National Security

The Senate yesterday passed by unanimous consent the Kerry-Lugar bill, as urged here and elsewhere. Here are some important passages of the bill, outlining U.S. policy and financial commitments...

Greetings from Malabo, the capital city of Equatorial Guinea, in West Africa. The ground-rule agreements that have carried me here preclude me from saying much more at this point, but I do hope to post some lightly annotated travel photos of this unusual place a little later.

Here above Malabo’s Old Harbor, the longevity of the Iranian Revolution does not seem a subject very close at hand. Moreover, my access to news of the Iranian election results is distorted somewhat by the limitations of my college freshman-level of French, which is the lingua franca of hotel cable-television-news options here along the Gulf of Guinea. (There is CNN International, of course, but its reporting is limited in comparison to the French coverage...

Welcome back. We’re at number six on America’s stimulus-blogging countdown. This next subject was further down our list of final posts but a front-page story in the Times gives cause to consider it now.

The piece describes a charter school, the Equity Project, that will open in Washington Heights next fall boasting of teachers who will earn $125,000 a year; the fortunate educators were selected after a competitive national search. This is an interesting project, and the students who are fortunate enough to enroll may have a terrific experience, but the concept is more than a little gimmicky, a sort of biosphere of educational reform; it is hard to imagine how this model could be scaled up to serve many disadvantaged students nationwide, or how the “evidence” gathered in studying the performance of its students could be easily extended to other settings...

The late winter seems so long ago. The ground was hard. There were no green shoots; the credit markets remained frozen, and stock prices seemed destined for new lows. In these circumstances arrived the stimulus bill…and so began the blogging of the stimulus. One Monday, I voluntarily and unthinkingly stacked seven-hundred-plus pages of dense but neatly justified federal type upon my desk and pledged to read it all. And now, in late spring, with summer a-comin’ and green shoots running riot, at least in the newspapers, I can say that I have finally done so. Finished. Fully stimulated...

The Marine Corps Four-Star General James N. Mattis currently serves as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation and also as commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command—titles that were surely announced in a PowerPoint presentation somewhere. More accessibly, from what I can tell by bouncing around the Web, he will be depicted by Harrison Ford in the forthcoming movie “No True Glory: The Battle For Fallujah,” which may be released later this year, based on the book by former-Marine-turned-journalist Bing West. Mattis is not a tall man, and his grey hair is trimmed tightly; his ears protrude a little, in a manner pioneered by President Obama and, before him, Mr. Spock. He speaks in a blunt and unvarnished fashion not typical of general officers on staff assignments at the Pentagon...

At Africa Command, the public-affairs people scheduled me for an hour with the U.S. Navy Captain Robert Suggs, whose business card reports that he is Deputy Counter Narco-Terrorism Office [sic]. Drug running is not a subject of particular interest in my research, but I’m always game for a well-informed briefing. Suggs turned out to be a man in his early sixties, balding, with a white mustache. He wore a camouflage uniform with the Africa Command patch on his left bicep, but also, notably, a Seabees insignia—from the Navy’s civil engineering and construction group...

Last month, the PIMCO bond and economy guru Bill Gross wrote, “The future of the global economy will likely be dominated by de-leveraging, de-globalization, and re-regulation.” De-leveraging and re-regulation are easy to grasp. American households, for example, are shifting rapidly from borrowing to saving; this change in the United States during the last nine months has been particularly dramatic, and not exactly helpful to our consumer-dependent economy. Banks have already de-leveraged and shifted large chunks of their bad debt to taxpayers. Re-regulation is in the newspaper headlines every day—one of its goals, presumably, will be to prevent Wall Street’s wizards from re-leveraging. But de-globalization? What might that actually mean?...

It may be difficult to pass through Germany without thinking about automobiles, but I actually came here for research on Africa. I’ve spent the last two days at Kelley Barracks, which was originally constructed by Hitler’s military in 1938, as the Wehrmacht prepared for continental war. During the Cold War, the installation served for more than two decades as the headquarters of the U.S. VII Corps, which was equipped and trained to fight a total war in Europe against the Soviet Union. There are still some VII Corps souvenirs on the campus, such as an Iraqi tank captured during the Gulf War of 1991. Today, however, the camouflage uniforms of the officers and soldiers bear an arm patch depicting, within an oval, a silhouette of Africa. The VII Corps is long gone; in its place has arisen the headquarters of the newest of America’s global combatant commands, Africa Command, which was officially birthed in 2007...

If Velupillai Prabhakarn, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, is truly dead, as Sri Lankan television is reporting, then the long struggle of the island’s Tamil population to simultaneously free itself from both the L.T.T.E.’s terrorism and the repressive biases of the majority Sinhalese has reached a historic turn...

Today, as for a number of weeks, at least fifty thousand Sri Lankan Tamil civilians are stuck as refugees on a beach in the northeast corner of their country, trapped between two combatants—the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a banned terrorist and separatist guerrilla organization—that have repeatedly shown an appalling indifference to their fate. Exactly what is happening on this beach is difficult to determine because there are few independent witnesses. It is clear, however, that this is essentially a humanitarian crime scene of large proportion...