Tuesday, December 6th, 2005
FURTHER ENDORSEMENT FOR THE 2005 WEBLOG AWARDS
Another Zenpundit blogfriend is in the running and needs your help !
VOTE FOR AUSTIN BAY !
Also don’t forget to vote for:
Archive for December, 2005
Monday, December 5th, 2005
BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS: WILL BUSH DO A “NIXON GOES TO CHINA?”
Dr. Rick Shenkman, a historian of the presidency and the Editor of HNN has an article hypothesizing that President George W. Bush will turn to the role of historic peacemaker in his second term:
“President Bush until now has been able expertly to capitalize on his status as a war president. In a crisis Americans naturally rally around their president. By playing on our continuing fears of another 9-11 he secured his re-election last November. But fear works as a political strategy only so long. The more a president becomes identified with our fears the more likely it becomes that an ever-growing number of Americans will turn to someone else who offers hope. (It was the Democrats’ misfortune that John Kerry last year neither seemed able to exploit peoples’ fears nor appeal to their hopes.)
…Immediate victory now in Iraq is no longer an option. But President Bush does not face the choice of either pulling out all of our forces as the war’s most determined critics demand or grimly “staying the course,” as he has been advocating. There is fortunately for his poll ratings a third option.
Perhaps we should call this the “Richard Nixon Option.” It was the option Nixon astutely chose in 1968 when the country was divided over another seemingly intractable war it didn’t know how to get out of.
Nixon knew Americans did not want to admit defeat. He also knew that they were tired of war. His solution? To offer himself up as the peace candidate who could deliver a compromise settlement that would redeem the great sacrifices made in the war.
His ingenious remedy involved withdrawing from Vietnam on the installment plan. The war continued for years, of course. But the public was willing to go along because Nixon convincingly could claim to be winding down American involvement.”
Shenkman has articulated essentially a political strategy revolving around the reality of diminishing returns – Bush could maximize the return his investment of political capital only by switching gears. I would note that Nixon did so not just by switching gears but by jumping tracks in his China Opening – he added ” peacemaker” to his repetoire of Commander-in-Chief, the latter role being reinforced by other issues than just Vietnam. Bush could attempt something similar in terms of complementing Iraq with another diplomatic issue rather than implementing a “peace” policy in Iraq itself.
Monday, December 5th, 2005
THE 2005 WEBLOG AWARDS
Alerted by the ever helpful Dave Schuler, I am pleased to say that Zenpundit has been nominated and is a finalist for BEST OF THE TOP 1751-2500 in The 2005 Weblog Awards. Should I win, I hope to parlay the momentum and notoriety accrued into a mad quest to achieve world domination and…cough….ahem…write a short, self-congratulatory, post.
Like Mr. Schuler, I would like to take the time to endorse a few gentlemen I’m honored to call my” blogfriends” who are also finalists in categories of their own:
Much like the Middleweight division in boxing, this category has a deep bench when it comes to talent. The Glittering Eye, however, sparkles brighter and Dave regularly demonstrates his perception, analytical prowess and wide ranging intellect.
Curzon, Younghusband and Chirol have made Coming Anarchy a blog that is as visually impressive and thematically unified as it is intellectully stimulating. One of my favorite places to hang out and comment.
Sometimes called ” The Instapundit of Asia”, Simon World has been a “must-read” blog for Asian and especially Chinese affairs for me for some time now. A richly deserved nomination.
Sunday, December 4th, 2005
THE POWER OF RULE SETS
” There’s no mystery about who should write the rules. It should start inside the Core, and it should start first with our ldest and closest military allies, such as the United Kingdom, Japan, Korea, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – to name the most obvious ones.”
– Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett
” It is better, even from the perspective of our power-in the long run- to write the rules, though they may sometimes be applied against our wishes, than to abandon the rule following in favor of policies that have no more general appeal than we want them followed at least for the time being. We can extend our influence beyond our temporary hegemony if we take this moment to craft a system of rules with our allies that is compatible with our basic understanfing of state responsibility“
– Dr. Philip Bobbitt
He who writes the rules may or may not lose all the battles, but they usually win the war.
The global ” rule set” known as ” International Law” is broken because the implicit and commonly understood premises on which statesmen once acted have vanished along with the USSR. And although the explicit texts of the Cold War’s ” high contracting parties” remain, their words appear to take on new meanings in light of globalization’s spread of economic and information connectivity, failing states in the Gap, transnational terror networks and supranational governance structures like the EU and WTO. What you think those meanings are depends a lot on where you stand and where you want to insert a wedge for reasons of national interest.
Or domestic political interest. Don’t like guns but your fellow citizens are attached to their Second Amendment rights ? Petition the U.N. for a convention restricting ownership of small arms. Your industries have trouble competing with other countries? Try an “environmental agreement” that acts as a carbon tax only on certain competitor states. Or ” tax harmonization” upward that punishes freer economies than your own.
Rule sets matter. Previously, the United States willingly signed onto all kinds of far-fetched, even harebrained, international treaties, safe in the knowledge that since the Soviet bloc could be reliably expected to cheat blatantly or ignore its commitments, no one would bother pointing fingers at the U.S. because no country took such agreements seriously. Well today those documents are being dusted off and invoked by lawyers from NGO’s hostile to America to hold us to stipulations to which our diplomats never would have agreed were it not for the expectation that they were effectively meaningless.
In light of ” Lawfare“, the United States has to become engaged here as never before in order to:
a) Establish a common premise for interpreting open-ended language with our allies that allows for a traditional standard of ” robust sovereignty” so that states are both responsible for their actions as well as free to act. Mutual understandings make crafting joint policies far easier.
b) Negotiate for only genuine ” win-win” and fairly narrowly defined covenants. We should sign only what we intend to keep and we should keep our word for what we actually signed. We are not Swaziland or even China. Our behavior sets the standard.
If we fail to build a consensus with our allies in the Core we are going to find ourselves increasingly “triangulated” and isolated in world affairs. For those states playing the zero sum game – and there are many – new advantages are to be had most easily at the expense of ” The Great Satan”, the unpopular apex of the global pyramid.
Our adversaries appeal to the short-sighted human desire to slice up the existing pie differently. America needs a diplomatic strategy that demonstrates that we are about baking bigger pies.
Sunday, December 4th, 2005
THE WARFIGHTER’S VIEW FROM IRAQ
Bill Roggio, formerly of The Fourth Rail and now Threatswatch is now deployed in Iraq and has interviewed Lieutenant Colonel Dale Alford, commander of the Marine 3/6 ” Devil Dogs” Battalion:
“He has a unique, outside of the box idea to get the Iraqi Army trained up to the proper standards to fight the insurgency on its own. Instead of using the MITT model, where small teams are embedded into Iraqi battalions to provide assistance, he would transplant the staff of a Marine battalion and graft it onto an Iraqi battalion. The staffs would team up, man for man, and act as advisers down to the company level, in the areas where the Iraqi military needs it most: logistics, heavy weapons support and air support. When finished, the embedded staff would leave the equipment behind for the Iraqi Army to carry on the fight.
He believes this would increase the proficiency of the Iraqi Army and reduce the deployment time of large amounts of American troops. This would place the burden of deployment on the professional elements of the Marine Corps, the officers with the rank of Captain and above and the Staff Sergeants and above in the enlisted ranks. A small detachment of officers and NCOs would need to remain home to train the Marines left home, but this would have the effect of accelerating the leadership development of lieutenants, sergeants and corporals. With the combat experience throughout the Corps, this would not be a problem in the short term.”
This is of course, not what the United States has been doing in Iraq in terms of policy as the recent article in The Atlantic made clear.
