It’s an all too familiar scenario from the 21st century urban battlefield.  An Iraqi soldier posted at the security barrier in Sadr City, Baghdad, is killed by sniper.  American military advisers are dispatched to rectify the situation.  Their solution: lase the building housing the sniper and blast it with a Hellfire missile.  This is but one example of the intermittent but fierce combat faced by U.S. troops in the city.  Quoth the New York Times:

The formal truce that was announced in the Green Zone with great fanfare on Monday has meant nothing here. Shiite militias have been trying to blast gaps in the wall, firing at the American troops who are completing it and maneuvering to pick off the Iraqi soldiers who have been charged with keeping an eye on the partition.

American forces have answered with tank rounds, helicopter rocket strikes and even satellite-guided bombs to try to silence the militia fire. On some stretches, the urban landscape has been transformed as the Americans have leveled buildings militia fighters have used as perches to mount their attacks.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, an official for the United Nations is speaking out about lethal raids by “foreign intelligence services” that are, in some cases, taking the lives of civilians with no accountability.  The official doesn’t specify details about these foreign agencies, but my guess is he refers to CIA or SOCOM missions targeting al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan.

If America’s chief interest in these two conflicts is finding and killing international terrorists who might otherwise strike the United States proper, this is all just fine.  However, if we intend to fulfill John McCain’s rosy scenario of a democratic Iraq and Afghanistan with minimal violence by 2013, we have another thing coming.  Dropping a 2,000 pound JDAM on a building in Baghdad to eliminate a sniper may be tactically expedient, but it won’t win very many “hearts and minds;” certainly not those of the building’s owners when they return, nor their extended family if they happened to be inside the building at the time.

Americans face a difficult decision about the conflicts in which we are now engaged.  If we decide that democratic state-building in Iraq and Afghanistan is truly in our interests, we must realistically assess what accomplishing this will entail.  It will mean a long-term commitment for years to come.  It will mean recruiting more troops for the Army and Marine Corps and putting them in harms way; essentially expanding the “surge” and making it permanent.  It will mean changing tactics by drawing on the successes of those American units that have worked with local officials, successfully blending the military and political, to secure their areas of operation.  It will mean all of this, but it will still will not guarantee victory.

On the other hand, we could scale back our objectives and simply focus on attacking the terrorist threat in both countries without regard for the broader political implications of our actions.  This path, too, has its risks and comes with no assurance of success.  The only thing of which we can be certain is that if we maintain our present compromise approach of using excessive firepower to make up for deficiencies in personnel, we will neither build democracies nor secure America when our wars come to an end.

Yesterday, Reilly White posted an excellent piece of writing detailing the excesses of the latest incarnation of a Depression Era agricultural policy that masks corporate welfare in the guise of aid to “small farmers.” I refer, of course, to the Farm Bill. Yesterday, the House passed this legislation by a vote of 318-106 and the Senate followed suit today, passing the bill by an 81-15 margin. All three presidential candidates wisely made themselves scarce from the Senate floor, dodging a politically difficult decision. President Bush is expected to veto the bill but, given the margins of victory in each House, it will be easily overturned and enacted into law sans Bush’s approval.

Forty-seven million Americans have no health insurance today. As of 2006, almost thirty-seven million Americans lived at or below the federal poverty line, to say nothing of the millions more who struggle to survive with incomes that don’t meet the technical definition of “poverty.” Nationally, we are $9 trillion in debt and our major entitlement programs are facing critical shortfalls over the next thirty to forty years. Yet, we still see fit to lavish $307 billion of unnecessary aid on farmers who are now earning record profits from high commodity prices and we do so with overwhelming political support. Excuse the cliché, but where’s the outrage?

The mythical American Farmer comes again to the forefront of American policy, as Congress debates the $300 billion annual Farm Bill. The premise of the bill reads pretty well for a defense of a depression-era farmer out of a Steinbeck novel – pity, then, that there really aren’t many of them left

Today’s Wall Street Journal Opinion section points out some important points about this year’s debate

“This year farm income is expected to reach an all-time high of $92.3 billion, an increase of 56% in two years, making growers perhaps the most undeserving recipients in American history.”

With agricultural and commodity prices skyrocketing, it becomes particularly difficult to justify such exorbitant agricultural subsidies. But then again, that’s not the point – the subsidies are expected to keep American farmers farming (because that’s what we do in America).

However, the architecture of subsidy policy dates from the 1930’s, when 25% of Americans were farmers; now, just 2% of Americans are so employed, and the vast majority of agricultural products are produced at large or corporate farms. Viewed in that sense, it’s already failed to preserve the identity of the small farmer anyway. But the piece goes further

“A bigger scam is the new income limit to qualify for subsidies. Mr. Bush sought a $200,000 annual income cap, but Congress can’t bring itself to go below $750,000.”

Fascinating. Seemingly under the radar of most Americans, the Government is effectively doling out farm subsidies to some of the wealthiest members of its society – and mind you, Congress apparently exceeds even the President’s lofty concepts of wealth.

But that’s not even the largest problem – we continue to annoy the rest of the developing world (including our friend in NAFTA) with our protective agriculture policies, which have the adverse effect of pricing developing agricultural economies out of the market – ironic considering the competitive advantage they would maintain in a free trade environment.

But regardless, this is getting out of hand – add impetus for biofuels, rising fuel costs, and the highest commodity prices seen in decades, and you’ve got the equivalent of giving Exxon a welfare check and a tax break. Oh wait, we already do that too.

Complicating this, any congressman with rural constituents recognizes that voting against the bill gets them six cyanide pills and a game of Russian Roulette closer to political suicide. And, who can resist that well-paid farm lobbyist with that winning smile and near-earnest appreciation of working folk?

A disturbing piece out of the Washington Post today recounts the reaction from some voters encountered by many of Senator Barack Obama’s campaigners while making their rounds.  The story offers many anecdotal accounts of hostility and racial slurs like this one:

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”

It also notes that, in spite of the experiences of campaign staff, gathering objective data on the racial attitudes of voters is difficult.  Thankfully, American society has made some progress since the days when publicly expressing overtly racist views was socially acceptable behavior.  However, if the experiences recounted here are true, there still much further to go.

Dimitry Medvedev’s first trip abroad as President of the Russian Federation will take him to China (with a brief stopover in Kazakhstan). It seems that since the end of the Cold War, bitter memories of the Sino-Soviet split and the 1969 border conflict that left these two Asian giants on the brink of war have been set aside in order to forge a strategic partnership that has brought both states closer to one another than at any time in the past.

The two codified their budding friendship in 2001 with a “Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendship,” which pledged both to mutual nonaggression, support for their respective hot-button issues like Taiwan and Chechnya, and various forms of consultation. China and Russia regularly exchange state visits, such as the one on which President Medvedev is soon to embark, in addition to ministerial level talks on a range of issues. Each is an active member in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a multilateral grouping that facilitates economic and security partnerships in Central Asia. Then there were the national years, with 2006 dubbed “the year of Russia” in China and 2007 “the year of China” in Russia. Moscow has even seen fit to supply its neighbor with billions of dollars of advanced weaponry to fill the gaps in China’s ambitious military modernization program.

However, there are clouds on the Eastern horizon. China has a population of nearly 1.5 billion people and a GDP of about $3.4 trillion at official exchange rates, a value that grows by 8 to 10 percent a year. Russia has a population of about 140 million, one which has been declining in recent years, and a nominal GDP of $1.3 trillion which is growing, but is heavily dependent on energy exports. All this means that over the next twenty to thirty years, China will almost certainly exceed Russia in every measure of national power, except, perhaps, the size of its nuclear arsenal. This certainly does not portend conflict as a matter of course, but it is enough to make Russian strategists lose sleep over the future.

In a Moscow Times opinion piece, author Richard Lourie says as much, commenting on a lingering sense of “Sinophobia” amongst many Russian officials who are wary of the stirring giant on their southern frontier. Siberia is the source of their angst, according to Lourie:

Geography abhors a vacuum every bit as much as nature. The Russian Far East, which is two-thirds the size of the continental United States, has only 7 million people. On the other side of the Russian border, in the three northeastern Chinese provinces, there are 100 million people in an area one-eighth the size of the Far East.

The fear, fed in part by Russian xenophobia, is that those 100 million Chinese will spill across the border and submerge the sparsely populated, resource-rich lands of eastern Russia. Border areas are already marked by tensions between native Russians and Chinese migrant laborers.

Again, this is not a forecast of an inevitable Sino-Russian war; such a prospect is remote. I do, however, think that the geopolitics and geoeconomics of Northeast Asia cast doubt on the longevity of a Sino-Russian strategic partnership. Such a relationship remains valid only so long as the two are on a relatively equal footing and share mutual interests. The future of both these prospects is questionable at best.

There is a fascinating commentary in today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal advocating the use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a counter-cyclical tool to negate the pricing policies of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC.  Lincoln Anderson, an economist with a Boston-based finance firm, argues that the 701 million barrels of oil stocked up in the SPR are excessive and could be better used by adding supply to the U.S. market.  The goal would be to shave a little off the roughly $120 price tag for a barrel of crude.  Should OPEC increase production in the face falling demand, as it has done periodically, the SPR could purchase excess oil and work as a price support for the market.

The idea is that this sort of policy could lead to a little more stability in U.S. energy markets, easing the pain in times of high prices while ensuring that large price drops don’t distort the market and shift demand away from nascent sources of alternative energy.  Anderson believes a minimal reserve of no less than 120 million barrels of oil could be kept in the SPR at all times, an amount he states is greater than any one time drawn down in the SPR’s history.

This argument strikes me as an interesting one…one worth thinking about, given severity of the present energy mess we find ourselves in.  At the same time, I remain skeptical of the price-setting power he attributes to OPEC.  His own article cites the fact that OPEC’s control of oil production has declined from 52% in 1973 to only 40% today.  More importantly, he doesn’t take into consideration the ever-growing demand for energy in China and India, which may have more to do with today’s high prices than the cartel’s production policies.  Thoughts, anyone?

On the sixty-third anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, Russia is looking toward the future through the lens of its Soviet past. For the first time since 1990, Moscow staged a parade through Red Square replete with all of its latest military hardware, including T-90 tanks, Topol-M road mobile ICBMs, and Sukhoi fighter aircraft. Reviewing the scene from on high were Russia’s new president Dimtry Medvedev and its familiar patriarch, now in the guise of Prime Minister: Vladimir Putin. It was Putin who decided to blend old-style Soviet authoritarianism and militaristic symbolism with a (relatively) capitalist economy buoyed by windfall energy revenues.

Now, the fruit of that strategy, renewed Russian power incarnated in a metal tank hull, is on display for all to see…or is it? As most of the coverage of these festivities points out, the event was in many ways a Potemkin rally, showcasing a few big-ticket items in what is still a largely dysfunctional Russian military. Long range bomber patrols and talk of a “new Cold War” may give some leaders pause, but Germany’s Der Spiegel is on the money when it writes:

In reality, Western capitals have no need to panic because of the saber rattling on Red Square. After all, France celebrates its Bastille Day every year with a military parade including tanks on the Champs Elysees and fighter aircraft flying across the Arc de Triomphe. Nations who once played a far greater role on the world stage need to bask in the glory of historical uniforms, machine guns and bombast. It eases the nagging pain of lost territories and influence.

The reality is that the Russian army is plagued by poor quality conscripts who are often abused by their officers in brutal hazing rituals. Its arms industries are advanced but highly inefficient. Its once vaunted navy is a shadow of its former self and its strategic patrols are in decline.

Russia has come a long way from chaos of the early 1990s; it has gained a tremendous amount of wealth and power in the years since the Soviet empire’s demise. Moreover, even a cursory reading of European history will show that one should never dismiss the capacity for Russia to overcome disaster and take back its place on the world stage. Still, it hasn’t reclaimed its mantle of world power yet and isn’t likely to do so for some time.

Photo Source: AP.

In 1968, long-time American Airlines CEO C.R. Smith retired with this statement: “These days no one can make money on the goddamn airline business. The economics represent sheer hell.”

Forty years on, it would be difficult to find an airline executive who disagrees with him. There are a lot of things that separate the airline business from nearly every other; it has the all the union-grinding labor disputes common in large manufacturing firms, with the added panache of providing services that are as despised for their inadequacy as they are a crucial component of national infrastructure. And by the way, planes also make excellent missiles.

When Delta and Northwest took the monumental but unsurprising move two months ago to merge, their $10.5 billion in combined 1^st quarter earnings losses seemed to seal the deal. Most of this absurd loss is due to writedowns on the companies’ respective valuations; however, it still begs the question: what could they possibly have to gain from one another?

Airline bigwigs cite economies of scale, for one. Not only by pooling together their meager resources of peanuts, biscuits, and four ounce sodas – but ultimately saving on fuel costs, the most relevant cost issue for the airliners. Opinion seems to be divided between laissez-faire capitalists who reckon that the merger is crucial to prevent a collapse of either company, and populist ideologues who foresee a chain reaction of airline mergers and universally high priced airline tickets.

But there are other costs, too. Atlanta-based Delta already has plans to consolidate the combined companies’ headquarters in the more spacious Atlanta-Hartsfield Hub, an annoyance to both Minneapolis-based Northwest as well as Minnesota’s political elite, who are worried about the pending loss of jobs from the state.

CQ Politics points out here that while the advocacy groups on both sides are getting busy consolidating their efforts, the failed 2001 bid of United Airlines and US Air remains fresh in the minds of many. John Ashcroft, while not exactly the poster-child for the anti-corporate agenda, called the planned merger uncompetitive.

What can we expect from a Delta-Northwest merger? Not much. The combined companies, even if able to hold onto the coveted ‘Largest Airliner’ status, will not become profitable overnight; nor, for that matter, will competition be hampered significantly in major consumer markets.

Ding ding, here comes Northwelta.

Today the Times of India reports that the Indian military will conduct the third flight test of their Agni-III intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) on Wednesday. The first test was evidently botched when high temperature gases damaged some of the missile’s wiring, but this was corrected for the second trial and India hopes for another success today. The new missile is spec’d with a range of about 3500 kilometers.

What’s interesting about the piece is that it states directly in the title that the new IRBM is “China-specific.” Of course, realistically, China is the only country of strategic significance that falls within the Agni-III’s range (aside from Pakistan, but 3500 km would be overkill for that target). There really isn’t another reason to build such a weapon, but the way it’s discussed is just so…blunt.

But then, India has used the Chinese threat as the rationale for its nuclear arsenal from its inception and that threat has only grown since India’s first, “peaceful” atomic detonation in 1974. India feels outmatched by Chinese DF-21 and DF-31 missiles and believes it must field a modern IRBM of its own to feel secure in its second strike capability. If all goes as planned today, New Dehli should be one step closer to that sense of security that only comes with capability to incinerate any of your rival’s major population centers…

UPDATE: Today’s test of the Angi-III IRBM was conducted successfully and the Indian Defense Research and Development Organization is reporting the missile ready to enter service with the Indian military.  The Agni-III will bolster India’s nuclear deterrent against its Chinese neighbor by being able to carry a 200 kiloton thermonuclear warhead as far as Beijing and Shanghai.  Reports also indicate it will benefit from the improved accuracy once the joint Indian-Russian version of the GLONASS satellite navigation system goes online in 2010, allowing an upgrade from its present inertial guidance system.

As a courtesy to Americanus’ readers, I wanted to point out that posts may be rather sparse this week as I am currently swamped with papers, research, exams and other ivory tower nonsense while Reilly White is currently traveling on business.  If there is time, perhaps one of us will sneak in a new post here and there, but the pace will be less than frenetic.  However, once the current storm passes, Americanus will be back in action.

Until then, I’ll leave you with an excellent edition of NPR’s Justice Talking focused on the legal and policy aspects of mental health in America.  It’s fascinating treatment of an important and often overlooked issue in American public policy.