Left Flank

Whether militarily or to foster political reform, Matthew Yglesias makes some good arguments why the US doesn't need to be involved in the Middle East.

The basic proposition here is that if our military weren't so intimately involved in the Middle East, that this would run the risk of economic harm via instability in oil supplies. And fair enough, but our current policies have economic costs of their own in terms of both monetary expenditures (about $1 trillion on Iraq thus far, more than that in terms of bases and fixed infrastructure over the past couple of decades) in terms of terrorist attacks, in terms of pricey efforts to secure ourselves against terrorist attack (been on an airplane lately?), as well as in various other familiar airy senses.

That's the short-run trade-off. In the longer term, we could massively mitigate the harms Pollack is worried about here by investing in making our country less oil dependent so that fluctuations in the price of oil wouldn't be such a big deal. A move of that sort would, of course, be a costly and difficult undertaking. But the alternative «a broad program of economic and political reform» that «will take decades, if not longer» to complete certainly doesn't sound any easier. And certainly there's no effort here to make an explicit cost-benefit calculation and explain why our past ten years' worth of forward-leaning policy in the Gulf have brought us more in economic benefits than they've cost, or that completely remaking the political and society of the Arab world would be easier or cheaper than building a lot of windmills and trains.

And, here's a better reason: most American oil comes from the Americas, not the Middle East.

With the recent disclosures about DPRK-Syria cooperation at al-Kibar, context is a rare commodity, and The Economist delivers.

Judging by its past behaviour, North Korea would do pretty much anything for cash; there are suspicions that it helped the Khan network supply nuclear material to Libya. That said, providing engineers and designs for Syria's reactor may chiefly have been meant to tweak America's nose, says Michael Green, a former Bush administration official now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

The Bush administration and North Korea fell out badly in 2002 over charges that Kim Jong Il's regime had secretly been trying to enrich uranium (also a potential bomb ingredient) while plutonium production was frozen by a previous agreement. The following year North Korea privately threatened to expand its «deterrent», test it (which it later did) and even sell it. With little to export beyond counterfeit currency, drugs and crises, says Mr Green, North Korea used Syria to up the ante—and the expected compensation for later agreeing to desist.

Now America and Mr Kim are negotiating again as part of a six-party deal (also including South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) to tempt him to give up his bombs. Senior American officials last week acknowledged that they had debated whether to try a combination of diplomacy and threats to end the Syrian project. For Israel, however, the Syrian reactor was an existential threat-in-the-making. There was no green light from the United States, the officials said: «none was asked for, none was given.»

Hoping to avoid retaliation, and to head off the risk of a wider Middle East war, Israel wanted the intelligence that led to the bombing kept secret. Worried that wider disclosure would sink the six-party effort too, America briefed only a score of senior members of Congress at the time.

But now the administration needs Congress's support for a controversial deal that could fall significantly short of the prize that the six-party negotiations were supposed to deliver: that, in return for oodles of energy aid and a lifting of some key sanctions, North Korea would first provide a full and accurate accounting of its nuclear past and later dismantle all its nuclear programmes. Instead it has merely declared a rather modest stockpile of plutonium and dug its heels in. Trying to move talks forward, American diplomats have struck a tentative deal that would allow North Korea to «acknowledge» American «concerns» about uranium and proliferation activities, in return for better verification of Yongbyon's plutonium haul. But the backtracking led Congress to demand the facts on Syria first.

George Bush said this week that by going public, America wanted to press North Korea's (notoriously impervious) Kim Jong Il into fuller disclosure, and send a message to proliferators everywhere. But the Syrian pictures may just as easily lead Congress to demand that America adopt a tougher stance in the six-party talks.

Another casualty could be the NPT itself. The IAEA's boss, Mohamed ElBaradei, says inspectors should have been given information about the Syrian reactor sooner by America and Israel. Yet Syria, had it not chosen to deny all, could have claimed that technically it was doing nothing wrong. Building a nuclear reactor is not against NPT rules, unless done with weapons intent—and that is hard, if not impossible, for inspectors to prove, says Henry Sokolski of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington. However, under a 1992 rule accepted by Syria, it should have alerted the IAEA to its reactor plans before construction started. North Korea, Iran and now Syria. The NPT seems there for the breaking.

Firstly, comes NPT reform and a proper way to share intelligence. And then, the US can deal with its armistice with the DPRK. In that order!

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«Why did fate have to throw me into the peaceful lives of honest smugglers Like a stone hurled into the placid surface of a pond I had disturbed their tranquility, and like a stone had nearly gone to the bottom myself!»i Like Mikhail Lermontov's fictional account of Pechorin's encounter with smugglers in «Taman» in A Hero of Our Time, I am not certain if one could legitimately label Robert D. Kaplan in Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, or any number of politicians, border guards, and professors he interviews, a victim. In Lermontov's «Taman», the seducer, Pechorin, unwittingly becomes the pawn and victim of a «supple», singing smuggler, and then a boy thief steals his saber and dagger. Kaplan might lose a little cash obtaining a visa on his running interview from Hungary to Armenia, but his interviewees always steal an opportunity to tell their respective tales. I would like to believe Kaplan orchestrated his interviews as cunningly as he organized his itinerary from one storied city to another, but like Lermontov, whose realistic portrait of the depraved Pechorin is nearly lost among his sordidly colorful characters and the enchanting Caucasus itself, Kaplan reveals a cramped world full of crooks and despots.

Pechorin's Ghost: A Critique of Kaplan's Eastward To Tartary - Get more documents