Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Update III: Haiti's Hurting, What's New? (Rotting Roadblocks)

Crime, Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Taxation, The West

Haiti is forever convulsed by political or natural disasters. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where four out of five people live in poverty and more than half in abject poverty (NYT), was struck by a massive, magnitude-7.0 earthquake, on Tuesday afternoon.

The rescuers, spokespersons, geological surveyors and geophysicists; the missionaries, medicine- and military men and women; the aid-deliverers—most are Westerners. Western countries prop up their Third-World creations. That’s how it is.

In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the gravest danger was an epidemic; the greatest danger in the wake of the Haiti disaster is a crime wave worse than before.

The Big O is promising to devote—and divert—all the resources he has no right to toward the rescue effort in Haiti.

I say “YES TO US AID, NO TO USAID”:

Americans are the most generous people on earth. “The extent and the depth of charitable giving” in the US is such that “the average donation in the U.S. is three-and-a-half times more than in Canada.” As a percentage of their aggregate income, Americans give more to charity than citizens of any other country. BO will go ahead and “pledge” a puny few hundred million to Haiti on behalf of a people that gave $241 billion to charity in 2003.

American largess makes the United States Agency for International Development, and other the compassionate pickpockets, as unnecessary as it is unethical.

Update I (Jan. 14): Since Haitians are now refugees and candidates for Minute-Maid immigration, it takes an immigration hawk to highlight the following: Haitians, by and large, speak Creole. Their faith is more Black Magic than Roman Catholic. Thoroughly schooled in violence, Haitians are, at the same time, utterly uneducated, although not in the ways of the world – they’ve been ravaged by AIDS-HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Update II: “The liberal West honestly believes that bad leaders are what shackle backward peoples.” In this context, how often have you heard that Haiti is what it is because of bad leadership; a deficit in democracy, on and on? Lo: a veteran disaster relief specialist told CNN that the current “serious crime problem” was less of an issue under Papa Doc’s “nasty dictatorship,” when “lots of people were killed. But infrastructure and services worked better then than they do now.”

“It was safer to use public transport then than it was last year, certainly in terms of crime,” he said. “Over the last 10, 15, 20 years, the gangs and the drug culture have taken hold of Haiti …”

Is it possible that a dictatorship—preferably a benevolent one, but never-the-less an authoritarian regime—might work better in certain cultures than a tyranny of the majority? Perish the thought.

Update III: Barbarism. “ANGRY Haitians set up roadblocks with corpses in Port-au-Prince to protest at the delay in emergency aid reaching them after a devastating earthquake.” Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, is understanding:

“It’s getting ugly out there, people are fed up with getting no help.” [news.com.au]

Yemen Via Al Jazeera

Foreign Policy, Just War, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

A’s For Al Jazeera, becasue AJ is one of the best news channels. If I could get Al Jazeera, I’d spend much less time ferreting for facts absent from American “news” media.

Writes Marwan Bishara: “As the US and Britain prepare for covert war on Yemen, and following on their failures in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, Yemenis might wonder if the joke is becoming a reality.

One does not have to be a Yemen expert to tell you that further destabilising Yemen along the lines of Pakistan or Somalia is not sound policy, and that Yemen’s proximity to the Gulf and the Horn of Africa does not bode well for regional stability.

But that is exactly what will happen if the US/UK “counterterrorism” policy focuses on providing military support to a three-decade-old government that presides over an unstable and decentralised country.

By offering more military training, arms, naval patrolling, intelligence sharing and possibly shared offensive operations, the West might help prolong and sustain an autocratic regime that faces secessionist movements in the North and South.

Mostly, though, it will aggravate a fragile state of Yemen into a failing state.

Even if estimates are exaggerated (Yemen’s interior minister in 2002 put the number of guns at 60 million), Yemeni tribes are better armed than any other in the region and will not surrender their weapons quietly to the central government, especially in light of the declared foreign intrusion into their country’s affairs.”

[SNIP]

I don’t know who Marwan Bishara is, but do Brush up on reality with his Al Jazeera analysis of the “Onward To Yemen” impetus, courtesy of the neoconservatives and their neoprogressive philosophical soulmates.

Distrust my recommendation? My fervently pro-Israel father is surely credible on this front. According to dad, the only fair shake Israel ever gets in the media broadcasting in the democratic South Africa is from … Al-Jazeera.

Updated: Jihadis Really Really Hate Us

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Islam, Jihad, Journalism, Terrorism

Says John Brennan, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, in an interivew with CNN’s Gloria Borger: “We have made quite a bit of progress this year in degrading the capabilities of Al Qaida organization. We’ve taken the battle to them. We have eliminated a number of their senior leaders and operatives. But that doesn’t mean that they still don’t have a capability of carrying out attacks. And that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to look for ways and vulnerabilities in our system to get their operatives either here to the United States or in other places to carry out these attacks.”

Replies MICHAEL SCHEUER, the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999: “Mr. Brennan is blowing smoke. You have some dead bodies — I agree with that; it’s all to the good — but no impact on the overall organization. … I think it’s stronger than it was at 9/11, certainly because the support and opposition across the Muslim world to American foreign policy is far greater today than it was in 9/11.”

I’ve covered Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, favorably: “When I think of a libertarian-leaning patriotic warrior, I think of Michael Scheuer. The chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, Scheuer is also the man behind the enhanced interrogation methods, which the hard-left and their friends on the libertarian left would have you believe are as heinous as the war crime at Hiroshima.”

Still, I’m not sure what he’s advising.

“Yemen is bin Laden’s ancestral home,” Scheuer comments. “More Yemenis than any Arab nationality fought against the Soviets. There would have been more Yemenis in the 9/11 attacks, except they couldn’t get visas as easily as the Saudis.”

And he recommends that, “We stop depending on surrogates. We stop depending on Pakistan. We stop depending on Yemen and use our own strong right arm. There is no — there’s no clause in the Constitution that says President Obama can delegate the defense of America to a Yemeni dictator.”

I don’t know what that means. Do you? Gloria doesn’t inquire. Like most journalists today, she possesses very little intellectual curiosity.

Update (Jan. 4): Is there a reason to so carefully distinguish “Islam” from “Jihadist Islam”? The latter is a redundancy. Jihad is part of Islam.

Open-Ended Stay In Afghanistan

Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Military, Terrorism, War

Withdrawal from Afghanistan “would be based on conditions on the ground.” That’s the latest about-face from the Obama administration. The date of departure is apparently “aspirational.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “If it appears that the strategy’s not working and that we are not going to be able to transition in 2011 then we will take a hard look at the strategy itself,” he said, adding that the president reserves the right to adjust his decision. “We’re not going to just throw these guys into the swimming pool and then walk away.”

“McMussolini” has been pushing for this.

On the phone today to South Africa, I was reminded by my father of what’s at stake: the lives of some of the finest men this country has to offer; the prospect of being killed and crippled for naught.