Richard's Thoughts & Photos

French Presidential Politics

2007-03-29T07:07:00.000-04:00

As an unabashed Francophile, I am following France's current presidential election fairly closely. I'm not sure that there is much to be learned, but it sure is fun.

The following three articles give a good summary of the state of play, which I should warn you, changes almost daily:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/27/AR2007032701719.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/world/europe/28france.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/world/europe/29paris.html

Moderate vs. Puritan Islam

2007-03-28T11:09:00.000-04:00

I have just finished reading "The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists" by Khaled Abou El Fadl and recommend it highly to anyone wanting to understanding the schism in Islam between what El Fadl refers to as "Moderates" and "Puritains". (Click on post title above to see Amazon's listing and reader reviews for the book. Note that it is a real bargain to boot.)

El Fadl is an Islamic jurist who is Professor at UCLA. He takes an Islamic jurist's look at the Qur'am and how it can be (and, historically was) interpreted in a moderate way and how the Puritans have hijacked the holy book and the Islamic religion in a perverse fashion. His analysis should interest and appeal to Muslims and non-Muslims as well.

He concludes with a short but important chapter on what the moderates must do in order to reassert the primacy of their enlightened view of their religion.

Not a long book and reasonably accessible. Read it for sure.

Shooting The Messenger

2007-03-26T11:15:00.000-04:00

Boy, do I identify with this cartoon. For more cartoons on Gore, click on post title above.

Gore: Don't single out cars and trucks to solve global warming

2007-03-21T16:35:00.000-04:00

Agree with Al Gore in general or not, his advise regarding the automotive industry makes a lot a sense.

Gore: Don't single out cars and trucks to solve global warming

Harry Stoffer | Automotive News / March 21, 2007 - 11:41 am

WASHINGTON -- Automakers have an ally of sorts -- in Al Gore.

In a highly anticipated appearance before Congress today, the former vice president said he supports higher fuel economy standards. But automakers alone should not be expected to solve global warming, he contended.

"Don't single out cars and trucks," Gore said in a lengthy statement before a pair of House subcommittees. He described emissions from motor vehicles as "only a slice of the problem" and not the biggest slice.

Still, the future Gore envisions would be vastly different. He called for an immediate freeze on greenhouse-gas emissions and a 90 percent cut in those emissions by 2050. He did not say exactly how those moves could be accomplished.

The ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, said a freeze, if taken literally, would mean no new businesses, no economic growth and no more people.

Gore also called for:

Taxes on the carbon in fuels, offset by cuts in payroll taxes.

U.S. participation in a new international treaty on climate change, which would follow the Kyoto treaty rejected by Congress and the Bush administration.

Programs that would encourage consumers to generate their own electricity through means that don't release greenhouse gases into the air.

Gore said such steps are needed to deal with "a crisis that is by far the most serious we have ever faced." He has achieved international recognition for his Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.

Auto industry leaders who testified last week before a subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee said they could support a cap on total U.S. emissions. But they said the burden for compliance should be spread across all businesses.

Automakers say that regulators should determine the highest feasible fuel economy standards and that lawmakers should not arbitrarily set tougher standards.

Motivating Good Health Care Research?

2007-03-17T13:50:00.000-04:00

Here is an area about which I know very little, but this article raises some very useful questions.

Race for the prize

Joseph Stiglitz

March 17, 2007 3:00 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/joseph_stiglitz/2007/03/prizes_not_patents.html

Part of modern medicine's success is built on new drugs, in which pharmaceutical companies invest billions of dollars on research. The companies can recover their expenses thanks to patents, which give them a temporary monopoly and thus allow them to charge prices well above the cost of producing the drugs. We cannot expect innovation without paying for it. But are the incentives provided by the patent system appropriate, so that all this money is well spent and contributes to treatments for diseases of the greatest concern? Sadly, the answer is a resounding "no."

The fundamental problem with the patent system is simple: it is based on restricting the use of knowledge. Because there is no extra cost associated with an additional individual enjoying the benefits of any piece of knowledge, restricting knowledge is inefficient. But the patent system not only restricts the use of knowledge; by granting (temporary) monopoly power, it often makes medications unaffordable for people who don't have insurance. In developing countries, this can be a matter of life and death for people who cannot afford new brand-name drugs but might be able to afford generics. For example, generic drugs for first-line Aids defences have brought down the cost of treatment by almost 99% since 2000 alone, from $10,000 to $130.

But, despite the high price they pay, developing countries get little in return. Drug companies spend far more money on advertising and marketing than they do on research, far more on research for lifestyle drugs (for conditions like impotence and hair loss) than for lifesaving drugs, and almost no money on diseases that afflict hundreds of millions of poor people, such as malaria. It is a matter of simple economics: companies direct their research where the money is, regardless of the relative value to society. The poor can't pay for drugs, so there is little research on their diseases, no matter what the overall costs.

A "me-too" drug, for example, which nets its manufacturer some portion of the income that otherwise accrues only to the company that dominates a niche, may be highly profitable, even if its value to society is quite limited. Similarly, companies raced to beat the human genome project in order to patent genes such as that associated with breast cancer. The value of these efforts was minimal: the knowledge was produced just a little sooner than it would have been otherwise. But the cost to society was enormous: the high price that Myriad, the patent holder, places on genetic tests (between $3,000 and $4,000) may well mean that thousands of women who would otherwise have been tested, discovered that they were at risk, and taken appropriate remediation, will die instead.

There is an alternative way of financing and incentivising research that, at least in some instances, could do a far better job than patents, both in directing innovation and ensuring that the benefits of that knowledge are enjoyed as widely as possible: a medical prize fund that would reward those who discover cures and vaccines. Since governments already pay the cost of much drug research directly or indirectly, through prescription benefits, they could finance the prize fund, which would award the biggest prizes for developers of treatments or preventions for costly diseases affecting hundreds of millions of people.

Especially when it comes to diseases in developing countries, it would make sense for some of the prize money to come from foreign assistance budgets, as few contributions could do more to improve the quality of life, and even productivity, than attacking the debilitating diseases that are so prevalent in many developing countries. A scientific panel could establish a set of priorities by assessing the number of people affected and the impact on mortality, morbidity, and productivity. Once the discovery is made, it would be licensed.

Of course, the patent system is itself a prize system, albeit a peculiar one: the prize is temporary monopoly power, implying high prices and restricted access to the benefits that can be derived from the new knowledge. By contrast, the type of prize system I have in mind would rely on competitive markets to lower prices and make the fruits of the knowledge available as widely as possible. With better-directed incentives (more research dollars spent on more important diseases, less money spent on wasteful and distorted marketing), we could have better health at lower cost.

That said, the prize fund would not replace patents. It would be part of the portfolio of methods for encouraging and supporting research. A prize fund would work well in areas in which needs are well known - the case for many diseases afflicting the poor - allowing clear goals to be set in advance. For innovations that solve problems or meet needs that have not previously been widely recognised, the patent system would still play a role.

The market economy and the profit motive have led to extremely high living standards in many places. But the health care market is not an ordinary market. Most people do not pay for what they consume; they rely on others to judge what they should consume, and prices do not influence these judgments as they do with conventional commodities. The market is thus rife with distortions. It is accordingly not surprising that in the area of health, the patent system, with all of its distortions, has failed in so many ways. A medical prize fund would not provide a panacea, but it would be a step in the right direction, redirecting our scarce research resources toward more efficient uses and ensuring that the benefits of that research reach the many people who are currently denied them.

It's About Time, But Don't Be Too Subtle

2007-03-14T16:20:00.000-04:00

I am glad that someone is taking the lead here, although more directness and coordination (e.g., through AAMA) stands a better chance of driving change (maybe). To read the rest of the article, click on post title.

Industry chiefs: Higher CAFE is not the only answer

Harry Stoffer | Automotive News / March 14, 2007 - 12:44 pm / UPDATED: 3/14/07 2 P.M.

WASHINGTON -- Government should take steps to boost consumer demand for fuel-efficient vehicles, top auto industry executives told lawmakers today.

Simply raising fuel economy standards is not the answer to the threat of global warming or the nation's energy supply concerns, the executives argued.

In Europe, automakers achieve fuel economy levels that some members of Congress want to require in the United States. But much higher gasoline prices in Europe create consumer demand, Chrysler group CEO Tom LaSorda said in prepared testimony before a panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

LaSorda did not call directly for higher U.S. gasoline taxes but said "a new and unique formula" for the United States should include "harnessing of market forces." Other company executives noted that Chrysler has endorsed higher gasoline taxes in the past.

The House panel sought testimony on the industry's role in combating global warming and improving energy security. Called to testify today at the unusual hearing were the CEOs of the Detroit 3; the president of Toyota Motor North America Inc., Jim Press; and UAW President Ron Gettelfinger.

'New approach'

U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the full committee, signaled before the hearing that he is receptive to ideas beyond corporate average fuel economy standards. In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, March 13, Dingell said: "We need a new approach." He did not elaborate.

....

Steroids Scandal

2007-03-14T07:31:00.000-04:00

Now I understand it all. Click on post title to read rest of parody.

The Atlantic Monthly | April 2007

Inside the Bush administration’s steroids scandal

The Shots Heard 'Round the World

by John Freeman Gill

.....

Illustrations by Steve Brodner

An open letter from Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig:

ith Opening Day upon us and Hank Aaron’s hallowed career home-run record likely to come under controversial assault this season, it is with some urgency that I share with you disturbing new revelations about the conduct of several current and former Bush administration heavy hitters.

In recent weeks, baseball’s ongoing investigation, led by former Washington Senators left fielder George Mitchell, has turned up damaging new evidence.

Put simply, it has become clear that when key players in the Bush administration appeared in 2005 before the reform committee of Major League Baseball and declared under oath that they had never knowingly used steroids while conducting foreign policy, they were not being truthful with the American public. Formerly classified urine samples conclusively confirm the charges—first leveled in former Oakland A’s star Jose Canseco’s book, Juiced—that Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz regularly injected each other in the buttocks with anabolic steroids during the 2001 and 2002 seasons....

American Islam

2007-03-11T12:54:00.000-04:00

I have recently finished reading "American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion" by Paul M. Barrett and recommend it most highly. Through a series of sketches of American Muslims he describes the diverse counter-currents of that religion as it is practiced in the United States. For me, this diversity of thought and action was an eye opener. Along the way, the author shows the reactions of non-Muslim Americans to their new or old Muslim neighbors, not always edifying on both sides.

Here is a list of the profiles:

The Publisher (Osama Siblani, publisher of The Arab American News in Dearborn, MI)
The Scolar (Kaled Abou El Fadl, a liberal Muslim who seemed interesting enough to drive me to buy several of his books)
The Imam (Siraj Wahhaj, of a mosque in Brooklyn and much in demand as a preacher in other parts of the country)
The Feminist (Asra Normani, of Morgantown, WVa)
The Mystics (focusing on American Sufis)
The Webmaster (Sami Omar al-Hussayen formerly of Moscow, Idaho, but since deported after being found not guilty of terrorism charges)
The Activist (Mustafa Saied who has rejected Wahhabism for a much more tolerant Islamic belief).

Read this book. It reads relatively quickly and is well-worth the investment in time. I can recommend the following review in The Washington Post on the book by Reza Aslam (whose book on Islam I recommended some time ago):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/15/AR2007021501527.html

An online discussion with the author in The Washington Post also is interesting:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/02/16/DI2007021601412.html

Press Source Confidentiality?

2007-03-07T06:34:00.000-05:00

I have been watching the PBS series on the press with much interest. One of the issues raised is whether reporters should have immunity from naming sources. Much more subtle that I had realized.

In today's New York Times, there is an excellent column on the subject. Read the entire column by clicking on the post title. Here are a few excerpts.

Not All Sources Are Equal

By ANTHONY LEWIS

Published: March 7, 2007, New York Times

Boston

THE conviction yesterday of I. Lewis Libby Jr. on perjury and other charges, after a trial with a parade of press witnesses, leaves a legacy of intensified concern about legal proceedings that force journalists to disclose confidential sources. It is a legitimate and urgent concern. Without the ability to promise confidentiality, the press would have been unable to report notorious abuses of government power from Watergate through the Bush administration’s violations of fundamental rights in the “war on terror.”

But it is much easier to see the danger than to agree on a way to stop it. That is because there are compelling interests on both sides of the problem, as many in the press are loath to admit.

....

THOSE are some of the conflicting interests at stake on the issue of a testimonial privilege for the press. Can Congress figure them all out in a qualified privilege statute specifying in detail when journalists should have a privilege? I doubt it. I think a statute will have to leave the balancing of interests to be done by judges, case by case.

One respected judge, David Tatel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has made a wise proposal. It is that the courts use their power to define privileges — a power affirmed by statute — to give a qualified privilege to journalists.

Judge Tatel’s proposal is aimed at the typical leak case: when a federal prosecutor is trying to find the source of a leak and subpoenas journalists. Judge Tatel suggests that a judge in this situation should weigh the public interest in the leaked material against the damage alleged by the government. If the leak were, say, the fact of the government’s lawless wiretapping, it is easy for me to see that the public interest should prevail.

Judges are not always wise. But in our system they are the ones we trust to weigh acutely conflicting interests. In the wake of the Libby case, Congress should pass legislation that makes clear the public interest in journalists’ confidentiality but leaves it to judges to weigh that against other social necessities.

Yet Another Sane Voice on Fuel Taxes

2007-03-07T05:40:00.000-05:00

An article in today's Detroit News makes the argument for higher fuel taxes, among other useful points. To read the entire article, click on post title.

....

"Fuel taxes move auto market

"The overriding consideration is that it is fuel taxation policies -- not automakers -- that drive consumers to buy differing vehicle types. If gasoline was priced two or three times higher in the United States and if high quality diesel fuel was available here at a lower cost than gasoline, then you can bet Americans would be interested in much more fuel efficient vehicles.

"In the meantime, with our lifestyle and relatively cheap fuel, there is a good reason that full-size pick-up trucks like the Ford-F-150 and the Chevrolet Silverado have been America's best selling vehicles for decades...."

Oil Pumping Innovations: The Whole Story?

2007-03-06T11:10:00.000-05:00

There was and interesting article in the New York Times (click on post title to access article) about technologies/techniques which increase the yield from existing oil wells/fields. The article does admit that the costs of recovery using these technologies/techniques cost more than usual pumping, but are still profitable given today's oil market. The article argues that this makes the discussion of "the end of oil" questionable at best.

I am more interested in what the article doesn't say. Not only do these recovery techniques typically cost more, they also often require significant amounts of energy. Thus, the net energy extraction is significantly less than more "normal" techniques.

This means that the net effect on the total amount of energy available is less than one might think, although maybe more oil becomes available if alternative forms of power are used to drive these approaches. However, in most cases, we would probably find that significant amounts of CO2 are generated to increase the extraction of this additional oil, in addition to the CO2 that is generated when the oil is utilized. Thus, the effects on global warming of these "high-tech" extraction techniques is almost certainly adverse.

Ignatius: The Climate Change Precipice

2007-03-02T08:18:00.000-05:00

I strongly recommend David Ignatius' column in today's Washington Post entitled "The Climate Change Precipice". Click on post title to read column.

In that article, Ignatius refers to a report by Peter Schwartz of the Global Business Network on this subject: http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/documents/gbn_impacts_of_climate_change.pdf

I have just scanned the report, but at first glance it looks excellent. I have been a fan of Peter Schwartz and his approach (systems- and scenario-based) for many years now.

Friedman Column Well-Worth Reading

2007-03-02T07:51:00.000-05:00

I found this column especially enlightening - and challenging. To read all of it, click on the post title above. Through it, I discovered the site of MEMRI which I think will be most useful in learning about the Muslim world: http://memri.org/aboutus.html

March 2, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times

The Silence That Kills

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

On Feb. 20, The A.P. reported from Afghanistan that a suicide attacker disguised as a health worker blew himself up near “a crowd of about 150 people who had gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open an emergency ward at the main government hospital in the city of Khost.” A few days later, at a Baghdad college, a female Sunni suicide bomber blew herself up amid students who were ready to sit for exams, killing 40 people.

Stop and think for a moment how sick this is. Then stop for another moment and listen to the silence. The Bush team is mute. It says nothing, because it has no moral authority. No one would listen. Mr. Bush is losing a P.R. war to people who blow up emergency wards. Europeans are mute, lost in their delusion that this is all George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s fault.

But worst of all, Muslims, the very people whose future is being killed, are also mute. No surge can work in Iraq unless we have a “moral surge,” a counternihilism strategy that delegitimizes suicide bombers. The most important restraints are cultural, societal and religious. It takes a village — but the Arab-Muslim village today is largely silent. The best are indifferent or intimidated; the worst quietly applaud the Sunnis who kill Shiites.

....

The world worries about highly enriched uranium, but “the real danger is highly enriched Islam,” Mr. Fandy added. That is, “highly enriched Sunnism” and “highly enriched Shiism” that eats away at the Muslim state, the way Hezbollah is trying to do in Lebanon or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Al Qaeda everywhere.

....

“The battleground in the Arab world today is not in Palestine or Lebanon, but in the classrooms and newsrooms,” Mr. Fandy concluded. That’s where “the software programmers” reside who create symbolic images and language glorifying suicide bombers and make their depraved acts look legitimate. Only other Arab-Muslim programmers can defeat them.

Occasionally an honest voice rises, giving you a glimmer of hope that others will stand up. The MEMRI translation Web site (memri.org) just posted a poem called “When,” from a Saudi author, Wajeha al-Huwaider, that was posted on Arab reform sites like www.aafaq.org.

....

Jerry Brown: Automotive Champion?!

2007-02-26T16:18:00.001-05:00

Let's assume that Jerry Brown wants to be constructive. He admits that he has no idea how to change consumer behavior. Let the automakers wave their magic technological wand. I will still argue that suitable purchase and use taxation will be the most effective aid to changing automotive consumer behavior, giving a realistic chance of California's concerns with Global Warming to be addressed in the real world. (click on post title for rest of column.)

EYES ON THE ROAD

By JOSEPH B. WHITE

California, Auto Makers Battle
Over Vehicle Emissions

Flurry of Litigation Over Efforts to Reduce
The Environmental Impact of Cars, Trucks
February 24, 2007, Wall Street Journal

When it comes to automobiles, California isn't just another state. It's something close to a sovereign nation -- a nation currently at war with a fair chunk of the auto industry.

California's recent efforts to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant, and to mandate reductions of CO2 emissions, including gases coming out of vehicle tailpipes, has provoked a flurry of litigation with big auto makers. The car companies contend California's efforts to clamp down on CO2 amount to an effort to regulate fuel economy, and states have no right to supersede federal fuel efficiency laws. The state has countered that car makers, by persisting in selling gas guzzlers to Californians, are creating a public nuisance by contributing to the ill effects caused by global warming -- including rising sea levels that could threaten California's 1,075 miles of coastline and dwindling mountain snows that could undermine the state's water supply. (Read the complaint¹)

Into this fight comes now California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown -- yes, that Jerry Brown, the former California governor who ran for president three times and more recently was Mayor of Oakland. Mr. Brown inherited the litigation with the auto industry when he took his current office in January. Some have called on Mr. Brown to quit the state's legal fight with the auto industry. But Mr. Brown has chosen a different tack. He has called on the chief executives of the six biggest auto makers in the U.S. market to meet with him to find "cooperative approaches" to the global warming issue. (Read his letter²)

So far, the auto makers have declined, through their attorney, to schedule a CEO summit. Instead they have offered to send "legal representatives" to brief Mr. Brown on the industry's "multi-faceted efforts to improve fuel efficiency." So what does Jerry Brown really want? In a telephone interview, the attorney general says his real goal is to help the car companies.

"This is not a problem that is going to be swept under the rug," he says. "It is getting intense scrutiny. Even a year ago, people would not expect we would be as far into this issue as we are."

....

Mr. Brown also remembers that when he was governor, the auto makers fought seat belts. And he says electric cars, once mandated under California law, "died because the car companies wanted (them) to die."

Industry executives counter that electric cars died because they were exorbitantly expensive, and the vast majority of consumers had no interest in buying them, preferring instead the larger, heavier vehicles Mr. Brown is denouncing.

But Mr. Brown's point is that the auto industry has a long history of insisting that it cannot profitably build cleaner, safer cars -- only to be shown up when such advances turn out to be both possible and profitable.

....

To a significant degree, the dispute between California and the car makers is a culture clash. California has a long history of using its special status as the nation's biggest car market to press for risk-taking on advanced technology. This is what you'd expect from a state whose economy is based to a great degree on nimble, high-tech entrepreneurship.

Auto makers, by contrast, are stuck with a business that involves sinking enormous chunks of capital into machinery and factories staffed by thousands of workers whose labors will yield a return only after several years. Those returns will come only if the car makers haven't misjudged, while planning their vehicles three to five years earlier, consumer tastes or the price of oil. The risks inherent in auto making breed a certain conservatism -- all the more so given the inconsistent track record of various on-board gadgetry.

The other problem is that car makers don't create CO2 emissions by driving cars. People do. Mr. Brown, who says his last car was a Mercury Sable purchased in 1991, concedes that changing Californians' motoring habits won't be easy, he says.

....

Well Worth Considering

2007-02-13T13:10:00.000-05:00

Zakaria emphasizes a very good, and often forgotten, point. If we are to develop a robust global warming strategy, we have to cover both mitigation and adaptation. For rest of article, click on post title above.

Zakaria: Unfortunately, We Can’t Stop Global Warming

Even if we adopted the most far-reaching plans to combat climate change, we would still watch greenhouse gases rise for decades.

By Fareed Zakaria

Newsweek

Feb. 19, 2007 issue - The most inconvenient truth about global warming is that we cannot stop it. Please don't mistake me for a skeptic. I'm fully persuaded by the evidence that climate change is real and serious. Of the 12 hottest years on record, 11 have occurred since 1995. Temperatures have risen by 0.74 degrees Celsius over the past century. (If that seems small, keep in mind that the difference in temperature between the ice age and now is about 5 degrees C.) And human activity appears to be one important cause. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has risen dramatically since the industrial revolution. Methane has doubled and carbon-dioxide levels are up 30 percent since 1750. The projections going forward are highly plausible scientific estimations. The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that by 2100, temperatures will have risen by somewhere between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees, and as a result, sea levels will rise by 18 to 59 centimeters. The trouble is, if you accept all these facts and theories about global warming, it is difficult to see how any human response launched today can avert it....

... in addition to our efforts to prevent and mitigate climate change, we need to employ another strategy—adaptation.

No one likes to talk about adapting to global warming because it seems defeatist. But the result is that, as we debate the meta-theories about global warming, we're increasingly unprepared to deal with its consequences. Whether or not CO2 emissions are triggering certain reactions in the atmosphere, we can see that sea levels are rising. What are we going to do about it?

In an intelligent, practical speech last September, the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Frances Cairncross, urged that we begin such a discussion. "We need to think about policies that prepare for a hotter, drier world, especially in poor countries," she said. "That may involve, for instance, developing new crops, constructing flood defenses, setting different building regulations or banning building close to sea level." She points out that adaptation programs could move forward fast. Unlike plans to slow down global warming, which require massive and simultaneous international efforts, adaptation strategies can be pursued by individual countries, states, cities and localities.

Three years ago the Pew Foundation sponsored an excellent study, "Coping With Global Climate Change," which focused on the role of adaptation. The report found that moving in this direction would be costly and fraught with uncertainty and error. Yet, the authors point out, humankind's long history has shown it's possible; we have adapted as the environment around us has changed. The costs of relocating seaside communities are extremely high, but they will be even higher if we wait 20 years. The most important conclusion of the Pew study was that early planning is far more effective than managing the consequences of a breakdown. In other words, strengthening the levees in New Orleans costs much, much less than rebuilding the city.

Many environmental advocates fear that talking about coping with global warming will hamper efforts to slow it down. In fact, we have no alternative but to do both. Mitigation and adaptation complement each other. In both cases, the crucial need is to stop talking and start acting.

Putting the Heat on Global Warming

2007-02-12T07:08:00.000-05:00

Yet another voice of reason. To read complete article, click on post title.

John McCormick

Putting the heat on global warming

Detroit News, February 12, 2007

....

All these considerations aside, the rational minds running Motown's automakers are left facing a dilemma. On the one hand they know that the modern automobile is actually responsible for a relatively small part of the emissions 'load' that mankind's activities impose on the earth. At the same time they recognize that cars - versus coal-fired power plants, heavy industry or even the hundreds of jets streaking across our skies daily - are far more visible to the general public. Unjust though it is, the automobile's exhaust pipe has become the poster child for air pollution and, by extension, global warming.

As a consequence, environmentalists repeatedly attack the auto industry as if it is single handedly to blame for the planet's climatic problems, real or imagined. The so-called 'greens' argue that the carmakers must sell vehicles that they think people should buy, rather than the vehicles people want to buy, thus ignoring the most basic tenet of a market driven economy.

These same activists point to General Motors' withdrawal of the plug-in electric car, the EV1, during the 1990s, as proof that the auto industry is not serious about producing environmentally sensitive vehicles. The absurdity of this argument is self-evident. Does anyone truly believe that GM chose to waste billions of dollars on a vehicle that would not succeed? The fact that only a few people bought the EV1 (or any other electric vehicle of the time) was because they were impractical. Consumers in a free market economy buy what they wish to buy; be it a Hummer, Toyota Prius or anything in between.

What influences the vehicle buyer's decision is a subtle combination of desire, practical considerations and dollars and cents. And it is this last factor that should be given the biggest weight as we debate the relationship between the automobile and the world's environment. It is not the job of the automobile industry to tell buyers what to purchase, any more than it is the job of house builders to promote smaller homes. This role is best played by the government, not by direct edict, but by exerting financial pressure on a vehicle purchaser's decision.

The most obvious example of this process in action is Europe's vehicular tax strategy. For example, European governments tax fuel in a manner that encourages diesel, which is much more energy efficient and therefore lower in CO2 emissions than gasoline. They also tax higher displacement engines, leading consumers and therefore automakers to concentrate on smaller, more efficient vehicles. This policy does not prevent consumers from buying larger cars and trucks, it simply makes the choice more expensive.

If a US administration, now or in the future, is ever to make a serious effort to curb this country's appetite for the world's energy resources and corresponding imbalance in overall emissions, then attacking the auto industry with legislation is not the answer. Nor is the misguided focus on grossly inefficient corn-based E85 production. It's wiser to concentrate on producing cellulosic-based ethanol, or much better still, to give major financial assistance to the development of advanced batteries for a new generation of electric cars.

But in the short term, the answer, as tough and unpalatable as it may be in some quarters, is to use taxes, not half baked rhetoric, to persuade consumers to modify their vehicle choices.

John McCormick is a columnist for Autos Insider and can be reached at john.mccormick@detnews.com

Interesting Thinking about Iraq

2007-02-11T08:12:00.000-05:00

I have left out much of the meat of this challenging opinion piece. Click on post title to read the rest. It is worth the effort.

Victory Is Not an Option
The Mission Can't Be Accomplished -- It's Time for a New Strategy

By William E. Odom
Sunday, February 11, 2007; B01, Washington Post

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Its gloomy implications -- hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact -- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Americans do not warm to defeat or failure, and our politicians are famously reluctant to admit their own responsibility for anything resembling those un-American outcomes. So they beat around the bush, wringing hands and debating "nonbinding resolutions" that oppose the president's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

For the moment, the collision of the public's clarity of mind, the president's relentless pursuit of defeat and Congress's anxiety has paralyzed us. We may be doomed to two more years of chasing the mirage of democracy in Iraq and possibly widening the war to Iran. But this is not inevitable. A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of "who gets the blame" could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East.

....

Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond? Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.

If Bush truly wanted to rescue something of his historical legacy, he would seize the initiative to implement this kind of strategy. He would eventually be held up as a leader capable of reversing direction by turning an imminent, tragic defeat into strategic recovery.

If he stays on his present course, he will leave Congress the opportunity to earn the credit for such a turnaround. It is already too late to wait for some presidential candidate for 2008 to retrieve the situation. If Congress cannot act, it, too, will live in infamy.

William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan. He served on the National Security Council staff under Jimmy Carter. A West Point graduate with a PhD from Columbia, Odom teaches at Yale and is a fellow of the Hudson Institute.

Anti-Semitism?

2007-02-08T07:23:00.000-05:00

If you are interested in this subject, the entire article (click on post title) is well-worth reading.

The New Anti-Anti-Semites.

Split Personality

by John B. Judis
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 02.08.07

s there a growing trend among American intellectuals (and former presidents) toward anti-Semitism? That is what a number of recent articles, essays, and speeches--the latest on "The Poisoning of America" from Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations at the Herzilya conference--would suggest. Some of these statements stop short of saying that Tony Judt, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, Tony Kushner, and Jimmy Carter (to name some of the best-known targets) are anti-Semites. Instead, they say that what they have written is anti-Semitic or encourages anti-Semitism. In The Wall Street Journal last year, Bret Stephens, a member of the editorial board, suggested that Walt and Mearsheimer's essay on the Israel lobby "may not be anti-Semitic in intent [but] may yet be anti-Semitic in effect."

What these charges are meant to do is to raise the warning flag of anti-Semitism over certain opinions, placing them beyond argument--in a realm consigned to social pathologies. Who would argue, for instance, over the "history" contained within The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? In "Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," a paper published by the American Jewish Committee, Alvin H. Rosenfeld writes of the critics of Israel interviewed for Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel, "[They are] not driven by anything remotely like reasoned historical analysis, but rather by a complex range of psychological as well as political motives that subvert reason and replace it with something akin to hysteria."

My intention in broaching this controversy is not to argue on behalf of Walt, Mearsheimer, or Judt. I think Walt and Mearsheimer do exaggerate the influence of the Israel lobby and define the lobby in such an inclusive way as to beg the question of its influence. I also don't share Judt's hopes for a secular democratic state on what is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. But I think that, in characterizing these views as anti-Semitic, or as contributing to anti-Semitism, Rosenfeld and other critics are attempting to suppress an important debate on American foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East. And they have also fallen prey to a contradiction within their own thinking.

....

These controversies over anti-Semitism come, too, at a predictable and particularly unfortunate time in the discussion of U.S. foreign policy. The last time a similar brouhaha arose was in the 1970s, when Jewish peace organizations in the United States challenged Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. At the urging of the Israeli government, organizations like Breira were run out of town by their traditional, and more subservient, brethren. Partly as a result, the United States acquiesced in Israeli policies that, in the long run, have benefited neither the United States nor Israel. The same thing could happen again. A debate has already begun over U.S. policy toward Iran in which AIPAC and the Israeli government have expressed interest in the United States stopping at nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Fears of a new Holocaust--made more plausible by the very real anti-Semitism of Iran's president--have been sounded. What policies are in the interest of the United States? And of Israel? These are difficult questions, but they are not made easier to answer when critics of Israel and of the Israel lobby in the United States are charged with anti-Semitism.

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Some Excellent Questions About Iran

2007-02-04T08:58:00.000-05:00

What to Ask Before the Next War
Don't Let the People Who Brought Us Iraq Define the Questions

By Paul R. Pillar
Sunday, February 4, 2007; B07, Washington Post

Imagine that the famously flawed intelligence judgments about Iraq's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been correct. What difference would that have made to the American effort in Iraq?

The Bush administration would have had fewer rhetorical difficulties in defending its decision to go to war, even though any discoveries of weapons programs would have confirmed nothing about the use to which Saddam Hussein might someday have put such weapons or whether Iraq would eventually have acquired nuclear weapons.

But the war itself would be the same agonizing ordeal. An insurgency driven by motives having nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction and little to do with Hussein would still be going on.

Iraq's sectarian divisions and intolerant political culture would still have pushed it into civil war. Iraq would still have become the latest and biggest jihad, winning recruits and donors for al-Qaeda and boosting the militant Islamic movement worldwide. And the United States would still be suffering the same drain of blood and treasure in Iraq and most of the same damage to its global standing and relationships.

This thought experiment highlights how problems with the policy process (or, rather, the lack of a process) that led the United States into the Iraq quagmire went beyond the administration's manipulation of intelligence on weapons programs and terrorist relationships. The administration so successfully shaped the policy question around its chosen selling points involving these two issues that what passed for a national debate gave little attention to important questions about the likely nature and consequences of a war. The debate was largely reduced to contemplating the terms of a pseudo-syllogism: Hussein has weapons of mass destruction; Hussein supports terrorism; therefore, we must use force to remove Hussein.

Now, an accelerating debate about Iran and its nuclear program shows signs of the same dangerous reductionism. Some argue for an airstrike against Iranian nuclear facilities sooner rather than later. Whether the Bush administration will act on such advice in the next two years is uncertain, but it is taking confrontational steps, including augmenting forces in the Persian Gulf and raiding an Iranian consulate, that increase the chance of heightened tension escalating into a military clash.

A long argument over many barely addressed issues would be needed to get from a belief that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons to a conclusion that a military strike, or even policies that increase the risk of U.S.-Iranian hostilities, is advisable. One issue is the uncertainty of the intelligence about Iran's nuclear program, although this is getting some discussion thanks to the recriminations about the intelligence on Iraq.

Other questions that need answering include:

What would be the urgency of taking forceful action, given that the announced estimate is that Iran is still several years from acquiring a nuclear weapon?

How malleable (and how well-defined) are Tehran's intentions, and what changes in Washington's policy might lead Tehran to abandon a weapons program? Even if Tehran's intentions do not change, what other options would impede or slow its nuclear program? If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, how would that change its behavior and affect U.S. interests? In particular, why would deterrence, which has kept nuclear peace with other adversaries, not work with Iran?

The likely hardening, concealment and dispersal of Iran's nuclear facilities raise questions about the impact any military strike would have on the program. How much would Iran's nuclear efforts be set back, especially given that bombs are not very good at destroying knowledge and expertise? Would the Iranian response be appreciably different from that of Iraq after Israel bombed its nuclear reactor in 1981 (Iraq redoubled its nuclear efforts while turning to different methods for producing fissile material)?

The most neglected questions concern other consequences of a U.S. strike or any other U.S.-Iranian combat, even if such combat did not lead to a prolonged occupation. How would Tehran respond to an act of war? What terrorism might it launch against the United States? How would it exploit U.S. vulnerabilities next door in Iraq, where it has barely begun to exploit the influence it has assiduously been cultivating? What other military action might it take, with the risk of a wider war in the Persian Gulf?

Other effects concern Iranian politics. How much would the direct assertion of U.S. hostility strengthen Iranian hard-liners, whose policies are partly premised on such hostility? How much would it add to all Iranians' list of historical grievances against the United States and adversely affect relations with future governments?

Broader regional and global ramifications include the impact on the oil market, whether other Middle Eastern nations would be less willing to cooperate with the United States and the prospect of exacerbating the damage the Iraq war already has dealt to U.S. standing worldwide.

Some might argue that the worst case that could ensue from an Iranian nuclear weapon is so bad that it trumps all other considerations. But there is no more reason than there was with Iraq to consider the worst case of only one side of the policy equation. And the worst case that could result from U.S.-Iranian combat is plenty frightening: thousands of Americans dead from retaliatory terrorist attacks, a broader war in the Persian Gulf, $150-per-barrel oil, a global recession and more.

That's not the most likely case -- neither is a vision of Iranian-generated mushroom clouds -- but it is plausible that substantial portions of that scenario would materialize.

Avoiding the next military folly in the Middle East requires that the agenda for analysis and debate not be so severely and tendentiously truncated as before Iraq. Not only must proponents of military action not be allowed to manipulate the answers, they also should not be allowed to define the questions.

The writer, a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, teaches security studies at Georgetown University.

Is that how the State of the Union was drafted?

2007-02-01T07:17:00.000-05:00

To see more on this topic, click on the post title above.

Technological Answers to CAFE?

2007-01-29T13:01:00.000-05:00

The following article (click on the post title to read all of it) lists several practical and less-practical ways of meeting increased CAFE requirements. The one thing it does not discuss is to how to change consumer behavior, other than differential vehicle pricing.

In fact, in this week's Automotive News there are many articles related to President Bush's comments last week in his State of the Union message. Although I hardly read every line of every article, I saw no mention of fuel taxation in any of them. The subject is simply ignored by what proports to be the most comprehensive newspaper in the automotive industry. Strange.

Bush's shocker: How to meet a higher CAFE

Richard Truett | |

Automotive News | 1:00 am, January 29, 2007

First the good news: In theory, automakers can meet President Bush's call to improve fuel economy simply by commercializing off-the-shelf technologies.

But it's going to cost plenty. If light-vehicle CAFE standards rise by a third by 2017, to 34 mpg, as President Bush proposed last week, we'll see a more small cars, diesels and hybrids.

Here are the technologies that could deliver big gains in fuel economy, along with ratings for practicality and cost. A score of 5 five means the technology could be on your driveway soon. A rating of 1 means the technology is the modern equivalent of the 100-mpg carburetor....

Best bets
How various fuel-saving technologies are likely to fare.
Winners: Turbochargers, diesels, starter generators, efficient transmissions
The jury is out: Lightweight materials, plug-in hybrids
Not in this lifetime: Fuel cells

Now that we've rated these technologies, we will offer a caveat on our grades. If Congress approves a steep increase in fuel economy, automakers inevitably will speed up introduction of these technologies.
One way to improve CAFE would be to manipulate the marketplace: Raise the price of big trucks and other gas hogs, then lower the price of smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. In the world of CAFE, this is a time-honored technique.

So maybe we'll have to switch to pass-fail grades after all.

A Point Very Well Taken

2007-01-27T09:27:00.000-05:00

January 27, 2007, New York Times

Op-Ed Contributor

At Ease, Mr. President

GARRY WILLS

Evanston, Ill.

WE hear constantly now about “our commander in chief.” The word has become a synonym for “president.” It is said that we “elect a commander in chief.” It is asked whether this or that candidate is “worthy to be our commander in chief.”

But the president is not our commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army.

I first cringed at the misuse in 1973, during the “Saturday Night Massacre” (as it was called). President Richard Nixon, angered at the Watergate inquiry being conducted by the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, dispatched his chief of staff, Al Haig, to arrange for Mr. Cox’s firing. Mr. Haig told the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to dismiss Mr. Cox. Mr. Richardson refused, and resigned. Then Mr. Haig told the second in line at the Justice Department, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. Mr. Ruckelshaus refused, and accepted his dismissal. The third in line, Robert Bork, finally did the deed.

What struck me was what Mr. Haig told Mr. Ruckelshaus, “You know what it means when an order comes down from the commander in chief and a member of his team cannot execute it.” This was as great a constitutional faux pas as Mr. Haig’s later claim, when President Reagan was wounded, that “Constitutionally ... I’m in control.”

President Nixon was not Mr. Ruckelshaus’s commander in chief. The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: “The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” That title is rarely — more like never — heard today. It is just “commander in chief,” or even “commander in chief of the United States.” This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken “for the duration.” But those impositions are removed when normal life returns.

But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and “the duration” has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever — more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.

There has never been an executive branch more fetishistic about secrecy than the Bush-Cheney one. The secrecy has been used to throw a veil over detentions, “renditions,” suspension of the Geneva Conventions and of habeas corpus, torture and warrantless wiretaps. We hear again the refrain so common in the other wars — If you knew what we know, you would see how justified all our actions are.

But we can never know what they know. We do not have sufficient clearance.

When Adm. William Crowe, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, criticized the gulf war under the first President Bush, Secretary of State James Baker said that the admiral was not qualified to speak on the matter since he no longer had the clearance to read classified reports. If he is not qualified, then no ordinary citizen is. We must simply trust our lords and obey the commander in chief.

The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements. We are reminded, for instance, of the expanded commander in chief status every time a modern president gets off the White House helicopter and returns the salute of marines.

That is an innovation that was begun by Ronald Reagan. Dwight Eisenhower, a real general, knew that the salute is for the uniform, and as president he was not wearing one. An exchange of salutes was out of order. (George Bush came as close as he could to wearing a uniform while president when he landed on the telegenic aircraft carrier in an Air Force flight jacket).

We used to take pride in civilian leadership of the military under the Constitution, a principle that George Washington embraced when he avoided military symbols at Mount Vernon. We are not led — or were not in the past — by caudillos.

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescient last book, “Secrecy,” traced the ever-faster-growing secrecy of our government and said that it strikes at the very essence of democracy — accountability of representatives to the people. How can the people hold their representatives to account if they are denied knowledge of what they are doing? Wartime and war analogies are embraced because these justify the secrecy. The representative is accountable to citizens. Soldiers are accountable to their officer. The dynamics are different, and to blend them is to undermine the basic principles of our Constitution.

Garry Wills, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern, is the author, most recently, of “What Paul Meant.”

What A Great Idea

2007-01-26T06:23:00.000-05:00

Why didn't we think of this a long time ago?

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This is a printer friendly version of an article from The Detroit News
To print this article open the file menu and choose Print.

January 26, 2007

Daniel Howes

Daniel Howes: One bonus plan for all employees is bold move

F ord Motor Co. and UAW leaders, in a revolutionary bid to put real money behind the "we're-on-the-same-team" slogan, are in discussions to create a single incentive plan to cover all U.S. Ford employees, according to three ranking sources close to the situation.

Likely to be presented to Ford's directors in March, the plan would pay each hourly worker "somewhere between $500 and $1,000" in advance of this summer's national contract talks and set common performance targets for all of Ford's 115,600 U.S. employees -- salaried and union.

If ratified, the plan would create an unprecedented model of mutual interest between the UAW and Detroit's automakers. It would mollify critics outraged that Ford is mulling whether to pay bonuses to salaried employees for hitting predetermined targets. And it would closely bind all employees to the company's competitiveness, striking a blow to the malignant us-vs.-them culture of Detroit.

It would be, in a word, brilliant.

How can talk of bonuses be justified when Ford on Thursday posted a $12.7 billion loss -- the largest in its 103-year history? The same way CEO Alan Mulally theoretically justified paying bonuses to salaried employees for 2006:

They helped achieve massive restructuring targets on cost-cutting, quality and customer satisfaction, the precursors to delivering profits and expanding market share. Without the hard work of all Ford folks, from Glass House offices and engineering cubicles to the factory floor, the Blue Oval is toast.

It's all about "inclusion," Mulally told The Detroit News, referring to his notion of team-building. "It's about everybody knowing the business realities, everybody knowing what our plan is to deal with it. The most important thing to our employees is that we're compensating them competitively -- our executives, our management, all of our employees."

And, it should be added, compensating them fairly. That Ford would be considering bonuses for salaried employees when union members approved health care concessions for retirees, saving Ford close to $1 billion annually; or when most of its locals approved "competitive operating agreements"; or when 38,000 hourly workers accepted buyouts -- all of them saving Ford big dough -- strikes many as unfair.

Treating all the same

"Our current agreement does not give" union members "a penny," one source familiar with the talks told me, because the United Auto Workers' profit-sharing plan pays out only when Ford books profits from its U.S. operations. "It feeds divisiveness. You take away all that stuff. You have one Ford team working for the same objective. If you're in the money, you all benefit."

The logic behind the plan, similar to ones used at Boeing and Xerox, is that union and salaried employees would benefit if the company achieves incremental improvements of 15 percent or more annually on predetermined targets. Those include cost, cash flow, quality and customer satisfaction, as well as profitability and market share.

Ford and UAW officials declined comment.

If agreed to by both sides in a memorandum of understanding, pending ratification in this year's contract, the deal likely would pressure General Motors Corp. and the Chrysler Group to follow suit. Currently, Ford has five separate incentive/bonus plans, Chrysler has four and GM has three.

"If they eliminated the bonus pool and said we're using the same bonus formula for everybody, that would be a sea change in Detroit," said Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research. "It's a big fairness issue. Let's recognize productivity change, flexibility -- the whole shot -- not just profits."

Ford's 'better idea'

It would be hard to overstate how revolutionary a change like this would be. Union and salaried folks would share incentives to achieve the same goals and would be rewarded for hitting or exceeding them -- a reflection of Mulally's intent that everyone be on the same page.

In Ford's often petty culture, salaried employees might grumble that union members are being rewarded for their innovative engineering, design or purchasing decisions. There might be concerns among the rank and file that jettisoning the traditional union profit-sharing plan for a single unified incentive plan might shortchange them.

But how? By its own admission, Ford will not be profitable in the United States until 2009, meaning UAW members are likely to go half a decade or more without seeing any profit sharing.

Under the plan being discussed by Ford and the UAW, members would see a modest payout this year for last year's progress and likely additional payouts in the next few years -- money they would never see under their profit-sharing plan.

"You're not going to be getting the same payout," one source said, "but you'll be working towards the same metrics."

Yes, the CEO would reap a bigger reward than a 10-year veteran of the assembly line. But they'd both be reaping a reward according to the same criteria.

'Equal sacrifice, equal gain'

If nothing else, Ford's year-end earnings and the outlook for this year and next, detailed Thursday, show how difficult the automaker's road back is likely to be. The brutal truth is, there are no guarantees Mulally & Co. will succeed.

They have too much plant capacity and too many people. Too much of their business model rests on slow-selling SUVs and pickups and not enough on fuel-efficient cars, crossovers and gas-electric hybrids. And brands like Jaguar Cars continue to consume cash and deliver losses.

But Mulally has told associates he regards a unified incentive plan as a potential game-changer, a rallying point that "makes so much sense" and could help Ford emerge from its funk sooner.

Pursuing the deal in advance of this summer's bargaining with the UAW gives UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and Vice President Bob King some help in selling an agreement likely to offer slim pay raises, if any, and changes to health-care benefits.

"Perceived fairness costs a great deal of votes on any contract," McAlinden said. "Equal sacrifice is something that's printed above every work station at Ford. You've got to give the equal sacrifice -- or equal gain."

Gasoline: Price Matters

2007-01-25T06:38:00.000-05:00

The following is an exerpt of an interesting article from the LA Times. To read all of it, click on the post title above.

To read a summary of the Cambridge Energy Research Associates report cited in the article, go to:

http://www2.cera.com/gasoline/summary/

All in all, this confirms my conviction that higher gasoline taxes will significantly change consumer behavior.

U.S. motorists cutting back a bit

Americans cut miles driven for the first time since 1980. High prices are behind the change in transportation habits.

By Elizabeth Douglass
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 25, 2007

Two years of record-high gasoline prices have forced auto-crazed Americans to do something they haven't done in more than two decades: Drive less. ...

Other reports over the last year on mass transit ridership, total miles driven nationwide, gasoline demand, vehicle sales and retail and restaurant spending reinforce the notion that U.S. drivers made significant — and in some cases, lasting — adjustments to offset steadily rising gasoline prices.

"In 2005 and into 2006, we did see consumers start to change their driving behavior," said David Portalatin, director of industry analysis at NPD Group Inc., which tracks consumer spending. "That's a very hard thing to change, because I've either got to change where I work, where I live, or what kind of car I drive in order to actually consume less gasoline."

It's a small but important shift for a nation that many believed was impervious to rising gas prices because drivers were unable or unwilling to rein in their gas-guzzling ways. Lofty energy costs have generated such concern that President Bush devoted a significant chunk of his last two State of the Union speeches to addressing the nation's oil addiction.

"The message is that price matters," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a Boston-area consulting company that recently published an analysis called "Gasoline and the American People." The study highlighted the decline in per-driver mileage and a cooling appetite for the largest sport utility vehicles, among other things, and concluded that expensive gasoline was transforming "America's love affair with the automobile."

Even though pump prices have dropped substantially from their highs in 2006, "there's a greater sense of insecurity, and people don't want to be caught emptying their wallet at the gasoline pump," said Yergin, author of "The Prize," a Pulitzer-winning history of the oil industry....

While high prices cut into the expected growth rate, U.S. gasoline consumption nonetheless increased by about 1% in 2006 after staying flat the previous year. "The gasoline consumed since that August peak in gasoline prices is up nearly 2.5% versus the comparable time period a year ago," said Portalatin, the NPD researcher. "What it means is that consumers have a short memory."

Retiree Joe McElroy of Fountain Valley admits to being a backslider. When local gas costs jumped last summer, McElroy consolidated errands and trimmed trips to visit Riverside relatives. But, he acknowledged, "when prices eased up, I kind of relaxed on that cutback and went ahead and did a little more driving."

That response is what economists have come to expect. Decades of studies invariably conclude that big spikes in prices at the pumps produce only tiny short-term cutbacks in demand. If that research is any guide, whatever changes motorists made during the recent gas-price spikes would be wiped out by recently plunging prices outside of California.

But some transportation experts say that a handful of new factors are starting to turn the tide, causing some consumption changes to stick despite lower prices....

Energy and the State of the Union

2007-01-24T10:31:00.000-05:00

One of President's Bush's major themes in last night's State of the Union message was energy independence, wherein he proposed some "painless for the electorate" initiatives. I was disappointed, but not at all surprized, that there was no mention of changing consumer behavior in significant ways, such as by increasing fuel taxes. Biofuels are, as the following column says, may be good ideas but will not significantly impact energy independence in the foreseeable future. Playing around with CAFE will not probably have much real impact (other that causing the auto industry problems) if consumers have no economic reason to choose smaller, lighter vehicles and drive less and more slowly.

Nor was it surprising that President Bush had nothing to say about stationary sources of CO2. Apparently, he still doesn't believe in global warming.

Blindness on Biofuels

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, January 24, 2007; A23, Washington Post

President Bush joined the biofuels enthusiasm in his State of the Union address, and no one can doubt the powerful allure. Farmers, scientists and venture capitalists will liberate us from insecure foreign oil by converting corn, prairie grass and much more into gasoline substitutes. Biofuels will even curb greenhouse gases. Already, production of ethanol from corn has surged from 1.6 billion gallons in 2000 to 5 billion in 2006. Bush set an interim target of 35 billion gallons in 2017 on the way to the administration's ultimate goal of 60 billion in 2030. Sounds great, but be wary. It may be a mirage.

The great danger of the biofuels craze is that it will divert us from stronger steps to limit dependence on foreign oil: higher fuel taxes to prod Americans to buy more gasoline-efficient vehicles and tougher federal fuel economy standards to force auto companies to produce them. True, Bush supports tougher -- but unspecified -- fuel economy standards. But the implied increase above today's 27.5 miles per gallon for cars is modest, because the administration expects gasoline savings from biofuels to be triple those from higher fuel economy standards.

The politics are simple enough. Americans dislike high fuel prices; auto companies dislike tougher fuel economy standards. By contrast, everyone seems to win with biofuels: farmers, consumers, capitalists. American technology triumphs. Biofuels create rural jobs and drain money from foreign oil producers. What's not to like? Unfortunately, this enticing vision is dramatically overdrawn....

To read the rest of this column, go to:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/23/AR2007012301562.html

Dan Howes of the Detroit News has some interesting reactions to President Bush's energy declarations in last night's State of the Union Message. To see them, go to:

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070124/AUTO02/701240347/1148

To see the New York Times article of this part of the speech, go to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/washington/24energy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The Wall Street Journal take on the subject:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116957395027385156.html?mod=hps_us_pageone

Following are summaries of the President's energy proposals:

From the Detroit Free Press:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070124/BUSINESS01/701240403/1002/

"Here are some details of President George W. Bush's 20 in 10 proposal. To reduce U.S. gasoline consumption by 20% by 2017, Bush wants to:

• Increase requirements for renewable fuels to 35 billion gallons a year by 2017. The current targets call for 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. This increase would account for a 15% reduction in gasoline use.

• Increase fuel economy by about 4% a year, starting with the 2010 model year for cars and 2012 for trucks. This would save up to 8.5 billion gallons of gas a year, the additional 5% reduction toward the goal.

If met, the moves would reduce U.S. gas consumption in 2017 to below today's levels and halt the increase in global warming gases from vehicles."

From the Detroit News:

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070124/POLITICS/701240421/1148/

"Autos/energy

Slash gasoline consumption by up to 20 percent by 2017, primarily by increasing the amount of ethanol and other alternative fuels the federal government mandates must be produced.

Give federal officials authority to raise auto fuel mileage standards, allowing automakers to trade or "bank" credits among models.

Double the capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve -- a protection against emergency oil market disruptions caused by terrorism or natural disaster -- to 1.5 billion and fill it by 2027."

American Islam

2007-01-23T16:03:00.000-05:00

A fascinating dialogue. I have bought "American Islam" and will probably report on it when I finish reading it. Don't hold your breath: I am way behind in my reading.

the book club
American Islam
Why Americans fear Muslims.
By Reza Aslan and Daniel Benjamin, Slate Magazine
Updated Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2007, at 2:05 PM ET

From: Daniel Benjamin
To: Reza Aslan
Subject: Will Islamic Radicalism Gain a Foothold in America?
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2007, at 10:35 AM ET
Reza—

One of the striking things about mainstream journalism in post-9/11 America has been the scant attention paid to the nation's Muslim community. There were, of course, plenty of stories on the many immigrants taken into detention after the terrorist attacks and on the questioning of large numbers of Muslims by law enforcement officials. But compared with the enormous amount of copy that newspapers devoted to the pederast priest scandals, the coverage of American Muslims has been seriously inadequate. Given the size and importance of the community—it's no understatement to say that it is the first line of defense against jihadist attack—the lack of reporting has been a dramatic failing of the American media.

There were a few exceptions, and one was a series of Page One stories that Paul M. Barrett wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2003. Those articles provided the basis for American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, a book that fills a real need and does so remarkably well. (Full disclosure: Paul Barrett is an old friend and former colleague.) American Islam does not give us the entire picture of what is going on among believers of the nation's fastest-growing religion. Nothing could. But through a group of seven profiles, it delivers a set of powerful insights about Muslim life in the United States and the tensions that are shaping the community—or, more accurately, communities, since there is a fractious diversity of Muslims in the United States.

As you might imagine, American Islam is a study of people caught in the crosscurrents. Some are trying to navigate between the roles of dexterous insider and outraged outsider. Others are trying to push their fellow Muslims to adopt changes that are at odds with hundreds of years of tradition. Others still are re-litigating ancient struggles—such as between mysticism and orthodoxy—in a New World setting. Several are trying to champion a tolerant, ecumenical version of Islam against one that seems increasingly insular and xenophobic.

In that sense, the book poses the question that really is the central one not only for Muslims but all Americans: Is radicalism going to gain a real foothold here?

Barrett's carefully crafted approach is a smart one because of the paucity of sociological data on Islam in the United States. We don't even know how many Muslims there are in the country; the Census Bureau doesn't ask about religious affiliation. Estimates by Muslim groups put the number at 6 million or higher, but these are truly rough guesses; as Barrett notes, the best guess is between 3 and 6 million. The number of mosques is also a matter of dispute, as is the degree of religious observance within communities. Trying to get a sense of the relative strength of different strains of thought among American Muslims is maddeningly difficult.

So, instead of giving us unsubstantiated generalizations, Barrett looks closely at the micro-environments of his seven subjects. Among them are a colorful newspaper publisher of Lebanese Shiite origins who is a power broker in Michigan's large and politically influential Muslim community, and noted Kuwaiti-born scholar Khaled Abou el Fadl, who challenged fellow Muslims to speak out against the attacks of 9/11, becoming something of a pariah. A chapter on Siraj Wahhaj, a radical-leaning imam in Brooklyn, traces the complicated story of African-American Islam, whose adherents compose a fifth of the country's Muslim population but who have tense relations with Muslims of foreign ancestry, as well as attachments to figures such as Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan that are shared by no other Muslims.

In telling these stories, Barrett exercises great restraint, avoiding the temptation to generalize on the basis of individual experiences. The book—which I thought was a great read—does not overinterpret, letting the reader instead, for example, hear the unadorned story of Abdul Kabir Krambo, an American-born hippie-turned-Sufi whose faith gave him an anchor in life but not quite enough equanimity to deal with the foreign-born Muslims (he was " 'the token white guy' " on the board of his mosque) who don't always approve of his native ways. Krambo's mosque was destroyed by arson in 1994. The mystery of whether the attack was carried out by non-Muslim Americans or anti-Sufi Muslims provides a perfect example of the complex tensions that plague Barrett's characters.

Among scholars of terrorism these days, the accepted wisdom is that a major reason no second catastrophic attack on the United States has occurred is that the foot soldiers of jihad are not here—at least not in great numbers. Many Muslims in this country may be angry about U.S. foreign policy, but they are not alienated from American society or values. They are also more educated than the national norm, earn more than the norm, and are not ghettoized, as the Muslims of Europe are. ("American Muslims have bought into the American dream," my friend Marc Sageman, the author of Understanding Terror Networks, likes to say. "What is the European dream?")

But will it stay that way? One of the most moving chapters hints that it will. "The Activist" describes the trajectory of Mustafa Saied, an Indian-born Muslim who gravitates to the Muslim Brotherhood while in college and spends his time at rallies where the chant was "Idhbaahal Yahood" ("Slaughter the Jews"). He later renounces his extremism after intense conversation with other Muslims, one of whom persuades him that " 'the basic foundations of American values are very Islamic—freedom of religion, freedom of speech, toleration.' "

However, that there are some extremists afoot is clear from a chapter on Sami Omar al-Hussayen, the Saudi graduate student at the University of Idaho who was unsuccessfully prosecuted under the Patriot Act for giving material support to terrorists through his role as a Web master for a legal student group. The members of al-Hussayen's Islamic Assembly of North America are, at the very least, addicted to some deeply anti-American rhetoric, such as the writings of the "Awakening Sheikhs" of Saudi Arabia, Safar al-Hawali and Salman bin Fahd al-Awda.

I'm persuaded that America's culture of immigration has made a huge difference in shaping the attitudes of Muslims here. But other elements in the culture—rising Islamophobia, especially from the Christian right, and ham-handed law enforcement efforts, of the kind Barrett explores in his chapter on al-Hussayen—appear to be eroding some Muslims' sense of belonging. And, of course, there is our presence in Iraq, which appalls most American Muslims, including the Iraqi expats who once supported the invasion. Which way do you think the wind is blowing?

I'd also like your thoughts on one of the central themes of the book—that Islam, or at least one stream of it, is being remade by its encounter with America. This notion appears in several of Barrett's chapters, including the one on Asra Nomani, the former Journal reporter, single mother, and author of Standing Alone in Mecca, who confronted her hometown mosque in West Virginia with a determined campaign for equal treatment for women. In your superb book No god but God, you discuss the "Islamic Reformation" and mention, for example, European thinker Tariq Ramadan's contention that the synthesis of Islam and Western democratic ideals is driving the faith in that direction. Does Barrett's reportage suggest something similar is happening in the United States?

In any case, the changes that Barrett describes are encouraging. But as I think he would agree, it is impossible to say whether the stories he relates are indicative or isolated. What's your take?

Bests,
Dan

From: Reza Aslan
To: Daniel Benjamin
Subject: Assimilation and the Creation of a Uniquely American Faith
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2007, at 2:05 PM ET

Dan,

As I was reading American Islam, I was reminded of an incident that occurred last November in Washington, D.C., and got a lot of play in the American Muslim community. Jerry Klein, a popular radio host at WMAL-AM 630, suggested during one of his shows that Muslims in the United States should be forced to wear "identifying markers," specifically "a crescent moon arm band, or … a crescent moon tattoo." As one would expect, his phone lines were immediately jammed with listeners. Only they were not calling to excoriate Klein, but to agree wholeheartedly with him. One caller argued that American Muslims should not only be tattooed "in the middle of their foreheads," but that they should then be "rounded up and shipped out of the country." A Maryland caller concurred. "You have to set up encampments like they did during World War II," he said, "like with the Japanese and Germans."

Of course, what the callers did not realize was that Klein was joking. To his credit, he was horrified by his listeners' reactions, and said so on air. But perhaps Klein should not have been so surprised. According to recent polls, 39 percent of Americans want Muslims living in the United States to carry "special identification," and nearly half think their civil liberties should be curtailed in the name of national security. Roughly a third of those polled are convinced that the sympathies of America's Muslim community lies with al-Qaida, while a full 60 percent say they do not know any Muslims.

As a Muslim, I am obviously disturbed by these figures. But what I find particularly remarkable about these polls is that if the person being polled actually knows a Muslim, they are less likely to have negative perceptions of Islam. (By the way, I think that Barrett's estimate of how many Muslims currently live in America is low; more realistic, I suspect, are estimates of 6 million to 10 million.) It follows, then, that the best way to educate Americans about Islam is to introduce them to living, breathing American Muslims. That is precisely what makes Barrett's book such an engaging and important read. To my mind, this intimate group portrait of American Muslims is far more revealing than any of the half-dozen or so academic tomes that have been written on the subject over the last few years.

You are right to point out that the American Muslim community has, for the most part, managed to avoid many of the problems of identity and integration that plague Muslim communities in Europe. Barrett, like many social scientists, argues that this is partly due to economic factors. After all, the majority of European Muslims come from impoverished immigrant families, while the majority of Muslims in the United States are either middle-class converts or educated immigrants. Sixty percent of Muslims in the United States own their own homes. Believe it or not, the median income for a Muslim household in America is greater than it is for a non-Muslim household.

But as I read the individual profiles in American Islam, it became clear to me that it is more than mere economic factors that have allowed Muslims to so thoroughly assimilate into American society. (By the way, maybe it is this assimilation that explains why so many Americans think they have never met a Muslim. Perhaps they assume all look and dress like Osama bin Laden.)

Although Barrett does not press the point, I truly believe the ease with which Muslims have assimilated into American culture has less to do with economics than it does with America's long and storied history of assimilating different cultures and ethnicities under a single shared political and cultural ideal—an ideal we can label simply as Americanism. The Muslims who settled in Europe formed insulated ethnic enclaves cut off from the rest of European society. But American Muslims have seamlessly integrated into almost every level of American society. Indeed, they represent the most powerful argument against the prevailing "Clash of Civilizations" mentality that pits Islam against the West.

Finally, as a Muslim who lives in the United States and who has spent a great deal of time among Muslims in Europe, I can tell you that, more than anything else, it is the core American belief that faith has a role to play in the public realm that has allowed American Muslims to so seamlessly reconcile their faiths, cultures, and traditions with the realities of American life. Say what you will, this is not, nor has it ever been, a "secular" country. It is, in fact, the most religiously diverse and religiously tolerant nation in the world. In no other country—and certainly no Islamic country—can Muslims pursue their faith and practice in whatever way they see fit than in the United States. It is, in short, America itself that has made American Muslims so much more resistant to the pull of jihadism than their European counterparts.

This brings me to your excellent question regarding one of the central themes of Barrett's book. Is the Muslim encounter with the United States creating a new, American brand of Islam, much the way this country gave rise to new forms of Judaism and Catholicism? The short answer is yes. Just look at the Zaytuna Institute in Hayward, Calif., established by Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, an American convert and one of the world's most respected authorities on Islamic law. Tired of Muslims in the United States being forced to import their imams from countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—countries whose values and traditions are far removed from ours—Sheikh Hamza has created America's first Muslim seminary, to train American imams who can relate to the unique cultural and religious needs of American Muslims. But that's just part of the story. America also gives Muslims the freedom to explore issues like Islamic feminism (as demonstrated in Barrett's wonderful profile of my friend Asra Nomani, a journalist and author), Islamic pluralism, Islamic democracy, and even Islamic homosexuality, all of which has allowed Islam in America to flower into an independent and uniquely American faith.

The real question, which you touch upon, is how the U.S. government, whose image in the Muslim world is at an all-time low, can tap into the American Muslims community and take advantage of what you rightly note may be America's greatest weapon against jihadism. I mean, if what you say is true—if the American Muslim community is the "first line of defense against jihadist attack" —then why have they seemingly been sidelined by the US government in this "great ideological battle for civilization"?

Reza

Reza Aslan is a research associate at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy and the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.
Daniel Benjamin is a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2158114/

Uncivilized Behavior

2007-01-20T14:29:00.000-05:00

This the kind of counter-productive behavior (on both sides) that President Carter refers to in his controversial book.

Israel's Holocaust trustee blasts Hebron settlers
Sat Jan 20, 2007 1:09 PM ET, Reuters

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior official of Israel's central Holocaust memorial on Saturday assailed Jewish settlers who harass Palestinians in a tinderbox West Bank city, saying the abuse recalled the anti-Semitism of 1930s Europe.

The fierce attack by Yosef Lapid, chairman of Yad Vashem's advisory council, was prompted by Israeli television footage showing a Hebron settler woman hissing "whore" at a Palestinian neighbor and settler children lobbing rocks at Arab homes.

The spectacle stirred outrage in the Jewish state, where many view the settlers as opposing coexistence with a future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lapid, a Holocaust survivor who lost his father to the Nazi genocide, said in a weekly commentary on Israel Radio that the acts of some Hebron settlers reminded him of persecution endured by Jews in his native Yugoslavia on the eve of World War Two.

"It was not crematoria or pogroms that made our life in the diaspora bitter before they began to kill us, but persecution, harassment, stone-throwing, damage to livelihood, intimidation, spitting and scorn," Lapid said, reiterating remarks made earlier this week in Israel's Maariv newspaper .

"I was afraid to go to school, because of the little anti-Semites who used to lay in ambush on the way and beat us up. How is that different from a Palestinian child in Hebron?"

Hebron has been a frequent flashpoint of more than six years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Some 400 settlers live there, under heavy Israeli military guard, among 150,000 Palestinians.

"The man is obviously a very, very sick person, to compare the Jews in Hebron to barbarians and compare us to the Nazis," David Wilder, a spokesman for the settlers in Hebron, said in response to Lapid.

Another community spokesman, Noam Arnon, played down the televised harassments as "fringe incidents," and told Israel Radio: "In six years, 37 Jews have been murdered in Hebron, and now they're preoccupied with curses?"

CRACKDOWN OR COMPLACENCY?

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered a cabinet-level probe last week into Palestinian allegations that abuse by Hebron settlers is commonplace and routinely ignored by Israel.

Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh said he hoped for an Israeli crackdown against the settler "provocateurs", but Palestinian officials called for comprehensive action.

"If they are serious about coexistence, the Israelis must take practical steps on the hundreds of daily violations against Palestinians in the old city," Hebron Governor Arif Jabari said.

Jabari's apparent pessimism was shared by Lapid, a former Israeli justice minister.

"We Jewish citizens of Israel wave a reprimanding finger at most," he said. "Worse still, I tolerated this silently as justice minister too."

The World Court has branded the settlements illegal but many Jews claim a biblical birthright to the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war.

Israel withdrew settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005, a move billed as breaking the diplomatic deadlock with the Palestinians.

The rise since of Hamas, a Palestinian Islamist group whose charter calls for the Jewish state's destruction, and a recent war against Hizbollah guerillas in Lebanon has hardened the resolve of Israeli rightists against ever leaving the West Bank.

Lapid said while there was no comparing the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died, with Palestinian suffering from Israel's policies, this did not mean Israelis could not be culpable.

"It is inconceivable for the memory of Auschwitz to warrant ignoring the fact that there are Jews among us who behave today toward Palestinians just like German, Hungarian, Polish and other anti-Semites behaved toward Jews," he said.

(Additional reporting by Haitham Tamimi in Hebron and Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem)

Yossi Bellin: The Case for Carter

2007-01-19T16:20:00.000-05:00

An Israeli view very much like my own. To read rest of article (there isn't too much more) click on post title above. For some more on the author, who has real credentials in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, see the following link:

http://www.answers.com/topic/yossi-beilin

The Case for Carter
Opinion

Yossi Beilin | Tue. Jan 16, 2007, Jewish Daily Forward

Looking at the controversy that has erupted over former President Jimmy Carter’s book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” I have to say I am a little envious — envious of a national culture in which a book, or just a book title, can stir such a debate.

I cannot recall when the publication of a book has generated such a debate in Israel. And even though we are talking here about a book that was published in the United States and has yet to be translated into Hebrew, the quiet way in which “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” has been received in Israel is nevertheless noteworthy, not least because it is Israel itself that is the object of Carter’s opprobrium.

....

It is not that Israelis are indifferent to what is said about them, but the threshold of what passes as acceptable here is apparently much higher than it is with Israel’s friends in the United States. In the case of this particular book, the harsh words that Carter reserves for Israel are simply not as jarring to Israeli ears, which have grown used to such language, especially with respect to the occupation.

In other words, what Carter says in his book about the Israeli occupation and our treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories — and perhaps no less important, how he says it — is entirely harmonious with the kind of criticism that Israelis themselves voice about their own country. There is nothing in the criticism that Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves.

....

Every Israeli, and every Jew to whom the destiny of Israel is important, is indebted to Carter for breaking the ring of hostility that had choked Israel for more than 30 years. No American president before him had dedicated himself so fully to the cause of Israel’s peace and security, and, with the exception of Bill Clinton, no American president has done so since.

This is why the publication of Carter’s recent book, and perhaps more than anything else, the title it bears, has pained so many people. And I must admit that, on some deeply felt level, the title of the book has strained my heart, too. Harsh and awful as the conditions are in the West Bank, the suggestion that Israel is conducting a policy of apartheid in the occupied territories is simply unacceptable to me.

But is this what Carter is saying? I have read his book, and I could not help but agree — however agonizingly so — with most if its contents. Where I disagreed was mostly with the choice of language, including his choice of the word “apartheid.”

But if we are to be fair, and as any reading of the book makes clear, Carter’s use of the word “apartheid” is first and foremost metaphorical. Underlying Israel’s policy in the West Bank, he argues, is not a racist ideology but rather a nationalist drive for the acquisition of land. The resulting violence, and the segregationist policies that shape life in the West Bank, are the ill-intended consequences of that drive.

Of course, there is no appropriate term in the political lexicon for what we in Israel are doing in the occupied territories. “Occupation” is too antiseptic a term, and does not capture the social, cultural and humanitarian dimensions of our actions. Given the Palestinians’ role in the impasse at which we have arrived, to say nothing of Arab states and, historically speaking, of the superpowers themselves, I would describe the reality of occupation as a march of folly — an Israeli one, certainly, but not exclusively so.

But if we are to read Carter’s book for what it is, I think we would find in it an impassioned personal narrative of an American former president who is reflecting on the direction in which Israel and Palestine may be going if they fail to reach agreement soon. Somewhere down the line — and symbolically speaking, that line may be crossed the day that a minority of Jews will rule a majority of Palestinians west of the Jordan River — the destructive nature of occupation will turn Israel into a pariah state, not unlike South Africa under apartheid.

In this sense, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” is a stark warning to both Israelis and Palestinians of the choice they must make. That choice is between peace and apartheid, for the absence of one may well mean the other. Carter’s choice is clearly peace, and, for all its disquieting language, the book he has written is sustained by the hope that we choose peace, as well.

Yossi Beilin, a member of the Knesset, is chairman of the Meretz-Yahad Party.

Energy New Deal

2007-01-19T07:22:00.000-05:00

I like Friedman's argument for what I call "push-pull" energy policy.

January 19, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times

A Warning From the Garden

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Well, so much for our daffodils! They all bloomed in our front yard last week. They now form a nice bright yellow cluster at the bottom of our driveway. Temperatures of 65 degrees in Washington in January will do that. Frankly, daffodils in January do brighten up the lawn. Maybe next year we’ll try for roses in February.

....

Even the White House seems to have noticed. Al Hubbard, the president’s economic adviser, says Mr. Bush will soon unveil an energy independence strategy that will produce “headlines above the fold that will knock your socks off.” Since everything the president has done on energy up to now has left my socks firmly in place, I will be eager to hear what Mr. Bush says.

....

What would be compelling? I used to think it would be a “Manhattan Project” on energy. I don’t any longer. I’ve learned that there is no magic bullet for reducing our dependence on oil and emissions of greenhouse gases — and politicians who call for one are usually just trying to avoid asking for sacrifice today.

The right rallying call is for a “Green New Deal.” The New Deal was not built on a magic bullet, but on a broad range of programs and industrial projects to revitalize America. Ditto for an energy New Deal. If we are to turn the tide on climate change and end our oil addiction, we need more of everything: solar, wind, hydro, ethanol, biodiesel, clean coal and nuclear power — and conservation.

It takes a Green New Deal because to nurture all of these technologies to a point that they really scale would be a huge industrial project. If you have put a windmill in your yard or some solar panels on your roof, bless your heart. But we will only green the world when we change the very nature of the electricity grid — moving it away from dirty coal or oil to clean coal and renewables. And that is a huge industrial project — much bigger than anyone has told you. Finally, like the New Deal, if we undertake the green version, it has the potential to create a whole new clean power industry to spur our economy into the 21st century.

To spark a Green New Deal today requires getting two things right: government regulations and prices. Look at California. By setting steadily higher standards for the energy efficiency of buildings and appliances — and creating incentives for utilities to work with consumers to use less power — California has held its per-capita electricity use constant for 30 years, while the rest of the nation has seen per- capita electricity use increase by nearly 50 percent, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. That has saved California from building 24 giant power plants.

....

But prices also matter. I don’t care whether it is a federal gasoline tax, carbon tax, B.T.U. tax or cap-and-trade system, power utilities, factories and car owners have to be required to pay the real and full cost to society of the carbon they put into the atmosphere. And higher costs for fossil fuels make more costly clean alternatives more competitive.

....

This isn’t rocket science. Government standards matter. They drive innovation and efficiency. And prices matter. They drive more and cleaner energy choices. So when the president unveils his energy proposals, if they don’t call for higher efficiency standards and higher prices for fossil fuels — take your socks off yourself. It’s going to get hot around here.

Common Sense on Iraq

2007-01-18T07:02:00.000-05:00

I worry about micro-management, but closer oversight by Congress certainly seems in order. The trick will be to find the right balance.

Anatomy of a Wrong Approach

By David S. Broder
Thursday, January 18, 2007; A23, Washington Post

The third or fourth time I heard Vice President Cheney tell Fox News's Chris Wallace on Sunday that al-Qaeda was gambling that the United States "doesn't have the stomach" to keep up the fight in Iraq, it crossed my mind that Cheney may be staring at the wrong part of the national anatomy.

The question, really, is not whether we have the stomach for the fight but the brains to figure out what to do in Iraq.

The vice president's effort to reduce it to a question of courage -- to suggest that those who want to expand the war are braver than those urging steps to limit it -- is a standard rhetorical trick. Whenever any Bush policy is questioned, someone from the administration almost automatically charges that its critics are soft on terrorism.

Iraq requires thought, not just gut instinct, because we are struggling with a situation we've never faced before. What does America really know about how to deal with a Shiite-Sunni civil war in a land devastated by years of dictatorship, damaged by invasion, infiltrated by terrorists and surrounded by countries with their own territorial ambitions? Not much, which is why it behooves us to move with caution.

The most serious thinking, inside and outside the administration, has concluded that it is fundamentally up to the government in Baghdad to curb the militias controlled by rival Sunni and Shiite clans. President Bush says the Iraqis can't do it alone, so he is sending more troops, 20,000 of them, to help Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his forces.

Trouble is, no one knows if those Iraqi forces will show up to fight or, if they do, whether they will target anyone other than their Sunni enemies.

The Iraq Study Group and a good many others urged Bush to demand action from Maliki before offering any further help. They said, let him show an effort to take control of the corrupt and sect-filled ministries, launch serious constitutional reform, divide up the oil revenue, start delivering services.

Bush instead bought Maliki's argument that none of that is possible until Baghdad is more secure, and securing Baghdad means sending more troops into its high-risk urban warfare.

Given the decision that Bush has made, is there anything Congress can do to protect American interests and save as many American lives as possible? Yes, there is. The lawmakers should hold Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates strictly to account for monitoring the action -- or inaction -- of the Maliki government.

There is a lot of talk now on Capitol Hill about nonbinding resolutions opposing the "surge" of troops, or some sort of measure to limit or cut off the funds for that deployment. No such action is likely to have any impact on the president. The deployment has begun, and Bush is adamant about his authority as commander in chief to continue it.

What Congress can demand is regular, frequent -- even weekly -- updates from the Pentagon, relayed from the able Gen. David Petraeus, the new commander in Iraq, about what the Iraqis are doing. The State Department should be delivering similar reports from the embassy in Baghdad on the operation of Maliki's government. Members of Congress ought to be traveling to Iraq themselves, checking out the reports with the troops who are bearing the brunt of the fighting.

The administration may complain about this intense monitoring and call it micromanagement. But after the blunders of the past three years, neither the president nor our allies in Baghdad have earned the right to operate with a free hand.

If Petraeus and his staff can provide specific measures of Iraqi military cooperation and progress, good. If the U.S. Embassy sees signs that the Maliki government is getting its act together, better yet. And if members of Congress can confirm these impressions on the ground in Baghdad, then take it to the bank.

If not, then Congress should call on the president to "show some stomach" and tell Maliki that the game is coming to an end.

Without a credible threat to walk away, there is every reason to believe that Maliki will attempt to use this expanded American force as a shield for the Shiite effort to drive the Sunni minority out of their homes and far from any share of power.

That is not a goal worth one American life. And if it turns out that's what all this amounts to, then we will have no choice.

Medicare Hot Air

2007-01-17T16:51:00.000-05:00

Just in case you are interested (I am). For the rest of the statement, click on post title above.

Medicare Hot Air
Can the Democrats' bill bring lower drug prices? Don't count on it.

January 17, 2007 , FactCheck.org

Summary
Democrats are overselling their Medicare prescription drug bill. They claim it will bring about big price cuts for medication while Medicare experts say it won't. Republicans have been equally misleading, describing the bill as a system of severe price controls, which it isn't.

The fact is that the bill would do little more than require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to talk to drug companies about granting discounts. It specifically denies him the bargaining leverage of paying only for some drugs and not others.

Analysis
Ever since Congress passed President Bush's new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients, Democrats have been attacking it as a giveaway to drug companies. In the 2006 House and Senate campaigns, several TV ads attacked GOP lawmakers for supporting a law that forbids the federal government from negotiating directly with drug companies for lower prices. Democrats promised they would repeal that ban.

Now Democrats are advancing such a bill, H.R. 4 , which passed the House last week by a vote of 255 to 170. Prospects in the Senate are unclear. Both sides are making vastly exaggerated claims about its likely effect, which independent experts describe as negligible.

During debate, its chief sponsor John Dingell of Michigan flatly predicted big savings:

Dingell: This legislation is simple and common sense. It will deliver lower premiums to the seniors, lower prices at the pharmacy and savings for all taxpayers . . . . I have confidence that Secretary [Mike] Leavitt can cut a good deal with the bargaining power of 43 million beneficiaries of Medicare behind him without restricting access to needed medicine.

And Republicans described the bill as giving the government power to set drug prices. Rep. Michael Burgess of Texas took the lead for Republicans:

Burgess: Under the guise of negotiation the Democrats propose to enact draconian price controls on pharmaceutical products.

Both sides are blowing hot air. A number of experts, including the Congressional Budget Office and the chief actuary of the Medicare system, say the bill won't bring the lower prices Democrats promise. And contrary to the Republican claim, the actual language of the bill grants no price-setting authority to federal officials.

...

Iraq: The Algerian Model

2007-01-17T06:38:00.000-05:00

I don't generally like Maureen Dowd's sarcastic columns, but this one has some very important points in it. To read the rest of the column. click on the post title above.

January 17, 2007, New York Times

Op-Ed Columnist

Aux Barricades!

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Being president can be really, really hard.

“Sometimes you’re the commander in chief,” W. explained to Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes.” “Sometimes you’re the educator in chief, and a lot of times you’re both when it comes to war.”

President Bush has been dutifully making the rounds of TV news shows, trying to make the case that victory in Iraq is “doable.” He thinks the public will support the Surge if he can simply illuminate a few things that we may have been too thick to understand. For instance, he says he needs to “explain to people that what happens in the Middle East will affect the future of this country.” Yes, Mr. President, we get it.

...

It’s unnerving to be tutored by an educator in chief who is himself being tutored. The president elucidating the Iraqi insurgency for us is learning about the Algerian insurgency from the man who failed to quell the Vietcong insurgency.

During his “60 Minutes” interview, Mr. Bush mentioned that he was reading Alistair Horne’s classic history, “A Savage War of Peace,” about why the French suffered a colonial disaster in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algiers from 1954 to 1962.

The book was recommended to W. by Henry Kissinger, who is working on an official biography of himself with Mr. Horne.

...

Maybe it was inevitable, once W. started reading Camus’s “L’Etranger,” set in Algeria, that he would move on to Mr. Horne. As The Washington Post military correspondent Tom Ricks wrote in November, the Horne book has been an underground best-seller among U.S. military officers for three years, and “Algeria” has become almost a code word among counterinsurgency specialists for the mess in Iraq. The Pentagon screened the 1966 movie “The Battle of Algiers” in 2003, but the commander in chief must have missed it.

I asked Mr. Horne, who was at his home in a small village outside Oxford, England, what the president could learn from his book.

“The depressing problem of getting entangled in the Muslim world,” he replied. “Algeria was a thoroughly bloodthirsty war that ended horribly and cost the lives of about 20,000 Frenchmen and a million Algerians. There was a terrible civil war. ...De Gaulle ended up giving literally everything away and left without his pants.”

President de Gaulle had all the same misconceptions as W., that his prestige could persuade the Muslims to accept his terms; that the guerrillas would recognize military defeat and accept sensible compromise; and that, as Mr. Horne writes, “time would wait while he found the correct formula and then imposed peace with it.”

Mr. Horne also sees sad parallels in the torture issue: “The French had experience under the Nazis in the occupation and practiced methods the Germans used in Algeria and extracted information that helped them win the Battle of Algiers. But in the long run it lost the war, because it caused such revulsion in France when the news came out, and there was huge opposition to the war from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”

...

Being Jewish

2007-01-14T07:41:00.000-05:00

As an independent Jew (one that does not give knee-jerk support to Israel) I found the following "Leader" from this week's Economist particularly interesting. To read more on the subject from farther back in this week's Economist, click on the post title above.

On a somewhat related issue, you might want to see the following article from this week's New York Times Magazine:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/magazine/14foxman.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Israel and the Jews

Diaspora blues

Jan 11th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Jews around the world should join the debate about Israel, not just defend whatever it does

Polaris

WHAT is a Jewish state for, and what should it be like? Jews have been debating that for 200 years. Even today, with Israel already 58 years old and taken for granted by most of the rest of the world, they still cannot agree.

The early settlers came for a variety of reasons. Some wanted to escape the stifling constraints of religious dogma and east European village communities; others thought it would hasten the coming of the Messiah. As European anti-Semitism grew, the idea took hold that Jews needed their own land as a safe haven. After the Holocaust, saving Jewish lives became the fledgling state's first priority. Soon, it acquired another role: being a potential Israeli citizen became one of the anchor points of what it meant to be a Jew.

Since then, Jews have continued debating and reshaping their own relationships to the country. In Israel secular Jews found Israeliness a handy substitute for religious observance. Some religious Jews, for their part, revived the previously fringe creed of messianic Zionism, holding that to settle in all the biblical land—including the lands Israel captured after 1967—is a God-given duty. To others, the ultra-Orthodox, a Jewish state should spend as much as possible on subsidising Jewish learning and maintaining piety. And of these groups there are countless splinters and crossbreeds.

Meanwhile, diaspora Jews have developed an even more eclectic mix of Jewish culture and attitudes to Zionism (see article). And that is partly because, as the threat of genocide or of Israel's destruction has receded, a growing number of diaspora Jews neither feel comfortable with always standing up for Israel, nor feel a need to invoke Israel in defining what makes them Jewish.

Yet the big Jewish diaspora institutions have not caught up. Their relationship with Israel is still based mainly around supporting it in times of crisis and defending it from critics. This is true of the big umbrella groups for Jewish communities, but especially so of the pro-Israel lobby groups in America, formed to influence American foreign policy in Israel's favour. Often these lobbies have ended up representing not Israel but its right-wing political establishment, with American defenders of Israel accusing critics of being “anti-Semitic” for saying things that are commonplace in Israel's own internal debate.

My country, but not right or wrong

Their attitude persists partly because Israel was indeed much more vulnerable when the lobbies were founded; partly because the lazy way to defend Israel is to suggest that its critics, even legitimate ones, are anti-Semites; and partly because the pro-Israel lobbies have formed an unholy alliance with evangelical Christian groups who believe, like the religious Zionists, that the ingathering of the Jewish exiles will bring forward Judgment Day. In their fervour, these evangelical Christians are more uncompromisingly Zionist than most Jews. That they also believe that Judgment Day will entail the destruction of Israel and the deaths of a great many Jews does not seem to bother the Jewish lobbies; that, after all, is the theology of the future, and their job is the politics of today.

This knee-jerk defensiveness of Israel does not help the Jewish diaspora, at least in terms of keeping young Jews from leaving the faith. Some find the uncritical attitude to Israel distasteful; others simply find Israel irrelevant. Some strike out on their own, finding new and creative ways to explore their Judaism. But many are simply drifting away.

The tendency to stand by Israel right or wrong brings a second problem. It locks diaspora Jews out of the fateful and often bitter debates that rage inside Israel itself. Israel is an increasingly divided society. Secular and religious Jews used to have more beliefs in common, albeit for different reasons (eg, holding on to the occupied territories, whether for security or for religious redemption), but for decades their interests have been diverging. They disagree on the most basic questions: borders, who is a Jew, the role of religion, the status of non-Jews. Lately the traditional political boundaries have been melting down too. Israeli Jews swim in a sea of conflicting ideas about who they should be. Unless they agree on that, they cannot ultimately resolve their relationship with the Palestinians, including the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens.

Helping Israel should no longer mean defending it uncritically. Israel is strong enough to cope with harsh words from its friends. So diaspora institutions should, for example, feel free to criticise Israeli politicians who preach racism and intolerance, such as a recently appointed cabinet minister, Avigdor Lieberman. They should encourage lively debate about Israeli policies. Perhaps more will then add their voices to those of the millions of Israelis who believe in leaving the occupied territories so that Palestinians can have a state of their own, allowing an Israel at peace to return to its original vocation of providing a safe and democratic haven for the world's Jews.

Sarkozy on EU Reform

2007-01-13T14:41:00.000-05:00

Although a bit dated, the following summarizes the views of French right's candidate for the presidency in 2007. To read the entire speech, click on the post title above.

EU reform: What we need to do

by Nicolas Sarkozy, Europe's World

What can Europe's political leaders do to regain popular support for the EU and get it moving again? Nicolas Sarkozy explains his strategy for unblocking the deadlock with a "mini-treaty" and for streamlining the European institutions

Next year's 50th anniversary of the EU's founding Rome treaty should be celebrated with pride, for it marks an historic achievement: half a century of re-uniting a divided continent thanks to the democratic vision of founding fathers like Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak, Alcide de Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer. But there is also cause for concern because the European project is in crisis; it may not be a clear cut crisis, but it is a profound one.

The forces driving the Union's political momentum have run out of steam, and Europe's citizens are either doubtful or indifferent to its aims and lack any real collective hope for the future. Some people, notably in France, think this sort of disenchantment is quite natural, but I disagree. In my view, the whole question of European integration is capable of once again inspiring popular enthusiasm; I believe that the "political Europe" I have always had faith in can still be attained....

This article is based on the speech that Nicolas Sarkozy gave on September 8, 2006 at the Brussels think tank Friends of Europe (www.friendsofeurope.org) in association with the Fondation Robert Schuman (www.robert-schuman.org)

Iraq Political Cartoons

2007-01-13T08:02:00.000-05:00

To see more cartoons on this topic from Slate Magazine, click on post title above.

Two Wars in Iraq

2007-01-12T06:48:00.000-05:00

What follows is a particularly useful summary of the state of things in Iraq and President Bush's recent decision to "surge" (a.k.a., "escalate", or "double down"):

Bush refuses to confront the war that he is losing in Iraq

By Philip Stephens

Published: January 12 2007 02:00 | Last updated: January 12 2007 02:00, Financial Times

There have been two wars in Iraq.

The first has been the one in the mind of George W. Bush - in the brilliant phrase of the American scholar Mark Danner, a war of the imagination*. This designates Iraq as the cockpit of a Manichean struggle against Islamist terrorism. Victory is the only option if, in the president's words this week, the US is not to surrender the future to extremists.

The second war has been the one we watch nightly on our television screens - the insurgency-cum-sectarian bloodletting that has cost 3,000 American and countless times as many Iraqi lives. In this grindingly vicious, increasingly complex conflict the US has for some time been facing defeat.

Last November the two wars, the imagined and the real, might well have converged. The heavy losses suffered by the Republicans in the mid-term elections carried the message that America had lost faith in Mr Bush's war. The voters wanted the troops to come home. Even as they spoke, the Baker-Hamilton study group concluded with commendable candour that the real war was indeed being lost. Surely, the pretence would have to end

Those who thought so underestimated, if that is the right word, Mr Bush. The president, as we heard again this week, will not let go of the war of the imagination.

Iraq is fracturing along its sectarian and ethnic fault lines; the government of Nouri al-Maliki is propped up by Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, the nastiest of the Shia militias; the Sunni insurgency is undiminished; Iran and Syria are doing their best to stir further mischief. Mr Bush's answer is another 20,000 troops and a change in the rules of engagement.

This, it should be recalled, is not the first overhaul of Iraq policy. In November 2005, the White House published a National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. Much of what Mr Bush said this week echoes that document. Sceptics will recall that the latest escalation of American forces will do little more than restore them to the levels of 15 months ago.

In its own terms it makes sense,

as Mr Bush now proposes, to embark on a determined effort to pacify Baghdad as a building block for reconciliation and reconstruction. Few would quarrel, either, with the president's stern warning that

Mr Maliki must reach out to marginalised Sunnis and former Ba'athists. To have the slimmest chance of stabilising Iraq, the US must break the vicious circle that holds politics hostage to violence and security to political deadlock.

Mr Bush, though, has willed the ends without the means. Even if Iraq's Shia leadership is willing to tame its militias - a doubtful proposition - 20,000 additional US troops is woefully inadequate. Treble or quadruple that number, military strategists say, and a "clear and hold" strategy in Baghdad might just work. In any event, Mr Bush has announced that the so-called surge is strictly temporary, thus further diminishing its likely effectiveness.

Missing too is a political roadmap, for Iraq or for the region. Necessary though it is, admonishing Mr Maliki to engage the Sunnis is not of itself a strategy for political reconciliation. Reminding Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan that they have an important stake in Iraq's stability likewise does not substitute for engagement with Iran and Syria.

Here, Mr Bush has ignored the Baker-Hamilton insight that it will be impossible to stabilise Iraq without at least the tacit acceptance of its neighbours and above all of Iran. To the president's mind, talking to your enemies is an admission of defeat. The irony is that, in the context of Iraq, to refuse to engage with those enemies makes a certainty of defeat.

What we are left with, then, is a president still fighting the simple war he thought he had started in 2003. This owes nothing to the bloody tapestry created by myriad power struggles in Iraq. Instead, America is facing a finite number of Ba'athist and foreign diehards who, with resolve, can be beaten in battle.

Mr Bush, of course, has not been alone in his delusions during these past few years. It is not that long since Dick Cheney, the vice-president, was publicly declaring the insurgency to be in "its last throes". It will be for historians to judge when precisely the US lost the war. To my mind, though, there is a good case to pinpoint two moments almost at the outset. The first was Donald Rumsfeld's response to the rioting and looting in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. "Stuff happens," the then defence secretary breezed, even as he prepared to reduce US troop levels in the face of rising disorder. Soon after, the administration handed the enemy 350,000 recruits by disbanding the army and purging Ba'athists.

The sadness is that the descent into chaos was predicted as well as predictable. In 1999 the generals and policymakers in Washington carried out a series of planning exercises for the occupation of Iraq. The now unclassified conclusions have recently been published by the National Security Archive.

"A change in regime," the authors of the exercise code-named Desert Crossing noted, "does not guarantee stability . . . aggressive neighbours, fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines, and chaos created by rival forces bidding for power could adversely affect stability".

They calculated that a force of 400,000 and an occupation lasting perhaps a decade would be necessary to build stable self-government in Baghdad. Even then, the assumption was that retribution against the Ba'athists would be limited and the army would be kept intact.

The point these policymakers came back to again and again was a need to reach an accommodation with the regional powers, if necessary by ending the isolation of Iran. With what now seems like extraordinary prescience but at the time was seen as common sense, they cautioned: "More so than any other country in the region, mismanagement of Iran, with all its capabilities and possible intentions, could be disastrous for the United States and the coalition." And so it has proved.

One temptation now is to see Mr Bush's latest strategy as a cynical manoeuvre. It might be an effort to run down the clock of his presidency - leaving the Saigon moment to his successor. Alternatively, the president might be seeking political cover for retreat later in the year - the administration could at least say it had done its best. My own inclination is to believe the worst. Mr Bush is still fighting that other war.

How Globalization Went Bad

2007-01-11T15:11:00.000-05:00

This is a really worthwhile article, even if the title is not really right for the content. In my mind, a better title would have been: "The Risks of a Unipolar World". To read the whole article and see what I mean, click on the post title above.

How Globalization Went Bad

By Steven Weber, Naazneen Barma, Matthew Kroenig, Ely Ratner

Page 1 of 4

January/February 2007, Foreign Policy

From terrorism to global warming, the evils of globalization are more dangerous than ever before. What went wrong? The world became dependent on a single superpower. Only by correcting this imbalance can the world become a safer place.

The world today is more dangerous and less orderly than it was supposed to be. Ten or 15 years ago, the naive expectations were that the “end of history” was near. The reality has been the opposite. The world has more international terrorism and more nuclear proliferation today than it did in 1990. International institutions are weaker. The threats of pandemic disease and climate change are stronger. Cleavages of religious and cultural ideology are more intense. The global financial system is more unbalanced and precarious.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The end of the Cold War was supposed to make global politics and economics easier to manage, not harder. What went wrong? The bad news of the 21st century is that globalization has a significant dark side. The container ships that carry manufactured Chinese goods to and from the United States also carry drugs. The airplanes that fly passengers nonstop from New York to Singapore also transport infectious diseases. And the Internet has proved just as adept at spreading deadly, extremist ideologies as it has e-commerce....

Perfect for these Times

2007-01-11T14:38:00.000-05:00

Low concept
The G.W. Bush Severance Package
His stock is falling. He has lost the confidence of shareholders. So how much would it take to make him go away?
By Henry Blodget
Posted Thursday, Jan. 11, 2007, at 1:43 PM ET, Slate Magazine

Dear Mr. Bush:

This memo sets forth the terms of the severance agreement reached this morning between your representatives and the Board of Directors regarding your contemplated departure as Chief Executive Officer of United States of America, Inc. (Hereafter: "USA, Inc.").

The Board acknowledges that you believe you are doing "a heck of a job" and that, if not for weak-willed defeatists in Congress, the White House, the news media, the Democratic Party, the military, Iraq, the G7, and the voting public, the rest of the world might agree. The Board acknowledges that your representatives have produced evidence that you believe supports your assessment of your job performance and challenges the expertise and motives of your detractors. Without passing judgment on such evidence, the Board will try to honor your request that it be made available to "patriotic" historians.

The Board agrees to accept any hypothetical resignation you may decide to offer. If you decide to resign, the Board understands that you will do so "for personal reasons" and "to spend more time with your family." The Board agrees that any such resignation would be voluntary.

Lastly, the Board agrees that, if you resign, Mr. Richard Cheney will immediately be sworn in as the company's 44^th President. Mr. Cheney will issue two executive orders—the first anointing you the "Freedom, Democracy, and Victory President," and the second pardoning you. Having ensured his presidential legacy, Mr. Cheney will then resign, citing health reasons.

About Your Severance Package:

Your representatives provided the Board with a recommended hypothetical severance package developed by your severance consultants. The Board acknowledges that your severance consultants have extraordinary experience and expertise in this arena, having advised on 185 CEO departures in the last three years. The Board agrees that, should you resign, your Hypothetical Severance Package will become your Severance Package.

Terms of Your Hypothetical Severance Package

In gratitude for your past six years of service as the War President and your future years of service as the Freedom, Democracy, and Victory President, you will receive:

A lump-sum equivalent to a modest 0.02 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of USA, Inc. in your six years of leadership (calculated by annualizing the final year), as well as an additional bonus of 0.02 percent of projected GDP for the next two years. Your severance consultants note that this percentage is less than half of that recently received by another departing Chief Executive, Home Depot's Robert Nardelli. (The Board thanks you for your sacrifice.) The special additional bonus will compensate you for the inconvenience of having to relocate two years earlier than expected.
The Board recognizes that the above lump-sum payment of $21 billion will create a substantial tax burden for you and your family. The Board regrets that it cannot decree that income taxes on Chief Executive Officer severance packages "be temporarily waived to stimulate the economy and create jobs." As a result, the Board will accept your alternate recommendation that the sum be structured as a Special Ex-CEO Trust, from which you will receive interest and dividends tax-free. Your consultants estimate that this will produce a lifetime income of $1 billion per year.
Because the above income may not support the lifestyle to which you are accustomed, you will also receive the following nonmonetary compensation:

*Lifetime use of U.S. military transport aircraft, as well as complimentary joy rides in all new fighter planes, tanks, assault vehicles, and moon rockets.
*Right of first refusal on all future military contracts for any companies you work for, serve as a director of, or own shares in.
*Full military pension for your service as a member of the National Guard and Commander in Chief.
*Full Social Security and Medicare benefits, even if such programs are eliminated.
*Full government pension and benefits, including full health care, dental care, psychiatric care, and drug and alcohol rehabilitation coverage.
*Full memberships at any clubs you wish to belong to, including Augusta National and the Dick Cheney Memorial Quail Sanctuary and Wildlife Refuge Hunting Club.
*Four full-time assistants to handle your communications needs.

If you predecease your wife, Laura, the above benefits will accrue to her (except, for obvious reasons, the membership at Augusta National). If you and Laura predecease your children, the above benefits will accrue to them. If your family predeceases your fellow patriot Mr. Karl Rove, the above benefits shall accrue to him.

The Board agrees that the terms of this hypothetical severance agreement are merely hypothetical, that you have not decided to resign, and that you may not decide to resign. The Board recognizes that you alone are the Decider, and it does not in any way wish to influence or rush your decision. The Board regrets, however, that given the rate at which USA, Inc. shareholder frustration is increasing, the terms of this hypothetical severance agreement will expire at sundown.

Sincerely,
The Board of Directors
USA, Inc.

Henry Blodget, a former securities analyst, is the author of The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual.

An Interesting Analysis of President Bush's "New Way Forward"

2007-01-11T08:44:00.000-05:00

I am skeptical about what President Bush announced last evening, for the reasons cited by David Brooks, as well as some others. I also agree that those opposed to what the President proposes owe us something concrete with which to compare the "New Way Forward".

January 11, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
The Fog Over Iraq
By DAVID BROOKS

If the Democrats don’t like the U.S. policy on Iraq over the next six months, they have themselves partly to blame. There were millions of disaffected Republicans and independents ready to coalesce around some alternative way forward, but the Democrats never came up with anything remotely serious.

The liberals who favor quick exit never grappled with the consequences of that policy, which the Baker-Hamilton commission terrifyingly described. The centrists who believe in gradual withdrawal never explained why that wouldn’t be like pulling a tooth slowly. Joe Biden, who has the most intellectually serious framework for dealing with Iraq, was busy yesterday, at the crucial decision-making moment, conducting preliminary fact-finding hearings, complete with forays into Iraqi history.

The Democrats have been fecund with criticisms of the war, but when it comes to alternative proposals, a common approach is social Darwinism on stilts: We failed them, now they’re on their own.

So we are stuck with the Bush proposal as the only serious plan on offer. The question is, what exactly did President Bush propose last night? The policy rollout has been befogged by so much spin and misdirection it’s nearly impossible to figure out what the president is proposing.

Nonetheless, here’s my reconstruction of how this policy evolved:

On Nov. 30, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented Bush with a new security plan for Baghdad. It called for U.S. troops to move out of Baghdad to the periphery, where they would chase down Sunni terrorists. Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish troops, meanwhile, would flood into the city to establish order, at least as they define it.

Maliki essentially wanted the American troops protecting his flank but out of his hair. He didn’t want U.S. soldiers embedded with his own. He didn’t want American generals hovering over his shoulder. His government didn’t want any restraints on Shiite might.

Over the next weeks, Bush rejected the plan and opted for the opposite approach. Instead of handing counterinsurgency over to the Iraqis/Shiites, he decided to throw roughly 20,000 U.S. troops — everything he had available — into Baghdad. He and his advisers negotiated new rules of engagement to make it easier to go after Shiites as well as Sunnis. He selected two aggressive counterinsurgency commanders, David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, to lead the effort. Odierno recently told John Burns of The Times that American forces would remain in cleared areas of Baghdad “24/7,” suggesting a heavy U.S. presence.

Then came the job of selling the plan. The administration could not go before the world and say that the president had decided to overrule the sovereign nation of Iraq. Officials could not tell wavering Republicans that the president was proposing a heavy, U.S.-led approach.

Thus, administration officials are saying that they have adopted the Maliki plan, just with a few minor tweaks. In briefings and in the president’s speech, officials claimed that this was an Iraqi-designed plan, that Iraqi troops would take on all the primary roles in clearing and holding neighborhoods, that Iraqis in mixed neighborhoods would scarcely see any additional Americans.

All of this is designed to soothe the wounded pride of the Maliki government, and to make the U.S. offensive seem less arduous at home. It’s the opposite of the truth.

Yesterday, administration officials were praising Maliki lavishly. He wants the same things we want, they claimed. He has resolved to lead a nonsectarian government. He is reworking his governing coalitions and marginalizing the extremists. “We’ve seen the nascent rise of a moderate political bloc,” one senior administration official said yesterday.

But the selling of the plan illustrates that this is not the whole story. The Iraqi government wants a unified non-sectarian solution in high-minded statements and in some distant, ideal world. But in the short term, and in the deepest reptilian folds of their brains, the Shiites are maneuvering amid the sectarian bloodbath all around.

This is not a function of the character of Maliki or this or that official. It’s a function of the core dynamic now afflicting Iraqi society.

The enemy in Iraq is not some discrete group of killers. It’s the maelstrom of violence and hatred that infects every institution, including the government and the military. Instead of facing up to this core reality, the Bush administration has papered it over with salesmanship and spin.

Bitterlemons.org

2007-01-10T16:45:00.000-05:00

I have mentioned in past posts, a valuable resource on the Israely-Palestinian conflict, Bitterlemons.org. Below is a summary of their most recent e-mail edition. To read the comments in detail, click on the post title above.

b i t t e r l e m o n s. o r g

January 8, 2007 Edition 1 Palestinian-Israeli crossfire

Also from bitterlemons...

If you haven't already subscribed, check out our Middle East Roundtable. For a free subscription, go to bitterlemons- international.org.

The conflict in 2007
	. Sadly, like 2006 by Yossi Alpher In a best case scenario, Israel and its neighbors will sit down to begin discussing the Arab League/Saudi peace plan of March 2002.
. Reaping a bitter harvest by Ghassan Khatib Palestinians, Israelis and others are about to harvest the fruit of their past mishandling of the conflict.
	. National Islamism means no progress by Barry Rubin Hamas and Fateh will not be able either to unite against Israel or make any agreements with it.
. Yet another "peace process" looming? by George Giacaman The withdrawal from Gaza was proof that Israel needs a Palestinian partner, and this requires "movement" on the political front.

Entitled Selfishness

2007-01-10T06:58:00.000-05:00

Despite being a pre-boomer who probably would probably be adversely affected by what Samuelson proposes, I must agree with his argument. Senior entitlements should be tempered by realities. Higher income seniors can - must - afford some modification of benefits. I (and, I am sure, many others) do care about my children and grand-children, as well as the nation as a whole.

Entitled Selfishness
Boomer Generation Is in a State of Denial

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, January 10, 2007; A13, Washington Post

As someone born in late 1945, I say this to the 76 million or so subsequent baby boomers and particularly to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, our generation's leading politicians: Shame on us. We are trying to rob our children and grandchildren, putting the country's future at risk in the process. On one of the great issues of our time, the social and economic costs of our retirement, we have adopted a policy of selfish silence.

As Congress reconvenes, pledges of "fiscal responsibility" abound. Let me boldly predict: On retirement spending, this Congress will do nothing, just as previous Congresses have done nothing. Nancy Pelosi promises to "build a better future for all of America's children." If she were serious, she would back cuts in Social Security and Medicare. President Bush calls "entitlement spending" the central budget problem. If he were serious, he, too, would propose cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

They are not serious, because few Americans -- particularly prospective baby-boom retirees -- want them to be. There is a consensus against candor, because there is no constituency for candor. It's no secret that the 65-and-over population will double by 2030 (to almost 72 million, or 20 percent of the total population), but hardly anyone wants to face the implications:

? By comparison, other budget issues, including the notorious earmarks, are trivial. In 2005, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (the main programs for the elderly) cost $1.034 trillion, twice the amount of defense spending and more than two-fifths of the total federal budget. These programs are projected to equal about three-quarters of the budget by 2030, if it remains constant as a share of national income.

? Preserving present retirement benefits automatically imposes huge costs on the young -- costs that are economically unsound and socially unjust. The tax increases required by 2030 could hit 50 percent, if other spending is maintained as a share of national income. Or much of the rest of government (from defense to national parks) would have to be shut down or crippled. Or budget deficits would balloon to quadruple today's level.

? Social Security and Medicare benefits must be cut to keep down overall costs. Yes, some taxes will be raised and some other spending cut. But much of the adjustment should come from increasing eligibility ages (ultimately to 70) and curbing payments to wealthier retirees. Americans live longer and are healthier. They can work longer and save more for retirement....

... Opportunities for gradual change have been squandered. These public failings are also mirrored privately. I know many bright, politically engaged boomers who can summon vast concern or outrage about global warming, corporate corruption, foreign policy, budget deficits and much more -- but somehow, their own Social Security and Medicare benefits rarely come up for discussion or criticism. Older boomers (say, those born by 1955) are the most cynical, hoping their benefits will be grandfathered in when inevitable cuts occur in the future.

Our children will not be so blind to this hypocrisy. We have managed to take successful programs -- Social Security and Medicare -- and turn them into huge problems by our self-centered inattention. Baby boomers seem eager to "reinvent retirement" in all ways except those that might threaten their pocketbooks.

Military Transformation and Forward-Looking Strategy

2007-01-07T09:29:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I read the book review cited below (and accessible in full by clicking on the post title above) and found part of it particularly interesting, give my background as a proponent of developing robust strategies in business. The part of the review, at this stage focusing on Kagan's book can be summarized by the following paragraphs:

"Kagan points out that all of these improvements in ground and air capabilities have been useful mostly for taking on traditional armed forces in conventional combat -- not for war in its full political context, nor for the kinds of missions the United States finds itself engaged in today. Absent a compelling threat, defense thinkers and planners focused narrowly on the destructive power of emerging military capabilities and failed to remember what war really is: a political act aimed at producing a positive political outcome. Nowhere was this narrow focus more evident and tragic than in the Bush administration's failure to plan adequately for postcombat operations in Afghanistan or Iraq, or even to understand that the combat phase would inevitably affect the political circumstances after it.
This observation leads Kagan to a different kind of transformation: namely, the need for the U.S. military to change the way it plans for war. "Military operations of any scale must be planned from back to front," he writes. Planners should start with a vision of the political outcome they want to achieve and then work backward, being sure only to apply force in ways that encourage the desired outcome. Had this approach been applied to the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon would at the very least have called for substantially more ground forces than were used to bring down Saddam Hussein. And the very operation itself might have been called into question."

I have long argued that effective strategy development and deployment (call it transformation, if you like) depends, among other things) on envisioning one or more futures and reasoning backward to the present to see what would have to do to robustly anticipate the future(s). That can then be compared with the current situation to see what actions are required to prepare for uncertain futures. That may seem obvious, but most businesses extrapolate from the present, much as Kagan describes the military doing in the 1990s.

The Real Meaning of Military Transformation: Rethinking the Revolution
Thomas L. McNaugher
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007

War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.. Max Boot. : Gotham Books, 2006, 640 pp. $35.00

Summary: Rumsfeld's mishandling of the Iraqi occupation has given the "revolution in military affairs" a bad name. But as Max Boot and Frederick Kagan point out in two new books, transformation is vital to any military's success -- and more important now than ever.

Thomas L. McNaugher is a Vice President of the RAND Corporation and Director of its Army Research Division.

Topics:
US policy and politics
National security and defense

War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today. By Max Boot. Gotham Books, 2006, 640 pp. $35.00.

Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy. By Frederick W. Kagan. Encounter Books, 2006, 432 pp. $29.95.

Vanity Fair: John McCain

2007-01-05T16:15:00.000-05:00

To read this interesting (and long) article about a (the?) possible GOP nominee for 2008, click on the post title above.

Prisoner of Conscience

Given his popular status as a maverick war hero, John McCain has a good shot at winning the 2008 presidential election—if he can get his party to nominate him. But one minute he's toeing the conservative line (on gay marriage, say, or immigration) and the next he's telling someone what he really thinks.

by Todd S. Purdum February 2007, Vanity Fair

Cognitive Decision Theory Applied to International Relations

2007-01-04T14:52:00.000-05:00

This is a most interesting article on cognitive decision theory applied to international relations. Well-worth reading. Click on post title to access article.

Why Hawks Win

By Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Renshon

Page 1 of 1

January/February 2007

Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. A look at why the tough guys win more than they should.

Elizabeth Glassanos/FOREIGN POLICY

Should Hawks Win? Matthew Continetti of the conservative Weekly Standard and Matthew Yglesias of the liberal American Prospect square off in an FP web exclusive debate.

National leaders get all sorts of advice in times of tension and conflict. But often the competing counsel can be broken down into two basic categories. On one side are the hawks: They tend to favor coercive action, are more willing to use military force, and are more likely to doubt the value of offering concessions. When they look at adversaries overseas, they often see unremittingly hostile regimes who only understand the language of force. On the other side are the doves, skeptical about the usefulness of force and more inclined to contemplate political solutions. Where hawks see little in their adversaries but hostility, doves often point to subtle openings for dialogue.

As the hawks and doves thrust and parry, one hopes that the decision makers will hear their arguments on the merits and weigh them judiciously before choosing a course of action. Don’t count on it. Modern psychology suggests that policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors more than the doves. There are numerous reasons for the burden of persuasion that doves carry, and some of them have nothing to do with politics or strategy. In fact, a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind.

Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.

In fact, when we constructed a list of the biases uncovered in 40 years of psychological research, we were startled by what we found: All the biases in our list favor hawks. These psychological impulses—only a few of which we discuss here—incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations. In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end....

Obama on Senate Ethics

2007-01-04T08:21:00.000-05:00

This would be a good start, if the practical modalities could be worked out. It seems to leave open the vital issue of campaign contributions. What can we do about that?

A Chance To Change The Game

By Barack Obama
Thursday, January 4, 2007; A17, Washington Post

This past Election Day, the American people sent a clear message to Washington: Clean up your act.

After a year in which too many scandals revealed the influence special interests wield over Washington, it's no surprise that so many incumbents were defeated and that polls said "corruption" was the grievance cited most frequently by the voters.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that this message was intended for only one party or politician. The votes hadn't even been counted in November before we heard reports that corporations were already recruiting lobbyists with Democratic connections to carry their water in the next Congress.

That's why it's not enough to just change the players. We have to change the game.

Americans put their faith in Democrats because they want us to restore their faith in government -- and that means more than window dressing when it comes to ethics reform.

Last year, I was hopeful that scandals would finally shame Congress into meaningful ethics legislation. But after the headlines faded, so did the enthusiasm for reform. In the end, I found myself voting against the final ethics bill because it was too weak and unresponsive to the obvious need for comprehensive reform.

This time around, we must do more.

We must stop any and all practices that would lead a reasonable person to believe that a public servant has become indebted to a lobbyist. That means a full ban on gifts and meals. It means no free travel or subsidized travel on private jets. And it means closing the revolving door to ensure that Capitol Hill service -- whether as a member of Congress or as a staffer -- isn't all about lining up a high-paying lobbying job. We should no longer tolerate a House committee chairman shepherding the Medicare prescription drug bill through Congress at the same time he's negotiating for a job as the pharmaceutical industry's top lobbyist.

But real reform also means real enforcement. We need to finally take the politics and the partisanship out of ethics investigations. Whether or not the House ethics committee has been covering for its colleagues, the secrecy with which its members have operated has led people to question why legislators who are serving jail time were not caught and stopped by the committee in the first place. It's led people to wonder why Congress cannot seem to police itself.

I have long proposed a nonpartisan, independent ethics commission that would act as the American people's public watchdog over Congress. The commission would be staffed with former judges and former members of Congress from both parties, and it would allow any citizen to report possible ethics violations by lawmakers, staff members or lobbyists. Once a potential violation is reported, the commission would have the authority to conduct investigations, issue subpoenas, gather records, call witnesses, and provide a report to the Justice Department or the House and Senate ethics committees that -- unlike current ethics committee reports -- is available for all citizens to read.

This would improve the current process in two ways. First, it would take politics out of the fact-finding phase of ethics investigations. Second, it would exert greater public pressure on Congress to punish wrongdoing quickly and severely. Others have proposed similar good ideas on enforcement, and I am open to all options. We must restore the American people's confidence in the ethics process by ensuring that political self-interest can no longer prevent politicians from enforcing ethics rules.

The truth is, we cannot change the way Washington works unless we first change the way Congress works. On Nov. 7, voters gave Democrats the chance to do this. But if we miss this opportunity to clean up our act and restore this country's faith in government, the American people might not give us another one.

The writer is a Democratic senator from Illinois.

"No god but God" by Reza Aslam

2007-01-03T09:01:00.000-05:00

I recently finished the book cited above and found it both interesting and especially well-written. For more about the author and the book (and other writings) click on the post title above.

There are several good reviews of the book including the following:

http://www.amazon.com/No-god-but-God-Evolution/dp/1400062136

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/04/25/174945.php

The following link leads you to an interview with the author:

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/04/08/203604.php

The last paragraph of the book reads as follows:

"It may be too early to know who will write the next chapter of Islam's history, but it is not too early to recognize who will ultimately win the war between reform and counter reform. When fourteen centuries ago Muhammad launched a revolution in Mecca to replace the archaic, rigid, and inequitable strictures of tribal society with a radically new vision of divine morality and social egalitarianism, he tore apart the fabric of traditional Arab society. It took many years of violence and devastation to cleanse the Hijaz of its 'false idols'. It will take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols - bigotry and fanaticism - worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad's original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living it."

I can only hope that we survive what is already looking like a new "hundred years' war" and that the outcome is as the author posits.

Don't Forget Afghanistan

2007-01-02T16:57:00.000-05:00

Among all the havoc in the world, Americans all-too-often forget their oblications and interests in Afghanistan. This article does an excellent job of summarizing where we have been, where we are, and what we still have to do.

To read whole, long, article, click on the post title above.

Saving Afghanistan
Barnett R. Rubin
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007

Summary: With the Taliban resurgent, reconstruction faltering, and opium poppy cultivation at an all-time high, Afghanistan is at risk of collapsing into chaos. If Washington wants to save the international effort there, it must increase its commitment to the area and rethink its strategy -- especially its approach to Pakistan, which continues to give sanctuary to insurgents on its tribal frontier.

Barnett R. Rubin is Director of Studies and a Senior Fellow at New York University's Center on International Cooperation and the author of The Fragmentation of Afghanistan. He served as an adviser to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General at the UN Talks on Afghanistan in Bonn in 2001.

[continued...]

U.S. policymakers have misjudged Afghanistan, misjudged Pakistan, and, most of all, misjudged their own capacity to carry out major strategic change on the cheap. The Bush administration has sown disorder and strengthened Iran while claiming to create a "new Middle East," but it has failed to transform the region where the global terrorist threat began -- and where the global terrorist threat persists. If the United States wants to succeed in the war on terrorism, it must focus its resources and its attention on securing and stabilizing Afghanistan.

Happy New Year

2007-01-01T08:25:00.000-05:00

I wish one and all a healthy and happy new year. To see some of the best American editorial cartoons of 2006, click on the post title above.

Enjoy!

Read It and Weep

2006-12-30T07:29:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-28T06:53:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

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:

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.
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.
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

2006-12-25T08:40:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-21T06:43:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-20T08:50:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-19T08:37:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-19T07:57:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-18T16:26:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-15T11:47:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-14T07:07:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-13T07:35:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-12-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-12T16:36:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-12T07:07:00.000-05:00

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?

2006-12-12T07:00:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-10T15:23:00.001-05:00

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?

2006-12-10T08:11:00.000-05:00

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..."

2006-12-09T07:20:00.000-05:00

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....

For link to rest of article, click on post title.

Afghanistan: Dare We Ignore?

2006-12-09T06:50:00.000-05:00

We are about to compound our errors in Iraq by ignoring the importance of what we never finished in Afghanistan. We simply cannot let that country revert to its horrible past. Here is a place where a bit more attention and resources should assure a fairer outcome and, maybe, a safer world. Part of that attention should be aimed at convincing (forcing?) Afghan and Pakinstani leaders and institutions to cooperate towards an end that would untimately serve both nations well.

Afghanistan war nears 'tipping point'

Government support is flagging, NATO is split on strategy, and Taliban fighters are revitalized.

By Laura King and David Holley
LA Times Staff Writers

December 9, 2006

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — The conflict in Afghanistan has entered a dangerous phase, and the next three to six months could prove crucial in determining whether the United States and its NATO partners can suppress a revitalized enemy — or will be dragged into another drawn-out and costly fight with an Islamic insurgency, according to senior military and security officials and diplomats.

"I think we are approaching a tipping point, perhaps early in the new year," said a Western diplomat in the region, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the situation publicly.

Popular support for the central government is faltering, and Western military allies are deeply divided over how best to combat the insurgency.

On the other side of the fight, the Taliban has regained the strength to dominate large swaths of Afghanistan; government control is tenuous at best in at least 20% of the country, according to several Western diplomats and Afghan officials.

Militants have built a network of bases in the tribal hinterlands that straddle the frontier with Pakistan. Over the last year, a growing number of mobile encampments on the Afghan side of the border have given the insurgents greater self-sufficiency, military officials say, although the guerrillas still draw heavily on logistical support and weaponry funneled from the Pakistani side....

(For link to rest of article, click on post title.)

Carter on Israel Controversy

2006-12-07T16:27:00.000-05:00

I have not yet read the book in question, but intend to do so. I have heard Carter interviewed on several television shows and am trying to keep an open mind. More, perhaps, after I have read the book.

Carter Book on Israel 'Apartheid' Sparks Bitter Debate
Scholar Resigns From Ga. Center

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 7, 2006; A04

A veteran Middle East scholar affiliated with the Carter Center in Atlanta resigned his position there Monday in an escalating controversy over former president Jimmy Carter's bestselling book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," traces the ups and downs of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process beginning with Carter's 1977-1980 presidency and the historic peace accord he negotiated between Israel and Egypt and continuing to the present. Although it apportions blame to Israel, the Palestinians and outside parties -- including the United States -- for the failure of decades of peace efforts, it is sharply critical of Israeli policy and concludes that "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land."

Kenneth W. Stein, a professor at Emory University, accused Carter of factual errors, omissions and plagiarism in the book. "Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information," Stein wrote in a harshly worded e-mail to friends and colleagues explaining his resignation as the center's Middle East fellow.

Stein offered no specifics in his e-mail to back up the charges, writing only that "in due course, I shall detail these points and reflect on their origins."

A statement issued by the center yesterday in Carter's name said he regretted Stein's resignation "from the titular position as a Fellow" and noted that he had not been "actively involved" there for the past 12 years. Carter thanked Stein for his advice and assistance "during the early years of our Center" and wished him well.

While acknowledging that the word "apartheid" refers to the system of legal racial separation once used in South Africa, Carter says in his book that it is an appropriate term for Israeli policies devoted to "the acquisition of land" in Palestinian territories through Jewish settlements and Israel's incorporation of Palestinian land on its side of a separating wall it is erecting.

He criticizes suicide bombers and those who "consider the killing of Israelis as victories" but also notes that "some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians."

Accusing the Bush administration of abandoning the effort to promote a lasting peace, he calls for renewed negotiations on the basis of security guarantees for Israel and Israel's recognition of U.N.-established borders.

Formally published three weeks ago, the book quickly became a bestseller. Carter has been prominently interviewed in the media and has been mobbed at book appearances around the country.

Speaking Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," he said he was glad the book had raised controversy. "If it provokes debate and assessment and disputes and arguments and maybe some action in the Middle East to get the peace process, which is now completely absent or dormant, rejuvenated, and brings peace ultimately to Israel, that's what I want," he said.

Criticism of the book, primarily from Jewish groups and leaders, began even before it was published, and it became an issue in the midterm elections last month. The New York-based Jewish Daily Forward noted in October that Democrats were trying to distance themselves from its reported contents as Republicans were seeking to widely disseminate Carter's views in an effort to win Jewish votes.

Speaking to the Forward about Carter, Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matthew Brooks said the coalition had "not shied away from shining a light on some of his misguided and outrageous comments about Israel in the past. . . . So far, there's been nothing but silence on the part of the Democratic establishment in terms of holding Carter accountable."

Rep. Steve Israel, a Democrat from New York, told the Forward that the "book clearly does not reflect the direction of the party."

Since then, the controversy has only grown. In a widely published commentary last weekend, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that Carter's "use of the loaded word 'apartheid,' suggesting an analogy to the hated policies of South Africa, is especially outrageous."

In a statement issued Monday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles contended that Carter "abandons all objectivity and unabashedly acts as a virtual spokesman for the Palestinian cause."

In a telephone interview yesterday, Stein said that Carter had "taken [material] directly" from a published work written by a third party but that legal action was being contemplated and he was not yet at liberty to make the details public. He said accounts in the book about meetings he had attended with Carter between 1980 and 1990 had left out key facts in order to "make the Israelis look like they're the only ones responsible" for the failure of peace efforts.

Military Concerns about Baker-Hamilton

2006-12-07T16:13:00.000-05:00

Apparently, John McCain still thinks that more troups are needed in Iraq before the rest of the Baker-Hamilton recommendations can be implement. Frankly, as much as I dislike the idea in principle, I suspect that he may be right. See the article following this blurb for more on the matter.

Many in Congress have praised the group's report, which was eight months in the making. But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Hamilton and Baker that he does not believe their approach will work. The panel called for a phase-out of the U.S. combat role by 2008 and rejected the idea of a short-term increase in the number of combat troops in Iraq.McCain took issue with that approach, saying he did not agree with the Baker-Hamilton group's conclusion that the U.S. military does not have enough forces available to sustain a troop boost in Iraq."There's only one thing worse than an over-stressed Army and Marine Corps, and that's a defeated Army and Marine Corps," said McCain, a Vietnam veteran and a 2008 Republican presidential hopeful. "I believe this is a recipe that will lead to our defeat sooner or later in Iraq."

December 7, 2006, New York Times

Military Analysis

Will Iraq Study Group’s Plan Work on the Battlefield?

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

The military recommendations issued yesterday by the Iraq Study Group are based more on hope than history and run counter to assessments made by some of its own military advisers.

Ever since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States has struggled in vain to tamp down the violence in Iraq and to build up the capacity of Iraq’s security forces. Now the study group is positing that the United States can accomplish in little more than one year what it has failed to carry out in three.

In essence, the study group is projecting that a rapid infusion of American military trainers will so improve the Iraqi security forces that virtually all of the American combat brigades may be withdrawn by the early part of 2008.

“By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigades not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq,” the study group says.

Jack Keane, the retired acting Army chief of staff who served on the group’s panel of military advisers, described that goal as entirely impractical. “Based on where we are now we can’t get there,” General Keane said in an interview, adding that the report’s conclusions say more about “the absence of political will in Washington than the harsh realities in Iraq.”

The experience of American commanders shows the difficulties in rapidly handing over security responsibilities to Iraq. In June, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, developed a plan that called for gradually drawing down the number of American brigade combat teams by December 2007, to just 5 or 6 from the 14 combat brigades that were deployed at the time. In keeping with this approach, American troops in Baghdad began to cut back on their patrols in the capital, calculating that Iraqi security forces would pick up the slack.

But no sooner did General Casey present his plan in Washington than it had to be deferred. With sectarian violence soaring in Baghdad, the United States reinforced its troops there. More American soldiers are now involved in security operations in Baghdad than Iraqi troops.

Now, the Iraq Study Group is essentially taking General Casey’s plan off the shelf and carrying it further. The group’s final military recommendations were not discussed with the retired officers who serve on the group’s Military Senior Adviser Panel before publication, several of those officers said.

Military experts say there are several difficulties with the panel’s recommendation. First, it underestimates the challenge of building a capable Iraqi security force. After several years of desultory efforts, the United States has taken steps to upgrade and better prepare the teams of American advisers who are assigned to Iraqi units. But training the Iraqi Army is more than a matter of teaching combat skills. It requires transforming the character of the force.

“The new Iraqi Army will need years to become equal to the challenge posed by a persistent insurgency and terrorist threat,” Lt. Col. Carl D. Grunow, a former military adviser, wrote in a recent issue of Military Review, a journal published by the United States Army.

One big problem, Colonel Grunow notes, is that the Iraqi military is not proficient in counterinsurgency operations or sufficiently sensitive to the risk of civilian casualties.

“They are still fighting their last war, the high-intensity Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a war with clear battle lines fought with mass military formations, and one in which civilians on the battlefield were a nuisance, and not a center of gravity,” he wrote. The Iraqi military, he added, “must learn to fight using strategies and tactics far different than those used in the past.”

Even if the number of American advisers is increased, it is highly unlikely that the Iraqi forces would be capable of assuming the entire responsibility for security throughout the country in little more than a year. It took four years, from 1969 to 1973, for the Nixon administration to make South Vietnamese forces strong enough to hold their own and withdraw American combat forces from Vietnam. Even so, when Congress withheld authority for American airstrikes in support of those forces in 1975, the North Vietnamese quickly defeated the South and reunified the country under Communist rule.

The rapid withdrawal of American combat forces would also deprive the Iraqi military of the opportunity to work as partners with the Americans in combined operations. “There is no meaningful plan for creating a mix of effective Iraqi military forces, police forces, governance and criminal justice system at any point in the near future, much less by 2008,” noted Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, referring to the group’s study.

Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star general, said in an interview that the overall concept of withdrawing American forces as the Iraqis built up their military capability was sound. But he argued that the specific recommendations by the panel raised a second problem: if American combat brigades were withdrawn from Iraq, the thousands of American advisers who remained might find themselves dangerously exposed, particularly if the fighting in Iraq grew into a full-scale civil war. The advisers could be killed or taken hostage.

“They came up with a political thought but then got to tinkering with tactical ideas that in my view don’t make any sense,” General McCaffrey said. “This is a recipe for national humiliation.”

A last issue is that given the deterioration of security in Iraq, it may take the combined efforts of American combat units and Iraqi security forces to try to arrest the spiraling violence. In the end, that task may not be achievable. But since it is American forces that have often worked to curb the sectarian killings — and since many of the Iraqi forces have been infiltrated by sectarian militias — there is reason to believe that the civil strife will grow if the American combat forces soon begin to leave.

A preface to the report by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, the group’s chairmen, said that one aim of the report was “to move our country toward consensus.” The study contains all the ingredients of a Washington compromise. What is less apparent is a detailed and convincing military strategy that is likely to work in Iraq.

More Reasoned Columnists (Washington Post) Re. Baker-Hamilton Report

2006-12-07T12:55:00.000-05:00

A Report Overtaken by Reality

By George F. Will
Thursday, December 7, 2006; A31

The Iraq Study Group, like the policy it was created to critique, was overtaken by the unexpectedly rapid crumbling of the U.S. position in Iraq since the ISG was formed in March. The deterioration was manifested in last week's misbegotten summit between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which made brutally clear how difficult it will be to apply even the ISG's temperate recommendations to the deteriorating reality.

Summits usually do, and generally should, resemble American political conventions -- they should not be deliberative events but should ratify decisions made earlier. The ISG's recommendations must be read in light of these facts from the week during which the recommendations were being written:

Calling Iraq's prime minister "the right guy" for Iraq, Bush met him in Jordan, presumably because Iraq is too dangerous a venue for discussing how to, in Bush's words, "complete" the job. The job is to stabilize Iraq, which cannot be done without breaking the Mahdi Army, which cannot be done without bringing down Maliki, who is beholden to Moqtada al-Sadr, the cleric who more or less controls the Mahdi Army, which probably is larger and more capable than Iraq's army.

Also in the week before the ISG's report, the leaked Donald Rumsfeld memo urged policy to "go minimalist." That is generally good advice to government, but much of the rest of the memo, with its 21 "illustrative new courses of action" -- a large number, and evidence that none is especially promising -- echoed the 1960s Great Society confidence in government-engineered behavior modification: jobs programs for unemployed young Iraqis, reallocation of reconstruction funds to "stop rewarding bad behavior" and "start rewarding good behavior," and bribery ("provide money to key political and religious leaders").

It is beyond dispiriting that after 45 months of war an American official can think that this semi-genocidal conflict over the survival of groups divided about the meaning of God's will can now be dampened by clever economics. By what the ISG did not recommend -- e.g., many more troops and much more money -- it recognized that the deterioration is beyond much remediation.

When the ISG made a four-day visit to Iraq in August, its members were taken to the Green Zone, in a city so dangerous that only one ISG member -- former senator Chuck Robb, a Marine veteran of Vietnam combat -- left it, to visit Marines in the turbulent Anbar province. But, then, long before the ISG came to study it, Iraq seemed impervious to America's plans for ameliorating its dysfunctions.

The ISG's central conclusion, important to say with the group's imprimatur even though the conclusion is obvious, is that the problem with Iraq is the Iraqis, a semi-nation of peoples who are very difficult to help. The ISG's report will help accomplish what it recommends -- increase pressure on Iraq's "government" in the hope of turning it into a government by June, when Maliki says Iraq will be able to cope with its security needs.

How likely is that? Look back two years. In June 2004, at the time the Coalition Provisional Authority was to transfer sovereignty to what it thought would be an Iraqi government, Americans were toiling to finish their work of occupation: "A lawyer who had once clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was poring over a draft edict requiring Iraqi political parties to engage in American-style financial disclosure." Such surreal vignettes abound in "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," by The Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The book, which should be read along with the ISG report, would be hilarious were it not horrifying that so much valor and suffering have been expended in this context:

Halliburton, writes Chandrasekaran, hired Pakistanis and Indians, but no Iraqis, for kitchen work. "Nobody ever explained why, but everyone knew. They could poison the food." Of the CPA staff, "More than half, according to one estimate, had gotten their first passport in order to travel to Iraq." Two CPA staffers said that before they were hired, they were asked if they supported Roe v. Wade. The traffic code the CPA wrote for Iraq stipulated that "the driver shall hold the steering wheel with both hands" and "rest should be taken for five minutes for every one hour of driving." But Chandrasekaran's driver, who like other Iraqis had obeyed the laws under Saddam's police state, began disregarding all traffic laws. "When I asked him what he was doing, he turned to me, smiled, and said, 'Mr. Rajiv, democracy is wonderful. Now we can do whatever we want.' "

Not exactly.

georgewill@washpost.com

Baker-Hamilton Does Its Job

By David Ignatius
Thursday, December 7, 2006; A31

DUBAI -- The Iraq Study Group's report achieved the goal of any blue-ribbon commission: It stated the obvious, emphatically.

"The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." Of various proposals for fixing Iraq, "all have flaws." A "precipitate" withdrawal would be a mistake, but so would a big increase in U.S. troops. America should set "milestones" for the Iraqi government to control all provinces by next September. The U.S. military should shift to a training and advising mission so that most American troops can leave by early 2008. But there is no "magic formula," and even if this approach fails, the United States "should not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq."

A cynic might argue that this laundry list is precisely what the Bush administration was moving toward in its own internal review of policy. But I think that's the point about the bipartisan commission headed by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and ex-representative Lee H. Hamilton. They have stamped an interwoven "D" and "R" on recommendations that seem so familiar you wonder why they haven't been official policy all along. (Some of them have been, though you wouldn't have known it from President Bush's bluff and bluster.)

What's new in the Baker-Hamilton approach is the part that's least likely to be successful -- the call for an International Support Group that, in theory, would include the regional bad boys, Iran and Syria, along with foot-draggers such as Russia, China and France. And while they're at it, Baker and Hamilton propose a crash effort to resolve the Palestinian conflict, make peace between Israel and Syria and resolve the mess in Lebanon.

I like this "New Diplomatic Offensive" precisely because it is so ambitious. It would put the United States back in the business of trying to solve the Arab-Israeli problem, which has been driving the Middle East crazy for nearly 40 years. As for Iran and Syria, the great advantage of asking them to join a global effort to stabilize Iraq is that if they say no, it's blood on their hands. As the report notes, "An Iranian refusal to do so would demonstrate to Iraq and the rest of the world Iran's rejectionist attitude and approach, which could lead to its isolation."

And what is America's leverage for bringing Iran and Syria to the table (other than the implicit threat to walk away and let them worry about the Iraqi civil war)? The report includes this delicious Bakeresque ploy: "Saudi Arabia's agreement not to intervene with assistance to Sunni Arab Iraqis could be an essential quid pro quo for similar forbearance on the part of other neighbors, especially Iran."

Aha! So that explains the unusual op-ed by quasi-official Saudi analyst Nawaf Obaid in The Post on Nov. 29 threatening that Saudi troops would be sent into Iraq if America should leave. It was a bargaining chip.

Another laudable aspect of the Baker-Hamilton report (especially in comparison with Bush's rhetoric) is that it doesn't mince words about how bad things are in Iraq. The Iraqi army has made only "fitful progress toward becoming a reliable and disciplined fighting force." The Iraqi police are "substantially worse" than the army. The results of the latest effort to pacify Baghdad have been "disheartening." Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki means well, but he "has taken little meaningful action" against militias. Sunni Arabs haven't yet "made the strategic decision to abandon violent insurgency." No reconciliation will be possible without an unpalatable amnesty for Iraqis who fought against U.S. forces. At least we are beginning to tell the truth here.

The final reason to embrace the Baker-Hamilton report is that its combination of cut-your-losses pragmatism and earnest do-gooderism will reassure the world that America has turned a page on Iraq. The level of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East these days is genuinely frightening. It has become the organizing principle of political life, even in once-friendly countries such as Lebanon. This is the real national security threat to America -- this sense in the rest of the world that Iraq symbolizes America's fatal new combination of arrogance and incompetence.

This report asks the world to help us find our way back home. Even if its proposals don't succeed, Baker-Hamilton can still accomplish its purpose, to "enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly."

A Wall Street Journal Editorial about the Baker-Hamilton Report

2006-12-07T12:46:00.000-05:00

The following guest editorial from the Wall Street Journal seems to represent the editorial board's view. Before reading the editorial, here is some background on its author, a well-known neo-con:

Eliot Cohen, called by one observer “the most influential neocon in academe,” is a well-known scholar of military affairs based at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), which has served as a base for a number of prominent neoconservatives, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Cohen heads SAIS's Center for Strategic Studies, a program founded in 2003 with a generous grant from Philip Merrill, a minor media mogul who heads the U.S. Ex-Im Bank and serves as an adviser to the hawkish Center for Security Policy. Cohen is famous for his thesis that the war on terror constitutes World War IV, and that the Cold War should really be considered World War III. (5)

Cohen has been affiliated with a number of hawkish advocacy groups, including the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and the Project for the New American Century. He also serves on the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank, which has been heavily criticized for members’ conflicts of interests and for its stilted ideological profile. (Nearly a third of the board members come from the staunchly conservative Hoover Institution.)

Cohen is the author of Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime, 2002, which George W. Bush reportedly read in preparation for the invasion of Iraq; Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War, 1990; and Citizens and Soldiers, 1985.

No Way to Win a War

By ELIOT COHEN
December 7, 2006; Page A18

The theory of the thing is very peculiar indeed. You are in the middle of a war -- a hard war, a war that is going badly. If the government has bogged down, if the people inside have gone stale, you would say that the sound thing, the Churchillian or Lincolnian or Rooseveltian thing, would be, first, to fire a bunch of officials (generals as well as top civilians), promote or bring in fresh talent, and put together a small group of people to take a new and unillusioned look. Those people would report back in secrecy to the president and his most senior advisers and aides.

They would consist of experienced soldiers and civilians in whom the president (who, after all, has to make the strategic decisions, and is the accountable executive) has trust. There would not be many of them, a half dozen or so, and they would have to be hardy enough to visit the war zone for several weeks, talking not just to politicians and generals but to captains and sergeants. They would go see things for themselves. They would visit a forward operating base near Tikrit; they would spend some time with Iraqi soldiers in Taji; they would take their chances in a convoy to al Asad, or even a patrol in Tal Afar.

They -- not their staff of a few soldiers and secretaries -- would do the probing, digging, thinking, discussing and, above all, the writing. The chairman of the group would insist that they air their disagreements candidly and thoroughly in front of the president, engaging in a debate that might last a day, perhaps longer. The rest of us would not find out about the panel until months, or even years, after it reported back; maybe not until the war was over.

* * *

The administration's congressional critics (including those of its own party) came up with a different solution: the Iraq Study Group (ISG), which has now produced a document that consists of 50 pages of recommendations, preceded by a 40-page thumbnail sketch of the current situation in Iraq and 50 pages of maps, lists of people, and full-length biographies of the commissioners. This is a group composed, for the most part, of retired eminent public officials, most with limited or no expertise in the waging or study of war. It consists of individuals carefully selected with an eye to diverse partisan and other irrelevant personal characteristics. These worthies, with not one chairman but two (for balance, of course), turned to several score experts known to disagree vehemently with one another about the best course of action to be pursued in Iraq.

Some of the commission members and their advisers cordially detest the president and his administration and opposed him and his war from the outset; others were equally passionate in their defense of both the man and the conflict. And yet this diverse group had an overwhelming mandate, from the beginning, to produce a consensus document. The commission members spent four days in Iraq, and with the exception of a one-day foray by former Marine Chuck Robb, they stayed in the Green Zone, that bubble of palaces and residences that has little to do with the real Iraq of Basra, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Baquba and Mosul. At the end, they had breakfast with the president and a few hours later posted their conclusions on the Internet for all the world to ponder. There is something of farce in all this, an invocation of wisdom from a cohesive Washington elite that does not exist, a desperate wish to believe in the gravitas and the statecraft of grave men (and women) who can sort out the mess in which the country finds itself.

A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results. "Iraq's neighbors are not doing enough to help Iraq achieve stability" -- a statement only somewhat ameliorated by the admission that some are even "undercutting stability," which sounds as though Syria and Iran were being downright rude, rather than providing indispensable assistance to those who have filled the burn wards of Walter Reed, the morgue in Baghdad, and the cemetery at Arlington. The selected remedy is, first and foremost, rather like the ISG's credo for its own functioning, consensus. "The United States should immediately launch a new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region," as if our chief failure with Bashar Assad or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lies with the hitherto unnoticed laziness or rhetorical ineptitude of our diplomats, or as though Europe, Saudi Arabia and Israel have not yet figured out that stability in Iraq is a good thing. "Syria should control its border" and "Iran should respect Iraq's sovereignty."

No kidding -- but who is going to make them? That perennial solution, "resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict," makes its appearance, including direct negotiations between Israel and Palestinians, but only with "those who accept Israel's right to exist." The report conveniently forgets that the elected leaders of Palestine do not, in fact, accept Israel's right to exist. And it also neglects the grim reality that one of the most terrible things about Gaza, and possibly the West Bank as well, is that no one, not even Hamas, is really in charge.

Part of Iran's price for easing up on us in Iraq is pretty clearly taking the heat off its nuclear program; the ISG recommends that that issue "should continue to be dealt with by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany." Well, what deal should the U.S. be willing to cut on Iranian nuclear weapons? Do we think the Iranians would deliver? And what are the long-term consequences?

War, and warlike statecraft, is a hard business, and though this is supposed to be a report dominated by "realists," there is nothing realistic in failing to spell out the bloody deeds, grim probabilities and dismal consequences associated with even the best course of action. Indeed, some parts of the report read as sheer fantasy -- Recommendation 15, for example, which provides that part of the American deal with Syria should include the latter's full cooperation in investigating the Hariri assassination, verifiable cessation of Syrian aid to Hezbollah, and its support for persuading Hamas to recognize Israel.

The prescriptions for internal processes in Iraq are only somewhat better. The ISG argues that American forces should shift to developing Iraqi security forces and backing them up, which is more or less the course we are on now. It talks of milestones for Iraqi performance, as if Iraqi benchmarking were more a problem than Iraqi will, and Iraqi will more the problem than Iraqi capability. It suggests announcing our own planned redeployments without considering the most obvious consequence, which is that Iraqis of many political hues will decide that the Americans are leaving, and the time has come to cut deals with Jaish al Mahdi, or the Badr organization, or al Qaeda in Iraq, or any of the other cutthroat outfits infesting that bleeding country.

Quite apart from the psychological impact of our actions, there is the sober fact that the Iraqi army is small, 138,000-strong (and that number probably overstated), and that building effective security forces takes time. The 188,000-man police forces are corrupt, riddled with militia influence, and in need of a thorough overhaul. We cannot build the Iraqi security forces without a substantial combat presence. Nor is the problem merely one of training, as Iraqi corporals driving around in pickup trucks without functional radios might have sourly pointed out, had they had the chance to talk to a Study Group member.

At least the ISG has given considerable thought to preparing us for future conflict. Consider Recommendations 47 and 48. Congress, they declare, should allocate money to repair the clapped-out equipment the Army and Marines will bring back from Iraq. This is no doubt better than, say, heaving Bradley infantry fighting vehicles overboard on the way back to American ports in order to provide a home for new coral reefs. "As [American] redeployment proceeds, military leaders should emphasize training and education of forces that have returned to the United States in order to restore the force to full combat capability." Pentagon planners would do well to pursue this plan rather than give the troops six months of leave and then having them paint the sorely neglected rocks outside the sergeant major's office.

The great war leaders, in their private deliberations, shied away from vagueness. Haziness about ends and means, about what to do and how to do it, is a mark of strategic ineptitude; in war it gets people killed. But a Churchill could only call the flattening of German cities "terror bombing" in private.

Thus, unsurprisingly, in a public document of this kind, euphemism and imprecision abound. The U.S. needs to give "disincentives" to Syria and Iran: But the real question has always been whether we are willing to use a variety of overt and covert means -- from bombing insurgent safe houses to sabotaging refineries, from mining harbors to supporting their own insurgents -- to do so. And, in fact, the report mentions no means for squeezing either country.

True, as James Baker irritably noted at the press conference releasing the report, the U.S. talked to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But as the U.S. did so it also bankrupted the U.S.S.R. in an arms race, undermined its client governments in Eastern Europe by supporting Polish labor unions, and killed its soldiers by providing surface-to-air missiles to Afghan guerrillas. Real pain, and not merely tough talk sweetened by a bucket of goodies, paves the way for successful negotiations with brutal opponents.

* * *

What we need in Iraq is not a New Diplomatic Offensive (capitals in the original) so much as energy and competence in fighting the fight. From the outset of the Iraq war much of our difficulty has stemmed not so much from failures to find the right strategy, as from an astounding and depressing inability to implement the strategic and operational choices we have nominally made.

This inability has come from things as personal as picking the wrong people for key positions, in the apparent belief that generals are interchangeable cogs in a counterinsurgency machine. It has come from an unwillingness or inability to grab the bureaucracy by the throat and make it act -- which is why, three years after the insurgency began, we still send soldiers out to risk roadside bomb attacks in overweight Humvees when there are half a dozen commercially available armored vehicles designed to minimize the effects of such blasts. It is why -- although the government has declared long before the ISG issued its report that training the Iraqis is Job One -- we still embed fewer than a dozen American advisers in an Iraqi battalion when the right number is three to five times that many.

We have not come up to the brink of failure because we did not know how important it is to employ young Iraqi men or to keep detained insurgents out of circulation or to prevent militia penetration of the security forces by vetting the commanders of those forces. We have known these things -- but we have not done these things.

The creation of the Iraq Study Group reflects the vain hope that well-meaning, senior, former public officials can find ideas that have not already occurred to people inside government; that those new ideas can redeem incompetent execution and insufficient resources; that salvation can come from a Washington establishment whose wisdom was exaggerated in its heyday, and which has in any event succumbed to a kind of political-intellectual entropy since the 1960s; that a public commission can do the work of oversight that Congress has shirked for five years in the misguided belief that it would thus support an administration struggling to do its best in a difficult situation. This is no way to run a war, and most definitely, no way to win it.

Mr. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116545762987142981.html

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