Capping OBL seems to have ended an era in some ways, although events will grind away past the convenient point which historians will pick to delineate said era. That inconvenient History failed to stop for Francis Fukuyama twenty years ago, and it doesn't care what I think either, although that won't keep me from railing about stuff.
Status of the current Middle East/North African imbroglios? Still fucked, the lot of them from Syria to Libya (Tunisia a possible exception). Things as I write this are particularly interesting in Syria as the Assad dynasty for my money only has weeks or months to live. Bashar seems (unlike his dad) to be only brutal enough to piss people off, not enough to completely cow or eliminate them. Of course the playing field has changed since Hama in 1982 and with cellphone video cameras and social media it is likely no longer possible to keep the lid on military operations against your own people. Also, this isn't a Muslim Brotherhood exclusive uprising like Hama; pretty much everyone not in the Baath party has had enough of it.
I have a lot of company in being perplexed over what "we" are trying to accomplish in Libya. Unless he is killed my prediction remains that Gaddafi will outlast NATO (not "Nato" as I keep seeing it in the media) and retake as much of the country as he wants, possibly hiving off Cyrenaica as a sop/out to the rebels and international community. The latter part is what I would do, and he has in fact offered that already. This has been rejected by people who don't have a better plan, so the whole thing will likely end with a whimper as the coalition bombing Gaddafi's forces (and home) falls apart.
What else? Iran's nuclear program moves forward haltingly after the Stuxnext worm and it's progeny/imitators. The more I think about Iran having nukes as a deterrent against US interference, the more I feel they are wasting money and effort. If the US/Israel were going to hit Iran for any reason (and there are several excellent ones) the window is wide open even if Iraq is not cooperative. There are of course other reasons they want them, reasons not lost on the Saudis as discussed here earlier.
Further east we're back to Pakistan again. It's been abundantly clear for a long time that Pakistan is not on our side in the big picture, if for no other reason than it is a failing state with extremist Muslim tendencies and nuclear weapons. They could not be trusted at any level with the details of the Bin Laden raid, and if they couldn't be trusted with that they can't be trusted with anything we need from them. India is the West's natural ally in that area, and efforts should shift to them; I believe this is happening, but as long (oh, how much longer?) as the US is in Afghanistan they will be dealing with Pakistan.
That's the mid-latitude Eurasian belt, or at least the high points. The world is a busy place, but you will notice that I've little to say about sub-Saharan Africa. The reason for that is simply that I consider most of it to be beyond hope, and not capable of causing North America much more trouble than it already does. This is still "Arithmetic on the Frontier" but the "Frontier" to me these days is moving to the boundaries of our continental shelf. Probably some stuff closer to physical home next post.
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