International Affairs: July 2008 Archives

Two days ago President Bush met with Bob Fu from the China Aid Association and received an Olympic Prayer Band bracelet distributed by Voice of the Martyrs.

Today in The White House Residence, President Bush met with five Chinese freedom activists to discuss his concerns about human rights in China. The President assured them that he will carry the message of freedom as he travels to Beijing for the games, just as he has regularly made this a priority in all of his meetings with Chinese officials. He told the activists that engagement with Chinese leaders gives him an opportunity to make the United States' position clear - human rights and religious freedom should not be denied to anyone.

Sounds good, but I wish that religious freedom were as high on the bilateral agenda as economic issues.

Update:

Looks like the White House reads Master of None.

It looks to me like China is in the process of colonizing the third world.

• China supplies arms and technology to the Middle East
• China develops Sudan's oil industry
• China builds infrastructure and mines in the Congo
• China disciplines Zimbabe's tyrant Mugabe
• China's increasing control of Africa's natural resources
• China builds African infrastructure

And so on. Along with all the money, China is pouring millions of Chinese workers into the Third World. There are 50% more Chinese than there are Africans, and it looks like China has a long-term goal of moving into Africa and taking it over with a civilian army.

Unlike European colonialism in which the colonizers sent a small contingent of soldiers and businessmen to exploit the natives, the Chinese are sending millions of workers all over the world not just to exploit, but to simply move in and replace. There's no doubt that the People's Republican Army will protect the safety and security of Chinese expatriates with force when necessary.

China has plenty of people, but lacks land and natural resources. Africa has bountiful supplies of both, and dysfunctional governments that can be easily bought and controlled. China won't need to actually annex African nations if it can just install proxy governments and substantial ethnic Chinese minorities.

If someone else has already brought these points together into a cohesive report I'd like to read it.

"Mystery explosions" are rattling Iranian leadership... could Western intelligence agencies actually be doing something right?

For an organisation that prides itself on being a well-run administrative machine, the leadership of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards is having a rather testing time. It’s not just last Saturday’s mysterious explosion in a suburb of Tehran that killed 15 people that is causing the leadership sleepless nights, although the nationwide news black-out imposed immediately afterwards does suggest the Revolutionary Guards, the storm troops of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, are rattled.

Details are only now starting to reach the outside world, and it looks increasingly like sabotage was responsible for devastating a military convoy as it travelled through Khavarshahar. The company responsible for moving the equipment, LTK, is owned by the Revolutionary Guards and is suspected of being involved in shipping arms to Lebanon’s Hizbollah Shia Muslim militia, which is trained and funded by Tehran. ...

In May, officials blamed British and American agents for an explosion at a mosque in Shiraz that had just finished staging an exhibition of Iran’s latest military hardware. Last year more than a dozen Iranian engineers were killed while trying to fit a chemical warhead to a missile in Syria.

A few months earlier, a train reported to be carrying military supplies to Syria was derailed by another mysterious explosion in northern Turkey. It is highly unlikely that these incidents are unrelated, which has only served to deepen the mood of fear and suspicion gripping the Revolutionary Guards’ leadership.

Tensions have been running high in Tehran since Seymour Hersh, the respected American investigative journalist, revealed in the New Yorker magazine last month that President George W Bush had authorised up to $400 million to fund a major escalation in covert operations to destabilise the regime.

These are all valid military targets. I'd love to think that our much-maligned intelligence agencies are behind this chaos.

(HT: Instapundit.)

It's hard to find concrete information, but it appears that Barack Obama will be in Iraq for less than 24 hours. Maybe even less than 12 hours! Is that really enough time to "fact-find"?

Senator Barack Obama arrived in Baghdad on Monday, meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and other senior Iraqi politicians, on the latest leg of a weeklong overseas tour, his first as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

A United States Embassy official said Mr. Obama, who was traveling as part of an American delegation, had arrived in the Iraqi capital in the early afternoon after first stopping in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. ...

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq, met briefly with Mr. Obama when the senator arrived at the Baghdad airport and they flew by helicopter to the Green Zone, where the American embassy and many Iraqi government offices are located, according to an American military official.

Mr. Obama was scheduled to meet again with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker later Monday, the official said. ...

Mr. Obama is expected to spend the rest of the day in Baghdad. His movements remained shrouded in secrecy, and Americans here strictly warned Iraqi officials not to give details about Mr. Obama’s visit. But as well as his meetings with senior politicians, he was also scheduled to meet with American soldiers, according to American and Iraqi officials.

So he's probably going to fly out of Baghdad this evening to spend the rest of the week pressing flesh with Europes' socialist masters. I get the feeling he wouldn't have even made this token visit if it wasn't necessary to cover for his utter lack of experience and interest in the matter.

Does the AFP really need to shadow the ChiCom's propaganda so closely that they use the same words? Only a communist could talk of "drafting" "volunteers" with a straight face.

Foul-smelling green algae that has been plaguing China's Olympic sailing venue has been cleared, state media said Tuesday, after more than one million tonnes of the sludge was removed.

Authorities had set a Tuesday deadline to clean up the algae bloom in Qingdao, drafting 10,000 soldiers and volunteers and hundreds of fishing boats to help with the mammoth task.

I don't get the feeling that the civilian "volunteers" had any more choice in the matter than the soldiers did. Someone should investigate this slavery/serfdom and make yet another horrid connection to the travesty that is the 2008 Olympics.

Ezra Levant has written a fascinating pair (so far) of posts about his recent testimony before Congress' human rights caucus. The first contains some background and the transcript of his prepared remarks, and the second reveals Islam's plans to use the Western legal system to institute Sharia law, as related by a diplomat from Pakistan.

She wants Western countries to ban critical comments about Islam -- and she mentioned the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in particular. It was well pointed out by others on the panel that Western defamation law deals with the vindication of improperly besmirched reputations using the truth, as determined by courts of law -- but when it comes to clashing religions, the truth of any faith is in the heart of the beholder. The only legal system that would hold the Koran to be "the truth", and subordinate every other faith beneath the Koranic truth, would be a sharia legal system, such as that in Saudi Arabia. In other words, she wants to replace our secular legal systems with a Muslim legal system. I appreciated the honesty.

Western defamation law is also about vindication of an individual's reputation -- the individual must be indentified; he must have suffered measurable damage. Defamation is not about hurt feelings -- it is about the unjustified destruction of one's reputation in the eyes of another. It has nothing to do with tender feelings, though that was the grievance cited most often by Fatima. ...

But the single most revealing comment I heard all day about this matter was from a State Department lawyer on the panel (whose name I wish to confirm before publishing it.) She has done meticulous research on the Muslim campaign to ban criticism of Islam, and has helped develop the U.S. response to the idea in international legal forums.

She went deep into the issue: she looked at the Arabic word used by Muslim diplomats when describing the "defamation of Islam" that they sought to illegalize. She consulted scholars of Arabic who confirmed for her that the particular legal phrase had been coined very recently, especially for the international diplomatic campaign -- and that, when discussed domestically, Muslim countries used the real Arabic words they mean: the traditional words for blasphemy.

Muslims want to use our defamation laws to ban blasphemy against Allah, but they know that if they didn't use the codewords "defamation of Islam" they wouldn't get very far.

Sure, everyone is talking about this, but it's so hilarious I have to post the picture too, courtesy of LGF.

Iran photoshopped pictures of its recent missile launches to make it look like there were four missiles when there were actually only three. There's got to be a Viagra joke in here somewhere... can anyone find it?

Richard Fernandez explains that nuclear deterrence depends heavily on sowing uncertainty in the minds of your enemies, and that the American missile shield we're installing in Eastern Europe is a key contributor to that uncertainty.

What a working missile defense shield will do is make any Russian limited WMD attack on the West a very uncertain proposition. While Russia’s arsenal is easily big enough to overwhelm, through sheer numbers, the defensive system based in Poland and the Czech Republic any such attack would also be big enough to guarantee Russia’s destruction in the resulting retaliation. It may be an exaggeration to claim that a missile defense will have the effect of disarming the Kremlin of any viable military response between issuing a diplomatic protest and starting Armaggedon but it is quite clear it threatens to invalidate a large range of the “full spectrum” responses now available to the Russians.

He also quotes from "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence" which explains that deterrence doctrines have never depended on so-called "rational" enemies.

Deterrence of the Soviets never depended on having “rational” leaders. Stalin was in charge when the Soviets first began a build-up of nuclear arms, and it is difficult to consider him as an example of a rational leader. This is perhaps the grossest error of those who make arguments that the new multilateral threats are “undeterrable” because the new regional actors are not likely to be rational. Stalin was hardly more rational than they. The very framework of a concept that depends on instilling fear and uncertainty in the minds of opponents was never, nor can it be, strictly rational. Nor has it ever strictly required rational adversaries in order to function. What should be sobering to all of us in viewing deterrence as a process is that its outcome was never, nor can it ever be, strictly predictable. ...

Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially “out of control” can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts in the minds of an adversary’s decision makers. ‘This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.

An excellent and concise explanation of the psychology that helped us win the Cold War and continues to protect us today.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Next time CAIR or some other domestic Islamist group complains about religious persecution because one of us infidels looks at them sideways maybe we should take them more seriously -- after all, Muslims are the world's experts on religious persecution.

IRAN

Christian Detained on Terrorism Charges - Forum 18 News

On June 3, a newly converted Christian couple in Iran was arrested by police for holding Bible studies with Muslims in their home, and attending a house church. According to Compass Direct News, “Makan Arya and Tina Rad were seized from their home in east Tehran after one of Makan's relatives informed security police of the couple's Christian activities. Their 4-year-old daughter was left behind, ill and unattended. The couple was taken to an unknown jail where they were severely beaten and interrogated for four days.” Compass reported, “Makan was accused of ‘activities against national security’ and Tina of ‘activities against the holy religion of Islam.’ The authorities threatened to take their daughter away to a religious institution and warned they could be imprisoned on charges of apostasy or fabricated drug charges if they didn't stop their Christian work.” The report added that eventually the couple was pressured into signing a statement claiming they had not changed their religion from Islam and promising that they would stay away from their house church and other Christians. “After a court hearing, Makan was freed on bail charges of US $19,634 and Tina upon payment of US $29,451. The couple returned home to find that the window of their shop had been smashed by local Muslims. On June 23, Makan received a letter threatening him with continued attacks if he did not put up evidence of his Islamic faith on the front of his shop, to which he responded by hanging pictures of Muslim leaders on his window,” Compass added. Ask God to strengthen the hearts of these believers to proclaim His Name without hesitation or fear. Pray for healing, especially for Tina who currently cannot walk as a result of her mistreatment in detention. Luke 6:27-28

Muslims in the West should exert as much energy denouncing real persecution in their homelands as they do complaining about slights here.

In the middle of a very optimistic article about the future of Iraq is this strange characterization of how Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is balancing his relationships with America and Iran.

Maliki has also shown surprising skill on the foreign policy front. Instead of bemoaning the fate of being dependent on both Tehran and Washington, currently two of the world's bitterest enemies, he is using his trumps on both sides. In Washington, he is campaigning for moderation in the nuclear dispute with Tehran, arguing that Iran could otherwise invade southern Iraq. In Tehran, he has promised to do everything in his power to ensure that the upcoming security treaty with the United States will not infringe on Iran's sphere of influence.

So... in Washington he pushes us to moderate our stance towards Iran, and in Tehran is assures Iran that no one will threaten its power. How is that "using his trumps on both sides"? It sounds to me like he's pretty firmly on Iran's side, unless I'm missing something.

(HT: JB.)

Slowly but surely the Iraqi government is meeting the benchmarks set for it by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Even though the Democrats intended to use the benchmarks as leverage for forcing an American retreat from Iraq, what some thought was impossible is actually happening, and we're winning. Naturally the Associated Press spins this optimistic step into a negative.

No matter who is elected president in November, his foreign policy team will have to deal with one of the most frustrating realities in Iraq: the slow pace with which the government in Baghdad operates.

Iraq's political and military success is considered vital to U.S. interests, whether troops stay or go. And while the Iraqi government has made measurable progress in recent months, the pace at which it's done so has been achingly slow.

The White House sees the progress in a particularly positive light, declaring in a new assessment to Congress that Iraq's efforts on 15 of 18 benchmarks are "satisfactory"—almost twice of what it determined to be the case a year ago. The May 2008 report card, obtained by the Associated Press, determines that only two of the benchmarks—enacting and implementing laws to disarm militias and distribute oil revenues—are unsatisfactory.

The White House sees, but of course we all know better. Can't they just report good news without hedging and qualification?