Following a disputed but highly publicized report that North Korea apologized to a Chinese envoy for its nuclear test, the hermit kingdom has decided to rejoin 6-way talks regarding its nuclear program.

China, the United States and North Korea agreed in talks Tuesday to resume the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear programs “at a convenient time in the near future” after a break of almost a year, a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement said.

Christopher Hill, U.S. head delegate to the six-party talks, told reporters after meeting with his Chinese and North Korean counterparts that while the precise date needs to be agreed by all six parties, he believes it will be “in November, or possibly in December.”

The announcement was made after a series of meetings in the Chinese capital among Hill, who is U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei and North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan on the same day.

China, much moreso than the United States, is in a position to influence North Korea. I believe that the sudden change in position is not necessarily due to schizophrenia or trying to fool the international community, but because following the nuclear test, pressure from China as well as financial sanctions by Japan have made Kim Jong-ill weaker than he ever has been before.

In fact, according to this article in The Australian, Chinese foreign policy experts and intellectuals are openly debating regime change there, something unprecedented. Whether or not new talks will yield results is another story, but it shows that Kim Jong-il doesn’t have as much room for negotiation himself.

THE Chinese are openly debating “regime change” in Pyongyang after last week’s nuclear test by their confrontational neighbour.
Ä…Å
The Chinese Government has been ultra-cautious in its reaction. However, since Monday, Foreign Ministry officials have started to make a point of distinguishing between the North Korean people and their Government in conversations with diplomats.

Ahead of yesterday’s Security Council vote, some in Beijing argued against heavy sanctions on North Korea for fear that these would destroy what remains of a pro-Chinese “reformist” faction inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“In today’s DPRK Government, there are two factions, sinophile and royalist,” one Chinese analyst wrote online. “The objective of the sinophiles is reform, Chinese-style, and then to bring down Kim Jong-il’s royal family. That’s why Kim is against reform. He’s not stupid.”

More than one Chinese academic agreed that China yearned for an uprising similar to the one that swept away the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 and replaced him with communist reformers and generals. The Chinese made an intense political study of the Romanian revolution and even questioned president Ion Iliescu, who took over, about how it was done and what roles were played by the KGB and by Russia.

Mr Kim, for his part, ordered North Korean leaders to watch videos of the swift and chaotic trial and execution of Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, the vice-prime minister, as a salutary exercise.

The balance of risk between reform and chaos dominated arguments within China’s ruling elite. The Chinese have also permitted an astonishing range of vituperative internet comment about an ally with which Beijing maintains a treaty of friendship and co-operation. Academic Wu Jianguo published an article in a Singapore newspaper - available online in China - bluntly saying: “I suggest China should make an end of Kim’s Government.”

“The Chinese have given up on Kim Jong-il,” commented one diplomat. “The question is, what are they going to do about it?”

Something in the air is beginning to smell, and I belive it is one of decay. The regime of Kim Jong-il is beginning to rot from the inside. Internally, he is weaker than ever before.

When people think of authoritarian regimes and dictators, they think that one man — such as Kim Jong-il — controls everything. Surprise, surprise! This is not true. In fact, even North Korea’s regime is composed of very certain elements which help maintain control. Kim Jong-il is one factor, with his cult of personality. Another that many know well is the military. However, in order to feed and pay this military, Kim Jong-il needs the support of the country’s financial elite; those who are able to do business outside the country and are therefore able to support the military which keeps these financial interests secure.

But what happens when these financial elites begin to perceive Kim Jong-il’s tactics as detrimental to their interests? Again, from the Australian:

Meanwhile, some of the North Korean elite are seeking their boltholes in China.

Xin Cheng, an estate agent in the high-rise district of Wang Jing, which is popular with resident South Korean businessmen, said many high-ranking North Koreans were buying property there.

The North Korean business elite is looking for a way to both protect what it has while expanding. In order to do that, there must be a degree of reform which Kim Jong-il refuses to go along with. It would be the further erosion of his own power. Seemingly this would be the beginning of either an internal power struggle or a financial flight, both of which we can only hear scarcely about, but which would leave both leave Kim and his royal family jeopardized. If even the military isn’t being fed, be ready for a coup backed by the business interests.

This is likely the best scenario that both the United States and China can hope for. Stable transition will assure that a plethora of refugees won’t flood into China, while rogue military personnel loyal to Kim Jong-il won’t go straight for the nukes. But again, this is the most optimistic scenario. The worst-case scenario, which is what China is planning for, is a huge influx of refugees and total regional instability. A scary thought for them.

So in order to bring this change about, the United States should work with China in order to alleviate such concerns in order to bring about the mutual benefits. DPRK Studies puts together a list of things that the U.S. government, instead of simply making demands, can actively do so that someday soon Kim Jong-ill will be a name only to be read about in schoolbooks.

THE CARROTS: U.S. policy makers need to address China????????s concerns of an influx of refugees and fear of having USFK on their border with two specific proposals.

First, a comprehensive plan to assist North Koreans in their country in the event of collapse by a) having ample aid ready and waiting to be delivered to the North Korean people; b) having teams trained for all major localities ready to deploy to direct aid help keep order; c) help China foot the bill for deploying and maintaining troops on its border with North Korea, and d) carry out an intense psych-ops campaign leading up to and during this event to prepare the North Korean people.

Second, a U.S. policy that USFK units will remain below the 38th parallel and not setup bases or deploy north except in the event of a war, with the exception of military advisors and related personnel. Security functions north of the border to be assigned to ROK units who are quite capable and do not fact a language barrier. In this way the buffer zone China prefers would be maintained, and in all likelihood USFK would see more of a drawdown, particularly along the DMZ, as the KPA threat is removed.

THE STICK: This one is on the blunt side; tell China to choose between propping up Kim Jong-il and having access to the U.S. economy. Begin with the loss of Most Favored Nation trade status and escalate from there. It????????s a double-edged threat that would hurt many American business in the short term, but might convince China that the U.S. is indeed so serious about the North Korea issue that the next step might be military. Above Pinkston notes that China is becoming a stakeholder in the DPRK economy ???????? use this stick to make China realize who is more important to their finances.

The stick seems to be one that any American government wouldn’t go for, no matter how effective it would be. The Bush administration would lose so much support from business and consumers alike that it would find itself flailing about helplessly. A large popular mandate for such a move would only come on the brink of absolute crisis.

In this situation, I’m not sure if there are any sticks that we can truly apply; only carrots. But if the Chinese political elite is actually openly debating regime change in North Korea, there is hope that the carrots alone will be enough to bring China around. Doing so will ensure the possibility of a stable long-term transition in North Korea as well as the prevention of a dangerous arms race.

Recently, there was a Zogby poll that came out, claiming Hugo Chavez had a commanding lead over his opposition. Who paid for it is unknown, but Alek Boyd has a new item up indicating that the signs point to Hugo himself.

After all, hasn’t Hugo set up phony polling firms of his own, for the express purpose of ginning up his poll numbers? Alek has exposed that he has on that, too. KA has an item showing it here, and so does Alek. Image-conscious Chavez has a long history of phony polls.

Enter John Zogby. Turns out Zogby has a history of politicized polls and this one seems no different. The polls were all face to face, meaning that Venezuelans would have been terrified of telling their real views and not only that, the margin of error was a provable 30% on who voted for Chavez in the past.

This Michael Rowan report, found by Alek Boyd, is an absolute slam dunk in telling us the gamy history of the Zogby group, the likelihood of voter intimidation and the sheer phoniness of this whole effort. Alek is kickass.

Read the whole thing here.

Doctor Zin at Regime Change Iran has found a megatrend piece that’s so arresting it can’t help but make you stop and think.

World oil prices right now are dropping like a stone. If they go below $50 a barrel and stay there, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are in for hard times. They won’t be able to maintain their political popularity because in all case, that popularity is derived from pork-barrel spending and government handouts. If they lose popularity, will that make them more, or less, aggressive against their own internal opposition and the rest of the world? The implications of this growing development are huge. It may well mean that a guy like Ahmadinejad won’t be in any position to develop nukes. But then again, it may well mean that he’s more predisposed to use what he has. It’s hard to say what will work out, but one thing is for sure, this is a growing factor in international affairs.

Doc Zin’s piece can be read here.

UPDATE: Citibank has just come out with a report on Venezuela, saying the same thing here.

Recently, two Russia blogs we admire, Sean????????s Russia Blog and Vilhelm Konnander????????s Weblog, have leveled harsh charges of anti-democracy at Kazakhstan, charges that unfortunately tell only half that country????????s story and fail to give a fair sense of the broader geopolitical context. The charges were apparently prompted by a recent comment by U.S. President George Bush while hosting a state visit by the nation????????s leader that Kazakhstan was a ???????free country.???????

Sean and Vilhelm argue that Kazakhstan is run by a dictator who should be actively confronted, rather than supported and encouraged, by the Bush administration. To be sure, Kazakhstan has much work to do before it can call itself a fully fledged democracy; its democracy index from Freedom House classifies it is ???????not free??????? — just like Russia and China, which it is sandwiched between. But is it really fair to refer to ???????Kazakh crimes??????? as Vilhelm does, or to characterize U.S. President Bush as an ???????idiot??????? because of his Kazakhstan policy, Sean????????s approach? This article will argue in the negative. There????????s no indication from either Sean????????s or Vilhelm????????s posts that either one of them has ever spent any appreciable amount of time in Kazakhstan and neither one relies on first-hand accounts from those on the ground in-country; apparently, they are willing to base their conclusions on what they????????ve read in the papers ???????? as well as, perhaps, their instinctive antagonism to the current U.S. president. Let????????s try to look past the anecdotal evidence of Kazakh corruption and autocracy and see the full picture. Doing so illuminates an interesting and important debate about how to foster the growth of democracy around the world. Hopefully, readers will continue this debate in the comments section.

There are three main points that Sean and Vilhelm seem to overlook, or certainly undervalue, in their analyses: (1) Kazakhstan????????s shocking legacy of abuse as a victim of Russian imperialism; (2) Kazakhstan????????s scores on progressive policy from international agencies, which in many cases are far higher than those of Russia and therefore show considerable cause for hope of improvement; (3) Kazakhstan????????s willingness to be a bulwark against the expansion of Russian imperialism in the former USSR and to be an ally of the United States in this regard. It????????s the conclusion of this analysis that, unlike Russia, Kazakhstan shows great promise as a potentially free society and that Western policy should be one of accommodation, understanding, engagement and encouragement rather than confrontation. Ironically, the West has so far chosen engagement where Russia is concerned, a policy that cannot possibly succeed because Russia shows none of the positive signs indicated by Kazakhstan. By no means is the author skittish on the politics of confrontation; rather, she is an unrelenting advocate for it where Russia is concerned. But Kazakhstan is a different case entirely, for the reasons explained below. By no means is the author an overzealous fan of President Bush, whose policy towards Russia has caused her much disappointment. But he is right on Kazakhstan, and deserves a fair appraisal of his policy.

1. History of Imperial Abuse

Vilhelm has harshly accused Kazakhstan of being ruled over by a ???????diverted mind??????? because its leader proposed diverting the flow of some Siberian rivers into his desert country for purposes of economic development. Vilhelm believes that the project is untenable for practical reasons, and he might be right, but offers readers no better alternative for improving the lives of the Kazakh people, and without such ideas at hand the nation????????s leader can hardly be blamed for exploring all options. Vilhelm is perhaps not sufficiently sensitive to the nation????????s plight, which is stark indeed.

If you visit the official website of the Embassy of Kazakhstan, you will find a feature called ???????Kazakhstan????????s Nuclear Nightmare.??????? You can read about the horror story of Semipalatinsk, tragic victim of cruel Soviet abuse. As the Embassy states:

For exactly 42 years, from August 29, 1949 to August 29, 1991, hundreds of thousands of people in Kazakhstan were subjected to one of the most horrific treatment a human being can inflict on another. They were used as human guinea pigs during almost 500 nuclear explosions the Soviets carried out at Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in their push to compete with the United States for global domination. The cumulative power of those explosions, both above ground, on the ground and underground, is believed to equal 2,500 Hiroshima bombs.

The plight of the people living in this region of Kazakhstan has been documented in the Times of London, on Radio Free Europe, in USA Today, and elsewhere. One Times of London article reveals:

One village looks at first sight less desolate than some blighted collective farms we’ve seen, where the few remaining families live in filth and deprivation that make Indian slums seem prosperous. It is peopled, for a start. With children characteristically clad in electric colours -Kazakh dress compensates for the wintry monochrome of the Steppes. With the thin cattle every family keeps within the walls of compounds that have no running water, and where the septic tank is an unheard of underpinning to the precarious rotting floorboards over the redolent latrine pit. The school functions. So, exceptionally for a place this size, does the clinic -for the good and terrible reason that every family in Sarjal contains, or has already buried, victims of radiation poisoning.

The current government of Kazakhstan had absolutely nothing to do with this abhorrent crisis, and because Russia refuses to provide the necessary resources to care for the population it destroyed, the Embassy is reduced to begging for international aid and assistance. The radiation crisis is only one of many serious handicaps that Kazakhstan faces in seeking to crawl out from under the crushing weight of Russian imperialism. Disappointingly, neither Sean nor Vilhlem have done anything to bring this situation to the attention of their readers, much less to cut Kazakhstan any slack because of it. The burden of Soviet imperialism (of which Russia was the beneficiary) is an extremely harsh one for Kazakhstan, and many other former Soviet slave states, to bear, and to its great discredit the West is not doing nearly enough to help them carry it. Quite simply, it is unreasonable to expect perfection in areas of democratic progress when a country is laboring under so large a burden not of its own making.

And Russia????????s imperial desires remain active. As Marat Yermukanov of the Jamestown Foundation explains, though Russia is famous as a storehouse of oil and gas resources it nonetheless ???????has swung from being an electricity exporter to become dependent on imports??????? and faced a disastrous series of potential blackout situations last winter, a situation expected to get worse this year. As a result, it is now actively seeking to subvert Kazakhstan????????s sovereignty in an effort to gain control over the country????????s vast potential for electricity generation. Yermukanov writes:

Moscow intends to increase investment in Kazakhstan????????s efforts to construct additional power generating facilities at the Ekibastuz-2 hydroelectric power station, near the southern border of Russia. But the generous gift from Russia could turn into a Trojan horse. West Kazakhstan and Aktobe regions are dependent on Russian electricity suppliers, because the power lines from northern Qostanay region to western parts of the country pass through Russia. On October 1 the Russian electricity supplier, Inter RAO EES, announced a 9.5% rise in electricity prices for businesses and state enterprises in Aktobe region. Electricity bills for residents of Aktobe region increased by 21.3% between 2005 and 2006. The Russian electricity company claims that West Kazakhstan region owes $20 million for consumed electricity. Aktobe region, where electricity rates are the highest in the country, needs government subsidies of 30 million tenge to keep residents supplied with Russian electricity until the end of the year.

Yermukanov concludes: ???????Astana????????s growing independence from Russia in shaping its energy strategy is bringing that country nearer to the EU, and eventually, Astana will have to make a choice between Europe and Russia.??????? If Russia????????s recent behavior in poisoning the pro-West candidate in Ukraine????????s presidential elections and attempting a coup d????????etat in Georgia are any indication, Russia will go to great lengths to see that Kazakhstan makes the ???????right??????? choice, something Kazakhstan has every reason to fear.

2. Kazakhstan????????s Report Card

Vilhelm complains that Kazakhstan has censored the British comic Sacha Baron Cohen, who as his alter ego Borat mocks all things Kazakh, and it????????s certainly true that the country could be more liberal where freedom of expression is concerned. But it could be a lot more conservative, too. In a recent post announcing the fact that Russia had earned a ranking of 147 for press freedom from Reporters Without Borders, Sean failed to mention Kazakhstan????????s much better rating of 128 — better than Mexico or Singapore and 13% higher than Russia. Only 21 countries out of 168 surveyed had a lower score than Russia for press freedom, and that????????s not surprising given Russia????????s horrifying string of dozens of murders of journalists since the fall of the USSR, culminating most recently in the slaying of hero reporter Anna Politkovskaya. Yet, Sean felt the need to put Russia????????s ranking in context, reminding readers that the rating for press freedom of the U.S. and many European countries was also shockingly low. Sean wrote that this meant Russia????????s declining press freedom might be viewed as merely part of a ???????global process.??????? Unfortunately, he didn????????t show any similar mercy for Kazakhstan when writing about it.

There have been many other global studies where Kazakhstan has come out ahead of Russia, which has a seat on both the Security Council and the G-8. In its most recent ranking for societal corruption by Transparency International, Kazakhstan ranked tied for 107th while Russia was tied for 126th (Kazakhstan led Russia by 16% this time). When Foreign Policy magazine identified the world????????s sixty ???????failed states??????? based on stability criteria, Russia was #59 on the list and Kazakhstan was not present. When the World Economic Forum surveyed economic competitiveness, Kazakhstan ranked 56th while Russia was 62nd. If Russia, which is increasingly showing itself to be a strident foe of both democracy and U.S. national security, deserves those seats on the Security Council and G-8, then how can it be wrong to extend an olive branch to the regime in Kazakhstan? Neither Vilhelm nor Sean have called for Russia????????s ouster from those lofty forums. Given the imperial legacy Kazakhstan must struggle with, its current performance is actually quite impressive.

In short, although we see anti-democratic events in Kazakhstan that we????????d rather not, we simply don????????t see the kind of horror stories coming out of Kazakhstan that are commonplace in Russia, so although the current regime may not be what we????????d ultimately like to see in place, it????????s not nearly the same basis for concern as is the case in Russia. Kazakhstan hasn????????t elected a proud KGB spy as its president, it isn????????t playing the music of the Soviet national anthem as its own, and it isn????????t seeking to destabilize and de-democratize its smaller neighbors the way Russia is doing in Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltics.

To his credit, Vilhelm at least makes vague allusions to Kazakhstan????????s recent progress (Sean virtually ignores this), but Vilhelm doesn????????t flesh it out while making his case for confrontation. An article he cites, but does not discuss in detail, from the Washington Post states:

So far Kazakhstan has shown remarkable success in addressing the social conditions that can feed extremism. The Asian Development Bank reports that the poverty rate has been cut by half in five years. A large middle class is rapidly forming, thanks in part to a revised tax code that favors small and mid-size businesses. The government now spends a respectable 4 percent of gross domestic product on modern, Western-style education and pays the full cost of sending its top 3,000 high school graduates for study in the United States, Europe, Japan and other developed countries. Graduates of this program are accustomed to modern freedoms and expect their country to embrace them.

Vilhelm critiques this article as ???????in contrast to a negative story??????? that the post ran earlier, and the article he refers to does contain critical information. But the earlier piece also states: ??????????????I really do think ÄKazakhstan????????s presidentÅ has learned how to be clean,???????? said Martha Brill Olcott, a Kazakhstan specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ???????He has learned a lot more about how you can promote to some degree divestiture Äof assetsÅ. Most of his holdings are, I wouldn’t say transparent, but they’re more so.??????????????? Given this, it is hard to justify America pursuing a confrontational policy that would risk driving Kazakhstan into the waiting neo-imperialist arms of Russia. After that, the country????????s human rights picture would only darken and the U.S. would lose a vital ally, as explained below.

Similarly, Vilhelm claims that Human Rights Watch has ???????repeatedly criticized Kazakhstan for severe human rights violations,??????? but, while certainly there are many points of criticism, the report he references also states: ???????The government of Kazakhstan has made some preliminary moves to improve its poor reputation with respect to media freedoms. For instance, in January 2004 it paroled Sergei Duvanov, an independent journalist and fierce government critic convicted in 2003 on questionable rape charges. President Nazarbaev also vetoed a highly restrictive media law after it was widely criticized abroad and deemed unconstitutional by the country????????s Constitutional Council The U.S. government certified in 2004 that Kazakhstan had complied with the human rights standards on which military and other assistance is conditioned. In May 2004, the U.S. State Department announced that Kazakhstan had made ???????significant improvements in the protection of human rights in the last six months.???????????????

If Kazakhstan????????s report card already exceeds that of its former oppressor, Russia, then can????????t we hope for even greater progress in the future by nurturing, rather than confronting, its nascent democratic impulses?

3. Bulwark Against Imperialism

Kazakhstan is a vital strategic ally of the United States, not merely in the region but in the world, as it seeks to encourage the development of democracy in the former USSR and struggle against terrorism, and there????????s nothing wrong with stroking such an ally from time to time. In fact, from the perspective of U.S. interests, it would be criminal negligence not to do so. Sean himself points to an LA Times editorial which states: ???????There are few nations more strategically important to the United States than Kazakhstan. Its mineral resources are vast; by 2015, it is expected to account for nearly as much oil production as Iran. It is a stable U.S. ally in a region marked by shaky friends, rivals and foes, such as Russia, China, Afghanistan and Iran. It is a majority-Muslim country that sent troops to Iraq and opened its airspace to U.S. flights during the invasion of Afghanistan. It is a model for nuclear disarmament, having agreed to destroy the missiles it inherited from the former Soviet Union.??????? While Sean and Vilhelm don????????t dispute this fact, because they can????????t, they seem to seriously underestimate its importance (or perhaps they simply don????????t have U.S. interests primarily at heart; it????????s difficult to imagine, though, that they could possibly wish to see Russian influence in Kazakhstan increase, something that certainly wouldn????????t lead to more democracy there). Sean heaps scorn on President Bush for pursuing praising Kazakhstan????????s progress with relatively moderate rhetoric. He calls the President of the United States an ???????idiot??????? for referring to Kazakhstan as a ???????free nation??????? and classifies Kazakhstan as merely a nation ???????we have to deal with??????? ???????? apparently while holding our noses. Is this really the best way to deal with a country that can feely choose the Western or Russian camps? If so, Sean gives no convincing explanation.

4. Conclusion

Like it or not, there????????s a gigantic difference from the American point of view between an ???????unfree??????? state like Kazakhstan which is friendly to the U.S. and its interests and which may be amenable to inside pressure and one, like Russia, that is hostile and obviously incapable of self-initiated reform. It????????s perfectly reasonable, and in fact essential, for U.S. diplomats to adopt a ???????catch-more-flies-with-honey??????? approach to Kazakhstan, in the hopes of winning leverage that will lead to further reform. Exactly this idea explains why Russia, in abject defiance of logic, sits on the G-8. But in Russia????????s case, things have only gotten much worse after trying it, not better, because Russia has never manifested any genuine desire to change its Soviet attitudes. When we also consider Kazakhstan????????s vast strategic importance, it becomes a no-brainer. It????????s simply incorrect to conclude that pursuing highly cordial relations with Kazakhstan means we are ignoring its opportunities for reform. We????????re not. As the Post article noted above states: ???????The American Bar Association, Freedom House, Counterpart Consortium and the U.S. Agency for International Development have made much headway in this regard.???????

Moreover, it????????s simply not reasonable — in fact, unfair — to expect Kazakhstan to embrace a fully relaxed political climate with the threat of Russian imperialism literally dangling over its head. How can the Kazakh ruler view with anything other than trepidation Russia????????s blatant efforts to take control over internal politics in Ukraine and Georgia? How can Kazakhstan????????s non-white population not be terrorized by the pandemic racism now sweeping Russia? It????????s only natural that the leaders of states threatened by Russia will be reluctant to fully embrace democracy when it could leave them vulnerable to Russian encroachment. The key to fully advancing the development in these countries is not confronting them but insulating them from the Russian threat. Only once that is accomplished will harsh attacks like those leveled by Sean and Vilhelm be proper, should Kazakhstan then fail to complete its journey to democracy.

Also unfair is the knee-jerk hostility that President Bush and the Republican Party seem to inspire in their critics. Sean recently went as far as to opine that in light of their governance ???????anyone still believing that there is still democracy in America is still stuck on gazing at the trees despite the forest.??????? To Secretary of State Rice, in response to her criticism of Russia????????s unfree media in the wake of the Politkovskaya murder, he wrote: ???????Take a look in the mirror, sister.??????? You have to feel for America in general and President Bush and the Republicans in particular when issues of this kind arise. If he adopts a confrontational posture towards a given country, a chorus of voices call for him to be conciliatory and accuse him of ???????unilateralism??????? and ???????arrogance.??????? When he????????s conciliatory, those same voices call for confrontation and accuse him of supporting autocracy. The world calls for America to be less unilateralist, yet unilateralism seems to be the order of the day in dealing with President Bush and his country. Is calling the president an ???????idiot??????? really likely to lead him to take notice of suggestions (leave us not forget that this ???????idiot??????? graduated from both Harvard and Yale, was elected governor of Texas and re-elected president with a majority of the popular vote while holding a majority for his party in both houses of Congress for six years)? Isn????????t it possible that a constructive dialogue moving Kazakhstan further in a positive direction was pursued by President Bush behind closed doors, the appropriate venue for such discussions with a vital ally, and, lacking a pipeline to the Oval Office, Sean simply knows nothing about them?

Where is the respect that the world demands from America when the world deals with America? Where is the thoughtful, careful dialogue that the world demands from President Bush when it speaks about him? That????????s a paradox for the ages. It is not helpful, however, to make impulsive judgments about Bush????????s policies based on personal antipathy towards him.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia Blog La Russophobe.

Lula By A Light Year - Brazil’s Lula landslides to reelection
Source: AFP, via Yahoo! News

Brazil’s incumbent President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva has cruised on to an easy victory in Brazil’s runoff election. He’s got more votes than he did last time and the total ballots aren’t even fully counted. With 94% of the tally counted, the final score was 61-39, a very strong showing.

See for yourself at Brazil’s official election site here.

Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons has some excellent analysis, along with some translations from the Brazilian local press about why this has happened. It looks like Lula did a good enough job while the attack-tactics of his political opponent, Gerardo Alckmin, seem to have backfired with voters. Alckmin went after Lula on corruption, which was negative and had some trouble getting his more positive message out on free markets. For one thing, he said he was going to cut taxes but did not specify which government programs he would cut. He seemed to be unable to explain that lower taxes combined with higher growth means more taxes in the coffers and fewer government programs to cut. But since people believed that any tax cut would have to be “paid for” by cuts to bureaucratic programs, it is a clear-cut case of not getting the message out or not getting it out believably.

Randy quotes some people as saying that the government has way to great a hand in some banks and in the state oil company, but I would like to add my own take on that - I think that’s wrong because the government has done a pretty good job of turning the banks and the oil company into world-class firms that can compete on a global level, even as state companies. I don’t see them as bureaucratic sinecures, they’re real companies. I actually researched this this past week.

In fact, I get the feeling that the fact that Brazil’s seeing the best growth it’s seen in years and the absence of a crisis might very well be the reason why sensible Brazilians reelected Lula. If all the other leaders you elected gave you whipsaw gutwrenching rollercoastering economic crises and this one didn’t … wouldn’t you want to leave good enough alone?

Boz at Bloggings by Boz writes an excellent analysis explaining that the overall development is positive for Brazil and even factors that might be negatives in other countries, such as a split congress, might just be helpful for Lula. It’s a pleasant read here.

Andres Oppenheimer at Miami Herald has an interesting take on this election too - he says the sheer normalcy of the election and the relative lack of mudslinging and tocsin-crying is probably a good sign for Brazil’s democracy, which, though it is growing slowly, is moving in just the right direction. His good essay is well worth reading here.

UPDATE: O.K., now here’s one I have been waiting for! Luis Afonso at Swimming Against the Red Tide, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a blogger who has no sympathy for Lula, debunks considerable myths around the Brazil election, some of which have been spread by me. It’s a good antidote to conventional wisdom and is well-argued. Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Elsewhere on the South American continent, Daniel Duquenal at Venezuela News & Views writes that Lula’s strong reelection is unbelievably bad news for Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who currently is thrashing to survive the coming December election. Chavez has quit cavorting with Lula over in Rio and Lula is fed up with the Venezuelan dictator wannabe. Man, this is good analysis! It’s a big must-read here!

UPDATE: Fausta at Fausta’s Blog has more thoughts on this, with links to other blogs that discuss the security questions that Lula is ignoring. Read it here.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd at The Brothers Judd - who always eerily thinks just like I do - says that if both of Brazil’s candidates govern like rightwingers even though one says he is left and one says he is right, what’s the problem. He thinks that if they keep this up, they’re going to end up with a Security Council seat. I totally agree - the excellent post is here.

UPDATE: Chris McGowan has a fascinating long post at Huffington Post, realistically describing how it must have looked to Brazilians, from his own left-leaning point of view. He points out that Brazil’s election was refreshingly fair, and explores the intriguing fact that the whole thing was done electronically. It’s good reading here.

UPDATE: Michael Stickings of The Moderate Voice has an item that mulls Lula’s wide margin of victory, with the atomized party situation in the congress, making coalition-building imperative. He has lots of links too, read it all on this post here.

UPDATE: Political scientist and elections expert Matthew Shugart at Fruits and Votes has more analysis of how it went, noting that this is the first case he’s seen where the challenger did worse in the second round than in the first. He wonders if there are others. It’s an interesting question, in this post here.

UPDATE: IBD has a new one just out, says that Lula deserved his victory, given his strong economic showing. All that totally superseded any of the problems during his administration like corruption. If you were Brazilian, the guy was likely good for you, or at least didn’t hurt you too much like some of his predecessors. Read it here.

UPDATE: Oppenheimer has another new one just out (he is filing from Sao Paulo), where he quotes Brazilian leaders who think Lula is likely to be a strong president. Oppenheimer however outlines some of the challenges Lula will face - and there are a lot of them. How he handles the economy will be key to his presidency’s success or failure. It’s good reading, either here or here.

UPDATE: Washington Post has an elegant and realistic essay on why Lula succeeded in a lead editorial here.

Hat tip: Real Clear Politics

UPDATE: Michael Barone at his U.S. News & World Report blog brings up several obvious and excellent points in what is the best analysis so far of what happened in Brazil’s election - he explains out the Heloisa Helena vote, the north-south divide and Lula’s personal popularity. His analysis is better and fresher than anyone else’s - it’s kickass. Read the whole thing here.

Our own dear Stefania Lapenna has published her first column for Townhall on the details of Cuba’s rising democracy movement. Cuba’s democrats realize deeply that there can be no ‘reform’ of Castro’s dictatorship in Cuba, there can only be change - more specifically - peaceful revolutionary change. That informs their tactics and as Castro withers, hurtling toward the ash heap, Cuba is seeing the rise of Cuba’s new democrats.

It’s beautifully written and an absolute must-read here.

(Click on and see how cute and Italian Stefania looks in her picture!)

ANSWER Coalition anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan
Source: Susan Forrest, Indymedia Los Angeles

Today I went to the antiwar protests, over in Hollywood, to check out the scene. Compared to other antiwar rallies, this was small. It might have been put together hastily - I did not learn about it until yesterday. Still, ANSWER tends to attract many more people than this and they did have Cindy Sheehan as their headliner.

Without prejudice, I estimated there were only about 650 people at this one - I’ve been to the last three and this was the smallest of all. The ANSWER procession was led by a big billowing Venezuelan flag, followed by a Palestinian one, so you wouldn’t at first glance think this actually was a protest about the Iraq War. There were plenty of anti-Bush signs, too, which seemed to run through all groups as an energizer, but on the whole, there wasn’t all that much focus on Iraq. This protest was mainly about other places - Palestine and Venezuela.

I was amazed to hear speaker after speaker praise Hugo Chavez. I think the appeal of it is that he’s come out so strong against Bush - the common theme was hating Bush. I am starting to think the antiwar crowd is getting downright bored of the endless Iraq War and they are opening up to the novelty and excitement of Chavismo.

This was the first antiwar rally where Hugo Chavez figured so prominently. Yes, I saw Bolivarian circles there. People wore their regalia from their recent Sandalista trips to Venezuela. There definitely was that fashion-show quality at the rally, show how many exotic places you have been to in your attire. Meanwhile, one old guy gave me a free bottle of Citgo Venezuelan motor oil, pulling it out of a big paper bag. He urged me to buy Citgo and I assured him I would treasure the motor oil.

Sweating in his suit as the mercury hit 100 degrees, former Pasadena Mayor William Paparian praised Hugo Chavez and his “devil” speech.
Source: Susan Forrest, Indymedia Los Angeles

Still, I looked up and was startled to see Cindy Sheehan, who later made a speech, and several Hollywood types - actually more than there were last time, but again, all very minor celebrities - people with bit parts on shows like Dharma & Greg denouncing the war and George Bush. There was one guy in fact who did a really high-grade show-business quality imitation of Bush on the stage, and I was really impressed with how well he managed to imitate Bush. I learned he wasn’t on the script by a disdainful ANSWER organizer but I could not help but notice that unlike the other speakers, he really had the audience mesmerized.

ANSWER’s crowd was pretty small
Source: Susan Forrest, Indymedia Los Angeles

It was broiling hot and people were getting sunburned very rapidly. They all gathered to one shadowed spot near the truck where it was cooler, but also easy to count them. There were some ‘gold star mothers’ among the protestors, but few young people of draft age. I heard one saying to a pal that the young were so attracted to the military life, it was really hard for a good mom to stop them - she had a 16-year old at home and just really hoped she could dissuade him from joining the Marines like her 19-year old did. But she unwittingly was giving mixed message - the fanny pack she was carrying bore the bright red USMC logo, so I don’t know what she was thinking would dissuade her kid. Antiwar military moms were a small group - I only saw three; Code Pink was there - again, in very small numbers, only about three, too; some Korean activists were there, some Filipino Moro guerrilla supporters were there, a scrum of Hare Krishnas were there, dancing away, the Greens were a presence - there were about eight of them there; Palestinian scarves were in abundance and about two or three young women looked Arabic among them; I didn’t see any punk rockers or goths like I did last time. There was a young woman who went topless and painted her nipples like rainbows - and since she was saggy she wasn’t exactly photogenic. There were plenty of old people and 60s backwashers, too - two showed up in Vietnamese rice-farmer conical hats, no doubt fresh from a trip to Vietnam they’d taken to relive the good old days.

There were some Mexicans too, scattered around, but unlike past rallies, they didn’t show up to put some real muscle into the spirit of the rally. In the last three antiwar rallies I went to, huge streams of Mexicans demanding immigrant rights ensured that at least 2000 people were in attendence. Today, they weren’t there at all, although there was a nice Aztec dancer contingent at the end of the rally.

It goes way beyond Blaming Bush
Source: Susan Forrest, Indymedia Los Angeles

Mostly, it was just the hardcore left of the activist world. The mood was light and friendly through and a couple of the leftwing guys flirted with me. It began with a march at 12 noon and ended at CNN headquarters on Sunset Boulevard.

The speakers kept speeches and events mercifully short and I got the feeling everyone just wanted to get the heck out of there, both speakers and people. The crowd thinned out significantly by 2:45 and by 4:00, the whole event had been cleaned up and cleared out.

CNN certainly didn’t bother to cover this - and from ANSWER’s point of view, maybe that was a good thing - they could have reported how small and shrunken these antiwar rallies were getting. With the Democrats supposedly poised to take control of the House in November, I really wonder why there is so little interest in Iraq protest rallies now. Even the protestors, focused on Hugo Chavez as they were, seemed bored of the Iraq issue.

Here is one account of the rally, which I think overcounted the attendees, in this article here.

Sean Gleeson suggests ten ways to do it and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. Check out his hilarious post in this link here.

Boz at Bloggings by Boz has a good new set of the latest poll numbers, all of which give a good reading on the political temperature through the hemisphere. It’s a mixed bag this time. Or let’s just say there’s something for everyone.

In good news, rightwing banana king Alvaro Noboa is continuing to kick Openly Chavista Rafael Correa in the keister.

In more neutral news, Lula is likely to win in Brazil, and a Zogby poll shows that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez still holds a strong lead over his challenger, Manuel Rosales, something I have a hard time believing, but nevertheless pay attention to.

In bad news, slimey Daniel Ortega is leading in Nicaragua with the opposition badly split. I think he needs 50% for a runoff (don’t quote me!) so they may still have some time to get their act together. I’ll have more on that later.

UPDATE: Boz advises that Ortega only needs 35% to avoid a runoff, check out the scary details of his post in the comment section just below.

In the meantime, read Boz’s post on the latest polls here.

When I say ‘Bolivian Infighting,’ which is what is going on over there, I don’t mean it figuratively - it turns out Evo Morales’ MAS party acolytes, or ‘Masistas,’ are literally fighting each other in the streets over who gets the government bureaucrat jobs. In other words, who gets to wear the Hush Puppies and become a Lifer.

Can you imagine?

This goes to show where the perceived value is in Bolivian society - with the government sector, not the private sector. And it tells us a lot about just how oppressive it must be to be in Bolivia, because the bureaucrats are the number one reason why the private sector is so wretched, so full of Chiclet-sellers unable to get business licences. Bureaucrats are responsible for holding them down, all in the name of their grip on power. Now, the jobs are perceived to be good enough that young Morales party operatives, and lots of outside opportunists too, are fighting for them.

What a repulsive spectacle.

Read Miguel Centellas’ fascinating post about the Morales Minions battling each other in the streets for the sinecures, known as ‘pegas’ - or maybe a better word for it is ‘piggas’ - over in La Paz.

First, some words from France’s resident tough guy, Nicolas Sarkozy:

I would like to say one thing, in what is my conception of the Republic, security is the responsibility of the State, I am against militias, I am against the private ownership of firearms, and I????????m trying to make you think about that. If you are assaulted by an armed burglar, he????????ll use his weapon more effectively than you anyway so you????????re risking your life. If the criminal is not armed and you are and you shoot, your life will be ruined, because killing someone over a theft is not in line with the republican values that are mine. The private ownership of firearms is dangerous. I understand your exasperation for having been burglarized two times, I understand the fear that your wife and daughter may have but the answer is in the efficiency of the police and the efficiency of the judiciary process, the answer is not in having guns at home.

I lived in New York City and San Francisco in the early 1990s and I remember hearing this kind of talk from city leaders like Art Agnos and David Dinkins all the time. I felt like I was suffocating and all I ever thought of was getting a gun, all I ever dreamed of was taking out a mugger, all I ever wanted was one month to go by without a trip to the police station to file yet another report.

No, Sarkozy doesn’t “understand,” not in the slightest. I went from liking him to wanting to kick him front and center after reading that. He just doesn’t get it. And to make matters worse, he’s supposed to be the tough one over there in a sea of soggy socialist apologists. This is downright scary. And decadent.

It took Rudolph Giuliani to change the world, through his advanced police science and his political will to take a mop and broom to all the thugs on the streets, ending the horror of massive crime for all of us. Great revolutionary, that Giuliani.

France has no such leader, anywhere. Instead, they have Sarkozy, who expressed that statement above.

Not surprisingly, thugs read this message from what passes for ‘hardliner’ in France and they draw their own conclusions: the system in France and perhaps Europe as a whole is weak and vacillating, with no will to defend itself, either individually or especially through the state.

Just check out the public attitudes described here, regarding the face-covering veil - people wearing them actually expect to be hired as a matter of right, on their terms and feel quite free to blame the society if they aren’t successful. And they also feel confident enough to challenge society when they don’t get their way because they will get a sympathetic establishment to see things their way - the judges, the media, the polticians. As for the consensus in the rest of the society, the very culture, well, too bad, forget it.

That’s why France is now on the verge of civil war, according to the estimable Paul Belien of Brussels Journal, who’s been persecuted by the eurotrash Clousseaus for his bloggings. Pajamas Media has an exclusive interview with him here. Belien writes that 50,000 riot police are getting ready to do battle - with no will to win. It’s well worth reading and pondering here.

Not long ago, I worked with a group fighting for East Timor’s independence. It was a rare time I actually had something to do with the political process instead of just watched. I organized demonstrations and painted signs and argued in meetings with UN officials. I fervently wanted East Timor’s independence from Indonesia. It was in 1998 and 1999.

Once upon a time, East Timor was part of a global Marxist National Liberation Movement that threatened to communize third-world countries into hammer-and-sickle republics based on an outdated German philosophy that failed every time it was ever tried. The real game of course was the Soviet Union’s power politics to gather up client states to checkmate the U.S. as millions of people lost their freedom.

Having spent some time in Indonesia, I gradually came to the conclusion that the National Liberation Movement that had engulfed Timor Leste over the 1970s and 1980s and had gradually burned out was probably nothing to worry about, any more than radical Islam was.

Some place just don’t absorb ideology well at all, they’re already too waterlogged with past ideologies to be able to do anything but just sop them up and dissipate them and watch them disappear in the great oneness of existence. Indonesia - and East Timor - is one of those places.

So in the wake of the great Asian currency meltdown that laid Indonesia low and resulted in the ejection of its 33 year dictator, Soeharto, and above all the great democratic revolution of 1998 in Indonesia, which I witnessed from the universities and the street barricades and the Chinatown and the Hotel Indonesia and the vast 1960s Sukarno-designed public spaces and the embassy row amid black-lit palm trees, cold drinks and pink stucco buildings … I followed by supporting East Timor’s independence.

It was nothing but a mistake.

The old National Liberation Movement types no longer had a Soviet Union to support them, but they hadn’t changed. Instead, the Mozambique-educated and bred leaders who took power in East Timor, just used the United Nations as their Soviet Sugar Daddy. They tried to change but they could not - at heart they were Marxists who could not change.

So they set up rules, regulations, bureaucrats, and all the other hallmarkes of communist societies. They had TONS of money from the UN to make their fiefdoms, otherwise unsustainable otherwise, come to life with all that UN patronage.

How wrong we all were.

Today East Timor is nothing but a gang-warfare empire where the spoils are the only prize and the fighting goes on. It, sadly, makes me change heart about whether this place really should be independent instead of still part of Indonesia. Some nations, if the only ideas they can come up with are inspired by Marx, really don’t deserve to be nations, because they arent sustainable. Communism fails everywhere it is tried and can only be supported by expropriating from others until there is nothing left to steal. Sad, but true. I was too idealistic and thought the Marxism of the East Timorese who took power could be overlooked - they had “changed.” But Marxists cannot change - unless they intend to be non-Marxists. The system is inherently unreformable.

Via Pajamas Media, Global Voices has an excellent, first-rate roundup of several blogs from East Timor talking about how pessimistic that situation is in East Timor. Read it here.

Last Wednesday, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro may have slipped into a coma.

On Saturday, his sycophant, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, flew into Havana (scroll down), possibly to bid a final farewell to his Cuban master. And Brazil’s President Lula da Silva made a slip of the tongue last weekend, saying ‘when Castro was alive…’ forgetting no one had announced that The Beast was dead. Meanwhile, Otto Reich reports that news agencies are getting visits from Castroite government functionaries regarding coming funeral arrangements, including seating, best camera angles, visas, how-tos ahead the coming spectacle…where guerrillas, tyrants, and Sandalista suckups will gather in one horrible place to mourn their hero.

I think there is little doubt that the Monster of Havana who has spent 47 years destroying Cuba, is at or near death. The Grim Reaper is after him, and the sickle is no longer on a little flag with a hammer; it’s real.

It’s over.

As that happens, brutal crackdowns are happening against Cuba’s innocent independent librarians. Like this one by Castro’s savage martial artist goons who specialize in assaulting Cuban independent librarians, who represent Cuba’s fragile green shoots of civil society, blameless people like these:

Two Cuban independent librarians, beaten by professional government thugs
Source: Stefania LaPenna at Free Thoughts

See The Real Cuba’s post here for details, they’re important.

I wrote to Martha Beatriz Roque this week - a fearless dissident who always answers e-mail and she did not reply. Maybe she cannot reply. Or it is too dangerous if she does.

Amid all the brutality against dissidents, there’s a sudden broader crackdown against ‘corruption.’ People are being busted left and right for stealing, which is rampant in Cuba, the only glue that holds the entire inhuman system together. This ‘reform’ however, is deceptive. Only the mainstream media seem to be eating that story up - just as they start to put out stories of how Raul Castro, Castro’s wretched brother and successor, is really, deep down, a ‘reformer.’ Just like Yuri Andropov, another ruthless man who rose to power and pretended to be a big jazz lover who’d reform the crumbling, rotting Soviet empire. So it is with Raul.

Because not one of the corruption crackdowns is a genuine interest in ending corruption. Instead, what’s happening is a power struggle.

Everyone steals in Cuba and everyone kicks some of the spoils upstairs to his or her patron. This goes all the way to the top of the Cuban hierarchy - 50 years after communism was introduced, Cuba has become an empire of thieves - the very concept that once fascinated Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - ‘thieves’ - which he obsessively wrote of in The GULag Archipelago.

When corruption crackdowns come, it’s a sign of turmoil at the top, Castro’s elite fighting over his dead carcass and the carcass of his thieves’ empire. Humberto Fontova, the great Cuban writer, explained as much in an interview with Investor’s Business Daily here:

“A Cuban’s got to know which party official is in favor within the regime. If your patron has fallen out of favor, it will be held against you.” And you’re likely to go down in a corruption crackdown.

The Cuban government’s sudden bid to end 49 years of corruption echoes Mikhail Gorbachev’s liquor-sales crackdown in the twilight years of the USSR. That, too, was part of a power struggle.

Much as Reuters would like to claim reform is possible in Cuba, it’s not. The main problem is that Cuba is a communist regime. Not only are all the institutions that check and balance powers gone, replaced by a maximum leader, but also the collective mechanism of the market to set prices is gone. Corruption is all that’s left.

“Everyone steals in Cuba,” Fontova said. “If they didn’t, they would starve to death.”

Castro’s system sets prices for everything. That includes the low wages of workers ???????? about $30 a month for Cuban doctors, for example, to the near-nothing prices of basic commodities like gas and toilet paper. The regime touts the low prices as proof of its humanitarian instincts, but reality shows how little it values anything.

Underpaid workers steal and resell commodities because they’re underpaid and alienated.

In shortage-plagued Cuba, half the nation’s gasoline, for instance, is siphoned off into black markets by everyone who comes in contact with the production chain. Workers kick money to their higher-ups and desperately try to make a profit on it themselves.

“Cuba’s economy was considered a basket case, even by communist standards,” said Fontova, noting that even the Russians threw up their hands at what Castro had wrought.

But to call it “mismanagement” is a misnomer, Fontova added. Cuba was the only society that ever went from vibrant capitalism to wasteland communism without a war, he observed.

In other words, there is nothing more than theft holding together that horrible regime that has smothered Cuba - there are no civil institutions, no checks and balances, no free flow of information - just one majordomo, on his deathbed, surrounded by gangsters now fighting over spoils.

Hence the corruption crackdowns are the visible evidence of the fearsome battles for absolute power at the very top.

What will become of Cuba in the midst of this, with Castro dead? It’s just not known. One thing is for sure: the remains of the Castro regime won’t give up power willingly. The only other thing that is for sure is that what can’t go on, won’t. Communism has to collapse because it is unsustainable.

Not just unsustainable in itself but even its life support is withering away as Manuel Rosales rises in the polls. He’s running for office on a platform of no more free oil for Fidel Castro’s odious tyranny. That in itself is an external threat to Raul Castro, who will go down in hail of gunfire rather than give up power.

What will become of Cuba? It is not going to be easy. Cubans and Cuban-Americans - as the reality of this enormity dawns - are introspectively thinking about this, in great detail. According to Cuban-American blogger Val Prieto, they know they can’t get caught up in celebrations, nor can they get caught up in score settling. A brave new dawn is emerging in Cuba and it’s a period of silence and introspection because the world truly is changing.

Read some of Val’s thinking and that of his fellow Miami Cubans in this intense thoughtful post here.

UPDATE: Fausta has more important details, plus excerpts from Mary O’Grady’s excellent WSJ column today in this must-read post here.

UPDATE: This analysis, by Charlie Bravo at Killcastro has a lot of wisdom and understanding. Read it here.

UPDATE: Castro insists he’s alive. He says he’s scoffing about the whole thing but I wonder why he felt such need to tell us. Read it here. Castrianism, an excellent Italian blog, has movies and pictures here.

PostGlobal hosted by the Washington Post poses a question for its readers that I think many here would find interesting to discuss:

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has said bread is more important than democracy, and he may be preparing to try to dissolve the Hamas-led Palestinian parliment. Does a leader have a right to bypass democratic institutions to ensure his people are fed and secure?

What we see now in the Palestinian Territories has been long coming ever since Hamas won the parliamentary election last year. Every attempt has been made — from cutting off funding to airstrikes to internal disputes — to make sure that Hamas cannot govern effectively (not that we know if it would have or not anyway). Abbas has been waiting for this moment.

However, it would be premature to say that he is circumventing democratic institutions. The Basic Law gives him the right to disband parliament and hold new elections. With so much fighting in the streets, thousands of people not being paid due to debt, and whatever there was of an economy now in standstill, Hamas is losing its popular legitimacy and new elections could certainly yield different results as Palestinians reevaluate the lives they are living now because of the choice they made.

After all, the point of elections is choice. While they alone do not make a democracy, it instills within the people an expectation that they have some sort of power over their own government and, in effect, their own lives. If they do not believe that having Hamas in power is in their benefit any longer, then they should be able to choose someone else. If Fatah truly is the moderate movement that it claims to be, then this could be a good thing.

It would be disingenuous for Abbas to take absolute power, though. It would discredit him completely as a “moderate.” I do not see how such a situation could turn out well, with Hamas fighting for its power back and the same corruption and ineffectiveness that transpired under Arafat returning. The end result would be that the Palestinian people have neither bread nor democracy.

Having spoken about the point of elections, the point of democracy in Palestine is to ensure political pluralism, thus creating effectiveness and ideological moderation. Even though Hamas was voted in — causing many to preach the doomsday scenario that democracy has wrought — the real sight to see is when they are voted out.

Hamas is part of a battle between international forces — those of Western civilization and that of Islamic uncivilization. To participate in democracy is to come within the restrains and moderation of civilization and to become beholden to the will of the people that it represents. Since it cannot seem to reconcile its domestic obligations with its international ones, such as the destruction of Israel, it has been forced into ineffectiveness. Its inability to moderate is costing its legitimacy, which can only mean death by ballot box. When Abbas disbands parliament and calls for new elections, Hamas will be rejected. By extension, so will the radical Islamist foreign policy that helped bring the current catastrophe about.

Vyacheslav Mizin and Alexander Shaburov are a pair of Russian artists who produce work such as the image above under the name ???????Dark-blue Noses??????? (???????????????????? ?????????????????). They have represented Russia at the Venice Biennale and shown widely in Russia and internationally. The Matthew Bown Gallery of London scheduled a show of their work for November 9th through December 2nd and last week the gallery????????s owner, Matthew Bown, traveled to Moscow to meet with the artists and select works for the exhibition. When he appeared at the Moscow International Airport last Friday with the above image in his possession (as well as ten others, including four similar collages), he was arrested (after boarding his flight) and the works, depicting a semi-nude Vladimir Putin cavorting with various world figures were confiscated. After nine hours in detention, Bown was allowed to leave the country, minus the artwork. The day after the arrest, the Moscow gallery (owned by Marat Guelman, a Jew who has been identified as an ???????enemy of Russia??????? on various fascist websites in Russia) which had been showing DBN????????s work before Bown received it was attacked and ransacked. The owner was savagely beaten and stated ???????My face was smashed into meat.??????? A large quantity of Georgian art work which had been on display was destroyed. Guelman told the Russian newspaper Kommersant that ???????he attackers worked without hysteria and did not look like hooligans or fanatics but like professional fighters.??????? Regarding Bown, Guelman stated that ???????officials confiscated the photos on suspicion of “defamation of third persons” and he said prosecutors were considering opening a criminal investigation on the grounds of insulting the president.??????? The New York Times reported that the attack on Guelman ???????was carried out by 10 men who looked like skinheads. The attack was the latest incident to raise troubling questions about xenophobia and freedom of expression in Russia.??????? There have been 39 race-based murders in Russia so far this year.

Perhaps even more terrifying than these barbaric acts were the reactions of the artists themselves, which seemed to boil down to ???????who cares???????? or perhaps ???????we didn????????t mean any harm, please don????????t kill us Mr. Putin.??????? According to Kommersant:

Blue Nose artist Alexander Shaburov said that the customs service was not as alarmed by the depiction of Putin as by a work showing a female suicide bomber in a fluttering dress in the mode made famous by Marilyn Monroe. Shaburov considers the coverage of the picture showing the Russian president an exaggeration by Western media ???????that still think that polar bears roam Russia, each followed by five KGB agents.??????? Shaburov does not consider the Masks Show work insulting to the Russian president. ???????It’s about how the media substitutes for our private lives,??????? he said, ???????how in Russia, as in all information societies, figures from television become closer than our real neighbors and acquaintances. It is simply the citation of a fact. Of course, there is humor and a disengaged view, but that can’t be equated with insult.??????? Shaburov agreed with Gelman about the motivation for the attack. Another Blue Nose commented that ???????Half of the crimes in Russia occur because people associate with the wrong elements. The Internet is a place where you constantly hang out with people you would never have anything to do with in real life ???????? there are all kinds of extremists and just sick people there. On the Internet, everybody sees and knows his enemies and everybody openly hates each other.??????? Shaburov noted that Gelman’s webpage is read not only by his admirers, but by those with whom he has been in long debate as well.

Russia is a land that offers many strange contradictions, and perhaps the strangest of them all is the Russian self-image of courage and strength. Russians pride themselves on having been able to survive so many wars and such a harsh climate, and the country is festooned with memorials to the valor of Russians in battle. Yet, even the totalitarian regime that governed Russia during the Soviet era was terrified of artists and had no hesitation in using the most brutal types of force against them, clearly an expression of weakness and cowardice rather than strength. Does Putin, who enjoys 70%+ approval ratings in polls, really think that the circulation of these images can damage him? Do those who enforce his laws? And, where is the vaunted bravery of the Russian fighting man when it comes to controlling his own government? Nowhere to be seen. Ultimately, it seems that those in the West are more interested in defending the civil liberties of Russian artists than even the artists themselves. Given this we must ask, did the USSR ever really disappear? If if it did flicker momentarily, surely the claim made by so many rash observers of Russia when Vladimir Putin came to power that since Russia could ???????never go back again??????? to the dark days of Soviet dictatorship was piffle, and their advice it was possible to be patient with Putin and allow Russia to work out its growing pains in peace pure rubbish, seriously damaging both to Western security and worldwide democracy What more need happen in Russia before these individuals will step forward and admit their error?

Russia????????s punch in the Dark-Blue Nose is fully neo-Soviet in character. Not only does it betray the fundamental weakness of the regime, but also its characteristic disrespect for the value of individual life and freedom and its classic ham-handedness. By taking this action, the Kremlin has guaranteed that the images will be far more widely circulated than they otherwise would have been, and made the linking of the race attack to the art seizure unavoidable. No doubt, Putin fancies that he has ???????learned the lesson??????? of the Soviet downfall and imagines he can do it right ???????this time.??????? But the evidence is to the contrary. At the same time, however, is the West reacting more expeditiously and effectively as second Iron Curtain descends once again across the continent? Time will tell. It does not seem so at present.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.

Amid escalated confrontation with Russia and no perspective of things getting better there Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is apparently trying to guarantee himself and his ruling United National Movement (UNM) from surprises due to a possible Moscow involvement.

Saakashvili asked the parliament to cut his term by several months and hold parliamentary and presidential elections simultaneously early in 2008. By uniting two election campaigns Saakashvili, who????????s widely expected to stay for the next term, hopes to help his party win a clear majority in the parliament while his popularity will be still high.

This is exactly what the opposition doesn????????t like about the President????????s unexpected proposal. All major opposition leaders voiced their protest against the move while one of them, Republican Party leader David Usupashvili, called it a step ???????towards ???????turkmenization??????? of Georgia???????. While ???????turkmenization??????? is the least probable scenario here it seems that Georgian government is taking the threat from Russia very seriously.

First of all, Saakashvili wants to avoid the Ukrainian pre Orange Revolution situation where the direct involvement and support of Yanukovich by Russia transformed presidential elections into a crisis. Parliament Chairperson Nino Burjanadze hinted this telling the press that the president ???????reduced his term to avoid serious expenditures and finally bring the state in the working environment from the one of constant elections.”

Second, Saakashvili wants to have free hands in the parliament in case relations with Russia get worse enough for a war in Abkhazia or South Ossetia to start, as Putin predicted in Finland.

Georgia is a presidential republic where both the president and the parliament are equally legitimized by national elections. To have (probably Moscow controlled) opposition dominate the parliament in times of crisis is asking for a trouble, similar to a power deadlock that leaded to an armed confrontation between Yeltsin and Duma in Russia in 1993. It’s good, that Saakashvili uses legal means. But there is no guarantee that he’ll continue to do so next time he’ll need to strengthen his power.

Under Ceausescu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej regime (Dej was the political mentor of Ceausescu) 250,000 Jews have been sold by Romania. The German ethnics who held the Romanian citizenship were also sold to the West Germany. Aside from the financial transaction, Ceausescu asked Israel to smooth the relations of Romania with the United States.

This is just one more despicable act of the Romanian communists. Israel paid cash for the Jews who wanted to leave Romania, but also with technology and by lobbying in Ceausescu????????s favor in Washington DC.

After 1967, Romania was the only communist country who did not break the diplomatic relationship with Israel. Surely, it is not like Romania was a friend of Israel, but there were ongoing exchanges between these two countries. Ceausescu????????s state politics have been very pro-Arab, but he did not allow the terrorists arabs to attack the Israeli embassy in Bucharest (1971), or to kill the Premier Golda Meir (in 1972) when she visited the country. Again in 1974 the Arab terrorists who were being trained in Romania tried to assassinate the president of the World Jewish Council. The Romanian intelligence stopped it.

More about it here
and here

In 1990 the Muslims who studied in Romania founded the Muslim Students Association of Romania with the purpose of protecting the student rights and to inform Romanians about the Islamic religion. In 1999 the association changed its name into the Islamic and Cultural League. Its headquarters is in Bucharest, but it has offices around the country in: Timisoara (since 1992), Iasi (1994), Cluj Napoca (1996) and Constanta (1997).

Journalist Geza Porkolab has written in Gazeta de Cluj newspaper about the League. His article was based on SIE and SRI press releases denouncing the terrorist activities of the League. There are other small association, cells etc. of various terrorist organizations quite active in Romania, but for a good reason the League and Taiba (it describes itself as a humanitarian foundation) have been put by the Romanian intelligence among the most important in the branch. The League presumably coordinates the activity of Hamas and Muslim Brothers in Central and Eastern Europe. According to SRI the sympathizers and members of Hezbollah enjoy a better social and financial status having chains of fast foods, hotels, jewelry shops, restaurants, clothing shops, exchange offices, all over the country. More about it here

A Romanian journalist, George Damian observes the friendly relationship between Hungary and Russia.

At the beginning of this year, President Putin visited Hungary and made a rare gesture ???????? he returned the Sarospatak thesaurus (a collection of valuable volumes which have been stolen by the Soviet Army in 1945) Russia and Hungary signed 10 economic agreements referring to oil, gas, the modernization of the Paks atomic plant and infrastructure projects. When the tape of Premier Gyurcsany recognizing that he lied his own people was broadcasted in Hungary, he was in Moscow signing the agreement for the biggest underground deposit of natural gases from Europe.

Few years ago, Hungary refused to carry put its commitments towards NATO. Now Hungary seems to be unable or unwilling to fulfill its engagements towards the EU, violating the economic stability agreement it signed with the Union. While Budapest has serious issues to settle internally and externally with the EU, Russia is there to offer Hungary some comfort. If that is the case, then we are dealing with a troubling reality, to say the least.

The Culebra Cut stretch of the 50-mile Panama Canal
Source: AFP Getty, via Houston Chronicle

Panama’s great referendum on expanding the mighty Panama Canal, to accomodate two times’ as much ship traffic, is taking place today. 1.7 million Panamanians are registered to vote on the $5.3 billion upgrade, essentially a bond project to be financed with crossing fees. Local muni-bond initiative as is, it will affect billions of people around the world. Some 70% of Panamanians are polled to favor it ahead of the vote.

Panamanian babes pass a sign urging passage of the Canal referendum
Source: AFP Getty, via Yahoo! News

The widening of the canal is the greatest move since Panama’s 1903 independence, according to President Martin Torrijos, whose father won back the Canal from Jimmy Carter in 1977, and Panama took possession amid fireworks at midnight, 2000 in the Millennium.

Not only will the new canal be able to take twice as much traffic - each boat will be able to handle three times the amount of cargo it can currently carry, so has the potential to expand its sector of world trade sixfold. 2 x 3 = 6.

Great cargo ships pass through the Gatun locks near the Atlantic
Source: Associated Press, via MSNBC

The Canal currently handles 4% of world shipping traffic (and that figure is from 2000, so it’s likely higher than that - UPDATE: BBC has the recent figure, it’s 5%), so a potential sixfold increase will create marvellous opportunities from the outermost reaches of the Atlantic to the far side of the Pacific.

At the ports around the world - in Singapore, in Zanzibar, in Dubai, in Pondicherry, in Madras, in Colombo, in Makassar, in Jakarta, in Kuala Lumpur, in Guangdong, in Kaohsiung, in Osaka, in Shanghai, in Manila, in Sydney, they wait.

In Houston, in Buenos Aires, in Norfolk, in Sao Paulo, in Baltimore, in Miami, in New Orleans, in Savannah, in Dakar, in Newark, in Capetown, in Caracas, in Boston - they wait.

The points of expansion along the Panama Canal route
Source: The Panama Canal Authority, via Wikipedia

Everyone in the world who trades is watching Panama today. If Panama passes the referendum, whole new trading opportunities will spring forward. All of those ports will benefit. Shipping costs will fall, more nations will be able to participate, and living standards will rise - around the world. Walmart prices will get still lower, countries like India and Senegal will be able to get deeper footholds into world trading, energy supplies will become more abundant - the possibilities are endless - and they are all good.

Panama’s voters will be able to ok the newest in technology, tech that would not be possible without their will to make it happen - exotic new kinds lighting that permits night crossings, water level modifications that will prevent El Nino problems, and drilling technology that can now go through solid bedrock, deepening the canal to allow heavier ships through. Check out the Panama Canal’s live Web cam of gigantic ships bouncing through the locks like baby toys.

Cargo ships full of Wal-mart goods pass through the Gaillard Cut near the Pacific
Source: AP, via Washington Post

Amazingly, despite the fact that more than 70% of Panamanians want this - those smart, dollarized Panamanians who are turning their country into a lovely increasingly prosperous place on earth, the mainstream media sees only problems with this expansion. It will cost too much! It will wreck the environment! It will benefit foreigners more than Panama! It will not work! They are so full of it.

For their information, credit rating agency Fitch put out exactly one ‘warning‘ to Panama if it dares upgrade its outdated canal - that it ‘risks’ a credit upgrade, which will lower its cost of borrowing and put it into the ‘A’ range of borrowers. That’s the big risk Panama is taking!

Naturally, the fringe-left is against this. I don’t know how Hugo Chavez feels about it - he wants a Nicaragua canal to to ship oil to China, a pipedream for sure, but he would surely like to get his hands on an expanded Canal. Miguel advises me that Chavez has been very silent about the whole Canal upgrade, something unusual for him. Meanwhile, UPDATE here, the Cuban communist press already is expressing its disdain for the measure in this stupid story here - so the picture is starting to emerge of what these anti-trade regional tyrants really think of it. As for Chavez, he may be supporting Nicaragua’s proposed canal because he knows Panama isn’t for sale and Panamanian prefer to make their own decisions about their Canal with their own financing, and not Chavez’s. It might be significant that Panamanian voters in favor of a ‘no’ on the Canal wore bright Chavista-red t-shirts, for what it is worth. In my opinion, whatever happens, the Canal will take eight years to upgrade and Chavez won’t last that long in office, so no matter what happens, Chavez won’t be around for it.

A Panamanian babe who just might have voted yes
Source: AFP Getty, via Yahoo! News

Brave Panama’s voters are voting not just to enrich themselves, creating 47,000 new jobs and adding $4 billion to their national coffers each year, they are also benefiting the world, enabling many many more people to participate. We love Panama for doing this. It’s Panama’s unique advantage in the world to be able to open it all to world trade. It will be a magnificent thing when it happens.

More Panamanian babes - these are Kuna women, whose tribe is famous for its beautiful artwork
Source: AFP, via Yahoo! News

UPDATE: Joy in Panama!!! And everywhere else! Makassar! Sydney! New York! Osaka! Dakar! Nearly EIGHTY FREAKING PERCENT OF PANAMANIANS HAVE APPROVED THE CANAL EXPANSION, a higher margin than even the biggest poll numbers indictated. FREE TRADE RULES IN PANAMA!!!!!!

UPDATE: Panama’s electoral tribunal has the whole results out and you can see them for yourself - the measure passed by a whopping 78.08% vs 21.92% on the ‘no’ side. 98.12% of the ballots were counted valid, with 1.04% of the ballots blank and 0.82% null. The ‘yeses’ won, and big. It wasn’t even close! The near-80% victory for free trade exceeded the most optimistic polls! So much for the great wave of isolation and leftism. Today struck a big blow against Hugo Chavez, once again. Read the whole cool thing on the official electoral site here.

UPDATE: Via Boz, I found this Miami Herald editorial extolling the importance of passing the canal referendum, giving arguments about the importance of Panama remaining globally competitive. Read it here.

UPDATE: Investor’s Business Daily has an editorial describing how the ports around the U.S. are excited by this move and how the canal expansion will lower Walmart bills for all. Read it here.

UPDATE: Financial Times, in more of an analysis than editorial, describes the fascinating details of how the Canal works - I linked this in the earlier Panama post, but it’s so good it’s worth reading again here.

Melissa de Leon Douglass at Global Voices has a truly excellent, comprehensive roundup from the Panamanian blogosphere, with emotions expressed ranging from ‘I’m proud of my country’ (the way it should be! And we should celebrate with them!), to photos of tears and misery from the 20% who voted ‘no’ (can’t wait to click on that link, just to be mean). It’s a must-see treat here.

Steven Taylor at PoliBlogger has some good droll commentary on the need for the upgrade plus lots of news links in this post here.

What would a ‘colligation’ of all the free-market blogs in Latin America look like? As one big blog coming in from a feed? Luis Afonso Assumpcao of Swimming Against The Red Tide wanted to find out, so he set up an interesting new blog, compiling all the thoughts coming in from Miami Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and the rest of the region where longing for free markets is growing.

As Hugo Chavez’s crazed empire shows high signs of meltdown, and rightwinger after rightwinger gets elected president throughout Latin America, libertarianism is an idea that is growing in importance through Latin America. This blog would be a good one to watch for trends. Check it out here.

Israeli President Moshe Katsav is currently facing charges for rape. Recently, an Israeli diplomatic delegation including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. An article from the Russian newspaper Kommersant quoted Putin as follows, speaking to the group:

“?????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????! ???????????????????????????????? ????????????????????? ?????????????????????????? ????????????????????! ?????????????????????????? ????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????! ???? ???????????????????????????? ???????? ???????????????????????? ????????? ????????????????! ???????? ???????????? ????????????????? ????????????????????????! ????????? ???????????? ???????????? ????????????????????????????????!”

In a New York Times story, this remark is characterized as “flippant” and reported as follows:

According to journalists and officials in the room and published accounts by Agence France-Presse late Wednesday and Kommersant and The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, Mr. Putin was heard saying, ???????Say hello to your president,??????? to Mr. Olmert, referring to President Moshe Katsav, who could face criminal charges that he raped and assaulted two former employees. Mr. Putin added, ???????He really surprised us.??????? The microphone was quickly turned off as reporters were ushered from the room, but the news organizations reported that Mr. Putin went on. ???????We did not know he could deal with 10 women,??????? he said, according to those in the room and the Post and Agence France-Presse accounts, apparently referring to the complaints by several women that Mr. Katsav harassed them or worse. Kommersant????????s version ???????? citing the remarks in Russian ???????? was cruder. ???????He turned out to be quite a powerful man,??????? the paper????????s reporter in the official Kremlin pool, Andrei Kolesnikov, quoted Mr. Putin as saying. ???????He raped 10 women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him.???????

In fact, it????????s far worse than ???????flippant.??????? Russian Cyrill Vatomsky translates Putin’s statement as follows:

Please relay my greetings to your president! He turned out to be quite a stud! Raped 10 women! I sure did not expect that from him! He sure surprised us all! We all envy him!

The Russian phrase Vatomsky translates as “stud” — “?????????????????????????? ????????????????????” — is quite similar to the type of language Putin infamously used when he said he would ???????stomp the Chechens in their outhouses??????? using the colloquial verb “??????????????????????????.” For the New York Times to simply translate this phrase as ???????powerful man??????? is gross negligence, leading to a faulty conclusion that the remark was merely ???????flippant.??????? As Cyrill explains, ?????????????????????????? is a word to be generally applied to a machine rather than person, and ???????????????????? is to “man” what “broad” is to “woman” in English.

Even under the Times version, Can you imagine how the world would react if U.S. President George Bush spoke this way about rape? This incident might seem unbelievable to those not familiar with Putin, but as blogger Robert Amsterdam points out that, in fact it????????s commonplace. He cites to a New York Times article which states:

In 2000, Larry King asked him about what happened to the Kursk, a submarine that under mysterious circumstances had ended up disabled on the sea bed with its entire crew dead. ???????It sank,??????? Mr. Putin said. Two years later, at a news conference in Brussels, a French reporter asked him a pointed question about Chechnya. Mr. Putin suggested that the reporter might want to become a radical Islamist, and invited him to Moscow for a circumcision, saying he could recommend a procedure so that nothing would grow back.

In the aftermath of the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya on Putin????????s birthday, Putin????????s response was to publicly label her an enemy of the state. He said: ???????This murder has done more damage to Russia — and the current authorities of Russia and Chechnya, which she has been covering lately in her work — than Politkovskaya’s articles.??????? This prompted Politkovskaya????????s editor to reply: ???????Putin said an outrageous thing today about Anna. What he said today is so outrageous that it is unworthy of a man, and it is unworthy of the president of Russia.???????

If Vladimir Putin would say these things publicly, in front of heads of state, does one dare to imagine what he says behind closed doors to his KGB cronies? And what thoughts might he be thinking, that he dare not verbalize even to his most trusted associates?

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.

Ranks are beginning to close on the question of Vladimir Putin????????s Russia in the West????????s pro-democracy circles. The question is no longer whether action is required but rather what action, how and when. Last week, Publius Pundit documented the importance of two watershed events in Russia, the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the onset of a Russian pogrom against Georgian children in Russia, in signaling a sea change in the country????????s political course. On the same day we published, the respected pro-liberty think tank CATO Institute announced that it was creating a new Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and hiring neo-Soviet dissident and former Kremlin insider Andrei Illarionov to run it. Illarionov was quoted as saying bluntly: ???????One can see those who attempt to dissent or protest end up either sewing mittens in Krasnokamensk or being struck dead by a bullet in her own lift.??????? The one sewing the mittens is oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, arrested and sent to Siberia the moment he began making noises about seeking the presidency; Illarionov, a former economic adviser to Putin????????s Kremlin, and Putin????????s former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, now an opposition candidate for president in 2008, are the two leading voices of opposition in neo-Soviet Russia, so the CATO move was a dramatic statement in favor of the defense of liberty and democracy in Russia. In fact, it was a direct challenge to the Kremlin.

In the days that followed, two highly respected conservative publications — on in America and one in Britain — have joined us in expressing utmost concern in the most serious language (including the ???????f-word??????? and the ???????m-word???????) that Russia is now a runaway state headed for anti-democratic disaster. We welcome discussion in the comments section as to possible responses the democratic world can make to this crisis situation, which can ultimately have dire consequences for world peace if left unattended.

1. The F-word

On October 12th, reviewing the worsening showdown between Russia and Georgia, the Economist blasted Russia with the ???????f-word??????? ???????? that is, fascism.

The Kremlin loathes Georgia, once a cherished vassal, with the special wrath reserved for wayward loved ones. To the Russians, Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, is an American puppet, hell-bent on taking his country into NATO, and the arch-carrier of the germ of post-Soviet revolution. For his part, Mr Saakashvili is irate over Russia’s meddlesome backing for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two regions of Georgia that broke away in the early 1990s. Georgia’s arrest last month of a handful of Russian intelligence officers (terrorists, insists Mr Saakashvili) may have been a counter-provocation, aimed at garnering international sympathy. If that was the plan, it probably worked: the Russians went berserk. Even though the men were swiftly deported, Russia recalled its ambassador, evacuated other Russians, severed transport and postal links with Georgia????????and then imposed a raft of punitive measures against the legions of ethnic Georgians (many of them Russian citizens) living and working in Russia itself. In Moscow, hundreds have been arrested and deported (pictured above); celebrities with Georgian names harassed; Georgian-owned businesses raided and closed. The manager of one Georgian restaurant says the staff are in hiding; another says the water has been turned off. The police, meanwhile, asked Moscow schools for lists of children with Georgian surnames, though Dmitri Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, terms the request a ???????disgusting??????? excess of zeal. Now we understand how Chechens living here feel, says a doctor, who like many Moscow Georgians is a refugee from Abkhazia. New immigration laws, explicitly targeted against Georgians, are promised; so are restrictions on the remittances that help prop up Georgia’s economy; Russians allege they contribute to its militarisation. Another hike in the price of Russian gas seems likely (there was one last winter, along with mysterious simultaneous explosions in both export pipelines). Mr Saakashvili may have underestimated the further damage the Kremlin can do to Georgia. He may also have over-estimated the outside help he can expect. ???????Russia sees Georgia as a bastion of the West,??????? he complains, ???????but the West doesn’t.??????? For all that, Georgia will survive the confrontation. But can Russia?

The Economist sees neo-Soviet (that is, self-destructive) behavior in Putin????????s actions: ???????The Kremlin’s escalation of it is an extreme example of another Soviet habit Mr Putin has inherited: using foreign enemies as scapegoats and tools in domestic politics. Past targets have included America, Ukraine, and foreign do-gooders allegedly engaged in espionage. This row comes as anxiety mounts over the question of the succession to Mr Putin when his second (and supposedly final) presidential term ends in 2008. A foreign threat, even a bogus one, will help keep the electorate pliant, whatever the Kremlin decides to do.???????

But that much hysteria is apparently not enough to satisfy Putin, who is increasing fanning the flames of racism documented by Publius Pundit months ago. The Economist reminds us:

Until recently, the Kremlin has tried to ???????ride the tiger??????? of extreme nationalism, as Dmitri Trenin, of the Carnegie think-tank in Moscow, puts it, through a risky double strategy: portraying itself as a bulwark against extremism, but also trying to harness nationalist instincts for its own ends. It is widely thought to have created the nationalist Motherland party to siphon votes away from the Communists. (Motherland is now being merged with two other parties into what will become the main ???????opposition???????????????almost certainly a completely loyal one). Mr Putin seems now to be giving the tiger freer rein.For example, he last week enjoined his ministers to protect the interests of ???????Russia’s native population??????? against the ethnic gangs who, he said, control the street markets. Such gangs are ???????a reality???????, says the Kremlin’s Mr Peskov, in justification. But after a racist bombing in a Moscow market killed a dozen people in August, Mr Putin’s remarks were at best inadvisable; and in what is????????however much some ethnic Russians might wish otherwise????????a multi-ethnic country, potentially disastrous.

As the Economist sees it, this clearly ???????demonstrates Mr Putin’s failure to create the ???????dictatorship of the law??????? that he once promised. Untrammelled by normal constraints such as an independent judiciary or a genuine opposition, the Kremlin makes and breaks laws as it pleases. The growth of racist violence is both evidence and result of a broader lawlessness. Lack of faith in government institutions, and especially in the police, says Eduard Ponarin of St Petersburg’s European University, leads some to seek other forms of redress.???????

The conclusion? A terrifying one: ???????Yegor Gaidar, a former prime minister, draws an analogy with inter-war Germany, which like post-Soviet Russia experienced economic chaos, then a period of stabilisation in which post-imperial nostalgia took hold. Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independent parliamentarians, worries that Mr Putin seems to be switching from an imperial idea of Russia towards one more resembling a ???????Reich.???????? History also offers a term to describe the direction in which Russia sometimes seems to be heading: a word that captures the paranoia and self-confidence, lawlessness and authoritarianism, populism and intolerance, and economic and political nationalism that now characterise Mr Putin’s administration. It is an over-used word, and a controversial one, especially in Russia. It is not there yet, but Russia sometimes seems to be heading towards fascism.???????

2. The M-word

Shortly after the Economist fired its warning shot came another, this time from the other side of the Atlantic and the Weekly Standard. Enlisting the services of Russia expert Anders ?????slund, the Standard dropped the ???????m-word??????? — murder. Headlined ???????Putin gets away with murder,??????? it noted an eeiry set of ???????coincidences:???????

In Russia, gangsters have the macabre custom of making a birthday present of a murder. On Vladimir Putin’s 54th birthday, one of his fiercest domestic critics, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was shot to death in her apartment building in central Moscow. She worked for the weekly Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last independent newspaper. Its deputy editor was murdered a couple of years ago, and the killer was never found. Although Politkovskaya had been tailed by the FSB for years and her murderer was captured on film, he got away. The Kremlin has made no comment. The prosecutor general claims to have personally taken charge of the investigation, but such investigations seldom result in an arrest.

Then it observed: ???????In the last year, President Putin has exported ground-to-air missiles to Iran that can shoot down American F-16s. He has exported arms to Syria that were successfully used by Hezbollah against Israel. A year ago, the Kremlin cheered when Uzbekistan evicted a large U.S. air base, and now it is encouraging Kyrgyzstan to do the same. Meanwhile, state-controlled Russian media spew out nationalist and anti-Western propaganda. Every evening after the first state channel’s main newscast, one of the Kremlin’s foremost propagandists, Mikhail Leontiev, delivers his daily diatribe against the West.??????? The conclusion couldn????????t be more clear: putin is a murderer and war monger. Strangely enough, the Standard was actually being rather moderate; it could have mentioned the hundreds of thousands of AK-47 assault weapons Putin agreed to ship to Venezuela, the large packages of financial assistance he recently inked with Cuba and the Hamas terrorist regime in Palestine and his repeated attempts to undermine the soveriegnty of pro-West governments in Ukraine and Lithuania using the tactic of energy blackmail. The Econmist agreed: ???????Whoever killed Politkkovskaya, Mr Putin shares the blame for having made independent journalism both rare and perilous.???????

The Standard????????s conclusion was exceedingly blunt: ???????To consider Putin a strategic partner or even ally would be to close one’s eyes to reality. If Putin persistently behaves like an enemy of both the United States and the E.U., we had better pick up the gauntlet. Only a fool or a coward would do otherwise. The fundamental problem of Western policy toward Russia is that it is still based on the idea that the Cold War is over. Alas, this truth has become obsolete, as Putin has gone about reviving one feature after another of a police state, including authoritarian rule and an anti-Western foreign policy.???????

The Standard warns us not to treat Putin as if he were Boris Yeltsin, who it refers to as ???????a democrat, as Leon Aron shows in his excellent biography.??????? Yeltsin is blamed for delivering Russian assets into the hands of Russia????????s allegedly corrupt oligarchs; few recall Yeltsin????????s reason. He, and his right-hand man Gaidar, warned us that his countrymen were fully capable of choosing to return to the dark days of authoritarianism, and to prevent this he sought to disperse the assets of the Soviet regime as quickly as possible, so that reassembling them would be difficult. Yeltsin was proved right when Putin came to power, and but for Yeltsin????????s actions both the West and the people of Russia could well be dealing with a much more formidable dictator. Some may ask: But didn????????t Yeltsin name Putin as his successor? Indeed he did. But at the time, Yeltsin was being threatened from all sides with prosecution and imprisonment, a fate similar to what oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky actually met. Yeltsin was old, infirm and often inebriated when he stepped from power, and may have been forced or fooled into supporting Putin. When the nomination was made, most of the West simply burst into laughter, sure than at unknown KGB spy could not become the second freely elected President in Russia????????s history. The West was wrong then, and in reacting too slowly to Putin is just as wrong now. Putin????????s election should have signaled an emergency situation, and not only because Putin was a proud KGB spy. At the time, the Russian people professed to loathe Yeltsin, blaming him for the downturn in the Russian economy in the wake of the Soviet collapse, yet they followed his word like lemmings and annointed his chosen sucessor. The West should have known then that dictatorship was coming, and moved to interrupt it. Russia????????s feeble economic state would have made it particularly amenable to concerted Western influence.

Even now, loud warnings are being sounded and largely ignored. The Standard reminds us: ???????Putin talks about democracy while systematically destroying it, as Berkeley political scientist Steven Fish has detailed in Democracy Derailed in Russia.??????? It notes how Putin backed down when the West strongly supported the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and when it sought to use energy blackmail there; this contrasts markedly with the West????????s lukewarm support for Georgia as it faces an even more brazen challenge to its soveriegnty from Russia. The Standard states: ???????Right now, Russia is apparently preparing for a war against the independent former Soviet republic of Georgia. With no justification whatsoever, Putin personally has accused Georgia of state terrorism. He likened the arrest of four senior Russian military spies in Georgia to the acts of Stalin’s henchman Lavrenty Beria. Russia has evacuated its diplomats and citizens from Georgia and imposed a nearly complete embargo. Major Russian military maneuvers are under way.???????

3. A rogue by any other name

Asking questions like whether Russia is or isn????????t facsist, is or isn????????t neo-Soviet, and whether President Vladimir Putin is a murderer may seem like provocation to the Kremlin????????s KGB crowd, but in fact they????????re not. That crowd is only too pleased to have its potential rivals sitting about the parlor debating what names should be applied to Russia????????s conduct while they literally snuff out the last remaining vestiges of democracy in Russia, achieve a strangehold on the main economic arteries and sock away the nation????????s treasure trove in secret coffers and the armed forces while keeping the nation on life support, thus weak and easy to control. They????????re happy to have us call them any names we like, so long as concerted action remains only contemplation. So many times we have seen regimes of this kind rise before our eyes while we stood slack-jawed, moving to action only at the crisis stage. Will this be yet another?

John Hall, senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service, wrote the following about Anna Politkovskaya:

After she was found brutally murdered in her Moscow apartment building, most of her obituaries identified her as a war reporter who seemed to court danger. She was far more than that. Those who might have taken the trouble to read her book, “Putin’s Russia,” would have seen she was a chronicler of Russia’s steady decline into authoritarian rule under President Vladimir Putin and perhaps his most bitter critic in all of Russia. Her book should have been more widely heralded in the United States, but the diplomatic and journalistic book review establishment here sniffed at it. Foreign Affairs magazine called it “stridently indignant.” Other reviewers said she was too provocative in claiming Russia was on its way back to Stalinism. One even suggested she was a “Cassandra.” Perhaps we all needed to be a little more indignant and provocative about Putin’s Russia after his election to a second term. The pity is that Politkovskaya didn’t get as much attention when she was alive as she’s getting now that her voice has been silenced.

It cannot be more diplomatically said, so let????????s repeat it like a mantra: “Perhaps we all needed to be a little more indignant and provocative about Putin’s Russia after his election to a second term.” In other words, perhaps a bit more “russophobia” and Anna would still be alive today, or at least we????????d be in a better position to identify and protect her successor. What seemed to some as strident before the killing may now seem like appeasement.

Kim Zigfeld publishes the Russia blog La Russophobe.

The first Congress of the Independent Libraries organized by the Assembly to Promote Civil Society is underway across Cuba, and despite the brutal repression the librarians are facing.

The Assembly to Promote the Civil Society is civil society coalition of 365 Cuban opposition movements that fight peacefully for democratic and regime change in the island. From Octuber 10, 2006, to February 2007, a meeting of the 152 independent libraries is taking place in numerous Cuban towns and cities. They are informing the population about the goals of the civil desobedience and non-cooperation campaigns named ???????Yo no coopero, yo si quiero el cambio??????? (I don????????t cooperate with the repressive authorities, I want the change). The official motto is ???????We are gathering for democracy???????. Banned books, reviews, leaflets are being distribuited to the neighbors of the libraries where the meetings are taking place and to the population at large. There will be special events with youths and children, too.

Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello from Havana sent these first photos showing the librarians and libraries gathered in Congress for Democracy.

Below is the “Elena Mederos” independent library.

Miguel Vazquez Tamayo has shortly detained two times last week, but he has no intention to be intimidated.

The Cuban resistance is growing and these events can????????t be ignored. The independent libraries are gathered for democracy. Their meeting is part of the Civic Desobedience and Non-Cooperation campaign I mentioned above.

StJacques over at Free Republic has translated a fabulous Chilean editorial from El Mercurio blasting the Venezuelan dictator as dangerous for Chile’s interests, right on the heels of Mexico’s blast at Chavez for his ego.

Read it here.

They’re on something like Round 28 at the United Nations for the Security Council seat and pretty much getting nowhere. The deadlock continues to show the same wretched numbers, with Hugo Chavez at about 78 votes and Guatemala at about 108 votes, more or less. Same old score, round after round.

Mexico, however, as it often does, said just the right thing, telling Chavez to throw in the towel, it was sick of his shenanigans, trying to hold the UN hostage over its little proxy games it claims to play with the U.S., when in reality, Venezuela’s contest is with independent little Guatemala, a small state Chavez wouldn’t deign to recognize, given that he perceives himself as playing in the big leagues and only at war with the U.S.

Read Mexico’s common sense advice to Chavez here.

Aman Imani, an Iranian writing for The American Thinker, has an amazingly interesting article about just what Iran’s freedom fighters are facing as they stand down the mullahs - a parasitic class that feeds off of their society and demands to be king or kingmakers. It’s full of good local details and enlightens us about just how tough the task is of reforming Iran.

It’s well worth reading here.