Hitchens Still Faithful to Neo-Con Movement

Christopher Hitchens doesn't regret being a leading media proponent of the Iraq invasion and subsequent insurgency quagmire. Today in Slate Magazine he writes that the Iranian democratic uprising may have gotten a jumpstart from the US invasion next door.

Which brings me to a question that I think deserves to be asked: Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about "the liberation of Iraq," he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread.

The theory is not a slam dunk and even if it is: Sorry if I'm not that impressed on this angle as a selling point. The thousands of lives and trillions of dollars wasted don't seem worth it to me. Nowhere is it written in the US Constitution about the obligation to stabilize the governments of Iran, Iraq or Outer Mongolia.

Things I Didn't Know About Iran

Some interesting articles have popped up in the wake of the Iranian Uprising. Here are a few shocking things, I never would have thought about Iran:

David Frum:

The collapsing economy has exacerbated Iran's already horrific social problems. Iran is home to some two million narcotics users. Despite (or perhaps because of ) the regime's repressive sexual attitudes, prostitution flourishes: An estimated 85,000 prostitutes work in Tehran alone. Last year the head of Iran's anti-vice police force was arrested cavorting with six naked prostitutes in a Tehran brothel. It's generally estimated that Iran is home to 80,000 cases of HIV/AIDS -- three-quarters of these cases traceable to intravenous drug use.

Anne Applebaum:

Since 2006, the "One Million Signatures Campaign" has been circulating a petition, both online and in print, calling for an end to laws that discriminate against women: for equal rights for women in marriage, equal rights to divorce, equal inheritance rights, equal testimony rights for men and women in court. Though based outside the country, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, founded by a pair of sisters, translates and publishes fundamental human rights documents online; it also maintains an online database containing names of thousands of victims of the Islamic republic. In the last decade, Iranian women have participated in student strikes as well as teacher strikes and in organizations of Bahai, Christian, and other religious groups deemed "heretics" by the regime.

Junkies, hookers and women's rights protests. Not as pious, and conservatively Islamic as I had assumed.

Popular Uprising in Iran Leads to Results

UK Times Online: Tens of thousands defy ban to march in Tehran in support of Mousavi

Tens of thousands of Iranian opposition activists have taken to the streets of Iran for a third day protesting against the disputed presidential election, defying a ban by the Interior Ministry.

Chanting crowds wearing green campaign colours greeted Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated candidate in Friday's disputed presidential elections, as he slowly moved through the streets on the back of a four-wheel drive car.

"Mousavi we support you! We will die but retrieve our votes!" shouted the crowds of thousands, young and old, who packed his route.

...

New York Times: Khamenei Calls for Vote Inquiry Amid Calls for Calm

Mr. Moussavi met with the supreme leader on Sunday night, several news agencies quoted state television as reporting. Ayatollah Khamenei then asked that the powerful Guardian Council “precisely examine” Mr. Moussavi’s charges of irregularities, state media said.

The council will make its findings known in 10 days, according to the state media reports.

The ayatollah’s call appeared to be a shift in his position. Earlier, Mr. Khamenei had said the vote, which gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an overwhelming victory, had been fair.

...

Slate Magazine: Events in Iran prove that even a little bit of democracy is a powerful thing.

Yes, this was a highly managed, deeply illiberal election, and it didn't even change the composition of the Iranian government: After all that, Ahmadinejad is still president. But the voting process did open a crack where none had existed before, the possibility of choice did inspire what had seemed to be a passive society to protest, and the campaign rallies allowed people to shout political slogans in front of the police without the police reacting. One could argue—and many Iranians do—that the poll was farcical. But Iran goes to show that a bad election is better than none at all.

What comes next? As I write, the Internet rumor mill says that Mousavi is under arrest. By next week, he may be president—or he may be in prison. But that, too, is the point: The impact of democracy—even halfway, tentative, incomplete democracy—is unpredictable. Which is, of course, why dictators try to control it in the first place.

Novel Idea from the European Right: Budget Sanity

Anne Applebaum goes to Europe and sees it tilting to the right. For economic reasons:

For the record, Ferguson is, at least by origin, a British Tory. For the record, there aren't any U.S. Republican polemicists making the same arguments in quite as public a way. With a few exceptions, the American center-right's loudest and most articulate voices have been focused almost exclusively on national security for the better part of the last decade. Lip service was paid to "small government" and "reduced spending" while successive Republican Congresses, hand in hand with a Republican White House, enlarged government and spent like crazy. How can they now criticize Obama's possibly lethal budget deficits when their own were so vast, so recently?

None of this is to say that any of Europe's conservatives would necessarily go down well in the United States. (Picture Silvio Berlusconi, paparazzi and alleged teenage mistresses in tow, campaigning in Mississippi.) It's also true that they don't necessarily have much in common: Allegedly, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy can hardly stand to be in the same room at the same time. But if nothing else, the success of the European center-right during the current crisis proves that there is something to their political formula. They are fiscally conservative. They are, if not socially liberal, then at least socially centrist. They haven't been swayed by the fashion for big spending. They are trying to keep some semblance of budget sanity. And, at least at the moment, they win elections.

It's not rocket science is it?

Poseur Alert

Be prepared when a written piece on pop music is titled: Cultural Sorbet

Random sentence: Waits acted as a palate cleanser, allowing them to care about new sounds once more.

As I've written before: What's with pretentious Tom Waits' fans?

Er, Good News: Support for bin Laden down to 34% from 50% in Pakistan

Fred Kaplan has a blunt article on the Afghanistan-Pakistan puzzle in Slate:

In short, we can send Pakistanis money, arms, handbooks, and the like. But we can't make them do what they say they're going to do or even effectively monitor whether they're doing it. Bush sent $10 billion to then-President Pervez Musharraf, who pledged that he would use the aid to go after the terrorists. For the most part, he didn't.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani military has little desire to improve its counterinsurgency skills. Many officers are more loyal to the Taliban than to the central government. And though the army is beginning to crack down on Taliban fighters in the Swat and Buner districts, it is still the case that 80 percent or 90 percent of Pakistani troops are stationed on the border with India, which most officers still see as the country's greatest threat. This perception is no mere idiosyncrasy; it is integral to the Pakistani worldview, dating back to the founding of the nation and the partition from India in 1947. It has been reinforced by three wars between the two nations, in '47, '65, and '71, as well as a war or two that nearly broke out in the past decade, and has been hammered home further by the fact that both counties have nuclear weapons.

Maybe this time the Pakistani military is really getting serious. Certainly the population is less enamored of Islamist terrorists than it used to be. Those who say they support suicide bombing under certain circumstances has plummeted from 40 percent in 2004 to just 5 percent in 2008, according to a Pew survey released this past March. (Then again, 34 percent of Pakistanis still say they have confidence in Osama bin Laden, down from 50 percent.)

I like how Kaplan throws out the bin Laden poll way down in the article. 34% is no tiny minority of extremists. The Taliban are much more popular than the Americans. There's no way to change it, but the Americans keep playing pretend and sending money. It's impossible that this will end well. Impossible.

Hitchens: Disgrace and Incompetence at the CIA

I've been waiting to see what Christopher Hitchens was going to say about the torture memos. He comes out punching in Slate.

Here is a seldom-mentioned reason why the CIA might go crazy in this way, to the point where even the FBI and other agencies were cripplingly (for us) reluctant to cooperate with it. On 9/11, according to Bob Woodward, George Tenet audibly hoped that the suicide-murderers of al-Qaida were not connected to the shady-looking pupils at those flight schools in the Midwest. The schools, that is to say, about which only the CIA knew! In other words, and not for the first time, the CIA (which disbelieved the evidence of Saddam's plan to attack Kuwait in 1990 and continually excused him as a "secularist") had left us defenseless and ignorant. Unprofessional and hysterical methods of interrogation, therefore, were unleashed in part to overcompensate for—and to cover up—a general lack of professionalism at every level of the agency from the top down. The case for closing and padlocking Langley and starting all over again with an attempt at a serious national intelligence body becomes more persuasive by the day.

(...)

... But if this emergency rule-bending is then institutionalized, and kept a secret from Congress and the courts and the voters, and becomes a regular bureaucratic practice known only to an unelected and unaccountable few, then you have created a secret state within the state and are well on the road to becoming a banana republic. The next stage, very often, is that certain inconveniently damaged secret prisoners have to be made to "disappear," as in the death-squad regimes of Latin America in the days when the CIA ruled that roost as well. I am very much afraid that this will be the next awful disclosure we read about.

Definitely read the whole thing. I think Hitchens had the one of the most salient point after 9-11: Why wasn't anybody in the intelligence community fired? Reading this now in 2009, the situation has festered to a point where the country has almost lost control of the CIA by the democratic government. How many more disgraces are to come?

On Obama Firing the GM CEO

Mickey Kaus makes a great point at his blog at Slate today:

Rick Wagoner = Ngo Dinh Diem? Discuss. After visibly defenstrating GM CEO RIck Wagoner, and moving to replace the board of directors, won't Obama now "own" the GM problem? If the company shuts down in the near future, costing tens of thousands of blue collar jobs, it will be under executives implicitly or explicitly chosen by Obama. It will be Obama's failure, not simply GM's failure, no?

This marks my first "Mickey Kaus" post. About five years ago, Kaus was probably the most cited blogger. I guess one post doesn't entitle me to call him "The Mickster" or simply "Mickey." Maybe in a few years I'll have the confidence to make the same post, but make it one line:

Wagoner = Diem? Mickey here. or

Obama firing GM CEO a good idea? Not according to the Mickster.

Fatuous "Reset Button" Diplomacy

I had recently posted on Hillary Clinton's ridiculous "rest button" stunt with a top Russian diplomat.

Anne Applebaum goes beyond the stunt itself, and writes about the new thinking in diplomacy under Clinton for the Obama administration. They're going to have to think a little harder.

Nor is this true of Russia alone. Any president can legitimately call for a fresh start in his relations with the world, and none more so than the current American president, who replaces an unpopular predecessor. Sooner or later, however, Obama will also have to make difficult decisions about regimes that oppose U.S. policy for reasons deeper than dislike of George W. Bush. If Russia persists in its occupation of Georgia, do we accept that situation? If Russia uses its energy policy to blackmail Europe, do we go along with that, too?

The rest of the world is no different. It's a fine thing to open diplomatic relations with Iran or Syria—I've always thought it extremely stupid that we have no embassy, and thus no resident intelligence officer, in Tehran—as long as we remember that talking is not a solution: Sometimes more "dialogue" reveals deeper differences. It's also a fine thing for the president to issue greetings on the occasion of the Persian new year, but that might not dampen the popularity of Iran's nuclear program among both adherents and opponents of its current government. What then?

I do realize that these are early days. The traditional, deadly struggle for influence between the State Department and the National Security Council is only just getting under way, and the president has other things on his mind. But the gift of a "reset button," however translated, was not a good beginning. If this administration thinks it can transform America's relationships with Russia or anyone else with the flick of a switch and a change of rhetoric, then it is living in a virtual reality, not a real one.

Do you get the sinking feeling that Obama and Hillary don't know what the hell they're doing? (We already knew that about Joe Biden.) We've grown so used to hearing how intelligent they are, but when it comes to foreign policy they don't seem to have any street smarts or sense.

Foreign Intervention Fatigue

Christopher Hitchens has an article in Slate about Pakistan's surrender of the province of Swat to the Taliban.

However, one should be careful of the seductions of this compromise. In a wishful attempt to bring peace with the Taliban in Pakistan itself, the government has recently ceded a fertile and prosperous and modernized valley province—the former princedom of Swat—to the ultraviolent votaries of the one party and the one God. This is not some desolate tribal area where government and frontier have been poorly delineated for decades, as in Waziristan. It is a short commute from the capital city of Islamabad. The Taliban have never won an election in the area; indeed, the last vote went exactly the other way. And refugees are pouring out of Swat as the fundamentalists take hold and begin their campaign of cultural and economic obliteration: no music, no schooling for females, no recognition of the writ of the central government.

(...)

There is another symbiosis between state failure of that kind and the spread of deadly violence. A state or region taken over by jihadists will not last long before declining into extreme poverty and backwardness and savagery. There are no exceptions to this rule. We do not need to demonstrate again what happens to countries where vicious fantasists try to govern illiterates with the help of only one book. And who will be blamed for the failure? There will not, let me assure you, be a self-criticism session mounted by the responsible mullahs. Instead, all ills will be blamed on the Crusader-Zionist conspiracy, and young men with deficiency diseases and learning disabilities will be taught how to export their frustrations to happier lands. Thus does the failed state become the rogue state. This is why we have a duty of solidarity with all the secular forces, women's groups, and other constituencies who don't want this to happen to their societies or to ours.

By all means, let field commanders make tactical agreements with discrepant groups, play them off against one another, employ the methods of divide and rule, and pit the bad against the worst. C'est la guerre. But under no circumstances should a monopoly of violence be ceded to totalitarian or theocratic forces. For this and for other reasons, we shall long have cause to regret the shameful decision to deliver the good people of the Swat Valley bound and gagged into the hands of the Taliban, and—worst of all—without even a struggle.

Note the parts that I bolded from Hitchens' article. I get tired of hearing that we have duties in places like "Swat." Six months ago, I had never heard of the place, so I don't think it's my duty to pick sides in their civil war. Wouldn't it be arrogant of me to assume such a position?

What can we do about it, anyway? Nobody wants or is prepared for a US led intervention into Pakistan. The army in Pakistan have been sitting on their hands when it comes to combating insurgents. There's no doubt, much sympathy, and outright support of the Taliban inside of the force.

If the Jihad side has that much support, maybe it is unstoppable in Pakistan. Hitchens makes a case that a failed state or a jihadist state will mean future terrorist attacks on us, over here. Maybe so. But right now, call me naive, isolation from the part of the world seems like the better course. Get out of there and let them drag themselves down, instead of us with it.

The bottom line is that nobody knows what to do with Pakistan. The western countries are broke and spread thin. A pullback from the region seems inevitable. Perhaps a quarantine of the region is necessary. Maybe we shouldn't allow Pakistanis or Afghans to be able to freely board a flight to Canada or the US, and thus stop importing their problems. Maybe a more defensive posture is the key to combating terrorist attacks on us.

We should think of new ideas because the neo-con method of attacking countries and imposing our will on them, don't seem to be doing anything to stop or even slow the growth of jihadism.

Another Foreign Intervention Friday

Public opinion, and even the Obama administration itself are facing up to the fact that Afghanistan is an unwinnable situation. They are going to attempt a "surge" with more troops but admit that ultimately they want to train and hand it over to the Afghan army and get the hell out of there. The "surge" is to mow the lawn, and use the weed-whacker on those hard to get places. Make this effort one more time and get out while there is still order.

What about the people still serving over there? No doubt, people will lose their lives. Why? For a stalling tactic before inevitable withdrawal? Hardly a noble cause. Fred Kaplan in Slate Magazine gave his report on the situation.

Unlike those who got us into Vietnam, today's top officials—including President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates—at least see the specter. Both have emphasized that their goals in Afghanistan are limited; daydreams of turning the place into a democratic republic—"some central Asian Valhalla," as Gates snorted in recent hearings—are over. Gates further stated at those hearings, before the Senate armed services committee, that he would endorse his commanders' request for three additional brigades—but that he'd be "deeply skeptical" of subsequent requests for more. The fighting needs to be done mainly by Afghan troops, he said, adding that if the Afghan people begin to see it as an American war, "we will go the way of other imperial occupiers."

Isn't this immoral? If they know it's a lost cause they should begin immediate withdrawal.

Richard Nixon hummed and hawed on a lost cause in Vietnam when he took office in 1969. He could have ended it quickly rightly saying it was not a war he started and popular opinion favours pulling out. Instead, it took him five years and almost 25,000 US troop deaths and billions of dollars before leaving the war to the South Vietnamese in 1973. The country ended up being lost within a little more than a year, with the famous helicopters on the roof of the US Embassy, panic evacuation in 1975. (I honestly think I remember this footage when I was five years old, but maybe I've seen too many documentaries.)

I cringe to think Obama intends to send an additional 30,000 troops and ramping up the effort in a lost cause. As Yogi Berra would say: It's deja vu all over again.

The Awfulness of Billy Joel

Ron Rosenbaum has a laugh out loud column on his contempt for Billy Joel, in Slate Magazine. (Sure, it's been done before, people have been ripping Joel since my childhood, but this one is worth the time.)

"It's Still Rock and Roll to Me."'

It shows how completely, totally clueless Billy Joel is. It suggests he wrote it because he thought people regarded him as an outmoded relic because he doesn't wear the right hip-signifier clothes. That it's a matter of his wide ties vs. New Wave skinny ties, that it's because his car doesn't have white-wall tires or because he doesn't dress "like a Beau Brummell" or hang out with the right crowd or look like Elvis Costello.

He thinks people can't stand him because he dresses wrong or doesn't look right.

Billy Joel, they can't stand you because of your music; because of your stupid, smug attitude; because of the way you ripped off your betters to produce music that rarely reaches the level even of mediocrity. You could dress completely au courant and people would still loathe your lame lyrics.

It's not that they dislike anything exterior about you. They dislike you because of who you really are inside. They dislike you for being you. At a certain point, consistent, aggressive badness justifies profound hostility. They hate you just the way you are.

Dispatch From Pakistan

Vanessa M. Gezari visits Peshawar in Pakistan and reports on the bleak situation for Slate Magazine:

"I don't see this as a problem of the province, of the frontier, of Pakistan," Khan said. "I see it as a very, very serious international problem."
....

"I want the West to know what we are in and to sound a bell of warning, because I have been telling everyone that this is not going to stop here," Khan said. "It will grow into the rest of Pakistan if it's not stopped here."

The reporter visits the city markets where all kinds of looted NATO goods are for sale.

The attacks on NATO supply convoys have other consequences for Khan and his police. The containers aren't just being burned, Khan said; some are being raided by militants and thieves. In the markets of Peshawar, anyone can buy military uniforms, helmets, night-vision goggles, and high-tech weapon scopes, he said. He himself had bought 500 or 600 pairs of U.S. military boots, at $30 a pair, for use by his traffic police. (He had considered buying bulletproof vests, too, but they weren't the right grade for the weaponry his men faced.)

The US and NATO troops cannot properly fight the Afghan War with this overwhelming problem with its "ally" Pakistan. It's been a sore spot from the start and eight years later it has gotten worse not better. Short of invading outright, there isn't a real solution.

Fighting an Insurgency

I don't envy Obama in trying to figure out what's best for the Afghanistan campaign. (Among many other problems of course.) We've been dug in there for seven years. It's impossible to declare a clear victory. Fred Kaplan takes a look at some of the issues as it stands now in Slate magazine:

The biggest problem is that the country's fate ultimately lies outside its borders. As long as Pakistan's northwest territories remain a lawless free-for-all, with Taliban and al-Qaida fighters crossing the border at will, Afghanistan will never be stable. And as long as Pakistan faces a threat from India to the east, its leaders will never deploy enough troops to quash the insurgents in the northwest territories.

In short, we could do everything perfectly in Afghanistan, but it wouldn't matter unless the region-wide conflicts could be brought under some control.

Again, the good news is that all the relevant players—President-elect Obama, Adm. Mullen, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Gen. David Petraeus, and their top aides—understand this. But knowing the dimensions of a problem is only the first step to solving it. And each one of this problem's aspects—countering the insurgency in Afghanistan, stabilizing Pakistan, and calming tensions between Pakistan and India—is very difficult.

...

But three caveats are worth noting. First, as Dexter Filkins reports in his excellent book "The Forever War", Afghan militias are notorious opportunists; they switch sides at the slightest shift—in who's winning or who's paying more—or sometimes just at whim. They might be won over, but maybe not for long.

...

One possible way to short-circuit this cycle is to demonstrate a few quick and easy successes. For instance, rush a flood of troops to a town that is not under grave threat from the Taliban at the moment and provide it with lots of services—roads, electricity, food, whatever aid is needed. At the same time, rush another flood of troops to an area of marginal Taliban control and crush them. And do all this without killing any civilians.

Kaplan does a great job of describing that there are many intelligent solutions for fighting this battle, but the bottom line is that it might not be worth it. Read the last paragraph I cited from the article above. What a dog's breakfast. You spend most of your time doing a song and dance for the whimsical locals, hoping they will like you. You try not to kill civilians but you are fighting guerrillas who look like them.

Do I have a solution to offer? Pull out. You can try to make it look better, by slowly withdrawing or making flimsy "peace with honor" pledges, but that just prolongs the inevitable. Take a hit to the pride. As Marcellus Wallace says: "...that's pride fuckin' wit ya. Fuck pride! Pride only hurts, it never helps."

Sometimes you just have to admit that the situation is has run its course. Good old American know-how cannot prevail over every circumstance.

UPDATE: Putting lives on the line so every bigamist war lord can get their Viagra.

Stuffing Money Under the Mattress

Anne Applebaum has an article in Slate about how schemes like the Madoff fraud will erode trust and make doing business much more difficult. (here)

Worst of all, everyone who invests anywhere will think just that much harder, take that much longer, demand that much more documentation. And they will do so not only because of Madoff, but because of the subprime lenders, Wall Street investment banks, and Enron fraudsters who have worked so hard to erode our faith in the reliability of our system.

...

Madoff's pyramid scheme, far broader than anything MMM dreamed up, was made possible by our own tradition of lawfulness. And now he will help bring that tradition down. Here's a prediction: In the coming years, American capitalism will become slower, more cautious, less productive, and less entrepreneurial. We're still a long way from Eastern Europe of the 1990s or from the Latin America or Russia of the present. But maybe not as far as we think.

Who can you trust these days with your money? Is burying gold in your backyard the soundest investment strategy?

On a related note: It's troubling to me that the government of Canada sold off virtually all of its gold holdings. Is our entire Treasury based on questionable paper?

Hitchens: 'Tis the Season to be Incredulous

Fed up at this time of year? Christopher Hitchens voices his distain for Christmas, in Slate today: (article)

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer. It becomes more than usually odious to switch on the radio and the television, because certain officially determined "themes" have been programmed into the system. Most objectionable of all, the fanatics force your children to observe the Dear Leader's birthday, and so (this being the especial hallmark of the totalitarian state) you cannot bar your own private door to the hectoring, incessant noise, but must have it literally brought home to you by your offspring.

...

Imagine that conclusive archaeological and textual evidence emerged to prove that the whole story of the birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth was either a delusion or a fabrication? Suppose the mother had admitted shyly that, in fact, she had fallen pregnant for predictable reasons? Suppose we found the post-Calvary body?

Serious Christians, of the sort I have been debating lately, would have no choice but to consider such news as absolutely calamitous.

Having Difficulty Tracking All the Bailouts?

You can use this excellent interactive guide from Slate Magazine. (Here)

It is staggering how much they are spending. Now all we need is a clear guide for how it is all going to be paid for. It's amazing to me that this whole crisis was brought on because Americans were racking up ridiculous mortgages, credit card, and personal loan debt. Now the solution is merely shifting this unmanageable debt to the government. It will not bode well for the future. You have to start paying the bills at some point.