Mark Byron

Clubbed Med

I've been a bit under the weather over the weekend, so it's catch-up time.

Greece-postponing the crash that needs to happen; I don't see the Greeks making the cuts needed to balance things especially with the establishment parties that are now in charge. The second election surprised me, as their mainstream conservative New Democracy party got an expanded plurality, enough to patch together a majority with the mainstream socialist PASOK.

I was kinda rooting for the hard-left Syriza to win, since they'd give the ECB and IMF the MDS (middle digit salute) and get back to normal sooner, if normal includes nationalizing the banks.

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Egypt-Have Murci! Mohammed Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, beat out the general's choice 52-48. The next question is how much authority the generals will let him have and whether they'll make their autocoup throwing out the parliamentary elections stick. Neither option seems all that palatable and Israel is seeing their Sinai border get more problematic; whatever happens in Egypt will have spillovers to the east, especially if the MB start to back their sister-movement Hamas.

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Syria-the Russians are sending a gator freighter there. The cover is to allow for the evacuation of Russian nationals, but it also give a shield to Assad and friends if the west does want to intervene; they might have to shoot at Russians to do so.

Coup of Grace?

The Egyptian analogue to the Supreme Court just declared the Muslim Brotherhood-led parliament unconstitutional and disbanded it, giving power back to the military interim government. That's bad news for democracy, but might be good geopolitics for the US and Christians in the region.

The court is made up of Mubarak appointees, so they have something of a vested interest into the pre-2011 status quo. What we're seeing is something akin to Turkey, where the military there has stepped in to toss governments that look too un-secular, although the current government seems to have escaped that fate as it tries to give Muslims more room to maneuver in the public square.

That sounds good from a freedom-of-religion standpoint, but it has also resulted in a less-pro-western government in Turkey, as they have ditched previously friendly relations with Israel. A MB government in Egypt will be more anti-Israel and more pro-Hamas than the current one, which leaves small-d democrats rooting for the MB and conservative foreign-policy types rooting for the Mubarak holdovers.

Adding to the mix is the Coptic Christians in Egypt who weren't exactly best buddies with Mubarak but were treated with some deference; the more radical Muslims in the new parliament might be inclined to put severe restrictions on the Copts if not forcing them underground. A similar dynamic is going down in Syria, where the Assads, religious minorities themselves as a Muslim analogue to Mormons (if I can take some poetic license; the Alwaitis are looked at as apostate by Shia and Sunni alike), treat their Christians much better than the opposition would; part of Russia's backing of Assad could well flow from an honorable looking after fellow Orthodox churchmen in Syria.

Thus, conservatives would have some things to be happy about if the military stays in power in Egypt, except that the neocon vision of spreading democracy around the world takes it in the chops. One could see the Pat Buchanans in the realm cheering but the Weekly Standard crowd being of mixed thoughts.

It might well be worth letting one of these popularly-elected Islamist government actually be allowed to govern and see if they can coexist with the rest of the world. If they can coexist, that will take a lot of the steam out of al Qaeda and their ilk if we can give would-be jihadis a political outlet to change corrupt systems rather than forcing them to arms to get their way. If the powers that be keep pulling the plug when they win, they'll stop being part of the political process and take up arms or bombs.

There is an election coming up for president, pitting a MB guy versus a Mubarak leftover; the winner would be in position to move things in their direction, although a MB president going up against the military might result in a civil war far bloodier than we saw last year.

Get Yer Yahya's Out... of the Way

The Drone Ranger rides again, dispatching al Qaeda second-in-command and Internet front-man Abu Yahya al-Libi. Pakistan's wild, wild Northwest was where our buddy was located.

The Monday strike was the third such deadly attack in as many days and the 21st suspected U.S. drone strike in Pakistan this year. At least six missiles were fired at a militant compound near the town of Mir Ali in the North Waziristan region near the Afghanistan border.

This guy beat me to the title pun; and christened the mechanical merchants of death the Rolling Drones.

Seriously, we're essentially looking at Pakistan as enemy territory, at least the NW part of the country which is all but run by the Taliban.

Cold War 2.0?

The Russians are talking trash over missile defense systems in Eastern Europe... at least, one hopes they're just talking trash.

Russia says it is prepared to use "destructive force pre-emptively" if the US goes ahead with controversial plans for a missile defence system based in Central Europe.

The warning came after the Russian defence minister said talks on missile defence were nearing a dead end. Moscow fears that missile interceptors would be a threat to Russia's security. But the US and Nato say they are intended to protect against attacks from Iran or North Korea.

"A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens," chief of the Russian defence staff Gen Nikolai Makarov said.

Such ABM batteries are only a threat to Russia if they are planning on re-invading Eastern Europe in the near future or are envisioning a US invasion or want a Islamic nuke to head towards the US.

What is likely at play is a desire for Russia to get back the hegemon status in its old imperial domains. If they play hardball with Eastern Europe, they might move them to cast their lot with Russia if those countries think they can get more from the Russians than they can from the US and the rest of Europe.

US-Russian relations haven't been good as of late, as the Putin team has been playing the bad cop in world affairs quite a bit, partly to look tough back home and partly to keep buisness interests with rogue players like Iran and Syria going. This move just brings that bad blood out into the open.

Bay of Halal Pigs?

The Syrian civil war is taking interesting turns, as we saw an amphibious raid by rebels; I can't recall seeing that anywhere in my adult lifetime, which has to go back to the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by dissidents with US help for a matching reference. Somehow, using "Bay of Pigs" in a battle between Muslim factions has a bit of irony.

Syrian rebel gunmen in inflatable dinghies have attacked a military unit on the Mediterranean coast, with deaths on both sides, state media report.

It is thought to be the first rebel assault from the sea. Separately, Lebanon says its navy has seized weapons destined for the rebels.

Clashes between security forces and deserting troops left heavy casualties near Damascus and Aleppo, reports say.

The issues are beginning to take a regional angle, as the rebels have support in northern Lebanon, where Tripoli's Sunni majority is often at odds with its Alawite minority; that enmity might well extend to fighting the Alawite Assad clan running Syria. The containers of arms was heading to Tripoli and thence to the rebels, something that the pro-Syrian Lebanese government would like to stop.

The good news for the fans of the rebels is that support is getting in. The bad news is that the Lebanese government is trying to stop things, which might wind up turning the fight into an international one.

Mitigating Obama's Errors

Hopes that a heart transplant would change Dick Cheney have proven unfounded- he's hit the hyperbole a bit heavy in declaring Obama "an unmitigated disaster to the country."

On domestic policy, he comes close to that. On foreign policy, he's actually done an OK job, letting the security forces do their job in getting Osama and keeping Club Gitmo open. With the exception of taking a more pro-Palestinian line on Holy Land policy and being a bit too eager to bug out of Afghanistan, he's been not too far from what a McCain administration would have done.

Of course, Mitt-igation of these errors is coming if the voters so choose. One hopes the changes mitigate things as well.

The Lord, High Executioner

Josh Trevino on Dear Leader-"I'd like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third." The top of the very short list that never will be missed, to be sure.

Return of the SOBs

Here's a thoughtful yet disturbing line from Charles Krauthammer over the current Egyptian dilemma-

The military is the only guarantor of a democratic system in the future, the same way that in Turkey the military for 50 years after the Ataturk revolution in the early ’20s guaranteed a secular, open society. If the military is gone, as Obama had urged — and it’s a good thing the military didn’t listen to him — then what you are going to get is the rule of the Islamists. If you add up the vote, [they have] over 60 percent of the vote. They can essentially… write a constitution that could be extremely repressive….

The problem is the transition has to be over time. We saw the French Revolution, the Russian, and Iranian. The liberals go out in the street and start it, and then it’s the ideologues — organized like the Islamists or communists (in Russia) — who seize power. So you want the military as a stabilizing influence. And we have to hope that it allows the evolutionary process over time….

A democracy is a place where you have a second election. And the question is: Will Egypt have a second election or not? I think the military is likely to ensure a second. I’m not sure Islamists would.

That last paragraph has some salience when you look south to the rest of Africa for evidence. The anti-colonial leaders would win the first election, then proceed to set up a one-party state, with the Big Man ruling for a generation before leaving either feet first or with the mobs swarming the tarmac as he flies off to the Riviera or Saudi Arabia. "One man, one vote, one time" was the old saw for that dynamic.

In the US, we have a constitution as the backstop for government misdeeds. However, other countries don't have that rule-of-law mentality and some other vehicle needs to keep government in check. In many countries, the military serves as that backstop, stepping in  when the system becomes dysfunctional or steps over a line that cannot be crossed. Pakistan comes to mind, as does Turkey, as Krauthammer mentioned.

The Arab world seems to have a string of Big Men, either generals or monarchs, that keep political Islam at bay or (in the case of the Saudis) bring the Islamists into the tent. That offends the senses of a Western liberal (in this case, Anglosphere conservatives are usually liberals) that they deserve better than a dictatorship.

If the alternatives are a slightly malevolent dictatorship or a very malevolent Islamist democracy, are we in the position to push democracy under the bus? Given that a lot of the Founding Fathers were not thrilled with direct democracy, even the US has its safeguards in place.

Islamic Democrats?

Are we looking to go back to the Cold War era policy of backing pro-US tyrants? I hope not, but that seems to be the logical extension of folks wondering who lost Egypt.

The early returns have about a 60% vote for Islamic-centric parties, with the semi-moderate Islamic Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party getting 37% and a more hard-core Nour party getting 24%. That could lead to, depending on whether F&J looks for secular allies or not, something akin to Iran's bounded democracy.

However, could we also see the F&J turn into, if I can borrow from European politics, Islamic Democrats, analoging from the Christian Democratic parties that litter the mainland European center-right. One can only hope that can happen, for if we have countries that are majority anti-western Islamic, geopolitics gets very strained very quickly.

I don't think there is a lot that the US could have done to reverse this result. Given that the were no solid political movements to back here, the Brotherhood filled that vacuum. The more secular groups didn't have the social services network of the Brotherhood to give them street cred.

Stateside, liberals might not like the Salvation Army for their old-school stance on sexuality, but there aren't too many secular alternatives to the more evangelically-inclined soup kitchens and homeless shelters. The same applies somewhat well in Egypt, where the schools and hospitals that the IB have set up gave them a big heads-up. It would have taken decades of effort for secular outsiders have set up a parallel network, even if the Mubarak regime would have allowed such a fifth column to be created.

The only good alternative to having some Islamic-flavored presence in the governments of places like Tunisia and Egypt is to have the old secular strong-men still in charge. That smacks a bit too much of the "he's an SOB, but he's our SOB" strategy we saw in the Cold War; in a way, Mubarak was a throwback to that era, where he and his predecessor Anwar Sadat opted to cast their lot with the US in the Cold War after first being in the Soviet sphere until the early 70s.

We might get some new Irans, but we might get some Islamic Democratic parties. It's worth taking a stab and seeing if we can see some sort of Islamic equivalent of "Judeo-Christian values" in Arab countries.

The Math of Khan

Here's an interesting story of American assimilation; the Jacksonville Jaguars are about to be sold to Shahid Khan, an Illinois-based auto-parts tycoon. As the name implies, he's of Pakistani descent, having moved to the US to go to U of Illinois; he got an engineering degree and wound up buying the company he was designing parts for. It reminds me a tad of how Bobby Jindal's parents came over from India to go to LSU and saw their son grow up to run the state.

You'd expect a guy with a last name of Khan to be owning a 20/20 cricket team rather than an NFL club, but that's not the case. Khan has become a generous member of the UI community, donating to a lot of college efforts as well as politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Given the current pleasantries between the US and Pakistan, his nationality might set some good-ol-boys off. However, Khan has an American wife and seemingly has gone native, looking to buy the Rams a bit closer to home before doing a Jag snag.

 

Don't Have a Dawg in that Fight

Here's an interesting brawl fixin' to happen; the hacktivists at Anonymous are going after the Zetas-

A group claiming affiliation with the international hacking group Anonymous posted a video demanding that the Zetas release a hostage in Veracruz. The person in the video claims to have information about the names of the Zetas and of corrupt public officials working with the Zetas. They say they will release the names and addresses of people linked to the Zetas online.

The group then hacked the website of the former attorney general of the state of Tabasco, someone who has previously been accused of ties to criminal organizations, and posted a note claiming he works for the Zetas.

Here we have two folks on the dark side of the law going mano-a-mano. In most recent cases, Anonymous has been a pest from the anti-powers-that-be left, often hacking to pay back foes of Wikileaks. Here, they seem to be on the side of the angels for a change, assuming their outings are legit.

However, the outings will likely cause a few folks to die at the hands of rival gangs or the new Mata Zeta hit squads, assuing those two are not one and the same. Rough justice, indeed.

ETA and Something Moor Both Go Out of Business

This might get lost in the noting/celebrating of the demise of Gaddafi; the Basque terror group ETA is hanging it up, opting to take the example of the IRA and become part of Spanish politics peacefully.

That should help Spain quite a bit, for the fear of terrorism will go down. There will still be the stray Islamic terror, but homegrown terror will decrease. If the lessons in Northern Ireland are any indication, there will still be a few ETA hard cases who want to keep at it, but they can morph into something like Sinn Fein or the Scottish and Welch nationalist parties.

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Meanwhile, Gaddafi went out feet first as promised. A trial might have been better, as this Globe and Mail piece notes, but there is a sense of closure in a corpse.

The death of Gaddafi (how may variant spellings do we have for him?) should allow Libya to move on towards a more democratic government. There is a power vacuum here, as the old regime was a one-man show. Also, tribalism can be a factor, so we could see a decentralized government with a lot of local autonomy.

The one big fear for a lot of folks is that Islamists will try to fill that vacuum. They aren't a majority, but a violent minority can often get their way.

Mecca for Post-Moderns

I recall the end of a current ad where the head of the household is in the process of eating his daughter's goldfish as sushi. When the fishies turn up AWOL, the dad says "whadya gonna do?"

We're much in the same predicament as the tweenager in the ad with Iran right now. There isn't a lot that can be done about the attempted assassination attempt on the Saudi ambassador. Any diplomatic solution by the US seems trite and any military solution seems overkill.

The best solution might come from the Saudis themselves. They have something that Iranians are keenly interested in... Mecca. Were the Saudis to declare the Haj off limits to Iranians, it would get the Iranian's attention in a hurry. It would inflame Sunni-Shia relations in hot spots like Iraq and Lebanon and possibly result in at least one civil war breaking out or resuming.

There are a lot of interesting sub-plots here if this isn't just an Amateur Night sting of a Iranian would-be spy. If the Iranians were actually thinking of recruiting the Zetas as hit men, it might start a major US intervention in Mexico, as the drug war and the "War on Terror" get a quick and dirty merger.

The Zetas are likely smarter than that; being caught helping the Iranians would make them Public Enemy #1 in the US and bring a US response that would militarize northern Mexico beyond the flawed run at Villa in the 1910s. Thankfully for them, it was a US agent posing as a Zeta.

Obama's Greatest Hit

Interesting news out of Yemen, where an US-born al Qaeda teleterrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed by US forces, likely a Predator drone aircraft. al-Awlaki was able to use his native English to spread his cause over the Web and inspired more than one American jihadi, including the Fort Hood shooter.

I don't have a problem with unmanned drone aircraft doing the shooting; it does make things a bit antiseptic for our side and a bit less gallant, but if the pilot can be doing the job from an office complex in Nevada, more power to 'em.

What is novel is that we've essentially put out a extrajudicial hit on Anwar al-Awlaki. There doesn't seem to be much doubt that he'd be up for either life in prison or a trip to Jack the Dripper had he been hauled to justice. It's not something that is good for a country that thrives on the rule of law to be shelving such principles on a global battlefield.

However, it is a battlefield, albeit an unconventional one. A missile strike delivered some rough justice without putting US or Yemeni troops at harm's way; if you're more of a pacifist or more of a legal purist, that is too rough, but a constitutional law prof turned president signed off on the policy.

It will be interesting to see if this gets anyone into the Democratic nomination race.

Who's Hiding in Costellobad?

It took ten years, but rough justice was done to Osama in the wee hours of this morning Pakistan time. No, he didn't get Mirandized nor did he get a trial, but he opted to go down fighting when a team of Seals came for him in a compound in Abbottabad. This wasn't a remote village but the site of the Pakistani West Point, so local officials will likely have some 'splainin' to do as to how Osama was sitting under their noses.

It's not a happy-happy day. al Qaeda has largely metastisized into a loose coaltion that doesn't need a leader, but the changes over the last few years have made the group less able to run big operations like 9/11.

What is interesting is that it didn't take a big military footprint to do the job; a small special-ops unit was able to do the job. That might play to a strategy that leans more towards a criminal/SWAT team approach rather than a tanks and bombers approach, supplimented by good military special forces and CIA assets.

Out of the Pocket

When I was watching Fox News earlier in the week (Sunday morning, if memory serves), they had a retired general, "Spider" Marks on talking about Libya. The phrase that struck me at the time from Gen. Marks' commentary was that "hope is not a methodology"; a lot of what we're presently doing is degrading the Libyan military and hoping the opposition can take advantage of the help. Marks, a Romney-backing conservative last go-round, wasn't been too critical of the operation, but that things are rather open-ended and fuzzy.

[Update 9PM-Poor memory-it looks like it was CNN and not Fox; they had Marks on in that 11AM window that I recall. However, the transcript doesn't have that line in it. It's a good line, but it doesn't look like Marks said it. Either my memory is making things up or CNN decided to edit the transcript.]

Donald Sensing has a comparable quote from his military days-

When I was assigned to the Army Operations Center in the early 1990s at HQDA, the chief of staff was Gen. Carl Vuono. He sometimes found occasion during our briefings to him about current and planned operations to hammer home a point: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans."

Don't tell me what you hope will happen, don't tell me what you wish you could do, he repeated. "Give me a plan that makes it happen."

Sensing and others on the right don't see such a plan. They're likely right, but that might not be as much of a negative as you'd think.

Do we want a war-plan that schedules when the 102nd Airborne takes over Tripoli, secures the airport and TV stations, and serves us Gadaffi's properly chilled head on a platter? Such a plan probably exists in the Pentagon, but we'd rather have the locals do that if we can swing it.

If we were actively working with the opposition and had large numbers of Special Ops folks seeded in to give tactical support, the resulting government will look like a manufactured US lackey, which will make it easier for either Gadaffi holdouts or al Qaeda to do battle with the next government that emerges. It might be best to be making it up as we go.

Yes, we're scrambling at present, but think Michael Vick. No, not the dog-butcher side, the mobile QB side. His strong suit is to create on the move and get out of the pocket; chaotic but effective. You can't script that, not easily at least, which gives more conservative coaches fits.

Or conservative military analysts, for that matter.

Part of it is that we have a liberal, pacifist-leaning POTUS, and conservatives won't give him the benefit of the doubt. Were President McCain or Romney overseeing this operation, you'd not see that degree of skepticism.

We still have some good folks in the military and the Commander in Chief isn't dancing cheek to cheek with Dennis the Menace. The President has a large degree of smarts and quite a bit of common sense, albeit usually deployed in questionable directions. He also has some level-headed foreign leaders on board as well; this is one case where having the US listen to our European allies like Cameron or Sarkozy might help matters for once.

Planning a Scramble

Things seem to be improving in Libya, if you count having Gaddafi's forces having less territory being an improvement. This seems to be playing out a bit like Afghanistan a decade ago, where a combination of US-led air power and anti-government troops on the ground pushed back the Taliban.

The two differences from that experiences are (1) there were some special forces on the ground to give specialized support and (2) a Northern Alliance grouping of anti-Taliban folks were already running part of the country and gave the US someone organized to work with.

Is there a fear that al Qaeda will fill this vacuum? Yes, but it shouldn't stop folks from getting rid of Gaddafi, who isn't exactly the good cop of the area. Does Lockerbee come to mind? If not, look that up and weigh that against 9/11. He had been on a peace offensive in the 00s, trying to look like just another Arab Big Man, but that's now well out the window.

The al Qaeda line reminds me a bit of the tarring of the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s with a communist brush, since the US commies were backing it. In that case, the help of the hard left was secondary to the cause and the commies were actually on the side of the angels. I think the same is true here in Libya; al Qaeda help is tertiary and they're actually fighting for the good guys in this one.

The potential fear to deal with down the line is if al Qaeda tries to carve out fiefdoms in the more secluded parts of the country, especially in the desert south, turning southern Libya into a staging area much like NW Pakistan. However, we need to deal with that down-the-line.

This is a messy undertaking and the president is going to get some flak; he gets it from the left since he isn't a pure pacifist and doesn't keep the other 535 secretaries of state happy with constant briefings, and he gets it from the right who nit-picks for the sake of nit-picking.

I made the mistake of surfing into Hannity on Friday; he questioned whether Obama's up to the job in Iraq. The US is, and one can only hope Obama is as well. It beats the heck out of assuming Obama isn't up to it, in which case the best we can hope for is a slaughter of innocents and a few guilty ones. He might not be my first choice, but he's the POTUS for another two years; unlike Canada, we don't have the option of having a new election when we "need" one.

Neoconlibs

If the Kristolian wag that neocons are liberals mugged by reality, reality must have been on the warpath in Washington this week in the form of action against Libya. A near Desert Storm-level coalition of NATO and Arab countries (the latter mostly for diplomatic cover) have cast their lot against Gaddafi and the UN has signed off on action to cripple the regime's ability to attack its own people; the Security Council vote was 10-0-5, with Russia and China opting to abstain rather than shoot down the action via a veto.

The administration seems to have its own clash between idealists and pragmatists, but a do-something camp emerged this week if this Politico piece is legit, with an interventionist camp wanting to use military power for a good cause carrying the day. Interestingly, the interventionists tended to be assistant-level female staffers winning over their more status-quoian male bosses.

Of course, reality didn't manage to apply the board of education to the seat of knowledge to everyone; a rather consistent Dennis Kuchinich is looking to impeach Obama for this. He might be a three-sigma outlier on the left, but he's consistent, the anti-Ron Paul (although Paul might agree with him on the less-than-constitutional nature of the attack). Other Democrats aren't looking to go that far, but a combination of old-school pacifism and the disappointment of 535 commanders-in-chief left out of the loop lead to a decent quota of grumbles from the left.

The right is largely silent so far; they grumbled about Obama not doing something sooner, but the main question from both right and left is "What is the goal?" Getting rid of Gaddafi is the first order of business, but are we up to a multi-year run of nation-building a la Iraq once we get the old strongman out? The ethnic divisions in Libya seem much less toxic than in Iraq, but Gaddafi's tribe got special treatment and paybacks are going to be the order of the day lest calmer heads prevail.

There is going to be some interesting payback opportunities on the right to see how Obama handles this situation and whether some of the liberal digs at Bush over the klutzy transfer of authority in Iraq get echoed back by conservatives in this case. An operative rule for commentary is if you wouldn't have liked it aimed at Bush, don't aim it at Obama.

Obama is sure not to say "Mission Accomplished." What else he gets to say will be interesting.

Goin' Fission

I've yet to blog on the Japanese situation; I'm a bit stunned and short on words.

I was watching the tsunami come ashore in real time during the wee hours of Friday morning Eastern time; I was coming off a on-line tutoring shift at 1AM and channel-surfed into the news channels as the waves were hitting the Sendai area. It was surreal, watching both Fox News and CNN carry the same helicopter footage of the wave hitting; things were too long-range to see any people, but there was an eerie sense of watching a live snuff film.

Japan is in better position to handle such things; we borrowed their term of Harbor-Wave for what we used to call tidal waves, after all. Even for them, dealing with a 9.0 earthquake close to shore created a no-win situation, killing thousands and likely tens of thousands.

Unlike the Haitians or South Asians hit by major earthquakes in the recent past, the Japanese don't need too much financial or logistical help. However, the scale of the damage may have long-term effects on the global economy, as the Japanese might wind up cashing in a lot of their foreign investments in order to import goods for rebuilding; along side that, we'll see a large disruption of their economy. This is Katrina on steroids, without the advance warning that you get for a hurricane.

The current crisis revolves around a nuclear plant in Fukushima, where three reactors have partly melted down. So far, the damage has been largely contained, with some modestly radioactive discharges used to vent the containment buildings.

This seems both discouraging and encouraging at the same time for the future of nuclear power. It's discouraging in that we have three reactors on the verge of a meltdown, but encouraging that they took the worst Mother Nature can throw at it and not go China Syndrome on us... so far. If this holds up, fears of another Chernobyl should be tamped down, although you will still have some folks worried no matter what.

Nuclear power is fairly non-polluting as long as you avoid meltdowns and major releases and figure out what to do with the plants once they are deactivated; that last part is a major work in progress, as NIMBY-itis plagues any plan to store waste long-term.

What Have You Done for Him Lately

It's interesting that the shooter in Frankfurt yesterday was a guy from Kosovo. One would think that he would have a soft spot for the US Air Force for their ousting of the Serbs from his country over a decade ago.

However, that is sooooo 90s, and we're in the 10s. Also, infidels are still infidels, even if they are former allies. Osama was happy to take US help in ousting the Russians from Afghanistan, then turned around and aimed at the less-egregious infidels.

Be thankful that modern Christian history is short on jihad-style thought; otherwise, we'd have the Westboro folks shooting at mourners rather than damning them loudly. Unfortunately, they're allowed to do that thanks to the First Amendment. They're allowed to question one's eternal destination as long as they don't try to expedite one's trip to eternity.

From the Shores of Tripoli

Not every freedom meme works peacefully. The meme that started in 1989 that gave us the fall of the Berlin Wall saw some bloody clashes in Romania and China; in Romania, the dictator wound up leaving feet-first at the hands of protesters who executed him after a crude trial.

The Arab freedom meme of 2011 has hit its first major bloodshed. Libya has moved into a civil war of sorts as opposition forces take over cities, sometimes with the help of the army. It's now Gadaffi and a small cadre of domestic militia and mercs from outside of Libya who are not going quietly against everyone else. Even Libya's UN delegation has defected.

There's not much the rest of the world can do but watch and stand ready to pick up the pieces afterward. A no-fly zone has been floated in some circles, so that NATO can effectively ground the Gadaffi loyalists in the Libyian Air Force, but that still doesn't get a regime change, just limit the amount of earth Gadaffi can scorch before leaving. Asset freezes don't help much, since this will play out in days rather than months, and financial assets won't help Gadaffi too much at this point.

The only way that the Marines will get to relive their theme song is to help evacuate foreigners or to provide security once a new government is established. Using foreign military power here seems foolhardy and would backfire in the long run, for any new government would be seen as Western lackeys if they were put in with US help.

Oil prices are spiking over this news; Libya is an OPEC member and a drop in production is feared, especially if the meme disrupts some of the Persian Gulf monarchies.

Gadaffi wants his 72 Virginians; pray that he doesn't take too many more people down with him for such an honor.

'79 or '89?

The unrest that toppled the Tunisian strongman earlier this month has gone viral and hit Egypt, where it's US-backed Big Man, Hosni Mubarak, is hanging by a thread. The viral nature of early 2011's events remind me of the events of 1989, where much of Eastern Europe ditched the Soviet yoke and moved towards democracies, many (notably the Czech Republic and Poland) with a neoliberal lean to their politics.

Those were Good Things, where the liberal/neocon vision of all people regardless of race or creed wanting what the folks in the Anglosphere want held true. That isn't always the case when the people have had enough of a Big Man.

If we go back a decade from the fall of the Berlin Wall, we see another vision of what can happen when a Big Man falls; there was widespread protest against the Shah of Iran in 1979, with critiques coming both from Western-friendly reformers and from Shia militants. The early moves saw a move towards democratic reforms, but were quickly overrun by the move to put the ayatollahs in charge, a move that has left Iran in a bounded-democratic theocracy for the last three decades.

David Warren and Ross Douthat have some interesting pieces on Egypt in the hopper, both warning against leaning too much into the happy-face side of things. The news of the day has a loose coalition of reformers, led by former nuke chief Mohamed ElBarade, working with the Islamist-leaning Muslim Brotherhood in the anti-government protests. The latter is a bit scary, since the MB folks gave us both the ideological boss of al Qaeda as well as one of the 9/11 kamikaze pilots.

The optimist would hope that the radicals will calm down once they are part of the political process (they're currently stomped on by Mubarak) and be less radical once they are in the tent wizzing out. The realists will worry about them taking over a frail democracy much as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon.

To top that steaming bowl of unknown unknowns off, let's not forget the Coptic community in Egypt. For all of Mubarak's flaws, they have not been overly hostile to their Christians. That would likely change if the MB tries to force conversions or otherwise drive the Copts underground or out of the country.

Change isn't always good and the devil you know can be better than the devil you don't know. Lots of prayer concerns, not too many good answers.

 

The New Sugar Daddies

Here's an interesting story out of northern Canada, where one local mining company is looking to buy out another, but doesn't have the cash to do it and is looking for Chinese help in financing the deal.

Baffinland Iron Mines suitor Nunavut Iron Ore is seeking backing for its bid from deep-pocketed Chinese investors, sources say.

Getting involved in a fast-moving hostile takeover battle is not viewed as something that generally interests Chinese investors, but sources said that hasn't stopped Nunavut from approaching potential backers that could help the company compete with ArcelorMittal's cash offer for all of Baffinland.

Chinese investors have been keen on snapping up natural resources, including ore. From investing in the Australia outback to the Inuit side of the old Northwest Territories, Chinese investors are looking to feed their industrial machine and make friends while they do it.

Such activities are more political in developing countries, where investment in local infrastructure can make friends at the UN, but extending those deep pockets to US allies like Canada and Australia can erode US influence. That's not to say that every deal done by a Chinese company has an ulterior motive, but Chinese "soft power" in world finance is a force to be dealt with.

General Pao's not Chicken

Here's an interesting obit for Hmong leader Vang Pao; he lead a group of Hmong soldiers against the North Vietnamese along the Laotian-Vietnamese border. A lot of Viet Cong supply lines ran into Laos, and the CIA-backed Hmong were instrumental in slowing down the North from taking over both southern Vietnam and Laos.

Unfortunately, they lost both those fights, as mid-70s Indochina went communist, with North Vietnam reunifying the country on their terms, then taking over Laos in 1975 and Cambodia a few years later. A large chunk of Hmong then immigrated to the US and other countries, with Pao dying in exile in Fresno.

The pre-Watergate era CIA is a favorite whipping boy of the left, so anyone who was working for the CIA and using Air America as their airline of choice looks corrupt from that vantage point. However, even the left-leaning BBC seems to cast Pao as a Hmong patriot, looking to fend off both Japanese and Vietnamese colonialists.

Pao came from the "He's an SOB, but he's our SOB" era, Pao seems to deserve better than to be categorized as such. Some of the anti-communists were legit, and he seems to have been one of them.

 

In Flanders' Political Fields

I was loosely aware that Belgian politics was getting dysfunction, with Walloons and Flemish factions not getting along and strong Flemish desire to split the country in two. What is interesting now is that it has been seven months since their last election and a working coalition has yet to be found. The guy tasked with the job of brokering a deal, Johan Vande Lanotte, through in the towel today.

There are echoes of both Canada and the old Czechoslovakia in this case. Canada comes to mind in that the Flemish separatist groups beg comparison with the Parti Quebecois, making it hard to form a coherent majority government without it. The Czechs are next on the radar, with the more cosmopolitan and western-leading Czechs wanting free of the eastern-leaning and agrarian Slovaks; substitute the Flemish for the Czechs and the Walloons for the Slovaks and add water.

However, such analogies beg for the Velvet Divorce. Belgian politics breaks down on both ideology and regional grounds, so coalitions are the norm. However, the increased presence of separatist parties has made it hard for federalists to form a functioning coalition.

Since Brussels is the primary EU capital, this has some interesting implications for Europe as a whole. This might be the under-the-radar story of 2011, more important than some of the scuffles to be had on Capital Hill this spring.

 

Name's Bond... Yuan Bond

Here's an interesting sign of China's being a part of the adult table of world finance; the World Bank is starting to issue yuan-denominated bonds. The World Bank does development projects in developing countries, and China has grown to the point where they are now donors to the Bank rather than getting aid.

Given the large stash of T-bills and other investments Beijing is sitting on, lenders can be fairly sure that they can get other hard currencies for the yuan. This development isn't bad for the US, but is a good sign for China's financial status.

Inside Jobs

Pakistan has been a string of bad news stories as of late; the latest one saw a governor assassinated. One of Punjabi governor Salman Taseer's body-guards did him in for being in favor of getting rid of blasphemy laws. Getting rid of those laws would give both non-Muslims and dissident Muslims protection against Muslim purists and/or being on the wrong side of the government.

Being done in by your own security is a chilling way to go; Indira Gandhi died that way as well. Such inside jobs make security nearly impossible to pull off if the bad guys can plant a mole or appeal to folks in a way that will make an insider turn jihadi.

The mission of terrorists is to make the status quo unbearable; that's why we see a lot of assassinations in Mexico where the narcos want free reign.

Sacred Atheism

Here's a pair of head-scratchers from Korea.

(1) The North is pledging "a sacred war of justice of Korean style based on the nuclear deterrent at anytime necessary". "[D]edicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity" is what MW has as the 1a definition for sacred; that's rich for the avowed atheists of the PDRK to be proclaiming.

(2) The South is plurality-Christian, but isn't quite with the program, either.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak had harsh words for North Korea on Thursday.

"In the case of another surprise attack, the country must launch a merciless counterattack," Lee said.

Lee's a Presbyterian, so you might expect him to show some mercy. No such luck.

Let's get ready to rum-bull.

SOBs of Anarchy

What do the WikiLeaks fans who are DNSing all the institutions who have droped WL like a hot potato and al Qaeda have in common? They both hate the current world order and the economic system in which it operates.

Of course, their versions of asymmetrical conflict vary, hacking secret document archives and deluging their foe's web sites with bogus information requests as compared with bombs and AK-47s. The latter is far less damaging than the other, even though the former will likely generate target lists for the latter to take advantage of.

We know by-and-large what al Qaeda wants; a world under the knee of their version of Islam.

What does the WL crowd want other than to harass The Man? People usually don't want anarchy,which is where we head towards if all knowledge is public and the targets of state power (terrorists, criminals, etc.) know exactly what The Man is up to and corporate R&D and internal records are available to competitors and customers.

Usually, people move a system towards anarchy in order to move it to a new status quo; moving directly to their desired locale might not be feasible, so making the current system unworkable and chaotic is the first step towards the next one. Some people use anarchy to get to such a destination, whether it be communism, white power, black power, a green utopia or whatever the end goal is. Others will just rail against The Man, not having a coherent destination beyond letting them download their next DVD or MP# for free.

Lots of questions, few answers.

Responding to Slaps

Try this metaphor on for size. Bar scene in movie. Hero gets slapped by drunk reveler; your posse can take his, but it won't be pretty.

The macho thing to do is to beat the crap out of the drunk. However, if he has friends, you wind up having your friends fight with you, doing major damage to the bar's physical plant, sending a few of your guys to at least Urgent Care and not really changing much of anything.

The smart thing would be to say "We could have a nice bar-room brawl over that, but I'll pass on that this time." Eventually, you might have to have that donnybrook if he keeps being a horses-keister, but the prudent route would be to pass on a fight.

On to the headlines, where North Korea delivered the geopolitical equivalent of that head-slap. At least one and possibly two more South Koreans are dead courtesy of the latest shelling of a border island.

What does the US and the South do about such acts? A serious reprisal will likely result in hundreds of people killed on both sides of the border and would likely not result in any change of behavior from the government in the North. A full-scale war designed for force a regime change would be very messy and possibly nuclear, killing tens of thousands at least and devastating South Korea.

And, when the US did win that brawl, they would have a shattered North to reconstruct. A lot of it is already shattered economically, living at a susistance level, but there would be billions in aid that would be needed to make things something close to right.

There aren't any great answers. Token retaliation only kills people and doesn't change the bigger picture. Regime-change level force kills thousands and devastates both sides. Doing nothing lets the bullies of the north get away with murder.

Tom Lehrer's Marines would "rather kill them off by peaceful means." That's where diplomacy, as unsatisfying as it seems, might be our best option in the short term. Along with a message that the next slap will get that brawl started.