Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 12:59AM ARTICLE: First Woman Ascends to Top Drill Sergeant Spot, By JAMES DAO, New York Times, September 21, 2009
I remember the debates from the early 1990s about women in combat and in the military in general.
The counter-arguments felt like pissing in the wind back then and the "long wars" have simply crushed them.
Women will do everything now, including running the drill sergeants.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 12:20AM POST: Zinni calls on Obama to Release "National Strategy Report" and for US "Smart Power" Functions to be Organized in a New Military Command, By Steve Clemons, Washington Note, Sep 04 2009
Another way to slice a path to the Department of Everything Else, from Zinni.
(Thanks: Judah Grunstein)
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 12:15AM ARTICLE: US Treasury eases cash and travel restrictions on Cuba, AFP, September 4, 2009
Nice step by the Administration that moves the ball forward. Hopefully, the embargo ends soon.
The best part of the new rules:
It allows US telecommunications network providers to link to Cuba with fiber-optic cables and satellite technology, permits US wireless telephone providers to enter roaming service agreements with Cuban firms, and allows US satellite broadcasts to the island.
That's the right business to be in.
(Thanks: Terry Collier)
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 12:11AM POST: Consumer Paradigm for China (รโร รยฅฯโฐฯรฃรโรบ), China Tells, September 4th, 2009
Some sense of the effort required to tilt China more toward relying on domestic consumption. This kind of change comes generationally.
(Thanks: Steve Epstein)
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 12:05AM ARTICLE: Australia, US call on China for war games, JONATHAN PEARLMAN, Sydney Morning Herald, September 3, 2009
Good sign and right instinct on the part of both Australia and our outgoing head of Pacific Command.
There is some worry that the new head of PACOM won't be open to this sort of thing, so some retrenchment may occur before events conspire to bring him up to speed.
(Thanks: David Sutton)
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 11:08PM POST: Iran's Twitter Revolution won't succeed because of US government, By Evgeny Morozov, Net Effect, 08/28/2009
Nice argument by Morozov. We should never be in the business of limiting such connectivity.
(Thanks: Gunnar Peterson)
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 1:30AM EDITORIAL: What Mr. Obama Said, and Didn't Say, New York Times, September 23, 2009
Good editorial that only points out the difficulty of asking Russia and India and China to put their economic interests in Iran at risk and THEN expecting help on Af-Pak.
Why should a bankrupt superpower think it's going to have its cake and eat it too?
Talk about unrealistic.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 1:26AM ARTICLE: U.S. and Allies Warn Iran Over Nuclear 'Deception'
Over, By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD, New York Times, September 25, 2009
I always love the term "deception" in this regard. After decades of secretly building up our nuke stockpiles and secretly sharing info with friends (while spies secretly took them to our enemies), we now lecture others on the secrecy and "deception" of their programs.
Naturally, we don't hold Israel to any such standard.
Is there such a thing as a "good" nuclear bomb or "good" nuclear power? Or do they all seem to use the capability for similar ends?
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 12:38AM ARTICLE: China's Plans for Mines Are Blocked, By KEITH BRADSHER, New York Times September 24, 2009
More friction reported between Australia and China on mining.
This is one damn complex relationship!
Who learns more from it? China, of course.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 12:35AM ARTICLE: U.S. Fears Pakistan Aid Will Feed Graft, By JANE PERLEZ, New York Times, September 20, 2009
Yikes!
We want to triple the aid to Pakistan and are debating how much we should bypass the government and it's corruption.
Good luck with that one. Why would anybody think that flooding society with free cash wouldn't result in the same?
Aid is not the answer, it's the curse.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 12:33AM ARTICLE: China Spreads Aid in Africa, With a Catch, By SHARON LaFRANIERE and JOHN GROBLER, New York Times, September 21, 2009
The guts of the piece:
From Pakistan to Angola to Kyrgyzstan, China is using its enormous pool of foreign currency savings to cement diplomatic alliances, secure access to natural resources and drum up business for its flagship companies. Foreign aid -- typically cut-rate loans, sometimes bundled with more commercial lines of credit -- is central to this effort.
Leaders of developing nations have embraced China's sales pitch of easy credit, without Western-style demands for political or economic reform, for a host of unmet needs. The results can be clearly seen in new roads, power plants, and telecommunications networks across the African continent -- more than 200 projects since 2001, many financed with preferential loans from the Chinese government's Exim Bank.
Increasingly, though, experts argue that China's aid comes with a major catch: It must be used to buy goods or services from companies, many of them state-controlled, that Chinese officials select themselves. Competitive bidding by the borrowing nation is discouraged, and China pulls a veil over vital data like project costs, loan terms and repayment conditions. Even the dollar amount of loans offered as foreign aid is treated as a state secret.
Anticorruption crusaders complain that secrecy invites corruption, and that corruption debases foreign assistance.
"China is using this financing to buy the loyalty of the political elite," said Harry Roque, a University of the Philippines law professor who is challenging the legality of Chinese-financed projects in the Philippines. "It is a very effective tool of soft diplomacy. But it is bad for the citizens who have to repay these loans for graft-ridden contracts."
In fact, such secrecy runs counter to international norms for foreign assistance. In a part of the world prone to corruption and poor governance, it also raises questions about who actually benefits from China's projects. The answers, international development specialists say, are hidden from public view.
"We know more about China's military expenditures than we do about its foreign aid," said David Shambaugh, an author and China scholar at George Washington University. "Foreign aid really is a glaring contradiction to the broader trend of China's adherence to international norms. It is so strikingly opaque it really makes one wonder what they are trying to hide."
Until recently, wealthy nations could hardly hold themselves out as an example of how to run foreign aid, either. Many projects turned out to be tainted by corruption or geared to enrich the donor nation's contractors, not the impoverished borrowers. But over the past 10 or 15 years, some 30 developed nations under the umbrella of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.) have made a concerted effort to clean up their assistance programs.
They demanded that foreign money be awarded and spent transparently, using competitive bidding and outlawing bribery. Increasingly, they also are also pushing to give borrowers more choice among suppliers and contractors, rather than insisting that funds be recycled back to the donor nation's companies.
China, which is not a member of the O.E.C.D., is operating under rules that the West has largely abandoned. It mixes aid and business in secret government-to-government agreements. It requires that foreign aid contracts be awarded to Chinese contractors it picks through a closed-door bidding process in Beijing. Its attempts to prevent corrupt practices by its companies overseas appear weak.
Some developing nations insist on independently comparing prices before accepting China's largesse. Others do not bother. "Very often they are getting something they wouldn't be able to get without China's financing," said Chris Alden, a specialist on China-African relations with the London School of Economics and Political Science. "They presume that the Chinese are going to give value for money."
Development experts say they have tried to convince the Chinese government that better safeguards and a more open process will enhance its efforts to gain influence and business. If its projects collapse because of kickbacks or inflated costs, they argue, China will end up exporting not only goods and services, but a reputation for corruption that it is already battling at home.
It's an old story unlikely to change until the 5th (in 2012) or maybe even the 6th generation (2022) of leaders comes along. China has hundreds of millions of rural poor to manage, so they view their abuse of other poor nations as defensible.
The only thing that changes the equation is transparency, and that's hard to come by in a lot of these Gap nations.
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 11:51PM ARTICLE: Lush Land Dries Up, Withering Kenya's Hopes, By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, New York Times, September 7, 2009
If climate change predictions are accurate, it'll be a much tougher future for much of sub-Saharan Africa.
Will the resulting violence matter globally? No.
But it will matter to the locals, and those dependent on rising connectivity to these places--like rising Asia.
That's why this strategic dialogue should start now.
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 11:50PM ARTICLE: Firefighters Become Medics to the Poor, By IAN URBINA, New York Times, September 3, 2009
This is the hidden reality of the lack of healthcare for so many in our society: ERs are jammed up with minor cases better treated preventatively and firefighters do all the house calls.
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 11:44PM ARTICLE: Crux of Afghan Debate: Will More Troops Curb Terror, By ERIC SCHMITT and SCOTT SHANE, New York Times, September 7, 2009
The return of the Powell Doctrine of limited regret and limited effort. As Bruce Hoffman notes, it is entirely seductive. But as I will point out, and have for years, it's on the wrong side of history.
Globalization will not go into stasis on our command. It will continue to expand into frontier areas, making every perceived off-grid location part of our networked world.
What is sadly missing in this debate is the burden sharing--beyond NATO. We conduct this entire discussion in American-centric terms: What does it take to prevent an attack on our soil? How many American troops? How much can America afford? We understand NATO to be a severely declining asset--in demographic terms.
And yet, we cannot imagine danger that is not solely directed at the West, when a destabilizing hit on China would be just as bad as anything that could happen on our shore, if it caused Beijing to move down certain paths.
Bottom line: we grown past the self-delusions of the Powell Doctrine, despite it many temptations.
But we do not see the world in all its complexity. Only the West is ever "in danger," and so only the West must muster the effort--meaning primarily the U.S.
The learning curve continues, even as most people populating this debate have seen their world visions overtaken by events.
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 11:41PM ARTICLE: Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows, By THOM SHANKER, New York Times September 6, 2009
Numbers to remember when we fantasize about great-power competitions and rivalries inside the Gap:
Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world's leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study.
The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before.
Italy was a distant second, with $3.7 billion in worldwide weapons sales in 2008, while Russia was third with $3.5 billion in arms sales last year -- down considerably from the $10.8 billion in weapons deals signed by Moscow in 2007.
The growth in weapons sales by the United States last year was particularly noticeable against worldwide trends. The value of global arms sales in 2008 was $55.2 billion, a drop of 7.6 percent from 2007 and the lowest total for international weapons agreements since 2005.
Point being, we have no real competition.
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 4:32AM 
President Barack Obama's performance at the United Nations last week was widely hailed -- and condemned -- as a clear departure from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. His most telling statement spoke volumes about the limits of U.S. power in an interdependent world: "Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone." Subtext? Atlas has put down the heavy globe and has neither the intention nor the wherewithal to pick it up again.
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 1:51AM ARTICLE: Security Council Adopts Nuclear Arms Measure, By DAVID E. SANGER, New York Times, September 24, 2009
The basics:
PITTSBURGH -- President Obama moved Thursday to tighten the noose around Iran, North Korea and other nations that have exploited gaping loopholes in the patchwork of global nuclear regulations. He pushed through a new United Nations Security Council resolution that would, if enforced, make it more difficult to turn peaceful nuclear programs into weapons projects.
But as Mr. Obama sat in New York as chairman of the Security Council -- a first for an American president, meant to symbolize his commitment to rebuilding the Council's tattered authority -- he received a taste of the opposition he is likely to face on some of his nuclear initiatives.
Some developing and nonnuclear nations bridled at the idea of Security Council mandates and talked of a "nuclear free zone" in the Middle East. That is widely recognized as a code phrase for requiring Israel to give up its unacknowledged nuclear arsenal.
Key phrase there: if enforced.
Our hypocrisy on the subject is rank: only our friend in the Middle East can have nukes.
People want to make this a thing about autocracies and democracies, but that's--quite frankly--completely irrelevant. For Iran, it's about keeping a democratic America from invading it.
Obama is pissing in the wind on this one, along with his flowery rhetoric on a nuclear-free world. Better he work problems he can actually impact rather than play--meaninglessly--to the history books.
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 1:45AM OP-ED: The Afghan Imperative, By DAVID BROOKS, New York Times, September 24, 2009
Perfectly fine description of why the U.S. must remain "all in" on COIN in AfPak.
But, as with all such U.S.-centric explanations, it stops there and doesn't raise any issues about eliciting allied help beyond NATO.
In the end, without that, we're just stretching out the loss--and the pain.
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 1:14AM ARTICLE: Good Will, but Few Foreign Policy Benefits for Obama, By PETER BAKER, New York Times, September 19, 2009
Good analysis, but it misses the point. Obama has made it clear to the world that America (under him at least) no longer lives the illusion of running the planet, and so now we make nice.
But a lot of people seem to think that, by making nice, we'll still get to run the planet: framing every issue OUR way and looking for OUR preferred outcomes.
The learning is just beginning . . ..
Monday, September 28, 2009 at 1:11AM OP-ED: A Better Missile Defense for a Safer Europe, By ROBERT M. GATES, New York Times, September 19, 2009
For the record, Gates' very intelligent presentation of the thinking behind the decision to scrap the Bush missile defense plan in Europe and go with something more flexible.
