Bloodless Coup

I remember getting the first Tom Clancy Ghost Recon game back in '01 or '02. It was about Georgia striking back against Ossetian separatists who were acting on behalf of hardline Russians, then the Russians trying to rebuild the Soviet Union by hitting them back and seeing if anyone would do anything. I give him the freebie with writing about a plane flying into the U.S. Capitol, back in the 90's. But it really does look like Tom Clancy has his hands on the pulse of the future.

Uh, so a Jack Ryan figure is going to become president?

When you write 100 books related to current conflicts it's not a shock that parts of your plots in a couple of them might unfold later.

But if you think he's a psychic - okay.

And, in fairness, when scores of books, video games, etc., are written in your name, a la V.C. Andrews, it's likely that any of the numerous bright people who are toiling for your name's and fortune's greater glory, one of those unnamed masses will, in the way of blind squirrels, happen upon a nut from time to time.

Next, a massive, global conventional conflict effectively decided by the battle for Iceland . . .

I'm a writer. If I were going to do one of these "Tom Clancy's Op Center" or whatever books, the very first thing I'd do is call Baltar and say, "Hey, I need a war. What's a hot spot most Americans haven't heard of that could erupt big one of these days?"

I bet most of the folks contributing to these series started with a question like that. Eventually, if the scenario was at all plausible, some of these maybe-hot-spots will heat up. I haven't read a single one of these books, but I'm comfortable predicting that there will be more overlap between the books and reality in the future.

So, what you're saying is that we're aware of these hot spots? These sorts of wars are to some degree predictable? Sounds like you guys agree with the assumptions behind a pre-emptive war.

No, what I'm saying is that Tom Clancy is a semi-literate idiot who got lucky a couple of times, not any sort of magic psychic foreign relations expert.

Are you saying that "regional conflicts can be seen and their escalation to some extent anticipated" is the same as saying that "supposedly-preemptive wars are justified"? I'm sort of astonished that I would even need to make this statement, but NO IT ISN'T.

Gosh, I thought he was saying that people who study conflict might know more about where it might erupt than the average writer. And perhaps that writers have been known to talk to such experts when creating plots.

And that such experts exist, and they don't have to be psychic to acquire such expertise. And that most writers -- at least, most writers who are making a living at writing -- are information sponges and make a point of learning from experts on subjects they're planning to write about.

There's nothing in there that gets you to supporting "pre-emptive wars", Morris. A preemptive war is still a war. I'd just as soon preempt that, too.

"And that such experts exist, and they don't have to be psychic to acquire such expertise."

Indeed, although they have had to find jobs somewhere other than the Bush administration, 'cause those folks aren't hiring the smarty-pants types (and when they do, by accident (Powell, Whitman, O'Neill), they fire them right quick).

Back to the topic for a moment... hey, Morris, this is one of those moments where some of that "soft power" all those lefters talk about would be damned useful, eh? Too bad we don't seem to have any handy at the moment, eh?

I do love the spectacle of the various neocons trying to figure out how to rattle the sabers without actually, like, confronting the reality of what war with Russia would mean. (BTW Baltar, I think that alone makes a pretty compelling argument for voting for Obama, smug Clintonite hangers-on and one-party rule and iffy tax proposals notwithstanding.)

It's a really really shitty situation but given the reality of the US's position in the world at the moment I don't see that there's a damned thing we can do about it. Any of you IR experts disagree?

There is butt-fuck all we can do about it. Our "hard power" is tied down elsewhere (and I don't know how we'd do against Russia in their backyard), and we have no "soft power" (Bush pissed it all away).

Russia gets to dictate whatever terms it wants to Georgia, and then everyone goes home and thinks about it for a while. Russia just announced they are back in the game (at least locally), and that the expansion of NATO is dead.

Um, well, if you are the of the NeoCon or Cheney worldview, of course there isn't anything we can do about it. For them anything short of war is pointless and useless. However, war against strong states is usually too costly. So they huff and puff and look all manly, but actually only pull the trigger against weak states (like the weakest member of the "Axis of Evil").

They are forced to sit by, fuming but impotent, when big states do bad things. Unless of course they are indeed crazy enough to go to war against Russia.

It's a good thing they are completely disinterested in non-war IR issues (pandemics, global warming, species dying off in the global commons, etc.) - one wonders what they'd feel forced to bomb to "fix" those problems.

Our hard power is used up? We're hardly using our tanks or artillery, if we wanted to intervene, but you're making assumptions here. The first is our intervention may be Russia's strategic goal, to make us redeploy so that we don't finish the war in Iraq, so we look weaker. The second is, either Russian generals are pathological liars, or Russian command and control is so f-ed up that nobody know what anyone else is doing. Now, they could be planting disinformation, but why?

Telling people again and again that you're not moving forward and you're going to stop, and then moving forward and not stopping, makes it clear to everyone that you're the bad guy who can't be trusted. This could be a whopping amount of intentional military deception, or it could be a whopping amount of no clear signal from the top, so they assume they're not supposed to stop until they hear from Putin, or there's no clear signal through the field, or Putin is afraid to tell them to stop because he's afraid they won't.

This appears to be either about Russian military prestige or about their incompetence, but no Democrat is calling for Russian generals or Secretaries of Defense to be brought to trial for violating the human rights of Georgians. No Democrat is saying because there's a strategic pipeline involved that Russians want blood for oil. They'll only piss in the American pool.

In any case, it looks bad. And may I remark that for all those who bitched and bitched about our Iraqi coalition being small, this is what unilateral action looks like. This is what a pre-emptive war looks like. But honestly, if they want to get into another Afghanistan situation to keep oil from being piped out, I say let them. Supply the Georgian insurgency, just as Russia supplied Saddam.

Gorby chimes in today. I think he is... not entirely unpersuasive.

Morris, I mostly don't know what the hell you think you're talking about. But you keep hammering on this "pre-emptive war" thing, as if it's some sort of cosmic special case. You do understand that a "pre-emptive war" is still just a war, right? And that war is best avoided because shit gets blown up and people die horribly and stuff, right?

Morris, I'd love to have another fight with you, but your comment was pretty much incomprehensible. Can you restate whatever point you are trying to make?

"our intervention may be Russia's strategic goal, to make us redeploy so that we don't finish the war in Iraq, so we look weaker."

{snickers} seriously? you believe that?

but onward: i take it you think that us going into iraq with 200,000 troops-ish, about twelve of whom weren't ours, was manifestly less "preemptive" than russia taking on a neighbor that has, at least arguably, been directly challenging its authority and rubbing its face in ongoing disputes all along? i don't agree that an invasion was called for, but there are real provocations there far more substantial -- well, far more true -- than the attenuated, unsubstantiated, and ultimately-revealed-as-false mock-provocations we claimed as justification for invading a country on the other side of the world.

and as for democrats: could you please explain to me how the overall gist of what obama said differs from mccain's comments on the same issue? i mean, mccain obviously tacitly hewed to the party line, that if it involves the UN it must be gay, and we hate gay, while obama seemed to think it might be nice to work within the confines of the international law we do have, such as it is. but both condemned the resort to violence. so when you castigate democrats for not calling for war crimes prosecutions, do you think that might be a bit premature?

Moon,
We have accomplished all we can accomplish with our military in Iraq. Violence is down, Sadr's kowtowing, so it's now up to the Iraqis to make it right. Russia couldn't do that in Afghanistan, because we supported an insurgency againt them. They support Iran who supported the Iraqi insurgency, and they lost their proxy war.

Russia spent most of the years leading up to Iraqi freedom opposing us at every turn, taking the oil for food bribes and interfering with every one of the twenty something UN resolutions we got condemning Iraq. For Obama, twenty something resolutions wasn't enough. He still didn't think our military could accomplish what it has accomplished. How many would it take for Obama to be convinced an intervention was warranted?

Russia's been blasted internationally, and Russia doesn't care. They're showing the world what they think they can get away with, very much like when Saddam went into Kuwait. And they keep telling people they're stopping, and Obama's veep contender jumps out and says, "Look at the cease fire Obama got!" And Russian infantry keep marching into Georgia.

How many times would it take before Obama thought we could help out a fellow democracy, how far would he let the Russians get? Georgia? Ukraine? Lithuania? Poland? Germany? He's a citizen of the world, so how much of the world would he let them take before he thought military aggression by evil America was a better option? I bet Putin's got a zero to five plan for children, just like Obama has. I bet Putin's got a socialized medicine plan, just like Obama does. What makes you believe that Obama would think a country full of racist and rich white people is more deserving than poor Russians when it comes to governing the world of which Obama wants to be a citizen?

I don't know what's worse, you making shit up about Putin or you making shit up about Obama resembling your made up Putin. There's too much ridiculousness here to engage, like planning a building in a hypothetical gravity-free environment located just off the southern shore of manhattan. I mean, seriously Morris, wtf? There's nothing to debate here, because there's nothing you've said that's true, except that it's time to get out of Iraq. I'm glad to hear that you're falling into lockstep with your GOP buddies who considered timetables literally traitorous until, well, they started thinking about how foolish they looked, what with the Iraqis saying give us a timetable already. Thing is, this is not a new advent; they've wanted us out for a while. And you are correct: Iraq has finally returned to the status quo, sans Hussein, with a mockery of democracy, which, whether we leave now or in ten years, will almost surely resort to some sort of semi-stable authoritarian mockery of democracy the likes of which they had under Saddam. It'll be better for them than it was under Saddam in the 80s, and better for them than it was when we wandered off noncommitally in 93 and left them holding the bag with an embarrassed and pissed off and undeposed dictator, but it won't be any better for them than it was in the few years before the war. Not saying it didn't suck then. Just saying it's now sucked much worse for the past five years, and if they're lucky it'll only suck as bad as, say, 2000, when we're gone.

Then there's this: "For Obama, twenty something resolutions wasn't enough. He still didn't think our military could accomplish what it has accomplished. How many would it take for Obama to be convinced an intervention was warranted?"

First of all, this was never about what our military could accomplish in terms of hard power. Find me one place where Obama said our military wasn't up to the task of blowing a third-world country back into the stone age. He almost surely noted that our country wasn't up to the soft power engagement required, and almost surely was mocked by the GOP for it for daring to think soft power had anything to do with it. They'll watch us blow up statues and greet us with flowers, they said. They'll feel liberated, they said. And anyone who thinks the Iraqis won't be positively smitten with us once they see how well we blow shit up, well, there won't be any who aren't positively smitten, so why waste our resources considering that, they said.

Obama probably thought that, for an intervention to be warranted, either it ought to be the worst humanitarian crisis going on at the moment (if, indeed, we decide we're in that business -- and not just as a post hoc rationalization for a war explicitly couched in preempting a supposed imminent threat to our safety), which Iraq wasn't at the time (although it's surely much higher on the list now) -- or it ought to be against a nation that presents a clear and present danger to Americans on American soil, which Iraq wasn't at the time. For clear and present danger, it was Afghanistan, Morris, and for an even clearer and more present danger, Morris, it was Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia's our country club lunch buddy (and by our, I mean our noble GOP, who surely wouldn't share a conversation with a country known to harbor elements seeking our destruction, because that's a scuzzy Democrat thing, right Morris? right Morris?), and Afghanistan isn't as picturesque, what with all the poor people in shacks and the snowy mountains and the long arduous task of dickering with Pakistan (another truly threatening country we don't have the balls to call out for what it is) about whether and to what extent will be able to, you know, actually wage a war on terrorists hiding within Pakistani boundaries.

Whatever, Morris. Seriously. You're just making shit up, and at this point you're just recyclying the same old canards, and I'm just reeling under the same old sense that you'd rather conduct your debates in alternate universes where you don't have to support anything you say than in the real world, where you're typically not so much wrong as you are just arguing from imagined premises that bear no resemblance to reality.

Why don't you just cut to the chase and resort to Clinton-bashing again. Or maybe start serially misspelling Obama's first name. Or even better, start sprinkling your ridiculous lies about him with references to his middle name, his deep secret fidelity to his Islamic overlords, whatever. {Cue ghost noises and scary wide eyes}

Moon,
I don't know what's worse, the boredom of listening to Obama say "Uh...uh...uh..." a hundred times in his speeches, or your repeating the liberal ad hominem attack of saying anyone who disagrees with you a liar. Your ignorance of anything but Michael Moore's version of Iraq "in the few years before the war" astounds me. Children were dying by the thousands because of sanctions imposed to encourage compliance with inspections, but Saddam preferred secrecy to letting children drink milk.

"Find me one place where Obama said our military wasn't up to the task of blowing a third-world country back into the stone age."

Find me a place where anyone not elected to the U.S. Senate in one year claimed so much significance to his opposition of a Senate act in the years before he was even elected. I'd love to be able to quote to you from a U.S. Senate transcript about what Obama was saying in 2001, 2002, or 2003 about Iraq, but he wasn't there yet. He doesn't have a national record. But we know from his words he was opposed to the liberation of Iraq, and I wonder how many children had to die and how many Kurds had to be exterminated before it became a humanitarian crisis worth his word stumbles.

Yes, the Shiites and Sunnis are still in conflict. But then I've never heard the Kurds complain, and even the Sunnis and Shiites now see that we're better than AQ, this is why they no longer rebel. You can't realistically expect a soft power solution in a country ruled by someone who defies dozens of UN resolutions, and the hard power was necessary to provide order such that someone worse didn't fill the emptiness if we eliminated Saddam. Without order, democracy doesn't work.

Maybe McCain is too much frontal assault, but Obama is too much of nothing doing. The UN judged Saddam's compliance wanting again and again, and you'd think that would mean something to a citizen of the world like Obama. How many Georgians would have to die before Obama sent in the tanks? Saddam killed a hundred thousand of his people, and Obama didn't think that was enough of a humanitarian crisis to risk the American alternative to Saddam's rule.

mostly, i'm done with this morris. i just want to point out that it's really tiresome to hear the circular canard about how we can't rely on the UN because the UN is ineffectual when a great deal of the UN's ineffectuality is due to our lack of regard for its actions. we refused to pay our dues for years and years, and never paid them in full. we proved time and time again that, when the UN didn't do exactly what we wanted we'd simply ignore it. which is something like louisiana deciding it just doesn't like the FMLA and ignoring it. ditto, the ICC. we can flout the very notion of international law, as we so often do, on a principle of unfettered sovereignty. but we can't pretend to support it while doing everything to undermine it, and pretend no one's going to notice that we're the primary reason these international organizations are entirely moribund.

oh, and btw, i'm not calling republicans and others who disagree with me on policy liars per se. there are plenty who know the first thing about formulating an argument from identified premises with at least some modicum of support in reasonably trustworthy sources, and i enjoy debating them. hell, i'm not even calling you a liar, as such; i'm reasonably sure that you are, at most, spinning things you absolutely believe to be true. what i'm doing is calling your mode of expression incoherent. and by that i will continue to stand until you stop ignoring the tacit and unsupported assumptions necessary to your arguments, stop changing the subject whenever cornered on something you can't support, and stop deploying various transparent tactics designed to obfuscate rather than persuade.

and at a minimum, you really ought to look up irony. i love your first sentence: "i don't know what's worse, [ad hominem attack on obama], or or your repeating the liberal ad hominem attack of saying anyone who disagrees with you a liar." sort of like the nails-on-a-blackboard ridiculousness of listening to all the bushies out there talking, vis-a-vis georgia, about how wildly inappropriate it is in the 21st century to solve our international disputes by invading countries, occupying capitals, deposing disfavored leaders, etc. if only we had a robust international organization we could rely on to sort these things out when they happen . . . .

irony, it would seem, is not the right's strong suit. or rather, avoiding irony isn't.

So Morris, you are advocating the US military intervene in every instance around the world where tanks are rolling and children are dying? Good luck with that. You'll bankrupt the country, destroy our hegemony (such as it is), and see thousands of Americans killed and maimed for ... what exactly? So we can bring "order" (which of course often comes with killing innocents, at least in regimes like that which we've helped set up in Iraq), after we make war in Iraq, Zimbabwe, India, China, Burma, Sudan, Lebanon ... And yes, obviously this would all go against international law and the UN (which for some reason in this thread you think's important, though I don't recall that being a general position of yours). If you want that kind of war-war-war approach to our problems, which will unite the other powers against us, drain our ability to defend ourselves against them or other threats, and of course obliterate the national treasury from being able to spend money on things like health care for the needy or highways, have at McCain - he seems perfect for you.

Btw, your (pointless & trivial) opening is freakin' bizarre. Obama is the best speaker national politics has seen in our lifetime. Whereas McCain ... not so much.

Bro,
"Obama is the best speaker national politics has seen in our lifetime."

Um, you may be right, um, I don't really know, um, I haven't been talking about this much, um, Mr. Mackey, umkay? He has as good a speech writer as we've seen in our generation, but when he takes questions, he's full of ums and uhs, among other things. Why do you think he won't debate McCain in town hall meetings, as he was challenged to do? He's inarticulate.

As I've said before, the liberation of Iraqis is an experiment in bringing democracy to the Middle East. If it works, we keep it up. If it fails, we blast our threats there back to the stone age. What Russia did to Georgia, we can do to Iran. Iran isn't a threat to us because they're democratic, they're a threat because they're a closed society intent on weapons of terrible power. As much as you might enjoy the ambivalence of moral equivalence, this isn't it.

Moon,
If the other countries of the UN actually paid their peacekeepers the money Americans pay them to pay their peacekeepers, they might keep the peace. But many don't, so their peacekeepers engage in shady deals or steal rather than focus on, you know, the peacekeeping. Oil for food and sanctions against Iraq were a great example of UN corruption, because they're given no incentive to do good. This is the problem with Obama's zero to five plan to place all children under the care of the state. If that works out as well as the foster care system, we'll have tens of millions of mentally scarred kids within just a few years. The UN is what it is, a way to build a consensus that singles out rogue nations, like Iraq. But when Russia and China have more incentive to oppose us than to oppose injustice, we're screwed.

You think McCain is a better speaker than Obama?
Let me know when the shuttle lands bro.

And what the hell are you talking about in your last paragraph? So pro-life you wants to kill 60 or 70 million Iranian people b/c they seek weapons that we have - and them seeking our weapons makes them evil or something, but our government wouldn't be remotely evil by carrying out a policy in which we murder millions? We would be superior even if we blew 'em all to tiny radiocative bits? Because I take it such an action wouldn't make us morally equivalent in your eyes ... mmmmmkay.

If a person threatens me, how wise am I to let them near a weapons? Our policy isn't to murder millions, it is to sacrifice good Americans, good soldiers, so that we can show them mercy. Fallujah would be nothing but radioactive bits if that was not our policy. We went in and lost American lives so we would not have to kill them all. But if the Shiites were to say, take control of Iraq and use our training and weapons bought with our money against us, then we don't need to sacrifice any more soldiers.

If Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons, we don't need to sacrifice any more soldiers out of some misplaced sense of kindness that gets us a moment's emotional relief for our trouble, because it's not our trouble. It is that of a soldier's family. If radical Islamists in power won't leave us alone (9/11), and they won't make peace, and they won't stop developing weapons with which to destroy us, no rational society could let them continue. If they want to live according to an anti-progressive, anti-technological religion of the Middle Ages, then they should have no desire for modern weapons. But they do. That worries me. And it worries me that Obama isn't worried. Natanz must be destroyed.

Morris, first, of course Obama is worried. If you actually bothered to read his statements before bad-mouthing him you might know that.

Secondly, the analogous situation is - imagine if Iranian troops were in Canada and Mexico and a big Iranian fleet was continually off all our sea borders. And Iran's leaders had labeled us a leading state in an Axis of Evil, and continually threatened to bring down our government. And that we didn't have nukes. Ummm, don't you think a rational response in that situation would be for us to build nukes? So given our political/military policies in their region and toward their state, isn’t it entirely predictable they would seek them?

And hey, I'm not saying anything about US policy relating to civilian deaths. I get your point (though your point is exaggerated given the amount of air attacks we rely on, which end up killing lots of civilians) - you yourself said "blast ... back to the stone age" - which doesn't suggest we are on the side of goodness and measured responses, people taking up the cause of oppressed civilians the world over (which for some reason you want us to do).

And since when is Islam anti-technology? Hardly. And what on Earth are you talking about re: 9/11? Last I checked, Iran didn't carry that out.

Are they a threat? Sure. Should we try to stop them from getting nukes? Sure. But I have my doubts about bombing them back to the stone age achieving that aim. There are of course a variety of reasons for that, but a simple one is - won't it just make them more threatened? So won't they just rebuild it? I mean if the Iranians bombed us are you suggesting we'd just cower before them and do their bidding? And if you think that's NOT what we'd do - why do you think that's what the Iranians would do if we bombed them?

Of course it goes without saying that this has little to do with Russia and Georgia, but this is one of those threads that's gotten hopelessly off-topic.

And gosh, btw, you are noting regimes (led by fundamentalist Shiites that we had a role in putting in power) we spent vast sums of treasure and blood on might not do our bidding! Who knew! Maybe that suggests that spending vast sums on such adventurism isn’t a good idea.