IMF, Thy Name Is Hypocrisy
Feb 23, 2010 Disaster Capitalism, Jobs Bills, global news, globalization
Guess what? The IMF is telling Britain it’s too soon to cut the welfare state in a recession. Yes, this is the same IMF that regularly produces ruinous disaster capitalism in the developing world.
There’s a reason why torture and disaster capitalism come from the same minds. It’s inherent in the authoritarian personality.
Afghanistan and the Obama Military (UPDATE)
Feb 15, 2010 11-Dimensional Chess, Afghanistan, Global Governance, Global Security Issues, Muslims and modernity, Obama's Afghanistan Policy, Political Geography, global news, global president, globalization, peacemaking, political hoaxes
Operation Mushtarak began this weekend. The Obama military is going to war under the banner of a non-English noun.
Mushtarak is defined as “common,” “joint,” “combined,” “concurrent,” or “collective;” in the Arabic of international relations this word is used to form the phrase al-amn almshtarak (collective security). Mushtarak is the verbal noun of the eighth measure of the verb root “Sh-ra-ka,” an ancient Semitic and Nilo-Saharan word meaning to share, to participate, and to partner.
As I expected, this is where the lefty blogosphere prepares to lose its shit; but I have full faith and confidence in my branch of service. See the red blob? That’s the strategic objective of the current offensive.
There are going to be civilian casualties (yes, it’s inevitable). There are also going to be dead American heroes because all military operations in urban terrain produce casualties. Rockets will fly off course because, of course, their every component was built by the lowest bidder. Unit commanders will not hesitate to establish superiority of fire; the mission right now is to find and eliminate resistance. The object is actual shock and we — not look-at-me-I’m-tough-on-terr’rsts shock and awe, but actual shock and awe that ends the fighting. This is not a fireworks display to announce the arrival of the American hegemony, but the quiet arrival of the Obama army.
When the battle is over and the Taliban are gone, you have established space for peace.
As we saw in the conquest of Baghdad, once that phase is over you can count on things to remain relatively quiet for about 24 hours. Team leaders will have to establish security. It is an interesting force-mix on the ground: infantry, armor…and lots of Military Police. Y’know, the guys who know how to keep a city secure and direct traffic?
Like, guys trained to do this sort of stuff?
Which…looks a lot like this?
Does any nation do it better? Yes, there are other nations who can do it quite well, and thankfully they are on our side. Indeed, it is a telling difference that America’s strongest allies are still with us in this fight, and doing good work.
The Taliban have shooters and they have weapons, and yes they will use the rules of engagement against us. THAT IS THE POINT; WE ARE THE GOOD GUYS. Some helpful background on the current rules of engagement, from AP via HuffPo, emphasis mine:
Under the current rules of engagement, troops retain the right to use lethal force in self defense, said U.S. Col. Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the international force.
The rules seek to put the troops in the “right frame of mind to exercise that right,” Shanks said. They require troops to ask a few fundamental questions:
• Even if someone has shot in my general direction, am I still in danger?
• Will I make more enemies than I’ll kill by destroying property, or harming innocent civilians?
• What are my other options to resolve this without escalating the violence?
Luckily, the troops also have an army of aid workers and a sort of government-in-waiting are at the starting line for the go-order. Huge amounts of cash will be spent where they have the most effect, which is in putting people to work and co-opting the local notables. In other words, it’s the perfect relief army, and it’s made up of every international organization under the sun. (Adding: except the UN, it turns out!)
The war will not be over, but the town will be in NATO hands and it will not implode.
From there, follow-on forces will reach further and the same process will continue. This is not understood well by certain editors (Psst: Arianna! Simon Tisdall is not a good source for an opinion on force sizes).
Some reports say the Taliban are regrouping in Uruzgan, north of Helmand. The question thus arises: is the allied offensive merely displacing the problem? And what about the war’s hinterlands: the Talib and al-Qaida bases in Waziristan – where Pakistan perpetually prevaricates – hostile Baluchistan, and the northern borders, where a spreading war threatens fragile Uzbek supply routes?
Helmand Province is a breadbasket. Afghanistan will need it to survive as a landlocked state with so little infrastructure and export power. In other words, if The Thing Called Afghanistan is to become an actual country instead of a basket case, it will need this province. The best look I’ve had at a map is at the Guardian, but it’s a Flash file with no embedding. From UnderstandingWar.org comes a fairly good one that I’ve marked up:
The red horseshoe around Marjah is the perimeter, supported by camps and fuel points throughout the operational zone. The black arrows represent actual strategic real estate. The blue circle is the region where the Taliban have fled: the same sparsely-populated mountains where American firepower was unleashed in 2001. So much the better in the age of Predator drones.
Nor is the Taliban monolithic; “divide-and-conquer” is the order of the day. You’ll note that no one in this administration is giving speeches about the Taliban’s destruction. It’s a remarkably impersonal kind of war for a change.
Perhaps McChrystal can win over the Taliban himself ala George Washington and Doublehead and put a nice, yellow bow on a victory. Which leaves me wondering what a military victory under this president would look like on Fox News. Speaking of which, I predict fake outrage at naming the operation in Arabic in 5, 4, 3, 2… In fact, the better this offensive turns out, the more I expect United Nations hysteria to show up on Faux Noise. Get ready for the John Bolton rerun.
The only question: where are the internationalists among the left, and can the left adequately promote success?
And would someone in the vast liberal media conspiracy please get a political geographer on the air to explain how employment migration patterns will have men returning from those mountains for work in Spring? Number one job: create jobs.
War is a sort of unnatural disaster. Worse, it is a blunt instrument. Yet as a disaster, it is something to be managed by professionals with plenty of supplies and money to maintain the peace. Obama has no intention of being remembered for his wars, but if he is able to keep his promise and announce troop reductions in 2011 he may very well be remembered for redefining America’s military doctrine for the 21st Century.
UPDATE: According to the AP and CNN, Pakistan has captured a senior Taliban commander with knowledge of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Again, I ask: what does an Obama victory look like on Faux Noise?
Morning Notice
Feb 14, 2010 Nicholas Sarkozy, Teh Dreaded Frenche™, global news, globalization, immigration, regressives, religion
Sarkozy’s right-wing government tried immigrant hysteria as a foundation for local elections. It’s not working on the French:
Polls showed that a majority of people initially supported having the discussion about national identity. But those numbers quickly reversed themselves as media commentators attacked the debates for stigmatizing foreigners and their children and as conservative politicians participating in the town hall meetings made what many considered to be racist or xenophobic comments. For example, a conservative mayor in eastern France argued that the country would be “eaten up” by immigrants who already constitute “10 million (people) we pay to do [expletive],” while a former right-wing minister warned that France risked disappearing “when there are as many minarets as cathedrals.” Secretary of State for Family Affairs Nadine Morano also provoked a scandal when she appeared to describe young French Arabs as being unpatriotic and shunning work.
In the most recent survey conducted by the polling firm Obea-Infraforce in late January, a mere 33% of people considered the debates to be constructive and 61% said the process had in no way defined what being French means. More than half of respondents also felt the entire idea was motivated by concerns by Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement party that it could suffer big losses in the March elections.
Sarkozy’s mistake: he didn’t have a Glenn Beck or a Faux Noise Network. Plus, French society doesn’t have that toxic religious angle.
Morning News
Jan 14, 2010 American diplomacy, Global Security Issues, global news, globalization
Haitians welcomed the return of the US military to their country. Across the world, the United States is once again the good guy.
Which reminds me: this ad, or a version of it, has been running for months. The US Navy has matched the “Army Of One” campaign with branding of its own. I wonder what John Paul Jones would make of “a global force for good:”
Global Netroots
Aug 13, 2009 Netroots Nation, Nico Pitney, global news
An admission: I’ve got a man-crush on Nico Pitney. If the Pulitzer committee doesn’t give him at least a nod for his intensive blogging on the Green Revolution in Iran, there is no justice in the world. As a graduate of the Defense Language Institute, I was extremely impressed with his ability to “crowdsource” Farsi-to-English translation, so there was no question about attending a panel discussion on global connectivity.
Jerome Armstrong is the author of Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics
Lauren Shannon is an American expat living and working in Japan. She created the website Americans Abroad for Obama to organize voters outside the country — which is no mean task, because Americans are literally everywhere. She now runs FightingLiberals.com.
An impressive trio, a topic as large as the world, and it’s just the first 75 minutes of a three-day conference!
==============================
Lauren Shannon wants to debunk misperceptions of the expatriate population. Of the 7 million Americans abroad, most are not military; even in the military, donations from enlisted servicemen gave at a ratio of 6-1 for Obama over McCain. Fully 99% of American expats are college educated. During the Bush years, the expat community leaned more liberal than ever, with some GOP abroad organizations disappearing altogether.
Shannon describes an online voter registration tool at her website. Her organization has been credited for swinging the election in New York’s 20th Congressional District; during the 2006 election returns of the Virginia Senate race, Senator Allen conceded to Jim Webb when absentee ballots turned overwhelmingly against him.
==============================
Nico Pitney says that citizen-produced media has filled a gap that traditional media wasn’t filling. Facebook, Twitter, and other technologies are not being used in “new” ways, but are being used more than ever. One advantage of net-based reporting is the volunteerism: crowdsourcing not only provides translation, but does so without being asked.
==============================
Responding to questions about government censorship, Shannon explains that most of the blocking isn’t political in nature, but the result of spam filters or perceptions of certain services as conduits for pornography. During the 2004 election, Shannon was unable to pull up the White House or RNC websites without going through a proxy server because the IP addresses had been widely used by spammers in the far east. A Turkish judge blocked YouTube because of an ethnic flame-war between Greeks and Turks.
Armstrong described the strict Malaysian press laws; because those laws did not cover the internet, the opposition found an outlet online and grew too fast for the government to control anymore. He compared this to Singapore, where press laws have been updated with every new technology and the government remains in power.
Pitney says that freeware, anonymizers and firewall-penetration software have outpaced the ability of governments to control web traffic.
==============================
Shannon questions whether there is an economic model for traditional journalism in international affairs. Citizen-based journalism may be the only way to cover most foreign stories anymore because so many media outlets are cutting back international staff.
Pitney sees a hybrid non-profit and for-profit model as the future of journalism generally for the same reasons.
==============================
Comments from the audience described a world of “micro-experts” and a web of relationships between bloggers across territorial lines. Shannon remarks that we need to build these relationships now so they will be ready when the news happens. Conversely, the panel and audience agree that bloggers need to learn how to better protect sources; particularly in Iran, photos and news were posted by amateurs who didn’t understand the dangers.
Weekly World News?
Mar 16, 2009 Chinese censorship, European stimulus, Evo Morales, Grass Mud Horse, economic stimulus, global news, paul krugman
This is the first edition of a weekly blog in which I’ll round up the events that shape global politics. I’d like to call it Weekly World News, but I don’t want to be confused with Batboy. Still working on the title.
We start this week with President Obama, who met Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva amid the G-20 meetings in Washington. Obama is siding with the developing world against Europe, which has become very stimulus-shy. Paul Krugman points out why:
Europe’s economic and monetary integration has run too far ahead of its political institutions. The economies of Europe’s many nations are almost as tightly linked as the economies of America’s many states — and most of Europe shares a common currency. But unlike America, Europe doesn’t have the kind of continentwide institutions needed to deal with a continentwide crisis.This is a major reason for the lack of fiscal action: there’s no government in a position to take responsibility for the European economy as a whole. What Europe has, instead, are national governments, each of which is reluctant to run up large debts to finance a stimulus that will convey many if not most of its benefits to voters in other countries.
In many ways, Obama is the first American president who ‘gets’ globalization. In a press conference today, he spoke of the need for global action to recover from global recession. Click here to see the video.
But speaking of global governance, yesterday’s edition of the New York Times featured an op-ed from Evo Morales, President of Bolivia:
In 1961, the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed the coca leaf in the same category with cocaine — thus promoting the false notion that the coca leaf is a narcotic — and ordered that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within 25 years from the coming into force of this convention.”…So for the past eight years, the millions of us who maintain the traditional practice of chewing coca have been, according to the convention, criminals who violate international law.[...]
The custom of chewing coca leaves has existed in the Andean region of South America since at least 3000 B.C… Today, millions of people chew coca in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and northern Argentina and Chile. The coca leaf continues to have ritual, religious and cultural significance that transcends indigenous cultures and encompasses the mestizo population.
Morales explains that coca leaves contain alkaloids chemically similar to caffeine and nicotine. The alkaloids aren’t narcotic until they’ve been concentrated and processed. This points to one very important problem with international lawmaking: the ruling bodies are distant and disconnected from the societies their laws affect.
Last, we have this bizarre video from China. The alpaca-like animal is a “grass-mud horse,” which is a Chinese-language pun on “fuck your mother.” This silly video has spread like wildfire among the Chinese. The NYT explains:
Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.
Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.
Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”
h/t to Disgrasian for that one.
