Why Study War? – Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal
Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether. It’s no surprise that civilian Americans tend to lack a basic understanding of military matters. Even when I was a graduate student, 30-some years ago, military history—understood broadly as the investigation of why one side wins and another loses a war, and encompassing reflections on magisterial or foolish generalship, technological stagnation or breakthrough, and the roles of discipline, bravery, national will, and culture in determining a conflict’s outcome and its consequences—had already become unfashionable on campus. Today, universities are even less receptive to the subject. This state of affairs is profoundly troubling, for democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.
The Enemy Late Acknowledged – National Review editorial
Two reactions are appropriate to the Bush administration’s decision to place Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. First, one should cheer. Second, one should ask how much longer it will take the president to resolve the contradiction at the heart of his Iran policy. One should cheer because the Revolutionary Guard is among the world’s most effective forces for barbarity and chaos. Separate from Iran’s regular military, it espouses the revolution-exporting ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei (the latter of whom possesses ultimate control of its actions). It has killed Americans gladly, as at the Khobar Towers. Its current specialty is killing American soldiers in Iraq, through Iraqi proxies, with armor-piercing bombs. These things alone do not make it a terrorist group in the precise sense of that term, but its arming and financing of Hezbollah certainly does. Likewise the massacres of civilians that its aid to Iraqi militants has made possible. To designate the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist entity, then, is to acknowledge reality. Yet there is something decidedly unrealistic in the idea that the Revolutionary Guard can be separated from the Iranian government as a whole. (The distinctions got even more jesuitical when it emerged that the State Department might not designate the entire Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, but simply its Quds Force, composed of special covert units.) There is no getting around the fact that the Revolutionary Guard — including the Quds Force — expresses the will of Iran’s highest rulers. If what it does counts as terrorism, they count as terrorists.
Tougher on Iran – Washington Post editorial
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a sprawling organization involved in myriad activities, including guarding borders, pumping oil, operating ports, smuggling, manufacturing pharmaceuticals, building Iran's nuclear program -- and supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq. According to the Pentagon, one-third of the U.S. troops who died in Iraq last month -- 23 soldiers -- were killed by "explosively formed penetrators," sophisticated bombs supplied by Tehran. Iran also delivers rockets and other weapons to Shiite militias; on Sunday, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch said that about 50 members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps were operating in the area south of Baghdad, where they are "facilitating training of Shiite extremists." In effect, the Revolutionary Guard, a radical state within Iran's Islamic state, is waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible. In response, the Bush administration is considering categorizing the Guard as a "specially designated global terrorist" organization under a post-Sept. 11 executive order aimed at blocking terrorists' access to their assets. The measure is reportedly part of a package the administration is considering to increase pressure on Iran at a time when it is defying U.N. orders to freeze its nuclear program and is showing no hint of flexibility in talks with the United States and the European Union. This seems to be the least the United States should be doing, given the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq. What's puzzling are the murmurs of disapproval from European diplomats and others who say they favor using diplomacy and economic pressure, rather than military action, to rein in Iran.
National Stress in Iraq – H.D.S. Greenway, Boston Globe
National stress has come to Iraq in spades. The chaos and mutual hatreds that America has unleashed cannot be stuffed back into Pandora's box with a David Petraeus surge, no matter how the Bush administration might wish it. Throughout Iraq's brief history as a united country, neither Kurds nor the Shia have been given a reason why it is better to be Iraqi first and Kurdish or Shi'ite second. The Kurds retain the fiction of a united Iraq to suit their purposes of the moment, but no one believes for a second that the Kurds will ever again be willingly controlled by Arabs. The Shia want the power they have always been denied, and which the Americans handed to them in a free election. Now the Americans are unhappy with what they have wrought, and want to blame Iranians for arming their coreligionists. In the meantime the Sunni Arab states, some of them our allies, arm their Iraqi coreligionists. And all are destined to disagree on the division of the Iraqi spoils. Into this emotional and highly charged mix, Americans are still hoping to bring back the order they lost in the first moments of their occupation by a pathetically feeble escalation.
French Diplomacy Takes Step in a New Direction - Bronwen Maddox, London Times
It is never an encouraging sign when the fate of a country is thought to turn on one person, or one meeting. But the arrival yesterday in Iraq of Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, is an important step. It signifies the willingness of France under President Sarkozy to work with the US in the Middle East, and even in Iraq. That move, which could lay the ground for broader international involvement in Iraq, is one of the more encouraging developments of the past months. Kouchner’s arrival follows the corncobs-and-hamburger informal summit between George Bush and Sarkozy. It shows that Sarkozy intends to put clear distance between himself and his predecessor Jacques Chirac, even on the most sensitive subject of Iraq, where Chirac had broadcast to the world his satisfaction at having foreseen the US’s predicament. Since Sarkozy’s election in May the two countries have begun cooperating on Iran, Lebanon, and Syria; Kouchner’s visit offers the hope of extending that to Iraq. He arrives as relations between Britain and the US over Iraq have turned irritable; it is hard to see that as a coincidence. As Britain plans its withdrawal from Iraq the US needs a new partner, even if merely a diplomatic one, and France is well placed to step into that gap.
We Won't Defeat Terrorism by Fighting Each Other - Con Coughlin, London Daily Telegraph
It's not the constant barrage of rockets raining down on their heavily fortified compound in Basra that is sapping the morale of British troops. It is the seemingly endless salvos of invective that are being directed at them on an almost daily basis from across the Atlantic by America's top brass. It has been a long time since the reputation of the British military has taken such a severe battering from what, after all, is supposed to be its closest ally. British and American officers, the majority of whom have trained and risen through the ranks together on NATO exercises, often indulge in the banter that goes with intense professional rivalry. While having a grudging respect for the British Army's professionalism and dedication to duty, American officers cannot help themselves when it comes to ribbing their British counterparts about having to rely so heavily on superior American firepower and resources to conduct their operations. The British, for their part, question the Americans' gung-ho, shoot first, ask questions later attitude, while being deeply envious of the fact that, when it comes to procuring equipment, they get whatever they need - and in abundance. If - as seems increasingly likely - British troops do withdraw, it will be the Americans who provide covering fire for the retreating convoys. But the irreverent tone of the exchanges has changed dramatically since the Bush administration's mounting frustration with what it regards as the British military's failure in Basra has erupted into the open.
The Blame Game Begins – Robert Fox, Guardian
When British troops begin the final pull back from Basra city over the next month, it will mean more than just a "reposturing", as the current military lingo has it, for the UK military presence in Iraq. It is now showing the first real indication of a parting of the ways between Westminster and Washington over Iraq since Tony Blair secretly signed up British troops to the Bush invasion plan at Crawford in April 2002. The blame game has already begun. At the weekend the hawkish Pentagon adviser Stephen Biddle said the British had cut and run from Basra and that US forces are likely to have to go down there to "sort the mess out", by defeating the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr. This, superficially at least, suggests profound ignorance about the capabilities of US forces in Iraq, and of the true situation on the ground in and around Basra The US does not have the forces to take and hold Basra, no more than they can take and hold simultaneously, Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi, Baquba, Kirkuk and Mosul. The British forces never intended to take and hold the southern cities - occupation was never on the cards. British generals are now saying privately that the army has achieved all that it can tactically in Basra with such frequency that this is now a matter of public record. Their view, which is shared by the Foreign Office, is that it is time to hand over local control in Iraq's richest oil province to Iraqis. "The solution may not be what we might have wanted in the first place," a senior office said to me in the past few weeks, "but we have said we are going to give it back to the Iraqis, and that's what we're going to do.
A Proxy War for the Provinces of the South - The Independent leader
The killing early yesterday of the governor of Iraq's Muthanna province offers the latest proof that, however bad the situation in Iraq might appear to be, it can, and probably will, deteriorate. Muhammed Ali al-Hasani, a Shia, is the second governor of a southern province to be assassinated in 10 days. Murthanna, moreover, was the first province to be transferred to Iraqi jurisdiction by the British military. This does not bode well, either for the eventual tidy withdrawal of the British contingent or for the Iraq they would leave behind. It may be argued that there are special circumstances. Washington's much-publicised "surge" has brought calm to some former hotbeds of insurgency in central Iraq. Fallujah is one such trouble-spot that is experiencing some respite. Rather than stemming the violence, however, the "surge" seems increasingly to have displaced it - to the fringes of the Kurdish north and to the Shia south, both of which enjoyed relative peace before. The inescapable conclusion must be that even the present US troop level is too low to pacify all Iraq. A second conclusion is equally inescapable: that no improvement can realistically be expected.
War’s Chilling Reality – Bob Herbert, New York Times (subscription required)
HBO’s contribution to an expanded awareness of the awful realities of war continues with a new documentary, “Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq.” Mr. Gandolfini, one of the executive producers of the film, steps out of his Tony Soprano persona to quietly, even gently, interview 10 soldiers and marines who barely escaped death in combat. The interviews are powerful, and often chilling. They offer a portrait of combat and its aftermath that bears no relation to the sanitized, often upbeat version of war — not just in Iraq, but in general — that so often comes from politicians and the news media.
You Voted for this Ridiculous War, Reid. So Go Fight It – Martin Samuel, London Times
The British Army in southern Afghanistan is now consuming bullets like at no time since the Second World War. The casualty rate is even higher, considering the small size of the force. Captain David Hicks, killed in action this month, became the seventh member of the 1st Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment to die in four months. And this was the mission that John Reid, the former Defence Secretary, brayed might be completed without a shot being fired when he committed 3,700 troops with a stroke of his pen in 2006. He should have gone, too, shouldn’t he? He should have got that random tap on the shoulder and his fare to an ant-infested crater in a desert, with a one in 36 chance of an early transfer to a body bag. “Give us a call from time to time, John Boy. Tell us if it living up to expectations. Is that gunfire I hear in the background? Well, fancy. Still, best push on. Next time you want to make any judgment calls on military strategy, you know where we are.” In the way that Peter Cook was the comedian’s comedian, so Reid’s Helmand campaign is the foreign policy disaster’s foreign policy disaster. It is one for the purists; one for those who thought the Iraq war was close, but no cigar. From its humble beginnings as a justifiable mission to find Osama bin Laden, overthrow the Taleban and rebuild a nation in 2001, it has moved on to various scattergun targets including reconstruction, defeating the drugs trade, winning hearts and minds, combating insurgency, mentoring a new Afghan army and police force, building another new nation (we left that last one half-finished, like all bad workmen), redirecting local agrarian policies and providing Afghan women with education. Most consistently it has been a terrifying fight for survival.
Dealing with the Challenges of Military Interventions – Jeremy Kinsman, Toronto Star
There are actually fewer shooting wars today than usual. But Canadian politics have been unusually linked to the three main internal conflicts that have already killed more than half a million civilians in and around Darfur, Afghanistan and Iraq and displaced several millions more. Darfuris, who are victims of cruel internal repression by Sudan, have not been protected because of strategic distraction elsewhere, but numerous Canadians believe we ought to be there. The international interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq triggered insurgencies whose consistently underestimated force has tied the West down. The Afghan intervention was sanctioned as necessary by the international community, and so Canada took part. The Iraqi intervention was a war of bad political choice that was not internationally sanctioned and Canada stayed out. Afghanistan dominates our news coverage because Canadian soldiers are at risk. While the nature of our involvement is unpopular, there is a wish to see Afghanistan succeed. But the Iraq conflict that superseded Afghanistan as the U.S. priority is reported as a hopeless imbroglio and viewed in Canada more as a Washington political story. To humanitarian interventionists, the Darfur agony has been under-reported. They blame the duty in Afghanistan for preventing Canada from sending troops to protect civilians in Darfur. Contrary to rosy advice given Paul Martin when he launched his impromptu Darfur peace initiative, it is a current fact we could not do both. In any event, Canadian or any NATO forces are politically unacceptable to Africans for front-line Darfur duty. Where are these three conflicts going?
The Peace Racket – Bruce Bawer, City Journal
An anti-Western movement touts dictators, advocates appeasement—and gains momentum. If you want peace, prepare for war.” Thus counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Sun Tzu offered essentially the same advice, and it’s to him that Vegetius’s line is attributed at the beginning of a film that I saw recently at Oslo’s Nobel Peace Center. Yet the film cites this ancient wisdom only to reject it. After serving up a perverse potted history of the cold war, the thrust of which is that the peace movement brought down the Berlin Wall, the movie ends with words that turn Vegetius’s insight on its head: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.” This purports to be wise counsel, a motto for the millennium. In reality, it’s wishful thinking that doesn’t follow logically from the history of the cold war, or of any war. For the cold war’s real lesson is the same one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: conflict happens; power matters. It’s better to be strong than to be weak; you’re safer if others know that you’re ready to stand up for yourself than if you’re proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your unwillingness to fight. There’s nothing mysterious about this truth. Yet it’s denied not only by the Peace Center film but also by the fast-growing, troubling movement that the center symbolizes and promotes. Call it the Peace Racket.
U.S. Aim to Arm Sunnis a Mistake - R.K. Ramazani, Philadelphia Inquirer
The repeated breakdown of balance-of-power strategies for the Persian Gulf stems from profound differences between the historical experiences of Europe and the Middle East. In Europe, power-balancing promoted peace after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which marked the end of wars over religion. Thereafter in Europe, power-balancing assumed that the people's highest loyalty was to the nation state. But in the Middle East, ties to fragile states remain subordinate to primordial loyalties to family, religion, sect and ethnicity. Power-balancing among such entities is the proverbial castle-building in the sand. Massive American arms sales to Arab Sunnis against Shia Persians today are bound to fan flames of wider conflicts. The American invasion of Iraq has undermined the millennial Sunni order, while Shia power has increased. Sunni Arab states now fear the rising power of Shia Iran, Shia domination of Iraq, Shia ascendancy in Bahrain, and the unrest of the Shia minorities in other Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf. Of particular importance, the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia deeply resents the discriminatory policies of the Sunni regime. Saudi Shias are concentrated in the eastern province where most of the kingdom's huge oil fields and export terminals are located. Unprecedented Shia empowerment in the region may yet transform the Persian Gulf into the "Shia Gulf," home to the lifeblood of the global economy.
Take Al Qaeda to Court – Kelly Anne Moore, New York Times
As the need to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility becomes more urgent, the question that derails all conversation on the subject is, “Yes, but what do we do with the detainees?” Some have proposed a new national-security court, a special system to detain and try terrorism suspects, as an answer. Proponents of such a system say that terrorism cases are too complex for ordinary federal courts. In particular, they argue that the federal courts are overburdened and too limited by the procedural guarantees of the Constitution to handle evidence without compromising intelligence sources and methods. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States does not need a new and untested detention system for terrorists. The existing federal system has a proven track record of dealing with complex prosecutions.
Pakistan’s Unfulfilled Promise - Joseph Loconte, Weekly Standard
U.S. government reports and independent human rights groups agree that the shadow of religious extremism is growing larger. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) wants the State Department to name Pakistan a "country of particular concern." And there's plenty to be concerned about: The nation's religious schools, or madrassas, promote a curriculum that "remains extremist and includes exhortations to violence." Blasphemy laws threaten harsh sentences--including the death penalty--for defiling Islam, the prophet Muhammad, or the Koran. Injuring the "religious feelings" of individual citizens, whatever that slippery phrase may mean, is prohibited. Religious minorities--such as Shia Muslims, Ahmadis, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Christians--face social and economic discrimination. Once accused of blasphemy or other crimes, they can expect lengthy detentions and attacks on their homes and houses of worship. "The government often fails to protect religious minorities from sectarian violence," concludes a recent Freedom House report, "and discriminatory legislation contributes to a general climate of religious intolerance."
Egypt's Unchecked Repression - Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Washington Post
This month marked the fourth anniversary of the disappearance of Egyptian journalist Reda Hilal. Rumors about the involvement of a secret government death squad tasked with silencing detractors of the ruling Mubarak family in this and other disappearances -- such as that of Libyan dissident Mansour Kikhia in Cairo in 1993 -- have spiked in recent weeks. On Aug. 8, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights reported that it had confirmed more than 500 cases of police abuse since 1993, including 167 deaths -- three of which took place this year -- that the group "strongly suspects were the result of torture and mistreatment." The organization previously found that while Egypt's population nearly doubled during the first 25 years of Hosni Mubarak's regime, the number of prisons grew more than fourfold and that the number of detainees held for more than one year without charge or indictment grew to more than 20,000.
Calculated Risk – London Times leader
Turkey, long the crossroads between Europe and Asia, is itself at a crossroads. Abdullah Gul, the country’s Foreign Minister, and a member of a political party with a deep Islamic past, yesterday failed to be elected to the presidency. Neither Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, who presented his controversial minister for this post before his victory at the recent general election and has now done so again, nor Mr Gul himself, was disappointed. His elevation to this extemely sensitive role is merely a matter of time. Mr Erdogan knows that in the third and final round on August 28 a simple majority is sufficient for success and the votes exist to do this. It will be a profound moment for the country and all those who would see it as part of Europe. The key question for all Turks, and for the country’s neighbours and partners is whether the powerful army will accept the outcome. It forced the general election by issuing an e-mail that implicitly threatened intervention if Mr Gul were elected; since then, it has made no further comment beyond reaffirming its previous views. Although still the most popular and trusted institution in Turkey, the army, which sees itself as guardian of Kemal Atatürk’s secular legacy, was taken aback by the size of Mr Erdogan’s win in the general election as well as by the strong warnings from Washington and Brussels that military intervention would be a costly blunder. It has probably therefore decided to hold its fire and see how Mr Gul performs in office.
A Promise to Secular Turkey – Washington Times editorial
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul again declared last week his intention to seek the presidency, and, although he fell short of the two-thirds majority needed in the first round of voting in parliament yesterday, Mr. Gul is all but assured of winning the job next week in the third round, when only a simple majority is required. When the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) nominated Mr. Gul in April, the move precipitated a political tumult that included large street protests, a caustic warning from the Turkish military and a call for an early election from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This time around, with Mr. Gul's victory almost certain, the response has been different, in large part because of the AKP's sweeping parliamentary victory last month. Many observers, including this page, argued that because only two parties in 2002 crossed the 10 percent threshold required to win seats in parliament, the AKP's commanding majority was not a true refection of its electoral support. After the AKP won more than 46 percent of the vote last month — an increase of more than 12 percent — in an election in which more than 84 percent of Turks went to the polls, that criticism is no longer valid. Turkish voters obviously knew that Mr. Erdogan's party backed Mr. Gul, and his supporters, with good reason, have portrayed the election results as both a mandate for the party and an endorsement of a Gul presidency. Parliamentarians from Turkey's largest opposition party again chose to boycott the vote, but their abstentions won't be enough to prevent Mr. Gul's election.
Turk or Muslim? - Tulin Daloglu, Washington Times
I was on vacation at a luxury hotel in Marmaris the day the ruling Islamist rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) announced Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as its presidential candidate. It reminded me that the challenge to Turkey's prosperity is, indeed, built in the social dynamics. Luxury hotels reserve part of the beach for their customers, but the rest is open to the public. Within an hour of the AKP announcement, a group of locals bombarded the beach — women with headscarves and shalwars, with their underwear visible after swimming, men and children with their underwear. It was unusual for them to appear this way on such a beach. They were definitely not Islamists, but they simply did not know any better. Yet, the tourists were visibly curious. Soon the scenery turned them off. They left the beach for the pool within the hotel compound. Two recent polls offered extremely interesting insights on perceptions of cultural and religious propriety. A survey conducted by Bahcesehir University, one of Turkey's leading universities, showed that 88 percent of AKP supporters believe that wearing a bathing suit on the beach is a sin. Sixty-three percent of National Action Party (MHP) supporters and 14 percent of Republican People's Party (CHP) supporters agree. Turkey is surrounded by sea on three sides. Another poll earlier this year by the Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of Turks define themselves as Muslim first. Evidently, it brings new challenges as well as responsibilities. This week, a Turkish plane bound for Istanbul from Northern Cyprus was hijacked. According to passenger accounts, the hijackers asked the passengers to raise their hands if they are Muslims. Everyone did. The hijackers said that as Muslims they had no intention of hurting the passengers. Unfortunately, no one seemed bothered by the hijackers' attempt to build empathy with fellow Muslims. No one was willing to consider or discuss what the hijackers would have done if there had been non-Muslims on the plane — or to make the point that it is nonsense to mix religion and criminal acts. Turks refuse to address these issues unless the West forces them to. Then they behave as reactionaries.
A View of the Summit – John Morrison, Guardian
African summits? Apart from the drummers and tribal dancers at the airport, they're much like summits anywhere else. Run up the flags, line up the Mercedes, switch on the TV cameras and keep the masses at a safe distance. But whatever the burning issue at the top of Africa's agenda, you can guarantee that the elderly men around the table will ignore it or fudge it before returning home. That's a pretty cynical view, but it's the verdict I came to after three years reporting these bunfights in southern Africa in the 1980s. I even shared the occasional pot of hotel tea with Thabo Mbeki, then the exiled ANC's foreign minister. Since then, South Africa has joined the party, but judging by last week's Southern African Development Society (SADC) summit in Lusaka, Zambia, the habit of brushing difficult issues under the carpet hasn't gone away. By failing for the umpteenth time to get to grips with the issue of Zimbabwe, the SADC leaders are seriously undermining Africa's credibility on the world stage. Once again, President Robert Mugabe has emerged unscathed and uncriticised by his peers. "We feel that the problems in Zimbabwe have been exaggerated," says Zambia's president Levy Mwanawasa. Well, tell that to the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled abroad and the millions left behind who are struggling with political dictatorship and economic collapse. The continent's leaders seem to be in denial, but I think they may get a rude awakening the next time they lobby for a better global deal for their countries on the world stage. Gordon Brown and other leaders in the developed world, who have expended serious political capital trying to force through debt relief and more aid for Africa, can hardly be expected to do more on these issues if African leaders pretend that the continent's most spectacular example of bad government doesn't exist.
How Many Dead in Darfur? – Eric Reeves, Guardian
How many people have died as a result of Khartoum's genocidal counter-insurgency campaign in Darfur? What is overall mortality since February 2003? These questions have been much in the news recently, particularly in the wake of a decision by Britain's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) that an advertisement by the Save Darfur coalition and Aegis Trust had inappropriately represented as fact a death toll of 400,000, when this was a matter on which opinions diverged. Notably, the ASA did not find, as erroneously asserted by Sam Dealey in the New York Times, that the advertisement "violated codes of objectivity and truthfulness". Nor is the ASA likely to be the best source for understanding the complexities attending the competing claims of various mortality estimates, ranging from Khartoum's figure of 9,000 to the figure of well over 450,000 generated by this writer.Why does any of this matter? Here it's useful to recall that in February 2004 - one year into the most violent and destructive phase of the Darfur genocide - the official UN estimate for total human mortality was 3,000. In retrospect this is of course an absurdly low number, although there certainly was no effort to deceive by the UN. But only activist efforts - not those of professional epidemiologists - succeeded in compelling a closer examination of the data available, which were in fact extremely limited. Activist pressure also helped ensure that subsequently a significantly wider and more authoritative set of data would become available, although not always meeting specific epidemiological standards.
The Reality of Ukraine’s Revolution – Lawrence Uzzell, Christian Science Monitor
Americans should look at reality rather than Hollywood-style happy endings when they gauge the progress in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states. Many Americans still prefer the memory of Boris Yeltsin's stirring 1991 speech atop a Moscow tank, but they ignore the aftermath: the suppression of legislators and journalists. More than two years since the electrifying "revolutions" in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, it is time to reflect on the results. The reality is disappointing in contrast with the hopes of Ukraine's 2004 "Orange Revolution." The bad news: Ukraine is moving at a glacial pace in reforms. The good news: At least Kiev has avoided any major deterioration. Ukrainians can be grateful that they won secession peacefully in 1991 from hypercentralized Moscow. According to a draft report published by Washington-based Freedom House, the overall "democracy score" in Ukraine became slightly worse from 2006 to 2007. Ukraine's current performance in economic freedom is declining, as rated in the free-market report published annually by The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. In fact, Ukraine's economy is seen as slightly less free than Russia's. The January report stated, "Ukraine is ranked 40th out of 41 countries in the European region, and its overall score is much lower than the regional average."
Dollar Diplomacy – Niall Ferguson, The New Yorker
It was “the most generous act of any people, anytime, anywhere, to another people,” its chief administrator declared. It was “among the most noble experiences in human affairs,” its representative in Europe said. It was “the most staggering and portentous experiment in the entire history of our foreign policy,” the young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who served on its staff, wrote. Foreigners concurred. It was “like a lifeline to sinking men,” according to the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. It “saved us from catastrophe,” a manager at Europe’s largest tire factory declared. Sixty years after Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlined the need for economic aid to stimulate European recovery, in a speech at Harvard University’s commencement on June 5, 1947, the plan named after him continues to be fondly remembered in donor and recipient countries alike. In our own time, liberal internationalists have periodically called for new Marshall Plans. After the collapse of Communism, some economists maintained that the former Soviet Union was in need of one. More recently, there has been desultory talk of Marshall Plans for Afghanistan, Iraq, and even the West Bank and Gaza. When critics lament the allegedly modest sums currently spent by the American government on foreign aid, they often draw an unfavorable contrast with the late nineteen-forties. Yet some people, at the time of its inception and since, have questioned both the Marshall Plan’s motivation and its efficacy. Was it really so altruistic? And did it really avert a calamity? More popular history is written about war than about peace, and very little concerns itself with economics. Greg Behrman’s “The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe” (Free Press; $27) is admirable for bringing to the potentially arid story of America’s biggest aid program all the literary verve and drama one associates with the best military and diplomatic history. Behrman’s approach recalls that of Margaret MacMillan in her recent book “Paris 1919,” about the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War. Like “Paris 1919,” “The Most Noble Adventure” is an account in which individual actors predominate over economic calculations. But, whereas MacMillan’s book had few, if any, unalloyed heroes, Behrman’s has a surfeit. I counted five.
Eroding Sovereignty – Frank Gaffney Jr., Washington Times
Sovereignty is an abstraction to which few Americans give much thought. We take it for granted, like the air we breathe or the water we drink. Yet, the essence of the most successful political experiment in history — the United States of America — is the sovereign power entrusted by the people via our Constitution to our elected, accountable representatives. Unfortunately, such sovereignty is endangered by those who believe the world of nation-states is too disorderly for efficient global commerce and the peaceable resolution of disputes. Call them the Transnational Progressives (conservative wit John O'Sullivan coined an abbreviation he insists must be spelled Tranzies). They prefer supranational arrangements like the European Union, run by wholly unaccountable bureaucrats. The trouble for the Tranzies is that a lot of folks who value their freedoms — notably, the American people and many who represent them in Congress — generally don't fancy such arrangements. They see them for what they are: big government on steroids, unwieldy, unchecked and unresponsive to the will of the ruled. So it is necessary for the Tranzies to resort to extraordinary means to supplant national governments. The European Union's architects have acknowledged privately they could never have pulled it off if the publics of the Continent's various nations understood what was afoot. Today, we know a similar effort is at work behind the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) on the agenda at the Montebello Summit. In fact, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests doggedly pursued by Judicial Watch, we know there are some two-dozen trilateral "working groups" whittling away our sovereignty — er, "harmonizing" our rules and regulations on immigration, the environment and health care with those of Mexico and Canada. This effort, as one of the SPP's admirers has put it, involves the nation-state's "erosion by stealth."
Soldiers and Suicide: Numbers are Disturbing – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial
The sad cost of the prolonged military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan has been made painfully clear in a sobering new report on U.S. Army suicides. Last year, stress overwhelmed a distressing number of American troops, and suicides in the ranks hit a 26-year high. The Army reported 99 confirmed suicides in 2006, up from 87 in 2005. Whatever efforts the Army has made to address the mental health problems of its active duty forces must be re-evaluated and perhaps redoubled in light of the latest suicide rates. The new figures also show there were 948 attempted suicides last year. More than 25 percent of those who succeeded in taking their own lives did so while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. The suicide toll on a half-million-person Army translates to a rate of 17.3 per 100,000 -- the highest since the Army started counting in 1980. So far this year, 44 soldiers have committed suicide, 17 of them while deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army listed failed relationships, legal and financial troubles and the stress of the job as factors behind the soldiers' suicides. The most common deployment location for suicides and attempts was Iraq.
Saint Augustine – Michael O’Brien, National Review
The Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) organization within the Department of Defense recently announced its twelfth annual Employer Support Freedom Awards. The ESGR awards single out 15 exemplary companies from across the nation that have been especially diligent in offering support to their Guard and Reserve employees who have been called up to fight overseas. Guard members, Reservists, and family members of troops nominated more than a thousand companies over the past year. Regional committees then narrowed down the more outstanding companies, which were further reviewed by a committee of Defense officials, high-ranking military members, and several small-agency heads. Fifteen companies were chosen, and are to be awarded the “Freedom Award” in mid-September — the highest honor a civilian employer can receive from the Pentagon. This year’s winners range from large corporations — like General Motors — to small family businesses — like Augustine and Sons, Inc. — to state employers, such as the New Hampshire State police. While the winners of the award are diverse, the stories of companies reaching out to soldiers and their families in need are often the same.
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