Read It and Weep

The Legal Year in Review

By Andrew Cohen
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, December 29, 2006; 12:00 AM

The good news from the world of the law in 2006 is that we did not for once in recent memory have to endure an avalanche of vapid news coverage about a solitary trashy tale of sex and fame and crime. There was no Michael Jackson molestation trial or Kobe Bryant rape trial or Laci Peterson saga to draw our attention away from trials and cases and legal issues of true merit.

The bad news from the world of the law in 2006 is that we didn't take that extra time given to us by divine providence and follow or absorb with any depth or sense of passion or outrage the truly monumental and generally ominous things that were done in the law, in our name, in this fifth-going-on-sixth year of the legal war on terrorism. Tens of millions of Americans know and care about the identity of the latest winner of American Idol. But only a tiny fraction of those know, too, of the manifold pressures currently pushing upon the rule of law. Hey, you didn't really think that Paris and Britney really were going to end up best-friends-forever, did you?

From our government's own documents, for example, we learned in 2006 that hundreds of the terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, being held now for about half a decade, never took up arms against the United States or were otherwise a part of Al Qaeda when they were captured by U.S. or Coalition forces shortly after we went to war. Our own military has told us this and we have done nothing with it. Those men languish there, in our self-made terror incubation camps, while our legislative- and executive-branch leaders conjure up ways to deprive them of their rights. Can you believe that hot and naughty Miss USA is now in rehab?

We lasted the entire year in 2006 knowing that our executive branch was able and eager to spy upon us, without any warrants or other legal checks or balances upon that invasive power, as part of a domestic surveillance program that many leading legal experts believe is, at best, constitutionally suspect and, at worst, blatantly illegal. We even learned this year that some of that surveillance fell upon anti-war protestors and others who were exercising their constitutionally-protected free speech rights. And we did virtually nothing about it. Do you really think Tom and Katie are married?

Meanwhile, almost all of our federal judges remained silent about the National Security Agency program (and its cousin, the Department of Defense's "Talon" program, whose administrators were caught with data on anti-war activities at churches) except for a brave few. For their part, our national legislators, whom one noted essayist aptly called "corrupt and indifferent," were unable or unwilling, day after day at the so-called "people's house" of Congress, to muster up the courage and force to assure either us or themselves that the White House wasn't permitting or even encouraging widespread constitutional violations. Seriously, what do you think really happened at that stripper party at Duke?

2006 was the year in which the Supreme Court, thanks to the newest Justice, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., declared admissible evidence seized from a home after the police entered via a "no-knock" raid. Writing for a 5-4 majority over a vigorous dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that the "societal cost" of suppressing evidence obtained as a result of these sorts of raids was greater than the corresponding privacy protections citizens would receive from a continuance of the longstanding "knock and announce" rule of police work. Only the civil libertarians among us cried foul when this case was announced this past June. Everyone else remained silent. Can you believe that Starr Jones took on Barbara Walters on television?

Just when we need strong, independent judges most to thwart the concerted effort by the White House to impose a "unitary" theory of governance, 2006 also happened to be the year in which hundreds of thousands of Americans expressed their scorn for the judiciary by voting for anti-judge initiatives in elections all across the country. The worst of these measures was soundly defeated in South Dakota. But in Colorado a similarly goofy scheme netted nearly 600,000 votes before it went down to defeat. These troublemakers were egged on by cynical politicians who successfully pander to their base by labeling judges as anti-American (or worse) when they issue unpopular rulings. I haven't yet been hit by a mobile phone thrown by supermodel Naomi Campbell, have you?

We've also just endured a year in which an over-the-top television host was accused in court of contributing (via a nasty, unfair interview) to the suicide of a mother whose child went missing and who thus became natural fodder for that host's popular but grim show that features daily doses of vengeance and prejudgment on its menu. We experienced a collective moment of Zen when we learned that the icon of corporate greed, Enron's Kenneth Lay, dropped dead in his bathroom in the middle of the night, a la Elvis, just months before he was to be sentenced for fleecing billions. And we discovered that the judge in the Terri Schiavo case, who bravely followed the law, still gets hate mail. Wait, please tell me once again why O.J. Simpson can't go to jail if he confesses to killing Nicole and Ron?

2006 was not a good year for the Constitution. It was not remotely a good year for the concept of separation of powers in government or for the idea that our system works best when there are sufficient checks on the excesses of one branch over another. It was not a good year for opponents of an imperial presidency or for supporters of a concerned and compassionate Congress. It was not a year that offers a lot of hope that things will get any better, or even stabilize, in 2007.

So we got out of the law this year what we deserved from it. And hopefully we will come to realize in 2007 and beyond that if we continue to ignore and neglect the most important and weighty issues that confront the Constitution, its power and authority will erode, slowly but surely, until one of the best ideas ever conceived by man is relegated to being just another dusty, historical document.

Andrew Cohen writes Bench Conference and this regular law column for washingtonpost.com. He is also CBS News Chief Legal Analyst. His columns for CBS can be found online here.

More Argument for Higher Fuel Taxes

Why can't most people understand this? Maybe, they all like the idea of a free lunch.


At Witz’ End: No Free Lunch at CAFE
You can’t get fuel economy for free.

by Gary Witzenburg

(2006-12-27)

There are those who understand and accept the laws of physics, and those who don't. Unfortunately, the latter group is a vast majority with no technical education or experience and clearly includes every lawmaker, environmentalist, and media member who believes that CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) needs to be substantially increased.

To believe that, these technically challenged people must believe: 1) that U.S. automakers continue to lag behind imports in fuel efficiency, 2) that they are withholding fuel economy technology that would make everyone's vehicles far more fuel efficient than they are today, but otherwise unchanged 3) that they must be forced to provide the higher mileage their customers demand, and 4) that 40-50-mpg vehicles - even if technically feasible - will offer the same features and capabilities at the same prices as today's 20-30-mpg cars and trucks.

But those armed with engineering knowledge and facts know the unfortunate truth.

Domestic makers can offer real data proving otherwise all day long, but people believe what they want to believe. And for some masochistic reason, they still want to believe their home teams are losing. Yes, at the dawn of CAFE in the wake of the 1970s fuel crises, American cars were less fuel efficient than European and Japanese models because they were bigger and heavier, and because fuel economy was not a high priority with U.S.-market gas ridiculously cheap. Today, with domestics selling plenty of excellent small cars and off-shore brands marketing more and more large, heavy luxury cars and trucks, that is not even remotely true. Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, fuel economy is a top priority for everyone, everyone is competitive and any differences between competing vehicles are small.

There is no magic technology…and if there were, why would American makers withhold it when superior fuel economy is a HUGE competitive advantage? And why would anyone with half a brain believe that any business must be forced to provide what its customers demand?

Fuel efficiency is mostly about weight. Depending on the rate of acceleration, it takes x amount of energy to accelerate y mass to z speed. Once it reaches that speed, aerodynamics play a major role because slipperier shapes require less energy to part the air. No one should be surprised that big, heavy, brick-shaped trucks burn a lot more fuel than small, light, sleekly shaped cars. Driving style (jerky/aggressive vs. smooth and gentle), tire rolling resistance, accessory loads, and even powertrain technology play much a smaller roles. Increasing efficiency through expensive technology usually adds more cost than benefit at U.S. gas prices. Smaller displacement reduces performance and load capability with little economy benefit, since a smaller engine works much harder than a larger one to pull the same load.

Engineers can reduce a vehicle's fuel consumption primarily by reducing its size and weight and secondarily by streamlining its body. Beyond these major factors, what remains are incremental enhancements in powertrain and vehicle efficiency. But the easiest and most affordable improvements were made long ago. What remains are measures worth fractions of miles per gallon at much higher costs.

Cars and trucks weigh what they do primarily because of their capabilities. They are the size and weight they are to carry what they do, perform as they do, tow what they can, and protect occupants in crashes as well as they do, at a given price level. A higher-economy SUV, for example, is by definition smaller and less capable. What combination of features and capabilities are buyers willing to sacrifice for higher efficiency: Cargo capacity? Off-road or all-weather capability? Towing capability? Roominess? Ride? Occupant protection? Affordability?

CAFE mandates the sales-weighted average economy of the total "fleets" of cars and trucks each company sells each year. It therefore reflects the "mix" of vehicles - the proportion of smaller to larger ones - an automaker sells, not the efficiency of individual vehicles within that mix. A full-line automaker naturally has a lower CAFE than most smaller companies because it sells more larger cars and trucks. To meaningfully raise its CAFE, an automaker has to downsize its mix of vehicles by convincing its customers to buy more, smaller, more fuel-efficient models and fewer of the larger, less efficient ones most Americans prefer.

"If you want people to eat less, you raise the price of food," GM Product Development Vice Chairman Bob Lutz once sagely said. "Instead, what the government is trying to do with CAFE is fight national obesity by making the clothing industry manufacture only small sizes."

Those who naively push for higher CAFE believe they'll get 50-mpg cars and 40-mpg SUVs with the same safety and capability they enjoy today at about the same price. They think they can have something for nothing - the proverbial "free lunch" - because they desperately want it. Ain't gonna happen, folks, because no one has figured out how to repeal those pesky laws of physics. What they'll get with higher CAFE is exactly what most Americans do not want - vehicles that are much smaller, lighter, less capable, less safe, and more expensive.

Contrary to what politicians and the popular press want us to believe - and as much as we all wish there were - there is no free lunch at this CAFE.

Carter on Israel and Palestine

I have recently finished reading (actually listening to the audio book) on President Jimmy Carter's recent book entitled "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” (Simon & Schuster, November 2006). As you can see from the sample commentaries below and these web references, this book has been controversial, to say the least.

For a Zionist view of the errors of the Carter book, see:

http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2006/12/carters-palestine-israel-book-its-even.html


The Anti-Discrimination League has also checked in to condemn the book:

http://www.adl.org/israel/carter_book_review.asp

The following web address presents Carter's summary chapter:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Books/story?id=2680021&page=1

Read this (or, preferably, the whole book) and draw your own conclusions. As for me, here are a few thoughts:

1. The title is certainly controversial, perhaps un-necessarily so. On the other hand, this provocative title has probably served to get the book's ideas debated.
2. Presumably, there are many errors of fact and appreciation in Carter's presentation. I am not really competent to judge these. But even if we discount the questionable "facts", Carter's main line of reasoning seems plausible.
3. Carter's prescriptions, summarized in the last chapter of the book, seem evident to me and have seemed so long before I read this book. Israel is simply not promoting its long-term interests by its current policies and practices. Likewise, the United States should encourage a change in Israel's approach, rather than support current erroneous approaches either explicitly or implicitly.

The following web site presents the so-called "Geneva Accord" referred to in the book and its summary chapter:

http://www.bitterlemons.org/docs/geneva.html

[By the way, the Bitterlemons site provides very interesting Israeli and Palestinian opinions on matters important in that region. If you are really interested in this subject, sign up for their free electronic newsletters.]

December 14, 2006, New York Times

Carter View Of Israeli' Apartheid' Stirs Furor

By JULIE BOSMAN

On Tuesday night in Phoenix, after signings and interviews to promote his new book, ''Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,'' President Jimmy Carter made a hastily arranged visit: an hourlong gathering with a group of rabbis.

''We ended up holding hands and circled in prayer,'' Mr. Carter said in a telephone interview from Phoenix, adding that the rabbis requested the meeting to discuss his book.

It was an unusual interruption during an unusually controversial book tour, which began with a few faint complaints last month and has escalated to a full-scale furor, with Mr. Carter being trailed by protesters at book signings, criticized on newspaper op-ed pages and, on the normally sedate ''Book TV'' program on C-Span2, being called a racist and an anti-Semite by an indignant caller.

Such backlash is triggered by Mr. Carter's assertions that pro-Israel lobbyists have stifled debate in the United States over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; that Israelis are guilty of human rights abuses in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories; and that the editorial pages of American newspapers rarely present anything but a pro-Israel viewpoint.

But the bulk of outrage has come from his use of the word apartheid in the title, apparently equating the plight of today's Palestinians to the former victims of government-mandated racial separation in South Africa.

Jewish groups have responded angrily, saying that Mr. Carter's claims are dangerous and anti-Semitic. But Mr. Carter is steadfastly defending the book, saying he believes there is a valid comparison between Israelis and the white South Africans who oppressed blacks.

''It was obviously going to be somewhat provocative,'' Mr. Carter said of the title. ''I could have said 'A New Path to Peace' or something like that.''

But Mr. Carter said he felt apartheid was the most pertinent word he could use, and in retrospect he would not change any of the book's content.

His book details his version of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beginning with the 19th century. He concludes that Israel is now following a ''system of apartheid,'' in which Israelis are dominant and Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights.

The book was published Nov. 14 by Simon & Schuster. It is at No. 7 on The New York Times's best-seller list, and has sold more than 68,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, which measures 60 to 70 percent of a book's sales.

In the interview Mr. Carter defined apartheid as the ''forced separation of two peoples in the same territory with one of the groups dominating or controlling the other.'' Under that definition, he said, the United States practiced a form of apartheid during its ''separate but equal'' years of segregation.

Opposition to the book has appeared widely on newspaper editorial pages, including in The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In an essay titled ''It's Not Apartheid,'' Michael Kinsley lambasted the book in The Washington Post on Tuesday. ''It's not clear what he means by using the loaded word 'apartheid,' since the book makes no attempt to explain it, but the only reasonable interpretation is that Carter is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa,'' Mr. Kinsley wrote.

In The Jerusalem Post, David A. Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, called the book ''outlandishly titled.''

Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said: ''The title is to de-legitimize Israel, because if Israel is like South Africa, it doesn't really deserve to be a democratic state. He's provoking, he's outrageous, and he's bigoted.''

This week the Anti-Defamation League began running ads criticizing Mr. Carter in major newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Mr. Carter has also fought off charges that he misappropriated material in a book by Dennis Ross, a former envoy to the Middle East who is now a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News.

And Kenneth W. Stein, an adviser to Mr. Carter, resigned last week from the Carter Center after calling the book ''replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.''

Mr. Carter contradicted those claims, saying he had never read Mr. Ross's book ''The Missing Peace.'' ''I wrote every word myself,'' he said. ''I didn't plagiarize anything.''

Mr. Carter has a longstanding interest in the Middle East conflict. When he won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the prize committee cited his role in the 1978 Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt.

Mr. Carter wrote in an essay in The Los Angeles Times on Friday that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's lobbying efforts have produced a reluctance to criticize the politics of the Israeli government. The editorial boards of major American newspapers and magazines, he continued, have exercised self-restraint on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians.

A vocal pro-Palestinian viewpoint, he said, is ''nonexistent in this country to any detectable degree.''

Which is the claim that Mr. Foxman said he found most offensive. ''The reason he gives for why he wrote this book is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media,'' he said. ''What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States.''




A president remembers

The Carter version

Dec 13th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid By Jimmy Carter Simon & Schuster; 264 pages; $27. To be published in Britain by Simon & Schuster in February Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

JIMMY CARTER won a Nobel peace prize for bringing peace between Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978. Since then he has devoted his career to good causes, mainly through the Carter Centre, which helps to monitor elections and resolve conflicts around the world. Now he has stepped forthrightly back into the Middle East with a book promising to address “many sensitive political issues many American officials avoid”.

How daring. The book has certainly prompted a reaction. A former director of the Carter Centre resigned as one of the centre's fellows in protest at its inaccuracies. Harvard's Alan Dershowitz called the book so biased against the Jewish state as to be “indecent”. A luminary from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy was “saddened” by all the former president's historical errors.

Since some of these critics are what some would call the usual (pro-Israeli) suspects, pro-Palestinian readers may hope that Mr Carter takes on the fabled power of America's Jewish lobby. He does describe the misery of the occupied lands, calls for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders and offers a few risqué paragraphs about a White House and Congress which the former president says have been “submissive” in the face of Israel's expansionism.

This may pass as daring in America. But tweaking the pro-Israel lobby is not the same thing as writing a good book. And this is a weak one, simplistic and one-sided as charged. Israeli expansionism gets the drubbing it deserves; Arab rejectionism gets off much too lightly.

Why? Perhaps because Mr Carter was had at Camp David. Egypt and Israel made the peace they craved by offering the Palestinians not much more than autonomy—and future talks. As Mr Carter now ruefully admits, Israel's Menachem Begin saw peace with Egypt as the main prize and intended to “finesse or deliberately violate” the undertaking to the Palestinians. What the former president does not dwell on enough is the extent to which the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and indeed most of the Arab world apart from Egypt, made Begin's job easy. They rejected the Camp David accords, and not until 1988—a full decade after Camp David—did Yasser Arafat grudgingly accept Israel's right to exist. By then it was a different Israel.

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
By Jimmy Carter.
Simon & Schuster; 264 pages; $27. To be published in Britain by Simon & Schuster in February

Shared Concerns on Energy

Here is an area where the U.S. and Europe have common interests, if slightly different problems. Unfortunately, as this commentary points out, Europe once again cannot coalesce on a policy, making it essentially impossible for the U.S. to enter into the equation. Lugar's proposal, outlined below, should provide a useful starting point for discussion.


The New Threat To Europe

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, December 25, 2006; A29, Washington Post

This year began with a European energy crisis caused by Russia's cutoff of gas supplies to Ukraine, where a democratic government not to the liking of Vladimir Putin had taken power. Because Russian gas passes through Ukraine on its way to Western Europe, the pressure also dropped in Paris and Vienna and Rome -- and Europeans suddenly realized they were dependent for electricity and warmth on an autocracy that was prepared to use energy as a tool of imperialism.

It looks like the year will end the same way. Georgia and Azerbaijan, two other Russian neighbors that have chosen not to kowtow to Putin, are scrambling to find gas supplies by Jan. 1 to make up for Russian cutbacks or to avoid a huge and predatory price increase. So, oddly, is Belarus, which until now has been a Kremlin client -- but which has resisted a Russian demand that it turn over ownership of a key gas transit pipeline. Western energy companies that have invested in Russia are meanwhile reeling from a crude campaign of bullying designed to force them to give up majority stakes in oil and gas fields to Kremlin-controlled companies. Shell has already caved, allowing Gazprom to take a 50 percent stake in a huge offshore gas field.

It would be nice to report that in the intervening months Western governments have taken steps to ensure that Russia, which supplies anywhere between 30 and 100 percent of the gas consumed by European Union countries as well as much of their oil, is not able to use this leverage for political or economic extortion. Sadly, the opposite is true: Though "energy security" has become a favorite topic for discussion at E.U. and transatlantic summits, next to nothing has been done about it.

That's partly because solutions aren't easy. Weakening Russia's hold over European energy supplies requires measures that would be costly and difficult, such as building new terminals for importing liquefied natural gas or new pipelines to carry oil and gas from Central Asia and the Caucasus to Europe.

There's a less excusable problem, however: the failure of European Union governments to agree on either a common energy strategy or a policy for responding to Russia's growing aggressiveness. Some politicians, like German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, propose a new Ostpolitik that would entice Russian cooperation with offers of economic and strategic partnership. Others say the E.U. should refuse to renew an expiring economic pact with Russia unless it stops trying to monopolize European energy supplies.

Though it has a vital stake, the United States has been mostly missing from the discussion. That's one reason a recent speech by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was intriguing. Lugar has been a pioneer of some of the most farsighted U.S. policies toward the countries of the former Soviet Union, including the Nunn-Lugar program for securing and dismantling nuclear weapons and materials.

Now he's proposing that the NATO alliance formally adopt "energy security" as one of its central missions. NATO, he told a German Marshall Fund conference alongside the recent NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, is "used to thinking in terms of conventional warfare between nations. But energy could become the weapon of choice for those who possess it.

"A natural gas shutdown to a European country in the middle of winter," he added, "could cause death and economic loss on the scale of a military attack."

NATO, Lugar said, should resolve to treat "an attack using energy" the same way it would a land attack by conventional military forces -- that is, an attack on one country would compel a response by all. That doesn't mean military action, he said; "rather, it means the alliance must commit itself to preparing for and responding to attempts to use the energy weapon against its fellow members."

Lugar pointed out that NATO used to hold exercises to prepare for the logistical and supply challenge of responding to a Soviet attack. A new exercise, he said, "should focus on how the Alliance would supply a beleaguered member with the energy resources needed to withstand geo-strategic blackmail." This wouldn't be easy, he acknowledged: In fact, "the energy threat is more difficult to prepare for than a ground war in Central Europe." Guarding against an energy cutoff by Russia will mean massive investments in new supply lines and reserve supplies, as well as the means to distribute them in a crisis.

That sounds daunting at a time when NATO has its hands full trying to fight a war in Afghanistan. But the energy threat goes to the alliance's historic purpose: defending democratic Europe from attack by the autocratic and belligerent power on its Eastern frontier. And, as Lugar pointed out: "The use of energy as an overt weapon is not a theoretical threat of the future. It is happening now."

Executive Super-Compensation

This is an excellent article on executive compensation and growing income disparity. Click on the post title above to read the rest of the article.

Gilded age: how a corporate elite is leaving middle America behind

By Krishna Guha, Francesco Guerrera and Eoin Callan

Published: December 21 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 21 2006 02:00, Financial Times

Stephen Schwarzman, chief executive and co-founder of Blackstone Group, one of the world's largest and richest private equity firms, makes for an unlikely champion of the average American.

But minutes before chairing a meeting that will decide how to reward Blackstone's partners for its record profits this year, Mr Schwarzman, whose fortune Forbes has estimated at $2.5bn (£1.3bn, €1.9bn), says he is worried about the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth in the US.

"America is a place where people like to have the American dream, everybody successful," he says in an interview with the Financial Times. "The middle class in the United States hasn't done as well over the last 20 years as people at the high end and I think part of the compact in America is everybody has got to do better."

His concern is that the increasing publicity about the stellar rewards reaped by the relatively few in the financial and corporate world could trigger a political and social backlash....

A Practical (Cynical) View of the Mid East

As cynical as the following editorial souncs, I think that it is a realistic and practical guide. Is there any hope?

December 20, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times

Mideast Rules to Live By

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

For a long time, I let my hopes for a decent outcome in Iraq triumph over what I had learned reporting from Lebanon during its civil war. Those hopes vanished last summer. So, I’d like to offer President Bush my updated rules of Middle East reporting, which also apply to diplomacy, in hopes they’ll help him figure out what to do next in Iraq.

Rule 1: What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language. Anything said to you in English, in private, doesn’t count. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth off the record. In the Mideast, officials say what they really believe in public and tell you what you want to hear in private.

Rule 2: Any reporter or U.S. Army officer wanting to serve in Iraq should have to take a test, consisting of one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer yes, you can’t go to Iraq. You can serve in Japan, Korea or Germany — not Iraq.

Rule 3: If you can’t explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don’t try to explain it at all — they won’t believe it.

Rule 4: In the Middle East, never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person doing the conceding. If I had a dollar for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasir Arafat, I could paper my walls.

Rule 5: Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over before the next morning’s paper.

Rule 6: In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away.

Rule 7: The most oft-used expression by moderate Arab pols is: “We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it’s too late. It’s all your fault for being so stupid.”

Rule 8: Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas — like liberalism vs. communism. They are about which tribe gets to rule. So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war as we once did. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It’s the South vs. the South.

Rule 9: In Middle East tribal politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, “I’m weak, how can I compromise?” And when it’s strong, it will tell you, “I’m strong, why should I compromise?”

Rule 10: Mideast civil wars end in one of three ways: a) like the U.S. civil war, with one side vanquishing the other; b) like the Cyprus civil war, with a hard partition and a wall dividing the parties; or c) like the Lebanon civil war, with a soft partition under an iron fist (Syria) that keeps everyone in line. Saddam used to be the iron fist in Iraq. Now it is us. If we don’t want to play that role, Iraq’s civil war will end with A or B.

Rule 11: The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel’s mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can’t understand how, if they have the superior religion, Israel can be so powerful. Al Jazeera’s editor, Ahmed Sheikh, said it best when he recently told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche: “It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about seven million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.”

Rule 12: Thus, the Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.

Rule 13: Our first priority is democracy, but the Arabs’ first priority is “justice.” The oft-warring Arab tribes are all wounded souls, who really have been hurt by colonial powers, by Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, by Arab kings and dictators, and, most of all, by each other in endless tribal wars. For Iraq’s long-abused Shiite majority, democracy is first and foremost a vehicle to get justice. Ditto the Kurds. For the minority Sunnis, democracy in Iraq is a vehicle of injustice. For us, democracy is all about protecting minority rights. For them, democracy is first about consolidating majority rights and getting justice.

Rule 14: The Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi had it right: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”

Rule 15: Whether it is Arab-Israeli peace or democracy in Iraq, you can’t want it more than they do.

Challenges for Europe

I too am disappointed by Europe's inability to suggest anything positive and its unwillingness to really step up to global responsibilities. Maybe it is just too much to ask. Maybe there are no good new ideas. But, enough with the criticism, however justified, without good alternatives to suggest and a commitment to invest effectively in a better international policy.



'Old Europe' Can Gloat, but Then What?

By Anne Applebaum
Tuesday, December 19, 2006; A29, Washington Post

BERLIN -- On the day James Baker's Iraq report was published, I gritted my teeth and waited for the well-earned, long-awaited, Franco-German "Old Europe" gloat to begin. I didn't wait long. "America Faces Up to the Iraq Disaster" read a headline in Der Spiegel. In the patronizing tones of a senior doctor, Le Monde diagnosed the "political feverishness" gripping Washington in Baker's wake. Suddeutsche Zeitung said the report "stripped Bush of his authority," although Le Figaro opined that nothing Baker proposed could improve the "catastrophic state" of Iraq anyway.

And then, for two weeks . . . silence. If there are politicians, academics or journalists anywhere in Germany and France who have better ideas about how to improve the catastrophic state of Iraq, they aren't speaking very loudly. There is no question that America's credibility has been undermined by the Iraq war, in "Old Europe" as everywhere else. There is no question that America's reputation for competence has been destroyed. But that doesn't mean there are dozens of eager candidates, or even one eager candidate, clamoring to replace us.

There is, it is true, quite a lot of wishful thinking around. "Iraq is a disaster -- now we will have to clean up the mess," one German diplomatic acquaintance told me. "Germany Mulling Bigger Role in Iraq" read another Der Spiegel headline. But Germany is notoriously averse to sending soldiers, or anyone else, anywhere near combat. At the moment German politicians cannot even agree on whether their troops should be allowed to fight in Afghanistan, where they have been stationed for years. France, meanwhile, has announced that it is removing its troops from Afghanistan altogether. So how, exactly, will this Iraq cleanup take place? What will this "bigger role" be? "We can train judges and police," my acquaintance explained -- after the fighting is over, of course. Whenever that happens.

Scattered across Europe there are also a few diplomatic optimists, people who hope Europe can play "Middle East matchmaker," in the words of one writer, and maybe get the Iranians and Syrians to be more helpful and kind in Iraq -- or at least to stop funding the insurgency. Presumably these are the same optimists who also used to believe that a Franco-German-British diplomatic team could persuade Iran to stop conducting nuclear weapons research. Presumably they didn't notice that the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, held a "Holocaust denial" conference in Tehran last week -- not, perhaps, the clearest signal that he wants to make friends with bien-pensant Europeans -- or that the French president, Jacques Chirac, recently declared that his views on Syria exactly matched those of his American counterpart.

With some exceptions, the weird reality is that most European governments, whatever their original views on the war, are either officially or unofficially opposed to an immediate U.S. withdrawal: Chaos might ensue. And the chaos would be a lot closer to Europe than to North America. Most European governments, officially or unofficially, are also now worried that the next American president will retreat from world politics or become "isolationist."

Nor is there anybody here, of any stature, who believes that Europe -- for all its recent economic improvement, for all its trading power and for all its dislike of American foreign policy -- is going to replace the United States anytime soon. Germany is about to take over the rotating presidency of the European Union, and therefore Germany is discussing E.U. integration policy, E.U. immigration policy and E.U. economics. Germany is not discussing how the European Union will take on a leading military and diplomatic role in the Middle East. And not even Germany wants any of the other potential world powers -- Russia, say, or China -- to replace the United States in the role of dominant superpower.

In this weird reality, there is a very narrow sliver of hope: Maybe now the Germans, and even the French, will finally come to realize that there is no alternative to the transatlantic partnership, no better international military organization than NATO, no real "role" for any of us outside the Western alliance -- even if only because all the alternatives are worse. Maybe the Old Europeans will find inspiration to support and contribute further to the alliance, diplomatically and ideologically if not militarily. Maybe the United States will come to the same realization, too.

Ultimately the only way for the West to deal with the new threats posed by a disintegrating Iraq, a resurgent Iran and a shattered Middle East is through a unified policy -- an alliance whose members are not easily played off against one another -- and a joint strategy.

Joyeux Noel and Glückliches Neujahr to you all.

Repairing Bush's Foreign Policy Mess

Nothing new or radical, but a good summary critique of Bush's foreign policy. To read rest of article, click on the post title above

How Bush can start fixing his policy failures

By Strobe Talbott

Published: December 19 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 19 2006 02:00, Financial Times

The US faces in Iraq what could be the most consequential foreign-policy debacle in its history. The only other contender for that distinction is the Vietnam war. But Vietnam was a unitary state that had been artificially - and therefore temporarily - divided, while Iraq was an artificially united state that perhaps has now been permanently divided. Moreover, Iraq, unlike Vietnam, is surrounded by dominoes.

The origins of the looming -catastrophe go back to the beginning of George W. Bush's presidency. In his first nine months in office, the administration virtually suspended diplomacy in the Middle East and weakened or nullified a range of multilateral agreements. The result was widespread resentment over America's apparent disregard for international law, institutions, treaties and alliances.

After the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration squandered an instantaneous outpouring of goodwill. It rejected an unprecedented offer from Nato to deploy troops alongside US forces in Afghanistan and used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for invading Iraq, in part by "connecting the dots" between Afghan-based terrorism and Iraqi totalitarianism, even though the two phenomena were separate. The Iraq invasion was the high-water mark of Bush unilateralism and the low-water mark of America's standing in the world's eyes.

In the years ahead, the US will need maximum participation and trust from the international community, especially for the "diplomatic offensive" recommended by the Baker-Hamilton Study Group on Iraq. That will require not just a new approach to Iraq but an overhaul of US foreign policy. Yet the reluctance with which Mr Bush gave up on his effort to keep John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations suggests either that he does not understand the extent to which Mr Bolton personified the administration's contempt for the world body - or worse, does not care. Whatever course the president chooses in Iraq, he will need the UN. He should appoint a new UN ambassador who is inclined and empowered to strengthen an institution the US has systematically undercut in recent years. With this in mind, Mr Bush should meet early in the new year with Ban Ki-moon, incoming secretary-general, and help him establish the best possible relationship between the UN and the Congress....

The writer, president of the Brookings Institution, was deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration and is writing a book on global governance

Murder and Russian Politics

What follows is an excerpt from this week's Economist article of Russia. To read the whole article, which in my opinion is one of the best articles on the state of play in Russian politics, click on the post title above.

The Litvinenko affair

Murder most opaque

Dec 13th 2006 | MOSCOW
From The Economist print edition

What a poisoned Russian agent tells us about the way that Russia is governed

THE flamboyant Russian community in London has until recently been regarded by the city's natives with wry amusement. The tycoons and tax refugees at its centre have boosted the price of high-end property, imported expensive soccer players along with their befurred wives and provided useful fodder for gossip columnists. Then Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned.

Never in his life was Litvinenko as important as he has become in death. He was not really a spy, as he has been described, but worked for domestic units of the FSB, one of the KGB's post-Soviet successors. He has been labelled a defector; but few people took the information he brought out of Russia when he fled to Britain seriously. He had always been a pawn in other people's power struggles, and even as a pawn his utility was declining....

... Another theory mooted in Russia is that the sudden spate of mysterious killings—which has claimed others besides Litvinenko and Politkovskaya—is part of the ongoing power struggle inside the Kremlin, in advance of Mr Putin's putative departure from office in 2008. The aim, it is variously said, is to undermine one or other of his possible successors or somehow to force Mr Putin to stay on, which some who have profited during his presidency would sorely like him to do. Whoever is anointed by Mr Putin as his successor will surely “win” the election in 2008; the real competition, it is argued, is occurring now, between Kremlin factions. This idea sees Litvinenko's murder as a symptom of a basic flaw in Mr Putin's quasi-authoritarian system of government: the transfer of power, as mandated by the constitution, is tricky and perilous....

... During a tsar-like televised phone-in with his people in October, Mr Putin made a little-noticed but revealing remark. He was asked, in a periphrastic way, about a tasteless joke he had made in relation to allegations of rape against Moshe Katsav, Israel's president. It was wrong, Mr Putin said, for the issue of women's rights to be used as a weapon in political squabbles. In other words, he assumed that the allegations had an ulterior motive—as they would have had in Russia. This points to the problem at the bottom of Russia's increasingly bitter ties with the West: the Russians' deep conviction that the rest of the world works as Russia does, and that all politics and diplomacy are as cynical and self-interested as Russia's own.

The row over Mr Berezovsky is another example of this way of thinking. Some Russians simply refuse to believe that in Britain extradition cases are decided by the courts, rather than by the government. Likewise, some in the Kremlin were angry that Litvinenko's deathbed accusations managed to penetrate his police guard to be broadcast: they apparently assumed that protection meant arrest.

Try to be nice to the snoopers

The Russians now have a chance to repair their reputation, reassure the world about the security of their nuclear installations (a nagging worry since the Soviet Union's collapse) and prove that law in Russia is more than a political instrument. Russia's qualms at hosting foreign detectives bent on questioning current and former spooks are understandable; any country would feel much the same. But the Russians could, short of compromising state security, offer total co-operation with the British inquiry. Condoleezza Rice, America's secretary of state, urged them this week to do just that.

Both the British and the Russians are trying to appear conciliatory. Yet the co-operation has been tightly circumscribed from the start. As well as being permitted to question their interviewees only via Russian officers, the Scotland Yard detectives seem unlikely to be given access to any serving FSB men. The Russians, meanwhile, have begun their own investigation into Litvinenko's death and what they say is Mr Kovtun's own poisoning, and want to question people in London. That could in theory bolster the British efforts—or it could result in obfuscation, and be used to advance old grievances.

It would not be fair to conclude from any of this that the Kremlin is guilty as charged. But it all amounts to yet another sign that the hopes entertained in the West about Mr Putin when he first took office—that he actually meant what he then said about democracy, and that under his rule Russia could conceivably become a “normal” country—were misplaced. There have been many such signs, from barbarity in the north Caucasus to harassment of foreign oil firms and meddlesome foreign policy. But perhaps none has publicised the murk and cruelty of life in Russia so effectively as the mysterious death of an unimportant man.

Robert Reich on American Capital Markets

I too have trouble worrying about American capital markets as long as its players are earning so much money. For an example on this latter point, see:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116614488587050944.html?mod=home_whats_news_us

or

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/wall-street-and-the-penthouse-effect/?excamp=GGDBwallstreetbonuses



A private-sector group called the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation has just offered up a number of measures to ease up regulatory burdens on companies that list their shares publicly in the US, in order that the US financial market stays competitive internationally. The group has the support of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who has also fretted publicly about American stock exchanges becoming uncompetitive because of too much regulation.

But the idea that American capital markets are losing their competitiveness is total nonsense. Returns to the financial sector in the U.S. are higher than in any other sector of the economy, and now higher than ever before. Investment bankers are awash in money. So are hedge fund managers, private-equity managers, the managers of large pension and mutual funds. Year-end bonuses will hit a record.

Uncompetitive? What are they talking about?

It’s true that the percent of big global initial public offerings listed on U S stock exchanges is declining while the percent of IPOs done through financial centers in London, Hong Kong, and elsewhere is rising. This year, the U.S. accounted for 28 percent of all new equity raised in the world’s largest financial markets, down from over 40 percent in 1995.

That doesn’t mean Wall Street is becoming uncompetitive. Capital markets are now global. So of course other financial centers are going to gain a larger share of IPOs. Meanwhile, Wall Street is doing deals all over the world. Mergers and acquisitions in Europe, China, Latin America. Hedge funds taking in money from all over the globe.

American capital markets are fully competitive. America is still the world’s largest magnet for foreign capital. Foreign investors held over $2 trillion of US stocks last year, more than the total stock market capitalization of all other markets except the UK and Japan.

In fact, foreign companies that list both on a US and a foreign stock market typically trade at a premium over foreign firms that list only outside the US. Why are investors willing to pay more for listings in the US? Because the US capital market is more stable and transparent, and its tough accounting standards give investors better protection. In other words, because of the very regulations that the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation wants to get rid of.

The Committee has come up with a bad solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist. Hank Paulson should disregard their report. To paraphrase an old saying, if it aint broke, don’t break it.

A Well-Intentioned (?) Foolishness

I see that a group of retired military officers and big energy users are calling for steadily increasing CAFE regulations to solve our energy dependence on foreign sources. As readers of my blog know, I feel strongly that this approach is inadequate. Raising CAFE will not per se change consumer behavior. It will take parallel increases in fuel taxes to do so. Perhaps it is not too surprising that this group does not advocate such an approach, given that its non-military members are all large consumers of fuel or petroleum-based feedstocks.

For more on the Energy Security Leadership Council, go to their web site:

http://www.secureenergy.org/energycouncil_about.php

Group seeks tough fuel efficiency standards

Foreign oil called threat to security

BY JUSTIN HYDE
FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF

December 14, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A group of corporate chief executives and retired military generals called Wednesday for the federal government to raise fuel economy standards by 4% a year and take other steps toward cutting U.S. oil imports almost in half from today's levels by 2030.

The push from the Energy Security Leadership Council adds to a growing movement in Washington for toughening fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles, especially the 27.5 miles per gallon standard for passenger cars set by Congress in 1975. Industry executives say the debate around Capitol Hill has shifted from whether an increase is necessary to what form it will take when Congress convenes next year.

The council includes the chief executives of FedEx, UPS and Dow Chemical and top executives from Southwest Airlines and Goldman Sachs, along with several retired U.S. military commanders. They contend U.S. reliance on foreign sources of energy gives adversaries in parts of the world too much leverage over the U.S. economy.

"We're now far more vulnerable than we were in the '70s," said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs' international unit. "The disruption that could occur ... could be extremely serious."

Their main proposal would require federal regulators to reform standards for cars as they did for trucks last year, setting a goal based on a vehicle's size rather than a single number for the entire fleet. Regulators would assume 4% annual increases but could delay those if they found the industry couldn't meet them.

The group also proposed fuel-efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks, as well as more incentives for alternatives to oil such as ethanol. They estimate their proposals would save just under half of the U.S. daily consumption.

While the auto industry has opposed increases in fuel economy standards for years, a number of executives and lawmakers say the change of power in Congress and growing concern about American dependence on foreign oil make an increase likely.

Automakers have not opposed a proposal by the Bush administration to let federal regulators set new standards for passenger cars, but most, including the Alliance for Automobile Manufacturers, object to an automated increase, saying only the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has the expertise to raise standards.

"We believe that technology remains the successful formula for progress toward reducing our dependence on foreign oil," said GM spokesman Greg Martin.

More on the Mess in Afghanistan

See the rest of the editorial by clicking on the post title.


December 13, 2006, New York Times

Op-Ed Contributor

One War We Can Still Win

By ANTHONY H. CORDESMAN

Washington

NO one can return from visiting the front in Afghanistan without realizing there is a very real risk that the United States and NATO will lose their war with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the other Islamist movements fighting the Afghan government.

Declassified intelligence made available during my recent trip there showed that major Al Qaeda, Taliban, Haqqani Network and Hezb-i-Islami sanctuaries exist in Pakistan, and that the areas they operate in within Afghanistan have increased fourfold over the last year.

Indeed, a great many unhappy trends have picked up speed lately: United States intelligence experts in Afghanistan report that suicide attacks rose from 18 in the first 11 months of 2005 to 116 in the first 11 months of 2006. Direct fire attacks went up from 1,347 to 3,824 during the same period, improvised explosive devices from 530 to 1,297 and other attacks from 269 to 479. The number of attacks on Afghan forces increased from 713 to 2,892, attacks on coalition forces from 919 to 2,496 and attacks on Afghan government officials are 2.5 times what they were.

Only the extensive use of American precision air power and intelligence assets has allowed the United States to win this year’s battles in the east. In the south, Britain has been unable to prevent a major increase in the Taliban’s presence.

The challenges in Afghanistan, however, are very different from those in Iraq. Popular support for the United States and NATO teams has been strong and can be rebuilt. The teams have created core programs for strengthening governance, the economy and the Afghan military and police forces, and with sufficient resources the programs can succeed. The present United States aid efforts are largely sound and well managed, and they can make immediate and effective use of more money....

Anthony H. Cordesman is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

European Union Enlargement a Success?

This article provides an excellent look at the issues surrounding recent and possible future enlargement of the European Union. To continue reading the article, click on the title of the post.

Fraught at the frontiers: why Europe is losing faith in its most successful policy

By George Parker and Daniel Dombey

Published: December 13 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 13 2006 02:00, Financial Times

Jean Monnet, one of the European Union's 1950s founding fathers, foretold that in a globalised era, size would count. "Our countries have become too small for the world . . . measured against America and Russia today and China and India tomorrow," he once said.

Europe's leaders have since sought to expand the EU in line with this vision. But enlargement, often cited as the club's most successful policy, has become a political liability. Tomorrow, at a summit in Brussels, the EU's member governments will clash over how much further - and how quickly - the Union can extend to the east.

The debate will raise questions about what it means to be European and whether the EU can carry on growing without grinding to a halt or further alienating its citizens. The outcome and tone of the talks will have hard-edged consequences: is it going to become even tougher for candidates to join the club?

Senior EU officials say this is a dangerous moment. If the bloc sends out negative signals to future members, what consequences could it have for reformers in Turkey, the politically unstable Balkans or former Soviet republics such as Belarus or Ukraine? The world has a stake in the message that comes out of Brussels.

The end-of-year summit gives European leaders a chance to take stock of the club's "big bang" expansion of May 2004, which saw it expand from 15 to 25 members. By the time Bulgaria and Romania join on New Year's day, the EU will have taken in 10 former communist countries and increased its population to 490m, almost half as big again as the US.

So what went wrong with the latest enlargement? The simple answer is: not very much. While some western European countries, including Britain and Ireland, experienced unexpectedly high levels of immigration from Poland and other new member states, economic studies say the migrants filled skills shortages.

Indeed, the creation of a mobile pool of labour - giving Europe's economy some of the flexibility taken for granted in the US - seems to have played a role in pushing EU economic growth above 2.5 per cent, outstripping America. Unemployment across the bloc has at last started falling....

France24

The French government (indirectly) started a 24 hour satellite news service last week. It is not available in most of the US but is accessable (in French, English, or Arabic) at the web address shown below:

http://www.france24.com/france24Public/fr/nouvelles/monde.html

Energy Progressivism

Well worth a read. To read complete article, click on post title. The link to the McKinsey Global Institute report is:

http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/Global_Energy_Demand/index.asp

December 12, 2006, New York Times

The Energy Challenge

The Cost of an Overheated Planet

By STEVE LOHR

The iconic culprit in global warming is the coal-fired power plant. It burns the dirtiest, most carbon-laden of fuels, and its smokestacks belch millions of tons of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas.

So it is something of a surprise that James E. Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy, a coal-burning utility in the Midwest and the Southeast, has emerged as an unexpected advocate of federal regulation that would for the first time impose a cost for emitting carbon dioxide. But he has his reasons.

“Climate change is real, and we clearly believe we are on a route to mandatory controls on carbon dioxide,” Mr. Rogers said. “And we need to start now because the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive this is going to be.”

Global warming is not only an environmental hazard, but also a great challenge for economic policy. Without economic incentives, analysts say, the needed investments in industrial cleanup, innovative low-carbon technologies, fuel-efficient cars and other ways of reducing energy waste will not occur.

Mr. Rogers’s stance is far from universal within the power industry, but it has surprising support, particularly from those, like him, who also produce electricity from carbon-free nuclear reactors.

And despite the Bush administration’s adamant opposition to any limits on fossil fuel emissions, the idea is beginning to pick up momentum in the American political arena as well. Already, California has adopted a policy aimed at reducing the state’s contribution to global warming by 25 percent in the next 14 years.

In Washington, several influential lawmakers, including Senator John McCain, a leading Republican contender for president in 2008, have introduced legislation intended to limit the nation’s carbon dioxide output.

But how would those goals be achieved? Global warming can be seen as a classic “market failure,” and many economists, environmental experts and policy makers agree that the single largest cause of that failure is that in most of the world, there is no price placed on spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Yet it is increasingly clear that there is a considerable cost to carbon dioxide emissions, especially to future generations, as climate specialists warn of declines in farm output in poor tropical countries, fiercer hurricanes and coastal floods that could make many people refugees....

Russia: Hard or Soft?

The following column, reprinted in the New York Times from the International Herald Tribune, neatly summarizes the state of play of the West vis-a-vis Russia. Still not clear where and how to go from here.

December 12, 2006, New York Times

Politicus

For Russia’s Cooperation, a Harder Line May Be Needed

By JOHN VINOCUR

International Herald Tribune

BRUSSELS

Vladimir Putin does not want to be "reviled and isolated," a close adviser to a European government leader was saying the other day.

Could be. But one problem when it comes to mustering opprobrium and ostracism, even in careful doses, is that President George W. Bush and Europe appear incapable of making Putin believe they have the will or the unity to manage either.

So while newspapers were recounting visions of Russia's return to Cold War tactics - murders in London, harassment of the British ambassador in Moscow, silencing BBC broadcasts in Russian - Putin's people went ahead last week further holding up an already defanged UN Security Council resolution on Iran that, if it passes, would only postpone the question of when the world will sanction the mullahs' nuclear program more seriously.

The resolution's delay, now running toward a fourth month, says something. For an Iran expert talking at a symposium, it signifies Iran's strengthening belief that it can get away with anything in moving toward nuclear weapons - with what for some appears to be tacit Russian complicity.

And that without any apparent downside for the Russians, Iran's major supplier of arms and heavy equipment.

In fact, if Russia were somehow producing a Baker Commission report this week on Putin's fulfillment of major strategic goals since 2003, from the point of view of Moscow's nationalist power politics, he would get straight A's.

Putin has pushed and bullied Ukraine and Georgia away from NATO, established and deepened Europe's dependence on Russian energy sources, and elbowed the European Union into near silence in the face of threatened boycotts and Russia's refusal to sign a charter of good conduct between energy suppliers' and their clients.

Through the Security Council, and Bush's current reliance on it, Putin holds a Russian veto and a gatekeeper's prerogatives in relation to the West's hopes to stop Iran. The war in Chechnya, normally a minus-column entry, escapes serious censure because the allies keep quiet about it. A democracy that's flickered out, a fleeting rule of law? To Putin, they're nonproblems, as disposable as paper hats and tinsel.

Alongside Vice President Dick Cheney's supposedly hard-line speech on Russia in Lithuania last May (it reads like softly-softly stuff now), contrast Putin's current behavior and the Americans' faint reaction to it:

Bush meets twice with Putin in the last 30 days and offers him American approval for membership in the World Trade Organization. This, after years of withholding it out of minimal belief in Russia's reform course.

Amazing. For Europe, here was Bush, whose bark is regarded in the European subconscious as ultimate back-up insurance against Russia, giving away something for nothing without a hint of a quid pro quo.

Less than nothing, actually, in terms of Russian contempt. Pocketing the WTO offer, Putin then thumbed his nose at Bush and NATO through an attempt to set up a private dinner with Jacques Chirac in the margins of the Alliance summit meeting in Latvia two weeks ago.

Some Europeans see Bush as cowed. For the most part, they want him to talk directly to Iran. They don't laugh off one American analysis that argues that in refusing the Baker Commission's call to engage Iran directly, Bush seemed to abandon his best route to bypass Putin's barrier at the Security Council and move ahead with or without European allies who will not talk of an eventual military response to Iranian nukes.

In the view of experts at the symposium, the juxtaposition of American and Russian behavior leaves Iran believing it does not have to fear attack. Beyond that, they say, Iran thinks it holds levers over Russia on a number of strategic regional issues, and may be able to buy Russian support as the Iranian nuclear program evolves.

So what to do? The least dismal part in working toward an answer is that the Russians continue to publicly insist that they don't want Iran to have a military nuclear program, and seek the same goal as the Allies.

One response is for the allies to tell the Russians they must stop being a problem on every front. This involves what may seem more like a wish-list than reality.

The official who believes that Putin does not want contempt or a pariah status - without insisting he thinks the West could make this into Putin's fate - enumerated a series of points that could meld into a common European/American admonition.

It would say to Russia that it must be helpful and consistent on Iran, stop attempting to destabilize Ukraine and Georgia, approve a UN resolution giving Kosovo its independence, and accept the idea that the West wants a constructive relationship.

Investment and technical assistance is the carrot. Intensive development by Europe of alternative energy sources to Russia is the precaution.

But getting Putin to move? The answer there, the official said, would be a more united, more coherent front that does not start qualifying the message "when there's a deal in the wind."

He did not mention Bush.

If the Baker Commission argues that Bush is failing in his prosecution of the war in Iraq, the truth is also that Russia's current view of America as its "primary adversary" (the phrase is that of a senior U.S. official two months ago) serves as an accusation Bush has failed as well in his favorable, accommodating judgment of Putin.

Acknowledging this now and acting to reverse it (or just disregarding it) would become an indelible part of Bush's legacy. In any event, Putin's aggressive Russia commands a decision because it's a big part of an existential problem dogging the president's final 14 months: how not to leave office with Iran on track to become a nuclear threat.

For Putin, his favorable legacy at home already looks assured when his time is up (in theory) in 2008. He's the man who retrieved Russia from humiliation and turned it into a nation that counts again.

His reaction to purely verbal contempt coming from abroad? Hah. The only seemingly certain route to shame in Putin's mind would be for him to retreat or show weakness at those points where he's marked out Russia's hard new lines.

The Supreme Court and Global Warming

The following article raises some interesting points of the hearing last week regarding EPA regulation of CO2. Some other interesting articles include:

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30A14F8355A0C738FDDA80994DE404482

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/29/AR2006112900169.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6556413

As the article which follows points out, we will probably need additional legislation. However, even this won't do much, in my opinion, until we motivate individuals and industries to change environmental behavior. Both carrots and sticks (or what I like to call "pull-push" policy) are in order.

COMMENT

HOT AND COLD

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Issue of 2006-12-11
Posted 2006-12-04

Thirty-six years ago this month, President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in a ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. The act—the product of a bipartisan effort extraordinary even for a day when bipartisanship was unexceptional—had been hammered out by a group of senators that included Democrats Edmund Muskie, Birch Bayh, and Thomas Eagleton, and Republicans Bob Dole, Howard Baker, and Robert Packwood. The bill passed the Senate unanimously, prompting Senator Eugene McCarthy to tell Muskie, “Ed, you finally found an issue better than motherhood.” At the signing ceremony, Nixon called the Clean Air Act a “historic piece of legislation,” but he stressed that it was only a first step. “I think that 1970 will be known as the year of the beginning,” he said.

Nostalgia for the Nixon Administration is an increasingly acceptable emotion these days, and it was hard not to feel it last week, when oral arguments were heard in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency. The suit, which has been described as “one of the most important environmental cases ever,” is the first on global warming to reach the United States Supreme Court. The plaintiffs—a group that includes, in addition to Massachusetts, eleven states, three cities, and thirteen environmental groups—hope to compel the Bush Administration to impose limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. If they are successful, the operation of every power plant and factory as well as the design of every new car in the country could potentially be affected. At the center of the suit is the Clean Air Act, and the question of just how ambitious its authors intended it to be.

The Bush Administration’s position, in keeping with its general stance toward regulation but in contrast to its general stance toward executive power, is that its hands are tied. The E.P.A., it argues, lacks the authority to limit greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, because when the act was drafted global warming wasn’t yet recognized as a problem. The “relevant provisions of the law,” it states in its brief to the Supreme Court, are “best construed not to authorize regulation . . . for the purpose of addressing global climate change.” Furthermore, the Administration asserts, even if the Clean Air Act did grant the E.P.A. the power to treat CO2 as a pollutant, the agency shouldn’t—and wouldn’t—exercise it.

Just about anyone familiar with the Clean Air Act can see the White House’s narrow reading of the law for what it is: a deliberate misreading. The act was expressly constructed to allow the E.P.A. to regulate substances known to be dangerous and also substances that might in the future be revealed to be so. Danger was defined as broadly as possible; among the many possible hazards listed in the statute are “effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, manmade materials, animals, wildlife, weather, visibility, and climate.” In a friend-of-the-court brief for the plaintiffs, four former E.P.A. administrators—including Russell Train, who headed the agency under Nixon, and William Reilly, who led it under George Bush senior—point out that Congress clearly directed the E.P.A. to “regulate air pollution based on new and changing scientific information.” The four go on to note that the E.P.A. has, many times in the past, used its authority to control pollutants whose dangers could not have been foreseen in 1970; for example, in the early nineteen-nineties, faced with data on ozone depletion, the agency issued a timetable for phasing out chlorofluorocarbons.

But just because the Bush Administration is willfully misconstruing the Clean Air Act doesn’t mean that it will lose. Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency comes to the Supreme Court via the D.C. Circuit Court, whose three-judge panel issued three disparate opinions on the case. One of the judges ruled for the states. The second ruled for the E.P.A., on the ground that the agency could decline to regulate greenhouse gases if it chose. The third sided with the second, but gave different reasons: the plaintiffs, he asserted, lacked the standing to sue, since they were suffering no particularized harm (beyond the danger to humanity at large). During last week’s oral arguments, the plaintiffs’ standing was the focus of fully half the questions. James Milkey, the Massachusetts assistant attorney general who argued the case on behalf of the states, was midway through an explanation of how coastal regions would be especially hard hit by global warming when Justice Antonin Scalia interrupted him.

SCALIA: I thought that standing requires imminent harm. If you haven’t been harmed already, you have to show the harm is imminent. Is this harm imminent?
MILKEY: It is, Your Honor. We have shown that [rises in] sea levels are already occurring from the current amounts of greenhouse gases in the air, and that means it is only going to get worse as the—
SCALIA: When? I mean, when is the predicted cataclysm?

Meanwhile, from the plaintiffs’ perspective, even a victory could be vexed. Should the court decide that the states have standing and that the E.P.A. has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, responsibility for writing those regulations would still fall to the agency. Given who’s in charge of the E.P.A. these days, it’s hard to see how this would represent a solution. (Imagine entrusting campus alcohol policy to the guys at Delta Tau Chi.)

The Bush Administration’s indifference to global warming might seem at this point like just one of many failures—of will, of imagination, of leadership. In future decades, it will come to seem more significant: at a moment when there was still a chance to avert the worst effects of climate change, the United States couldn’t be bothered to.

The plaintiffs in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency have brought the suit out of desperation. What is really needed, as they would be the first to acknowledge, is immediate action on a scale commensurate with what’s at stake: not an invocation of the Clean Air Act but a new law of comparable vision that would lay out clear—and aggressive—targets for greenhouse-gas reductions. The Democrats should use their newly won congressional majorities to pass such legislation, and President Bush, following Nixon’s example, should sign it. That, at least, would be a beginning.

Envisioning the Future?

I hope that this chilling scenario is off the mark, but, unfortunately, it is entirely possible. The problem that remains is finding a strategy to avoid it.

December 10, 2006, New York Times

Op-Ed Columnist

After the Fall

By DAVID BROOKS

In fall 2007, the United States began to withdraw troops from Iraq, and so began the Second Thirty Years’ War. This war was a bewildering array of small and vast conflicts, which flared and receded and flared again across the entire Middle East, but which were joined by a common theme.

The essence of all this disorder was that the Arab nation-states lost control. Subnational groups — like Hezbollah and the Mahdi Army — and supranational groups — like loosely connected terror networks, the new Sunni and Shiite Leagues and the satellite television networks — went from strength to strength while central national governments toppled and fell. The collapse of national governments led to a power vacuum that the more authentic and deeply rooted social groups sought to fill.

This war had several stages. The first was the disintegration of Iraq. No national institutions could survive the onslaught: there was no impartial justice, no effective law enforcement, no political organization that put loyalty to nation above loyalty to sect or tribe. Absent a government of laws, government by death squads emerged. Militias — with their own hospitals, schools and indoctrination systems — sought to impose order through assassination and revenge.

The Muslim world watched the Sunni-Shiite bloodletting on satellite television and became enraged. Militias, seminaries and terror organizations developed transnational alliances. Shiite uprisings occurred in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Pakistan. Furious Sunnis rallied in places like Egypt, demanding that their leaders preserve Sunni supremacy.

The environment was ripe for new sorts of radical leaders, influenced by Moktada al-Sadr and Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. These leaders were hot, charismatic and divisive. They had no intellectual ties to the old 20th-century Arab nationalism, which was scorned as the model that failed.

Chaos spread as governments in Lebanon and Jordan collapsed. The Palestinian Authority fell into complete dysfunction as Hamas and Fatah waged a low-boiling civil war. Al Qaeda reveled in the bloodshed and spread it with rapturous fury. The spreading disorder vindicated an observation that the historian Michael Oren had once made: that there are really only three nations in the Muslim Middle East: Iran, Turkey and Egypt. The other nations are make-believe. The borders are arbitrary and the governments are artificial.

The surviving governments scrambled to stay in front of their radicalized populations and meddled ceaselessly in the wars around them. Turkey meddled in Kurdistan. Iran meddled everywhere through Hezbollah and a legion of mini-Hezbollahs. The Saudis tried to buy their enemies off, but only ended up financing them. Egyptians spread out everywhere as foot soldiers and assassins, especially after the end of the Mubarak era.

Westerners had a great deal of trouble understanding the ever-shifting conflicts among sects they didn’t understand and tribes they’d never heard of. Early in the war, Americans engaged in a moronic debate about whether Iraq was in civil war, which illustrated that American vocabularies were trapped in the nation-state paradigm, and how unprepared Americans were to understand the non-nation-state world.

Parallels were made, some apt, some inapt, to the first Thirty Years’ War, which decimated Europe in the 17th century. That, too, was a spasmodic constellation of conflicts not among nation-states, but among faiths, tribes and local groupings.

This second version of that war produced a Middle East that looked medieval and postmodern at the same time. The core weakness of Middle Eastern nations was that over centuries Arab society had developed intricate social organizations based on family, tribe and faith. Loyalty to these superseded national bonds. Notions of federalism, subsidiarity and impersonal administration — the underpinnings of the nation-state — had trouble flourishing in these sands.

The Middle East’s weak national ties were ripped apart by the rising forces of the 21st century: religious fundamentalism, global terrorism, economic globalization and transnational communications networks. Efforts to do nation-building without security faced long odds. Efforts to exhort Iraqi and other leaders to behave “responsibly” — as defined by Western nationalist categories — were doomed to failure. The American defeat sealed the deal.

It was a terrible era for those brave patriots fighting for national unity. There was horrific turmoil, and the emergence of sociopolitical organizations whose likes the world had never seen.

Toyota: "Only the Paranoid Win..."

Most of those in the global automotive industry wish that they had these problems. But, one of Toyota's strengths over the years has been maintaining effective challenges before its employees so as to avoid hubris (as much as possible). Bravo.

Paranoid Tendency
As Rivals Catch Up,
Toyota CEO Spurs
Big Efficiency Drive

Culture of Institutional Worry
Drives Mr. Watanabe;
How Paint Is Like 'Fondue'

Finding Limits to Improvement

By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU
December 9, 2006; Page A1 Wall Street Journal

TOYOTA CITY, Japan -- The world sees Toyota Motor Corp. as an unstoppable profit juggernaut, overtaking rivals one by one as it rolls toward replacing General Motors Corp. as the world's largest auto maker.

Not Katsuaki Watanabe. Toyota's chief executive officer is a worried man. He thinks Toyota is losing its competitive edge as it expands around the world. He frets that quality, the foundation of its U.S. success, is slipping. He grouses that Toyota's factories and engineering practices aren't efficient enough. Within the company, he has even questioned a core tenet of Toyota's corporate culture -- kaizen, the relentless focus on incremental improvement.

U.S. and European car makers have spent years struggling to overhaul outdated operations and work practices to better compete with Toyota. By some measures, some of those companies are catching up. Now, driven by a severe dose of institutional paranoia, Mr. Watanabe is trying to move the target.

Mr. Watanabe, 64 years old, wants kakushin, or revolutionary change in how Toyota designs cars and factories. He is pushing Toyota to reduce the number of components it uses in a typical vehicle by half -- a radical idea that would usher in a new chapter in car design. He also wants to create new fast and flexible plants to assemble these simplified cars.

His ultimate aim: Cut at least a trillion yen ($8.68 billion) in vehicle costs in the next three to four years -- the equivalent of about $1,000 a vehicle -- and keep slashing costs at similar rates thereafter. That is on top of one trillion yen Toyota squeezed out of its parts purchasing from 2000 through 2004, an effort led by Mr. Watanabe in an earlier role. By comparison, GM recently lopped a similar amount from its annual costs, but largely by cutting jobs.

Toyota is gaining market share and racking up profits even as its U.S. rivals are in an historic tailspin. Toyota now has 12% of the world-wide car market, including sales from two affiliates, putting it in the No. 2 spot behind GM. It is poised to soon overtake the embattled Detroit auto maker. Mr. Watanabe's formula of relentless improvement, characterized by a series of programs with lengthy acronyms, helps explain why the Japanese company has been able to prosper as American giants wither.

Like most senior Toyota executives, Mr. Watanabe is careful to downplay the company's ambitions in public. His favorite words include jimichi (steady), tetteiteki (thorough), and, especially, guchoku (having an open mind). If it succeeds, Toyota would further pressure Detroit to revamp itself; failure, however, could slow the Japanese company's seemingly inexorable rise....

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