Down Time

To all three of you regular readers....

My computer is temporarily maimed, so I don't think I'll be online for the next week or so. With any luck the issue will be fixed and I'll be back soon.

Threat Analysis

I have to write a 500 word paper addressing the question: "What, in your view, is the greatest threat facing the United States over the next 20 years?" This is what I came up with. My first draft was 1200 words long, so it took a lot of butchering to get it down to something managable (it's now 500 words--yay!) I'm open to comments and criticisms if anyone has one. Unless you're just writing to call me a hippie. That's understood.

Here is the latest version (updated October 30):

The greatest threat facing the United States over the next twenty years is the lack of a coherent strategic vision. The dipolar world power structure collapsed with the Soviet Union, and the current paradigm requires a new set of strategies. Competitors for power are challenging us in new ways: militarily, economically, and ideologically. We must create a vision of international cooperation to counteract our competitors’ attempts to undermine our strength. A failure to establish such a vision of a new global rules set threatens our ability to be a leader in the global forum.

The United States thrives on trade with open market nations but is seriously disadvantaged when dealing with the restrictions of closed markets. For example, China’s access to our open market gives their economy many trade benefits while our lack of access to theirs is a significant hindrance, and they are currently using this advantage to engage in economic warfare with us. The lack of Chinese intellectual property regulations has resulted in rampant copyright infringement, and they are using stolen technology, government subsidies, and punishing tariffs to compete. Their investment in US debt puts us at a strategic disadvantage, and the dumping of 150 billion dollars of debt on the world market would cause a dramatic increase in domestic long term interest rates and threaten a global recession. The Chinese are aggressively competing with us for resources such as oil, wood, and metals in an attempt to control international markets. We must create and actively promote a global marketplace that protects free and open markets and provides incentives for other economic powers to work cooperatively or Chinese-style economic warfare will become the dominant mode of trade.

As the pre-eminent military superpower in the world we have the capability to defeat any other military power. Ensuring the stability of the world theater, however, requires understanding our competitors’ motivations and ensuring that the costs of conflict are greater than the benefits. We must position ourselves strategically now, while we have the advantage, to create disincentives for armed conflict and instability, as any outbreak of hostility must be countered before international or American will is exhausted. If we work under the auspices of international institutions, as we did in Afghanistan, the "hearts and minds" are already ours; if we build ad hoc coalitions in defiance of the international community, as we did in Iraq, we will have lost the trust and cooperation of those we need.

Nations who want to undermine our global strength will use any means to damage our position, including supporting non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda. In order to confront their threats we must craft a coherent strategy and create a national defense mission that considers these issues in an integrated manner. A comprehensive analysis of our competitors is necessary to create a strategy that helps us show the world that it is in their best interests to work with us and that no nation will benefit by economic, military, or ideological conflict with the United States of America.

Posturing over Syria

I want to preface this thought with the statement that it's only a thought in its premacy. I've noticed that we're aggressively posturing over Syria, under the pretext of the Hariri assasination and the foreign fighters coming into Iraq over the Syrian border, but something has been seriously bothering me with our nation's rhetoric. Please tell me if I'm wrong on any of this or if you see any glaring holes in my logic, but here it goes:

Bashar al Assad, who has just taken over the "Presidency" from his father, has portrayed himself as a reformer. He has publically come out and condemned the assassination of Hariri, and when the Lebanese began protesting the Syrian occupation, instead of cracking down as his father would have he very rapidly pulled the troops out of Lebanon. This seems to be either because he was too weak to stand up to the Lebanese, he was too weak to stand up to international pressure, or because he actually wanted out of Lebanon. I can understand the Syrians being too weak to stand up to considerable international pressure, but the international pressure hadn't yet had the chance to really foment to that level. I can also understand bowing to the pressure of the other Arab states because of their sympathies with the Lebanese, but I didn't see an outpouring of outrage on the streets of Cairo or Jeddah. More importantly, if Bashar was too weak to stand up to the international pressure or the possibility that an anti-Syrian uprising would occur in Lebanon, I can't imagine that he would be able to buck the long-entrenched Ba'ath party within his own government--you know, the one who orchestrated the Lebanese occupation in the first place. The world knows that we're in no position to drive the Syrians out of Lebanon the way we drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, so I can't imagine that the US could have used the threat of force in back channels to get the Syrians to capitulate.

It looks to me like Bashar may actually be interested in transforming the Syrian regime. An interview with Christiane Amanpour may not seem like much, but it was more pro-west than anything I can recall Syria doing in the time before his presidency. He also made it a point to call for a UN investigation into any involvement within his government in the Hariri assassination, and to deal with anyone involved in a typically Syrian manner, as was evidenced by the "suicide" of Syrian Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan. I would be liable to dismiss this as empty rhetoric, because I don't think he's powerful enough within Syria to take on the Ba'ath party and Hezbollah head on, but it's empty rhetoric in the right direction! Furthermore, his calling on the United Nations to investigate (even if his inferiors end up being completely uncooperative) shows an uncharacteristic openness for a Syrian leader. That's more than anything I've seen out of Syria, Iran, or Iraq (the three main states in which the Ba'ath party or Hezbollah had any kind of clout) in the past twenty five years.

So, we have a state that is interested in talking with us, with publically integrating with some of our ideas of the future, with starting to investigate a transformation of their culture to become more economically (and possibly politically) engaged. The days of the Arab despot supported by the US or USSR are over, and Bashar knows it. He's said as much. he's the leader of a nation with 60% of the population under the age of 25, a population who, by all accounts, is pushing for a more open internal media and more access to the outside world. He's positioning himself to transform his national dialogue and national identity. But to what end?

If he's truly trying to transform his nation, and the political machine that runs it, it would behoove us to incentivize Bashar to buy into our paradigm, our vision of the future. He's going to need all the help he can get. If this is the case (and it's a big "if"), he's working against the interests of one of the most hard core intelligence services in the Middle East, which is working hand in hand with Hezbollah. His major allies will be the youth in his own country, the business sector, etc. If we're the kid on the playground who is pushing the other kid, trying to get him to do what we want, he has two choices: he can either stand up to us to save face, or he can capitulate and look weak. If he honestly doesn't want to stand up to us, we're working against ourselves by playing hardball publically. Privately, fine, but in public, we're screwing ourselves as well as Bashar.

An interesting analysis of this situation can be found on Stratfor.

I was thinking of the immortal words of Homer, who said...

D'oh! All this time I thought people could post to my blog--it turns out that I didn't enable outside posting.

Well, you live, you learn. Thank you to Dum Pendebat, who pointed out this unfortunate oversight.

Work Time

I love this process. I'm trying to write a paper for a university entrance requirement, and it feels almost like being back in school. It's maddening, harrowing, exciting, and exhilarating. The hardest part is trying to pare down what I've written to the requirements of the assignment. I'll post it when I'm done, but I'm burnt out for the evening. Maybe I'll give it another try tomorrow.

Saturday night was a lot of fun, even though only one person came over. With any luck we'll be able to have a larger gathering next time, and eventually we'll actually get quite a few people together. We're going to be meeting this week with a Maghrabi who has offered to (possibly) help tutor us.

Falter

A long time ago I wrote a story and I just found it, still published where I first published it. It was originally on dyingdays.com, published in May of 2001. It's one of my favorites, and has nothing to do with the purpose of setting up this blog, but I'm putting up the link here because it's mine and I want it to be here.

It's called Falter.

Arabic in Baltimore

Maya and I are trying to organize people to get together in Baltimore and practice our Arabic together, but it's been a frusterating process. Every time we plan on having people over we're thwarted. Mister McFate getting to us again. It seems like that's been the theme over the past few months.

~Z~ sent me some intermediate level listening and writing exercises and they arrived today. I've flipped through it and it just serves to remind me of how much I need to learn. Ha! I keep thinking I'm doing well, and then I go on Al-Jazeera or VOA and realize that there are a hundred million three year olds with better Arabic skills than me. Keeps me humble....

I got into an interesting conversation this afternoon about Saudi Arabia. An acquaintance of mine suggested that the impinging oil crisis is precipitating a conflict with Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis are active in supporting Al Qaeda as a preemptive offensive. He drew a parallel between the Saudi-Al Qaeda relationship today and the Iranian/Syrian-Hezbollah relationship in the '70's, prior to when everyone knew that Hezbollah was acting with the political support of the two regimes. He inferred that Al Qaeda is the state sponsored non-state actor working on behalf of and in the interests of the Saudi government; basically, it's not just the Saudi on the street that is trying to harm America but it's the government as well. Needless to say, he is not a fan of the Saudi government. Reminds me of Robert Baer's Sleeping with the Devil.

I don't agree with his analysis. Although I don't think that the Saudi regime is our best friend, I do think that they have a vested interest in having a stable American economy, especially since we have been the primary driving force for theirs for the past fifty years. Why would a regime want to destabilize their primary supporter in the world economy? There aren't that many in the royal family who are so gung-ho that they would prefer to go back to the Beduin days of camel's milk and dates and give up partying on the Riviera, and the Chinese appetite for oil hasn't yet gotten to the levels that they could solely float the Saudi economy without our help. We do have friends in Saudi Arabia, but it's not the kind of ideological friendship that we have with Japan or England. It's enlightened self interest, pure and simple (and maybe not particularly enlightened at that).

I think Baer was right when he pointed out that we have something to be very afraid of in Saudi Arabia; however, I think it's the people who agree with the Muslim Brotherhood that should scare us and not the royal family. Fahd had cut a deal with the Wahabbis in letting them foster and ideology of hatred in the local populace and it was made even worse when the Brotherhood were driven out of Egypt by Mubarak and right into Saudi Arabia. Why would you make the claim that Al Qaeda is the secret arm of the house of Saud when Usama has publically painted the royals as apostates? When Al Qaeda has repeatedly attacked Saudi interests? I think that the Saudi royal family is being held hostage by Al Qaeda, or more to the point, by the tide of Wahabbi fundamentalist clerics that preach the same message as Al Qaeda. I think that the Saudi royal family is the one who has made the deal with the devil.

This is my first post. I'm not sure what to write.

I'm starting a weblog for the same reason I decided to learn Arabic--if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Blind groping in the dark may not be that effective, but it's a start. At least you're groping and not simply blind.