Michael Moran's Notebook:

Can't let the day pass

If humanity had evolved with four fingers on each hand rather than five, the world would be marking this day with far more fanfare and introspection. Much as I enjoy my falanges, it's kind of a shame that the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks came and went so quietly.

I work in lower Manhattan, probably nine blocks from where the attacks made their deepest scar. Walking around the neighborhood at lunchtime last Friday, there were almost no reminders of the event that had tens of thousands coursing through these very streets eight years ago. Only one hint — a fireman in dress blues — crossed my path. I stopped him, and asked him had he been on the force in 2001, still a somewhat sensitive topic for the FDNY.

"No, but my cousin was," he said. "He survived, thank God. They had him on a command truck outside the towers." 

So many did not survive, of course, and it is both sad and somehow heartening to see that all that, too, has passed. I was there that day, and I have covered the consequences (as I covered the road that led to it).

But for now, let Charlie Sennott's column suffice. I'll just remember my own acquaintances who passed that day — a friend, Graham Berkeley, on United 193, an uncle, FDNY Lt. Tom O'Hagan, and my landlady, Arlene Babakitis. Whatever anyone makes of the reaction of the United States to the horror, none of those fine people deserved their fate.

In proliferation stare-down with North Korea, Obama takes a round

A sustained diplomatic, military and intelligence effort led by the United States apparently has convinced North Korea that the secret cargo in the hull of its cargo ship, Kang Nam I, should remain a secret.

The world may never know if the freighter, believed headed for the pariah regime of Myanmar, contained missile components or even, as some suggested, nuclear weapons technology. Whatever it contained, the prospect of unloading it under the watchful eye of the U.S. military has convinced Pyongyang to order the ship to come about and set a new heading for a destination as of now unknown.

American intelligence officials raised an alarm two weeks ago when the ship left North Korean waters, speculating that it might be carrying illicit arms meant for the military dictatorship in Myanmar. More seriously, anonymous “intelligence sources” suggested that impoverished Myanmar is just a way station for a more nefarious technology transfer.

The ship has been shadowed for the past week by warships including the U.S.S. McCain, a destroyer named for the former GOP presidential candidate’s father, Adm. John S. McCain. The cargo vessel had been expected to stop en route to Myanmar — a cruise of some 4,100 miles — to refuel. The most likely refueling port, analysts believed, was Singapore.

But as the McCain shadowed the Kang Nam I, American, South Korean, and Japanese diplomats have mounted a campaign aimed at ensuring that a stop by the ship in any port along the way would trigger a full inspection of its cargo and a reporting of its contents to the United Nations.

United Nations Security Council sanctions passed after North Korea tested its latest nuclear warhead authorized the world’s navies to monitor such traffic. China, which has traditionally protected Pyongyang from the harshest Security Council rebukes, even voted for the sanctions this time, a significant symbolic shift and a victory for U.S. diplomacy.

But Beijing still blocked efforts to authorize boarding parties to inspect suspect North Korean vessels.

That was never likely to happen, of course, leaving the Obama administration is the absurd position of having less leeway to deal with a potential transfer of nuclear weapons technology than it had with a bunch of teenaged Somali pirates.

Now, a very dangerous moment may have passed. The ship, of course, could still turn around again and head back toward Myanmar, though the North would have to find some way to fuel it at sea, which is not a capability its navy is thought to possess.

The ship could also try to dump its cargo on the high seas, though such an action would be captured by satellite photography.

More likely at this stage, the Kang Nam I is headed, fantail between its legs, back toward North Korea.

If so, Obama has prevailed and dodged a difficult moment. He could have ordered the U.S. Seventh Fleet to go beyond the U.N. Security Council’s writ and board the Kang Nam, imposing the kind of naval quarantine on North Korean shipping that John F. Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961. But, then, Kennedy knew what was on the Russian ships — Obama had no such certainty.

Obama had to weigh the risks of halting the Kang Nam I against the possibility that that the increasingly irrational North would respond with a wild retribution of some kind against South Korea and the American troops based there. The North need not go nuclear to cause thousands of deaths. Within the range of its tens of thousands of artillery tubes on the 37th parallel is the entire city of Seoul and some of the U.S. garrison, too.

History should be cited, not shortsighted

Nothing gets the foreign correspondents' blood flowing like mass rallies in the streets of one of the world's great dictatorships. Let's face it, we all have a little John Reed in us (or Malcolm Muggeridge, if you prefer), hoping to be there to write the first draft of history, the way Reed did in his account of the Bolshevik Revolution ("Ten Days that Shook the World") and Muggeridge did in his exposure of Stalin's Ukrainian famine in the 1930s.

So the fair-minded reader has to excuse the occasional flight of historical fancy from a correspondent wading into the thick of an event like the Tehran protests. Certainly it's fair to point out, as the Washington Times and just about everyone else has, that the protests are the largest since the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

But making mischief with history proves irresistable to some. Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Stevens, angered by Obama’s apology to Iranians for the coup the U.S. engineered against their elected president during the Eisenhower administration, has this to say about the current unrest:

"But the better Eisenhower parallel is with Hungary in 1956. Then as now a popular uprising coalesced around a figure (Imre Nagy in Hungary; Mir Hossein Mousavi in Iran), who had once been a creature of the system. Then as now it was buoyed by inspiring American rhetoric about freedom and democracy coming over Voice of America airwaves.And then as now the administration effectively turned its back on the uprising when U.S. support could have made a difference. Hungary would spend the next 33 years in the Soviet embrace. One senses a similar fate for Iran."

This old saw presumes that the United States, which at the time was frantically attempting to prevent the Suez Crisis from turning into World War III with the Soviet Union, should simply have ignored that risk and intervened in Hungary, a landlocked nation and member of the Warsaw Pact located 540 miles from the nearest NATO unit in West Berlin. Hmmm….

The blogosphere, as usual, does the mainstream press one better. This from CanadaFreePress, a conservative outlet which was trying to use history to accuse Obama of appeasement:

"Just as going to the Reichstag in 1939 to inform the Nazi regime of the superiority of the Aryan race would not have done anything to prevent war, but rather such a blatant show of weakness would have helped bring it on, Obama’s Cairo speech has served as a signal to the tyrannies of the Muslim world, that the United States is now in an inferior position vis a vis them."

The problem with that one, of course, is that Hitler burned down the Reichstag in 1933. In fact, a more intelligent application of the Reighstag might have been to call the fixing of the Iranian election “Ahmadinejad’s Reichstag,” since consolidating the power of a megalomaniacal anti-Semite was involved in both cases.

Some references to history seem more fair-minded. Tiananmen, on the other hand, arguably strike an appropriate note. Both Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the ultimate political victim of Tiananmen, then-PRC leader Zhao Ziyang, who tried to halt the military crackdown, were products of their respective revolutions. In both cases, euphoria encouraged by outside events (the collapse of European communism in 1989, Obama's Cairo speech in 2009) helped drive events forward.

The tech angle also helps. Many have noted in recent days that, as the New York Times' ReadandWrite blog noted, Twitter is the CNN of Tehran.

But even the Tiananmen analogy can be overdone. China's crackdown — at this writing at least — was far, far more brutal.

Hijacking history in such instances is a stock and trade of the essayist (and the blogger) John Podhoretz, the conservative impresario, writes in blog post dubbed "Tehran Tiananmen" that should the mullahs crush Iran's street protests, "there will be no pretending any longer that Iran’s regime isn’t a unified, hardline, irridentist, and enormously dangerous one."

In fact, quite the opposite. Like China, Iran has grown into a regional power which cannot be ignored. This is not Cuba on the Persian Gulf, and the United States is not in a position to hermetically seal its borders. Oil rich, technologically sophisticated, and with no small amount of sympathy around the Arab and wider Islamic world, Iran can, in fact, "get away with it." Sometimes, reality sucks. But if history tells us anything, it's that ignoring reality is the best way to ensure grave mistakes.

See here for an overview of local reaction around the world.

G-20: Some nitty gritty

Beyond my column this week, which looks at the views of various factions within the G20, there are a few good pieces I would recommend from economic experts.

RGE Monitor, is the website of Nouriel Roubini, one of the very few economists who predicted the current economic mess we're in.

The website I run, CFR.org, offers a more basic guide to the G-20, plus a look at what economists believe will emerge from its divided ranks.

Meanwhile, a lot of people are talking about the wonderful Economist lead this week, "How China Sees the World," complete with the New Yorker-style view across the Pacific. Europe, of course, is just a place for Chinese yuppies to buy Gucci purses.  The shape of things to come ...

Will the Indian Ocean be at the center of the world in the coming decades?

I love maps. I thought one day I might collect them — I've managed to squirrel away a few old ones over the years from my travels in the former Soviet Union, Germany and Latin America. But the price always gets in the way. Maps aren't cheap, even when they don't provide much of a guide to the world we live in.

But I still love them. One of my favorites shows the world as viewed from the Southern Hemisphere, with the Antarctic floating above it all, and South Africa, Tierra del Fuego, and New Zealand sitting roughly where Alaska, Greenland, and Svalbard would be on most maps.

Well, if you like that kind of thing too, you'll love the next edition of Foreign Affairs.

I'm privileged to get advanced looks at the magazine, the sister publication to the website I run — CFR.org — at the Council on Foreign Relations. The March/April edition, which hits the newstands next week, is led by a tour de force on the Indian Ocean by Robert D. Kaplan, who questions our Mercator-challenged ignorance of it and asserts that it (and not the Atlantic or Pacific) will be at the center of the world in the decades to come. It isn't online just yet, but my bimonthly preview podcast with FA's Managing Editor Gideon Rose is available.

For a deeper look at one of the works that influenced Kaplan’s thinking, see "Asia Looks Seaward," by two U.S. Naval War Academy scholars, Toshi Yoshihari and John R. Holmes.

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