In one of the bloodiest protests I’ve ever heard about, anti-government “Red Shirt” protesters in Thailand donated blood for their protest to spill at the Thai government headquarters. Their protest was for a new election to be called. They collected enough blood to fill 1,000 standard soft drink bottles. This is definitely one of those things that belongs in the “finger-chopping whacky” category.

The Red Cross has denounced the protest as wasteful and unhygienic because diseases such as hepatitis and HIV can be spread if needles are reused.

A number of Buddhist monks, who are forbidden by law from taking part in political activities, were among the first to give blood.

Today, Iraqs go to the polls to elect a national government that will guide the country through the coming years and the probable withdrawal of US troops. Voting has been going on for days, with Iraqis overseas, police and troops having already voted.

The campaign has been a typical democratic affair. In a country tense with all the random violence, all parties are guilty of faning the flames of fear. Several major Shia leaders are pushing their people to vote because of a widespread fear of returning Baathists. Meanwhile, secular party leaders are warning against a Shia-led theocracy that be subservient to their lords and masters in Iran. While this is typical in a democracy, the risk is that this fear-mongering may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, or that when violence inevitably happens, the stage has already been set for the conclusions people will make.

I just got off the phone with a Western colleague who is working in Iraq and who has been there on the ground for almost three straight years, primarily in Erbil, Kurdistan. He has a pretty positive view on the country and on the elections when we spoke today, despite the fact that more than two dozen people have been killed in election violence, and his comment appears in the title of this post. (This guy works at a private company in an operation that is designed to avoid the typical pitfalls of running a business in Iraq. His office in Erbil has its own generator to make sure they can operate through the numerous powercuts in Iraq. They have invested in a direct satellite-to-internet connection so they do not rely on local providers.)

Al Qaeda’s “local affiliate” has pledged to disrupt the voting process with attacks, but voting seems to be going forward and the hope is that these elections will result in less violence. The bodycount has been steadily dropping for the past few years. And we can only hope that it continues, and that these elections provide some stability to a country that was ranked by the Economist as the most “business unfriendly” nation of 2010.

Qom: the most religious city in Iran; the well-spring of the Islamic revolution; and the location of the latest secret nuclear facility to be discovered. Years ago I passed through Qom on my way back to Tehran from central Iran. Earlier that day I was surprised to spot anti-aircraft and SAM sites sprinkled alongside a gently sloping mountain. It was Natanz, another nuclear facility built partially underground.

More recently Graeme Wood of The Atlantic visited Qom and was saw that:

Despite their conservatism, Qom’s pilgrims seemed motivated not by passion for Ahmadinejad—I never heard anyone say his name, though the “Leader” Ali Khamenei was mentioned repeatedly over outdoor loudspeakers—but by a total denial of politics, and a preference for something much simpler.

One observation of Iranians, universal in Western books, articles and travelogues, is that of the incessant need to talk politics — over tea, in the bazaar or even in a taxicab. This is in stark contrast to other Middle Eastern countries like Syria or Saudi Arabia. It has been noted as a sign of a democratic spirit. Iran’s parliament dates back to 1906, and is one of the oldest in the region. I engaged in countless conversations on politics, with both North Tehran liberals and self-proclaimed Muslim fundamentalists.

Thus Wood’s observation of “a total denial of politics” in Qom struck me. I am curious as to whether this has always been a characteristic of Qom, or is a recent development. Moreover, the alternative: since the beginning of the Green Movement, has the daily political chatter in the Persian Street been quietened? Can people talk openly about politics over tea and in the bazaar without fear of being turned in as a member of the Sea of Green?

Please enlighten me, dear reader.

Sultan Qaboos of Oman took power from his mad father in a palace coup in the 1970s and has ruled Oman as an absolute monarch ever since. Oman is known to be a relatively poor country that recently discovered hydrocarbon deposits, with historically violent religious elements that have remained dormant through the current sultan’s reign. Sultan Qaboos is also a bachelor—while most emirs of the region his age have several wives, Oman’s Sultan is famous for divorcing his wife shortly after taking power and remaining single ever since, with no successor to take his place. Also, if you discuss Oman and its politics here in the Middle East, one of the first hushed comments you’ll hear is that the Sultan of Oman is widely rumored to be gay.

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Between the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia and the peninsula of Qatar is the tiny coastal island of Bahrain. This miniscule independent country is more important than you might think. First, it’s a major non-NATO US ally that regularly hosts US sailors active in the Persian Gulf. It also sits on top a large amount of hydrocarbons. But perhaps even more importantly, it is currently engaging in a political experiment that could have major implications for the future of constitutional and democratic government in the Arab World.

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President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was elected in 2006 as a left-leaning moderate, but he took radical measures after forming an alliance with Hugo Chávez, and his presidency was marked with financial irregularities, a rapid weakening of the Honduran economy, corruption investigations by Mexian and US authorities, and a constitutional crisis. And yet he was power mad—despite holding one of the lowest public approval ratings in Latin America, the legislature was commencing impeachment proceedings against him, and the Supreme Court had invalidated his push for a referendum, he nonetheless pushed ahead to try and amend the constitution in an unconstitutional manner. Before he could succeed, the military, acting on an arrest order of a Honduran Supreme Court Judge, deposed Zelaya and exiled him to Costa Rica in June 2009. This was labeled a “military coup” by the international community and largely condemned—the day after Zelaya was deposed, Barack Obama warned “it would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition.”

But the aftermath of the coup has been remarkably smooth. A caretaker government was lead by a member of Zelaya’s party, Roberto Micheletti. A presidential elections scheduled before Zelaya’s ouster for November 29th proceeded as planned. All political parties participated, including the far-left party that withdrew its pledge to boycott the election. Despite fears and threats of violence, the vote took place fairly calmly, with only one major clash between protestors and police. And Honduras now has a new president, Porfirio Lobo of the centre-right National Party, who won a clear mandate with 55% of the vote (primarily because the rival Liberal Party was split between backing Zelaya or Micheletti). Turnout was about what it had been in the 2005 election. Honduran lawmakers also finalized the outcome by voting by an overwhelming 111 to 14 not to allow Zelaya to return to power, despite pressure from the international community. Opinion polls show that the people of Honduras are still uneasy with the way in which Zelaya was deposed, but at this point, everyone is ready to move on.

The US is “disappointed.” Brazil has expressely stated that it will not recognize Lobo. Editorials in US newspapers are crying that “democracy loses.” For many, the removal of Zelaya by the military remains unacceptable, and everything thereafter is the fruit of a poisonous tree that cannot be accepted as legitimate. This shows how Zelaya and his backers were successful in trumpeting to the domestic and international press to label his ouster a “military coup,” which made its legitimacy hard to swallow.

But this is nonsense. The military removed Zelaya acting on an order of the judiciary, and was necessary to stop the undermining of the balance of powers. Furthermore, we need to stop thinking of the military as some sort of thuggish and fascist institution—in many developing countries, it acts as the final political safeguard. While the courts fulfill this role in most developed countries, the courts are at the mercy of other branches of government if they refuse to respect the rulings of the judiciary, because the judiciary generally has no power to carry out its rulings. In developing countries, the armed forces also tend to be disciplined and organized, a stable institution that enjoys high rates of trust by the general public, and while not perfect, we have seen bloodless coups at work recently in Turkey and Thailand.

Despite Obama’s soppy statement quoted at the beginning of this post, he was doing a good job by speaking Victorian at the time of the coup. The Bush administration made a huge blunder when it gave the mere indication that it supported the coup against Chavez in 2002, which resulted in toxic US-Venezuelan relations. Nixon and Kissinger guaranteed decades of derision and condemnation when in 1973 they refused to deny they supported a military coup in Chile. As always, you should think pagan —as I’m doing, out loud, in this post—but you should speak Victoria, as Obama has done.

But only for so long. Honduras should be commended for its smooth and careful handling of the post-Zelaya caretaker government and election, and with no percievable chance of Zelaya returning to power, now is the time to embrace the new government. Honduras has seen an ipso facto impeachment of a president and now that their great national nightmare is over, everyone should move on.

ENDNOTE: By the time I had finished writing this post, the US, Colombia, Peru, Panama and Costa Rica have indicated they will recognize the election result.

The Telegraph has an interesting article on the internal divisions of Britain’s Conservative Party.

This is a tale of two parties. It starts at a drinks reception in Manchester, where a senior Conservative is talking about prisons. In his view, far too many people are locked up. Like the Tory grandee Douglas Hurd, he thinks jail is an expensive way of making bad people worse.

Try telling that to the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, who will present himself to conference as the nation’s turnkey. Under his “mug-a-hoodie” strategy, the prison population would rise to 100,000 for the first time in history, and “street rats” could expect no mercy.

On a host of other issues, the party is similarly split. For every save-the-planetarian with a gnat-sized carbon footprint, there is someone who attaches more credence to the tooth fairy than to global warming. For every rationalist arguing that Britain’s future is in Europe, there is a Little Englander who fears, quite wrongly, that we are going to become a dystopia of Brussels bylaws and straight bananas.

The Conservative Party gathered together this week is reformist and reactionary, modulated and spittle-flecked, nice and nasty. Janus-faced, it has one eye focused on the future and the other staring at the past. With the Thatcher legacy still unresolved, libertarians vie with social authoritarians.

The concern of which school of conservative thought an opposition party philosophically bases its policy principles is not limited to Britain. It is the same dilemma faced by the opposition conservative party in two largest economies in the world, the United States and Japan. Britain is the test case, as the next general election will take place on or before June 3, 2010. Japan’s next major election is next summer. America’s next major election is in November next year.

Well, as Curzon said: the party’s over. Last night the ruling party of Japan’s 54 year streak of power was finally broken. One could say that a political earthquake has struck Nagata-cho. Or that a tsunami has left them washed up. Or a typhoon has blown a wind of Change™ through the halls of power. No matter how many hackneyed phrases I use I will never measure up to the amazing political coverage provided live on uStream last night by the guys at Trans-Pacific Radio and Mutantrog. Their guerilla pundit show was most excellent. I was amazed at the depth of knowledge these guys had of all the local politicians. I have been long fascinated with international politics and political philosophy, but the minutiae of electoral politics has never been very appealing to me. I also never collected baseball cards. It must be a personality type.

In the age of the internet, when domestic and international politics cross lines all the time, not having a grounding in at the lowest level of political analysis is a weakness. That is something I am aware of, and also the reason I read and listen to the gents at TPR and MF, along with our other blogfriend Observing Japan to get indepth English language commentary on Japanese politics. You should too. Last night the LDP received a royal kick in the knads from the Japanese public, and it was all the more enjoyable with the informed commentary of the TPR, MF and OJ crew. Thanks lads.

Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has ruled Japan almost uninterrupted for the past six decades. It suffered a leadership crisis through the 1990s but managed to keep power largely due to the incompetence of the opposition. In 2001, the party elected as Prime Minsiter its last best hope, a maveric fringe politician known as Junichiro Koizumi. He pushed through structural reforms, most importantly the privatization of the Post Office, the controversy over which led him to disolve the Diet and call a sudden snap election, which resulted in his party winning a record-breaking landslide in the most recent Lower House election in September 2005.

Barely a year after winning that election, Koizumi stepped down without nominating a clear successor, leaving the party to decide who would follow after him. In a three-way race between an old school conservative, a boring moderate, and a “Japanese neo-con,” the later—Shinzo Abe—was the clear popular choice. Abe had only a decade serving as a parliamentarian in the Diet and had little cabinet experience, and his election made him the youngest PM in the modern era and the first born after World War II. Abe was labeled a “Japanese neo-con” and was a nationalist who focused on his pet issues such as patriotic education and needling North Korea over abducting Japanese nationals. Although he started out very popular, he was slammed by more practical issues that affected the lifestyle of the citizenry. He was then slammed by a sleeper issue, the failure to correctly record the national pension records, and saw his popularity collapse. This resulted in the LDP losing the Upper House election to the opposition Democrats, and he spent exactly one year in office and resigned when he couldn’t handle the stress.

Abe was followed by Yasuo Fukuda, a softer, more moderate face of the LDP. But Fukuda was unable to grasp the popular mood and appeal to issues that were relevant to the voting public. Over time Fukuda faced the same problems as Abe and saw his relatively high approval rates steadily drop. Like Abe, Fukuda resigned due to the stress.

Taro Aso was an old school conservative and the eldest son from an elite family heavily entrenched in politics and business. He was the clear favorite to follow after Fukuda resigned, partially because he was seen as the best man to lead the LDP into an election. That was correct at the time. But his repeated gaffes, unpopular attempts to stimulate the economy, and inability to convince the electorate that he was competently aware of the issues has quickly resulted in his steady unpopularity. Although some LDP reformists tried to dethrone Aso before today’s election, he has survived—and despite the party’s woes, many in the ruling coalition are relieved that they finally have a leader who doesn’t cut and run from the leadership the moment

All three of these men were “LDP royalty”—each counted a former prime minister as their father or grandfather. This aspect of Japanese politics won’t immediately change if the opposition wins. DPJ party leader Yukio Hatoyama is the grandson of a prime minister, and his brother sits across the political aisle and until recently served in Aso’s cabinet.

Polls close in just a few hours at 8 p.m. local time, and the results should start to flow in immediately thereafter. If you’re in Japan and understand Japanese, NHK will provide the best coverage. If you’re not in Japan or want instant English coverage, our friends over at Transpacific Radio and Mutantfrog are teaming up with others to provide live, streaming coverage of the results as they come in, the only audio-visual media that will provide this type of live coverage in English. Those of you who are interested should be sure to tune in here.

Long-time blog pal the strategist has been posting on the recurring theme of Leadership as of late. He has two worthy posts What can Chuang Tzu tell us about leading people? and Where can you find good books about leadership? that anyone interested in leadership should go read.

The first post emphasizes the role of a leader as a facilitator: A leader must “create or shape situations where people succeed through their own initiative and effort.” The second post is chock full of resources on leadership that do not use that specific term in the title, and a further discussion of the term itself.

A couple of years back we had a lively discussion on leadership that Peter himself took part in. It might be interesting to see if and how views have changed.

In his latest book Tribes, the famous marketer Seth Godin makes an important distinction between leaders and managers:

Leaders have followers. Managers have employees.
Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.

I think this could definitely extend to military and political leadership. Godin’s point is a manager’s role is that of increasing efficiency within the current paradigm. Leaders on the other hand, break with the past.

Furthermore, Godin stresses in his book that in this day and age anyone and everyone can be a leader of their own movement, if they are willing to take the initiative. In our field this is evidenced both by super-empowered individuals like Osama bin Laden, and the Strategic Corporals on the ground all over the world. I also hope it can evidenced by our current political leaders soon, because it always seems that blog posts on leadership are compelled to refer to the bygone works of Churchill, Sun Tzu and Xenaphon.