Esquire's Politics Blog: So, How's That Egyptian Revolution Coming Along?

Egypt has just concluded voting for its new parliament — the first round, anyway — with surprisingly large turnouts and little-to-no serious violence. And that should make us all pretty happy, right? Alas, there's a lot of angst out there in the mainstream media and the blogosphere on all the issues that get lumped together in the big, mournful vibe of who killed the revolution? As usual, America's incredible impatience with progress, along with our unrealistic expectations about "new faces" dominating political outcomes, are fueling this growing sense of pessimism. But, in truth, the revolution is going along just fine.

Herewith, some whining you'll be hearing in the coming days — and the truth behind it....

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: 5 Post-Qaddafi Realities for Libya and the Rest of Us

They came to bury Muammar Qaddafi, not capture him. After more than four decades of rule, he was still in the business of threatening and killing Libyans — a kind of start-up insurgency that would never go away. So if Qaddafi is indeed dead, then so much the better; the great bogeyman has been removed from the scene. Of course the world will (temporarily at least) lament the violence required for his departure from power, but as dictator-toppling exercises go, this one was about as good as it gets: First, the Arab Spring's power of example, then the rebels-turned-ruling-military-force driving him out from below, and finally an enabling from the human rights-minded powers that be.

But still: How did we really get here? And, perhaps more importantly, what now?

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Daily Dish cite on Esquire post

Find it here.

I credit Yale and Claremont Grad School for convincing me on this point, showing the utility of the wisdom of crowds (especially populated by young new thinkers).

Esquire's Politics Blog: 5 Ways to Make the Pakistan Mess Less Stupid Than Vietnam

In the wake of Admiral Mike Mullen offering such electrifying testimony last week, various commentators — and respectable ones, like Christopher Hitchens and Dexter Filkins — are circling the "long war" question of the moment: What to do about Pakistan? And it's clear to anybody with a brain at this point that Pakistan has abused our trust and military assistance as much as — or worse than — we have long abused that fake state in our pursuit of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. So now, as the West's fiscal crisis kicks into high gear, progressively denuding us of NATO allies while Congress finally gets serious about reining in the Pentagon's vast budget, we've come to a clear tipping point in the whole Af-Pak intervention as its tenth year of operations draws to a close.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: How We Talk War When We Talk With China Now

Admiral Mike Mullen, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded a worried note in his New York Times op-ed on Tuesday on the state of Chinese-American military relations. It was a typically one-sided presentation of the situation: those spying, secretive, bullying, and increasingly well-armed Chinese versus a U.S. that's only trying to keep the regional peace... while selling arms at a record pace to every neighboring state, conducting joint naval exercises right off China's coast, and, you know, openly planning to bomb the breadth and length of the Middle Kingdom.

Details!

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's The Politics Blog: Obama's Middle East Speech Text, Decoded Line-by-Line

Expectations couldn't have been lower for President Obama's Middle East speech on Thursday, and yet it was a work of "realist" beauty that recognized: a) how little influence America actually has over these types of events, and b) where we stand at the beginning of what is likely to be a long process of political upheaval and — hopefully — economic reform that addresses the underlying issues driving the entire region. Yes, Obama took a pass on Palestine and Israel (his historic referencing of Israel's pre-'67 borders is the Mideast equivalent of a "world without nuclear weapons"), but he's got several touch points in the coming days (the Netanyahu meeting, another speech, Netanyahu's speech to Congress) with which to address that, so this was more of a broad-strokes laying out as to what America stands for, and what it's willing to do amidst its current fiscal realities. And — again — it was a great mix of stated idealism, expressed in long-haul terms, and political pragmatism that recognizes the here-and-now realities that must temper any sense of America coming to anybody else's immediate rescue.

Obama's was a well-crafted message — one that reassured both the world and Americans that this administration knows its limits and its responsibilities to history. It was, in a word, presidential.

And now, so you don't have to sit through it again, a little deconstruction of the most compelling sections excerpted (from the prepared remarks) at length....

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

The Politics Blog: "Life After the Bin Laden Kill: What Now?"

You can take down the wanted posters and run through the streets all you want, but the Osama bin Laden assassination leaves many essential questions unanswered. From Pakistan to China and the Pentagon to the 2012 polls, here's where we stand.

• So who runs Al Qaeda next?
• Will Al Qaeda retaliate?
• Isn't Pakistan is the real battleground — not Afghanistan?
• Is the Great Hunt finally over?
• Did Obama just get tough on terror for 2012?

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: Obama's Libya Speech, Decoded

Okay, we're familiar with the Obama drill on Libya to date: 1) Write political checks with your mouth that you have no intention of cashing with your military. 2) Keep acting like it's no big thing to your presidency, because you're a busy leader, and let the French take this bit in their mouth for once. 3) When all the ducks (UN, NATO, Arab League) are lined up, commit only the minimum of cutting-edge military assets to make this work, emphasizing no boots on the ground and absolutely no sense of responsibility for the aftermath — besides the usual superpower tithing. So yeah, a responsibility to protect, just no responsibility to pay the Bush-Cheney standard of 90-percent of blood and treasure.

Now for the official sales pitch to the American people, line-by-line:

I want to begin by paying tribute to our men and women in uniform...

Translation: Although every president starts out every war address like this, I'm a Democrat, and so I especially need to do this.

Read the entire 3,500 word post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: Battle: The Real Obama Doctrine Emerges

In 2008, Barack Obama ran against the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive, unilateralist war. His presidency, he assured us, would be different. And once he took office, it certainly was. One "apology tour" and Nobel Peace Prize later, the Obama Doctrine, such as it was, consisted of telling everyone and anyone that America was winding up its wars, pulling down its military tents, and going home — where it was going to be "renewed," "rebuilt" and so on. His National Security Strategy said it all: "Building at home, shaping abroad." Spot the focus; spot the window dressing. "Shaping" is a military term of art referring to anything other than actual warfare.

It was awfully darn close to Barack Obama promising never to do another Iraq, another Afghanistan — another anything.

And now we're bombing Libya.

So what happened?

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: Battle: Libya? How the Pentagon Cured America's War Itch

Before and after President Obama decided to be "very unambiguous" about why Muammar Qaddafi should step down, a lot of people were reading way too much into his defense secretary's comments above, made at West Point as part of a legacy tour that just happened to fall in the middle of a civil war. Was this some pre-emptive kind of door-slamming on the prospect of U.S. military intervention in Libya and whatever follow-on "Facebook revolutions" are to come? Not really. As MacArthur himself — a serious headcase if there ever was one — discovered with Truman, only the commander-in-chief makes those calls. The rest of us are just advisers, onlookers, and ne'er-do-wells.

And don't read too much into Hillary Clinton's own Libya whopper on Tuesday — "this doesn't come from some Western power or some Gulf country saying this is what you should do, this is how you should live" — because there's a lot more going on here than no-fly zones. As the world awaits our next move in the Middle East's power struggle, an intense battle is unfolding within the national-security establishment back home: The "future of the force," as insiders here in Washington and around the Pentagon like to call it, hangs in the balance. And Robert Gates, having already advertised that the United States of America had reached its limits and now poised for his final power play, knows how to counter better than anyone in the president's ear.

Can we interpret the Gates comments — made on his way out the door and protecting his tenuous small-war legacy every step of the way — as a repudiation of Bush and Cheney's long-war logic? Again, not really. (And please take note that almost all of the proposals out there for "surgical" this-and-that in Libya comes closer to Rumsfeld's vilified light-and-fast mentality than anything approaching a mass land force occupation.)

Does the Defense Department suddenly want to walk away from this "era of persistent conflict," as Gates likes to call it? No. (He's fully supports Obama's our-badassess-versus-their-badasses approach to counter-terrorism, swapping out Bush's bring-'em-on bravado for remorseless killing drones).

Is the U.S. military, as Gates said in the West Point speech, an "institution transformed by war" to the point of tamping down any possible major land war in Asia? Only insofar as we're keeping counterinsurgency alive and the troops safe. (Remember the last time we ditched that plan?)

But in staring down the Obama administration's wave of withdrawal from the world — the "post-American world" vibe that has we'll-be-number-one-again pundits like Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria headed straight for Qadaffi's bookshelf — Bob Gates swims against it. While managing two wars, he got fed up with trading future combat casualties in imaginary wars with China against today's very real ones, so you'll have to excuse him for sounding such somber notes. And God bless him for that, because it took a while to get here.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: Seven Reasons Why Qaddafi Would Be the Best Domino Yet

Please, spare me any dread over this goofy dictator's hopefully looming and well-earned demise. Muammar Qaddafi has had over four decades to do right by his country and he ranks right up there with old-man Castro as one of the worst leaders ever to keep a people down. Team Obama should have zero qualms on this one, no matter what any of our alleged allies in the region may say, because if they're worried about the Qaddafi family's influence powering on, they know damn well what needs to be done (or not done). Here's why you, Mr. and Mrs. American, should cheer on this revolution along with your careful president.

Read the entire post at Esquires' The Politics Blog.

The Politics Blog: "10 Lessons from the Revolution in Egypt... So Far"

This weekend, while Cairo was burning and Hosni Mubarak struggled to maintain power, I was in a kind of virtual Vulcan mind meld with a network of regional experts for my day job at Wikistrat, a Tel Aviv-based online scenario-modeling firm, ginning up ideas of what might come next for Egypt: Does the big man step down? Or do the people win? Does it all happen very fast, or way too slow? They're not easy questions to answer, and what happens in the next day or so will be crucial. But based on that weekend of analysis — and quite a bit of time spent in Egypt, including close interactions with the military there — a clearer picture is starting to emerge.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Wikistrat planning weekend scenario exercise on Egyptian's "Angry Friday" VERTICAL SHOCK with network of experts

Setting up our version of a war room on Egypt.  

We should have a basic available-to-anyone summary page up hopefully by Saturday afternoon, with drill-downs saved for subscribers.

Til then:

After Mubarak, will Egypt face a void? 

BY TIM LISTER, 29 JAN 2011

QUOTES:

Thomas P. Barnett of forecasting group Wikistrat put it more colorfully: "Let me give you the four scariest words I can't pronounce in Arabic: Egypt after Hosni Mubarak" . . . 

In any event, says Barnett -- formerly a professor at the U.S. Navy War College -- events in Egypt and Tunisia show that the "Islamist narrative" to explain the woes of the Arab world is being challenged by a maturing and well-educated youth movement whose expectations of a better life have been dashed by economic stagnation and a stifling political atmosphere . . . 

Barnett, chief analyst at Wikistrat, says Mubarak's best -- and perhaps only -- option may now be to announce an "exit date" to take the sting out of the protests, organize an orderly transition to fresh elections and hand authority to a caretaker Cabinet that could focus on growing the economy . . .

Read full piece here.

The New Rules: The Battle for Islam's Soul (Jan 2011)

Beginning with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the West has viewed the Middle East and North Africa primarily through the lens of radical fundamentalist political movements. That perspective has narrowed our strategic vision ever since, conflating Shiite with Sunni, evangelicals with fundamentalists, Persians with Arabs, Islamists with autocrats, and so on. But recent events in Tunisia and Algeria remind us that the vast bulk of history's revolutions are fueled by economics, not politics. In this, the struggle for Islam's soul is no different than that of any other civilization in this age of globalization's rapid expansion . . .

Read the whole column at World Politics Review.

Who Should Worry About the Tunisia Fallout, Really? (Jan 2011)

4. Egypt's modern "pharaoh" should worry.

Last time I was in Egypt, I heard the same lament from every young man I came across: "I can't get married because I can't get a job!" You want to brew a revolution? There's no faster way than keeping young men from getting their just desserts, if you know what I mean. Put them off long enough, and some will resort to a strap-on — you know, the kind that allegedly wins you 72 virgins in the afterlife. And president pharoah Hosni Mubarak's latest offer to his public is... 8-percent economic growth for the foreseeable future. Now that's downright China-like, if he can keep his promises — and fast . . . 

Read the full post at Esquire's The Politics Blog

Four scary words: Egypt after Hosni Mubarak (2008)

Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak's "emergency rule" is deep into its third decade, with modernizing son Gamal teed up as the pharaoh-in-waiting. While Gamal's efforts to open up Egypt's state-heavy economy have progressed nicely the past few years, so has Mubarak the Elder's repression of all political opponents, yielding the Arab world's most ardent impression of the Chinese model of development.

But with the global recession now reaching down deeply into emerging markets, serious cracks emerge in the Mubarak regime's facade. Unemployment is - unofficially - somewhere north of 30 percent. Worse, it's highly concentrated among youth, whose demographic bulge currently generates 800,000 new job seekers every year.

Ask young Egyptian men, as I did repeatedly on a trip, what their biggest worry is, and they'll tell you it's the inability to find a job that earns enough to enable marriage - a terrible sign in a society becoming more religiously conservative.

At 83, Hosni Mubarak is an unhealthy dictator who's achieved a stranglehold on virtually every aspect of Egyptian life, creating an immense undercurrent of popular resentment. While Washington focuses on Iran's reach for nukes and its upcoming presidential election, Egypt is more likely to be plunged into domestic political crisis on President-Elect Barack Obama's watch . .  .

Read more: Thomas P.M. Barnett's Globlogization - Scripps Howard News Service column - Four scary words: Egypt after Hosni Mubarak 

Egypt:  The Country to Watch, Esquire, October 2006

Let me give you the four scariest words I can't pronounce in Arabic: Egypt after Hosni Mubarak.

Osama picked the time (9/11), and Bush picked the venue (Iraq), but this fight between radical Islam and globalization's integrating forces was preordained the day Deng Xiaoping set in motion China's economic rise almost three decades ago. You can't rapidly add billions of new capitalists to the global economy and pretend the Islamic Middle East will remain queerly disconnected forever, somehow fire-walled from that borglike assimilation.

And so, while resistance may be ultimately futile, it will be bloody as hell in the meantime, with Cairo--not Tehran--likely to become the next big flash point in this Long War . . . 

Read the entire piece here.

Esquire's Politics Blog: Who Should Worry About the Tunisia Fallout, Really?

Details of the downfall of Tunisia's longtime strong man Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali are familiar enough: The spark that triggers the street-level explosion of social anger (a young man, hassled by the government for his pathetic gray-market activities, decides Plan B is to set himself on fire); the frantic government attempts at crackdown (close school!); only to be followed by the offering of sacrificial lambs (take my minister — please!); and, finally, the embarrassing departure of the big man himself. At this point, the rump government is throwing anything it can into the angry fire, hoping it will burn itself out. And the "unity" government doesn't seem to be doing much better.

With any such revolution (color this one green — as in money, despite all the Iran-esque web chatter), there is the temptation to read into it all sorts of larger meaning. This time around, I think the best route is simply to note which parties — outside of Tunisia — should be made supremely nervous by the unfolding events. With the possible exception of Crazy Qaddafi....

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: Obama's Afghanistan Review, Decoded

So the White House just released its much-anticipated review of our ongoing military efforts in Afghanistan (and Pakistan, mind you). And while President Obama, Bob Gates, and Hillary Clinton took pains to explain in a press conference on Thursday that "this continues to be a very difficult endeavor," it can also be very difficult to parse propaganda from, you know, the actual end of a modern war. But since this is a reasonably well-written document that the president's talking about here — and since it more or less outlines the past, present, and future of our troops' presence in region in a still-untidy five pages — it seems worthwhile to deconstruct the review line-by-line... and (white) lie-by-lie. Here goes.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: How the WikiLeaks Cables Reveal Obama's False Utopia

So the Obama administration says America's relations with our allies around the world can survive the latest WikiLeaks dump of U.S. diplomatic cables, and I'm inclined to agree. Truth is, the whole thing reads like a booze-addled Thanksgiving argument spun out of control, and nothing more. So the Middle East's corrupt autocrats hate each other and constantly goad the White House into taking out their garbage — big deal! God only knows the same good ol' boys will be the first to condemn us once things get tough and we choose to act. (To say nothing of Julian Assange's impending lawsuit.) In the meantime, sell the bad guys a few anti-missile defense systems and tell 'em to shut the hell up, because President Obama has one helluva lot more on his plate right now than just Iran, or North Korea, or Pakistan, or... you get the point.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: 5 Ways the U.S. Can Fend Off the Next Korean War

Well North Korea seems determined to stay on the front pages this month, having very proudly unveiled to a visiting American scientist a couple of weeks ago the existence of yet another uranium-enrichment facility (yes, it's apparently state-of-the-art and, yes, we already knew about it) and then launching an artillery barrage on Tuesday in self-declared retaliation for an apparently routine South Korea military exercise along the border. While it's tempting to write this off as just the latest shenanigans from Pyongyang designed to keep us on our toes, understand that virtually every all-out war scenario on the peninsula begins with a North Korean artillery barrage, so South Korea's decision to retaliate is no small matter.

Before this thing get out of hand too quickly, here's how the Obama administration can keep our already oversubscribed military away from another Axis of Evil war.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

 

The Politics Blog: America in Yemen: The Perfect War We've Been Waiting for?

Before the ink could dry, it seemed like the secret war had already begun. Just a couple of toner cartridges haplessly headed for American synagogues, and suddenly the headlines are shouting it: TIME TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT YEMEN and OUR INVOLVEMENT IS GOING TO HAVE TO BE LONG-TERM. I suppose that's what it's come to in this country these days — that, as soon as an obscure Al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen claims responsibility for some UPS packages in Chicago, Americans assume we have another all-encompassing, mega-expensive affair on our not-so-bloody hands. Because when it comes to nation-building, the United States doesn't do anything small and beautiful anymore.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

Esquire's Politics Blog: 5 Ways the New Congress Changes the Future of War

What with all the Washington pundits swashbuckling before Tuesday's election about why President Obama should and shouldn't rush back to the battlefront, you'd think national security might have been a bigger campaign issue. There is that little matter of the economy, of course, but then there's that wrinkle called the Tea Party — and the Republican instinct to placate the underlying political anger by way of conspiratorial notions concerning war and peace. Well, we're not quite back to Bush/Cheney territory, but a conservative majority means a lot for America's global outlook. (And that doesn't mean the left leans left, Bill Kristol.) Assuming our old new enemies in Yemen don't hit the terror jackpot any time soon, here are the issues to track after the stunning repudiation of our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president by the American voter. We're not even going to get started on Don't Ask Don't Tell...

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.

The Politics Blog: The Problem with David Petraeus Talking to the Taliban

Much has been made of the new "talks to end the war in Afghanistan" as General David Petraeus "rewrites the playbook in Afghanistan." The King of Counterinsurgency has shelved his nation-building effort to broker a near-term peace accord with Hamid Karzai, say the journalists fed information by the very man who's given up on Karzai, ambassador Karl Eickenberry. (Or so says Bob Woodward.) And while informed observers are quick to note that U.S. armed forces are still laying it on thick — with real success, it now appears — not enough has been made of the dangerous game Petraeus is playing for the long term. It's a bet that could end up putting U.S. arms back in the hands of a new wave of terrorists.

Read the entire post at Esquire's The Politics Blog.