A trio of bloggers takes on the Bogeyman and Pundita teaches some old tricks of reporter's trade

We in the media--and the blogosphere counts as media--have a duty to walk on the right side of the fine line between scaremongering and warning. Many in the blogosphere take the duty very seriously. The duty is hard at any time but during war, which generates large amounts of propaganda, counter-propaganda, misinformation and disinformation, it becomes devilishly hard.

Thus, Defense Tech, ZenPundit and Dr. Von are to be commended for setting aside their schedule to look into the hideously complex, highly technical and very scary story on Electromagnetic Pulse weapons (EMPs) that surfaced again last week in World Net Daily, and which was picked up by the John Batchelor Show.

Dr. Von, being the only particle physicist among the lot, gets the last word on the technical aspects of the story.

Defense Tech receives Pundita's special David Letterman Award for calling World Net Daily a Tinhat--short for Tinfoil Hat --publication.

Mark Safranski at ZenPundit is to be commended for somehow pulling together key points made by Defense Tech and Dr. Von and delivering a balanced assessment of how much we should be worrying at this time about an EMP weapon launched at the US from a tramp steamer.

This still leaves open the question, "Why now?" For the answer we must get historical, as Paris Hilton might say, or as Alfred Hitchcock might have said, set up the plot.

It all began one dark and stormy night back in the 1990s, when the CIA received a phone call from a gaggle of unemployed Russian nuke scientists and KGB/GRU defectors.

"Hello? Between us spoke good English. We have knowledge between us to blow galaxy up. If not hiring, we can try Pyongyang."

Happily for the continuation of the historical, the person on the other end of the phone had enough sense not to hang up.

How do you keep a gaggle of Russian defense tech experts and spooks happily and gainfully employed? Here in Washington we have the tradition of setting up a commission to handle delicate human resources situations. But first must come The Book, to introduce credentials and provide the rationale for establishing a commission.

By October 1999 The Book, KGB, had been published and so the Military and Research and Development Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services was ready to hear from Russian experts about the threat to military and civilians from an EMP bomb.

That being the trickiest part of the Clinton era, which was never kind to defense expenditures anyhow, it was not until October 30, 2000, that Clinton signed the FY2001 National Defense Expenditure Authorization Act, which brought the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack (EMP Commission for short) into existence.

Then came the presidential election, then came everybody on the Hill and at the Pentagon sorting through the shock of Bush and Neocons in the White House. Then 19 guys with box-cutters as weapons demonstrated that with some ingenuity, planning and a suicidal bent, you didn't need hi-tech weaponry to launch a catastrophic attack on the USA.

Then came the Department of Homeland Security. At last count the DHS is made up of five million agencies, all of them wrangling with each other over budget allocations. It's just here that we again pick up the tale of the EMP Commission, which Pundita has pieced together by studying recent World Net Daily reports filed by Joseph Farah. All the reports (and the Washington Post op-ed piece by Kyl) can be found by following links in Farah's May 2 report for World Net Daily.

I've bolded every reference to the EMP Commission, so the thread is clear:

Sometime in Early 2005
Peter Fonash, acting deputy manager for the National Communications System in the Department of Homeland Security, says the agency has "determined that there is minimal EMP effect."

March 2005
The EMP Commission is called upon by one congressional committee or subcommittee or another to justify its continued existence. The EMP Commission testifies that the EMP threat is not being taken seriously by the Department of Homeland Security. The commission explains that the Department of Defense has received briefings at the highest levels but that equivalent briefings have not been conducted at DHS "yet."

(Translation: DHS kept saying their briefing schedule was full up.)

April 2005
The Washington Post publishes an op-ed by Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Chairman, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security. Kyl warns in the direst terms of the threat from an EMP attack and offers that "Iran has surprised intelligence analysts by describing the mid-flight detonations of missiles fired from ships on the Caspian Sea as 'successful' tests."

(In other words, what looked like a test failure was read by experts on the EMP Commission as a sure sign that Tehran was fiddling with making an EMP bomb. A fact that Tehran would know, I might add.)

Kyl finally gets down to brass tacks by noting: "Fortunately, hardening key infrastructure systems [against EMP bomb attack] and procuring vital backup equipment...is both feasible and -- compared with the threat -- relatively inexpensive, according to a comprehensive report on the EMP threat by a commission of prominent experts [EMP Commission].

"But it will take leadership by the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and other federal agencies, along with support from Congress, all of which have yet to materialize."

May 2, 2005
Joseph Farah reports for World Net Daily:

WASHINGTON – Former CIA chief James Woolsey affirms the work of a special commission [EMP Commission] investigating the threat of a nuclear-bomb generated electromagnetic pulse attack on the U.S. by rogue states or terrorists and is urging the country to take steps necessary to protect against the potentially devastating consequences.

In testimony before the House International Terrorism and Non-Proliferation Subcommittee, chaired by Ed Royce, R-Calif., Woolsey, director of the CIA from 1993 through 1995, referred to the nuclear EMP threat, characterized in intelligence circles, he said, as "a SCUD in a bucket."

Woolsey commended the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack [EMP Commission] for its years of work on the subject and for its dire report concluding that it is a means of attack that could lead to the defeat of the U.S. by a much smaller enemy and utter devastation of the country.

"That is a very serious threat," he told the committee.... Woolsey, like the commission, specifically mentioned the new dimension a nuclear Iran would add to the risk of such an attack.

"We do not have the luxury of assuming that Iran, if it develops fissionable materials, for example, would not share it under some circumstances with al-Qaida operatives," he said. "We don't have the luxury of believing that just because North Korea is a communist state, it would not work under some circumstances to sell its fissionable material to Hezbollah or al-Qaida."...

From all the above I think it's reasonable to conclude that the EMP Commission is for now safe, by the skin of its teeth, from the budget ax.

Again, I was able to draw that conclusion based on data presented in Farah's reports and the links he provided. Yet The Tale of the EMP Commission is virtually invisible to the eye of the casual reader. It's hidden because the reader's mind is focused on dire predictions about what an EMP bomb can do, descriptions of what it is, and a mixture of speculation and intel regarding recent enemy activities. However, all that exposition tracks back or specifically quotes testimony given before committees and/or subcommitees -- testimony given to defend the work of the EMP Commission.

So what does it all mean? It means that the consumer of news has to learn to think like an old-school reporter--a reporter well-trained in ferreting out the traditional Four W's of a story:

Who (said or did it)?
What (what was said or done)?
Where (where was it said or done)?
When (when was it said or done)?

There is also the "H" (How did it come about?) if the reporter has space for it in the report.

But given the skill of today's disinformation specialists and the general low quality of reporting, I insert an "I" in my list:

Who?
What?
In What Context?
Where?
When?
How?

Asking yourself in what context something is said helps you quickly spot where in the story you've been napping. For example:

Farah's May 2 on EMP is headlined, "Ex-CIA chief warns of EMP nuke threat" and sub-headed, "Woolsey calls on U.S. to defend against devastating 'Scud-in-a-bucket' attack."

So you mentally stop and ask yourself, "In what context did Woolsey give that warning and make that call?"

Farah's report answers the question in the second paragraph:

"In testimony before the House International Terrorism and Non-Proliferation Subcommittee, chaired by Ed Royce, R-Calif., Woolsey, director of the CIA from 1993 through 1995, referred to the nuclear EMP threat, characterized in intelligence circles, he said, as "a SCUD in a bucket."

But back up: What about the first paragraph? Why didn't he mention at the beginning of his piece the Who, What, Where, When and In What Context Woolsey spoke?

Okay, let's look again at the first paragraph:

"WASHINGTON – Former CIA chief James Woolsey affirms the work of a special commission investigating the threat of a nuclear-bomb generated electromagnetic pulse attack on the U.S. by rogue states or terrorists and is urging the country to take steps necessary to protect against the potentially devastating consequences."

The "special commission" is our old friend by now, the EMP Commission. Farah names the commission in the fourth paragraph:

"Woolsey commended the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack for its years of work on the subject and for its dire report concluding that it is a means of attack that could lead to the defeat of the U.S. by a much smaller enemy and utter devastation of the country. "That is a very serious threat," he told the committee. "

Most of the balance of the report is given to expanding on the dire warnings and predictions. Some of the data he presents easily gives rise the Tinfoil Hat dig. But if you get hung up on that data you tend to forget the context in which Woolsey is speaking.

You won't lose your bearings if you remember that Woolsey is talking to a congressional committee that has budget on its mind, and which is wanting to know just what the heck the EMP Commission has been doing for years to justify its existence. In short, he's on a mission to persuade, so of course he's full throttle.

If you tell me it would be helpful if Farah had specifically mentioned that--well, here we come to the need to be a defensive news consumer. Farah doesn't exactly run with people who have excellence in journalism as their top priority. He has an agenda to push. That observation holds true for many who report the news.

I don't know Mr. Farah's career or even whether he's primarily a reporter; he could be an intelligence analyst who also does reporting. I rarely read World Net Daily and only glance at the Counterintelligence Blog, to which Farah contributes--and only when I want to catch wind of defense tech/intel doings on the Hill or at various Washington agencies.

But Mr. Farah's career and his particular skill set are irrelevant to my points. People who earn their living by massaging data into news reports range on a scale from 'average bias'--of the kind you and I and most people bring to studying data--all the way up through highly trained propagandists.

I interject there are several gradations on the scale between those two extremes. One is 'spin doctor'--someone with PR or marketing skills who is good at directing the data consumer's attention to the positive data.

Bad reporting is also one gradation--people who simply have not been adequately trained to report; they're been trained to promote an agenda; e.g., 'watchdogging' the US government.

It's such observations that cause many news consumers to throw up their hands. Many are very cynical about the news media. However, that cynicism is dangerous if it leads to tuning out the news or to a wholesale rejection of a news story. Thomas Jefferson and many others have correctly warned that democracy depends on an informed citizenry. So you need to stay tuned in.

And most news stories are not a pack of lies. They are mixture of analysis and opinion that shades perception of the story by emphasis on certain facts and by omission or addition of facts.

So you've got choices:

> You can sit around and complain about the sorry state of reporting.
> You can tune out the news.
> You can find news sources that don't irritate you, so that you're getting mostly reinforcement for your own views.
> You can learn to think like a good reporter while you're taking in the news.

If you want to go for the last choice, which Pundita recommends, here's a tip: It helps at first to take in the news via print versions or to print out reports you read on the Internet. Then use a magic marker to highlight the Who, What, In What Context, Where, When, and How. After a while, you won't need a physical highlighter; you can do it in your head. Practice.

For more on the EMP commission and a good layman's description of EMP and the various threats it poses, see the Heritage Foundation's August 2004 report .
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Mexico-US: The darkness of inattention

(Many thanks to Bruce Kesler , who alerted me that The San Diego Union-Tribune is a good source for US news about Mexico and sent me the Union-Tribune report that quotes Sidney Weintraub.)

"Pundita, re your essay on the external approach to solving the illegal immigrant problem:

The way I conceptualize the problem is in terms of "pull" forces and "push" forces. Both need to be addressed but while the push forces (the forces pushing Mexican migrants over our borders) are the more important they're also the hardest to address both politically and pragmatically.

The pull forces can be addressed by putting more onus on employers. Leaning on employers in just three states--California, Texas and Illinois--would produce a mighty effect. Coincidentally, those three states have large numbers of electoral votes and presidents (or those who wish they were presidents) are disinclined to do much leaning.

An additional problem in dealing with immigration is that we don't even agree on the terms of the discourse. I'm in the process of preparing a decision diagram on immigration that may make things a little clearer.
Dave in Chicago at The Glittering Eye."

Dear Dave:
Please hurry up with that diagram; it's desperately needed. I am going to assume that by "immigration" you're referring principally to illegal immigration. Now let me see if I understand you correctly: It's hard for Americans to address the actual reasons that drive large numbers of Mexican/Central Americans to illegally enter the US. Ergo, Americans who want solutions to the illegals problem should busy themselves with addressing the price of tea in Outer Mongolia.

If you cry, "Foul!"--well, pragmatic solutions only work if they deal with reality. The reality is that the Mexican government has the US government in a hammerlock because of the oil deal that Fox struck with Bush. Fox's government has taken obscene advantage of the deal. His administration has a tacit program of encouraging Mexicans to illegally immigrate to the USA--a program that's flowed to the state and local levels in Mexico. The upshot: a tidal wave of Mexicans trying to get across the border. According to Georgie Anne Geyer at the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Mexico, as a state, is publicly encouraging its people to go to America – in effect, to break its neighbor's laws – so that (1) it can rid itself of its egregious overpopulation and bring its approximately $12 billion in remittances home every year, and (2) thus also rid itself of ambitious dissidents who politically could threaten the corrupt and inept state they come from.

The Bush administration wants to form a guest-worker program for the estimated 500,000 Mexican workers who cross the border every year. Sidney Weintraub, one of America's most cogent Latin American scholars, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently pointed out in The Financial Times that what America would really be doing with a guest-worker program is subsidizing companies who can get away with paying foreign workers pittances of what they pay Americans.

At the same time, he pointed out – and these figures can be backed up endlessly with examples of the Mexican government's corruption and haplessness at development – federal tax revenue in Mexico is now less than 12 percent of gross domestic product, one of the lowest ratios in even Latin America.

So one can argue that U.S. taxpayers are not only relieving Mexico of its excess and potentially politically tricky population, but also making good the shortfall from the failure of the country's own tax collection efforts.

So if you won't take it from Pundita or the International Monetary Fund, perhaps you'll take it from Sidney Weintraub. The rich tax deadbeats in Mexico and Fox's government are pulling a fast one, which is why my first essay on Mexico was titled Why Vicente Fox is going straight to hell.

There's no internal or "pull" solution that will deal effectively with a bunch of slicks operating from Mexico's side of the border. And with all due respect, it's naive to propose that the US employers who benefit from Fox's human export program are going to cooperate with US laws meant to break dependence on illegal employees. Such employers will stop hiring illegals only when forced to do so by draconian enforcement mechanisms that would turn this country into a police state. But no fear of that happening because the expense of creating and maintaining that kind of enforcement would crash US state budgets.

Of course laws already on the books should be enforced but the first task is to thin the crowd of illegals so that present US enforcement mechanisms are not overwhelmed. The only way to thin the crowd is to back it away from the border: deal with it at the points of origins; e.g., southern Mexico. But this approach depends on breaking Fox's hammerlock on the Bush administration. This in turn depends on the American voter waking up to the "push" side of the problem.

Realize that Fox's human export program operates under cover of darkness--the darkness of inattention from the American public. The irony is that many educated Americans of Mexican heritage are not blind to what's going on in Mexico, but their voices don't make it onto the US nightly national news.

It's so hard to address the "push" issues simply because Americans haven't the foggiest idea about the issues. That's because for decades our glorious national news media have conceived of Mexico as situated somewhere out in the galaxy between Venus and Saturn. Only a handful of regional (southwestern) US media do daily reporting on Mexico yet that is not enough, given Mexico's importance to the USA and the complexity of the illegals problem and it's connection with post-9/11 defense concerns.

The upshot is that Americans can't talk knowledgeably let alone intelligently about Mexico's problems. So when asked why so many illegals come to this country from Mexico, Americans reply that it's because of poverty and unemployment. Internal or what you term "pull" solutions stack up from there. Yet the entire stack is based on erroneous perceptions, a general view of Mexico that is decades old, and ignorance about recent developments in Mexico.

Because of the knowledge deficit, few Americans are aware that concerns in Washington about Lopez Obrador's growing power in Mexico translate to a glass ceiling for many proposed US measures to deal with the immigration problem.

Because of the knowledge deficit, few Americans know there is a faction in Mexico that intelligently views the illegals problem as Mexico's problem to deal with. This is an extraordinary development. It goes against the long-held Mexican tradition that looks at the illegals as America's problem to deal with--a tradition that Fox's government has promoted.

The faction has set off great controversy in Mexico. So they need all the help and encouragement they can get from Americans, including the Congress. Instead, they're getting obstruction from American activists who work to help illegals assimilate in the US and no attention from the general American public, which translates to no help from Congress.

And because of the knowledge deficit, Americans can't argue to Mexicans who have been unwitting pawns of Fox's human export program that they are pawns. Mexico's ruling class has long encouraged the export of their 'troublemakers' --the Mexicans who have the strongest opposition to corruption and inertia in their government. This set in motion a vicious cycle: the more the really outraged Mexicans flee to the US, the fewer troublemakers left in Mexico to contest bad government. This makes conditions in Mexico worse by further weakening opposition to bad government. This causes yet more Mexicans to flee.

To help break the cycle, Americans must effectively argue to their congressional representatives, the White House and Mexicans that if there was ever a time for Mexicans to stay home and fight for better government, now is that time because of historical forces. Yet Americans can't argue because of their knowledge deficit.

I hope by now I've made my point. Americans concentrate on internal solutions to the illegal immigrant problem because that's all they know--and even their knowledge of technical and legal matters concerning proposed internal solutions is very sparse and often erroneous.

But because of the knowledge deficit, the American window on Mexico only looks out on the US-Mexico border. Thus, Americans fixate on solutions that equate to asking, "How can we stop this flood of Mexicans and Central Americans from crossing the border into the US?"

Just from the security angle that's the wrong question. Once you've got a flood backed up, the most you can do is play Hans Brinker. The right question is to ask how to prevent pools of people from becoming a human tide at a border. The answer is that you use every diplomatic means available, including the US arsenal of policy instruments, to stop the pools from turning into a tide at the border. For a few specific suggestions, read back through my earlier essays on Mexico.

But the World Bank and the IMF have dug in their heels. They've said in effect to Fox's government: Fix the blasted tax code and go ahead with structural adjustments, or forget getting more megabucks WPA-type project loans that we know Mexico will default on anyway.

So what we have is a Mexican Standoff. Is there any way to break the standoff? Yes; there are two ways that I've seen. But much depends on Mexico's political parties and the Fox and Bush administration seeing Americans awakened from their long slumber about Mexican affairs. As with so many other problematical situations around the world, the "illegals problem" has flourished in the darkness of inattention.

I understand that I've thrown a great deal of data at the reader since starting my series of essays on Mexico and the illegal immigrant situation. Much if not all the data is new to Americans who don't live in the southwestern United States and don't follow doings at the World Bank and IMF. I myself am struggling to play catchup regarding Mexico's situation because so much of my attention has been focused the Middle East and Europe since 9/11. But the journey of a thousand miles has to begin. If Americans really want a solution to the illegals problem, we must get better informed about the "push" factors and act on what we learn. Toward this end I look forward to your diagram.
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Happy Birthday, Mr Prime Minister

"I'm glad Tony Blair won reelection but I'm concerned that the vote signals a rejection by the British people of his stand on the Iraq war and Britain's position in the Coalition. What do you think are the foreign policy implications for the USA?
[Signed] Jan in Reston"

Dear Jan:
First let's congratulate Tony Blair for going down in history. He is the only Labor party candidate to win a third term in a row and only the second prime minister in history to win three general elections in a row with a mandate. Today is his birthday, so he has much to celebrate.

Second, it's early hours to be making sweeping assumptions about what the vote means. There were predictions that voter turnout would be low. And Michael Howard's party got strategic advice, which seems to have paid off, from American GOP operatives. So Pundita waits on the breakdown of the vote numbers and technical analysis by British pundits who specialize in such matters.

I will note that the votes weren't even counted before the Left here and in Britain were spinning the numbers to mean a resounding rejection of Blair's decision to stand by the Bush administration's position on Iraq.

Blair is sensibly not disputing the spin, for to dispute it would point to other reasons why the Conservatives made gains in the election. It's to be remembered that Michael Howard and his party took virtually the same position as Blair with regard to supporting the US in the Iraq campaign.

Britain's defense secretary took a more measured view of the vote. According to the Scotsman

Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon acknowledged Iraq had been an issue in the campaign, but insisted it was “nothing like” as significant as the economy and public services.

He told ITV1: “I have not found people saying that Iraq is the most important issue as far as they are concerned.

“I have had some people who have raised it with me but not as a central decision-making factor in how they cast their vote.”

Pundita does not think Mr Hoon was blowing smoke, although his observations might be precise to the point of misleading.

It's to be remembered that while a "majority" of British polled at various times in the past were against Britain joining the Iraq campaign that is not to say a majority is "practically all." Many British did support and continue to support Blair's decision on Iraq. However, what has many British concerned is the way the decision was made--it rested solely with Blair--and what is seen as Blair's stubborn and wrong-headed defense of intelligence on Iraq WMD that was viewed at the time as greatly flawed.

What Pundita finds stubborn is the persistent refusal of Blair's critics to accept the obvious, which is that Britain agreed to support the US war on terror. This support includes accepting the US military command's general strategy on how to fight the war and where the campaigns should be staged. This would include the Iraq campaign.

There is no "Iraq war," as Pundita has noted more than once on this blog--any more than there was an Afghan war. There are operations within the war on terror; Afghanistan and Iraq are but two.

In other words, when Blair stood with President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, he was standing with the war on terror. Thus, he didn't make a liar out of the British people's agreement to support the US war--an irony, given that Blair is accused of being a liar by his critics.

Blair's greatest mistake, and Bush's, was in not stressing in their speeches what I've just noted. However, I think the history books could view their reticence to speak straight not so much as a mistake as an unavoidable tradeoff. Once you start talking about the "war on terror" in fully rational terms, it leads to clarification of the battle plan.

So it doesn't do for a national leader to be terribly clear during war when making public statements about the war. Of course that observation runs against the grain of democracy but there is nothing democratic about war and its prosecution.

Blair and Bush decided to get behind the WMD rationale for invading Iraq and tough out the consequences. It will be up to history to determine the wisdom of their decision.
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Bruce Kesler responds, Pundita argues for external approach

Dear Pundita:
Re: Your comments about my report for the Augusta Free Press on illegal immigration.

Better put than those who commented the other way, that we should just throw up our hands and virtually open the borders, to whatever. In fact, both your "external" and my "internal" approaches are needed. I focused on the "internal" approaches, as we have most immediate control of these, but I do also mention the need for Mexico to get its own act together and the US to push hard for that. Mexico, alone, is the source of half the illegals, and most of the illiterate ones (probably also the hardest working and nicest, and most exploited ones) who are the primary financial burden and slowest assimilators -- Again, thank you for your additional comments.
[signed] Bruce Kesler in Encinitas

Dear Bruce:
Thank you for your reply and thanks to Mark Safranski at ZenPundit for forwarding you my blog on your report. It was on my To-do list to send you a copy--my To-do list now long enough to reach from my house to somewhere in Kansas City.

The problem with the internal solutions is that they're geared toward the way the US was in the year 2000 and assume the enemy we face today is an idiot. But you may trust that the enemy, once across the border, will play things by the book.

If the enemy is smart, and he can be very smart when it comes to doing sneaky things, he will not risk jumping a checkpoint to truck in hazmat, conventional weapons and high value operatives. We must assume he's constantly testing the system at the US southern border so the system needs to become a hard target.

So here's why I am in favor of Americans getting behind the external approach: From the security standpoint, which should be the #1 priority right now for the USG, the US and Mexico need to throw all available resources toward thinning out the crowds at all US-Mexico border checkpoints.

The task is to thin the crowds at the conventional border crossings to the point where guards and covert military observers have time for more eyeballing, and so that there can be more random checks.

The only way to thin the crowds significantly is to thin them at the point of origin. Most of the very poor, illiterate Mexicans who seek work in the USA are from southern Mexico. So stop them from migrating to the north of Mexico. How to do that?

Part of the answer is "Development-bank funded WPA-type projects that employ them at points in southern Mexico." The Mexican government doesn't want to take that approach. They want other types of loans from the World Bank and other development banks. And they fear that attractive work in southern Mexico will only bring more illegals from Central America across their border.

The answer to the last is arm-twisting by the USG for stricter border control measures and a coordinated approach to WPA projects that involves Central America as well.

Here one might ask whether all this wouldn't take years. The answer is that the World Bank can move with jaw-dropping speed when they want and that they are one of the world's most efficient organizations, when they want.

The problem is the infamous "mafias" at the Bank. So called because a certain group(s) of nationals or regionals gets in power inside the Bank and diverts Bank loans to their country or region.

You may trust that once Paul Wolfowitz gets to the Bank, the Arab mafia will gain power and that an Iraqi mafia will materialize almost overnight. This is because the USG wants to make Iraq a showcase and throw resources to addressing The Arab Problem.

So the "Latin American" mafias at the Bank, along with Ukraine and other East European mafias, will be left with crumbs, which is why Yushchenko was here recently glad-handing US senators. He senses the party is over.

The World Bank (and development banks in general) is not the only option, of course, but the idea is for Americans to set up such a howl that the USG uses influence at major development banks to set up a mini-Marshall Plan composed of WPA projects for countries that are hurling waves of immigrants at the southern US border.

That's only one approach I suggest along external lines; another is to arm-twist the Mexican government into adopting reforms that ease "temporary worker" immigrants--the people who are coming here just because they can't get loans at Mexican banks, and so on.

There are many other approaches as well--and once Americans greatly concerned with border security put their attention and ingenuity toward stopping waves of immigrants at the point of origin, many more workable approaches will be devised.

So I'm really suggesting a paradigm shift; I'm calling for Americans to look at the situation from the southern side of the problem and ask, "How can the Mexican government be helped and prodded to stop migrations at the point of origin?"

The USG won't get fully behind the external approach unless prodded by the American voter. The Bush administration is dragging their feet on the external approach because they're playing oil politics with Vicente Fox. Oil politics is serious business, but President Fox is playing oil politics because he can get away with it.

So US firms that employ legal immigrants from Mexico need to make it clear to Fox that they want Mexico's government to step up to the plate and get behind an external approach. Once Fox hears US businesses snapping at him about reform, this will put wind behind the Bush administration's sails. This will translate to the World Bank and other international organizations getting behind the WPA projects. Quickly.

None of this means abandoning the internal approach because quite frankly it won't be abandoned; there's too much political will behind it. But that's exactly the crux of the problem. There is not enough political will behind an external approach. This is despite the fact that the approach aims to actually solve the problem of huge crowds at the border instead of the futile approaches to 'managing' them once they are across the border.

For links to other Pundita essays on Mexico, US-Mexico relations, immigration from Mexico and the Mexico-US border situation/war on terror, see Mexico Desk.

Zeus not uncrowned and Dalai Lama's Rule of Thumb

Pundita is closing down the Comment section again. This is after receiving only four comments (two, if one cuts out the clowning around in PNMSpeak) in response to Part 5 of the Intersection series. I am still hoping for comments from two other readers but these, if and when they arrive, will be published (along with the two serious comments) in a post.

Dave Schuler's comment is part of a "riff" on Part 5 that he published on his own blog, The Glittering Eye. His wide-ranging thoughts about various points I made in the essay are worth the read. He notes in part:

Central planning whether in totalitarian Soviet Russia or the bureaucratic European Union have several problems in handling problems effectively and expeditiously. Perhaps the most important of these is informational: the very mechanism of its operation obscures the market information that's necessary to make an efficient choice. There's something similar at work in any top-down technocracy: no expert is so expert that he or she is smarter than the aggregate wit, wisdom, and experience of the
crowd.

The link in the passage refers to James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Just the Publisher's Weekly review is worth the read. In part:

While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."

To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest).

His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google.

If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally.

The author's observations fly against the cherished notion that once the masses are allowed into government, anarchy inevitably follows.

Aristophanes, observing the chaos of the Athenian assembly, wrote, "The ruler of the world is Whirlwind, that hath unseated Zeus."

I was reminded of the quote by Dave Schuler's Angel in the Wind.

There are, perhaps, too many variable factors to draw fast conclusions about what trips off anarchy. However, it could be argued that the chaos that overtook Athenian government had more to do with special interests manipulating votes than with mass participation in governing decisions.

I continue to welcome comments via email about the Intersection essays. However, after receiving a letter that seems to represent a thesis on stochastic calculus or a discussion of an Esperanto translation of James Joyce's Ulysses, I see it's time to tighten up on this blog's letters policy.

As I have noted before regular Pundita readers are very smart. So it is with regret that I lower the boom by instituting the dreaded Dalai Lama Rule of Thumb.

The way this rule came about...during a guest appearance years ago on William Buckley's Firing Line, the Dalai Lama brought along a translator and parked him within whispering range of his chair.

Buckley would ask a long question about the Chinese, Communism or Tibet, then the Lama would lean toward the translator, who would whisper and wave his hands to translate the question.

Suddenly Buckley leaned forward, listened intently to the whispers, then exclaimed in confusion, "Wait a minute! Your translator isn't speaking to you in Tibetan; he's speaking in English!"

The Dalai Lama boomed cheerfully, "Yes. Simple English."

.

A Winter Soldier tells of grim toll of illegal immigration on America. Pundita tells of Point of Origin and Cascade Effect

Bruce Kesler has written a data-rich report for the Augusta Free Press Online that is required reading if you want a handle on how illegal immigration affects America. Thanks to Mark Safranski at ZenPundit for finding the report.

In simple businesslike language, Kesler orders the jumble of issues into the tolls that a large illegal population exacts on Americans and illegals:

The toll on the American tax system; the toll on the US federal and local government budgets; the toll on employers, individual taxpayers, schools, police departments--and the toll on the American political system.

Perhaps most troubling is the last. In the space of a few sentences, Kesler explains how the inclusion of illegal immigrants in the census works in practice, and how this robs US citizens of fair representation.

The writing is so clear that Pundita wondered what branch of academia or bureaucracy Mr. Kesler represents. The byline, "Bruce Kesler resides in Encinitas, Calif." threw no light, so it was off to Google's search engine, where the mystery was quickly resolved.

Mr. Kesler "has worked as a finance and operations executive for Fortune 100 companies, and now owns an employee benefits consulting and brokerage firm in Encinitas, California."

That certainly explains how Kesler deftly marshals so many facts and figures on the immigration issue; it's part of his job as an employee benefits consultant. So his piece is not only enlightening, it's also a great example of citizen journalism and shores points I made in the "Getting Unstuck" essay posted yesterday. I will not labor my points, except to note that Kesler's work experience, while outside the bureaucracies that deal with immigrant issues, is nonetheless very valuable toward understanding the issues.

But now I must proceed to dispute the basis of Mr. Kesler's recommendations. With one exception (better efforts by border patrols on the Mexican side of the border), he tasks the United States with the job of solving the problems created here by illegals.

Of course that is a pragmatic approach because the problems have fallen to the US to solve. Yet the approach is unworkable as its been unworkable for decades. Kesler is simply ordering up more of the same.

More of the same; e.g, "a federal law withholding other funds if each state does not institute a minimum $200-per-infraction fine payable to the local governments for hiring illegal gardeners, day-laborers, nannies, house cleaners, etc.," presupposes a vastly expanded bureaucracy and judicial system to enforce new and tougher laws and with attendant expense.

It's an expense that the US should and need not incur, and it's an expense that is ever-expanding because every relevant law on the US books only calls forth the need for more laws and more enforcement mechanisms--none of which work, which only calls for more revenue outlay and more laws. That's a vicious cycle.

To break the cycle, one needs to study data that is not produced by looking at things from the American side; i.e., one needs to study the situations at the points of origin. Kesler inadvertently refers to this need when he writes, "We do not want to follow Germany's path to unassimilated, impoverished Turks, or France's to antagonistic and violent Arab subcultures."

But only one category of the immigrants coming from Mexico can be compared to the category represented by the impoverished Turks and Arabs who flee to Europe. I have argued this point in detail in other essays so I won't trot out the details here.*

Yet there's lots of data to indicate that it's barking up the wrong tree to look at immigration as a monolithic phenomenon; indeed, much of it isn't even immigration. It's daily commuting and temporary (albeit illegal) residence. People in these two categories plan to return to their point of origin, or close nearby, at a foreseeable time in the future.

Point of Origin
So to set up more complex mechanisms in the US than already exist on the books to help vast numbers of illegals assimilate is putting money in the wrong place. If you're coming here illegally because you've been trying for five years to get a housing loan at your bank in Mexico, and the bribe to move the loan process along is bigger than the loan amount, what's the solution? A better assimilation process for you, once you get here? Of course not. The solution is to get the blasted Mexican government to vaporize the mountain of red tape wrapped around antiquated Mexican banking laws.

You can continue a far way down the list of reasons for coming here illegally (from the regions south of the US) before you hit the kind of problems that send waves of African Arabs flooding into Europe. The OECD, IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Bank, and USAID are inching their way to grappling with that bald fact. They've figured out between them that by gum you have to deal with situations at the point of origin if you don't want them overwhelming resources at the arrival point.

As to why those organizations are only inching toward a fact that has piles of data to support it, because development banks and USAID might as well be headquartered on the moon, for all the scrutiny they receive from US voters and Congress. And without the voter breathing down necks of congressionals and the White House, one is routed to Pluto for answers.

There on Pluto you will speak with lobbyists who lean across the desk and say earnestly, "But if you push these governments too hard to join the Nineteenth Century, you do realize, don't you, that they'll get really mad at the USA. Then what will happen to gas and oil prices?"

The Cascade Effect
That reply doesn't stay on Pluto long because it makes such a handy excuse for the shrewd ones that they deploy it right here on Earth. For example, when the Mexican government sees the US handing out that excuse about them, they use it to avoid confronting governments in Central America about their crummy outdated banking laws, which are bringing thousands of illegals across Mexico's border. And each government passes the excuse on down the line--or up the line, as the geographic case may be.

Realize the cascade starts when the obvious leader (in this case, the world's most powerful nation) sets the bar for intelligent behavior so low that a chipmunk could hop over it.

Then governments from south of the US border put on a long face and stand outside the G7/8 annual meetings and honk into mounds of Kleenex. Please give us more money, please forgive our debt, we're soooooo overwhelmed with problems.

Tip for those waiting for the end of the world: Don't hold your breath; any race this full of monkey business is kept around for laughs.

My dispute with his recommendations takes nothing away from the reporting part of Kesler's article; he well understands the American side of the illegals problem and clearly explains it.

A footnote about Mr. Kesler: I found his biography on the Winter Soldier website, which is "dedicated to the American veterans of the Vietnam War, who served with courage and honor."

Kesler is one of a group of Vietnam veterans who make themselves available to "answer questions and accept speaking engagements regarding the Vietnam-era war crimes disinformation campaign."

Pundita is glad to see that the Winter Soldier organization still seems to be going strong. You might want to visit the site, if only to read about Bruce Kesler's accomplishments.

* See today's earlier post, Mexico Desk for a list of earlier Pundita essays on Mexico.

Getting Unstuck: Part 5, Stuck at the Intersection of Government and the Mass Age

Michael Wright, an old friend, talks with Pundita about the direction her blog has taken. New readers might want to skim Parts 1-4 of the “Stuck at the Intersection” series (links shown at the end of this essay) before reading the interview.

M: In the essay you refer to as Pundita’s mission statement [1] you set yourself the task of discovering where Americans are now in relation to understanding the world at large outside US shores. I know this task actually began for you on September 11, 2001. You zeroed in on studying broadcast television news media. That led to you sounding an alarm about the general public’s ignorance of the wholesale transfer of US white-collar jobs offshore. I assumed at the time you’d continue in that area. Instead, you focused exclusively on foreign policy and in late 2004 started a blog on the topic. So where is Pundita now? What general trends or major factors have you identified, what’s important to you?

P: Actually, I started the research a couple months after 9/11. I halted in 2003 when I found that I could predict the line-up and how the local affiliates and the Big Three [CBS, NBC, ABC] and [PBS] NewsHour would handle the same headline story.

I haven’t set aside the issue of jobs offshoring; I see what I’m doing now as an extension of my reaction to the incredibly naïve arguments that Bill Gates and other American industry leaders used to defend offshoring.

M: I’d call the arguments “the bottom line.”

P: Then maybe we haven’t read the same arguments. Gates views the individual American hi-tech worker as in competition with individual hi-tech workers in other countries. This simply isn’t the case in the key instances. The worker and the college student in free societies are in competition with authoritarian governments that control the education and work choices of their citizens. I touched on this situation in the Pharaoh essay.[2]

And even in countries such as India and Romania where the citizens can say ‘no’ to their government about job and study choices, the government usually subsidizes education in hi-tech fields and/or supplements by one means or another the pittance that their workers receive from Western firms. In some cases the pittance is actually no pay; the government wants them to work for free for the Western firms just to get the technology/information transfer. All this is a modern version of the Plantation economy.

So how is the American worker supposed to compete with workers who will work for free or for peanuts? This is what the American worker is in competition with—the Plantation and Pharaoh governments, not “individual” foreign workers.

And the ”investments” that Microsoft and other American businesses are making in China and India are naïve to the point of funny if they weren’t scary. India and China will throw them out at the first opportunity.

It’s easy to assume that the arguments put forward by Bill Gates and his counterparts are not naïve but cynical and ruthlessly focused on the bottom line. Yet everything I have learned since 9/11 about Americans’ understanding of international affairs would challenge that assumption. The majority of Americans, and this includes American executives at transnational organizations, are on a steep learning curve about how the world works and the historical forces underlying the worst problems in developing countries.

My most pointed writings verbally shake the reader by the shoulders and cry, “Wake up! This is not 1989!” Every spring and summer I spend half a day on the Washington National Mall, asking visitors from all around the country and the world to give me their views of the world and America. What I find most striking about the replies is that they reflect unrealistic expectations about the American government’s capacity to resolve global situations they view as problematical.

America is and will remain for the foreseeable future the world’s most powerful nation. The catch is that the jobs outsourcing/offshoring trend is but one among many warnings that at some point which is fast approaching, American financial resources will be greatly refocused on domestic concerns.

In case after case around the world, America spent the past half-century pouring trillions—when reckoned in local currencies—into hard luck countries. And trillions of US military dollars were poured into shoring up governments that had great strategic importance for America’s defenses during the Cold War.

However, in this globalized era, precious few countries don’t have strategic importance for America’s defenses. So when that bald fact is weighed against the onrushing need to re-deploy American resources, is plain as day that something’s got to give.

To put that observation in cold-blooded language, the governments in the world’s hard-luck countries had better assume they’ve got less than five years to stop futzing around. They have to address situations they’ve been able to avoid because of their dependency on aid and development bank loans provided by the developed countries. American foreign policy needs to make the same assumption.

But with the exception of the military branch, governments, including the US government, are not set up to solve problems but to manage them--chiefly through strategies of containment. And international organizations such as the World Bank are not set up to save the poorest except via the longest way around, which is trickle-down economics. But trickle-down theory addresses growth, not triage; it’s directed at development not rescuing populations from a train wreck of worst-case scenarios.

So the question is whether the containment approach can work this time around. I don’t think it can. I think we’re at a crossroads that parallels the crossroads with the social security program. The argument about social security is whether to attempt to fix it, or simply wait until the program goes broke then ask, “Now what do we do?” There are arguments for either approach because any attempt at a fix will involve pain.

However, the analogy falls apart if you consider the scope of the global problems that have been propped up and created by governments not addressing their most glaring failures. I think we’re at a place where the US government has to make a sincere attempt to prod the developing world governments to deal with their chief problems, which are remarkably similar. Part of that attempt involves devising and proposing real solutions—

M: What you’re saying is that Americans need to move away from asking, for example, what the government is doing to help African nations and ask instead, “Why, after all the help they’ve received, can’t the nations help themselves?”

P: Well, you can’t just ask that, in the manner of washing your hands—no more than you can tell a dope addict that he’s got no one but himself to blame after you’ve spent years supplying him with low-cost dope. But I’m warning that such questions will come, once it’s unavoidably clear that American resources will need to be shifted more to America’s domestic problems. Actually, such questions have already been voiced but they don’t get a hearing at the government level and with good reason.

M: Okay but in trying to establish Pundita’s approach -- you’re saying that we have to move away from fixes and toward finding real solutions and that part of this involves asking tough questions of other governments.

P: The tough questions have been asked but institutions such as the IMF have been willing to accept evasions for answers. But yes, this is the direction that President Bush has laid down, or tried to. My blog, which was launched within days of his reelection, takes Bush at his word and asks, how do we get from here to there?

If Bush is asking for real democracy to be instituted across the board, if he’s asking for more accountability from the world’s hard luck governments, if he wants those governments to get their act together, how does all this translate for American foreign policy and particularly our policy instruments, such as the World Bank? That’s the patch of ground on which I stand when I look at US government initiatives events that greatly impact US policy.

M: Yet you’ve been critical of Bush in several instances.

P: If US foreign policy comes in line with the general statements Bush has made, I’ll have no major gripes. But so far we don’t have policy in a lot of areas; we have talk. And even the talk has been flagrantly contradicted by some recent State Department actions. If the US weren’t at war, I’d have more criticisms than ones I’ve voiced on this blog. But I have to assume that Bush is getting sound counsel from military advisors, which could explain some of the gaps between public statements and actions.

My concern is that the US war on terror, which I find justifiable in the way it’s been prosecuted so far, will morph into a cold war that provides cover for bad US foreign policy. This time, though, the policy would be playing out in a world that’s vastly changed from the one during the Cold War era. A world that’s vastly more difficult for a few rich nations to control, let alone manage.

M: This is why you’ve made a huge issue out of what you call stage show democracy. Frankly your argument for democracy is taking some getting used to and I don’t know if I accept what you’re saying. It’s almost as if you’re challenging all the traditional arguments for democracy.

P: I’m not challenging the philosophical arguments; I’m saying that there is a purely empirical defense of democracy and that we should line up the execution of policy—planning, financial aid, loans, and so on—behind that defense.

The traditional philosophical arguments for democracy, and even Sharansky’s argument, overlook that the problems of the Mass Age are too numerous and complex for a small number of people—a governing elite—to solve. My argument for democracy is grounded in the empirical observation that true democratic government, which allows many people to participate at the problem-solving level, is the only form of government capable of effectively administering to the needs of mega-populations.

M: [laughing] You’re saying that until AI is a lot farther along, we need many more brains involved in government.

P: If that way of looking at it helps you find where I am, you’re welcome to the idea. But it doesn’t take an artificial form of intelligence to solve the problems that besiege mega-populations. It doesn’t even take a high IQ—a point that I’m afraid was misunderstood in the responses to my essay on the topic.

The intelligence I referred to reflects job experience in a post-industrial society as much as educational background, IQ, and so on. I was saying that many American voters of average intelligence are now more intelligent than the majority of government workers and elected representatives--or at the least, fully as intelligent.

The pyramid of knowledge possession, whereby a small number of informed, educated people rule over large numbers of uneducated, uninformed masses, has been up-ended if not atomized.

So while most Americans are still poorly informed about offshore situations, the expert knowledge derived from the work experience of many 'average' Americans is an untapped resource for solving problems that vex the governing elite.

M: Okay but that up-ended pyramid holds true only for very few countries. But there’s still the traditional defense of democracy to fall back on for the others.

P: I think the phenomenon is more widespread than that. What we’d call the upper middle class is bigger in India than the entire population of the United States. Inclusion in that class doesn’t necessarily equate to job experience in a post-industrial society but trust me when I tell you that the average informed Indian voter—I emphasize ‘informed’—is in many cases just as smart or smarter than the majority of bureaucrats who labor for the Indian central government.

A similar situation is occurring in China, which causes China’s communist party bosses at the central government level unending worry.

M: But this pool of smart citizens doesn’t want to work for government because the money’s not there, or because they’re frustrated with the bureaucratic way of doing things --

P: I don’t want to make generalizations about other countries. I’d say that in America, the challenge is how to connect this pool with the governing process in a more direct way and without crippling the necessary bureaucratic infrastructure of government and raising the specter of anarchy.

Much history can be viewed as one long cry against the failure of elites to effectively and humanely govern large populations. But the alternative--to open up the governing process to large numbers, is also fraught with peril, given the population size in today's largest democracies.

Yet clearly humanity is at a crossroads. Several of today's biggest social problems are highly complex and interconnected via conditions set in motion and reinforced by the policies of transnational organizations and trade practices.

Of course, that observation is the theme song of the anti-globalists. But if governments are to be charged with finding and implementing solutions, they must move away from tradition-bound, rigidly enforced civil service routines and embrace strategies used in the private business sectors. And they must rely less on political ideology and theorizing and more on systems that provide constantly updated data and analysis. That’s something the anti-globalists don’t want to hear—at least, not the ones I’ve spoken with. They still think a gussied-up socialist ideaology can save the world.

M: And you’re saying the tecchies can save the world? This is the new Promised Land? The development bankers and economists failed, so now we try out the systems guys?

P: You lose points if you make Pundita laugh.

M: [laughing] Sorry!

P: You’re making this more complicated than it is, or maybe I could put it more clearly. Here’s an example to illustrate:

A woman outside the government and with no military training came up with a simple idea for how to flummox the terrorists in Iraq with regard to a specific situation. She passed the idea to Paul Wolfowitz during a public email exchange run by the White House. Wolfowitz must have fallen over with excitement when he read the idea but his reply politely turned aside the suggestion. The proposed strategy depended on the element of surprise so of course he was noncommittal.

The military deployed the very same strategy the woman proposed and with great success. I don’t recall whether the woman stated her occupation, but it was the kind of idea that someone very experienced with outfoxing a group of small children—say, a kindergarten teacher—could have thought up with no trouble.

It’s possible that the military came up with the idea independently. But the story illustrates the possibilities with regard to problem solving, once you think in terms of finding and matching relevant experience with a problem.

M: But even if the command in Baghdad got the idea from that woman they would have needed to do analysis. So if you bring more people into the governing process, this can produce more intelligent decisions, but also increases the need to test decisions and analyze plans that rest on intuition rather than data. That’s where communications technology, decision analysis, better intelligence reports, and so on, come in.

P: That’s the idea. Also, the technologies can help match the right people with problems.

M: The technology is out there. The people who can solve the problems are out there. It’s a matter of connecting them.

P: Yes, but it’s also a matter of getting very sophisticated about the downside of problem solving, as applied to large complex systems, which modern societies represent. That’s why I dredged up my recollection of conversations with a computer scientist from decades ago. It’s not enough to come up with a workable idea. You have to factor in how the idea, once implemented, will impact the society and take measures to offset negative consequences. Again, that is where technology comes in.

M: One-half is rocket science. The other half is common sense.

P: Something like that, yes. Of course, there are a few things standing in the way.

M: The World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations, governments, political party machines, policy institutes to mention a few.

P: Don’t forget the industries they’ve generated.

M: I’ve gotten you to come out of the closet and admit you’re a wild-eyed visionary.

P: I’d say I’m also a cold-eyed realist. The problems humanity is facing are enormous. So this is what’s known as enlightenment at the point of a gun.

M: You’re envisioning a world where a farmer in say, Mongolia can get on a sat-phone or computer and dial up a data bank of agricultural extensions and farmers who’ve dealt with the kind of problem he’s got with his soil. And another data bank where he can look up funding for the soil additives or farm implement he needs. You’re a visionary.

P: I think a lot of people have had the same vision. And what you’re talking about is already here, in some form. If you’re a doctor anywhere in the world with access to a computer and the Internet, you can access databanks that discuss the kind of symptoms you’re analyzing in a patient and look up research on the disease and cures. Of course there are counterpart databases for the legal profession and others.

The trick is to include this kind of approach in the governing process. That would save tons of tax revenue by distributing it more efficiently than done now.

M: It’s a new chapter, not the end of history.

P: Before you get carried away, there is a specific set of recurring problems in developing countries that’s best studied as a system—one that’s so far proven almost impossible to dismantle. That’s why I’ve gotten interested in complex systems and want to talk with decision analysts. I’m also trying to scare up conversation with retired cops and officials, inside and outside the force, who were directly involved in fighting corruption in the NYPD back in the 70s. The Serpico era. I’m beginning to suspect that the systemic problem of government corruption in developing countries is intractable because the wrong people have been consulted for solutions.

M: Is that why you suggested Eliot Spitzer for the job of World Bank president? [3]

P: Yes, but all that for another day.

(1)
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/01/in-search-
of-where-we-are-now.html

(2)
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/03/pharaoh.html

(3)
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/01/why-eliot-
spitzer-is-man-for-job.html

Stuck at the Intersection series
(In order of publication)

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/
is-there-traffic-engineer-in-house.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/
your-village-called-theyre-missing.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/
stuck-at-intersection-part-3-nope-guru.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/stuck-at-
intersection-part-4-this.html

Making Bush democracy doctrine work and a visit to the Russia House

"Dear Pundita, I grew up hating the Soviet Union but I'm beginning to see what you're saying about Russia. The [US] government is practicing a double standard in their dealings with Russia and Saudi Arabia. This is hurting the democracy doctrine."
[Signed] Ernest in Miami"

Dear Ernest:

To be a government is to practice a double standard when it comes to strategically important foreign relations. However, even double standards have a code. If you break the code--make it so fuzzy and full of exceptions that nobody can predict what you'll do, you're in trouble. This is why the State Department is very unhappy with Bush's war on terror and his democracy doctrine; they are messing up the code.

State has their own democracy doctrine, which served them very well, thank you, in peeling former Soviet republics away from Moscow's influence.

On paper, both doctrines are the same. In practice, State's version leaves nothing to chance; i.e., the idea that the democratic process will produce a staunch US ally. In short, the State version of democratic government is a carefully managed stage show. Bush's version, as he has spelled it out in speeches, clearly interprets genuine democracy as the best friend of the USA.

A quarter century ago, one could argue that Bush's view is idealistic but impractical when applied to real-world situations, of that kind the Soviet Union represented. Today, Bush's view is not only practical but also the best informed. But George W. Bush is standing at a bend in the road that the rest of Washington and the academic/policy establishments have not yet reached.

This is partly because the dominant American philosophy schools are stuck at the place called post-modernism, which means an endless recycling of ideas that came before. This applies as well to foreign policy philosophy.

That is why the completely uninformative term "neoconservative" gained coin, why "progressive" thinking is a rehash of old discredited socialist ideas, why "realist" schools can only root around in the history of American presidents for different ways to say the same old things, and in general why clear thinking has ground to a halt in Washington.

The other part is that Bush's clarity of thought about democracy is matched only by his difficulty at explaining his thought processes. Thus, State has an excuse for their muddle: they're not mind readers.

The key to understanding the Bush democracy doctrine is to realize it didn't evolve from a love of democracy--even though Bush, as with most Americans, does love the concept. The doctrine emerged from his reading of how to stop terrorism.

How Bush got from point A to point B in his thinking is a story for another day. For now--State can dredge up examples to shore the argument that left to their own devices people can vote in governments that are very unfriendly to the USA. The US foreign office is charged with looking out for America's best interests, so their version of the democracy doctrine has history on its side. But it's in the practice of the historical US double standard that State's present view is muddled and counterproductive.

For example, Saudi Arabia only supplies roughly a quarter of America's petroleum needs, if memory serves. But Saudi Arabia, as the largest oil producer, dominates OPEC. So State's reasoning behind applying a double standard to Saudi Arabia's lack of democracy is that an unfriendly leader at OPEC translates into very serious problems for the USA.

Ergo, don't push the Saudis too hard and too fast to adopt democracy. But it's okay to read the riot act to Putin because he suspended rigged elections for governors and shut down media outlets owned by tax-evading oligarchs perched beyond the reach of Russian law.

What's wrong with that picture? What's wrong is that it's no longer OPEC that dominates the petroleum business and thus, world trade. It's demand for oil that dominates it. OPEC can only hang on for the ride.

The cartel is now under constant and steadily increasing threat of disintegration. The threat comes from deals cut by oil producing countries with governments that are trying to keep up with their skyrocketing demands for petroleum.

Going back decades, the Saudis have warned a succession of US administrations that this day was coming. Well, now it's here and nobody's ready for it. That's a good way to summarize foreign policy thinking, as well. The playbooks treat situations that no longer exist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is just the situation Putin and his band of young technocrats are trying to avoid. Whether or not they've formalized the ideas I've sketched above, they are attempting to abstract the elements that make democracy successful, and build from there.

As to how successful they've been--considering where they started from, they've made progress in fits and starts. It's a shame Putin or someone in his administration hasn't written a book about the efforts so far. The document would be very valuable to people all over the world who are trying to formulate development and aid policy for the modern era.

But the problems that the Russian government faces are huge. Mark Safranski, an American Russia expert, is helping to educate Pundita to the scope of the problems. It was time for another lesson when he used the Russian word 'muzhik' in his ZenPundit essay about Putin's Monday address to the Russian nation.

These Russians, muzhik-descended, second-generation urbanites, older for the most part and living in outlier cities and towns are Putin's equivalent of Nixon's " Silent Majority" and Putin plays to them in a similar way.

That brought forth my request to know what a muzhik is. Mark's reply, which I publish here with his permission:

A muzhik was a peasant, particularly the unlettered, poor, kind that lived in the old village communes in Tsarist days. Prime Minister Petr Stolypin managed to free the peasantry, at least some of them anyway, from this particularly stupid form of post-serfdom by breaking up the village collectives, at least in terms of law.

(To understand the collective landholding, think medieval serfs being allotted several noncontiguous plots of land each several miles from the other. [Then you] understand why Tsarist Russia had famines despite the black earth region.)

Uneducated, superstitious and ignorant, the muzhiks were also sometimes called "the dark people" and feared for their occasional incredibly savage, mass rebellions...which would kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

The peasantry who escaped the tyranny of the village and became prosperous private farmers later became known to history as "kulaks" ( the fist --"the greedy hand"). Being the most productive, efficient and successful, the kulaks were of course killed by Stalin during collectivization.

The poor and middle peasants were then shoved by the Soviet state onto Sovkhovs (State farms) and worst of all, Kolkhozs (Collectives) and given internal passports, which prohibited them from leaving and relocating to towns or cities. And so of course, Russia again had famines.

Stalin let them starve, Brezhnev bought imported grain. Ninety percent of the Russian people are of recent peasant descent. They don't live particularly well or expect to--Moscow is a showcase of the elite by the way. Most urban Russians live in towns that would make Detroit look like Disneyland.

That last sentence instantly conveys many things to an American about today's Russia. To get more understanding of what Putin is grappling with, I recommend plowing through his entire Monday address to the Federal Assembly, then reading two excellent analyses of the address--one by Mark and the other by Peter Lavelle, the UPI senior analyst for Russia affairs.

All that reading will stand you in good stead, for the problems that Russia faces are shared, to one degree or another, by the world's most underdeveloped nations. Before rushing in with more aid and development loans, Americans need a better picture of the terrain.

Vladimir Putin's speech
ZenPundit's Russia House
Peter Lavelle's Putin's Catechism

Why John Bolton is the Man for the Job

Pundita's support for John Bolton as the US ambassador to the UN is pragmatic to the point of cynical. I think the United Nations is a relic of a time in history that is gone and won't return--a time when a handful of nations could control all the rest. But because the US government is bound and determined to send an ambassador to the UN, I support sending John Bolton.

He is someone who knows the UN joint inside out, and to the extent anyone can get things done there, he is that person. So he represents an honor accorded to the original idea behind the organization: before washing our hands of the United Nations, at least give it the best try we can to make parts of the United Nations functional.

From that viewpoint, I present some weighty endorsements of Bolton's capability for the job, which frankly is ambassadorial in name only. He's being sent to break up logjams and ram through reforms that halt the UN's worst offenses.

I consider the endorsements weighty because they are well-reasoned and focus on Bolton's accomplishments and his proven skill at representing US interests. The first endorsement is my selection of quotes from a piece that was published in the Washington Post:

...Bolton, who has been writing about the United Nations for decades, is one of the few people in public life willing to draw the distinction between what the United Nations actually is and what everybody would like it to be.

The United Nations is not a popularly elected world government; it isn't even a collection of well-meaning people who just want peace. It is a group of different agencies with different agendas, some of which are relatively effective and some of which are ineffective or even dangerous...

But if the United Nations isn't good in and of itself, neither is it evil. It is only as good or bad as its employees, all political appointees whose activities are, by ordinary government or business standards, subjected to shockingly little oversight. Unlike, say, the U.S. civil service, or the Japanese bureaucracy, the U.N. bureaucracy is not beholden to a democratic government or even a sovereign government.

There is no electorate that can toss the Libyans out of the human rights commissioner's chair, no judicial system that can try corrupt officials. As I understand Bolton's critique of the United Nations and other international institutions (when he isn't being Rumsfeldesque in his turn of phrase) it is precisely this that concerns him:

Indeed, he has spoken and written for many years on the threats to America's sovereignty -- and everyone else's sovereignty -- from international institutions that owe nobody any allegiance, are subject to no independent review and have no democratic legitimacy of their own.

The trouble with many U.N. defenders is that they refuse to see this fundamental problem, and demand a constantly expanding role for the United Nations without explaining how its lack of democratic accountability is to be addressed.

The trouble with many U.N. detractors, in Congress and elsewhere, is that they see the corruption and nothing else. But there is a role for U.N. institutions -- in Afghanistan, or in international health -- as long as that role is limited in time and cost. And there is a desperate need for U.N. reform. In defense of John Bolton: He may, if he can get confirmed, be one of the few U.N. ambassadors who has thought a good deal about how to set such limits and make such reforms.

-- From Defending Bolton
By Anne Applebaum
Washington Post, March 9, 2005; Page A21

The next endorsement represents passages from a Senate Floor statement by Senator Gordon Smith on April 21, 2005. Kindly note the mention of Bolton's pro bono work for the UN:

As an Assistant Secretary for International Organizations from 1989 to 1993 in the first Bush administration, Under Secretary Bolton worked for Secretary James Baker on UN reform matters and on the repayment of arrearages and assessments.

While serving as the Assistant Secretary for International Organizations, he detailed his concept of a unitary UN that sought to ensure management and budget reforms that impacted the entire UN system, not only the UN Secretariat...This is the type of creativity and resourcefulness we need in order to address the enormous problems within the United Nations.

In 1991, Under Secretary Bolton was the principal architect behind the initiatives that finally led the United Nations General Assembly to repeal the resolution that equated Zionism and racism, one of the more notorious and heinous resolutions ever passed by the United Nations...

During his time out of government, Mr. Bolton served the United Nations on a pro bono basis between 1997 and 2000 [emphasis mine], as an assistant to former Secretary of State Baker in his capacity as the Secretary General's personal envoy for Western Sahara, working to resolve the dispute over that territory--quite an effort from someone who does not believe in the power of multilateralism and international organizations, which is alleged against him but is not true...

He also shaped the administration's approaches to countering the threat of WMD proliferation and, most importantly, the proliferation security initiative, a program that led directly to the discovery of Libya's nuclear program and its subsequent disarmament.

And finally, a letter of endorsement signed by 53 distinguished former ambassadors:

April 12, 2005

The Honorable Richard G. Lugar
Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

Dear Senator Lugar,

Your Committee will soon be reasoning together on the nomination of John R. Bolton as our country's next Ambassador to the United Nations. We urge you to give special weight at this time to the explosions of freedom now taking place in Ukraine, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Kyrgyzstan, Zimbabwe, to name just a few. We believe that these early stirrings of courageous groups within countries that for too long have held on to rigid authoritarian or in some cases totalitarian rule reflect in large measure the policies and optimistic realism of President George W. Bush.

No one in the world of diplomacy and geo-political policy has a better grounding of proven experience than John Bolton. He was on hand as an active participant during the period of the break-up of the Soviet Union and made important contributions to policy-making at a time of total ambiguity when the world of two superpowers was morphing into what we have today.

We believe it is in the best interest of the community of nations as represented by the United Nations, for the maintenance of world peace and security, that the views of America's President be clearly and directly presented in both the General Assembly and the Security Council of the UN.

It is for this reason more than any other that we urge you to quickly and clearly approve John's nomination.

Sincerely,

Bruce S. Gelb, former Director of USIA; former Ambassador to Belgium

Anne L. Armstrong, former Ambassador to the United Kingdom

William S. Farish, former Ambassador to the United Kingdom

Walter J.P. Curley, former Ambassador to France and Ireland

Richard R. Burt, former Ambassador to Germany

Peter Secchia, former Ambassador to Italy

Edward N. Ney, former Ambassador to Canada

Chic Hecht, former Ambassador to The Bahamas; former US Senator

Alfred H. Kingon, former Ambassador to the European Union; former Assistant Secretary of Commerce

Thomas Patrick Melady, former Ambassador to The Vatican, Uganda and Burundi

Frank Shakespeare, former Ambassador to Portugal and The Vatican

Michael Sotirhos, former Ambassador to Greece and Jamaica

Robert D. Stuart, Jr., former Ambassador to Norway

Weston Adams, former Ambassador to Malawi

Everett E. Bierman, former Ambassador to Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu

Stephen F. Brauer, former Ambassador to Belgium

Nancy G. Brinker, former Ambassador to Hungary

Keith L. Brown, former Ambassador to Denmark and Lesotho

Richard W. Carlson, former Director of VOA; former Ambassador to Seychelles

Gerald P. Carmen, former Ambassador to the United Nations

Sue McCourt Cobb, former Ambassador to Jamaica

Charles E. Cobb, Jr., former Ambassador to Iceland

Peter H. Dailey, former Ambassador to Ireland and Special Envoy to NATO

Diana Lady Dougan, former Ambassador - US Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy

Richard J. Egan, former Ambassador to Ireland

William H.G. Fitzgerald, former Ambassador to Ireland

Joseph Ghougassian, former Ambassador to Qatar and Senior member in Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq

Joseph B. Gildenhorn, former Ambassador to Switzerland

Glen A. Holden, former Ambassador to Jamaica

Richard L. Holwill, former Ambassador to Ecuador

Charles W. Hostler, former Ambassador to Bahrain

Roy M. Huffington, former Ambassador to Austria

G. Philip Hughes, former Ambassador to Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Lester B. Korn, former Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social
Council

Paul C. Lambert, former Ambassador to Ecuador

L.W. Lane, Jr., former Ambassador to Australia and Nauru

Ronald S. Lauder, former Ambassador to Austria

John Langeloth Loeb, Jr., former Ambassador to Denmark

Gregory J. Newell, former Ambassador to Sweden; former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations

Julian M. Niemczyk, former Ambassador to Czechoslovakia

Sally Z. Novetzke, former Ambassador to Malta

Penne Korth Peacock, former Ambassador to Mauritius

Joseph Carlton Petrone, former Ambassador to the United Nations European Office (Geneva)

Charles J. Pilliod, Jr., former Ambassador to Mexico

James W. Rawlings, former Ambassador to Zimbabwe

Frank Ruddy, former Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea

Paul A. Russo, former Ambassador to Barbados, St. Kitts, Antigua, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Dominica

Ronald J. Sorini, former Ambassador and Chief Textile Negotiator

Timothy L. Towell, former Ambassador to Paraguay

Helene van Damm, former Ambassador to Austria

Leon J. Weil, former Ambassador to Nepal

Faith Whittlesey, former Ambassador to Switzerland

Joseph Zappala, former Ambassador to Spain

How to pack a reviewing stand with fawning foreign dignitaries during your nation's Victory Day celebration

Well. Pundita wrote just a few days ago that this would be a week during which much is decided and little is announced unless Putin dropped a bombshell in his annual address to the nation. He dropped the bomb. No wonder he was philosophical about Secretary Rice's unpleasant remarks. He knew what he was going to say on Monday:

"Capital gathered by Russian citizens should work for the country. To achieve that target, we must ensure that a 13 percent income tax is paid on that money, and that the money is kept in Russian banks."

Of course he didn't add, 'This also means that at any second, Gazprom can choose to bank all their oil revenue in Russia.' But he didn't need to spell it out, to get across his message to banking executives outside Russia and their buddies in the State Department, the British foreign office and Brussels.

Pundita did warn, but Foggy Bottom turned a deaf ear. Now just see where this has led. To review:

December 30, 2004 Pundita post
A timely reminder about the IMF-Ukraine Central Bank scandal
The IMF-Ukraine affair is a sobering reminder of the connection between the FSU oligarchs and the West European banks. The Ukraine Central Bank's scheme to embezzle the IMF depended on laundering funds through European banks. That's a tactic the oligarchs perfected while carving up the Soviet Union's government-controlled industries. The tactic underscores that the oligarchs' mind-boggling wealth can't be separated from banks outside the USSR regions.

When the electronic transfers get into the billions, the deposits the banks hold onto, if even only for a few hours or days, help them underwrite lots of business loans and make big investments in the financial markets, which oils the wheels of commerce.

So there is a house-of-cards situation looming for West Europe, if the Russian government continues to wrest back control of the major industries that the oligarchs took off the Soviet government's hands. This would be provided Moscow uses control of the profits to build up Russia's bank reserves.

January 5, 2005 Pundita post
Watch out for spattering plot goo
...Pundita sticks with her thesis that any plan to hem in Russia originated on the other side of the Pond. However, this is a high stakes poker game. What would happen to the banking systems in West Europe, if the oligarchs pulled out their rainy day money and put it in local banks?

Of course not all the banks the oligarchs use are European owned; come to think of it, many of them are branches of American banks. Oh but that's right I forgot--the really big number crunching computers are owned by OPEC, BIS, and NASA. So maybe the State Department and their European counterparts overlooked a few details when they sat down to play poker with the Kremlin.

As to how long it would take for heads of state to speed-dial Putin after the first wave of electronic transfers got underway--about 12 mintues. 11-1/2 minutes to pray and the other half to lower their voices below the pitch of castrato.

Moscow holds so many high cards in this situation that this is why Pundita suspects our State Department didn't have a clear idea about what they were meddling with. The EU3 did know the score; they knew that any plan to isolate Russia was a bluff. The bluff was so dangerous that it would take the threat of force of arms to even come to the poker table. That's why the EU3 and their satellites needed the USA involved in the game.

Earth calling State Department: countries on the other side of the Atlantic have been machinating against each other for thousands of years. Their lack of perspective about each other is matched only by their knack for cooking up plots that explode or collapse from sheer complexity.

Pundita is tuckered out from pacing the rug and hopping from one foot to the other in her impatience to hear of the verdict on Khordokovsky, so I will end here with the promise to have more about the Putin speech--either late this evening or tomorrow.

Stuck at the Intersection, Part 4: "This mystical blend of analytic and qualitative thinking about the problems of government"

"Hi Pundita,
So you're looking for a field of large-scale system design and hoping that the insights of such a discipline will avert shortsighted government decisions that don't account for the larger context (whatever that context may be). I've been looking for the same thing, just from the other direction. I don't claim to have an answer, but I can claim some professional experience in the area.

To unpack the jargon, system engineering is the discipline of engineering entire systems, as opposed to engineering a stand-alone widget or a stand-alone computer. A related discipline is decision analysis, which is the field I work in.

If systems engineering is the discipline that tackles your first desire (a discipline of large-scale system design), decision analysis is the discipline that deals with your second desire (avert government decisions that don't view a problem in the context of everything else--to borrow Thomas Barnett's favorite phrase). It seeks to improve decision-making by bringing analytic approaches to bear. To be clear, the goal is not to replace the human decision-maker; it is rather to challenge, refine and improve human intuition.

I spend my days worrying about how to distill the tradeoffs a sponsor faces, so that they can better understand the consequences of this or that choice. I build mathematical models, use optimization tools, and try to get inside the head of the decision maker. (That last task is by far the hardest.)

The cutting edge of system engineering is in fields like complex system design, engineering large systems--basically pushing the upper threshold of the discipline. The question driving these fields is: How can we understand and manage huge and complicated systems?

While we recognize that there are theoretical limits to analytic methods (game theory, decision analysis, RAND's 1950s dream of a "science of strategy") in problem-solving, we are nowhere close to implementing even the most elementary of these approaches.

Most of the successes I've seen, when it comes to applying this stuff, comes from using the most elementary of analytic approaches. The scale of complexity that we can handle is expanding and there are great methods for improving decision-making just waiting to be used. And we need it all so badly.

Despite all this work, I still feel that we are winging it when it comes to joining the technical study of systems with the practical job of changing how the government deals with the world.

Plenty of decision analysts aren't at all concerned with the problems the government faces. Similarly, plenty of public policy/ political science/ international relations wonks aren't at all concerned with trying to truly understand the governing dynamics of the systems of the world.

(Had there been more of that sort of thinking in the fields I might have stuck with political science or international relations instead of ending up a math major.)

A year or two ago I thought that such a field existed--this mystical blend of analytic and qualitative thinking about the problems of government. I've come to realize there isn't any discipline that neatly encompasses it. But there are tantalizing pieces floating about.
[Signed] Manila in USA"

For a historian's take on the Stuck at the intersection... essays, see Mark Safranski's To think strategically you must think systematically.

For a look at an organized attempt to apply systems thinking to a range of activities, including public policy/planning, visit the Systems Dynamics Society for links to papers by Jay W. Forrester, who developed a methodology for studying and managing complex feedback systems.

Beaver Policy for John Bolton

We interrupt this blog to reply to letters that boil down to, "Please tell if there's any way we can save John Bolton's nomination."

Pundita is not a fairy godmother. And we're unaware the nomination is in jeopardy. But if you want to make matters worse, go ahead and spam the senators on that committee. Now we turn to the Adults Only page:

On her first day at her new post, Condoleezza Rice was met at the gate by State employees wearing a long pigtail and with their hands tucked into billowing silk sleeves.

They told her, "Sadly, our reading of the entrails reveals that we will not be seeing you much. Happily, this is because you will go down in history as the Traveling Secretary of State. If this is not clear, we can make it so by pounding you to dust then atomizing your molecules."

This is the same group at State who nearly brought down the Bush presidency, just as a warning to the Bush administration not to continue wandering off the NATO reservation.

This is also the Mandarins' concern about John Bolton. Now that he has seen the width of the gossamer thread dangling the sword above his head, he has a few days to ponder certain realities and send signals back.

Bolton thinks with great precision, which equates to clarity, which is why he has few real friends among the Necons, not to mention their archrivals. Here are but two examples of precise thinking Bolton has demonstrated:

Discerning the difference between international law and the International Criminal Court. (This one stumps Senator Biden, every time.)

Understanding that you must first have an American policy before you can think of meshing the policy with those representing international alliances; e.g., NATO, United Nations, European Community. (This one is the Rorschach test for Wilsonians and Natoists.)

Thus, I believe John Bolton is capable of discerning when it's wise to take a page from the beaver member of Pundita's foreign policy team. The beaver's #1 rule for how to negotiate logging rights with bears, owls and wolves who think they own the riverbank is, "Very carefully."

It is by many small steps over many decades that we got to this messy point in American history. So one does extricate oneself from mess in a single bound. If Bolton can assure the Mandarins that he knows where the line is, they will work the phones in reverse.

And he needs to give the same assurance to Secretary Rice. She needs to feel she can pick up the phone and say, "Halt until further notice" and he'll do it.

As to whether he can count on any more than limp-wristed support from Rice, put yourself in her place. He is going to upstage her, even if he works on a very short leash at the UN.

But Bolton would upstage anyone in that position at State because the UN is very ripe for change. The key players there (such as Kofi Annan) know that. And they know that Bolton has the contacts, and knowledge of the complexities, to help bring about needed changes.

In other words, he's going to have the wind at his back so he'll make it look easy; there will be some spectacular successes early on. This cannot be the case for Rice in her job. Maybe Pundita is unduly pessimistic but nothing I have seen about State has convinced me that the agency can be reformed from the inside.

What Bolton can do at the UN for Rice is take pressure off her to act the Bad Cop role.

Guys who do lunch and a guy who does good: More on Bolton

For readers who are biting their nails to the quick about John Bolton's nomination--if Kofi Annan has anything to say about it (and he does) Bolton will get the post. There's been so much garbage said and written about Bolton that I know this news will come as a shock to many, but Annan respects Bolton and with good reason.

Here's something about him you might not know (Thanks, LM):

At the moment when progressives are condemning John Bolton's nomination to the post of US ambassador to the United Nations, it's useful to recall several extraordinary efforts he's made for the benefit of small nations struggling toward liberty.

Preeminent among these is probably the case of the Western Sahara, which has been under brutal Moroccan occupation since 1975 while the majority of its citizens wait in refugee camps in Algeria for a UN-promised referendum...

...it was Bolton working with James Baker who crafted the Baker Plan to help get the Saharawi referendum back on track and...bring about a peaceful, democratic solution to one of the UN's longest-running conflicts. Morocco has nonetheless been intractable; Baker eventually issued a statement saying he'd spent seven years on the problem, made insufficient headway, and was resigning.

Not John Bolton; at the combative [nomination] hearings...in Washington, where he was under considerable attack, Bolton managed to refer three times to the patience and suffering of Saharawis...That may seem like small potatoes to persons who've never heard of the conflict, but it was electrifying to those of us who've been agitating for decades, and certainly was a source of joy to the many thousands of old and young people stuck in time in refugee camps in Algeria.

If United Nations programs are riddled with inefficiency, at best, and with entrenched corruption, at worst, then maybe a complex, pushy maverick with a proven record in at least one liberation movement could shake up those guys in the $3,000 suits who do lunch more than they do good.