Storm Warning

A lot of people seem to have forgotten all about the Cold War these days. This is apparent when you see someone taking an American action from the 1950s through the 1980s out of that context and analyzing it by today's standards. But never fear, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And the Cold War may be rearing itself again. It seems the Russians may be attempting to kill their enemies by poison in foreign countries.

Alexander Litvinenko has only a 50 per cent chance of surviving the next four weeks, said Alex Goldfarb, who brought him to Britain six years ago and has been visiting him in hospital.

Sources have confirmed that the Russian was taken suddenly and dangerously ill on November 1 while investigating the recent murder of dissident Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Mr Litvinenko was poisoned following a clandestine meeting with an associate at a sushi bar in London's Piccadilly.

The ex-KGB man was given documents which claimed to name Ms Politkovskaya's killers. According to the papers, she was murdered by four members of President Vladimir Putin's federal security service, known as the FSB. A source close to Mr Litvinenko claimed he had been the victim of a revenge attack by the increasingly hard-line Russian regime.

The source added: "He is convinced that he has been poisoned at the instigation of President Putin."

Any suggestion that Putin's men are attacking their enemies on British soil is bound to place serious strain on relations between the two countries - and raises the ghosts of Cold War scandals such as the assassination of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident murdered with a poison-tipped umbrella.

Scotland Yard confirmed last night that the Litvinenko case was being investigated as a 'suspicious poisoning' and that his condition was 'serious, but stable'.

It was also clear that MI5 had launched an urgent operation.

Senior security sources told The Mail on Sunday that the Russian had been poisoned with thallium, a virulent toxin that can cause death within ten hours.

Thallium was a favorite of the old KGB. I posted earlier about the nationalization of Russian industries. Now it also seems that the sword and the shield may again be rising.

Reconciling The Wings

Mark Steyn notes with some dismay the two types of Republicans in existence at the moment. One school of thought is that which supports the war as the central issue. The other is one which treats the war as peripheral. Therein lies a major problem for the future.

If Milton Friedman had to die, then a week after the defeat of a Republican Congress that had apparently forgotten every lesson Friedman taught in Free To Choose is eerily apt timing. As it happens, had ill health not intervened, Professor Friedman would have been disembarking round about now from a National Review post-election cruise with yours truly and various other pundits and commentators.

Instead, we were obliged to sail without him, and in the days that followed I found myself wondering what the great man would have made of the most salient feature of our deliberations: On the one hand, there are those conservatives for whom the war trumps everything and peripheral piffle like "No Child Left Behind" can be argued over when the jihad's been seen off. On the other, there are those conservatives for whom the war is peripheral and, insofar as it exists, it doesn't begin to mitigate the abandonment of Friedmanite principles on public spending, education and much else. There is a huge gulf between these two forces, to the point where the War Party and the Small Government Party seem as mutually hostile as the Sunni and Shia on their worst days. If the Republicans can't reunite these two wings before 2008, they'll lose again and keep on losing.

Shortly after the election when people were pointing fingers about why the Republicans lost, I noted:

Actually, I think that both groups are correct, oddly enough. The Republican-conservative coalition depends on certain conservative tenets being a bedrock foundation for the Republicans. But at the same time, conservatives must realize that there are times when moderation rather than ideological purity are the better way to go. That was Reagan's strong suit, being able to stand on the truly important issues while yielding enough on other things to make it all work.

I think that reasoning is correct, as does Steyn:

It has been strange for me in these days since the election to spend so much time with so many figures I admire and to find that each group barely recognizes each other's concerns. The War Party is the War Party, the Small Government Party is the Small Government Party, and ne'er the twain shall meet, apparently. That way lies disaster: You can't be in favor of assertive American foreign policy overseas and increasing Europeanization domestically; likewise, you can't take a reductively libertarian view while the rest of the planet goes to pieces. Someone in the GOP needs to do what Ronald Reagan did so brilliantly a quarter-century ago:reconcile the big challenges abroad with a small-government philosophy at home. The House and the Senate will not return to Republican hands until they do.

Reagan's genius was to be able to hold to the core values while still being able to work with the middle. He is sorely missed right now.

By The Government And For The Government

The Washington Post has an article about the growing trend in Russia of the government seizing control of private industries through strongarm tactics. It amounts to a redistribution of wealth to the bureaucrats who run the government and to political cronies. And it is happening more and more all the time.

What happened next has become a common occurrence for companies that are too successful in Vladimir Putin's Russia: VSMPO-Avisma was taken over by the state.

In industries such as energy, aviation, engineering, mining and car manufacturing, private companies that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union are being brought back under state control or consolidated in the hands of businessmen loyal to the authorities. Government ministers and Kremlin insiders now sit on the boards of the country's largest companies.

And Kremlin Inc.'s appetite for control shows no sign of abating. According to Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior analyst at the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow, the Kremlin is also eyeing new stakes in energy as well as diamond extraction, metallurgy and machine building.

The Kremlin defends the swelling economic role of the state as an essential element in the creation of powerful companies that can compete in the global economy. The takeovers are also officially called a necessary reversal of dubious privatizations in the 1990s that deprived the state of income and strategic assets crucial to Russia's security.

But the emergence of the government as a preeminent business player has also led to charges that the Kremlin is using its vast powers to force itself on unwilling partners, and is wielding its new economic clout as a foreign policy weapon while enriching political insiders.

This effective renationalization of key industries is also a retreat from the goals of privatization, a pillar of Russia's efforts to become a market economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The drive to put property in private hands stemmed from a belief that such companies would be more efficient, and more attractive to investors, than the industrial dinosaurs of Soviet times.

Read it all, it is a very scary scene right now. The Russian government is also going after foreign companies with the strongarm tactics. Oil companies in particular are at risk as the government uses investigations as a way to force their will on these companies. Hmmm. Where have I heard that tactic being discussed before?

Forward Into The Past

Ron Suskind, writing in the Washington Post, gives the incoming Democratic Congress advice. He starts out by saying there are two schools of thought right now. One is to actually try and lead, the other is to look into the past. Suskind, while giving lip service to the idea of actually trying to govern, focuses almost exclusively on how to lead boldly into non-stop, endless investigation. Damn the idea of actually governing, attack!

First, the Democrats must broker a separation of powers. The show horses are their putative candidates for president, especially in the Senate, and the party's leadership in both chambers. Keep them above the fray, focusing on proposals for the future and the new "action plans," especially in foreign policy. But unleash the pit bulls: the committee chairs, their seconds and investigators who will dig relentlessly, identify targets and thus, inevitably, leave themselves vulnerable in their next reelection campaigns.

I've spent the past several years investigating various aspects of the Bush administration — including economic policy and the battle against terrorism — so I know there are so very many targets for the Democrats to choose from. However, there is not unlimited public patience for such efforts. The Democrats should therefore start with the freshest data: Exit polls from the midterm elections showed that concern about Iraq was matched by broader concerns about terrorism and, surprisingly, government corruption.

Suskind, is one of the sources of a number of the memes that circulate freely on the left, of course. He's been after this administration for years, so this is hardly a surprise. His advice to try to separate leading from attacking rings quite hollow. He wants everyone in the world subpoenaed, sooner rather than later. He also has one extraordinary piece of advice on how to destroy enemies:

Some Republicans would disagree. The goal of an investigation, and public hearings, they argue, is to destroy the targets. Ruin them, and whatever public purpose they champion is ruined as well. You have to make it personal. That's what people understand — and that's what will create a public "moment" at a hearing table, one that will echo forward, even if the events in question are long passed.

Over in the people's chamber, some House investigators are quite clear on how to make things personal: Force administration officials to say that they lied or to take the Fifth Amendment.

That last sentence kind of says it all. There is no agenda to actually investigate to reach the truth. This is advice to force what are no more than show trials with predetermined outcomes. After years and years of denouncing McCarthyism, this is exactly what is being promoted. Perhaps it would be a good thing to remember that show trial moments can backfire rather badly. One only has to look at how the McCarthy investigations ended.