Roger Simon's Mystery

OK. It's tinfoil hat time. Roger
Simon begins with a mystery. Where is the Oil for Food investigation going?

I know - this blog seems obsessed with the Oil-for-Food scandal, but it is
one of the greatest mysteries of our time and this blog is written by a
mystery writer. And, as with any good mystery, you never know the identity of
Mr. Big until the very last minute. Of course, in this case it has seemed for
some time that Mr. Big's initial (pace Kafka) would be K. But who knows? There
are nooks and crannies as far North as Ontario now. Surprises could occur.

Ontario? Does anything spooky ever happen in Ontario? In this case, maybe.
Here's a chart I drew up based on known connections. A Canadian high-ranking UN
official named Maurice Strong has resigned after being accused to being one of
two officials who Saddam bagman Tongsun Park met. According to the Washington
Post:

UNITED NATIONS, April 20 -- The United Nations' special envoy to North Korea, Maurice F. Strong, decided Wednesday to step aside until U.N.-appointed investigators and federal prosecutors finish examining his financial ties to a South Korean lobbyist accused of trying to bribe U.N. officials.
The move comes less than a week after federal authorities charged Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman, with lobbying U.N. officials as an "unregistered agent" of Saddam Hussein. A witness said Park in 1996 and 1997 invested $1 million in Iraqi funds in a Canadian company owned by the son of a high-ranking U.N. official, a federal investigator said.
Strong, a Canadian entrepreneur and environmentalist, acknowledged Monday that
Park had invested money in a business he was "associated with" in
1997 and later advised him on his dealings with Pyongyang.

However, this same Maurice Strong has connections to Paul Martin, the Prime
Minister of Canada who is now being
accused of presiding over a decades long corruption scandal and to the
French-Canadian Demarais family which have strong monetary connections to Total
Elf Aquitane, which is alleged to have dealings with Saddam Hussein and BNP
Paribas, the official bank of the Oil-For-Food program. The Guardian
reported on April 6, 2003:

An Anglo-Iraqi billionaire who has close links to the Blair government,
built his financial empire on peddling his influence with Saddam Hussein's
Baathist regime - the Observer can reveal. ... Auchi was arrested last week in
connection with a �26 million kickback scandal involving the French oil giant
Elf-Aquitaine. His arrest is the latest spectacular twist in a story that
spans three continents and involves an attempted assassination, two of
Europe's largest political corruption scandals and a series of multi-million
pound oil and arms deals with Saddam Hussein. An Observer investigation can
today reveal how a man who built his fortune on secretive deals with the Iraqi
regime came to mix with ministers in the Blair government.

 

Here are a few other snippets which are bound to add to the mystery. While
these associations are circumstantial and by no means conclusive, it does serve
as a useful roadmap for connecting the dots.

"On Friday, Mr. Hunt reported that Mr. Volcker is a close friend and paid adviser to billionaire Paul Desmarais Sr., who owns the Power Corp. of Canada. Power Corp. shares control of a holding company that is the largest single shareholder of the multinational energy firm Total, which received $1.75 billion worth of oil from Iraq. Total was in discussions with Saddam Hussein to develop oil fields in Iraq if sanctions were lifted (which would have made them worth billions of dollars more). Mr. Demarais' son is currently a director of Total."
-- Washington
Times

Just a month before the Canada Free Press revealed that Volcker, a former
Federal Reserve chairman, is a member of Power Corp.�s international
advisory board�and a close friend and personal adviser to Power�s owner,
Paul Desmarais Sr.�a U.S. congressional investigation into the UN scandal
discovered that Power Corp. had extensive connections to BNP Paribas, a French
bank that had been handpicked by the UN in 1996 to broker the Oil-for-Food
program. In fact, Power actually once owned a stake in Paribas through its
subsidiary, Pargesa Holding SA. The bank also purchased a stake in Power Corp.
in the mid-seventies and, as recently as 2003, BNP Paribas had a 14.7 per cent
equity and 21.3 per cent voting stake in Pargesa, company records show. John
Rae, a director and former executive at Power (brother of former Ontario
premier Bob Rae), was president and a director of the Paribas Bank of Canada
until 2000. And Power Corp. director Michel Fran�ois-Poncet, who was, in
2001, the vice-chairman of Pargesa, also sat on Paribas�s board, though he
died Feb. 10, at the age of 70. A former chair of Paribas�s management
board, Andr� Levy-Lang, is currently a member of Power�s international
advisory council. And Amaury-Daniel de Seze, a member of BNP Paribas�s
executive council, also sat on Pargesa�s administrative council in 2002. -- Canada
Free Press

A UN official said Mr Strong was in the Dominican Republic recuperating
from pneumonia and would be making no public comments. Mr Annan, asked if he
had known of the relationship between Mr Strong and Park, said he was not
aware of it. Mr Strong was also a member of the board of Air Harbour
Technologies, along with Mr Annan's son, Kojo Annan, whom the UN is also
investigating for possible conflicts of interest in the award of an
oil-for-food contract to Cotecna, a Swiss company that employed him. -- Sydney
Morning Herald

Maurice Strong 68, and his wife, Hanne, fancy themselves quite the
environmental couple. He was chairman of the far-out Earth Council, earning
the nickname Father Earth. In 1992 he orchestrated the United Nations Earth
Sumniit, which called on the developed world to fork over, for its
environmental sins, $600 billion to the Third World. Together the Strongs run
the private Manitou Foundation. A gathering place for religious sects (Hanne
is into "spiritual interests"), it backs, among other things,
research into ethnobotany-the interactions between humans and plants. ... Nevertheless, Strong's a chap to be reckoned with. Congress says that without belt-tightening the U.N. can kiss good-bye $I.'3 billion in back U.S. dues. He is the driving force behind a U.N. reorganization plan aimed at dealing with Congress' objections.
... Strong is up to his eyeballs in Molten Metal Technology, a busted handler
of hazardous waste notorious for its flaky technology and ties to presidential
hopeful Al Gore (FORBES, Jan. 22, 1996 and Apr. 21, 1997). A big contributor
to Gore's campaigns, Molten Metals has surfaced in the Senate hearings on
corrupt campaign financing.  ... So how did Strong come to be picked to
reengineer the U.N.? The way we hear it, former secretary general Boutros
Boutros-Ghali wanted to recruit someone close to the current Administration.
Strong, Al Gore's pal, fit the bill. Boutros-Ghali was tossed out last year,
but his successor, Kofi Annan, allowed Strong to stay on. Strong says he
doesn't want the U.N.'s head honcho's job. His mission, he says, is to save
the the planet from industry's depredations. Will the real Maurice Strong
please stand up? Global
Policy Org, 1998

Spy Vs. Spy

Linda Robinson's compelling opening paragraph in US
News and World Report is at once suggestive and accusatory. It is suggestive
of what human intelligence gathering and analysis can achieve while subtly
asking why it was not done before. 

In the second week of December 2003, U.S. Special Forces captured an Iraqi
man named Fawzi Rashid, a top insurgent leader in Baghdad. Rashid was carrying
a letter from Saddam Hussein, U.S. News has learned, that was less than a week
old. It would prove to be the key break in the 10-month manhunt for the Iraqi
dictator. Military intelligence specialists, working with the Green Berets,
persuaded Rashid to identify the courier who had delivered the letter. Two
days later, the courier led U.S. forces to Saddam's grim spider hole. The
lightning-fast sequence of events was the result of a decision to have
intelligence analysts work side by side with soldiers, known in Pentagon-speak
as "collectors." "Analysts were telling the collectors what
they needed, and collectors were giving their collections right back to the
analysts," says a senior Pentagon official, describing Saddam's capture.
"What's new . . . is that you had analysts and collectors all under the
same chain of command."

If the target in the story was Saddam Hussein, the target of the story was
the Central Intelligence Agency. But the Washington
Post describes the US military efforts to create a human intelligence
gathering infrastructure in less glowing terms, depicting it as a Rumsfeldian
dodge to conduct operations without Congressional oversight.

The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a
new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad,
according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The
Washington Post.

The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support
Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total
dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to
operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control,
the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists,
interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special
operations forces. ... Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain
accountable to Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence
missions are subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors
believed. ... Under Title 10, for example, the Defense Department must report
to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the
Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines
issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state
that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations
. . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification
unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as
ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards
the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of
imminent combat.

At a Department
of Defense briefing, an unnamed senior Defense official flatly denied these
charges, emphasizing that these Strategic Support Teams were in fact lineal
descendants of earlier units called "Human Augmentation Teams"; that
they would operate directly under senior commanders -- but not the Secretary of
Defense -- and that the tasks of the teams were coordinated with the Director of
Central Intelligence. That hardly mollified some critics. AP
writer Robert Burns reports "Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and other
Democrats called for hearings, but Republicans balked. According to The
Washington Post, the Department of Defense is changing the guidelines with
respect to oversight and notification of Congress by military intelligence. Is
this true or false?" Feinstein wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld." One key difference, according to the IHT
was that ""DOD is not looking to go develop strategic
intelligence," said one senior adviser to Rumsfeld who has an intelligence
background. "They're looking for information like, where's a good landing
strip?"

It appears that they are looking for slightly more than that. Global
Security reports that the Pentagon is building up a constellation of human
intelligence support systems including:

• J2X CONOPS -- a system for providing analytic support to HUMINT operations
  at the strategic, theater, and tactical echelons;


• ROVER -- a geospatial Information System-Palmtop- Digital camera system;


• FALCON, FORUM and SMINDS -- which are automatic translation systems
  enabling people of different languages to speak to each other simultaneously
  or interpet documents in foreign languages while in the field.


• WMD1st and Digital RSTA -- WMD analysis and a targeting tool; and


• a HUMINT laptop system to house all the relevant tools.

This looks very much like a closed-loop system in which intelligence leads
can be prosecuted iteratively until they lead to action, with no discernible
boundary in between. But it is not the philosophical abolition of the barrier
between thought and deed that really rankles. It is also about turf. Linda
Robinson asserts that the scale of the Pentagon effort effectively threatens
the CIA monopoly on spying, whatever the Department of Defense says.

A key flashpoint has been the recruitment and handling of sources. For many
years, all intelligence sources recruited by U.S. agencies, including the
Pentagon, were registered and maintained through the CIA's InterSource
Registry. Now the Pentagon has begun registering the human sources it uses for
military purposes under a separate registry, called J2X.

Whether or not the Pentagon succeeds in its endeavors remains to be seen.
What is less debatable is the need to improve human intelligence operations.
Marc Ruel Gercht in a Weekly
Standard article described the CIA's currently human intelligence system as
seriously broken. He believed that as presently constituted the Agency had no
chance of significantly penetrating the ranks of the terrorist enemy.

One can, however, grade intelligence services on whether they have
established operational methods that would maximize the chances of success
against less demanding targets--for example, against Osama bin Laden's al
Qaeda, which is by definition an ecumenical organization constantly searching
for holy-warrior recruits. It is by this standard that ... the CIA will
continue to fail, assuming it maintains its current practices. ... It was in
great part structurally foreordained: Not only the promotion system but also
the decision to deploy the vast majority of case officers overseas under
official cover--posing as U.S. diplomats, military officers, and so on--set in
motion a counterproductive psychology and methods of operation that still
dominate the CIA today. ... And there is simply no way that case officers--who
still today are overwhelmingly deployed overseas under official cover or,
worse, at home in ever-larger task forces--can possibly meet, recruit, or
neutralize the most dangerous targets in a sensible, sustainable way.

It is into that gaping breach that the CIA's rivals will sail.

Pope Benedict XVI

The Times
Online reports on the election of a new Pope:

At comparative speed and with moving ceremony, the 115 cardinals gathered
in the Sistine Chapel have elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new
spiritual leader of the world�s Roman Catholics. The selection of this
scholarly and forceful figure will be portrayed as the �conservative�
choice and one that favours continuity over change.

One indicator of Cardinal Ratziner's own self-image is his choice of title.
Pope Benedict XV, his predecessor in name, came to the Petrine See at the
outbreak of the First World War. The New
Catholic Encyclopedia has this to say about him.

(Giacomo della Chiesa) (1914-1922) Born Pegli, Italy, 1854; died Rome,
Italy. Nuncio to Spain, privy chamberlain, Archbishop of Bologna, and
cardinal, he was elected directly after the outbreak of the World War, and
maintained a position of neutrality throughout. He sent a representative to
each country to work for peace, and in 1917 delivered the Plea for Peace,
which demanded a cessation of hostilities, a reduction of armaments, a
guaranteed freedom of the seas, and international arbitration. President
Wilson was the only ruler who answered him, declaring peace impossible, though
he afterwards adopted most of Benedict's proposals for establishing peace. At
the close of the war France and Spain resumed diplomatic relations with the
Vatican, and Great Britain retained permanently the embassy she had
established during the war. Benedict promulgated the new Code of Canon Law,
established the Coptic College at Rome, enlarged the foreign mission field,
and in his first Encyclical condemned errors in modern philosophical
systems. He denounced the violation of Belgium and gave freely to the
victims of the war, widows, orphans, and wounded, and established a bureau of
communication for prisoners of war with their relatives.

Like Pope John Paul, Ratzinger lived through the Second World War and served
for a time in the German Army. Wikipedia
notes that he joined the Hitler Youth at 14, where his biographer maintains he
avoided attending meetings, was drafted at 16 and deployed as a raw recruit to
Hungary at 18 where he deserted at the end of the war. In the seminary, which he
entered after being processed out of POW camp, Ratzinger became interested in
two great historical intellectuals of the Church, Augustine
and Bonaventure.
He then went on to a theological career within the Church -- he was colleague to
Hans Kung at Tubingen -- then later went on to found a theological journal,
before he became
"prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known
as the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which was renamed in 1908 by Pope Pius
X." Ratzinger was an opponent of liberal trends within the Church from the
1960s, at a time when he would have been in his 30s and early 40s, making him a
conservative "culture warrior" in the heyday of the counterculture.

Ratzinger comes at a time when his own native Western Europe is gripped with
a crisis similar in some respects to that which divided Eastern Europe in John
Paul's day. Like John Paul, he arrives at the Papacy in the midst of a global
war: what the Cold War was to John Paul the War on Terror must be to Benedict
XVI. He is an unknown quantity, without extensive pastoral experience; a
philosopher Pope: the Pope of the Memes. And it is in this last where Benedict's
historical significance may lie. He is the first Pope of the Internet Age and
stands uncertain, as we all are, on its brink.

Update

The Guardian quotes a Vatican analyst as saying:

Vatican analyst John-Peter Pham said the cardinals clearly agreed with
Ratzinger's assessment that ``John Paul confronted two totalitarianisms -
Nazism and communism - and that what remains is the `dictatorship of
relativism,''' as the new German pope put it.

There was also this addendum about his wartime membership in the Hitler
Youth.

In his memoirs, he wrote of being enrolled in Hitler's Nazi youth movement
against his will when he was 14 in 1941, when membership was compulsory. He
says he was soon let out because of his studies for the priesthood. Two years
later, he was drafted into a Nazi anti-aircraft unit as a helper, a common
fate for teenage boys too young to be soldiers. Enrolled as a soldier at 18,
in the last months of the war, he barely finished basic training. ...

If Ratzinger was paying tribute to the last pontiff named Benedict, it
could be interpreted as a bid to soften his image as a doctrinal hard-liner.
Benedict XV reigned during World War I and was credited with settling
animosity between traditionalists and modernists, and dreamed of reunion with
Orthodox Christians.

 

Marla Ruzicka

Anyone who wants to remember Marla Ruzicka, the Bay Area activist who was
killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, should first all remember how she died. Time
gives this account of her death.

Ruzicka, 28, became a victim of the Iraqi conflict on Saturday, when a car
bomb detonated beside her car on the perilous road from central Baghdad to the
city's airport. Her longtime Iraqi aide and driver Faiz Ali Salim, 43, was
also killed.

She didn't die while accompanying a military convoy. She wasn't killed at a
US checkpoint or by American fire. She died on a road frequented by civilians
killed by what was almost certainly a command detonated bomb; which didn't go
off by itself but was set off by someone waiting patiently, at a distance, with
his converted cellphone or garage door opener, until a likely victim came along.
For Time to say that Marla Ruzicka was the 'victim' of an abstract Iraqi
conflict is as misleading as to maintain that Iraqis who may have wrongfully
died in US custody are 'victims' of 'international conflict'. To remember Marla
Ruzicka it is important to remember that first and foremost she was murdered,
murdered by insurgents.

It is also important to remember the invisible man, Mr. Faiz Ali Salim, who
was as innocent as Ruzicka, and who because he lived there had even less choice
in the circumstances of his death. If Ruzicka represents the idealistic
activist Salim should stand for all the thousands of Iraqis who
have been kidnapped, beheaded, car bombed while at mosque, blown up roadside
bombs and thrown into woodchippers, perhaps by the same men who pressed the
detonation button that killed them both. He didn't die from some nebulous Iraqi
conflict, as Time likes to remember, but from the actions of men who had killed
before and, with the help of those who help us to forget that fact, will kill
again.

Les Pied Noirs

While revisiting the history of the French-Algerian war in 1954, I stumbled
on an extensive quote -- at
second hand -- from Paul
Johnson's Modern Times, which though written before 9/11 provided a valuable
key to understanding 'terrorism' as it emerged from the chrysalis of
anti-colonialism. Colonialism died in part, Johnson argued, because it provided
the demographic basis for its own demise. (Hat tip: FreeRepublic)

Algeria was the greatest and in many ways the archetype of all
anti-colonial wars. In the 19th century the Europeans won colonial wars
because the indigenous peoples had lost the will to resist. In the 20th
century the roles were reversed, and it was Europe which lost the will to hang
on to its gains. But behind this relativity of wills there are demographic
facts. A colony is lost once the level of settlement in exceeded by the growth
rate of the indigenous peoples. 19th century colonialism reflected the huge
upsurge in European numbers. 20th century decolonization reflected European
demographic stability and the violent expansion of native populations. 

Algeria was a classic case of this reversal. It was not so much a French
colony as a Mediterranean settlement. In the 1830s there were only 1.5 million
Arabs there, and their numbers were dwindling. The Mediterranean people moved
from the northern shores to the southern ones, into what appeared to be a
vacuum: to them the great inland sea was a unity, and they had as much right
to its shores as anyone provided they justified their existence by wealth
creation. And they did: they expanded 2000 square miles of cultivated land in
1830 to 27000 by 1954. ... But rising prosperity attracted others ... And the
French medical services virtually eliminated malaria, typhus and typhoid and
effected a prodigious change in the non-European infant mortality rates. By
1906 the Muslim population had jumped to 4.5 million; by 1954 to 9 million. By
the mid 1970s it had more than doubled again. If the French population had
risen at the same rate, it would have been over 300 million by 1950. The
French policy of "assimilation", therefore, was nonsense ...

Algeria was lost to France even before the events of 1945, when the first
troubles began. And because there is really no dividing line between colonialism
and the counter-colonization Western Europe is experiencing today, Johnson's
observation applies with at least partial validity to modern South Africa,
Israel, France and the Scandinavian countries. Declining European birthrates and
burgeoning Muslim immigrant fertility are making the policy of
"assimilation" just as problematic in Western Europe as it was 
in Algeria five decades ago. One answer to this problem is to redefine political
entities so that ethnic Europeans are once again the 'majority'. It is probably
accidental that beginnings
of the EU in 1957 coincided with the final withdrawal of the shattered
colonial empires to the European shore. But it is not improbable to suggest that
it represented an attempt to stem the decline in the core sources of European
power. The rise of United States and Japan and the meant the Old Continent was
no longer the sole technological powerhouse. And after a brief postwar boom,
European population was once again trending flat. Consolidating markets was an
obvious counter to the advantages of the United States. Yet the European
enlargement project had a secondary effect. It was the most audacious act of
Gerrymanderying in history. It provided the opportunity to sidestep the changing
demographics in Western Europe by redefinition. Long after Frenchmen were a
minority in France they could still belong to an ethnic European majority,
providing Europe extended to the Dnieper. Instead of mending the hole in the
hull, the problem could be ameloriated by making the ship bigger so that it
would take longer to sink.

Although the economic aspects of the European constitution that will be
presented to the French on May 29 have been the focus of debate, its demographic
dimension is as important and more viscerally understood. Jean Marie-Le Pen's humorless
parable about EU enlargement nevertheless has a certain truth to it.

The government will use every means possible and imaginable [for a
"yes" win]. Now, in confidence, the prime minister tells us that �
it�s a French Europe that we�re trying to build�a sort of French colony.
It's like an old joke during the war: �Come quick! Come quick! I took 50
prisoners, but they won�t let me go!� [Laughs.] Well it�s exactly that,
isn�t it? France took 24 prisoners, but they won�t let it go!

But if the EU is a really an attempt to turn the continent into a French
colony it has once again run into Paul Johnson's observation that a "colony
is lost once the level of settlement in exceeded by the growth rate of the
indigenous peoples" except now it is in the context of Eastern European
entrants. At the heart of French electoral resistance to the EU Constitution is
an unwillingness to accept the free-market policies that non-French members
want. Sylvain Charat
at Tech Central Station writes:

 The 1957 Treaty of Rome proclaimed four fundamental freedoms: the
free movement of persons, capital, goods and services. This has been strongly
restated in the Lisbon Agenda, which aims to make Europe the most competitive
economic zone in the world by 2010. Convinced that liberalization of services
would be an important source of wealth and jobs, the European Commission was
asked by EU leaders to draft a directive ensuring it. This was done on January
13th, 2004 ... the two French commissioners at that time, Michel Barnier, now
foreign minister, and Pascal Lamy, hoping to run the WTO, signed onto it.
Additionally, the French government did not protest.

Those free market aspirations have come into shuddering collision with the
French 'social model' where
25 percent of the workforce is employed by the government, 10 percent of the
population is on welfare and French law calls for a 35-hour week. While European
enlargement ordered British shopkeepers to sell wares in grams and kilos instead
of pounds and ounces it was fine, but now that it lets "hairdressers,
plumbers and accountants to work freely across Europe" as the Scotsman
reports, it is no longer so fine -- and a French 'Non' is more than likely. This
is bound to be met by the rueful echo of what one Muslim moderate, who was
originally in favor of Algerian integration into Metropolitan France said
five decades ago: "the French Republic has cheated. She has made fools of
us ... why should we feel ourselves bound by the principles of French moral values... when France herself refuses to be subject to them?",
except that it will be uttered in Polish, or worse, English.

Europe if not now then soon must accept that enlargement by itself can never
fully compensate for the fundamental weakness of its demographics and economy.
Even a ship as large as the Titanic eventually fills with water. French
EU Foreign Minister Michel Barnier could not have spoken
more eloquently of the dead-end French policy had become when he said the EU had
no contingency plan in the event of a rejection. "We have no plan B. You
cannot have a plan B. It is 'Yes' and that's the only way to discuss this item,
so we go 100 percent for that outcome". If wishes were horses then beggars
would ride.

Will Hutton in the Observer
understands the real need to address Europe's weaknesses -- to avoid the belated
repetition of Algeria on its soil -- by a means better than bankrupt French
strategy, though he can't state it clearly.

Fifteen consecutive opinion polls during April have confirmed that the 'no'
vote in the French referendum on the Constitutional Treaty stands at some 53
per cent .... An improbable alliance of right and left is tapping the mood
that French travails in general, and unemployment in particular, are because
France cannot be true to an idea of France. France has been locked in quasi
economic stagnation for more than a decade; unemployment is 10 per cent and
youth unemployment even higher.

The original Common Market was a French creation, in effect, an extension
of the French state and the accompanying subordinate relationship of
capitalism. Now that the EU is being transmuted into a network of European
states, of which France is but one and in which the market has a much more
central role, France is losing control of both the EU and an idea of France.
And what's worse, it isn't delivering results. Vote 'no'.

There is a realistic chance that there could be a 'no' vote in both
countries, in which case the treaty is stone dead. What to do? One option will
be to muddle through, adapting the current European treaties where possible,
but that ... Even if it doesn't happen ... the dark forces in both countries
have got to be addressed, and that means rekindling growth and answering the
question of how the European project is to be squared with an idea of Holland
and France. It's a political quagmire, demanding high skills from Europe's
wooden and unimaginative leadership.

After sixty years of retreat from its colonial heyday, Europe is an idea
whose back is to the wall. What it needs now is a new vision and leadership,
which with some American help, may address the core of its weakness: suicidal
demographics; cultural self-loathing; its oppressive socialist economies. The
hour is late and the ship captained by fools but hope still remains.

The Berlin Wall Has Fallen On Us

As former chief of staff of the the Australian Labor Party's leader, Kim
Beazley, Michael Costello could be expected to be less
than sympathetic toward George Bush (hat tip: Glenn
Reynolds).

It is entirely understandable that the Left is viscerally anti-Bush. His
political strategy is not based on the democratic approach of seeking the
middle ground, but on sharpening differences and divisions, of defaming and
intimidating those who do not support him as appeasers, immoral and weak. His
and his cabinet officers' contemptuous treatment of allies and the
international institutional framework could not be better demonstrated than by
his nomination of John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN. I have had direct
experience of how Bolton works. He believes that when the US says
"jump", others should ask "how high?" He tolerates nothing
else.

But Costello goes on to note that Bush is nevertheless right in pushing for
democracy around the globe. He ruefully says that his ex-chief has been wrong
about the Iraqi elections and much else in the unfolding drama in the Middle
East.

Some say, as did Kim Beazley, that the elections in Iraq have not had any
influence on promoting democracy elsewhere in the region -- for example, in
Lebanon. This is incorrect. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt said recently of
developments in Lebanon that "this process of change has started because
of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the
Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start
of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that
something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it." 

For some reason, George Bush and his chimpoids have been unaccountably lucky.
"Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Bolton - they too will pass." What is
important, Costello argues, is for the Left to reclaim its rightful place in the
vanguard of history, so accidentally usurped by the Neanderthals in Washington.
"What will go on is the great human desire to be free, which should be at
the core of our foreign policy." It would be interesting to see which
personalities in the Left Costello can convert to his view. Christopher
Caldwell wrote a retrospective of the great French political writer Raymond
Aron. (Hat tip: MIG) He particularly understood the problem with the Left's
ideal of "freedom".

A key theme in much of his work ... is that until very late in the 20th century, people were judging events according to 19th-century conceptions. Particularly intellectuals, who had an understanding of socialism that time had already shown to be largely mythological. "In theory," Aron wrote, "a revolution is defined as a liberation. Yet the revolutions of the 20th century seem, if not revolutions of enslavement, at the very least revolutions of authority."
...

Costello's notion of "freedom" is curiously identified with "the
democratic approach of seeking the middle ground" as if the essence of
freedom was the willingness to compromise. Raymond Aron understood the fallacy.
As the Nazi menace began to rise in Europe, Argon argued that the Left made the
fatal mistake of believing that the exercise of freedom lay in compromising with
the aggressor. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Caldwell wrote:

In March 1936, Blum's government opposed Germany's re-occupation of the
Rhine by calling it "unacceptable." This is a word that Aron held in
particular contempt. As he put it, "To say that something is unacceptable
was to say that one accepted it." Again, Aron deeply admired Blum. But he
noted with dismay that he seemed proud of putting up no resistance.
After the German re-occupation, Blum said, "No one suggested using
military force. That is a sign of humanity's moral progress, and the socialist
party is proud to have contributed to progress." Aron added: "This
moral progress meant the end of the French system of alliances, and almost
certain war."

We hear an echo of Blum's words in the self-congratulatory speech that
Spanish prime minister Jos� Luis Rodr�guez Zapatero gave on the first
anniversary of the March 11 Madrid bombings, which brought his Socialist
government to power and caused the pullout of Spanish troops from the Iraq
coalition. In the course of a speech in which he praised his government's
"inimitable integrity," Zapatero condemned those who questioned his
decision, warning that they would be forgotten. "We reserve our memory
for those noble and beautiful things that unite us, that make us rise up and
advance in the worst moments, and that earn the admiration of other peoples.
Because anyone who looks at us with just and objective eyes cannot fail to
recognize the merit of Spain's actions."

And there is a faint re-echo of Zapatero's oblationary speech in Costello's
strange critique. The chimpoid may have lacked the ability to compromise; but
that defect was trivial beside the blindness that has afflicted the Left through
history. Freedom is ultimately inherent in man, as Costello noted. It is
independent of the foreign policy of the Left.

Big Trouble in Little China 2

Once China's real strategic imperative -- securing its energy and trade
routes -- are grasped its activities are more easily interpreted. Increases in
China's amphibious capabilities are usually seen as menacing Taiwan. But here's
what the Navy
League has to say:

The PLAN's evolving strategy has been described in terms of two distinct
phases. The strategy's first phase is for the PLAN to develop a "green
water active defense strategy" capability. This "green water"
generally is described as being encompassed within an arc swung from
Vladivostok to the north, to the Strait of Malacca to the south, and out to
the "first island chain" (Aleutians, Kuriles, Ryukyus, Taiwan,
Philippines, and Greater Sunda islands) to the east. Analysts have assessed
that the PLAN is likely to attain this green water capability early in the
21st century. Open-source writings also suggest that the PLAN intends to
develop a capability to operate in the "second island chain" (Bonins,
Guam, Marianas, and Palau islands) by the mid-21st century. In the future, the
PLAN also may expand its operations to bases in Myanmar, Burma. These bases
will provide the PLAN with direct access to the Strait of Malacca and the Bay
of Bengal.

These are very same island chains which so preoccupied the Imperial Japanese
Navy during the Second World War and for exactly the same reasons. Any attempts
to positively control sealanes leading in and out of northeast Asia will involve
dominating the Malay Barrier and the Bonins, Guam, Marianas, and Palau islands.
As to the amphibious force, the Navy League has this assessment:

The PLAN's 7,000-man Marine ... Force's ... primary mission is to safeguard China's island holdings in the South China Sea during times of peace and to seize and defend islands in the South China Sea during times of war.
(Here's where the Spratleys comes in. It sits across the route from the Malay
barrier to the East China Sea -- Wretchard). The Marine Force also may be
used for amphibious raids or for establishing beachheads in scenarios
entailing a military confrontation with Taiwan.

Taiwan is the secondary mission. Keeping China's access to energy is the
primary mission. The devil in the proposition is that as long as China is seen
as representing a threat to Japan, any attempts to reach out to "the first
island chain" (which includes the Aleutians) and the "second island
chain" (which includes the Bonins, which is Japanese territory) will bring
a reaction from Nippon. Like the Anglo-German Naval Race of the 1900s, any
serious maritime rivalry will be fraught will grave consequences. One
interesting thing about these developments is that for the first time in 500
years Europe is absent from the maritime strategic equation.