Pundita

Since publishing my 11/28 report about a possible gaffe by The Sunday Times and John Murtha I've received a letter asking whether I thought Murtha's resolution was a preemptive move; i.e., whether he was acting on inside information that the US military had broached a plan to draw down troops in Iraq in 2006.

I ask the writer to reread my report. Representative Murtha's resolution to immediately withdraw US troops from Iraq was floated on November 17, which is almost two months after a proposal for drawing down US troops was discussed in open Senate and House hearings.

Those hearings were on September 29. So if the writer is on the prowl for leaks, he might want to note that on September 28, House Representatives Walter Jones (R-NC) and Neil Abercrombie (D-HI.), called a news conference to announce their proposed legislation to withdraw US troops from Iraq.

They were joined by Lt. General William Odom (Ret.). Odom has called the invasion of Iraq "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history." His advice since at least as early as 2004 has been to yank US troops from Iraq and replace them with a coalition of European and Asian allies "to put things in order."

If Odom's name rings a bell for readers who have been with this blog since early days -- he is on the advisory board of the New Atlantic Initiative headquartered at the American Enterprise Institute, as are Rupert Murdoch and Mikhail Khordokovsky. (Because NAI and AEI members insist that Mr Khordokovsky is a martyr for democracy, I would not be surprised to learn he's still on the board.)

To put all the above another way, President Bush had his reasons for recently extending the highest US intelligence-sharing rank to Australia and not Israel, despite all the help that the US has received since 9/11 from Israel's intelligence gathering agencies.

Some say that NAI is another front for AIPAC; while I think that's going a bit far, NAI members have perennially displayed quite a knack for being terribly well informed about planned US military and diplomatic moves.

The leaks flow in all directions, but a big pipeline has been from MI6 to Mossad and vice versa and from there to various sinks in Washington. Until Australia was elevated in rank in September, only Britain was privy to the highest US intelligence-sharing ranking.

In other words, by September Bush knew that the cat was already out of the bag. So he brought generals George Casey and John Abizaid to Washington to openly discuss their plan to draw down US troops in Iraq.

I've also been asked how the US military can run a war under such leaky conditions. Pundita is tired of explaining the same five points over and over, so in answer I will publish the entire text of an article by UPI Senior Analyst Peter Lavelle about the Kremlin's challenge to OPEC, which I linked to in a January 2005 post.

Lavelle's report explains so many things that you could have gotten away without reading a newspaper or watching the news during this past year, and still been well informed about the twists and turns of opposition -- here and abroad -- to the White House policy in the Middle East including Iraq.

To boil it down, you can graph the opposition according to President Bush's line on Russia. When he moves closer to Putin and his language toward Russia becomes more conciliatory, opposition to the US policy in Iraq explodes in Washington. When he distances himself from Putin and takes a harder stance toward Russia, the opposition settles down to a dull roar.

Recently Secretary Condoleezza Rice and some element among the State Department mandarins signaled that they were considering the wisdom of Bush's attempts to strike a balanced approach toward Russia. Like clockwork, that set off another explosion of opposition to the White House policy on Iraq. So here we are today, up to our eyeballs in leaks and anti-Bush, anti-US in Iraq moves wafting from quarters in the Republican camp.

I hope that Vice President Cheney reads this particular Pundita post because I think it's the starkest warning that one can't drive in two directions at the same time.

Dear Mr Cheney, if we want to keep US policy on track in the Middle East, it means cutting bait with Republicans whose stance on US foreign policy is directed by Europeans and Israelis who take orders from Russian billionaires, who are in up to their necks with the Russian mobs.

If cutting bait means the GOP taking a big hit in the fundraising department -- what is the alternative, Mr Cheney? To keep fighting with knives sticking out of your back and Bush's back? To expect the US military to keep doing the same? Why not do what Dean did, and take fundraising directly to the American people?

As for the Democrat party leaders, I have concluded during the past year that Democrats are terminally naive. So I venture only an Act of God can show Democrats that they're being used as pawns by foreigners whose main concern in life is to eject Vladimir Putin from power. However, it's a Republican controlled Congress so when Democrats see factions of Republicans working to destroy President Bush's policy in the Middle East, who can blame them for jumping on the bandwagon?

Now; will the world come to an end if the Kremlin's plan shoves OPEC closer to extinction? Even the Lords of the Craps Table and their mathematical models and banks of supercomputers cannot project how all the chips will fall. So if the people who oversee the international monetary system can't predict how it will turn out, Pundita can't predict.

Yet I think it's safe to say that the downsides to the petrodollar have come to outweigh the upsides. The most we can say at this point is that it will be a different world, and one with rocky patches for Americans because the Kremlin now officially accepts oil payment in a mix of currency. Yet the petrodollar made America weak; it made us too dependent on the schemes of central banks outside the US. Not to mention too dependent on OPEC.

The Kremlin's plan was inevitable; it was on its way from the day that the Soviet Union dissolved. Instead of confronting that a new era was upon us, the US joined with attempts to gain control of Russia's energy resources. The attempt wasted megabillions if not trillions in US resources, blinded American foreign policy to vast changes in other regions of the world, and hurt America's chance to form a good relationship with post-Soviet Russia. All of that has returned to bite us hard.

Ladies and gentlemen. The Cold War is over. Do not allow a few billionaires to restart it. Look over your shoulder at China and India and realize it is a new day. Adapt, rather than trying to freeze time.

OPEC Dethroned, Putin's "KremPEC" Arrives
by
Peter Lavelle
August 2004
Published by
In the National Interest

"For the past year, oil analysts, politicians and investors have been bewildered by the Kremlin's legal assault in Russia's largest privately own company – oil giant Yukos. For most observers, attacking and driving Yukos into bankruptcy, particularly as petroleum markets are experiencing volatility, is irrational for both Russia's domestic and international interests. However, there is a method to Putin's "madness." He intends to completely re-order the nature of oil politics, with Russia playing the leading role.

The "Yukos Affair"
The "Yukos affair" is often described as a politically motivated Kremlin attack against the country's super-wealthy known as the "oligarchs," particularly Yukos' core shareholders – Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on trial for tax evasion and other serious charges, is the most notable. Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, is believed to have meddled too much in politics and even might have had political ambitions of his own. Thus, using this logic, Khodorkovsky, a person of considerable means, was a political threat to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.

There is nothing particularly wrong this with interpretation, but it does overlook what motivates Putin's Kremlin. If the Kremlin had aimed to cut Khodorkovsky down to size, it easily could have done so without assaulting Yukos, Russia's crown jewel oil producer controlling two percent of the world's known oil reserves. The Kremlin's interest in Yukos goes far beyond the personal conduct and ambitions of Khodorkovsky. It is determined to re-order Russia's oil patch to serve national and international interests.

The Kremlin's assault on Yukos is not an impulsive act of political and economic terrorism against property rights and enterprise. Compared, Russia is the only major oil exporter (and the only major oil producing country with the two exceptions of the US and UK) where the state is not the major operator in the upstream sector. Thus, the Kremlin is re-ordering Russia's oil sector to roughly match international norms.

The way the Kremlin is re-ordering the oil sector rightfully raises concerns that all the chaotic privatization of the 1990s will eventually be targeted the way Yukos has been. However, these concerns are exaggerated. Other oligarch empires, such as in non-ferrous metals, probably will be challenged by the Kremlin as this sector, like oil, is considered of strategic importance.

One thing appears to be clear: the Kremlin and the next targeted oligarch will not play out the "Yukos scenario" again – the Kremlin has shown its determination to get what it wants and the rest of Russia's oligarchs will certainly avoid a head-on collision with the state.

Yukos as a company will soon vanish from Russia's corporate environment. Unable to pay up to $10 billion in back taxes, the company will most likely declare bankruptcy and eventually have its assets parceled out to other Russian oil companies. However parceled out, there is no doubt these valuable assets will be in the hands of Kremlin-friendly entities.

"KremPEC" (Kremlin Petroleum Export Corporation)
Putin is looking to the future. Since 1999, Russia's petroleum production has increased 48 percent, primarily on the back of flows from new wells. Producing 9 million barrels of oil a day, Russia is the world's largest producer. With that in mind, Putin has called upon his oil ministers to finalize plans increasing the number of export pipelines to increase output to 11 million barrels a day by 2009. Russia's expected export increase, in conjunction with other world suppliers, is hoped to lower the cost of crude as early as 2006.

Due to almost unprecedented global demand, the Kremlin's coffers receive an additional $1.5 billion per month, and a number of petroleum market experts claim high prices last year comprised about 3 percent of Russia's 7.3 percent gross domestic product growth. Experts also estimate that each dollar above the yearly average of $22 per barrel adds 0.25 percent to GDP.

Putin has stated that, "The government must base its decisions on the interests of the state as a whole and not on those of individual companies."

These are not just words – Russia's oil giants LUKoil and Sibneft are acutely aware that Putin means business.

LUKoil, Russia's second largest petroleum firm, has already understood Putin's message, and is more than willing to pay more taxes and work as a loyal energy foreign policy conduit for the Kremlin.

Sibneft, third-ranked oil producer owned by oligarch-English football enthusiast Roman Abramovich, has also caught the Kremlin's attention. With investigations of Sibneft and Abramovich mushrooming, it appears only a matter of time before Sibneft will come under the Kremlin's heel as well.

What will happen to Yukos' assets after it is forced into bankruptcy is open to speculation. The smallish government-owned Rosneft Oil Company is rumored be the Kremlin's favorite – some of Putin's key aids are on Rosneft's board of directors. The natural gas monopoly Gazprom, government-owned as well, is also thought to be in the running. In the end it does not really matter. Yukos' transformation will essentially create what has been the Kremlin's goal from the advent of this affair: the creation of "KremPEC" (Kremlin Petroleum Export Corporation).

Russia – The International Petroleum Kingpin
"KremPEC" has ambitious international goals. Terrorism threatens oil export giant Saudi Arabia, a barrel of oil hovers around $45 a gallon of gasoline costs up to $2.50 in the United States and far more in Europe, and "weapons of minor destruction" limit the prospect of Iraqi oil significantly impacting international oil markets any time soon.

Add to this situation the fact that energy-hungry China and India are also actively interested in sourcing new and secure energy export markets to support their rapid economic growth.

The Kremlin has also carefully thought out what the future might hold if Saudi Arabia becomes a target of larger and increased terrorist attacks. Without Saudi exports of crude, OPEC would lose its influential powerbroker. Russia, as the largest producer in the world, might rethink its position concerning membership in the international petroleum cartel if Saudi exports were to face long-term risk.

Russia, with OPEC observer status, has flirted with the idea of joining OPEC in the past. However, regaining the former market share of international exports held by the Soviet Union has been the primary goal. With the domestic oil sector soon to be completely under the Kremlin's thumb, that goal is close to becoming a reality.

Additionally, Russia has had little incentive to work closely with OPEC when oil prices are high. However, with future supplies in doubt and prices uncertain, the Kremlin has reason to reconsider its position. Being the world's new energy kingpin most certainly appeals to Putin – intent on returning Russia to its former great power status.

Putin is on top of the world. He is in the process of creating his own oil cartel at home, "KremPEC," and just might land himself the prize of sitting at the very center of international oil politics. Putin also looks forward to a steady cash flow to pay for domestic reforms and fight the poverty so pervasive in Russia.

Russia and The World: A "Win-Win" Scenario
The "Yukos affair" will quickly become part of history and it is doubtful another Kremlin-business confrontation of its nature will occur again. In the wake of this affair, Russia's oil patch will become more secure, attracting international petroleum investment, as well as providing Russia needed cash flow to continue the reform of its economy. Instead of partnering with an oil oligarch, negotiations will take place behind Kremlin walls.

For an energy-hungry world, doing business with "KremPEC" will become almost risk-free and will eventually make OPEC's current hold over world petroleum markets irrelative. OPEC is about to be dethroned with Putin's "KremPEC" as its successor."

If you heard a thundering sound last night around 10:30 PM ET, it was everybody who was watching NBC's Law and Order SVU running to their computer and Googling "New Orleans bioweapon labs."

The scriptwriter for the SVU 11/29 episode Storm had to do some fancy footwork to stay within the show's theme (sexually-based crimes), which took up the show's first half hour, and the script's target was clearly the Patriot Act. However, it was news to me and I am sure most of America that there are five Level Three bioweapon labs in the New Orleans-Covington area.

My hope was that the scriptwriter made up the whole story but 30 seconds on Google dashed that hope. As to what kind of lunatics would put Level 3 labs in a hurricane alley flood zone -- Pundita does not want to think about that question. But the more that comes out about New Orleans, the harder it gets for me to keep poking fun at the Iranians for building a nuke weapon facility near a major faultline.

My biggest concern was whether there was any truth to the plot of Storm, which wends its way to a vial of weapons grade anthrax stolen from a NOLA bioweapon lab during the Katrina hurricane.

From articles about the NOLA bioweapon labs posted on the Above Top Secret website, it seems the authorities have been close-mouthed on the question of whether any of those labs lost electricity during the hurricane and subsequent flooding and whether anything in the labs turned up missing.

For the sake of my peace of mind, I am going to assume that the Storm scriptwriter took dramatic license in order to pound home a few points. And I will assume a factual error on the scriptwriter's part regarding a statement that Ebola virus is stored at those five Level Three labs. That would have to be a Level Four lab, unless the writer was insinuating that one such lab is also in the New Orleans area.

I interject that this is the second time I've tuned in SVU in two months and this is the second episode I've seen that deals with a bombshell story about a highly infectious killer agent. So I don't know what's going on with Law and Order SVU. The show has been on the air for seven seasons; I've only seen it a few times but until last night I didn't associate it with muckraking journalism.

The earlier show (Strain air date October 18) concerns an epidemic of a new "killer" strain of AIDS. According the script those who contract the virus develop full-blown AIDS within a year and (if I recall correctly) the new strain is resistant to AIDS anti-viral drugs.

According the script, this strain of AIDS is being spread like wildfire among members of the American Gay community who are methamphetime addicts. According to the script, the Gay meth heads get stoned and forget about wearing a condum.

I did not research any of the script claims; if there is a killer strain of AIDS reaching epidemic proportions, I can't deal with this. Tracking H5N1 is enough for me at this time. But if you'd like to lose some sleep, by all means I invite you to check out the episode's claims.

The moderator of the Above Top Secret website posted a charitable statement about allowing educational sites to make extensive use the reports posted on the New Orleans bioweapon labs.* But I will only publish the first paragraph of the first report and urge you to visit the site if you want to read more.

I note that from the first report, it seems there are more than five bioweapon labs in the New Orleans area and that some of them are private firms under contract to DoD. Is it just me being hysterical, or is that carrying military outsourcing a little too far?

NEW ORLEANS AREA BIOWEAPONS AND INFECTIOUS DISEASE RESEARCH LABS JEOPARDIZED BY KATRINA

Tulane’s National Primate Research Center Reports No Release of Nearly 5,000 Test Monkeys or Disease Agents – Other NOLA Defense or Research Projects Involve HIV, SIV, SARS, Herpes-B, Anthrax, Botulism, Measles, West Nile and Mousepox

No Confirmed Information on Other NOLA Level-3 Labs Involved in Bioweapons Research –At Least One Lab Reportedly Compromised

by
Michael C. Ruppert
The Wilderness Publications
www.fromthewilderness.com

September 13, 2005 0800 PST (FTW) – Prior to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina on August 29th, the greater New Orleans area was a significant hub of infectious disease and biological weapons research. At least five Level-3 biolabs were located either in New Orleans or in its nearby suburb of Covington. [...]

*
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/
forum/thread170401/pg1

If The Sunday Times quoted General George Casey out of context, they got away with undercutting the US rationale for keeping troops in Iraq -- and they used a statement by the senior US commander in Iraq to do it. And they did it less than a month before Iraq votes in their permanent government.

On November 20, The Sunday Times -- the sister publication of The Times, Britain's "paper of record" and arguably the world's most influential newspaper -- published an article titled American plan for first troop withdrawals within month. The first two paragraphs outline a plan reportedly drawn up by generals George Casey and John Abizaid for the US to reduce the number of troops in Iraq by more than a third by the end of next year, and compare this to the UK plan for phasing out their troops in Iraq.

The Sunday Times next presents a quote that is clearly meant to describe the generals' rationale for drawing down US troops in Iraq:

General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, told Congress in September that the large US military presence was fuelling the insurgency.

It “feeds the notion of occupation”, he said, and “extends the amount of time it will take for Iraqi security forces to become self-reliant”.(1)

If that sounds familiar, it is virtually the same quote used by Representative John Murtha (D-PA) to introduce his rationale for calling for immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq:

General Casey said in a September 2005 Hearing, “the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency."(2)

Yet a September 30 Associated Press report suggests that Murtha, and The Times, quoted Casey out of context:

Both Abizaid and Casey said they did not want a large increase of U.S. forces in Iraq, in part because that would fuel the insurgency by reinforcing the perception among Iraqis of the Americans as occupiers.(3)

That is quite different from saying that the US troop presence in Iraq is fueling the insurgency. If the AP account is correct, why would a prestigious newspaper and John Murtha grossly distort the words of the US commander in Iraq? Here we come to the fun part. It's not certain that is what they did.

According to a September 30 Knight Ridder Newspapers report, General Casey indeed stated that the US troop presence in Iraq fueled the insurgency:

Casey also said the U.S. presence in Iraq was fueling the insurgency because of the perception of a U.S. occupation, making a troop reduction critical to the U.S. mission in Iraq.(4)

No, we can't clarify what Casey said by going to the official transcript because it won't be published online until next year, if it's published.

And no, the hearing is not in the C-SPAN archive. All that's there is the Pentagon press briefing the day after the hearings, in which Casey and Abizaid answered questions related to their testimony at the Senate and House armed services committees. The generals did not say anything at the Pentagon briefing that specifically pertains to the quotes used by Murtha and The Sunday Times or which resolves the contradiction between the AP and Knight Ridder accounts.(5)

A news organization might have published the entire transcript but in the process of researching this I was stopped by something odd. It's almost as if there were two different Senate hearings from the way they were headlined and described by the major media and The Washington Times.

The major media reports on the hearings and the questions at the Pentagon press briefing focus on what Congress thought about the generals' testimony:

General Casey raised alarm among the Senate Armed Services Committee members when he announced that the number of combat-ready Iraqi military battalions had dropped from three to one. Heated discussion revolved around the issue, so naturally the major news media fixed on that portion of the hearing:

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he was troubled that with such uneven progress in training the Iraqi army, the Bush administration is still planning for the possible withdrawal of some U.S. troops from Iraq next year.

Casey said troops reductions are an important part of the overall military strategy for stabilizing Iraq. He declined to predict, as he had in July, that the Pentagon could make a fairly substantial troop withdrawal next year if political progress continues and the insurgency does not grow more violent. But he said under questioning by committee members that troop reductions were possible in 2006.

“You’re taking a very big gamble here,” McCain said to Casey. “I hope you’re correct. I don’t see the indicators yet that we are ready to plan or begin troop withdrawals, given the overall security situation.”

Democrats on the panel pressed Casey and Gen. John Abizaid, the Central Command commander who also testified, for clear measures of progress on the military front and for indications that the Iraqis are taking seriously the need to assume more responsibility for their own security.(3)

The Washington Times, which is oriented to the Pentagon and war/ counterterroism issues, highlights a part of the testimony that discusses al Qaeda's threat:

Gen. Abizaid raised the stakes for Iraq by presenting a chilling assessment of al Qaeda's worldwide goals. He said leader Osama bin Laden's sights are set on Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and then the entire region, as well as Asia.

Although the Bush administration describes the conflict as the "war on terror," Gen. Abizaid made clear the enemy is al Qaeda.

"Their objectives are very clear," Gen. Abizaid said. "They believe in a jihad, a jihad, first and foremost, to overthrow the legitimate regimes in the region. But in order to do that, they have to first drive us from the region. This is what they believe. They believe, ultimately, that the greatest prize of all is Saudi Arabia and the holy shrines there."

He said the war against Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Iraq, and al Qaeda worldwide, presents "a rare opportunity to get in front of these extremists and focus on them now before al Qaeda and its underlying ideology becomes mainstream."(6)

If those words sound familiar, they hark to passages in President Bush's headline-making speech to the National Endowment for Democracy on November 6.

The speech set off a media firestorm, if you recall; critics charged that Bush's discussion about al Qaeda's plan for a global caliphate switched horses midstream in an effort to shore public support for the US operations in Iraq. But as the Washington Times article indicates, actually all Bush did was summarize a portion of testimony given by General Abizaid at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in September.

These observations don't bring us closer to learning whether the Knight Ridder reporter, John Murtha, and The Sunday Times quoted General Casey out of context. Yet I find it hard to entertain that after describing the nature of Qaeda's threat, Abizaid or Casey would flatly assert that the US presence in Iraq is fueling the insurgency. That's because Qaeda is not an insurgency movement.

Indeed, Iraq's Baathist insurgency made a fatal mistake by hooking up with Qaeda, which has invaded Iraq and is intent on setting up their own government in the country. The vast majority of Iraqis who had joined Qaeda fell away when they saw that the insurgency's tactics were directed at Iraqi civilians and took indiscriminate civilian casualties.

Ayman al Zawahiri's plan is the major Qaeda recruitment tool, not the US presence in Iraq. Certainly, Qaeda has used whatever situations are available, including the US presence in Iraq, to help with recruitment. But if all the Coalition troops in Iraq went home tomorrow that would not stop Zawahiri's plan. If the US had never invaded Iraq, that too would have made no difference to the plan.

General Casey and General Abizaid went to the Hill in September 2005 in part to deliver that news. However, the members of Congress they spoke to were grappling with public concern about mounting US casualties in Iraq and worry that the US had not sent enough troops to Iraq to quell the insurgency.

That placed the generals in the difficult position of arguing somewhat at cross purposes or at least on two different fronts. The generals wanted to tamp down calls for a large additional troop deployment to Iraq. At the same time they wanted to justify a plan to draw down US troops in 2006.

The latter had to be justified in the face of news that two out of three Iraqi battalions had been downgraded during a time when al Qaeda's attacks in Iraq were in full tilt. And the generals had to make their arguments without spilling classified information.

So it might turn out that the official transcript of the Senate hearing supports both the Knight Ridder and Associated Press versions of Casey's remarks. It could be that at different points Casey used his concern about the insurgency's relation to Qaeda's plans to support two different arguments.

Then where does that leave Knight Ridder's version of what Casey said? Out dancing with a contradiction on thin air, until a complete transcript of the generals' testimony is located.

And where, for that matter, does it leave Casey's reported assertion that an increased US troop presence would help fuel the insurgency? Filed under "War During the Information Era," perhaps?

1) November 20 The Sunday Times. Report filed by Sarah Baxter and Michael Smith.

2) November 17, The Hon. John P. Murtha, press release introducing his resolution to redeploy American troops in Iraq.

3) September 30 Associated Press. Report filed by Robert Burns. Via Spokane, Washington newspaper, The Spokesman Review.

4) September 30 Knight Ridder Newspapers. Report filed by Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan S. Landay. Via Seattle, Washington newspaper, The Seattle Times.

5) September 30 Department of Defense press briefing.

6) September 30 The Washington Times. Report filed by Rowan Scarborough.

Here's another news item that America's TV broadcasters ignored: Indonesia has imposed a one-year ban on a prominent U.S. terrorism expert days after the United States lifted a 6-year-old arms embargo on Indonesia.

More on the story from Riehl World View's But they shoot Christians, don't they?, which reports on the daily murders of Christians in Indonesia and the country's anti-American policy.

Revised 11:45 PM, ET

Memo to self: Do not publish while falling asleep over the keyboard. Saw upon awakening that I left a few things out of my report on John Batchelor's Thanksgiving Day program, which is included in today's earlier post America's News of the Day.

Pundita forgot to mention that the report of a firefight across the Syrian border is (of course) "unconfirmed." And that Assad is also waiting for Chirac to leave office in the hope the flap about Hariri's assassination will die down then.

I'd also forgotten to mention the Shropshire-Kosovo segment (or rather I didn't notice until this morning that I inadvertently dropped it while cutting and pasting).

These lapses wouldn't have required an explanatory post if I'd remembered to add the obligatory caveat whenever I publish my hasty scribbles on broadcast reports.

Ah well, this will teach Batchelor's webmaster not to take a holiday off. And teach Pundita not to publish a post after too much Thanksgiving dinner.

In penance I put up a link to Shropshire's site when I corrected the post; here's the addition for readers who saw the early edition:

"Inspiring report on the Kosovo Children's Music Initiative. An American music teacher and composer uses her talents to help children in Kosovo. Pundita notes that Liz Shropshire's initiative is a good example of the 'small is beautiful' aid project."

If you missed the NBC Nightly News Thanksgiving Day report, shame on you! You missed a report on the plight of buffalo who stray from Yellowstone Park and Michael Brown's reincarnation as a motivational speaker since he left FEMA. How can you hope to be well informed if you are unaware of such vital news?

If you didn't tune into John Batchelor's Thanksgiving Day program, you didn't miss any vital news; just details such as:

> US troops in Iraq got into a firefight with Syrian border guards while chasing terrorists across the Syrian border. Report is unconfirmed, of course. Nope, Syria can't lodge a complaint unless they want to underscore that they're sending terrorists into Iraq.

> Tehran has now used up their nine lives with the European Union leadership. Russia has also had it up to their eyeballs with Tehran, leaving China with the decision about whether to stand out in the cold. Next week's European meeting will tell us more than Thanksgiving's IAEA meeting on the question of Iran, but the issue of UN sanctions is coming closer and closer.

> The current situation with Syria's leader Bashar al-Assad. Assad is reportedly prepared to wait out Bush's term in office on the theory that it will be back to business as usual in Washington when the next US president takes over. So, Assad may well thumb his nose at UN sanctions if they're imposed.

> Report on the outrage in China about Beijing's initial cover-up of the Harbin chemical spill.

> Reports on Israel's new political party led by Ariel Sharon and the current political climate in Israel.

> Report from Dr. David Nabarro, Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza explained what it's going to take for the world to avoid economic disaster if H5N1 becomes a human pandemic.

Batchelor's show also carried a report on the latest terror attack on US soldiers and Iraqis, as did NBC and the other TV news broadcasters. But the TV broadcasters ignored important news in favor of cookie-cutter Thanksgiving Day stories and editorializing on the US in Iraq.

I understand that Batchelor's radio program has three hours to play around with, whereas the Big Three TV broadcasters (ABC, CBS and NBC) only have a half hour. But who threatened to revoke their license if they expanded their evening news beyond a half hour? Nobody. Who blackmailed them into airing puffery they present as the day's top news? Nobody.

Who has demanded for years that American TV broadcasters adopt higher standards? The American public. And who among the broadcasters has listened to the demand? Nobody. Yet still those rickety bastards rake in billions in advertising dollars from publicly held transnational corporations, which don't want the American public -- or any public, for that matter -- to be well informed.

Well-informed voters make changes in the status quo; changes create uncertainty, which is bad for investors, which is bad for people who sit on the sponsors' board of directors. So I dunno; if you are perpetually steamed that TV news producers treat you like an idiot, maybe the place to lodge your complaint is with your company or union pension fund.

To be fair (in honor of Thanksgiving), I will mention the one bright spot in this week's TV broadcast news: Barry Peterson's investigative report for CBS news on environmental pollution in mainland China. Peterson, his film crew, and the Chinese villagers who cooperated with the news team took considerable risks and showed real courage.

The question is whether Peterson will be allowed back in China now that the report, replete with footage from a hidden camera, has aired. If so, this is another sign that a power struggle within the CCP is translating to slightly more tolerance in Beijing for the journalism profession.

If you missed Peterson's report, you can read the transcript at the CBS website.

Yet the occasional good reporting from the Big Three only highlights their low journalism standards. Now that I have that off my chest, I might as well round out my report on Batchelor's Thanksgiving Day program by summarizing what else was discussed. (As always, my hastily scribbled notes on broadcast reports are just that.)

> A tip from John Loftus about DEBKAfile: Reportedly the people who run the website have an "in" with a member of Israel's IDF, who has been known to leak reports from US and British intelligence. John advises that you can ignore their political analysis but that Debka's reports on troop movements are generally pretty accurate.

> Inspiring report on The Kosovo Children’s Music Initiative. An American music teacher and composer uses her talents to help children in Kosovo. Pundita notes that Liz Shropshire's initiative is a good example of the 'small is beautiful' aid project.

> James Palmer's report on his article in New Jersey's Star-Ledger about the situation for Iraq's journalists under Saddam's regime and since the regime's fall. Palmer is a freelance reporter stationed in Iraq; he also described the difficult situation he faces there.

> Report on the post-Katrina resurrection of the scrappy Gambit Weekly newspaper. (Remember Gambit's great in-depth reports on Louisiana politics and Kathleen Blanco?) Also, a report from Gambit's editor-in-chief, Clancy Dubois, about the current state of things in New Orleans.

> An interview with the head of the New York Historical Society, which has mounted an exhibition on pre-Civil War slavery in New York. "There is the myth that slavery only took place in the South." Some 40% of New Yorkers owned slaves.

> Rick Beyer related stories from his book, The Greatest War stories Never Told, including the story of the pizza delivery man who correctly predicted the start date of the Gulf War.

> Mention of the latest European study on earth's carbon dioxide levels; the details recounted by John Terrett are too depressing to pass along on Black Friday.

Applause for John Terrett's great job as the show's substitute host. Thanks also to Batchelor regulars Malcolm Hoenlein, John Loftus, and Aaron Klein for volunteering to give up part of their Thanksgiving to research and present important news of the day.

I see from the website that my favorite British reporter will be hosting Batchelor's show on Thanksgiving and the day after. Check Batchelor's website around 9:00 PM, ET to see tonight's lineup -- assuming the webmaster is working on Thanksgiving.

One thing for certain: the IAEA is working today. Al Qaeda is working today. Hezbollah is working today.

John Batchelor writes about his interview last night with Louis Freeh. See Batchelor's November 24 diary entry Freeh, Able Danger, Gorton, Roemer at Red State.

As I note in my introduction to the republished version, the Anti-jive policy essay suffered from optimism. The truth is that American big business is greatly opposed to Bush's idea that foreign policy should be grounded in a consistent defense of democratic principles. Factions in the Pentagon are also opposed to the idea. However, I remain firm in my arguments that since 9/11 the world has been forced to confront where foreign policy grounded in expediency has led, and that playing ostrich again won't make the issue go away.

When the 9:00-10:00 PM segment of John Batchelor's program started last night, I made a face. I chafed at listening to the latest installment in the Joseph Wilson soap opera and was impatient to hear Yossef Bodansky's report. I turned down the sound then restlessly turned on PBS to see what was showing.

PBS was showing "Perilous Flight: World War II in Color." The documentary featured color footage of the war shot by Hitler's filmographers, the US military and Hollywood filmmakers such as George Stevens.

The footage had not been shown before to the public. I fiddled with the TV mute button when Alireza Jafarzadeh started to give his report to Batchelor's audience about Iran's deep tunnels; the news was about North Korea's involvement in the tunnel building. But I couldn't stop watching the war footage. I tried, then, with limited success to listen to both the program announcer and Alireza.

I am not sure how far to carry the parallels between Germany's war buildup in the 1930s and the Iran-North Korean cooperation to build a nuclear weapons program. Yet parallels exist, and evoke Bush's Axis of Evil warning. So it was eerie to listen to Alireza's discussion while watching images of the US liberation of France from Hitler's forces.

The Germans massacred French patriots ahead of the invading Allied army, explained the announcer. Images of rotting corpses pulled from mass graves....

Images of weary French soldiers in trucks after being released from POW camps....

Image after image of the horrific devastation left by the Allied bombings. The French were amazingly philosophical about this. ("The French understood that modern war does not distinguish between civilian and military targets.")

A Frenchman recounts that he chastised his wife for weeping about prized armoires destroyed along with everything else in their house during a bombing. "We are all alive; why cry over furniture?"

Pretty farm girls mugging for the camera. A smiling French farmer serving wine from a cooking pot to a US soldier....

"Color renders the images of war unbearable," intoned the announcer.

Yes. I switched off the TV when the title "Dachau 1945" flashed on the screen.

Seffy reported that Assad is trying to cook up diversions rather than fulfilling the demands of the UN resolution. Assad has about three weeks before Mehlis wraps up his investigation into the Hariri assassination, which is a deadline, of sorts, for Syria.

And because Assad won't cooperate with the Mehlis investigation, the challenge returns to the UN Security Council. Assad and his handlers in Tehran are betting that no one wants a showdown.

Things went on too long in that part of the world for there to be an easy resolution. Yet I wonder if Assad and Tehran haven't miscalculated, as they miscalculated about Iraq.

The law of unintended consequences worked in favor of the Iraqis in a way no one could have predicted. The US did so much stumbling around during the first year of the occupation that this left many Iraqis at the mercy of Muqta al-Sadr and the reign of terror his Iranian-style brand of Islamic justice created.

"By God these are monsters!" cried one Iraqi woman. Soon, Iraqis were telling the Americans to bomb their houses to get rid of Mookie's henchmen camped there.

I remember Chalabi and Sistani finally managed to talk a grain of sense into Mookie (weeks of house arrest also helped). But by that time the Iraqi Shiites (who had dreamed of an Islamic government) had seen the pattern to Iranian style Islamic justice.

The Iraqis wouldn't have see the truth so soon, if the Coalition military had imposed the blanket martial order that I had prayed for in vain.

Then, once Allawi took over from Bremer, reality TV came to Iraq. Soon the Syrians, Saudis, and Iranians masquerading as Iraqi insurgents were singing like a bird on Iraqi national TV.

After a few months of watching the Iraqis were wised up: neighbors were trying to create a civil war in Iraq. So then, the Iraqis dug in their heels.

People everywhere are like that: fool me once, fool me twice, but not a third time. The more the pattern of Iranian scheming became evident, the more the Iraqis said, "Ah ha!"

I am not getting my hopes up, but it could be the same will happen with Assad's machinations to provoke civil war in Lebanon and start a war with Israel.

From Bodansky's report, it seems Assad is trying anything to stir up a mess that will keep his crew in power. His gamble is that short of a march on Damascus he wins whether or not Syria loses a war with Israel. The catch is that Assad's machinations are by now forming a pattern.

They didn't have satphones, satellite radio, Internet, and television in the 1930s. So, despots in those days could get away with trotting out the same bag of tricks over and over again. Few people could readily see the repeating patterns of behavior.

That is something the French need to keep in mind while warning the US to be cautious about provoking Tehran to make moves. An aggressor is always making moves. The trick is to spot the patterns made by the moves.

Caution is always needed. Yet the other side of caution is a refusal to make reasonable demands in the face of aggression. That gives an open road to aggressors. In the 1930s, the road led to the haunting images of a war recorded on color film.

Pundita is still on vacation but we snatched a few hours yesterday to catch up on some recent events, which prompted this quick take:

Roses
The US armed forces in Iraq, for keeping a stiff upper lip while used as a political football by Brussels Heads and Likudniks on both sides of the US political aisle.

Condoleezza Rice, for toughing it out at negotiations on Gaza while plugging her ears against complaints that Abu Mazen is not in control in Gaza. Who would want him in control of anything?

Ariel Sharon, for staking his political career on his belief that a Palestinian state won't destroy Israel.

The vast majority of the Iraqi people, who continue to show grit and patience with their first attempts at democracy. Good luck to them in their December 15 election to choose a permanent government.

Australia's government, for consistently and courageously proving since 9/11 they're a true ally of the United States of America.

The Democrat Party, for taking an unequivocal stand in favor of trade sanctions against China.

Donald Rumsfeld, for

> standing firm against the Department of State's machinations to appease Brussels on Iraq, and

> surviving the combined onslaught of State, Treasury and Commerce in retaliation for his firm stand against China's deadly foreign policy.

The genius at the White House who said, "I have an idea! Why don't we expand our reading on Russian politics beyond the press releases of Putin's enemies?"

One Rose
The Kremlin, for clearly signaling they would take a tougher stand on Iran at this Thursday's IAEA meeting. We'll see whether the Russian Bear stands up to China's Dragon at the face-to-face meeting.

Brickbats
President Bush, for agreeing to honor Hu Jintao with a visit and inviting him to Washington for another round of listening to Hu's lies.

Republicans who continue to stab President Bush in the back about Iraq.

Democrats who continue to studiously ignore data on Saddam's WMD threat.

The Brussels Heads and Likudniks among retired US military brass who aid and abet US politicians working to undermine Bush's strategy in the Middle East. Get a foreign government lobbying license, ya bums!

American corporations copying the Gates Charity Formula for getting around anti-bribery laws in dealings with developing world governments.

Pravda on the Potomac (Washington Post) and The Brussels Times (The New York Times) for continuing to betray journalistic integrity in favor of keeping access to high ranking officials who wage the Beltway Wars.

2005 Milkbone Awards
Robert Zoellick, for being the poodle to US corporations that betray democracy in the name of free trade even after he moved to State.

Democrat Party bosses, for continuing as Brussels' poodle.

Republican Party bosses, for continuing as Beijing's poodle.

Pundita is finally off to her vacation! I will check back in at this blog on December 3. This morning I set up a new blog Pundita Encore, which republishes selected Pundita essays. At this point I don't know whether the entries will be on a daily basis, although I'd like to aim for that.

I don't know how much I'll edit the original essays for republication, although I'd like to spruce them up. It will depend on my mood and how much time I have to fiddle with them.

I've said before that I greatly appreciate that you've taken the time to read my writings. There, I've said it again! Thanks also to readers who wrote with comments and questions. I do not think I'll return to blogging on a daily basis, at least not for the duration of this year. For now, events have overtaken me.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Best regards to all,
Pundita

Gather every man, gather every woman
Celebrate your lives, give thanks for your children
Gather everyone, gather all together
Overlooking none
Hoping life gets better for the world *

I read an essay about a quarter century ago that moved me because of its implications for democratic government. I came across the writing by chance, while browsing through a Vogue magazine. I cannot remember the writer's name; perhaps Molly someone, a film critic. She analogized the Star Wars-type films to humanity's cathedral building era. She did this to make the point that in the place of the lone director handling all aspects of the film-making process (a la Cecil B. De Mille) were now thousands of talents laboring to produce a film.

A few months earlier I'd sat in an auditorium in India watching an unassuming young woman receive an award. She was one of several Indians brought there to be awarded for service to a village. She looked out over the throng for a moment, clearly nervous at having to speak before such a large gathering.

Then in a clear, ringing voice she said, "We cannot all be great people but no matter how small we are, we can all do great things."

A roar of agreement went up from the audience. I felt as if I'd been running for ten thousand years and finally reached a goal post. The age of democracy is here. It's been such a long time coming. It has gathered a force that cannot be stopped.

I do not romanticize "the people" or the democratic process. I see them as the only workable solution to a central problem that government has never faced until the rise of megapopulations. Mussolini promised to make the trains run on time. Today, people are realizing that there are now too many trains, too many ways they can derail, and too many people riding them to expect just one person or an elite to deliver on a government promise.

Megasocieties not only require and demand solutions, they require that government anticipate problems and head off the most serious ones. (Think pandemic, hurricane relief.)

Here we come to a snag. Until the era of megapopulations government has only been expected to manage problems (e.g., kick the can down the road, respond to the loudest complaints, etc.) not solve them.

Another snag: it is very hard to anticipate (a) whether a situation is problematical before it occurs, and (b) whether a potentially problematical situation is large or small.

Re (b) a case in point: A few dead crows are found on the streets in Chicago in a few locations. Calls to the sanitation department to remove them go to the bottom of the list because there are much bigger emergencies. A short time later there is an outbreak of West Nile virus, killing several people in Chicago. Later, officials grid the neighborhoods where the virus broke out and discover the outbreaks arose where the dead crows were reported to the sanitation department. (1)

If you drill down to bedrock you find that the worst problem was not the dead crows, the virus or the sanitation department. It's that Chicago's municipal government, as with all governments, necessarily hires management that specializes in one area or another of municipal management. A problem arose in Chicago that was outside the areas of specialization of the government workers, and which required a cross-section of knowledge bases to anticipate and solve.

You cannot get away from that situation -- not unless you pool all the knowledge bases and specialties represented in the population; i.e., put the entire population to work for the government. Yet that is essentially what democracy does.

The biggest challenge of our era is connecting diverse knowledge bases and generalists with day-to-day administration of governments. But you can't even begin to work at that challenge until the society has a democratic government. Why? Because you can't count on widescale volunteer input in any other form of government. Why report dead crows if you're hauled off the prison for complaining?

People in megasocieties have to see evidence that at the end of the road, their efforts are going toward problem solution, as versus keeping in power an elite whose only idea of problem solving is keeping themselves in power.

So today's despots are shoved into a smaller and smaller corner in order to defend their regimes. And using more and more energy and resources to shore the defenses. Classic examples are the regimes in China and Iran. What are they down to now? Manipulating the media in the effort to present phony evidence that they are solving problems.

It's all over for them; I know it might be hard to believe at this moment but we're in the mop-up period. No matter how ruthless the military commander, no matter how silver-tongued the demagogue, huge problems rippling in falling-domino effect through a megasociety are a force more powerful than guns and rhetoric.

When the chain reaction sets off, despotic governments are forced to run around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to cover up a million different manifestations of the problem. They're outwitted at every turn by the sheer size of the populations they rule and the complexity of problems -- in an age dominated by technology.

The relative cheapness of technology has meant that the masses no longer need to yearn to become a king or general in order to lead the good life. Government in developed countries is seen as a highly paid servant. If the servant screws up, people are too busy earning a paycheck to believe more than twice the promises of the servants. They want results.

That places non-democratic governments in a quandary. If they succeed in development, the masses will view them as a servant and act accordingly when despots fail to deliver on promises.

If the despots block development in order to keep the masses down, they find it increasingly hard to get the money to allow them to fend off revolutions -- in an era when bomb-making instructions are posted on the Internet and the bomb chemicals can be bought for a song.

There are still places in the world where despots can fob excuses onto others but, "God is punishing you" doesn't have quite the same effect when you run into an aid worker who exclaims, "Gee, your government really screwed up disaster relief! Same happened to us but we put the fear of God into the bureaucrats."

Populations today are simply too large to hope that a vast bureaucracy laboring under an emperor or oligarchy can fill the bill. Thus, democracy is no longer an option; it's the only edge humanity has against the downsides of our success as a race, which is measured in our great number.

1) See Dial 311..., which mentions the technology that could have headed off the virus outbreak in Chicago -- if officials had thought to use it before the fact. The implications for fending off H5N1 hardly need emphasis.

* From an Isley Brothers song, Harvest for the World

I think most American adults understand by now that we spent the 1990s putting off pressing Washington to retool for the post-Cold War era, and that 9/11 was a sign we'd put things off too long. Knowing this doesn't make it easier to get through the vast and complex readjustment period, which includes a war.

I suspect no small part of the anger that's arisen among Americans about the war and related issues is rooted in impatience stemming from an uniformed assessment. We are not just engaged in a war with terrorists; we are living through the end of an era and the start of a new one.

The state of American-led institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, NATO; the European Union and OPEC; the international monetary system; the end of the European colonialist period -- these and many other situations converged and entwined with ones that led President Bush to declare a new "axis of evil."

All this entwining is not good news for the Type-A personalities and those who like to solve one problem before moving to another. There seems at this point to be no solution, just another unraveling of another skein that leads to another ball of yarn.

Case in point: governments in developing nations set up a howl about repaying debts to the G8 nations, then it turns out that about 30% of the debt they incurred represented loan money stolen through government corruption. Meanwhile, the culprits absconded to Switzerland or wherever, or they're dead from a coup, and the legacy they left behind is a country in ruins.

If you ask, "Now they're getting around to complaining they were robbed; why didn't they do that a quarter century ago?" -- Well, it did no good to complain a quarter century ago. Indeed, it's only since 9/11 that the US government has mustered any real will to fight corruption; before that it was only token protests, token anti-corruption measures. Even today, it's like pulling teeth.

Yet once that particular ball of yarn started unraveling, governments perceived how their tolerance for corruption led to well-financed terrorists armed to the teeth.

In short, we are having to change long-entrenched 'cultures' in Washington and other developed-world capitals. And we are having to get involved with developing nations on a level we never did before.

This does not mean America is 'responsible' for the failures of the poorest nations. And none of it makes us responsible for terrorism and widescale corruption. But as the world's only superpower nation it's fallen to America to improvise a path through an uncharted era.

I've seen progress since I launched this blog in November 2004 -- in fact, so much progress it's heartening. It can take years for people to sort out things in their mind but once they get the general idea, things can move very fast.

Before sorting out must come putting attention on a situation. The impetus for many Americans to pay attention, to get involved in following world events, has been the war. The war has its good days and bad, yet there has been an a perceptible shift in opinion across the globe since the war began:

People the world over are coming to realize that you do not have to accept corruption as an inevitable fact of life; that terrorism feeds on despotism; and that democracy means you are responsible, not Them.

All the rest is slug work: pushing and pulling, prodding and nudging. Success is measured in shoring up a centimeter's worth of progress. That's how it will go for us day after day, year after year -- abroad and at home.

Women's rights is the issue I put at the top of the agenda; if roughly half a country's voting-age population can't vote, or is intimidated into parroting the male vote, you can't expect to find a large enough pool of human resources in the country to make democratic government work out in practice.

American consumers need to acknowledge the dark side of the globalized era in trade. They need to get very discriminating with their spending power and very vocal when they see American businesses betraying fundamental American principles in their eagerness to cut business deals with despots.

Consumers need to confront American businesses that act as corroborators with despotic regimes. They also need to confront American officials, academics and media figures who 'normalize' the betrayal of American principles on the lie that people living under despots are not quite ready for democracy.

The Secretary of State and the President can't do it all; a lecture on human rights goes in one ear and out the other when despotic governments see Americans eagerly buying their stuff. It's a big world; there are plenty of developing countries that are struggling to make democracy work and which have laws respecting human rights. These are countries we should buy from.

Yet the greatest persuader is to clean up our own house; we need greater external oversight of our international lending and aid institutions. If the World Bank continues to refuse an independent audit of the books, withhold US replenishments and start a USA development bank that adheres to the strictest auditing procedures.

Similarly, we need to find out how many USD billions were stolen from the American taxpayer (and the Russian people) during the 1990s as part of US aid deals with Russia -- and the part that USAID and US congressionals and lobbyists played in this grand theft.

Any such investigation will lead to the World Bank and the US Department of State, and will be very embarrassing to the American government. Yet we need to send a strong message that the American people have zero tolerance for corruption. This will pay off in countless ways. When people in other countries see Americans are serious about battling corruption, they will get up the will to make the same demands on their own governments.

Again, a few people can't do it all. If Paul Wolfowitz is to make genuinely effective changes at the World Bank, the mandarins who run the place -- and the US congressionals who serve their interests -- need to know he's got the American people at his back.

John Bolton is pushing hard for UN reforms but it helps if the mandarins who run that place see the American public cheering him on.

Americans also need to get more articulate about arguing the democracy doctrine with European allies who defend multilateralism at the expense of human rights. Let's face it, Europe's welfare system means that a lot more Europeans than Americans have time to delve into the philosophy of government and foreign policy.

There are a lot of Europeans (and Middle Easterners) who are university students for life. The American worker is at a disadvantage here. Between commuting, raising a family, working one or two jobs and taking night business courses, many Americans don't have the time to stay abreast of international affairs, much less analyze the fine points of the Chirac school of foreign policy.

But where there's a will, there's a way. One way is to become a regular listener of the John Batchelor program. This is also an investment of time because his show (including station and news breaks) runs three hours (and a fourth hour in the Washington, DC area).

Yet the length of his show allows him to provide an in-depth, coherent picture of the modern era. After several weeks of listening to his show (I joined the audience in 2003 during the first week of the Iraq invasion), I realized that the war on terror was akin to the elephant in the fable of the Twelve Blind Men.

The Talking Heads who held forth on nationally broadcast television and their press counterparts were looking at the war though the lens of their specialized area of knowledge, which effectively blinded them -- and their audience -- to the war's scope and roots.

I realized John Batchelor's show was as much a school for the mentally blind as a news program. "It's all connected," he would tell his audience back then. He was right.

The politics of oil, a world still in transit from the post-Soviet era, the history of the Middle East, the emergence of the European Union as a power, the decay of the United Nations, the tragedy of Africa, the complex history of Islam, Israel's struggle against its enemies, China and India as emerging powers, rivalries between European allies and their relationship to the US, failures and triumphs of globalization, Muslim terrorist organizations, Middle Eastern and Central Asian governments, Beltway Wars, the vastly changed US military and post 9/11 battles to modernize America's intelligence agencies and foreign office, battles in the US Congress....

All of this was not thrown at the audience in the piecemeal, disjointed fashion one finds by taking in TV news or reading newspapers. John Batchelor integrated the themes, wrested order out of the jumble of war news reports. At the same time, he defined America's challenges in the early 21st century and analyzed the war in that context.

John's empirical approach is not good news for the Democrat or Republican party machines, which run on agendas rather than facts on the ground. But I guarantee that after you listen to his show for six months you will astound your circle with your grasp of world and domestic affairs. The problem is eking out the time to listen.

One way might be listener clubs, in the manner of book or hobby clubs. One member of the club could agree to listen during a specific hour, or listen on a designated night, then report at the end of the week to the rest of the club.

Another aid is John's website, which features links to newspaper articles related to topics under discussion, and John's published reviews of books he discusses on the show. The links are found under the "Current Intelligence" section on the home page.

While these are not a substitute for listening to the show, they point you to excellent news reports on current events that need watching, and important trends.

John's show also provides, over time, many tips on good news sources, and he features some of the world's top mainstream media reporters. Listening to his show is an education in becoming a more discriminating news consumer.

Another strategy, which is so simple I'm surprised a TV producer hasn't thought of it, is to develop a sports 'scorecard' approach to following international news. This is an approach that a foreign policy club might want to use.

Make up a chart of major organizations, e.g., World Bank, IMF, UN, BIS, NATO, OPEC, etc. List their stated goals for the year, and check in routinely to see what they're up to, and score their efforts.

Same with major annual meetings (e. g, G8, World Bank).

Same with major US policy initiatives (e.g., Six Party Talks with North Korea) and check in regularly to see what's up and score.

Same with major issues in world regions.

The beauty of the scorecard approach is that helps build a coherent picture of world events. The problem with the nightly TV news is that it is event driven (and to a great extent, picture driven). This means the viewer is getting a jumble of impressions about a situation. However, if you already have a coherent picture of the situation, it's easier to fit the current reports into a pattern that leads to deeper understanding instead of confusion.

Another strategy is simply practice at following and discussing international news. If you seek out people who enjoy talking about such matters then of course your conversation level and interest will rise.

Finally, you need to muster patience. Whether it's the Cold War tribe still dug in at the State Department, or a tribe in the Middle East or wherever -- stuck in the mud tribes are all pretty much the same, at root, in their outlook.

The world outside our shores is mostly a bunch of really old clans and tribes, which didn't have the advantage of picking up and heading for the New World when things got really awful. They stayed in one place, century after century, millennium after millennium, and hacked things out as best they could.

The upshot is a bunch of stubborn, proud peoples who know they need to change, understand they need help from the most developed nations, but don't want to be bossed around by a bunch of youngsters.

When Americans throw up their hands about this, I tell them to take two viewings of Cold Comfort Farm and call me in the morning. The movie is a British comedy; a send-up of the feudal-minded farmers who managed to resist the passage of time.

None of us should be expected to display the superhuman tenacity, patience and cheerfulness of the film's thoroughly modern, city-bred heroine, as she nudges her country relatives into the modern age. It's okay to shout at the top of your lungs, "We have our own problems to deal with!"

Many a time -- many, many a time has Pundita done that. But I am reminded of something President Bush's father once said: "Ninety percent of winning is showing up."

You just need to stay in there and keep nudging because people are not stupid; eventually, they get it. Very few of the world's people are conditioned to the kind of robotic behavior that makes a suicide bomber. As for the rest -- it's just a bunch of people. If you dig into the history, you understand how people came to act as they do.

For example, many Americans are hopping mad at the Saudis for setting up a network of Muslim fundamentalist schools around the world. Hello, the American government breathed down the Saudis' neck to blow USD billions of petrodollars on setting up those networks.

Have you forgotten the Green Belt? The Cold War? Fighting the Godless Commies around the globe? Or maybe you are too young to know about that. Yes, the Saudis were instrumental in helping the NATO alliance win the Cold War.

So now we want the Saudis to fix those Muslim schools so they promote democracy, and ditch the radical stuff. The Saudis are waiting for signs that the Bush democracy doctrine outlasts his presidency. Being very knowledgeable about the way things work in Washington they are betting it will be right back to business as usual, as soon as Bush cleans out his desk.

"Business as usual" means a high tolerance for anti-democratic governments, and backing phony democracy revolutions that ramrod an American puppet into power. This, on the theory that stability serves American interests better than genuine democracy.

So we need to surprise the Saudi rulers. Doing so is not glamorous work. It requires patience and persistence, and a willingness to engage with each other and foreigners about their concerns -- and ours -- with regard to making the democracy doctrine work. And it takes a lot of listening.

I just received an email from a reader who asked, "How do you know so much?"

Partly through long practice at Common Sense Reasoning, which I discussed once on this blog. Asking yourself, "How would I feel if I were in that person's position?" won't always give you the right answer, but it creates a mental bridge to help you across the unknown.

But mostly through asking questions and listening to answers in the manner of a small child hanging on the words of a parent. Thus, I've had countless thousands of teachers in my life.

You can't fill up a full cup; in the same manner you can't learn anything if you know it all. Whatever wisdom I gained is not through book learning; I gained it by experience and a willingness to play the role of the Fool to others' Wise Person.

I spent many years taking instruction from peoples all around the world. Thus, today I cannot be beaten in a debate about democracy. When I tire, I remember that I am debating on behalf of all those believed they did not struggle in vain for a life of dignity.

The more you learn about individual instances of human cruelty and suffering, the more it's necessary to keep looking over your shoulder to see how far we've come as a race. Then you see humanity's troubles are but a thunderstorm's brief appearance on one long summer day.

Okay; now -- really and truly -- it's time for Pundita to take that vacation, or sabbatical, or whatever it will turn out to be. I will not be able to answer any more letters for a time.

11/12
"Hi Pundita,
Did you did see this??
http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-11-11/34470.html
"Pigs in China's Hunan Province Test Positive for Bird Flu"

From what I know about the bird flu, that's a big problem.
Benjamin in Framingham"

Dear Benjamin:
It sure is a huge problem; it's a very scary story. But I am going to be cautious about the story until we hear from CDC or another independent source. The story could be a plant.

China's MOH is battling the provincial health offices; e.g., Hunan, for more control. Because China has not been forthcoming in past about bombshell news, this new eagerness to share with the world is a little suspicious.

In any case, it is going to be a nervous winter. More and more reports coming about Avian Flu outbreaks.....

"Pundita:
A plant? I didn't even think there were such things. I guess it could be. lol, OK then here's another catastrophe for you to worry about!

Kuwait's biggest field starts to run out of oil
Benjamin"

So. You would try to frighten a frail old woman. Right back atcha:

Water scarcity spreading. Only thing wrong with the article is that there's no "may be" about it. Water scarcity is the real bogeyman stalking the human race.

But before I forget; back to the pig bird flu infection story for a moment: Remember what I taught in the China Pig Disease series of posts? The Epoch Times has become Leak Central for every disgruntled CCP official or Chinese political party trying to take down the CCP. So while ET is an important source, the question is how to 'read' the stories. Some are true, some are plants, some are rumors with inaccuracies.

How to tell the difference? Often no way, except over time or with a lot of digging. However, we shouldn't forget that ET broke the SARS story, so we can't ignore their reports on bird flu in China.

At the same time, we have to keep in mind China's version of the Beltway Wars. We learned from wading through pig disease reports that one of the battles seems to be between China's (central) ministry of health and provincial health officials. Thus, until the CDC or WHO weighs in, I have to put a question mark next to the reported pig "oral secretions" testing positive for bird flu.

Even if the story is based on inside information, it could be garbled. For example, the oral secretions that were tested could turn out be nose secretions. Swabs of pig snouts have turned up bird flu virus at various times, which ain't the same as an infected pig.

Piggies have generous snouts that snuffle up all kind of bugs but the bugs just lounge around in the snouts. Same for human snouts, I might add -- and for all snouts. No harm, unless there's a cut inside the nose, I suppose.

The Kuwait report you sent is interesting but not surprising. Iran is also running out of oil, which is why they are developing nuclear power. It isn't just a blind for a nuke weapons program. The problem in that regard is that Iran is Earthquake Alley.

How fast are the Middle Eastern oil kingdoms running out of oil? I think the answer is mostly state secrets. But a silver lining to Saddam's regime, which ran the Iraqi oil fields into virtual ruin, is that gross inefficiency slowed down the rate of oil pumping in Iraq.

Also, the embargo removed the impetus for Saddam to modernize the equipment and oil extraction processes. So it could take years before many of the wells are operating at peak capacity, which helps brake the amount of oil consumption.

However, the biggest worry right now is water. The Middle East is running out of water, as is much of the world. Note the article above starts with a passing mention of Colorado's water problem. Yet the problem is approaching crisis in parts of Africa and in the Middle East. The seawater desalination plants are very expensive to operate; they use petroleum to run. The higher the price of petroleum, the more the desert kingdoms feel the pinch to keep the plants going.

Anybody with a solution would become a trillionaire, so Pundita readers might want to put on their thinking cap.

I think I still have somewhere a National Geographic magazine from the 1950s showing Sudan irrigating fields of crops using sprays -- at high noon. Zillions of gallons of water evaporating in the desert sun. Imitating the Western commercial crop irrigation methods of that era.

I remember seeing the same outside Phoenix when I was a kid; same era. They used to irrigate the citrus groves with sprays. I assume they learned to switch to drip but water conservation techniques are still in their infancy.

I haven't researched this but I seem to recall that the Israelis have done a lot of work in the area of highly efficient irrigation technologies yet conservation is as much a mindset as engineering.

As much as a third of Iran's water is wasted due to poor usage techniques. So finally they got the idea that they should return to traditional agriculture techniques to conserve water. As reported in Africa Water Journalists blog (which is a good source if you're interested in issues concerned with desertification and drought world wide):

With only 230 mm of rainfall a year, Iran has less than a third of the global average. Yet Iranians have farmed the land for thousands of years using ancient irrigation systems. Water channels known as qanats tap into underground reservoirs and can carry water along an underground network of channels for thousands of kms, from the foothills of mountains though deserts.

Not all traditional farming/irrigation methods work in today's climate patterns, but in too many cases around the world, governments instituted Western-style farming, building, and irrigation methods at the behest of development banks.

Why? Because the lead contractors hired for the development projects used the Western methods and materials, which of course are vastly more expensive than the traditional indigenous ones.

Yet in many cases that's like taking a farm in Kentucky or England and setting it down in the middle of the Sahara. Raving lunacy, yet no more lunatic than we see here in the USA.

It doesn't get nuttier than building a box-style house on a beach in Hurricane Alley. Some time back during a hurricane -- maybe Charley -- a TV repoter spent a night on the beach in an experimental house that was built in the shape of a dome. He came out the next morning and all the boxy houses nearby were smashed to smithereens. The dome house gave the wind and waves nothing to grab onto and wasn't harmed a bit.

You see the same lunacy in the American West in Forest Fire Alley. But one homeowner said to himself, "Okay, we've bought a vacation home next to a forest so maybe we should read up on how to fireproof a house and grounds."

The alterations were not expensive or ugly; they didn't have cement over the yard. Came the inevitable forest fire and their house was the only one in the neighborhood that was spared. The fire had nothing to grab onto, so it leaped over them.

Why didn't his neighbors copy what he'd done? I do not know. Maybe we should ask the Americans who build boxes on beaches in Hurricane Alley.

All this is mindset; nothing else. Same for water conservation.

I remember one stay with a lower income family in Asia; they lived in the monsoon belt but they were in a desert area. They had a beautiful garden -- amazing, for that climate. I knew water was more precious than gold in that region so I asked the wife how they had managed to raise such a garden.

She replied that when they started the garden more than twenty years before, they saved every bit of excess household water for the plants. The children were raised to save every spare drop of water.

When her family spit out water from brushing their teeth, the water would be saved. Every bit of dish washing water, bathing water, water for washing vegetables and grains, excess cooking water -- every drop they saved then carried out in buckets to the young plants. They used natural soaps and plants for washing, so as not to poison the plants.

Eventually, the trees they planted put down deep roots, which helped the trees weather the driest periods, and eventually the trees grew tall and shaded the more delicate plants.

The garden was a refuge on the hottest nights. I remember sitting there on a bench underneath a tree, listening to a nightingale perched among leaves shimmering silver in moonlight. It seemed like paradise. Yet in the harsh light of day it was seen that paradise was set in a parched land.

(The situation is taking on an operatic quality. See the 4:45 PM update at the end of the post.)

Pundita has dragged herself out of retirement to comment on John Batchelor's latest post at Red State titled Joe Wilson and the Spooks. I missed several segments of John Batchelor's show last week, so it was news to me that Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA employee who posts at the Counterterrorism Blog, jumped into the Joe Wilson-Paul Vallely tiff by calling Maj. General Vallely a liar. (1)

Not content with that salvo, Johnson blabbed to Jed Babbin at The American Spectator that he was getting information from "active duty" CIA workers about the Wilson/Plame affair. (See Batchelor's post for details.)

Talk about loose lips sinking the ship. It's a no-no for the CIA to run operations against US citizens; in fact, it's against the law. This point galvanized John Batchelor to raise tough questions in his latest blog:

[...] To communicate that Johnson and the Wilsons (who [Johnson] says he has spoken with since Vallely was on my show) are aided and abetted by active CIA officers is to warn ham-fistedly that the abuse thrown so far by Wilson, his lawyer Wolf, Johnson, and not a small number of unnamed voices in cultish blogs, is part of some action from a government entity that, last time I checked, is prohibited from practicing its magic inside the United States.

It invites speculation as to how far back this unnamed group, including serving active CIA officers, has abetted the Wilsons. As early as the criminal referral by the CIA to the DOJ in September, 2003?

As early as the Novak columns in July 2003, when we now learn the CIA did not make much protest to Novak's inquiry before he published?

As early as Wilson's op-ed in the NYT in June, 2003, when, we now learn, there was no CIA requirement that Wilson submit his version of his Niger trip to the CIA for review?

As early as the Kristoff column in the NYT in May 2003, when we now learn Wilson participated in the preparation and yet was not contacted by the CIA about creative uses of information that was stamped as classified when it was sent to the [Vice President's] office in March 2002?

As early as February 2002, when Valerie Plame identified her husband Wilson as the man to go to Niger, despite the facts that he was not trained in WMD, had not been in Niger in two decades, was not a CIA officer or asset?

In sum, how long have active officer[s] in the CIA been running alongside the Wilsons?

And when did the actives get in, and are officers who have subsequently retired since February 2002 still involved in the unnamed group? And are the active and retired officers from that treasured gang that is now celebrated as NOCs?

Are we dealing with a clique that regards itself as exempt because of the convenient uses of the 1982 law? Do we go forward with the Libby prosecution while ignorant of the names of the active officers at the CIA who are participating in Joe Wilson's adventures? [...]

The present CIA reminds me of New York City's embattled police force during the 1970s. The NYPD was under fire from the public on many fronts, while at the same time officers were being shot down right and left in the line of duty.

This was during an era when it was fashionable to call cops "pigs;" an era when the NYPD was overwhelmed in trying to deal with crimes related to the flood of heroin into the city. An era when the mayor's office was not giving the police the support they needed, while at the same time scoring off the NYPD to make political points.

The upshot was a bunker mentality among police; you didn't betray the Brotherhood at any cost, as Frank Serpico learned the hard way.

The CIA found themselves in much the same position after 9/11. Despised by many Americans because they fell down in dealing with the al Qaeda threat. Then caught up in a tug-of-war between the White House and the State Department, and a war between factions at State and Pentagon.

One can sympathize with the CIA's difficult position but Batchelor's questions need to be answered. If the CIA has stepped over the line to defend their own, this is not serving the US intelligence community and the national interest.

For more on the mess see Jed Babbin's The CIA Disinformation Campaign.

(1) If you need refreshing, Vallely said on Batchelor's show that he recalled Wilson telling him back in 2002 that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Then Joe Farah at World Net Daily picked up the story. Then Wilson jumped into the fray by hinting that he would sue Vallely and WND for publishing Vallely's letter. At which point Pundita fogged out, after warning that Joe Wilson is Bre'r Rabbit. (A reader disagreed; he wrote it was plain to see that Wilson is Yosemite Sam).

By the way, I was wrong when I told readers last week that Batchelor's post about the tiff between Wilson and Vallely represented his first entry into the blogosphere. His latest post at Red State is attached to earler posts, which show he's been blogging at least since October 23. Pundita really must poke her nose out of her cave more often. The earlier posts, including Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Wilson, and Who Tasked Plame? are also a window on the Beltway Wars.

Update 4:45 PM ET
From Red State site
More on Vallely and Wilson
By: streiff

Apparently some lefty websites, as well as some of our own lefty denizens, have picked up the theme that General Vallely and Joe "My Wife is in the CIA" Wilson never appeared on FoxNews together.

Unsurprisingly, former CIA agent and egregious tool Larry Johnson is in that slobbering pack.

Alas and alack, Brit Hume reports:

This as liberal Websites say they have proof Vallely is lying, saying research service LexisNexis shows Vallely and Wilson never appeared on FOX on the same day. But in fact, Vallely and Wilson appeared on the same day nine times in 2002, and on the same show twice -- on September 8 and September 12, when both men appeared within 15 minutes of one another. [...]

To this day, few American workers realize that they're not actually in competition with individual Chinese workers; they're in competition with China's government, which I have likened to the reign of ancient Egypt's pharaohs.

Of course this is something American government officials, congressionals and captains of industry don't want to hear about jobs offshoring and outsourcing, which is why few Americans know the story. The story is simple, however:

If China's government decides they need X number of say, software or electrical engineers in order to be competitive in a certain area of global trade, they 'order up' those workers by imposing the necessary specialized education on the needed number of Chinese.

The penalty for refusing to major in a particular subject and specialize in a particular profession or business? The same penalty that was imposed on Taishi villagers who wanted to vote out their corrupt chief; really unpleasant things, which can include imprisonment of one's family.

So today's China has a method of governing has more in common with the rule of the pharaohs than with capitalism. In an essay titled Pharaoh I pointed out that apologists for China ignore that individual workers in democracies are not in competition with individual Chinese workers for jobs. They are in competition with China's government, which is another way of saying they are competing with China's military.

In short, individual workers in democracies are playing against a stacked deck when it comes to competing with China's workers for jobs in the globalized marketplace.

The question is how China's government has been able to maintain such control over China's huge work force. The system of bao jia explains how.

To understand bao jia, and how it played out in modern times, is to understand how central authorities maintain control in China. Bao jia also explains the collectivist or 'wolf pack' mentality so prevalent among Chinese. ("All must agree and follow in line with leader.")

Even if bao jia has less hold in the biggest cities and Hong Kong, the attitudes developed under two millennia of the bao jia system remain. Below are three short pieces (with references) that explain bao jia and how it still impacts Mainland China, but first a little good news:

Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of individualism, has gained attention in China and a Chinese translation of Rand's The Fountainhead went on sale there this month. (Hat tip: Simon World.)

Critics sniff that Rand's philosophy helps China's robber barons justify their rampant greed. However, Objectivism is the best medicine for people who were born and raised to the idea that if one person in the family does wrong, the entire family must be punished -- so to save the entire village from punishment.

Bao Jia references

1. "Where was that sense [of collectivism] fostered in the Chinese history? When Qing Dynasty united China, the Emperor established a national government system: County, District, and Province. Under the county, it had a system called Bao Jia. Ten families were in one Bao and ten Bao constituted one Jia. Bao Jia system had many social and government functions: security, tax collection, charity, school, etc. and it was maintained till 1949 under the Nationalist government.

All dynasties in Chinese history developed a "Heavy Award and Heavy Punishment" policy for the Bao Jia's performance. For example, if one person passed the national civil examination, the government would send a band to his hometown to announce the news, chanting his county and family name all the way there. If one person committed crimes, the whole family would suffer from the wrongdoings. Naturally, there were more good things that people do so the award appeared to be more associated with the collectivism.

There are a few of sayings about this award practice. One of them says: If one can fly, his dogs and chickens arise with him to heaven. We have another saying for the punishment side: Nine families die with one person's crime.

It developed into its worst form of crime by association when power struggles became fierce."

http://www.chinaadoption.org/
characteristics.shtml

2. "A reference to the system under which neighbours were requested to keep watch on each other's activities and report them to local authorities."

http://english.people.com.cn/dengxp/
vol1/note/A2130.html

3. Death Trap:
How One Chinese City
Resorted to Atrocities
To Control Falun Dafa
by Ian Johnson

Pressured by their Superiors,
Weifang's Police Tortured
Members of Banned Sect

(From 2000 series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles on Falun Gong written by Ian Johnson for the Wall Street Journal.)

"WEIFANG, China -- Rising out of the North China Plain in a jumble of dusty apartment blocks and crowded roads, this is an unremarkable Chinese city in every respect but one: Local police regularly torture residents to death. [...]

Across this country of 1.3 billion, at least 77 Falun Dafa adherents have now died in detention, according to reports by human-rights groups.Weifang, which has less than 1% of the national population, accounts for 15% of those deaths.

Why?

The answer has its roots in imperial China, when the country developed a system of social control that is still used today. It puts huge pressure on local officials to comply with central edicts -- but gives them absolute discretion over implementation. For officials running Weifang, that mean they were under strict orders to eliminate the huge number of Falun Dafa protesters in their district but faced no scrutiny of the methods they used. [...]

Officials in Beijing set up the framework for the killings one year ago after they became impatient with the continued flow of protesters from around China into the capital. Deciding drastic measures were needed, they reached for a tried-and-true method of enforcing central edicts, one honed over centuries of imperial rule.

Based on the 2,200-year-old bao jia method of controlling society, the system pushes responsibility for following central orders onto neighborhoods, with the local boss responsible for the actions of everyone in his territory. In ancient times, that meant the headman of a family or clan was personally responsible for paying taxes, raising troops and apprehending criminals.

A variant of this is now in use to implement even broader policy goals. After the Communist Party launched economic reforms in the late 1970s, it had great success by signing "contracts" with peasants and factory chiefs, who had to deliver a certain amount of grain or industrial output but were given complete latitude over the methods used. By the late 1980s, provincial governors were also signing similar contracts, being held personally responsible for maintaining grain output in their province or holding down births to a certain level.

Now the problem was Falun Dafa. The government's Office 610, a bureau that was coordinating the crackdown, issued an order in December 1999, telling officials of local governments they would be held personally responsible if they didn't stem the flow of protesters to Beijing, according to Weifang officials. As in years past, no questions would be asked about how this was achieved -- success was all that mattered. [...]"

http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2001/
international-reporting/works/falungong10.html

Whereupon Dr. Ernie and Pundita struggle to define China's system of government.....

October 24
"Hi, Pundita, re your essay Another kind of darkness, I particularly liked this image:

"What rules in China doesn't have a neat label. It's imprecise to call it gangsterism or totalitarianism, nor can it be labeled mercantilism or communism. It's the worst of everything about every bad system of government, glopped together."

Perhaps we should start calling it "glopism." [Here is my definition]:

"When corrupt government colludes with thuggish businesses and organized criminals to perpetuate a vicious circle of economic, political, and social destruction at the expense of those too ignorant to understand, too weak to resist, or too law-abiding to fight back."

Is that pretty much what you meant?
Dr. Ernie in California"

Dear Dr. Ernie:
Pundita likes the term "glopism" -- but how to apply it with precision to China's government? Without precision, a term is useless for building up a body of knowledge. I venture that your description is too narrow because a corrupt government is not necessarily a military dictatorship.

China is a military dictatorship behind the mask of the Chinese Communist Party. China's government is also corrupt -- but so is India's. The same can be said for numerous others. However, India and many other corrupt governments are not a military dictatorship.

Another problem with defining glopism: there can be a corrupt military dictatorship that does not enslave the population for the express purpose of making their workers competitive in certain areas of business. China's government, on the other hand, does engage in this practice. A crash course in how it works:

If China's government decides they need X number of say, software or electrical engineers in order to be competitive in a certain area of global trade, they 'order up' those workers by imposing the necessary specialized education on the needed number of Chinese.

The penalty for refusing to major in a particular subject and specialize in a particular profession or business? The same penalty that was imposed on Taishi villagers who wanted to vote out their corrupt chief; really unpleasant things, which can include imprisonment of one's family.

So today's China has a method of governing that has more in common with the rule of the pharaohs than with capitalism. Thus, the Pundita essay titled Pharaoh. I pointed out that apologists for China ignore that individual workers in democracies are not in competition with individual Chinese workers for jobs.

They are in competition with China's government, which is another way of saying they are competing with China's military. Individual workers in democracies are playing against a stacked deck when it comes to competing with China's workers for jobs in the globalized marketplace.

How do you define the pharaoh aspect of China's government? I guess you could simply call it "Massah" or "slave management" but there are other elements as well:

There is also an element of feudalism; the government views landholders as serfs who do not have rights to their property. This element is still mixed with communist doctrine. Then there is an element of capitalism and one that can be described as mercantilistic. And let's not leave out the oligarchical element.

And we shouldn't overlook bao jia; although the system helped unify Chinese under a central authority thousands of years ago, it was greatly abused in modern times. I've written about bao jia before. Because I can't stress enough how important it is for Westerners (this to include the US Department of State) to learn about bao jia, I'm putting up another post on it.

Because of bao jia, I don't think one can't lump Chinese and Indian government and other Asian governments together when talking about "Asian gangsterism." Bao jia might not be a unique governing system, but the extent to which it conditioned thinking might be unique to the Chinese. It's a question that should be explored by a scholar -- if it hasn't been to this date.

So what are we looking at here, Dr. Ernie? It's the worst elements of every kind of bad government the human race produced. Then why is China's government still standing? The answer is that they're not; they're being carried by the advanced democracies, in the same way the oil kingdoms of the Middle East have been carried. The result in the Middle East? Practices that should have died out in the last century among Arabs and Persians are alive and well and lobbing suicide bombers at us.

Same happened to China's bao jia system. In much the same manner that British colonialism propped up the maharaja system of government in India, the West and in particular the American government propped up bao jia in China.

With regard to China, during the latter half of the last century the advanced democracies followed in the footsteps of the European colonialists. The colonizers came upon societies that were unfit to sustain a big population. Instead of modernizing the societies, the colonialists used their modern techniques to manage them.

The upshot? Ancient methods of government were preserved in amber. This made the governments incapable of ministering to burgeoning populations in the 20th century, which leapfrogged in number thanks greatly to antibiotics, vaccinations, crop pesticides, etc. Result when the colonizers pulled out? Disaster after disaster.

History repeated itself when the NATO governments saw China as a useful wedge against the Soviet Union. The upshot was a mess. But what do the Western apologists call this mess? "China's Confucian-style government." Not only is that view uninformed, it's an awful insult. Confucius would roll in his grave if he saw the government in today's China.

I think it will eventually dawn on China's leaders that democracy is not really an option once the population gets into the mega numbers. You either democratize or die out -- unless you are being carried.

However, withered legs have their downside, as Chinese familiar with their imperial history know. Eventually the cult of the emperor in China meant that the ruler was deemed too sacred to walk. Thus, his leg muscles withered because he was carried everywhere. That made him completely dependent on the Mandarins who ministered to him.

That's an unwise situation for a billion people to land themselves in. So, if you were a deeply cynical person such as Pundita, you might find yourself asking whether apologies for China's government actually represent satisfaction with the status quo, which is a China dependent on being carried by the most developed nations.

Of course, we might be able to hang onto your description by terming it something other than glopism. Come to think of it, "creepy" might be a better fit for the criteria you've defined.

In this way, we could preserve the purity of the glop term for referring to modern China's government, and use "creepy" to refer to governments that merely mix corruption and organized crime.

Readers who have been with Pundita's blog since May are familiar with reader "Liz," who made her first appearance as a contributor during exchanges about the security situation at the Mexican border.

Her initial letter made it clear that she was knowledgeable about disaster planning but from a later exchange I learned that her specific area of expertise is cyber security; also that she was the author of a 2002 book on the topic, Planning for Survivable Networks.

She asked me not to publish her real name. As the months went by I was so impressed with her observations on a range of issues that I felt bad I couldn't give them proper accreditation. Also, I encouraged her to return to writing if she could squeeze out time from her work schedule.

Last week she sent an essay titled, The Worst of All Possibilities; it struck me as the perfect companion piece to Harvest for the World, which I planned to be the last 'daily' post for the Pundita blog. However, I made a strong case that she allow me to give the essay proper accreditation. She agreed, and thus I can finally reveal that Liz is Annlee A. Hines.

In Harvest for the World I return to a major Pundita theme, which is that democracy is the only form of government suitable for the age of human megapopulations. The Worst of all Possibilities zeroes in on the kind of thinking in Western democratic government that answers totalitarian aggression with appeasement, and which finds rationales for tolerating despotic government.

Until the advanced democracies abandon that thinking at the policy level, emerging democracies will continue to struggle uphill against forces that would return them to government that represents the worst of all possibilities.

Annlee points out that sustaining more than lip service to democracy depends on strength of character and acknowledging the limits of risk aversion. Her essay addresses themes that are vital for the American public, academia and policymakers to confront, so I hope she will continue to publish essays on the theme -- and under her own name. Now, I am happy to present Annlee's essay, and with thanks for her contribution....

This essay is a guest contribution by Annlee A. Hines

I love long distance contests. They’re about endurance rather than speed, and speed is just not my forte. I recall an interview with Boris Becker, where the journalist asked him about the number of five-set matches he’s won in his career, and he said that the fifth set had nothing to do with tennis and everything to do with will.

I remember another interview, with Pam Reed, who had won the previous two years’ Badwater Ultra (setting the course record in 2002; the race is Death Valley to Mt. Whitney, 135 miles) and would finish fourth in the current year’s race, which they were chronicling.

Diane Sawyer asked that early-forties woman why ultras were so often won by people in their 50s and even 60s. Reed replied that she thought maybe it was because ultras require patience, and the young have little patience for much of anything.

I do my distance training on an elliptical, having beaten up my joints refereeing too many soccer games on very hard ground. I still love the game, and would play and officiate again if I had less good sense. But I know that there will be consequences for my body, and I’m old enough to appreciate that there’s only so much medicine can do to mend the damage. I’m an engineer by trade, so I understand a patched system is never as strong or as capable as the original. So I spectate, and I appreciate.

One of the skills of a good soccer player is heading the ball, yet it’s something most non-players, especially parents, wince at. The key is going to meet the ball, heading it, not letting it simply hit your head. It really does hurt far less that way, but it requires an effort of will to learn that through your own experience. However, once the initial fear of discomfort, even pain, is overcome, you can do remarkable things meeting the ball with your head on your terms.

Unfortunately, we have far more spectators than players in this universe. We prize rule of law, and (I believe) rightfully so. But a comment made about the overemphasis on law made me think: lawyers, by training, want to minimize, if not outright eliminate, risk for their clients.

Sometimes, like the soccer player meeting the ball rather than avoiding it, we ought to mitigate risk rather than minimize it. But only those who are, or have been, players understand that.

Those who have only been spectators see only the risk and want it eliminated. Being spectators, they don’t understand that it can never be eliminated.

How much of our conflicts about the direction America should take are like that disconnect between the players and the spectators? How much is about the desire by those who are not actually responsible -- and thus, have nothing to lose by being wrong -- to have perfection, a total elimination of risk, a situation of not one mistake being made?

Those who are, or have been, players know that what you see from the sidelines is a wholly different perspective from what you see on the field; the angles of view are simply too divergent to see the same situation in the same way.

Further, the player is right there in the middle of it; he or she must make a choice and live with the consequences. The spectator can critique the consequences of someone else’s choice and even replay the contest, thanks to modern technology, pointing out how the player should have seen this and done that.

The players may have a chance later to review but are too busy dealing with the consequences of their choices, and the choices of the other players, to kibitz during the heat of contest.

And only the player really understands that the outcome of the game is a result of the choices made by all the players in the game, our side and their side, too. That applies to war as well; as the military often says, the enemy gets a vote, too; he makes choices that impact what choices we should make (among the choices now available to us because of his choices and our past choices, and so on).

The Duke of Wellington purportedly said, “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

And General Douglas MacArthur, who had served as the Superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) before serving as the Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area in World War II, said, “On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that on other days and other fields will bear the fruits of victory.”

MacArthur's observation was part of his basis for requiring of every cadet a rigorous physical education and participation in athletics, a requirement which still stands.

How have we forgotten this?

That brings me to Winston Churchill. For how many years was he a voice in the political wilderness, a man of will and endurance, a man whose ideas were scorned as simplistic?

His stance was not nuanced enough, I suppose -- a criticism from the spectators who hadn’t done a tenth of what he had across locations in the British Empire. Churchill was a player rather than a spectator.

In the time of their greatest hour of need the British turned again for leadership to a player rather than a spectator. Yet it was not until Britain was shoved into a desperate fight for survival did it recognize and fully admit that need. Until then, Churchill was too politically incorrect to tolerate.

I doubt I would have had his patience and his willingness to wait, to remain in the political game despite his lousy score for so long. Yet defending democracy over the long haul makes it incumbent upon us to have the will, the endurance, the patience to remain players in the game.

The stakes are fully as high now as they were in the 1930s -- and at times, we are still voices in the political wilderness because the old appeasement crowd has not been swept out entirely, especially, as Pundita reminds us, from Foggy Bottom.

We may take breaks, we may rest at half-time, yet it needs to be a half-time of our choosing and no one else’s. We must stay in the game or we shall cede the field. When we cede the field to the appeasers it’s only a question of “How long?” before they cede the entire match to the enemy. In seeking to avoid the worst they lead us to the worst of all possibilities.

The enemies we face today, whether Islamic fascists or transnational organized crime syndicates, despise the very things that define democracies, and so we are truly in a fight for our survival. Winston Churchill had some advice in 1941 about how we should wage such a fight:

“Never give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

(This writing incorporates excerpts from 11/8 and 11/15 essays, both of which I've deleted.)

Three posts yesterday -- two based largely on segments from John Batchelor's Monday show and one based on a CBS report. John's reporting and analysis are of such consistently high quality that I'm ashamed to say I've come to take it for granted -- whereas I burble praise when a mainstream media reporter does a good job.

Of course that's because the bar is set so low with the mainstream that it really stands out when a reporter leaps above the bar. Yet there are many good reporters working in the mainstream, as Batchelor's show demonstrates. Many of his correspondents are moonlighting from major press and electronic media outlets.

So the raw material is out there for making great American journalism. What seems to be lacking is vision at the management and editorial/production levels.

Data is just that until it's understood; only then does it become intel. It's not just the war news that is hard to follow; it's the complexity of globalized era. The Cold War was easy for journalists because the Iron and Bamboo curtains greatly limited the amount of information they needed to process. And the Middle East was behind a virtual Sand Curtain. And Latin America was behind a Banana Curtain. And Africa was behind, well -- Dark Continent Curtain.

In short, there were very few chess pieces on the news board -- even after America became a superpower. Today, news producers/press editors are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of newsworthy events, so they have retreated to a completely irrelevant decision tree for analyzing which news gets featured. The major part of what drives decision making is economics: it costs megabucks to maintain world-class foreign bureaus, and megabucks to hire good analysts.

Another part of the problem relates to psycho-epistemology. The picture-driven, event-driven TV medium is the worst for building a coherent understanding of events. Even the talk driven news shows such as PBS NewsHour are at the mercy of the traditional way of analyzing news, which I term Bunching:

A bunch of Talking Heads arises out of nowhere to discourse authoritatively about a news event, They are replaced the next night by another bunch when another news event rises. Then, poof! the bunch is replaced by another bunch the next night, discoursing with equal authority on another news event that has arisen.

The upshot is a crazy-quilt jumble of facts and opinion that only news junkies and wonks can fit into a coherent picture of world events. Result: the general public fogs out. People need coherence before they need facts. Above all, they need meaning: Why should I pay attention to this?

One of my essays The Seven O'Clock Intelligence Briefing analyzes what the public would need to know, in order to understand the Ukraine presidential election.

My point was that without providing adequate background to a situation and connecting it with American interests, it is hard for the public to discern the truth of matters, hard to distinguish which news stories carry true weight.

Paid agendists, propagandists, and influence agents are the cats among the pigeons; they are skilled at manipulating the public's (and journalists') poor grasp of world events. The best defense is a better informed public.

I could write volumes on this topic but my point is that Pundita blog strives to explain the relevance of complex situations to a general reader; in particular, how certain situations (e.g., corruption and development banking) feed into the War on Terror and Bush's democracy doctrine.

In summary, it ain't enuf to know the facts on the ground; one must connect their meaning with a larger picture, one that a general readership can grasp. This is if news organizations in the 21st century are to keep the public well informed. Given the close connection between democracy and an informed public, communication is a very important issue. Political bias is really the least of the problem.

In the end it's just a bunch of people and their actions we're discussing. If we never forget that, we can always find our way to a clear explanation about matters of state. Such matters are no harder to understand than the progress of a sports team or the plot of a soap opera. However, both are serials, which means the fans build up an understanding over time. As I pointed out in the Seven O'Clock essay, it is supposed to be the job of the news media to help the public build up an understanding of the events they hurl into the news reports. They've done a lousy job.

This said, I don't think the static medium of television or even the printed medium is the best way to learn about issues related to major news stories. Because learning is an interactive process I consider the Socratic method -- a dialogue between teacher and student -- the very best way to learn. This is because the student's questions drive the teacher's replies and reveal what the student does not know about a topic. The teacher can help fill in the blanks and correct misunderstandings on the spot.

So I think the blogosphere/Internet chat room, which allows for rapid feedback, and talk radio, and which allows for caller feedback, are better media for getting background on the news, at least until TV becomes interactive.

I note that John Batchelor does not accept calls during his radio show but he gets around that limitation through dialogues with his guests. Clearly, he goes into his subjects very well informed but he will take the role of the student and ask the kind of questions that his audience would ask.

I know from my year of blogging how easy it is to assume too much about a general reader's grasp of a subject. Early on I threw too much at the reader in one of my essays, Democracy Stage Show Kit, because I made reference to concepts that would only be readily familiar to people working in development areas.

That led to misunderstanding and away from my central point. My first reaction boiled down to, "I can't go back to Square One; I'm not a teacher."

It took a few essays but I managed to clarify. The experience brought home to me that an interactive element is key to making sense out of news events. That's why I recommend people start foreign policy discussion clubs.

"The Energizer people should have picked these mules -- not some bunny."

CBS News reporter Mark Phillips is no spring chicken. So, bless his heart for climbing up the Hindu Kush to report on efforts to get relief supplies to Pakistan's earthquake survivors in the remotest regions.

The situation for the survivors is very grim. Helicopters can't land in many of the places, so it's up to the mule trains but with winter closing fast, time is running out. If you're a praying sort I hope you'll pray for those fiercely independent mountain people. Especially pray for God to talk sense into them.

They need to descend to lower altitudes if they are to survive the winter but they have resisted efforts to persuade them to come down from the mountains. They ask where they should go to, because the towns at the lower elevations were also wiped out by the quake.

At least they would have a chance to survive this winter if they came down. What they're going to do when the mules are blocked by 15 feet of snow, I don't know. All I know is that it will be too late by then for them to change their minds.

Those mountain tribes in that part of the world are so old -- older than Islam, older than Christianity and Judaism, older than the Hindu gods. That they should die out like this, freezing to death, breaks my heart.

Last night's televised version of Mark's report omits his personal observations, so I reprint them here. Click on this CBS link for the pictures and video of the report.

A Not-So-Short Walk In Hindu Kush
Nov. 7, 2005
Reporter's Notebook written by
CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips.

Somewhere around the 4,000-ft. mark, funny things start happening to your eyes. Spots seem to appear on the extreme edge of your field of vision. Loose, basketball-sized boulders on the trail seem to move as you try to step around them. But this isn't a pleasure stroll in which you can stop to admire the view and catch your breath.

This is a mercy mission. And while it may be a physical challenge for a soft, city-living correspondent, to the men and mules of the 72nd Animal Transport Battalion of the Pakistan Army, it's a day at the office. What really bothered me is that none of them even broke a sweat. And while I could hear my heart pounding in my ears, at the 5,000-ft. mark they broke into song ... and kept climbing.

There are areas in the earthquake zone that are simply inaccessible by any other means. High up in the mountains there are villages to which no roads lead -- or if there were roads, those roads are gone. Even single-file tracks have been obliterated by landslides. And in those villages -- or what's left of them -- there are severely injured people. And hungry people. And people without shelter. And winter is coming.

Some of these places are way up there, above 5,000, 7,000, even 9,000 feet. Some cling so precariously to the steep pitched mountainsides there is no place a helicopter could land. Mule trains are the only way.

So every day at dawn the soldiers of the 72nd A.T. stack sacks of flour, sugar, tea and pile tins of cooking oil on the backs of their mules and start the climb. Several hours and several thousand vertical feet later, they off-load these supplies in the villages and head back down. Then they do it again.

Often the trail they took yesterday isn't there today, covered over with new rock slides. With their hands, the mule handlers heave boulders out of the way to clear a new path. You can hear the shifted rocks cracking for what seems like miles as they smack their way down the slopes below.

The animal transport battalions of the Pakistan Army have a long, proud history. In the decades of hostility between Pakistan and India over the disputed province of Kashmir, the mule trains were the only means of fortifying the high Himalayan passes. They'd carry heavy guns and shells into areas unreachable with normal military transport. Sometimes, if the area was considered too dangerous for humans, the mules would be sent along the trails alone.

You may have heard about stubborn mules. These aren't. The train I was with had to climb up 60-degree, loose-boulder fields, had to wade through angry, roiling, rocky streams, had to stagger through slides of shifting shale and never once did an animal refuse. And always up and up and up. The Energizer people should have picked these mules -- not some bunny.

The Pakistani government is trying to convince the quake survivors in the villages to come down to the valleys where aid is more easily distributed. But the major towns, all of them severely damaged by the quake, are already thronged with displaced people from the hills, not to mention their own surviving populations.

Many of the tent cities that have formed are little more than squalid camps with no running water or sanitation. Disease warnings are already being issued by world health authorities.

"I'd rather die up here," is a phrase I heard more than once in the mountain villages.

The problem is, in a word, winter. Sometime in the middle of next month it will set in with a vengeance. Temperatures, already freezing at night will drop and stay dropped. Blizzards will whip up snow drifts ten feet deep. The tents the mule trains are carrying seem inadequate. Yet large portions of the village populations see a winter in the hills as a lesser evil than the threat and crowding of the towns. Some are building crude lean-tos out of scavenged material from the demolished buildings. But even then, they say, they'll have to shovel snow off the roofs night and day to keep them from caving in.

In the village of Sat Bani, our destination, 60 people were killed in the quake. Not a single building is standing. Several hundred souls — some survivors from Sat Bani, some who have come from villages even higher up — wait. The mule trains arrive every few days trying to bring up enough supplies to last through the winter but everybody knows when the snows come in a few weeks, even the mules won't be able to get through.

We leave the village a while after the mule train has departed. They don't dally to talk to people. One of the villagers insists on escorting us down the tricky passage just below the settlement so we don't get lost. As we part he shakes our hands and offers some advice. "Be careful," he says. "These mountains are very dangerous."

By Mark Phillips
©MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Comments by guests on John Batchelor show tonight about riots in France:

John Terrett (British correspondent)
The situation had been building for years and it finally boiled over.

Reza Bayegan (Iranian expat living in Paris for six years)
Most rioters are Sunnis 2nd generation North African or Sub-Saharan Africans. So most are French citizens. They are not really in bad [economic] shape when compared to other countries; they are getting free health care and free education.

Rioters are alienated from their parents and the Muslim religious authority -- alieniated from authority in general.

Reza told Batchelor that he has not found that he's been discriminated against by the French in all his years of living there and has not experienced any kind of retaliation from French non-Muslims since rioting began.

John Loftus
There are huge sections cities/towns in France where the African-Arab population is segregated from the French popluation -- where the people don't speak French and where the police never go. The police hadn't stepped foot in the town for years where the two boys were electrocuted. They showed up only on strong report of crime taking place.

[French authorities] are invoking a 1955 Algerian law to declare military authority over the rioters, which is the worst thing they can do.

Francis Fukuyama
Pundita always fogs out while listening to Fukuyama. He something to the effect that Muslim youth in Europe are suffering from alienation. Batchelor's website carries Fukiyama's written pronouncement on the riots.

Martin Arnold (Financial Times reporter) living in Paris.
French ruling class threatened by rioters. Ruling class is white, male, educated in France's best universities; many are public servants. There is not a single ethnic person serving in France's legislative body.
* * * * * * * * *
From various MSM TV reports tonight
Police closing down internet sites that are networking hubs for rioters; e.g., telling where to meet to stage riots.

(Vanity Fair editor living in Paris interviewed on CBS nightly news):
The Muslims in France speak of America with admiration, saying that in America the Muslims are free to attend whatever schools they want, in America Muslim women are free to wear headscarves.

French police saying that many of the youths seem to be part of criminal gangs.
* * * * * * * * *
Pundita notes:
Regarding the last comment above: I can't help but recalling that the Thai police/military kept saying the same thing for years about increasing violence in Muslim south. By the time they acknowledged that it was not just criminal gangs -- that there was a jihadi terrorist element -- it was too late to deal with the situation without setting off a minor bloodbath.

I hate to disagree with my favorite British news analyst but I remain suspicious about the timing of the boiling over of angst. As John Terrett observes, the situation has been going on for years -- decades. Yet by amazing coincidence the situation boiled over at just the time the EU3 leaders collectively showed real starch in their spine with regard to Syria and Iran.

Nicolas Sarkozy's awful slurs, which many have blamed for feeding the anger of the rioters, are nothing new. He's been playing to France's hard right. What's new is Jacques Chirac's willingness to go along with the original wording of UN Resolution 1636 on Syria, which was even tougher than the slightly watered-down version hammered out last weekend.

What's new is the tough language about Iran used by Britain's foreign office head, Jack Straw.

What's new is Tony Blair's public accusation that Iran is behind al Qaeda terrorist activity in Iraq.

In short, during the past month there has been a sea change in the attitudes of the European Union leaders, which has alarmed Syria's President Assad, who carries water for Iran's regime. The change has also alarmed al Qaeda's leaders and Iran's dictators.

The situation is ripe for a big al Qaeda terrorist attack in West Europe, which still has many undetected Qaeda sleeper cells. So when the riots broke out in France I was relieved to see they were spontaneous and seemingly not instigated by Qaeda. There is plenty for France's poorest to riot about. And Sarkozy's infamous contempt for France's African-Arab immigrant population clearly poured oil on the flames.

Then a passage in an article Dan Riehl sent along this weekend gave me a start:

The rioters were using an urban battle tactic that was refined in 2003-2004, in Thailand, by a Qaeda-linked Muslim terror group. The tactic is hit-and-run attacks on motor scooters against police and military troops. The Thai military and police were sitting ducks until they adjusted their tactics.

I told myself that the adoption of the same tactic by the rioters was simply a logical development; after all, many of the poor can't afford cars in Europe and scooters are a widespread mode of transport. But I was concerned enough to mention the Thai tactic in an email to Dan.

Then, within hours I was reading news wires that mentioned the growing coordination of the attacks across Europe. Again, this is not necessarily connected to Qaeda and can be seen as a logical development.

However, it is an unavoidable fact that all this spontaneous, logical development of the "riot" tactics has come on the heels of the UN situation I mentioned in my post today. My concern is that spontaneous grief and rage among the poorest Muslim immigrants has provided Qaeda -- and Iran's regime -- the perfect opportunity to warn Chirac and other West European leaders to back away from their tough stand on Assad's regime.

In any case, I think it's fair to assume that by now, Qaeda is providing technical assistance, tactical advice and money to the aggrieved rioters.

None of this contradicts the points that Terrett, Loftus and several commentators have brought out since the riots began. West Europeans need to confront the simple fact that ghettos are not a good thing. Reportedly Chirac has privately acknowledged the ghettoization of the vast majority of France's 5 million Muslim immigrants. (See Nov 7 Guardian.)

"Trying to determine how much French foreign policy in Africa was affected by the French desire to obtain uranium is a difficult task. There was no recorded decision by the French leaders who formed the French African policy that can be related to uranium extraction rates. Instead the historical facts, rhetoric, and events and their outcomes must be investigated. By examining the history relating France to its former African colonies, one can only surmise how much French foreign policy was influenced by the uranium needs of the country. ..."
Section XI -- The French Desire for Uranium
by Nicholas Pederson
Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000

...Den Brer Fox sez to Brer Rabbit, sezee, "Who ax you fer ter come en strike up a quaintence wid dish yer tar-baby? En who stuck you up dar whar you iz? Nobody in de roun worril. You des tuck en jam yo'se'f on dat tar-baby widout waintin fer enny invite," sez Brer Fox, sezee.

"En dar you is, en dar you'll stay twel I fixes up a bresh-pile and fires her up, cuz I'm gwinteter bobbycue you dis day, sho," sez Brer Fox, sezee.

Den Brer Rabbit talk mighty humble: "I don't keer w'at you do wid me, Brer Fox," sezee, "Jes so's you don't fling me in dat briar-patch. Roast me, Brer Fox," sezee, "But don't fling me in dat briar-patch." ...

Well, I see Ambassador Joseph Wilson is threatening to sue Fox news analyst Major General Paul Vallely for libel and slander, and also sue World Net Daily for carrying a story about what Gen. Vallely told John Batchelor's radio audience about what Wilson told Vallely about Wilson's wife.

In brief, Vallely said that Wilson bragged to him in 2002 that his wife worked for the CIA, and Wilson is calling him a liar.

To orient yourself to how that latest salvo fits into the hideously complex Wilson-Plame Affair, which is part of Washington's epoch-making Beltway Wars, skip down to my Saturday entry highlighting John Batchelor's blog on the topic then skim the WND story linked above.

As to what any of this has to do with the "crazy report," as Ms. Plame reportedly termed it, which sent her hubby off to investigate whether Saddam was trying to purchase yellowcake from Niger --

Pundita has a theory: Mr Wilson and Ms Plame eventually figured out they were duped fair and square and Mr Wilson foolishly lost his temper about this. Wounded professional pride and all that; experienced ambassadors consider themselves nobody's fool.

See, the crazy report happened to be true. Now watch carefully don't blink: Because most of Niger's uranium mines and Niger itself are controlled by a French consortium, if you say that Niger's government negotiated with Saddam's about yellowcake -- that is as much saying America's NATO ally France broke any number of international agreements.

The problem for the Bush administration (and Tony Blair) was that catching France red-handed and stopping France were two different things.

Enter Dick Cheney and George Tenet, both on very good terms with President Bush, and who shared his determination to do something about the total lack of cooperation from Jacques Chirac's government.

To follow this next part it helps if you remember President Bush's daddy headed the CIA and that starting from his first day in office, Bush 43 actually read all the intelligence reports on his desk every morning.

Here we must draw a curtain but in due time Ambassador Wilson was told to see what he could dig up about the Niger yellowcake business. Right there he must have known something was screwy if he accepted the instructions at face value:

"Walk into a den of thieves and ask if they've heard about any bank robberies recently."

That's what Wilson's instructions boiled down to. So from the gitgo the CIA knew he would bring home nothing. And Wilson knew he would bring home nothing. If he had just left it at that, but he couldn't. That's because he was a flaming Liberal who couldn't stand the Bush administration and was very much against the Iraq invasion.

Thus, Wilson was provoked to dash off an op-ed piece for The New York Times after Bush quoted from a forged document to warn that Saddam had tried to purchase yellowcake from Niger.

A furor followed. And so it came to pass that the Bush administration then had no choice but to ask George Tenet to please declassify highly sensitive data. The data indicated that the Niger yellowcake information Bush quoted was correct, even though the particular source he quoted was bad.

Once the data were declassified and broadcast a very strange thing happened. Despite their criticism of the Iraq invasion, Chirac's government transformed into a veritable fountainhead of helpfulness in the US war on terror.

France gave (and continues to give) the US military big help in French regions of Africa -- fighting terrorists alongside US forces in Sahel and other places -- and tremendous help with interdictions of terrorist ships at sea. And, one might infer, they keep a closer watch on Niger's dealings with despots wanting to buy uranium.

But something went horribly wrong, as so often happens in war. Mr Wilson might have been philosophical about being used as a pawn but he drew the line at an attack on his wife. As to why anyone in the White House would go after his wife while the White House was basking in a huge wartime coup is beyond Pundita.

And it was a coup -- and a diplomatic success. There was no way Chirac's government could cry "Foul" about the release of that intelligence. Clearly, Bush had no choice given that he'd quoted from a forged document. (A forgery so poorly done, I might add, that a 12 year old with Internet access could see through it.)

How to put this delicately...everyone's ass on our side of the Pond was covered; the same for MI6, which if I recall handed the CIA the forged document that Bush quoted from. Nobody could be accused of making an effort to embarrass France's government.

Then why did some idiots in the White House go after Mrs Wilson? Mr Wilson could huff and puff all he wanted against the Iraq invasion; the declassified intelligence showed that indeed, there had been negotiations on the part of Saddam's government to purchase Niger yellowcake.

The only answer I can muster is that in war the best you can hope for is that you'll make fewer mistakes than the enemy. Yet going after Valerie Plame was a very costly mistake.

If you tell me that my theory is on the moon, Pundita will just continue to sit up here on the moon and let you stay down there on earth watching B'rer Wilson get revenge. At least my vantage point allows me to keep an eye on the French.

Speaking of which, it's really helpful toward understanding the French if you read through the intelligence report I linked to above. The sections are short and clearly written. You might want to go directly to Section II France and Nuclear Energy. Unless you're already an expert on the topic I bet your jaw will drop at least once while reading. And note they've been a lot smarter than the US about energy matters.

Is there any way, any way at all at this late stage, to head off the worst of Mr Wilson's ire? Well, one has to consider the skills of an ambassador who spent much of his career dealing with despots and crooks.

The negotiation skills one gains under such conditions are not terribly unlike those shown by Bre'r Rabbit in Tales of Uncle Remus, which are rooted in the trickster lore of West African folk tales.

One should also recall Joe Wilson's courage -- one might even say reckless courage. He sheltered more than 100 Americans at the US embassy in Baghdad when Saddam Hussein went after them, and he mocked Hussein's threats to execute anyone who refused to hand over foreigners. Those acts endeared him to President Bush's father.

So the Bush administration might want to consider the famous encounter between Bre'r Fox and Bre'r Rabbit and ponder deeply. A public apology to Valerie Plame might help even if they have to swallow hard to do it.

..."I ain't got no string," sez Brer Fox, sezee, "En now I speck I'll hatter drwon you," sezee.

"Drown me ez deep es you please, Brer Fox," sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, "but don't fling me in dat brier-patch," sezee.

"Dey ain't no water nigh," sez Brer Fox, sezee. "En now I speck I'll hatter skin you," sezee.

"Skin me, Brer Fox," sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, "snatch out my eyeballs, t'ar out my yeras by de roots, en cut off my legs," sezee, "but please, Brer Fox, don't fling me in dat briar-patch," sezee.

Co'se Brer Fox wnater hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch 'im by de behime legs en slung im right in de middle er de briar-patch.

Dar wuz a considerbul flutter whar Brer Rabbit struck de bushes, en Brer Fox sorter hang roun fer ter see w'at wuz gwinter happen.

Bimeby he hear somebody call im, en way up de hill he see Brer Rabbit settin crosslegged on a chinkapin log koamin de pitch outen his har wid a chip.

Den Brer Fox know dat he bin swop off mighty bad.

Brer Rabbit wuz bleedzed fer ter fling back some er Brer Fox's sass, so he holler out: "I wuz bred en bawn in a briar-patch, Brer Fox -- bred en bawn in a briar-patch!"

En wid dat he skip out des ez lively as a cricket in de embers.

How Mr Rabbit was too sharp for Mr Fox from Tales of Uncle Remus (published 1881) by Joel Chandler Harris.

Thanks to Dan at Riehl World View for sending me this:

BEIJING (Associated Press Nov 7) - China said Sunday it had asked for outside help to test three possible cases of bird flu in people while scientists and government representatives prepared for a strategy session in Geneva amid fears of a possible worldwide flu pandemic among humans. ...

If China has turned over a new leaf by immediately reporting suspected human cases of H5N1 and asking for outside help in testing, I could not be more relieved. It would mean there is a chance to speed-bump the virus, which buys the human race more time to prepare for a pandemic.

Yet only the naive would assume that these are the first suspected human cases of H5N1 that China has seen. Given the repeated history I can't take Beijing at their word at this time; a pattern of actions from their health ministry is what I'll be looking for.

I am suspicious about the timing of Beijing's announcement. It could be a showcase move to head off criticism ahead of the Geneva meeting.

Click here for the rest of this very important story.

The situation in France seems to have started as unplanned riots but Pundita has a problem with coincidences during war. By coincidence the rioting escalated from spontaneous expressions of rage to well coordinated attacks last Thursday, which was the day after the Mehlis Commission issued a summons to six Syrian intelligence officers to appear for questioning outside Syria.

So as you can see, things have moved quickly; it was only last Monday that UN Resolution 1636 passed by unanimous vote in the UN Security Council. The resolution gives the Syrian government virtually no stalling time to produce witnesses in the Mehlis Commission investigation and the witness list could, in theory, extend to Syria's President Bashar Assad.

A Washington Post/Associated Press article notes that the resolution has given the commission sweeping powers. Six Syrian intelligence officers have been summoned outside Syria for questioning along with a Lebanese official.

The resolution gives Mehlis the power to question "any Syrian at a location and under conditions of his choosing."

Translation: the parties can be questioned without Syrian government "minders" present, and they and the investigators now have a fighting chance of avoiding assassination enroute to the interrogation locations.

Yet whatever the wording of the powers conferred by the resolution, enforcement will require that the EU3 (Britain, France and Germany) continue to hang tough.

And dang if it didn't happen that around the same time poverty stricken rioters commandeering attack squads of motor scooters, and using cell phone and Internet networks, pulled off surprisingly well-coordinated attacks, according to French police. And also managed in their grief to throw together a firebomb making factory.(1)

For readers who keep track of such things, here are the intel officers named so far that Mehlis has called for questioning.

> General Assef Shawkat, chief of Syria's military intelligence service (President Assad's brother-in-law).

> Maj. General Bahjat Suleiman, former chief of Syria's internal intelligence service.

> Brig. General Rustum Ghazale, Syrian intelligence chief in Lebanon when ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated.

According to the AP story the other three senior officers listed in the summons did not include President Assad's brother, Maher, whose name was mentioned in Mehlis' report.

Now what should happen if the three generals on the list suddenly find themselves in need of triple bypass surgery and die on the operating table before Mehlis can interview them?

Pundita doesn't know. However, those three generals are probably very hard to catch napping; after all, they surived the Assad regime this long. So I sense it's more likely that Assad will stall while he tries to whip up support at the Arab League for thumbing his nose at Mehlis' demand. And while he phones Jacques Chirac to extend his sympathies about the troubles across France.

1) From a MSNBC News Services report 8:28 p.m. ET Nov. 6 (H/T World Net Daily): Police find Molotov cocktail factory in Paris; marauders attack in central Paris; and in Grigny (south of Paris) 10 police were injured from shotgun blasts fired by marauders. (Let's stop calling them rioters, shall we?)

Dan at Riehl World View is keeping tabs on the Paris riots; thank goodness because Pundita too tuckered to follow the story. Click here for the latest.

Pundita's favorite radio host and news anchor John Batchelor recently aired a bombshell interview in which a retired West Pointer recalled that Ambassador Joseph Wilson had "bragged" to him in 2002 that his wife worked for the CIA.

Now Batchelor has gone to the blogosphere (Welcome, John!) to recount the story and nail down the meaning of a "covert agent." Finally, a little clarity! Visit Red State for Batchelor's full report. Selected passages here:

My colleague Major General Paul Vallely, USA (ret.), West Point '61, wrote me ... that Wilson had bragged of his wife the "CIA desk officer" to Paul and all other ears in the green room at Fox News in D.C. in the winter spring of 2002. ...

Paul told the same story to me on air on Wednesday, November 2 ... Joe Wilson called his wife a "CIA desk officer."

This is nearly the only accurate statement that Wilson is now making. He uses the ambiguity of spytalk to avoid clarity. "CIA desk officer" is vague. "Covert agent" is not vague, but it must be carefully studied with regard the 1982 law:

(4) The term "covert agent" means--

(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency--

(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and

(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or

(B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and--

(i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or

(ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or

(C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.

Reason simply: when Wilson bragged of Valerie Plame to fashionable media savvy Washington in the winter/spring of 2002, he was speaking the facts of the matter. According to her present employment status, she was not covert -- she factually was a "CIA desk officer."

Critically, according to the 1982 law, Valerie Plame, while at one time a "covert agent," serving overseas, was no longer overseas, nor had she been since 1997.

Also, again according to the law, the five-year time limit protection expired in 2002.

(Puzzle: did Joe Wilson, revealing his wife's employment to Vallely in the Fox green room in 2002, violate the 1982 law's time limit clause?)

In any event, by 2003, the relevant year, anyone who ever cared to listen to Wilson -- at a major TV station, at cocktails parties, in the usual Washington elbow rubbing rooms -- knew that his wife was working as a "CIA desk officer." ...

11:30 PM update
For more on General Vallely's comments to John Batchelor about Ambassador Wilson, see World Net Daily Nov 5 report. (H/T Dan Riehl)

I kept wanting to share this historic photograph but never got around to fixing up my blog to display pictures. So you'll just have to click on the link and scroll down to the second photograph. Oh, go ahead and live dangerously. You won't get on a watch list; the link is from the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas.

To many Americans it would just seem a picture of some old Chinese guy with salad dressing on his chest raising his wine glass in toast. Actually, you are looking at one of the most important moments in modern China's history.

Pundita readers need no introduction to General Cao Gangchuan and his role in bringing down the curtain on Jiang Zemin's rule. That's what you're looking at. When General Cao raised his wine glass on the evening of July 31, 2004 he did more than pay tribute to the 77th anniversary of the founding of China's modern military. From the tone of his speech, everyone in attendance guessed that he was marking the end of an era in China and the start of a new one.

But that historic toast was not Killer Toast; the killer came the next day, August 1, which is Military Day in China. By then everyone was breathlessly waiting to hear General Cao's toast at the festivities.

They had already flipped through their Communist Party Toast Codebook. From this, they recalled that during the previous year's Military Day toast, General Cao had told them to obey the Central Party Committee, the Central Military Commission, and Chairman Jiang.

Slowly, General Cao rose from his chair and raised his wine glass. A hush fell over the assembly. Then... then .... this is always the part where Pundita has to take a sip of sherry to prevent palpitations ... then... General Cao said nothing at all about Jiang Zemin.

Only military discipline prevented the gathering from knocking over chairs in their haste to spread the news. A New York Times reporter was arrested in China on spying charges, simply for reporting the gossip raging around Beijing within minutes of the speech.

A month later Jiang Zemin relinquished his last official hold on power in China. And all that's happened since, and all that is to come in China, was set in motion by a general's toast on a glorious summer evening in a grand banquet hall.

For an extremely biased and downright catty account of Jiang Zemin's rise to power ("Licking the Boots of the Upper Echelon to Rise Further...Working His Connections and Fawning on Key Personnel to Become Shanghai’s Leader..."), see The Epoch Times biography.

The stories of Jiang's wait for hours in the snow to give a present to a superior's mistress, and how he flummoxed democracy advocates by reciting Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, are by themselves worth the read. (1)

Who cares how much of the biography is true? It's a primer on what Chinese don't like about their leaders and a rare glimpse of sexual politics, China style.

1) Stories from Anything for Power: the real story of China's Jiang Zemin, Chapter Four.

"You have accused the state department of a double standard about Russia and China. Aren't you guilty of the same about Vladimir Putin? You have used tortured arguments to defend his anti-democratic measures while at the same time praising democracy to the sky! Please explain the contradiction if you can.
Alena in New York"

Dear Alena:
I don't know what part of my argument is tortured. I observed that Putin has gathered and wielded enormous power in the process of trying to create a nation out Russian territories that were run like duchies.

However, I have egg on my face about lecturing the Russians about duchies. This is since Hurricane Katrina turned up that Louisiana has been run like a duchy, right down to making their own foreign policy under the direction of a French Canadian organization started by a Canadian with close connections to North Korea's government.

If you missed my post on the topic that man is Maurice Strong, who didn't recall a million dollar check made out to him as part of a UN Oil-for-Food deal.

However, I think (I hope) that Louisiana is an exception to the rule among American states, which agree to act as if they're part of a union. In Russia, the exception has been the rule.

So Putin is operating on the principle that before you can have a democratic nation, first there has to be a nation. Many Russians agree with him, which is how he was able to gather so much power.

As to whether the agreement is actually a majority -- taking a shot in the dark, I'd say most Russians want to have their cake and eat it too. They want independence from a centralized government but at the same time they want a centralized government to pick up the pieces.

So what does that make Russians? It makes them normal. Look at Tamil Nadu state in India. Look at Louisiana. Look all around the world, and you will find regions that can't stand the thought of a centralized government until they need one. So then it's decision time. By atavistic tradition, usually backed by military force, you can't keep changing your mind about your decision on the days it suits.

It's also dealing from the bottom of the deck if your idea of establishing democracy includes a program of balkanization. "Yo, we're all democrats here in these 20 square miles of our nation."

And how long do they think they'll remain democratic, when everyone around them with their own 20 square miles says the same thing? That situation is ripe for a strongman and slick operators. And where does it end?

"Yo, we're all democrats here in New Orleans."

Then who ran screaming to the federal government after Katrina struck?

President Putin knows that promises are not enough. By the time he leaves office he must deliver a central government and consolidated union of states that do not run roughshod over democracy.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but he has always seen himself as preparing the ground for a democratic nation -- groundwork that was not done by Boris Yeltsin and his American and West European backers.

The Russian people have the hard job of both supporting Putin's efforts and protesting when he makes too many compromises with the old order. So far, they're doing a pretty good job of threading the needle. They're not helped by State's efforts to discredit Putin and make his successor more malleable to their balmy theories about defending American interests in Central Asia.

"With the election on May 2 of Chile's former interior minister Jose Miguel Insulza to the post of secretary general of the Organization of American States (O.A.S.), that alliance will, for the first time since its founding in 1948, have a chief executive who is not the preferred choice of the United States."

So begins a May 2005 PINR intelligence brief titled Washington loses control of OAS. The brief is a must read if you want to understand the real background to the unpleasant reception President Bush has received during his trip to Argentina. It also brings out that the US Department of State has been relying on an outmoded playbook in their approach to the Latin American region as a whole; a playbook that flagrantly contradicts the Bush Democracy Doctrine.

Although the installation of market democracies is Washington's best-case scenario, it has been willing to embrace authoritarian regimes when it perceives that they are fending off political forces that would establish alternatives to capitalism and cultivate the support of powers outside the hemisphere for their experiments.

Pundita never likes to propose the Taco Bell Solution but that might be just the ticket in this case. By now Pundita readers should be familiar with the basic drill:

Recall all US ambassadors to Washington and put them in a stadium along with all DOS employees. Breakfast, lunch and dinner catered by Taco Bell, until everybody understands that protecting a democracy by supporting despotic regimes will come back to bite you real fast in the modern age.

Once everyone is on the same page, the next step is to take this simple quiz: What is the difference between a market economy and a democracy?

It might take a month or so of subsisting on burritos (especially if the quiz taker has been posted to China), but eventually everyone will figure out the answer.

Once in a while Pundita receives a letter that goes something like this: "How do you stay sane if you're following world news 24/7? I'm asking because I want to start a blog about foreign affairs."

Well, first of all -- and here I think I speak for many veteran bloggers -- the line between sanity and insanity lurks around 18/7. Once you near the 20/7 range of news consumption, you're getting beyond the help of medication.

In truth you can't closely follow world news without meeting the Twilight Zone. So a lot of the work of staying sane is finding ways to ignore that zone opening up while you scan news wires. Take this item from yesterday, for example:

Jordan's Queen Rania, speaking on behalf of the U.N. children's fund, called for help to immunize Pakistani children against disease. UNICEF officials say they are planning a measles vaccination program, and earthquake rescue workers also warned that cases of acute respiratory infection and diarrhea have been increasing.

Of course there's nothing eerie about asking for donations to a measles vaccination program for child earthquake victims. Until you learn that only 300,000 tents have been delivered thus far to shelter Pakistan's homeless earthquake victims.

About 3 million of those victims are sleeping in the open, during a part of the year in Pakistan when the temperature is plunging and snowstorms are looming in the mountainous regions. People in the worst-affected zones can't take refuge in the existing structures. This is because there are still earth tremors and the structures are very unsound; buildings collapse on a tremor.

So it's down now to a matter of days -- a few weeks if you are a hopeful sort -- before you're looking at a human death toll that could easily reach a half million within hours.

That prospect could have been avoided if Pakistan had been quicker to accept India's offer to fly aid into Pakistan's remote regions. (We're still twiddling our thumbs waiting on November 7, when the red tape will finally unwind enough from the Line of Control to allow for Pak Kashmiri quake victims to enter India's refugee shelters.)

Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf has thrown his weight behind speeding up the process. Today he announced that Pakistan is delaying purchases of F-16 jet fighters from the United States. This is so the projected expense can be diverted to aid Pakistan's quake victims.

Here a reasonable person would ask, "What the hell does a projected expense have to do with the next 72 hours in Pakistan's mountainous regions?"

Pundita is an expert at making the Twilight Zone vanish but I can't help you, if you insist on understanding what's going on in that part of the world. Your best bet is to pretend that Musharraf's announcement is a clever way to twist another billion in cash out of the United States. That makes sense, doesn't it?

It's easier to explain away UNICEF's poor prioritizing. There are uncounted billions of dollars sloshing around in what might be countless UN programs, but the monies aren't fungible. So you can have, say, a Palestine UN committee collecting USD millions to educate Muslims about the threat of Zionism. But no portion of that money can be used to deliver food and tents to Muslims in imminent danger of freezing and starving to death. Go down the list of UN programs to find the same story.

The upshot? Last week the United Nations pleaded for millions USD in donations so they don't have to suspend helicopter relief flights to Pakistan's quake victims.

Without the helicopter flights directed by the US military based in Afghanistan, the estimated 79,000+ death toll in Pakistan from the quake and its aftermath would be much higher. The bad news is that the death toll is galloping toward 100,000 and that's not including projected deaths from weather exposure and starvation as winter closes in.

Meanwhile, it's business as usual at the United Nations.

Pundita will not reveal all her secrets for staying sane. However, I will share a trick if you're a heavy-duty news consumer. I turn over certain stories to the news anchors and Talking Heads at Loony Tunes Cable News and let them have a whack. Recent LTCN offerings:

> Cooking with Tony and Jacques: Making bangers souffle in the microwave.

> Kim Jong-il analyzes news on high level Chinese Communist Party officials "Basically, they're all trying to move to Singapore."

> Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qaddafi, aka Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya ("Just call me Brother Daffy") discusses why Saudi Arabian princes are never seen in public without a headdress. "Less bother than hair straightening preparations." *

> The Yossef Bodansky-Paris Hilton daily report on terrorist activities. [tossing his pen in the air] "Paris, we've been over this before. The Land of Two Rivers is not in Minneapolis."

> The Apprentice for Tyrants. Individuals on two teams compete in tasks to show Robert Mugabe why they deserve to be his top general. Elimination rounds take place in front of a firing squad.

> Remake of Casablanca starring Victor Yushchenko as Rick and Yulia Timoshenko as Ilsa. Ukraine's government a bunch of crooks? Round up the usual oligarchs.

If you want to subscribe to LTCN you'll have to use your imagination. And stay on that 18/7 side of the line, hear?

As to what's really going on in Pakistan, same thing that's been going on for decades. China's military is worried that Pakistan will rejoin India. Pakistan's military is worried that if the US pulls out of the region again, this will leave them facing China's anger if they get too friendly with India.

Will many Pakistani earthquake survivors have to die because of such worries? Many have already died for that reason. Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

* For those who have not followed the feud, Qaddafi's embrace of his African heritage has caused discomfit among Arab royalty, particulary the Saudi royals -- much to his glee.

Letter 3

Glad you enjoyed the analysis but look how much you conveyed in one short sentence! Yet Metternich had his excuse: the times in which he lived. What is the State Department's excuse?

If State continues on the same path it places America in grave danger because having recanted we can't say "Fooled you twice" without unleashing implacable rage and distrust.

Bush had a bad moment in East Europe when (after talking about America's support for democracy) he was confronted by a reporter about the phony Orange Revolution. He made an incoherent reply but what could he say? "I have no control over the State Department?"

Yet his democracy doctrine has been swimming upstream just because of the Orange Revolution. China's leaders and every other despot (including Assad) point to the example of the Orange putsch to justify cracking down on genuine democracy movements -- on the argument that they're protecting their people from American meddling!

"Remember the Orange Revolution" has become the cry used by despots to justify everything from crackdowns on the Internet to public protests. The Orange Revolution has been used to mock every speech that Bush (and Rice) have made in defense of democracy.

We've gotten two breaks: Bush didn't fully articulate the democracy doctrine until after the travesty in Ukraine, and the successes of the Afghan and Iraq elections came close in time. But we are now inviting the world to believe in our commitment to genuine democracy. If we go back on our word now I do not want to think about the consequences.

State is not the only one with satphones: it is now virtually impossible to pull off a phony revolution without many people finding out -- except in America, of course, where most of the population still doesn't know that the Orange Revolution was a stage show that utterly failed to meet State's objective.

The larger issue is that Metternich's view is suicidal in an era of human megapopulations. I've been inching (okay, careening) toward that realization for years and this past year of blogging helped me crystallize it. It struck me with great force that democracy is no longer a choice for humanity; it is the only model of governance that is suited to deal with megapopulations.

When societies get into the tens of millions, the oligarchical and monarchical models of governing collapse. Then rulers have two choices: "winnow" the population down to a more manageable size (via genocide, driving populations to another region, etc.) or open up the governing process to a larger number of people.

Democracy is the only protection against the race dying from its very success. The more viewpoints represented, the more input, the more problem solving ability brought into the governing process, the better the chance at solving the problems that face megapopulations.

This defense of democracy is divorced from a value system and thus might be too cold-blooded for many tastes. Yet it rests, I think, on unassailable data drawn from every kind of management situation and indeed every human social experience:

When a company or family gets too big, more help is needed to manage it and once the numbers become great, diversity of experience and knowledge are critical to effective management. This diversity can only come from the democratic process.

Metternich's viewpoint was built from managing a very small population; State's view was honed during an era when most of the world was in effect a small population from the American viewpoint. That's because most of the world had no way to protest being treated in the manner of chess pieces. Today, a nuke in a suitcase explains that the unwashed masses will make their displeasure heard by one means or another.

A new age is here, and State is dangerously oblivious to it.

A blogger wrote this morning to protest Pundita's opinion that John Bolton should have been given the post of Secretary of State. The blogger noted in mock horror (I assume it was mock) that the appointment would have unlocked "the seventh seal on the way to apocalypse."

While waiting to learn whether I have permission to publish the blogger's entire letter and his name, I wrote a response to the above observation, which I publish here.

Readers whose views on John Bolton were shaped by the news media might wish to first study the informed opinion of 53 distinguished former ambassadors.

The endorsements were in response to the Senate review of Bolton's qualifications to be US Ambassador to the United Nations. This writing projects what John Bolton could have accomplished as Secretary of State, and why he had no chance to be offered the position.

Apocalypse has not broken out at the United Nations since Bolton arrived. Instead, the United Nations Security Council quickly delivered an unanimous vote on the Syria resolution; this, after cosmetic changes to the resolution's wording that allowed China and Russia to save face but which didn't water down the seriousness of the demands.

I'll grant this much: There would have been an apocalyptic battle at Foggy Bottom if by some miracle Bush could have put Bolton in as Secretary of State. By the time the dust would have settled, several obstructionists at State would have been reassigned to token posts. (There would have been no way to fire them or pressure them into resigning, at least not without another battle that would have taken years.)

Reassigning the obstructionists would have cleared the way for a coherent, modern US foreign policy. Also, Bolton as Secretary of State would have put the Bush doctrine at the helm of US foreign policy instead of the Chirac Multilateralism school, which State adopted during the Clinton era, and which Condoleezza Rice and Robert Zoellick have carried forward at State. *

But few Americans can imagine what John Bolton would have accomplished as Secretary of State because he was smeared by the Eurocrat wing of the Democrat Party, GOP toadies for the Chirac School mounted a limp-wristed defense of Bolton, and praise for Bolton from neoconservatives amounted to damnation.

As it was, Bolton's trip to the UN as US Ambassador was blocked for months during a critical period while Bush had to decide whether to override Congress on the matter. America and her allies lost precious time in the war because of that.

While he was at State Bolton was repeatedly blocked by State mandarins who believed it was better to follow along with the EU Three's approach to negotiating with Iran over nuclear proliferation. He was blocked as well by mandarins who wanted to carry forward State's badly conceived, outmoded policy on China.

The result: Bolton, as did his predecessors, failed to bring about progress in negotiations that by now could have disarmed the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.

The American Left (and several on the Right, I seem to recall) went to lengths to portray Bolton as so bad-tempered that he was incapable of pulling together multilateral negotiations. Yet as John O'Sullivan pointed out for the National Review Online:

[Bolton] devised a practical way of halting the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups and rogue states -- the Proliferation Security Initiative -- that the international community has now signed onto. The PSI advanced U.S. interests by recruiting those allies who could offer America real help to prevent its enemies obtaining weapons of mass destruction. That was pragmatic multilateralism of a high order. [...]

O'Sullivan also pointed out in the same writing that Bolton was among the James Baker proteges "...who managed the delicate diplomacy of defeating the Soviet Union and reunifying Germany without provoking a major European crisis."

John Bolton was so long in getting to the United Nations because President Bush was already overseeing a shooting war on multiple fronts and didn't want the Beltway War between DoD and State to escalate into a shooting one.

I hardly exaggerate about the shooting part, if you consider the very damaging CIA and State "leaks" about military matters that occur every time State mandarins become enraged with Bush or Rumsfeld.

The tragedy is that John Bolton's approach is just what America and the world need at this time. It is a practical approach, rather than a pragmatic or idealistic one. His approach is making good progress at the United Nations. It could have done the same at the US Department of State.

Bolton's practical orientation allowed him to grow and change with the times, while those who wield great power at State remain stuck in an era that is gone. To this day, few Americans understand that there are people serving at the US foreign office who through pragmatism believe with all their heart that the best defense of America lies in not breaking with Brussels policy.

If you should observe, "I thought defense policy is shaped by the White House, Congress and Pentagon" -- now you know I wasn't joking when I wrote that I would have advised Cindy Sheehan to protest outside the US Department of State, if she wanted redress.

The war on terror wouldn't have been necessary, if after the breakup of the Soviet Union the White House and Congress had brought US defense policy in line with the times -- and ordered State to recall that America's reason for existence was broader than making sure the Soviet Union never rose again.

I could have also told Cindy Sheehan this: the Iraq insurgency would have been over by now if John Bolton had taken the helm at State. But I never did seek her out when she came to Washington. I suppose that's because I feared I'd grab her by the shoulders and yell, "Wake up!"

Not a kind thing to do to a bereaved mother. But maybe now you can understand why John Bolton did indeed display a short temper at times while at State.

* For more on the differences between the Chirac School and the Bush doctrine, see Pundita's Two very different views of the world, which builds on points in Belmont Club's Pro and Contra essay, linked above. I have just noticed that the one-year anniversary of the essay's publication is nearing. So this is a good time to remind readers that Wretchard's Pro and Contra inspired me to create this blog.

Letter 2

My estimation is that things are even worse at State now. Maybe I'm saying that because I had unrealistic expectations of Condoleezza Rice. If you recall, during 2003 I brushed aside your cautions about her.

I knew she was a Cold War warrior. I knew Robert Blackwill (and Madeline Albright's father) had been her mentor, which gave me a bad turn. But she stayed on point during a very bad period for the Bush administration.

I didn't expect miracles from Rice's first year at State; anyone appointed to the job by any president has to work around the mandarins dug in there. Yet I really believed it was a new day for American foreign policy when she arrived at State.

Then, within weeks of taking the helm at State, Rice's fawning and cowardly response to China's pressure -- and Red Queen response to reporters who questioned her ditching human rights demands -- and her bullying, irrational and poorly informed response to Russia set off my alarms. The double standard was painfully obvious.

Then came John Batchelor's remark one night on his show, "Condi only wants one war at a time." That clued me that as with all good Cold War warriors of the Albright school, she was looking at Iraq as distinct from the war on terror. That, despite all she had said in defense of the Iraq invasion.

Since coming to State, Rice put a loyalist in charge of dealing with North Korea/6 party talks; his expertise is Eastern Europe. He has made one mistake after another, in my book.

Rice's unreasonable, completely uninformed and dangerous expectations about India threaten the fragile 'new beginning' of diplomatic relations between India and US, which Bush pushed hard for.

Pressure on Japan has made things more difficult for the Japanese vis-a-vis China -- an already difficult situation.

Ditto for Ukraine -- Rice (as did Powell) completely ignored the strategic situation as she's done for all the FSU that have close historical ties with Russia.

Ditto for Latin America. She has consistently misread the situation there, and particularly with regard to Venezuela.

In his recent speech Zoellick (who is Rice's mouthpiece) very precisely laid out State's 'mature' Cold War policy, which was to "expand" China and "contract" the Soviet Union. The policy remained in effect even after the Soviet Union dissolved.

Although Putin was hysterical in his language after Beslan, his observation that Britain and the US had adopted the '"Carthage solution" in the post-Soviet era with regard to Russia was not too far off the mark. To the victor goes the spoils of war; with the Cold War won, State became obsessed with trying to ensure that the Soviet Union could never form again.

Yet by Clinton's era simple greed jostled geostrategy as the prime mover in State's actions. The Russian mobs and Western businesspeople who wanted to run Russia or rip off its people got their hooks into State, USAID and the World Bank via oligarchs who shaped State's views on the FSU in general and the situation in Russia.

State continued with the view formed during the 1990s: Russia could exist if it became a vassal of the United States. Then by a whisker Putin beat Khordokovsky at his own game. (Indeed, only K's arrogance caused him to lose that match.) K's drubbing enraged State.

That brought forth the Get Putin campaign and heavy-handed meddling in Ukraine's election; the latter only shifted power from one oligarch clan to another.

All that sent Bush's efforts down the drain. He'd managed to convince Putin that the US wasn't intent on reducing Russia to the size of a postage stamp. The US meddling and bullying talk played into the hand of Russia's hard right factions.

The upshot? Russia's military learned for certain they couldn't count on the US when China leaned on them. So Russia drew closer to China and dug in their heels about Syria and Iran. And the majority of Russians slipped back to Cold War paranoia about America's intentions.

As for the rest -- some of the best Cold War warriors have now left State, people still under the influence of the oligarchs remain dug in there, and Rice just doesn't get much about the concept of a truly 'American' policy, beyond keeping NATO together and reducing Russia to jelly.

So that's why I think things are worse now at State than in 2003. The mandarins treat the Bush doctrine as a blip and they got a Secretary of State who will hold the line until Bush leaves.

Rice's democracy speeches have been wonderful, but I suspect that comes from Bush breathing down her neck.

Maybe I am being too hard on her, maybe a leopard can change its spots. But I think we would have been better off, if Bush had sent Bolton to head State and sent Rice to the UN.

12:30 PM Update
For those horrified at the above suggestion, kindly reserve judgment until you've read Wake Up, which I published in response to a reader's observation that Bolton as Secretary of State would have unlocked "the seventh seal on the way to apocalypse."

12:05 AM UPDATE
Oops! Pundita Brain Furballs Alert ack ack! They sentenced him to death for playing St. Peter, not Peter Pan. Now we can breathe a sigh of relief that Tinkerbell is not on the hit list.
* * * * * *
Al Qaeda has put out a contract on Egyptian actor Omar Sharif (remember Lawrence of Arabia?) because he announced that he enjoyed playing the role of Peter Pan. Tick tock tick tock is that a crocodile drawing near Captain Hook?

In other terror news, Riehl World View points out that Iran made the AP wires three times today and that none of the news is pleasant. I guess Iran's bosses are not happy with Monday's UNSC vote on Syria. Look for more chest beating from Iran, more attempts to provoke Israel into a war, and more "Made in Iran" bombs shipped across the Iraq border.

"I'm assuming you heard Stephen Hayes on John Batchelor [show] last night but have you read his article for the Weekly Standard? I don't want to use the word treason, but I don't know what else to call Joseph Wilson's lying and the support he got from the CIA.

Also, I don't know what to make of Hayes' claim that the White House is spooked by the CIA's machinations. Do you think that's the right interpretation of Bush's unwillingness to strongly defend the US invasion of Iraq?
Aries in Los Angeles"

Dear Aries:
Everything that Wilson and the CIA did is wholly justified, wholly consistent with supporting the NATO alliance, which is held key to defending America. President Bush isn't spooked; he's caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The situation is rich in irony because by temperament Bush is the last person to be a revolutionary. He sees himself as a defender of the best of the old order. Thus, his decision after 9/11 to preserve American-led institutions such as NATO, UN and the World Bank by reforming and modernizing them.

Here we come to a snag: those organizations are dedicated to preserving the peace, which is not the same as promoting genuine democracy. That's the problem with revolutionary ideas; you can't both break with an old order and compromise with it.

That's also the problem for Republicans trying to muster arguments in defense of Bush's decision to invade Iraq. They're arguing about the price of tea unless they defend a purely American-oriented defense policy, which they're unwilling to do if it means taking an overt stand against the NATO alliance.

Thus, in the manner of ecclesiastics debating the size of angels, these Republicans nit-pick over the hideously complicated facts of the Wilson/Plame affair and US intelligence on WMD in Iraq -- and lose the American public in the process. *

Bush's democracy doctrine, when piled on top of his defense doctrine (which reserves the right to preemptive military strikes) is a direct challenge to the guiding principles of the NATO alliance. So Bush's attempts to preserve the alliance have backed the administration into a position that works against his decision to invade Iraq.

Peel away the layers of debate and you're left asking whether America's best defense is found in an alliance with other nations or adherence to fundamental American principles. Unless defenders of the Iraq invasion engage with that central debate, American political and business interests that view the democracy doctrine as plumb loco will continue to hack away at the Iraq invasion.

Invariably, people who find themselves an unwilling revolutionary try to get out of the dilemma by reaching for a compromise, as well they should. Nobody with an eye on history seeks revolution; it is horribly messy process that brings suffering to all.

Yet Bush's democracy doctrine rides on the tide of human progress, not the will of an American leader. There is no turning back now.

* I'm not familiar enough with Stephen Hayes' writings to judge whether he's among such Republicans. His latest article about the Wilson/Plame affair strikes me as simply well sourced reporting on a view that's gained coin among Republicans. They'd rather argue about whether Bush is spooked than grapple with the central debate.

Letter 1 (see earlier post today)

Was I in the Twilight Zone during 2002 and 2003? I thought the only way DoD could ensure that CIA/DOS wouldn't pass intel to MI6 (and from there to Saddam and from there to AQ) was by severing channels.

If your colleague wants to call that "control" -- well, I suppose that's one way to put it.

However, I also seem to recall it was not only CIA but also DOS that was leaking like mad and feeding statements to the US press from 'unnamed sources.'

I also thought I saw Bush leading a war on behalf of America and the whole world. And I thought I saw State fighting to preserve the NATO alliance at any cost, including the US victory in the war on the terror.

Silly me; I must have gotten it all wrong.

For the rest of this week I'll be publishing letters I exchanged last week with a correspondent, and which pertain to US foreign policy and the democracy doctrine. Because I don't have permission to publish the correspondent's side of the dialogue a certain amount of choppiness in the exposition is unavoidable. Also, I am publishing the letters virtually unedited so I ask the reader's indulgence.

A note for readers who will find my opinion of Condoleezza Rice's performance as Secretary of State to be downright mean: Be happy I left the letters unedited because my opinion would be much meaner if I had polished it for publication and added footnotes.

Be happier still I didn't opine on the political opportunists who view Secretary Rice in terms of her race and gender rather than her career accomplishments. One has to be dangerously stupid to view Condoleezza Rice first as a woman and a black. Rice is a Natoist and a Cold War warrior who's not finding it easy to take the Bush doctrine to heart. She's not the only one in Washington in that position. Yet it's early days for the doctrine and Rice's career as head of State -- points I omitted from my harsh analysis.

September 12
"Pundita:
...with fortunately a lower death toll [from Hurricane Katrina], then the issuance of blame will be less important. Now I think it will be mostly about how and what to rebuild. May I ask -- Who are you? Why do you do this? I like reading this site. I check in most every day.
Benjamin in Framingham"

Dear Benjamin:
Thank you for the praise and comments and the questions. I knock myself out with the blog because it's a tall order if Bush wants this to be Liberty's Century. During the Cold War the US backed democracy movements in other countries but the movements were generally a stage show -- a phony democracy ruled by an 'elected' elite.

Bush is talking about genuine democracy, the real deal. Okay, but then the United States needs to retool how it goes about promoting democracy in other lands. For that, US citizens need to become more sophisticated about deep issues related to foreign policy, and which generally fly under the radar of public awareness. This is so we can do a better job of monitoring how our Congress, White House and State Department are managing the task of promoting genuine democracy.

Translation: We need to keep breathing down their neck, so the promotion of genuine democracy doesn't slip back into orchestrating stage shows. ...

With regard to the Katrina Affair: I am not particularly interested in fixing blame. I am trying to learn whether a crime was committed. If that sounds like hairsplitting: not to peoples who live under governments where it's been routine history to get shoved off land by the most ruthless and even genocidal means. It's always been the routine in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

In short, Americans are looking at what happened in Louisiana from an American point of view. I'm looking from the viewpoint of foreigners who would automatically leap to the conclusion that the "ineptness" of Blanco et al. masked a land grab.

The Katrina disaster has received unprecedented coverage in the world's poorest countries, including those with despotic regimes. Every village with a satellite dish has been glued to the communal TV set, watching the drama unfold in New Orleans.

So by trying to figure out whether a crime has been committed, I am making an effort to warn that we should head things off at the pass: Let the question of criminality be raised by Americans and settled by Americans, because this is how things are done in a real democracy.
Pundita"

October 23
"Pundita,
I hope you and the team are doing well. I liked your Film Noir character in Chinese Puzzle, although she's a departure from your Miss Marple character. But why Film Noir to introduce the essays on China pig disease?

It reminded me of our discussion about The Untouchables several months ago and what you wrote about the corruption and crime in Chicago during the 1930s. Do you see a connection between that era in America and today's China?"
PS:
My friends from New Orleans are okay. They went to stay with relatives in Ohio.
PPS: Not to be nosy but I noticed you removed mention of the team from your sidebar. Is that a sign you getting ready to leave us? I mean, you also took down the quote from Caesar. It's kind of like seeing someone in the office taking home their personal belongings. One day you come in and see the African violet is gone, then you know. Anyhow, I hope everything is okay with you.
[Sleepless in St. Louis]"

Dear Sleepless:
I've answered your question about China in an essay I'm publishing tomorrow. Pundita is happy to hear your friends are safe ...

The team is fine, although Charlotte lost a close relative a couple months ago; possums can't quickly get out of the way of moving vehicles, you understand.

You're very perceptive. I removed the text about the team and Caesar's generous compliment because I told myself I wanted to tuck them somewhere else on the sidebar. As you see they're still not returned; I don't know why, just as I don't know why I've kept the blog going this long.

I've never been any good at good-byes. I've toyed with the idea of publishing only one essay a week -- I have to end here because I'm still trying to sort things out. Will keep you posted.
Pundita"

October 24
Mike -
A few weeks back there was a "super championship" match on Jeopardy, pitting the three greatest players in history against each other in a series of rounds. These guys knew between them just about every question, or at the very least had a guess. The one question all three drew a complete blank on: Who was the former Lebanese prime minister assassinated not long back?

Can you believe that? But tune into the major media to see why the vast majority of the American public [are] ignorant of the most important stories in the war and [their] implications.

I dunno; increasingly I feel as if I'm butting my head against a stone wall. I've told you that I'm closing the blog so many times that it's a running joke. But tomorrow is the last post, at least for a while. Need to get away from pressure to write, at least for a time. Need to clear my head. I'd love to take a trip somewhere....

October 25
"Hi Pundita, I thought you might be interested in this article at Tech Central Station:

Does Growth Lead to Liberalization?
by Gregory Scoblete

http://remotefarm.techcentralstation.
com/101705E.html

An interesting read -- referred to from The Adventures of Chester.
Liz in Texas"

"Liz:
Yeah. Very interested. I dunno; every time I get just a little hope that the good guys are gaining a centimeter of ground against the fiends dug in at the State Dept., I see something like the article you sent me. I'll try to post on it when I calm down enough.
Best,
Pundita"

"Mike --
Our enemies, ourselves
I was a fool to allow myself a few moments of joy and hope about win against Galloway and other Mordor denizens. A tip from a reader brought me back to reality. Zoellick 9/21 speech on China getting attention from a milblog and TCS. Link to speech below also link to TCS comments with selected portions.

Note the facile lie from TCS writer that economic growth caused South Koreans and Iranians to demand more freedom.

I don't know what upset me more -- Zoellick's speech or fence-straddling argument from TCS. Until and unless Zoellick is effectively answered, those who seek to beat the terror masters are always playing against a stacked deck.

I don't think one can argue that Zoellick is simply trying to defend State's long-standing policy on China or that he's attempting to undercut DoD's increasingly hard line on China. Stripped down, Zoellick is really implying the same thing Chirac's multilateralism school implies: that genuine democracy is a danger to global trade. But effectively demonstrating that's actually what Zoellick is saying -- aye, there's the rub. I've been butting my head against his argument since I started blogging. All to no avail.

http://www.state.gov/s/d/rem/53682.htm

October 27
(From an ongoing exchange of emails about the blogosphere with Dan Riehl)

"Pundita -
...I do not believe we need a new media on the Right that's as bad as some of the MSM is on the Left. All that the heated rhetoric does is stir up the worst of people; I truly believe that in the end, it is divisive.

America needs reasoned voices that can talk to more than the lunatic fringe. Now more than ever, America needs an inclusive politics and it is not always very easy to find.

I have hope that web logging will allow the average person to rise above such tactics and help to steer a right course for the nation based upon education and true understanding. We'll see, I suppose.
Dan at Riehl World View"

"Dan:
I agree with your comments except that I have a big question about the "average person" you mention. I wonder if the average person has the time to read blogs, much less write them.

Of course there are 'average' people who write blogs. They have 3.2 readers outside their circle of coworkers, friends and/or relatives. If they blog on a topic that requires highly specialized knowledge (an 'expert' blogger) -- depending on the subject, they can find themselves with 15 minutes of fame if their specialization suddenly becomes of passing interest to the Blogosphere Heavies.

But I'd say that on the whole, the blogosphere has already become too useful to the Establishment media ("MSM") to see it as a place where the Little Guy can find a public platform. Not unless the Little Guy gets sophisticated and plays the blogosphere game; e.g., hooking up with networks of like-minded bloggers, doing a lot of reciprocal links, featuring other bloggers' comments on his blog, "marketing" essays to other blogs so the essays can get linked, etc.

Heck, it's better than trying to get out one's opinion via publishing little newspapers and handing them out at bus stops, or cranking out fax blasts. But the old saying "The big fish eat the little fish" applies to the blogosphere.

The truth is that the blogosphere is saving the MSM billions in research, hiring more and better analysts, and setting up bigger and better overseas bureaus. The MSM has come to depend on bloggers to troll the Internet and do the research for them -- all with no charge to the MSM corporations.

So my dark view is that the blogosphere is actually helping to prop up everything that's bad about MSM. It's allowing the MSM to continue without modernizing, without upgrading, without hiring more good reporters, without setting up more overseas bureaus, and without cleaning up their act.

In my view, the MSM cherry picks the data and opinion they lift from bloggers. That means the American public is still very poorly informed about how the world works outside America's shores. And very poorly informed about vital issues in US states outside their own.

The really bad news is that the MSM is not called 'mainstream' for nothing. Most Americans still get most of their news from the MSM. So do not ask why Americans in the post-9/11 era still have a news establishment that is fit only for a banana republic.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic. But I think the best way to bring Americans genuinely good reporting on a consistent basis is if some American multibillionaire wakes up one morning and says, "I am tired of being treated as if I live in Pongo-Pongo. I'm gonna start a cable news channel that has such a high standard of reporting, and is so creative, that it will force the MSM to raise the bar or go under."

So you see underneath my cynical exterior I believe in the Tooth Fairy and Santa.
Pundita"

October 28
"Have you seen this article, "Why is the World Bank still lending?" in today's Wall Street Journal? [2] An interesting way of describing the recent history of the World Bank!
Cheers,
Liz in Texas"

"Mike:
A reader sent me this WSJ article on the World Bank. Read it and tell me what you see. Does the writer understand, I wonder, that he's bringing some news about the end of an Age, not just about the end of an era in the World Bank? Do the WSJ readers understand? Does the general public understand?

Key aspects of colonialism didn't die when the colonial powers relinquished their holdings in Asia and Africa. But now there are vast changes taking place in the world, and those changes are finally, finally putting the Colonial Age behind us. Is the American public ready for the changes?

Meanwhile, there is still the old Age to contend with. The big fish in the UN Oil for Food Program will never be called to task, much less indicted. Hell, Annan's right hand man shredded three years' worth of documents as soon as Volcker's "independent" commission was formed.

The kind of massive cover-up Kofi Annan presided over, the kind of US and British deals with Nazis that were papered over -- such have always been business as usual. Yet that kind of business is suicidal in today's world.

I had hoped that in the wake of 9/11 the American public would demand news media that kept them better informed, would learn more about the underlying issues that led to massive corruption in today's governments.

Four years out, my hope has faded. How many Americans listen to John Batchelor's show on a regular basis -- and really listen and take notes? If it's 5% of the adult population, it would be lucky. And he's just one person with one radio show. Not enough.

Even if 5% of voters are well informed, that's not enough.

As far as getting news via the Internet -- how many have the tenacity to wend their way through the intricacies; e.g., the story of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the UN OFF theft? The rest want the problems narrowed to something easy to think about, such as Cindy Sheehan, Harriet Miers, etc. When I heard that Sheehan was coming back to Washington, for a moment I considered going to meet her to say:

"Are you aware that the US Department of State looks at the President and the Congress as the hired help? So if you want to see changes in Washington -- the kind of changes that will head off a century of war -- have you considered lying down in protest outside Foggy Bottom?"

I'm blithering, aren't I?

A few weeks ago I got a letter from a loyal Pundita reader. He asked, "Who are you?" and wanted to know why I blogged. I don't think the questions were mere curiosity; if I read someone regularly I'd like to know just a little about the person behind the ideas. So I tried to give an answer. Realized the other day the answer wasn't an answer, just a presentation of ideas.
Who am I, Mike?
Pundita"

"Hey kiddo, what books are you reading nowadays?
Mike"

"Mike -
Reading a book? This barbarian has forgotten how. I read ... summaries, synopses, reviews, and listen to John Batchelor's discussions with authors. Else I would be wearing animal skins and grunting.

How about this? You give me a reading list. Then I shall run away to sea. I will board a tramp steamer bound for the Indian Ocean then spend my days reading and contemplating the vast horizon.
Pundita"

1) Excerpts from TCS essay [1]
http://remotefarm.techcentralstation.
com/101705E.html
"In a September 21 speech to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick advanced the well rehearsed theory that as China's economy grows, its newly enriched citizens will begin to demand political freedom commensurate with their economic gains. "Closed politics," Zoellick said, "cannot be a permanent feature of Chinese society. It is simply not sustainable -- as economic growth continues, better-off Chinese will want a greater say in their future and pressure builds for political reform." ...

"...the mere existence of a market autocracy rarely poses a fundamental or existential challenge to the U.S.-led world order. The Chinese example, as Zoellick noted, is illustrative:

China, he said "does not seek to spread radical, anti-American ideologies. While not yet democratic, it does not see itself in a twilight conflict against democracy around the globe. While at times mercantilist, it does not see itself in a death struggle with capitalism. And most importantly, China does not believe that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system. In fact, quite the reverse: Chinese leaders have decided that their success depends on being networked with the modern world."

China may indeed be a threat to the U.S., but the parameters of the challenge are (as of today) localized and territorial, not global and ideological like radical Islam.

As an abstract statement of political trajectory, Zoellick's optimism will likely be vindicated. Over time, "internal contradictions" have undermined political frameworks, as the Soviet Union discovered to its chagrin in 1991. South Korea's emergence from military dictatorship to democratic government is a more specific reminder that a growing economy coupled with an educated-yet-disenfranchised middle class is a potent danger to autocratic regimes. Such a danger is brewing in Iran currently. [...]"

2) Why is the World Bank Still Lending?
By ADAM LERRICK for
Wall Street Journal Online
October 28, 2005; Page A13

World Bank money is building schools in China's impoverished western provinces but the bill for interest charges is being mailed to the United Kingdom, attention Chancellor of Exchequer Gordon Brown. Mexico, Chile and Brazil will soon be lining up for the same deal.

This is but the latest scheme designed to preserve the World Bank's lending role at a time when the need and demand for its services are falling. Major middle-income countries, the cream of the Bank's lending portfolio and where more than 80% of Latin Americans live, are curbing their borrowing and paying down their balances, setting off alarms at the Bank. Net loan flows have shifted from a positive $10 billion in 1999-2001 to a negative $15 billion in 2002-2004.

The cause is clear: The interest subsidy embedded in Bank loans, a compelling 12% per annum in 1999, has now shrunk to less than 2% on average as emerging nations have gained increasingly greater access to private capital. The difference is no longer enough to persuade finance ministers to realign their economic priorities with the social agendas of the Bank's rich members.

The cost of doing business with the Bank is not just about money or about the burdens of the bureaucratic "hassle factor." There is also the "technical assistance," which the Bank has always insisted be tightly bundled with subsidized loans. Translated, this Bankspeak is really about imposing a First World vision upon an emerging world. The environment must be safeguarded, workers must be protected, women must play an equal role, indigenous peoples must be empowered and the overriding focus must be on the poor.

When it all adds up, the Bank's "technical assistance" has a negative value to its traditional client states. A new generation of government officials, with Ph.D.s from MIT and Chicago, have done the arithmetic. Borrowing patterns reveal that they rate the cost of Bank "advice" at 3%-4% per annum. Over time, that amounts to 25%-35% of loan expense. When the interest subsidy falls below the cost of World Bank compliance, the real subsidy vanishes and so do the borrowers.