Kudos to Andrew Sullivan for managing to make an off the cuff reference to Girolamo Savonarola in a random blog.  Never thought I would run into a reference to the 15th century fanatical homophobic Florentine priest who ended up burned at the stake for his opposition to the notorious Alexander VI in a reference to a conservative flack.  Savonarola’s most famous contribution to pop culture is the phrase Bonfire of the Vanities.  I wonder how many people caught the reference.  In a country where a period drama set in Italy a 100 years later has its title changed from “Courtesan” to “Dangerous Beauty” because 95% of the country did not know what courtesan meant, the number cannot be high.

If the Balkans were the tinderbox of the late 19^th and early 20th centuries, the Caucasus contends for “honors” since the fall of the Soviet Union.  Starting with the Armenian-Azeri war over Nagorno-Karabakh and the Georgian conflicts with Abkhazia and Ossetia and then the brutal Russian wars with Chechnya blood has flown in the Caucasus with troubling regularity.  With a signing of an agreement to establish diplomatic ties and open borders, Turkey and Armenia have taken a major step to resolve one of the older conflicts in the region.

Armenia’s (and Georgia’s) location has contributed to its troubled history over the past 2000 years.  After a brief moment of imperial glory under Tigranes the Great, the country would be the subject of numerous wars between the Roman Empire and Parthia.  This rivalry would be passed on to their Byazntine and Sassanid Persian/Arab/Seljuk Turkish neighbors.  After the establishment of the Ottoman Empire the region would be the subject of numerous wars with Safavid Persia and then the Russian Empire.  It was the latter rivalry during the First World War that led to one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies in history.

Worried about an Armenian fifth column in the face of Russian military advances the Turkish government forcibly deported large Armenian populations.  In the ensuing massacres and deportation an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died.  Armenians and most of Western Europe termed this genocide.  The Turkish Republic vehemently opposes the designation of “genocide” arguing a lack of intent or organized slaughter of the Armenians who mostly died due to starvation in war time.

I first learned about the vehemence of these positions in my college days when the Usenet group soc.history was rendered unusable for over a 5 year period by repeated postings on the subject by a small group of Armenians and Turks.  Turkish sensitivities on the subject remain touchy with an acknowledgment of the deaths as genocide on Turkish soil leading to prosecutions for insulting Turkishness.  Likewise the Armenian Diaspora, particularly the influential American component, has aggressively pushed for recognition of the deaths as genocide.  The bruised national egos and the ghosts of the dead have long made any rational discussion of the subject between the aggrieved parties close to impossible.

And then oil stepped in to complicate the picture.  The discovery of oil in Azerbaijan with whom Armenia went to war over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh made the complicated traditional American sympathy for the Armenian position (often the product of domestic politics with respect to the Armenian Diaspora) with self interest in the need for Azeri oil.  Armenia is a logical transit point for the oil pipeline intended for the Black Sea.  Complicating matters further is the Turkish diplomacy in the post-Soviet world directed at enhancing common cultural ties with their ethnic cousins in Central Asia and Azerbaijan.

Saturday’s agreement is a major first step towards cooling down the temperature in the region (and improving Western access to the all important oil).  Many more steps need to be taken and it still remains to see if the ghosts of the past will continue to spook an attempt to step into the sunlight.  If Turkey and Armenia (and Azerbaijan) do resolve their differences it will be a positive example to their Georgian, Abkhazian and Ossetian neighbors to follow.

Just how big a military is threat is Iran? Recent columns by Juan Cole raise this pertinent question as usual parties beat the war drums. With a military budget estimated around 7.4 billion dollars, the Iranian military is dwarfed by Israeli military expenditures of over 13-19 billion dollars. The American military budget is over 500 billion dollars.

Even the military budget of China which was projected as the next great military threat in the 1990s by the Cox report has a budget nine times smaller than the United States (at the official exchange rate). The current United States military budget is larger than the next 13 countries combined. With this in time it is time to give some perspective on the nature of the military threat the United States faces.  For a comparison chart of military budgets go here.

Commensurate with its expenditures, the United States does have global military obligations and some other powers like China and India have only regional aspirations. America’s actions as the gendarme of the world unfortunately have been encouraged by the post-cold war freeloading by the European NATO allies who showed themselves singularly incapable if handling their own backyard brawl in Yugoslavia and the Kosovo. The rest of the world (except for occasional French intervention in its former colonies and recent Nigerian assertiveness in West Africa) has failed to intervene in various African tragedies unless the United States took the lead.

The reality is that the United States has not been threatened conventionally by any power since the fall of the Soviet Union. This makes the overblown hype about the nature of the opposition in every war the America fought since 1990 more disturbing, particularly when the opponents have been repeatedly shown to have feet of clay.

Saddam Hussein’s million man army was useless against superior American firepower. The vaunted Yugoslav military folded once Clinton sent in ground troops. The build up to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq after 9/11 was even more egregious because Saddam Hussein’s military capabilities had atrophied after Desert Storm.

At this point no conventional opponent comes close to challenging the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

Many successful rulers and administrators have often failed to grasp the importance of good public relations.  As a result, an otherwise competent or successful tenure in office has been marred by rising unpopularity. Others have excelled far too well on the propaganda side of governance until the inevitable disclosure that the emperor wore no clothes. Very few rulers have managed to find a fine blend of the two and the very success of the public relations campaign makes an honest appraisal difficult.

This is not (yet) an appraisal of Barack Obama. That book is still being written. This is the first in a series of appraisals of rulers through history and whether their reputations are deserved, undeserved or over inflated.

The Emperor Ashoka is a fine example of this. The Wikipedia entry on his life contains a list of the usual platitudes about his reign and how his reign was a golden age of peace and prosperity. The only problem is that almost all the extant data of his reign comes from pillars and rock inscriptions placed by Ashoka across his vast empire. The third Mauryan emperor knew the value of propaganda. Read the rest of this entry »