zenpundit.com

ONE MORE READING RECOMMENDATION

Most of us bloggers are simply frustrated writers. I have some familiarity with going through a professional editing process but not much, relatively speaking, so I found it interesting to read how Tom Barnett was put through his paces by the process at Esquire magazine.

It’s a good lesson for aspiring writers on the degree to which you need to have your ducks in a row if you expect to someday get published in a big-time forum. Tom’s rep as a visionary, best-selling, author did not stop Esquire from taking his reportage and running it through an editorial Iron Maiden – several times. No quarter was asked or given. Dr. Barnett referred to it as becoming ” a made man” at Esquire.

I kind of imagine Mark Warren sitting across a large desk, manuscript in hand, and looking down the barrel of a red-marking pen at a prospective writer laying prostrate on his office floor, and saying:

” Do you feel lucky, punk ?”

SUNDAY MORNING RECOMMENDED READING AND A BIT OF A RANT

“ France fell because there was corruption without indignation” is a quote about the tragic Third Republic that might now fit the Fifth Republic as well. See Marc Schulman at the American Future about Saddam’s view of French politicians.

CKR of Whirledview uses the Foreign Policy article by the formerly respected Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as a starting point for an intelligent analysis of the upkeep of our nuclear forces.

The esteemed Pundita has a two part series on how Mexican-American relations intersect with the GWOT. In Part I. Pundita puts the need for Mexican reforms in context with disaster planning for a catastrophc Terror attack. In Part II. Pundita sums up the problem of elite reality avoidance rather pithily ” If only there was some way to get across to the Mexican government, and the American oil company executives who don’t want to rile the Mexican government, that Ayman al-Zawahiri is not Pancho Villa.”

Dr. Von laments the decline of young Americans going into the hard sciences as a threat to the American technological edge that we hold over China, Japan, India and the EU.

My view is somewhat different – the decline of Americans goping into the hard sciences coupled with fewer foreigners entering American PhD. programs due to post-9/11 Visa restrictions is a serious problem. Many of these super-bright foreigners never go home – except as newly minted American citizens. Discouraging 180 IQ Chinese or Indian students from going to MIT through a pile of paper work and long delays hurts us economically without impinging on al Qaida in the least.

The answer is thoroughly vetting Pakistani and Arab Muslim male Visa applicants -including those residing in Europe holding citizenship in Allied countries- for contacts with Islamist organizations when they are still at home, the way we once looked hard at people who might have been potential Eastern Bloc spies.

Having relatives or membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb-ut-Tahrir or HAMAS or merely worshipping at Mosques frequented by such people ought to be enough to bar entry into the United States. I realize both our European allies and American Muslim advocacy groups will screech at this policy change but so did leftist front groups that back in the day who pimped for Soviet interests when we scrutinized fellow travellers. It’s to be expected and to be ignored. This kind of change in Visa security might also have the salutory effect of encouraging Arab-Muslim family networks whose senior men have economic ties to the U.S. to police their own junior members behavior instead of enabling it.

Finally, a general admonition to go to Registan.net today for Nathan’s latest updates and always excellent commentary on the latest in the current crisis in Uzbekistan.

PART I – A PREFACE TO A DISCUSSION OF RULE-SET THEORY

Recently, Dan of tdaxp was kind of enough to do a thorough review of my article on Rule-Set theory that was published in the first issue of The Rule-Set Reset. Dan asked many good questions and raised lots of issues and after reading his review, I thought I owed him a detailed response. I intend to tackle Dan’s questions directly in Part II. after giving some background information on how my article originally came about.

Dr. Barnett had hired/partnered with Dr. Bob Jacobson to have Bob publish RSR and from conversation and innumerable email exchanges Bob indicated that one purpose of RSR would be to develop Rule-Set Theory as an operating paradigm for analysis. Shooting ideas back and forth before I started writing and then during the editing process we came to a point where we conceived of Rule-Sets as a series of concentric circles, with the smaller circles subject to the earlier, broader Rule-sets – ultimately in the center would stand the individual ( something I can’t show with my crude grasp of graphics – face it people, your damn lucky to even have this one – so I’m stopping at Explicit Rule-Sets, basically at the nation-state level, just as the article did)

Eventually, we were supposed to connect all of these circles through a series of articles in a comprehensive theory of how Rule-Sets govern human interaction but are in turn dynamically evolving due to human action ( at least within those circles that humans can affect since obviously we can’t change the laws of physics). Bob would have preferred that I had started logically with the outermost circle and work inward but…well…and I didn’t feel quite up to that task being a humble historian rather than a physicist like Dr. Von. So I decided to write an article on an aspect of Rule-Set theory that was ” closer to home” in terms of my intellectual comfort zone. Critt liked it at any rate even if Bob had some reservations.

With RSR as dead as Julius Caesar, it’s not terribly likely that Rule-Set Theory will go much further along these lines unless Dr. Barnett decides to pick up that ball and run with it in some fashion. We’ll just have to wait and see what he wants to do. So there you have it, some PNM inside baseball.

THE FOLLY OF THE “GET PUTIN” GANG

The other day, Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote a perceptive column about the state of Russia being analagous to that of France after WWII. De Borchgrave went on to make the sensible point that whatever the historical accuracy of dredging up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the timing left much to be desired if closer relations between the United States and Russia were the object:

“As a proud nation celebrated the 60th anniversary of VE-Day (May 8 for Europe and the United States, May 9 for Russians), it was not prudent to remind Russia it was also part of the twin evils of the 20th century — Nazism and communism. Nor was it wise to keep up a steady drumbeat of epithets about the lack of democracy as Russia looked back with pride at the sacrifice of 27 million men and women (more than 10 percent of its population) in the Great Patriotic War that defeated Nazi Germany. That was more blood spilled than all the other allied nations put together. The World War II casualties of the United States on all fronts were a shade less than half a million.

Russia and America need each other today on several critical fronts, from transnational terrorism to the security of Russia’s 8,000 nuclear weapons and thousands of tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. A small amount of these nuclear materials would be sufficient to make a radiological (“dirty”) bomb that would render Wall Street or downtown Washington around the White House uninhabitable for years.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condi Rice have ramped up their criticism of what they see as Mr. Putin’s backsliding on democracy. Engaging Russia, as Mr. Bush says he wishes to do, means dropping gratuitous insults about its lack of democratic virtues. Such advice is best rendered in private. Russia is at a crossroads. One direction points to Germany after World War I, or the collapse of democracy and the totalitarian temptation. The other is Germany after World War II, the birth of a strong democracy nurtured by the United States.”

Unfortunately, there is a gathering crowd in Washington working behind the scenes who do not desire good relations with Russia and essentially view Vladmir Putin’s administration as a crypto-Soviet state fundamentally hostile to the United States. Dick Morris, a former adviser to a Senate majority leader, a President and lately,Viktor Yushchenko, the new president of Ukraine, writes in the influential Capitol Hill paper Roll Call of a ” Czar Putin” under whom “… the old Soviet Union will be back on the road to regional domination and the old ambitions of global power will return”. The otherwise sensible National Center For Public Policy Research with solidly Reaganite credentials, maintains a satellite operation called Center for the Future of Russia that is little more than a comical propaganda sheet for the Oligarchs ( which makes one wonder if any unusually large checks have floated the National Center’s way of late).

Vladmir Putin is at best an illiberal democrat. He has used strongarm tactics to break the power of the Oligarchs over Russia’s government and he is censoring the press through pressure, confiscation, intimidation and legal harrassment. The war in Chechnya under Putin is being carried out with the usual trademarkRussian mixture of brutality and incompetence. Putin has steadily consolidated most of the levers of power in his own hands. These are things which the United States should regard with a concerned wariness when dealing with the Russian Federation.

But if Vladmir Putin is no Thomas Jefferson, he isn’t Joseph Stalin either. He has been elected democratically and enjoys wide, deep, support and dissenters are not being herded into camps behind barbed wire. Putin is not the enemy of the United States and he is a determined reformer who is by all reports, honest. Can that be said of Khordokovsky, Berezovsky, Gusinsky and the other Oligarchs who have looted Russia of hundreds of billions of dollars with the help of mafia crime lords and ex-Communist fixers ? These characters do not have clean enough hands for any respectable American conservative to imagine they represent the free market or for any American liberal to pretend that these looters are democrats. In Chicago, we have a term for ” businessmen” like the Oligarchs:

” Mobbed Up”

These are ruthless men with very, very, large bank accounts and sinister motives who are trying hard to get the ear of official Washington because they would like to see the Bush administration begin to undermine Putin. That this would not be of appreciable benefit to the American people when Putin’s replacement proves to be a hapless stooge and Russia goes off the rails in the direction of a failed state armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, concerns them not at all.

But it should concern you.

BOTHERSOME BLOGGING BACKLOG

To my great annoyance, work intruded on my evenings this week and consumed vast swaths of time better spent elsewhere, including on blogging. I’m going to try to rectify that this weekend with some posts I’ve been mulling over. Stay tuned