We began with the big GOTCHA! headlines on the apprehension of the Taliban #2, Mullah Baradar, but experts on the region began making skeptical noises from the very beginning.  One such expert spoke up at NRO-the Corner, where his note was soon followed by a summary piece co-authored by former Bush White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, focused on reporting from the New York Times:

…there’s a better-than-even chance that the administration is trying to turn a lemon into lemonade. Its public messaging is that the capture of Baradar is a huge win in the ongoing war with the Taliban. But is the administration concealing the downsides of the capture? We hope not. And we certainly hope the administration is not crowing about capturing Baradar in Pakistan in order to distract from the difficulties it has had on the home front with the KSM trial and Mirandizing the Christmas bomber. But if the Times story is accurate, the evidence is beginning to tilt in the wrong direction.

Our colleague JE Dyer has now written two pieces – The Pakistan Connection and Taliban Roll-Up: The Other Connections – further exploring  the Baradar capture and subsequent events – mazy complexities in West-canted concentric networks of unknowns radiating at least as far as Moscow, Baghdad, and Dubai.

Returning to the initial event, Chet Nagle at The Daily Caller doesn’t hesitate to call the arrest “phony”:

With regard to this murky event I prefer the word detained, since Baradar and other senior Taliban leaders were captured once before—and released. In 2001, Baradar and several colleagues were taken by Afghan militiamen. Pakistan intervened and the Taliban bosses were sent on their way. Baradar will probably have the same good fortune again, after a decent interval.

He closes on highly speculative and even incendiary-looking suggestions regarding an apparent proposal to divert $7.3 Billion in Stimulus dollars to Pakistan, alongside the observation that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons factories have undergone “astounding modernization and expansion” over the period during which the country has received $12 Billion in aid.

If it’s a game, I’m not even sure who’s playing it for us at this point, or what they’re trying to achieve – other than keep it from impacting too much on the U.S. domestic audience, whichever way things go.

Should the United States use force to regime-change Iran? No – not today. But should we be ready to use all the elements of national power – diplomatic, informational, military, and economic – to support the reformists, and actively hinder the IRGC in trying to suppress them and brutalize the Iranian people?

Such intervention need not be a repeat of the CIA-sponsored coup against the Mossadegh government in 1953. It could well be carried out without any more hint of the US selecting Iran’s future leaders than attended Reagan’s support to Solidarity in Poland. Moreover, the idea that the US would be the only nation potentially involved is ludicrous: the Tehran regime already draws security support from China, and of course its principal patron for arms and nuclear technology is Russia. Russia and China will both try to exploit to their benefit any attempt by Obama to further isolate Iran. One or the other would almost certainly be involved, from the shadows, in an all-out regime crackdown on the Iranian population.

The biggest problem with a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities has always been that merely doing that isn’t enough. A US-level strike could set the program back by years; but the nuclear technology isn’t the problem: the revolutionary, terror-sponsoring ideology is. Iran’s people have the will to do the world the great favor of removing that ideology from power. But they will need help. As the events of 11 February unfold, the greatest failure of the Obama administration will not be that it is taking its time to implement sanctions that won’t change the mullahs’ minds anyway. The greatest failure will be the fact that, in the name of the American people, it is standing by and doing nothing to promote the best chance we have of averting a nuclear-armed Iran.

JE Dyer – Hot Air – “Missing the Big Opportunity in Iran”; also at The Optimistic Conservative

Xie’s side-observations are sometimes as interesting as his main themes. I didn’t know, for instance, that both Russia and India were experiencing double-digit inflation well in excess of nominal growth rates. His next-decade economic forecast for the U.S. and the Eurozone is summed up in one word: “terrible.” Yet the most eye-catching takeaway from his first two pieces at Caing.com – “Trapped Inside a Property Bubble” and “Pumped with Cash – And Ready to Crash?” – is his designation of 2012 as a target year for the Chinese bubble to burst amidst another global financial crisis:

2012 is building up to be another crisis year. Governments and central banks did not handle the last crisis well. They did not reform a global financial system plagued by incentive misalignment and wild speculation. All the money governments and central banks released is turning into global inflation. And they resorted to bailing out speculators, laying the foundation for another crisis.

The focus of the Chinese problem, in Xie’s view, is property speculation, the same property bubble that has made for those striking videos of empty, never-occupied skyscrapers and never-alive ghost towns, but which, more important, is also pricing China’s large, but proportionally small middle class out of the housing market, and spreading inflationary pressures on wages while also turning potentially productive citizens into compulsive speculators.

It’s mere coincidence if Xie seems to be reading from a Mayan calendar. He bases his prediction on rough but reasonable calculations derived from historical precedents and real-time observations, not on ancient prophecy. As Xie explains, the conditions that made China’s decade-long growth spurt possible have disappeared, and are unlikely to return. Even as China has lost its status as “lowest of the low-cost producers,” the country remains heavily export-dependent, yet prospects for a worldwide resurgence in export markets are dim at best. Like other economists, Xie expects near-zero growth in the Eurozone and Japan, and low growth in the U.S., with no prospect for other countries to take up the slack, especially since many of them are almost as export-dependent as China, if not more so.

China seems, however, to be far from having adjusted psychologically or politically to this new reality. Rather than undertake a re-adjustment of expectations, and face attendant political strains, China has been taking a path of least social and political resistance, in a manner that will strike some familiar chords for Americans:

The biggest risk to China’s economy is the desire to maintain past economic growth rates by maximizing investments in property – an unproductive asset. It supports short-term growth by sacrificing long-term growth as capital’s average productivity declines over time.

Local government performance in China is measured according to GDP and fiscal revenue. Property development can achieve high numbers for both quickly. This is why property’s share in China’s capital allocation is rapidly rising as prices appreciate and volumes increase. This is a politically driven bubble — and it’s already massive. Unless the trend is reversed by reforming incentives for local governments, China’s property bubble could mushroom in two years from what’s now a dangerous level.

Xie is building on his own past work here – he is one of the world’s proven experts on economic bubbles, especially of the Asian variety – but you don’t need to be an economist or China expert to follow him: The inflation of the Chinese property bubble amounts to “mal-investment” on as gigantic a scale as you would expect from the non-transparent, un-free, deeply corrupt public administration of an economy encompassing the lives and fortunes of over 1 billion people. The supposed advantages of authoritariansm, so impressive to New York Times columnists and some American presidents, can come at an unimaginably steep price.

Observers of the world scene – including JE Dyer in recent posts at the Optimistic Conservative’s Blog and elsewhere, or people like the international diplomats cited in Sunday’s Washington Post – have good reason to view China as a great power on the rise, a potential peer competitor to the U.S. It’s tempting to look at the financial crisis that Xie sketches, or at China’s well-documented and widely discussed demographic and resource issues, and assume that the challenge to American status is taking care of itself, but it would be imprudent to assume that a bad decade for China will permanently simplify our strategic lives. Indeed, the prospect of China’s weakness may turn out to be more dangerous than the prospect of Chinese ascendancy – even before we begin to consider the direct effects of a Chinese implosion on our own immediate interests.

The stridency of Chinese diplomats reacting to U.S.-Taiwan arms deals may reflect new self-confidence – or it may foreshadow a more bellicose, even desperate reaction to increasing pressures at home, amidst historically new, decisively frustrated expectations. Countries quietly confident that their hour is coming can afford to be patient. Countries sensing that their hour is passing – Germany 1914, Japan 1941, to note two of the more famous examples – often become more aggressive.

Redacted

Smith, of course, keys on the fact that RT is an arm of Russia’s state-owned media.  (It’s channel 236 on Time Warner Cable in my area.)

But that tends to be indicative in more ways than one.  Looking at the older ads RT has lined up for inspection at the link above, one has the sense of a Soviet-era zeitgeist unrecovered from.  The images are clunky and unsubtle, the kind of political snark American 14-year-olds would outdo from their home computers, in both sophistication and humor.  As would French, Japanese, Brazilian, and no doubt Russian 14-year-olds, for that matter.  Subversive political art just doesn’t work as an expression of state policy.  To come across as subversive, it has to be really, you know, subversive.  It helps if it’s a little funny too, or if it at least slips in a sly, mentally interesting irony.

Now, it is funny that President Obama, whose American critics would say he has never met a Russian demand he didn’t want to give in to, comes in for this over-the-top, back-of-the-hand ankle-biting. (I promise those will be the last locutions evocative of yoga class.)  I don’t think that’s the humor the RT ad had in mind.

I suppose we could also attribute a high-concept postulate to the RT auteurs, that Obama is more dangerous than Ahmadinejad because he’s fey and unpredictable, as opposed to embodying Ahmadinejad’s other characteristic of shrill aggression.  The sort of “Well, with Nixon we at least knew where we stood” kind of thing.  Then Jimmy Carter burst forth from that turgid time, and America was all over the map like an old geezer with Alzheimer’s, handed the keys to the Ferrari.

But neither of those qualifies as a mentally interesting irony.  Your call, reader, as to the precise nature of the intended implications in the RT ad.  It comes off to me as subversive imagery by committee.  And then RT couldn’t even get American airports to display it in its original form.  Come on, guys.  Get yourselves some leverage on US soil – buy it if you have to – and sue in federal court.  That’s what artist Michael Lebron did when the Washington, D.C. Metro declined to display his anti-Reagan oeuvre entitled “Are You Tired of the Jelly Bean Republic?”  As the New York Times recounts – with obvious relish – a federal appeals court consisting of Ken Starr, Antonin Scalia, and Robert Bork ruled in 1984 that the Metro could not refuse to display Lebron’s poster.

It’s reassuring, in a way, that RT doesn’t bring the attempted subversion off any more effectively than the Grey Lady or CNN would.  RIA Novosti as a whole (the holding company for the state-owned media) seems to be an experiment in combining the functions of MSNBC, USA Today, The National Enquirer, and The Onion.  I would award it high marks in the Enquirer line, myself.

But there’s a starting point you have to have stored in your tribal consciousness to really move forward in this realm, and I’m not sure the deep thinkers at RT know what it is.  The NYT writer crowing over the Lebron case would apparently have to be reminded of it.  You see, when Michael Lebron sued the Washington Metro to display his anti-Reagan poster, and Starr, Scalia, and Bork ruled in his favor, what mattered in all this was the following:

1.  Although the criticism was directed at him, Reagan had no involvement whatsoever in the court’s decision; and

2.  He didn’t care.

That, dear Russian friends, is freedom of speech.

Cross-posted at The Optimistic Conservative.

When I first taught at Hebei University in Baoding, China, in 1984, I never saw a single boy and a single girl walking together on campus, although I often saw mixed groups.  Dancing was illegal when I got there, but it was legalized in May or June.  Two people asked me, independently, what there was about capitalism that led to homosexuality.  I replied that I didn’t think there was any connection between economic systems and sexual preference.  “But there is no homosexuality in China,” I was told.

When I went to China again in 1989, life was much freer–so much so that Beijing Spring occurred between mid-April and June 4th, when it was crushed.  Even so, homosexuality was taboo.  Marxist societies, like all forms of totalitarianism, are afraid of any kind of freedom, which is why dancing had been outlawed until 1984.  But China’s one-child policy had led to a disproportionate number of boys as opposed to girls, and Chinese officials must have thought that allowing homosexuality would ease the pressure on young men in a country where there weren’t enough young women for them to marry.

The gay marriage reported in the China Daily article is not legally binding, at least not yet.  But if a government newspaper publicizes it, it is no accident, Comrade.

I encourage you to join me in demanding the full story behind why the filth who orchestrated [the murders of captured American soldiers] are walking around free. We won’t get those answers unless we push for them, with the same courage and dedication our fallen heroes gave to their duty. This story will go away, unless you keep it alive. Love the warriors, by making it clear to Washington that their lives are worth more than any politician’s career.

Hayward devotes much more attention to capsule biographies of the American soldiers executed by Qazali’s forces and apparently on Qazali’s orders, than to the Qazali release itself (actually the second release of a Qazali brother to Iraqi authorities ahead of probable full freedom), and much of the rest of the post is taken up by free-form indictments of Obama security policy from an admittedly “hostile” perspective.   The responses from HotAirite commenters are unsurprising:  re-echoing rage, plaudits for the good Doctor… and a trollish attempt to change the subject to Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra.

For wider political resonance, Hayward brings in Janet Napolitano’s performance as Homeland Security Secretary in relation to the foiled Christmas Day Flight 253 bombing, as well as the simmering issue of Navy SEALs charged with abusing an Iraqi captive.  Other conservatives have followed a similar pattern of attempting to connect Qazali to issues that are only indirectly related, at best:  Andy McCarthy also hits the Christmas Day attack, and expresses “astonish[ment]” that he’d be observing a capitulation to Iranian-backed terrorists even while “Iranian tyrants are brutally suppressing a revolt by the Iranian people.”  In a post entitled “No Conceivable Justification for This One,” Jennifer Rubin asks for Democrats to join Republicans “call[ing] foul on the entire Obama approach to terror.”  Allahpundit refers to the apparent exchange as “unreal” and “mind-bendingly insane”:  Linking to an item on former Gitmo detainees who may have been part of a Flight 253 conspiracy, he asks, “How many jihadis do we have to release before someone figures out that releasing jihadis is an exceedingly bad idea?”

We don’t have to accept every notional connection to the Qazali affair to admit it raises serious questions, and to agree with Senators Kyl and Sessions, who have formally requested answers from the Administration on important policy questions.  Concerned citizens have a right to demand a full accounting.  Still, if we decide to reject the explanations – those already available and any further ones to come – we should be clear what else we’re rejecting, and what else we’re asking for.

The pundits and bloggers have been primarily responding to reports from Bill Roggio at the Weekly Standard and the Long War Journal in which anonymous U.S. intelligence officers are quoted denying that the release was anything other than an unequal “swap,” and ominously warning of Qazali’s eventual return to violence and subversion:  “We are going to pay for this in the future,” says one individual identified simply as “a military officer.”  Roggio deserves credit for breaking this story – as well as for his long service to all of us in reporting on the Conflict Formerly Known as the War on Terror – but you have to turn to official U.S. military statements, or perhaps the typically even-handed summary by ABC’s Jake Tapper, to get much understanding of why anyone would even consider letting this particular detainee go along with some 100 of his comrades.

According to Tapper, a spokesman for US Forces Iraq (formerly Multinational Forces Iraq) has denied a quid pro quo, and asserts that the release was performed under the terms of the US-Iraqi Security Agreement, in recognition of the Iraqi government’s sovereign rights and responsibilities.  At Contentions, Max Boot provides useful details and context, responding directly to conservative bloggers (including his colleague Rubin) while also pointing to the larger implications of their “understandably irate” reactions.  After explaining the relationship of Qazali’s group to the larger and better known Shia militia under Moqtada al-Sadr, he compares the Shia fighters to the Anbar Sunnis whom the US military and Iraqi government have brought into a complex reconciliation process – inevitably involving the forgiveness of past violence, including terror and other war crimes.

More critically for our purposes here, Boot reminds us that a policy of laying every ill in the world at the feet of President Barack Obama, and reflexively grouping each new incident with every other criticism, has its limits – and dangers:

All of these deals have been brokered by Prime Minister Maliki with the close oversight of General Ray Odierno, now the U.S. Forces-Iraq commander, and his boss, General Petraeus. They can hardly be accused of being “soft” on terrorism, yet they know that in the end warfare alone will not suffice to end an insurgency. There must be a process of political reconciliation, which involves accommodating even vile figures such as the Qazali brothers, who have American blood on their hands. It is the same realization reached by Lincoln, Churchill, and other great wartime commanders who understood that after the guns fell silent they would have to learn to live with former enemies.

If we insist on the political equivalent of a “terminate with extreme prejudice” order, we should be aware that the Commander-in-Chief may happen to be well away from the target zone on this one.

As we pass the first zero-U.S. casualty month since Operation Iraqi Freedom began, with our forces on track for effectively complete withdrawal in 2011, there may be little interest in, and less practical basis for, an assertion of American prerogatives on what amounts to Iraqi policy toward former insurgents.  Assuming that Boot’s description is more right than wrong, and assuming further that we’re not demanding a complete reversal of current U.S. policy in Iraq, entailing the recall of Odierno and Petraeus and the commencement of military operations against Iran from the territory of our newly declared protectorate Iraq, what are the critics demanding we do differently in such cases?  Summary executions justified as acts of revenge?  Forcible transfer to indefinite or permanent American custody?

Rightly or wrongly, we have accepted that “what happened in Iraq, stays in Iraq,” and we long ago, indeed from the very beginning, disclaimed any intention to take Iraq over.  On the day we changed this policy, or declared all-out war on Islamism (the two would likely go together sooner or later), there would be plenty more where the Qazalis came from, and there would soon be many more fallen heroes to avenge – in perpetuity or ’til kingdom come.

The President’s strategic priority here is that Westerners, and especially white Westerners, no longer be in the position of Middle Eastern dynasts, namely, statutory rulers of non-Westerners (Muslims for the most part) dwelling with and among the Jews in this case. Furthermore, the scenario that I’m suggesting is entertained by Obama (and key foreign-policy advisors) has two prongs.  In the first, Iran acquires nuclear weapons and the ability to loft them Jerusalem-wards.  Israel, put on notice by the US, does little or nothing about it.  For reasons that I feel no obligation to flesh out here, such an outcome must before long lead to the extinction of the Zionist enterprise known as the State of Israel.

The second prong, obviously, is that Israel will strike Iran to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons over the near term.  All the terrible things that have been forecast should Israel attack Iran very probably will occur.  In that case, the Administration will sever all ties to the country, or will at least attempt to do so, and Israel will be abandoned to its fate.  Needless to say, that outcome will not be the end of Israel but the end of American support for Zionism.

Like all leftists, Barack Obama is a leveler.  He will bow enthusiastically to the Emperor of Japan because he is both non-white and non-Western.  He will bow obsequiously to the King of Saudi Arabia because he is non-Western.  On the other hand, he will merely nod to the Queen of England because she is echt white and Western.  Elizabeth II is the literal embodiment of the historical dominance of non-whites and non-Westerners by white, Western “imperialists.”  The Chinese, naturally enough, must be accorded supreme deference in this hierarchical scheme.  In Copenhagen, for example, Obama wasted no time with the Europeans, whom, I suspect, he despises, but went hat in hand to the President of China for approbation.  George Bush and Bill Clinton’s toleration of the political deformity that is present-day “Communist” China was largely pragmatic.  Obama’s is viscerally ideological.  It is a thoroughly depraved ideology, true, but an ideology nonetheless.

To resume, the Iranians, who are white but fanatically anti-Western, currently have a well-wisher in the Oval Office.  Let them get the bomb, and let the Jews, the white, Western canaries in the geopolitical coal mine, tremble.  What more might an anti-Western bigot, whom the West in a spirit of deracinated anti-bigotry nominated as its spokesman, desire?

[12:53AM Tehran Time]

Confirmed: Multiple reports of protesters clashing with special security forces in front of IRIB, one of the regime’s state broadcasting channels.

Unconfirmed: Special regime forces trying to disperse the crowd in front of the IRIB building, but so far they have been unsuccessful.

More reports of casualties coming in from various areas of Tehran and in other cities.

Rumors are circulating that Khamenei has been transported somewhere by helicopter for his safety.

Multiple reports are coming in of martial law being declared in the city of Najafabad, the deceased Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s hometown.

The situation in Iran is in chaotic and in constant flux. It is not clear what will happen next, but with the killings by regime goons of protesters on the tenth day of the Moharram ceremony of Ashura, the people will likely be even more enraged. It is not clear what will come next, but it has been a monumental day in Iran.

Live-blog: Ashura in Iran – December 27, 2009 | Iran News Now.

The basis of his proposal is for the U.S., France, Britain, and Israel to agree together to stop Iran, and to view the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis as a model for the initial phase:

Applying pressure on the Iranians by interdicting any imports or exports to and from Iran by sea and by air would send a message that would undoubtedly be perceived as demonstrative by Tehran. Additionally, reinforcing the Western naval presence inside or immediately outside the Gulf would make it clear to the Iranians, without infringing on their territorial waters, that they (and all states dealing with them) are entering a danger zone. In parallel to this slow strangulation, measures should be taken to deter Gulf states (such as Dubai) from engaging in any trade or financial transactions with Iran and to encourage them to freeze Iranian assets in their banks. This should not be too difficult, as the threat of disconnecting any renegade from the Swift system would be sufficiently persuasive in the current circumstances, in which Dubai sorely needs international financial assistance.

It might be necessary to go beyond that and actually resort to force to prevent the Iranians from achieving nuclear military capabilities. Planning for a massive air and missile attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities (known and suspected) should be considered seriously, and this planning made public (at least partially) to convince Iran that the West can not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk. Such planning should also, to the extent possible, involve NATO, against the territory of which there is little doubt that the majority of Iranian missiles and nuclear weapons would be targeted (if only because they cannot yet reach the U.S.). The U.S., U.K., French and Israeli intelligence services should better co-ordinate what they know, and contributions from others should also be welcome, as well as any information that could be provided by internal opposition movements in Iran.

A recent column by Caroline Glick observes Debouzy’s arguments, and asks whether Netanyahu can wait much longer for Obama to act. She wonders whether America is necessary for the operation, and whether a determined Israel might not find itself with allies regardless of America’s stance – leading her to suggest a different historical parallel:

While Debouzy invoked the Cuban Missile Crisis, given the Obama administration’s position on Iran, a more apt analogy is the 1956 Suez Crisis. Whereas in 1962 the US acted alone against the threatened Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba, in 1956, France, Israel and Britain acted against Egypt without US permission to limit the harm that then-Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser could cause to their separate strategic interests.

Today, the Obama administration’s treatment of US allies and enemies alike bears far more resemblance to the Eisenhower administration’s policies than to those of the Kennedy administration. And in turn, the administration’s behavior presents allied governments with options reminiscent to those they faced in 1956.

She believes in the end it will come down to whether Netanyahu can measure up to Ben-Gurion:

There can be little doubt that if Ben-Gurion and Eisenhower were in charge today, Ben-Gurion wouldn’t hesitate to again defy Eisenhower and attack Iran – with or without France and Britain. Certainly, Netanyahu cannot justify placing Israel’s fate in Obama’s hands.

She believes, in short, that if Netanyahu shows leadership, he may find himself with allies. From the American perspective, however, I think we may have to consider that action without us will tend to confirm a tremendous setback for U.S. influence in the region and beyond, even if the subsequent complications involve us directly.