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Both good but entirely unrelated.

Tom Barnett belts on out of the park at Esquire magazine:

What the Hell Is Really Going Down in Honduras?

….The primary charge was treason relating to Zelaya’s stubborn effort to mobilize popular support, through a non-binding poll, for a constitutional assembly. But the underlying suspicion was that the lame-duck and deeply unpopular (as in, sub-30-percent approval ratings) president was plotting to extend his personal rule with the strong encouragement of his new “oil daddy,” Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, whose well-established blueprint has worked with political protégés elsewhere (e.g., Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa).

Essentially, this Chavez scenario was a Pandora’s box that Honduras’s political elite refused to open. Why? Because after too many decades of nasty military dictatorship, Honduras, while still quite poor, had managed seven straight civilian transitions thanks to its 1982 constitution. So the Honduran legislature, which had previously ordered Zelaya’s arrest (but not his deportation), promptly voted him out of office and – following the constitution – selected its ranking member, Speaker Roberto Micheletti, as the interim president. Two key points to remember here: Martial law was never instituted, and the national elections, slated for November, are still a go. In effect, Zelaya’s removal from power was an impeachment without trial – a classic rush job that denied him his day in court even as he had already lost his battle with the country’s supreme court and displayed overt contempt for its rulings on his proposed poll.

From the Honduran military’s point of view, their actions broke no law, and since the military never assumed power, calling these events a “military coup” is completely misleading. From America’s point of view, it seems clear enough that Chavez-style politics has its limits, so overreactions are to be avoided. But from a national-security perspective, when your own Drug Enforcement Agency is telling you (as a Bush official did a year ago) that Chavez has become a “major facilitator” of the flow of Colombian cocaine to America, and when there are credible reports that Honduras, under Zelaya, has joined that network as a trans-shipment waypoint, there definitely needs to be some limits to your diplomatic efforts to reinstate this suddenly revered “pillar of democracy.”

I am in full agreement with Tom here about Mel Zelaya, who is the Rod Blagojevich of Latin America as well as a supplicating client of Hugo Chavez. The Obama administration, with the thrust coming from the State Department, has been too supportive of Zelaya’s outrageous behavior in an effort to avoid giving the Latin American left room to blame America for Zelaya’s removal. Now that moment has passed, it is time to distance the US from Zelaya and let him twist in the wind as OAS encouraged negotiations with the legitimate interim government in Honduras drag out for weeks or months

Chris Albon at War & Health has an excellent book review of Before My Helpless Sight (The History of Medicine in Context) by Leo van Bergen:

Leo van Bergen’s book, Before My Helpless Sight, is a history of suffering in World War I, a description the author readily admits: “At the roots of the book lies the question of what can happen to a soldier between the moment he steps onto a train or ship bound for the theatre of battle an the point at which he is evacuated wounded, or whether dead or alive, buried in the ground” (pg. 1). Needless to say, the book is not a light read.

….Van Bergen cannot be criticized on methodology. The book is impressively well researched (and cited), including qualitative and quantitative sources in numerous languages. Apart from the organization of the book itself, you see very little of the author in the pages. Readers are bounced from anecdotal accounts to descriptive statistics with little commentary or fanfare. This is not necessarily a negative, the sources speak for themselves. Their sheer, horrifying weight is ample to progress the book forward.

….However, in the light of the book’s contribution these issues are quickly forgotten. Before My Helpless Sight is a powerful counter to the innumerable discourses on WWI tactics and strategy. Van Bergen pulls back the curtains of glorious offensives and magnanimous generals, revealing the grim, muddy reality of life on the Western Front. It is a story of pus, rats, hunger, dirt, disease and madness. You do not know World War I before reading this book.

More and more, as passing time gives historians greater perspective, the Great War appears as a civilizational turning point for the West on the broad spectrum of human activity. WWI produced, really for the first time, a significant number of horrifyingly disfigured and maimed survivors, who would have perished from their wounds in, say, the Civil War or the Napleonic Wars. John Keegan writes, in his The First World War how postwar European governments resorted to segregating these most unfortunate of war invalids away from the eye of their publics and being at a loss how to deal with those soldiers  mentally shattered by “shell shock”, what we now recognize as PTSD.

Modern war as an industrial, mass-synchronized, 2GW meat grinder was so awful that the West turned to all kinds of stratagems to avoid a repeat of the Western Front – from political pacifism, isolationism and maginot lines to political revolution, blitzkrieg  tactics and technological innovations like the tank or airplane. None of them were a complete answer to the horrors born in 1914.

Pepe Escobar writing in the Asia Times had a very interesting article on Iran’s hardline faction, centered in the Pasdaran and security services, and the religious group behind them, the Hojjatiyeh, a term which I had not previously heard ( hat tip to Russ Wellen):

Requiem for a revolution 

An iron-clad cast
The key man to watch is Major General Mohammad-Ali Jafari. In 2006, he became the IRGC’s top commander. At the time he was already thinking in terms of the enemy within, not an external enemy. He was actively working on how to prevent a velvet revolution.It’s essential to remember that only a few days before the election, Brigadier General Yadollah Javani – the IRGC’s political director – was already accusing Mousavi of starting a “green revolution”. He said the Guards “will suffocate it before it is even born”.The IRGC has always been about repression. They literally killed – or supported the killing of – all secular political groups in Iran during the 1980s, especially from the left. After the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died in 1989 they split into two sides. One side thought Iran needed a (slight) opening; they were afraid of a popular counter-revolution. Today, they are mostly reformist leaders or reform sympathizers.

The other side was, and remains, ultra-conservative. They include the already mentioned Jafari and Javani, as well as Ahmadinejad and his current Minister of Interior, Sadegh Mahsouli, the man who oversaw the election.

The religious strand runs parallel and overlaps with the military strand – this is always about a military dictatorship of the mullahtariat. So one must refer to the Hojjatiyeh, an ultra-sectarian group founded in the 1950s. Khomeini banned them in 1983. But they were back in force during the 1990s. Their spiritual leader is Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, known as “the crocodile” in Iran. Two weeks before the elections, Yazdi issued a fatwa legitimizing any means necessary to keep Ahmadinejad in power.

That was the green light to steal the elections. It’s essential to remember that Ahmadinejad replaced no less than 10,000 key government bureaucrats with his cronies in these past four years. These people were in charge of the maze of official organizations involved in the election and the vote counting.

Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi believes that Iran’s supreme leader is chosen by Allah – when Allah tells the 86 members of the Council of Experts to find the leader. That’s how Khamenei was “found” in 1989 – even though he was (and remains) a minor scholar, and never a marja (source of imitation). What Yazdi wants is an oukoumat islami – a hardline Islamic government sanctioned by none other than Allah.

An informative piece. Read the rest here.

Escobar is also the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving Into Liquid War and Obama Does Globalistan, published by Nimble Books.

With an arrest warrant from the Honduran Supreme Court (hat tip NYkrinDC), the Honduran military today removed from office President Manuel Zelaya, a political protege of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for proceeding with an illegal referendum designed to lay the groundwork for an unconstitutional additional term in office. Zeleya has been sent into exile in Costa Rica.

Zelaya’s referendum had been rejected by the Supreme Court, the Congress and even his own political party. Zelaya had ordered the military to support the referendum, when Army chief  Gen Romeo Vasquez refused, Zelaya attempted to fire him and subsequently took possession of the ballots by leading a large crowd of supporters to a military base where they had been impounded.

The Congress had already moved to investigate Zeleya’s fitness for continuing office prior to today’s coup. Venezuelans and Nicaraguans had been infiltrating Honduras in order to help Zelaya’s supporters with the referendum, and predictably, Chavez reacted with frustration at the setback dealt to Zelaya’s Bolivarian “soft coup” before it could even get off the ground to change the system itself.

Given Honduras unhappy history, military involvement in politics is naturally suspect, but in this instance, it was the civilian president who was determined to act against the constitutional order, operate outside it and break the rules in his own political interest. What happened in Honduras seems to me to be less a pro-active coup than a reactive counterrevolution by the military and broad elite. That Hondurans resented the hijacking of their country by the international left, orchestrated at home by a Chavez stooge is unsurprising, but the best strategic move now would be for the Honduran military to turn over power to Zelaya’s constitutionally designated successor, Congress President Roberto Micheletti, and let the civilian government take appropriate legal action, if any, against Zelaya and any foreign ALBA apparatchiks active in this crisis.

According to Zelaya’s initial comments, the USG has thus far,  mostly stayed out of this affair, refusing to sanction Zelaya’s removal, except to issue a mild reprimand against the Honduran military’s action.

ADDENDUM:

The State Department attempts to square the circle with intellectually incoherent positions.

ADDENDUM II:

Chirol at Coming Anarchy weighs in:

….Former President Manuel Zelaya, ally of Venezuelan thug in chief Hugo Chavez, sought to illegally hold a referendum on changing the Honduran constitution. This could have allowed him to run again in violation of the country’s current term limits. It’s a classic trick of would-be-dictators and luckily did not succeed. While some in the media and elsewhere are labeling this a coup, I would not not. It’s rather a ‘coup’ in the same sense as Turkey has experienced several times whereby the military removed leadership that was violating the country’s laws.

Some may argue that the military’s removal of the president by force was not democratic. Indeed, on the surface it would seem to be illegal, however given that the president was pressing on with his illegal actions, declared so by the supreme court, congress and the military, it was in fact a fairly reasonable and foreseeable response. While of course, I do not encourage such actions by any military in general, in the case of Honduras, the constitutionally mandated checks on presidential power had failed. Since Zelaya blatantly continued his illegal activity, we can in fact be thankful that he was ousted before having a chance to rewrite the constitution and turn the country into an even poorer, worse off Venezuelan satellite.

ADDENDUM III:

Having just suffered a humiliating electoral defeat at home, leftist Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez, vows to accompany Zelaya back to Honduras.

My friend Cheryl Rofer of Whirledview, who has a professional background in nuclear weapons issues, is an advocate of strong diplomatic efforts for nuclear disarmament and, someday, of a world free of nuclear arms ( note to readers: Cheryl is NOT advocating immediate or unilateral nuclear disarmament). While I see room for responsble reductions in nuclear weapons systems, I disagree that this objective – very low or no “legal” nuclear weapons- is a good idea; in fact, I expect that doing so will make great power war possible again, a nightmare we have not seen since 1945.

Cheryl had a very interesting post recently, where she makes an argument that the old world, the one that launched the 20th century’s descent into epic carnage and ideological fury in August 1914, is long gone and that the subsequent changes in political order mitigate the dangers of a revival of great power rivalry and warfare. I am using a sizable excerpt here in order to show the core of Rofer’s argument:

Not 1913

My customary response to this (after batting away their ideas that we are talking about unilateral disarmament or that we might have zero nuclear weapons in the next month or so) has been that the negotiations and concessions necessary to move toward zero nuclear weapons will restructure the world in such a way that it will resemble no world we know or have known.

But Nicholas and Alexandra has given me a new argument: Europe is no longer ruled by a single dysfunctional family.

That’s an exaggeration of the Europe of 1913, which was the problem back then. But no such important grouping of countries is any longer ruled by a single family. And there’s more to it than that: the form of rule is important, and the world has pretty much given up on absolute monarchies. There are still autocracies of various kinds around the world, but they are few.

Many of the rulers of Europe before World War I were related to Queen Victoria. She provided the fateful hemophilia gene that the Tsarevich suffered from. Both Nicholas and Alexandra were related to the British royal family, Alexandra a granddaughter of Victoria. Kaiser Wilhelm was a cousin. King Alfonso of Spain was a cousin by marriage, and there were ties to Greece, Prussia, and Denmark. The members of the family were fabulously wealthy, and, as we have recently seen, the values and interests of the fabulously wealthy are not the same as those of the rest of us.

Nicholas regretted having to go to war against Cousin Willy, but his other duties required it. Russia’s national interest was part of it, but a big part of how he thought of national interest was a pride-duty-upholding-our-sacred-values kind of thing that is more like a family’s sense of who they are than today’s national interests of economic growth or security for citizens.

….Monarchy exacerbated the problems
Most of the countries of Europe were monarchies; now most are democracies. In a monarchy, the monarch is in charge of everything. There may be ministers, but they are advisors who have only as much power as the monarch grants. Britain had been moving away from this model for some time, but Nicholas and Alexandra were hardly alone in believing that only one person can rule. When World War I broke out, Nicholas commanded the troops directly. This left a bit of a vacuum in other spheres, which Alexandra tried to fill, with Rasputin’s help.

Power is that centralized in very few countries today. Heads of government have access to advice from experts in many fields: military, scientific, economic, societal, political. The ballot box and the media remind those heads that accepting advice can be a good idea. None of this implies that decisions will be perfect, but it does mean that big decisions, like going to war, will be thought out and justified in ways that a monarch does not need to.

As I said in the comment section at Whirledview, there are two distinct questions here with Cheryl’s argument:

a) The influence of monarchy in historical period of 1913 in precipitating the civilizational calamity of WWI ( or, if you like a broader view, the 1914-1991 “Long War” between liberal democracy and authoritarian-totalitarian regimes).

b) Emerging strategic parallels with 1913 that could be exacerbated by a nuclear free world.

I will deal with each question in turn.

Europe of 1913 was, I would agree, certainly a much more hierarchical and authoritarian place than it is today. Cheryl is implicitly invoking “Democratic Peace theory” here to explain the warlike tendencies of late imperial Europe that contrast so sharply with the conflict averse, liberal democratic, welfare states that make up the EU. However the historical picture I think is more complicated in that none of the monarchs, not even the nominal autocrat Tsar Nicolas II of Russia, were absolute monarchs in practice.

Nicholas II, on paper, was the most powerful ruler but even so, he was forced to accept the Duma and limits on his previously (theoretically) infinite powers in the Revolution of 1905. Kaiser Wilhelm II was technically the “German Emperor”, sort of a commander-in-chief and presiding officer of a federation of Lander that made up Imperial Germany, and not “Emperor of Germany”. The Kaiser had to deal with an unruly Reichstag filled with socialists, other German monarchs like the King of Bavaria, a Prussian and imperial civil service, a junkers class and a Grossgeneralstab, all of which had various institutional prerogatives that checked the authority of “the All-Highest”. The King of Great Britain retained enough real power to force a pre-war reform of the House of Lords against the will of a majority of parliament, but this was regarded as an extraordinary political event ( George III had regularly exercised powers not far removed from those of President Barack Obama). The government of Austria-Hungary is beyond my expertise, except to say that it’s government was riven by byzantine rules and duplicative bodies. The Young Turks had seized power from Abdul-Hamid II and the new Sultan was a figurehead. France was a republic.

While the monarchs exercised varying degrees of executive power before the Great War, they were a declining legacy component of a modern, evolving, state system, one increasingly animated by an aggressive spirit of brutal nationalism and militarism. The state, not the monarch, is what ran Europe in 1913 and in 1918 nearly all of these crowned rulers were swept away without a trace, like a predatory insect discarding an old shell as it grew larger and stronger. Those monarchs that remained became living flags and tourist attractions. Nationalism is far from dead in 2009 and while the state as a global institution has taken an impressive beating since the end of the Cold War, it retains in most countries impressive powers of coercion and an ability to inflict great harm, even where it cannot make itself be obeyed. Zimbabwe, Iran, Sudan, Burma, to name just a few, have governments that continue to rule barbarically and thumb their noses as the civilized world, despite being loathed by substantial parts of their population or even the vast majority of citizens

The strategic calculus regarding the value of nuclear weapons to a state does not remain unchanged with reductions in nuclear arsenals, the value actually increases in the sense that each nuclear weapon becomes more significant as there are fewer of them. Nuclear weapons become more prestigious and, once the US and Russia move to very low numbers of warheads, have greater military significance to the ayatollahs, military dictators, presidents for life, nationalist demagogues and terrorists who might like to have some. Nuclear weapons are useful as status symbols or as shields to deter intervention while pursuing regional ambitions against non-nuclear neighbors, or even nuclear ones in the case of India and Pakistan.  This strategic value does not disappear with paper agreements to the contrary, and even miserably poor nations like North Korea and Pakistan can build nuclear weapons, if they have the political will to endure the modest inconvenience of becoming a diplomatic outcast.

A world that formally abolishes nuclear weapons, or reduces them to the point where major war appears to be a “survivable” risk even if they are used, creates incentives for states to wage war where previously  the fear of nuclear escalation made statesmen pull back from the brink. Moreover, I do not think we will return to exactly the world of 1913 or 1944. History never repeats itself quite so neatly. No, I think we will see the dystopian worst of both worlds – increasing “bottom-up” chaos of 4GW insurgency ( which is driven by more factors than just the nuclear age) coexisting with a renewed interest of states in pursuing interstate warfare at the top.

Human nature does not change. I agree that democracies are far less inclined, on average to fight one another than are authoritarian states but this average could easily be a product of modern democracy being a rarefied commodity until the last twenty years. We still have many brutal tyrannies on planet Earth and democracies are not incapable of aggression, error or hubris. Athens embarked upon the expedition to Syracuse, Republican Rome was more ferociously expansionistic than its later Emperors and the U.S. went through a Manifest Destiny phase.

These things should give us pause before we become too eager to take nuclear weapons off of the table.

I am no Iran expert but it seems to me that the Islamist regime of Khameini and Ahmadinejad’s Pasdaran clique is soundly losing the information battle to “own” Iran’s critical cultural-political  myths, rooted in Persian history and Shia Islam, to Mousavi’s Green opposition.

Here’s a piece from an Iranian journalist at al Jazeera:

Some influential moderate clerics privately admit that Khamenei has not done “justice” to the presidential candidates and has not treated them with impartiality.

This behaviour, they believe, could jeopardise his position as leader since one of the main qualities required of the supreme leader is “justice”.

In an Iranian context, the requirement for justice in a ruler is a pre-Islamic, Persian concept known as “farr”. While somewhat ambiguous, it is akin to both the Confucian concept of a mandate of heaven and the Western notion of a social contract. I’m sure an Iranianist might quibble with me here ( please weigh in, if you are reading) but the point is that is their cultural bedrock of political legitimacy. To be “unjust” is like an American president seen to be repudiating liberty. Khameini has made himself appear as he actually is and has always been since his days as Khomeini’s political valet – a tyrannical and hypocritical partisan politician in religious robes.

Secondly, from Shia Islam comes the central idea of martydom of the virtuous. Shooting protestors, notably the young woman Neda, ramps up the sense of persecution and martyrdom that is deeply rooted in Iranian culture. Imagine the Kent State shooting on steroids.

Iran’s hardliners may or may not prevail but right now the protestors are clearly inside the regime’s OODA Loop.