Archive for September, 2007

Evo Morales: Not Cool

Apparently Bolivia’s president gave the Iranian president a reception with military honors:

Ahmadinejad shores up support in Bolivia, Venezuela

If you don’t like the U.S., well OK, but the last time I was in Bolivia (last August, actually) I don’t remember any Bolivians expressing support for the imposition of a Shi’ite Muslim theocracy in the Andes.

I never got the sweater thing, but that was pretty harmless. But linking up with Iran? No sir, I don’t like it.

Also, the Bolivians might want to consider a new military uniform to replace those 1847 models they’re still wearing. I guess they’re just really into the look of British dudes from the Crimean War.

Realism

Abizaid: World Could Abide Nuclear Iran

Assuming Iran actually is trying to get nuclear weapons, which is still an assumption, I agree particularly with his note about Iran not being suicidal. The Iranians also know that slipping a weapon to Hizballah would be so easily traced that they might as well just openly launch a missile, so the terrorist route is equally unlikely. (Al-Qaeda would do better to approach North Korea than Iran about such a deal. On the whole, I think mullah-run Iran has behaved a lot more rationally than the Kims.) Mostly, I agree that the cost of another war is higher than the alternative, so it’s ultimately a cost-benefit analysis.

I think that if every Army general retired and went into politics at the same time, the U.S. would certainly have a more calculated approach to world affairs. I know soldiers can’t speak their mind publicly about policy while in uniform, but I desperately hope they voice the same reasoned opinions to their civilian commanders that they do in public after retirement.

It’s also interesting that only a military guy could make such a calculation without being excoriated as a coward with his head in the sand.

More here.

“Moral Vacuum”

This column was deeply unsettling and thought-provoking:

The Age of Irresponsibility

For a President who believes so deeply in good, evil and the need for justice, why does he think a situation with no consequences isn’t going to bring out the worst in people? And for those who argue that counterinsurgencies—from the American West to Ireland to Malaysia to Kenya—have always involved (or even “require”) violent excesses by the occupiers, I think it’s obvious who deserves the blame for failing to learn that and promising the opposite in Iraq.

Bold Move

Could have told them two years ago that Times Select would do more harm than good:

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Website

The bosses at the old job had us set up a similar walled-garden movement that was later abandoned for similar reasons (lost eyeballs ultimately = lost ad revenue). Opinion’s a commodity online (see this blog?) so charging for it didn’t make a lot of sense, particularly when so many people are out there searching for Paul Krugman, Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd’s latest. That’s lots of eyeballs that are going to bail out the minute they hit that subscription wall.

Letting the archives go for free is an interesting one. Post-1995-or-so content—after the web really came into force—makes sense to give out as free, but people will pay a small fee for research purposes if you want to charge for the pre-1996 stuff. And even if they did give it all out for free, as a researcher, I’m probably going to that publication’s site looking for one specific thing, and I’m unlikely to go, “Hey, while I’m here looking for a Times article from 1944, I think I’ll take a largely unrelated interest in their current events coverage, even though I’m not here for that purpose.” Sure, a small fee for individual articles is just a trickle, but it’s a trickle that you don’t have otherwise and that isn’t really costing you new users.

Regardless, smart. And that’s from someone making his living off of web media. What.

Iraq

Understanding the logistical impossibility of maintaining the troop surge, and disregarding whether or not you really believe that the past few months’ effort has worked, I can’t quite wrap my head around this one.

When you say spend months arguing that a certain strategy will work, then you believe that the strategy does indeed work, why then do you abandon the strategy for the very reason that, well, it worked? Apparently the President is assuming the troops’ presence allowed some other societal facet to bloom that will provide ongoing stability. But it seems to me that other than the troop level, there aren’t other variables that have changed from spring 2007 to now: even if violence is down, we haven’t seen a big Iraqi government breakthrough (ask the White House), nor is there any kind of factional reconciliation to speak of.

This is like when a patient takes medication for a chronic condition, then after realizing he feels better, says, “Man, I feel great–looks like I no longer need to take my medication.”

I Got One For Ya

This morning I was on the subway thinking about the Korean War, just on the DL as usual, when it occurred to me that President Bush could learn a lesson from his professed exemplar, Harry S Truman. (No period after the S.)

People in the Administration and the military have regularly accused Iran of aiding Iraqi Shi’ite militias in their attacks on Americans. I don’t know if Iran is actually building the IEDs, but they certainly have a sympathetic Shi’ite proxy in Iraq, and it’s unlikely that they aren’t somehow involved. Whatever the nature of Iran’s help in the mayhem, this assistance is one of the leading casus belli (plural of that?) for a potential strike on Iran. (For a level-headed assessment of what would likely happen in that event, you can read this.) Here’s where history offers some perspective.

In October 1950 the U.S. and its United Nations allies were, by all measures, winning the Korean War, having pushed to the Yalu River and taken the majority of what is now North Korea. It was then that Mao Tse-Tung sent an army of Chinese regulars into Korea and pushed the United Nations halfway back into South Korea. Eventually the front lines stabilized around the 38th Parallel and stayed roughly there until the ceasefire in 1953, which obviously is still the border today.

What does this have to do with Iran today? Well, General MacArthur was loudly calling for a nuclear attack on China to punish them for getting involved in Korea, and with an entire Chinese army fighting directly against the Americans, China’s involvement was far more overt and deadly than anything Iran has done in Iraq. It also had a more direct cost, as North Korea would likely have gone down in utter defeat without Chinese help.

Truman, however, knew that the U.S. public–not to mention the military and America’s allies fighting in Korea–would not support a widened conflict that could easily turn into World War III only five years after the end of the biggest war yet, and an attack on China would likely have widened things a great deal. So rather than attack China directly, Truman fired MacArthur (hugely unpopular at the time) and kept the conflict limited to Korea, which eventually led to his leaving office at record low approval ratings. Was his decision unfair to American forces fighting in Korea? I don’t know, but I do know that he was smart to avoid a broader war that would have turned nuclear. (MacArthur could have even volunteered an attack on the USSR: Soviet pilots were flying North Korea’s jet fighters against the U.S. and UN. Imagine how an American attack on Vladivostok would have played out for the world.)

The Korean War was a mixed bag: the U.S. avoided a wider conflict and halted communism’s advance on the peninsula, but we’ve been stuck with Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il for 50+ years, and there was the fact that South Korea only became a real democracy in the 1980s after several awful dictators. The lesson here for President Bush is that his predecessor knew that he was playing with fire if he widened the war, fire that could quickly burn out of control and sweep the war-exhausted U.S. into a tremendous fight it didn’t want. Attacking Iran would be a similar regional tinderbox, no matter how grumbly Dick Cheney states otherwise.

I hope this is all overblown and the President’s team is just doing a “Look how crazy we are that we’d make it look like we want another war; you better not mess with us because woo! Crazy!” act to scare potential critics and enemies into keeping their mouths shut. (Kind of a stretch if true.) But, either way, the President can learn from all those historical biographies he’s supposedly reading and gain some valuable insight.

Too Easy, Yet Great

You don’t see these guys living in DC. Some things about New York, I really don’t miss:

Though I’d say hipsterism became a parody of itself around 2003 or so, it’s still funny. (Thanks, John.)

Our Fellow Guests

These dudes shared downtown Indy and our hotel with us during the wedding weekend. (I may or may not have mentioned to the Slate V peeps a few weeks prior that the convention would be there with us.)

Good times.