US blinks on cotton fight--as well we should have

INTERNATIONAL: "U.S. and Brazil Reach Agreement on Cotton Dispute," by Sewell Chan, New York Times, 6 April 2010.

Good to see the U.S. and Brazil make a deal over our cotton subsidies. Brazil, with African co-litigants (first time ever) successfully took us to the WTO Court on the subject, and, apparently, our recent unwillingness to abide by the ruling lead Brazil to threaten retaliation.

The case was also closely watched because Brazil would have been the first country to violate American intellectual property rights in retaliation for unfair trade policies under the approval of W.T.O. arbitrators.

Brazil had threatened, for example, to stop charging its farmers technology fees for seeds developed by American biotechnology companies and to break American pharmaceutical patents before their scheduled expiration. Those retaliatory actions would have cost American businesses up to $239 million.

"Traditionally, retaliation in trade has been the preserve of the largest developed countries, which have market power," said Robert Z. Lawrence, a professor of international trade and finance at the Harvard Kennedy School. "But this mechanism -- suspending intellectual property protection -- gives smaller, developing countries a way to enforce their rights under trade rules."

I admire Brazil for taking us on here, and sticking to their guns when proven right by the WTO.

Another symptom of the aid curse, with the cure being NGOs as intermediaries

ARTICLE: "Poor nations that get aid cut back on their own spending, Seattle researchers say: Seattle researchers have quantified what has long been an open secret about international aid: Many poor nations cut back on their own health spending after they get funding from wealthy donor nations," by Sandi Doughton, Seattle Times, 9 April 2010.

Another sick example of the aid curse.

For every dollar in health aid received, governments in the developing world on average shifted between 43 cents and $1.14 from their own health budgets into other priorities, says an analysis published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The other priorities could include education, road building -- or even the military. But the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) wasn't able to track where the money went, said Director Christopher Murray.

In a finding sure to fuel debate, the Seattle scientists also report that aid money given directly to governments led those governments to cut their own health spending, while money funneled through nongovernmental organizations did not.

The majority of U.S. health aid is awarded to NGOs, which, in turn, build clinics, train health workers and oversee other health projects. The Gates Foundation takes a similar approach. But many other nations give money directly to governments, which is meant to bolster national health systems.

In defense of the states: if they get help in health from outsiders, it may be considered their own business to reallocate their existing budgets.

But you just know that a certain amount of that displacement effect ends up with the military or in somebody's pockets.

Health-oriented NGOs, as we typically see, do the best work and have the most impact (remembering my column on the decline of the lethality of war in developing economies being traced back largely to vaccination programs).

[thanks to Jim Fick]

As opposed to . . . ?

ARTICLE: "China Pledges to Work With U.S. on Iran Sanctions," by David E. Sanger and Mark Landler, New York Times, 13 April 2010.

WORLD NEWS: "Leaders Pledge to Secure Nuclear Fuel: Summit Highlights Global Threat, but Final Communique Steps Back From Concrete Measures, Avoids Thorniest Issues," by Jonathan Weisman, Wall Street Journal, 14 April 2010.

The results from Obama's recent showy push on nukes are predictable enough.

Regarding Iran, Russia says it will only go so far and no further on crippling Iran's economy--presumably rejecting the gasoline embargo notion.

As for China:

President Obama secured a promise from President Hu Jintao of China on Monday to join negotiations on a new package of sanctions against Iran, administration officials said, but Mr. Hu made no specific commitment to backing measures that the United States considers severe enough to force a change in direction in Iran's nuclear program.

Pretty much par for that course.

As for the summit itself, we got the usual, gloriously vague communiqué (which is French for a non-binding, whisp-of-a-nothing document that can be signed with no fear of creating true responsibilities) in which everybody pledges to secure nuclear fuel. The alternative was to sign a communiqué that cited everybody's complete indifference to the subject, but that was narrowly voted down.

As the map indicates, the bulk of the civilian highly-enriched uranium sits in the Old Core and the former socialist East (Russia, China). The vast majority of the Gap is populated by all those gray states that have no boxes to check on the subject).

But at least Obama can say "We have seized this opportunity" . . . to sign the communiqué. But again, nobody saw anything new or compelling from either Russia or China WRT Iran.

But the quest to justify Obama's Nobel continues . . ..

Iran: the easiest prediction

ARTICLE: "Iran scientists reportedly have plans for new nuclear facility: Iran's atomic energy agency plans to commission 'one or two' new sites, pending the approval of President Ahmadinejad, a news agency says, a move that could heighten tensions with the West," by Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, 4 April 2010.

As I noted in Great Powers, all such stories will be true. No matter how far Iran plans on going along the route of creating an A-to-Z nuclear capability, they are committed to maintaining the capacity to keep the program alive--whatever the West or Israel throws at them kinetically.

The sloppy, asymmetrical deterrence exists: We'd have to nuke everything to be certain we'd got it all in one lengthy sweep of bombing. Otherwise, you're just buying a little bit of time that the Iranians can erase by redoubling their efforts, which they will do if you put them through the humiliation of numerous air strikes.

[thanks to WPR's Media Roundup]

Palin hits her (TV) mark

THE MEDIA EQUATION: "How Sarah Palin Became a Brand," by David Carr, New York Times, 5 April 2010.

Called this one a while back, saying she'd become the white Oprah, although a female Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh probably would have been closer to the mark.

When Sarah Palin made her debut as the host of " Real American Stories" on Fox News on Thursday night, she described several triumphs of regular people over insurmountable odds, but she missed an obvious one: her own.

After her failed bid for the vice presidency, she was more or less told to head back to Alaska to serve out her term as governor -- a kind of metaphorical kitchen.

Instead, she quit her day job and proceeded to become a one-woman national media empire, with the ratings and lucre to show for it.

I don't ever see her coming back seriously to politics. She'll remain in her growing media empire, getting fabulously rich, but--more important to her personality--fabulously famous.

She may run, all right, in 2012, but it'll be a Pat Buchanan-brand-maintenance run rather than a serious attempt.

She has found her niche, so important to her that she ditched her beloved Alaska in a heartbeat, along with the job that was only a stepping stone.

Palin is the perfect political figure for our fame-obsessed, reality-TV-star time--more Kate Gosselin than Hillary Clinton.

And she will be enormously successful in her media pursuits.

As always, Tina Fey's send-up of the "Sarah Palin Network" last Sat on SNL was dead-on.

Obama's lean toward economic connectivity over democracy: a very smart strategy

ARTICLE: "Free trade beats out free Egyptians," by Anna Borshchevskaya, The Daily Star, 3 April 2010.

Once again I find myself in complete agreement with the Obama administration's focus on economic connectivity and its prioritization relative to the democracy agenda:

After the imprisonment of Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nour in 2005, the Bush administration suspended plans for free-trade agreements with Egypt. The Obama administration has now effectively reversed this policy just ahead of Egypt's May parliamentary elections.

During a March 21-23 visit to Egypt, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said the United States hoped to double trade with Egypt over five years. In a departure not only from President George W. Bush's approach to the Middle East, but also a break with President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo last year, Kirk omitted any linkage to "freedom" and "human rights."

Kirk instead said that Washington's commitment to freedom, democracy, and human rights make the US "an even more attractive environment for investment and partnership." He added that the "partnership between the United States and Egypt in promoting peace and stability in the Middle East is a great foundation on which to build a much stronger economic and commercial relationship."

The Obama administration also seeks to import more goods from so-called Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZs).

These operate under an arrangement according to which goods made in designated industrial areas in Egypt and Jordan, using Israeli inputs, gain duty-free access to the US market.

"We believe [that importing more goods] serves the United States' interest for the reasons that the QIZs were initially put in place, and that it helps provide stability when people have access to gainful employment," Kirk explained.

Nothing will make the Egyptian people more willing to ditch Mubarak's "emergency rule" than rising incomes, a growing economy, and a widespread sense of self-mastery.

[thanks to WPR's Media Roundup]

Good czar, bad advisers

Pool Photo by Alexei Nikolsky, via Associated Press
'THE GOOD CZAR' Vladimir V. Putin projects a tough terror fighter.

WEEK IN REVIEW: "In Russia, Putin Escapes Blame for Terror Attack," by Clifford J. Levy, New York Times, 2 April 2010.

The gist:

In other countries, leaders might pay a political price for not preventing a startling attack like the suicide bombings in the Moscow subway last Monday. Not here, at least not so far. If anything, terrorism and unrest in Russia's predominantly Muslim regions have long served to strengthen Mr. Putin's hand.

Mr. Putin uses the conflict to portray himself as a swaggering street fighter who is willing to do almost anything to protect an anxious public from jihadist fanatics. And when there are failures in Russia's war on terror, they are attributed to bumbling or insidious subordinates -- not the man himself.

He plays on a piece of Russian folk wisdom that is roughly translated as "the good czar, bad advisers" -- the belief that, throughout history, a Russian leader with the right intentions is often betrayed by underlings. That is why Mr. Putin, the prime minister and former president, is often shown in public scowling and lecturing other officials.

This is Russian History 101.

[thanks to WPR's Media Roundup]

The frontier is always a source of scary behavior, but it also gets tamed by comprehensive connectivity

POST: "Are Computers in Africa Really Weapons of Mass Destruction?" by the black-hats-on-the-dark-continent? dept, Tech Dirt, 5 April 2010.

A myth-busting post that begins with a scary tale:

In recent months, a number of folks have argued that the arrival of high-speed bandwidth in Africa represents not an opportunity for economic growth, but a dangerous threat to the world. According to these Western pundits who are, incidentally, often promoting their cybersecurity services, computers and connectivity in Africa either pave the way for terrorists to unleash cyber-attacks or for botnet operators to gather millions of unprotected machines into their control. Although we've spent considerable time debunking the hysteria around cyberwar, this new version of the meme is even more unfounded.

The rest of the piece debunks the notion that Africa represents something beyond the norm.

The truth is, Africa is just the latest frontier, and yeah, with the opening connectivity, the worst elements will rise to the fore and make all sorts of mischief. But the bulk of humanity there will go about their business no better or worse than we do, given their resources. The criminals and terrorists and scam artists always flock to the most recently connected places, because they know the rules and security will lag desperately behind.

But the lag isn't infinite, so things settle down eventually, and the process is driven by locals who are legally and successfully exploiting the connectivity and don't care to be associated with such nonsense.

In short, this is a familiar process of frontier integration, and Africa doesn't exactly present a case out of the norm. It's just the case du jour.

[thanks to Michael Castello]

Disrupting the money trail will never be enough

FRONT PAGE: "Iran Sanctions Yield Little: Asset Freezes Net Only Small Sums as U.N. Weighs New Ones to Fight Nuclear Program," by Steve Stecklow, Wall Street Journal, 5 April.

So far the US has racked up less than $43m in frozen assets. The Swiss make $1.4m happen against a $712m total of Iranian investments held in their banks.

Peanuts, as they say.

Even more unrealistic: the oft-running (at least in Indy) political TV ads that say, if only America can cut her energy dependency in half we could stop the Iranians from sending explosive devices to our enemies in the region. The fallacies there are too many to mention. First, we don't buy Iranian oil, even indirectly, to any appreciable degree. Second, we no longer can influence global prices--that's virtually all Asia's doing now. So I guarantee you: America cuts its oil imports to nothing and Asia simply assumes the rather meager percentage (10-15%) that we pull out of the PG today. Simply put, this logic is about as goofy as the notion that turning down the CO2 knob will rid the world of terrorism. Guess what? We got rid of the Sovs and all the terrorists and national liberation movements in the world simply shifted to self-financing. Iran is peon compared to the old Soviet empire. Wipe it off the map and these groups still get by just fine.

Our solution will never be cutting off money, but eliminating popular appeal by engineering economic development and better attached political outcomes.

The rest is wonderful show, but it will never be decisive.

The long and the short of the U.S.-Iran naval showdown

Found here

VERSUS

Found here

WORLD NEWS: "Iran-bound powerboat raises fears: A record-breaking craft's potential to be fitted with torpedoes concerns the US navy," by Guy Dinmore, Financial Times, 5 April 2010.

Because of the great legend that was the Millennium Challenge exercise, as codified by Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, we all know that a fleet of suicide speedboats would defeat the entire US navy in the PG, sending them to the bottom.

Whether it ever happens is another thing, because anybody who sends a US carrier to the bottom has a bigger problem than the resulting bragging rights, but the mismatch is real. We have a navy built to fight other navies, and nobody's really got one anymore, save a few great powers we can't afford to fight anyway for financial reasons (and they us, in return).

What we face in most places are glorified coast guards, so why wouldn't the Iranians try to freak us with ultra-fast speed boats--a littoral version of a car bomber?

But then, if we admit, there's plenty of realistic ways, for somebody who's really committed, to sink a US carrier. But again, that ain't the problem. The problem is what America would do next.

And we're not exactly defenseless even on this point, as one naval strategist points out in the piece, the swarming speedboat hypothesis has never been proven, and "Everyt time small, fast boats run into helicopters, the helicopters win."

So something to worry about all right, but please retain the larger perspective.

ANYBODY can sucker punch us at any time. It's what comes next that matters.

Or, in my New Map vernacular, non-states can dominate temporarily with vertical scenarios (bolts from the blue), but states still dominate the drawn out horizontal scenarios, where resourcing is everything.

Another warning on China's bubblicious economy

FRONT PAGE: "Warning for China on the perils of rapid economic expansion: CCB chairman adds to chorus of concerns," by Henny Sender and Jamil Anderlini, Financial Times, 5 April 2010.

From the chairman of the China Construction Bank, unsurprisingly one of China's biggest.

We are told, officially, that China is on pace to grow 9.5%, but unofficial figures suggest something more like 11-12%, which is almost impossible to accomplish without severe inflationary pressures.

The real warning:

Mr Guo said there would be a price to pay for the flood of state-directed bank lending that made up the bulk of China's economic stimulus package last year . . .

No free lunch, as they say.

Train-up better or isolate for their sins?

ARTICLE: "U.S. plan to train Indonesian elite army unit raises alarm: The plan to train members of Kopassus, which is accused of rights abuses, would violate U.S. law, critics say. Analysts, however, say the goal is to engage, rather than isolate, troubled nations," by John Glionna, Los Angeles Times, 6 April 2010.

Old story: U.S. reaches out with mil-mil training, and lo and behold, not every officer who attends our schools turns out to be a great guy, years later. Likewise, not every group we reach out to has a spotless record.

So do we train them up better or isolate the whole lot of them? Which route do you think buys us less interventions down the road and which creates more?

You either mentor or tell them to get along on their own. On their own, their record tends to be far worse than when mentored by us, but even with the mentoring, outcomes are not guaranteed.

Then again, neither should the rotten apples lead to the demonization of the entire process.

[thanks to WPR's Media Roundup]

The pol-mil shenanigans pale compared to the serious economic penetration

Found here

OPINION: "What's at Stake in Kyrgyzstan?" by Ariel Cohen, Wall Street Journal, 14 April 2010.

COMMENT: "Bismarck holds lessons for a rising China," by Wen Liao, Financial Times, 14 April 2010.

As always is the case when anything happens in Central Asia, we are told that Russia wins and America loses. Casting the region in these terms is old habit, but it's increasingly meaningless.

Check your map: China's the country with the substantial border and the growing economic penetration. We care about Manas because of Afghanistan. Russia wants Manas gone so it can force us to rely more on it for supply access to Afghanistan from the north.

We play our "great game" (a truly cliched term) amidst the superstructure, whilst China goes about rearranging the base to its liking, and we tell ourselves that influence is being won or lost in zero-sum terms. The Russians offer the former Bakiyev regime $2B in aid to desist our offer on Manas. But then Bakiyev signs our deal anyway. Let's see how much the new regime is offered by Moscow, and then how much more it demands from us for Manas--again. We will go on losing and winning and losing and winning, and it will be all so meaningful.

Meanwhile . . .

... by extending credits to prop up former Soviet states in central Asia and eastern Europe--demonstrating in financial terms its rejection of Russia's claim to an exclusive "sphere of influence" in its near abroad--China showed its determination to maintain the post-cold war settlement across Eurasia.

China is growing by leaps and bounds, and is already recognized by most everyone as Asia's primary power--leaving the Russians in its dust. Does anybody spot anything in their two economic trajectories that says the Russians will rebound and approach China's levels any time soon?

If anything, China's rise and the growing organized resistance it generates means its diplomacy is arguably the biggest change-agent on the planet right now--even bigger than our own, because everybody is simultaneously adjusting to and preparing against China's trajectory. By comparison, few states, located overwhelming on its borders, find themselves focused on Russia's relative flatline.

While China seeks a low profile everywhere it goes in the world, lest it get sucked into every issue of the day, Russia has to insert itself in both Iran and Venezuela to garner any serious attention.

It is because of its relative unimportance to the global architecture that Russia can suffer its non-leadership by Putin and Medvedev. But China? It really does need a Bismarck, or someone who can manage its rise in such a way that it does not engender sufficient global friction as to render its trajectory self-limiting or--worse--truly self-defeating.

From Wikipedia

Everybody wants this version of the Second Reich to stick around.

Newco's make for a renewed economy

NEEDED: more of these

OP-ED: "Start-Ups, Not Bailouts," by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 4 April 2010.

Nice piece by Friedman. Makes me proud to be senior managing director of a start-up-company-now-matured. Because helping create all those jobs is meaningful.

The key point that starts the piece:

Here's my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: "Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less," said Litan. "That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period."
Message: If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies -- fast.

Second cool point: about 1/4 of those jobs came from companies started by immigrants, whom we know are way more likely to start a newco than people born here.

The bottom line of the piece: we need to revitalize risk-taking within our economy and society, and that begins with entrepreneurs and newco's.

In our seven years, Enterra has tackled intelligence sharing, supply chain management, critical infrastructure protection, alternative energies, development in postconflict countries and now--right here in America--healthcare reform! The same subject has dominated everywhere: determining the rules and accelerating/smoothing the process as much as possible through rule-set automation that makes the routine autonomic and real-time resilience the norm. Where else are you going to find that sort of crazy-ass ambition but in a start-up?

We must eventually act on climate change, so starting earlier gives us more experience

LEADERS: "Spin, science and climate change: Action on climate is justified, not because the science is certain, but precisely because it is not," The Economist, 20 March 2010.

Not my favorite subtitle, because the logic expressed is a bit awkward (We should act on bad information?). But the underlying argument appeals: The certainty of the science is there; it's the politics that is creating the uncertainty on the basics (the planet is warming up [or more accurately, experience less normal cooling in reply], humans play a role in that, and the way we play that role is undeniably detrimental to our environment--besides the impact on global warming).

On the big predictions of future warming, the swag is significant, and here's where the subtitle makes more sense: if the upper-end happens, we'll collectively face a ton of adjustment over the second half of the century. I always doubt upper-end predictions, but they must be accommodated on some level in our thinking, plans and action.

But the more immediate truth also remains: the West will not talk the rising East and South into foregoing rapid development on this basis--buttressing my sense that the phenomenon is destined to put off for quite some time in terms of widespread response.

But since the response will necessarily come, either for global warming reasons or for sheer pollution problems (or, more likely, the latter first with the former being added on top with each passing decade), there is solid logic in pursuing international cooperation, R&D and regulations as a way of beginning the long journey down this path.

That's why I don't have a problem with Copenhagen happening--and then largely failing.

Plus, quite frankly, we need to get past this current, horrible political generation running things in DC. I don't think we've ever had a more silly, self-destructive bunch.

So I see plenty of growing up to come across the global board (West getting more realistic on what can be done and how fast, the East and South becoming more cognizant of their growing environment damage), but I'm also for the low-and-slow continuous attempts to build a global rules regime on this question, because, watching how long it took GATT to morph into the WTO, I know this sort of cooperation takes a very long time to build.

So yes, pursue. Just be patient and realistic on outcomes.

Kim, truly in distress, reaches out to China

ARTICLE: "North Korea Is Said to Be Seeking China's Aid," by Choe Sang-Hun, New York Times, 2 April 2010.

Described as suffering his worst economic crisis since the mid-90s famine, Kim is expected to visit Beijing shortly for a definitive influx in aid.

We shall see what the Chinese demand in return. Speculation will center on returning to the Six-Party talks, but honestly, the more important discussion is what happens to the extant private market activity in NorKo, which Kim is expected to crush in favor of renewed government control over everything.

To me, getting Kim back to the talks is meaningless, but Beijing finally forcing him down some Deng-like path? That would be seminal.

Obama isn't half-white, he declares on census

ARTICLE: "Asked to Declare His Race, Obama Checks 'Black," by Sam Roberts and Peter Baker, New York Times, 2 April 2010.

I will admit: I am somewhat disappointed and offended by his choice.

Obama could have checked both the black and white boxes, reflecting his true parentage. Instead, he checked only black, essentially denying his mother's European race.

Such a choice, to me, is beyond self-perception or skin tone. He could have made the statement that he's biracial, which he is. He's not mostly black, but at best, half African. Conversely, he's not mostly white either, but at best half European.

Instead, he went with the old one-drop-makes-you-black argument, something I've always found crudely offensive. People are who they are--in aggregate.

Why should I be offended?

Do the counterfactual. Obama could have checked just white. Imagine how African-Americans would have accepted that one.

To me, the rising-above-race choice is he checks both and says in effect: This is who I am. Deal with it.

Instead, he did the safe, least offensive thing, because let's admit it, if he recognized his European half officially, he'd encounter more hassle for "denying his blackness" than he does now for pretending he's not half-European.

I am unimpressed. Being half-European isn't something to be ashamed of, any more than being half-anything.

[ADDED LATER IN RESPONSE TO A COMMENT]

I think the better example is Tiger Woods, who, when asked what his race is, basically answers, "all of the above" when he references his African, Asian, Native American and Caucasian roots. He says he is all because he feels he is all, no matter what society sees in his skin (because, frankly, most Thais see a Thai man when they look in his face). I admire that.

Woods revealed his "Cablinasian" self-definition in 1997 on "Oprah," but he made it up when he was 16. He has consistently maintained that to pretend he's only black would be to deny his mother (she is Thai and Chinese) and the fact that he feels as much Asian as anything else. Tiger obviously has/had two very strong influences as parents and he seeks to publicly respect both. The acronym-like construction refers to: CAucasian, BLack, INdian and ASIAN, because he's 12.5% Caucasian (white, particularly Dutch), 25.0% Black, 12.5% Indian (Native American) and 50.0% Asian (25% Thai, 25% Chinese). Woods likes being all those things and likes being known as all those things. That is the choice he makes as a supreme role model (putting his recent transgressions aside), and it's an impressive one--to me.

Obama offered a more narrow answer (and an inaccurate one), not because he is ashamed (just read his two autobiographies and you'll see that he's not), but because he's very political and worries about how his decisions get interpreted. I don't admire that, even as I appreciate how his profound capacity for such calculations makes him a strong politician.

I was just hoping for something besides a politician's act on this teachable moment.

The census doesn't ask, "Which of these categories do you feel you belong to?" It instructs you to check all boxes that apply ("What is Person X's race? Mark x one or more boxes").

To achieve his usual accuracy, Tiger would check "White," "Black, African Am. or Negro" (yes, for some reason "Negro" is still on the form), "American Indian or Alaska Native," "Chinese" AND "Other Asian" (writing in Thai, which is listed as an example), meaning he'd check five boxes! Why? Because that would be accurate and not to do so would be inaccurate.

Obama chose to recognize his father's race but not his mother's, and that was a very political choice by a man who knew full well his selection would be noticed.

And yeah, I was disappointed by his choice--and his inaccuracy.

Petraeus in 2012?

COLUMN: "David Petraeus for President: Run General, run; With many voters yearning for an outsider, and military officers looked up to, General David Petraeus could be a powerful presidential candidate and a potentially accomplished President," by Toby Harnden, Telegraph, 3 April 2010

An ardent case made for the general in 2012. My fantasies (and that's all they are at this point) have run toward 2016 on the assumption that Petraeus wouldn't turn down the Chairmanship (offered to him by Obama for the same sly, "team of rivals" reason why Hillary was offered SECSTATE) and Obama would appear too formidable in 2012 (no sitting, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning president has ever run for re-election, although Teddy Roosevelt did run again in 1912, after four years out of office but with his '06 prize in tow)--especially if one assumes the economy is in full recovery mode by then (a decent bet).

But then you think, out-of-power parties are more open to experimentation when confronting a sitting president (tougher to oust as of late, and Obama is one helluva fundraiser), and Petraeus would definitely be that. Plus, maybe he's done being general and doesn't look forward to be the great man's right hand at the Pentagon.

So who knows. I personally would be deeply intrigued by Petraeus running in 2012, no matter who he ran with or for.

[thanks to Michael Smith]

Iraqis vote with their heads, all right

WEEK IN REVIEW: "The Iraqi Voter Rewrites the Rulebook," by Rod Nordland, New York Times, 4 April 2010.

Nice piece by Nordland, who consistently impresses.

The guts:

And perhaps the biggest was the unexpected sophistication of the Iraqi voter, even though the election results left this often-violent land without a clear governing consensus and some groups crying for a recount. It may, in fact, be months before a governing coalition can be formed in a 325-seat Parliament where no group won more than 91 seats.

Still, the election accomplished something quintessentially democratic: The voters had their say, and what they said was not just "a pox on all their houses," but also something far more trenchant -- that many assumptions about what appeals to voters, however true elsewhere, need to be revised for voters here.

First, incumbency didn't matter. Only 62 of the 275 members of the last Parliament kept their seats. Also dashed were the political hopes of many government officials -- commissioners, deputy ministers and more.

Second, sectarianism is still a force in Iraq, but no longer the only significant force, as it was five years ago in the first election after Saddam Hussein fell. While some religious parties did well, it wasn't well enough to dictate who will form a government. Other religious parties ended up with hardly a seat to call their own.

Nor was tribalism a guarantee of victory. One tribal leader, Hamid Shafi al-Issawi, had counted on the 50,000 votes of his huge Issawi tribe in Anbar Province; he couldn't even muster the few thousand votes needed to take a seat.

Even the clout of party leaders proved dubious. Those leaders, who formed voting alliances called lists, chose the order in which their members appeared on the ballot. That ensured that the leaders themselves were big winners in position No. 1. But further down the list, the order counted for less. For example, Mohammed Ridah Fawzi, a follower of the militant leader Moktada al-Sadr, finished sixth and won a seat, even though he was 86th on the Shiite-dominated Iraqi National Alliance list.

And (Boston, take note), the patronage vote was nearly nonexistent.

As always, none of this guarantees anything but a messy and still-too-violent political landscape in Iraq.

But it does say we consistently underestimate the Arab capacity for democracy.

Me? I will tell you that this evolution is going about as fast as I had hoped it could.

Drones work the enemy to death

European Pressphoto Agency: An armed MQ-1 Predator drone, in an Air Force handout photograph

WORLD NEWS: "U.S. Defends Legality of Killing With Drones," by Keith Johnson, Wall Street Journal, 6 April 2010.

FRONT PAGE: "Drones Batter Al Qaeda and Its Allies Within Pakistan," by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, New York Times, 5 April 2010.

I am fully onboard with Team Obama on this one: the notion that reaching out and killing terrorists who have declared war on our troops and our nation is not "unlawful"--especially when you're talking ungoverned or poorly controlled areas. It's one thing to go and kill people inside functioning states with judicial systems capable of rooting out such threats, but quite another when you're talking no-gov-lands like Waziristan, when Pakistan's rule is thin to the point of absent.

From the WSJ piece

Harold Koh, State's legal adviser, puts it this way:

In this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks.

Obama has truly exploited this capability, as the CIA has killed 4-500 suspected militants since Jan 09. The USG says only 20 civilians were caught in the fire, a number naturally disputed by non-USG observers.

Bin Laden declared war on the U.S. in 1996 and has waged that war ever since from foreign locations. We finally returned the favor in 2001, taking the fight to those foreign locations. If international law doesn't provide enough detail on this sort of fight, then it's job of the international community to fill those gaps in--not that of the U.S. to fight with one hand tied behind its back.

The good news:

A stepped-up campaign of American drone strikes over the past three months has battered Al Qaeda and its Pakistani and Afghan brethren in the tribal area of North Waziristan, according to a mid-ranking militant and supporters of the government there.

The strikes have cast a pall of fear over an area that was once a free zone for Al Qaeda and the Taliban, forcing militants to abandon satellite phones and large gatherings in favor of communicating by courier and moving stealthily in small groups, they said.

The best part:

By all reports, the bombardment of North Waziristan, and to a lesser extent South Waziristan, has become fast and furious since a combined Taliban and Qaeda suicide attack on a C.I.A. base in Khost, in southern Afghanistan, in late December.

In the first six weeks of this year, more than a dozen strikes killed up to 90 people suspected of being militants, according to Pakistani and American accounts. There are now multiple strikes on some days, and in some weeks the strikes occur every other day, the people from North Waziristan said.

The strikes have become so ferocious, "It seems they really want to kill everyone, not just the leaders," said the militant, who is a mid-ranking fighter associated with the insurgent network headed by Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani. By "everyone" he meant rank-and-file fighters, though civilians are being killed, too.

Tactics used just a year ago to avoid the drones could not be relied on, he said. It is, for instance, no longer feasible to sleep under the trees as a way of avoiding the drones.

"We can't lead a jungle existence for 24 hours every day," he said.

Militants now sneak into villages two at a time to sleep, he said. Some homeowners were refusing to rent space to Arabs, who are associated with Al Qaeda, for fear of their families' being killed by the drones, he said.

The militants have abandoned all-terrain vehicles in favor of humdrum public transportation, one of the government supporters said.

The Arabs, who have always preferred to keep at a distance from the locals, have now gone further underground, resorting to hide-outs in tunnels dug into the mountainside in the Datta Khel area adjacent to Miram Shah, he said.

Most realistically, the drones give us access and lethality in a zone where the Pakistanis cannot manage or simply refuse to go:

While unpopular among the Pakistani public, the drone strikes have become a weapon of choice for the Obama administration after the Pakistani Army rebuffed pleas to mount a ground offensive in North Waziristan to take on the militants who use the area to strike at American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The bottom-line conclusion from the local gov-friendlies:

Two of the government supporters said they knew of civilians, including friends, who had been killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, they said, they are prepared to sacrifice the civilians if it means North Waziristan will be rid of the militants, in particular the Arabs.

"On balance, the drones may have killed 100, 200, 500 civilians," said one of the men. "If you look at the other guys, the Arabs and the kidnappings and the targeted killings, I would go for the drones."

Our very of the cheap-and-expendable versus theirs--an appropriate symmetricization of the kinetic side of the conflict.