INTL 11/24 Asia Times Online|Spengler-When the cat's away ...

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KK24Ak02.html

Nov 24, 2009
When the cat's away ...
By Spengler

United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates is the Mephistopheles of the Barack Obama administration - not because of his gift for intrigue, which is slender, but because of his capacity to personify non-being. "Everything that arises goes rightly to its ruin," said Goethe's devil to Faust, "so it would be better for nothing to arise."

In his November 20 keynote speech to the German Marshall Fund's (GMF's) International Security Forum on Friday in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Gates portrayed the man who wasn't there. That is the secret of his longevity in public office.

Several hundred attendees, including defense ministers and other senior officials of two dozen countries, waited for a hint about the Obama administration's intentions towards Afghanistan. But the previous week, Obama chose "none of the above" from a list of options assembled by the permanent bureaucracy, so Gates spoke about such pressing matters as a US$45 million grant for Caribbean security, Canada's counter-terrorism training program in Jamaica, and Guatemala's interception of a cocaine-laden submersible craft - in short, about nothing.

Nothing is what American and allied officials had to say about items to which the GMF event held public sessions - Iran's nuclear program, piracy, and the future role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Cabinet officials, parliamentarians and senior military officers went through the motions of discussing policies to which they had no connection, like drones flying patrol after their beehive was burned. The US government lives in Obama's BlackBerry. When it goes silent, the orphan drones of the foreign policy establishment fly in aimless patterns.

As a showcase for the foreign-policy thinking of Western governments, the GMF event looked like a Leonid Brezhnev-era butcher shop. There wasn't much in the glass cases, and what there was, did not seem especially appetizing. That is not the fault of GMF, one of the premier venues for policy vetting, but of its suppliers, the NATO governments.

The GMF focuses on Atlantic issues (it is funded by the German government as a token of gratitude for America's Marshall Plan economic aid after World War II), but it reaches out to every part of the world that touches on Atlantic interests. A rough gauge of the declining prestige of American policy is the absence of Chinese (as well as Indian and Russian) officials. The conference organizers tried for months, without success, to persuade the Chinese government to send an official.

The trouble is that "nothing" is not mere non-being. What stands against "this something, this cloddish world" is not emptiness, as Mephistopheles explained; it is chaos and corruption, rather, the will to pervert and destroy. When America removes itself from the world scene, chaos creeps back in, and it comes in the guise of corruption. For all its flaws, America is the only world power capable of real altruism. In the absence of American leadership, the rest of the world waits dispiritedly for disaster, making sure to look out for the main chance.

A case in point is the problem of piracy, the subject of an on-the-record session featuring the Defense Minister of the Netherlands, Eimert van Middelkoop. Piracy is a business and it is about money, Van Middelkoop allowed, not worth shooting about. Isn't piracy a vehicle for funding international terrorist groups like al-Qaeda as well as a terrorist capability?, a questioner asked. "That is not how I present the problem," the Dutch minister grunted.

Piracy has deep connections to terrorism, in the estimate of every intelligence agency in the NATO sphere, but it is inconvenient to speak of it. A shipping company executive explained why: security for a container ship requires a four-man team and costs $1 million a year per ship. With a thousand ships afloat, his firm would pay $1 billion a year to protect them. It doesn't help that it is already losing more than $1 billion a year due to the global contraction of world trade, which shows no sign of recovery. Ransom costs about $2 million per hijacking, a tiny fraction of the cost of protection. Were the military to provide guards, it would need to deploy 40,000 soldiers for his company alone, at a time when personnel resources already are overstretched.

"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute," went the American slogan during the 1805 campaign against the Barbary pirates. Tribute today seems the better part of valor: when Vladimir Lenin said that capitalists would sell him the rope with which to hang them, he could not have imagined quite so literal an example as Western governments encouraging shipowners to bribe prospective terrorists. At best, banana republic style blackmail, at worst, support for terrorism.

Corruption is the unstated obstacle in the Israel-Palestine problem. With American arms and training, an Arab official said on a background session, the Palestinian Authority "is in full control of the West Bank". It only remains for Israel to return to the 1967 borders with minor land swaps to accommodate a portion of the 450,000 West Bank settlers, cede East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, and allow a token contingent of Palestinian refugees to resettle in Israel, in order to end the conflict. Hamas will be incorporated into a democratic Palestine, the official insisted.

The problem is that Hamas killed the Palestine Authority's (PA's) soldiers and seized their newly-issued American weapons in Gaza in June 2007, in Israel's view: If Israel hands the West Bank over to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, before long they will face a Hamas regime with thousands of Iranian missiles, just as they do in Gaza. Why doesn't the PA return the favor to Hamas, and liquidate some Hamas fighters?, the Arab official was asked. "You are inviting a Palestinian civil war!," he shot back. The trouble is that there already is a Palestinian civil war, but only one side is fighting.

All the training and arms in the world will not persuade the leaders of the Palestine Authority to fight, because they are extremely wealthy men who live in luxury anywhere in the world. Ahmed al-Meghami, then the PA's attorney general, estimated in 2006 that billions of dollars may have been stolen by Palestinian officials. Men with London townhouses and villas in the south of France don't risk their lives. Their Hamas counterparts are quite willing to die and in any case have nowhere to go except safe houses in Damascus. That explains why only one side fights.

Western donors to the PA know this perfectly well; they also know that the putative refugee population is inflated by as many as 1.3 million non-existent souls in order to inflate foreign aid requirements, as I reported on August 18 (Palestine problem hopeless, but not serious). But it is easier to keep the charade going than to admit failure. Cupidity and inertia have produced a criminal enterprise in the guise of a proto-state, vulnerable to liquidation by hard men who are willing to die for what they believe. That is why the Palestinian civil war is a one-sided affair; the other side has no reason to fight.

Turkey, meanwhile, has drifted out of the NATO orbit. Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Iran on October 27 and denounced as "hearsay" claims that Iran intended to develop nuclear weapons and pronounced its nuclear program "peaceful". The chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Turkish parliament, asked whether he shared that assessment, told the GMF event, "I am neutral on the subject."

Obama chose Turkey last April to announce that "America is not at war with the Muslim world", and his administration portrays Turkey as a model of a modern Muslim polity. Turkey's gesture of Islamist solidarity with the Iranian regime humiliates Washington.

What makes Obama's reliance on moderate Turkish Islam all the less credible is the attempts of the Erdogan government to eradicate the country's secular politicians through extra-legal means. The Turkish government is staging one of the most outrageous show trials of political opponents since the Joseph Stalin frame-ups of the 1930s, charging several hundred members of the secular elite with a vast and improbable plot to overthrow the government. Barry Rubin of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think-tank, Gareth Jenkins of Johns Hopkins University and this writer among many others have been warning about an Islamist coup for months (Turkey in the throes of Islamist revolution? Asia Times Online, July 22, 2008.)

The case broke into the mainstream American media on November 21, when the New York Times wrote, "Since 2007, 300 people have been detained during the investigation of an underground group known as Ergenekon, including a writer of erotic novels, four-star generals and other military officers, professors, editors and underworld figures - some of whom appear to have committed no offense greater than speaking in favor of Turkey as a secular state." The belated Times account quotes Professor Jenkins of Johns Hopkins as saying that Ergenekon "represents a major step, not, as its proponents maintain, towards the consolidation of pluralistic democracy in Turkey, but towards an authoritarian one-party state". Not once during the numerous panel discussions on human rights and the rule of law did the Ergenekon putsch come up.

Turkey, in short, is becoming a pro-Iranian Islamist dictatorship - just as this writer among others warned many months ago - yet the foreign policy establishment is required to continue pretending that Turkey remains the eastern pillar of NATO. Like the case of Palestine, absurdity seems more palatable than the admission of defeat.

With Turkey's bid for membership in the European Union stalled, a Turkish academic offered, the balance of business has shifted to the Persian Gulf, and with it the balance of political power has tilted towards the Islamists. Turkey's Islamists, in particular the influential Fetallah Guelen organization, are proselytizing among Turks throughout Central Asia and even in Russia - although Russia banned the Muslim organization in 2006. "The Russians shut down the Guelen organization in St Petersburg but not in Moscow," a Turkish attendee explained. "Almost anything in Russia can be bought."

Money from the Gulf is not the only factor in Turkey's swing away from the West, to be sure. The old secular leadership strata, which styled itself after its European counterparts, is just as exhausted and infertile as the secular Europeans. A great migration of peasants to Turkish cities out of the backward Anatolian hinterland, meanwhile, has swelled the constituency of the Islamist parties. Money helps a great deal, though, and the Erdogan government has used its edge to place government monopolies in Islamist hands. Iran uses oil and trade to infiltrate Turkey, and Turkey uses the coffers of Islamist organizations to buy into Russia.

With the cat in semi-retirement, the mice are not only playing, but growing to cat-like stature. Obama's fecklessness has allowed the unimaginable to occur: Russia's influence in the Middle East rivals that of the United States.

David Samuels wrote on November 13 in Slate magazine [1] about "the elegant and brutal way that the Russians have leveraged their position as the arms supplier of last resort to Iran and Syria". Russia feints towards Iran by offering to sell Tehran a top-of-the-line air-defense system, the S-300. It then extorts concessions from the West (or Israel) in return for delaying shipment of the system. One result of Russia's rocket diplomacy, Samuels observes, is a three-way alliance between Russia, India and Israel to develop high-tech weapons, including a so-called fifth-generation fighter that may be able to challenge America's F-35.

If Israel does attempt an air strike against Iran's nuclear program, it will do so in response to the visible failure of American diplomacy, and with the tacit permission of Russia - which has the capacity to veto such a strike by giving Iran anti-aircraft missiles of sufficient capability (or by not giving Israel the key to the counter-measures, for Russia never sells a weapons system to another country that it cannot neutralize).

Obama's foreign policy in every manifestation - Iran, Turkey, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia - has come to grief, and the White House so far has shown no reaction except lockjaw. The great decisions of the world are being taken outside Washington. Too many things have gone wrong to secure the outcome. The game now is in the hands of the spoilers, the players who draw strength from chaos, and first among them is Russia. That creates positive feedback, for the powers who thrive on uncertainty will do their best to generate more of it.

Note
1. See Follow the Rockets

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, associate editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com)

Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.

I was going to link a preceding relevant Spengler article that I posted, but it appears to have been one of the victims of the system attack. Therefore I'm going to re-post it in this thread.....

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Posted for fair use......
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KJ20Ak03.html

Oct 20, 2009
When the cat's away the mice kill each other
By Spengler

Iran has blamed the United States for Sunday's suicide bombing in Sistan-Balochistan province in which six Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps commanders were killed, as well as 37 other people. In an indirect way, the charge is true. No one in Washington these days would dream of blowing up Iranian officials, to be sure. America's abdication of its position as the world's sole superpower, though, will make incidents of this sort routine.

No one in the region doubts that America eventually will leave Afghanistan the way it left Iraq - not the way it left Vietnam, because America had won the war on the ground in Vietnam, unlike Afghanistan, where it has won nothing. That will represent a triumph for the elements of Pakistan's military who supported the Taliban from the beginning.

The hostage-taking at Pakistan's military headquarters in Rawalpindi on October 10 and the bombing of police headquarters in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, comprise part of the pattern that includes Sunday's bombings in the Iranian border town of Pisheen: the unifying element is a demonstration of Sunni power against an external enemy, namely Iran, as well as internal enemies.

The United States in the person of its AfPak majordomo, Richard Holbrooke, can send the Pakistani military on offensives against the Taliban as often as it wants. The Taliban will hide in the Waziristan hills, and wait for the Americans to leave Afghanistan. The US has no stomach for an extended fight.

The region is full of geopolitical mines. To be name some of them:

# India can't let the fundamentalist side of the Pakistani military take power without responding.
# Iran can't let Pakistan's Sunnis crush the 20% Shi'ite minority.
# Israel can't allow for the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons.
# Saudi Arabia can't let Iran dominate Iraq.
# Turkey can't let Iraq's Kurds form an independent state.
# China can't let Turkey agitate among the 100 million Muslim ethnic Turks within its borders.

Without America to mediate, scold and restrain, each of the small powers in the region has no choice but to test its strength against the others. That is why the major players in the region resemble a troupe of manic Morris dancers in a minefield.

The most dramatic response to Washington's abdication of power may be Israel's. The Jewish state's window of opportunity to strike at what it claims is an Iranian nuclear weapons program will close before long, either because the Iranian program will grow past the point at which air strikes can stop it, or because Iran will acquire S-300 anti-aircraft missiles from Russia sophisticated enough to prevent an Israeli attack.

A complex negotiation involving Russia and Israel is underway. Russia has the capacity to suspend or cancel its promised shipments of S-300 missiles to Iran, or to provide Israel with means to make the system ineffective. Russian nuclear scientists, meanwhile, reportedly are assisting Tehran's weapons program, and the Russian government has the capacity to neutralize this threat as well. The question is: what does Russia want from Israel in return for refraining from arming Iran?

The answer may lie in the world's response to the virtual cancelation of the American F-22 program. Fewer than two hundred of the fifth-generation American stealth fighter are likely to be built, and the US will export none of them. America's efforts are concentrated rather on the F-35, a cheaper, more versatile and less advanced aircraft. For the first time since World War II, America's rule of the skies may be challenged by its failure to invest adequately in the next generation of American aircraft. Russia and India already have agreed on joint development of a fifth generation fighter aircraft based on existing Russian airframes. Russian quality control is notoriously poor and Russian avionics are backward. If Israel joined the consortium, the product might challenge the F-35 in the world market for military aviation.

Russia has only a few cards to play, but these cards are important: the proliferation of its anti-aircraft technology enhances its bargaining power. Were Israel to strike Iran during the next few weeks, it might do so not as a proxy for the US, but as part of a broader agreement with Russia. America may have missed the point of Russian policy. The entire issue of sanctions on Iran may seem like diplomatic idiocy to the Russians; the question, in Moscow's judgment, may come down to a digital decision: either attack Iran, or don't. Russia wants to benefit in either case, but it probably prefers to prevent an historic enemy on its southern border from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The United States may cast away its technological edge in air power without a second thought, but Russia understands that superpower status today depends more on military technology than any other factor. No one can control the failed states and soon-to-be-failed states of the region; one can only contain them. The fact that America can sail an aircraft carrier up to the coast of any country in the world without fear of attack and without significant opposition gives America a decisive edge in containment. That, I believe, is what Russia wants to diminish. Think of it as a chess move: sacrifice a few pieces, eg Iran, in order to get at the king. None of these terrible things would be happening if only Vladimir Putin were president of the United States, as I proposed last year. (See Putin for US president - more than ever Asia Times Online, August 13, 2008.)

If Israel were to set back Iran's nuclear weapons development, the position of the Tehran regime would deteriorate, particularly at the expense of Pakistan. I suspect that Sunday's suicide bombing targeting leaders of the Revolutionary Guards was a feint by Pakistan to test Iran's resolve. With Iran weakened, we should expect:

# More Sunni violence against Iraqi Shi'ites, and an uncertain outcome for the 2010 Iraqi national elections.
# More pressure on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
# A free hand for the Taliban in Afghanistan against the Shi'ite Hazara, who traditionally received Iranian support.
# A free hand for the Taliban's supporters in the Pakistani military, who will use the opportunity to mop up the 20% Shi'ite minority in Pakistan.

The world's attention will shift from the shadow-play of interests between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, to the Pakistan-Indian theater. Pakistan is the natural center of militant Islam. Unlike Iran, whose fertility has declined from six children per female during the 1960s to only 1.5 today, Pakistan has a large population of 173 million, and unlike most of its neighbors, it is young and growing. It is also under-educated, with a literacy rate of barely 50%, and poor, with most of the population living on less than a dollar a day.

The center of gravity of regional power is likely to shift away from Iran to Pakistan. The mass assassination of Iranian officers most likely represented a gesture from Pakistan as to what the future will bring. America's use of the Pakistani army to chase the Taliban around Waziristan has about the same effect as shaking a warm bottle of cola before opening it.

What is most astonishing is that official Washington seems entirely oblivious to the crack-up of American influence occurring in front of its eyes. None of the wonkish foreign policy blogs, let alone the mainstream press, seems able to focus. That is not surprising, for official Washington and unofficial Washington have a wheel-and-spoke relationship. As the staff at US State Department and National Security Council work up policy papers, they send out feelers to the think-tank community and get feedback. This is what feeds the Washington rumor mill.

The difference between this administration and every other administration I have observed is that there appears to be no staff work, no departmental effort, no National Security Council - nothing but President Barack Obama. Obama's penchant for policy czars has become the source of continuing controversy, with his opponents at Fox News and elsewhere complaining he has bypassed cabinet departments (whose senior staff require senate confirmation) in favor of 29 "policy czars" who report directly to him.

Like Poo-bah in the Mikado, the president seems to be Lord High Everything Else, Secretary of Everything and a non-stop presence before the television cameras. Some of his supporters are chagrined. The New Republic's publisher Marty Peretz, who evinces buyer's remorse over Obama's Middle East policy, diagnosed the president with "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" in his blog on October 4.

The reason for Obama's peculiar mode of governance, though, may have less to do with his apparent narcissism than with his objectives. It is a credible hypothesis that this president holds views that he cannot easily share, even with his own staff. As he told the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, he truly wants a world without superpowers: "In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed."

What does Obama mean by this? How strongly does he feel that America should not be elevated above any other nation? There is some basis for the conjecture that his innermost sentiment is hard-core, left-wing Third World antipathy to the United States. It now seems well established that his autobiography Dreams of My Father was ghost-written by the former Weatherman Bill Ayers, now a professor of education in Chicago. Long rumored, this allegation is confirmed by celebrity journalist Christopher Anderson in his new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. Jack Cashill at the American Thinker has been on this trail for a year, comparing Ayers' attributed writing to Dreams, and in my view made a strong case even before Anderson's book appeared. Ayers never repudiated the bombs he planted in public buildings during the 1960s.

Obama's upbringing was leftist (which in itself proves nothing - so was mine). He was abandoned by three parents - his biological father Barack Obama Sr, his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetero, and his mother Ann Dunham, who left him with her parents to pursue doctoral research in anthropology in Indonesia. Dunham's communist sympathies from adolescence onward are widely reported; the African-American poet Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member, was a friend of his maternal grandfather Stanley Dunham and, according to Dreams, something of a mentor to young Obama.

"Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against all odds", was the title of Dunham's doctoral dissertation. Dunham's sympathy for the traditional life of Indonesians fighting against the encroachment of the global economy evidently left a huge impression on young Obama, for he thought their lives better than those of poor people in the United States. As he (or Bill Ayers) wrote in Dreams of My Father:

And yet for all that poverty [in the Indonesian marketplace], there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like [the Chicago housing projects] so desperate.

That paragraph is a precis of his mother's doctoral dissertation, and may be the most the most important point of self-revelation in Obama's collective utterances. The words may have come from Bill Ayers, but the sentiment is doubtless Obama's. In mature adulthood, Obama continued to identify with the leftist sentiments of his mother.

Obama appears to believe that America's influence in the world is malignant. But even a president who wants to drastically reduce America's influence in the world must negotiate a formidable military and national security establishment which has a strong moral commitment to - as well as vested interests in - that influence.

The president, in this view, consciously sees himself as an outsider who has become the leader of an alien tribe, rather like Eugene O'Neill's Brutus Jones or Kipling's Peachy Carnahan - except that Obama leads the world's only superpower rather than a primitive tribe. He demands personal control over the reins of power, for as an outsider he can trust no one - surely not David Axelrod or Rahm Emanuel. That may be why he has no real cabinet, but rather a set of "policy czars" who reported to him directly, including the special ambassadors George Mitchell, Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke.

Perhaps the cat isn't away, but locked up in the cellar. As a result the mice will slaughter each other. Those who wish to reduce American power may get what they wish for, but they might not like it.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, associate editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com)

Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.

"...Obama appears to believe that America's influence in the world is malignant..."

I had some small connection with the U of Wis in the late 60's and early 70's and was appalled at what they were teaching the kids. Those kids and those that followed are now in high positions in various places and it shows.

I have been arguing since at least 1975 (After the Demo Congress threw VN to the wolves deliberately) that the goal of the Cultural Left is the elimination of American influence on the world scene; cultural, social and economic. As stated above, they feel that our culture is malignant and the sooner destroyed the better.

Nice to see people waking up but a tad too late I think.

Some years ago we were visiting a nephew of a friend of ours, from Denmark. Suddenly he takes off on G. Bush, practically frothing at the mouth. Finally I said that he might not realize it but there was a movement in the US to break it up into five geographical parts, separate countries (Ecotopia) which would just naturally solve the problems of which he was speaking.

There was a pause and then he said; "My God! You can't do that. There would be international chaos!"

Yup.