Politick

Maliki Manipulates Barry

The Press has made a big deal of a leaked memo from the prime minister of Iraq, Maliki, generally siding with a phased withdrawal ala Barack.  No surprise, with its US point of view and worship of Barack, the Press got the story backwards.  They have implied that Obama has persuaded Maliki to go with Barry's w/drawal strategy.  Instead, Maliki has manipulated Obama to go with Maliki's (and Bush's) plan.  Maliki is afraid that a Demo govt will do to him what Tip O'Neill did to the South Vietnamese - abandon Iraq at the point of victory and leave them to the mercies of bitter enemies.  So by floating this, he has moved Obama quite a ways from his earlier views on Iraq:

• 2006, immediate complete w/drawal
• 2007, 16-month complete w/drawal
• 2008 post Maliki, gradual w/drawal depending on conditions on the ground and a residual force of 50-80k to hold the peace.   Almost identical to the Bush plan!

Barry is quite a good politician - much better than Mac, and perhaps even better than Bill Cinton - and so expect him to shift focus away from Iraq and on to Afghanistan before the Press catches on. 

A Good Op-Ed Piece on Iraq

Here's an interesting view of the Iraq Study Group Report from today's Daily Telegraph.  Summary:  Study Group Report is aimed at Congress not the President, and rather than propose a face-saving way to exit Iraq, it argues instead why we cannot leave.  Its core recommendation is a variant of what we have been calling Cut-And-Stay: pull back from policing the country and nation-building, increase the support for building the Iraqi Army's capabilities, stay in bases with a strike force to keep adventuresome neighbors out, and protect the oil. This Op-Ed piece adds that we should engage in carrot-and-stick dialog with Syria and Iran. 

A very good read. 

Bush, Iraq and the Wilsonian Delusion

"Democracy can never be forced by the sword from without, it must grow by the seed from within."
- Thomas Jefferson

Woodrow Wilson ushered in an era of nation-building when he intervened in The Great War "to make the world safe for Democracy."  He also put troops in Latin America and Eastern Europe to put in place liberal democracies by force of arms.  All of these efforts ended in utter failure.  His intervention in WWI is now seen by historians as destabilizing and setting in motion the chain of events that led to the devastation of WWII.  The few successes after WWII (Japan, Germany, Austria, Italy) are anomalies where the seeds of Democracy had already taken root.  Candidate Bush in 2000 railed against nation building, but got suckered into the Wilsonian Delusion by the neo-conservatives.  What can we learn from this?

W.O.T. Grand Strategy

In an extraordinary op-ed piece, the most knowledgeable Islamic scholar in the most conservative major US publication predicted that WWIII may start on August 22 - next week! - as a nuclear war.  Bernard Lewis in The Wall Street Journal believes that Iran will respond to recent moves by the US, Israel and moderate Islamic nations by doing something dramatic on one of the most honored dates in Islam - the date when Mohammed ascended to Heaven from the Far Mosque (Jerusalem).   Iran may even pop off a nuke.  Whether this is popped in the desert or on Tel Aviv remains to be seen. 

How did it come to this?  The recent exposure of an Islamic plot in England to use liquids to blow up flights to the US is just the latest in a series of very public signals by the US, moderate Islamic nations and Iran.  A possible Grand Strategy for the War On Terror (WOT) is emerging out of the wreckage in Iraq, and it is directed at Iran. The story of the last few months is a remarkable geopolitical drama unfolding before the whole world, if we only have the eyes to see it. 

Bush Blunders, Israel Thunders - Is it WWIII Yet?

The recent action in Israel caused Newt Gingrich to spout off that were are seeing the start of World War III. Where has he been since 9/11? It is clear that Iran is behind the trouble; Israel has correctly been taking out the supply routes from Syria to Lebanon, as they know Iranian oil profits have funded the terrorist activity, with missiles and other weapons being funneled through Syria. But a lot of missiles got through - estimates are well above 13,000, which has allowed Hezbollah, its front organization, to lob 100s of missiles a day into Israel. (Hezbollah was founded in 1982 with Iranian support, and continues to get $100 million per year from Iran.)   How did it come to this, and is WWIII around the corner?

An Army of Immigrants

There are tides in politics, when taken at the surge can lead to success, and when taken in the trough can be lost to the foam. We are in a political mood swing away from the optimism of a Global Village and towards the xenophobia against the Barbarian Hordes. A decade ago, Califdornia's Prop 187 tried to restrict illegal immigration, but all it did was to hurt the Repubs in Calif.  That was a different time, with the dot-com bubble beginning and optimism surging. We are now shifting the other way. The tide has turned.

We are also more at risk, as the influx from one culture is stressing the melting pot and Latinizing many communities, rather than Americanizing the immigrants. Back around the time of Prop 187, Ross Perot warned that NAFTA (free trade with Mexico) would create a great sucking sound of jobs moving south. Instead, the job seekers came north. The law of unintended consequences confounds the best and the brightest, as well as the Ross Perots. NAFTA lowered agriculture tariffs, devastating marginal Mexican farmers. They left the farms and looked to El Norte for hope.

Incoherent policy makes it easy for them. We shoot illegals at the border then give them free reign once they get inside: schooling, healthcare, benefits, amnesty. Their kids become citizens. Legal immigrants have a harder time! Visa complexity, risk of not coming back in after a business trip out.

We need to create a bigger contrast between legals and illegals. Walls need not be built. Illegals need not be criminalized as much as incentivized. Legal immigration should be opened up. Most of all, following the rules and earning citizenship should be worth more.

A simple proposal: offer citizenship to qualified illegals who enlist in our army and fight our wars. The army will Americanize them, and their duty earns them the right to become citizens.

This is not unprecedented. Rome had its auxiliaries. Britannia had its Ghurkas.

This doesn't solve the whole problem, but it is a start.

Dubai Ports Debacle - Congress Wins, We Lose

Twenty years or so ago Reagan took Congress out of the middle on foreign investment, and put an inter-agency group in its place, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).  If any of these agencies spot a security issue, they run it up the flag pole.  In the Dubai case, no issue was flagged - Dubai services the US Navy when they dock over there, and may be the largest such foreign group supporting our forces. The point of CFIUS was to take the politics out of the process, and in this case, they may have succeeded too well! Someone should have flagged the political issue even if they found no security issue.

Now, Congress has gotten its nose back into this tent, and is yabbering about expanding their oversight to telecom, airlines, buildings and a whole lot more.  We don't like to speak of corruption in the American political system, but now Congress will be able to shake down foreign investors before they get approval.

Bush Gets a Backbone - Why Seek a Storm in the Ports?

Bush's position on the UAE takeover of operations at US ports is principled. The operator of the port does not handle security, and we have already allowed foreign management of ports (a Chinese company runs Long Beach, for example).  No reason to treat friendly Arab countries differently - indeed, smarter for us to entwine them in our world than isolate them.  Osama bin Laden's real goal is to topple US-friendly Muslim governments, not the US. Why play into his hands?  In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says the best way to defeat an enemy is to make it a friend.  By linking economic interests. 

The more interesting question is why this issue? 

Postscript to "War of the Worlds"

We noted how "War of the Worlds" has been a prescient social indicator, each time presaging the major event to come. The book - WWI. The radio show - Pearl Harbor. The first movie - Sputnik and the Space Race. So what does the Spielberg movie presage? The most telling moments in the movie are how quickly order breaks down, and it becomes everyone for themselves. There is no heroism, no sacrifice, other than for one's family. At the time of the post (July), it looked like it was preparing us for another terrorist attack. After the hurricane hit New Orleans, it is now clear what the movie portends: how quickly civil order can break down, even in the US. So what does it presage? Katrina. And the next breakdown.

Testing Our Constitution in Iraq

Amidst stories about the new Iraqi Constitution (or lack thereof), the NYT dropped an editorial this Sunday as to whether the war is already lost. The key event is the Ohio death incident a few weeks ago & the precipitous drop in support for the war it accentuated. Point is not that the loss of lives is high, but what are they dying for? WMD? No. WOT? No. Democracy? Looks unlikely. If I were Al Queda I would launch a Tet offensive right now. Interesting is that some stock market pundits are half expecting it.

While the Iraqis debate their constitution, we must reconsider ours for the war.

Why carry on the fight? Oil? Honor? The best argument seems to be what Colin Powell is supposed to have told Bush - if you break it, you own it. The reason to stay is to fix what we broke. We have now created the conditions that we would have gone in to fight over! Pathetic, but there you are. We have to get the terrorists out of the western desert, and we have to keep the voracious neighbors out. Beyond that to expect democracy is a bit much. My recommendation:

Cut & stay. Pull back to three bases (south/port, middle/Baghdad, north/oilfields) and stay there to keep Iran & Syria out. Use the army not to police the streets but clean up the terrorist cells.

Divide & Conquer. Push federalism. One source of insurgency is the Sunni minority trying to keep the Shi-ites from gaining the whole thing. The Kurds in the North have a working democracy of sorts - they have had 15 years of autonomy since the 1991 war to develop it. We all know Iraq is a post-colonial construct. The Ottoman Empire had instead three provinces. Attempts to centralize Iraq over 4000 years have proven difficult. Let it be federated & let the US Army in the bases keep the neighboring wolves at bay while the country settles into a federation with common defense and currency.

Divert & Distract. One of the smarter moves LBJ made in 1968 when the North Koreans plucked one of our spy chips (The Pueblo) was to low-key the whole affair. Keep it off the news. Let diplomacy work. Time for that in Iraq. The Brits pacified Malaysia from Communist insurgency when it looked like one of those Vietnam dominoes, but it took them 14 years. Iraq too will take time. Keep it off the radar screen to give the military the chance.