'Both Gingrich and Paul have a nasty demeanor of a sort that, I think, will never make it to the White House...'

That's Althouse on the performance last night of New Gingrich and Ron Paul. And that's funny, because it's those two who I chose to blog on as well. (I've met Gingrich personally, and I've mentioned before, he's a terrible people-person. Ron Paul? I've never met him. But, well, he's just crackpot all around.)



See, "The Iowa Debate."



Previously, "Ron Paul at GOP Debate: 'There Was No Al Qaeda in Iraq'," and "Newt Gingrich at GOP Debate: 'Put Aside the Gotcha Questions'."

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Ron Paul at GOP Debate: 'There Was No Al Qaeda in Iraq'

I almost fell on the floor listening to this guy. There used to be some kind of rule for excluding marginal candidates from these debates, and the organizing committees should have invoked it for Ron Paul years ago. What a disgrace:
See Sacremento Bee, "Paul and Santorum clash over US-Iran relationship."



Anyway, a big write up at NYT, "8 From G.O.P. Trade Attacks at Iowa Debate."

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Taliban Shoot Down U.S. Copter in Afghanistan

At Los Angeles Times, "31 U.S. troops, 7 Afghans killed in Taliban attack on NATO helicopter."
In a rare event, Taliban insurgents shoot down a Chinook helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade near Kabul. It's the largest single-incident loss of military lives since the war's start.
And at New York Times, "31 Americans Killed as Taliban Shoot Down a Copter." (Via Memeorandum.)

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U.S. Urges Citizens to Leave Syria Immediately

At Jerusalem Post:
State Department warns that given the "ongoing uncertainty and volatility" American citizens are urged to leave immediately while transportation is still available.


See also New York Times, "Broadcasting Hama Ruins, Syria Says It Has Ended Revolt."

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More Than 12 Million Facing Starvation in Somalia

This just makes me sad. Forget politics and political science theory. I wish we could do something.

At Los Angeles Times, "Somalia famine spreads to 3 new regions, U.N. says":
Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa

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With hunger in the Horn of Africa dramatically worsening, the United Nations on Wednesday added three more regions of Somalia to the list of areas it says are stricken by famine.

More than 12 million people are facing starvation, with children particularly vulnerable. The U.N. last month declared that two regions of Somalia were suffering from famine, and it said Wednesday that the famine was likely to spread across most of Somalia in coming months, as well as parts of Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia.

Somalia is struggling with its worst drought in 60 years, and 3.7 million Somalis are in crisis, mainly in the south — creating Africa's most serious hunger crisis in two decades. Refugee camps in the capital, Mogadishu, are now affected as well, U.N. agencies said.

Shocking images of those suffering have resulted in an increase in aid in the last two weeks, after donors' earlier sluggish response, but violence in the south of the country has limited humanitarian agencies' access.

The U.N. is seeking to raise $1 billion to address the crisis.
I'm researching relief agencies, by the way. I'll make a contribution, but so much gets wasted on overhead and corruption I'm wary. More on that later.

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Somalis Starve as Shabab Islamists Bar Escape From Famine

This really bothers me, at NYT, "Somalis Waste Away as Insurgents Block Escape From Famine." The picture here was on the cover of today's hard copy edition.

Readers know I've expressed reservations against humanitarian intervention, especially since Libya really wasn't. But I'm not reflexively opposed to the use of military power to guarantee food shipments. Almost twenty years ago President George H.W. Bush sent U.S. forces to Somalia to protect delivery of humanitarian aid. We all know how that turned out, but we didn't go in right in the first place, didn't have enough men and heavy armor on the ground, and President Bill Clinton got cold feet after we sustained casualties. If we were ever to do something like that again, we'd be best to go in without the U.N. or our NATO allies. Leave it to American forces, who've been engaged in two decades of counterinsurgency warfare since the early 1990s. The experience is cumulative. We could do a better and more effective job of relief today, and frankly, it could do some good. The Horn of Africa is right next to Pakistan and Yemen as the top location of festering Islamist war against the West.
Every morning, emaciated parents with emaciated children stagger into Banadir Hospital, a shell of a building with floors that stink of diesel fuel because that is all the nurses have to fight off the flies. Babies are dying because of the lack of equipment and medicine. Some get hooked up to adult-size intravenous drips — pediatric versions are hard to find — and their compromised bodies cannot handle the volume of fluid.

Most parents do not have money for medicine, so entire families sit on old-fashioned cholera beds, with basketball-size holes cut out of the middle, taking turns going to the bathroom as diarrhea streams out of them.

“This is worse than 1992,” said Dr. Lul Mohamed, Banadir’s head of pediatrics, referring to Somalia’s last famine. “Back then, at least we had some help.”
In any case, more at New York Times, "Off Media Radar, Famine Garners Few Donations," and "How to Help Victims of the East Africa Famine."

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Courtney Messerschmidt Gets Results!

I'm proud to announce that my neoconservative protégée continues her rocket launch into foreign policy prominence.

Carl Prine interviews Courtney, a.k.a. GSGF, at Line of Departure, "A Woman for All Reasons."

And the interview's starting to go viral, at Daily Dish, "FoReIgN PoLicY thEOry."

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Moral Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

The cover story, by Leon Aron, at the June/July Foreign Policy, "Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong."

I think that title is over-promising, actually. The key explanatory innovation is the role of moral ideas in overthrowing the old order. Aron writes, for example:
LIKE VIRTUALLY ALL modern revolutions, the latest Russian one was started by a hesitant liberalization "from above" -- and its rationale extended well beyond the necessity to correct the economy or make the international environment more benign. The core of Gorbachev's enterprise was undeniably idealistic: He wanted to build a more moral Soviet Union.

For though economic betterment was their banner, there is little doubt that Gorbachev and his supporters first set out to right moral, rather than economic, wrongs. Most of what they said publicly in the early days of perestroika now seems no more than an expression of their anguish over the spiritual decline and corrosive effects of the Stalinist past. It was the beginning of a desperate search for answers to the big questions with which every great revolution starts: What is a good, dignified life? What constitutes a just social and economic order? What is a decent and legitimate state? What should such a state's relationship with civil society be?

"A new moral atmosphere is taking shape in the country," Gorbachev told the Central Committee at the January 1987 meeting where he declared glasnost -- openness -- and democratization to be the foundation of his perestroika, or restructuring, of Soviet society. "A reappraisal of values and their creative rethinking is under way." Later, recalling his feeling that "we couldn't go on like that any longer, and we had to change life radically, break away from the past malpractices," he called it his "moral position."
At least from an ideational perspective, the argument is familiar. I'm reminded of the edited volume from Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, published in 1995. Ideas are contrasted with material interests as a mobilizing factor in historical change. So Leon's argument builds on themes that have been common in international relations literature for some time. Aron's book on this is forthcoming, and looks interesting: Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991.

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Keep America Safe: 'More Risk'

Via Theo Spark:

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Hugo Chavez Will Go to Cuba For Chemotherapy

At Fausta's, "Chavez going to Cuba, not Brazil, for chemo VIDEO":

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U.S. Recognizes Rebels in Libya

The story's at New York Times and Memeorandum.

At the video is a portion of the president's March 28th speech. "Regime change" isn't mentioned, although that was the plan all along:

I wouldn't have authorized this deployment, but if you're going in don't lie about it. That's what I hate about R2P. It's so dishonest, but amounts to virtually the same logical outcome as democracy promotion policies. But if it's launched under a Republican president the "world community" rises up in arms at the "threat" of another "Hitler." When a Democrat does it it's "humanitarian intervention."

See: "'Saints Go Marching In': David Rieff at The National Interest."

Side Note: One more thing about R2P: Samantha Power invoked the doctrine for the invasion of Israel, which is just sickening to think about. Democrats will do that.

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U.S. Builds Up Electronic Attack Arsenal

At LAT, "U.S. is using electronic warfare to attack in waves":
In the skies above Libya, the U.S. Navy has been deploying a small fleet of supersonic EA-18 Growler jets to "jam" Moammar Kadafi's ground radar, giving NATO fighters and bombers free rein to strike tanks, communication depots and other strategic targets.

It's the latest demonstration of "electronic attack" hardware — the "EA" in the Growler's name. Armies have been waging electronic warfare since World War II, but today's technology packs a strategic wallop unforeseen even a decade ago.

With foreign adversaries continuing to improve their radar capabilities and air defense networks, and terrorists worldwide using modern consumer electronics to trigger explosives, the United States is spending billions of dollars in a massive effort to respond. These jammers, for instance, spew radio waves and emit other electromagnetic noise to jumble enemy electronic signals.

"War fighters have gone from using physical weapons like spears and knives, to chemical weapons such as gunpowder and explosives, to electronics with radio waves and computer codes," said Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "It's a natural evolution in warfare."

At a time when the defense budget is being eyed for cuts, electronic attack technology is one of the few areas — along with drones and cyber security — in which President Obama wants to boost spending.
Continue reading.

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Chasing the Dying Memories of Soviet Trauma

There's a retrospective on the fall of the Soviet Union at the new Foreign Policy. I'll be reading and posting more from it, but this essay from Orlando Figes is fascinating, "Don't Go There":
In November 2004, Nona Panova was being interviewed by a researcher from the Russian human rights organization Memorial, working under my direction on an oral history project about private life in the Stalin era. Nona, a 75-year-old woman whose father had been arrested during the purges of the 1930s, had been talking for several hours about her upbringing in St. Petersburg and her family when she saw the tape recorder with its microphone. The conversation went like this:Panova: So that's how it was.… [Notices the tape recorder and shows signs of panic.] Are you recording this? But I'll be arrested! They'll put me into jail!

Interviewer: Who'll put you in jail?

Panova: Someone will.… I've told you so much; there's so much I've said.…

Interviewer: [Laughs.] Yes, and it was very interesting, but tell me, who today would want to put you in jail?

Panova: But did you really make a recording?

Interviewer: Yes, don't you remember? I warned you at the start that our conversation would be recorded.

Panova: Then that's it. It's all over for me -- they'll arrest me.
More at the link. Ms. Panova thought she'd be killed. Here's another part this was gripping:
For years, what the world knew about the Soviet Union was limited entirely to the public sphere. Apart from a few memoirs by great writers caught up in the repressions of the 1930s, particularly Evgenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam, there was little from a personal perspective coming out of those years. More representative testimonies began to emerge only in the glasnost period, when victims of Stalin's repression were encouraged to come forward with their stories. Organizations like Memorial helped them look for information about their missing relatives, took interviews, and organized archives from the mass of documents, letters, photographs, and artifacts that people brought into their offices in plastic bags and boxes following the Soviet regime's collapse.

And yet even these documents were difficult to interpret. Take diaries, usually regarded as the most direct expression of an individual's private thoughts and emotions. Diarists of the 1930s and 1940s, however, faced serious obstacles. When a person was arrested, the first thing to be confiscated was the diary, which was likely to be used as incriminating evidence. Many diaries that came to light during the glasnost years express conformist political ideas. Should we take their words at face value, as expressions of a genuine yearning to belong to the Soviet collective, which was no doubt felt by many people insecure about their place in the system? Or should it be assumed that fear drove more to hide themselves behind a mask? Two major finds have been translated from Russian: the 1930s diary of Stepan Podlubny, a kulak son fashioning a Soviet identity for himself in a factory school, which was published in Germany as Tagebuch aus Moskau (1996) by historian Jochen Hellbeck; and Nina Lugovskaya's schoolgirl diary from the same decade, published in English as I Want to Live (2006). For Hellbeck, the Podlubny diary shows how the individual was practically unable to think outside the terms defined by Soviet politics. In this vision of the "Soviet subject" -- developed by Hellbeck from several newly discovered Stalin-era diaries in Revolution on My Mind (2006) -- there is little space for private life at all, if we take that to depend on independent thought. Yet the Lugovskaya example shows that even a schoolgirl subjected to the full array of propaganda about the "radiant Soviet future" was not only capable of dissenting, pessimistic, and even "anti-Soviet" thoughts, but eager to confess them to her diary as an expression of her individuality.
Living in fear as a direct result of communist totalitarian control. This is where today's progressives seek to return. They're communists, and just take a look across the radical left establishment today. To simply speak out against the PC commissars is to risk a termination of employment, personals attacks, threats of violence, or even possible jail time in country's like Canada and the Netherlands. Progressives are communists. Like Soviet citizens under Stalin, there is no dissenting from the progressive line without threat to life and liberty.

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The Future Still Belongs to America

Great piece from Walter Russell Mead, at Wall Street Journal:

It is, the pundits keep telling us, a time of American decline, of a post-American world. The 21st century will belong to someone else. Crippled by debt at home, hammered by the aftermath of a financial crisis, bloodied by long wars in the Middle East, the American Atlas can no longer hold up the sky. Like Britain before us, America is headed into an assisted-living facility for retired global powers.

This fashionable chatter could not be more wrong. Sure, America has big problems. Trillions of dollars in national debt and uncounted trillions more in off-the-books liabilities will give anyone pause. Rising powers are also challenging the international order even as our key Cold War allies sink deeper into decline.

But what is unique about the United States is not our problems. Every major country in the world today faces extraordinary challenges—and the 21st century will throw more at us. Yet looking toward the tumultuous century ahead, no country is better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities or manage the dangers than the United States.
RTWT.

There's not a lot to quibble with, although Mead might underestimate the challenge of transnational terrorism --- which is promoted by powerful regional states --- to the stability of the international system. If the issue is geopolitics and the rise and fall of great powers, then, yes, America's well positioned for continued primacy for generations. Other than that, I think folks will appreciate systemic arguments like this when the economy's expanding and unemployment's declining.

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IDF Delivers Goods to Gaza

Great video, via Theo Spark:

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Gilad Shalit Five Year Anniversary

At Haaretz, "Shalit family members chain themselves together outside Netanyahu's residence in Jerusalem."

Also, Noah Pollak at Commmentary, "“Human Rights Community” Agrees: Gilad Shalit Should Remain in Captivity."

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A New Constitutional Understanding of War Powers?

Bruce Kesler takes Charles Krauthammer to task, quite effectively, at Maggie's Farm, "Krauthammer Goes From Frying Pan to Fire, and Misses the Point."

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Ed Morrissey's Visit to Israel

He's mentioned it at the blog a couple of times, but he's got an interesting interview at this post as well, "Farewell, Jerusalem." He's speaking with Erielle Reshef from IBA News:

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The Hate Israel industry

From Kelly McParland, at National Post, "Dog days in the Hate Israel industry":
Things must be getting tougher in the Hate Israel industry these days, what with Arab leaders slaughtering their own people everywhere you look, in order to hold onto their jobs.

People were killed in Egypt, people were killed in Tunisia and Bahrain, people are still being killed in Yemen, Libya and especially Syria. They’re being killed because they’d like to change the government, which you can do in Israel just by turning up to vote. They’re being killed because they’d like to be more like Israel. How can you focus the world’s attention on the despicable state of affairs in apartheid Israel when the people in neighbouring countries insist on giving up their lives in hopes of winning similar rights to those Israel already offers? It’s almost like the protesters in all those places didn’t realize that the source of all their troubles lies in Jerusalem, not in their own countries.

Hate Israel people aren’t easy to persuade, though, so they’re persevering despite the headwinds. The folks behind the Canadian boat to Gaza sent their little contingent off on the weekend to join the heroic struggle to break the murderous Israeli blockade of Gaza and bring life-saving supplies to its besieged people. The people of Gaza aren’t really besieged, and it’s not really that hard to send them supplies, if that’s your intention, but admitting as much would spoil all the drama and self-serving bombast of the Hate Israel folks, so they’re pretending otherwise. If they’re really lucky, Israel will try to turn back the boat and they can try to provoke a confrontation, enabling them to get a ton of international publicity for themselves, which is what they live for. It might be a bit more difficult than in the past, though, since Israel may be reluctant to play along, and since the blockade has already been eased. And Turkey, which has been supportive of the flotillas, has its hands full trying to deal with the flood of civilians fleeing Syria to escape the government’s murderous campaign to put down a popular revolt. (Syria is one of those countries that kills people who challenge the government, a state of affairs the Hate Israel people have to studiously ignore.)
Amazingly clear and concise commentary. But the world plays along with the Islamist charade, in a pro-Palestinian campaign of anti-Semitic hatred.

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Republican Party Splitting Over U.S. Role in Libya

I don't think Obama's Libyan war violates the War Powers Act, but unlike my fellow neocons, I'm more reserved in my support for the NATO campaign against Gaddafi. Recall Victor Davis Hanson's essay at the start of the war, "A Middle East Policy in Shambles." Completely ad hoc, and spineless too, it's hard to get excited about this, especially since Afghanistan (and Pakistan) remains the central danger point in U.S. international affairs.

Anyway, I think my concerns are not unfamiliar among the wider conservative establishment. Michele Bachmann, in particular, seemed to impart the sense that America's a bit overextended at the moment. See, LAT, "GOP splitting over U.S. role in Libya and Afghanistan":

Republicans are facing a widening fissure over the U.S. role on the world stage as party leaders decide whether to confront President Obama this week over his policy toward Libya.

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and other congressional Republican leaders have said that U.S. involvement in NATO's bombing campaign, which hit the 90-day mark Sunday, violates the War Powers Act. The House could seek to cut off money for the war as it takes up the annual Pentagon spending bill this week.

Several of the party's potential presidential candidates have called for the U.S. to quit the fight in Libya and questioned the depth of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

Other Republicans have begun pushing back, criticizing what they see as a growing isolationist agenda within the party. The result is that Republicans, once relatively unified on foreign policy issues, now have a division that parallels the long-standing split in Democratic ranks.

The debate was on public display Sunday as two of the GOP's leading figures on defense and foreign policy, Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, criticized Republican presidential hopefuls and congressional leaders who question the country's military intervention around the world.

"There has always been an isolationist strain in the Republican Party," McCain said on ABC's "This Week," "but now it seems to have moved more center stage.... That is not the Republican Party that has been willing to stand up for freedom for people all over the world."

Graham said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that any debate over cutting funding for the Libya war would encourage resistance by Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi. "Congress should sort of shut up," he said.

McCain and Graham also criticized former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who's leading in the polls for the party's presidential nomination, for referring to the fighting in Afghanistan as a "war for independence" that the U.S. should leave to others.

"I wish that candidate Romney and all the others would sit down" with U.S. commanders "and understand how this counter-insurgency is working and succeeding," McCain said.

Romney was one of several presidential hopefuls who, in last week's Republican candidate debate, focused criticism on U.S. military operations in Libya and Afghanistan. None took the sort of hawkish positions that McCain advocated during his presidential run in 2008.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), for example, questioned what U.S. interest is at stake in Libya. "We were not attacked," Bachmann said. "We were not threatened with attack. There was no vital national interest."

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