The Face of Arab Modernity

If you do not know this man's face...you will.

His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is the Vice President and Prime Minister of the Unites Arab Emirates and the newly crowned ruler of Dubai, the second most powerful and influential of the seven emirates that make up the UAE. For the past 20 years, and with the tacit agreement of his recently deceased father and former ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mo as he is affectionately known to ex-pats and locals alike, has been vigorously fighting to bring Dubai into the 21st century...and he has. Dubai is a cosmopolitan city, oozing with absurd wealth and dripping with the kind of delight Nero would approve of...and you don't even have to pay that much for it.

With the human sex trafficking, the terrorist money laundering, the local entitlement class, and the modern day caste system in place, Dubai may not be YOUR kind of Arab modernity...but the alternative is not much better. Think Iran. If we are lucky, then think Jordan.

Life and geopolitics, especially in the Middle East, is about uncomfortable compromise. You only hope that you are more right than the next guy...and the world and its markets agree.

The World Irreverently...

Go here for some...shall we say...unique perspecitves on the recent headlines. Courtesy of that paragon of journalistic accuracy and integrity, The Onion.

Winning the (Quiet) War on Terror

See this article from the Christian Science Monitor. This "quiet war" rarely makes the news, and when it does, no one pays much attention. Why? Because it's not as sensational (read "doesn't promote the media's political agenda" here) as news coming out of Iraq or Afghanistan...and because it is having a large measure of success. CJTF-HOA is doing some outstanding work cutting al-Qaida off at the knees in the countries of east Africa, with the one exception of Somalia where they are forbidden to operate.

HOA is an outstanding example of how you defeat an insurgency...you cut it out at the roots before it has a chance to grow. This is known in military parlance as "theater engagement", the process of showing the flag in conjunction with humanitarian operations (i.e. vaccinating kids, digging wells, building schools, training local military, etc.). Theater engagement allows you to bring the "soft power" of the military to bear on a problem in a way that lingers in the mind of the host nation population when al-Qaida comes knocking. You earn their trust through good works and a professional example...and it works.

Cynics say you are just buying off the local population by providing them with things their host nation government cannot.

Yeah...so what.

It is effective and not to mention a hell of a lot less expensive, less complicated, and less taxing for the military. The American taxpayer's money is well spent. When done with the consent of or in conjunction with the host nation, it builds political good will and provides national security in one shot.

You cannot ask for more than that...

"Hysterical and bacchanalian..."

...is how the Russian foreign ministry described President Mikhail Saakshvili, Georgia's temperamental but brilliant leader, and his reaction to the January 22 near simultaneous early morning explosions of two natural gas lines just inside Russia along its border with Georgia.

The Georgian President hit the proverbial roof, immediately calling Russia, and its 1993 capitalist upstart Gazprom (a publicly traded company with appox. 40% of its shares owned by the Russian government and alone responsible for 8% of Russia's GDP), the "enemy" whose actions were "outrageous blackmail".

The President had every right to be upset, it being the dead of winter in the Caucasus and the lines that were destroyed were his entire country's (and by default, because they came from the same source, Armenia's) only source of gas. And it's winter...and it is cold. Place this event in the context of Russia's earlier tiff this year with Ukraine over the cost of Russian supplied natural gas (a proposed price increase on the Ukraine of appox. 500%), and you can see his point. To add insult to injury, later that day, and several hundred kilometers away, an electrical line from Russia to Georgia was "interrupted".

Post-Soviet economic blackmail by a former ruling government or minor industrial accident?

I'll let you decide...

The Not-So Suprising Face of Islam

Today, Shi'ite Muslims all over the world "celebrate" Ashura, a religious observance in which they flagellate themselves to simulate the pain, suffering and death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, who, according to Islamic tradition, was killed in AD 680 at Karbala, a city in modern day Iraq, in a battle for the leadership of the faith.

If, after observing:

1) this Islamic "festival",

2) the Islamic world's stunningly hypocritical reaction to that Danish newspaper's Mohammad cartoon ridiculousness (you should see the cartoons in Gulf newspapers depicting Christians and Jews in such a wonderful light on a daily basis), and

3) the Iranian government's quest for "peaceful nuclear power" despite their vast oil reserves (somewhere on the order of 90 billion barrels worth) put within the context of their President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's now infamous and all too truthful rant to "Wipe Israel off the map!",

you do not yet understand the immense danger fundamentalist Islam poses to the civilized world, then you are either:

1) a "happily uniformed, not burdened by the facts, head in the geopolitical sand" jackass, or

2) a fundamentalist Muslim yourself.

Just for correlation, compare this "celebration" to the Christian (read "prodominatly western and democratic" here) celebration of Easter, a philosophically similar religious observance mourning the passing and then celebrating the resurrection of a prophet, conducted in, shall we say, quite a different manner.

Sure, the egg thing is a bit silly, but then again so is slicing your skull open with arrestingly large Mameluke sword to show your depth and breadth of religious devotion. People get committed to a rubber room for less...

I would invite all of you who subscribe to the "Islam is a peaceful religion" nonsense to Riyadh's Deera Square, affectionately known by westerners living in the Kingdom as "Chop Chop Square", this Friday at noon to witness Sharia law in action.

You are bound to see something exciting like a beheading, a stoning, or some other delightfully quaint and unmistakably tribal form of punishment that Qur'anic-based law exacts of the recently convicted.

Or if you are really lucky, the prisoner has committed something particularly egregious (like, for example, printing cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad in a rather unflattering light?) and has been sentenced to something rather innocuously called Al-Had, in which the prisoner is affixed to a wooden X mounted in the ground and partially beheaded while the crowd cheers Allah Akbar, "God is great", then mobs the executioner in order to shake his hand and congratulate him for enacting "God's will".

And, before you ask...no, I am not making this up.

Certainly sounds like a religion of peace to me. Let's help spread the word on the utopian tendencies of this much maligned and misunderstood religion populated by bushy bearded pacifists who want nothing but world peace.

Who's with me?

David and Goliath

This past Veteran's Day, I gave a speech on this holiday's significance to a group at a local college. As so happens, the discussion turned towards the war in Iraq. We were (politely believe it or not) discussing the war in Iraq in the context of the Global War on Terrorism when an older Cuban gentleman posed this question: "What is the difference between a terrorist and someone who is a legitimate resistance fighter?"

Fair question...

And my answer was this: “A terrorist intentionally targets, to kill or wound, civilians in order to instill fear into the population of a state in order to coerce that state into accepting their agenda. A freedom fighter attacks lawful targets (as defined under the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Land Warfare) to force the state to legitimize their cause.

What are considered lawful targets? Military personnel and equipment, for example. This is why I cannot fault the Iraqi insurgents for attacking military convoys, patrols, etc. I can fault attacks on Iraqi civilians by the insurgents at polling stations, hospitals, mosques, etc., or taking civilian aid workers or journalists hostage. This falls outside the realm of the internationally accepted definition of lawful war.”

The question was then posed, by a slight, soft spoken Japanese woman, that, “The United States should then be considered a state sponsor of terror due to its targeting of civilians in the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.”

Another fair question...which I answered...

“The difference was one of, unfortunately, numbers. The two atomic bombs were used to avoid a massive US invasion of mainland Japan. Such an invasion would have caused casualties to both military and civilians on both sides on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. So the decision to drop the two atomic bombs was a lesser of two evils. Drop it and kill 100,000 Japanese (approximate total, the majority of which were civilians, according to the Avalon Project at Yale Law School) with no US casualties and minimal damage to the economic and cultural infrastructure of Japan, or invade the Japanese mainland, kill untold numbers of US military and Japanese civilians and military, and destroy the vast majority of the Japanese infrastructure. Do to the effects of "Fat Man" and "Little Boy", the Japanese surrendered unconditionally ending one of the worst wars the world had ever seen.”

Was this attack justified under the circumstances at the time? I believe it was. The world was embroiled in an "unrestricted war", a war that could only be won through massive military conflict at all levels (military, economic, political) involving the entire population of both nations. Unfortunately, the scale of this type of attack was necessary to end the war and thus end the suffering.

We do not face that kind of enemy today. In many ways, we are a victim of our own success. Because of our massive strength and global reach, any military move we make looks like a provocation and therefore, in the eyes of the "oppressed", any asymmetric tactic, to include terrorism or weapons of mass destruction, can be used by David against the modern Goliath without justification and with tacit international support. What we have seen in Tehran in 1979, Beirut in 1983/84, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, Aden in 2000, and New York in 1993 and 2001 and many other places throughout recent history and around the globe is just that.

Some of those attacks were legitimate military targets...some were not. And if David wants to hit Goliath…fine. But when David's intentional targets become those defined by the Geneva Conventions as noncombatants, David had better be prepared for the full wrath of Goliath (this ain't the Bible...this is reality), and not cry foul as he is slowly and methodically eliminated with extreme prejudice. A moral imperative demands it.