Resetting the Rule Set on this Long War by Thomas Barnett

Between the United Nations, G-8, Congress and the Supreme Court, it seems like everybody nowadays is working to rein in the Bush administration's conduct in this Long War. All these attempts at producing counterbalances - both legal and diplomatic - should be welcomed by the American people.

Why?

First off, legal and diplomatic reactions sure as heck beat military responses. Ever since the Cold War's end, so-called realists have predicted the world cannot long endure a sole military superpower. In other eras, such domination spawned arms races, hence the balance of power.

Well, America has projected military power around the planet with high frequency since 1990, and yet no great powers have sought to challenge our Leviathan. We outspend the world on defense, with our closest competitor, China, racking up approximately one-tenth - $70 billion - of what the Pentagon spent at home and abroad last year.

So America still has the biggest gun in the world, and no one's trying to take it away from us.

On the contrary, other great powers routinely facilitate our massive defense spending by buying our sovereign debt in what amounts to an implied transaction: They outsource global security to the United States, concentrating more on economic development.

In short, America plays the role of globalization's bodyguard, while other states focus more on foreign aid and direct investment to facilitate its spread.

Since America enjoys a consistently vibrant and innovative economy, our defense spending as a percent of national gross domestic product is not high by historical standards. But future interventions abroad better look more like the Balkans under Clinton than Iraq under Bush.

Too much bloodshed and too little traction will push both allies and the American people to renege on this deal. When that happens, no one will be minding the global security store, something the world hasn't witnessed since the chaotic 1930s.

The second reason Americans should welcome this asymmetrical balancing effort is that it's only natural that the world seeks to recapture some sense of rule-set equilibrium after these past tumultuous five years. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but humanity successfully deals with them by creating rules that protect the weak while constraining the powerful.

The 1990s were a glorious decade of great technological creativity and enormous wealth creation, as globalization's spread lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. But the decade was also disorienting, in effect pushing our major rule sets out of whack.

As I describe the 1990s, politics couldn't keep up with economics, and security fell way behind technology. Countries became far more connected and interdependent than we realized, leaving us collectively in serious deficit on certain rules.

But then two system perturbations came along in 2001 that revealed how mismatched our rule sets were: the corporate scandals - WorldCom, Enron, Arthur Andersen - that accompanied the market crash and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

At that point, new rules flooded the world in a panicky attempt to cover these suddenly revealed gaps.

Americans got both the Patriot Act and Sarbannes-Oxley, two congressional acts that foisted a ton of new regulations upon our business sector. As Steve DeAngelis, CEO of Enterra Solutions, likes to put it, these laws set a "new minimum standard for being a public corporation in the 21st century." And, if your company cannot achieve this new standard, you've got four choices: Go private, go bankrupt, go off-shore or get bought.

Abroad, President Bush's concept of pre-emptive war, the so-called Bush Doctrine, similarly proposed a new minimum standard for being a nation-state in the era of globalization. In effect, the Bush administration says, "Meet these new standards - no terror, no weapons of mass destruction - or your rogue regime faces these choices: Go away, get sanctioned, get isolated or get invaded."

Is the world full of targets for U.S. invasion?

Hardly.

And that's where our allies' balancing efforts make sense. The Bush Doctrine needs to be calibrated, clarified and embedded within some larger global rule set on rehabilitating politically bankrupt states.

In its first term, the Bush administration played catch-up with globalization. That rule-set reset was much needed.

Now the world is playing catch-up with the Bush administration. That rule-set recalibration is likewise necessary and good.

My advice?

Nobody in this struggle is inherently good or evil, so lay off the name-calling and conspiracy theories.

Equilibrium is both the goal and the watchword.

The Slow Pace of Intelligence Reform by Douglas Farah

Despite the high priority supposedly allotted intelligence reform, there is bipartisan agreement that things are not going well on that front. This is especially critical as the United States faces an array of challenges, perhaps unprecedented, where intelligence is crucial.

According to a Congressional report from the House Intelligence Oversight subcommittee, to be released today finds the DNI “has failed to revamp its approach to information analysis, neglecting large swaths of potentially useful data. The report also found that the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence has done a poor job of prioritizing key tasks.”

Crisis are raging or brewing from Somalia to Beirut, the Tri-Border Area to Southeast Asia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Good intelligence, paired with good analysis, have seldom been more vital to our survival and well being. But we are quite far from the ideal of a fully functional intelligence community.

Much of what we need to know is occuring in soft states or grey areas, where governments, which the intelligence community knows and understands, simply do not exist. The community has taken only hesitant steps to meet these changing challenges and priorities.

Among the other problems are the slowness in getting security clearances, the lack of standardized procedures for getting those, and the lack of human intelligence. There is also criticism of the lack of information sharing across agency lines and within agencies.

It is no secret that information sharing among intelligence agencies has sharply deteriorated in recent months. Despite a brief cessation of hostilities right after 9-11, the overall situation has never been good, and is getting worse. It is mind boggling that almost five years after 9-11 this difficulty and lack of communication still hobbles a unified effort to identify and fight an enemy who has made no secret of its desire to destroy us.

The lack of human intelligence is something that will not be addressed quickly, but is among the most urgent. This is especially true in areas of growing crisis where the intelligence community remains largely bereft of eyes and ears on the ground. Somalia, Ethiopia, the DRC and most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Tri-Border Area, all face sharp new threats to their stability which will likely have reprecussions for our national interests and security.

Liaison relationships with clearly identified counterparts in stateless regions of the world simply does not happen. Senior U.S. officials have stated publicly that the U.S. had no idea of what was brewing in Somalia, leaving us suddenly faced with an Islamist movement in which the predominant faction is clearly identified with al Qaeda.

The seeming inertia and inability of the leadership to move the reform process forward expeditiously is dangerous to all of us.

Applications, Blogging, Hawaii, and United States Air Force

(Applications is on hold, Hawaii is from Wednesday, May 24, 2006 to Friday, August XX, 2006 or Friday, September XX, 2006, and United States Air Force enlistment is late 2006. Blogging will not be done until further notice and until applications are updated.)

Ankara and Washington Develop Joint Strategies Against PKK by Zaman Daily Front News Desk

The United States has expressed its support to Turkey over a joint operation against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

US Ambassador to Turkey Ross Wilson informed that the US is working to develop more functional methods for dealing with the PKK.

Wilson referred to the common vision document that was signed between Turkey and the US a month ago, and stressed that the document foresees cooperation over the PKK, economic and commercial issues as well as many others.

Speaking on the crisis between Israel and Lebanon, Wilson conveyed the American government and the public’s gratitude for Turkey’s contribution to assisting the evacuations from Lebanon. He also appreciated Turkey’s efforts to establish peace in the region, and expressed the US’s continuing support for Turkey’s entry to the European Union.

Turkish and American military officials met in Ankara and Bagdat (Baghdad) to discuss measures against the PKK presence in Northern Iraq.

Sources reported that the US is ready to take concrete military steps against the PKK.

In Ankara, US top level military representatives to Turkey Peter Satten met officials from the Turkish Military Operation and Intelligence Directorate.

Turkish and American military officials also held talks in Baghdad and northern Iraq.

Terrorism: Hezbollah Poised for Attacks Abroad Say German Secret Services by Adnkronos International

'Sleeper' cells belonging to militant Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah are present in Western Europe, Latin America and in southeast Asia and been ordered to be ready to carry out terrorist attacks should Israel prolong its military offensive against Lebanon, according to unnamed German intelligence sources.

A similar alarm was raised two days ago by Israel's Shin Bet security service and Israeli embassies and institutions have been put on high alert. Hezbollah reportedly has sleeper cells in more than 20 countries, including Italy, and is alleged to have already been involved in several spectacular attacks.

These include Argentina's deadliest bombing and the largest single incident of terrorism against Jews since World War II: the 1994 car-bomb attack on the AMIA building in the capital Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people - most of them Jewish - and injured over 300.

Eight days after the AMIA attack, the Israeli Embassy in the British capital, London, was car-bombed by two Palestinians allegedly linked to Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has also been blamed for an earlier suicide bomb attack in 1992 that destroyed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring 242.

Hezbollah is believed by the United States and some other countries' intelligence agencies to have kidnapped over 30 Westerners between 1982 and 1992, including US journalist Terry Anderson, British journalist John McCarthy, the Archbishop of Canterbury's special envoy, Terry Waite, and Irish citizen, Brian Keenan.

Hezbollah was accused by the US government of being responsible for the April 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut that killed 63; of being behind the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, a suicide truck bombing that killed 241 US Marines in their barracks in Beirut in October 1983; of bombing the replacement US Embassy in East Beirut on 20 September, 1984, killing 20 Lebanese and two US soldiers; an attack that killed 58 French soldiers in their barracks; and of carrying out the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 en route from Athens to Rome.

A Lebanese newspaper has estimated 1,000 people have been killed in terror attacks by Hezbollah. The group denies involvement in any of these attacks.

Is a New Islamic War Brewing in Africa? by Simon Robinson

When Islamic clerics captured Somalia's capital Mogadishu last month, it seemed to offer some hope for peace in the war-torn Horn of Africa country. Somalia has had no central government for 15 years, and the country was a patchwork of fiefdoms run by murderous warlords. The rise of the Islamic Courts Union worried the U.S., which says the group has ties to Al-Qaeda and harbors known terrorists, but others saw opportunity: perhaps the Islamists could finally end the bloodshed and bring a functioning government to Somalia.

Six weeks on and those hopes are disintegrating quickly. Hardliners within the Islamic Courts Union have pushed aside moderates and appointed as their head a man the U.S. suspects of collaborating with al-Qaeda. Mogadishu locals, who had cheered the demise of the warlords, began to fret when their new Islamic leaders cracked down much as the Taliban did in its early days in Afghanistan: young men watching World Cup football from Germany were beaten, and men wearing long hair were forced to have it cut. Talks between the Islamists and the fragile interim Somali government — elected in neighboring Kenya more than two years ago but powerless ever since and holed up in the southern Somali city of Baidoa — also stalled.

Then, in the past week Islamic forces surrounded Baidoa. The Islamic Courts Union says it will not attack the interim government, which is mostly secular in outlook, but the government's closest ally, Ethiopia, is worried enough to be massing troops to take on the Islamic forces itself. The Islamists and Somali journalists say that Ethiopia has already sent troops over the border, a claim Ethiopia denies. But there is no doubting Ethiopia's intentions. "We will use all means at our disposal to crush the Islamist group if they attempt to attack Baidoa," Ethiopian Information Minister Berhan Hailu told Reuters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital.

It wouldn't be the first time the Ethiopians have taken on Somali Islamists. In late 1996, Ethiopian troops crossed the border into Somalia to take out a group called al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI), which had connections to Al-Qaeda and aimed to remake the lawless Horn of Africa country as a hardline Islamic state. At that stage, though, the group had only a few hundred fighters, and Ethiopia, which claimed AIAI operatives had tried to kill Ethiopia's transport minister and had attacked hotels in Addis Ababa, crushed the Islamic group within months. But the Islamists regrouped and adopted a new strategy. Much as Hamas in Gaza or Hizballah in Lebanon, the Islamists spent years winning support among the Somali public by running medical clinics, schools and courts. Ten years on, many of the leaders of AIAI now help run the Islamic Courts Union.

Ethiopia fears that a powerful Islamic regime in Somalia (or any powerful regime in Somalia for that matter) will threaten its borders and may link up with anti-Addis Islamic groups in the Ethiopian area of Ogaden. With its superior troop numbers and military hardware (including a small number of planes), Ethiopia is likely to win any battle between the two forces. But war could leave Somalia even more broken than it already is. John Prendergast, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and an Africa specialist in the Clinton administration, says a conflict would likely end the transitional government's chances of taking over in Mogadishu, severely damage the Islamists capacity to lead, flatten the city of Baidoa and leave Ethiopia with heavy casualties. "The [Islamic] militias are highly motivated and disciplined and would rally around the slogan of protecting Somalia from foreign invaders," says Prendergast. "But the reaction from Ethiopia would be hellish and the Islamists know that."

There is still hope that the Islamists and transitional government will meet and come to some accommodation. "The place to deal with differences is at the negotiating table," Kofi Annan's Special Representative for Somalia, Fran'ois Lons'ny Fall, said last week. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer told journalists by video-conference that the U.S. has told Ethiopia "not to get drawn into this provocation." She said the U.S. hopes that moderates within the Islamic Courts Union will pull back the Islamic militias and return to talks. "If there was a significant engagement from the region backed strongly by the international community, then there's a chance war can be averted," says Prendergast. Unfortunately, the international community is focused on other conflicts at the moment.