FDD

Notes and Comments

BROUHAHA: What a curious quarrel: President Bush, in Israel, describes the policy of appeasement that led to World War II and the Holocaust, and Senator Barack Obama and his supporters take umbrage, claiming he has been viciously insulted.

Instead of protesting that Bush has implied that Obama would be soft on terrorist masters (because Obama has said he would meet - personally and without preconditions - with Iranian terrorist master Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even as Ahmadinejad's regime is killing Americans in Iraq, squashing freedom in Lebanon, developing nuclear weapons and threatening Israel with genocide), Obama might simply have said: "On this one point, Bush and I agree. I, too, would oppose a policy of appeasement. I, too, look not to Neville Chamberlain but to Winston Churchill as a model."

Politics aside (if we can manage that for a minute), the key issue is not whether you talk to terrorists, despots and tyrants. The issue is what you say - in particular (1) what you are willing to offer and (2) what you are prepared to threaten.

A president who doesn't know is a president who isn't ready to negotiate. A president should sit down with a sworn enemy only when it's clear that a deal - beneficial to our side - is not merely possible but imminent. Anything else is diplomatic malpractice that can only lead to diplomatic defeat.

Also, while everyone is by now familiar with Bush's controversial snippet, how many have taken the trouble to read the passage in context? Do so. It's below. Then decide whether you think these lines were "outrageous" (as Sen. Joe Biden said) or "disgraceful" (as Sen. John Kerry said) or "reckless and reprehensible" (as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said) or "beneath the dignity of the president" (as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said) or "a cheap political attack" (as DNC chairman Howard Dean said):

America's Counter-Intelligence Capabilities (RWC)

Finally, this tough but pointed note was sent to me by an active duty army officer I know.  He was commenting on America’s strained counter-intelligence capabilities which have always been poor, in some measure because we have a free and open society. It has a ring to it anyway,

“Robert Hansson wasn’t just a Soviet spy, he was an FBI Special Agent In Charge of FBI Soviet Counter Intelligence.

Aldrich Ames wasn’t just a Soviet spy, he was the CIA Officer in charge of CIA’s Soviet Counter Intelligence.

We don’t just get penetrated. We get bent over.”  OK, colonel.

Crime and the New Demographics of Europe (RWC)

The Washington Post recently did a long take-out about France and the crime problem with its Muslim citizens.  Molly Moore of the Post Foreign Service did the reporting. It was sympathetic to the problems of poverty and alienation among European Muslims but the facts that emerged were compelling.

Seventy per cent of all prisoners in France are Muslims, though Muslims comprise only 12 per cent of the French population.

Compare this to some other European countries. 

The Muslim crime problem is disproportionate to the population in all of them, but nothing compared to France.

In the UK, 11 per cent of prisoners are Muslims.  They make up 3 per cent of the population.

In the Netherlands, which is 5.5 per cent Muslim, 20 per cent of all adult prisoners and 26 per cent of all juvenile prisoners are Muslim.

In Belgium, two per cent of the country is Muslim, mostly from Turkey and Morocco and they comprise 16 per cent of prisoners.

The Perils of Tribalism (RWC)

Tribalism, fervid religiosity, nationalism –all of these forces are at play in the huge, non-monolithic continent that makes up Africa. 

There are lots of countries to worry about for lots of reasons.

The west is locked in struggle with Jihadi warriors who have been shaped by the tribalism of the Islamic Near East, whether it is Waziristan or the Iraqi desert or in Africa.

Sadly, an understanding of tribal structures in Africa has been shunned by the west for a long time even though an understanding of tribalism offers considerable insight.  It is considered a politically incorrect subject and many anthropologists don’t want to talk about it.

“I and my brother against my cousin” was the headline in a recent story on this subject in the Weekly Standard, albeit focusing on the Middle East. 

This was said about a new book by Philip Salzman called Culture and Conflict in the Middle East.  He makes the point that tribes matter most in many parts of the world. 

The dynamics of “honor” and collective responsibility help explain resistance to change in the Middle East, says Salzman.  It seems to me that a weird concept of tribal honor is what enabled a fundamentalist Islamic grocer in the Midwest to stab his young daughter to death, with the help of his wife.  The mother held the high school student down on the kitchen floor for the murder. The girl had sullied the family honor by defying them.  They were upset about her dating an American, a black teenager.  (The father was a terrorism suspect and the FBI, through a hidden bug in the family apartment, recorded the murder as it happened.  The man and wife were shouting, “Die daughter, die,” as they killed her. 

For God’s sake what could possibly explain such behavior?  Tribalism is the best bet.

Zimbabwe's Problems Continue (RWC)

Someone who should be facing the hangman himself for crimes against his own people, but he is not, is Crazy Bob Mugabe, still in power in Zimbabwe.  He most recently has been trying to steal the national election and has been brutalizing the opposition.

He should be swinging from a rope for what he has done to his country and its people over the decades. 

Over the past months he has employed the same vicious methods of terrorizing political opponents.  He lost the recent election but he has busily been obfuscating the numbers, claiming the opposition didn’t receive a majority of 50% of the votes plus one.

He continues to hold on by the tips of his gnarly, 84 year old fingernails through aggressive fraud and violence.

Life in Havana (RWC)

From Havana:  Life under the cross-dressing Raul Castro continues to improve.

Cuban government employees who are retired on pensions, which is much of the population, are going to get a monthly increase in June. That’s the good news.

The bad news is it will be about $1.95 cents.

That brings the average monthly state pension up to around $9.50 cents. 

That’s $9.50 cents… a month. 

And, in the same city, old Robert Vesco caught the “westbound freight”, to use a term once popular with hoboes. He apparently died six months ago from lung cancer in Havana and was buried without fanfare or announcement.  He was a fugitive from the US for many decades.  Remember Investors Overseas Service, IOS ?  Vesco ripped off those investors big-time.

He settled finally in Cuba, one step ahead of US law enforcement and after yachting episodes on the high seas.  He ultimately caught himself in a wringer with Fidel Castro, who had allowed him to operate criminally, until some member of the Castro family got burned.  Vesco ended up doing nine years in a Cuban jail cell for that.  He has been pretty much invisible for the past couple of decades and the Castro regime has said practically nothing about him. He once had a partner named Bernie Cornfeld.  You might remember him, a kind of nutty celebrity while he was at IOS.  He was a very high profile prisoner in Switzerland for a while.  Bernie had a huge house in Beverly Hills in the early 70’s, which he rented.  It was like a castle and had been built by John Barrymore or some other earlier film star.  I went to a couple of parties there. 

Bernie lived quite lavishly with a constantly replenished troop of good looking young women in residence, Playboy Mansion-style.  One of them was the very young Heidi Fleiss, who later famously turned professional.  I don’t actually remember her but, I learned later, she was a main squeeze of Bernie’s and was very young at the time. Bernie’s mother, a nice lady from Brooklyn, lived upstairs in the castle.  Bernie has since also caught the west-bound freight, though he more likely would have said he cashed in his chips.

Friends of Saddam (RWC)

A couple of Saddam Hussein’s best-known henchmen are finally now on trial in Baghdad for murder.

Remember Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister and Saddam mouthpiece who was all over US TV in the lead-up to the war five, six, seven years ago?  There was no lie the guy wouldn’t tell, no matter how blatant or obvious.

He has been in the slammer since surrendering four years ago last month.

Tariq Aziz, now 72 years old, faces the death penalty for signing off on the murders of 40 Iraqi businessmen who annoyed Saddam by price-gouging.

How the mighty have fallen. 

Aziz was famous for his love of Pierre Cardin shoes, expensive Cuban cigars and Chivas Regal Scotch.  I’m in tune with the Scotch and the cigars but the Pierre Cardin shoes leave me cold. (I am a fifty years-plus Bass Wejun guy.) Aziz hails originally from Mosul.  His real name is Mikhail Yuhanna but he changed it.

His digs were an enormous palace on the Tigris River.  He favored gilt furnishings, paintings on velvet and flocked whore-house style wall paper, all in keeping with the shoes. The house is now headquarters for the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, ironically a group often at odds with Aziz’ boss Saddam Hussein.

Also on trial, Saddam’s half-brother Watban Ibrahim al-Hassan, and another figure from the past, Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam’s, better known as “Chemical Ali”.  He has already been sentenced to death in another case involving the infamous mass murder of tens of thousands of Kurds, many of them women and children, by poison gas. Hence the nick-name.

They all face the gallows.

Hezbollah is Re-arming (RWC)

The UN has issued a report saying that Hezbollah now has 10,000 long-range rockets and 20,000 short range rockets stockpiled in Lebanon, near the Israeli border. 

The long range rockets are capable of reaching deep into Israel, as far as 185 miles, perhaps as far as the Negev desert where Israel’s nuclear facility reposes.

The UN report also said that Hezbollah admits to smuggling arms from Syria and Iran into Southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah Chief Nasrallah has been bragging for some time that he has a “surprise weapon” to use against Israel, most likely a surface to air missile for deployment against Israeli fighter jets.

Robert Fiske, the left-wing, anti-Israeli (and anti-American) British journalist Robert Fiske, now posted in Lebanon, says that about 300 young Lebanese men leave Beirut for Iran and training with Hezbollah every month.  Fiske would know.

Security in Afghanistan (RWC)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, as you know, recently came close to being wiped out in Kabul.  As Fred Burton and Scott Stewart pointed out in an excellent Strategic Forecasting, Inc. report (“Stratfor”) the fact that the assault happened during a live TV broadcast of the event, and the crowd included the US ambassador William Wood, the UK envoy and the NATO commander, heightened the coverage.

It turns out that Afghanistan Intelligence had some advance warning about the plot to assassinate the president and successfully thwarted two groups of al-Qaeda connected murderers that day, car bombers and a squad of men with a mortar. Later, the Taliban claimed credit for the attack efforts.

One group was able to evade the net. They were the ones who did all the shooting.

Three Islamic extremists successfully hid in a 3rd floor in a dilapidated building overlooking the parade ground a couple of hundred yards away.

They had rented it almost two months in advance.  They were able to bring in grenade-firing assault rifles and a heavy machine gun, apparently by hauling them up it up at night by ropes.  Police had searched the building two days before the attack.  The men locked themselves in the room sometime after that and were not noticed. 

President Karzai had been warned of a planned attack to take place during Sunday military parade by his intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh. A security perimeter of armed troops was tight and thick but the three men had already gotten through earlier.

The trio, who knew there would be no escape for them, began firing wildly as Karzai drove slowly by in an open-topped vehicle.  Their opening volley coincided with a planned 21-gun salute, for a moment effectively disguising the fact of the attack.  (Later, intelligence chief Saleh said that text messages found on the men’s mobile phones clearly spelled out their suicidal intent. It is possible that only one was killed by security police.  The other two appeared to have shot themselves.)

The heavy and inaccurate arms used by the men seemed like a pretty stupid choice, particularly since they roughly knew the distance to where the president would be.  Sniper rifles with scopes would have been more likely effective.

A Taliban spokesman later offered the moronic statement that the three assailants weren’t trying to kill the president –although they did kill three other people in the crowd and wounded eleven  –they were just trying to show the world they could do it.

The Taliban point was totally phony.

There was considerable breast-beating within the Afghan government, particularly in the Ministry of the Interior, about the security failures that allowed the three men to evade detection.

One official told the Washington Post, in a story reported by Carlotta Gall, that “What happened was really shameful.  Clearly it was a blow to our national and international prestige.” Well, maybe.  But they are being awfully tough on themselves.  Consider that this poor country has had over 4,000 separate terrorist attacks in just the last 12 months.

Crisis in Burma (RWC)

The disastrous cyclone Nargis, and the destruction in Burma, or if you prefer, Myanmar, which I don’t prefer, is setting in motion a crisis reaching far beyond the tens of thousands of people who have died or are missing and the tens of thousands more who are homeless or threatened by disease.

Food shortages and the rising prices of food suggest chaos and hunger around the world.

Burma was supposed to begin exporting its rice harvest this year, counted on by neighboring countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which now face an increased shortage.  The price of rice is expected to sky rocket.  It has just about tripled since the beginning of 2008, smashing the budgets of food-aid programs.

World Vision, the large U.S.-based disaster relief agency, told the Wall Street Journal they may be forced to cut back by a million and a half people who would benefit from their programs, out of 6-million usual beneficiaries.

Remember the environmentalists telling us that corn-based ethanol will cut back on greenhouse gas?  That was totally untrue.
Just the opposite is true. The Wall St Journal reports that corn-based ethanol will nearly double greenhouse gas emissions over 30 years.

The fact is that turning crops into fuel drives up the price of food and increases atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Time magazine, on the other side for so long, in their recent cover story, “The Clean Energy Myth” said just that.  Gee, said the Wall St. Journal, if Time feels that way can that other superficial and irresponsible rag Vanity Fair  -so good at celebrity-sex and rich people scandal and so poor on social and political issues, be far behind? The adjectives are mine, not the WSJ’s.