Dennis Kucinich is a Maverick

As the bowtie attests to, Dennis Kucinich knows PR.Ron Paul is the most mavericky (read that story if you haven't yet.) in our static and worthless government, and Dennis Kucinich is the second most mavericky.  John McCain is not a maverick, and is probably nothing more than a soulless talking meat puppet.  Anyways, here is Kucinich's take on the Obama Administration's taking a page from the George W. Bush playbook:

Who is in charge of our operations in Iraq, now? George Orwell? A war based on lies continues to be a war based on lies. Today, we have a war that is not a war, with combat troops who are not combat troops. In 2003, President Bush said 'Mission Accomplished'. In 2010, the White House says combat operations are over in Iraq, but will leave 50,000 troops, many of whom will inevitably be involved in combat-related activities. 

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Democratic Militarism

One of the best known theories of Political Science is the "Democratic Peace Theory" which notes that democracies rarely go to war with one another.  The most prominent explanation for this historical trend is that voting brings accountability preventing leaders from unnecessarily engaging in war.  However, Daniel Larison emphatically skewers the notion that Democracies aren't particularly warlike:

States that do not respect international legal norms vis-a-vis other states tend not to abuse human rights at home (or at least they abuse them much less often), while states that abuse human rights at home want to maintain certain strong international legal norms if only to guarantee non-interference in their internal affairs. Internal and external policies are never entirely separable, because the same government is responsible for both, but looking at the last sixty-five years it is not at all clear that repressive and abusive states are more likely to disrupt or undermine international stability.

In other words, China does lots of nasty things to its own citizens, but the U.S. is a hell of a lot more likely to go invade another country and do nasty things to those citizens.

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Brookings: How We're Doing in the World

Brookings recently released its annual survey of how the U.S. is doing in the world, a series of indices for the last four years concerning foreign policy and diplomacy as well as global economics and development.  According to the survey, the United States has made considerable diplomatic progress under the Obama Administration in nearly all spheres, while global economic indicators have gotten decidedly worse across the board.  And while this shouldn't surprise anyone, the progress made over the last two years goes to show the enduring power of a cooperative and cordial international stance and good PR, and the statistics highlight several neglected issues.

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Iraq Elections: A Small Step, Not a Giant Leap

After a year of worry, heightened by the drama of the de-Ba'athification candidate purge, the Iraqi elections went off without many hitches.  Which is to say that there were plenty of bombings, 38 people were killed, but turnout was high with two-thirds of the country voting including a majority of the Sunni population which boycotted the last election in 2005.  That's good news for the Iraqis and it's better news for us, because it means that we are on pace to leave on schedule by the end of 2011.  What the election does not do, however, is retroactively vindicate the decision to invade Iraq.  

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Oscar Preview 2010: The Best of the Best Pictures

At Oscar time last year, I had watched very little of what was actually being shown, but I had watched The Wrestler, loved it, and I really thought that Mickey Rourke should have won Best Actor.  It was the best performance I'd seen in a long time, but when Sean Penn won for Milk, I was outraged.  But because I hadn’t seen Milk, I had no business feeling outraged; I was comparing a performance I had seen and loved to a performance I had not seen. So this year, I thought, well, of course, you can’t watch every movie that's nominated for everything, so I decided to watch every movie that was nominated for Best Picture.  That means that when I inevitably disagree with whatever movie wins Best Picture, I can legitimately disagree with the Academy's decision.  The Academy extended the number of picture nominated this year to ten, which doubled my workload, but it was a labor of love.

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The Silent Good Times Roll

If you listen to the mood of cultural zeitgeist right now, you'd think the world was slipping inevitably towards calamitous anarchy.  The economy is in decline, our cultural values are eroding and America's place in the world is in doubt even as we are confronted with a multitude of problems: two wars, climate change, pandemic disease, Islamic terrorism, the rise of China and a looming deficit, debt and entitlement problem.  While this analysis contains some of substance, this granular reality obscures a larger truth: things in the world and in America are better than at any time in history, perhaps excepting five years ago when we had all of this plus a housing bubble.  This relatively brief moment of crisis has not weakened the core strength of American society, culture and economy and the arc of history continues to bend towards increasing societal welfare.

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Osama bin Laden is Conan and America is NBC

The upcoming trial of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed should be used to redefine the War on Terror as being about bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice.

The Washington Post recently reported that al Qaeda Grand Poohbah, Osama bin Laden, has endorsed the failed Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound jet:

The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of the Sept. 11," he said of the Nigerian suspect in the Dec. 25 botched attack.

"If our messages had been able to reach you through words we wouldn't have been delivering them through planes."

Directing his statements at President Barack Obama - "from Osama to Obama," he said - bin Laden added: "America will never dream of security unless we will have it in reality in Palestine."

While bin Laden would seemingly make a perfect Bond villain, this is a non-story.

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Obama Makes No One Happy: Afghanistan Surge

David Guttenfelder Photo of Troops Sleeping in AfghanistanThere is a great Calvin and Hobbes quote - "A good compromise leaves everyone mad" - that sums up Obama's decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.  The left has learned more about this war it wants nothing more to do with, while the right does not like Obama's plan to start removing troops in July 2011 as it seems defeatist.  I'm more charitable, but then this is exactly the recommendation I gave last month: give the generals what they want on the condition of leaving, rather than create a fragile peace that invested us there long term.  In a vacuum we should just leave now, but Afghanistan isn't a vacuum.

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Signs of a Jobless Recovery

The news of the Dow closing over 10,000 points yesterday was hailed as proof that the economy is back on track, the index is now up from a low of 6,470 in mid-March- a gain of over 54% in 6 months.  That is startling growth, though probably much of that is due to unnecessarily painful losses in the first place, after all the Dow is still down over 28% from its high.  However, as Michael Roston points out, all of that progress in the stock markets hasn't trickled down into employment as evidenced by record military enlistments:

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Anti-gay Shia Death Squads in Iraq

Rumors of horrible anti-gay violence in Iraq has been filtering out for months, but this articles has all the gory details.  While the glue in anus murders and barbaric torture jump off the page, the part that really shocked me was their systematic torturing to learn about the underground gay culture.  The clear parallel to our own system of kidnapping and torture to build a database about the underground terrorist network shows that our brutality has been met in kind.  That the 130,000 troops we still have there can't protect this vulnerable minority, who are an orphaned interest in Iraq, shows how limited our position is now.  Any attempt to help them might actually increase their isolation and danger. When we leave, the lives of most Iraqis will be much worse than it was before we came, even under a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein. In the meantime, expedited immigration for gay Iraqis would allow more of them to escape from the Middle Ages barbarism still alive and well in Iraq.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Tamerlane for the Twenty-First Century

Several months ago, I read John Darwin's book "After Tamerlane".  It chronicles the history of empire-building from the Central-Asian-controlled world empire paradigm to the coastal-powers paradigm with which the world is now most familiar.  China, India, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and the West all originated or suffered sweeping dynastic and social changes from this paradigm shift.

Money to be made by controlling the Silk Road had before 1399 created an incentive for consolidation.  The conventional wisdom is that, as sea power became more important for global trade, control of the Silk Road became obsolete.  Naval powers such as Portugal, Britain, Japan, and the United States took over, while cities such as Samarkand, once the cultural, military, and commercial center of the world, were forgotten.

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Water Crisis in Yemen

I've been reading Marc Reisner's excellent Cadillac Desert, about water development in the American West so this interview on the CNAS National Security blog about how water shortages in Yemen are raising concerns about the failure of the state struck a chord.

 Rogers: In what ways are you seeing rogue groups in Yemen use this extreme resource scarcity to their advantage?  

Johnsen: Well it’s one of those things I think that’s affecting a lot of – a lot of different groups. So most recently we saw very severe water crisis in Aden just a couple of weeks ago. Ta’izz is an area that’s been particularly hard hit by this. What it is is it’s almost – it’s eroding the legitimacy of the government. So the government is increasingly unable to provide services to many of its citizens. So when the water is not turned on in places like Ta’izz or places like Aden or in the southern governorate of Abyan which has been a hotbed of rising calls for secession recently, then these individuals are turning to neighborhood sheikhs or tribal leaders who are able to purchase water from private companies and then provide the service that the government is just at this point either incapable or unwilling of providing.

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