The Game = Iran?

Always entertaining, Marc ("Abu Aardvark") Lynch spends an amazing amount of Foreign Policy's time comparing rapper Jay-Z's hegemonic power with the potentially rising power of his near (but not near-peer) competitor, The Game.

You don't even have to know anything about rap to appreciate this piece (my own knowledge of rap stops abruptly with Straight Outta Compton). Lynch lays out the hegemon's options as well as the challenger's, and you can just read along and enjoy the ride.

The War at Home

Much as I'd rather not beat the Mexico-is-the-new-Colombia meme into the ground, it's worth looking at Ken Ellingwood and Tracy Wilkinson's "Calderon's Drug Offensive Stirs 'Wasp Nest.'" This L.A. Times story portrays a northern Mexico that is now fully militarized and occuped by the federal army.

The force's highly visible presence has caused the local assassins to change tactics, substituting pistols for AKs and beat-up cars for SUVs. In other words, the bad guys now have to get much closer to their targets to kill them, an undoubted benefit--but it remains to be seen how well the army treats Mexican civilians and thus, whether the civilians see the federals as liberators or occupiers.

The signs in the Ellingwood/Wilkinson story aren't encouraging, but then the Mexican army may just be experiencing the same (occasionally lethal) growing pains that U.S. forces met when they faced occupation duties post 9/11:

Activists say soldiers trained for combat, not police work, have run amok at times.

Margarita Rosales, a laundry worker in Juarez, said her son, Javier, 21, was found dead in April after he and a friend were seized by soldiers and federal police after a night of drinking. His body bore marks of a severe beating, she said. Rosales said the friend told her that Javier, an X-ray technician, was singled out because he was heavily tattooed.

"He didn't sell drugs. He wasn't involved in that kind of thing," she said. "If they had found kilos of drugs, kilos of cocaine -- but why? There is no reason why."

Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, human rights ombudsman for the state of Chihuahua, said his office has received 200 complaints of abuse by the military, including allegations of suspects being tortured to extract information, wrongful detention and seven killings. Nationwide, complaints against the army tripled between 2007 and 2009.

Robert Kaplan Interview by Michael Totten

Well worth the read. Totten caught up with Kaplan a few weeks ago, immediately after the end of the Sri Lanka insurgency, and their conversation ranges from the Horn of Africa to the Russian Arctic, with stops in between for how India, China, Russia and Iran will all affect U.S. interests.

Note that both Kaplan and Totten agree that Persian soft power is a strong and possibly decisive factor in places like Turkmenistan.