Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Shrub & Twigs' Crimes Against Almost Everybody Getting You Down? Then Jerk Him Around

I know you take the sorry state of affairs that Dubya, Dickie & Rummy, LLP, have dragged the Republic and the world into with much sadness, shame and anger. But don't fuss with your loved one, kick the cat or curse out the guy making a right hand turn from the far left lane during rush hour. No. Jerk HIM Down. Around. Sideways. Any which way but lose. I mean it. All you have to do is click on the link below. Then use your mouse to manipulate him for a change: down, down, down in a free-fall flight into the abyss.
Down, boy!
Fun, huh? Pass it along.
 


6:22 PM / Editor / permalink    4 comments



Friday, May 12, 2006

Is 'Cut and Run' Really an Anathema in Politics of Modern Warfare?

Below is an opinion piece so eloquently stark and unadorned in its power that an introduction would do it a disservice. It is from the May/June issue of Foreign Policy Magazine, which is a subscription site--but worth the bucks if you have them.
Cut and Run? You Bet

By Lt. Gen. William E. Odom

May/June 2006

Why America must get out of Iraq now.

Withdraw immediately or stay the present course? That is the key question about the war in Iraq today. American public opinion is now decidedly against the war. From liberal New England, where citizens pass town-hall resolutions calling for withdrawal, to the conservative South and West, where more than half of "red state" citizens oppose the war, Americans want out. That sentiment is understandable.

The prewar dream of a liberal Iraqi democracy friendly to the United States is no longer credible. No Iraqi leader with enough power and legitimacy to control the country will be pro-American. Still, U.S. President George W. Bush says the United States must stay the course. Why? Let's consider his administration's most popular arguments for not leaving Iraq.

If we leave, there will be a civil war. In reality, a civil war in Iraq began just weeks after U.S. forces toppled Saddam. Any close observer could see that then; today, only the blind deny it. Even President Bush, who is normally impervious to uncomfortable facts, recently admitted that Iraq has peered into the abyss of civil war. He ought to look a little closer. Iraqis are fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans. That's civil war.

Withdrawal will encourage the terrorists. True, but that is the price we are doomed to pay. Our continued occupation of Iraq also encourages the killers -- precisely because our invasion made Iraq safe for them. Our occupation also left the surviving Baathists with one choice: Surrender, or ally with al Qaeda. They chose the latter. Staying the course will not change this fact. Pulling out will most likely result in Sunni groups' turning against al Qaeda and its sympathizers, driving them out of Iraq entirely.

Before U.S. forces stand down, Iraqi security forces must stand up. The problem in Iraq is not military competency; it is political consolidation. Iraq has a large officer corps with plenty of combat experience from the Iran-Iraq war. Moktada al-Sadr's Shiite militia fights well today without U.S. advisors, as do Kurdish pesh merga units. The problem is loyalty. To whom can officers and troops afford to give their loyalty? The political camps in Iraq are still shifting. So every Iraqi soldier and officer today risks choosing the wrong side. As a result, most choose to retain as much latitude as possible to switch allegiances. All the U.S. military trainers in the world cannot remove that reality. But political consolidation will. It should by now be clear that political power can only be established via Iraqi guns and civil war, not through elections or U.S. colonialism by ventriloquism.

Setting a withdrawal deadline will damage the morale of U.S. troops. Hiding behind the argument of troop morale shows no willingness to accept the responsibilities of command. The truth is, most wars would stop early if soldiers had the choice of whether or not to continue. This is certainly true in Iraq, where a withdrawal is likely to raise morale among U.S. forces. A recent Zogby poll suggests that most U.S. troops would welcome an early withdrawal deadline. But the strategic question of how to extract the United States from the Iraq disaster is not a matter to be decided by soldiers. Carl von Clausewitz spoke of two kinds of courage: first, bravery in the face of mortal danger; second, the willingness to accept personal responsibility for command decisions. The former is expected of the troops. The latter must be demanded of high-level commanders, including the president.

Withdrawal would undermine U.S. credibility in the world. Were the United States a middling power, this case might hold some water. But for the world's only superpower, it's patently phony. A rapid reversal of our present course in Iraq would improve U.S. credibility around the world. The same argument was made against withdrawal from Vietnam. It was proved wrong then and it would be proved wrong today. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the world's opinion of the United States has plummeted, with the largest short-term drop in American history. The United States now garners as much international esteem as Russia. Withdrawing and admitting our mistake would reverse this trend. Very few countries have that kind of corrective capacity. I served as a military attache in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during Richard Nixon's Watergate crisis. When Nixon resigned, several Soviet officials who had previously expressed disdain for the United States told me they were astonished. One diplomat said, "Only your country is powerful enough to do this. It would destroy my country."

Two facts, however painful, must be recognized, or we will remain perilously confused in Iraq. First, invading Iraq was not in the interests of the United States. It was in the interests of Iran and al Qaeda. For Iran, it avenged a grudge against Saddam for his invasion of the country in 1980. For al Qaeda, it made it easier to kill Americans. Second, the war has paralyzed the United States in the world diplomatically and strategically. Although relations with Europe show signs of marginal improvement, the trans-Atlantic alliance still may not survive the war. Only with a rapid withdrawal from Iraq will Washington regain diplomatic and military mobility. Tied down like Gulliver in the sands of Mesopotamia, we simply cannot attract the diplomatic and military cooperation necessary to win the real battle against terror. Getting out of Iraq is the precondition for any improvement.

In fact, getting out now may be our only chance to set things right in Iraq. For starters, if we withdraw, European politicians would be more likely to cooperate with us in a strategy for stabilizing the greater Middle East. Following a withdrawal, all the countries bordering Iraq would likely respond favorably to an offer to help stabilize the situation. The most important of these would be Iran. It dislikes al Qaeda as much as we do. It wants regional stability as much as we do. It wants to produce more oil and gas and sell it. If its leaders really want nuclear weapons, we cannot stop them. But we can engage them.

None of these prospects is possible unless we stop moving deeper into the "big sandy" of Iraq. America must withdraw now.


Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (Ret.) is senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and professor at Yale University. He was director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988.
Foreign Policy Magazine
 


5:38 PM / Editor / permalink    1 comments




Friedman Continues His Hot Streak

You know the drill. For those dear readers whom do not or can not subscribe to the TimesSelect feature of The New York Times, I post in full certain columns of the Grey Lady's franchise players. In this case, again, it is a Tom Friedman piece that I believe needs to be read by as many thinking folks as possible. To wit:
Op-Ed Columnist
The Post-Post-Cold War

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

BUDAPEST

Being in Eastern Europe in the wake of Dick Cheney's warning to Russia against using its oil and gas exports as "tools for intimidation and blackmail" has been revealing. The Financial Times noted that some Russian media presented Mr. Cheney's remarks as echoing Winston Churchill's 1946 speech in Fulton, Mo., warning that an "Iron Curtain" was descending on Europe.

I actually don't think we're going back to the cold war. I think we're going forward. We're leaving the world we've been in -- the post-cold-war world -- and entering the post-post-cold-war world. Americans won't like the post-post-cold-war world, unless they get serious about energy.

The cold-war world was a bipolar world, stabilized by a nuclear balance between two superpowers. The post-cold-war world was, for Americans, a unipolar belle epoque, in which an American Hyperpower, as the French dubbed it, seemed to dominate the global scene, economically and strategically -- a scene characterized by a steady expansion of free markets and freely elected governments.

The post-post-cold war is a multipolar world, where U.S. power is being checked from every corner. China is rising as a power, thanks to hard work and high savings. Beyond China, though, other powers are rising thanks only to soaring oil prices -- powers that were on the decline in the post-cold war.

These are: Vladimir Putin's Russia, which is countering the U.S. on a variety of fronts; Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, which is Castro's Cuba on steroids in the post-post-cold-war world, leading a new wave of nationalizations and anti-Americanism in Latin America; and, of course, Iran -- using its oil windfall to go nuclear. Yes, $70-a-barrel oil is making this post-post-cold-war world a multipolar world.

"It's the 'axis of oil,' " says Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Case for Goliath." "It is more lasting and more important than terrorism -- and we don't have any policy for it."

Not only are others becoming more assertive: the U.S. has become less intimidating. With Americans bleeding in Iraq, with George Bush hugely unpopular in Europe, and with the U.S. two-party system so warped it can't even respond to a crisis like energy, America is not as feared as it was.

"In 2002 and 2003 everyone was talking about the American 'Hyperpower,' " said Eric Frey, editor of the Austrian daily Der Standard. "No one these days is talking about overwhelming American power, and that has even added to the anti-Americanism. Because before you had resentment and respect, and now you have resentment and scorn."

At the same time, the re-emergence of Russia has gotten the attention of Eastern Europe. Hungary gets more than half of its natural gas from Russia. Lately, some Hungarians have started to recall an old cold war joke: After the Hungarian soccer team beat the Soviet team, the Kremlin sent Hungary's leaders a brief telegram that read: "Congratulations on your victory. Stop. Oil stop. Gas stop."

"If you had asked me five years ago, I would have told you the whole story is finished -- no more Russian bear," said Pal Reti, editor of HVG, the Hungarian economic magazine. "They have so many problems themselves they would not have time to care about others' problems. But I've found that they have another set of priorities and they now have the muscle" to act on them. Yes, Russia no longer has much of an army or any ideology, but it still has a lot of brutish instincts, and now it has the oil money to push them.

In the post-cold-war world, European integration and economic reform seemed irreversible and certain to make Europe into a world democratic power. But in the post-post-cold war, Europe can't unite on anything -- even on an energy policy -- so it is being pushed around by Russia.

"I am very pessimistic about Western Europe -- and that is new," remarked Lajos Bokros, a professor of economics at the Central European University in Budapest. Too many Western Europeans "are not competitive enough" and "do not want to implement the reforms." Unless Europe chooses the high-growth Irish model, as opposed to the French, Italian and German models, Mr. Bokros added, "the whole European region will decline further and become insignificant and irrelevant for this global game."

For all these reasons, I don't miss the cold war, but I do miss the post-cold war. Because this post-post-cold-war world seems infinitely more messy, difficult to manage and full of way too many bad guys getting rich, not by building decent societies, but by simply drilling oil wells.
 


4:08 PM / Editor / permalink    2 comments



Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Is a Really Big War Coming? Some Folks Say You Can Book It

It's one thing when a columnist punches a point to maybe make another point; it's also another thing when a columnist hammers an issue because he or she has done the homework and is hell-bent to explain it to you. It is an altogether different thing, however, when a Senior Fellow of Foreign Policy Studies with The Brookings Institution goes to nailing in the same spot as the columnist. That is unless the reader is from the right, of course, but very few folks of that persuasion read these pages--other than most members of my family, but they wrote me off as a heretical aberration to be ashamed of a long time ago.

Amidst all of the chatter/noise on Iran and its nuclear ambitions filling the media spectrum, two pieces stayed in my mind and gut long enough that I believe I must share them with you. Both of them are a number of days old, which in today's news cycle is ancient history. Both of them could also just as well be written tomorrow morning.

First up is a column from The Los Angeles Times, which I excerpt and then link to.
Rosa Brooks:
War clouds
Russia's dangerous double game with Israel and Iran could easily spark a Middle East conflict, with dire consequences for the U.S.
April 28, 2006


LET ME TELL YOU about the next war.

It will start sooner than you think -- sometime between now and September. And it will be precipitated by the $700-million Russian deal this week to sell Tor air defense missile systems to Iran.

When the war begins, it will be between Iran and Israel. Before it ends, though, it may set the whole of the Middle East on fire, pulling in the United States, leaving a legacy of instability that will last for generations and permanently ending a century of American supremacy.

Despite the high stakes, the Bush administration seems barely to have noticed the danger posed by the Russian missile sale. But the signs are there, for those inclined to read them.
Continue reading at The Los Angeles Times.

The next piece is from The Brookings Institution, and is far more reserved and analytical, but no less scary since it postulates that Bush will act responsibly in the end.
Is War with Iran Inevitable?

NRC Handelsblad, April 21, 2006

Ivo H. Daalder, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies

There appears to be an emerging consensus in Washington and around the world, that war with Iran is just a matter of time. But is this consensus right? There are good reasons to believe that the Bush administration, while convinced that an Iran capable of producing nuclear weapons represents a major threat to international security, will conclude that military force does not offer a desirable answer. The reason is not that the threat would not warrant the use of military force, but that the military, political, and international context for making such a decision militates against it.

The Iranian nuclear threat is no doubt more real than the Iraqi nuclear threat in 2003. Whereas the "evidence" of an Iraqi nuclear program hinged on disputed information about yellowcake purchases in Niger and the acquisition of aluminum tubes, Tehran has been quite open about its desire to master the technical process of enriching uranium (which constitutes the most critical step in producing a bomb). This reality has led many people to conclude that if President Bush decided to go to war on the basis of flimsy evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program in 2003, then surely he will go to war on the basis of much more substantial evidence of an Iranian program this time around.
Continue reading at The Brookings Institute.
 


5:55 PM / Editor / permalink    4 comments



Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Trying Japanese War Criminals -- and Then Hanging a Bunch

Most of you will remember the movie I made last summer about the trial of the Japanese war criminals after World War II. If you do not, you may want to read this post. It appears that it will soon be in a movie theater near you--if you live in China, that is.

In production it was titled, in English, The International Military Tribunal for the Far East. It is now titled, thank goodness, Tokyo Trial. The movie has a Website, in Chinese. There is also a Trailer online.

I played one of the 11 judges. Because the director and producer wanted historical accuracy, as much as possible roles were cast according to how close the makeup people could duplicate the actual characters on film, which is why I played the Canadian judge instead of the American judge. It is why an actor from Turkey played the judge from India, etc.

Below are some snapshots of the judges taken during shooting in Beijing and Tianjin. Since I cannot at this moment name everyone correctly, I will identify no one other than one or two whom it is important to name and that I can.
This is a posed photo of all of us with our translator, Phoebe, in Tianjin. The tall man on the far right, up front, is the very fine American actor, Dan Ziskie, who played the head judge, Sir William Webb, an Australian. I am to the immediate left of Phoebe, and next to Anatoly, a real Russian playing the Russian judge, and a truly fine actor.

This is a group shot of us in the hottest place on Earth--the sound stage in the Beijing suburbs where the crew built an exact replica of the Tokyo courtroom.

This is a promotional still between takes in a beautiful, period building on a campus in Tianjin. The Japanese defense attorney has just challenged Sir Williams' credentials to serve as judge, and we have stormed out of "court." I am directly across from Dan, between a fine actor and Chinese movie star--whom I only know by his English name, Damian--and Anatoly, the Russian judge.

This photo is between takes of the judges deliberating verdicts and sentencing. We are doing a line rehearsal; I am on the left making one silly point or another--and pointing it out. Directly across from me is my dear mate, Les Collings, an Englishman who has lived in Asia since god was a pup. He's really taking to this acting business. We are shooting in a beautifully preserved home of a famous Chinese writer who lived in Tianjin during the early Republican years of the 20th Century. Now, if only I knew his name.

This photo was taken while we are awaiting a change in lighting. I am flapping my arms to get some air stirring; I've temporarily misplaced my fan.

This photo was taken on the last night of shooting in Tianjin--we have been at it almost 24 straight hours. I am trying to get some fresh air while they are setting up the next shot. The statue I am goofing on is of that famous Chinese writer whom I cannot name. May the literary gods forgive me.
 


2:10 PM / Editor / permalink    3 comments



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