Thousands from Palestinian surge over border remain in Egypt
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
There are a dozen old saws to cover it: Washington is a one crisis city. Too many fish to fry. When it rains, it pours. Balancing on one leg. Etc., etc.
They all boil down to the fact that a major crisis – which had been brewing for years – has now blossomed in peaceful, tranquil, and [they hope], increasingly prosperous – and self-satisfied Europe.
No, the Cold War isn’t back.
Because try as he may to lament it [the fall of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”], or even try to redress it, Russia’s “Paramount Leader” Vladimir Putin cannot recreate it. He cannot regain the Soviet Union’s old glory because of his demographic catastrophe, his failure to even begin reform of Russia’s institutions [not the least the military], the total economic dependence on hydrocarbon exports [into which inadequate funds are not being reinvested], a bleeding sore on his southern borders which he has now exacerbated [with another hidden one tied to it within his 25 million Muslim minority] … and much more.
But the new Rasputin has set in motion a series of events which will demand maximum attention from President George W. Bush in his lame duck months during a heated presidential campaign. It might even get the attention of the Europeans on their sacrosanct August holidays.
The problem is, of course, that out there in the rest of the jungle, the old and some new, problems are continuing to percolate. And, in that way history has of deluding us with multiple dramatic current events, they could be in the long run as important if not more so than the clash in Georgia.
China will have concluded the Olympics in a few more days. The extravaganza has done little to enhance Beijing’s image abroad, with its totalitarian gigantism and shortcuts, its oppressive atmosphere, its demonstration of all the weaknesses of a system that wants to have modernity on the cheap but with the old cudgels. The manufactured glory may have massaged some of the most exposed nerves of Chinese nationalism. But when the last medal is awarded, none of China’s mounting problems would have been ameliorated in the slightest – not its growing inflation, the falling rate of export growth on which it is so dependent, the growing unemployment, especially of the young educated, the deteriorating rural economy, the poisonous disregard of the environment, growing dissidence. Nor would the world have any better answer of what Beijing’s leadership intends with a huge and growing military machine. It’s not Washington’s problem today, but tomorrow …
Pakistan may be headed for a crisis of the regime. Islamofascists based in the tribal areas not only continue to train and encourage terrorism against the West, but increasingly have chosen Pakistani targets, threatening civil government. Civilian politicians, failed repeatedly in the past, have been thrown into an inadequate government without the support – but for the moment, the tolerance – of the military, the country’s only viable institution. There may now be a struggle to either impeach and dishonor its most recent leader, President Pervez Musharraf, destroying any further hope of political consensus by doing it. American aid still flows to Pakistan in the war against terror, but having failed to effect a shot-gun marriage between Musharraf and the politicians, the job of micromanaging [or mismanaging] has been turned over to the Brits, who the last time they tried to settle Subcontinental problems brought on the bloody Partition.
As though President Hamid Karzai were not a weak enough figure, his glorious green cape notwithstanding, and Afghanistan’s problems of becoming a semi-modern state not enough, a full-fledged Indian-Pakistan clandestine intelligence war is snowballing in that country. While NATO’s 70,000 troops [and the U.S. hard core of 26,000] are coming under increasing attack, New Delhi and Islamabad are trading accusations and insults about the activities of their spy organizations Both are notorious for spending most of their time trying to upset the other with whatever means. In the Hobbseian world of the tribals on the Afghan-Pak border, this exacerbates old feuds dating from even before the British raj, defeating what is supposed to be a joint U.S.-Pakistan-Afghan-Indian effort to end the sanctuary for the international terrorists in the area. Luckily, at least so far, India-Pakistan relations have not descended to the levels which produced two and a half wars since their independence 61 years ago but …
Shorn of his Communist support because he bluffed through a nuclear technology agreement with the U.S., seen as another element in a growing “strategic” alliance between Washington and New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is soon facing elections. His political Svengali, the Italian-born Nehru dynasty widow, Sonia Gandhi, will be up against strong opposition in the Bharatiya Janata Party. Its Hindu revivalist roots will be showing as it seeks to best Singh’s Congress on issues where it has flip-flopped, including the American alliance, but sure to arouse the growing Muslim-Hindu violence in the country. Admitting now that all Indian Muslim terrorism is not Pakistan-directed, official New Delhi is trying to cope with the worst violence in decades in the disputed territory of Kashmir where a half a million security force cannot keep the peace and …
India’s shadow miniature on its northern border, the once little Shangrila kingdom of Nepal, has a new government headed by self-professed Maoists. So dementedly immersed in Marxian radicalism are they that their leader, the former guerrilla chief Prachanda [a nom de guerre. “the fierce one”, of the Bhramin high caste Hindu] has seen the current Chinese regime as unacceptably “revisionist”. However, faced, after a bloody decade of violence that cost thousands of lives, he now must wrestle with the problems of inflation in one of the world’s poorest countries, resurrecting tourism as its only real industry beyond subsistence agriculture. But, he says, simultaneously, destroying the remnants of feudalism. All this, however, not an academic problem for India, since his thugs have their roots and alliances with similar violent, armed movements in a dozen Indian states next door and …
The effort to restrain North Korea’s nuclear and missile weapons program – and its proliferation of them to pariah regimes all over the world – is about where it was when Washington set out to use the Chinese, Pyongyang’s only ally. Beijing has either coaxed or finagled North Korea into a set of agreements which were supposed to inch toward implementation. State Dept. negotiators whistle Dixie going through the graveyard at midnight but already the North Koreans as is their custom have missed deadlines and promises of fulfillment. Now Washington has applied the brakes – refusing, for example, to take North Korea off its state terrorism list which has wide economic implications – and seems to have once again taken up Tokyo’s complaint of Pyongyang;s unfilled promise to account for dozens of Japanese kidnapped over the years. With the possibility new famine due to the diversion of past aid to one of the world’s largest military, there will be new excruciating policy choices and …Are all these America’s problems, one might well ask. The answer is, unhappily, that though they may not be, U.S. strategies and tactics toward each one of them – or even a policy of nonintervention – is a paramount issue for all sides. Whether that is as it should be, or whether it is even true, almost defies an answer. The world thinks so even at a moment it is calling for American action or inaction, sometimes at the same time. [Persian Gulf Arab voices calling for American attack on the Iranian nuclear weapons efforts, whatever the consequences from the leading exponent of state terrorism in the world through its tentacles throughout the Mideast, and the world.]
As the “hyperpower” – as the old French anti-Americans put it – however enmeshed in Iraq, and with pacifistic candidate Barack Obama’s enthusiastic approval, soon to be even more caught up in Afghanistan, Washington will still continue to get the 2am calls. [It is somewhat instructive if sardonic to note that our Nepalese friend of the Maoist affections spent a good deal of his career – he was a former school teacher – making his way in the world through American–assisted “projects” to his little Himalayan country.]
Tiblis, Moscow, Bucharest, Brussels today … Kabul, Delhi, Islamabad, Beijing, Pyongyang tomorrow. The next president of the U.S. would be well advised to remember all this as he trundles from one rubber chicken meal to another get the job.