Calling Attention In an interview this past winter, George Clooney admitted that his activism in Darfur may have been counter-productive: "“I’ve been very depressed since I got back. I’m terrified that it isn’t in any way helping. That bringing attention can cause more damage. You dig a well or build a health-care facility and they’re a target for somebody.”

That's the trouble with civil wars and "internal matters" in other countries. If the international community takes one side - usually the side that's losing - it will only increase the determination of the oppressors. Sure, they may fall or die sometime, but often it's years or decades later.

Armed intervention will only make the invaders another, disruptive factor in the conflict, as the U.S. invasion of Iraq shows. Often, the "good guys" are nearly as bad as or worse than "bad guys," with only media propaganda telling us different. Peace-keeping forces may end up presiding in a "reverse ethnic cleansing" as they have in Kosovo. Trade sanctions will actually solidify the grip on power of the oppressor and hurt that nation's opposition, minorities, and poor people the hardest. Even mere diplomatic condemnation will offend the regime and poison its relations with neighbors and the international community, further steeling their resolve to hold onto power.

Many people look back in shame at Rwanda. But if US/UN intervention was even logistically possible, they would have been forced to choose sides and end up slaughtering one side and take responsibility for governing Rwanda after, whereas today Rwanda is rapidly developing and relatively stable on its own.

Remember that the U.S. intervention in Vietnam probably added a million deaths to that conflict. Since the U.S. left in defeat, Vietnam has also experienced rapid development.

The other night on ABC News anchor Elizabeth Vargas was virtually clamoring for U.S. intervention in Zimbabwe. It appears to me that the best course is to do nothing. Condemning Mugabe and his regime won't lessen his grip on power, but only make him more likely to lash out at his opponents. If the people want to resist through armed conflict, that's their business, not ours. And if they decide instead to wait the old man out, that, too, is their business. Trade sanctions and condemnations will only make things worse for them.

Labels: foreign policy

  4:17 AM permanent link 0 comments

  Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War This is my latest at the Partial Observer. Comments welcome at the PO. Excerpt:

Buchanan wrote the book because the of Churchill Cult that exists in the United States. While fighting evil is admirable, destroying our own country's prosperity and strategic position to fight "enemies" who pose no threat to us and want no war with us is not. The would-be Churchills of the U.S. - President Bush first among them - appear more concerned about how history will look upon their own courage and heroism, but have little regard for the lives and welfare of the people they are supposed to govern.

Labels: foreign policy, history, war

  7:46 AM permanent link

  Decline and Fall Update Two years ago I published The Decline and Fall of the United States of America, which marks March 23, 2006, the day the Fed stopped reporting the total amount of dollars in the world, as the beginning of the end. Since then,

• The housing bubble burst within the year, leading to the subprime mortgage crisis. In other words, this real estate speculation that had propped up somewhat rosy economic figures during much of the Bush Administration, became unsustainable when the Fed panicked over M3.
  
• Oil went from $64 a barrel, to $110.
• Gold went from $513/oz on Dec 31, 2005 to $1000 today (not adjusted for inflation, because inflation is the point!)
  
• The dollar lost 25% of its value relative to the Euro
• and 17% against the Canadian dollar
  

Some of this was inevitable, because of the long-term looming crisis of Social Security and Medicare financing. If the U.S. government took no action to reform these entitlement programs, foreign investors would, sooner or later, question the sustainability of the American Dream.

And the U.S. government took no action. Bush's only action was a Social Security "privatization" scheme that didn't address the core financing problem, and in any case was more than offset by his insistence on expanding Medicare entitlements. Congress was worse than useless.

To be fair, I doubt that other industrialized countries, which provide most of our foreign investment, are any more responsible regarding their own entitlement programs. Then again, they're also not wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on "Defense," most of which goes to bases in other countries, domestic pork-barrel projects, and costly wars that do nothing to protect the United States and American citizens.

Had Bush and Congress merely held discretionary spending to late-1990's levels and avoided a bellicose foreign policy - in short, had they done nothing, our situation wouldn't be nearly so dire as it is today.

Whatever one may think about the gold standard, if people would rather invest in an inanimate object such as a metal, rather than in a business enterprise that has people dividing labor, trying new ideas, and creating wealth, we know that the country is generally inhospitable to business enterprise. And that means the standard of living will not increase and will probably decrease substantially over time. And this has to change.

Labels: budget, economics, Federal Reserve, foreign policy, Partial Observer

  7:19 PM permanent link 0 comments

  The Colombian "Terror Threat" I was disgusted when I heard that Chiquita was fined $25 million for the "crime" of protecting its employees in Colombia. Apparently, the right-wing paramilitary group they were paying protection money to is labeled a "terrorist" organization by the U.S. government.

It'd be one thing if Chiquita was paying off Al Qaeda. But how are these Colombian thugs a terror threat to the United States? Why should they be considered an enemy of the U.S.?

Don't such groups exist largely because of the political instability in Colombia caused by the U.S.'s War on Drugs? Weren't the dangers Chiquita's operations faced in Colombia a result, then, of U.S. policy?

Would it have been better if Chiquita let its employees get killed? Or if it ran crying to the U.S. government to protect its interests on the taxpayer's dime? Or if it hired its own mercenaries to fight back and create further instability in the region?

How is something that happens in Colombia a crime in America?

We should tell American citizens and businesses that if they want to travel or do business beyond U.S. boundaries, they do so at their own risk, and must be responsible for their own security. Just like Chiquita.

Maybe Chiquita is a big, bad, exploitive multinational corporation. Maybe it should be criticized for a number of things. But I don't see how they did anything wrong here.

Labels: foreign policy, War on Terror

  8:49 AM permanent link 1 comments

  Abe Foxman is Right Every week while Congress is in session I review the bills passed the previous week. During my scan, I also notice the non-binding resolutions that passed. Most of the resolutions are useless, such as congratulating the Detroit Tigers for winning the American League last year (waiting until July to make this empty gesture).

But many resolutions are worse than useless, and seemed purposely designed to damage our foreign relations. They lecture other countries on how to manage their own affairs, and urge them to apologize for actions taken by previous governments a long time ago. Imagine Venezuela passing a resolution asking America to apologize for Jim Crow. Or Sweden telling the United States to abolish the death penalty. Or China expressing "concern" about America's border patrols. Americans would rightfully say, "Shut up! It's none of your business!" Such resolutions would unnecessarily provoke tension between the two countries. Yet it is commonplace for Congress to insult other countries this way.

What has this to do with Abe Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League? Paul Gottfried tells us "he has worked to block congressional action to condemn the mass murder of one million Armenians in 1915 by Turkish military divisions." Why would he do that? " Because of "concern about the feelings of the Turkish government, which has good relations with the Israeli state."

To the extent I think of Foxman at all, I don't think well of him, because making a living by making false or exaggerated charges of bigotry isn't something I respect. And I'm not sure of Foxman's purpose here, because I don't know how, exactly, a Congressional resolution would damage Turkish-Israeli relations, or what this has anything to do with the Jewish community Foxman supposedly represents.

But regardless of his motives or alleged hypocrisy, Foxman is quite correct that "the Jewish community should not be the arbiter of that history, nor should the U.S. Congress." Congress shouldn't have passed this resolution because a) it is pointless, and b) because, to borrow from above, "of concern for the feelings of the Turkish government, which has good relations with the" United States.

We may have a personal distaste for Turkey's refusal to call it a genocide, but there are far more important issues that the United States and Turkey have to deal with right now. Why create a wholly avoidable diplomatic headache for ourselves?

Labels: Congress, foreign policy

  5:46 PM permanent link 1 comments

  Electing the World Dictator I don't make any apologies when voting for third party candidates. First, they better reflect what my values and hopes for the country. It makes no sense to choose among two candidates you don't want when a far more agreeable third candidate is asking for your vote. Second, the chances of your one vote determining the outcome of an election is zero. Even if a statewide election is determined by just one vote, and the odds against that are astronomical, many of the votes were miscounted. And if you vote third party and the "greater of two evils" wins by just two votes, you are off the hook for voting third party. Your vote won't make a difference either way.

For such reasons I don't regret voting Libertarian in 2004. My state was "safe" for one of the candidates anyway. Moreover, while no incumbent ever deserved to lose more than George Bush, John Kerry was dumb enough or evil enough to have voted for the Iraq Resolution, and was advocating a troop surge. It was clear that no challenger ever made a weaker case to get elected. If this was what the Democrats could come up with, the Democrats deserved four more years of George Bush.

That said, in the words of Spider-man "with great power comes great responsibility," I forgot that, in a Presidential election, Americans are also choosing on behalf of the rest of the world, that is, actual and potential victims of U.S. foreign, drug, and trade policies. It is one thing to say stuff like "maybe the Democrats were better off losing in 2004; they'll probably come back and win in 2008 and 2016." That's fine for Americans, but other people have to live with the outcome of our elections, too. The degree and kind of suffering the American President will inflict on the rest of the world should weigh heavily on our minds. All Americans who voted for either Bush or Kerry deserved to get Bush. But did the Iranians?

True, I voted for the Libertarian candidate who would have abdicated the World Dictator office - that's part of the reason I voted for him. But that vote was to "send a message," not motivated by a reasonable expectation that he would get elected. If we faced reality and asked ourselves, among the viable options, who would be a better world dictator, Bush or Kerry, it was clear that the latter would have been more restrained, pragmatic, and conciliatory in his diplomacy. That alone counts for a lot.

As it is, however, the world is stuck with Bush. As Sidney Blumenthal reports,

In Rome and Paris I met with Cabinet ministers who uniformly said the chief issue in transatlantic relations is somehow making it through the last 18 months of the Bush administration without further major disaster. None of the nonpartisan think tanks in Washington can organize seminars on this overriding reality, but within the European councils of state the trepidation about the last days of Bush is the No. 1 issue in foreign affairs. . . .
Their faint hope -- and it is only a hope -- is that they have already seen the worst and that it is not yet to come.

I know how they feel.

Labels: elections, foreign policy, politics

  2:21 PM permanent link 1 comments