So Paul Wolfowitz is going to be the new head of the World Bank, with a term of office, barring personal catastrophe, of at least the next five years. The post-JDW (James D Wolfensohn) era was always going to be interesting for the Bank, especially in light of the tensions, upheavals and resentments produced by the Iraq war. Now it's going to be even more challenging, with a leading architect of that war at the helm.

I would certainly not have selected Mr. Wolfowitz if I had the power of nomination. But it is done, he has now been unanimously approved by the Bank's Board, and pace Brad DeLong with whom I agree far more often than not, I think it is time to shift our attention from Wolfowitz the Pentagon official, or Wolfowitz the controversial choice to lead the Bank, to Wolfowitz the international civil servant.

Those of us who believe the World Bank has an important role to play in both making the world a better place and in US foreign policy need to think about what we should be doing to help the institution succeed. And as distasteful as that may be for some, in the coming months that may mean rising to the defense of the Bank and its President against a host of narrow political agendas that wish to pull the Bank off into one meaningless or ineffectual direction or another.

As I've noted before, the Bush Administration could have saddled the Bank with a much worse burden. By background and temperament Paul Wolfowitz appears superior to any of the minor luminaries whose names were in common circulation prior to his nomination. Wolfowitz shares with much of the Bank's staff many of the ambitions and aspirations for the constructive roles the institution can play in development. Under the old principle that "where you stand depends on where you sit," it's likely that a number of the biases he will inevitably bring with him from the Pentagon will begin to disolve earlier rather than later. He has made no indication to date that he has any intention of Meltzerizing the Bank -- he is openly equating his "success" with the Bank's "success," not with dismantling the institution or redirecting it from its overarching goals.

In fact, the common criticism directed at JDW -- lack of focus -- may be equally difficult for Wolfowitz to avoid. Based on initial signals of an enthusiasm for linking economic and political development -- as well as the general discomfort the Bush Administration evinces with social development-oriented activities of many UN agencies -- the risk to the Bank instead may be that it becomes the preferred agency for a hodgepodge of US political priorities and pet-projects.

A US-dominated political agenda would threaten the Bank in a number of ways far more serious than the relatively simple problem of dissipating staff and budget resources. It goes to the heart of the credibility crisis that Wolfowitz' appointment presents for the Bank. As I explained several weeks ago when the nomination was announced:

[O]ne of [JDW's] major achievements was to reduce the level of suspicion about the Bank's agenda(s) with at least a portion of the NGO-civil society world. At a very high cost, I might add, and as [Sebastian] Mallaby also notes, many of these groups will never be satisfied, so there's a legitimate debate about whether [JDW] should have invested so much in the effort.

But the Wolfowitz appointment takes what progress there has been and basically tosses it in the garbage can. And that's the case regardless of any personal views or concrete actions of Wolfowitz himself in the new job. The symbolism -- that the US owns the Bank and can do with it what it will -- is how it's going to be read across the globe.

The irony is that one of the few really strong consensus items in recent years has been the importance of the locals "owning" their own development strategies and projects, and the broader need for the developing countries to feel they've an ownership stake in the multilateral institutions. Again, I think the "local ownership" theme has sometimes gotten a bit out of hand with some of the "comprehensive development strategy" stuff that was JDW's crowning glory. But there's an important bit of wisdom there, and it represented an essential corrective for a Washington-centered institution that had in many ways lost its way. Seems, however, that the message hasn't penetrated the Oval Office.

The first two years in the job for Wolfowitz, at a minimum, will be one of proving himself and reproving the Bank. Very trying times.

The staff face the challenge of credibility with individual client countries on specific projects. This will exacerbate the always-present tensions, sub-texts and hidden agendas (suspected or real) regarding which projects are selected, how they are designed, how they are approved. But beyond the difficulties for the staff, the credibility question presents a major problem for the Bank as a whole. As I noted earlier:

There's already enough opposition to the mythical Washington Consensus, and this will add enormous fuel to the anti-globalization fires as well. The super anti-globalizers will see this as one great big present from Santa, and the staff know it.

Wolfowitz could personally be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but the Bank is going to get saddled with a lot of his baggage. There will definitely be a "proving period" for him to get it right, or not. And that's assuming the US doesn't come into more intense conflict with anybody else, e.g. Iran, and have that blowback on him and the Bank.

Those trying times for the Bank and its staff will be brought into sharp focus by the debates to come over the next six months regarding Tony Blair's July push for a major G-7 Africa-centered anti-poverty agenda and a reassessment in September, in the context of the broader UN reforms, of progress on the Millennium Development Goals. Wolfowitz' background and White House connections will not make it easy for him to navigate the inevitable highly-politicized pulls on the Bank that will come from every direction. If he looks to be making a hash of things, then I'll criticize. But for the sake of the countries the Bank is designed to help, and the broader health of the international system, I wish him all the best.

For those of you dropping by chez Nadezhda from the World Bank today, welcome. Not surprisingly, there are quite a number of you! If you're interested in a discussion of today's reactions from around the globe as well as what the Wolfowitz nomination means for the Bank's future, we're following it here in a comment thread and updates. We'd be especially interested in getting some of the reactions of Bank staff, so please feel welcome to join in the discussion. {And some further discussion here and here.} nadezhda

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{original post, Oct 25 2004}

I've suspected for some time that Paul Wolfowitz is far more interesting and less ideologically rigid than he's been made out to be. This fascinating New Yorker profile and some quick googling turned up this article:

In fact, there is a woman from whom Wolfowitz does draw support and backing for his views, but she comes from a very different — and unexpected — background. His closest companion and most valued confidantes is a middle-aged Arab feminist whose own strongly held views on instilling democracy in her native West Asia have helped bolster his resolve.

Shaha Ali Riza is a senior World Bank official who was born in Tunis, grew up in Saudi Arabia and holds an international relations masters degree from St Anthony’s College, Oxford. Close acquaintances of the couple have told The Daily Telegraph that she is romantically linked with Wolfowitz, 61, a fellow divorcee with whom she has been friends for several years.

Even by the discreet standards of Washington’s powerful inner circle, it is a remarkably closely guarded secret. They rarely go out as a couple openly or demonstrate affection publicly, according to friends who are aware of the relationship. They attend low-key Washington social events and visit friends’ homes together and Riza also sometimes goes to official functions and dinners with him, but is not identified as his partner, an acquaintance said.

“Most people would never guess there was a relationship, even if they saw them together,” he said.

It is a sign of the sensitivity surrounding the relationship that the few friends willing even to acknowledge it last week did not want to be named. “Shaha Riza runs around with Wolfowitz a lot. I gather she is his current girlfriend but they are very careful about this,” said one.

As far as I know, this hasn't been denied.

I also found this strange page that asserts that Riza is under surveillance by some strange combination of the Mossad and the Mujahedin-e-Khalq.

Bizarre world we live in.

Warning, this is not a thoughtful post. This is a cranky post.

In "Time for a Rethink?" praktike offers a review of positive comments and views from the liberal or "left" part of the American political universe on the encouraging signs of political change in the Middle East. Though he points out some of the continued weaknesses of the Bush Administration's policies, he calls on opponents of the neocon approach to Iraq to get behind those Bush policies we can support. Time to be constructive.

This is not a new theme for prak, and it's an approach I've consistently endorsed. I've advocated elsewhere that opponents of Bush's foreign policy nonetheless give vocal support to specific policies that are consistent with what we ourselves would be promoting if the Bush team weren't still running the show.

With those principles in mind, I have been supportive of the shifts being made gradually over the past six months by the military field commanders in both strategy and tactics. I have been supportive of the shift in approach which appears to have been adopted by the US embassy since the handover to the interim government at the end of June. My most recent endorsements of Bush policies have included supporting the Iraqi elections and the Administration's broad strategy toward Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. I have repeatedly cautioned against reproducing a domestic Vietnam-style polarization. To my way of thinking, an America polarized by foreign policy debates is a dangerous America for the rest of the world. But I have also vigorously opposed the disinformation campaigns that the Bush Administration waged as part of the presidential campaign or the gamesplaying with military budgets and force planning. So I want it understood that these comments are not an attack on prak's overall intentions which I share.

Two things have me seriously out of sorts. First -- and more on a personal level than anything I suppose -- I am quite resentful of the notion that somehow, as a vocal critic of the Bush policies regarding the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I have something to explain or apologize for. I don't think I'm misreading the subtext, even coming from those who aren't engaging in the recent rounds of "traitors on the left" triumphantalist hyperbole. The suggestion seems to be that if as critics we "can't admit we were wrong," we're being partisan or we're somehow not for democracy and freedom. That it's our lot to accept the "olive branch" offered by the David Adesniks of a bipartisan policy based on "democracy promotion." Gracious in defeat, don't you know.

Sorry, if there is an olive branch to be offered by the victorious, it should in point of fact be extending the other direction, from those of us who have long advocated policies that the Bush Admnistration is only now begining to adopt. I am eager to be magnanimous in victory, but it appears quite unlikely that my branch will even be acknowledged by the Administration's supporters, let alone accepted by a foreign policy team that's never made a mistake.

This brings me to my closely related second source of crankiness. The so-called "left" is being diverted by the unnecessary self-justifying squawks that have been coming out of the liberal hawks. Those who opposed the first Bush Administration shouldn't be wasting time squabbling on who was more right or more wrong about the war. They should be joining together now be saying to the new Bush team, "Glad you guys have finally come to your senses. Nice to have you back on board." We should be looking forward, trying to make sense of this post-Iraq world that's starting to emerge, to see what we think about the current Administration's priorities and policies as they are starting to take shape.

As I see it, the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq adventure have represented a severe dis-continuity in American foreign policy, and we're now returning to something approaching our normal balance. This is an idea that requires a much longer and more developed essay that's still rummaging around in my brain. For purposes of this discussion, let's simply focus on the issues of political change (not other elements of global politics like NATO or environment, trade etc).   more »

{update Jan 31 9:35PM EST} by nadezhda

This article was written in the hours just before the polls opened in Iraq on Sunday. Since then we've all been absorbing the remarkable, uplifting images of Iraqis by the millions -- of all ages, gender, ethnicity, faith -- celebrating in their "wedding finest" their hopes for their future, and with a degree of courage hard to fathom.

We still await the actual results of the Iraqis' historic exercise of their political voices - one which many of us around the world have long called for. Once the votes are counted, as I note in the article, we'll have a better sense of what possibilities face the Iraqis as they take their next steps toward self-governance.

While we wait the tally, there's been considerable reaction across the blogosphere. As the article indicates, I'm not surprised by the nature of most of that reaction, though I have to admit I'm sorely disappointed in many respects.

Where I can't say I'm disappointed, however, is that chez Nadezhda has been the beneficiary of some of that froth of blogospheric excitation, with links to this essay from a number of other blogs. We haven't been Instalanched, but we have been "Dispatched" and "Winded," among others. Thanks for the positive response, and our blogging service thanks you for the extra bandwidth fees!

praktike has an great roundup at Dean's Nation of some of the best responses to the elections (best from the viewpoint here at chez Nadezhda). The quotes he collects come from the center and center-left of the blogosphere. They reflect the best thinking of those whom Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation and Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, describes today as one side of the new cleavage emerging in US foreign policy.

In a must-read essay in The Washington Note, Clemons explains that the main cleavage of post World War II foreign policy was between the realists and the liberal internationalists -- setting to one side the more strictly "anti-war" left and the "pull-up-the-castle-gates" right . As Steve points out, the dividing lines are now shifting. Those of us whose intuitions draw on the heritage of the post-WWII generation -- Truman democrats (small d) if you will -- find ourselves on the other side of an emerging and vocal alliance of neo-con "heavy" and "lite."

The relative scarcity in the blogosphere of loud responses from Truman democrats is a warning of how rare a bird we "pragmatic optimists" are in the blogosphere. Not surprisingly, I personally believe that's an important absence that needs to be redressed with more efforts like ours here at chez Nadezhda and Liberals against Terrorism.

{update: Jan 31 11:45AM EST} by nadezhda

Though we don't yet have the election results, there are some interesting initial takeaways. The always reliable Dan Darling outdoes himself with an indepth report on the insurgency and security issues surrounding the election, and what it may mean for the Zarqawi jihadists.

Zarqawi suffered an unqualified defeat today - one that he is not likely to soon recover from. Not only did he fail at his purported desire to derail the Iraqi vote, but he was unable to carry out anything resembling the kind of operations that his group has mounted in the past in either the Kurdish or the Shi'ite areas of the country. This was literally his "make or break" moment in the eyes of the al-Qaeda leadership and goes to show just how limited the insurgency is to a single geographic area of the country, only being able to launch attacks in other areas such as Irbil or Basra with extensive preparation and planning.

See "Iraqi Elections: Zarqawi Gambled -- and Lost."

{update: Jan 30 12:50AM EST} by nadezhda

Seems there's someone else who shares my suspicions of debating the metrics of success. Brad Plumer doesn't think much of any "armchair narrative we decide to impose tomorrow."

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{Article originally posted by nadezhda Jan 29 2005 4:00PM EST}

Some years ago I concluded that the common abbreviation for the United States of America -- US -- is all too apt. We have become a self-absorbed nation and society that defines everything in terms of "us."

In part, that's just human nature. Recently, however, we've displayed a bit more human nature than is altogether healthy. And rarely more so than in what passes for analysis in the run-up to the Iraqi elections. SuperBowlWeek has nothing on IraqiElectionWeek as a content-free zone of emotionally-charged vapidity.

The phenomenon is shared across the entire political spectrum, but the item that compelled me to the keyboard this morning came from Andrew Sullivan, who asks what the measure for "success" should be on Sunday.

I asked myself, is this like Howie asking Bradshaw during the pregame show -- if they beat the point spread can we also call the Patriots a dynasty?

I single Sullivan out merely as an illustration of our collective self-absorption -- on both left and right -- that produces such a profoundly wrong-headed perspective on the world. A self-absorbed worldview is a dangerous one in an interdependent world such as our own.    more »

Here's a very wise voice-of-experience post about doing business in the evolving environment of an emerging market in transtition.

There's a quote that's the fundamental takeaway. And what I repeat over and over to anyone who wants to talk about "how to" change an economic and political system.

The reason it's hard, and the reason it takes a long time, isn't that somehow the societies are genetically or culturally incapable of dealing with a liberal democracy. Instead, as "Lounsbury on MENA" puts it so clearly:

Mentality, difficult to change even after intellectually the change is well understood to be necessary.

That's why it takes a generation. And that's why it's critical not just to ignore the original generation of economic, political, cultural/religious elites. You skip a full generation. Don't waste time with the guys who are standing in the wings, or the next cohort that would have been in line.

This is one situation when "don't trust anyone over 30" is a pretty good motto to apply.

Thomas Ricks in today's Washington Post has a very interesting story about Rumsfeld's latest efforts to shake up the military establishment. His target: Civil Affairs.

The Army is engaged in a bureaucratic brawl with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over how to organize troops for "nation-building," a growing problem for the military as it settles in for lengthy occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly other countries.

Rumsfeld wants to shift thousands of civil affairs troops from the Special Operations Command to the regular Army on the theory that the service needs to do better at security and stabilization. This comes as he is pushing other components of the elite Special Operations Command -- such as Navy SEALs and the Army Delta Force -- to focus on aggressive actions against terrorists and other missions.

Officers specializing in civil affairs -- which helps establish local governments in occupied areas, oversees humanitarian assistance and coordinates military activities with aid organizations -- say they oppose the move. They say many officers believe, based in part on their experience in Iraq, that regular combat commanders do not understand their work and do not know how to use them well.

I have been intending to write up a post in reaction to Dana Priest's book The Mission which I recently finished, and also tie in some of the observations made by Major Isiah Wilson in his report on civil-military planning in Iraq. That post, still only half-formed may have to wait indefinitely, with the start of classes soon (the Wilson report is about sixty pages and I don't know when I'll have a chance to sit down with it soon). Until it does materialize, this may serve in lieu of it.

Although Priest talks about the US Army's increasingly frequent service in nation-building, peacekeeping "operations other than war", she doesn't go into great detail about the structure of the military's civil affairs duties — perhaps because that role has often been assumed ad hoc by units deployed to Kosovo and elsewhere. If she mentioned that Civil Affairs was a subcommand of US Special Operations Command, I definitely missed it.

Previously I've thought that one answer to the issue of America's increasingly militarized nation-building mission — a role that, as Nadezhda (and Priest) argues, the military has traditionally been hesitant to embrace as a whole, despite admirable performances by those who serve in these missions — might be to somehow expand the concept of "joint" operations planning to include US civil institutions like State, the Justice Department (why do we train so many foreign soldiers, and so few police?), and so forth. Not having read the full Wilson report yet, I'm still not clear on just how operational war plans are made, but it's my impression that whatever influence these other non-military branches of government have on the campaign occurs more at the strategic (ie., the President and his Cabinet) level than the actual planning of the deployment and order of battle. The result is a situation where, as Wilson describes it (I have gotten this far), the armed forces defines its mission in strictly military terms and assumes that the responsibility for political, economic, and social reconstruction falls to someone else. In other words, Phase IV is somebody else's problem.

Reading this article, now I'm wondering if one good start might not be to go one better on Rumsfeld and actually make Civil Affairs Command its own independent command, with an independent institutional voice at the table alongside the regional CinC, SOCOM, and the others. As Ricks' piece notes, even though Civil Affairs is opposed to being subsumed under the regular army's command,

having civil affairs in Special Operations has never been a great fit, either. "We do not, after all, fit the mold of steely-eyed killers," [an officer] said. "We are supposed to be language and cultural experts."

No matter how much the Bush administration team may dislike it, the nation-building mission is not going away, and we will need a force structure capable of bearing that load. I think the dangers we face in Iraq today show some of the costs of going into "post-modern war" (to borrow Wilson's phrase) without adequate preparation for that Phase IV post-combat mission. Perhaps State under Condi Rice will develop into a strong voice for taking on that role, but I doubt it. Like it or not, given how much State has withered as an instrument of American policy when compared with our military forces, I think there has to be some effort to strengthen the standing of those soldiers devoted to the study of "operations other than war" within the US military if we're to see effects. In this, rather than going too far, I think Rumsfeld may not even be going far enough.

Edit - See also a parallel discussion at Tacitus, a somewhat related proposal on the subject of military reorganization at Belgravia Dispatch, and the Barnett briefing in comments.

This evening I was finally able to set aside the time to finish up Stephen Cohen's recent book The Idea of Pakistan. In this post I aim to summarize his key conclusions and in the process offer a review of the work.

As the title of this post suggests, The Idea of Pakistan is intended primarily as a guide to the political, social, and economic makeup of the country, its major political actors (the military, the Establishment, the Islamists), and the future trends and issues that the Pakistani and American leadership confront when making policy. Each of these topics are capable of sustaining multiple books of their own (and have), but Cohen's ability to provide a comprehensive briefing on each subject makes this a valuable introductory resource for readers new to the country. Since this information is presented categorically rather than chronologically, it can be at times difficult to hold all the factors operating at a particular point in time in your mind when reading on a different section, but Cohen compensates for this fairly well by starting off the book with an account of Pakistan's history from the struggles of Partition and the founding of the state to the coup that installed Pervez Musharraf in 1999, then going deeper in the subsequent chapters.

A well-balanced book (hey, this is the Brookings Institute we're talking about here), Cohen offers what are in my view key assessments on the following subjects (not, it should be noted, an exhaustive list):
   more »

Brad Plumer has an interesting post on his home blog that I noted in an earlier post. Seems his Halo comments don't accommodate long comments, and I'm nothing if not windy, so I'm publishing mine here.

But first, Brad's post:

Do Institutions Cause Growth?

Readers of this site—all three of you!—know that I'm a big fan over the liberalization/democratization debate. The discussion boils down to one question, really: is it better for a developing country to become a democracy first and then work on economic development, or should the economic stuff come first so that people can become rich enough and educated enough to have a democracy?

One way this plays out is when the "democracy first!" folks say that you can't have good economic growth without things like transparency in your financial institutions, the rule of law, low corruption, and that these things all require democracy. (More on this here.) But that argument always struck me as odd. After all, Singapore's not really a democracy, but its government doesn't go around seizing people's stuff and monkeying with the law. Same with the East Asian "tigers" during their boom years in the 1950s. Not democracies. At a glance, democracy is probably more likely to lead to good institutions and the rule of law, but so can a benevolent dictatorship.

Anyways, I just found this NBER paper (PDF) by Glaeser, Shleifer, La Porta, and Lopez-de-Silanes that goes into this critique in more depth. After doing the analyses, they find that the good democratic stuff everyone loves—constitutional limits on sovereign power, judicial independence, etc.—have no predictive power for the growth of per capita income. "[I]nstitutions," the authors claim, "have only a second order effect on economic performance." So what does have an effect? Human capital—stuff like primary school enrollment, which shapes both institutional and productive capacities of a society." Most importantly, they're all very skeptical of pushing countries with low levels of human capital into democracy.

Let me just add that the work of Shleifer, La Porta, and Lopez-de-Silanes on these sorts of subjects has come under heavy fire. Previously, they've argued that a country's economic success depends on good deal on what kind of legal tradition it has—British-style common law or French-style civil law. Nicholas Thompson discussed their work in Legal Affairs, along with some of the criticisms. Still, it's interesting.

My comments to Brad:

Just a few comments, since someday I'll have to sit down and write my full-blown critique. And to do Andrei, Rob etal justice requires another bit of thought and lengthy essay. So this is just some remarks to have in the back of your mind as you plow through the development literature.

I HATE "sequencing" as a development construct, whether we talking about political economy or we're talking about any other form of liberalization and institutional reform (my baliwick, relationship between financial sector and capital account, so I was doing practicing "law and finance" before it existed as a theoretical school).

Sequencing misses the entire dynamics of how development happens -- economic, political, social. Sequencing is a mechanistic, linear, unidimensional "tool" that's actively dangerous in the hands of the worst wielders, usually those with a political axe to grind. Nothing organic, no feedback loops, no insights from networks.

Shleifer et al are doing their best to pull apart pieces of the puzzle. They're focusing on the impact of generations of institutional structures that affect the way business is done, politics is structured, and contribute to the "mentalities" that influence how people define and solve problems (which is what the common law vs civil law traditions really gets to). These are very welcome areas of inquiry.

Setting aside the sequencing issue (which is difficult for me since I froth at the mouth about it) I know the democracy vs liberalization is an intriguing debate, but IMHO a misguided one. As you point out, how do you distinguish the "undemocratic" east and southeast Asian tigers, with at least a modicum of respect by controlling elites for property and rules (uncodified though they might be) and a good deal of diverse opinion and policy battles within the "undemocratic" elite, versus the "illiberal" democracies Fareed writes about. Does the democracy label get us anywhere really?

From a development standpoint, when I look at a political economy, What I'm more interested in than formal electoral and official representation arrangements is which of the various policymaking functions are performed by what groups, with what channels for voices to be heard, with which checks and balances, if any. When you map those factors out, you'll see where the big bottlenecks are, where unresolved conflicts are more likely to produce major tension, and where incentives are screwed up, conflicts of interest persist, and bad policy (or widespread corruption) is likely to result.

Take China for example. If you just look at the formal one-party system with some gradual innovation in the party, government committees and the Peoples' Congress, you'd get one rather monolithic-looking picture. If you pull the pieces apart and start looking more closely, monolithic is not the word that would spring to mind. And the amount of change going on that the government leaders are trying to simultaneously stimulate and control is pretty awesome. The amount of "voice" in the system is much more diverse, and heading in more different directions than is commonly recognized from outside. And the instruments of control of "dissent" are more subtle and both more or less effective than is recognized. China as a poster child for "economic liberalization" prior to "democratization" is incredibly misleading. And equally misleading to plop it into the same category as Chile, as some hacks are tempted to do.

We do need ways to simplify the portrait of the development process so we can talk about it. Serious folks are continually looking for a "unified theory." I personally think that any such unified theory will be institution-centric, but institutions in a far more catholic sense than is often sued. And any such holy grail will involve a great many more dimensions than the binary "democratization" debate.

Here endth today's lesson.

BTW -- An excellent and even more important, sensible introduction to the "law and finance" research program and the debate it's generated is in the article that Brad links to in LegalAffairs by Nicholas Thomspon.

Brad Plumer continues following an interesting series of studies and debates about institutionalization and whether democratization should come before or after economic liberalization. But as I commented there, and I've said on numerous occasions, I find the sequencing debates fairly sterile and removed from the actual reality of reform and economic, social and political development.

In the real world of reform, it's attitudes and world views -- or what the Russians are always referring to as "mentality" -- that makes as big a difference. And when you get combination that blends old and new, the mix can be interesting, to say the least.

From Halfway Down the Danube on the new Romanian government, a commenter explained the rapid pace with which the new government roared out of the gate at the end of December:

Bernard, this goes to some of the things I like about Basescu, and some of the things that make me a little nervous. Okay, more than a little nervous.

Short version: he's a liberal free-marketer, with all the enthusiasm of a convert. And he's a can-do kinda guy. But (1) his brainstem reflexes are still old-school Communist, and (2) "can-do" somtimes comes out as "authoritarian and totally contemptuous of process".

There's no close American equivalent, but try to imagine a Rudy Giuliani who had been born and raised in Stalin's Russia. Something like that.

Sounds pretty terrifying, huh? But not necessarily all that unusual in the societies transitioning from one system to another.

There is no innocence in the politics of humanitarian assistance.
Jayadeva Uyangoda, head of dept of political science, Colombo University.

The notion of a "core" group of major countries with resources and logistical assets within the region affected by the tsunami makes a great deal of sense. Although just how that "core" is supposed to relate to all the other pieces of the international mosaic has been more than a little unclear since announced by President Bush, but probably best left deliberately vague.

The announcement of the "core" has been seen by some, however, as another Bush "coalition of the willing" designed to cut out the formal mechanisms of multilateral cooperation. But in that prickly reaction to the core, no one seems to be paying much attention to relations within the core itself.

Except in Sri Lanka. Where the decision to send a contingent of US Marines has "raised eyebrows" in some quarters of Colombo and Delhi, with some suspicions that humanitarian aid isn't all that innocent, especially when it involves a movement, temporary or not, into India's sphere of influence.

"India Furious!" said a banner headline in the Monday edition of the Sudar Oli (Beacon Light), a Tamil-language newspaper considered sympathetic to the LTTE published from Colombo.

The newspaper said India was upset that Sri Lanka had not given it proper warning that it would be welcoming U.S. Marines into its "neighbourhood".

But G. Parthasarthy, a former Indian ambassador to Pakistan, told Reuters by telephone from New Delhi that too much ado was being made of the aid effort. "They love conspiracy theories in Colombo," he said.

Parthasarthy said it was clear the United States had got into the aid race rather late "after stringent domestic and international criticism".

For the present, he said -- "and please underline 'for the present'" -- the aid seemed to be just what it was, humanitarian and with no strings attached.

Although having lost more than 15,000 people itself, India has been keen to demonstrate its ability to manage in the wake of the catastrophe. After Indo-Lankan relations reached a nadir in the early stages of Sri Lanka's civil war, they have improved substantially. India is now seen as a supportive neighbor when humanitarian assistance is called for. India has already mobilized five Navy vessels including a hospital ship, a field hospital, six military helicopters and nearly 1000 military personnel for Sri Lanka.

And then there's India's famous general prickliness about anything that could be seen as failing to acknowledge its global and regional status. India has politely refused external aid for itself. As Amb Parthasarthy reminded the Reuters interviewer:

"Ten foreigners come and work two hours a day and the world's media think they've sorted out our problems tickety-boo," he said.

"We have the resources to manage our own situation."

Best not to forget that.