Hottest female fighters in the world

We'll start off with an honorary mention for Regina Halmlich, who retired in 2007 but is a true pioneer of women's boxing. And hey, she was pretty foxy, too.

On to the list!

6. Zulina Munoz

La Loba, Mexico's gift to boxing, is darn cute.

5. Mia St. John

A tae kwon do black belt turned model turned pro boxer, she notched up 45 wins, including 18 knockouts, and has since turned to MMA. She also found the time to pose for Playboy.

4. Kina Malpartida

The 2009 WBA super featherweight world champion!

3. Gina Carano

Where do I start? Gina Carano, a Muay Thai fighter who took part in the first ever sanctioned women's MMA fight and is damn hot.

She's in a movie which I have to see, and was in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, which was fun. She's so tough that when Ewan McGregor punched her in the face on the set, he nearly broke his hand.

2. Eva Wahlström

Finland's second-hottest athlete is simply gorgeous.

She also happens to be by far the most accomplished female boxer in Finland's short history.

1. Natascha Ragosina

I said at the beginning that to qualify on this list, you have to be hot and good. Natascha Ragosina is not only beautiful, but deadly. She has a boatload of titles in boxing and kickboxing, and I'll let this image speak for itself:

She's a super middleweight, but this woman literally punches above her weight. Not only does she have a boatload of super middleweight championships, but she was also the 2009 WIBF heavyweight champion. Here's video of her defeating then-heavyweight champion Pamela London.

Now that's hot.

By the way, in case anyone is wondering why Laila Ali isn't on your list, this is your answer. She's retired now, but when she was still active, she refused to fight any of the top female fighters in her weight division, like Ragosina. That takes her off my list.

Natascha Ragosina is not only beautiful, but she can kick your ass. What more can you ask for?

A new Falklands conflict?

Next month will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. I don't know if they've got an election coming up or something, but they'be been making noise about the islands again.

The Falklands war is still something of a sore point for Britain's political left, what with Margaret Thatcher being Antichrist to them. I've actually sat a British and Irish studies exam on a book that determinedly referred to the "Malvinas conflict". Unsurprisingly, the foreword went to some lengths - for an academic work - to abuse the then-Prime Minister.

To me, hearing leftists talk about the "Malvinas" is bizarre. Surely, apart from any hopefully mythical modern-day Stalinists, the left believes in democracy and self-determination? The population of the Falklands is British and has repeatedly made it clear that they wish to remain British. It's the Argentine claim that the islands are somehow theirs that represents pure imperialism. What makes the left-wing defense of the Argentines even more bizarre is that at the time of the war, Argentina was fighting the so-called "dirty war" against left-wingers and trade unions, with the same military that invaded the Falklands. One can only assume that the British left let their hatred of Mrs. Thatcher distort the picture.

If you wanted to be neutral, I suppose you could call them the Sebald islands after their probable Dutch discoverer, but I don't see any need to, as the Argentinians are, in my opinion, clearly in the wrong. In this case, it's the former colony that is the imperialist. It was on precisely these grounds that the United Nations found Argentina to be guilty of unjustified aggression back in 1982.

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Unfortunately, as much as Britain may have the moral advantage, they are at a decided military disadvantage when it comes to the defense of the islands. Should Argentina decide to invade again, the British would find it much more difficult to retake the Falklands in 2012 than they did in 1982.

By itself, the Argentine air force is hardly a threat. Their newest aircraft is the A-4AR Fightinghawk, an A-4 Skyhawk modernized with F-16 avionics. It's still a Skyhawk, the first examples of which entered service in 1956. Alongside them the Argentines essentially deploy the same aircraft, minus combat losses, that they fought the Falklands War with: Mirage III:s and V:s, and the Israeli upgraded versions of the latter. They also still fly the indigenous Pucará counter-insurgency aircraft, some of which are run on biofuel so they can fight a green counterinsurgency. In other words, Argentina currently maintains more or less the same air force that the British resoundingly defeated in 1982.

After the 1982 war, a major investment was made in improving the defenses of the Falklands. Mostly, this took the form of RAF Mount Pleasant, a brand-new airbase featuring what Wikipedia calls the world's longest corridor. Opened in 1985, RAF Mount Pleasant is home to No. 1435 Flight, which operates four Eurofighter Typhoons. Ground defense is provided by an infantry company from the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment. Given its current obsolescent/obsolete state, the four Typhoons at Mount Pleasant and the Royal Navy ships in the area can probably see off the whole Argentine air force. But it's not quite that simple.

In my mind, the best analogy for the Mount Pleasant airbase is Singapore in 1941. The naval base at Singapore had been constructed to house the battlefleet Britain would send to the Pacific theatre. From there, it would have exerted a powerful deterrent - Mahan's "fleet in being" - on the Japanese. The Japanese pre-empted this plan by taking the inadequately defended base before the fleet could be deployed. The outnumbered defending EN forces were destroyed by asymmetric attack: aircraft against a battleship and cruiser. Having lost Singapore, the Royal Navy had to operate from bases in the Indian Ocean, and was unable to retake Singapore. The Navy had been ordered to defend Singapore, but denied the resources it needed.

Similarly, RAF Mount Pleasant could easily house enough air power to deter any Argentine invasion. But what if the Argentines pre-empt this plan? The present complement of four Typhoons may be more than enough to deal with anything the Argentine air force can send their way - in the air. However, a force of only four aircraft is appallingly vulnerable to asymmetric attack on the ground. Should those aircraft be disabled by sabotage or other means and the airbase be taken, how will Britain get it back? Without carrier-borne aviation, which Britain no longer has, any attempt to retake the islands would be in the face of Argentine air superiority. Even their obsolete aircraft could make life very uncomfortable for a naval task force, let alone an amphibious landing, depending on fighter cover from Ascension Island. After the inexplicable decision to retire both the Sea Harrier and Harrier from service, the Fleet Air Arm now operates no fixed-wing combat aircraft, and although the UK still has a single carrier (HMS Illustrious) in service, there are no carrier-capable combat aircraft in her inventory that could fly off her.

So while Britain found it difficult to put together a carrier task force to retake the islands in 1982, the same feat would be impossible in 2012, because the carrier task force simply cannot be assembled. The aircraft don't exist, with even the remaining Harrier GR9 airframes having been sold to the Americans. If the Argentines take the islands with a coup de main, the United Kingdom can't get them back on her own. Having dismantled her power projection capabilities, she would have to rely entirely on her allies for carrier-based air cover. This is a dismal prospect: the Americans are allied with Argentina, and are hardly likely to be interested in a shooting war in Latin America. The Spanish have a carrier, but the prospect of Spain going to war against Argentina over a British colony seems incongruous at best.

If Argentina invaded, British air superiority over the islands could only be realistically re-established by a French or Italian carrier group. That is the state of British sea power in 2012.

The first of the next generation of British aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth class, is due to enter service in 2016. Until then, the Falklands are Argentina's for the taking, because British politicians did what no enemy ever could: destroyed the Fleet Air Arm.

Dependency theory and conspiracy theory

There was a post at Tiger Beatdown titled "Occupying Europe, when the colonizer reclaims wealth", by Flavia Dzodan. Anyone familiar with leftist discourse knows what's coming from the title, but to prime myself for some intellectual activity this week (I'm writing this Monday morning), I'll go through the motions with it. What I'm trying to do is criticize the worldview that I perceive is behind the text.

A long time ago, when I took a course to become a kickboxing instructor, I was taught to give feedback in the form of a metaphorical hamburger; a prime example of the McDonaldization of education, if you will. The idea is that first you give positive feedback (a bun), then criticism (the meat), and finish off with more positive feedback (the other bun). I like the metaphor, because to me, it implies that the positive reinforcement equates with the useless carbohydrates of the buns, while the criticism is the meat of the whole thing. That's an anachronism, as the example was given at a time when any Finnish person would have thought that "karppaaminen" ("low carb-ing") refers to a type of fish.

In the spirit of this advice, I'd like to start by saying that I very much approve of the author's criticism of "importing" the 99% slogan from the US "Occupy" movement. As a European, I am in general dismayed that so many European political movements seem to be importing agendas directly from North America. For example, it's recently become something of a meme here in Finland to rail against tax breaks for the rich; indeed, I've even seen people claim that our entire budget deficit is caused by tax breaks granted since the early nineties. According to an authoritative study, the opposite is true: tax progression has remained essentially the same, while taxes on low- and medium-income earners have fallen considerably more than for high-income earners. But because tax breaks for the rich are on the agenda in the US, the same must be true here.

However, there is a fundamental issue I disagree on:

The European Union’s wealth is the wealth of Empires. Mainly the British, Dutch, Spanish, Belgium, French, Italian, Austro-German and Portuguese empires. This is the wealth built on the backs of the African slave trade and the colonization of lands as distant from each other as the African continent, the Americas, Asia and Australia. This wealth is made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories. This wealth is also made of resource depletion and subjugation of native populations. This wealth that never belonged to Europe to begin with.

In other words, all you Occupy Whatever protesters with your bizarre neo-swastikas: you're not being leftist enough. All that evil financial capital was created by robbing the Third World:

The very same wealth people now Occupying these public European squares reclaim as their own, demanding it is re-distributed while it was generated as a result of Europe’s occupations in the first place. And yet, none of this is examined or contextualized. Most people operating under the illusion that this wealth they are reclaiming is rightfully theirs, that they are entitled to it.

Though the author gives us the "very basic premises of dependency theory", cribbed from the Wikipedia page, and dresses up these claims with it, what becomes obscured is that dependency theory is, first and foremost, a theory on the current relationships between countries and markets in the world system. It is not, and does not justify, the historical claim that current European prosperity is "made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories". This is a much broader claim, and one that I take great issue with. Many dependency theorists do advocate such a historical worldview, but the difference between the theory of international relations that is dependency theory and that historical worldview must be kept in mind.

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This claim was formalized as the theory of the "development of underdevelopment" by sociologist Andre Gunder Frank in the article by that name. His specific claim was that the underdevelopment of Latin American countries was not caused by "the survival of archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage", but by the international capitalist system, which exploited them for profit.

It's important to see this criticism in context. Frank, and dependency theory in general, was reacting against views of development that saw underdevelopment as principally the fault of the underdeveloped countries themselves, either because they hadn't managed their economic development properly, or even because they were racially inferior. The latter view has been put forward recently here in Finland, and figures in Finnish discussions on development aid, for instance.

While much of the dependency theorists' criticism of existing models of economic development was good and necessary, Frank threw the baby out with the bath water when he claimed that underdevelopment is entirely caused by the world system. If this was true, then Hernando de Soto's (the economist, not the conquistador) reforms would have had no effect. De Soto has led the way in improving standards of living in developing countries precisely by removing antiquated obstacles to economic development and improving the ability of ordinary people to participate in the economy. His success has shown that such obstacles do play a vital role in restricting economic development. By reforming property rights and arguing for a decriminalization of coca growing, de Soto managed to make life so difficult for the Shining Path Peruvian Maoist terrorist organization that they tried to kill him. Read more about de Soto here.

Despite endorsements from people like Kofi Annan ("Hernando is absolutely right") and Bill Clinton ("the world’s greatest living economist"), de Soto infuriates left-wing commentators precisely because he's offering a capitalist solution to underdevelopment. Perhaps the most eloquent defence of de Soto I can offer is to link to the Grauniad, which dedicated a "review" to attacking de Soto, but managed to offer no concrete criticisms whatsoever beyond accusing him of being a front man for international capitalism.

De Soto's work quite concretely demonstrates that legislation and culture in the underdeveloped countries do play a major role in restricting development, even today. To lay everything at the door of a faceless, ill-defined "international capitalism", a left-wing hobbyhorse similar to the Stalinist "international bourgeoisie", is at best a single-cause fallacy.

As a historical view, the idea that Western development is caused by non-Western underdevelopment is fundamentally absurd. It rests on a zero-sum view of world wealth, where Western prosperity cannot be the result of progress within Western society, but must be created by taking resources from other societies.

To take a fairly specific example, it has long been a commonplace for certain leftists to assert that the British "industrial revolution" was built on profits from imperialism and the slave trade. However, it has been pointed out by David Richardson that less than 1% of the domestic investment in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was made up of profits from the slave trade. Furthermore, while it's indisputable that the Atlantic slave trade had a grave human impact on Africa, the idea that it impoverished and destroyed the entire continent is ridiculously exaggerated. It obscures, among others, the fact that there were also Africans who themselves made a considerable profit from selling other Africans into slavery. In my opinion, the bald generalizations offered by supposedly "post-colonial" Marxists that cast all white people as aggressors and all black people as helpless victims are just as racist as the racist views they purport to replace.

Even some Marxist historians like Bill Warren agree:

There is no evidence of a process of underdevelopment…The evidence rather supports a contrary thesis: that process of development has been taking place…and that this has been a direct result of the west.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the economic development of the entire world, at any stage, is a direct result of anything done by the West, but the simple truth is that throughout the history of the world, all societies have developed economically, and some societies have developed faster than others. This speed has varied, and indeed at times turned negative, and the forms the development has taken have also varied. Development and "undevelopment" have both taken place at all times and in all cultures; there is no truth to the racist ideas that only white westerners can bring about economic prosperity, or that African culture - as if there were such a thing as an "African culture" - is somehow inherently inimical to development.

At its heart, economic development is endogenic. This is not to suggest that exogenic factors can't play major or even decisive parts in specific processes, but it's long since become obvious to me that these kinds of rejoinders of the blindingly obvious are necessary when writing about anything even remotely political. But historically, it has primarily been the endogenic development of a culture or society that determines what its economy is like and how prosperous it is. There is no single cause; the circumstances a society is in, including various environmental variables like natural resources and climate, power relations within the society and of the society with others, cultural and economic structures within the society and a bewildering array of other factors, conspicuously including decisions made in and by the society, determine what path of economic development it takes. If unraveling this was easy, then economic history wouldn't be an academic discipline.

It's precisely the complexity of economic development that makes single-cause explanations like "international capitalism" or the blithering nonsense of Jared Diamond's guns, germs and steel so inadequate. They attempt to reduce a massively complex series of interrelated historical processes to a single cause, and frankly, when they go beyond that to assert that this single mechanism still functions today and people offering alternative views are on its payroll, they enter the realm of conspiracy theory.

These zero-sum theories don't make any sense on their own merits. If the underdevelopment of the so-called Third World is entirely a result of Western capitalism, does this mean that before the advent of the Age of Discovery (which, frankly, is an appallingly Eurocentric term), fundamental global inequalities of wealth didn't exist? If so, how did the diabolical Western capitalists acquire the means to appropriate the wealth of other nations? Surely they had some competitive advantages to start with. These zero-sum views reduce world economic history to a simplistic nonsense of a pillaging West and a pillaged Rest, and don't hold any water when faced with even an elementary knowledge of history.

Even worse, by casting the entire "Rest" as a unitary block of victimized cultures, they completely deny the rich history and heritage of, say, Arabic and Islamic culture, not to mention China, by reducing them to simple victims of Western imperialism who, unable to defend themselves, succumbed to the superior invader. No thought is given to the notion that these societies have their own history and their own processes that might be worthy of study. This simplistic view of the other as an eternal, impersonal suffering victim in fact reinforces the very Eurocentric, orientalist orthodoxy that its proponents claim to oppose.

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The Tiger Beatdown article goes deeper into the land of conspiracies in its account of the Libyan civil war:

And now, to prove that none of this Dependency Theory is a thing of the past, in a very recent display of neo-colonial power, NATO forces, the pan European military arm, occupies Libya, a former Italian colony, supporting the “good guys”, the rebel insurgent group whose idea of justice was to sodomize Gaddafi minutes before his execution (Warning for extremely graphic content). Europe, once again, behind the pillage of bodies outside their territory, because that’s another concept that Europe laid out the foundations for: the idea of what Judith Butler very aptly named “the non grievable” lives.

By implication at least, the author seems to be claiming that the Western intervention in Libya is grounded in economic policy, and is part of this transfer of wealth from the Rest to the West. This is utterly ridiculous. No arguments or facts in its favor are advanced, beyond simply stating that the intervention occurred. And surely, if we are to mention atrocities committed by the rebels against al-Qaḏḏāfī, we might also remember that his regime was hardly benevolent? It seems odd to posthumously cast the Libyan dictator as a victim of Western economic repression, but these are the strange lengths to which Marxist conspiracy theories will go.

The leftist attitude to Western intervention is frequently a sort of Catch-22. If the West intervenes in a country like Libya or Iraq, then the intervention is an instance of Chomsky's "New Military Humanism"; an exercise in economically motivated power politics that in itself proves how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. If, however, the West does not intervene, as in Syria or most conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, then its callousness and disregard are proof of how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. In the eyes of these critics, the West is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

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To end on some more positive feedback (the lower bun of this hamburger, if you will), I'd like to turn to racism again.

All European Empires were built on this notion of “the Other”, the non human that was only good in so far as she could produce labor and resources and, in turn, more children to be exploited. Nowadays, these ideas constantly framed as “the immigrant menace” and the inevitable raising of xenophobia and racism; European governments passing laws demanding more and more stringent requirements to access a documented residency status. The non Western immigrant that did manage to acquire a residency, forced to learn the language of the country or risk deportation. The old colonial practices now enforced on European territories under the guise of “cultural preservation” and “integration”.

Again, I can't agree with the Marxist notion that "the other" is economically defined, or that the other is acceptable as a producer of labor and resources. To proper racists, the racially constructed Other is inherently repulsive and must be kept away, not from economic interests but from pure political prejudice. In Finland, for instance, the main anti-immigrant party is also heavily in favor of reducing Finnish dependence on international trade and, at worst, almost a striving for autarchy. Certainly this view doesn't see the immigrants as economic resources to be exploited: on the contrary, pseudo-Fascist movements see the immigrant as a threat to the health and integrity of the "national body". In my opinion, to see European racism as economically motivated is senseless, as such a theory as to its origins and motivations entirely fails to account for its political manifestations without pseudo-conspiracy theories of "false consciousnesses".

However, in the context of the current European "debate" - which it hardly is by any sensible standards - on immigration, it's important to highlight the very real racist nature of these policies of "assimilation". Fundamentally, they insist that immigrants have no right to their own culture or language, but must abandon their identity and take on a new one, imposed by the hegemonic culture. In other words:

Nowadays, European States (the Netherlands and Denmark are two such examples) have laws that demand Non Westerners learn and speak the local languages or risk fines or, failing to comply, eventual deportation. Their right to occupy a space subject to assimilation.

This is precisely the kind of immigration policy that Finnish political racists are advancing: immigrants must "assimilate", i.e. give up their identity, or be forcibly deported or otherwise penalized. We should recognize that this is inhuman. For instance, a Finnish racist movement states in its election program for the previous election that everyone has a right to their own culture and language. They then go on to state that immigrants must assimilate and abandon their own culture, or be deported. It could hardly be made clearer that to these movements and their supporters, immigrants aren't people at all. In Finland, even the biggest left-wing party, the Social Democrats, campaigned with a slogan calling for immigrants to assimilate.

So I would like to take this opportunity to give my unqualified support for the demand that the "Occupy" movement, in Europe at least, concern itself with the "others" of our society as well:

Travelers and Roma people constantly evicted from European spaces, their right to Occupy anything denied while a complacent media enforces their status as “Other” and as such, undeserving of the right to inhabit spaces that should be reserved for legitimate Europeans. Because, let’s be clear here once and for all: only people who are legitimized by the State can occupy anything. The rest, the undocumented immigrants, the refuges, the Roma, the asylum seekers, had their right to occupy revoked. However, the European Occupy movement is not widely addressing this deprivation and their role, as rightful subjects, in it. Instead, I insist, the movement claims a bigger portion of the tainted pie.

To echo the point I made earlier in my Finnish-language blog post on transgender rights in Finland, Mahathma Gandhi has reputedly said that a nation is measured by how it treats its lesser members. I object to the idea that, say, the non-cisgendered or immigrants are somehow "lesser" members of society than the more outwardly conforming, but I'll again suggest a rewording: a movement for socio-economic change can be judged by who it wants to enact socio-economic change for. So far, the Occupy movement is a movement of the mainstream, for the mainstream, and the Others remain marginalized.

Obama's foreign policy failure

When Barack Obama was elected, one of the campaign's favorite buzzwords was "change". In the field of foreign policy, the Obama administration was going to make America the darling of the world again. Remember the big New Beginning speech in Cairo? And the state visits that US critics called the "World Apology Tour" that were supposed to usher in a new era of American foreign policy?

So what actually happened?

Iraq

Almost two years ago, I predicted that if Obama actually goes through with the US withdrawal from Iraq, the consequences will be catastrophic. If the Iraqis are abandoned to their own devices, or to put it in Vietnam-era terms, the conflict is "Iraqi-ized", the country will face a real danger of collapse.

So far, this has been avoided through a simple ploy; the Obama administration has said it withdrew all US combat troops, leaving just 50,000 troops in the country. Back in the Cold War, it was customary for both superpowers to station troops in third countries but not admit it. Back then, they were usually called "advisers" no matter what they were actually doing. In the terminology of the time, the US has withdrawn all its combat troops, but left five divisions of advisers.

Now, with the supposed withdrawal carried out, Obama can declare victory. David Letterman actually said it best. Remember when George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and delivered his "Mission Accomplished" speech? As Dave put it: "Well, they're trying that again."

The real withdrawal is coming at the end of 2011. In terms of strategy, I believe these deadlines have a horribly detrimental effect on the coalition effort to stabilize Iraq. What the late 2011 deadline does is it gives all the al-Qāʿida -affiliated insurgents a target to prepare for. If you know the Americans are leaving on such and such a date, start planning to overthrow the Iraqi goverment immediately afterward. Until then, stockpile armaments and supplies and expand your infrastructure. I believe this is exactly what they're doing.

This is exactly what happened in late 1974, when the Americans had left Vietnam. Congress signed a bill banning any US military activity in Indochina, and President Nixon was impeached and resigned. Knowing that the Americans wouldn't intervene, the North Vietnamese Army overran South Vietnam in a matter of months. The entire process of Vietnamization, transferring the burden of the war from the American to the South Vietnamese armed forces, had been a complete failure.

There's a very real risk that the same thing will happen in Iraq a little over a year from now. Remember when George W. Bush talked about the axis of evil and all that, including the idea that Iran was supporting the Iraqi insurgency? He was ridiculed for it back then, but now we can read, via the New York Times, what Wikileaks has let us know about Iran's involvment in Iraq.

NYT: Leaked Reports Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias

During the administration of President George W. Bush, critics charged that the White House had exaggerated Iran’s role to deflect criticism of its handling of the war and build support for a tough policy toward Iran, including the possibility of military action.

But the field reports disclosed by WikiLeaks, which were never intended to be made public, underscore the seriousness with which Iran’s role has been seen by the American military. The political struggle between the United States and Iran to influence events in Iraq still continues as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has sought to assemble a coalition — that would include the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr — that will allow him to remain in power. But much of the American’s military concern has revolved around Iran’s role in arming and assisting Shiite militias.

As of this writing, the Iraqi political process is still deadlocked, with no government in place. This year, Iraq ranked seventh on the Failed States Index, barely doing better than Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. In all likelihood, the US withdrawal will leave behind a country in total disarray, if it isn't completely taken over by the Iranian-supported militias.

Whatever happens, the hurried retreat from Iraq will ensure that the eight-year war will have one enduring result: some 4,000 American soldiers will have died in order to cement Iran's status as the leading power in the Middle East. The only country that directly gains from the chaos in Iraq is Iran.

Over the years, several left-wing commentators have delighted in pointing and laughing at the US attacking Saddam Hussein, because in the 1980's, the West largely supported Saddam's regime. What they either don't realize, or leave unsaid, is that there was a very good reason why the Americans supported Saddam: his Iraq wasn't the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iranian islamism was seen as a much greater threat than Saddam.

The defining political dynamic of the Islamic countries of the Middle East has been that there is no clear leader. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran have all contended for a dominant position in the region, with the Iraqi-Iranian conflict being, in one sense, precisely about regional dominance. Now Iran is becoming more and more powerful, and the elimination of Iraq as a counterbalance is a major geopolitical victory for Teheran.

It might be worthwhile for the decision-makers in Washington to recall that the reason the United States became embroiled in Iraq in the first place, that is twenty years ago, is because of the threat Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia. Ever since FDR, Saudi Arabia has been seen as a vital ally of the United States in the Middle East; some readers may be surprised to learn that over the years, the Saudis have received more military aid from the United States than Israel. The reason for the Gulf War was the threat Saddam's Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia. If the Obama administration goes through with the policy of withdrawal, effectively leaving behind a failed state under the sway of Iran, all the Iraq War will have accomplished is to change the threat to the Saudis from the Iraqis to the Iranians.

It's ironic that in the 1980's, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war over the dominance of the Middle East. By some estimates, Iran may have suffered as many as one million casualties in the fighting. The war was inconclusive. Twenty years later, the US fought an eight-year war against Iraq, and this time, Iran won.

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Afghanistan

Next summer, according to Barack Obama's timeline, the US will begin to withdraw from Afghanistan as well. If Iraq was seventh on the Failed States Index, Afghanistan is sixth. The post-Ṭālibān government of Hamid Karzai has turned into a dictatorial, corrupt regime reminiscent of South Vietnam at its worst.

The comparison isn't far-fetched: the coalition forces in Afghanistan are fighting an insurgency based in a neighboring country, waiting for the occupying forces to leave so they can take over. The key to Afghanistan is Pakistan, a fact that Obama seemed to recognize in pre-election debates but has resolutely ignored in office.

Just recently, we were told that American's most wanted man, Usāmah bin Lādin, is living comfortably in northern Pakistan, along with second-in-command Ayman aẓ-Ẓawāhirī and the rest of the gang.

The Daily Telegraph: Osama bin Laden 'living comfortably in Pakistan'

Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living comfortably in a house in the north-west of Pakistan protected by local people and elements of the country's intelligence services, according to a senior Nato official.

The latest assessment contradicts the belief that the al-Qaeda leader is roughing it in underground bunkers as he dodged CIA drones hunting him from the air.

"Nobody in al-Qaeda is living in a cave," according to an unnamed Nato official quoted by CNN.

He added that Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second in command, was also living in a house close by somewhere in the country's mountainous border regions.

Pakistani officials on Monday repeated their long standing denials that the Saudi-born terrorist mastermind was being given safe haven.

Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Pakistani intelligence service has been playing a double game. In addition to channeling US and other Western aid for the anti-Soviet insurgency, Pakistani intelligence moved drugs the other way. Afghanistan has been the world's premier producer of heroin for a long time, and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence moves some of the stuff out of Pakistan. The money they make off the operation is used, among other things, to interfere in Pakistan's internal politics and to fund terrorist operations against India.

As part of this lucrative narcotics deal, the Pakistanis have a cozy relationship with the Ṭālibān, who also fund their operations through the drug trade. At the same time, they're supposedly a staunch ally of the United States and totally committed to the war on terrorism. While the intelligence service continues to move heroin for the Ṭālibān, there is a full-blown insurgency going on in northwest Pakistan, which has by all accounts become the most important basing area for the Ṭālibān operating in Afghanistan.

As in Iraq, so in Afghanistan: the US withdrawal will leave behind a failing state that will probably fall to the Ṭālibān. If this happens, the next target of the insurgency will be Pakistan, and in the worst case scenario, Pakistan will fall to Islamism. It's more than probable that the Pakistani government will have to come to terms with the Ṭālibān, possibly meaning a wholesale radicalization of the whole country and an escalation of the conflict with India.

For the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan before a viable government is in place and the Ṭālibān insurgency has been defeated amounts to, for all intents and purposes, abandoning the country to the Ṭālibān. If the Obama administration goes through with the plan, then the entire Afghanistan War will have been fought for nothing.

At best, US troops will leave behind a corrupt dictatorship that will come to some kind of terms with the Ṭālibān. The country will continue to be used as a base for terrorism, which was the reason the US invaded it in the first place.

**

What is needed in both Iraq and Afghanistan is not a withdrawal strategy, but a winning strategy. For Iraq and Afghanistan to become viable states that won't collapse like a house of cards as soon as the last American troops leave, the insurgencies need to be defeated. In the case of Afghanistan, this also means addressing the insurgency in Pakistan.

Right now, none of these things are happening. With the Ṭālibān securely based in Pakistan, largely immune from US operations, there's going to be very little stopping them from retaking Afghanistan after the US withdrawal. The situation in Iraq looks slightly better, but again, there's very little standing in the way of the militias restarting a full-fledged civil war, with Iranian support, as soon as the Americans leave.

Both the Iraq and the Afghanistan war were badly conceived, poorly executed and massively expensive policy blunders. The wars in themselves weren't necessarily a bad idea; getting rid of the Ṭālibān and Saddam Hussein is a victory for the entire world. The way the George W. Bush administration went about them was the problem, and now the Obama administration is compounding the problem by essentially abandoning both countries to the islamists. I genuinely hope I'm wrong and nothing horrible happens. It's just incredibly difficult to see how either Iraq or Afghanistan can become anything other than failed states if Obama goes through with the withdrawal.

**

Israel

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the Obama administration has also had grandiose plans for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was even described as a top priority.

That said, this is a topic on which the administration, even the President himself, can't seem to make up their mind. A couple of years back, I wrote about how Obama visited Israel as president-elect and strongly supported Israel's reprisal air strikes. On the other hand, Obama had stressed the need for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and demanded that Israel stop its "settlement" construction. At Cairo, he told the audience that "the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements".

Any hopes of a fresh approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were dashed quite spectacularly in March 2010. As vice-president Joe Biden was visiting Israel, the Israeli government announced that it was going ahead with a plan to build 1,600 new homes in occupied East Jerusalem, in direct defiance of the Obama administration's demands that Israel halt "settlement" construction.

In diplomacy, this is what is called a slap in the face, and the Obama administration politely turned the other cheek.

This year, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton launched a new round of talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, going so far as to say that a Palestinian state could be achieved within a year. Anyone who felt skeptical was amply rewarded when the Israelis torpedoed the negotiations by deciding to continue "settlement" building in occupied territory. Again, the Obama administration was apparently powerless to react.

American policy-makers don't always seem to realize how crucially important the Palestinian issue is in the Middle East. Despite Obama's grandiose talk of a new beginning, his administration's policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has in many ways been the worst possible choice. He's managed to antagonize Israel and the Israeli lobby in America, while failing to further the peace process or improve America's relations with the Muslim world.

**

Russia and Europe

In 2007, the George W. Bush administration announced plans to build a missile defense system based in Eastern Europe. The goal of the system is to defend the United States and Europe against small-scale missile attacks from a country like Iran or North Korea. The system the Bush administration planned would have a very limited capacity, and would be practically useless against a Russian nuclear attack. Nonetheless, the Russians were vocal in their protests against the system. Their opposition has nothing to do with missile defense in itself, but is geopolitical: a US missile defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic is a very strong guarantee to these countries that the United States is interested in their security versus Russia.

In August 2008 there was the Georgia war, or if you prefer the Sov...Russian nomenclature, the amred conflict in South Ossetia. According to the Russians, they have stationed peacekeepers in the sovereign states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These sovereign states are recognized by a wide variety of free countries, including and limited to Russia, Venezuela, Nauru and Nicaragua.

Nicaragua.

In what was apparently a colossal miscalculation, Georgia attacked the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, which gave the Russians the perfect excuse to invade Georgia. This was old-fashioned sphere of influence politics: the Russians consider Georgia to be in their backyard, and they get to decide what happens in their backyard. It was also a brazen violation of international law and an invasion of a sovereign country. To make things worse, the country in question was a member of the NATO Partnership for Peace, and had recently hosted US troops on a joint exercise.

How did the Obama administration react to Russia's actions? By deciding to scrap the missile shield.

Guardian: US scraps plans for missile defence shield in central Europe

Barack Obama today reversed almost a decade of Pentagon strategy in Europe, scrapping plans to deploy key elements of a US missile defence shield.

Instead, he said, a more flexible defence would be introduced, allowing for a more effective response to any threat from Iranian missiles.

The U-turn is arguably the most concrete shift in foreign policy from that of the Bush administration, which spent years negotiating to place silos and interceptor missiles in Poland, and a radar complex in the Czech Republic.

The shift is a triumph for the Kremlin, which has long and vehemently argued that the shield is aimed at neutralising its intercontinental missiles; Moscow had warned of a return to a cold war arms race, and threatened to deploy nuclear missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave, surrounded by EU states.

Yes, of course the administration said that Russia shouldn't invade other countries, but this is the only concrete political action they took immediately following the crisis.

Viewed on its own merits, several commentators considered Obama's missile defense U-turn reasonable. That may be so, but this is to ignore the geopolitical significance of the missile shield for Eastern Europe. Viewed from the Kremlin, Obama's move to scrap the missile shield is pure weakness. The Americans come up with a plan; Moscow protests; the Americans retreat.

This wasn't the first time Obama was ready to sell out Eastern Europe, either. in March 2009, Obama approached the Russians on the subject with a letter.

NYT: Russia Welcomes Letter From Obama

The Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said Tuesday that his administration was open to overtures from the United States on its proposed missile defense plan, but he dismissed the notion of a deal in which the United States would shelve the plan in exchange for Russia’s help on Iran.

The statement came in response to a report in The New York Times about a private letter from President Obama to his Russian counterpart, saying the proposed missile defense system would not be necessary if Moscow could help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons and nuclear warheads.

On the Foreign Policy website, a blog post described the letter as "Yalta all over again":

"it could also turn out to be a second coming of Yalta -- a sell-out of America's eastern European allies of epic proportions."

The Yalta Conference was held at Yalta in February 1945 between these three gentlemen and their entourages.

One of the topics of the conference was no less than the division of Europe into two spheres of influence. Probably the most infamous example is Churchill's draft proposal, which he pencilled out on a sheet of paper: he suggested to Stalin that they divide up Central Europe between themselves, listing names of countries and percentages of influence each side would have. For example, Romania would be 90% Soviet and 10% Western, with Greece the opposite. On a smaller scale, Yalta was where the Western Allies agreed to repatriate all Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union, regardless of their own wishes or their upcoming fate. This meant death for thousands at the hands of Stalin's execution squads.

In short, at Yalta the western allies sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviets. The comparison may be exaggerated, but the way Barack Obama's administration has reacted to the Georgian war certainly doesn't show strength. Offering to trade the missile defence of NATO to the Russians in exchange for fuzzy diplomatic guarantees is unlikely to send a strong message that the United States is committed to resisting Russian expansionism, and the failure to react in any way to the invasion of Georgia only strengthens the message. If anything, the weakness of the Obama administration will embolden the Russians to act more aggressively inside what they consider their sphere of influence. As I'm writing this blog post uncomfortably close to the Russian border, I can say that this is bad news for all of us over here.

It isn't just relations with Eastern Europe that Obama seems intent on sabotaging, though. He caused a stir in 2009 by seeming to downplay the UK-US "special relationship", prompting the Daily Telegraph to ask:

DT: Will Barack Obama end Britain's special relationship with America?

A British official said: "I don't think Obama is steeped in the tradition of the special relationship going back to Churchill and Roosevelt. Of course someone of his generation is going to look at it differently. I think what he looks at are the assets that are brought to the table and the expertise you have. This is a definite change of emphasis."

In the six decades since in which Winston Churchill first coined the phrase special relationship, successive American presidents have paid ritual obeisance to the notion that Britain should assume a place at the White House top table.

Now even allies of Mr Obama believe he intends to extract a higher price for access to the corridors of his power.

This might seem overly paranoid, but a year later, Argentina brought out an old hobby-horse: the Falklands. The Argentinians consider the Falkland Islands their territory, but the islands' British-born population does not. Earlier this year, Argentina threatened to blockade the islands, and Venezuela's dear leader strongly supported them. As a blogger for the Telegraph put it:

So far, the mounting Falklands conflict has been met with deafening silence from Washington. Both the White House and State Department have failed to comment on the situation, despite a significant heightening of tensions. Not only is this another striking failure of leadership on the part of the US administration, but it also demonstrates an extraordinary level of indifference towards America’s closest ally.

As far as Europe is concerned, Obama's foreign policy looks worryingly like an effort to appease the Russians at the expense of Europe.

**

All in all, I consider President Obama's foreign policy so far to be a total failure. He has brought no leadership and no new vision to US foreign policy. The mere fact of his election, and the rhetoric of the first few months, seemed to raise the world's opinion of the United States, and got him the Nobel Peace Prize. A prize that was earlier given to organizations like the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Grameen Bank, and since to an imprisoned Chinese human rights activist, was given to an American president for making a speech. To paraphrase a percentage-jotting alcoholic, never has so much been awarded to so few for so little.

Obama did succeed in raising hope; where he failed was in capitalizing on it. His Middle Eastern policies range from the inept to the potentially catastrophic, and his humiliation by Israel has effectively ended any hope of an outreach to the Muslim world. If his administration has had any impact on relations with Europe, it has been a negative one, undermining the special relationship with the UK, destabilizing NATO and encouraging the Russians in their quest to become a superpower with a Cold War-like sphere of influence.

I haven't really mentioned East Asia, as I don't feel that I'm qualified to comment on it, but suffice to say that the Obama administration has attracted criticism for a soft policy on China as well, preferring to concentrate on economic interests to the detriment of human rights.

One of the many great injustices of a representative democracy is that in foreign policy, as in nearly all other fields, the consequences of Obama's actions will be borne by his successor. If the rest of his term plays out like this, the next guy is getting a bum deal.

Most emphatically I am that one!

Now that I've returned to my studies, I'm reading up on world history. I found a book at the university library on South American "Indians", by Paul Radin. The book is from 1942, so I have to check up on this stuff later, but it's an interesting read.

I'm currently on the Tupi-Guarani, who lived in the Amazon basin. Ritualistic cannibalism was part of their culture; they would take prisoners of war and ceremonially eat them. Before a captive is killed, he has a ritual "conversation" with his executioner. As I read it, I couldn't help but visualize it like this, with my apologies to Ryan North.

(click comic for larger image)



I feel I have to stay true to the source, so I reproduced the entire conversation, but I can't help thinking the comic would be much better if the last panel was blank.