All war is assassination--just delivered on an industrial scale

FEATURE: "The Drone War," by Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedmann, The New Republic, 3 June 2009.

All these drone killings, because they focus on high-value targets, raise the issue of assassinations, so sayeth the authors.

Officially, the USG does not assassinate, at least as far back as the Church Committee investigations that led Ford and Carter to sign presidential directives disallowing the same. But Reagan went after Qaddafi and Clinton went after al-Qaeda leaders with regularity.

And now with the drones, because they're so discreet (or at least attempt to be), we find ourselves launching missions with the expressed goal of getting THAT bad guy, and Bergen and Tiedemann say that means we're moving back into assassinations without a proper public debate.

Back in PNM, I made the argument (as I did thousands of times in the brief) that conflict had downshifted from System to State to Individuals, so our interventions were more and more devolving into round-up-the-bad-guy drills, starting with Panama (Noriega), Haiti (bad actors), Somalia (the warlord focus), the Balkans (when we started going after Milosevic cronies in a very pointed fashion, using a variety of means), driving out the Taliban/al Qaeda leadership (Afghanistan) and then the deck of cards in Iraq.

In short, we haven't waged wars against states--as in nations and their people--for a long time. We mostly do police work on behalf of the global community--as in, rounding up the bad actors. With the Powell Doctrine, you went in with big force, grabbed whomever, and left, not trying to fix anything.

Now, after 9/11, we stick around, and our lists tend to grow in size and working space, increasingly drawing us into situations where we target and kill individuals in other peoples' states. It is a very direct action version of the International Criminal Court: the Core's self-declared (and actual) military champion taking on bad actors in environments where the local legal/state system is incapable.

In this strategic environment, then, the targeting of individuals is the norm, meaning we've taken a lot of the industrial out of mass conflict and boiled it down, with plenty of high technology, to the essence of warfare in the modern age: the killing of bad actors operating within dysfunctional political/social/economic environments.

Simply put, in a small, connected world, the frontier must be eliminated, because bad actors with systemic ambitions will tend to hide there, beyond the nets.

You can call this assassination if you like, but that term only reflects the way we've glorified and built-up our non-state opponents. Assassination as we generally have used the term has pertained to the disutility of killing other government's national leaders. That really hasn't changed--witness the big effort we went through with Saddam before hanging him (or enabling the successor government to do so).

To use the term "assassination" here is to symmetricize the conflict in a bad way--i.e., granting legitimacy to those who do not deserve it.

Tagging drones in this respect is misleading. They simply represent technological advance, the downshifting of conflict to individuals, and our desire to avoid losses in very tough landscapes.

Nice Economist editorial on Kim Jong Il and the wider dangers his continued rule represents

LEADERS: "North Korea's nuclear spectacular: Kim Jong Il's bombshell; Isolated it may be, but North Korea's antics do damage far beyond its own reach," The Economist, 30 May 2009.

Nice litany of bigger-than-just-the-peninsula problems that a North Korea led by the Kims causes.

The mag goes out on a limb and says China should really step up and help America punish Kim--if it wants to be seen as a global leader.

F--k that.

My argument from November 2004 has been the same: North Korea before Iran.

A China that can engineer a Korean unification IS A GLOBAL LEADER--PERIOD.

That would be a China everybody has to take seriously.

Until it can prove itself along such lines, China is mostly bark but no real bite.

The paradox of Pakistans

WEEK IN REVIEW: "Struggling To See A Country Of Shards," by Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, 3 May 2009.

Good article, best snippet:

Pakistan has several selves. There is rural Pakistan, where two-thirds of the country lives in conditions that approximate the 13th century. There is urban Pakistan, where the British-accented, Princeton-educated elite sip cold drinks in clipped gardens.

And these two worlds collide in the Swat.

Islam, we are told, became the glue, but once Islam entered politics, it got hard to control.

These are the ultimate realities. The proximate trigger, we are likewise told, was America's withdrawl of aid after the Sovs fell. Since then we're happy enough just to see Pakistan not explode.

The great hope?

The Taliban, like al Qaeda, is so frickin' clumsy and so frequently overplays its hand.

Interesting argument: Pakistan is not a collapsed state and its urban infrastructure works better today than the Soviet version did in the USSR's heyday. The problem is, two-thirds of Pakistan know nothing of that reality.

How can a global surveillance system be a bad idea when it comes to health?

INTERNATIONAL: "Questions Linger Over the Value of a Global Illness Surveillance System," by Gardiner Harris and Pam Belluck, New York Times, 2 May 2009.

The tip from Mexico was picked up by our Centers for Disease Control, and then was spread to other nodes across the global surveillance system that was slapped together slowly over the past ten years.

Article asks if the system gets credit for so few deaths or blame for scaring too many.

Big point: there is a system there and it continues to evolve.

Our prosperity is linked to world prosperity; it's just that our aid isn't linked to economic development

OPINION: "Don't Forget About Foreign Aid," by Madeleine K. Albright and Colin L. Powell, Wall Street Journal, 5 May 2009.

Better argument found within:

There is also a critical role for the private sector. Businesses must do what they do best by expanding economic growth and enterprise development around the world. It we are serious about making global development a strategic priority, we must explore new opportunities for businesses and government to leverage each other's efforts and resources. Only a strategy that combines smart government policies with the engine of business and entrepreneurship will be powerful enough to overcome the enormous challenges we face.

Albright and Powell co-chair the Initiative for Global Development.

Title really doesn't match the message here. I mean, after the rote plea for more aid, the rest of the op-ed focuses on business development.

China mining confronting local blowback in Vietnam

WORLD NEWS: "Vietnam Bid for China Mining Funds Draws Protests," by James Hookway, Wall Street Journal, 2-3 May 2009.

Chinese mining interests bumping into local grass-roots environmental groups and a wide suspicion of China in general.

China will see more and more of this, given its approach. It will have to elevate its game and submit to being consistently cast as a great villain of modern globalization.

The Americanization of the Holocaust: did FDR try more than known?

WEEKEND ARTS: "Roosevelt And the Jews: A Debate Rekindled," by Patricia Cohen, New York Times, 1 May 2009.

New book (Refugees and Rescue) says FDR hatched plot in 1938 to move Jews out of Europe to South America.

Will it change the opinion of those who condemn him for not doing more later (refusing St. Louis ship in 1939, not going after camps during war more aggressively, etc.)? Probably not.

But, in my mind, FDR played a very bad hand very deftly. Getting the U.S. through the war with the lowest per capita casualty rate was crucial to getting public buy-in for a strong internationalist role afterwards. Nothing (the Holocaust, the USSR's amazingly high death rate, the second front) should have come before that goal, because in avoiding what happened to America after WWI, FDR did the world a great favor.

FDR didn't wage the war simply to win the war but to set up the right kind of peace.

Since there's been no great power war anywhere on the planet since then, it's hard to argue with his priorities.

Another piece on the U.S.-China financial interdependency that suggests both sides are maturing in their thinking

BUSINESS DAY: "China Grows More Picky About Debt," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 21 May 2009.

The relationship, we are told, is evolving with remarkable speed.

China is growing more picky about which American debt it is willing to finance, and is changing laws to make it easier for Chinese companies to invest abroad the billions of dollars they take in each year by exporting to America. For its part, the United States is becoming relatively less dependent on Chinese financing.

China is buying more T bills than last year, but is not automatically meeting our heightened demand. That slack is being picked up by Americans themselves and other investors around the world.

Interesting sign of how quickly the system can self-adjust from a--suddenly--crippling structural imbalance.

Beautiful bit from Banyan on China's as world savior

ASIA: "May the good China preserve us: China is enjoying its new prestige as a global economic helmsman, but it still has problems at home," Banyan, The Economist, 23 May 2009.

The quintessential joke: "After 1989, capitalism saved China. After 2009, China saved capitalism."

Now the stretch I liked:

China has been doing its bit to act the part. It has blessed the IMF with a promise of $40 billion of its money. It has been signing up "swap" agreements with central banks from Indonesia's to Argentina's giving them access to billions of dollars-worth of Chinese yuan in a crisis. It has encouraged experiments with an inchoate offshore market in yuan in Hong Kong. And its central-bank governor has talked loftily of the need to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency with something like the IMF's Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).

So far, however, all this smacks of political posturing. Since most Chinese exporters invoice in dollars it is hard to see who would want all those yuan anyway. China seems in no hurry to move towards full convertibility of the yuan and greater exchange-rate flexibility. And the talk of ditching the dollar comes oddly from a country that has done little to diversity its own massive holdings of foreign exchange. Raising the issue when it did seemed more designed to make a splash and change the subject at the G20 away from anything that might embarrass China.

In public, most Chinese leaders scoff at the idea that their own policies might have contributed to the crisis. They blame over-indebted American consumers going on an unsustainable binge, leading to a gaping American trade deficit. Yet the counterpart is an unsustainable Chinese export drive, to America above all, that was built on a cheap currency. The dollars earned from the drive went flooding back to America, pushing down interest rates there, raising house prices and encouraging Americans to borrow even more to buy Chinese stuff. As Nicholas Lardy, an American economist specializing in China, has put it, the two countries were as co-dependent as a dope-dealer and an addict.

The rest of the piece lists the usual problems associated with China trying to build up domestic demand (gist: people hoard money out of fear of their old age [no pensions] and catastrophic illness [no medical care], which really does make Chinese our economic opposite--yes?).

The dope-pushing image has a nice historical symmetry to it, if only China had done it to the Brits.

Pakistan results and no US casualties

ARTICLE: Al-Qaeda Seen as Shaken in Pakistan, By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, June 1, 2009

Lots of controversy on the drones with regard to creating local friction with populace, but the seminal attraction remains: no direct casualties on our side from ops.

The trigger for the opening on Cuba (as always, it's greed)

NATIONAL WEEKLY EDITION: "Oil in the Gulf (of Mexico): Cuba's undersea stores could thaw trade with the United States," by Nick Miroff, Washington Post, 25-31 May 2009.

When I say greed, I mean both sides: Cuba wants the investment and America wants the close-in oil. Nice for Obama to show up on cue.

This story has laid around for several years now, but is building to a crescendo as of late: upwards of 20 billion barrels off Cuba's coast (actually, in a chunk almost equidistant between Cuba, Mexico and the U.S.). Also a lot of gas (but who doesn't have gas in this world?).

Time to toss the embargo and open this baby up!

Why Iraq can explode

NATIONAL WEEKLY EDITION: "Iraq's Oil Fuels Problems," by Ernesto Londono, Washington Post, 25-31 May 2009.

Iraqi army majors making $70k a month embezzling state funds and Sunni guards walking away from their checkpoints because they haven't been paid in months.

It would seem that Iranian Shiites have nothing on their Iraqi co-religionists when it comes to running an inept, wildly corrupt government.

Good summary piece on Kim succession issues

FRONT PAGE: "North Korea Plans Kim Succession, U.S. Believes," by Jay Solomon, Evan Ramstad and Peter Spiegel, Wall Street Journal, 23-24 May 2009.

Amidst all the goofball partisan finger-pointing on cable news shows, this is a great article to return to for ground truth. This crisis has little to do with us, missile defense, defense spending, or our commitment to Asian security.

This is an internal crisis masquerading as a regional crisis.

Feeding the pandemic fears: wide definitions of at-risk populations

NEW YORK: "Talk of 'Underlying Conditions' May Add to Flu Worries," by Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times, 28 May 2009.

The list is long: diabetes, weakened immune system, obesity, lung disease, pregnancy, younger than 2, older than 65.

When you're talking an advanced economy, those are big numbers and significant percentages of the total population.

When such warnings go out, docs feel they're assuring the non-at-risk types, but the warnings often just jack up the fears in those substantial pools.

A bit hyperbolic (title at least) but the usual good stuff on Iran from Leverett and Mann

SUNDAY OPINION: "Have We Already Lost Iran?" by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, New York Times, 24 May 2009.

You might remember the story of Flynt and Hillary from the excellent Esquire piece written by John Richardson a while back. Suffice it to say, they know from where they speak.

Basic line is a familiar one to readers here: Obama has probably already lost his chance to stop Iran from getting a bomb. Why? He's changed the one but keeps the essential dynamics in place: give up the bomb and we will reward you economically.

That is simply offering the insufficient for the profoundly desirable.

Also, the two argue that picking Dennis Ross was very unimaginative: he is a classic engage-with-pressure type who's timing is wholly out of synch with reality here. Iranians are said to view Ross as simply a tactic: he will offer a poor deal simply to clear the way for kinetics.

My take: he will offer a weak deal simply to clear the way for face-saving-but-useless sanctions ("unprecedented!" of course) and Obama's team will simply move on to the next negotiating venue (after Israel's strikes prove "amazingly effective" and then ultimately inconsequential).

Again, there is little good Obama play on this in the short term: the usual failures must be applied before the serious talking begins.

Is it possible to end cancer in an aging and increasingly toxic world?

FRONT PAGE: "In Long Drive to Cure Cancer, Advances Have Been Elusive," by Gina Kolata, New York Times, 24 April 2009.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: "Treating cancer: Illuminating surgery; A clever way of highlighting tumours to make them easier to remove," The Economist, 25 April 2009.

Great chart on jump page shows how death rates from heart disease goes down dramatically over the past half-century and that accidents have been reduced somewhat. Meanwhile, Alzheimers slowly builds from small numbers to about half of what accidents are.

But cancer is a flat line: we improve so much and yet the death numbers remain.

To me, that's just the reality of an aging population because cancer is fundamentally a fellow traveler as we age.

I can tell you from what I learned with daughter Emily: there are plenty of cures out there for childhood cancer, but you can abuse a child with chemo and radiation and surgery in ways that you simply cannot with elders. They just lack the resilience and their cell-division rates have slowed down so much in comparison.

So breakthroughs, like the one described in the Economist where cancer cells are illuminated from within for easier spotting and removal during surgery, but I don't expect cancer to decline that much, even with our coming biology revolution.

People will still die, no matter the delay, and cancer will remain a biggie, yes?

The better and smarter half

NATIONAL: "First Lady In Control Of Building Her Image: Focus Is Turned to Domestic Life," by Rachel L. Swarns, New York Times, 25 April 2009.

Cousin of mine helped Michelle get into her first job in the legal field in Chicago, and so she's familiar with both. Like most people who can make that claim in the before time, my cousin says it's no contest on the sheer brainpower: it's Michelle hands-down.

It'll be interesting to watch her as First Lady and beyond. There's a reason why she's polling about 85%. She knows what she's doing.

The eyes have it

THE ARTS: "Fan Fever Is Rising For Debut Of 'Avatar,'" by Michael Cieply, New York Times, 25 April 2009.

NOVELTIES: "Inside These Lenses, a Digital Dimension," by Anne Eisenberg, New York Times, 26 April 2009.

The new film from technology inventor (and director) James Cameron is generating a lot of wild talk on the web, the story says, with some who have seen it claiming that the reality factor on this proprietary 3D technique is so great that brain imprinting occurs to the point of subsequent dreaming (sort of a "I've been here before" feeling).

Second story is about the future of heads-up displays on glasses and even contacts. My son already plays videogames with wrap-around-vision glasses that he finds quite immersive (in fact, he did his science project on them this year).

It all reminds me of that sequence of Philip K. Dick's, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" where Decker's wife (I believe, or maybe it was Decker himself) engages in the daily religious observance of relieving the great prophet's mythical trek up a hillside as enemies throw rocks at him from the side. In the description, it doesn't sound that different than my son with his wrap-around vision glasses, except he's yet to feel the blows (but that's coming soon).

My point: I expect a lot of this technology to find its way into religious observance over the century, just like in Dick's book. Why note the crucifixion and passion and death and resurrection when you can feel it all for yourself?

The true baptisms are just beginning . . .

The other shoe drops on the government cyberscare campaign

FRONT PAGE: "U.S. Plans Attack and Defense in Web Warfare," by David E. Sanger, John Markoff and Thom Shanker, New York Times, 28 April 2009.

LEADERS: "Cyberwar: Battle is joined: A behind-the-scenes conflict appears to be under way--but not the sort you might think," The Economist, 25 April 2009.

CANYOUBELIEVE IT! America's really going to play for cyberwar--both defense AND offense.

Wow. I never could have imagined we'd reach this day.

As The Economist points out (and as I have argued repeatedly), we're being given the royal scare treatment thanks to this current intra-USG scrum on cybersecurity--as in, who controls and thus who gets funded.

Naturally, I am beyond fear.

Bring on the Pearl Harbors! Living in a horizontal state (federal), we Americans just love to obsess over shots to the head, even though it's the horizontal scenarios (like this economic situation) that always give us more trouble.

Nice article on the Shabab (successor to Somalia's Council of Islamic Courts)

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA: "Jihadists attack Somalia: Al-Qaeda on the march; Barely supported by the West, Somalia's new government may buckle under the latest wave of jihadist assaults," The Economist, 23 May 2009.

"The Youth" (Shabab) now control the lower (southern) quartile of Somalia.

Frankly, if I'm Somaliland or Puntland (the latter is almost already its own country), I declare a divorce and dissolve the fake state called Somalia, because I've already seen the end of this movie.

Yet another data point that showed the world-spanning wisdom that was the Powell Doctrine in the 1990s.