Pundita

"1919: Merian Cooper and six other former U.S. Army pilots offer their services to Poland in the 1919-1920 Soviet-Polish war. The Americans call themselves the Kosciuszko Squadron – a squadron that will live on in the Polish Air Force after the Americans go home.

At the end of WW I, a new independent Poland was created from territory previously held by Germany, Austria, and Russia. Poland thus regained the independence it had lost in 1795. Almost immediately the new Polish Republic was invaded from the east by the Bolsheviks.

In the spring of 1919, Merian C. Cooper, a former U.S. Air Service pilot in France, was visiting the Polish battle lines as the head of American relief work in southern Poland. When he saw the sacrifices being made by the Poles to defend their new nation, he thought of the possibility of an American volunteer squadron, similar to the Lafayette Escadrille of 1916, to assist them.

He immediately went to Paris where he met a friend, Cedric E. Fauntleroy, who had been a combat pilot during the war. Together, they received official permission to recruit former U.S. flyers for a Polish squadron.

Seventeen Americans volunteered their services to Poland and they formed the Kosciuszko Squadron, named in honor of tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish patriot who had fought so well in the American Revolution under George Washington.

These 17 men fought for Poland under difficult hardships. Repeatedly they flew bombing and strafing missions against hordes of Cossacks from the east. Also their supply of food, clothing, and equipment was seldom adequate. For example, the Polish Air Service had to use whatever airplanes it could obtain, so it was forced to purchase both Allied and German airplanes left over from WW I.

The Bolshevik invasion ended in May 1921 with victory for the Poles, and those members of the Kosciuszko Squadron still alive were discharged from further duty. "

From SAMWolf comment at The Freeper Foxhole (Free Republic's Daily History Thread) posted February 11, 2004

"The Kosciuszko Squadron was first used in the Kiev Offensive in April 1920, rebasing from Lwów to Polonne. Most of the Squadron's flights were directed against Semyon Budionny's First Cavalry Army. The Squadron developed a tactic of low-altitude machine-gun strafing runs. Polish land commanders highly valued the contribution of the Kosciuszko Squadron.

General Puchucki of the 13th Infantry Division wrote in a report: "The American pilots, though exhausted, fight tenaciously. During the last offensive, their commander attacked enemy formations from the rear, raining machine-gun bullets down on their heads. Without the American pilots' help, we would long ago have been done for."

Merian Cooper was shot down but survived. Budionny had put half a million rubles on Captain Cooper's head, but when he was caught by the Cossacks he managed to convince them that he was a mere corporal. A few months later he escaped from a POW camp near Moscow to Latvia.

In August 1920 the Kosciuszko Squadron took part in the defense of Lwów, and after the climactic Battle of Warsaw it participated in the epic Battle of Komarów which crippled Budionny's cavalry.

After the Polish-Soviet War, the 7th Kosciuszko Squadron was reorganized as the 121st Squadron and later as the 111th Squadron, each bearing the "Kosciuszko" eponym. The 111th Squadron fought in the Polish September Campaign. Perhaps the most famous successor to the original Kosciuszko Squadron would be the World War II No. 303 "Kosciuszko" Polish Fighter Squadron (Warszawski im. Tadeusza Kosciuszki), one of the most successful fighter squadrons in the Battle of Britain.

In 1920 the Kosciuszko Squadron made over 400 combat flights. Cedric Fauntleroy and Merian C. Cooper received Poland's highest military decoration: the Virtuti Militari. Another member of the Kociuszko Squadron to receive the Virtuti Militari was Mieczyslaw Garsztka (Posthumously)"

From Wikipedia

Pundita:
Re your comments about the guilt and remorse you feel about not doing more for your country: I think the emotions spring from the same sense of honor that drives so many of us who wear or have worn the uniform. There, but for the grace of God, could have gone I -- and it doesn't have to stay that way tomorrow.

Some call the obligation "paying it forward" -- our gift to the next generation, as we were gifted by those who went before. But I think of it as paying back; repaying the trust they had that we would not squander what they bought and paid for, often with boredom and loneliness, sometimes with the loss of those at home who couldn't or wouldn't wait, and sometimes, yes, with blood.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be it yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

-- John Alexander McCrae, In Flanders Fields

Annlee Hines

"Pundita, I read your post about your blogroll. I get purism but Julia Child didn't only cook French food. Now put that nice lady's blog on your blogroll. You like her blog so what's the problem?

I don't believe you're leaving the blogosphere. I think you're doing the deathbed scene in La Boheme. Merry Christmas to you and your TEAM, Diva.
Caesar in San Francisco"

"Pundita,
Odd as it may seem considering that we've never met and I don't even know your name...I find myself thinking of you as a friend. Thus, when -- as you did in [a recent] post, and have once or twice since -- you allude to a sense of impending crisis or disaster in explaining your oft-deferred decision to depart the blogosphere, I suddenly seem to be viewing your continued presence with a vague sense of worry rather than the amused relief with which I have commented on these deferrals in the past.

Make no mistake, I still consider you a blessing to the blogosphere, and am personally most grateful for your continued presence ... but while I don't know your circumstances...I feel an increasing sense of foreboding.

I am not intending to intrude on your privacy, and I am not fishing for more information. If you feel like acknowledging this e-mail at all, I hope it will just be to say that everything is under control and I'm letting unfounded fears rush in to fill this information vacuum (something I should know better than to let myself fall victim to anyhow!). But failing that, please take care of yourself. Do what you need to do. Get yourself through this, whatever "this may be."

Your insights will be just as sharp and just as appreciated (most likely more so, actually!) when you're not risking yourself to share them with us.

Keep yourself well. And I'll be praying for you.
Jim"

Dear Caesar:
Thank you for the beautiful Christmas e-card, which the team greatly appreciated. If you want to get Dymphna's Irish up, describe her as a "nice lady." She's a scrapper, like you.

Think back to the earliest seasons of the TV show. How could Julia Child have taught her audience to cook like a master chef, if she'd focused on following different recipes? Her cooking demonstrations focused on teaching basic techniques that would allow the audience to master any recipe.

The Pundita blog has focused on teaching readers to think in highly empirical fashion when taking in news about foreign affairs. First master that. Then US agendas -- the different recipes for dealing global situations -- will turn out better.

I have wanted readers to focus on what I have to teach. This does not make me a Diva. It makes me someone who always knew her time at blogging would be short.

However, I will admit to Drama Queen on occasion. Anything to keep the reader from bounding into the thickets of dogma. What great policy essays I could have written, if only I'd thought to crib from La Boheme and Madam Butterfly. How much more I could have accomplished! Where is Pundita's Kleenex box?

Dear Jim:
Thank you for your prayers. So. You show off your data analysis talents. You will get a Puffy Head Minder after you for sure, now. Yes yes, considering the little information you had to work with, you got into the ballpark.

The crisis has been looming for many months. That's why my essays can be very long. Often I write as if it's for the last time, in the manner of someone on the ship calling out last-minute thoughts to those on the pier while the plank raises. I have always known that I might shut down the blog very abruptly and be never heard from again on the blogosphere. I wanted to try to avoid that after I built up a relationship with readers. I wanted to figure a way to post on occasion.

However, there would be a crisis with or without the blog. I did not pay enough attention to my country before 9/11; I was not grateful enough for America's freedoms and protection. This, despite knowing firsthand that entire populations of women in some other world regions live as literal prisoners.

Many such women lie when confronted with the truth of their situation. Part of the lying is grounded in the Stockholm Syndrome; the other part stems tragically from a noble emotion: the determination not to betray the traditions of one's parents.

After I first saw all that, I fell on my knees when I got off the plane in the USA. I kissed the first American ground my feet touched. I can still remember the taste of grit and gasoline from where my lips touched. I did not wipe my lips. I felt I had kissed sacred ground.

Still, I did not enough appreciate the sacred ground. I used the freedom and protection of my birth land to concentrate on personal matters. On 9/11 I was overcome with guilt that I had not done enough to serve my country all those years prior. I will take the guilt and remorse with me to my death.

Now I have to return to one of those awful world regions. I have not wanted to go, in part because I will be risking my health with the arduous physical journey. Yet it's something I must do. The other part is not easy to explain.

I know that steady sustained action is what I need to muster instead of bursts of angry energy. Yet sometimes the patience required for that is hard to muster. God help me I don't fall prey to hatred during my travels. All the rest of the crisis, which I brought on by delaying the inevitable, is almost details next to this concern.

Humility is the best antidote to overdone bouts of righteous anger -- humility not an especially American trait.

No, I don't find it odd at all that you think of me as a friend. Same thing happened to me. I was never part of the Internet culture, never visited chat rooms and so on. Yet the blogging experience brought letters and also that thing, the site meter.

For the first five months of the blog I didn't have a site meter but once I got one -- I saw it showed the places of visitors. Places all around the world and in the USA, places in the US I'd never known about before. So while many regular readers of this blog have never written me and I don't know their names I came to know them by their city or town.

Then I would worry, if say, a reader in Wyoming or England didn't show up to read for several days. "Was everything all right? Hopefully just on vacation or too busy to visit." Yes, it happens. You don't start out meaning to care about people you've never met but you do simply because you actually have met on one level.

In the way the blind can 'see' someone as beautiful or ugly, we are not limited to knowing each other through physical meetings. Else how could so many have mourned the death of Sherlock Holmes and demanded the author restore him to life?

One evening almost 12 years ago I was in a terrible mood, so I wandered into an old theater in Georgetown that is no longer there, seeking to distract myself with a movie.

A documentary called The Kingdom of Zydeco was playing. The film was my first sight of Louisiana, the bayou country and its people.

It was love at first sight. I wanted to leave everything behind, get on a plane, then live out the rest of my days among the people of the bayou country.

I did not go. It was not just because of life's entanglements. I had glimpsed the Elysian Fields, but I knew it would not be like that if I visited. It would be a very human place, of course, with all the attendant troubles. I wanted to keep my idea of heaven removed from life's cares.

Over the next few years my thoughts would return to southwestern Louisiana and it would be a point of cheer.

Then one day this year I asked myself what I would do if I won a big lottery. I thought I'd put an announcement on the blog that I was inviting all the 'regular' Pundita readers to a party, all expenses paid no matter where they lived.

"Where should the party be?" I wondered. At first I thought of renting a cruise ship but that didn't sound right. Then I remembered the picnic in The Kingdom of Zydeco.

"That's it! I'll charter flights to the bayou country and throw a picnic. We'll eat crawfish stew and dance to Zydeco music, and we won't have a care in the world!"

The thought of the party gave me happiness.

Two months later Hurricane Katrina struck southwestern Louisiana, wrecking the fishing industry that had supported the region since anyone remembered. And as we all know all too well, much suffering then came to the people of the region.

I was deeply shaken by the news. I felt as if I'd lost a part of my heart. Finally I snapped at myself, "Your Elysian Fields are gone. Stop acting like a child."

On Christmas Eve I recalled the party. That's how I came across an Associated Press/Boston Globe report, A Light Endures on the Bayou:

This Christmas Eve the Mississippi River in Louisiana's bayou country lit up with miles of traditional bonfires built on the top of levees, just as had been done for over a century of Christmas Eves.

Residents of the region took weeks to build the massive 20 foot bonfires from woven sugar cane and wood materials -- the latter plentiful this year because Katrina felled so many trees.

Most bonfire piles are in the shape of a teepee, but this year one bonfire was in the shape of a helicopter, complete with propellers made of PVC pipe and silver duct tape. It was a tribute to the air rescue workers who retrieved people from roofs in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath.

When I read of the bonfires I realized that the spirit of the people I'd fallen in love with had not been extinguished by a storm.

I haven't won the lottery yet -- it might help if I remembered to buy a ticket -- but I have decided there's nothing to prevent me from throwing the party in my heart. We'll dance and eat crawfish stew and we'll laugh and not have a care in the world.

In the old days -- the really old days -- tribes had puffy head minders. That's how baptism was invented, according to the possum member of Pundita's foreign policy team.

The minder would be sitting around shooting the breeze, then suddenly grab a stick and run off to whack somebody with it. People never knew why, of course, but eventually they decided that they must have been thinking about getting ready to show off.

Showing off, in the old days, was really dangerous. Tribes with too many know-it-alls tended to get raided by saber-toothed tigers and all manner of poisonous snakes.

But still, people didn't want to get whacked. So they'd run and jump in a lake or river when they saw the minder running up. They'd stay underwater as long as they could then come up shouting, "Thank you minder, for saving me from a puffy head!"

Worked every time. The minder would go back to sitting at the campfire and shooting the breeze.

Merry Christmas to one and all. With prayers of thanks and gratitude for the service of American troops in the US and abroad.

Turning point: The Battle of Fallujah

"The rule of thumb for the last century or so has been that for a guerrilla force to remain viable, it must inflict seven casualties on the forces of the government it is fighting for each casualty it sustains ... By that measure, the resistance in Iraq has had a bad week. American and Iraqi government troops have killed at least 1,200 fighters in Fallujah, and captured 1,100 more. Those numbers will grow as mop-up operations continue.

These casualties were inflicted at a cost (so far) of 56 Coalition dead (51 Americans), and just over 300 wounded, of whom about a quarter have returned to duty.

"That kill ratio would be phenomenal in any [kind of] battle, but in an urban environment, it's revolutionary," said retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, perhaps America's most respected writer on military strategy.

"The rule has been that [in urban combat] the attacking force would suffer between a quarter and a third of its strength in casualties."

The victory in Fallujah was also remarkable for its speed, Peters said. Speed was necessary, he said, "because you are fighting not just the terrorists, but a hostile global media."

Fallujah ranks up there with Iwo Jima, Inchon and Hue as one of the greatest triumphs of American arms ... The resistance has suffered a loss of more than 2,000 combatants, out of a total force estimated by U.S. Central Command at about 5,000 (other estimates are higher) as well as its only secure base in the country."

-- Quotes from Jack Kelly's November 21, 2004 article Victory in Fallujah

"Dear Pundita:
We were listening to a news show with Moises Naim and Tom Friedman talking about globalization and the need for a global government. I said to Sam, "Those are two of the 900 Lazy Bastards Pundita's always talking about."

Sam said, "The world is too complex for them so they want to make it simple by ruling over it."

I said, "Don't you see? The world is not too complex for them. They're selling a vacuum cleaner they know doesn't work."

Stop saying you're not a good teacher because you are. Sam and I have decided not to say goodbye to you. We want you to be safe and happy, is all.
Not Born Yesterday in New York"

Dear NBY:
Thank you for your good wishes, and for the letters and questions you've sent this past year. All the best to you and to Sam.

What Pundita hears, when she presses her ear to the ground and listens very closely to Mr. Naím's talk, is Brussels dialing for dollars to help them build up a military that would be as powerful as the US one. What Pundita hears from Mr. Friedman is an attempt to help the Democrat party define something approximating a foreign policy platform.

However, there's more to their talk than that, so we'll take some time with this one. With regard to your comments about Naím and Friedman -- no matter what you think of their views, you need to perk up your ears and listen with great attention and care to what they are saying. That's because you're going to be hearing a lot more, from many quarters, about the views and recommendations presented in the discussion you mentioned.

The views have been around for years, but now they're getting a big push because of mounting concern that once Bush leaves office US foreign policy will fall into a complete muddle.

No matter what foreign governments think of President Bush's foreign policy, his approach was crystal clear by 2003. When things are clear, you can plan around them. It was also clear by then that the State Department was not going along with Bush's policy and instead trying to stick with the Clinton approach, which was strongly oriented to the EU view. But with Bush's reelection, foreign observers could at least predict the tensions and maneuvers between State and the White House. Again, it was something they could plan around.

Yet the past year has given vivid indications that there is considerable dissension in the upper echelons of the Republican party with regard to foreign policy matters. So the growing perception in foreign circles is that Bush's doctrine will be ditched by the GOP, or at least watered down to such extent that it's no longer recognizable, if a Republican wins election in 2008.

When they turn to study the Democrats, foreign observers see a party that has built a foreign policy around opposition to the US invasion of Iraq and what the largest US trade unions think of trade pacts.

None of that is clear indication of what is going to happen to US foreign policy once Bush leaves office. To an American such a question is jumping the gun; we'll face the question in 2008. But foreign governments can't afford to be that shortsighted. They are looking for clear indicators and not finding them. The same for Americans who advise on foreign policy matters.

So the race is on to take control of the situation by trying to define an overarching agenda that is a sophisticated variation on multilateralism. You need to keep the race in mind while considering what Naím and Friedman said. Now I'll let the other readers in on the discussion you mentioned. From A World Without Borders - December 15 PBS NewsHour panel moderated by Ray Suarez:

"A lot of the failed states that you see around the world, the moment that the government fails it is replaced by these [transnational criminal] networks that immediately hone in and develop and exploit an export. Perhaps the only good thing that the country, that the rest of the world has is either logging or is either diamonds or is it drugs and opium or is it people?

And the point is that all of these countries at the end of the day are globalized. And in fact, in many, and the point of [my] book "Illicit" is that is this illicit trade that is reshaping much of the world. There is more going on under the radar than what is going on [at the WTO meeting] in Hong Kong. Illicit traders are reshaping the world in far more important ways than the ministers now meeting in Hong Kong.

...globalization has empowered individuals and weakened governments...the natural habitat of government is inside the country, inside the borders. And what globalization is creating is a world where borders are easier to trespass. And whereas governments are inside, there are all sorts of activities going on across borders that they have a hard time containing. And they are weaker.

I think it's very important to bring government back and to start thinking in which ways can we empower governments and make governments more amenable to deal with these challenges."
-- Moisés Naím

"Moisés is really laying out is there are a whole lot of issues today...that require global governance. We need some kind of global governance regime to deal with global warming, to deal with trade. But there is no global government, and so we're kind of caught between that right now. We suddenly live in a world, a flatter world where we are caught up in these transnational forces that really require someone to provide some rules."
-- Thomas L. Friedman

The links are to a biography, which I hope readers will study if they're under the impression that Friedman is simply a reporter and Naím is simply the editor of Foreign Policy Magazine. These are intelligent people who understand the modern era, and their thinking is highly connective, for want of a better term. "Connective" in this context means that when you take in the day's international news, you first view the news against what governments and the biggest globalized government-backed organizations are doing about the situation. (1) It's a kind of thinking that all Americans of voting age need to get better at doing.

Naím's most recent book (Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.) spells out the grim truth: failing states are now an easy mark for criminal gangs that think and act globally. In the manner of vultures circling dying prey they use hard currencies to buy up the tanking bank system of a struggling country and from there, move to take over the government. They now have it down to a craft, in the manner that corporate raiders have perfected strategies to take over a company.

I haven't had time to read Illicit but from what I've heard about it, I recommend it to anyone who is trying to understand Paul Wolfowitz's statement that corruption is the greatest threat to democracy since communism. Paul is only giving a gentle introduction to a situation that Pundita's blog has pounded away at, and which Naím's book starkly illustrates with examples that amplify on the 2000 International Crime Threat Assessment Report.

Corruption -- bureaucrats and politicians taking bribes -- now has two very different aspects. There is the traditional one associated with getting things done quickly in government and to assure that legislation goes a certain way. Tracking alongside this traditional model is the use of bribes to buy up a government.

This second model is why I took a sudden keen interest in Louisiana. A report connected with the Katrina hurricane turned up that a French Canadian organization started by Maurice Strong reviewed all Louisiana's business contracts with foreign governments.

Strong's connections raise the possibility that North Korea's government had moved in on Louisiana's dock business. Unless you wanted to walk the cat back one step further and say that China's military had moved in.

In that event it would not be simply government-backed organized crime making more inroads, given Strong's hatred of the United States and his stated desire to find means to destroy the power of the USA.

Strong's influence on Louisiana's government has to be examined in light of George Soros' plan for taking the US power down several pegs: balkanize the might of the American nation out of existence; i.e., break up the US union of states into smaller countries.

Do struggling US leftist publications and policy institutes that accept grants from a Soros organization know about the Soros plan, which he's not bothered much to hide underneath his talk about open society? Do Louisiana's legislature and Kathleen Blanco understand what Maurice Strong is connected with, beyond a nice Cajun cultural organization?

The best answer is that when your company or state government is desperate for cash it's hard not to take the attitude of Scarlett O'Hara: I promise to think about such questions tomorrow.

That is what governments are up against today. As the potentially ominous situation with Louisiana suggests, it's not only national governments that are targeted by sophisticated crooks looking to buy up a government. The target is any weak government: central, state, city. So Americans need to understand the stuff Naím talks about because it is not limited to a struggling countries on the other side of the world.

However comma one should remember that Mr Naím labors for Foreign Policy magazine, which is put out by The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. When last I checked, that policy institute had Mikhail Khordokovsky on the board. That's not saying much; he sat on more than one influential policy board during his salad days. Yet wherever there is Mikhail Khordokovsky, by following twists and turns one bumps into card-carrying mobsters, of just the kind Mr Naím warns about.

To put this another way, and without casting aspersions on Carnegie Endowment or Mr Naím's character, you need to make a clear distinction between the information people give you and what they'd like you to do with it.

Carnegie Endowment, as with all influential policy institutes, has a certain point of view, which they push at every opportunity to any editor looking for background on a story of particular interest to the institute.

From his biography, I assume Naím's recommendations for how to deal with globalized crime track closely with plans under consideration at the World Bank-IMF.

Thomas Friedman seems to have a somewhat different orientation, although I have not read any of his books and only a few of his articles for The New York Times. But obviously his latest book (The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century) is his clearest argument for a one-world governing institution.

From what I have read and from his biography, I suspect Friedman's outlook is steeped in the civil service view: Yes, the vacuum cleaner doesn't live up to its warrantee, but the homeowner can't afford a deluxe model and the clinker is an improvement over broom and dustpan.

I have sympathy with the civil service view. Just as someone's got to shovel manure and haul trash, there have to be people who are tasked with picking up the shortfall in the public's attention to complex governing matters. That unnecessary and unproductive tax burdens and much counterproductive legislation evolves from this work -- what's the alternative? In an era when people are so busy they can only eat breakfast and find time to pay bills while stuck in their daily commute traffic jam?

So I suspect Friedman is taking a pragmatic approach to dealing with serious threats to democracy brought about by globalized problems. I'd guess he's saying, Let's stop clowning around and set up a global central government to sort through the problems before they overwhelm even the mature democracies.

If I am right, it suggests Friedman is task-oriented. He's looking at the number of tasks involved in solving complex cross-border problems and saying that a governing organization has to take charge of prioritizing them. And from what I read of Friedman's early promotion of the US invasion of Iraq, I think his focus is on protecting democracy.

Naím seems altogether more complex in his orientation. I have known a great many people who sound like Naím when they talk. The halls of international institutions are crowded with them. They look at the power of the USA as a fact of the world's existence. Their concern is how to use the American power to maintain order in the world while at the same time de-Americanizing agendas regarding global affairs.

This seemingly contradictory view is not so much anti-American as pro-order. Opposition from many quarters to American agendas makes for disorderly and stalemated official meetings.

So if Friedman represents the rank-and-file civil servant view, Naím represents the view of officials who must negotiate compromises and try to come out with something constructive.

From his biography, Friedman is much too busy to qualify as a 900 Lazy Bastard and besides he has no position in officialdom. But busy pragmatists who look for simple solutions unwittingly clear the path for The 900 Lazy Bastards, who as Charlotte (the possum member of Pundita's team) has assured me, sit around under rocks waiting for humanity to get on a roll.

"Then they come out from under their rocks," explained Charlotte, wrinkling her snout in distaste, "And promise to fix everything you don't like if they can sit on your back."

Yet Friedman's call for a one-world government finds him contradicting the thesis of his book; this is plainly seen from studying the transcript of the discussion. Friedman notes that because of the convergence of technology and the globalized era, individuals and small collections of individuals have gained the power to stand up to officialdom.

How, then, does it follow that a global government will manage to ride herd on the unruly masses in the globalized era?

Naím's thesis runs into the same problem. If transnational crime syndicates run circles around governments, how does a meta-government prevent gangs from running meta circles around it?

As for the great success of the crime syndicates, they've simply been running ahead of communications ability. Yet whether it's in a remote village in the Third World or a crowded neighborhood in Chicago, as soon as people have the means to effectively communicate with each other about matters that alarm them, momentum quickly builds for action.

So a larger truth than the one Naím describes is that police departments around the world have been swamped with tips about crime since cell phones became ubiquitous. And as soon as talk radio comes to a village, the chief's demand for a bribe to do his job gets blabbed all over the region.

It's just that the crooks have been ahead of the implementation of technologies. The 311 system I wrote about is still in its infancy with regard to use and implementation. (See Governing in the Age of Megapopulations.) But it's on the way, all over this country and the world.

And it's getting harder for corruption to be buried. Recently all of India watched in outrage as video of an Indian member of parliament taking a bribe was beamed to their TV sets. The 21st Century's version of Candid Camera.

Many Westerners have never been in an Old World village so they're not entirely clear on they mean when they speak of the global "village." Believe you me, nobody gets away with much in a village. The old people sit around the centrally located well all day and watch everything that happens. In regions where there are monkeys, the monkeys sit around on the village roofs and watch everything that happens. When monkeys don't like a human, they nip him or make a ruckus or get oddly still. So then you start watching the person the monkey doesn't like, to see what's wrong with the person.

Everybody knows everybody else's business in a village. Village life is stifling because of this, but it's also much safer than a city. Very few murders and other big crimes. So we don't need a radio tag injected under our skin at birth or a one-world government to manage the world shrunk by effective communications. We just need human nature and ICT to take their course.

Most humans don't like crooks and graft; most of us just want to get along in the world without doing undue harm to others. And for every crook, there is a human with a hunter's nature who enjoys nothing more than tracking down a crook.

This said, we are in a very difficult transition period and down the road we face the specter of massive dislocations of human populations because of water shortages. That will lead to more water wars.

One of the greatest worries I have with regard to the Middle East concerns what success in Iraq will do to the region's water supplies. As soon as Iraq's moribund economy gets off the ground and industry builds up -- what are they going to do for water? Many more Iranians and Syrians will migrate to Iraq to find work. The trickle will become a flood of migrants if democracy stays in Iraq.

The biggest nightmare scenario is reverse diaspora if the Bush Doctrine is successful. Imagine a democratic Middle East drawing back millions who fled poverty and oppressive government. And imagine millions of African workers migrating there to serve the industries that rise up once the Middle East economies take off. What are they going to do for water? What are the new industries going to do for water?

Problems of such magnitude leer at our current technologies, so at some point down the road is a very rough patch for humanity. Yet if modern history is the guide, the problems will be best addressed by private industry coming up with engineering solutions and local central governments working in close cooperation.

This does not mean the G8 governments and major international organizations cannot be a help. But right now the G8 are trying to implement solutions through international organizations that are rife with graft, inefficiency, and undue politicking (of the kind contributing to the ongoing plight of refugees in Darfur).

Pundita wants to see an independent audit of the IMF and the World Bank's finances before I will agree to study their recommendations for dealing with globalized corruption and crime. And I want the audit results published on the Internet for all the world's taxpayers to see.

And I want to see every recommendation made by John Bolton for accounting reform at the UN implemented, before I would study their recommendations on dealing with corruption and organized crime.

1) In the spring I gave an example of this kind of thinking when a reader asked me about my opinion of a Time magazine cover story on Jeffrey Sachs' call for an all-out globalized war on Africa's worst poverty.

The second I saw the Time story I thought, "I see Gordon and Kofi are marshaling the troops."

Then I went on to read Sachs' ideas within the context of calls for the developed countries to cancel the debt of African nations, which Gordon Brown wanted at the top of the agenda at the G-8 meeting in the summer. And I pointed Pundita readers to Gordon Brown's speech some months earlier at a big US policy institute, which was a preview of things to come at the Gleneagles summer meeting.

Another example, which I can't recall whether I published, was my first reaction to a National Geographic story on H5N1, which featured on the cover a dramatic close-up photograph of an Asian who had obviously just died in hospital.

I thought, "Uh oh. WHO is dialing for dollars again."

I then slammed on the brake. Since 2004 I'd bemoaned how little attention the media had given to the situation, so I was relieved when the media began pushing the story. The question was how governments were preparing to deal with H2H of mutated H5N1 and how international funds were being spent on such projects.

"I'm seeing a lot of emphasis on pharmaceuticals," I told a friend after I studied WHO proposals and those by major governments for warding off pandemic. "And not enough emphasis on quarantine measures such as human temperature detectors installed at airports."

"That's because it's not possible to cut a temperature detector with water and sell it as flu vaccine on the streets of Bombay and Mexico City" he replied.

I thought of his remark when US customs announced they'd caught a shipment of counterfeit Tamiflu.

Before the days of the globalized Internet and user-friendly search engines such as Google and references such as Wikipedia, it was not easy to learn to make such connections. Not unless you had specialized knowledge of a certain sector or took great pains to keep yourself informed about major international situations.

Today, any American with Internet access can type "Jeffrey Sachs Africa" into a search engine and follow the Yellow Brick Road until coming to G8. After a time making such connections gets faster because you find the same names and situations popping up in connection to certain organizations with global reach.

And as I've advised before you can always stumble into the ballpark by asking yourself, "You're telling me because?"

Poverty across much of Africa has been with us all our lifetime, but if a media uproar suddenly arises that is unconnected with any specific happening in a country, that's the time to pay attention to the known players and look at the calendar.

If thinking in connective fashion sounds a daunting task, it's like anything else; with practice it becomes habitual.

Is there a big trade meeting coming soon? Are we nearing the Spring IMF-World Bank meeting? Who is chairing the G8 meeting this year and what is his pet project? What is the State Department trying to tell us about this country? What's big on the table at Brussels these days? And so on.

Welcome to the world that has been bubbling along for a half century outside the narrow focus of the US major news media. They plop out reports at the time of the meetings, but don't make connections between earlier stories and the meetings. Result: the public does not have a coherent view of foreign affairs.

None of this means issues such as H5N1 and African poverty don't deserve your attention. It means that in the globalized world of today, you need to learn to look for signs about what a powerful faction wants you to do about a situation that has global implications.

This so you don't find yourself three years down the road asking, "How did my tax dollars get involved in this mess?"

What the factions want you to do depends on how they stack the data about a situation. The stack is rarely all good or all bad. Sachs' book about poverty in Africa is informative on range of issues, and the National Geographic cover story about the threat of an Avian Flu pandemic is a decent introduction to the subject. However, canceling Africa's debt across the board, and the UN's idea of how to ward off a pandemic, are not necessarily the best solutions.

Below is a letter I dashed off in response to Stratfor head George Friedman's analysis for John Batchelor's audience on Thursday. I decided to publish the letter because it illustrates how differently the same intelligence can be analyzed by different people.

Caveats: While some of my points have been presented in expanded form in recent posts, readers who do not follow Batchelor's show might have trouble following some of my comments. And while I make no apology I acknowledge that I'm being unfair to Friedman because I have provided virtually no quotes from his report.

Terms used in the letter: IR = Iran, IQ = Iraq, ME = Middle East, Maddy = Ahmadinejad, Iran's President.

> Dilip = Dilip Hiro, who also guested on Batchelor's show on Thursday to analyze the Iraq election and Iran's meddling in the election.

> Loftus = John Loftus

> Seffy = Yossef Bodansky

> Dombey = Daniel Dombey, a reporter for The Financial Times who also guested on the Thursday show to analyze the impasse regarding EU negotiations with Iran about Iran's nuclear program.
* * * * * *
I see a pattern here -- Friedman seems to be looking at the ME from the viewpoint of Washington. Maddy is looking at the ME from the viewpoint of a Middle Easterner. He's playing to the Middle East much more than Europe and the US. Maddy is not trying to present himself as mad but as wholly consistent.

So I say let's try and look at things from Maddy's point of view:

1) As for the bellicosity -- threatening to destroy Israel -- Friedman's explanation (Maddy putting on crazy act to scare world) ignores the obvious, which is that Iran said virtually the same thing even before Maddy was put in power. (Remember the missile with 'For Israel' or similar painted on it and paraded for the cameras?)

As to why Maddy called for Israel's destruction at that particular time -- it came on the virtual eve of Iraq's election. So I think the statement is somehow tied to that. Maybe he's trying to make the anti-Israel position the 'official' Shia one -- to dampen any tendency for the new Iraqi government to negotiate with Israel.

Also, the statement was terribly embarrassing to the Saudis, who pushed the two-state solution for all they were worth. By coming out so strongly against Israel, Maddy is in effect saying, "We Shia (led by Iran, of course) are the real spiritual leaders of the region, not the House of Saud."

Another point: isn't there some tit-for-tat going on here? I seem to recall from a few months back that Israel made the threat of having to take strong action if Iran continues to develop nuke weapons. From that view, it's not surprising that Maddy would get reciprocal in his rhetoric.

Also, his statement might have something to do with Hamas; by saying that Israel should be destroyed, he might be sending a warning to Hamas leaders that they shouldn't allow Palestine politics to cause them to strike any deals with Israel or with factions that don't take such a hard line against Israel.

2) I suspect the Holocaust denial talk was directed more at the Germans than Israel. IR has sought to embarrass the new German administration; Seffy's analysis last night explains why. They have been using every means to pressure Germany into backing off a hard line on Iran's nuclear program. Raking up the Holocaust makes sense within that context.

3) Friedman didn't mention Maddy's talk about religion. I have discussed this angle in one of my posts; I bring it up here to dash Friedman's thesis that Maddy is trying to present himself as crazy in order to scare the world. (We're getting the Bomb plus we're nuttier than a fruitcake so watch out, world.)

Maddy's yappity-yap about religion is not crazy talk and it's quite easy to understand, if one recalls that Qom became the spiritual center for Shia after Saddam cracked down on IR holy cities. Iraq's Karbala and Najaf are the holy of holies for Shia, not Qom. Dilip correctly noted that after Saddam fell a third of Iranians made a pilgrimage to the IQ holy cities. Those pilgrims brought with them donation money that would otherwise have gone to Qom coffers. Add to this, the IQ clerics who took refuge in Qom are returning to Iraq.

In short, after Saddam's crackdown (after the Shia uprising), Qom took on a greater significance that it's now losing. Also, IR is playing the 'Shia Brotherhood' card for all it's worth, in order to woo IQ Shia.

Maddy's talk about the Second Coming of the Mahdi and his spiritual visions needs to be viewed against all the above. He's making a pitch.

4) As for Friedman's statement that Iranian expats have inflated the percentage (80%) of Iranians who are against their present regime, where's his data to support that statement? The percentage is based on polls, not on the guesstimates of expats; if Friedman wants to say the polls are skewed -- given that the Iranians live under a military dictatorship, it's hard to get good polling under those circumstances.

5) As for Friedman's admittedly convoluted thesis about Israel -- I don't know what he is talking about. And I do not understand why Friedman thinks Israel could knock out Iran's nuclear facilities. My understanding, from what Seffy and Loftus have said on earlier broadcasts, is that Israel does not have the capability for an effective preemptive strike on Iran's nuke facilities, and Dombey's analysis shores that.

One has to take such intel with a grain of salt -- Israel has been known to be very creative in the past -- but for now, I am accepting the claim that a preemptive strike is virtually ruled out.

What bugged me is that Friedman rationalized the convolutions by saying that of course it's complicated (to the point of gibberish) because "this is the Middle East we're talking about." The very clear implication is that nothing can make sense in that part of the world given the people involved. So the needle on my Sahib-0-Meter went into the red range while listening to his comment.

But you need to put Stratfor in perspective. They have done excellent analysis on certain situations and world regions, and in others they've fallen down in my view. The lesson it's that it's unwise to rely blindly on any one intelligence/news source.

And you need to put aside your views while taking in intel and analysis. Dilip is such an apologist for Iran's current regime, and so anti-American in his views, that he can be very hard for an American to take. But he has a lot of contacts in Iran and tremendous knowledge about Iran and Iraq's political history.

He made some very good points tonight -- in particular about the factor of Iran's greater population number vis-a-vis Iraq. Another good point is the comparison he drew between the Iraq-Iran relationship and the Mexico-US one.

Iran is a powerful country next to a weak one, yet what happens to that weaker country is of great strategic importance to the stronger one. So one should expect a certain amount of meddling from the stronger country or at least the attempt to wield influence on the country's political affairs.

I think Dilip's wrong to dismiss complaints that Iran 'stole' Iraq's election. But I think we need to confront that even if Iran's present regime is replaced by a better one, Iran will try to influence politics in Iraq. The same will hold true for Iraq, when they get stronger -- they will try to influence Iran's politics.

There will always be a lot of ebb and flow between the two oil-producing countries. As Iran's oil reserves continue to shrink, they will be greatly tempted to get a piece of Iraq's oil production.

One other point that struck me from Dilip's analysis: just because leading Iraqi politicians took refuge in Iran for years, it does not necessarily follow that they will be under Iran's thumb now that they are returned to their country.

We can't assume that every Iraqi who lived under the protection of Iran's regime -- there were many such Iraqis -- is going to follow the line of the present regime in Iran. Some will lean more toward the regime, some less. Differences with the regime will become more apparent as the returned Iraqis get settled into the business of governing Iraq.

Yet the truth is that returned Iraqis who left the region to settle in the US and Europe (e.g., Allawi) during Saddam's regime (many such Iraqis lean toward secular government) are simply not as accepted among Iraqi Shia as the Iraqis who took refuge in Iran. Dilip also emphasized this point in his discussion.

All the above points up that useful intel/analysis can come from someone who is not on America's side. The opposite is true; a strongly pro-American observer doesn't necessarily deliver good analysis or useful intelligence.

Intelligence work really is about fitting together 'mosaics' -- bits of data that you try to form a picture with. Dilip's report is interesting to compare with Seffy's Wednesday one. They are both looking at essentially the same data. But Seffy, who takes the side of Israel and the US, sees in Iran's machinations much to worry about. Dilip, who takes Iran's side, sees no cause for Iraq to worry about Iran. The most accurate picture of the vast transitions probably falls somewhere between those two views. That would call for fast reflexes on the part of US diplomacy -- and the Gold Dinar Fairy.

To return to Dombey's report for a moment: I love that he brought out (under Batchelor's questioning) that Brussels and Washington are unable to confront that their actions toward Iran are appeasement. His entire analysis was very sharp, very precise and easy to follow: US has outsourced job of negotiation to the E3, and they've outsourced the job to Russia.

Batchelor asked why pin hope on Russia, which has just reported an agreement to sell close to a billion worth of weapons/weapons tech to IR? Dombey: EU3 and US hope that even if the Russian solution doesn't work (so far it's been rejected by Iran), allowing Russia to propose their solution puts them in line with EU3-US. So if it goes to the UN, China will be reluctant to stand against EU3-US-Russia.

Of course what's hysterically funny (graveyard humor), and which Dombey brought out, is that none of this diplomatic maneuvering is working; Tehran continues to thumb its nose at the EU3-US and will continue to do so at the UN.

All that is very bad news, and it jibes with Seffy's Doom & Gloom Wednesday analysis. Right now, Iran definitely has the upper hand.

"Sorry you're shutting down the blog. I guess you heard the bad news last night from Yossef Bodansky [on John Batchelor's show]. Iran has won this round in Iraq and they got Germany to capitulate on the matter of nukes. So it will be more rounds of negotiation with the EU3 that go nowhere.
Ahmed in Los Angeles"

Dear Ahmed:
Always keep in mind that whatever Batchelor's view of a situation, he presents intelligence rather than 'news' -- or rather he looks at news stories as intelligence, which is the right way to look at news, especially during war. But Seffy (Bodansky) is a card-carrying intelligence gatherer and analyst in the pure sense of the terms. So he takes some getting used to.

I nicknamed Seffy "Dr Doom" before I met him. (Our meeting described in a Pundita essay about my adventures at the National Intelligence Conference.) In person he was nothing like the voice of doom I'd heard on Batchelor's show -- until he settled down at a seminar to describe the hurdles that intelligence work faces when Washington politicians get to make decisions on national security. He switched to his professional mode, which is not geared to sunny days.

I learned that it helps to try and think like a general while listening to Batchelor's show. Do you really want the forward observers ringing you up on the satphone and saying, "Our side is beating the pants off the enemy."

No. You want all the bad news, every bit of it that can be dug up.

Iran is an endless source of delight for Doom & Gloomers because Iran is Bad News Central. But what was done over a generation in that part of the world is not undone in a couple years.

It helps Americans to remember that the map designations of "Europe" and the "Middle East" are artificial when seen from the viewpoint of history. The ancient trade hubs of the Middle East that became large cities had tremendous interaction with empires we associate with Europe. The interaction was at all levels -- war, trade, social.

Americans think of the Shah of Iran as an American puppet, but his rule reflected the European monarchical outlook (even more than the dynastic one of ancient Persia). The clans in the rural areas of his rule were treated in the manner of Europe's serfs during the feudal era. Meanwhile, the Iranians who served the Shah's government and who were educated in the US absorbed ideas they found useful, but they didn't come away from the experience with the American view of society.

A very different story for Iranians educated in Western Europe, simply because the "European" view of government was not foreign to them.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's views were profoundly shaped by European thinking and notably French thought. So when Saudi-educated Arabs were brought into the revolutionary government, Iran became in a very real sense "Eurabia." A traditional Wahabist set of laws was superimposed on a manner of socialist government that was lifted from Europe.

That's the ballpark for much of the Old World. Meanwhile, the American view languished behind the literal and figurative walls of diplomatic and military enclaves in the Middle East, and the very brief Gulf War did not change the situation.

To put all this in evocative terms, it was the ideas of French philosophers that were hotly debated in Cairo's coffee houses. To whatever extent the ideas of America's founding fathers made material for debate, it was highly abstract because the American experience was so foreign.

Ironically, it was the televising of the 9/11 attack and aftermath that brought many Middle Easterners their first empirical view of American life; i.e., a view that was not grounded in abstractions.

The strongest impression conveyed by the aftermath footage was of people not sitting around and asking what was to be done. Image after image showed civilian Americans running toward the disaster, pitching in to help in any way they could.

The history of the American democracy in one sentence.

Americans have a big heart, courtesy of the great freedom and vastness of our society and the profound influence of ideals on our thinking. We lead with our heart, which has its downsides, but that's our style.

The style needs to be tempered by knowledge while we're thrashing around in the Middle East. We're gaining the knowledge, firstly because we're now we're taking instruction directly from the peoples -- Iranians, Iraqis, Egyptians, Jordanians, and so on -- instead of policy analysts.

Secondly because we're getting the instructions in the manner of a climber following an experienced mountain guide. Instruction is very direct, life-or-death oriented, visceral: "Do this. Don't do that."

This kind of instruction also reflects the "Eastern style" teaching. I've met Westerners who have yearned to study with an Eastern master of the old school. I assure them the experience is hell for Westerners, particularly for those who have no military training.

There's really not so much need for that kind of teaching in a modern, highly civilized society, which is very safe. But it's still not a safe world and thus, the old school method of teaching still has it's place.

The basis of the Eastern method is that the Master knows everything and the student never knows anything. No matter how much the student learns, he's still a complete idiot. This style is very hard on modern Westerners, who are schooled to believe they have worth, that their opinions matter, and that they are progressing. So American students in particular create complex strategies to protect their ego, which only gives the Master more opportunity to show them for fools.

Only after you leave the Master do you realize from unfolding experiences that you developed some real wisdom during your time as the Master's student; you were the Eternal Stupid only within the context of the teacher-student relationship.

You don't become the fountainhead of wisdom because wisdom is as much a matter of living through many experiences as anything. But you learn to apply your knowledge and life experience in ways you didn't think of before. You learn when it's smart to play the Fool role you had no choice but to take on with the Master. You learn to really think about when it's wise to let others play Wise Man.

Within a year of leaving the Master, I figured a way to save 20,000 refugees from being slaughtered in cold blood by a military in the middle of a genocidal campaign. Yes, one person took on an entire military -- an entire government -- and won a battle.

As to how I did it -- the Master had taught me that if you've got nothing in your hand that means you're holding all the Joker cards and to keep playing them. I realized that I had one bit of information that the military did not have, and I played it to the hilt.

Yet I couldn't have done it without help from a group of incredibly brave and good-hearted Muslim men and boys. They really understood the kind of people they were dealing with in that military. It was their part of the world and they knew it inside out.

That, too, I learned from the Master: when it's vital to listen. Between what I knew and they knew, we worked a kind of miracle. And not one drop of blood was shed.

Americans in the Middle East are definitely in the role of the Fool, yet the more we stay in there and play (as against staying behind enclave walls and writing checks), the wiser we'll become.

They just got too much into the Endurance groove in that part of world, is all. When you can't pick up and leave your native region, you develop great patience and endurance. The extreme opposite is the United States of America, which evolved from people who said, "I'm not taking this shit anymore," and left their birth region.

There's a limit to the usefulness of any one way of dealing with things: the intense originalism and reflexivity of the American psyche, which comes from not putting up with things as they are, easily means short patience for situations that require endurance.

On the other hand, the tremendous endurance of the Old World psyche easily devolves to a futile reliance on patience when bold improvisation is clearly required.

Thus, the dialogue between the Old World and the New World began in earnest when we decided to stay on and hack it out in Iraq.

I'd wanted to keep the post about Pakistan's quake victims at the top of today's pile of posts, and also because I added an exchange with Dave Schuler to the post (his second comments found at 4:15 PM entry). But then I saw this news item and saw red...

What set Pundita off is the suspicion that Chalabi is somehow involved in turning a small problem into a big mess. And Allawi will have to somehow pick up the pieces. Again. They are related, I think -- cousins or brothers-in-law; I don't recall which at this moment. Maybe it's Karma.

"Iraq election losers unite to contest result
21 Dec 2005 17:38:55 GMT
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/
newsdesk/MAC160883.htm
Source: Reuters

(Adds detail, background)

By Mariam Karouny and Omar al-Ibadi

BAGHDAD, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Iraq's Sunni Arab and secular parties threatened on Wednesday to boycott the new parliament after alleging massive fraud in last week's election, ramping up pressure on the triumphant Shi'ite Islamists to share power.

Sunni rebels, whose informal truce helped push turnout to 70 percent as insurgents pitched for a voice in the new, full-term legislature, warned they would intensify attacks if the Shi'ite Alliance held on to the lion's share of power.

The Electoral Commission, which opposition groups demanded be dissolved accusing it of bias, rejected calls for a rerun of the vote, saying complaints were numerous but unlikely to affect the overall result -- a view held by U.S. and U.N. officials.

With demands for a rerun or a substantial revision of the vote looking unlikely for now, lobbying by those disappointed with their shares of the vote seemed intended to back up calls for posts in a grand coalition government -- something the ruling Shi'ites have offered and Washington is encouraging.

Representatives of secular Shi'ite former prime minister Iyad Allawi and two major Sunni Arab groups, the Islamist-led Iraqi Accordance Front and the secular Iraqi Unified Front, along with other groupings, met on Wednesday to coordinate.

"We all agreed to contest and reject the results of the election," said Allawi aide Thaer al-Naqib. "We want the Electoral Commission dissolved and the election rerun."

"We will take to the streets if necessary," he told Reuters. "We might even not take up our seats in the new parliament and so any new government would be illegitimate."

Unified Front leader Saleh al-Mutlak said they would take their complaints not only to the Electoral Commission but also the Arab League, European Union and United Nations.

INSURGENT THREAT
Other Sunni Arab leaders have warned of a resumption of rebel violence if leaders whom they accuse of being puppets of Shi'ite, non-Arab Iran keep power; there were brief clashes with U.S. forces in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi on Tuesday.

"The resistance will intensify and ... and much blood will be spilt if Iran's agents gain power," said Majeed al-Gaood, who says he speaks for rebel groups, from neighbouring Jordan.

The United States, anxious to staunch the revolt as part of a strategy of withdrawing its 150,000 troops while leaving Iraq stable, has also made no secret of concerns over links between Shi'ite leaders and Washington's enemy Iran and over accusations pro-government sectarian militias are killing with impunity.

Though always denying having preferences for the election result, U.S. officials have made clear they want to see a broad, inclusive government across the sectarian and ethnic divides, even if the Alliance retains its slim majority in parliament.

The U.S. ambassador to Baghdad said pointedly on Tuesday that the Interior Ministry, target of much Sunni criticism over sectarian attacks, should not be run by a sectarian figure.

Provisional results offer an unclear picture of the new assembly, particularly since a complex process of redistributing votes is required to allocate 45 of the 275 seats. However, Shi'ite leaders believe they can expect at least 120 seats and possibly as many as the 140 or so they have at present.

Electoral Commission chief Hussein al-Hindawi told a news conference that 10.9 million voters took part on Thursday, putting national turnout at 70 percent, much higher than the 58 percent who participated in January's ballot, when many in the Sunni Arab minority stayed away from the polls.

Among the regional votes, turnout in western Anbar province, where insurgents are strong in towns like Ramadi, hit 55 percent. That compared to just two percent in the Jan. 30 election for an interim assembly." (Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman and Alastair Macdonald in Baghdad)

That quote from Brent Stevens, Wall Street Journal reporter, on Tuesday's John Batchelor show. Brent was in the region last week. He reported that about a thousand US troops are there, and rendering so much help (including huge road-clearing projects and the only functioning hospitals) that when a Muslim cleric gave an anti-American speech in a mosque he was booed by the Pakistani worshippers.

The bad news is that the winter is closing in fast (2-3 weeks), there are 3 million homeless from the quake, and many of the tents they've been provided have not been winterized. The Pak military is doing a good job of coordinating relief efforts, according to Brent, but the quake areas "look like Hiroshima after the Bomb was dropped" so even with help from the US military and other outside agencies, recovery is very slow going.

Brent did not explain why there is a problem with getting winterized tents to the region, but I wonder whether the 20,000 tents provided by the United Nations are winterized. I note from an Ireland Online article that the UN also provided "60,875 plastic sheets and more than 320,000 blankets."

Not to strike a sour note, but I question the priorities. The first need is winterized tents, and that would have been obvious from the day of the quake.

"UN humanitarian relief co-ordinator Jan Vandemoortele appealed for an additional €37.3m to provide survivors with thick blankets and shelter materials. He said another 2.4 million blankets, 170,000 plastic sheets and 200,000 tarpaulins were needed."

Again, I would think that the top priority is winterized tents. Brent reported that there have been many fires in the tent cities because people are trying to waterproof the tents by pouring kerosene on them. This has caused many accidents from cooking fires, so the hospitals are reporting burn and smoke-inhalation victims.

In related news, Kofi Annan has appointed President Bush's father as special UN envoy for rehabilitation and reconstruction in quake-hit areas of northwestern Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Perhaps George W. Bush can get things moving with regard to winterized tents.

More prayers are needed. Hopefully, the winter will be mild in that part of the world this year.

2:45 PM Update
I am republishing this essay under a new time so it will stay at the top of the blog today. Also, I received a comment from Dave that I should share:

Dear Pundita:
According to reports that I've heard there's a U. S. MASH unit set up not far from the quake's epicenter complete with ICU. At this point only about 30% of those who present themselves for treatment are earthquake victims (although nobody's being turned away. That suggests that the U. S. military has become the primary health care provider for a good-sized chunk of Pakistan.
Dave Schuler
The Glittering Eye

Dear Dave:
Thank you for the news; I didn't realize they were providing so much health care. This also helps explain why the cleric was booed. We've heard so much about the US acting unilaterally; this, as contrasted with multilateralism. But actually the US has been tracking toward bilateralism (or at least 'falling into' that approach). This strikes me as a good thing because it allows for highly reflexive responses to the needs of other governments. This is the second time recently that the US military has responded with great efficiency to a humanitarian crisis. (Well, I think one could add Katrina to the tsunami and the quake, if the military had been brought earlier into relief planning for the hurricane.) A tragedy their hands are tied with regard to helping in Darfur.

4:30 PM
"Pundita,
I think that robust bilateral ties particularly with strategic countries like Pakistan are a very positive approach for the United States and an approach which capitalizes on our strengths rather than emphasizing our weaknesses.

I'm quite skeptical of multi-lateral agreements and institutions. Too often they involve bureaucrats (the vulture elite?) which frequently do not share our values or have our best interests at heart. Or, possibly,any interests other than their own.
Dave Schuler"

"On the Leonid Reiman story, you are following the wrong trail. It is the Alfa Group -- Megafon's competitor -- pushing this story. The Alfa Group has seriously important connections in the US, especially media. So I would back away from the political slant and stick with what it is almost always about: MONEY!"
-- Peter Lavelle from Dec 14 Pundita post

"Pundita, dear, you must have heard John Batchelor egging on Gary Kasparov last night. Have you noticed that John is out for Vladimir Putin's scalp? Do you think this has something to do with Iran? Or with the WSJniki? Congratulations on your retirement. Of course I will miss you.
Boris in Jackson Heights"

Dear Boris:
For my part I will miss Pundita-land's Resident Cynic. But we must look on the bright side, Boris. Pundita's retirement saves her readers from dedicating a month to figuring out what is going on with Rosneft, the Alfa Consortium, Mikhail Fridman, the European and American central banks, and the Wall Street Journal-Financial Times crowds. In other words, trying to figure out the ruckus would be as much fun as investigating China's Mystery Illness.

However, I think we could get into the ballpark if we applied Peter's advice about Russia's telecom scandal to the larger situation. In other words, the ruckus probably has something to do with money. It must be really big money, if John Batchelor invites Kasparov on his show twice in the same month to rant that Russian democracy has gone to hell in a handbasket.

Now that Don Evans has rejected President Putin's olive-branch offer to head up Rosneft, I am hoping that Putin will offer the job to a Russian. But at least according to today's Moscow News, he is still looking for an American in the hope this will be a sop to the Wall Street Journal-Financial Times crowds.(1)

Nothing will mollify the WSJniki until Putin is run out of Russia on a rail. And consider the uproar in Europe when Gerhard Schröder agreed to head up Gazprom. The big US-West European investors and speculators are hopping mad about Putin's recent statement that foreign banks are no longer terribly welcome in Russia.

I would think that a frosty climate in Russia for US and West European banks puts Russia's Alfa Bank in a very powerful position and thus, gives Russia's central bank clout in The Casino.(*) Down the line this could make the Russian ruble a contender at The Casino. I am not sure how The Lords of the Craps Table would react to this.

I am also unsure about Mikhail Fridman's position in Russia's post-Yukos era. As Chairman of Alfa Group Consortium he has tremendous power but he has come under fire recently because of a privatization scandal. And he is one of Russia's Oligarchs. I don't know whether his relationship with Putin has changed dramatically since Yukos was broken up.

Pundita does not agree with Peter Lavelle's contention that the Kremlin "stole" Yukos -- not unless you want to consider it stealing when a government does not exert itself to warn crooks that this time they are serious about collecting back taxes. However, the Yukos takeover was messy and also very traumatic for Russia's business community. Certainly, it was a rough way for the government to send the message that the rule of the Oligarchs had ended in Russia.

The one person in all this I haven't read anything bad about, despite his association with Fridman, is Peter Aven, the President of Alfa Bank. I might have to eat my words but his credentials are impressive and to all appearances he is very dedicated to getting Russia on her feet.

So if the WSJniki are simply worried about solvency and efficiency, they might not have a heart attack if Aven headed up Rosneft. The question is whether Putin would even consider a Russian for the post at this time. Any Russian who leads Rosneft will automatically gain tremendous political clout in Russia. Putin might prefer a foreigner for that reason; if so, I think that would be shortsighted. It's sending a message to the Russian people that a Russian can't be trusted to head the nation's most valuable company.

That message undercuts the rationale for going after the Oligarchs, who were perfectly willing to sell out Russia to foreigners. The message also plays into the hands of Russia's xenophobics, which of course follow the hard Right in Russia.

Yet I don't think the xenophobics are just a bunch of Skinheads attacking foreigners, although their recent antics called forth a stern lecture from Putin that "extreme nationalism" wouldn't be tolerated. If we recall that US senators used an ax on Japanese electronic appliances at the height of Japan's attempt to buy up the United States, I think we're in the ballpark about Russian sensitivities at this time.

The Kremlin will keep 51% share control of Rosneft, which still leaves 49% up for grabs to foreign investors. That should be enough for the rest of the world, I should think. So why not put a Russian in charge of Rosneft to assure the Russian people that it won't be McRosneft?

Pundita does not know what the Kremlin would think of my logic, and it could be that offering the top post at Rosneft to an American is tied with a plan to build a pipeline that would deliver up to 1 million barrels of oil per day to the United States from the port of Murmansk. Reportedly the Kremlin may be giving consideration to the plan.

The Kremlin didn't exactly go broke breaking up Yukos but between setting up Gazprom and Rosneft, they took on a huge pile of debt. Yet I think they should be able to scare up foreign investor interest without having to give the plummiest job in Russia to an American.

The long view (which is of no concern to US-managed pension funds) is that it's in America's best interest if the Russian people are happy -- as happy as it's possible for Russians to ever be. They need to stop thinking of themselves as a land of crooks and develop more faith in their future.

Translation: Trying to run Vladimir Putin out of Russia is not the way to encourage more help from his government in dealing with Syria and Iran.

* The Casino is Pundita's name for the international monetary system; The Lords of the Craps Table are those who greatly influence the system; i.e., major central banks, BIS, currency traders for major banks, OPEC ministers, and IMF.

1)
December 21, 2005.
Evans Rejects Putin's Offer to Chair Rosneft
By Maria Levitov
The Moscow Times

"Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, a close ally of President George W. Bush, has declined a controversial Kremlin offer to take a senior position at state-run Rosneft.

Evans told reporters in Washington late Monday that family and business commitments would not allow him to take the job. [...]

Last week, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder came under fire after he announced plans to head a Gazprom-led pipeline project that he had pushed while in office.

After Putin hinted on Friday that Rosneft might hire a prominent Westerner, Evans also began to face increasing public pressure not to accept a job with a Russian energy company.

The exact position offered to Evans was unclear, but he told the Financial Times that he had turned down "a position of serious responsibility at Rosneft."

Evans currently serves as CEO of the Financial Services Forum, a group of senior executives from 20 of the largest U.S. financial institutions.

Despite Evans' rejection, market watchers said the Kremlin was likely to continue wooing high-profile foreigners to burnish Rosneft's image ahead of a planned IPO.

The state plans to sell up to 49 percent of Rosneft in an IPO next year to repay a $7.5 billion loan raised to buy a majority stake in Gazprom. A Western executive would likely instill confidence among foreign investors in a company that has been sullied by the messy destruction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos empire. Rosneft acquired Yukos' largest production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, after a forced government auction last year.

Khodorkovsky is serving an eight-year prison sentence for fraud and tax evasion in a Siberian penal colony after a highly politicized trial.

Evans' rejection must have come as an embarrassment to the authorities, who failed to sound out their candidate better before making a job offer, said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank. The next candidate, likely also to be a foreigner, will be tapped more discreetly, he said.

"We know that Schröder is busy," said Peter Westin, chief economist at MDM Bank.

In an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, former world chess champion and outspoken Putin critic Garry Kasparov called Schröder's decision to work for Gazprom "one giant leap for corruption in the West." Kasparov went on to write that Evans' acceptance of the job "would formally put the Bush administration's heretofore-unspoken presidential seal of approval on the Kremlin's dirty dealings."

Evans also received direct appeals not to take the job in editorials in The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. However, he denied that he had bowed to criticism about taking the job, the Journal reported on Tuesday.

Rosneft stands to gain from the clout and expertise of an experienced foreign executive. But Westin said that Evans, who quit his job at the Commerce Department in February, was not the right man for Rosneft.

A senior position at the oil company is not simply an industry job, but also a political position, said Westin. Ethical questions "would be less of a concern if someone came from business, rather than politics," he said.

The next candidate will probably be identified before next summer's Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg -- and will most likely be an American, Alfa Bank's Weafer said.

The so-called U.S.-Russia energy dialog has hardly moved ahead since the beginning of the Yukos affair in 2003, Weafer said, and the Kremlin could be looking for an American to revive it.

Before he was arrested, Khodorkovsky had been pushing for the construction of a privately owned pipeline -- much to the Kremlin's chagrin -- to deliver up to 1 million barrels of oil per day to the United States from the northern port of Murmansk.

"It's well known that the U.S. has been interested in this project," Weafer said. Before Rosneft took over Yuganskneftegaz, the state did not have its own company in place to run the project, he said.

Now, the Kremlin may be more inclined to proceed with the Murmansk pipeline, and an American in a senior Rosneft chair would help jump-start the process, Weafer said."

"Now soya is rapidly advancing from all sides toward the heartland of the Amazon, fuelling massive deforestation."

The question is the extent to which the giant American agribusiness Cargill stands behind Brazil's soybean king -- indeed, the extent to which Cargill created his political power in Brazil. If this is a new question for you, read on....

"The Brazilian government released figures yesterday showing that the amount of [Amazon rainforest] deforestation that took place last year was the second worst on record. Some 26,130 square kilometres of rainforest were cleared in the 12 months to August 2004. This was only surpassed in 1995 when an area the size of Belgium was erased."
-- (UK) Independent editorial, 20 May 2005

The survival of the Amazon forest...may be the key to the survival of the planet. The jungle is sometimes called the world's "lung" because its trees produce much of the world's oxygen. It is thought nearly 20 per cent of it has already been destroyed by legal and illegal logging, and clearance for cattle ranching...the soya boom has dramatically stepped up the pace of destruction. It began on the back of the BSE [Mad Cow disease] crisis in Britain, when the feed given to cattle suddenly became a matter of intense public concern. Cattle feed producers around the world switched to soya as an untainted source.
-- from the following report

"The rape of the rainforest... and the man behind it
May 20, 2005
By: Michael McCarthy and Andrew Buncombe
The (UK) Independent

It is stark. It is scarcely believable. But the ruthless obliteration of the Amazon rainforest continues at a headlong rate new figures reveal - and today we reveal the man who more than any other represents the forces making it happen. He is Blairo Maggi, the millionaire farmer and uncompromising politician presiding over the Brazilian boom in soya bean production. He is known in Brazil as O Rei da Soja - the King of Soy. Brazilian environmentalists are calling him something else - the King of Deforestation.

For the soya boom, feeding a seemingly insatiable world market for soya beans as cattle feed, is now the main driver of rainforest destruction. Figures show that last year the rate of forest clearance in the Amazon was the second highest on record as the soy boom completed its third year.

An area of more than 10,000 square miles - nearly the size of Belgium - was cut down, with half the destruction in the state of Mato Grosso, where Mr Maggi, whose Maggi Group farming business is the world's biggest soya bean producer, also happens to be the state governor.

Mr Maggi sheds no tears over lost trees. In 2003, his first year as governor, the rate of deforestation in Mato Grosso more than doubled. In an interview last year he said: "To me, a 40 per cent increase in deforestation doesn't mean anything at all, and I don't feel the slightest guilt over what we are doing here. We are talking about an area larger than Europe that has barely been touched, so there is nothing at all to get worried about."

Many people violently disagree. The survival of the Amazon forest, which sprawls over 4.1 million sq km (1.6 million sq miles) and covers more than half of Brazil's land area, may be the key to the survival of the planet. The jungle is sometimes called the world's "lung" because its trees produce much of the world's oxygen. It is thought nearly 20 per cent of it has already been destroyed by legal and illegal logging, and clearance for cattle ranching.

But the soya boom has dramatically stepped up the pace of destruction. It began on the back of the BSE crisis in Britain, when the feed given to cattle suddenly became a matter of intense public concern. Cattle feed producers around the world switched to soya as an untainted source. The boom was intensified by the fact that Brazil - in contrast to the US and Argentina - did not go down the GM route in its agriculture, so when most European countries went GM-free, it was from Brazil that they sought their soya bean supplies.

Europe now imports 65 per cent of its soya from Brazil. A further impetus to the boom is coming from China, whose emerging middle class wants to eat more and more meat - so the demand for animal feed is soaring. The soya boom is bitterly criticised by environmentalists.

"It is turning the rainforest into cattle feed. It is gross," said John Sauven, head of the rainforest campaign for Greenpeace UK.

It first showed up in the deforestation figures in 2003, when after falling or staying steady for eight years, the rate of destruction leapt by 40 per cent in a single year, from 18,170 sq km to 25,500 sq km.

Since then the rate has stayed at its new high level, with 24,597 sq km cut down the next year, and, as the figures released yesterday by the Brazilian environment ministry showed, from satellite photos and other data, no less than 26,130 sq km of rainforest was cut down in the 12 months to August 2004. This was a further leap of 6 per cent on the year before and caused immense dismay, not least because President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government adopted an action plan last year to protect the Amazon.

The Environment Minister, Marina Silva, who is from the Amazon state of Acre, said the figure was high, but promised the country would "work to fight this in a structured way, with lasting and effective action, involving all sectors".

Greenpeace's Amazon co-ordinator Paulo Adario said the scale of the destruction was a tragedy, and showed that deforestation was "not a priority for the Lula government".

Mr Maggi, whose company grossed $600m last year, does not see the future as one of restricted soya plantings. He has called for a tripling of the amount of land planted with soybeans during the next decade in Mato Grosso, and his company announced last year that it intended to double the area it has in production.

How demand for soya drives the destruction
The production of soya beans is now a vital industry for Brazil. Agribusiness is the country's number one export earner, and soya is the principal commodity. The current government under President Lula actively promotes soya export as a means to earn foreign exchange for debt payments.

From the 1960s, the Brazilian government promoted soya cultivation so Brazil could become self sufficient in vegetable oils. Soya was increasingly planted on large-scale, fully mechanised farms in the south and the states on the Atlantic coast.

In the past, some agro-engineers believed soya would never threaten the rainforest, because of climatic limitations and soil conditions. Soya was thought to be "as adaptable to conditions of the tropical climate as a panda bear to the African savannah".

However, the development of new varieties has enabled the rapid expansion of soya plantations north, into the tropical states where the rainforest is situated. Between 1995 and 2004, the area cultivated with soya increased by 77 per cent in the centre-west, with Mato Grosso becoming the single biggest producer.

Now soya is rapidly advancing from all sides toward the heartland of the Amazon, fuelling massive deforestation. Two companies dominate Brazil's soya business. Gruppo Maggi, owned by Blairo Maggi, Mato Grosso's governor, is considered to be the world's largest individual soya producer. The number one soy-exporter is the giant US grains business, Cargill."
* * * * *
If you were interested enough in the topic to read this far and would like a tiny idea of what the Amazon rainforest is really up against, read this first, then plow through the entire report on the RSS meeting...

"[Also attending RSS] the Dutch bank Rabobank and the English bank HSBC, which are among the main shareholders of ADM, Cargill, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus, the four companies that control the world trade of soy. The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank, a big financier of the expansion of soy, was also present. In 2002 and 2004, the IFC gave two loans of 30 million dollars each to the Amaggi group to expand storage infrastructure and for liquid capital, but without carrying out the adequate environmental and social evaluations. Financing this expansion signifies the expulsion of the indigenous peoples and farmers from their lands and more deforestation."
-- from Roundtable on Sustainable Soy - Alotau Enviornment blog

"Look, the US has lost the war in Iraq - everybody knows this. Iran isn't taking any chances the Bush "lie machine" won't target Iran next to cover its tracks. Iran is acting rationally. (I don't like the Iranian regime.) We have seen the same kind of US pressure against Syria lately. Again, Iran is acting defensively."
-- Peter Lavelle, from Dec 16 Pundita post about reported Russian sale of SAMs and weapons tech to Iran

December 16
"Pundita, I wonder if Peter Lavelle thinks we are losing in Iraq as a result of the US not attempting to "win" in the classical sense? One could argue we are actually attempting to "lose", but in a specific way.
Alaska Reader"

Dear Alaska Reader:
Wouldn't our enemies love to know what CENTCOM is attempting to do in Iraq, eh? Realize that some of the people making accusations against the Bush administration are attempting to glean information. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book: if your opponent is very close-mouthed you might loosen his tongue if you make a wild accusation against him. The Bush administration is the tightest-lipped in modern US history and the Defense Department has their lips zipped.

But in Peter's case, I assume he's simply repeating what he knows from watching CNN International, BBC and Russian television. In other words, his view of the Iraq campaign is shared throughout much of Europe and among the antiwar camp in the United States. And even many Americans who supported the Iraq invasion believe the US is losing the war in Iraq -- or least, having won we lost the peace.

From that view, one might argue that the Allied forces did not win World War Two until the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991. There are parallels; by knocking out Saddam's regime, this knocked out a counter-force to Iran's military. With Hitler's forces beaten, this knocked out a counter-force to Stalin's forces.

But we know from what Jim Ellsworth wrote (and which I published in the dialogue about Saddam Hussein's trial) and from other military sources that CENTCOM was not born yesterday. They knew that knocking out Saddam would unleash other forces in the region, including al Qaeda.

In some ways it's like pest control. Farmers have learned the hard way that if you kill off one crop pest, you can set off an onslaught from the prey of the bug you wiped out. However, human beings generate so many varieties of responses that the analogy to crop pests is not useful.

There are many variables that could only emerge after Saddam's Baathist regime was toppled. So the phase of the war, post-Saddam, is highly reflexive on both sides. Keep in mind that the enemy couldn't predict how all the chips would fall, either.

Of course "highly reflexive" suggests the need for much improvisation and going back to the drawing board, which Congressional check-writers don't like, which the media do not like, and which in fact everyone having to watch from the sidelines does not like.

Above all, everybody watching a war hates the words "campaign" and "theater." We want a theater of war nicely labeled The War, so we can win or lose, so then everybody can go home. It's nerve wracking to follow a war.

Pundita used to sit around at 2:00 o'clock in the morning listening to John Batchelor's war reports; I'd get so nervous I'd throw my pen across the room and snap, "I am not going to listen to this any more."

By the time Batchelor's show was moved to an earlier time slot I'd calmed down a little.

Are we winning in Iraq? We already won that campaign; the Coalition defeated Saddam's military. As for the rest, we'll find out. My money's on CENTCOM.

As for the Bush "lie machine," again Peter is repeating widely held views in Russia and among European allies who strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq. There are lies told in war, but Bush did not lie the US into a war.

Sometimes I wish I had a comment section so that all readers could share the letters I receive in connection with Pundita essays. (Then I recall that often people put more thought into letters than a comment section.) Here I share a brief exchange with Peter Lavelle, and my replies to two letters that I hope all readers will find interesting. Many thanks to all the readers who have taken the time to write since learning that Pundita blog is ending.

December 16
"Hi Pundita!
Sorry to be so tardy in my reply -- I have had a terrible flu...I am honored to accept your wonderful weblog award!
Peter Lavelle in Moscow"

Hullo, Peter!
Sorry to hear you were under the weather and hope this letter finds you better...I am tickled that you appreciated the Pundita award. Thank you again for the time you took on December 3 to educate me about matters Russian.

I don't need to tell you how strongly I feel that Americans need to get educated about Russia, which is virtually impossible to do without resorting to the Internet. I think of your Untimely Thoughts blog as a vital "public service."

Well, Peter, now that I am leaving the blogosphere (at least for the foreseeable future) and will be spending FAR less time in the coming year tracking world events, I will miss you and hope we can keep up our infrequent email exchanges on occasion, if only to say "Hello!"

All the best to you and your writing endeavors.

"December 18
Pundita, I have thoroughly enjoyed both your writing and my resulting education since I came across your blog sometime in the summer. I am a professional cellist by trade (and aspiring to become a well-paid one!), but also a student of political junkies and human nature in general, and your writings have given me a glimpse of the structures that underlie the surface movements of geopolitics and government. I wish you success in your endeavors, and hope for you to visit the blogosphere as often as your time permits. Thank you for writing.
Matt in New England"

Dear Matt:
Thank you for the letter of appreciation and for your good wishes. In turn I wish you great happiness in your career of music. Although I make occasional forays to break up the routine, giving readers that glimpse you wrote about is Pundita's mission statement. For several months I had the statement posted on the sidebar as a link to the essay titled "In search of where we are now." So, thanks such as yours are particularly treasured.

I did not start out to teach -- I have neither the training nor temperament for teaching -- and I did not think I was trying to teach at the first. Within a few months I realized that I had taken on too big a task and acquired the responsibility of teaching. It was a cartoonish moment: maybe like Roadrunner suddenly looking down while zipping across thin air. I decided to shut down the blog.

Then I received a letter that said simply, "You opened doors for me" and which recounted the reader's deepened view of world affairs that had come from reading the blog.

After chewing it over, I realized that I was not applying my highly improvisational style to the situation of the blog. In a sense not being able to do something is quite liberating, for whatever one does from that moment on toward the situation, one has nothing to lose by trying in any which way.

In other words, if you're dead in the water anyway, might as well keep thrashing around. In earlier days that attitude got me through (and helped me get others through) some very dangerous situations in far-flung regions of the world.

With that, I decided that I should not "try" to teach and just write from the heart in my own way. So here I am today, answering a letter of thanks from a reader who discovered Pundita's blog in the summer, which might not have happened if I'd shut down the blog in the spring.

December 20
"Pundita! I was so sad when I realized I was right and you are leaving then today I started laughing when I read Another Kind of Beer. I could just see the situation for that woman because it was really my situation when I found your blog. I got completely freaked out by 9/11 then when I tried to understand it I got overwhelmed because it was all so foreign. So then I retreated into listening to Coast to Coast and trying to shut out the world. I mean, it was easier to worry about aliens and ghosts than to try to understand Palestine and the Shia and the Sunnis and all.

Then somebody called and said to read your blog. You were talking with wild animals about world issues. I thought, "That's better than aliens." That's why I thought up food presents for your team and when you published my letter I saw you played along. You made everything into an adventure, even research. Of course it isn't just an adventure but it's the attitude. You helped me get the right attitude to take in world news, in the same way you got that woman to see she was not lost in a strange land.

With love and best wishes for whatever you do in future,
No longer Sleepless but still in St. Louis

Dear No Longer Sleepless:
The rest of the team joins me in wishing you all best and we thank you for your many contributions to this blog. And many thanks from the rest of the Team for all the food goodies.

In trying to create a sense of adventure I took my inspiration from my Dad, who was a scientist, and also from George Gurdjieff's time of leading a small band of artists and intellectual out the Russian Revolution to safety in France.

My Dad taught me to look at science as a diagloue between humans and the larger natural world. It comes down to call and response; if you frame questions in a way that Nature can 'answer' by Yes or No, then you can string together the replies into sentences of a sort that the human brain can understand.

He taught me that scientists often get bogged down because they can't think of the right way to frame questions and so the idea is to keep improvising even when working blindfolded. Eventually, if you stick at it, you'll find a way to ask a question that brings illuminating results.

Mr Gurdjieff taught the same lesson to the Russians he rescued. His charges were clueless when they started out. They assumed the revolution would quiet down shortly and the world they knew would remain intact. I think I have mentioned before that the women set off on the journey in high heels, as if they were going to a picnic in the park.

That's the group he had to lead through chaos, warfare and human slaughter; one day the Red Army would be in control of the countryside and another day the White Army.

Gurdjieff knew that the safe, highly civilized world the intellectuals and artists inhabited was gone; meanwhile he had to turn the group into tough survivors while not breaking their spirit. He turned it into a grand adventure for them; he taught them to improvise when they had no idea of how to proceed. And he taught them patience.

Sometimes, as in the situation of the woman in the Beer story, all one can do is wait. But how you wait is important. It is your time, your life, so don't see the wait as a delay. You are never late for the events of your life. Everything that happens in your time is yours, your experience.

This continues my reply to Dymphna's letter, published earlier today.

After studying your blog layout I am quite certain that you look at the blog sidebar from the vantage point of being plugged into the blogosphere, which is quite distinct from blogging. For the edification of readers who are not bloggers:

The blogosphere is a creation of linking and specifically bloggers linking to each other's blogs -- both permanently (sidebar) or via links embedded in posts. The sphere of links is the basis of the ranking system used by EZ Bear to define the blogosphere ecosystem, even though many bloggers are not ranked in EZ Bear and thus, their links to a blog are not tracked by EZ Bear. You can see this by comparing links shown on Technorati with links shown on EZ Bear; not all the Technorati links show up on EZ Bear. And EZ Bear does not track links to blogs that are picked up by subscription websites.

(Technorati in turn does not record many links for reasons I've never understood; it might have something to do with software. And they too do not show links put up by subscription sites -- at least, not the subscription sites that have linked to my posts.)

Of course EZ Bear also tracks by daily readership number provided the blogger uses Site Meter tracking software. But it is entirely possible to receive a high ranking on EZ Bear even with a low daily readership, simply through the mechanism of permanent linking, which is why so many blogs have an extensive blogroll.

Those who value the sense of community the blogosphere affords, or who blog primarily to promote themselves in some way (e.g., as a book author) take linking very seriously just because the ranking system attached to it helps give their blog publicity and thus, helps increase readership.

So they would be horrified (and some have expressed horror) at Pundita's attitude toward her blogroll. I would put up links then yank them a short while later. Then some names would return only to be yanked again. Once I yanked the entire blogroll.

Finally a loyal reader wrote that my constant fiddling with the blogroll was driving her crazy. I settled down a bit after that, then came another bout of fiddling. I eventually settled on nine permanent links. The tenth (Sumedh Mungee) I had up for a short while, then yanked, then restored only a few days ago after naming him for a 2005 Pundita Weblog Award.

The above suggests that I did not look at the sidebar from the vantage point of being a member of the blogosphere. I was looking at it as way to make a gift for my readers and anyone who came across the Pundita blog, against the time I would be leaving. But it was just an idea at first; over time I struggled with the gift in the manner of a novice cook who is making a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. There was a lot of improvisation and correction involved.

Excluding the link to Dave Schuler's The Glittering Eye blog (which is my symbolic thanks to the blogosphere), if you study the sidebar links as a whole, there are two snapshots: one of the Bush administration's view of the war and foreign policy issues. The other is a snapshot of views in:

> Asia (Simon World)
> Russia/Central Asia/Europe (Untimely Thoughts) and
> via Sudan Watch and other of Ingrid Jones's Africa blogs linked on Sudan Watch:

-- Africa
-- global development and aid issues
-- United Nations
-- global oil politics
-- environmental problems; e.g., water scarcity

In other words, Ingrid's Sudan Watch is not just about the Darfur crisis, or about Sudan or even Africa. It's a window on the developing world and related issues, all of which are important to US foreign policy.

This is not counting the link to John Batchelor's website, which daily has links to the best reports on important issues here and abroad, and which reviews books that deal with the full range of 21st century issues.

I wanted to find an all-Canada and Mexico blog, and also a south and central American blog or at least an all-Latin American blog. I hope to have the time to pursue that goal once I stop blogging. Those blogs would help complete the big picture.

Mungee's blog is also important because it helps round out the picture in India; it's also a window on ICT for people who are not in that field, which is profoundly shaping the modern era. It's also a window on rural development -- and something more:

Study the photograph at the top of the blog: A man in tribal clothes squatted in a verdant field, showing a child how to use a PDA. There it is, in one photograph: the early 21st century across the world. All the promise and challenge of this era are captured in the picture. You've heard of the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason? Well, this is the Age of Human Resources.

So that is my gift to people who return to Pundita's blog to root around in the archives or who come upon it for the first time. I found a few blogs that together convey our world in a way that's not readily apparent from the nightly news.

I have thought about adding a link category for bloggers I like and who are plugged into the blogosphere. I thought of calling it "American potluck" or somesuch. But after thinking over all the above, my heart tells me to leave well enough alone, at least for now.

Who knows? If I return to the blogosphere, I might do it in a right proper way -- comment section, trackback, participating in blogger carnivals, politicking to get into a Whizbang Awards, endlessly visiting other blogs and adding my comments in order to promote my blog, putting into practice the great marketing advice that Dan Riehl has given me, and writing many essays about other bloggers' essays.

Thank you again for writing to say goodbye, Dymphna. I will leave you with a cautionary observation and a traveler's tale; why the latter has come to mind while reading your 'personal' blog, I do not know. But I wrote "Another kind of beer" for you.

Note the caption at Sumedh Mungee's blog: "There is no box."

That's right; there is no box and there never was a box. There are just ways of thinking, and dialogue. Stop the dialogue; terrorize it into silence, and ways of thinking harden. This only means that the Genius informing every heart can't easily be heard -- but not boxed in, not gone away. It's always there as a whisper or a roar.

So that would be my answer to the question posed by Gates of Vienna:

"Does liberal humanism provide enough spiritual might to counter the Great Islamic Jihad? If not, then we have no arms to fight it with."

Neither liberal humanism nor Islam or Christianity or any religion or creed provides spiritual force. Spiritual force comes from the heart's ability to listen to the best within us.

Now about that traveler's tale....

One late night in the boonies in a Third World country an American woman showed up. She had been pushed to her limit by the rigors of travel in a land that was completely foreign to her. Then she couldn't get a room and was told she'd have to wait for hours to find out if one could be found. She broke into sobs and blurted that she wished she'd never made the journey.

I happened to be stting in what passed for the lobby and hearing all this. I slapped my hands on my knees, stood up and announced matter-of-factly, "I don't know about you but I'm going out for a beer."

The woman whirled to look at the stranger who spoke English. She choked through her sobs, "A beer? There's beer in this place?"

I grinned at her. "Want to come along?"

"Oh yes!" she cried in relief. "A beer! I would die for a beer right now!" She glanced at her suitcases.

"They'll be okay," I said.

I led her out into the night. A few minutes of walking through the dusty roads of the village. She asked my name and told me hers. As we walked she talked about why she had made the journey and how much she regretted it.

"I'm turning right around and going back to the US as soon as I get some sleep and find transportation."

I led her through the silent streets of the village bedded down for the night. She looked around eagerly and asked, "Where's the bar?"

I pointed ahead. On reaching the open countryside she stopped, looked around and said ruefully, "There is no bar, is there? No beer."

"The bar is right here," I smiled, and added, "Look up."

She looked up, then plunked down on the ground in awe and stared.

In that region there were no electric lights for many, many miles at night. We sat in silence watching the sky so close in the pristine air it seemed with small effort one could touch the heaven's starry tapestry.

Then we chatted about nothing in particular, as if we were sitting in a bar after work.

By the time we returned to the village a room had been found for her, but she knew by then that she could have bunked with me if no room materialized.

I saw her a few days later. "Still here, huh?"

She grinned. "Thanks for the company -- and the beer."

Dear Pundita:
I'm sorry you're shutting down your blog. Pundita Encore will be a good resource but I shall miss what I believe to be one of the superior blogs -- up there with Wretchard [Belmont Club] but in your own more wide-ranging style. Aside from content, the craft of your writing is excellent. I think you do some kind of writing for a living because it seems so fluid. When I found your blog -- can't remember how I stumbled upon it -- I grabbed our readers by the lapels and told them they must go there. No one else writes in your voice or with your breadth.

I thought your Blog Awards observations were spot on. When the Baron and I went to look at them we realized we're in a little ghetto. I don't know most of those people. I did visit a few to see what I might be missing.

Since you are leaving the scene for a while, I'd like to ask a favor. Would you do a critique of Gates of Vienna and tell me why we didn't qualify for your blog roll? Are we too much in a ghetto? Too random? I'd be interested in your opinion, which I respect. And your perspective would be helpful.

I hope your leave-taking is a happy one, meaning you are just much too busy having a real life to bother blogging. I hope you are leaving your present blog up just to float in the ether.
Dymphna
Gates of Vienna blog"

Dear Dymphna:
Thank you for the praise and kind farewell. Analyzing your blog and explaining why I do not link to it on my sidebar are two different things. I have taken a liking to several blogs I have visited during the course of research but I rarely return to read them. But I will do the best I can toward answering your questions.

First, I've only visited your blog a handful of times; each time, I've come across an educational, well written report about some aspect of Islamic history/culture or an organization (Muslim or otherwise) in the US that is espousing values which pose a threat to American security.

These themes are in line with the Gates of Vienna (GOV) mission statement, as laid out in the essay titled The Newest Phase of a Very Old War:

The thesis of this blog is that, like it or not, we are in a religious war. We do not define the terms but we should take careful note of them. We are mistaken if we think the Enemy wants merely to kill us. Once again, Jihad offers two choices to the West: conversion or death.

However, I was struck by another GOV thesis, as stated in Part One of the series titled The Enemy Within:

...can this battle against the enemy within be fought without a religious regeneration in our own [American] culture? Does liberal humanism provide enough spiritual might to counter the Great Islamic Jihad? If not, then we have no arms to fight it with.

This thesis puts you and Baron Bodissey (GOV co-author) in general agreement with traditionalist Muslim clerics not to mention the fundamental teachings of al Qaeda's Ayman al Zawahiri. His target is much more secular government than Christianity. And he is very clearly against the nation-state.

Also, the secondary thesis tends to overwhelm the mission statement because it raises issues that transcend the war on terror and the struggle between Christianity and Islam. The issues reflect the tension between the rise of civilization and the existence of tribes.

The laws that form a nation-state are inimical to religious/tribal laws, which is why the ancient Greeks politely but inexorably kicked the Greek gods upstairs. Same happened in ancient India. It has happened everywhere that the nation-state is shown to be a more efficient model of human society than tribes.

The conundrum is that the state's diffusion and consequent weakening of religious/tribal values leads to a weakening of purpose. This makes the nation-state vulnerable to decay from within and attacks from without, as the ancient Athenians learned the hard way. It's a lesson that has been taught countless times in history.

By placing this theme in your blog you've invited a 10,000 pound gorilla to take up residence. It's a huge, huge theme, which is quite hard to integrate with GWOT and matters Islam because it overpowers them. It's the heart of many disputes connected with civilization.

This observation should not be seen as a criticism or a call to revise the GOV mission statement. Of course many blogs, including Pundita's, make forays into topics that are outside the confines of the blog's stated theme. In GOV's case in particular I would be reluctant to criticize forays because your very first letter to me mentioned that you had taken up blogging to help you through the difficult period following the death of your daughter. I note that you mentioned this again in your most recent correspondence.

I admire that as part of your blogging you do reporting that provides valuable information to the US war effort. Yet during this endeavor you listen carefully to your heart (of course mourning and the healing process have a way of prompting special attention to intuition). If close listening leads you to forays, that is simply the personality of Gates of Vienna.

I think what distinguishes newsy blogs from other media platforms is a very distinct personality, which always reveals byways of the heart and contradictions.

In short, I don't have a criticism of Gates of Vienna. What you might want to play around with is more clearly delineating the two themes so that new readers are quickly oriented, but here I am just thinking aloud.

As to whether I can criticize any of the handful of GOV essays I've read -- I take issue with the branding of today's enemy as a German Nazi and with analogies that call forth Nazi atrocities, such as the Kristallnacht atrocity. Such branding has snowballed during the past year on American news talk shows and numerous blogs and opinion websites.

Pundita has also been guilty of mental laziness in invoking the "Islamofascism" label as a matter of convenience, but not since I've noticed the tendency to cast the enemy as the Third Reich.

Earlier this year Pundita rumbled with some fans of Muslim Brotherhood who denied the Nazi roots of the organization. However, it is getting into dangerous waters to haul a peaceful US ally into analogies that miss the mark in the first place, and secondly stimulate prejudice against Germans. Both of which play into the hand of al Qaeda and the Syrian and Iranian regimes.

Pundita thinks Ahmadinejad has gone on a Holocaust denial kick to target Germany or to be more precise, Germany's new government. I think Maddy's handlers in Iran's military want to embarrass the German government and drive a wedge between Britain, Germany and France. Since the Merkel-led coalition has formed Tehran has watched the EU Three toughen and show more solidarity in their approach to negotiations with Iran about nukes.

In any case Maddy is not Hitler; correct me if my memory is wrong but I seem to recall the latter had virtually unqualified support from the German people after he consolidated power. Maddy is in power only because he's backed by Iran's military; at least 80 percent of Iran's populace wishes him gone along with his handlers.

Iran's regime is a military dictatorship, plain and simple, and which no longer finds use to Arab neighbors or the Israelis; this since the US toppled Saddam Hussein's government. So when Maddy floats the "We're all Muslims against the World" routine what he hears back is, "What you mean 'we' Kemosabe?"

Except from Bashy -- Bashar al-Assad -- of course, and he has made his name mud in the Arab world. Iran's military is in a pile of trouble at home and they know it; they are hanging on only because of oil receipts. But stand back and look at the big picture. For decades Iran's regime was petted and feted by West Europeans and Russians and tolerated by Americans; now they're hearing that they're the Third Reich.

If I recall the majority of Iran's people are under 30; it's because so were many wiped out by the war with Iraq -- a war that the West encouraged in order create stasis in the region.

What can the West do now? Keep the pressure on for democratic reform, don't let Iran's leaders change the subject by yammering about Israel, and turn off the theoretical bubble machine. No triangulation, no chessboard thinking. Demand to negotiate directly with Iran's military.

We should take our cue from a reform-minded Iranian cleric whose answer to Maddy's talk about the Mahdi's Second Coming was to the effect, "Yes yes but we also have to focus on the deficit and inflation."

They have to focus on a few other things as well, but so far Maddy has created uproars that distract attention from Tehran's seat on a slippery slope.

To be continued.

"After we pass this, we send it to the Senate. And I think that's the end of it."

Pundita thinks we should see something like another Boston Tea Party -- launched this time against the Democrat and Republican parties -- if the Senate doesn't at least vote for the limp-wristed security measures passed by the House.

However, the bill does not deal with the huge problem of remittances, which Pundita addressed at length earlier this year. (See Mexico essays on the sidebar.)

And of course legislation cannot substitute for strong action by the White House and State Department in dealing with the Mexican and Central American governments, which tacitly (and overtly) encourage immigration to the US in lieu of making reforms that bother the ruling class in those countries.

Border-security bill passes House but divides GOP
Mike Madden
Republic Washington Bureau
Gannett
Arizona Central newspaper online

"Dec. 17, 2005 12:00 AM WASHINGTON - The House passed a sweeping border enforcement bill Friday night that would make illegal presence in the United States a federal crime, order employers to verify their workers' legal status and build a fence across most of the Arizona-Mexico border.

The 239-182 vote split the Arizona delegation, underscoring the fractious politics behind the issue. More than half of the 1.2 million arrests made last year by the U.S. Border Patrol were in Arizona.

The vote also exposed broader disputes among House Republicans that could pose hurdles for any immigration-reform bill, despite widespread recognition that the current system no longer works.

Pressure from constituents to fix the law has mounted in the past few years as illegal immigration has soared to record levels, straining hospitals, schools, social services and police departments around the country.

GOP leaders pushed hard for the measure so that lawmakers could go home for a monthlong Christmas break and lay the groundwork for next year's elections by touting tough action to stop illegal immigration.

But the bill does not include a plan for temporary-work visas for any of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the United States, something President Bush has sought for two years and a step many Arizona lawmakers say is crucial. The White House supported the bill anyway but said the administration will keep pushing for broader legislation.

The Senate may support a guest-worker visa when it takes up the issue in February, setting up an election-year clash over the most extensive immigration reform in years.

Both of Arizona's Republican senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, have written immigration bills that allow guest workers, though they differ over how to design the program.

The House measure attracted only grudging support from many lawmakers.

Republicans were split. Conservatives who want to crack down harder on illegal immigration and businesses that employ undocumented workers complained that it didn't go far enough.

Moderates who favor a guest-worker plan were upset that the bill didn't include the plan. They predicted undocumented immigrants would stay in the United States to work illegally even under the new bill's terms.

'The end of it'
Opposition arose on both sides of the debate, even within the Republican majority. Arizona GOP Reps. J.D. Hayworth and Jim Kolbe, who rarely agree on any immigration question, both opposed the bill and voted against two procedural motions needed to advance it to a final vote. Hayworth voted against final passage, one of only 17 Republicans to oppose the bill.

Kolbe, who will retire after this term in office, skipped the vote on final passage. His office released a statement saying he had a prior commitment but would've voted against the bill.

"These people, having voted on enforcement only, are never going to touch it again," said Kolbe, who has co-sponsored a guest-worker proposal with Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., that mirrors McCain's proposal.

Kolbe said he fears the House will never act on it.

"After we pass this, we send it to the Senate. And I think that's the end of it," he said.

Meanwhile, Hayworth predicted the Senate will pass its own guest-worker program that the House eventually will take up instead of the bill passed Friday.

"In terms of truth in labeling, are we in fact engaged in enforcement first, or are we in fact engaged in enforcement maybe?" Hayworth asked.

Republican leaders tried hard not to alienate other conservatives, who said they would revolt against any guest-worker bill. Republicans met privately Thursday to hash out internal disagreements before holding the first of two procedural votes needed to move the bill toward passage.

Both narrowly passed, despite opposition from Hayworth and Kolbe.

Most Democrats voted against the bill, saying it was too harsh on immigrants and impossible to enforce.

Pulled between siding with Kolbe, his co-sponsor on the guest-worker program, and with Republican leaders, Flake voted for the bill but said he could have voted against it. He said he was counting on the Senate to pass a more comprehensive reform bill.

He said he voted for the second procedural motion only after asking for assurance from House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., that leadership wouldn't block the House from taking up a guest-worker bill next year.

"If the only way to move this forward is to give the Senate a flawed vehicle, then give it," Flake said.

Other Arizona lawmakers voted along party lines. The bill included a proposal by Rep. Rick Renzi to require Border Patrol uniforms to be made in the United States, easing security concerns raised by their production in Mexican factories.

Outside Congress, advocates for increasing legal immigration said they also hoped the Senate will pass a guest-worker plan and that the House bill will not become law. Business groups joined with labor unions and churches to oppose the House bill. Advocates for immigrant rights decried the legislation. The National Council of La Raza called it "appalling."

Mexico's ambassador to the United States, Carlos de Icaza, said the bill wouldn't fix immigration problems.

"Fences by themselves don't solve things, and not between neighbors," de Icaza said in an interview.

Conservatives called the measure a useful step toward getting control of the nation's borders, especially the 1,950-mile frontier with Mexico. The Federation for American Immigration Reform and other groups that seek reduced immigration agreed, urging supporters to call lawmakers all day Thursday and Friday to lobby for certain amendments."

Whereupon Pundita grouses to the Riehl World View blogger. (For an introduction to Dan Riehl's highly independent views about the blogosphere, read the Sigmund, Carl and Alfred interview.)

Subj: Bringing the US Department of State in line with today's world
Date: 12/17/05 5:28:10 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Pundita1
To: itsjustdan@comcast.net

Dan, this long essay, which ranges over several issues connected with State, is prefaced by a long letter from a loyal reader (cybersecurity expert Annlee Hines) ...
Pundita
* * * *
In a message dated 12/17/05 5:34:02 AM Eastern Standard Time, itsjustdan@comcast.net writes:

"what happened to your retirement???"
* * * *
Date: 12/17/05 5:36:22 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: Pundita1
To: itsjustdan@comcast.net

what are you doing up at this ungodly hour? I am going to sleep before I crash face forward onto the keyboard. will write tomorrow.
* * * *
Date: 12/17/05 6:10:53 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: itsjustdan@comcast.net
To: Pundita1@aol.com

"Pundita always says this. LOLOL nite"
* * * *
It's a forced retirement, Dan. In a few days I will have no choice but to leave the blogosphere and concentrate completely on personal matters. But after taking a short break about a month ago (or whenever I announced my long vacation) I decided to battle on as long as I possibly could, right down to the wire. Not a smart decision if you knew my circumstances, simply a tenacious one.

I want to show you something, so you understand the road ahead for the Bush democracy doctrine:

Do you remember the essay I sent you by the US vet about his adventures helping the stranded in New Orleans after Katrina? "The Deuce." My site meter showed that no sooner did you link to it than hundreds of your readers began showed up to read it, and it went on like that until I gave up trying to count. But over the course of a few days thousands read the essay. (I am very glad they did; it is a wonderful story.)

Now, I will tell you how many of your readers came calling today after you published a link to my essay about the US Department of State: As of 10:30 AM, two. One of them in Europe.

Yes, it's a Saturday, and it's still early, and this is a weekend when many people are doing Christmas shopping, so I'm sure there will be more readers from your site as the week wears on. And Pundita's blog, which probably sees fewer readers in a day than yours sees in an hour, will stay up after I leave, so a few thousand readers here and abroad will eventually read the essay and maybe a hundred of those will find the time to ponder about it.

However, a few thousand are not enough to turn the tide, you understand. What about John Batchelor's audience, which numbers I don't know but maybe as many as 10-20 million listeners a night? I can tell you this much: whatever knowledge his audience has gained about the doings at State, after listening four years to his show, it has not made a dent in the Democrat and Republican political machines. Not even the smallest dent.

In the end, US foreign policy will be set by battles between the most aggressive and ruthless partisans and lobbyists and by the machinations of civil servants at State. In short, about 50 people will shape how the US interacts with the world. And if it all falls down again, as it did on September 11, there will always be the US military to pick up the pieces.

I don't see all this as a cause for pessimism; one cannot fight to win because many times in the battle to inform and explain, all seems lost. One simply does what one can, and keeps doing it, until one can't battle longer. In this way, civilization lurches onward.

But I will tell you that at times I fall prey to a dark mood. This happened when I published the essay about State that I sent you early this morning. Before tumbling into bed I thought that I should be happy if only 100 people took the time to read the essay, which admittedly was overly long.

After crashing for a few hours I checked the site meter then glumly observed, "Bah. My fellow Americans would rather watch paint dry than read about State."

With a sigh I clicked to your site, to see your comment about the essay. At first I missed it. On the second scroll-through I found it, but could not believe my eyes at first. You'd published your comment under the title, Are you ready for some football? and the first sentence was clearly about football.

For a moment I sat there staring, then burst into laughter. I laughed until tears streamed down my face. If anyone can lead a horse to water, it's a smart marketing professional. (Are there any other kind but smart?) So the Pajamas Media people should listen carefully to your critiques and take notes because you know what you're talking about.

Yet not with all your smarts, Dan Riehl, not with all your smarts and marketing experience, can you squeeze out a higher percentage of interest among the American electorate about the doings at Foggy Bottom. But you sure gave it one hell of a try, which I find to be of great cheer.

Hi, Pundita:
Re: your post about de-Europeanizing the US Department of State. As always, I enjoyed your essay, and don't disagree with the premise. Being human, however, I can always quibble about something.

One thing I've noticed about people who grow up (individually) in cramped quarters: disagreements to them are win-lose. Those of us who grew up with a little more space around us (even though the city grew out to change that) tend to think more in terms of win-win.

Oddly, societies seem to operate in somewhat the same way, though the flavor is a little different. Europe, with its history of so many wars fought over the same dreadful ground, sees all contests between states as win-lose, while the US, with its history of taking our kit and going elsewhere, tends to be win-win. You can have your way here; I'll just go over there, and we won't bother each other -- we might even trade a bit eventually.

But those Americans most likely to be the doers rather than the arguers are those least likely to be attracted to the State Dept. Most societies are older than ours, and so generally those attracted to old societies will be the ones who want to deal with them. The doers of that group will want to deal with them for profit (business), the talkers will gravitate to a talking shop: State, the UN, etc.

As for a universal truth, I think that wonderful set of clauses [in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence] may be just that, though John Locke had to spell it out for us. I've come to the conclusion that he had to spell it out because those truths are not self-evident. (Though it made a lovely bit of framing the argument, eh?) Further, it is because they are not self-evident we must say them aloud, indeed proclaim them early and often and defend them every time, lest they be nibbled away like a stream bank when no one is looking.

Since those serving at State and desirous of serving in the UN, et al, are those among us least likely to live that truth, perhaps we need to make government service less of a career opportunity, even at the risk of introducing new forms of ineffeciency. After all, the inefficiencies which come with our present career service model (including tenure, by any other name as sweet) are most dissatisfying.
Annlee Hines

Dear Annlee:
You should know by now that Pundita loves quibbles, which have inspired many Pundita essays and helped me (and I hope, readers) clarify thinking on a matter. Which is to say that knowledge does not build if everyone is in perfect agreement. I appreciate your comments, which are always thought provoking. I disagree with you on some points in your letter and see in them a need to clarify some of my statements.

I agree that environment, including the amount of "space" one inhabits, is a factor in attitudes about how far to carry a disagreement. However, my call to wrest the State Department away from Eurocentrism is grounded less in what the Europeans are like and more in what official Washington and the American public are like.

It is pulling teeth with an elf's tweezer to get the majority of Americans to think with any depth about global matters and thus, it's easy for State to operate outside the spotlight of the American public's scrutiny. This situation won't change markedly because America is a vast nation, Americans are such terribly busy people, and many matters of diplomacy are best carried out without the constant glare of media attention.

The other side is that because of America's superpower status, American foreign policy should not drift under the influence of foreign regional concerns and the increasingly globalized interests of American big business.

The latter reflects the viewpoint that characterized the foreign relations of the European colonial powers. Such attitudes are not necessarily the best for America's defense and the regions of no great interest to the business powers. Yet if 9/11 has taught anything, it is that no world region is unimportant in this era.

For this reason American foreign relations need to be brought closely in line with the only rational definition of foreign policy, which is to directly support the defense of a nation.

Toward this end, the US government must not fall in love with any one world region, bloc, alliance or other nation -- no matter how valuable they might be to US strategic resources and business interests. This is on the theory that the backlash from an oppressed, isolated, ignored or especially favored region can wipe out whatever security the US gains from focusing on a particular resource or region at the expense of others.

Yet during the waning years of the Cold War and running into the post-Soviet era the US Department of State was dominated by factions that were hyperfocused on Eastern Europe/Russia. The American public had only the haziest notion of how the post-Soviet era in those regions was shaking out and so was unaware that the Cold War did not stop with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, a few other things were going on in the world, as Americans learned on 9/11 and again, when France and Germany rose up in 2002 at the UN to tell America to go sit on a tack. And again as it dawned that Beijing had not sat on their hands with the power accorded them by the big Western trading nations. This was a power considered by the NATO allies to be a 'necessary evil' to offset Soviet expansion, and which continued unexamined by the State Department after the Soviet Union dissolved.

So I take issue with your implication that State is a talker and not a doer. If only State had confined themselves to talk! The problem for the American people and the world at large is that throughout the Clinton years, State continued as a big doer.

By the end of the Cold War State had gathered tremendous power; I believe they got more power than the Congress and White House to set and direct foreign policy. During the Clinton era no small part of the power was placed under the control of George Soros and the Marc Rich crowd, US corporations wanting to cash in on the breakup of the Soviet Union, and congressionals who listened to lobbyists here and abroad who didn't want to stop with 'winning' the Cold War; they wanted to take control of Russia's government and destroy any possibility of the Soviet Union rising again.

By the end of Clinton's presidency State was virtually running the Central Intelligence Agency and controlling the Pentagon's agenda. And it's not much of an exaggeration to say that State was by then run from a post box in Brussels; i.e., they fell in line with the foreign policy of the European Union. This policy was in turn (and still is) influenced by the 'Chirac School' of multilateralism, which is a thinly disguised rationale for allowing trade to dominate all other issues.

One cannot blame all this on America's foreign office, and one certainly can't blame it on the European Union. During the Clinton era State acted behind the screen of public inattention, which reflected the US media's hyperfocus on domestic issues and battles between the US political left and right.

Nor can State's power be tracked solely to the Cold War and the US determination to retain the NATO alliance after the Cold War ended. The power State accrued over decades was an inevitable consequence of the inbuilt tension between the congressional and presidential branches of US government.

The tension serves the checks and balances in the US Constitution in that it acts as a corrective measure when one branch becomes too powerful. The downside is that the constant jockeying for power between two elected branches of government gives power to a civil service agency. This is because a bureaucracy is buffered against the revolving door of political appointments and attendant shifts in political winds.

People who understand this warned passionate supporters of the Bush doctrine not to pin great hope on Condoleezza Rice's appointment to State, particularly during the first years. The Secretary of State does not run Foggy Bottom. Those whose entry into the State Department is through presidential appointment, or who come to State hand-picked by appointees, must find ways to negotiate with powerful civil servants they know can outlast a term of political appointment.

Generations of those civil servants at State were trained to give the highest priority to NATO aims, which meant little adjustment in thinking when the focus went to chipping away at Moscow's hold on the waning Soviet empire. The Bush doctrine, while retaining lip service to NATO, represents a completely new day for US foreign policy -- and a very dangerous, untested one, in the view of State's most powerful chiefs.

What happens, they ask, when Bush leaves the presidency and Rumsfeld leaves Defense? The United States of America could be out there bouncing on the limb of democracy yappity-yap and with no safety net provided by our oldest and most powerful allies.

These civil servants see themselves as the tiller on the ship of state, which in a democracy is buffeted by the winds of politics. They are there to keep America's foreign policy on a steady course through the storms of change wrought by political winds. They provide the continuity that democratic politics does not necessarily allow.

Is their view of their function right or wrong? There is no easy answer, until you stop and think it through very carefully. Let's begin with the obvious questions. Do we really want our foreign office to act as a pioneer? To always place integrity above the exigencies of dealing with a flashpoint situation? Do we want them to march in lockstep with the latest power shift in Congress and presidential election?

From the other side, is the US foreign office supposed to set US foreign policy and shield the decisions from control by the Congress and White House?

That's a question the Founding Fathers didn't think about because at the time the US Constitution was framed, the Union was not the world's lone superpower nation in a world of many governments and alliances with global power. But we can feel our way to the answer because the Founders designated three and not four branches of US government. This was alluded to during a recent debate on PBS NewsHour. An ex-State official fumed that State was being shut out of a place at the table by the Bush administration when it came to decisions on Iraq.

The other guy stared at the official in quiet amazement then said something like, "State is a bureaucracy. They don't get a seat at the table."

Britain's foreign office does function as a virtually autonomous branch of government. But in our version of democracy our laws do not allow for a fourth branch of government.

This brings me to another disagreement with your statements. I am in great sympathy with the position of America's foreign service workers. Whether they serve in diplomatic missions or at Foggy Bottom, they are at the mercy of political appointees who often can't find their country appointment on a map and whose knowledge of diplomatic matters would not fit on the head of a pin.

Time and again, these appointees have wrecked months and even years of delicate negotiations through sheer ignorance or the desire to carry through a political party's agenda at the expense of sane actions. But I am reminded of the punchline in Under Siege, when the ex-Navy Seal tells the disgruntled ex-CIA operative that if you don't like taking insane orders, don't sign up.

The State Department is not the guardian of the American nation. It is not the tiller of the ship of state. That function falls to the American people as a whole and elected representatives to the Congress and White House. State is there to carry out orders by elected officials. If they don't like them apples, find another place to work.

That does not mean America's foreign service workers do not have a legitimate beef. One cannot put competent workers in the position of receiving dangerously inept orders from idiots and expect them to be cooperative. We saw this in starkest terms during the Viet Nam war, when reportedly US soldiers sometimes replied to clearly insane orders by shooting the idiot who issued them.

Certainly, State's vast bureaucracy, which I sent up in The US Department of Pack Rat, needs pruning and refurbishing for the post-Soviet era. However, I don't think less is more in this case. America is a superpower nation in an incredibly complex world of many competing powers; we need the best diplomats (and foreign office) that US tax money can afford, not "less." We need a meritocracy at State, one that does not pass over intelligent, experienced and very dedicated workers in favor of a 'political' promotion.

Foreign service employees posted abroad often work under very dangerous and difficult conditions and are always looked upon as spies by the host government. Despite this, they do not garner respect and gratitude in the American society in the way that police do. Bureaucrats are not held in high esteem in America and the foreign service is no exception. The American public needs to become more aware of the contributions of the best field workers yet at the same time they can't just because those workers are placed in more danger by the spotlight of public attention.

Also, we need to give our foreign service workers protection against Americans who are handed power and diplomatic posts simply as a plum because they wrote out big donation checks to a political candidate and did big fundraising. The American public needs to realize that such plums are very counterproductive and even very dangerous in this era.

A good analogy is Michael Brown's appointment to head FEMA. During a settled weather pattern, it didn't matter so much that FEMA was run by someone whose greatest expertise seemed to be showing Arabian horses. Then came the perfect storm.

There many storms during this very unsettled era. Gone are the Kabuki-like days of Cold War diplomacy, when moves by other governments were so predictable that an American with no foreign service experience and not even speaking the language could be expected to hold down a diplomatic post. The 9/11 attack was the perfect storm in US foreign policy circles. Congressional attention to the needs of our foreign service has not reflected this because such discussion boils down to pay scale hikes and more money spent on training. Yet at the least we need to move past the era when being a great friend to a political campaign is the sole criterion for determining competency to run a diplomatic mission.

Let the friends sleep in The Lincoln Bedroom or run the White House Easter Egg Roll. Give them any kind of plum except the work of US diplomacy.

I also take issue with your statement "Americans most likely to be the doers rather than the arguers are those least likely to be attracted to the State Department."

We desperately need the best arguers we can find. Arguing skillfully about highly abstract concepts that underpin different types of government is very much a "doer" occupation, and one that has been tragically neglected on American shores, which carries over to US diplomatic missions.

Yet I will grant that the sentiment you express about talkers and doers is a hallmark of American thinking. Thus, in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand took a thousand pages to bash home the point that despots such as Josef Stalin did not think up Communism and its rationale; that was done by philosophers who were quite distant from the clock-punching workaday world of "doers."

The view among many Americans is that to see American success is to love democracy and capitalism. So if we just keep doing our thing, eventually everyone will see its value. Tell that to someone who lives in a country taken over by transnational dope-selling gangs that are models of free market enterprise after they've murdered all dissenters in the government.

Tell that to a country taken over by a cadre of foreign investors and bankers practicing free market economics, cranking out pro-democracy tracts and stage-managing "democratic" elections while taking zero interest in the welfare of the populace.

The Bush democracy doctrine is not a real doctrine in the sense of a developed philosophy of foreign relations. It is an outline of ideas, which must run the gauntlet of many thoughtful, subtle and shrewd disputes if it's to outlast Bush's presidency. America's foreign service workers are on the front line of the disputes, which means they need to hunker down to serious talking -- and keep talking outside the narrow channels of diplomacy.

In the bars of Calcutta, the coffee houses of Cairo, the shopping malls of Shanghai, they must talk and talk and talk. They must learn to talk skillfully, intelligently, and thoughtfully when challenged by arguments that elevate profit motive, national security, internal social order, and religious law above democracy.

Before talk must come hard thinking. Months ago I warned a reader that America is facing the fight of our lives. The battlefield is ideas. I say with a smile that you have already made that point, and eloquently, so I will close with repeating your own words:

...it is because [the truths stated in the Preamble] are not self-evident we must say them aloud, indeed proclaim them early and often and defend them every time, lest they be nibbled away like a stream bank when no one is looking.

More of my December 3 correspondence with Peter Lavelle, UPI Senior Analyst and whose blog, Untimely Thoughts, won a 2005 Pundita Weblog Award. The first part of our discussion revolved around Russia's telecom scandal and the Kremlin's nationalization push.

Peter's side of the exchange is shown in quotes. See this Pundita post if you need to refresh your memory about the weapons agreement under discussion

Peter,
I note from a Reuters report that Russia's export agency claims to have no record of the SAMs sale agreement to Iran. Washington is seriously bent out of shape about the reported agreement. However, an unnamed diplomat said the deal made no sense. From various Russia news services, it seems there was indeed a deal. But why would Putin allow such a sale -- or does he have no control over it?

"Pundita,
See this part of my weekly panel discussion with experts on Russia.(1) The panel doesn't directly answer your question but explains Russia's engagement of Iran and other "rogue states."

Okay; I have read the discussion at the link you sent me. Isn't Putin's position contradicting his 'state of the union' speech, in which he was clearly inspired by Bush's democracy doctrine?(2) Wasn't he speaking of Russia as becoming the "civilizing" influence in Central Asia and helping to lead the entire region to more liberal values?

I read an analysis of the speech (published on your site) that very nearly brought tears to my eyes. Was all that hot air? Wishful thinking on the part of the analyst? If not, there seems to be a contradiction between Putin's stated vision and what he's doing. Or not?

"Not at all. To have a liberal society, each state needs security from both domestic and foreign threats. There is an unstated myth in Western media - the Kremlin controls the "stans" - that is simply wrong. Russia's influence is very limited. What the Kremlin fears is the possibility of an Islamic republic coming to power on its ex-Soviet border. The Kremlin will accept just about anything from the old Soviet establishment to avoid this. The Kremlin's foreign policy regarding its southern flank is defensive in the extreme - it is playing the role of a fireman fearing the worst."

Interesting. So why agree to sell SAMs to Iran and moreover agree to help them modernize their air force across the board? Is the Kremlin being blackmailed by Tehran thugs in league with al Qaeda and Chechen hard-liners? See, it doesn't stack -- the reported missile deal and what you've written, which makes good sense.

"[...] SAMs are a defensive system by very definition."

Ah, but modernizing Iran's air force cuts both ways.

"Look, the US has lost the war in Iraq - everybody knows this. Iran isn't taking any chances the Bush "lie machine" won't target Iran next to cover its tracks. Iran is acting rationally. (I don't like the Iranian regime.) We have seen the same kind of US pressure against Syria lately. Again, Iran is acting defensively."

The contract was reportedly signed before the Kremlin lost patience with Tehran, so we'll see what happens next. A nuke-armed Iran is not in Russia's best interest, so my hope is that Putin will find a way to scotch or at least suspend the contract -- use it maybe as a carrot to encourage Iran's regime to give up nuke weapon development.

Wars are not won or lost before they're over. If any war drags on longer than a year, it settles down to each side trying to take advantage of the other's mistakes.
* * * * * * *
The close reader will note that Peter's last reply attempts to switch the ground of discussion by attacking Bush's prosecution of the war. My impression is that Peter's response reflects how the Kremlin (and I assume the Russian military) tries to gloss the inherent contradiction in their approach to Iran.

The last thing the Kremlin needs in their region is a nuke-armed despotic regime under pressure from the most radical Islamist elements. The problem for Russia is that at this point they can't depend on backup from the European Union or China, if they take a hard stand about Iran's nuclear weapons program.

To say Russia could depend on backup from the United States -- since when? The State Department has very recently softened their harsh rhetoric toward Russia, but that is no assurance the US wouldn't leave Russia bouncing on a limb. The US government does not yet speak with one voice on the US approach to Tehran.

At the risk of repeating myself endlessly, if we want more cooperation from Russia on the issue of Iran (and Syria), we first need to get very clear on how the US should approach Iran then seek greater cooperation from Brussels and Beijing.

1)
http://russiaprofile.org/experts_panel/
article.wbp?article-id=338E06A9-ABFE-
4C2D-8B3B-DECEA602AEE7

2) President Putin's remarks in his 2005 "speech to the nation" sketch an ambitious vision that is easily picked apart and compared with the record. However, several of his statements reveal a determination to move Russia toward the lofty goals outlined in Bush's democracy doctrine. Putin set the bar high, which invites close scrutiny and criticism of his record during the rest of his term. That, in itself, is a credit to his thinking.

Here are the parts of the speech that especially impressed me and touched off my questions to Peter Lavelle about the troubling contradiction I noted in the Kremlin's approach to Iran's despotic regime:

April 25, 2005
The Kremlin, Moscow
The Russian President's Annual Address to the Federal Assembly

"...Russia should continue its civilising mission on the Eurasian continent. This mission consists in ensuring that democratic values, combined with national interests, enrich and strengthen our historic community.

"...the terrible lessons of the past also define imperatives for the present. And Russia, bound to the former Soviet republics – now independent countries – through a common history, and through the Russian language and the great culture that we share, cannot stay away from the common desire for freedom.

"Today, with independent countries now formed and developing in the post-Soviet area, we want to work together to correspond to humanistic values, open up broad possibilities for personal and collective success, achieve for ourselves the standards of civilisation we have worked hard for – standards that would emerge as a result of common economic, humanitarian and legal space."

Too many false starts for Pundita to jump for joy but the statement out of Brussels is progress, of sorts. We'll see how much solidarity the leaders maintain when they have to decide just exactly how long the "window of opportunity" will remain open for Iran.

Thu Dec 15, 2005
Reuters UK
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders were set to condemn Iran's president for denying the Holocaust and warn Tehran the opportunity for a diplomatic solution to its nuclear programme cannot stay open forever, diplomats said on Thursday.

A summit statement drafted by EU foreign ministers said of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement that the Nazi mass extermination of Jews was a myth: "These comments are wholly unacceptable and have no place in civilised political debate."

It also voiced grave concern at Iran's failure to remove suspicions about its nuclear intentions and said: "The window of opportunity will not remain open indefinitely." [...]

December 14, 11:20 PM Pundita email to correspondent:

"Dun dun dun DUN dun dun dun DUN! Bashy dissed King Notdullah! Go get him, Sire! (Listening to Seffy) Ooof thud just fell off chair laughing"

For those who have not followed Pundita's blog since early days (and the John Batchelor show), Bashy is my name for Bashar al-Assad; King Notdullah is my name for Saudi King Abdullah; and Seffy is Yossef Bodansky, who frequently reports to John Batchelor's audience about GWOT. Right now Seffy is focusing on Assad's attempts to hang on to his power.

Assad can thumb his nose all he wants at the UN Security Council but he has made a serious mistake by insulting a very sharp (not dull) ruler who is about twice his age. Saudi King Abdullah tried to give Assad a face-saving out (for Arab solidaity and all that) and Assad threw it back in his face. You don't diss old kings in that part of the world if you're a whippersnapper.

I almost feel sorry for people whose idea of following the war is limited to finding as many bricks as possible to hurl at the US effort in Iraq. They are missing out on the ground floor of a new world era. And they are now so far behind the curve of events, they can't hope to make sense out of the war.

As to the Gold Dinar Fairy, I hotly dispute that she's a figment of my imagination although I've never actually seen her. She's sort of an Arab version of Tinkerbell and the Tooth Fairy rolled into one. Translation: Money talks, nobody walks.

So we'll see whose checking account is bigger: House of Saud or Iran's regime. As for Assad's banking account, I suspect he's transferring what funds he has left to Switzerland but Tehran's oil bankroll is still keeping Assad's regime afloat.

Okay; Pundita will settle down now. I'm giddy because of election day in Iraq. Three cheers for the Iraqi voters and the Coalition and Iraqi troops! Remember all the talk in 2002, 2003 about Arabs not being capable of self rule? Take this, you trash talking -- tsk! tsk! be gracious in victory, Pundita. From the the Scotsman (UK):

Strong turnout in Iraq elections
Iraqis have voted in a historic parliamentary election, with strong turnout reported in Sunni Arab areas that had shunned balloting last January [...] Several explosions rocked Baghdad as the polls opened [...] But violence overall was light and did not appear to discourage Iraqis, some of whom turned out wrapped in their country's flag on a bright, sunny day [...]

A big thanks to Riehl World View and The Steel Deal for catching this United Press International story:

NOVOSIBIRSK, Russia, (UPI) -- December 14 -- Russia's president said Wednesday he wants foreign banks "essentially banned" from his country, Itar-Tass reported. [...]

"This is connected not only with competition, including the impossibility to trace the movement of money and capital in the modern world," said Putin. "This is connected among other things with the need to fight terrorism. We must not forget this. And this is connected with the need to fight money laundering."[...]

Readers who have been with Pundita since the early days know that I warned almost a year ago that this sort of move was coming once the Kremlin wrestled control of Russia's oil away from Russia's oligarchs.

Is Putin serious about severely limiting foreign banking in Russia? Well, I think he's very serious about getting more cooperation from US, West European and Israeli banks in coughing up billions in owed back taxes that Russian oligarchs have stashed in those banks. I also think he's sending a clear message to Russia's business community that the Rape of Russia is over.

While the Russian oligarchs ran the show they sure didn't do their big banking at Russian banks; they banked the big profits at US, Israeli and West European banks. So not only did the oligarchs rob the Russian taxpayers and government blind, they did not put enough Russian oil profits into the Russian banking system and thus into the Russian economy to help it stay solvent. Sort of like beating up someone after robbing him.

That's not even speaking to Israeli banks refusing to cooperate with the Russian government's attempts to get back the billions in back taxes owed to Russia that oligarchs and Russian mobsters bunkered in Israel stashed there.

11:00 AM Update
See Putin the Clever vs Mordor: the war moves to the banking sector for my analysis of Putin's latest move in what I only half-jokingly referred to earlier this year as "World War V." Thanks again to Riehl World View and Steel Deal for catching the UPI article!

This will give the US contingent of the Get Putin gang something to think about -- even if Evans does not accept the position:

Analysis: Evans and Russia's oil patch
By Peter Lavelle

"MOSCOW, Dec. 13 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans, who is a close friend of U.S. President Bush, is reported to have been offered the job of chairman of the Russian state oil company Rosneft ahead of its initial public offering next year. Bringing Evans on board may help improve the oil giant's damaged reputation in the wake of the Yukos affair, but is it enough for investors?

The Russian business daily Kommersant Tuesday reported Evans met with several top Russian officials during a trip to Moscow last week, and with President Vladimir Putin on Dec. 7. The daily says Putin offered Evans the post of head of Rosneft's board of directors. At the time of writing, neither the company nor Evans commented on the report.

If the news is confirmed and Evans takes up the post, his duties would apparently include improving Rosneft's attractiveness to the Western investment community and to potential shareholders. This will not be an easy task."

December 2
Hullo, Peter!
Greetings from America! I hope all is well with you. Pundita has been ranting again against the Get Putin crowd. I dragged one of your UPI articles into it (Kremlin eyes metals sector), so I thought you'd like to see the post, titled "Applying the lessons they learned from Marc Rich, they bankrupted Russia". John Batchelor invited Gary Kasparov onto his show the other night to rant and rave, which put me in a ranting mood.

Also, would you care to comment at your Untimely Thoughts blog about today's WSJ piece on the money-laundering scandal involving Leonid Reiman? [See end of this post] Thanks!
Pundita"

December 3
"Pundita,
Greetings from Moscow! It is good to hear from you. Your comments on the metal industry and other items reminds me how I can be easily misunderstood. Most of the time I try to explain what is happening in Russia without taking a side. On the metals story: it is a "strategic sector" and Putin has made it clear that the state [will be] front and center.

Personally, I have mixed thoughts about this. However, my thesis was that the state is willing to buy out Russia's oligarchs -- not steal from them like in the case of Yukos.

On the Leonid Reiman story, I wrote on it over a year ago.[1] This guy is as guilty as sin but it appears he has done a pretty good job of covering his tracks. As long as he can keep any legal action within the Russian court system, nothing will happen to him.
Peter Lavelle"

Peter:
Perhaps I did not make my point clear, then, because that is exactly what I understood you to mean. Please see if I have it correctly: (from a heated exchange with a correspondent):

"The Wall Street Journal crowd is not interested in a security zone. They fear that the Kremlin's solution -- the state buying back control of key industries while allowing a certain percentage of foreign investors -- will catch on with other countries. Right now the WSJs are hysterical because they see that the Kremlin isn't stopping with oil and gas; now they're getting set to buy back control of the metals sector.

I bemoaned the conundrum but I think Putin & Co. have hit upon what they hope is the way Russia can avoid a stagnant economy while at the same time protecting against foreign takeover via control of key resources.

Von Hayek would argue that in the long run the patchwork solution can't work. And of course the solution is aleady in effect in Arab oil kingdoms; foreign interests own a stake in the oil companies. But the Russians are not the Arabs.

Russians such as Kasparov are playing back to Americans what Americans want to hear: that Russia is ready at this time to have a government that reflects the American idea of democratic government. I think Putin's view is that before there is a rule of law as Americans envision it, there must first be a nation; i.e., a general agreement on which governing body makes the major decisions: clan bosses or a central government."

Well, Peter, am I in the ballpark? If so (or if not) please advise.

I would be interested in reading your article on Rieman. My specific interest in asking for your comment was about whether you think Reiman's close association with Putin makes a mockery of Putin's attempts to wrest power away from the most crooked oligarchs.

I guess what I'm asking is whether Reiman covered his tracks well enough to fool Putin (hard to imagine) and in any case, now that the cat is out of the bag, will Putin ditch him?

Thanks if you can find the time to give some sort of reply. Frankly, I am deeply suspicious of the timing of the Reiman investigations. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I don't think the American government has taken it lying down that they haven't yet been able to install a puppet government in Moscow. In other words, I think the Get Putin crowd are still working overtime to tar Putin.

Maybe Putin deserves a black eye in this instance but I noticed that the WSJ said nothing about Mikhail Fridman's oil interests -- assuming he still has them.

"Pundita:
I certainly don't disagree with you; we are on the same page. Of the course the WJSniki are upset -- they can only get a minority stake in companies that can produce enormous profits, but controlled by the majority share holder (the Russian state) that will not always -- if ever -- focus exclusively on the bottom line.

From a purist liberal market position -- which doesn't exist in reality -- what Putin is doing has considerable downside. Gazprom-Rosneft (what will become "Kremlin-nickel") will have a tendency to crowd out the normal development of a modern economy. That said, if the government is conscious of this problem -- and many are in government -- then a political decision has to be made to ensure the the "crowding out" factor is taken into account.

The record of "national resource champions" is mixed. Norway has gotten it right, will Russia get it right? We'll see. The WSJniki have a point, but they don't understand Russian politics and the country's continuing economic transition.

However, protecting defined "strategic resources" is all well and fine, but last week the state became the majority owner of Russia's largest carmaker AvtoVAZ. Car manufacturing is not a "strategic sector" in Russia by any definition.

On the Leonid Reiman story, you are following the wrong trail. It is the Alfa Group -- Megafon's competitor -- pushing this story. The Alfa Group has seriously important connections in the US, especially media. So I would back away from the political slant and stick with what it is almost always about: MONEY!
Peter"

[Correspondence continued in tomorrow's post]

1)
Analysis: Russia's 'Telecom-gate
By Peter Lavelle
MOSCOW, Nov. 15, 2004 (UPI) -- Russia's Telecommunications Minister Leonid
Reiman, alleged to have taken a $1 million payment in the early 1990s, is at the center of growing scandal that stands to tarnish and undermine Vladimir Putin's claim that fighting state corruption is an important part of his agenda.

The politics of Russia's telecommunications industry has always been fraught
with charges of favoritism, shady deals and the reality of opaque company ownership structures. Telecommunications Minister Leonid Reiman, since the inception of the Russia's first digital telecoms network in the early 1990s, has been at the center of the industry's development. He is now the focus of a scandal questioning his use of office for personal gain. The potential fallout surrounding the allegations against Reiman could significantly affect Russia's fast growing and very lucrative telecoms industry as well as test Putin's demand that government officials conduct themselves in the same transparent fashion as the business community.

At the end of last month in the British Virgin Islands court, an affidavit was signed by a former Reiman business associate claiming that the then up and coming Leningrad communications official accepted a $1 million payment to "arrange" the establishment of Russia first digital telecoms network. The affidavit, signed by telecoms entrepreneur Anthony Georgiou but only made public last week, states he invested $2 million -- half going to Reiman -- to create the telecom company Peterstar.

The fact that Reiman is alleged to have accepted the payment, while a government official, is not a particularly damaging charge. Considering how businesses were created and run in the 1990s, cash payments to officialdom to grease the works were the norm. For the $1 million payment, Georgiou claims that Reiman secured the 16 ministerial signatures needed to establish Peterstar - a no small feat at the time.

According to court testimony, all state officials involved in setting up Peterstar signed recipients for payments received.

At stake now is how Peterstar, undergoing a number of mutations, has become a major player in Russia's very competitive telecom industry with Reiman as the government official overseeing it.

Peterstar went on to merge with telecom North West GSM, St. Petersburg's largest mobile phone operator, and Sonic Duo -- holding the prized GSM mobile license for Moscow. Collectively, these companies now form Russia's third-largest telecom operator known as Megafon. Reiman has repeatedly claimed that he has no personal interest in Megafon.

In the same BVI court proceedings, Danish lawyer Jeffery Galmond -- believed to have been involved in the development of Russia telecom industry -- said Reiman was the primary beneficiary of a trust indirectly holding shares in Megafon until last year. But Galmond is on the record saying Reiman had not been paid any cash for his financial interest in Megafon.

Doubts concerning Reiman's personal involvement in Megafon have been raised
virtually as many times he publicly states otherwise. In August 2001, Reiman's ministry suddenly awarded valuable mobile operator licenses to Sonic Duo without holding a public tender. Russia's two other telecom giants, Vimpelcom and MTS, called foul pay.

A month before, in what was called the "frequency scandal," Reiman suddenly
re-allocated frequencies favoring Megafon. Only after the personal intervention of then-Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, was Reiman forced to reverse the reallocation.

Then the plot thickened. Who owns what? Who has the right to own what? All of this would be a non-story if the actually ownership of Megafon had not been called into question. The legal proceedings in the BVI were started after Russia's huge industrial and financial group, as well as major telecom player, Alfa Group defended its claim that it owns a 25.1 percent stake in Megafon, purchased from the financial boutique LV Finance for an unclosed amount in 2003.

Another Russian company, IPOC, contests the Alfa Group's claim of legal ownership in Megafon. IPOC directly owns 6.5 percent and 31.3 percent indirectly though still another legal entity called Telecominvest claims LV Finance violated its first right of refusal to purchase shares in Megafon.

As Megafon's ownership structure is debated and most likely decided upon in distant BVI, the political fallout from the court proceedings could not be more embarrassing for Putin's Kremlin. Since assuming office, Putin has used Russia's reinvigorated and empowered state bureaucracy to bring to heel Russia's small clan of super-rich "oligarchs" -- limiting their political power and economic influence. The state under Putin is supposed to protect the Russian economy from unscrupulous business people, not encourage opaque business activities of state officials.

Leonid Reiman is also widely seen to be close to Putin. When Putin ordered a
significant downsizing of government ministries immediately after reelection in May, Reiman lost his job at the Telecom Ministry. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, Putin reversed himself - something he rarely does - and rescinded the government shakeup. The only revision of the original shakeup plan was to return Reiman to his telecom portfolio.

How Putin reacts to "Telecom-gate" will be an indication of whether he accepts double standards among his own inner circle and whether his demand for a fair playing field in the world of business is only rhetoric.
* * * *
Close Putin Ally Implicated in Probe Into Laundering
By David Crawford, Glenn R. Simpson & Gregory White
from The Wall Street Journal
Posted December 02, 2005
A money-laundering scandal that started in Germany has spread to other countries and now implicates a top Russian official who is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, say law-enforcement officials with knowledge of the situation. In letters to counterparts in other Western countries, prosecutors in Frankfurt have named Russia's telecommunications minister, Leonid Reiman, as a central figure in a German criminal probe. Using financial records, the prosecutors lay out what they suspect was an elaborate scheme to milk Russian state-owned telecom companies for cash or divert their assets.

In their letters, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the prosecutors say they suspect Mr. Reiman "illegally enriched himself through a series of transactions," and then set up a network of shell companies and trusts to secure and conceal more than $1 billion in assets. The German investigation has spawned parallel inquiries in the U.S., Cyprus and Switzerland.

The corruption allegations are among the most serious ever against a sitting Russian minister. President Putin has worked closely with Mr. Reiman for more than a decade, from the days when the Russian president was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and Mr. Reiman was executive of a state telecom company. Some of the transactions under investigation date from around that same time.

The investigation has already had repercussions. The German inquiry has led to the resignation of a Commerzbank AG board member. Four other current and former officials of the big German bank are also suspected of money laundering, including Chief Executive Klaus-Peter Muller, whose home and office were searched by German police in August, according to a Commerzbank spokesman. And the investigation has spread to the New York offices of Barclays PLC and other Western banks, according to law-enforcement officials familiar with the inquiries.

Mr. Reiman, who declined to comment for this article, has continually maintained that he did nothing wrong. He says the allegations against him, which came to light as part of a bitter Russian business dispute, are a pressure tactic by billionaire Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group to fend off a rival claim by Jeffrey Galmond, a longtime associate of Mr. Reiman, to a disputed stake in mobile-phone operator OAO Megafon.

The allegations stemming from the Megafon case rely in part on the testimony of a former Galmond employee who is a convicted felon, and Anthony Georgiou, a former business partner of Mr. Reiman's who has since fallen out with him. Both men, who have given sworn testimony in the civil case, have acknowledged in court that they have agreements to receive compensation from Alfa Group or its allies.

Even so, their testimony is consistent with voluminous financial records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The records show a series of large transfers, totaling tens of millions of dollars, moving assets of Russian telecom ventures to shell companies based in Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and other tax havens.

Much of the funds then flowed via the New York office of Barclays to a mutual fund based in Hamilton, Bermuda, which Mr. Galmond says he owns. The former Galmond employee in the Megafon case alleged that the tangled structure was designed to conceal the fact that the real owner is Mr. Reiman, something both Mr. Galmond and Mr. Reiman deny.

The German prosecutors' letters and other documents show that they have embraced several of the allegations that emerged from the Megafon litigation about how the alleged corruption scheme worked. It had three phases, according to court papers in the case, each of which allegedly relied on Mr. Reiman's role in directing phone ventures part-owned by the state. [...]

Mr. Reiman isn't a criminal target of Western prosecutors. Most of the countries involved in the latest investigations don't assert any jurisdiction over crimes that may have occurred wholly in Russia. In Russia, authorities have looked at some of the transactions and found no significant legal violations. [...]

Mr. Reiman is named in search warrants and requests for international judicial assistance, German prosecutors' spokeswoman Doris Moller-Scheu said. That's because prosecutors have "substantial evidence" that he participated in the initial crimes of stealing assets of the Russian companies and paying bribes to Russian officials, she said.

Commerzbank allegedly helped finance the expanding empire and conceal its true ownership, while Barclays handled many of the suspect transactions between its numerous offshore entities, according to investigators. A spokesman for Barclays in London said the bank can't comment on any law-enforcement matters.

A Commerzbank spokesman says the bank fully backs its CEO, Mr. Muller, who is one of the suspects, and it believes no current staff are guilty of illegal activity in connection with the case.

The U.S. Justice Department has begun its own investigation into the business dealings of the banks and shell companies, according to people familiar with the inquiries. It declined to comment.

The New York office of Barclays, the focus of the U.S. inquiry, acted as the middleman moving funds and converting currencies in many of the deals between firms in Cyprus and Bermuda, transaction records show. The bank acts as a "correspondent" bank for the Bermuda Commercial Bank Ltd., which handles most of Mr. Galmond's operation on Bermuda. John Deuss, chairman of Bermuda Commercial, declined to comment.

The Galmond fund in Bermuda, IPOC International Growth Fund Ltd., has been under investigation by the Bermuda government, which is looking into whether it violated regulations that require mutual funds to have many shareholders. Mr. Galmond acknowledges he is secretly the primary owner of IPOC, but the fund denies any impropriety.

"Hi, Pundita,
Sorry to learn you're leaving the bloggysphere. Best of luck to you in future. Before you go I'm hoping you can answer my question. If you had the power to change one thing about US foreign policy, what would it be?
Tom in Sioux City"

Dear Tom:
If I had a magic wand I would de-Europeanize the thinking at the US Department of State and replace it with American-style thinking.

The United States of America is founded on a concept of universal values. Whether or not one agrees with the stated values, the American outlook transcends the rivalries and struggles for power that mark tribalized, clannish aggregates of people.

Europe is not founded; it is many clannish peoples having to live close together on one more-or-less contiguous body of land. The outlook that arose from that experience is grounded in the struggle to maintain equilibrium. The outlook, when applied to gaining trade and diplomatic advantages, resulted in the famous "divide and rule" thinking and tactics of the European trading powers.

The leaders of modern Europe know all that; the founding of the European Union was an attempt to unite Europe around basic principles that all Europeans could agree upon. The leaders envisioned a United States of Europe -- a true European nation.

Whether or not such nation will come about someday, old ways of thinking die hard. When people are under pressure, they fall back on the fighting style they know best. In this case, it is to bring out as many differences as possible in order to gain advantage, and by such means control a situation. That style of fighting is second nature to the European leaders, their foreign offices and intelligence agencies.

Yet one look at the situations in Africa and the Middle East shows that this is the very worst time in history to be focusing on differences that sharply divide people. So while the kindest thing you could say about America's grasp of the situations in those two regions is that we're on a steep learning curve, our instincts are right.

Between them, the British and French foreign ministries know everything there is to know about the tribes of Africa and the Middle East; they can recite chapter and verse the history of every Islamic sect and every blood feud that has arisen in the Middle East and Africa going back to the Old Testament. But what use is it to have a scorecard, if you're standing out in the parking lot during the ball game?

America has, due to sheer ignorance, stumbled into one cultural land mine after another since throwing our weight around in Iraq. Yet when history is at your back and your instincts are right, that means you're in ballpark.

Here is the ballpark: once technology collapses the world into a very small place, innumerable differences must take second place to universal values when it comes to the foundations of government.

That kind of thinking comes naturally to Americans and with it should come an approach to foreign relations that emphasizes universal values. The European Union leaders are now busy trying to co-opt this approach but they are doing it as a means to brake what they see as growing American hegemony in the Middle East.

In other words, no matter how hard Europe's leaders try to think universally during their waking hours, they mumble "triangulation" if shaken awake in the middle of the night. Triangulation, detente -- whatever it takes to keep the other fellow off balance.

Yet like a fool, State's most powerful offices still think it's possible to bring about peace and non-despotic governments in the Middle East, if they only follow more closely the collective advice of Europe's leaders!

Earth calling the US Department of State: those leaders are not advising in order to bring about peace and democracy; they're trying to maintain influence in the Middle East. The same situation holds true for the African nations.

Europe's leaders have a right to try to maintain their influence and between them, they have some good advice for America. Yet State needs to place the advice in the context of the American outlook.

State also needs to follow on with the tradition that Secretary Condoleezza Rice is eking out. As you know I have been sharply critical of Rice and remain so; she has followed State's dogmatic views on Russia, Latin American countries, and China and with predictable bad results. However, if you study Rice's constant travels you'll see that she is pioneering an approach whereby the President's chief foreign relations advisor gives great weight to the advice of the government in question.

This is a revolutionary approach for American's foreign office, which has traditionally given the greatest weight to the advice of close allies. So it is an empirical approach rather than a dogmatic one and thus, perfectly suited to the present era.

The catch is that the empirical approach has already raised a red flag among the NATO allies. Yet President Bush is determined to hold the NATO alliance together, as he is determined to refurbish all the American led post-World War Two international/ regional organizations.

I understand the principles guiding the President's decision and being human I also want to have my cake and eat it too. But once you start down the road (for example)of listening first to what the Egyptians advise about Egypt rather than what the Saudis or NATO heads or the IMF advise -- I perceive a crossroads down the line.

Which road we take will depend greatly on whether the US Department of State is dominated by the American or European outlook.

6:30 PM Update
I just received a letter from a reader who thought he could catch Pundita napping. The writer asked what kind of universal values American foreign policy should promote, given that I'd admitted that not everyone would agree with the values at the top of America's list.

My answer is that government is under discussion, not a philosopher's concept of a perfect society or a theologian's metaphysics. Peoples living under a freely elected government have no serious dispute with this statement of universal values as applied to government:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

"Death toll now stands at 400,000 and rising -- half the number of Rwanda's genocide ten years ago when the world said "Never Again". Darfur is Rwanda in slow motion. But after 20 months of blogging Darfur, still not many people, including Africans and Arabs, are interested -- even when given today's technology and free blogging tools. It's a funny old world. What's different this time though is you can turn the other cheek but cannot say you did not know about the hellhole of Darfur."
-- Ingrid Jones, Sudan Watch

"Dear Pundita,
Just to say thank you for listing Sudan Watch in Pundita's 2005 Weblog Awards.

It was a lovely surprise, I enjoyed your well written piece and chuckled at your insightful comments about Instapundit et al - and the dog vomit!

Thought your awards list was so well thought out, you ought to make it an annual event! (I'm serious -- you are a great blogger with an incisive mind).

Guess what -- congratulations from human rights activists in Boston Mass. and around the US and UK are pouring in here!

They've read my latest post at Sudan Watch. I've just received four emails congratulating me on my award -- a few of them were cc'd to several other people!

Best wishes and thanks again for the very kind mention.

It's pretty gruelling blogging African humanitarian crises and genocide and an emotionally draining lonely solitary task, so your post comes as a breath of fresh air to have a bit of light hearted fun.

I have linked to Pundita at:

http://sudanwatch.blogspot.com
http://meandophelia.blogspot.com

also in the sidebars of my other blogs:

http://ugandawatch.blogspot.com
http://congowatch.blogspot.com
http://ethiopiawatch.blogspot.com
http://nigerwatch.blogspot.com

Kindest regards,
Ingrid Jones
England, UK"

Dear Ingrid:
I did quite a lot of thinking about the Darfur situation after reading your letter. Pundita learned the hard way to be very careful about giving advice. But after thinking it over for days I can't conceive of any great harm coming to them, provided your human rights activist friends don't embellish on the plan I suggest.

But first, I think we can agree that the situation for the Darfur refugees is desperate. The African Union peacekeeping forces don't have enough of a mandate to make a dent and there's no peace to keep.(1) And even in the unlikely event that the Sudanese goverment agrees to allow it, the earliest the UN could deploy troops to the region would be September 2006. So we're looking at maybe another 100,000 dead and just that many starving in refugee camps within a year.

Meanwhile, routes to the refugee camps have recently been cut off by fighting so aid can't get through. (1, 2)

Meanwhile, the combined efforts of the African Union, European Union, United Nations, Arab League, US government, and many score humanitarian and religious organizations have failed to stop the mass murder and crisis for Darfur's refugees.

This while diplomats continue to nitpick over whether mass murder in Darfur is technically genocide and officials haggle over which version of the death count is accurate. And while Kofi Annan seizes on yet another plan to squeeze more money out of the West to pour into the African Union's bottomless pit and the International Criminal Court clucks, "Tsk tsk" at war crimes.

It's not a war going on in Darfur; it's slaughter carried out under the noses of Canadian, Swedish and Chinese energy companies.

In short everyone is finding their own cause to pursue in the Darfur massacres and doing an excellent job of saving Face in the process. That's one way to describe a practiced hypocrite. The reaction by the aid agencies has been programmatic and thus, easy for hypocrites to work around. Let's see them work around this:

> Target sites: Vatican mission offices, largest mosques and Christian churches. (Focus on churches with big missions to convert Africans to Christianity.)

> Gather, raise arms and eyes to heaven and call out, "O Bumba, please stop the bad things in Darfur!"

If you have African friends who can teach you to correctly pronounce Bumba's other names, by all means. And if you take a liking to other African gods, by all means yell out the names when you get tired of "Bumba!"

> Don't be a martyr; if you get surrounded by a nasty crowd run like hell and go to another mosque or church.

> When asked by onlookers what you're doing, reply something like this: "We prayed for years to Jesus Christ and Allah to stop the bad things in Darfur but they have turned a deaf ear. So we're hoping the old gods of Africa will show mercy to our prayers."

> If onlookers try to drown you out by calling at the top of their lungs to Jesus Christ and Allah, that's great. Leave them praying at the top of their lungs and proceed to the next mosque and church on the list. Parting shot: "Let's hope you're still out here praying 15 minutes from now."

> DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT make this into a Million Man March. Five or ten people standing at a respectful distance from a church or mosque is not threatening. No showy demonstrations that cost a mint to mobilize.

> If you can reasonably dedicate only two hours a week to the prayer calling, do just that much with all your heart. Just don't think of giving up. Don't think about the results. Just keep calling to Africa's gods.

> Do not bring rum or other alcohol as offering to the gods when you stand outside mosques.

> If you are accosted by Africans who lecture that you're not going about praying in the right way, by all means invite them to call in their way and just keep calling in yours. Be very sincere. I recall being told that the African gods have a sense of humor and love nothing more than pricking hypocrites, but don't push your luck.

Now, why Bumba? It's not easy to explain. One of blogger (The Glittering Eye) Dave Schuler's relatives was a card-carrying Christian saint who went to live in a cave with a bear. (Actually, he's got more than one saint in his family -- on his father's side, I think. His mother's side is vaudeville, he wrote recently, if my memory serves.)

Dave's hilarious essay on dog vomit inspired Pundita's 2005 Weblog Awards, which inspired your letter of thanks, which prompted me to think hard on the Darfur crisis. My reflections on Darfur caused me to look up names of African gods. The second name on the website's Current Top Ten of African Gods is Bumba -- who is, and I am not making this up, the God of Vomit.

Bumba is a Congolese creator god. He vomited up the universe including living creatures and a pile of diced carrots.

I'm not sure whether to read all this as a message from God but that's how I conceived the plan and stumbled across Bumba, the Great God of Vomit.

Bumba doesn't seem a terribly accessible god from the description but they way I figure it the buck always stops at the desk of the god of creation.

Okay; that's my advice, which I hope you share with every activist and humanitarian organization around the world. They've got nothing to lose by trying the plan, seeing how nothing else has worked.

Thank you for your letter and the praise and the links. I have been hinting to my readers for months that I would be suspending the Pundita blog depending on circumstances. Events have caught up with me, so after publishing this essay and my correspondence last week with Peter Lavelle at Untimely Thoughts, I am departing the blogosphere, at least for the foreseeable future.

That means it's unlikely there will be a 2006 version of Pundita's 2005 Weblog Awards. Also, I published a version of the 2005 awards post that simply lists the awards: Pundita's 2005 Weblog Awards: the polite version. More suitable for framing than the original, don't you think?

1) December 12, 2005 Christian Science Monitor: The African Union struggles to calm Darfur.

See November 14, 2005 Christian Science Monitor: Sudan falters as US House rethinks aid for more background.

2) December 10, 2005 newswire report:
"Aid flights grounded as Darfur violence worsens
Aid flights have been grounded in West Darfur as violence escalates despite hopes for a peace deal before the end of the year.

There have been high hopes for the seventh round of Darfur peace talks because the two key rebel groups are presenting a united position for the first time.

However, the talks have been complicated by a demand that a representative from Darfur be appointed Sudan's vice-president.

They have also been overshadowed again by renewed fighting, particularly around el-Geneina in West Darfur state.

All roads have been closed to United Nations traffic and some aid flights have been grounded due to threats to planes from militia groups.

Aid workers say humanitarian access to West Darfur is the worst it has ever been.

The worsening situation again coincides with peace talks being held in Nigeria.

UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has urged the Security Council to strengthen the African Union peacekeeping mission in the region."

"Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan"
-- Jordan's King Hussein, father of Jordan's present ruler

"Pundita! Were you listening to John Batchelor last night? Did you hear the part about Ahmadinejad saying he saw lights around people at the UN? He sounds crazy and he's another Hitler only with the Bomb! Do you think there's going to be a showdown soon between Iran and Israel?
Sleepless in St. Louis"

Dear Sleepless:
Get a grip. Ahmadinejad is not another Hitler. He's a servant. From his teens, he said and did exactly as he was told by his masters in Iran's military. He will continue to do so, or be dead of a tragic accident within 24 hours.

Ahmadinejad is going to find tragic accident anyhow if he doesn't stop causing the House of Saud to lose Face. They are big losers, if events force them to acknowledge that Jordan King Abdullah's plan for a resolution of the Israel-Palestine situation is the workable one.

The problem is that other Arab leaders don't trust Abdullah. More to the point, the Saudis and other Arab oil rulers fear that a Palestinian-Jordanian confederation will consolidate too much power in Abdullah's hands.

The American news media are hopeless, so the American public is unaware that vast changes have been going on in Jordan during the past year. In one sentence, Jordan's king is going ahead as if his plan had been accepted, and preparing the ground for a confederation. (1)

Meanwhile the Saudis are having to watch as the Iranian military and their hired goons -- al Qaeda and all the rest of the alphabet soup of Iran-controlled terror armies -- throw monkey wrenches into their plan for the two-state solution.

What should the American government do, during this critical period? Well, it's a little late in the day to throw their weight behind Jordan King Abdullah's solution. Besides, what does he know? He's a Palestinian -- half Palestinian if you want to be silly about it -- and his queen is a Palestinian. Why should he take the lead in developing a workable solution for the Palestinian people? That would be like putting the South Koreans in charge of negotiations with the North Koreans. America's foreign policy establishment has a reputation to uphold. Putting people in charge who know what they're doing threatens to skew the batting average.

But let's address your concerns about Ahmadinejad. Take a look at this:

[...] In a keynote speech on Wednesday to senior clerics, Ahmadinejad spoke of his strong belief in the second coming of Shi'ite Muslims' "hidden" 12th Imam.

According to Shi'ite Muslim teaching, Abul-Qassem Mohammad, the 12th leader whom Shi'ites consider descended from the Prophet Mohammed, disappeared in 941 but will return at the end of time to lead an era of Islamic justice.

"Our revolution's main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi," Ahmadinejad said in the speech to Friday Prayers leaders from across the country.

"Therefore, Iran should become a powerful, developed and model Islamic society."

"Today, we should define our economic, cultural and political policies based on the policy of Imam Mahdi's return. We should avoid copying the West's policies and systems," he added, newspapers and local news agencies reported.

Ahmadinejad refers to the return of the 12th Imam, also known as the Mahdi, in almost all his major speeches since he took office in August.

A September address to the U.N. General Assembly contained long passages on the Mahdi which confused Western diplomats and irked those from Sunni Muslim countries who believe in a different line of succession from Mohammed.

This fascination has prompted wild stories to circulate.

Presidential aides have denied a popular rumor that he ordered his cabinet to write a letter to the 12th Imam and throw it down a well near the holy city of Qom where thousands of pilgrims come each week to pray and drop messages to the Imam. [...](2)

The key word in those passages is "Qom," which is not the holiest of cities for the Shia sect. If you want to be sure the Mahdi reads your letter, throw it down a well near Najaf or Karbala. The catch: those cities are in Iraq. They are the holiest cities, not Qom.

After the failed 1991 Iraqi Shia uprising Saddam Hussein ordered the slaughter and imprisonment of tens of thousands of the rebels. He ordered tanks to wreck mosques in Najaf and Karbala (Saddam later ordered repairs) and clamped down on pilgrimages to the cities. (3)

Many of the Shia clerics fled to Iran and settled in Qom, also a holy city. So Qom took on much greater religious significance under Saddam's crackdown. Now that Saddam and his regime are gone from power, the Shia clerics are returning in droves to Najaf and Karbala and so are the pilgrims. The Iranian clerics are not taking this lying down -- particularly since they suffered a complete loss of Face due to the Information Age. The theocratic revolution was a complete bust, and now the whole world knows it.

It's not just about donations by the Faithful flowing from Qom to Najaf and Karbala, although there is untold wealth at stake; it's about the prestige and power, in a world where the edicts of clerics command the unquestioning obedience of millions.

It's also about Tehran's attempt to win the obedience of millions of uneducated Iranians who are being herded out of the countryside and into the major cities as part of the government's attempt to deal with the water shortage crisis.

Above all, it's about the Iranian military's maneuvering for an attempted land grab in southern Iraq.

Let us be clear: the region was carved up by Westerners who thought it was smart to set national boundaries in a way guaranteed to keep the locals at each other's throat. It's called "divide and keep control." The strategy is stupid in the era of portable nukes but the point is that the Shia in Iraq now have a national identity that Tehran's military, and clerics, would like to see replaced by fealty to a religious sect.

So while I do not know whether Ahmadinejad sees lights around people, I am certain that his masters told him to go on a talking jag about mystical visions and the imminent return of the Mahdi.

As to whether knowledgeable Iranians are buying Ahmadinejad's talk about the Mahdi's Second Coming:

"Of course, we must pray for the return of the Imam, but we must also tackle inflation and unemployment," said former Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reform-minded cleric.(2)

Now what does any of this have to do with Israel? For the answer, closely read the following:

[...] WorldNetDaily's Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein [...] planned to travel to Damascus this week to interview officials from Syria, Lebanon and the U.S. but his visa application was rejected because, according to at least one official in the Syrian embassy, he's Jewish.

"This is absolutely ridiculous. Syria is out of control," said Lebanese leader Walid Jumblatt, a veteran politician and head of Lebanon's Progressive Socialist Party. [...] They are getting so desperate they would coddle [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon just to get out of their problems. Meanwhile they do this? [Rejecting Klein's visa] is just a stupid, stupid thing." [...] (4)

Mr Jumblatt is in a position to know. But why would Syria's regime be so desperate at this time? John Loftus noted recently that Bashar al-Assad is thumbing his nose at the West -- waiting for Bush and Chirac to leave office on the theory that the uproar about Rafik Hariri's assassination will die down then.

I would think the cause for desperation is Syria's status in the Arab world as Tehran's poodle, measured against Syria's desire to maintain standing in the Arab League. The Arab regimes don't have the same use for Tehran, now that they're certain Saddam's regime is gone for good.

However, the Arab League is not going to provide the firepower to protect Assad's clan if Assad tells Tehran to sit on a tack. Only the Americans in the region are equipped to provide that kind of firepower. Sounds like game, set and match to Pundita.

As to what any of this has to do with Israel -- nothing, except that Israel is again forced into the role of the magician's stage props. Right now, Israel is the prancing rabbits and dancing ladies, while Tehran tries to fit itself into the new order emerging in the Arab Middle East since Saddam's departure. Ahmadinejad will say anything to keep attention focused on Israel and away from Tehran's increased isolation in the region.

But you may trust that his talk about the imminent return of the Mahdi has gone down like bacon at a bar mitzvah with the Arab world's Sunni. The Mahdi is sacred to the Shia but not to the Sunni. So Ahmadinejad's mystic talk is what's known as digging a hole for yourself with your tongue.

Does this mean that the danger to Israel is not what it's cracked up to be? No; this is an extremely dangerous period for Israel. But it is a period -- an inevitable phase, once Saddam was toppled.

As to what Washington can do during this period -- they are stuck with the two-state solution. So the best they can do is pursue the solution until it works or collapses. They can keep repeating the same three points, not back down from them, and keep asserting that the US won't cut and run. And use every means to arm-twist leaders in Brussels, Moscow and Beijing to keep their machinations down to a dull roar in the Middle East.

All of that is pretty much what Condoleezza Rice is doing. The rest depends on cool heads in Israel and the Middle East Arab governments, and continuing to battle the terrorist armies.

The approach also requires that the US not shy away from elbowing out Britain, Germany, Russia and France as "peacemakers" in the region. They had their chance. All they did was make one mess after another.

As to where all that leaves Tehran's regime -- out of step with the Arab regimes in the region. Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw summed it when he said, "Iran is unique in opposing a resolution to the Arab-Israel dispute based on the principle of two states living side by side in peace and security." (5)

If Tehran holds to their posture they will be isolated in the Middle East, which means they will become increasingly desperate, with greater reliance on al Qaeda's way of doing things.

1) Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, July 2005 Are There Signs of a Jordanian-Palestinian Reengagement?

2) Reuters, November 17 via Persian Journal: Iran president paves the way for arabs' imam return

3) BBC, April 2003: Karbala and Najaf: Shia holy cities

4) WorldNetDaily, December 9: Lebanese leaders blast Syria's Klein snub

5) Reuters, December 9: Iranian leader condemned for Holocaust remarks

I've consolidated all my posts this week on Batchelor's Middle East trip into this one except for the post about the New York Daily News article (See John Batchelor and the sleepless era of news)

Monday, December 5
Breaking News! World Net Daily reports that John will broadcast tonight from a truck parked near an Israeli Defense Forces artillery outpost in a Negev town that borders Gaza.

The artillery unit is regularly used by the IDF to fire at rocket launching sites in Gaza following Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks at Jewish communities in the border area.

Aaron Klein, WND's Jerusalem Bureau Chief, will join John in the truck and help him host the show.

A good portion of tonight's show will focus on Israel's upcoming parliamentary and prime ministerial elections, and the aftershooks of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's evacuation of Jewish communities this past summer from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

And -- what's this?

Batchelor and Klein will broadcast from various Mideast hot spots all week.

Hot spots... hot spots... now I wonder where those might be?

For more on tonight's broadcast, check out the WND report and check John's website (after 9:00 PM, ET) for a complete description of the Monday lineup.

Wednesday, December 7
John Batchelor chats up three Most Wanted terrorists
If you missed Tuesday's program, you didn't only miss reporting on the war on terror; you missed the war on terror. You also missed a demonstration of great intelligence gathering work.

Funniest moment: When one of the terrorists graciously agreed to stay on the line for an ABC station break. (They could only stay on their cell phones for a few moments at a time because the IDF was working overtime to track the signals.)

The interviews might be available from the Audio Intelligence section (as MP3) within 24 hours or so. Check Batchelor's website.

Batchelor will be broadcasting from the Middle East all week. The show is from 10:00 PM to 1:00 AM on many stations but if you can listen via WMAL-AM (Washington, DC) on the Internet, you can also pick up the 9:00 PM-10:00 PM segment. Same for listening via satellite radio. Check Batchelor's website for details and also to listen via Internet if your radio ABC affiliate station does not carry the show.

Thursday, December 8
John Batchelor broadcasting from Damascus tonight
I think that's where he's going to be broadcasting from tonight, from a WorldNetDaily report. Anyhow, he's still in the Middle East. Check at the website after 9:00 PM for tonight's schedule and to listen via the Internet.
http://www.johnbatchelorshow.com

Batchelor, Klein on to Jordan and Syria
Stay tuned. Here's what's available so far at Batchelor's website of the audio record (MP3) of the Dec 6 interviews with terrorist leaders:

Khalid el Batsh, Deputy Commander of Hamas, interviewed by John Batchelor, Aaron Klein & Larry Kudlow. Aired December 6, 2005.

Abu Abir, Spokesman and senior leader for the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza, interviewed by John Batchelor, Aaron Klein & Larry Kudlow. Translation by Fawaz Gerges. Aired December 6, 2005. Note: only part 3 available.

I am hoping there will be an audio archive of the second interview with Abu Abir (on Wednesday show). Makes an interesting comparison to the Tuesday interview.

Also, there is an audio archive of the Dec 6 interview with Saeb Erekat, Chief Palestinain Negotiator, interviewed by John Batchelor & Aaron Klein.

"You know what you are" Klein denied Syria visa because he is Jewish
Sixth question on visa questionnaire is "Religion?" John Batchelor answered, "Protestant." When Aaron refused to answer, the official told Aaron, "You know what you are," and denied Aaron's visa.

So John Batchelor and Aaron are broadcasting from Amman, Jordan tonight.

(this last entry posted 12/08/2005 10:18:00 PM)

"Yes of course it's complicated; it's a war."
-- John Batchelor

This post continues my discussion with US War College professor James Ellsworth. He agreed to allow publication of his end of the exchange 'as is,' without the polishing that would transform a letter into an essay. I note that Jim is expressing his own opinion but as a military person and thus, his use of "we" and "our" where he's clearly referring to the US military.
* * * * * * * *
Jim,
Saddam is not seeing the trial as a trial; he's seeing it as a part of the war -- isn't he? At the time the Iraqis called for the trial they had no idea that the insurgency would drag on so long, and neither did we. I just wonder if, from the purely military tactical view, this kind of trial is a mistake?

Pundita,
In one sense, you're spot on: Saddam clearly does see this as part of the war. In another, though -- and this may illustrate a broader point about our inability to get our perspective out -- you're seeing this through the prism of the media coverage. Because from where I sit, everybody on both sides fully expected the insurgency to go on this long, from the very beginning.

Do you remember when Bush and Rumsfeld told us this was going to be a long, hard fight? I'm sure I could find the press releases if I had a little more time--just like I found the President's speech to the UN Security Council on 12 Sep 2002 laying out our justification for the war, which had nothing to do with whether or not Saddam actually had WMD.

Of course we're going to accentuate the positive. This is a war we expect to win, and expected to win from the beginning; you simply do not get out in front of your own citizens and place all the emphasis on the risks and dangers: the enemy is going to do a plenty good job of that for you -- and your job is to return the favor!

Meanwhile, we were preparing our troops to expect that Saddam had ordered thousands of his best soldiers to decline combat, to fade into the countryside and the population, and to fight the "real war" as an insurgency. We were preparing our troops to be ready for it and to defeat it. When I was finishing up as a War College student, in March of 2003, we already had significant time in the curriculum where we were wrestling with how we were going to do that, and rebuild Iraq. And yet somehow everybody "knows" we went in without a clue and without a plan. It's frustrating.

Yes, we made mistakes. So did our enemy. Clausewitz called that "fog and friction" (see Heinze 2003 for a good, concise discussion), and they're at least as severe in counterinsurgency as they are in force-on-force combat (see Moore 2000 p. 4). This is what war looks like, up close and personal.

It's even what victory looks like. A week or two ago Marc Schulman at American Future ... featured a couple of great parodies of what the reporting on Midway and Normandy would have looked like today.

But it's not really about media bias (IMHO), not most critically. It's about the fact that every man, woman, and child in the world watches modern war unfold in messy tactical detail without seeing the plan, and without the breadth of professional knowledge and depth of perspective that come from studying it and fighting it and leading it for twenty or thirty years. And in general, they only see our mistakes because our enemy doesn't believe in letting the people see theirs.

So what the professional looks at and sees as measurable progress through a plan he knows and understands -- interspersed with the fog and friction of war, which he knows affect friend and foe alike -- the citizen sees as this one-sided parade of our mistakes, interspersed with disjointed tactical "stuff" that he simply can't assemble into a picture of victory and therefore assumes we must be losing.

Where the media come in, in my assessment, is in (wittingly or otherwise, I do not judge) reinforcing that assumption because the footage that they can get to put on the air to keep people watching presents that same, "messy tactical," one sided picture.

(As I've pointed out in my blog, as much as they like to portray themselves as a "fourth branch of government," they're really a for-profit enterprise that has to sell programming and ad space to stay in business.)

It doesn't have to be their fault; it's just the nature of the business: if they could get footage of al-Qa'ida screwing up, they'd show it just as readily -- just look at the reporting on al-Zarqawi's folks blowing up a Muslim wedding party. If they could get stunning insider exposes of corruption and human rights abuses among our enemy, they'd show them.

Although here I'd say there is at least some unintentional complicity: when they do get such footage of the enemy -- like them beheading a relief worker -- it's a defeat for us, and evidence of "just how badly the war is going;" when they get such things on us -- like Abu Ghraib -- it's an exposé of American atrocities.

Welcome to Information War. We have got to figure this stuff out, and fast.

The blogosphere just "is" -- all attempts to define it fall short. There are as many types of blogs as there are people, and the collegiality that has arisen on the blogosphere has as many benefits as downsides. However, if the most influential news-oriented contributors to the blogosphere are to become a reliable alternate news source, they need to take pains to insure that collegiality does not descend into the insularity that is an occupational hazard for those working in the mainstream media.

Those thoughts first occurred to me in December 2004, when I was still new to reading blogs and I'd only been blogging about a month. I came across a comment by well known blogger that deeply troubled me, coming as it did in the wake of the astoundingly biased, uninformative blogosphere coverage of Ukraine's presidential election. With few exceptions, the coverage parroted the pap that the US Department of State and the Get Putin gang of policy institutes fed to major media outlets.

I admired the blogger's writings but his comment reflected a blogcentric view that mirrored the insularity one finds in other media. So, despite my newness to the blog medium, I felt the comment demanded an answer, which I published on a blog I did not keep up. I republish the essay here as an introduction to Pundita's 2005 Weblog Awards. (I've provided a choice between the original version of the awards post and the polite version, which simply lists the awards.)

Quo Vadis?
December 20, 2004

The other night I read a popular blogger's comment that bloggers had been keeping the Congo story going. I thought of Bobby Block on the satphone, calling from somewhere in Africa, describing to John Batchelor what he'd recently seen of the fighting in the Congo. He'd witnessed atrocities, included cannibalism.

Block sounded wrung out emotionally and he was physically exhausted and still in a very dangerous powderkeg region. I remember John telling him, "Keep yourself safe" and Bobby's wry assurance that he would try.

That conversation must have been about a year ago. I forget which newspaper Block was reporting for at the time--probably the Wall Street Journal but maybe The New York Times.

I've been listening to Batchelor's radio program since the third day of the US invasion of Iraq. I can't remember when I first heard him talk about the Congo but it was not longer after I started listening. He returns to the situation every so many weeks. More than any American media outlet, his program talks about situations across the African continent and keeps the Congo story going.

John is alive to the fact that Americans can't ignore any region of the world because the enemy doesn't. The situation in the Congo is made to order for al Qaeda so it bears close watching, as does all of Africa.

A grotesque irony of this war is that the enemy does a public service by forcing Americans to think globally. The enemy is quicker than Western governments at finding the weakest links in the developing world. Run him out of Afghanistan, run him out of Yemen, run him out Iraq, he just sets up shop somewhere else. Somewhere where human life is still cheap, where armies can be bought for a song and tribal blood feuds are easily exploited.

The enemy is very sophisticated. He's an oil patch expert; he knows every region where oil exploration is underway, where oil pipelines are being laid. He knows every petroleum route by heart. He understands globalized crime and banking and how they intersect. He fights with a copy of the financial pages in one hand. For all his talk about hating modernity, the enemy thinks modern--more modern than most Americans. He understands the 21st century.

I'm wonder whether the blogosphere isn't heading toward the same mistake as the mainstream media. The mainstream pays so much attention to what their own members talk about that their attention is narrowed on their own world. That, too, the enemy exploits because he is a master at working on our blind side.

This past Saturday, UPI Senior Analyst Peter Lavelle -- always up to his eyeballs with drop-dead writing deadlines -- patiently replied to the flood of questions and opinion I emailed him on a range of Russia issues. Of course he did other things while waiting for me read and reply to his end of the correspondence, which included background articles to help me better understand a situation. But by the time I logged off, six hours had passed during which Peter had made himself available. (I will be publishing portions of our correspondence later this week.)

Peter has made the time once before for such correspondence. Pundita is one of the few US-based blogs that looks beyond the American media's reports about Russia. However, my blog does not specialize in Russia or East European affairs, so it's not on any Russia watcher's reading list. That means there is no payoff for Peter spending that much time in correspondence with me, other than a willingness to teach someone with desire to learn.

Sunday morning was spent analyzing John McCain's interview on Meet the Press, plowing through online versions of the world's top newspapers, tracking reports on avian flu and writing analysis that I emailed to various correspondents, and digging into a reported weapons sale to Iran. Sunday afternoon and evening answering emailed questions from Pundita readers, pondering Peter's replies, more research, more writing.

I can't remember what time my brain finally went on strike -- maybe around 2:00 AM Monday morning -- but as often happens when I push beyond the point of exhaustion I fled to The Glittering Eye for a break before tumbling into a hasty sleep.

"Maybe he's got some new recipes up," I muttered. Or a story about the Samoyed members of his family or research about something that no one has thought to do. (Who but Dave Schuler would think to dig into the CIA's vaunted overthrow of Mossadegh?)

So maybe you can understand my disappointment when I found a big logo for Whizbang's 2005 Weblog Awards at Dave's site, accompanied by the news that he'd been nominated as a finalist in one of the 'best of' categories and his request that his readers to put in a vote for him.

I blurted, "Who has time for this crap?"

I was immediately overcome with guilt. Dave Schuler has graciously endured my perennial ill temper, found time in his busy blogging/work schedule when I pleaded for help in getting to the bottom of an issue I found important, and taken the time to analyze and promote several of my writings.

So Pundita dutifully clicked on the web awards link to cast her vote for The Glittering Eye. While there I noted the Best Blog top finalists. I was unfamiliar with three of them. (Eschaton, The Corner, Talking Points Memo.) As for the rest, during the 14 months I've been reading blogs I'd only visited the entire group about 20 times in total. Rough estimates of my visits: Powerline twice, Michelle Malkin twice, Instapundit five times, The Huffington Post once, Boing Boing once, Kos twice, and so on.

There's no reason for me to follow such blogs, which struck me as linkologists or political agendists. So, I had no way of deciding which among them is the best, let alone grasp why they should be considered the "best" of the blogosphere.

I then returned to The Glittering Eye to insert a peevish remark in the comment section. That's when I saw the post underneath Dave's one about the weblog awards. The post was titled: The Four Types of Dog Vomit and yes, it really is about dog vomit.

I sat there for a moment with my jaw dropped and probably my eyes bulging out of my head. Then I burst into laughter. Dave Schuler has a patience I could never muster for the ways of the pack but he's nobody's fool.

I'll have to rely on Dave's opinion that Captain's Quarters noses out the others in the Best Blog finalist category because of the blog's investigation of corruption in Canada's government. But, undaunted by the little time I allot to reading blogs, I complied my own awards list...

Sudan Watch
For reporting on atrocities and human rights abuses in Sudan and other countries; for fingering the world's biggest scoundrels and for calling again and again to conscience.

Sumedh Mungee
For discourses on ICT innovations/business and how they are shaping this era; for windows on India's role in the ICT era and the impact on global rural development.

Simon World
For courage in hammering away from inside China at China's regime about democracy issues.

Untimely Thoughts
For expert analysis of Russia's vast transitions in this era and their global impact.

American Future
For massive research projects of importance to US foreign/defense policy.

The Fourth Rail
For consistently delivering a coherent, informative picture of US military progress in Iraq.

Belmont Club
The war's most formidable polemicist.

The Glittering Eye
The blogger's blog -- finds, tracks and analyzes blogs to watch and thoughtful essays on the full spectrum of issues. Also, for those who consume heavy-duty news virtually 24/7, a place to escape for a few minutes and remember the simple things in life.

Honorable Mention
Winds of Change
Not a blog but a showcase for thoughtful blogger essays and debates on war-related issues and a portal to GWOT sites and news stories.

Sudan Watch
For reporting on atrocities and human rights abuses in Sudan and other countries; for fingering the world's biggest scoundrels and for calling again and again to conscience.

Sumedh Mungee
For discourses on ICT innovations/business and how they are shaping this era; for windows on India's role in the ICT era and the impact on global rural development.

Simon World
For courage in hammering away from inside China at China's regime about democracy issues.

Untimely Thoughts
For expert analysis of Russia's vast transitions in this era and their global impact.

American Future
For massive research projects of importance to US foreign/defense policy.

The Fourth Rail
For consistently delivering a coherent, informative picture of US military progress in Iraq.

Belmont Club
The war's most formidable polemicist.

The Glittering Eye
The blogger's blog -- finds, tracks and analyzes blogs to watch and thoughtful essays on the full spectrum of issues. Also, for those who consume heavy-duty news virtually 24/7, a place to escape for a few minutes and remember the simple things in life.

Honorable Mention
Winds of Change
Not a blog but a showcase for thoughtful blogger essays and debates on war-related issues and a portal to GWOT sites and news stories.

"...nothing in life is easy - and certainly nothing worthwhile. But some things are so beautiful and all but necessary you have to learn to accept the dreadful uneasiness they may inevitably bring one day."

In his essay So, What was I thinking? Dan Riehl at Riehl World View steps out of character to write about the death of a loved one. To give another a place in our heart is to touch God, I think. Dan's words reminded me that the wellspring of love is a deathless place.

Dan asks why she did it "I'll never know." Maybe that's why; he couldn't think about it and she knew that. She knew it was time.

"I sleep with my Blackberry under my pillow so I can take a call from China at 3 a.m."

I am not sure John Batchelor would describe himself as a conservative and I've not heard a Batchelor show that is not erudite but aside from those quibbles, David Hinckley's article for the New York Daily News does a good job of conveying that John Batchelor is a newscaster for the present era. That means Batchelor's show is in a category all by itself.

By DAVID HINCKLEY
New York Daily News
December 5
"Batchelor's eager to conduct mideast talks

Beyond saying he plans to spend this evening in the Gaza Strip, John Batchelor declines to specify exactly where he will be and with whom he will be speaking.

Even listeners on WABC (770 AM), where Batchelor has carved a 10 p.m.- 1 a.m. nightly niche with his internationally minded and often erudite programs, won't hear all the details.

"The people I'm talking with," Batchelor said late last week before he left, "are, I think the phrase is,'high-value targets.' Discretion seems appropriate."

These guests also aren't necessarily the group one might expect to talk with Batchelor, who makes no secret that his horse in the Middle East is Israel. But that's exactly the kind of thing he's been doing since WABC hired him in the wake of Sept. 11: tooling around the world building an international network of experts and contacts who he feels can present a truer picture of what goes on out there.

He doesn't hide his own view, which is conservative. He does, however, regularly talk with guests who disagree.

"I don't have or want only Republicans listening to me," he says. "I have Democrats and others as well, because we're providing information."

In fact, he says, it is the breadth of his audience and the subsequent power of his microphone that enables him to make trips like this week's, which will also take him to several other spots in the Middle East.

"The people I'll be seeing have the biggest bodyguards with the biggest guns," he says, "and they won't let anything happen to me because they know that through me they can talk directly to America.

"I have a large audience of well-connected people in New York and Washington. When they talk to me on ABC, they can reach those people in ways they cannot through any other means, including TV."

He stresses, however, that doesn't mean he is giving his subjects an open forum for spreading disinformation.

"My audience is very intelligent," he says. "They know no guest will take over a WABC microphone. They know that whatever is said, I will bring the discussion back to the point. The story is what I say it is."

It's a story he says he tries to see through a broad international and historical lens. On the Iraq war, for instance, he says its current unpopularity means nothing.

"Of course, this war is unpopular," he says. "All wars are unpopular. Americans hate war. Until we win. And after we win this one, George W. Bush will be seen as having done a superb job for seeing it through."

Backing these assessments with a Princeton degree, theological studies and a passionate interest in history, Batchelor says he never worries about talking over his audience's head.

"They know so much," he says. "And they're enormously curious to know more."

Having come to talk radio at 52, Batchelor says radio isn't where he does his studying.

"I don't listen to talk radio," he says. "I don't have time. My show is a 24-hour operation. I sleep with my Blackberry under my pillow so I can take a call from China at 3 a.m." [...]"

After snatching a little sleep I stumbled to the computer and logged back onto the Internet. And what should my eyes be greeted with? A picture on AOL Headline News of an outraged Saddam with his finger raised in court and the headline DISORDER IN COURT Saddam chants, "Long live Iraq!"

To begin with, Pundita has not been in a good mood since Nixon stabbed Taiwan in the back so he could suck up to China. Without caffeine in my veins Saddam's courtroom antics sent me over the top. I thought, What next? Singing We Shall Overcome and sit-ins to free the rat bastard?

I had no sooner worked up a head of steam when an email arrived to thank me for the tip that John Batchelor would be broadcasting this week from the Middle East.

The note was from James Ellsworth, who happens to be a professor at a war college. So this was not his lucky morning to send a thank-you note Pundita's way....

ust awakend tyo see saddam acting up like 60s radical, which put me in a fould moodl . isn't he the head of iraq.s military? was? so why not just just try him befor ea a military tribunal then put him beofre a firing squad?

"ROTFL! Good morning, Pundita!
Delicate balance there. Probably WOULD have if the goal was efficiency...but lots of political capital (and, frankly, TEACHING POINTS about the rule of law) to be made in Iraq by allowing the Iraqi people to extract THEIR revenge on their former oppressor...but WITHIN THE BOUNDS of the rule of law."

are you sure? I have been wondering about all that. as long as it is what the iraqis want, okay. But there is dignity, the need for a people to have dignity. You see, the Iraqis don't know all that he did, and once it starts coming out -- this is a very difficult thought i am trying to express while still half awake.

I just worry that this Judgment at Baghdad (a .la Nuremberg) is not good for peop.les who have never known much dignity. The Germans had a high culture in recent centuries they could hang onto for dignity. the people of the land of 2 rivers haven't had that since -- what? 1,500 BCE?

I don't know. Maybe you are right.. I go now to mainlaine a qart of caffeine so I can type

"Pundita,
It was a key demand of the Iraqis when we got him. But your point brings up an interesting and key fact: there are, in many senses, two completely different meanings to "the Iraqis" at the moment. It is entirely possible that it could be simultaneously true that the POLITICAL Iraqis want to exact their revenge, AND the "ordinary" Iraqis could have their political dignity damaged, all by the same act. So IF that were the case, this could be a critical win in the near term, yet potentially problematic in the longer term.

My sense, though, is that there is a psychological component to this similar to what follows the dissolution of a violently abusive marriage: before the victim can truly move on and RECLAIM her (or his!) dignity, there needs to be some definitive, symbolic event that breaks from the past, exorcises its demons, and clears the stage for the future. This is what the IRAQI trial of Saddam represents to Iraqis. It's also, in a key sense, empowering -- because not only is Saddam being brought to justice, but it's the Iraqi courts, acting for the Iraqi people, that are doing it.

Contrast this with the impact on Iraqi dignity--AND on the legitimacy of the p roceedings in the court of worldwide public opinion (likely to be shaky enough as it is!) if Saddam were tried and convicted by THE OCCUPIERS (like Nuremberg). No, I think we got this one right. But like I said, it IS a delicate balance, with a LOT of moving parts; if I'm missing one, I could be dead wrong."

Jim, the Judgment at Nuremberg was not broadcast in living color all over Germany.* Big difference between now and then. I'm not being argumentative; I am just worried that ways of doing things in a mature democracy are being imposed on people who never knew democracy, rule of law. Is a trial that recounts atrocities done to them -- is this the way for Iraqis to start learning? Or will it bring them terrible shame? And with nothing to fall back on?

Such questions haunt me.

Also, they're trying to make a democracy at this time. Huge task. Is Saddam's trial hurting or helping at this time?

"For many of the reasons I laid out in my last message, helping, I think. For one thing, it's showing that in a democracy, even those everybody "knows" are guilty are entitled to a fair trial. For another, it shows that we are willing to trust the Iraqi people/government to run the show, even if we continue to have great influence. And perhaps most critically, it will show, when that influence is generally used to RESTRAIN the Iraqis who ARE hell-bent on revenge, and to ENSURE he gets a fair trial, that we are not QUITE as hypocritical as our press has been portraying us every time we make a mistake."

The psychological factor you cited (need for closure) is a very compelling argument for the trial -- but is the analogy correct? In an abusive marriage, the victim was aware of all the injustices. Isn't the better analogy here more like discovering that one's father is a serial killer?

"I haven't heard anything that would suggest that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis don't already KNOW that "dad" is a serial killer AS WELL AS a wife-beater! Your point about the SPECIFICS of the atrocities is still worth reflecting on...but the psychotherapeutic point remains: they MUST move through the stages of coming to grips first with what was done to them, second with the fact that it's over, and third (and as I said, perhaps most importantly) that THEY have real power over their future...to start with laying the past to rest."

Your argument is still compelling, so for now I will sit on my concerns. Just occurred to me that our dialogue might interest Pundita readers so I will publish with your permission.

I wonder: Do you think the trial at this time might help the Sunnis and Shiites realize all that was done to the Kurds, which might help solidify them as a nation?

"Pundita, it's fine to publish the letters. To answer your question, I would imagine the Sunnis don't especially care what was done to the Kurds (I have a quip I like to use about Sunnis being dissatisfied because they can no longer treat a Kurd like Shiite)...but it could perhaps strengthen the bond between Shiite and Kurd as each learns more details about what was done to the other.

That could, however, be a VERY bad thing for the finally-moderating tone of Sunni sensibility; if anything like that were emphasized, it would have to be accompanied by a great deal of attention paid to how to help the Sunnis avoid feeling like THEY are on trial, given their dominance in the former regime. They need to have an avenue to psychologically dissociate themselves from Saddam and his goons, to avoid the damage to their pride and cultural identity that you were concerned about in our earlier discussion.

For the Sunnis, your analogy of "dad as serial killer" has a lot of power in another sense: even if THEY got beaten every night at home, the looks they'll be getting from teachers and classmates the next day after each news broadcast from the trial will not, for the most part, be friendly.

We must have a plan to be the "Principal" who calls a faculty meeting to remind everybody that the kids did not participate in the crimes, and were victims just as much as those who died."

Okay, Jim. Now: what happens if they manage to get the trial moved to Europe? I am concerned that the Brussels Euros will try to manage the trial so that it becomes an antiwar screed. They were wrong on Iraq, wrong on Bush's Greater Middle East policy, so now they are trying to scrape together spitballs to hurl at the US.

"Moving the trial to Europe (or anywhere outside of Iraq) while arguably justifiable in terms of the sense of U.S. law (cf. moving the OJ trial out of Simi Valley) would in my judgment undercut most of the rationale I just laid out for holding the trial now in the first place. Your concern would be just the axle grease frosting on an already unpalatable cake! (grin)"

Yes, the field tilts to the Brussels Euros if it moves to Europe because it will give them considerable control, including media control. They stand to lose much Face as more comes out at the trial about the past. They have been very skilled at glossing Saddam's atrocities as part of their war against Bush.

Europe (the EU3 in particular) and the US will be as much on trial as Saddam. The difference between the US and Europe in this regard is that we more-or-less respected the embargo, whereas the Brussels crowd greatly profited from it.

And there is the other huge difference: we acted to remove Saddam, whereas France and Germany (and factions in Britain) acted to stop the US from trying.

If as you say the majority of Iraqis have a good idea that Saddam was always a monster, I wonder if they know the extent of West Europe's complicity? I would think that at all costs, the Brussels Euros want to prevent the Iraqis from knowing.

It's not really about the trial of a monster, in the view of the Brussels Euros. It's about protecting their influence in the Middle East. For all America's money, for all our military might -- we got spooked after Sadat's assassination. We stayed behind the enclave wall, wrote out checks and allowed the Europeans to direct our policy in the Middle East. We scurried right back behind the walls after shoving Saddam out of Kuwait, which is just where the Euros want us.

Well now it is our time -- time to do things American style, time to act as Americans act. The Brussels Euros are fighting this tooth and nail.

* Just to clarify, after re-reading. I was not thinking from the view of the political situation in Germany at the time but of the overwhelming impact of that kind of trial today among heavily tribalized clan peoples. Maybe I overlooked that satellite TV in Iraq, now widespread since Saddam's fall, has already braced the Iraqis for the images they will see, the testimonies they will hear.

An eighth human death from H5N1 (after exposure to infected poultry) in Indonesia was confirmed on December 3. See Bloomberg for details. However, from my tour around the Internet last night I have not found anything to suggest that there is a highly lethal strain of avian flu transmitting H2H (human to human).

A World Net Daily article recounts medical speculation that a relatively mild strain of H5N1 could be spreading via H2H in Thailand. (H/T Riehl World View.) Yet I can't find data to rule out that the noted 'increase' in H5N1 cases in Indonesia and Thailand is due to increased awareness of the virus at hospitals and clinics.

The most striking increase is in the awareness of H5N1 in the health community worldwide. Also, there is vastly increased public awareness worldwide, which means more people are going to the hospital or clinic even for mild flu-like or cold symptoms, which makes it possible to catch more cases of H5N1 infection. From a September BBC report:

According to the BBC correspondent in Jakarta, Rachel Harvey, the increase in the number of suspected cases in Indonesia could be partly due to an increase in public awareness. There is now saturation coverage of the bird flu outbreak on television, radio and in newspapers, she says.

"With increased surveillance it's not unusual that you would pick up more cases," said Dr Margaret Chan, the WHO's representative on bird flu.

Right now it seems the greatest causes for alarm are that no country is up to speed on pandemic preparation and developing countries where bird flu has made an appearance are very uneven in their reporting and surveillance efforts.

The reasons for laxity cover the spectrum: bureaucratic bungling, interagency fights, low budget for data collection and reporting, reluctance to accept outside help, and so on. See the December 2 New York Times article Experts Doubt Bird Flu Tallies From China and Elsewhere. The problems discussed in the article are by no means limited to East Asia.

There is the added problem of corruption. Romania's health care bureaucracy might be the most corrupt on earth next to China's or at least up there in the top ten. So, if you just throw money at 'em, chances are good it won't all be spent on reporting. That means putting an additional layer of oversight into programs that earmark aid for avian flu data collection and reporting. That kind of oversight costs a lot of money, and it takes time to get the oversight bureaucracy up and running. Time is what we're short of.

That's not speaking to the Harry Lime problem. A November 15 New York Times report via the International Herald Tribune mentions that a fake vaccine was used for inoculating chickens against flu.

The official Xinhua news agency reported last week that a fake flu vaccine, possibly including active virus, may have actually spread the disease instead of preventing it.

"The harm is incalculable," said Jia Youling, chief of the veterinary department at the Agriculture Ministry."

For once I am in total agreement with a China official. However, the single biggest problem to emerge is that countries are putting too much faith in vaccine development and anti-viral drugs. There are serious questions about whether Tamiflu (or any anti-viral on the market) is effective against bird flu! See December 4 Pundita post Two health experts challenge use of Tamiflu to treat Avian Flu.

So it's time to get real. By now, every international airport in your country -- whichever country that is -- should have human temperature sensors at the exit and entry gates. Where are the sensors? They're in Hong Kong. Here, Pundita feels a Valley Girl joke coming on:

"How do you stop a killer bird flu pandemic?"

"Move to Hong Kong. Duh."

The truth is that any method of tracking bird flu in the boonies anywhere in the world is bound to have holes a mile wide. And it's foolish to bank on a magic bullet drug or vaccine to stop an epidemic in the critical early stage.

So while it's vital to improve data collection and work on magic bullets, governments must not neglect the most effective way to stop a pandemic, which is thorough preparation for quarantine measures. This preparation involves a lot of drill and the entire society.

Is that effort time consuming for the citizen? Yes. But you may trust that if quarantine preparation is ignored in favor of a magic bullet that misses the mark, there will be no one around to close the barn door after the horse is gone.

"Russia has long positioned itself as a major peace broker between Iran and the West -- and all of a sudden they are throwing this bombshell. It just does not make any sense."
-- Western diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous (1)

December 1
RIA Novosti
Russia has technology to outsmart anti-missile systems - expert
(MOSCOW) Russia has the technology for a strategic missile that could get around any existing or future anti-ballistic missile defense systems, the chief of the Russian General Staff said Thursday.

"This is a very expensive technology and its [industrial] production depends on the situation," Yury Baluyevsky said.

He said anti-ballistic missile defense systems were not efficient in their defense against existing types of weapons.

December 3
Pravda
Russia to sell 29 air defense systems to Iran

(MOSCOW) ... Russia intends to sell 29 Tor M-1 anti-missile systems capable of downing cruise missiles and air bombs to Iran, the Vedomosti newspaper wrote [December 2] with reference to an anonymous manager of a defense enterprise. According to the newspaper, the contract on the matter has already been signed.

But hey, a contract is just a piece of paper, as Pravda reminds the reader:

In 2000, Russia pulled out from the secret agreement with the USA about restricted arms deliveries to Iran. The document was known as the Gore-Chernomyrdin Protocol. Moscow undertook not to strike any defense deals with Iran. In return, the USA promised to help Russia enter the international market of defense technologies. The promise was not kept, though.

Tsk tsk. Always try to keep your promises.

For more on the reported deal and US official reaction:

U.S. Concerned by Reported Russian Missile Sales to Iran, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, December 2 via Defense News

Iran to get Russian missile interceptors from Russia's business daily Vedomosti via RIA Novosti (12:29 - 2/12/05)

1) From Reuters (UK) December 2 report Iran and Russia sign $1 bln defence deal

The information in the reports raises questions about government programs to stockpile Tamiflu for use against an Avian Flu outbreak in humans. Clearly more research is needed fast on Tamiflu for use against H5N1.

The Sunday Times
December 04, 2005
Doctor says bird flu drug is useless
Jonathan Carr-Brown, Health Correspondent

"A VIETNAMESE doctor who has treated dozens of victims of avian flu claims the drug being stockpiled around the world to combat a pandemic is “useless” against the virus.

Dr Nguyen Tuong Van runs the intensive care unit at the Centre for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi and has treated 41 victims of H5N1.

Van followed World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines and gave her patients Tamiflu, but concluded it had no effect.

“We place no importance on using this drug on our patients,” she said. “Tamiflu is really only meant for treating ordinary type A flu. It was not designed to combat H5N1 . . . [Tamiflu] is useless.” [...]

Van, who has also treated patients with Sars, the respiratory condition linked to birds, said avian flu had a frightening effect on its victims and the only way to keep patients alive was to “support” all their vital organs, including the liver and kidneys, with modern technology like ventilators and dialysis machines.

Van would not criticise governments for stockpiling Tamiflu but said doctors had to explain its limitations. [...]"

The Jakarta Post
December 4, 2005
The overuse of Tamiflu in treating avian flu
Iwan Darmansjah, Jakarta
"The writer was a WHO expert panel member on drug evaluation and pharmaceuticals (1975-2003)."

"Tamiflu -- generic name oseltamivir -- has been promoted too far to be used in avian flu because it is neither proven nor significantly effective even in the treatment of common flu. In influenza Type A and B (common flu) the efficacy in clinical studies is manifested as an improvement of one day (FDA website -- updated on Nov. 17, 2005 -- states one to one-and-a-half days) in the recovery-time of influenza that normally heals within a week. A one-day improvement should be considered an insignificant result in a clinical trial.

Moreover, in the U.S. most flu is that of Type A. Such results, measured by days of recovery for a sickness that lasts normally a week, should be classified as "modestly effective" at the most to justify marketing of the product. Adverse reactions are not yet completely known. On the current FDA website, adverse event reports from Japan in children documented "primarily unusual neurologic and psychiatric events such as delirium, hallucinations, confusion, abnormal behavior, convulsions and encephalitis... 12 deaths in pediatric patients were documented since Tamiflu's approval".

The FDA is currently investigating these reported events, all of them from Japan. Although adverse events are different from (established) adverse reactions, this phenomenon should not be taken for granted, since this is not the first time that Japan has produced such reports on other drugs that have later been proven to be true.

Against avian flu Tamiflu has never been studied before, while avian flu is quite a different disease than ordinary flu that occurs in countries with a cold climate nearer the Antarctic. Influenza in tropical climates, such as Indonesia, is again not the same as the cold winter flu in the above countries.

Thus the "fever" of stocking Tamiflu is rather surprising; it even is supported by a trusted agency, the WHO. The efficacy criteria adopted by the FDA (1999), which was the data accepted before marketing, is indeed debatable if applied to the avian flu syndrome. The case of avian flu has a different dimension, and surrogate endpoints such as the use of days in improving a self-limited illness in a clinical trial cannot be extrapolated into the deadly avian flu case.

Here, "real endpoints", such as survival rate or total deaths should be measured in controlled clinical trials. Such data could then guide clinicians to use the drug against avian flu. What then should the control treatment be in such a study, and what causes death in avian flu? [...]"

Dan Riehl at Riehl World View has researched the rumors about House Representative John Murtha (D-PA) and found much interesting hard data. Dan notes in part:

The Los Angeles Times in June reported that Murtha funneled nearly $21 million to 10 or more corporate clients of KSA Consulting, where Robert "Kit" Murtha is a senior partner. Carmen Scialabba, a Murtha congressional aide for 27 years, is also a high-ranking official at KSA.

Now one may snort that raising an eyebrow about Murtha's lobbying connections ignores Business as Usual in Washington, yet this cynicism ignores the big picture. An American can look back almost with nostalgia at the Washington lobbying scandals during the waning years of the Cold War, when maneuvers by foreign and US business interests to influence Congress didn't boomerang on US national security -- at least, not enough to raise great alarm. Such is not the case today.

There is no such thing as "domestic" politics for the world's lone superpower nation in today's highly interconnected world -- and in particular not during a globalized asymmetric war launched by America's enemies.

The date of the LA Times article suggests Mr Murtha has had plenty of time of worry that pointed questions about his ethics would mar his next election bid. Murtha's headline-grabbing call to immediately bring US troops from Iraq has made him a quixotic hero in his home congressional district, according to a Big Three nightly news report the other night. (ABC, if my memory serves.)

There might be no connection between John Murtha's call for troop withdrawal and his desire to head off ethics questions, yet Dan turned up another credible source (The Hill newspaper) that raises even more troubling questions about the power that Murtha has accumulated in Washington. The Hill article (linked to in Dan's post) notes:

In 2004, Murtha ranked behind only President Bush and his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, in overall defense-industry contributions, with $284,750.

So I find it disturbing that the major broadcast media (and, it seems, the mainstream media in general) have not sought to question Mr Murtha about his motive for demanding immediate US troop withdrawal from Iraq.

President Bush, on the other hand, is always fair game: the media examine every sentence he utters, every action he takes with regard to Iraq, in light of speculations about his political motives.

That's not a level playing field, which tilts to the enemy's advantage.

"Pundita, dear, your post on Stephen Curtis shows the instincts of a mud wrestler but I have trouble reconciling this with my image of you as a schoolmarm in the frontier West. What set you off, may I ask? Was it Gary Kasparov's latest prose for the Wall Street Journal?
Boris in Jackson Heights"

Dear Boris:
That wasn't mud wrestling. This is mud wrestling: Marc Rich and the Russia Connection.

By the way, your note caused me to recall the accidental death of another man who knew too much. Oh but wait -- Vince Foster's death was deemed a suicide. There are so many accidental deaths and suicides related to the plunder of Russia that it's hard to keep them sorted.

The Wall Street Journal and the entire Get Putin crowd are in another snit because the Kremlin is getting ready to buy back control of Russia's metals industry.

The capitalists can lecture all they want about the evils of Russia returning to a Commanding Heights economy; people such as Marc Rich cannot be termed "capitalists," they are government-backed crooks. So until an economist figures out how a poor country can prevent conquest and plunder by rich countries through the mechanism of dirty financial deals, nationalization of a poor country's key commodities is the lessor of two evils.

Vladimir Putin is still up against the Seventh Ring of Hell. So it's a good time for a review of recent history. A place to start is the golden oldie article I mentioned above.

Mark [sic] Rich and the Russia Connection
by
Christopher Ruddy
for NewsMax.com
February 19, 2001

"Marc Rich may have a pardon clearing him to enter the U.S. at any time, but don't expect him ever to return.

Washington sources tell me that congressional investigators would love to slap him with a subpoena upon arrival and haul him before congressional hearings and the cameras for interrogation. The Clinton pardon deal may just be one small part of what Congress may want to find out from Rich.

Perhaps the most serious concern for congressional investigators is Rich's longstanding ties with Russian intelligence agencies, the Russian mafia, and some of the old communist states of East Europe.

Last week the New York Post's Rod Dreher reported that Rich made tens of millions of dollars helping Russia’s communist bosses loot their country, leaving it bankrupt.

Rich’s role in ruining Russia’s economy was detailed in the book "Godfather of the Kremlin," by Paul Klebnikov, who Dreher describes as an expert on Russia and a Forbes magazine senior editor.

The book reveals how Rich and Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky and associates stole untold sums from the Russian people through corrupt international financial manipulations.

In 1983, the year he fled the United States to avoid prosecution, Rich took advantage of the grain embargo the United States imposed on the USSR because of its war in Afghanistan.

Rich ignored the embargo and imported grain into the Soviet Union, winning friends in the Soviet hierarchy with whom he would ally himself when the Communist government collapsed.

According to NewsMax.com Washington sources, from then on Rich was associated in his business dealings "by the Communist Party and KGB senior figures. Everybody in that carousel, commie and KGB, got personal benefits ... commissions in Western accounts."

It is widely believed by intelligence experts that today's powerful Russian "mafia" is nothing more than an arm of Russian intelligence agencies, such as the former KGB.

Other evidence suggests Rich had more than a casual business relationship with Russia's spy agencies.

Appearing on CNN's "Larry King Live" earlier this month, former head of the U.S. Marshals Service Howard Safir revealed efforts by East Germany, then a Russian satellite state, to get Rich off the hook.

Safir said, referring to Rich, "You are talking about an individual, when I did a spy exchange in 1986, he had a lawyer from East Germany offer $225 million for him and Pinky Green if the prosecutions were wiped out."

According to Klebnikov, Rich came into the picture again as a major wheeler-dealer in Russia around 1990, when the Soviet Union began to open up to outsiders, Dreher wrote.

"Governmental authority began to crumble. All these local Communist Party bosses got to strike deals on their own," the author told Dreher.

Working out of Switzerland, which has secretive banking laws, Rich was in a prime position to help Russia's plunderers carry out their dirty work," Dreher wrote.

"Klebnikov reported that Rich dealt in oil, aluminum, zinc and other raw commodities.

"He'd strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company," Klebnikov told Dreher. "He'd say, 'OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at 5 to 10 percent of the world market price. And in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.' "

"He made a complete mint off of Russia," says Klebnikov.

Rich began buying Russian aluminum at absurdly cheap prices, with his hard currency. Rich then dumped the aluminum onto Western industrial markets, causing a 30 percent collapse in the price of the metal, as Western industry had no way to compete.

There was such an outflow of aluminum from Russia that there were shortages of aluminum for Russian fish canneries. At the same time, Rich reportedly moved in to secure export control over the supply of most West Siberian crude oil to Western markets.

Rich's companies were under investigation for fraud in Russia, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal of May 13, 1993. As a result, for at least two years, while the Soviet Union was writhing in its death throes, Rich was that nation's largest trader of aluminum and oil on a spot basis.

According to Dreher, a former foreign-trade minister told the author that Rich taught the robber-baron elite how to get around the law by running secret deals through shell companies and the like.

In an interview with Forbes magazine, a former Russian trade minister, Oleg Davydov, told Klebnikov that in the rush to privatize government-owned industries the Russian government made a serious mistake by immediately dismantling the government foreign trade monopolies.

"These organizations had decades of experience and representatives all over the world," Davydov explained.

"They charged 0.5 percent commission and remitted all the difference [between domestic commodity prices and world prices] to the government. When these legal channels became inconvenient [for Russia's new businessmen], there appeared a huge mass of foreign entrepreneurs, mostly crooks like Marc Rich, who began to teach us various ways of taking the money out through offshore companies."

"Marc Rich ended up being a mentor to all these young kids who came out of the Communist Party establishment, and who made billions off these schemes themselves," Klebnikov charges.

"Applying the lessons they learned from Marc Rich, they bankrupted Russia," Klebnikov alleges.

"As a result, you have a ruined economy, bankrupt government, and an impoverished population."

Rich, headquartered in Switzerland, was well situated to help the Russian mafia. Switzerland has already been identified by international police agencies as a major center of Russian money laundering.

If it is true that Rich and his intermediaries were willing to spend more than $200 million for a pardon for U.S. crimes, it raises questions of whether a lot more money may have changed hands than the few million suspected as donations to the DNC, Hillary's Senate campaign or the Clinton Library.

Could money, for example, have been transferred to an offshore bank account? It's a good question investigators need to ask. Especially since the Clintons have had their own Switzerland connection. Several years ago London's Sunday Telegraph reported that Vince Foster, onetime White House deputy counsel, made frequent trips to Switzerland before the Clintons entered the White House."

John Batchelor continues to blog at Red State; his latest entry reminds me that he was an author before he was a radio show host. He writes beautifully, bitterly, of the hypocrisy that mourns the execution of Van Nguyen while ignoring the horrors unleashed by the heroin trade.

... Those heroin grams out of Cambodia are part of the chain of cruelty that reaches into the rogue state of Cambodia -- brutalized by the unrepentant, PRC linked Khmer Rouge lieutenants of Pol Pot's last years -- and then reaches across Asia to wreck neighborhoods and fund terror gangs ...

From Batchelor's December 1 entry Singapore Hang 'em High

"A war can be lost because public opinion turns against its continued prosecution. The New York Times -- the self-described “newspaper of record” -- is among the world’s most influential opinion leaders. As shown by the cited quotations, the newspaper’s stance on Iraq underwent a complete transformation during the decade separating 1993 and 2003."
-- Marc Schulman, American Future

Schulman's research turns up fascinating patterns. Another fascinating pattern would be revealed by a study of editorial opinion on Iraq at West Europe's strongest pro-EU newspapers during the same period and comparing this to NYT opinion.

One interesting bit of history dug up by Schulman is that Tony Blair was also Clinton's poodle when it came to Iraq. Of course there is an alternative view of Mr Blair: that he was a hawk on Iraq before George Bush came to office, and that he turned to America when he got no support from Britain's most powerful EU partners.

(Times Editorial 11/19/98)
Weary of endless confrontations with Iraq, President Clinton, Congress and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain are now rallying around the idea of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. The thought is certainly alluring. The installation of a democratic government in Baghdad would probably eliminate the threat of Iraqi aggression. Unfortunately, the only sure way to reach that goal is for American troops to invade Iraq and capture Baghdad, a risky prospect few Americans would support. The White House and the Pentagon are well aware of all these problems, and were openly skeptical about plotting against Mr. Hussein until Mr. Clinton unexpectedly embraced the idea earlier this week. If Mr. Clinton and members of Congress are serious about trying to overthrow him, they need to level with the American people about the potential financial and human costs. The project will not be cheap or bloodless. Nor is it likely to succeed without an American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Keeping Iraq isolated and controlling its weapons of mass destruction through aggressive inspection is an imperfect policy, but it is more practical than anything else that has been proposed.

"Our robber barons created wealth. Russia's oligarchs took over wealth from the state and shipped much of that wealth out of Russia illegally. I don't agree that Khordokovsky knew he would face imprisonment if he returned to Russia. He thought his high level contacts in the Bush administration would protect him. Khordokovsky is a thug who got religion too late."
-- Stephen F. Cohen commenting on the trial of Mikhail Khordokovsky

In the early evening of March 3 this year, after one of his countless business trips for Yukos, Mr Curtis boarded his private helicopter at London's Battersea Airport. At the controls was experienced pilot Matt Radford, 34.

Around 20 minutes into the journey towards Mr Curtis' multi-million-pound seafront home, Pennsylvania Castle, at Portland, Dorset, the helicopter plummeted to the ground near Bournemouth Airport and exploded. ...

Witnesses heard the helicopter's rotor cut out and pilot Mr Radford reported an unspecified problem to air traffic control. It exploded into flames 29 seconds later. ...

On November 3, 2005 the inquest jury returned a verdict of accidental death, saying the crash was probably caused by the pilot becoming disoriented in bad weather.

Stephen Curtis was a lawyer who set up a breathtakingly vast and complex web of shell companies that became Group Menatep, the parent company of Yukos Oil, Russia's most valuable oil company. The shell game allowed Mikhail Khordokovsky and his cohorts to rob the Russian people of billions of dollars.

Stephen Curtis knew enough to put Khordokovsky away for life. When Khordokovsky was arrested in Russia in 2004 on tax evasion and fraud charges he saw that Curtis was appointed managing director of Group Menatep, the parent company of Yukos. But the criminal investigation had spread outside Russia. Swiss auditors looking at possible money laundering or tax evasion attempts raided two Yukos companies and seized their assets.

In the effort to avoid prosecution Stephen Curtis offered to sing to Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service. He only managed to meet with NCIS twice before he was killed.

Eric Jenkins, Mr Curtis's uncle, told the inquest that his nephew said he was receiving threatening phone calls and was under surveillance. Mr Jenkins said that two weeks before his death Mr Curtis had said that if anything happened to him, it would not be an accident.

Although there was no evidence of sabotage from the Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) ... the father of the pilot, Dennis Radford, said he thought the possibility of sabotage had not been fully investigated by the AAIB.

Quotes from (UK) Telegraph and icWales.