Speaking of Success...
Never admit defeat. Failure is a thing of the mind. Say it and it becomes reality. Defer reality by proclaiming victory. Sometimes it works, more often it does not. And at this moment, Afghanistan's leading election contender to Afghan President Hamid Karzai is pointing out that whoops, the emperor has no clothes. Standing there nakedly, the truth is that the much-heralded success of tamping down the Taliban in Afghanistan has been a dismal failure.
They just refuse to go away, to shrivel up and pass into history. A new troop surge, with an additional 4,000 U.S. marines pulled out of Iraq and installed into Afghanistan, the new front line between the world of rationality and reason and that of fanatical Islam. Only it isn't working as it is supposed to. Perhaps the Taliban aren't listening? Seven Americans killed on Monday, six British servicemen and four Canadian soldiers in the last week alone.
Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, formerly the country's foreign affairs minister, points out that despite thousands of British troops having patrolled Helmand province next to Kandahar where the Canadian and Dutch troops are located, the insurgency has not been controlled, it has increased. Every time the Taliban have been fought and declared beaten, they have simply returned.
It is the government of Afghanistan, claims Dr. Abdullah that is responsible. The international coalition still has its place in Afghanistan, is needed to keep the Taliban at bay. But it is the incompetence of the Afghan government, its failure to control corruption, the injustices done at its behest because of the criminality of the police leading to public resentment and grievances that has set the country back.
"Eight years down the line, we need more troops? This is a failure", proclaimed the independent candidate. "A national government fails and you think you can bring more troops and you can substitute that for failure?" The perception of the people of Afghanistan is that they have been abandoned by their government, their needs neither recognized nor met. People in the cities are complacent; in rural areas they are desperate.
"The fact that this insurgency is becoming stronger, that's the failure of the administration to deliver to the people. Thousands of people are with the insurgency" because of government failure. "In an insurgency, if you lose the people, you lose the war. Strengthening Afghan institutions is critical."
Labels: Human Relations, Political Realities, World Crises
Accountability Eludes
There's no one as certain as a convert to a new way of thought. Having eschewed one's old way of belief, the new one takes the ascendancy and bursts into the brilliance of declared thought like the birth of a new star. Watching Robert McNamara during his interviews in a series titled
The Fog of War, one had the impression that the man condemned everyone else's role in the calamity that was the U.S.-Vietnam War, withholding responsibility for his own careful direction of that very war.
He comes across as the respected, wise old statesman. With the acuity of vision that hindsight renders. As though if everything had gone according to his script all would have been well. He was the policymaker for President John F. Kennedy, the trusted intelligence, the technical genius who could foresee how things would unravel if proceedings went according to his plan. He felt that war could be prosecuted successfully if one adhered to strict technical principles, just as one relied upon a sturdy business plan.
Analysis and statistics have their place. How, though, to quantify human reactions to various stimuli? Graph a war and be assured of its outcome on the basis of statistical analysis? In antiquity, ancient Rome developed a system of battle that defied its enemies, and it won all its battles because of its battle-proficiency, its development of a system that outranked that of its enemies' armies, with the unbreechable Roman phalanx.
Outside of the use of the greatest weapon of mass destruction, swiftly annihilating people and demolishing infrastructures, there is no manner in which modern battles can be fought according to the numerical strategy of an accountant whose business model for commerce was successful, but could not be successfully transcribed to warfare. But Robert McNamara believed in his genius to plan and predict, and so did the presidents who used his genius.
By the time it became evident that the manipulation of statistics would not and could not result in the victory he kept promising, it was abundantly clear that the prosecution of the Vietnam War was an utter failure, costly in lives and prestige, in trust and in self-confidence of two nations. Attempting to exonerate himself in his "
In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam", he never did quite manage to admit he erred horrendously.
That he was responsible for the deaths of countless lives. He conceded that errors were made, that there were misjudgements, but not that he held personal and singular responsibility for organized mass murder otherwise known as the unintended consequences of waging war.
Labels: Heroes and Villains, Human Fallibility, That's Life, United States
Illegitimate!
At a time when the Iranian people's wishes have been stifled by an
increasingly hard-line regime which has unleashed a storm of brutal
recrimination on the masses anxious to protest their disbelief at the underhanded
machinations of their Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah
Khamenei to ensure that his chosen candidate for president be re-elected, the world looks on, detached, unmoved by their plight.
Above all, the United States, which has always considered itself a great moral force for good in the world, and which has, to that effect, moved heaven and earth to impose its values on other countries, suddenly sits back, slack and
disinterested.
Interested, however, in overlooking all manner of overt and covert plans which would have the effect of disrupting world peace, for its stated new goal of conducting meaningful dialogue with a fanatical theistic government that has no interest in discussing its internal affairs with anyone, let alone the president of the country whom the ayatollahs most despise, as the Great Satan.
One might think that President Barack Obama might entertain second thoughts about continuing to extend his open hand to Iran. But no. In his eagerness to appear as a partner for peace and
reconciliation with Russia, President Obama stands prepared to continue to outstretch his open hand to Iran.
Russia, after all, which has gone out of its way to aid and assist Iran, with nuclear expertise, extending credit for nuclear
installations, and refusing, along with China, to denounce the country's bellicose warnings against Israel and the United Nations in defiance of
condemnations over its
unauthorized nuclear program, has a vested interest here.
Whereas the United States had formerly identified Iran's nuclear ambitions for what they truly represent, now while still admitting that to be clear, it plans to talk reason with an unreasoning theocracy claiming that the Almighty has given it clear passage to nuclear ascendancy, to match its aspiration to achieve political ascendancy in the region it inhabits.
At a time when Iran's Assembly of
Qum Seminary Scholars have mounted a direct challenge to the legality and morality of Ayatollah Ali
Khameni's actions, the U.S. stands mute.
Iran's elite religious scholars have chosen to publicly defy Iran's leaders, labelling President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's re-election "
illegitimate". Yet President Obama, along with President
Medvedev, stand prepared to give their support to the legitimacy of that election, denounced by the Iranian public, and now further losing credibility with the voice of the country's leading ayatollahs.
"The voice of people seeking justice was marred by violence, which
unfortunately left several dead and wounded and hundreds arrested. How can one accept the legitimacy of the election just because the Guardians Council says so?" This joint statement from Iran's religious scholars (with the added voice of Iranian Ayatollah
Sistani, now in Iraq, for good measure) registers their supreme
disaffection for the current regime.
The Republic Guards' Major General Mohammad Ali
Jafari claims it is his troops' intention to lead a "revival of the revolution and
clarification of the value positions of the
establishment at home and abroad", so clearly the Supreme Leader has given instruction to the military to silence his government's critics. Is he prepared to take on the Assembly of
Qum Seminary Scholars?
It might appear that Presidents Obama and
Medvedev have not exercised their due diligence in studying
intelligence reports. They're backing the wrong horse on this one. Whether it will make much difference in the long haul is another story.
Labels: Middle East, Russia, United States
Trouncing Honduras
Honduras is a sovereign nation, among other sovereign nations. It has a constitution and a parliament and it practises its own kind of democratic rule. In its constitution is an inviolable convention that an elected president may only remain in office for one, and one term only, a convention that may not, under its constitution be amended. Honduras is also a poor country, reliant on good relations with its neighbours and on the United States.
Its recently-ousted president had undertaken some financial initiatives better suited to a country that could afford to increase the salaries of public servants, and when President Zelaya insisted on proceeding regardless, the country's budget was set off kilter. The result of which was to make loans from the IMF difficult, and in stepped Hugo Chavez, to finance the country in exchange for an agreement that Honduras become a member of Venezuela's Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas.
When Manuel Zelaya attempted to initiate a change in the country's constitution by invoking the potential for a constituent assembly enabling him to bypass his country's ban on presidential re-election, he further complicated his position. The country's supreme court explicitly banned his initiative, despite which he proceeded with the intention to launch a poll to elicit from Hondurans an opinion whether they would accept a constituent assembly.
Which was ruled illegal by the supreme court, despite which the president proceeded, ordering the army that it must, on his orders, distribute the ballots. When the head of the Honduran military refused to comply, the president fired him. Whereupon the supreme court reinstated General Vasquez, ordering the ballots to be confiscated. Not to be outdone, President Zelaya attempted to recover the ballots in defiance of judicial orders.
Which is when the fed-up and disgusted supreme court issued a warrant for his arrest. Because a new, interim president could only, under the constitution, be named in the absence of the current president, he was spirited away out of the country, into Costa Rica. And it is at that juncture that Roberto Micheletti, the head of congress, next in line of succession and a member of President Zelaya's liberal party, was voted by the legislature to temporarily sit as president.
Until the installation of the new president-elect, already voted into office, ready to take office in January, 2010. Now, the Chavez-led group of Latin American countries seethe with anger that Honduras would unseat one of their own, irrespective of the fact that he acted illegally, and against the country's constitution. The Honduran political establishment; congress, the courts, the military and business community, refuse to return Zelaya to office. His public approval rating had stood, before the crisis at 30%.
Clearly the country had every right to spurn this man's illegal attempts at securing his future as ongoing president of a country that had no wish to accept his will to continue, in defiance of the country's constitution, its supreme court and its congress.
Labels: Political Realities, World News
Targeting The Enemy Within
External enemies can be fought. They are identified and a face-off occurs and the result is either success or failure. Internal enemies are more elusive; they can be identified, but sometimes they can blend in with others in the population, and knowing the geographical terrain as no enemy would, they can advantageously linger long after being routed to spring to life again, like the fabled hydra of Greek legend.
For Muslim Pakistan, the encouragement of a proxy army of religious fanatics meant to target neighbouring Hindu India, the understanding of their having bred an unmanageable beast has come late.
Lesson: be careful of the Frankenstein created. A malevolent, hateful entity will not distinguish between victims. Its force of malign purpose will extinguish loyalties once it becomes self-supporting, no longer amenable to distinguishing between its objects of annihilation and its controllers, so like as enemies of their greater purpose - ultimate control of its own ascendant destiny.
Pakistan was incapable of sustaining itself as a religious state within a democratic political infrastructure. Its democracy was too unstable, too frail to defray the costs of acute and political religious fundamentalism.
If, in its current battle against the religious insurgents, those who have instilled terror in the formerly ungovernable provincial hinterlands, it vanquishes forever its neighbourly enmity toward India, much will have been accomplished.
In the meantime, it is instructive and hopeful to witness President Asif Ali Zardari seemingly transformed from playboy to responsible political maturity. Finally, Pakistan recognizes the enemy, and it has been themselves. Henceforth, Asif Ali Zardai has declared, his government's operations would target "strategic assets", identifying the leaders of the Taliban, eradicating their terrifying ultra-religious unorthodoxy in Islam.
The intent is to recapture the Swat Valley for the country, along with its neighbouring districts where the major cities have been threatened by capture and occupation by the Taliban. "Military operations are all across the board against any insurgent, whether in Karachi, Lahore or whether he is in any part of Pakistan.
"The Pakistan People's Party has focused itself against the extremist mindset. Terror is a regional problem; it cuts across borders. I would love to be remembered for creating a Pakistan where militancy - I know it can't totally be diminished - is defeated", declared Preesident Zardari.
When he meant to say he knows it cannot be totally defeated; he means to diminish its impact and its reality, and its future. In the meantime, he has rendered the region a great service by befriending Afghan President Hamid Karzai. He has extended goodwill gestures to India, and influenced a mutual campaign to battle the influence of militant Islam in the entire geography.
He has his detractors in Pakistan, the old guard who liked things the way they were, ready to wage war with India as their first order of business. "It rankles the small mind. It does not rankle the army", said President Zardari, "because after India and Pakistan became nuclear powers, that position of being able to take over another state is nullified". Mutual Assured Destruction focuses the mind.
But why did it take so long to focus the Pakistani mind on that reality? And the reality is that Pakistan encouraged religious fanaticism in Afghanistan through supporting and directing the Taliban, hoping to enlist Afghanistan in Pakistan's hostility to India. What a tangled web of deceit, murderous intent and carnage.
Labels: Political Realities, World Crises
Bellicose Defiance
Well, which is it, the insistence that the world has no right to impose its will on the ambitions of a country to realize its aspirations to own nuclear technology leading to nuclear weapons?
Or a country so traumatized by its exclusion from polite international society that it truly believes a hostile invasion of its territory is imminent, leading it to threaten and instill the fear of uncertainty in its neighbours and the international community? On the other hand, might it simply not be pure delusional lunacy enabled to tantrum its way to defiance by a cowed public?
Likely it's all of these things; a paranoid administration in a poverty-stricken country insistent on its primary place on the world stage, despite international condemnation. It does, after all, keep close company with other like-minded totalitarian regimes, more invested in upholding the executive and religious and ideological 'rights' of the ruling elite than the primary existential needs of a suffering population.
Diverting scarce funds from feeding the masses toward the more needful funding of nuclear armaments.
Ensuring that a mass uprising will not occur by entitling and enriching the country's police and armed forces' heads. And warning the population repeatedly through inner-directed propaganda that a vicious international campaign is underway to invade North Korea and disinvest its people of their rights, their resources, their national autonomy.
Instilling the fear of brutal force wresting national pride and independence from the nation, and brutalizing its people, at the very time that their Dear Leader abandons the population to privation and starvation.
At the very time that the United Nations Food Program informs that 9-million North Koreans face starvation, but that their leader will only permit a quarter of that number to receive food aid. All is not lost; there is always Taedonggang beer, the "Pride of Pyongyang". People may starve, but if they can somehow pull together the asking price, they can tipple.
North Korea and Iran share technical expertise and intelligence on their mutual defences against the raging deceit of the West. Each trumpets their long-range missile capabilities, each warns they will not sit idly in anticipation of territorial outrage.
North Korea enjoys the thrill of infusing fear and the trepidation of uncertainty in its neighbours by revoking peace treaties and tentative co-operative advances, and by assuring the United States, its perceived mortal enemy that it has the intention of sending ballistic missiles its way.
Not yet capable of miniaturizing a nuclear warhead, it does have that intent. As though it plays an end-sum game of firsters.
Labels: Political Realities, Technology, World Crises
American Credibility
Under the new American administration, the country's new direction in a search to ingratiate itself with the countries from which it has become estranged over the course of previous administration's directions, choices and occasional interferences of gross disproportions on the world stage, is turning in a strange way against it. In a bid to be all things kind and gentle to all administrations sere and cruel, Barack Obama, hoping to have his overtures for friendliness met with a like response is proving problematical for him.
It's hard to believe that this man, holding out so much hope for Americans, let alone the rest of the world, is so naive that he truly does believe that open-mindedness and goodness of intent is contagious. That if behaves in a respectful and just manner to others they will return the compliment. That does work, true enough, on some occasions, with some people and some administrations, but it is absurd to believe that this is a fail-safe position to take in any and all circumstances.
Furthermore, in his desire to ingratiate himself with the worst proponents of human-rights abuses, whose transgressions against their own people, let alone threats redolent of intent against others, has the ultimate result of abandoning those whose interests and values intersect with America's own, what exactly will have been accomplished? Honduras is the most recent case in point, where the country's Supreme Court and its democratically elected parliament has taken steps to unseat a demagogue threatening its constitution.
And simply because President Obama wishes to restore an element of reasonable relations with South and Central America, it appears that he is prepared to abandon the one nation in the geography whose dedication to the principles of democracy are far in advance of those nations, like Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which have deliberately chosen to subvert democracy for their own singular, and self-availing purposes.
Speaking in Turkey and in Egypt, Barack Obama has entreated Arab and Muslim countries to come to a peace agreement with their neighbour in the Middle East. With respect to the sticking point of Jerusalem - the ancient city claimed by both Israel and the Palestinians/Arab countries as integral to the nascent Palestinian state as its capital - the response has been instructive. Mr. Obama contends that dividing Jerusalem will solve the problem.
Yet a newly-released poll of enquiry demonstrates that Arabs in the Palestinian Authority are not prepared to permit either Jews or Christians access to areas demanded for a PA state. The Arab World for Research and Development survey found that Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza would not agree to share Jerusalem with Jews and with Christians. Asked directly whether they would agree with President Obama's statement that Jerusalem should present as "a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims", fewer than 17% agreed.
While Barak Obama and much of the reset of the world excoriates tiny impoverished Honduras for refusing to permit their country's democratic commitment to be eroded the way of Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, the far more dire problem of confronting Iran's faux democratic elections have received little overt censure. The United States was to proffer a hand of open opportunity and potential friendship to Iran, in the hopes of gentle 'suasion becoming more influential than confrontational denunciation.
In light of recent events in Iran, where the fanatical theocracy has employed brutality to quell a popular protest against the illegality of the presidential vote outcome, how can the United States even begin to contemplate pursuing its oft-repeated determination to a quiet and less-than-remonstrative dialogue with the country? If, as the United Nations, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea are as determined as they claim to ensure that North Korea's pursuit of a nuclear-tipped long-range missile never reaches maturity, how can Iran's agenda be overlooked?
For that matter, recently warming relationships with Syria presents another conundrum. Closer relations with a country that has consistently collaborated with Iran to arm and recruit for proxy terror militias. With a country whose aspiration to absorb Lebanon remains unfulfilled but still on the agenda. With a country whose illicitly stealthy maneuverings with North Korea to enable it to join the nuclear club poses yet another threat to world stability.
How now, President Obama?
Labels: Political Realities, United States, World Crises
De-Legitimizing History
As though to go the denial of the Holocaust one better, the propaganda coming out of the Arab world with respect to the very existence of ancient Israel in the Middle East continues its course. The Arab world, quite simply, is not prepared, and it begins to appear, will never quite reconcile itself to the acceptance of Jewish legitimacy on what is deemed to be soil dedicated to Islam.
In writing of the emergence of Arab nationalism resulting from Turkish Ottoman rule, Arthur Goldschmidt - a writer entirely sympathetic to Islam and the Arab cause - writes in "A concise History of the Middle East":
If Arab nationalism was to mean separation from the ottoman Empire, this might do more for the Egyptian khedive or the British than for the Arabs of Syria or Iraq. Even though Egypt was prospering, Arabs elsewhere did not crave British rule, let alone a French imperialism comparable to what already existed in Algeria. The Jewish settlers in Palestine, hardly large enough yet to threaten the Arab majority, might later aspire to separate statehood, and Arab nationalists opposed this even more than Turkish rule.
There was always an underlying current of hostility toward the very idea of any tribal or cultural or religious group outside Islam seeking autonomous possession of any part of the Middle East geography. Partly fed through Islamic precepts of making jihad against any entities threatening to take from Muslim Arabs that which they claimed as their divine right of accession, and partly fed from their long and unfortunate history of colonialism.
Nothing has changed through the centuries, and certainly not much has changed in the last century. If Israel's claims to right of nationhood in the Middle East as a fait accompli, resulting from the Balfour Declaration and the UN-approved partition of Palestine can no longer be defeated militarily, the idea is to bring the country to its knees through political propaganda portraying Jews as the world's outcasts, claiming land rightfully belonging elsewhere.
And little does it seem to matter how outrageously stupid are the claims, demands and denunciations against Israel as an 'apartheid', or a 'dictatorship', as an evil 'occupier', betraying their common humanity with the poor disadvantaged Palestinians, there is a ready and supportive audience to embrace those claims. Malicious slander is candy to those great swaths of humanity whose nations' administrators loathe Jews, and claim anti-Zionism does not equate with anti-Semitism.
The most risible example of a de-legitimizing campaign is the recent one where the Palestinian Authority has launched a campaign impugning Israel's right of ownership or custodianship over its own historical, heritage documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls document ancient Jewish life. These Hebrew-language parchments describe a Judaic society in biblical times in current-day Israel and the West Bank. They are far more ancient than the advent of Arab-speaking people in the area, let alone Islam.
And therein lies the wish to deny their legitimacy. Much as the Arab and Muslim community seeks to deny the ancient reality of Jerusalem as Jewish, as the site of the first most holy symbols of Judaism. Where Islam spoke its contempt of religions other than its own by building a mosque over the most holy of Israel's sites, the Temple Mount, where sat the first and the second Temples of Solomon, of which the Wailing Wall (Western Wall) is the sole remnant.
Islam insists that Jerusalem contains, in the Dome of the Rock, the third most sacred place in the religion, yet there are no indications that this is so in practise, since no Arab or Muslim countries mount pilgrimages to that site where Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven. Yet the Palestinian Authority with the full urging and support of the Muslim world - and the Western world as well, led by the UN and the U.S. - claims it has the moral, historical and legal right to insist on Jerusalem as the capital of its nascent nation.
Just as it has attempted to apply moral pressure against the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to surrender the Dead Sea Scrolls to them as the rightful owners of this ancient Jewish treasure. The PA claims the Israel Museum has illegally taken possession of the scrolls, that they were taken from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities upon Israel's rescue of East Jerusalem in 1967 from illegal occupation by Jordan.
No less a scabrous enemy of Israel than the former Yasser Arafat signed an accord on behalf of the PLO agreeing, as the "sole representative of the Palestinian people", that Israel's current custodianship of the Dead Sea Scrolls was in compliance with the 1994 Oslo Agreement, which set out the Protocols on Civil Affairs in the territories with respect to archaeological finds and artifacts.
The PA is interested in re-writing not only Jewish history, but their own as well, to conform with their benighted idee fixe that Israel's existence is illegitimate as a Jewish-majority state, established by Jews for the preservation of world Jewry. For to do so would be tantamount to finally agreeing with its existence, to finally relent and relinquish their dream of re-possession.
Labels: Israel, Middle East, Particularities/Peculiarities
