The Second Rule of Foreign Policy

"Dear Pundita:

Isn't the World Bank's PALll project (Ukraine) and similar projects correcting the type of mistakes you noted about the Bank's development loan model? I think the Bank's lending policy has become sensitive to the need for establishing the basic mechanisms of democratic government in developing countries.
[Signed] Kumar in Bethesda"

Dear Kumar:

Okay, let's look at PAL-2. First we'll read the first three sentences (written in Bankese, which means they take up half a page) from the PAL-2 project description:

"The Second Programmatic Adjustment Loan (PALII) Project will continue deepening the program of achievements, in the five thematic areas of the first PAL operation: fiscal and financial Discipline; regulatory reform; creating and protecting property rights; public sector accountability; and, management of social and environmental risks. The project will encourage policy coordination - PAL provides an anchor for the pro-reform constituency in the Government and the Verkhovna Rada, it acts as a catalyst for change, and it is able to direct technical assistance to areas so requiring. Wider participation of civil society in the design, and implementation of reforms will be supported, as will the continued macroeconomic stability, through the establishment of structural reforms, crucial for growth over the medium term. "

All that sounds helpful toward creating a modern civil society, one that supports the mechanisms of democratic government. Now let's break down all those words into crystal-clear English:

PAL-2 Contracts (awarded Spring/Summer of 2004)

Analysis of Conformity of Ukrainian Legislation with WTO Standards
Contract amount: $409,000
Contractor: HTSPE Ltd.
Contractor Country: United Kingdom

Advisor on the Strategy Paper for Further Development of Public Procurement System in Ukraine
Contract Amt: $40,000
Contractor: Simeon A. Sahaydachny
Contractor Country: United States

Assisting in Preparation of a White Book on Internal Financial Control
Contract Amt: $35,000
Contractor: Lars Lage Olofsson
Contractor Country: Sweden

(There's a fourth contract--for computers. The contract was awarded to a UK company; that contract is also pocket change--pocket change in USD, that is; it takes about 5-1/2 Ukraine hryvnias to buy 1 US dollar.)

Readers who have been following the situation in Ukraine will intuit something odd about the PAL-2 way of helping to install the mechanisms for democratic government in Ukraine. Well, yes--if installing such mechanisms is the primary goal, it would be skewed priorities to borrow half a million bucks to conduct an analysis on how to make Ukraine's legislation conform with WTO policy.

However, that's not the goal. The Bank has clearly stated their goal with regard to Ukraine. From "Ten Things You Never Knew about the World Bank in Ukraine," here is the #1 thing that we (to include the American commentariat on the Right and Left) never knew, unless we lived on the World Bank website, of course:

"1. For Ukraine, European Union integration is proving a challenging task. The Ukrainian government’s “European Choice” program aims at harmonizing Ukraine’s laws and practices with those of the European Union. The World Bank is supporting this program by helping Ukraine establish a more inclusive and responsive government, with a view to forging closer relations with the EU."

Alert readers might be scratching their heads at the "European Choice" reference. Yes, thanks to the Canadian press and the research talents of the bunch at World Socialist Web Site, Pundita's readers are aware that more than one choice was under consideration. Kuchma had discussed the possibility of Ukraine joining a trading bloc with Russia. That set off a panic in EU circles, which reverberated in Washington.

Further discussions were suspended after the howls went up but just the EU fear that Kuchma would go ahead with the plan was probably his undoing, leaving aside other factors. If you look at the dates on those PAL-2 contracts it's obvious the ship had left the pier before Yuschenko's election campaign. Under Kuchma Ukraine had been on a track to join the EU and NATO; the Bank wouldn't have committed the funds to PAL-2 if they'd thought otherwise.

Pundita repeats herself here: The World Bank is a one-trick magic show. To the extent that better business practices and freer markets help democracy, the Bank helps democracy. But the World Bank, as with all development banks, is founded on the concept of the development bank project loan. The loan model is meant to be a trickle-down aid to economies. The same model is used, only there is a mid-step inserted: bring the Ukraine government's way of doing things in line with EU and WTO practices.

The other night Stephen Cohen gave John Batchelor's audience a summary of the thinking on the US side that led to strained relations with Putin. He finished by observing that the first rule of foreign policy is that actions have consequences.

Here's the second rule: Know exactly what your country's foreign policy instruments are doing in any given fiscal year.

Pundita contests William Safire's counsel to the "quality" news media

Dear Mr. Safire:

Re your observations, "America's quality [news] media are now wading through the Slough of Despond. Our self-flagellation, handwringing and narcissism threaten our mission to act as counterweight to government power."

It should not be the mission of the news media to act as a counterweight to government power; that mission belongs to the electorate. The mission of the news media should be to inform the citizen public about events that critically impact the public.

There are good reporters. Yet somehow it happened that the Establishment became the employer of many who believe that a reporter's job is to place the American government in the dock.

The upshot was plainly evident on the morning of September 11, 2001, when millions of Americans stared in disbelief at their television sets and told themselves that the plane must be off course. Even after seeing the second plane, millions of Americans still couldn't believe that it was attack. That's how poorly the US new media had done their job in the decade running up to 9/11. So Americans had to learn the hard way that the world's lone superpower nation had a news media fit only for a banana republic.

What you call "quality" media became a tabloid for Beltway food fights. The major American press and television news build front pages and newscasts around the day's food fight and call that "the daily news." They do this to such an extent it's not worth a busy person's time to routinely follow the Establishment news outlets--not if staying informed about vital news is the goal.

Thus, I came across your January 17 opinion piece only by clicking on a link on Drudge's site, which led me to Der Spiegel's online post of your piece for The New York Times.

I interject that if the Times thinks they can routinely get my attention via an "exchange" arrangement with Spiegel Online and similar attempts to ape the format of new news media, they are wrong. I almost clicked out of the Spiegel site immediately on seeing the Times banner. It was only the title given your piece, The Depressed Press , which staved off the mouse click.

That doesn't mean I never read reports in the Times. But to find the occasional informative sentence embedded in a Times report, I depend on trustworthy "new" news media researchers and analysts to do the digging. I don't have the time to sift paragraphs of opinion and Beltway tabloid news just so I can mine a few bits of data I can pick up more quickly and easily from other sources.

With regard to the self-flagellation, handwringing and narcissism--well, if the media you term quality were actually quality, they wouldn't have time for all that, would they? This is in consideration that America is at war, and that the Establishment spent the decade running up to 9/11 depending greatly on the BBC for news and views about what's happening outside American shores. So the Establishment should have no time for anything but to catch up and help the American public catch up.

This observation brings me to your remark that "clean government needs a snooping adversary..."

No, Mr. Safire. Just being a snoop and an adversary leads to the media becoming a pawn of the factions that most need watchdogging. Clean government requires a professional news media doing their job.

It seems to me that the slough of despond is mostly pique that millions of Americans no longer depend on the Establishment for opinion. The best therapy is to stress that respect for the opinions of journalists must be earned; it's not something bestowed by a title or the name of a media organization.

Every day I take in opinion that I don't agree with, but which I consider because the people giving the opinion have earned my respect. They've earned it with painstaking work to bring vital news to the public. As far as I'm concerned, that right has already been earned by several members of the "new" media.

The UN's Paper Sword

In late December Claudia Rosett updated John's audience on Kofi Annan's stonewalling. She pointed out that the history of Kofi's actions as head of the UN demonstrate that there would be nothing behind any US government assumption that a "greater good" could be served by supporting Kofi's refusal to resign.

What I find unsettling about her observation is that it reminds me of John Loftus's discussion with John more than a year ago about ElBaradei. I've been reminded of that discussion several times since, as IAEA negotiations with Tehran have unfolded.

Loftus detailed that the US had the goods on Baradei, who for years during Saddam's rule put on a blindfold with regard to al-Tuwaitha. Loftus said that Tuwaitha is so radioactive that Putin had to warn Bush that US troops should take care not to bomb the facility during the invasion of Iraq.

When John asked why the Bush administration didn't use what they had on Baradei to blow him out of the water, Loftus replied he didn't know. But he speculated that Baradei with the goods on him might be seen by the administration as useful in pushing Iran hard on their nuclear weapon program.

If that's how the Bush administration was thinking, we've all seen how useful Baradei has been with the goods on him.

I understand the need not to convene Kangaroo Court but not rushing to judgment works both ways. The initial Bush stand on Annan, after the UN Oil-for-Food investigation captured US headlines, was "wait on the evidence." Okay. But then don't find Annan innocent ahead of the evidence.

Maybe the best course for the Bush administration is to use the rest of Annan's tenure to figure out what the US should do about the United Nations. Annan, after all, is simply the most visible symbol of the UN problems, which are systemic.

The question is whether the system can be fixed without remaking the UN from the ground up. This point was brought home to me while reading an essay Ever Always by the Belmont Club author, who once again exposes the root of a problem:

"The [UN] Security Council's structural defect is part of its design. It was meant to freeze international action, not promote it. Paralysis is a Security Council feature not a bug. While international multilateral action from recorded history has always been carried out by nations whose interests momentarily coincide, the Security Council was carefully constructed to consist of rivals whose interests clash, each with a veto over the other.

"The proposals put forward to limit international military action to the Security Council are tantamount to preventing alliance action because all "legitimate" international action is made the province of the parties in conflict. This recipe for enhanced stasis, as Gourevitch points out, has ironically been advanced under the "the Rwanda never again clause" -- when in fact it amounts to a "Rwanda ever always" clause, as the Congolese and Sudanese know to their cost."

The security council is the sword arm of the United Nations. Time and again the "enhanced stasis" that is the council has resulted in the UN wielding a paper sword against crises such as Sudan. Only the crushing weight of the United States, brought fully to bear, loans the security council a sword of steel.

However, the United Nations, as with the IMF-World Bank, was conceived as a US policy instrument. Now that our policy instrument has gotten away from us, do we really want to see the UN Security Council in possession of a steel sword?

Why Eliot Spitzer is the Man for the Job

Pundita has been asked to explain her nomination of Eliot Spitzer for the next World Bank president. I pick Spitzer because the challenge he faced in dealing with Wall Street parallels the greatest challenge the incoming World Bank president will face--or rather should face. But understanding why Spitzer is the Man for the Job requires a grasp of how the development bank loan model works in practice. So first a crash course:

Contrary to popular understanding the IBRD project loan was created to directly benefit business, not government. This makes sense if you consider that the IBRD was conceived as an economic means to help a country rebuild and develop. The model is the grandfather of the Trickle Down theory.

The loan money is disbursed to a government but the government pays out to contractors to execute the project. That's why a wag once referred to the Bank as "One big procurement scam." However, it's not a scam. In certain situations the model works beautifully; it works as intended when a country has to get back on it's feet. For example, the model helped put many European businesses back on their feet after WW2. That in turn helped build up Europe's postwar economies.

But the IBRD loan model did not change when it was applied to help countries that had never been on their feet in the first place. The only change was the IDA financing. To quickly grasp what's wrong with applying the IBRD loan model to the least developed countries, take this quiz:

1) People in your neighborhood are blowing each other up, hacking each other to death with machetes, and living on bugs for dinner. The solution is to write low-cost loans to widen your neighborhood's street and rebuild the local community center. This is so your local cement business and building contractor can avoid shutting their doors.

TRUE___

FALSE___

2) If you answered TRUE to the above. After five years of implementation of the above loans, people in your neighborhood are still blowing each other up, hacking each other to death with machetes, and living on bugs for dinner. The solution is to write even lower-cost loans so that your local flower vendor and coffeehouse can stay open.

TRUE___

FALSE___

The IBRD is a one-trick magic show. Behind the kaleidoscopic stage business, which is the numberless types of Bank-financed projects--construction, education, environment, agriculture, the list is endless--is one unchanging factor. All those government-sponsored projects underwritten by IBRD and IDA loans are executed by contractors, which the debtor government (with Bank approval) chooses.

Here we come to a snag. If the project loans are really to help the country get on its feet by helping the business sector, the government can't rely exclusively on contractors from developed nations to do the project work. That would be counterproductive. The local contractors must be given work on the projects, even if it's only subcontracts.

Yet even the international megacontractors, such as Bechtel, face big challenges when overseeing the work of many contractors from developed nations. When the oversight task must include many score or hundreds of contractors from an underdeveloped country, the problem with applying the IBRD model to the poorest countries stands up and shouts. The IDA loan is never big enough--cannot be big enough--to finance the kind of oversight that would insure efficient use of the project loan money and block the worst graft.

The Bank does factor in a certain amount of inefficiency on the project and a certain amount of embezzlement when writing the project loan. But that hardly deals with the problem. There are two types of corruption involved with World Bank loans. (And with all development bank project loans.)

First, there is embezzlement of Bank loan funds at the administrative level--the debtor government level. This type of corruption is famously associated with despots who receive Bank loans. The despot's government routinely peels off millions of dollars from Bank loans.

I interject that is not counting outright theft. One of a despot's many tricks is to have a military unit put on black clothing and ski masks then sneak into the project site at night to steal heavy equipment.

The next morning, when the poor World Bank project engineer sees all the cranes and bulldozers gone, a fence from the same military unit shows up and offers to sell some cranes and bulldozers from his brother-in-law's business. Then the despot spends the profit on more military expenditures, so he can terrorize his people and neighboring countries all the more.

Second, there are the many varieties of fraud practiced by shady contractors the world over since contracting began. (This doesn't include the loan money wasted by honest local contractors who are still in the learning phase.)

In theory, the first type of fraud can be blocked by very close Bank oversight, which the World Bank has attempted during the past decade in particular. The sticking point is that despots aren't idiots. They figure the only reason they're getting low-cost loans is because their country is sitting on a natural resource that a World Bank member(s) find useful. And/or their country has reaped the windfall of being in a location that a World Bank member (e.g., a NATO country) finds to be of military importance.

So when the Bank auditors arrive the despot raises himself to his full height and thunders, "Are you calling me a crook?"

Right there is one reason Eliot Spitzer is specially qualified to lead the World Bank. He dealt with that kind of situation all the time when he was chief of Manhattan's Labor Racketeering Unit.

"What? You're calling us racketeers? We'll have to shut down the docks for a week while we talk to our attorneys about suing for slander."

The second type of fraud explains why the Bank has firmly resisted bringing in outside auditors. If you conduct independent forensic investigation of the amount of Bank loan money that is routinely stolen or wasted by contractors connected with Bank projects in least-developed countries, the Bank's credit rating will tank.

Then the Bank would be trying to sell junk bonds to finance their lending. That would not allow the Bank to support their lending practices. In other words, the World Bank would go out of business. At least, that is the Bank's excuse for not dealing with their central problem.

For readers who are familiar with the blowout on Wall Street, the Bank's excuse sounds remarkably like excuses Wall Street trotted out to resist making real changes. When they saw the lynch mobs forming across America, Wall Street firms called on each other to take executive action. However, the proposed actions had nothing to do with the central problem, which is that stock offerings are no longer only "to the trade."

The IBRD project loan model is also "to the trade." The model was not conceived for countries where the most basic governing infrastructures in a modern civil society were never there, or so gone they'd have to build from scratch. Leave aside the crooks; how can you sue a shoddy contractor in a country where contract laws are nonexistent and the judicial system runs completely on bribes, if it runs at all? This leaves no way to impose standards on the work of local industries.

Then visitors from developed countries ask, "Why doesn't anything work here? And by the way, why does the drinking water in these countries always smell like goat poop?"

Yet the Bank has spent decades resisting a change to the IBRD project loan model, in the same way Wall Street spent decades resisting changes to their way of business. In the mid-20th Century, Wall Street's resistance would have been justified. People are responsible for their own investment decisions. So if they lose their shirt--well, that's Wall Street. But Spitzer's call for reform recognizes that stock offerings are no longer only to the trade. Wall Street not only accepts but now depends on investments from many millions of people who know nothing of the business of trading stocks and bonds.

In the same manner, developed countries should not write loans to "least developed" countries when they know the government doesn't have the same institutions in place that allow developed countries to properly utilize low-cost loans. For the least developed countries, such loans only add obstacles to creating a functioning civil society.

Here is a good summary of Eliot Spitzer's thinking about the need for Wall Street to move into the 21st Century:

"Spitzer tells FRONTLINE that his investigation led him to the conclusion that Wall Street's whole business model in the late-1990s, in which stock analysts were fully integrated into the investment banking operations of brokerage houses, was not only "fundamentally corrupt" but, in fact, fraudulent. The only solution, he believes, is for Wall Street to implement the "structural reforms" agreed upon in the [global] settlement, in which analysis and investment banking are walled off."

With little adjustment, those observations could apply to the World Bank. It is time to set up a wall between the IBRD project loan model and the governments of the least developed countries. That would mean considerable pain for many honest businesspeople because the problem went untended for decades. This is another reason Spitzer is the logical choice for Bank president. He learned to turn a selectively deaf ear to the piteous cries of the doomed on Wall Street.

The IBRD loan model was conceived as a crutch, but the model eventually generated a contracting subculture. The subculture is totally dependent on government business derived from Bank loans. This translated into a devastating effect on business progress in the least developed countries.

If companies are so weak that the only way they survive is by getting business from loan projects made to the worst governments in the poorest countries, the Bank must carry out triage.

The bottom line is that the relationship between IDA project loans and companies that service the loans is so entwined that there's going to be severe pain, no matter how you fix the problem. But letting the problem stand is akin to refusing to amputate a limb that gangrene has destroyed.

Of course, Eliot Spitzer's investigation into Wall Street practices had the force of the US legal system behind it. He wouldn't have the same force behind him at the Bank. Yet Spitzer knows the terrain of Establishment resistance to calls for structural reform. He's been there, bought the T-shirt and the DVD. Above all, that is why Eliot Spitzer is the best choice for the next World Bank President. Even if he only took the job for a year, as interim president, humankind would benefit.

Here's a useful website for Americans who would like to avert World War V

"Pundita! Please stick your head out of your cave once in a while! Eliot Spitzer wants to run for governor of NY. He wouldn't take the job of World Bank President even if he was offered it.
[Signed] Not Born Yesterday (in New York)"

"Why Eliot Spitzer, Pundita? Am going to link to your post [on Spitzer] but wondered what the reasoning was.
[Signed] David in Dorset, UK"

Dear NBY:

Believe you me, at this juncture the world needs Eliot Spitzer much more than the state of New York.

Dear David:

We confess to a moment's trepidation before clicking on the link you provided, after we saw that you're situated Across the Pond. We wondered whether it was one of those websites that exhorts readers to splash themselves with chicken blood and hop up and down outside IMF headquarters during the Spring meeting. The ritual terrifies the squirrels, you understand.

We are happy to report to our American readers that your website worldbankpresident.org is wonderfully civilized--and intelligent as well. Frankly it's a shame that the idea for the website didn't come from an American.

Of course it's vitally important that Americans take a profound interest in the choice for the next president of the Bank; a website dedicated to news about speculation regarding the choice provides a valuable service to Americans not to mention humankind at large.

So you want to know why Pundita likes Eliot Spitzer for the next Bank president....I imagine you've Googled Spitzer's name, but perhaps a close follower of the Bank's doings would also need to have followed the nightly news in America, while Spitzer was on a tear with Wall Street, in order to instantly grasp why he is the only rational choice for next President of the World Bank.

All right, Pundita will explain her reasoning in her next posting, "Why Eliot Spitzer is the Man for the Job."

For readers who can't stand the suspense kindly plow through the speech Sebastian Mallaby gave in October 2004 at the Council on Foreign Relations regarding his book on the World Bank. Take special note of the glaring contradiction between Mallaby's passing along the Bank's apology for corruption, and his acknowledgment that it's not possible to determine what part, if any, the Bank has ever played in any government's success stories.

Readers should also click on the link provided at your site, or go directly to the UN's Global Policy Forum to read the reprint of a Wall Street Journal editorial on the Bank. The editorial makes it clear that an independent audit of graft that Bank loans have financed will be conducted over the dead bodies of World Bank governors.

If one puts Mallaby's discussion of corruption together with the above point and tosses in Spitzer's time spent prosecuting labor racketeers, it shouldn't take a crystal ball to intuit the gist of Pundita's next post.

However, corruption is not the Bank's central problem. Because few people understand how the Bank works, for all the countless words written, explaining the problem in a few simple words will be a challenge. But Pundita will give it a try because to understand the Bank is to realize why Spitzer should be in top post at the Bank for at least a year.

System Failure: The Democracy Stage Show, Part II

The following exchange took place in 2000 during a Q&A session at a BBC-sponsored forum on the World Bank.

"My question is regarding my country. In the cold war era the World Bank gave money to Mobuto and his government knowing very well that money was being used for his personal use and I think that money was to keep there and prevent communism being spread around Africa. Why should the people of the Congo pay for this debt because we never used the money and Mobuto was an illegal government?"
--Serge Tshamala, Maryland, USA (from RD Congo)

"I think the whole issue of Mobuto and the Congo troubles you and everyone who has something to do with Africa. The question of where the money went and what the objections were at the time is something I can't really answer seeing as I wasn't around. I can tell you that in recent years there has been an enormous effort on the part of the Bank to make sure money is used on social and other programmes and the incidents of debt try to be alleviated. Your country is one which is suffering from the most terrible political problems and we are working closely with the UN to try to get the country back on an even keel."
--James Wolfensohn, President, World Bank

As if to mock Wolfensohn's final comment the present situation in several African countries underscores that the World Bank working with the United Nations to get things "back on an even keel" is not a winning formula.

Yet to be fair the Bank has always been a prisoner of a certain kind of macroeconomic thinking that has little to do with the real world. The point is pounded home in a writing by the IMF's chief researcher, Raghuram G. Rajan.

The essay, written in plain English, should be required reading for Americans who want this to be "liberty's century." Or at the least, want their tax dollars to go to more effective efforts at helping LLDCs ("least developed countries"--the polite way of referring to countries that are such a mess they can't be even be considered "developing").

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

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

"Democratic Institution Building and The Rule of Law

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

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

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

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

No Chopped Liver

Pundita is shocked at the names on the list of candidates being tossed around for the post of President of the World Bank after Mr. Wolfensohn leaves at the end of May 2005. None of the people on the list are even remotely qualified for the post. European sources have said that Bank shareholders want to avoid a selection process along political lines and hope the candidate will be chosen on his qualifications. I couldn't agree more. But because a team of Dobermans can't be charge of a bank Pundita nominates Eliot Spitzer for the post.

In search of where we are now

"I tried to figure out your political affiliation by reading your old posts. I gave up. Can you tell me which party you favor?
Caesar in San Francisco"

Dear Caesar:

From the long view, 9/11 was the post-Cold War era crashing in on the fantasy world that American political parties and the American news media had been living in since the end of the Soviet Empire. After 9/11 President Bush undertook the necessary task of re-coupling US foreign policy with US defense. But elements of US foreign policy are still wandering around in the mid- to late decades of the 20th Century. And when the bubble burst Americans didn't recognize the world outside our shores.

So this is not a partisan or even political situation. The situation is to find the 21st Century. That's what we do here in Pundita-land. Instead of slogging through bogs to watch rare birds or prowling forests to find wild mushrooms, we go in search of where we are now.

The Democracy Stage Show

This essay has been revised. Please see "Democracy Stage Show" on Pundita's sidebar or visit: http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/03/democracy-stage-show-kit.html

Rugby the Rat Vindicated

Pundita is determined that this blog shall not become a message board for wildlife, lab rats, and canine members of the Bush family. However, the foreign policy team will give me no peace until I pass along this item from the January 10 Discarded Lies blog titled Rugby Vindicated .

"Something Rotten in the State of Ukraine"

"Pundita, the more I read about the Ukraine election, the more confused I become about whether democracy was really served. There are strong arguments on both sides."
[Signed] June in Cincinnati"

Dear June:

At least you're looking at both sides, which is what Americans need to do, if we want to forge good foreign policy for this era.

Pundita has observed before that the situation in Ukraine is complex. No small part of the complexity is due to the simple fact that almost all US news media ignored the situation in Ukraine until it blew up. The media ignored the situation for years--despite America's deep involvement in Ukraine during those years. So of course the situation is confusing because it's tons of new data to sort through and hitting all at once.

But keep at it because once you learn the way things work with regard to one situation the knowledge transfers to other situations. After a time you'll see certain patterns emerge, then following the international news will become much easier.

With regard to Ukraine, there are two issues: the claims of fraud during the election, and the pre-election situation that brought so much outside influence and money to the election during the past two years.

Take cheer from the following report , "Something Rotten in the State of Ukraine," written by an observant and idealistic American eyewitness to the situation. He, too, is trying sort things through....

Even Wendy had to grow up

"Dear Pundita:
I got so angry at the French after I learned they sold weapons to Saddam even when they knew we were planning to invade Iraq. I stopped drinking French wine and threw away my French cookbooks although I got them out the trash after I realized I couldn't live without them. My blood boiled all over again when I read your essay about the Chirac school of foreign policy. At least Tony Blair has been a good friend to America and democracy.
[Signed] Caesar in San Francisco

Dear Caesar:

To expect that any government in that vast contiguous bunch of nations across the Pond is going to be "friends" with any other government is expecting too much of human nature.

Tony Blair was not acting as a "good friend" to America when he sided with Bush on Iraq. He was acting in Britain's best interests. Germany and France had gained too much power in the EU, from the viewpoint of several British MPs and their constituents. The Germany-France-Belgium-Luxemborg alliance threatened to marginalize Britain. Blair's decision to join Bush's "coalition of the willing" in Iraq was a brilliant strategy for helping Britain right the balance of power.

Now before you get so disappointed with Blair that you never to eat plum pudding again, you need to put the concept of "alliance" in context. This is what--the eighth TV season of Survivor? So, Americans should know by now that alliances are very conditional. The alliance lasts as long as both parties find it useful; all bets are off the moment one party's interests diverge from the alliance's rationale.

There are Survivor contestants who become friends after their time in the game is ended. But only the most hypocritical or naive among them expect that vows of friendship during the game signal any more than strategy.

In the same maner, if Tony Blair wasn't a national leader he could be considered a good friend to America. I think he genuinely likes Americans and that he has very deep gratitude for the help the US gave Britain during the two world wars. But you need to look at the other side of the story, as well. Jacques Chirac has made it clear that he doesn't like Americans; he doesn't like our culture. At the same time, once Chirac saw Blair's strategy, which threatened to isolate the FrancoGerman-led alliance in the EU, Chirac and his German counterpart threw more help to the US war on terror than they like to broadcast.

French forces have been fighting alongside American special forces in formerly French-controlled African countries where al Qaeda got a foothold. And the French government joined Bush's strategic alliance to interdict ships used by al Qaeda and/or which carry contraband material, including WMD components. That's how Libya was caught red-handed.

France and Germany did not betray America by going against Bush on Iraq. They acted according to their perception of their best interests, as they have done all along. You could argue that their perception is wrong--that their policy with regard to the Middle East in general, and Bush's decision on Iraq in particular, is unwise. Yet the simple truth is that the world changed greatly for the Europeans after the Soviet Union dissolved; the US news media and the US public did not keep up. The upshot was that most Americans were stunned by Germany and France's divergence from the US over the Iraq situation.

The only stunner was the US Department of State's abuse of their power in the attempt to bring down a sitting US president and commander-in-chief during a hot war. If you want to use the language of "betrayal," that was the knife if the back--not only the president's back, but also the American people's back. Because State workers are also American, it can be hard to fathom why they acted in such manner.

To be generous, probably the majority of State employees who wanted to get rid of Bush acted in what they considered to be America's best interests. If so, they were correct about America's best interests--for the eras of the 1950s and 1960s. But by the 1980s, Gene Kelly's Paris was long gone.

And by the 1990s, the KGB villains had been replaced by oligarchs rich and ruthless enough to sell entire governments down the river, and whose modus operandi resembled that of the crocodile in Peter Pan. The Europeans knew what they were really dealing with and they knew the vast majority of Americans didn't know. So in the manner of Peter Pan they assured State, "Don't worry, we'll be your guide to the Neverland created by the fall of the Soviet Empire."

So it came down to a day at the United Nations, as Americans sat before their TV sets and watched in disbelief as the French and German governments told America to go sit on a tack.

Okay, we've had our adventure in Neverland. Now it's time for the State Department and the American public to ditch the role of Wendy. The hands on the alarm clock have moved. Time for America to grow up. In this way, we avoid the extremes of blind trust and bitterness.

Roasting a sacred cow

The Diplomad's recent posts contain anecdotal criticism of some UN umbrella organizations. I find the criticism notable coming as it does from authoritative sources inside the US Foreign Service. One of the arguments for the US staying with the UN is that some of the UN umbrella organizations (e.g., UNICEF) do valuable work. Diplomad makes a good start at roasting that sacred cow.

During the past year I've abandoned my position that it's impractical for the US to leave the UN no matter how badly the organization functions. I now think it's impractical to stay with the UN, simply because there is so much wrong with the UN that starting anew is much better than throwing good resources after bad.

The time and resources of Americans are best spent creating agencies that do the same "valuable work" as the UN umbrella organizations--but do the work efficiently and without massive corruption, and specifically to serve the cause for democracy.

Speaking of the UN, I am troubled by Matt Drudge's mention last night on his radio show that there is a growing friendship between President Bush and President Clinton. I suspect this odd coupling has more do with Bush giving Clinton a look-over for the job of UN Secretary General than it does with budding friendship. Clinton has been angling for the job.

If by chance Bush thinks Clinton could be made useful to US foreign policy he would be practicing selective amnesia or making a dangerously cynical reach across the political aisle.

President Clinton's defense policy left this country wide open for a catastrophic military attack, put US foreign policy under the control of the group that runs the European Union, and turned the State Department into a lackey for the EU.

Mr. Clinton is not fit to oversee a chicken coop, much less a world body. That many Democrats still don't realize this speaks only to the vile quality of news reporting in this county during the Clinton era and since.

"Anyone but Kofi" is not the way to deal with what's wrong with the United Nations. If the American people want an organization where humane governments can discuss and resolve on world problems, the UN is not that place.

The place might be a new international organization that sets and maintains stiff criteria for admission--and get the criteria right this time. No more treating despots as if they are democratically elected. Granted, this approach leaves US foreign policy little wiggle room. The alternative is to keep flushing billions of aid and development bank dollars down the toilet.

And launch serious public discussion on whether a permanent "world body" should exist at all. Perhaps ad hoc agencies and meetings would be a better way for this era.

Is American journalism experiencing Salman Rushdie Syndrome, or what?

(Thank you Bill Roggio at the fourth rail.) Monday's Winds of War briefing picked up the Reporters Without Borders report on torture of imprisoned Iranian bloggers. The briefing also carries a link to a Human Rights Watch report via the Iran Press News site. The first paragraph of the report:

"(New York, January 6, 2005) -- After testifying to a presidential commission about their torture during detention, a group of Iranian journalists have received death threats from judicial officials under Tehran chief prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi, Human Rights Watch said today."

Take note: that's an American presidential commission. Pundita can understand that the lily-livered American feminist movement lives in terror of the mullathugs--but the American news profession? American Op-ed writers, print news editors and TV news production teams please SPEAK UP LOUDER.

Barney and the Theoretical Bubble Machine

"Pundita! I just read your last post! Ever since I started listening to Coast to Coast I KNEW there had to be a machine somewhere in all this! Can you tell me about the Theoretical Bubble Machine? Does it have anything to do with the Illuminati or the Club of Rome?

PS: I got a strange letter from the post office about the shrimp gumbo I sent you for the raccoon. Maybe I didn't seal the container right but I thought the sentence about detonating the package was a little extreme. Today I sent crabcakes. I wrapped them in aluminum foil and packed them in dry ice so there's NO WAY they can leak or stink. I included some waterbugs for the crows but I made sure they can't get out of the plastic bag.

PPS: I'm getting more sleep since I switched to the Malibu Diet and took your advice about being more philosophical about geopolitics.

PPPS: Ever since I visited the World Socialist Web Site I've been having dreams about a sinister looking man in a cheap leather coat. I wonder if he's Trotsky. Anyhow, could you tell me what brand of demon repellent you sprayed around before you visited the website?
[Signed] Better Rested in St. Louis"

Dear BRISL:

Don't worry; he was probably only Beria. The Club of Rome....there's a flash from the past...So you want to know about the Theoretical Bubble Machine, eh? The prototype was built by Roosevelt's Brain Trust. A clunky model using a primitive computing machine was put together in the bar at Bretton Woods. This was after World War II. The model was refined after Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the Lawrence Welk show.

From then on, the Theoretical Bubble Machine had a very colorful history. Harvard professors would pay fraternities in beer kegs to steal the machine from the Council of Foreign Relations and restore it to its supposedly proper place at Harvard. Then the council would organize commando units from unemployed policy experts to steal back the machine. These commandos were paid quite literally in peanuts and ID tags that allowed them into embassy parties serving a buffet.

In the mid-80s Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger organized a raid that brought the Theoretical Bubble Machine to the basement of the Center for Strategic & International Studies. I think some moonlighting employees from Langley and a Sony vice president were involved in that caper.

The possum told me that she remembers a tale her mother told about strange doings one night at Foggy Bottom about 10 years ago (these would be possum years, so I am not sure about the date), so the machine may have ended up at the State Department for a time. But the story is that Samuel Huntington (a Brzezinski disciple) managed to get the machine back to Harvard, whereupon it was promptly stolen back by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The whereabouts of the machine became somewhat murky at that point, but what's known for certain is that in late 2001 Douglas Feith organized a raid that brought the machine to the Pentagon.

Here the squirrel picks up the narrative...on second thought, Pundita will summarize. One day Barney accompanied President Bush on a visit to the Pentagon and while Bush was deep in conversation Barney began wandering around looking for a place to relieve himself, as he has a penchant for doing.

The upshot is that since that day, White House policy has been run by something called, "events on the ground." Within hours, Paul Bremer (a Kissinger disciple) was yanked back to Washington from Baghdad and screamed at until he agreed to step outside his theoretical bubble, Iyad Allawi was pressed into service, and here we are today.

As for the Theoretical Bubble Machine, it's still out for repairs. It seems the composition of the....liquid that spilled into the machine messed up the polka rhythm of the bubbles.

Banana Split and Trifle

"Re your last post and the letter from June . I'm surprised you didn't call her out on her implied observation that it's okay for the US to intervene in another country's affairs whenever we perceive the possibility of election fraud. Also, the situation with Ukraine is so complicated it's easy to see how Max Boot could confuse separate issues.
[Signed] Chicago Dan"

Dear Chicago Dan:

Pundita thought she dealt with the point by observing that the US should not engage in the practice of unjustified and unsolicited intervention. Regarding your observation about Max Boot, are you making a little joke with Pundita? Mr. Boot is not confused. Ever since the Theoretical Bubble Machine went out for repairs, Boot and Opinion Experts like him have been reduced to the vocation of chef. Mr. Boot concocted a Trifle that layers different issues into a sickeningly sweet glop he called The Ukraine Miracle. After you swallow the stuff you'll belch, "Isn't democracy wonderful?" for days.

Yes it is wonderful, but what State was up to in Ukraine wasn't about democracy. All you really need to know about Max Boot is that he's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the same Council on Foreign Relations that is trying to claw their way back into influence at the White House. This is also the same council that installed the Theoretical Bubble Machine in their basement after World War II.

As to why the anti-Bush Los Angeles Times would publish Boot's Op-ed piece--any number of reasons. They might be trying to stay on the good side of their sources at the State Department. They might be trying to embarrass Bush by taking a whack at Putin. But of one thing you can be certain: The Los Angeles Times has no interest in gathering and presenting the facts on the Ukraine situation.

The LAT is not alone; no American newspaper informed their readers of the unfolding situation in Ukraine, which meant that TV newscasters didn't pick up on the story until after the situation in Ukraine blew up. Because of that, Americans who didn't listen to the John Batchelor program in 2003 and 2004 didn't have a clue as to the mess building in Ukraine. Not until the UK's Guardian Unlimited broke the story about State meddling in the Ukraine election. That didn't happen until after the first election round in Ukraine and the situation had blown up.

Then Pat Buchanan read the Guardian report and set up a howl on some website rag (Word Net Daily, if Pundita recalls). Only then did a couple US newspapers (Christian Science Monitor and Washington Post) dip their pinkie in the situation just enough to give readers an idea that the US was somehow "involved" in Ukraine.

This is why Pundita was forced into the ungraceful position of crawling to a socialist website run by a bunch of Trotskyites, just to scrape background on what Foggy Bottom has been up to in Ukraine these past few years.

Al Qaeda is always telling people that America is dangerous. You bet we're dangerous. Few things are more dangerous than a lone superpower with a Banana Republic press.

Now that we have that off our chest--State has made lemonade out of lemons with Bush's war on terror. At first, State was horrified that Bush radically altered US foreign policy after 9/11. But once they heard Bush's talk about democracy being the best antidote to terrorism, State was off and running. The machinations against Russia and in particular the scheme to set Yuschenko in power could be recast in the language of "Liberty's Century."

The tragedy is that there were good democracy programs at work in Ukraine, and which were sponsored by Americans not connected with State or any US government agency. As Pundita pointed out before, these Americans were invited by Kuchma's government, so these programs were not an "intervention" and most certainty not unsolicited.

But now, everything US citizens did to help democracy in Ukraine is tainted. All that donated money, all that hard work--tainted. Those Americans were used; they were manipulated into a situation they understood very poorly, if at all. Members of Congress and the esteemed American Bar Association, please take note.

American attorneys must learn not to shut off their brain and research department when they receive a request for pro bono assistance, just because the request is coming from foreigners who have mastered the Democracy Rap. And as the squirrel never tires of telling Pundita, we all need to get up a little earlier in the day than the State Department. And State needs to get up earlier in the day than their EU counterparts.

It seems that American ingenuity and compassion are matched only by our naivete. We need to wise up, for the world's lone superpower nation can no longer afford to be informed at the level of a Banana Republic about doings outside our shores.

This said, there is no shame in being outsmarted by oligarchs. The International Monetary Fund, which doesn't have bananas sprouting from their ears, was ripped off to the tune of $600 million (or $200 million, depending on which source) by oligarchs laboring for the Ukraine Central Bank under Yushchenko's leadership. Money says it's unlikely the IMF would ever have wised up, if one of those clan members hadn't ratted out other clan members.

This is just why Pundita is grateful to her foreign policy team. Sometimes it takes feathered bipeds and furry mammals to bring humans back to earth. The first thing the possum asks, whenever a foreign policy question is brought to the table, is whether a chief is involved. The second question is always, "Which clans" are involved in the situation.

Readers who worry that this way of viewing the doings of foreigners will lead to prejudice should be advised that one must be prejudiced against lobbing bombs and USD millions at the wrong situations.

In Afghanistan the US military learned the hard way that in those parts "cousin" is a euphemism for an enemy. The military began to learn this aspect of Afghan clan society after they bombed innocent civilians to kingdom come, on the "intelligence" provided by a cousin getting even with another cousin.

Yushchenko's clan got one over on us. Let's leave it at that. However, to put this in context, the ship had sailed even before reporters at the World Socialist Website caught up with the story. You would have to go back to Kuchma's rise to power and his dispute with Yuschenko to grasp the story--but all the details are not available. To the extent we're learning bits and pieces of the story, it's because Kuchma and his supporters began singing after they learned that ballot stuffing might not work to put Yanukovich in power.

What's done is done, except for the investigation we should conduct, and which Pundita mentioned in her prior post. But we should take extensive notes, in hopes this will raise flags because we're busy all over the world bringing the miracle of democracy to peoples we don't understand. Flags shouldn't stop up us from trying, but it's written nowhere that we have to wise up through hard knocks. There is an informed way to help. Taking this tack will save Americans, and the people we're trying help, untold grief.

How many broken eggs does it take?

... if the US had played it straight Pundita would not be writing all these posts on Ukraine. We are within our rights to attempt to induce and even pressure governments who receive our aid into adopting measures we favor. We are not within our rights to pull a sleight of hand in the name of democracy in order to set our favored candidate in power.

"Pundita, I still think America's intervention in Ukraine was, on the whole, a good thing. There was tremendous fraud by Yanukovich's Putin-backed supporters during the first round of election. Max Boot pointed out that the American Bar Association spent $400,000 to train Ukrainian judges in election law, and that five supreme court judges who benefited from the training voted to overturn the fraudulent results of the Nov. 21 balloting and to hold the revote, which led to Yushchenko's victory."
[Signed] June in Cincinnati

Dear June:
At that juncture, the judges in question would have voted for eight days in a week; Yushchenko's forces mobilized mobs to gather outside the court building; clearly they threatened to storm the building if the vote didn't go as they wanted. That would have been the match to the tinder, which is why the judges voted on a situation that was still very murky.

Boot's argument mixes two distinct issues; by doing so, he glosses US intervention in Ukraine's affairs.

Boot lists the aid money/programs that the US government gave, and which various US organizations donated to aid in strengthening Ukraine's democratic processes. He presents these in support of his argument that, "There was nothing nefarious about the U.S. intervention in Ukraine, which was designed to promote democracy, not any particular candidate."

However, the US-sponsored democracy programs and aid/donations were not interventions -- at least, not on their face. They were made at the invitation of the sitting Ukraine government, and carried out with the government's full approval. Oddly, Boot's writing implicitly recognizes that fact by citing that the aid in question had been over the period of two years--which was prior to the election.

But there was US government intervention in the democratic process in Ukraine and their affairs of state. How and why Washington intervened in Ukraine's affairs rests on complex issues, which means the story is easily glossed over and lost in the shuffle of the drama surrounding the contested election. One part of the story is summarized under the heading "How the change of power in Ukraine was prepared" in the World Socialist Web Site article I cited in an earlier post. The best I can do is encourage you to read the story or read it again.

The story does not begin with the Ukraine election. It begins with Kuchma's fall from favor in Washington. After reading the article, please don't write Pundita to accuse Dick Cheney of being behind it all. Remember, this is the World Socialist Web Site we're dealing with. Oil and gas were part of it. But Kuchma shut down the offending pipeline.

One aspect of the story not mentioned by that particular WSWS article is Kuchma's act to sell a government-owned company (to a relative, if I recall correctly) in order to prevent the company from being taken over by foreign investors. From this distance, that was a questionable way to keep a key company out of the hands of foreign investors, but it may have been a temporary measure made under extreme time pressure.

In any case, the action should not have called forth a decision among foreign powers to bring down Kuchma's government. Yet that seems to have been the case--that, and his government's interest in creating an alliance with Russia and other FSU to form their own version of the EU. Whether or not such an alliance was made with pressure from Russia, that is not justification for foreign powers to bring down a government and set their own man in place.

Kuchma attempted to steer Ukraine on a course that was as independent as possible from Russia's influence and he was doing it with Putin's blessing. But from the EU and US side, his spark of independence was, as the dramatists say, his undoing.

Yet Kuchma and his hand-picked candidate, Yanukovich, did everything in their power, within reason, to stay on the right side of Washington. Why? Because they saw the advantage and because Vladimir Putin wanted them to. Yes, this is the same Vladimir Putin who stuck his neck out to tell the world of his support for Bush's reelection. Putin was under the impression at the time that the Bush administration was honestly trying to forge better relations with Russia. This would work to Ukraine's advantage, and Kuchma and Yanukovich knew this. They also knew that Russia has a big stake in Ukraine, and always will. The reverse is also true.

The Yuschenko forces and their American and European backers claim that Moscow intervened in Ukraine's election; that they threw much more money into Yanukovich's campaign than the Americans and Europeans threw to Yuschenko, and that Yanukovich's forces rigged the voting. These accusations are two separate issues.

After Kuchma and Yanukovich fell from grace in Washington, they knew there would be no chance of Yanukovich winning the election, given the US/Europe backing of Yuschenko. So they asked Moscow for financial help.

Is that democratic? Well, it's unwise, if you want to hold onto your democracy, to ask foreigners to contribute to your election campaign. Pundita doesn't know the election law in this case. If Ukraine law allowed, then the Orange candidate had as much right to solicit funds from Americans/ Europeans as the Blue candidate had to ask Russia for funds.

The other issue is ballot stuffing. There were abuses on both sides, although it seems that the Blue candidate (Russia's pick) outstripped his opponent in ballot stuffing during the first election round.

However, the US/ European forces who backed Yuschenko were taking no chances. They mobilized even before the first election was called in Yanukovich's favor, which set in play the scenario that led to the mobs outside the Ukraine Supreme Court.

Ironically, if the US had not intervened, we would have supported democracy and kept our reputation intact. This is because at the point of election observation we were above reproach. US observers had been invited -- I repeat, invited -- to observe the election and to speak up in the event of observed balloting fraud.

In short, if the US had played it straight Pundita would not be writing all these posts on Ukraine. We are within our rights to attempt to induce and even pressure governments who receive our aid into adopting measures we favor. We are not within our rights to pull a sleight of hand in the name of democracy in order to set our favored candidate in power.

I don't want to hear that Putin was doing the same. What is this, kindergarten? Here in the adult world, it's not okay to do what the other guy is doing just because he's doing it. Either the US government screwed up or didn't care that they shoved Kuchma toward Moscow after they decided to back Yuschenko. Either way, they made an unnecessary enemy of Kuchma, who then turned to Moscow. That might have gotten his guy Yanukovich a loss under fair conditions, i.e., conditions that did not see outside money in play, but we'll never know.

The question of Russia's intervention is their matter and the Ukraine government's matter to investigate. The question of European intervention is the matter for the EU parties involved and Ukraine to consider. It will be a cold day in hell before Yushchenko's government orders an investigation of US actions. But what Americans need to investigate is whether:

> funds were siphoned from US democracy programs to finance Yushchenko's campaign and the post-election mobilization against the contested vote.

> George Soros acted "without portfolio" at the State Department's behest with regard to his part in financing Yushchenko's campaign and the mobilization.

We need the investigation for two reasons. With regard to Soros, he is not an employee of the US Department of State. He has no position with any US government agency. He did act without portfolio for State during the Clinton administration, with Clinton's blessing.

If Mr. Soros's status has continued under the Bush administration, this needs to made clear to the American public. (From all accounts, Soros was never able to get his foot in the door of the Bush White House.)

If on the other hand, Soros and his connection(s) at State acted according to their own lights -- without guidance from the White House or Congress -- the connections at State need the riot act read to them.

The issue is one of accountability. Mr. Soros has a tendency to play Pied Piper. But when things go wrong, and they've gone wrong in Georgia and Serbia, he's not held accountable. This is because he has no official position with the US government. Particularly during a hot war this country can't afford to allow Pied Pipers to operate with the unofficial blessing of our foreign office.

The most important reason for conducting an investigation is the discrepancy between the dollar amounts that have been quoted with regard to US-sponsored democratic programs in Ukraine. Max Boot quotes the US version. The WSWS article highlighted above quotes Ukraine government sources:

In the past two years alone, the American government has spent more than 65 million dollars to help the Ukrainian opposition to power. This has been confirmed within the past few days by government representatives. Additional millions came from private donators such as the Soros Foundation, and European governments.

Naturally, these funds flowed indirectly to political parties. As the US government stresses, they were made available to serve in general the “promotion of democracy.” It is an open secret that such funds benefited the opposition almost exclusively. The money went to institutes and non-governmental organisations that advise the opposition, assist it with the most modern technical aids and advertising techniques, and train election helpers. Visits paid by opposition leader Yushchenko to American politicians were also financed with these funds. Also funded in the same manner were the voter opinion polls, which were then held up as proof of election fraud by the government camp.

As well as exercising a general influence in the elections, these funds also serve to deepen corruption. Even if one excludes direct bribery, such sums in a country where average monthly wages are between $30 and $100 must have a corrupting effect.

Yushchenko's government might dispute the account but without a US inquiry the version provided the WSWS reporter will stand in Russia, in the portion of Ukraine that voted for Yanukovich, and in every country that is leery of US "democracy aid."

That intervention by a foreign power in a country's affairs is "nefarious" almost pales beside the point that the intervention in this case mocks Bush's call for this to be liberty's century. It mocks every American who puts trust in the Bush administration to stand by the American people's commitment to promote democracy in the world. It mocks democracy.

The mess we got ourselves into in Ukraine was unnecessary, if the US had simply dealt from the top of the deck; i.e., stayed aloof from the fray until called upon to report on any observed election fraud. Then would have been the time to lodge complaints with Russia and the Europeans who involved themselves in the election.

Those who say that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs are correct, but just how big an omelette are we talking about? If it's 65 million dollars worth -- do we need to break that many eggs to serve the cause of democracy, in a land where the average monthly salary is between $30 and $100?

Perhaps the mullathugs should have consulted with Dan Rather

Reporters Without Borders reports on the torture of imprisoned Iranian bloggers.

"We fear that the [Iranian] authorities are succeeding in purging the web of all critical content through brutality, intimidation and censorship. . ."

One never knows about human nature; it's possible the Tehran government wants to be toppled.

Welfare-to-Work Program for Despots

"Pundita, I read your [Jan 5] blog on Gordon Prather. I think you're wrong to make light of him. He makes very serious charges against Bush's handling of nuclear proliferation and he uses highly technical language to do it. I wouldn't call that acting like a nanny.
[Signed] June in Cincinnati"

Dear June:

Pundita is not sure what's highly technical about the statement, "Bush has failed to support the IAEA-NPT regime in North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. Consequently, your chances of getting nuked in your jammies have gone way up."

But we concede your point when Dr. Prather discusses centrifuges and other aspects of nuclear weapons technology. However, foreign policy is not rocket science. Prather's main beef against Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) is that it chases down what Prather calls "junk"--the kind of materials his expertise tells him do not pose a serious military threat to the USA. He's looking at the PSI from the viewpoint of military defense technology, which calls up the highly technical discussions.

Prather is one of many defense experts who enjoyed favor in Washington for decades. That's just why China got away with murder for decades. Every year, the White House and Congress asked the Pentagon the same question: Is China a military threat yet? Then the Pentagon consulted with experts on military systems and reported back, "Nope. Not yet."

Technically, and within the narrow limits of the question, the experts were correct. China was (and remains) way behind the United States in military systems. The same could be said for every other country. However, going back decades, China has had enough military power to allow the Chinese Communist Party to:

--Maintain a stranglehold on the Chinese and Tibetans and threaten Taiwan.

--Force Chinese into slave labor, which cranked out ultra-cheap products that the Western consumer snapped up.

--Stifle democracy movements in China.

--Sell or barter Chinese military technology, which was stolen from Western defense industries, to despotic governments who rule over peoples still trying to climb out of the Iron Age. That in turn helped those despots quash democracy movements and maintain a stranglehold on their people.

I'm not singling out China. The above formula was repeated all over the world--in every land that was the recipient of (World Bank) IDA loans and loans from the international banks, which follow in the wake of the World Bank in the way sharks follow in the wake of an ocean liner. The formula was repeated in every land that was the recipient of ongoing large-scale Western aid.

Put another way, the formula was repeated in every land that had some resource or strategic position that Western countries wanted or needed.

The results of the formula? It came down to the horrors in Indian Kashmir. It came down to genocide in Rwanda and Sudan and the bloodbath in DR Congo. It came down to government-engineered mass starvation in Ethiopia. It came down to the international megabusiness in heroin production and distribution. It came down to propping up North Korea's cannibalism supporting regime. It came down to blowing up buses of Israeli schoolchildren. It came down to the government-sponsored hanging and stoning of children in Iran. It came down to the day that Americans remember as 9/11.

So, yes--technically, the defense systems analysts are right: A country such as China or Saudi Arabia, Iran, Burma or Nigeria, etc. was never a match for America in the military sphere. It doesn't necessarily follow that governments far behind the US in military technology can't make their lands a hell on earth for their people and cost Americans blood and USD trillions.

If the formula sounds familiar--it's essentially the one that turned entire cities in America into virtual police states, as the only way to keep a lid on the crime that resulted from widescale drug addiction among the poor. Then one day, alert Americans started asking, "How is it that in a land of such wealth, we've got a permanent underclass of poor people who end up in a life of crime to support a drug habit?"

The answer was not hard to find. America had created a welfare system that was guaranteed to raise up generations of poor and keep them poor. The surprise was the extent of the connection between the welfare system, drug addiction, and crime.

Before the Food Stamp system went electronic, on any given Food Stamp distribution day in a city, you could see brokers working the lines formed outside the distribution points. The brokers offered cash on the spot for the Food Stamp booklets, which they bought at a steep discount on the face value of the stamps.

The same brokering went on in countless inner-city stores that were fronts for drug cartels. The profits from the resold Food Stamps helped fund wholesale illicit drug purchases. Then the drugs were sold on the street to the very people who sold their Food Stamps to the brokers.

Essentially the same situation has been going on in the world for a half century, and on a scale that mocks the mess the US welfare system spawned. We're making a big deal about the corruption found in the UN Oil for Food Program, but the billions skimmed from that program are a drop in the ocean. For decades, governments that received low-cost NGO loans for building projects routinely sent military operatives to steal the heavy equipment on the projects. Then the government would fence the stolen equipment in order to get hard currency to buy weapons.

That's just one scam out of countless for skimming hard currency off Western loans and aid. Then American taxpayers ask, "How do these dirt-poor governments find the money to buy so many weapons and support big armies?

So it's misleading to think of Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative as a purely military operation. The initiative is also a forceful way of telling all nations that the scams are being shut down.

If you're an Iranian despot spending $800 million to build a nuclear facility, which you swear to the international community is only for nuclear power--that's one issue. The other issue is that if you have that kind of money to spend on a 20th Century energy technology while the majority of your people still live in the 4th Century, America can no longer afford to participate in any way in the scam.

The 4th Century is generous. You saw pictures of what the city of Bam looked like before the earthquake. It was hard to tell the before-and-after pictures apart. What did those people need nuclear power for? An improved brand of candle wax and cow dung would have done it.

It's not necessarily talking trash, if a petroleum exporting government wants to install nuclear power plants. But one look at towns and most cities in Iran indicates what the Iranian government has done with their oil profits these past two decades. They plowed the greater portion into military spending. The distant second is Potemkin Village type projects, which look good on the glossy covers of reports the Iranian government shows to transnational banks they're wooing for loans. This is while the vast majority of Iranians live at borderline starvation. The Iran government had their excuse while Saddam was in power. Now we've removed the excuse.

So, Bush's PSI should not be conceived as interventionism--not given the amount of US tax dollars and investment funds that found their way into Western foreign aid and loans made by NGOs and international banks. And which propped up or created the despotic regimes we're dealing with today.

Of course the despots are huffy about Bush's tough love--as huffy as American welfare applicants when the Welfare-to-Work program was started and social workers began asking probing questions during the application interviews. Thus, the PSA campaign that put up posters all over America. The posters headlined, "Life is unfair. Get over it."

The PSI is a forceful way of saying the same to despots who spent decades whining to NGOs, "Oh we just poor developing country," every time they applied for a low-cost loan or defaulted on one.

Okay, if you're a poor developing country that depends on NGOs just to stay afloat, you don't need to be plowing your hard-earned hard currency into buying weapons material at gouge prices from black marketeers.

Granted, buying weapons is addictive because the Monkey See-Monkey Do aspect of human nature kicks in. If the government next door buys a fancy weapon system, your government wants the same system. So think of the PSI as helping depots break a habit they can't afford, and which Western taxes, defense industries and investment markets helped create.

The tough love extends to the contractors in EU nations who insist it's their right to sell weapons-related material and services to any country they want. This point also applies to Israel and FSU (former Soviet Union) contractors and African and Latin American governments that sell natural resources used in fancy weapons. Nobody is off the hook.

All such countries were on America's dole, in one form or another, for decades. If during the course they pulled themselves up enough to develop an export business from their national resources and defense industry, that's their right. It's also America's right to sit hard on allies and US foreign policy instruments (such as the World Bank) if firms in sponsoring countries insist on selling their wares and services to despots in developing countries.

Congress has not yet fully invoked the right, but Bush has made it clear that's where things are headed, if allies don't stop helping despots create regimes so well-armed and brutal they spawn insurgencies and terror groups, which falls back on America and every other democratic government.

Bush is leaving it to our Foreign Service to find reasonably polite ways to put the above points to allies and trading partners. But make no mistake; Bush wasn't kidding when he told the American people that our government would be fighting terrorism on many fronts, and in many ways that Americans would not hear announced on the nightly news.

The Nuclear Weapons Physicist as Nanny

"What do you think of Gordon Prather's claim that the Arab Bomb is a myth and that evidence against A. Q. Khan is overblown? I'm asking because it seems as if his views on how the US should deal with rouge/risky governments on the nuclear proliferation issue had considerable influence on earlier [US] administrations and that he still has a hearing among some factions in Washington.
[Signed] Chicago Dan"

Dear Chicago Dan:

Pundita dutifully read the article you forwarded and skimmed most of the articles penned by Dr. Prather that are listed on the Antiwar.com website.

Prather's view is spelled out his December 20, 2004 article for Antiwar.com. He states:

"The key to preventing nuke proliferation is the international control of the production, processing, transformation, and disposition of certain nuclear materials. In return for a promise to not acquire or seek to acquire nukes, the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons recognizes the "inalienable right" of all signatories to enjoy the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy. But all NPT-proscribed nuclear materials – as well as the facilities in which they are stored, processed, transformed, or consumed – have to be made subject to an International Atomic Energy Agency Safeguards Agreement."

This view puts Dr. Prather in line with what could be called the Chirac school of foreign policy. The school has ditched the view of the Kissinger school, which codified where US diplomacy had headed during the Cold War.

Kissinger's school made a pass at justifying the admission of thug governments into the Western community of democratic nations. The rationale was that if you treat despots as if they're democratically elected, some democratic impluses will eventually rub off on them. Chirac's post-Cold War school is more honest in that regard. If you're a despot and a trading partner, and if you at least muster an appearance of cooperating with the World Body at the UN, you do can do what you please within your own borders. Dr. Prather follows the same reasoning in his December 18, 2004, piece for Antiwar.com when he lectures Undersecretary of State John Bolton:

"Suddenly, the neo-crazies were alleging that the Iranian gas-centrifuge program – not the reactor at Bushehr – was the basis of the Iranian clandestine program to produce nukes. Well, first of all "clandestine" does not mean illicit or illegal[*] or prohibited. Under their old Safeguards agreement, if the Iranians wanted to spend a zillion dollars clandestinely producing thousands of gas centrifuges, that's none of Bolton's beeswax. Or if they clandestinely bought thousands of parts for gas centrifuges from Persian Gulf or Southeast Asian junk dealers, that's none of Bolton's beeswax, either."

* Prather observes in the article you sent me that, "...delivering a uranium-enrichment centrifuge to anyone is not illicit unless such delivery is a violation of the laws of the exporting country. And accepting delivery is not illicit unless the importing country (a) is a signatory to the NPT and (b) intends to enrich uranium for use in a nuclear weapon."

However, it's Prather's choice of words that caused Pundita to snap to attention. It's not every day that one comes across a nannyish tendency in a physicist specializing in nuclear weapons. I doubt that modern nannies (at least, the ones on this side of the Pond) scold children into minding their own business by invoking that old-fashioned figure of speech.

Pundita likes to envision a world in which nosy governments can be scolded into adopting a live-and-let live philosophy. The US military in Iraq should consider trying out that approach in lieu of all the unseemly wrangling with Syrian and Iranian troops slipping across Iraq's borders. Perhaps a good scolding would do the trick, replete with shaking an upraised forefinger.

Also, Allawi might try out that line on Tehran and Damascus. "None of your beeswax which political party gains the most votes in Iraq's election."

See whether that floats.