The Saddam Capture and Psy Ops

If something seems to good to be true, it probably is. As such, some interesting wire reports are coming out about the Saddam capture. Basically, what they are saying that what really happened was that a Saddam was staying in Tikrit, his home town, and was ratted out by a tribe who had a daughter raped by his son Uday. They turned him into Jamil Talibani's PUK Kurdish Pesh Merga, who then worked out a political deal with the Americans. They then drugged him and put him in the "rat hole" for the Americans.

My feeling is that US Army psychological warfare teams* couldn’t have created a better story of the capture of Saddam, which means it’s likely that they did. Everything about the capture perfectly resonated the feelings that the US wants to push onto the Arab world: resistance is futile. Even the Lion of Babylon, the man who defied American power for over a decade, was found in a hole amongst rats looking like an Arab Ted Kazinsky when his card was finally pulled.


Here’s an interesting excerpt from an interview with Bush:

MS. SAWYER: Was he sedated? And was it designed to humiliate him?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, I don't--first of all, I don't know if he was sedated or not. I mean, that's a question you'd ask the folks in the field.

Secondly, it was designed to reflect the truth and to show--and to show the world that this barbaric person was found in a hole, hiding, cowering...

So what makes me give credence to this particular claim from the Kurds? Well, US brass and Ahmed Chalabi made several mentions of help from the Kurdish militia, but what kind of help could the Pesh Merga really offer US Special Ops? There is no comparison between a US Navy SEAL and Kurdish mountain fighter. So just what kind of help was it?

I don’t know that if this is true it will amount to a scandal. The Bush administration, armed with the mind of Karl Rove, knows how to manage image. Ever notice those little banners behind Bush with a few key words reinforcing his message? Will the American public really care that the Bush team lied about how they captured Saddam when they really don’t seem to care that no WMD has been found?

It worries me how much control this administration has over information. If you remember, the Afghanistan War was reported only as a series of Pentagon and White House press releases. The mainstream press has not given proper skepticism to the words of Bush (whereas the alternative press has never given proper credit to the truth and wisdom to any of Bush’s words). The networks need to work around being the advocater of this Administration, while still reporting on it's agenda.

* Psychological Warfare is an integral part of any modern military. Psy Ops specialists are masters of perception and deception. Their most infamous work was building a mock armored battalion out of wood along the Kuwaiti border in 1991 to feign a direct invasion instead of the left hook through Iraq that actually took place. They also arrange for soldiers only over six feet tall to guard the Korean DMZ. They’re also in charge of propaganda and publishing and help in crafting press releases and press conferences. It was recently uncovered that Psy Ops was sending letters to the editor to local news papers and forging the names of troops as the signatories.


Links:
DebkaFILE - Very pro-Israeli hawkish site
Republicons - Obviously a bit partisan
More as I find them


Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq Saddam Hussein Capture Bush staged Pys-Ops Pyschological Warfare

Progress

I know it’s been forever sense I last posted. Contrary to expectations, I’ve been very busy throughout the break making new friends and catching up with old ones. It’s been a blast so far and I’m only a week and a half into it – I still have New Years in New Orleans to look forward to. This is going to be a far less formal post than normal, being that this is not a Spinnaker submission.

___________________________

My thoughts lately have been more abstract than usual, crunching the problem of justifying my linear progressive political thought. Linearism is the idea that we’re going somewhere - that progress in thought and material is making mans lot somehow better than it was before. I confronted a mad genius about a month ago who challenged my thoughts on civilization and what progress really is. Mr. Vorchek was himself an anarcho-primativist. Though I wasn’t very impressed with his Ænemiac embrace of tearing down Western modernity for fear of failure, he did stir some thoughts that I had been dormant for awhile.

The two toughest questions stirred were thus: Is life truly better now than it was a decade, century, or millennia ago? And where are we going, what is this grand and noble vision?

To answer the first question, we must get to its root. What do we mean by better off? We could take Jeremy Bentham’s direction, and simply conclude that man’s lot can be gauged through his happiness. I don’t feel that qualitive judgments on our existence should be answered with hedonism. One of the core problems with this approach is that we’re measuring an absolute gain over time and not relative gains. Happiness is relative by nature. I do not find that our psychotropic-loving modern man is much happier than his ancestor of old.

So what then is an appropriate measuring stick? Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I think the Greeks were on to something with there constant pursuit of the nature of justice. Being that we’re measuring these qualities absolutely, let us look at the advance of mankind over the past century both mentally and physically. Physically, one must look no further than the fields of medicine. Over the past century, we’ve watched the development of vaccines for Polio, Malaria, Influenza and other ailments that severely crippled and painfully killed off huge quantities of people bring these ailments under control. Government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO’s) like the World Health Organization stop epidemics in their tracks, like SARS last summer.

Mentally, Western Man is freer than ever. Though some like Foucault would argue that this freedom is all illusion, the very fact that I’m able to post online and have a friend across the Pacific read these ideas so that she can spread them into a “communist” country if she sees them fit speaks to one of the greatest virtues of the information age. Ideas are allowed, and do, spread like wildfire. A century ago, we were just beginning to harness the technology of relaying small messages across the Atlantic about events on either side of the lake. Common man could not spread his thoughts without getting published, where today almost anyone literate (provided they attend and use their free public education) can find a library with free internet access and self-publish just as I do.

In absolute terms, man’s general lot has improved enormously in the past century. His happiness has not. Mothers in Westernized nations don’t have to deal with high infant mortality rates, paralyzed and ostracized children with Polio, and Malarial mosquito’s. This does not mean that the pain of man has been alleviated or that new problems haven’t arisen, it’s only that problems that have solutions today are fixed. Relatively, we measure our lot not with our Great-Grandparent’s but rather with the Jones’s, our next door neighbor, which is why relative happiness will not increase with absolute gains.

To answer the second question, where are we going, I worded a horrible answer at the time. “Have you ever seen Star Trek? Imagine that, minus the interstellar travel and aliens,” was the best answer I could think of. What I meant by the answer was that in the fictional world of Star Trek, most of the problems of the industrial revolution had been resolved and mankind didn’t need to worry about the next harvest, having a roof over ones head, clothes on ones back, and consequently crime wasn’t an issue. This is not to say that men did not suffer, that spouses were always faithful, that parents and children did not die, or and that crime was never committed and that all were happy and none sad. Man would still judge his lot based on his fellow man, but by and large the plaques of the 20th century were solved. Wars, pain, and sadness still went on, but the reasons for sadness were far less severe than our reasons are today. Just AIDS is a horrible epidemic, wiping out a third the population in some African nations and affecting something like 1 in 40 Americans, it doesn’t hold a candle to bubonic plaque’s suffering.

The problem with primitivism thought, beyond that it is utopian in it’s own right, is that it goes contrary to human nature. The difference between humans and other extinct humanoids was that man was able to step outside of genetics to evolve. Unlike any other animal on earth, we don't need an extra chromosone to go from fires outside a cave to nuclear fission reactors. We were able to make tools, shelter, and clothing and improve upon them as necessity dictated. This continues today. We will find the cures for the diseases that ravage our people, we will find ways to alleviate grinding poverty, and we will work to educate children and adults. If nothing else, societies will do this to keep their competitive advantages against other societies.

For all its shortcomings, I have not lost faith in Western Civilization and the idea of progress that brought us where we are. My idea of progress has been refined over the past few weeks though. I don’t really feel that there is any one utopia that we ought to follow, but instead there are injustices to be alleviated. The essence of linear thinking in politics is problem solving and achieving goals, and there is nothing wrong with that. We will march on.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Politics Foucault Civilization Anarcho-Primativism

The Democrats....

Many people are asking me whom I support in the 2004 Democratic Primaries. Well, I’ll give you a short history of my political thought on this subject and bring you where I am today. First I was adamantly pro-Dean. I believe the only one who can take on Bush is going to have to be tough, someone who cuts the chase and tells you how it is, someone who won’t sugarcoat and meander around all the important issues. I also liked Dean because from all reports, he was a very moderate governor – fiscally conservative, but still had his social priorities straight – like health insurance for all children in the state. He also seems to know how to mobilize otherwise politically apathetic voters.

Then Dean seemed to be pandering farther and farther to the isolationist left. I don’t mind at all that he didn’t support the war in Iraq, and didn’t pull a Kerry by supporting it just so it’d look better on the campaign trail. But he started talking about repealing “every cent” of the Bush tax cut, balancing the federal budget even when the economy is sinking, and supported withdrawing US troops from Iraq to be replaced with international troops. To me, all of these are really bad ideas. Not only are they bad ideas, but they’re unelectable ideas. One cannot expect to get voted into office under the promise of taking back at least $200 from almost every American family.

So I then threw my conditional support to Clark, someone who just recently joined our fair party. He’s a four-star general, which is about at tough as it comes, and an intellectual as well. He even taught economics at West Point, which is not exactly a bad trait for a President. He seemed to hold all the best traits of Dean, but also seemed very electable. Who better than a former NATO commander to refocus the war on terror, and not sound like a hippy peacenik by opposing the Iraq war?

Well, my support for him has fizzled. I still think he’s the most electable of this motley ensemble. But he’s come out against financing the rebuilding of Iraq, which is a terrible idea. Even as an ardent fighter against this war, it is our mess nonetheless and I believe we need to clean it up – no matter what the cost. This is war, and this is the price of war. Furthermore, he stumbles around – he flip-flopped on his position on Iraq. Now I hear he supports a flag burning ban amendment to the Constitution. Wow... (not that I support flag-burning, but a Constitutional Amendment?! When we learn out lesson about prohibitive laws against the citizenry in the Constitution)

Most of the Democratic candidates, Lieberman aside, are in pure reactionary mode. They want to revoke and undo everything that Bush has done in his 3 years thusfar, and that’s just empty rhetoric. I want substantive ideas, not regression. We need to work with what we have, not pretend we’re going to pick up where Clinton left off in 2000. The fact of the matter is Bush has changed the course of America in his 3 years, and doing a 180 in reaction wouldn’t be more disasterous than his own foreign policy.

I don’t fully support any of them. I almost trust Bush better with foreign policy now, simply because he’s obviously contained/preoccupied – if not humbled – and will more than likely not embark on any more “regime change” adventures in the Middle East. He broke it, he needs to fix it. I honestly would feel very queasy about handing Iraq over to Dean, who will muddle it up worse by withdrawing under fire. One does not withdraw from combat because of a 2/10ths of a percent casualty rate. That’s a surefire way to ensure the war on terrorism is skewed towards to Jihadist.

Dean is right that the Democrats lost the mid-term elections because they did not distinquish themselves from the Republicans. Bush-lite is not a viable option for a Democratic presidential candidate who wants to win the general election, but it unfortunately like only the Anti-Bush will win the nomination. We Democrats need to learn some lessons from the the Republicans - find leadership, create a solid agenda and push it hard , let the American public see these leaders push and explain this agenda, and maintain tighter party discipline.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Democrats Primaries 2004 election Dean Kerry

The V-Word

The V-word seems to have become the first “politically incorrect” word that the rightwing has adopted. It carries with it the painful memories of their generation, and a painful legacy taught to ours. There are as many theories as to what went wrong in Vietnam as there are people who experienced or studied it.

I fear that because the memory is so painful, and carries with it so much weight, that it has become impolite, if not taboo, to talk about it in context to our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hear people on the radio allude to Vietnam, then quickly write it off – bring up shallower points of pointing out just how different the geography is between arid desert plains and jungle. Though the geography and enemy are different, I have questioned how different the military strategies are in this war of terrorism with the military strategies of the Cold War.

Though we ended up winning the cold war, we won all of our battles politically – not militarily. Let us remember that Korea was no great victory. We were pushed out of Pyongyang by the Chinese and came to a stalemate at the 38th parallel. This is now the DMZ between North and South Korea still zealously guarded by over a million troops on both sides, even though the Berlin Wall has long sense come down. Vietnam was... well, Vietnam. Central America was a covert bloody mess for us too. Let us not forget whom we empowered to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, lest we forget September 11. I think there are strong lessons and parallels that we must draw from to learn from our mistakes for sounder victories in the war on terror.

Secretary of State Colin Powell fought in Vietnam, and applied our lessons their to a self-named doctrine that I hope the Bush Administration is working with today. The doctrine consisted of understanding your political objectives, matching political objectives with military objectives if necessary – creating a clear and concise mission, with a clear and concise exit strategy. Following this would prevent open-ended wars like Vietnam, with military goals that were impossible to accomplish without working against political objectives.

Unfortunately, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was recovering from a rocket attack on his hotel in Baghdad, he continued to speak of “transformation” of the Middle East. Though indeed a democratic and libertarian transformation of the Middle East would be amazingly helpful in the war against terrorism, we must ask how well this can be accomplished with Abram’s tanks and Apache gunships and how long that would take. Though these machines were meant to end the cold war, we must remember that World War III never happened – it was statecraft and triumphs of will that brought an end to that affair.
Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq, Terrorism Insurgency Vietnam Quagmire Exit Strategy

saboteurs of hope

I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going on in Iraq. It’s such a strange occurrence that terrorist acts are going unclaimed. Even the most atrocious suicide bombings in Israel tend to have several claimants. The Pentagon has painted the terrorist and guerillas all to be former Ba’athist. This might well be true, but this is also the most convenient excuse for the Pentagon, so I am more than a bit skeptical.

It’s very difficult fighting an anonymous enemy. Though this enemies name might be a mystery, its motives are revealed through its tactics. The tactics have been blatant use of force against infrastructures designed to make life easier on common Iraqi’s. Oil pipelines have been by and large kept down and unusable through persistent attack. This prevents oil money from entering the country through the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The United Nations and now the Red Cross have been suicide bombed, the UN twice. Other NGO’s and IGO’s are fleeing as well because of this –including Doctors Without Borders, one of my favorite charities. Those who work with the CPA, particularly Iraqi Police, are being targeted.

All of this has one clear aim: make life miserable for the occupiers and the occupied. Unfortunately, the secular Ba’athist and militant Islamists, as well as regional governments, have reason to want the Iraqi’s to shrug off the Americans or the Americans to shrug off the Iraqi’s. I don’t know that this means that they are working in tandem though.

These attacks are only getting worse, and I imagine they will sustain at their current level if nothing else. What this means is that American’s must have a stomach to weather through this storm. Unfortunately, August 19th and October 28th don’t quite carry the same national resolve as September the Eleventh. Bush must work to set clear and reasonable goals, considering the reality of the situation, to provide a timeline and/or conditions of a return of Iraqi national sovereignty.

I don’t know what an appropriate exit strategy at this point is. I do feel that if Bush chooses to not leave before squashing this rebellion, we might well be there past is potential second term as President expires. Unless a new counter-insurgency doctrine makes it’s way from West Point or Washington think tanks to the Pentagon in the next few months, we ought not expect an end to this resistance against us or the sovereign Iraqi government for quite some time. We ought also to weigh how much our continued overt presence only helps the attacks by encouraging alienated and despondent Iraqis to abed these saboteurs of hope. Even through all it’s shortcomings, our involvement in Afghanistan perhaps ought to be the framework in Iraq as well.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq, Terrorism Insurgency

I should be posting more soon. My Oct 1 blog is being published this week, which means I have to write something new for the Spinnaker - which will be posted here.

I saw Noam Chomsky tonight at UF. Interesting fellow... maybe quirky is a better word. He was a horrible speaker, honestly.... he speaks like William Saffire writes.... kind of a coherent rambling of facts and/or observations with little holding them together... no central thesis... and i disagree with him on a lot, i see him sometimes as a glorified conspiracy theorist. He's so far out of the mainstream and ignores the conventional wisdom to draw complete pictures which makes for interesting, but often very flawed, theories. One thing he did say struck a cord with me:

"Fundamentalism is destroying this world: be it religious or market fundamentalism"

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Noam Chomsky

Go Taikonauts!

sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been swamped with schoolwork.

Yay! China launched a man into space! It’s about damned time too. I’ve been waiting for this for years now, when I first discovered the Go Taikonauts website.

I certainly hope this sparks a new space race. I think we’re becoming far too bored with space missions. I blame that partly on the International Space Station. In retrospect, it seems like it was a well thought out idea to justify shuttle launches for another decade. You know that for the price of this war in Iraq, at least the first price before being revised up a few weeks ago, we could have sent a manned mission to mars? $100b is the price tag. Think of it! We could have had the reality TV that we got from the war, far lighter casualties, and colonized a new land that didn’t already have people in it!

Despite what my good friend Nina (who’s living in China for a year) says about how they need to work on drainage and garbage disposal first, I think it is a noble effort and I hope the shoot for the moon. In any case, I extend my congratulations to the CCP for this achievement. Go taikonauts!


Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events China Space Taikonauts

A few of you questioned my reasoning that Saddam was only bluffing his WMD threat in my last post. Admittedly, it looks foolish on the face of it, but there is an underlying logic. Hussein was willing to front the image of a wild, unpredictable rouque for his own security. Did it work? Perhaps well enough. It certainly gave Clinton second thought, even though his own words show that he was in favor of regime change.

But to back my conclusion up (/sarcasm), the Washington Post ran this article today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25416-2003Sep30.html

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events WMD nuclear proliferation Iraq Hussein Saddam

Nuclear Ambitions

Much has been made of diplomatic initiatives of the Bush Administration to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in 3rd World countries. Though his assessment that these weapons pose a threat to the dominance of US power in the world is correct, his efforts to peacefully disarm would-be WMD states are failing. The sad truth is that there isn’t any compelling reason to believe that he shouldn’t fail in stopping would-be proliferators from acquiring their weapons.

It seems we are fundamentally misreading the concepts behind proliferation itself. I don’t believe the reasons for Pakistani, Indian, Israeli, Chinese and now Iranian and N. Korean proliferation are fundamentally different from our own reasons for developing weapons of mass destruction after the Second World War. These weapons up the ante of confrontation to generally unacceptable levels, thereby both leaving borders at their status quo (in this case, the Russians on their side of the Iron Curtain) while simultaneously increasing relative power in the world. North Korean and Iranian regimes want a nuclear shield protecting their nations the same way Truman wanted a nuclear shield protecting America from the Soviets. The primary difference is that we are the perceived aggressors, having already eliminated 1/3 of the “Axis of Evil.”

One cannot bride, coax, or scare nations close to acquiring nuclear weapons away from developing said programs. There was no dollar amount, favorable trading status, treaty, or threats of pre-emptive strikes that would have stopped Truman and Eisenhower from building up our nuclear stockpiles. Even nations under the American nuclear umbrella during the cold war, the UK and France, developed WMD. So far, only domestic pressures have stopped nations capable of developing nuclear weapons easily from doing so – as is the case with South Africa, Germany, and Japan.

Even the implicit threat of ownership of WMD has strong security reverberations. Israel has never confirmed nor denied the existence of a program and has never tested a weapons inside its borders. However, the belief that Israeli is a nuclear armed state deters potential invaders. Likewise, Saddam Hussein was so concerned with the appearance of WMD potency that he bluffed still owning deliverable weapons up until his fall from power this year. It seems likely that certain UN inspectors were correct in their assessment that previous stockpiles had gone bad with time and he was never able to revive his program for new munitions. If Iran or North Korea begin honest negotiations to stop their respective nuclear programs, it is likely the programs are so far from success that the immediate rewards – non-aggression pacts and financial incentives – will be greater than the far off goal of insured state sovereignty through nuclear deterrence.
Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events WMD nuclear proliferation diplomacy theory North Korea North Korea Iran

To Trade or Tarriff

Another Spinnaker submission:

_____________________________________________

Imagine if the leaders of the worlds poorest nations came to the table and expressed their belief that the best things Western nations could do to help them out was not to give more foreign aid, but instead slash wasteful spending inside of their own budgets to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Imagine, then, that the leaders of the richest countries declined their plead. Though the situation is a much more complex, that is what happened last month in Cancun during the latest World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting. A group of 21 poor nations (a.k.a. G-21), representing more than half the world’s population, confronted the group (a.k.a. G-8) of the world’s richest nations with a single demand: stop government handouts to agricultural businesses.

Western nations spend roughly $1 billion dollars a day on these agricultural subsidies, according to WTO Director Mike Moore. Last year, Congress passed a $200b[1] bill for handouts to America’s farmers. Europeans spend roughly $2 per cow a day, more than what half the world’s human population makes [2]. Even through all this, the poorest 6% of American farmers will get less than 1% of these subsidies[3], meaning the money is not being spent to help struggling family farms. This is likely due to the $58m spent by agribusiness in donations during the 2000 elections[4].

All these handouts lead to distortion of market prices. Because these subsidies encourage farmers to produce more by offering minimum price payoffs, Western farmers flood the marketplace driving down worldwide prices that they themselves are protected from. For instance, Oxfam estimates that removing cotton subsidies and protections in Europe and America would create a 25% increase in cotton prices, which would translate into $300m for African farmers,[5] because American and European farmers wouldn’t be able to sell at below-production prices. Another area of concern is the sugar industry, which much of the Caribbean depends on for economic and political stability. American federal guarantees for high minimum prices for farmers and a 15% cap on sugar imports, matched by $1.4b worth of European subsidies and a 140% import tariff,[6] have dropped global sugar prices in half between 1995 and 1999.

The G-21 nations focused the Cancun meeting on these issues and ultimately walked out when Western nations wouldn’t budge, but instead pressed their own issues like intellectual property rights. Economists left and right of the spectrum complain of the corporate welfare that is keeping unemployed much of the Third World. It would seem G-8 leaders would want to see the benefits of a more stable world with fewer nations drowning in debts and teetering on solvency, but alas, campaign contributions have always gotten in the way of logic in politics.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


[1] BusinessWeek (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_22/b3785037.htm)

[2] Oxfam

[3] (Wall Street Journal) http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=110001675

[4] http://www.farmingsolutions.org/

[5] http://www.oxfam.org/eng/pr030501_wto_cotton.htm

[6] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2285293.stm


Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Doha Round WTO World Trade Organization Globalization subsidies

Dead Ends

Another writing sample for a newspaper:

The departure of Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas appears to have been the final blow to President Bush’s “Roadmap to Peace”. Despite his best wishes and intentions to the contrary, a lack of decisive action and unrealistic expectations on his part made failure inevitable. Though the situation is not hopeless, a great deal of momentum has been lost and tremendous energy is needed to rescue this noble mission.
T
hough it is neither fair nor accurate to pin the source of violence on America or anyone other than the parties involved, it is easy to underestimate how many cards the United States is holding. Since the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel, Israel has received enormous amounts of US military aid. This year we spent $2.79 billion. Next year we plan to spend $2.9 billion. The President has watched the situation fall back into chaos, issuing vague statements calling for proportionality in retaliation and calling overkill “not helpful.” Bush has also condemned a wall that the Ariel Sharon has ordered built that has thus far followed roughly the pre-1967 Yom Kippur War boundaries, but many fear it will eventually veer deep into the West Bank. Recognizing that it might only strengthen the Jihadist militants like Hamas, Bush has also condemned the recent decision to expel the secularist Yassir Arafat from the occupied territories. Despite all his requests, Sharon feels secure that the paycheck will come in no matter which course his government takes.

Secondly, unrealistic and dangerous expectations were embedded into the roadmap. First among them was the expectation that the Palestinian Authority could completely scourge terrorism. It was hardly realistic to expect the weakened Palestinian Authority to control the more powerful religious militants. Even had Arafat or Abbas tried, it would more than likely spark a civil war where the Jihadi’s had the upper hand in popularity and funds. By allowing outside groups beyond the control of the negotiating parties involved the ability to derail the entire process through what they do best – create mayhem – Bush handed the power of success or failure over to Hamas and Palestinian Jihad. The only way Bush could have avoided this outcome would have been to directly bring said groups to the negotiating table as well. Politically and strategically, negotiating with some of the most brutal terrorist the planet has ever seen was out of the question.

Ultimately, the option of peace belongs with the Israeli government. Israel can continue on the path of total war against militants in its occupied territories, it can choose to negotiate with the militants, or it can abandon the territories once the wall is completed. There are no easy, painless options in the Middle East peace process.

Paper Promises

A letter written to Stratfor:


"But as with North Korea, Iranian leaders know that nuclear weapons are more valuable as a bargaining chip than as a reality. Asymmetry leads to eradication of nuclear threats. Put less pretentiously, Tehran must assume that the United States -- or Israel -- will destroy any nuclear capability before it becomes a threat. Moreover, if it has nuclear capability, what would it do with it? Even as a deterrent, retaliation would lead to national annihilation. The value of nuclear weapons in this context is less real than apparent -- and therefore more valuable in negotiations than deployment."

- An Unlikely Alliance


Fundamentally, I must disagree with your assessment. Though the assessment that the US and Israel would do everything they could to stop a fully developed program, like that of Osirak in 1981, it becomes much less possible to launch such a strike once nuclear capability is reached. This is where the disagreement comes into play. The nuclear threat of even a handful of low-yield bombs provides deterrent enough to insure against “regime change” better than any conventional military force could.

No doubt, we’re looking at super-asymmetry. The loss of Tokyo, Seoul, Tel Aviv, an aircraft carrier battle group, or a Marine Expeditionary Unit is enough to deter all but the must warranted aggression. Though Pyongyang or Tehran would be flattened during such an exchange, it is a threat that must be made real. There is as much reality behind these threats and assurances of mass destruction as there was during the MAD years of the Cold War. However ridiculous the logic may seem, it is the working logic nonetheless. As such, there is little reason to believe that Tehran or Pyongyang would really bargain away their best and only means of survival for paper promises.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Iraq North Korea North Korea nuclear WMD negotiations Stratfor

Options in Iraq

Hey guys: I wrote this one up tonight as a sample piece for UNF's student newspaper, The Spinnaker. It wasn't supposed to have my own ideas, just analisys. I think it's dry. I had to keep it around 400 words, so I never drew a final conclusion.

________________________

Though many lament that we are in Iraq at all facing the difficulties that we are, wisdom would urge us to make the best of the situation. Sun-Tsu argues that the only way to win on the battlefield is to know both yourself and the enemy. Bush wants Iraq to become stabilized enough for reconstruction to begin and Iraqi’s to feel say enough to have a pluralistic government, so that troops might return as quickly as possible. The enemy, and there are many, are seeking to keep reconstruction workers and money out, shake the ethnic and religious fault lines running through the country, all of which would lead to a hopefully “Vietnam-ize” Iraq and get America out.

To confront the challenges the multi-faced resistance is putting out, we must adjust our tactics to neutralize their strategy. Realizing that the current tactics are not working, Bush has finally begun opening doors to new options. There are two primary options on the table, each carrying their own distinctive advantages and disadvantages.

The option Bush favors most is the Afghanistan model, which has faced growing criticism of late. The plan involves retraining a large Iraqi police force in how to work in a pluralistic and open society capable of taking on the security needs of protecting Iraqi citizens and infrastructure. Doing this would allow us to withdraw troops from police duties and keep them relatively unseen from the Iraqi public but still stay strong enough to crush any organized threats inside and outside of the country. It would also allow Iraqi’s to feel “liberated” and self-governed and not invaded and occupied. The inherent disadvantage is that it will be prone to infiltration by collaborators to the resistance who wish to destroy the very infrastructure they are meant to be protecting, which likely helped by the Najaf bombers who killed al-Hakim and the UN bombers; it also seems to be coming quite a bit late in the game.

The second option Bush has begun considering is gathering more troops under the banner of the UN. India, Russia, and Turkey have all signaled that they might be willing to send in substantial numbers of infantry and money to Iraq, even to places within the “Sunni Triangle” to help pacify the nation and protect infrastructure. Multi-lateral military cooperation will only mean different foreigners patrolling Iraqi streets in different foreign tanks, which doesn’t resolve the humiliating issue of having foreign armies occupying your nation in the first place. Additionally, the diplomatic concessions that must be made behind closed doors before Security Council meetings might alone make the endeavor too costly.


Tags:Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Iraq

Why We Went to War

1) Weapons of Mass Destruction and Threat to Neighbors

The basis of the WMD threat argument was grounded in a belief that Saddam Hussein was insane. He was not. He was a calculating and manipulative man out for his own survival. He is the essence of Realpolitik and Machiavellianism. His invasion of Kuwait was based on a miscalculation that we helped feed to him. He felt he could do it consequence free, since the US Ambassador arguably told him that “border disputes” among Middle Eastern nations were none of America’s concern. Would he have done it again? Not likely. He was surrounded by US forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that, though relatively small, would have made short work out of an attacking Iraqi Army. The Saudi’s have also been stocking up on American weapons for decades. Hussein's military was in an advanced state of decay. Something like 2/3’s of all his military equipment was destroyed during the Gulf War and he had neither the money nor friends to resupply him in any serious way.

I do take as fact that he had chemical and some biological weapons, as well as a nuclear weapons program that was cut short at Menachum Begin’s order in 1981. However, I side with many former weapons inspectors when they say that chemical and biological weapons, especially low-grade 3rd World kinds, don’t have a very long shelf life. Both UN weapons inspectors and air strikes destroyed his means of production. This means the old stockpile went bad sometime in the mid to late nineties. This also explains the overwhelming evidence of WMD, but the lack of any substance. This sounds to me like the CIA equivalent of the last Mars Lander, where engineers forgot to convert over from the metric system.

Even if Saddam did have WMD, there is little serious belief that he would personally use them or share them with Theocrats/Islamicists. The reason being is twofold. First, if he used them himself it would become quickly obvious whose nuke went off by sampling the radioactive material, matching it up to which mine it came out of, and who sold whom what. The result is something just shy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), but rather just Assured Destruction. All of Baghdad and Tikrit would turn into a glass parking lot within a few days.

This same axiom also applies to Theocrats terrorist, but one can also add in the fact that Saddam, who is a Ba’athist (a secular Arab Nationalist party), is competing for power with the Theocrats. In Syria, rival Ba’athist Hafiz Assad has had his battles with the Muslim Brotherhood, incarnated as Hamas in the West Bank. In Iraq, Saddam has brutally repressed Shi’ite clerics and other Theocrats with aspirations for power. Politics is always local, and no matter how much bin Laden & Co hate America, they despise the House of Saud and the Nasserites (secular Arab nationalists) even more for corrupting their lands with Modernity and US troop presence.

2) Oil

What I have to say about oil was summed in a quote I hope I got right, “We didn’t go to Iraq to steal their oil. We went in to make sure it was pumping. We’re more than happy to pay for it.”

There’s a lot of wisdom in those words. We have leverage against OPEC, once the Resistance stops blowing up the damned pipelines.

3) Empire

A lot can be said about this. I’ll save most of it for another post. I think Empire had more to do with this war than almost any other aspect. I think of Empire in the neo-conservative way; spreading Western Civilization/Modernity, by force if necessary. I think this is where we’re going to encounter the most failure, because we’re not committed enough to Empire to do what it takes to really enforce it. A lot of what the Theocrats are rebelling against is the imposition of Modernity on their culture. All of us being victims of our perspective, we all deem our own culture as clearly the superior. Most Arabs, while discontent, are admirers of their own achievements, religion, and values and don’t quite care for the criticisms of the West. We have our own problems they don’t want that come with Liberalization – like crime and falling moral standards. I don’t imagine infidelity and shoplifting are quite the problems in Saudi Arabia that they are here.

Many liberals and neo-conservatives share a notion that if we only temp another Civilization with enough of the incentives of the West – individualism, capitalist culture, and other more worldly delights, or alternately compassion and family planning – that they will drop their silly ancient ways like a bad habit. Simply by exposing Iraq to the scents of consumerism and liberalism, the theory goes, we’ll have a domino effect in the region and it will be well on the way to Modernity by the end of the decade. Bad news: Ain’t gonna happen in our lifetime.

4) Image

This, to me, is second only to Empire. Bush sought to crush the image that most stems from our experience in Beirut, Mogadishu, and Vietnam. The rest of the world believes we are a paper tiger, imminently strong but unable to sustain casualties for causes in the Third World. Ultimately, they might be right. We withdrew from Somalia with less than 50 casualties and a big firefight. We withdrew from Lebanon because we didn’t know what was going on and got duped into taking sides, and ultimately almost 300 Marines paid the price in one blow.

Iraq was meant to demonstrate that we were prepared to drudge through a clouds of WMD, disrupt the trans-Atlantic alliance, flip the finger at the UN, and create a possible Theocratic/Anti-Western revolution in the Islamic world just to get one man. I’m still not sure Americans are prepared to accept the costs of war in treasure and lives. At heart, we’re isolationist – we’ve expanded and taken all of the Continent we want, so now it’s about protecting the Fatherland, I mean Homeland. I don’t think many Americans think GI’s dying in Iraq after Saddam ousting is doing much to protect American lives, no matter what the reality is.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Iraq WMD lies Ritter Scott Scot Ritter Bush War

The Marxist Case for Family Values

OK, I have talked about writing this one for a while. I have even delivered the lecture a few times, so hopefully I have made my case solid. This all came about while I was rereading the Communist Manifesto on the road this summer. Let me state, I am not a Communist. If for no other reason, I have taken a decidedly anti-revolutionary stance in politics. Though change is needed and oftentimes quickly, historical wisdom suggests that the slower the change comes the more lasting it is. In essence, every society and culture is going to have serious embedded flaws and needs to work at resolving those flaws: reinventing society and culture will only lead to a new system with different flaws with no historical memory of how to solve them. In other words, all of us know ways of coping with and eventually changing our current problems.

In America, we have the highest divorce rate of any country. Sexual activity generally begins in the teens, which has led to a substantial increase in teen pregnancy. Many of the nuclear families that are together are highly dysfunctional with all parties feeling alienated from one another. This is something both American Political parties have hit up on, both offering their own solutions. The Republicans seem bent on ignoring the situation fiscally. As if by banning giving a condom to sexually active 15 year olds is going to stop them. Many feel that Democrat’s have gone off the deep end at times with Sex Ed, in that it might create the impression that because the subject is being taught to a perceived sexually active group, those not in on the subject matter are likely to succumb to the conformity pressure seeming to emanate from the teachers pulpit. I tend to take the Democratic stance, only because I believe the problem is embedded in our Capitalist culture.

“How so, pinko,” you might ask me. We live in a culture of commodification in which nothing is sacred. Everything is a commodity and often spoken with the language of economics. In the Manifesto, Marx laments the state of the lawyers and doctors that such honorable professions have been dragged down to the level of hourly wage slaves. That complaint sounds odd to us, since we live in a time where we are all hourly wage slaves (or at least wishing we could get an hourly rate instead of a salary). I think that perhaps Marx meant that these professions now must succumb to commodification – instead of working for the well being of all, they work for the well being of the few who can now afford to pay the wage. Doctors, lawyers, and statesmen all work for the highest bidder.

The situation repeats itself in most aspects of society as well. Consumer choice is now an embedded right. Though it is considered sacrilege to criticize freedoms (and trust me, I’d rather live in that sort of society!), we apply this right to every aspect of our lives in the sense of a permanent transience. We feel bound to nothing. Religion, leadership, courtship, families, and friendships are bound to supply and demand as well as consumer choice. We feel bound to something only insofar as we need it, and even then we have a right in deciding how best to fulfill those needs.

Consider the language used in courtship: One is on the market, available. Single men and women dress like walking advertisements of themselves. In fact, a new fad in clothes stamps short expressions or words in block lettering across the chess or butt: “Princess”, “Flirt”, “Pay Attention to Me.” Kind of sounds like “Coke is it,” and “Refreshing,” no? Sense consumerism pervades the dating process – a 30-day free trial (plus setup fees), ought it not pervade a relationship if established? Many of the youngest among us look at it all in purely materialist – “Look, I got one too!” Unfortunately, that perception never fades with age for some. Even for the older and more “committed”, one always feels able to escape and get a different product once the cost of repairs exceeds the perceived cost of the item itself. There is no obligation. Kids hatched are like miles on a car – it breaks the car in, but it wears it out too. It also decreases the resale value of the car. Marriage is a contract – and like all contracts in Capitalist societies, it can be broken if one will pay the penalty (protective tariff?) the court assigns.

Less and less in this world is sacred and priceless. The natural human desire for expansion is becoming the moral. Capitalism, to me, is only a concept of how best to make money. It would be foolish to shrug off capitalism. As with all realist theories, one plays with fire when they let expansionist and self-serving mentalities slip into every other aspect of their life.

Jane Jacobs hits on this in “Systems of Survival”, going so far as to identify two “moral syndromes” that every modern day man must carry to morally cope with his world. The first is a commercial syndrome; the second is the guardian (government/protector) syndrome. Though she doesn’t quite approach it at the same angle I have, I believe the ultimate truth she has found is that the modern individual needs to be flexible (not soft) on their moral values depending on their situations. Her thesis worked more to rebut the growing idea that government needs to operate more like a business, but we can apply the same idea here too: Wall Street ethics and mentality ought not be applied in the bedroom or at the family dinner table.

Like all great liberal pundits, I offer no better alternative other than raising awareness of the issue. Bare in mind that I am not entirely trashing the mentality; take this more as an observation than a judgment. We Americans take our freedoms very seriously (when we know they’re being violated), and perhaps then it makes sense then that we have moved these freedoms into every aspect of our lives. Maybe the driving point of the Enlightenment and birth of Liberalism was the belief that nothing is sacred and free from personal choice. As with all progress, it comes with a trade-off. The trade-off we have made for these freedoms is security (as in job security, not airline security) and dignity. By subjecting one another to market forces and competition, things are apt to abruptly change and people removed from contact for better or for worse.

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events Gay Marriage Gay Marriage Marxist Family Values Family Values Conservative

The Iraqi Dilemma

History has not been kind to Western intervention in Islamic societies. The clash of Modernity with Tradition has often come to bloody stalemates. The forces of Modernity will always be more reluctant in use of force. It seems natural even that the Traditionalists would put up a tougher, bloodier fight than Western Liberalism has a taste for.

Did we forget Lebanon already? Somalia? No matter what the reality is, perception has and will be that of invader and conquered. We can dress it up as “liberator” and “liberated”, but it matters if locals do not see it that way. Therein lies both the problem and the solution. How do you get a conquered people to feel liberated?

You turn the power on. You spend more time helping people than pointing barrels at them. You keep water flowing. You rebuild hospitals and other civilian infrastructure that has decayed or been destroyed in the variable-speed 12-year war that has ravished the country. You withdraw the troops leaving the country on a short path to being a better place than it was before they came.

Unfortunately, the Iraqi resistance knows this. They have seized the negative momentum of destruction that was supposed to end when the last Iraqi tank was destroyed. The rampant looting following the fall of the Ba’athists helped them in their course. They want us out and they know the formula: high casualties, high costs, and public feelings of hopelessness in American and in Iraq.

So they have picked off US soldiers in a sustainable low quantity – just enough to keep on page two of most newspapers and in the back of American minds. They have help keep the utilities off in most of Iraq, enough to stay in the editorials of Arab newspapers. They have blown up the Jordanian embassy, UN mission, and northern oil pipeline to grab the headlines of newspapers around the world. They intend to keep reconstruction money out of and natural resources inside of Iraq by blocking oil sales that would bring much needed fiscal relief. They intend to promote hostility between Americans and Iraqi’s by keeping young G.I.’s edgy and trigger-happy when around the Iraqi public, creating further alienation.

Stating the obvious, the momentum must turn in favor of progress if Bush is to win his “splendid little war.” How to get there is another question. Bush seems to be on the right track by training Iraqi police. They are better suited than Americans to the do the police operations desperately needed inside of Iraq. Of course, they need re-education in how to deal with the population in a Western Liberal way, disguised with Arab tongue and culture.

Two dilemmas spring from that are: Where are the supplements to take the place of the tens of thousands of Iraqi police while they are being re-educated in Poland? While there will undoubtedly will be a need for them in the future, there is nonetheless a necessity for them now. The second dilemma stems from the mission itself and is much deeper and harder to address. How do you re-educate the entire society? Let us not fool ourselves by pretending that this was about weapons of mass destruction or Saddam’s human rights abuses. This is Empire at work. This is the full induction of what was once the most Modern country in the Arab world into the Western Liberal tradition. Iraq was always meant to be the post-War Japan of the Middle East, a beacon and a “roadmap” of what a Westernized economy and popular culture can do for a country in an otherwise violently xenophobic arena. It seems now that just because you dangle a hook with our cultural and economic bait does not dictate that the world’s citizens will always bite.

I don’t know what more Bush can do other than what he already seems bent on doing: leaving Iraq, like Afghanistan, after a symbolic Western gesture of elections – free, fair, or otherwise. Perhaps the isolationist instincts of America are not without logical foundations: Empire does not work within the neo-Western values we embrace. Perhaps we cannot have a successful Iraq because we cannot stoop to the level of the Iraqi resistance without undermining our own cause. Despite his calls for vigilance, I think Bush really means to say patience. It will all be over soon, and Iraq will recede, like Afghanistan, into the abyss’s of our newspapers and minds.

Tags: Treyopia Iraq Spinnaker Current Events Exit Strategy Exit Strategy Bush War

Sharon's Wall

As with everything in international politics, there are never perfect answers. It is easy to spot horrible ideas, but even the best of ideas tend to sink when one weighs all the variables and possible outcomes of an action. Oftentimes, then, leaders must make the least worst decision. This makes it easy to criticize every foreign policy decision, which is why foreign policy editorials tend to very negative, unless written by loyalist to the decision maker. But here I must defer.

I must admit I have no loyalty to Israel’s Prime Minister Arial Sharon. Though the man may display deftness in an M60 tank battling it out with Egyptians on the Sinai, I feel his agenda towards terrorism is self-destructive. He has devoted all of his resources towards battling the symptoms of terrorism (the bombings/bombers themselves), while neglecting and worsening the roots of terrorism (the humiliation of occupation, economy, and views towards Israel). There is a policy he is pursuing that I wholeheartedly agree with and it seems the rest of the world – left, right, and center - is against. Mr. Sharon is building himself a wall following roughly the pre-1967 war borders. He intends to cut non-citizen Palestinians out of Israel for good, thereby ceasing suicide bombings and other horrors that Israeli civilians endure.

Palestinians object because they cannot negotiate the wall’s location – Sharon holds all those cards. Many Peace Now types tend to be mortified at the thought of another Iron Curtain. They believe it will remove all hope of reconciliation and the possibility of a peaceful negotiated end to the situation. They understand that the Palestinian and Israeli economies are interwoven, and that the rise of a wall would permanently cut tens of thousand Palestinians off from their Israeli jobs. Some even point out that if one were to enforce that type of solution, it would create two Palestinian entities that cannot be connected through Israel. However, they also disregard that to fix that problem, one would have to slice Israel in half then…

Conservatives and other hardliners oppose the wall because they realize what it will do – not only would it keep the Palestinians out of Israel, but also it would eventually keep Israel out of the of the West Bank. Land, they feel, is rightly theirs. Some feel it is rightly theirs because of conquest – just Arabs would have held on to any land they acquired at the end of hostilities. Others, Christian and Jew alike, view this as an eternal battle as old as the Bible itself and to step in the direction of partitioning the land would be a sin. Many Jews and Christians alike believe that only until the State of Israel fully exercises dominion over the Holy Lands will the Messiah come (again, for the Christians).

Both sides play to the strong emotions of this political arena and ignore the realities. The reality of the situation is that Israel can no longer occupy the West Bank and Gaza. The price of suicide bombings is too great. Even when the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) close up the roads in and out, the bombings go unabated. The civilians of Israel need security, and they have not gotten it under the belligerence of Likud or the relative peace of Labor. The reality is that there are groups, on both sides, that will do anything in their power to stop the peace process.

To use Thomas Friedman’s terminology, Israel and the Palestinians need a divorce. They simply cannot live together. One can go on for hours pointing fingers, throwing the blame. That does not diminish the reality that Sharon finally understands, which is that the IDF cannot continue holding the West Bank. The wall is a first step towards a true two-state solution. It will both end, or severely diminish the suicide bombings and alas, end the humiliating 36-year occupation of Palestinian land. This solution will inevitably cause both pain and protest, but I would be inclined to think it able to stand the test of history.

Tags: Treyopia Sharon Israel Israel-Palestine Intifada CurrentEvents Spinnaker