Through a combination of procedural clumsiness, personal ambition and institutional pride, the parliamentary majority of French President Nicolas Sarkozy has mounted something of a protest over the past few days. At issue is both the relationship of the government to its majority, and the functioning of the UMP party. Parliament members complain of inaccessible ministers and the imposition of unpopular legislation without deputies' input. One prominent UMP figure attacked the party's "Brezhnevian" direction. (French-language links.)

So far, the legislative victims of the parliamentary rebellion have been a law on OGM's and a constitutional amendment that would have bypassed popular referenda for certain treaties. The first was killed through a surprise procedural maneuver by the opposition that a more disciplined majority could have easily turned back. The second was voted down in committee, with the votes of several UMP legislators. Both measures are recoverable through parliamentary procedure. But with President Sarkozy politically weakened, and the unions showing their strength (in the form of 50,000 school teachers and public sector workers marching in the streets), it's hardly the kind of news that augurs well for his second wave of reform packages.

Last night was one of the rare times I watched the televised news, so I finally saw footage of the impact of the Sichuan earthquake. There's really no comparing the heartrending effect of video to even still images, let alone press coverage. The impact it had on me reminded me of remarks by a French diplomat for an article I did on the EUFOR Chad mission. He talked about the "CNN effect" on public opinion, and how it has increased the pressure on governments to intervene in far off crises.

I'd add to that the observation that, in ways that are particularly evident this year, the global response to natural disasters has overtaken the Olympic Games as the primary arena of international solidarity. That's not to say it's an apolitical arena, since so many of the offers of aid carry very significant political subtexts, as reading through this list of donors makes clear. (Vietnam's offer of $200,000, for instance, stands out.) But whereas the Olympics still carry political overtones that often divide us, disaster relief gets down to the human urgencies that invariably bind us all together.

Meanwhile, in a bit of tea leaf-reading regarding China's opening up to the world, Russian and Japanese relief teams have now been allowed entry to the country, and the Ministry of Industry and Information made an "urgent public call" for rescue equipment, ranging from hammers and shovels to cranes and life detectors. I'll update as I find more.

And in a related development, Jason Siggers over at Armchair Generalist provides a reassuring update on the delivery of relief supplies to Burma. Hopefully the lines will be moved further, but for now it's a first step.

Amidst the signs of progress in Iraq, two cautionary notes: despite the Maliki government's solidification of its hold on power by military means, very few of the major political challenges to national reconciliation have been addressed, let alone solved; and the security gains of the past year have now exerted a "push me-pull you" pressure on Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons to return to their homes, which have either been appropriated or walled off behind sectarian lines. In other words, having returned the security situation to what resembles a frozen civil war (or a tenuous and sporadically violated ceasefire), we're now confronted with the difficult, costly and lengthy challenges of nation-building.

Which brings us to Andrew Bacevich's LA Times op-ed (via AM's Dr. iRack), which calls into question the broader context of the "Long War." In essence, Bacevich argues that in setting out to change the world, we've weakened ourselves from within. Now, if we don't rein in our own profligacy and hubris, we'll no longer have the luxury to engage in nation-building abroad. It's a convincing argument, if only for the fact that we're better at national renewal than we are at international transformation. And it's one worth considering, given that somehow the Iraq War seems to have had little impact on the instinctive reflex in some circles to reach for American military power when faced with a thorny problem, whether it be Iran's nuclear program or humanitarian crises in Burma and Darfur. Add to that the fact that the U.S. Army is retooling in the image of a counterinsurgency force adapted to stabilization and reconstruction operations, and Bacevich's assessment becomes pretty dire.

In the aftermath of 9/11, America understandably confused a security threat with a national security threat; a threat to Americans was mistaken for a threat to America. But it also confused the calculus of the terrorist threat for a zero sum game. The impact of the Iraq War (which having been wrongly folded into the "Long War" narrative must now be included in its assessment) has demonstrated that America can both weaken al-Qaida and itself at the same time. That is, in the War on Terrorism, both we and the terrorists can lose.

That Iraq also demonstrates the limits of America's ability to mold societies in our own image is even more reason for a sober reassessment of the interventionist urge. The way things are shaping up around the world, there will be plenty of situations where we'll be tempted (perhaps even required) to apply the military lessons we've learned in Iraq in other countries, under other circumstances. But unless we integrate the political lessons we've learned in Iraq first, we're likely to meet with the same frustrating results.

While browsing through this interim GAO report (.pdf, via the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs) on Coalition Support Funds reimbursed to Pakistan for its antiterrorism operations in the FATA, I was surprised to see that the amount of requests for reimbursement that were denied spiked from $5 million to $25 million in February 2007. That's almost a third of the monthly operational expenses that Pakistan was "billing" to the program at the time. Almost as surprising was the fact that the amount of reimbursements that were denied immediately dipped back down to roughly $15 million by June 2007 (the latest date for the figures).

That got me launching a hasty Google News search, which reminded me that February 2007 was when Dick Cheney paid his unannounced, pit stop visit to Islamabad to tear Pervez Musharraf out a new one. Days later, of course, Pakistan announced it had seized a Taliban leader, and within a few months it had announced a new counterterrorism agreement with the Afghan government.

Of course, the bulk of the money was still turned over, for operations that have had no real strategic impact on the effort to eradicate Taliban and al-Qaida bases in the area. But at least now we have an actual price tag on what Pakistan's half-hearted media stunts are worth.

Those suggesting we should conduct a "coercive humanitarian intervention" in Burma would do well to consider this, from a WaPo article that otherwise describes the junta's efforts to mask the country's underlying dysfunction:

The moral arguments for intervening in Burma are irrefutable. And in a world where decisions were made free of any practical considerations, they'd suffice. So while I can't really say I object to the idea of a "coercive humanitarian intervention," I do object to the way in which it's being proposed.

We've already seen what happens when you remove a violent, repressive regime that holds an ethnically volatile population together. Even if the kind of militarized relief efforts being proposed don't trigger a war whose outcome would spell the end of the Burmese regime, there is the non-negligible possibility that they would destabilize it to the point that the country slides into anarchy.

In other words, the argument that needs to be supported is not whether to provide relief to the victims of Cyclone Nargis, but whether to declare Burma an international protectorate, and engage in the nation-building operations that will necessitate. With the added condition that the entire operation will have to take place outside the auspices of the UN, with no help and probably a good deal of hostility from the part of Pekin.

Given the moral calculus involved, that's still an argument that can be legitimately defended. But we should be clear about the task we're taking on, and just how we intend to accomplish it.

According to this Jamestown Foundation article by David Romano, Turkey's recent diplomatic contacts with the Kurdish Regional Government represent a major shift, and is the result of a combination of factors:

While encouraging, the move is only the first step towards a true thaw. The remaining sticking points are the KRG's willingness to actively confront -- as opposed to their efforts to logistically isolate -- the PKK, and Turkey's formulation of a comprehensive, civilian population component of its COIN strategy.

Still, the dialogue culminates a long and volatile game of chicken at the end of which both sides decided to pull back from the edge of open conflict that would have served no one's interests. And while the gains are tentative, they represent one of the few bright spots on the growing horizon of ethno-nationalist conflict resolution.

Importantly, American influence, once it was finally mobilized, figured prominently in the solution, and demonstrates the ways in which a mediator trusted by both parties to a conflict can use carrots and sticks to nudge them towards a resolution. The tricky part about Turkey mediating backchannel talks between Israel and Syria, or Egypt between Israel and Hamas, is that neither can wield the kind of carrots and sticks that are likely to be needed to break the impasses. That's a problem that needs to be resolved if they are to achieve any meaningful outcomes.

In an article for Foreign Policy, Laura Rozen reveals the degree to which the Israeli national security establishment has now moved out ahead of the Bush administration's hardline posture in the Middle East. There's no small amount of irony there, since it was this same Israeli national security establishment that initially reinforced Bush's policy of isolation and containment of the region's bad guys. But now, in the case of both Hamas and Syria, Israeli insistence has led to Washington lifting its objections to backchannel talks. Rozen suggests that while a late-administration reversal can't be ruled out, most people are already pinning their hopes on a future administration's re-engagement.

I don't have much to add here, other than to point out that the Israeli political arena consistently includes points of view (ie. talking with Hamas) that are considered off-limits in the States. I've also yet to see a more convincing formula than Yitzhak Rabin's for engagement: Negotiate as if there is no terror, and fight terror as if there are no negotiations.

This is a very insightful and neglected historical analogy, and the fact that it's made by the former head of the U.S. Special Forces Command will hopefully pre-empt any attempts to dismiss it as America-bashing. It's become something of a conventional wisdom that the democratization of Latin America has been a net victory for American regional interests. But as Maj. Gen. Lambert points out, the fallout from the methods used to suppress and/or eradicate a generation of Marxist revolutionaries is still being felt.

Gen. Lambert doesn't mention the exacerbating factor of ambient anti-American sentiment that no amount of public diplomacy or democracy promotion can reverse, because it's based on a narrative personally experienced by many Latin Americans as the truth. I happened to be in Ecuador when it was revealed that the School for the Americas -- the U.S. training ground for the Latin American officer cadre -- provided instruction in what at the time was called torture, but is now known as enhanced interrogation techniques.

The implications for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader Middle East of Latin America's longer term shift -- which ranges from America-phobic to America-neutral to America-oblivious -- as the "Children of the Left" come of age can not be underestimated.