A few days ago heavy monsoon rains led to the the breaking of a dam/embankment of the Kosi river in Nepal (google map marks, zoom in on the pin for details). The river left its bed without warning and took a new path. A few miles downstream in India the flooding left 1.2 million people homeless, many without food and scores killed.

The two governments trade barbs about the responsibility for the dam’s maintenance and this horrible catastrophe.

But that drama is worth less than 20 second of ‘western’ news so lets turn to the real one.

Here is Gustav. Lots of wind and rain and maybe some flooding. As the warnings came early, casualties and problems will be small. Unlike in India, the refugees will somewhat be taken care of.

source

Whiskey Bar and MoA commentator Onzaga got hit by Katarina in 2005. The last time we heard  from her is quite a while ago. I wonder where/how s/he is now.

After the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war the ‘west’ moved to implement several new doctrines to justify intervention in foreign countries.

One is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

… populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity is an international commitment by governments to prevent and react to grave crises, wherever they may occur.

Another is the concept of ‘guarantor of regional security’ as used for example by the U.S. State Department:

For the U.S., NATO of course remains the guarantor of security in Europe, and therefore in the Baltic Sea.

Note that most of the Baltic Sea coast is owned by countries which are not even NATO members. With what right should NATO be a ‘guarantor of security’ there?

A third kind of justification are U.N. Security Council resolution for peacekeeping and general ‘security’ issues. The U.S. falsely claimed that some of these legalized the attack on Iraq.

But now Russia has used more or less all three of the above justifications in response to the Georgian attack on South Ossetia.

Gareth Evans of the International Crisis Group and one of the initiators of the international R2P is miffed:

[The R2P] is the approach to dealing with mass-atrocity crimes that was embraced by 150 member states at the 2005 U.N. World Summit.
…
We are conscious of the fragility of that consensus should the impression gain hold that R2P is just another excuse for the major powers to throw their weight around. It needs to be made clear beyond a doubt that whatever other explanation Russia had for its military action in Georgia, the R2P principle was not among the valid ones.

Evans then goes on to give five arguments that the Russian Federation had no international R2P right to intervene in Georgia. I find his arguments very weak and believe Russia clearly had such a right. But Evans’ discussion is not to the point anyway because the Russian federation did not even claim that it acted on behalf of R2P in international law. As foreign minister Lavrov declared:

[T]he Constitution of the Russian Federation, the laws of the Russian Federation make it absolutely unavoidable to us to exercise responsibility to protect.

But back to those new intervention doctrines. The point is that the R2P, the ‘guarantor of regional security’ concept and the UN Security Council resolution process all have huge flaws that allow anyone to claim a right to intervene about everywhere.

The ‘west’, i.e. the U.S., could live with this very well when it was the only entity capable of serious intervention. Now that someone else uses the same reasoning, the danger of these concepts will be discussed differently.

Nikolas Gvosdev, outgoing editor of The National Interest, concludes:

I assume that in the next several years we may see a return to enhancing the position that the international system should be defined by sovereignty and territorial integrity of states and the importance of the imprimatur of the Security Council for any military action other than self-defense, ..

Let’s hope so. R2P, ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the other concepts are mostly pretense for neo-colonial intervention. They always can and will get abused.

The world needs to go back to the concepts of the Westphalian sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention.

There will still be cases where some will argue that they act in an international form of defense of others, i.e. breach of law to help a third person in an emergency.

That concept is well developed in national law. But that is only possible because we have national processes to judge the rightness of such a claim after the fact. We also have national authorities that penalizes cases of wrong applications of the concept.

But we do not have those institutions in the international realm. As long as we do not have an universally accepted international system of judgment and an international capability to penalize all offender nations, an international ‘defense of others’ is an invitation for misapplication.

Westphalian sovereignty is difficult. One has to stand by when some internal conflict in a foreign state turns nasty. But its alternative are lousy concepts like R2P and anarchy and the sole ‘right of the mighty’.

One of the women in these pictures was pregnant when they were taken.

(bigger)
Published on March 9, 2008 by the Anchorage Daily News

Cont. reading: Palin Rumor

McCain’s choice for co-runner does know little about foreign policy. But there will soon be events in which she will have to debate Joe Biden, a foreign policy old timer who met more international folks than Palin met moose. That will not be a beauty pageant as she will be asked about her position on several hot issues.

Jim Lobe checked her public record:

John McCain has repeatedly defined “the battle and struggle against radical Islamic extremism” as “the transcendent issue of our time.”
[…]
I just did a Nexis search for anything Sarah Palin may have said or written about that issue — I searched her name with “Muslim” and “Islam” or any variant of those words — and didn’t find a single citation. Of course, there probably aren’t many Muslims in Alaska and she doesn’t profess any foreign policy expertise. But if this is indeed “the transcendent issue of our time” on which just about every national political figure has said something in the last couple of years, …well, I leave you to reach a conclusion. (She hasn’t said anything noted by Nexis about Israel in the last two years either.)

Someone will have to teach Palin the right codewords, train her to recognize the various complicate names of various countries and foreign leaders and indoctrinate her with the Bush / Cheney / McCain / AIPAC War of Terror believes. That will be an intensive and intimate endeavor.

There are several folks who left the Bush administration and would love a job in a McCain one. The Palin trainer job would open that perspective. Perle, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Libby, Feith, Ledeen are all available. Who else?

While Palin is now an empty vessel foreign policy wise, within a few days she will have to say something about Israel, Russia, the nuclear deal with India, Pakistan border fights and other issues. So who will bring her up to speed?

And yes, she is red meat for the fringe and may try to turn any discussion into ‘value voter’ and ‘culture war’ stuff. But real politics do not stop there.

Bush is now trying to make sure that his War of Terror legacy survives his presidency and will be a theme of the election contest:

Tucked deep into a recent proposal from the Bush administration [..]: an affirmation that the United States is still at war with Al Qaeda.

[…]
The language [..] goes beyond political symbolism. Echoing a measure that Congress passed just days after the Sept. 11 attacks, it carries significant legal and public policy implications for Mr. Bush, and potentially his successor, to claim the imprimatur of Congress to use the tools of war, including detention, interrogation and surveillance, against the enemy, legal and political analysts say.

Some lawmakers are concerned that the administration’s effort to declare anew a war footing is an 11th-hour maneuver to re-establish its broad interpretation of the president’s wartime powers, even in the face of challenges from the Supreme Court and Congress.

Usually the Democrats would predictably fold over Bush’s request. But to do so now would be deadly for their candidates. They can not avoid a discussion about this by passing it silently through congress. Therefore discussions over renewed war powers for the War of Terror will be a big part of the showdown over next 60+ days.

Palin will have to talk about this and its foreign policy implications. With Biden on the other side that will not be an easy task. Who will tell her what to say?

Whether and when and how the Obama campaign decides to "go at" Palin
will be an interesting test of their political instincts and their
skill with the propaganda knife. Can they define and demolish her
without turning into the bullies, picking on a delicate flower of
Caucasian Christian womanhood? Or will they just let Sarah be Sarah,
and see what falls out of the Alaskan corruption and craziness tree?
Stay tuned.

But, the politics of it aside, by picking a woman as his running
mate McCain has performed at least one service: He’s made it possible
to precisely calibrate just how far behind the curve of history the
Republicans really are — and it’s 24 years, the exact length of time
since the Democrats put the first woman on a presidential ticket.

Billmon: Gettin’ some of that "RE-form"

?

The Guardian editors falsely remark:

Something shattered when the Georgian artillery opened up with a massive barrage on Tskhinvali on August 7 (Colonel Arsen Tsukhishvili, chief of staff of the Artillery Brigade said with pride that 300 of his gun barrels fired at the enemy simultaneously). What broke was not only the columns of Russian tanks the Georgian artillery was aiming at.

As Joshua Foust notes, these are ex-post-facto justifications:

Saakashvili continues to use gullible journalists to push the lie
that he advanced in South Ossetia to head off a column of Russian tanks
bearing down on Tskhinvali. The complaint about the tanks did not show
up in any interviews with Saakashvili or any of his officials until,
near as I can tell, Mr. Worms told Mr. Totten about it—now that meme is cropping up in many interviews with Georgian officials.

I would guess, if Russia actually was moving tanks through the Roki
tunnel into South Ossetia, Georgia would have been complaining about it
in the hour before they launched their cease-fire offensive into the
breakaway region. Or they would have raised it at the emergency UNSC
meeting on August 7th/8th. Or it would have been mentioned at all
before August 25—perhaps in one of Saakashvili’s many op-eds in Western papers.

It is really funny how this works in the ‘western’ media.

Meanwhile some circles are building up an alternative to Saakashvili. Nino Burjanadze was a member of the Georgian parliament since 1995 with then president Eduard Shevardnadze’s party. She later joined Saakashvili in the U.S. managed rose revolution. In April she split with Saakashvili and last month she left the parliament and opened her own think-tank, the ‘Foundation for Democracy and Development‘ in Tbilisi. The U.S. and the Russian ambassadors took part in the inauguration.

When the British foreign minister went to Tbilisi on August 21, he had an hour long meeting with her. Yesterday she met with Joe Biden in Denver.

It is not that she is much different from a policy standpoint than Saakashvili. Her father’s business money brought her into politics and it is alleged that he was a big beneficent of corruption under Shevardnadze. But Burjanadze can be expected to run a ‘western’ course without rocking the boat too much and without unnecessarily angering the bear.

A few month from now the Guardian editors will damn Saakashvili and laud Burjanadze into the Georgian presidency.

Right before the convention started, some dickhead on the McCain campaign dangled
a memo in front of the Terry Schiavo wannabes in the press, predicting
a 15-point post-convention bounce for Obama when all is said and done.
At the time, it looked like a moronically obvious attempt to spin the
expectations game (so of course, the  media zombies gobbled it right
up).

But at this point, I’m thinking it may end up looking like wizardry.

Billmon: Great Big Bounce

When the Russian Federation (RF) officially recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia I was quite surprised:

I had expected that Medvedev would wait, but the ‘western’ response to Saakashvili’s splendid little war was probably too much to take.

When I wrote that I had the ‘western’ ‘information operation’, i.e. propaganda campaign, in mind as the reason for the Russian reaction.

I was wrong. The move to recognize those areas, and other Russian Federation since then, were motivated by something that is much more serious and dangerous.

The Russian Federation feels weak and is afraid that the ‘west’ might make another attempt to archive control over those factual independent areas.

To recognize those areas was a move to make sure that the ‘west’, i.e. the U.S., understands the consequences of challenging them.

Pat Lang, who sees a chance that this conflict might go nuclear, argues differently. He thinks, if I understand him correctly, that the Russians felt strong and believed the U.S. is weak. Therefore, he argues, they took those two areas because, simply, they could do so. He warns that the Russian underestimate the neocon’s and that such ‘miscalculation’ could escalate.

I believe that the Russian Federation has a very different read of the situation.

It is NOT that the Russian Federation thinks the U.S. is weak, it fears that the U.S. is strong.

Cont. reading: Russia Fears an Imminent U.S. Attack

Maybe the old lie that anyone can grow up to be president is still just that — an old lie. But now we know that any child (man child at least) can grow up and become the presidential candidate of one of the country’s two main political parties — because the Democrats just proved it. (And eight years from now, I hope the party extends that same promise to every child, not just to those of us who are gender-challenged.) 

But, one giant step at a time. Some months back Michelle Obama reportedly said that for the first time in her life, she was really proud of her country. I don’t know if she actually said that, or if she did what she meant by it — personally, I think anyone who is really proud of a country (any country) should be in a psych ward, not the White House.

I guess I can understand the emotion, though. Because for the first time I can remember — or at least since the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Richard Nixon — I’m really, really proud to be a Democrat.       
Billmon: Really Proud

—
Note to new readers at Moon of Alabama. You may wonder why we have threads on Billmon posts here. The MoA About page explains the relation.

A study on how the Soviets lost the road war in Afghanistan can help us to assess the chances of the ‘western’ occupation in Afghanistan.

30 is still a magic number around the Hindu Kush: This just in from Reuters:

International troops called in the air strike in which 30 Taliban fighters were killed after the militants attacked a convoy of foreign troops and Afghan forces in the Sarobi district of Paktika province near the border with Pakistan on Tuesday, the deputy provincial governor said.

If this did not happen directly within a village the bombing may have indeed, for a change, killed some combatants. But I can guarantee that the number 30 was picked from hot air.

It is interesting that the attack aimed a convoy. It was thereby part of the earlier discussed  road war that will eventually suffocate the occupation.

The foreign troops in Afghanistan live off fuel that has to be brought into the country. The fuel transports increasingly need more protection and escorts. More escorts will require more fuel. Which requires more fuel convoys …
Guess how that spiral will end.

Here is an interesting U.S. military report written in 1995 about Convoy Escort in Guerrilla Country: The Soviet Experience:

Cont. reading: Soviet ‘Lessons Learned’ on Road War in Afghanistan

Updated below
—

A U.S. Army sergeant outed as a murderer in today’s NYT seems to be the same one that led the unit involved in last years New Republic / Beauchamp controversy. Then he denied atrocities Beauchamp reported on.

In July 2007 a U.S. soldier under the pseudonym Scott Thomas wrote about the war in Iraq at the The New Republic’s Shock Troops blog. Scott Thomas described some disgusting behavior by his fellow soldiers. Such included running over dogs with Bradley fighting vehicles and playing with a child’s scull found in a mass grave.

The rightwing media, the Weekly Standard, the National Review and many others, went nuts over these reports. The blogger’s name was disclosed as Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a member of Alpha Company, 1-18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division, and after some heavy push and pull and an army investigation, The New Republic said it "cannot stand by these stories."

At the time of that controversy, a mil-blogger in the U.S. wrote to Beauchamp’s company senior non-commissioned officer, identified as First Sgt. John E. Hatley, and got this response:

My soldiers conduct is consistently honorable. […] Again, this young man has a vivid imagination and I promise you that this by no means reflects the truth of what is happening here. I’m currently serving with the best America has to offer. […]

Sincerely,

1SG Hatley

Today the NYT reports about willful killing of Iraqis who were taken prisoners by the U.S. troops.

In March or April 2007, three noncommissioned United States Army officers, including a first sergeant, a platoon sergeant and a senior medic, killed four Iraqi prisoners with pistol shots to the head as the men stood handcuffed and blindfolded beside a Baghdad canal, two of the soldiers said in sworn statements.
…

Cont. reading: First Sgt. Hatley and the Beauchamp TNR Affair

Yesterday the Russian parliament voted on non-binding resolutions calling on President Dmitry Medvedev to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.

Bush called on Medvedev not to endorse these:

He said Georgia’s borders merit the same respect as other countries’, including Russia’s.

One wonders why Bush didn’t mentioned Serbia in that little hidden threat.

Today the Russian Federation officially recognized the independence of both regions:

"I have signed decrees on the recognition by the Russian Federation of the independence of South Ossetia and the independence of Abkhazia," Medvedev said in a televised statement.

I had expected that Medvedev would wait, but the ‘western’ response to Saakashvili’s splendid little war was probably too much to take.

In the official ‘western’ media version Russia is the problem and overreached in response to the Georgian attack. But in reality the Russians refrained from conscious bombing of Georgian civil infrastructure and pulled their troops back as soon as possible. When was the last time U.S. forces attack in such a sensible way?

Meanwhile Sarkosy, with Rice’s prodding, issued a letter to Saakashvili that essentially lied about the ceasefire conditions Russia agreed to. The ‘western’ media do not mention that at all. Sending U.S. military ships and Saak’s continuous bellicose speeches did not help either. NATO introduced some punishing measures even while it depends on Russia for its logistics in Afghanistan.

Medvedev explicitly warned about that yesterday. NATO’s other logistic line through Pakistan is in serious danger. Yesterday two NATO vehicles were burned in Karachi.

Now it seems that Russia had enough. Both former Georgian areas are now independent and in a next step will likely ask to join the Russian Federation. It should be obvious by now that one can not bully Russia anymore. But the ‘west’ still tries. This is dangerous.

There are now nine NATO warships in the Black Sea with nine more said to be coming. In response, the Russians send their Black Sea flagship, a missile cruiser, back to sea. The NATO ships have over 100 tomahawk (land attack) and harpoon (sea attack) missiles on board. Such concentration of forces can lead to misunderstandings and escalation. They should be avoided.

Russia has air cover over the Black Sea and owns a lot of the
coast. In a conflict, the NATO fleet would likely get a serious beating.

But a conflict in the Black Sea would virtually guarantee a McCain victory in the upcoming U.S. election. U.S. foreign policy is always determined by domestic politics. That is what makes me really nervous about these escalations.

This is a bold step by the Iraqi prime minister Maliki:

"There can be no treaty or agreement except on the basis of Iraq’s full sovereignty," al-Maliki told a gathering of Shiite tribal sheiks. He said an accord must be based on the principle that "no foreign soldier remains in Iraq after a specific deadline, not an open time frame."

Al-Maliki said the U.S. and Iraq had already agreed on a full withdrawal of all foreign troops by the end of 2011 — an interpretation that the White House challenged.

Juan Cole suspects Iranian pressure behind Maliki’s stand. That may well be the case.

But the real fight behind this could also be about federalization or partitioning of Iraq and growing U.S. pressure into that direction.

There is some ominous movement behind the scenes. Via Roads to Iraq:

Cont. reading: Behind Maliki’s Stand – Biden’s ‘Partition Iraq’?

For two generations after the Civil War, the Republican Party routinely won elections by running against the Confederacy and Jeff Davis (with a healthy dose of anti-Catholicism thrown in for good measure). One particularly inventive GOP candidate even took to carrying the alleged shirt of one of his martyred comrades around to his stump speeches. At the emotional climax of his rant against the treasonous Democrats and their papish ways, he would thrust the soiled, ragged garment over his head for the audience to see — thus the phrase "waiving the bloody shirt."

It was a powerful bit of theatre. But as the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic aged and died and the wounds left by the war either healed or scarred over, the message gradually lost its kick — even among the GOP faithful.

…
[I]f we’re lucky, very lucky, what happened then may happen again, making this election the last (and hopefully futile) wave for the Vietnam War’s version of the bloody flag.
The Bloody Shirt

While the press repeated Saakashvili laments about 100,000 internal refugees in Georgia, most of which were from Gori and are now back to their homes, a bigger crisis got little notice in the ‘western’ media:

Authorities in northwest Pakistan are urgently seeking millions of dollars to help up to 300,000 people who have fled from fighting between government forces and militants.

…
Pakistani troops launched an offensive against militants in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border early this month. The region is a haven for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) umbrella group involved in the fighting has offered a ceasefire but it is unclear if the government or the army will talk with them at all. After the suicide attack on an ammunition factory on Friday, the government, with applause from the U.S., banned the TTP as a ‘terrorist organization’.

Sice today it is even unclear if there is a government in Pakistan at all. Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N party just left the governing coalition with Asif Zardari’s PPP. The main issue between them is still the restoration of the judges kicked out by former military dictator and president Musharraf. Zardari fears that those judges would again pursue corruption charges against him.

It is yet unknown how any vote for a new President, which should take place within the next four weeks, could happen or how the usual government business can proceed. The best for now to to overcome the blocked situation would be new elections in Pakistan. But as Sharif’s PML-N would likely win those in a landslide, Zardari will do everything possible to prevent a new round of voting.

Meanwhile the killing goes on and, unlike in Georgia, the U.S. planes that might come to the Bajaur region will not carry help for the refugees.

According to the Economist, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will have to refinance $223 billion of debt before the end of September.

But there seems to be only few who currently could lend such amounts of money and most of these are not interested. Medium players like the China Construction Bank cut their holdings of Freddie and Fannie. And while the headline of a recent Reuters news piece claimed Russia says keeps buying Fannie, Freddie debt, the text revealed something different:

Cont. reading: Credit Crunch – Round Two

This morning RBN received an early copy of Senator McCain’s speech for the announcement of his Vice President candidate. We decided to publish the first page immediately and without further comment.
—

Remarks of Senator McCain—as prepared for delivery

Dear friends,

for months, I’ve searched for a leader to finish this journey alongside me, and to join me in making Washington work for the American people. I searched for a leader who understands the rising costs confronting working people, and who will always put dreams first. A leader who sees clearly the challenges facing America in a changing world, with our security and standing advanced by eight years of a successful foreign policy. A leader who shares my vision of a government that calls all citizens – Republicans, Democrats and Independents – to a common purpose. Above all, I searched for a leader who is ready to step in and be President. 

Cont. reading: McCain Announces VP Choice

Andrew Bacevich has some good insights on U.S. foreign policy, but now I am a bit confused about two different reasons he gives for its dubious quality.

This from the August 15 Bill Moyers Journal:

Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large – I mean, one could point to many individual exceptions – but, what we want, by and large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.

We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the book’s balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit.

So the decisions made in DC somehow do reflect the general will of the people.

But in today’s LA Times oped Bacevich finds different culprits:

Cont. reading: Who Or What Makes U.S. Foreign Policy