International Affairs: August 2005 Archives

Edvard Radzinsky has written an article about the upcoming generation of liberated Russian girls (translated to English from his native Russian). He terms it "the other Russian revolution" and explains how girls who grew up oppressed under the old Soviet system are becoming women set to conquer the world.

MOSCOW--For the greater part of the 20th century, Russia's population suffered from the nightmare of wars, repression and perpetual hunger. There was the famine of the Civil War, the famine of the years of collectivization, and the famine of the Second World War. It almost seems as if the relative prosperity of recent years has engendered a peculiar reaction of the flesh, something almost akin to gratitude. All across the country, a plethora of beautiful girls has sprung up.

With bared midriffs and piercings, they are outwardly very like one another. In fact, there is an immense gulf dividing this throng of beauties. One group is astoundingly uneducated; their lives consist of nightclubs, concerts and narcotics. The other (and these are many) is just the opposite. They are highly educated, and have plunged rapturously into the ocean of literature now being published in Russia--those famous books by which the world lived in the 20th century and which have only now come to us. These women study with merciless obstinacy, hours and hours every day. Each knows several languages. In spite of their youth, they have already visited the great capitals of Europe, as if realizing the dream (so recently unattainable) of their grandmothers and grandfathers.

There's almost no better measure of a society's freedom and liberty than how it treats its women.

I'm certainly no military planner, but even I can comprehend why the imaginary terror scenarios Peggy Noonan summons to argue against military base closures will never happen.

Imagine they're planning that on the same day in the not-so-distant future, they will set off nuclear suitcase bombs in six American cities, including Washington, which will take the heaviest hit. Hundreds of thousands may die; millions will be endangered. Lines will go down, and to make it worse the terrorists will at the same time execute the cyberattack of all cyberattacks, causing massive communications failure and confusion. There will be no electricity; switching and generating stations will also have been targeted. There will be no word from Washington; the extent of the national damage will be as unknown as the extent of local damage is clear. Daily living will become very difficult, and for months--food shortages, fuel shortages.

Let's make it worse. On top of all that, on the day of the suitcase nukings, a half dozen designated cells will rise up and assassinate national, state and local leaders. There will be chaos, disorder, widespread want; law-enforcement personnel, or what remains of them, will be overwhelmed and outmatched.

Impossibly grim? No, just grim.

Actually, the scenario can be dismissed because it's incredibly impractical. If terrorists had a single nuclear device they would use it immediately, not wait to collect more to set them off all at once. Every day they hold onto a weapon is another day they risk getting caught without being able to use it at all. Steven Den Beste argued similarly last year.

The reason they are organized in cells is to minimize the damage when a cell is discovered. By the same token, they are unlikely to engage in an operation this huge because if it is compromised they lose too much all at once. If they had ten working nukes, they'd start ten totally independent plans instead of one grand ten-attack plan.

But that's not the least of their problems. It is not at all clear they actually have the human resources to engage in a plot of this magnitude. It is now known that the 9/11 attack was launched using their A-team; it required most of their best-quality willing martyrs just for that one operation. ...

I think I can plausibly argue that if al Qaeda had enough fissionables for a single nuke, they'd be working to use it immediately. They would not wait until they had as many as SR and Wretchard describe.

I cannot say that the 30-city scenario they describe is inconceivable but I do not find it remotely plausible. I don't believe that the resources are there, and I don't believe that it's the kind of plan al Qaeda would make even if the resources were there.

No terrorist group, or country, including the United States, has the ability to pull off the kind of attack Ms. Noonan envisions. In actuality, closing unneeded bases will allow us to redirect money towards more useful military endeavors and make us more prepared for the worst.

James Taranto yesterday lambasted Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, but did so by creating a rather tenuous moral connection between assassination and abortion.

We agree that Chavez is a menace, but give us a break. Religious conservatives argue (to take an example) that embryonic stem-cell research is wrong because the sanctity of nascent life is absolute and thus outweighs any possible benefits. But Robertson is willing to countenance assassination because it is "easier" and "cheaper" than other ways of bringing about a desired outcome? It goes to show that one can be religious without being morally serious.

That's basically the same non sequitur used to try to link abortion with the death penalty. Despite Mr. Taranto's assumption, most religious conservatives make clear distinctions between killing the innocent, killing the guilty, and killing the dangerous or threatening. I'm not saying I think we should assassinate anyone in particular, but if war against Venezuela were justified (which I have no opinion on, being uninformed about the matter), then assassinating Hugo Chavez, if his death alone would resolve the matter, would be a far better solution than ground combat. If we can kill soldiers, why should the lives of leaders be sacrosanct? Presidents aren't civilians in the traditional sense, because they have ultimate command authority over the military.

Update:
Francis W. Porretto says Chavez has earned a dirt nap:

Someone should thoroughly ventilate Hugo Chavez, without delay. Indeed, when I was young and hale, I would have volunteered to do it. The Venezuelan people are among the best folk in Latin America; they deserve to be free.

Wow, I totally predicted this a few weeks ago. "Imagine the outcry from the left if the terrorists started strapping bombs onto dogs!" I said. And now... terrorists are employing "canine bombs", and the left and their terrorist sympathizers are none-too-pleased.

Some Iraqis are horrified by the ethics of dragging the animal world into a human conflict.

"How can they use these lovely pets for criminal and murderous acts?" asked Rasha Khairir, 25, an employee of a Baghdad stock brokerage. "A poor dog can't refuse what they are doing with him because he can't think and decide."

Despite a common prejudice in the Muslim world against dogs, which are considered unclean, even the most virulent clerical opponents of the U.S. presence in Iraq have decried the use of canines as proxies in the war.

Abdel Salam Kubaisi, a spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Assn., a hard-line Sunni Arab clerical organization sympathetic to insurgents, called the practice un-Islamic. "Our religion does not permit us to hurt animals," he said, "neither by using them as explosive devices nor in any other manner."

But apparently some terror groups aren't as concerned with the alleged teachings of Islam.

"Dogs have been used in many areas by insurgents throughout Iraq" to carry explosive devices, said Noori Noori, inspector-general at the Interior Ministry. "They used mentally retarded people for operations during the elections, so why wouldn't they use animals?"

Last year in Ramadi, in the vast desert west of the capital, insurgents dispatched a booby-trapped donkey toward a U.S.-run checkpoint around sunset. "As one of the soldiers tried to stop it, the donkey exploded," said resident Mohammed Yas, 45. The only casualty was the donkey.

Too bad the "hardline clerics" -- i.e., terrorists who make others carry the bombs -- aren't as concerned about human life as they are about the lives of dogs. I'm just waiting for PETA to chime in; oh please, please let them say something condemning the use of dogs as weapons.

My brother, far more knowledgable about Japanese politics than I am, says that Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's move to dissolve Japan's Lower House and call for new elections is a huge political risk that could ensure his Liberal Democratic Party's dominance for the next decade, or destroy them. What's the driving issue? Postal deregulation, just like I wrote about a few days ago. Says the Asahi article:

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi dissolved the Lower House and called a snap election Monday after the Upper House dealt him a crushing blow by rejecting his package of postal privatization bills. ...

Koizumi told a meeting of LDP leaders right after the bills were voted down: "I will smash the old LDP and create a new one. I will not join hands with the old LDP. The party will not endorse as LDP candidates anyone who voted against the bills. If the LDP wins in the Lower House election, then those Upper House lawmakers will realize they were wrong."

Koizumi told a news conference Monday night, "I want to ask the voters if they think postal privatization is needed, even though the Upper House voted the bills down."

Koizumi also made waves by being the first Japanese leader since, I suppose, Emperor Hirohito to deploy Japanese military forces outside the country to help the Coalition in Iraq. That, plus his deregulation scheme, makes me root for him, though I know little else about him or his politics.

Here's a plan for reducing the population of Gitmo that I can support: sending illegal combatants back to their home countries.

The Bush administration is negotiating the transfer of nearly 70 percent of the detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to three countries as part of a plan, officials said, to share the burden of keeping suspected terrorists behind bars.

U.S. officials announced yesterday that they have reached an agreement with the government of Afghanistan to transfer most of its nationals to Kabul's "exclusive" control and custody. There are 110 Afghan detainees at Guantanamo and 350 more at the Bagram airfield near Kabul. Their transfers could begin in the next six months. ...

he agreement with Afghanistan is the largest of its kind so far. Prosper said yesterday that the U.S. government is working to send 129 Saudis and 107 Yemenis from Guantanamo to the custody of their home countries. If the U.S. government is able to arrange the transfer of detainees who came from all three countries, the population at the U.S. facility will drop by 68 percent, from 510 to 164.

Great news, as long as the receiving governments don't just set these guys free. I doubt they will though, because there won't be much incentive. The countries mentioned don't care much about human rights and wouldn't think twice about keeping people in prison just to use them as a negotiating tool with the US.

This also seems to be the most morally acceptable solution. I don't like the idea of holding people forever with no charges, but I also don't want these terrorists to get involved with the American court system. If we send them back to their home countries they can be charged there (or not) and dealt with by legal systems with more authority over them. If I were a Guantanamo prisoner I'd be begging to stay.

I've been thinking recently that I'd like to see an international charity premised on delivering guns to oppressed people living under tyranical regimes. The first application would be a place like North Korea, where most of the people are miserable but powerless to oppose a facist military government that holds all the weapons. What would happen if an organization were able to purchase and airdrop a thousand AK-47s and some ammunition directly into one of North Korea's enormous gulags? What if similar drops were made all over the country, directly into the villages and towns so that the people could snatch them up before the government could respond?

A similar strategy might work in regions facing genocide, like Darfur, where only the government-sponsored thugs have access to firearms. Why not even the odds by providing the refugees living in "aid" camps with the means to fight back and reclaim their land? Or is it better to just let them rot for the rest of their lives in disgusting tent camps run by "humanitarian" NGOs?

I'm sure such an organization would be condemned by the UN, but would it be illegal to operate it from the United States? There'd be risks involved with the deliveries, and it would be expensive, but if drug smugglers and terrorists can raise money and move people and weapons around I don't see why Guns Without Borders wouldn't be able to.

Indoor plumbing may soon be a requirement for elected officials in India.

Village council candidates in India should be allowed to stand for election only if they have a toilet at home, the rural development minister says.

In a letter to all chief ministers, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh said the toilet rule should be set out in law.

He said too many elected members "do not have toilet facilities in their own houses and defecate in the open". ...

The rural development minister suggested all chief ministers make similar provisions.

"Only then can we eradicate the practice of open defecation by 2010," he says.

It's good to have a goal.

The Bear Flag League has declared today "Support Michael Yon Day", and I'm happy to do my part by linking once again to his absolutely first-rate front-line reporting from Iraq. His account of the Battle of Mosul is riveting and I can't tear my eyes away from the pictures he took every step of the way. While you're there reading, hit his "Support the Next Dispatch" button to show your appreciation and to give him the resources it requires to stay embedded in Iraq.

Update:
Also check out this account of American troops becoming American citizens. As Mr. Yon says, welcome aboard!

(HT: Clayton Cramer.)