Pundita

"Pundita, Your readers might be interested in the piece I've titled, Chirac Damns Blair.
Marc Schulman
American Future"

Dear Marc:
So. You were holding out on Pundita. You send Pundita reports on German elections but save juicy news on EU doings for your readers."

"Pundita, You asked me to only send you pieces on the German election! I'll be glad to send you notice of reports on EU. Remember? You made me the Go-to Guy on Germany?"
Marc

"We did?"

"Yes, Pundita, look on your sidebar blogroll."

"Yes yes we're not senile, you know. But tell Pundita how can the readers understand the full import of the German elections without the reports on the EU? Never mind. All right, you are now the Official European Union Desk Reporter and Analyst if you don't mind. What is going on over there, anyhow? Pundita has been focused on China these past two weeks. Thank you."

"Pundita -- If you want everything EU-related I'll have to double my rate. [He is making a little joke].

Gleaneagles has a very nice golf course. Perhaps Tony could hit a wicked hook or two that would relieve Jacques and Gerhard of their miseries. Can you imagine a threesome composed of these guys! The Golf Channel would have to cover it. The ratings would be fabulous.

In case you can't tell, I think the EU is kaput. The bigger issue is whether the euro is kaput. That would have major worldwide economic repercussions."
Marc"

All right, that is enough Silly Time. Pundita is late returning and here it is 3:40, so I will rush this post into publication without doing the HTML thing to the links. I cannot suggest strongly enough to my readers that you check Marc's blogspot every day for the next few weeks because according to some of the reports he forwarded, things are moving very fast in Europe, and this will have an impact on many US related issues. Also, barring a near miracle, it seems that Schroeder is done for.

All the reports Marc sent in the past 24 hours are worth a careful read....fiddlesticks. Where is the link to Chirac Damns Blair? Never mind; kindly visit American Future and read through everything Marc has posted in the last 48 hours. He is finding the European/US reports that give a clear window on what's happening in Europe right now.

Thank you, Marc, for the time you've taken to send along the reports.
.

I have declared this official Silly Day here in Pundita-land. This was after receiving an email yesterday from someone making the unlikely claim to be Tariq Ramadan. Much of the letter was taken up with saying unkind things about Collounsbury, a Western expat stationed in Casablanca.

For readers who are still trying to find their first cup of caffeine for the day, Collounsbury's ringing defense of the Muslim Brotherhood set in motion events that led to the antipundita blog, which exploded into Antipunditagate when a blogger discovered malicious software on his computer after visiting the antipundita blog.

To pick up the thread, the writer complained, in part, that "we don't need drunken American donkeys who don't even know what day it is coming to the defense of Muslims."

I interject that Pundita is not sure Collounsbury is American. In any case I was mystified by the wording of the writer's insult until an alert reader sent a passage from a recent entry on Collounsbury's blog, which Pundita passes along without editorial comment:

Last night, working late on this bloody data issue, I suddenly recall I am invited to something at the Briths Consul's club. Since there are people there I want to schmooze with, I close the laptop and make off in haste to the Consul's club down near the Corniche, irritatingly located among a maze of old 1940s era villas (the development being then outside of the city retreat). Arriving late, I am puzzled that there are no fancy cars and the like. Indeed it is all quite dark.

No matter, I dash into the club and find... nobody, well hardly anyone. Just two women dining in the garden. Walking over to ask about the event I suddenly realise, bloody hell, today is Tuesday, not Wednesday. I actually slapped my forehead I confess, in a quasi theatrical fit of stupidity.

The writer also noted that he enjoyed reading Pundita's Barney and the Theoretical Bubble Machine.

Then there was the letter this morning from someone identifying himself (or herself, for all Pundita knows) as "No nails Arbitrage." He asked Pundita to reveal the name of the financial institution in New York mentioned in my warning post about the antipundita blog. He continued to pester Pundita, even after I explained that there was no possible way it could have been his company computer. This decided me to publish the following public service announcement:

Dear Nail Biter:
It would not be right for Pundita to give out the name of the financial firm in New York City. But realize the number of situations that would have to be in effect, before you should worry:

> You would need to have been logged onto your company computer this past weekend.

> You would have needed to be a first-time visitor to Pundita's blog because no one logged on from that firm had ever visited before the weekend.

> You would have needed to be a member of Live Journal blogspot on the weekend.

> You would have needed to visit the antipundita blogspot.

> Then your company's firewall would have needed to be insufficient to block the spyware that ZenPundit blogger reported finding on his computer.

> You would not have seen the warning Pundita posted about the financial institution because the person who logged on from the firm did not return to visit Pundita after the weekend -- or if the person did visit again, it was not from the company computer in question.

Of course it's not been definitely established that the spyware was installed by a program connected with the antipundita blogspot. But looking at the worst-case scenario, only if all five criteria fit should you wonder whether it was your computer.

> In short, it is impossible within the Newtonian universe for the computer in question to be yours, unless perhaps you are one of those people who sign their anonymous emails with the same words they use for a passcode.

> However, if you are still biting your nails after reading this, ask your company's computer security people to check out your computer, as Pundita advised before.

Google Responds
Google's eBlogger help desk also has some advice. They responded to my email and are continuing to investigate the situation. They wrote in part:

Blogger gives people a lot of room for creativity on their blogs, but unfortunately, some people take advantage of that. We are working on ways to protect our users from this kind of thing and to prevent this abuse of our system, without restricting legitimate uses. [...]

We also suggest that you try the Mozilla Firefox browser, since it can help protect you from many malicious sites which tend to target Internet Explorer. More information can be found here:

http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/

It is possible that ZenPundit's computer did not have Firefox, which might have explained how the spyware, which was attached to some particularly "nasty code," infected his computer.

Then there was the very odd letter from someone claiming to be both a Nazi war criminal and a CIA section chief. He accused "Dubai Person" (the anonymous creator of antipundita blog) of being "a RAW defector who the CIA was too stupid to check for ties to Russian mobs."

Why is Pundita getting the impression that we've been dragged into an intelligence community food fight?

More Silly Day festivities are planned, so you might want to check back after 3:00 PM. By that time Pundita should be recovered from Batchelor Double Whammy Night.
.

Pundita's only comment: The US should put all we've learned during the past half century into making this strenghtened relationship with India one that doesn't sour.

"A 10-year military agreement just signed by the defense secretaries of the United States and India is intended to provide for numerous advances in the relationship, including joint weapons production, greater sharing of technology and intelligence as well as an increased trade in arms.

"A statement signed by India's defense minister, Pranab Mukherjee, and the U.S. defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in Washington on Tuesday night said that the United States and India had "entered a new era" and declared that the two countries' defense relationship had advanced to "unprecedented levels of cooperation." [...]

"Mukherjee made a point of stressing in a separate speech to the Carnegie Institute on Tuesday that India would retain its independent foreign policy, rejecting any notions of a "unipolar" world.

"Uday Bhaskar, director of Delhi's Institute for Defense Studies, said this was a crucial element of Indian policy and said that the framework agreement should not be seen as a move by India toward dependence on Washington.

"I don't think that India has the DNA to allow it to become a Japan or a Britain in terms of adopting a subordinate status to the U.S. and allowing them to guarantee the nation's security. India's strategic culture would not allow it," he said.

"Other analysts in Delhi highlighted the ongoing conflict between the U.S. policy of friendship toward Delhi and its continued military support for India's nuclear rival, Pakistan.

"While the U.S. is trying to build this long-term relationship with India, it is also selling weapons systems to Pakistan," said Brahma Chellaney, a defense analyst with the Center for Policy Research. "It is a contradiction which won't be easily resolved." [...]

For the full report:
International Herald Tribune

"Pundita, I've written a piece titled Post Communist China, which asks what is the plan if and when the Communist Party falls? What is the best way to ensure a liberal democracy takes root and what are the potential alternatives?

I would appreciate your comments and thoughts. It is a debate that needs to happen before, not after, the fall.
Simon in Hong Kong"

Dear Simon:
Pundita is recovering from Double Whammy Night on Batchelor's show (see today's first post) so we are not in an analytical frame of mind. But your questions remind me of the time when Indira Gandhi threw her opposition in jail. An American reporter told her, "Mrs. Gandhi, this is not democracy."

She retorted, "Yes it is. It's Indian democracy."

I am also reminded of a conversation I had with a Mainland Chinese when the Shanghai economic zone was started. I burbled, "I'm so glad China is trying capitalism."

He snapped, "It is not capitalism. It is Chinese improvement to communism."

I have a problem with your mention of the words "fall" and "liberal." We're not looking for perfection here. The CCP doesn't need to fall; they can just change the name. And let's not push luck; if they make it anywhere near the Singapore model in the coming five years, this would be cause for dancing in the streets. Rome wasn't built in a day, and all that.

However, the Chinese could surprise us. Off the top of my head, I'd say that Howard French's report on experiments at the local level, Test of Democracy and Dissent points the way for China. They actually have the apparatus for making democracy work in place at the village level, it's just that they never used it.

That's why I think some variation of democracy could come with stunning speed if the CCP cries, "Uncle!" They have to confront that they need more decision making responsibility carried out at the local level.

By one estimate, there will be 300,000 village committee elections in China’s 18 provinces this year alone. In many areas, officials are making efforts to involve ordinary citizens in local decision making.

“The experiments taking place here and there are very meaningful, because China’s economic reforms began the same way,” said Li Fan, director of the World and China Institute, a nongovernmental institute in Beijing that studies electoral reform. “The central government didn't know how to carry them out, so it relied on local governments.”

Mr. Li said, however, that the most important breakthrough would come when the already existing assemblies -- local, provincial and national groups known as people’s congresses - were given a real say, instead of meeting one day a year, as is typical, to endorse the government’s decisions. “The Communist Party doesn't want this, because they are afraid the congresses will criticize the government,” Mr. Li said. “They prefer a rubber stamp.”

By the way I found the link to the article on your site. The entire report makes riveting reading -- particularly in light of Beijing banishing the D word from the Internet. French's report makes it clear that talk about democracy is alive and well in China.

It's just that they want to make it a Chinese invention. I don't know if you saw the earlier Chinese pairs competitors in Olympics figure skating. Twenty years ago they were a joke. The last Olympics, their lead skaters were a micron off perfection. And this was not a fluke; the entire team reflected a high level of mastery of the sport.

All they need now is to put the same attention to modernizing their government that they put to figure skating and business. The West's job is to keep after them.

"Hi, good morning, lovely weather isn't it? How are you doing with transferring more responsibility to the people this morning?"

Notice how Pundita got through the sentence without mentioning the D word.

In fact, this is why we need to clean up the UN and keep pushing the democracy doctrine. Once democracy becomes a competition between countries, watch what happens. All it ever needed was for the world's superpower to make a strong stand for genuine democracy. That day has finally come. So this era does not belong to cynics; it belongs to the young at heart.

Yet here I would have a caution. Decades ago, and after an absence of many years, John Kenneth Galbraith returned to visit India. When asked to remark on the changes, he replied, "I see that India is still lurching along."

Many Chinese have a horror of things falling apart. You never have that worry if you're an Indian because they're always lurching along, for the past 15,000 years or so. That's the same way a sailboat stays on course. Not by keeping to a straight line but by making countless adjustments.

The fear of things falling apart comes from a tendency to think in terms of an ideal. The Chinese need to think back on their Olympics figure skating history. They just kept at it and when one type of system of coaching didn't work, they lurched to another. They need to apply that lesson to the task of modernizing their government via the D word.
.

Last night Marc Schulman at American Future forwarded me his latest posts relating to the election campaign in Germany. The posts deal with important issues that go beyond events under discussion.

First, the German press reaction to Tony Blair's address to the European Parliament, which is a window on a widening breach between France and Britain and the uneasy alliance between Berlin and Paris.*

The German reaction to Blair's speech is also a clue about the temperature readings we can expect behind closed doors at the G8 meeting. Bring your parka and snowshoes if you're planning on visiting Gleneagles.

Second, Marc's post on the formation of a leftist party that will drain some votes away from Schroeder's party. Will that be enough to give Merkel the win? The situation might be reminiscent of Ralph Nader's 2000 US presidential campaign.

American (and Canadian) readers will also hear an echo in points the new left party is making about foreign competition.

German media response to Blair speech.

To the Left of Schroeder.

* See Pundita June 22 post for the link to an analysis of the alliance and also if you need your memory refreshed about the importance of the upcoming election in Germany.
.

I usually don't like to inflict my personal life on the reader but for those who are new to Pundita-land, Bush Major Speech Night is right up there in my pain index with a root canal. This is because BMSN always means that John Batchelor will solicit opinion from both Katrina vanden Heuvel and Michael Vlahos.

Pundita adores her husband* but Katrina drives me up a wall because she's always waiting for the return of 1968. And Vlahos is Pundita's arch nemesis.

The worst part is that after years of suffering through his lectures on Islam and how poorly the Bush administration grasps the Islam Renavatio, I actually understand what Vlahos is saying. However, my position is very simple:

Do not say, "Please understand me" while holding me at gunpoint. Above all do not say, "Please understand me" while expecting me to foot the bill.

People have written to ask Pundita what really transpired at Crawford between President Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah. It boiled down to Bush asking how it's possible to blow a zillion dollars and be unable to account for it, and Abdullah saying in parting, "Oh did I mention the Middle East is running out of water?"

One way or another, kicking and screaming, every Muslim on this planet is going to leave the 14th Century and confront what is here now. No more excuses and especially not the excuse that you're working through your stuff about religion. That's the oldest excuse in the 900 Lazy Bastards Book of Excuses. "Sorry I can't plow the field I have to go start a new sect."

Where was I? Vlahos. My biggest problem with him is really my fault. At least Batchelor manages to rein in Vlahos but one night while Batchelor was on vacation, Monica Crowley and Eric Shawn ran the show while Vlahos held forth. Vlahos hypnotized them with his erudition. When they were sufficiently dazed he intoned, "We must come to understand the Arabs because if we don't they're coming after us."

Pundita was sitting on the patio at that moment. I burst out, "Vlahos is on the moon!"

The next thing I heard came from a corner of the back yard. It was the youngest raccoon asking, "Why is Vlahos on the moon?"

One problem with moderns is that we tend to indulge too much the questions of children because there is no end to it once they start down a road. This is how it came to pass that Vlahos The Mighty Borg Killer is this very night pinned down at the moon's Montes Carpathus Ridge and awaiting reinforcements.

The strange thing is that they rarely miss a Vlahos Night on Batchelor. Even if I'm inside the house in the dead of winter, I hear scratching at the garage door and the plea to listen to their hero. Or maybe it's Bush Major Speech Night they sense coming.

All this is by way of saying it's going to take me at least two days to recover before I can plumb the Bush speech. This said, Pundita will probably produce the same analysis she has for every other Bush speech relating to the war:

Whatever makes CENTCOM happy; if they are happy with the speech then whatever Bush said, it's fine. Just keep on killing the enemy.

But for the benefit of readers who would like a more nuanced analysis, Marc Schulman of American Future has pulled my irons out of the fire by sending me his take on the speech. Pundita herself will read Marc's analysis after we've recovered from a Batchelor double whammy night and spinning a yarn.

* Russia scholar Stephen Cohen

9:45 AM Bruce weighs in with an analysis of the speech:

"Pundita, the problem, as I see it, is that bottom-line Bush:

1. Is being dragged into the sort of series of defensive speeches like Johnson was;

2. Should put the ball squarely back in the court of the critics by saying explicitly:

'After much sacrifice we won the war within SVN, only to see it tossed away by those who cut off aid and broke promises. And they want to do it again.'

Then we'll have a real debate, and win, over which side the critics are really on. They'll howl and rationalize, but lose to the common sense of the American people.

Bruce Kesler ChFC REBC RHU CLU

In one of his rare outings during the Iranian presidential election campaign last week, Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the man then designated as the likely winner by almost everyone, ran into a spot of bother. An old woman broke through his security ring, shouting, "May I have a word with you?" Once allowed to approach Mr. Rafsanjani, the woman removed his turban with a blow and shouted, "No more mullahs!" *

Another People's Revolution in Iran. How quaint.

Thanks "Liz" for sending me the WSJ piece. The complete article seems to be the best analysis so far about the Iranian military's consolidation of power. That's going to go over in Israel like bacon at a bar mitzvah.

But we should look on the bright side. The new regime will at least be speaking straight. No more pretense to save face for the EU Three. They have no more face to keep up, anyhow.

Political mullahs like Messrs. Khatami and Rafsanjani tried to deceive Europeans, and often succeeded, by pretending to be Davos-style liberals abroad while telling women at home to cover their hair because it emanates a dangerous ray that makes men wild.

With Mr. Ahamadinejad, however, you'll get what you see. Unlike Mr. Khatami, who claimed that Islam was the same thing as democracy, Mr. Ahamadinejad has no qualms about saying that the two are incompatible.

He is also open about his belief that women are not the equal of men and that non-Muslims cannot have equal rights with Muslims.

Messrs. Khatami and Rafsanjani tried to present to the Western world an "other" that was really the same bar the beard and the turban. Mr. Ahamadinejad, however, is proud of acting as the "other" that can never abandon its otherness.*

* Wall Street Journal
Anaysis by Amir Taheri
June 28, 2005

I've been informed that someone in Dubai set up a "mirror" Pundita blog on Google's eBlogger. The site is called "antipundita."

Mark Safranski at ZenPundit has posted a strong warning to his readers to avoid the site.

He found that destructive surveillance software was inserted on his computer during his visit even though he had a firewall. He wrote me that it took some time to clean up the resulting mess on his computer.

I've been advised to warn my readers as well. Oddly the mirror blog's target does not seem to be Pundita. The target seems to be a circle of bloggers who have taken up dispute with two Pundita essays, which concern in part the Muslim Brotherhood, the CIA and MI6.

From what we've been able to piece together, the Dubai person, shall we call him (I'll assume it's a male) became a member of the blog circle at some point, then anonymously set up the mirror site in Dubai. Then he invited the blog circle to visit and vent their anger at Pundita on his site.

Initially I dismissed the situation as a joke involving just the blogger circle and even made my own joke. I published a Tabloid-style post in big block letters promising to "Tell all" about the Muslim Brotherhood, the Nazi connection, and why it wasn't a good idea to attempt a U-Turn while eating a Taco Bell burrito and talking on a cell phone. (I've since deleted the post.) But as reports about the blogspot came in, I decided it was best to take the matter seriously.

If you can't stand not knowing what's on the site -- well, as ZenPundit describes it, it is pretty much rum-induced cursing at Pundita by Collounsbury, a Western expat in Morocco. Perhaps he was exercised about Pundita's post on the perils of Going Native.

The only other thing I can tell you is that the Dubai person claims to be British. Here Pundita feels a joke coming on but in deference to the seriousness of the occasion I will quash it.

A word to the person at a large financial institution in New York: if you have visited the antipundita site, you might want to warn the computer security desk and perform a very thorough check of the computer you used.

Here is the Dubai person's computer ID, for those security-minded people at the NYC firm:

Host Name de1622.alshamil.net.ae
IP Address 217.165.52.114
Country United Arab Emirates
Region Dubai
City Dubai
ISP Multimedia Services Over Adsl Network

Here is the Dubai person's ID at Collounsbury's blog circle:

de11033.alshamil.net.ae (Multimedia Services Over Adsl Network)
Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

www.livejournal.com/users/collounsbury/349345.html

(And yes, I have notified Google's bloghost company.)

Well. We're certainly having a hard time moving away from the topic of the Muslim Brotherhood, aren't we? As long as Collounsbury's circle is already hopping mad, we might as make their day with this post by Marc Schulman at American Future titled Tariq Ramadan: A threat to the West. This for readers who have Ramadan confused with a Muslim religious observance.

While we're on the subject of phonies, this would be a good place to detail the bang-up job the Muslim Brotherhood, French and British did in helping the Palestinians during Arafat's era then blamed on Israel:

> Chronic malnutrition was not a problem during the 25 years of Israeli control. From 1967-1993 the economy of the West Bank thrived, tourism skyrocketed, universities increased in number from one to seven, infant mortality plummeted, life expectancy increased, and the lives of the Palestinian Arabs improved by objective World Bank measures. At one point almost 300,000 Palestinians were working in the Israeli economy, with earnings well ahead of their counterparts in neighboring states.

> Only after Arafat took over in 1993, with his Palestinian Authority gaining autonomous control of 96% of the Palestinians living in Israel, did the Palestinian people suffer the collapse of their economy and the spread of poverty and malnutrition.

> After Oslo, billions of dollars in international aid flowed into the PA, from the EU, the US, and a number of Arab countries. Yet the Palestinian people have nothing to show for this largesse. It is now obvious that rather than using that aid to build his state, with schools, hospitals, roads, and social services, Arafat created a massive kleptocracy that siphoned off vast fortunes to personal accounts, and squandering the rest on the terror war against Israel. Suha Arafat lives in luxury in Paris, on a stipend of $100,000 per month, while the average Palestinian earns $2.00 per day.

> Hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies enter the West Bank and Gaza regularly, but never reach the starving Palestinians. As we know now from Jordanian and Palestinian sources, Arafat and the PA have created a monopoly on the transfer of food to Arab cities in the West Bank. Food entering the West Bank goes only to designated PA officials who then sell it to selected merchants. Thus Arafat and the PA reap financial reward by intensifying the food shortage at the expense of the starving Palestinians.

-- From David Meir-Levi's September 2004 report, The Islamikazi War and Palestinian Poverty

And for those who can't get enough of learning about the Nazi-Muslim Brotherhood connection, here's a brief history from Northeast Intelligence Network with color pictures. Kindly take special note of the last few sentences.

With all that behind us, tomorrow we will return to China I hope.
.

This post is to reply to readers' questions and criticism regarding my June 24 essay, Muslim Brotherhood: A skeleton in America's closet, and the decay of British culture.

1) At last count there are about 177,000 Google references to the connection between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazi party. To find the majority of those references you'd need to type in "banna nazi" instead of a keyword string such as "muslim brotherhood nazi, which only produces about 7,000 links. Incidentally some sites have it wrong when they list "vanna" nazi. It's "banna."

Please don't anybody write Pundita again to ask why the name of John Loftus is connected with so much data about Muslim Brotherhood-Nazi connection. Write Loftus -- or to save yourself the time, click on the link I provided in the essay and read the deliberately scanty biography he provides.

Note the security clearances he lists. There is a reason why John Loftus and no one else was given clearance to talk about some data pertaining to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nazi Party.

Regarding a related question about the source: the website I linked to -- Warriors for Truth -- was almost a random pick out of tens of thousands of references; they were near the top of Google's list and did a reasonably good job of summarizing some items Loftus has revealed about the Muslim Brotherhood-Nazi connection, at least for the purposes of my essay.

The site itself has no relevance to the points I made. I have linked to al Jazeera and a Trotskyite site. I'll link to just about any site if it contains useful data for my readers and/or does a good job of summarizing the data. Regular Pundita readers know this. We're an empirical blog not a political one.

I interject that I could have put up a link with even more incendiary information about the Muslim Brotherhood-Nazi connection and the MI6-CIA connection. For example, the British Secret Service lied to the CIA -- they didn't tell them that the 'agents' they foisted on the CIA were Nazi war criminals.

The CIA later lied to cover up the mess. This was after they learned the hard way that they'd been lied to by people who were supposed to be US allies. However, the full story--as much as has been declassified at this point--is outside the scope of the essay I wrote. However, the "Blame it on the British" excuse would be pretty weak.

In any case, the site I linked to does a decent job of summarizing the basics. Interested readers could have pursued more about the story on their own.

2) Tariq Ramadan is forging alliances with the Communists and other non-Islamic groups and softening the old Muslim Brotherhood rhetoric. The US military will believe a leopard has changed his spots when they see it. They have intelligence indicating that the miracle has not yet occurred. If you dig on the Internet, you can learn that Pundita is not revealing state secrets. The Muslim Brotherhood has active terrorist connections.

3) All the above explains why Condoleezza Rice refused to accord the Muslim Brotherhood the same privilege she accorded outlawed political parties in two other countries.

Could she have put better words to it? A more diplomatic or at least more explanatory sentence? Yes and no. The Muslim Brotherhood's leaders got her message loud and clear. She was saying in effect that the leaders need to clean up their act because the stage show is not fooling anyone but poorly informed people.

I swear to you, Loftus is not making up any of the stuff about the Muslim Brotherhood-Nazi connection. But given all the screw-ups of the CIA, Pundita is not interested in raking up the history of the MI6 in Arab lands. I was intent on conveying that no matter how nice and intellectual Tariq Ramadan sounds to European ears, he's bad news.

And no matter how unfair and stubborn Condoleezza Rice might have sounded, she had her reasons for sending an uncompromising message to the Muslim Brotherhood.

This does not mean the US won't deal with them down the line if they get rid of the people they know they need to ditch. But the leaders tried to set a trap for Secretary Rice at that press conference in Cairo, and she refused to take the bait. Good for her.

4) The argument that the US should deal with the Muslim Brotherhood because the movement is widely popular in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East is not defensible.

It's falling into the same trap that the British did in relation to the Nazi Party. Yes, the Nazis were wildly popular in Germany in the runup to the invasion of Poland but popularity should not be the guide for rational defense policy.

5) In reply to the female reader who brought up the question -- it's more descriptive in most cases to term "female circumcision" as "female genital mutilation." This is not being sensational, only descriptive. I came as close to detailing the mutilation as I wanted by use of the word "sawing."

I interject that making this distinction would help more people understand why Muslim governments in Africa countries have moved heaven and earth to fudge data relating to AIDS transmission.

I will not describe how the mutilation is done outside a clinical setting and how the wound is sewn up but the point is that it does not heal, not in the way a surgical circumcision does. It remains a small oozing wound. This means virtually every Muslim female who had her clitoris mutilated, and who has intercourse with an HIV-infected partner, gets the disease -- unless he wears a condom and many African and Arab males refuse to wear them.

If you're slapping your forehead -- how did you think AIDS spread so fast on a continent where anal sex from the homosexual act is taboo in every nation, in every African and Arab culture?

What the Muslims have said is that AIDS incidence is actually lower in Muslim women because Muslim women are not promiscuous because of genital mutilation. Muslim governments have brought out data to support these claims.

Of course the Muslims are trying to blame it on the non-Muslim Africans. This argument has backed them into a corner. This is because it brings them to discussion of whether AIDS was almost automatically transferred to females who suffered genital mutilation during the years when no government or Islamic authority was facing the widening epidemic.

The Muslim leaders in Africa are trying to cover up the truth for the same reason Beijing's government made a suicidal attempt to cover up outbreaks of H5N1. They are rightly frightened that their 'race' will go down in infamy.

It's because they are frightened that Muslim leaders are quietly cooperating to encourage that the practice of genital mutilation be abandoned. I assure the confused questioner that the practice is widespread throughout the Muslim world.

Therein lies the problem for Western countries because genital mutilation is also practiced in the Muslim communities in those countries. And because hard-line Muslim clerics have set up shop in those countries, they do more than continue to encourage the practice of mutilating Muslim female children. They also issue threats against mothers who do not agree to mutilate their female children.

So, the grotesque conundrum that the authorities in Europe have set for themselves is whether to encourage that the female Muslim children be taken to an accredited doctor to have a 'clean' circumcision with proper healing.

When you realize the rationale for depriving a female of her clitoris, the conundrum is a sign that Europe is descending into barbarism.

The debate has worked its way to America, I might add. It needs to be shoved away from our shores and dumped back in the laps of the British, whose society is a train wreck. And for the same reason they waited too long to deal with Hitler. Why are they so afraid this time around? Perhaps because of the large number of British expats working in Muslim countries. They saw what happened at Luxor.

Same speculation would apply to the French -- who also have a very large expat community in Arab lands. Realize that many of these expats have been living in great fear because of the strong retort that the US government made to terrorism. Because they can't direct outrage at the Arab Muslims in the host governments, they've turned their anger on the American government.

6) It is so well established that Britain became the "terror capital of the world" by the 1990s that it's not necessary to provide data to support the statement. It is widely known that they had an open-door policy for every terrorist organization on the planet.

And they were very open -- proudly open -- about the policy. What they didn't figure out until after 9/11 is that just because you bend over backward to accommodate a terrorist, that doesn't mean he won't try to blow you to kingdom come.

Thus, the 2000 memorandum by Lyndon La Rouche is not a "source" for the above statements. It is the "story" -- the centerpiece of the Muslim Brotherhood essay.

I repeat: there is a difference between a source for a story and the story. Now what was the story? What was Pundita's reason for bringing up La Rouche and the letter?

As I politely put it in the essay, Mr La Rouche is controversial. Okay, we won't beat around bush: he is widely known and believed by many to be a raving lunatic.

The point of the essay is that when things arrive at the juncture where a perceived lunatic is the only person calling for sensible action, this is a sign your civilization is headed for collapse.

Now kindly return to the La Rouche letter, and tell Pundita what you see. You're looking at a cut-and-paste job from headlines and a portion of transcript of a session at British Parliament.

La Rouche didn't use special sources. He quoted the day's news, to support his argument that it was past time for the US to put Britain on the list of states sponsoring terrorism. The headlines and transcript amply shore his argument.

My point was how did it happen that it was left to at best a 'quixotic' person to play the child in the Emperor's New Clothes?

As I labored to convey in the essay, I think it happened because the American government could not confront what America's closest ally had become. I think it happened because the majority of British people could not confront what their society had become. They had come to openly tolerate barbarism.

Thus, I brought forward Mr La Rouche and his memorandum as a kind of morality tale and warning.

To repeat: I was not using La Rouche or his letter as a source to back up statements I made. Pundita's blog is not a newspaper or scholarly journal. When I provide links, it is not to support statements I make. It is to ask my readers to make themselves aware of a particular situation.

If I wanted to source my statements, I would make this a subscription blog. But very little of what I've published on this blog can't be verified via Internet research.

7) Now for the reader who asked whether I was quoting from the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion when I mentioned public stoning practiced by Muslims.

Public stoning -- including stoning of children -- is practiced in Iran by the method I described in the essay. The stonings are attended by large crowds -- sometimes in the hundreds of thousands -- which are rounded by the military and ordered to attend.

Understandably the regime in Tehran has tried to suppress news about the atrocities, perhaps more to help the EU Three negotiators save Face than anything. If the extent of the barbarity of the Iranian regime were generally known by the public in Europe, the governments concerned would have a hard time rationalizing how they treat Tehran.

That is why I brought up the specific example when citing instances of barbarism. But then I overlooked that not all readers are informed about instances of stoning.

I interject that I do not think Iran is the only region where public stoning according to Muslim law take place; I might stand corrected but I seem to recall it is also used as a method of execution in rural areas of Pakistan and the tribal territories. However at least in Pakistan, if public stoning takes place, I doubt the government officially sanctions it, as is the case with Tehran. I don't know whether stoning is the law in other countries with Muslim governments, such as Sudan.

8) For the male reader who expressed confusion about my application of the word "terrorism" to acts of public stoning and genital mutilation of female children -- again, I am not going to describe how these mutilations are carried out when not done in a clinical setting. My intention is to inform, not make the reader's blood boil. But the reader may trust that if someone did that to his penis when he was a boy, he would be properly terrorized for life.

Instilling terror is the intent of all cruel and unusual punishment -- in prisons, POW camps, misogynist societies and tyrannies, and families headed by an abusive parent or spouse. Acts of terrorism are also the standard practice for gangs that prey on immigrant communities.

The objective of cruel and unusual punishment is to terrorize a segment of the society, or the entire society, or an individual, into submission.

The objective is evident in Muslim dictatorships. The view of the Muslim hard-liners is that if Islam -- the Will of God -- is not properly respected, it is their duty to help God do his work by terrorizing people back into a properly submissive relationship with their God. This view ran riot in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. I seem to recall that was also the same view of the Inquisition so I am not singling out Islam.

The critic interprets the meaning of terrorism in the modern political aspect, which is too narrow. Terrorism is as old as the evil of one human seeking complete control of another. It's not how it's carried out that is the defining characteristic. The means and motives for terrorizing are many but the objective is always the same: to instill the emotion of terror in a person.
.

I hate to steal thunder from my earlier post today (Bringing real democracy to world's rural peoples) but Pundita's favorite WOM has done it again. Eric Miller gave a speech on China at his 55th college reunion.

No the 55 is not a typo; when I put Eric Miller in the category of Wise Old Men of Wall Street, I am being precise. And realize that before he hooked up with Tom Brown's outfit, Mr Miller was the Chief Investment Strategist of Donaldson, Lufkin, & Jenrette.

When Mr Miller decides to summarize matters, he doesn't clown around. His speech is a summary of other summaries he's done recently on China. So this is the distillation of analyses done by a cautious, seasoned investor. It's also got additional facts you might want to keep in mind; e.g. China has 100 cities with a population of over a million, whereas the US has nine.

So if you've been looking for one reliable jargon-free, chart-free economic report on China that's purged of political bias, this is the one to print out and keep in your country binder for the next three months:

The Looming New Superpower.

I hope this additional reading chore for today doesn't bump Pundita's essay; please find time to read it. How to make democracy work for the vast majority of the world's poorest is a very important issue -- one that directly connects with China's rise not to mention the Bush Democracy Doctrine and GWOT.
.

"Another topic that fascinates me is the factor of technology in the spreading of "freedom" in places like North Korea and China. Have you written on that?"

We assured Beth we'd have this ready on the weekend so this essay is Pundita's reply to the last question, above, in Beth's letter. Yes I have mentioned the connection between technology and the difficulty of bringing genuine democratic elections to rural regions in developing countries. See the essays under the Pundita sidebar category Phony Democracy. However, I am not well informed on developments in this area and what knowledge I have is behind the curve of fast-moving events across the world.

Yet Beth has put her finger on a very important issue -- critically important, as it relates to the Bush Democracy Doctrine and the ongoing attempts by democratic governments in developing countries to genuinely 'democratize' their elections.

I stress that several of these attempts predate Bush's doctrine. Many governments have long recognized that the best way to defuse protest movements that explode into rage against the central government is by bringing the vast majority -- in developing countries, the poorest -- into the democratic decision making process. Yet the logistics of accomplishing this are mind-boggling.

To give my readers in developed countries a small idea of the obstacles -- read this, but make you're sitting down first:

The Internet in its current state is not suitable for “direct consumption” by the average rural consumer. A physical book provides information as long as there is enough light to read. [In many rural villages electricity is only available for a few hours a day.] An Internet source of information requires the user to be aware of several technological notions that they don’t particularly care for.

One such example that I have witnessed is the difficulty in explaining to a new user the need to connect to the Internet before you can access information on the Internet.

Many users (both urban and rural) expect that, just like a TV or radio, a computer that is powered on must by definition be able to access the information they need. They have to be constantly reminded of the need to “connect” to the Internet even after powering on, and that the connection to the Internet could be lost at any point in time, in which case, they must reconnect.

-- from Sumedh Mungee's Rural Development II essay

So. For those Developeds who ask, "Well why can't we just get computerized voting into those rural areas?" -- the staggering cost aside, it ain't that simple, even for governments that are pushing for rural participation in the voting process. Yet the World Bank, in typical Bank fashion, has decided to throw the kitchen sink at the problem:

An international consortium, including Indian and American companies as well as the World Bank, is planning to establish thousands of rural Internet centers in India to bring government, banking and education services to isolated villages. [...]

The goal is to serve rural villages with populations of more than 5,000. Ultimately the plan calls for centers or kiosks in 5,000 villages in the state of Karnataka.*

On paper, the project sounds like a great idea. Here's the reality, as summed by Mungee in his first Rural Development essay:

What we need is not for a whole bunch of “digital divide experts” to drive into villages, set up kiosks and line up villagers and teach them. The moment the “experts” leave the village, the initiative starts to collapse under its own weight.

Instead what we need is to enable a do-it-yourself ecosystem that empowers tech-minded individuals in every village (they are there -- we have to learn to recognize them!) to start small shops, earn revenue, and educate their customers incrementally. ...

Mungee expands on this theme in Rural Development II:

How did rural India “learn” to make long distance telephone calls? Understanding the cost structure, long-distance phone codes and even just dialing long strings of numbers was once way beyond the reach of the average rural phone customer. Today the same villager is happily (and confidently) tapping out numbers on his cell phone.

This change was brought about by the youth who manned the earliest “STD booths” and patiently explained the costs and even helped village customers dial the numbers they wished to call.

If you read the Comment thread appended to the Rural Development essay, you will see that Pundita visits and makes a plea for more data. This was charitably answered by Radha:

Grassroots entrepreneurs or social business is what this is being called now and people have been thinking like this for some time now…look up www.tarahaat.com

Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done. For the average Sushma on the dusty [village] streets of Panna, much of what is available on the Net does not apply to her context. There is still not enough local context, forget local language context.

If I sound pessimistic, believe me I’m not…just stating the reality. You see I can’t afford to be as this is my line of work…ICT and social development! An interesting programme that has just started [in India] is www.mission.org.

Just so the term "local language context" doesn't fly past your long-term memory, I request my readers to visit the Tarahaat site. You will immediately run into a message requesting to insert some code on your computer. Ignore the message and wait. After a minute or so the site will appear -- in English. The request is directed at Indian readers -- India being a place where umpteen languages are spoken.

While you're at Tarahaat, move your mouse over the details in the painting of a typical Indian village, then keep reading. The painting itself is an education for readers who are not familiar with rural villages in undeveloped countries. The train in the background was of course a gift of the British empire, but the general layout of the village stretches back to the most ancient times -- including the village built around a large tree.

That painting is the world for many people around the globe. To bring them into the democratic process is the work of our era. Americans who chant "freedom and democracy" must become knowledgeable about the changes they're asking for in the world.

If we want real democracy, not a stage show or Potemkin Village form, we must understand in more detail what we're actually asking for. Else we're working blind. The idea of democracy has been accepted by many peoples. It's just how to get from here to there is the puzzling part. We need to put all the intelligence we can muster into solving the enormous logistical problems. Mungee's ideas are a step in the right direction, and deserve consideration from the international development community, including the World Bank.

Speaking of Potemkin Village Democracy, I have some weird good news. You have to know how Beijing thinks to see cause for rejoicing but without further introduction....whoops...Pundita is so piled up with reports we would lose her head if it wasn't screwed to our shoulders....well, we've misplaced the URL, which means we need to return to Simon World and track back from there. All right; not to build up suspense, but we did say we'd have this post up before noon. Tomorrow, then, or the day after for the good news, of sorts, from Mainland China.

The subtitle of this essay, "There is no box" is taken from Sumedh Mungee's elegant website. Although his theme is technology development, you might want to return for regular visits to read his thoughts on the intersection between cutting edge technology and rural development.

* The quote, from a New York Times report, is cited in Mungee's Rural Development essay. Click on the link I provided to bring up more quotes and a link to the entire Times report.
.

Here is a UK Telegraph news report £220bn stolen by Nigeria's corrupt rulers , filed today by reporter David Blair. I hope you find time to read the entire report but here are select passages:

The scale of the task facing Tony Blair in his drive to help Africa was laid bare yesterday when it emerged that Nigeria's past rulers stole or misused £220 billion.

That is as much as all the western aid given to Africa in almost four decades. The looting of Africa's most populous country amounted to a sum equivalent to 300 years of British aid for the continent.

The figures, compiled by Nigeria's anti-corruption commission, provide dramatic evidence of the problems facing next month's summit in Gleneagles of the G8 group of wealthy countries which are under pressure to approve a programme of debt relief for Africa.

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has spoken of a new Marshall Plan for Africa. But Nigeria's rulers have already pocketed the equivalent of six Marshall Plans. After that mass theft, two thirds of the country's 130 million people -- one in seven of the total African population -- live in abject poverty, a third is illiterate and 40 per cent have no safe water supply.

With more people and more natural resources than any other African country, Nigeria is the key to the continent's success. [...]

ZenPundit alerted me to the news item last night with the droll comment, "Journalism gods smile on Pundita." It was his way of saying that my cautions about the Commission for Africa and views on widescale corruption in many governments had just received ample support.

From the bottom of my heart, I wish that I wasn't so right on such issues. Yet the news article is all the more reason for Americans to learn about and support The International Integrity Standard.

Many readers might be stunned to learn that one of the greatest obstacles to fighting corruption is the simple reason that there exist no objective criteria for measuring it! The IIS seeks to remedy that situation. But the people who are battling hardest against anti-corruption drives are not the corrupt rulers; they are the 'legitimate' business concerns that profit from contracts made with the rulers.

Many people believe that any attempt to fight such corruption is doomed to fail. The task can seem impossible but realize it's never been tackled with any real energy. That's because there have only been half-hearted measures to fight it, and an unwillingness on the part of governments worldwide to squarely face the issue. All that is changing rapidly.

Paul Wolfowitz, in his capacity as World Bank President, has named corruption as a threat equal to Communism. That's a signal the American government has faced reality. From the publication of Nigeria's report on corruption in their government, clearly Nigeria's government has also finally faced reality. The rest of the world must do the same, if the organizers of Live8 and planned marches on the Gleneagles summit are serious about "saving Africa."
.

Pundita received letters in response to yesterday's post from some readers whose questions boiled down to asking how to thread the proverbial camel: How to teach people who are in denial about the downsides of their culture without causing them loss of dignity? How far should modern Western peoples go to imposing their values on those who don't share the same values?

These are thoughtful questions, particularly in light of Operation Muslim World Outreach, which marks the US decision to make it policy to help Muslim moderates reform and modernize their religion. And also in light of the Bush Democracy Doctrine, which many see as an attempt to impose Western and in particular American values on other peoples.

However, and with recognition of the readers' sincerity, the questions reveal the downside of the Age of Specialization, which now afflicts even kindergarten schooling in the modern Western culture. Frankly, the anthropological approach to analyzing human behavior has ultimate validity only if some of us weren't from this planet and arose from entirely different types of protoplasm. In that event, one would need disciplines such as anthropology and sociology to help bridge the psycho-epistemological gap.

This is not to dismiss the usefulness of such disciplines, which help us build a historical record of our race. But the disciplines have been over-applied; one downside is that Diversity sensitivity has run amok in policy decisions. Too much attention to diversity sets up a very powerful psychological screen, which makes it hard for us to perceive similarities between ourselves and peoples of vastly different cultures.

Diversity awareness has also been over-applied to diplomatic relations and development and aid policy. Time and again I have seen this phenomenon in action. Time and again, it prevents people who need to communicate about problems from finding the obvious and simple solution.

I first addressed this situation directly in The Enclave Mentality and the Oriental Stranger Syndrome, although it's a leitmotif in my writings. The essay outlines the complex prejudices and byways of human nature that arise when peoples from a powerful culture interact with those in a dependent culture, and how the resulting behaviors greatly impact foreign relations, including development policy.

In this essay I'll discuss what might seem to be the obverse of the Enclave Mentality, which is Going Native -- the latter being the scourge of the Western colonizers. If the Enclave Mentality prevents a resident foreign class from identifying with local peoples, Going Native represents a resident foreigner's over-identification with the locals.

I add that this can extend to peoples in a dominant culture over-identifying with an immigrant population or any distinct minority. However, that behavior should have a different label because Going Native specifically relates to conduct by people in a more powerful foreign resident class interacting with a weaker local population.

This said, the seemingly opposite Enclave Mentality and Going Native syndromes produce the same results, which often amount to ineffective and frequently bizarre approaches to problem solving. So while it's necessary to be aware of both syndromes and how they play out in foreign relations policy, formalized attempts to avoid the extremes tend to create their own bizarre situations.

The way out of the maze was alluded to in a reply that the Armenian-Russian mystic George Gurdjieff made to a disciple, who asked how she could learn to be more loving and compassionate toward all people.

Gurdjieff replied that it was a very big thing to learn to be more loving to all people so she should start small -- by practicing to be more compassionate with animals. He advised her to get a dog; if she could manage to treat a dog kindly even when she was in a bad mood, she could learn to transfer that to her relations with humans.

That advice is the key to understanding many things. The more you learn about animal behavior -- and even the behavior of lower life forms -- the easier it is to see the many fine and subtle similarities between humans of vastly different cultures.

For example, if you take it down to the level of say, a cockroach, you'd be amazed to learn that they share psychological traits with humans. For example, it's well established that 'bad boy' males are very attractive to female humans. For some unknown reason, the bad boys bring out the mothering instinct in many women.

It's the same in the world of cockroaches. Scientists have learned from observation that there are 'bad boy' cockroaches -- they run around and bully other male cockroaches, display fickle behavior towards the females, but these are the males who are the most popular with female cockroaches. Go figure.

Pundita has a story to top that one, but I want the reader to promise not to attempt to replicate the results. On second thought, I want to consider before telling the story because as soon as you warn certain types not to do something, they go right out and do it.

Of course you don't want to get carried away with identifying with lower life forms, but a lot of the wisdom we have collected over the millennia about how to deal with each other is based on observing wildlife. Consider the warnings we give about 'human snakes,' human vultures, and so on. Now that there isn't much wildlife to observe in our daily lives, we're tending to lose that wisdom, or at least not pay much attention to it.

Yet the wisdom speaks to atavistic traits that are shared by all humans. All humans know how to use guile, all humans experience envy and pride, resent a know-it-all, display impatience, and so on. Humans share a vast array of subtle traits. The gestalt we call human nature.

The double-edged sword of modern Western culture is its great reliance on idealism, which is based on systems of morality and gives precedence to conscience. This idealism has a great civilizing effect but because it deals greatly with abstractions, here is where you run into the 'babble of tongues' and the confusion it engenders. This is where the need for painstaking study of other cultures comes in, and the need for great precision at translating concepts.

Whereas systems of conduct that give precedence to the foibles of human nature create less confusion. This is because they deal with more concrete concepts that are universally understood. Idealism and its high abstractions tend to ignore or run roughshod over the universally understood foibles when it comes to building bridges of communication.

I interject there have been attempts to meld both systems; George Gurdjieff's teachings being perhaps the most well known of these. But his teachings were designed to be a mystical path -- a means to expanding consciousness and strengthening the impulse of faith. He wasn't interested in applying his system to foreign relations.

To put all this into an example, an American Christian got into an altercation with a Palestinian Muslim guard at the site of a Christian landmark in Jerusalem. This was post 9/11, during a time of great tenseness in the city due to fighting and terror attacks. There were very few tourists and foreign pilgrims at that time.

In typical American 'buddy' fashion the American put his arm around an American female companion for a photograph in front of the landmark. The guard told him it was forbidden for males to touch females. The American got outraged. By the time they got finished going at each other they were reliving the Crusades. It ended with the American not getting his photograph.

When I heard the story I asked the guy, "Did it ever occur to you that the guard had his hand out?"

No. It had never entered his mind. He looked at the guard's remark from a purely idealistic viewpoint -- human rights, gender equality, etc.

But if you put that American guy in front of an American national monument with an American guard saying you can't take a photo, what's the first thought that comes to mind? The guard is invoking a technical rule because he wants a tip.

Now put yourself in the Muslim guard's place. Business had been really bad in Jerusalem for many months for guards, tour guides and trinket sellers. Here comes an American = $$ on the hoof. You see a chance for a little profit when you can use your authority to invoke a technical rule.

I don't have a crystal ball so I can't say what the guard's real intention was; however, my view of that situation is an example of thinking according to a system of conduct that is grounded in human nature. The American's approach is an example of an idealist-based system.

In truth it takes both, if you want to help people evolve their primitive practices and if you want to teach the highly abstract concept of democratic government. And if you want to project a foreign policy that is actually 'heard' in many parts of the world.

Stopping to look at things from both angles takes practice. But as with anything else, with practice a way of thinking becomes second nature. That's what you want to head for, if you want to thread the camel. And if you want to steer clear of the poles of behavior represented by the Enclave Mentality and Going Native.

Going Native is no joke because it has elements of the Stockholm Syndrome -- I repeat, elements. They probably have different psychological roots, but the end result is pretty much the same. You develop an identification with another that goes beyond normal sympathy and empathy. Then you start imitating the behavior of the other and/or find tolerance for behaviors that you'd otherwise reject. That's how it can end up that highly civilized moral people tolerate barbaric practices.

I don't know how the French and Spanish imperialists warded off the syndrome, beyond removing the worst offenders from their posts and sending them home to get their head straight again. But the British stationed in foreign lands developed very elaborate social rituals for warding off Going Native, including ostracizing British who didn't want to join in the ritual belittling of the Native population.

Of course much of the belittling was genuine but it was also a literal ritual -- a kind of test to make sure you still remembered who you were, your own culture, and that you continued to see its value.

Readers who never ran up against this syndrome can find roughly parallel situations in their daily lives. We've all met an athletic coach or boss, etc., who identifies too much with the group he or she is supposed to be helping or administering to.

That's how a lot of Western businesspeople, including journalists, come to be functionally blind to the extent to which they tolerate behaviors in foreign government officials, etc. -- behaviors they wouldn't tolerate in their own country.

That's also how they end up unable to muster a vigorous defense for their own culture, including democracy, respect for minority rights, gender equality, and so on. They begin to compartmentalize their beliefs. That is a slippery slope, which leads to the phenomenon the British dubbed Going Native.

Someone once observed, "The less conscience, the more laws required." In the same manner, the less attention we pay to human nature, the more we need to rely on highly specialized knowledge in our dealings with people from other lands. There is a time and place for such knowledge, but if it's used as a substitute for dealing with human nature, it is a roadblock to better foreign relations.

After mulling it over, Pundita thinks she will save the telling of the killer bee story for another time.
.

(6/27: See Pundita replies to questions... for my response to questions and critical comments about this essay.)

Because Pundita does not have a Comment section I try to avoid inserting comments on other blogs; however, on occasion I break my self-imposed rule. This is by way of explaining how I landed in a debate about Condoleezza Rice's statement in Cairo on Monday that she would not meet with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood -- the largest (outlawed) opposition party in Egypt. Her statement set off a firestorm of criticism.(1)

For the complete account of Pundita's adventure, visit ZenPundit (Mark Safranski) to read the Comment Section and the very short essay that prompted Pundita to add her two cents' worth.

My original comments (including the remark that the Muslim Brotherhood "developed a 'rap' that is meant to appeal to Euros still clinging to the idea that Tehran is not a terror sponsor") greatly incensed another ZenPundit reader, who identifies himself as Collunsbury, and who is a businessman based in Morocco:

[Quoting Pundita] I understand the part about contradiction but to talk w/ Muslim Brotherhood is akin to formally recognizing the Nazi Party

This is one of the stupidest things I have ever seen written.

The Muslim Brotherhood is by no means comparable to the Nazi Party, and whatever simple minded analysis that has "bad guys" being untouchable simply doesn't have the first bloody clue about the region. Then I have read "Pundita" rather bizarre posturing on MENA [Middle East-North Africa] before so I can't say this is suprising. Not even the idiotic "Euro" slur.

After making my original comment and adding a reply to Mark's response, I promptly forgot about the comment thread. I didn't check back until yesterday afternoon, when I found Collunsbury's comments. So this is how we learn that if one starts something on the blogosphere one should keep tending to it. Pundita then leaped to amend her oversight:

"Clearly, Collunsbury is under the wrong impression that I was making a 'comparison' between the Nazi Party and the Muslim Brotherhood. I did not go into detail because I assumed that ZenPundit's readers are well-informed enough to know that the Muslim Brotherhood is the remnant of the Nazi Party in Egypt. Declassified US intelligence documents (declassified years before 9/11) and much other evidence makes this statement inarguable.(2)

"However, the Muslim Brotherhood is but one in a long list of examples that showed the downside of CIA reliance on guidance from MI6, which convinced the US that it would be a splendid idea to support the Muslim Brotherhood. This is for reasons clearly understood only by avid students of the Cold War and the barking mad.

"As with so many other movements the CIA supported during the Cold War, the MB is another of America's Frankensteins -- or chickens come to roost, if one prefers."

Pundita does not belong to the Scorched Earth school of rebuttal. And because I'm aware of the consistently lousy reporting of the European and American press available to people in Morocco about the war on terror, I did not address Collunsbury's remark that my "Euro" comment was a slur.

However, my charitable attitude was before I exchanged emails with Steve at The Word Unheard. I thanked him for keeping tabs on a situation that received virtually no attention in the mainstream media, which is the phony polling places for the Iran election set up in the USA by the mullathugs. For his part Steve informed me that Media Slander is charging once more into the breach.

At the mention of Linda Foley's name Pundita plunged into a dark mood. It's not so much that Foley accused the US military of deliberately targeting and killing journalists; such accusations are to be expected these days from the head of an American newspaper guild. It's her habit of labeling those who disagree with her as being part of a vast right wing conspiracy that sets me off.

Pundita is not a perfect person. When we get into these moods, generally we only snap out of it after we say something mean, such as accuse the raccoon of being a Trotskyite. But having been deserted again by my team, I had to cast around for another victim. Condoleezza Rice conducted herself so well this week that this temporarily left the State Department off my usual hook, which left the British.

I recalled Lyndon La Roche's memorandum, which I'd been saving for years for just such an occasion. If Collunsbury thinks Pundita slurred the Europeans by noting some cling to the idea that Tehran is not a sponsor of terrorism, he should try this slur on for size:

In January 2000 Lyndon H. LaRouche wrote a letter for presentation to then-US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright. The letter is a request "to launch an investigation, pursuant to placing Great Britain on the list of states sponsoring terrorism."

With some understatement, Mr La Rouche and his organization are controversial. And, seen from the vantage point of the year 2000, his request is laughable -- until one reads through the list of reasons he provides for making the request. Seen from the vantage point of today, the only thing laughable is that the incidents he cites just skim the surface of the cesspool that Britain -- and the rest of West Europe -- had become.

Seen from the vantage point of today, it is a tragedy for the civilized world that Secretary Albright did not act on La Roche's memorandum. By 2000, Great Britain -- not Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, Libya, Yemen or Syria -- had become the biggest exporter of state-supported terrorism.

Yet the memorandum does not explain how a once-great civilization descended to such depths. The only clue, perhaps, is found in the lack of vigorous response to George Galloway's ringing defense of terrorism. (Yes, this is the same George Galloway who recently appeared before a US congressional panel investigating the UN Oil for Food Program, and who lambasted the US for the invasion of Iraq):

On Jan. 25, 1997, Tory Member of Parliament Nigel Waterson introduced legislation to ban foreign terrorists from operating on British soil. His "Conspiracy and Incitement Bill," according to his press release, would have for the first time banned British residents from plotting and conducting terrorist operations overseas.

Waterson proposed the bill in the aftermath of a scandal over Britain providing safe haven for Saudi terrorist Mohammed al-Massari, who claimed credit for the bombing of U.S. military sites in Saudi Arabia in June 1996.

On Feb. 14, 1997, Labour MP George Galloway succeeded in blocking Waterson's bill from getting out of committee.

Galloway, in a speech before the committee that was printed in the House of Commons official proceedings, stated, "The Bill will change political asylum in this country in a profound and dangerous way. It will change a state of affairs that has existed since Napoleon's time. . . . We are all in favor of controlling terrorism in Britain. Surely not a single honorable Member has any truck with terrorism here, but we are talking about terrorism in other countries. . . .

"The legislation is rushed in response to a specific, and, for the government, highly embarrassing refugee case--that of Professor al-Massari, who was a thorn in the side of the government of Saudi Arabia. . . .

"By definition, a tyranny can be removed only by extraordinary measures. Inevitably, in conditions of extreme repression, the leadership of such movements will gravitate to countries such as ours where freedom and liberty prevail.

"The bill will criminalize such people, even though they have not broken any law in Britain or caused any harm to the Queen's peace in her realm. They will fall open to prosecution in this country under the Bill because they are inciting, supporting, or organizing events in distant tyrannies, which are clearly offenses under the laws of such tyrants."

I'm trying to understand how the British came to despise their own culture to such extent that they refused to Anglicize those who came there as immigrants.

Or perhaps they despised the Arab and African tribal peoples who came as immigrants. Perhaps the British considered the peoples so beneath the radar of civilization that to attempt to integrate them into the culture would be an affront to British history.

Yet what is beyond my ability to conjure is how the British came to accept the ideas that terrorism is the only means by which tyranny can be undone, and that their country should practice a grotesque double standard: provided the terrorists were not attacking the British, it was okay if they attacked even Britain's closest ally.

Mr. La Rouche's memorandum provides no answer. So I return to Collunsbury's third argument for the US recognizing the Muslim Brotherhood:

The Ikhouane have in the past dabbled in terror and/or armed opposition. Who can bloody well blame them, given the bankruptcy of the regimes in question? The world is a rough place, and realists should not be afraid of a stupid word, "terrorism."

Collunsbury is uninformed about the present activities and intent of the brotherhood's leaders. But this aside, clearly he does not perceive as terrorism the practice of sawing off a female child's clitoris for the express purpose of robbing her of sexual pleasure in adulthood. Or the act of burying a child in the ground up to the neck, then picking up stones and hurling them at the child's head until it is pulp; this done for offenses so minor among civilized peoples they don't even amount to a prank.

Barbaric tribal practices one can understand -- they are ghastly but at least comprehensible acts rooted in humankind's primitive past. But that this primitivism should be tolerated, accorded the rank of civilized behavior in the modern era by the British culture, speaks of an evil nearly beyond comprehension. It is an evil that threatens the survival of the human race. So if you find yourself wondering how someone such as Collunsbury can shrug off terrorism as "realism," go ask the British for the answer.(3)

After writing the above words and putting a link to Media Slander on the Pundita sidebar, I feel much better.

(1) For background and an analysis of the controversy, read yesterday's Washington Post article, Rice's Unwillingness to Cross Lines May Have Limited Mideast Trip.

(2) A few minutes later I added a postscript:

"Whoops - correction: the documents might not have been declassified until after 9/11. To the best of my knowledge (admittedly, not expert in this area) all the US intel relating to the situation under discussion was supposed to remain classified until 2015 and surely several documents relating to MI6-CIA and Muslim Brotherhood remain classified."

I picked up on the 2015 date after reading a posting at the Warriors for Truth website, which cites John Loftus as a source for comments about the connection between the Muslim Brotherhood, Nazi Party, CIA and MI6.

I add that the WFT posting only skims the surface about the connection between the CIA's post-WW2 involvement with remnants of the Nazi party and their decision that the MB could be useful to American interests in the region at that time.

I cannot fathom the use the CIA and MI6 found for Nazis; however, as with the US decision to arm and train mujaheeden fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, there might have been a perceivable logic during the Cold War to the CIA's nurturing of Nazi Party members hanging out in the Middle East. Yet once loosing the hounds of hell, one does have an obligation to keep minding them. Yet as with the mujahadeen, CIA minding of the brotherhood drifted then ended, leaving the hounds to work out their karma, so to speak. This has caused no end of trouble for the USA, not to mention the Muslim Middle East, Israel, and the European and African continents.

(3) For tips on how to reassert the views of Western civilization without touching off another Crusade, see 6/25 Pundita essay, Going Native and how to insult a killer bee....


.

"Dear Pundita:
I just want to say thank you so much for the thinking and writing you do on your blog. I'm thoroughly enjoying your discussion with Simon. My 'circle' and I are thrilled to read sites like yours, Simon's, Rebecca MacKinnon's and others who are putting serious, nonpolitical thought into these issues.

Regarding your comments about natural disasters, I am thinking about China and North Korea and the African continent; I tend to forget just how influential natural disasters can be when it comes to policy.

I pretty much agree with the Bush idea of the domino theory of democracy. After reading your ["Yes and Back Again"] post, where you talk about the more countries that make a try at democracy reforms the easier it is for even more to try it -- what do you see as the tipping point?

I'm also curious if you've thought or written much about the effects of 9/11 and the resulting Bush doctrine in say, a quarter century. What are the chances we'll be looking back at this time as one of the biggest revolutions in terms of real changes for the better for the greatest number of people?

Another topic that fascinates me is the factor of technology in the spreading of "freedom" in places like North Korea and China. Have you written on that?

I guess I'm an optimist in that I see capitalism as inevitably leading to more democracy. Your writing helps me understand more of the issues better.
Beth in the Midwest"

Dear Beth:
I'm not going to sugarcoat this. We're in for the fight of our lives. This is because in many cases we're trying not so much to institute democracy as undo conditions we set in motion during the Cold War. But first some review. And to clarify for overseas readers, by 'we' I mean the American people because in a democracy the government is the will of the people. So we don't have the luxury of calling our government 'them' when we have to confront past mistakes.

In one sentence, the US position during the struggle against the Soviet Union pitted the US against genuine democracy. The reasoning was that a genuine democracy in many parts of the world would vote in pro-Communist governments; ergo, such governments would ally themselves with the Soviets. Ergo, genuine democracy had to be suppressed at every turn in key regions.

I interject for young readers that the above should not be interpreted as recrimination. It was the way things were. The US was engaged in a cold war; not to have engaged with the Soviets would have created conditions far worse than we find today.

However, we can't work out effective pro-democracy strategies unless we confront the fact that it's much harder to tear down and rebuild than to start from scratch.

So Condoleezza Rice's Cairo Speech was very important, very necessary; it was a landmark speech because it squarely acknowledged the past. One can't move forward without noting how one got to the present.

However, the task before us is daunting. This is because we're having to undo the conditions during a very difficult time. Not only are we engaged in a hot war and facing the Arab Problem, but we're also up against America's Frankenstein, which is China. China is actively working against the Bush Democracy Doctrine at every turn -- in Asia, in Africa, in 'Latin' America, in the Middle East.

Beijing has a formal anti-democracy foreign policy, which meshes perfectly with the anti-democracy arguments posed by Islamic fundamentalists and their militant wings. They actively support any government that is trying to suppress democracy movements and organized opposition to a tyranny.

The policy is engineered and overseen by China's military and fully backed by China's business community. So this policy is not the brainchild and sole property of the CCP clique in Beijing. The anti-democracy policy has four aspects, one of which arose in the post-9/11 era.

1) Geostrategic -- a means to challenge America's hegemony.

2) Survival pragmatism. China's bottom line is that they must go outside their land to purchase huge quantities of critical natural resources and they must compete with other countries for those purchases. This often calls for negotiations with dictatorships and supporting the tyrants' line at the UN.

China's permanent seat on the UN Security Council gives them tremendous power to block censure measures directed at tyrannies. Indeed, without much in the way of natural resources to trade, China's UNSC seat is a big playing card.

3) Divestment. Just as long-established crime families in the US began to divest criminal enterprises during the 1980s and settle for a cut of profits, China's government has been divesting ever since they joined the WTO -- WTO membership meaning closer international scrutiny.

China became International Crime, Inc. during the Cold War. Their crime syndicates had the advantage over the Yakuza because the Chinese versions had the full support of the Chinese military and CCP government. Many of the world's narco states and narco-terrorist movements were set up by the Chinese and run by them. And much of the early Shanghai Miracle was factories that processed dope and made counterfeit products -- often with startup funds from siphoning money from development loans.

They're trying to divest the dope factories and at least some of the counterfeit manufacturing. This means any government in the world looking for large infusions of hard currency is a target for China's offshoring enterprises, shall we call them. These enterprises include manufacturing material for nuclear weapons/dual-use for export to any regime with the money to buy.

4) China's leaders view the Bush Democracy Doctrine as a signal that the US government is taking a harder attitude against China's regime and that the hard line will only increase.

If you put the four factors together, it's easy to understand why some observers are seeing a new cold war developing, along the lines of the struggle against the Soviets. However, the situation is completely different; e.g., the Soviets did not hold US debt. And American businesses didn't depend on cheap Soviet labor to help US companies stay competitive in global markets. The Cold War was a pre-globalization struggle.

One might take a philosophical view about China's anti-democracy policy, given the interconnectedness of today's trade. After all, China remains heavily dependent on American help and trade. So in theory (so the argument goes), the Chinese are limited in how much they can work against the US.

And many in the West strive to put China's tyranny in a historical perspective. China's growing middle class is interpreted as a sign of progress (so the argument goes), which will eventually lead to liberalization of government policies.

Both arguments view China in a vacuum -- disconnected from their foreign policy and geostrategic aims. And they overlook the single most important factor in China's success story. To the extent that China a success, it has been carried there on the back of Western democracies. How much they've been carried is not understood by people who don't know of the huge role that the World Bank played in helping China -- a role that was pushed hard by the US government.

To their credit, the Chinese made much better use of the help than Russia and other FSU countries. But China's claims that their dictatorship is compatible with democratic capitalism, and that autocratic government is a key to success in many developing countries, are lies.

Yet it's just those lies that China has developed into an argument against democracy. It's an argument they are pushing everywhere in the world that they can.

So that is why I think of China as our Frankenstein. America did not make the Soviet enemy. To the extent that China is an enemy, that's our creation in large measure. As to how we're going to reprogram our creation -- got any suggestions?

If America's European allies showed a united front in criticizing China's support of dictatorships, that would cause China's leaders to review because they are very concerned about maintaining Face on the international stage. However, our allies can't even show a united front about Tehran's regime, which poses clear and present danger to Europe as well as America.

All the above is by way of saying that it's too early to ponder a tipping point for democracy in any region. Everywhere a situation might appear near to tipping, the Islamic radicals (backed by big money from oil despots) and China's government will race in and attempt to push back the tip.

Any pressure the US puts on the oil despots can be offset by China rushing in to make up the shortfall. For example, if the US put sanctions against Saudi Arabia or even cuts out all oil purchases, China will rush in and make the buys and support the Saudi regime. That's the way things are.

With regard to your question about the use of technology in the spreading of "freedom" in places like North Korea and China, I touched on the issue in Democracy Stage Show Kit and a rebuttal to criticism of the essay. (See the links under the Pundita sidebar category "Phony Democracy"). And I mentioned the issue in the Riots in China... essay, which was written after I received your letter.

When one thinks about it, there is no way to have anything but a 'stage show' national democratic government in many regions of the world. This is because rural peoples (often the vast majority of the population) don't have access to the means that allow democratic peoples in developed nations to participate in the voting/campaign process.

The World Bank has recognized the problem but in typical fashion the Bank has turned to the Juggernaut approach to problem-solving. So while the operation might be successful, it's open to question whether the patient will survive! I'll discuss that situation in tomorrow's post.

I was delighted to discover Rebecca MacKinnon's blog, RConversations. I note that I found her blog via a link in one of the essays you wrote for your web log. From what I've read, she is doing good work at reporting on the connection between democracy movements and media freedom. (* 1:20 PM - see the caveat, below)

A note about your kind comments: The blogosphere gods tend to inflict brain furballs -- or worse, Rugby -- on Pundita when she displays a puffy head, so generally I delete praise from letters I publish. However, I'm sure Simon will appreciate your thoughtful praise; I know I do. Cross-blogging is time consuming -- time being the most precious thing for serious bloggers (for those readers who don't blog). So the project, which spanned days, was -- well, a project, in addition to our routine blogging chores.

Until tomorrow, then.

* CAVEAT - 1:10 PM UPDATE
I will let the note about Rebecca MacKinnon stand, as a grim reminder to myself to carefully read a blog, at least for a several days, before providing an unqualified recommendation to Pundita readers. MacKinnon's latest post (June 22) reveals that she has gotten herself embroiled in the kind of argument that in an earlier century caused droves of Catholics to flee to the Protestant faith:

"I agree, China is better off -- and the future of democracy in China is better off -- thanks to the existence of Cisco routers in China. But to me, there is an important difference between selling routers to China and providing software services to China in general -- with the understanding that one can't control how the technology ultimately gets used -- and the sale of technology directly to Chinese government entities whose intentions are rather obvious."

This would be the same important difference as making a sharp distinction between the number of seraphim and cherubim that can be stuffed on the head of a pin. By what leap of blind faith does MacKinnon assume the future of democracy in China is better off, after her nine years of living in China and observing how "...jobs created by foreign trade and investment have vastly improved the lives of urban Chinese, helped create a nascent middle class, and helped millions of Chinese gain much greater control over their lives because they're no longer economically dependent on the government?"

Rebecca MacKinnon's muddled view, which sees a cause-and-effect relationship between growing affluence and embrace of democracy, only underscores my observation that China is America's Frankenstein.

This said, MacKinnon is indeed doing good work at reporting on the issue of media freedom in China and thus, with warnings and imprecations, I recommend her site as a source for raw data on the widening debate about China's suppression of many blogs.
4:30 PM UPDATE

(This essay should be subtitled Pretentious Report Titles are Catching. Don't be afraid.)

Note to reader: Featuring PINR on this blog should not be taken as agreement with all PINR reports or their POV.

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR)* or "Poor Person's Stratfor," as Pundita thinks of them (their reports are free!), has published a report titled, The Coming World Realignment.

I think it's closer to the truth that the report outlines the early steps to create a US foreign policy that while not ignoring NATO puts America first in US foreign policy. This means that US foreign relations policy has finally emerged from the Cold War period and its postoperative stage, which was still hyperfocused on Eastern Europe and in particular Russia.

In short, for American students of foreign policy, this report is the best news you've had so far this century. The report gathers mention of many trends that have been emerging in the post 9/11 era; it gives serious grounds for hope that the US administration and State are now striving to avoid the trap of the Cold War, which hyperfocused attention on the Soviet regions and looked at the rest of the world almost purely in terms of the Cold War.

The 9/11 attack threatened to hyperfocus attention on the Middle East. It is clear from the PINR report that we're seeing hope for a balanced view of the modern world emerging in the White House and the US Department of State.

It's all connected, these days. One can't hyperfocus on any region; one must focus on how all the regions interact in relation to the United States -- and how these interactions affect American defense and trade interests and standing in the world community.

And certainly, one can't hope to hang US strategic interests on global trade or an urge to merge with European Union interests -- or the interests of any regional trading bloc. We've lived and we've learned this lesson the hard way. Now the page is turned; a new chapter is being written in US history.

For their part, the Europeans have also lived and learned. A new chapter is being written in their history also. Pundita does not see the quarrels that have broken out in the wake of the "No!" votes as a crisis for Europe. I see the situation as a sign of emerging recognition in Europe that they tried to tried to base integration around the limitations in NATO.

Yet the concepts for EU integration, as codified in the EU Constitution, were based on a model that has been undergoing rapid revision in America's post-9/11 era. NATO itself is changing rapidly, reflecting the recalibrated, globalized view of American foreign policy.

Pundita readers can gain a clear picture of this aspect of Europe's situation by reading another somewhat pretentiously (and ominously) titled PINR report, 'An Assessment of the Franco-German Axis and the United States.

I should add that you shouldn't let the titles put you off; both reports are short and written in clear, unfusty language (reflecting perhaps, the demands of military and business readers who have no patience with ritual academic Policy Org writing).

The heart of the problem is alluded to in this passage, which will come as news to many American readers:

"...in the winter of 1995-96, Chirac failed to upgrade the Franco-American relationship because even if France accepted her reintegration into N.A.T.O.'s commandment, Washington didn't allow a European to become head of Allied Forces Southern Europe.

N.A.T.O., and not the Western European Union (as Paris hoped in the early '90s), is nowadays at the heart of the European security architecture, as can be read in the E.U. Constitutional Treaty, whereas a common European defense, although existing, only has limited, regional, projection power."

The limitations on Europe in the NATO chain of command point to the problem for Europe:

Without effective firepower behind it, foreign policy is not worth squat. The EU leaders were trying to build up the concept of a continental nation and continent-wide foreign policy around somebody else's military -- while at the same time circumventing the NATO elephant in their living room.

To boil it down, the EU leaders tried to leapfrog too many steps. So now they have to retrace and rethink -- based on the present, not on the world as it existed when the concepts underlying the EU Constitution were hammered out.

Now what, if anything, does all this have to do with the upcoming elections in Germany? Pundita suspects it has a lot to do with luck.

Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has taken a seeming gamble by calling for early elections, which pit him against Angela Merkel. Merkel is the new darling of the American Right because her views on government hearken to those expressed by Margaret Thatcher.

And Merkel is surely seen by the Bush administration as the best hope for restoring good diplomatic relations between the US and Germany. However, we shouldn't get our hopes up because Schröder is one of those enormously lucky politicians. He is also a very smart tactician who knows how to squeeze every iota of advantage from luck that comes his way.

He's got a lame duck government so it seems he was thinking that by calling early elections, he might maneuver Merkel into the role of Simon Legree; that would make his administration look good by comparison. Admittedly, a big gamble. Then a piece of luck came his way: the storm that's arisen over the "No!" votes!

Do you realize this will be the second time a storm has arisen on the European continent -- at just the moment when Schröder's fortunes are looking bleakest?
He pulled a rabbit out of the hat the last time because of his great handling of the crises that arose from horrifically bad weather in Germany. That allowed him to squeak through.

If he pulls it off again Pundita will nickname him Chancellor Houdini.

Pulling it off might translate to steering EU discussion about the Constitution into productive channels. So the runup to the German elections bears watching from this side of the Pond. For those new to the situation, or just wanting to brush up, start with the pithy Euractiv report, German elections in autumn: good for Lisbon agenda, bad for budget and Turkey?.

Next, I am putting you in the able hands of an American blogger, Marc Schulman at American Future :

"Dear Marc:
After reading your pieces on Merkel -- may I ask whether you will 'specialize' in following that election? If so, I'd like to note it to my readers. I know there are European blogs that talk about the upcoming election but I'd rather have an American perspective for my readers.

"Good Morning, Pundita.
Yes, I do plan on majoring in the German election, as it represents a potential turning point in Transatlantic relations and Franco-German relations (and, therefore, in the EU).

Here are the urls (chronologically) of three recent posts:

The Wall Street Journal notes how much Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Nicolas Sarkozy have in common [Pundita has omitted this post because WSJ is subscription only]:
What To Expect from Merkel (by guest blogger Karen White).
Merkel = Thatcher, by the editor of Germany's Handelsblatt."

Thank you, Marc.

Well, that is quite enough reading material for one day from Pundita!

* From their website: "The Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an independent organization that utilizes open source intelligence to provide conflict analysis services in the context of international relations. PINR approaches a subject based upon the powers and interests involved, leaving the moral judgments to the reader."
.

An alert reader ("Liz") just emailed a news report titled, Mexican president: Mexico building relations with Russia:

"Our countries have a lot in common. Both Mexico and Russia are creating new economic models and conducting similar economic and social reforms, while the development of their economies is driven by the energy sector," [Vicente Fox] said. ... "In foreign policy, our countries are advocating a multi-polar world and working jointly in this direction."

Liz supplied her editorial comment:

"Bozhe moi! Or, if you prefer (and you'll pardon my transliteration) --Odin sukim sin k drugo!"

Because the email was titled with the words I've quoted in the title of this post, Pundita will assume that "Bozhe moi" means -- well, the quote. As for the rest, I could try asking Ouija or just assume.

Pundita hopes she didn't give Presidents Putin and Fox ideas with her blogs on Mexico's corruption and mention of the profound parallels I noted between Russia and Mexico. However it came about, I'm glad someone else has noted that the two countries have much in common, such as entrenched vertical corruption in the government.

Well, it's not quite as ominous or sudden as it might seem. The Kremlin has been advocating Russia coming into our neck of the woods in a big way, ever since they got bent out of shape about the big US presence in their neighborhood. Tit for Tat Policy, I believe is the formal term.

But this is just why we are fortunate that the White House and our dear State Department have decided that one must take a whole-world approach when formulating foreign policy. See tomorrow's Pundita post for news on this stunning progression of events or Snail Mambo!, to show off Pundita's command of foreign language. Until tomorrow -- bozhe moi or skoal!

UPDATE: June 22
"Da, nyet, blini"

"Pundita, I thought you "nearly fell off [your] chair laughing" when you got my email because you understood the Russian. Okay, here is the translation:

Bozhe moi = My God

Odin sukim sin k drugo = One son of a bitch to another (or the other; depends on context)....

Skoal, indeed.
Liz"

Dear Liz:
I am afraid Pundita's Russian is rather limited. As for the cause of my merriment -- your reaction to the Multi-polar Era. Pundita can translate that into plain English: "The We're Trying to Get Around the Bush Democracy Doctrine and US Cleaning Up the UN Era."

Hatamash bakateli! (That's Hawaiian, I think, for skoal, although I doubt I spelled it right.)
.

Pundita is trying to figure out how to get to Iran as fast as possible! Tonight I learned from listening to Alireza Jafarzadeh* on the John Batchelor show that Iran's Supreme Leader, Aytollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, has a 100% success rate at election turnout prediction!

Pundita is not pulling your leg. For years now he's been predicting the exact voter turnout in Iran's elections, right down to the last fraction. He did it again for last week's presidential election. He predicted the voter turnout to be 62.7% and by gum it was 62.7% -- what are those chair scraping sounds? Hey, wait! I get first dibs on an audience with the Aytollah! I already have my winnings spent!

All right, if you want to be that way -- Jafarzadeh told Batchelor that the highest estimates of actual voter turnout, from uncensored reports from polling stations all across Iran, are about 10%.

Can we infer from the low turnout that President Bush's hard words about the 'unelection' inspired more Iranians to stay away from the polls than the regime in Tehran let on? I'd say no.

The inspiration came from an imprisoned Iranian reformer named Hashem Aghajari. In 2004 his wife managed to smuggle a letter from him out of the prison.

In the letter, he called on the nation to send a message to the ruling establishment by boycotting the polls.

"The sham election is the end of reforms within the establishment. The Iranian nation has learned now that there is no hope of a democratic change under the ruling system," Aghajari wrote in a letter from Evin prison, where he is serving a four-year term for questioning clerical rule.

Pundita doubts you would have read that news in the major European (or American) press; the above quote is from a report in the Taipei Times -- Taiwan a place that really knows what it is to struggle for freedom from despotism.

There had been considerable agonizing in Iran during the runup to this election about whether to heed Aghajari's call for boycott. The argument was that even if they boycotted, the Supreme Council would stuff the ballots anyhow to make it look to the outside world as if there was good voter turnout.

On the other hand -- to participate in a stage show, in which the election candidates and winner were pre-selected by the Supreme Council, would send a message of weak resolve to the regime. From the low election turnout, it seems the boycott faction won the debate.

President Bush spoke out in response to repeated fervent requests from many Iranian pro-democracy reformers who believe European governments, and the Chinese and Russian governments, are collaborating with the Iranian regime because of business ties with the regime. The reformers represent more than 80% of the Iranian people.

Bush went as far as diplomatic speech would allow to give a friendly warning to our dear allies and trading partners that it's really not nice to keep supporting a tyrannical regime made up of murderers. That was all the Iranian pro-democracy citizens were hoping for: that some government outside Iran -- any government -- would stand up and tell the world that the election was a sham.

That Bush spoke out surely gave a psychological boost to Iranians who had decided to boycott, but that can't be construed as meddling -- no matter how much the Tehran regime and the European press might try to spin it as such.

For more on the call for a boycott, read the full report in the Taipei Times.

As to who is going to win the runoff, let me race to the crystal ball and take a peek. I see...I see....I see that for some years Rafsanjani has had a warrant out for his arrest in Germany for the murder of Kurdish nationalists. That means he can't step in any EU country without landing in the slammer -- unless he steps on EU soil with the immunity accorded a presidential figure.

Well, the warranty expired in 1906 but crystal ball seems to be saying that once again Rafsanjani can stay at the Ritz. As to how he would get along with America's next Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton -- now that Pundita can predict with 100% accuracy!

* From the biography on the John Batchelor Show website:

Alireza Jafarzadeh is the president of Strategic Policy Consulting, Inc. He is also a FOX News Channel foreign affairs analyst. Alireza Jafarzadeh is a well-known authority in issues relating to terrorism, and Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq, Iran, and the Middle East; Iran's nuclear weapons program; and its internal political developments, including the anti-government demonstrations, the student movement, and human rights.

The international concerns about Iran's nuclear weapons program [had] largely arisen from Jafarzadeh's stunning revelations about [seven] major previously secret nuclear sites, including the sites in Natanz, Arak, Karaj, Ab-Ali, and Tehran.

Jafarzadeh revealed the existence of Natanz uranium enrichment facility, and Arak's heavy water facility in August 2002, Ab-Ali centrifuge testing facility near Tehran in February 2003, two additional nuclear sites near Karaj in May 2003, and two other new nuclear sites in Kolahdouz military complex in Tehran, and Ardekan in July 2003.

He unveiled the details of Iran's development of bio-weapons in May 2003, and had previously provided valuable information about the Shahab-3 medium range missile. On April 27, 2004, Jafarzadeh revealed information that Iran, using some 400 nuclear experts, is now running a secret nuclear weapons program supervised by the military and the Supreme Leader parallel to their overt nuclear energy program. Jafarzadeh had previously unveiled in March, a secret meeting held earlier by Iran's senior officials where they decided to speed up their nuclear weapons program, while faking cooperation with the IAEA.

He first disclosed the details of Iran's involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1997, and the Jewish Community Center bombing in Argentina in 1993.

Jafarzadeh has lectured in Georgetown University, University of Michigan, and National War College, and has been a frequent speaker at briefings, hearings and luncheons at the US Congress, the United Nations, Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and the Morning Newsmaker Program at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

Prior to becoming a contributor for FOX News Channel, and until August 2003, Jafarzadeh acted for a dozen years as the chief congressional liaison and media spokesperson for the US representative office of Iran's parliament in exile, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

Jafarzadeh earned his Bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, and his Master's degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas, in Austin.

.

June 21 Update: A note from Simon, after his return from travel, contains his response to this post: "Thank you for the final reply. I agree with your conclusion wholeheartedly. Look forward to repeating the exercise in the future."

(For readers just joining the discussion I've posted a 'file' with links to the China dialogues I reference in this essay. See the following entry.)

It's coming time to wrap up the Simon World-Pundita dialogues on China. Simon and I began our dialogue during a highly contradictory moment in US policy toward China -- "contradictory" long the operative description for US relations with China:

On the one hand several US congressionals were strenuously calling for a much tougher US approach to China's currency peg to the US dollar, China's textile exports, and China's foot-dragging on human rights issues. And an article in Atlantic Monthly and the Pentagon's release of their annual assessment of China's military caused many to wonder if America was starting down the road of a new cold war.

On the other hand, the US government was calling for China to step up to the plate in their role as the US-designated lead negotiator for the Six Party Talks -- a plum role that rightfully should have gone to a US ally in the talks, South Korea.

All this flurry of news about China, which captured many headlines starting in late May, could be taken as a coda to Fareed Zakaria's widely read May 9 cover story for Newsweek magazine. The report (also featured on MSNBC online), titled Does the Future belong to China? could have been subtitled, Mix Confucianism, discipline, communist central planning and dictatorship and presto! a raving success story!"

Yet for all its inaccuracies, evasions and airy dismissal of China's problems with the wave of one sentence, the Newsweek story played back what the US Department of State, the mainstream media and the American investor class had long preferred to hear about China: a comforting myth. China was really too busy making money, pulling itself up by the bootstraps, to be a serious threat to America or to derail economically.

It was against this backdrop of clashing and incomplete views on today's China that Simon and I launched discussion with his first question, "Do you think America's China policy is coherent?"

Simon (an Australian) brought to the discussion his background in economics and a clear-eyed view of China from living and working in Hong Kong for years. My contribution was that of a Washingtonian with a reasonably good knowledge of US foreign policy and the impact of Western development policies on China.

Both sides in the discussion could claim receiving an education by the time the dialogues wound up. The observation from Simon I left unanswered for later this week (after he returns from travel and has time to clear through the pile on his desk) extends far beyond China and goes to the heart of foreign relations for America and all the developed countries:

"I think the problem with your argument is it mixes up notions of multilateralism with notions of a multipolar world."

Pundita is not confused about the two concepts, which doesn't mean my arguments about such don't require tightening up. The problem is that the point Simon brings out is really not an issue in America or anywhere in the developed world -- not as a distinct topic for debate. Yet the issue is central to our time; certainly Bush's preemption and democracy doctrines, and the uproar from many regions in the globe in response, imply this.

One cannot hope to formulate coherent foreign policy for this era without resolving the inherent conflict between an 'enlightened' or liberal-minded multilateralism and the power of regional blocs. Jacques Chirac and other EU leaders who pushed hard for the ratification of the EU Constitution have learned this the hard way. Now they are forced to stop and grapple with the issue.

Perhaps I might have made all this clearer by providing a link to the entire essay called Two Very Different Views of the World instead of quoting a few passages from it in the Never Assume answer to Simon.

The Two Views essay was actually the first I wrote for this blog, even though I published it second. And for several months the essay was linked at the very top of the Pundita sidebar under the heading, The Central Debate.

However, the essay only makes a start at organizing discussion about the clash between multilateralism and multi-polarity. I guess I was waiting for those with vast scholarship to take up the burden of analysis and discussion. Yet whatever scholarly discussion exists on the topic has not emerged in the USA as a public debate. The issue has been drowned out by bitter quarrels between the Left and the Right, Hawks and Doves, and opposing factions in the Republican Party about domestic concerns and the US occupation of Iraq.

Well, Simon's critique has prodded me to another attempt to discuss the issue. For now, I think the two most important observations to emerge from the China dialogues are this:

China's present situation is very complex, and present US policy has ignored the complexity. This had led the US to a passive-aggressive relationship with China.

This in turn helped Beijing (and numerous Western policy analysts) avoid confronting a stark reality: to the extent that China has become successful, they have been carried to success on the back of Western democracies.

So it is now time for American policymakers to gain a clear-eyed view of China -- one that avoids the extremes of demonizing Beijing on the one hand and overlooking the threat that a dictatorship ruling over a large nation poses to civilization, on the other.
.

Thanks to Simon of Simon World for dedicating the time to the dialogues.

(In order of publication)

Pundita
Ducking Reality

China and rascal rabbit of life's surprises

Say, whatever happened to those one billion consumers?

China and the world: Yes and back again

Simon replies to Yes and back again

Clairol joins with barbarian hordes...

History lesson from Dave Schuler, Pundita's reponse
Riots in today's China...

Simon
Collection of Simon's parts of the dialogue

Joe Katzman of Winds of Change weighs in
The Bush Doctrine as a Global Development Policy
.

Pundita is proud to announce that her foreign policy team has come up with a creative way to resolve the diplomatic impasse between the United States and North Korea but first some background about the way things work in Pundita-land.

Getting the nocturnal and diurnal members of the team together for a meeting is never easy but in any case I see very little of them during this time of year. Yet at odd times during the late Spring, and as if by a mysterious prearranged signal, they gather in the garage in various stages of wakefulness. This is in a gesture of guilt about abandoning Pundita to wrestle with weighty policy matters on her own.

On these occasions I race to the grocery store to buy lemon meringue pie and raw shrimp for the gathering. This is to show I appreciate guilty gestures. The raccoon enjoys the shrimp. The crows and squirrel really don't have a pastry preference but the possum is fond of lemony sweets.

That is how we came to discuss the news about Kim Jong-il. In case you haven't heard he is toying with the idea of addressing President Bush as "His Excellency" in return for a little respect.

I note that Asian cultural sensitivities about what constitutes proper respect have become quite the issue, with Seoul turning green at the mention of John Bolton's name and literally cringing with dismay every time a member of the Bush administration calls Kim a tyrant.

It seems okay for Asians to call each other insulting names; consider China's words for Japan these days. But as Henry Kissinger suggested in a recent op-ed piece for the International Herald Tribune, Asian memories of Western imperialism seem to shade Asian perceptions of what constitutes diplomatic behavior.

"America needs to understand that a hectoring tone evokes in China memories of imperialist condescension and is not appropriate in dealing with a country that has managed 4,000 years of uninterrupted self-government. "

Of course Kissinger's detractors will snort that he has a vested interest in calling for more respect. I think it's just that he spends a lot of time in China these days. He is wanted in a number of countries for questioning about various decisions while he was US Secretary of State. So China is perhaps one of the few places outside the United States that Kissinger -- Doctor Kissinger, to show proper respect -- is certain he can visit as a hero and not get served with a subpoena.

That might also explain Doctor Kissinger's generous recollection of China's history of self government.

But back to Kim Jong-il. The team knows quite a bit about him; I've shown them photographs and read them intelligence reports and news items. They don't like him.

"Why," asked the possum on one occasion, "would a chieftain force his people to eat each other?"

So they are on President Bush's side in this matter and defend his hard words about Kim and refusal to meet with him. Thus, it took Pundita some explaining to convey that the Bush administration should at least put on a show of cooperation at this delicate time.

The team did better with understanding Kim's call for more respectful language from the United States; as with all wild animals they are keenly attuned to the survival angle in attempts to preserve Face.

"There you have it," I finished. "If Bush calls Kim by a respectful name, Bush will betray his principles. If Kim does not receive more respectful language, he could refuse to return to negotiations."

I left them to ponder the impasse while I went to open a can of lychee nuts for the late arrivals, the beaver and falcon. I returned to find the team looking pleased with themselves. The squirrel hopped onto the conference table, which I've asked him several times not to do, and announced the result of deliberations.

"Chief Bush should call Chief Kim a nice name and a bad name."

Update, June 19: Simon World linklet for today carries a disturbing report from Xinhua news agency (via China Daily) that throws more light on the growing unrest across China:

China's income gap widened in the first quarter of the year, with 10 percent of the nation's richest people enjoying 45 percent of the country's wealth, state press reports said. China's poorest 10 percent had only 1.4 percent of the nation's wealth, the Xinhua news agency reported, citing a recent survey by the National Bureau of Statistics. ...

In order to build a modern "well off" society, China hopes to attain an urbanization rate of 50 percent by 2020, which means finding jobs and living space in cities for hundreds of millions of people.

"The income gap issue will not become smaller in the next 10 years, but probably will increasingly widen," Fan Gang, a leading economist at the National Economic Research Institute of China told Xinhua. "When discussing the issue of income distribution, the thing that everyone hates most is corruption, this is unfair."

From the reports coming out of China about the riots, Pundita ventures that corruption shares the top of the list with rage about government-sponsored/tolerated thuggery meant to drive Chinese poor off their land. Perhaps Fan Gang's comment reveals an ulterior motive for Beijing's refusal to deal with Gangster Capitalism. Click on the Simon World link to access the rest of the China Daily story, which is worth the read.
* * * * * *
Simon is on travel so I am delaying the last installment of the China dialogues until Monday or Tuesday. But we are still on the China page, thanks to Dave Schuler's response to yesterday's Clairol post.

Dear Pundita:
Your characterization of traditional Chinese society isn't quite accurate: there were parallel systems. Like much of the world every village had a village headman on the one hand and the central bureaucracy sent out their own representatives on the other.

Theoretically becoming one of these bureaucrats was a very egalitarian matter: any peasant's son who passed the civil service examination could become one. In practice (not unlike the SAT's here) the rich could hire tutors, etc., so it wasn't quite a meritocracy.

So there was a local semi-democratic government and a parallel highly centralized, hierarchical, and bureaucratic central government.
Dave Schuler in Chicago"

Dear Dave:
Thank you for the history lesson. Pundita's memory of Chinese dynasties is as about as clear as her memory of Indian, Persian and Egyptian ones. My clearest memory of dynastic histories is encapsulated in a Monty Python skit--I think it was Monty Python; British comedic dynasties also run together in my mind.

Anyhow, the skit showed Italian peasants just starting to harvest when Nazi tanks roll across the field, flattening the harvest. Cut to the same peasants starting on another harvest; the Allied tanks roll in from the opposite direction, flattening the harvest.

Civil service meritocracy, semi-democratic government -- that's the Ming Dynasty, isn't? Pundita always thinks of the Ming as the "1066" of Chinese history. Anyhow, there was a period in Chinese history of independent peasant landowners, which probably coincidences with the height of the situations you're talking about. But if peasants wrote the history of civilization, much of it would come down to the skit I recounted.

This said, your points are well taken. Yes, there were parallel systems, which waxed and waned according to events largely outside the control of peasants except when they got really ticked off and staged rebellions.

What we're seeing today in China is a growing rebellion among the rural peoples. This could spell bad news for the ruling party and foreign companies using China as a plantation.

Beijing hasn't released figures since 2003 on the number of yearly riots and with good reason; riots are breaking out all over the country. The 2003 figure was 58,000. That figure is surely a drop in the bucket next to what's going on today, which is a ruthless land grab that the peasants are increasingly fighting.

The story in China would be familiar to students of America's Robber Baron history phase. Corporations that want to build a plant and officials who want to clear land for government projects are using thuggery to eject the people from the land. The cops are paid not to intervene. So the people have no choice but to pick up arms. There's a lot of sympathy building in China for the ones who fight back, so Beijing is increasingly reluctant to punish the peasants who skirmish.

That puts Beijing in a bind. They want to continue bending over backward to accommodate foreign investors, but they're staring down the barrel of insurrection. Of course Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri and his kindred of kind are making hay from the situation in Muslim regions of China.

Al Qaeda isn't deterred by a million-man army. They pussyfoot around and stoke trouble then lay low, when the military comes near. So now Beijing is really in a pickle.

The US government keeps telling Beijing, "Introduce democracy," which is a valve for blowing off a huge head of steam. But Beijing is the Wise Man; they know it all. In their book there's nothing that sticking to Central Planning can't solve. So their way of dealing with snowballing unrest has been to attempt to put a lid on reality, in the manner of Elmer Fudd shooting at Bugs Bunny.

However, the lid has blown off (scroll down the Sudan Watch page to find the two reports, one of which I quote here):

BBC news reported on a rare video footage shown on UK Channel 4 news the previous night. The film was shot in China by a resident with a digital camera. It was then handed to a reporter from the Washington Post. ...

The video footage showed a shocking riot in China not far from Beijing. To clear land and make way for a power plant, peasant farmers were set upon and beaten by a marauding gang of thugs hired by local officials to drive the farmers from land they had squatted on.

According to the BBC report from Beijing by Daniel Griffiths, the eviction of local people to make way for new developments is becoming one of China's sharpest social issues. Re the video, he said the pictures showed local farmers fighting a pitched battle with dozens of unknown men wearing camouflage gear and construction helmets. Hunting rifles and clubs were used in the bloody clashes in the northern village of Shenyou. Chinese state media said that the residents had been resisting the takeover of their property by an electricity company which wants to build a power plant there.

According to both reports, violent disputes like this one are common in China, where competition for useable land is fierce.

Such land grabs are not limited to China; they are common in India, although they are (to my knowledge) no longer sponsored by the central government. They are common just about everywhere in the less developed countries where entitlement to land is not legally established. Indeed, that's why Pundita has viewed the Darfur democide with deep suspicion--as I came to view the shenanigans in the Ukraine election with suspicion.

Granted it's no more than a suspicion but nine times out of ten, it seems, a land grab is at the bottom of many of today's conflicts. This would include much violent crime in underdeveloped countries where there's little or no history of property rights as we know them in the West.

When Westerners think of democracy they tend not to realize that they're thinking of a matrix of situations. This would include legal property rights, legal protection for contracts, and a judicial system for enforcing the legalities that is not run by bribes.

The IMF and the World Bank recognize this situation, but the recognition came late in the day. And it's come in piecemeal fashion. That's why I harp on the need for modeling and a systems approach to implementing democracy programs. Development planners get one piece of the puzzle; e.g., black markets vampire the economy. So far, so good. But if they institute reforms to cut out the black market without taking into consideration how black markets function as a system, you end up with a nightmare:

The little guy now has to pay taxes on top of the payoffs he made to mobsters during his black market business days. This is because there is no golden handshake, no pension, no social security for mobsters. If the black market vaporizes due to government fiat the gangsters aren't going to let their wife and kids starve.

Society is a complex interlocked system, if you will. Unless you study the matrix trying to alter one part of it by government fiat returns disaster. The attempts to solve problems in piecemeal fashion that flagrantly ignore other aspects of the matrix set in motion widescale social unrest. Then you see a wholesale rejection of democracy. This has been happening in 'Latin' America.

Beijing is up against another part of the matrix--well, all parts, really, but right now they're caught in a vise with regard to the land-clearing. On the one hand, they have to keep clearing land for industrial projects to keep up foreign investments and make China a favored destination for offshoring.

On the other hand, America's Robber Barons weren't operating in a time of portable nukes and megapopulations. Governments can no longer displace vast numbers of people and not expect a severe penalty, which can include the government toppling.

What's the way out of the vise? Trust that there's enough intelligence among the people to work out their own solutions in democratic fashion. Which returns us to the points you brought out. There have been times in China's history when more decision-making power resided among the peasants; those times have been marked by prosperity and relative peace. When Mao saw the Revolution had gone bad, he tried a disastrous means of bringing in a form of democracy; that cleared the path for the Mandarin types to gain control of China and consolidate power in Beijing. And here we are today.

People aren't stupid; they know that industrialization means the need for industry to have land, which equates to jobs, down the line. So what they will settle for is reasonably fair compensation of some kind.

However, rage is building among China's peasants against Western corporations. Beijing is trying to divert the rage by directing it at Japan but that's not going to work. Meanwhile, China's quest for energy is taking them into the same kind of situation that Western businesses are facing in underdeveloped countries. China's quest for gas and oil now makes them a big player in African countries, including Sudan and Chad. They just beat out a Canadian company for a concession there.

Indeed, if you scroll down the latest Sudan Watch list of all their current news items, you'll have a good idea of what's on the agenda for the G8 meeting at Gleneagles.

Note that George Soros is taking up the call for energy companies to be transparent. Why does that not surprise Pundita, now that Russian oil is back under control of the state?

Thus, the outline of the early 21st Century takes shape.
.

For the full text of Simon's reply to yesterday's post, see Simon replies to Yes and Back Again . Because his reply raises several important points, this post will be a two-parter. Here, I respond to his first comments:

Simon observes:
You say Governments better listen, but in cases such as China there are two problems: they don't want to listen and they don't have the mechanisms for listening. China has never had a system of feedback from "the people" -- if there was an issue, the only form of redress would be to take a petition to Beijing and try and see the right person (and this continues today). ...

Pundita replies
They don't have a system for feedback because that's the way the villagers have always wanted it. However, it's closer to the truth to say that China does not have a legally-mandated system for the government to receive feedback. But China's villagers have a very effective informal system of providing feedback to their government. I'll dub it the Elizabeth Taylor method of communication, after an incident that occurred in Taylor's trailer dressing room on the movie set of Cleopatra:

A minion connected with the film company handed Taylor a stack of publicity photos of her and asked whether she found them acceptable. After glancing through them Liz picked up a pair of scissors lying on her dressing table, cut the photos to ribbons, then wordlessly returned to her make-up.

That act should not be seen as the posturing of a prima donna. After spending virtually all her life in the movie business--an industry dominated during that era by men whose ears were not trained to listen to females in business--Elizabeth Taylor had learned to make her points unequivocally clear.

The same holds true for Chinese villagers, who have a tradition stretching across thousands of years of living under rigidly centralized authoritarian government. The less they see of the government in their village, the happier they are. This is because they know if the government shows up, it can't be to help them. The government wants something--to take their crops away, their daughters away, their sons away, or to kick them off the land, or squeeze more taxes out of them.

They know it's never, "Hi, how are you? Just stopped by to see how you're doing." And even if they just stop by, the villagers know it's a snooping mission. They've known all this for thousands of years. So they preferred to go petition the emperor, rather than see the emperor's civil servants come to their village. This view has outlasted the reign of China's emperors. Of course this means the villagers don't get any real representation but they have a way of making their most serious grievances known.

For example, if the tax collectors get overzealous, the villagers waylay them on the road and beat them up or kill them. If Beijing refuses to issue an epidemic alert, the villagers rip up the railroad tracks and threaten to shoot any outsider who comes near.

If all this sounds vaguely familiar to American readers with a long memory about the rural, remote southern regions of the United States in decades past, well sure. Villagers are villagers. Once you've lived in a rural village that's been around for centuries and had to deal with a powerful central government, you can walk into a similar village anywhere in the world and understand the people.

A certain mindset develops, and it's really the mindset that China's educated elite must deal with today, if China is to overcome vast problems. But they don't want to deal with it because of the long tradition of Chinese central government being scared of the villagers. They don't want to rile them, any more than they have to.

Incidentally Beijing is well informed about how things are going in remote areas of China. Or perhaps it's closer to the truth to say that the military is well informed. Most of the military comes from those villages so the armed forces get an earful and report back. I'm just guessing here but maybe the PLA plays the intel card against the CCP.

In any case, we're looking at what Americans with a background in psychology would define as a co-dependent relationship: the villagers and the central government support each other's entrenched self-destructive patterns of behavior.

So while it's true that China has 700,000 poor oppressed peasants, an equally important truth is that those poor peasants have eked out a form of power, which they zealously protect. Even at the cost of their betterment.

If you find their reasoning hard to follow, a rough analogy would be the bitter opposition that many American females mounted against the women's liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Those females knew they were second class citizens. But historically females had made a kind of power out of their weakness in society, which many were unwilling to trade for the uncharted.

That's roughly the position of China's peasants today. That explains why it's the villagers--the peasants--who are the biggest supporters of Beijing's authoritarian rule. This is another point that is hard for moderns in a highly urbanized democracy to grasp, so I'll unpack this point a bit:

The rise of professional standing armies--full time armies attached to a ruler--allowed rulers without any conscience to wiggle out of their historical deal with the peasants. The deal was that the peasants paid an arm and a leg in taxes of some kind, in exchange for military protection when they needed it. Watch Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai film, which is widely available in the West, if you want to understand this part of the story.

Once the army wasn't mustered as needed--once it became a fixture--the peasants couldn't very well demand their taxes back, when the ruler didn't bother to send protection from brigands and blood feuds. The ruler could use the professional army to burn down the village, if the villagers complained about the ruler's poor job performance.

However, in regions that saw constant threats of foreign invasions, the villagers put up with the situation because they knew the standing army would go after the outsiders. The same situation exists today in China, which is bordered by 14 different countries. There's not one of those countries that Han Chinese don't consider to be a bunch of barbarians.

So while the villagers have long lists of complaints about Beijing, they are the most conservative minded among the Chinese when it comes to foreign policy. They have a simple policy demand of the central government: make sure the barbarians don't overrun us. As Wikipedia puts it:

China remains in control and has maintained repressive policies against groups which it feels are threats, such as Falun Gong and the separatist movement in Tibet. Supporters of these policies, who tend to be the majority of rural Chinese people and a smaller majority of urban Chinese people, as well as a minority of observers, claim that these policies safeguard stability in a society that is torn apart by class differences and rivalries, has no tradition of civil participation, and limited rule of law.

Opponents of these policies, who tend to be a minority of Chinese people, most Chinese dissidents living abroad, many people from Hong Kong or Taiwan, ethnic minorities like Tibetans, and most Westerners, claim that these policies severely violate norms of human rights that the international community recognizes, and further claim that this results in a police state, which creates an atmosphere of fear and ignorance.

It is the Falun Gong's international support and network of connections that the rural Chinese most fear about the group. The same with the Free Tibet movement.

It is the villagers' fear of outside forces that gives impetus to many of Beijing's weirdest edicts, such as the 'suggestion' that television news anchors not dye their hair any color but black.

This came about because the villagers got bent out of shape when they saw Chinese blondes and redheads reading them the nightly news. First the news anchors, then all China. Then soon the villages would be overrun with barbarians and the villagers wouldn't be able to tell the difference until they were killed in their sleep by Swedes and Irish.

From all the above I hope it's clear that Westerners tend to overlay their view of oppression on China's situation. Thus, Beijing's government emerges as the Bogeyman and China's poor peasants as the victim.

The situation is more complex than that. At the same time, the complexity makes the outlook for a democracy movement in China more hopeful than many Western observers assume. The task is twofold:

The civilian and military leadership need to work at convincing the villagers that it's un-Chinese to be so backward and paranoid in one's thinking.

The leadership needs to assure the villagers that by getting more involved with their central government, this won't equate to the village being overrun with snoops and revenuers.

Installing electronic voting machines and 'town halls' could be a big help; this way the villagers could vote without government minders swarming all over the village, snooping and micromanaging the voting process.

We're not looking for perfection here, or even a mature liberal democracy. Beijing managed to sell the idea of a free market zone without mentioning the word 'capitalism.' They can do the same with the basics of democracy.

What they can't do is keep claiming that China's huge population puts democracy out of the question--not if they want to keep credibility with China's burgeoning professional class, which is coming into greater contact with Indians.

I see this post is longer than I had intended. Yet I think the foray into history and village life has value beyond understanding China's situation. Since the end of World War Two, much well-intentioned American foreign policy has poured uncounted billions of dollars into many wrong projects, supported many wrong types of politicians, and in general repeatedly failed to grasp many situations in the least developed countries.

This would include China, even though China has been removed from the LDC list. But if the American and West European governments had really understood China's villagers when they decided to normalize relations with China, China might be a democracy today, albeit closer to the Singapore model than the Western one.

Americans who come to Washington to serve in government, including the foreign service, can't imagine what village life is like in the old-world countries--places where people have had to endure thousands of years of living under imperial rule. "A creepy form of European socialism," as one scholar put it, or Soviet/Mao style communism, wasn't much of a step up.

Until tomorrow then, when I will take up with the second part of Simon's letter.
.

9:15 AM update: Simon has replied at some length to today's post and with some strong disagreements. For clarity's sake I have posted his reply underneath this one by turning the eBlogger clock back a few minutes. Pundita will respond in tomorrow's post, which will (at least for a time) bring the China Dialogues to a close.

In a second post yesterday (Never Assume) I published Simon's reply to my essay on China and democracy and my clarifications on points he made about the essay. Here, I republish the meat of his reply:

"Democracy is not just about voting; it also requires checks and balances; independent, free and strong institutions (courts, press etc.); rule of law (in both enforcement and legislation by popular acclaim rather than decree); and respect of private property rights.

"If we were to chart countries on these yardsticks you'll find China is currently a mess, with the CCP trying to restrict the first two while implementing the second two. Are they compatible? No. That's the true contradiction at the heart of China. But is it sustainable? I fear it is for far longer than most would suspect."

Now I'll repeat the question from Simon that I quoted in the first post yesterday:

: "...are we witnessing a gradual emergence of an effectively liberal capitalist democracy empire, primarily directed and led by the US?"

My answer is, "It depends on how many governments give up trying to out-talk reality and how fast they give it up."

The Bush Doctrine is a wonderful thing, but it came a little late in the day for humanity. This decade should be called, "Now you tell us?" As example, recently the head of Iranian security announced that the entire government, and in fact everybody in Tehran, needed to be transferred to the city of Isfahan.

Why? Well, because Tehran is built on or right next to a major fault line. Iran is Earthquake Alley anyhow, and Iran is overdue for the Big One. Nope, the buildings are not earthquake proof and in fact they are an example of what could be called shoddy construction. Crooked procurement specialists, crooked contractors, substandard building methods and materials.

To get down to it, the projected number of people to die in an earthquake striking Tehran is 700,000.

Now if you're sitting in China can this affect you? Yes, given China's dependence on oil trade with Iran or at least their heavy investment in Iran's oil business. It's all connected, these days.

Another item: the Middle East is running out of drinking water. The population leapfrogged from 75 million to 300 million. They need something like eight trillion gallons of drinking water a day, and the expense of petroleum is putting massive-scale desalination of sea water out of the question. (The desalination techniques depend on petroleum for their energy.)

It's now a little late in the day to be tackling the problem. And many Arab governments are broke. When you ask the ones with oil wealth what happened to all the oil revenue--well, it's not there.

Another example: The sands of the Gobi desert are chewing up vast tracts of China. When you ask Beijing why they didn't say this was a problem sooner--well, they didn't.

I don't mean to single out the Middle East or China. Everywhere you look these days, governments are clearing their throat and announcing that they have a problem--one they should have mentioned about a decade ago.

Another example: by now Western European governments have noticed that their countries are overrun with millions of illiterate Arabs and Africans who don't speak a European language and who really resent cleaning toilets and emptying garbage for a living.

And there is the 10,000 pound gorilla. I received a letter in response to my recent mention of H5N1; the writer referred to the possibility of a pandemic. I didn't have the heart to reply that it would be a statistical anomaly if there is not a pandemic. In other words, it will be a miracle if the human race dodges this bullet.

How long have we got? Two hours, tomorrow, next year, five years, fifteen minutes from now. And no, a vaccine won't come in time to avert chaos. The strain will be very lethal by all projections--fast killer. And even once the vaccine is developed, the task will be getting it around the globe.

Now we like to think that we're not looking at a Perfect Storm--that a score of disasters will strike nicely spaced apart, giving us time to recover before we have to face the next one. But of course we don't know how events will stack. Yet one thing can be known for certain: the more people who are engaged in their governing process, the more effectively responses to disaster and entrenched societal problems will be mustered.

So Simon tells me that Beijing thinks they can keep the lid on reality for longer than anyone can imagine. For some reason which strains my knowledge of China's history, the Chinese have developed a habit of thinking they can make reality go away by renaming it. Don't call it a labor camp; term it a "reeducation" camp and name it Bluebird of Happiness.

The problem here is that Nature and the intersection of human events don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese. So this presents a problem, if you're trying to talk a galloping desert into being something it isn't.

Simon, I hope you get my drift, if you'll pardon the expression. Sensible Chinese all over the planet must find some way to talk Beijing into letting go of the notion that if 700,000 peasants will only show enough patience, Beijing can Beat the Devil--or Sighing Wind in Pines, if one prefers it that way.

Failure to convince Beijing is not an option. Make it happen, by any which way. How? Directness, as the falcon member of my team is fond of saying, is the best policy. Beijing can put it to the people: "We need to get more of you involved in government. Now we can play this two ways. You can go crazy and crash the country, or you can figure out how to do this in orderly fashion."

But first, some background in the Bush Doctrine is required if one wants to talk sense into Beijing. So let's take a look at where we've come from, and where we are now.

Paul Wolfowitz and Natan Sharansky did not so much influence George W. Bush's thinking as help him articulate it at the level of a doctrine. In 2004 the anonymous Belmont Club blogger wrote an essay, Pro and Contra, which for the first time analyzed the Jacques Chirac or 'Brussels' school of geopolitics against the emerging school represented by the ideas of Sharansky, Bush and Wolfowitz. In two paragraphs, the blogger accomplished what no one (to my knowledge) had managed to do:

He brought the central flaw of the era of globalization into focus and showed that it was cutting civilization off at the knees. Here are the key passages:

History may remember Jacques Chirac as one of the most prolific institution builders of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The European Union and the United Nations are but some of the multilateral projects he sought to strengthen in the belief they would serve as a prototype for the future ordering of the world.

Wolfowitz's vision seems altogether more complex. He seems unwilling to speak of institutions outside the context of empowerment, as if to speak of instruments of governance without freedoms was tantamount to prescribing tyranny. Their difference of opinion may be rooted, not so much in an argument over bureaucratic arrangements, but in their view of the nature of man himself.

". . .as if to speak of instruments of governance without freedoms is tantamount to prescribing tyranny."

With those words the writer nails the essence of the argument. If modern civilization is built on the concept of an alliance of cooperative nations, tyranny can easily present itself as on equal footing with democracy, merely by making an appearance of cooperation!

That is exactly what happened over the course of the post-World War Two era. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations raised up in the manner of a Phoenix to guide the world out of the ruins of a catastrophic global war.

The new world order would be built not on trade, but on managed trade, on the principles of economics and sound banking practices applied to a system of international cooperation. Then along came the Cold War, and the realities of governments led by despots who wanted to join the new order, at the level of trade, but did not want to share power with the people they ruled.

Let's see where all this was headed on the morning of September 11, 2001. The Belmont Club blogger quotes Chirac as arguing for a new world order based on multi-polarity:

That of an order based on respect for international law and the empowerment of the world's new poles by fully and wholly involving them in the decision-making mechanisms.

"Only this path," [Chirac] added, "is likely to establish a stable, legitimate and accepted order in the long run."

The new "poles" [Chirac] spoke of are the emerging regional powers of the new century, including Europe, China, India and Brazil. . .

"It is by recognising the new reality of a multi-polar and interdependent world that we will succeed in building a sounder and fairer international order. This is why we must work together to revive multilateralism, a multilateralism based on a reformed and strengthened United Nations."

With those words, Chirac neatly articulates the ideas that give legitimacy to tyrannies in the modern era. The multi-polar order Chirac envisions is built on regional trading powers, not on the concept of an advanced civilization; i.e., one that does not govern by oppression.

Standing in the dust that had been the World Trade Center, George W. Bush grasped that there is an unacceptably high cost attached to putting oppressive regimes on the same footing as democracies for the sake of international cooperation.

Thus, through a national tragedy, the most powerful man in the world, as the BBC once described him, found himself in an odd kind of agreement with the very protesters who hop up and down outside the G8 and IMF-World Bank annual meetings.

Mr Bush can't be described as anti-globalist, but the leader of the world's lone superpower nation was forced to grapple with the central complaint of the anti-globalists: to attempt to base civilization on world trade leads to a dystopia. Yet to attempt to base civilization on anything else, in the era when multitudes of widely varying cultures must interact with each other in reasonably civilized fashion, raises the question: if not on the foundation of trade, then what?

Whether one agrees with him or not, Bush named "freedom from oppression" as the foundation.

One thing that immediately derived from the Bush Doctrine is that scholars, philosophers, and wonks the world over went to Seventh Heaven at the thought of all the questions the doctrine raises. And even despots--unused to arguing about the nature of Man in order to justify their existence--have been forced to a philosophical bent. This, in the attempt to defend their right to rule with an iron fist.

Debates continue to rage over whether Bush is right and whether the United States should export democracy--genuine democracy. And if so, how? To what lengths should the American government go to implement Bush's idea of the right course for civilization?

Pundita has remained pretty much aloof from the debates. This is because I approach the Bush Doctrine with knowledge of a trend that has been gathering for years in development policy circles. The trend has been to acknowledge the failure of international organizations to implement good government in less developed countries. This includes the tacit recognition that despotic regimes make bad government. But the hands of the organizations have been tied because their charters prevent them from interfering (directly) in a nation's political course.

Thus, although they don't generally admit it before a microphone, the Bush Doctrine is an idea whose time has come. However, there are huge questions about implementation, as the debates indicate. The course seems set to use a combination carrot and stick approach, and encourage governments to implement democracy reforms within a "try your best" margin: give indication of how you will reform the judicial system, deal with corruption, do a better job of collecting taxes, encourage more freedom of expression, and so on.

It's going to be slow work with many setbacks, but there will be a snowball effect at some point. One of the biggest problems with instituting reforms is that often nobody wants to try, unless everyone is trying. That's because if you go after corruption in one country, the gangs simply move next door. If you agree to fair elections, a neighboring enemy country will send in people to stuff the ballot boxes, or terror armies will sweep the polls.

Yet if everyone sees everyone else more or less on the same page, this gives impetus for everyone in a region to try harder with reforms.

In short, once people put their mind to something and work at it, progress happens. But this is a long journey, and different cultures must join it in their own way. What are the roadblocks? Natural disasters, and the sheer volume of problems that built over the course of bad government in so many countries.

Which returns me to the need for sensible people everywhere to start talking as much sense as possible to their government, including the one in Beijing. What's important is not the word 'democracy;' what's important are the ideas behind it, and the truth that democracy makes for the best form of government in the age of megapopulations. So the task is to find a way to translate the same universal ideas which Bush sketched into one's own language and cultural referents.

Our parents' generation got us this far. They did the best they could. Now it's our turn to keep the human race lurching along. This time around, we need all hands on deck. There's no use bemoaning the shipwrecks of bad government. One must take the position that to be human is to err -- but work fast, very fast, to correct the most glaring errors.

How much time have we got? I am reminded of a nursery rhyme:

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score and ten
Can you get there by candlelight?
Yes and back again

Time is what one makes of it, when the heart is fully engaged. Can one build foreign policy and good government around that observation? Let me put it this way: we'd better well try.
.

You say Governments better listen, but in cases such as China there are two problems: they don't want to listen and they don't have the mechanisms for listenening. China has never had a system of feedback from "the people" - if there was an issue, the only form of redress would be to take a petition to Beijing and try and see the right person (and this continues today).

That's what I was getting at -- central planning doesn't work but China (and others) have long had a top-down model of governance. Human history tells us that's been the more common model. Call it tyranny, call it dictatorship...even today it is the "preferred" governance model for a lot of places. Even those trying to transition to democracy are finding the path bumpy to say the least. Look at Russia for an example of one that is now rapidly backsliding into its preferred model. How does the Bush Doctrine deal with this?

Secondly I (being from an economics background) disagree on your analysis of world trade. I get your drift -- that world trade meant making deals with the devil. But the fundamental argument comes down to whether living standards can influence politics or is it vice versa? By that I mean if a country's population has rising living standards, people start to have something worth saving, fighting for, protecting and defending. That means they want a voice in how things are run, especially when they are run contrary to their interests.

Globalisation and free trade encourage that trend. From my reading of your post you see it the other way around. You actually hit on a key difference -- today trade is much "freer", thanks to the WTO. The managed trade of the Cold War was an artifice to support political ideologies. Now trade is a way to raise living standards and encourage understanding across nations and cultures.

I'm not convinced by the co-operation amongst nations argument either. Even Bush and co. attempted multilateralism for Iraq via the UN, even though it was rebuffed. The Iraq war can even be cast as Bush's attempt to strengthen the UN or at least multilateral institutions, by giving force to resolutions. Also witness his putting Wolfowitz into the World Bank.

Multilateral institutions matter -- what they face is how to recast themselves now the Cold War is over...something they should have done 15 years ago but are only getting around to now. And where you quote Belmont, he notes the EU as one of Chirac's great institutions. And indeed it is -- it can be argued the EU has helped solidify the transitions of Eastern Europe, as far afield as Ukraine, and helped human rights and freedoms in Turkey and the Balkans. Like it or not, you've got to give it to the EU. It has been one of the best institutions for spreading freedom and democracy in modern times.

I think the problem with your argument is it mixes up notions of multilateralism with notions of a multipolar world. I'm all for the former and against the latter. That's not a contradiction. A world lead by the US, with the support of the Anglosphere and like minded nations is the best defence (and if needed, offense) against tyranny and dictatorship. That's what we're seeing now.

As always, interested in your thoughts...and I need to ponder some more.

.

I received comments from Simon about today's post on China (see the following entry) that call for immediate publication and response:

"Dear Pundita:
Allow me one comment on today's post. I agree with the thrust of it but I fear you define democracy too tightly. Democracy is not just about voting; it also requires checks and balances; independent, free and strong institutions (courts, press etc.); rule of law (in both enforcement and legislation by popular acclaim rather than decree); and respect of private property rights. If we were to chart countries on these yardsticks you'll find China is currently a mess, with the CCP trying to restrict the first two while implementing the second two. Are they compatible? No. That's the true contradiction at the heart of China. But is it sustainable? I fear it is for far longer than most would suspect.

In terms of the US, the vast majority are likely very complacent about democracy but thankfully the system has enough people concerned about it, and enough checks on it, that it can be sustained with only minority interest. I've long thought the vast majority are mostly interested in the basics -- food, shelter, rising living standards and a good education for their kids. It's only the few who care about the rest of "that freedom thing". Once China's been democratic for 200 years, I'll forgive some complacency.

I'm sorry for monopolising your time but this is one damn interesting dialogue. Judging by the times of your posts, you're really burning the midnight oil on this! It is deeply appreciated.
Simon in Hong Kong"

Dear Simon:
Don't consider it monopolizing; this is not only an interesting dialogue but a very important one. My quick response to your comments is partly to head off letters from 'long time' readers of Pundita essays. They might accuse her of having set out an inducement in yesterday's essay to prompt discussion of Pundita essays that discuss the very points you raise! Indeed, I've pounded away so hard at the points you raised that I've risked driving away readers. ("Okay, Pundita, we GET it!")

But in truth the hour was late, as you noted. When I neared the end of the writing I simply assumed that the reader would get my drift. Ironically, I deleted one sentence that might have headed off misunderstanding; this was on the assumption that I didn't need to overstate my point.

The sentence was, "Americans know too much about voting and not enough about the processes that make democracy work."

Thus, the old adage: Never assume.

One of my major themes is that development institutions (in particular the World Bank-IMF) and the United States government came very late in the day to the notion that democracy is about more than "free and fair" elections and erecting government buildings: From the System Failure essay:

"Democracy embodies an ideal but in practice it's a form of government. How the government is administered--the nuts-and-bolts daily grind of how the government works out in practice--is critical to a functioning democracy. Development banks such as the World Bank Group have always recognized that, but much of their "institution-building" in the poorest countries has ignored the basics. The judicial buildings are erected, always with fanfare. The bureaus required to keep a government functioning are set in place. Behind the trappings, nothing works.

"So things function in the country, to the extent they function, via bureaucratic fiat and graft. Our government has not been completely blind to this problem. Here's an excerpt from a somewhat self-congratulatory speech given in 2004 by Robert B. Charles, Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, in testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform:

"Democratic Institution Building and The Rule of Law

To improve the rule of law, USG projects also have assisted the Government of Colombia in establishing 37 Justice Houses (casas de justicia), which increase access to justice for poor Colombians. Make no mistake: this is not a small victory or goal -- it is at the very heart, in our view, of sustainable progress and U.S. support. So far, these casas de justicia have handled over 2.2 million cases, easing the burden on the over-taxed, inefficient judicial system.

Remarkably, the Department of Justice and USAID “Administration of Justice” initiatives have also established 30 new Oral Trial courtrooms and trained over 10,000 lawyers, judges and public defenders in new oral legal procedures designed to reduce impunity and quicken the judicial process. The new accusatorial criminal justice system will be open to public scrutiny and is expected to be more efficient and effective, and thus more worthy of public confidence.

"All that is good news. The bad news is that the obstacles to democracy in LLDCs [least developed countries] are more basic than the problems mentioned by Charles--so basic it's hard for people in developed countries to wrap their mind around the situation.

"For example, Americans take for granted the concept of "property ownership." We also take for granted that there are laws to define and protect the legality of contracts. A democracy without these two concepts in operation is unthinkable. Yet in many countries neither concept is operational. So no matter how many judicial courts and bureaus the development loans install, it's a stage show if the country has "democratic" in its name."

Not content with simply stating my points, I sought to understand how generations of American USAID workers and World Bank program directors could overlook such simple facts. In the Enclave Mentality and the Oriental Stranger Syndrome Pundita zeroed in on enclave thinking:

"The picture that Americans receive from government officials in foreign countries is the same type that the British overlords received from the rajas in India. The rajas were mostly concerned with keeping their power. Thus, the strongest message that came through to the British was "Don't rile the Natives any more than you have to."

"The French developed a very creative way of dealing with the same message, maybe because the French didn't possess the navy the British had in those days. The French thought up the Modernity Kit, which they hawked to every chieftain they wanted to trade with. They convinced the chiefs that you're a thoroughly modern person if you master the French language, learn to eat with a knife and fork, and develop an appreciation for chamber music.

"Thus, generations of colonized peoples were raised up without a clue as to what really constitutes modern Western government. They got only the outward forms: the marble buildings of bureaucracy and judiciary, the 15 copies of a directive that had to be signed and stamped, the filing cabinets and the ritual banter between judges and lawyers.

"That is how it came to pass that vast tracts of humanity have no idea what makes for American democracy and how it came about."

However, in Democracy Stage Show Kit I save my most scathing criticism for Freedom Hawkers, who gloss the mechanics of government, push democracy as if it is a cure for all society's problems, and neglect to explain that freedom is not free: it requires the individual citizen to shoulder considerable responsibility.

The last point set off a small firestorm of criticism on the blogosphere, with one blogger asking whether Pundita was suggesting that democracy is only for the affluent--for those with enough time, money and energy to personally engage in the democratic process.

I was suggesting that no democracy is strong enough to survive the majority of its citizens leaving the business of governing to elected/appointed officials and civil servants. I think I managed to defend this argument in two essays that respond to the critics. (See the Pundita sidebar, under the heading "Phony Democracy Movements.")

Yet discussion about how to keep a mature democracy healthy seems almost academic, when viewed against the monumental task of introducing modern democratic government to peoples with no experience at such government. In Making Bush Democracy Doctrine Work I advocate dividing the concept of democratic government into two categories:

"So how do we get from here to that place on the road where Bush is standing and pointing at a dot on the horizon? The way is to organize into a school of policy certain observations that have been floating around for years in various quarters, including the IMF, USAID, and Putin's government. Bits and pieces are also found in Hernando de Soto's observations about the black-market economy and in writings by other informed observers (including some of de Soto's critics).

"The observations derive from analyzing mistakes that governments and development banks have made while trying to promote democratic reforms in developing countries and FSU countries, including Russia.

"What stands up and shouts about the mistakes is that they come from the attempt to institute democracy as a finished product rather than an evolutionary kernel. In this, the democratic reforms fly in the face of the way mature democracy came about in Western countries.

"So instead of talking about "democracy" as a monolithic phenomenon, it helps to divide it into two categories: Evolutionary Democracy and Imposed Democracy. I'm sure someone could think up better names for the categories (and maybe already has) but for the purposes of this discussion, they're in the ballpark.

"America and West Europe (including the UK) represent evolutionary democracy. They had centuries to perfect their systems of government. The end product is offered by the West to peoples who don't have that evolutionary history with democracy.

"But democracy isn't a gizmo that you plug in and get great reception. So if you want to bring in democracy as a finished product--leapfrog the evolutionary process--then you have to identify and break down the evolution into steps. Then ask how to apply the steps of evolutionary democracy to procedures for making imposed democracy work.

"That question is the path out of the post-modernist corner into which US policy thinkers have painted themselves. And it's the way to catch up to the place on the road where President Bush is viewing the need for genuine democracy.

"Genuine democracy is the best insurance against state-sponsored terrorism and conditions that birth terrorist fervor. However, there has to be a systematized way of compensating for decades and even centuries of evolutionary development. Just getting people to the voting booth and throwing them into the water of democratic government doesn't hack it in most cases.

"The upshot is disillusionment with democracy and/or a 'rescue' for the democracy that amounts to a stage show: bring in Western experts, impose reforms from the outside (e.g., via IMF edicts), and 'manage' the outcome of an election to insure that the winner will follow the outside experts' instruction.

"So, behind the stage trappings is the rule by an elite. That guarantees the majority of people under rule don't get enough experience with real democracy. So if they throw out the administration and advisors, their idea of government is right back where they started from, which can be somewhere around 1450 or much earlier."

I will end abruptly at this point, to stave off more quoting, and so that the reader can press on to today's post about China. But then again, new readers might enjoy learning The Freedom Song, as I sang it in Things Fall Apart, the Center Cannot Hold :

"Democracy is no longer just about the choice between freedom and slavery. It's about transferring decision-making from small numbers (an 'elite') to large numbers with their vast diversity of experience and education. It's about the human race making it through this century in one piece.

"Here we come to a snag. There are two democracy doctrines; one is phony. The Democracy Bubble of the 1980s and 1990s, when it burst, left many people round the world feeling cheated by their experiment in democracy. But they didn't really have democracy. They were sold a form of government that's a stage show run by a small circle.

"How did so many people get taken in? Pundita's been trying to figure that out, in the manner of a bunko squad detective taking apart a con. I've zeroed in on the word 'freedom,' which is the word I hear most associated with democracy. Remove the dom and you're left with free--the con artist's favorite word.

"(To the tune of "A Christmas Song" sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks):

Freedom for you and freedom for me!
We'll be free with democracy!
We won't worry when we are freeeeee!
All we do is vote and see
Our leaders will make us free!

"Freedom is not free. It has a very high price and the payment is not a one-time shot. It's a huge ongoing investment of time and because time is money in the modern world, it's lot of money to invest. So the question is whether all the freedoms that come with democratic government are worth the high price for all peoples in all circumstances.

"From a Darwinian perspective, and during earlier eras, the answer would be no; the Democracy Stage Show Kit [DSSK] essay looks briefly at one reason--the exhaustion factor. But the choice is no longer about accepting democracy. The choice is how well the human race survives this century.

"A Palestinian once told Pundita that humanity has no worries about the future because Muslim prophets have said that the end of the world is near. Hello, the end of the world is sure enough near for some peoples if they don't get cracking but we're not looking at a doomsday scenario in this century. We're looking at hell on earth for a lot more people, if we don't get more brainpower set to work on the problems we're facing. The fastest and best way to do this is via genuine democratic government beep this is a recording.

"The US government needs to take all the above into consideration, the next time they decide to cut corners--for the greater good--and support a democracy stage show. They need to update their concept of the greater good. Same goes for the governments in other developed countries. Let's get it together, ladies and gentlemen, because this earth will not suspend her schedule of events while we're working through our issues.

"In the [DSSK] I noted, "We have simply passed the era when a small elite could be counted on to properly manage the problems of governing a populace. It takes large numbers of people to efficiently govern populations that run into the hundreds of millions. "

"In his commentary ZenPundit observes, "This point is not merely one of functionality but of political legitimacy."

"I agree, and yet functionality and political legitimacy must converge, else the concept of 'government' is rendered invalid. I don't know the exact population number that has to be reached before tribal government begins to break down but at some point up in the thousands, it does. The same for imperial government when the population rises to the millions. "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold."

"From then on, the choice is to rule by force or bring in democracy, which can efficiently govern very large numbers. Yet the functionality of democracy has not been emphasized during the past century; democracy has been presented as a philosophical subject and ideal. That's allowed for a lot of fuzzy inspirational talk and not much talk about the nuts of bolts of democratic government. That's what is missing, when we preach democracy. A little less preaching, a little more explanation. That would make it harder to palm off a show for the real deal."

Then, too, new readers might wish to study the points I made in--what's that sound? I think it might be Da and Nyet (the crow members of Pundita's foreign policy team) cawing outside my window, "Somebody get the hook."

All right, that is enough quoting onself for one day.
.

"In order to achieve their ends, the planners must create power -- power over men wielded by other men -- of a magnitude never before known. Their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power. Democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom which the centralized direction of economic activity requires. Hence arises the clash between planning and democracy."
--Friedrich August von Hayek
The Road to Serfdom , 1944

"Nevertheless, the ancien régime was brought down, partly by its own rigidity in the face of a changing world, partly by the ambitions of a rising bourgeoisie, allied with aggrieved peasants and wage-earners..."
-- Causes of the French Revolution

I'll pick up from yesterday's post with the third observation made by Simon of Simon World :

The Communists (CCP) are now a party of nationalism and market economics. The leadership is kept up at nights by the thought of the 700 million peasants that are largely missing out on its economic miracle, while its support is more often coming from the rapidly growing coastal people. The growing income and living standard gap is the biggest problem the government faces.

Striking support for these observations comes from a bellwether June 13 Reuters Report by Alan Wheatley, China Economics Editor, Beijing, titled Textiles just start of a flood of Chinese goods. When read with Simon's points in mind what jumps out from the economic data is that the market-oriented communist party has planned China into a corner:

...fast-rising exports are a distress signal that demand at home has dried up. "If domestic consumption isn't there, companies look outside China because they don't have sufficient margins here." ...

"At this stage, China is a supply-side story. It has to turn into a demand-side story and start consuming more."

The figures quoted by Wheatley don't lie. So the latest happy consumer index showing Chinese to be almost as happy as Indians suggests that the poll is carefully controlled to jibe with the CCP's wishes and dreams.

Pundita is remembering back to the 1960s, when the American business community argued that one billion consumers were just waiting to buy American products, if only the US government would drop objections to normalized trade with China.

Well, here we are, 40 years later, with 700 million peasants left out of China's Shanghai Miracle. That certainly explains why China has become a supply side story. They've got the manufacturing capacity revved up but without a big domestic market for the products, they have no choice but to sell outside their shores--to increased howls from all quarters, including the South Koreans, that China is dumping.

This points to the problem with a Capitalist zone set down in a country run by a dictatorship. I think that by now von Hayek's argument has been pretty much won. Give people enough freedom, enough ownership, and allow the natural inclination to better oneself to express itself in business: the result is a reasonably strong, vibrant society. But a zone cannot be considered a nation's society; it is an enclave within the society.

In a dictatorship, those inside the enclave must have special protection against the rest of society; this coupled with the vastly better standard of life for those within the enclave breeds envy and resentment among those outside the enclave. These emotions build to anger, which builds to blind rage. The inevitable outcome is plainly described in tales of the French Revolution.

The Chinese who protested at Tiananmen Square during 1989 caved in rather quickly to the dictatorship's guns and tanks. But the blind rage wasn't there because--well, because almost everyone in China was in the same boat: poverty-stricken. They were asking for more freedom, not looking to butcher every member of the government they could find.

One look at photographs of Shanghai--Bling Bling City--tells that times have changed in China. There is, as Simon pointed out, a large and growing gap between living standards in China.

But closing the gap means conferring the same privileges on the masses that the Enclavers enjoy. The risk here is that with more freedom in the globalized era of trade it becomes harder to control information, harder to condition responses.

The dictatorship then faces a quandary. Draconian repressive measures stifle the business of doing business with the outside word. But without such measures the masses will demand more say in how they are governed.

China's ruling party says they have a way to beat the devil: Planning. First get the peasants educated, then teach them English, then put them through university where they will study nanotechnology, then gradually introduce more government reforms at the local levels....

Clearly the stepwise process assumes that dolts can't manage democracy. But look at America. First of all, we had a long tradition of only sending dolts to Washington because we couldn't spare the smart ones from their jobs. Second of all, America was a bunch of illiterates as late as....well, the IRS still writes tax forms for people with only a twelfth grade education, and still takes wall-to-wall calls around tax filing time from Americans who can't understand the forms.

Pundita suspects that the way democracy has been presented by advanced Western democracies helped create the perception in the developing world that one has to reach a certain IQ and level of character development before democracy can breed anything more than anarchy.

This view is akin to making an icon out of your electric toaster. Democracy is a form of government; it's a gizmo for managing decisions and tax money in a large complex society. One can write volumes about the beauty of toasted pop tarts and muffins. The same for democratic government. It furthers human rights and many other wonderful things. But the system itself is just that--a tool. The anarchy comes when you don't know how to work the tool. I stressed that point in the Democracy Stage Show Kit .

Many Americans don't know very much about how their government works. So when Americans are tourists and we're asked, "What is democracy?" we tend to give airy replies. When pressed for the nuts-and-bolts details of how democratic government works, most Americans tend to lapse into poetry. That might be why democracy seems mystical to many people in lands with no experience at democratic government.

But somehow Pundita thinks von Hayek would say that China's dictators are not at all mystified by democratic government.

Tomorrow I'll close this series of essays by tackling Simon's first question: "...are we witnessing a gradual emergence of an effectively liberal capitalist democracy empire, primarily directed and led by the US?"
.

This essay continues the dialogue about China-US relations, which the author of the Simon World blog initiated with Pundita in the Ducking Reality essay; new readers might want to turn to that essay before starting this one.

Dear Pundita:
Thanks for your essay -- a very interesting response to my questions. One immediate thought about your points is that the world has already experienced a time where geopolitics was dominated by trade -- the British experience of the 19th century. Rule Britannia and all that.

While empire is so 1800s, are we witnessing a gradual emergence of an effectively liberal capitalist democracy empire, primarily directed and led by the US? Is the British Empire analogy a useful pointer or a distraction?

I also am not sure [I'd agree that] Beijing is asleep at the wheel. I'd cast the problem more as a dictatorship used to absolute control grappling with the realities of a (mostly) market economy and foreign trade flows. You observed that for decades the US had a bipolar policy toward China. You could say there's a bipolar China as well.

Some additional thoughts:

1. China's central government gives the impression of being dominant, in control and with a firm grasp on power. In reality it is more often reactive than proactive, at the whim of conflicting agendas of regional governments (witness the trouble the central government has had in reining in economic growth).

2. Outside of Taiwan, China's people and government mostly have little interest in foreign policy and geopolitics, save perhaps in securing a reliable flow of natural resources to keep China's economic growth strong.

3. The Communists (CCP) are now a party of nationalism and market economics. The leadership is kept up at nights by the thought of the 700 million peasants that are largely missing out on its economic miracle, while its support is more often coming from the rapidly growing coastal people. The growing income and living standard gap is the biggest problem the government faces.

Economic management matters far more than geopolitics (which is why I don't think a Taiwan invasion is likely unless provoked by the independence factions on the island). A nice contrast to the American government.
Simon in Hong Kong"

Dear Simon:
Thank you for your thoughtful response and insights--and for questions that provide enough material for several essays! I'm sure Pundita readers appreciate, as I do, the time you've taken to engage in a little citizen journalism for our edification.

Your original questions -- the ones that formed the basis of the Ducking Reality essay -- took on an ominous tinge for me after I read Henry Kissinger's June 9 opinion piece Conflict is not an Option for the International Herald Tribune. For all his high-level contacts in this country, Kissinger doesn't understand the Bush Doctrine. Yet it's clear from his writing (and from his long, close relationship with high level officials in China's central government) that China's government has turned to him for advice on how to interpret the Bush administration's view of China.

The tone and substance of Kissinger's piece strongly suggest that Chinese officials are alarmed about Robert D. Kaplan's piece for Atlantic Monthly (How we would fight China), which implies that the US could be turning to a cold war posture in relation to China.

So I will dedicate this essay to sketching the rationale for the Bush Doctrine, as preface to answering the questions you pose above. Beijing cannot understand the doctrine by reading Kaplan's piece. Nor will they understand by consulting with Dr Kissinger on how to interpret the piece, which, as ZenPundit points out, Thomas M. Barnett eviscerates in his critiques.

However, getting a balanced view of Washington's policy on foreign relations, which is undergoing a massive revision, is not easy for a dictatorship that has no history of democracy as a reference point. No matter how much time Chinese spies, envoys and businesspeople spend in America, much is lost in translation when they return their observations to China. So I think it's best to start answering your questions by discussing what I consider to be the fundamentals:

At the height of Japan Inc.'s trouncing of US manufacturers, some congressionals used a hatchet to smash Japanese electronic appliances on the floor of the Senate (or maybe it was the House). Meanwhile, a couple of young men named Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were fooling around with software programs. American industry soon came roaring back with a great leap forward, one that no one could have predicted.

But all the above was just another day in the life of a democracy. The great difference between China and America is that America puts faith in their people. China puts faith in planning.

The drawback with pinning faith on planning is that one can't predict and control life, much less plan for life's surprises. So as messy as the free society is, it has the edge where it counts -- in the struggle for survival -- because a democracy allows for highly diverse input to government in response to new challenges. That increases the chance that an effective response can be quickly mustered to deal with life's surprises.

China's faith in planning keeps the government in the position of Elmer Fudd. They tend to look at the ebb and flow of life in the way Elmer looks at Bugs Bunny. The wascal wabbit keeps popping up, no matter how much lead Elmer pumps at him.

These observations echo the point you raised in #1 when you observed that in reality China's central government is more "often reactive than proactive, at the whim of conflicting agendas of regional governments."

But it's not only regional governments that are playing Bugs for China's dictators. It's also the complex interplay of events between Nature and Humankind. Today, mega human populations can quickly transform complex interconnected events with lighting speed.

That's why I used the examples of Beijing's awful initial response to SARS and H5N1 in the Ducking Reality essay. Beijing's reaction to the SARS outbreak perfectly illustrates the stagnant aspect of dictatorship. Beijing honestly believed they could erase all trace of the original source of the outbreak, which was a military hospital. But someone who worked at the hospital called a relative in Taiwan; the relative then called back to the mainland, then ping! the wascal wabbit Reality was suddenly beyond Beijing's control.

I add that this lighting chain of events was very lucky for humankind. This is because as the word of SARS shot around China the villagers showed more sense than Beijing officials, who panicked and tried to flee the outbreak. The villagers ripped up railroad tracks in many regions, set up barricades on roads leading to and near their villages, and set up sentries who threatened to shoot any outsider trying to come near the village. In short, they imposed a quarantine.

The military sided with the villagers, it seems (or maybe the military didn't have time to react). In any case, the villagers' response forced Beijing to do what they should have done immediately -- publicly admit to the outbreak, and order people to stay in place and not try to flee the cities. That slowed the spread of SARS, which gave health officials in China and worldwide a little time to work out containment measures. Even so, it was a close call for the human race.

In this discussion, the Chinese villagers represent the intelligence/knowledge base 'river' in every society. If that river is dammed up by dictatorship -- the pool, represented by the government, stagnates. Ideas can't flow, responses can't flow.

In his opinion piece Kissinger invokes length of time when speaking of China's government: "The Chinese state in its present dimensions has existed substantially for 2,000 years."

The length of time is a laudable historical achievement, but is no measure of a government's present effectiveness. In other words, governments work until they don't work.

In olden times government could represent a stagnant pool and still survive many types of challenges because of the long lead-time associated with them. For example, the progress of an invading army could take months or even years to wend its way to the destination. That gave target governments time to fortify and raise an army in response.

Another example: it could take many months for plague to hit a population; that meant word of mouth could precede the plague in some cases, which gave the society a warning. The same with many trade situations and the spread of innovations that radically altered markets.

Today, the lead-time has greatly shrunk for many challenges. That means the ability to muster a quick, effective response depends greatly on a society's flexibility. The river must flow: the government must have ready access to the knowledge base and intelligence represented by the society as a whole.

So when President Bush talks about democracy saving civilization, he's looking at democracy from the angle of its ability to harness society's river of knowledge and keep it flowing. I venture that is what China's leaders don't understand about the Bush Doctrine. If so, they're not alone.

Many in Washington are still trying to catch up with Bush's curve because he's looking at democracy in a way that's outside the traditional ideological arguments. He accepts the traditional arguments, but he's viewing democracy as the form of government that's best suited to marshaling as many 'empowered' people as possible to respond to challenges that arise in unpredictable fashion.

The question is why this view, which seems self-evident when spelled out, wasn't transferred to developing societies when the United States took a lead role in development during the mid-Twentieth Century. I don't think there's a single answer.

One reason is that America had been 'doing' democracy for close to two centuries but doing doesn't necessarily equate to close, accurate analysis of how you do something. Nor does it equate to the ability to effectively communicate how you do something.

Another reason is that the transfer mechanisms for American ideals, and in particular the World Bank, focused on economic development. This dovetailed with the exigencies of the Cold War. America could deal with dictators at the economic level while skirting the messy question of why a democracy should support a dictatorship.

Yet economic development and free market capitalism are not fundamental to a strong society; the input of the people in the society is the fundamental factor. The Bush Doctrine implicitly recognizes this.

In typical Yankee tinkering fashion, the Bush administration has said in effect, "Whoops! Back to the drawing board! It's democracy, not economics."

The suddenness of the attempts to apply this Eureka! moment has taken many governments off guard. The same has happened to the US State Department, Pentagon, and US academic/policy institutes. Frankly the Bush Doctrine, or at least the speedy attempts to implement it, has confused and scared those who don't have a tinkering bent. Many foreign governments see democracy as something the US is trying to push on other nations as a means of US imperial expansion.

The danger, from the US side, is that confusion about the doctrine and how to implement it have driven several policy analysts back to familiar ground. Familiar ground could include cold war thinking. Here I am in agreement with Henry Kissinger when he warns that the US must not drift into a cold war mode.

To be continued tomorrow.
.

"After reading your Finger of Shame essay I am simply horrified at your position on Africa. You write, "there's so much money sloshing around Africa you don't even want to think about it." Clearly you're implying that Africans are more than capable of helping themselves. How much money is sloshing around Darfur? How much money is sloshing around the refugee camps?

It seems to me that you are representative of a breed of American who chooses to address the world's most pressing humanitarian crises by advocating a washing of the hands. This certainly seems to be the case for President Bush, who seems willing to sell America's soul in exchange for help from the Sudanese government in the war on terror.
Nicole in London"

Dear Nicole:
I have expressed support for debt relief for African nations, which President Bush has also supported and acted upon. I have also followed Bush in recommending that aid to nations in Africa be decided on a case-by-case basis. I favor a local or at least regional approach to Africa's problems, rather than a continent wide approach.

I also follow Bush in believing that US policy should treat adults in African countries as if they are adults. The point I made in the essay you quote is that everybody--not just Americans--should be making more demands on governments in all nations in terms of supporting human rights, democracy, and good governance. We should be raising the bar on our own conduct and demanding that others do the same.

With regard to your statement about Bush, he has not cut a deal with Sudan's government, no matter what you've read in the Los Angeles Times. The article quotes another one of those pesky unnamed high level officials at the US Department of State. That article has been alluded to in Wikipedia and cycled and recycled throughout Think-tank land and Europe.

I interject this is what we do in Washington, those of us who don't watch Desperate Housewives. We watch the Beltway Wars. Every time State gets exercised that the President of the United States is trying to take the lead in foreign policy, State goes on the attack using stooges in the CIA and a powerful member of our glorious American news media.

The story with Sudan's president, Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, is that he has a history of making deals with devils, as he's done more recently with Janjaweed leaders. He used al Qaeda to help him consolidate power. But when he tried to get out of the deal with that devil, he found out he wasn't Daniel Webster. Bashir has been throwing intelligence about AQ at the US ever since, which was 2001.

He continued to throw intel at the US even after September 2004, when the Bush administration rammed through a UN draft resolution threatening Sudan with sanctions on its oil industry if Khartoum didn't cease and desist in Darfur. (The resolution was then watered down and waffled upon by other UN members.)

Bashir will continue to throw intel at the US because he knows his life isn't worth a plug nickel until he's rooted out every AQ cell in Sudan. The problem for Bashir is that Sudan is the largest country in Africa, so finding all those cells isn't easy.

The problem for Bush is that after years of delicate negotiations and arm-twisting, his lead negotiator managed to get a peace accord between the north and south, which ended the civil war in Sudan. The treaty was signed in January of this year.

The treaty hangs by a gossamer thread because now Bashir wants to renege on his agreement to share oil revenue with the south. If the thread snaps, we'll see a fresh outbreak of the civil war, which will claim the lives of many more millions of innocents caught in the crossfire.

I don't know what changed Bashir's mind. I am taking a blindfolded shot in the dark by guessing that it might have to do with the size of the recent petroleum find in Darfur. Maybe further exploration turned up that the find wasn't as big as first assumed. Click on this link for news about the find--and for some indication of how petroleum has affected the situation in Sudan and the Darfur region.

Again, I stress I am taking a wild guess. I am not guessing when I observe that petroleum is a huge factor in the Sudan situation and some would say the overriding factor.

If you look at the inset map of Sudan, which shows the foreign oil/gas concession holders, you see that the oil discovered back in the late 70s is in the south. That was the big bone of contention in the civil war. The fear in Khartoum, which is in the north, was that the south would break away from the north, taking the oil revenue with them.

The Darfur find is also in the south but Darfur is in the western region of Sudan. I don't know how the peace accord carved up the country. But if Bashir was counting on Darfur's oil as a backup, in case the south reneged on the accord and broke away, and if the Darfur find wasn't all it was first cracked up to be--that would explain why he suddenly changed his mind.

Again, I stress that I am guessing because even if the west of Sudan was included in the northern portion for the peace accord, that wouldn't automatically prove I'm right.

What's not speculative is that the Chinese have military in Sudan to protect their large oil interests there, although the number of troops is not as large as Baroness Cox claimed a few years back. And China, along with other foreign oil/gas concerns with stakes in Sudan, wants peace at virtually any price in Sudan.

"Any price" includes sucking up to Bashir's regime and throwing up obstacles at the UN. The map inset is fuzzy on my browser, and the map is old -- October 2002 -- so it doesn't show India's gas concession. But from the map, we've got:

What looks to be Austria (or maybe Australia)
Canada
China
Malaysia
Sweden
Qatar

So those would be the embassies you'd want to hit up, if you'd like to see more action taken with stopping the mass murder or at least improving the conditions in the refugee camps. Pointing the Finger of Shame could do some good--maybe shaming Bashir into allowing relief workers in the refugee camps to have rape kits.

According to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Bashir is claiming there been have no rapes, ergo no need for rape kits.

That means there is no way for doctors in the refugee camps to tell if the raped women have been infected with AIDS and of course the doctors have no way to collect DNA evidence on the rapists. Bashir arrested a French doctor because he published a report on 500 rapes that happened over a 4-1/2 month period. Bashir says the doctor fabricated the numbers. Bashir is lying in his teeth but he's lying under pressure from the Arab League.

Muslims and Arabs have had enough bad press in the past few years; they don't want the world hearing about thousands of women gang raped by Arab Muslims after the women's unarmed husbands were slaughtered in cold blood by Arab Muslims.

Remember there's a lot of oil wealth represented in the Arab League, so Brussels doesn't want to cross Bashir, who doesn't want to cross the Arab League. And the African Union doesn't want to cross the Arab League or Brussels.

Bashir has said he doesn't want non-African troops on the ground, and a meeting of Arab leaders in late 2004 determined that the 'troubles' in Darfur were a purely African problem. From the Wikipedia article on the Darfur crisis:

In October 17, 2004 in a meeting between leaders of Libya, Sudan, Egypt, Nigeria and Chad, the idea of foreign intervention was rejected. They stated that they believe it to be a purely African matter. Egyptian presidency spokesman Magued Abdel Fattah said that the international community should, "provide Sudan with assistance to allow it to fulfill its obligations under UN resolutions (on Darfur) rather than putting pressure on it and issuing threats".

China strongly supports that determination because they fear the idea that a nation can be invaded due to major human rights violations and genocide, and so on.

I interject that Beijing has good reason for those fears every time they look in the mirror. They know what they did in Tibet; they know what they supported in Cambodia and what they now support in Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Burma, North Korea--and Sudan.

To boil it down, Khartoum wants money from the Western developed nations, and they have agreed to NATO logistical support for African Union troops. But Bashir wants to hog-tie every agency or alliance that can actually stop the genocide, which technically should be called democide. It's government sponsored mass murder, plain and simple, which is going on in Darfur.

But that's why there's nit-picking about definitions. If technically it's genocide, under international law other nations have a right to invade a sovereign country.

So, Nicole, what do you want President Bush to do? Tell the US Department of State to start calling it genocide? But technically it's not genocide because you have to be born yesterday to assume that all this government-sponsored murder has to do with religion, race or tribe. It sounds to me like a government land grab--but it always sounds like a government land grab to me, no matter what the dispute.

In any case, cold hard megacash must be at the bottom of it--else the government wouldn't be spending so much money, after the end of the civil war, to keep clearing out the villages in Darfur even where there are no rebels. Pundita suspects the cash has the stench of petroleum attached to it--although it might have to do with water rights, which are fast becoming more precious than oil in that part of the world.

I would have a good guess as to what Bush could do if the European Union, the African Union, the Arab League, and the United Nations acted with conscience instead of cowardice. I could also guess what John Bolton would have done, if his nomination to the post of UN Ambassador hadn't been held up. But it would be more productive from your end to ask what your government is doing.

How refreshing it would be, if the conscience that prompted the British to outlaw the practice of burning women alive in India manifested itself in the EU Three negotiations with Tehran. Yet it seems the British went overboard in beating themselves up for their sins as colonizers.

So here we are today. Dealing with cannibalism in DR Congo, bride burning in India, booming slave trade in China, genital mutilation of female children throughout the Muslim world--to include right here in the USA and in England, I might add. Not to mention butchering women, children, and unarmed men for the sin of speaking their minds in Iran. And refusing rape kits to doctors in refugee camps.

What we have today the world over is the silence of many once-good men. Men who somehow adopted the idea that if you don't call evil by a name it won't come after you. It is the silence that arms and protects men such as Bashir.
.

Pundita has been asked to give her opinion "the frank version" by a reader who wants my thoughts on the summit.

Frankly, I'm hoping what came out of the summit was President Roh withdrawing what must have been strenuous objection to John Bolton going anywhere near the United Nations. As long as Bolton remembers to say "Mister" whenever he refers to Kim Jong-il, perhaps this will mollify Roh's government.

That pretty much ends my thoughts on the summit, given that the crystal ball is still out for repairs. I have no idea what Roh and Bush said to each other behind closed doors. But Pundita has plenty of frank thoughts on the Six-Party Talks. Ready?

Frankly, it's hard to stuff methamphetamine and processed heroin into a computer chip, so I guess the hardworking North Koreans are doomed to continue working on assembly lines that crank out shoes and pots and pans.

Frankly, the only reason Kim Jong-il was brought to the six party talks was because the US military practically shut down his counterfeit US dollars ring. But just when he was wondering what to do for hard currency, he got Russian, South Korean and Chinese businessmen vying to buy shoes and pots and pans from him.

Frankly, George W. Bush is giving the State Department enough rope to hang themselves. They wanted six way talks and they got them. So I hope they're happy with the results. State seesawed for years between dissing South Korea and making unreasonable requests. The disrespect was shown by flagrantly treating Japan as their most trusted ally in the region and pressing China to lead in the Six Party Talks. It should always have been Seoul to lead the talks. I don't support the rationale for the talks, but at least putting Seoul in charge would have prevented the talks from exacerbating the dispute between Seoul and Washington.

Despite the flaws in the Sunshine Policy, South Korea does have to live next door to North Korea; Seoul has a right to try to work for reunification and a responsibility not to act recklessly with regard to Pyongyang. The State Department saw Kim as the fly in the ointment but when Seoul asked, "Okay, what happens if his regime collapses?" State heard their phone ringing.

The Pentagon's contribution to Plan 5029 and the RAND study on reunification, both completed just prior to President Roh's visit, are a nod to recognizing Seoul's problems.

However, I'm just not sure what State expects to get out of the talks if they resume. The inherent flaws in the six party talks are that Russia, China, and South Korea have greatly increased their trade with North Korea since the talks were first initiated, and they show no sign of wanting to censure North Korea for their weapons program.

Also, Russia and China don't want to censure Iran for their nuclear weapons program and they both do big trade with Iran. Moscow and Beijing have clearly indicated many times over the years that they are not against nuclear proliferation and transferring nuclear/dual-use technology to despotic governments.

Kim Jong-il is pulling the same ploy on the five other members to the Six-Party talkers that Tehran pulls on the EU Three talkers. The similarity in approach is not a coincidence. Kindly see today's earlier post.

This said, I understand the need to attempt negotiation but frankly, I am just not sure how much is gained by years spent making G8 nations look like fools on the world stage. That's all that's been accomplished so far by G8 negotiations with two tyrannical regimes hell bent on threatening their neighbors and the United States with nuclear weapons.

If Seoul doesn't think of Pyongyang's regime as tyrannical, if they want to pursue their Sunshine Policy with North Korea, that would be their prerogative--except for the fact that they don't want US troops to pull out of South Korea at this time.

In other words, they want to keep the United States military behind their way of handling Kim Jong-il. Frankly, that doesn't sound right to Pundita. It sounds as if Seoul has manipulated the US into the role of an Enabler. For those unfamiliar with the way I use the word--an Enabler is a family member who enables a relative to keep doing dope or alcohol out of a misplaced belief that this will eventually help the addict break the habit.

And in any case, Seoul's approach is not moving forward on dealing with North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
.

Dear Pundita, I caught Bob Woodruff's interview for ABC with the North Korean official who told him that North Korea had nukes. If not for your warnings [in earlier Pundita posts] it wouldn't have occurred to me that granting the interview to ABC was directly tied to Roh's visit with Bush. It was patently obvious but only if you're aware that Kim Jong-il is playing China, South Korea and Japan against each other.

The US saw the six party talks as a means to pressure DPRK into giving up their nuclear weapons program. North Korea saw the talks as the perfect way to stir the pot. If the US State department had practiced some CSR [common sense reasoning] as you call it, they might have realized the North Koreans were taking their neighbors into account, as the US wanted, but not the way the US intended.
Jim in Duluth"

Dear Jim:
Well sure. Imagine yourself on the other side of the world and in Kim's position, then look at the Six Party Talks. Before the talks were suggested North Korea was just a beggar in relation to Japan, South Korea, and China. But the talks gave Kim an opportunity to force emperors to bow and scrape to a beggar, and he went for it.

However comma the need to practice CSR cuts both ways. For all the time Kim and his generals spend on the Internet and schmoozing with Chinese military brass, they are still looking at Washington from the viewpoint of the Madeline Albright days.

Kim should have asked himself, "Now if I were a very smart president of the world's lone superpower nation and running a global war, how would I view a despotic nuclear weapons proliferator who's trying to build a nuke weapon delivery system that threatens Hawaii, California and Japan?"

If you were listening to the John Batchelor show on Friday night, or if you closely study a map of the world, you wouldn't have to practice CSR. You'd know the answer--provided you also know about the connection between Tehran and Pyongyang, which John has been reporting on for years.

Kim Jong-il would say that the official didn't mention anything to ABC about a delivery system; only the weapons. But once two despotic governments set up a three ring circus with nuclear weapons in the main ring, they should realize they've got a captive audience.

From Kim's view, I can understand why he got deeply involved with Tehran. Aside from their common enemy (the US) and the hard currency that the nuke technology exchanges provided, it was a way of asserting North Korean power -- telling the big boys in the region that Pyongyang had friends outside the region.

However, the circus got underway when the EU Three (Britain, France, Germany) began negotiating with Tehran about their nuclear weapons program. Tehran, under pressure, began dropping big hints about their efforts to build a nuke delivery system. These included film footage of missiles paraded through the streets of Tehran. The missiles had "Israel" painted on them; that was clearly visible to the camera. But when shared with Pyongyang they would have "Japan" and "California" painted on them.

To boil it down, the Japanese have a right to defend themselves from the clear threat of a nuclear attack from Pyongyang. And because the US can't cover all bases, Kim's coyness is running us out of options.

As to how long it would take Japan to arm with nukes--fifteen minutes, if the nukes and delivery systems came gift wrapped. We wouldn't want to do that and certainly Japan doesn't want to be a nuclear weapons power. But the US and Japan cannot spend an eternity munching popcorn at the circus.

As for Israel, they know Tehran is trying to provoke them into a war; as I write these words Tehran is probably ordering Hamas or Hezbollah or one of those front mobs to lob more shells into Israel. This provocation has been going on for several weeks now.

The Israeli military has decided for the nonce to play it according to CENTCOM's advice. They are taking it on the chin, not rising to the bait. But this shelling can't go on forever for Israel, which puts tremendous pressure on the Bush administration to find a path to progress in dealing with Tehran and Pyongyang's nuclear weapons.

I add for your edification that Tehran and Pyongyang coordinate how they practice their idea of nuclear brinkmanship, which has created the circus. It revolves around one trick. They attach a long string to a piece of cheese, then just as the negotiators reach for the cheese they yank on the string.
.

"Pundita, Do you think America's China policy is coherent? To me there is a tension between the protectionist/ isolationist/ China as rival camp and a steadily weaker free trade/ multilateral/ China as partner camp. Is there any hope for reason or is China the next American bogeyman? When I see a mainstream Hollywood movie with Chinese villains I'll know who's won, but how far is that day? And more importantly, can it be avoided?
Simon in Hong Kong"

Dear Simon:
Yes, sure, there's a way the worst can be avoided but the worst is not what you envision. First let's go over old ground: There was a bi-polar US policy toward China for decades -- ever since the US got the idea to play Red China against the Soviet Union. The only way Washington could keep up the contradictory aspects of the policy -- really two policies -- was through a massive effort of willful blindness about China's military dictatorship.

After the Soviet Union dissolved, the Containment policy, along with the Cold War double policy toward China and many other nations, drifted. The push by Western transnationals to use China as an offshore manufacturing plantation came to dominate US relations with China. In 1995 the push was codified, at the policy level, with the creation of the 'America Desk' at the State Department. It was explicitly stated that US business interests should be at the forefront of US foreign policy.

In line with this the CIA and DoD were in effect gutted by the Clinton administration. Add to this, the inherent limitations of a military in a democracy. Every year the Pentagon has to deliver a report on various nations' military strength, including China's. But until this year the parameters of the report were so narrow as to give a very distorted and incomplete picture of China's threat.

For example if you make a simple comparison between, say, China's naval strength and the US counterpart, well of course China is no threat. Ditto for nuclear missiles, etc. In short, if you exclude every scenario except classic symmetrical warfare, China comes up short.

So every year there was the ritual of Congress and the White House asking the Pentagon, "Are they a threat yet?" and the Pentagon replying, "Nope."

After 9/11, it dawned on Congress that in theory at least it would be possible to destroy any nation, even America, using asymmetrical warfare combined with portable WMD. At that point everybody began ringing up all those American companies that had been using China for a plantation and allowing hordes of Chinese to work for them stateside with minimal supervision. They asked, "Just exactly what kind of technology have you shared with the Chinese all these years?"

They also rang up German, French, British and Israeli defense contractors and asked the same question. Then they began rooting in the files in the office that looks just like the warehouse in the final scene of Raider's of the Lost Ark. The name of this office was "All the intelligence reports on China nobody bothered to read for the past half century."

Then they rang up the Indian military and asked, "Would you mind repeating all those wild claims you've been making about China for the past 40 years?"

By the end of 2002, the Congress had felt their way toward the idea that it's plumb loco to allow trade issues to dominate a superpower nation's defense policy. From there, it was a hop and a skip to the realization that a nation pays a high price for willful blindness. But it was a little late in the day to apply the realization to China, which held a huge amount of US debt.

In short, by 2003 it was painfully clear that America had not been content to make one Faustian Bargain -- the one with Saudi Arabia. They had made two. So the question was how to back away from the edge of the cliff without crashing the US economy and the world economy.

But again, it was late in the day. The weapons/ dual-use technologies that China had acquired had been sold to any despot or terrorist army with the money to buy. When American officials and military brass yelled at their Chinese counterparts, "What were you thinking?" the Chinese lapsed into Pidgin English and produced charts and graphs to demonstrate they were just a poor developing country.

So here we are today. The Shanghai Gang managed to eject Jiang Zemin and his crew from power as a sop but again it's late. The US has done a pretty good job of locating the al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States -- the ones that were already in country in 2001.

I don't know how the Australian government has done with their batch. Europe's report card is not good. Keep in mind that England was the terror capital of the world for decades because of their very compliant policy toward Islamic 'dissidents.' The Saudi government has bumped off every al Qaeda cell they could find but they ain't called sleeper cells for nothing. Doubtful the Saudis got all the sleepers.

As for Russia -- another country that was very irresponsible about dual-use technology and weapons sales -- it's doubtful Russia's scorched earth policy after the Beslan massacre rooted out all the sleeper cells.

As for Canada and the countries south of the American border, nobody knows. As to when the enemy will strike again, nobody except the top al Qaeda leaders know the answer. But the money in the US defense community is on a coordinated strike in many parts of the globe.

I don't mean to single out China. There was a lot of yelling behind closed doors in Jerusalem, in Paris, in London, in Moscow, in Washington, in Riyadh, and many other world capitals. Basically, you can't go to sleep with your eyes open in a world of portable nukes and expect everything to be peaches and cream on the day you wake up.

What you're seeing coming out of Washington is not incoherent policy; it's the struggle to ditch the bi-polar policies -- the double standard -- and formulate a single policy that looks at the world with clear eyes.

How do you create rational defense/foreign policy in an interconnected world, a very dangerous world, which runs on trade? That is the question before Washington, before every government that's awake. President Bush and the US military leaders know the Bogeyman isn't a nation, no matter how much grandstanding politicians do to please constituents and lobbyists. The Bogeyman is an intersection of events.

So allow me to reformulate your question to read: "Is Beijing awake yet?" Eight thousand dead migratory ducks say no.

Beijing was warned before and after SARS broke out. They were warned before and after the big H5N1 outbreak. The WHO and CDC warned until they were blue in the face: Don't lie; give the most accurate reports you can, immediately. Don't wait days or even hours. Still, each time, Beijing suppressed the true number of dead birds and lagged in making reports. This happened again just days ago.

Then they lied about the cover-up -- stupid lies because many Chinese across China saw dead birds falling from the sky. There are unconfirmed reports that Chinese who made accurate reports about the number of dead ducks they counted were arrested. Given the long, well-documented history of Beijing's attempts at coverup, the reports hardly need confirmation. That's the spirit! Ward off a pandemic by throwing it in jail.

Realize this death falling from the sky had happened before -- during the last outbreak. There was no way to prevent everyone from describing what they saw.

So why does the leadership in Beijing act like that? Because they are not confronting the reality that Ayman al-Zawahiri doesn't give a damn about Chinese wanting to save Face. The H5 strain of virus couldn't care less how hard Chinese work to make their nation look spiffy for 2008 Olympics visitors.

Please nobody write Pundita to ask if I know about the joint defense conference. They are still sleepwalking. Earth calling Beijing: Wake up.
.

I treat organized crime, international aid, debt issues and democratic reform as linked issues; thus, several of my essays mention TOC/government corruption. To see more Pundita essays that mention the issues, type "crime" into eBlogger's Google search engine at the top of this page.

When he began his job at the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz singled out corruption as a major problem in development and said, "Corruption is the biggest threat to democracy since communism."

Western governments and international organizations have been slow to seek public discussion of the corruption/TOC issue. And they've been slow to recognize that corruption in the present era is of a very different order than the 'inevitable' corruption that traditionally comes with the territory of government.

Transnational crime syndicates are not Don Corleone. They can buy out national governments, and they don't hesitate to form alliances with terror armies and spies selling WMD secrets. The vast amounts of money at their command mean that bribes in the modern era are of an order that the old-time ward heelers could not have imagined.

The millions of AIDS orphans in Africa and Asia are a labor pool for TOC syndicates, so the issue of transnational crime's intersection with government corruption represents a humanitarian crisis as well as a serious challenge to democracy.

Governments can get together and offer immunity if people will just start coming forward and telling what they know.

Crime Desk (in order of publication)

IMF-Ukraine Central Bank scandal During Viktor Yushchenko's tenure as head of Ukraine's Central Bank, the bank steals hundreds of millions of dollars from the International Monetary Fund.

To the ramparts, fellow billionaires... Verticalization of government corruption in Russia. Maps a key problem for most developing countries.

Paw, a Revenuer's at the door... Inadequate tax base feeds crime and government corruption in tribal/clan societies.

Kaiser Soze Model of Democracy The Gang that Couldn't Launder Money Straight tries to take over Ireland's government.

Elephant in the World's Living Room US foreign policy needs to pay more attention to the TOC factor.

The matrix of TOC Introduction to International Crime Threat Assessment Report.

Crooked governments beware...

.

"After reading your posts from yesterday and earlier today I'm having a hard time understanding your position on the Blair-Brown project, as you call it, or the Commission for Africa report. You seem to be both for and against it.

The report itself is confusing. It reminds me somehow of the EU Constitution. I'm assuming that many of the recommendations are wishful thinking, but it's almost as if the planners are trying to apply the "Europa" concept to Africa. The French and Dutch stopped Europa in its tracks with their "no" votes and I think the British would have soundly rejected the constitution if they'd been allowed to vote on it. Yet it almost seems as if the complex bureaucratic machinery that so many Europeans dislike about the European Union is being proposed for Africa.

The report recommendations hit all the right notes--dealing with corruption, the need for better government and judicial mechanisms; they discuss many of the themes you've addressed in your essays about development. However, the machinery for implementing, administering and overseeing the recommendations, the vast sums of money required, would put the effort out reach of most people's understanding--the same as for the EU Constitution.
Jan in Reston"

Dear Jan:
You've brought up an interesting comparison, which ties in with the Regionalism Debate. The debate has been kicking around for years in trade policy circles. To boil it down, if you carve up the world into regional trading blocs such as North American, European, Asian, African, etc., what does that do to multilateralism--the linchpin of foreign policy negotiations in the modern era?

To reduce the argument to its essence, if everybody plays Monkey See Monkey Do, isn't everybody right back at square one?

Pundita suspects that cold, hard balance of payment figures trounce the academic points of the argument; i.e., the Bank for International Settlements will 'recommend' on how many teeth the bloc agreements will actually have.

Where were we? The Commission for Africa. The Save Africa Project (SAP), shall we call it, is a flashpoint, which is why it's confusing. It represents a head-on collision between four very powerful forces; before I list them, I want my point to be at the top of the pileup. This is the same point I've made in essay after essay:

Whatever amount of money is spent on SAP, whatever type of structural adjustment is initiated, whatever kind of debt relief is arranged, do modeling first. Attempt to project the unintended consequences, attempt to project the consequences if a SAP project is successful. Then factor in how to head off the worst consequences.

So my position is that some version is going forward, no matter what Pundita and the Bush administration think of the Africa Commission. There's nothing that can be done to stop SAP. So I am thinking from a position of damage control: at least try to limit the worst-case scenarios that can arise from SAP projects.

That doesn't mean I'm for or against the commission. It means I know a great deal about the history of earlier all-out attempts to save the world. To play on a famous sentence in Atlas Shrugged, before you can be a person who saves the world, first be a person who knows how to get things done without sowing disaster.

This advice, so sensible when viewed from an armchair, is very hard to stick with, when you are out in the field and faced with the sight of dying babies and their desperately ill and starving parents. I have been there; I know exactly what it feels like.

The natural human impulse is to want to kill whatever it is that is hurting such horribly suffering humans. You want to throw everything at the Enemy. If anyone stands in your way, the impulse is to brand him a demon.

In that frame of mind, you don't want to hear about diverting millions of dollars to mathematical modeling to assess how you will feed and provide water to those people you save and get them educated and gainfully employed so they won't start gunrunning militias that plunge a region into ceaseless rounds of massacres.

Now that I have that off my chest, here are the Four Forces:

1. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair (two Scots) are representative of a noble tradition in Great Britain that came to recoil against slavery--indeed, the tradition inspired the humanitarian aspect of the American Civil War. In short, Blair and Brown are sincere in their desire to help the peoples of the African continent, as whole.

And Blair and Brown are not stupid or naive; they are very much aware of the pitfalls in throwing huge amounts of money into African aid. However, their position strikes me as an echo of Bush's answer to the naysayers about the invasion of Iraq. In certain circumstances, you can't allow the threat of catastrophic failure to prevent you from doing the right thing by your fellow humans.

2. Just when leaders of broke African governments were wondering how they were going to talk the Group of Eight into giving them debt relief, along came the war on terror. This was followed by hordes of al Qaeda fighters chased by Coalition special forces into Africa. The African leaders raised their eyes to the sky and shouted, "Thank you!"

So basically it's costing the Coalition an arm and a leg to get help from broke African governments in chasing down Bad Guys in their neck of the woods.

3. The UN Oil for Food Program busted wide open when the Marines got to Baghdad. This meant the party was over for many crooks; they knew that sooner or later the US government was going to lower the boom on the United Nations. So they began casting around for alternate means, different organizations, through which to work crooked deals. As soon as they heard about SAP their ears went to full perk.

4. Bill and Melinda Gates decided to save the world.

Put the Four Forces together and shake. The resulting glop means it would be really wise to chop down the Commission for Africa into little commissions that can be very closely monitored by well-trained independent observers, to include teams of forensic accountants.

And to spend an unfortunately large amount of money on draconian security for SAP projects. This way there is a fighting chance that vaccines and AIDS medication won't be stolen, watered down, and sold on the streets of cities across Africa and Asia.
.

"Pundita, dear, regarding your "Africa who?" essay, I was touched by your advice that reasonable thought be deployed on the eve of the Africa Gold Rush. You remind me of the schoolmarms in the old American Western movies, lecturing the gangs riding into town that they should remember to act in the manner of civilized men.

However, I wonder if you've actually read the entire Commission for Africa report. They're already trying to evade the sheriff--that would be Bush. As soon as he shut down Saddam's Oil for Palaces Program they knew it was only a matter of time before he'd deputize someone like Bolton to go shoot em up at the UN. Then he sent Wolfy to the World Bank. Have you heard the latest? Wolfowitz is saying that corruption is the biggest threat to the world since communism.* So while you didn't get your heart's wish for head of the Bank [Eliot Spitzer] Wolfy might ask Spitzer for advice. And of course it's becoming dangerous to rip off the state in Russia, unless you want to risk serious jail time. Africa is the Last Frontier.
Boris in Jackson Heights"

Dear Boris:
In his discussion of my Democracy Stage Show Kit essay, ZenPundit observed:

When an oligarchy or a dictator loses the confidence of the state bureaucracy, when the nomenklatura of terror has its will sapped by uncertainty, even an efficient police state will unravel with unnerving speed. Erich Honecker ruled East Germany for decades. His successor, Egon Krenz, lasted a month.

The same observation applies to the public's loss of confidence in the state bureaucracy. In recent months there have been ugly--no, horrific--incidents in South or Central America where mobs of townspeople have massacred corrupt officials; dragged them out of their office and killed them in very brutal fashion.

Modern communications and the huge global news media industry are feeding news consumers worldwide with a constant diet of shocking stories about government corruption.

And the internet is plugging what the Belmont Club blogger refers to as the Memory Hole. It used to be that a civil servant or elected or appointed official could say or do things, then a few years later deny them or put a spin on them. It was very hard to catch them if the state set out to erase the original comments from the public record. Now with the Net and powerful search engines, it's virtually impossible to erase all record of things that were done and said years before.

All these factors conspire to make it hard for the state to divert public outrage toward a traditional scapegoat--usually a minority population or a segment of a ruling class. That's one reason Beijing developed a post-9/11 policy of supporting authoritarian governments; it's a strategy to challenge Bush's Democracy Doctrine. The ruling party in China has seen where this strong call for freedom and transparency in government is leading when combined with the internet era. It's threatening to take away the state's traditional propaganda weapons for deflecting rage against the state.

But it's not just the Bush Doctrine; many factors have converged to reveal in unprecedented fashion the scope of corruption in governments worldwide. The French contemptuously refer to "Chateau Iraq." No matter how much they're against the US invasion of Iraq they have seen the swamp of corruption that was exposed by the invasion, which includes the Chirac government's deals with Saddam's Baathist regime.

The sheer volume of information that's now available about government corruption, and the speed with which it's transmitted, threaten the mechanisms of government even in France, which has a history of tolerance for government corruption.

I venture the tolerance has eroded because people are realizing it's not only corruption in all cases; it's globalized crime syndicates taking over governments or becoming intertwined with them.

ICTAR (International Crime Threat Assessment Report) practically shouts about that situation. The report was published in December 2000, when the US and world press were caught up in the drama of the disputed US presidential election. So the report's publication went virtually unnoticed by the public. But that report, which represents what might have been unprecedented US interagency and international agency cooperation, is probably the one "intelligence" triumph of the Clinton administration.

It might be that Senator John Kerry and other congressionals who wanted to take a policing approach to dealing with terrorism were influenced by the ICTAR findings. If so they were wrong; state-funded terrorist armies are distinct from international crime syndicates, even though the two can intersect. ICTAR makes that distinction clear but it's certainly tempting to read a great deal about terrorism into the findings.

In any case, ICTAR dashes the comforting illusion of Two Worlds--the reasonably 'good' democratic (or quasi-democratic) governments and the 'bad' despotic regimes. Today every poor country is a potential target for takeover by a crime syndicate. And for essentially the same reason that certain companies are easy pickings for corporate raiders:

A government teeters on the edge of bankruptcy--because it went broke buying US dollars to keep in reserve for oil purchases, or because the tax base is inadequate, or the government is a study in mismanagement, or all three. Along comes a transnational crime syndicate lugging suitcases stuffed with hundreds of millions of dollars:

"Hi! We're not here to make waves in your country. We'll be nice! We just want to invest in your debt instruments and stock market and make deposits in your banks. Is that okay?"

That's one reason Gordon Brown is saying to the Group of Seven oops Eight: Throw in the towel; wipe out all the debt for the African countries because if you don't, they have another way of raising the cash to keep the lights on.

Of course we've been down this road before but Brown wants to couple debt forgiveness with tough anti-corruption measures and a host of other fixes that hopefully will prevent the same countries from falling over the cliff again. Thus, the Commission for Africa.

Can it be done? Well, reading ICTAR teaches that something has to be done. However, unless anti-corruption drives cut both ways, it's emptying an ocean with a sieve to attempt to oust the criminals from their influence on a national economy.

The UN Oil for Food Program has been called the crime of the century. That's because it involved so many seemingly legitimate companies from so many countries and so many officials in advanced democracies. That mocks the traditional view of the corrupt Arab dictator. Saddam Hussein was propped up by the corruption of people working under the protection of democratic governments in advanced countries. It's the same with African despots.

During the Cold War, the Soviets and the Western Allies thought nothing of propping up corrupt dictators but the governments waging the war maintained control. Now crime syndicates are using the tactics of the state and they're not necessarily under state control.

Even in cases where the crime syndicates are controlled by a government, that's walking around a tiger by the tail. The syndicates can easily overthrow a ruling party--in the way the old KGB or CIA could overthrow a Banana Republic regime. And they can do it using the tactics I mentioned in Democracy Stage Show Kit. They can make it look like a People's or 'velvet' revolution.

So it's also a matter of "Physician Heal Thyself," if you want to talk about saving Africa. We can no longer wait for African countries to stumble toward healing themselves because terror armies have moved in on certain regions there. But if you want to put the brakes on corruption in African governments, that also means going after corrupt officials in donor countries. And sitting hard on companies that practice Harry Lime Capitalism.

With regard to the Gold Rush--the World Bank could tell you there is no way to throw massive amounts of money and material into virtually any country without maybe 40% of it being skimmed off by crime organizations and corrupt government officials. In fact, 40% is a happy hopeful figure. That's not including funds lost from waste, inefficiency.

But I venture you're also talking about the contractors that will clean up from new mega donor programs arising from the CFA recommendations. So what else is new? Somebody has to truck in the material, somebody has to unload it, somebody has to provide the vaccines, build up docks for offloading, and so on.

Yes, a lot of money will be made from throwing mega-millions of aid money at problems in Africa. Ever thus. But that's why I began this essay with ZenPundit's observations and my discussion of the shortening fuse of public sentiment toward government corruption. I'm not the schoolmarm lecturing banditos. I'm warning the sheriff's office that the lynch mob is headed their way, if they don't clean up their act.

The task is to throw as many checks and balances as possible into any overarching program to save Africa. The Blair-Brown project might have to be scaled back and considerably tightened up. This is because polls show that a majority of the British public voices as much skepticism as many Americans about how much good it will do to throw massive amounts of money into Africa.

I think President Bush has the right idea in this; he wants to see very concrete plans and the checks and balances. But the risk for the US standing aloof from the Blair-Brown project is that as we drain the swamp at the United Nations, the crooks will move into organizations that work external to the UN. So given the stakes, the US shouldn't depend entirely on the World Bank (or the UN) to be the watchdog for the Africa Commission projects.

Yesterday the US House International Relations Committee approved legislation to withhold half of US dues to the United Nations unless the world body overhauls its bureaucracy, bars dictatorships from human rights posts and installs a tougher internal watchdog. (Hat tip: John Batchelor Show.) You can imagine how well that went over with the crooks. But you know, it's largely a matter of staying on them. In this way they learn that most Americans get really aggravated about people who trade on human misery.

* New World Bank Chief Says Aiding Africa Is His Top Goal
By Elizabeth Becker
Washington Post
Published: June 1, 2005

WASHINGTON, May 31 - When he becomes president of the World Bank on Wednesday, Paul D. Wolfowitz says, Africa will be his top priority.

"Nothing would be more satisfying than to feel at the end of however long a term I serve here that we played a role in changing Africa from a continent of despair to a continent of hope," he said Tuesday at his first news conference.

To underline that commitment, he will travel to Africa in June.

Mr. Wolfowitz becomes the 10th president of the bank, the world's largest development organization, at a time when experts are again asking basic questions about what works in pulling countries out of poverty.

One of the few things most development institutions agree on is the need for a large increase in development aid. The United Nations and the World Bank under James D. Wolfensohn, the departing president, have called for the world's rich nations to double the aid given to the poor. ...

Surveying the array of issues tied up in the goal of reducing poverty, Mr. Wolfowitz said he would emphasize finding solutions in partnership with the countries involved; ensuring that women have the same opportunities as men; restoring the bank's role of building structures like roads, ports and bridges in poor countries; and coordinating the bank's efforts with other donors and institutions.

"The best approach is to put the people in developing countries in the driver's seat," he said, adding that this often requires humility and patience.

He also singled out corruption as a major problem in development.

"Corruption is the biggest threat to democracy since communism," he said. ...

.

For readers who saw the post before 1:45 PM EDT, I've added a few sentences to my observation on the utility of Common Sense Reasoning (CSR):

Despite the great value of CSR and the human tendency to engage in such reasoning, trying to put oneself in the place of another has fallen out of favor--even though Game Theory is based on CSR. The modern problem-solving arsenal, which includes statistical reasoning and scientific epistemology, has tended to overshadow the prosaic mental act of trying to imagine oneself in the place of another.

Yet with all the modern skill sets for reasoning at their command, time and time again World Bank project managers have torn their hair in anguish, saying, "If only we had thought to ask."

Also, to head off inquiries, I deleted the sentence "Although African rulers resisted, many battles were one-sided massacres" from Pakenham's quote because it distracted from my point, which is that powerful forces, even in modern history, work against Africa being a 'nation.'

Frankly, I would be a little less worried about the consequences of planned "Commission for Africa" projects if there had been more than one commission; e.g., "Commission for Congo."
.

Pundita has been asked to comment on the Commission for Africa . There is no "Africa," in the way there is Bharata or the Middle Kingdom. (India and China having had long experience with strong centralized government in large parts under various ancient dynasties.) There is a vast body of land.

"In scarcely half a generation during the late 1800s, six European powers sliced up Africa like a cake. The pieces went to Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Belgium; among them, they acquired 30 new colonies and 110 million subjects." (1)

The bottom line is that the fabulous natural resources of a vast continent are up for grabs and that the front in the war on terror has extended to several regions on the African continent.

Translation: the "Africans" are going to be helped whether they want it or not. The continent needs to be cleaned up--made safe for megabusiness plantations set up by developed-world transnational corporations. The cleanup means wholesale immunizations, tamping down militias, and so on.

The British government has essentially teamed with pharmaceutical companies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to get the immunization aspect of the cleanup underway. You can save yourself a trip to Gleneagles by reading the following:

Gates' charity shifts policy
David Teather in New York
May 18, 2002
The Guardian

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and a recent global health campaigner, has invested $205m in nine large pharmaceutical companies. The investment has been made through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charitable body in the US with an endowment of $24bn (£16.5bn).

It has become a significant force in international health issues and contributed $555m to programmes last year alone. The decision to take stakes in individual firms appears to be a shift in strategy, and for the first time aligns the charity's interests with those of the drugs firms.

The foundation had eschewed equity investments and held shares in just two companies - cable firm Cox Communications and Waste Management. Now it has ploughed $76.9m into Merck shares, $37.3m into Pfizer and $29.7m into Johnson & Johnson.

Mr Gates has already built some ties with the drugs industry. Merck chief executive Raymond Gilmartin joined the Microsoft board last year while Mr Gates helped Merck with AIDS programmes in Botswana - much of the foundation's focus has been on improving health in the developing world. Investment in drugs firms could leave the foundation open to criticism.

A representative sits on the board of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations which buys vaccines from some of the pharmaceutical firms in which the foundation now holds shares.

A spokesman for the foundation said the investments were independent of the charitable programmes. Mr Gates' belief in the importance of intellectual property protection for drugs in the developing world as a means of encouraging investment is also controversial. ...

Malaria Trial Could Set a Model For Financing of Costly Vaccines
By Marilyn Chase,
Wall Street Journal
April 26, 2005; Page A1

Next month, hundreds of African infants will get an experimental vaccine against malaria in a medical trial that could foster a multibillion-dollar collaboration of science, philanthropy and market savvy.Under two new funding strategies championed by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and Britain's finance minister, Gordon Brown, rich nations and their private-sector partners for the first time would jointly guarantee the provision of vaccines against the worst scourges afflicting the developing world.

They are stepping in where market mechanisms have failed. While older vaccines for diseases like mumps and measles are more widely and cheaply available, vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS, the developing world's top killers, are so risky and costly to bring to market that little progress has been made in these areas. The malaria vaccine about to be tested has been under development for two decades -- and at one point it was nearly abandoned. The annual death toll for AIDS, TB and malaria totals at least six million.

The new funding tools are aimed specifically at this market failure. In one approach, donor governments would guarantee that a company that produced a cutting-edge vaccine for poor countries would receive market-rate prices long enough to recoup development costs. This mechanism, proposed earlier this month, is called an advance-purchase contract.The other strategy consists of rich countries, for the first time, floating government bonds geared specifically to supplying poor countries with available vaccines now and new vaccines later.

Through a proposed International Finance Facility for Immunization, the billions of dollars expected to be raised would greatly expand the distribution of existing life-saving vaccines for diseases like polio and hepatitis, and ensure that newer vaccines reach those who need them.

Of course, the first battle -- coming up with vaccines for the worst diseases -- is still being fought. Meanwhile, there is concern among aid groups that the new funding proposals will divert resources from proven tools, such as mosquito nets.

Malaria is one of the scourges targeted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation set up by Mr. Gates and his wife, Melinda. ...

I don't wish to portray Bill Gates (or Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) as unscrupulous. They are applying systems thinking to situations on the African continent. In effect they are creating a new Juggernaut, having seen the limitations of the World Bank Juggernaut. But I repeat the lesson Pundita was taught long ago by a World Bank economist, and which I recounted in The Juggernaut:

Pundita, in the manner of Alice, asked the economist why he termed the Bank a juggernaut--an engine of destruction. He replied that World Bank projects stand as irrefutable proof that you can't fix anything in this world without breaking something, somewhere down the line.

It's not possible to fully understand the economist's observation by studying one Bank project or even a few score. But it's a profound irony that the Bank could render the greatest help to humanity by publishing a book titled, The Book of World Bank Unintended Consequences from A to Z.

Is there a way to Beat the Devil? Solve problems that involve complex interactions of myriad factors without creating even bigger problems?

After many years of thinking on that question and being instructed by many wise people, and after seeing many unintended consequences with her very own eyes, Pundita says there is a way to get around the Devil if not exactly beat him.

First, it helps to remember Guru David's First Law of Large-scale Systems Design.

Second, if you hold fast to Common Sense Reasoning, you have a fighting chance of limiting the very worst unintended consequences of your bright idea for solving a problem.

What I call Common Sense Reasoning is a way of thinking that is common to all humans. It's asking oneself, "What would I do, if I were in X's place?"

Common Sense Reasoning does not confer omniscience; indeed, CSR is often wrong because many times we can't imagine what someone would do; we don't know enough about them, their culture, or their knowledge base to correctly imagine how they would think or act. But the effort to reason in such terms creates great emotional intelligence, which establishes a strong bridge of communication. It causes one to stop and question, to think of questions one wouldn't otherwise ask of another.

Despite the great value of CSR and the human tendency to engage in such reasoning, trying to put oneself in the place of another has fallen out of favor--even though Game Theory is based on CSR. The modern problem-solving arsenal, which includes statistical reasoning and scientific epistemology, has tended to overshadow the prosaic mental act of trying to imagine oneself in the place of another.

Yet with all the modern skill sets for reasoning at their command, time and time again World Bank project managers have torn their hair in anguish, saying, "If only we had thought to ask."

You would be amazed how simple, how basic, the questions might have been.

Here one might ask, "How much CSR do you need, to know what someone infected with malaria would want?"

Yes, well, if Pundita were a mosquito she would ask herself, "Now where would I like to live?"

Not in Pundita's neighborhood, that's for sure. Despite its lushness and steamy climate in the summer, there are very few mosquitos. Part of the reason is that the neighborhood is kept very clean--no backyards full of tin cans and whatnot holding standing water. And there are no feral cats hanging around, which means this neighborhood is Bird City.

The cats are kept inside by their owners. Perhaps this has something to do with my neighbor's Siamese cat, who had an unfortunate run-in with the Peregrine falcon member of Pundita's foreign policy team. Pegleg, as he has been dubbed by the team since the altercation, is now strictly an indoor kitty.

Whatever the reason, this neighborhood is dominated by birds, who feast on mosquitoes. I've never studied the patterns of malaria in various regions of the world, but in general when you see mosquitoes running riot you should study the bird population.

I'm simply giving an example of CSR in action. Asking the kind of questions that normally wouldn't occur to health workers battling malaria. This doesn't mean that more birds are a substitute for medicine. But if you want to think in terms of solving a problem, instead of having it bite you in the behind with your solution, CSR weights the odds in your favor--sometimes not by much, but just enough to avert disaster.

I'm trying to imagine what Félix Houphouët-Boigny would make of the Commission for Africa. His detractors grumble that he was corrupted by power and that he imposed too many Western ideas on his people. Whatever truth there might be in such accusations, they ignore the larger truth of where his people started from when he first ran for office, and where he led them. He was an incredibly wise person.

I used to know many Houphouët stories by heart. The one I remember best, after all these many years, as how he got control of his ministers in his old age. He was slowing down, unable to walk without assistance. So he consulted with his doctor; he explained that his ministers were losing respect for him because they were seeing his physical decline.

The doctor observed that it was a matter of rebuilding stamina; with old age had come a very sedentary lifestyle. The doctor warned that too much activity after all those years of being sedentary could damage his health severely and to build up stamina slowly.

Houphouët took the advice to heart. In private, he began with counting out his steps, and adding a few more steps every day, until after months of this he could walk miles without tiring. But all the while he did this, he kept up his old man's gait in the presence of his ministers.

Until one day....he called them to walk with him. To their astonishment he set off at a brisk pace, all the while issuing instructions and pelting them with questions of state. Very soon the ministers (who lived sedentary Limousine Lives) were huffing and puffing to keep up with him.

I think Félix Houphouët-Boigny would have taken control of the Commission for Africa; used it give his people an edge over the Harry Limes.

(1) From Scramble for Africa... by Thomas Pakenham.
.

Pundita suspects that Beijing used their (US-conferred) leadership position in the Six Party Talks, while they lasted, to egg on Seoul's widening rift with Japan and the US. It wouldn't have taken much egging, to be sure. South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun has dredged up as much bad history as possible between Korea and Japan. In this, he surely took a page from Beijing's playbook: flummox the home opposition by stirring up national sentiment against a foreign scapegoat.

Not to be outdone, Japan decided that delicate six-way negotiations with the two Koreas about nuclear bombs was the perfect time to throw off their "masochistic" view of Japan's occupation of Korea and show a little pride about their role in bringing Korea out of the Middle Ages.

So here we are today, with President Roh threatening to start a diplomatic war with Japan; this, despite good business deals between the two countries and knowledge on both sides that North Korea's nuke program represents a security threat to both countries.

Meanwhile, tracking back to President Bush's entry into office in 2001, some Senate Republicans (and, I would guess, some Democrats) were upset with President Kim's (the South Korean Kim) Sunshine Policy and morbidly suspicious that the two Koreas were planning to gang up on the USA. This led Bush to call for a review of US policy toward North Korea, the policy he inherited from Clinton. The suspicions were fanned by the Pentagon's discovery of South Korea's Contingency Plan, which we'll arrive at in good time.

Then along came 9/11, the Axis of Evil speech, and eventually the interdiction of a ship bound for Libya, which turned up Pyongyang's role in the making of the Islamic Bomb.

Meanwhile, Chinese tourists from the northeast provinces were partying it up at a Hong Kong-owned casino hotel in North Korea. (Hat tip: Asia Cable . Pundita had no idea there was an official capitalist zone in North Korea until I read Todd Crowell's report.)

And, as Pundita reported in earlier posts, South Korean businessmen and Roh's government were throwing millions (USD) into building up North Korea's Kaesong Industrial Park, which only deepened suspicions about Roh among US congressionals suspicious about North-South ties.

Then came the Contingency Plan Flap, which actually got underway in 1999. (Hat tip: The Marmot.) Joon Ang Daily , dateline June 6:

A joint U.S.-South Korean military plan to respond to a sudden collapse of the North Korean regime has been revived two months after Seoul announced it wanted the proposal shelved.

Yoon Kwang-ung, the South Korean defense minister, and his U.S. counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, met in Singapore over the weekend and agreed to develop and upgrade the contingency program.

When the South Korean government announced in April it would bear full responsibility for responding to a collapse of the regime in Pyongyang, U.S. government and military leaders were reportedly furious at the effort to exclude U.S. forces.

But on Saturday, Shin Hyeon-don, the spokesman at the Defense Ministry, said, "The two countries decided to promote a measure that would complement and advance Plan 5029 according to related regulations and procedures.

"Strategic orders will be delivered to the Korea-U.S. Military Committee as soon as possible, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the two countries and the U.S.-South Korea Combined Forces Commander will develop the plan." ...

The contingency plan caused a diplomatic rift between Seoul and Washington. Prepared in 1999, it was meant to deal with a sudden collapse of the North Korean regime and the mass defection of North Korean residents to South Korea.

In 2003, South Korea and the United States had agreed to transform the conceptual plan into an operational one by the end of this year.

Seoul's complaint in April was that a joint plan would infringe upon the sovereignty of Korea, and discussions were suspended.

But Mr. Yoon and Mr. Rumsfeld met in Singapore and reached an agreement to resume developing the plan. ...

Here the reader might reasonably ask, 'Why didn't Washington resolve the flap before they prodded Seoul into Six Party Talks?' I hazard the operational phrase is "Don't be reasonable" while pondering Washington's handling of the North Korea situation.

As coincidence would have it, something akin to agreement on Plan 5029 was reached within less than a week of President Roh's June 10 arrival at the White House for a 'working meeting' with President Bush.

More coincidence: Pundita mentioned just the other day to her readers that what this country needed was a brass tacks plan for reunification of the two Koreas. Lo and behold, it seems the DoD had the same idea. Just today the RAND Corporation released such a report, commissioned by the DoD!

Really, President Roh must announce more often that he intends to visit the White House for a working meeting! Think how far along things might have been if he had dropped by, say, once a month during the past year!

We have The Marmot to thank for news of the report and for a link to a downloadable version of the report. The report is the Must Read of the week as we prepare for Roh's visit to Washington on Friday.

But wait; there's another piece of the puzzle for Americans trying to make sense out of US policy toward North Korea and losing sleep over who is going to foot the bill, if North Korea's looming food crisis requires massive amounts of food aid:

Incheon (that's a city in South Korea for those who aren't up on the Korean War) has promised on Seoul's behalf to finish construction of the Ryugyong Hotel in beautiful downtown Pyongyang!

If you don't see the connection with footing a food aid bill and you've never heard of the Ryugyong Hotel--officially the hotel does not exist and officially Incheon's mayor never promised to finish constructing it. But the connection is that the cost of the building project will be about $1 billion. If you ask whether the girders will be gold-plated--the history of the Ryugyong Hotel, as with everything about Kim Jong U's tenure in office, is a very weird story.

(American readers: Please don't rush off at this point to Pat Buchanan's website to ask where you can sign up for your official Isolationist Policy badge. We can get through this.)

The good news is that if South Korea is even thinking about footing the bill for the Ryugyong that must mean they wouldn't mind picking up the tab for food aid to North Korea. Indeed, Roh has already stated a willingness to chip in with food aid but Seoul is waiting for a signal from Washington. We can assume this is another item for the working meeting on Friday.

In the meantime, we can buckle down to learning the history of the Ryugyong and catch up on the news about the Incheon mayor's officially nonexistent promise to finish an officially nonexistent hotel. For this, we turn to The Marmot again and The Shape of Days (don't miss his gorgeous pictures of the bat-like Ryugyong!) with a grateful nod to Simon World for introducing us to the blasted Ryugyong story (June 6 Linklets).

Once we've boned up on Plan 5029, the RAND report, the batty Ryugyong, and the rumble between Seoul and Tokyo, we'll be in a better position to determine whether inviting China and Japan into talks that involve the two Koreas was a good idea without Washington first getting on the same page with South Korea.

To be fair, China did not make the mess that the Six Party Talks represent and indeed, China gave good advice years ago to Kim Jong-il's regime (see Todd's story on the capitalist zone), which he pretty much ignored. But Pundita thinks China has made hay from the mess.

Given that things are heating up with regard to US-North Korea relations, Pundita will be closely following The Marmot's Hole and Simon World for news on the Koreas because those blogs are clearly a great source for important news on the Koreas. So, I am adding their blog links to the Pundita sidebar.

3:00 PM UPDATE

"Pundita! Look what I just pulled from Google News! Just look at these headlines!

Washington Post: U.S.: N. Korea Committed to Weapons Talks

Bloomberg: U.S. Says N. Korea Gave No Signs It's Ready to Restart Talks

The articles say pretty much the same thing so how can two headlines mean two entirely different things?? Are the North Koreans going to continue with the talks, or what? I can't take much more of this [expletetive deleted]!
STILL Sleepless in St. Louis"

Dear Still Sleepless:

All right, calm down; Pundita has consulted with Ouija to learn the true meaning of the back channel message. Ready?

HA HA BEIJING YOU THINK YOU SUCH BIG BOSS TEE HEE SEOUL YOU THINK YOU SOME SMART HO HO TOKYO YOU HAVE ROCK SALT FOR BRAIN WE CAN MAKE DEAL WITH WASHINGTON ON OUR OWN ANY TIME WE WANT

Now let's try for a polite translation: Presidents Bush and Roh should immediately and with full transparency communicate to Pyongyang the results of their working meeting on Friday.

Now please go take a nap.
.

"If we declare the [Darfur] situation genocide, what next? Don't we have to arrest the president [of Sudan]? It doesn't help to make radical statements and all that; we have to work with the situation as it is."

That pearl of wisdom from South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki, who visited Washington last week to advise President Bush that African nations need a very clear commitment on aid and debt relief when the world's richest nations meet in Scotland next month.

Mr Mbeki is not satisfied with vague assurances that something will be worked out. He wants President Bush and other leaders of the G7/8 to get down to the brass tacks of just how debt relief is to be financed. Mbeki wants concrete action when it comes to money, but is vague about how far to push the Zimbabwe and Sudanese governments with regard to human rights, democracy, and other tiresome details.

Bush was quite frank in saying that, "countries such as ours are not going to want to give aid to countries that are corrupt or don't hold true to democratic principles, such as rule of law and transparency and human rights and human decency."

But President Mbeki criticized the Bush administration's characterization of Zimbabwe as an "outpost of tyranny" and doesn't think it's helpful to name genocide for what is when dealing with Sudan's government.

All right. We won't get down to brass tacks about....how shall we term it? The unpleasantness in Zimbabwe and Sudan. Mr Mbeki wants concrete suggestions about how to finance the debts of African governments. We aim to please here in Pundita-land so we've put on our thinking cap and come up with a very concrete suggestion. Why not get the Triads and Russian mobs operating in South Africa to finance the debt?

This is a beautiful idea if you stop and think about it. The crime syndicates are already playing benefactor in Africa by employing many AIDS orphans.

Nigeria and increasingly South Africa are the regional centers for TOC [transnational organized crime]. Although not as large a factor as in other regions, links between African rebel factions and organized crime groups are increasing, which is potentially exacerbated by millions of AIDS orphans. Corruption has permeated much of African society and is now perhaps the greatest limit to growth in many countries.

But before we get into messy specifics about crime in South Africa, let's get an overview from the AC/UNU Millennium Project:

Transnational organized crime has grown to the point where it is increasingly interfering with the ability of governments to act. Nation-states can be understood as a series of decision points that are vulnerable to the vast amounts of money available to crime groups.

TOC's power in one country can be leveraged to increase power in others. The IMF has estimated that as much as 5% of the global economy--$1.8 trillion per year--is laundered through the international financial system. This understates TOC's total income, since not all income needs to be laundered. Diversification in diamonds, barter, and other media outside traditional currency systems could put the real income to well over $2 trillion per year. ... The vast amount of money amassed by TOC allows its participants to buy the knowledge and technology to create new forms of crime to generate even more profits. ...

Now we'll return to South Africa:

As a major locus of maritime trade and air traffic between Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere, South Africa is emerging as a significant hub of international criminal activity. The lifting of international trade sanctions with the end of apartheid has made South Africa readily accessible to international criminals whose operations take place within the framework of legitimate commercial business activities.

South Africa's modern airports and harbors--including container ports at Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and East London--are attractive to criminals smuggling narcotics and other contraband. South Africa's well-developed business connections to the West and political connections to some states of concern can be used by criminals to broker illicit transactions involving arms, controlled technologies, or strategic commodities.

For criminal organizations, South Africa also has the advantage of a modern financial system linked to financial markets worldwide, which facilitates money laundering. And, as happened in Russia, criminal organizations recruit professionals with skills well-suited to competing in the modern business environment who were pushed aside or sidelined by the political and economic changes taking place in South Africa.

With the increase in international travel and business since the apartheid government turned over power in 1994, the scope of organized crime in South Africa has evolved from generally small-scale operations centered in localities to nationwide syndicates....

Foreign organized crime groups, primarily Nigerian, Russian, and Chinese syndicates, have established bases of operations in South Africa since the mid-1990s for a variety of illegal activity, including drug trafficking and other contraband smuggling, poaching and trafficking in endangered species, money laundering, and financial crimes....

For the rest of the Millennium report on South African crime visit this link and scroll to the Africa heading. But to really get ourselves educated and understand why it's a great idea to get big-time crooks to shoulder debt relief for Africa's poverty-stricken governments, here is the Must Read:

Triad Societies and Chinese Organised Crime in South Africa by Peter Gastrow, Organised Crime and Corruption Programme, Institute for Security Studies; Occasional Paper No. 48-2001.

The implications of the writing go far beyond a discussion of Triads operating in South Africa; if you want to understand the modern world, this is the report to study.

In my June 5 essay I mentioned the business concept of Velocity and that China's government had fully grasped Velocity and applied it to great success. The same holds true for the most sophisticated transnational crime syndicates, which include the biggest Triads. The crooks have invested billions USD in building up infrastructures, such as ports, which facilitate global trade in contraband.

So they rip off money from the poor and from the governments (I don't have the latest figures but you can easily estimate $3-5 billion/year ripped off from South Africa's government alone). They vampire the society; they are not interested in turning the society into a trading power, except in contraband. They're not interested in educating the people, except to criminal enterprises: how to excel at the slave trade and doping up their neighbors so they can get them hooked on drugs that keep increasing in price.

But as Thabo Mbeki has reminded us if there are no ugly words there will be no bottleneck situations. So we must speak of the vampires as thoroughly modern businesspeople, which they happen to be.

And they are just as much under the gun of transnational business rules, including the rules of Velocity, as legitimate businesspeople. If the crooks don't get the goods shipped to the customer fast enough, if the goods are damaged--they get beat out by a competitor.

That information is light at the end of the tunnel for those seeking a truly workable and fair means of debt relief for African nations--and indeed for all the governments asking the G7/8 to cough up.

All you need is a coordinated effort to slow business to a crawl at certain docks and at times that can't be predicted by the crooks. How can this be done? Well, look for the Vial or the Thingy, or whatever Alfred Hitchcock termed it. As he explained it doesn't matter what it is; it matters that everyone is trying to find it.

To find the Vial, you need to take apart shipping containers and send in Vial sniffing doggies. Use dogs who are so old they couldn't smell a piece of Limburger cheese if it rested on their nose.

Also send in legions of inspectors to root around in the containers. Hire the oldest and most arthritic people and preferably the clumsiest.

By now you have the general idea. Make as much mess and confusion as possible, break as many widgets as can be broken, and slow things at the docks to the pace of a snail's mambo. Then put out the message: "Send your donations, earmarked Debt Relief, to the nearest American embassy."

I guarantee that within one month enough money will materialize to keep Africa afloat for the coming decade.

Next.
.

On the flight to Singapore, [Donald] Rumsfeld said ties with India would strengthen while those with China could fray if Beijing did not open its society more.

Rumsfeld previewed findings of the Pentagon's annual report to Congress about the Chinese military, saying, "China's defense expenditures are much higher than Chinese officials have publicly admitted. It is estimated that China's is the third-largest military budget in the world, and now the largest in Asia."

Warnings about China's military modernization have been issued before, but Rumsfeld's remarks were notable because they came at an Asian security conference attended by defense ministers and military specialists from across Asia and the Pacific Rim.*

Actually, it was Bill Gertz who previewed the Pentagon's annual report on China's military; he did that last Sunday on Matt Drudge's radio show. Mr Gertz has impeccable credentials as an investigative journalist and he's highly connected, as they say, in the US defense/intelligence spheres. He's the author of Treachery: how America's friends and foes are secretly arming our enemies. The book is required reading for anyone still harboring the belief that a nation's survival depends on adhering to a double standard with allies.

Here are my notes on Drudge's interview with Gertz--with the caveat that Pundita doesn't do shorthand; boldface type indicates where I filled in gaps with my own language.

> The Pentagon getting ready to release it's annual report on Chinese military power. There is big debate in Washington about chapter two of the report: China's Future [with regard to military buildup, I assume]. Within 15-20 years...working on anti-US strategy in preparation [for armed conflict with US over Taiwan, I think he said?]...

> NSC staff trying to play down the report. There are two camps: State Department and Pentagon. State wants a soft approach to China--pretty much more of the same old US policy toward China: hollow tough talk. Rumsfeld for tougher approach.

Gertz: "Rumsfeld's saying wait a minute, we don't know where China is going. We're dealing with a pseudo-capitalist economy that is building up military against us."

> Gertz says that all scenarios for China military development are not good. There used to be a balance but now China shifting and building up rapidly against Taiwan..."There is a real danger of conflict by miscalculation"...

Drudge: "Where is China getting the money for the buildup?"
Gertz: "US trade is building the Chinese military for them..."

> Drudge: "How much pressure is Bush putting on Israel about their [military] technology transfers to China?"

Gertz: "Israel has had a very dynamic technology transfer with China....We need to reevaluate the military trade with China. [With Israel] it's been the greed factor..."

> Gertz says the Pentagon alarmed about the Harpie--an anti-radiation missile. "They've spotted some of these Israeli-supplied drones...[I didn't get down the rest]"

> Drudge: "Would you characterize China as a US enemy?"
Gertz: "Yes. It was big mistake to allow the Chinese to take the lead on six party talks with North Korea..."

We've gone down this road before with China but it never lasts long. Sooner or later, Washington gives into US businesses determined to use China as a plantation and US Calculator Christians salivating over the huge untapped market for conversion that China's billion-strong population represents.

And Secretary Rumsfeld's comments still avoid tackling China's geopolitical strategy.(1) This is despite the fact that in Burma, in Nepal, in Vietnam, in North Korea, in Zimbabwe, in Pakistan, in Iran--everywhere there is a regime hell-bent on sticking to despotism, there you will find China helping to prop it up.

Then Washington wonders why Vladimir Putin gets sarcastic in response to lectures about his affronts to democracy and Russia's weapons sales to Argentina and Syria.

When the Chinese are called out on their strategy they fall back on discussing America's double standard during the Cold War era. This argument overlooks that for every evil America did in the world by propping up dictators we did a thousand times more good. Indeed, we rescued China from mass starvation.

But I press on to my point, which is that Rummy's comments signal a sea change that's been building in Washington since 9/11. For decades the US Department of State ran US foreign policy, then with Clinton's entry into office State managed to hamstring the US military not to mention the CIA.

Pundita has no comment about the disputes regarding Rummy's modernization of the DoD, which are outside my purview. However, I feel safe in observing that under Rumsfeld's leadership, and with President Bush's encouragement, the Pentagon has correctly battled to take back advisory turf that should belong to the military.

There have no been no bullets fired but this has been a life-or-death battle, with America's future at stake. Foreign policy must be built on defense policy, not the other way around. Yet over the course of the Cold War defense policy came to mean 'getting along with US allies,' which devolved into pandering to allies.

That is how it came to pass that France and Germany sold weapons to Saddam's regime. That's how it came to pass that Israel sold weapons technology to China, which China turned around and sold to Israel's enemies! That is how it came to pass that Saudi Arabia bankrolled the Islamic Bomb, which Libya and several other countries were building--with China's help--before we caught them red-handed. The list goes on and on.

Yet clearly the human race has passed from the era where a double standard in foreign policy can be considered practical. It's suicidal, is what it is; Rumsfeld's tough comments about China represent a recognition of this. The question is whether State, and the US lobbies and congressionals who support a double standard toward China, will retain the high ground.

Feeling my way to an answer, I think that recent comments by Condoleezza Rice suggest that a faction at State is coming around to the radical idea that diplomacy is supposed to follow defense policy not lead it.

But State, and the congressionals who support a tougher US line on China, are up against something in transnational trade that's been termed Velocity.(1) The term is a fancy way of saying that it's how fast you get your goods to the customer and service the wholesale buyer that gives the edge in a fiercely competitive globalized market.(2)

Beijing took the pulse of the globalized business era then made sure to build and modernize infrastructures in China that facilitate rapid transport of goods around the globe. So it's not accurate to say that cheap labor explains China's business success. The success has been due to a variety of factors, which include military control to insure safety for foreign business plants and dock operations.

But the velocity factor is huge. So while it's true that the US doesn't "have" to do business in China, offshoring US plants to other developing countries that could use our business is unfeasible in many cases because they don't have the infrastructures to support big offshore trade. And the crime situation, which includes the kidnapping industry, is a nightmare for foreign companies sited in many developing countries.

Yet we could begin to invest more in countries that have a better human rights record and are friendlier to the US than China. That is the only way Beijing will listen to protests about their support of tyranny at home and abroad.

(1) For a recent analysis of China's geopolitical strategy, read Dana Robert Dillon's May 11, 2005 report for the Heritage Foundation, China's Zombie Countries .

(2) For an introduction to the velocity business concept (and how it's impacted the US military and Donald Rumsfeld's thinking), see Velocity Management: The Business Paradigm That Has Transformed U.S. Army Logistics by Marygail Brauner, et al.

* The online newspaper I quoted (azcentral.com) blocked me from returning to the page when I went to collect their URL. They wanted Pundita to run the gamut of a questionnaire before allowing me to see the URL link to the article. So I can't give the quotes proper accreditation.
.

"Sam asked me while I was reading him your essay, Since when does she believe in fairies and leprechauns? So I said to him she's waiting for someone to ask what the Gold Dinar Fairy is. Until someone breaks down and asks we'll never see an adult discussion about Canada. All right. What is the Gold Dinar Fairy? Now can we please have just one discussion about Canada? They're our neighbors, you know.
Not Born Yesterday in New York"

"Pundita, I'll bite. What is the Gold Dinar Fairy?
Caesar in San Francisco"

Dear NBY and Caesar:
Due to overwhelming popular demand Pundita will now discuss the Gold Dinar Fairy. She's something like Tinkerbell. You have to believe. Crown Prince Abdullah could tell you that once she gets her wings revved up she sprinkles peace, happiness and a sudden halt to suicide bombings. So obviously there are not enough believers in Iraq at this moment. The question is why. Visits to Pundita's sources for news on Iran were no help in solving the mystery. That left the crystal ball, which is out for repairs; tea leaves, and the Ouija board.

The tea leaves weren't much help unless you consider, "The Saudis are trying to pressure the Bush administration into not putting up a fuss about their request to make their own nuclear bomb" to be helpful.

That left Pundita no choice but to wrestle with Ouija, which has been on the fritz since 1992. It has a habit of lapsing into Slavic languages whenever I put questions it doesn't understand. But the question, "Why O why is the Gold Dinar Fairy not flitting around Iraq these days?" elicited a reply in reasonably coherent English. Take it or leave it:

WELCOME TO WORLD BANK DOCTOR WOLFOWITZ PLEASE MAKE SURE IRAQI GOVERNMENTS DOESN'T SHUT IRAN CONTRACTORS OUT OF BIDDING FOR BIG TICKET BANK PROJECTS IN IRAQ HAVE A DAY NICE

Pundita hasn't forgotten Canada. We're waiting to see whether Prime Minister Paul Martin will be forced to call an election if he can't get the budget passed by the end of June.

.

Every so often a new reader asks for an archive that presents Pundita's essay by theme. Months ago I created such an archive on another blog that links to this one but as the weeks and essays piled up, I shunted the project to the back burner with the promise to put it on my To-do list someday.

Someday has arrived. I've made a start at updating the archives, revising the category names to make them more descriptive, and adding a sentence of explanation about certain essays. I'm hoping to finish the project this weekend but in answer to a new reader's urgent plea for a "map" of Pundita's blog, here's the link to Pundita's File Cabinet.

The Pundita Mission Statement and first three 'files' -- Building Liberty's Century Policy, On the need to develop American policy as distinct from NATO policy, and What US policymakers should take into account about Old World nations -- will get the new reader started.
Regards to all,
Pundita

(New readers might want to look at the May 31 Pundita essay about North Korea before starting on this one.)

"Pundita! I'm completely confused about policy coming out of Washington. Okay, so Dick Cheney told Larry King that China is the key to pressuring North Korea, but the New York Times reported that senior officials in Washington no longer think China is the key! It's like the White House has a split personality when it comes to China or maybe it's just the battles between the State Department and the Pentagon but anyhow [US] policy on North Korea reminds me of The Three Faces of Eve.
Sleepless Again in St. Louis"

Dear SAISL:
Remember that the CIA favors The New York Times as a voicebox. Before we continue, I'll quote the passage in the Times report that vexes you:

In a change that reflects a failure of the present policy, some officials say they will no longer rely heavily on China to sway the North Koreans. Ms. Rice met with China's leaders in Beijing in March specifically to ask them to pressure North Korea. That pressure has continued. But senior officials say they now realize that China may never be willing to use its leverage over North Korea, which relies on China for much of its food, energy and other resources.

I don't know exactly when Cheney taped his interview with Larry King, which was aired May 31, but if I recall it was on May 29 that CNN published a partial transcript of the interview, which featured Cheney's remarks about China. The New York Times report you mention was published on May 30, but you can be sure that the White House had advance notice of the report.

So Cheney's remarks to King were most probably to offset the impression fostered by the NYT report that the White House was backing off from putting pressure on China with regard to North Korea.

If you're still confused I think the distinction is between types of pressure--military and diplomatic. The Pentagon sending stealth bombers to South Korea is a distinctly different kind of pressure on Beijing than Rice asking Beijing to pressure North Korea into returning to the six party talks.

Realize that the party is over for Beijing. For decades, the US relied on clandestine intelligence gathering to learn what was going on with China. The rationale for intel gathering, of the pussyfoot nature, is that you can't just ask a head of state what's going on and expect to receive a straight answer.

But there's nothing like a superpower using military force to topple a regime and military interdictions of shipments on the high seas to make pussyfooting unnecessary. To put this another way, Pervez Musharraf and Moammar al-Ghadafi have been singing like a bird to the US military high command.

This sort of thing is catching. For decades China had a free run because they knew it was politically incorrect for any national leader to bring the truth to Washington about Beijing. But now that it's widely known that the White House is all ears, everybody's on a talking jag.

In short the Pentagon now has a pile of evidence, as versus 'intelligence,' on China's activities to promote nuclear proliferation in North Korea and several other small countries.

However, the Pentagon's clearer view of China comes late in the day. South Korea and China have found common ground in their opposition to Japan. And the south has found common ground with the north in Korea. United States policy toward North Korea has studiously avoided taking into account the sea changes.

One can spend time wrangling over how to approach China with regard to North Korea. Or one can take the sea changes into account then ask Seoul, "What do you want?"

The truth is that Seoul is unclear on what they want. On the one hand they want reunification with the north. On the other hand they fear that reunification will overwhelm their society with North Koreans. And they are naturally reluctant to share power with any part of the north's governing apparatus. On the one hand, they say that they are inclined to believe the carrot approach works to keep Kim's regime at bay. On the other hand, they set up a howl when the US military announced a troop reduction in South Korea; Seoul lobbied to get the reduction slowed down.

The lack of clarity from Seoul parallels the lack of clarity from the US side. Even a child could realize there is something screwy about asking a dictatorship to talk sense to another dictatorship on behalf of a democracy. Beijing has no place in the six party talks; they should never been vested with the power to negotiate in any way on behalf of the USA. To say that this is not what was intended--that the US simply wanted China to negotiate according to their best interests--is disingenuous. The US sent a thug to talk another thug out of being a thug.

Now one might argue that talk about reunification has nothing to do with the immediate "crisis" with regard to Kim's nuclear/chemical/biological weapons programs. However, the US has been futzing around for close to two decades about Kim's weapons program. So now Washington sees a crisis. Okay, but let's say Pyongyang's nuke facilities are bombed tomorrow and Kim falls down dead. Then what?

The US should have been working hard for at least the past decade on reunification-- working with Seoul on how to make reunification feasible. This would have given clear direction and support to the faction in Pyongyang that wants to unseat Kim Jong-il and bring about peaceful reunification with the south.

What's been the obstacle to this approach? Pundita doesn't know but it's probably a combination of factors at work. Reunification would mean that a united Korea has nuclear weapons inherited from the North. I doubt that Japan would like that situation. And a united Korea might not be so willing to give up nukes if the greatest rationale for getting rid of them -- Kim's despotic regime -- is removed.

In any case, such questions need careful attention and hard work sorting out. As for Kim and his weapons program--well, he's not going to give up the program and he can't allow reunification on any terms but his, which means putting south Korea under his control. He simply can't stay in power, once many north Koreans learn the details of his rule and he knows this.

Meanwhile, Beijing is playing for huge stakes in Asia and on the world stage. So it's not worth it to Beijing to draw a line in the sand about propping up Kim's regime. Kim knows this, so he's playing Seoul against Beijing in dealings with the USA.

If American readers groan that they're hearing Pundita suggest a checkbook be opened -- I'd say that before money must come clarity. South Korea does have a Reunification Ministry. It's anyone's guess how much concrete discussion they've had with the World Bank-IMF and Asian Development Bank about financing reunification. But if you move toward a fuzzy goal you'll follow fuzz, which is no help as a guide. And fuzzy is no help to any faction in Pyongyang that's looking for direction on how peaceful reunification could be managed.

As to how China would see a united Korea with nukes and the combined military strength of north and south, I doubt they'd jump for joy. Where is Pundita's Kleenex box, so we can have a good cry over the prospect of China's discomfort.

Good background on the present Korea situation:

James Brooke's For Koreas, an industrial union in the International Herald Tribune; the report is about South Korea's investment in the north's Kaesong Industrial Park. Despite its date (October 2004) this article contains highly relevant information. Please note mention of South Korea's fear that the US would try to sabotage the broadened partnership between the two Koreas.

And if you missed it, see Brooke's June 2 report for the New York Times (via the Inrternational Herald Tribune on Korea's current food crisis. Note the mention that North Korea is making counterfeit Viagra. It would be interesting to know which government or crime syndicate set up the factory in North Korea for making a counterfeit pharmaceutical. That line of crime sounds a departure from North Korea's usual contraband exports.

See also a rare and recent 'inside North Korea' report filed with the Christian Science Monitor (June 2), On North Korea's streets, pink and tangerine buses.
.

Few Americans dreaded the Non and Neen votes more than Pundita, because that would mean it would be time to discuss the concept of social dumping. No, don't go to Wikipedia for a definition; it's not there yet. But sooner or later Americans will learn more about social dumping than we ever wanted to know.

A few months ago Tech Central Station made a valiant effort to wade into the discussion; however, the authority they featured, a Swede who lobbies in Brussels, seemed unaware that American readers wouldn't have the foggiest idea of what he was so incensed about.

Yet the term, and the very bitter arguments surrounding it, are at the heart of the thumping rejection of the EU Constitution in France and the Netherlands. A portent of the No votes came in early May, when a European Parliament vote on work hours in Britain revealed a deep schism in the European Union. For years, Britain had an "opt-out" clause, which allowed British employees to work longer than the 48 hours/week mandated by the EU's "working time" directive. On May 11, the European Parliament voted to strip Britons of their right to work as many hours as they darn well pleased. This set off an uproar:

Phillip Bushill-Matthews, the Tory employment spokesman, said the measure was an attack on freedom and a signal to the world that a declining Europe remained incapable of facing up to labour market reform.

"It is not for a remote group of Left-leaning politicians in Europe to tell people how long they can work and rest." Ministers expect support from new member states in eastern Europe who want to take advantage of flexible labour markets.

Konrad Szymanski, a Polish Euro-MP, called the vote a "black day" for European enterprise. "It imposes the worst legacy of the French and German economies on those countries which do not want that, such as Poland, Britain and Ireland."

Lest you think the flap is just a Right-Left debate or another instance of labor unions at war against capitalism, Pundita will now attempt to use the term "social dumping" in a few sentences, by way of conveying the scope of the argument:

At first, many South Koreans were thrilled that the Sunshine Policy meant that North Koreans would have a chance to work for South Korean manufacturers. And they are still thrilled, because they can buy really cheap goods made in the North. But it's now dawning on some Southerners that really big business with the North will mean that Southerners might have to compete against Northerners for jobs. This would result in Southerners having to dump their way of life and adopt a much lower standard, if they want to be competitive. They would have to live much like the Northern employees, who work like slaves for less than peanuts.

Now we'll try "social dumping" in another context:

At first many Americans were thrilled to have access to really cheap Mexican labor. Then one day it occurred to many Americans that if things continued on, they would be in competition with Mexicans for jobs. Because the Mexicans were willing to work like slaves for peanuts, Americans who want to be competitive would have to dump their way of living and adopt a much lower standard.

And another:

At first many West Europeans were thrilled to have access to really cheap East European labor..and continue on as above.

By now you get the picture: Social dumping is having to dump a society's standard of living in order to remain competitive in a globalized or regionalized economy. As you can see by the Korea example, the issue of social dumping converges with human rights issues. And the French--always deep thinkers--are looking at the broadest implications of social dumping:

All this business, all this trade, the very fabric of modern civilization--what use is it, if the fruits of trade force a generation to go backward? The immigrant experience in America (and West Europe) is about making a better life for one's family; the idea is to progress up the social scale. And part of the social contract in advanced modern societies is strong protection for human rights. But if one is willing to use services and products from countries that don't respect the human rights of their citizens, what happens to the social contract in advanced countries?

There is no easy answer to such questions, which form the basis of debates in the US Congress about doing business with China and other countries that do not respect human rights. On the other side of the divide are the excellent points brought up the Swedish author, and by EU nations that are outraged at the European Parliament's vote against the British opt-out clause. Poor countries see anti-Social Dumping measures as a way to hold them back from becoming competitive with the richer nations.

In 1997, the World Bank-IMF decided to bite the bullet with publication of a report titled Are International Labor Standards Needed to Prevent Social Dumping? While on the longish side, and despite the age of the data, the report is still the best introduction to the topic of social dumping. The idea of setting up international labor law is right up there with dandruff and halitosis as a topic for polite discussion in America, but that's where discussion is headed in Europe and sooner or later it's coming our way.

Update: 3:45 PM, EDT: Below are Dave Schuler's comments on this post. No, Dave, Pundita had no idea such a claptrap notion was around. So much claptrap, so little time...but thanks for the warning on this one.

Dear Pundita:
This an important topic--and one that doesn't cut 100% the United States's way. For example, there are quite a few countries that view the U. S. health care system as a violation of human rights.

In the post you mention the "social contract". Presumably you're aware that the lcaptrap notion that no such thing exists is abroad in the land and is held by quite a few otherwise intelligent and well-educated people. Right now I'm having a pretty well-publicized debate with a guy who was on the Nobel list a few years ago on essentially this subject. His position is that social groups are harmful abstractions with no real existence.

My position is that since social groups have been easily observable for as long as humans have been humans and in every part of the world and BY DEFINITION in every society, groups are every bit as real as individuals. Note: no group, no social contract. Homo economicus.

There are such things as species that are simply individuals. Many kinds of cats come to mind: solitary hunters, coming together mostly to have sex. Human beings are not creatures like that.

My position is that social groups are intrinsic to the human species and necessary for their happiness. Consequently, natural law favors the notion of a responsibility of individual people to the society i.e., a social contract. To think otherwise is to hold up Ted Kaczynski as the epitome of the human species.

Dave Schuler
The Glittering Eye
http://www.theglitteringeye.com
.

May 31, 2005: Khodorkovsky, Lebedev Decry Russian System of Justice

Khodorkovsky's attorneys said the prosecution provided no evidence that there was a criminal group beyond asserting that Group Menatep, a holding company with the major block of shares in Yukos, was itself such a conspiracy. They noted that the only evidence submitted to the court was the fact that Menatep had a Web site, a phone list and a memo discussing the diversification of investments.

"General Motors is a criminal group under those criteria," said John Pappalardo, one of Khodorkovsky's international lawyers.

14 May 2004--Group MENATEP Announces Appointment of New Directors

Group MENATEP, the international diversified holding company that controls assets in excess of US$ 30 billion, including a substantial stake in YUKOS oil company, has announced the appointment of three new managing directors who will jointly manage the operations of the company following the death of Mr Stephen Curtis.

High Intrigue Surrounds Death of Menatep head

Stephen Curtis, the British lawyer who was made managing director of Yukos Oil’s parent company, Group Menatep, last November, became an informant of Britain’s National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) just days before dying in a helicopter accident, the Independent reports. Citing an investigation by Channel 4 News, the British newspaper writes that a high-level police inquiry is investigating whether the crash that killed him near Bournemouth on March 3rd [2004] "really was an accident."

According to documents shown to Channel 4 News, Curtis, a close confidant of jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, drew up structures for Yukos’s offshore oil trading business back in 1999 that helped the company avoid taxes. Russia’s Tax Ministry has presented Yukos with a bill of $3.5 billion for unpaid taxes in 2000 and resulting fines.

Khodorkovsky's lawyer who mysteriously died worked for British Intelligence

The mysterious lawyer Mikhail Khodorkovsky brought in to run his empire after he and his partner were jailed last year became an informant for British intelligence only days before he died in a fiery helicopter crash, according to British media reports.

The lawyer, Stephen Curtis, who was the mastermind of the vast web of offshore structures that eventually became Group Menatep, received death threats on a daily basis and feared for his life in the weeks before he died, the Independent newspaper and Channel 4 television reported over the weekend, citing unidentified friends of Curtis...

Curtis was appointed managing director of Group Menatep, the parent company of Yukos, Russia's most valuable oil company, in November, shortly after Khodorkovsky was arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud. Platon Lebedev, Khodorkovsky's longtime partner and Curtis' predecessor at Menatep, was arrested on similar charges in July. Both men, who are still awaiting trial, deny the charges.

Curtis, who had a long history of involvement with influential businessmen in the Middle East, had been involved with Menatep since 1997 and was instrumental in creating the holding's complicated offshore network, according to documents obtained by The Moscow Times.

According to Channel 4, Curtis approached Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service with an offer "to provide them with information," but he only managed to meet with his NCIS handler on two occasions before he died...

Channel 4 reported that friends of Curtis' said he was receiving death threats by telephone daily and was considering selling his London penthouse because it was too well-known.

Group Menatep spokesman Yury Kotler called Curtis' death a "huge loss," but said that he had not heard that Curtis was receiving death threats. He declined to comment further.

September 21, 1999: The Rape of Russia by Anne Williamson.*

The following is Anne Williamson's testimony before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives, presented Sept. 21, 1999. It shows how the historic opportunity given the U.S. to help transform Russia into a free, peaceful, pro-Western country was squandered in the form of a bruising economic rape carried out by corrupt Russian politicians and businessmen, assisted by Bush [41] and (especially) Clinton administrations engaged in political payoffs to Wall Street bankers and others, and by ineptitude and greed on the part of the U.S. Treasury and the Harvard Institute for International Development, assisted by fellow travelers and manipulators at Nordex, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve. The losers were the Russian people and (mainly) U.S. taxpayers...

May 27, 2005: Excerpt from comments made by a forum of experts on the Khodorkovsky/Yukos affair conducted by Peter Lavelle at Untimely Thoughts:

It is clear that something like the Khordorkovsky/ Yukos affair was bound to happen. It was simply inherent in the logic of Russia’s transition.

On the one hand, we see a massive concentration of economic/financial resources in Russia’s energy sector, with added geo-political benefits for those controlling it. On the other, an unbridled lawlessness and vaporization of the state, where nothing could resist the raw power of money. It was impossible to expect Russia’s oligarchs and their foreign allies not to attempt to buy the collapsed superpower wholesale. Khodorkovsky/ Yukos simply pursued this logic most daringly.

Equally, it is inconceivable that the state would not fight back. However corrupt and inept Putin’s regime may have been, it represents an electorate who rightly feel that it, and not the oligarchs and foreigners, should be the ultimate arbiters of the use of Russia’s resources.

By standing up to the challenge, Putin has endowed this electorate with a meaningful voice for the first time in Russia’s history. He has also emancipated it internationally by insisting that, despite its manifest flaws, it will be a Russian and not foreign judicial system which will deal with the issue.

--Vlad Sobell, Senior Economist, Daiwa Research, London.

May 31, 2005:

In a statement read by his lawyer, Anton Drel, after the court hearing, Khodorkovsky said: "I will fight for freedom - mine, Platon Lebedev's, other friends of mine, all of Russia's, and especially, for the next generation, to whom our country will fully belong in a few years. For them, my fate should stand as a lesson and an example ... The future seems bright to me, and the air of tomorrow's Russia, clean. Truth always wins, sooner or later."

I would like to believe that statement, but I very much doubt that all the truths connected with Menatep will ever come out. Whatever wrongs to democratic process the Kremlin committed in going after the amazing Mr Khodorkovsky and his fellow Oligarchs must be weighed against the fact that they were up against Mordor.

* For the full text of Williamson's testimony, which is greatly overextended due to her attempt to detail the Seventh Ring of Hell, go to:

http://www.russians.org/williamson_testimony.htm

Or visit the Imperial Forum.

.