Left Flank

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There has already been much discussion about the remaining mysteries surrounding the Syrian plutonium-generation reactor. My own guess (and it is just a guess) is that the Syrian reactor was the fruit of a three-way partnership composed of Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Iran provided the money, idea, and leadership. Iran ordered Syria to provide the site and some of the labor. North Korea provided the expertise, for which Iran paid (directly or indirectly) in cash.

But where Westhawk is even more helpful is the other half of his post: , the NPT system is broken, so he asks, «What will replace the broken NPT-IAEA system?» I would argue that the system is fundamentally sound, if only nuclear powers with intelligence assets would share information and let the IAEA do its job.

The challenge of proliferation control lies not in the lack of proven techniques but in the absence of moral suasion and sustained diplomacy by the world leaders. The American government subsidized the spread of nuclear knowledge through the Atoms for Peace program to counter Soviet influence, and at virtually every critical juncture since then successive administrations have set aside long-term proliferation goals in favor of short-term strategic priorities. (Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz, The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets, and How We Could Have Stopped Him, p. 1844, Palm e-book)

Collins and Frantz advocate the following proposals to fix the system:

• a moratorium on enriched uranium;
• revision of the NPT, including eliminating the right to opt-out and a UN commitment to sanction violators;
• the reduction of nuclear arsenals and a moratorium on the creation of a new generation of weapons;
• restrictions on sales of nuclear technology;
• monitoring of civilian nuclear industries;
• intelligence-sharing

With the exception of sanctions, which are generally a worse remedy than the problems they seek to cure, this is a sane international nuclear policy

Joshua Foust reminds us of the unromantic Tibet. And then, he offers this sage, post-Kosovo advice:

However simply looking down upon China with Holy Western Outrage is not a solution. Ignoring the priggish and quite frankly offensive Han chauvinism (dwarfing even the gaudiest excesses of American chauvinism, which rarely goes beyond empty sloganeering and angry TV pundits), the current Chinese government—which kindly props up our entire financial system through its generous purchasing of our securities and bonds and cheap exports—literally stakes its existence on the government's infallibility. Allowing Tibet independence would require allowing Xinjiang independence… which would also require Taiwan's independence. Many Americans would cheer at the prospect, but hopefully not with the understanding that Chinese society is actually much less homogeneous and far less stable than the CCP likes us to realize. And, like it or not, a stable China means a stable America. We disrupt that at our own peril.

So yes, let us join hands with the spiritual, romantic Tibetan people—I cannot deny their appeal. But let us also do so in a proper context, taking a sober look at the true history and true issues surrounding it. Nothing in anyone's past can justify the horrors visited upon any of the CCP's hundreds of millions of victims. But that is why we should agitate for their redress in a constructive manner—which precludes angrily stomping our feet and shouting slogans. Brave people are literally dying for their freedom in China: let us do them the courtesy of seriously advancing their concerns.

The rest of the post is more informative than all of those western deconstructions on CNN.

McClatchy's Tim Johnson deconstructs in effect today's Beijing-escorted reporters' trip to Jokhang Temple in Lhasa. What makes it so postmodern is the fact that no reporter was actually there.

Okay, so imagine you're a Chinese official in charge of public relations for this disaster: How do you spin it? Do you say the monks drank funny kool-aid this morning? Do you avoid explanations and just move on? Can you plausibly contend that all these monks are part of the «Dalai clique» and have been infiltrated into one of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism?

Or do you just sit and feel that indigestion bubble up in the tummy, another Maalox moment, and prepare to go to the woodshed?

Who knew Tim Johnson was writing a novel?

The Atlantic's Graeme Wood on Buddhist democracy nails it:

There may be something or nothing to learn about democracy from these spectacles. The first suggests that the movement for Tibetan independence does not answer only to the Dalai Lama, and that China may have a bigger problem, with a wider and more distributed base, than it thought. Would Lhasa consider exchanging the unquestioned rule of Hu Jintao for something more than the unquestioned rule of Tenzin Gyatso? As for the Bhutanese monarch, all signs point to democracy -- except for the often and freely expressed desire of the Bhutanese to keep and revere the monarchy, with or without elections. Whatever else this shows, it should put rest to the notion that democratization of the Buddhist street is any simpler -- or more welcome -- than democratization of the Arab one.

Second place in thought-provoking quotes, though, goes to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner:

On Wednesday, Kouchner told RMC radio and BFM television that the boycott was not a bad idea. But "it seems unrealistic," he said. "There are a lot of good ideas that can't be put into practice."

"When you're dealing in international relations with countries as important as China, obviously when you make economic decisions it's sometimes at the expense of human rights," he added. "That's elementary realism."

It's no time for sycophantic devotion to one political course, religion, leader, or even state, especially when repression seems to be expanding.

The Bhutanese electorate is voting because they have no choice, between two parties without a disagreement, and to retain as much of the ancien regime as possible. Just last year, some Bhutanese believed democracy did not fit the Buddhist kingdom.

According to a quote in a CNN report, "It's not that the people of Bhutan don't want democracy. They want monarchy more," Dorji said. "Monarchy has been a success story in this country. We've always had very good kings."

And, there's a darker side.

In 1990, tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalis were forced out of Bhutan after protesting against the imposition of national dress and the closure of Nepali language schools. More than 100,000 now live in crowded camps inside Nepal.

A similar number still live in southern Bhutan, but exiled groups say tens of thousands have been denied identity cards – and thus voting rights – making »a mockery» of the election.

»The strategy is to depopulate people of Nepali origin from the country,» Narad Adhikari of the Druk National Congress, an exile group, said in Kakarvitta, on the India-Nepal border. »If they don't have voting rights, their citizenship is in danger.»

Rebel groups, with recruits largely drawn from the refugee camps, have emerged in the past year and have threatened to disrupt the polls. They have detonated 11 bombs inside Bhutan this year, killing at least one person.

Now, that sounds like a controversy worthy of the people's decision.

Both conservatives and progressives are criticizing the Bush administration for its continued support of Pakistan's embattled president, Pervez Musharraf, and the same could be directed at Republican presidential candidate, John McCain.

Cato Institute advises the Bush administration to stop the personal touch.

Politically, the United States will have to branch out to civilian leaders other than Musharraf in order to maintain some semblance of political stability. Militarily, to prevent the army's gradual erosion, the United States must continue giving aid to Islamabad with strict oversight and the assurance that such funding is being used against insurgents and not against long-time rival India.

The Center for American Progress is slightly less diplomatic.

The Bush administration continues to demonstrate a shocking tone deafness and incompetence when it comes to U.S. policy toward Pakistan. Just recently, the White House press secretary stated that it was too early to tell whether elections had weakened Musharraf's power. In even more disturbing remarks, she continued: "I think what President Musharraf has shown is an ability to provide for the country a chance to be confident in their government."

Furthermore, sources in Islamabad tell us that the administration is asking the PPP to explore forming a coalition government with PML-Q rather than to reach out to former prime minister Sharif's PML-N. In short, the Bush administration may be trying to keep Musharraf in the game and sideline Sharif. The Bush administration has been nervous about Sharif because of his historical closeness to the religious parties in Pakistan, yet sidelining the PML-N could be potentially destabilizing for Pakistan as it controls the heartland of Pakistan through control of the Provincial Assembly in Punjab.

The Bush administration needs to let Pakistan's political parties do their own parliamentary horse-trading without U.S. pressure, but we worry that the administration has refused to learn the lessons of its failed policies in Pakistan. Its efforts to negotiate a deal between President Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto prior to her assassination served to delegitimize her for many Pakistanis, making her a greater target for anti-American extremists in Pakistan.

The administration's consistent over-reliance on President Musharraf emboldened an authoritarian figure who has weakened the nation's independent judiciary and media, making the United States appear to be a force against democracy and the Pakistani people. What's more, U.S. policy has done little to counter the strengthening militant groups in Pakistan. If anything, the administration's ham-handed policies have only inflamed a fragile political and security environment in the country.

Meanwhile, Juan Cole warns that a McCain administration will do no better with Pakistan (as well as defending Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama).

And, let's just consider the shaky dictator Pervez Musharraf, who just suffered a sharp rebuke from the Pakistani electorate, as I wrote about today in Salon.com. McCain appears never to have met a rightwing dictator he didn't like. McCain defends the dictator. Here is what McCain said about Musharraf late last December:

"Prior to Musharraf, Pakistan was a failed state," McCain said. "They had corrupt governments and they would rotate back and forth and there was corruption, and Musharraf basically restored order. So you're going to hear a lot of criticism about Musharraf that he hasn't done everything we wanted him to do, but he did agree to step down as head of the military and he did get the elections."

There's much more in this blog, so make it a priority!

I'm undecided about buying former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's posthumously published plea for Islamic and civilizational «Reconciliation». Mostly, I can't forgive her for abetting A.Q. Khan to build his uranium bomb (and, recall her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, got Khan started), but The Economist is about as even-handed as I care to read about Ms. Bhutto and keep considering a purchase.

Much of this book's argument has been rehearsed before. Bhutto defends Islam's liberal, tolerant traditions. The first person to embrace the religion, she points out, was a woman, Bibi Khadijah, later to become the Prophet's wife. And she debunks as “convenient and simplistic” the notion that Islam and democracy are somehow incompatible. Yet her own political overview of Muslim countries tends also to be rather simplistic.

She tackles head-on the thesis of Samuel Huntington's essay and book, “The Clash of Civilisations”, declaring herself a “reconciliationist”, not a “clasher”. She even proposes her blueprint for reconciliation: a kind of Islamic Marshall plan, using the petrodollars of the Gulf and the riches of the West, Japan and China to assist “the Islamic world to leap into modernity”.

The observation that economic backwardness fuels anti-Western feeling and fanaticism, however, is hardly new. Familiar, too, is her analysis of the culpability of the West in propping up dictators where they seem strategically useful, undermining its claims to be promoting democracy. The victims of this hypocrisy include, of course, her own country, which, like a recent cover of this newspaper, she calls “the most dangerous place in the world”. Her effort to make it safer led her last year to negotiate with Pervez Musharraf, the president she had long reviled as an unprincipled military dictator. She recounts the pragmatic haggling that enabled her return, at the expense, her critics would argue, of the unity of the civilian democratic opposition.

Here as elsewhere in this book and in Bhutto's autobiography, “Daughter of the East”, there is a tension between the fervour of her expressed ideals and the reality of her political life. Her refusal to acknowledge any mistakes during her deeply disappointing stints as prime minister may be inevitable in a campaigning politician. But it made it hard to share her enthusiasm for what she might achieve at the third attempt.

But, yes, she was brave.

I'm sure this will never be good enough for the Pakistan's People's Party or Ms. Bhutto's family—and dámn it, if the lone gunman is still out there for conspiracy theorists to search for—but it was just a distraction from the larger issues.

Western diplomats warned that the findings in Scotland Yard's report will not help president Pervez Musharraf's government tackle the political fallout from Ms Bhutto's killing, as Pakistan heads towards parliamentary elections which are now due on February 18th. Earlier, the elections were due on January 8th but were delayed after nationwide riots occurred following Ms Bhutto's killing.

«The PPP will keep on arguing that this was a conspiracy hatched possibly with support of people in Pakistan's ruling structure» said one western diplomat. «They will keep on rejecting Scotland Yard's outcome».

The Pakistani government this week announced the arrest of two suspects in Ms Bhutto's killing. A third was arrested last month, when Pakistani officials accused Baitullah Mehsud, the pro-Taliban Islamic militant, of backing Ms Bhutto's assassins. But the official position has been thrown into fresh controversy after officials on Wednesday confirmed a ceasefire between Mr Mehsud and Pakistani government troops in the region bordering Afghanistan.

Now, excuse me while I stick a finger down my throat to purge my reaction to the "creeping convenient canonization of Benazir Bhutto." Individual Count strikes just the right chord.