Canadian Cincinnatus

The phoniness of the pro-Putin charge that the invasion of Georgia was Georgia’s fault.

Yesterday’s post about the Russian-Georgian conflict got me thinking about something that has bugged me for a while: the line circulated in pro-Putin circles, the appeasing western left and even some right-wing bloggers of the isolationist bent, that Georgia attacked Russia!

Anybody with even the tiniest amount of military knowledge recognizes the absurdity of this claim. Even though the invasion was executed incompetently, the military action that transpired require many months of planning and preparation. It is militarily impossible to do something like that on the spur of the moment. In addition, that it started on the opening day of the Beijing Olympics – a huge event guaranteed to use up the media oxygen – raises, or should raise, extreme suspicion.

As usual, my expert on Georgian affairs, Tom M, put it best:

“First off, Russia was never attacked.  But Russian Forces in Georgia were fired upon by Georgian forces.  What amazes me is that anyone could think Russia was attacked, when everything happened well within Georgia... not even a "cross-border" incident.

As far as I know, nobody has articulated things this way... i.e. that Georgian forces never were even close to the Georgia-Russia border... not a single shot was fired into Russian territory.”

He also offered this analogy (that I don’t think is weak): 

“I've been thinking about what kind of analogy to present to Canadian friends about the 2008 Russo-Georgian war...

An obviously weak one would go as follows:

1) Canada and Quebec start hostilities

2) The US grants all in Quebec US citizenship (i.e. issues them US Passports)

3) A skirmish erupts on the Ont-Que border

4) The US then sends massive numbers of troops into Que to protect their newly minted US Citizens from Canada and bombs Ottawa

5) Open war breaks out... Canada loses.”

South Ossetia becomes complicated for Putin

Looks like Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is running into some complications in his efforts to control the South Ossetia territory that he seized with military force back in 2008. According to this Moscow Times story:

“While the Russian authorities are, for the time being, using kid gloves to deal with the opposition at home, they have not shown the same constraint in South Ossetia.

Opposition leader Alla Dzhioyeva suffered a minor stroke after her home was raided by the authorities and her election headquarters was destroyed. South Ossetia's short experiment with democracy came to an abrupt end when Dzhioyeva won 57 percent of the vote in the presidential election versus the 40 percent received by Anatoly Bibilov, the Kremlin protege of outgoing South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity.”

Here is some background information for this story from my friend, Tom M, who is extremely knowledgeable about Georgian affairs: 

“As background to this story, Alla Dzhoiyeva won the South Ossetian presidential "election" late in 2011, but she was not the Kremlin's candidate.  Consequently, her win by a wide margin was contested in South Ossetia's "courts" where the results were annulled and she was forbidden from running at the runnoff "elections" in March of this year.

She insisted she had won the elections "fair and square" and would not back down.  Last week or so, her political offices were raided by the South Ossetian KGB (yes, in South Ossetia the federal police still go by the KGB moniker).  She was arrested and struck with a rifle butt in the head, resulting in a stroke and a stay in the hospital where she is in a coma.”

An even more disturbing quote from the same Moscow Times story:

“So why would the Kremlin and Federal Security Service be so upset about the victory of one pro-Russian candidate over another?...

The second reason is even more unpleasant. The world is rapidly moving toward a military conflict in the Middle East. If civil war in Syria is followed by an Israeli strike against Iran, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is likely to seize the opportunity to stage his long-awaited attack on Georgia. There are clear signs of contingency planning for this attack. The 58th Army is under new command, and almost all of its weaponry has been modernized. What's more, waging a war directly after the March 4 presidential election is the best way to stir up a patriotic frenzy and destroy Russia's "radical opposition" at the same time.”

“This reminds me of those who argue that Poland attacked Nazi Germany in 1939, not the other way around.”

Forbes magazine: “The Left’s Big Lie on Allende”

Have you noticed how the left only gets upset about atrocities when it happens to them?

The overthrow of Salvador Allende of Chile, the coup organized by the CIA in 1953 against Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran and Franco winning the Spanish Civil War: if you listened to the left, you would think that these were among the biggest atrocities of the blood soaked 20^th century. Communists killed 100 million people in that same time period but they choose to stress relatively trivial incidents.

Take Franco. Yes there was a bloodbath after he won the Civil War. But to judge Franco properly, it must be remembered that much of his killing was primarily confined to communists and anarchists (i.e. the people who were actively fighting against him – when they were not killing each other). After these people were suppressed, Franco left the Spanish people pretty much alone and, as a result, Spain began to enjoy a genuine peace and tranquility that has lasted until this day. It is, or should be, a testament to his leadership that Spain was able to make a smooth transition to liberal democracy in only a few years since his death. And also that he steadfastly rebuffed Hitler’s entreaties to join him in World War II. Considering the anarchy that Spain was gripped with in the mid-1930’s and the awful choices that it faced, it seems to me the Spanish Civil War had about the best possible outcome that it realistically could have had. But no, we instead remember Franco as a bloody butcher, and conveniently ignore what happens every single time the communists take over a country.

Even with the one indisputable monster popularly known to be a right-winger, Adolph Hitler, limousine liberals don’t like to acknowledge that his party was called the National Socialist Party, or more precisely, the National Socialist German Workers Party. Cripes, when you say it like that it sounds like the Nazis were a Teutonic version of the NDP! The name is indicative of the fact that Hitler explicitly created National Socialism (which, by the way, was how he referred to his movement) as a Hegelian synthesis of the right (nationalism, militarism, anti-Semitism) and the left (central planning, concentration camps, the continuous and systematic mass murder of opponents and eugenics). The left remembers the first part of Hitler’s equation but not the last part.

Getting back to the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973 - which to academic hipsters is an act of pure evil on the part of the CIA - a recent Forbes magazine article counters with some inconvenient truths: 

“Elected with just 36% of the vote in a split election, he believed he had a mandate to ram through a hard-core Marxist program of expropriation and indoctrination like that of his mentor, Cuba's Fidel Castro.

In the process Allende left Chile's economy in ruins and trampled the rule of law so badly he brought his country to the brink of civil war. He was stopped only when the legislature charged him with 22 constitutional violations and ordered Chile's military to oust him.

As Chilean jets strafed La Moneda presidential palace Sept. 11, 1973, Allende shot himself with a gold-plated submachine gun given him by Castro.

At the request of Allende's family, an official investigation in May exhumed the dead man's body, conducted forensic tests and on Tuesday found that, yes, Allende took his own life. It was what his family always believed, consistent with the tone of his final speech and a family history of suicides.”

"’Within weeks of Allende's overthrow,’ wrote Henry Kissinger in his Years of Upheaval, ‘his incompetence, corruption and violation of democratic procedures — all widely acknowledged while he was alive — disappeared from public comment.’

No one had a bigger stake in making a claim that communism doesn't lead to disaster than Castro himself ... That's why Castro was the first to spread the Big Lie that Allende was killed by a sinister CIA-Pinochet cabal.

Castro sycophants in the media and Hollywood followed and succeeded for years in making Allende their martyr.” 

Getting only 36% of the vote, an unpopular political agenda, wrecking the economy, violating the constitution and the rule of law, a power struggle with the democratically elected parliament and an ignominious suicide with a gold-plated, commemorative subgun: not part of the official narrative. Not part of it at all.

 

Forbes magazine – “Give Greece What It Deserves: Communism”

This article in Forbes echoes I have been saying all along about the Greek crisis: don’t keep throwing good money after bad. The important thing for the EU is not to save Greece – it is all but lost – but to teach the other PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain) a lesson. The EU can do without Greece. It produces very little. But if the other PIIGS fail, the EU is toast.

“Once in a great while an opportunity comes along to deliver justice to a people, giving them what they truly deserve. Greece’s time has come.

It must be dawning on all but the most obtuse member of the banking elite that they can’t possibly steal enough money from German taxpayers to save the Greek government from default. Put it off, maybe, but collapse is inevitable.”

“Why not go all the way and give the country what many of its people have been violently demanding for almost a century?

Let them have Communism.”

“If you don’t want the real contagion to spread, that is the disease of believing you can perpetually consume more than you produce, leave Greece to the Greeks and let the bankers take their lumps.”

I think too many people forget what a horror communism is (cf Van Jones). Perhaps a real live example in a European nation might serve to remind them.

 

The dirty laundry beings to air in modern China

As I discussed several years back on these pages, authoritarian dictatorships look better from a distance than they really are. Cheerleaders of authoritarianism, like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, seem oblivious to this fact.

"Dictatorships look better on the surface than democracies do because authoritarian governments can paper over problems a lot easier, but the flip side is that they are also more brittle. When the problems finally do surface, it is usually when they are too big to ignore (and fix)."

While my original article targeted Putin’s Russia, I also commented on labour unrest in China. Since I wrote that piece, labour conflict there has been on the rise, to the point of becoming a serious threat to the Communists:

“The worker unrest in Guangdong is occurring at a time of protests across Chinese cities and a series of bombings directed against government offices.  There has been a noticeable increase in social discontent, which seems to have been aggravated by the hardline policies of Hu Jintao, the country’s current leader.

According to one report, there were 280,000 protests in China last year.  And although it is not possible to verify the number of “mass incidents,” today there are clearly many more of them than in the middle of last decade, when analysts believe there were only 80,000 to 90,000 demonstrations a year.”

“Across both the province and China as a whole, the disaffected are lashing out.  “There is a growing sense of a country in danger of pulling itself apart at the seams,” as Hong Kong journalist Will Clem put it yesterday.  Poor migrants in Guangdong have yet to start a full-scale insurrection and it’s too early to speak of “blood laptops” and “conflict handbags,” but these days they are in the mood to fight.”

280,000 protests a year!

This means that the average Chinese citizen now feels economically secure enough to begin making demands on the system. The status quo is going to start changing soon over there.

 

A wonderful thing is happening in Eastern Europe

This according to Stratfor:

“At a Thursday meeting, the defense ministers of the Visegrad Four (V4) - a loose regional grouping of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia - decided to create a battle group. The decision is significant but expected. It's significant because it shows that the V4 states are willing to upgrade their loose alliance to the security and military level. It's expected because STRATFOR has long forecast that they would be forced to take security matters into their own hands by NATO's lack of focus on the singular issue that concerns them: Russian resurgence in the post-Soviet sphere.”

This echoes some advice I gave for Eastern Europe last February on these pages:

“What the Eastern European countries need to do is to develop a rapid reaction force –within the context of NATO – for the express purpose of repelling a Russian invasion. Don’t involve the Obama-led US or the effete Western Europeans in this. They are too vacillating. To cut Russian bullying off at the pass, the real purpose of this force should be stated explicitly right away and large-scale joint maneuvers held as soon as possible afterwards. In this way they will tell the Russians by words and actions that they will hang together. The Russians will scream provocation and hurl gigantic threats at them, but let them. The Russians always try to get their way with the West by bluff and bluster.

Could such a force hold off the Russian army? I don’t know if they could win, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that by fighting together as a unified force they would turn any Putinist invasion into a big Charlie Foxtrot.

How do I know this? Simple. Examine the performance of the Russian Army in South Ossettia in the summer of 2008. The invasion of this small, postage stamp sized plot of land containing a mere 50,000 souls, with a pro-Russian puppet government already installed, had a tragicomic air about it reminiscent of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. Shortly afterwards Georgian TV interviewed a Russian soldier who deserted because he hadn’t eaten in 5 days. The interview was conducted at a MacDonald’s. Russian logistics are that bad. Additionally, every single volunteer unit in the Russian Army was required to achieve what little they did. Keep in mind that these are the only units in the Russian Army competent enough to execute complicated maneuvers such as an invasion. The bulk of the Russian Army is conscripted. These troops are almost completely ineffective.”

It’s nice to see events prove me right. Of course, I am not saying these things are happening because of anything I wrote, but rather, the Eastern European governments simply came to the same conclusion that I did: that the Good Lord only helps those who help themselves. It’s best not to rely entirely on the goodwill of the US, as Obama’s election has amply demonstrated.

The DIY spirit in the East also shows that the pundits who denounce NATO as a worn-out organization with no mission are completely off the mark. They make the same mistake many columnists do when comment on events in Europe. They underestimate the increasing importance of Eastern Europe in Europe. Whether they are predicting the dawn of Eurabia, as Mark Steyn does regularly, or just issuing generic criticisms of Euro-weenie-ism, commentators usually fail to draw a distinction between Eastern and Western Europe. Much disapprobation that is valid for Western Europe is completely off the mark for the East. In Eastern Europe, the economies are far more open and dynamic, the local population more self-reliant, political correctness dismissed as Soviet propaganda-lite and the fin de siecle decadence of the EU ruling class is as widely scorned there as it is in a Mark Steyn column.

Eastern Europe is currently discounted because they are still the junior partners in Europe. But as their position relative to the decadent West changes, so will the world’s appraisal of them. 

P.S. To confirm the point I made last year about the decrepit state of Russian army logistics, here is a recent news item about how Russian soldiers are fed dog food.

 

Saudi payback against Obama?

According to this CNBC report, the Saudis are considering slashing oil output, citing market oversupply. The average consumer, looking at the price of gas at his local filling station can be forgiven for being sceptical of public Saudi reasoning.

But this begs the question, if ‘market oversupply’ is not the real reason why the Saudi oil machine is cutting back, then what is it?

In possibly related news, numerous reports have come out indicating that Saudi Arabia is seething at the Obama administration for forcing Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to leave power in Egypt, among other things. Worried about unrest among Shiites in Bahrain spreading to their own Shiites (who as luck would have it, occupy the oil rich portions of Saudi Arabia), they are concerned that if push came to shove, the Obama administration would hang them out to dry as well.

Are the oil production cuts a punishment to Obama for his general skittishness on the Middle East?

 

The Nature of Today’s Middle-East Revolutions

George Friedman of the intelligence firm StratFor wrote the most lucid and penetrating article I have yet read about the recent wave of protests and revolutions in the Middle East. Some of the more illuminating points he makes are:

“We do not see these revolutions as a vast conspiracy by radical Islamists to take control of the region. A conspiracy that vast is easily detected, and the security forces of the individual countries would have destroyed the conspiracies quickly.”

“In this case, whatever the cause of the risings, there is no question that radical Islamists will attempt to take advantage and control of them. Why wouldn't they? It is a rational and logical course for them. Whether they will be able to do so is a more complex and important question, but that they would want to and are trying to do so is obvious. They are a broad, transnational and disparate group brought up in conspiratorial methods. This is their opportunity to create a broad international coalition. Thus, as with traditional communists and the New Left in the 1960s, they did not create the rising but they would be fools not to try to take advantage of it.”

This is what conspiracy theorists don’t get. The world is just too complicated for anyone to control. Of course, this fact doesn’t prevent professional revolutionaries from trying.

“It is interesting here to note that the young frequently dominate revolutions like 1848, 1969 and 1989 at first. This is normal. Adults with families and maturity rarely go out on the streets to face guns and tanks. It takes young people to have the courage or lack of judgment to risk their lives in what might be a hopeless cause. However, to succeed, it is vital that at some point other classes of society join them. In Iran, one of the key moments of the 1979 revolution was when the shopkeepers joined young people in the street. A revolution only of the young, as we saw in 1968 for example, rarely succeeds. A revolution requires a broader base than that, and it must go beyond demonstrations. The moment it goes beyond the demonstration is when it confronts troops and police. If the demonstrators disperse, there is no revolution. If they confront the troops and police, and if they carry on even after they are fired on, then you are in a revolutionary phase. Thus, pictures of peaceful demonstrators are not nearly as significant as the media will have you believe, but pictures of demonstrators continuing to hold their ground after being fired on is very significant.”

“This leads to the key event in the revolution. The revolutionaries cannot defeat armed men. But if those armed men, in whole or part, come over to the revolutionary side, victory is possible. And this is the key event. In Bahrain, the troops fired on demonstrators and killed some. The demonstrators dispersed and then were allowed to demonstrate - with memories of the gunfire fresh. This was a revolution contained. In Egypt, the military and police opposed each other and the military sided with the demonstrators, for complex reasons obviously. Personnel change, if not regime change, was inevitable. In Libya, the military has split wide open.”

“It is this act, the military and police coming over to the side of the demonstrators, that makes or breaks a revolution. Therefore, to return to the earlier theme, the most important question on the role of radical Islamists is not their presence in the crowd, but their penetration of the military and police. If there were a conspiracy, it would focus on joining the military, waiting for demonstrations and then striking.”

This is a very illuminating point about the limits of power. The source of a strongman’s power is the military, so he needs a big army; but the only way to have a big army is though conscription; but with conscription, most of the army consists of civilians on loan. How many 18-year-old kids are willing to shoot their brothers and fathers? The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 started because the army - sent out to squash the protests - joined them. Now the protesters had tanks. This lesson was not lost on the Soviet Union. The Red Army took great pains to make sure conscripts served in a different part of the Soviet Union. In Tiananmen Square, the units sent to crush the pro-democracy protesters were trucked in from the furthest corner of China.

What a dictator really needs is a large professional army, but only a handful of liberal democracies like the US, Great Britain and France have been able to afford that – and only at great cost. In all of these countries, the threat of a dictatorship is very small, but still, it is one of the reasons I favour conscription for Canada.

“Those who argue that these risings have nothing to do with radical Islam may be correct in the sense that the demonstrators in the streets may well be students enamored with democracy. But they miss the point that the students, by themselves, can't win. They can only win if the regime wants them to, as in Egypt, or if other classes and at least some of the police or military - people armed with guns who know how to use them - join them. Therefore, looking at the students on TV tells you little. Watching the soldiers tells you much more.

The problem with revolutions is that the people who start them rarely finish them. The idealist democrats around Alexander Kerensky in Russia were not the ones who finished the revolution. The thuggish Bolsheviks did. In these Muslim countries, the focus on the young demonstrators misses the point just as it did in Tiananmen Square. It wasn't the demonstrators that mattered, but the soldiers. If they carried out orders, there would be no revolution.”

This is what the mainstream media doesn’t get but conservatives do. Radical Islam might not have started these uprisings but they might be the ones benefiting from them.

“If I were to guess at this point, I would guess that we are facing 1848. The Muslim world will not experience massive regime change as in 1989, but neither will the effects be as ephemeral as 1968. Like 1848, this revolution will fail to transform the Muslim world or even just the Arab world. But it will plant seeds that will germinate in the coming decades. I think those seeds will be democratic, but not necessarily liberal.”

I think this is a point many conservatives miss. The present situation in the Middle East is untenable. The stability there is entirely illusory. It is the stability of a pressure cooker - before it blows. Right now, the only alternative – radical Islam – is worse. Though this may surely be the most likely outcome of overthrown governments there, at least there is a chance for a liberal democracy, maybe not now, but in the future. 

But as Instapundit would say, read the whole thing.

 

Iraqi Shi’ite supporting Iranian Green Revolution?

According to Michael Ledeen, who has been predicting a revolution in Iran for a decade now, says:

The Iranian opposition has enormous internal support, and is also receiving encouragement from Shi’ite leaders in Iraq.  Ayatollah Jamal al-Din, a follower of the Grand Ayatollah Sistani of Najaf (arguably the most esteemed figure in the Shi’ite firmament), called upon the Iranian people to overthrow their leaders and restore freedom to their ancient land.  His words echoed some of Mousavi’s language and bear careful attention: 

Oh, Dear brothers! There is no difference between a dictator who wears a [crown], a dictator who wears a turban and a dictator who wears the traditional Arab gear. Dictators are the same regardless of their styles and languages. Freedom and dignity are the same for every people. And you, the Noble People of Iran, you were the first people in the Middle East to revolt against the dictatorship and corruption in 1979. Today is your day to reclaim your dignity, your freedom and the treasures of your rich country from the grasp of those thieves who stole religion and state. 

If this is true, then there is one man who has to be thanked when Iran eventually does overthrow the mullahs. That man is the much abused former President of the United States, George W Bush. His liberation of Iraq and his pro-democracy initiative, which has been much derided as hopelessly naïve, was a seed planted by him in Iraq that is now bearing fruit elsewhere.

 

Where is President Obama on the Libyan Revolution?

During the Egyptian Revolution, President Obama saw fit to lecture the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak on what he should do, how he should do it, and when.

Now that America’s enemy, Colonel Gaddafi is machine-gunning his own citizens and even firing anti-aircraft missiles at them (!), the same loquacious President became strangely silent, even though what Gaddafi is now doing is 100 times worse than what Mubarak ever did.

One problem with weak Presidents like Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter is that their feebleness leads them to hector allies while sucking up to enemies.

In any event, here is an instructive video from Bill Whittle summing up the Obama foreign policy