by china hand2
lifted from comments
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Below are a list of links to news articles dealing with some major changes taking place in Taiwan today.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the place, Taiwan recently
elected a KMT president, ending the eight year DPP hold on the
country's executive.

For those even less aware of the place: The KMT is the party which
was "led" by Chiang Kai Shek. Today's group are the mainlanders who
fled to Taiwan following Chairman Mao's victory in the CCP revolution.

Chen Shuibian was the DPP president preceding the current one, Ma
Yingjeou (pinyin: Ma Yingjiu). Originally getting his start as a lawyer
defending a group of opposition party members in a sedition case
brought against them in the late '70's, Chen gradually rose to
prominence in the party, eventually becoming Mayor of Taipei. His
public image was based on a firm anti-corruption platform, and he used
it to great advantage when running against the "old guard" KMT pols.

Leaving aside the many questions surrounding his run-up to the
presidency, once there he continued to use his anti-graft and
anti-organized crime message to attack the KMT, gradually expanding
this into a very open pro-independence position.

Cont. reading: The China Taiwan Flirt

Chris Floyd linked and quoted my piece on Obama Implements Neocon Startegy Against Iran. Thanks Chris!

He received some comments towards his piece.

The first one must have been a bit weird with comments copied from here included and Chris deleted that one it was down-voted into the nirvana.^*

Then another of his commentators by the name blue ox babe refers to that and presents his/her view of the commentators at this site:

the gang at Moon of Alabama are moderately arrogant, and highly partisan. they are the sort to think of “practical” solutions which involve murdering other nations’ innocents if the “national security” interests are valuable enough to the MoA commenter in question. what MoA is, essentially, is a bunch of wannabe policy wonks.

Now you know it!

Cont. reading: Looking Into A Funhouse Mirror

News, views, rants, whatever … open thread

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against the Sudan's president Omar al-Beshir for alleged war-crimes in Darfur.

I have not followed the process towards, but my impression is that it was manipulated by several interested groups and nations and not driven by clean judicial reasoning.

As Sudan will reject the courts demand the issue will go to the UN security council. Several of UNNSC's members do not recognize the ICC's powers for the crimes their chief of states initiated and initiate. But they will likely have the hypocrisy to pressure Sudan and to eventually interfere with violent measures.

The conflict in Darfur is between pastoral nomads and resident farmers in an area with increasing desertification. Such conflicts are natural and very hard to solve. Usually the less strong party will have to move away.

That there are significant yet unexplored oil-fields below Darfur's desert seems to be the main reason why there is an international interest in this case at all. Similar conflicts, partly with higher casualties, in Africa and elsewhere simply get ignored.

That may well be the better alternative for all people involved.

There are various signs in today's news that the Obama administration policy is pressed to and is actually following a neocon policy towards Iran that is designed to end in a U.S. attack on Iran for the benefit of Israel.

Several political actions reported in recent days seem to follow the recommendations of 2008 study that was written by neocon's hosted at the American Enterprise Institute.

Dennis Ross seems to be a main actor in this effort.

Today's Israeli demands towards the U.S. and the Obama administration with regards to Iran were published as:

1. More and harsher sanctions before any talk with Iran
2. An international action plan for the case that such talks fail
3. A time limit for eventual talks and to define them as "one-time opportunity"

Israel threatens that in case the U.S. does not concede these points, it will attack Iran. An event that would have harsh consequences for the U.S. position in the Middle East.

I called this an Israeli dictate. Steve Clemons writes:

Cont. reading: Obama Implements Neocon Strategy Against Iran

So Obama offered Russia a deal. Except that thist is no deal anyone would take:

President Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons, American officials said Monday.

Let's recap:

The Bush administration unilaterally declared to install a missile "defense" system in Czechia and Poland, allegedly against Iranian missiles which Iran does not have and is unlikely have within the next decade if ever.Even the U.S. NATO partners were surprised by this.

The Russian's assume, correctly in my view, that these missiles are intended to enable a U.S. nuclear first strike capacity. All missiles defense systems have an inherent attack capability. It would only need a few minutes from launch the of such missiles to reach Moscow and other Russian decision centers.

They could either decapitate Russia or could be used as a defense against a Russian response strike should the U.S. launch a major nuclear first strike. The Mutual Assured Destruction policy that for long assured the non-use of nuclear weapons would be weakened or even ended by those installations.

The Russian's tried to negotiate and offered a bilateral common missile defense against the alleged Iran threat. The U.S. declined.

In response the Russians threatened to install short range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad to be able to hit the missile defense in Polen an Czechia.

When the Obama administration came into power, Russia made noise that it would refrain from that move if the U.S. would pull back on missile defense. It also offered cooperation on several other issues including Afghanistan.

Obama could have used that to let the missile defense issue just die away. Instead, The Obama administration now wants to blackmail Russia in a rather unrelated (from the Russian standpoint) issue.

Of course it can not agree to that. Once giving in to such blackmail would put Russia in a cycle where the U.S. would press for more concessions, and more, and more …

The New York Times piece linked above puts a lot of official U.S. spin into its story:

Cont. reading: Obama Continues Bush’s Russia Policy

When Ronald Raegan's secretary of the Treasury, attacks the Obama administration from the left, there is something out of whack. James Baker in the FT:

We should act decisively. First, we need to understand the scope of the problem. The Treasury department – working with the Federal Reserve – must swiftly analyse the solvency of big US banks. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner’s proposed “stress tests” may work. Any analyses, however, should include worst-case scenarios. We can hope for the best but should be prepared for the worst.

Next, we should divide the banks into three groups: the healthy, the hopeless and the needy. Leave the healthy alone and quickly close the hopeless. The needy should be reorganised and recapitalised, preferably through private investment or debt-to-equity swaps but, if necessary, through public funds. It is time for triage.
…
To avoid bank runs and contain market disruption, the Treasury should announce its decisions at one time. Washington will also need to co-ordinate its actions with other major capitals, especially in western Europe and east Asia. At best, this will encourage other countries to take similar steps with their own banking systems. At a minimum, other governments can prepare for the financial turmoil associated with the announcement.

…
During the 1990s, American officials routinely urged their Japanese counterparts to kill their zombie banks before they could do more damage to Japan’s economy. Today, it would be irresponsible if we did not heed our own advice.

Baker neglects the derivative and CDS mess that needs to be eliminated. But the plan is the right one. I offered something similar back in October and wrote:

Those steps can be taken now, or in six month. Now they could help. Six month from now there will be so much damage done to the real economy, that a very deep and multi-year long recession will be needed to recover.

Unfortunately it looks like I was right on that.

There have been several such reports over the years – two recent ones:

LSA Anaconda, Iraq – Here's what KBR made available for an ordinary breakfast: baked bacon, creamed beef, pork sausage patties, turkey sausage links, plain omelets, scrambled eggs, hash browns, grits/oatmeal, buttermilk biscuits, French toast, waffles, assorted yogurts, muffins, doughnuts, and coffee cake.

and

FOB Altimur, Afghanistan – One tent away is the DFAC, or dining facility, where a crew of cheerful civilian cooks from India stays up all night preparing a smorgasbord of goodies. There is a mountain of fresh strawberries and grapes, replenished daily. There are six kinds of ice cream and pie. There is surf and turf every Friday night, with lobster tails flown from Maine via Dubai. After a late patrol, the men can still get grilled cheeseburgers at 2 a.m.

As Napoleon said, an army marches on its stomach. Good food is good motivation. But what those reports describe is the luxury of a five star hotel. Meanwhile how many people in the U.S. have to live on food stamps? Over 30 million.

From a more strategic standpoint: Isn't one of the main problems in Afghanistan economic development? Or the growing of opium? Or unemployment?

So why not buy local food? Why no have local farmers provide what those bases need? Pay well at the local farmers market and it will be much cheaper than to fly in vegetables from California.

Joshua Foust is currently on a forward operation base in Afghanistan. He has a nice little story how he and a colleague solved a problem by hiring some locals for $60 when the French troops had planned to make that a project and hire some foreign contractor for thousands of Euros.

Cont. reading: Think Global And Buy Local

A well written piece on AIG. The exposes the core of a nuclear economy whose meltdown we observe.

AIG wrote unhedged Credit Default Swaps, insurance against credit defaults of packaged debt obligations like mortgages, in a notional value of $450 billion. That stack is now down to $300 billion. The U.S. people have so far pumped $150 billion into AIG. That this is exactly the amount AIG has now less in CDS exposure is certainly not pure coincidence.

We can expect that all CDS's AIG has written will be called on as all classes of debt will have very high default rates over the next years. There were several other fields of faulty financial engineering AIG 'invested' in that will result in additional tens of billions of losses.

Tomorrow AIG will post a new quarterly loss of $60 billion ($460,000 per minute). Also tomorrow the U.S. government will put another $30 billion of fresh capital into AIG. We can be sure that more will follow each quarter for many years to come.

Why does the U.S. government do this?

If we let A.I.G. fail, said Seamus P. McMahon, a banking expert at Booz & Company, other institutions, including pension funds and American and European banks “will face their own capital and liquidity crisis, and we could have a domino effect.” A bailout of A.I.G. is really a bailout of its trading partners — which essentially constitutes the entire Western banking system.

There is certainly no lack of people who think it would be a good idea to let the entire 'western' banking system fail.

But unfortunately we do need banks to 1. aggregate savings, 2. allocate the aggregated savings as credit to productive investments and 3. administrate the general public payment systems.

So either the U.S. bails out AIG or the sky falls down.

But there may be a way out. Why not instantiate a new banking system?

Set up clean New Banks in all countries under very strict regulatory rules and give them some basic capital. Then declare all credit default swaps null and void and let the dice fall where they may. When the old banks default, the new banks will pick up their good assets and business.

The advantage of such a 'shock and awe' solution is that the drag on the real economy will be over much faster than in any other solution. The current slow pace of backing up the system again and again does not generated trust. It is devastating for real production, trade and the livelihood of billions of people.

The land supply route to Afghanistan through Pakistan is endangered and the political situation there will get worse. The new route through Russia Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is, at least officially, only for non-military goods. The possible route through Iran is blocked due to Israel's interests. The supply by air will be less effective when, in five month, the Manas airbase 'hub' in Kyrgyzstan is closes down.

The U.S. military understands that it is impossible to wage a bigger war in Afghanistan without better routes. Swoop:

[D]eep concern has arisen at the Pentagon about supply lines, reflected in the following private comment to us from an official at the policymaking level in the Defense Department: “The idea that we can wage an effective military campaign in this landlocked country without safe and dependable logistical support is crazy."

I assume that the Pentagon policymaker will let Obama know of these concerns. The only realistic strategy then is to end the war. But U.S. public opinion currently still prevents that.

Maybe the carcass of a dead tall Arab man can be found somewhere in east Afghanistan to soothe the U.S. public urge to forever go after one Osama Bin Laden.

A crazy idea?

—
earlier coverage of Afghanistan logistics at MoA:
Iran Should Offer Fuel To DESC, Feb 21, 2009
The New Route Plus Iranian Jet Fuel Supply To Afghanistan, Feb 20, 2009
The Pink Route To Afghanistan, Feb 3, 2009
The Costly New Supply Route To Afghanistan, Jan 26, 2009
New Supply Routes To Afghanistan, Nov 19, 2008
Fuel for War in Afghanistan Aug 20, 2008
The Road War in Afghanistan Aug 16, 2008
Fuel Tanker Attacks in Afghanistan Mar 24, 2008