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GURKHAS IN SADR CITY ?

Will the United States seek the assistance of Nepal’s fabled warriors ? Jodi at the Asia Pages has the story.

SCOTUS OPINION ON THE HAMDI CASE

The Supremes tinker with the status quo. Detainees are entitled to a ” meaningful hearing ” to dispute their status as ” enemy combatant ” before a ” neutral ” venue but their detention without charge is Constitutionally authorized by the U.S. Congress during a state of war.

This would seem to overturn Johnson v.Eisentrager but as far as I have read ( I am not finished yet ) O’Conner hasn’t made such a claim ( Hamdi is of course a U.S. citizen but most Guantanamo detainees are not ). My guess is that the Bush administration lost a vote or two because of Abu Ghraib ( Justices take ill to being deceived or misinformed during oral arguments) because the precedents – Ex Parte Quirin, Johnson v. Eisentrager- had been more on their side than that of Hamdi and Padilla. The costs of stupidity and cruelty can be high.

Eugene Volokh’s preliminary comments here. Mithras has a good post up here. Brad DeLong’s is short and references Lincoln.

UPDATE: Arthur Silber’s post here.

SAUDI ARABIA’S THIRD MAN IN THE STATE VIEWS THE UNITED STATES AS THE ENEMY OF ISLAM

Saudi Arabia’s powerful Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz, the rival of Crown Prince Abdullah, has gone on record agreeing with at least some of the radical pan-Islamist views of al Qaida.

“We must be aware that Islam is now a target of the superpowers “

The prince was alluding to American calls for democratic political and social reform in KSA and the wider Arab world. The al Qaida terrorists who carried out bombings and beheadings in KSA were merely ” deviants ” in the view of Prince Naif.

Naif and Abdullah are struggling for power in the wake of the physical decline of King Fahd. In all previous royal successions the Crown Prince has moved up to become the King of Saudi Arabia but one monarch, the erratic and unpopular King Saud was later deposed by the royal family and replaced by Crown Prince Faisal when a power-sharing arrangement failed to end struggles over KSA policy. Naif’s obvious manuverings against Abdullah and his reaching out to Islamist extremists could indicate that the Crown Prince’s succession is by no means assured.

ADDENDUM:

De Borchgrave on Islamism in the KSA.

IRAQ’S INSURGENCY – MORE NETWAR THAN GUERILLA WAR

RAND corporation has a gloomy though tightly written assessment of American Counterinsurgency policy in Iraq. Reader’s digest version:

1) The CPA and ground command failed to initiate any kind of tactics known

to be effective in countering insurgents in classic guerilla warfare situations.

2) Iraq’s insurgency does not resemble or function like a classic guerilla

resistance. It’s the Netwar, stupid.

It is absolutely imperative the American policy makers, military leaders and analysts get an intellectual grip on what is happening on the ground in Iraq and provide operational space for military commanders and civil affairs officers to make innovative and systemic adaptations to tactics, policy and political message. Iraq presages an era asymmetric combat for the United States across all domains until we demonstrate the ability to retain the initiative and use our disparate power effectively.

JOHN KERRY’S DANGEROUS UNREALISM

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, to the extent that he has allowed himself to be visible in recent months, has attempted to portray his foreign policy views as a multilateral, alliance-building, ” Bush -lite “. Senior foreign policy advisers to the Kerry campaign include such relative Democratic hawks as Samuel Berger, Richard Holbrooke, William Perry, Rand Beers, Richard Morningstar, Madeleine Albright, James P. Rubin and Flynt Leverett. Leverett and Beers formerly served on the Bush II NSC staff and Kerry has also had private meetings with former Carter National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the anti-Soviet bete noire of the dovish Cyrus Vance- Warren Christopher crowd. In short, Kerry has selected a foreign policy and national security team well to the right of his own cautiously left-wing views. Political progressives, of the Oliver Stone-Michael Moore corporate conspiracy variety, are apparently nervous and upset at the prospect of a Democratic nominee who might mirror the second Clinton administration in foreign affairs.

Perhaps the leftists need not worry. We must recall that on foreign policy Mr. Kerry holds strong views of his own, indeed his political career was launched by his opposition to the war in Vietnam and he is less likely to be led by his advisers than to lead them. It would also to be fair to ask, among the above list of experts, to whom does Kerry really listen as opposed to use as attractive campaign window dressing ?

Kerry’s proposals on the the crisis with North Korea so far have been disturbing and brimming with an unwarranted optimism where he purports to begin dealing with the DPRK by making unilateral concessions. They speak more of declinist doves than realist hawks: From the Economist.com:

“Inevitably, his attempts to balance mild diplomacy with Bush-like assertiveness lead to inconsistencies. Take North Korea. Mr Kerry dismisses the six-country talks about North Korea’s nuclear plans in favour of a face-to-face discussion with America. That is curious, given that this is one of the few cases where Mr Bush has volunteered to act multilaterally, and that North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il has all along been demanding bilateral talks.”

Kerry proposes to discuss, during these bilateral talks with North Korea, reuinification of the Korean peninsula.

New bilateral talks between the DPRK and the United States would cut out two allies and two major regional powers from the discussion of Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, render the multilateral 6-party talks an empty show and reverse the sole major concession won from Kim by the Bush administration. The Christian Science Monitor called Kerry’s silence about the 6-party talks ” odd “. Damn stupid in terms of negotiation strategy alone is a more apt description.

I’d like to ask what the hell kind of end-game does Kerry envison for these negotiations ? Normalization of Pyongyang’s status as a nuclear power ? Where does Kerry have the right to negotiate away the future of South Korea in unification talks without the participation of the ROK ? What kind of holy hell would the Democrats, Terry McAuliffe, Paul Krugman, The Nation, The Daily Kos and the liberal blogosphere be raising if George W. Bush suggested doing something so unilateral and overweeningly arrogant ?

The Kerry campaign will be trying very hard to suggest in the next few months that they would be more competent and more diplomatic in furthering the interests of the United States than the Bush administration; that they share many of the goals but deplore the execution. It’s time to start asking John Kerry how he thinks the world really works and what America’s interests are in that world.

The answers may be shocking.