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Not the Way to Intervene – Paul Saunders, Washington Post
Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan are frustrated that the United States has not been able to count on the U.N. Security Council to provide legitimacy for American military action, and they want the world's democracies to decide when intervention is appropriate [" The Next Intervention," op-ed, Aug. 6]. But the cure they propose is much worse than the disease -- and it could undermine not only vital U.S. interests but also American efforts to promote freedom. First, Daalder and Kagan fail to offer a persuasive answer to what they correctly call the "critical question" in winning international legitimacy for military action: who decides. Their answer -- "the world's democracies" -- is shallow. How will the world's democracies decide to endorse American use of force? Not democratically -- that would create a new General Assembly, a U.N. body even less willing to do American bidding than the Security Council.
Salute and Disobey? - Richard Myers and Richard Kohn, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Lawrence Korb and Michael Desch, Foreign Affairs / Real Clear Politics
Michael Desch's "Bush and the Generals" (May/June 2007) contains significant errors of fact and interpretation. One of us, Richard Myers, has direct knowledge and personal experience with the subject; the other, Richard Kohn, has been studying and observing American civil-military relations for 45 years. Bush administration officials did not, as Desch charges, "overrule" the military "on the number of troops to be sent" to Iraq or "the timing of ... deployment." Both were the result of over a year of questioning and discussion back and forth, and the final plan contained contingencies for different numbers of forces depending on the course of the campaign. To be sure, the combatant commander often found the probing and questioning of plans by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff distasteful. But in the end, all involved supported the final plan regardless of the disagreements along the way.
Wrong Way Out of Iraq – New York Times editorial
As Americans argue about how to bring the troops home from Iraq, British forces are already partway out the door. Four years ago, there were some 30,000 British ground troops in southern Iraq. By the end of this summer, there will be 5,000. None will be based in urban areas. Those who remain will instead be quartered at an airbase outside Basra. Rather than trying to calm Iraq’s civil war, their main mission will be training Iraqis to take over security responsibilities, while doing limited counterinsurgency operations. That closely follows the script some Americans now advocate for American forces in Iraq: reduce the numbers — and urban exposure — but still maintain a significant presence for the next several years. It’s a tempting formula, reaping domestic political credit for withdrawal without acknowledging that the mission has failed. If anyone outside the White House truly believes this can work — that the United States can simply stay in Iraq in reduced numbers, while ignoring the civil war and expecting Iraqi forces to impose order— the British experience demonstrates otherwise.
Bad Guys Make Even Worse Allies – Stephen Braun, Los Angeles Times
The United States seems to be missing some guns in Iraq. Somehow, the U.S. military has lost track of 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 80,000 pistols that were supposedly delivered from our caches to Iraqi security forces. It was classic bureaucratic bungling, the Government Accountability Office concluded last month in a report criticizing the Pentagon's failure to keep proper records and track weapons flows. But there may have been another factor -- the government's dangerous and bumbling use of bad guys. Consider the case of one particular bad guy, Viktor Bout -- a stout, canny Russian air transporter who also happens to be the world's most notorious arms dealer.
Delaying the Inevitable – Nicholas Kristof, New York Times (subscription required)
As we struggle to extricate ourselves from Iraq, it’s useful to look at how the Soviet Union handled a similar position in the 1980s. Then we should do the opposite. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 based partly on an intelligence failure analogous to our own in Iraq: they believed that their poorly behaved puppet in Kabul was poised to switch loyalties to the United States. By 1986, the Soviets wanted to end the Afghan war, and tried some of the same approaches that we have tried or talked about: a new constitution, a new leader, a policy of “national reconciliation.”
On the Road to Jalalabad – Ann Marlowe, Wall Street Journal
Sen. Hillary Clinton has cynically charged that we are "losing the fight to al Qaeda and bin Laden" in Afghanistan. But on my eighth trip to Afghanistan (last month) I saw that the trend lines are up, not down. The first encouraging sign came in Dubai as I boarded my flight for Kabul. Afghanistan's main private air carrier, Kam Air, has recently added a second daily round trip between Kabul and Dubai. Once in Kabul I bought a new SIM card for my mobile phone and found that what would have cost me $40 a few years ago and $9 in September last year now cost only $3. Not surprisingly, mobile phones have spread to a broad section of Afghanistan's 24 million people, with the two major providers, AWCC and Roshan, claiming a total of three million subscribers, up from two million in September last year. Amin Ramin, managing director of AWCC, estimates that his company alone will count two million subscribers by the end of 2007 and three million by the end of 2008. I spotted similarly hopeful trends in three heavily Pashtun provinces--Nangarhar, Laghman and Khost--in eastern Afghanistan.
Fencing with Tehran – Los Angeles Times editorial
The Iranians are riding high these days. While the United States is hemorrhaging $5 billion a month in Iraq trying to stabilize Iran's flattened former enemy, Tehran is hauling in $5 billion a month in oil revenues. Iran is making life miserable for the United States in Iraq by allowing weapons to flow to Shiite fighters who are attacking U.S. troops there, if it isn't arming and training the insurgents itself. And Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite who lived in exile in Iran, held hands with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week during a chummy visit to Tehran, to the annoyance of President Bush. Meanwhile, Iran's centrifuges are probably spinning away, enriching uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons. Although Russia has taken the welcome step of refusing to deliver fuel to Iran's Bushehr civilian nuclear reactor, countries with commercial interests in Iran continue to balk at imposing U.N. Security Council economic sanctions with teeth. People who have met unofficially with senior Iranians recently describe them as self-confident, even cocky, and uninterested in bettering relations with the U.S.
Bush Takes Right Stance on Pakistan: For Democracy - Mort Kondracke, Roll Call / Real Clear Politics
President Bush seems to have decided -- and rightly so -- that truly "free and fair elections" are the best way to maintain crisis-plagued Pakistan as a stable ally in the war on terrorism. That's what Bush said last week in a press conference, and the administration backed it up with a phone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf warning him off a plan to stay in power by declaring a state of emergency. The administration apparently is encouraging a deal between Musharraf and Harvard- educated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto that would allow Musharraf, America's problematical ally in the war on terror, to remain president if he allows free elections, which polls indicate Bhutto would win.
The Coming Urban Terror – John Robb, City Journal
For the first time in history, announced researchers this May, a majority of the world’s population is living in urban environments. Cities—efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital—are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence. Over the last few years, small groups’ ability to conduct terrorism has shown radical improvements in productivity—their capacity to inflict economic, physical, and moral damage. These groups, motivated by everything from gang membership to religious extremism, have taken advantage of easy access to our global superinfrastructure, revenues from growing illicit commercial flows, and ubiquitously available new technologies to cross the threshold necessary to become terrible threats. September 11, 2001, marked their arrival at that threshold.
Stopping the Genocide – Washington Times editorial
Like any progress toward ending the genocide in Darfur, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1769, which authorizes a joint United Nations-African Union force for western Sudan, is welcome news. It's important that the Security Council was able to pass a unanimous resolution, even a diluted one. U.S. economic sanctions were essential to really putting the pressure on Sudan. That China, which has previously provided diplomatic cover to Khartoum, voted in favor of this resolution could be seen as a new willingness in Beijing to bend to international pressure. Beijing may be concerned about the possibility of protests at the 2008 Olympics and may have come to the realization that its multibillion-dollar investments in Sudan are threatened by ongoing violence. Most likely, however, is that China signed on because the toughest parts of the resolution, such as sanctions for non-compliance, were left out.
Stabilizing Colombia - Washington Times editorial
Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar program to assist Colombia's fight against narcotics trafficking, needs fundamental changes to increase its efficacy. As Congress hashes out the program's structure and budget this fall, Democrats seeking to ensure taxpayer dollars are used responsibly run the risk of hampering Bogota's efforts by denying the government critically needed funds and crucial funds and a U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement. Plan Colombia, conceived and approved during the Clinton administration, has received more than $5 billion over six years. It was initially marketed as a means to dramatically reduce coca production and its northward flow. However, half a decade later, Colombia's coca market remains robust, with the volume of hectares used for coca cultivation only minimally reduced, seemingly due to the current ineffective and potentially hazardous aerial spraying system for eradicating coca. Legislators should continue investigating the feasibility of alternative methods of eradication without undermining the program's basic infrastructure that has managed to keep coca production from expanding exponentially.
A Bit of Socialism is Okay for Cuba – Neil Clark, The Australian
The debate on Cuba is rather similar. For the Right, Cuba is an example of where socialism inevitably leads to: repression, poverty and enslavement. For many on the Left, including filmmaker Michael Moore, Cuba is a beacon, a socialist paradise in a hostile sea of capitalism, a progressive model whose policies on education and health care ought to be copied throughout the world. Yet both the Right and the Left hold a picture of Cuba which is far removed from the truth. Cuba is a repressive, poverty-stricken country, yet it cannot accurately be described as socialist, if by socialism we mean a society which is based on egalitarian principles. The problem with Cuba is not that it's too socialist, but that it's nowhere near socialist enough. But don't expect either its right-wing detractors or its left-wing supporters to admit it.
Russia’s Mental State – London Daily Telegraph editorial
Things are different in modern Russia, where, as we report in horrifying detail today, it takes only modest influence to secure the incarceration and chemical torture of a business rival, wealthy relative or prosecution witness, and where the sectioning of citizens hostile to the Kremlin seems set to become once more a fact of political life. That Vladimir Putin is still treated by civilised nations, especially those of the G8, as the president of a democracy is an indictment of their cowardice, for since he came to power Russia has again become a corrupt dictatorship, barely distinguishable from the Soviet Union under Khrushchev.
Irresponsible Threats – New York Times editorial
The last thing China needs is to give American politicians new excuses to erect protectionist defenses against Chinese imports. So it is stupefying that some Chinese officials — with the blessing of the government press — have been talking of using China’s enormous cache of American Treasury bonds as an economic weapon. The threats started late last month when Xia Bin, head of financial research at a cabinet think tank, said China should use its gargantuan foreign exchange reserves, heavily invested in American Treasury bonds, as a “bargaining chip” in bilateral negotiations. Then, in The China Daily last week, He Fan, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, warned that if China’s currency appreciated strongly (as many in Washington are demanding), the central bank would be forced to sell dollars, “which might lead to a mass depreciation of the U.S. dollar.”
FISA and the Kook Fringe – Washington Times editorial
In the wake of congressional passage of a bill clarifying the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to ensure that U.S. intelligence agencies can monitor the operations of foreign terrorists operating overseas for the next six months, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid denounced the legislation and said they want to revisit the issue when Congress returns. The bill, signed into law by President Bush, ensures that U.S. intelligence will be able to monitor overseas telephone calls, e-mails and faxes — but that authority expires in February. Unfortunately, the legislation fails to provide retroactive liability protection for companies who could face lawsuits from privacy ideologues for cooperating with government requests to monitor terrorist suspects' communications. The key question today is whether Mr. Reid and Mrs. Pelosi are serious about fighting what will almost certainly be a losing battle on FISA once again or are simply parroting silly rhetoric in an effort to satiate the bloggers and the rest of the lunatic fringe.
Built-in Scandal Potential – Dan Thomasson, Washington Times
By giving U.S. intelligence agencies unfettered, unsupervised access to the overseas telephone calls and e-mails of Americans, Congress has set the stage for a major scandal. If history is any indication, and it generally is, that scandal comes when someone discloses — or leaks, if you will — that the electronic spying is far more invasive than originally presented, despite assurances to the contrary. But in the name of fighting terrorism, the good lawmakers who can't solve any of the nation's domestic problems because of partisan squabbling have agreed in their infinite wisdom that government spies and sub-spies are basically trustworthy and loyal and would never make unwarranted intrusions into the privacy of their fellow citizens. After all, haven't all those who assured them that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction given their word that no honest American's international communications would be the target of eavesdropping?
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