Ron N, who lives in Vancouver, B.C., has sent us a criticism of US policy toward Canada recently, then several more criticisms of US policies in general in Latin America. The buggy prof thanks Ron for his thoughtful comments, which are reproduced here, followed by our bugged-out reply.

First Ron N:

Many of us here are upset at Bush's consistent rudeness toward Canada, not least his cancelling the planned state visit (too busy) and inviting Australia's PM to the Ranch instead. We feel (as do many Americans, I 'm told) that as a sovereign country, we have every right to take a principled stand that differs from yours and not expect punishment in return. Your Ambassador Salucci expressed poorly veiled threats re future relations regarding trade. This sort of open coercion and unrepentant disregard and bullying of any country not toeing the line has done enormous damage to your (America's) image in the world. There's even some (not so serious) talk of inviting Schroeder and Chirac for dinner - and serious talk of strengthening our European trade relations. All this to leverage American power and influence. Is it worth it? There must be many more sophisticated means of exerting US influence abroad.

JFM, a visitor to the site, left a few critical remarks at the end of the buggy prof's April 6th commentary that dealt with the backwardness --- political, economic, intellectual --- of the 22 Arab countries. In particular, he disageed with some of buggy's historical analysis. Fine. Always happy to respond to specific, detailed criticisms.

An earlier reply to JFM's was set out on April 13th, though too briefly and schematically --- or so it now seems, what with the pounding pace of events unfolding rapidly in Iraq and their politically charged spillovers to the rest of the Middle East. What follows then is a more elaborate reply, mainly because of the topic's far-flung political significance right now, today and tomorrow . . . something of a key item in the background of the ongoing war on Islamofascist terrorism, including, note carefully, one of the major reasons for the Bush administration's ongoing diplomatic offensive to try through various means --- starting with the war to topple Saddamite Iraq --- to encourage the restructuring and modernization of the surrounding Arab states and Iran.

Sounds ambitious, no? Well, read on. It shouldn't be hard to infer how the argument here hooks up with the Bush administration's policies in the region. See neocons

For that matter, remember, the buggy prof has detailed much of the background here already --- including the numerous handicaps that have held back economic development, science, modern philosophy, and modernizing forces in general (AKA globalization) in the Arab world. All of which handicaps and failures have left --- amid all the festering psychological upheavals, emotional dislocations, and envies and resentments --- a rife sense of "humiliation and disgrace" that marks much of what we call the Arab street and among Arab intellectuals, fundamentalist imams and mullahs, and media types these days. The quoted phrase here is from Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, in his latest book The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (Modern Library, 2003) . . . regarding which there's a good illuminating review at Frontpage. Recall too, from that earlier article of ours, that we've noted how the real "clash of civilizations" doesn't pit the West against Islam: rather, it's taking place right at the heart of Islam itself, with moderates and pro-Western groups in the Arab world confronting --- we hope more and more now, the toppling of Iraq's Saddamite regime a big impetus to change --- these revivalist, regressive, and resentment-charged groups and movements.

And if, as it happens, you don't recall this key point, no matter. Read on, and it will figure prominently in a few moments.

 

In part 5, published here on April 13th, three kinds of power in international relations were set out and briefly explained . . . all too briefly: potential power, mobilized power, and activated power. Our ultimate aim here, one part after another, recall, is to clarify the huge lead in power-potential the US has over other states, something the world has never seen before . . . not in the modern era (roughly the 17th century on), nor in the ancient world either. Even Rome, which had a huge sprawling empire from Britain across Europe through the Balkans and on both sides of the Mediterranean and on into the Middle East, was limited in its expansion by two great empires to the east: the Persian, and the Chinese, and by the limits imposed by the technologies of transportation and communications in those days. (See the table below.)

And yet, the key point here, all these comparisons ignore the actual status of the US in the global arena. The US isn't an imperial state as we'll see --- with formal colonies and the ability to determine their domestic politics and foreign policies; it isn't even a hegemon in any robust sense if that means the ability to shape or reshape a global institutional and rule-based international order; in fact, as the recent tussels with France and Russia and Germany in the UN Security Council over Iraq --- a pivotal, even existentially charged security issue of paramount importance for the Bush administration and American people --- it couldn't even prevail upon the governments of two Latin American members of the Security Council, Chile and Mexico, to support its position on a second resolution to authorize war with Iraq. And yet the US is far and away the most important market for Chile's and Mexico's exports and the most important source of investment in those countries.

How is that possible if the US is supposed to be so powerful --- a hyper-hegemon without parallel in the French jargon for describing its global role?

To answer, once again we begin with an effort to clarify the key but elusive concept of power in international relations.



The Huge US Lead in Power in 2001

Introductory Comments

A tip: to appreciate the comments that unfold here, you'd do well to have read at least the fifth installment on this topic, posted earlier today. In particular, these comments are a natural follow-up in both more theoretical and concrete terms of the huge American lead in power compared to all other countries, something the world has never seen . . . not even in the days of the Roman Empire at its height. As the previous article on military power noted, Rome's power was hemmed in by its population base, the technologies (mililtary and otherwise) available to it, and the georgraphical barriers that prevented expansion into the areas of northern Europe beyond the Rhine in Germanic tribal regions and eastward beyond the Middle East. There a powerful Persian empire further limited Roman expansion, and beyond it, there was in Asia the expanding and powerful Chinese empire.

As was also noted in that previous article, the US today outspends the next 14 countries in the world on defense, and for that matter its R&D military expenditures are equally overwhelming. Even the EU, with a third bigger population --- 380 vs. 280 million --- will be spending only about $140 billion this year as opposed to the US's $400 billion or so . . . the US military budget about 4.0% of GDP vs. an average of 7.0% yearly in the 45 years of the cold war, something in other words easily sustained by the huge wealthy American economy. The EU NATO average spending on the military is around 2.0%, Britain's and France's higher, and Germany's a startling 1.2% --- leaving the German military establishment, as a New York Times article put it a few weeks ago, essentially a "basket-case." Japan's military spending is around 1.5% of its GDP if you include disguised forms of it. China, with about a $6 trillion a year economy vs. the US's $10.6 --- with the US per capita income $37,000 or so and China's about a seventh that (all figures in purchasing power-parity terms) --- spends, probably, around $70 billion, a little more than 1.0%, to say nothing of its technological backwardness . . . far behind Taiwan's and South Korea's, never mind the US's.

All of which emphasizes the significance, for the long-term power of the US (or any other other country, with power always viewed comparatively), of three key capabilities that underpin both its military and diplomatic clout or influence . . . leaving aside competing counter-balancing coalitions that may or may not arise as other countries see US power as threatening or not and raise their own arms expenditures and acquisitions while allying against it: [1] the population of a country, especially its size and moral robustness, including its adtive support or not for its foreign policies; [2] its economic dynamism and wealth; and [3] its technological prowess. There are, as we'll see, other component capabilities, such as [4] the levels of military spending and the operational effectivensss of its military establishment; [5] the wisdom of its leaders' choices in foreign policy (including their success, diplomatically and militarily); and [6] the ability to neutralize potential adversaries and win over the support of other countries . . . including new allies, bandwagoning the term for this ability --- the opposite of balancing.

JFM left this comment a couple of days ago at the end of the buggy prof's April 6th commentary that dealt with the backwardness --- political, economic, intellectual --- of the 22 Arab countries. In particular, he disageed with some of buggy's historical analysis.

First JFM's Comment:

A few remarks. First the "leadership of the Arab world in 12th century" is largely a myth or more exactly it does not account for the reason. During all ancient history until the Roman empire included, the eastern half of the Mediterranean and the Middle East were more advanced culturally and technically than the West. And while the Western Roman Empire succumbed to the Barbarians, its Eastern half (Byzantius) survived and was spared several centuries of anarchy. This increased the gap between West Europe ad East Mediterranean/Middle East. The Arabs inherited this adavance over the West. While they made some advances of their own, Ibn Warrak tells that a good part of the was made by non=Muslims or first generation Mulisms (educated in a non-Muslim way and who generally had converted to avoid trouble), with most of the reaminder creative work done by Christian and Jewish minorities. After the 12th century that changed. Everywhere in the Muslim-Arab world, fundamentalist know-nothing doctrines held sway, and the technological, medical, financial, and architectural -- and literary --- creativity of the Arabs soon disappeared.

My other remark is about women in Arab world. It is generally acknowledged that the first four years in life are crucial for the intellectuual development of children. During those years they are mostly cared by women and since in Arab world they are kept in ignorance they cannot make a good job of educating their children.

If it helps, those who want a shorthand way of memorizing what the military revolution is about --- as unveiled with powerful vividness in Iraq by the US military and its allies --- can think of it this way: [1]speed, flexibility, surprise, and [2] remarkable real-time intelligence and target-acquistion, [3] the targets themselves destroyed in almost the same instant thanks to precision-guided smart weaponry . . . [4] plus extraordinary communication at all levels and among all units on a nation-wide battlefield.. Nothing hard to remember here, is there? But remember: it's what makes these tactics and an overall strategy and coordination possible that really matters.

What makes it all possible is a quartet of hard-to-acquire and even harder-to-implement component parts, available only in the last twenty years or so . . . the pace of innovation increasing in rapid tempo throughout the period, amid great technological flux and uncertainty and through two very different decades of security threats: the cold war in its last stage as it turned out, and then the emergence of the new threats in the war on terrorism. In plain English,

The idea of cancelling the huge foreign debt of the Iraqis, which was incurred mainly by France, Germany, and Russia --- specifically by their nationalized firms, private firms, and public and private banks (with government guarantees) --- was first floated two days ago by Paul Wolfowitz, the Assistant Secretary of Defense. It was his rejoinder to the trio of Saddamite patrons meeting in Moscow the last two days, the latest installment of their moralizing humbug and diplomatic maneuvers at countering what the French media called the Anglo-Saxon coalition . . . a term, as at least one French journalist courageously noted, was used throughout WWII by the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime. The Wolfowitz suggestion was then taken up yesterday at a meeting of the World Bank, and guess what?

The pacifist and humanitarian Germans --- innovators, as the German media have put it, of the new German moral way in foreign policy --- refused categorically to write off the debt, estimated to amount to well over $120 billion (a staggering amount for such a small GDP, itself in shambles right now) and with about $4 billion owed the Germans. Turns out, evidently, the German Schroeder government can't even keep up its sanctimonious public posture when it comes down to hard cash. See The Guardian

Given all this, little wonder that the icon of politically correct hokum and anti-Americanism in Germany, the weekly Der Spiegel, has run a long article in which Germans, Russians, and Frenchmen --- businessmen and politicians --- express their anxiety about what American and British soldiers may discover in Iraqi Saddamite files about their decades of lucrative chicaneries and lavish support for the brutal fascist regime. Der Spiegel (Note that excerpts from the article will appear at the end here.) As for the Russians, they already have more than enough reason to nurture anxiety. According to the Daily Telegraph, top-secret documents taken from Saddam's intelligence agency the last day or so and passed to the paper (no doubt from a British source) set out in detail the military and intelligence assistance the Russians were giving Saddam's regime right up to the start of the war . . . including listening in on Blair's conversations with other statesmen. Oh, and not to forget that Moscow also provided Saddam with a list of hit-men available in the West for assassination contracts.

The swift unfolding of the Iraqi war --- with the US strategic stress on lightening-fast dashes of mobile armored forces on the ground, both light and heavy infantry units, plus small agile special ops, all supported by air power and advanced technologies for reconnaissance and intelligence for target acquisition and communication to various weapons delivery systems: CentCom itself in Qatar able to monitor the entire Iraqi battlefield --- has taken almost all the media by surprise and even quite a few old-time generals.

At the heart of the new strategy are revolutionary information-age set of computer-driven technologies (C3-I), evolving now for over two decades. To make good use of them on the battlefield, flexible ground forces and various weapons platforms have had to be developed, with the information and communications technologies able to acquire pin-point targets and lead to real-time destruction that use smart, information-driven warheads --- some sea-based hundreds of miles away, other dropped from planes or by stand-off cruise missiles, yet others fired by artillery or fast-moving tanks. It all adds up to combined arms operations in ways that the world has never seen before. Nor is that all. There are the remarkably adaptive battlefield tactics too. Agilely executed in fluid battlefield conditions, and updated sometimes hourly as the war unfolded and opportunities arose across several fronts, these resourceful and nimble tactics couldn't have materialized without uncommonly well-trained men and women operating in highly flexible military units and organizations . . . from squad- and platoon-levels all the way up to divisional headquarters, and at times through Cent-Com to distant carrier-based planes.

 

A joyous celebration in the streets of Baghdad and Basra and elsewhere in liberated Iraq that has been unfolding all day long --- the fall of the Saddamite fascist regime achieved in 22 days of spectacular military victory --- gives the lie to all those who were so vocally and angrily denouncing the US, the Bush administration, the President himself, and the politically courageous Tony Blair as late as yesterday. Bush and his administration were arrogant, over-confident, and naive in various degrees of idiocy; their military strategy was in shambles by the second week of the war, Rumsfeld himself the dunce of the decade; the Iraqis formidable nationalists, ready to die for either Saddam or out of national pride, to defeat the US and British aggressors, with the Arab street ready to explode against the new imperialist thrust, etc, etc.

As for Blair, he was smeared for over a year now as Bush's lap-poodle by the oily, canting, politically correct British media and chattering class, the BBC included, always ready apparently --- on the feeblest of pretexts --- to unpack their cumbersome baggage of ideological claptrap, left-wing pieties, and anti-American clichés and then parade and prattle on about them endlessly . . . oh, and as they prattle their snarled-out words, posture with their thrusting, in-your-face sense of moral superiority. Well, the upshot of today? Once more, these sanctimonious pulpit-pounders have been left looking like full-scale ideological twits; little else. Unable, it seems, to learn anything from their past failures and their kinetic whacked-out predictions, however jarred by events . . . even as they plunge headlong, eyes shut but mouths brazenly wide-open, to the next big cause to be barnstormed and marched against in raw indignation. The horrors of globalization. The evils of capitalism. The abominations of American life. The moronic mind of the Texan Toxin. The environment ready to melt down, a victim of all the former; the entire world itself, in their wrought-up platitudinous mind, plunging toward perdition unless they take control and restructure and regulate everything in sight. How silly and shallow their cocksure convictions, held with theocratic certainty. A useful term that, theocratic. In particular, lacking religious belief, alienated from their own societies, working out identity issues in public, they have turned their combination of resentments, envies, utopian hopes, and frustrations --- all decked out in post-modernist and multicultural rhetoric full of chiliastic fervor --- into a surrogate political religion.

A NEW EUROPEAN-AMERICAN DIVISION: THE IMMEDIATE BACKGROUND

As the war winds down in Iraq --- the Saddamite regime reduced, essentially, to a rag-tag remnant in Tikrit and a few Fedayeen thugs augmented by fanatical jihad types from around the Middle East, eager for martyrdom (an eagerness we should facilitate) --- the Bush administration has to brace itself for a new round of difficulties with much of the EU . . . on the governmental level with France and Germany, and on the popular level almost everywhere, even in Britain to an extent. The latest diplomatic spark for a confrontation? The demand, above all voiced by Berlin and Paris backed by Moscow --- three big patrons in the past of the blood-soaked Iraqi Saddamite fascist regime --- that the UN dominate the reconstruction of Iraq, politically and economically. Read, of course, when you hear of the UN in this context, the Security Council . . . where the Russians and French have a veto power, their only leverage over the Anglo-Americans. Period. And appreciate that the demand is fully in their self-interest, what with their huge economic stakes in Saddamite Iraq, which owes, apparently, around $100 billion . . . a huge chunk of which is owed the Russians, the French, and the Germans, all now doubly worried because there is open talk of a post-Saddamite regime renouncing the debts incurred to foreign countries during Saddam's 30 years of ruthless rule.

Will the UN be given the key role?

No, and not even Tony Blair --- for all the media speculation, most of it in the EU apparently wishful thinking that sees an internationalist Blair pitted against an imperial unilateralist Bush --- wants that. As his official spokesman said at the end of his meeting with Bush in North Ireland yesterday, the Security Council antics in months of deadlock over Iraq showed that the UN hasn't the capacity, never mind the desire, to run Iraq." See Blair. At most there will be a useful role for the specialized UN agencies like those handling refugees or feeding people, nothing more. For the US and the UK governments, to be more concrete, the UN Security Council discredited itself in refusing to back up its coercive diplomacy against Saddamite Iraq --- which was supposed to disarm according to the first resolution demanding it in October 1990 in 45 days --- even 4500 days further on, with the 17th resolution, 1441, finding Iraq in material breach of the demands over 12 years old. The UN on this view had reached a turning point, and it failed to turn, leaving it as ineffectual as the League of Nations was in confronting the fascist dicators in the 1930s . . . not that the Security Council hadn't already show itself to be little more than a debating society for scoring point when it came to Somalia in 1993, Bosnia 1992-1995, Rwanda in 1994, and Kosovo in 1999. All of which, remember, were disasters for collective UN security cooperation.

Naturally, that view won't go down easily with the French, Russians, and Germans, all worked up into a lather of hope and expectation that they can still salvage their shipwrecked counter-balancing policy, nor with some of the other EU governments.

Note that this commentary should be read after you've looked over the previous article or two that were published earlier today and yesterday. Those with decent memories will recall, if they've done so, that the previous article started out stressing a key set of points as a way of making sense of recent US diplomatic and security policies in the war on terrorism. In particular, the challenges that shape the nature of this war and its threats to the US and its allies are three in number, closely related and adding up to one of those defining moments in international relations history. The three interacting threats? [1] Islamo-fascist terrorism; [2] Islamo-fascist fundamentalisms, which support the various terrorist networks like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Isalmic Jihad, and Hamas, and provide both ideological rationales and recruits for the terrrorists; and [3] Islamo-fascist states that actively support terrorism while they energetically strive to acquire Weapons of Mass Destruction: in particular, Saddamite Iraq, Baathist blood-soaked Syria, and clerical-fascist Iran. To this trio of Islamo-fascist states add, of course, Stalinist North Korea . . . itself non-Islamic, but only too happily inclined, as all the auguries suggest, to supply any Islamo-fascist terrorist network or state with its own WMD and delivery systems . . . which, as it happens, are their only exports. Period.

As for the "defining moment" in international history, think of similar turning-points over the last century. Specifically:

WWI, 1914-1918, and then the Russian Communist revolution followed later by Nazi and fascist revolutions in the interwar period, which created systematic ideological challenges of the extreme left and the extreme right to the democratic countries . . . the threats here all the greater because key great powers, Russia, Japan, Germany, and Italy, developed totalitarian political systems that were inspired by their ideologies, both at home and abroad. The result, of course, was WWII and 50 million dead, the democratic countries divided at home and unable to balance and deter and if need be wage preventive war until the catastrophes after 1939 in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. With, of course, the appeasers in the democratic countries mouthing rationales and apologetic pacifism that have been reflected in the current controversy over Islamo-fascism, Islamo-fascist states with WMD, and Islamo-fascist fundamentalisms . . . though, at least in the US and UK and Australia, as well as East Europe, with minimal impact on policymaking itself. Fortunately.

Hint: It will help, before you look at this crisp, to-the-point summary of the lengthy UN report that came out last year --- written by a group of Arab scholars and intellectuals --- to have looked at the two previous articles published here, one on Thursday and the other yesterday.

The article appeared last July in the outstanding British weekly, The Economist --- a magazine over a 100 years old, which roams widely across US, European, and generally global politics and economics . . . the writing always effectively readable and highly informed (if judgmental as good journalism of this sort is supposed to be), its journalist contributors numbering in the hundreds around the world as part-timers, with a core staff of well-educated professionals. Its sales in the US make it far and away the most important market of the magazine, and believe it or not, a survey a few years ago showed that the average subscriber was not just university-educated but had an average income of over $200,000 a year . . . the buggy prof's income dragging that figure sharply downwards. Available online, you can read about half to two-thirds of the articles with a free registration, but you need either to pay a small sum or be a subscriber to the print edition in order to access all of them.

What follows here is a brief excerpt, within copyright limits I trust, and you should click on the link and read the entire article . . . including the very illuminating charts. First, though, a few brief theoretical observations:

The Iraqi War: A Defining Moment

The relevance of the UN study to the future of Iraq --- plus this and our earlier two commentaries on the Arab world compared to Israel and the rest of the industrial democratic countries --- should be self-evident. Gradually, as events unfold, the buggy prof will build on these commentaries in order to try shedding light on the challenges US policy faces in Iraq and toward the rest of the Arab world . . . itself the fulcrum of the war on terrorism.

Remember here. The challenges that shape the nature of this war and its threats to the US and its allies are three in number, closely related and adding up to one of those defining moments in international relations history, as with:

A suggestion: before you read "The Ugly European," you need to look over the previous article on the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and why the Israelis are a rich advanced democratic country and the 22 Arab countries are the opposite: generally poor, non-industrialized, non-democratic, and lacking an effective rule of law. Quite apart from what it says substantively about the Palestinian Authority, it also illuminates, so the buggy prof hopes, two other central themes of the day:

[1] the bold Bush initiatives to remake the domestic political map of the Middle East, starting with the fascist totalitarian Baath party regime in Iraq, with its dangerous WMD and support for terrorism . . . a mid-term goal about which the administration is becoming more forthright, especially as the war in Iraq draws to a close;

[2] and the very different style of appeasement and fears of altering the diplomatic status quo almost anywhere in the world that characterizes most of the EU . . . not, fortunately, all of it.



Why the EU Countries' Appeasement of the Corrupt, Autocratic Palestinian Authority Was Challenged by the US Last Year: Successfully

As the previous article noted, the PA under Arafat has been a stronghold of autocratic rule, repression of democratic opponents on the PA's administered territories on the West Bank and Gaza, and a cesspool of corruption and nepotism . . . so much so that a Palestinian poll in August of 2002 showed that 69% of the Palestinians viewed the PA in such terms. Arafat himself, it appears, has garnered about $1.3 billion of the $8-9 billion that the US and the EU and some oil-rich Arab states have provided in financial aid to the Palestinians since 1993. As the article linked here shows, that's enough money to feed three million Palestinian children for a year, buy 1000 mobile intensive-care units, and build and support 10 hospitals. Then in early September last year, the Palestinian Council --- the legislature that was set up in 1996 that was supposed to govern the PA-administered territories under the Oslo Agreements, but that Arafat manipulated and repressed until the backlash caused by, as you'll see, a Bush initiative --- became emboldened enough to outrightly criticize the Arafat PA and demand reforms, including the selection of a Prime Minister that would not just be a figurehead for the despot.

For that matter, note in passing, more and more Palestinian leaders --- even some in the PA --- criticized the resort to violence in the fall of 2001 that, as they noted rightly, has been a disaster for the Palestinians. That included, last December, Mahmoud Abbas . . . a top Arafat deputy who has become the new Prime Minister in the changing PA

The New York Times has carried a fascinating story about the growth of democratic institutions, however imperfect, in the areas of the Palestinian Authority . . . where an elected legislature, elected president (corrupt through and through), and a constitution have been in existence for four years, with the Palestinians themselves responding to the pressures exerted on the PA by the Bush administration, forcing Arafat, among other things, to select a powerful Prime Minister. How is this possible, given the despotism of the PA and throughout the Arab world, with two or three small Gulf states making some progress in some degrees of media freedom and elections that aren't totally manipulated and gerrymandered?

The answer: the Palestinians have learned from the Israelis even as they had been under Israeli occupation and 25% of West Bank men worked inside Israel. In particular,

Lots of talk about the UN these days, and from all sides . . . especially about how central a role the Security Council should play in post-war Saddamite Iraq. Not least, needless to say, from the Germans, French, and Russians who helped bring the UN Security Council into disrepute, refusing in the French case even to have a second resolution passed that did no more than reaffirm 1441, passed unanimously last November.

Disrepute? Of course. What else?

As Secretary of State Powell noted in a news conference held today in Europe, diplomacy not backed by credible force is a sham . . . as 12 years of Iraqi evasions and lies have underscored. The first resolution calling for Iraqi disarmament, passed in the fall of 1990 before the Gulf war, envisaged a time-schedule of 45 days. Roughly 100 times that number of days have passed since then, with the harsh economic sanctions doing little to stop or divert the regime from its WMD programs, even as they inflicted major harm on the Iraqi civilians --- not that the moralizing Germans seem to care about that, provided force wasn't used to remove the regime responsible for refusing to comply with the UN resolutions. As for the French and Russians, forget any moralizing cover for them. They have patronized Saddam, with the French becoming the major investor and exporter to the regime, while Jacques Chirac the President was the man responsible, as the French Premier in 1976, for signing the agreement to give Iraq, which has the second largest oil reserves in the Middle East, a nuclear reactor for allegedly peacetime energy needs. Even that, remember, was too much for the Soviet government to which Saddam had first appealed for nuclear aid.

THE BRILLIANT US STRATEGY AND MEDIA NONSENSE

So far, for all the sniping in the media about an ill-conceived Rumsfeld-dictated plan that has deprived, allegedly, US forces of enough heavy armor and soldiers on the ground, the strategy adopted by Rumsfeld, the Joint Chiefs, and General Franks --- based on a bolder, updated version of the revolution in warfare: rapid mobile forces, focused air power and smart weaponry, a matchless superiority in intelligence, reconnaissance, and communications, and centralized command over the entire battlefield of Iraq --- has proved to be remarkably successful in Iraq . . . maybe the most brilliant military strategy that the US has used since WWII; more, quite likely one of the most brilliant in all of history. A big claim? Maybe so; true nonetheless . . . up to now, and likely to be true throughout the campaign.

In particular, consider that:

The start of the ground war on day one --- ahead of the predicted several days of shock-and-awe bombardment --- allowed American and British forces to push quickly into southern Iraq, then allow 3 US divisions, including the heavy mobilized 3rd infantry along with the lighter Marine 1st Expeditionary force, plus the 7th Cavalry backed by the Airborne 101st, to cover over 220 miles along three different prongs, situating them just outside the perimeter guarded by the Republican Guard divisions to the south of Baghdad