Category: Geopolitics

Ayatollah’s grandson calls for US overthrow of Iran

Telegraph | News | Ayatollah’s grandson calls for US overthrow of Iran
The grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, the inspiration of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, has broken a three-year silence to back the United States military to overthrow the country’s clerical regime.

Hossein Khomeini’s call is all the more startling as he made it from Qom, the spiritual home of Iran’s Shia strand of Islam, during an interview to mark the 17th anniversary of the ayatollah’s death.

“My grandfather’s revolution has devoured its children and has strayed from its course,” he told Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language television station. “I lived through the revolution and it called for freedom and democracy – but it has persecuted its leaders.”

Time is on our side in the Long War

KnoxNews: Columnists
Americans are routinely accused of lacking strategic patience. We want our wars finished by the next major holiday or certainly by the next election. Given that mindset, we’re forced to subsist on current events for encouragement – e.g., al-Zarqawi’s death rescues us from the chilling revelations surrounding the Haditha killings.

But if you subscribe to the Long War, you look for trends and not individual events to drive your strategic calculations.

Gen. John Abizaid, current CENTCOM commander, calls Iraq the first war of globalization. Ultimately, we’re trying to connect the Middle East to the global economy on the basis of something besides oil, turning all those idle young males into stakeholders instead of bomb-throwers. Meanwhile, the radical Salafi jihadists seek to disconnect the region from what they see as the corrupting – and growing – influence of globalization.

Here’s the good news: Time is on our side.

China Easing Its Stance On Taiwan

China Easing Its Stance On Taiwan
China’s adjustment was decided at senior levels of the Communist Party in the summer of 2004, shortly after Chen was reelected to a second four-year term and Beijing realized its policy was going nowhere, officials said. The Chinese decided that talk of conquering Taiwan within a short time was not fruitful and that the real answer lay in the longer-term strategy, based on making China more attractive to Taiwan’s 23 million inhabitants through economic and political development,

Jordan – Palestinian State

Backward reels the news — The Washington Times

Israel’s unspoken ulterior motive, which Jordan’s King Abdullah and ranking officials know all too well, is to make Jordan the Palestinian state, leaving what’s left of the West Bank as a sort of no-man’s-land buffer between the two countries. While Mr. Sharon was still prime minister, he suggested to King Abdullah he resume responsibility for the West Bank, which was Jordan’s mandate prior to the 1967 war.
King Abdullah understood, as his late father King Hussein did, this would be the first step in a geostrategic gambit to turn Jordan into a full-fledged Palestinian state. Continue reading “Jordan – Palestinian State”

Islamic Imperialism: A History

All or Nothing by Theodore Dalrymple
In his new book, Islamic Imperialism: A History, Professor Efraim Karsh does not mince words about Mohammed’s early and (to all those who do not accept the divinity of his inspiration) unscrupulous resort to robbery and violence, or about Islam’s militaristic aspects, or about the link between Islamic tradition and the current wave of fundamentalist violence in the world. The originality of Karsh’s interpretation is its underlying assumption that Islam was, from the very beginning, a pretext for personal and dynastic political ambition, from the razzias against the Meccan caravans and the expulsion of Jewish tribes from Medina, to the siege of Vienna a millennium later in 1529, and Hamas today.

Contrary to its universalistic pretensions, Karsh argues, Islam has never succeeded in eliminating political power struggles within the Muslim world, where, on the contrary, such struggles have always been murderous. Islamic regimes, many espousing in the beginning the ascetic principles of what one might call desert Islam, invariably degenerate (if it be degeneration) into luxury- and privilege-loving dynasties.

Nation-Building or Gene-Splicing?

TCS Daily – Nation-Building or Gene-Splicing?
Without Britannia — with it’s free-trade policies and its Common Law legal institutions — Hong Kong might have remained a rather desolate rock. In other words, it took the forceful British territorial annexation of Hong Kong after the First Opium War in the mid-1800s to create a major center of commercial activity by 1900, and one of the world’s most prosperous cities by 1997, when it was returned to the Chinese.

Institutions are like the DNA of a society. Healthy DNA, when expressed, serves as the blueprint for a healthy organism. Likewise, healthy institutions, when in place, allow millions of individual actors to engage in cooperative, mutually beneficial behaviors, the stuff of peace and prosperity. But mutant DNA can create cancer cells. Saddam’s Iraq, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and Stalin’s Russia have (or had) mutant institutions. And pathologies can threaten to spread.

If Iraq is conceived as a pity party that requires more resources, more shiny new schools and more dependency, the effort will fail and its new leaders will be corrupted. But if Iraq focuses on incorporating simple systems like security, titled property, and dispute resolution, among others, then they may yet have the ingredients for success.

The Perils of China Threat Inflation

The Perils of Threat Inflation by William S. Lind
Taiwan is vastly important to China, because the great threat to China throughout its history has been internal division. If one province, Taiwan, can secure its independence, why cannot other provinces do the same? It is the spectre of internal break-up that forces China to prevent Taiwanese independence at any cost, including war with America.

But America has no corresponding interest. A war with China over Taiwan would be, for the U.S., another “war of choice,” not of strategic necessity. We are currently fighting two other “wars of choice,” and neither is going particularly well.

A strategic rivalry between the U.S. and China points to an obvious parallel, the strategic rivalry between England and Germany before World War I. That parallel should give Washington pause. If the rivalry—completely unnecessary in both cases—leads to war, as it then did, the war will have no victor. Germany and Britain destroyed each other. While Britain finally won, the British Empire died in the mud of Flanders.

A war between China and the United States could easily result in a similar fatal weakening of the U.S. (perhaps after a strategic nuclear exchange), while a defeated Chinese state may dissolve, with China becoming a vast region of stateless, Fourth Generation instability. Is Taiwan worth risking such an outcome? Was Belgian neutrality worth the Somme, Bolshevism and Hitler?

In a 21st century where the most important division will be between centers of order and centers or sources of disorder, it is vital to American interests that China remain a center of order. America needs to handle a rising China the way Britain handled a rising America, not a rising Germany.

Preparing for life after Castro’s death

Preparing for life after Castro’s death
The University of Miami — in coordination with the American Red Cross of Greater Miami and the Keys and a slew of nonprofit groups and local, state and federal agencies — has completed what officials say is the most comprehensive plan ever put together in Miami to prepare for the critical days following the death of Cuba’s communist leader, who will turn 80 this year.

The greatest fear among the planning organizations is another mass migration along the lines of the Mariel boatlift in 1980 or the 1994 balsero crisis. Much of the report is dedicated to planning for such an event, such as assigning a county official as the point person and assigning specific tasks to deal with migrants.

EU is at a turning point

Los Angeles Times: EU is at a turning point

In Britain and Poland in the last month, nationalistic parties uneasy with integration into the European Union have scored major advances. The EU constitution, rejected last year by France and the Netherlands, is dead in the water. Economic nationalism and protectionism are surging. The French, Italian, Spanish and Polish governments recently have taken steps to protect national industries from foreign takeover.

On a continent that dreamed of eliminating national borders, hostility toward immigrants — especially those from Muslim countries — is causing national boundaries to spring back to life.

In short, political life across Europe is being renationalized, plunging the enterprise of European integration into its most serious crisis since World War II.

Iraq Is the Republic of Fear

Iraq Is the Republic of Fear
Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq "the republic of fear" and hoped it would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.