RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a strange world of blatant hypocrisy and distorted equivalences, the United States — with the help of an all too cooperative media — is turning to victimization as the definition and explanation of most human relationships.

The tragedy of the death of an 18-year-old during an altercation with the police is not to be vouchsafed. Nor can the long and brutal history of U.S, race relations – particularly with African-Americans as victims – be denied or forgotten.

But the instantaneous assumption that the police were at fault [still to be attenuated] and in the innocence of the victim [tarnished by surveillance video of a strong-arm robber] – is symptomatic of a larger social evil. It is the instantaneous and unsubtle attribution of victimhood to individuals caught up in life dramas whatever their real character.

Not many of us sail through life without suffering what we deem injustice. Those may, objectively, be larger or smaller afflictions. But for the individual concerned, they are monumental and cannot be wished away. But to celebrate those kinds of miscarriages of life – especially before they are analyzed – is to create a false atmosphere of overwhelming injustice and persecution which imperils society.

The phenomenon is so widespread that sometimes it not only trivializes real misbehavior, but becomes a joke. A New York mother complains about an aggrieved innocent holding a young thief in a bearhug, capturing him for the police after he and a companion had stolen her telephone. The mother excuses her own obvious parental neglect by yammering about her son having fallen among thieving companions. But she insists, and that is where it turns ridiculous, but an all too common phenomenon, that he is a victim rather than a child who obviously is launched on a criminal career, a menace to society.

All this is compounded, of course, by the 24-hour media news cycle with its appetite for new revelations whether vetted or not and commentary by anchors who rarely know the background of these complicated issues much less having a professionalism about their trade. One of the strangest phenomenon of our times is that these “newsmen” reporting on current history have little knowledge or apparent interest in past history itself.

The bear is loose

No, not the self-designated ursus in the White House, but the Kremlin’s ruler.

Having launched a program attempting to reinstate Moscow’s hegemony over the former Tsarist/Soviet Empire, Vladimir Putin now has been hoisted on his own petard.

When his naked aggression in Georgia in 2008 elicited no significant American-EU response, he followed it with his 2014 annexation of Crimea. When that produced little more than Western denunciation, he mobilized for further aggression, attempting to use the Russian-speaking minority in eastern Ukraine.

But he has now become a prisoner of his own rhetoric and aggression.

True, like the European dictators of right and left of the 1930s, he has gained wide popular support at home. But the chauvinistic reaction of the Russian public is a false flag. Shamed and humiliated by the implosion of the Soviet Union [“the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”, Putin has said], a catastrophic declining population, a start-and-stop economy, and an enormous flight of capital, Putin has used aggressive nationalism to try to reinvigorate a failed regime with all too well remembered demagoguery.

But he is now riding a tiger. Earlier he seemed to have won in Ukraine with an administration succumbing to pressure to back away from the overwhelmingly popular demand to move closer to European Union’s prosperity. [Even relative objective polling of Russian-speakers in Ukraine show their choice is to move into the EU orbit rather than to tie their destinies to a failing Russia.] Then when a popular movement overthrew that Kyiv administration and installed a new pro-European Union executive by a democratically elected parliament, reinforced now with new elections, Putin grabbed Crimea and began to try to manipulate the Russian-speaking minority in eastern Ukraine for his program to reestablish empire.

Testing, testing, testing…

The horror of 298 innocents, oblivious to the warfare 33,000 feet below them, blown out of the sky by criminally negligent fanatics supported by Russian Vladimir Putin, forebodes greater catastrophes.

The incident is a part of a worldwide scene wherein Pres. Barack Hussein Obama’s strategy of withdrawal from what he — and a large part of the apolitical war-weary American people – sees as overreaching worldwide projection of U.S. power.

But Obama’s clumsy retreat has led to a continuing welter of probes by opponents – and even allies — of Pax Americana. Whatever the merit of arguments about a declining U.S., its power and influence on the rest of the contemporary world remains enormous. Obama’s withdrawal creates an international and regional power vacuum, setting up the kind of ambiguities that throughout history has led to misperceptions, and, often, major wars.

The classic example, often cited if by simplistic interpretation of a very complex episode, is Dean Acheson’s speech to the National Press Club on January 12, 1950. In what was considered a seminal statement, the secretary of state did not include the KoreanPeninsula in a statement of the all-important United States “defense perimeter”. Its omission was widely interpreted as a signal that Washington would not defend South Korea, a product of the division of the Peninsular at the 38th parallel at the end of a 50-year-Japanese Occupation on Tokyo’s World War II surrender.

With concentration on the postwar Soviet takeover of Eastern and Central Europe, the U.S. had absent-mindedly occupied the Peninsular with only a vague understanding of its potential threat to highly industrialized if decimated Japan. Into that vacuum, the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin, riding the full thrust of the developing Cold War, instigated his puppets, the well disciplined army led by Kim Il Sung, a former Soviet officer, to attack the South with the intention of reunifying the country as another Moscow satellite. The U.S. responded, if lamely in the beginning, but in force, and initially was victorious in threatening a complete reversal of the two superpowers’ goals.

But Mao Tse-tung, frightened by the prospect of a reunited Korea, an American ally on Communist China’s most important northeastern land frontier, hurled tens of thousands of former surrendered Nationalist troops as cannon fodder into the combat. Pres. Harry Truman, engaged on other European and Middle Eastern “fronts”, denied Gen. Douglas Macarthur his “all-out” strategy for a military victory even were it to bring on possible direct and perhaps nuclear conflict with Beijing, and the war ended in stalemate. “The Forgotten War” cost five million lives – including almost 40,000 U.S. soldiers — devastated the Peninsular, and left a festering international problem.

Today, looking around the world, there are too many places where just such complex unsolved geopolitical nodules present the same sort of potential.

This column was originally published in The Washington Times, Sunday, March 20, 2011. It will be republished at yeoldecracc.com

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/20/sanders-horror-vacui/

President Obama has given new meaning to that epithet “imperial presidency.” It was slung at Richard M. Nixon not only for his extravagant White House “palace guard” — some in kitschy uniforms — but for his more serious unconstitutional overreaching.

But though imperial in his style, Mr. Obama reigns; he does not rule.

Whether on domestic or foreign policy, Mr. Obama abdicates to congressional or bureaucratic control, then spins the resulting muddle as something for which he is not responsible. One sees, for example, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen pontificating far above their pay grades, only to be contradicted either by events or Mr. Obama himself. The president takes a hands-on approach only in maintaining his left-wing political base, be they Wisconsin unionists or Washington lobbies.

This standard operating procedure is reinforced by Mr. Obama’s denigration of historic American accomplishments, often on foreign soil. In the one international arena where he has sought leadership, relations with the Muslim world, the result has been an almost total disaster. Having made what he considered two seminal speeches offering renewed friendship with Islam, he now finds American interests in jeopardy in both locales. Turkey, once a stalwart NATO ally and the site of his first lecture, defies the West on the Iranian nuclear weapons issue, the greatest threat now facing the alliance. His Cairo speech, seemingly falling on deaf ears, was followed by his bemused administration fostering regime change but adding little to the still-undetermined outcome in Egypt.

Of course, Mr. Obama did not create these long-simmering crises. But he contributes to them through his administration’s lack of faith in American power, hard and soft. Favoring multilateralism to American leadership, Ambassador Susan Rice preaches that gospel at the United Nations but neglects reform of the organization’s abysmal corruption and inadequacy. Only when Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi began slaughtering his own people did Washington join the move to redress the charade of Libya’s prominence on the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Aristotle observed nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum — the “horror vacui” — and we are getting a demonstration geopolitically when the world’s paramount power chooses not to lead. Or worse still, when Mr. Obama trumpets a policy without following through. Minor players take the field, exacerbating regional conflicts in an increasingly intertwined world.

Events are drawing Israel into a major war with neighboring Arab terrorist organizations to result in another total reordering of Mideast relationships.

Comparison of the current scene with the eve of the Six Day War in 1965 is almost unavoidable. Then, too, a reluctant Israel waged a preemptive action because of what it saw as an existential threat from an alliance of Arab neighbors.

As great as the possibility for another complete regional redispositioning is, the outcome of events is even more unpredictable than it was in 1965. Today’s situation is vastly different:

First, Egypt, the largest and traditionally the leading Arab state, will not be the tripwire which brought on Israel’s preemptive strike then. This time Cairo could well be a benevolent neutral if not an ally in any new encounter between Israel and its principle enemy, the radical Arab Islamicists. Cairo’s military junta is waging a ruthless campaign against the jihadists, voted into power but which it dislodged with considerable popular support.

Secondly, the prospect of a Soviet Union intervention is missing – and a clash of the then two superpowers – which hung over the earlier events. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin’s nuclear arsenal notwithstanding, his ability to influence events in the region with conventional military forces and aid is marginal. In part, that is because his imbroglio in Ukraine having produced early victories is now turning into a Russian disaster.

Thirdly, the ambivalent position of the Obama Administration despite all its public protestations of loyalty to a U.S. ally, is a sharp contrast to Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s profound pro-Israel sympathies at a time when the U.S. Left had not made a bogus Palestinian crusade a central issue.

And, fourthly, there is a new aggressive and potentially nuclear-armed Iran, dedicated to the destruction of Israel, mobilizing long suppressed Shia minorities throughout the region in a Muslim sectarian conflict. Tehran’s mullahs have been able to bridge the historic Arab-Persian divide to bolster Arab Shia and even non-Shia allies.

Mañana is here

Much has changed, obviously, since I published Mexico: chaos on our doorstep [Hardback, Paperback: 232 pages, Madison Books (July 24, 1989), ISBN-10: 0819172960, ISBN-13: 978-0819172969, Amazon, $13.17].

. As so often has happened, my timing was bad. The book’s research identified a problem prematurely and the title raised hackles among some Latin American specialists, most of whom had a more optimistic view.

But what led me to write the book may still be as relevant. It was my “discovery” of the startling fact that the 1500-mile U.S. Mexican border was the only land frontier between what in those days was called The Third World, pre-industrial, poverty-stricken, and unstable societies,.and the First World of a few “developed” European and North American countries, Australiasia and Japan. Ultimately, I argued, that was bound to lead to a security crisis for Washington.

The prediction has been a long time in coming and we may still not be there yet – but recent events on the border suggest we are very near at least.

I couldn’t but be struck these past few days with the familiarity of “the children crisis” on the Texas border. In my reporting for the book in Mexico and in the U.S., particularly among Mexican Americans, the head of Los Angeles’ medical services told me his budget was coming apart because pregnant illegal Mexican women increasingly were using his facilities. They accomplished two purposes: they got free medical services not then available in Mexico except to the rich. But more important, they established the American birthright of their offspring who might in later years claim citizenship for their families. But his complaint was that in order to meet this additional drain on his facilities he was having to reduce his postnatal care extension service.

Substitute the nationalities of the current children and accompanying parents and pregnant women now producing “a humanitarian crisis” and you see trends haven’t changed.

Intelligence failures” – fundamental mistakes in evaluating a geopolitical situation – are not rare among state intelligence organizations. They are unfortunately common enough and have cost the lives of millions.

They are a reflection of what after all is a human endeavor with all its frailties. A technician’s intercept of a Japanese naval signal, in the infancy of radar, is ignored with disastrous consequences on Dec. 7. Failing to check a driver’s license more carefully when he is stopped for speeding fails to nab a 9/11 plotter. Placing the briefcase loaded with a bomb a few feet too far fails to kill Hitler costing more thousands of lives.

Such failures are only marginally reduced by the introduction of all the new techniques of the digital revolution since the opportunity for error is so great in these complex situations involving individual peculiarities as well as the presumed overriding political considerations.

Yet there are larger intelligence “failures”, those that result from a fundamental misunderstanding of a much larger cultural environment, whether it be the whole frame of reference of an opponent or constructing a seemingly logical scenario without all the facts. A case of the latter, for example: in 1937 Washington almost went to war with Japan over “The Panay Incident”, sinking of an American ship of the Yangtze Patrol thought to be an expression of Tokyo’s militarist aggression but actually the result of the smuggling activities of a corrupt Japanese admiral. That, of course, did not preclude the outbreak of that war a few years later.

Washington’s surprise and shock at the most recent events in Iraq are the quintessential example of the former, in this instance an inability to judge events in the context of the Muslim world.

For whatever reason, Pres. Barrack Obama and his national security team – despite the extraordinary credentials in Arabic studies of CIA Director John O. Brennan – are bent on misinterpreting the Islamic world. On that basis, Obama’s attempt to reach out for a new relationship with Arab and Islamic countries, expressed in his 2009 Istanbul and Cairo speeches, has come to naught. Instead, that simplistic outreach has further confused issues.

In a revolutionary world environment, foreign policy of a great power – and especially the lone superpower – is bound to be full of inconsistencies. Interests are far-flung and constantly demanding new priorities. But one does not have to refer to Machiavelli to recognize rules of the road which when violated are costly and in the case of the U.S., destabilizing for the entire world.

Again, those guidelines are often internally contradictory in the nature of generalizations. But a knowledge of and adherence to them is essential to pursue a foreign policy, and, in this instance, of the superpower, the United States, and world peace and stability..

That we living through revolutionary times does not have to be extensively argued. Suffice it to say that the digital revolution alone has made it harder than ever to distinguish between reality and perception by exaggerating – to quote Sec. Donald Rumsfeld – unknown unknowns. A recent former CIA operative hired by a Swiss bank to prevent fraud put it to me succinctly: the ability to reproduce almost any document [or signature] has led to almost unlimited financial hoax.

In the world of international relations something similar is equally true. But, again, there are basic dictum which are as old, at least, as the European nation-state and apply today as they always have. Many are commonsensical. To be unacquainted with them is to introduce new and additional volatility in an uncertain world.

America’s role Because of its size, its population and continental breadth, and its economy, the U.S. under any conditions would play a major world role — disengaged as well as engaged.. But there are important additional nonphysical aspects. The Founders, however conservative their personal backgrounds [with the unresolved problem of black slavery], constructed a new nation on ideology rather than ethnicity, race or language. They believed that they were creating a new and unique beacon of liberty and justice harking back to Greek and Roman institutions as well as a Judeo-Christian ethic.

That, in essence, is “American exceptionalism”. To associate it with such more precise policies as “interventionism” or “isolationism” is to misunderstand completely. All one has to do is hark back to the 1930s debate of America’s world role in which both poles invoked U.S.singularity, whether Midwest agrarian radical isolationists, or East Coast industrial and financial bureaucratic interventionists.

Events in Thailand give the lie to conventional wisdom that rapid economic development leads inevitably to political progress and stability, were such evidence still required.

Thailand has made remarkable economic progress in the last half century, climbing into the ranks of middle income countries. Hit by the 1996-97 East Asian Financial Crisis and then later by the 2007-08 worldwide financial debacle, its gross national product nevertheless has more than doubled since 1995. Income disparities – both between the Bangkok capital megatropolis of 5.4 million and the countryside and among individuals – is high but the latter is trending downward. Only 15% of its 70 million people live below the poverty line, mostly in rural areas Access to pure drinking water and sanitation is universal. Maternal and infant mortality have dropped dramatically. Unemployment had been less than 1% until this latest coup. Foreign investors have piled in, notably making Thailand the center for automobile manufacturing and assembly in Southeast Asia.

Nor can the explanation for Thailand’s political troubles be blamed, as it is so often in Africa and Asia, on a colonial past. The British and French were content in the 19th century race for empire to permit the Thais to live in a backwater, a kind of neutral zone between the expanding the British Indian Empire [including Burma and Malaya next door] and French Indochina including Laos, Thailand’s Siamese twin. [An obscure footnote to history: London’s notorious “22 demands” made on a defeated, tacit Japanese ally immediately after World War II, were rejected when local U.S. Office of Strategic Services veterans fabricated Washington support for the Thais.]

Breakdowns in the constitutional monarchy peacefully established in a bloodless revolution in 1932 have repeatedly brought the military to power. [This is the twelfth takeover in 80 years.] These, too, have generally been peaceful, often with the approval of the elite and the King. Some observers even saw these military usurpations as a breakthrough for its largely rural cadre against the growing domination of emigrant Overseas Chinese merchants in Bangkok with their strong familial ties. That contrasted strongly with what cultural anthropologists have characterized as the loose traditional Thai family structure.

The current extremely successful campaign of aggression by Russia’s dictator-candidate Vladimir Putin illustrates two of the fundamentals of geolitical history:

A demagogue’s capability of achieving remarkable results through bluff.

How history often turns on relatively small margins only later to be disremembered.

Putin, with a home front in near crisis, has nevertheless won an important strategic victory by his covert invasion of the Crimea and wresting it, at least temporarily, from Ukraine. The disarray in Kiev after an unbelievably corrupt regime was dismembered by a popular street revolt has facilitated his pretense of superior power. That a rapidly declining Russian population, beset with all sorts of economic and social ills has embraced his new nationalist fervor, is no surprise. The old bandwagon effect of propaganda is notorious; pace Germany in the Nazi takeover after 1933 when the celebrated “good Germans” were increasingly few and far between – as long as Hitler was winning..

Putin’s victorious march from one propaganda feat to another is occasioned more by the utter collapse of a naïve U.S. policy in regard to Russia. Not least has been Washington’s inability to present a common front with the European Union. It is one of the many contradictions of the current scene that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, presumably the most exposed of the EU’s members to blackmail because of its heavy [one-third] dependence on Russian energy imports, has taken the firmest line, at least publicly. Pres. Obama’s statements, on the other hand, ring hollow as more of past “red lines” which turned out meaningless.

Putin’s success is all the more “illogical” given the fact that he appears to have no ideology – other than a vague wish to return Russia to Soviet and/or Tsarist glory. Yet he dare not maximize that nostalgia given the still unresolved issue of Stalin and his domestic terror within the living memory of at least a few Russians. Nor, one suspects, is he moving systematically from one strategic move to another, but rather improvising tactically as he goes along.

What is clear is that his aim is to reassert Moscow authority over the former “lost” areas of Soviet dominance. Ukraine with its 45 million people, great agricultural resources and ancillary industry to the old Soviet decentralized industrial networks [not the least munitions] is a special prize and first in his agenda That would suggest that rather than proceed with dismembering it – that is, repeating the process of detaching Crimea and linking it to Russia which he might be able to do in Eastern and Southern Ukraine — he may well want a weak and subservient Ukrainian central regime.