I have said many times before that NATO (not Nato, BBC!) has outlived its usefulness. It is after all the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and as such should stick to its neighbourhood. Afghanistan is an exception since the 9/11 attacks were an attack on a member nation, and Article 5 covers that quite distinctly.
Rebuilding Afghanistan was never in the agreement and I object to it as a bottomless pit for blood and treasure. Certainly routing al Queda and putting the boot to the Taliban government neutralized the immediate threat (as much as reasonably possible) and could be counted as effective payback under the circumstances. Iraq was most certainly NOT a NATO concern, and has done much to put the USA in the situation where they need to be guilting other Alliance countries into stepping up.
Regional confederations of nations with aligned interests are coming together, which is a good thing for them. America is worse than broke and entirely too beholden to the Chinese holdings of US debt and currency to be counted on in South-East Asia, for example. That said, no combination to be found around the South China Sea can stand up to Chinese strong-arm tactics over its ludicrous claimed Exclusive Economic Zone , assuming that China continues to disregard world opinion about it's blatant expansionism.
One can of course compare what China is doing on it's way up with what the US did, and a lot of it is standard Great Power manoeuvring. The South China Sea stuff however is baldly hegemonic and there is no way to spin that one as anything other than screwing over everyone smaller than them in the neighbourhood.
The world is adjusting to the balance of power, much as it did 20 years ago. China is not quite a Superpower, but it's on its way up as the Americans contract, and this leaves local vacuums that China will happily fill. China however is not a monolith, and the cracks are plastered over at the moment.
So, should NATO get involved in a dispute over the Spratly Islands? Certainly what happens in that part of the world is significant to international trade, but the Europeans are almost as boned as the USA, and in any event shy about shooting at anyone who can shoot back. I don't see Canada getting into that, nor any reason why we should. If the Americans think we should get involved just because they are, I don't see it that way, and I don't think the Canadian government (and certainly not the people) will either. Multiply that by all of the NATO signatories, and you have a problem with Mr. Panetta's position.
Piracy in the Indian Ocean? Sure, that's something that affects almost everyone, and doesn't drag us into geopolitical struggles. Peace support (not Peacekeeping!) in Africa, Company to Battalion scale? That sort of thing also can work, provided the area in question has any reasonable chance of being salvaged.
You may see a trend here: smaller countries like Canada can do the smaller stuff, but we have to have a good reason to do so if it's not part of our treaty obligations. If that's what the Americans want, they might get it, albeit appealing to NATO for it renders completely meaningless the terms of that organization. There is this other thing called the UN that was designed to do this sort of job, but we've seen how well that works. Time for everyone to re-evaluate their national interests and possibly re-combine into more relevant organizations to meet those.
Saturday 19 November 2011
Tuesday 8 November 2011
To bomb, or not to bomb?
It now seems imminent that Iran will have its nuclear weapons. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but the place is a flash point in the meantime. There is a lot of handwringing about bombing or not bombing, but I say go for it. But, NOT the nuclear program.
Leaving aside the troublesome aspects of dropping bombs on radioactive material, the nuclear program is something that virtually all Iranians are behind. Hitting this would rally them all and trigger a whole pile of proxy wars with Iranian surrogates from Gaza to Afghanistan.\
While a chance to kill a whole bunch more Hezbollah wouldn't exactly be unwelcome in Israel for example, the current situation of Syria ensures no significant threat from them. Those who say the Israelis would be "mad" to bomb Iran now are not as right as they could be.
What I have advocated before I will advocate again: hurt the regime in Iran, not the people and the infrastructure. Hit all the Quds Force assets you can, the Revolutionary Guard, and anything else that will weaken the mullahs. This will strengthen the opposition while compromising the government's ability to hit back.
Leaving the nuclear program in place is then a gamble that a more reasonable regime will take over and not hand fission bombs out like Hallowe'en candy to Islamic terrorists. To put that scenario in perspective, Pakistan has a bunch of nukes and we never bombed their program.
Pakistan is a lost cause due to fanaticism and failed-state-ishness but Iran has more potential as long as we can help them get some better leaders. Does Iran with a bomb scare you more than Pakistan, in the state the latter is rapidly devolving to? If so, why?
Leaving aside the troublesome aspects of dropping bombs on radioactive material, the nuclear program is something that virtually all Iranians are behind. Hitting this would rally them all and trigger a whole pile of proxy wars with Iranian surrogates from Gaza to Afghanistan.\
While a chance to kill a whole bunch more Hezbollah wouldn't exactly be unwelcome in Israel for example, the current situation of Syria ensures no significant threat from them. Those who say the Israelis would be "mad" to bomb Iran now are not as right as they could be.
What I have advocated before I will advocate again: hurt the regime in Iran, not the people and the infrastructure. Hit all the Quds Force assets you can, the Revolutionary Guard, and anything else that will weaken the mullahs. This will strengthen the opposition while compromising the government's ability to hit back.
Leaving the nuclear program in place is then a gamble that a more reasonable regime will take over and not hand fission bombs out like Hallowe'en candy to Islamic terrorists. To put that scenario in perspective, Pakistan has a bunch of nukes and we never bombed their program.
Pakistan is a lost cause due to fanaticism and failed-state-ishness but Iran has more potential as long as we can help them get some better leaders. Does Iran with a bomb scare you more than Pakistan, in the state the latter is rapidly devolving to? If so, why?
Thursday 3 November 2011
Pusillanimity and the Oakland Soviet
A recent conversation with my father-in-law resulted in him saying that all of these "Occupy" people are "communists". This is fundamentally accurate, and not a surprising reaction from a retired businessman; if the "Death to Capitalism" banners weren't enough to give the game away I don't know what is.
People are starting to get fed up and again hardly surprising given the hijinks in Oakland in the last few days. I don't know if there has been a sifting out of participants so that the most radical are the ones who are sticking it out, but the novelty has definitely worn off even when they're not destroying property and trying to kill public servants. The whole thing is devolving rapidly, the worst example being Oakland. The others (especially in Canada) are varying degrees of useless and just plain squatting, but they are certainly now doing more harm than any possible good.
This means that the continued presence of these communes in business areas is killing small businesses in the vicinity through intimidation, deliberate vandalism, and effective blockade of customers. These people are not fans of the crony capitalism that got the U.S. in the mess it's in, and are certainly NOT in the much maligned (with some cause, some of the time) "1%". One problem (there are many) with not having a set "aim" is the inability to see when things are going badly off-track, as they obviously have done now.
The lefties and fellow travellers pooh-pooh the conservative/capitalist concept of having some idea what the hell you're doing and trying to accomplish, but most of us aren't nihilist anarchists and we like Order. Civilization requires some structure and certainly some common ideas about how things should work, and certainly requires enforcement of basic concepts. The occupiers are discovering, like it or probably not, that when you get more than three people anywhere you start needing organization if you are sticking around.
Supplies and security come right after shelter (often before) and they don't just happen. They require organization and leadership, and you won't have the former without some version of the latter. Now as is my wont, I circle back to the original point.
Oakland's civic reaction to this, specifically that of the Mayor and City Council, has been and to the time of writing continues to be inconsistent, and therefore a guaranteed and de facto disaster. The police have been whipsawed by contradictory orders, and one of the predictable results of this is certain Black Bloc elements in the protest will exploit the resulting chaos, as happened last night (main link). Another is a drop in morale of the police as they realize that their bosses don't have their backs, and no good can come of that.
So, the Oakland Soviet has blockaded the third-busiest port in the U.S. and to "press time" it is shut down. It has been pointed out that this hurts all of the workers who depend on the port for their livelihood; this is where the true colours of the Occupy clowns is shown. It's not about "the 99%", it's about their vague concept that things should be "different". Different how, exactly? I've asked this class of person that question before, and as much as they don't like what's happening the only coherent answer you'll likely get is some variation of "revolution".
So far it's a polyglot of signs about all things except making money and paying taxes, but the black flag has already been flown; how long until we see the red?
People are starting to get fed up and again hardly surprising given the hijinks in Oakland in the last few days. I don't know if there has been a sifting out of participants so that the most radical are the ones who are sticking it out, but the novelty has definitely worn off even when they're not destroying property and trying to kill public servants. The whole thing is devolving rapidly, the worst example being Oakland. The others (especially in Canada) are varying degrees of useless and just plain squatting, but they are certainly now doing more harm than any possible good.
This means that the continued presence of these communes in business areas is killing small businesses in the vicinity through intimidation, deliberate vandalism, and effective blockade of customers. These people are not fans of the crony capitalism that got the U.S. in the mess it's in, and are certainly NOT in the much maligned (with some cause, some of the time) "1%". One problem (there are many) with not having a set "aim" is the inability to see when things are going badly off-track, as they obviously have done now.
The lefties and fellow travellers pooh-pooh the conservative/capitalist concept of having some idea what the hell you're doing and trying to accomplish, but most of us aren't nihilist anarchists and we like Order. Civilization requires some structure and certainly some common ideas about how things should work, and certainly requires enforcement of basic concepts. The occupiers are discovering, like it or probably not, that when you get more than three people anywhere you start needing organization if you are sticking around.
Supplies and security come right after shelter (often before) and they don't just happen. They require organization and leadership, and you won't have the former without some version of the latter. Now as is my wont, I circle back to the original point.
Oakland's civic reaction to this, specifically that of the Mayor and City Council, has been and to the time of writing continues to be inconsistent, and therefore a guaranteed and de facto disaster. The police have been whipsawed by contradictory orders, and one of the predictable results of this is certain Black Bloc elements in the protest will exploit the resulting chaos, as happened last night (main link). Another is a drop in morale of the police as they realize that their bosses don't have their backs, and no good can come of that.
So, the Oakland Soviet has blockaded the third-busiest port in the U.S. and to "press time" it is shut down. It has been pointed out that this hurts all of the workers who depend on the port for their livelihood; this is where the true colours of the Occupy clowns is shown. It's not about "the 99%", it's about their vague concept that things should be "different". Different how, exactly? I've asked this class of person that question before, and as much as they don't like what's happening the only coherent answer you'll likely get is some variation of "revolution".
So far it's a polyglot of signs about all things except making money and paying taxes, but the black flag has already been flown; how long until we see the red?
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