China's fifth column in Africa? The deuce you say, general!
Thomas Barnett
¦"NATO Chief Worries About China," by Sandra I. Erwin and Harold Kennedy, National Defense, December 2005, p. 10.
Jim Jones, USMC 4-star head of European Command, is a smart guy, but he comes off a bit clueless in this piece (then again, you never know how they quote you, as I have learned time and time again …).
Still, this bit points out the strangely lopsided, actually asymmetric way that the Pentagon tends to argue regarding China. I mean, why do military generals think it's their job to talk about China's economic penetration of global markets as if it's something they can do ANYTHING about?
Jones says "It's beyond question that China is the most aggressive country economically in Africa."
Hmm, "aggressive" is an interesting choice of words for a general who's country just invaded the world's second-biggest oil reserve. So China is pushing hard for economic relations with sleazy dictatorships like Saudi Arab--uh, no, that would be the U.S. China has to make do with skimpy Sudan.
Oh well, when you're going to go sleazy, do it big time.
Jones oddly enough digs his own hole by quoting an African diplomat thusly: "We love the United States. You're always telling us what we should do. Now, China is giving us the things that you say we need."
Such as . . . . free scholarships, and lotsa aid and infrastructural investment.
Jones says, "It's something we have to worry about."
Hmmm.
Or maybe we just locate the labor where the problem is, general?
If this is the level of strategic thinking, then we're not even on the game board.
SysAdmin: the videogame
¦"Virtual Manuevers: Games Are Gaining Ground, But How Far Can They Go?" by Sandra I. Erwin, National Defense, December 2005, p. 44.
Interesting article about new videogames that work the SysAdmin function on an individual-training level. One's funded by DARPA and it's called "Stability Operations: Winning the Peace." It's modeled loosely on SimCity and Tropico. Players get to role-play commanders and "are exposed to the political, military, economic, social and intelligence levers they can pull in a particular situation, while they learn the consequences of their actions."
Remember when I spoke in Canada last winter at a big defense conference and some Canadian officer said somebody should write a great book or make a great movie about peacekeeping to inspire young people to join their military? Well, I told them then that their best bet was a videogame, if they wanted to attract the right age range.
So much for my staying much ahead of the curve on that one. Just goes to show you how fast the market can provide if properly incentivized.
Gamer expert says the military likes either table-tops or huge live exercises, so there's a gap at this level of training. True, but getting less so. Still, no question that military wants to embrace such technologies. As one Joint Forces command guy put it in the piece, they're just very picky on the details. Fine and good.
Interesting though that videogames lag in the same places where the services' lessons learned lag, as do their own live training: more in the interagency and multinational and non-governmental and inter-governmental cooperation. As the gamer expert put it here: "There is no good technology to train interagency interoperability and interaction."
Based on our performance in the real Iraq, it would seem that the games reflect reality all too well.
Getting reasonably realistic about the long war
¦"Bush Estimates Iraqi Death Toll in War at 30,000," by Peter Baker, Washington Post, 13 December 2005, p. A19.
¦"21st-Century Warnings of a Threat Rooted in the 7th," by Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, 12 December 2005, p. A21.
¦"Hillary Clinton Crafts Centrist Stance on War," by Dan Balz, Washington Post, 12 December 2005, p. A1.
Bush talks calmly and openly about the realistic figure of Iraqi civilian deaths: something north of 25k and south of 35k. Some crazy (and universally reputed) estimates run as high as 100k, but the consensus figure of many groups is the one Bush cites.
Now, let's put that in perspective: the UN admits we killed about 50k kids under the age of five each year in Iraq with sanctions across the time period between Desert Storm and OIF. That's about 600k dead. We won't hit that annual average total even at the three-year mark on OIF, so why not focus on all the Iraqis not dead, I ask? How about crediting the U.S. military with saving all those lives, sacrificing over 2k of their own in the process?
Doesn't anybody do math like that?
Meanwhile, an ABC poll of Iraqis says 71 percent said "things were going well in their own lives." Hmm. Wonder what percentage we'd get in the States right now?
44 percent felt the same way about their country. Geez, Bush would love those ratings for himself, no?
"Schools, crime, health care, security, water, electricity and jobs were all rated in good condition by more people than in February 2004," which is when the U.S. started to get serious about its nation-building in Iraq. How about crediting the Army and Marines and SOCOM and CENTCOM and the Guard and the Reserves on that score?
While Bush is speaking in Philly, Murtha complains down the road, saying he opposes the U.S. "occupation" first and foremost.
We've got to get real on that term. We stopped occupying Iraq and running an occupational government a long time ago.
A lady asks Bush to explain the 9/11-Iraq link and he simply says 9/11 changed his view of the world. She's not happy with that, complaining that Bush must think people like her are morons. Apparently she only believes in wars of direct retribution.
How about a global community enforcing global norms against a horrid criminal who killed over a million of his own citizens during his long murderous reign? Where's our sense of global outrage on that one?
Or our sense of the stragtegic picture?
Bush, Abizaid, Rumsfeld, and new Under Secretary for Policy Edelman are now talking up the "caliphate" to express the long-term strategic threat posed by radical Salafi jihadists, and they are quite right to do so.
Let's call the enemy for what he is and what he seeks to achieve. Experts say this is a fanciful goal, not unlike . .. I dunno, a "thousand-year reich" or "global socialist revolution"?
So we stood up to those threats in the past as we made them chimeras, condemning them to the dustheap of history. Good for us then, and good for us now.
Abizaid says we had our chance with "Mein Kampf" and ignored Hitler's designs, so why do the same with Osama and AMZ? And this is the regional expert and Arab everyone praises as the perfect choice to lead CENTCOM right now, so why not pay attention to his expert advice?
So we get more and more realistic about the long fight, and that realism spreads to serious Dem candidates for president in 2008, like Hillary. Good for her. Let the left pour scorn on her. She'll remain a credible national leader in the process, instead of some braindead lefty with nothing to offer except their putrid hatred of Bush.
Iraqiana: keeping it real
¦"Key Iraqi see loose alliance as future: Shiite leader's vision at odds with others'," by Rick Jervis, USA Today, 12 December 2005, p. 1A.
¦"Hollywood's Crude Cliches," op-ed by Richard Cohen, Washington Post, 13 December 2005, p. A27.
¦"China and India Jointly Pursue Syrian Oil Assets: Alliance Marks New Tack By Former Energy Rivals; A Threat to Western Firms?" by Shai Oster and John Larkin, Wall Street Journal, 12 December 2005, p. A17.
I said it many times before and I stick with it: we're heading for a loose federation of three mini-states in Iraq. The pretend colonial creation of a state yields, in their near-term, to a tripartite solution. Kurds want it. Shiites want it. Sunnis better get used to it.
The bribe (shared oil revenue) has been offered: take it or leave, Mr. Triangle.
We don't stay to fight terrorists (throw those in as the bargain). No, we stay to enforce an emerging peace between three states that would otherwise go to direct war. This is global policing and peacekeeping at its best. It keeps the Big Bang's effects still alive in the region, providing whatever impetus remains for progress on pluralism (more importantly in the economic realm than the political one).
And it shows that it was never about the oil.
Listen to Richard Cohen's brilliant riff on the George Clooney paranoid thriller "Syriana" (reminding us all what a stunning brilliant columnist he often is):
A movie does not have to stick to the facts.
Still, if it is going to say anything, then it ought to say something smart and timely. But, the cynicism of "Syriana" is out of time and place, a homage to John le Carre, who himself is dated. To read George Packer's "The Assassin's Gate" is to be reminded that the Iraq war is not the product of oil avarice, or CIA evil, but of a surfeit of altruism, a naïve compulsion to do good. That entire collection of neo- and retro-conservatives--George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and particularly Paul Wolfowitz--made war not for oil or for empire but to end the horror of Saddam Hussein and, yes, reorder the Middle East.
They were inept. They were duplicitous. They were awesomely incompetent, and, in the case of Bush, they were monumentally ignorant and incurious, but they did not give a damn for oil or empire. This is why so many liberals, myself included, originally supported the war. It engaged us emotionally. It seemed … well, right--a just cause.
It would be nice if Hollywood understood that. It would be nice if those who agree with Hollywood--who think, as [director and screenwriter] Gaghan does, that this is a brave, speaking-truth-to-power movie when it's really just an outdated cliché--could release their fervid grip on old-left bromides about Big Oil, Big Business, Big Government and the inherent evil of George Bush, and come up with something new and relevant. I say that become something new and relevant is desperately needed. Neoconservatism crashed and burned in Iraq, but liberalism never even showed up. The left's criticism of the war from the very start was too often a porridge of inanities about oil or empire or Halliburton--or isolationism by another name. It was childish and ultimately ineffective. The war came and Bush was re-elected. How's that for a clean whiff?
Meanwhile, who's pursuing Syriana's oil nakedly?
Why China and India, of course, in collusion no less, as they begin to realize their growing collective buyer's clout in the marketplace.
That's how pathetically off-target George Clooney's movie is.
Of course, I will see it anyway, cause I really like George Clooney and because I enjoy a good yarn.
The revolution has begun in China--from below
¦"Legal Gadfly Bites Hard, and Beijing Slaps Him," by Joseph Kahn, New York Times, 13 December 2005, p. A1.
¦"China detains commander in village shooting: Protesters killed in land dispute as tensions mount in rural areas," by Calum Macleod, USA Today, 12 December 2005, p. 11A.
Great story about a crusading lawyer in China, who "travels the country filing lawsuits over corruption, land seizures, police abuses and religious freedom," always risking career and limb to fight the Communist Party in court!
In my conclusion, "Heroes yet discovered," I write about "China's Erin Brockovitch."
Well, this guy doesn't need a push-up bra, but he was actually born in a cave, so take that Abe Lincoln! We may be looking at a serious father of a new China down the road.
Civil cases in China topped 4 million last year, up 30 percent from 1999. As the article says, "ordinary citizens in fact have embraced the law as eagerly as they have welcomed another Western-inspired import, capitalism."
Good markets leading to good governments.
Want some evidence? "Chinese authorities on Sunday detained the commander of the troops that fired on villagers protesting land seizures in southern China. The assault killed at least three people last Tuesday in Dongzhou village, Guangdong province. "The commander's wrong actions caused deaths and injuries, and Shanwei investigative agencies have taken the step of detaining him according to law …" so sayeth the Guandown provincial government.
Why does the Communist Party allow this? Rural peasant revolts are up 50% from 1999.
Getting the picture? Think Beijing is moving fast enough toward political pluralism? Think the process is moving in the right direction?
Think China's embrace of globalization has anything to do with this?
Think I'm hopelessly naïve about China now?
The revolution has begun in Asia--from above
¦"As an Asian Century Is Planned, U.S. Power Stays in the Shadows," by Seth Mydans, New York Times, 13 December 2005, p. A12.
The first East Asia summit that includes every major regional player of note, except the United States, begins now.
ASEAN's crew of little southeast Asian nations has invited Japan and India and China, and let South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, along with Russia, observe. Not exactly Mahathir's dream of a "caucus without Caucasians," now is it?
America, great "container" of China's growing military clout, is not invited.
This is what our "separate lanes" of negotiation with China gets us. Quick, someone pull the State Department's head out of its ass.
We don't need to be lecturing the Chinese or any other state opening itself up to globalization about the need for rapid embrace of democracy. We need to speak softly on that subject, and carry a big trade carrot.
Or we will find ourselves progressively shut out of an Asian Century, fools that we are.
Malaysia: Islam's leading "lead goose"
¦"Our Friend in Malaysia (But Don't Say That Too Loudly …)," op-ed by Mary Kissel, Wall Street Journal, 12 December 2005, p. A19.
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is somebody I write about admiringly in BFA, citing Malaysia's growing role as role model to moderate Islamist states in the Gap, so much so that within a decade, I don't think you'll find any international expert who sees that country or that region belonging to anything but globalization's Functioning Core.
And this guy is a good friend to America, all right.
Think we won't win a Global War on Terrorism? Think again. Guys like Badawi will define the New Core in coming years, and the New Core will set the new rules in the GWOT, teaching us all a thing or two about tolerance, diversity, and just economic development.
He is one to watch.
House of Saud prepares for the end of days
¦"Saudi Arabia Looks Past Oil: Enriched by Record Prices, The Nation Seeks to Diversify," by Jad Mouawad, New York Times, 13 December 2005, p. C1.
The government (which gets 90 percent of its revenue from oil) and oil account for roughly two-thirds of Saudi Arabia's GDP.
During past oil booms, the House of Saud promised to get smarter and do more for the private sector, but there's good evidence this time that the new king, who has spoken openly of constitutional monarchy within a generation's time, is serious.
Saudi Arabia's stock market is attracting capital from abroad, and it just joined the WTO after 12 years of negotiations, "a move expected to give a powerful push to the country's private sector."
Good. Over 80 percent of the workers in that private sector are guest workers from abroad, which doesn't exactly jibe with a huge youth bulge that either gets busy with jobs or something worse.
A "structural shift" is occurring, says one Western financial observer.
As the piece notes, "The government has relaxed foreign ownership laws, loosened credit rules, liberalized the telecommunications market, passed a new capital markets law and created regulatory agencies to oversee these changes."
Amazing.
Any regional experts calling this by 2005 prior to our invasion of Iraq?
Think the Big Bang isn't working? Think again.
America's shame is New Core's gain
¦"America's Shame in Montreal," editorial, New York Times, 13 December 2005, p. A34.
The NYT condemns the Bush White House for not negotiating on climate change in Montreal. The best it could do was agree on trying to bring India and China into the fold.
What does that tell you?
It tells me that, just like on so many trade and security issues, we're finding we have more in commong with New Core pillars than we do with the Old Core West."
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