The Strident Centrist Blog

I’ve put another essay up linked to the front page entitled “The Constitutional Crisis, The Democrats and Bipartisanship.” Check it out.

Badger at Missing Links passes on an item that appeared in a Bahrein newspaper asserting that western oil companies are offering $5 millioin for each Iraqi Parliament deputy who votes for the Bushaviks’ proposed Oil and Gas Law .

“It’s not about the oil.”

Mike Lux at Open Left tells of overhearing former Senator Rick Santorum making call after call on his cell phone on an Amtrak train returning from New York (to Philadelphia, presumably?) trying to goad conservative activists to work against McCain:

Call after call after call, speaking in a relatively loud voice, trashing his party’s likely nominee, he says, I probably shouldn’t talk about that on a train, I’ll call you later on that topic. And it really made me wonder how bad the topic could be. At some point I started feeling a little guilty about hearing all this stuff so I turned around, introduced myself, and said “Hey, I’m in politics, I’m on the other side, I’m a Democrat,” in part to see if he would keep doing the phone calls trashing McCain given that a Democratic activist was sitting in front of him. And he did keep doing them, call after call. Apparently, it didn’t bother him at all that a Democrat was listening in as he kept trashing McCain.

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.

Scott Horton at Harpers has the back story behind Bush’s favorite painting. Bush’s misunderstanding of it would be hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that the consequences of his presidency are so tragic for our nation and the tens of thousands of dead and wounded in our military and around the world.

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.

George Soros has a sobering piece in today’s Financial Times that closes thusly:

Until recently, investors were hoping that the US Federal Reserve would do whatever it takes to avoid a recession, because that is what it did on previous occasions. Now they will have to realise that the Fed may no longer be in a position to do so. With oil, food and other commodities firm, and the renminbi appreciating somewhat faster, the Fed also has to worry about inflation. If federal funds were lowered beyond a certain point, the dollar would come under renewed pressure and long-term bonds would actually go up in yield. Where that point is, is impossible to determine. When it is reached, the ability of the Fed to stimulate the economy comes to an end.

Although a recession in the developed world is now more or less inevitable, China, India and some of the oil-producing countries are in a very strong countertrend. So, the current financial crisis is less likely to cause a global recession than a radical realignment of the global economy, with a relative decline of the US and the rise of China and other countries in the developing world.

The danger is that the resulting political tensions, including US protectionism, may disrupt the global economy and plunge the world into recession or worse.

When it comes to matters of international economics, Soros is not one to be ignored.

I finally found the problem, or rather problems, I was having trying to get the “Empowering” proposal to display as desired using Internet Explorer 7, which I described in a post yesterday. First there was a semicolon missing from a statement in the top-level file behind the display. That solved the background color issue. The font issue was solved by the use of a properly formatted “style” element in the subordinate file. Damn computers that don’t understand what you intend.

Lt. Col. John Nagl, USMA 1989, Rhodes Scholar, one of the Army’s premier students of counter-insurgency and fourth-generation warfare, and author of the book there on entitled Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, has announced he is leaving the service and joining a Washington think tank. Although his stated reasons are family-related, Fred Kaplan at Slate, among others, wonders what else might be involved:

Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post reporter who broke the story of Nagl’s retirement, quotes Nagl as saying that he’s leaving the Army because his family wants to settle down and because working at the Center for a New American Security will allow him to stay focused on the work that he loves. Nagl told me the same thing in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon and emphasized that, contrary to some rumors floating around, he is not leaving out of anger or disgruntlement.

Still, some officers who are sympathetic with Nagl’s views say they find it discouraging that the Army can’t find some way to hang on to a soldier of his caliber. For one reason or another, junior and midlevel officers—lieutenants, captains, and lieutenant colonels—are leaving the Army in droves.