Playing Poker With the Bear

Today's article by 'Spengler' on the Asia Times website ("Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess," at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/JH19Ag04.html) makes a compelling case that opening a military base in some new country is often regarded by American strategists (especially Neo-Cons) as an end in itself. He writes:

...Russia is playing chess, while the Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by "war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as many
hotels as possible on squares of the playing board. Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American strategic thinking.

The Russians, meanwhile, are the consummate chess-players: they ponder every move carefully, trying to anticipate how friend and foe alike will react. Only when they are sure that the odds are in their favor do they make their move.

I once had a very similar thought myself: Americans play poker, while our rivals and enemies play chess.

While chess is a game of long-term strategy, poker is all about short-term bluffing. Expanding NATO all the way to Russia's border, without having enough troops to deal with the blow-back, would be a good example of a recent U.S. bluff.

Poker players also get a new hand every round (a "new deal," in case you ever wondered where that phrase came from). Their bad luck--even their mistakes--from the last hand never carry forward to the next, unlike chess, where one desperate move frequently leads to another. The failure of our ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, have strengthened Iran. But this, in turn, seems only to have made the Neo-Cons all the more determined to attack Iran. Our blunders in the Middle East may yet force us into an even bigger catastrophe over there.

In the final assessment, I think our foreign policy would be a lot better off if our rulers started thinking more along the lines of chess, and less like desperate poker-players in a Vegas casino. Foreign policy, like chess, is one long, continuous game; it is not a serious of disconnected little 'deals' with no long-term implications.

But alas, chess requires a capacity for long-term strategic thinking that seems to be in short supply in the U.S. these days. In today's Washington, the Kennans and Kissingers have given way to the Cheneys and Wolfowitzes--a development I regard as most unfortunate.

Credit Crash

The recent subprime mortgage meltdown (and related financial troubles) in the U.S. got me to thinking about the nature of a credit economy generally--and let there be no doubt: ours is definitely a credit-based economy. The average citizen has a negative savings rate, the Federal Govenment is hopelessly in debt, and our country as a whole has had an unfavorable balance of trade for decades now, even when the dollar is weak. In fact, the only reason we are able to afford all those imports is because the Chinese and other foreign nations have long been willing to use the profits they make off us to purchase U.S. savings bonds, giving our government more spending money on the one hand, while making the dollar artificially expensive on the other. Modern America seems positively premised on the idea of borrowing large sums of money indefinitely.

Economically speaking, credit acts on an economy the way a stimulant acts on the human body. This has been widely appreciated at least since the Federal Reserve Board was created in 1913 and given the effective power to adjust interest rates to stabilize the money supply. John Maynard Keynes in the 1930's advocated temporarily lowering interest rates (along with cutting taxes and increasing government spending) during a recession or depression in order to stimulate borrowing and, with it, consumer demand. But no one ever thought of this as a permanent, day-in-day-out growth strategy until the 1990's, when Alan Greenspan took over.

Abusing credit, the way we have been doing, is just like abusing speed. At first, it was a temporary pick-me-up meant to fend off recessions; but ultimately, it became the great cure-all, helping us to cruise along from one market bubble to the next. Now, as I watch Bernanke hurl more Fed money into the economy in a desperate attempt to create more 'liquidity', I can't help but get the feeling that our country is as hopelessly addicted to cheap money as it is to cheap oil.

And it looks like credit-addiction can be as nasty as any crystall-meth habit. Ever higher doses (that is, lower interest rates) seem to be yielding less and less of a bang. Why, a few years ago, rates actually nearly went to zero, yet median income stagnated and in some cases, actually declined. And despite today's low Fed discount rates and big-ticket Wall Street bailouts, we're nowhere even close to the end of the current recession. Isn't that what dope-fiends call 'tolerance': when ever greater amounts of a drug produces ever weaker highs?

Another, even more frightening effect of speed addiction is the manic, delusional and often violently paranoid mentality that descends on the user. So much of the needless belligerence of the past few years, like the invasion of Iraq, the hyping of the Iranian bomb and all the airport strip-searching going on now strike me ridiculous--if not alltogether dangerous in themselves. I now wonder if the fact that we as a nation have come unmoored from any sense of what a real economy is anymore--something based on production as well as consumption--has made it impossible to understand what our true national interests even are. Is the dominance of the Neo-Con ideology--both haughty and paranoid at once--somehow related to this surreal economic existence of ours?

The Mladic Conspiracy

Last week's apprehension of Radovan Karadzic, accused of crimes against humanity in the Bosnian Civil War of the 1990's, astonished the world. This on account not only of the fact that many thought it might never happen, but also because of his radically altered appearance: the formerly clean-shaven, pompadoured 'President' of the wartime Bosnian Serb Republic was shown in the docket sporting a flowing white beard. Acccording to reports, he was given false identity papers about a decade ago by the Serbian Secret Police and was making a living as a new-age faith healer in Belgrade!

Almost immediately afterward, reports surfaced that he had been betrayed by his former comrade Ratko Mladic, the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army who is still in hiding, accused of war crimes. On 24 July, the London Telegraph reported:

Mladic... allegedly passed on the information in a bargain with investigators to
delay his capture and avoid trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia at the Hague...

A source close to the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, said that Mladic has been negotiating with those hunting him over the terms of his capture, and “gave information on [on Karadzic’s whereabouts] to save himself”.

(I also heard a similar report on television--I believe it was CNN, in fact.)

I personally find this story doubtful, though. It doesn't make much sense, plus there's a better potential explanation for why Western intelligence agencies would wish to publicize such an account of Karadzic's capture.

First of all, how likely is it that the story about Mladic ratting on Karadzic is actually true? In order to believe this, we would have to assume at least three things:

1.) Mladic actually knew the whereabouts of Karadzic

2.) Mladic would risk capture by contacting the people hunting him, hoping for a better trial venue (namely, one inside Serbia)

3.) Mladic would be inclined to believe that handing over his wartime leader would actually secure him a guarantee against a trial at the Hague

All of these are dubious propositions.

First of all, it does not seem likely that he would have known the whereabouts of Karadzic. It is unlikely that Karadzic himself would have told him, since that would have made it possible for Mladic to betray him. And why would any Serb agency hiding Mladic have told him? It wouldn't have been necessary for him to know where Karadzic was, and it might have increased the chances of Mladic embarassing them, by either purposely or accidentally blowing Karadzic's cover. They certainly wouldn't have wanted that!

Secondly, why would Mladic have risked blowing his own cover by contacting authorities who were after him? (The article did not specify which authorities he was supposed to have contacted; I will assume it was referring to some authority other than those of the Serbian Government--the BND, perhaps?) That would be the absolute last thing a fugitive from justice would do! If he wanted to turn himself in first, then negotiate, I might be able to understand that. But send out signals to potential captors? Highly unlikely.

And thirdly, how likely is it that such a bargain would actually work? I have no doubt that Mladic would prefer a trial inside Serbia, but why would the Hague budge on this point? They've waited over 10 years for Karadzic's capture, just so that he could be tried before the Hague. They had every opportunity to approach Serbia with a compromise until now, yet it seems they never did. They could have included both Karadzic and Mladic in the deal, and that would probably have been acceptable to the Serbian government. But the chances of a partial acquittal and/or more lenient sentences would also have been greater, which is why I'm sure they never did pursue such a deal with Serbia. Why would Mladic have believed them to be amenable to such a deal, after all these years of patient (and up till now, fruitless) waiting?

No, I don't believe any of the conditions were true. The more likely motive for Western intelligence agencies to spread such a story is psy-ops: psychological operations, which is the attempt by a military or an intelligence entity to influence the beliefs of a target group in the service of a tactical goal.

Simply put, I'm sure this is an attempt to smear Mladic, tarring him as a selfish traitor, by implying that he would turn on his former superior (who is still quite popular among Serbs) in order to save himself. Those most likely to know his whereabouts, afterall, would probably be Serb nationalists themselves, who also revere Karadzic. If it is the Serb Government that is protecting him, this might also give them a bit of political cover, by helping to dampen--and perhaps deflect--the anger of the nationalists if and when the government eventually does hand Mladic over.

The psy-ops theory also answers another puzzling question: why would an intelligence service see fit to reveal such a thing to the public? If it doesn't benefit them to know, afterall, it certainly doesn't benefit us to know!

They had better hope, however, that Mladic is apprehended soon; if not, they will begin to look incompetent.