Mystery of the Burned Bagram Korans, Part 2: The riots

Hekmatyar is responsible for deliberately slaughtering roughly 50,000 Kabuli civilians during his bombardments of the city during the extermination campaign westerners still quaintly refer to as the “Afghan civil war,” that hellish ISI-wrought, Khomeinist-contested and Saudi-funded interregnum between the Red Army’s massacres and the Taliban despotism.

Terry Glavin tries to see behind the dust kicked up by the Koran burning riots in Afghanistan, and with help from Amrullah Saleh spies a pattern that first manifested clearly in the deadly Mazar-i-Sharif riots last year:

An Equal Opportunity Butcher Returns to Afghanistan
by Terry Glavin
The National Post [Canada]
February 27, 2012

In a column in the Ottawa Citizen I examined the shadowy and overlooked forces at work behind the latest bloodcurdling eruptions of what we’re all expected to believe are the offended religious sensibilities of those inscrutable Afghans. I relied mainly on some key observations the legendary Afghan spy chief Amrullah Saleh shared with me during a telephone conversation in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The script that’s playing out in the latest riots in Afghanistan is an almost play-by-play reenactment of last April’s berserking, which everyone was also expected to apprehend as eruptions of religious outrage, but which was also no such thing. For an elaboration of what was really going on last April, you can look it up in an essay I wrote for Dissent while the ashes in Mazar were still smouldering.

In my column, there is mention of the psychopathic mass-murderer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency also gets honourable mention, and I am not hesitant to reiterate here that no adequate remedy for the ISI may exist except to get rid of everyone above the rank of major.

To appreciate what follows, you’ll want to know straight away that Hekmatyar heads up the original faction of Hezb-e-Islami, an offshoot of which is well represented in Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga, and even in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet, in the person of Economy Minister Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal.

You will also need to know that the ISI has declared that it is most pleased that the United States is setting up Mullah Omar’s Taliban in a fancy district of Qatar to begin the final forced “reconciliation” of the Afghan people with the genocidal Taliban high command. The ISI is seeing to it that Omar’s Haqqani wing will have Qatari office space of their own so that they won’t feel left out of the bargain.

And here’s Hekmatyar’s mouthpiece, immediately prior to the Koran riots: “If any groups are ignored in the peace talks, it would change to resistance force against the government and could be a major threat to Afghanistan,” Mr Baheer said. “Destabilizing Afghanistan is not a difficult task, it’s too easy.”

In other words, nice filthy little disgrace of a capitulation you’ve got going here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it, we want our piece. And with the right people in the right places, “destabilizing Afghanistan” is a very easy thing to do indeed.

I now introduce Afghan analyst Abdul Ali Faiq, who these days works in London with the European Campaign for Human Rights in Afghanistan. Abdul has closely tracked the trajectory of this past week’s protests and their locales, and he’s also closely monitored the local buzz and the factional polemics in Dari/Farsi and Pashto media. His findings stand in sharp contradiction to the story that most westerners are hearing about what’s going on. But they are perfectly consistent with Amrullah Saleh’s assessment.

The whole thing’s got Hekmatyar’s signatures all over it.

“What happened at Baghram, this is not a concern for the 29 million people of Afghanistan,” Faiq told me. Some soldiers mistakenly burned a Koran, it was a sad and regrettable mistake, even President Barack Obama is falling all over himself issuing groveling apologies. Most Afghans have their minds on other things. “They say, why should we care?”

One of Faiq’s key findings is that even in the Tajik and Hazara areas of the north – Kabul, Parwan, and so on – and in the Persian west – Herat, for instance – the specific locales of the violence and the slogans being shouted are associated with ethnic pockets of Pashtuns, but more importantly, with centres of Hezb-e-Islami.

“It’s a manipulation of the masses,” Faiq says. “It is Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami. This is a milking cow for them. They have made this drama. They made this scenario.”

Many Afghans are legitimately aggrieved by the sacrilegious aspect of the Bagram incident. But what most Afghans are more likely to notice is that it’s almost poetically emblematic of what a growing number of people across the country’s political, ethnic and religious divides now cannot help but conclude: the Obama administration holds them and their sorry little country in utter contempt, and he never did mean it when he said he was going to be the president who would take Afghanistan seriously for once.

The American surrender crept up so subtly, and was couched in such syrupy lies — of course all wars end in negotiations, of course all negotiations must be Afghan-led — that it was accomplished before most Afghans had even an inkling that they were being sold out.

You think it’s hard to figure out who’s who around the presidential palace in Kabul? Most North Americans and Europeans couldn’t tell you the first thing about who’s who around the Obama White House these days. Cut the Afghans some slack here. It’s taken them a while, but they’ve finally figured out that as far as the whole “Af-Pak” thing goes, it’s all Joe Biden, all the time, and he’s the dumbest American vice-president to come along since Dan Quayle.

My friend Sanjar Sohail, editor of the liberal Kabul daily Hasht-e Sohb, put it this way: “This is good for the Khomeinists, the ISI, and for Hezb-e Islami. If there was no Koran burning at the Bagram base, it would have been something else, and of course Hezb-e-Islami is benefiting from it.”

No serious person in Afghanistan has any doubt that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, if not living in a mansion in Rawalpindi within a short limousine ride from ISI HQ, is living in swank digs known to the ISI, somewhere, instead of spending his days at the International Criminal Court at the Hague on charges of crimes against humanity, which is where he belongs.

It should tell you something that the reason the ISI generals invented the Taliban in the first place was that they thought Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e-Islami were a bit too harsh. Hekmatyar had been the ISI’s most lavishly-funded war-criminal proxy all through the 1980s. The ISI wanted something a little less bloodthirsty, so in around 1994 they replaced him and Hezb with Mullah Omar and his Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar’s been ostensibly freelance ever since.

Hekmatyar is responsible for deliberately slaughtering roughly 50,000 Kabuli civilians during his bombardments of the city during the extermination campaign westerners still quaintly refer to as the “Afghan civil war,” that hellish ISI-wrought, Khomeinist-contested and Saudi-funded interregnum between the Red Army’s massacres and the Taliban despotism.

A Pashtun supremacist turned Stalinist, then drug-trafficker and drooling Islamist fanatic, Hekmatyar ran his Hezb faction in Leninist style, a habit he picked up from his days as a student at Kabul University, where he’d been jailed for two years for his part the murder of a Maoist rival. Hekmatyar is an equal-opportunity butcher. He was the gangster the ISI spent most of its American money on during the anti-Soviet jihad (although they say he never won a battle against the Soviets and that all his victims were Afghans) and was also the Saudis’ anointed proxy for a while, and has also been a frequent guest of Khomeinist Iran.

Hekmatyar rushed to Osama bin Laden’s aid after September 11. He brags about having helped Al Qaida forces escape through the Tora Bora mountains into Pakistan, and he brought Al Qaida fugitives back with him to Iran, where he wore out his welcome after a year or so. Dozens of the more deadly attacks carelessly attributed to the Taliban in recent years were Hekmatyar jobs. His Hezb gangsters have even carried off some spectacular whacks of Talib columns, just to prove they can do it. It was a Hekmatyar rocket that came close to killing Karzai at a military parade in Kabul in 2008.

We are supposed to believe the ISI doesn’t know his whereabouts, and we are supposed to believe the Americans will scruple about cutting Hekmatyar in on Obama’s new reconciliation and power-sharing action in Qatar. Believe what you like, but believe this: the vampire’s back in town.

Terry Glavin is a journalist and cofounder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.

To Kyle in Oz, and a few words about U.S. foreign policy today

Dear Kyle:
I have suspended the comment section, at least temporarily. So I'll reply here to your thoughtful speculations abut why the U.S. has over many years gone easy on Pakistan's regime and your conclusion:

" ... The only answer that seems even close, and it is quite unsatisfactory, is this: That any attempt to defang the Pak system would lead to the collapse of Pakistan itself. The 'Grand Strategy' here is simple: A collapse of Pakistan would lead to the Indians being strategically unencumbered.

The only strategically unencumbered great powers in recent history are Great Britain and its successor, the US. There is no Japan or Korea or Taiwan anywhere in India's sphere that could act as a balancer were Pakistan to collapse."

Many months ago an Indian reader insisted that I was wrong when I wrote that the U.S. had originally made Pakistan a client state in order to contain the Soviets. He pointed to Sir Olaf Caroe's 1951 Wells of Power to shore his argument that the real objective of Washington in supporting Pakistan was to contain India, not the Soviet Union.

The problem with that argument is that by the time Caroe tried to peddle his book in Washington (where reportedly he got much less of a hearing than he claimed), the U.S. had already made Pakistan a client state and with the express objective of containing the Soviet Union.

Yes, Washington did not like Delhi's attempt to stay non-aligned during the Cold War, which is why they indulged and even supported Pakistan's machinations against India. But it is looking at things from the vantage point of today to assume that throughout the Cold War Washington's defense establishment considered containment of India to be an issue.

Besides, India was doing an excellent job of containing itself without any help from the USA. And you only have to read a few of Rajeev Srinivasan's acid comments about Delhi's current foreign policy to consider that India is still doing a good job of containing itself. Rajeev (and other Indians, such as the former Career Diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar) have decried Delhi's habit of sitting like a stump on a log while Beijing and Islamabad run rings around them.

However, you're correct in assuming that Washington in this era does not want to see Pakistan's government collapse. The Pentagon is very concerned about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, and the ISAF has enough trouble, as it is, getting supplies trucked through the county to Afghanistan without the society going up in flames.

Beyond that, I venture you're being too rational if you perceive a grand strategy at work. There are so many grand strategies in Washington they tend to cancel each other out, which is how the Obama administration managed to drive Hamid Karzai insane.

So while it might be that there is one faction or group of lobbyists pushing to contain India for strategic reasons, you may trust other lobbyists are arguing that this is a stupid idea.

It comes down to which lobbies can shout the loudest before another lobby out-shouts them. The resulting melee was sent up in Daniel Drezner's dissertation on how Washington's three major schools of foreign policy would deal with a threat from flesh-eating zombies. (The Night of the Living Wonks.)

In all seriousness if you want to grasp Washington's thinking on foreign policy, listen to John Batchelor's hilarious June 23 interview with Drezner about how Washington would manage a threat from the undead.

(The interview starts around the halfway mark in the podcast; you can also read John's blog post on the interview for an introduction.)

If you say at the end, 'Then the actual approach to zombies would be to confuse them so much they'd return to Hell rather deal another day with the U.S. Department of State' -- on paper, yes. But here we come to a snag. I maintain there is a fourth school of American foreign relations, and that this one has had remarkable focus and staying power.

I'll take up a discussion of the fourth school when and if my mood improves. In the meantime, and as an introduction to the fourth school, here is my reply (originally posted yesterday at Zenpundit's comment section) to an Indian American who wondered aloud if the poor treatment India receives from Washington is due to prejudice against India's "funny brown people."

...After 26/11 it became harder for Atlanticists to argue that Pakistan needed to remain a U.S. client state in case the Kremlin made contact with a Klingon battleship. But Atlanticists are quite set in their view of the world. ...

If it’s any comfort the 'Get Russia' crowd does not give a fig about the funny white people of the United States, either.

I doubt you’re ready to believe me but I tell you again that the studious blindness in Washington about Pakistan is propped up by the enduring influence of the Get Russia crowd inside the Beltway.

The crowd is comprised of Atlanticists — who believe European NATO countries are the Middle Kingdom — plus lumpenproletariat such as oil barons, bankers, and Russian oligarchs who don’t care about NATO and just want to run Russia again.

(An American Atlanticist is someone who can name every major city in Romania but can’t find Mexico City or Pittsburgh on a map.)

The big obstacle the U.S. military has to overcome in dealing with Pakistan’s regime is the delusion that officers in the Pakistani military are ‘guys just like us.’ No they’re not; they’re just skilled at mirroring back to the American Sahib how he likes to see himself. The skill was honed and passed down during centuries of dealing with the British Sahib.

The American military, intelligence, and diplomatic establishments also don’t understand how the caste system works in Pakistan and how it impacts the military class. They understand nothing about the Pakistanis.

When one doesn’t understand other peoples while fighting a war, one needs to fall back on common sense – on what one can do – and not try to refashion the other in one’s image. If Petraeus and his advisors can understand that much, and learn about the relevance of Pakistan’s proxy war in Kashmir to the Taliban in Afghanistan, they’ll be able to throw together a better plan for Afghanistan.

I gave that advice hours before I'd seen the New York Times and Washington Post reports that plunged me into a vile mood and prompted today's earlier post (The Last American Helicopter out of Kabul). After studying the reports I realized my advice had come eight years too late.

In closing: policy by its very nature is something that doesn't shift and change with every breeze. That explains why my last analysis of U.S. foreign policy, in 2008, ended with the recommendation "Run for your lives."

The incoherence in America's foreign relations cannot be laid at Barack Obama's doorstep; that foreign policy utterly collapsed within a year of his becoming U.S. President only completed a process that began decades earlier. In fact, Obama's approach to decision-making, which is based soley on his reelection campaign strategy for 2012, is the most coherence official Washington has seen in years.

The United States has simply arrived at the limits of representative democracy in the era of globalization. America's founders never intended representative government to mean that thousands of competing interests would be representing themselves inside the political establishment. But that's where American government stands today.

Thank you again for your comments.

Best regards,
Pundita

The Virtual Think Tank and thinking about security threats in the Twenty-First Century

With this post I'm opening up the comment section on Pundita blog.
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Mark Safranski, whose ZenPundit blog has been a staple at Pundita since the early days, is a contributor to the newly-published Threats in the Age of Obama, a collection of essays edited by Michael Tanji.

ZenPundit has assembled quotes from a few of the essays in Tanji's book, which give an idea of the breadth of interests represented by the contributors. I haven't yet read Threats, and I'm not familiar with all the people that Tanji has gathered for his book (see the list of contributors below). But from the names I'm familiar with the book is a good overview of the security threats that Obama's administration needs to deal with.

The book is also an example of the Virtual Think Tank; as such it's as much an example of cross-discipline thinking as it is a primer on this era's security threats.

Daniel Drezner, from his new perch at the Foreign Policy website, reported a few days ago that President Obama has been raiding America's public policy schools in a quest to stuff his foreign policy team with university deans. This isn't the first time a U.S. presidential administration has built an in-house think tank by pulling academics from their chair at a university. But no matter how much academic brainpower is assembled to advise the President, the history of results is always depressingly (and often tragically) the same:

The opinion of academics whose conclusions most closely serve the administration's partisan leanings and defense goals come to dominate foreign policy. And because the academics are specialists, who are rarely given to investigating outside their discipline, galactic-sized chunks of reality completely escape their attention.

That explains the utter weirdness that has characterized U.S. foreign policy for decades and the escalating number of purported Black Swan events to beset these shores. ('Well it just happened like a bolt out of the blue, Mr President.')

Tanji, a former supervisory intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, is well-aware of the limitations of the Virtual Think Tank (see his essay on the topic, which I've linked to above). But clearly he hopes its unfettered scope will prevent the worst oversights to arise from the blinkered research and analysis that academia produces.

We should all hope. In this era, when a handful of people can wreak as much destruction as a million-man army, the window for saying, 'Back to the drawing board' is very narrow.

Academic specialists are necessary contributors to all types of government policy, of course. The systemic problem generated by the approach is that the traditional think-tank, and the Washington institutions that rely on them, tend to limit the type of specialist whose views are considered.

And because the spur of the profit motive is largely absent from government deliberations, there isn't much incentive to rigorously question a viewpoint once it becomes entrenched at the policy level. The questioning tends to be forced in the wake of a massive failure, which is the wrong time to cast around for fresh input.

The beauty of the Virtual Tank is that it opens the door wide and encourages specialists from many disciplines and starkly opposing viewpoints to exchange ideas and pool data. That is especially vital in this era because there's a big difference between research and intelligence gathering and the kind of conclusions that derive from each. Both approaches are necessary.

I also note that Michael Tanji has invited Mark Safranski to contribute to his Threats Watch project, which is ongoing. The site is a good place to pick up news about emerging security issues.

And speaking of the Virtual Think Tank, ZenPundit has a roundup of contributions to the latest Clausewitz Roundtable.

In addition to Mark Safranski the contributors to Threats in the Age of Obama are: Daniel H. Abbott, Christopher Albon, Matt Armstrong, Matthew Burton, Molly Cernicek, Christopher Corpora, Shane Deichman, Adam Elkus, Matt Devost, Bob Gourley, Art Hutchinson, Tom Karako, Carolyn Leddy, Samuel Liles, Adrian Martin, Gunnar Peterson, Cheryl Rofer, Steve Schippert, Tim Stevens, and Shlok Vaidya.

Several of the contributors have a website/blog of their own, so Googling the names will call up their credentials.
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This entry is cross-posted at RBO with Procrustes' usual great taste in accompanying artwork.

The entry is also linked to with comments at ZenPundit and tdaxp.

The Yalta play

ZenPundit Mark Safranski has weighed in on the announced US plan to designate the Pasdaran a terrorist organization (or to be more precise, give them a "special" terrorist status).

Mark takes issue with those who have voiced a negative view of the plan and states why he strongly supports the plan. (See this Pundita post for my view of the plan.) One of his arguments is that during the Soviet era, the US " ... saw no contradiction in bleeding the Soviets in one part of the world while negotiating with them in another."

Thus, Mark does not see the US plan as counterproductive:

... until we have an agreement with Iran we do not have any agreement and the regime should be squeezed at every point until we do. I'm all for negotiating in earnest [...] We should scrupulously keep our word and demonstrate to the Iranians through actions that we will deliver exactly what we promise. But until that point in time, Teheran should get no favors, no breathing space, no economic freebies of any kind until we come to an arrangement.

I agree, within the context that Mark is viewing relations with Iran; i.e., through the lens of negotiations. Yet there is a big difference between negotiating and asking for help.

The US request for help from Iran did not come through official channels; it was made public by Maliki. But the US agreement to meet face-to-face with Iran clearly signaled a request for help with ending the violence in Iraq.

Then, within about 24 hours of the first US working meeting with Iran about Iraq, out came the announcement to designate the IRGC a terrorist organization! And what did we hear about the reason for this plan? US negotiators working on Iran's nuke program are getting impatient with the UN. Well, tough cookies. The negotiators were the ones who set up the parameters of the negotiations. They set September as the time they would go back to the UN and attempt to wring out tougher sanctions on Iran.

American negotiators don't think China and Russia will go along in September with tougher sanctions; okay, but that situation has been going on for years with no sign of change. So that's not enough reason to blow up the footbridge on joint US-Iranian efforts to fight al Qaeda in Iraq.

(I have noted in some recent posts that I think the time has ripened for Iran's Supreme Leader to put the Pasdaran on a leash in Iraq. Pundita thinks military events in Iraq are making a strong argument for Iran to stop instigating strikes against the US military in Iraq.)

And notice the timing of the announcement! The plan to designate the Pasdaran a terrorist organization has been rolling around Washington for more than a year. But on the very heels of a history-making US-Iranian joint effort on Iraq, BAM! out comes the announcement about the plan.

I stress this is only an announcement of deliberations about whether to carry out the plan. So it seems as if some in Washington just couldn't wait to set off this firestorm -- again, on the heels of a joint US-Iranian effort.

Pundita bets these people are in the Washington camp that has already written off Iraq. That camp sees halting Iran's nuke program as the top priority. That's because their thinking about Qaeda has settled into a groove. They see the war with Qaeda as a generational one. Yet events are in the saddle, not Qaeda, and many events around the world are turning against Qaeda.

So at the risk of trying to sound like Roosevelt at Yalta, I think the top priority is to destroy al Qaeda as soon as humanly possible; for that we need all the help we can get, even if means holding our nose.

However, none of my arguments overturn ZenPundit's reasons for wanting to be tough on the Pasdaran, and which deserve attention. So what is the tiebreaker? I think we should let the Europeans do the heavy lifting right now with regard to negotiations with Tehran. I think we should let the Europeans hurl sticks at the Pasdaran. Let the Europeans designate the IRGC a terrorist unit.

The obvious retort is 'That's just the problem.' Yes, and that's why I led off my earlier post on the subject with a passage from Victor Comras's congressional testimony. We need to clamp down on our buddies who do business with Iran -- and keep going after US shell corporations doing business with Iran.

Those actions are the logical starting point for turning the screws on Iran -- because if we don't get more cooperation from allies who do business with Iran, the Pasdaran can continue to find banks and companies that will do business with them.

Yet those who cooked up the plan to block Pasdaran funds are treating the Pasdaran, who do many billions of dollars in business -- as if they were North Korea's army, which controls not a drop of petroleum. Hello, the Pasdaran are megabucks businessmen.

At the least, wait until the September meeting before launching financial war against the Pasdaran. What they should have done was float the Pasdaran plan in backchannel discussions with the Europeans. If the discussions leaked, well, it wasn't our fault and it just an idea we were batting around. In this way, we could have left some room for our request for help from Tehran.

Say, let's work together to help Iraq! First off, how about labeling one of your military units a terrorist organization and freezing their assets?

"Halliburton is not the only US corporation with foreign subsidiaries working with and in Iran. Some of its main competitors in the oil field industry, including Baker Hughes, and Smith International, also have foreign operations there. General Electric’s Canadian, Italian and French subsidiaries have also long been engaged in business deals with Iran, and there is a Swiss owned Caterpillar dealership in the heart of Tehran.

"Some 35 foreign subsidiaries of different US companies are reportedly now operating in Iran. Several, including GE, have decided to follow Halliburton’s example. They have announced they also will no longer seek new business deals with Iran. This is an interesting declaration given the fact that they have long claimed to exercise absolutely no corporate control over these subsidiaries."

-- Victor D. Comras, Attorney and Consultant Special Counsel to Eren Law Firm, in testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, April 30, 1997

Victor Comras is cautiously in favor of yesterday's announced US plan to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. I recommend that you read his April congressional testimony, which is clear and brief, before plunging into his analysis of the planned move. Yet after taking in both his opinions, I think the route of additional economic sanctions against Iran, which wends through negotiations with Europe, China and Russia, is very complex.

There is nothing complex about the US offer to work with Iran to help tamp down Iraq's violence. The first US committee meeting with Iran took place just days ago in Baghdad. Now we turn around and, going beyond the issue of sanctions, designate an Iranian military branch as a terrorist organization. The move ignores the situation on the ground in Iraq and mocks the US offer to work with Iran. So the move sends a loud message that the US government is not working in concert to gain Iran's help in Iraq.

The upshot is that the US presents itself as acting in such irrational fashion that Iran's so-called moderates are completely confused.

If the US were not fighting a hot war next door to Iran, it would make sense at this time to attempt to isolate Iran economically and throw at them every financial strategem the US Treasury could cook up. But hello, the top priorities are to kill Qaeda in Iraq and beat down sectarian violence. So it makes no sense to strip Iran of all face, then say, "Help us."

The curious thing is that the US annoucement about labeling the IRGC a terrorist unit comes on the heels of concilliatory noises from Iran's president:

"The terror going on in Iraq has links to foreign states that were adopting ideologies hostile to Iraq but recently they felt that supporting terror will make it spread outside Iraq to other countries," the Iraqi Premier told reporters. The Prime Minister, who just ended official visits to Turkey and Iran, told the news conference that he got pledges from Turkey and Iran to support Iraq in face of violence and providing basic services to its people [...]

What is a pledge from Ahmadinejad worth? The answer depends on how his military advisors read Petraeus's counterinsurgency.

Petraeus has created virtual chaos by cutting deals with an endless parade of Iraq's Sunni and Shia tribes. One result is that Iran can no longer control Iraq's insurgency. Ergo, one reading is that it would make sense for Iran to morph into the fountainhead of helpfulness at this time.

But it's almost as if there are elements in Washington that don't want Iran to be helpful. It's as if some elements are focused on the campaign in Iraq, and other elements are focused on Iran's nuclear weapons program.

If Pundita's speculation is in the ballpark, she would suggest that President Bush settle on priorities and enforce them.
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August 17 Update
Tonight I saw that ZenPundit had weighed in on the discussion. Here is my counter-argument: The Yalta play.

Capitalism vs Democracy, Part 1: What is a foreign policy, anyhow?

It is fair to say that for almost a quarter century prior to September 12, 2001, the United States of America did not have a foreign policy; we had economics theories fobbed off as foreign policy. So from the long view it could be considered a kind of cosmic comment on insane policymaking that America's twin cathedrals to neoliberalism, globalization and economics 'shock therapy' were blasted to rubble.

One would hope that the catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center marked the end of the Insane Era in US foreign policy, but at this time the application of defense doctrine to US foreign policy should be considered a blip. There is no guarantee that the policy will outlive the Bush presidency. What's more, there's no guarantee that US foreign policy won't revert to a showcase for economics policy once Bush leaves office.

There was much right about the Reaganomics revolution -- for America. There was much right about Thatcher's economics revolution -- for Britain. There was much right about unrestricted global trade -- for the rich countries. And when viewed on a limited basis, the revolutions had positive consequences when applied to several countries. The revolutions had terrible consequences for developing countries that did not have the government and private sector infrastructures in place to accommodate a radical shift to privatization and free market economics, which could not count on NATO to come to their defense, and which had big trouble coming up with enough petrodollars to purchase energy to fuel their experimental market economy.

The fall guy for the debacles should have been the International Monetary Fund and their structural adjustment program. (Here's a foreign policy tip for governments: If you're going to do something that you're only hoping will work, you need a front man.) But no, the US government under Bush 41 and Clinton wanted to be the world standard bearer for neoliberalism, shock therapy and globalization.

So here we are today, with a good portion of the world hopping mad at the United States for pushing disastrous economic policies on them. And with foreign policy advisors who are still seriously wondering whether it's strictly necessary to work the concept of national defense into a nation's foreign policy.

To be continued tomorrow.