Geopolitical thread

SSridhar · Post by **SSridhar** » 08 Apr 2011 18:11

Mr. Bharat, your handle has been changed to 'Advait' in order to comply with forum guidelines.

SSridhar · Post by **SSridhar** » 08 Apr 2011 18:19

Advait wrote:Why not just supply Vietnam, Philippines, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan with nuclear weapons? Even if just one of them accepts our offer, it will increase China's troubles. What's good for the goose is good for the gander and all that.

Advait, I quote from J.N.Dixit

. . . adhering to absolute principles of morality is the safest and the most non-controversial stance in foreign relations. This, however, is not possible because of the amoral nature of international relations. Safeguarding one's national interests may result in compulsions that necessitate departure from absolute principles of morality

Let's also recall that the excuse under which the US and PRC hide in their collaboration of nuclearizing TSP has been that PRC had not signed NPT when it transferred the weapons, raw-material and technology. India also has not signed NPT yet.

Advait · Post by **Advait** » 08 Apr 2011 22:07

I don't care what any treaty says. Do the big guys really pay attention to any treaty when it runs counter to their interest.

Gerard · Post by **Gerard** » 09 Apr 2011 04:18

Upper Silesia flags up its call for autonomy

Blue and yellow colours of a new football stadium in Katowice signal the south-western Polish region's growing self-confidence

devesh · Post by **devesh** » 09 Apr 2011 18:34

^^^ the beginning stages of renewed German nationalism perhaps???

we should be watching Germany about this movement. i think we can expect some sort of tacit approval and even covert encouragement from Germany. WWII pushed Germany back into its original heartland. 1000 years of migration and settlement were pushed back in just 5 years. now that Germany is slowly starting to come out of WWII shadow, it will be very interesting to watch how they will react to this.

nationalism is a unique feeling. a reemergence of nationalistic feeling might also improve the birth rate. national pride and all that......interesting times ahead for Germany.

Klaus · Post by **Klaus** » 09 Apr 2011 18:44

^^^ Could also be one of the foundational blocks on which the much talked about Russo-German partnership may take off, with this piece of real estate facing the heat from 2 flanks.

Lot of similarity with Prussia and the late 19th century.

devesh · Post by **devesh** » 09 Apr 2011 18:49

^^^
Russo-German partnership has been confined to economic issues as of now. if, once again, Poland becomes a pawn on the chess set, then the broad geopolitical aspects might become relevant again. the Polish temptation is strong for both Russia and Germany. like moths to flame they are, when Poland is concerned.

RajeshA · Post by **RajeshA** » 09 Apr 2011 19:26

Klaus wrote:^^^ Could also be one of the foundational blocks on which the much talked about Russo-German partnership may take off, with this piece of real estate facing the heat from 2 flanks.

Lot of similarity with Prussia and the late 19th century.

There are loads of Associations of Displaced People in Germany. It is only in the last 10 years that Germans have really started looking at the stories of these displaced people. Earlier on it was a taboo to even speak of these things. Still mainstream Germany has no appetite of opening up these issues again.

In the end it would end up as management of cross border cultural and linguistic groups spread out throughout Europe. There are Germans living across the Danish border and vice versa, or Germans living over the Dutch border, etc.

The Eastern regions of Germany like Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg have become heavily depopulated and deindustrialized. The Germans are in no mood to take up such expansionist projects in the future.

Many people look back at the exodus of their parents and grandparents from Schlesien, and there is still pain and loss there, a bit like amongst the Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan, but amongst the other Germans, there is little in terms of connection to that region lost to Poland, and they wouldn't be part of any plans of retrieving lost territories.

Poles are also very sensitive about any German pronouncements on their historical lands in the East, so I guess in view of Polish sensitivities, this issue is practically dead as a political issue in Germany.

devesh · Post by **devesh** » 09 Apr 2011 19:30

^^^
the scenario is very likely. but societies need incubation time from past horrors. the question is, has Germany gotten enough resting period or does it need several more decades, or even centuries perhaps? one must remember that this is cyclical. no society remains decadent forever. it is a matter of time. but what time frame will Germany require?

Christopher Sidor · Post by **Christopher Sidor** » 10 Apr 2011 18:41

^^^^
One of the stated goes of euro unity were to dissolve these age old animosities regarding territories, like the east-Prussia and Silesia lands which Germans lost to poles in WWII. Or the German-French tensions due to certain provinces of Germany, which France lost in late 1800s.

But with the euro integration effort stuck only on economic and financial issues, with the political union being moribund can we see a return to the old-Europe? Germans know that they have practical economic mastery over Europe without firing a single shot. So what hitler failed to achieve with his nazis thugs has been achieved indirectly. But with the recent bickering which was seen in Germany regarding the bailouts to certain European nations shows, there is still some way to go. It is noteworthy that Germans did not help Greece and other countries via a purely European mechanism, rather they roped in IMF. Granted IMF has been European dominated since its inception, but it still speaks volumes about how Germans see their fellow Europeans.

devesh · Post by **devesh** » 11 Apr 2011 00:07

the more the mango German rebels against the idea of some utopian unified Europe, the better it is. they need to grow out of US/Soviet imposed dhimmitude. they need to question why Germany is simply going along with US led policy initiatives at global level. recently they abstained from voting on Libya. but they need to go a step ahead. openly question US and its Atlantic poodles in Europe on their activities and imperialism.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 13 Apr 2011 23:13

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indi ... 967651.cms

India 5th most powerful nation, says govt index
Sachin Parashar, TNN | Apr 13, 2011, 01.35am IST

NEW DELHI: India is the fifth most powerful country in the world, says the latest national security index (NSI) designed by the country's foremost security and economic experts. A part of India's National Security Annual Review 2010, which will be officially released by foreign minister SM Krishna on April 19, the NSI 2010 placed India fifth in the hierarchy of top 50 nations identified on the basis of their GDP.

According to Foundation for National Security Research director Satish Kumar, who edited the national security review, the NSI is based on an assessment of defence capability, economic strength, effective population, technological capability and energy security of the top 50 countries. The US is at the top of the list on the basis of these criteria followed by China, Japan and Russia.

South Korea emerged as the sixth most powerful nation followed by Norway, Germany, France and UK.

While India ranked third in the case of population and fourth in terms of defence capabilities, it was at the 34th position in technology and 33rd in energy security. Only US, China and Russia are ranked higher than India in defence capability. In economic strength, India ranked seventh.

Out of the five criteria, maximum weightage was given to defence capabilities at 30%. Economic strength, technology and effective population had weightage of 20% each. Energy security had the remaining 10%. The national security annual review governing body, which comprises a host of experts, is headed by former foreign secretary M K Rasgotra.

On the likelihood of people raising eyebrows over India's extremely high rank, the NSI report said the strategic community in India will still take time to get used to India being such a powerful country. "Of course, the variable that helps India most is the size of its skilled working population. But that variable helps China to a great deal,'' it said.

China ranked first in the assessment of effective population which was calculated on the basis of three variables -- size of population between 15 and 64, size of population educated up to secondary level and above and human development index based on UNDP reports. The US is at the second position in effective population category.

Norway's high position was attributed to its number one position in the field of energy security. The NSI said some of the most powerful countries in the world were not necessarily energy self-reliant. The weight given to various indicators in arriving at the above conclusions was based on judgment. According to the annual security review, a group of experts went over the indicators and their opinions were collated to arrive at the relative weightage given to indicators.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 14 Apr 2011 21:07

If you consider the times and mileu of Harold Mackinder who coined the phrase "geopolitics" to legitimize golabl hegemons one finds that it essentially a form of Darwinism ie the 'survival of the fittest' hegemons.
Mackinder describes the geographical control needed (Central Asia landmass) to become a global hegemon and in turn charts the path for future Imeprial powers. This quest layed out by him has led to the many global wars of 20th century WWI, WWII and Cold War. It also misled the G.W. Bush adminstration in the first decade of 21st century.

Mackinder's ideas were an outgrowth of his times and were suited to mid 19th century politics. Times are differetn now and need rethinking about such justifications for Imperial power. One could end up losing the way in many ways.

brihaspati · Post by **brihaspati** » 14 Apr 2011 22:28

Questions : if the Euro-zone experiment was based on the hypothesis that "economic integration" led to political/ideological and security integration - what does current jitters imply? A temporary hiccup only?

Observation: We demand that history should not be used to model the present and the future, and that we need to think of new models for the future. But then we face the realities handed down to us from the past and we say we must be realistic and that reality must guide actual implementation of all models or even choice of models.

So isn't the argument of pragmatism and realism actually an argument to submit to history itself in the present and the future?

Johann · Post by **Johann** » 14 Apr 2011 23:06

brihaspati wrote:Questions : if the Euro-zone experiment was based on the hypothesis that "economic integration" led to political/ideological and security integration - what does current jitters imply? A temporary hiccup only?

Economic integration although enormous (free trade, common currency, major internal labour movement) is still far from complete because individual governments remain sovereign.

Many countries within the EU are either not yet Eurozone members (the Eastern Europeans), or have refused like the UK, Sweden and Denmark. So levels of integration from the get-go

Each of 17 governments within the Eurozone continues to tax and spend at their own rate (I'm not certain of this, but the spread between Eurozone member seems much wider than individual US states), despite EU and ECB guidelines. Banking regulation and enforcement also varied much more widely.

So while individual governments have lost control over monetary policy, there is no Eurozone wide system of bonds to allow the EU to collectively raise funds from the market.

The real division in the Eurozone, as well as the EU seems to be between those who are more manufacturing and export dependent, and those who depend more on housing/construction and tourism. Its the latter group that have seen the speculation, the regulatory failures, the massive financial instability and budget deficits, which has now been followed by bailouts for the banks and austerity budgets for the public.

In fact one of the things that has come out of the Eurozone crisis has been demands for deeper coordination on government finances, and market regulation, with all the implied political changes.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 14 Apr 2011 23:12

Bji,
Europe has two streams: Latinized and Germanism. It was the coflcit between the two that caused the misery. Economic integratin was thought to be a panacea. A French politician and a German politician were at the forefront of that. It was good while Cold War lated but now Germany wants to integrate Russia and thats where the problems have started. And then there is the fear of the Euro now abated.

Johann · Post by **Johann** » 14 Apr 2011 23:37

ramana wrote:Bji,
Europe has two streams: Latinized and Germanism. It was the coflcit between the two that caused the misery. Economic integratin was thought to be a panacea. A French politician and a German politician were at the forefront of that. It was good while Cold War lated but now Germany wants to integrate Russia and thats where the problems have started. And then there is the fear of the Euro now abated.

Ramana,

Ireland, Greece, and Portugal are in one boat, while France and Germany are in another. So clearly this is not a Latin-Germanic thing.

The economic tension within the Eurozone is between manufacturing economies and service economies.

The former have prospered on the back of global growth, while the later have suffered because of property driven asset bubbles.

In that sense France and Germany are still on the same page - their banking sectors support a competitive locally based industrial economy, instead of cannibalising it.

devesh · Post by **devesh** » 15 Apr 2011 02:03

^^^

interesting thing is Mackinder's views were an outgrowth of Darwinism and BoP strategy (Balance of Power).

BoP existed before Mackinder. Britain used it many a times to keep Europe from being dominated by one power. Napoleon is the immediate 19th century example. before that, they checkmated Philip of Spain and Charles of Holy Roman Empire. always the same strategy. support and aid small forces to fight much larger and established forces.

Mackinder identified important areas and said that if one power dominated these areas, then global domination was very likely. this is an extension on BoP. BoP is defensive strategy to keep any other powers from dominating these areas. so, Mackinder's views consist of 2 levels:
1. defensive: BoP (stop other powers from dominating unique regions)
2. offensive: directly dominate those regions to achieve global hegemony.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 15 Apr 2011 02:25

In end isn't it Darwinian logic of survival of fittest hegemon?

Johann, I wasnt talking about current economic crisis which is really periphery of core Europe.

Atri · Post by **Atri** » 15 Apr 2011 03:52

The sad thing about Darwin is that most of the time "fittest" is interpreted as "strongest" which is wrong, utterly dangerous and adharmik understanding.. World has long moved ahead of darwin's version of evolution.. and even in his original thesis, he did not mean "fittest" to be strongest.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 15 Apr 2011 06:32

A world that doesn't have to ask for America's permission…

http://rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com/posts ... permission

JE Menon · Post by **JE Menon** » 15 Apr 2011 15:40

Atri is right. Fittest for the environment is what Darwin suggested, certainly not strongest. If it was the strongest, dinosaurs would not be extinct

And human are certainly not the strongest, but almost certainly among the fittest. We can plan for our survival and perpetuation, a huge advantage - although whether we will do so, depends on other factors way beyond our control for the moment.

This is a huge field of discussion.

Speaking of countries, though, looking at many factors, India is quite fit. SDRE, but fit. We have survived for quite a while with the systems we have. It's not going to be easy any more to destroy us, though you can bet a sustained effort will be made.

brihaspati · Post by **brihaspati** » 15 Apr 2011 16:37

In "Darwinian" sense - cockroaches, rats, mosquitoes - etc were all "fit" - for it simply meant the ability to reproduce viable next generation in large numbers. If we apply it to "nations" need to specify exactly what a "nation" "reproduces"! Many more nations which are copies of itself? Or reproduces itself exactly? So one criteria could be how many more nations or new nations spring up that identify with the parent nation! [Given that most of the world judges its success or failure now by how much it has been able to mimic all aspects of the life/state/gov of USA - USA appears to be the Darwinian-ly "fittest" one

]

Is India "reproducing" itself? Or what it is producing is an offspring from many secret extra-marital affairs? Is it producing many cukoo-offsprings in neighbouring crows nests?

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 19 Apr 2011 02:41

Internet freedom declining as use grows

A young Tunisian discovering that his blog has been hacked and deleted. An Indonesian housewife suddenly facing high fines for an e-mail she sent to friends complaining about a local hospital. Millions of users in Pakistan discovering that Facebook has been shut off. These are some of the restrictions on Internet freedom that users around the world have encountered in the last two years.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... z1JuhYcHTn

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 19 Apr 2011 20:00

Interesting news site from Europe. Full of whats termed CTs!

http://europenews.dk/en//

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 19 Apr 2011 20:20

Check the links to India in the above site

http://europenews.dk/international_links#India

URL links

Austin · Post by **Austin** » 20 Apr 2011 10:14

India can be fourth most-powerful nation by 2025: Krishna

Austin · Post by **Austin** » 20 Apr 2011 12:11

Pranav wrote:Chinese and NATO arms better than Russian? - http://english.pravda.ru/russia/economi ... an_arms-0/ (Read the whole article and also the comments!)

Medvedev slams unreliable Russian-built planes - http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-new ... 1cv4y.html

One gets the feeling that the Russian military-industrial complex is being dismantled, perhaps deliberately.

Medvedev is reforming Russias MIC , right now its not in a good shape due to decades of mismanagement and needs to be reformed since a significant amount ( $ 650 Billion ) is pumped in as part of SAP 2011-2020 and without these reforms money might get siphoned by Generals and MIC and get under utilised.

Where ever possible they are introducing competition by purchase and lic production of weapons from its closest western allay which is France and Italy , the Mistral and Iveco deal is good example of this inspite of local industry opposition.

They had earlier brought in Serdyukov a known reformist to reform the armed forces , trim it and change the structure and that has been by and large done and now MIC is being taken care.

Ofcourse this is not just Medvedev initiative but has the support of Putin and is executed by Serdyukov.

SwamyG · Post by **SwamyG** » 22 Apr 2011 02:57

With the recent NSI out, some of us should pat ourselves on our back onlee. BRFites have been projecting countries that matter down the years. My list contained China, India, USA as the top three followed by Russia and Australia. In the next tier were countries like Brazil, Germany ityadi.

I am glad 4 countries from my list made into NSI's top 5 list: USA, China, Japan, Russia and India.

The Indian world order

Few countries in what Indian diplomats refer to as India’s ‘civilisational’ arc appear in the ranking. Nuclear armed rival Pakistan trails in lowly 37th position. Iran is ranked 28th, one place above Belgium. Bangladesh trails in 50th position, just ahead of Nigeria.

The bold part has seen countless rounds of discussions in BRF. I am really glad the powers to be - Indian diplomats in this case - are using that language. Is this another case of babudom saving, protecting and nurturing India that politicians fail to do?

“As regards the rankings of the UK, Germany and France, one must recognise the fact that these are powers of yesteryears,” Prof Kumar writes in the forward to the index.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 24 Apr 2011 10:00

Brazil: What Could Go Wrong?: By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

D Roy · Post by **D Roy** » 24 Apr 2011 23:09

. woo hoo so Very realistic . woo hoo my countrymen are so rational and balanced. woo hoo they are so restrained and grounded. woo hoo we are unstoppable when we set ourselves clear and doable targets.

anyone watched the movie Semi-Pro?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Pro

devesh · Post by **devesh** » 24 Apr 2011 23:28

^^^
Walter Mead is the Tom Friedman of neocons. Mead has the advantage of knowing history actually, but he's still an American imperialist. couldn't care less for anything other than American empire. and he blames India and Brazil for having a "permanent victim mentality" in one of his posts. apparently, India's history with Britain is nothing to be worried about and just has to be glazed over. God, if only the stupid Indians could just stop living in the past.

Mead and George Friedman are made of the same cloth. only difference is that Mead still keeps up the liberty/freedom/peace nonsense.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 26 Apr 2011 10:07

April 25, 2011, 7:20 p.m. EDT
IMF bombshell: Age of America nears end
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/imf-bo ... =countdown

BOSTON (MarketWatch) — The International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.

For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China.

Ravi Karumanchiri · Post by **Ravi Karumanchiri** » 26 Apr 2011 12:34

X-POSTED from the India-US Strategic News and Discussion thread

^^^^ Rakshaks,

I largely agree with the bulk of what has been written in the several posts preceding this one (except for that IMF article), but I have a different take on things.

I could explain it at length, but it is late here and now, and a pithy statement will suffice, I think….

“With a friend like Pakistan, the US, China and Saudi Arabia have no need for enemies.”

Consider:
1) If Pakistan is the hub of transnational, Jihadi-inspired terrorism (which it is), and
2) If these terrorists are keen to destroy America (which they are), and
3) If these terrorists would like to abolish the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and replace it with a ‘mullahcracy’ (which they do), and
4) If these terrorists are duty-bound to “free” the Uighars from godless communism and bring them under Sharia-rule (which they will try, eventually), then
5) It is only a matter of time until Pakistan wears-out all of its “friends”. IMO, India should just bide her time, keep her powder dry, and watch this happen.

Already, Pakistan is at serious odds with America. One AQIP attack too far against the KSA, and that relationship will sour also. Then, when Pakistan has sufficiently alienated both America and Saudi Arabia, the TSP will come to expect far too much from China, and that relationship will spoil as well. Inevitable economics will fuel all of these fires; when America can no longer afford Pak-bound largess, and when China’s economy falters when the US bond market collapses. Public sentiments in the West and policy imperatives in all three Pak-friendly countries will push this dynamic even harder and faster.

As for that IMF article; China’s one child policy has placed an enormous crater in the middle of Chinese demographics. In time, this will severely constrain Chinese domestic buying power, as a typical Chinese household will consist of two breadwinners with one child and four grandparents all living under the same roof. This will mean that China will remain an export-focussed economy for the foreseeable future, certainly as long as the one child policy remains the rule with few exceptions, plus twenty years or so. With the impending fall of American economic hegemony, China will need a market to absorb her exports, and the only one with the buying power and growth rate will be India. China will eventually discard Pakistan for India, out of economic necessity, if for no other reason.

One penultimate thought: I am not entirely convinced that China’s support for Pakistan is entirely meant to counter India. Although I certainly agree; China has done a lot to keep India off-balance, notably support for Pakistan and insurgents within India, not to mention the border issues; I believe that the major reason China supports Pakistan is to diminish American influence there. Once America finally turns its back on Pakistan (which is inevitable), I believe that China will have less of a reason to be Pakistan’s best friend, and will find an opportunity to turn to India.

Lastly: No one should be confused about the dynamics at play. China is arming against the threats she perceives from America, not from India. China feels that it only needs to dull and delay India’s prospects with insurgency and uncertainty along India’s borders (not that I’m excusing this); but the greater military threat facing China is America, in the eyes of the Chinese leadership. Of this I am certain. At the same time, the greatest fear of the Chinese leadership is neither America nor India – it is the people of China themselves. I am certain of this too. The central committee of the Chinese communist party is hell-bent on maintaining economic growth, which is their only hope for preserving order and holding on to power. When that growth slows or falters, China will take a different path, WRT her relations with Pakistan and India. This too is inevitable. (Note: Last month, China posted her first monthly trade deficit in a very, very long time; attributed to rising commodity prices – a trend that is sure to continue.)

Altogether, this means that time, demographics and economics are all on India’s side.

RajeshA · Post by **RajeshA** » 26 Apr 2011 16:33

Ravi Karumanchiri ji,

Sorry to say this, but when China gave Pakistan the nukes, it was a dead give away, whom China considered an enemy! That is one certainty above any other!

Ravi Karumanchiri · Post by **Ravi Karumanchiri** » 26 Apr 2011 19:42

^^^RajeshA,

About that: When Pakistan tested, as soon as possible after India tested, not in a purpose-built shaft, but in a productive mine; it gave me an impression that I cannot fully explain; that China provided a bomb so huge it had to be carried on a truck; that the Chinese supervised closely until the bomb went off. It's just an impression, and I cannot defend it as I would like; but it does raise the possibility that Pakistan's nuclear stockpile isn't what we all fear it to be. Maybe, they've even used them all up, and Pakistan's "Islamic Bomb" is still an untested bluff.

In this scenario, China's interests will have been served (which is, to get India to expend her energies on an arms build-up rather than on infrastructure development and education, etc.), without incurring the risk of another nuclear neighbour; and Pakistan's 'echendee' is kept intact.

JMH (Just my hunch)

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 26 Apr 2011 21:38

X-posted....

Circles of Hell: Michael Scammell

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... tion=false

Voices from the Gulag
edited by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and translated from the Russian by Kenneth Lantz
Northwestern University Press, 414 pp., $29.95 (paper)

Gulag Voices: An Anthology
edited by Anne Applebaum
Yale University Press, 195 pp., $25.00

The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin
by Stephen F. Cohen
Publishing Works, 216 pp., $22.95

Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir
by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky, translated from the Russian and edited by Deborah Kaple
Oxford University Press, 229 pp., $29.95

What benighted bureaucrat, I wonder, sitting up all night in Moscow’s OGPU [1] headquarters, came up (around 1930) with the innocuous name Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps to describe his new department? And what harried official arranged the first letters of the Russian words Glavnoye upravleniye ispravitel’no-trydovykh lagerei to form the acronym Gulag? Little could either have suspected how far from home this sterile formulation would travel, or that it would come to stand beside the word “Holocaust” as the name of one of the two great aberrations of twentieth-century civilization.

It was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who transformed that gray abbreviation into a symbol of twentieth-century barbarism, rhyming gulag with archipelago (a full rhyme in Russian: Arkhipelag Gulag) to endow it with the sinister ring that has reverberated around the world ever since. I had always thought this combination sprang fully formed from Solzhenitsyn’s imagination, but I recently learned that it was inspired by the boast of a sadistic boss called Degtyarev, who helped run Solovki, the first big Gulag camp situated on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, not far south of the Arctic Circle.

Degtyarev’s specialty was selecting prisoners for execution and shooting them personally, for which he was nicknamed “camp surgeon.” He had a more boastful name for himself: “Commander of the Forces of the Solovetsky Archipelago.” When Solzhenitsyn heard this from the distinguished St. Petersburg philologist, Academician Dmitry Likhachev, a former prisoner in Solovki, he seized on it as the perfect metaphor for his subject and a memorable rhyme for his title. [2]

The word “gulag” acquired considerable resonance virtually overnight, but for many years after Solzheni- tsyn’s publication it referred exclusively to the labor camps, especially those established by Stalin after 1929. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary of 1993 spells it with a capital “g” and defines it in those terms. But by 2003, when Anne Applebaum wrote her own magisterial Gulag: A History, its meaning had expanded to cover the full range of criminal acts perpetrated by the Soviet regime. “The word ‘Gulag,’” wrote Applebaum,

has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women’s camps, children’s camps, transit camps. Even more broadly, “Gulag” has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the “meat grinder”: the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths. [3]

Since then “gulag” has lost its capital letter and entered the language as an independent noun, used in the plural sometimes, like “holocaust,” to signify other extreme forms of repression.

I was reminded of the progress this word has made by the arrival of four new books, all with the word “Gulag” in their title or subtitle, attesting to the combination of fascination and horror that the Gulag continues to exert on readers and offering further evidence of the crimes of that era. Two of them are selections from memoirs about the Gulag edited by its two foremost historians, Solzhenitsyn and Applebaum. A third, by the well-known Soviet specialist Stephen Cohen, is a brief memoir about Gulag survivors, while the fourth, also a memoir, comes from a most unexpected source, a former labor camp foreman who worked in the Gulag during World War II.

As is well known, Solzhenitsyn was inspired to write The Gulag Archipelago in part because of the large number of letters and memoirs he received after the unexpected publication in 1962 in the Soviet Union of his labor camp novella, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He drew on over two hundred of those accounts for the later work and interviewed as many of their authors as he could, which was when Likhachev told him about the archipelago image. Solzhenitsyn was unable to name most of his sources at the time for security reasons, and it was only after the fall of the Soviet regime that he was able to make amends and identify them. Later, in 2001, he published the testimony of seven of them in a volume called Pozhivshi v GULAGe (roughly, “Survivors of the Gulag”), which has now been translated into English and published as Voices from the Gulag.

Unfortunately Solzhenitsyn is barely present in this book, apart from being listed as editor, and there is no word about his reasons for selecting these seven voices, or explanation of the book’s shape or purpose. The translator, Kenneth Lantz, in an otherwise excellent introduction, does nothing to dispel the mystery, so the reader is left to guess at the editor’s intention. As it turns out, the memoir excerpts all follow a definable pattern, suggesting that Solzhenitsyn (or someone else) must have urged his authors to set down their experiences in a certain order. Each begins with a brief account of the author’s family history, profession, and normal life, followed by his sudden arrest, brutal interrogation, conviction (usually without a trial), consignment to the labor camps, and the devastating hardships and dangers of his peregrinations from camp to camp before final release and rehabilitation—though not necessarily permission to return home. Judging by the chapter numbers and brevity of some of the contributions, the originals must be much longer (and are presumably housed in the Memorial Library that Solzhenitsyn started in exile).

With the partial exception of the longest excerpt in the book, “My Life as a Gift” by V.V. Gorshkov, these stories are generally artless, and make less impact in this form than when they were subsumed into Solzhenitsyn’s larger narrative in The Gulag Archipelago. Yet their very rawness gives them an authenticity that is also persuasive. The innocence of their authors at the outset, and their anguished astonishment over each new horror they are forced to endure, compel faith in their veracity, while the almost ritual repetition of the tortures inflicted on each new victim sends a powerful message about the everyday ordinariness of arrest and incarceration in the Soviet Union. One prisoner is an auto mechanic, another an engineer, a third a circus performer, two are newly returned veterans from World War II, and two are still students when arrested.

All are thrust into solitary confinement or a crowded, filthy jail cell, undergo brutal interrogations as well as persecution by criminal prisoners, are sent on forced marches or transported by truck, train, or steamer to remote locations in the far north or in Siberia, and are compelled to toil on starvation rations at backbreaking labor in subzero temperatures. As weaker souls around them sicken and die, these prisoners cease being ordinary and become extraordinary, capable of unsuspected feats of courage and endurance, like men in battle, except that their sacrifices are meaningless and their ordeals the result of cruelty and cynicism.

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag Voices is similarly a byproduct of her larger history, containing excerpts from the memoirs she consulted in writing her book. Her selection does have a shape, being designed “to follow, roughly, the track of a prisoner’s experience, from arrest to release, and to illustrate various facets of camp life” (which in fact mimics the organization of her history). There are approximately double the number of voices represented in Solzhenitsyn’s collection, all having been published already, most of them in English translation. A major advantage of this arrangement is that, despite some unfortunate clashes of tone and terminology between the English and American translations, they are on the whole more professional and easier (in the lexical sense) to read.

The volume opens with a dry account by Dmitry Likhachev of his arrest in 1928 and closes with K. Petrus’s equally slight account of his release in the early 1950s, while Anatoly Marchenko’s description of life in a punishment cell (translated by myself) carries the story up to the mid-1960s. In between, Applebaum covers the same stages of the prisoner’s progress that are recounted in the Solzhenitsyn volume. She also restores the gender balance by including four narratives (one of them by a man) about the particular sufferings of women in the camps, ranging from the implacable pressures on young women to save themselves by prostitution or becoming a powerful boss’s mistress, to the horrors of mass rape and the ordeal of giving birth and watching one’s infant die of brutal neglect and malnutrition. Elena Glinka on the rapes and Hava Volovich on bearing and losing a child are as harrowing as anything I have read on the subject of the Gulag, and Isaak Filshtinsky’s compressed account of a young woman’s rise from fearful sex victim to hardened and cynical wife of a sadistic camp commandant is as richly allusive as a story by Chekhov.

The literary excellence of these and other excerpts (from Gustav Herling’s beautifully written memoir, A World Apart, Alexander Dolgun’s eloquent Alexander Dolgun’s Story, and such accomplished writers as Lev Kopelev and Lev Razgon) makes one regret Applebaum’s decision to omit the work of other powerful writers like Evgenia Ginzburg, Varlaam Shalamov, and Solzhenitsyn himself, on the grounds that their writings are “readily available.” A few of her selections strike me as relatively weak, and detract from the impact of the book as a whole. This is because Applebaum’s goals are primarily documentary rather than literary (though she obviously appreciates literary excellence as well); but as with Solzhenitsyn, I found that she puts much of the testimony of these authors to more effective use in her history than in her anthology. I would like to have seen a collection of the most powerful work possible on the Gulag with the more documentary material made available online.

Stephen Cohen’s short book, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin, addresses a subject that has received less attention than the lives of the prisoners in the labor camps, namely, what happened to the survivors when they returned to civil society. Not surprisingly, most of the ex-prisoners Cohen met on his visits to the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia were faring badly, and Cohen, who came to know several of them in his research for his book on Nikolai Bukharin, reports sympathetically on their broken marriages, broken careers, and broken lives. He is rather more interested, however, in a small group he calls “Khrushchev’s zeks,” one-time Communist officials who regained many of their former privileges when they returned to Moscow after the death of Stalin in 1953.

Khrushchev, he writes, “clearly trusted those recently exonerated ‘enemies of the people’ more than [he] did the Stalinist officials who still dominated the party and state apparatuses.” Not only did they persuade Khrushchev to order the immediate release of victims of the Gulag, Cohen writes, but they helped convince him to deliver his famous 1956 “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin’s “personality” and “mass repressions.”

Cohen’s book is not so much about the victims’ everyday lives as it is about their little-known role in Soviet politics. His analysis of the changing motives behind Khrushchev’s ongoing anti-Stalinist campaign and the maneuvering of Party leaders before, during, and after the campaign is fascinating, and fills in many parts of the historical picture. So does his account of how the government’s attitudes toward former prisoners changed under Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. Still, I’m not persuaded by Cohen’s thesis that leaders like Khrushchev—and more especially Gorbachev, whom Cohen counts as a personal friend—might, in other circumstances, have “saved” the Soviet Union from extinction.

The main problem with his book, in addition to its brevity, is the episodic, anecdotal character of the narrative, with new names and new ideas turning up in almost every paragraph. Some of the victims themselves fade into the background, and one comes away from it wishing that Cohen had chosen to write a more full-bodied memoir, with direct accounts of the leaders and prominent former prisoners he was able to meet. (One explanation for Cohen’s brevity is that he gave much of his material on returnees to Nanci Adler, who drew on it for The Gulag Survivor, her excellent book on this subject. [4])

The most original and surprising book here is Fyodor Mochulsky’s Gulag Boss, the first memoir, to my knowledge, ever published by someone from the other side of the watchtowers and the barbed wire. Although he served only six years in the Gulag, from 1940 to 1946, as a very young man, and was a civilian employee of the NKVD rather than an armed officer, Mochulsky is not an ordinary witness. A deeply loyal Party member both before and after his Gulag experiences, he became a career diplomat after World War II, worked at the United Nations and in the Chinese embassy of the Soviet Union for a long period, and later rose to be head of the China Section of the Central Committee before spending the last twenty years of his career (from 1967 to 1988) in the Intelligence Service of the KGB under Yuri Andropov. He remained a staunch supporter of the Soviet system to the end, while grudgingly acknowledging the excesses of Stalin and his supporters.

Mochulsky’s memoir is based on a diary he kept while working in the Gulag and portrays a familiar world of forced marches, barbed wire and watchtowers, freezing living conditions, starvation rations, backbreaking labor, and frequent deaths from malnutrition or a shot in the head. It is a world that is instantly recognizable from the accounts of former prisoners. Here are the colossal inefficiencies and callous neglect of the Soviet authorities, the privileged conditions and freakish excesses of the criminal prisoners, and again the horrifying plight of women, including more stories of rape and lesbianism, and of a beautiful young girl who makes several unsuccessful attempts to seduce Mochulsky (though he is sorely tempted), and turns out to have specialized in seducing, murdering, and robbing army officers before her incarceration at the tender age of seventeen.

What makes these stories astonishing, however, is the looking-glass world in which they take place. Mochulsky views this world through the eyes of a callow young man who totally believes his NKVD recruiter’s statement that “in capitalist countries…prisoners just rot in jail,” whereas in the Soviet Union

our laws are humane. The Soviet government sets itself the goal of giving each convicted person the opportunity to atone for his guilt to society by letting him do some honest labor for the common good.

This sounds cynically hollow to us now, but it made a deep impression on the patriotic young engineering graduate, and he continued to believe in it when the evidence of his eyes and ears sent a very different message. There is something intensely moving about his account of facing down a revolt by criminal prisoners in his care, of arranging to get proper living quarters built for prisoners exposed to subarctic temperatures, and of his sincerity and conscientiousness in carrying out his duties.

Mochulsky occasionally steps back and condemns the system’s excesses, but his memoir is written from the point of view of a true believer, presenting us with the conundrum of a good man serving an evil system. He also brings out some startling parallels between guards and prisoners, and their linkage. During a forty-five-day journey to the Pechorlag camp just south of the Arctic circle, he endures a series of crushing hardships only a little less harsh that those of some prisoners, and his first “home” in the Gulag is a primitive dugout that is barely habitable. This makes him all the more sensitive to the pitiable conditions of his charges (whom he risks punishment to help), while not in the least shaking his faith in the system. Indeed both guards and prisoners seem to accept their fate with stoic resignation.

What are we to make of all this? Black and white still define the differences between tyranny and democracy, but the complex gray area in the middle, where most people’s lives are lived, is harder to describe. All four of these books illustrate the gray areas as well as the horrors, and underline the colossal inefficiencies and uncertainties of the Soviet system. There was room in this system for altruism, generosity, nobility even, but the capricious arbitrariness of the regime left even more room for cruelty and corruption. Worst of all was the terrifying fear and insecurity felt viscerally at all levels of society. Whether an illiterate peasant, cultivated artist or scientist, high Party official, or general, you sensed an invisible trapdoor beneath your feet that might yawn open at any moment and drop you into an inferno from which there was usually no escape.[5]

This, it occurs to me, illustrates one crucial difference between the Gulag and the Holocaust. If you were a Jew in Poland under Nazi occupation, for example, or a Gypsy, you would be murdered for who you were, the corollary being that if you weren’t a Jew or a Gypsy you had much better chances of survival—unless killed in the war. [6] The situation was the obverse in the Soviet Union. No matter who you were, with the single exception of Stalin, you could be arbitrarily arrested, beaten, shot or starved to death, or condemned to a life of slavery, and no one could escape the risk.

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History served as a strong and useful reminder of these issues, and its success highlighted the painful truth that the world has not yet measured the full meaning of the Gulag in the way it has the Holocaust. This is largely because Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, has not itself come to terms with what the Gulag represented in the way the Germans have acknowledged the evils of the Holocaust and taken responsibility for it. Two admirably active voluntary organizations, Memorial and Vozvrashchenie (Return), have worked since 1988 to photograph the sites of former camps, record testimonies, collect information, publish studies and memoirs, and document what they can of the repressions carried out during the Soviet Union’s seventy-year existence.

Meanwhile, as the result of citizens’ initiatives, there are approximately three hundred small museums and a thousand statues and other tokens of remembrance scattered over the territory of the former Soviet Union, but they are almost invisible in daily life, and there are no such museums and few reminders in the larger cities, especially not in the capital. The promise of the Khrushchev government to allow a prominent memorial to be erected in Moscow (though not by the government itself) has never been realized. The closest officials have come is to allow the placing of the “Solovetsky Stone,” an unsculpted boulder from the main island of Solovki, on Lubyanka Square, in memory of the notorious Lubyanka Prison and the secret police headquarters that dominated the square in Soviet times. That stone was installed in 1990, before even Yeltsin came to power, and long before Putin appeared on the scene.

The present Russian government has sent conflicting signals about its attitude toward the Gulag. On the one hand there was Putin’s public courtship of Solzhenitsyn, followed by his recent decision to authorize a special edition of The Gulag Archipelago for use in Russia’s schools; on the other, a recently published teachers’ manual explains that Stalin acted rationally in his campaign of terror to ensure the country’s modernization, and Stalin was recently ranked third in a TV contest to find history’s greatest Russian.

Putin and Medvedev have allowed Memorial and Vozvrashchenie to continue some of their operations, but not without harassment from local and central authorities. As long ago as the mid-1990s, according to Memorial‘s website, permissions began to be withdrawn for the investigation of mass burial grounds, some of which remain under the control of the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB, while the compilation of Memorial’s “books of memory,” in which the names of former victims are recorded, has been frustrated by the refusal of the authorities to cooperate.[7]

The most recent instance of official harassment was a daylight raid by masked men on the St. Petersburg offices of Memorial in December 2008. Police confiscated twelve computer hard drives containing twenty years’ work documenting Gulag victims, along with research on the still secret graves of an estimated 2.7 million Leningraders, all of which were intended for an important new project designed to circumvent the obstacles to a physical museum, namely, a “Virtual Museum of the Gulag.” [8]

The Prosecutor’s Office claimed that it was investigating links between Memorial and an article in an obscure anti-Semitic newspaper that had been shut down a year before. On March 20, 2009, a court decided that the search and confiscation were carried out with “procedural violations,” and in May the hard drives were returned. The message sent by the authorities seemed clear enough: we are watching you and will do everything we can to hamper your activities. Thanks to the persistence of Memorial’s dedicated staff, however, the Virtual Museum went fully online in January 2010. [9]

The question of why the present Russian government is so adamantly opposed to a full reexamination of the evils of the Gulag is hard to answer, but Leona Toker, in her excellent Return from the Gulag Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000), offers one explanation. Most of those who lived through and remember the era of the Gulag, she writes, are “more ready to condemn the identifiable agents of terror…than to recognize the radical flaws in their own past attitudes.” [10] Citing Shalamov, she suggests that “one of the reasons why Nuremberg trials were impossible in Russia is that in the Larger Zone few were innocent.” As a result, the “blanket accusation” of guilt has led to a “blanket amnesty.”[11] The “larger zone” she refers to was, of course, the Soviet Union, the smaller zone being the labor camp (or camps). Toker suggests that a way out of this dilemma would be for Russian society to admit “the traitors and the informers within the pale of the shared humanity as the unhappy exponents of impulses known to all and mastered by most,” and writes that the best labor camp narratives “show us ways of turning our awareness into sympathetic imagination.”

Alas, there seems little likelihood that the KGB’s successors will develop a “sympathetic imagination” or allow Gulag research and Gulag studies to develop and flourish at home. But there is no reason why the history and literature of the Gulag shouldn’t be studied more systematically and widely and commemorated in the West. The United States has its Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a website lists over sixty centers worldwide, including twenty-four in the US alone (in addition to Washington) and one in Russia. Why not a Gulag Museum here too, and a program of studies at a prominent university, say, Yale, which has published a huge amount of material relevant to this subject? [12] Anne Applebaum recently suggested that the West’s reluctance to tackle the subject of the Gulag thus far may be linked to residual guilt over embracing “a genocidal dictator…who committed crimes against humanity” as our ally during World War II. [13]

But surely it’s time to overcome such hesitations. There is already a large and growing literature on the subject by Westerners as well as natives of Russia, Central Europe, and other former Soviet republics. The superb histories of the Gulag by Solzhenitsyn and Applebaum, together with Toker’s discriminating volume on the literature of the Gulag, are more than enough to define a program, and if Peter Weir’s new film about the Gulag, The Way Back, starring Colin Farrell, is as good as early reports suggest, this may be a sign that the subject is at last about to enter the mainstream. [14]

1
Acronym for Ob'edinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, Unified State Political Administration, a euphemism for the Soviet secret police. The OGPU was later merged into the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), which later became the Committee for State Security (KGB). ↩

2
Dmitry S. Likhachev, quoted in Chelovek-epokha: dve vstrechi s D.S. Likhachevym (A Man and His Times: Two Interviews with D.S. Likhachev) by Nikolai Kavin, Zvezda , No. 11 (2006), pp. 29–38. I am grateful to Alexis Klimoff for first drawing my attention to this statement, and to Likhachev's granddaughter, Vera Tolz, for tracing its source. According to Professor Tolz, the dissident writer Vladimir Gershuni, who assisted Solzhenitsyn with some of his research for The Gulag Archipelago , also claimed to have suggested the title to Solzhenitsyn. On the available evidence (admittedly scanty), I am inclined to believe it was Likhachev. ↩

3
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Doubleday, 2003), pp. xxv–xxvi. ↩

4
Transaction, 2002. ↩

5
Adding to this complexity, as Mochulsky shows, was the possibility of equally dizzying rises from obscurity to power, and the frequent interchangeability of prisoners and guards. You could at various times in the history of the Gulag rise from prisoner to foreman and even armed commander, and Mochulsky met such men during his service. The most notable example of this phenomenon was Naftaly Frenkel, a prisoner in Solovki, who rose to become a guard and then one of the top commanders of the camp, where he invented the notorious "food-for-work" system, according to which prisoners were fed according to their output. He later held a senior rank in the Cheka (secret police), met Stalin and other leaders, and was appointed chief of construction on the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Both Solzhenitsyn and Applebaum write about him in their histories. ↩

6
See Applebaum, Gulag: A History , and David Bennett, " The Worst of the Madness " (Letter to the Editor), The New York Review , December 23, 2010, p. 101. See also Timothy Snyder's comment for some Soviet exceptions to this rule, The New York Review , December 23, 2010. ↩

7
See http://www.memo.ru/eng/index.htm , subsection "Memory of the Victims." ↩

8
See Catriona Bass and Tony Halpin, "Gulag Files Seized During Police Raid on Rights Group," The Times , London, December 13, 2008. ↩

9
See http://www.rightsinrussia.info/home/hro ... net-museum . There has been a Virtual Museum website since 2005, but it was highly incomplete until 2010. For the museum see gulagmuseum.org (in Russian). ↩

10
Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 245–246. ↩

11
Toker, Return from the Archipelago , p. 246. Nanci Adler similarly notes the burden of guilt and the problem of "official amnesia" in post-Gulag Russia, see The Gulag Survivor , pp. 1–3. ↩

12
An excellent example of what such studies might look like is provided by the annual journal Gulag Studies , published by the small firm of Charles Schlacks Jr., with contributions by Applebaum, Toker, and French and Russian authors. The journal is now edited by Professor Olga Cooke at Texas A&M University. The first issue contains an excellent "selected bibliography of historical works on the Gulag," by W.T. Bell and M. Elie, and in the following double issue (numbers 3–4) there is a Gulag historiography, also by W.T. Bell. ↩

13
See "Interview: Anne Applebaum Discusses Peter Weir's New Gulag Film, ‘The Way Back,' Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, December 26, 2010. ↩

14
Of course, what we really need in this multimedia age is a Shoah for the Gulag, although it is probably now too late. ↩

What the world needs to know are three more mass killings of the 20th century:

- Mao's Great Leap forward and
- Churchills' role in the Bengal famine
- Ottoman Trukey's Armenian massacre

Then the list would be complete.

Christopher Sidor · Post by **Christopher Sidor** » 27 Apr 2011 03:00

Iraq, Iran and the Next Move. April 26, 2011 | 0854 GMT. By Stratfor

This article analyzes the proposed withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, in the context of present day West Asia. Post withdrawal the number of US forces in Iraq will be limited to 20000. There are some decent analysis on the impact of such withdrawal on Saudi Arabia, its defense and standing in the persian gulf.

From the article

The United States has been unable to block Iranian influence in Iraq’s post-Baathist government. Indeed, the degree to which the Iraqi government is a coherent entity is questionable, and its military and security forces have limited logistical and planning ability and are not capable of territorial defense.

So from Saddam's Iraq, which fought the Iranians to a standstill for over 8 years expending over 100 billion USD, Iraq has no effective army which can defend Iraq's territory ? And that too in a country which is the closet to Saudi Arabia in Oil and Gas Wealth potential if not more. It is noteworthy that it is not Iran or Russia which rivals Saudi Oil Reserves but it is Iraq. And if we combine Iraq and Kuwait, then this combine comfortably exceeds the entire Saudi Oil potential.

There has been much discussion of the historic tension between Iraqi Shia and Iranian Shia, all of which is true.
....
....
More important, as the United States withdraws, Iraqis, regardless of their feelings toward Iran (those Iraqis who haven’t always felt this way), are clearly sensing that resisting Iran is dangerous and accommodation with Iran is the only solution.

Nothing to back up these claims. They are presented as facts. Sloppy very sloppy.

Now comes the most valuable part of the analysis. Saudi Arabia

The country that could possibly counter Iran in Iraq is Saudi Arabia, which has been known to funnel money to Sunni groups there. Its military is no match for Iran’s in a battle for Iraq, and its influence there has been less than Iran’s among most groups. More important, as the Saudis face the crisis on their periphery they are diverted and preoccupied by events to the east and south. The unrest in the region, therefore, increases the sense of isolation of some Iraqis and increases their vulnerability to Iran.

If we assume that Iraq does indeed feel vulunerable w.r.t Iran, then this is true.

The basic problem the Saudis face is that they don’t know the limits of their ability (which is not much beyond their financial muscle) to manage the situation.
....
....
what further worsens the Saudi position is that they cannot overtly align with the United States for their security needs. Nevertheless, they also have no other option.
....
....
Their(i.e. Saudi) national strategy has been to uncomfortably rely on the United States. If the United States is seen as unreliable, the Saudis have only two options. One is to hold their position and hope for the best. The other is to reach out and see if some accommodation can be made with Iran. The tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia — religious, cultural, economic and political — are profound. But in the end, the Iranians want to be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, defining economic, political and military patterns.

Wrong and incorrect reading of the situation. Saudi Arabia has options. It exercised one recently, the Sunni card. On 24th and 25th April-2011 Dawn, the erstwhile paper or mouth piece of Muslim League in undivided India, wrote two pieces.
Warmth is back in ties with Saudi Arabia?
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia agree to enhance ties
It is noteworthy that the first article talks about a Pakistan-GCC-Turkey entente to check Iraq. From this, dawn, article given above the following quote

Gulf governments were no more ready to give in and vowed doing everything at their disposal to protect their ‘legitimate interests’.
Hands off the Arab world — was the clear message to Iran. And in the meantime, the Arab world also went into full gear to galvanize support and muscle to block Tehran’s inroads, into what is being termed here the ‘Arab territory’ – through the Shia soft belly of the Arab states.
And it is here that Pakistan and Turkey got into the loop too. For after all these are the two strongest countries — as far as muscle is concerned — within the Sunni world.
A stream of events took place in a short span of time. Saudi National Security Council chief Prince Bandar bin Abdul Aziz came over to Islamabad, immediately after the meeting in Kuwait of President Zardari and Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz, the second deputy premier and the long-time interior minister.
And Prince Bandar’s visit was preceded by a visit of the Saudi chief of staff to Pakistan. In the meantime, the Bahraini foreign minister also dashed to Pakistan, despite the ongoing strife in his country.
.....
.....
And Prince Bandar is no ordinary diplomat. He is often regarded as a trouble-shooter for Riyadh. John Hannah, writing in the Foreign Policy magazine, says: ‘Saudi Arabia’s legendary former ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, is once again a major presence on the world stage.’
....
....
And his previous visit to Pakistan did not escape world attention and generated considerable interest. In the same story Hannah says: “More interestingly – and undoubtedly more worrisome – at the end of March, in the wake of the Saudi intervention in Bahrain, Bandar was dispatched to Pakistan, China and India to rally support for the kingdom’s hard line approach to the region’s unrest.
....
....
So it appears Pakistan is getting sucked into a regional cold war — and Washington may not mind it this time too.

Saudi Arabia has options. It can depend on PRC-Pakistan nexus to come to its aid. Just as China supplied Saudi Arabia with IRBM missiles to keep Iran in check it might help Saudi Arabia again through its proxy Pakistan.
While the visit to India should mainly seen to keep India neutral and not tilt towards Iran, it might also to assuage India's concern w.r.t to oil supply disruption in case of tensions boiling over.

From the second Dawn article, mentioned above

According to sources, Saudi Arabia asked Pakistan to use its influence and good relations with Iran to persuade it to avoid interfering in Arab internal affairs.
The two sides stressed that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia had the capacity to lead Ummah during these turbulent times.
Saudi Arabia also assured Pakistan that it would support its endeavours to safeguard its interests in Afghanistan.
Pakistani sources confirmed that Saudi Arabian political leadership had categorically stated that Pakistan’s interests would be taken care of.
Ms Khar was reportedly told that Saudi Arabia considered its relationship with Pakistan as strong and ‘special’ and that no other country could come even close to this level of political understanding.

It is in this respect that the recent belligerence of Paki Army against USA should be viewed. Pakistan feels secure that with the recent turmoil, it will be needed more than ever. USA will require Pakistan manpower to sustain the status quo in certain critical western Asian nations. Another way of looking at this is with Saudi Arabia and China backing it currently, due to each's domestic compulsions, Pakistan Army feels that it can demand and get its way in Afghanistan. Is this an indirect confirmation that pakistan army has never given up the concept of seeking strategic depth in afghanistan?

For India this is once again a reminder about why India was partitioned and the utility of Pakistan in the scheme of "wells of power". As long as Oil is present in certain west Asian nations and each of these west asian nations are repressive and regressive in nature, Pakistan will be required. Please note that the bharanian minister rushed to Pakistan when the country was in full turmoil. Not to US not to China but to Pakistan. If there is anything that India can take away from this, it is this, Pakistan is too valuable to certain North Atlantic nations, West Asian nations and China. We could dismember Pakistan, but we will not be able to destroy it entirely. And if we try we will face the repeat of what happened in 1971. It is noteworthy that we are perhaps the only country on this planet to have faced a nuclear threat from three different countries
1) China
2) Pakistan
3) USA.

I wonder how come people still say that India should partner with West/US in-spite of the different core interests that we have. Or they claim that we, i.e. India and West/US, are natural partners.

Pranav · Post by **Pranav** » 27 Apr 2011 07:25

ramana wrote: What the world needs to know are three more mass killings of the 20th century:

- Mao's Great Leap forward and
- Churchills' role in the Bengal famine
- Ottoman Trukey's Armenian massacre

Then the list would be complete.

Also, the Ukranian famine (the Holodomor). But there are many more. Rajiv Malhotra in his "Breaking India" book looks at the neo-colonial angle to the Rwandan genocide and the Sri Lankan conflict.

Pranav · Post by **Pranav** » 30 Apr 2011 18:58

A series of interesting developments:

Sanity returns Egypt to the Arab fold

By Rami G. Khouri

Sometimes you can almost physically feel the political earth shifting beneath your feet. One of those moments occurred in Cairo a few days ago, when the main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas, signed an Egyptian-brokered reconciliation agreement to reconstitute a single Palestinian government.

This event will be seen in retrospect as a historic turning point in the contemporary history of the Middle East – not so much for what it means for the Palestinians, but more for what it tells us about the return of Egypt to its natural role in regional diplomacy. This is the first tangible sign of the return of sanity and dignity in the affairs of state and diplomacy in Cairo’s foreign policy, after decades of emasculation, subservience and marginalization.

Other signs will follow quickly, including the opening of the Gaza-Rafah crossing, the resumption of normal relations with Iran, rational relations along the Nile Valley, more effective and realistic regional nuclear policies, and greater regional trade and economic complementarities.

...

So was the speedy, almost Pavlovian, comment by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu within hours of the reconciliation accord that Fatah could have peace with Hamas or with Israel, but not with both.

http://english.alarabiya.net/views/2011 ... 47269.html

In Russia:

It’s all but in the bag: Putin to stand again for the presidency

Vladimir Putin has given his strongest indication yet, during his annual address to the Russian parliament, that he intends to return to the role of President of Russia, formalising his position as the most powerful politician in the country. A presidential election is scheduled for early next year.

http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2011/0 ... residency/

Putin eclipses Medvedev in run-up to 2012 election

Putin, a former two-time president, appears to have gained the upper hand in a fierce power struggle with his protege, and analysts say the presidency his for the taking.

April 28, 2011|By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times

The 2012 Russian presidential elections may be over already.

Vladimir Putin's words and deeds of late have made it eminently clear that he's had enough of being prime minister and wants the No. 1 job back from President Dmitry Medvedev. And many experts believe it's his for the taking.

Amid what political analysts have identified as a fierce power struggle between the two Russian leaders, the expulsion of a key Medvedev aide from the Kremlin is being interpreted as a sign that Putin has gained the upper hand.

And Medvedev's own recent comments referring to life after politics have done little to alter that impression.

Two weeks ago, Medvedev's political advisor, Gleb Pavlovsky, discovered he was no longer welcome as a political strategist in Moscow's halls of power. "I think I lost my position in the Kremlin due to an impulse from Putin's team," Pavlovsky said in an interview after news of his firing in mid-April leaked out this week.

Putin promises extensive re-arming - http://www.thehindu.com/news/internatio ... 712592.ece

Together with the Chinese moves to dump the dollar, it sure does look like Pax Americana is in some difficulties.