Attached is an important eyewitness assessment of the current situation in Haiti. It was written by William McNulty, a retired marine who is a volunteer member of Team Rubicon, a self-financed and self-deployed group of former Marines, soldiers and health care professionals currently providing emergency relief in Haiti.
McNulty paints a grim picture of condition in Haiti and especially, as he puts it, “… the impotence of western power to deal with disasters/emergencies;for either out of lack of compassion, political correctness, or because the institutions set up to take care of emergencies are so overburdened with layers of bureaucracy that they are ineffective.”
Phi Beta Iota: Team Rubicon is a self-financed and self-deployed group of former Marines, soldiers and health care professionals currently providing emergency relief in Haiti. Unlike the Red Cross and others, they do not skim 50% for overhead, they are there now, and every penny goes straight into Haiti.
Short After Action Review due to time-constraints…more to follow. I´m currently in Santo Domingo about to hop a flight back to DC.
For the last six days I was operating in refugee camps in the worst hit areas of Port au Prince. I was the Asst Team Leader for Team Rubicon, a team of former Marines, soldiers, firefighters, doctors, and nurses operating in the supposed ´denied areas´ of Port au Prince. We were – and the team continues to be – FIRST RESPONDERS to wounds now over ten days old.
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Sensationalist journalism prevented aid from getting to Port au Prince. . . . There were no mobs of bandits, the media was wrong. But…if the world doesn´t get there fast, there will be. People get very desperate without food and water. I would too. But since bureaucratic institutions are reactive, not proactive (by their very nature), the irresponsible journalism and circular reporting of the traditional media made even the military scared to respond in a timely fashion. I was personally told by a friend of mine at SOUTHCOM to not deploy until the security situation improved. He´s a very good friend and good at his job, but couldn´t have been more wrong.
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Immediately remove anyone in the military chain of command who becomes part of the problem, or move them off base and into town so they can learn the hard way. . . . This is a disaster on a catastrophic scale, and it doesn´t have to be this bad. Hold your leaders responsible.
US Army Human Terrain System (HTS) principals recently produced a number of briefings adding up to a total of 133-pages of MS PowerPoint slides. For convenience sake here, we'll use the title of the first presentation titled The Future: Training Directorate Executive Overview, 08 January 2010 (The Future)1 as the overall title for the series. The presentations contain a dizzying array of information, mostly in living color.
They are audacious and excellent documents whose purpose seems to be to convince command and funding sources that HTS principals have been working since at least 2008 to improve recruiting practices (rigid check of qualifications), training methodologies (going Socratic, modular and phased) and logistics practices (housing, deployment, transport, move to Kansas City).
Once past the hypnotic affects of the 133 slides that induce a “this is great” feeling, the realization comes that the same people who destroyed the US Army program concept in the first place are the same ones that now claim they can reconstruct it and expand HTS operations to all combatant commands.
Montgomery Clough and Steve Fondacaro still remain at the program's helm in spite of two year's worth of allegations–from former and current HTS employees–that fraud, waste and abuse have been common place throughout the life of the HTS. Further, the substance of The Future is early-collegiate, not professional military/academic pedagogy. Financial figures are presented with no work breakdown structure/allocation. And worse, there is no mention of any academic/university review of the social science effort. This is troublesome given that management's experience in the field is limited. In short, the effort seems somewhat disingenuous.
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John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer specializing in national security and political matters. His book on the Human Terrain System (entitled General David Petraeus' Favorite Mushroom is available at Amazon and Wiseman Publishing. Reach him at cioran123[at]yahoo.com.
Africa and China are now immersed in their third and most transformative era of heavy engagement, one that promises to do more for economic growth and poverty alleviation than anything attempted by Western colonialism or international aid programs.Robert Rotberg and his Chinese, African, and other colleagues discuss this important trend and specify its likely implications. Among the specific topics tackled here are China's interest in African oil; military and security relations; the influx and goals of Chinese aid to sub-Saharan Africa; human rights issues; and China's overall strategy in the region. China's insatiable demand for energy and raw materials responds to sub-Saharan Africa's relatively abundant supplies of unprocessed metals, diamonds, and gold, while offering a growing market for Africa's agriculture and light manufactures.As this book illustrates, this evolving symbiosis could be the making of Africa, the poorest and most troubled continent, while it further powers China's expansive economic machine.
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One of the most worrying elements to emerge from these pages is a consistent lack of transparency in all these Chinese ventures. “Not a single Chinese official in the region would agree to meet us,” the authors write. Their requests for interviews with African officials and Chinese managers were routinely ignored, access to work sites barred and information on contractual terms withheld. Domestic parliamentarians have been similarly stymied, unable to uncover even basic details of projects they were promised would transform their countries. None of this bodes well on a continent where top-level sleaze and capital flight have already leached away billions of dollars earmarked for development. Opaque, unscrutinized contracts threaten more of the same. Michel and Beuret are admirably even-handed, unsparing in their attacks on the cynical agendas and sad outcomes of past French, British and U.S. intervention.
Phi Beta Iota: Above two on order and will be reviewed soon.
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“As the chief China economist for Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong and a former resident of both Beirut and Damascus, Mr Simpfendorfer is well placed to tackle the subject. But although he is a professional economist, what sets Mr Simpfendorfer's book aside from the usual run of publications about the mainland's rise is not his command of macroeconomic statistics, but his grasp of how the expanding relationship between China and the Arab world works at the personal level.” – Tom Holland, South China Morning Post
“Despite the global economic crisis, the trajectory of the Arab and Chinese economies still match the soaring skylines of Dubai and Shanghai. Furthermore, as Ben Simpfendorfer bracingly illustrates, these are not isolated events but rather the resurrection of a Silk Road symbiosis. For all the region's troubles, this book places the Persian Gulf back where it geographically belongs: at the center of Eurasia and bending towards the overwhelming gravity of China.” – Parag Khanna, author of The Second World–Empires and Influence in the New Global Order and Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation
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A convincing economic, political and cultural analysis of waning Western dominance and the rise of China and a new paradigm of modernity. Jacques (The Politics of Thatcherism) takes the pulse of the nation poised to become, by virtue of its scale and staggering rate of growth, the biggest market in the world. Jacques points to the decline of American hegemony and outlines specific elements of China's rising global power and how these are likely to influence international relations in the future. He imagines a world where China's distinct brand of modernity, rooted firmly in its ancient culture and traditions, will have a profound influence on attitudes toward work, family and even politics that will become a counterbalance to and eventually reverse the one-way flow of Westernization. He suggests that while China's economic prosperity may not necessarily translate into democracy, China's increased self-confidence is allowing it to project its political and cultural identity ever more widely as time goes on. As comprehensive as it is compelling, this brilliant book is crucial reading for anyone interested in understanding where the we are and where we are going. Publishers Weekly
For the better part of 15 years, with one tragic interruption, he dug and dug and then transformed his scholarly spadework into accessible, inviting prose. The result is “When China Rules the World,” a compelling and thought-provoking analysis of global trends that defies the common Western assumption that, to be fully modern, a nation must become democratic, financially transparent and legally accountable. Jacques argues persuasively that China is on track to take over as the world's dominant power and that, when it does, it will make the rules, on its own terms, with little regard for what came before. Washington Post
Muscling Latin America: The Pentagon has a new Monroe Doctrine (The Nation)
In September Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington's decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon's main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador's new Constitution to promote “universal disarmament” and oppose the “imposition” of military bases of “some states in the territory of others.” It was also one of the most important victories for the global demilitarization movement, loosely organized around the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, since protests forced the US Navy to withdraw from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. Correa, though, couldn't resist an easy joke. “We'll renew the lease,” he quipped, “if the US lets us set up a base in Miami.”
Funny. Then Washington answered with a show of force: take away one, we'll grab seven. In late October the United States and Colombia signed an agreement granting the Pentagon use of seven military bases, along with an unlimited number of as yet unspecified “facilities and locations.”
Connect these dots: In Nigeria this week, Muslim youths set fire to a church, killing more than two dozen Christian worshippers. In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been suffering increased persecution including, this month, a drive-by shooting outside a church in which seven people were murdered. In Pakistan, Christian churches were bombed over Christmas. In Turkey, authorities have been closing Christian churches, monasteries and schools. Recently, churches in Malaysia have been attacked, too, provoked by this grievance: Christians inside the churches were referring to God as “Allah.” How dare infidels use the same name for the Almighty as do Muslims!
Pakistan-Afghanistan-Turkey: For the record. A senior Pakistani official said Turks are playing a role behind the scenes in mending relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Reuters reported. The official said that the Turks are among those working on negotiations with some Taliban elements and that there is “a lot happening behind the scenes that people don't know about.”
Phi Beta Iota: We've known since 9/11 that the asymmetric war is also marked by an asymmetric excellence in public relations, propaganda and perception management–not only do our opponents spend $1 for every $500,000 to $5 million that we spend, but they are better at this than we are. The USA is spending billions (low billions) on Information Operations (IO) and Strategic Communications, and still has no idea how to do it in languages we still do not speak, from a moral base we still do not have in the context of a Grand Strategy that does not exist because we have a secret intelligence world that is incapable of thinking broadly and deeply or giving the President and the Secretary of Defense what they NEED to know rather than what our expensive ignorant technical systems make possible to give. We are SO reminded of Catholic Mandarin Ngo Dinh Diem in Viet-Nam with his murderous sister Madame Nhu (Karzai's Brother….), only this time you have drugs, religion, and no competent Afghan military we can pretend we are supporting. A reprise of Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam?
With the possible exception of Syria, Turkey is the most welcoming and friendliest country in the Mediterranean. It is also the Islamic country that is on the friendliest terms with Israel. It predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, had a distinguished history of providing a welcoming sanctuary for Jew persecuted by Christians, particular those in Spain. But beneath their gracious exterior, there is a strain of national pride and a stubbornness that is as strong as any country I have ever visited. Turks are very proud of being Turks. Everyone with a modicum of intelligence in the eastern Med knows that if you insult and push a Turk into a corner; be he a low level peasant or a minister, he will get his dander up and dig in, and you will have a real problem on your hands.
That is why Israeli Foreign minister Ayalon's outrageous personal insult to the Turkish ambassador was so stupid. As anyone who knows the Turks would expect, the Turkish government swiftly reacted with a harsh unequivocal ultimatum — “Apologize or else.” Israel blinked and was quick to back down — and Turkey set an example for the world, particularly the United States.
The attached article by Uri Avneri, a hero of the 1948 war and Israel's leading peace activist is the best summary of this revealing incident I have yet read.
Taliban Overhaul Their Image In Bid To Win Allies