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MUSINGS

Not much that is new to say on the London bombings yet but I can recommend John Robb’s analysis at Global Guerillas in the meantime regarding al Qaida’s probable evolution toward ” Open Source ” warfare. I don’t think they are quite as far along that curve as Robb does, there are alternate channels of communication, albeit slower ones, that may be keeping the top tier of al Qaida leaders plugged into the operational decisions of their national terror franchises to a greater degree than we realize.

I have a wedding to attend today, a friend from way back in grad school so posting will be light until late this evening. I will probably put up another book review though, either The Sling and the Stone by Thomas X. Hammes or The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans. Put your money on the former because my copy of the latter appears to have grown legs and wandered off somewhere.

CONQUEST THE DRAGON

I’m starting a new book review series, mostly the odd assortment that have crossed my nightstand table recently but also a few timely public policy books. I’m going to begin with Robert Conquest’s newest work, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History.

I very much enjoys books by scholars of the old type, rarely seen in universities today, who command not just depth in their field or subspecialty but real breadth of knowledge as well. Men of Letters and not mere writers. Robert Conquest, is of course, most famous for his seminal work, The Great Terror, on Stalin’s crescendo of systemic mass-murder in the Soviet Union during the 1930’s. At the time of publication, Conquest was savaged by those in academia sympathetic toward the USSR or at least uncomfortable with any manifestations of anti-Communism and the critics said that Conquest’s figures couldn’t possibly be right. To an extent, the critics were correct… but only in the sense that Conquest had underestimated Stalin’s crimes. When the Soviet archives briefly opened and vomited forth long-concealed horrors, Conquest issued a reassessment of The Great Terror to examine the greater orders of magnitude of Stalin’s institutional state terrorism .

Since then the academic Leftists have not forgiven Conquest for being right and Conquest, for his part, refuses to let them forget it either. That legacy forms the raison d’etre of The Dragons of Expectation.

Conquest has penned a withering critique of 20th century Western intellectuals as prisoners of a delusional mindset that prevented them from acknowledging the full reality of Soviet conduct or the motivational roots from whence such behavior sprung. Conquest is unsparing in his judgement and explains in detail why that should be so. Eric Hobsbawm, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, John Kenneth Galbraith, E.H. Carr, Ted Turner, Simone de Beauvoir, C.P. Snow and others are quite mercilessly ( and often deservedly) savaged with their own words by Conquest, who approaches his task with a hint of glee.

Conquest, who is a poet as well as a historian, remains an artful turner of phrases ( though I’m sure his targets were less than enchanted with his prose) . Some samples:

“Their establishment of a state inherently hostile to all others in a country as large and powerful as Russia was a main factor in destabilizing the world: it started in Lenin’s time – but went on long after what a frivolous historian might call the elimination of Germany in the semifinals “

“One of the oddest of the verbal expressions is the condemnation often to be found in the West of ‘ Triumphalism’. This strange term is used to deplore any sign of being glad that the Soviet Union failed and that the Western world ‘triumped ‘. It seems to imply, above all, that such an attitude is in bad taste. The poor, unfortunate totalitarian anti-Western regimes collapsed, but one shouldn’t crow “

“More generally,at the highest levels, academic writing-in English – is stupefying in two different, though often complementary,ways. First, we everywhere find a groteaque vocabulary held together by a tangled syntax, if such it can be called. But second, going a leap further, we get theory”

“But, as has been rightly commented,if you know no other language than your own, you really don’t know your own. You have no perspective in which to see it.”

Conquest probably did not expect to win over many opponents with his arguments and, in light of his long careeer and numerous clashes, there is an a strong air of score-settling and ” I told you so”. However, if you are going to read books launched as intellectual attacks it makes sense to read well-written and thoughtful ones rather than the hamfisted, political Don Rickles acts between two covers, pumped out regularly by lightweight Cable TV/Talk Radio wingnuts.

BIG TROUBLE OVER A LITTLE CHINA REPORT

Bill Gertz reports intra-IC wrangling over the Pentagon’s annual report on Chinese military power between China softliners and those painting a more dire picture of Chinese capabilities.

“The draft report had included tough assessments of China’s arms buildup and a stark conclusion that the military balance of power across the Taiwan Strait was shifting in Beijing’s favor. The shift is because of a sharp increase in China’s arms purchases and deployments, that include new missiles, warships, aircraft and communications gear.

…Among those who do not regard China as a near-term threat are Thomas Fingar, the former State Department intelligence analyst who is now the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst under Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte. Mr. Fingar recently hired former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst Lonnie Henley, who during his career at DIA developed a reputation as someone who played down China’s military developments. “

The hardliners and skeptics here would include Naval intelligence, PACOM, the submarine community, current and former NSC and DoD political appointees of a neocon orientation who developed the idea of deterring the emergence of a ” peer-competitor” in the National Security Strategy of the United States .

What the hardliners have in their favor is that official Chinese statistics are, quite simply, bilge. Like the former Soviet Union, China attempts to conceal their actual military budget by dispersion through a range of military, economic, scientific and state security agencies and a bewildering array of PLA-connected companies. Estimating actual Chinese expenditures is at best an educated guess from what we know the Chinese to have actually produced or are in the stages of designing and testing.

The softliners can point to the fact that paper capabilities mean a lot less than what a military force can logistically bring to bear and sustain for a significant length of time in the field. China is not in America’s class. In fact, China is not in PACOM’s class, even given the assumption that PACOM is operating in China’s theater and conceding ” home field advantage”, much less PACOM plus Taiwan.

The short and medium term danger is that China is gaining ground on Taiwan and closing the qualitative gap that is the bedrock of Taiwan’s security, increasing the incentives for Chinese generals and Politburo officials to play at brinksmanship. This is best remediated by the Taiwanese to increase their own anemic defense spending to keep the transaction costs of a Chinese attack on Taipei as high as possible. Going the ” free rider” route of the Europeans in the post-Soviet NATO 1990’s is a luxury Taiwan cannot afford, particularly when coupled with periodic bursts of Taiwanese nationalist rhetoric calculated to give Beijing fits.

To paraphrase Brooks Adams, to be disarmed and aggressive is a particularly stupid policy and one that endangers American national interests. The purpose of Taiwan Relations Act is to commit America to defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression, a pact that helps stabilize East Asia and keep the peace.

What is not, is a blank check to encourage Taipei to indulge in European-style geopolitical immaturity.

WHEN THE IRRESISTABLE FORCE OF INCREASING COMPLEXITY MEETS THE IMMOVABLE OBJECT OF POLITICAL INCOMPETENCE

Via Simon World, we learn that the Chinese Communist Party has admitted that its rural leadership cadres are now systemically provoking the peasantry rather than ameliorating their problems.

” ‘ In a rare press conference by a top party official, the vice-director of the Central Organisation Department, Li Jingtian , said the “mass incidents” in China had arisen because local authorities had been incapable of dealing with widespread grievances among rural residents.’

There has clearly been a directive from someone at the top to start dealing with these local protests lest they topple the CCP from power. Fancy a senior official admitting that local cadres are incompetent. Luckily, the CCP have an answer…re-education“

A Soviet model, political bureaucracy designed to wield political power over a relatively primitive, heavy industry-collectivized agricultural, command economy in the advent of increasing market exchange increasingly resembles a Brontosaurus, staggering around on dry land, looking for a place to die. Perhaps trampling many small mammals along the way.

Rural cadres, who number in the millions, historically have been picked for their orthodoxy and intuitive talent for discerning the emerging Party line. Not terribly well educated, they have enough connections to avoid the personal consequences of bad decisions for years and years to say nothing of corruption or favortism in local village rivalries.

As the old, Marxist, ” New Class”, they constitute a significant obstacle to China’s further progress.

ISLAMIST TERROR HITS LONDON

A previously unknown al Qaida affiliate, the Secret Organization group of al-Qaeda of Jihad in Europe, perhaps as small as only a few individuals, struck civilians in a series of bombing attacks against public transportation targets including bus and subway trains. CNN is estimating dead in ” the double-digits”.

Given the odd change of name it is possible, as happened in Lebanon during the 1980’s, an existing Islamist group in Britain with ties to terror groups like HAMAS or Palestinian Islamic Jihad created a ” cut-out” group with the al Qaida ” brand” to carry out this brutal and cowardly act of terror. It will also be very interesting if Scotland Yard turns up any evidence of cooperation between IRA splinter groups and Islamist extremists. IRA members have already been caught exporting their terror skills to FARC in Colombia and this bombing would only be a logical extension of that kind of inter-terror group cooperation.

We can also expect a possible reassassment of British security laws and immigration policy, the latter having previously become controversial enough to spawn the birth of a right-wing nationalist party that did modestly well in local elections.

The blogosphere is just starting to react at this hour. Curzon at Coming Anarchy points to a predictable burst of moral appeasement from the anti-globo left. Juan Cole has nothing yet though I expect that to change. Liberals Against Terrorism have two posts up, one by praktike and the other by Armchair Generalist. Winds of Change has a post up as does Wretchard at The Belmont Club who makes some good points about terrorist targeting.

More commentary later as this story develops.