John le Carré, the former British spy turned spy novelist, has some grave words for Tony Blair. More than seven years after the invasion of Iraq, the former British prime minister, now out of office and touring the world pushing his political memoir, is encountering serious protests at his book signings.
“I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin,” he told me when I sat down with le Carré recently in London. “We’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.”
In trying to understand why the Democrats just crashed and burned, I think the first layer in peeling the onion takes the form of an admission to two crucial mistakes made by Obama before he took office. He campaigned brilliantly on a vague theme of change. In so doing, he unleashed a hornet's nest of intense expectations that would have been hard to fulfill in the best of circumstances, but Obama's personnel decisions made during the transition period guaranteed the worst of circumstances.
Two big reasons underpinned the power of his appeal and placed his uplifting narrative into sharp contrast with the visceral disgust felt toward Bush by the mass of Obama's supporters in the Democratic party and Independents.
A sense of unfair economic hardship embodied in the widespread feelings of insecurity and anger that emanated from the combined effects of stagnating living standards, the continuing loss of jobs due to deindustrialization, and the systematic transfer of wealth from the middle to the upper classes. The anger reached a bi-partisan critical mass with the onset of a massive middle-class bloodletting in the Great Recession, while the wealthy perpetrators of the bloodletting were bailed out by and even profited from the Bush Administration's so-called counter-recessionary policies.
Growing disgust with Bush's lawless policy of unilateral militarism and never ending war, reflected in the increasingly costly, unfocused wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere (and perhaps augmented by a vague feeling of fear fatigue, reflecting a sense that it was time to end the politics of fear and return to less abnormal state of affairs).
Both Hillary Clinton in the primaries or John McCain in the general election danced to Obama's music of change, but neither was able (or wanted?) to smoke out how Candidate Obama's planned to change directions. In effect, their failure to do so, freed President Obama from having to live within tight policy constraints imposed by specific campaign promises. This opened the door toward a cynical “move to the middle” via a series of timid compromises and accommodations, justified by the shopworn theory that his most committed supporters had nowhere else to go. That tired justification may play well to the self-referencing political class in Versailles on the Potomac, but Obama's supporters did have places to go: the hard core base could simply stay home, and independents like to switch sides.
Obama's fatal move to middle began immediately after his election when he chose to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic by picking members of the oligarchical establishment who helped to create and benefitted from the economic and national security messes he inherited — i.e., Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Robert Gates, and Hillary Clinton, plus the plethora of 2nd tier policy wonks and wannabes who came out the Clinton economic and national security apparat in waiting, eg, the “good war mafia” of precision-strike/coercive diplomacy dilettantes in defense, like Michele Flournoy, whose main achievement to date has been to completely gomer up the Quadrennial Defense Review.
These personnel decisions set the stage for a continuation of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush business-as-usual under a kinder and gentler face, taking the forms of policies that (1) continue the redistributive economic policies to favor the people who caused the meltdown, albeit softened by a highly visible albeit insufficient stimulus policy and (2) continue shoveling money into the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex via (a) an escalation of war policy — e.g., by embracing the idea of the AFPAK theater of operations — under the guise of a phony distinction between expanding a good war against terrorism in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) while ending the bad war in Iraq (which was merely in temporary remission, as the recent escalation of murderous events in Baghdad and Anbar Province show) and (b) increased funding of an outdated cold-war inspired weapons modernization program that does not modernize a shrinking, aging force structure.
India: The Chandigarh Tribune reported the results of last Wednesday's bi-annual naval conference, at which Minister of Defence Antony spoke. Antony said the government approved the construction of two new naval bases in the Bay of Bengal, opposite the Malacca Strait and Sri Lanka. At present, the only Indian naval base in Bay of Bengal is the huge naval establishment at Vishakapatnam, the headquarters of the Eastern Naval Command.
The northernmost base will be built at Paradip in Orissa State, closer to Bangladesh and opposite the Malacca Strait. The southernmost base is at Tuticorin in Tamil Nadu State, opposite Sri Lanka.
The Tribune commentator assessed that the two new bases are a counter to China's increased naval presence in the Bay of Bengal, including in Burma and Bangladesh. The Navy has smaller stations in the eastern Indian Ocean, but no full-size bases capable of providing all logistics support, supplies, replenishment, repair and maintenance. A third base for nuclear powered submarines also will be built at a separate location in the Bay of Bengal. The bases will take at least three years to build.
Comment: Chinese naval interest in the eastern Indian Ocean is spurring the expansion of India's naval infrastructure. China has announced its intention to build a deep sea port at Sonadia near Cox Bazar, Bangladesh. It is also building ports in Burma/Myanmar. All are in the Bay of Bengal.
Most major Indian naval infrastructure construction has been focused against the threat from Pakistan. The new bases represent a shift in Indian strategic thinking — to counter the threat from Chinese poaching in the Indian Ocean, without reducing vigilance against Pakistan. A new naval base in western India was announced in April 2010.
Phi Beta Iota: The maritime environment may well displace the space environment in the 21st Century, as offshore cities and factories come into being (including water desalination plants away from the brown water), and a portion of the population takes to permanent ocean-going residence. As with outer space, the “Outlaw Sea” are not charted in the sense that most vessels do not have transponders and there is rotten “situational awareness” overall including close-in. We we re-writing the 450-ship Navy piece today, we would place even more emphasis on getting the 75-ship Expediter into existence, and we would create a surface and air breather arm to the Ocean Surveillance Information System (OSIS) as a new command with global reach and very tight multinational information-sharing and sense-making networks centered at each of the regional multinational decision-support centres that China may fund if the USA does not get its act together. Whoever owns and operators those regional centers is going to be in the cat-bird seat–they will completely displace the unaffordable ineffective secret C4I grid that DoD and the US IC have now.
Michael Nasuti of Kabul Press recently published an article in which he calculated that killing each Taliban soldier in Afghanistan costs on average of $50 million to the US. The article, seemingly carefully. researched with all assumptions laid out so that anyone can examine them, is well worth reading. Nasuti, “Killing Each Taliban Soldier Costs $50 million.” He points out that at this rate, killing the entire Taliban forces (only 35,000) would cost $1.7 trillion, not a small amount for a country suffering from a severe economic downturn to spend on a war with no apparent purpose. And Nasuti's number, of course, assumes that they coud not be replaced faster than they are killed, but it appears that they can, easily.
Nasuti, who actually uses a “conservative” number (assuming that he has undercounted the number of Taliban casualties by one half), states that he had previously served “at a senior level” in the United States Air Force. He says,
The reason for these exorbitant costs is that United States has the world’s most mechanized, computerized, weaponized and synchronized military, not to mention the most pampered (at least at Forward Operating Bases). An estimated 150,000 civilian contractors support, protect, feed and cater to the American personnel in Afghanistan . . . The ponderous American war machine is a logistics nightmare and a maintenance train wreck.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who has been neutralized by the succession of Russian rulers, especially Putin) has just advised President Obama to get out of Afghanistan. Jonathan Steele suggests here (also attached below) that Obama ought to heed that advice, because Obama is in a similar albeit somewhat worse position than Gorbachev was in 1985-6.
Analogies are dangerous, because they can capture your thinking and take you off the cliff. But here goes.
If Steele's analogy is accurate, it suggests some pregnant ramifications that are not addressed directly by Steele: Russia (Putin and Medvedev) appear to be helping US/Nato in Afghanistan with training programs and by providing access routes for northern logistics lines of communication. This cooperation serve both parties by improving relations in the short term, but it also helps US/Nato stay on its disastrous course in Afghanistan. Are there other reasons why would Putin, an ardent nationalist, would what the US to remain stuck in Russia's backyard?
Russia needs help in staunching spillover of Sunni radicalism into its Moslem areas and its Central Asian sphere of influence (a variation of the original reason USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979). The US war on the Taliban serves that interest. So from Putin's point of view, keeping US/Nato bogged down in Afghanistan serves Russian national interests for free.
Putin, a former member of the KGB and an ardent nationalist, certainly knows the US fomented Sunni extremism in Afghanistan to sucker the Soviets into invading Afghanistan with the aimed of bogging the USSR down in its own VietNam-like quagmire (a policy proudly acknowledged by President Carter's National Security Advisor,Zbigniew Brzezinski in his notorious interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, January 1998). Putin must also know that the US/Nato engagement in Afghanistan, is (1) a huge resource drain that is weakening US economically and militarily, as well as (2) weakening the bonds giving the US political control over its Nato allies. From his point of view, these two outcomes would certainly improve Russia's relative power with respect to Europeans (especially Germany) and in the world, at the expense of the US. Moreover, in Putin's eyes, these outcomes might seem to be justified as payback to the US. After all, did not the US unleash the Islamic radicalism with its efforts to maneuver the USSR into Afghanistan in 1979 and did not the US humiliate Russia by the exploiting Russia's economic misery and military weaknesses, after Gorbachev had done the the US and the West a huge favor by precipitating collapse of the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War without bloodshed?
So, who should Obama and his advisors listen to? Putin the nationalist and go for a short term political gain at expense of remaining stuck in the quagmire that serves Russia's interests, or Gobachev the statesman who advises Obama to bite the bullet and absorb short-term political pain to gain long term benefits of exiting a quagmire that is weakening the US economically and militarily?
Of course the war advocate could counter by saying this is based on an analogy run amok. We are not making the gross mistakes the Soviets made in Afghanistan, and besides, it is cutting and running that weakens us. After all, Gobachev is just an old man who refuses to see that his time has past and is struggling futilely to remain relevant.
Designed to press the “reset” button after east-west tempers flared over the war in Georgia, the meeting ended with several agreements, the most dramatic of which was Russia's nod for the US to send military supplies across Russian territory to its forces in Afghanistan. Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin wanted to give Obama a reward for taking a calmer view of Russia than George Bush, in particular for accepting Georgia's share of blame in the South Ossetian crisis and for cancelling the most provocative aspects of Bush's missile defence scheme which Moscow viewed as a threat.
Phi Beta Iota: We cannot say enough good things about these folks. This is righteous good stuff–eight times cheaper than industrial offerings, virtually no “true cost” externalities, interchangeable parts, human scale, the whole enchilada.
Somalia anti-piracy patrol: Update. The Danish navy says it sank a Somali pirate boat in the Gulf of Aden. Spokesman Kenneth Nielsen said Wednesday that the command and control ship HDMS Esbern Snare intercepted a suspicious boat Tuesday, confiscated weapons and fuel, and detained six pirates. The Danes then used explosives to mine and sink the boat. The suspected pirates were later released since officials said no crime had been committed.
Earlier Wednesday, the European Union's anti-piracy force said pirates attacked but failed to hijack a French-flagged ship off the coast of Tanzania. The Danish navy ship is part of NATO's anti-piracy operation in the region.
European Union's anti-piracy force says the pirates are holding 19 ships and more than 420 hostages.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: After several years of trying, the some 40 ships on anti-piracy patrols have made scant progress against the pirates but have maintained skills.
