Barrel Strength

The German government tells Greece to sell off some of its islands to pay its debts.

See what Ignatieff has to say about abortion in this clip from his press conference:

When Obama agreed to scrap the missile defense shield for Poland and the Czech Republic, he hoped that this would generate concessions from Russia.  Instead of negotiating away the missile defense shield, Obama simply gave it away without anything concrete in return.   The hoped for dividend has been snubbed by Russia with the real Russian President saying this today.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday warned major powers against intimidating Iran and said that talk of sanctions against the Islamic Republic was “premature”.”There is no need to frighten the Iranians,” Putin told reporters in Beijing.

As printed in the Washington Post, so it’s not spin from the VRWC MkII:

… U.S. diplomacy has remained mostly in the hands of one man, Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, who is pushing for normalizing relations with the only country in the world led by a president indicted for war crimes.

[...]

“We’ve got to think about giving out cookies,” said Gration, who was appointed in March. “Kids, countries, they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.

[...]

Ghazi Salahuddin, a close Bashir adviser, praised Gration for “trying to be even-handed.” During a stop in this Darfur capital, Gration was greeted like a rock star by hundreds of cheering Bashir supporters in a conference hall plastered with posters of Bashir with Obama, poorly joined together using a computer.

Oh. Dear. God.

From MSNBC today:

President Obama will travel to Copenhagen to make a pitch for Chicago’s Olympic bid, White House officials have confirmed to NBC News.

Obama will leave for Denmark Thursday night, hours after his wife Michelle departs for the vote. The president made the final decision Saturday night after returning from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

From Washington Times today:

The military general credited for capturing Saddam Hussein and killing the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq says he has only spoken to President Obama once since taking command of Afghanistan.

“I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconferece],” General Stanley McChrystal told CBS reporter David Martin in a television interview that aired Sunday.

“You’ve talked to him once in 70 days?” Mr. Martin followed up.

“That is correct,” the general replied.

Your correspondent earlier equated the Obama presidential run to mass hysteria in UK  after Diana’s death.  That analogy can now be extended to this shallow celebrity-president who is in love with his own image as others have noted.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
George Orwell
1903-1950

I have come across a copy of Foreign Affairs,vol 68, no 1. 1989. Soviet Communism was in the process of collapsing. The satellites were flying off in their own directions. Within a year the Russian state would sign the Treaty of Paris, [Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, November 1990] signifying the end of its pretensions to overthrow the international order, and its return to the comity of nations, after having rejected the same in the Bolshevik Revolution.

So what are all the learned international relations and political science profs writing in Foreign Affairs in the winter of 1989?

Professor David Holloway of  Stanford University was writing a chapter on “Gorbachev’s New Thinking”, mentioning the end of revolutionary faith in the Soviet Union.

Professor Robert Legvold was writing about the “Revolution in Soviet Foreign Policy”. They no longer thought about conquering the world.

Professor Charles Gati was writing about “Eastern Europe on its Own”.  The dictators were having as much trouble assimilating Gorbachev as the learned professors.

The normally highly sagacious Richard Nixon was  describing Gorbachev in that issue and changes in Soviet policy as “changes in style and rhetoric” not to be confused with “shifts in substance and policy.” (at p.200)

But one article you will not have seen in Foreign Affairs or anywhere else for that matter, was a confident statement beginning with “1989 will see the demise of Communism as a serious political idea, and the end of the Soviet Union as an effective regime.”

No article in 1989 began “It’s over”.

Yet it was happening before our noses. In 1989 I was 39. I had been for years firmly anti-communist. I had no illusions about the nature of communism: the essential rubbish of Marxism, the tens upon tens of millions killed to sustain the lie and make the way for the new soviet man; the thuggish brutality, the deliberate destruction of Russia’s productive farmers, the endless slaughters in the prisons of the KGB.

Yet none of us got up and said: communism is over. It is finished. The house of cards will collapse within 18 months. Not one person on this side of the Iron Curtain. My friend the Dark Lord recalls listening to  a Hungarian taxi driver in 1986 or thereabouts telling him “it is finished” in such definitive terms, but even the Dark Lord failed to grasp the dimensions of the taxi driver’s remark.

Which brings is to the present day. What do we fail to see that is before our noses?

Islamic demographic take-over of Europe?

Mark Steyn in “America Alone” and Christopher Caldwell in “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” are slowly creating awareness among the well read on this issue.

The world getting colder instead of warmer?

Failure of regulatory oversight of markets? Too late for that barn door!

You get my drift. Orwell reminds us that a constant effort must be made to see the obvious. It is not enough to speak of economic cycles. You have to be ready to sell out of the market before the crash, even as you endure the opprobrium of many for being a bad sport. You have to be ready to state the obvious in public places, even as the faithful are scandalized. And if I am slightly more apt to scandalize the faithful (global warming alrmists) I am no better at predicting the future than Joe Average.

An American president stands before a Russian audience and denies his nation’s primary role in winning the Cold War:

Now, make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.

Just when you thought the man could push the envelope of narcissistic self-delusion no further.

The One’s new tone of accommodation towards the Islamic world isn’t playing in Peshawar, much less Peoria:

A message attributed to the deputy leader of al-Qaeda has denounced Barack Obama as a “criminal” on the eve of the US president’s Middle East trip. Ayman al-Zawahiri said Mr Obama’s “bloody messages” would not be concealed by “polished words”

[...]

He called Mr Obama “that criminal who came seeking, with deception, to obtain what he failed to achieve on the ground after the mujahideen ruined the project of the Crusader America in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia”.

[...]

[Obama] will travel to Egypt on Thursday, where he will make a speech at Cairo University. In the audience will be 10 senior figures from the banned Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, the BBC’s Christian Fraser reports from Cairo.

And the Muslim Brotherhood is equally charmed by the prospect of that visit.

So is the Salafist troglodyte community.

George Friedman is head of Stratfor, a strategic forecasting firm whose analysis may have passed by your desk from time to time.

Friedman has written a most entertaining romp through the next hundred years. Whether right or wrong he helps open one’s mind to the larger picture. Friedman’s intellectual base is in demography, geography and technology: geopolitics. Religion figures little in his view of the next century, whereas I think it is already the prime driving force of the next confrontation, in the form of Islam.

Major predictions:

• The rise of the United States is only beginning. As the only power to bestride the sea lanes between Europe and Asia, with command of both shores, and of inner (near earth)  space,  it is going to continue to rise in importance through the next century.
• China will implode.
• Europe is decadent.
• The Islamic challenge never will amount to much, though Turkey will become a major power by the middle of the century.

Major observations:

• Population growth is crashing everywhere, to be followed by population loss in almost all major countries, with the United states least affected.
• Global warming is irrelevant.
• The computer will continue to reshape economic activity.

My take-away was from his early chapter, on the distinction between barbarism, civilization, and decadence.

• barbarism is the belief that the mores and virtues of your tribe or village are what all of humanity should embrace, and you are ready to take fire and sword to your neighbours or foreigners to make them agree.
• Civilization is the acceptance that the world is full of barbarians and that one needs to fight  selectively, if barbarically, to save civilized codes of conduct.
• Decadence is the belief that there is no real distinction between civilization and barbarism, and if there is, it is hardly worth fighting for.

On the computer, he says that it causes us to de-emphasize all aspects of reality and of our engagement with it that cannot be quantified – the contemplative, the playful, the religious. The corporation is the creature of the quantitification of the computer, and no one can compete with the United States who does not embrace the methods of the computer. To the extent that the computer does not allow for any values other than its own, it is barbaric in the sense of the term used above, and the corporation is a barbarian: exclusively focused on the goals, rules and mores of its own tribe.

I recommend it for a fast read.

The President’s recent approval of the rescue mission for an American merchant captain is a laudable start but it must lead to a genuine campaign to end the scourge of Somali piracy. Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had the fortitude to take real action. So here’s my three-point plan in their tradition:

1. Treat pirates as pirates
   No more nonsense about “irregular combatants” or poster children for the Geneva Conventions. These people are brigands and there is long precedent in admiralty law for dealing with them. Uncooperative vessels in designated waters are fair game for lethal force. Rope, yardarm, pirate: some assembly required.
    
2. Letters of Marque
   Queen Bess’ Sea Hawks did admirable service against the perfidious Spanish and bounty hunting is a storied American tradition. Give Blackwater a chance to redeem itself after its failings in Iraq. Share the wealth, America.
    
3. Shock and Awe Mk 2
   So these pirate chaps have a lair? Time to liven it up with Operation Quarterback 3, hosted by the B2 Spirit bomber. Really, who doesn’t love an airshow?

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Kicking up the old-school crazy, Lawrence Martin channels Canada’s Great Satan™ for global nuclear disarmament. Because, of course, the only way to convince loony foreigners to forego nukes is to start out by sacrificing all of your trump cards. At least that’s how The One appears to be playing Texas Fold ‘em on the world stage.

In summary, take it away, DCI Gene Hunt:

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They’ve replaced an intellectually dishonest rationale for raw imperialism with a loopier and shallower one.

Looks like the bus has backed up over Francis Fukuyama for yet another run.

The lack of economic policy to address the financial crisis might be due to the fact that Obama administration is busy undoing the foreign policy initiatives of the previous Bush administration.  And what an effort it is!

News stories abound today about UK planning a rift with US which is obviously a pushback by the Obama administration to earlier comments by the head of the civil service in UK, Sir Gus O’Donnell:

In an extraordinary blunder, the usually-guarded Sir Gus said no-one in the U.S. Treasury department was answering telephone calls.

He said it meant the Government was finding it ‘unbelievably difficult’ to hold discussions ahead of the meeting of world leaders in London.

Even though the world was in the grip of the worst economic crisis in decades – top of the G20 agenda – Number 10 was having trouble getting in touch with key personnel, said the Cabinet Secretary.

‘There is nobody there,’ he told a civil service conference in Gateshead.

‘You cannot believe how difficult it is.’

There seems to be a trend in this administration in picking fights with allies.  Whether it is free trade with South Korea or abrogating a defense agreement with India.  The latter is interesting given the scope of rejection, involving UK and Australia, as well as the fact that Bush administration worked hard to make India an ally.

The Indian Navy chose to power its indigenously designed, cutting-edge stealth warship, the INS Shivalik, with gas turbines from American company General Electric (GE). But even as the Shivalik readies for sea trials, the US State Department has ordered GE to stop all work on the turbines it has supplied….

GE has told MDL that there could be up to three months delay, while the new US administration reviews its military relations with several countries. India is not alone in facing this ban; GE has been told to stop work even with close US allies like the UK and Australia.

The rejection of allies and the corresponding attempts to improve relations with countries hostile to US interests, such as Syria, Russia and Iran, is bizarre and contrary to Political Realism which this administration was suppose to spawn, when it rejected neoconservative foreign policy.  In the real word is there such thing as a moderate Taliban?  Is it any wonder that the Chinese are testing the US mettle in South China Sea and North Korea is doing the same in the Korean peninsula?