistan. Perhaps some commandos can grab Osama (assuming he is still alive) and we can be done with it.

But even if that happened our "allies" in Afghanistan would probably insist we stay. We always seem to end up at the service of our supposed puppets in country. The anti-Pashtun/Taliban folks in Afghanistan have been telling us for years, "Let's you and them fight."

By the way, speaking of Pakistan, Obama was close friends with three Pakistanis he hung out with at posh Occidental liberal arts college in LA. (That's when he changed his name from Barry to Barack.) That's why he went to Pakistan in 1981, which is just about the only foreign trip he ever took unconnected with his parents. And he later roomed in NYC for years with another Pakistani that he knew through his Oxy friends.

UPDATE: In Pakistan in 1981, Obama stayed at the estate of the man who was recently caretaker Prime Minister after his boss, Gen. Musharraf, quit. Although Obama recently boasted of how much foreign policy expertise he gained from this trip, he didn't mention it in Dreams from My Father since it didn't have much to do with his story of race and inheritance.

Obama's youthful connection to Pakistani bigshots is not particularly remarkable. Imagine an American student at Amherst in the 19th Century who makes friends with the tiny number of Italian students there, and goes to visit Italy with his classmate. His friends would almost certainly belong to a politically influential network of Italian families. Of course, if the American later ran for President, it would be interesting to know which network of Italian families he had connections to.

Still, Obama sure has a lot of odd Muslim connections -- like Tony Rezko being in bed with the Black Muslims in Chicago. I don't see any evidence that Obama ever had a spiritual interest in Islam. As he admitted in connection with his Muslim grandfather, the youthful Obama saw both Islam and the Nation of Islam as being anti-white and anti-miscegenation (his grandfather had denounced his parents' marriage), so Obama vaguely approved of both religions, without, as far as I can tell, caring much about their theology.

Obama's Pakistani friends no doubt came from wealthy, influential families within Pakistan. Does anybody know what their political connections are within Pakistan, since they've probably helped shape Obama's view of that complicated and obscure part of the world?

September 9, 2008

Detailed account of the Georgian-Russian war

A military-oriented blog has a highly detailed account of the recent unpleasantness in the Caucasus. I can't judge the accuracy or bias (the author reads Russian, so presumably a lot of accounts by combatants have made their way onto the Russian-language Internet -- no word about how much he got from Georgians).

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 3, 2008

NYT: Georgia, not Russia, attacked

The Battle of Kursk it wasn't ... The New York Times reports:

Just weeks after Georgia’s military collapsed in panic in the face of the Russian Army, its leaders hope to rebuild and train its armed forces as if another war with Russia is almost inevitable. ...

Georgia’s decision to attack Russian and South Ossetian forces raises questions about the wisdom of further United States investment in the Georgian military, which in any case would further alienate Russia. Not doing so could lead to charges of abandoning Georgia in the face of Russian threats. ...

“Our mission is to protect our country from Russian aggression,” Davit Kezerashvili, Georgia’s 29-year-old defense minister, said in an interview last week when asked what missions the military would be organized to perform. “...

Military rebuilding will take years, which means that long-term decisions about American support to Georgia will fall to the next presidential administration.

Republicans and Democrats alike have signaled strong support for Georgia.

Mr. Saakashvili has cultivated close ties to both the McCain and Obama campaigns. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for vice president, visited Mr. Saakashvili last month, as did Cindy McCain, the wife of Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. Mr. McCain has been a vocal proponent of Mr. Saakashvili’s government, and a strong critic of the Kremlin. ...

Russia’s military, while able to overpower and scare off the inexperienced Georgian Army, went into battle with aging equipment, including scores of tanks designed in the 1960s, and armored vehicles that broke down in large numbers along Georgia’s roads. ...

But as Georgia and the West begin to discuss military collaborations, the conversation is informed by the events of last month, in which the Georgian military scattered under fire. ...

But interviews with Western military officers who have experience working with Georgian military forces, including officers in Georgia, Europe and the United States, suggested that Georgia’s military shortfalls were serious and too difficult to change merely by upgrading equipment.

In the recent war, which was over in days, Georgia’s Army fled ahead of the Russian Army’s advance, turning its back and leaving Georgian civilians in an enemy’s path. Its planes did not fly after the first few hours of contact. Its navy was sunk in the harbor, and its patrol boats were hauled away by Russian trucks on trailers.

The information to date suggests that from the beginning of the war to its end, Georgia, which wants to join NATO, fought the war in a manner that undermined its efforts at presenting itself as a potentially serious military partner or power.

Mr. Saakashvili and his advisers also say that even though he has no tactical military experience, he was at one time personally directing important elements of the battle — giving orders over a cellphone and deciding when to move a brigade from western to central Georgia to face the advancing Russian columns.

In the field, there is evidence from an extensive set of witnesses that within 30 minutes of Mr. Saakashvili’s order, Georgia’s military began pounding civilian sections of the city of Tskhinvali, as well as a Russian peacekeeping base there, with heavy barrages of rocket and artillery fire.

The barrages all but ensured a Russian military response, several diplomats, military officers and witnesses said.

After the Russian columns arrived through the Roki Tunnel, and the battle swung quickly into Russia’s favor, Georgia said its attack had been necessary to stop a Russian attack that already had been under way.

To date, however, there has been no independent evidence, beyond Georgia’s insistence that its version is true, that Russian forces were attacking before the Georgian barrages.

That's a big improvement over so much of the initial reporting in the American that made it sound like Russian takes rolled first over the de facto boundary of 17 years; but the NYT now sounds a little too overconfident in the opposite direction. Russia may have been trying to provoke Georgia into committing the casus belli. I don't know that Putin was trying to provoke Georgia's government of over-networked yuppie goofballs into starting this war, but he might have.

During the battle, one Western military officer said, it had been obvious that Georgia’s logistical preparations were poor and that its units interfered with each other in the field.

This was in part because there was limited communication between ground forces and commanders, but also because there was almost no coordination between police units and military units, which often had overlapping tasks and crowded one another on the roads.

One senior Western military official said that one of the country’s senior generals had fled the battle in an ambulance, leaving soldiers and his duties behind. Georgia’s Defense Ministry strongly denies this.

No one disputes that the army succumbed to chaos and fear, which reached such proportions that the army fled all the way to the capital, abandoning the city of Gori without preparing a serious defense, and before the Russians had reached it in strength. It littered its retreat with discarded ammunition.

C. J. Chivers reported from Tbilisi, and Thom Shanker from Washington. Clifford J. Levy contributed reporting from Moscow.

The key strategic question not mentioned here is whether Georgia intends to build a military oriented toward the offense or the defense.

Hezbollah showed in 2006 that, by spending the $100 million per year it gets from Iran, plus whatever it extorts out of the Lebanese economy, you can dig in and withstand a modern army with airplanes and tanks even when you have none. At least, you can withstand a modern army for about as long as a modern country will put up with waging offensive war. As the Georgians showed, in the 21st Century, people really don't like to fight very much, so the balance is switching from offense to defense. It's not 1940 anymore, so mini-Maginot Lines are coming back into utility.

But you can't conquer the land you want by digging in on the land you already have. At this point, having tried to retake South Ossetia, Georgia finds itself with Russian sitting on land that Georgia controlled up until last month, so it is likely to even more want to go on the offensive to get the Russians out.

What's the solution? I don't know, but, it would be nice if Democratic Georgia had one of those democratic elections we're always hearing about and voted Saakashvili out for starting and instantly losing a war with Russia. Then a new government could start a defensive-oriented strategy, digging in to make it too costly for Russia to go further south, while negotiating to get Russia to pull back to its protectorates, leaving a demilitarized zone behind.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 27, 2008

Saakashvili: The gun went off by itself while I was just holding it

The WSJ Op-Ed page explains things:

How the Georgian Conflict Really Started
By MELIK KAYLAN
August 28, 2008; Page A15
Tbilisi--'Anybody who thinks that Moscow didn't plan this invasion, that we in Georgia caused it gratuitously, is severely mistaken," President Mikheil Saakashvili told me during a late night chat in Georgia's presidential palace this weekend.

"Our decision to engage was made in the last second as the Russian tanks were rolling -- we had no choice," Mr. Saakashvili explained. "We took the initiative just to buy some time. We knew we were not going to win against the Russian army, but we had to do something to defend ourselves."

Everybody knows the best defensive tactic in tank warfare is a failed offensive, especially against Russia. For example, consider how well taking the initiative worked out for Hitler when he started the biggest tank battle ever, the Battle of Kursk, in the summer of 1943.

... "I got a call from the minister of defense [who, by the way, in case I haven't mentioned it before, is 29-years-old] that Russian tanks, some 200, were massing to enter Tskhinvali [capital of the Russian protectorate of South Ossetia] from North Ossetia," Mr. Saakashvili told me. "I ignored it at first, but reports kept coming in that they had begun to move forward. In fact, they had mobilized reserves several days ahead of time."

This was precisely the kind of information that the Russians have suppressed and the world press continues to ignore, despite decades of familiarity with Kremlin disinformation methods. "We subsequently found out from pilots we shot down," said Mr. Saakashvili, "that they'd been called up three days before from places like Moscow. We had intelligence coming in ahead of time but we just couldn't believe it. Also, in recent weeks, the separatists had intensified artillery barrages and were shooting our soldiers. I'd kept telling our guys to stay calm. Actually we had most of our troops down near Abkhazia where we expected the real trouble to start. I can tell you that if we'd intended to attack, we'd have withdrawn our best-trained forces from Iraq up front."

But, as you admitted above, you did attack. You say you "took the initiative" with your "decision to engage." Your tanks crossed the de facto boundary between Georgia and South Ossetia first.

Aren't you saying you hadn't "intended to attack" when you did, in fact, attack? I guess it was like what cops are always hearing, "I didn't mean to shoot him! The gun just went off by itself." Or are you just saying that you wish now you hadn't attacked, at least not in such a stupid manner?

In Saakashvili's defense, he had a legitimate interest in Russian tanks staying out of South Ossetia, since, by crossing the natural boundary of the Caucasus Mountains, they are then positioned to threaten his actual country.

They were especially threatening because he apparently hadn't devoted much of his considerable recent arms purchases to defense, as shown by the complete collapse of his army after its offensive, opening the way for Russia to roll as far into Georgia as it pleased. There are plenty of countries in the world that could advise Georgia on how to resist a tank invasion, but Georgia seemed to get most of its military training from the U.S. and Israel, two countries who have a "shoot first and ask questions later" tradition when it comes to initiating armored warfare.

His less legitimate motivation was apparently fear that if Russia sent 200 tanks into South Ossetia, then he wouldn't have a hope of invading that territory in the future because the Russians would be set up strongly for defense of it, so he had to attack now or forever hold his peace.

But, considering how badly beaten he was, it was, in any case, absurd.

So, this is the NATO partner to whom we are going to hand over decisions about war and peace?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 25, 2008

Georgia's government: The Davos Man Junior Varsity Team

Because older Georgian politicians are mostly corrupt ex-Communist mediocrities, Georgia, since the "Rose Revolution," has had one of the youngest sets of political leaders in the world.

It's important to realize that they aren't some random grab bag of provincial hotheads. Instead, they are the cream of Georgia's new generation of globalized elite, almost all educated abroad and plugged into the most influential global networks of finance, law, media, trade, and NGOs. Thus, they've enjoyed tremendous press coverage from similar folks in the prestige media.

These are the kind of people who will be running the world for the next generation, making Georgia a harbinger of what's in store for all of us.

And what did these exemplars of the globalized Best and Brightest do when they got power?

They started a tank war with Russia.

*
By the way, judging from how fast Russia struck back, I would guess that Russia has plenty of spies within Georgia. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if one of those Georgian B&Bs was privately supplementing his official pay as Putin's personal agent provocateur within the Georgian government:
Hey, guys, let's go invade that Russian-occupied territory with our tanks! C'mon, what's the worst that could happen?

Perhaps that sounds excessively paranoid and convoluted, but, after all as they say in those parts (or at least should say):

"Forget it, Jake, it's Caucasustown."

For a profile of perhaps the most brilliant of all the dangerous operators who have emerged from that part of the world, see here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer