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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (90990)	12/16/2004 7:31:19 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793799

A Warning Signal From Yanukovych? By Captain Ed on International Politics Ukrainian Prime Minister and presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych gave a statement that sounds suspiciously like a warning of a potential military takeover of the nation if the rerun of the final election stage goes against him: Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, facing a new election battle against a liberal challenger buoyed by vast street protests, said on Thursday Ukraine had been cast into a crisis which could turn to disaster after the new vote. ... Speaking at his headquarters, Yanukovich restated his opposition to the Supreme Court ruling that led to the new vote. "This is not a conflict between the opposition and the authorities. It is a crisis which is determining the future of Ukraine," he said, while declining to answer questions. "Moreover, a real danger exists that after Dec. 26, Ukraine may be on the brink of a full-scale crisis." At first blush, this statement comes across as either (a) preparation for another hijacked election and the inevitable street protests that would follow, or (b) Yanukovych's refusal to accept any losing result by claiming fraud in the new runoff -- and using the military to retain power in either case. There doesn't seem to be any other reason for Yanukovych to make that dire prediction. It sounds like Yanukovych wants to prepare a case for declaring a national emergency, one that would keep him in power indefinitely. Yanukovych, however, may find that power denied him as his one-time allies have started to jump ship. Current president Leonid Kuchma has apparently cut ties with his protegé now that Yankovych's support has all but collapsed in Ukraine: The prime minister was backed in the earlier vote by outgoing President Leonid Kuchma, but he has since turned on his former ally, saying the president did nothing to stop more than two weeks of street rallies by Yushchenko's supporters. Nor is Kuchma alone in backpedaling away from the suddenly radioactive prime minister. Yanukovych's prior campaign manager and now-former head of Ukraine's central bank has repudiated the PM as well. Yanukovych's public support is drying up, making it highly unlikely that he will retain control of Ukrainian security forces after another election debacle like the last. If he loses a fair election -- an almost certain outcome now -- he won't have a prayer of convincing the military to install him in a putsch. That may not keep him from trying it, and today's missive shows that Yanukovych intends on keeping his options open.

To: LindyBill who wrote (90990)	12/16/2004 8:02:19 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793799

Excellent analysis! LOYALTIES David Frum's Dairy - NRO After my post yesterday about the Presidential Medals of Freedom awarded to Bremer, Franks, and Tenet, I found myself spending much of the day talking about whether Bush isn't too to those who work for him. At the same time as I was explaining the president's reasoning in rewarding the Baghdad Three despite their many mistakes, Bill Kristol published an oped in yesterday morning's Washington Post calling for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. Bill's friend and ally Sen. John McCain had previously expressed "no confidence" in Rumsfeld's leadership. Bill's views on such matters deserve respectful attention. And this whole business of Bush loyalty - the code that I jokingly called "Bushido" when I first encountered it four years ago - calls for serious thought. Some preliminary observations today, and more tomorrow. 1. Nobody will deny that 9/11 and the battles since have been marked by terrible errors and mistakes: 9/11 itself was the worst mistake of all, but there has been no shortage of others. Perhaps the most consequential of all was the failure to anticipate the nature of the postwar situation in Iraq. The war planners assumed that they would inherit a functioning Iraqi state; that international troops (especially from Muslim countries like Pakistan) would help with policing and security; and finally that the Baath regime was very brittle: once it broke on the battlefield, little resistance would remain. 2. On the other hand, not everything that has been called a mistake really was a mistake. Two examples: on Iraqi WMD, I still think the US was right, not wrong. The reason WMD were not found in Iraq was not that Saddam had obediently rid himself of his killing technology after the Gulf War, but because Iraq mounted a very swift and capable campaign of concealment and deception in 2002-2003. A second example: It's often said that the US made a mistake dissolving the Iraqi army in 2003. I'll concede that it was probably an error to stop paying salaries to former soldiers and (especially) officers. But Saddam's army was Saddam's army. The officers were disproportionately Sunni, many of them tainted by brutal atrocities against the Shiite majority who would soon be electing a new government. Those officers would fear and resent the new government; the new government could never trust those officers. Perhaps the officers should have been pensioned off rather than summarily dismissed. But as we saw at Fallujah in April 2004, trusting them would probably have had consequences even more disastrous than firing them. 3. Some of the problems of the post 9/11 period can be traced to specific decisions by specific individuals. You can indeed blame Donald Rumsfeld for sending too-few troops to Iraq - if you think that the number of troops is too few, and that this fewness was an important cause of the failure to contain the insurgency (two large and I'd suggest maybe over-simplified assumptions). Other mistakes can be blamed on other individuals who usually escape censure: Tommy Franks, for example, who rejected demands of Pentagon civilians to plan for war's aftermath (on the age-old bureaucratic principle that it wasn't his department) - and indeed retired almost as soon as Baghdad fell. It was Franks too who insisted on micro-managing the battle for Tora Bora from his office in Qatar, more than 1200 miles away. Or on Louis Freeh who ran the FBI through the years when it was failing to notice the warning signs of 9/11. Or Bill Lann Lee, the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the late 1990s, whose office forbade the Department of Transportation to proceed with passenger screeding techniques that would have caught the 9/11 hijackers on the ground. Etc. 4. Beyond that, though, the faults begin to look less personal and more institutional. Why did the Army have so few armored Humvees at the start of this war? That soldier at Camp Buehring was hardly the first to notice that armored cars are essential tools in a guerilla war: The Rhodesians and South Africans figured that out 20 years ago in their campaigns against black nationalist guerillas. But the US Army didn't want to fight guerilla wars - and some leaders of the Army decided that one way not to be asked to fight them was to eschew acquisition of the weapons needed to fight them. Richard Clarke's memoir is actually quite good on this point: He describes again and again how the Army balked at carrying out unconventional missions against al Qaeda. When President Clinton called for plans, the Army presented him with scenarios based on a five-division expeditionary force - and Clinton flinched, which is what the scenario was intended to make him do. Or consider the failings of the FBI. Heather MacDonald has done heroic work exposing how political correctness has enfeebled domestic counter-terrorism enforcement. But let's remember that it was candidate George W. Bush who called in 2000 for weakening America's anti-terror laws - and that it was newly elected President Bush who highlighted the dangers of racial profiling rather than Islamist terrorism in his first State of the Union address. In other words, the FBI was crippled not by the incompetence of this or that agent or director, but by taboos shared across almost the whole of American society. 5. It's a patriotic duty to review the mistakes and failures in the conduct of the war with an eye toward better performance and victory in the future. If people want to argue that Iraq would go better if more troops were sent there - or that we should rely less on local forces and more on US troops in places like Waziristan - they should go ahead. They might be right. They might of course also be wrong. (All of us who comment on war from the sidelines should remember the famous quip attributed to Robert E. Lee. Asked why the South lost the Civil War he supposedly said, "Unfortunately, all our best generals were writing for the newspapers.") 6. And sometimes an individual's performance is so extremely bad that onlookers will call for him or her to be fired and replaced, as my friend Richard Perle called for the firing and replacement of George Tenet. But there are also real dangers in over-personalizing criticism. Chief among those dangers is that individuals can find themselves on the chopping block less for the seriousness of their mistakes than because of a verbal gaffe or because they have offended powerful constituencies in Washington. A convincing case might be made, for example, that the worst-performing member of President Bush's first-term national-security team was Condoleezza Rice. But unlike Rumsfeld, Rice never spoke carelessly; unlike Colin Powell, Rice kept on good personal terms with all factions in the Republican Party. Which is a good part of the reason why Rice will sail through her committee hearings unchallenged, while so many of her colleagues in the first term take their leave. 7. Presidents often find themselves having to accomplish their purposes through flawed instruments. Lincoln may be the most extreme example in US history, but he by no means stands alone. When dealing with these flawed individuals, presidents have to make some very tough choices. It would surely have been very gratifying to many people if George W. Bush had fired a bunch of people on the morning of September 12. But who? The FBI was most to blame - but the new bureau chief, Robert Mueller, had been sworn in only nine days before. Not much point in firing him. Everybody below Mueller? But the FBI, flawed as it was, had just thrown itself into the biggest manhunt in US history. This was hardly the moment to take the bureau apart and rebuild it. There were similar problems at CIA. And firing say Norman Mineta at Transportation would have seemed a rather pathetically inadequate response to so terrible a catastrophe. 8. DoD has performed better since 9/11 than the FBI did before it. Even still, the litany of problems from Tora Bora certainly seems to qualify for some major changes in leadership and direction. Secretary Rumsfeld has revolved through the Pentagon's roster of generals looking for the right men. His own tenure of office is no more an entitlement than theirs. That said, there's more to remember. As Matt Miller points out in an interesting column today, the Pentagon remains a troubled and often hugely wasteful bureaucracy. Rumsfeld has struggled against that bureaucracy - and it is his successes even more than his defeats that have excited much of the opposition to him. Unlike almost all of his recent predecessors, Rumsfeld has been guided by a clear and ambitious vision for his department - a vision that even many of his critics would agree is basically right: a military transformed so that it is capable for not only the big-unit warfare of the past, but the asymmetrical warfare of the future. And while there have been disappointments on the battlefield, those Rumsfeld critics who support the war ought to exercise their imagination to foresee how a Rumsfeld departure would be interpreted: as a total repudiation of the war and all those who planned it and supported it. Finally, there would be the problem of a replacement. John McCain may find the answer to that question obvious: "me, me, me." Others though may find the problem more daunting. More tomorrow. nationalreview.com

To: LindyBill who wrote (90990)	12/16/2004 9:17:42 PM
From: Sig	Respond to of 793799

The enterprise is magnificent. If the information age could have an equivalent to building the Great Pyramid, this is it. Google plans to digitize Harvard's libraries — and those of Oxford, Michigan, Stanford, and the New York Public. Likewise, scanning the pages of a book into a computer database is no technological marvel. But scanning the pages of 15 million books is something else. And as with Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza, it is likely to define its own epoch.>>> Computing that out , a modern automatic book scanner which appears very expensive can scan 1500 pages per hour or about 3 books. 6 hrs per day. 300 days per years gives us ahhhhhh about 6000 books scanned per year. So if you gave one man the machine in year 1AD, he would still have 500 years to go to finish the job. And of course, it would all be in Greek or Latin hahaha. Its no wonder the man mentioned pyramids Sig