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TYING UP, FOLLOWING-UP AND INTRODUCING

First, new to the blogroll:

Juice Analytics – Focus on business intelligence and analysis.

Strategic Security Blog – From the Federation of American Scientists.

Extending on previous posts of late:

From Dan of tdaxp – the remainder of his fine Learning Evolved series -“Overcoming Doubt” and “Conclusions“.

From Chicago Boyz discussion forum (hat tip to Lexington Green) – “The Allende Myth“

Dr. Barnett on the Saudis.

More to come later today.

HISTORY YET UNWRITTEN: THE SAUDIS AND IRAQ’S OCCUPATION

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in a rare burst of emphatic public diplomacy, is attempting to forestall any change of course in American policy in Iraq by the Bush administration. This is coupled with the abrupt resignation of the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, former longserving intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal. It was Turki who was the Saudi bagman to the Afghan mujahedin and later to the pro-Wahabbi faction of the international Islamist movement.

Turki is the bursar of Sunni jihad and a one-man liason with a dozen foreign intelligence services and Turki’s departure from Washington should be seen in that light. In case any of our more provincial members of Congress missed the significance, the KSA regime added the infamous tagline ” to spend more time with his family”. Kudos to the al-Saud for attempting to speak the language of the natives!

Clearly, the senior princes and King Abdullah are quite exercised over the ISG report. As they should be. Regardless of the content of the report, it represents pressure by the American elite on the Bush administration to change the status quo on Iraq and the House of Saud prefers the misery of the present to the risk of uncertainty.

This begs the question of what role backstage Saudi pressure and patronage of their Sunni co-religionists have played in the debacle that was the Iraqi occupation ? The Saudis were one factor among many the Bush administration had to consider and, naturally, the KSA would be playing to its perceived interests as was Israel, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Jordan, not to mention the European allies. But the drip, drip, drip of compromises to soothe Saudi sensibilities may have added a large weight on the scale toward the state of paralysis in which we find ourselves.

Or not. It will be sometime after 2008 when the memoirs start cranking out and even longer to the distant day when FRUS 2001-2004 is published.

THE COMING OF THE IRAQ COLLOQUIUM

Starting this Friday, Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye is hosting a distinguished panel of Mideast experts for an upcoming blogging series on aspects of Iraq and American policy toward the region. So far, the line-up includes:

“John Burgess is a former U. S. foreign service officer who has had two tours of duty in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the first in 1981-1983 and the second 2001-2003. He reads and speaks Arabic and has spent the bulk of his career in the Middle East with assignments in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain in addition to his assignment in the KSA. His blog, Crossroads Arabia, is one of the blogosphere’s finest resources for information and commentary on the KSA.

Shivaji Sondhi is a professor of physics at Princeton University“

Having put together one online symposium myself (” Globalization and War”), I appreciate the hard work that Dave has put into organizing this event, to which I am looking forward to reading and commenting upon. Here Dave explains his vision for the colloquium:

“I don’t know if you’re as discouraged by the present political climate and the likely turn of events with respect to Iraq as I am (not to mention Iran) but I’ve been wracking what I like to think of as my brains for some time now trying to consider U. S. interests in the region, how they’re likely to be affected by a withdrawal of U. S. troops before the country can be stabilized, what other measures are available to secure those interests in the event of such a withdrawal, and so on.

Participants and, indeed, all readers would be encouraged to address questions to the participants either in the pages of the participants’ blogs or here: “

I will be linking and commenting daily and look forward to learning something new !

THE CHILEAN SULLA

To paraphrase an old Saturday Night Live punchline, General Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, is still dead.

Unfortunately, his ghost will continue to haunt us for some time as he remains a figure of menace and loathing far beyond his actual crimes, which were considerable. Naturally, for Chileans, Pinochet’s polarizing yet iconic status makes sense, they, after all, lived through the Pinochet regime while we did not. Yet from the rhetoric you might think the ancient generalissimo of Santiago had eclipsed Stalin, Hitler and Mao in the pantheon of tyranny. For example:

Christopher Hitchens:

“And, also like Franco, he earned a place in history as a treasonous and ambitious officer who was false to his oath to defend and uphold the constitution. His overthrow of civilian democracy, in the South American country in which it was most historically implanted, will always be remembered as one of the more shocking crimes of the 20th century.”

Well. If we start with Imperial Germany’s democide of the Herrero in Namibia and work our way forward from there to the year 2000, given the stiff competition Pinochet has in the mass murder department, I’m not really capable of the same level of shock as is Christopher Hitchens. The current ruler of the Sudan, General Omar Bashir, has racked up around 100 times as many dead as did Pinochet and Bashir does not even play in the truly big leagues of genocide ( not yet, but give him time). So the normative issue here really isn’t one of body counts.

wu ming of ProgressiveHistorians , gets the reason for Pinochet’s “celebrity” status among dictators, right:

“Pinochet came to power in a military coup on September 11th, 1973, backed and advised by the Nixon regime as and bankrolled by corporations such as ITT, Anaconda and Kennecott, as well as banks such as Chase Manhattan and Bank of America, against the democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende, uncle of Chilean author Isabel Allende. Allende was later found shot to death, ostensibly as a suicide, but more likely assassinated. Piniochet’s death squads tortured and killed political dissidents, leftist intellectuals, and musicians such as Victor Jara, with exceptionally gruesome methods, and without the families of los desparecedos ever knowing their fate. And all the while, the American government happily supported those crimes, out of fear for peacefully elected socialists.”

In other words, Pinochet was not only an evil, murderous and vainglorious thug, more importantly, he was a successful counterrevolutionary ! That’s why Pinochet is accorded the political attention less competent but equally (or more) sinister ex-dictators like Baby Doc Duvalier, Suharto and Idi Amin are denied.

Allende’s martyrdom ( I agree with wu ming that Allende was probably assassinated) has long obscured his close ties to the Soviet and Cuban intelligence services that preceded his election and the large financial investment the KGB secretly made in Allende’s political career ( slush funds that mirrored the better known CIA payments to Allende’s political rivals) [1]. That Allende wished to bring Chile into ” the socialist camp” in an alliance with Cuba and the USSR is fairly certain. Less certain, is the domestic regime he might have eventually imposed in Chile, had he outmanuvered his opponents on the right and consolidated his rule, but ” peaceful” and ” democratic” would have been unlikely descriptors.

While long memories of the Left and Pinochet’s own affectation for comic opera fascist uniforms, have propelled Pinoochet into a league of infamy where comparisons are regularly made with Franco, Milosevic and Hitler, a far better historical analog might be the Roman dictator Sulla. It was Sulla, whose bloody career was was a mix of dreaded proscriptions and sound structural reforms that stabilized the late republic and restored prosperity. It was Sulla, who surrendered power and enjoyed a luxurious (if notorious ) retirement, even as his fellow citizens did not again breathe easily until Sulla himself drew his last.

Let Chile catch its breath.

1. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin. The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB And the Battle for The Third World, p. 69-85

A MANIFESTO FOR THE MARKET-STATE?

Dr. Richard Florida of The Creativity Exchange has put out a ” Creative Compact“, a social contract of sorts, for the knowledge-based, increasingly networked and open-source age. It struck me as fitting the mold of an attempt to hypothesize a social contract for Philip Bobbitt’s emergent ” Market-State” by helping to guarantee a maximization of opportunity, one that does not neatly fit into a partisan column.