The Strident Centrist Blog

Don Vandergriff’s blog hosts a joint post by Chuck Spinney and Immanuel Wallerstein on the geopolitical background and significance of the recent events in Georgia, and it is by far the most succinct and cogent piece on the subject I’ve seen yet. Spinney, a retired civil service employee of the Defense Department, is a protege of the late strategist and military reformer USAF Col. John Boyd. I’m not familiar with Wallerstein, but take him seriously simply on Spinney’s say so. As a teaser, here are a couple of Wallerstein’s paragraphs that sum up quite well how we got it so wrong:

It is perfectly true, as everyone observed at the time, that the Yalta rules were abrogated in 1989 and that the game between the United States and (as of 1991) Russia had changed radically. The major problem since then is that the United States misunderstood the new rules of the game. It proclaimed itself, and was proclaimed by many others, the lone superpower. In terms of chess rules, this was interpreted to mean that the United States was free to move about the chessboard as it saw fit, and in particular to transfer former Soviet pawns to its sphere of influence. Under Clinton , and even more spectacularly under George W. Bush, the United States proceeded to play the game this way.

There was only one problem with this: The United States was not the lone superpower; it was no longer even a superpower at all. The end of the Cold War meant that the United States had been demoted from being one of two superpowers to being one strong state in a truly multilateral distribution of real power in the interstate system. Many large countries were now able to play their own chess games without clearing their moves with one of the two erstwhile superpowers. And they began to do so.

McClatchy reports today that Islamic militants are surrounding the city of Peshwar, which is strategically located athwart the eastern approaches to the Khyber Pass. This is the primary ground route supplying the coalition’s forces in Afghanistan.

Taliban groups and other extremist warlords now threaten Peshawar from three sides. Should they take over Peshawar, the rest of the North West Frontier Province could follow, leaving Islamic extremists in control of a region that borders Afghanistan and sits astride one of the main supply routes to U.S. and coalition troops there.

The strategic disasters initiated by the Bush-Cheney cabal continue to unfold.

From The Globalist, under the title “A Leaderless Global Order”:

Usually in such circumstances [the internal political conflicts in Lebanon], the United States would have intervened by sending a prominent ambassador or the Secretary of State to conduct shuttle diplomacy — and resolve the conflict. But not this time.

Even if the United States had sought to address the crisis in Lebanon, it would have failed. As has been the case in recent years, the United States found itself aligned with one side — the government and Sunni Muslim leaders — and not on talking terms with the other side.

The “we talk only with those who agree with us” policy has disabled U.S. diplomacy. The world’s most powerful player is finding itself on the margins of peacemaking.

. . .

Qatar has shown that with the decline of the United States as a global pivot point and broker, regional players who enjoy the respect, trust and confidence of all parties can play the role of peacemakers in the absence of the superpower.

Writing in the Asia Times, M K Bhadrakumar, a retired Indian diplomat, writes about how Bush’s just completed Middle East swing has exposed for all to see the breadth and depth of the disaster his administration has been for US interests in the Middle East:

The point is, the historic failure of the Iraq war is yet to be fully grasped. On a regional plane, as the Iraq war interminably rolls on, the situation is fraught with the immense consequence of the unraveling of the entire system of states that was created in the Anglo-French settlement after the fall of Ottoman Empire in 1918. The Iraq war has triggered Shi’ite empowerment and unleashed historical forces that lay chained for centuries. Its geopolitical significance is yet to sink in as winds of change sweep across the entire region. (more…)

This morning the main stream media reported that Muqtada al al Sadr has ordered his troops off the streets. From the way this is being pitched on every MSM account I’ve seen so far the reader is left to infer that this is a climb-down on Sadr’s part, and thus perhaps a sign of weakness and/or a loss of face.

However, within the past week I stumbled upon a new blog, Roads To Iraq, about which I know very little, but the writer of which seems pretty closely plugged into what’s going on over there. S/he frequently refers to Arabic publications and offers links to them. From the writing my guess is that English skills are very likely a recent acquisition.

In any case, the Roads To Iraq writer suggests that Sadr’s cease fire is the result of negotiations with representatives of the Maliki regime that took place in Iran following the death of Maliki’s security adviser at the hands of the Mahdi Army. The writer implies, but does not state, that the negotiations were at the behest of the Maliki regime. If this is true, the MSM narrative is very misleading, as is all to common these days.

In another set of insights from off the beaten path, Chet Richards of Defense in the National Interest offers some views on what the events of the past week might mean for the war itself as well as USA politics under the title “Is This the Iraqi Tet?”. Here are some samples: (more…)

Below is the essence of a comment I posted yesterday on Pat Lang’s Sic Semper Tyrannis blog entitled “Who Are the ‘Iraqi Security Forces’”. I thought it worth reposting it here. According to the Badger’s post of a translation from the Kuwaiti press this morning, the troops of the Maliki regime security forces are already starting to melt away from the fight. If this is accurate, one of Sami Rasouli’s predictions is already coming to pass, even before any hint that the coalition will pull up stakes.

—-snip—-snip—-

Last night I attended a meeting of a political club at which the speaker was one Sami Ratouli, a mid-fiftyish Iraqi-American who was born and raised in Najaf and emigrated out of his homeland in 1976. After about a decade in Britain and Europe, he settled here in the Twin City area of MN, founded a successful Middle Eastern bakery and restaurant and became a US citizen. He is a Shiite but his wife is Sunni.

He recounted how moved he was when on 9/12/01 two long-time customers, middle aged Jewish women, came into his shop, asked to speak to him in private, and told him to call one of them at any time day or night if he or anyone in his family needed help or shelter in the event of threats or persecution such as had occurred sporadically elsewhere in the country following the events of the previous day. He resolved then and there to turn his business over to others and find some way to build bridges between the Islamic world and the West, and within the Middle East itself. (more…)

If you haven’t run across it yet, don’t miss the piece in today’s New York Times Magazine by Parag Khanna. Here’s but a small sample:

The rise of China in the East and of the European Union within the West has fundamentally altered a globe that recently appeared to have only an American gravity — pro or anti. As Europe’s and China’s spirits rise with every move into new domains of influence, America’s spirit is weakened. The E.U. may uphold the principles of the United Nations that America once dominated, but how much longer will it do so as its own social standards rise far above this lowest common denominator? And why should China or other Asian countries become “responsible stakeholders,” in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s words, in an American-led international order when they had no seat at the table when the rules were drafted? Even as America stumbles back toward multilateralism, others are walking away from the American game and playing by their own rules.

The self-deluding universalism of the American imperium — that the world inherently needs a single leader and that American liberal ideology must be accepted as the basis of global order — has paradoxically resulted in America quickly becoming an ever-lonelier superpower. Just as there is a geopolitical marketplace, there is a marketplace of models of success for the second world to emulate, not least the Chinese model of economic growth without political liberalization (itself an affront to Western modernization theory). As the historian Arnold Toynbee observed half a century ago, Western imperialism united the globe, but it did not assure that the West would dominate forever — materially or morally. Despite the “mirage of immortality” that afflicts global empires, the only reliable rule of history is its cycles of imperial rise and decline, and as Toynbee also pithily noted, the only direction to go from the apogee of power is down.

This is justifiably getting a lot of buzz. Check it out!

Mark Perry, author of the esteemed Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace, and a man with very close ties to the uniformed military, has an explosive two-part piece up at the Asia Times about what’s behind the recent apparent improvement in the situation in Iraq. It’s not the surge. Rather, it’s the change in strategy, namely the establishment of cooperative relationships with key tribes that began well before the surge, that is making the difference. The tribes were increasingly alarmed about the disruptive impact the Wahabis drifting over the Saudi border to do Jihad with Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) were having on tribal life.

The explosive part (or rather one of them) is that the military saw the need for this as early as August, 2003, but all efforts in this direction were shut down by the White House. And they continued to bat them down until well in to 2006! Finally, when a Marine colonel received an urgent request from a tribe leader in his area he went ahead on his own initiative and proffered the requested help. His chain of command backed him up and when Condi Rice went ballistic they ignored her.

It’s fascinating, well-written story, with considerable insights into the military leadership’s utter disillusion with the administration and its war, the damage done by this whole fiasco to the Army and Marines, and some inside skinny on internal Army politics as well. Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2. Enjoy.

Helena Cobban, the now freelance journalist who blogs at Just World News, is following the developments resulting from the breaching of the wall separating Gaza from Egypt like a hawk. Here is the link to her latest post as of this writing, and here’s another that went up about an hour ago. If you want to keep on top of her posts but don’t have an RSS feed, here’s her blog’s main page. The reverberations of this are going to surge back and forth across the Middle East for months, if not years or decades.

B. H. Liddell-Hart, the mid-20th century British military analyst and writer, was once lauding a regimental officer he’d met many years before (perhaps during the First World War if I recall correctly) with words to the effect “he was the most intelligent officer I ever met. Of course, he never made general.” Eating the best and brightest of its young has been a bad habit of professional military services as long as there have been such, and the United States Army is far from an exception of the rule. Retired Col. Douglas MacGregor is a case in point, as you’ll see in this brief biography in the Wikipedia.

MacGregor has an important article in Mother Jones about what the surge has and has not accomplished, a piece apparently informed by extensive input from officers on the ground in Iraq. Let’s just say that the administration’s unequivocally positive spin is just that: spin.

We don’t know much about developments within Iraq. Military officers who have recently served in Iraq tell me they don’t truly understand Iraq’s complexity or the duplicitous nature of the Iraqis they work with. In my conservations with them, they raise troubling questions that don’t lend themselves to sound-bite answers on talk radio or the evening news. Is the Great Awakening inside the Sunni Arab community the road to Iraq’s stability, or is it just a pause for Sunni rearmament and reorganization? Is it a means to secure American military bases inside an emerging Sunni client state generously supplied with cash from Saudi Arabia, a kind of cordon sanitaire along the fault line that separates the Sunni Arab world from Shiite Iran and its beachhead in southern Iraq? Does this development mean America wins when our former Sunni Arab enemies regain power in central Iraq? Or—here’s the most disturbing question—will the presumed successes of today be catalysts for yet bloodier civil war inside Iraq or, worse, larger regional war? (more…)