Recently in International Affairs Category

I agree with Victor Davis Hanson's perspective on General McChrystal.

There are plenty of other causes to worry: McChrystal’s derision of a dinner with a French diplomat, the entire notion of letting off steam to a leftwing reporter in Paris during a war, even the revelation of whom McChrystal voted for (i.e., Obama). Once one digests all the ramifications of this, I think one will see this is not a partisan issue, but one of judgment and deference for the chain of command.

Surely if a colonel or a major gave the same sort of interview about the general, and such an officer’s subordinates told the press the same sorts of things about McChrystal (much less Obama), he would be gone yesterday. I recall in Iraq overhearing a conversation among some reporters. One asked out loud, “Do you think Petraeus will ever run for office?” Another piped up, “Maybe, but who knows on which side?” — the point being that even though Petraeus worked with the Bush administration, and even though the Left took after him, he deliberately set a tone of professional nonpartisanship. He would never have disclosed to a reporter his past voting record, or had subordinates relay that information to the press. And he would never have disclosed any of his private concerns about Washington competency to a reporter, much less in a long-running conversation with a pesky Rolling Stone tag-along.

And now President Obama has hitched his horse to General Petraeus, the same man Obama's followers once labeled "General Betray Us". (The Senate voted to condemn the ad, and Senator Obama voted "present". and Senator Obama called the vote a "stunt" and didn't show up.) I guess we should take some solace in the fact that not even Obama can justify sticking one of his incompetent Chicago cronies in charge of an actual war.

It's completely humiliating for me as an American to read that the federal government has basically allowed Mexico to annex southern Arizona.

Imagine the federal government closing a section of the Lincoln Memorial because it was under the control of Mexican drug lords and bands of illegal immigrants.

That scenario is playing out as reality in southern Arizona, where parts of five federal lands -- including two designated national monuments -- continue to post travel warnings or be outright closed to Americans who own the land because of the dangers of "human and drug trafficking" along the Mexican border.

Roughly 3,500 acres of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge -- about 3 percent of the 118,000-acre park -- have been closed since Oct. 6, 2006, when U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials acknowledged a marked increase in violence along a tract of land that extends north from the border for roughly three-quarters of a mile. Federal officials say they have no plans to reopen the area.

Elsewhere, at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which shares a 32-mile stretch of the border with Mexico, visitors are warned on a federally-run website that some areas are not accessible by anyone.

"Due to our proximity to the International Boundary with Mexico, some areas near the border are closed for construction and visitor safety concerns," the website reads.

Instead of issuing warnings to Americans the government should put the United States Army on the border to protect us from this invasion. The Army can't be used for law enforcement, but it sure as hell can be used in a military capacity to defend us from foreign incursion.

Claudia Rosett explains why the Gaza "Freedom Flotilla" is a farce.

The basic narrative spun by the organizers of this "freedom flotilla" is that some 700 "activists" from dozens of countries have boarded eight or nine ships filled with tons of "humanitarian aid." Their mission is to run the Israeli blockade, "break the siege of Gaza" and "establish a permanent sea lane between Gaza and the rest of the world." The umbrella website for this venture is labeled "The Free Gaza Movement," and on it the "Free Gaza Team" of the "Freedom Flotilla Coalition" professes a dedication to nonviolence and respect for universal human rights.

All that might make sense if Gaza were a peaceful and democratic enclave, unreasonably walled up by its neighbors. But there's some important information that the flotilla crew omits. Gaza is a terrorist enclave. Gaza is controlled by an Islamist terrorist group, Hamas. And Hamas is: backed by Iran; headquarters some of its leaders in terror-sponsoring Syria; has a busy and violent history of suicide bombings, shootings and rocket and mortar attacks; and is dedicated in its charter to the destruction of Israel.

That is what the blockade is all about. It didn't happen because the neighbors decided to victimize Gaza. Rather, it is Hamas-run Gaza that threatens the neighbors, and for that matter, is hostile generally to liberal, western societies.

Then follows a laundry list of atrocities committed by Gaza's rulers, the terrorist group Hamas. Finally, is the flotilla really interested in delivering "aid" and promoting freedom?

For this coalition to describe itself as affiliated in any way with "freedom" is an abuse of the term. Likewise, the show of bringing tons of "aid" is hollow at best. Israel, in an attempt to head off a confrontation, offered to let the Gaza flotilla unload its cargo at an Israeli port and have the goods delivered (after inspection) to Gaza by land. The flotilla folks weren't interested. Nor were they willing, despite their avowed love of universal human rights, to try pressuring Hamas to let them bring letters and food to the kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit.

It's all a ruse, and Israel is wise not to fall for it. That the rest of the world is so eager to believe the flotilla's stories is reprehensible.

BorderInvasionPics.com has lots of exactly what you'd think: pictures of people illegally crossing America's southern border.

(HT: RC.)

Evgeny Morozov argues that cyberwar is a threat manufactured to generate revenue for large government contractors and endorsed by the government because it excuses incompetence.

Recasting basic government problems in terms of a global cyber struggle won't make us any more secure. The real question is, "Why are government computers so vulnerable to very basic and unsophisticated threats?" This is not a question of national security; it is a question of basic government incompetence. Cyberwar is the new "dog ate my homework": It's far easier to blame everything on mysterious Chinese hackers than to embark on uncomfortable institutional soul-searching.

Thus, when a series of fairly unsophisticated attacks crashed the websites of 27 government agencies—including those of the Treasury Department, Secret Service and Transportation Department—during last year's July Fourth weekend, it was panic time. North Korea was immediately singled out as their likely source (websites of the South Korean government were also affected). But whoever was behind the attacks, it was not their sophistication or strength that crashed the government's websites. Network security firm Arbor Networks described the attacks as "pretty modest-sized." What crashed the websites was the incompetence of the people who ran them. If "pretty modest-sized" attacks can cripple them, someone is not doing their job.

I don't know many details about ongoing cyberattacks, but I do believe that the solution is probably more of the same thing we're doing now: virus scanning, firewalls, secure passwords, physical security, and awareness of social hacking.

(HT: TH.)

Does Japan's decision to build a naval base in Djibouti signal the decline of the United States Navy?

Japan is spending $40 million to build a base in Djibouti (on the northern border of Somalia), for its military personnel supporting the anti-piracy patrol. Most Japanese military personnel in the area are at sea, in warships. But now they have a place ashore to for supplies and maintenance facilities. Japan also has maritime patrol aircraft in Djibouti. All this is to help protect Japanese maritime trade, which is considerable.

Up till now, our allies could trust our capability and will to protect trade across the high seas.

Insider Aaron David Miller explains why he's no longer a believer in the "mid-east peace process" religion.

Like all religions, the peace process has developed a dogmatic creed, with immutable first principles. Over the last two decades, I wrote them hundreds of times to my bosses in the upper echelons of the State Department and the White House; they were a catechism we all could recite by heart. First, pursuit of a comprehensive peace was a core, if not the core, U.S. interest in the region, and achieving it offered the only sure way to protect U.S. interests; second, peace could be achieved, but only through a serious negotiating process based on trading land for peace; and third, only America could help the Arabs and Israelis bring that peace to fruition.

As befitting a religious doctrine, there was little nuance. And while not everyone became a convert (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush willfully pursued other Middle East priorities, though each would succumb at one point, if only with initiatives that reflected, to their critics, varying degrees of too little, too late), the exceptions have mostly proved the rule. The iron triangle that drove Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and now Barack Obama to accord the Arab-Israeli issue such high priority has turned out to be both durable and bipartisan. Embraced by the high priests of the national security temple, including State Department veterans like myself, intelligence analysts, and most U.S. foreign-policy mandarins outside government, these tenets endured and prospered even while the realities on which they were based had begun to change. If this wasn't the definition of real faith, one wonders what was.

It's long, but worth reading.

Personally, I don't think the "peace process" is really meant to succeed. It's meant to keep our friends and enemies busy and to make it look like the United States is interested in world peace. We aren't. We're interested in protecting ourselves and growing our wealth, and sometimes true peace is a means towards that end. But sometimes instability is more valuable, and when it is we hide that instability under a never-ending "peace process" to cloak our real intentions.

Many people unfortunate enough to have been born in third world countries (and I know quite a few) would give their left arm to live in America. Since we can't take everyone who would want to come, the next best option is to bring slices of America to the third world. A couple of hundred years ago that would have been accomplished by British/Roman-like colonization, but these days that's just too uncouth: some third-worlders may prefer their present form of government to ours. Fine! Enter charter cities.

The deeper problem, widely recognised but seldom addressed, is how to free people from bad rules. I floated a provocative idea. Instead of focusing on poor nations and how to change their rules, we should focus on poor people and how they can move somewhere with better rules. One way to do this is with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of new “charter cities,” where developed countries frame the rules and hundreds of millions of poor families could become residents.

How would such a city work? Imagine that a government in a poor country set aside a piece of uninhabited land. It invites a developed country to enter into a new type of partnership, in which the developed country sets up and enforces rules specified in a charter. Citizens from the poorer country, and the rest of the world, would be free to live and work in the city that emerges. It could create economic opportunities and encourage foreign investment, and by using uninhabited land it would ensure everyone living there would have chosen to do so with full knowledge of the rules. Roughly 3bn people, mostly the working poor, will move to cities over the next few decades. To my mind the choice is not whether the world will urbanise, but where and under which rules. Instead of expanding the slums in existing urban centres, new charter cities could provide safe, low-income housing and jobs that the world will need to accommodate this shift. Even more important, these cities could give poor people a chance to choose the rules they want to live and work under. ...

There are large swathes of uninhabited land on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa that are too dry for agriculture. But a city can develop in even the driest locations, supported if necessary by desalinated and recycled water. And the new zone created need not be ruled directly from the developed partner country—residents of the charter city can administer the rules specified by their partner as long as the developed country retains the final say. This is what happens today in Mauritius, where the British Privy Council is still the court of final appeal in a judicial system staffed by Mauritians. Different cities could start with charters that differ in many ways. The common element would be that all residents would be there by choice—a Gallup survey found that 700m people around the world would be willing to move permanently to another country that offers safety and economic opportunity.

Author Paul Romer cites Hong Kong as the archetype and compares its success under British rules to the decades of failure experienced by mainland China.

Why won't this happen? Despite the billions of average people who would benefit, consider the long list of powerful interests who would end up losers if charter cities took off: existing despots and their inner circles; the United Nations; zillions of Non-Governmental Organizations who parasitically exploit aid streams; socialists; nationalists; and probably many more. These loser groups would all band together to prevent the average people of the world from moving en masse into charter cities with better rules.

David Books is wrong: the problems of the third-world are primarily political, and poverty is an effect, not a cause.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”

He touches on the corruption issue, but if we really want to help the third-world we'll probably need to resort to the sort of intrusive paternalism that we normally associated with colonialism. I doubt we have the will for it... it's a lot easier to just throw money into a pit and hope for the best.

In one of the most realistic and practical offers of long-term help I've yet seen for a devastated Haiti, Senegal is offering plots of land to Haitians who want to return to their ancestral home.

HAITIANS WHO survived the earthquake have been offered the opportunity to come back “to the land of their ancestors” by Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade.

Mr Wade told French radio he wanted Africa to make room for victims of the disaster as it was from there that many Haitians’ ancestors had originated. ...

Presidential spokesman Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye told reporters that Mr Wade had shared his plans with senior aides, and they involved offering voluntary repatriation and plots of land to any Haitian who wanted “to return to their origin”.

“Senegal is ready to offer them parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,” he said.

Senegal is hardly a wealthy nation, but they're in much better shape than Haiti.

In January 1994, Senegal undertook a bold and ambitious economic reform program with the support of the international donor community. This reform began with a 50% devaluation of Senegal's currency, the CFA franc, which was linked at a fixed rate to the French franc. Government price controls and subsidies have been steadily dismantled. After seeing its economy contract by 2.1% in 1993, Senegal made an important turnaround, thanks to the reform program, with real growth in GDP averaging over 5% annually during 1995-2008. Annual inflation had been pushed down to the single digits. As a member of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), Senegal is working toward greater regional integration with a unified external tariff and a more stable monetary policy.

If I were in Haiti, I certainly would have left for somewhere, long before the recent earthquake.

In the aftermath of the earthquake near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, it is useful to review the four stages of post-disaster misery and to consider how our expensive Western institutions and society are designed to protect us. Each successive stage is easier and cheaper to prevent or mitigate than the stage before it. Unfortunately, in the case of Haiti we're likely to see all four stages play out to their fullest.

Stage 1: Immediate aftermath. People are killed or injured directly by the disaster itself. Stage 1 is often impossible to prevent and very expensive to mitigate.

Stage 2: Zero to three days. Within the first 72 hours people who were injured during the disaster will start to die from their injuries if they do not receive treatment. People who are trapped in rubble or otherwise isolated will also die. Stage 2 can be mitigated by extensive search and rescue capabilities that are on-site in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, and by a robust medical system that was not degraded itself by the disaster.

Stage 3: Four days to two weeks. Lack of water, sanitation, and electricity (depending on the climate) will begin to cause an explosion of communicable diseases within the first two weeks after a disaster. People who survive the disaster itself will fall sick with respiratory and digestive tract diseases, and minor injuries will become infected and cause further mortality. Caches of emergency water will be consumed, further weakening the survivors. Stage 3 can be prevented or mitigated by quick repairs to basic services and by the delivery of water and generators.

Stage 4: Two weeks to one month and beyond. Starvation will take hold in urban areas if basic infrastructure is not restored within one month. Urban population centers will begin to dissipate as survivors migrate into rural areas in search of food. Social unrest will quickly lead to the complete breakdown of pre-disaster political institutions, and survivors will form into ad hoc gangs or tribes. Violence will break out as these groups fight for control of resources. Stage 4 can be prevented by strong institutions that are powerful and organized enough to prevent food scarcity and provide basic physical security.

As we've seen in Haiti, most third-world urban centers are precariously balanced -- they wear a visage of civilization, but reality can come crashing down in an instant. The institutions required to mitigate suffering in the aftermath of a disaster are a form of insurance that must be built before a disaster strikes, but they're viewed as a luxury that poor countries are reluctant to invest in when money could instead be spent building an appearance of civilization. They choose to have a higher median quality of life with greater risk than a lower median quality of life with less risk.

The Obama Administration is charging panty-bomber Abdulmutallab with possession of weapons of mass destruction!

Just read Abdulmutallab charging docs. He's charged w/having a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Hmm. So, since we're using the 'criminal' standard, shouldn't all those thousands of pounds of mortars, bombs, missiles, etc in Iraq as WMDs? (leaving yellowcake out of it, since that was sold to Canada for energy)

So wait a minute, now the left is willing to admit that Saddam Hussein had WMD after all?

Despite finding saarin, mustard gas, and other chemical weapons, and despite various prison sentences for those who used them in Iraq or those who sold them, apparently, the only thing that would have satisfied the left that Saddam had WMDs would have been discovering a giant SPECTRE-sized Ken Adam-styled laboratory with men in white lab coats hard at work caught in the act.

Well it's nice to know that our invasion of Iraq are now justified in the minds of the left.

President Obama has been widely criticized for golfing more in his first nine months than President Bush did in his first two years, but the real crisis isn't the President's frequent vacations, it is his persistent vacation from history, as VP Cheney explains:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.

We didn't defeat the Nazis by appeasing them or by winning their friendship, we defeated the Nazis by killing them. After we won, there was plenty of time for (military) trials and executions, as well as the release of regular POWs. If we don't fight to win, we won't win, it's as simple as that.

Update:

Maureen Dowd asks who can we catch?

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch watch-listers sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back.

If Obama has lost Maureen Dowd, it's not clear who is left in his base....

So you think International Community isn't doing enough to police the seas and prevent piracy? Then put your booty where your mouth is and buy shares in a pirate gang!

In Somalia's main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate. ...

"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Mohammed said.

"The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity."

There isn't a prospectus, but here's some testimony from an current investor!

Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel.

"I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony.

"I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."

Past performance is no guarantee of future results, etc.

(HT: Tyler Cowen and Eric Crampton.)

I'm hard-pressed to find an antonym to "surge", but perhaps our brilliantly eloquent President can help me. What do you call it when you promise to send 30,000 more troops but tell the enemy in advance how long they'll be staying? It's a surge of soldiers, to be sure, but it's a psychological retreat.

The problem is not troop numbers. When he declared on Tuesday, "These additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011," the president has undercut the McChrystal plan and made success difficult to achieve.

There should be nothing wrong with an open-ended commitment to victory. In late 2006 and early 2007, when the Bush administration put the finishing touches on the strategy that would become the Iraq surge, Obama and many of his top aides questioned its wisdom. On July 19, 2007, for example, Obama declared, "Here's what we know. The surge has not worked." That a year later Obama scrubbed his criticism from his campaign website suggests that today he recognizes the positive impact of George W. Bush's decision. What Obama fails to understand, however, is that the surge is not only a military strategy, but a psychological one as well.

Victory over radical islamists won't be achieved by killing them all, it will be achieved by sapping their continuing will to fight. Surging troops but announcing our defeat in advance will result in more dead islamists while renewing the resolve of the movement as a whole. It's hard to see how that benefits America.

I'd venture that most software geeks are fairly leftist and generally support the theory that human activity is causing global warming. In that light, the biggest revelation from the recently hacked global warming emails might be the awfulness of the climate simulation code.

I've examined two files in some depth and found (OK so Harry found some of this)

• Inappropriate programming language usage
• Totally nuts shell tricks
• Hard coded constant files
• Incoherent file naming conventions
• Use of program libray subroutines that appear to be
• • far from ideal in how they do things when the work
  • do not produce an answer consistent with other way to calculate the same thing
  • but which fail at undefined times
  • and where when the function fails the the program silently continues without reporting the error

AAAAAAAAAARGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!

More code analysis.

I'm pretty proficient at writing simulation software: it's how I earned my PhD and how I earn a living. I've also worked closely with self-trained programmers who only write code to advance their research in other fields, and I can tell you that their code is almost always terrible. Writing good software is extremely difficult, and it doesn't surprise me at all that the climate modeling software is so bad as to be useless. It is always wise to be skeptical about the outputs of simulations, especially if you cannot see the source code for yourself.

I'm not sure how the anonymous writer can characterize this as a wrongness by the Right while agreeing that Obama humiliated himself and America by groveling before Japan's emperor.

Obama's handshake/forward lurch was so jarring and inappropriate it recalls Bush's back-rub of Merkel.

Kyodo News is running his appropriate and reciprocated nod and shake with the Empress, certainly to show the president as dignified, and not in the form of a first year English teacher trying to impress with Karate Kid-level knowledge of Japanese customs.

The bow as he performed did not just display weakness in Red State terms, but evoked weakness in Japanese terms....The last thing the Japanese want or need is a weak looking American president and, again, in all ways, he unintentionally played that part.

I'm glad our current president is so much more subtle and nuanced than our previous.

I find this display of obsequiousness both distasteful and insulting to me as an American citizen.

(HT: Gateway Pundit.)

Eamon Javers asks a contrarian question: "Is China headed toward collapse?".

Chanos and the other bears point to several key pieces of evidence that China is heading for a crash.

First, they point to the enormous Chinese economic stimulus effort — with the government spending $900 billion to prop up a $4.3 trillion economy. “Yet China’s economy, for all the stimulus it has received in 11 months, is underperforming,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” wrote in Forbes at the end of October. “More important, it is unlikely that [third-quarter] expansion was anywhere near the claimed 8.9 percent.”

Chang argues that inconsistencies in Chinese official statistics — like the surging numbers for car sales but flat statistics for gasoline consumption — indicate that the Chinese are simply cooking their books. He speculates that Chinese state-run companies are buying fleets of cars and simply storing them in giant parking lots in order to generate apparent growth. ...

This, Chanos and others argue, is happening in sector after sector in the Chinese economy. And that means the Chinese are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.

So how to hedge against China's failure?

The Obama administration is apparently negotiating a secret copyright treaty whose absurd contents have been leaked.

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

That's just the start of the badness. The whole thing is completely impossible to enforce, so I'm not particularly worried about it. intellectual property is dead and a piece of paper won't bring it back to life.

(HT: RD.)