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A BRIEF COMMENT ON AL SADR AND NAJAF – THE PIPES PLAN?

Juan Cole and Collounsbury have weighed in on the fighting against the Sadr militia in Najaf.

My comments are as follows:

First al-Sadr should have been neutralized, politically, legally or otherwise in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam. Not having done that was stupid. The previous campaign to suppress the Sadrists, poorly-timed with the Fallujah debacle, resulted in the U.S. looking brutal yet ineffective. I’ll shed no tears when al-Sadr is gone but *how* we went about doing this was less than smooth, to say the least, and once started we cannot afford another stop order that makes the U.S. look bewildered and uncertain.

My impression about the current fight is that the United States government is now following the advice of Daniel Pipes ( see here, here and here) and is trying to create a ” democratically-minded strongman ” in Prime Minister Allawi. In crushing the Sadrists militarily, a strategy is being followed that is eerily similar to that of Ngo Dinh Diem who consolidated his rule over South Vietnam by destroying the Binh Xuyen, Hoa-Hao and Cao-Dai private armies. The difference is, that Diem had the strength on his own to destroy his non-communist rivals, Allawi is having the U.S. military do it for him which sort of negates the strongman image.

The fact is the most powerful military forces in Iraq today are the U.S. military followed by the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Sunni insurgency, then the Sadrists and probably a few other militias. Allawi’s Iraqi police and militia are not politically reliable or militarily effective at the present time.

For Allawi to stand strong, everyone else must be brought low.

GEORGIA ON MY MIND -PROMOTING CONNECTIVITY AND PREVENTING THE CAUCASUS FROM BECOMING THE NEW BALKANS

Georgia’s new president, Mikheil Saakashvili, stopped in Washington for one of those ” unofficial visits “ that often presage a regional realignment of American foreign policy.

Saakashvili took power in an overwhelmingly popular, bloodless, coup that toppled the disintegrating regime of former Soviet Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze. The latter had proven unable to quell ethnic separtism of Georgia’s fractious regional minorities, establish a stable economic base for Georgia or forge a working relationship with Russia ( though that was hardly all Shevardnadze’s fault). In a rare show of unanimity, both Moscow and Washington signaled to Shevardnadze to go quietly.

The Caucasus region needs economic stabilization and movement toward the EU and the Europeans could play a decisively helpful role here if they choose to do so, both by easing Moscow’s fears that a heavy-handed American presence would bring and holding out carrots for Russian cooperation. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan need encouragement to integrate economically both to defuse ethnic tensions and strengthen their own viability as independent states. The U.S. can be a catalyst in financial and diplomatic circles to help make these things happen.

MEANWHILE,OVER AT THE ARGUS….

Nathan has a good post up on the Georgian-Russian conflict.

CULTIVATING STRATEGIC THINKING – THE U.S. NEEDS A DARPA FOR FOREIGN POLICY

(Parenthetical aside: Until Saturday, my posts will be short )

In the past few years, thanks to the media stories about the high-tech wizardry of drone planes and a zany proposal to set up a market for terrorism futures ( actually this was not a bad intel collection idea ) the public has become aware of DARPA, the semi-secret Defense lab where scientific imagination runs free, relatively speaking, of the usual bureaucratic restraints. It’s a good program.

What the USG desperately needs is a national security equivalent to DARPA that can both engage in deep thinking and have the freedom to run pilot programs to enhance America’s strategic influence that can later be expanded by our traditional power bureaucracies. This would be far more than a just a federally funded think tank – RAND, Brookings, Hoover , Heritage, AEI, CATO, CFR, Carnegie, CSIS and others all do a fine job of policy analysis. They also give statesmen a productive place to hang their hat as an alternative to whoring themselves out as corporate or ideological lobbyists. Another one of those is not what the times require.

What I’m proposing is a lot closer to a cross between a soft-power version of the Institute for Advanced Studies and a clandestine service – one with the objective of developing innovative programs to maximize the influence of American values and promote ” Connectivity ” in nations mired in the endemic, isolated, misery of the” Gap “. This is not what the USG normally does. The bias of State and Defense, State in particular, when dealing with foreign policy questions tend to be orientated toward day to day, tactical, crisis management. On occasions, the NSC has moved into a pro-active strategic planning mode, prompting vicious turf battles with State ( in the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations) but this proved to be a temporary, dependent upon the character of the particular National Security Adviser, not an institutional reform. State itself once set up a Policy Planning Staff under Kennan and Nitze but the experiment did not have lasting effects – as a bureaucracy the State Department is allergic to strategic thought and addicted to a staus quo bias.

A national security DARPA should be lean and mean with a rotating door of exceptionally bright thinkers from many fields who come in for a few years, invigorate the place with fresh perspectives and then depart. The profile should be low, if not secret, so there will be freedom to bat around and implement ( on a pilot program level) ideas without the usual bureaucratic turf conscious tug of war. I would not limit it to foreign policy/defense/intelligence experts by any means – bring in the physicists, computer geniuses, philosophers, economists, cognitive psychologists – even select writers or artists ( imagine the contributions of someone of the caliber of an Issac Asimov or Mortimer Adler for example).

New challenges require new methods. Implementing new methods requires only vision and political will.

POSTSCRIPT: Jeff at Caerdroia has a good post that looks at the nuclear proliferation program of Iran from a strategic standpoint.

WILL THE TIDES FOUNDATION INFILTRATE A KERRY ADMINISTRATION ?

Evidently Teresa Heinz Kerry has a history of shuttling $ 4.6 million from the Heinz family foundations to the secretive, extreme Left, Tides Foundation that funds, among other groups, the Institute for Global Communications which provides technical assistance to Communist front groups like Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, the War Resister’s League and United for Peace and Justice, the latter which has personnel links to the CPUSA.

A good question would be were such donations made with the general cluelessness of a super-rich political dilettante or with full knowledge and approval of Tides political objectives ? Will activists associated with Tides end up on Democratic short lists for White House staff and deputy assistant secretary and similar administration positions ?

Reporters should start digging now.

MORE ON PNM COMING SOON

I’m working on a post that deals with the important divergence between what Dr. Barnett referred to as “ Kantian rule sets” and what the U.S. needs – and traditionally has had under international law – to operate as a Leviathan force in the Gap. More or less this represents a soft-power challenge to any effective ” shrink the Gap ” strategy and in my view it’s self-interested and intentional on the part of those who advocate Kantian rules.

UPDATE – NGO’S BANDING TOGETHER TO INSURE THE POOREST OF THE WORLD’S POOR….STAY THAT WAY:

This relates squarely to my upcoming post. Not all the forces of disconnection wave Ak-47’s or live in presidential palaces. Many of them inflict harm in air conditioned conference halls and wage a fight through lobbying, grass-roots organizing and cashing big checks from American foundations interested in killing off free trade without getting slapped with the label of ” protectionism “. Or having to go through the messy chore of an open democratic debate on their ideas before the American public or in Congress. Their preferred vehicle is the UN. Geitner Simmons has the goods.