Over at the Atlantic, Fred Kaplan has a great piece up on the recent riots in Greece.

Although sparked by a police killing, Kaplan frames the riots within a historical long view:

Greece could now be at a crossroads, which requires a bit of history to explain. Following World War II, Greece had a civil war, which pitted an old guard pro-Soviet left against a pre-modern unenlightened right. The civil war left scars for decades on the country’s politics, pushing left- and right-wing parties into ideological barricades, inflamed further by personal hatreds arising out of the war years. Then there was the dynastic, coffee-house politics of intrigue and corruption that a poor country struggling to erect a modern middle class was prone to. Greece’s very fragility and strategic eastern Mediterranean position during the Cold War led to heavy-handed American tutelage. The Truman Doctrine might have saved Greece from the communism of its Balkan neighbors to the north, but Greeks were not grateful, because of the Latin American-style interference with which Greece was subjected to by America. The colonels who took power in a 1967 coup ruled Greece in a brutal manner that brought forth the worst kind of unregulated Third World-type development. They were backed by the United States, even as they were despised at home. The first real crack in the military regime came in November 1973, when protests at the Athens Polytechnic led to the downfall of one junta leader and the ascension of another, whose regime was toppled the next year with the reinstitution of democracy. From then on, student protests in Greece have had a particularly poignant legitimacy to them, as well as a distinctly leftist edge, laced with the left’s uniquely effective ability to question authority.

As Kaplan himself hints at, Greece’s past make it a likely signal for things to come.

After all, Greece was not the only country that was once caught in the crosshairs of the Cold War and is now caught in the financial crisis. Thailand, Ukaine, Turkey, etc—all of them finished the Cold War with severe internal disjunctures. For a while, so long as credit flowed freely and the right deals paid off the right players, those fissures could be glossed over. But now that the credit has run dry and their currencies are getting hammered, the underlying social tensions—which, by and large, were left unresolved—are coming right back to the surface.

Once it becomes clear that the good times won’t be returning any time soon—ie, that US consumers are too indebted to take advantage of liquid credit markets—the rioting and violence will begin in earnest.

Not good. 

Two weeks out, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the Mumbai attacks were more than simply business as usual.

Just look at this:

The Mumbai attacks were directed not only at India but also at Pakistan’s new democratic government and the peace process with India that we have initiated. Supporters of authoritarianism in Pakistan and non-state actors with a vested interest in perpetuating conflict do not want change in Pakistan to take root.

That may read like the standard fair of a self-styled pundit, but it isn’t. The words come from Asif Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto and president of Pakistan.

Needless to say, presidents of nuclear countries do not take to the pages of the NYTimes lightly, much less two weeks after the fact. So Zardari’s message smacks not of hope but desperation: its publication now betrays impotence far more than it appeals to solidarity.

Even more, Zardari’s piece is the clearest tell yet of just how precarious things in Pakistan have become. Fundamentally, his appeal is to the world order of old, a world as firmly rooted in the “self-evident” legitimacy of nation-states as it was held together by shared interests in territorial sovereignty.

Yet that world no longer exists. If Zardari’s pen is any indication, Pakistan is now imploding in slow motion, and Mumbai will likely go down as the first time a non-state actor successfully leveraged the disintegration of a nuclear state.

CBS and CNN should be excited. Now that David Gregory has been tapped to host Meet the Press, within a year or two the Sunday morning slot will be wide open.

Although he’s not as bad as George Stephanopolous at ABC, Gregory’s own ambition is too transparent. Just watch the clip from yesterday’s announcement: his body language isn’t that of newsman honored, but a narcissist gratified.

Over time, that isn’t going to play well. There’s an elusive gravitas that Tim Russert brought to Meet the Press, a keen sense of why the news was important to his audience. He respected the news because he respected his viewers; he understood the import it held for their lives.

Gregory lacks that sense of respect. He’s too excited by the prestige of his position to be worthy of it. And because of that his viewers will, in the end, tune out. 

In Foreign Affairs this month, current—and future—Secretary of Defense Robert Gates makes the case for ”A Balanced Strategy” in the US military.

This is the kind of thing that various officials have spoken about for years, but Gates actually seems to believe it. And even more, he also makes a remarkable admission of the military’s inherent impotence in the face of an irregular threat:

What is dubbed the war on terror is, in grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign—a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and those of moderation. Direct military force will continue to play a role in the long-term effort against terrorists and other extremists. But over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory. Where possible, what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit. It will take the patient accumulation of quiet successes over a long time to discredit and defeat extremist movements and their ideologies.

In my view, that Obama tapped Gates for Defense (and to a lesser extent, James Jones for Security) was even more significant than having Clinton at State.

Frankly, for the last couple decades, and perhaps even since Eisenhower’s famous admonition, neither the President nor the Congress have had any real, effective control over the Pentagon. Partly because of lobbies and partly because of its unique institutional culture, there’s too much inertia in favor of the status quo. As a result, the only way for change to come is through respected leadership within the DoD itself.

Gates and Jones have that respect, which is why it’s so significant that Gates is now admitting, publicly and widely, that things need to change, that the military cannot continuing operating as it has, and that—most telling of all—military force alone will never be enough. 

By now it’s painfully clear to all that the current financial crisis is global in scope. Yet what the constant repetition of that point has obscured, both on-line and on air, are the few nuanced assessments out there about where the political fallout will be greatest.

One of the best I’ve seen thus far is this analysis from Jules Evans, which articulates well a point I’ve only weakly intuited to date.

In short, Evans’ point is that the region which stands to lose the most will be Central and Eastern Europe, or the CEE:

A senior banker at Unicredit, which is the biggest bank in the CEE region, told me: ‘We have about six months to stop the region from imploding. The EU and ECB need to do more. So far they have felt, it is not in the eurozone, it is not our business. But if there is a crisis in eastern Europe, it will affect western banks, and then it will affect western Europe.’

He also told me there was the real threat of nationalism in eastern Europe, with foreign banks being nationalised for not lending more to CEE economies. ...

If the CEE region did collapse, it could put great strain on the local political systems in these countries, and could give rise to isolationist, xenophobic governments, as it did in some CEE countries in the early 1990s. We should remember that the last time there was a major Austrian / CEE banking collapse was in 1931, with the fall of Creditanstalt, which helped give rise to the Nazi Party.

The EU should have the firepower to stop such a crisis from happening - the Baltic and Balkan economies are not that big. The EU or ECB may need to provide major bail-outs or guarantees to the local CEE banking system, in order to help local banks raise credit. Otherwise we are faced with an asymmetric bail-out, where western banking is guaranteed and eastern banking is left to rot.

Another pressing question is what happens in Ukraine, which looks set for a serious devaluation in the new year, and which is now struggling to pay its debts for Russian gas. Much of the EU depends on the gas that comes through Ukraine from Russia, so the EU needs to make sure its supply is protected there.

About the only saving grace here is that Russian has been hammered by this as well. But it’s still got enough natural resources to pull any number of weakened and resentful countries in Eastern Europe back into its fold.

I’m not sure the EU will have the political will to shelter Bulgaria, Ukraine, et al financially over the next year. But at the same time I’m not sure it fully appreciates what it will likely face as a result a decade or two down the line. 

The deadliest conflict in the last fifty years appears set to become even deadlier.

In eastern Congo, a Tutsi rebel group led by General Laurent Nkunda has come dangerously close to reigniting civil war:

Congolese government forces are fleeing the eastern capital of Goma as Rwandan-backed rebels press towards the town, threatening a lethal confrontation with United Nations peacekeepers and the prospect of all out regional war…

The fighting, which has escalated dramatically in the last two days, is by far the most serious since the UN brokered ceasefire in 2003 and threatens to drag Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo into a new all-out regional war.

As it happens, I actually visited Goma in 2001, on the day President Kabila was assassinated.

And my question now as then is this: where the hell is France? In particular, where is Sarkozy?

After all, this is a French problem—or better, a problem France did much to create but has done very little to resolve. Recall that throughout the 1980s and early 1990s France supplied and trained the Interhamwe militia that perpetrated the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Recall also that when the Rwanda Patriotic Front finally drove the Interahamwe into Congo, ending 100 days of slaughter, France refused to disarm them at the border.

Fourteen years, two civil wars, and over 3.8 million deaths later, we’re again facing the consequences of that decision.

Sarkozy has made no secret of his plans to reclaim France’s foreign largesse. If he’s sincere in that desire, he would do well to help resolve the crisis now underway—either by prodding the UN into further action, or by publicly confronting France’s poor relationship with both the Tutsi minority in eastern Congo and the Tutsi government of Paul Kagame in Rwanda.

For various reasons, that latter option is something of a pipe dream. But coordinating further UN action is not. Especially with Britain and the US tied down in the Middle East, this is the perfect opportunity for Sarkozy to further French influence in world affairs.

He would do well to take it, now matter how painful that choice may seem.

Two days out, it seems increasingly clear that the authorization for our foray into Syria bypassed the State department altogether.

First there’s this from the Times:

American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the raid said the mission had been mounted rapidly over the weekend on orders from the Central Intelligence Agency when the location of the man suspected of leading an insurgent cell, an Iraqi known as Abu Ghadiya, was confirmed. About two dozen American commandos in specially equipped Black Hawk helicopters swooped into the village of Sukkariyah, six miles from the Iraqi border, just before 5 p.m., and fought a brief gun battle with Abu Ghadiya and several members of his cell, the officials said.

Then there’s this from the US Open Source Center, the agency tasked with translating and collecting publicly available information from foreign media sources:

As of 1830 GMT on 27 October, OSC has monitored limited reaction in the Middle East to the US operation in the vicinity of Abu Kamal in northeastern Syria, news of which came too late for extensive print media coverage or comment on the 27th. Apart from harsh Syrian condemnation, limited official comment elsewhere generally condemned the US operation. Official Iraqi reaction suggested some confusion within the Iraqi Government. Most regional media reporting of the incident cited Syrian claims that the target and victims of the attack were entirely civilian in nature.

Let’s put this together. At some point early last weekend, the CIA received actionable intelligence regarding the location of a primary counter-insurgency target. The Special Forces team would have spent the next day planning the operation, with the final approval happening just before the raid began around 5pm on Sunday. Presumably, the White House would have spent that same period weighing the benefits of the raid against the political fallout.

Yet State doesn’t seem to have been included in that deliberation. Look at the OSC report, and it’s pretty clear that our embassies in the region were completely in the dark. Aside from our ambassador to Qatar, there was no State presence in the Arab media, much less a coordinated push-back by either State department officials or surrogates.

I don’t have a die hard position against cross-border raids per se. But you’d damn well better have good cause, and even more, you damn well better do your homework—ie, figure out what the fallout will be, and brace yourself for it.

The Bush administration pretty clearly failed to do that. And as a result, we just set back the Middle East peace process significantly. As I noted yesterday, Syria finally—finally—starts behaving like a member of the international community, and what do we do?

We humiliate its government by publicly violating its territorial sovereignty. Not exactly the way you get a rogue state to normalize its foreign relations.

Yesterday’s Special Forces raid into Syria has gotten far more play abroad than it has here at home, and understandably so. The only stories that are guaranteed to sell right now are the economy and the campaign, while the only news guaranteed not to sell are anything related to Iraq.

Yet we neglect the raid at our own peril, and not just because of the incompetence it demonstrates. The real issue here is Israel and Lebanon: in neither country will there be a lasting peace until each (and particularly Israel) normalize relations with Syria. In other words, in each case Syrian compliance is the foremost constraint. So long as it isn’t on board, peace simply isn’t going to happen.

Fortunately, the last year or so has witnessed a extraordinary thaw in Syria’s relations with its neighbors to the west and south. In particular, last summer Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad held talks with French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and last May came confirmation that his administration was in fact engaged in serious talks with Israel. More recently, Syria established official diplomatic ties with Lebanon—thus giving ceding its longstanding claim over Lebanese territory.

Yesterday’s raid needs to be read against those developments. I’ve no doubt that insurgents have long camped out in eastern Syria, and that those insurgents pose a clear and present danger to the stability and security of western Iraq. But that doesn’t make the raid any less reckless. It prioritizes a relatively minor imperative in Iraq above perhaps the most important development in the Middle East peace process in years.

The generous reading here is to say that that confusion was accidental—that whoever gave the green-light for the raid was so focused on counterinsurgency in Iraq they didn’t fully appreciate the broader geopolitical risks involved with violating Syrian sovereignty. The cynical reading is that the fallout was intended: that someone in DoD wasn’t happy with the diplomatic progress being made, and decided to take advantage of the window afforded by the failure on Sunday of Israel’s moderate Prime Minister to secure a viable coalition.

Either way though, the raid was a disaster—incompetence at best and rank malfeasance at worst. We deserve to know which. 

Lawrence Lessig, in response to a prompt about Obama’s possible margin of victory:

The focus of Obama’s team should be not “how big” but “for what”? When the victory is recorded, the meaning of the victory must be clear. “Mandate” must have meaning, not just metric.

My sentiments exactly. 

Tim Dickinson offers up some great long-form journalism on John McCain:

In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House ... Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.

And that’s the tamest part. If only someone at the Times or Post would take as close a look.