NightWatch

For the Night of 7 July 2009

North Korea: The pending return home of a North Korean ship suspected of possibly carrying illicit cargo shows that efforts are working to enforce U.N. sanctions imposed against the country after its nuclear and missile tests, the Chief of U.S. naval operations said Monday.

The ship looks like a spoof to elicit responses, not to deliver goods. The bad news for North Korea is that no port will allow North Korean ships to berth, if they are suspected of carrying weapons. So the North has to and will arrange carriage by other flags.

The NightWatch hypothesis is that Kang Nam 1’s return to home port is not a great success for non-proliferation initiatives. The ship’s voyage was a North Korean test of Western backing of the UNSC resolution. M/V Kang Nam 1 gained an enormous amount of intelligence about how to beat the sanctions and allied tracking capabilities. The next ship will be harder to track.

Afghanistan: Note. NightWatch is half way finished with its analysis of fighting in June 09. What jumps off the data sheets is that the basic nature of the fighting has changed. Open source information shows that 50% of all attacks/clashes are roadside bombs. They are responsible for most Allied casualties. The enemy now is less Pashtun fighting men than Pashtun bomb makers.

The significance is that the bomb makers are using their improvised weapons to shepherd and corral Coalition forces on the roads to keep them away from the villages the Taliban control in the Districts. One USMC general said the Corps is adopting the Korean War strategy of fighting side by side with local soldiers.

The general was prophetic in ways he might not understand and, surely, did not intend. During the Korean War, the American decision to operate on the limited Korean road infrastructure surrendered the countryside to the Chinese communist forces.

US and Coalition forces use of the Afghan roads is unavoidable, but is producing the Korean War result – lots of casualties and abandonment of the country-side to the enemy. The only way to avoid this outcome is to provide more forces permanently so as to hold ground. American military doctrine does not seem to entertain the idea of holding ground.

At the risk of alienating readers, there are not enough pro-government forces in Afghanistan to provide the level of security that will make Pashtun tribal and clan elders support the Kabul government. In fact, US and Coalition forces only can protect themselves reliably with air support.

The Afghan Pashtuns are no more afraid of Coalition ground troops than they were of Alexander’s Greeks. US military spokespersons assured the Afghans today that the difference in the latest US Marine Corps offensive in Helmand Province is the US will not leave until permanent security is assured.

Not even the Afghan illiterates believe such statements. US military spokespersons should by now understand that history is not measured in months of deployment in South Asia, tied to election security. Pashtun memories of past foreign invasions and occupations are longer than the US has existence.

Israel-US: President Obama denied that the US has given Israel a green light to attack Iran.

Iranian leaders probably are breathing easier.

Honduras: Costa Rica will host talks between ousted President Zelaya and the Honduran interim President Micheletti.

The one point that makes this ouster of a President different from a coup is that the armed forces have not taken control of the government, have no position of authority in deciding government matters and remain responsive to civilian direction. This political event is being grossly mischaracterized.

In a military coup, the armed forces leadership takes over the government, as in Mauritania, Pakistan, Fiji and Bangladesh. Imagine a scenario in which General Pervez Musharraf overthrew the constitutional government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999, but handed the government to … Benazir Bhutto, who was herself overthrown by Musharraf’s predecessor General Jehangir Karamat. What Musharraf did was a coup. What happened in Tegucigalpa is execution of an arrest warrant.

The Honduras event is best understood as a constitutional coup by the Congress and Supreme Court against t the President in personam, not the Presidency – an important distinction ignored by the media.

Folks at the US Department of State, above all else, should understand that a government operating under a constitutionally prescribed separation of powers is not a government in which the President is supreme -- Foreign Service Officers get examined about such nuances. Quite the contrary the purpose of a division of powers is to make the executive branch accountable to the other branches, as well as the electorate.

NightWatch is agnostic about the merits or demerits of the booting of Zelaya, but considers it important to name the phenomenology properly. The risk is that the policy response will miscarry.

As of now, the US is allied with the region’s worst American haters in a bid to restore an American hating fellow named Zelaya because diplomats in the US chose that Honduras experienced a military coup. That is a conclusion NOT supported by the evidence.

The US position is bewildering only in the context that the US also supported the free and fair elections in the Gaza Strip that brought the anti-US and anti-Israel hating HAMAS leaders to power. One might wonder, “What were US diplomats thinking?”

Zelaya, like Chavez and Morales, is a self-styled champion of the poor. He condemns the extravagances and “corruption” of the elite and advocates greater social justice – platform planks that would find welcome in Venezuela, other Bolivarian countries and almost anywhere, except maybe Iran. Chavez and Morales and even President Correa in Ecuador have championed those sentiments and accomplished little that improves the livelihood of their poor. Those remain worthy goals and aspirations separate from real world politics.

Zelaya’s worthy ends, however, justify his means no more than the Honduran Congress, which pre-empted him just as he was about to pre-empt them. The ancient Greeks would call this farce.

The constitutional tug-of-war is Honduran business. US business is what is good for America. Only a single editorial published in the Wall Street Journal has provided clear sighted analysis of the Honduran event and whose reasoning is worth reading. Prime Minister Al Maliki in Iraq delights in providing daily reminders that American policy makers are essentially clueless and rudderless about what is good for other countries and cultures.

The ouster of Zelaya arguably is a setback for the Honduran poor, but the poor are political pawns in Venezuela and Bolivia as well as in Honduras, as they always are in almost every state. The complexities of Honduran politics are not the proper province of US foreign policy. What is best for US national security would seem to be the obvious guide.

Readers and NightWatch find it hard to understand why the US Secretary of State supports restoring an American-hating Honduran ousted president and considers this position to be in the US national security interest. That is a quality of self-loathing and personal guilt that most Americans do not share. And at least one brave Wall Street Journal Op Ed writer thinks so as well.

NightWatch Note: NightWatch has a practice of ending selected political vignettes with the sentence, “This is a study in democracy.” Sometimes that ending is ironic or sarcastic. Always it is intended to illustrate that democracy is not a one-size-fits-all form of government.

During the past four years, around the world, NightWatch has reported anecdotes that demonstrate that there exists no universal definition or understanding of democracy or of its implications for government accountability to voters.

No democracy, including in Europe, is remotely like that in this great American federal Republic. That should be obvious to all. For example, the US is a federal Republic but its parent state, the United Kingdom, is a constitutional monarchy that operates a unitary government. Which, pray, is the model of democracy that the US should promote?

A foreign policy to promote democracy should have answers to the obvious questions, “What democracy? Which form?” There are as many variations as there are countries which hold national elections.

The US is hardly the world’s tutor on political science or model of government, especially to political cultures that were old and flourishing before the US was discovered, much less populated. That is not an unpatriotic statement, but an observation of historic fact.

The US political system is mind-bogglingly expensive to operate, with more than 8,000 government entities making law or rules for the citizens, but we think of ourselves as free. Only a rich country can afford American democracy! The rest of the world marvels at our lack of insight about our own system, which is difficult for them to understand.

Some ancient democracies are the repositories of the political authorities that America’s Founding Fathers consulted and which are available for interpretation and application by all, including Hondurans. There exists no umpire who decides whose interpretation is the most accurate … fortunately.

Utopian socialist regimes are a world class failure and an embarrassment of ignorant management in the 20^th Century. In the 21^st Century, capitalism has done little better, but the basic standard of living in capitalist states is probably the fairest test of which system works best – in the sense of provides most -- for its people. Just look at Zimbabwe, which years ago could at least feed itself.

Why would some people in US policy positions have the US encourage failed government theories and inaccurate descriptions of what occurred in Honduras. The good news is that the Hondurans have decided to sort this out for themselves.

End of NightWatch for 7 July.