The Mound of Sound

Well, we did it again. Washington wanted to play hardball with Moscow and succeeded only in exposing the weakness of the NATO alliance. As a symbol of Western solidarity, NATO has been left bloated, battered and bruised, largely by American bullheadedness since September, 2001.

NATO’s Secretary-General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has been a total dud. He’s great at making grandiose pronouncements that are best quickly forgotten if only to avoid embarrassing the Alliance and Scheffer himself. He failed to rally the member states to make a meaningful commitment to the mission in Afghanistan. Those nations that have shouldered the burden – Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, France and Germany – have pretty much acted on their own rather than as a NATO force. That is reflected in the way each fights (or doesn’t) by its own rules on its own turf. That’s five out of twenty-seven member nations (how many can you name?). Doesn’t sound very impressive, does it? Scheffer, a rotten leader.

There was Tony Blair, Washington’s lap dog, its poodle. Blair’s career can be summed up with the epitaph, “He went along to get along.” He not only vouchsafed Washington’s outrageous lies on Iraq, he tossed in his own for good measure. A rotten leader but a good judge of when it was time to get out with his hide intact.

Then, of course, there’s the Wrecking Crew. No, I didn’t lift that reference from the just released book. I coined it for a photo album I posted on this very blog on 21 September, 2007. If you want an amusing stroll down Memory Lane, check it out. http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/search?q=%22Wrecking+Crew%22

Ah yes, the Wrecking Crew. Leadership at its very worst. Consistently rotten to the point of perversion. They’ve squandered their nation’s strength and its wealth, harming many to abet the already privileged few. Abroad they took their nation’s prestige and goodwill and sold it cheap in pursuit of a radical ideology fomented from a viral hubris. It was a twenty-first century adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes played on a global stage. Applied delusion on a mass scale. Like all such folly it wasn’t long before it collapsed under its own weight.

Bush, aided by the sycophant Scheffer, treated NATO as a child might treat a balloon – constantly blowing it up and squeezing it. With no effort to rationalize the Alliance or clarify and redefine its role in a post-Cold War era, Bush just kept on trying to toss in one Eastern European nation after another, a protracted campaign of passive-aggression against Moscow.

History has shown that alliances work best when there exist strong bonds, shared interests and common purpose. In Cold War NATO those elements were obvious and strongly-shared. It was actually a very large alliance, as these things go, and, despite that, it functioned quite well. Post Cold-War NATO is a bloated, clumsy thing progressively expanded through Central and Eastern Europe. There is nothing “North Atlantic” about the ex-Warsaw Pact states now relabelled as our own and very little that could pass for strong bonds, shared interests and common purpose, something evident in all the “no shows” in Afghanistan.

What are the strong bonds and shared interests between Canadians and Romanians or Slovenians? The question answers itself. Are we really willing to send our young men and women to fight over them? Of course we’re not and our adversaries, real or potential, know it.

NATO has come to exist more as an extension of American foreign policy than anything else. This may be the undoing of NATO itself for it conflicts with the whole notion of shared interests and common purpose needed to maintain a healthy alliance. It represents the clash of Washington unilaterialism with a supposedly multilateral coalition.

Afghanistan may have marked the beginning of the end for NATO for it demonstrated the Alliance to be a square peg that couldn’t be made to fit the round hole. With NATO members shirking “the mission” on a ratio of four to one, it’s hard to depict this as a NATO venture at all.

Throughout the Bush years the West has consistently overplayed its hand. Bush overplayed his hand by going into Iraq unnecessarily with entirely predictable and yet, for the supposed leader of the free world, wilfully unforeseen consequences. American military power was never greater than before the first American tanks rolled across the Iraqi border. The occupation of Iraq showed little states that once dreaded America’s military prowess that they had less to fear than they had imagined. By using force needlessly, Bush allowed the rise of Iran and the Shiites as the dominant regional force in the Middle East.

Now we have Georgia. Any guesses why Putin and Medvedev are dragging their feet on withdrawing their forces from Georgia? It’s because we, once again, have overplayed our hand. Putin has been given a no-risk opportunity to see just what resolve NATO can truly muster when Condi Rice shows up in Brussels to crack the whip on the Alliance underlings. He has so much to gain and so very little to lose by delay and we’ve played right into his hand. Summer is almost over and Europe is anticipating an urestricted supply of Russian gas to heat its homes this winter. You do the math.

This game isn’t over and we can’t wish it away. If NATO is to be salvaged it will have to be rationalized with clearly defined purposes and equally clear commitments from its members. There is already talk of a two-tier Alliance – NATO Classic and NATO Lite if you like – which makes more sense as the days, and failures, go by. Organize the member states by commonality of interests and you will inevitably get back to a North Atlantic group (old NATO) and a Central and Eastern European group (new NATO) acting cooperatively but not in lockstep. That, at least, might restore some credibility to Article 5 of the Charter.

Make no mistake about it, the West needs NATO or some similar alliance, to confront the threats and challenges looming this century. There’s plenty of trouble coming, everything from resource wars to climate-driven mass migration – enough that we don’t have to provoke needless conflicts. We need to take an inventory of what we’re about to face and craft a new understanding of what we’ll need in an alliance for this cetury.

Our world is undergoing upheaval – environmentally, economically, and geo-politically – that will call out for new leadership. The ideologues have shown themselves unfit to navigate these shoals. We have an urgent need for new leadership with a clearer vision, steadier hand and a lighter touch.

One thing Stephen Harper understands is the importance of staying in touch with young Conservatives.

Georgia attacks S. Ossetia. Russia repels invaders. Russia storms Georgia. Ceasefire deal is inked. Russia stays put in Georgia. Washington flies into a tizzy, summons NATO underlings to Brussels. NATO members threaten “sanctions” on Russia. Putin yawns.

What is Vlad Putin’s game? I think it’s just possible that NATO has presented him with a temptation he can’t resist. It may have given Putin the opportunity to test NATO’s resolve and explore the tensions that pervade the alliance. Putin may even sense a possible opportunity to fracture NATO’s already wobbly solidarity.

Look at it from Vlad’s perspective.

1. He knows that the major Western European powers are going along with Washington very reluctantly. They need Russia a lot more than they need or want Georgia. Russia is a main source of Europe’s natural gas supply and it’s become a vital market for Western European exports.

2. He knows that NATO’s eastward expansion through the Balkans and Caucasus has been American-driven and that the US has pretty much ignored its traditional allies’ reservations which, incidentally, included the very prospect of a Georgia-style conflict.

3. He knows that NATO has shown itself something of an alliance in name only in Afghanistan with some nations ducking the mission altogether and others placing such severe restrictions on the use of their deployed forces as to undermine their benefit to ISAF.

4. He knows that he can afford to test the waters. If the heat gets too much, all he needs to do is order his mechanized forces to drive back a few hundred kilometers and all will be forgiven.

5. He knows that the Europeans will ensure that NATO’s response will be mild at worst. The Washington ideologues may have an appetite for reviving the Cold War but the Euros, who dealt with it in their backyard for half a century, want no part of that.

No, when Nick Sarkozy leveled his “or else” ultimatum, he might just have presented Putin an opportunity he can’t refuse to test NATO’s heart – and its spine.

Harper Uber-Weasel, HealthMin Tony Clement, has castigated Canadian doctors for supporting safe-injection facilities such as Vancouver’s Insite. According to The Globe & Mail, Tony tried a new tack:

“Is it ethical for health-care professionals to support the administration of drugs that are of unknown substance, or purity or potency, drugs that cannot otherwise be legally prescribed?” Mr. Clement said.

Clement’s mush-mouthed sophistry is, as always, over the top. No one supports “the administration of drugs.” What the medical profession supports is the provision of clean needles and a safe place for addicts to use under supervision, a site that also offers counselling for those wanting to end their drug habits. As Clement knows this isn’t about the administration of drugs. Close Insite and those very drugs will still be bought and sold and administered only in back alleys with shared needles that create an enormous health problem for the entire community.

CMA president Dr. Brian Day wasted no time kicking Clement to the curb where his type belongs.

“Dr. Brian Day said sites that allow addicts to inject their own narcotics under the supervision of medical staff have been successful in curbing illegal drug use and slowing the spread of disease.

“We specifically take issue with the minister using that phrase,” Dr. Day told reporters after Mr. Clement’s speech.

“The minister was off base in calling into question the ethics of physicians involved in harm reduction.

“It’s clear that this was being used as a political issue.”

Clement, reaching even lower, then criticized Insite as ineffective, because most narcotics are still used in “back alleys and seedy motels.” Wait a minute. Insite isn’t effective because it isn’t big enough to reach more addicts? So let’s shut it down? Hey Nimrod, if that’s your concern – reaching more addicts – why don’t you simply fund more clinics?

The man is a total moral reptile.

What to do, what to do? If we want to achieve some sort of success in Afghanistan (and what that might look like grows smaller as the years pass), there will have to be some breakthrough in Pakistan.

Musharraf is gone. Like most things that happen in Pakistan, that’s a mixed blessing, certainly for NATO forces in Afghanistan and probably for the Pakistanis themselves. Mushie might not have been a great ally to the West in the fight against al Qaeda but he was a somewhat effective keel for his country.

Without Musharraf, the two ruling parties will now have to try to govern and, in Pakistan, that’s a Herculean chore. The pols are going to have to carve out turf that has been traditionally dominated by Pakistan’s army. The military is actually far more than just an armed force. It’s also a wealthy and powerful political and economic institution and, as such, tearing the country out of the generals’ grasp may not be all that easy. Pakistan’s military is more than familiar with seizing power in coups.

The other key segment of the military is Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency or ISI. This secretive outfit is still believed to be harbouring Taliban forces in the tribal lands and is also strongly believed to have played a role in the July 7th bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Some experts believe the ISI remains a free agent utterly beyond the control of the civilian government.

While the attempted orderly transition of power into civilian hands proceeds there’s the question of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and Dr. Kahn’s nuclear weapons export shop that was never completely dismantled. There are some experts who fear that Kahn & Co. could surreptitiously resume business if the fledgling government gets distracted.

Finally there’s al Qaeda and the Taliban operating relatively freely in the tribal lands. Mushie was never able to bring them to heel and he was Washington’s boy, something that severely wounded his popularity and political survival. The new bunch seems intent on distancing themselves from America and, when it comes right down to it, there’s really only one way to do that.

America keeps raising the notion of crossing into Pakistan to hunt down the terrorists and the insurgents but that’s probably just noise. The US and ISAF are woefully understrength in Afghanistan as it is. Where would they get the megaforce it would take to try to tame the tribal homelands and purge them of the insurgents? That’s really tough, forbidding territory and any infidel who seeks to take it on will be fighting more than the insurgents. They’ll have to fight the tribesmen themselves and they are genuinely tough customers.

There seem to be no good answers on how to deal with Pakistan. Perhaps with infinite patience, and perseverence and solid groundwork, some breakthrough may yet be achieved, eventually. And yet the Bush administration’s recent courting of India has created an enormous setback in relations with Pakistan.

What we ultimately achieve in Afghanistan may well depend on Washington’s ability to sort out its problems with Islamabad. Don’t hold your breath.

I used to like the John McCain who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. I don’t much care for the guy who calls himself John McCain today. That said I have had moments where I felt really uncomfortable watching the new McCain stumble into brain lock again and again on the campaign trail.

At the outset it was possible to dismiss the occasional lapse as a “senior’s moment” but they’re coming so fast and furious of late that questions are being raised about whether the Arizona senator is mentally fit to run America.

Check out this interesting discussion at the Talking Points Memo Cafe:

George w. Bush is demanding that South Ossetia and Abkhazia remain Georgia territories, regardless of the wishes of the Ossetians and Abkhaz. George w. Bush wants to restore the same situation that was imposed on South Ossetia and Abkhazia by Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin. Yes, that’s right, it was the ethnic-Georgian Stalin who pushed the Ossetians and Abkhaz against their will into the arms of Georgia.

From The Independent:

“…Hidden in the lush forest above the coast at Gagra in Abkhazia is a lime-green mansion; one of several dachas built for Joseph Stalin, an ethnic Georgian, along the Abkhaz coastline. He’d come for weeks in the summer, relaxing on the balcony or playing a game of pool with other leading Bolsheviks. It may have been here that Stalin made many of the decisions that scattered and divided nations, and led to many of the conflicts that have flared up since the Soviet Union collapsed. National and ethnic identities were shifted, encouraged or suppressed during different periods. Whole nations were deported to Siberia or the Kazakh steppe, scattered irrevocably like human dust. Borders between the different entities of the union were changed at will, often with the express intention of fomenting ethnic unrest.

Now, it seems, Canada and the US have announced they’re “withdrawing” from a planned NORAD exercise with the Russians. Wait a second, it’s a NORAD exercise. WE are NORAD. Isn’t this a bit like refusing to attend your own, backyard birthday party?

Stephen Harper, never one to let facts get in his way, told reporters, “”In my judgment, this is a very worrisome development. It really indicates a Soviet-era mentality. ”

The Ossetian and Abkhaz people have endured a century of intermittent fighting with neighbouring Georgia. Read the history and then ask yourself if we’re really backing the Good Guys in this one or maybe just honouring the legacy of Joseph Stalin.

John McCain knows the Iraq War is extremely unpopular with the American people. That’s why he deftly changes the subject, saying there’s no undoing the past and, like it or not, it’s essential that America emerge victorious.

What the Old Cold Warrior doesn’t want to discuss is his own Uber-hawkishness in the wake of 9/11. The New York Times takes a look at just that today and it sheds an important, perhaps even critical, light on John McCain’s fitness to command the world’s most powerful and, in the wrong hands, most dangerous military in the world:

“…Within hours [of the 9/11 attacks], Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

…To his admirers, Mr. McCain’s tough response to Sept. 11 is at the heart of his appeal. They argue that he displayed the same decisiveness again last week in his swift calls to penalize Russia for its incursion into Georgia, in part by sending peacekeepers to police its border.

His critics charge that the emotion of Sept. 11 overwhelmed his former cool-eyed caution about deploying American troops without a clear national interest and a well-defined exit, turning him into a tool of the Bush administration in its push for a war to transform the region.

…While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.

…The Sept. 11 attacks “demonstrated the grave threat posed by a hostile regime, possessing weapons of mass destruction, and with reported ties to terrorists,” Mr. McCain wrote in an e-mail message on Friday. Given Mr. Hussein’s history of pursuing illegal weapons and his avowed hostility to the United States, “his regime posed a threat we had to take seriously.” The attacks were still a reminder, Mr. McCain added, of the importance of international action “to prevent outlaw states — like Iran today — from developing weapons of mass destruction.”

…Soon Mr. McCain and his aides were consulting regularly with the circle of hawkish foreign policy thinkers sometimes referred to as neoconservatives — including Mr. Kristol, Robert Kagan and Randy Scheunemann, a former aide to Mr. Dole who became a McCain campaign adviser — to develop the senator’s foreign policy ideas and instincts into the broad themes of a presidential campaign. (In his e-mail message, Mr. McCain noted that he had also consulted with friends like Henry Kissinger, known for a narrower view of American interests.)

One result was a series of speeches in which Mr. McCain called for “rogue state rollback.” He argued that disparate regional troublemakers, including Iraq, North Korea and Serbia, bore a common stamp: they were all autocracies. And as such, he contended, they were more likely to export terrorism, spread dangerous weapons, or start ethnic conflicts. In an early outline of what would become his initial response to the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. McCain argued that “swift and sure” retribution against any one of the rogue states was an essential deterrent to any of the others.

…Although he had campaigned for President Bush during the 2000 general election, he was still largely frozen out of the White House because of animosities left over from the Republican primary. But after Mr. Bush declared he would hold responsible any country condoning terrorism, Mr. McCain called his leadership “magnificent” and his national security team the strongest “that has ever been assembled.” A few weeks later, Larry King of CNN asked whether he would have named Mr. Rumsfeld and Colin Powell to a McCain cabinet. “Oh, yes, and Cheney,” Mr. McCain answered, saying he, too, would have offered Mr. Cheney the vice presidency.

…At a European security conference in February 2002, when the Bush administration still publicly maintained that it had made no decision about moving against Iraq, Mr. McCain described an invasion as all but certain. “A terrorist resides in Baghdad,” he said, adding, “A day of reckoning is approaching.”

Regime change in Iraq in addition to Afghanistan, he argued, would compel other sponsors of terrorism to mend their ways, “accomplishing by example what we would otherwise have to pursue through force of arms.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/us/politics/17mccain.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1218986227-SdI9iNC4PQ0VTrBpxPkTCw

It may be no coincidence that the neo-cons have gone to ground in this campaign. Even their imperialist/dominate the world website, http://www.newamericancentury.org/, has been shut down, apparently for non-payment. They must, however, be beside themselves in anticipation of an even more neo-conservative regime replacing BuCheney. And what a candidate. All the impulsiveness of George w. Bush and all the murderous bloodthirst of Dick Cheney rolled into one.

Too young to remember the Cold War? Don’t worry, it may be back before you know it.

The Times reports that Russia is considering re-arming its Baltic fleet of subs, cruisers and bombers with nuclear weapons.

“Under the Russian plans, nuclear warheads could be supplied to submarines, cruisers and fighter bombers of the Baltic fleet based in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between the European Union countries of Poland and Lithuania.

A senior military source in Moscow said the fleet had suffered from underfunding since the collapse of communism. “That will change now,” said the source.
“In view of America’s determination to set up a missile defence shield in Europe, the military is reviewing all its plans to give Washington an adequate response.”

The Russian military also said it would ignore attempts to restrict the movement of its Black Sea fleet in and out of Sebastopol, in Ukraine. The Crimean port was emerging as a potential flashpoint in Russia’s efforts to prevent former Soviet countries on its borders from joining Nato.

This weekend Ukraine further angered Russian officials by offering to create a joint missile defence network with western countries.

The Russians have already indicated that they may point nuclear missiles at western Europe from bases in Kaliningrad and Belarus. They are also said to be thinking of reviving a military presence in Cuba. “

The Americans are predictably outraged even though the Bush regime itself is pressing ahead with development of a new generation of nuclear weapons for America’s military. Once again it’s “do as I say, not as I do” smothered in a layer of fetid hypocrisy.

Added to the other known arms races already well underway – China and India for example – this is just the sort of thing we can expect when rational diplomacy is trumped by red-meat ideology. We’ve gone down this road before. Then we were called back from the edge by sensible leaders. Today we’ve got Putin and the prospect of McCain. Oh dear.