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.

From “Timothy”, writing at Slashdot:

A laptop containing the unencrypted security data for 33,000 travelers using the Clear system was stolen at San Francisco International Airport on July 26, according to CBS5 Television. The Clear system allows travelers who register and pay a $100.00 annual fee to speed through airport security by using a smart card at special kiosks in some airports.

As commenter “BWJones” put it:

To have a company intimately involved with *security* not apparently able to manage their own security in a manner that protects the country and their customers is a joke. Fine… having a laptop stolen is common enough and I don’t fault them, but having unencrypted data of 33,000 of your customers on that laptop is a crime.

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.

Earlier today Marcy Wheeler, of emptywheel.firedoglake.com and one of the most forceful opponents of the assault on the Constitution (the FISA modification Act “compromise” that includes telecom immunity and weak exclusivity and minimization provisions) that passed in the House today, wrote an open letter Senator Barack Obama asking him to vocally oppose the Act as written. Referring to the recent Boumediene decision of the Supreme Court, she wrote:

Ultimately, the Supreme Court found aspects of the Military Commissions Act unconstitutional because it tried to limit the review of Article III Courts to mere review of whether the Administration had complied with its own procedures, and not a real review of the legality of the detention of men at Gitmo.

The Court of Appeals has jurisdiction not to inquire into the legality of the detention generally but only to assess whether the CSRT complied with the “standards and procedures specified by the Secretary of Defense” and whether those standards and procedures are lawful. [from Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion]

Yet this is precisely the kind of procedural review that the current FISA bill envisions. The “political branches” are attempting to limit court review of wiretaps on Americans to a procedural review in three ways: (more…)

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…)

For those of us who remember November 22, 1963, this headline in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram about Wednesday’s rally is just plain scary!

At his blog The Reality-based Community, Mark Kleiman asserts that David Herszenhorn’s writing in the New York Times bears similarities to ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek (of the Old and New Testaments of the Christian scriptures, respectively). That is, like both of those languages, Herszenhorn’s piece in yesterday’s Times on John McCain and torture leaves implicit a lot of “connecting tissue”l, so to speak. So Kleiman helps us along by inserting the missing pieces in italics, as was the custom for the translators of the King James version. To wit, the opening paragraph as so elaborated:

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Wednesday to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods [called “torture” under domestic and international law] that have been used by the Central Intelligence Agency [and an unknown number of other agencies and contractors] against [an unknown number of people described by the government as] high-level terrorism suspects [at least scores of whom have died as a result]. The vote, following House passage of the measure in December, set up a confrontation with President Bush, who has threatened to veto it.