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BRAVO!

President Bush makes my day !

Sure, executive orders can be repealed by any future administration but the move isn’t entirely symbolic either; legally, Federal agencies must now err a little closer to respecting property rights under the 5th amendment. A rare gesture these days.

It was also a nice political rebuke to SCOTUS for their nod toward oligarchy in Kelo v. City of New London.

RECOMMENDED READING

Some interesting things for interesting times:

Sonny at FX-Based has Part III of “In Defense of EBO” up. Sonny’s series is written as a refutation of “Bloodless theories, bloody wars; Easy-win concepts crumble in combat“, a highly critical piece by Ralph Peters.

Steve DeAngelis of ERMB explains “Development -in-a-Box” in the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Earl of Prometheus6, unlike most of us, has some firsthand experience with the big IC/NYT story of the day.

This next one was fun. At least for me, and highly recommended:

Curzon of Coming Anarchy unsheathes dagger and sword to avenge Coming Anarchy’s patron saint, Robert Kaplan, from a somewhat prissy and and faux-intellectual attack job. Defending Kaplan brings out Curzon’s more creative powers of rebuttal and this post does not disappoint.

Bill Petti of The Duck of Minerva and I probably would not agree on all aspects of foreign policy but I like the way he chooses to frame his analysis.

PurpleSlog coins a phrase that will create instant arguments, regardless of the merits of the underlying issue. On the other hand, however you care to phrase it, he’s discussing an intellectual phenomenon we have seen before.

That’s it!

THE NEW YORK TIMES AS Al QAIDA’S COUNTERINTELLIGENCE ARM

The New York Times revealing the apparently very narrow intelligence monitoring of international financial transactions by suspected al Qaida couriers, operatives and financiers by the Treasury Department and IC was exceptionally damaging to American national security.

Unless the Bush administration is up to something else entirely different, publication here was particularly irresponsible and pointless partisanship by the Times editors. Covert or cut-out financial transfers of funds are the lifeblood of jihadism and terror operations and detecting these activities is now going to be immeasurably harder, as more al Qaida funds transfers are shifted to alternate, underground, networks. Great job guys !

As for the leakers inside the IC who first alerted the Times, they need to be identified, their security clearances revoked, fired and prosecuted.

PETER THE GREAT’S REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE

I’m finding that I share a number of interests with Lexington Green of Chicago Boyz, including it seems, a fondness for scholarship in Russian history. If you like that subject and know it well enough to see the salience between Russia’s past and the problems Russia and the West face today, then you should like Lex’s post, “Russian Backwardness Revisited“.

Green quotes University of Chicago historian Dr. Richard Hellie‘s review of Russia in the Age of Peter the Great:

“Regrettably, neither Peter nor his admirers and imitators had the slightest understanding that human rights and dignity and personal autonomy were and are absolutely essential to sustain a cohesive, responsible, self-generating, productive society. For half a millennium autocrats, absolute rulers, and dictators in Russia (and elsewhere) have been picking and choosing from the Western technological and cultural package in hopes of surviving, maintaining independence, or overtaking and surpassing the West. The lesson would seem to be that anything less than the entire package will yield disappointing results in anything other than the short term. “

And Lexington himself goes on to add:

“It is noteworthy that Peter the Great himself contrasted Russia with England. It is noteworthy also that Hellie elaborates that by noting the absence of “social cohesion”, the rule of law and the sanctity of contract. Alan Macfarlane, picking up from F.W. Maitland has shown the central place of the law of trusts in the growth of civil society in England. (Macfarlane video of a lecture on Maitland here.) The peculiar freedom of the English courts from monarchical control was also uniquely English. And a society based on contract not status was much more elaborated in England than elsewhere. These Anglospheric inheritances were distinctly Western, and spread reasonably quickly and took decent root in Western Europe. Alas, for the poor suffering people of Russia, they have not transplanted so well in the foreign soil of their Byzantine-derived civilization, with — as John points out — the additional historical baggage of its period of Mongol rule. “

Interesting analysis.

It is certainly true that the lack of personal autonomy in Russian culture has proven to be a primary stumbling block in terms of retarding national development. It is a phenomena that went beyond a mere absence of freedom – the concept of individualism was simply alien and incomprehensible in the Russia of Peter’s time and long, long after that. The Russian nobility, the Muscovite boyars and the later Petrine dvoriane, were never ” free” men in the modern sense. Instead, the nobles were “Raby” or slaves, of the Tsar. Titled slaves, exalted slaves but still, theoretically speaking, slaves. Of all the peoples of Old Russia only the Cossacks, who owed feudal military service to the Tsar as a collective host under their Atamen, could consider themselves free .

Peter the Great’s westernization policy, as limited as Hellie may describe it, was nonetheless radical. Peter was attempting to impose a secular state structure on a people for whom the only conception of government was personal, patrimonial and holy and for whom Russia itself was a vague abstraction. To give you some idea of how drastic a change of mentality Peter tried to impose, when Peter forced the nobility to adopt Western modes of dress and shave off their beards, not a few of this class, the most advanced in Russia, saved their shorn beards in little boxes for fear of not being able to enter Heaven without them.

Moving such men in a single generation to the worldview of the West, with its more individualist conceptions and complex civil society was for all practical purposes, an impossible task. Which is why Peter had to surround himself with foreigners like Francis LeFort and parvenu creatures like Alexander Menshikov in order to carry out his reforms. In all likelihood, Peter’s transformation of Russia was understood by most of his Russian comtemporaries only as the inexplicable whims of the Tsar, something to be endured. Which is why a person like England’s Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, arguing the necessity of judicial independence with King James, had no Russian equivalent.

Such a thing was beyond imagining to the Russian mind, including Peter’s, who saw himself as the first servant of an all-powerful state.

THE INTELLECTUAL BOOM IN COIN DOCTRINE

Jesus! Things must really be going poorly if the liberal internationalist leaning, FSO journal, American Diplomacy is publishing articles calling for a reinvigoration of American counterinsurgency capabilities.

They are even talking about “shaping the strategic environment”.