Hat tip to Oxblog, who has a whole post up on the new Secretary of the Army Army Chief of Staff (thanks, Mark…). What caught my eye was an this old CNN story:

According to a once-secret Army memo, Gen. Peter Jan Schoomaker, who was in charge of a special forces unit at the time, declined to provide an assessment of the FBI plan for the siege of the [Waco] compound.

Believe it or not, this is good news…

“….This was not a military operation and could not be assessed as such,” Schoomaker, a career special forces soldier, wrote in the memo describing the meeting.

“We explained that the situation was not one that we had ever encountered and that the Rules of Engagement for the FBI were substantially different than for a military operation.”

One of the soldiers told the Justice Department officials in attendance: “We can’t grade your paper,” according to the memo.

Well, he understands the limitations and boundaries between civilian and military action. That’s a good sign.

In today’s L.A. Times (intrusive registration required – use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’, and you are guaranteed at least two popunder ads every time you visit the darn site), an editorial supporting freezing the assets of the Burmese junta:

The U.S. Congress is considering tougher measures to freeze the assets of the Myanmar government held in the United States and to bar the country’s leaders from traveling here.

Those steps are warranted unless Suu Kyi is released and allowed to travel freely. The United States and other countries earlier imposed economic sanctions on Myanmar that devastated its economy. Trade with Thailand and China, plus the export of narcotics, has kept it afloat.

The trading partners, other countries in the region and aid givers like Japan need to get tougher by imposing sanctions and aid suspensions to push the country toward democracy; that’s the outcome Myanmar’s citizens show they favor every time they get the chance.

That’s the beginning of what I’m talking about when I talk about defunding the kleptocrats.

They can’t keep the cash under their mattresses. They can’t invest it locally, because there is nothing to invest it in, so they’d rather have T-bills and real estate in New York or London. The things they want to buy – from Boeing, Chanel, and Nike – require dealing with Western companies.

While I’m not a fan of the intrusive measures designed to catch petty money-laundering, I do think it ought to be possible to trace the huge amounts these thugs steal from their people, find the places where it enters the Western economy, and make it risky and expensive for them to put or spend their money here.

I’m a believer in the market, and if we can make it riskier and more expensive for the thugs – and for those who profit from sweetheart deals with them – we can shift the behavior somewhat.
That’s not as conceptually satisfying as Toby Keith’s song suggests:

Justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys
You got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
We’ll all meet back at the local saloon
We’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces
Singing whiskey for my men, beer for my horses.

But more realistic and satisfying nonetheless.

Joe talks about the Congo and Burma, and generally asks what we will do if we are going to be faced with the Robert Kaplanesque question of what to do with the failing states in The Coming Anarchy? (If you haven’t read his bleak book, you should.)

It seems that we’re left with recolonialization on one hand, and a nation-scale version of what a Richard Price character called the ‘self-cleaning oven’ (in which drugs, disease and violence depopulate the slums of New Jersey) on the other. Joe has pointed out how limited our resources are; the possible options are few and hardly bring confidence. UN troops? Somehow Srebrenica is the image I always have; that and the helpless ‘smurfs’ of the film ‘No Man’s Land’.

But it seems that there is one point of leverage that we in the West have. Cash. I’m not talking about giving it, either; I’m talking about taking it….The wars in these collapsing states are fought by would-be kleptocrats, who are essentially playing a brutal version of ‘capture the flag’ where once they have it, they control the sale of resources…diamonds, oil, tantalum, cocoa…into the international markets. Sales which take place for cash; dollars and euros to be stashed away by the ruling elites.

These brutal civil wars are worth fighting, not for power alone, but to appropriate the resources of the country and sell them. Take a look at this somewhat dry but exhaustive paper “Congo: The Prize of Predation” by Olssen and Congden (requires Acrobat viewer):

“They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing else, I suspect. They were conquerors and for that you want only brute force…They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at in blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.” (From Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, 1989, p 21)

Joseph Conrad’s description of king Leopold’s Congo Free State from 1899 applies as well to the predatory war that has been raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1998. This war alone, fought in remote jungles by a multitude of rebel and national armies from the Great Lakes region, is believed to have taken some 3 million lives and left 2.5 million internally displaced.1 A primary reason for the initiation and continuation of the fighting has been a desire to gain control of easily appropriable and highly valuable natural resources like gold, diamonds, and coltan that Congo is endowed with (Panel of Experts, 2001a, 2001b). Though shrouded in a veil of real and fabricated grievances, the true engine of the great war in Central Africa appears to be greed.

Our study uses Collier and Hoeffer’s (2001) empirically based distinction between greed and grievance as the two main motivations for civil wars. The grievance aspect is well known and is covered in numerous political science studies. What we refer to as grievances include inequality, lack of political rights, and ethnic or religious divisions. Economists – schooled in the tradition of rational, profit maximizing entrepreneurs – and a growing number of other social scientists, have lately come to analyze civil wars as a competition between warlords for the appropriation of valuable resources. In Collier and Hoeffler’s (2001) statistical investigation of civil wars from 1960 to 1999, they find that greed-related explanations have a greater explanatory power than grievance.”

Just as the engine for the gang wars in the inner city is fueled by the profits of the drug trade, the civil wars and ethnic and political friction in Africa and the less developed portions of Asia and South America provides the spark – but the desire to capture and sell the resources available is the real fuel.

We buy those resources; we could, if we chose, find ways to choke off the supply of fuel to these conflicts. Is it worth it to us?

‘Conflict diamonds’ are those smuggled out by warlords, and sold in the international markets at a discount. When I next buy TG a jewel, I’ll be helping finance one of the civil wars…or maybe, if I am prudent, not.

Think about it.

In keeping with Joe’s desire for good news on a Sabbath Friday, I got an wonderful email today from Dave Trowbridge, author of the Redwood Dragon blog (and a few novels!). he and his partner Deborah (also a novelist of some renown) were among the first people in the blog community that I had a chance to meet.

About the good news…go take a look for yourself.

Congratulations to Dave and the lovely and talented Deborah!!

I didn’t put anything up today to commemorate D-Day, because I assumed one of the others would; I’m sure the entire team did the same thing. So I’ll jump in.

Today, the Allied nations took a risk that changed the world. They faced a frightening world that promised struggle, loss, and death to all of Europe and Asia. They took that bleak promise, conquered it, and created the most free and prosperous era in human history.

One of the discoveries we’ve made in the last year or so is that our world is no less challenging; now we need to show that we, too, can rise to the occasion.

Supporting Veterans is one way; sadly the current Administration seems to see it differently.

Someone ought to do something about that.

JK UPDATES: Correct diagnosis of what was going on. Glad A.L. stepped in. In addition:

In Forbes.com today, a business group comes out against sanctions to support Aung San Suu Kyi:

New sanctions against Myanmar, where pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been detained for a week, would do nothing to force the government to relinquish power, a U.S. business coalition said Friday.

Continued…

“The proposed new sanctions will bring … neither freedom nor democracy to the Burmese people,” said Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council and co-chairman of USA Engage, a coalition of over 670 businesses, agriculture groups and trade associations opposed to unilateral sanctions.

“Existing U.S. sanctions have accomplished exactly nothing — other than to hurt a population that is in desperate need of economic aid,” Reinsch said in a statement.

Surf over to the NFTC website, and notice that they oppose all boycott activity, including congresional atempts to limit business given to German and French companies in response to their psoitions on the Iraq War.

Surf over to the USA Engage website, and notice that they are an equal-opportunity supporter of international trade with thugs, as they support trade with Castro as well.

Engine Charlie lives; we obviously shouldn’t let little things like politics get in the way of $366 million in annual import/export business.

Stephen Den Beste has an essay up (I can’t bring myself to call them posts…) on Saddam’s WMD efforts that reinforces my point about WMD and bad management.

SDB: “I just stumbled on a report that offers an interesting point which might help explain just what happened with the apparently-missing Iraqi WMDs: the ones they did have were actually mostly destroyed, and in their frantic attempts to acquire the materials necessary to produce new ones, they ended up tossing money around like a drunken sailor, and got ripped off.”

Check out the rest. It goes a long way to answering my two questions on the subject:

SDB: “I think that it isn’t that they voluntarily disarmed; it’s that they tried to acquire the stuff they needed to rebuild their stockpiles and got rooked, again and again.”

That pretty neatly answers:

AL: “…two things (both of which get trumped if they actually find the Secret Underground WMD Factories) – why Saddam would risk war to hide weapons he knew he didn’t have, and why Bush would risk lying about something so crucial, when it would be impossible for the lie not to get caught.”

I’m not sure if I’m proud or ashamed… I’m one of the winners of Oxblog’s ‘Political Theory Pickup Lines’ contest.

In light of the recent scandals, however, and in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I cribbed part of it. I was once at a small restaurant in Santa Cruz with a date, also a political theory student, when we heard the smarmy chap at the next table croon to his date:

“I just want to go home with you, sit in front of the fire. sip some chardonnay, and discuss Wittgenstein’s warm humanism.“…As my date had just finished a paper on Wittgenstein, and Annie Hall was fresh in our memory (and I was a proto-Tucker Max at the time), we stood as one and said “What? Warm humanism? Do you have any idea what you’re talking about? Have you ever read one of his books? Can you name one? We don’t think so.” and sat down at our table.

The gentleman followed us and we had a ‘full and frank exchange of views’, and then all decided to leave the restaurant before the police showed up.

Here’s a great quote, which will probably make steam come out the ears of the Samizdata types:

The crucial point to understand is that property is not a physical thing that can be photographed or mapped. Property is not a primary quality of assets but the legal expression of an economically meaningful consensus about assets. Law is the instrument that fixes and realized capital. In the West, the law is less concerned with representing the physical realities of buildings or real estate than with providing a process or rules that will allow society to extract potential surplus value from those assets. Property is not the assets themselves, but the consensus between people as to how these assets should be held, used, or exchanged. The challenge today in most non-Western countries is not to put all the nation’s land and buildings on the same map (which has probably already been done) but to integrate the formal legal conventions inside the bell jar with the extralegal ones outside it.

Just finished reading De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. For the four people who read blogs and haven’t heard of this book, Hernando De Soto is a Peruvian economist who is very concerned with issues of development in the Third World, and who points out that there is substantial wealth in the underground economies, and that if there was a way to bring those econonomies into the mainstream, very good things would happen.

Read this book!

Roadracing World (motorcycle racing magazine) has an e-mail from a soldier in Iraq on their website.

I did have a very rewarding experience, though. Each unit has $25K captured currency from the regime that we must use to do projects that will improve the community. The theory is a series of small victories will help us win over the people. So we provided supplies, AC’s, and other necessities to a school and two orphanages.

Sure sounds like someone is paying attention to ‘hearts and minds’.

Motorcycle road racing and world political news…how much better can it get?