As we begin winding down in Iraq, many years after General Garner had us lined up to exit without destroying the Golden Hour, and as we reflect on Afghnaistan, which we also lost by refusing Charlie Wilson's urgent pleas to continue the money after the Soviet left, but earmarked for schools, water, and other necessary infrastructure, we once again return to the topic of “the Golden Hour” and the matter of inter-agency planning, programming, budgeting, and campaigning.
Winston Churchill likes to say that “The Americans always do the right thing, they just try everything else first.”
As someone who has lived in Turkey for most of the last two years, I have watched the development of her foreign policy with great interest, not to mention a good deal of confusion
It is hard to make sense out this rapidly-emerging, vibrant country of 70 million, increasingly well-educated, industrious people. While its remote interior is still very traditional, Turkey's coastal regions are already beginning to blossom into an outward looking, modern multinational consumer society, and the effects of rising incomes and education are very visible. In the coastal regions, I would say that living standards are now higher than those of Portugal, about the same as those of Greece, and somewhat lower than those of Spain. To be sure, the interior is poorer, especially as one travels east, but even in the east, there is growing modernity. Everywhere, markets are chock a block with high-quality healthy food and vast quantities middle income consumer goods, and there is fresh water galore, especially in the coastal regions.
The attached op-ed by Patrick Seale is a good summary that brings clarity to much of what is going on with Turkey's foreign policy and is well worth reading.
But there is more. Not mentioned are Turkey's bilateral overtures to Russia, Georgia, the Ukraine, and the various Turkic countries in great swath of Central Asia (including the Uighurs in NW China), as well as a bewildering variety of multilateral environmental and economic initiatives in the Black Sea region (involving Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Greece, and Turkey).
The announcement by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he will not run for reelection is the exclamation point on the utter collapse of the Obama adminstration's Middle East policy. Launched to great expectations — the appointment of George Mitchell, Obama's Cairo declaration that the plight of the Palestinians is intolerable — it is now in complete disarray. It is, without doubt, the first major defeat for Obama's hope-and-change foreign policy.
Chuck Spinney Sends… America's diplomatic recipe for winning the hearts and minds of “furriners” in the 21st Century:
Mix – Blind unreasoning fear with the
Domestic politics of privatizing embassy protection and the
Domestic politics of huge construction contracts
into neat grand-strategic soufflé, then bake it in the domestic political-economic oven of heated by the coals of the MICC's Long War Against Terrorism and serve hot to a world that hungers for American values.
For those readers who question the political relevance of such a tasty dish, I offer the following op-ed by Simon Tisdall of the Guardian
U.S. Needs Hit Squads, ‘Manhunting Agency’: Spec Ops Report
Noah Shachtman November 3, 2009
CIA director Leon Panetta got into hot water with Congress, after he revealed an agency program to hunt down and kill terrorists. A recent report from the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations University argues that the CIA didn’t go far enough (.pdf). Instead, it suggests the American government should set up something like a “National Manhunting Agency” to go after jihadists, drug dealers, pirates and other enemies of the state. . . . . . . .
Such a group wouldn’t just go after terrorists. “Human networks are behind narcotics trafficking, arms proliferation, piracy, hiding war criminals from authorities, human trafficking, or other smuggling activities,” Crawford writes. “Human networks also lie at the core of national governments, offering an increased potential to nonlethally influence state actors with precision. A robust manhunting capability would allow the United States to interdict these human networks.”
Clinton, Goldstone and true cost of the occupation
Hever: The Israeli government is hiding the true cost of the occupation even from itself
The Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported last Friday that at least 11 locations within settlement colonies in the West Bank are escalating construction in order to alter “facts on the ground.” In October, the joint Israeli-Palestinian organization, Alternative Information Center, organized a conference on the economy of the Israeli occupation in Bethlehem. The Real News' Lia Tarachansky attended and spoke to the AIC's Shir Hever about the real costs of maintaining Israel's occupation.
Cost estimated at US$9 billion to the governments of Israel and the USA, while profit is almost entirely privatized.
On Oct. 21, the incoming commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Robert F. Willard, made a little-noticed but astonishing accusation to reporters in Seoul:
“I would contend that in the past decade or so, China has exceeded most of our intelligence estimates of their military capability and capacity every year. They've grown at an unprecedented rate in those capabilities.”
