2013-06-19T01:20:38-04:00 Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=eric-margolis Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Eric Margolis Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2118341 2012-11-12T15:47:12-05:00 2013-01-12T05:12:01-05:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
On Thursday, China's new supreme leader is expected to be named in Beijing's Great Hall of the People. Almost everyone expects top Communist Party secretary Xi Jinping to be named party head and, a bit later, president of China.

China's once-in-a-decade change of Communist Party leadership may prove even more important than the U.S. election: it will determine the course over the next ten years of the world's most populous nation whose economy is set to overtake America's before the decade is over.

While the United States and Europe are in an economic mess and crippled by debt, China's long march out of dire poverty continues apace. During the past ten years of outgoing President Hu Jintao's leadership, China's economy has grown 400 percent. China is well on the way to becoming a modern nation with growing military power and technology.

When I was covering Moscow in the late 1980s, a popular joke making the rounds went: "the East Germans are the only people who can make Communism work." Today, a similar statement could be said about China: it has made capitalism work better than in the capitalist west.

I cannot look at today's China without vividly recalling my first trip there in 1975, a year before the Red Emperor, Chairman Mao, died. China looked like a vast concentration camp. A few gangs of Red Guards still rampaged. Everyone wore dirty green or blue quilted outfits. Hardly any private cars were seen, except for those of party officials. A few bluish fluorescent feeble lights lit the grim scene of fear, poverty and depression. The only more depressing place I ever saw was Stalinist Albania under Enver Hoxha -- who was, in fact, a close ally of Mao.

On my subsequent twice-yearly visits to China, I marveled at the changes I saw: it's as if some wizard waved a magic wand and from the ground sprouted skyscrapers, high-speed trains, new cities and giant factories. Where, I keep wondering, did all the money come from? Maybe Chinese, like East Europeans, buried all their gold in the ground when the Communists took power and only dug it up when the coast was clear.

The wizard, of course, was Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping who was, in my humble view, a greater and certainly more effective revolutionary than Mao. Deng broke the power of China's crackpot leftists and released his nation's vast productive power. Interestingly, the only title Deng held when he was ruling China was "chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association." He didn't need a title, everyone knew who was boss.

Under Dengs' inspired leadership, China finally managed to escape the chain of its past two centuries. Until the early 1800s, China, then with 400 million people, was the world's leading economic power, but a military midget. An increasingly corrupt, feckless Manchu (Qing) Dynasty presided over China's decay.

In 1839, the British pounced on prostrate China, waging two opium wars that caused tens of millions to become drug addicts. Britain seized Hong Kong. France, Russia and Japan fed like wolves on helpless China. Many of the greatest fortunes of today's Britain were based on the narcotics trade.

In 1850, a Chinese farmer declared himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ and launched the frightful Taiping Rebellion that in 14 years led to 20 million deaths. In 1894, Japan seized Korea and Taiwan from China and humiliated the Imperial armies and fleets.

China's calamitous 19th century engendered an even more bloody 20th century: 1920s civil wars; the Japanese invasion of 1937; a fight to the death between Mao's Communist and the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1958, Mao's Great Leap Forward, a crazy attempt to modernize the economy, wrecked China and caused 30-60 million peasants to starve. Mao's equally daft Cultural Revolution almost finished off China.

Seen in the retrospective of this grim history, China's rise to become the world's second most important power is even more miraculous. The deep-seated fear of chaos and government weakness, of being surrounded by rapacious foes, underlies much of China's current political thinking and allows acceptance of authoritarian rule and lack of human rights taken for granted in many other nations.

Chairman Mao used to read himself to sleep late at night poring over the history of China's civil wars between rival kingdoms and peasant uprisings.

Nearly all dictatorships make use of this argument; so do too many democracies. There are other choices: look at the way Imperial Japan gave way to a democratic system, however flawed. China can take this same road, but it will take a long time for it to develop democratic confidence and a nation under law. Beijing will probably continue its historic foreign policy of allowing its neighbors complete autonomy provided they acknowledge fealty to the China emperor. China wants to push the U.S. back into the Pacific, but it has no discernible territorial ambitions aside from regaining Taiwan and turning the China Sea into a mare nostrum.

Today's China, however admirable in many aspects, remains one of the world's harshest police states. I've spent my career covering nasty third world despotisms and can say that China remains a leading example of iron-fisted control, both evident and hidden. I've also experienced the wrath of the secret and military police.

But for all its intimidation and occasional scariness, China is clearly well advanced on the long march to modernity and becoming the first or second world power. In fact, China may soon attain the same level of economic development and wealth it enjoyed in the 1700s -- before the outside world fell on it.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2012.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1981613 2012-10-19T11:46:21-04:00 2012-12-19T05:12:01-05:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
But this missile, and 41 others (including some longer-ranged SS-5's) terrified the United States during the October 1962 missile crisis -- 13 days that shook the world. Each of them could have delivered a one megaton warhead onto America's East Coast cities, starting with Washington D.C. One megaton is a city-buster.

When the Cuban missile crisis erupted 50 years ago this month, I was a student at Washington's Georgetown University Foreign Service School. Cuba was headline news. The Cold War was at its peak.

A CIA-operation to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro's Marxist government had spectacularly failed at the Bay of Pigs. The new, inexperienced U.S. president, John Kennedy, got cold feet in the last minute and called off vital air cover for an invasion by Cuban exiles. Deprived of air cover, most were killed or captured.

The Pentagon urged a full-scale U.S. invasion of Cuba, backed by massive naval and air power. The Kennedy administration wavered.

Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev seized the moment by sneaking 42 medium-ranged missiles and smaller tactical nukes into Cuba, right under the nose of the Americans. When U.S. U-2 spy planes finally spotted the Soviet missile bases all hell broke loose.

U.S. forces went to DEFCON 3, then DEFCON 2 -- the highest readiness stage before all-out war. Six U.S. army and Marine divisions moved to South Florida and Georgia. Nearly 600 U.S. warplanes were poised to attack. On 25 Oct. nuclear weapons were loaded onto U.S. B-47 and B-52 bombers. Seventy five percent of the Strategic Air Command's bombers were airborne or poised to attack the USSR.

Hot-headed Fidel Castro furiously demanded Khrushchev launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the U.S. Decades later, Castro admitted this was a terrible mistake. Fortunately, the Soviet leadership said "nyet!" A nuclear exchange in 1962 between the U.S. and USSR would have killed an estimated 100 million people on each side.

As Soviet freighters steamed towards Cuba, the Kennedy White House imposed a naval and air blockade on Cuba. But it was called a "quarantine" since under international law a blockade is an act of war. Today, in the undeclared war against Iran, the favored term is "sanctions."

I watched all this from Washington, knowing the city was the first target for a Soviet nuclear strike. Some wise people left town. Wealthy Latin American families chartered aircrafts to bring their children home. The university chapel was filled with students on their knees, many weeping, and saying Hail Marys.

Looking back, I don't know why my friends and I didn't high tail it out of Washington. I guess we simply could not believe that nuclear Armageddon was at hand. But it was. Soviet and U.S. forces were heading for a collision.

Then, the blustering but crafty Khrushchev offered to take Soviet missiles out of Cuba if the U.S. pledged never to invade the island. Kennedy readily accepted the deal. In a secret codicil, Kennedy agreed to quietly withdraw U.S. nuclear-armed Thor and Jupiter missiles targeted on the USSR from Turkey and Italy.

The deal was done. Washington hailed it as a huge victory for President Kennedy, who became a national hero and icon. This mythology persists in the U.S. today. The American public is still largely unaware of the secret deal.

In the end, the Soviet Union came out ahead. Cuba was saved from a U.S. invasion, which was Moscow's principal strategic goal, along with preserving the Castro regime.

U.S. missiles in Turkey and Italy (and likely Britain) threatening the USSR were removed, but the story remained secret for decades. Unaware of it, the Soviet politburo ousted Khrushchev a year later for "reckless, hare-brained schemes" and made the dim Leonid Brezhnev chairman.

Fortunately, the U.S. military was not allowed to invade Cuba: Unknown at the time, Soviet troops there were authorized to use 100 tactical nuclear weapons against any invading force and their bases in South Florida. As Wellington said after Waterloo, "it was a damned near-run thing."

But this "victory" misled America into hubris and over-relying on military action to resolve its future political problems.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2012.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1761186 2012-08-09T16:51:43-04:00 2012-10-09T05:12:04-04:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
Madame Gu, as widely reported, was charged with poisoning Neil Heywood, a British businessman, fixer and possibly her former lover. Gu is the wife of the recently disgraced powerful Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai, who, until the scandal, appeared set to be elevated to a senior role in China's leadership. Bo was regarded -- and feared -- by many as a dangerous opportunist bent on reviving Maoism.

Gu's trial was the biggest sensation in China since the trial of Mao's shrewish, scheming wife Jiang Qing, leader of the notorious Gang of Four. Reviled as "the white-boned demon," she and her leftist allies were blamed for the ghastly Cultural Revolution.

Beidaihe, along with the lovely northern port of Dalian, are traditional summer venues for the pampered Communist Party leadership. This year's meeting is extremely important as it will likely determine the shape of China's next round of leaders at this fall's 18th party congress, a once-in-a-decade seismic event. President Hu Jintao will step down and is likely to be replaced by rising star Xi Jinping.

A peaceful, choreographed change is key to the Communist Party's hold on power.

The trial of Gu raised memories of the Cultural Revolution that still haunt China. In 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong had been kicked upstairs by more pragmatic comrades after his calamitous Great Leap Forward starved to death some 30 million Chinese and wrecked the economy.

The aging revolutionary was determined to regain full power. He unleashed armies of credulous students known as Red Guards to tear down the government and purge the party. China's president, Liu Shaoqi, and senior leader Deng Xiaoping, were denounced as "capitalist roaders" and "bourgeois revisionists." Liu died in jail; Deng was sent to forced labor.

Mao declared war on all remnants of China's glorious past and any foreign influences. Mao's new revolution began, oddly, with posters at Beijing University, and Jiang Qing's attacks on "deviant" intellectuals, writers and playwrights. These obscure attacks were harbingers of the coming tempest.

At the time, hardly anyone could understand what was going on in China. Chaos and anarchy swept China as rival armies of Red Guards waving Mao's Little Red Book battled one another and publicly humiliated and assaulted former leaders and scholars. I was in China in 1975 and vividly recall the gangs of Red Guards rampaging, burning and smashing. Watching a great nation run amok was a terrifying experience. Mao's China looked like a vast concentration camp filled with demented inmates.

In one of history's worst acts of vandalism, much of China's glorious art and ancient temples were destroyed as remnants of "feudalism" by mobs of fanatical teenagers. China was virtually paralyzed from 1966-1976: the economy broke down, education ceased, millions starved or were thrown into grim labor camps. A failed coup against Mao in 1971 by Marshall Lin Biao furthered the chaos and tumult.

After a decade of civil strife and national madness, in 1976 the People's Liberation Army and centrist reformers like Deng Xioping and the dying Zhou Enlai managed to wrest power away from the aging Mao, who was showing increasing signs of dementia and paranoia, and broke the Gang of Four.

The arrest and isolation of Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai suggests the party leaders feared he might have planned to ignite another wave of Maoism among China's youth. His failure to follow the party line was a major heresy.

The old adage about standing together or hanging separately surely applies to China. All its miraculous economic and social progress, and its rock-hard political stability since 1976 could be swept away by power struggles within the party leadership and challenges from the military.

Madame Gu's trial and the sacking of her ambitious husband will sharply remind the Communist brass that they must keep a united front or else China's ancient curse -- separatism, regionalism, warlordism -- could rise from the grave.

For Chinese, who have a good grasp of their turbulent history, instability is the greatest of all dangers.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1597448 2012-06-14T17:19:35-04:00 2012-08-14T05:12:09-04:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
The reason is obvious: Russia and the United States have thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on each other. Many are ready to launch in minutes. Compared to this threat, all of America's other security issues are minor.

Avoiding confrontations with a major nuclear power is obvious. Yet the United States and Russia are ignoring such common sense in their increasingly heated war of words over Syria's civil war.

The US and its allies have been actively trying to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria for over a year. They have been pouring arms, money, communications gear and fighters into Syria to take advantage of a popular Sunni uprising against the Alawite-dominated regime.

Washington's intervention in Syria is driven by its obsession to undermine Iran by bringing down its most important Arab ally. Israel, which exerts enormous political pressure over US Mideast policy in an election year, sees destabilizing Syria as a triple win: a blow to its arch enemy Iran; a blow to Syria's efforts to regain its strategic Golan Heights that Israel captured in 1967, then annexed; and wrecking the key backer of Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinians.

Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose presidential ambitions are increasingly evident, accused Russia of selling MI-24 helicopter gunships to Syria. Russia angrily denied the charge and asserted that US anti-riot gear was being used against demonstrators across the Mideast.

Washington scourged Syria for attacking civilian targets. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The same week, the US-installed president of Afghanistan pleaded with Washington to stop its air strikes that are killing many civilians. Pakistan's feeble government begged Washington to halt its drone attacks.

The angry Russians could have added that the US has been buying rocket-armed Russian-made MI-17 combat helicopters from them for use by Afghan government forces, and using helicopter and AC-130 gunships in Afghanistan. Or citing US sales of advanced Apache attack helicopters to Israel that were used to attack civilian targets in Gaza.


Syria has long been a close ally of Moscow. US attempts to overthrow the Assad regime were sure to infuriate and alarm Moscow, which sees US plots everywhere to undermine Russia. The Kremlin must find a way to answer the US challenge or lose face.

Meanwhile, another US-Russia fracas is brewing up in the Caucasus. Relations between the two great powers are still raw due to the 2008 mini-war between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia. Washington helped overthrow the former Georgian government of Eduard Shevardnadze in the so-called "Rose Revolution," replacing him with close US ally, Mikheil Saakashvili.

The new Georgian leader quickly turned his small Caucasian nation into a base for US and Israel intelligence and military operations. In 2008, Shakashvilli foolishly picked a fight with Russia. US warships were moved into the Black Sea, setting of a war scare in the region before tempers cooled.

Now, the US is back playing the Great Game in the Caucasus while the Georgia feud still simmers. This time it's in oil-rich Azerbaijan, which has become a key American and Israeli ally. The Baku regime just bought $1.6 billion worth of Israeli arms.

Azerbaijan and Armenia, a close Russian ally, have been warring for a decade over disputed Nagorno-Karabakh. This obscure conflict is heating up again as Russia and the US back opposite sides.

CIA has been busy for some time trying to stir up Azeri separatists in northern Iran. The US and Israel could use Azerbaijan as a base to attack Iran.

As if Russo-American relations were not bad enough, US Republicans demand President Barack Obama "get tough" with Moscow. Threats fly back and forth over the planned US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe that enrages the Kremlin.

Provoking or antagonizing Russia over areas that are of no vital US strategic interest is dangerous and childish. Moscow and Washington should be seeking peaceful resolutions in Syria and the Caucasus, not playing silly Cold War games.

Hopefully, Presidents Obama and Vladimir Putin will sit down and talk some grown-up sense when they meet at a summit this week in Mexico.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1580853 2012-06-08T11:53:16-04:00 2012-08-08T05:12:10-04:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/ says the major portion of US naval power will shift to the Pacific by 2020 as part of the Pentagon's new "pivot to Asia" strategy. Though not totally unexpected, this news has caused quite a stir across Asia and raised tempers in China.

However, there's rather less to this redeployment of naval forces than meets the eye. The US Navy has long kept half of its warships, aircraft, and logistics vessels in the Pacific. The new plan will see a modest increase in US naval forces in Asian waters; the ratio of Pacific to Atlantic naval units will increase to 60/40 or slightly more.

More of America's 11 attack carriers will sail the Pacific. The Marine Corps, with its own air wings ("the Navy's army," as wags call it), will increase its presence in the Pacific theater.

A 2,500-man US Marine expeditionary force is being stationed in remote northern Australia. It is far enough from China to be of little military use, but close enough to raise tensions with Beijing and Jakarta. Its mission, besides bracing Aussie spirits, is uncertain.

But US grand strategy is clear. Just as the US sought to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War by surrounding it with American allies and bases, so Washington plans to do with China.

America is creating a sweeping arc of allies and bases that begins in Singapore, and moves northeast to the Philippines, then Taiwan, Okinawa, Japan and South Korea, neatly bottling up China's expanding naval forces. India is being encouraged to build powerful naval forces that can threaten China's oil routes to the Mideast and keep its navy out of the Indian Ocean.

Other US naval forces -- the Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet, and units patrolling the Indian Ocean -- will support the US 7th Fleet that has ruled the western Pacific since 1944 after the US Navy won its most glorious victories and swept the Imperial Japanese Navy from the seas.

Shifting naval units from the Atlantic to Pacific is not a major undertaking for the US. After the severe decline of Russia's once mighty Red Banner Northern and Baltic fleets, there is no longer any major naval threat in the Atlantic. The days when packs of Soviet submarines were poised near Iceland to break into the North Atlantic to cut North America's links with Europe are long gone.

The Mediterranean is an American lake.

But even with the new Pacific redeployment, the US Navy will be hard-pressed to maintain its former domination of the region.

America's navy has shrunk to fewer than 300 warships and 3,700 aircraft from the 600 ships planned during the 1980's. Even so, the mighty US Navy remains larger than the next 13 navies combined. As a French admiral told me, the US Navy's budget exceeds France's total defense budget.

China's rapid development of anti-ship missiles, submarines, space-based sensors and a new anti-carrier ballistic missile, the DF21-D, increasingly alarms the US Navy and may force its attack carriers to operate far from Asia's coasts. In fact, huge aircraft carriers are ever more vulnerable to attack and will eventually be made obsolete by drones and missiles.

However, naval forces are no longer the primary expression of America's power. The US Air Force has dominated much of the non-communist globe since the 1950's and serves America's strategic interests in the same way the Royal Navy imposed the British Empire's military and commercial power. Air power has played the decisive role in all of America's military victories since World War I.

The Pentagon plans to strengthen its Pacific air power. This likely includes re-establishing US air bases in the Philippines and Australia, and expanding air bases in Guam, Okinawa and South Korea.

America has been at war for decades. Its aircraft and warships are aging rapidly. Equally threatening, Congress may force deep military spending cuts as deficits worsen -- at a time when the US military is being ordered to keep China bottled up on the Asian mainland.

China need only build its military power close to home. The United States must project and maintain its naval and air power 10,000 km across the Pacific Ocean, a hugely expensive, complex undertaking that gives cash-rich China an important, even decisive advantage.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1563056 2012-06-01T15:48:47-04:00 2012-08-01T05:12:19-04:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/ almost certain the vote was manipulated.

A huge popular explosion in Egypt will very likely ensue. Egyptians are already furious their first democratic election of a president was distorted by the state election commission, a tool of the military junta now ruling Egypt. The commission vetoed many popular and capable candidates from the election for spurious reasons, corrupting the election in advance. The vote was set up to split the votes of Islamists between numerous candidates.

In the end, two candidates, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi and former Maj. General Ahmad Shafiq, were left facing one another in the runoff vote.

I observed Egypt's parliamentary vote that began at the end of 2011 and ended in early 2012. This vote was fair, open and laudably democratic. Its outcome was only a surprise to the western media, which routinely misunderstands or misreports the Mideast. The Islamists -- the Brotherhood and orthodox Salafist al-Nur Party -- won a landslide with 66% of the popular vote.

In other words, two of three Egyptians voted for parties advocating government under Islamic principles. Horrified, Egypt's military, backed and financed by western powers and some conservative Arab allies, set about trying to split the Islamists, reinvigorating the Mubarak regime, and making sure the presidential election would be an uphill struggle for the Islamists.

The first round of the presidential election was clearly tainted by vote rigging, a specialty of the old Mubarak regime. The military's candidate, Shafiq, won easily in districts that had given landslide victories to the Islamists.

The Islamists were to blame for some of this. They failed to unite, splitting the vote. They failed to convince deeply worried Coptic Christians, who comprise 10% of Egypt's population, that Islamists would not be a threat to Christianity or enforce draconian Salafist practices. They did not sufficiently emphasize their commitment to democracy or youth issues.

Another key factor that I witnessed across Egypt was the military junta's ploy of withdrawing police from the streets and actually encouraging a crime wave to develop in a nation that was one of the world's most crime-free societies in spite of its grinding poverty. Many Egyptians were frightened by the rising crime wave into supporting Shafiq and his military backers who vowed to crush crime with an iron first.

Even so, it strains comprehension that Shafiq is now running neck-and-neck with Islamist Morsi. There is even talk that if Shafiq wins, he will name the hated former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as prime minister. A Shafiq victory would mean a return to absolute Mubarakism, without Mubarak.

Egypt did not stage its revolution so that Mubarakist autocracy and the fierce police state that kept it in power could return. So that the circles of corrupt businessmen and cronies around Mubarak could resume their plundering of the economy. Or so that Egypt could remain under the thumb of the United States and, indirectly, Israel. But that's what could happen.

In fact, a big question is how Egypt's Islamist-nationalists could get by without some $1.3 billion in US annual military and economic aid.

Morsi should vow to appoint popular Nasserist Hamdin Sabahi as his prime minister and name Copts to senior positions. He will have to quickly seek economic aid from the EU -- at a time when it is awash with troubles.

Washington is deeply alarmed the Brotherhood may abrogate the hated, one-sided 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel. Most Egyptians rightly see the treaty as void because Israel violated one of its most important provisions: that Israel would withdraw from the West Bank and permit creation of a Palestinian state. But in a US election year in which pro-Israel forces dominate the Republican Party, Egypt's nationalists and Islamist are well advised caution.

It's no coincidence young Egyptians dismiss the Brotherhood, "your grandfather's party." Its conservative members, many engineers and academics, have little experience in the dirty game of politics and often appears stuffy and slow.

But if Shafiq and the military win the next vote, Egyptians could turn dangerously radical as the revolution that began in Tahrir Square goes violent.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1527935 2012-05-18T16:52:36-04:00 2012-07-18T05:12:06-04:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
The last time Greece faced a crisis of this magnitude was in 490 BC when the armies and fleets of the Persian Empire were converging on Athens.

The great Athenian leader Themistocles rallied his countrymen and defeated the Persians.

Alas, this time Greece has no Themistocles to save the embattled nation. Unlike the incompetent Persian Emperor Darius, the Greeks now face Germany's very tough, stern and able Frau Doktor Angela Merkel who has vowed to impose zucht und ordnung (order and discipline) on the unruly Greeks. "Get a government," she is telling them.

A potentially fatal run on Greece's banks is underway, with over 800 million euros withdrawn in one day this week. The sky is indeed falling. Greek banks are entwined with banks across Eastern Europe and Cyprus. So if they go down, the tsunami waves will spread far and wide.

Who can blame Greek depositors for running? Default and an exit from the eurozone appear likely, meaning their money in Greece's wobbly banks could end up being converted into re-born drachma, worth only 30-50 percent of the euro.

Greece's recent political turmoil and inability to form a government shows its voters want the benefits of staying in the eurozone, but don't want to pay their dues through taxes and slashing deficits.

New elections scheduled for June 17 are unlikely to resolve this Greek drama. Leftist parties that stoutly reject the austerity program agreed upon by the last government in Athens are leading the polls.

On top of this, Greeks, who look way down on their neighbors, the Turks and Albanians, have to suffer through watching these nations grow and manage their finances pretty well. Maybe Turkish financial advisors for Greece?

Angela Merkel insists Greece will stay in the euro. But that's more hope than fact. German voters are in no mood to bail out the happy-go-lucky Greeks or swallow more austerity, judging from last week's important regional vote in North Rhine-Westphalia. French voters said the same thing last week when they elected moderate Socialist Francois Hollande over Monsieur Austerity, Nicholas Sarkozy, who was last seen jogging in the park.

What would happen to Greece if it quit the euro? Financial chaos, capital flight, riots and bank failures... maybe. But after the apocalypse, Greece would eventually revert to its 1960's status: a poor but proud nation living off tourism, shipping, agriculture and fishing.

Devaluing a new drachma won't do much for a nation whose main export is olives and feta cheese. Besides, the Greeks have severely damaged their tourist industry by endless strikes and surly service.

Angela Merkel is rightly concerned that Greece's exit from the euro would be a blow to Europe's political unity. This aspect of the crisis is as important as the economic/financial dimension.

But Merkel should also recall the timeless dictum of Prussia's king and renowned general Frederick the Great: "He who defends everything, defends nothing."

Greece should never have been admitted to the euro. It snuck into the currency union by hiring those miscreants at Goldman Sachs to falsify its financial books.

Admitting Greece to the eurozone was a bridge too far. Euro membership should be limited to those nations that have solid finances and honest reporting. In short, a club of northern European nations that follow Germanic good government. Unprepared nations, like Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Moldova or Ukraine, do not belong in the eurozone. Most have no business in the EU either.

The European Union and eurozone expanded too far, too fast. Retrenchment is now in order. As the French say, "Fall back to better leap forward."

Amidst this crisis, what many forget is that it was caused by politicians borrowing too much to buy votes and shady bankers lending recklessly to boost their own bonuses.

If there is one thing we learn from the Euromess it is the Golden Rule: governments must raise any and all funds they spend.

Borrowing from the money lenders is poison. More empires and nations have been ruined by unsustainable borrowing than by wars. Politicians should not be allowed to borrow except for well-defined, long-term projects, likes roads or bridges, in which revenue streams and repayment schedules are clearly defined.

There's not much the western leaders can do right now to save Greece. More important, Spain's banks, who loaned vastly too much to property developers, are threatening to go down like dominos. Portugal and Italy are showing severe strains. The debt chickens are homing to roost.

President Barack Obama keeps urging more debt creation in a vain effort to resolve the crisis originally brought on by too much debt in the first place. The real answer is that nations that erected a house of financial cards must go through a long, painful, cathartic period of rehabilitation and fiscal dieting to break debt addiction.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1510378 2012-05-11T16:06:15-04:00 2012-07-11T05:12:13-04:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/ After me, the deluge. So said French king Louis XV, and was he ever right. His successor faced the French Revolution and lost his head.

Much the same can be said of France's outgoing president, Nicholas Sarkozy. The victory of his Socialist rival François Hollande in last week's presidential election not only eclipsed the political career of the widely unloved Sarkozy, it left his clumsily-named political party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), facing its own deluge.

As Europe's conservatives watch in dismay and even horror, the second big shoe is about to drop in French politics. Far-rightist Marine Le Pen appears set to emerge triumphant from the wreckage of France's defeated center-right.

France holds two-round elections for its lower house, the National Assembly, on June 10 and 17. Polls show Hollande's Socialists and their left-wing allies winning some 44% of the seats; the center-right UMP, 36.5%. The Left already controls the upper house, the Senate.

Control of both houses would allow Hollande's Socialists to implement their vow to impose punitive taxes on the wealthy, hire 60,000 teachers (all Socialist stalwarts, of course), reject the EU austerity pact, boost spending and return the minimum retirement age to 60 from 62.

Meanwhile, the UMP faces questions of life and death. The party was cobbled together from four center-right parties made up of Gaullists, Liberal Gaullists, Liberal Radicals and Christian Conservatives.

Sarkozy, made giddy by the pomp and power of the royal presidency created for Charles de Gaulle, long neglected party affairs, choosing to run France like Louis XV. As a result, the party became a squabbling collection of egos without any core philosophy or direction.

The June election could inflict the coup de grâce on the floundering UMP. Not only could it be swamped by the Socialists, it must face a Faustian existential choice.

France's electoral laws mirror the complex nature of its people. Nothing is simple or straightforward. Assembly elections will be a three-way race between Socialists, UMP and Le Pen's far-right National Front.

With the Socialists holding a strong lead, UMP and National Front risk splitting the center-right vote. So electoral logic demands that they collaborate in many voting districts and agree to support a common candidate.

But the National Front -- xenophobic, racist, violently anti-Muslim and anti-Europe -- is poison to moderate French and many members of the UMP. To no surprise, UMP may split, or disintegrate, over the issue of joining forces with the National Front, seen by many French as a reborn fascist movement. In fact, it's not really fascist, but an avatar of the old 1940 far-right, ultra-conservative, ultra-Catholic movement.

National Front leader Marine Le Pen is clearly calculating that June elections will see the UMP crushed. This, in turn, may lead to massive defections of former UMP deputies to the National Front. Meaning that the National Front could become France's official opposition to the ruling Socialists.

Talk about déjà vu. Such a sweeping change would return France to its pre-war political landscape, when hard Left and hard Right were locked in bitter confrontation. Marine Le Pen could well emerge as the angry voice of many Europeans -- a prospect that causes shudders across conservative-ruled Europe.

She could also prove the nemesis of the European Union. Le Pen has vowed to oppose austerity pacts, quit the Euro, restore the franc and follow economic mercantilism. Her anti-EU, anti-free trade policies are attracting many people across Europe and even in Russia.

Fortunately, François Hollande could prove a counter-balance to the ascendant Right. He is a moderate, cautious, centrist politician given to pragmatism rather than ideology. His popularity and image of geniality and caring about people will help him withstand the forces of both Left and Right trying to pull him in different directions.

Even so, Marine Le Pen and her aggressive rightists are likely to become an ever-increasing threat to the French Republic as economic conditions worsen. It seems only a matter of time before ultra-conservatism rears its head again in Spain, Italy and Portugal. Greece is already on the way. Failure to implement austerity plans will bring economic convulsions and with them the bullies.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1441128 2012-04-20T16:01:20-04:00 2012-06-20T05:12:02-04:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/ called its "first intercontinental ballistic missile." India did indeed launch a new, 5,000 km-range Agni-V missile that can deliver a nuclear warhead to Beijing and Shanghai.

Previously, India's 3,500-km Agni-III did not have the range to hit China's major coastal cities.

But Agni-V is not an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), as wrongly reported. Nor was the missile North Korea launched on 15 April that fell apart soon after lift-off. Some media wrongly claimed it was an ICBM that could hit the United States.

One longs for the days when media employed real war correspondents who understood military affairs.

A true ICBM has a minimum range of at least 8,000 km and more likely 12,000 km. India and North Korea's missiles were medium-ranged ballistic missiles (MRBM's). The difference is important because MRBM's are theater weapons while ICBM's threaten the entire globe.

India crowed with pride over the nuclear Viagra of its Agni-V launch. One government scientist claimed Agni-V made India "a major missile power." By contrast, India's growing rival, China, dismissed the launch with a disdainful sniff. North Korea was blasted by just about everyone for trying to launch its MRBM.

As this column has been writing for years, India is indeed emerging as a major military power.

In 2000, my first book, War at the Top of the World, began examining the growth of India's military and postulated that India and China would one day go to war over their ill-defined Himalayan border and Burma.

Today, India has become the world's largest importer of arms. India's navy is to deploy three aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered submarines with ballistic missiles, a powerful air force, and armed forces of 1.3 million. India has long land and maritime frontiers and needs large, well-equipped military forces.

India and China have long been locked in an arms race, though neither will admit it. China holds a lead over India in modernized armed forces, but India is catching up. India is deeply concerned over China's land, air and missile forces on the Tibetan Plateau overlooking the plains of India, and by China's development of blue water naval forces that are edging into the Indian Ocean.

Yet almost unnoticed by the outside world, India has also been long working to develop a true ICBM that can reach North America, Europe and Australia. Why India, a nation of deep poverty, needs a missile that can deliver nuclear warheads to New York or Paris, remains a mystery.

US security officials appear blissfully unaware of the looming Indian missile challenge, or preferring to ignore it while fulminating against Iran, which poses no threat at all to North America.

The most likely reason India would want an ICBM is prestige and a seat on the UN Security Council. But there is the possibility that one day India may confront the United States over Mideast oil, or confront Russia and China in Central Asia.

India's deliverable nuclear arsenal, like those of all other nations, is designed to be a strategic deterrent -- a national life insurance policy.

Delhi has masked development of an ICBM behind its space launch program. As Washington tartly noted last week about North Korea's attempt to put a satellite into orbit, a booster that can place a satellite in orbit can just as well deliver a nuclear warhead.

The same applies to India. For now, India is a close US ally, and the recipient of US and Israeli help in building its nuclear arsenal. Washington has closed its eyes to India's refusal to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has tacitly blessed Delhi's extensive nuclear program as a regional counter-balance to China.

India's purported ICBM is named "Surya" and is believed to have a planned range of 12,000 km. The missile is said to be composed of the main stage of its PSLV space launcher and Agni-V. Its development remains shrouded in secrecy. The program has had many failures and misfires.

India is also deploying nuclear ballistic missiles on its growing submarine forces, including the 7,500-km-range K-15 and 3,500-km range K-4, and well as cruise missiles and a range of deadly anti-ship missiles designed to sink aircraft carriers.

The US Navy is the only power operating large attack carriers in the Indian Ocean or Arabian Sea. Indians still angrily recall a US carrier group, Task Force 74, which steamed menacingly off its coast during the 1971 India-Pakistan War.

The third maritime leg of India's nuclear triad provides a secure second strike capability after a surprise nuclear attack. But is also gives India to ability to attack most of the world capitals from the sea. Is anyone listening in Washington?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1410134 2012-04-09T10:50:36-04:00 2012-06-09T05:12:01-04:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
Enter another amazingly lucky Frenchman -- Nicolas Sarkozy.

France's presidential elections are only two weeks away. President Sarkozy, who was trailing in the polls behind Socialist challenger Francois Hollande just weeks ago, is now neck-and-neck with his leading electoral rival.

One suspects Sarkozy has either made a pact with the devil or should head straight to Monaco's casino.

First, in an incredible stroke of luck for the wildly unpopular Sarkozy, the man who should have been France's next president, former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), was utterly ruined by a string of sordid sex scandals. Disgraced bad boy DSK is now preposterously charged with aggravated pimping. The Strauss-Kahn scandal saved "Lucky" Sarko's goat: polls showed Sarkozy would have been soundly beaten by DSK.

France's judicial system is notoriously obedient to political power. Sarkozy is clearly beating political dead horse Strauss-Kahn to smear the opposition Socialist party, whose star the ex-IMF chief once was. French politics are notoriously dirty and sleazy.

Strauss-Kahn's Viagra-fuelled sexual escapades with ladies of the night and females who came too close proved a major misfortune for France. Strauss-Kahn was likely the only politician with the authority to impose desperately-needed reforms on France's sagging economy and bloated welfare state.

Second, the murder of seven people in Toulouse by a deranged youth of North African background that horrified France. Sarkozy, his allies and the right-wing media launched a blitz of scare stories about alleged "Islamic terrorism," the suspect's supposed links to al-Qaida, and fear of foreigners. In a scene straight from the classic film Casablanca, Sarko ordered his security forces to arrest the usual Muslim suspects who had nothing to do with the Toulouse massacre. France's Muslim-hating right loved it.

Third, Sarko played to France's growing xenophobia and prejudice against Islam by warning of Muslim conspiracies and demanding the number of "foreigners" in France be curtailed. Pretty rich, considering that Sarkozy was the offspring of Hungarian Jewish immigrants.

Now, Sarko and his men are crying about the dire threat to the Republic of Muslim halal meat (though not Kosher meat). France has 600,000 Jews who strongly support Sarkozy.

Equally important, Sarkozy's warnings of the supposed evils of the Islamization of France are luring voters way from the far right National Front of Marine Le Pen. Sarko fears she may grab enough votes on the right to deny him a first ballot victory on 22 April, or even knock him out of the race.

I extensively interviewed Marine's father, Jean-Marie. He was beating the anti-Muslim drums back in the 1980's and warning that "immigration equals invasion." He had a great one liner-for me: "You Americans took California away from Mexico. Now, by immigration, they are taking it back." Many French share his views. In the 1930's, France's right made Jews the enemies of mankind; today, the alleged culprits are Muslims. This noxious tendency has also infected US politics.

The hard left has also come back to life in France, threatening to draw votes from center-left candidate Hollande. Politicians across Europe have been swept from office by a tide of anger over economic woes. Strange things could happen in France, which has a tradition of radicalism and anarchism. But as of now, the Sarko-Hollande race still looks close, but Islamophobia is allowing Sarko to nose ahead.

None of the candidates have addressed France's severe economic problems or its growing lack of competiveness. Both Sarko and Hollande vow to raise taxes. Hollande promises to hire 60,000 new teachers to boost employment, a crazy scheme at a time when France has far too many sociology teachers, bureaucrats, and government employees, and spends a huge 56% of GDP on government.

Hollande wants a 75% top tax. The Socialists defend their beloved and quite lunatic 35-hour work week, which has further undermined the competitiveness of French industry and its service sector.

The basic problem is that in spite of chronic grumbling, the French live in one of the world's most beautiful, best-run, most civilized countries. France must slash government spending, lower sky-high taxes, liberalize the economy and stop borrowing. All candidates are dodging this existential question.

French don't want to change but must at some point. Vilifying Muslims or banning halal meat is not going to address these issues.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2012
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Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is right up my dark alley.

John Le Carré's Cold War espionage trilogy, which also includes, The Honorable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, is the finest work on the world of intelligence ever written. Le Carré served in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and knows of what he writes. He masterfully captures all the bureaucratic tedium and moments of terror of spy work, its lies, double-dealing, and betrayals.

The 1976 BBC TV version of Tinker, Tailor and the sequel, Smiley's People, was the best thing I have ever seen on TV. It was perfect. Full stop. Only the BBC series I, Claudius came near it.

John Le Carré stated the BBC version was "complete" and should not be remade. I felt the same way, fearing that a remake would inevitably disappoint.

A remake should at least bring new depth or, for commercial purposes, contemporary sensibility and familiar faces. Alas, the 2011 Anglo-French film version by director Tomas Alfredson that came out recently detracts rather than adds to this epic tale.

Don't get me wrong. The film is well made and interesting. But it has tried to compress Le Carré's large cast of fascinating characters and murky, jig-saw puzzle of patient detection into an all-too-brief two hours.

Inevitably, the film produces only one finely-etched character, Smiley, very well played by a somber Gary Oldman. But trying to follow the genius of Alec Guinness, who played Smiley for the BBC, is an impossible act to follow. Guiness actually became spymaster George Smiley. Just as that other great British actor, Jeremy Brett, first assumed, then has taken over by the character of Sherlock Holmes.

Sadly, the other wonderful characters in the BBC series that Le Carré brought to vivid life become mere cardboard cutouts in the 2011 film. The slippery Hungarian chief of the Lamplighters, Toby Esterhase; Bill Hayden, the charming seducer of one and all; insufferably pompous Sir Percy Alliline; gruff, chain-smoking Roy Bland; and Jim Prideaux, betrayed on a mission behind the Iron Curtain by the man he loved.

Having grown up in New York's theater world, I've seen many moments of memorable drama, but none more so than the wonderful scene in the Smiley's People where Toby Esterhase kidnaps a Soviet diplomat wonderfully played by the Anglo-French actor Michael Lonsdale. Watching Smiley slowly, relentlessly deconstruct the blustering Soviet official into a blubbering mess is one of cinema's supreme scenes.

Sadly, it's not in the 2011 film. Nor is the shadowy Karla, grand spymaster of Moscow Center. Perhaps he will reappear in future sequel to the new film?

Viewers of the film won't understand the great underlying drama of the Philby treason. The fictitious Philby-like character, Bill Hayden, weakly played by Colin Firth, only hints at the monster treachery that lies beneath.

The real Philby, a gifted son of Britain's elite who grew to hate the West, became a senior figure at British intelligence and its liason with CIA in Washington. Philby betrayed scores of Western operations and agents behind the Iron Curtain, some of whom were executed, including a relative of mine.

Equally damaging, Philby convinced CIA's powerful chief of counter-espionage, James Jesus Angleton, that the Agency was riddled with KGB moles. As a result, both MI6 and CIA were, to use Le Carré's term, "turned inside out" and crippled by frantic witch hunts and galloping paranoia.

Philby and his fellow spies in Britain's establishment, known as the "Cambridge Five," are generally considered the most destructive Soviet agents of the era.

But when I was invited into the KGB's top secret museum in Moscow, the curator assured me that George Blake, who was not part of Philby's coterie, had been, in fact, the most effective Soviet spy in Britain. Reading Blake's notebooks made me feel ice cold.

In Smiley's People, Smiley and his old team hunt and then trap Karla through his one human weakness, his daughter. In reality, I saw something eerily similar happen to one of the very top Soviet leaders in the 1970's.

As an old Cold Warrior, I do miss the thrill and drama of the conflict each and every day. The Soviets were redoubtable, worthy foes. As Japanese samurai used to say, honor in battle is commensurate to the might of your enemy.

Thank you, Le Carré for keeping these exciting memories alive.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2012]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1224734 2012-01-24T12:59:08-05:00 2012-03-25T05:12:01-04:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
By contrast, the reaction of the United States, the world's most vociferous proponent of democracy, to this important event and to the convening of Egypt's first democratically-elected parliament has been muted, to say the least.

This is curious and revealing. Many Americans still believe the Bush administration's claim that their nation went to war in Iraq to promote democracy in the Mideast.

Egypt contains a quarter of the Arab world's people. So here is a golden opportunity to implant genuine democracy in the Mideast's most important nation.

I recently saw this myself, mixing with crowds of demonstrators in Egypt's historic uprising for freedom in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

Sadly, the best response Washington could muster to the most significant political event in the Arab world since Gamal Abdel Nasser's revolution in 1952 was a few half-hearted platitudes that further damaged America's already battered image in Egypt.

The first ever fair, free vote in Egypt produced a landslide for Islamist parties -- as this author had predicted in his 2008 book on how the US rules the Muslim world, American Raj. Dr. Ron Paul recently named this book as one of three on his must-read list.

Egypt's venerable Muslim Brotherhood won some 48% of the vote, confirming it as the primary voice of 81 million Egyptians. In North America, the Brotherhood has long been wrongly branded an extremist, even terrorist organization by the seriously misinformed. This view is not only wrong, but harmful to US Mideast policy.

The Muslim Brotherhood is made up primarily of middle class, middle-aged professionals: doctors, engineers, lawyers. It is seriously stodgy and conservative. Many younger Egyptians derided it as "your grandfather's party." It sits squarely in the middle of Egypt's political spectrum.

The Brotherhood's political arm, its new Freedom and Justice Party, was patterned on Turkey's highly successful, Islamic-lite AK Party of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. Like Turkey's AK, the Muslim Brotherhood is primarily concerned with social justice, education, health and welfare, areas almost totally neglected by the former Mubarak dictatorship.

So far, the Brotherhood has said or done nothing to challenge the United States or Europe except for calling for justice for the Palestinians. But this, of course, was the primary reason why the US kept dictator Hosni Mubarak in power for thirty years: he secretly colluded with and aided Israel, and maintained fierce opposition to US foes Iran and Syria.

Interestingly, the Brotherhood has been in close contact with Egypt's military in a not-so-secret effort to work out a modus vivendi. An accord between the two power centers is possible, provided the military ends its repression and cedes some important powers to parliament.

Egypt's fundamentalist Salafists won a quarter of the seats in the new People's Assembly. Relying on rural support, the Salafists want the nation run under Koranic Sharia law, a view oppose by most urban Egyptians and the nations nine million Coptic Christians.

Like the Brotherhood, the Salafists and their Nour Party are almost entirely focused on local issues. They may be unable to compromise with the more moderate Brotherhood, and even become antagonistic.

In spite of ardent support for Palestine, neither the Brotherhood nor al Nour is calling for war with Israel. I didn't meet a single Egyptian who favored this idea.

The remaining quarter of the seats were won by the venerable, liberal Wafd Party, and a small number of young, western-oriented independents, the same Blackberry, iPhone generation who were originally ballyhooed by the social-media infatuated western media as vanguards of Egypt's revolution. In the event, their influence was minimal.

The first job of Egypt's new parliament is the difficult task of naming a 100-member panel to draft a new constitution that will then be validated by a national referendum.

Even if parliament achieves this task, it will then have to confront Egypt's 500,000-man military and equally numerous internal security forces. So far, Egypt's military, which is financed, armed and sustained by Washington, has thrown former dictator Mubarak to the wolves to appease popular anger, but it has barely given an inch on other key issues.

A year after the Tahrir Square revolution, Egypt remains a brutal police state where opponents of the regime and critics disappear, are tortured, and jailed in the thousands. Male and female rape and savage beatings remain standard punishments for protestors and bloggers. The military and security forces still control much of the nation's high ground, including most of the media, academia, the courts and industry.

Egypt's US-backed military has been used to ruling Egypt for two generations. The generals own between a third and two thirds of Egypt's key businesses or real estate and enjoy lavish perks and a cushy lifestyle.

The military's senior officers have been trained by the US, vetted by CIA, and are joined at the hip to the Pentagon in much the same manner as were Latin America's generals in the 60's and 70's.

Washington gives Egypt's military $1.3 billion annually, controls its flow of weapons and spare parts, and provides many tens of millions in "black payments" to the military, security forces, and feared intelligence service, the "Mukhabarat."

Accordingly, it's difficult to see Egypt's plutocratic military easily giving up all of its political and economic power to a rowdy civilian parliament, particularly when the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia, France, Canada and Israel are all quietly backing the military regime.

If the military further cracks down on parliamentary forces, it will drive the opposition underground and to violence. This is an outcome that will be a disaster for Egyptians and foreign powers.

America's cause is best serve by encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood and the development of real democracy in Egypt. Washington would be wise to press its allies in the military to quickly cede power to a responsible civilian government and relinquish the habit of governing. Otherwise, Egypt's military will face either a split in its ranks, as younger, Nasserite-officers try to seize power, or a bloody urban guerilla war.

Egypt and its foreign backers have an historic opportunity to achieve justice and stability in a new Egypt. Hopefully, they will be wise enough to seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2012

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1179692 2012-01-03T10:46:40-05:00 2012-03-04T05:12:01-05:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
I stayed up until 2 am watching last week's mammoth funeral of the "Dear Leader," Kim Jong Il, live on TV from North Korea's eerie, snowy capitol, Pyongyang. Giant floats and goose-stepping soldiers made this old Cold War Warrior nostalgic for the 1970's.

What next for the Hermit Kingdom? Kim3 -- Kim Jong Un -- has successfully made the transition to power. The 1.1-million armed forces, the Party, and security organs remain the power behind his leadership.

So far, a power struggle between these groups that could have led to the collapse of the North Korean state has not happened, avoiding South Korea's greatest fear, "unexpected reunification" -- a human tsunami of millions of starving northerners flooding south. Japan harbors similar fears of armadas of North Korean boat people arriving on its shores.

According to the US government and media, North Korea is one of the world's two dangerous "rogue states," along with Great Satan Iran, against whom the neocon war drums now thunder.

However, the advent to power of "Supreme Leader" Kim Jong Un may offer North Korea's uneasy neighbors and the United States an opportunity to defuse many of the peninsula's dangerous tensions and even begin a process of opening the isolated Stalinist state to the outside world -- even though Pyongyang insists nothing will change.

North Korea's usually eccentric, occasionally violent behavior is driven by paranoia, hatred of South Korean Evangelical Christians, fear of invasion, and hunger caused by crop failures. Threatening war is the principal method by which Pyongyang earns foreign currency and food aid.

The North follows Kim Il Sung's credo of "Juche," or total self-reliance and independence. Pyongyang routinely brands prosperous South Korea as an American vassal state, and its current leaders, "traitors."

North Korea remains in a state of war with South Korea and the United States six decades after the Korean War. Having just revisited the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating them, and briefly walked into North Korea, I felt the crackling tensions that could erupt any time into full-scale war. The often childish, quite irrational rivalry between North and South were also plainly on view.

North Korea's heavy guns dug into the DMZ have half of Seoul in their range. Kim Jong Il and father Kim Il Sung repeatedly threatened to turn Seoul "into a sea of fire."

The US has hinted it will consider using tactical nuclear weapons against North Korea in the event of war. Nearly 30,000 US troops garrison South Korea; 70,000 more could swiftly intervene there along with powerful US naval and air units. Until recently, South Korea's powerful armed forces were under command of a US four-star general. Even the Soviets weren't so heavy-handed in the Warsaw Pact.

North Korea keeps asking the US to sign a non-aggression pact in which Washington pledges not to attack the North. The North's modest nuclear program was created to deter a US attack by threatening a counter-strike on US bases in South Korea, Japan and Okinawa.

Many South Korean strategists (conservatives excepted) and their Japanese counterparts downplay the nuclear threat from North Korea.

Washington has long refused such a non-aggression pact. Instead, it has ringed North Korea with military forces and imposed a punishing trade embargo that has played a major role in keeping the North in dire poverty. Call the North an Asian Cuba.

The US says North Korea's regime is a brutal, illegitimate despotism with which it will only deal with the greatest reluctance and disgust.

Yet the US supports many nasty dictatorships around the globe, such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Ethiopia. Brutal police state Egypt remains a key US client. If the US really wants to end North Korea's nuclear program, the solution is to sign a non-aggression pact and gradually end US trade sanctions.

Both the US and South Korea should end their frequent, provocative military war games on North Korea's borders. Such posturing led to last year's military clashes and more paranoia in Pyongyang.

In exchange, North Korea will have to end its nuclear program under UN inspection, agree to cease threats against neighbors that are a form of financial blackmail, halve the size of its huge armed forces, move them away from the DMZ, and divert resources to feeding its people. The nightmare Stalinist police state must be reformed.

The hard right in the US will try to block such steps to peace. America's neocons worry that North Korea will supply nuclear and other weapons to Israel's enemies and wants it crushed. South Korea's Christian Evangelical hard right won't end its hostility to Communism.

There will be fierce opposition to change from North Korea's 1.1-million-man military, which would be the first victim of economic reforms diverting spending to industry and agriculture.

The pampered Communist Party would also fight hard against reforms. But even within its ranks there are reportedly Gorbachev-style factions that understand the need to modernize and drag their nation out of the early 1950's.

Washington's national security establishment would also fight hard to keep US forces in South Korea as essential to the security architecture of North Asia and a vital forward base for US military operations in the region.

Even so, Kim Jong Un has a major opportunity to begin defusing 60 years of severe tensions and to begin building up a viable nation with help from China. Besides battling entrenched military and party lobbies, he will have to convince Beijing that North Korea will not fall into the US sphere of influence.

This is the lynchpin of ending hostility with North Korea. China cannot allow South Korea or the US to take over North Korea and implant US bases on China's strategic Manchuria border. If North Korean collapses, Chinese military intervention is highly likely.

US-Chinese agreement on North Korea's strategic future is thus essential.

South Korea toiled its way out of dire poverty four decades ago, creating an economic miracle. Equally industrious, determined North Koreans could do the same today, if given half a chance.


copyright Eric S. Margolis 2011
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1170258 2011-12-27T10:48:07-05:00 2012-02-26T05:12:01-05:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
In 1988, I saw the surest sign the USSR was facing an earthquake when I became the first western journalist to be invited into KGB's Moscow headquarters, the Lubyanka Prison.

Moscovites were so terrified of the KGB secret police, they avoided uttering its dreaded name, referring to it instead by the name of a nearby toy store, "Detsky Mir."

Two senior KGB generals explained to me how their organization was breaking with its murderous past, modernizing and reforming. What they really meant: KGB, which understood the USSR faced collapse, was preparing to abandon the Communist Party.

The Red Army's 100 divisions and 50,000 tanks so frightened Europe that the Swiss and Dutch had even continued building border forts against Soviet attack until the mid 1980's.

But three years later, in December 1991, the mighty, feared Soviet Union collapsed under its own rotten weight.

The Soviet Union's disintegration could easily have ignited World War III with the US and NATO. That it did not was due to two remarkable men: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and his chief ally, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.

They realized the USSR was crumbling and the Communist Party was corrupt and brain dead, a labor union for the lazy. Gorbachev's "glasnost and perestroika' -- openness and new thinking -- sought to reanimate the party, open society and follow a peaceful, constructive foreign policy. He brought liberalization, freedom of speech and religion and partial democracy at home. Without Gorbachev, Germany would not have reunified.

Contrary to western myth, the Soviet Union was not brought down by President Ronald Reagan's arms buildup, though Moscow's ruinous military overspending played an important role.

The principal reason was economic: failure to modernize industry and farming. In 1975, Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov had warned the Kremlin the economy faced collapse in 15 years unless modernized. His prediction was amazingly accurate.

The humane, intelligent Gorbachev ordered an immediate end to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in which 2 million Afghans had died. In December 1989, the last Red Army troops left Afghanistan.

Gorby's courage in ending this bloody war should serve as an example to US President Barack Obama -- but it has not.

Gorbachev quickly opened arms reduction talks with Washington. He ordered the Red Army reduced by a third. The Party's luxurious privileges were curtailed. I watched this real Russian spring arrive, and was awed.

When nationalist rebellion erupted across the Soviet Empire, Gorbachev rejected demands by the Party and military to crush the uprisings. He refused to use force. By doing so, he sealed the fate of the USSR, but avoided armed conflict in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia that could quickly have drawn in NATO.

Instead, Gorbachev ended the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. He terminated the Soviet credo of international revolution.

The world owes Gorbachev, his late wife Raisa, and Shevardnadze an enormous vote of thanks. I consider him one of the 20th century's greatest men, perhaps the greatest for his achievements and moral courage.

Russians still unfairly blamed him for the collapse of their dying empire. The US, after agreeing not to expand NATO to Russia's borders, did just that. Shevardnadze, who became leader of independent Georgia, was overthrown by a US-engineered uprising.

The western-backed and financed regime of Boris Yeltsin inaugurated an era of robber barons, criminals, and boundless corruption. Over 100,000 Chechen civilians were massacred -- something Gorbachev would never have done.

Gorby's dream of a reinvigorated Soviet Union under a humane, socially responsive leadership -- something like today's European Union -- was dashed.

Writing about President George Bush's invasion of Iraq, Gorbachev sadly observed, "the idea of a new empire, of sole leadership, was born. Unilateral actions and wars followed," adding, "the US ignored the Security Council, international law, and the will of its own people."

Today's United States, addicted to war and debt, ought to take a lesson from the wise, humane Nobel Prize laureate, Mikhail Gorbachev.

It's time for some glasnost and perestroika in Washington before it heads the way of the old Soviet Union.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2011
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1158318 2011-12-19T15:51:49-05:00 2012-02-18T05:12:02-05:00

Eric Margolis http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/
Kim's death was not unexpected. He had been seriously ill with diabetes and cardiac problems that led to a stroke in 2008. His youngest son, 26- or 27-year old Kim Jong Un, was hurriedly groomed for the leadership.

It seems more likely Jong Un will be a figurehead behind whom North Korea's powerful factions -- its military, Communist Workers Party, and security forces -- wield power.

Any real efforts to reform North Korea and alleviate its frightful food and power shortage will mean slashing military spending. North Korea fields the world's second largest armed forces, some 1.2 million, that is huge but armed with largely obsolete weapons and immobile.

Spending cuts would be bitterly opposed by the powerful, pampered military brass.

So the status quo in Pyongyang may be retained. But we can't discount the emergence of a reformist faction from North Korea's opaque leadership, though chances of a Korean Gorbachev seem unlikely. Yet the 24 million desperately poor North Koreans desperately need a revolution.

On my recent visit to the Korean peninsula to shoot a documentary, I was again appalled by the shattering poverty of the North. Its people are small and wizened compared to robust South Koreans. At night, few lights show from North Korea. The North seems a hostile, alien planet.

The Korean peninsula is one of the world's most strategic places: it lies at the nexus of China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and American Pacific power. Some 28,000 US troops remain a permanent garrison in South Korea, backed up by US forces air, land, and sea power in Japan and Guam.

North Korea's eccentric regime is a close, useful ally of China. Beijing wants a stable North Korea outside of the US-South Korean strategic orbit. China's most sensitive military and industrial region, Manchuria, is just across the border from North Korea. Any US intrusion into the North would arouse great alarm in China, as it did in December 1950, during the Korean War.

If a violent power struggle or chaos breaks out in North Korea, Chinese military intervention is possible. Beijing has already issued veiled warnings.

What frightens South Korean strategists the most is not North Korea's small nuclear program, but rather what they call, "unexpected reunification:" the total collapse of the North Korean state, sending millions of starving refugees south across the Demilitarized Zone. South Korea is in no financial position to feed million or, more onerous, build a viable North Korean. In any event, many South Koreans do not want reunification.

Japan also fears waves of Korean boat people heading for its shores. Tokyo prefers a divided to a united Korea, which would be a serious economic rival.

This writer, who has covered Korea for 35 years, has a sense that the most likely scenario will be a combined military-party leadership taking power and slowly moving North Korea away from the Kim dynasty's megalomaniac leadership towards more cooperation with South Korea and better relations with the west.

North Korea has long offered to junk its nuclear program -- which is solely intended for self-defense -- if the US would sign a non-aggression pact with Pyongyang and lift crushing trade sanctions.

Kim's death now presents fruitful opportunities for the US and its Asian allies to engage with North Korea and nudge it towards less paranoid, more economically productive behavior. A US commitment not to set up military bases in North Korea would be a good start and calm China's fears.

Caution, diplomacy, and tact are required in dealing with North Korea right now, not the kind of warlike, imperial bombast coming from many US Republican candidates. As the Chinese say: "great dangers; great opportunities."

North Korea's nuclear weapons are not a threat so long as the North is not attacked or invaded. Washington must drop its obsession with this issue and look beyond.

The Obama administration recently stated that Washington was turning away from the messy Mideast and focusing primary strategic interest on Asia. Well, here is the chance -- just much sooner than anyone expected.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2011

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