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Meanwhile, Back in Latvia

by CKR

The NYT and WaPo ran commentary on Bush's speech in Latvia over the weekend. They didn't say much that wasn't already on the blogosphere.

I'm still trying to figure that speech out. I checked out Scott's Baltic Blog and found some more material and links.

I commented somewhere (praktike's blog, I think) that Bush was interviewed by an Estonian reporter and the quotes in Eesti Päevaleht (one of the two main newspapers) looked as incoherent in Estonian as his comments usually are in English. Scott gives us the English version. Still incoherent, with some interesting questions from reporter Aarne Rannamäe.

Scott also writes about the lockdown in Riga for Bush's visit. This is now standard procedure for presidential visits. Part of it is the perceived need for hypersecurity, and part of it is the political need for large numbers of hangers-on in every presidential visit. A few years back, the US insisted on shutting down Kentmanni Street in Tallinn, where the US embassy is located. Kentmanni is on the outskirts of Old Town, one among numerous narrow one-way streets. Shuttting it down caused a fair bit of inconvenience to traffic, but first came the temporary barricades and now it's more or less permanently sealed off. If you're walking, guards glare at you unpleasantly, so it's better to go by Kaupmehe or Tatari, depending on the direction you're going. American embassies in other cities are equally forbidding, part of the hypersecurity initiative.

Ordinary people who had reservations at Riga hotels were displaced to a ferry in the harbor. Come to think of it, how did they accommodate the President's retinue? Larger cities like Stockholm have had difficulties with presidential visits because the hangers-on outnumbered the hotel rooms.

Scott attributes the lockdown to the large Russian ethnic presence in Riga, but that's just the way it's done now. He and his Latvian students couldn't even get to the festivities. Just like Bush appearances in the United States.

Scott has a couple of other posts about the visit and associated events, so look around Baltic Blog a bit. He links to some photos of the lockdown visit, and I've stolen one from All About Latvia.

Thanks for the info, Scott!

Today's Volvo: Ford's Folly

By PLS

A Volvo saved my life years ago. The front end played accordion exactly as promised. It was smashed in like an English bulldog’s face flattened further, but the damage stopped at the barrier to the passenger cabin. I walked away with a mere cracked sternum, an injury that doesn’t rate a bandage, though it hurt to laugh for endless weeks. I’d suspected, til then, that I was something of a glum person. Turned out I do a lot of laughing. For weeks I was clutching at my chest to avert spasms of pain.

The car was totaled. I’d have bought a new Volvo, but I couldn’t afford one anymore. My divorce meant I’d have to do with compacts. I bought a little yellow Fiat the kids called Tweetie Bird. After that I acquired a no nonsense white Corolla that I test drove in Singapore and sold eventually in Colombo. Next came a Subaru wagon that didn’t mind potholes the size of Lake Victoria and ran so quietly I could sneak up on lions in Tanzania.

And then I got the car I have now, a stripped down Jeep Cherokee that was supposed to take me to Timbuktu, but never did. There were too many wars between there and Freetown, Sierra Leone, where I was posted. I did get to Timbuktu, but I had to fly to Bamako and hire a Landrover and driver, and even with him it was....but that’s another story.

Let the Discussion Begin!

by CKR

William Arkin in today’s Washington Post dissects the growth of American “global strike” policy since 9/11. He calls for general discussion. So does Robert McNamara in his Foreign Policy piece. I think that discussion of US nuclear policy is long overdue, like since 1989. This is going to be a theme in several of my forthcoming posts.

But the global strike contingency plan cannot be a credible threat if it is not publicly known. And though CONPLAN 8022 suggests a clean, short-duration strike intended to protect American security, a preemptive surprise attack (let alone one involving a nuclear weapon option) would unleash a multitude of additional and unanticipated consequences. So, on both counts, why aren't we talking about it?

There are two major issues to discuss. I’m going to leave the definitions to Arkin, so read his article.

First is the blurring of lines between the use of conventional and nuclear weapons.

Second is the role of intelligence in the global strike strategies.

Help Wanted: Diplomats

By PLS

First, the Bush administration exhausted much of its intellectual capital justifying preemptive war and torturing logic to discredit the Geneva Conventions. Then a good amount of brain power had to be thrown into the task of producing report after report to convince the world that no higher ups, not the President or Vice President or Secretary of Defence or General Sanchez or any other general, except scapegoat reserve General Janet Karpinski, had the least responsibility for maltreating anyone in American custody.

Meanwhile, of course, taxes on the rich were being cut, and since nearly every American dreams of being rich, the dreamers re-elected the tax cutters, who are gutting for lack of money every program that could be of use to anyone who isn’t rich. With butter in such short supply, General Richard Meyers has told Congress that, strong as this country is, the U.S. hasn’t enough money for guns either. We can’t make another war, in Iran or anywhere else, even if the War Party wants to. Donald Rumfeld may be brilliant at imagining pinpoint armies, but sophisticated military technology comes with a fat price tag. Grunts aren’t cheap to recruit nowadays either. Iraq war service is so unpopular that a $20,000 signing bonus isn’t attractive to college grads burdened with huge educational loans or to the less educated either, possibly because the fine print of an enlistment contract is scarier than the fine print on a credit card offer.

It looks like America’s hairy chest-thumpers may have to depend on diplomats to get things done, after all.

Unfortunately the Bush administration hasn’t been honing its diplomatic skills. The President himself delights in double talk and name-calling, which explains perhaps his affinity for John Bolton. Republican Senator Allen of Virginia just this week supported Bolton’s candidacy for U.S. Rep. to the U.N. by assuring fellow senators that the abrasive, abusive Bolton wouldn’t be caught dead raising a pinkie over a teacup, as if the core reason for opposition weren’t Bolton’s twisting of intelligence to support pre-conceived policies.

A Response to McNamara’s Apocalypse: Building down the Nuclear Arsenal

by CKR

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, has written an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May/June Foreign Policy.

There’s nothing new in it except that the author is Robert S. McNamara, and even that is not entirely a surprise. McNamara has been having conscience pangs about his role in the Vietnam war for some time now.

His argument is that the United States must immediately give up nuclear weapons as a tool of foreign policy. Main points (in no particular order):

The United States has never endorsed the policy of “no first use,” against nuclear or nonnuclear states.

The president still has the nuclear “football” (communications package) with him wherever he travels.

The United States should remove all strategic nuclear weapons from “hair-trigger” alert.

US policies are seen by many to be in contravention of its responsibilities under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

There is no way to effectively contain a nuclear strike, and no guarantee against unlimited escalation once a strike occurs.

Plans being discussed by the Bush administration would require new production facilities for fissile materials and nuclear weapons.

The last point above has some interesting possibilites that McNamara doesn’t go into. The late Carson Mark, leader of the theoretical division at Los Alamos, proposed in 1989 that, since the tritium production reactors were shut down, an end to its production could serve as a gradual de facto means of nuclear disarmament. Tritium is a component of fusion weapons (“hydrogen bombs”), and it has a 12-year half-life, which means that half of it is gone in twelve years. So as the tritium decayed, the capabilities of the weapons would decay. Of course, an agreement would have to be worked out with the (then) Soviet Union to stop producing tritium, too.

News via the Washington Post

Two weeks ago, before the British elections, in the Times, a document showed up that seems to indicate that George Bush made quite clear to the Brits, in the summer of 2002, that he intended to go to war against Iraq, no matter what.

Today the Washington Post published a story on that document. Nothing that hasn't been said before in British newspapers or the blogosphere. No mention that 89 members of the US Congress sent Bush a letter asking for an explanation. The article does note that the release of the document triggered criticism of Tony Blair, some new news beyond what the Times published on 1 May.

I guess this is what it means to be a "newspaper of record." You record, even if it's long after the fact. Way to go, WaPo!

So What's Wrong with Yalta?

By PHK

It’s no wonder the Bush Administration unilateralists disdain the Yalta Agreement. Its Protocol begins with the framework that established the United Nations.

What George W. Bush and his foreign policy speech writers also forgot to mention in Riga last weekend when he summarily trashed the document is that the Yalta Agreement – signed in February 1945 after U.S., British and Soviet troops had gone on the offensive against the Germans and the Soviets had already “liberated” Poland and parts of eastern Germany - enshrines the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

If one reviews Section II entitled “Declaration of Liberated Europe” of the agreement’s short and readable text, one sees immediately that it includes the following statement: “the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live – the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived to them by the aggressor nations.”

So what’s all the fuss about? What is wrong with the Yalta Agreement?

If there’s anything wrong, it’s not the document but Stalin’s subsequent nose-thumbing at the contents of Sections II and VII (on Poland) and specifically his refusal - after signing - to allow free and fair elections in the countries Soviet military forces occupied.

Bush in the Baltics – Continued

by CKR

The argument over that revisionist paragraph of Bush’s speech in Latvia is taking off in the blogosphere. Kevin Drum raises a nice question:

Bush is a master of using codewords in his speeches, and inserting Yalta into this speech wasn't a casual decision. It was there for someone. Who?

I think I’ve got a bit more to say than most of his commenters, and that thread has well over 300 comments at this point.

Kevin continues the discussion with a few links, having gotten answers that gather around “the far-right faithful, who believe that FDR was a commie.” Kevin had thought that this species died out a while ago, but the commenters provided a rich variety of evidence that this is not so.

I mentioned that pushing the Red Army back to Moscow would have been more difficult than a war-weary United States would have been willing to undertake, but Kevin’s commenters reminded me of some other history that was occurring at the time.

Japan was still not defeated, and the Allies needed Russia to press against Japan. So starting another war on the Soviet Union’s western front probably didn’t seem like a good idea to Roosevelt and Churchill.

I’ve never had much respect for Monday-morning quarterbacking of these difficult decisions. If we want to rehash World War II, for example, we can continue the argument over whether the United States should have used atomic bombs on Japan. Or we can do the variant of whether the second was more a warning to the Soviet Union than it was necessary to defeating Japan. I’m not opening these up for discussion, please! Just saying that this is another very famous decision that has been worked over and over and over.