Author: Helena

US’s global dominance ‘Reduced’: It’s nearly official!

Thomas Fingar, the U.S. government’s highest ranking intelligence analyst, recently told a semi-public audience that he envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, according to this intriguing report in today’s Wapo.
Joby Warrick and the venerable Walter Pincus wrote the WaPo piece. They add that the still unpublished report that Fingar was previewing in his recent speech,

    also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will “be the least significant” asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because “nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.”

This argument that raw military power– the one area in which the US still quite clearly outpaces all other world powers– has rapidly declined in significance (or, one might say, in utility) in recent years is a very important one. It is certainly, an argument that the country’s legislative as well as executive branches should take into good consideration as they ponder the priorities for the already deeply in-the-red US federal budget over the years ahead.

Continue reading “US’s global dominance ‘Reduced’: It’s nearly official!”

JWN redesign update #1

Big thanks to everyone who sent comments in response to the post I put up recently on my desire to upgrade several aspects of the blog. If you’re reading this post on the JWN site you will already have seen that the design is changing a bit. Bear with this process as it continues. I decided that rather than spend time discussing with a web designer what I wanted to do it might be a lot easier to start trying to do as much of the redesign myself as I am able. Especially as I now have quite a lot of experience of tweaking my own Movable Type.
In this first step, I reorganized the front page into a two-sidebar format, since the old sidebar had become ways long, crowded, and clunky; and I tweaked other design elements quite a bit along the way. However, the visual redesign of the site is by no means finished yet. I think I’m going to look for something ‘cleaner’ and classier. I really don’t like the blue I have on the banner right now. Ways too bright and perky!
I would love to have a well designed JPG-imaged banner, though I haven’t found anything I like yet. Can anyone out there make one for me? I’m thinking something classy, lots of white, some blue, possibly some greys… an image of the world, a peace dove or something… and of course the text that we have on the banner now. If you can make one for me, please send it along!
Also, any comments you have about the redesign to date. Giving the main blog text a fixed 55-px width rather than a proportional width was a suggestion from Bill the spouse. I have yet to implement that in the archived versions of the posts. Does anyone else have thoughts on that?
Onward and upward.
Update, Sept. 11: Sorry about any strange effects you might experience. I’m trying to keep them to a minimum. ~HC.

Oliver North???

You know there’s been this long-running dispute between, on the one hand, the US military command in Afghanistan and on the other, the Afghan government and the United Nations, over the number of civilians killed in a controversial US air attack near Azizabad, Afghanistan on August 22.
According to this story in today’s London Times it turns out the US military was relying to some degree in its repeated confirmation of its original (very low) casualty estimates on the say-so of– guess who– that infamous trickster Oliver North.
Hat-tip to Siun of Firedoglake.
I completely concur with the judgment Siun expressed there: “Pardon me while I throw up.”

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J. Diehl criticizing Saakashvili

WaPo columnist Jackson Diehl is a quintessential liberal hawk. So when he expresses open criticism of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, as he did today, that means there are serious cracks in the coalition of supporters that Saak had hoped to protect himself with, in Washington.
Diehl’s column was titled “The Trouble with Saakashvili.”
He writes,

    The irony is that, beneath that overweening campaign [I think he means ‘overarching’ not overweening? ~HC] to contain Russian belligerence, American officials are still seething at Saakashvili. His impulsive and militarily foolhardy attack on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 8 opened the way for Putin’s aggression. True, provocations by Russian-controlled Ossetian militias preceded the Georgian move, and Russian troops’ subsequent takeover of much of Georgia was clearly planned and prepared well in advance. But the mercurial Saakashvili disregarded direct American warnings that he not fall into Putin’s trap. He embarrassed his staunchest defenders in Washington and plunged both his country and the United States into what has been a costly — and so far losing — battle.

I actually want to write a lot more, as soon as I can, about the nature and size of the costs that Saak’s adventurism inflicted on the United States’ posture of military ‘deterrence’ all round the world.

Continue reading “J. Diehl criticizing Saakashvili”

Peres warns against attacking Iran

This is a story everyone in the US– but especially all those members of Congress who line up behind AIPAC’s warmongering– needs to read. Israeli president Shimon Peres tells the London Sunday Times that, regarding Iran, “The military way will not solve the problem… Such an attack can trigger a bigger war.”
How’s that again?? In all the anti-Iran propaganda with which AIPAC lards its public communications, it forcefully makes the argument that the US and Israel should be prepared to use military attacks against Iran to prevent it ever getting a nuclear weapon… because such a capability could be fatal for Israel.
And now Peres, who was the father of Israel’s own nuclear weapons program back in the 1950s and 1960s, tells us that an attack might actually be harmful, not helpful?
We might remember, too, that during the few months in 1995-96 when Peres was Israel’s prime minister, he launched his own fateful war of choice against Lebanon. That was April 1996, and it did not turn out well for Israel, at all. Peres had launched it partly as an election ploy. It didn’t work out well for him, either. He lost that election– due in good part to the fact that his war in Lebanon persuaded large numbers of Palestinian-Israelis not to vote for him…
And now, the Sunday Times’s Uzi Mahnaimi is writing this:

    Peres also criticised American foreign policy in highly unusual terms for an Israeli leader, saying it relied too much on military force in attempts to impose democracy on the Middle East.
    …“In my opinion, the Americans are making a mistake in their foreign policy.
    “When they intervene abroad, they’d do better using the economy, which doesn’t provoke such antagonism.”

Words of wisdom, spoken very late in the guy’s life, indeed. (When I interviewed him in Tel Aviv back in 1998, he still forcefully defended his decision to launch the 1996 war.)
So, late in the day, yes. But still, words that people in the US policy elite definitely need to hear.

Georgia-Hizbullah: Dept. of Delicious Ironies

So today, Wired’s Noah Schachtman draws attention to the fact– as indeed, I suspected might well happen– some strategists in the ‘west’ have started to recommend that, as it rebuilds its military, Georgia should use “a Hizbullah model”, rather than the earlier US-Israeli model.
Hizbullah, the latest model for pro-western militaries!
One article Schachtman quotes from is this one, by Greg Grant of DoD Buzz.
Grant wrote:

    The U.S. military has been advising and equipping the Georgian military for some time. I saw Georgian soldiers over in Iraq and they appeared competent enough. The American officers I talked to who worked alongside them there held them in high regard. So what, if anything, does the Georgian military performance say about the training we provided? Did we train the Georgians for the wrong type of war, too much irregular war focus and not enough big battle emphasis?

Continue reading “Georgia-Hizbullah: Dept. of Delicious Ironies”

US probing Russian Red Lines in Georgia

Two interesting recent posts from Wired’s Noah Schachtman. In this one, Sept. 5, he cites this London Times report as saying that last week, US/NATO military people managed to connect Georgia’s surviving air-defense missile radars to NATO’s own broader air surveillance system.
This would seem to challenge or contradict what I wrote here recently about the US having decided, for now, not to give Georgia any military aid. More on that, below.
But was what happened last week between the Georgian and NATO a/d systems a “re-connect”, rather than a “connect”?
Schachtman notes that back last December, Reuters had already quoted Georgia’s defense minister as saying that “Georgia has plugged into NATO’s integrated air defence radar system.”
It makes a significant difference whether what happened last week was a connect or a re-connect. If the latter, then that presumably means that the Georgian radars were still “connected” to the NATO system back on August 7/8… Which would mean a couple of things:

    (1) Having been thusly connected didn’t actually have the effect of saving the Georgians from getting creamed in the August war. It would even less effect now, since a large portion of Georgia’s ground radars have been destroyed in the interim.
    (2) Somewhere in the archives of NATO’s air surveillance system there almost certainly lie some pretty acurate records of who did what to whom, with what precise timing, back at the start of the war. (That’s a politically important matter, since Pres. Saakashvili continues to claim he was only “responding” to a prior Russian attack rather than– as most of the evidence seems to suggest– actually starting the war himself.)

Anyway, if NATO did indeed (re-)connect Georgia’s a/d radars with the NATO system last week, that’s the most I’ve heard about anywhere regarding western nations having given any concrete military aid to Saak since the war. So it looks as though Washington may be cautiously testing Moscow’s Red Lines regarding rearming Saak’s Georgia.
I actually judge that in Moscow, having Georgia plugged into the NATO system may not, on its own, be seen as strategically disadvantageous, as noted in point #1 above. Indeed, in a situation of gradually mending/evolving Russia-US ties, the “transparency” offered by the plug-in, as mentioned in point #2 above, could be seen as part of a broader regime of reciprocal confidence (re-)building in the region.
Wouldn’t that be a nice thought?
The London Times writer, Michael Evans, made no reference to the idea that what happened last week may have been a re-connection, rather than a first connection. But he did say this about the US (and UK) policy on the question of rearming Georgia, more broadly:

    [NATO] sources said that proposals were currently under discussion to fly Nato Awacs over the region, although they emphasised that no decision had yet been taken on such a development, which would be viewed as provocative by Moscow.
    As part of efforts to develop closer military ties with Georgia the US is also planning to set up a trust fund into which alliance members can donate money to assist Georgian military forces. “It’s basically Nato passing the hat around,” an official said.
    A Nato team of specialists has visited Tbilisi to find out what Georgia needs to rebuild its forces. Washington dismissed the claim by Moscow that the US warships sent to Georgia to offload tonnes of humanitarian aid had been delivering arms secretly.
    “The thrust of Nato’s efforts at present is to help Georgia get through the winter, preventing Russia from strangling the country. We’ve got to try to keep the democracy in the country going, but there’s no talk about accelerating Georgia’s application to join Nato as a member state,” one official said.
    A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence in London said: “In light of recent events, Georgia needs time to reflect on requirements for the future. We intend to provide assistance to Georgia and will consider requests for assistance in discussion and co-ordination with our Nato and EU partners.”

The discussion and indirect ‘signaling’ between ‘west’ and ‘east’ continue. Doubtless on the agenda are a whole basket off issues, not just Georgia. The other agenda items surely include:

    * Iran
    * Afghanistan
    * European energy supplies.

Regarding the latter two of these issues, as I wrote Sept. 4:

    Moscow might have large parts of western Europe over a barrel. But [regarding the US/NATO project in Afghanistan] it has the US over a railhead.

And then, there’s Iran, a policy “challenge” for the US and its European allies in which the US’s hawkishly anti-Iran position has been considerably undermined by Saakashvili’s adventurism…
The story continues to evolve.

Women discuss Sarah Palin

So I was at the checkout counter in our great locally owned foodstore here in Charlottesville this morning, and I bumped into Deborah McDowell, a chaired prof in the University of Virginia’s rightly lauded English department. Debbie is an uber-talented African-American woman of commanding presence. After we said hi, I remarked how depressing it has been trying to deal with the emergence of Sarah Palin. She said she completely agreed. And as we stood there continuing to talk about the outrageous way Palin and other Repubs laid into Obama last week, the checkout clerk (female, white, over 40) joined in too.
We walked on out of the store. Debbie was asking, in her great English prof’s voice, “just how stupid can the American people be if they fall for this nonsense, after all that we’ve seen from Bush for eight years, and they elect just a continuation of the same thing… ?” Another woman, whom neither of us knew, (white, around 40?) walked over, cappuccino cup in hand, and joined in. She asked a question of fact– “Isn’t it true, though, that the Democrats have been in charge in Congress for the past two years?– that we tried to address. Later, I said one of the things I really resented was how Sarah had explicitly, from the get-go, tried to expropriate the feminist “mantle” from Hillary Clinton, whereas the policies she and McCain espouse on issues of particular relevance to women, including but certainly not limited to the right to choose to abort an early-term fetus, are deeply, deeply, anti-female.
Our new friend agreed completely with that, and said that– though she’s a little fed up with the raucousness of some of the Obama supporters around here– she does intend to vote for him. Because of the way she had asked the question at the beginning, she struck me as a thoughtful person.
All in all, an interesting conversation. Not a representative sample of anything, but indicative that there are still plenty of women around who have not been bamboozled by all the evident flair, the feistiness, and fol-de-rol of Sarah Palin.

New vistas– personal, and blog-related

I haven’t blogged for, what, three days now. Which is fine. Sometimes the posts come thick and fast, sometimes there’s a gap. I don’t feel I need to blog with any particular frequency; and anyway, the few weeks right after August 8 were pretty intense and, I think, fruitful for the blog.
These past few days I’ve been doing some other things. Some things with my beloved Quaker meeting, which is always good to do because it keeps me grounded. Some thinking about longterm strategic directions for the blog and myself. More on that below… And a few things connected with the next big development in my family/personal life: which is the arrival (G-d willing) of my daughter Leila’s first child– our first grandchild– in early November.
Leila and her husband Greg live in New York (Brooklyn), so I’m hoping to be there with them as much as possible in the first weeks of the newborn’s life. I am completely thrilled they’re having this baby! It’s bringing back a lot of memories of when I gave birth to Leila and her slightly older brother, Tarek, in Beirut in the late 1970s. Back then, my sister Hilly came from England to help out. And okay, my then-husband and I had a wonderful live-in nursemaid, too. She made the post-delivery weeks a lot easier than they are for most young parents in the US or other western countries.
Having a baby and dealing with all the adjustments involved are huge challenges. The endless chains of broken nights are what I chiefly recall. Those, and suddenly this sense that, as the mother, you’re basically in servitude for a period of time to this small person who can’t even articulate her or his needs or desires… So scary! So as the parent, you suddenly need to learn all these completely new skills of ‘reading’ your baby’s needs… It’s quite amazing that any of us ever survived this process (as parents or, long before that, as babies.)
But my experience of having done this, like that of just about all the parents I know, has been truly amazing. I have learned so much– about the world, about the human condition, about myself, about relationships in general, about what is truly valuable in life (and oh, also, I suppose about baby-care and childrearing)… Simply by having hung in there and raised these three young people, now aged 23-30: all of them compassionate, well-grounded, talented, and a huge amount of fun to be with.
American society doesn’t give anything like enough support to the parents and caregivers of young children. Compared with anywhere in Europe, the situation here is brutal. I imagine that even in many low-income countries, women get more support from society as a whole. For example, Leila is a teacher in the New York City school system, where the teachers’ union is quite strong. But even with this allegedly “strong” contract the union has won for them over the years, she’s not entitled to any paid maternity leave. And children’s (cash) benefits, such as many European governments give to mothers as a matter of course?… Or the services of a home-visiting ‘district nurse’ or health visitor in the crucial post-partum days? Fuggedaboutit. We are truly in the Dark Ages here. No wonder that in some American inner cities, the infant and child mortality rates are on a par with some very low-income countries.
… So I’ll be in New York quite a lot in the weeks after the baby arrives. Obviously, the babe will make her/his own decisions about the timing. Before that (I hope), I’ll be on the west coast for much of October, doing various events to promote my Re-engage! book, and I have a couple of events on the east coast (New Jersey and Delaware) later in September. Check this page on the book’s website for details of those.
Meantime, I’ve been doing some thinking about future directions for, in particular, this blog. You know, I’ve been publishing it for 5.5 years now… A total of nearly 3,000 posts… Some of them, in retrospect, still really good, some of them somewhat scattershot or idiosyncratic.
To some degree, the whole blog has been idiosyncratic from the very start… From the day in early January 2003 when Tarek said, “You know, mom, you really ought to start writing a blog;” and I said, “A what?” … And he got me started reading Josh Marshall’s blog, which has gone from strength to strength since then, and Juan Cole’s blog, and, and, and… And a couple of weeks later he got me started on my own blog… ‘Just World News’: nice name, huh? We started out with Blogger software; he shifted me to Movable Type (where I found I’d picked the same template as Jonathan Edelstein)… and I’ve been married to writing JWN ever since.
So now (drumroll… ) I’ve decided to try to take JWN to a whole new level.
You know, for just about all these past 5.5 years I’ve thought of JWN as “something on the side”, or “a drafting notebook”, or something a little like (ghastly word, this), a “hobby”. But really, for a long time now, it’s been a whole lot more than that. It has become an important part of my professional and personal identity.
Bloggo ergo sum, as Descartes would have blogged if he could have torn himself away from contemplating dripping candles and inventing dualism.
Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But not wholly.
So now I’m going to think about ways to become a whole lot more intentional about what I do here on JWN. I think I want to invest in a re-design, and I know I want to think harder about getting some different kinds of quality content up here. One thing I’m definitely thinking about is interviews with interesting figures in the policy world.
Bill the spouse says I should have photos, videos and audio clips, too. Videos I totally can’t envisage posting (unless I hire someone who can do that for me.) But really, it’s not my comparative advantage. Audio clips maybe I could manage. In conjunction with the interviews, perhaps? And the odd photo or whatever.
Maybe.
But all that stuff takes time. Time that, mostly, I would rather spend writing, thinking, reading, and talking to people. Face it, I’m fundamentally a words person. That’s what I am. But I can make the words better organized, more intentional, more interesting and thought-provoking, more useful, and better displayed. That’s what I want to do.
I also want to figure out a way to have this baby blog generate a bit of income for us. I don’t need a lot, but some would be nice.
So readers and admirers of JWN, here is your chance to have input into helping to revision JWN. I am still right at the start of the process. Please tell me, either privately or in the open comments section here, any thoughts or suggestions you have on:

    * What changes you’d like to see regarding the content of the blog;
    * Ditto, the visual or organizational design;
    * A good, affordable web-designer I could work with on the re-design;
    * Your reactions to my suggestions on the blog, above;
    * Any ideas you have for potential ‘strategic partnerships’ I might explore between JWN and institutions or individual philanthropists (yourself? anyone you know?) who might want to support the blog financially, or sponsor it in some other way…

Your comments and suggestions will be great. This whole revisioning thing may take a bit of time. In the meantime, JWN will continue to be the opinionated, generally well-informed, visionary, but often quirky blog you’ve come to know and (I hope) love. Watch for some more political posts tomorrow.

The longterm status of Georgia: Challenges ahead

Georgia’s US- and Israeli-built armed forces got pulverized by the Russians during last month’s short war over South Ossetia. The Bush administration has promised $1 billion to the Georgians in reconstruction aid. So far, administration spokespeople have been at pains to stress that this aid is for humanitarian relief and reconstruction, and no mention has yet been made of the idea of rebuilding Georgia’s military.
The Bush administration’s actions during the entire Georgia crisis until now have been marked by a degree of caution and risk-avoidance that, in the circumstances, is entirely appropriate. Remember the reports about how the 100 or so military trainers the US had in Georgia at the time of the war were immediately told to change into civvies, stash any weapons they had out of sight, and sit out the war hanging round hotel swimming pools?
So why did the Bushists behave like that? Three reasons. First, they had no spare forces– their own, or forces of ‘allied’ nations– to send in. Second, they didn’t want to get drawn into a direct mano-a-mano with another Big (and also nuclear-armed) Power. Third, remember that the Russians have agreed to help out NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan by allowing non-military supplies to be shipped to NATO’s forces there through Russia…. So Moscow might have large parts of western Europe over a barrel. But it has the US over a railhead.
For now, the war has died down… I’m assuming that Pres. Saakashvili is desperately eager to rebuild his armed forces. There would be a number of logistical problems regarding how the US (or its Israeli surrogate) might undertake any rearming of Georgia. Ships through the Black Sea? Airlifts? Overland through Turkey?
Those problems could be solved, I suppose. But it’s the political problems that are still limiting all foreign reconstruction aid to non-military items.
So far, the call to “re-arm Georgia!” has not become any kind of a big issue in the US election campaign. (Imagine how different things might be if we had a Democrat in the White House.) But the Georgia situation has not been anywhere near resolved yet, in any durable political way. If the present status quo remains in place, I suppose it is possible a sort of “Finlandization by default” may emerge there.
However, reaching a formal, negotiated agreement on Georgia’s status– one that’s agreed to by all relevant parties including Russia, and that also resolves the currently contested status of the two now-seceded regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia– is far preferable. Absent such an agreement, all of Georgia, including the two seceded regions, would be unable to do the kind of long-term economic planning and investment that made Finlandization into a palatable and workable deal for Finland itself. Absent that agreement, all of Georgia will remain mired in the kind of directionless limbo that seems to mark Kosovo to this day.
I think I asked this before. But where in the world is Ban Ki-Moon?