French contradictions...

The French want power without commitment and truly believe that they will be able to master the challenge of terrorism.

This deserves not so much a fisking as critiquing and expansion.


France issued an implicit criticism of U.S. foreign policy on Thursday, rejecting talk of a "war on terror".

Well, that's nothing new: the French still believe that terrorism must only be fought by police tactics, despite the fact that terrorism of the 21st century is rather different than that of the 20th.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, speaking in parliament, expressed these views on global terrorism, while President Jacques Chirac backed France's claims to the international front rank with a fresh defense of his country's nuclear arsenal.

Here it's appropriate to try and understand French security thinking over the last 50 years. Remember, France left the military part of NATO over the fact that the US would not accede to have a French general in charge, coupled with a continuing severe disappointment that the US directly embarrased the French (and the Brits, but they got over that) over Suez. The French realized that they can't afford another war like WW1 and made nuclear weapons to be the guarantor of their national existence in the face of Soviet ambition; their conventional military was more often a tool for industrial policy than a military force that could have stood up to a general Soviet attack with OMGs breaking into the French hinterland. The Force de Frappe was the core of the strategic philosophy of dissuasion, which is falsely translated as deterrence (it fulfills the function, but the difference is in the national understanding of what is meant. The meaning is more one of creating a mental state and is the antonym, in French, of persuasion. Deterrence means more of an objective analysis of terms of force that lead to a rational decision.

Villepin noted Chirac's strong opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and said the Arab state had now sunk into violence and was feeding new regional crises.

Like Villepin didn't have anything to do with the fiasco of the UN in regards to Iraq. And not like the French didn't try their damndest to avoid dealing with the crisis: not avoiding the crisis, since the crisis came regardless of what the French did. The French wanted to avoid dealing with the problem. Big difference.

"Let us not forget that these crises play into the hands of all extremists," the prime minister said in a debate on the Middle East. "We can see this with terrorism, whether it tries to strike inside or outside our frontiers," he added.

But the extremists are the ones creating the crises.

"Against terrorism, what's needed is not a war. It is, as France has done for many years, a determined fight based on vigilance at all times and effective cooperation with our partners.

And what does this really mean? It means the reversion to fighting-terrorism-with-the-police, which has been shown not to work, especially when the terrorists can use co-option and corruption as non-government actors.

"But we will only end this curse if we also fight against injustice, violence and these crises," he said.

Villepin's remarks, which came a day after U.S. President George Bush admitted that the CIA had interrogated dozens of terrorism suspects in secret foreign locations, did not explicitly mention the United States.

But his rejection of language employed by Bush, who often uses the expression "war on terror" underlined the longstanding differences between Paris and Washington.

In separate remarks, Chirac stressed that France was committed to maintaining a nuclear arsenal of its own.

Blah blah blah, first causes, etc. Meaningless rhetoric aimed at the gullible...and here is why this starts to become interesting:

"In an uncertain world, facing constantly evolving threats, nuclear dissuasion guarantees our vital interests," Chirac said on a visit to France's Atomic Energy Commission nuclear simulation facility at Bruyeres-le-Chatel near Paris.

That is the core of French politico-military strategy: dissuasion. But why bring this to the foreground? Why now? Of course it has to do with Iran.

In the arguments and discussions during the Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, the Iranian government will also have to develop a nuclear strategy to go along with it: at least this seems to be what the French are contemplating. Why talk otherwise of your national nuclear strategy at this point in time: the Iranians, so the French hope, must be dissuaded - again, the opposite of persuasion - from thinking of using their nuclear weapons against France.

But only that: dissuasion guarantees vital French interests, not the interests of the international community.

He stressed that France was committed to funding continuing research and development into nuclear weapons technology.

In other words, in terms of nuclear weapons, walking the walk and not merely the talk, shoring up the believability of the Force de Frappe.

"There can be no great ambition without adequate means, that's clear," he said. "The position of countries is never guaranteed. In the 21st century, only those which make science a genuine priority will stay ahead."

What is the meaning of this? A put-down for the Iranians, who without a doubt have great ambitions but whose means are not adequate? The curious stating of what must be for the French painfully obvious - that the position of countries in never guaranteed - aimed at the Iranians? Or more exactly at the US?

Both France and the United States have played down splits opened by the Iraq war, pointing especially to cooperation on attempts by the West to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions.

But differences in tone and style have often resurfaced, notably during the Lebanon crisis, where France initially offered to send just 400 peacekeepers to Lebanon despite vigorously backing calls for an international force.

Ah, the classic problem of the French and one of the key problems for any country wanting to acquiesce to the nuclear club: the necessity of believable conventional capabilities as alternative to having one's bluff called when in conflict if the enemy thinks that you have abandoned conventional capabilities in exchange for the chimeric hope that the mere threat of using nuclear weapons is adequate.

Villepin's speech in parliament made much of France's leading role in securing a peace agreement in Lebanon backed by the United Nations, which he said had shown the virtues of "listening and dialogue."

"It is the duty of France and Europe to show that the clash of civilizations is not inevitable," he said. "No one retains this wisdom, inherited from our history, as we, French and Europeans, do," he said.

The problem is that while we - collectively as the West - don't want, need or otherwise desire the clash of civilizations, the Iranians and the Shi'ite do.

The real war...

This editorial in the WSJ from Newt Gingrich makes it clear what it will take to win this war.

According to Newt Gingrich, who wrote the article, there are three views to this war: that it is too hard; that it is wrong; and that we need to fight it right. Fighting it right, though, means making lots of pundits unhappy and encorages the anklebiters. But that's what Lincoln did, and that's what Roosevelt did. And they did it right.

Fighting it right is the only one that works: the Jacksonian thread of the US must once again come forward and settle the damn thing for once and for all.


The Hamiltonian and Wilsonian threads have had their say.

And to understand what *that* all means, read this by Walter Mead.

And this sums it up pretty well too, in the words of Mead describing what the Jacksonian tradition of US foreign policy means:

"Don't bother with people abroad, unless they bother you. But if they attack you, then do everything you can. . . . When somebody attacks the hive, you come swarming out of the hive and you sting them to death. And Jacksonians, when it comes to war, don't believe in limited wars. They don't believe, particularly, in the laws of war. War is about fighting, killing, and winning with as few casualties as possible on your side. But you don't worry about casualties on the other side. That's their problem. They shouldn't have started the war if they didn't want casualties."

To steal a phrase from Instapundit, indeed. If they start the war, it's their problem how many die.

The anti-war people are Jeffersonians and they emerge when the Hamiltonians get the US into trouble by actually getting involved with countries overseas, and the tension between the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians leads to some awfully muddle-headed decisions that the Jacksonians resolve. The Wilsonians are those who think there really is something like international law and all we need to do to solve the world's problems is to negotiate them away. These folks really set up the long-term frameworks which function only briefly and then make things much, much worse until the Jacksonians solve them.

Sure, it's a bit simplistic, but it gives a huge amount of insight into how the US deals with foreign policy problems...

...and more importantly, it underscores that none of this is really new or unique to American history. In many ways it's the same damn thing time and time again.

The effects of propaganda...

As I've stated here before, the US has a hard time dealing with propaganda, especially that of the black sort. It's sort of like having to answer to the question of "having you stopped beating your wife?", since a no answer means that you continue to do so and a yes answer means that you have in the past.

This article by Gerard Baker of the Times is an indication of how successful the black propaganda (i.e. propaganda aimed at undermining a nation, rather than the usual propaganda aimed at glorifying one's own achievements) really is.

Here are the key points:

Far from driving us together in the face of a common threat, the events of September 11 have ripped the West apart. Now, the world's distrust of and disdain for America borders on pathology. It doesn't stop at opposition to US policies but seeks deeper explanations for American behaviour in society, economics and culture.

America is a country of religious zealots, it is said, typified by its president-zealot; a selfish and hypocritical people despoiling the planet even as they exalt their nationhood in their mega-churches. Its impact on the world is denounced not just for what its military does but for what its companies and workers do, from Exxon Mobil to McDonald's.

When Rupert Everett described Starbucks as a "cancer" last month in a campaign to stop the coffee chain from opening a shop in his London neighbourhood, it seemed to reflect not just a rebellion against the vast anonymity of globalisation but a rejection of everything for which America is despised.

But global warming, religious observance, McDonald's and even Starbucks were features of the US long before 9/11. In the end, deep as the cultural differences between Europe and America are, there is little doubt that it is the policies — the military and diplomatic stance of the US in the past five years — that have caused the rest of the world to turn away from its traditional ally.

First of all, the key word is the pathology of the purported distrust and disdain: a pathology is a deviation from the norm, and in the terms that Baker is using, it is a psychopathology. Pyschopathology is used to denote behaviors or experiences that are indicative of mental illness. Baker is right: the kind of virulent anti-Americanisms that in in many places replaces discussion and discourse is indicative of a functional breakdown in cognition. If you have ever had to deal with someone who manifests BDS (Bush Derangemernt Syndrome, i.e. the mere mention of President Bush triggers aggressive and pathological behavior (see Kos, MoveOn.org, and significant portions of what is left of the Democratic Party).

And of course the descriptions of the US resemble not so much actual US behavior as much more the collective boogey-man for the left. Baker has a mistake in the next paragraph: he really means that Ruper Everett reflects a rejection of everything for which America is not despised, but rather loved.

And Baker is, of course, correct in noting that all of this is nothing new. But where I think he goes wrong is insisting that it is the behavior of the US which has "caused" the rest of the world to "turn away".

First of all, the rest of the world has scarcely turned away. NATO is still around, I do believe, and the Japanese-US relationship is better than it has been in many years. What Baker really means is that public opinion polls show something different: that when asked the right questions, "people" don't like what the US is doing.

Ah. Big difference, that last one.

Let me go back to Baker's article and start from the top here:

The rest of the world has always had a complex set of attitudes towards America — a mixture of envy, admiration, disdain, gratitude, exasperation, hope and, sometimes, fear. But that day, that week, America evoked only the sort of strenuous affection that causes a complete stranger to go out and stick bills on lampposts.

But that instantaneous solidarity with a stricken superpower was not, as it turned out, anything like a good predictor of the history that would unfold over the next half a decade.

As it prepares to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks, America stands reviled in the world as never before. It is a remarkable turnabout. In the same amount of time that elapsed between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the Treaty of Versailles, in as many months as passed between Germany's invasion of Poland and D-Day, the US has gone from innocent victim of unimaginable villainy to principal perpetrator of global suffering.

So complete has been this transformation in global sentiment that it is inconceivable now, should America be attacked again, today, that the tragedy would elicit the same response. There would be horror and sympathy in good measure, certainly, from most decent people. But there would also be much Schadenfreude, and even from the sympathetic a grim, unsmiling sense that America had reaped what it had sown.

The key point here is that according to public opinion polls, America stands reviled in the world as never before, and he goes on to point out that this happened in the timeframe that saw the ending of both WW1 and WW2.

But what is really telling is the line: the the US has gone from innocent victim to principal perpetrator of global suffering.

Now, on the face of it this is an absurd statement: there have been no changes in the role that the US plays in terms of "global suffering" other than the US has always been blamed for this. But what is different is that those who said this were usually political hacks for the Soviets or ChiComs, or some sort of NGO leftist that used the boogeyman of US imperialism to go and raise money from guilt-stricken western liberals. Now this has become more mainstream: it is the increasing acceptance of political propaganda as a mainstream meme.

Sympathy for a grieving America translated quickly into general support for the US war against the Taleban. But within a few weeks that support began to drain, as civilian casualties mounted and some questioned whether the US was doing enough to address the "root causes" of terrorism, in particular the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Then, in the view of most of the world, the US took a terrible detour: from the high road of regime change against the perpetrators and enablers of 9/11, the US descended into the thickets of Guantanamo, the "axis of evil", pre-emptive war without UN authorisation, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib and the quagmire of Baghdad today.

This is, of course, the world-view of the "enlightened" "intellectual" gentry of our times. I use the scare quotes deliberately, since this is anything but enlightened and anything but intellectual: it is, instead, the view of jaded sophists who have seen their darling causes abandoned for the pursuit of simple bourgeois interests.

It is the height of ignorance and stupidity for one to support a war against an enemy who deliberately uses civilians to hide behind and then abandon that when civilians get killed as a result. Addressing the "root causes" of terrorism is exactly what the US is doing in Iraq: it removed a regime that did nothing but terrorize its own people and pay others to be terrorists as well: there is now no doubt that pre-war Iraq was one of the major financers of terrorism in the Middle East and gave significant support to terrorist groups, including safe havens and training camps.

And Baker - representative for those "intellectuals" who fail to think things through - here muddles many things up. The US could have simply shot those now in Guantanamo out of hand, eliminating the problem, but as a land of laws with strict procedures, is now vilified for doing the right thing; the "Axis of Evil" is exactly that; there was UN authorization for the invasion of Iraq (just not the UN authorization that the corrupt French, Chinese and Russians wanted to deny the US and which has filled the public meme); the invasion of Iraq did what the UN failed to do (call Iraq's bluff and achieve regime change); Abu Ghraib was an anomoly and has seen those involved jailed and demoted; and the quagmire of Baghdad is not the doing of the US, but rather of Iran.

The US and its dwindling ranks of supporters elsewhere, led by Tony Blair in Britain, argued that 9/11 required a change in the way that America reacted with the world. The threat of Islamist terrorism, conducted by suicide bombers whose goals were nothing less than the destruction of the West and the return of the Caliphate, required something radically new. Armed potentially with weapons that could kill millions, these death-glorifying terrorists presented a wholly different challenge from the threat of the Cold War, and therefore required a much more assertive approach to the international system, led by the US.

But this argument failed to persuade much of world opinion, especially when Iraq, designated the most immediate threat, turned out to have been something of a paper tiger. Instead, the rest of the world simply saw an arrogant bully blundering into the Middle East and stoking the fire under the very terrorism that it had pledged to extinguish.

Here once again we see what Baker is really speaking of: it isn't the US, but rather "world opinion" that has changed. And "world opinion" hasn't addressed the problems of the first paragraph, but all we see is what the "rest of the world" has been led to see by the propagandists of the other side.

What other side? That of the Anti-Americanists.

But after President Bush's narrow but decisive election triumph in November 2004 that became less plausible. Americans had been given a chance to pass judgment on their leadership in the early years of the post-9/11 world. In John Kerry they had been presented with a candidate who explicitly articulated the critique of the rest of the world (He spoke French! He was clever! He liked the UN!) After 2004, confronted with the reality that President Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld really were the representative leaders of America, the rest of the world formed an alternative impression of the US — that 9/11 had, in fact, induced a dramatic change in the psychology of the nation. A nation that had not been attacked on its own soil in 60 years had overreacted and, through a combination of government lies and a complaisant media, had turned its back on co-operation with the world.

First of all, the election was anything but narrow: if it had been, then it wouldn't have been deciusive, right?

And Baker does hit it right: the "rest of the world" is being critical that the US hasn't ceased being the US, but rather soundly rejected Kerrey. And a compliant media? How little Baker recognizes how biased the media is in the US.

And by deciding to follow what the duly elected officials of the US decided was the right and proper policy, supported by the Congress of the United States, the US turns its back on co-operation with the world?

What the US turned its back on what co-optioning the policies of the US by foreigners. That is one of the reasons that Kerrey lost: the voting populace realized that he was not the one who would pay attention to US interests, and while the US is the world's eminent superpower, it doesn't give foreigners a say in how it runs things, thank you very much. But then again, neither does any other nation in the world. Duh.

And now we come to the core of the problem:

Conspiracy theories became even more popular. The US or its ally, Israel, was behind the 9/11 attacks precisely so that America could strike at its enemies in a broader clash of civilisations and battle for control of Middle Eastern oil resources. Even saner types who did not believe such fantasies still think that the US is a bigger danger to world peace than almost any other country in the world.

This is where the propaganda starts. This is where the sophists have spoken and corrupted the youth, presenting falsehoods as truths and denying truths as mere opinion.

The article by Baker is also indicative of the effects of propaganda: it is, itself, perhaps unwittingly, propaganda as well, for it misleads one down a dwindling path into a morass. It is opinion masquerading as "truth", the most insidious is that "public opinion" is somehow the final arbiter of these things.

If the situation was so bad, if the US was so nefarious and evil, if it were the perpetrator of global suffering, then why oh why are there more trying to get into the US than ever before? Because they want to join the Dark Side before the entry fee is increased?

Or could it be that what Baker is reporting is the result of a concerted propaganda campaign, one that started in the 1950s and has continued today?

European Stupidity...

First of all, this from the Austrian press. It's only in German, but I will translate the key graph. The author is, if I googled correctly, a politician with the OeVP, the conservative party of Austria, but he certainly takes leftist memes and runs with them.

Knapp zwei Monate vor den "midterm-elections" greifen George. W. Bush und Donald Rumsfeld wieder einmal in die Vollen. Während der Pentagonchef die Gegner des Irakkriegs als intellektuell unzurechnungsfähig und moralisch beschränkt brandmarkt, hat der Präsident bei einer Rede am Dienstag ein welthistorisches Potpourri angerichtet, in dem Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden und Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad gleichzeitig zugegen waren.

Just two months before the midterm elections, George W. Buch and Donald Rumsfeld are in full-scale attack. While the head of the Pentagon brands the opponents of the Iraq War as intellectually incompetent and morally restricted, the President set up a historical potpourri in his talk on Tuesday, in which Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden and Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad were all present. (translation mine)

First of all, Rumsfeld didn't use those words. You can read the sentiment into what he did say, but he most certainly didn't use those words. OK, it's an opinion piece and not something serious.

...

Mit seinen pompösen historischen Vergleichen, bei denen das Böseste gerade gut genug ist, lenkt Bush das Schlaglicht der Öffentlichkeit auf den letzten Bereich, in dem ihm die Amerikaner noch Reste von Regierungskompetenz zubilligen, sprich den Kampf gegen den Terror. Das Ganze folgt der banalen Logik von "Viel Feind, viel Ehr", wobei allerdings in diesem Fall zweifelhaft ist, ob sich Feind und Ehr auch in viele Wählerstimmen umsetzen lassen werden.

With his pompous historical comparison, be which the most evil is barely good enough, Bush attempts to distract the public from the last area which Americans give the administration that last of its competence, i.e. the fight against terror. The entire thing follows the banal logic of "many enemies, greater honor", whereby in this case it is more than a little dubious as to whether enemies or honor will result in votes.

Pompous historical comparison? Pompous?

That is absurd. The historical comparison is more than legitimate, indeed it is the correct one, as I've stated here more than once. And the idea of "many enemies, greater honor" is most definitely a European one: here the author is projecting the increasing historical failure of Europe to recognize that war has been declared upon them as something that the President of the United States is using in a cynical ploy to gain votes.

Was den Inhalt des Lenin-Hitler-Vergleichs betrifft, so hat Bush in einem begrenzten Ausmaß Recht damit. Es gibt eine Schicht von überzeugten Djiahdisten, deren Anspruch man in der Tat als totalitär bezeichnen kann und die sich durch unverhandelbare Forderungen (Errichtung eines weltweiten Kalifats) und nicht tolerierbare Mittel (terroristische Anschläge gegen zivile Opfer) charakterisieren.

Looking at the contents of the Lenin-Hiterl comparison, Bush is correct, but only in a limited sense. There is a group of committed Jihadists whose claim can be rightly called totalitarian and which are charachterized by non-negotiable demands (establishment of a world-wide Caliph) and non-acceptable methods (terrorist attacks against civilians).

First the author calls the historical comparison pompous, then he say that Bush is correct. Huh? Completely contradictory in less than a few sentences. Just like many Europeans who simply haven't thought things through.

Allerdings, und hier beginnt der Vergleich schon zu hinken, ist ja auch kein ernst zu nehmender westlicher Politiker je mit dem Ansinnen hervorgetreten, dass man mit Osama bin Laden in ernsthafte Verhandlungen treten sollte (weniger Terroranschläge vonseiten Osamas, dafür mehr fromme Muslime im Westen?)

However, and this is where the comparsion begins to fail, there is no serious western politicians who has ever brought up the idea that one should enter into serious negotiations whth Osama bin laden (fewer terror attacks in exchange for more pious moslems in the West?).

This is rich: because there is no explicit modern-day Neville Chamberlain, then the comparison isn't legitimate. Talk about splitting hairs.The problem isn't that there isn't an explicit Neville Chamberlain out there, but rather there are thousands of implicit Neville Chamberlains, each trying their best to influence public opinion towards appeasement.

Der Vergeich hinkt aber auch deshalb, weil es sich bei den versprengten islamistischen Terroristen um nicht-staatliche Akteure handelt, um einen vollkommen anderen Gegner als weiland bei der Sowjetunion oder bei Nazideutschland. Bushs Lenin- und Hitlervergleiche verraten indirekt auch eine merkwürdige Nostalgie an eine Zeit, als es noch einen benenn- und identifizierbaen Feind gab und man nicht einer gesichtlosen Schar heimtückischer Feinde gegenüberstand, die nur aus ihrer anoymen Finsternis heraus handeln können.Bush und Rumsfelds hinkende historische Vergleiche werden im besseren Fall keinerleit Schaden anrichten, weil wenigstens die gewitzeren amerikanischen Wöhler sie nicht zum Nennwert nehmen werden, sondern als das, was sie in Wahrheit sind: Wahlkampfgetöse.

The comparison is also bad because the groups of islamst terrorists are non-state actors, a completely different kind of opponent as the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Bush's Lenin and Hitler comparisons show indirectly a kind of curious nostalgy for a time when there was an identiiable enemy and not a faceless horde of sinister enemies, who can only act out of anonymous darkness. Bush and Rumsfelds crippled historical comparison can in the better case not cause any damage, because at least the more clever of the american voters will not take them seriously and see instead what they are in truth: election campaign statements.

Oh, and that is rich as well: because the danger comes from the NGOs of Evil, then Bush's comparison is pompous.

GMAFB: The whole point of Bush's speech was to clearly state and label the enemy as to what they are.

And there is of course then that usual snide European hint of how ignorant and stupid the American voter is (after all, they voted for Bush). If the Europeans had anywhere near the number of college-educated folks in their population, then you wouldn't see the number of jobs that go unfilled in Europe because employers can't find qualified personnel: the unemployment problem in Europe is not one of demand, but rather one of supply: there are too many untrained and unskilled workers who want too much money, and there aren't nearly enough skilled workers. Talk about stupid: I'd dare say it's more likely that the average European wins this one, rather than the average American. Grrrr...

Im schlechteren Fall besteht freilich die Gefahr, dass die Art und das Ausmaß der Gefahr, wie sie für die freien Gesellschaften des Westens heute besteht, eher verunklart als transparent gemacht wird, wenn Politiker aus den obersten Rängen mit dem historischen Erbe billige Wahlkamppropaganda veranstalten.

In the worst case there is the danger that the type and dimension of the danger, as it exists for free societies in the west today, will be more likely muddied rather than made more transparent, when first-rank politicians try to make cheap election-time propaganda by using the historical heritage of a nation.

This is especially rich: because Bush dared to draw a simile, a comparison, he is abusing the historical heritage of a nation? Let's see, where was this sort of commentary when Kerrey was running?


I guess you can give the author some slack: he was, after all, born first in 1975 and has therefore no historical knowledge whatsoever, coming of age after the end of the Cold War. If this is supposed to be the creme of the European crop, dann Servus!

Potpourri...

Here are several posts put together because they tie in. Again, hat tip to Watching America, which gives a great round-up of non-American news and opinion on US politics and policies, but isn't limited to that.

First of all, the purging of Iran's universities of non-conformist thinkers resembles very much the "Gleichschaltung" of the early days of the Nazi regime in Germany.

What is the significance of this move? First, obviously, it underscores the ability of the government to stifle alternative thought. The government decides, it happens. Secular professors have been "sent" into retirement and a cleric is now head of the University of Teheran, which sat just fine with the students (not). This, accompanied with a crackdown on independent journalists, websites and bloggers - quelle Horror! - points to increasing control over what the Iranian population may see (remember, satellite dishes are increasingly dangerous to their owners!).

Control over the information that the masses see and hear is one of the prerequisites for successful radicalization of those masses. And the radicalization of the Iranian people is what the government wants: Iran is, for the mullahs, still too moderate for their needs. Not for their tastes: for their needs. The key point here is as well the denial of employment for those who do not toe the party line, for those whose opinions are not "correct". This is also a key development in the entrenchment of a fascist government in running any country: alternatives to the government and the government's ideology are not only not desired, but holding alternative political opinions is hazardous to your economic well-being.

And the opposition to these moves is heavily splintered and pursue contrary goals, meaning that there is no organized resistance, virtually ensuring that the fascistic control of the economy and politics (in the widest sense of the word) can be implemented fairly quickly.


Second of all, what is the core of the Iranian ideology, after one has removed the religious aspects? it is geopolitics, i.e.the direct linking of natural resources with political ambitions and foreign policy. In this article the link with one of Iran's erstwhile allies, Venezuala, should be clear. We have countries with massive oil reserves being taken over, as it were, by ambitious and ruthless politicians who appear to be dedicated geopoliticians and who want to create, effectively, a new world order of fascist cooperation.

Sort of like Germany, Italy and Japan before WW2, the Axis powers. President Bush didn't label countries like Syria, Iran and North Korea as the "Axis of Evil" for nothing: this is the rebirth of an obsolete political school, of geopolitics and the concurring belief that it is control over natural resources that determines international standing and political power.

Of course, this leads to my third point. geopolitics almost invariably sees the world as a zero-sum game, which has become, I think, thoroughly discredited in the wake of WW2 and, for instance, the post-war development of Japan as an economic powerhouse with little or no desire and ability to control natural resources.

And the Japanese link is relevant: will Iran follow the example of pre-war Japan and make the same kind of mistakes and miscalculations of judgement that led it to be blind to the potential of its enemies and vastly over-confident in its own? This article points to exactly this conclusion.

But even more to the point, the article points to the role that Ahmadinejad is playing that the Shah of Iran played before his collapse, that of regional hegemon. The gulf states back then rejected this, as they are rejecting this role today: the irony, of course, is that this rejection back then, as the Shah's attempts to intimidate his neighbors were public and helped undermine his authority at home when they failed, helped weaken his authority and helped his downfall.

Is Iran set to repeat history?

Inevitability...

In today's Thüringer Allgemeinen (I know, every reads this...) there is an interview with Jacob Edery, who visited the offices of that newspaper with members of the Knesset. Minister Edery is the Minister for co-ordination between the Israeli administration and the Knesset.

This is the key paragraph in the story (and is really the only paragraph...):

In German:

Die USA müssten darum dieses Problem lösen "mit ihrer gesamten Macht". Da Irans Führung auf ihre militärische Stärke und dabei ebenso auf die Öl-Waffe setzen würde, bliebe kein anderer Ausweg mehr. Die USA hätten auch nicht die Zeit bis zur nächsten Präsidentenwahl. George W. Bush, so der Minister, müsse Kommando-Unternehmen einsetzen, "je früher desto besser". Schließlich würden die Iraner ihre nukleare Industrie verbarrikadieren. Den Europäern einschließlich der EU-Führung warf Edery vor zu ignorieren, dass sie selbst Teil des Konfliktes geworden und ebenso bedroht sind.


In English:

The US must solve this problem "with all of its powers". Since Iran's leadership will be using its military capabilities and will also want to use it's oil as a weapon, there is no other alternative. The US will also not have time to wait out the next presidential election. George W. Bush, according to the Minister, will have to use commandos "the earlier the better". The Iranians will be barricading its nuclear industry. The Europeans, including the EU-leadership, have chosen to ignore the fact that they have become part of the conflict and are as threatened as Israel.

This is my quick-and-dirty translation (took me 2 minutes) and hence any errors of translation are mine.


But this goes to underscore the point I made earlier today and which I have made in the past: now is the time to deal with the problem with the smallest loss of life and destruction.

Or does Europe want to wait until both Iran's and Israel's bluffs - bluffs in the sense that any deterrence strategy is the bluff that the weapons WILL be used of deterrence fails - are up on the table and the keys are half-turned in the firing controls?


Germany has quite a strong reputation in the Middle East (not the least because Hitler killed so many Jews, as repugnant as that might be and as little as that may have to do with the current German administration and the history of the Federal Republic) and if German politicians had the necessary sense they'd be out there pushing their good offices.

Instead they hide their heads in the sand and pretend that nothing's going to happen...

Inevitability is what brought us WW1 and the devastation of Europe.

Will inevitabilitynow bring the devastation of the Middle East, with a nuclear wastelands called Israel and Iran? With perhaps the destruction of a western European or US city as collateral damage as terrorists continue their attempt to reshape the world as they see fit?



It doesn't have to end that way, but it certainly is heading that way.

Hope After All?

Maybe there is hope after all. At least perhaps for the French, maybe all is not lost.

I regularly go the the website "Watching America" to see what sort of takes they have found on foreign newspapers reporting on the US. More often than not, it gives you a good idea of what some of the mind-sets are overseas in regards to US politics and policies, with a fairly even mix of positive and negative. Highly recommended.

So I found this there today. The author, Raphael Drai, is a Professor of Law and Political Science at the Universoty of Aix-en-Provence and School of Psychoanalytic Research Paris VII, so he's got some bonafides there, plus this appeared in the French newspaper Figaro. If you know the French newspaper scene, this is not exactly a pro-American rag.


So what does he say? He presents, as far as I know, the first signifcant public analysis of what Iran is actually trying to do with its brinksmanship, and I think that his take on it is pretty much on the money, and agrees with some of what I've posted here in the past.

To put it simply, Iran wants the bomb because it sees it as the best and fastest way to force its will on others. With the bomb, Iran *must* be listened to. Acquisition is simply a matter of using it against Israel, but more importantly it will be the key to Shi'ite supremacy in the Middle East, since the Sunnis don't have the bomb, nor are they expected to. With the bomb comes the establishment of Iran as the premier sanctuary for terrorism, the use of which Iran has increasingly perfected and which is a fundamental part of the Iranian theocracy. From what I understand, Iranian support of terror groups is the equivalent of a line item in their government budget, with the (false) argument that one's man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

This puts the goals that Iran is following in better perspective, and the understanding that Iran has of how decadent and weak the West is becomes clearer: Iran does not expect that the West will put together a cohrerent and meaningfull response, let alone through the UN, and Iran is truly becoming a rogue state, ignoring any and all treaties and agreements that it has signed. Non-Proliferation Treaty? Piffle. UN Resolutions? Double Piffle.

Why?

Because Iran - more exactly the Iranian theocracy, but hereafter Iran for brevity's sake - is not aiming for anything less than the end of days. This has been written off as so much farkle and talk, but this is the take of Drai as well. Put bluntly, as Drai does, Iran's goals are nothing less than the spread of Shi'ite doctrine as defined by Iran in a bid for global dominance and hegemony.

But what does this mean in the short-term?

Iran, as is now clear, supports Hezbollah and Hamas, both terrorist organizations dedicated to the destruction of a UN member state, with significant monetary, training and logistical assets. It brooks no interference from outsiders in this, i.e. this is, for the Iranians, not a subject of debate or of negotiations. It is their holy duty to do so.

Now imagine that Iran has the bomb. Not so much to use it - I think the Iranians also understand nukes as poltical weapons - but creating uncertainty and doubt about whether they would use it is almost as good as knowing for sure. The Iranians want the bomb for deterrence.

But not deterrence as we understand it: much more in the Russian sense, of ustrashenie (not sure of spelling or if that is the right word, will have to check that), which was the core of Russian nuclear strategy. It differs from the French concept of dissuasion (to dissuade, to convince someone not to do something) and from the English deterrence, to prevent by making it clear that the consequences are worse than the benefits.

The meaning of the word in this sense is compulsion, compulsion in the sense of adopting patterns of behavior so as to not be a threat to the one holding the weapons. This was, after all, the goal of the Soviets, turning their opponents will to serve that of the Soviet Union (this is not my fantasy, but rather served as the core of Soviet military thinking about nuclear weapons. Go find it out.) and hence change them from opponents into subservient vassals.

The Iranians aren't dumb. The stakes are huge and are very highly beneficiall if they can achieve them.

If they achieve their goal, they will not be opposed by ANY Middle Eastern state, at least at first. Their hold on Shi'ite terror groups and the extent that they are more than willing to finance and support terror directed against Israel means that they have covert tools at their disposal to undermine any and all Middle Eastern states with the exception of Israel, who they want to eradicate in any case.

This is the goal of the Iranians

This way lies madness, destruction and death.


The appeasement of the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese towards Iran show that Iran has these countries properly nailed down politically. Neither the Chinese nor the Russians, the latter more so, can afford a nuclear-armed Iran on the Russian border, nor can the Chinese afford Shi'ite terror in western China. Both are trying to, figurateively speaking, ride the tiger while doing business with them.

Iran doesn't care about the UN: the UN is only useful to it as a delaying tool. They have seen that they can emasculate UN resolutions (Kofi Annan just proved this) by simply refusing to go along with them, ignoring them even though they are binding resolutions. They believe that they can, with impunity, ignore the NPT, which they are a signatory to, because they believe that nothing will happen to them when they break it.

And given the way that the appeasers in the West are arguing  - that Iran should have the bomb and deserve to have it, that we should be friends, that their apocalyptic theology doesn't mean anything, that these are reasonable people if we were simply talk with them - I have very little hope that Iran will be stopped using political means. Which means that once again the US will have to take on the task to avoid even worse conditions later on.

Don't think they can be worse? Do you really think that Israel, who we all expect has nuclear weapons, will have its nuclear deterrence bluff called by the Iranians?

The whole problem of having nuclear weapons is that you have to be able to use them. If Iran truly believes that Israel will not use them, even while it is calling for the destruction of Israel, and that Iran can develop its own with impunity, abusing its status as nation-state to use terrorism as a political tool with immunity - we didn't do it, Hezbollah/Hamas did - then it is calling Israel's bluff.

The questions then becomes, as I have written here before, how many dead will it take before Iran's plans are thwarted?

And they must be thwarted: it is in our very own national interests to do so. I cannot understand how it can be in our national interests for Iran to break treaties, flaunt the international community and threaten not merely a member state of the UN, but even more fundamentally the very utility of the UN, with no consequences whatsoever.



But that this appeared in Figaro and from a Frenchman to boot: maybe there is hope after all.

A Blunt Weapon

Once again sanctions are being discussed as a way of "dealing" with the duplicity of Iran and it's nuclear weapons program (and given the duplicity over the last 20 years and the current brinkmanship being played out, there can be little doubt that this is the goal...).

Sanctions are at best a blunt instrument that at best annoys the guilty and always harms the innocent. It is the knee-jerk reaction of classic doomed western liberalism to a developing problem that calls for decisive action, since placing sanctions means postponing a decision. It means prolonging the situation in the chimerical hope that the problem will go away when those involved realize that by gosh, we're not pleased with them and we're not going to do any business with them until they stop acting so mean.

Sanctions have never worked. There are too many ways to defeat them, not the least being bribery on a massive scale, as we saw with the UN Iraqi sanctions.

"Real" sanctions mean not merely no official deals, but rather blockade and the deliberate choice that not only there be no trade, but there be no communication, no services, no access to the rest of world, no financial transactions and that the country being sanctioned be treated as an international pariah, with it's bank accounts frozen, it's trade embargoed, it's peoples isolated and it's ambassadors sent home packing.

This isn't even done to North Korea (their isolation is home grown) or Cuba (too many western countries interested in setting up business as the owner of the brothel), let alone Iran.


When you hear western politicians calling for putting sanctions on a country, that is a certain indicator that no one has a clue what to do, or more precisely, that no one is willing to take the next step.

Hence we have an escalating situation of a country that is betting its future that the West will bicker among themselves while they develop a full-scale full-circle nuclear industry that just happens to also be able to produce more than enough weapons-grade fissile material so as to make Iran and Iranian theology the dominant problem in the Middle East for the next 20 years.

Another case of the failure of the UN, and another good argument that Kofi Annan has caused the UN more damage than any of his predecessors. Any.

The silence is deafening...

So, two further data points to ponder.

First of all this Washington Post editorial underscores why it is increasingly the newspaper of mention and not the regrettable New York Times.

The key is in the last paragraph, and needs to be trumpeted from the towers with the same strength as the original allegations were trumpeted to the public.

To qutoe:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

It is unfortunate that so many took him seriously? Unfortunate? It should be a topic of partisan shame. Will the pundits now denounce and state their regrets?






The silence is deafening.

Second, as if no one has noticed that Iran is pursuing a nuclear program that is aimed at developing nuclear weapons - and anyone denying this is either a useful idiot or is intellectually not the sharpest knife in the drawer - this should make it clear that their program is anything like what they say it is.

So where are the news media and where are the pundits?





The silence is deafening.

Clueless as usual...

I came across this when I arrived this morning.

Guess no one can put two and two together?

For the very first time, Katuysha rockets are being used as a weapon of terror in Iraq. Fired at a Shi'ite community.


Now how difficult is it to connect the dots?

Who delivered literally thousands of such rockets to Hezbollah? Who really, really doesn't like the Shi'ites? Who is providing infrastructure and logistic support to the Sunni terrorists in Iraq?

And I deliberately call them terrorists, not an insurgency. An insurgency would have political goals: all that these people do is kill Shi'ites. Not to intimidate them poltically (you'd do targeted assasination for that), but simply for the joy of killing people they despise. Calling them an insurgency is to put gold plating on goat shit.

Iran continues to massively interfere in Iraq and Lebanon.

Where are the protesters? Where are the lawyers who should be dragging Iran in front of the International Court of Justice?


Oh, they're preparing their case against Israel instead.

Now you know why the ICJ is a mockery and a sham and isn't worth goat shit. Not even gold plated.

The Dark Underbelly of Globalization

For us in the industrialized West, globalization is nothing new and has everything to do with improving living standards. But there is a dark underbelly to globalization - and don't get me wrong, for me globalization with all its warts and problems is the best thing since sliced bread, and maybe even better than that - that has mostly political overtones and not so much economic ones.

Ralph Peters is someone who I've been reading since his debut novel back in the 1980s and who is an excellent commentor on current affairs. His most recent piece for the Weekly Standard - which can be found here - gave me the nudge to comment on what he is saying.

His point is that globalization is a two-way street, one that has perhaps a huge lag, but one that despite being ignored for so long not cannot be ignored. Put simply, and do read the link because Peters goes into it with more detail than I want to go into right now, the tribes are back with a vengeance, and it is because of globalization that we now hear of the masscres and destruction wrought by tribal warfare.

In other words, the distribution channel for information is a two-way street. While the news of the West is piped throughout the world via CNN, BBC and the other "news" agencies, the news of the ROW (Rest Of World) for many, many years was nothing of consequence, to be reported only in areas of strife and in calamaties of both human and natural origin. The asymmetry of information, that the ROW needed to know more about the West than the other way around, was a given and was the norm.

But this is no longer entirely the case. The West, after 9/11 and the follow-on attacks, needs also to find out about the ROW, and the "news" agencies have increased their coverage, not the least because local viewers and advertisers also want to see what is going on (more exactly, want to see what the "news" agencies present). But this has a downside.

What tribes - and I am using that term very loosely here, as does Peters - don't want is news. Tribes are loyal to themselves to the exclusion of "others", and they want *their* news and not something that an external observer wants to bring. The demand therefore isn't for news, but rather triball propaganda, the twisting of events to fit the tribal view.

We now see this in Lebanon with the faking of news by Hezbollah propagandists, we see this in Iran as well.


That's why I'm using what are called "scare" quotes when I talk about "news" agencies. They aren't, any more: they are conduits for whoever informs them, and increasingly they themselves are part and parcel of the tribes that are feeding the "news" agency. The fake photos in Lebanon were, according to the "news" agencies affected, the work of lone stringers, but the abdication of editorial responsibility is reprehensible at best and downright criminal at worst.

There is another good post on this topic: Tribes, from Bill over at Eject!Eject!Eject!

We are entering a period where post-modernists in Western culture will be confronted by tribal warfare that threatens to explode in their backyards. Post-modernists aren't capable of understanding what you have to do in order to eliminate tribal warfare: you have to eliminate the "tribe" as the fundamental element of the conflict.

You can do this two ways: either physically or politically. Physical elimination is easy, but given the repugnance of megadeaths not really the solution (want to eliminate Iran's nuclear ability? 17 200 kt weapons would do it within a 45-minute time period. This would kill about 30% of Iran's population, with another 30% injured and without infrastructure, there would be no major cities left. Could we do it? Yes. Would we do it? Not unless Iran detonates a nuclear weapon in the US.)


Dealing with tribes on a political basis is difficult, as any historian of the British Empire will tell you. Colonial Brits had a term for the local leaders and businessmen: WOG. It stands for "Wily Oriental Gentleman" and is an apt description. We of the West aren't innately more intelligent or wily than the intellegentsia of anywhere in the ROW; to underestimate the potential sophistication of the opponent, who may be wearing rags and fighting with primitive methods, is the worst failure any in the West can make.

The key is to turn the weakness of the tribe against it, to destroy the very nature of the tribe. Remove the tribe and tribal warfare disappears. Civilization starts up again.

But doing that is an art form that we are now only slowly and painfully learning. Our problem is that there are those in the West who are so eager to adopt the behavior patterns of the tribe, entranced by its effectiveness and ignorant of the damage that tribes do to any advanced civilization.

Dr. Dean's triumphant woop is the battle cry of a tribe; the clamoring for a perp walk for Rove is the lament of the tribe for an enemy; the nascent mutterings of MoveOn and Kos are the collective mutterings of a tribe dedicated to destroying the "other" for which there is no tolerance.

Dark times ahead.

Butting the Plame...

Hitchens does it again. The man deserves more money because he has stuck to his guns and called things the way they *are*, rather than the way journalists want everyone to see them.

Blame for Plame lies directly with the "administration critics" who were anything but simply that.

Is David Corn going now to apologize for his diatribes? For starting the whole PlameGate nonsense? For now it is nonsense: the leaker was Richard Armitage who was basically showing off to a reporter. Not a revenge act from the Bush administration, not retribution.

Specifically Corn is wrong here:

"The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security."

This was wrong: not merely that Corn placed the blame wrongly, but that there even was a "Wilson smear." And the jibes were wrong, the whole basis for the article was wrong.

But will we see an apology, a retraction, an admittance that Corn & Isikoff were wrong?


Probably about the same time that Kerry releases his military records.

Interestingly, Corn's column is called "Capital Games."

Which is what we are seeing here: but the games aren't the games of the Administration, but rather of its opponents. And they are the ones whose politics trumps national security.

Interregnum...

It's not so much that I don't have anything to say, it's much more that there is so much to say.

But reality intrudes (TM) and I have forecasts to finish and ratings to run. Be back ASAP and I hope it really is soon.

Still on hte road...

Yep, still on the road...

Another unfinished post...

Finally we're off for vacation and blogging here will be even worse than normal. But here is yet another unfinished post, or rather I got too disgusted to go any farther...

My father sent me this.

I took a brief look at it.

First of all, it's very subjective, yet uses a numerical index to suggest that there is an objective basis for what they are saying. This is fundamentally dishonest: you cannot, legitimately, express uncertainties (subjective evaluations) as a number, which is based on objective analysis. This must be done rather with valences (such as +++ or ----) rather than a number. In my work, the moment where we start using numbers that are not based on "real" facts, we no longer publish them as numbes, but rather use valences. Otherwise you are misleading your customers that you have the real numbers, and in the commercial environment you will be found out and you will lose your reputation. Shame that this is apparenly not the case here. Shoddy work at best and deliberate misleading at worst...

Secondly, the environmental footprint claims to include something that I know as a professional international economist can't be included: they claim to be able to reduce the footprint of a country by excluding products and services that are exported, counting these instead with the importing country.

I work extensively with import-export data (UNIDO, UNCTAD, COMEXT databases are part of my daily bread and butter) and there are no such numbers available on the basis that they are claiming (of being able to identify which El Salvdorean bananas are sold to the US and consumed by the US, for example). While there are direction of trade statistics, and there are detailed direction of trade by product numbers available (this is the UNCTAD data set: roughly 6 mn time series!), the ownership of those products cannot be determined, and indeed is the basis for developing the statistics: anonymity is guaranteed and there is no way for this group to have ***any*** idea of whether a Chaquita plantation produces for the local market, whether it produces for a secondary downstream manufacturer located locally or whether it delivers directly to the mother company. This would make a HUGE difference in terms of how the ecological footprint is measured. I am professionally unaware of any one who claims to have world trade modelled at even a two-digit level of detail, let alone the 6-digit level of detail that the UNCTAD data base offers.

If they are working with proxies, these are not stated. Again, very poor.

And **if** they are working with the raw UNCTAD data, I'd like to know how they summate the data: is this an averaged number, is it simply the most recent data, is it modelled for the future, what? After all, they should have a forecast, since they are looking at things like

Third, only one of the three indicators is "real". This goes back to the first point. The life satisfaction and the environmental footprint are subjective or are based on proxied data; only the life expectancy is "real", and even here it appears that it is modified to account for some sort of "happiness" factor. There is a fundamental truth in economic modelling: GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. You can have the most exquisite models, but unless they are properly fed and cared for, they are useless.


I really wish that ideology wouldn't drive such attempts to make guesswork appear scientific. Economics is called the dismal science because it is the only branch of the human sciences that insists on at least a modicum of actual data and empirical verification of correlations and causality. If these folks were honest, they'd be using Chernekov faces instead of trying to look objective.

The goal of the group is not furthered by making numbers up. If anything, they make me very suspect of whatever their goal is, given that they are presenting subjective judgements as objective evaluations. And arguing that it is better to have something rather than nothing doesn't hold water: they are deliberately presenting these subjective evaluations as if they were objective facts.

Columbia as being one of the happiest places around? Give me a break: murderours drug wars, coupled with significant abject poverty. The only reason that they are so highly ranked is that their ecological footprint is "calculated" to be so low. This fails a first, basic assessment of how believeable their product is. It isn't.

Sorry to be so harsh, but I've run into too much bad "science" recently, of ideologically-driven "science" masquerading as "truth". Doing science properly is hard work and more often than nowarding: the benefits, especially in this area, of making stuff up (Mann et al with their hockey stick curve) for personal glory and financial gain are very seductive and very destructive. And the claim of a consensus is facetious at best and downright dishonest at worst.


Posting will be sporadic for the next several weeks...

Unfinished Post #1 - Asymmetry

Despite my best attempts, I haven't been able to finish this, but wanted to post it nonetheless. This will continue as a series of unfinished posts until I can finish them... :-)



Ah, finally some time after assorted deadlines, disappointments and triumphs. The bittersweet joys of parenting teenage children mixed with the deep sorrow of watching friends slowly die. The last quarter hasn't been the best. But I disgress...

This particular post was prodded by this post on The Adventures of Chester.

Up front: I'm a professional forecaster: I earn my money doing industrial forecasts and have been doing this successfully for the last 20 years. You won't read my name in the papers because I'm not interested in that: instead I provide my customers with the knowledge they need to make decisions today that changes their futures.

We live in a world which is undergoing massive infrastructure and demographic changes, changes that are rarely understood.

Read and see what the future will bring and why it's not the future many think it might be. And why asymmetry is going to be a real ball-buster for everyone involved. And when I say that I mean everyone involved, from the wooliest leftist intellectual to the gung-ho America firstest,  to the ignorant uneducated peasant to the highly trained Eurocrat, from the Nepali family living in abject poverty to the billionaires.

Demographics is sometimes hard for people to really get a grasp on because demographic changes are slow in coming and are even less reversible than climate changes (and no, I don't think climate change is anthropogenic: to believe that is an act of literally incredible and more than annoying hubris). It's also a matter of simple arithmetic and only slightly more advanced analysis.

Infrastructure changes refer not merely to roads and bridges, but more fundamentally to how societies actually function and meet the needs of their populations. Who controls the infrastructure also controls the nature of how citizens of that country will view the world and understand how to make their way within the sets of rules, procedures, taboos and limitations that characterize all societies.

We in the West see our lives within a strongly structured and delineated world. Local governments that provide services for which we pay taxes; state governments who ensure that local developments mesh with at least a modicum of sensibility; central governments who are tasked with dealing with the problems that local and state governments don't and can't deal with. This is true regardless as to the exact form of how a government is organized: in France, for instance, the central government is much more dominant, but the local bureaucrats appointed by the central government fill the function of local governments. We know, largely, who is responsible for what function, what we must do in order to build that deck on the back of the house, who to call when the garbage doesn't get picked up.

The third world isn't like that at all: you pay (bribe) to get even a moderate sense of stability in your life, unless, of course, you have no money: then your life is tremendously stable. Of course, it is also rather nasty, brutish and short as you do not own anything, cannot hope that your children have it better, and can expect that the government and the thugs that pass for government will take any and everything of value you may posess, up to and including your life.

Big contrast that. Biggest we have on the planet.

Why The Democrats Still Don't Understand It...

This shows that while some Democrats have learned to actually think, that the party as a whole is still adrift and doomed.

Air America is failing because no one wants to listen.

The demography of Democratic supporters, those who finance the party, says it all: the party is behoven to big moneyed interests, be it the unions (who are deeply undemocratic in spending their member's money) or the fat cats like Soros and his ilk. They have become what they always say the Republicans are, whose financing oddly enough is now grass-roots based and comes from their consituency.

Sad, really.

What this money means is that the radicalization of Democratic politics will continue at the cost of any sort of centrist development. Are we sure that Karl Rove isn't advising these folks?

Their pseudo-religious righteous anger won't win them elections: while "energizing" their base (all I can think of is the Energizer Bunny) it alienates the vast majority of voters, especially when you look a tad past the veneer and see how radical some of these folks really are.

And the secrecy is probably in violation of some sort of campaign or financing law - IANAL, so I don't know for sure - but is certainly indicative of the fundamental cowardice of these donors - they fear the light of publicity - and their fundamental contempt for how the American elective system is run.

Asymmetry...

OK, I'm a lousy blogger. But there's a lot going on on my plate, more than I want to talk about, and reality intrudes. :-)

I posted the following at Asymmetrical Information in response to this:

Two points.

First: the goal of the insurgent is to win the hearts and minds of those he sees as oppressed, to radicalize them into becoming as he is. This means that for the insurgent, the use of terror, as long as it is either non-ascribable (anonymous death squads) or directly from the opponent, is a fundamental part of his panoply of tools. He needs to radicalize the population, turning them into terrorists themselves, in order to win. This means that everything is fair, in his eyes, as long as the hated, existing government and society is destroyed and he, as a revolutionary elite, can recreate society in the way that he wants. I'm simplifying here, but this is fundamental to the ways that urban terrorists operate.

In other words, the terrorist, the insurgent, doesn't give a rat's crap about how he achieves his goal: the goal is taking power. Everything else is secondary. This is part of the legacy that the generation of communist training of 3rd-world terrorists by the former SovUnion has left us: this is part and parcel of how the Sovs trained their useful idiots to destabilize countries in order to achieve the revolution. If anything, you targeted the opponent's morality directly, get him to do terrible things in order to drive a moral dagger into his heart to destroy his will to resist. If he didn't do it, if he was strong enough to refuse to be manipulated into blowing up schools and churches that you were using, if his soldiers were so good that they would shoot between the human shields in order to get you, well then you create atrocities and get useful idiots to make it look like your opponent did it instead of you.

Second: the goal of the non-insurgent is to win the hearts and minds of the people, to get them to collectively deny and reject the terrorists. This is heavily dependent upon the structure of society: if you have a largely intact society, this is relatively easy, especially if the terrorists really don't have a base to operate from and really don't have legitimate grievances (like Baader-Meinhof in Germany).

The problem is when the society involved is in tatters, as it is in Iraq, as it was to a certain extent in Vietnam. Then you have the joint task of reconstructing society **while** denying the enemy the necessary radicalization at the same time. This is much, much more difficult than what the insurgent must do: he must merely destroy; you must not merely prevent the destruction, but also aid in the reconstruction.

This is part of the asymmetric nature of the conflict. It's not just that one side has all the neat toys and walks the walk, forcing poor Mr. Terrorist to hide and skulk (a rather irresponsible romanticizing of how terrorists work!); it's much more that Mr. Terrorist has a vastly simpler job, of using terror and the ensuing intimidation to dominate the situation. That's his advantage in the asymmetric side of the story.

So, given this, the key question becomes: are we even talking the same language here? Those perpetrating terror see their aims as being absolutely just, of having perfect and indeed moral certainty that their aims are just, that the society they are destroying is not one that is just and therefore MUST be destroyed (otherwise they'd not have bothered!).

But their goal is the destruction of the existing system. That is the difference, the fundamental and core difference. They are not interested in the niceties of restoring pre-war borders, or of returning territories once lost, or stopping genocide, or any such goal. They are only interested in destruction and acquiescence, and indeed have moved violence from the military to the population in order to force the issue.

The difference is fundamental: on the one side you have existing societies with their inherent problems, contradictions and conflicts. Wars may be fought, but tradition has it that you have a winner and a loser and that you no longer behave like a barbarian, slaughtering and depopulating in order to destroy your enemy.

On the other side you have the destroyers and nihilists, those who hate societies so much that they will do literally anything to destroy their structures. They are, literally, outside the realm of civilization.

And failing to see the fundamental difference between the two is an act of appalling political and cultural blindness.

Reality intrudes...

Hi -

As usual during the end of a quarter, Reality Intrudes (tm).

But come this weekend and I may have some time...

Sorry to be such a bad blogger, but reality does intrude at times...

One small step...

Well, it seems that the Iranian government is taking its next step down the road to perdition.

One of the keys to demonizing a part of society is to clearly mark them in one way or another.

It turns out that this was something that the Germans didn't even invent: the use of markers to publicly identify Jews has a long history in the Middle East.

But the story isn't complete there: they are taking another leaf out of the plan book of the National Socialist movement: the German word is "Gleichschaltung", of removing differences between individual citizens, subjugating them to the dictates of the State. The Iranian parliament has decided that Iranians need to be wearing standardized Islamic garb.

Within fascism, citizens of the State are there to serve the State. There is no room for any alternative to the decisions of the State, any freedom is a grant of the State. People who think otherwise, who dare to question the State's decisions, are enemies of the State - per definitio - and their lives, the lives of their spouses and their children, are forfeit. The fascist state - duh - is totalitarian, brooking no alternatives to its power.


The Iranian people are entering an even darker period of their history. The Islamic revolution was, fundamentally, a revolt against modernism, against the destruction by the Shah of the special rights and priviledges of the clergy. To properly cover the history of Iran would take many, many posts for which I do not have the time, but suffice to say that the clergy in Iran enjoy enormous benefits and priviledges that have historical roots, yet have allowed them to have enormous economic and political power for which there is no democratic justification. Entry into the clergy is carefully controlled to ensur orthodoxy and control over the religious beliefs of the majority, controlled to ensure that there are no heretics, no future Luthers that could challenge the orthodoxy and the power of the clergy from within.

Key to the taking of power was radicalization and forcing people in Iran to take sides, of taking actions that made them commit to the Iranian revolution and break with their past. The taking of the US embassy served this purpose: it broke all diplomatic rules and gave those involved revolutionary legitimacy in the eyes of the clergy: remember that the revolution was not merely against the Shah, but also against the entire western world. This is the core of Iranian fascism, of that the revolutionaries are so radical that only the word of God has any meaning, the conventions of the west are irrelevant and must be ignored if it meets the needs of the Islamic Revolution.

The parallels, either deliberate or accidental, of the Islamic Revolution with the concepts and methodologies of National Socialism are too great to be ignored.


The problem is that neither Germans nor Italians (nor the Japanese) threw off their fascist form of government on their own, and indeed those who fought against it domestically failed and were executed with great prejudice (by hanging with piano wire to ensure great pain while slowly choking to death, since the victims were not dropped, breaking their necks, but rather simply raised from the ground by pulling on the wire, for instance).

The great danger (and the great seduction) of fascism is that once the State has been institutionalized, once the population is subjugated, once life becomes completely dominated by the whims of the fascists in charge, allowing on the one side people to lead a "normal" life, but ensuring that this normality is one determined by the State and controlled and enforced by the State. Neither the average German nor the average Italian nor the average Japanese realized how their freedoms, such as they were, were being taken away one after another: the method is to ensure that the average citizen isn't affected, but rather indeed benefits from the development, up to the point where they no longer make much in the way of any decision without first consulting the State.

So what can the Iranians do?


Good question. I'll be honest: I don't have an answer.


What will come next? We will see increasing arrests of dissidents and people who could oppose power: union members;ucators who might serve at universities as a source of dissension and as catalysts for student agitation; non-Islamic religious figures and members of those religions; homosexuals and "sexual deviates" will all start to disappear from Iranian society as the State starts to take over public life even more than it has. Expect a "Kristallnacht" where a minority is publically attacked by the thugs of the government and thereafter are exploited to further radicalize the public. Expect a crackdown on nonconformity with death sentences and disappearances; expect that the government will increasingly try to form a whole generation of children according to the precepts of the State, forming them to believe that the State is mother, father and family. The State will deliberately alienate portions of Iranian society from each other, but yet appear to be the only one who can reconcile the differing groups, ensuring that whatever problems the Iranian populace has, the State is not and cannot be part of the problem, but rather is benevolant and controlling.

It's a slow spiral to perdition. The real problem is that it took WW2 to thoroughly destroy fascism in Italy, Germany and Japan, and it took the dedication to insist not on some sort of peace process, but rather to fight so that fascism would be proven to the German, Italian and Japanese public of the time as to be a complete and total failure, a plague upon those lands.

That Iran must go through this process will destroy the country as we know it today. That's the great tragedy of Iran, the necessity of destroying the fascist nature of the Islamic Revolution in order to save the Iranians from their own worst natures. A tragedy is unfolding in slow, slow motion in front of us.