Coyote Blog

Powerline notes that this week is the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, or Wacht am Rhein as the Germans called it.  However, I will say that "nuts" was not my favorite quote coming from the 101st Airborn.  My favorite was the one from about every soldier in the 101 when asked how it felt to be "rescued" by Patton.  Their nearly universal answer was, and still is, that no one in the 101st ever thought they needed to be rescued.  I don't know if it is apocryphal, but as Captain Winters in Band of Brothers says "We're paratroopers, we're supposed to be surrounded."

Yes, I know the Cuban government sucks.  No, I do not want to give it a moral sanction.  However, our continuing total embargo of Cuba smacks more of saving face at this point rather than a very effective strategy to end communism on the island. 

While it is important to have sanctions against totalitarian governments, cutting off all contact with the democratic nations is just counter-productive.  Cross-pollination of democratic ideas has done more to bring countries like China and South Africa closer to the democratic fold than any number of sanctions.  In particular, limitations even on intellectual contact between Americans and Cubans makes no sense any more.

First, Scrappleface reports:

After a week of tough negotiating by France, Germany and Britain, the Islamic Republic of Iran has conceded to reduce the size of nuclear warheads it will use in the eventual bombing of Paris, Berlin and London.

I might have thought this was humor until I read this line, which seems all too real:

Iran has pledged to stop enriching uranium, while retaining 20 operating centrifuges, and continuing to process plutonium

LOL.  Even better, Scrappleface also reports that CBS is considering emulating recent moves by the Ukraine press to abandon bias:

Inspired by a public pledge from Ukrainian TV journalists to provide unbiased reporting from now on, CBS News has launched an internal investigation to assess the potential impact of such a move.

Go read it all.

This is a great idea, and one I missed the first time it came around.  It seems that the US has finally gotten tired of the U.N. being a big dictators club (the membership of the U.N. human rights committee is particularly appalling) and is doing something about returning the U.N. to some sort of sane and moral mission.  More here about the newly forming democracy bloc at the U.N. in a Reason article by Jonathan Rauch.

The idea has been given new currency with the growing movement to draft Vaclav Havel to replace the reprehensible and corrupt Kofi Annan, a movement currently being cheerled by Glenn Reynolds

The Knowledge Problem makes a good point:

Why has this administration said so little publicly about the development of capitalism, not merely democracy, in Iraq? Vernon [Smith] said that it's probably because we don't know how to "build" a market, and certainly Hayek and other Austrians would agree.

If the neocons are going to argue for aggressively promoting our values while toppling totalitarian regimes, they better figure out how to do it.

For years, a number of more conservative groups have been warning that the messages given by Islamic leaders and holy men in English for world consumption were far different than the messages given to their own people in Arabic.  And indeed, their translations of Arabic speech aimed at Muslims can be pretty scary.  Few Westerners believed or wanted to believe these warnings, preferring to hope that most arabs were like themselves, basically peaceful and supportive of democracy and plurality. 

For years, I was skeptical of these claims.  I felt like it would require extraordinary laziness and incompetance on the part of the media to just digest the English statements of Islamic leaders without ever checking out what they were saying in Arabic.  However, over the past couple of years, I have lost all faith in the work ethic, intelligence, and dilligence of the western media, and have come to believe that it would be enitrely possible for Arab leaders to manipulate Western media in this way.

For this reason, a part of this article (hat tip LGF) about German reactions to Musilm violence in the Netherlands is interesting to me.  It seems that, after the recent violence, the media finally had the idea to actually listen in on what some Islamic religeous leaders are saying in Arabic:

"These Germans, these atheists, these Europeans don't shave under their arms and their sweat collects under their hair with a revolting smell and they stink," said the preacher at the Mevlana Mosque in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, in the film made by Germany's ZDF public TV, adding: "Hell lives for the infidels! Down with all democracies and all democrats!"

Beyond the bizarre body hair reference, this is NOT what the media has been saying that Islam is teaching here in the west (I don't imply this represents the majority, but the media has essentially claimed it does not exist at all).

By the way, the proposed "solotions" strike me as nuts, and should also be enlightening to anyone in the US who looks up to Continental Europe as a counter-weight to percieved creeping fascism with the Bush Administration.  I may not be a fan of the Patriot Act, but nobody in the Bush administration, with far more provocation, has suggested anything as loony as making all religeous ceremonies English-only.

See Updates Below -- Update #1: Sarin test kits, most probably. Update #2: MSM still waddling along, left in the dust by blogs

This is not a huge surprise, but it is still bad news.  Sarin find announced a few days ago confirmed in pictures, and it sure looks legit.  Memo to Republicans:  This is bad news.  Do not make the same mistake as Democrats in deciding what is good and bad news based on how it vindicates or hurts Bush.

Larger version is picture #2 in USA Today Slideshow

Story courtesy of Powerline and Captains Quarters

Update #1

More information in the link above at Captains Quarters.  The betting line now is that these are Sarin test kits, rather than Sarin, which makes more sense anyway given how they were found.

It is amazing to me that USAToday and others could have this story now for days, and make less progress on what is really in this picture than amateur blog readers can in a couple hours in a comment thread.  Interesting.

UPDATE #2 (1AM EST Thursday): 

It has been well over 8 32 hours since readers at a number of sites, including Powerline and LGF, deconstructed this photo and concluded that these were Sarin test kits.  USAToday has still not changed their story or their caption.

Some of the "official" biographies of Arafat in the media are starting to make me sick.  Arafat was not a slightly flawed statesman and freedom-fighter.  Arafat was a leading terrorist who has squandered the Palestinians chances to get a real homeland for themselves.  When given the chance at statehood, he was unwilling and unable to create any sort of rule of law, and quickly demonstrated that he was really seeking violence and chaos, not stability and happiness, for his people.  You can find "alternate" obituaries here and here.

America experienced no major terrorist attack on its soil in the run-up to the election.  This can't be for lack of trying.  If the terrorists bombed Spain, at best a peripheral country in the war on terror, to influence its election, you know that they would have loved to have bombed the Great Satan.  But they didn't.  All we got was a VHS valentine from Osama.

Thank you to the US Military, to the administration, to the department of homeland security, to the FAA, to the Phoenix Police, to the FBI, to the CIA, and to everyone else who made this non-event possible.  And, thank you to all the citizens of the US, who, whatever issues they might have with those in power, would never harbor a terrorist.  This sounds like an obvious statement, but its not.  It is in fact our best defense against terrorism.  Europe is much more vulnerable, because it has communities and groups and various cities who ARE willing to aid and abet terrorists.

I posted here a while back about folks that seemed to be living in a very different universe, whose assumptions about the world were nearly unfathomable to me. This article by John Leo seems to get at this issue pretty well. It helps explain why, though I tend to be skeptical about the war in Iraq, I could so easily get turned off by the anti-war left.

For some reason, a portion of our country has adopted France as the standard bearer of "anti-imperialism" (or at least anti-US imperialism). France publicly positions itself similarly, trying to make itself the leader and counterweight to US "Imperialism". I will leave aside for now the argument as to whether the US's recent actions constitute "imperialism". I will instead focus on the French as a role model.

The first thing that struck me was how long the French tried desperately to hold on to their colonial empire. Both the US and Great Britain either liberated or came to an acceptable living arrangement with their major colonies within a few years of the end of WWII. Both seemed to come to terms with the fact that the colonial era was over. The French, in contrast, were still involved in bloody conflicts in Indochina and Algeria to retain their empire through the late 50's and even into the early 60's.

So, I decided to do a little research to understand the relative success of French and Anglo-American colonies. Of course, when judging the success of a former colony, a lot of things come into play, and certainly the freed colony must take a substantial amount of responsibility for its own success and political freedom. However, after a bit of research, it is instructive to see how well prepared for independence Britain, France, and the US left their colonies. Did they leave the country with democratic systems in place and a capable local ruling class, or did they just suck the country dry and try to prevent any locals from gaining any capability.

To make this analysis, I have selected a number of each country's key colonies. Some of the smaller African and island nations have been left out. I also realize that I left off some of the ex-British middle eastern colonies, but I am too tired now to add them back in.

I have used two pieces of data to judge an ex-colony's success. First is GDP per capita, corrected for purchasing power parity, found in the 2003 CIA fact book via World Facts and Figures. The second is the Freedom index prepared by Freedom House.

Continue reading ‘French vs. Anglo-American "Imperialism"’ »

Back some years (decades, eek!) ago when I was in college, I used to really burn hot in political arguments. I could not let any statement go from anyone without an argument. And, being a libertarian, I could always find something to disagree with someone about. Since then I have mellowed a lot, and can let a lot of things pass.

Today, its hard to resist arguing about the war in Iraq, but I often find myself in the odd position of opposing the war in Iraq but disagreeing with most of the premises and assumptions of other people I meet who are opposed to the war. Though I oppose the war, I find myself sharing assumptions about the world that are more prevalent among proponents of the war. This might have made me uncomfortable at one point of my life, but as a small-government individual-rights libertarian you get used to this kind of thing, after seeing everyone argue if the government should be in the boardroom (Democrats and increasingly Republicans) or the bedroom (Republicans and some Democrats) or both (Pat Buchanan).

Over time, I have devised a couple of tests to get at these conflicting assumptions. These tests have evolved over time but they seem to retain their power to sort out people who are operating in an alternate reality.

Here are the two tests, in their current form (though longer for this print edition). In each case, choose either A or B, based on which seems more correct to you. Elements of both A and B will have been true from time to time and in isolated incidents. Try to choose which represents the fundamental truth to you.

Continue reading ‘Before We Argue - Lets See If We Are Living In The Same Universe’ »

In part 1 of this series, I didn't talk much about the "global test" but rather spent some time giving my views on the war in Iraq. In brief, I opposed this war, but for reasons very different than that of most anti-war activist. I appreciate the need for the US to use force in the world from time to time, not the least for the quite salutary effect it can have on other miscreants who foresee that they might meet with the same fate (e.g.m see "Lybia").

One argument that I did not ever find compelling was the fact that we did not have enough allies or a large enough coalition. First, those putting forward this argument tend to go so overboard that they tend to insult those who did join us as "coerced" or "bribed". I think we owe a lot more to countries like Great Britain, Australia, Poland, Italy, and Spain (v1.0) than to intimate that they were suckers to join us. And what's with the strategy of saying that we did not have a large enough coalition, then actively trying to reduce it?

My hypothesis from day 1 of the war was that France was an ally of Iraq, and never going to join us, but that it didn't matter one way or another because alliances in the Muslim world would be much more important than with countries of fading glory in Western Europe. Therefore, the rest of this post will address two issues:

1. How realistic or unrealistic it was to expect help from our "traditional allies" and
2. Our mixed record of success with the allies that may matter more

Germany and Japan

Germany and Japan spent much of the 20th century unsuccessfully attempting to export totalitarianism to their neighbors by force. Both countries are rightfully reluctant to send their forces on cross-border adventures (in fact, Japan in prohibited in doing so by the constitution the US wrote for it). I have no problem with both countries taking a 100-year or so timeout on foreign adventurism.

France and Russia

The evidence continues to flow in. France and probably Russia were active allies of Saddam and the Baathist dictatorship in Iraq. Period. No amount of diplomacy, short of maybe a nuclear threat, was going to cause them to support an invasion of Iraq. They were no more likely to join in on an attack on Iraq than Mussolini and Italy were likely to join the Allies in WWII against Germany. The evidence emerging includes:

1. France and Russia were given a deal not long before the war to split the development rights to all of the oil in Iraq. Though it was not known then, the Duelfer report shows this to have been a direct strategy of Saddam to gain their security council vetoes. MSNBC had an article BEFORE THE WAR discussing the deal with France and Russia. Incredibly, America Haters, and even the author of this article, spend more time talking about the US going to war in Iraq for the oil. There has never been a scrap of evidence that the US went in for the oil, and very clear evidence that France and Russia were given lucrative oil deals to prevent the invasion. So who was acting for the oil?
2. France and Russia were easily the largest arms suppliers to Iraq. We knew this before the war and we have confirmed it in spades today. Every day our troops get attacked by French weapons, most of which were shipped to Saddam AFTER the embargo was in place and many within months of the start of the war. Iraq is not the only place where this is happening. While the US has in the past been careless or outright irresponsible in some of the places its weapons have ended up, today France, China, and Russia are not the key arsenals of totalitarianism.
3. France and Russia were key enablers in the UN, both passively, by defeating safeguards, and actively, by playing a direct role, of Saddam Hussein's stealing billions of dollars from the oil for food program. This story is still unfolding, and at this point I will leave aside the payments of oil vouchers to individuals, because it is not clear whether these acted as bribes (though they sure look like them). However, even without this aspect, the rape of the oil for food program is a miserable story of corruption, as detailed in part here and here.

The Scotsman has been on top of this story, and has a couple of great articles here and here.

Other Nations?
What about other nations. China? Yeah, right, the boys from Tiananmen square love promoting democracy over totalitarianism. Their actions to protect the Sudanese government from criticism over the current genocide there (again, in part, to protect their oil rights) have shown their true colors. And who else is left? Send in the Peruvian Air Force? The answer is, no one who could really help. When people say that we did not have a coalition, they primarily mean France, and you can see how likely that would have been. As an aside, I find it incredible that liberals of all stripes want to align themselves with French Foreign policy, perhaps the most illiberal in the last 50 years of all the wester democracies and certainly the country most responsible for making colonialism a bad word.

Allies that Really Matter in this War

In attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, the allies that should really matter are its powerful neighbors. I would argue that Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia are all more important allies in these wars than France. So how have we done with these countries - the answer is a mix of successes and failures.

In Pakistan, we probably have had our greatest diplomatic success. Certainly, on 9/12, as we were trying to decide what to do next, Pakistan seemed to be more of a problem than part of the solution, and certainly their nuclear program was worrisome. But the Bush Administration has done a good job at turning Pakistan into an ally (at least in the near-term), with Pakistan agreeing to base troops and fighters in the country, agreeing to renounce ties to the Taliban, and, perhaps most amazing, agreeing to actually use its troops and security personnel to help hunt down hiding Taliban members. Without Pakistan on our side, defeat of the Taliban would have been impossible, with Pakistan acting as a safe harbor for terrorists much like Laos and Cambodia did in the Vietnam war. Even better, all this has been achieved without ruffling too many feathers in India, which is in itself a diplomatic victory, similar to wearing a Yankees shirt in Fenway Park and not starting a fight. I know that Pakistan still has a ton of problems, but we are getting as much as we could ever expect from them in the near-term (heck, even allying with Stalin made sense for a few years get reach some key goals).

In countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, we probably reached about a diplomatic draw. Neither country would be highly enthusiastic about either an invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, but both provided at least modest logistics support. Neither, however, have ceased being tremendous breeding grounds for terrorism or have done much to deter those in their countries supporting terrorism. Certainly a reckoning is coming sometime in the future with Saudi Arabia, but, for now, they have been about as supportive as necessary (and no more).

It is difficult to paint our diplomatic efforts with Turkey in the run-up to the war as anything but a failure. Turkey clearly had many concerns about the war, from negative economic impact to encouraging their own Kurdish minorities to get frisky should Iraq's Kurds gain their freedom. However, given our good relations with Turkey over the last half-century, we should have been able to find a diplomatic formula to secure their cooperation. Even more, our failure was particularly deep given that Turkey's support seemed to fall apart at the eleventh hour, when these type of things should already have been worked out.

In Summary

It still flabbergasts me that so many people run around worrying about France's participation in our alliance. It strikes me that France's participation was both stupendously unlikely as well as of little practical value (beyond their UN veto). Much more important was our success with Pakistan and failure with Turkey. A new type of war in different parts of the world will require different alliances than the European wars of the 20th century.

UPDATE

Interesting post from Captains Quarters about the complicated nature of our relationship with Pakistan and the change in Al-Qaeda strategy to try to drive Pakistan out of its alliance with the US.

The Duelfer Report has become sort of a political Rorschach test for both opponents and supporters of the war in Iraq. Opponents of the war (examples here and here) will point to the findings that Iraq, at the time of the invasion, did not have WMD's and probably got rid of them soon after sanctions began and that inspections seemed to be working. War supporters (examples here and here) will point to the findings that Saddam was carefully maintaining the capability to produce WMD's in anticipation of restarting the programs when sanctions lifted. Rather than read all these conflicting reports, go to the original - the executive summary of the report is clear and you can get the gist in a page or two.

The point of the post is really not about WMD's, but about other countries and their attitudes about US and the war. As quick background, I supported the war in Afghanistan, because they obviously harbored those who attacked us and I felt it was important to set the example of a strong response to a terrorist act (rather than the weak response to the USS Cole or the first WTC bombing). The fact that Afghanis are having their first election in millennia and tens of millions of people, particularly women, are freed from the shackles of totalitarianism is just gravy. I opposed the war in Iraq, mostly because I did not think it was our job as a country, or my job as a taxpayer, to help clean up the world. I am not dumb -- I get the argument about stopping Hitler in Czechoslovakia, but I was worried that success would be pushing on a balloon - we might push back terrorism and totalitarianism in Iraq, but what about Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iran, etc?? Hitler was a one-headed monster - Islamic fascism unfortunately seems to be a many headed hydra. I know that President Bush would argue that a free and sortof democratic Iraq could be the seed around which moderation crystallizes in the Arab world. I would dearly love this to be true, but I fear that it is wishful thinking.

However, I will say that I have occasionally wavered in my opposition to the Iraq war. One reason is that I am thrilled to see Saddam gone and the Iraqi's trying to make a go of a free society. I wish them well. I cannot understand nor tolerate people who allow their opposition to the war and/or the president to cause them to root for failure as the Iraqi people try to make a go of it.

Second, as is sometimes the case as a libertarian, I have found myself, in my opposition to the war, uncomfortable with many of my bedfellows.

For example, many folks who oppose the war seem to feel that they actually have to go overboard and defend Saddam and pre-war Iraq. An extreme example is Michael Moore's ridiculous Fahrenheit 9/11, which tried to paint a happy picture of Saddam dominated Iraq. I find that position indefensible. Saddam sucked, and Iraq under Saddam sucked. The lighter version of this position is the Kerry campaign's position that we have substituted one bad thing (Saddam) for another (chaos and violence), with the implication that the Iraqi people are (or should be) unhappy with the trade. This is ridiculously disingenuous. Absolutely no one taking this position, that chaos is worse than dictatorship, would take this position for their own country. The proof? When faced with the choice of adopting a more statist security system in this country (Patriot Act, detentions, etc.) to avoid chaos and violence (e.g. future terrorist attacks) the anti-war crowd opposed these measures. And I promise, for all the talk of Bushitler, etc, these measures are trivial compared to what was done to keep "order" in Saddam's Iraq. So it strikes me as tremendously hypocritical to advocate for the Iraqi's a course no one would consider here in the US.

The other issue on which I disagree with my anti-war brethren is this notion of not building up a sufficient alliance or getting enough global approval. This is actually the point I have been trying to get to in this post. For months, I have suspected that this discussion was both naive and misdirected. Naive, because all along I was pretty sure that France and Russia were Saddam's allies, and no more likely to join a coalition against him than Mussolini was going to join the allies against Germany. Misdirected, because if we are going to wage a war with Islamo-fascists, help from countries like Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia is probably far more important than getting a few hundred MP's from France or Germany. Recent reports, including the Duelfer report and investigations of the ongoing UN oil-for-food program scandal, have begun to put factual flesh on the bones of my suspicions.

Since this post is going long already, I will continue in part 2.

UPDATE #1

I had a couple of emails already on Iraq. Let me clarify. I do not outright oppose the use of the military, even unilaterally, as a foreign policy tool. Also, I am not one of those idiots that somehow want to believe that terrorists are only attacking us because they have some valid complaints, and if we would just peacefully resolve their valid complaints, they would go away. Most terrorists and the nations that support them are bullies that hate our entire way of life, and who respond to nothing other than force. I have no problem agreeing that fighting terrorism will require military action against sponsoring nations, not just police work.

However, the attack on Iraq and its timing never quite made sense to me. I think of Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, et al as a bunch of teenage boys who have been raising hell in the neighborhood for over a decade. After years of ignoring their crimes or at worst giving them a stern talking to, we suddenly take one aside (and not necessarily even the one most culpable) and shoot him. This made some sense with Afghanistan, since we could draw a direct line of culpability between the Taliban and the 9/11 attacks. But was it time to shoot Iraq? And while there certainly were links between Iraq and terrorists, were they really worse than Syria's or Iran's or Saudi Arabia's. Certainly shooting Iraq got the group's attention, that we can hopefully mine diplomatically over the coming years, but shooting Afghanistan should have had a similar effect, and we never really tried to leverage that before we moved on to Iraq.

UPDATE #2

By the way, leaving now in Iraq and giving up and/or giving in would be a disaster. Reagan's retreat from Lebanon and Clinton's retreat from Somalia were disasters to US Foreign Policy. Our best weapon is to give the opposition no hope of victory. Once you demonstrate there is a point at which you back down, you will always be driven to that point by the opposition. I disagreed with the decision to invade Iraq, but now that we are there, there is no turning back the clock. Our presence is a fact and we must make it a success or it will really be a waste. . Relevant quote:

However, there is an element of truth in Roberts's remark. For a time, the humiliatingly rapid defeat of Iraq's military (with the tacit consent of many Iraqi soldiers, it's important to add) will cause angry young men in the Muslim world to enlist in greater numbers in the effort to wipe out that stain on Muslim honor.

But it is not an infinitely expanding cycle. There is not an endless supply of young Muslim men willing to kill -- or die -- to inflict painful but strategically meaningless attacks on a grimly determined America.

But if America is not grimly determined, then that changes everything. Instead of recognizing the futility of giving their lives to kill Americans, these Muslim young men will be filled with hope that their sacrifice might yield results.

Got another email today from a friend sending around the "Its time to panic they are going to reinstate the draft" email. This is the third time in a week I have been forwarded this email. Unfortunately, the email is an urban legend at best, or a campaign tactic at worst, and has been debunked all over - the best is at FactCheck.org. I guess I can forgive my friends, since CBS News fell for it too. I once embarrassed myself forwarding a similar fake email about a change in credit privacy laws. I sent it indignantly to senators and web sites and friends. OOPS, all a hoax.

Please, please. Before you pass on these emails to your friends and embarrass yourself like I did, Google it. Just plug in the email subject line, like I did here for the draft email. You will see a bunch of fairly ideological sites promoting the same story - with exactly the same language - this should be big red flag. You will also see a number of credible 3rd parties and urban legend sites debunking it.

The point of this post was about crazy emails floating around, but given that I mentioned the draft one, the house voted down the draft bill sponsored by a Democratic representative 402-2 today.

PS - if you have not seen FactCheck.org, check it out. They seem as fair as anybody in terms of equal opportunity debunking of both political parties.

UPDATE

Never trust men over 60 with the computer. Our Vice President managed to direct tens of millions of debate viewers to FactCheck.com, which is a anti-Bush/Cheney site. LOL. Perhaps even funnier, by the time debate viewers found the real site at Factcheck.org, they likely saw this headline on the front page:

Cheney & Edwards Mangle Facts. Getting it wrong about combat pay, Halliburton, and FactCheck.org.

OOPS. Dick, just answer the question yourself.