Mexico

A few months old but fascinating nonetheless.

Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State?
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report
May 13, 2008
By George Friedman

Edgar Millan Gomez was shot dead in his own home in Mexico City on May 8. Millan Gomez was the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in Mexico, responsible for overseeing most of Mexico’s counternarcotics efforts. He orchestrated the January arrest of one of the leaders of the Sinaloa cartel, Alfredo Beltran Leyva. (Several Sinaloa members have been arrested in Mexico City since the beginning of the year.) The week before, Roberto Velasco Bravo died when he was shot in the head at close range by two armed men near his home in Mexico City. He was the director of organized criminal investigations in a tactical analysis unit of the federal police. The Mexican government believes the Sinaloa drug cartel ordered the assassinations of Velasco Bravo and Millan Gomez. Combined with the assassination of other federal police officials in Mexico City, we now see a pattern of intensifying warfare in Mexico City.

The fighting also extended to the killing of the son of the Sinaloa cartel leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, who was killed outside a shopping center in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state. Also killed was the son of reputed top Sinaloa money launderer Blanca Margarita Cazares Salazar in an attack carried out by 40 gunmen. According to sources, Los Zetas, the enforcement arm of the rival Gulf cartel, carried out the attack. Reports also indicate a split between Sinaloa and a resurgent Juarez cartel, which also could have been behind the Millan Gomez killing.

SPIRALING VIOLENCE

Violence along the U.S.-Mexican border has been intensifying for several years, and there have been attacks in Mexico City. But last week was noteworthy not so much for the body count, but for the type of people being killed. Very senior government police officials in Mexico City were killed along with senior Sinaloa cartel operatives in Sinaloa state. In other words, the killings are extending from low-level operatives to higher-ranking ones, and the attacks are reaching into enemy territory, so to speak. Mexican government officials are being killed in Mexico City, Sinaloan operatives in Sinaloa. The conflict is becoming more intense and placing senior officials at risk.

The killings pose a strategic problem for the Mexican government. The bulk of its effective troops are deployed along the U.S. border, attempting to suppress violence and smuggling among the grunts along the border, as well as the well-known smuggling routes elsewhere in the country. The attacks in Mexico raise the question of whether forces should be shifted from these assignments to Mexico City to protect officials and break up the infrastructure of the Sinaloa and other cartels there. The government also faces the secondary task of suppressing violence between cartels. The Sinaloa cartel struck in Mexico City not only to kill troublesome officials and intimidate others, but also to pose a problem for the Mexican government by increasing areas requiring forces, thereby requiring the government to consider splitting its forces — thus reducing the government presence along the border. It was a strategically smart move by Sinaloa, but no one has accused the cartels of being stupid.

Mexico now faces a classic problem. Multiple, well-armed organized groups have emerged. They are fighting among themselves while simultaneously fighting the government. The groups are fueled by vast amounts of money earned via drug smuggling to the United States. The amount of money involved — estimated at some $40 billion a year — is sufficient to increase tension between these criminal groups and give them the resources to conduct wars against each other. It also provides them with resources to bribe and intimidate government officials. The resources they deploy in some ways are superior to the resources the government employs.

Given the amount of money they have, the organized criminal groups can be very effective in bribing government officials at all levels, from squad leaders patrolling the border to high-ranking state and federal officials. Given the resources they have, they can reach out and kill government officials at all levels as well. Government officials are human; and faced with the carrot of bribes and the stick of death, even the most incorruptible is going to be cautious in executing operations against the cartels.

TOWARD A FAILED STATE?

There comes a moment when the imbalance in resources reverses the relationship between government and cartels. Government officials, seeing the futility of resistance, effectively become tools of the cartels. Since there are multiple cartels, the area of competition ceases to be solely the border towns, shifting to the corridors of power in Mexico City. Government officials begin giving their primary loyalty not to the government but to one of the cartels. The government thus becomes both an arena for competition among the cartels and an instrument used by one cartel against another. That is the prescription for what is called a “failed state” — a state that no longer can function as a state. Lebanon in the 1980s is one such example.

There are examples in American history as well. Chicago in the 1920s was overwhelmed by a similar process. Smuggling alcohol created huge pools of money on the U.S. side of the border, controlled by criminals both by definition (bootlegging was illegal) and by inclination (people who engage in one sort of illegality are prepared to be criminals, more broadly understood). The smuggling laws gave these criminals huge amounts of power, which they used to intimidate and effectively absorb the city government. Facing a choice between being killed or being enriched, city officials chose the latter. City government shifted from controlling the criminals to being an arm of criminal power. In the meantime, various criminal gangs competed with each other for power.

Chicago had a failed city government. The resources available to the Chicago gangs were limited, however, and it was not possible for them to carry out the same function in Washington. Ultimately, Washington deployed resources in Chicago and destroyed one of the main gangs. But if Al Capone had been able to carry out the same operation in Washington as he did in Chicago, the United States could have become a failed state.

It is important to point out that we are not speaking here of corruption, which exists in all governments everywhere. Instead, we are talking about a systematic breakdown of the state, in which government is not simply influenced by criminals, but becomes an instrument of criminals — either simply an arena for battling among groups or under the control of a particular group. The state no longer can carry out its primary function of imposing peace, and it becomes helpless, or itself a direct perpetrator of crime. Corruption has been seen in Washington — some triggered by organized crime, but never state failure.

The Mexican state has not yet failed. If the activities of the last week have become a pattern, however, we must begin thinking about the potential for state failure. The killing of Millan Gomez transmitted a critical message: No one is safe, no matter how high his rank or how well protected, if he works against cartel interests. The killing of El Chapo’s son transmitted the message that no one in the leading cartel is safe from competing gangs, no matter how high his rank or how well protected.

The killing of senior state police officials causes other officials to recalculate their attitudes. The state is no longer seen as a competent protector, and being a state official is seen as a liability — potentially a fatal liability — unless protection is sought from a cartel, a protection that can be very lucrative indeed for the protector. The killing of senior cartel members intensifies conflict among cartels, making it even more difficult for the government to control the situation and intensifying the movement toward failure.

It is important to remember that Mexico has a tradition of failed governments, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century. In those periods, Mexico City became an arena for struggle among army officers and regional groups straddling the line between criminal and political. The Mexican army became an instrument in this struggle and its control a prize. The one thing missing was the vast amounts of money at stake. So there is a tradition of state failure in Mexico, and there are higher stakes today than before.

THE DRUG TRADE’S HIGH STAKES

To benchmark the amount at stake, assume that the total amount of drug trafficking is $40 billion, a frequently used figure, but hardly an exact one by any means. In 2007, Mexico exported about $210 billion worth of goods to the United States and imported about $136 billion from the United States. If the drug trade is $40 billion dollars, it represents almost 20 percent of all exports to the United States. That in itself is huge, but what makes it more important is that while the $210 billion is divided among many businesses and individuals, the $40 billion is concentrated in the hands of a few, fairly tightly controlled cartels. Sinaloa and Gulf, currently the strongest, have vast resources at their disposal; a substantial part of the economy can be controlled through this money. This creates tremendous instability as other cartels vie for the top spot, with the state lacking the resources to control the situation and having its officials seduced and intimidated by the cartels.

We have seen failed states elsewhere. Colombia in the 1980s failed over the same issue — drug money. Lebanon failed in the 1970s and 1980s. The Democratic Republic of the Congo was a failed state.

Mexico’s potential failure is important for three reasons. First, Mexico is a huge country, with a population of more than 100 million. Second, it has a large economy — the 14th-largest in the world. And third, it shares an extended border with the world’s only global power, one that has assumed for most of the 20th century that its domination of North America and control of its borders is a foregone conclusion. If Mexico fails, there are serious geopolitical repercussions. This is not simply a criminal matter.

The amount of money accumulated in Mexico derives from smuggling operations in the United States. Drugs go one way, money another. But all the money doesn’t have to return to Mexico or to third-party countries. If Mexico fails, the leading cartels will compete in the United States, and that competition will extend to the source of the money as well. We have already seen cartel violence in the border areas of the United States, but this risk is not limited to that. The same process that we see under way in Mexico could extend to the United States; logic dictates that it would.

The current issue is control of the source of drugs and of the supply chain that delivers drugs to retail customers in the United States. The struggle for control of the source and the supply chain also will involve a struggle for control of markets. The process of intimidation of government and police officials, as well as bribing them, can take place in market towns such as Los Angeles or Chicago, as well as production centers or transshipment points.

CARTEL INCENTIVES FOR U.S. EXPANSION

That means there are economic incentives for the cartels to extend their operations into the United States. With those incentives comes intercartel competition, and with that competition comes pressure on U.S. local, state and, ultimately, federal government and police functions. Were that to happen, the global implications obviously would be stunning. Imagine an extreme case in which the Mexican scenario is acted out in the United States. The effect on the global system economically and politically would be astounding, since U.S. failure would see the world reshaping itself in startling ways.

Failure for the United States is much harder than for Mexico, however. The United States has a gross domestic product of about $14 trillion, while Mexico’s economy is about $900 billion. The impact of the cartels’ money is vastly greater in Mexico than in the United States, where it would be dwarfed by other pools of money with a powerful interest in maintaining U.S. stability. The idea of a failed American state is therefore far-fetched.

Less far-fetched is the extension of a Mexican failure into the borderlands of the United States. Street-level violence already has crossed the border. But a deeper, more-systemic corruption — particularly on the local level — could easily extend into the United States, along with paramilitary operations between cartels and between the Mexican government and cartels.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently visited Mexico, and there are potential plans for U.S. aid in support of Mexican government operations. But if the Mexican government became paralyzed and couldn’t carry out these operations, the U.S. government would face a stark and unpleasant choice. It could attempt to protect the United States from the violence defensively by sealing off Mexico or controlling the area north of the border more effectively. Or, as it did in the early 20th century, the United States could adopt a forward defense by sending U.S. troops south of the border to fight the battle in Mexico.

There have been suggestions that the border be sealed. But Mexico is the United States’ third-largest customer, and the United States is Mexico’s largest customer. This was the case well before NAFTA, and has nothing to do with treaties and everything to do with economics and geography. Cutting that trade would have catastrophic effects on both sides of the border, and would guarantee the failure of the Mexican state. It isn’t going to happen.

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SEALING THE BORDER

So long as vast quantities of goods flow across the border, the border cannot be sealed. Immigration might be limited by a wall, but the goods that cross the border do so at roads and bridges, and the sheer amount of goods crossing the border makes careful inspection impossible. The drugs will come across the border embedded in this trade as well as by other routes. So will gunmen from the cartel and anything else needed to take control of Los Angeles’ drug market.

A purely passive defense won’t work unless the economic cost of blockade is absorbed. The choices are a defensive posture to deal with the battle on American soil if it spills over, or an offensive posture to suppress the battle on the other side of the border. Bearing in mind that Mexico is not a small country and that counterinsurgency is not the United States’ strong suit, the latter is a dangerous game. But the first option isn’t likely to work either.

One way to deal with the problem would be ending the artificial price of drugs by legalizing them. This would rapidly lower the price of drugs and vastly reduce the money to be made in smuggling them. Nothing hurt the American cartels more than the repeal of Prohibition, and nothing helped them more than Prohibition itself. Nevertheless, from an objective point of view, drug legalization isn’t going to happen. There is no visible political coalition of substantial size advocating this solution. Therefore, U.S. drug policy will continue to raise the price of drugs artificially, effective interdiction will be impossible, and the Mexican cartels will prosper and make war on each other and on the Mexican state.

We are not yet at the worst-case scenario, and we may never get there. Mexican President Felipe Calderon, perhaps with assistance from the United States, may devise a strategy to immunize his government from intimidation and corruption and take the war home to the cartels. This is a serious possibility that should not be ruled out. Nevertheless, the events of last week raise the serious possibility of a failed state in Mexico. That should not be taken lightly, as it could change far more than Mexico.

Que Sarah Sera...

Compare and contrast these two clips... and wonder how many voters will actually give a shit.

Sarah Palin's Greatest Hits

Tina Fey SNL Couric interview spoof

The week that China began to rule the World

Dan Atkinson is an interesting writer on economics. He writes for the Mail on Sunday, but also co-writes with the Guardian's llead economics writer Larry Elliot. Their book 'Fantasy Island' was a frightenly prescient work and their rather bleak world view has been largely vindicated by recent events (much more on the money than Anatole Kaletsky for example, who although very intelligent, has in my opinion been discredited by the turn of events in the global economy).

Dan Atkinson has written a thought provoking article on the ramifications of the recent financial storms shaking the US and UK:

"The week that China began to rule the world
By DAN ATKINSON

Just as the first guns of August 1914 blew away a world dominated by the European empires, so may the past nine days of sheer madness in the financial markets have marked the point at which the established developed economies - of which the United States is the undisputed leader - lost control of the world economy and its future.

Despite all the talk of a 'global financial crisis', the convulsions that began in August 2007 and have shaken us ever more violently since have been concentrated in the so-called Anglo-Saxon economies - chiefly Britain and America.

It is a 'global crisis' only in the sense that a baseball competition that comprises mainly Americans is the 'World Series'.


NEW ORDER: The crisis has shifted the balance of power on Wall Street in China's favour

To admirers, these are the go-getting economies that have been happy to see bog-standard activities, such as manufacturing, mining and agriculture, emigrate to the developing world while concentrating on financial services and the 'creative' industries such as advertising, film-making, music and the media.

To critics, they are the 'Ponzi economies', so-named after American fraudster Charles Ponzi whose 'investment' scheme paid returns to existing members not from successful investments but out of the subscriptions of new members.

Britain, America and, to a lesser extent, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and others have become addicted to debt.

This addiction has been fed by a financial services industry bloated to many times its natural size, and itself in need of huge amounts of borrowed money. The City and Wall Street, having asset-stripped domestic industry, set about lending consumers the money to buy imported goods that we no longer make.

In a final twist, the money is often borrowed from the same countries, such as China, that are selling us the goods.

The Anglo-Saxon economies, say the critics, are in the position of the dissolute aristocrat who can wear fine clothes for only as long as his tailor is willing to offer credit. At some point, the tailor is going to want cash.

Actually, after recent events, it does not much matter whether one is a critic or not.

The Anglo-Saxon model of turbo-charged finance, minimal banking regulation, gung-ho borrowing and ever-more-complex 'financial securities' has crashed into insolvency on both sides of the Atlantic as surely as any ill-advised business venture.

Northern Rock's nationalisation in February was merely the starter course in what has turned into a banquet of bail-outs.

US mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken into public ownership, lumbering taxpayers with £3trillion of liabilities, all on top of tens of billions of pounds of 'liquidity' (money, to the rest of us) supplied on easy terms by the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Board to the very people who got us into the mess in the first place --the banks and others.

On Friday came the showstopper - that fervent new convert to the socialist cause, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, announced another wave of nationalisations.

Not of institutions, this time, but of the reeking sewage in Wall Street's stables - the estimated £1trillion-plus of bad debt sitting on banks' balance sheets as a result of their own reckless greed in lending to 'sub-prime' borrowers who were unable to repay.

Having learned of this latest example of the sort of government interference that they supposedly detest, the Masters of the Universe in London and New York jumped for joy and share prices rocketed.

Like very much better-paid versions of British Leyland workers in the Seventies, bankers and brokers took the arrival of taxpayers' money as the signal to return to their bad old ways - in this case an addiction to inflated asset prices.

With Mr Paulson, his boss President George Bush and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke tossing the trillions around in a casual manner - and Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and the Bank of England Governor Mervyn King acting similarly but on a smaller scale over here - it would be tempting to see these emergency measures as a show of strength. But chronic weakness is at the root of the 'rescue packages', in two ways.

First, they are as much about looking after Britain and America's creditors as about protecting ordinary British or American people. In return for their goods, China and other developing economies have taken vast amounts of sterling and dollar denominated paper - shares, currency, bonds - whose value they naturally wish to see preserved.

As with any other creditors, they want to know their money is safe. And to make it so, Britain and, particularly, America have piled up yet more borrowing.

Like spendthrifts shifting debts from one credit card to another, the Anglo-Saxon economies are on the fast track to ruin.

Second, and perhaps more important in the long run, the deeper weakness disclosed by the colossal bail-outs is that neither Britain nor America really believes in its own economic ideas any more.

When the chips are down, no one, not bankers or brokers, Ministers or officials, really thinks that the financial markets know best.

No, this is not a 'global financial crisis' - it is a crisis that hurts countries in relation to how close they moved to the Anglo-American model in which the financial tail wags the industrial dog.

Yet the sun is probably setting even in the less indebted and more productive developed countries such as Japan and Germany.

The dominance of the Group of Seven countries - America, Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada - is no more guaranteed than was that of the pre-1914 British Empire.

Indeed, it was only a few hundred years ago that China, India and the Middle East were global players, while Europe was a backward, disease-ridden region on the edge of the world.

As Europe expanded it was thought to be the weakness of the 'mysterious' East that it was good at weaving carpets, writing poetry and the like, whereas the 'practical' West was good at making things.

The current British notion of a 'creative economy' turns this on its head.

Ultimately, however, our own weakness has less to do with the work we do than with one simple four-letter word - debt. It is because we and the Americans owe so much money that power and influence are slipping away from us to our creditors.

There was an early warning of this on the evening of October 19 last year in Washington, when the G7 finance ministers invited to dinner a number of developing countries that operate so-called sovereign wealth funds.

These are, effectively, government-run investment schemes that offend against G7 notions of free enterprise - or did, before the above mentioned nationalisation spree.

The G7 rather hoped that these countries would sign up to a code of conduct that would force them to act like ordinary commercial investors.

Chillingly for the developed countries, the dinner guests were uninterested in the views of their hosts (and, mainly, debtors) whom they more or less ignored.

As for the nine days that have just gone by, the bad news is that they have shown the British and Americans vainly trying to shore up a mountain of debt with what amounts to more debt.

The good news? These nine days may well be studied in the schools of the future as the moment when there was an irreversible global power shift.

If so, take heart - you are living through history.

The only problem is that, from now on, you and your leaders no longer control it."

Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead - Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens on what he views as the centre left's domination of British politics:

Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead

Peter Hitchens

I expect the Labour conference this week will be very like a funeral I once attended, in ice-cold rain, under black skies, in the shadow of a Victorian prison, where the heavy clay soil was so wet that the grave had to be held open with steel props in case it closed up with a gigantic squelch before the final prayers were over.

In short, it will be so gloomy that it will almost be funny.

Like the world banking system, Labour has gone belly up and can survive only if it is rescued by outsiders and entirely rebuilt.

What’s more, this is the second time this has happened to the decrepit party in two decades.

Two years ago, it seemed invincible and it was the Tories who were a despised and failed brand.

Now it’s indefensible and the Tories have mysteriously become, if not popular, then bearable. What happened? Why the sudden, violent swing?

The cold, miserable truth is that both our major political parties are corpses, their original purposes long forgotten, their loyal members driven away or sidelined, their traditional voters taken for granted.

Every so often, by a mysterious process, one of them is declared electable and the other is declared unelectable.

And we, the voters, do as we are told. By whom? For what purpose?

Labour really died around 1983, in the years of Michael Foot.

It was then invaded by young men and women, sometimes smirking, sometimes scowling, bleeping with the latest electronic devices and attired in costly suits, accompanied by spivs with suitcases of bank notes.

It was like watching a stately, traditional company being taken over by asset-strippers.

Its older inhabitants underwent a callous process of humiliation and scorn, while its honoured brand-name was turned to other uses by people who had never much liked it anyway.

Now that’s over. What began in the age of the bleeper has ended in the age of the BlackBerry.

The costly suits and the dodgy donors have migrated, for the moment, to the Tory Party. Who knows where they will go next? Back to Labour? Or somewhere else?

Funnily enough, those Tories who have much of a memory will remember their party’s similar death.

They will recall Blackpool in the autumn of 2003 - unbelievably, only five years ago - when poor Iain Duncan Smith sat alone, much as Gordon Brown does now, listening to the whispers of a thousand plotters planning to get rid of him.

He knew, as Mr Brown does, that he was finished.

But, as the son of a Spitfire ace who had himself been raised in the military code, he saw no honourable way to go except to wait for his enemies to come and kill him. This they duly did.

The assassination of IDS was one of the strangest and most important moments in British politics.

IDS did actually represent the force and mind of the Tory Party, bewildered and demoralised, after its wholly unjust 2001 defeat.

He became leader because none of the supposed ‘big beasts’ of Toryism liked Tory voters or party members, or shared their views.

And most of the medium-sized beasts preferred to go away and make some money, rather than have pails of lukewarm swill chucked over them by a media who were then wholly in the pocket of New Labour, just as they are now in David Cameron’s pocket.

What happened next is so fascinating that everyone missed its significance.

The Michael Howard palace revolution against IDS was a blatant takeover of a Right-wing party by the ‘Centre-Left’ establishment.

It was played out almost entirely on the airwaves and in the newspapers. MPs did what they were told by the media.

It was made easier because the ‘Centre-Left’ media have always inaccurately portrayed Mr Howard as being Right-wing.

He isn’t. He is actually a conventionally liberal career politician of the sort you find near the top of both big parties.

After IDS had been utterly destroyed, it was made plain to all Tory MPs (with the help of the media elite) that they had better not stand against Mr Howard for the leadership.

So nobody did. And he was ‘elected’ unopposed in a way that makes Vladimir Putin look like a fervent democrat.

Compare the absence of media fuss about this with the bitter media condemnation of Labour for installing Gordon Brown without a vote.

The Tory Party had been put into receivership. Its supposed owners - those who voted for it and supported it - had lost control over it.

The ‘Centre-Left’ establishment, Britain’s permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits, had taken over, and their task was to make it as unconservative as possible, as quickly as possible.

Mr Howard made it plain that his coronation was the end of anything remotely Right-wing.

He ruthlessly sacked two candidates, Danny Kruger in Sedgefield and Adrian Hilton in Slough, for making apparently Right-wing remarks that could be (and of course were) misrepresented in the ‘Centre-Left’ media.

Then he went a great deal further, and sacked Howard Flight, the serving MP for Arundel, for a similar offence.

Mr Howard almost certainly had no legal power to do this, but once again the ‘Centre-Left’ media decided it was not a scandal.

The imposition of the liberal careerist David Cameron on the Tory Party, once Michael Howard had finished being the establishment’s caretaker, was also achieved by the ‘Centre-Left’ media.

They adopted Mr Cameron as their candidate and propelled him to victory despite a very poor start to his campaign and an equally poor performance on live TV, later on, up against his more conservative rival, David Davis.

You’ll notice that it is the same people, that ‘Centre-Left’ combo of media types, who did a similar job on the Labour Party back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Interestingly, that revolution was much more about image than about reality.

The Tories have genuinely dropped most of their remaining conservative positions.

Labour remains a very Left-wing party. Most of its radical 1983 manifesto has in fact now been implemented, though in more subtle ways.

The only lasting deep change in Labour policy since the Eighties has been the party’s lobotomised conversion to support for the EU and globalism in general.

Nationalisation hadn’t mattered for years, the old industrial unions were as dead as the industries they helped to ruin, and the H-Bomb wasn’t an issue any more.

Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’ - its bilious hatred of selective state schools - remains untouched. What’s more, it has now been openly adopted by the Tories as well.

The rule nowadays is that you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.

That elite speaks for the 1968 generation which fanned out in the Seventies into the civil service, education, entertainment, the law, the arts, rock music and - above all - the media.

We no longer have elections where two evenly matched parties go into a fair contest with competing ideas and it is over only when the last vote is counted.

Instead, we have wild swings in which the approved party goes into the Election with a giant poll lead and then wins the Election with a mad, crushingly enormous majority over the unapproved party.

And the winner is always the ‘Centre-Left’, which claims to be moderate but is in fact a swirling cauldron of wild Sixties Leftism - anti-British, anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-education and pro-crime.

But if you dare to oppose this stuff, they’ll call you an extremist.

British democracy, as we used to know it, is quite dead. It just needs to have a new funeral every few years.

Zionism: A Conservative Defense - Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens writes a nuanced, complex and provocative defense of Zionism based on conservative principles (worth reading in full):


Zionism: A Defense

A prominent conservative argues that cultural and political kinship make Israel the West’s natural ally.

Peter Hitchens

Conservatives should support the State of Israel on principle, just as the globalist Left seeks to defeat Zionism on principle. The legions of political correctness would usually approve of a state founded as the result of a classic “national liberation” struggle against a classic “colonial oppressor” and ought to endorse a country so profoundly secular in so many of its institutions and so dominated by social-democratic political and cultural thinking. Especially, they should be enthusiastic about a nation whose whole reason for existence is profoundly anti-racist.

But they don’t and they aren’t. The Left will readily forgive Irish Republicans for terror and even for Catholicism. They remain sentimental about Fidel Castro despite the show trials and the dungeons. They will pardon South Africa almost everything, including an incorrect attitude towards AIDS. But all the categories flip over and upside down when it comes to Israel and Zionism. Why? Here are some suggestions, offered in the spirit of inquiry.

Despite its socialist appearance—kibbutzes, female soldiers, and the rest—Zionism is a profoundly conservative idea, based on the re-creation of an ancient nation and culture. It is also globally conservative, requiring a definite and uncompromising form of national sovereignty and an implicit rejection of multiculturalism. Israel stands—alone in its region—for placing the rule of law above the rule of power. Its destruction would be a disaster for what remains of the civilized world. Yet it has never been so threatened.

The recent Iraq war has done substantial damage to Israel’s hopes of survival, damage that was implicit in the pro-war case from the start. Those Zionists who supported the war made a serious mistake. The marketers of political and diplomatic cliché have expressed surprise that George W. Bush fulfilled his earlier pledge to pursue the road map to peace. How wrong they were. Even as the doomed Abu Mazen is carted off the stage in a bruised heap, the absurd effort to find a Palestinian Authority chieftain who both has any power and believes in compromise continues. If they had been paying attention, they would have realized that the globalist faction in the Republican Party has for many years been ready to sacrifice Israel in return for a settlement with the Muslim world.

It is strange how few have put together the two most frightening events of the year 2001, even though they took place within days of each other. The first was the Durban conference of the United Nations, supposedly “against racism.” The Muslim world chose to turn this gathering into a scream of hatred against Israel and against its protector America, so much so that the U.S. and Israeli delegations walked out. Just a few days later came the attack of Sept. 11. It has always interested me that this event was swiftly followed by, of all things, the payment of America’s back dues to the UN and the first open White House declaration of support for a Palestinian state. The War on Terror was strangely irrelevant to what had actually happened, with its clumsy ill-directed blows against Afghanistan and Iraq and its embarrassed refusal to confront Saudi involvement in terror or notice Palestinian street celebrations of the Manhattan massacre.

The alteration in policy towards Israel and the amazing pressure that must have been put on Ariel Sharon to swap his mailed club for an olive branch are by contrast real, accurately directed, and vastly significant. The trouble is, they are acts of appeasement rather than of resolution. This is serious, and if Washington is wrong (as I believe it is) about the Palestinian cause’s real capacity for compromise, it will turn out to be a grave step towards the dissolution of the Israeli state—not by frontal military action but by demoralization, destabilization, and de-legitimization.

The Israeli state has many flaws that only a fool would deny. Terrorists, still not fully disowned and in some cases actually revered, were prominent in its establishment and then in its governing class. It has engaged in pre-emptive war and has driven people from their homes through fear and massacre. Some of its responses to terrorist attack have been clumsy, lazy, and incompetent. Its present Prime Minister is severely tainted by indefensibly ruthless and inhumane past actions. Its political system is designed to enthrone factions, some of them repellent. The most important fault of all is that Israel should never have been founded, and should never have needed to be founded. But this last fault is an involuntary one, and is the reason for many of the country’s other troubles. It is no good blaming Israel for existing when its foundation was a desperate response to mechanized racial murder. Nor is it any good for supporters or opponents of modern Israel to pretend that the National Socialist massacre of Jews did not change the argument about Zionism for as far ahead as it is possible to look.

If the world were as liberal idealists imagine, Zionism ought to have been forgotten long ago as a foolish idea, a cranky and hopeless project as unrealistic as Esperanto. And if mankind were ruled by reason, then Zionism would indeed have gone the way of Esperanto. You might have thought that secularism, by making Judaism a matter of involuntary race rather than one of voluntary religion, would have resulted in near-total integration and assimilation. This did not happen. The opposite did. It is therefore important to remember that most right-thinking people believed with utter certainty that assimilation would happen and Zionism would fail. They believed this, during the years before 1914, in a period of history similar to our own because of its illusory stability and its materialist optimism. They continued to believe it in an era similar to the one we are just entering, the years of nervous anticipation and fear of war between 1918 and 1939.

The projected “National Home for the Jews” endorsed by Britain in 1917 was never intended to become a nation. It was to be part of the British Empire, not ruling itself but governed benignly from London, a permanent way station on the proposed land-route to India and a glacis protecting the Suez Canal from any power that threatened it from the north. The British Empire accepted the Zionist scheme because it provided Britain with an excuse to straddle one of the most important pieces of strategic property in the world.

This arrangement would have safeguarded the Arab peoples already living in the neglected Ottoman sanjaks that were arbitrarily glued together to form the Palestine Mandate, an entity even more artificial than Iraq. Under British government, Arabs were not given the right to rule Jews, and Jews were not given the right to rule Arabs.

When the idea was first put forward, there was plenty of room for both peoples within wide frontiers. For at that stage nobody had planned to set up the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which first came to birth as the Emirate of Transjordan, hacked in a hurry out of the original Mandate. This was another accident along the way, following the diplomatic game of pass-the-parcel, which began when the French ejected the British client “King” Faisal from Syria in July 1920. They had won the territory at the peace conference and did not share T.E. Lawrence’s enthusiasm for Hashemite chieftains.

To console Faisal, London gave him the throne of Iraq instead, inaugurating another permanent crisis. This displaced his brother Abdullah, who had originally been promised the Baghdad throne. Abdullah, a monarch with no realm, urgently needed another kingdom to reign over. He complained noisily and was given Transjordan to soothe his wounded feelings. Thus three-quarters of the original Palestine Mandate, the entire area east of the river Jordan, was snatched away from the projected “National Home” before it had even begun. The famous West Bank was seized illegally by Transjordan in 1948, allowing that country to change its name to Jordan. So when Israel occupied it in 1967, it merely passed from one illegal occupier to another. Though it is not widely known, this very area was originally designated for “close Jewish settlement” at the San Remo Accords, which defined the original Mandate and which remain the only agreed international document defining sovereignty over this territory. Even the Golan Heights, now claimed righteously by Syria, were originally within the Mandate and became part of Syria in later Anglo-French horse-trading.

There is a general assumption that Israel at some point stole its territory from a legitimate Arab state. Many of Israel’s critics seem to believe that there was at one stage a sovereign country called “Palestine” out of which the Jewish nation was unfairly carved. But no such country ever existed; Palestine was never the name of anything but a Roman province. The only previous title—for so many centuries that it had no real rival claimant—had belonged to the Ottoman Empire. From the Ottomans it passed directly to the British. When Britain, bankrupt and demoralized, scuttled from the region in 1948, Israel grabbed as much as it could of this dubious legacy. Arab armies in turn seized as much as they could.

Israelis unquestionably perpetrated unforgivable massacres and drove people from their homes. Had things gone the other way, there would have been other massacres, other refugees. Wilsonian ideals of national self-determination can take on a blood-stained tinge, just as much as imperialism, if not more so. When a colonial power vacates a disputed territory, such horrors are likely. But this was in 1948, a year after the partition of India and Pakistan, another shameful scuttle by Britain. All the refugees from that vast upheaval have found new homes. It also came shortly after the expulsion of millions of Germans from East Prussia, the Czech lands, and from Western Poland. Those dispossessed in these savage deportations have long since resettled, and no serious movement demands their return home. Why, uniquely, are the Arab refugees of 1948 still the focus of international demands for the restoration of lost lands?

There is one key difference that keeps this issue alive, especially on the Left, which mostly has not even heard of the German expulsions and would probably defend them if it had. Israel is not like other countries because it is a Western nation carved out of Middle Eastern territory. This leads us to the uncomfortable truth—unwelcome to modern Zionists who shudder visibly at any mention of the word—that Israel is the last major European imperial colony on the face of the earth. In its struggle for survival in a world that already has enough reasons for disapproving of it, modern Israel has sought to stifle such thoughts.

But a European colony it is. What distinguishes Israel from its Arab neighbors is no longer its general prosperity and physical modernity. Oil has evened up these differences in the past decade, and, while serious squalor persists in many Arab countries, so do middle-class comfort and good, functioning services. The difference runs much deeper. Israel’s people are European by culture and law, imposing that culture and law on a region where cousin marriage and tribal loyalty are normal, while pluralism, tolerance, party politics, and the rule of law are abnormal. In this, the new state is the direct heir of the British officers who governed the area as undisguised colonists between the two global wars—and from whom it has inherited much of its legal system, not to mention a chain of imperial fortresses still used by the Israeli army.

This makes Israel the permanent ally, in the Middle East, of the world’s lawful and free countries. This alliance is based on cultural and political kinship, factors that cannot be altered by a tyrant’s death or a coup d’état. Washington may be able to buy the friendship of one Arab or Muslim regime or another with arms and cash. But as soon as that regime falls, the investment of years is wasted if the new rulers are hostile.

I suspect this difference, far more than the ethnic and religious ones, arouses the hostility of Arab regimes. We do not really know what the Arab and Muslim peoples think, since such states do not have free public opinion as we know it. We do know that an ugly anti-Semitism previously largely unknown in the Middle East, has been deliberately and crudely encouraged by Arab regimes trying to find an outlet for the justified discontents of their own poor. We also know that there has been no desire for permanent compromise and genuine peace between even the supposedly moderate Arab regimes and Israel. The state of relations between Israel and Egypt, for instance, is frigid, nervous, and held in place mainly by American subsidies, and this despite Israel’s handover of territory of enormous strategic value. In fact, the Israeli-Egypt “peace,” artificial and without friendship between governments or peoples, is a standing warning to those who fantasize about a “new Middle East” or a harmonious two-state solution.

The hostility is bitter, kept alive by semi-official and official media and, in a nasty new development, it is now often crudely racialist, though nobody is supposed to mention this. The Western Left would drive a Holocaust-denier from any campus that employed him, but the thought police who search the minds of their domestic opponents are unmoved by the blatant anti-Semitism of the Arab terror organizations. Many who denounce Islam for its intolerance draw back from this condemnation when that intolerance is directed against Zionists. By a peculiar process of mental dishonesty so outrageous that it works, Zionism is often equated directly with German National Socialism by critics of Israel. The only reason for this absurd, disproportionate, and cynical claim is that it neutralizes the fundamental case for Zionism, namely that Germany’s policy of systematic massacre was unique, and that the Jewish case for a Jewish sovereign state is therefore unique.

Conservatism is realistic, honest, consistent, and opposed to cant. It takes the side of the particular and the ancient. It sees virtues in Western civilization against its rivals. It penetrates the disguises in which history advances itself and is not fooled by passing appearances. It does not seek perfection, but it does try to be principled. On all these grounds, and because that country is threatened as never before by shallow and ill-considered idealism, conservatism should consider Israel an ally.

______________________________________________

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday.

Did the Soviets trigger the Six Day War?

Nice conspiracy theory that says the Soviets triggered the 1967 Six Day War. Not completely impossible it's true, judging by this.

Foxbats Did Fly over Dimona
by Daniel Pipes
Fri, 24 Aug 2007

Labour should dump compassion - Matthew Parris

Very interesting article from Times columnist Matthew Parris (Dan I think you'll enjoy it):

The Labour Party should dump compassion

Christianity has not done socialism any favours. The Left must embrace progress and winners, not the workshy and the weak

It's time to ask not who should lead the Left in Britain, but where they should be led. Does socialism have a future? Little seems to be coming from the old warhorses of the left-wing intelligentsia these days, so, as the party conference season gets under way today, I thought I'd have a bash myself.

Socialism was never set in stone. In postwar Britain it has been evolving, and a powerful influence on this evolution, especially under the leaderships of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has been something called “Christian socialism”: the belief that the democratic and liberal Left may have something to learn from, and contribute to, New Testament morality: the working out of God's purpose on Earth. After all, didn't Jesus say “sell all that thou hast and give to the poor”?

I'm not suggesting that most politicians on the Left are consciously motivated by biblical injunction, or are even active believers. It's more subliminal. Ours remains a predominantly Christian culture, with Gospel beliefs about fairness, mercy and helping the poor, sick and weak, embedded deeply among our values; as is a tendency to ennoble suffering, and a guilt about wealth.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, all of us have drunk deep at this well. It does not take the subtlest of minds to make a connection between these values, and the socialist political imperative to redistribute wealth, and care for all classes. Both aim, in their outcomes, for humanitarian goals.
Background

But this apparent convergence of purposes is a deception. Far from reinforcing true socialism, Christian socialism has ambushed it, subverting its original message and wrecking it as a viable philosophy of government in a market-driven age.

Marx is about power. Christianity is about charity. Marx is about the authority of the collective. Christian liberalism is about the individual conscience. Marx is about justice. Christian humanitarianism is about mercy. The common causes in which Christians, liberals and socialists have tried to reconcile their differences - personal freedom, the redistribution of wealth and the beneficent State - have in Christian hands proved ruinous to the socialist idea: softening its head, picking its pocket, throwing good money after bad, nursing the weak and neglecting the winners, hearkening to disability and turning away from ability, and leaching its energies into a welter of simpering charitable causes. For most of the second half of the 20th century, Western socialism has hovered around the bedside of the victim, the loser and the marginalised. To win, it should have been outdoors, exhorting the strong.

This wheelchair socialism has sucked the Centre Left into spending people's taxes on unproductive causes, and associating itself with failure rather than success. Nietzsche characterised the driving Christian ethic thus: “It lived on distress...” H.L.Mencken added: “God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.”

It's not for me, here, to defend or attack the Church's absorption with the Prodigal Son rather than his industrious brother, the single lost sheep rather than the rest of the flock; or the way Christianity has made victimhood on the Cross both its mascot and its guiding light. I simply observe that this has absolutely nothing to do with what Marx was trying to say. Socialism was a most unsqueamish creed. If it wished to redistribute wealth, that was not for reasons of mercy but because Marx saw capitalism as a machine doomed to seize up: whereas mankind would fire on all cylinders if labour realised and exercised its potential muscle, and all men pulled together.

A socialist true to these roots, sitting in a modern British Cabinet, and faced with a decision whether to channel Treasury money into (a) scientific research; (b) transport infrastructure; (c) free bus passes for pensioners; or (d) a subsidised national paternity-leave scheme, could weigh socialist arguments for any or all of these purposes; but Christian charity, compassion, or a human-rights-based notion of “fairness” would not be among them.

Properly understood, socialist priorities should never be divorced from considerations of how most effectively to motivate citizens, oil the cogs and drive the pistons. Marx would have been contemptuous of the workshy and mildly uninterested in the disabled.

Nor would he have shared Christian socialism's tenderness for the outcast, for individual conscience, and for liberty. Socialism should see little value in personal freedom except in so far as it contributes to the collective good.

Central to socialism is the power of the collective (for the moment, the State): the power to improve the common lot, overriding the individual where necessary. This case for muscular government has always been stronger than we free-market liberals have wanted to acknowledge. Perversely, as socialist movements flounder everywhere, the case for muscular government is actually getting stronger.

This is not an ideological movement I would join, and in a post-industrial age its fixation with organised labour is redundant, but in other ways it remains a perfectly modern if brutal idea that deserves a confident voice in the century ahead.

Not that you would know it from the state of the Labour Party. I'm not in the business of advising Gordon Brown on how to save his skin; that battle is lost. The next election is lost. The election may come sooner than we think - how many more Siobhain McDonaghs wait to fall on their swords?

After that election, a Left Opposition will need to find a voice. It will not hear it from the Manse. It needs to find a crowd. They will not be discovered sleeping rough. It needs to find a class. They will not be the underclass. It needs to find a national purpose. Fairness and Equality will not suffice; Sure Start is not enough.

There's no point trying to out-smooth David Cameron or out-compassion Nick Clegg. Away (the socialist should say) with caring and diversity: let's hear about investment, not subsidy; progress, not equality; about Crossrail (what's the betting Mr Brown cancels it?); about how Britain generates its own power, how we rescue our rail network from impending insolvency, how we get from London to Scotland by train in two hours, and how we stop the planning system throttling every big project; about how we develop a global positioning system that the Americans don't control, how we pay for better highways and uncongested streets with proper road pricing, and how we research and market carbon-free transport, heat and power.

Unless you believe in big, costly, muscular and intrusive government, your voice in all such national causes must be muted. There's a damn good case to be made for strong-arming by the State, and only the Left can make it. This is not a time for Bonhoeffer and playgroups, but for a Left which believes unashamedly in taking command."

War - What is it good for?

Peter Hitchens on ariel bombardment in general and Dresden in particular:

"Personally I am against this kind of war, which may achieve victories in the short term, but damages those who use it in the long-term. For it is the long-term that matters. Using bombs knowing that they will kill innocents is a deliberate act, and it is silly to pretend otherwise. Britain's decision to embark on the even more explicitly deliberate bombing of German civilians, taken in May 1940 and intensified hugely afterwards, is a serious stain on our national record. I think the knowledge that we used such methods has done serious damage to our general moral state ever since, and contributed to our post-war decline and diminishing self-respect, even though we have tended to try to deceive ourselves about what we did. It is still thought to be pretty bad taste to talk about this.

The whole business is made somehow worse by the fact that the bombing was carried out with selfless courage by some of the bravest young men who ever lived, the bomber crews themselves, who believed they were helping to win the war and had quite enough to think about without wondering what their incendiaries and high explosive were doing, thousands of feet below. Their contribution to defeating Germany is debatable. My own view is that it probably did not shorten the war at all, but I doubt if this can ever be resolved. The casualties among those flyers were appalling, the worst since the mass human sacrifice of the flower of British youth on the Somme in 1916, and just as wasteful of young talent and hope. As for what happened when their bombs hit the ground, most people prefer not to know.

And who can blame them? The details (unhinged mothers carrying the shrivelled corpses of their bomb-baked children around the country in suitcases, immense clouds of bluebottles gathering on the rubble as the thousands of dead decomposed) are beginning to be published in mainstream histories and they are deeply distressing to anyone who possesses an ounce of human sympathy. The fact that most of the victims were the German urban working class ( who as Social Democrats had been Hitler's principal democratic opponents) makes it difficult to claim that the bombing was some sort of judgement on the Nazis. I'd like to see how much courage most of us would have shown faced with a similar regime, and how we would then have felt if we'd been bombed to bits, or baked and suffocated in cellars, for the misdeeds of a government we loathed and feared.

The protests of George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, against this method of warfare were sneered at, at the time, but seem to me to have been both honourable and right. Bell was no simpleton pacifist. He was a long-term friend and contact of German Christians who opposed Hitler, and if the British government had taken more notice of him and of what he told them, the July plot against Hitler, or something like it, might have succeeded and saved us a year of bloody war, as well as preventing Stalin taking over much of central Europe."

Sarah Palin - The Debate

Ok then! On the Right of this debate we have none other than Melanie Phillips, declaring her admiration and support for Republican VP Sarah Palin:

A Star is Born

The woman is a natural. Watch her performance last night here -- and you'll see why the left is in such a panic.

Middle America has found its champion: someone who embodies its values and makes it proud to hold them. She has pulled off something that the left assumed was as likely a development as the sun rising in the west: she makes conservatism attractive, optimistic and fun. She is totally authentic, the real deal: she turns the values of small-town America that she so proudly embodies into a lethal boomerang against the sneering elitists who scorn them. The repercussions will cross the Atlantic: British Tories who have tried to reinvent conservatism as social liberalism may well be sucking their teeth if Sarah Palin actually makes it to the White House.

Well okay, say her detractors, so she’s a good performer -- but she’s still way out there in fruitcake-land because she’s a creationist. Well, if she is I’d like to see the evidence -- because so far all I’ve seen is one statement by her which falls far short of supporting creationism, plus enormous confusion and ignorance among commentators about what creationism actually is. As far as I can see, all she has ever said on the subject, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News two years ago, is that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schools. The following day she explained that all she had meant by that was that discussion of alternative views should be allowed to arise in Alaska classrooms: ‘I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum’.

She would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state’s required curriculum. She simply didn’t think that any views should be excluded on the basis of religious or scientific opinion. It seemed that she had never even thought much about creationism. She was simply expressing a liberal view about the flow of ideas.

But here’s where the confusion among commentators kicks in. Palin is a Christian, which means she believes that the world had a Creator. She shares that belief with other Christians along with Jews and Muslims the world over. Unless one takes the view that all religious belief is certifiable, there is nothing remotely odd about a person of faith believing in God. Indeed, one might say this is a prerequisite (unless one happens to belong to the Church of England). But various commentators have committed the howler of assuming that belief in a Creator is creationism. Not so. Creationism is very specifically the belief that the world was literally created in six days. Millions of believers in God agree that this is absurd and irrational.

Then there is the further confusion – fomented in large measure by the astoundingly ignorant assertions made by lawyers and judges in the various US court cases over the teaching of creationism in American schools – that creationism is the same thing as Intelligent Design. It is not. Intelligent Design simply holds that life could not have originated spontaneously, but must have been at source the product of some kind of purposeful force. It does not deny evolution, rather the claim that evolution somehow spontaneously created itself. It is a view held by growing numbers of scientists, several of great distinction, and arises out of the very complexity of life that science has uncovered. Whether or not this is a well-founded theory it cannot be argued that, like creationism, it stands in opposition to science and reason. Yet the furore over Sarah Palin has persistently elided both creationism and ID with each other and with her actual belief in a Creator.

Maybe she is a creationist – but so far it’s just another smear."

And on the centre Left here is Oliver Kamm, no Palin fan, disagreeing with Melanie Phillips on more or less everything:

"I'm sorry to write yet again on this subject. But before moving on, I'll comment on a relevant and enthusiastic post about Sarah Palin, entitled "A star is born", by the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips on her Spectator blog. And before doing that, I'll say a word about the author herself.

I know, like and respect Melanie. She has shown a good deal of courage in expounding her views on, among other things, the threat of radical Islam - an issue of immense importance on which she is essentially right, and about which she has been writing for a long time. I'm very much in disagreement, however, with her view that "if liberal values and democracy are to be defended, their Christian roots have to be vigorously defended, upheld and reasserted". On the contrary, one of the most vital principles of liberalism is the secularist insistence, codified in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786, that there be no religious test for public office.

Christianity has proved compatible with literally any ideology, even in recent history: consider the racist justifications for apartheid offered by the Dutch Reformed Church; the Social Gospel preached by the Baptist reformer Walter Rauschenbusch; or the strong Tory pro-appeasement sentiments of Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1930s. I'm not concerned in public affairs with people's beliefs about first and last things, but only with whether they accept the implict social contract on which a free society depends. Moderate religion, whether or not you find its doctrines credible, accommodates itself to secular education and secular government, and is thereby a matter of private conscience.

And here we come to the issue of Melanie's post. Melanie believes that Sarah Palin is the victim of a smear campaign to suggest that she is a biblical Creationist. For my part, I'm not convinced - because the relevant data are not in the public realm, as far as I can see - that Governor Palin, whatever her faith, has made her accommodation with the secular principles that are integral to American goverment. The reason I'm not convinced is that she is on record, in public debate for an elected post, as stating that Creationism should be taught alongside evolutionary biology. This is not disputed by Melanie.

I've said nothing about whether Ms Palin is herself a Creationist; I don't know whether she is or not. But if she believes that religious dogma belongs in science education - possibly for a non-religious principle, such as not offending the sensibilities of believers - then her position is illiberal and must be opposed. To raise this question is not a smear, as Melanie believes. It's an important issue of public policy. And because Melanie has certainly and demonstrably misunderstood both the science and the pseudoscience in question, I hope she will reconsider her views."

Beware of statistics

BBC News is running a weekly ongoing series of articles that describe and illustrate common misconceptions (and manipulations) of statistics using examples from the news and ads.

There's an index of these articles here.

US Election - check, please!

I last posted this link 4 years ago, but it's that time again. Anyone interested in the US election should bookmark this site.

http://www.factcheck.org

Because right now the focus is on the Republican National Convention, it may look like it's particularly pro Obama, but if you scroll down, you'll see that they go after the anointed One's lies and distortions too.

(Oh, and in the interests of declaring my own bias - "Obama '08!!!!")

The Great Olympics Debate

Two counter posing views on what Britain's Olympics success means.

In the Blue corner we have Peter Hitchens, a man for whom the glass is always half empty:

"Isn’t this British Olympic boasting all rather East German?

Huge state-directed resources have been devoted to gathering supposed glory at a world sports festival.

But these medals do not tell the truth about what sort of nation we are at all. [...]

East Germany had a similar aim when it spent millions to produce medal winners.

The country itself was a backward, dirty dump, run by horrible old men and women, shrouded in a smog of two-stroke exhaust, brown coal smoke and cabbage fumes.

But at the Olympics it managed to appear to be modern, clean, youthful and bright.

And we have to pretend that Olympic success matters, just as they did, because we have nothing else to be proud of.

We achieve this by levying a tax on the sad, the deluded and the hopeless, called the National Lottery, and spending the money bamboozled out of these poor people on velodromes where cyclists dressed as spacemen whizz endlessly round under the cold gaze of ruthless trainers.

And how odd it is that all this effort, all this money and talent should have been devoted to succeeding in a contest which is, deep down, quite meaningless.

Politicians of all the Liberal Elite parties join in praising the way it has been done. Yet if anyone advocates the same methods in our State education system – ruthless selection, encouragement of the best, harsh discipline, no tolerance of failure – he is dismissed by the same politicians as an ‘elitist’.

Well, excuse me, but isn’t it far more important that we survive as an economy and a society in this hard, competitive and increasingly merciless world than that we gain a few shiny knick-knacks in an athletics meeting?

Let John Major, Michael Gove, Gordon Brown, Tessa Jowell and the rest of the supporters of comprehensive schools and diluted exams and socialised university entrance apply their principles to Britain’s 2012 Olympic team.

Your parents went to university? You’re rejected, so as to give an opportunity to someone who can’t swim as fast but needs encouragement.

You went to a private school? You’re rejected, too. We can’t have any privilege here, even if your parents bankrupted themselves to pay the fees. Your place will go to someone slower and less fit.

You passed a tough test way ahead of the others? Sorry, you’ll just have to go at the speed of the slowest in a mixed-ability training squad.

You’re talented but you live in a poor area? Too bad. All our best training schemes are in rich suburbs.

Your training is constantly interrupted by bullying, swearing and loutish behaviour? Too bad. Here’s a copy of our ‘anti-bullying policy’.

You’re doing really well? No help for you, then. Our concern is for equality, not excellence.

You’re slow, undisciplined, disruptive and no good? Have a special trainer and lots of resources.

If we nurtured our Olympic hopefuls the way we educate our children, the only role they’d have in any Games would be sweeping up litter in the stadium.

I have seldom seen a better example of an entire country getting its priorities wrong.

The day will come, and quite soon, when we win no medals and realise what we have become.

But I suspect, by then, it will be too late.'

Hoorah for Hitchens! When the country's basking in the sunny glow of all of those golds he comes along with a ruddy great black storm cloud.

In the red corner we have the New Labour apologist and Times Columnist, David Aaronovitch:

"One must be empathic. If I was a rank-and-file reactionary Conservative, forced to swallow political failure for more than a decade, and now permitted, lizard-like, to come out of my smelly culvert to claim a place on the sunny rock, I might let the light go to my head too. I might preen my scales and tell tales of the decline - no, the breaking - of Britain under Labour.

But one can take empathy too far. It seems impossible to counter the triumphal gloominess of the old Right with anything as feeble, as unconvincing, as facts. The best figures available show crime has gone down, but we know, we know, we know it has gone up! The best figures available suggest improving performance at GCSE and A levels, but we know, we know, we know that this is because of a dilution in standards!

Then along come the Olympics, and the national narrative, for a moment, no longer favours the lizard class and its story of decline. So let me make the most of it, in this short interval before pessimism sets in again. In 1996, after 17 years of Conservative government, the past six under the premiership of the cricketing Major, Great Britain went to the Atlanta Olympics and won precisely one gold medal. We ended that Games in 36th position, just behind Ethiopia and just ahead of Belarus. It wasn't just that Greece did better than us - Kazakhstan got four golds. If one were to take the Olympics as any kind of indicator of national health (and why should we not?) we would have to conclude that the past 12 years have been very well spent. And if Gordon Brown is to get it in the neck for every ill, real and imagined, why should he not get some credit for this?

Of course, I know it's not as simple as that, and I can acknowledge that the National Lottery, set up by John Major in 1994, is likely to have been a big factor in our changed sporting fortunes. But however we divide up the accolades (other than to the sporting men and women themselves), what seems clear, to me and to Boris Johnson, is that this success hardly points to our living in some kind of brutalised, boneless pre-dystopia.

[...]

If the “broken society” only means that there are places where there is too much poverty and crime, and that any death caused by a knife or a gun is a tragedy then, this side of Paradise, it means nothing. This is the peculiarly irritating aspect of the phrase. To take just one side of modern Britain with which I am familiar now that my drinking days are over, hundreds of thousands of Britons are involved, as participants or supporters, in scores of sporting events: marathons, half-marathons, ten-kilometre runs, bikeathons, triathlons, duathlons, from Orkney to the Isle of Wight. Some are athletes, some are motivated by charity, some - like me - are recovering lard-arses. Are they part of a broken society?

I was struck this week by Adam Sage's story in these pages about the French families who are sending their children to learn English by staying with British families in France. They speak English in the home and then go horse-riding in the safety of France. “I don't want to say bad things about Britain, but you do hear horror stories about children sent to stay with families there,” remarked one French teacher. But I would be prepared to bet that what really motivates such Gallic fearfulness is media coverage of the supposed brokenness of Britain.

Fine. How many times have we been told that there are two Olympic-size swimming pools in the whole of Britain and 29 (or something improbable) in Paris alone? So how come we came third in the swimming medals and the French came ninth? Are they 20 times as broken as we are?

The lizards may get their new government. If so it should begin its rule by admitting what its predecessors - the party of 2012 - got right."

Obama vs McCain

Like many non Americans watching the presidential contest, if I'm honest with myself, the emotional side of me wants Obama to win. The young charismatic black contender winning the election is a more inspiring and exciting result than it's alternative a very old white guy becoming President of the United States. So when I read that McCain is leading in the opinion polls my heart kind of sinks. Now this isn't really rational I admit it, but I still can't quite shake it. Anyway, this is all by way of introducing this opinion piece in the FT which gives some hard and realistic advice to Obama - ditch the poetry and promise to defeat evil:

Tips for Obama: no poetry, promise to defeat evil

By Edward Luce

At the civil forum on faith last week, Barack Obama was asked whether evil existed and, if so, whether we should “ignore it, contain it, negotiate with it or defeat it?”

The Democratic presidential nominee gave a nuanced answer that suggested that evil “should be confronted” but that we should have “some humility” in doing so “because, you know, a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil”.

John McCain’s answer was: “Defeat it.” Although the Republican nominee followed up with his trademark promise to follow Osama bin Laden “to the gates of hell”, all that anybody will recall is that Mr McCain answered the question in two plain words. And that Mr Obama did not. The same pattern was repeated when they were both asked when human life begins. “At conception,” said Mr McCain. “This, that, the other, and every other Tuesday,” said Mr Obama (OK, that was a paraphrase).

Leaving aside whether these are remotely appropriate questions for campaigning politicians (this is America, remember), most thoughtful people would prefer Mr Obama’s calibrated musings on matters of such complexity. But as Adlai Stevenson, the perennial Democratic presidential candidate, once quipped after being told that thinking people were supporting him: “Yes, but I need to win a majority.” He never did.

At next week’s Democratic convention in Denver, which promises to be the grandest convention since John F. Kennedy pipped Mr Stevenson to the nomination in 1960, Mr Obama will have his biggest opportunity so far to silence those who doubt his ability to speak in simple declarative sentences to ordinary voters. It is an opportunity he must not flunk.

Mindful of what happened to the Hamlet-esque candidacies of Al Gore and John Kerry, even some of Mr Obama’s strongest supporters are beginning to doubt whether he can. Take this, not untypical, offering from Margery Eagan, a self-confessed “Obama cheerleader”, in Friday’s Boston Herald: “I wish he’d save nuance and sanctimony for senior seminars; give America some straight answers; crack some jokes at his own high-horse expense; convince me he’s up to this . . . That’s what McCain’s done lately. It’s working.”

The auguries are mixed. By choosing to move his acceptance speech in Denver next Thursday from the convention hall to the Invesco stadium, because the latter can accommodate 75,000 people, Mr Obama has signalled that he plans to deliver one of his Berlin specials. Some Democrats believe that another mellifluous, highly oratorical Obama address to a mass adoring rally is precisely what will turn off the blue-collar voter.

As Bill Galston, a veteran of Democratic campaigns, puts it: “If Obama’s speech scores high on artistry and aesthetics, then we have a problem, Houston.” Better for Mr Obama to swallow his instincts and model himself on George W. Bush, whose constant repetition of simple themes – short on artistry and sometimes even grammar – broke through to the average voter.

“George W. announced his candidacy with a list of four or five promises of what he would do as president,” says Mr Galston. “Eighteen months later he was still repeating the same list in the same words.”

In his struggle to portray himself as empathetic to middle-class Americans’ needs, Mr Obama may be tempted to believe that Mr McCain has already done some of his work for him. By failing to recall, in an interview on Thursday, how many houses he owned and then asking his staff to check on it, Mr McCain presented his opponent with something of a windfall. The correct answer was “none” because all eight of the McCain properties are in the name of his wealthy wife, Cindy.

But such windfalls do not come often. And given most people’s low expectations for his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Minneapolis the following week, all Mr McCain will need to do is give a clear address having avoided falling over on the way to the podium. Beating low expectations is another Bush speciality. Exceeding high ones, as Mr Obama must do, is a more serious challenge altogether.

Here is a simple outline of what Mr Obama should do. Many people doubt whether he can emulate Bill Clinton’s ability to persuade voters that he can “feel their pain”. Such people are now being told by the McCain campaign that Mr Obama is an “arugula [rocket]-eating, pointy-headed professor type” who lives in a “frickin mansion”.

Mr Obama should therefore do what quiche-eating Ivy-League types are not supposed to do and display some real anger. He should postpone until the presidential inauguration next January any more suggestion that “we are the ones – the ones we have been waiting for” and remind people in simple terms of who he is and then link it with what he intends to do. He must spell out again and again that he was raised by a single mother who relied on food stamps.

He should contrast this with Mr McCain’s privileged background as the son and grandson of admirals and the spouse of a woman worth more than $100m. And he should promise to defeat evil. That always goes down well. Then he should get up the next day and do the same thing all over again. And again. Until we are all saying it in our sleep.

The writer is the FT’s Washington bureau chief "

British anti-Americanism 'based on misconceptions'

British anti-Americanism 'based on misconceptions'
Telegraph
18 Aug 2008

British attitudes towards the United States are governed by ignorance of the facts on key issues such as crime, health care and foreign policy, according to a new survey.

A poll of nearly 2,000 Britons by YouGov/PHI found that 70 per cent of respondents incorrectly said it was true that the US had done a worse job than the European Union in reducing carbon emissions since 2000. More than 50 per cent presumed that polygamy was legal in the US, when it is illegal in all 50 states.

...

Asked if it was true that "from 1973 to 1990 the United States sold Saddam Hussein more than a quarter of his weapons," 80 per cent of British respondents said yes. However the US sold just 0.46 per cent of Saddam's arsenal to him, compared to Russia's 57 per cent, France's 13 per cent and China's 12 per cent.

more...

Arts subsidies - for or against?

I find this a fascinating question: should the Arts, predominately enjoyed by the rich and the middle classes, be funded by Tax payers' cash?

Self identified leftwing commentator Oliver Kamm argues in defence of Opera subsidies (comments are interesting):

"In defence of opera subsidies

There used to be a Tory MP called Terry Dicks. He was so crude a right-wing populist that even Teddy Taylor, a veteran pro-hanger and anti-European, urgently disassociated himself from Dicks's views. Dicks's pet cause was hostility to public subsidy to the arts. The late Tony Banks said of him: "When he leaves the chamber, he probably goes to vandalise a few paintings somewhere. He is to the arts what Vlad the Impaler was to origami ... He is undoubtedly living proof that a pig's bladder on a stick can be elected as a Member of Parliament."

So I immediately thought of Dicks when I read Fraser Nelson of The Spectator referring - without irony - to opera subsidy as a middle class rip-off. Dicks was the last person I remember using that argument. Here's how Fraser resurrects it:

"Great moment on the Today programme this morning when John Major – without irony – told James Naughtie how great the National Lottery was because an opera lover like him could benefit from the money poured into the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. That deal was perhaps the most egregious example of cash transferred from poor people to rich people, but sadly typical of the regressive nature of arts funding. I can understand the logic behind supporting indigenous arts lest they die out, but why have British taxpayers subsidise the singing of songs written a hundred years ago in Italian or German? If the usually-rich people who tend to watch opera do not wish to fund the real cost of it, I have never seen why hard-pressed taxpayers should cover a chunk of the ticket price. This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy opera, I just don’t see why other people should subsidise my night out any more than they should subsidise my holiday."

Oh dear. Leave aside the cultural nationalism and the assumption that opera is an activity for the affluent; if Fraser believes the value of a night at the opera is the recreation he gets out of it, then at a minimum he has misperceived the economics of the transaction. If the state were to withdraw from subsidising opera from taxation - and the lottery is of course a voluntary levy - then the cost of it would simply not be met by those who attend. The gap would be filled by business sponsorship, with a bias against new and experimental productions. Imagine the vacuous populism of Classic FM on, literally, a grand operatic scale.

If you think that opera is just an individual consumption good like your holiday destination, then that won't trouble you. But if you consider the arts are a public good, and not only a private choice, then there is an impeccable liberal case for subsidy, understood as "a network of implicit contracts, which it would be prohibitively expensive to negotiate explicitly, both because of transaction costs and because of the incentive to act as a free rider and leave others to finance the activities of which one privately approves". (The quotation comes from Sir Samuel Brittan, who uses the example of arts subsidy, in his book The Role and Limits of Government: Essays in Political Economy, 1983, p. 56.)

Posted by Oliver Kamm on August 19, 2008

To spell or not to spell...

... that is the question. Ken Smith, Senior Lecturer in Bucks University, argues that we should accept commonly misspelt words as 'variant spellings':

"Just spell it like it is

7 August 2008

Don't let students' howlers drive you mad, says Ken Smith. Accept their most common mistakes as variant spellings ... and relax

Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students' atrocious spelling. Aren't we all!?

But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.

The spelling of the word "judgement", for example, is now widely accepted as a variant of "judgment", so why can't "truely" be accepted as a variant spelling of "truly"?

As a starting point, may I suggest the following ten candidates, which are based on the most commonly misspelt words by my students:

- Arguement for argument. Why do we drop the "e" in argument (and in judgment) but not in management? We do not pronounce "argument" "ar-gum-ent", so why should we spell it this way?

- Febuary for February (and Wensday for Wednesday). We spell the word "February" the way we do only because it is taken from the Latin word februa, the Roman festival of purification. Similarly, the "correct" spelling of the word "Wednesday" comes from the Old English Wodnes daeg, or Woden's day. But why should we still pay homage today to a pagan god or a Roman festival of purification?

- Ignor for ignore. The word "ignore" comes from the Latin ignorare meaning "to know" and ignarus meaning "ignorant". Neither of these words has an "e" after the "r", so why do we?

- Occured for occurred. There is no second "r" in the words "occur" or "occurs" and that is why nearly everyone misspells this word. Would it really upset you to allow this change, and if so why?

- Opertunity for opportunity. This looks odd, but in fact we only spell "opportunity" as we do because in Latin this word refers to the timely arrival at a harbour - Latin portus. However in Latin this word is spelt obportus not opportus, so, if we were being consistent, we should spell "opportunity" as "obportunity".

- Que for queue, or better yet cue or even kew. Where did we get the second "ue" in the word "queue"? Its etymology is obscure. But, etymology or not, why do we need it?

- Speach for speech. We spell "speak" with an "ea". We do not have to but we do. Since we do, let us then spell "speech" with an "a" too, to coincide with the spelling of the words "peach", "preach" and "teach". Both words come from the same origin - the Old English spechan - which, therefore, does not support either the "ea" or "ee" spelling.

- Thier for their (or better still, why not just drop the word their altogether in favour of there?). It does not make any difference to the meaning of a sentence if you spell "their" as "thier" or "there", and the proof of this is that you are always able to correct this. "Thier" would also be consistent with the "i" before "e" rule, so why do you insist on "their"?

- Truely for truly. We don't spell the adverb "surely" as "surly" because this would make another word, so why is the adverb of "true" spelt "truly"?

- Twelth as twelfth. The "f" word. How on earth did that "f" get in there? The answer is Old English again: twelf is related to the Frisian tweli, but why should we care? You would not dream of spelling the words "stealth" or "wealth" with an "f" in them (as "stealfth" and "wealfth") so why insist on putting the "f" in "twelfth"?

I could go on and add another ten words that are commonly misspelt - the word "misspelt" itself of course, and all those others that break the "i" before "e" rule (weird, seize, leisure, neighbour, foreign etc) - but I think I have made my point.

Either we go on beating ourselves and our students up over this problem or we simply give everyone a break and accept these variant spellings as such.

Remember, I am not asking you to learn to spell these words differently. All I am suggesting is that we might well put 20 or so of the most commonly misspelt words in the English language on the same footing as those other words that have a widely accepted variant spelling."

Georgia invaded by Russia over South Ossetia

The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power
Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report
George Friedman
August 12, 2008

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This, as we have argued, has opened a window of opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the invasion did not shift the balance of power. The balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that Aug. 8.

Let’s begin simply by reviewing the last few days.

On the night of Thursday, Aug. 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia drove across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union. The forces drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured the city, nor the rest of South Ossetia.

On the morning of Aug. 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region’s absorption by Georgia. Given the speed with which the Russians responded — within hours of the Georgian attack — the Russians were expecting the Georgian attack and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next 48 hours, the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and forcing a retreat. By Sunday, Aug. 10, the Russians had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.

On Monday, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other drive was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its ports. By this point, the Russians had bombed the military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within 40 miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside reinforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.

THE MYSTERY BEHIND THE GEORGIAN INVASION

In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on Thursday night? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia’s move was deliberate.

The United States is Georgia’s closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government and people doing business in Georgia. It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia’s mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian frontier. U.S. technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the posture of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that the Russians had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?

It is very difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against U.S. wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a massive breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the existence of Russian forces, or knew of the Russian forces but — along with the Georgians — miscalculated Russia’s intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when the Russian military was in shambles and the Russian government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s-1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that the Russians would not risk the consequences of an invasion.

If this was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: The Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia and the United States and Europe could not respond. As for risk, they did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no counter. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well — indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans needed the Russians more than the Russians needed the Americans. Moscow’s calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, as we have discussed, and they struck.

THE WESTERN ENCIRCLEMENT OF RUSSIA

To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the U.S. and European point of view, the Orange Revolution represented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet Union empire.

That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO’s expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — and again in the 2004 expansion, which absorbed not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.

The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented a fundamental threat to Russia’s national security. It would have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion — publicly stated — was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.

The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo’s separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: The principle of Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts — including demands by various regions for independence from Russia — might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia’s requests were ignored.

From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, the Russians decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.

Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn’t mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the Cold War, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is about 60 miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries hostile to Russian interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe and, in some cases, China.

RESURRECTING THE RUSSIAN SPHERE

Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had U.S. support, aid and advisers and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.

By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin re-established the credibility of the Russian army. But far more importantly, by doing this Putin revealed an open secret: While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. The United States wants to place ballistic missile defense installations in those countries, and the Russians want them to understand that allowing this to happen increases their risk, not their security.

The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.

The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance: For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, they do not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.

Therefore, the United States has a problem — it either must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for another war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran — and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow’s interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).

In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary militaries and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that they have resumed their role as a regional power. Russia is not a global power by any means, but a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that isn’t all too shabby at the moment. It has also compelled every state on the Russian periphery to re-evaluate its position relative to Moscow. As for Georgia, the Russians appear ready to demand the resignation of President Mikhail Saakashvili. Militarily, that is their option. That is all they wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.

The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia’s public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened — it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase of Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. As we have written, this conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on the Russians. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.

'The Forsaken'

'The Forsaken' tells the true story of the forgotten Americans who during the great depression fled the USA in their thousands to make a better life in Stalin's Russia. Once there they soon became disenchanted with the communist life, but they found that Russia now considered them Soviet Citizens and they could never leave, many ended their lives in the Gulag.

Here is an extract from a review of the book(the reviewer is Richard Pipes does anyone know if he's a relation of Daniel?):

"This is a very sad book, the story of thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the "building of socialism." It was, in the words of the author, "the least heralded migration in American history" and a period when "for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving." Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag. In Tim Tzouliadis's "The Forsaken" (Penguin Press, 436 pages, $29.95), their dismal story is told with great skill and indignation usually missing from Western accounts of communist Russia.

They came to Russia full of enthusiasm, bringing with them baseball and jazz, and eager to acclimatize. Russians found it difficult to believe the Americans' tales of woe when they saw their clothes, luxurious by Russian standards. And the migrants were themselves quite unprepared for the poverty and lawlessness which characterized life under Stalin, and in many if not most cases decided to leave. They soon learned, however, that when they surrendered their American passports upon stepping on Soviet soil (passports which were then used by Soviet agents in America), they had become, automatically, Soviet citizens. Protests and appeals to the American authorities qualified the émigrés in Moscow's eyes as troublemakers and led to their arrests, followed by confinement in concentration camps."