"Pundita, have you heard? [US Treasury] Secretary Snow said he wouldn't rule out Bono as a candidate for World Bank president. Isn't that a hoot?
[Signed] Claudia in Taos"
Dear Claudia:
Every German finance minister serving in the post-WW2 era has been completely convinced that his American counterpart was barking mad. The candidates John Snow likes for World Bank president help explain why. But at least John Snow barks madly on Earth. The last Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, stationed himself on Pluto. There he met Bono.
So there we were in the post-9/11 days, with the world on fire and the US economy teetering. President Bush would come to work in the morning, look around the conference table and ask Cabinet members, "Where's my Treasury Secretary?"
He was running around Africa with Bono. After Bush fired him, O'Neill wrote a book in which he complained that Bush wouldn't listen to him after their first meeting. But after you've heard, "Arf arf arf arf arf arf arf!" you don't need to hear the thoughts expressed a second time.
As to where America's presidents find these people--well, at least since the post-WW2 era the treasury secretary post has been largely ceremonial. The Federal Reserve has run US economic policy, except for the years during which the Bundesbank ran it.
As to how the German central bank came to run American economic policy--Pundita can't remember whether it was the head of the Bundesbank or Germany's finance minister who rang up Paul Volcker (then Chairman of the Federal Reserve) and yelled at him in at least three languages. At the time the American economy and thus the entire world was 48 minutes away from falling off the edge of the planet.
Things were such a mess that the Bundesbank told the Fed, "We're faxing you instructions in simple English. Do everything on the list, don't ask why, just do it."
But if Bono for next World Bank President is a scary thought, promise you won't run screaming if I tell you what's been running the World Bank. Sebastian Mallaby, a journalist who has written about the Bank, spilled the beans. Mallaby recounts that when he was ushered into his first interview with James Wolfensohn, he found Wolfensohn seated with Bono, Swami Agnivesh and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
That's the crew that's been advising the head of the world's most powerful development bank.
At least Bono is well-meaning; he's deeply concerned about the world's very poorest. The same can't be said for George Soros and Mikhail Khordokovsky, who were greatly responsible for the choice of Wolfensohn for Bank president.
As to how that situation came about--Soros's money helped put William Clinton in the White House. Soros had a strong reason for backing Clinton. Two years at Oxford did not teach Clinton how international finance works, much less how development banks work. So with Soros in effect running the State Department and President Clinton hanging on his every advice, the next task for Soros and his oligarch buddies was to find a World Bank president they could work with. Thus it came to pass that Clinton's choice for Bank president was James Wolfensohn, an investment banker.
Oligarchs can clean out investment bankers in six banking days flat. That's why stealing close to a billion dollars from the IMF was a walk in the park for Ukrainian oligarchs. Money says they were caught only because a rival oligarch clan ratted on them.
As to how much the oligarchs have skimmed from the World Bank with Wolfensohn at the helm, we can't find out because the Bank won't allow an independent audit. That's why we need Eliot Spitzer for the next World Bank President beep this is a recording.
Here, readers might ask whether Mallaby's eyeglass prescription might have needed adjustment at the time he met Wolfensohn. It's entirely possible. The man introduced as Shree Swami Agnivesh was probably Khordokovsky in an orange turban. The archbishop was quite probably Soros in purple miter. Wolfensohn and Bono wouldn't have known the difference.
But where there's life and fiscally responsible German bankers there's hope. Pundita has hatched a stopgap solution. Bush should ask Paris Hilton if she wouldn't mind allowing Tinkerbell to fill the post of US Treasury Secretary. Don't laugh before you've considered my reasons:
1. Tinkerbell has a very pleasing yip. She could get a better hearing from Bush during Cabinet meetings than the present treasury secretary.
2. The German finance minister loves Chihuahuas.
3. Tinkerbell's human family knows more about international finance than the last three treasury secretaries put together.
4. Chihuahuas happen to be the best lizard catchers. Handy during economic summits.
5. She would make the cover of newsweeklies more times than all other treasury officials and world leaders combined. Thus, Tinkerbell would popularize the subject of economics and direct a much-needed spotlight on the US Treasury post.
6. She is sane.
Given that the Treasury post is largely ceremonial, it's obvious from the above that Tinkerbell is the very best candidate for the Cabinet slot.
A bonus is that Paris Hilton reports that Tinkerbell is an excellent judge of male character. That trait would be invaluable in helping the Treasury Secretary decide on candidates for the post of World Bank President.
This seems a good place to review Pundita essays that address deeply entrenched problems in the poorest countries and my pick for World Bank president.
Verticalization of corruption
Why widescale poverty is entrenched
Why it's so hard to see the real problems
Democracy Stage Show Part 1
Democracy Stage Show Part 2
Eliot Spitzer for Bank President Part 1
Eliot Spitzer for Bank President, Part 2
.
Monday, March 7
Sunday, March 6
The Emperor is Naked
"Pundita! It's not like you to be mean to Bush! I understand what you're saying [in previous post] but he's just trying to find ways to persuade Iran not to continue with their nuclear weapon development. I don't think it hurts for Bush to say he's considering Europe's plan to offer incentives to Iran. It makes him sound reasonable.[Signed] Sleepless again in St. Louis"
Dear Sleepless:
It makes him sound dizzy. That is one reason Pundita jumped all over him. Tehran is not engaged in nuclear weapon development. We have their word on that. So it makes no sense to offer them incentives not to do something they're already not doing. In other words, we can't nail the slippery bastards. That means we'll have to bomb half of Iran to rubble before we can figure out where they're hiding the nuke-building facilities. The good news is that Iran won't look much different after the bombing than before. Once you get out of the cities you're in the 5th Century BCE.
This observation brings us to the crux of the problem. If you have to hire German or French engineers just to figure out how to put up an electricity grid, and if you're stoning children to death as government policy, you're just not ready for modern weapons. But no one in the modern world told the Iranians that. Why? Because they have oil. Everybody pandered to them. Nobody told them the truth about themselves. Nobody cared enough about them to speak straight.
So they're like emperors who have never once been contradicted. They do not have an idea of civilized behavior, much less responsible behavior. Yet they are completely convinced that they're doing just fine in the modern era. So if they can't have a nuclear weapon, they are going to throw a tantrum and break things.
The first thing Dr. Phil would advise is that you don't play into that. You don't offer incentives for the same reason you don't bribe children into stopping a tantrum. And for the same reason you don't pay thugs not to rob you. If you go down that road, the thug will be back next week asking for another payment.
Every adult with half a brain knows all this. So why are European officials heading for Geneva this week for yet another round of negotiations about a nuclear weapons program Tehran says they don't have?
The answer is that by keeping the discussion centered on nukes, the EU3 hope to distract the world's attention from the fact that they're pandering to a regime that makes history's barbarian chieftains look like the model of civilized behavior.
.
Dear Sleepless:
It makes him sound dizzy. That is one reason Pundita jumped all over him. Tehran is not engaged in nuclear weapon development. We have their word on that. So it makes no sense to offer them incentives not to do something they're already not doing. In other words, we can't nail the slippery bastards. That means we'll have to bomb half of Iran to rubble before we can figure out where they're hiding the nuke-building facilities. The good news is that Iran won't look much different after the bombing than before. Once you get out of the cities you're in the 5th Century BCE.
This observation brings us to the crux of the problem. If you have to hire German or French engineers just to figure out how to put up an electricity grid, and if you're stoning children to death as government policy, you're just not ready for modern weapons. But no one in the modern world told the Iranians that. Why? Because they have oil. Everybody pandered to them. Nobody told them the truth about themselves. Nobody cared enough about them to speak straight.
So they're like emperors who have never once been contradicted. They do not have an idea of civilized behavior, much less responsible behavior. Yet they are completely convinced that they're doing just fine in the modern era. So if they can't have a nuclear weapon, they are going to throw a tantrum and break things.
The first thing Dr. Phil would advise is that you don't play into that. You don't offer incentives for the same reason you don't bribe children into stopping a tantrum. And for the same reason you don't pay thugs not to rob you. If you go down that road, the thug will be back next week asking for another payment.
Every adult with half a brain knows all this. So why are European officials heading for Geneva this week for yet another round of negotiations about a nuclear weapons program Tehran says they don't have?
The answer is that by keeping the discussion centered on nukes, the EU3 hope to distract the world's attention from the fact that they're pandering to a regime that makes history's barbarian chieftains look like the model of civilized behavior.
.
Friday, March 4
Brussels sells Bush the Brooklyn Bridge
"What do you think of Bush's new willingness to consider offering incentives such as WTO membership...in exchange for Iran giving up their nuclear weapon program?"
Tom in Sioux City"
Dear Tom:
The disastrous EU negotiations with Tehran about nukes have left Brussels staring down the barrel of spectacular failure to demonstrate that they're capable of making effective foreign policy for the entire of Europe.
Add to this, the longer Washington remains aloof from the EU3-led* negotiations with Iran, the more questionable Europe's claim to be a friend of democracy and civilization.
Add to this, the Iranian democracy advocates have expressed their outrage at European complicity with the regime in Tehran. So Brussels knows that if the regime falls, Europe will be pushed to the back of the line for Iranian oil purchases and big-ticket business contracts with the new government. This would include a flood of development bank loans, including World Bank loans, which would be made to a democratic government in Tehran.
Also, a democratic government in Tehran would cancel many outstanding defense-related government projects now underway in Iran and demand a review of the contractors and subcontractors for the projects. It is guaranteed that a democratic government would keep European contractors in the courts for years if not decades, just as a matter of principle, rather than continue with many of the contractors.
So Brussels is not only looking at a massive diplomatic failure and loss of Face; they're also having contemplate the billions of euros that key European industries stand to lose, if the regime in Tehran is booted. This loss would be coming on top of the billions they lost when Iraq's regime was toppled and the money lost from European participation in the Oil for Food Program. All this would come on top of Russia's repatriation of their energy industry.
That's why Europe's media yowled and nattered that Bush must come to Europe prepared to listen. Brussels had only one shot, which was to ask Bush behind closed doors to at least voice consideration for joining Europe with offering incentives to Tehran. In exchange, Brussels would back Washington's call for sanctions against Iran. This would be in the event Tehran betrayed incentivized promises to give up their ambitions for a nuclear weapon.
President Bush fell for it, over protests from the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney. Thus, the United States is now on record for a willingness to consider offering incentives to a regime that finds nothing barbaric about stoning adults and children to death.
Even if Bush decides not to go along with incentives to Tehran, it's now on record that Europe's betrayal of the Iranian democracy movement is not censured by the United States of America. That's what Brussels needed.
As to whether the United States got anything in return for selling out our principles--we got the word of goverrnments who had already sold out on civilization. Even if the EU3 went on record with the assurances they used to bait the trap, we have to assume that Europe would use the United Nations and every other means at their disposal to stall the implementation of sanctions.
They would stall until Tehran presented clear evidence that they had a nuclear weapon. That would allow Brussels to rescind their agreement on the grounds that the sanctions only applied to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. That would force negotiations to start all over again.
To put all this another way, Brussels is committed to seeing that the current regime in Iran remains in power as long as possible. Toward this end, they want help from the USA in giving legitimacy to the regime by agreeing to bargain with them. They might not get what they want, but they got what they needed by selling President Bush the Brooklyn Bridge.
* The EU3 are Germany, France and Britain.
.
Tom in Sioux City"
Dear Tom:
The disastrous EU negotiations with Tehran about nukes have left Brussels staring down the barrel of spectacular failure to demonstrate that they're capable of making effective foreign policy for the entire of Europe.
Add to this, the longer Washington remains aloof from the EU3-led* negotiations with Iran, the more questionable Europe's claim to be a friend of democracy and civilization.
Add to this, the Iranian democracy advocates have expressed their outrage at European complicity with the regime in Tehran. So Brussels knows that if the regime falls, Europe will be pushed to the back of the line for Iranian oil purchases and big-ticket business contracts with the new government. This would include a flood of development bank loans, including World Bank loans, which would be made to a democratic government in Tehran.
Also, a democratic government in Tehran would cancel many outstanding defense-related government projects now underway in Iran and demand a review of the contractors and subcontractors for the projects. It is guaranteed that a democratic government would keep European contractors in the courts for years if not decades, just as a matter of principle, rather than continue with many of the contractors.
So Brussels is not only looking at a massive diplomatic failure and loss of Face; they're also having contemplate the billions of euros that key European industries stand to lose, if the regime in Tehran is booted. This loss would be coming on top of the billions they lost when Iraq's regime was toppled and the money lost from European participation in the Oil for Food Program. All this would come on top of Russia's repatriation of their energy industry.
That's why Europe's media yowled and nattered that Bush must come to Europe prepared to listen. Brussels had only one shot, which was to ask Bush behind closed doors to at least voice consideration for joining Europe with offering incentives to Tehran. In exchange, Brussels would back Washington's call for sanctions against Iran. This would be in the event Tehran betrayed incentivized promises to give up their ambitions for a nuclear weapon.
President Bush fell for it, over protests from the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney. Thus, the United States is now on record for a willingness to consider offering incentives to a regime that finds nothing barbaric about stoning adults and children to death.
Even if Bush decides not to go along with incentives to Tehran, it's now on record that Europe's betrayal of the Iranian democracy movement is not censured by the United States of America. That's what Brussels needed.
As to whether the United States got anything in return for selling out our principles--we got the word of goverrnments who had already sold out on civilization. Even if the EU3 went on record with the assurances they used to bait the trap, we have to assume that Europe would use the United Nations and every other means at their disposal to stall the implementation of sanctions.
They would stall until Tehran presented clear evidence that they had a nuclear weapon. That would allow Brussels to rescind their agreement on the grounds that the sanctions only applied to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. That would force negotiations to start all over again.
To put all this another way, Brussels is committed to seeing that the current regime in Iran remains in power as long as possible. Toward this end, they want help from the USA in giving legitimacy to the regime by agreeing to bargain with them. They might not get what they want, but they got what they needed by selling President Bush the Brooklyn Bridge.
* The EU3 are Germany, France and Britain.
.
Thursday, March 3
The Enclave Mentality and the Oriental Stranger Syndrome
"Pundita, Your explanation [in 'Anti-jive Policy' essay] about government corruption in the developing world is very depressing. You're saying that much of it is not really corruption as Americans understand the term but a way life that could take generations to change. There seems to be no solution except attempts to educate."
Ann in Cincinnati"
Dear Ann:
Pundita did not state that the situation could take generations to change. Yes, there has to be a process of education but the process must be first on our side. Rush Limbaugh spent last week in Afghanistan. He wanted to see the situation there with his own eyes. Rush told his audience a story that perfectly illustrates the essence of the problem on our side:
At first there was tremendous resistance among the Afghanis to voting. An Afghani explained his reluctance to a US solider he'd become friends with. He didn't want to vote because the winner would stalk the people who voted for the loser and shoot them.
The soldier told him, "Naw, that's not how it works in a democracy; if you lose, you just regroup and try to make your guy the winner in the next election."
The Afghani asked, "Really?" The soldier replied, Yeah really.
That was all it took. The Afghani went and told his family and friends. Thus, the US military realized the problem, and pretty soon word was flying around Afghanistan that a democracy means you don't get shot if you vote for the loser.
Well, how were the Afghanis supposed to know unless someone told them?
Rush also told a story about Ayatollah Sistani; Sistani nixed the US advice that the Iraqi Constitution had to be ratified by a majority of Iraqis. Conversation with Americans he'd gotten to know revealed that he thought the US had made up the rule for Iraq. The Americans told him, Naw, that's what Americans did; that's why American democracy is so strong.
Sistani decided to investigate. After a few weeks of studying American history, he realized that by gum, the Americans were telling the truth; thus, he saw the logic of not adopting a constitution without majority agreement.
Now in consideration of the billions of dollars the World Bank and Washington have spent on analyzing The Native, you might think the stories Rush Limbaugh told are anomalies. You would be wrong. The stories point to the Enclave Mentality, which has dominated US foreign policy thinking since US relations with Native populations began. The mentality is lifted whole cloth from the European colonizing mindset.
Americans are greatly mistaken if they think the mindset died out along with European colonizing. Today, Americans doing oil business in Nigeria live in enclaves, which keep them isolated from virtually all Nigerians except the officials and the wealthiest businesspeople. This situation is repeated all over the world.
The Native officials do provide the Enclave Americans with a picture of the host country and its peoples. However, the picture is the same type that World Bank employees drawn from the developing world write up in policy papers for the Bank. The Natives gauge what the Bank wants to know, then frame their analysis of the Native from that viewpoint. Therefore, galactic-sized chunks of reality are omitted from the analyses.
The Bank's view is as skewed as Washington's. Washington runs on policy papers; to be more specific, it runs on one page two-syllable abstracts of policy papers. Congressionals are supposed to read the policy papers but most only read the abstracts, which are piled to the ceiling in their office. They leave the chore of reading the actual papers, which can run to 1,000 pages with 20 pages of footnotes, to their aides. These aides are straight out of college and their brains must function on the nutrition provided by peanuts, popcorn and cola.
These are the Americans charged with comprehending and summarizing policy papers for Congress. Their boss stuffs the summary and abstract into his briefcase and reads them on the way to his congressional committee sessions, which set budgets and help shape US defense/foreign policy.
With regard to the Pentagon and CIA, their analysts actually read the policy papers and even comprehend them in some cases, but they read with a magic marker in their head. Every sentence has to be reframed in terms of budget considerations and DoD or Intel protocols. That means their analysis of the papers omit galactic sized chunks of reality.
The picture that Americans receive from government officials in foreign countries is the same type that the British overlords received from the rajas in India. The rajas were mostly concerned with keeping their power. Thus, the strongest message that came through to the British was "Don't rile the Natives any more than you have to."
The French developed a very creative way of dealing with the same message, maybe because the French didn't possess the navy the British had in those days. The French thought up the Modernity Kit, which they hawked to every chieftain they wanted to trade with. They convinced the chiefs that you're a thoroughly modern person if you master the French language, learn to eat with a knife and fork, and develop an appreciation for chamber music.
Thus, generations of colonized peoples were raised up without a clue as to what really constitutes modern Western government. They got only the outward forms: the marble buildings of bureaucracy and judiciary, the 15 copies of a directive that had to be signed and stamped, the filing cabinets and the ritual banter between judges and lawyers.
That is how it came to pass that vast tracts of humanity have no idea what makes for American democracy and how it came about. They do not know that America was built by women wearing long dresses and men with beards--men and women who were not terribly bright, who were for the most part narrow-minded and insular, and whose education was pretty much confined to reading the Bible. In short, vast tracts of humanity don't know that America was built by the same kind of people they are.
Now what does it take to correct that misperception? Yet more mountains of policy papers? Yet more billions spent on educational programs? The creation of yet more international organizations?
First it takes understanding the major roadblock, which was inadvertently alluded to by Banfsheh Zand-Bonazzi, the editor of Iran Press News during a conversation she had one night with John Batchelor. She mentioned in passing that the Iraqi borders weren't locked down by the Coalition forces because the British didn't want to offend the so-called nomadic tribes.
The tribes insisted that they be allowed to pass back and forth between Iran and Iraq whenever they wanted. These aren't just any old tribes; they control a lot of business including oil business in Iran. Zand-Bonazzi said bluntly that the British wanted to protect British business interests in Iran.
As to why the US military command in Iraq went along with it, Pundita is not sure. But given the history of US-British relations during the Cold War, which parallels to remarkable degree the plot of Thelma and Louise, it's likely the US command in Iraq didn't have a clue. The British command lectured their American counterpart about the importance of striking non-threatening poses while dealing with the Iraqi Native. Don't wear helmets, wear caps; don't carry your weapons in such obvious fashion, etc.
The British pointed to the relative peace and quiet of Basra to shore up the lectures. Well of course it was peaceful and quiet in Basra. The most powerful tribes were happy they could cross the border at will. The Iranian military and al Qaeda were happy they could use Basra as an easy entry point into Iraq.
Don't tear your hair because you'll be bald by the time you finish reading this essay. What Zand-Bonazzi was talking about is a very old story--it's as old as trade among different tribes. However, it was the colonizing trade model that created the enclave. During Victorian times, the mentality gave rise to the Oriental Stranger Syndrome, which is the Enclave Mentality filtered back to the home peoples who hear third hand about Natives.
The Oriental Stranger kept legions of British novelists, scholars and newspaper reporters gainfully employed. He also took the heat off London's embattled police force, which was fighting a crime wave that emanated from inhumane working conditions in London factories and slave wages paid the factory laborers. Muffled in turbans and reeking of garlic and other strange odors, the Oriental Stranger stalked the gaslit streets of London, wreaking murder and mayhem on Christianity, Western Civilization and British who didn't make it home before dark.
The Oriental Stranger did not spring whole cloth from the fertile imagination of fiction writers and reporters. He sprang from their imaginings about tales told by British soldiers garrisoned in far-flung outposts and British traders who lived in enclaves in the outposts. These tales rested largely on what the outpost rulers told the British about the outpost peoples.
This doesn't mean the stories were complete fiction; they were a window on the world outside the enclave. But you can see very little of the world if you look at it from a window inside your house. In the same manner, the Enclave view shows very little about the peoples outside the enclave.
The Oriental Stranger Syndrome is not really 'prejudice' in the sense of bigotry. It's what happens when you live near peoples you never really interact with. They are always The Stranger, and strangers are always suspect. Thus, you never let your guard down, you never say what you really think, you never really communicate. This sets up a cycle where the Stranger also sees you as a stranger. The upshot is that many colonized peoples learned the outward forms of modern life but didn't get the essences, the subtexts, the referents.
A good example of where this situation leads is the US military and business consultants stationed in Saudi Arabia. They lived in garrison and enclaves, they were trained not to make any criticism of the cultural practices they saw when they had to leave the enclaves. They were trained to look without seeing, and to avert their eyes about many things they looked at. This created a mystique of American power and menace and kept the knowledge Americans had about their culture locked up with them in the enclaves. That allowed the most radical elements in the Saudi society to interpret American culture and democracy to the Saudis.
So while it's ghastly that it had to happen this way, the ongoing terrorist attacks forced the US military out of the Green Zone in Baghdad. That meant legions of American kids and Iraqis had no choice but to interact with each other in a way that never would have happened, if the US occupation of Iraq had gone as the White House originally envisioned.
The same happened in the Afghanistan theater of war. American kids spilled off the military helicopters, looked around and asked, "Where's the base?" An Afghani would ride up, hand the soldiers the reins to a horse and say, "Here it is."
During an earlier era, the CIA and the Afghanis understood the common enemy--the Soviets--and were able to communicate effectively at that one level. That's a far cry from the communication needed to help the Afghanis build up their nation and a functioning democracy while dealing with insurgencies. The US military learned that they could not stay in their garrisons. They had to get out and go live with the Afghanis and they had to explain who Americans are and how we think.
Same happened in Iraq. What do American kids know about diplomacy and trade? And how many of them are walking textbooks on democratic government? They just reacted to the Iraqis in the way they react to people in their home towns. In other words, they acted human, which allowed the Iraqis to learn about them and respond in kind. This was despite the Green Zone, which is an enclave.
The terrorist attacks forced the US military to keep coming out of the enclave, and forced the Iraqis to keep talking with the Grunts. So despite the situation that Zand-Bonazzi mentioned, and despite the Green Zone, the Oriental Stranger syndrome was broken. No surprise, this was followed by the willingness of several Iraqi patriarchs to give a democratic election a try.
Thus another illustration of the truth in the old adage, "Your worst enemy is also your best friend." The enemy's ongoing terrorist attacks in Iraq have done more to further the cause of democracy than most Americans can imagine at this time.
After the Colombine massacre, a neighbor of one of the killers lamented that if only they'd gotten to know their neighbors and engaged with the kids on their block, maybe they would have noted the killers' increasingly strange behavior and mentioned it to the parents. The neighbor added, "But we were just so busy working and commuting; we didn't have the time to engage with the neighbors."
Better make the time because we can't expect a policy analyst to identify the most serious warning signs here or abroad. Yet the signs are not hard to read if we stop, look and listen and engage, engage, engage.
You won't ever lose your compass if you remember that people are not economics and political models of behavior. They are people. They are people whether they live next door or ten thousand miles away; if you forget that, then you must look at people through the narrow window of policy papers and intelligence briefings.
And you must be prepared to wait generations more, before the developing world grapples with the issues Pundita discussed in the Anti-jive Policy essay. But where is the rocket science in the points I brought up? Does it take a special gene to grasp that one can't stick with the clan system, which was designed to serve a few thousand people, and hope to get rid of entrenched corruption in a centralized government that administers to many millions of people?
.
Ann in Cincinnati"
Dear Ann:
Pundita did not state that the situation could take generations to change. Yes, there has to be a process of education but the process must be first on our side. Rush Limbaugh spent last week in Afghanistan. He wanted to see the situation there with his own eyes. Rush told his audience a story that perfectly illustrates the essence of the problem on our side:
At first there was tremendous resistance among the Afghanis to voting. An Afghani explained his reluctance to a US solider he'd become friends with. He didn't want to vote because the winner would stalk the people who voted for the loser and shoot them.
The soldier told him, "Naw, that's not how it works in a democracy; if you lose, you just regroup and try to make your guy the winner in the next election."
The Afghani asked, "Really?" The soldier replied, Yeah really.
That was all it took. The Afghani went and told his family and friends. Thus, the US military realized the problem, and pretty soon word was flying around Afghanistan that a democracy means you don't get shot if you vote for the loser.
Well, how were the Afghanis supposed to know unless someone told them?
Rush also told a story about Ayatollah Sistani; Sistani nixed the US advice that the Iraqi Constitution had to be ratified by a majority of Iraqis. Conversation with Americans he'd gotten to know revealed that he thought the US had made up the rule for Iraq. The Americans told him, Naw, that's what Americans did; that's why American democracy is so strong.
Sistani decided to investigate. After a few weeks of studying American history, he realized that by gum, the Americans were telling the truth; thus, he saw the logic of not adopting a constitution without majority agreement.
Now in consideration of the billions of dollars the World Bank and Washington have spent on analyzing The Native, you might think the stories Rush Limbaugh told are anomalies. You would be wrong. The stories point to the Enclave Mentality, which has dominated US foreign policy thinking since US relations with Native populations began. The mentality is lifted whole cloth from the European colonizing mindset.
Americans are greatly mistaken if they think the mindset died out along with European colonizing. Today, Americans doing oil business in Nigeria live in enclaves, which keep them isolated from virtually all Nigerians except the officials and the wealthiest businesspeople. This situation is repeated all over the world.
The Native officials do provide the Enclave Americans with a picture of the host country and its peoples. However, the picture is the same type that World Bank employees drawn from the developing world write up in policy papers for the Bank. The Natives gauge what the Bank wants to know, then frame their analysis of the Native from that viewpoint. Therefore, galactic-sized chunks of reality are omitted from the analyses.
The Bank's view is as skewed as Washington's. Washington runs on policy papers; to be more specific, it runs on one page two-syllable abstracts of policy papers. Congressionals are supposed to read the policy papers but most only read the abstracts, which are piled to the ceiling in their office. They leave the chore of reading the actual papers, which can run to 1,000 pages with 20 pages of footnotes, to their aides. These aides are straight out of college and their brains must function on the nutrition provided by peanuts, popcorn and cola.
These are the Americans charged with comprehending and summarizing policy papers for Congress. Their boss stuffs the summary and abstract into his briefcase and reads them on the way to his congressional committee sessions, which set budgets and help shape US defense/foreign policy.
With regard to the Pentagon and CIA, their analysts actually read the policy papers and even comprehend them in some cases, but they read with a magic marker in their head. Every sentence has to be reframed in terms of budget considerations and DoD or Intel protocols. That means their analysis of the papers omit galactic sized chunks of reality.
The picture that Americans receive from government officials in foreign countries is the same type that the British overlords received from the rajas in India. The rajas were mostly concerned with keeping their power. Thus, the strongest message that came through to the British was "Don't rile the Natives any more than you have to."
The French developed a very creative way of dealing with the same message, maybe because the French didn't possess the navy the British had in those days. The French thought up the Modernity Kit, which they hawked to every chieftain they wanted to trade with. They convinced the chiefs that you're a thoroughly modern person if you master the French language, learn to eat with a knife and fork, and develop an appreciation for chamber music.
Thus, generations of colonized peoples were raised up without a clue as to what really constitutes modern Western government. They got only the outward forms: the marble buildings of bureaucracy and judiciary, the 15 copies of a directive that had to be signed and stamped, the filing cabinets and the ritual banter between judges and lawyers.
That is how it came to pass that vast tracts of humanity have no idea what makes for American democracy and how it came about. They do not know that America was built by women wearing long dresses and men with beards--men and women who were not terribly bright, who were for the most part narrow-minded and insular, and whose education was pretty much confined to reading the Bible. In short, vast tracts of humanity don't know that America was built by the same kind of people they are.
Now what does it take to correct that misperception? Yet more mountains of policy papers? Yet more billions spent on educational programs? The creation of yet more international organizations?
First it takes understanding the major roadblock, which was inadvertently alluded to by Banfsheh Zand-Bonazzi, the editor of Iran Press News during a conversation she had one night with John Batchelor. She mentioned in passing that the Iraqi borders weren't locked down by the Coalition forces because the British didn't want to offend the so-called nomadic tribes.
The tribes insisted that they be allowed to pass back and forth between Iran and Iraq whenever they wanted. These aren't just any old tribes; they control a lot of business including oil business in Iran. Zand-Bonazzi said bluntly that the British wanted to protect British business interests in Iran.
As to why the US military command in Iraq went along with it, Pundita is not sure. But given the history of US-British relations during the Cold War, which parallels to remarkable degree the plot of Thelma and Louise, it's likely the US command in Iraq didn't have a clue. The British command lectured their American counterpart about the importance of striking non-threatening poses while dealing with the Iraqi Native. Don't wear helmets, wear caps; don't carry your weapons in such obvious fashion, etc.
The British pointed to the relative peace and quiet of Basra to shore up the lectures. Well of course it was peaceful and quiet in Basra. The most powerful tribes were happy they could cross the border at will. The Iranian military and al Qaeda were happy they could use Basra as an easy entry point into Iraq.
Don't tear your hair because you'll be bald by the time you finish reading this essay. What Zand-Bonazzi was talking about is a very old story--it's as old as trade among different tribes. However, it was the colonizing trade model that created the enclave. During Victorian times, the mentality gave rise to the Oriental Stranger Syndrome, which is the Enclave Mentality filtered back to the home peoples who hear third hand about Natives.
The Oriental Stranger kept legions of British novelists, scholars and newspaper reporters gainfully employed. He also took the heat off London's embattled police force, which was fighting a crime wave that emanated from inhumane working conditions in London factories and slave wages paid the factory laborers. Muffled in turbans and reeking of garlic and other strange odors, the Oriental Stranger stalked the gaslit streets of London, wreaking murder and mayhem on Christianity, Western Civilization and British who didn't make it home before dark.
The Oriental Stranger did not spring whole cloth from the fertile imagination of fiction writers and reporters. He sprang from their imaginings about tales told by British soldiers garrisoned in far-flung outposts and British traders who lived in enclaves in the outposts. These tales rested largely on what the outpost rulers told the British about the outpost peoples.
This doesn't mean the stories were complete fiction; they were a window on the world outside the enclave. But you can see very little of the world if you look at it from a window inside your house. In the same manner, the Enclave view shows very little about the peoples outside the enclave.
The Oriental Stranger Syndrome is not really 'prejudice' in the sense of bigotry. It's what happens when you live near peoples you never really interact with. They are always The Stranger, and strangers are always suspect. Thus, you never let your guard down, you never say what you really think, you never really communicate. This sets up a cycle where the Stranger also sees you as a stranger. The upshot is that many colonized peoples learned the outward forms of modern life but didn't get the essences, the subtexts, the referents.
A good example of where this situation leads is the US military and business consultants stationed in Saudi Arabia. They lived in garrison and enclaves, they were trained not to make any criticism of the cultural practices they saw when they had to leave the enclaves. They were trained to look without seeing, and to avert their eyes about many things they looked at. This created a mystique of American power and menace and kept the knowledge Americans had about their culture locked up with them in the enclaves. That allowed the most radical elements in the Saudi society to interpret American culture and democracy to the Saudis.
So while it's ghastly that it had to happen this way, the ongoing terrorist attacks forced the US military out of the Green Zone in Baghdad. That meant legions of American kids and Iraqis had no choice but to interact with each other in a way that never would have happened, if the US occupation of Iraq had gone as the White House originally envisioned.
The same happened in the Afghanistan theater of war. American kids spilled off the military helicopters, looked around and asked, "Where's the base?" An Afghani would ride up, hand the soldiers the reins to a horse and say, "Here it is."
During an earlier era, the CIA and the Afghanis understood the common enemy--the Soviets--and were able to communicate effectively at that one level. That's a far cry from the communication needed to help the Afghanis build up their nation and a functioning democracy while dealing with insurgencies. The US military learned that they could not stay in their garrisons. They had to get out and go live with the Afghanis and they had to explain who Americans are and how we think.
Same happened in Iraq. What do American kids know about diplomacy and trade? And how many of them are walking textbooks on democratic government? They just reacted to the Iraqis in the way they react to people in their home towns. In other words, they acted human, which allowed the Iraqis to learn about them and respond in kind. This was despite the Green Zone, which is an enclave.
The terrorist attacks forced the US military to keep coming out of the enclave, and forced the Iraqis to keep talking with the Grunts. So despite the situation that Zand-Bonazzi mentioned, and despite the Green Zone, the Oriental Stranger syndrome was broken. No surprise, this was followed by the willingness of several Iraqi patriarchs to give a democratic election a try.
Thus another illustration of the truth in the old adage, "Your worst enemy is also your best friend." The enemy's ongoing terrorist attacks in Iraq have done more to further the cause of democracy than most Americans can imagine at this time.
After the Colombine massacre, a neighbor of one of the killers lamented that if only they'd gotten to know their neighbors and engaged with the kids on their block, maybe they would have noted the killers' increasingly strange behavior and mentioned it to the parents. The neighbor added, "But we were just so busy working and commuting; we didn't have the time to engage with the neighbors."
Better make the time because we can't expect a policy analyst to identify the most serious warning signs here or abroad. Yet the signs are not hard to read if we stop, look and listen and engage, engage, engage.
You won't ever lose your compass if you remember that people are not economics and political models of behavior. They are people. They are people whether they live next door or ten thousand miles away; if you forget that, then you must look at people through the narrow window of policy papers and intelligence briefings.
And you must be prepared to wait generations more, before the developing world grapples with the issues Pundita discussed in the Anti-jive Policy essay. But where is the rocket science in the points I brought up? Does it take a special gene to grasp that one can't stick with the clan system, which was designed to serve a few thousand people, and hope to get rid of entrenched corruption in a centralized government that administers to many millions of people?
.
Wednesday, March 2
Anti-jive Policy
"Hey, Dita like this is the first fan letter I ever wrote. Like I see where you're comin from man, I'm rappin about you. You don't let nobody past. You the anti-jive machine. Also you got me interested in foreign policy. It's all connected man, like I see that now. I can tell you why Bush opened fire on Putin. Putin dissed him, man. Like Bush had to refrigerate him.
[Signed] DetroitTHX5"
Dear DetroitTHX5:
That's an interesting if somewhat ornate thesis. Let's see if we can work our way through it. The protocol is that national leaders refrain from giving public support to political candidates in another country. Putin broke the protocol when he came out in support for Bush during the US presidential campaign. By doing so, he conveyed that his friendship with Bush took precedence over protocol, which would imply a close friendship. However, several of Putin's actions as head of state did not show friendship to Bush or the US war on terror.
Thus, it could be argued that Putin was practicing diplomacy judo--using Bush's own statement of friendship against him in order to gain a political advantage, and making Bush lose Face in the process. From that angle, Bush would be required to restore Face by verbally punching Putin in the face. It all makes perfect sense after a few beers.
On the other hand, the thesis ignores the similarly tough language used by Secretary Powell in the immediate wake of the Beslan massacre; Powell as much told the Russians that they had brought Beslan on themselves through the way they handled the Chechen situation. And it ignores the reportedly very tough language Secretary Rice used during the recent meeting with her Russian counterpart.
All this tough talk has been around for months in the Establishment US news media and voiced by certain factions in the GOP and Democrat party. To be specific, the talk burst into the US news during the election in Ukraine and has escalated since
However, Bush is famous for not following Washington Groupthink and media opinion, which lends some support to your thesis. So, on balance, it's possible there was something personal behind Bush's decision to beat up on Russia during the Brussels speech. I note that the passage about Russia was a last-minute addition, unless the White House kept it under wraps. The version of the speech released to the press the day before did not contain the toughly worded passage.
Whether or not Bush had an ax to grind with Putin, Pundita is getting a bad feeling about all this uniformly tough talk. It smacks of a programmatic approach, which translates to adopting an attitude in place of dialogue. The Russians are known to respect toughness in political leaders. But they're equally known for intellectualism and polemics. All these traits were on abundant display during a 3-1/2 hour press conference that Putin held soon after the Beslan massacre.
That press conference was a humdinger. Putin accused the United States and the United Kingdom of being responsible for the Beslan terrorist attack. He accused the US and the UK of colluding in a plot to destabilize Russia by fomenting anti-Russian sentiment in former Soviet republics. He accused the US and UK of being behind the breakaway movement in Chechnya. He clearly implied that the US and UK were trying to topple his government. And just to make sure he was perfectly understood, Putin came right out and said that the US and the UK had launched a covert war against Russia.
I add that Putin's remarks got very little coverage in the US media and only in attenuated form. The remarks were widely reported in painstaking detail by the European press and pored over and parsed for many days, to the great enjoyment of the Europeans who love opera and hate the Coalition invasion of Iraq. They particularly liked the part about Carthage. After he'd blown off steam it occurred to him that conjuring the image of Russia reduced to a salt flat was not a boost to Russian tourism and trade so eventually he scaled back on his accusations. However, he stuck by the gist, which still amounts to very serious charges.
I can't speak to the accusations about the United Kingdom but there is a grain of truth in the accusations directed at the US. It is true that some Chechens who eventually became terrorists got their original training in CIA-sponsored camps; this was during the Afghan struggle against the Soviet Union. In those days the US was training anyone who was willing to fight the Soviets, which included Arabs who became al Qaeda members.
With regard to the rest of the accusations about terrorism, it sounds as if Putin moved history forward to gloss the present. I would not be surprised to learn that British and US agents helped in Chechnya, as they did in every republic that wanted to break away from the Soviet Empire. And surely there are still groups in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics who are helping the Chechen separatist movement. However, by the mid-90s, the love affair between the oligarchs and America was such that the US (and Britain) had a vested interest in seeing that Russia was as stable as possible.
The truth is that Chechnya became a magnet for al Qaeda; when the going got tough for AQ after the US crackdown Tehran stepped in with money, arms, and training. This said, it's wrong to dismiss Putin's studious blindness to the present as cynicism. True, Russia is doing big business with Arab countries that are known to be sponsoring terrorist organizations and with Iran, which is ruled by a terror-sponsoring regime. But we have to look at our own situation in the wake of 9/11 to understand Moscow's struggle with reality.
No State Department worker wanted to accept a certain number of terrorist attacks on the US as the price for doing business with Saudi Arabia, and with other countries that are tolerant of terrorist organizations or involved with funding them. But as the facts piled up in the wake of 9/11, the response behind closed doors in Washington was, 'Omigod, what are we going to do? We're in up to our necks with these governments.'
The same sentiments were expressed behind closed doors in Paris, London, and Berlin. Moscow had a delayed reaction; they clung to the idea that Russia had more leverage with the same governments because Russia wasn't dependent on any country for energy supplies. They thought that if push came to shove, they could make threats and make them stick. Thus, they learned the hard way that threats only work if you can deliver them to the enemy. The enemy in this case is like smoke.
To put all this another way, on September 11, 2001, the earth when seen from a satellite was a sea of ostrich bottoms. Everyone had their head stuck in the sand--and this includes the Israelis. They had tunnel vision about China's role in selling weapons and nuclear weapon technology to states that sponsor terrorism. The Israelis were hyperfocused on Arab terrorism and the terror-sponsoring regime in Iran. And the focus made them blind to the connection between terrorism and the Russian mobs that had burrowed into the Israeli financial markets. Every time there was a terror attack on Israel the Israeli military would ring up the mobsters and ask, 'You're not doing any smuggling deals with our enemies, are you?'
In reply, the mobsters would throw on a prayer shawl and go kiss the Wailing Wall.
This said, the Israelis had the only functioning and I mean only functioning intelligence organization among our allies. It's awful to contemplate the extent to which intelligence-gathering among NATO countries had fallen into disrepair. Now one might reasonably ask why the US didn't make use of Israeli intelligence during the decade running up to 9/11, if US intel was a basket case. One has to understand something about budget wars in Washington to get the full picture. There were intelligence analysts who spent the 90s piling Israeli intelligence data on Washington and drawing little stick figures in the effort to illustrate the growing danger to the US from Arab terrorism. The response in Washington boiled down to, "Oh it's just the Jews trying to scare up more aid dollars for Israel."
How could so many reasonably intelligent, sane people the world over be so blind to a steadily growing threat--a threat that was not hidden, but which continuously announced itself with escalating terrorist attacks?
The answer is buried under layers of myriad causes and conditions, which is why the world is lucky that George W. Bush landed in the White House. Bush has a drill-down mind; he has a knack for reaching through layers and grabbing onto the precipitating factor in a problem. The answer is quite simply that people were blind because they were up against something completely new. Seeing begins in the mind, which relies on memory. There was no memory, no way to think about what the new threat looked like, until after 9/11.
What Bush saw after 9/11 is that civilization had reached the point where it's suicidal for nations to allow expediency to govern their foreign relations.
Bush used simpler words to describe the problem; he said in essence that it was time to call a spade a spade, to say what you mean and mean what you say, and stick to your guns. However, the message was greatly obscured by the dust raised during the first years of the war on terror. Also, the war, and particularly the Iraq campaign, turned the Beltway into an armed camp of factions at State, Pentagon, CIA and Congress.
But the world changed on the day that Paul Bremer was ordered back to Washington from the Green Zone in Baghdad. The yelling inside the White House could be heard from across the Potomac. Pundita was not privy to exactly what was yelled, but the drift of the conversation was plainly evident in Bremer's actions when he returned to his duties in the Green Zone. He stopped practicing expediency and took actions that were in line with the promises that Bush had made to the Iraqi people.
From that day forward, the Bush administration made a wholehearted attempt to ditch Cold War policy, which had degenerated into a textbook on expediency. The response from the State Department and the CIA? They were so horrified at Bush's attempt to destroy the linchpin of foreign policy that they redoubled their efforts to block his reelection. They did this by deploying a machine-gun series of 'leaks' that portrayed Bush as an inept president and commander-in-chief.
The Beltway Wars continued even after Bush's reelection but slowly and surely, the White House is winning because many Americans are now at their back. This includes members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, and people inside State and the CIA. In short, it's taken a few years, but many people inside Washington are starting to 'get' what Bush has been trying to convey. Bush's second Inaugural speech and his speech at Brussels are not there yet. But they come close to articulating an epoch-making shift in US foreign policy.
The radical aspect of the shift diverts attention from its common sense. With hindsight, it's just plain stupid during these days of EFTs, Coach Class and portable nukes to give training, money and arms to people whose concept of civilization boils down to eating with a knife and fork. And it's plumb loco to turn your back on them, once your immediate need for them is finished.
So while Pundita basks in your compliment, it's really President Bush who's the anti-jive machine. I'm simply trying to fill out the basic idea Bush sketched and explore how to put it into practice. Many people the world over are engaged in this same effort, and the more the better. We're all out here in new territory, trying to lay down paths that we're improvising as we stumble along.
The problem is that civilization was raised on the foundation of expediency. True, expediency always had a way of blowing back on the government that relied on it to deal with neighbors and marauding tribes, but relying heavily on expediency got humanity this far. So if we're going to rely more on integrity and consistency in foreign relations, there are many wrinkles to be ironed out.
The sticking point is that is there's no such thing as partial integrity. You either have it or you don't. Ditto for consistency. So if you see "Made in China" stamped on weapons used by terror sponsoring regimes, what are you supposed to do? Tell Wal-Mart to stop trading with China? And should we return to horse and buggy until we figure a way to cease dependence on oil imported from autocratic or totalitarian regimes? The most vexing question is how far a nation should take a principled stand if the stand pits the nation against much of the world.
Yet 9/11, 3/11 and Beslan testify that humanity no longer has a choice about confronting the point Bush brought out. We've got to find ways to bring foreign policy in line with the basic ideals of modern democratic civilization. This is because data show that democracies tend to refrain from hot war and don't create large numbers of citizens who export terrorism around the world. The question is how to proceed according to what the data indicate.
Russia's advice in this regard should be welcomed, yet we don't have the luxury of engaging in weighty discussion during peacetime. The inescapable truth is that Russia is selling arms and dual-use nuclear technology to governments that are active enemies of the United States.
Russia is not alone in doing trade with US enemies. They are following the lead of China and the most powerful nations in the European Union. So it's practicing a double standard to criticize Russia on the issue without doing the same with allies.
Pundita can understand Bush taking a softer public with US allies. However, the uniformly tough talk to Moscow that has emerged from Washington during the past year smacks of a programmatic approach. This translates to adopting 'attitude' in place of dialogue.
The Russians are known to respect a tough attitude. However, they're equally known for intellectualism and polemics. All these traits were on abundant display during Putin's 3-1/2 hour press conference.
Thus, if Washington's tough attitude is not accompanied by informed debate and dialogue, the Russians will continue to throw out polemics and rationalizations that go unanswered by the US because attitude isn't reply.
Also, Washington could do more to bring the implementation of foreign policy in line with policy rhetoric. Putin has invoked the US Civil War in defending Russia's right to subdue a breakaway republic--Chechnya. We don't need to agree with the analogy but US policy should recognize Russia's policy toward Chechnya.
If we want to allow a Chechen rebel leader to take asylum in the United States, that's one issue. However, Russia has designated the leader as a terrorist. If we claim a willingness to work with Russia in the war on terror, our policy should match our words to the extent we can accomplish this without betraying our principles. That means the US government should not have direct or indirect dealings with the Chechen leader and should not provide him with financial or any kind of material assistance.
If US intelligence on Chechnya is so poor that we're rationalizing assistance to the leader as means to get good intel on Chechnya and Russia--this is a problem with US intelligence gathering, one that shouldn't drag foreign policy into it.
Also, the US government should ensure that the Chechen leader knows the difference between taking asylum and using the US as a base of operations against Russia.
The same observations apply to US government dealings with the Russian oligarchs who recently attended a White House prayer breakfast. Those oligarchs are fugitives from Russian justice. There's an Interpol warrant out on them. There was no need to give them asylum in this country; they have asylum in Israel. Inviting them to the US and showcasing them at a White House function was a nasty way of telling Moscow that Washington doesn't think the oligarchs should be considered criminals.
Okay. But then Moscow doesn't think Tehran should be designated a terror-sponsoring regime. They don't think Tehran will convert the nuclear technology that Russia is selling them into nuclear weapons. They don't think the Iranian military will figure out how to convert the vehicle-mounted rocket launchers that Russia's selling Syria into shoulder-fired launchers.
If Washington disagrees with Moscow's thinking--well, if foreign policy is silly putty, what's there to disagree with? Why have policy, if whatever thoughts pop into your mind can shift policy on a dime?
If rationality comes from the point of a gun, right now the United States is a paragon of reason because our guns are bigger and in better working order than any other nation's. But the enemy is not only making use of guns. He's turning humans into bombs. To win against such an enemy requires a great deal of cooperation from other nations, to include Russia.
The concept of cooperation has a rational basis, which is grounded in consistently applied policy. If we expect cooperation we need more than a good rap about democracy. We need to bring the implementation of foreign policy in line with fine words about policy. Else, all the fine words are just jive.
.
[Signed] DetroitTHX5"
Dear DetroitTHX5:
That's an interesting if somewhat ornate thesis. Let's see if we can work our way through it. The protocol is that national leaders refrain from giving public support to political candidates in another country. Putin broke the protocol when he came out in support for Bush during the US presidential campaign. By doing so, he conveyed that his friendship with Bush took precedence over protocol, which would imply a close friendship. However, several of Putin's actions as head of state did not show friendship to Bush or the US war on terror.
Thus, it could be argued that Putin was practicing diplomacy judo--using Bush's own statement of friendship against him in order to gain a political advantage, and making Bush lose Face in the process. From that angle, Bush would be required to restore Face by verbally punching Putin in the face. It all makes perfect sense after a few beers.
On the other hand, the thesis ignores the similarly tough language used by Secretary Powell in the immediate wake of the Beslan massacre; Powell as much told the Russians that they had brought Beslan on themselves through the way they handled the Chechen situation. And it ignores the reportedly very tough language Secretary Rice used during the recent meeting with her Russian counterpart.
All this tough talk has been around for months in the Establishment US news media and voiced by certain factions in the GOP and Democrat party. To be specific, the talk burst into the US news during the election in Ukraine and has escalated since
However, Bush is famous for not following Washington Groupthink and media opinion, which lends some support to your thesis. So, on balance, it's possible there was something personal behind Bush's decision to beat up on Russia during the Brussels speech. I note that the passage about Russia was a last-minute addition, unless the White House kept it under wraps. The version of the speech released to the press the day before did not contain the toughly worded passage.
Whether or not Bush had an ax to grind with Putin, Pundita is getting a bad feeling about all this uniformly tough talk. It smacks of a programmatic approach, which translates to adopting an attitude in place of dialogue. The Russians are known to respect toughness in political leaders. But they're equally known for intellectualism and polemics. All these traits were on abundant display during a 3-1/2 hour press conference that Putin held soon after the Beslan massacre.
That press conference was a humdinger. Putin accused the United States and the United Kingdom of being responsible for the Beslan terrorist attack. He accused the US and the UK of colluding in a plot to destabilize Russia by fomenting anti-Russian sentiment in former Soviet republics. He accused the US and UK of being behind the breakaway movement in Chechnya. He clearly implied that the US and UK were trying to topple his government. And just to make sure he was perfectly understood, Putin came right out and said that the US and the UK had launched a covert war against Russia.
I add that Putin's remarks got very little coverage in the US media and only in attenuated form. The remarks were widely reported in painstaking detail by the European press and pored over and parsed for many days, to the great enjoyment of the Europeans who love opera and hate the Coalition invasion of Iraq. They particularly liked the part about Carthage. After he'd blown off steam it occurred to him that conjuring the image of Russia reduced to a salt flat was not a boost to Russian tourism and trade so eventually he scaled back on his accusations. However, he stuck by the gist, which still amounts to very serious charges.
I can't speak to the accusations about the United Kingdom but there is a grain of truth in the accusations directed at the US. It is true that some Chechens who eventually became terrorists got their original training in CIA-sponsored camps; this was during the Afghan struggle against the Soviet Union. In those days the US was training anyone who was willing to fight the Soviets, which included Arabs who became al Qaeda members.
With regard to the rest of the accusations about terrorism, it sounds as if Putin moved history forward to gloss the present. I would not be surprised to learn that British and US agents helped in Chechnya, as they did in every republic that wanted to break away from the Soviet Empire. And surely there are still groups in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics who are helping the Chechen separatist movement. However, by the mid-90s, the love affair between the oligarchs and America was such that the US (and Britain) had a vested interest in seeing that Russia was as stable as possible.
The truth is that Chechnya became a magnet for al Qaeda; when the going got tough for AQ after the US crackdown Tehran stepped in with money, arms, and training. This said, it's wrong to dismiss Putin's studious blindness to the present as cynicism. True, Russia is doing big business with Arab countries that are known to be sponsoring terrorist organizations and with Iran, which is ruled by a terror-sponsoring regime. But we have to look at our own situation in the wake of 9/11 to understand Moscow's struggle with reality.
No State Department worker wanted to accept a certain number of terrorist attacks on the US as the price for doing business with Saudi Arabia, and with other countries that are tolerant of terrorist organizations or involved with funding them. But as the facts piled up in the wake of 9/11, the response behind closed doors in Washington was, 'Omigod, what are we going to do? We're in up to our necks with these governments.'
The same sentiments were expressed behind closed doors in Paris, London, and Berlin. Moscow had a delayed reaction; they clung to the idea that Russia had more leverage with the same governments because Russia wasn't dependent on any country for energy supplies. They thought that if push came to shove, they could make threats and make them stick. Thus, they learned the hard way that threats only work if you can deliver them to the enemy. The enemy in this case is like smoke.
To put all this another way, on September 11, 2001, the earth when seen from a satellite was a sea of ostrich bottoms. Everyone had their head stuck in the sand--and this includes the Israelis. They had tunnel vision about China's role in selling weapons and nuclear weapon technology to states that sponsor terrorism. The Israelis were hyperfocused on Arab terrorism and the terror-sponsoring regime in Iran. And the focus made them blind to the connection between terrorism and the Russian mobs that had burrowed into the Israeli financial markets. Every time there was a terror attack on Israel the Israeli military would ring up the mobsters and ask, 'You're not doing any smuggling deals with our enemies, are you?'
In reply, the mobsters would throw on a prayer shawl and go kiss the Wailing Wall.
This said, the Israelis had the only functioning and I mean only functioning intelligence organization among our allies. It's awful to contemplate the extent to which intelligence-gathering among NATO countries had fallen into disrepair. Now one might reasonably ask why the US didn't make use of Israeli intelligence during the decade running up to 9/11, if US intel was a basket case. One has to understand something about budget wars in Washington to get the full picture. There were intelligence analysts who spent the 90s piling Israeli intelligence data on Washington and drawing little stick figures in the effort to illustrate the growing danger to the US from Arab terrorism. The response in Washington boiled down to, "Oh it's just the Jews trying to scare up more aid dollars for Israel."
How could so many reasonably intelligent, sane people the world over be so blind to a steadily growing threat--a threat that was not hidden, but which continuously announced itself with escalating terrorist attacks?
The answer is buried under layers of myriad causes and conditions, which is why the world is lucky that George W. Bush landed in the White House. Bush has a drill-down mind; he has a knack for reaching through layers and grabbing onto the precipitating factor in a problem. The answer is quite simply that people were blind because they were up against something completely new. Seeing begins in the mind, which relies on memory. There was no memory, no way to think about what the new threat looked like, until after 9/11.
What Bush saw after 9/11 is that civilization had reached the point where it's suicidal for nations to allow expediency to govern their foreign relations.
Bush used simpler words to describe the problem; he said in essence that it was time to call a spade a spade, to say what you mean and mean what you say, and stick to your guns. However, the message was greatly obscured by the dust raised during the first years of the war on terror. Also, the war, and particularly the Iraq campaign, turned the Beltway into an armed camp of factions at State, Pentagon, CIA and Congress.
But the world changed on the day that Paul Bremer was ordered back to Washington from the Green Zone in Baghdad. The yelling inside the White House could be heard from across the Potomac. Pundita was not privy to exactly what was yelled, but the drift of the conversation was plainly evident in Bremer's actions when he returned to his duties in the Green Zone. He stopped practicing expediency and took actions that were in line with the promises that Bush had made to the Iraqi people.
From that day forward, the Bush administration made a wholehearted attempt to ditch Cold War policy, which had degenerated into a textbook on expediency. The response from the State Department and the CIA? They were so horrified at Bush's attempt to destroy the linchpin of foreign policy that they redoubled their efforts to block his reelection. They did this by deploying a machine-gun series of 'leaks' that portrayed Bush as an inept president and commander-in-chief.
The Beltway Wars continued even after Bush's reelection but slowly and surely, the White House is winning because many Americans are now at their back. This includes members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, and people inside State and the CIA. In short, it's taken a few years, but many people inside Washington are starting to 'get' what Bush has been trying to convey. Bush's second Inaugural speech and his speech at Brussels are not there yet. But they come close to articulating an epoch-making shift in US foreign policy.
The radical aspect of the shift diverts attention from its common sense. With hindsight, it's just plain stupid during these days of EFTs, Coach Class and portable nukes to give training, money and arms to people whose concept of civilization boils down to eating with a knife and fork. And it's plumb loco to turn your back on them, once your immediate need for them is finished.
So while Pundita basks in your compliment, it's really President Bush who's the anti-jive machine. I'm simply trying to fill out the basic idea Bush sketched and explore how to put it into practice. Many people the world over are engaged in this same effort, and the more the better. We're all out here in new territory, trying to lay down paths that we're improvising as we stumble along.
The problem is that civilization was raised on the foundation of expediency. True, expediency always had a way of blowing back on the government that relied on it to deal with neighbors and marauding tribes, but relying heavily on expediency got humanity this far. So if we're going to rely more on integrity and consistency in foreign relations, there are many wrinkles to be ironed out.
The sticking point is that is there's no such thing as partial integrity. You either have it or you don't. Ditto for consistency. So if you see "Made in China" stamped on weapons used by terror sponsoring regimes, what are you supposed to do? Tell Wal-Mart to stop trading with China? And should we return to horse and buggy until we figure a way to cease dependence on oil imported from autocratic or totalitarian regimes? The most vexing question is how far a nation should take a principled stand if the stand pits the nation against much of the world.
Yet 9/11, 3/11 and Beslan testify that humanity no longer has a choice about confronting the point Bush brought out. We've got to find ways to bring foreign policy in line with the basic ideals of modern democratic civilization. This is because data show that democracies tend to refrain from hot war and don't create large numbers of citizens who export terrorism around the world. The question is how to proceed according to what the data indicate.
Russia's advice in this regard should be welcomed, yet we don't have the luxury of engaging in weighty discussion during peacetime. The inescapable truth is that Russia is selling arms and dual-use nuclear technology to governments that are active enemies of the United States.
Russia is not alone in doing trade with US enemies. They are following the lead of China and the most powerful nations in the European Union. So it's practicing a double standard to criticize Russia on the issue without doing the same with allies.
Pundita can understand Bush taking a softer public with US allies. However, the uniformly tough talk to Moscow that has emerged from Washington during the past year smacks of a programmatic approach. This translates to adopting 'attitude' in place of dialogue.
The Russians are known to respect a tough attitude. However, they're equally known for intellectualism and polemics. All these traits were on abundant display during Putin's 3-1/2 hour press conference.
Thus, if Washington's tough attitude is not accompanied by informed debate and dialogue, the Russians will continue to throw out polemics and rationalizations that go unanswered by the US because attitude isn't reply.
Also, Washington could do more to bring the implementation of foreign policy in line with policy rhetoric. Putin has invoked the US Civil War in defending Russia's right to subdue a breakaway republic--Chechnya. We don't need to agree with the analogy but US policy should recognize Russia's policy toward Chechnya.
If we want to allow a Chechen rebel leader to take asylum in the United States, that's one issue. However, Russia has designated the leader as a terrorist. If we claim a willingness to work with Russia in the war on terror, our policy should match our words to the extent we can accomplish this without betraying our principles. That means the US government should not have direct or indirect dealings with the Chechen leader and should not provide him with financial or any kind of material assistance.
If US intelligence on Chechnya is so poor that we're rationalizing assistance to the leader as means to get good intel on Chechnya and Russia--this is a problem with US intelligence gathering, one that shouldn't drag foreign policy into it.
Also, the US government should ensure that the Chechen leader knows the difference between taking asylum and using the US as a base of operations against Russia.
The same observations apply to US government dealings with the Russian oligarchs who recently attended a White House prayer breakfast. Those oligarchs are fugitives from Russian justice. There's an Interpol warrant out on them. There was no need to give them asylum in this country; they have asylum in Israel. Inviting them to the US and showcasing them at a White House function was a nasty way of telling Moscow that Washington doesn't think the oligarchs should be considered criminals.
Okay. But then Moscow doesn't think Tehran should be designated a terror-sponsoring regime. They don't think Tehran will convert the nuclear technology that Russia is selling them into nuclear weapons. They don't think the Iranian military will figure out how to convert the vehicle-mounted rocket launchers that Russia's selling Syria into shoulder-fired launchers.
If Washington disagrees with Moscow's thinking--well, if foreign policy is silly putty, what's there to disagree with? Why have policy, if whatever thoughts pop into your mind can shift policy on a dime?
If rationality comes from the point of a gun, right now the United States is a paragon of reason because our guns are bigger and in better working order than any other nation's. But the enemy is not only making use of guns. He's turning humans into bombs. To win against such an enemy requires a great deal of cooperation from other nations, to include Russia.
The concept of cooperation has a rational basis, which is grounded in consistently applied policy. If we expect cooperation we need more than a good rap about democracy. We need to bring the implementation of foreign policy in line with fine words about policy. Else, all the fine words are just jive.
.
Tuesday, March 1
Paw, a Revenuer's at the door. "Quick Abdullah, put on your tribal headdress!"
"Pundita, the more I learn about world affairs, the more it seems that most countries are frozen in time. No matter how much aid the developed countries have given, no matter how many grand development schemes carried out by organizations such as the World Bank, there seem to be intractable problems in many countries. In every case, I come across a discussion of deeply entrenched government corruption. The World Bank and other international institutions have been trying for decades to deal with this problem but there never seems to be any progress.
Ann in Cincinnati"
Dear Ann:
To understand the situation, realize first that it's a joke to place Bill Gates and Warren Buffet among the richest people in the world. They're just among the richest who file accurate tax returns. But Gates and Buffet probably don't even make it onto the list of the top one million of the world's richest people--these being the filthy rich who don't file tax returns or file a complete fiction.
It's not corruption per se that's the fundamental problem in Russia, Mexico, India, Egypt, and continue down the list. The problem is that the richest people in such countries pay much, much more in taxes than the rest--but the payments are off the books. The payments are made directly to officials.
The payments should not be seen as bribes, if you want to get a handle on the problem. They are a form of taxation and because taxation means representation, the richest people are the first in line with demands for how government money is to be spent.
To put all this another way, the lights always work in certain sections of Cairo. There is never a problem with traffic lights because for certain Egyptians the police simply back up traffic for miles and hours so the special cars can get to their destinations on time. There is never a problem with the water supply for certain Egyptians because the government digs special wells for them.
Same situation in Mexico. There's plenty of government money in Mexico. It's just that it doesn't get spent very much on education and health facilities. It gets spent mostly on projects that the biggest taxpayers want done--these being the taxpayers whose payments are not recorded.
Same situation in India. Yet millions of Indians are literally brain-damaged from drinking water from the city supplies--the Indians who don't die first from a host of diseases brought on by bad drinking water.
To give you some idea of just how bad the situation is, and how it undermines all the backbreaking labor and brain sweat of ordinary working stiffs the world over--
When the British laid out pipes for sewage and water in New Delhi, they installed the pipes right next to each other. That was standard practice in those days. However, by the time the British quit India the pipes had corroded so that the sewage mixed with the water supply. Boiling the water only kills a fraction of the pollutants. As to what was done to fix the pipes, nothing. Maybe during the past decade the Indian government got around to making some repairs in response to complaints by Western businesspeople. But the situation went on for decades untreated. That was in India's capital city.
Now try to imagine how Washingtonians would respond to the same problem in America's capital city. In fact, you don't have to imagine, if you followed the news about the discovery last year that lead had been getting into the water supply for years and that this information had been suppressed. Believe you me, the water bureaucracy scrambled to ward off the lynch mobs. That's because all Washingtonians have something approximating representation along with their taxation.
That's just what the majority of Indians, Russians and Mexicans, etc., don't have--even though they pay taxes. What they pay is not enough to give them adequate representation against the representation that the richest receive via under-the-table tax payments.
At the bottom of it all is not organized crime. At bottom is a system of doing business that stretches back to the ancient civilizations. That system is the clan system, which differs from tribalism in that marriage can be outside the tribe in a clan.
Marriages in a clan system are actually business mergers and/or business contracts. Say my clan controls the lumber supply in a region and your clan controls the trucking industry. We make a merger to have your trucks handle the lumber transport by marrying my daughter to your son. That's why you'll see arranged marriages in Muslim northern India and other parts between children. The marriage isn't consummated but there has to be a marriage ceremony to cement the contract.
Alert readers might ask if polygamy gives clans a huge business advantage. Of course. If you have one wife, you maybe only have five sons. If you have four wives cranking out 25 sons between them, you've got lots of merger material to play around with.
So all this talk about Islam under fire from the modern era is twaddle. It's the clan system that's under fire and Muslims know it. And they don't want to give up polygamy because there goes the big business advantage in the clan system. This is what many Muslims don't want to confront. They say, "We look after our own."
Yes, they have big charity, but in the modern era where dams and bridges and road systems and electrical grids cost billions upon billions, and where human population in a small region can run into the tens of millions, the charity system is completely inadequate. The clan model is simply not capable of dealing with the modern age.
Yet still they want it both ways. They can't have it both ways. They can't have all the benefits of modern life plus hold onto a way of doing business which subverts the type of government that makes modern life work. Fair taxation with adequate representation for the majority is the base of modern civilization's pyramid. The clan model, when mixed with off-the-books taxation, stands the pyramid on it's head. The patriarchs of the most powerful clans throw enough money at officials to ensure that their neighborhood has its own water well, the lights working, and the garbage picked up. The rest of the neighborhoods can go to hell in a handbasket.
The flip side of the same problem is how tribes can wreck the tax base in a country by invoking nomad status. To understand this part of the problem--
Knock! Knock!
"Who's there?"
Taxman.
"Taxman who?"
Taxman you haven't paid your taxes to the Iraqi government for the last 60 years.
"I'm not Iraqi. I'm Wigeemeosooombbi Nomad. We Wigeemeosooombbi have no fixed abode for the past 200,000 years."
But you remain fixed enough during part of the year to use the electricity and garbage collection service in Iraq. Pay up.
"If you're going to persecute me, give me a moment to collect my satellite dish, 10-speed blender, refrigerator, washing machine, microwave, television, toaster oven, computer, electric breadmaker, electric spice grinder and my goats and sheep and continue my nomadic wanderings. Unless you'd like to accept this gift of gold dinars for your dear mother."
That's why Gazi al-Yawer, the Iraq interim President, was furious with the Coalition military for not locking down the Iraqi borders after the Coalition toppled Saddam's regime. It's not just the security issue. It's also the taxation issue. Unless that issue is dealt with, Iraq is always pedaling backward, Saddam or no Saddam.
Al-Yawer is part of the wave of Middle Easterners who came to the West and figured out everything Pundita sketched above. They know you can't have a modern nation unless you have an adequate tax base, and that you can't have a tax base without a census. You can't have a census if a third of the population doesn't participate on the grounds that they're just in country to visit their cousins for a couple months.
The response from al-Yawer's tribe to his demand that everyone in Iraq get a national ID? They put out a contract on his life.
To summarize, the developing nations don't have the tax base to support adequate programs to provide services that you and I consider baseline necessities. In country after country, the tax base is not adequate to provide baseline services because so much of the tax collection is off the books and doesn't figure into the government's spending budget.
Now we arrive at the most interesting part of the problem. Let's back up and take a look at all those electric appliances owned by Wigeemeosooombbi Nomad. Some of the appliances are manufactured locally or close nearby, such as in India or China, and some are imported from the developed nations. Now step back and look at Wigeemeosooombbi's neighborhood. It looks like Bam, Iran before or after the big earthquake hit, which is to say it's situated somewhere between the Fifth Century and 12,000 BCE.
Why are those residents buying 10-speed blenders? Why don't they spend on the big stuff, such as a step up from a mud hut for a domicile and cement to build real roads? For the answer watch carefully, don't blink:
If the tax base is adequate, the government can use myriad means to stimulate the private business sector. One way is using taxes to build and maintain infrastructures that allow private industry to take root and grow. For example, think of the US federal highway program, which interstate truckers use to deliver goods. But if much of the tax money is paid off the books to officials, what can the individual official do with that bribe money? Even if the bribe equates to a few thousand dollars, that's not enough to build a road system.
What the official can do with the money is start a very small business, which often turns out to be a merchandise sales outlet/import business, which in turn is a money laundering scheme. That's why you can go to the most remote regions anywhere in the poverty-stricken world and find a bazaar around every bend selling anything you can get at Best Buy. If the blender you want is not in stock, give them a week to special order it.
But all these electric chachka sales outlets are not going anywhere. They are not growing the tax base enough to fuel serious business development. The result? Governments favor the socialist economic model, and depend on low-cost development bank loans to make up the shortfall--at least enough to keep the nation from sinking into the sea.
So the next time you hear a discussion about corruption in the developing world, remember that government corruption is 'inadequate tax base' spelled backward.
.
Ann in Cincinnati"
Dear Ann:
To understand the situation, realize first that it's a joke to place Bill Gates and Warren Buffet among the richest people in the world. They're just among the richest who file accurate tax returns. But Gates and Buffet probably don't even make it onto the list of the top one million of the world's richest people--these being the filthy rich who don't file tax returns or file a complete fiction.
It's not corruption per se that's the fundamental problem in Russia, Mexico, India, Egypt, and continue down the list. The problem is that the richest people in such countries pay much, much more in taxes than the rest--but the payments are off the books. The payments are made directly to officials.
The payments should not be seen as bribes, if you want to get a handle on the problem. They are a form of taxation and because taxation means representation, the richest people are the first in line with demands for how government money is to be spent.
To put all this another way, the lights always work in certain sections of Cairo. There is never a problem with traffic lights because for certain Egyptians the police simply back up traffic for miles and hours so the special cars can get to their destinations on time. There is never a problem with the water supply for certain Egyptians because the government digs special wells for them.
Same situation in Mexico. There's plenty of government money in Mexico. It's just that it doesn't get spent very much on education and health facilities. It gets spent mostly on projects that the biggest taxpayers want done--these being the taxpayers whose payments are not recorded.
Same situation in India. Yet millions of Indians are literally brain-damaged from drinking water from the city supplies--the Indians who don't die first from a host of diseases brought on by bad drinking water.
To give you some idea of just how bad the situation is, and how it undermines all the backbreaking labor and brain sweat of ordinary working stiffs the world over--
When the British laid out pipes for sewage and water in New Delhi, they installed the pipes right next to each other. That was standard practice in those days. However, by the time the British quit India the pipes had corroded so that the sewage mixed with the water supply. Boiling the water only kills a fraction of the pollutants. As to what was done to fix the pipes, nothing. Maybe during the past decade the Indian government got around to making some repairs in response to complaints by Western businesspeople. But the situation went on for decades untreated. That was in India's capital city.
Now try to imagine how Washingtonians would respond to the same problem in America's capital city. In fact, you don't have to imagine, if you followed the news about the discovery last year that lead had been getting into the water supply for years and that this information had been suppressed. Believe you me, the water bureaucracy scrambled to ward off the lynch mobs. That's because all Washingtonians have something approximating representation along with their taxation.
That's just what the majority of Indians, Russians and Mexicans, etc., don't have--even though they pay taxes. What they pay is not enough to give them adequate representation against the representation that the richest receive via under-the-table tax payments.
At the bottom of it all is not organized crime. At bottom is a system of doing business that stretches back to the ancient civilizations. That system is the clan system, which differs from tribalism in that marriage can be outside the tribe in a clan.
Marriages in a clan system are actually business mergers and/or business contracts. Say my clan controls the lumber supply in a region and your clan controls the trucking industry. We make a merger to have your trucks handle the lumber transport by marrying my daughter to your son. That's why you'll see arranged marriages in Muslim northern India and other parts between children. The marriage isn't consummated but there has to be a marriage ceremony to cement the contract.
Alert readers might ask if polygamy gives clans a huge business advantage. Of course. If you have one wife, you maybe only have five sons. If you have four wives cranking out 25 sons between them, you've got lots of merger material to play around with.
So all this talk about Islam under fire from the modern era is twaddle. It's the clan system that's under fire and Muslims know it. And they don't want to give up polygamy because there goes the big business advantage in the clan system. This is what many Muslims don't want to confront. They say, "We look after our own."
Yes, they have big charity, but in the modern era where dams and bridges and road systems and electrical grids cost billions upon billions, and where human population in a small region can run into the tens of millions, the charity system is completely inadequate. The clan model is simply not capable of dealing with the modern age.
Yet still they want it both ways. They can't have it both ways. They can't have all the benefits of modern life plus hold onto a way of doing business which subverts the type of government that makes modern life work. Fair taxation with adequate representation for the majority is the base of modern civilization's pyramid. The clan model, when mixed with off-the-books taxation, stands the pyramid on it's head. The patriarchs of the most powerful clans throw enough money at officials to ensure that their neighborhood has its own water well, the lights working, and the garbage picked up. The rest of the neighborhoods can go to hell in a handbasket.
The flip side of the same problem is how tribes can wreck the tax base in a country by invoking nomad status. To understand this part of the problem--
Knock! Knock!
"Who's there?"
Taxman.
"Taxman who?"
Taxman you haven't paid your taxes to the Iraqi government for the last 60 years.
"I'm not Iraqi. I'm Wigeemeosooombbi Nomad. We Wigeemeosooombbi have no fixed abode for the past 200,000 years."
But you remain fixed enough during part of the year to use the electricity and garbage collection service in Iraq. Pay up.
"If you're going to persecute me, give me a moment to collect my satellite dish, 10-speed blender, refrigerator, washing machine, microwave, television, toaster oven, computer, electric breadmaker, electric spice grinder and my goats and sheep and continue my nomadic wanderings. Unless you'd like to accept this gift of gold dinars for your dear mother."
That's why Gazi al-Yawer, the Iraq interim President, was furious with the Coalition military for not locking down the Iraqi borders after the Coalition toppled Saddam's regime. It's not just the security issue. It's also the taxation issue. Unless that issue is dealt with, Iraq is always pedaling backward, Saddam or no Saddam.
Al-Yawer is part of the wave of Middle Easterners who came to the West and figured out everything Pundita sketched above. They know you can't have a modern nation unless you have an adequate tax base, and that you can't have a tax base without a census. You can't have a census if a third of the population doesn't participate on the grounds that they're just in country to visit their cousins for a couple months.
The response from al-Yawer's tribe to his demand that everyone in Iraq get a national ID? They put out a contract on his life.
To summarize, the developing nations don't have the tax base to support adequate programs to provide services that you and I consider baseline necessities. In country after country, the tax base is not adequate to provide baseline services because so much of the tax collection is off the books and doesn't figure into the government's spending budget.
Now we arrive at the most interesting part of the problem. Let's back up and take a look at all those electric appliances owned by Wigeemeosooombbi Nomad. Some of the appliances are manufactured locally or close nearby, such as in India or China, and some are imported from the developed nations. Now step back and look at Wigeemeosooombbi's neighborhood. It looks like Bam, Iran before or after the big earthquake hit, which is to say it's situated somewhere between the Fifth Century and 12,000 BCE.
Why are those residents buying 10-speed blenders? Why don't they spend on the big stuff, such as a step up from a mud hut for a domicile and cement to build real roads? For the answer watch carefully, don't blink:
If the tax base is adequate, the government can use myriad means to stimulate the private business sector. One way is using taxes to build and maintain infrastructures that allow private industry to take root and grow. For example, think of the US federal highway program, which interstate truckers use to deliver goods. But if much of the tax money is paid off the books to officials, what can the individual official do with that bribe money? Even if the bribe equates to a few thousand dollars, that's not enough to build a road system.
What the official can do with the money is start a very small business, which often turns out to be a merchandise sales outlet/import business, which in turn is a money laundering scheme. That's why you can go to the most remote regions anywhere in the poverty-stricken world and find a bazaar around every bend selling anything you can get at Best Buy. If the blender you want is not in stock, give them a week to special order it.
But all these electric chachka sales outlets are not going anywhere. They are not growing the tax base enough to fuel serious business development. The result? Governments favor the socialist economic model, and depend on low-cost development bank loans to make up the shortfall--at least enough to keep the nation from sinking into the sea.
So the next time you hear a discussion about corruption in the developing world, remember that government corruption is 'inadequate tax base' spelled backward.
.
Wednesday, February 23
The Kyoto treaty and a steamy situation
"Pundita my dear, don't you think Bush could have thrown Europe a bone and signed onto Kyoto? The treaty is so ineffective it wouldn't do any harm to go along with it and besides the US is now missing out on the hot action in emissions credits trading. The trade is going to generate big business, even bigger than the action from the UN Oil for Food program.
[Signed] Boris in Jackson Heights"
Dear Boris:
We appreciate your sarcasm but going along with Kyoto is anything but harmless. Kyoto represents the institutionalization of what's known in the trade as "dartboard" research. But this isn't just bad government-funded medical research we're talking about. This is an issue humanity can't afford to get wrong, and we can't afford to piddle around for a century to come up with the right answers.
Global warming is a fact. But we don't know why the globe is warming and whether the phenomenon is within human control in any significant way. We don't know how much of various human activity, such as industrial fishing, contributes to warming. We have many puzzle pieces but we haven't constructed a good working hypothesis that would allow us to integrate all the data that could possibly relate to presumed reasons for global warming.
Instead, we've seized on one piece of the puzzle--industrial emissions--and diverted billions of dollars to creating solutions that on one side might be worse than the problem, and on other side are completely ineffective.
In the one camp, which represents solutions President Bush is pushing, we've got a bunch of car companies investing billions in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. But has anybody done a study on the environmental impact of the steam generated by gadzillions of hydrogen fuel cells in operation?
At least one study done years ago on the impact of water from jet streams suggested that the cumulative effect of the water released into the atmosphere has a significant impact on the weather.
I don't think the study was pursued because it isn't sexy science; i.e., the line of research doesn't attract big government bucks, and because what airline manufacturer and carrier wants to read that kind of research?
But before billions more are invested, we need to figure out if steam producing solutions are taking humanity from the frying pan into the fire.
Now we turn to the Kyoto camp. Just three countries not under the Kyoto treaty--China, India and US--between them are building 850 coal-fired plants that will spew up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto treaty is meant to reduce. This is not counting the emissions from vehicles in China and other developing countries. That's a huge consideration because they're now building, importing and buying vehicles in China and India at the rate of a zillion per minute.
And the administration and monitoring of the Kyoto agreement is so hideously complicated that it calls for yet another massive supranational bureaucratic construct with the attendant waste in resources and, as you hinted with a sledgehammer, a great opportunity for graft.
And then there is the thundering herd of elephants in the living room, which is that China is looming as the biggest problem with regard to industrial emissions, and China doesn't want to sign the Kyoto accord.
So there is a Marx Brothers quality about Kyoto. It solves nothing, goes nowhere, and generates tons of paper (from trees) that are unread by the aides whose job it is to plow through data for their bosses in government. Yet this Nothing has become a foreign policy football and is seriously discussed at state dinners.
.
[Signed] Boris in Jackson Heights"
Dear Boris:
We appreciate your sarcasm but going along with Kyoto is anything but harmless. Kyoto represents the institutionalization of what's known in the trade as "dartboard" research. But this isn't just bad government-funded medical research we're talking about. This is an issue humanity can't afford to get wrong, and we can't afford to piddle around for a century to come up with the right answers.
Global warming is a fact. But we don't know why the globe is warming and whether the phenomenon is within human control in any significant way. We don't know how much of various human activity, such as industrial fishing, contributes to warming. We have many puzzle pieces but we haven't constructed a good working hypothesis that would allow us to integrate all the data that could possibly relate to presumed reasons for global warming.
Instead, we've seized on one piece of the puzzle--industrial emissions--and diverted billions of dollars to creating solutions that on one side might be worse than the problem, and on other side are completely ineffective.
In the one camp, which represents solutions President Bush is pushing, we've got a bunch of car companies investing billions in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. But has anybody done a study on the environmental impact of the steam generated by gadzillions of hydrogen fuel cells in operation?
At least one study done years ago on the impact of water from jet streams suggested that the cumulative effect of the water released into the atmosphere has a significant impact on the weather.
I don't think the study was pursued because it isn't sexy science; i.e., the line of research doesn't attract big government bucks, and because what airline manufacturer and carrier wants to read that kind of research?
But before billions more are invested, we need to figure out if steam producing solutions are taking humanity from the frying pan into the fire.
Now we turn to the Kyoto camp. Just three countries not under the Kyoto treaty--China, India and US--between them are building 850 coal-fired plants that will spew up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto treaty is meant to reduce. This is not counting the emissions from vehicles in China and other developing countries. That's a huge consideration because they're now building, importing and buying vehicles in China and India at the rate of a zillion per minute.
And the administration and monitoring of the Kyoto agreement is so hideously complicated that it calls for yet another massive supranational bureaucratic construct with the attendant waste in resources and, as you hinted with a sledgehammer, a great opportunity for graft.
And then there is the thundering herd of elephants in the living room, which is that China is looming as the biggest problem with regard to industrial emissions, and China doesn't want to sign the Kyoto accord.
So there is a Marx Brothers quality about Kyoto. It solves nothing, goes nowhere, and generates tons of paper (from trees) that are unread by the aides whose job it is to plow through data for their bosses in government. Yet this Nothing has become a foreign policy football and is seriously discussed at state dinners.
.
Pundita cuts EU and NATO some slack
"You seem opposed to the US continuing with NATO. Some EU leaders seem to want to abandon NATO in favor of an EU defense organization. Yet President Bush is strongly in favor of keeping NATO and strengthening it, and I agree with him. I don't think the US should abandon what has been a very effective organization, and I think the East Europeans who have joined NATO are very strongly in favor of keeping it.
[Signed} Jan in Reston"
Dear Jan:
Pundita is opposed to the State Department being dominated by foreign policy that does not emanate from the White House and opposed to any White House defense/foreign policy that does not serve American interests first. There should be no conflict between an America-first policy and NATO--or between any member country's defense policy and NATO. The idea behind NATO is that member countries pursue their own course within the basic guidelines of NATO membership and come together in times of crisis under a shared leadership to fight a common enemy. Over a period of decades the idea fell into disrepair.
The idea worked during the Soviet era because the alliance countries saw the Soviet Empire as a common enemy, so there was cohesiveness in basic outlook and policy for deciding on which situation merited a NATO response.
The cohesiveness was retained after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire because the shared goal was breaking up the Warsaw Pact--bringing as many former Soviet regions as possible into NATO and integrating them in the NATO-allied European community. But where was the common enemy for this task?
The State Department drifted from a NATO-centric view into a Eurocentric view that was dominated by issues that went considerably beyond the narrow confines of defense. Meanwhile, State had gained more power in Washington than the Pentagon. The flaws in this state of affairs became patently obvious on 9/11.
Yet even after a catastrophic attack on the US exposed how little attention the American defense/foreign policy agencies had paid the world outside Europe, State continued to support a Eurocentric view. State 'went along' with the invasion of Afghanistan because Europe went along with it and so NATO supported it. State openly broke with the White House over Iraq because Europe broke with the White House and NATO followed.
In short, NATO suffers from mission drift and State drifted along with the drift. That doesn't mean the basic principle of the organization is now wrong or that America should abandon NATO. But there needs to be review of NATO policy and tightening up on the organization's purpose. Before this can go forward the major NATO member countries need to review and retool their defense policy for the modern era. The US has made a big start with Bush's Security Doctrine and initiatives, but the State Department has yet to be brought in line with the doctrine and the Pentagon is still retooling--and under wartime conditions.
Europe's challenge is far more complex and difficult. For all the fights inside the Beltway and the disputes between Democrats and Republicans, this nation is not only powerful, it's also very strong--the institutions are strong and cohesive. It's amazing if you look back on how far we've come since 9/11; Americans were able to get it together very quickly on a wide range of complex issues.
Europe, on the other hand, was hit by 9/11 at a time when they were profoundly immersed in integrating at a new level. They were trying to reshape the Continent along very cohesive lines and asking themselves how much cohesiveness they could take.
At the banking and intel levels Europe rallied with stunning speed to help the United States in the critical hours after the 9/11 attack. But once the financial crisis was averted and the initial shock of the attack wore off, Europe was almost resentful that in the middle of all their refurbishing, they had stop and figure out how to respond to the larger issues surrounding 9/11.
Then came Bush's swift actions--the decision to attack the Taliban, the declaration of the war on terror, and the preemption doctrine. Over a period of weeks, Bush threw together a new national security policy for the United States.
Europe wanted time to think and there was no time; the Bush war on terror came together like lightning. Then came Iraq. Part of Europe's anger at Bush about Iraq is a rooted in a 'Stop the World I want to get off' feeling. If the war could just stop for a year and let them sort out what they need to do with regard to working out EU adjustments, they'd probably come around to several of the ideas that Bush threw at them with dizzying speed--and they already have come around in some key areas.
And since 9/11 the Europeans managed to get in a great deal of hard thinking about the issues Pundita sketched with regard to NATO, and they've come upon a serious problem. They've put together an EU constitution that calls for one foreign policy for the entire EU bloc. Because foreign policy rests on defense policy, the question is how a singular European defense policy fits in with NATO.
Also, a defense policy for the EU that's not a joke rests on greatly beefing up the Eurozone military and there's all sorts of questions, including funding questions, to be dealt with in that regard.
Ironically, the need to respond to Bush's shoot-from-the-hip security strategy galvanized the EU leaders to think about all the above much sooner, and more deeply, than they had intended before 9/11. All these defense questions are very sticky, very complex for the Europeans. They thought they could kick the can down the road during the 1990s because there was no looming military threat. Writing in December 2003 about Europe's first draft of a security strategy, Steven Everts of the International Herald Tribune observed:
War gives no time to construct defense policy from the comfort of the armchair. From that view, sticking with the tried-and-true alliance and doing patchwork repairs to it on the fly makes more sense than trying to build up a new alliance framework or revise the old one from the ground up. So for now staying with NATO makes sense. However, America needs to stick with NATO's original principle; our foreign office and defense agencies need to be very clear on American policy as distinct from the country policies of NATO members and a 'NATO view.'
Short takes on EU security strategy:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19269-1489226,00.html
http://www.aicgs.org/c/vanham.shtml
http://www.iht.com/articles/120673.html
.
[Signed} Jan in Reston"
Dear Jan:
Pundita is opposed to the State Department being dominated by foreign policy that does not emanate from the White House and opposed to any White House defense/foreign policy that does not serve American interests first. There should be no conflict between an America-first policy and NATO--or between any member country's defense policy and NATO. The idea behind NATO is that member countries pursue their own course within the basic guidelines of NATO membership and come together in times of crisis under a shared leadership to fight a common enemy. Over a period of decades the idea fell into disrepair.
The idea worked during the Soviet era because the alliance countries saw the Soviet Empire as a common enemy, so there was cohesiveness in basic outlook and policy for deciding on which situation merited a NATO response.
The cohesiveness was retained after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire because the shared goal was breaking up the Warsaw Pact--bringing as many former Soviet regions as possible into NATO and integrating them in the NATO-allied European community. But where was the common enemy for this task?
The State Department drifted from a NATO-centric view into a Eurocentric view that was dominated by issues that went considerably beyond the narrow confines of defense. Meanwhile, State had gained more power in Washington than the Pentagon. The flaws in this state of affairs became patently obvious on 9/11.
Yet even after a catastrophic attack on the US exposed how little attention the American defense/foreign policy agencies had paid the world outside Europe, State continued to support a Eurocentric view. State 'went along' with the invasion of Afghanistan because Europe went along with it and so NATO supported it. State openly broke with the White House over Iraq because Europe broke with the White House and NATO followed.
In short, NATO suffers from mission drift and State drifted along with the drift. That doesn't mean the basic principle of the organization is now wrong or that America should abandon NATO. But there needs to be review of NATO policy and tightening up on the organization's purpose. Before this can go forward the major NATO member countries need to review and retool their defense policy for the modern era. The US has made a big start with Bush's Security Doctrine and initiatives, but the State Department has yet to be brought in line with the doctrine and the Pentagon is still retooling--and under wartime conditions.
Europe's challenge is far more complex and difficult. For all the fights inside the Beltway and the disputes between Democrats and Republicans, this nation is not only powerful, it's also very strong--the institutions are strong and cohesive. It's amazing if you look back on how far we've come since 9/11; Americans were able to get it together very quickly on a wide range of complex issues.
Europe, on the other hand, was hit by 9/11 at a time when they were profoundly immersed in integrating at a new level. They were trying to reshape the Continent along very cohesive lines and asking themselves how much cohesiveness they could take.
At the banking and intel levels Europe rallied with stunning speed to help the United States in the critical hours after the 9/11 attack. But once the financial crisis was averted and the initial shock of the attack wore off, Europe was almost resentful that in the middle of all their refurbishing, they had stop and figure out how to respond to the larger issues surrounding 9/11.
Then came Bush's swift actions--the decision to attack the Taliban, the declaration of the war on terror, and the preemption doctrine. Over a period of weeks, Bush threw together a new national security policy for the United States.
Europe wanted time to think and there was no time; the Bush war on terror came together like lightning. Then came Iraq. Part of Europe's anger at Bush about Iraq is a rooted in a 'Stop the World I want to get off' feeling. If the war could just stop for a year and let them sort out what they need to do with regard to working out EU adjustments, they'd probably come around to several of the ideas that Bush threw at them with dizzying speed--and they already have come around in some key areas.
And since 9/11 the Europeans managed to get in a great deal of hard thinking about the issues Pundita sketched with regard to NATO, and they've come upon a serious problem. They've put together an EU constitution that calls for one foreign policy for the entire EU bloc. Because foreign policy rests on defense policy, the question is how a singular European defense policy fits in with NATO.
Also, a defense policy for the EU that's not a joke rests on greatly beefing up the Eurozone military and there's all sorts of questions, including funding questions, to be dealt with in that regard.
Ironically, the need to respond to Bush's shoot-from-the-hip security strategy galvanized the EU leaders to think about all the above much sooner, and more deeply, than they had intended before 9/11. All these defense questions are very sticky, very complex for the Europeans. They thought they could kick the can down the road during the 1990s because there was no looming military threat. Writing in December 2003 about Europe's first draft of a security strategy, Steven Everts of the International Herald Tribune observed:
It has forced European leaders to debate strategies and policies, rather than seek refuge in more familiar discussions on institutions and processes. It has already produced a "new realism" that pervades current debates on EU foreign policy. A year ago it would have been impossible to get all countries to sign up for a European strategic culture "that fosters early, rapid and, when necessary robust intervention."Not all the EU countries have yet ratified the EU constitution and it's not even clear whether England will accept the idea of a single Eurozone foreign policy run from Brussels. So there is still a lot of sorting out to be done. I think Bush and his advisors recognize this but clearly his approach is, 'America has a war to run.'
War gives no time to construct defense policy from the comfort of the armchair. From that view, sticking with the tried-and-true alliance and doing patchwork repairs to it on the fly makes more sense than trying to build up a new alliance framework or revise the old one from the ground up. So for now staying with NATO makes sense. However, America needs to stick with NATO's original principle; our foreign office and defense agencies need to be very clear on American policy as distinct from the country policies of NATO members and a 'NATO view.'
Short takes on EU security strategy:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19269-1489226,00.html
http://www.aicgs.org/c/vanham.shtml
http://www.iht.com/articles/120673.html
.
Tuesday, February 22
The price of Indian tea in Iran
"Pundita, I'm seeing why you still refer to the Group of 8 as the G7. There's a move afoot to get Russia's membership suspended until Putin toes America's line. Russia's place in the group is still not secure, even though they were supposed to host the G8 summit in 2006.
[Signed] Caesar in San Francisco"
Dear Caesar:
During his Brussels speech Bush spoke of Russia taking their full place in the European community. He criticized Moscow's actions in the context of how they fit with the standards of the EU. Moscow has been very concerned that NATO's expansion is 'surrounding' Russia. Bush's speech seemed to be saying to Moscow, 'Where's the problem? If you keep your nose clean, you can join the WTO and down the line you can join the EU and NATO.'
The problem is that Russia doesn't need to become a part of the Europeon community. Russia sits on the invisible line that divides Asia and Europe. During earlier centuries a series of French diplomats managed to convince Russia's tsars that they were barbarians unless they learned to speak French. But today's Russia doesn't need to fit in with Europe. They can fit in with Asia.
European Union countries as well as the US were deeply involved in promoting Yushchenko--an involvement that included trashing Russia. So if Russia needed a lesson on where they'd stand in NATO and the EU if they joined, the Ukraine affair was it. The lesson is that Russia can be treated as a full-fledged European country only if the people running Russia allow Brussels a big say in how Russia is run.
That's the same message Dame Neville-Jones conveyed to the National Intelligence Conference during her keynote speech--not about Russia but about Europe's view of the United States. She was not speaking in an official capacity but her previous standing in the British government gives her words much weight. Stripped of polite language, the message she passed on is that the EU's idea of improved cooperation with Washington is for things to return to the way they were during the Clinton era. That was the era during which US foreign/defense policy was run from a post box in Brussels.
I add that Neville-Jones is a Good Guy--a very staunch friend of the US war on terror. That's why she squished herself into the middle seat of Coach class to fly from London to Washington just to deliver a heads up to the US defense community.
It's doubtful that President Bush first heard the warning via Neville-Jones's speech. It's obvious that the EU has taken a hard line toward Washington and there's no indication they plan to soften, even if they find agreement over Syria's role in Lebanon. The EU leaders want to have more say in how US defense/foreign policy is run; if they don't get it, they can drag their feet on a host of issues. From that view, Bush's tough stance on Russia can be read as a bone thrown at the EU's demands for more say in US policy.
However, there have been big changes in the world since the US invaded Iraq. The US triumph in Iraq--and it is a triumph--brought up a situation that was greatly suppressed because of Saddam Hussein's aggression in the Middle East. The situation is that Iran is a Persian island in a sea of Arabs. As long as Iran could act to keep Saddam's aggression in check, Arabs were happy to invite Iran to their backyard barbecues. But now that Saddam's threat is removed, Iran is feeling, well, like an island. And they aren't going to reach out to Israel--not as long as the present regime in Tehran is in power.
What would you do, in Tehran's position? For the answer, look at a map. Iran sits on that invisible line that divides the Middle East from Asia. Iran has long been a big purchaser of Russian weapons technology and so they've had good relations with Russia. But to interest Russia in forming a bloc would take more than arms trade. It would take a bunch of countries getting on board.
The map shows that the first choice among the bunch is China. That was Beijing's idea when they formed the hilariously named Shanghai Cooperative. Beijing envisioned an Asian arc of power that included Russia, Iran, India and various satellites, such as whatever Stans the bloc could pry away from US influence.
Put in unpussyfooting language, the Shanghai Cooperative is a pussyfooting attempt to form an Asian version of NATO. Vajpayee had his own idea; he wanted to create an IT trade alliance with China that would leave the EU trade bloc and the US eating dust for the rest of the century.
One sticking point for Vajpayee's party was bringing Tehran on board with the Shanghai Cooperative. The Islamic fundamentalists in Tehran don't say nice about Hindus behind their back. Vajpayee's party represents Hindu nationalism. Iran didn't see why they should be allies with India and vice versa. So the Shanghai Cooperative sort of bumped along in getting off the ground.
Also, Iran and Russia, having many centuries of experience with China, knew that the Chinese have a penchant for never naming anything for what it actually is, if it has unpleasant or forceful connotations. That's why Chinese gulags in Tibet were given names such as Bluebirds Nesting in Feathered Fan.
To boil it down, Tehran and Moscow weren't sure they wanted to be run from a post office box in Beijing. Months passed. Moscow waffled and watched India and China waltz each other around, and Iran lost a lot of money and caused a lot of unnecessary bloodshed while trying to swing things their way in post-Saddam Iraq. Meanwhile, large numbers of Indians were getting more and more steamed at Vajpayee, who was so busy entertaining Microsoft executives and wooing China that he neglected his voter base. In what was a stunning surprise to no one but Vajpayee, the Hindu nationalists were routed last year from the seat in Delhi and the Congress party returned to power.
The thing to write on your hand about the Congress party is that they trust China no further than they can throw it. And with a Sikh in the top post in India--Sikhs being sort of an Indianized Islamic sect with a few nods to Hinduism--Tehran found they could deal with India, after Tehran faced the writing on the wall about Iraq and looked around at the sea of Arabs lapping at their shore.
The upshot is that Tehran is talking up the creation of a common market that would include India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, the Central Asian states, and the Caucasus. Just to show they're willing to put their money where their mouth is, Tehran has dropped import barriers to Indian tea.
Tehran is doing more than agreeing to drink Indian tea. They want India to back them up regarding Tehran's stance on going nuclear. As sweetener, they've offered India a gas pipeline deal and India has reciprocated with all kinds of planned investment in Iran.
Thus, the outlines of the early 21st century are jelling. For all their hi-tech industrial knack, the EU, America, India and China are heavily dependent on regions in Russia, the Caspian Sea states, and the Middle East for energy supplies. Tehran has sized up the situation, and is making a pitch to Russia to play by the new geopolitical order.
Now put yourself in Putin's place listening to the pitch from Tehran. Putin's overriding concern is to build up Russia as a truly sovereign nation and from there a stable democracy. Imagine Dallas, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago running their own foreign policy counter to Washington's. That's pretty much where Russia's at.
Moscow has to get control of the regional governors and the oligarch clans. Putin doesn't want to do it by brute force, in the way China and Iran solved similar problems. So it's messy because Putin and his technocrats are making up solutions and correcting them as they go along.
Washington and Brussels don't care about the mess. They care about oil and gas and gas and oil and oil and gas. Russia has no other use to them other than maybe a place to set up US/NATO bases. Quite frankly, Russia doesn't have all that much offer during this era, aside from energy and a weapons industry left over from the Cold War era.
For now, Putin is trying to keep everyone at bay while he continues to fiddle with structural adjustment in the effort to wrest Russia away from the clan model of government.
The question is whether Bush should approach Russia in the way he indicated in his Brussels speech. His lecture to Russia might be a reflection of pressure from factions in the Democrat and Republican party that want to go along with Europe's lead on Russia.
However, the factions are still living in 1982 and Bush knows this. So we'll have to see what happens in Bratislava, now that Bush made his bread-and-butter speech to the EU and made a pass at placating the factions back home.
Just to throw in more suspense, Pundita suspects that Germany is particularly against the Bush-Putin friendship. Germany, we should all remember, is the most influential member of the European Union.
For more on Iran-India talks:
http://news.newkerala.com/india-news/?action=fullnews&id=75559
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=2/22/2005&Cat=2&Num=006
[Signed] Caesar in San Francisco"
Dear Caesar:
During his Brussels speech Bush spoke of Russia taking their full place in the European community. He criticized Moscow's actions in the context of how they fit with the standards of the EU. Moscow has been very concerned that NATO's expansion is 'surrounding' Russia. Bush's speech seemed to be saying to Moscow, 'Where's the problem? If you keep your nose clean, you can join the WTO and down the line you can join the EU and NATO.'
The problem is that Russia doesn't need to become a part of the Europeon community. Russia sits on the invisible line that divides Asia and Europe. During earlier centuries a series of French diplomats managed to convince Russia's tsars that they were barbarians unless they learned to speak French. But today's Russia doesn't need to fit in with Europe. They can fit in with Asia.
European Union countries as well as the US were deeply involved in promoting Yushchenko--an involvement that included trashing Russia. So if Russia needed a lesson on where they'd stand in NATO and the EU if they joined, the Ukraine affair was it. The lesson is that Russia can be treated as a full-fledged European country only if the people running Russia allow Brussels a big say in how Russia is run.
That's the same message Dame Neville-Jones conveyed to the National Intelligence Conference during her keynote speech--not about Russia but about Europe's view of the United States. She was not speaking in an official capacity but her previous standing in the British government gives her words much weight. Stripped of polite language, the message she passed on is that the EU's idea of improved cooperation with Washington is for things to return to the way they were during the Clinton era. That was the era during which US foreign/defense policy was run from a post box in Brussels.
I add that Neville-Jones is a Good Guy--a very staunch friend of the US war on terror. That's why she squished herself into the middle seat of Coach class to fly from London to Washington just to deliver a heads up to the US defense community.
It's doubtful that President Bush first heard the warning via Neville-Jones's speech. It's obvious that the EU has taken a hard line toward Washington and there's no indication they plan to soften, even if they find agreement over Syria's role in Lebanon. The EU leaders want to have more say in how US defense/foreign policy is run; if they don't get it, they can drag their feet on a host of issues. From that view, Bush's tough stance on Russia can be read as a bone thrown at the EU's demands for more say in US policy.
However, there have been big changes in the world since the US invaded Iraq. The US triumph in Iraq--and it is a triumph--brought up a situation that was greatly suppressed because of Saddam Hussein's aggression in the Middle East. The situation is that Iran is a Persian island in a sea of Arabs. As long as Iran could act to keep Saddam's aggression in check, Arabs were happy to invite Iran to their backyard barbecues. But now that Saddam's threat is removed, Iran is feeling, well, like an island. And they aren't going to reach out to Israel--not as long as the present regime in Tehran is in power.
What would you do, in Tehran's position? For the answer, look at a map. Iran sits on that invisible line that divides the Middle East from Asia. Iran has long been a big purchaser of Russian weapons technology and so they've had good relations with Russia. But to interest Russia in forming a bloc would take more than arms trade. It would take a bunch of countries getting on board.
The map shows that the first choice among the bunch is China. That was Beijing's idea when they formed the hilariously named Shanghai Cooperative. Beijing envisioned an Asian arc of power that included Russia, Iran, India and various satellites, such as whatever Stans the bloc could pry away from US influence.
Put in unpussyfooting language, the Shanghai Cooperative is a pussyfooting attempt to form an Asian version of NATO. Vajpayee had his own idea; he wanted to create an IT trade alliance with China that would leave the EU trade bloc and the US eating dust for the rest of the century.
One sticking point for Vajpayee's party was bringing Tehran on board with the Shanghai Cooperative. The Islamic fundamentalists in Tehran don't say nice about Hindus behind their back. Vajpayee's party represents Hindu nationalism. Iran didn't see why they should be allies with India and vice versa. So the Shanghai Cooperative sort of bumped along in getting off the ground.
Also, Iran and Russia, having many centuries of experience with China, knew that the Chinese have a penchant for never naming anything for what it actually is, if it has unpleasant or forceful connotations. That's why Chinese gulags in Tibet were given names such as Bluebirds Nesting in Feathered Fan.
To boil it down, Tehran and Moscow weren't sure they wanted to be run from a post office box in Beijing. Months passed. Moscow waffled and watched India and China waltz each other around, and Iran lost a lot of money and caused a lot of unnecessary bloodshed while trying to swing things their way in post-Saddam Iraq. Meanwhile, large numbers of Indians were getting more and more steamed at Vajpayee, who was so busy entertaining Microsoft executives and wooing China that he neglected his voter base. In what was a stunning surprise to no one but Vajpayee, the Hindu nationalists were routed last year from the seat in Delhi and the Congress party returned to power.
The thing to write on your hand about the Congress party is that they trust China no further than they can throw it. And with a Sikh in the top post in India--Sikhs being sort of an Indianized Islamic sect with a few nods to Hinduism--Tehran found they could deal with India, after Tehran faced the writing on the wall about Iraq and looked around at the sea of Arabs lapping at their shore.
The upshot is that Tehran is talking up the creation of a common market that would include India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, the Central Asian states, and the Caucasus. Just to show they're willing to put their money where their mouth is, Tehran has dropped import barriers to Indian tea.
Tehran is doing more than agreeing to drink Indian tea. They want India to back them up regarding Tehran's stance on going nuclear. As sweetener, they've offered India a gas pipeline deal and India has reciprocated with all kinds of planned investment in Iran.
Thus, the outlines of the early 21st century are jelling. For all their hi-tech industrial knack, the EU, America, India and China are heavily dependent on regions in Russia, the Caspian Sea states, and the Middle East for energy supplies. Tehran has sized up the situation, and is making a pitch to Russia to play by the new geopolitical order.
Now put yourself in Putin's place listening to the pitch from Tehran. Putin's overriding concern is to build up Russia as a truly sovereign nation and from there a stable democracy. Imagine Dallas, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago running their own foreign policy counter to Washington's. That's pretty much where Russia's at.
Moscow has to get control of the regional governors and the oligarch clans. Putin doesn't want to do it by brute force, in the way China and Iran solved similar problems. So it's messy because Putin and his technocrats are making up solutions and correcting them as they go along.
Washington and Brussels don't care about the mess. They care about oil and gas and gas and oil and oil and gas. Russia has no other use to them other than maybe a place to set up US/NATO bases. Quite frankly, Russia doesn't have all that much offer during this era, aside from energy and a weapons industry left over from the Cold War era.
For now, Putin is trying to keep everyone at bay while he continues to fiddle with structural adjustment in the effort to wrest Russia away from the clan model of government.
The question is whether Bush should approach Russia in the way he indicated in his Brussels speech. His lecture to Russia might be a reflection of pressure from factions in the Democrat and Republican party that want to go along with Europe's lead on Russia.
However, the factions are still living in 1982 and Bush knows this. So we'll have to see what happens in Bratislava, now that Bush made his bread-and-butter speech to the EU and made a pass at placating the factions back home.
Just to throw in more suspense, Pundita suspects that Germany is particularly against the Bush-Putin friendship. Germany, we should all remember, is the most influential member of the European Union.
For more on Iran-India talks:
http://news.newkerala.com/india-news/?action=fullnews&id=75559
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=2/22/2005&Cat=2&Num=006
Sunday, February 20
Chinese spies! Russian arms merchants! German secret police! Is it a remake of Casablanca? No, it's the Ostrich school of defense policy!
"[Secretary] Rice was much tougher on the Russians during their meeting than was generally reported in the US press. So do you think Bush will keep up the heat on Putin over Syria and Iran during the Bratislava meeting?"
[Signed] Chicago Dan"
Dear Chicago Dan:
Is it me? Or has anyone else noticed that the spike in Chechen terrorist attacks in Russia coincided with Moscow's decision to favor Japan over China with a pipeline route and Putin's reluctance to accept China's 'invitation' to have Russia take a larger role in the Shanghai Cooperative.
And as coincidence would have it, terrorist attacks on Russia fell off markedly at just around the time Putin finally decided to:
(a) accept Beijing's 'invitation' to take a greater role in the Shanghai Cooperative
(b) do more oil business with China
(c) forgive much of Syria's debt to Russia and seal an arms deal, and
(d) give Tehran pretty much everything they want with regard to transfer of nuclear technology.
Well, perhaps Pundita reads too much into her haphazard following of news about terrorism attacks in Russia.
In any case, we extract two issues from your question. The most serious issue for the United States is drift toward the Ostrich School of foreign policy.
How is yelling at Putin about Syria and Iran going to convince France and Germany not to sell weapons and dual-use technologies to Syria and Iran? How does huffing at the Kremlin bring the British Foreign Office to cease their Appeasement Initiative toward Iran? And what does upbraiding the Russian arms industry have to do with the fact that the US is currently overrun with Chinese industrial spies?
The key issue is somehow always lost in the shuffle of the day's war and diplomacy news. The issue is that oppression and innovation don't go together.
China defends 'authoritarian' government, but you don't find China sending armies of industrial spies to Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea. No, they send the spies to the US and other democratic countries, where creativity flowers. The spies steal the innovations that come from the brain sweat of peoples who live in freedom. Then the Chinese make cheap knockoffs and sell them at a steep discount. Then they say, "See? You don't have to be a democracy to be a modern trading power!"
Then China gets invited to lunch at the G7 meeting.
If it ended there, we might take it in stride. But US soliders are getting shot at and blown up in Iraq with weapons that have Made in China stamped on their parts--when the stamp doesn't read Made in France or Made in Germany.
Meanwhile, US officials yell at the Saudis for helping to fund terrorist organizations. But selling weapons and WMD technology to the governments who run terrorist armies is a far greater problem.
Show me the Saudi who can operate a wrench and I'll show you a Yemini you've mistaken for a Saudi. The Saudis have a horror of physical labor. So where are the weapons factories in Saudi Arabia? Show them to Pundita.
No. The weapons factories and booming weapons industries are in Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Israel and China. They're in America also but during this era, at least, the American defense industry makes you steal the designs before you sell them to terror-sponsoring governments.
When we call out our allies on the issue, they come up with excuses that wouldn't get past any parent of a three-year old. Some perennial favorites:
"Where is the grand jury indictment showing evidence that X government sponsors terror?"
"We don't recognize those acts as terrorism. They are legitimate protests against oppression."
"Look, you can make a weapon out of toaster parts if you can read the computer code."
"We sold them stuff we dug up from a World War Two bunker."
"I'm a capitalist, not a moralist."
And the ever-popular, "Don't worry, they can't figure out how to detach the rocket launcher from the tank."
The Israelis came up with a creative way to deal with the problem of being attacked by the very weapon designs they sell to governments who turn around and sell them to Israel's enemies: They declared that Israel is perpetually at war.
However, Pundita awards her Ostrich Prize to Germany. To deal with the problem of terrorist attacks launched with weapons that the German defense industry sells to terror sponsoring governments, Germany is readying to become a police state:
Pay for your visits to the wine bar with EFT. No more cash payments for anything, just in case you're thinking of laundering money for a terrorist cell. Retinal scans at the dentist's office, in case you steal cavity filling material and convert it to a bomb. Computer chips inserted in your arm and pet cat, in case you and your cat turn out to be plotting a terrorist act against German wildlife. Minature cameras inserted under every toilet seat, in case you flush WMD down the can during a police raid.
That's just our allies playing ostrich. Now we turn to trading partners who are not allies. China only wants lunch invitations to the G7 meetings because acknowledging their true trade status means they can no longer trot out their favorite excuse.
Whenever you call out China over anything, they lapse into cute pidgin English: "Oh we just poor developing country. We can't wead patent and copyright law. Any weapons we sell is from 1916."
Whenever you snap at the Russians about their customers for arms deals, you get the same excuses our allies trot out. But if you back a Russian into a corner, you learn why it's possible to ace a test in Russian literature by answering, "The deathbed scene" to every question.
Russians are among the world's best storytellers and they don't believe in leaving a dry eye in the house. So Pundita will give everyone a moment to collect their Kleneex box before she lists the litany. Ready?
1. The Russian government has been broke since the Romanovs were overthrown.
2. During the UN embargo of Iraq the Russian government scared up cash to keep the lights burning in the Kremlin by (a) reselling oil they bought at a steep discount from Saddam Hussein and (b) selling Saddam every outdated weapon in the Russian arsenal going back to catapults and pitch arrows.
3. Those avenues of revenue-raising were shut down by the US invasion of Iraq.
4. That's why the Kremlin finally did what they should have done years earlier: go after tax-cheating oligarchs and wrestle back control of their energy sector from the oligarchs before it was sold piecemeal to US and European energy companies acting as fronts for Western banks.
5. Because the Kremlin dealt with reality only after the US invaded Iraq, they confronted their tax problem all at once and in a big hurry. That translated to highly questionable methods in going after the big-bucks tax cheats.
6. That's how two oligarchs with an Interpol warrant out on them ended up at a prayer breakfast at the White House the other week. When oligarchs on the lam from Russian justice are not in Washington sucking up to Republicans they're using Israel and Europe as a bunker for their war against the Kremlin.
7. If all the above sounds vaguely familiar, Beslan was Russia's 9/11. It was the inevitable consequence of many years of the government playing ostrich and not tending to gathering threats that were as plain as day to anyone who cared to look. That might be why Bush and Putin felt a kinship. They had both inherited a national security mess--a mess consisting of layers upon layers of neglect.
8. The big difference between the Putin and Bush presidencies is the advantage that a stable, wealthy democracy confers on America's leader. That meant Bush didn't need to build up a nation and a central government at the same time he declared war on terror.
The democracy that Yeltsin oversaw was a stage show--a carefully managed media event to please the West, in order to draw development/private bank loans. Behind the stage props was a ruin. Putin is trying to forge a Russian nation out of the ruin.
9. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has to scare up vast quantities of cash to keep the lights on and outspend the oligarch clans in order to remain in power. The clans have provided the only real stability Russia has known since the Soviet Union dissolved but they are also the greatest obstacle to Russia becoming a truly sovereign nation, not to mention a healthy democracy.
10. Putin's defense policy must be viewed against all the above considerations and Russia's place on the world map. He has the same policy as Roadrunner. The policy is to survive the day and make sure not to look down while running from one cliff edge to another.
11. With regard to foreign policy, Putin is taking the paths of least resistance that open up. Is that the right thing to do? No. It's dangerously shortsighted. But to take actions according to the long view would require a militarily powerful nation at Russia's back. Any hope Putin had that he might depend on America for back-up in dealing with China's 'invitations' was dashed when he saw American actions in Ukraine. The actions fully supported and encouraged the Yushchenko tactic of demonizing Russia and Putin.
12. So, even if Bush somehow convinced Putin that notwithstanding US actions in Ukraine and Georgia, America would be at Russia's back--the Russian military would not accept Bush's assurances. As with all military, they don't get paid to live on hope.
13. But even if the Russian military trusted Bush to stand by assurances to Putin, Bush is only in office four more years. Who knows what kind of defense/foreign policy will evolve from the next US administration?
14. And even if the Russians could be assured that Bush policy carries forward, geography is still the most important factor in Russia's foreign policy. Russia must find ways to get along with the European trading bloc, China, and Iran.
Now that we've all had a good cry, it's time to run the story through Pundita's handy pocket-sized Malarkey Translator:
Putin doesn't want to rumble with Washington any more than he wants to rumble with Beijing. But what Russia's weapons industry lost in sales to Saddam's regime, they can make up for with weapons sales to Syria. And what they lost from black market oil deals with Saddam, they can make up with sales of dual-use nuclear technology to Iran.
That bottom line brings Russia up against the US-led war on terror. But delivering threats to Moscow is delivering threats to the wrong address. Or rather, Russia should not be near the top of the address list. In their dealings with Iran and Syria, Russia is simply following the lead set by the European Union's most powerful nations. These very same nations are members of NATO--our dear allies.
This said, the US has a war to fight. So Pundita hopes President Bush reads the riot act to Putin over weapon sales to Syria and nuke technology to Iran. We hope even more that Bush trots out the same riot act for every head of state he meets with this coming week.
For their part, Moscow would be within their rights to lodge a formal protest with the US government over the White House inviting oligarchs on the lam to a prayer breakfast, and over the recent "testimony" before Congress by Yukos and Menatep officials.
The latter incident is so outrageous that Pundita, who is rarely at a loss for words, is speechless. Thus, we allow Peter Lavelle at untimely-thoughts.com to outline the situation: Yukos' Double Standard.
http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.html?alert=comments&art=1395
.
[Signed] Chicago Dan"
Dear Chicago Dan:
Is it me? Or has anyone else noticed that the spike in Chechen terrorist attacks in Russia coincided with Moscow's decision to favor Japan over China with a pipeline route and Putin's reluctance to accept China's 'invitation' to have Russia take a larger role in the Shanghai Cooperative.
And as coincidence would have it, terrorist attacks on Russia fell off markedly at just around the time Putin finally decided to:
(a) accept Beijing's 'invitation' to take a greater role in the Shanghai Cooperative
(b) do more oil business with China
(c) forgive much of Syria's debt to Russia and seal an arms deal, and
(d) give Tehran pretty much everything they want with regard to transfer of nuclear technology.
Well, perhaps Pundita reads too much into her haphazard following of news about terrorism attacks in Russia.
In any case, we extract two issues from your question. The most serious issue for the United States is drift toward the Ostrich School of foreign policy.
How is yelling at Putin about Syria and Iran going to convince France and Germany not to sell weapons and dual-use technologies to Syria and Iran? How does huffing at the Kremlin bring the British Foreign Office to cease their Appeasement Initiative toward Iran? And what does upbraiding the Russian arms industry have to do with the fact that the US is currently overrun with Chinese industrial spies?
The key issue is somehow always lost in the shuffle of the day's war and diplomacy news. The issue is that oppression and innovation don't go together.
China defends 'authoritarian' government, but you don't find China sending armies of industrial spies to Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea. No, they send the spies to the US and other democratic countries, where creativity flowers. The spies steal the innovations that come from the brain sweat of peoples who live in freedom. Then the Chinese make cheap knockoffs and sell them at a steep discount. Then they say, "See? You don't have to be a democracy to be a modern trading power!"
Then China gets invited to lunch at the G7 meeting.
If it ended there, we might take it in stride. But US soliders are getting shot at and blown up in Iraq with weapons that have Made in China stamped on their parts--when the stamp doesn't read Made in France or Made in Germany.
Meanwhile, US officials yell at the Saudis for helping to fund terrorist organizations. But selling weapons and WMD technology to the governments who run terrorist armies is a far greater problem.
Show me the Saudi who can operate a wrench and I'll show you a Yemini you've mistaken for a Saudi. The Saudis have a horror of physical labor. So where are the weapons factories in Saudi Arabia? Show them to Pundita.
No. The weapons factories and booming weapons industries are in Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Israel and China. They're in America also but during this era, at least, the American defense industry makes you steal the designs before you sell them to terror-sponsoring governments.
When we call out our allies on the issue, they come up with excuses that wouldn't get past any parent of a three-year old. Some perennial favorites:
"Where is the grand jury indictment showing evidence that X government sponsors terror?"
"We don't recognize those acts as terrorism. They are legitimate protests against oppression."
"Look, you can make a weapon out of toaster parts if you can read the computer code."
"We sold them stuff we dug up from a World War Two bunker."
"I'm a capitalist, not a moralist."
And the ever-popular, "Don't worry, they can't figure out how to detach the rocket launcher from the tank."
The Israelis came up with a creative way to deal with the problem of being attacked by the very weapon designs they sell to governments who turn around and sell them to Israel's enemies: They declared that Israel is perpetually at war.
However, Pundita awards her Ostrich Prize to Germany. To deal with the problem of terrorist attacks launched with weapons that the German defense industry sells to terror sponsoring governments, Germany is readying to become a police state:
Pay for your visits to the wine bar with EFT. No more cash payments for anything, just in case you're thinking of laundering money for a terrorist cell. Retinal scans at the dentist's office, in case you steal cavity filling material and convert it to a bomb. Computer chips inserted in your arm and pet cat, in case you and your cat turn out to be plotting a terrorist act against German wildlife. Minature cameras inserted under every toilet seat, in case you flush WMD down the can during a police raid.
That's just our allies playing ostrich. Now we turn to trading partners who are not allies. China only wants lunch invitations to the G7 meetings because acknowledging their true trade status means they can no longer trot out their favorite excuse.
Whenever you call out China over anything, they lapse into cute pidgin English: "Oh we just poor developing country. We can't wead patent and copyright law. Any weapons we sell is from 1916."
Whenever you snap at the Russians about their customers for arms deals, you get the same excuses our allies trot out. But if you back a Russian into a corner, you learn why it's possible to ace a test in Russian literature by answering, "The deathbed scene" to every question.
Russians are among the world's best storytellers and they don't believe in leaving a dry eye in the house. So Pundita will give everyone a moment to collect their Kleneex box before she lists the litany. Ready?
1. The Russian government has been broke since the Romanovs were overthrown.
2. During the UN embargo of Iraq the Russian government scared up cash to keep the lights burning in the Kremlin by (a) reselling oil they bought at a steep discount from Saddam Hussein and (b) selling Saddam every outdated weapon in the Russian arsenal going back to catapults and pitch arrows.
3. Those avenues of revenue-raising were shut down by the US invasion of Iraq.
4. That's why the Kremlin finally did what they should have done years earlier: go after tax-cheating oligarchs and wrestle back control of their energy sector from the oligarchs before it was sold piecemeal to US and European energy companies acting as fronts for Western banks.
5. Because the Kremlin dealt with reality only after the US invaded Iraq, they confronted their tax problem all at once and in a big hurry. That translated to highly questionable methods in going after the big-bucks tax cheats.
6. That's how two oligarchs with an Interpol warrant out on them ended up at a prayer breakfast at the White House the other week. When oligarchs on the lam from Russian justice are not in Washington sucking up to Republicans they're using Israel and Europe as a bunker for their war against the Kremlin.
7. If all the above sounds vaguely familiar, Beslan was Russia's 9/11. It was the inevitable consequence of many years of the government playing ostrich and not tending to gathering threats that were as plain as day to anyone who cared to look. That might be why Bush and Putin felt a kinship. They had both inherited a national security mess--a mess consisting of layers upon layers of neglect.
8. The big difference between the Putin and Bush presidencies is the advantage that a stable, wealthy democracy confers on America's leader. That meant Bush didn't need to build up a nation and a central government at the same time he declared war on terror.
The democracy that Yeltsin oversaw was a stage show--a carefully managed media event to please the West, in order to draw development/private bank loans. Behind the stage props was a ruin. Putin is trying to forge a Russian nation out of the ruin.
9. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has to scare up vast quantities of cash to keep the lights on and outspend the oligarch clans in order to remain in power. The clans have provided the only real stability Russia has known since the Soviet Union dissolved but they are also the greatest obstacle to Russia becoming a truly sovereign nation, not to mention a healthy democracy.
10. Putin's defense policy must be viewed against all the above considerations and Russia's place on the world map. He has the same policy as Roadrunner. The policy is to survive the day and make sure not to look down while running from one cliff edge to another.
11. With regard to foreign policy, Putin is taking the paths of least resistance that open up. Is that the right thing to do? No. It's dangerously shortsighted. But to take actions according to the long view would require a militarily powerful nation at Russia's back. Any hope Putin had that he might depend on America for back-up in dealing with China's 'invitations' was dashed when he saw American actions in Ukraine. The actions fully supported and encouraged the Yushchenko tactic of demonizing Russia and Putin.
12. So, even if Bush somehow convinced Putin that notwithstanding US actions in Ukraine and Georgia, America would be at Russia's back--the Russian military would not accept Bush's assurances. As with all military, they don't get paid to live on hope.
13. But even if the Russian military trusted Bush to stand by assurances to Putin, Bush is only in office four more years. Who knows what kind of defense/foreign policy will evolve from the next US administration?
14. And even if the Russians could be assured that Bush policy carries forward, geography is still the most important factor in Russia's foreign policy. Russia must find ways to get along with the European trading bloc, China, and Iran.
Now that we've all had a good cry, it's time to run the story through Pundita's handy pocket-sized Malarkey Translator:
Putin doesn't want to rumble with Washington any more than he wants to rumble with Beijing. But what Russia's weapons industry lost in sales to Saddam's regime, they can make up for with weapons sales to Syria. And what they lost from black market oil deals with Saddam, they can make up with sales of dual-use nuclear technology to Iran.
That bottom line brings Russia up against the US-led war on terror. But delivering threats to Moscow is delivering threats to the wrong address. Or rather, Russia should not be near the top of the address list. In their dealings with Iran and Syria, Russia is simply following the lead set by the European Union's most powerful nations. These very same nations are members of NATO--our dear allies.
This said, the US has a war to fight. So Pundita hopes President Bush reads the riot act to Putin over weapon sales to Syria and nuke technology to Iran. We hope even more that Bush trots out the same riot act for every head of state he meets with this coming week.
For their part, Moscow would be within their rights to lodge a formal protest with the US government over the White House inviting oligarchs on the lam to a prayer breakfast, and over the recent "testimony" before Congress by Yukos and Menatep officials.
The latter incident is so outrageous that Pundita, who is rarely at a loss for words, is speechless. Thus, we allow Peter Lavelle at untimely-thoughts.com to outline the situation: Yukos' Double Standard.
http://www.untimely-thoughts.com/index.html?alert=comments&art=1395
.
"Pundita!! The New York Times is going after Bush again! On the eve of his important meetings in Europe!"
"Pundita!! The New York Times is going after Bush again! On the eve of his important meetings in Europe! Have you seen the Times story up on Drudge about the Wead book!? Why doesn't the Times just move into the [UK] Guardian headquarters and free up all that office space in Manhattan?
[Signed] Sleepless in St. Louis again"
Dear SISLA:
From the few reviews now up on Barnes & Noble, which do not mention the tapes in question, it seems the part in Wead's book ("The Raising of a President") that deals with the Bush conversations Wead secretly taped is a small part of the writing.
But from the Times article up on Drudge, clearly the NYT was involved in the controversial part of the book for several weeks prior to the book's January publication. So, given the book's date of publication and the date of the Times article (today), it does seem at this moment that the Times waited until the day of Bush's trip to Europe to publicize the tapes.
According to the B&N website, the Wead offering is published by Atria Books, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. If this is indeed the same book the Times story mentions, then the plot thickens.
Simon & Schuster is owned by Viacom, which also owns CBS. That's the same CBS which had their knuckles rapped about the very unbalanced 60 Minutes II treatment of Bush's National Guard Service, to put it politely.
Viacom's problem is that several members of the public loudly charged that 60 Minutes was serving as a showcase for Simon & Schuster books. CBS hotly denied the charge. But since the uproar, 60 Minutes (and 60 Minutes II) are under very close scrutiny.
It might be that 60 Minutes slips in mention of the book, but as of this moment, the 60 Minutes schedule for tonight is not showing any such segment.
To boil it down, there was no way 60 Minutes could do a segment on the Wead book on this evening's broadcast without raising howls from the public. So it's possible that The New York Times was doing Viacom a favor, given that it would sticky if 60 Minutes did a tie-in segment with the Atria book.
Pundita sympathizes with your irritation, but the Times editorial board doesn't seem to think that the United States is at war. So they would not see the timing of their story about the Bush tapes as an attempt to distract Europe from the points that Bush wants to impress on Europe.
On the other hand, the Times probably has more readers in Europe than the US. If so, it would make sense for the Times to spring something on the President just as he's making what is a triumphal return to Europe.
In any case, within a couple days the Times story will be all over Europe. By the time the Guardian and other Bush-bashing Euro rags get finished interpreting the story, this will add fuel to European fears that Bush is a religious fanatic.
Andrew Wallenstein, who did a 12/06/04 piece for the Hollywood Reporter on the Viacom controversy ("Viacom taking more of '60 Minutes' time"), had sobering words about the broader implications.
Vertical integration was not conceived to be a way of cooking up stories that are treated as hard news merely as a marketing ploy for a company product. That's exactly how Viacom used vertical integration, until they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. With some understatement, the CBS News part in the ploy is not an example of ethical journalism.
The best defense is to get to know your friendly conglomerate and all its spinoffs, and keep a close watch on their exercises in vertical integration. Because if you think propaganda is the worst thing that can happen to the nightly news, you don't know how creative today's marketeers can be.
For the full Hollywood Reporter article, go to:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/columns/tv_reporter_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000731594
.
[Signed] Sleepless in St. Louis again"
Dear SISLA:
From the few reviews now up on Barnes & Noble, which do not mention the tapes in question, it seems the part in Wead's book ("The Raising of a President") that deals with the Bush conversations Wead secretly taped is a small part of the writing.
But from the Times article up on Drudge, clearly the NYT was involved in the controversial part of the book for several weeks prior to the book's January publication. So, given the book's date of publication and the date of the Times article (today), it does seem at this moment that the Times waited until the day of Bush's trip to Europe to publicize the tapes.
According to the B&N website, the Wead offering is published by Atria Books, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. If this is indeed the same book the Times story mentions, then the plot thickens.
Simon & Schuster is owned by Viacom, which also owns CBS. That's the same CBS which had their knuckles rapped about the very unbalanced 60 Minutes II treatment of Bush's National Guard Service, to put it politely.
Viacom's problem is that several members of the public loudly charged that 60 Minutes was serving as a showcase for Simon & Schuster books. CBS hotly denied the charge. But since the uproar, 60 Minutes (and 60 Minutes II) are under very close scrutiny.
It might be that 60 Minutes slips in mention of the book, but as of this moment, the 60 Minutes schedule for tonight is not showing any such segment.
To boil it down, there was no way 60 Minutes could do a segment on the Wead book on this evening's broadcast without raising howls from the public. So it's possible that The New York Times was doing Viacom a favor, given that it would sticky if 60 Minutes did a tie-in segment with the Atria book.
Pundita sympathizes with your irritation, but the Times editorial board doesn't seem to think that the United States is at war. So they would not see the timing of their story about the Bush tapes as an attempt to distract Europe from the points that Bush wants to impress on Europe.
On the other hand, the Times probably has more readers in Europe than the US. If so, it would make sense for the Times to spring something on the President just as he's making what is a triumphal return to Europe.
In any case, within a couple days the Times story will be all over Europe. By the time the Guardian and other Bush-bashing Euro rags get finished interpreting the story, this will add fuel to European fears that Bush is a religious fanatic.
Andrew Wallenstein, who did a 12/06/04 piece for the Hollywood Reporter on the Viacom controversy ("Viacom taking more of '60 Minutes' time"), had sobering words about the broader implications.
In fairness, it's hard to blame "60 Minutes" for its story selections considering that it is part of a media conglomerate with many tentacles in an increasingly consolidated industry. From CNN to Fox News Channel to the Big Three networks, all of the major U.S. TV news outlets are now cogs of media and entertainment behemoths.However, the type of consolidation that the CBS News/S&S partnerships represented is called 'vertical integration,' which is a way for parent corporations to integrate the marketing of products/services that are created by various companies within the conglomerate.
Vertical integration was not conceived to be a way of cooking up stories that are treated as hard news merely as a marketing ploy for a company product. That's exactly how Viacom used vertical integration, until they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. With some understatement, the CBS News part in the ploy is not an example of ethical journalism.
The best defense is to get to know your friendly conglomerate and all its spinoffs, and keep a close watch on their exercises in vertical integration. Because if you think propaganda is the worst thing that can happen to the nightly news, you don't know how creative today's marketeers can be.
For the full Hollywood Reporter article, go to:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/columns/tv_reporter_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000731594
.
Friday, February 18
Taco Bell: The Final Solution
"Now that it's clear that Germany, France and Britain won't support a naval blockade of Iran do you think America would be justified in going it alone? Also, any ideas on how to respond to North Korea's latest demand?
[Signed] Chuck in Annapolis"
Dear Chuck:
North Korea....Iran....Germany....we're looking but we don't see those countries on our world map. We see a Korean-speaking province of China, a Farsi- and Arabic-speaking province of China, and a German-speaking province of China.
That reminds me; the raccoon mentioned last year that he had to lecture his son on etiquette. The child spit out a mouthful of "very hot strange noodles" that had been a gift from his friend at the German embassy. When his father asked what a nose is for, his explanation for putting fire in his mouth was he thought it might be a new recipe for Wiener schnitzel. Kids.
So you want a naval blockade of Iran, eh? That's leaping over a few steps. A naval blockade is an act of war, which requires teamwork to pull off. How can America fight a war, when half of Washington thinks the war ended with the occupation of Iraq? So first we need a naval blockade of the Beltway. If we use the Coast Guard we might not need to wrangle with the issue of Posse Comitatus. Anyhow, the idea would be that nobody at Foggy Bottom, Pentagon, and Langley goes home for the weekend until everybody gets on the same page.
Once the blockade is up, herd them into movie theaters around the Beltway and sequester Taco Bell to serve breakfast, lunch and dinner at the theaters. The audiences should stay in the theaters until they've watched every episode of Survivor, Apprentice, and the Amazing Race. In this way they can learn what happens when teamwork breaks down or never gets underway, and they can learn the meaning of good and bad teamwork.
With regard to our dear allies, London and Paris know which side Berlin would come down on, if they took opposition to what Beijing wants. Right now General Cao wants the EU to stall around with regard to Tehran while he scrambles to build up the Chinese navy, which he can then send steaming to the Strait of Hormuz. That means Berlin wants to stall around. If London and Paris say no to Berlin, they might reopen a chapter in history they'd rather not open. Pundita does not blame them for not wanting to reopen it.
.
[Signed] Chuck in Annapolis"
Dear Chuck:
North Korea....Iran....Germany....we're looking but we don't see those countries on our world map. We see a Korean-speaking province of China, a Farsi- and Arabic-speaking province of China, and a German-speaking province of China.
That reminds me; the raccoon mentioned last year that he had to lecture his son on etiquette. The child spit out a mouthful of "very hot strange noodles" that had been a gift from his friend at the German embassy. When his father asked what a nose is for, his explanation for putting fire in his mouth was he thought it might be a new recipe for Wiener schnitzel. Kids.
So you want a naval blockade of Iran, eh? That's leaping over a few steps. A naval blockade is an act of war, which requires teamwork to pull off. How can America fight a war, when half of Washington thinks the war ended with the occupation of Iraq? So first we need a naval blockade of the Beltway. If we use the Coast Guard we might not need to wrangle with the issue of Posse Comitatus. Anyhow, the idea would be that nobody at Foggy Bottom, Pentagon, and Langley goes home for the weekend until everybody gets on the same page.
Once the blockade is up, herd them into movie theaters around the Beltway and sequester Taco Bell to serve breakfast, lunch and dinner at the theaters. The audiences should stay in the theaters until they've watched every episode of Survivor, Apprentice, and the Amazing Race. In this way they can learn what happens when teamwork breaks down or never gets underway, and they can learn the meaning of good and bad teamwork.
With regard to our dear allies, London and Paris know which side Berlin would come down on, if they took opposition to what Beijing wants. Right now General Cao wants the EU to stall around with regard to Tehran while he scrambles to build up the Chinese navy, which he can then send steaming to the Strait of Hormuz. That means Berlin wants to stall around. If London and Paris say no to Berlin, they might reopen a chapter in history they'd rather not open. Pundita does not blame them for not wanting to reopen it.
.
Thursday, February 17
Go ask Alice
"Do you think greater cooperation on dealing with Iran can come out of Bush's trip to Europe?"
[Signed] Tom in Sioux City
Dear Tom:
There can't be cooperation between the US and Europe on how to deal with Iran--or any other non-NATO country. That's because the concept of cooperation implies that distinct entities develop common ground. For more than a half century US defense/foreign has been so dominated by the NATO viewpoint that there has been no distinct US policy.
Europe was in such ruin after World War II that the US had no choice but to remain deeply involved in European defense. Now Europe is not in ruins, and the major military threat to Europe dissolved with the end of the Soviet Union. So now it's past time for relations between the US and Europe to disengage from the familial.
What we've seen since Bush announced the preemption doctrine is a recognition of the need to define America as distinct from Europe and NATO. We still have a way to go before a truly American policy emerges but the Bush presidency has made a good start.
The bad news is that until the US ekes out their own patch of policy ground, the US is in the position of the spouse who's trying to get through a messy divorce by sending mixed signals. One week we make demands. The next week we don't find the word 'demand' in our dictionary. Then we ask why Europe is jumping on us. Of course they're jumpy; you'd be jumpy in their position. They don't know where we stand.
Pundita doesn't like to apply psychology to international relations; however, this situation is the exception. The similarities between the present EU-US relations and a messy divorce are so striking that we should deploy a team of psychologists as interlocutor. And throw in a team of divorce lawyers.
We can have good relations with Europe that will carry us through the war on terror--I emphasize good, not necessarily great. Yet first we need to reestablish the relations in the context of 'foreign' relations rather than family relations. Until that happens, Tehran and Pyongyang and a number of other governments will continue to exploit the confused situation. Examples of confused policy are the present US relations with Russia and China, although those two are at the top a long list.
I add that it doesn't seem to be Bush who's confused. But he can't fire the entire State Department and Pentagon. Nor can he order a blockade of Capitol Hill until everyone in Congress decides on what century this is.
That's not even the hard part. Countless US academic departments and policy institutes were born and raised in the NATO paradigm. So they're looking at Bush's American viewpoint in the way the Red Queen looked at Alice: Clearly it's making no sense, so that must mean it's out to destroy civilization.
_
[Signed] Tom in Sioux City
Dear Tom:
There can't be cooperation between the US and Europe on how to deal with Iran--or any other non-NATO country. That's because the concept of cooperation implies that distinct entities develop common ground. For more than a half century US defense/foreign has been so dominated by the NATO viewpoint that there has been no distinct US policy.
Europe was in such ruin after World War II that the US had no choice but to remain deeply involved in European defense. Now Europe is not in ruins, and the major military threat to Europe dissolved with the end of the Soviet Union. So now it's past time for relations between the US and Europe to disengage from the familial.
What we've seen since Bush announced the preemption doctrine is a recognition of the need to define America as distinct from Europe and NATO. We still have a way to go before a truly American policy emerges but the Bush presidency has made a good start.
The bad news is that until the US ekes out their own patch of policy ground, the US is in the position of the spouse who's trying to get through a messy divorce by sending mixed signals. One week we make demands. The next week we don't find the word 'demand' in our dictionary. Then we ask why Europe is jumping on us. Of course they're jumpy; you'd be jumpy in their position. They don't know where we stand.
Pundita doesn't like to apply psychology to international relations; however, this situation is the exception. The similarities between the present EU-US relations and a messy divorce are so striking that we should deploy a team of psychologists as interlocutor. And throw in a team of divorce lawyers.
We can have good relations with Europe that will carry us through the war on terror--I emphasize good, not necessarily great. Yet first we need to reestablish the relations in the context of 'foreign' relations rather than family relations. Until that happens, Tehran and Pyongyang and a number of other governments will continue to exploit the confused situation. Examples of confused policy are the present US relations with Russia and China, although those two are at the top a long list.
I add that it doesn't seem to be Bush who's confused. But he can't fire the entire State Department and Pentagon. Nor can he order a blockade of Capitol Hill until everyone in Congress decides on what century this is.
That's not even the hard part. Countless US academic departments and policy institutes were born and raised in the NATO paradigm. So they're looking at Bush's American viewpoint in the way the Red Queen looked at Alice: Clearly it's making no sense, so that must mean it's out to destroy civilization.
_
Friday, February 11
"There was just so much money to be made"
I don't know the total attendance figure for the three day National Intelligence Conference & Exposition but I'd guess it was under 1,000. So even if each attendee and speaker represented, say, 10,000 others working in an area of defense, policing, and private security, and excluding the number of active duty military in democratic nations, they could be characterized as the few who protect the many.
I hasten to add that attendees included a small but vocal minority whose only connection to the defense/security fields was that of Concerned Citizen. Pundita was a proud member of that group and relieved to discover it was represented at the conference. The second day of a conference always finds the ice broken. People you see on the first day remember you the next; conversations strike up, and by the last day Pundita was waving at people who were perfect strangers two days before.
Lunchtime on the second and third days found Pundita chattering like a magpie with people who had shyly avoided conversation with strangers on the first day. By the third day there were no more strangers. The gravity of the conference had sunk in. The theme of this year's Intelcon is "Widening the intelligence domain to include the public" but it could have been subtitled, "The dark side of consumerism in the globalized trade era."
Boomers will recall a fashionable saying during the activist 60s: The enemy is ourselves. Pundita had cause to recall the saying many times during the conference. Somewhere out there was Them during the decade running up to 9/11: the vote-chasing politicians who traded their country's security concerns in exchange for high poll numbers, the appointed officials who for partisan reasons suppressed vitally important issues relating to national defense, the businesspeople who pandered to tyrants in exchange for a piece of 'emerging markets,' the industrial spies and lobbyists who sold to the highest bidder. And of course there was what we call The Enemy: the one who prepared to make war on us.
Yet behind it all stood--us and our demands for faster and cheaper, and our refusal to care or even ask about the real human cost of all that efficiency and cost savings.
And so as Russians watched their children shot in the back while fleeing a schoolhouse in Beslan, they couldn't allow themselves to think too hard on the end of the road for a defense industry that sells to despotic regimes which support terrorist armies.
And so as Spaniards retched at the sight of mangled human body parts strewn around a train station in Madrid, they couldn't allow themselves to ponder overmuch the penalty for refusing to look closely at an immigrant community that functioned as Spain's servant class.
And so as civilian volunteers searched the dust of the World Trade Center for traces of the dead, they couldn't allow themselves to think too hard on the real price for cheap Arab oil.
"There was just so much money to be made," explained one of Pundita's lunch companions on the second day of the conference.
He was speaking of the Bubble Years. His firm, as with all other computer firms caught up in the bubble, knew their products had 'back doors' a mile wide that could be exploited by hackers working for industrial spies, unfriendly governments and terrorists. But velocity, not security, was king. The customer demanded products that were easy to use, priced cheap and above all delivered fast. Those who gave the customers what they wanted quickly raised up trade empires; those who didn't went under.
Have things changed all that much since 9/11? Well, that was partly what Intelcon was about: to discuss where we were on 9/11 with regard to intelligence gathering/security issues, how far we have come, and the ground still to be covered.
The people who came from the four quarters to attend the conference represented a vast improvement in priority-setting. Pundita spied a name tag belonging to a worker for the recreational parks services in a western city--a city that wouldn't likely be near the top of the terrorist hit list. So the voters in that city are awake, and demanding that more tax dollars and attention be given security concerns. The lunch companion that Pundita mentioned--after 9/11 his company snapped out of the dream, and they had the money to restructure their products and priorities around security issues.
The other side of the story was neatly summarized by one speaker, who said that for many companies "risk assessment" still equates to hiring MBAs instead of intelligence analysts. And by a Concerned Citizen, who described herself as a Liberal Democrat who refused to watch Fox cable, but who demanded to be kept better informed about the war on terror.
She was hooted down by Fox loyalists but Pundita took pity on her stated predicament. After the seminar we told her about the John Batchelor program, which looks at the war from the viewpoint of US national security rather than Democrat and Republican party lines. She replied that she would explore the option but added that her real concern was President Bush's lousy handling of the war on terror.
What would she have Bush do? Bomb nations when they threaten to put up trade barriers because of US demands for better security measures at airports and containerized shipping ports? Cut off diplomatic relations with London, Berlin and Paris because they insist that appeasement works? Ship US congressionals to Gitmo when they put pork barrel demands of constituents ahead of vital national and regional security interests?
And just where does the buck stop for all that? If you're a citizen of a democratic nation, go look in the mirror for the answer.
_
I hasten to add that attendees included a small but vocal minority whose only connection to the defense/security fields was that of Concerned Citizen. Pundita was a proud member of that group and relieved to discover it was represented at the conference. The second day of a conference always finds the ice broken. People you see on the first day remember you the next; conversations strike up, and by the last day Pundita was waving at people who were perfect strangers two days before.
Lunchtime on the second and third days found Pundita chattering like a magpie with people who had shyly avoided conversation with strangers on the first day. By the third day there were no more strangers. The gravity of the conference had sunk in. The theme of this year's Intelcon is "Widening the intelligence domain to include the public" but it could have been subtitled, "The dark side of consumerism in the globalized trade era."
Boomers will recall a fashionable saying during the activist 60s: The enemy is ourselves. Pundita had cause to recall the saying many times during the conference. Somewhere out there was Them during the decade running up to 9/11: the vote-chasing politicians who traded their country's security concerns in exchange for high poll numbers, the appointed officials who for partisan reasons suppressed vitally important issues relating to national defense, the businesspeople who pandered to tyrants in exchange for a piece of 'emerging markets,' the industrial spies and lobbyists who sold to the highest bidder. And of course there was what we call The Enemy: the one who prepared to make war on us.
Yet behind it all stood--us and our demands for faster and cheaper, and our refusal to care or even ask about the real human cost of all that efficiency and cost savings.
And so as Russians watched their children shot in the back while fleeing a schoolhouse in Beslan, they couldn't allow themselves to think too hard on the end of the road for a defense industry that sells to despotic regimes which support terrorist armies.
And so as Spaniards retched at the sight of mangled human body parts strewn around a train station in Madrid, they couldn't allow themselves to ponder overmuch the penalty for refusing to look closely at an immigrant community that functioned as Spain's servant class.
And so as civilian volunteers searched the dust of the World Trade Center for traces of the dead, they couldn't allow themselves to think too hard on the real price for cheap Arab oil.
"There was just so much money to be made," explained one of Pundita's lunch companions on the second day of the conference.
He was speaking of the Bubble Years. His firm, as with all other computer firms caught up in the bubble, knew their products had 'back doors' a mile wide that could be exploited by hackers working for industrial spies, unfriendly governments and terrorists. But velocity, not security, was king. The customer demanded products that were easy to use, priced cheap and above all delivered fast. Those who gave the customers what they wanted quickly raised up trade empires; those who didn't went under.
Have things changed all that much since 9/11? Well, that was partly what Intelcon was about: to discuss where we were on 9/11 with regard to intelligence gathering/security issues, how far we have come, and the ground still to be covered.
The people who came from the four quarters to attend the conference represented a vast improvement in priority-setting. Pundita spied a name tag belonging to a worker for the recreational parks services in a western city--a city that wouldn't likely be near the top of the terrorist hit list. So the voters in that city are awake, and demanding that more tax dollars and attention be given security concerns. The lunch companion that Pundita mentioned--after 9/11 his company snapped out of the dream, and they had the money to restructure their products and priorities around security issues.
The other side of the story was neatly summarized by one speaker, who said that for many companies "risk assessment" still equates to hiring MBAs instead of intelligence analysts. And by a Concerned Citizen, who described herself as a Liberal Democrat who refused to watch Fox cable, but who demanded to be kept better informed about the war on terror.
She was hooted down by Fox loyalists but Pundita took pity on her stated predicament. After the seminar we told her about the John Batchelor program, which looks at the war from the viewpoint of US national security rather than Democrat and Republican party lines. She replied that she would explore the option but added that her real concern was President Bush's lousy handling of the war on terror.
What would she have Bush do? Bomb nations when they threaten to put up trade barriers because of US demands for better security measures at airports and containerized shipping ports? Cut off diplomatic relations with London, Berlin and Paris because they insist that appeasement works? Ship US congressionals to Gitmo when they put pork barrel demands of constituents ahead of vital national and regional security interests?
And just where does the buck stop for all that? If you're a citizen of a democratic nation, go look in the mirror for the answer.
_
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