Happy New Year

Posted on by
1

 

AsianSecurity Blog needed a break these last few weeks. Blogging well is a lot harder than I originally thought. And given the topics covered – nukes, North Korean repression, terrorism – it can be fairly depressing too. It is tough to come up with something smart and creative 2 or 3 times a week. Looking back at the last 9 months, I have written a book’s length worth of posts. For any of you thinking about graduate school or other sustained professional writing careers, serious blogging is good way to accustom yourself to serious, regular writing.

See you all next year. Enjoy the goofy vid. It’s a lighter take on the one of the worst aspects of security in Asia.

Merry Christmas – Is Christmas Any Different in Korea? Not Really…

Posted on by
1

 

Merry Christmas, all. I hope Santa brings you a Red Ryder BB gun.

 

As for a Korean Kristmas, there isn’t much difference. The holiday is not as big here. Korea is only about 20-25% Christian. And actually, the muted size of the festivities more appropriately matches Christmas’ relative importance (somewhat low) in the Christian calendar. As in the US, Christmas has been overtaken by commercialism. It’s all about tacky plastic decorations and the most decorations you see are in the stores, not in domiciles.

I was the only one to put up Christmas decorations in my office. I couldn’t find a live tree either – a crushing blow, that. All the Christmas specials you know aren’t on TV or at the DVD store. And about the only Christmas movies Koreans really like are the Home Alone films.

On a more serious, culture studies note, it might interest you to note that Santa is interpreted here as a Caucasian. The race of Jesus has been an issue of dispute occasionally – see the first few minutes of Ali for an sharp look at the impact of a white Jesus on the young Cassuis Clay. But there is not such tussle over Santa here.

TV Review: The Best Pop Culture Translation of the War on Terror is… Battlestar Galactica?!

Posted on by
3

bsgemblem

It’s Christmas week, so here is something lighter than usual…

And yes, you read that title right.

Lots of people get their beliefs about big issues from pop-culture, a social fact wildly underappreciated in social science. Witness the stunning impact of “24” on US popular attitudes to terrorism. And of all the shows and movies I have seen about the GWoT since 9/11, none of them capture the tensions as well as the new Battlestar Galatica. This is not a replacement for actually reading something, but it was political TV entertainment with brain, and that strikes me as awful rare. I just watched it on DVD. The show really flies off the rails midway through season 3, but the first few seasons are much sharper than I expected regarding the GWoT.

In the show, a human people from a far away planet are being pursued across space by a mechanical race (the Cylons) which they created but who then turned on them. The creators used this plot, which was so bad in the first show in 1978, to build an extended metaphor about the US in the War on Terrorism. I found this remarkably clever, particularly given American science fiction’s preference for silly CGI space alien stories like Avatar. Here are a few good parallels:

1. The humans repeatedly face extreme and realistic trade-offs that result in mass fatalities. Usually GWoT movies and TV soft pedal ethically awkward choices by establishing one character as the bad guy, whose death will wrap up the morality of the story easily (see the bloodthirsty Christian prince in Kingdom of Heaven or the sleazy bad guys of 24). In BSG, some humans are sacrificed for the good of the greater number. Civilians are left behind to die; soldiers shoot civilians; defenseless enemies are butchered. No one leaves the show morally excused or pure and therefore easy for US viewers to identify this.

2. The torture debate runs throughout the show. Cylon prisoners are abused, beaten, even raped. And even more realistically, sometimes torture is shown to work, sometimes not. And in one episode, a prisoner released from torture promptly kills her guard – very believable and very uncomfortable punishment for doign the right thing. The Cylons too torture their prisoners. It’s blood and pain all around, which pretty much sums up the US flirtation with torture as a tool of national policy.

3. The shows nicely demonstrates the tension between civil and military command during wartime. At two points, there are military putsches and martial law – basically Chalmers Johnson’s fear about the direction of the Bush presidency.

4. Lots of decisions are made under conditions of extremely poor information. The show abounds in the moral dilemmas of ‘what if’ scenarios that leave more bodies behind. At one point, the civilian president and military second-in-command decide to assassinate the military first-in-command, because she is promoting torture and military dictatorship.

5. The show also channels the GWoT paranoia about sleeper cells. The Cylons have agents that look exactly look humans. This captures exactly the fear of Muslims in the West who seem just like us until something like the London bombing or Ft. Hood shooting happens. Inevitably after these things happen, neighbors always say, ‘they seemed like such nice young men, so normal.’ The show makes strong use of the paranoia this creates, and it shows the splits and divisions among the humans that such paranoia creates.

6. The most obvious parallel, which is probably overdone by the producers, is to make the Cylons crusading monotheists and the humans polytheists. It is almost too easy to see the Cylons as Islamic jihadis. But again, the show gets good intellectual mileage out of the issue of religious tolerance, and the show has multiple characters who invoke God to justify extreme behavior.

7. The show also displays well the long-term stress that constant war places on democracy. The humans slowly become more regimented. Their democracy is constantly under threat of military intervention justified as wartime necessity. The soldiers are constantly tempted by jingoism and strut. The parallels to barracks democracies like Israel and South Korea are rich, and arguably the show was warning against the drift of the Bush administration.

8. There are lots of subtle digs at the Bush people. One leadership character prefers a standing desk and authorizes torture – nice a Donald Rumsfeld reference. The president of the humans undergoes a religious conversion.

9. The show does have flaws. Like too much science fiction, the core audience is young male, so the show abounds in ridiculously out-of-place sexy women. The CGI is mixed. The show has the same military obsession with people in uniform that so much US TV and film has. Like so many US war films, there is a great deal of macho military posturing, saluting, and barking, but at least there is some critical perspective. But this adulation of the military values also reflects the Bush-era GWoT.

This is vastly superior to 24 and other GWoT junk like Stealth or Lord of the Rings 3. The moral dilemmas are sharply defined, the choices available are usually bad, and the ‘right’ moral choice is rarely clearly apparent. The same kinds of cost-benefit analyses under stress and poor information that characterize political decision-making during war are regularly displayed. I found this a breadth of fresh air after laboring through the action-movie and easy morality idiocy of 24.

Should the US Pull Out of South Korea (2): No

Posted on by
1

USFK

(Part one of this post, in favor of leaving, is here.)

US SecDef Gates recently reaffirmed in very strong language the US commitment to Korean security. This served as a catalyst to extensive discussions among my colleagues about the value of the US commitment to SK. This is part 2 of the debate. My own thinking tilts toward the opinions in this post.

So here is why we should stay:

1. If we leave, everyone in Asia will read it as a sign that we are weak and that we are leaving Asia generally. Yes, this is the credibility argument straight out of the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan debates. But the world sees US power today as wavering; we are the tottering giant, especially in Asia. If we leave during the GWoT, that image will be confirmed, and the Chinese will push hard in Asia. A US departure will touch off an arms race as regional uncertainty rises. Asia is not where Europe or Latin America are in terms of regional amity. The US presence is more needed in this region, and it earns the US the friendship of the local democracies. It is hard to see how a spiraling arms race, as Japan and China openly start competing for regional leadership, plus perhaps India and China, would help the US. The US could very well be pulled back in later. A US departure from Korea (and Japan next?) will be read as a clear victory for China in the Sino-US regional competition.

2. It also means that the US will lose SK as an ally, because without the troops, they’ll feel, rightfully, that the US abandoned them. It would be nice to assure SK security without the ground forces, but US infantry on the ground (the USFK logo above) sends a much greater signal of commitment than air and sea power. SK will slide into China’s orbit if the US leaves. It’s already edging that way now. If America bails, it loses them. It is correct that SK no longer needs us to win a second Korean war though. So after unification, US retrenchment from Asia would be more possible and likely. But if America sticks with the Koreans through these difficult times, it will have them as good allies long into the future. Consider how loyal Kuwait and Germany are to the US because of historical goodwill. When Korea finally does unify – and it will happen as the post-Cold War North is in a permanent economic and legitimacy crisis – the Koreans will be deeply grateful if the US is here, or deeply resentful, and likely very pro-Chinese, if the US is not.

3. Unless the US demobilizes the troops of USFK, it must to rebase them somewhere else. That will require money, construction, hassle, etc. So long as the Koreans are paying for them – and they are, somewhat – and so long as they have Korean popular assent – and they do (USFK is not hated as US forces in Iraq are, e.g.) – then why withdraw them? They are not seen as occupiers; their establishments are already in place; the locals do not mind (too much) their presence.

4. Finally, DoD is restructuring USFK so that the bulk of any warfighting will fall of the ROKA. The primary US contribution to a second Korean war will be airpower. The ROKN already outguns the NK navy significantly, and the US ground presence here (28.5k) is too small to be really meaningful against the NK army (1.1 million). In other words, the costs to the US military in lives and dollars is shrinking. The US is dumping most of the burden on the locals, and Koreans generally seem to accept that this is really their responsibility.

 

So rather than leave, the US should continue to push South Koreans to pay a lot more under the USFK Status of Forces Agreement. This is renegotiated every 2 or 3 years, and SK’s portion of the burden has regularly. Right now, as best I can determine, SK pay about 47% of the (USFK) bill. For an OECD economy, that is low. So we could probably squeeze them for more, as Walt would recommend, but I don’t think we should leave.

Should the US Pull Out of South Korea? (1): Yes

Posted on by
6

 korea_beef_protest(1)

(See Part 2, in oppostion of withdrawal, here.)

Last month US SecDef Gates pledged the most formal statement yet of US “extended deterrence” to South Korea in history. Extended deterrence is an IR theory term. A country deters aggression against itself by a powerful military. A strong military drives up the costs of conquering a country, and so it deters aggression. During the Cold War, the US extended its deterrence to its weak and exposed allies. Countries like West Germany and South Korea could not withstand a communist onslaught alone, so the US pledged to defend them by extending its security umbrella. Such ‘collective security’ made everyone safer against the communists. In Korea, this has always included the use of nuclear weapons, as Gates made clear again  week.

The US Forces in Korea (USFK) total about 28,500 men. The are stationed north of Seoul by the DMZ, although they are being slowly withdrawn south of the DMZ to Pyeongtaek. Elsewhere, I have argued that this shift implies a loosening of the US commitment to SK. And lots of smart people – Bruce Cumings, Selig Harrison, and Brian Myers – have argued that the US should leave SK altogether. Chalmers Johnson said the US refusal to withdraw from Asian bases after the Cold War helped convince him the US had become an empire.

So here is the debate as I see it. Here are the reasons to leave:

1. In terms of raw US national interest, the value of the Korean alliance has decline dramatically. The Cold War is over, so the original rationale of US extended deterrence here is gone. Even if NK invaded SK and won, i.e., if the peninsula were reunified on communist terms, it would not matter that much to US security. Japan and China would still be around to balance/contain a communist united Korea. This is essentially the retrenchment argument. The Soviets were a genuine global threat that required a global US response. No one in world politics today poses such a threat – not China, NK, or Islamism. The US is a very secure great power – safe behind two oceans, a large nuclear arsenal, and the world’s most capable conventional military. Walt makes this argument regularly at Foreign Policy.

2. A more ‘moral,’ or altruistic approach would grapple with the social fact of South Korea’s long-term friendship with the US. It has stood by us for a long time as a reliable ally. It is a friend. It has participated in the coalitions of the willing in both Iraq and Afghanistan, even though it didn’t really want to go. Compared the to Europeans, the Koreans take their alliance commitment to the US very seriously. But even by this reckoning, we could arguably leave SK without great loss. SK has clearly won the intra-Korean competition. NK would lose a war with SK, even without US help. In a presentation I saw last moth in a conference at Changwon National University, my friend James Strohmaier of Pukyong National University presented this powerful graph of per capita GDP in the North and South. SK is purple; NK is blue. Obviously the race is over:

image

NK’s military, while large, is badly behind the South in technology. No one I have heard here thinks NK could win, even with the use of its nukes. So if SK can win this thing all by itself, what is the point of the US staying?

Is American Global Primacy Just Too Expensive?

Posted on by
14

200px-Flag_of_the_United_States_svg

One of the reasons I started a blog was because I get pulled into some excellent email chains that deserve to see the light of day. Here is a nice debate between me and a good friend (whose IR background is more law; mine is security and political economy). He thinks the costs of US empire’/dominance/unipolarity are too high to the US, and that we should start pushing burdens onto the allies more – an idea as old as the Nixon Doctrine. I agree in principle, but in practice, the allies won’t do it, the world will slide into multipolarity, and become more dangerous I think.

Friend:

An Empire At Risk. I share all of Niall Ferguson’s concerns, but he is focused, at least in this article, on a military decline as the ultimate effect of our profligate ways.  I say – so what?  I would like to see a US that spends less on the military and is less focused on policing the world. Let’s hear it for Germany, Sweden, Norway, Japan, etc. – countries that direct their resources toward their people and not an extravagant defense establishment and adventurism. In the world today, the US has had to invent a global enemy – ‘terrorism’ or a boogie man China – to justify its fantastically large military. Security today is not as the Neo-Realists traditionally portray. The great powers are not likely to return to the days of the 1930s any time soon.

Me:

Ferguson is always a good read, although ten years ago he said the US was the “colossus” bestriding the world as the new Rome. That didn’t work out too well…

You’re right that the US military needs to go on a diet. After 9/11, the military got everything they wanted including lots of c— we don’t need (F-22s, missile defense, Future Combat System). But the larger point is correct. The ultimate backstop of the liberal global economy is the US military. The more powerful the US is, the less it makes sense to compete against it. Unipolarity encourages bandwagoning and hedging at worst, not open balancing. If the French, Russians and Chinese get their wish for multipolarity, watch security dilemmas in places like northeast Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia move into defection spirals of arms-racing. Unipolarity correlates well with systemic peace, and a liberal unipole is even better. Switzerland can claim the moral highground of neutralism and abdication, and no one cares. If the US does it, the world will change.

Friend:

We have two basic disagreements.  First, I don’t share your concern about SD and spiraling arms races.  I am a believer in Jervis’ security community, though there are areas outside of it, a great power war is highly unlikely. Peripheral wars have gone on, are going on now  – even with ‘unipolarity’ – and will go on regardless of US military might. Moreover, it is rather speculative that US unipolarity will prevent the consequences you describe as the number of cases of unipolarity is quite small.

Regardless, and second, the problem with maintaining unipolarity is someone has to pay for it.  Why is it the burden of US citizens to maintain this blessed (if often fractured) liberal economic world order of peace and prosperity?  The British are sending an extra 500 troops to Afghanistan and they are one of the better allies there. Everyone knows the current US fiscal deficit is unstainable so, to fund unipolarity, Americans must give up public health insurance, infrastructure investment, and basic government funded research, fight inflation, suffer a depreciating dollar, yada yada, while the rest of the developed world has social safety nets and high-speed trains. If the world becomes more complicated without US unipolarity, if other liberal, peace-loving democracies must step up in a multipolar world, that’s fine. Americans deserve to have their wealth spent on their needs (cancer research comes to mind. Cancer touches everyone of us and will probably kill you and me. Compare what has been spent on that to just one year of defense spending – it’s shocking). 

Me:

1. You don’t think that the regional security dilemmas in places like Northeast Asia or the Middle East would inflame if the US retrenched? I can’t agree. If the US leaves the ME, Israel and Iran will be at blows. In Asia, China and Japan, and India and Pakistan and China would start racing furiously. I think even the Chinese think so, judging by what I have heard from Chinese scholars at conferences out here. Unipolarity has strong causal effects for peace.

2. Here I agree with you partially. But the US DID afford hegemony for awhile. Not even Vietnam broke US power: http://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/careful-with-that-decline-of-the-west-riff-weve-heard-it-before/. In fact, under Clinton, the budget was balanced, the debt was declining, the US was respected, and our foreign policy requirements were reasonable. Sullivan called the 1990s a ‘silver age’ for the US in his book the Conservative Soul. The real problem is that Bush misread unipolarity as omnipotence. Bush and his buddies wrecked US power through conscious choice. It was not the structure of unipolarity itself that bankrupted the US; it was W. Try here.

Friend:

I don’t believe in US isolationism.  Of course, complete disengagement from Asia and the ME would be destabilizing.   Multipolarity is not isolationism. The US should remain a balancer and diplomatic force.

But, I don’t think NE Asia countries would race furiously even with a large US draw down.  I think here we differ because my view is more informed by commercial liberalism and the waning of war among developed countries as a cost-effective or even plausible solution to problems (constructivism).  Though it doesn’t surprise me that Chinese scholars would promote the idea of a spiraling arms race and war if the US draws down – of course the party line is let the US carry our security water while we build our economy.  There view is that the US presence makes every feel OK while China grows.

Sub-Asia and the ME are different, I agree. 

As I mentioned, there are areas outside of the ‘security community,’  but I am not that concerned about arms races there.  India and Pakistan have been racing and warring for years and the world survived without a great power holocaust. Nuclear weapons provide a certain stability there, as does US even- handedness in arms sales to Pakistan and India. Stability can also come from balancing. 

The ME also has a long history of localized arms races and wars and while it has been tense and economically destabilizing at times, we have managed (until recently) without US  military entrenchment there.  The US has balanced through its support of Israel and relationships with ‘moderate’ ME powers.  The prospect of a war in the middle east are less than they ever were (unless the governments of moderate powers topple to extremists) and that is largely because of war exhaustion and peace efforts going back to camp David. Iran is a problem but do you really think a middle east war will result?

I know the world is a dangerous place but I not worried about regional powers balancing themselves – I prefer it because of cost issues for the US. The US should remain engaged and a balancer but not the balancer. If wars break out, that is bad but it’s not like the last 20 years of US unipolarity have been peace and prosperity.  Before Iraq and Afghanistan, there were the Balkans.

I can only say here that today is not the 1960s or even the 1990s.  You know that US economic preeminence, allowing it to afford lots of guns and butter, was an a rare confluence of factors. Those factors have largely receded and are rapidly diminishing.  The 1990s was an economic bubble as we learned in 2000.  Moreover, your domestic agenda (and maybe Sllivan’s) is apparently smaller than mine.  Clinton may have balanced the budget  but he didn’t deliver health care, infrastructure investment, ya da ya da.  (In fact, Clinton, for all his talents and opportunities, was a waste of space.)  So, I don’t view the 1990s as an example of our ability to do it all.  The 1960s is a better case but not a realistic one today. The price of unipolarity: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34263381/ns/us_news-life.”

Obama’s Pragmatism toward North Korea

Posted on by
3

NK Flag

Yesterday, I participated on a panel at the South Korean Institute for National Security Strategy. The conference was entitled “Prospects for the Situation of the Korean Peninsula and the North Korean Nuclear Issue in 2010.” I think I have been to this conference already about 10 times already in the last 18 months, but if you lived next to the last and weirdest stalinist slave state, with nukes now to boot, you’d probably go over and over the topic endlessly too. My session was entitled “The US and China’s Policy toward the Korean Peninsula and North Korean Issues.” I was a discussant for Brian Myers’ paper “On the New Pragmatism of America’s North Korea Policy.” Brian teaches at Dongseo University here in Busan, and I find his work on NK increasingly persuasive. Here is his most recent intelligent op-ed in the New York Times. Here is the Korean news story on the conference; I looked like I just got punch or something…

Here are my comments on his paper:

“My read of this paper is that is broadly correct. I agree with Brian that NK is highly unlikely to ever surrender its nuclear weapons, because they are central to regime legitimacy. They are more than simply a tool of security or extortion; they are central to the regime’s raison d’etre after the collapse of communism and the decisive NK defeat in the intra-Korean competition in the last 20 years. With the global effort for communism over and defeated, and with South Korea’s obvious success, a self-evident question is why NK even exists anymore. If the East Germans gave up in the wake of communism’s failure and West Germany’s success, why does not NK also? Brian correctly notes that regime ideology has changed more openly toward militaristic nationalism, perhaps even semi-fascism, to compensate, and nuclear weapons are central to the overt nationalist/racialist mission of defending Korea against Yankee imperialism.

I have a few further comments.

1. Brian makes the intelligent observation that although President Obama has moved beyond ideology, various opponents of the United States have not. While this seems fairly obvious to the rest of the world, it comes as a surprise in Washington. The assumption of unipolarity and American dominance is so accepted by the US that the only change needed to bring change to the world is change in Washington. That is astonishing American arrogance, and speaks especially to the ridiculous expectations raised by Obama’s character – expectations which the president did a lot to build as a candidate by constantly referring to his election as the ‘start of a new era’ in history. Only Americans talk that way about the US, and Brian is right to point out that expert opinion about NK is usually in fact expert opinion about the US.

2. Brian makes the argument that Pyongyang means what it says. Northern ideology is a serious exposition of regime beliefs, not a cynical ploy. This is a controversial position, because most NK watchers, as Brian notes, believe the opposite. NK ideology is perceived as so bizarre and so obviously fraudulent – NK has never been self-reliant, e.g., despites decades of juche – that it cannot be taken seriously. As Brian notes, diplomats like Madeline Albright and journalists like Selig Harrison all act on this implicit belief.

Brian is right however to point out that dictatorships – especially right-wing ones – usually mean what they say. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Osama bin Laden, the mullah theocrats in Iran, various clerical fascists in Latin America, and the Taliban have all told the whole how they see it and what they wanted to change. Brian’s claim is that NK is doing the same, and that we should listen actively. In IR theory, we refer to this position as ‘second-image.’ In other words, regime beliefs overwhelm international structural pressures to determine a state’s foreign policy. That sounds correct to me and better fits the empirical record of the Kim regime than the cynical approach. Particularly the move toward song-gun, recent crackdown on marketization, and the extraordinary efforts to build and hold nuclear weapons suggest that Brian’s read is more accurate.

3. Brian’s most serious criticism is of the Western and South Korean expert or ‘epistemic community’ on NK itself. He unpacks a series of the reigning assumptions of NK kremlinology and argues that they are wrong, in some cases very badly. He also asserts that the NK has used access to it as a manner of bribery of would-be experts in the West. This is the most explosive argument of the paper, as it implies that well-known NK watchers such as Bruce Cumings or Selig Harrison have been coopted, deceived by pleasantries from Kim Jong Il, or othwerwise pull their punches in order to insure their visa. This is a pretty serious charge, but it seems like a fair concern. It is certainly a good idea from Pyongyang’s point of view. If visas and access can be used a marketing tools, why not? The USSR and Kmer Rouge did the same thing, and certainly Bruce Cumings book – North Korea: Another Country – feels awfully generous to a regime we know has killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of its own people in its history. By inviting experts from the West and telling them what they want to hear – that regime ideology is bunk, that the North really just wants a deal, etc – NK sows enormous uncertainty in the West between its public and private statements. But this is hardly surprising, as keeping its various opponents uncertain and confused a long-standing tactic of the regime. If Brian is correct that the regime has no concern to negotiate in bad faith, then hoodwinking experts with access and pseudo-off the record commentary makes perfect sense.

If that is the most controversial argument, I think the most rich is Brian’s argument that NK is a racist-nationalist-militarist regime. Deciphering the true ideology of NK is something of a cottage industry in the social sciences. Bruce Cumings has famously argued that NK is a neo-Confucian dictatorship. IR theorists tend to see it as the last bastion of Cold War stalinism. Neo-conservatives generally see it as a gangster/terrorist/rogue state. And Brian argues that NK is something approaching native Korean fascism. Elsewhere Brian has written that NK is extraordinarily ethnocentric, that even during the Cold War its socialist-internationalist allies perceived little internationalism at all. This ‘ontology’ of NK is a crucial debate. It would help the scholarly and policy community enormously if the expert community on NK could resolve this internal ideology question.”

The US Conservative Meltdown in One Sentence

Posted on by
4

250px-Sarah_Palin_portrait

So yes, we all know that Palin is a balloonhead. Even the conservative-realist Foreign Policy gave thanks on Thanksgiving that Palin has no access to US foreign policy making. I have given up reading the reviews. I don’t think anything could seriously convince me to read the book.

But Sam Tannenhaus really captures how Palin both channels and reflects the larger problem of right’s increasing abdication of seriousness about government altogether:

“On the campaign trail she discovered a power greater than public office: the power of celebrity,” writes Matthew Continetti, an editor at The Weekly Standard and the author of “The Persecution of Sarah Palin,” a book that combines besotted advocacy with an assault on the liberal media that “tried to bring down a rising star.”

“Greater than public office”: this phrase distills an emerging doctrine on the right, as its long-standing distrust of federal bureaucrats and costly programs careers off into full-scale repudiation of governance itself.

 

Yes, the logical end point of tea-parties, Fox News, the ‘Palin-as-serious-contender’ fantasy, the ‘Obama-as-Hitler’ trope, Rush, Beck, and all the rest of the 2009 conservative implosion is the growing recognition by the rest of the country that the right is not only unfit to rule, but increasingly unable to.

(Tannenhaus’ good book on recent US conservatism is here.)

The Delicious Irony of al Qaeda’s Looming Bankruptcy

Posted on by
Reply

 

One of the many ironies of Islamic fundamentalism – besides the most obvious of killing for God – is its dependence on money despite its overtly nonfinancial religiosity, and its theological commitment to wrecking capitalism.

Hah! So much for all that piety and devotion to Allah; better go sell some more heroin to southeast Asian drug lords.

FP has a nice bit on al Qaeda’s rocky finances, which raises the obvious question no jihadi would ever address – why should an aggressively religious-ideological organization require money at all?

The answer of course is just as obvious. Most ‘warriors for God’ are in it for the cash; God is just nice ideological cover. Lots of pirates, separatists, militias, and other brigands in Southeast Asia (Philippines especially) and Africa use Islamism as cover for pretty standard mafiaosi thuggery. If the Taliban ran out of drug money, how many of its ‘devoted’ warriors would show up the next day? In fact, we learned just how few, when the drug money temporarily dried up after the Northern Alliance victory in late 2001. It took about 5 years for the Taliban to get back on its feet, because it was broke. But aren’t martyrs looking to go to heaven supposed to fight for free? I guess not.

And how about using capitalist tools (fundraising, shadowy bank accounts, paychecks to fighters and video producers) against capitalism itself? Doesn’t the use of the tools bring those very pollutions into the heart of the jihadi effort?If capitalism brings ‘westoxification’ and ‘Jewish financial hegemony’ – hence the targeting of the World Trade Centers – how does one reconcile using it openly?

The answer is just as obvious – one can’t –  which tells you just how intellectually bankrupt Islamism, even in its softer forms, really is. Muslims, like everyone else, can be seduced by money. They are just as tempted to willfully misread their own private interest as aligned with their religious requirements. This must be a revelation to absolutely no one save the radical imams of the Middle East. In 1202, the fourth crusaders, supposedly off to save the Holy Land for Christianity, took a left turn to plunder other (byzantine) Christians for the cash instead. How nice. And what an obvious parallel to Saddam Hussein paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in the 1990s.

Further, the Muslim world is just as tied into the global economy as everyone else. You can’t ‘escape’ capitalism or the market, just like you can’t ‘escape’ gravity or the tides. Just ask the Soviets; 75 years of titanic effort and bloodshed still couldn’t keep Russians from trading on the black market for bluejeans. The non-western paradise Islamists want is just as illusory and ridiculous as the Aryan pre-modern paradise the Nazis wanted to build in Russia. If even al Qaeda has to use ‘Jewish’ money and capitalism to fight exactly those evils, then there’s no way they will win – no matter how many financial centers they blow up. The world has moved on; Islamists are on a fool’s errand to find a myth that never really existed anyway…

More Troops – What a Surprise… Do the Kagans EVER Say Anything Else?

Posted on by
13

logo

Am I the only one who finds that the Kagans are relentlessly, almost ideologically, committed to US build-ups overseas, and the regular use of military power and military-related tools generally? I just read the WaPo op-ed from last week. It tells me nothing I haven’t heard from them whether on C-Span, Lehrer, or from their various websites/think-tanks for years. Certainly, Afghanistan may be worth the build-up they counsel. My own thoughts are deeply divided, so it’s not obvious that they are wrong in the op-ed. Nor are they incorrect that military leverage is the ultimate backbone for the exercise of national power. I agree there too. And I know they are a lot smarter, better travelled, and have better access than me. So I do read them usually.

But increasingly I don’t feel like I need to. I already know their answer – more soldiers, and more ‘will’ or ‘backbone.’ As Greenwald has said, these guys seems like robots. They always seem to suggest that more US force is the answer. If Russia misbehaves, we should threaten it implicitly and let southeastern Europe into NATO. On China, belligerence is the obvious way to save Taiwan. Iran should be bombed. Iraq was a great idea. Etc, etc.

It can’t be this easy. There are other tools of national power and influence – diplomacy, aid, sanctions – and these are wildly underfunded. (Compare the DoD and State budgets; the former is funded by 25-30x the latter. And forget about USAID.) I realize that soft power or whatever you want to call it is ‘soft.’ It doesn’t work too well. But counsels to war or war-like build-ups/advisors/military aid, etc, have their own massive costs that I never seem to hear about that from them or other ‘neo-cons’ (if that is where the Kagans lie). Walt has a nice 2- piece on the huge costs this sort of counsel implicitly carries. You can’t just war and war – it guts democratic freedoms at home, turns you into an imperialist abroad (whether you want to be or not), and breaks the domestic fiscus. (Not to mention that your country becomes responsible for a great deal of death and destruction, regardless of the cause it serves.) Do the Kagans ever blink for a moment when they read about the trillion dollar deficits for the next decade? I am sure they do. They are pretty bright. But is their answer simply to reflexively demand domestic program cuts to prop-up defense spending at the $6-700 billion level indefinitely? Again it just can’t be that easy.