Amid the wreckage of the New Middle East once envisaged by Shimon Peres, Turkey once stood out as a dim hope that someday something might change. As the Oslo process unraveled and peace with Jordan and Egypt remained cold, Turkey was an authentically Muslim country that befriended Israel and even viewed it as a strategic partner. Snuggling up to Israel was part and parcel of Turkish aspirations to be a part of the West, just as was its membership in NATO and its angling to join the European Union.
...The evidence is still equivocal, but it looks increasingly as if Erdogan plans to take his country down the path of Islam, picking up the political, social and economic baggage it needs as he ploddingly moves along. If he and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) aren't leading a Khomeini-style revolution, that's because Turkey's strategic location between Europe and the Middle East, its NATO membership and the distinct lack of enthusiasm on the part of Turks for religious extremism require him to proceed cautiously.
THUS, TURKEY hasn't officially given up on joining the EU. Indeed, Erdogan has embarked on a reform campaign to bring his country up to EU standards. But he can't possibly imagine that his Islamist prejudices, of which the outsized rhetoric against Israel is a critical part, won't create doubts among Europeans about a future marriage. On the other hand, what could be more European than Jew Hatred?
Even when it was practicing Islam-lite pre-Erdogan, the EU had cold feet. Now, Turkey's leaders are not only talking solidarity with fellow Muslims but talking with Bashar Assad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Khaled Mashaal, the kind of Muslims who talk in terms of struggle with and resistance to the West.
The EU won't admit Turkey for two reasons:
1) the Turks are foreigners
2) the Euros remember the past 1500 years of history
Yes, one could argue that Euros were foreigners to each other, but the Euros do have a common history, one that they don't share with Turks and Arabs. They remember, at a deep, visceral level, the Muslim conquest of Spain, the fall of Constantinople, the sweeping of the Turks towards Vienna, and the Moorish raids. That shouldn't matter hundreds of years later but it does, and no amount of Erdogan 'bringing his country up to EU standards' is going to fix that.
Turkey is right to plot a new course that doesn't depend on joining the EU. Unfortunately, Erdogan has decided to make Turkey the center of the new caliphate.
#1
Ironically, the EU facilitated the Islamists in Turkey by requiring, as a condition of EU membership, greater civilian control over the military. Erdogan used this civilian control to execute two purges of Turkish officers who were 'too' secular (or too pro Israel).
On the otherhand, the EU also required more autonomy for the Kurds and this has been done. In the next election there may be a anti Islamist shift.
Posted by: lord garth ||
07/04/2010 17:58 Comments ||
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#3
Shush... as long as we're in the closet, working quietly away at recruiting and supporting fiscally conservative, strictly Constitutionalist, free-market candidates, and turning out the voters for them ... the MSM will ignore us. All the more delicious, when they get their November surprise at the polls. They won't be able to explain to their owners and to their diminishing audience, how they managed to completely miss noticing the Tea Party effect.
Government's broken, but the market's also failing. The banks aren't lending. Consumers aren't spending. We need government spending to break out of this vicious cycle, so long as it's INTELLIGENT government spending. And we need to have an intelligent industrial policy that will stop hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China.
Just slashing government budgets will not bring down unemployment down; neither will dotcoms and mom-and-pop startups put tens of millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans back to work.
Time for a new political class that's not wedded to failed orthodoxies from the last century.
That's the key. Though I would expand that to say stop exporting 5% of the US GDP each and every year. It's far too much to be sustainable and results in the national pot of wealth to become smaller each year.
Posted by: ed ||
07/04/2010 19:53 Comments ||
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#4
I wish Mayor Bing well, but he has only so many chips and so much time to turn around the city and mindset. He is courageous. That said, I hope he is not destined to roll the huge boulder of Detroit govt up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout his term, like the myth of Sisyphus.
Posted by: Alaska Paul in NW Iceland ||
07/04/2010 6:36 Comments ||
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#5
as long as someone like the Conyers can get elected I have no hope. The population gets the wreckage they deserve
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/04/2010 10:28 Comments ||
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#6
Replace Detroit's motto "Motor City" with the phrase "Abandon all hope ye who enter here"
In Italian Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate
To make Chrysler's new owners feel at home.
And translated into Latin for any priests who remember the language,
In Henry Ford Sr's day, Detroit was to be the technology leader, the engine of innovation and economic growth. Wages were far higher than average. Hundreds of startups served an ecosystem characterized by rapid dispersion of new technologies into high value-added products that added enormously to the nation's wealth. Fortunes were made, and workers shared in the prosperity.
Silicon Valley today exhibits many of the same characteristics of Detroit in the latter half of the last century:
-- market consolidation and concentration of revenues into a few industry leaders (Oracle, Intel, Cisco) as former stalwarts fall and/or are swallowed up. Detroit used to have hundreds of auto companies, too.
-- offshoring and outsourcing to lower-cost manufacturing destinations. Today there are ten jobs created in China for every technology job created in Silicon Valley-- and job growth in Silicon Valley is flat, with double-digit unemployment. Andy Grove of Intel calls this a national catastrophe
-- ridiculously heavy tax burdens imposed by a state government in hock to labor unions that squeeze the middle class and force successful companies to look elsewhere.
-- a huge and growing underclass, consciously stoked by a political elite seeking to lock up the fastest-growing electoral bloc.
-- due to the swelling underclass, schools that cannot produce enough qualified engineers and other graduates to supply industry, exacerbating the slide from all of the above.
There's a very good chance that California in 2040 will look like Michigan today. Scary.
"The underlying problem isn't simply lower Asian costs. It's our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called "Start-Ups, Not Bailouts." His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.
Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.
The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that's the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.
What Went Wrong?
Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.
I am fortunate to have lived through one such example. In 1968 two well-known technologists and their investor friends anted up $3 million to start Intel (INTC), making memory chips for the computer industry. From the beginning we had to figure out how to make our chips in volume. We had to build factories, hire, train, and retain employees, establish relationships with suppliers, and sort out a million other things before Intel could become a billion-dollar company. Three years later the company went public and grew to be one of the biggest technology companies in the world. By 1980, 10 years after our IPO, about 13,000 people worked for Intel in the U.S.
Not far from Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., other companies developed. Tandem Computers went through a similar process, then Sun Microsystems, Cisco (CSCO), Netscape, and on and on. Some companies died along the way or were absorbed by others, but each survivor added to the complex technological ecosystem that came to be called Silicon Valley.
As time passed, wages and health-care costs rose in the U.S. China opened up. American companies discovered that they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done more cheaply overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders. Growth continued, even more profitably. But the job machine began sputtering.
Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975(figure-B). Meanwhile, a very effective computer manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workersfactory employees, engineers, and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenues last year were $62 billion, larger than Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL), or Intel. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel, and Sony
#11
We are becoming another Mexican/Brazilian-style banana republic:
-- a tiny oligarchy at the top;
-- a huge and swelling underclass that has more than doubled since 1986 due to the deliberate importation by corrupt elites of nearly 10 million illiterate or semiliterate campesinos from the south;
-- a rapidly growing, deeply-entrenched public sector union class;
-- and squeezed between all of the above, a shrinking and financially harried middle class.
Why are we doing this to ourselves?
Who will stand up and call BS on Tweedledum and Tweedledee and their fanboys in the media?
#12
-- a huge and swelling underclass that has more than doubled since 1986
And a disappearing middle-class for the reasons you have cited.
-- due to the swelling underclass, schools that cannot produce enough qualified engineers and other graduates to supply industry, exacerbating the slide from all of the above.
The schools are producing engineers but there are no jobs. A call-in on Limbaugh the other day was a electrical engineer who was unemployed. I think he said he had a masters degree in EE and 19 years of experience. He cannot find a job. He received an unemployment check. Listed on the check were his unemployment money, an item listed as stimulus money for $22.00, and an item where he paid $28.00 for income tax. The government giveth and taketh away all on the same check. Increasingly the underclass is being made up of such people who are unemployed or underemployed. Some of our engineering is being farmed out to India. I would expect that before too long quite a bit of our medicine will be farmed out to India also.
On Thursday, I watched as the American general David Petraeus passed through this cluster of one-storey buildings and barbed-wire fences on the outskirts of Brussels, where, on his way to Kabul to take command of the almost 120,000 troops fighting in Afghanistan, he briefly paid homage to NATO.
He said a few words about his years commanding Cold War troops on Europe's borders, and then the world's attention followed him out the door, leaving this lumbering organization and its 13,000 employees in near-solitude to oversee its collapse into complete irrelevance and disarray.
While we were busy watching the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 28-member nations dump $800-million into the only war they have ever fought under the mutual-defence rules of their founding charter, the organization itself has seen a changing world suck out all its internal logic and leave it a huge, hollow shell of self-abnegating bureaucracy.
Its efforts to repair itself -- including a study released four weeks ago by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and a huge summit in Lisbon in November, during which it will try to give itself a new "strategic concept" -- only draw attention to the impossibility of maintaining NATO as a significant organization beyond the end of the Afghan war.
If you talk in public to senior NATO officials, they will speak boldly about sweeping away the 61-year-old alliance's old Cold War structures and eastward-pointed defences, and giving it a new purpose: Perhaps a "comprehensive approach," in which it takes on peacekeeping, cyber-defence and all manner of other roles; or perhaps a rapid-reaction force, designed to respond in hours to sudden terrorist threats.
Privately, the organization's top policy minds throw up their hands and tell you a darker truth: The Afghan war didn't just disguise a disabling paradox within NATO; it turned that paradox into an impossibility.
First, there is the money: So far this year, 19 of NATO's 28 member states have cut their defence budgets sharply. Some very sharply: by 30 to 40 per cent in the Baltics, and the worst of the cuts, in Germany and Britain and France, are yet to come.
So NATO, like most of us, is operating in the red, its $2.6-billion budget facing a $670-million deficit. As it stands, of the 28 members only five -- Albania, Britain, France, Greece and the United States -- spend the required 2 per cent of their national budgets on defence, and that number is sure to drop.
In other words, any "strategic concept" will have to be known as "less."
But there is a deeper problem, one that quietly emerged during Afghanistan. In order to get more soldiers involved, and to make NATO reflect the new Europe, it added 12 new countries, all of them former Communist states, between 1999 and 2009.
It no longer makes sense, all of NATO's founding members agree, to have a huge and vastly expensive military organization devoted to defending Europe against an attack from Moscow. In fact, almost everyone in NATO headquarters, and most Russian military figures I've interviewed, say it is only logical that Russia become a member of NATO.
If it is to become an organization devoted to defending the developed world against modern-day threats in a way that justifies the expense, and if it is to convince its funding governments that it is not just a Cold War anachronism, then its membership needs to include Russia, which has a strong interest in modernizing its forces and having a common international defence that extends to its eastern flank. To qualify, Russia would need to become a functioning democracy, which it really is not at the moment, but the carrot of NATO could become an enticement to change.
But suddenly, such an expansion has become an impossible fantasy. As of 2009, half of NATO's members are, in effect, former colonies of Moscow, and their leaders almost unanimously believe that the organization should devote itself solely to defending Europe from an attack on its eastern flank, however implausible that is. They want missiles positioned along the Polish, Romanian and Baltic borders.
Those Eastern European countries want a NATO built around Article V of its charter, which requires all members to come unanimously to the defence of any other. This Cold War clause has been invoked exactly once, 12 years after the Cold War ended, on Sept. 11, 2001, to legally justify the conflict in Afghanistan. The founding members want to rid themselves of this burdensome obligation, but their new cousins see it as the only thing of value.
They will come out, in November, with a mish-mash that will disguise the fact that Afghanistan is the last, tragic time this giant alliance will play a major military role in the world.
"We're trying to co-operate against a backdrop of continuing distrust," says a top NATO official involved in coming up with a new purpose for the organization. "It's like a marriage where we have all the certificates and the marriage licence, but there's no love between us." There will be no formal divorce, but the action, after the general comes home, will surely take place somewhere else.
#1
NATO is irrelevant to the major challenges facing us in this century, all of which originate from Asia.
The problem with our NATO allies used to be lack of will. Thanks to the debt crisis, it's far worse now: even if by some miracle the Germans French and the rest were to change their national mindsets and want to increase defense spending, they no longer can. In fact, even Britain is likely to slash its military severely, as will the rest of Europe, because they have no choice. Ditto for the next US president, regardless which party he or she belongs to.
Add to the above the determination of Turkey's leaders to sidle up to Iran and embrace jihadism, and the obvious conclusion is that NATO must either go east or go out of business.
Going east = finding an accommodation with the only non-jihadist military power that spans Europe and Asia. If the West is to count for anything in this century, it has to bring Russia-- gangster-state, brutal, hideously and irredeemably corrupt-- into the western fold.
Otherwise, as one European diplomat put it, Europe will cease to exist, becoming a minor province on the far western edge of the Asian peninsula.
The stunned Iran cannot believe it's happening: The worst nightmare for the Ayatollah regime is taking shape right before its eyes, in the form of a complete chokehold on Iran's economy within a few months. Iran's soft underbelly is in the sights -- oil and gas. The arrogant Ahmadinejad thought this day shall never come, yet the "higher power" that guides him, in his view, apparently no longer works.
The US and Europe have decided to suffocate Iran's economy, no less. This is no longer about playing games here and there or about lukewarm sanctions against Iranian companies here and there. This time, the target is the whole Iranian economy. For Israel and most Arab states, there could be no greater success: The state behind everything that destabilized the Middle East is being threatened with collapse.
At the end of June, the US Congress and Senate approved by a large majority a law banning global companies engaged in ties with Iran's oil and gas industry from coming into the US. This is a comprehensive and strict law that will dry up Iran as it dried up Cuba. Once the law goes into effect, anyone in the most sensitive industry for the Iranians who goes into Iran will not be allowed to go into the US. (While Iran exports oil, it must import refined oil for cars and planes, and therefore its dependence on the world is high.)
This law's effect is already being felt, and energy giants that sell fuel for Iranian cars and planes immediately announced that they're terminating their ties with the rogue, crumbling state. For example, the French Total immediately put an end to its Iran business.
Yet there's more, and that's what hurts Iran the most: The European Union has also imposed a chokehold on Iran's economy. The decision was taken in June by all EU heads of state: As of early July, new investments by European companies and states in Iran's energy, oil, and gas industry will be banned. This is an absolute, comprehensive, and far-reaching boycott. Technical assistance and the transfer of goods and services to Iran's oil and gas industry will also be disallowed. Every violation of this decision will be illegal.
We must keep in mind that the EU is Iran's number one economic partner. About 80% of Iran's revenues come from oil and gas, and therefore this is its soft underbelly. And why are foreign investments critical? Because Iran's wells are growing old, and there is a constant need to renovate them, yet there is no money for it unless it comes as a foreign investment -- which is now banned. Should these renovations not take place constantly, Iran will stop pumping oil and the economy will deteriorate quickly.
The arrogant and unresponsive Iranians are now infuriated with the whole world: The US and EU (the EU will be "gravely punished," Tehran says, calling the Germans "Israel's slaves"), the Russians who abandoned them (according to Iran, Russia is a crumbling super-power. Everyone is crumbling, except for Tehran, of course,) and the Chinese who betrayed them. Where will they go now?
Posted by: Fred ||
07/04/2010 00:00 ||
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Link ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
